by Amanda Sun
“I was just thinking that you haven’t bleached all the brain cells out of your head.”
“Hidoi,” he complained. That’s cruel.
I ignored him. “What we need to do is silence Tsukiyomi. That’s all we need to do, and Tomo’s suffering is over.”
“That and stop Takahashi.”
Tomo grunted and we stopped talking, watching as he slowly turned onto his side and continued to sleep.
“It’s getting late,” Ishikawa said. “Don’t you need to get home?”
I pulled out my keitai and checked the time. “Crap!” I’d missed text messages from Diane asking if I was coming for dinner. We both had so many late nights at school—it was common in Japan for students and teachers to stay for after-school clubs until even eight or nine—that we didn’t have the chance to eat dinner together as much as we had when I’d first arrived.
“Go home,” Ishikawa said. “I’ll stay with Yuuto and make sure he’s okay.” I hesitated, but he just smiled at me. “The worst is over, yeah? And you need to stay on good terms with your aunt so she doesn’t stop you guys from seeing each other. As much as that would make my life better, it would make Yuuto’s suck, so get going already.”
He had a point. “But you’ll tell me if something happens, right?”
“Of course. Now get lost.”
I texted Diane to let her know I’d eaten and that I was on my way home. It didn’t feel right to leave Tomo lying there, but Ishikawa tried his best to look reassuring. Maybe he’d finally listened. Maybe he was straightening his life around. I took a last look at Tomo, who really did look fine now, and headed out the door toward Suruga.
I pulled the ends of my scarf tightly around my neck as I headed home. The streetlights lit the concrete paths of Shizuoka City, autumn leaves crumpled in piles around the lamp poles. It was safe enough to be walking home at this time alone, but I saw nothing but shadows in the darkness, possible Kami in every corner, waiting for me. Or maybe Yakuza. They knew what I looked like, and I was pretty much the only American girl in the city. If they wanted to find me, it would be easy.
I ran down the last few streets, clutching my keitai in my pocket. I knew the emergency number now. I’d asked Diane. The one for police was 1-1-0, and for medical and fire stuff it was 1-1-9, which kind of made me mad. Reversed, of course! That made so much sense. I’d told Tomo, who’d just laughed and asked why we’d reversed it to 9-1-1. Good point.
I ran up the steps of our mansion—that’s what they called certain apartment buildings here—and the automatic glass doors slid away. It was still cool in the lobby and the elevator; our building didn’t have central heat like some of the newer ones, so we relied on our heated kotatsu table and lots of sweaters to stay warm. It was only late October, though. I remembered how cold that February had been when I’d first arrived in Japan. It felt so long ago now.
I leaned against our pale green door and it opened into the genkan with a quiet snick. I opened my mouth to tell Diane I was home, but she was talking to someone, and the tone of her voice made me hesitate.
“No,” she said loudly, “I don’t think it’s for the best. She’s just settling in. It’s been hard for her.”
They were talking about me. I closed the door quietly and slid my shoes off, sitting on the edge of the raised floor to listen. I didn’t hear anyone respond before she started in again—she must be on the phone.
“I know, but this isn’t about you. It’s about her right now.”
I’d never heard Diane so worked up about anything. She was always smiling too much, even when she was nervous. I’d never heard her sound angry, not like this.
“You’re not hearing what I’m saying, Steven. It’s not a good time.”
Steven. The name froze me as I leaned against the wall. My father’s name, the one who hadn’t stuck around to even meet me when I was born. The one who’d run out of town after Mom had eaten the Kami dragon fruit, after she’d nearly lost me before I’d had a chance to live. Steven had walked out after the doctors had warned them that I might never talk or walk as a result of the food poisoning.
Was Diane... Was she talking to my dad?
“It’s been a year, Steven. Where were you?” she said. “When Katie needed you, you weren’t there.” A pause. “No, I know you didn’t know, but...Yes, I get that, but...” Diane suddenly appeared from behind the corner, the phone clutched to her ear. I stared back into her wide eyes, both of us surprised to be caught out.
