by Amanda Sun
She raised an eyebrow, puzzled. Behind her, Tanaka started fake laughing, flipping his chair on top of his desk before walking over to us. “Hu-hu-hu,” he said in an over-the-top voice that the drama club could probably hear from here. “Does Tomohiro have a rival?”
“Ew,” Yuki said, smacking Tanaka in the arm. “My brother? He’s, like, six years older than us.”
“Maybe she’s seen enough of Tomo-kun’s immature side,” Tanaka grinned slyly. “She wants an older man.”
I flushed with awkwardness. “Chigau yo”, I stammered. “Not even close.”
Yuki put a finger to her lips and blinked slowly, looking thoughtful. “He has a point, though. Boys our age are totally immature.”
Tanaka’s face drained of color. “O...oi! That’s not...” His shoulders slumped and he headed toward the blackboard, grabbing a cloth and starting to clean. Poor guy. He’d been asking for it, though.
“Niichan’s back in Miyajima,” Yuki said, “but I can give you his number. Everything all right?”
“I just wanted to ask him something about my history assignment,” I lied. “He knows a lot about kami myths.”
“Oh, yeah, he knows all that stuff. Here.” She took out her keitai and sent the number to me.
“Thanks.”
She grinned. “No problem.” I helped her push the desks out of the way while our classmates mopped the floor, and then I dashed to kendo practice. I’d call Niichan as soon as I had a chance, I thought. He’d be able to help me understand how the Imperial Treasures were caught up in this mess.
“Oi, Greene!” Ishikawa drawled from across the gym as I opened the change room door. He wore his gray hakama skirt, the dou chest plate already tied overtop. The colorful swirls of his tattoo slipped from sight as he slid on his kote glove. “Still taking kendo when Yuuto isn’t here?”
I reached for his other kote, still on the floor, and smacked his arm with it before passing it to him. “I don’t take kendo for Tomo, baka.” Maybe at first I had, to spy on him, but the sport of Japanese fencing had given me an outlet to deal with my grief over losing Mom. I loved the way I felt when I held the shinai, when the world was silent except for the shouts of opponents and the shuffling of feet. There wasn’t room to think about anything else.
“You’re tougher than I thought.” Ishikawa grinned. A lick of white hair pressed against his forehead, and he tucked it under the cloth tenugui wrapped around his head. Our club’s headbands were stamped with the black kanji that made up our motto: The Twofold Path of the Pen and the Sword. The last time I’d looked at the motto, it had been covered in Tomo’s blood as he’d pressed the tenugui against a bite from the dragon he’d sketched. My stomach twisted at the memory of the blood in the rain, the limbs dropping from the dragon as it tried to lift into the sky.
“Greene,” Ishikawa said, and I snapped out of it. “Man, you phase out a lot now. You okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Thanks for staying with Tomo the other night.”
“You’re all right, for a kouhai,” Ishikawa said, ruffling my hair with a strong hand before getting into line for push-ups. “Juniors,” he mumbled.
“Hey!” I called out, but he didn’t look back. I grinned and dropped to the floor, ready to sweat and spar my troubles away, to escape just for an hour.
The dial tone sounded tinny and strange in my ear. I couldn’t call Niichan long-distance on my keitai, so I was using the house phone. Diane wasn’t home yet, but as long as I kept it short, she probably wouldn’t mind me calling. I was allowed to call Nan and Gramps anytime—that was different, but still.
I punched in Niichan’s number and waited, my thoughts drifting to his small place on Miyajima Island in Hiroshima. I remembered how Yuki and I had slept in his one-room apartment on the tatami floor, how we’d whispered and chatted in our soft futons while the ocean outside lapped against the beach. It had only been a few months ago, but it felt like ages.
The ringing sound cut out, and a woman’s voice recited ultra-politely that the customer was unavailable. I left a short, awkward message, and then hung up. Guess my questions would have to wait.
I opened the lid of my laptop, putting it on the low table by my bed, and sat down on my zabuton cushion beside it. Might as well find out what I could about the Imperial Treasures.
