The Witches' Book of the Dead

by Christian Day

  He had approached the dwelling cautiously and tapped hesitantly on the door with his fingernail. The Japanese, he was later told, would not have done this because only foxes, those ominous manifestations of treachery, would tap softly with their tail when they desired entry—a human being would have clapped his hands.

  The peasants therefore peered out through a small hidden peephole before inviting the stranger in, and Nägeli slid the fusuma aside and bowed, and his spectacles almost fell off. Before them sat clay bowls of rice, tea, pickled cucumbers, onions, radishes—they were too poor for meat; how glorious the simplicity of these people seemed, who lived and worked in solitude, far from all modern comforts like electric light, flush toilets, and other such things.

  Although with a really only quite limited command of the language (ten, perhaps fifteen, words accented with Swiss gutturals), Nägeli had admired and turned the teacups with gentle gestures amid the muted candlelight, as if he, a blond gaijin, were capable of deciphering centuries of their distinguished culture in the craftsmanship of these vessels, and when a smiling old man then poured him some tea, he held the cup carefully and reverently in both hands, bowing toward him. How touchingly different from the vulgar people of his homeland, he thought. The Japanese were imbued with being, with the presentness of the universe.

  And while he drank tea and the mood in the room grew ever more reflective, he recalled all at once having often been sent as a boy into the mountains by his father to the peasant families in Bernese Romandy, to Rougemont, Château-d’Œx, and to Gruyère, up to the late-summery pastures and mountain meadows, in order to help with the harvest—they were the same peasants whom his father had once wheedled out of centuries-old carved and colorfully painted timber beams, which he then resold at the antiquities dealers in Bern for fifty times the cost.

  These country folk had been coarse and ugly, the palms of their hands riddled with little cuts and other vestiges of their decades of field work; in their dark, dusty parlors it had smelled of warm beer, boiled ham, and raw milk; they let their goats sleep with them in their bedrooms; their dialect sounded bovine and earthy.

  The little boy had been afraid of their forthright, beastly manner of slapping each other on the shoulder and drinking themselves stupid and thereby sinking into a frequently hours-long, sullen reticence. He sensed that they also mistrusted him, but the pact between them and his father regarding the timber beams, which had appeared so mysterious to the child, probably had to be fulfilled, even if the peasants found the boy rather burdensome and if he in turn was repelled by them.

  At night he would pull over his face the tattered checked bedspread that so stank of rancid ham in the fervent hope that they would not seek him out. In one of the most vivid longings of his childhood, he would often dig holes for himself, to excavate murky pits in whose crude gloom he might hide himself from the world.

  Now, however, in the sparse intimacy of this Japanese farmhouse, he felt these people’s unassuming simplicity to be like a magic shroud in which one could conceal oneself protectively. Without uttering a word they made up a plain mattress for him and insinuated with gestures that he ought to go to sleep now, since eerie creatures roamed about the hut in the forest, spirits and witches, hirsute and bug-eyed. He mustn’t listen to any noises at night, and above all and under no circumstances, please, was he to whistle in the dark.

  Reluctantly and halfheartedly, however, after hovering for a while between sleep and our world (and when the urge to void his bladder grew too strong), he ventured forth to find the latrine in the darkness. After groping his way on warm floorboards down a short corridor that was only navigable on account of the peasants’ noisy breathing, he took his seat on the wooden box, listening to the raindrops gently dripping from the leaves outside in front of the shōji. He suppressed the desire to whistle, though in doing so a single inadvertent note may have escaped his pursed lips.

  In the morning, fortified a little by an unsatisfying breakfast, which consisted of several rice cakes and a little sake, he hiked back down into the bright, sunlit lowland over which clouds drifted like carefree afterthoughts.

  14.

  Masahiko Amakasu’s boarding school was purported to be one of the best in the country: ivy-entwined, dark-red brick buildings that weren’t especially impressive skirted a woodland; there was a small, murky lake or pond where from March onward colorfully painted wooden model boats were sent floating in sporting competition like reveries; and off at some distance a pretty hill rose gently and enticingly, the scaling of which numbered among the first pursuits of the newcomers.