“I have to go,” Diane said. “I have your number...Yes, I know. Okay.” She clicked the off button as the phone slowly dropped from her ear.
My mouth was dry, my words thick. “Was that...my dad?”
“Oh, hon,” Diane said. Her eyes crinkled up, the corners of her plum-lipsticked mouth crumpled in a frown. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t going to trouble you with it.”
“What did he want?” I asked. “How did he even find you?”
“He phoned Nan and Gramps. He got my number from them. He found out about your mom a few weeks ago. He didn’t know you were here with me.”
“What does it have to do with him, anyway?” I wasn’t trying to be snarky; I meant it. He hadn’t been around for me ever. Him surfacing was like someone suddenly digging into the soil of my life and uprooting me, tipped on my side, exposed. Why now?
“He’ll be in Japan for a business trip in a couple weeks,” Diane said. “In Tokyo. He wants to see you, but I told him I don’t think that’s for the best.”
I felt like my heart had crystalized. I thought I didn’t care what happened to him, but I could feel the whisper of it circling through me. I did care. I wanted to know why I hadn’t been worth staying around for.
It would be no good getting involved with him, that much I knew. He’d destroyed Mom’s life; he’d destroy mine, too.
“Thanks,” I said, my voice shaky. “I don’t want to see him.”
Diane nodded. “I thought so.”
But part of me wanted to ask him why he had run off, and why he wanted back into my life now. And part of me wanted to cling to it, because with him, I wasn’t an orphan anymore. I’d have a parent again. But that was too idealized. It wasn’t going to be some kind of soppy reunion. It would be awkward and painful, and I had more than enough of that going on right now.
Diane rested a hand on my shoulder and attempted a smile. “I picked up some chestnut cakes from the depaato on the way home. Want to have one?”
“Yeah,” I said, giving her a fake smile back. She nodded and hurried into the kitchen. I could hear the clink of plates and the fridge door opening, the little cardboard flaps on the cake box popping open. Food as a source of comfort—that was Diane’s specialty. But after today, it sounded like the best idea ever.
I could bury the idea as soon as it had surfaced. I didn’t need to think about my dad right now; I could forget about it, erase it like it had never happened. If only I’d stayed with Tomo a little longer tonight. I would never have known about my dad being in Japan.
It didn’t matter, though. Steven could be in the same room as me, and it would feel like the farthest corner of the world, a wall of emptiness between us that couldn’t be scaled.
I sat down at the table, smelling the sweet cream on the chestnut cake as Diane hurried around the kitchen.
She was all the family I needed now.
* * *
The water was black this time, oceans of ink lapping against the stained shore. There was no orange gateway, no rolling dunes of sand. Instead, the ink waters ebbed against an inlaid stone path that trailed upward, toward a towering jumble of angled rooftops reaching toward the sky. On the distant edge of the black ocean, the ink tipped over in a waterfall that encircled the whole island, the spray sending up a fog of clouds. Were we high up in the sky, or on some cliff? I’d have to w
ade deep into the waters to look, and I was scared the current would drag me over the edge.
I looked back at the building—some sort of pagoda, maybe, or a fortress like Sunpu but as tall as Himeji Castle, layer upon layer of slanted tile rooftops and whitewashed walls, placed upon one another like tiers of a fancy wedding cake. Simple wooden steps led into the building; there was nowhere else to go on this tiny island surrounded by ink.
I stepped forward, and saw the first victim.
He lay at my feet, nearly buried in the grasses that sprung up around him. He wore armor, like some kind of samurai, but his eyes were empty, staring at a future that wasn’t there, his breastplate splashed with ink.
I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound escaped my lips. A dream, I thought. Another Kami nightmare.
I looked around the steps of the castle as I moved forward. Dozens of men lay slumped in horrible, lifeless heaps, ink soaking each of them as they lay beside their shattered weapons and snapped bowstrings. My feet moved toward the building against my own will. I didn’t want to see what was inside. I didn’t want to know what was responsible for this.
