by Sandi Tan
His hands are brown and twiglike but they have a young man’s firm grip on the rake. The strokes are sturdy as he sweeps bits of errant gravel off the pathway and back into the rocky pool. This doesn’t look like a man whose back ever troubled him. He’s almost not a man but some walking essence of sagacious calm, ready to be distilled, bottled, and sold in the temple’s gift shop.
“See anything you want?” Agnes says.
I walk closer to the man. He still doesn’t notice us, though we couldn’t have been more than twenty yards away. His mind is fully engaged in the chanting of his colleagues: The body we see out in the yard is a mere vessel. Bit by bit, I click together the jigsaw of his features—the high, chiseled cheekbones, the straight Peking nose, the slant and hood of once-arrogant eyes, the hunch hinting at a taller, more vigorous youth.
Hands that once struck me, held me, caressed me, and struck me again.
Taro. My God, it really is him.
A surge of nausea rises up my chest. She really did find him! Yet why am I so surprised? She found me.
Agnes smiles. “Lieutenant Colonel Rukumoto. He’s why you went to the archive week after week, isn’t he? Looking for revenge.”
“I had a feeling. But only a feeling,” I gasp. “He’s so very, very old.”
My heart is racing.
It’s true I’ve sought him, all this time. I may have seen the beach house go up in flames, but I never met his ghost. And one of the surest things in this world is that a man like Taro would have a ghost, and an angry one, too. Searching for him, with its attendant promise of vengeance or news of his death, with its promise of relief, has sustained me, given structure to my later days. It became its own ritual, long after my rage had grown dim. Yet I never dreamed I’d actually find him, least of all with someone like Agnes.
But was this really a peace offering?
“You don’t forget and you don’t forgive, do you, Lady Midnight?”
Agnes is different now. Her eyes have a crystalline, automatic hardness. The contempt has returned to her voice, and I know she hasn’t had to dig deep to find it. She’s inherited her father’s talent for conjuring up slights and turning them into weapons.
It’s all right. I accept the wrath of this poor, fatherless girl. Because here we are, bound in this cold wind, under the heaving gray sky, staring at the very man whose long-ago actions turned us both into the monsters we are now. If this didn’t seal our weird kinship, then I don’t know what could have.
“Learning about my father has been my personal project. You’ve helped me. In return, I present to you your personal project.”
She reaches into her blazer and draws out an antique keris, ceremonial but sharp, perhaps stolen from a museum. She pushes its hilt into my palm.
“Go on. You want him, don’t you?” She turns my shoulders until I’m facing the oblivious monk. “This is a settlement between the damned. Trust me, nobody’s going to miss either of you.”
I cup the keris in my freezing hand, and an electric current runs through my arm. This is what temptation feels like—cold, tingling, stiff.
Taro is here for my taking, at one hundred years old. He looks so placid I wonder if he’d resist at all. Would he even recognize me, a miserable crone aged eighty-eight, coming at him for crimes committed seventy years ago? Our geriatric pas de deux would be the stuff of legend—or comedy.
Watching him sweep, vulnerable, in soft garments, I can almost believe he’s put himself here to await precisely this fate. Japanese perversity.
“Go on,” Agnes whispers behind me.
Telling Agnes my story has revived my rage, lured my bloodthirst back from the dead. Has she been auditioning me for this very moment?
One quick, delicious slash to his throat, and I will right the wrongs of seventy years. I will do it for Daniel, taken away from me before his time. Father, Mr. Wee, even Violet, too. There will be no witness but she who put me up to the task.
Look at that villain, Cassandra. Think of the dead. Here’s your chance.
I take a few steps toward him, Buddhist gravel crunching under my shoes.
Puffs of condensation flee my mouth as I exhale; they want no part of this. My fingers wrap themselves around the keris, trying their best to make the cold thing snug.
The monk goes on sweeping, his rhythm unchanged. He keeps his eyes fixed on the ground, either open to the entire universe or closed off from it—I can’t tell which.
All of a sudden, he stops sweeping and turns. My heart jolts. Has he seen me? But no, his head tilts up.
There is a shiver above us. The gray clouds shrug off specks of silver, and the air becomes gauzy. Snow is drifting down.
The old monk’s face comes alive with a boy’s delight. His eyes crease—there’s a sparkle to them I’d never seen before—and he unfurls his pink tongue, stretching it as far as it will go. He catches a few flakes and closes his mouth, greedily savoring them. I can almost feel what he’s thinking. He’s not saying hello; he’s saying good-bye.
I turn to Agnes. “That’s not him.”
Snow is beginning to pour down now, but the flakes only swirl around Agnes, not actually touching any part of her. The heat rising from her body seems to have created its own weather system, refusing solace, repelling peace. The tears stay liquid in her eyes. She has willed them not to fall.
I press the keris back into her soft hands. “Not anymore.”
At Kyoto Station, we part ways. But first we shake hands like foes at the inception of a duel. Before I let her go, I examine her fingers. Her fingertips are impossibly smooth, line-free.
“My father always said it was a gift,” she says. “But I always saw it as more of a curse. One of the few things we didn’t see eye to eye on.”
“Your father,” I say. “Thank you for bringing him to me one last time.”
Her face thaws. Curiosity, and something approximating hope—no, hunger—enlivens her eyes. In her desperation, I see the neglected girl who would do terrible things to win back her father’s heart—even after his death.
“By the way,” she says, feigning casualness, “did he say anything?”
“Yes.” And because this lost girl has brought me the peace I now feel in my soul, I lie: “He told me you were the only thing he ever loved.”
