The Emperor of Any Place

by Tim Wynne-Jones

The dead deer lay halfway down the hill path that led to the lagoon. It had been eviscerated, a thread of entrails leading off into the tall grass that bordered the sandy route to the beach. To me it seemed a message to us written in blood.

  “We have to do something,” I said. Whether Isamu understood me or not, he nodded. We couldn’t go on living this way.

  Later that morning, I showed Isamu a series of small drawings I had made in my sketch pad, a plan view of Fort Ōshiro II, showing the shelter, the kitchen and dining area, the shrine, and the place we stored supplies. A large area inside the entranceway, directly before the gates, was marked by a dotted line. Below the drawing there were diagrams and section drawings indicating my plan. Examining the page carefully, Isamu nodded. It would be a lot of work, but it was something.

  If the creature came to the compound that night, neither of us was aware of it. We had worked all day behind the walls, worked feverishly at backbreaking labor. Now we lay sleeping — or at least Isamu was — dead to the world, trusting in our handiwork, but with a weapon or two near at hand.

  I was quite certain the animal had some kind of malevolent intelligence beyond anything one would expect to find in nature. Tengu was toying with us. Had I been asked before Tengu came, I would have said that I did not believe there was evil in the natural world, only survival. My childhood reading had included Darwin. I read books on how things worked and the biographies of scientists, inventors, Arctic adventurers, men of discovery. I wasn’t much for stories; my imagination tended toward the mechanical, the factual and prosaic. But despite all that, I was quite certain that simple survival was not at the heart of Tengu’s nature. I had lived on a farm and seen barn cats play with mice, catch and release them only to pounce on them again. The cruelty we perceive in our human naivety had a purpose, I gathered at a young age, student of nature that I was: the cat keeping itself sharp, working on its skills, its quickness. We didn’t feed the barn cats, other than a bit of milk if they were lucky. They depended on their hunting skill. What Tengu was doing seemed to have some darker purpose that was unfathomable to me. And what we don’t understand we have to ascribe to either God or the Devil, don’t we?

  Survival was very much at work in what Isamu and I were cooking up. We had been on the defensive, but now the creature was stalking us, tormenting us. It was as if it had been put on the island to drive us crazy — to drive a wedge between us. And it had been succeeding for a while. We had snapped at one another, sulked, and eaten separately.

  Until we came up with this plan.

  The beast did not return, not that night nor the next. It was a form of torture. Could a beast be that sly, that premeditated? If it was possible, then we would have to fight fire with fire. So the next day, we acted as if there were no Tengu. We went fishing, swimming, foraging. We played baseball with a small coconut and a stick. I marked out the bases on the beach and tried to teach Isamu the rules. We put on an act for the demon. If Tengu was watching, the thing saw two men with nothing to fear. We bathed in the lagoon just before sunset. To me it felt like some ritual thing a warrior might do — a gladiator before entering the Colosseum. And maybe this prolonged and showy tactic worked, for it was that night the creature returned at last.

  We heard it prowling along the perimeter of the fence, heard the low growl deep in its throat and chest, the ticking sound; heard it pick at the Manila twine, heard the bamboo click and creak as it tested the strength of the wall. Finally it got to the gate. We waited under a breathless thin rim of moon, heard the creature press hard, find some give in the door, and press again. There was silence. Retreat? No, not that — not after all our work!

  But it had only retreated far enough to charge the door. Suddenly, its body crashed against the reinforced bamboo! Once, twice, and then it broke through. And there we were, two men sitting side by side, waiting across the yard directly before the thing, lit by torchlight. It roared at us, a victory roar, and charged.

  And the pit opened under it.

  We held one torch each high above our heads as we looked down into the six-foot-deep hole Isamu had dug in the sandy ground. A pit we had rigged with sharpened bamboo stakes.

  The squealing was horrible, the raging, writhing creature pierced through and through. But even though it was pinioned there, I never let my revolver stray from the thing’s misshapen head. Isamu stood transfixed by it.

  “The oil, Isamu,” I cried.

  He didn’t move.