  Masahiko shared his dormitory room with seven other boys, who, on the very evening of his arrival, seized him and held him down while two lads laughingly emptied his plaid suitcase, holding it up open and letting its contents spill to the ground: the German books, the linen napkins his mother had packed for him, the sheets of music, the microscope, the chopstick set fashioned from yew wood, the bar of chocolate, the small bronze Buddha, and the teddy bear, which they immediately pounced on, tearing off its arms and legs with lavish cruelty, as well as the button eyes his mother had attached with needle and thread.

  Masahiko didn’t scream or cry, only grew more and more unresponsive and taciturn, and no longer spoke unless he was called on by a teacher in class or had to read something aloud; he had no friends, although he made note of the ringleader of the boys who had destroyed his stuffed animal so as to lure him by some ploy, many months later when the bully had long forgotten the incident, into the woods adjoining the school.

  There, after having gone missing for twelve whole hours and just as the school was on the verge of calling the police, the boy in question was spotted again, bound to a tree, physically unharmed, but unhinged and incapable of speaking about what had befallen him or who had tied him up.

  That boy suffered wretched nightmares afterward, screaming in his sleep at such unbearable volume that the teachers had to look in on him dozens of times during the night; after several days he was granted leave from the school, was later taken out of the boarding school entirely, and spent the next years of his life in a sanatorium for children near Osaka, in a soundproofed isolation room painted pale green.

  The punishments the school meted out to the boys for the slightest infractions could hardly be surpassed in their inventiveness and tedium. Woken up at half past three in the morning, the boys had to carry a precisely specified number of bricks up and down a hillside, two stones each for the least offense, four and more, for example, if a button on a uniform jacket had not been closed according to regulations, or if the fingertips of their white gloves were stained, or if one had encountered a more senior pupil on the gravel path and had not doffed one’s cap quickly enough, and so forth. Up to twelve bricks could be accumulated in this way, after which point one was moved to the next worst level of punishment; if they had to answer for thirteen or more bricks, therefore, the boys were whipped with an elastically whizzing fishing rod into the palm of their open hand, which had first been coated in salt.

  Never did it cross anyone’s mind, incidentally, that it could have been quiet Masahiko who had maltreated the bully, so he was not punished—but there were, nevertheless, suspicions wafting about in the boarding school air, so heavy with rumors and untruths, and the other children and even the teaching staff began to avoid Masahiko as though he were incurably ill, as though he trailed around with him an abhorrent shadow.

  15.

  Only the German teacher, Mr. Kikuchi—who was no longer at all certain whether he was still employed by the German intelligence service, since the reports on the moods and mental states of his countrymen that he had drafted for years and passed along to the German legation in Tokyo were neither acknowledged nor remarked upon—found an approach to young Masahiko and in so doing recognized him as a phenomenal genius.

  Kikuchi had, as a young man, been something of a dancer, ballet, before the First World War, in Vienna, in Michel Fokine’s ensemble. Now
, back in his home country, long tempered by his liberating, manly, athletic experiences in central Europe, he taught Japan’s spoiled young elite who, in his eyes, tended toward mediocrity and were pathologically conformist.

  But as these things go, his letters were by no means ignored, but read intently, and by Wilhelm Solf himself at that, the then-ambassador of the German Empire in Japan. And when those reports began making more frequent mention of a highly intelligent boy who both spoke and read German perfectly and who, obviously feeling at ease with German culture, had even cheerfully mastered Sanskrit in his insatiable thirst for knowledge, Solf the Indologist sent word (and this was the very first response from the Germans Mr. Kikuchi ever received) that one ought to look after this young butterfly, please, lavish upon him encouragement and friendship; sometimes the benevolent ministrations of a single adult were sufficient to help a child such as this blossom. Naturally, Kikuchi wished to do nothing less.

