by JP Romney
“Well, yeah, I guess.”
“Oh, good. Very good. Tōfu tastes like clouds, don’t you think, Koda?”
“I … don’t know.”
“If you could fry clouds, I mean. I like clouds. And snow. And sunsets. What do you like?”
“Well,” I said, walking along beside her. “I like airplanes. And hanging out with Haru.”
“Boring. Let’s talk about something else.”
Moya shoved a huge piece of tōfu into her mouth and washed it down with sake.
“Wow,” I said.
Then she belched.
“And that was the perfect end to a perfect night.”
“I really like tōfu,” Moya said, throwing her trash into a nearby bin.
“I can see that. And sake. How are you still standing? You should be in a gutter drooling on yourself by now.”
“Koda,” she said, “you are not as smart as you look.” She sighed, leading me to the entrance of the shrine. The smell of rice liquor filled the air. “But you are one of the good ones. Even if you are a dirty little thief.”
“Um, thank you?”
“I had my doubts about you, you know. People make such terrible thieves. But you, Koda, you really are one of the good ones.”
“I’m sorry, people make bad thieves?” Maybe I was a little intoxicated, too, because that last sentence only seemed to bother me a bit.
“You have a good heart. You see things other people can’t, and you care enough to try to help.”
Moya’s smile fell away and she stared off into the parking lot. “But some things can’t be helped. Other people will be sad. Other people will be sick. Finding Shibaten is the only way to end all of this.”
“Shibaten? The river troll?”
“Of course,” Moya said. “Why else would I send you to that weird bus driver? No one is more obsessed with Shibaten than he is. He has to have a memory somewhere in that gross house of his.”
“I thought we were looking for crows.”
Moya reached out and touched one of the stone lions that guarded the entrance. “No. The crows are just the symptom, Koda. Shibaten holds the key to curing the disease.”
“What does that even mean?”
Moya looked at me a little too long. “Find the memory, Koda. Use your powers for good, and I will show you what that means.”
“I guess it couldn’t hurt to ask him,” I said.
Moya slumped to the ground. “That’s my little cutpurse—asking politely for things he’s supposed to steal.”
“Being polite opens doors.”
“You know what else opens doors? Hammers. And rocks. And fire. Fire opens doors.”
“Burning down an accountant’s house is not a good use of powers,” I said, sitting down next to her. “I think you’re a little drunk.”
“I’m a lot drunk, dummy.” She looked over at me. “Do you know where the kaki tree is?”
“There are no kaki trees in this town, Moya,” I told her.
“That’s not true. There’s one. It’s the last kaki tree. I hid it. In a bamboo grove surrounded by camphor trees. Go to the westernmost part of town, and you’ll see a road next to a small graveyard. Behind the last house on the road there’s a footpath. Take the footpath and you’ll find the bamboo forest. But don’t tell anyone about this, Koda. Don’t tell anyone or I will burn you alive.”
“Okay, you probably don’t realize how extreme that sounds right now.”
“I will. I’ll burn you alive.” Moya looked up at me without a hint of a smile. “Do me a favor.”
“This is an odd time to ask for a favor—after threatening my life and all.”
“Don’t look at me for a second. Promise me.”
“I feel like this relationship is very one-sided, Moya.”
Moya leaned forward until she was centimeters from my face. Her breath was sweet. Strange and sweet, with an alcohol sting. “Don’t look at my eyes, Koda.”
I looked down.
“Wow. Not at my boobs. What’s wrong with you, kid?”
“Where am I supposed to look?” I said, jerking my chin back up.
“Just close your eyes, genius. Have you never done this before?”
“Done what?” I said.
Moya covered my eyes with her hand and kissed me. It’s true, I’d never done that before. It was different than I’d ever imagined. It felt like the oxygen was being pulled out of my body and, with it, all of the fear and the sadness and the pain that had been collecting in my soul ever since Aiko died. When Moya pulled away, I felt the air rushing back in. My head swam in the alcohol on her breath.
