* * *
“Give me the map. Just give me the goddamned map,” Aki snarls, and follows it up with a flurry of Japanese words that I’m quite certain I’ve never heard before. “We have to do the photos at the lovers’ shrine. It’s so tragic and romantic.”
Tadashi surrenders the map to her. We’ve been wandering the forests beneath the lowest tier of Kuramagi for half an hour now, trying to find the lovers’ shrine before the black woolly clouds overhead split open and soak Aki and her rented silk kimono. I squint down at my English version of the hiking map, which helpfully marks such features as “Moon Waterfall” and “Teahouse” farther down the trail, but doesn’t list the alleged lovers’ shrine at all. The only thing close to the ryokan and the village proper is the untranslated Shinjū-hokora. It depicts two green fingers of stone yoked together with rope, which seems vaguely like it could depict lovers. All the same, I can’t figure out how we reach it from the trail we’re on, or if it even connects at all.
“This way,” Tadashi says. “Hurry up.”
We trudge behind him down the same slope we climbed two minutes before.
The slender branchless cedar trunks cause some sort of eerie optical illusion in my peripheral vision as they slide past. Wet, moldy scents soak the air around us; the too-ripe stink of early autumn surrounds us with rot and decay. That, coupled with the buzzing in my head, now a raging hornet’s nest, keeps me perpetually on the cliff of feeling like I might throw up. I never ate breakfast after I visited the museum so I could get the women’s bathing room to myself. I want to eat comfortably, like I did last night, but now the thought of making myself eat feels awful again. My hunger is turning ragged in my gut, slicing me up from the inside.
I trip over a loose stone on the trail; when I glance down, I notice a crooked line fracturing the stone path, probably split open by the earthquake. Sure enough, as I look through the trees farther up the slope, a narrow furrow runs through the undergrowth, then halts at a sagging, moss-strewn boulder. The boulder looks as if the earthquake pried it forward; feathery torn vines fringe its edges. It looks so inviting, like the perfect place to curl up and hide from the world for a while. I lean toward it.
The buzz in my head rises in cadence.
“Are you guys sure this is the way?” Mariko says. “My feet hurt. Maybe we should do this another day…”
Her voice tapers off in the distance as I step off the path, onto the mountain’s slope. I want to see what’s behind the boulder. All I can hear is the crunch of leaves under my feet like snapping bones. Everything smells loamy and close to death, like fruit just about to ferment. It smells wonderful. It smells the way I feel inside.
I run my hand along the boulder. An involuntary shudder wracks through me, though there’s no breeze, no chill. There’s a hollow space tucked behind it, just like I’d hoped. Stone and dirt, ripe with a metallic tang. The buzzing has turned to a chorus now, a pressure guiding me in.
Someone’s calling my name, but it’s too quiet. All I hear is my own heartbeat, throbbing in my ears. All I feel is the pressure in my head, threatening to pop.
I step into the hollow just as the sky opens up and the rain thunders against the forest canopy.
It looks like some sort of shrine inside the hollow—at least, to my untrained eyes. Only a weak, watery light grazes against the paving stones crusted with dirt and the carved altar pressed against the far wall. But none of the other items I’ve grown to associate with Shinto shrines are present—none of the zigzag streamers, the prayer boards, the offering boxes, or recessed spaces for the kami to rest. Just that altar, splattered with dried moss and vines and roots that curl down from the hollow’s roof.
Then I spot a stone: black speckled with gray, round on one end, curved, shaped like a comma. The buzzing in my head mingles with the sounds of rain. Something inside me shifts—a weary sigh, a head falling against a pillow after an exhausting day.
I reach for it easily, my body a resounding chorus of yes.
* * *
Someone is calling my name again. I push myself up from the altar—when had I knelt before it?—and turn toward the opening into the makeshift hokora, the tiny Shinto shrine. My sandals skitter across the stones as I peer down the slope toward the postal trail.
“Hurry up! You need to get inside!”