  On his free day, Ambassador Solf had himself chauffeured to a park near the boarding school so that, from a bench, he might secretly observe young Masahiko on one of his excursions into the city that Kikuchi-sensei supervised. As the sunbeams cast splotches of light across the park lawn, Solf, to maintain appearances, fed the contents of a rolled-up paper sack of flaxseeds to a scurry of squirrels, who first timidly, then ever more assertively, attended to the kernels dropped so heedlessly under the bench as the ambassador’s roaming eyes, concealed behind sunglasses, assayed the boy from a safe distance. On the surface, Masahiko admittedly evinced negligible differences to other Japanese adolescents but all the same let something of his extraordinary character shine through in the exuberant game of badminton against his teacher Kikuchi, something that deeply impressed the diplomat.

  Solf chose to ignore the fact that Kikuchi-sensei, diving after the shuttlecock, was quite obviously in love, noting down instead the precision of the ensnarement Masahiko employed to keep the white-haired man so animatedly engaged. The elastic choreography was a masterwork of manipulation; if the teacher exercised a bit of restraint, then the boy grazed his opponent with his arm when returning the shuttlecock; if moves were made to attack, then he dropped to his back, pulling the panting Kikuchi down with him into the silky bed of grass.

  The game of wakashūdō, the old tradition of the beautiful young man, the bishōnen, who is submissive to his teacher, was staged perfectly, and observing it gave Solf a pleasant shudder and the certainty that this very boy was the one to sponsor and instrumentalize, to gradually cultivate into a man who decades later, even after his, Solf’s, death, would prove to be extraordinarily useful.

  And thus it happened that Masahiko Amakasu began to work for the German Reich without ever knowing it. Kikuchi himself was arrested for unknown reasons and released again a short time later—the boy had already left the school for a military academy—given an allowance, and dismissed from school service.

  Masahiko, meanwhile, was henceforth to remain in Solf’s shadow theater: the clandestine transfer of a certain payment here; there the promotion of his father to a better position at the university; and here, then—you’re welcome—the opening of a new, modern hair salon in the capital under his mother’s management … yes, Masahiko remained ignorant of everything.

  Even after he graduated with full honors and distinctions from the academy, when he was urged to begin a promising career at the Ministry—provided, of course, he passed the entrance examination—no one besides Solf knew of the young man’s involvement with the German Reich. And, to no one’s astonishment, he bested his class on four successive tests, which assessed not Masahiko’s astonishing intelligence, but solely his disposition toward and undying loyalty to the emperor, descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu.

  The seed had thus been planted, and nothing was to stifle his future growth, his meteoric rise: not Masahiko’s ostensible disdain for the Western world, nor the German predilection for conquest and the debasement of other peoples, an inclination the young man was able to comprehend with such emotional precision that it seemed he had somehow spliced his own soul into the German one with ethereal wires.

  16.

  And Kikuchi-sensei? He gave him forth, his boy, into the world. After scarcely a year (his arrest was ignored) he was sent into retirement, and an abyss of free time opened itself before him, an endless ocean of idleness.

  He was alarmed, then turned inward and realized with gentle satisfaction that he did in fact still have a few things to attend to. First of all he wanted to have the unattractive steel teeth removed that had once been screwed into his jaw—he had too often partaken of sweets when he was a child.

  Motivated by the fear of anticipated torture that was eating away at him and to tame his body and his mind, he began visiting the sport club late every afternoon to learn the art of archery.

  They respected him there, and he showed skill and athletic elegance, and whenever he raised the bow over his brow and emptied his being, allowing it to become one with arrow and target, he succeeded in causing not only Masahiko’s countenance to vanish, but also the incessant monstrous thoughts of his teeth and their impending surgical excision.

  After launching a pair of arrows, he would slide like a spirit in white socks into the back room, following the painstaking rules of kyūdō, and bow to the red solar circle of the flag on the wall above him, before fetching the next two arrows lying ready for him there on a table.

