by Anthology
“I’m not afraid, Akira-kun.”
You decide she is lying, and are somewhat relieved. She is finally acting more like you expect: simply a girl, perhaps more understanding of life’s unfairness than most, but not as calm as she pretends, not as fearless.
***
Kazushige finds the body while scouting ahead. He runs back, more alarmed than you ever remember seeing him, and shouts for someone to follow. It’s terrible, he says. A dead man—by his uniform, someone from a different unit on the same side—all his guts strung out, face disfigured beyond recognition.
The oiran grabs your sleeve as you head out. She doesn’t want to be left alone, not after yesterday’s battle. You clasp her hand. “It’s all right. We’ll be back.”
“You don’t need to be the one who goes.”
Taichou’s orders—you do. “Stay here,” you tell her.
By the time you reach the point Kazushige marked, the body is no longer there.
“I’m sure it was here,” he says. “Look, there’s still blood.”
It’s dried: faint bronze layered on ice. “Did it look like the work of a sword?” you ask.
Kazushige is still looking around, as if the corpse might have crawled away. “Damn. Help me check the surrounding area.”
But there’s nothing, even half a mile out. You imagine what he might have seen; you wonder what beast, human or otherwise, did it.
When you report back to Taichou, Kazushige pretends that the wounds were likely from some violent skirmish, and that together you buried the corpse. You hold your tongue. When you leave the captain’s tent Kazushige holds your wrist in a vicelike grip, pressing hard in warning. You make a small sound of pain, and he lets go.
“Thanks,” he says.
***
In your dream, the demon is singing: yuki no asa, ni no ji ni no ji no, geta no ato.
I remember this, you tell the demon. Morning snow; the impression of geta. Twice the strokes for two.
Yes, the demon says. How clever you are. Did your mother once sing it for you?
My mother, and my brother.
The demon is a lady, you find, or perhaps it is only for now. Her touch against your cheek is like water. Her breath on your nose is like ice. Don’t shudder, the demon says. It makes me feel so far away from you.
But you’re not far at all. You’re right here, you say.
For now, the demon says. She kisses your cheek. Thank you for playing along.
***
“I think she might last through winter,” Kazushige says, squatting next to you while you fill some cartridges with gunpowder. Since he found the corpse and it disappeared, you haven’t spoken. You glance at him, not sure if you should be wary or lighthearted. The oiran likes the look of Kazushige, or at least that’s what she told you once. Specifically, she said, mmm, he’s so huge and manly. You told her he wasn’t all that bad, and she just grinned.
You think Kazushige must be terribly in love with her, because he hasn’t had his turn yet. He’s so patient. Sometimes the others call him Hotoke-sama, but he just laughs.
Tentatively, you ask: “Are you hoping for spring already, Kazushige-san?”
“Aren’t we always?” He smiles and nudges you, and you try not to tip over. You think of how many people his giant hands have killed: firing expertly, or gripping a sword and slashing in broad strokes. Kazushige was trained in one of the most prestigious sword schools, but he has embraced foreign weapons entirely. Everyone in the camp views him with a mix of awe and jealousy.
Kazushige trained you, but in truth, you don’t know him at all. But do you need to? What would be the point of knowing him? He treats the oiran with respect. He has never laid hands on you.
“I suppose.” You never forget to be polite; to be grateful, at the right moment.
“What does she taste like?” He asks, suddenly. There is a powerful hunger in his voice. Your skin prickles.
“Hm?”
He breathes out loudly. “It’s nothing.” He pauses. “Sometimes I envy you.”
For the fact of your uncaring, or for the beautiful oiran that sleeps across you, that you have now, at times, started to consider your friend? What a stupid, tenuous word that is, friend. And yet she is the closest to it. As is Kazushige, perhaps.
“You have no reason to.” You turn your face down, because now it is time for you to draw on modesty, the last feeble weapon in your arsenal.