The stairs creaked as I went up them. Inside, the room was musty and dark, the only light shining from the windows near the raised platform at the end of the room, where great white curtains billowed out with a wind I couldn’t feel. The bamboo tatami mats were cold and hard against my bare feet as I stepped forward. There were fallen soldiers here, too; what horrible battle had taken place?
Wait, that one’s alive. I looked and saw him crouched in the corner, a dark shape hunched over his bended knee, a sword on the tatami beside him.
His silver earring glinted as he tilted his head forward, his blond highlights slipping from behind his ears.
“Jun,” I said, and he looked up at me. He lifted the sword; it almost looked as though it was made of stone. It was a deep black, like the inside of a cave, and the blade of it dripped with a darkness that must be ink. Or blood.
“It’s over now,” said a woman’s voice.
I turned to the raised platform in front of me, where the voice had come from. A woman knelt on the floor, the folds of her crimson kimono stretching in a pool of red around her. The sleeves of the kimono layered in a dozen different colors, all variations of black, red, gold and silver. An elaborate golden headdress rested on her head, the strings of golden beads tinkling against one another as she tilted her chin to the side.
“Okami Amaterasu,” I said, stepping over a long smear of ink on the tatami. I glanced at the fallen soldiers in the throne room as I walked toward her. “Who did this?”
“You did,” she said, and the world went cold with fear.
I shook my head. “I could never do something like this. And I only just got here.”
“There is only death,” she said. “There is no escape.”
Tomo had said those words so many times. He heard them in his nightmares, too.
“No escape from what?” I said. “Fate as a Kami?”
Amaterasu smiled sadly. “No escape from the past.” She twisted her knees to the side, the fabric of her red kimono swishing as she moved away slowly, and I saw one more body beside her.
“Tomo,” I whispered. I wanted to throw up; I wanted to wake up. I pinched my arm, hard, to remind myself this wasn’t real. It’s just a dream. But there was no comfort from seeing him there, lifeless, drenched in ink.
“Tsukiyomi,” she answered, and I saw then that his hair wasn’t copper, but black. I’d thought it was ink staining his hair, but he looked different—older, more worn and...less human than he’d ever looked, an almost angelic beauty that left me feeling terrified. He looked like a trickster fairy, the kind that was too beautiful to trust.
He was, and wasn’t, Tomo. I couldn’t explain it, except that dreams are strange and never quite right.
“I don’t understand,” I said. Was this all meaningless nightmare stuff? Why was I seeing this?
“I loved Tsukiyomi,” Amaterasu said. “And so I killed him.”
Ikeda had mentioned the story to me before, that Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi had once been lovers, before Tsukiyomi lost his mind.
“I had to stop him, before he destroyed everything the August Ones had made.”
“The August Ones?”
“And now he’s dead. But he lives in the shards of his soul that carry on.” She motioned at the ground, and I saw shattered pieces of glass in every color.
“Like Tomo,” I said.
“Taira no Kiyomori, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Yuu Tomohiro, all of them magatama of one soul,” she said.
I tilted my head. “Magatama?”
She motioned again to the broken glass. “Susanou shattered it,” she said. “Only the sword remains.” I looked to Jun and the stained sword at his side.
“Listen to me, child,” Amaterasu said to me. “Green means an eternal circle. You will betray Yuu Tomohiro, just as I have betrayed Tsukiyomi.”
The heat rose up in my cheeks. “I would never hurt him.”
She leaned back, the golden beads jingling on her headdress.
“You will kill him, before the end.”
My mind reeled. I wanted to retch. Kill him? Me?
I fell to my knees. “No,” I said. “This is just a stupid dream. I don’t have to do what you tell me. We make our own fates.”
“There is only one fate,” she said.
I looked down, my clothes soaked in ink.
I woke to my own screaming, to the sound of Diane thumping across the floor to hold me tightly in her arms.
