Japanese Dreams

by Sean Wallace (ed)

  “Husband,” the kitsune said in a stern voice. Then, to Mimura: “Do you ask our help, who care nothing for the works of men?”

  “No.” He glanced at the spongy moss beneath his feet. “I ask your help, who care for the fields and forests of Kyushu.”

  “Hmm.” She looked upward. “See, the sun is risen and yet it rains from a bright sky. It must be my wedding day come again.”

  “I—” he began, but his eyes were clouded with shadow and the swirl of a thousand fox tails.

  The sun rose into angry clouds that closed in out of the last of night’s shadows. They rode on a violent wind which snatched the fires from the Mongol’s camp and spread them through the tents and horse lines. The storm wailed like an ogre that had lost its peach orchard. The Mongol ships strained at the anchors, chains and ropes threatening to part with the waves.

  Mimura watched the banners of the Chinzei Bugyo’s forces rally under the storm’s assault, his father’s forces in the van. Then the rain closed in so hard he could see nothing except the pale whipping of mist carried on the rain, foxtails flying in the crest of the wind.

  He sat in the doorway of the shepherd’s hut as the rain washed history into the bay.

  Later the old dog slunk in from the rain and shook itself off in the hut behind him. Mimura broken open his last rice ball and shared it with the Fox king. A single bare tail thumped twice on the floor. When the skies finally began to clear, Mimura bowed to his benefactor and picked his way down to the beach.

  He had a tale to tell, though he knew the kitsune would never be more than a dream to anyone who heard his words.

  Hibakusha Dreaming in the Shadowy Land of Death

  Ken Scholes

  Some of us started getting together for Group Psychotherapy after the war ended. I think it was Peach Boy’s idea. He’d seen a flier, written in English, nailed to a post at the market and thought it might be a good way to practice the new language. He rallied up me, Golden Boy, One Inch Boy, and Urashima Taro, and we went down together to meet with the American psychiatrist, Amanda Fullbright Hampton, at her new office in a former Imperial Army officer’s quarters in Tokyo.

  We shuffled in each Tuesday with nothing better to do and sat in a circle, our hands wrapped around cups of steaming tea. Outside, American soldiers swaggered past Dr. Hampton’s window, their pink faces shining and their white teeth flashing smiles. Each Tuesday, she made a great show of her annoyance and shut the blinds but I could tell she welcomed their looks. I found myself wondering if she didn’t sometimes put on stockings and a shorter dress and high heeled shoes and go to the places where the soldiers drank in order to find one she could take home from time to time. Then, I wondered if maybe she might like to take me home sometime. Usually, I wondered this during our meetings. Apart from the fantasizing about Dr. Hampton, I found the Group Psychotherapy rather useless.

  “What do you think about Kintaro’s story?” Dr. Hampton asked me. She smiled and shifted her skirts.

  I shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

  She leaned in and I tried not to look down her shirt. “He was talking about his mother.”

  I shrugged again. “We all know she was an ogress.” When the psychiatrist frowned, I continued. “Well,” I said, “she was.”

  The true nature of this was lost on her. She was looking for something underneath it, some kind of meaning. But we’d all learned the hard way that there wasn’t any meaning left in the world. Most of the gods left a long while ago. Those who couldn’t leave simply forgot who they were. Some of us who weren’t quite gods didn’t have that luxury. Of course, we couldn’t tell her that.

  Kintaro the Golden Boy cleared his voice. “Regardless,” he said. “I saw a woman who could have been her twin down at the market and suddenly I felt—”

  Issun-Boshi, the One Inch Boy interrupted. “You know who I saw the other day?”

  “Who?” Momotaro the Peach Boy asked.

  Kintaro looked stunned by the developing side conversation. He was used to getting more attention than the rest of us. He shifted his gaze from Peach Boy to One Inch Boy to me.

  Dr. Hampton sighed. I started wondering if she were better in bed than she was at Group Psychotherapy and I was beginning to realize that she simply had to be.

  I grinned at her and sipped my tea before turning to One Inch Boy. “Who did you see?”

