Asimov's SF, January 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  It had also reminded him of the complex process of yuzen zome resist dyeing, the painstaking delicacy that was an inherent part of the kimono dyeing process, or worse yet, the application of poppy-seed sized makinori ... he winced at the memory of arranging the minute particles on the cloth, after mixing them with rice paste, sprinkling the sticky mess onto wet silk, then coating the silk with wood wax to prevent the design from cracking, before fixing the entire swath of cloth with soy juice ... then picking off each piece of zinc after it was dry, just to achieve a mist-like subtle pattern in the background of the main design. Why he'd ever thought that such intense, yet nearly intangible labors were his chosen life's work, his life's purpose, now escaped him.

  It made his current work, of quickly yet painfully piercing flesh, creating a fine wash of blood that constantly had to be wiped away from his work field, seem far more simple in comparison.

  “—doesn't stop Ulger from wanting his nano-armor, even if he isn't entitled to it,” Harumi said between puffs of her second clove cigarette.

  “Does he not carry a gun? That might mean getting shot—"

  “Strictly a Barney—empty, no bullets ... you never watch TVLand, do you? The store owners gave it to him for window dressing. Like a security camera with no film in it, just a battery to make the red light go on. I wouldn't be surprised if someone didn't want to take a shot at him, for the hell of it ... or not,” she added with a noisy draw on the end of her smoke, before dropping the spent conical butt onto the asphalt and grinding it into the shapeless grainy mass with her flip-flop sole.

  “I ... understand he made my boss angry. So he's done the same with other people?"

  “Ohhhh yeah, you could say that. Again. I don't know for sure what he did to Ignazzy, but given that he's a he, it sure isn't what he did to me ... but it must've been equally rotten—"

  “This Ulger person—"

  “"Walker. Walker Ulger, rhymes with ‘stalker'—"

  “This Walker Ulger, he didn't behave as a man should toward a woman?"

  (Memories of his initial reaction after Mieko's first unwelcome beyond-his-closed-door visit, when he'd punched his walls in frustration because she'd been where he hadn't wanted her to be, came back to him in a shameful wash of crimson.)

  “Uhmmm, you could say that. It started out innocently enough. I was smoking in the alley behind the restaurant, a clove jobbie, and he starts in about me smoking weed, insisting it was a joint, and I finally gave him the center finger salute, and he starts in that he'll report me to my boss for ‘assaulting’ an officer of the law, only all he is is a play cop, and I told him as much, but then he goes, ‘I'm on the payroll of your boss and every other boss on this block, so that makes me the ‘law of this land’ and makes a grab for my smoke. I mash it onto his arm, he goes medieval on my ass, and ... ever since then, he's been on my case. Riding me for not genuflecting when I see his badge. Claims that he'll stop harassing me if I get him an in with Ignazzy, convince him to give manju-head a nano-yarn sweater. Which I know Ignazzy won't do. And I don't blame him ... whatever Ulger did to Ignazzy must've been as obnoxious as what he tried with me. What I'm thinking is, old amazu-shoga ears must've leaned on the wrong person, which is why he feels that he needs a nano-yarn wrap. I can feel the fear on him, which makes him all the meaner. Anyhow, everyday, he comes into the restaurant for miso zuke dofu, never pays for it, even though it's an expensive dish, and while he's eating, he asks my boss about me, making suggestive remarks, telling him he should add a living sushi bar on Saturday nights, that I'd be better than cartoon sushi under the raw tuna ... crap like that. All the while, I stay hidden in the kitchen, wondering if Ulger will mention me burning his arm with the cigarette, which I know will get me canned if my boss hears about it. And every day, when I'm getting ready to go home, Ulger keeps pace with me while I'm riding my bike, saying, ‘All you have to do is put in a good word with Ignazio. I know he has the extra nanoyarn in his autoclave room. Too much of it for just us cops.’ Crap like that. So ... that's what's been making me crazy lately. Enough to dump a tray of tofu onto the floor—"

  “Tokugawashogunate...” Masafumi found himself whispering, as he made a connection between Harumi's ongoing troubles and that fifteenth century restriction measure that ultimately created the painted kimono tradition. So simple a connection, yet it explained so much—

  “'Toku’ ... what?"

