Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Law, Lucas K.

  Lots of people are heading into Tokyo today. There’s little else to do, beside eating and surviving. The TV news hasn’t come back, but officials drive around in little trucks from time to time, shouting on loudspeakers. They’re launching a satellite today. It’s what we’ve been saving our resources for, what all the surviving scientists have been recycling parts into. If it takes off, we’ll be connected again, they think. We’ll be able to send out our message: that we’re here, if there’s anyone out there to listen.

  The gates of the station are rusting, but the train runs twice a day. People file soundlessly onto the platforms, their greasy hair slicked back with water, their stained pants smoothed and ironed with the palms of their hands. No one speaks. We’re a ghost of what used to be, haunting the tracks in pale silence. We line up inside the little triangle markers as if we’re on our way to school, to work, to the department stores. I twist the strap over my shoulder so the picnic basket is in front of me, so I can see it at all times. Aki squishes in beside me, protecting the basket with her little body.

  The train pulls in without a chime, without a polite voice announcing its arrival. The wheels squeak on the track. The cars rattle from side to side, braking as the doors line up between the triangles. Every window on the train is shattered, shards swept into neat piles along the sides of the tracks where they’ve remained for months and months. The doors open rigidly, and Aki and I sit down on the crimson seats on the opposite side. There’s lots of space. Only five people get in our car, once packed with salarymen and office ladies and students in uniforms of navy blue and red and black, all brass buttons and knee socks.

  The door at the end of the train car slides open, and the conductor steps in. His blazer is missing a clasp, and the gold trim is fraying off his cap. His white gloves are freshly washed but hopelessly stained. He would’ve lost his job showing up like this before, but in this world of after, he looks crisp and sharp, a symbol of what we used to be. He slaps his hands against the sides of his trousers and bows deeply to us. His head still toward the floor, he shouts apologies to us. “I’m sorry for the condition of the train,” he barks in the politest Japanese. “I’m sorry for the state of the windows. Please take care not to cut yourselves. I’m sorry we cannot properly clean the floors. The train will start in a moment. I’m sorry the chimes will not properly announce the stops.” It’s always the same speech. We listen quietly, not saying a word. He snaps upright, and moves on to the next car, bowing again as he leaves.

  A few moments later, the train sways into motion. The chill of the autumn breeze blows in the jagged windows. A tiny line of dark brown has dried down our window, dotted with a bead of dried blood at the bottom of the frame. It’s a long way into the city, the trains running slowly on the tracks.

  The man across from us is eyeing our picnic basket. I tighten my fingers on the lid and look away, hoping he’ll stop staring. He doesn’t say anything as we jolt back and forth. He has broad shoulders under his black blazer, a thin angular face and hard black eyes. He’s lean and hungry like us, but so much bigger. I wouldn’t stand a chance against someone his size. All he needs to do is snatch the picnic basket. I couldn’t stop him. We both know it. I often take the onigiri in something safer, like a backpack, but I needed to bring as many as I could today, and that leaves me with the vulnerable picnic basket.

  “Smells good,” he says finally.

  I don’t answer. The four others in the car ignore him as well, but they’re listening, watching. A young lady in the corner lifts a handkerchief to her mouth and lets out a horrible, racking cough.

  “What’ve you got in there?”

  I press my lips together in a hard line. I don’t think “my mother’s bones” will cut it with him.

  “Can’t you talk?”

  “Leave her alone,” says another man. “They’re just children.” He’s in a tattered t-shirt, white with an English slogan on it: Go! Future Dream in thick black letters. I wonder what dream the future holds for any of us now.

  “We’re all someone’s children,” the man in the blazer says. “Children only need a little to eat. We need more to fill our bellies.”

  “Your belly looks full enough,” the Go! man says. “Hunger isn’t as bad a taste as stealing from children.”

  The man in the blazer curses and looks away as the train rounds a corner. I give a quiet nod to the man in the t-shirt. I press my hands into my lap so he won’t see how they’re shaking.