  “One of the Forty Seven,” he said. Even Kintaro’s eyebrows raised at this. Dr. Hampton tapped her pencil on her clipboard.

  “I thought they were all dead by now,” I said.

  Peach Boy snorted. “That doesn’t mean anything. Look at us. We’re living proof of the Karmic Cycle.” He grinned.

  Only I wasn’t so sure of this. Of course, I was also the only one of us who didn’t know who he was.

  Kintaro the Golden Boy remembered his past life as the heroic foster son of an Ogress. He could talk for days about wandering around with the regent warrior Minamoto no Yorimitsu and his Four Guardian Kings, fighting bandits and Spider Gods.

  And Momotaro was quick to remind everyone that he distinctly recalled the smell and texture of the giant peach that he arrived in, and cried openly when he spoke of that childless old woman and her husband who found him, Heaven’s gift of a son in his own words.

  Next up was Urashima Taro, a fisherman who saved a turtle, visited the undersea Dragon’s Palace and returned home to find that three hundred years had passed. “Imagine my surprise,” he told us all that first day we met.

  And there was Issun-Boshi, who insisted—despite his presently Sumo-sized self—that he spent part of his life in miniature because his own mother had wished to have a boy “even if he were only one inch tall.” A skilled samurai, he killed an Oni with a sewing needle and won the heart of a princess who wished him to normal size...and then some, it seems.

  Fact is, everyone knew themselves but me.

  “And who are you?” Dr. Hampton asked me the same day she asked the rest of us.

  “I’m hoping you can help me sort that out,” I told her with a smile. She shifted uncomfortably and it was the first time I wondered what she might look like without her clothes. It was easier to think of that than it was to think of that unexpected and sudden end to the war, the piercing sunrise that swallowed two cities.

  That was two years ago. Today, we were talking about our mothers (again) until One Inch Boy brought up the ronin and everything changed.

  Kintaro leaned forward in his chair. “Where did you see him?”

  One Inch Boy glanced at Dr. Hampton as if asking for permission to continue the digression. She said nothing. “At the G.I. Bar,” he said, “on the water-side of the Dai-Ichi Seimei Building.” He paused. “He’d been drinking sake for days.” He paused again. “Well fed, too.”

  I knew the bar, down by Allied Command, but I’d never been there.

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Hampton said, “Kintaro would like to finish what he was saying?” She smiled; there was sweet sadness in it.

  Momotaro stroked his thin mustache. “It sounds like he’s done well for himself. I wonder what he’s been up to?”

  One Inch Boy shrugged. “I asked. He wouldn’t say.”

  “Probably no good,” Kintaro said. “Why, I wouldn’t—”

  But this time, Dr. Hampton did the interrupting. When she did, she uncrossed her legs and I saw a bit of creamy white calf. “Time’s up,” she said. “Please take a cookie with you when you go.

  And we did, because like everyone, we were so hungry that even the Gaijin sweets appealed to us.

  “I’m not sure about this,” I told Peach Boy outside the bar.

  “What’s not to be sure about?” he said, smiling. “Maybe there’s work to be had. Good money, easy money.”

  “But what about the Americans?”

  One Inch Boy spoke up now. “Giving birth to a baby is easier than worrying about it.”

  I scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Kintaro pushed past me. “Come
on,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  We slipped in. There were uniformed soldiers everywhere, drinking and listening to loud music, talking even louder. I could smell their sweat. The four of us stopped and looked around the room. One Inch Boy pointed, then picked his away across the room to an old man at the far corner of the bar.

  The ronin looked up at us and smiled, showing the gaps where many of his teeth had been. “Boys,” he said, “it’s good to see you.”

  He stank of sake and sweat and he wore cast-off American clothes. I thought I should recognize him but I did not, though the others did.

  “What have you been up to?” Kintaro asked, clapping the old man on the back.

  The old man chortled. “A little of this and a little of that. You?”

  Golden Boy shrugged. “We’re trying American Group Psychotherapy for free cookies, hot tea and English lessons.”

  “And the psychiatrist has shapely legs,” I added.

  “Well,” he said, “I can drink to that.” And he did.