  “'Tokugawa shogunate.’ It was initiated six hundred years ago and cut down on excessive spending by the merchant class. It forbade them from wearing embroidered silk, or cloth woven with gold threads, to stop them from emulating royal classes. But the merchant class members’ wives still wanted fine kimonos, so painted silk circumvented the shogunate. Because of this desire for finely decorated kimonos, artists like Miyazaki Yuzen switched from painting fans to painting silk meant for kimono construction. Like ... cartoon kimonos. Embroidery designs, only flat, not embroidered. But difficult to produce. Eventually, kimono painters became ningenkokuho, like other fine artists in Japan—"

  “Remember, I'm only one-eighth Japanese—translation, please?"

  “It means ‘holder of an intangible cultural property,’ an honor—"

  “Oh, like those Kennedy Center Awards they give to old people?"

  “I ... suppose. It is something to be strived for, within any artistic community. To be named ningenkokuho implies more than mere mastery of one's craft—"

  “Like, you're the best of the best?"

  Wondering if she meant “you're” to signify him, or if she was merely being linguistically imprecise, he slowly replied, “You are beyond ‘best’ ... you're interwoven with the entire culture of Japan. What you have done has become part of Japan. Something that cannot be disconnected from its origins."

  “Oh. Like sticking nano-ribbons into someone, and there's no way to pull them out once they've been healed?"

  Glancing down at his watch, Masafumi saw that they'd spent far more time in the alley than he'd been allotted, so he avoided comment on her incorrect analogy by nodding vaguely and saying, “Break time is over—"

  “Yeah, mine too. Old Ulger should be in soon, mooching misozukedofu. I swear, I should substitute a slice of old rubber tire for the konbu wrapping, just to see if the oaf knows the difference between retread and dried kelp. Now that would be a dish with some ‘bite’ to it!"

  Glad that Harumi could make even a weak joke about her tormentor, he picked up the empty bowls and handed them to her, saying, “Tell your boss it was oishii—and thank you again."

  “Anytime, Masa,” she smiled, then smacked back to the restaurant, the echo of her hard soles hitting the rubbery insides of her flip-flops following him as he walked to the back to his job.

  He didn't know if Ignazio would consider this encounter “gettin’ close” to Harumi, but in his own mind, Masafumi decided that the meeting was the equivalent of freeing a woman's big-sleeved outer osode kimono from the remaining layers of kimono beneath. Even as that unveiling had served to reveal emotional layers of his own psyche that he'd tried to keep pinned down, much like the weights placed on freshly made tofu, in order to squeeze out the remaining nigari, that salty congealing agent that both created tofu and threatened to ruin its taste if not expelled from the cured form. Just as his own thwarted creative urges had to be expelled from his being, lest they dilute his present artistic course.

  Yet, as he let himself into the back door of the shop, he realized for the first time since he'd ended his years of hikikomori that he'd actually managed to come back to, and not distance himself from, that which had made him retreat into himself in the first place. Always that maddening conundrum: How to make that which is merely worn into something that comes alive because it is worn?

  He'd thought that his new vocation, inkslinging, was more direct than kimono painting—spot the stencil on someone's body, ink it in, wipe away the blood, and bandage it, job's finished. But after spending time with Harumi, taking sly glances at her tattoo
ed body (an Irezumi-like covering from collarbones to elbows, and down to the bottoms of her thighs, a swirl of native Japanese flowers, clouds, and distant mountains, surrounded by foamy-crested curlicue waves), and listening to her rant about that fat-eared security guard, Masafumi had come to realize that with each movement of her body, each rapid fuming breath between words, her tattoos ceased to be ink imbedded in flesh, and became an additional garment. An article of indelible clothing that had no doubt helped to make her a target of that goon with the toy gun, who nonetheless wanted her to procure him a suit of nano-armor. For Masafumi doubted that Harumi was the only person in the city who smoked clove cigarettes (which even he realized smelled nothing like cannabis).