It turned out they were just about as mysterious to the rest of Japan as they were to me. They were called the Sanshu no Jingi, the Three Sacred Treasures. Only the emperor and his close aides had ever seen them, and even then only for special occasions. No one was even sure what they looked like, or if the treasures kept by the royal family were the originals.
They had really long, fancy names. The Yata no Kagami, for one, was Amaterasu’s mirror, the same one that had haunted Tomo’s nightmares and sketches. The one I had seen for the first time in my dreams a few nights ago.
Tomo had been wrong about their location, too. Only the Yasakani no Magatama jewel was kept in the palace in Tokyo. The sword, Kusanagi no Tsurugi, was in Nagoya, about two hours west of Shizuoka by bullet train. They were thought to be replicas, but Amaterasu’s mirror was supposedly the real one, and they kept it in a shrine in Ise, Mie Prefecture. I pulled up a map to see where Mie was. Southwest from here, past Nagoya and curved around a bay of water.
Outside the rain began to fall, tapping against the sliding door to our tiny balcony. I hoped Diane would be home soon, or at least that she wasn’t caught out in this. It was getting heavier by the second.
The breath caught in my throat as I looked at the search page. The real mirror of Amaterasu. Was it really the real one? I knew the Kami were real—I knew the ink lived in me and in Tomo—but it was still a scary thing to think about, that someone as powerful as Amaterasu had really existed. The paper copy of the goddess, the one whose name I had written with Ikeda in the sketchbook, had already been strong enough to send both Tomo and Jun reeling in the sky. After learning they were descended from Susanou and Tsukiyomi, Tomo and Jun had grown ink wings and fought high above the trees. It was only with Ikeda’s help that we’d summoned Amaterasu’s power to blast them apart and stop them from killing each other.
And that was only the Amaterasu that Tomo had drawn. What about the real one? For anyone to have that amount of power was terrifying. And like Ikeda and Niichan had told me, kami didn’t play by our modern rules of morality. They had their own code entirely of what was right and wrong.
I shut down the search tab and reached for the lid of my laptop, but the news column on my home page made me hesitate. The kanji for death, , stared up at me from the headline. I clicked the article, my hand rising to my mouth.
Two more Yakuza found dead in Shizuoka. They showed old photos of them, smiling.
I knew that one. The Korean guy with the Mohawk who’d brought the bottle of green tea over when Hanchi was forcing Tomo to draw. His photo smiled back at me, completely unaware of what awaited him in his future.
I scrolled down the news article, much of it still illegible to me with my current kanji-reading abilities. The page showed a photo of the crime scene, a dark graffiti image painted across the rice paper door in the room where they’d died.
A black viper, tall as a person, with ink dripping down his painted fangs.
Oh god.
I grabbed my keitai, my thoughts whirling. I pressed it to my ear, listening to the ring as I held back tears.
His voice was steady, emotionless. “Katie.”
“Jun, please,” I said, holding the phone with shaking hands. “Please stop.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can. You have to.” The rain swelled, beating against my window as the wind whipped the storm around.
“Katie, these aren’t innocent people, you know. We’ve talked about this. The world is better off without them.”
“
That’s what courts are for,” I said, the tears streaming down my face. “I should call the police.”
His voice softened, warmth seeping in. “They won’t believe you.”
“That’s why I’m asking you to stop. Please.”
A pause. “It’s not in my hands anymore.”
“I don’t get it.” And then it dawned on me. His followers. “Wait...is your Kami cult helping you?”
“Katie, I...”
The rain pummeled my window as I jumped to my feet. “I thought you said most of them weren’t strong enough for their sketches to lift off the page!”
“They’re not, but...when Amaterasu showed me the mirror, the truth about who I really was, I felt the shift. I felt the power of Susanou awaken in me. It’s affecting them, too. They grow stronger being near me, the way Yuu and I were affected by you.”
Ishikawa was right. It was war, and Jun had his own army. Could you fight death sketched on a page? How do you catch the murderer? How do you protect the victim? My mind raced.
