by Vance, Ramy
There was nothing magical or particularly Other about the place. Patrons sat on the floor eating small dishes of yakiniku, tako, edamame and a dozen other dishes that such places provided. Think of it as the Japanese version of tapas, or mezza. Little plates of bite-sized food.
The walls were made of three-inch-wide planks of wood and hung with paintings of Girl Diver and Octopuses and The Tale of Genji Scroll, as well as photos of—I’m guessing—famous patrons, not that I recognized any of them. There were also two shisa statues standing on the shelf behind the cash register. They symbolized guardian dogs (if a dog was the size of a lion, only stronger, faster and more vicious) who protected those in their care from evil.
One sat with its mouth open as it “ate” evil. The other had its mouth closed to hold the evil in.
I’d been on the receiving end of an attack from a pair of shisa once in my life, and by the GoneGods if I never met another pair again, I’d consider it a life well-spent. I breathed a sigh of relief that these two were just statues.
The only difference between the izakaya I remembered and the one I stood in now was that, among the Others heartily drinking their beer and sake sat several humans, one of whom was an American. Argh.
↔
The American walked up to me with a smile that looked all the more sleazy given he was wearing what looked like a Hawaiian shirt.
Still, despite his Larry the Lounge Lizard stride, he was cute. For an older guy.
Egya, seeing that I was about to be hit on, steered Deirdre away so the changeling wouldn’t come to my rescue. Egya was always hunting for the laugh, and I could just see how this one would play out: “Remember the time you were looking for your soul and this American guy hit on you …”
“Hello,” the American said, giving me a big smile.
Even though he was wearing a ridiculous shirt, if you looked at him from just the neck up, he was cute. Shallow dimples, a big inviting smile, short black hair. If he had longer hair he’d look a bit like Justin, and—
The thought of my boyfriend hurt my heart and suddenly I went from warming to the possibility of a wee bit of flirting to Arctic cold.
I didn’t answer.
“Hello,” he repeated, sticking out his hand, “I’m—”
“Not interested,” I said.
“OK,” he said, “if you’re not interested in my name, no harm. I’ll just have to forego the introduction. From henceforth, please refer to me as ‘You’ or ‘That guy,’ or—”
“Funny,” I said. “Must work wonders.” I wondered if he recognized me from the photo in the doorway. Probably not. As a human, he wouldn’t think I was the subject of a photo taken decades ago. Besides, even if he did recognize me, what did it matter? He was some stupid human—none of my concern.
“If by ‘wonders’ you mean getting my ass kicked a lot, then yes, I am a fountain of miracles.”
Damn it, cute and funny. My Achilles heel.
“Look, I’m flattered, but you’re a little old for me,” I said, hoping a blow to his ego would send him packing.
“Old?” he said, putting a hand on his chest as if my word was a bullet that had hit him. “I’m twenty-four. How young do you want them? Besides,”—he lifted his hand; a silver ring hugged the base of his left ring finger—“And happily,” he added.
“Humph,” I said. “Can’t be that happy if you’re here and she’s … where?”
“Back home,” he said, keeping it vague. “Look, I know you’re cute. You know you’re cute. But I’m not looking for a hook-up, believe me. It’s just that this is a bit of a rough place and—”
“You’re trying to protect me? In that shirt?”
“It’s kariyushi-wear, traditional for these parts.” He looked down at his shirt. “It’s what people wear here. And yes, I’m trying to protect you—by asking you to leave. We wouldn’t want to a tourist to like you to get hurt because you wandered off the beaten path and—”
“Ms. Darling, it is truly an honor to meet you again.” An oni demon with a metal ring the size of a frisbee in his tusk bowed deeply in my direction. “My master wishes your company,” he said, pointing to the beaded room at the back of the izakaya.
As I walked toward the curtains, I turned to the kariyushi-wearing man and winked. “Whatever will a tourist like me do?”