  We rock back and forth for over an hour. I close my eyes to rest, but the sun is glaring in the sky, the chill of wind rippling over my skin from the broken windows. At some point along the Tokyo Bay, Aki tugs on my elbow. “I’m hungry,” she says, her eyes deep and questioning. Her hair used to be so glossy, her smile spread from ear to ear. She had a dimple on the right side. I haven’t seen it in over a year.

  I rest my hand gently on the blue cotton bandana tied in her hair. “Not yet.”

  Her lips curl with disappointment. “But—” It’s the only protest she forms. She knows she won’t convince me. I don’t dare bring out the onigiri here. It’s one thing to have them in the basket, but to flaunt them in front of the others, to bring out the smells and textures—I’m not sure even Go! man will be on our side then.

  “I’m sorry, little silkworm,” I say, tracing the white lines in the blue bandana. She looks out the window, watching the sunlight dance on the water in the bay.

  Our grandfather worked at a silkworm farm for most of his life. He showed me once the handfuls of tiny white cocoons, like soft eggs clustered in his hands. It was hard to imagine the tiny worms inside, their slow and graceful metamorphosis into ghostly white moths. Adversity changes us, he said. We weave a beautiful armour to face it and come out changed, ready to fly.

  We are all little cocoons, I think, as I look at the people in the train. We spin threads around ourselves, shutting others out as if we were the only ones struggling. Hungry to survive, destined to die. And yet together, unravelled, our stories form yards and yards of beautiful silken thread.

  Another half hour and the train snakes into Tokyo Station. The doors shudder open. The man in the blazer hesitates as he considers taking the basket from us once more. The t-shirt man stands in his way. He harrumphs and steps out of the doors. I quietly shoulder the basket while Aki adjusts her own bag. We step onto the platform and twist our way up the stairs. I’m just behind the Go! man now.

  “Wait,” I say quietly. He turns to look at me. “To thank you.” Aki understands what I’m saying, and unzips her bag to reach for our lunch.

  He rests a gentle hand on her wrist. “No.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t open it here. You’ll get mugged, and so will I.”

  I nod, watching him walk away. We’re all so frightened. How did we get to this? Didn’t we all feel so safe together before the quake? Didn’t I ride the train home from school in the dark, walking the long alleyways behind closed temples and gleaming convenience store windows and buzzing vending machines crawling with cicadas? Didn’t I walk fearlessly in the shadows then, surrounded by strangers? And yet the first one to fear was a hobbling, smiling, plump grandmother.

  How different the world is when the illusion of civilization has shattered with the windows of the trains. How quickly history can unravel, taking us back to the beginning, when we walked the strange new world alone and armed with spears.

  Tokyo Station: once bustling and vibrant, now empty and hollow as a skull, cracked and cast aside by the living. So many sought shelter here when the buildings came down. They’ve cleaned up since then, the bodies removed, but the smell of death lingers. It’s stale and acidic, a metallic bitterness in the air. Not everyone died in the quake. Lots followed in the days after, one after another in despair and sadness, like a doomed army with no other way out. Our footsteps echo in the long passageways. Aki’s fingers squeeze mine tightly. She is remembering, I think. She can smell it, too.

  “Tamago,” I s
ay.

  It takes her a moment to realize what I‘m saying. Then her quiet voice answers, “Goma.” Sesame.

  “Mahou,” I say, magic, to get her mind off food. Aki has always loved to play shiritori. It’s a word game, where the last syllable of the word has to start the next word. You only lose if you say a word that ends in “n.” We walk past the silent moving sidewalks, out of service for over a year. We’re almost out of the tunnels now, following the exit signs for the southern gate.

  “U—” she stumbles for a minute. “Unagi.”

  “That’s food again.”

  “I mean the eel, swimming. Gi.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Ginka.” Silver coins, like tiny minnows, slipping through my fingers just as quickly. “Your turn, Aki. Ka.”

  She doesn’t answer for a moment. Then she says quietly, “Kazan.”

  I stop, the small crowd continuing around us both ways. Volcano. Mount Ontake, spewing vile clouds of curling grey death on all of us. I smack Aki lightly in the back of the head. “That ends in ‘n,’” I say. “You lost.”