“I’m coming!” I shout, unable to keep my annoyance from curling the edges of the syllables. I just want a moment alone—it’s all I ever want—but of course there’s always more work to be done. I hope Aki’s kimono is ruined by the storm, her makeup running clownish trails down her face. I close my fist tight around the stone, duck around the boulder—I fit around it more easily this time—and start down the wooden path to meet them on the trail.
It’s not until I stop to lift the skirts of my burgundy iromuji that I realize I just answered in Japanese without thinking. And that I’m wearing a burgundy iromuji.
And that the woman waiting for me on the trail, her finely patterned kimono immaculate even as rain pelts her, is not Akiko.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Your chores around the honjin are still not finished,” she says, shuffling ahead of me in small but furious steps. “And yet you play at that foolish shrine. It’s disgraceful. Your father is soft for allowing you to go on this way.”
My father. I know, with a conviction I haven’t earned, that this woman isn’t talking about Tetsuo Azumi. How could she be? I don’t know how, but I know it as certainly as I know my own name. Which is—
“Miyu!” the woman hisses again. “You’re slower than spring thaw! Hurry up! Do you really want to disappoint him?”
Miyu. No. That isn’t right. I’m Reiko—Reiko Azumi, daughter of Tetsuo and Yuki Azumi of suburban Seattle, Washington. But Miyu feels right; like an old nickname, maybe, something a friend had called me once as a joke and then it suited me so well it stuck.
No. What am I thinking? I’m dumbly following some grumpy older woman who is calling me by the wrong name. What about my—my co-workers? (My mind hitches as if over a snagged stitch at the thought of calling them friends.) Akiko and Kenji and Mariko and the rest. I stop and turn, searching for them, but there is no sign. I fumble with the iromuji kimono’s massive, billowing sleeves as I reach for my throat. My camera is gone. What the hell? Wrong clothes, wrong name—what is going on?
“If you do not come with me right this moment, you will not like what happens,” the woman says, with a voice like charcoal. I clatter after her, all too aware of the noise of my wooden sandals—when did I put those on?—against stone and the way I feel I might tip over with every step.
The rain sounds worse than it feels; the high canopy of trees absorbs most of the moisture. Maybe Akiko’s kimono will be spared after all. Maybe they’ve already headed for shelter, too. All right—I’ll follow this lady, figure out what has her panties all in a wad (is she wearing panties under her robe? Am I?), then find the others. Simple enough.
Or so it seems, until we reach the trail’s mouth and turn onto the main streets of Kuramagi.
Hundreds of people pour through the streets like a spilled bag of grain. Men and women of every age, but every last one of them clad in traditional kimonos—navy and red and green and patterned. This girl wears an elegantly embroidered formal kimono called a furisode, for the cultural festival perhaps, and that man has the wide folded skirt of a hakama—not that I have the first clue when I’d learned the distinction. Pack horses haul carts of caged chickens or grain or fabric down the streets. Ribbons of smoke spin from every chimney and hut; a sweet starchy smell radiates from one of the shops we pass, enticing me to linger in spite of the rain.
Is this part of the cultural festival? The opening ceremony isn’t until tomorrow, but maybe today is some kind of unofficial reenactment or something, chock full of cosplayers. I can’t find a single person in jeans or hear the telltale twinkling cell phone sounds, but maybe that’s part of the reenactment rules.
And at some poin
t, I must have agreed to participate, too. God. First I think I can cause earthquakes, then I start having blackouts where I don’t remember changing into feudal villagers’ garb. Probably another undocumented side effect of the antidepressants: agrees to absurd historical reenactments, right along with may cause suicidal thoughts and tendencies. Gotta love modern medicine.
My sandal catches on the uneven stones of the narrow staircase to the village’s upper level. I pitch forward and nearly slam my chin into the step in front of me. “Graceless cow,” the woman snarls back at me. Like it is my fault these sandals are impossible. I slip my foot back into the sandal—I am wearing tabi, I notice, white cotton socks with a separate slot for my big toe—and hurry up the stairs after her.
“Listen,” I call. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake. I need to get back to my—uhh, my friends, and—and I appreciate the costume, but I—”
“Friends!” She laughs. “A jester, are you? You have no friends.”
