I shiver under my tiny plastic umbrella, pacing back and forth through the puddles. I’d forgotten it’s Adult’s Day, the celebration for twenty-year-olds—I can’t avoid seeing the shining stars of the holiday. Young women walk choko-choko in fancy geta onto the gravel path toward Meiji Shrine. Twenty-year-old perfection cocooned in layers of bright kimono and white fur shoulder-wraps. They glimmer against the dark gray street and the green trees. Admiring family members hover around them, carrying umbrellas to protect them from the rain.
They can scarcely walk in those heavy kimonos. They’re not shivering, though. They’ve made it through. They’ll walk beneath the torii gate into the shrine, make their offerings, and be blessed. Everything falls toward them—young men, good fortune, even gravity. They’re so bright I can hardly bear to look, and light-years away.
I don’t know why I came out here.
I walk fast back to the station. Change clothes in the bathroom, wipe my face clean for appearances. At a vending machine, I buy a can of hot milk-tea to warm my hands, and get back on the train.
At least I chased away the voices for a little while. But when the train pulls into my station, the pressure comes back ten times worse.
I have to be careful now, because of Obaa-chan. My bag has to be zipped, not the least shred of crinoline showing. The better way would be not to bring it around the front at all. I walk down the station steps, duck around the raised guard rail and across the tracks, then sidestep between the ivied wall and the back of our apartment building. An ice-cold drip from the eaves strikes me right at the crest of my head.
The voices are back.
“She’s mine.”
“No, she’s mine!”
“Naoko-san, hey!”
My fingers clench. As I sidestep past our neighbors’ back porch, the metallic ticking starts. There’s the rustling, too, frantic this time. It sounds so real. Too real. Maybe there’s a cat fight? But feral cats don’t whistle my name . . .
I peek past the piece of wall that divides their porch from ours. Things are fighting, outside our back step. A skeleton, and a bat? No, skeletons don’t have lights . . .
Crack.
The whistle rises in pitch like a scream, and the bat-thing falls down with the skeleton-thing standing over it.
I jump in and kick the skeleton-thing. It breaks apart, all its pieces scattering across the ground with a sound like a bike crash. A metal bar—the brake of a train? A bike pedal. A chain. A couple of disconnected gears. When I look for the bat thing, all I see is Obaa-chan’s old paper umbrella from her tour of the Nakasendo Highway years ago, and a cracked teapot with a broken lid.
“Iya da . . . I’m fighting garbage?”
That’s it—I’ve really lost it. I drop my bag, squat down and hide my face in my hands.
“We’re not garbage,” says the whistling voice, beside my feet. “I might be dusty, but I haven’t been thrown away. I still matter.”
I look down. The sumi-e painting on the side of the old teapot isn’t plum blossoms any more. It’s a face, and the crack looks like a sly grin.
I mutter aloud, “I need to see a psychiatrist, for sure.”
“No,” whistles the voice slyly through the crack. “Everything will be all right so long as you pass your college entrance exams.”
I don’t scream.
I do stand up with both hands over my mouth.
The metal parts are pulling back together as if by magnets, and the little lights go on, blue and yellow.
“Ow,” says rusty trumpet. “Kyusu, no fair. You called her.”
“You broke me!” the teapot retorts. It settles itself atop the umbrella, which tips itself up and gives a ruffle. “Den is nothing but a ruffian. I’m a good boy.”
“Traditional,” says Den, scornfully.
“Glue,” I mumble. “Inside, we have some. Wait a minute . . . ”
I slip off my shoes and step in the back door. The kitchen light is on, and Obaa-chan is cooking. I keep my mouth shut, tiptoeing past the door and into the front entry hall. Oto-san always kept glue in the slipper cabinet; it wouldn’t have gotten moved when his company moved him.
Back out to the cold. I sit on the back step beside my zori and glue the two pieces of the teapot lid back together, casting glances at Kyusu, who has developed small brown bamboo hands and is covering his head as if his life force resided there, like a kappa’s.
“Do you have tea in there?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says, importantly. “Very old tea.”
“He doesn’t,” says Den, who stands by the wall with lights winking. “It’s all dried out long since.”