***
She decides to play her shamisen next to Kazushige at dinner. He can’t stop staring at her in the dim light, his mouth slightly open. She pours him another cup of sake. You watch Taichou eyeing them at the end of the table, but he’s played along thus far, he’s not going to stop tonight. The other men, too, seem particularly preoccupied with how she leans close to Kazushige and calls him master.
Something is wrong, you think—something is strange about her song. It sounds like the habit of breaking one’s heart. Some melody you’ve heard before, the lyrics about two tracks from two pairs of feet, disappearing in the snow. (Mother’s paperthin smile, Kaoru in the afternoon light, a hand of death stroking your cheek so that it freezes.) When dinner finally ends, the oiran takes Kazushige’s hand and leads him back—to your tent. You don’t even protest. Maybe you can’t. You stand outside in the snow and it’s wet, slushy beneath your sandals. You wonder if you should try to find somewhere else to stay, or just wait. Wait.
Then you hear a harsh grunt, a gasp—I’m still—please, wait—and you can’t listen any longer.
You wander away, just far enough so that you can’t hear their noises. You crouch down and close your eyes. Sex always makes you think of Kaoru. (The same words, through the paper screens: wait—Master, please—oh, no no—of course I like it, of course, that feels—ah—wonderful.) Anything from sliding doors to the mention of Kabuki can make your insides burn. Sometimes you see your brother’s face and the smile suspended on it, meaning nothing. His lips parting, the choke beneath his involuntary sigh. (Some days his neck was lilac as the pattern on the robe of the brothel owner’s wife; how expensive that garment must have been, paid for in sweat and flesh.) You shake your head, knowing that won’t clear the images, and straighten up to take a piss.
You are standing in the snow, feeling your heart thaw, watching the sky for wolfhowl and moonbeams, when you hear a cut-off cry. A gasp. You’re back at your tent before you know it. The side is splattered with something like ink, and from beneath the flap red seeps onto the snow. Your hesitation lasts only a second.
In the dim light you can hardly see the blood, but you can smell it. The two bodies on the bed are still—or appear to be. Then one of them slowly twists around.
The oiran. Her expression when she sees you is—angry. Full of hate. No, terror.
She screams.
***
His body is collapsed in blood, the wound on his neck a strange slash. The oiran sits in her soaked red sheets, now sobbing after her cries turned hoarse. Taichou appears first. He grabs your shoulder and stares at you, searching. You stare back. You have no answers to give, and he sees this, backhands you anyway. He wrenches the oiran from her sheets—drags her out into the snow—and she stands before everyone, pale body stained.
“What was it,” Taichou asks, and when she merely shudders, he grabs her chin and forces her to look at him. You want to tell him not to do that—it’s dangerous—no, it might be hurting her—no. It’s not your place. “What was it?”
Talk, you useless slut is not spoken, but you all hear it anyway.
She mumbles something. You see Taichou’s hand quiver on her chin and this time you take a step forward. Her eyes slowly slide to yours, hold you in place. She’s not scared of him, you realize. She’s not afraid of any of this.
“What was that?”
“Oni,” she repeats. “Oni came, Taichou. Quick as lightning, with blades for fingers. It all happened so—so quickly. It’s these mountains—please, believe me—” her breath catches. “W
e’re not safe.”
***
They search her belongings, scour your tent, but there is no tool that could possibly inflict such a wound. She was naked; there was nothing on her person to conceal. Someone came and departed, then. She acted so well, appearing dead; or her beauty stirred the killer to pity, and she was spared. You have no way of tracing whether the murderer is independent, or one of the enemies’ assassins. Nobody knows much of Kazushige’s past—any number of grievances on his name or his family may have finally caught up with him.
That is not so unusual. The she remains breathing, however, is.
Taichou, ever the noble, has Kentaro strike her instead. On her knees in the snow, covered in a crust of blood, she is a pitiful figure—but she doesn’t let her head drop. She coughs and spits red, keeps her cries to a minimum. When Kentaro is finished, she merely wipes her lip and lowers her eyes.
