Dark Lanterns

by Zoe Drake

  "I'm extremely glad to hear that, sir," Ogawa stammered.

  "What was the department you started your career in, at entry level?"

  "Internal communications." Ogawa winced a little at the memory. "I worked in the mail room."

  "Internal communications. That seems a good place to start." Returning to the desk, Fujisawa wrote something in flowing, well-ordered Japanese script. Tearing the sheet of paper from its memo pad, he walked back to the window. He opened the window a little wider, and Ogawa released his grip on the frame long enough to take the proffered memo. The paper had an oddly warm, textured feel to it. "Please take this to Jizo-san, in the redemptions department."

  "Thank you, sir. Erm...when do I start?"

  "Immediately." With a speed unexpected for one so plump, Fujisawa slid the window fully open and shoved Ogawa hard in the chest. With a gasp of surprise the younger man toppled backwards.

  The onset of free fall came as a disturbingly familiar terror. Ogawa spun, cartwheeling downwards, and he realized that this time he was falling in the correct direction. Around him ... gray, gray, gray. The sky drew its brows together and assumed the color of accelerating concrete. Light winked from a thousand skyscrapers, and Ogawa had a sudden vision of his own image reflected in each window, reflected a thousand times across the panorama of this fake Nihonbashi. A tiny Ogawa in each window, a tired man in an anonymous polyester suit, tie and jacket and pants flapping like empty clothing on a windy washing day.

  Ogawa's head tilted downwards, and he wondered where the white lines were, the painted lines on the parking lot that he had thought would take him away. They weren't there. Something had changed; something was blocking his view of the ground. Instead, he caught a glimpse of dark clotted-blood bone-streaked wetness, branching outwards from its concrete trunk. The side of the building had suddenly and without effort extended a wrist, a palm and quite terrible fingers to catch Ogawa as he fell.

  Yasuo Ogawa was about to begin his first day of employment.

  Halfway through the grounds of Kasaieki-mae Park, on her way home from school, Yuko Iwata stopped and stared to her left.

  She saw a riotous sprawl of color on the ground around one of the garbage bins. That in itself didn't bother her much; what made her pause was the weird look of the stuff. It was like the scuffed earth had acquired a coat of paint. Last semester there'd been some science homework about lightning striking sand on the beach and turning it into glass; it reminded her of that.

  As Yuko approached the trash bins, the mess resolved itself in her vision. It consisted of card or paper, cut into dozens of small squares all roughly the same size, covering an area about one meter square. Yuko crouched down to examine it, her brow wrinkling in puzzlement.

  It was a map.

  To be more accurate, it had once been a map.

  The squares represented Tokyo. There were green areas of parks, gray areas of built-up residences and businesses, bordered by the red and yellow veins of roads. Yuko could make out the Kanji lettering of the Showa avenue, Hibiya Park, Ueno railway station, but nothing was where it should have been. Everything had been mixed up; the capital city had been cut into pieces and then rearranged in new, unexpected patterns.

  Yuko got to her feet, swinging her satchel back onto her shoulder. Perhaps someone had put the map in the trash, and then someone else had come along and pulled it out. But why had they brought it to the park? Why had it been carefully cut into squares before being dumped?

  She kept speculating on what could have happened all the way back to her house, an average wood-and-plaster two-storey building set in the tiny streets near Kasai station. To her relief, her parents weren't home. They hadn't returned from work yet.

  Yuko's brother, Takenori, was upstairs, going through his collection of B'z and Mr. Children J-Pop CDs. She flopped down on his bed, sucking on a carton of choco-milk. Behind Takenori's head, and above the textbook-filled desk, hung the scroll given to her mother by Yuko's Calligraphy teacher. Sleep four hours a night and pass, it declared in beautifully lettered Kanji. Sleep five hours a night and fail.

