by Amanda Sun
Shiori’s face fell. “Oh.”
This whole thing was stupid. Couldn’t we just come out and say how we felt? Tomo and I were together, but I didn’t want to hurt Shiori.
“You can come with us,” I blurted out. Tomo raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. “It’s more fun that way anyway, right?”
“Oh, I’m too busy,” Shiori said. “I have that appointment, and then I need to stop for a couple things we need for dinner.” The train was slowing, pulling into the next stop, and the motion sent an elderly man’s bag skidding across the floor. Tomo dashed after it, returning it to the bowing, grateful man. Shiori leaned into me while he was gone, her voice low. “It’s a shame you don’t know how to cook Japanese food, Katie. How will you ever keep a Japanese man happy?”
Did she actually just say that? “Sorry?”
Shiori sighed. “It’s pathetic, you know, trying to steal Tomo from me.”
My mouth opened, but I had to force words out. “Steal him?”
“Tomo-kun and I have been inseparable since we were little. You think you’re going to change that?”
My stomach twisted; I’d never heard Shiori sound like this. “I’m not trying to get between you.”
“I don’t need your pity invites to everything you do. Anyway, do you even know the first thing about dating a Japanese guy? Poor Tomo-kun. Japanese guys have totally different expectations than Americans, you know. I could never date a foreigner. I mean, for a bit of meaningless fun, maybe, but not long-term. You know your relationship with Tomo isn’t going to go anywhere serious, right? Wait...did you know?” She looked at the bright red plastered on my cheeks. “Ara, you did! Never mind. Enjoy your date. It’s nice to be exotic, even if it’s short-lived, right?” She rose to her feet as the train doors opened, waving her hand at Tomo with a big smile as she went out the door. I stared at her like a blowfish, my mouth open in a big O as the train pulled away.
Tomo collapsed into the seat beside me, the motion making the seat jump a little. “Daijoubu?” he asked. “You look pale.”
“I’m not okay,” I said. “Not at all. Did you hear what she said?”
He leaned forward. “What?”
But I couldn’t say it. It was hurtful, but it was true, wasn’t it? I was stumbling over every cultural difference, like Jun’s name. What kind of expectations did Tomo have? Was I supposed to cook lunches for him like in animes? Women working in the offices brought tea for their male coworkers at break time, and Diane had told me about a teacher who’d quit working because she’d gotten married. Did Tomo expect me to do that, too? Were we really too different to have a future?
“Nothing,” I said. I was scared Tomo would agree with what she’d said. He’d already acted pretty jealous about the Jun thing.
“Forget her,” Tomo said. “It’s probably baby hormones talking. Today it’s just you and me, ii?” He ruffled my hair with his slender fingers, a grin carving its way onto his lips. I smiled back, confidence slowly flooding back into me. Tomo liked to cook, for one thing. Yuki had told me that was pretty unconventional for a Japanese guy. Maybe he wasn’t typical in any way.
Shiori had reminded me that I was different, that I didn’t fit in. But the way Tomo looked at me right now, I didn’t feel different at all.
* * *
“Up a mountainside?”
Tomohiro grinned. We’d been riding the bus for fifteen minutes, scaling closer and closer to the summit on the narrow roads that tunneled through the trees.
“This isn’t exactly the most convenient spot for everyday meetings,” I said.
“Okay, fine, maybe it’s a bit far for every day,” Tomo said, slouching into the bus seat. “But it’s worth it.”
I stared out the window as the bus pulled up to a platform. Forests surrounded us in a blanket of leaves, more lush green than I’d seen in one place since moving to Shizuoka. Above the trees, a thick wire ran up the hill.
“What is this place?”
The bus shuddered to a stop, and we hopped off the front, dropping our yen into the plastic box beside the steering wheel.
“Nihondaira,” Tomo said, and the moment we stepped out of the bus, the fresh, sweet mountain air gusted around us.
The chirps of wagtails and Japanese bush warblers echoed from every corner of the forests. It was as though Toro Iseki had burst through its boundaries and transformed into an overgrown secret garden.
The crows cawed incessantly, the only familiar sound that we were still in Shizuoka.
“Look,” he said and stretched out his arm. It was hard to see, but there was something in the distance across the bay, a looming shape with a cap of white at the top. “The air’s muggy, but you can kind of make it out.”
Mount Fuji towered over the landscape, reaching into the sky like a giant. I’d never seen a mountain that huge in my entire life.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed. “This whole area is.”
“And remote,” he said. “Well, except the tourists.” Most of the ground around us was paved into a huge parking lot for the tour buses. But on the edges of that platform, the rolling mountains teemed with life and sound. I turned—behind us stood a variety of radio towers in striped red and white. To the right of us was a touristy-looking building about half the height of the towers.
“Gift shop?” I wondered.
“This is where a lot of the Shizuoka tea is made,” Tomo said. “They sell some of it in there.”
“Oh,” I said. “So these are the rolling lands of your dad’s tea empire.” I poked him sharply just above his hip and he jumped a mile.
“Oi!” he snapped. He reached for me and I raced toward the tea shop. The sound of grinding gears and wire scraping against itself stopped me in my tracks. Tomo crashed into me, grabbing me around my waist and lifting me off the ground.