Walls, Walls and More Walls
As the oni demon led me to the back, I motioned for Egya and Deirdre to wait for me here—a request about which Deirdre was not happy. I heard a small “milady” of protest behind me, and I made an it’ll-be-fine gesture at her before I stepped away.
At least, I was pretty sure it would be fine.
The demon escorted me through a beaded curtain and into a secluded room before bowing deeply and leaving.
To an untrained eye this room looked empty. It had no exit, only one chair and four—if you counted the entrance—identical walls with nothing on them. But my eyes weren’t untrained.
I approached the three walls and examined them more closely before picking the one to the right and running my fingers over it in a tickling fashion. “Come on, Kenji,” I said as I tickled the wall. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”
The wall ceased to be a solid, boring piece of wood and turned into a convulsing structure that roared with laughter. “Yamite. Yamite, kudosai,” it said between chortles.
“You want me to stop, huh?” I giggled. “Then you’ll have to say the magic word.”
“Wordo?” it said between struggling breaths.
“Come on. You remember, don’t you?”
The wall got its laughter under control as it thought. Finally it spoke in a heavy Japanese accent. “Penappuru.”
The Japanese alphabet was nothing like the English one. For one thing, with the exception of the letter n, every consonant had to be coupled with a vowel. Letters like h had five distinct sounds to them: ha, he, hi, ho and hu. And unlike English, where the vowels e or i could have multiple pronunciations, theirs only had one. The letter e, for example, was pronounced with a sharp a sound, and the letter i was a sharp e. In other words, the word “hi” in Japanese would be read as the English word “he.”
Then get rid of the letter l and you’d know exactly three percent of what you need to know to speak Japanese.
I worked through the word penappuru … “Pineapple. Very good,” I said, stopping my tickle onslaught. “Safety word activated. How are you doing, my old friend?”
The wall crackled, its wooden exterior taking on more of a skin-like quality before it shuffled away from the real, non-living wall behind it. “I am doing well,” it said in an accent more natural to an English speaker, but still distinctly Japanese. I guess it’s hard to enunciate when you’re being tickle-tortured. “I am so happy to see you again, Katu. So very happy.”
I looked up at the animated wall. “Me, too.”
“But something is different about you,” Kenji said, the wall crinkling as it spoke. (I only referred to Kenji as an “it” because it possessed no sex to speak of. Truth was, for all I knew Kenji was a “he” or “she.” Then I had thoughts of planks of wooden walls piled at a hardware store and wondered if that was Kenji’s version of an orgy. I shuddered at the thought).
Kenji was a nurikabe, one of the stranger Japanese Others. In the annals of Japanese myth, nurikabe were “Obstructers of Ways,” placing themselves as false walls to confuse their victims or get them lost. But I found that, at least in Kenji’s case, that bit of lore was just that. Kenji never turned us around, never tried to confuse us. If anything, it helped Blue and me by first saving our lives and then finding a home for Blue with the noro priestess.
But that was a lifetime ago. And now … well, now I was just happy to see my old friend after all these years.
“Different?” I said, repeating his question. “No, not really. Oh, there is this one thing, though. Hardly worth mentioning really, but I’m human again.”
“Ahh, yes,” the wall said. “So mu
ch magic gone now that the gods are no more. Half-breeds like you have lost their magic selves. Now they are all human. Too bad—I always liked werewolves. So much fun to play fetch with.”
“And what about vampires? You never liked us?”
Kenji chuckled. “Most, no. One, yes.” The wall bent over slightly in my direction, its way of pointing.
“So glad to have made the cut,” I said.
“Are you here to see Blue?”
“Blue-chan? She’s still alive?” My voice took on a bit more anticipation than I’d intended.
“Yes,” Kenji said, not missing it. “Alive, strong. Not so much a chan anymore,” referring to the Japanese moniker reserved for the young. “She is old now.”
“That’s what happens when you’re mortal.”
“Hai,” he said. “We grow old. All of us.”