Kyusu looks offended.
I hand Kyusu his lid, and glance down politely at the tube of glue while he puts it on. His teapot’s still full of cracks, of course—but if I had to glue anyone’s mouth shut, I’d rather it be Den’s.
I ask, “Kyusu, do you need anything else? I have a rag, I could tidy you up—”
“Iya!” he cries. Then he ruffles a bit, and apologizes: “Shitsurei shimashita. You’ve taken good care of me.”
“Yet you’re still alive,” says Den. He sounds surprised. Kyusu gives an indignant ruffle, and Den lifts his bike pedal like a threatening fist.
I stand up. “Den, leave him alone. Shall I kick you again?”
Den’s lights wink out. Suddenly a light flicks on in the window above my head, and both Den and Kyusu flop down, old pieces of junk forgotten in the dirt.
Behind me, Obaa-chan opens the door. “Nao-chan, what in the world are you doing out here?”
“Tadaima.” I duck my head. “I’m home.”
“Okaeri-nasai.” The way Obaa-chan says it, it’s more a command than a greeting. She leaves it there in my ears and shuffles back into the house. Face burning, I carry my shoes back to their spot in the entry hall, and sneak my bag into the closet behind my folded futon. I wish I could have left it outside, but I don’t trust Den.
If he and Kyusu are there at all. But I saw them; I glued Kyusu’s lid for him. And Obaa-chan’s stories always made the yokai spirits seem so real . . .
Maybe it’s myself I don’t trust.
Obaa-chan is sitting in her chair at the kitchen table when I walk in, but the moment I sit down she stands up again, pouring me tea the way she used to for Oto-san, with precision and ceremony. Taking a small bowl to the rice cooker and filling it. Filling another bowl with miso soup. Bringing them to my place. Reminding me of the trouble I am to her.
I clap my hands together. “Itadakimasu. Obaa-chan, I’ll do the dishes.”
“Of course you won’t,” she replies. “You’ll be studying.”
Ashamed, I hide in my miso soup. It’s delicious, with bits of fried tofu. Just what my frozen body needed, which only makes me feel worse.
“You haven’t been taking proper care of yourself, Naoko-san,” Obaa-chan says. “Your face is all dirty.”
She knows. She must; she didn’t ask a single question about my bag. I pull my bangs down over my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“I spoke with your father.”
I put my chopsticks down, carefully. Pinch the edge of the table until my fingertips turn white.
“I’ll be driving you to cram school, and picking you up, this week. That should help.”
It feels like a door shut in my face. I should be grateful. She’s always tried to help. But I hardly feel I know her any more.
I manage to say something. “You’re taking good care of me, Grandmother.”
I pick up my chopsticks again and start eating, like a puppet.
There’s no escape.
Day after day, kanji characters march through my head. Mathematics, English, social studies, science, Japanese language—they’re skeletons made of broken chopsticks and bent umbrellas, rusty scissors, a hundred kinds of junk. Their footsteps hurt, and when I try to catch them they twist and fall apart.
Obaa-chan invited me into the formal tatami-mat room with the kotatsu,
so I could tuck into the quilt under the heated table and keep warm while I worked. I declined, because I don’t need Grandfather and Mother’s ancestor portraits watching me on top of everyone else. Since then, the weather has dropped below freezing. Obaa-chan peeks into my room occasionally, her mending in hand, but she never asks me to change my mind.
“You can still pass.” Kyusu is peeking through my window, seemingly unaffected by the cold. “It’s not much longer.”
“Kyusu, I’m trying to study.”
I have no idea why he even cares. It was just a little glue.
“You’d rather go out. I can see why,” says Den, beside him. “We know you try on the costume when no one is in the house. You’ve got a new spirit, and now it’s being squashed.”
“Both of you shut up, okay?”
A sad little whistle comes in reply. “All right, I understand.”
Now I feel sorry. For a teapot on an umbrella. This does not help my concentration.
“You don’t have to do this,” says Den.
“Yes, I do.”
Oto-san went to Tokyo University. I dream about getting into Kyoto, if I only could score high enough, but I’ll never get there—probably easier to fly to the moon.