“Hey!” I shouted as he laughed. A few of the Japanese tourists looked over and then quickly away. I was a foreigner, so they made it their business to politely ignore the shenanigans I was causing.
My feet touched the ground again and Tomo broke off his hold on me.
“That’s the ropeway,” he said, following my gaze.
Little cable cars bounced up and down on the wires as they whirred slowly through the air, rolling along the thick cord toward a distant mountain peak.
“Is that where we’re going?”
“Not exactly, but we can take a detour. There’s a shrine up there, so there’ll be more tourists. But on the edges of the shrine are forests, and no fence.”
“Got it,” I grinned. “Let’s ride the ropeway. I want to be surrounded by forest.”
He grinned. “Ikuzo.” Let’s go.
We’d lost something important without Toro Iseki. We needed to be alone among the trees and the birds, somewhere horses could come to life if we wanted them to.
The thought was sobering. No, we couldn’t bring anything like that to life again. No horses, no butterflies, not even any furin chimes in the trees. They’d been dangerous, sinister, but they’d been beautiful, too. It made me sad to think I would never see those things again.
I noticed a weird frame covered in brass squares while we waited to enter the cable car. A large metal frame held a dozen rows of silver pipes, and along these pipes hung hundreds of brass padlocks like on vintage high-school lockers or construction-site fences.
“What’s this about?” I said.
Tomohiro rested his hand on the locks, giving them a shove so they swayed back and forth. Now that I looked closer, kanji names had been written down the sides of the locks in black pen.
“Lovers’ locks,” he said. “Lock your heart here so your relationship lasts forever.”
I felt too warm then, looking at the rows of locks. Were these couples all still together? Every lock had a keyhole at t
he bottom, but no keys in sight. The locks weren’t going anywhere.
Tomo spoke beside me, his breath warm on my ear. “They threw the keys away,” he said. “Guess they’re stuck together until the end. Maybe I should get a lock for us, too.”
“You sure you want to be stuck with each other that long?” I was joking, but what Shiori had said still stung, leaving an uneasy hole at the edge of my confidence where it seeped away into the shadows.
Tomo took a deep breath as the cable car arrived, a lady opening the door and announcing it was time to board. “It’s not that long until the end for me,” he said, and I shivered.
We crowded into the cable car with the tourists and lifted into the air.
“So we can fly after all,” Tomohiro said, but his voice was sad. He’d thought once he could fly safely on a dragon, but that didn’t end well. Now here we were, suspended by a cord, bouncing over every pole along the ropeway.
“At least this mode of transportation won’t try to eat you,” I said. “Although it is kind of rickety.”
“Well, it’s run fine for the past fifty years,” Tomo said, his eyes gleaming. “I guess it’s due to break down and throw us to our untimely deaths.”
“You better grow feathers fast if that happens.”
He tucked his bangs behind his ears—where they stayed for a few seconds before tumbling back—and closed his eyes. I knew he was pretending we weren’t surrounded by tourists.
At the end of the ropeway, we followed the crowd as they curved around the platform and toward a staircase of what looked like a hundred giant stone steps. They rose sharply from the cable-car platform, and I gasped when I saw the roumon gateway at the top.
It looked like the entrance to an ancient castle, a fortified gate of deep crimson and white. The roof tilted up like a bird raising its wings, the black rounded tiles stubbed with crests of shining gold. A thick rope wound around the gate, little thunderbolts made of white cloth hanging down from it and swaying in the breeze.
“Kunozan Toshogu Shrine,” Tomohiro said. “That’s just the entrance.”
We walked up the steps slowly. “A shrine? So it’s Shinto, then, not Buddhist.”
“Yeah,” said Tomohiro. “Dedicated to the most famous Kami of Shizuoka, Tokugawa Ieyasu.”
“That sounds like a person’s name, not a mythical kami,” I smirked.
Tomohiro stopped climbing the stairs to look at me. “It is,” he said. “He built Shizuoka Castle. And when he died, after months of sickness and nightmares, he was buried here.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“When?” I whispered.
“Sixteen-hundred-something,” Tomohiro said, and he kept climbing. I followed him. “Don’t worry. I’m sure the ghost is long gone.”
“And you think he was really...?”
“A Kami?” Tomohiro stopped to catch his breath and then continued up the stone steps. “Well, let’s see. He was kidnapped during an uprising when he was six. The abductors demanded Tokugawa’s father break ties with their enemy clan or they’d kill his son. And his father said, ‘Go ahead.’”
I raised my hand to my mouth, my eyes wide.
“Yeah,” Tomo said. “And after three years of the boy suffering in their hands, his captors suddenly dropped dead. So did his father. So did half the Japanese in the area.”
Shit.
“Tomo,” I said, my throat dry. “How do you know all this?”
“I’m just looking for answers,” he said. “It used to be Taira no Kiyomori in my nightmares. Now it’s Tokugawa. And I want to understand why.”
“I thought we were looking for a new place to be alone.”