Jun’s voice turned gentle and patient. “Katie, the Kami are rising. It’s a new world now, and we don’t need these scum polluting it. Listen...almost every religion in the world talks of a final judgment, right?” He laughed, the sound of it jarring in my ears. How the hell could he laugh at a time like this? “I’m the heir of Susanou. This is my fate. It’s always been my fate.” I collapsed onto my bed, the rain outside nearly overcoming the sound of Jun’s voice. “I’m the heir to the ruler of Yomi, the World of Darkness. The Judge. I will fulfill my purpose until the end.”
“Not like this,” I pleaded. “That can’t be what it means. You don’t have to do this. You can choose your own fate.”
His calm voice cracked open, his voice tinged with panic. “It’s not like I want to do this, okay? Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do.”
This was the real Jun, now. This was the guy who’d rescued me in Oguro, the one who’d asked me out for coffee. But then I realized, fear creeping up my spine—the other side of him was just as real, wasn’t it? They were both him.
“But Tomo is fighting his fate.”
“Tomo is the descendent of Tsukiyomi. Don’t you get it? Tsukiyomi lost his mind and murdered the other kami. What do you think is going to happen with Yuu?” My heart froze; I collapsed onto my knees, the hard tatami pressing lines into my skin. Murdered the kami? Is that what had happened to Tsukiyomi? Is that what would happen to Tomo? “It can’t go on forever like this. You always knew it would end. He’s a monster that should never have existed. A monster who wished to be human. Sore dake. That’s all.”
I clutched the phone as the rain poured. Everything was changing. Everything was ending.
There is only death.
I took a deep breath. “You’re a monster, too, Jun.”
“Gomen,” Jun said, his voice a whisper lost in the rain. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.” And then he was gone, and there was nothing but the sound of the rain washing away the only world I’d ever known.
I woke to the sound of my keitai buzzing beside my laptop. I blinked, trying to orient myself in the dark room. Had Diane come home? I hadn’t heard her. The rain was quiet now; the storm must have stopped. The phone screen was too bright to look at with my tired eyes, so I lifted it to my ear as I stretched out my legs.
“Hello?”
“Katie-chan?” It was Niichan, Yuki’s brother. I realized my mistake then, that I’d answered the phone in English.
“Oh, hi,” I said, switching to Japanese.
“Sorry, is it too late to call? I think I woke you.”
“No, no,” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes. “I was in the bath.” I stopped midrub. That was more embarrassing. “I mean, um, the rain is really something, huh?” Bath was furo, and the verb for raining was furu. Maybe I’d get away with it.
Niichan sounded like his face was bright red. “Uh, I...don’t know,” he said. “It’s not raining in Miyajima.”
“Right,” I said, squeezing my eyes closed.
“Is everything okay? I was worried about calling so late, but you sounded nervous on your message.”
I shook my head and flicked on my bedside light so I wouldn’t crash into anything as I talked. “I need to talk to you about the kami,” I said. “Things are out of control, Niichan, and I don’t know how to stop them.”
“You didn’t stay away from him, huh?”
“It’s more complicated now,” I said, sliding my door open and stumbling into the hallway. I was relieved to see Diane’s shoes in the genkan. She must have figured I’d gone to bed and so she hadn’t woken me. “There’s a rogue Kami out there and he’s trying to take over the world.”
Niichan hesitated. “Are you joking?”
“I wish,” I said. “I need to know how to make the ink go dormant, Niichan. For Tomo’s sake, so he doesn’t...lose himself. And I have to make this guy Takahashi Jun’s power go away, too, or he’s going to destroy everything.”
“Wait, wait. Takahashi Jun, the kendo champ? He’s a Kami? Katie, tell me everything.”
I grabbed a mug and held it under our hot water dispenser as I filled in Niichan on the details. “Jun told me there are two kinds of Kami, right? Imperial ones, descended from Amaterasu. That’s the royal line, all the emperors and stuff. But there were also Kami in the samurai families, and they showed up through a bunch of different ways. Marriages, affairs, even different kami ancestors than Amaterasu.”
“Right,” Niichan said. “You said to me that day you were scared Yuu was descended from Susanou.”