  So it was I who put my torch and gun down and tugged, one-handed, a large vat of oil, spinning it on its rounded edge, trying to keep it from tipping, all the way to the edge of the pit. I kicked it over and the thick liquid poured over Tengu. Exhausted, I looked at Isamu, expecting him to throw his torch on the howling monster. But Isamu only watched, his eyes blazing in the reflected light from his torch, his body immobilized by shock. So, badly shaking now, I recovered my own torch from where I had stuck it in the ground and threw it into the pit. The howling didn’t end until the flames did.

  There was no celebration. Not that night. The creature was finally dead; I was able to grasp that, but it was harder to let go of the fear it had engendered.

  The rain helped.

  It came sometime in the predawn. A light rain but continuous. After a bit, I sought the shelter of my bed, wrapped myself up in bedclothes, and fell into an exhausted sleep. When I awoke, Isamu was sitting cross-legged at the edge of the pit, his body as still as a Buddha, his hands curled in his lap, but with nothing of the Buddha’s serenity on his tired, rain-soaked face. His eyes were open but unseeing, looking down into the hollow place where the charred and soaking remains of our tormentor lay. Isamu was so still that I wondered if he was actually dead. I knelt beside him.

  “It’s all right, Isamu,” I said. “We did it. It’s over.” Tentatively I touched his arm.

  Finally, the other man acknowledged my presence. He nodded. But his eyes were full of a sorrow that I couldn’t understand.1

  1 Curiously, Ōshiro does not write about the incident, only mentioning Tengu’s demise after the fact, as you will see. It seems from what he writes that either he wanted to protect Hisako from the horror of it, or that he repressed the event entirely.

  I left the fort this morning. The door was open wide. Derwood was at work shoveling dirt into the pit we had excavated. He probably still is. So much work, using the wire hand he has made himself. Hard work. Too hard for him, but I did not offer to help. I did not want to be there. It was there. The horror. We had dug a pit and filled it with sharpened spears, and Tengu charged to its death into it. The siege is over. I should help, but I do not. I feel weak — weak as I felt when I first dragged myself up onto this shore from my raft. I feel, Hisako, as if it is all catching up to me: the war, my flight, the months alone, the uneasy time with an enemy who has become a friend, the terror that he brought with him that is now past.

  Except I cannot quite believe that.

  I sit down on the beach by the gently lapping tide, writing this. Trying to explain to you what I cannot understand myself.

  “It will come back,” I said to him as I watched a shovelful of sand fall across the blackened corpse.

  He seemed to understand me and stopped his digging, and with his good hand patted my shoulder. “No, we’ve done it, Isamu-san. It is over.” I nodded because I knew the words “no” and “over,” and because he expected me to agree with him, but I was full of uncertainty. That is when I left and walked down the hill to the beach. It is as if something of me died in the night.

  I look out to sea. It is a dull day, the sea calm, exhausted, tired of the moon always tugging at it, not wanting to always be coming in or going out and never getting anywhere. I stand at the lip of the tide and feel my feet sink a little into the sand with every halfhearted sip of the waves that slips by my ankles.

  I’m not sure how long I have been standing here, but I suddenly become aware that I am being watched. I expect it is Derwood — that he has come for me. F
or one terrible moment, I even think he has come to kill me, now that the danger of the monster has passed. The terror is exhilarating. So I do not turn right away, confident that after all we have gone through, he will not shoot me in the back. I want to look out upon the weary sea, drained of its color, not even made lively by the squawking of the gulls on this strangely quiet morning. I close my eyes. Some small dark part of me almost wants him to pull the trigger.

  When I do finally turn, my ghostly children are waiting patiently just beyond the water’s edge, and beyond them is a small cadre of jikininki. They have come for me, I think. They seem to know something I don’t. But I am not afraid.

  “What is it?” I say. I fold my arms impressively and stand as straight and tall as I can, not wanting them to get any fancy ideas. “Have you come to make a petition to the Emperor of the Island?”

  One of them, the nearest, says, “Our own emperor wishes to speak to you.”

  “Ho! So you have a leader? I thought you were one and one and one?”