“Good night, Koda. Be strong. There are harder times ahead.”
Then she walked away. I wanted to follow her, but I slid down to the foot of the stone lions instead. The air blew crisp and raw against my skin. My eyes stung.
Moya was possibly insane and probably dangerous, but as she disappeared around that corner I felt the light inside me dim. It was like I’d invented fire and then someone took it away from me. Suddenly the night seemed so much bigger. So much darker. Suddenly I felt so much more alone.
* * *
The next morning, caretakers from Ōmura Shrine swept up the bottles and the lanterns and the plastic toys far away from Headmaster Sato and his small Mitsubishi. The headmaster pulled out his briefcase, locked his door, and walked through the high school parking lot. The day after the festival was usually a pleasant time for everyone. The teachers and staff would be in a good mood. A few would probably have hangovers, but nothing a little kusuri wouldn’t fix. The headmaster smiled for the first time in weeks and rounded the corner. He saw a crowd of those same teachers gathered near the southwest wall of the building, near the school swimming pool that had been drained and abandoned for years. They were all looking up. Some of them were crying.
The headmaster shielded his eyes from the morning sun and stared up at the roof. A shadow balanced dangerously over the edge.
“Taiki!” one of the teachers cried.
The boy teetered on the roof for a moment, then stretched out his arms.
“No!” the headmaster screamed, and dropped his briefcase.
12
For days, the parking lot at Kusaka High School was blocked by police cars and flashing lights. The front doors were chained shut. The windows were bolted. Men in suits with briefcases flew in from Tōkyō and stepped over the barricades that had been set up.
When something terrible happens, people call it a tragedy. Aiko was definitely that—a tragedy. But when something terrible happens again, and again, there’s another word for that: a pattern.
I sat on the floor of the front room with my parents, watching the glow of the television set. Watching as reporters descended from Fukuyama and Ōsaka and as far away as Sapporo. They held cameras and microphones and personal computers. They asked questions like “Why this town?” and “How did you miss the signs?” and “Who is responsible?” and “Who is to blame?”
What they really meant was How do we feel safe again? What can you tell us that will explain away the nightmare?
The teachers made no public statements. They bowed politely or tried to ignore the barrage of questions as they carried groceries from the Sunny Mart or mailed a letter or filled their cars with petrol. The tragic pattern in Kusaka was making national news, and the people of Japan wanted to know how this had happened and, more important, if it could spread.
Agents from the Public Safety Commission were set up in the school. They opened their briefcases and talked to every teacher and employee. The suicides were a disease. If they searched hard enough, they believed the cure for that disease could be found somewhere inside the interviews and notebooks and personal email accounts.
Some teachers, like Ikeda-sensei, got angry. His gym classes could never have led to the suicides, he said, or rather shouted in his huge sumō voice.
“But Aiko was found in the school gymnasium. And Ichiro died on the floor of your mat
h room,” the agents calmly answered.
“That had nothing to do with me!” Ikeda-sensei shot back.
“Perhaps it does. Perhaps it doesn’t. We will see.”
Other teachers, like Ino-sensei, withered under the questioning. “You are the school counselor?” the agents asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you counsel your students not to take their own lives?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“We don’t make jokes, Ino-sensei. If we did, though, they would go something like this: A counselor is supposed to help her students manage their stress, and that didn’t happen in this school. See, that’s not even a joke. It’s just a statement.”
“It’s an accusation.”
“It’s an observation.”
As it turned out, one individual couldn’t endure the agents’ questioning at all. Sato-kōchōsensei’s car was found in the parking lot of Ōmura Shrine. The headmaster had entered the grounds and sat down against the eastern wall next to the old botan tree. The newspapers said that when the priests came to rake the grounds in the morning, they found him doubled over. His heart had simply stopped beating.