  “My man, you score?” Ignazio's sweaty face was open-eyed and leering, showing virtually all his teeth in a tight stacked-stone line. Masafumi debated about mentioning Ulger, but decided not to. Instead, he slipped past Ignazio and walked into the tattooing room with the various paper-on-a-roll covered chairs and padded tables, whose walls were covered with glass-fronted flash design displays, and print-outs of digital photos of most of their customers’ tattoos. Sitting down in one of the chairs, he said carefully, “I learned what has been bothering her. It's a private matter, but one she could share, in part. She brought me some black zara dofu. It was very good."

  “I'll bet it hit the spot. Me, I like the green and white kind better. Why don't you go in there, where she works? I've never seen you in that place—"

  There was no way to explain that back in Japan, Masafumi would've eaten the same dish at a riyori, a tofu restaurant, and not at a place that served a multitude of dishes, from sushi to katsu-don to yudofu, plus a wide variety of sakes to go along with the simple manju dessert. Extreme mixing of culinary disciplines was far more alien to him than the fast-food hamburger place down the block, where he chose to eat instead. There, the mixing of unsuited foods was a normal thing, and thus not bewildering.

  “This is my country, now. So I eat what others eat. Going back to my origins in one way would mean wishing to go back to them in all ways."

  “You're one weird duck, kiddo. But cool. Seriously cool, my man. Best worker I've had since this place opened. Know what? You've been doin’ flash for too long. Time to branch out. Start learnin’ how to work the nanoribbons. Insert'em, the whole ball o'wax. Now I'm aware you still can't brand nobody, and as far as piercing goes, you're still gonna have to take some classes I'm not gonna pay for, but seein’ that there ain't no place you're officially gonna learn how to work the nano-ribbons, class starts as soon as someone comes in here wanting some work done, okay?"

  Biting his lip so that he couldn't ask about Ulger and his thwarted efforts to “get some work done.” Masafumi nodded, before saying, “You're the boss ... you want me to learn the ribbons, I will learn them."

  —even as his mind began whirling like suminagashi, leaving whorls of half-formed ideas and urges to settle like ink swirls on marble paper, as he realized how he might be able to solve Harumi's problem ... not to mention the central puzzle of his own creative existence.

  If he told her next to nothing beforehand....

  * * * *

  III (kosode)

  "Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true."

  —Bruce Nauman

  “So you've never worn a kimono?"

  Harumi worked the tattoo gun over the tray of momengoshi without speaking for a few seconds, then said, without looking up, “No, in my family, we were lucky to know what tofu was when I was a kid. I have an old picture of my great-great-to-the-I-don't-know-what power grandma-san wearing one, but that's it. The picture wasn't in color, so I don't know what it really looked like. There were clusters of birds on it, I think. Plus this big sash around her middle, with what looked like a flat pillow on her back. The whole kimono trailed onto the ground in back of her—"

  “Obi. The sash was an obi."

  “Ohhh ... be. OK. And the sleeves were huge, and hung down—"

  “The osode ... they resemble dewlaps, the sleeves. The osode goes on over the kosode, the undergarment. That picture had to be very old. By the Edo period, kosode was no longer thought of as a mere undergarment, but as a thing to be worn alone. Years before that, women wore up to twelve kimono, each one positioned so as to reveal just a bit of the one underneath. By the time I left Japan, most women who still wore the kimono for important functions wore only the kosode, as a main garment."

  “I can't see how anyone could move in that many layers—they must've looked like sumo wrestlers.” Shutting off the gun, Harumi began stacking the wooden trays, but, as she got to her feet, something in Masafumi made him shout past the beaded doorway, “Ignazio, do you mind if I help Harumi carry these to the restaurant?"