* * *
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Tomo said, his eyes wide and filled with concern. We were hiding inside one of the Yayoi huts at Toro Iseki. His dad was asleep at home, after stumbling in from overtime work sometime in the middle of the night. Considering the whole separating-us-for-a-month business, this had seemed the best place to meet without anyone knowing.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” I said. “Anyway, I was pretty sure these were just typical nightmares. I mean, they don’t mean anything, right?”
Tomo pulled me toward him, wrapping me in the warmth and smell of him as we held each other. “They don’t,” he said gently, his voice against my ear. “I’ve been fighting them my whole life. Don’t listen to what they tell you. I never have.” But that was only half-true. He fought against it, sure, but he believed it, didn’t he? He believed he was a monster, that he only had a short time left, that in the end, there was only death.
I hadn’t told him everything about the dreams. It sounded stupid, but I was scared that if I said it out loud, that Tomo had died, that it would come true. I didn’t want to tell him Amaterasu had said I was the one who would betray him. Maybe she’d only meant the stupid mistake I’d made kissing Jun? But Tomo had forgiven me, and, anyway, Amaterasu’s face had looked like the topic was a whole lot more serious than a kiss.
Instead, I’d told Tomo about the castle and the dead samurai, about Tsukiyomi dead beside Amaterasu. “What did she mean by the Magatama?” I said as Tomo and I sat on the packed dirt floor, our backs pressed against the wall of the straw hut. “What is that?”
“It’s a curved jewel,” Tomo said. He lifted his hand palm-up, and I could see the ribbons of scars peeking out from under his soft wristband. “I’ve seen it before in my nightmares, too. Like glass in my hand...” He closed his hand slowly, remembering. “It shatters, and the shards dig into my skin. Kuse, they burn like fire.”
“It was broken in my dream, too,” I said. “There were sharp pieces all over the floor.”
“The Magatama is one of the Imperial Treasures,” Tomo said. “But I don’t get what it means. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s just kami memories, from when they ruled Japan.”
“Imperial Treasures?” I wrapped
my arms around my knees. “Like mythical, or real?”
“Real,” he said. “Well, sort of. They’re called the Sanshu no Jingi. They’re real, but I don’t know if the myths surrounding them are. There are three of them—the mirror, the sword and the jewel. I think they’re kept in the palace in Tokyo. The mirror is linked to Amaterasu. Not sure about the sword and Magatama.”
The large brass mirror, the one the paper Amaterasu had held in front of Jun in Nihondaira—it had revealed the truth about all of us, that we were tied to some kind of awful tragedy that kept repeating itself with the kami’s descendants. Jun and Tomo would always be enemies, because Susanou and Tsukiyomi were. And Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi, in love until...until what, exactly?
I shivered in the morning cold. “What happened between Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi?”
Tomo pulled the top of his knit hat until it snapped off his head, his copper spikes flopping around his ears. I felt the warmth from the hat as he gently pressed it onto my head, smoothing it over my hair and pulling it down over my ears. “Better?” he said. I nodded, and he grinned. “I don’t know what happened, Katie, but it doesn’t matter. They aren’t us. They’re long gone.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But we still have to deal with their drama.” The mirror, the sword and the jewel. The sword...was it the one I had seen beside Jun? How did these treasures tie into all this? Were they really just fragments of kami memories?
Tomo took my hand in his and pulled me up from the ground. “We’ll beat this,” he said, his deep eyes searching mine. “You’ll be just fine.”
“So will you,” I said, and he smiled, but I saw the sadness in his eyes, the disbelief. Amaterasu’s threat echoed in my thoughts.
I will never hurt him again, I thought as I pulled him toward me, as I pressed my lips against his. We will make our own future.
* * *
I grabbed Yuki’s arm right when the bell rang. “Yuki-chan, I need a favor.” She looked at me, surprised.
“Everything okay?” she said.
I nodded. “I just... I was wondering if Niichan is still in town.”