“You don’t.” His electric-panel face taps against my window, lights blinking. “It’s your life. Your grandmother shouldn’t be watching everything you do.”
“Den—”
“I’m serious. You could tell her so.”
I dig my left hand deep into my hair, and force my cramped fingers to keep writing, nicely formed characters, one in each box. Twelve hundred character essay, due tomorrow morning. And tomorrow night I’m sure there will be another just like it.
“Nao-chan, dinner!” Obaa-chan calls.
I can hardly set down the pencil. I shake my hand out, and blow on it, walking to the kitchen. Here, the space heater is on, but the friction in my head is so bad I’d almost prefer the cold.
I imagine myself standing on the sub-zero Jingumae bridge in my spiderweb stockings. I sit down, Obaa-chan gets up.
“I spoke to your father last night,” she says, serving rice. “The weather is warmer in Nagasaki.”
“Is that so.” I imagine myself standing on the moon.
“He would like to talk to you sometime.”
I have nothing to say. She never calls me to the phone. I used to talk to Oto-san, when he sat here on my right. I never minded eating late so I could talk to him. Obaa-chan talked to him, too. Now his empty chair is a crater, and she and I stand on opposite sides.
Obaa-chan sighs. “If you told me more about your studies, I could tell him how you’re doing.” She sets down the rice bowl; the tiny sound of it hitting the table echoes like an asteroid impact. I answer like an alien.
“You already know how I’m doing. Don’t you? You’re always watching me. You don’t even let me breathe.”
Obaa-chan frowns. “Nao-chan, these exams will decide the rest of your life. You’ll just have to endure.”
“I can’t stand it!” I push back from the table. “What if I don’t want to take the exams? What if I don’t care?”
Her fingers clench around the rice paddle, still in her hand. “You!” she snaps. “You only think about yourself—you treat your father’s sacrifices as if they mean nothing.”
“That’s right, he’s perfect, and I’m nothing but a nuisance who will never be good for anything!”
“Naoko-san, sit down and eat your dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.”
I run away down the hall, all the way out the back door. I curl up on the step with my knees pressed into my eyes.
“Naoko-san?” whistles Kyusu’s voice. “Are you all right?”
Den whispers, “Look how powerful you are now.”
“Leave me alone!”
I want to say that it was Den’s fault, but I was the one who did it. I chose to speak.
I’m too tired to study and too angry to sleep.
Again.
Obaa-chan and I aren’t speaking. I haven’t eaten breakfast or dinner for two days because that would mean going into the kitchen. It would mean her serving me, reminding me as always of the filial debt that I can never repay.
“You should say sorry,” Kyusu whistles, by the window. “She still cares for you. Just say sorry.”
“No way,” says Den. “You should stay strong. She should apologize to you.”
Kyusu gives a ruffle. “Naoko-san, your grandmother would be glad to see you eat. So would I.”
He’s stopped telling me I can pass the exams.
I still have to pass the exams.
I feel sick, but my stomach is empty. Probably, Obaa-chan thinks I’ve been eating at school, but I’ve only had a little water. I’m just not hungry; my stomach feels flattened like an origami box. I tiptoe out to the back door and slip into my zori on the step. I take deep breaths, as if the icy air might fill me out to my proper shape again.
“Naoko-san?” Kyusu hops over from the window, his bamboo umbrella-handle stamping small circles in the frozen dirt. “I’m worried about you. Please eat.”
“She’s glimpsed the possible ends,” says Den, leaning against the frozen twists of ivy. His yellow light blinks once. “Failure.”
“Den, stop.”
His blue light blinks once. “Death.”
A shiver rises up from my feet, all the way to my head. Is that where this darkness leads? Suicide? “I don’t want to throw my life away,” I say. “I just want—I don’t know, a way out of this.”
“Time?” Kyusu suggests meekly.
“A different spirit,” Den trumpets. “Like wearing your costume.”
I can only sigh. “I still have to pass the exams.”
“No, you don’t,” says Den.
“She does, though,” says Kyusu.
Den laughs like the clatter of a chain against metal. “Not if she leaves the human world, and joins us. That would be a significant change.”