Well, that cuts a bit close. “I appreciate that you’ve all gone to a lot of trouble here, but I really don’t think I should have a role in your reenactment or whatever. I just—umm, I really need to go. Sorry.”
The woman whirls around to face me and seizes a handful of my robe’s collar. Shock more than anything pins me in place. The fine white powder dusting her face cracks as she leans in close; I can smell her breath, heavy with tea and rot.
“You had the perfect opportunity to leave us, didn’t you? But you chose not to take it. Live with the choices you’ve made.” Her upper lip twitches; she seems to be searching my face for something. “Or do your father a courtesy and relieve him of your burden for good.”
The hairs on the back of my neck rise at that. This lady’s role-playing skills put the Legends of Eldritch Journey board members to shame. Okay, I decide. I’ll see where this goes. It beats tailing Akiko around. And I’ve never turned down a chance to be someone other than myself.
She’s leading me to the honjin, I realize. An unbidden sense of dread coils around my throat like a noose. Though I don’t know why I feel it, I recognized this sensation all too well—it’s like the long walk to the principal’s office that day at Saint Isaac’s. It’s like the moment I first pushed open Hideki’s bathroom door. I can’t name what fills me with that dread, but I know it lays inside the honjin walls.
The woman and I shed our sandals in the front room of the inn, and I drop into a bow without thinking. “Chichi-ue,” I say. Father. I don’t know what chills me more: the word itself or the fact that I’d said it so readily.
“Stand.” A shadow drapes across me. “You have work to do.”
I rise and find myself face to face with a man who looks nothing like my dad—Tetsuo Azumi, Chief of Digital Product Sales and Development for UpStart Technologies. And yet … I can’t shake the flare of shame the sight of that face ignites in me. Round nose, wrinkles folded across his face like a fan, thick black hair speckled with gray … it’s a particular breed of shame. I felt it the first time I’d been informed that my parents were coming to visit me in the psychiatric ward. The shame of facing my parents for the first time since the glass jar where I’d hidden all my secrets had shattered open.
“You are not supposed to leave this house unescorted, Miyu,” he tells me. Me—Miyu.
I grip a handful of my thick cotton robe in one hand. “Uhh … I had…” I glance toward the woman beside me, her mouth puckers up like a stubborn spring bud. “Yodo-in was with me.”
She closes her eyes with a snort of air.
“And your work was not finished when you left,” Father says.
I look toward the platform of the main room—the hanging cauldron in the center, issuing a spray of sparks each time a stray raindrop finds its way through the chimney into the embers. The wooden bucket against the wall with a rag draped over it. The black wooden floors, only partly polished, but mostly fuzzed by a thin veneer of soot.
“I have a very important gathering tonight,” he says. “I will not allow you to ruin this, too.”
Something in his tone makes me tremble like a string he’s twanged. “I’m very sorry. I’ll finish it right now.” I pad up the stairs onto the tatami mat platform and snatch the rag. The scrap trembles in my hands as I dip it into the soapy water.
What kind of crap role have I been assigned for this stupid reenactment? I think. But at the same moment, as I start wiping the wood, up and down, up and down, my muscles find the rhythm like an old familiar warmth. I know this act. I have cherished this act for the silence and peace it brings me. When I do this, I am safe.
My father (the man playing my father?) and the older woman speak in jagged, splintered tones in the other corner of the main room, but I can hear enough to make out what they are talking about. Perhaps that’s their intention. “You should send her away,” the woman says, her scowl furrowing her brow and flaking the pale makeup on her face. “Our plan is dangerous enough without the sort of complications she always brings. Everything she touches is destroyed.”
I grimace. She really knows me well.
“That will be for the daimyo to decide,” my father replies. “She’ll be his problem soon enough.”
As I bend down to wet the rag again, I feel something pinch my skin inside a hidden pocket of my robe. It’s the stone I took from the altar. Something shifts inside me, like my dream of the earth splitting open, and I smile.
