by Tricia Reeks
You saw an advert on the train. You saw two, but you only paid proper attention to one. It was inside the train. On the opposite wall first then on the ceiling when you looked up, then on the floor when you looked down. It was so bright, so distinct, that it stayed fully visible for a moment or two when you closed your eyes.
It had not been a good day.
It had been the worst day.
You close your eyes now and remember it, wholesale, a full week ago.
You open them. The sign glows overhead. The steel arms of the turnstiles reach out invitingly.
The advert on the train read, “Samurai Land—Come be a part of History. Authentic Time Travel. One Moment of Zen per customer GUARANTEED!”
The second advert, attached to that one, extolled the virtues of Ancient Rome Land, but the samurai one reached you first. It was the first thing to break in through the veil of your misery, the first thing to offer you hope.
Earlier that day, the day of the advertisement, you woke to find your (ex-)girlfriend’s clothes and technology moved out of the flat you’d been sharing. Then, after the lunch break, your boss called you to his office, told you, calmly: I’m sorry, but we’re letting you go.
No explanations, from either party.
You were too shocked, too tired to ask.
You bought a ticket for Samurai Land with your severance pay.
When given the choice, you opted for the full-on experience. Immersion in the arena of Ancient Japan for a whole lunar month. That’s why it cost so much.
That, and the time travel bit.
When you first began researching the place, you were skeptical about this technology, but then you read testimonials from previous, deeply satisfied customers, and you were convinced, totally, that this trip would turn your life around. Make you happier. Make you stronger. Make you better. Make you Zen.
It certainly looks impressive from the outside. There is a large, bold sign above the gates, hand-painted (so the website said) by craftsmen trained in secret techniques passed down through the centuries. Which appealed to the youthful part of you, the part that once took exams in artsy subjects, but hasn’t since done anything with the grades you gained therein.
On either side of that sign is a large gray stone wall, at least twenty feet high, and above that, and behind it, a mist-wreathed white castle, in the Ancient Japanese style. The mists are the mists of time, the online brochure said. The castle will only become properly clear to those who take the journey.
This sounded appropriately mystic, for a science as arcane as time travel.
You do not lose your nerve in the presence of the formidable battlements.
Or the fog.
You are convinced that only in this way will you be able to reclaim your pride, move on with your life.
When asked by the worker at the gate why you have come here, that is the answer you give. He responds in a way that suggests it’s the right one. He tells you: “That’s exactly what we love to hear. Come this way.”
You pass through the turnstile, and already the fog is lifting. There is action and movement on the street where you could swear you saw none only moments before. It feels quite assuredly like you are no longer in the when and the where in which you were having such a terrible time.
As you walk on, led by the customer service assistant, who is now dressed in elaborate robes rather than the T-shirt and jeans combo you’re sure he was previously wearing, he tells you: “Your name is Kenji.”
It isn’t really, it’s _____. But in here it is Kenji. “Which sounds like a proper samurai name, doesn’t it?” says the assistant. Before showing you into a changing room, and handing you a sword and a kimono. Your armor, he tells you, will be provided upon the instance of your first fight, which will take place in the morning. This will come with a helmet, with a scary demon design of your choice. In the meantime, you’ll have to wear this wig.
It is in the traditional chonmage style.
You’re happy they’ve given you a wig, because you didn’t want to shave part of your head. You were worried it would itch and give you a rash. Or, worse, that it would encourage a more permanent baldness. You think it’s clever that they’ve thought to take the technology for such wig making back in time, alongside the customers and all of their staff.
You hope they have also brought flushing toilets, though you are open to showering in the old style, using either a jug, or a bamboo gutter, or a waterfall.
If one can be found in the surrounding hills.
***
It turns out that you’ll have ample opportunity to look. You have paid a great deal for this experience, but the ticket you purchased still only covers ronin-class. You’ve signed on to spend a full month as an itinerant warrior. As none of those who have signed up to be warlords have yet recruited your services, this means you’ll have to find accommodation outside of the castle, in the vast snowy valley at the far side of the fort.
Aside from the cold, and especially the wind—which billows up amongst your underthings, bypassing the kimono you’re not sure you’ve affixed about your person in the proper fashion—you don’t mind this temporary exile.
The scenery is beautiful. Far more beautiful than anything you recall seeing in the over-urbanized present. Indeed, you think that is why you didn’t take your artistic talents further—your world simply lacked the inspiring qualities of a place and time like this.
Though, the niggling doubt remains that it was, rather, because a career in the arts seldom seems to pay.
The scents of cherry blossom and jasmine float boldly through the air, sweeping that doubt under the carpet of snow. Swallows and swifts and shrikes circle, wild and balletic, in the sky overhead. Herons and cranes perch at the edge of small, well-kept ponds, lily pads drifting serenely among their one-legged reflections. The distant outlines of mountains stand clear and sublime in every direction.
Already, you feel more at ease.
***
The morning comes, and it is time for battle.