  Above the drone of his own needles, Ignazio shouted back, “Go on, kid. Get yourself a bite while you're there. I'll be a while with this guy,” and as easily as that, Masafumi, two trays in hand, left the shop and followed Harumi to her workplace. As she walked ahead of him, he wondered how her arms and legs would look, if she were to add additional designed bands just under her existing torso-and-upper-limbs tattoos, in a different pattern, like layered kosode—

  “Awww, Queen Mary Jane has a court now.” A brief sideways glance past Harumi's stiffening back revealed a bulky tan-suited shape, surmounted by a blob of a face topped with limp bristles of short-cut dull brown hair, and balanced on each side by thick slug-meaty ears.

  Walker Ulger. He of the empty pistol and the unfulfilled longing for unseen armor. From what Harumi had been telling Masafumi over the last few weeks, ever since she'd opened up to him in the alleyway, Ulger had been making more and more stops at her employer's restaurant. No longer content to settle for his free meal of saffron-hued momengoshi steeped in fermented miso wrapped in konbu, he'd begun to wait around the inside of the place while others ate, watching them, making strange comments about the food, and the people eating it. But since this part of the city was seldom, if ever, visited by the police (whose budget cuts were legendary), the shop owners put up with their private security guard's antics, lest he, too, turn on them, as the Vietnamese street gangs in the Twin Cities had gutted those two cities back in the teens.

  And always, whenever he saw Harumi, Ulger would bring up the nano-yarn sweater, as she dismissively dubbed the body armor he so persistently sought. Daily, she'd tell Masafumi, who sat and nodded, waiting for the autoclave to finish sterilizing the implements of his trade, even as he stole glances at the vats of nano-ribbons steeping in the brilliant pigments. Harumi liked to talk, so Masafumi seldom had much to say to her, and he never mentioned the lessons in nano-implantation Ignazio had been giving him. One customer was a worker at a sporting goods company whose products (athletic balls) used nanotechnology, and whose workers made ribbons of the stuff in their spare time by attaching a small slip of sticky paper to a patch of nanotubes one third of a millimeter high. They then pulled the ‘tubes, which clung to each other and formed a long transparent sheet, into ribbons. In exchange for a full-body tattoo, the customer would “pay” for his tattoo with bundles of the stuff. These home-made ribbons weren't like the ones produced by automated factories. Those were always two meters long. The hand-rolled ones were about half that length. The official nano-ribbons resulted in a denser armor, because the person laying it down was able to work for a longer period with the same continuous strand before going on to the next piece.

  For their purposes, the shorter lengths of “yarn” worked out exceptionally well ... once Masafumi became used to wearing the magnifying goggles needed for such minute work, he soon became adept at judging just how much “ribbon” he needed to augment a body design. All he had to do was score the flesh, a shade harder than a fingernail scrape, then drop on the nano-ribbons, and let them settle down onto the waiting depression in the skin. The work reminded him of the African and South Pacific body ornamentation that resulted from opening wounds on a body, then rubbing some
thing into the wounds to prevent them from healing flat and smooth.

  Once the ribbons were in place, their inherent capacity to store solar energy made even the most basic tattoo (or raised brand) look alive. As he studied under his boss, Masafumi wondered if that was part of the allure of body armor for this Ulger person. The subtle sheen of augmented flesh was like a badge that could never be removed or a pistol that never needed to be polished. It was sad, how lacking Ulger had to be, to desire such outward amplification of his being, of his status, such as it was....

  When Harumi said nothing, but kept on walking, Ulger moved directly in front of her, blocking the sidewalk with his big spread-apart feet and his elbows-jutting arms, his hands placed on both hips. The restaurant was only half a block away, but Masafumi knew that even if he and Harumi were to try and walk in the street, alongside the passing cars, Ulger would find some other way to block their path, perhaps one that would leave Harumi's morning's work lying in fleshy piles on the heat-shimmered asphalt.

  “You want to carry these? Because if you do, I already have help."

  “Yeah, I see ... he your new tattoo boy? He gonna finish up your arms and legs for you? Or is he gonna outline what you do have with nano-yarn? He gonna quilt you? I think he's gonna turn you into a coloring book, black outlines around everything—"