“I was wrong,” I said, dipping a genmai tea bag into the hot water, smoothing the little string attached over the ceramic lip. The side of the mug burned my finger and I pulled away, the string slipping into the cup. “It was Jun—Takahashi—that got his ink bloodline from Susanou. Tomo is descended from Amaterasu on his dad’s side, and Tsukiyomi on his mother’s.”
Niichan was silent for a moment, and then he let out a shaky breath. “Maji de,” he said. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s true,” I said. “And I need a way for the power to go dormant. There’s got to be a way, Niichan.”
“Maybe, but I... I’m sorry, Katie. I don’t know.”
My heart sank. I curled my fingers around the handle of the mug. “Not even any ideas?”
“No pleasant ones,” he said. His list was probably about the same as mine. 1) Leave Japan. 2) Die.
“Well...can you at least tell me more about Tsukiyomi?” I said. “Jun said he went crazy and murdered kami. Is that true?”
“They’re myths, Katie. How do we know what’s true? And remember what I told you about judgment calls—times have changed. You can’t judge what the kami did by the way society works now.”
“I know,” I said. “I just need to know what happened. Maybe there’s some detail that can help us, Niichan. Please.”
“Ee to,” he said, deep in thought. I could hear a sound across the phone, like a pencil tapping against a chair. “Well, Amaterasu, Tsukiyomi and Susanou were all created at the same time by the August Ones.”
August Ones. Where had I heard that before? The vision of the dead samurai snapped back into my memory. Amaterasu had mentioned them. I had to stop him, before he destroyed everything the August Ones had made. What had she meant? “Who are the August Ones?”
“The first kami, Izanagi and Izanami. They created Japan, and then they gave birth to all the other kami. Well, a lot of them. The three you mentioned were created by Izanagi.”
“So Tsukiyomi was going to destroy Japan?”
“Destroy Japan?” Niichan’s surprise reminded me I hadn’t told him about the nightmare. “I don’t think that’s in the legends.”
“Then what happened?”
“Let me think
. It’s been a while since I studied it. So Amaterasu and Susanou fought, that I remember. She hid in a cave—solar eclipse, ne? And they tricked her back out again. They threw a big party and fooled her into glancing at herself in a mirror to draw her out, and they hung the Magatama jewel in a tree to tempt her out, too.”
The Imperial Treasures. That was two of them linked to Amaterasu and Susanou. But it didn’t make any sense. How could the treasures be involved? “What about the Kusanagi?”
“The sword? It belonged to Susanou.” That made sense. Jun had always had the sword beside him in my nightmares.
I remembered Tomo in the nightmare, unconscious, dripping in dark ink. Jun’s head bowed, his apology.
Oh god. What if that hadn’t been ink spilling from Tomo’s wounds?
I was an idiot. A complete idiot. But it was just a dream. I couldn’t let Jun hurt him.
“How does Tsukiyomi fit in? He was Amaterasu’s lover, right?” I yanked the cutlery drawer open and dug for a spoon; my tea was already way too strong, but I dipped the spoon into the mug to chase down the tea bag, anyway.
“At first. But then he killed another kami. Amaterasu banished him from the heavens. That’s why the sun and moon are separated, right? Night and day. It’s just a creation myth, Katie.”
But the Amaterasu I’d met hadn’t banished him. She’d killed him. Why? “She didn’t...hurt him?”
“I don’t think so. She had a lot more trouble with Susanou, but she was a gentle ruler. She’s always been considered benevolent, a protector of Japan.”
“She gave the first emperor the Imperial Treasures,” I said. “I looked it up.”
“Yeah,” Niichan said. “They each represented a trait she wanted him to rule with. The mirror is honesty, the sword is bravery and the jewel is love. She gave them to Jimmu, her descendent, and I guess one of the first humans to have the powers of the kami.”
Emperor Jimmu. I tried to picture him, an ancient figure who was half myth himself. What had he thought when his ink kanji had started to move on their scrolls? Or had Amaterasu explained to him how to control it? Was that knowledge somehow lost over time like Jun had said?