You found an empty cabin, sparsely but effectively decorated, late last night, and it is here that an attendant comes to help you into your armor. This includes your choice of a helmet, which is red, and has large, angled eyeholes, which your attendant assures you will be fearsome to your enemies. It reminds you of Munch’s Scream, or a face from Guernica—the horse perhaps, or the mother—as recreated in melted wax, like a seal, a ready trademark for your violence.
It’s quite difficult to see through those eye-holes, though, as the helmet is a little big, and keeps slipping from side to side about your head. The chonmage wig is designed to stop this from happening. Perhaps you haven’t put it on properly.
Such trifling concerns are soon banished from your mind.
Back down in the valley, you can see enough to make out hundreds of other figures, all dressed in similar armor, all with brightly colored masks.
Your attendant helps you to your appointed place in the formation. He tells you that you’ve been recruited into a warlord’s army, and that your warlord is about to wage war on both of his competitors at the same time. At stake is complete control of the castle and all buildings and visitors therein.
Before being sent to the safety of the sidelines, he tells you to draw your sword. The warlord will give his unit ten minutes of orientation with battle tactics and then the carnage will begin.
“But, don’t worry,” he says. “These swords aren’t actually capable of cutting, much less slicing anyone to pieces. Our insurance doesn’t cover that,” he says. “Not on top of the risks involved in time travel itself.”
Instead, the swords are edged with electronic sensors, and all the armor is fitted with corresponding tagging units. These will respond by giving the wearer a mild shock in the location of any fake-wounds. A full-body shock will result from a deathblow.
If your sword runs out of charge mid-battle, you’ll have to find the nearest generator. He points to a large square unit, covere
d with fake-looking stone. You’ll be at your most vulnerable at this point, so it’s best to stay close to a generator at all times.
You are beginning to wish you’d paid more attention to some of these details before signing up.
***
The snow all about you is trampled and scattered, geysering upwards as more and more bodies fall. The snow all about you is turning red with fake blood.
It turns out you’re pretty good at this.
A kind of panic response has kicked in. A survival instinct.
Your enemies genuinely appear to find your helmet terrifying.
The shocks that afflict them are audible, even over the crunch of the ground underfoot. You are beginning to relish the sound.
To forget the emptiness of your double bed that morning.
To forget the terrible coffee you had to endure at your last place of work.
You whoop as you run across the valley floor, breaking formation, striking any and all before you with masterful, lightning-fast swipes of your blade.
A whole month of this appears in your mind’s eye, like a hot spring, and you wish only to jump in, to savor, to enjoy this new and exciting form of release.
Then, there is a buzzing at your shoulder.
Then one across your back.
You become disorientated, angry, confused.
Your helmet has slipped again, and you can’t really see what’s going on. You swing your sword blindly. You don’t seem to be making any contact at all.
You feel a buzzing in your right thigh.
Your left arm.
There’s a loud, insistent beeping coming from the hilt of your sword. It’s out of charge.
You reach your fake-wounded arm up to readjust your helmet, looking frantically around for a generator. You finally spot one, but you’ve lost track of your mysterious assailant.
You careen across the snow, whooping now not with ecstasy, but with something far closer to despair.
You want your money back.
You want to go home.
A shock runs through your entire body.
The generator rushes up to your face at an unusual angle.
It turns out the stone is not fake.
Everything goes black.
***
When you come to, you are in your cabin. You are lying down, and your view of the ceiling is interrupted by two nervous-looking faces. One of whom you recognize as your attendant. The other is the customer service assistant from the gate.
“Are you feeling okay?” they ask, in unison.
You nod, hesitantly, aware of a pain just below your left temple, and also a feeling of swelling in your right ankle and foot.
The two faces grow calmer.
“That’s good to hear,” says the customer service assistant. “You had a mild concussion, and we think you have seriously sprained your ankle. Our best doctors have examined you and recommended that you do not participate in any further fighting for at least a week.”
“Is that okay?” your attendant asks.
You think about this.
You did enjoy the wildness of battle, the simulated carnage, the weight of the sword as you swung it.
But you did not like the shocks. Not a bit.
You nod again.
“That’s good to hear,” repeats the customer service assistant. “Now, by way of compensation, the owners are willing to offer you a fifty percent discount on your stay.”
“Is that okay?” your attendant repeats.
Your head hurts.
Your ankle is aching.
You don’t really miss the simulated carnage.
You just want to go back to sleep.
You nod.
***
Since then, for the past few days, you have contented yourself with ritual.
Every morning, your assistant has brought you food, and guided you through the specifics of what he has told you is an Ancient Japanese tea ceremony. He’s even given you a small scroll containing a detailed history of this, though you seem to have misplaced it.
Every afternoon, you have knelt on the wooden floor of your cabin and meditated. You have felt the sense of calm returning. You’ve gazed out through the open shoji doors, across the valley, observing the continued whirling of the shrikes and the swifts and the swallows, and you have looked down to where the cranes and the herons pad elegantly, as though upon tightropes, beside the finely tended ponds.