  “We all lost,” she says.

  Akiko, my sister. As vibrant as the red and yellow leaves of the autumn she was named for, Father used to say. A true autumn child, dancing from foot to foot like the cool wind, spinning like a top, crying like the rains whenever she skinned a knee, every burst of her spirit like the fresh sharp edges of fall. But now she’s thin and quiet, her face pale like a newly fallen snow on the dying leaves. The world around us is Aki’s mirror, fading into a season we may not survive. Lovely vibrant Akiko is crumpling under the weight of her cocoon.

  “Stupid,” I say, smacking her on the shoulder. “Try again.”

  “Ka” she says, mulling the syllable over. “Ka—”

  “Kaiko,” I suggest.

  That gets the faintest of smiles. “Kaiko,” she agrees. “Silkworm. I miss Grandfather.”

  “Me too.”

  We burst from the seams of Tokyo Station, into the fresh mid-morning light. It’s a half-hour walk to Haramikyu Gardens from the station. Local trains are difficult to get for outsiders; non-Tokyo residents have to pay, and we can’t afford it, so we walk. Rubble and glass have been swept to the sides of the streets, collapsed buildings leave gaping holes in the dense walls of concrete and wood. There’s an old man with a walking stick just staring into a pile of the rubble, his thoughts, and wits, far away. It’s not uncommon. There are those who lost their minds that day and haven’t found their way back. In the distance, babies and young children cry, along with the constant mewing and whimpering of lost dogs and cats. A big Shiba, flea-bitten and matted, crosses in front of us. He was someone’s companion once, a beloved pet. Now he’s one of the thousands and thousands of strays trying to eke out an existence in the rubble.

  He’s not the only one. People are sorting through the rubble everywhere we go, looking for valuables, tinned food, anything they can resell. Women spread out delicate silk kimonos on the dusty streets, cranes and chrysanthemums in a rainbow of colours, embroidered with silver and gold and metallic-red thread. Family treasures, but no one is buying. In this world, rice balls have more value than the finest silk.

  “Do you know how many cocoons it takes to make a kimono?” Grandfather asked me once, as I stroked my fingers along the soft little eggs nestled in their trays. “Five thousand. Five thousand little lives, weaving away.” He smiled, his finger arcing through the air. “Four thousand, nine-hundred, and ninety-nine, and the kimono would be missing a swatch right—there.” His fingers tickled under my neck, and I giggled. His thick white eyebrows knit with delight. “Never think you and your sister are too small.” He nodded, his eyes weary as he blinked at the little cocoons. “Every contribution matters.”

  I wonder what he’d say now. I wonder what he’d say about all those who jumped off the surviving rooftops, who sliced open their cocoons and tumbled into shattered futures, brown beads of blood on raw woven silk.

  There’s already a crowd gathering when we arrive, though the launch isn’t until later in the evening. The golden teahouse is packed with the homeless, blankets spread from glass wall to glass wall. We look for a place to set up along the line of trees. We don’t want to be too far from the projection, but already the best spots have gone to the locals.

  “Here?” Aki says, finding a spot along the pathway. It’s not bad, shaded by trees but not so hidden away as to be mugged. I nod, and she unzips the side pocket of the basket, pulling out our long blue tarp. She straightens the edges carefully, flattening the creases with the palm of her hand. I rest the basket on top and pull aside the plastic latches. Aki smooths the bandana in her hair, stands in front of our sales spot and bows crisply to the crowds.

  “Good afternoon,” she shouts, even though it’s barely eleven. “Are you hungry? Don’t watch the launch on an empty stomach! Onigiri for sale!”

  Aki has incredible lungs for such a thin, little silkworm. Whenever I tried to sell the onigiri, I couldn’t get out more than a whisper, my cheeks blushing pink by the attention drawn to myself. So now Aki calls the customers over, and I only have to hand them the rice balls and nod my head.

  “We have bonito, tuna, tamago, seven vegetable furikake!” she shouts. “Fresh nori, taste our nostalgia, relive our past into the future!”