  "You know what that idiot cram school teacher did today?" Takenori fumed. "You know how he's always telling us not to be so passive in class, and to pay attention more? Well, he told us last week there was a test for today, and a cover teacher came to supervise it. One of the questions was, 'Does your regular teacher wear glasses?'. Some of us answered yes, and some answered no. Turned out the correct answer was, 'I used to, but I switched to contact lenses.' "

  Yuko and Takenori were both leaving school at the end of the year. It was expected that Takenori would enter a private high school in Aoyama at the end of this year. It was also expected that Yuko, a high school senior, would enter university. Their parents could only afford to send one of them to a cram school, and it had been decided a long time ago that it would be the son.

  Takenori and his father weren't on speaking terms at the moment. Last week, Takenori had returned worn out after attending regular school and cram school, and playing a match with the school basketball club. He'd fallen asleep in his room, and Papa had scolded him for not coming down for dinner at the correct time.

  Yuko stared at her brother's pre-occupied face. How different he'd looked last week, she thought. Eyes screwed up tight, tears pumping down bright red cheeks. He'd picked up a chair and beaten it three times, up and down, on the kitchen floor. And he'd screamed — not words, but just noise — raw, penetrating noise. Papa was still smarting over it. He kept muttering that Takenori "didn't show enough respect these days".

  "Maybe you should try something to keep Komatsu-sensei happy," Yuko volunteered. "A friend of mine told me that she had a teacher once who ate a lot of curry-rice. At the end of one test paper, she put down a really tasty recipe she knew for curry-rice. She got full marks."

  "It'll take more than that to make Komatsu happy. He goes on about the environment a lot ... maybe I should write in green ink?"

  He turned to his shelf of TV games, pulled Man-Made Death 4 out of its hologram-studded cover, and slipped it into his PlayStation Deluxe. The sleek black console hummed faintly and winked one tiny red light on its control display.

  "You know, Yuko, there's something else I'm nervous about, right, it's ... well, I haven't got a girlfriend right now. I know you don't have much time, and your friends are older than me, but I was thinking ..."

  Here we go again, Yuko thought. "Well, Miyoko's got a younger sister, about your age. She's pretty cute. I'll see what I can do."

  Sucking the carton of Choco-Milk dry, she watched her brother as he started to say something about the girls at school, and failed to finish the sentence, his mouth pursing itself and eyes narrowing as the pre-game graphics flickered into life on the screen.

  "Do my homework soon,' muttered Takenori, as if he were talking to himself. "Just want to see ... if ..."

  The Saturday evening news was full of the murder.

  After the family anime shows, while the Iwata family was having dinner sitting on the tatami in front of their giant plasma-TV screen, they found themselves confronted by scenes from their own neighborhood. Streets, houses, schools, in close-up and long-shot, the on-screen image shaking as if the cameraman's hands were trembling. Subtitles marked the names and the locations of the buildings involved, and the breathless commentary of the reporter underscored it with dates and events. A community cross-examined; a life under the lens.

  "She was only sixteen," Yuko's mother was saying, "and she came from a school only a couple of blocks from here! Her poor parents ..."

  "You'll have to stop walking home through that park," her father rumbled. "We've told you that before, Yuko. There could be all kinds of strange people in that park after school. There are violent kids hanging around, all kinds of unstable folk ... ah, this country just isn't safe any more."

  Yuko remembered that her mother had thrown away the first page of the morning newspaper after breakfast; she'd said that the details t
hey'd printed were "too disturbing". Excusing herself from the table, she went into the kitchen and quietly picked the front page out of the garbage.

  Later, when her parents sent her upstairs to do her homework, she methodically flattened out the soiled page and read it.

  "The girl's body had been found on waste ground near the river," Yuko read aloud, "several kilometers away, inside an oil drum half-filled with cement. She was partially naked, her body covered with bruises and cigarette burns, and she had been sexually assaulted several times."

  She put down the sheet of newspaper, and looked across the plastic MacDonald's table covered with milkshakes and burger wrappers, at the disgusted faces of her friends.

  "Oh, gross," said Namiko.

  "Yuko, don't go all weird on us!" said Masumi.

  Later, after window-shopping at the Shibuya 109 mall, Yuko and her friends were walking down the Center-gai Dori to get some crepes when a young man stepped in front of them and thrust a brightly-colored flyer towards their hands.