Beyond the narrow slats over the windows, voices gather in the streets, shouting something I can’t quite make out. I peer through the wooden slats. A pair of horses—tall, proud steeds, unneutered, muscles firm as clay on their chests—push through the throng of peasants and merchants. The faces of the men atop them are shielded from my view, but I recognize the golden three-leaved sigil on the black banner carried by the man in front.
The Tokugawa. The shogunate rulers I learned about at the honjin historical museum—the same building where I now stand. According to the woman at the museum, they were the ruling family of the shogunate, the Japanese military that, in essence, ruled over Edo-period Japan.
The standard-bearer pulls his horse to a halt just outside our honjin and slides from the saddle. After securing his horse, he moves to the two men behind him. They wear the long sleeves of a traveling haori jacket in a solemn deep gray; rather than don the broad hats of the villagers, their silky black topknots stand uncovered, at attention.
A new fear trickles into my veins at the sight of these men. Unlike the dull weight of fear I’d felt toward my father, this one jolts me like lightning. A dangerous fear. The kind of fear I never can resist.
“Who is it?” Father asks, frowning as he moves toward the front windows.
The answer comes to me from a deep well that opens inside me, and sounds just as dark. Somehow, I know the name of these men and feel the fear of them, too.
“Samurai.”
Father’s eyes widen, whites flashing, before he recovers and stares outside. “Not just samurai.” His fingers hook in the obi that binds his kimono. “Hatamoto.”
The meaning of the word bubbles up from the dark well, too. The hatamoto are samurai who represent the shogunate in Kyoto directly rather than serving a feudal lord. Military officers, immediately responsible to the bakufu government.
“What are they doing here?” Yodo hisses. “We received no word of this. If they know of our—”
“Silence,” Father says. “They know nothing. The shogun is just rattling his saber at the daimyo, like he so loves to do.”
“But they could ruin it all. Too much scrutiny—”
“Go,” Father says to her. “Send word to the daimyo’s clerk. Don’t let them see you.”
Yodo-in bows, quick and reflexive, as she moves toward the back of our honjin to slip away unseen. I glance toward Father and let the crackle of shame I feel when I look at him embolden me. “And what is it you wish for me to do?” I asked.
His jaw goes stiff as steel as his gaze snaps toward mine. I
can hear his old lessons, can hear the rap of the bamboo stick against the garden stones as he forced me to recite the seven virtues that I forever seemed to lack. Filial piety was always at the top of the virtues I’d violated.
“What I always wish you to do,” he says at last, the ice of his tone glistening with a threat. “Serve.”
We line up, facing each other, in the front room of the honjin to greet the shogun’s samurai. Instinct guides me into place; I kneel and bow my head just like Father does.
The samurai enter. I can only see their shoes at first. “Stand,” a voice commands.
I do, and slink back to my bucket. My pulse quickens, hatred filling me like oxygen.
“My most humble respects to you, honorable samurai of the Tokugawa,” I hear my father say. “To what do we owe the honor of serving you?”
I draw a deep breath as they talk, trying to break whatever spell has been woven over me. I’m not in feudal Japan. There is no great life-or-death conspiracy to overthrow the shogunate hanging in the balance. This stranger cannot order me into service. Who the hell do I think I’m pretending to be? It’s always been second nature for me to piece together elaborate backstories for my elven sorceress and cruel space syndicate baroness. I always feel safest playing someone other than myself, but playing a weak, shame-filled character is not why I came to Kuramagi. It’s time for me to quit succumbing to distraction and plot my revenge. No more delays.
I toss the rag back into the wooden bucket and head toward the front of the great room to slide back into my wooden geta sandals. “Look, I’m sorry,” I say, as the door swings open again. “I’ve got to get back to my friends. You guys have fun with your—”
The two samurai, their squire, and my “father” stare at me as if I’ve been speaking … well, as if I’ve been speaking English.
Which I have.
But which I haven’t been, up until this point.
Once again, the throbbing pressure builds up behind my eyes. God. What the hell medication did I take? If I accidentally doubled up on the Xanax, this just might be a really wicked hallucination—
A Darkly Beating Heart Page 5