“We all grow old these days. Old and gray,” I agreed with the nurikabe, who currently looked like a plain wall. Kenji could change his appearance to look like any kind of wall he liked; right now he was wafer-thin and wooden, which I interpreted as letting his guard down. So we’re still friends after all, I thought with a smile. “That’s something we all have in common now,” I said.
“She grew up well, Kat. She became one of the most respected noro priestesses on the Ryukyu islands.”
That’s good, I thought. When I left her with the priestesses, I wasn’t sure if they’d take to her, given that she was being dropped off by a gaijin yokai—literal translation: foreign demon. But the mere fact that she became a noro priestess meant they had accepted her, and she had become a highly respected one, at that. Well, that was no surprise; Blue had more charisma than an archangel and a smile that infected you with joy.
“I could call her if you like,” Kenji said, breaking me away from my thoughts. “I could call Blue. She doesn’t live far from here.”
I thought about it. It would be amazing to see Blue again (and I didn’t care how old she was—she was still a chan to me). But I had left her after the war, placing her in the arms of loving, adoptive parents, and never came back. Sure, I’d set up a trust fund with enough money that she would never have to worry about being homeless again, but I never came back. I never called or wrote or did anything to let the little girl—now old woman—know I was alive.
I’d wanted her to have a normal life. You can’t have a normal life when your fairy godmother is a vampire, and so I figured the best thing for her was for me to stay away.
When the gods left four years ago and I became human again, I didn’t try to find her because I worried she might have died from old age or disease or whatever humans died from. The thought that she might be gone was too much to bear, so I lived content not to know. That way, I could at least pretend she was alive.
But now I had confirmation she was alive, and my heart beat with nervous, anxious anticipation at the thought of seeing her again.
Except I was here to find my soul, and I had already been attacked once by a half-dead Other. I was being hunted, which meant that anyone near me would also be hunted. I had spent the last several decades staying away to protect her and I wasn’t about to selfishly put her in harm’s way just because I wanted to see her again.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Not now. It’s too dangerous.”
“Abunai?” Kenji asked.
I rolled back my sleeve and showed the wall my arm, which was strange because I had no idea if nurikabe even had eyes. “Please tell me you can see this, or sense it, or whatever you have that passes for sight.”
The wall bent slightly and I placed my forearm in its crease. “I am sorry, but I cannot sense anything.”
GoneGodDamn, I thought. “I had hoped you could. I figured you might be able to see it since you are the Obstructer of Ways. But I guess it makes sense. So far I’m the only one who can see it. Well, me and a weird futakuchi-onna who said it was a map to the Kami Subete Hakubutsukan.”
“Kami Subete Hakubutsukan,” Kenji said in a hushed voice. “Abunai.”
Abunai meant dangerous. “Do you know what this is?”
Kenji paused for a long moment, growing so perfectly still it became hard for me to see Kenji as anything but a wall and not the living, breathing creature it was. Then an image appeared on Kenji’s surface. It was another map and I took a mental snapshot of it.
“Not what—where.”
“This place?” I asked, touching the center of the map (not that Kenji could see me doing that). “This map isn’t telling me much more than that it’s somewhere in Okinawa.”
A red dot appeared on the center of Kenji’s map, about six inches above where I’d placed my finger. “It is legend that the Kami Subete Hakubutsukan is somewhere hidden on Kakusareta Taiyo Shima,” the wall said before pausing. “Say, you aren’t one of those—ahh, how do you say in English?—nut jobs screaming about the Three Who Are One, are you?”
“Three Who Are One?” I said. “Sounds like something that belongs in a Harry Potter novel.”
Kenji chuckled before his voice took on an annoyed voice. “In the last six months we have many Others from all over the world come to our little island, claiming to be the Heralds of the Three Who Are One. I keep telling them that I don’t know what Three Who Are One is, but they keep on coming in, asking the same question.”
“Again, what is Three Who Are One?”
