Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan

by Unknown

  If Shizuko’s life were a movie, the scene with the matchmaker would be revealed as Shizuko and Namiko’s secret ruse to bring the Hypnotist and the kuroko back together. Who loves matchmaking more than an unhappy couple? The act of bringing two people together promises happiness by proxy, as if happy couples were all alike and interchangeable, as if affection were easily transferred. The kuroko, black-clad, would arrive at the Pantheon clutching Shizuko’s bridal portrait in one hand; he would order tea, but he would be too nervous to drink it.

  What sort of husband does the kuroko imagine for his daughter? What a photograph! Her husband will not be like anything from the kabuki stage, that’s for sure.

  Still, there is something appealingly aristocratic about the new mode of arranged marriages. When he was Shizuko’s age, marriage meant traveling to the house of the nearest farm girl—bare-breasted in summertime, blackened teeth unbrushed—and fucking her until you had a home of your own for her to move into. Nothing more than the breeding of livestock, especially when the women, hunchbacked by seventeen from digging up daikon all day, coarse from labor and dull-eyed from illiteracy, were so near to livestock already. He always thought that if he were to touch one, her idiocy might prove contagious, might colonize him like a host of fleas, drinking his life force, hatching its eggs in his hair.

  Namiko would hover, trying to keep a straight face. It’s been so long since she had a good laugh, but this would make her laugh, send her into hysterics when she and Shizuko devised the plan and leave her guffawing every time she thought of it for a week after, confusing the customers and annoying her heavy foreign employer, who is redecorating the café with cotton velvet drapes imported from Europe, plush and luxurious and immensely flammable.

  The new drapes are a good hiding place for Shizuko, who will grab a handful of dragées—can’t go without sugar for an hour, this girl, she is too bitter, she must balance herself out—and duck behind the one nearest the door. Pay no attention to the bride behind the curtain.

  The title screen flickers black and white: “Kairakutei thinks he is meeting his booking agent about a new tour.”

  Cut to Kairakutei at the door. The kuroko drops the photograph. Kairakutei opens his mouth, but for once the storyteller is at a loss for words, and this is a silent movie anyway. The kuroko looks for an exit, panic-stricken, but it’s too late: he’s been seen.

  Kairakutei looks up, uncertain why the waitress has just collapsed in giggles. Is something the matter?

  “Sorry,” Namiko says, composing herself. “Daydreaming.” She begins clearing off the tables. “Better close up already, or my boss will have my head.”

  “Oh,” says Kairakutei, “I doubt that very much.” One thing about coffee grounds, they’re much less effective than reading tea leaves. He loves tea, he really does, loves the ritual, the aroma, the taste, but he has gotten addicted to this other stuff now and cannot give it up. Ever since he took the arsenic, the Hypnotist has trouble keeping up his energy. He is tired all the time.

  He hopes it’s the arsenic and not old age.

  Exhaustion sweeps over him. He has outlived his world. “You know,” says the Hypnotist. “When we came here, we were some of the only ones. Foreigners, I mean. Good luck getting all of this, then. I remember, I was only a child, we had just arrived, we were on our way to the foreign district, and a group of boys started throwing stones at us. But not children. Young men. I was seven. I didn’t speak a word of Japanese.”

  “They were probably more scared of you than you were of them,” says Namiko.

  “Yes, I got that distinct impression as the first stone hit my nose; blood and snot were pouring out of my face, but I thought, be sensitive, Henry, the poor dears must be terrified. We’re not robust, my family, we’re not as good at adventure as we think we are. My father left Scotland because he expected to make a fortune in the goldfields; ended up becoming a concert singer instead. Oh, he had a beautiful voice, but still there he is at the antipodes, singing his heart out to entertain the real miners. He could have done that at home.”

  “Some people get restless.”

  “Yes,” says the Hypnotist, “I gathered that.” Out of breath already just from hauling himself to his feet, chins trembling from exertion, he raises one hand to dab at his glistening face; no, he is not robust, nor an occultist, nor even a believer in the art of mesmerism, beyond his heartfelt conviction that the public will see whatever it wants to see, God bless ’em, and that most people would rather be taken in than left out. “I’m a homebody, myself. Which means I’d better get going; someone will be wondering where I am.” He casts a last look around at the marble café tables, the row of foreign newspapers on display, the French pastries under glass. It is not Parisian, but it’s a credible rendition of someone’s idea of what a Parisian café ought to look like.

  “Foreigners,” Kairakutei mutters. “How much is he paying you to fuck him, anyway?”

  “Excuse me?”

  It’s as if he asked her whether it was raining earlier. The Hypnotist leans his gargantuan bulk against the door frame, fixes his blue eyes on the waitress; conversational, curious. “The Russian. How much is he paying you to fuck him?”

  The next day, the kuroko comes to the Pantheon to meet the matchmaker. He is dressed in black, and he is clutching Shizuko’s bridal portrait in one hand, but, ah! He is looking for a place that no longer exists. Where the café stood there are only the charred remnants of the foundation, a melted lump that was once a cash register, a handful of overturned tables black with ash. The whole building has gone up in flames overnight.

  Out like a candle.