  One Inch Boy leaned towards him, lowering his voice. “You’re doing very well for yourself. Are you working?”

  The ronin flinched. “A bit,” he said.

  “We need work,” Peach Boy said. “Maybe you can help us out.”

  The old man shook his head. “I don’t think I can.” He drained his sake and belched.

  “And I don’t think you work,” Kintaro said. His eyes narrowed. “You drink too much to work.”

  The ronin shook his head and wagged a finger at the Golden Boy. “For my work, I drink just enough.”

  Kintaro still retained a great deal of his superhuman strength though he didn’t look it. He’d traded the round, boyish features for the defeated look of a middle-aged man who’d watch his people rise and fall. But when his hand came down on the ronin’s shoulder, I heard the old man’s bones groan beneath the power of Kintaro’s grip.

  I pushed myself between them and scowled at Kintaro. “There’s no need for this,” I said.

  Kintaro sneered. “He doesn’t smell right.” He looked around the bar. “He smells like them. Hell, he looks like them.”

  I wondered if this was how it was meant to be now. Our gods had moved on. Only a few of us remained from those olden times and we lived quietly and wondered if the American bomb and boot might be the end of us. I wondered if perhaps waking up on the edge of that blasted ruin of a city was simply an illusion. Perhaps I was in Yomi, the land of the dead. And perhaps my companions were dead, too, and we were all wandering towards the edges of what might be life without ever truly finding it.

  I put my hand on Kintaro’s arm and brushed it off the old man. I was surprised at my own strength. “There is no need for this,” I said again. Then I turned to the ronin. “I’m sorry for my friend,” I told him.

  He smiled but the light went out in his eyes. “Be sorry for all of us,” he said with a quiet voice.

  I looked at the others. All but Kintaro had looks of profound sadness on their faces. Kintaro still looked angry.

  He spat on the floor. “Be sorry for yourself, old man,” he said to the old man. Kintaro glared at the rest of us and stormed out of the bar. I noticed a few of the soldiers watching him as he went.

  While Peach Boy and the others apologized for our friend, I slipped out behind him into a sullen, gray evening.

  I caught up to him near the water. “Why are you so angry?”

  Kintaro’s voice was louder than was proper. “Why I am so angry? Why are you not angry? Look around you.” He cast his arm about, encompassing the jeeps and soldiers moving freely among our people, freely upon our island. “We are hungry. Are they?” We are broken. Are they? And that old man—once a hero to his people—bends and takes every inch they’ll give him. He’s up to something. I know he is.”

  “But Kintaro,” I said, “if we had prevailed would it be any different for them beneath our flag?” I swallowed, feeling myself tremble as memory washed me. “If we had their bomb wouldn’t we have done the same?” Then, I let my voice become gentle. “Besides, each week we go to see the American Dr. Amanda Fullbright Hampton. We drink her tea and eat her cookies and speak her language. If the old man has found a way live in this hell who are we to judge him?”

  His voice was sharp. “What do you know?”

  And he was right. I knew little. I couldn’t remember any of the war. Or anything before that. Nor any of my past incarnations. I woke up in a ditch on the edge of a blasted city, Peach Boy’s tattered shoe prodding me. I woke up with no knowledge of myself, my skin nearly as pink as a Gaijin, my vision blurred, and my hair burned away. Within a week, my skin had darkened to its appropriate tone, I could see just fine and I needed a haircut. They said it was how they knew I was one of them after all.

  By the time I opened my mouth to reply, Kintaro had walked away. It was the last time I saw him alive.

  Kintaro the Golden Boy was killed the night before our next session with Dr. Hampton. We learned the news from the woman he rented a sleeping mat from in an Army warehouse that had been converted to sleeping quarters for low income workers.

  “What happened?” Peach Boy asked her.

  “He killed Americans. Fifteen of them.”

  “But why?” Issun-Boshi asked.

  She shrugged. “Ask the old man.”

  We went to the bar but the old man was not there so we wandered about that part of the city, learning what we could without drawing too much attention to ourselves. Gradually we pieced together the end of Golden Boy.