“We are,” Tomohiro said. “But you wanted to come here, and I felt the pull, too. I feel like I’m supposed to be here. He led a lot of successful battles in his time. Maybe he knew something I don’t about controlling the ink.”
We’d reached the gateway now and could see the shrine before us. It was a flurry of bright rainbow colors. I’d never seen any shrine or temple like it in Japan. The posts and foundation of the house were painted bright red, but the walls were a deep black and covered in bright images of dogs and birds. Every surface shone with elaborate whorls of intricate gold. The painted dogs curled around the building had blue and white spots, with tails and manes like lions. Once-brass lanterns, now turned green and scaly with time, hung from thick chains in the roof. Just under the ceiling beams wove an elaborate pattern of blue, red, white and green flowers and shapes. Everything gleamed like it was alive.
“Tomo,” I said, stepping forward. My breath caught in my throat.
That was when I heard the gasp, like air being wrenched from his lungs.
The painted dog’s lip curled back with the sound of wood snapping and grinding, a growl echoing from his mouth of sharply drawn teeth.
I turned just as Tomohiro collapsed in the gateway, his head cracking against the stone. Ink pooled around his skull like blood.
“Tomo!” I shouted, racing back to the gateway where he fell. The ink spread in a shimmering pool on the stone as tourists clustered around him. I collapsed onto my knees beside him, putting my hands on his shoulders. His eyes were closed and it didn’t look like he was breathing.
Behind me I could hear the groan of ancient wood bending and snapping as the painted dog snarled, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I shook Tomohiro by the shoulders gently, but nothing happened.
Above us, in the shadow of the gateway, I heard strange groans and whispers. Something was really wrong. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. We needed to get away from here, fast.
“Someone call for help!” one of the tourists shouted. Several had already reached into their bags for their keitais.
“No,” I shouted, and they hesitated. I knew what Tomohiro would say. Don’t draw attention. But how could I help it? He’d passed out in a pool of ink.
I hooked my arms under Tomo’s shoulders and started dragging him away from the gateway, toward the top of the stone stairs where I could look at him in the light. The ink left a bloodlike trail as I pulled him forward to see what the emergency might be.
The moment he was out of the shadow of the roumon, he gasped as if he were drowning, like he was breathing in life itself.
“Tomo!” I smoothed his hair out of his face. The ink had soaked into his copper spikes and they stuck together in matted tangles.
He opened his eyes and looked at me. His pupils were huge, alien, glistening black.
No! Like the times he’d lost control while drawing. The Kami in him had taken over.
He kept gasping for air, his voice frantic as he groaned.
“It’s okay,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “It’s okay.” My hands dripped with ink as I stroked his damp hair.
A woman stepped over and offered her water bottle. I nodded my head in thanks and opened it, the ink slicking over the cap and trickling down the sides.
“I’m going to call an ambulance,” another tourist said.
“No!” I said. We couldn’t risk getting the hospital involved. What if it drew the police or something? “It’s okay. He’s okay now, see?”
Tomo closed his eyes, and when they opened again, they were their normal dark brown. I pressed a hand against his heart.
Please calm down. Please.
“Katie,” he managed.
“Pull it together, Tomo,” I said quietly. “Everyone’s worried.”
He got the message, and his breathing slowed.
“But he’s bleeding!” shouted a tourist.
“It’s ink,” I said. “See?” I splayed my fingers, showing the black liquid to the crowd. It was strange, showing off the one thing I wanted to hide. Their faces crumpled with confusion and I had to fix it, fast.
&n
bsp; I reached into Tomo’s satchel, hoping for a pen, anything I could lay the blame on. My fingers brushed against glass, and I pulled the item out.
A bottle of ink, sealed shut, but the ink on my hands muddied up the container so the crowd couldn’t tell.
“It leaked,” I said, my body shaking. “He’s in Shoudo Club. It’s for his calligraphy projects. He’s okay. Come on, Tomo, sit up.”
He took hold of my arm and pulled himself upright. His body was shaking, his heartbeat erratic.
“I’m okay,” he managed, bowing his head to the crowd. “I’m sorry for the commotion. I...I got too hot.”
“He just needs some water,” I said, passing him the bottle. He drank deeply, the water spilling over his lips, dripping onto his shirt and the satchel strap.
“Well, if...if you’re sure,” said the tourist.
Tomohiro ran a hand through his ink-caked hair. He curled his legs underneath him and stood slowly. I kept a hand on his arm just in case.
“I’m all right,” he said again. “No need to call for help. Thank you, everyone.” And he bowed deeply to the crowd, his eyes cast to the ground. He stayed like that, and I just stared at him. But then I realized that the whole occurrence would have been considered troublesome for the tourists. Japanese courtesy called for us to apologize. I bent over in a deep bow, too, until Tomo reached for my wrist and led me down the steps.
We couldn’t make it into the woods to be alone. There were too many eyes on us. So we got on the ropeway, making our way back to the platform.
I squeezed Tomohiro’s hand, but he pulled it away from me. “Are you okay?” I said quietly. “Really?”
“My head’s killing me,” he said. “That stone was hard.”
“It’s stone.”
He grinned, rubbing the back of his head. “I’ll live,” he said. But that wasn’t what I’d meant.