  "Are you alone?" he asked.

  He wore a baggy, pastel-colored suit, a cream shirt open at the neck to show off his gold chains, his hair carefully tousled and waxed in the latest Johnny's Junior boy-band style. He winked at them from under shaved eyebrows, and the girls giggled, walked past, ignoring him. They all knew he was a scoutman — a tout for the sleazy host bars and modeling clubs deeper in the unsavory parts of Shibuya.

  "What a jerk," said Masumi.

  "Yeah," said Namiko. "What was that all about? Are you alone? Anyone can see there were three of us."

  Yuko looked back. The young man had gone; he had melted into the crowd. She didn't say anything.

  She knew the young man had been talking only to her.

  Yuko found it difficult to finish her homework that night. When it came to the pre-arranged time for her to go to bed, she tried to distract herself with her homework, her shojo manga ... but nothing worked. Nothing could capture her attention any more.

  Except the map. The dismembered and rearranged fragments of the map.

  Just before nine, she went downstairs, looking carefully distraught.

  "Oh please, Mom ... I totally forgot about the test tomorrow! I'll just go over to Namiko's house and grab her notes ... she only lives a few blocks away ... I'll be back before eleven, I promise."

  Once outside, still in her school uniform under her spring coat, she headed straight for Kasaieki-mae Park.

  In the center of the park, where Yuko had found the map, the children's playground lay deserted in the darkness. The climbing frames looked like the bones of a prehistoric creature, flesh picked clean by the shadows, stark and brutal in the lamplight.

  Yuko heard the wind whispering in the trees, asking her a question that had to be answered.

  A figure was approaching.

  It materialized at the edge of the playground, its substance oozing out from the darkness behind the leaves, moving into the circle cut out by the blades of lamplight. A filthy overcoat with a hood pulled over the face. Colorless, shapeless clothes, but unmistakably male. It spoke to Yoko in a voice that was the scraping of knives against a brick wall.

  It asked her the question.

  "Yes, she said in answer, "I'm alone." Her voice was hoarse, barely more than a whisper. "I'm really alone."

  The figure stretched out a hand into the lamplight. Against the dead white skin, the map shone lividly. Schematic tattoos of factories and warehouses, the scars and stitches of highways and railway tracks. Warm, smoky fumes blew upon Yuko's face.

  Holding her breath, Yuko took the figure's hand, and they walked together into the shadows beneath the trees.

  There are rumors concerning the underpasses that traverse Tokyo, the tunnels for cars and trucks that lie just beneath the city like splinters under the skin. Some say they have witnessed terrible and inexplicable things while traveling through the tunnels. Figures that beckon from the sides of the road, or dart in front of the cars, only to vanish when the driver scrambles out of the car in panic. There have been tales of things glimpsed in rearview mirrors. Screaming faces. Eyes that do not belong to humans. Half-glimpsed figures that have no right to be among the living.

  This is one such story.

  On that day, a July day of steamy, ceaseless rain during Japan's wet season, a certain taxi driver was about to pass through the Sendagaya Tunnel. This was no ordinary underpass. Decades before, the keepers of the neighboring Senjuiin Temple had found themselves a way to compromise extending their grounds without inconveniencing the honorable flow of traffic. The Buddhist graveyard, with its stone jars full of ash and bone resting from their labors, was located directly above the mouth of the tunnel. Above the ceaseless river of cars, tree branches and creeping vines hung, reaching out from the graveyard boundary, their dark leaf shadow mottling the tarmac below. Behind the concrete parapet the thin skeletal fingers of wooden grave markers could be faintly seen, pointing toward the stone-colored sky.

  On the day in question, the young woman named Kaori stood on the narrow sidewalk leading to the underpass. Seeing a taxi approach with the red 'FOR HIRE' sign glowing softly in the corner of the windshield, she raised her hand.

  The vehicle jerked to a halt, and as was usual among Tokyo taxicabs, the passenger door opened automatically.

  Kaori looked inside the gloom of the cab. The rain trickled through her overcoat, dripped from the rim of the umbrella she held. She paused, uncertain of the taxi's shadowed interior, the smooth vinyl seats, the plastic screen closing off the driver's seat from the back.