  “I am not the leader,” says another of the creatures, coming forward but not closer than the gentle lapping of the tide. Water, it seems, is another element that does not agree with them. “We borrow words from the stories of those who have died so that we may converse with those who are living. If we must. I am first among the dead you see before you.”

  “So converse with me, first of your tribe!” I say to the creature in a jaunty voice. My depression of earlier has lifted a little. As dark as my depression may be, at least I am more alive than these miserable creatures! It is almost entertaining to watch them pulling away from the tide with their faltering steps, not able to bear even the frothy hem of the incoming water. It has risen past my ankles. The tide is turning, and I half think I might stand here and watch these miserable fellows have to withdraw farther and farther from me up the shore, as the sea climbs inch by inch up my body. I will stand there unmoved by them or by the sea until I am claimed by it.

  “A word with you,” says the one who calls itself the first. “But I cannot raise my voice so loud as to be heard above the tide.” I relent. I unstick myself from the suction of the wet sand and march up to where the jikininki congregate. My diary and writing implement sit on the sand. I move them farther up the shore and put a rounded stone on them so they do not blow away. Already, I am hungry to write this scene in those pages. I shall write it as if it is happening before your very eyes.

  “What is it you want?” I say it in a most regal voice so that they hear I am not anywhere near ready to become fodder for their ravenous appetite.

  “Perhaps, if you knew more,” says the first, “you would look more kindly upon our . . . our needs.”

  I know what their “needs” are and cannot help but turn up my nose. Still, I would speak to them. “Go on, king of the ghouls,” I say imperiously.

  The ghoul king, or whatever it is, looks around at its ghastly companions. “I am the first. Not the king, not the leader, for we have no leader, no followers. I arrived in this place before anyone else, that is all. That is all that distinguishes me. I have been here the longest.”

  At that moment one of my ghosts, the boy who always ventures nearest, suddenly slips his hand in mine. I look to see if he is afraid, but he does not seem to be. It is hard to tell if he has any sense at all of what is going on. The first of the jikininki glowers at the ghost boy, flinching. They seem to find the companion ghosts distasteful.

  “There was a first body to float up on this island,” says the jikininki spokesman. “A fisherman whose boat had overturned in a storm.”

  “But if he was dead,” I say, “how did you learn how he died?”

  “Dying was among his memories,” says the jikininki. “His last thought. His topmost memory.”

  I should have known better than to ask.

  “His body lay there for a great long time, for there was no one here to attend to him, to do what you do and send him on to the Afterlife, or to do what we do and consume what he had been, taking up his story and making it our own.

  “He lay there long enough that I grew from him. Not his ghost, you see, but the ghost of what would never be, though I had no sense of that, at first. I stood looking down on his rotting corpse, abandoned on the beach, picked at by other scavengers — the crabs that had come ashore with him, the gulls and carrion crows, but still not entirely decayed. And something in me, some instinct, led me to understand what I must do.”

  “Please spare me the details!” I say. The demon bows slightly, as if I truly am an emperor. “And in time other corpses arrived?”

  “Other corpses, yes. And with each corpse fresh memories. And it might have stayed that way, with just me here — the island all my own, alone, providing many stories for my consumption — but then there was a war at sea and the dead floated in, too many to count. And while I feasted, there were so many corpses — more corpses than I could get to — so other jikininki came into existence as had I, rising as a dreadful need out of the corpses. The need for their stories not to be lost.”

  The thing bows to me and says no more.

  “That’s it?” I ask. “This is supposed to win me over?”

  But the first of these monsters seems to have forgotten I am there. Its nose is raised in the air, and when I look around, it is true of the others as well; seven or eight of them all sniffing and turning this way and that, until finally one of them starts marching in its ungainly gait along the beach in a northward direction, and soon enough the others turn that way, too.

  And a horrible thought occurs to me.

  “Derwood!” I call out. Something must have happened to him. He slipped while he was filling the hole and fell, skewering himself on one of the bamboo spears. The boy child clutching my hand stares up into my eyes, smiling, unconcerned about anything, not of this world and free of all of its horrors. I gently extricate my hand from his so as not to disturb the wraith, and bowing slightly to this glowing child and to each of his kindred, I take my leave, pick up my diary and pen, and race after the jikininki, soon passing them and dashing up the hill toward my home and my only friend on this strange and impossible island.