Taichou has no such qualms about beating you. The bruises feel like weights beneath your skin. If you were not useful to them, you might be dead. “If anything else happens,” Taichou says, “Be assured that I will not let either of you off so easily.”
They do not trust you, have never truly seen you; but they have never feared you, either. They will not start now.
She cannot explain anything beyond her belief that it was oni. They decide she is crazy. Women from Yoshiwara sometimes are, driven to drink and delusions from the misery of their existence. Maybe it was a long time coming; or maybe she was so rattled by whatever it was she did see. Some start calling her yuki jyoro—snow whore. Still, her words have an effect: the decision is made to head for a different checkpoint. Murmurs throughout the camp are uneasy and angry. Before leaving the next day, they dispose of Kazushige’s body—the camp’s first the whole past year.
You wash your sheets in the river, waiting desperately for them to run clear, your hands icy in the water. A small, additional punishment.
When you look up, the oiran is seated a short distance from you. The bruise on her left cheek is painful to look at, and her eyes raw from crying. But there is serenity in the way she waits for your accusations, your questions.
“I’m not,” she says.
“Not?”
“Not lying.” I’ve seen one, she once told you. Oni. Winter not thawing quick enough. Snow piling on the mountains, soft and downy as bird feathers. A man with his entrails spread, his face missing.
She watches you, lips trembling as if she wants to say more. Everything about this moment is a terrible idea. Above all, you have the strongest urge to lay your lips on hers, just to keep her quiet.
You have never thought this before. She has changed things.
“Akira-kun,” she says, pulling her legs up so that her knees are against her face. “Can you keep a secret?”
Don’t undo this, something tells you, not for her, you don’t know what she is—
But you recall that first smile she gave you, and how it cut. How her songs wear down your soul. How she turned, so slowly, last night. You cannot change the fact of things; you can only open your eyes wider.
“Yes,” you say, and wait, and breathe.
***
She explains it the way one would tell a fairytale. You never hear about the gods who bled all over the snowcapped mountains, who cursed the earth and all things in it. It may be pretty to imagine, but the oni of these peaks are anything but pretty. They are terrible. Terrifying. They do all the things you hear in stories, and some things you don’t. They like the taste of human hearts and eyeballs. Their manners of killing are varied, but always violent.
Oni are banished to the earth from the next life over, for sins so terrible not even hell wants them. The most powerful have plenty of dark magic, and can take on the shape of a man or woman; they go into villages under their human guise, slaughter the men, rape the women, resume their true forms and eat the children.
They don’t feel, she continues. Not the way humans do. The concept of a feeling means nothing to them. It’s a void. A set of characters limning the air. Smoke curling from a burning villge, the gasping between a child’s cries, the blood running from a woman’s thighs as she leaves Yoshiwara with no worse hell to descend to. All forms of emptiness, drawn in different lights.
The oni don’t feel. This is the one thing that keeps them alive, the one thing that keeps them from living. They understand sensations, thrills, pleasures—but not their consequences.
Once upon a time, she says, oni entered a village. One encountered a farmer’s daughter. She was not the most beautiful woman in the village, but she might have been the most unlucky. The oni buried himself inside her. The woman lived with shame and terror for months. Her death in childbirth was a blessed one.
Children of oni are not born once. They are born as many times as they are killed. With the blood of terrible gods in their veins, they are unable to truly die; the closest they can get to that satisfaction is bringing death to others. There are countless ways of doing so, but the best is using human methods. Humans are inventive like that. They love to dispose of each other. So there are oni that learn trades, speak human tongues, use human weapons with the speed and strength they have gained through the years. Humans need only supply the reasons. Killers and assassins are always wanted; a war just makes it easier.
“Do you know the tale of Ikkaku Sennin?” She stands.
“No.” You stand with her.
“He fell in love with Sendaramo, and lost his magical powers. But my bastard father didn’t do that.” She clenches her fists. “Someday, I’ll find him. I’ll make him suffer what I’ve suffered; I’ll make sure he understands.” The hate in her voice ebbs away. “My mother was human,” she says, as if this needs saying. But if not for that mother, she could not possess such a look of misery; she wouldn’t feel at all.