  "Well, come in if you're coming in," called the driver, in a guttural Edoko accent.

  She stooped and entered the cab, easing herself onto the seat, rain dripping from her coat onto the seat.

  "Where to?" the driver prompted, twisting in his seat to look back at her. He had a broad, middle-aged face, the moles and the liver spots on his brow betraying his age, his grey hair a steely, close-cropped fuzz. His uniform - pale blue suit and white cotton gloves — was crisp and immaculate, despite the summer dampness.

  Kaori paused. She realized she couldn't remember where she was going, or where she had just come from, and wondered why she couldn't. Her face slack, imposing on the taxi driver's patience, an address finally came into the vagueness of her mind. She spoke, giving him an address in the Chofu district. The driver put the car in gear and moved out into the traffic.

  As the car pushed forward into the twilight of the tunnel, the girl twisted around in her seat and gazed back, looking past the tunnel entrance, back down the road, to a crossing that receded further and further.

  What am I looking for?

  Emerging into a curtained mist of rain, the taxi disturbed a trio of crows scavenging a garbage collection point. They flopped lazily into the air, tar-black wings flapping audibly as they passed over the taxi.

  "Ugly brutes," the driver commented. "They're taking over the city these days. With all the waste we put out, they just get fatter and fatter."

  She didn't reply.

  "It's strange what you see on the roads, " the driver continued, warming to his theme. "You'll never guess what I saw running through the streets one night. Nearly ran it over, I did."

  "Someone's cat?" the girl asked, looking up sharply. "A dog?"

  "A fox," he said with a grin. "First time I've ever seen one in the city. Some people still believe they're spirits, you know. There's a shrine to the fox god Inari near where I used to live. Trickster spirits. You see one, you don't know whether it'll show you treasure, or lead you off into the woods to get lost and starve to death. Now they're here in the city, like the crows. Makes you wonder how long they've been here."

  Foxes, Kaori thought. Spirits. Inari. What was the driver talking about? What kind of a person was driving her through the city?

  The girl turned her head to stare through the window. She watched the blurred, gray shapes of the buildings pass by through the shower-stained glass. Pedestrians hurried d
own the narrow street, their faces hidden by umbrellas, pushing themselves through the rain as if through an endless series of bead curtains. Her name, she thought. Her name was Kaori. She was in a taxi. A car ...

  In her mind she saw the image of another car. A car with its right side caved in like crumpled origami paper. The shattered glass around it had glittered in the lamplight as the paramedics eased her out of the wreckage, and Kaori remembered opening her eyes and seeing only the ground, as if her neck could no longer support her head. The ground had sparkled with stuff like sugar. Glass, glass all around, glistening wetly like spilt sugar in the kitchen. Mother would have been furious ... look, Kaori, you spilt sugar all over the floor ... Kaori, what have you done to yourself?

  Mother. Kaori sat up straight, trying to pull her troubled thoughts together. The address she'd given the driver was her parent's address. Was she a schoolgirl? She looked down at her clothes, the fashionable blouse, skirt and pumps, the brand name bag on the seat beside her. She leaned forward so she could see her face in the driver's rear view mirror. She had shoulder length hair, tinted with brown. An efficiently made-up face, with deep crimson lips that refused to themselves into a smile. Not the face of a schoolgirl.

  She was an adult, she remembered. She worked, she lived alone. What was the address? What was the address of her apartment?

  As she struggled to concentrate, she became aware of other memories competing with her own. Things were oozing through into her mind, the soft voices of people whispering into her ear, invisible passengers sharing her taxi.

  "The old folks call it the Kurokabe - the black wall," the driver was still babbling. "They say it appears in this world, every time a fox is born."

  Kaori twitched in her seat, looking around her. "The address?"

  The taxi driver flicked a glance in the rearview mirror. "Eh?"

  "The address. Did I give you the address? "

  "Sure you did," the driver said, his eyes settling back on the road, the gloves resting, confident on the wheel. "Don't worry, I'll get you home."