  I filled in the pit we had dug, which was now a grave for Tengu. The work was hard and my improvised prosthesis was next to useless. I ended up kicking dirt into the hole as much as shoveling it. By the time Isamu returned, I was sitting cross-legged on the ground, rubbing an unguent into my aching and bruised stump. The contraption I’d constructed as a metal hand had chewed my forearm up something terrible. All that was visible of the pit was a square-shaped depression of churned-up sand, a few inches lower than the surface of the ground. I had decided that I would shovel or kick sand into the hole on a daily basis, a little bit at a time, and then roll one of the steel oil drums over it to compact it. In time, I hoped, weeds would grow in and grass, until no evidence of the hole could be seen at a casual glance and the blasted thing in it might gradually be forgotten.

  Isamu seemed distant, as if something had snapped. I called to him and smiled, glad to see him back — glad of some company — but my greeting barely registered on his face. He took the shovel without seeming to notice the work I’d done and headed from the compound without a word. I could only assume another corpse had washed ashore. I’d leave it to him; I was too tired to bury anything else right now. I stood and stared down at the square of sandy soil that marked Tengu’s resting place. I smiled grimly to myself. Burned and buried. We had granted the creature both rites, as if he were both Eastern and Western.

  Sadly I watched Isamu withdraw into himself over the next few days. My own relief at being free of the monstrous creature buoyed me to no end. I cooked nice things for Isamu that he ate but without delight. I sang his favorite songs to no apparent success. My voice is not much, I’ll readily admit, but it used to get a laugh out of him and now he seemed not to hear.

  One evening, after we had eaten, he tried to talk to me. I listened intently but, knowing so little Japanese, I
could only make out that he was talking about Tengu in relationship to the two of us. He would point at the monster’s grave and then at me and himself. His eyes would inquire of me if I understood, and when I shook my head, he would throw up his hands and go off by himself.

  He slept late a lot, which was not at all like him. Then one morning I awoke and found his hammock empty. I went about my morning ablutions trying not to worry. His spirit will come back once the horror has truly passed, I thought. I had watched men wander around after a battle, seen the same vacancy in their eyes. They were alive but what was there to celebrate? I’d flown supplies into Guam that past August, after the Americans took back the island. There were more than seventeen hundred men to bury and some six thousand men officially injured, but I saw injuries in the eyes of men who wore no bandages. It was as if being alive was an affront to the dead. As if being alive only meant there was going to be another opportunity to die; that they had been saved only to prolong the agony. We have a name for the illness now: post-traumatic stress disorder. It was called shell shock back then. Whatever you call it, it’s not something you can put a bandage on.

  The day that Isamu left early, I worried enough that by midafternoon I made my way up into the coral tree and scanned the island, hoping to catch sight of him. The sun had passed to the other side of Kokoro-Jima before he made an appearance. He was walking along the beach carrying the Gibson Girl.

  Isamu built a new box kite. He had thin wire, a whole roll of it, wire that would be perfect as an aerial. He had hidden the wire from me, but now he produced it, and together we set about making the distress beacon operable. In the end it was Isamu, the stronger of the two of us and certainly the most dexterous, who cranked it enough to get the light on the top glowing. He cranked it like a man possessed.

  This is good, I thought. He is ready to get out of here. Ready to go home.

  Then we waited. Isamu wrote; I drew: plants, flowers, rock formations. It was as if the Gooney Bird had been my own personal Beagle, bringing me to this tiny island, and I must record the flora and fauna here just as Darwin had done a hundred years ago on his grand tour. I wasn’t sure what Isamu was doing. I recognized his ballpoint pen as belonging to my pilot, Pete Laski. It was a new invention but tended to jam unless you held it pretty well straight up and down. Flyboys used them, because the lower pressure in the cabin made the ink flow just fine. I asked Isamu what he was writing, but what could he tell me?