An honorable man, the reporters wrote, Headmaster Sato felt the sting of each suicide deeply in his heart. While he may not have been the cause of the tragedies at Kusaka High School, he was certainly the watcher at the gate. Kids like Aiko and Ichiro and Taiki had slipped by unnoticed while he stood on the wall. There was only one thing an honorable man in Japan could do then. Headmaster Sato knelt down in a holy place and properly died of a proper broken heart.
This wasn’t true, as I would find out later, but the newspapers didn’t ask many questions. The headmaster was an admirable man, they wrote, a noble man. He was a true beacon of dignity in our troubled times. It was like they’d all forgotten that death was the reason they were here in the first place.
After Sato-kōchōsensei passed away, things in Kusaka changed. The investigation and the reporters moved quickly to close the case. Maybe the headmaster’s death answered their questions. Maybe it softened their hearts. Maybe they thought Kusaka had faced all the tragedy a town could face for now. Who knows? But the agents gathered their papers, nodded to the reporters, and finally let the press conferences begin.
A new headmaster from Kōchi City leaned forward and bowed in front of a long table bristling with microphones that hummed against the floor of the school gymnasium. The men and women sitting around him lowered their heads as the cameras clicked and flashed. They were dressed in black. Teachers from school, mostly, but also the small mayor of Kusaka Town. Even the governor of Kōchi Prefecture sat nearby, and to each of their lapels a single yamabuki flower had been pinned.
Yamabuki means “mountain breath.” Bright. Fresh. Unnervingly yellow. These flowers stood out like a snicker in a funeral. For some reason I didn’t quite understand, yamabuki flowers came to symbolize the fallen students of Kusaka High School. Aiko, Ichiro, Taiki—they were called the Yamabuki Three. Whoever came up with the phrase thought that the spirits of the students would float along like the mountain’s breath. Reverent and beautiful, right?
Or super creepy. Adults may have taken up the name Yamabuki Three, but we students never did. Adults can hang their wreaths of yamabuki flowers over the windows and the entrances to the school, but we’re the ones who have to stay here and eat and walk through dark halls at the end of the day. No matter how beautiful or reverent the words, saying that the school might be haunted by dead classmates doesn’t help anyone when they’re trying to finish a math test.
In the gymnasium, the new headmaster bowed so low that his head almost touched the table. The other teachers did the same. They apologized for the shame that Kusaka now bore. They promised to make things right again.
Next to apologize was the mayor, and then the prefectural governor. Finally, the agents from the Public Safety Commission stood to address the reporters and answer the one question everyone was asking.
Their answer: ijime.
A single word to explain a tragedy that had claimed four lives in just a few weeks: bullying. According to the findings of the commission, the Yamabuki Three had killed themselves because they were victims of bullying.
Aiko Fujiwara’s home life fell apart after her mother left the family, the agents said. She felt excluded and pushed to the outside. She was teased for talking to herself on the balcony during class breaks. She became an outcast in school and society as a whole.
It turns out Ichiro Kobayashi had lost his parents in a car accident. When he moved to Kusaka, he felt intense pressure to meet expectations on the baseball field. The conditions of his home life with his uncle were still under investigation.
Taiki Watanabe, the last of the suicides, was a yowaiko, a weak child, small, with a history of being picked on at home and at school.
Ijime.
Maybe there was some truth to the commission’s findings, but I knew there was more to the Yamabuki Three. There had to be. The crows. The weird haiku poem about a traveler on the road. The bloody kanji on the floor and the cleaning fluid and how Taiki made it onto a locked roof in the first place.
The agents closed their briefcases and buttoned up their suits. They stepped back over the barricades and drove their vans away from Kusaka Town. Eventually the crowds of reporters thinned out until hardly anyone was left and hardly anyone outside our town cared.
Ino-sensei was required to undergo training in ijime counseling. Speeches were given and clubs formed. There was even a contest at school to see who could come up with the best antibullying poster. No one lost that contest, of course—all the entries were published in a calendar that we were told to hang in our bedrooms and look at each morning.