This time it’s you reaching for her, not cupping her ears or her chin, just holding your hands out, waiting to see what reaction this will elicit. She stares for a moment, then moves toward you. You pull her in, and her arms curl around your back, her chin rests on your shoulder. Her chest against yours rises and falls, steadily, and you can feel her heart like a hummingbird. The demon blood thrumming inside it.
“Aren’t you afraid of me?” she whispers.
You shake your head. You can’t say why this is true—perhaps because she has a beating heart, just like yours, and she has suffered through so much more. You are no longer afraid of her, of what will happen. But there are many things you wish to ask her. Is the demon you’ve seen the one leaning against me now, lovely in the lake’s reflection? Who has bought you, who has sent you to our camp to kill us? How long have you been circling these white plains? How many men and women have you murdered this way, in Yoshiwara, in Edo, in the war? Before the war?
What do you think of when you see snow falling? What do you think of when you smell winter?
“What is your name?” Your mouth is against her ear, closer than you’ve ever been to another person since Kaoru lay beside you, trying not to let you hear his weeping; no—since they pushed your face into a pillow and forced themselves inside you, groaning—
Her laughter emerges as white breath against your shoulder.
“In truth I have no name, but the humans who first raised me called me Ayame.”
“Ayame,” you repeat.
“A name is a useless thing to have.” She pulls back and studies you. You see blood cascading in her eyes. You see fire. You see Kazushige’s wound. When she kisses you, you close your eyes, but it doesn’t stop the images. Snow keeps falling, right through the darkness that remains long after you’ve opened your eyes again.
***
“Why Kazushige?” you ask, later that day. You are polishing guns that will obviously be used soon.
“Do you know how to fold paper cranes?”
“Yes. Why Kazushige?”
“Promise me you’ll teach me how to fold a paper crane, first.”
You’ll have to think about where to fi
nd the paper, but that can be arranged. Taichou keeps some for his official letters. They’re not square. You’ll just have to slice them square, or maybe she can do that, with whatever she uses to slice men’s throats. “I promise.”
“I’m teasing. I already know how. You think I don’t know how?” she smirks and you shrug, the gesture unpracticed.
“Why Kazushige?”
Irritation crosses her face. Her eyes narrow, as if she is asking: Why? Do you care? Why should you care? “He detested you.”
“He was kind to me.”
“Kind? Just because he didn’t hurt you the way the others did? You think that is kindness? You disgusted him with your weakness. That’s why he never touched you.” You don’t know if you can trust her; you don’t know if that will make things hurt less. She glares. “How you can hold on to that fluttering goodness inside you? Don’t you get angry? I’m angry all the time.”
You hold her gaze, try not to tremble as she continues: “You misunderstand me, Akira-kun. The desire to see some blood spilled—you don’t know the hunger, how much it hurts here,” she draws a circle over her heart, waits to see how you’ll react when she says, “How much I burn to see you all dead, how your breathing makes me want to spit. How humans make me sick.”
That doesn’t surprise you, doesn’t chill you even if it should. You put down the rifle you were cradling. “Let’s fold some cranes,” you say, taking her hand. She looks shocked for a moment. Then rueful.
It turns out she has paper—one of the parting gifts from the obasan. She balances a perfectly folded crane on your head; it flops down onto your shoulder. She sighs and picks it up. “That body Kazushige saw? That was the work of an oni not covering its tracks. He had seen too much. So I decided I was going to finish the job. I was prepared to slay him, slay everyone. I was told not to let anyone live. But then you came back—you came in—and I couldn’t kill you.” She grins, but there is nothing happy about it. “It’s all your fault.”
***
So the camp marches, marches onwards, through the drowsy mountains and your own protesting feet, shivering. It’s glorious in its way, the battle hymn of war singing in your bones, in the strings she still plays. There is a village some miles before the next checkpoint. You will scour it for supplies, for signs of the enemy.