  VI. The Spiritualist

  Sometimes I wonder what it would be to travel the world, not as a tourist but as a creature who must keep moving or die; though I have thought of death many times, have held her in my arms and let her kiss my face, and I am only a little afraid of her now. I am no longer the twelve-year-old girl who tried to drown herself because she thought that’s what refined women do. I no longer joke about running to sea. I comb my hair out each night, one hundred strokes of the brush. I have eyes in the back of my head.

  “Come to the theater with me,” said my neighbor. She works as a mannequin girl in one of the department stores, modeling clothing all day and drinking all night, a crop-headed, bony creature who feels good taking care of a poor widow, particularly a poor widow who has buried three, three husbands, a poor widow who has a heavy hand with the arsenic.

  I told her, “I’d rather go to the movies.”

  “No, Shizuko,” says the Modern Girl, “No, we always go to the movies; your brain is rotting. I’m going to expose you to culture; I’m going to educate you.”

  She’s gloomy, the Modern Girl; her lover has skipped town. Now I must charitably allow myself to be her charity project.

  The wooden clapping starts up, and the Modern Girl squeezes my arm: “Don’t you love it? The ritual?” We are here to consume the real, the authentic National Culture, except for the part where there is no kabuki play on tonight—the theater has been given over to a spiritualist act instead—so instead of feasting on the green and rotting carcass of a dead art we must watch someone pretend to speak to the dead; no matter! It’s all the same to the Modern Girl; Victorian kitsch and Meiji camp are all one to her, they fade one into another, variations on a theme, art is Art purely by virtue of not speaking to her, she is paying good money to watch something removed from her own life.

  For myself, I find the whole thing ridiculously old-fashioned, right down to the heavy black dress the medium wears, a long heavy thing with, I swear, a damn bustle, which looks like it was fished out of a trunk at some estate sale in Tokyo, and probably was, for isn’t this a touring production? Isn’t Namiko the most famous spiritualist in the capital?

  Look at her on the stage. She doesn’t have much of a presence. She’s so small, so wiry that your eyes are alw
ays tempted to skip over her, until she begins describing what she sees. Then the men begin to cry and the women give their shuddering sighs of recognition. Then the ghosts begin to come forth.

  “I’ll have to sit down,” Namiko says, when she is ready to begin manifesting spirits. “This part requires all my strength.” But when she is lying down, the air ripples, and the ghosts appear, flickering, like projections on a screen.

  A mother, overcome by the vision of her dead son, rushes the stage, sobbing; it breaks the spell, and the room goes dark.

  “What?” someone yells. “Is that all?” We have been here fifteen minutes. Theater is not cheap.

  But Namiko can barely stand.

  If I were Namiko’s father, I would do her face up with stage makeup to hide the hollow circles under her eyes, the sallow tones of her skin. I would tell her that a woman with a small and birdlike frame cannot wear black onstage the way an obese white hypnotist can; she disappears. I would teach her how to command attention with a gesture, how to bluff your way through disaster when you feel you are being eaten alive from the inside.

  She’s shivering. Her hand on the podium is the gnarled hand of a skeleton. Two kuroko come onstage to help her into a wheeled chair and spirit her away, even as the audience screams for more ghosts.

  “Huh,” says the Modern Girl. “So that’s what people did for fun in olden days.” She looks over at me, raises one skinny, penciled eyebrow, purses her vermilion cupid-bow lips. “What is it? Shizuko, what’s so funny?”

  “It’s nothing,” I tell her. “Let’s go home.”

  “Where are we?” Maeda Sentaro spoke mostly to himself, but the closest rider heard him.

  Ishida spat and scowled, his face drawn in lines of exhaustion. “We are lost, of course.”

  He gestured at the trees around them and the deep snow that covered everything that could be seen. The storms of the night before had been sudden, violent, and bitterly cold, and the landscape around them transformed from a forest into something filled with frozen shapes that seemed almost impossible. The fir trees were gone, completely buried in drifts of white. The snow was dense, and with very few exceptions the trees showed no sign of even being under the frozen precipitation. Instead there were vast shapes that could have been nearly anything under their caul of white. Some were small, the size of crouching children, and others towered five times the height of a tall man.

  Ishida Mototada was in charge of their expedition. He was a good kashira and a calm man, so the expression on his face and the tone of his voice were nearly foreign things to Maeda.

  Maeda licked his lips and regretted it immediately. The moisture froze to his already chapped flesh. “Have I offended you?”

  Ishida glanced his way for a long moment and then shook his head. “No.” He looked around at the uneven shapes around them, squinting against the wind and the glare alike. “I am not comfortable here. I do not trust them.”

  Maeda shook his head. “The trees?”

  “No. What they might hide.”

  Maeda looked again, carefully this time because Ishida was a good commander and seldom one to underestimate his enemies. The trees were buried in white to the point where they no longer truly looked like trees. They were only shapes, often bent and bowed by the weight of the heavy snows.

  “There is nothing they can hide, Ishida. Anything within the frost would be dead.”

  Ishida lowered his head and closed his eyes for a moment. His face was usually calm, but the tension under the surface of his skin could not be hidden.