That was how Kusaka changed. That was how we honored the Yamabuki Three. That was how Japan forgot this small town. We patted ourselves on the back and said, “Now we understand. Now we see. Now the danger is finally over.”
But you know what?
We were wrong.
13
By the time I reached Yori’s house, the sun was just touching the high mountains of Kusaka Town and the cool smell of evening was drifting through the valley. I swung down the kickstand and left my bike on the street. I creaked open the gate, took a breath, and walked up to the front door. “Gomen kudasai,” I called, trying to slide it back.
It was locked.
“Hello?” I said louder. “Is anyone here?”
Nothing.
“Yori-san?”
The house was as dead and quiet as the weed path in front of it. I turned and sat down on the steps. Moya and her kiss were constantly on my mind. What kind of a name is Moya anyway? It means “mist” or “fog.” What mother names her daughter Fog? Oh, nice to meet you, my name is Ms. Foggy von Misty Hair. See, totally normal.
I stood up and walked around the outside of Yori’s house. Maybe there was something buried in all the junk inside that would help me find Shibaten. A few weeks ago I would have laughed at the idea of tracking a kappa with the help of a bus driver. But then crows started killing kids. And if you can accept crows who mind-control people into walking off school roofs, well, river trolls aren’t such a difficult leap.
Shibaten and the crows were connected, though I couldn’t imagine what that connection might be. People in Kusaka may not know too much about crows, but everyone knows at least a little about Shibaten. He’s a kappa, obviously. He’s older than the town itself. There’s a forgotten statue of him in the southern part of town. The story goes that when Kusaka was founded two hundred years ago, the rōnin and the farmers made a deal with Shibaten. If he promised to stay in his river and not venture out into the valley, they promised not to hunt him down and make a floor mat out of him. Or something like that. I don’t pay attention on school field trips.
I heard footsteps on the road in front of the house. I ran around the corner but didn’t immediately recognize the man walking toward me. He was dressed in a brown busines
s suit with a yellow tie and a tote bag for a briefcase. His clothes weren’t old, but the man inside them looked tired and wasted away.
“Yori-san?” I said.
The man’s face lit up. “Koda?”
I bowed a little at the waist. I was standing in his front yard, so it seemed like the proper thing to do.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I need to find Shibaten,” I said.
Yori stopped and looked around.
“Did he follow you here?” he asked.
“No.” I looked behind me. “I mean, that would make my life easier, but no.”
“That would not make your life easier, Koda. It would be terrible! Absolutely awful! Let’s get inside.”
Yori walked past me and up the steps. He yanked on the front door, but it caught on the lock and wouldn’t budge.
“Ne-chan!” he called through the window. There was no reply. He turned on me suddenly. “Did you see anything strange when you came to the house?”
“Like what kind of strange?”
“Kappa are trickster demons.” He rattled the caught door again. “This could all be some kind of…”
“Trick?”
“Exactly.”
Yori set his tote bag down. “What did you do, Koda?”
“What did I do? I didn’t do anything.”
“You’re not listening,” he said. “Kappa are dangerous, Koda. Very dangerous. Shibaten will kill you.”
“Kill me? Why? What did I do to him?”
“What did Aiko and Ichiro and Taiki do? Murder is just part of a kappa’s nature.” Yori looked past me to the corner of the house. “We need to get inside immediately. Follow me.”
Yori led me around to the side of the house. He pushed hard on the window, and with a few creaks it gave way. Yori hopped up and squeezed himself inside. I did the same, landing on the dusty floor of his kitchen. Yori shut the window.
“Ne-chan!” he called, but his sister didn’t answer.
We walked through the junk of Yori’s home and into the front sitting room. The TV was dead. Yori opened his briefcase, pulled out his keitai phone, and dialed. Hello Kitty swung back and forth from a charm on the antenna stub.