  No one steps forward for a little while, but I don’t mind. I’m weary from the journey here, my stomach roiling from its own juices.

  Then a blond-haired man peeks out from the pathway. “Is that Aki?” When he laughs, the sound shakes his stomach.

  It’s David. He’s still alive, still surviving here. He was on holiday in Tokyo when the quake hit. He hasn’t been able to get home, to even tell his family that he’s okay. The way he tells it is he was posing with a Buddhist monk one moment, and the world was churning the next. “The picture turned out blurry,” he always says, as if that were the worst part.

  “David,” Aki says. “Want an onigiri?”

  “You know me,” he says. “Give me a tuna, will you?” His Japanese has improved. I guess he hasn’t had much else to do, stranded here with the rest of us.

  “It’s not real tuna,” Aki says. “Just furikake powder.”

  “That’s fine.” He passes her the yen quickly, but the police are here, so I don’t think we’ll be mugged by spectators. David’s expression shows that he didn’t even expect real tuna. The tins are long gone from the shelves, and the fresh fish is something we can’t afford. He ruffles Aki’s hair, scrunching up her bandana, before he disappears into the crowd.

  On the grassy plain near the golden teahouse, they’ve set up a big solar projection screen so we can watch the launch all the way from Tanegashima. It’s the latest in our attempts to reach out to a silent world. We think that while the ash hung in the air, some of our satellites went down. Our cries to the outside have met with nothing but silence. The runways at Narita and Haneda are shattered and cracked, the same in Kansai. They’ve sent smaller planes and helicopters to Okinawa to see if the runway was useable, and to Seoul to reach out to the world. None of them have returned. Whether they were shot down or lost, whether they made it only to discover no survivors there, or whether there was no electricity or gas for them to return to us, we have no way to know. This satellite will be a flare in the ocean of silence, to show the others we’re still here, to try and re-establish communications and figure out what’s going on out there.

  The day passes slowly. It’s getting harder to find those who can spend on onigiri. It’s always easier in Tokyo than Kamakura; the salarymen’s pockets are deeper here. Mothers buy for starving children, while the orphans look on with wide eyes, red sores on their faces, their clothes torn. It’s easy to pity them; we would be them if the man on the train had taken our picnic basket. But every onigiri I give away is less food to put in my sister’s stomach, and it’s her face that haunts me at night, her pale skin and jutting cheekbones and skinny legs.

  When Aki’s shouting gets fainter,
I know it’s time for us to eat our onigiri. The nori crinkles gently against my fingers, the rice at first hard like beads, then melting in my mouth with a soft pop of nuttiness. I eat half my onigiri like it’s a five-course meal. Aki eats hers in the same savoury way, each bite its own feast.

  The one street girl is still there, dark red circles around her tear-stained eyes. She’s squatting against a tree trunk, her bare feet black with dust. She holds a ragged kitty doll by the leg, its arms and smiling face sprawled into a tangle of browning grass.

  Aki watches her too. I know what will happen. It happens every time.

  Aki gets up slowly, walking over to the girl.

  I want to help, too. I’ve told her so many times. We don’t have enough for ourselves.

  Father told us to always help others. Grandfather said every silk thread counts.

  This isn’t the world they lived in. Things are different now. Remember the boy who jumped us at the station and stole your backpack? Remember the grandmother who took Mother’s kimono?

  The street girl lifts a sleeve to her eyes, drags it across. Dirt smudges on her cheeks.

  The world is different, Oneechan. But I’m the same. I’m still Aki.

  She gives the girl half of her onigiri. The girl begins to sob, racking cries that she stifles with her tattered sleeve.

  Yes. You’re still Aki.

  When she returns to the tarp, my half is waiting for her, like always. And I’m still your Oneechan.

  Inside Aki’s cocoon, I can see the flutter of wings forming.

  The sun begins to set. The projection comes on the screen. It’s been ages since any of us have watched TV or been on the internet. It seems like a miracle to watch it flick on, like everything is back to the way it was. The illusion plays out again, that we are civilized, that things are the same.