For an instant I forget the cold. Leave the world? Is that possible?
Kyusu hops backward with a ruffle. “Iya . . . ”
His mournful whistle disturbs me. “Kyusu, is your life so terrible? Would you rather be in someone’s kitchen serving tea, or keeping off the rain?”
“It’s not that. Den is . . . ” He waves away his own thought with one bamboo hand. “I had to be forgotten before I could have my own memories, but I mustn’t be undervalued. You should know that neglect does . . . unexpected things.”
“It gives you life!” Den cries.
I hug myself. “I am alive.”
Den scoffs with a grating noise. “Are you more alive now, or when you wear the costume?”
I look down, worrying the ties of the house-coat Obaa-chan made for me. He knows my answer, or he wouldn’t have asked.
“Your father left for Nagasaki. That’s what did it.” Den waves his bicycle pedal in a grand circle. “Now you’re realizing you have the power to do as you like with your own life. You could turn yokai, and leave behind your problems for good. Exams mean nothing to us.”
Just throw the exams away? I can hardly imagine it. I pull my house-coat tighter. “What do I have to do?”
A deep shudder comes from the rails behind the wall. The flash of a headlight breaks the darkness, and the first train of the morning shrieks by.
Den says, “Come to Harajuku.”
No matter how many times I’ve come out to the Jingumae bridge, I never expected to follow the Adult’s Day girls so soon—and not like this. Above my head, the giant torii gate of Meiji Shrine looks almost painted, heavy ink-black lines against the dawning sky. It stands like a dark border between my past and future.
Den and Kyusu step beneath it first. Following them into the space between the trees, I shiver even in my winter coat. I try to imagine the yokai version of myself, but I see only Kitano Naoko, desperate high-schooler and cosplayer in withdrawal.
What kind of yokai could I be? I
wouldn’t do well as a neck-stretching rokurokubi, or a faceless noppera-bo. All I really know how to do is Gothic-girl.
What would a Gothic-girl yokai look like? Longer hair? Paler face? Would I feel cold? Hunger? Would I have silent footsteps?
Den and Kyusu don’t. Den’s gears rattle and scuff through the gravel; Kyusu hops with little crunching sounds, rather like the lamp in the Miyazaki movie. I’m still surprised they made it here so easily; early commuters on the Yamanote line seemed too rushed to do more than raise an eyebrow at a pile of abandoned objects in the corner by my seat. We’ve left commuters behind, though; here on the path between the trees, there is no one.
Soon the inner torii gate comes into view. Beyond it, the heavy wooden doors to the courtyard stand open. Kyusu stops abruptly before the high gate-sill, spreading his bamboo-and-paper skirts.
“Naoko-san, don’t do this,” he whistles. “Your grandmother will have found you gone by now. She’ll be frantic, asking the neighborhood police if they’ve seen you.”
Obaa-chan frantic . . . I hug myself, and shiver deeper into my coat. “What other choice do I have?”
Den straightens himself up, walking forward. “You can’t stop her, Kyusu.”
“And you can’t make her. She doesn’t even like you.”
“That doesn’t matter. She’s mine anyway.”
“No, she’s not.”
“Well, she’s certainly not yours.”
“Quiet down, both of you,” I say. “I belong to myself. Den, you said yourself, it’s my life.”
Den’s electric-panel face swivels around to me. “Truly? Then why are you here?”
I bite my lips shut.
“Naoko-san,” says Kyusu, “we can still go home . . . ”
“That’s enough!” Den raises his bike pedal threateningly. “Teapot-boy, give her to me or this time I’ll break your face.”
I cry out, “Den, don’t!”
But Kyusu drops his skirts with a whistling sigh. “It’s all right. I’ll stay behind.”
Den hops and rattles over the wooden sill into the main shrine courtyard. I step over too, but with Kyusu gone it feels different. I don’t like Den talking like he owns me. My stomach starts to cramp. I wish I could see the priests, but no one is in sight. Even the fortune-telling windows are still closed. At the stone steps I approach the offering bin and clap my hands to invoke the attention of the kami.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 90 Page 5