You have seen, on occasion, battles taking place in the distance.
Every evening, you have risen, testing your ankle, and practiced drawing and swinging and slashing with your sword.
But your heart isn’t in it.
Being a ronin was only fun, was only truly diverting, when you believed yourself invincible. The bubble of that particular belief has long-since popped.
You keep messaging for your attendant to bring up more and more saki, but he warns you, repeatedly, that it is not free, and advises moderation.
In the minutes that you lie awake before sleep, you half-dream about your ex-girlfriend, about the double bed in the flat that you shared.
***
This morning, that dream hadn’t left you.
Neither the tea ceremony nor the practiced chatter of your attendant could snap you out of it.
As you kneel on the floorboards of your cabin, staring out through the open shoji doors, you have difficulty focusing upon the balletic wing-beats and swoops and the crescendo-like rising of the various birds. Coupled with the fact there’s some kind of construction activity on the other side of the valley, your lingering dream conspires to deny you the meditation to which you were becoming accustomed.
Frustrated, you slide the shoji doors shut.
When you return to your kneeling position, you notice that the left door, previously hidden, contains a painting. A picture of a waterfall, cascading down through a valley more stony, less snowy than this. It is clearly and exaggeratedly stylized, but also somehow seems so real to you that you fancy you could shower beneath it, you fancy you could abdicate your inhibitions under pressure of its flow.
You remain kneeling on the floor of your cabin, ignoring your attendant when he comes to bring you food, ignoring the food itself, neglecting to stand and test your right ankle, neglecting to practice swinging your sword.
Slowly, you are forming a plan.
***
When you open the shoji door today, you see that the construction at the other side of the valley is complete.
It’s another cabin.
Its shoji doors are also thrown wide; you can see someone inside it.
A geisha.
Kneeling, leaning back on her ankles at the same time as she leans forward to pour herself some tea. Impeccable poise. A yellow flower blooms from the black of her hair.
The sight of her clarifies, immediately, intensely, the notion that was taking shape last night.
You wish to resume your artistic studies where you left off, all those years and years ago.
You wish to be a painter.
***
“Hello,” the customer service assistant says. “How may I help?”
You tell him you’d like to acquire all the materials necessary for painting in the Ancient Japanese style.
He looks at you slightly askance.
He doesn’t think Kenji is a very painterly name. “And, besides, you are signed up for the ronin-class experience only.”
“How much will it cost to switch to the painter-class experience?”
“It could be quite pricey,”
You shift your weight onto your right foot, and wince, loudly.
“Well, I suppose I can arrange for the switch,” he concedes, “if you’re willing to accept a lowering of the discount down to, say, thirty-five percent.”
“Forty-five,” you counter.
“Forty,” he offers.
“Done,” you agree.
He loads you up with paper and ink and brushes and silk sheets, and yo
u head back out into the cold.
***
Quite aside from the fact that you are apparently extant in Ancient Japan over five hundred years before you were born, it has been over a decade since you last sat down to draw or paint.
You take a few hesitant sweeps with the brush across a swathe of silk you’ve set aside for practice.
The marks you’ve made look like a pair of disembodied eyebrows, raised quizzically within the emptiness, as though musing on some deep existential dilemma. Such as, perhaps: Where’s the rest of my face?
Undeterred, you try again to sketch the geisha’s portrait, but it’s difficult working from memory. Night had already fallen by the time you returned, and her shoji doors were closed. Maybe it’s the saki you’ve been sipping despite your attendant’s repeated rebukes; perhaps it’s simply tiredness from the long walk in the snow, but anyway, you struggle to recall the precise layout of her features, the exact style of her hair, the true shade of red on her lips.
Frustrated, you stand up, still wincing at the pressure on your ankle. You walk over and slide the door shut. You notice the painting of the waterfall again.
You decide that copying that will be far better practice, will help you get back up to speed.
***
The dawn light streams in across the floor of your cabin, picking out a minefield of scrunched paper and silk scraps torn asunder.
Landscape painting, you’ve decided, is not your forte.
All that interests you, really, all that you can bear to train your eyes upon, is that beauty, distant, aloof, alluring, in her cabin on the far side of the gorge.
Frantic, imbued with what feels, in your faintly sleep-deprived state, to be a kind of mystic energy, you resume your cross-legged, semi-meditative position from last night, and set about striking the ink on a page.
Your actions have a renewed vigor, a confidence which is beginning to make itself known in your art. After the third or fourth try of the morning, you even feel you could show it to a stranger and have them pick out the geisha’s face in a crowd.
Well, so long as it’s not a crowd full of geishas.
Although, her kimono looks highly individual, and is punctuated by a striking, shocking-pink sash.
You will try and paint that next. A full-body portrait. After all, it’s almost as though she’s posing for you, standing in her doorway, head tilted enigmatically downwards in the direction of the latest war.