  “There are things that can hide in the cold, Maeda. Some of them are worse than the worst of our enemies.”

  Maeda did not speak immediately. Instead he considered the words of the man riding next to him. They rode because their lord demanded it and because the enemies of Mogami Yoshiaki were their enemies as well. There were some who would have considered Ishida’s words treasonous, but Maeda knew better. Ishida was a loyal soldier and had proven himself several times in combat.

  Maeda knew him well enough to know that what was different this time was fear. Ishida was scared.

  Maeda said, “It is only ice and snow, Ishida.” He spoke carefully and kept his voice calm. Ishida was a leader for a reason, and his skills in combat were not to be underestimated. Maeda had seen him kill before and had heard others talk of the man’s prowess. “There is nothing here beyond that. The temperature will rise and the snow will melt.”

  Ishida’s voice did not carry far. There were other riders within calling range of them, but Maeda suspected that none of them heard the man’s words. They were meant for him alone. “It is winter, Maeda. The snows came earlier than expected, but I do not think they will melt as suddenly as they fell. We are stuck here in this cold, and I dread the cold. I always have.”

  He chided the man, but carefully. “I have never heard such a thing. We have traveled together in winter before, Ishida, and you have never said a word of this.”

  Though his voice remained low, there was an edge when Ishida spoke again. “No. We have always traveled together before the first snowfall. I was given my lord’s word that I would never have to travel after the snows came.”

  Maeda thought about that for a moment and realized the man’s words were true. He had never seen his kashira after the snows came.

  “He could not have known. This snow came up very suddenly.”

  Ishida nodded his head, and they rode in silence for several minutes before the man spoke again. During that time the man kept his head lowered and studied the snowy ground before them.

  Ishida said, “What do you know of my life, Maeda? Have you ever heard me speak of my wife? Of my children?”

  “No. You have never spoken of them.” He frowned and considered those words. “Not to me and not to anyone who said anything of them to me.”

  “My family only comes to me when it snows, Maeda.”

  Maeda smiled. “Then shouldn’t you be happy? If you only see your family when the snows come, then perhaps you will see them today or tonight.”

  Again the leader of their expedition looked to the shapes that haunted the snowy hills around them.

  “The question is not if I will be happy to see them. It is whether or not they will be happy to see me.”

  “Please explain. I do not understand at all.”

  Ishida’s eyes stayed heavily squinted as the winds picked up and a pattering of snow and crystals fell from the looming shapes all around them. The forms all bowed in the same direction, as if they had turned their backs on the travelers coming their way. Some huddled together, families of ice and snow. The more Maeda looked at them the less he liked them. At first they were only unusual; now they seemed too much like they were joined in a silent conspiracy.

  When Ishida spoke again the unexpected sound of his voice startled Maeda.

  “My marriage was arranged. My wife came from the mountains near Zao Onsen and traveled down to meet me in Yamagata. That does not sound like a long distance, but it can be.”

  Maeda’s marriage had also been arranged, and he nodded his head. His wife, Sen, was a good woman and they had three children together, but theirs was never going to be a love story told in poems.

  “Kano came with her family and stayed with us for twelve days before the wedding took place. During that time we were allowed to see each other when we were supervised. I have never seen a more beautiful woman, and as much as I admired her looks so too I was charmed by her mind and her quiet wit. When we were married I was already very in love with her.”

  Maeda almost spoke but stopped himself. In his time Ishida had never volunteered anything of his family life, and he did not want to make the man grow silent again by interrupting.

  “Kano’s father asked me to walk with him before the wedding. We moved through the cherry trees and down to the river, and there he told me three
things. He said that Kano was his most prized daughter and that he trusted me with her, trusted me to take care of her and keep her safe. Of course I swore to him that I would. How could I not? I was already in love.

  “Next he told me that she was already mine. That she had spoken of me with him and said that she loved me. I cannot tell you how much those words meant.

  “And at last he told me that I must never make Kano bathe. They had their own rituals and their own ways that were sacred.”

  Maeda thought about that for a moment and broke his silence. “Surely she had to bathe herself. How else could she stay clean?”

  “Kano did bathe, but never in my presence.” Ishida shook his head. “There was nothing we did not share, but we could not bathe at the same time and she—” He stopped speaking for a moment and grew paler as the winds picked up again and threw ice and snow from the hulking shapes across their path. The frozen fragments rained down on their heads and shoulders. The winds were strong enough that Maeda would never have heard what the man said in any event.

  Only a few seconds later the winds calmed, and the frost that fell across their cloaks stopped accumulating.

  Ishida once again raised his head and looked around carefully. Maeda joined him but saw nothing amiss.

  Finally Ishida spoke again. “We had two children together, Aki and Kanbei. They bathed only with their mother. It was a small thing and one I easily grew accustomed to. I did not even really give it thought.”

  There was movement. Something shifted in the pervasive field of white on white, and Maeda turned to study the area where the movement caught his notice. He saw nothing; still, the hairs on his arms rose and he shivered. The cold was a heavy burden, but one he was sheltered from. The way his hairs tightened against his skin had nothing to do with the chill in the air.