She bites her lip and smiles. “Thank you. But he would never use that word.”
I try to draw out our farewell, make her realize we’re nearly kin. She could have been my daughter; I was almost her aunt. “Will we meet again?”
“You and I?” She shakes her head. “I hope not.”
“Agnes, I do wish you’ll find a way to forgive me. To let go of all this history.”
My words are met with silence.
She puts me on the Shinkansen to Tokyo and remains on the platform, watching me as my train departs. I see her lips mouth “Good night” and her face is cold once more, but I knew her father too well to mistake this for a lack of feeling. What I can’t tell is if she’s going to stay on in this city of temples, or if she has tapes to burn, ashes to bury, as soon as I disappear from view.
It’s night on the train. I can see nothing out the window but blackness and my own reflection, greenish and pale beneath the pitiless lights. My eyes are tired now. I’m even cheated of Mount Fuji.
Night has come early, and along with it, the sobering truth.
Taro was now spent, penitent. Killing this changed man would only condemn me to an eternity of self-hatred and regret. Kenneth’s threat would be fulfilled: I would have become a ghost—as he has, for his own unforgivable acts.
Agnes is a clever girl, with her father’s sixth sense about deeds and consequences. Was this ultimate punishment what she intended for me all along? I’ll never have the answer. But my refusal to comply denied her story its rightful conclusion. She will have to dream up a happier ending.
I look around the compartment. What were her words again? Trust me, nobody’s going to miss either of you. Drunk salaryme
n snoring, old ladies nibbling on rice balls, a young man with a pair of Rollerblades on his lap, apparently dozing. I agree. None of these people will miss me.
So be it. My end will come. However it does, whenever it does, I vow to go peaceably. I have told my story. I will not be a ghost.
When I reach home tonight, I will celebrate like a grateful woman—with cognac, chocolate, and a good book. I’ll savor every sip, every bite, every word. And then at long last, I will close my eyes.
At Tokyo Station, I weave through the pulsating throng. It’s rush hour and I’m engulfed in one endless pinstriped horror, the combined detritus of the district’s office blocks, snaking toward the underground. I can’t walk fast enough. Finally, past the turnstiles, at the top of the down escalator, I stop moving altogether and let the hurrying bodies jostle, overtake, curse me for being old, slow, stupidly in their way, for I am what they all fear—sudden, aberrant stillness.
But by God, do I feel alive in my stalling!
I take a deep breath and let the escalator carry me down.
References
Here are some books I consulted for information and inspiration.
On the very real and dark research conducted by the Japanese Army during WWII:
Unit 731 Testimony by Hal Gold (Yenbooks, Tokyo, 1996) and A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare Operation by Daniel Barenblatt (HarperCollins, NY, 2004)
On the War in the Pacific, from a British colonial perspective:
Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941–1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Belknap Press, Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 2005)
I first encountered the Japanese myth of Kiyohime in this book featuring the haunting and horrifying woodblock prints of Taiso Yoshitoshi (1839–1892):
Yoshitoshi’s Strange Tales by John Stevenson (Hotei, Amsterdam, 2005)
And last but not least, this encyclopedic anthropological gem:
Malay Magic: Being an Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula by Walter William Skeat (Dover, NY, 1967)
Acknowledgments
John Powers, loving husband, bolster, booster, and buoy.
Mitch Hoffman, brilliant, steadfast editor.
Barbara Braun, my agent, and John F. Baker—miracle workers.
Mark E. Doten, the boy wonder who fished me out of the bog.
Jessica Levin, my first “civilian” cheerleader.
Patricia Williams, Kathleen Clark, and FuzzCo, all of whom tried to make me presentable.
Anne Twomey, who designed such a fine-looking book jacket, Kim Hoffman, Lindsey Rose, Siri Silleck, Carrie Andrews, and everybody at Grand Central/Hachette who worked so hard to bring this monster out.
The constant Nico, and the cats who came a-visiting along the way: Pheebs, Snugs, Spike, Zero, Minnie, Momo (Mokes), Katara, Lill, Taco, and the late, great Bandit.
The wonderful friends who collaborated on my book trailer: Marijke van Kets, Lucas Jodogne, Carla Dunareanu, Jeremy Haik, and Hannah Mir Jayanti. Thank you!
Those who offered wisdom and kindness, from ancient times:
Philip Cheah, Pierre Rissient (the Whistling Snake), Melissa Franklin, Gretchen and Barry Mazur, Steve Erickson, Richard Peña, Laurie Ochoa, Rey Buono (high school drama teacher with whom I fought and fought)…and all the characters in the newsroom at The Straits Times’s “Life!” under Richard Lim and T. Sasitharan when I was there as a rookie covering movies—I have never forgotten you.
You are all my favorite ghosts.
Contents
Title Page
Map
Epigraph
Part One: The Haunted
1 : A Child’s Hands
2 : A Child’s Feet
3 : The Doldrums
4 : Dirty Island
5 : Blood Hill
6 : The Jungle
7 : Wonder World
8 : Limbo
9 : Where Have All My Ghosts Gone?
10 : The Serpent in the Garden
Epigraph
Part Two: The Haunter
11 : Turnipheads
12 : The Rat Brigade
13 : Quartet
14 : The Night of the Burning Trees
15 : A Sorcerer’s Work Is Never Done
16 : Legacies
17 : Lady Midnight
18 : The Prime Minister and Lady Midnight
19 : The End
References
Acknowledgments
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Sandi Tan
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First e-book edition: July 2012
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ISBN 978-0-446-58270-4