  And whenever he would make his way home late in the evening, riding the streetcar through lively neighborhoods, he had archery to thank that he no longer felt the loneliness of age, which had wrapped itself around him like a flayed rabbit pelt since his retirement. He knew he would always be able to make himself tea at home, eat some rice, and observe the shadows.

  Hesitantly, almost timidly, in order not to disturb the delicate idea, he began to ponder the possibility of adopting another hobby. One day, he imagined with a smile, he would collect porcelain thimbles. And the steel teeth? He left them in his mouth. He never heard from the Germans, from Ambassador Solf, again. One final time a small sum of money arrived, which he saved to treat himself, on his last birthday before his death, to a wonderful dinner in an upscale restaurant in the capital.

  17.

  Long after Kikuchi-sensei had become ashes, young Masahiko one day traveled out to the cliffs of Tōjinbō. A late snow had fallen, driven down from the north. It was achingly cold. The railroad journey ended in Sakai, where the snowbound citadel of Maruoka shrouded itself in an impenetrable wintry fog. Swaddled in scarf and coat, Masahiko had clapped his gloves together to warm himself and boarded an unheated autobus at the train station square out to the crags; he was the sole passenger.

  Having recently turned thirty, he had taken up the habit of smoking and lit himself a cigarette. The autobus had departed for the city again, swathed in a turbid puff of diesel fumes. He held the little yellow flame of the match up to his face as the sea now stretched out before him, ashen and hazy and calm. Doubtless no oak leaves lay at his feet.

  He saw the basalt cliffs extending left and right, the towering scab of a long-dried wound carved into the earth millennia ago. In the lull of late afternoon, a young girl stood teetering at the precipice and, after a few seconds of uncertainty and hesitation, plunged over the cliffs, a falling shadow.

  Masahiko stamped out his cigarette and ran stumbling to the spot where the woman had only just been standing. He looked over the edge at the rutted, unmistakably sharp umber rocks below, and when, despite shielding his eyes as a sailor would, he could make out no one and nothing but a purple-and-red handkerchief, he carefully clambered down backward for a half hour until, now at the bottom, he nearly slipped on a spongy, faintly crackling bed of kelp. It was slowly getting dark. He had reached the seashore below.

  He lit one match after another, cupping his gloved fingers protectively around the flame. A flashlight would be helpful right about now. Damn, the matchbox was empty. He called out a couple of times: no answer, not
hing, only the gentle, clear scouring of the lonely, cold sea. He searched the shore and the embankment; something had moved back there. It was only a dark-gray seagull pecking for food in the algal salad.

  On a wet rock, he discovered some oxidized, dark-brown blood; here was where she might have landed, hit her head, here—removing the glove, he gently touched the spot with the tip of his finger; impossible to say whether the patch was fresh or had been there for years. In complete darkness now, the moonless sky could no longer be distinguished from the sea.

  He hurried a couple of hundred paces along the coast to the west, his hands half-raised before him, until stopping at a grotto from which soft light shone, either a flickering candle or an oil lamp. Cautiously, he stepped onto the yellow-lit patch of shore and approached the entrance.

  Cowering inside was a young woman, her back leaned against the cave wall. She waved him over. Her hair was disheveled and shaggy, and aside from a scrap of leather covering her torso she was naked, and she had painted her legs and arms and face crimson.

  This couldn’t be the same woman who had just been standing on the rocks above. She seized him, throwing him to the ground, and sat astride Masahiko’s shoulders. He squirmed and tossed back and forth; he could feel her solid, sinewy thighs, she was extraordinarily muscular, and he was unable to escape her. From her crotch poured forth a repellent stench of rot and pestilence.

  It was now as if rifts in time were opening up; blackish-gray clouds appeared on the horizon; maize sprouted in the most improbable places; vines slithered up around a colossal statue of the stone Buddha; winged animals drawn by a child—half mouse, half dragon—were scurrying around on their heads, upside down; everywhere it reeked of ammonia; a tall, dark tree of a man whose face was obscured by shadows whispered a few times: Hah.