  Kintaro had stormed an American barracks with a katana and a rusty revolver he had found in a culvert. Some said he’d been shot over thirty times before he fell. Others said he’d not been shot at all. But many had seen the bodies pulled out from the building. The streets whispered the story to us but to my knowledge it was never reported in the American news. A thousand years of heroics and his last battle went unremembered by his foes, despite the price he extracted from them.

  We still met at Dr. Hampton’s office for our session. She pointed to the teapot and we served ourselves. “What would you like to talk about today?” she asked.

  “Kintaro is dead,” Issun-Boshi said. His voice sounded hollow to me and his eyes were red. “I would like to talk about that.”

  “Maybe we’re all dead,” I whispered. But no one heard me.

  Dr. Hampton looked surprised and, for a moment, ambushed by our sudden honesty. Her eyes went wide for a moment, then she regained her composure. “What happened?”

  We filled in the details as best we could. When we were finished, she let out her breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. And suddenly, I realized she was crying and that there was greater beauty in her tears than there could ever be in her legs or breasts. For that hour, I did not wonder at all about how she was in bed. For that hour, her Group Psychotherapy was as mighty as old magic, as crafty as any dragon. She simply put down her clipboard and laughed with us, cried with us, as we talked about our fallen friend. As his story was told, her eyes became alive and her skin flushed, her breath caught easily in her throat. When we finished, she came around to each of us and hugged us. It felt improper even though her hair smelled as good as I had imagined it might and her body felt as warm.

  “I’m afraid,” she said as we stood to leave, “that this will be our last session together.”

  We looked at her blankly and Peach Boy spoke first. “What do you mean? We need you now more than ever.”

  She looked out the window and I realized that her face was not lined with sadness just from our loss but from some other loss inside of her. Then she recovered. “I don’t think I can help you.” She paused and chose her words carefully. “I’m not sure you need help.” Then she paused again. “Besides,” she said, “I have to return to America.”

  So one by one we filed out of her office, cookies clenched in our fists and stuffed into our pockets. Each stopped at the door and gave her a slight bow. She hugged each of us again.

 
; I let the others go first. “I’ll catch up,” I told them.

  I shifted on my feet before her, holding my hat in my hands. “I was wondering....” My eyes met hers for a brief second. They were blue with flecks of green in them and they were an ocean that could drown me. I lost my words and shifted again.

  “Yes?”

  I saw the curve of her breast beneath the white silk of her blouse. I followed the line of her neck to her tiny ears. “I was wondering now that I’m not your patient if you’d like to take me home with you sometime?”

  She laughed and I felt the heat rise on my cheeks as I looked away. But her hand reached out and touched my arm and I knew then that her laugh was all nervousness and intoxication. She was drunk on the legend of us, or at least of my friends and their memories of Kintaro, and her smile told me her answer before she gave it. “I would like that very much,” she said. “Meet me here at nine.”

  Bowing again, I fled into the rain to find my waiting friends.

  We went back to the bar, hoping the old man would be there to tell us why Kintaro had attacked the Americans. His corner was empty so we took it and talked in low voices over cheap beer.

  We talked about Kintaro for a while, then talked of the future.

  “What will we do?” Issun-Boshi the One Inch Boy asked.

  Momotaro the Peach Boy shrugged. “I have a cousin in America. He works in orchards in a desert near the Pacific. He’s offered me work and will help me get on my feet there.” He sipped his beer. “I think I will go there and start over again.”

  “You think they will let you go to America?” I asked. This sounded off to me.

  He shrugged and grinned. “I am Momotaro. I will find a way.”

  One Inch Boy turned to me next. “What about you? Are you going to America, too?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “It’s hard to know what to do when you don’t know who you are,” I said.

  “Me,” Urashima Taro said, “I’m going back to the ocean.” He saw our puzzled looks. “The here and now holds nothing for me. Perhaps the queen of the Dragon Palace will have me back.” He sighed. “Otohime and her twenty maids in waiting. And this time, I’ll let a thousand years pass before I return. And I will hope that our people—that all people—have learned a better way.”