“An event? A person? Some messiah who will come back from the dead? I have no idea. All I do know is that they believe tomorrow night will usher it in, whatever it is.”
“Tomorrow night? You mean New Year’s Eve?” I said, not telling him about the Morrigan or my soul. Whatever the Three Who Are One was, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with either of those things.
“Ahh, but tomorrow isn’t just any New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow is special because it is also Celestial Solace. Think of it as the New Year’s Eve for the gods, but it lasts three months. And every three hundred and thirteen years, their new year and the human new year overlap.”
“I see. Kind of like a divine Y2K.”
“Y2K?”
“You weren’t mortal then. Big New Year’s event. Everyone thought the world was going to end, except not really. Most of us took it as a joke, a fun little extra to put into that year’s celebrations. But there were a few that took it very, very, very seriously.”
“Ahh, then yes. A divine Y2K it is. And because we are dealing with mythical creatures whom superstition infects like a cancer, they are coming here and annoying me with questions I have no answers to. Don’t they know that their superstitions should have left with the gods?” Kenji sighed. “So nothing to do with Three Who Are One bakajin, huh? OK, then what is it that you seek?”
I considered telling him about what had happened to me, about how I’d briefly turned into a vampire because of some powerful Other’s spell, about how when I broke the spell and became human again, not all of me came back—that my soul did not return, but instead was captured in some jar or vase or whatever you keep souls in these days, somewhere in Okinawa.
But instead I pursed my lips and said nothing.
“Very well,” Kenji said. “But tell me this: does the map show you where on the island the Kami Subete Hakubutsukan is?”
“No. Right now it’s just a map of Okinawa. I had hoped when I landed here it would give me more details, but so far, nothing. That’s why I came to you.”
Kenji paused before leaning in, its wall-like body folding around me as though trying to encase me in a room of its own making. “There are those who would kill for this map.”
“I know,” I said. “One of them tried to kill me on the plane over. But I don’t know why. I have an idea—a theory, even, but nothing concrete. What is a Kami Subete Hakubutsukan anyway?”
The wall took in a deep breath. “Hakubutsukan means ‘museum’ and Subete means ‘everything.’ ”
“The Museum of Everything?” I asked, sitting down for the first time since meeting my old w
all friend. When I sat, I noticed three men in cheap business suits staring in my direction through the beaded curtain. Private room we may be in … but secluded? Not as much as I would have liked.
The Japanese businessmen, or as they’re affectionately referred to in Japan: salarymen—salary men—stared at us as if there was nothing more interesting in the world. Not really that strange given I am a cute, auburn-haired gaijin in a seedy part of town, I tried to convince myself as I chatted with Kenji. They probably think I’m some kind of high-end call girl or something. After all, these salary men probably weren’t here for a beer or three after work. They were looking for some Other extra-recreational activities.
“Ahh, but that’s where it gets complicated. Kami refers to the gods. So it’s the Gods’ Museum of Everything,” Kenji said, drawing my attention away from them.
“Hold on. Are you telling me that the gods built a museum and that’s what I’m looking for?”
The surface of Kenji’s wall changed and I watched as images of gods appeared. And not just Japanese gods; we had Zeus represented by the lightning bolts in his hand, Odin with his one eye, Ganesha with his elephant head, Shiva with each of her many arms holding a different weapon. There was Enlil, Enki and Inanna, and Sheela Na Gigs and Isis. Every major and minor god appeared in succession.
Once Kenji had established the Who’s Who of gods on its surface, it drew an image of a building not unlike the Smithsonian. One by one the gods moved to the building in a style of animation that reminded me of the old stop-motion cartoons, each step awkward and sudden. There I watched as the gods placed items in there. The Staff of The Monkey King, the Arc of the Covenant, the Lance of Longinus (the spear that pierced Jesus’s side), Odin’s Eye, Izanami-no-Mikoto’s comb. The list went on and on.