Dark Lanterns

by Zoe Drake

  Kaori recalled the story, the story she'd heard so often. A taxi driver picks up a young girl standing alone near a cemetery, an underpass at night. She stands alone in the rain, holding an umbrella. The girl gets in, and gives a certain address. When the taxi arrives at the address, the driver turns around and finds that the passenger has disappeared, leaving a backseat covered in rainwater to prove the driver was not hallucinating. The driver goes to the house, and is received by the elderly couple living there. The mother tearfully realizes that the taxi's passenger was her own daughter, who had died some time before. She produces a faded photograph; the driver recognizes it as the face of his passenger.

  That was the story told in Tokyo. Also in Sendai, in Kyoto ... so many other places. Everyone had heard the story, but nobody knew for certain whom it involved. A story told, long ago. Someone else's mother. A picture in a magazine.

  How could she do that to her own mother?

  "I've changed my mind," she said. "I don't want to go back to that address. Take me somewhere else. Take me to my apartment. It's in Gotanda. Near the station."

  The driver, this time, gave no sign of replying. He simply drove, as if he'd been struck deaf, or as if Kaori had ceased to exist. "Hello?" she called again. "Can you hear me? What's wrong with you?"

  What's wrong with me, she thought. Instinctively she looked at her hands. The flesh on them wasn't transparent. The varnish on her nails was chipped and had lost its spangly sheen, but that could have meant anything. She pulled up the hem of her skirt, looking for the scar from the ski accident she'd suffered while at college. The scar that she'd been obliged to wrap with tape every morning before putting on her stockings, because her manager said the bank's customers would think scars 'unsightly'. The bandage was still there. Was the scar still there too?

  As she sat, feeling the filmy substance of her stockings across her fingers, she looked up again with a start as the taxi came to a stop. The vehicle had reached a wide intersection, stopping at the lights. On the other side of the crossing yawned the entrance to another tunnel, and above it, another bridge, this time a traffic flyover. An overpass carrying the signs and color-coding of the Minato district. The signs ... Shirogane. She recognized that name ...

  This was the Shirogane Tunnel. That meant that Kaori was heading away from both her parent's house and her apartment ...

  "Excuse me, driver," Kaori said, leaning forward in her seat. Her eyes scanned the road ahead, searching for what was bothering her. There was something else ... something had changed. The taxi was stationary, with a few cars behind it. In front, in the dip of the road, beyond the opposite set of lights, the maw of the tunnel beckoned. There was something wrong with the lights ....

  "Driver," Kaori tapped on the glass, to get his attention. "Look at the lights ..."

  The lights weren't green, or red, or amber. They had turned black. A sullen, inky black. Some malfunction, Kaori thought, they'd been switched off ... but then she looked past them and saw the same shade of black mirrored in the mouth of the tunnel. The gleam from the overhead lamps and the cats' eyes within had disappeared. Instead there was an icy, glassy darkness, stretched across the length of the tunnel. It was nothingness. It was a doorway into absence, a hole cut in the concrete of the world.

  "What is it?" Kaori breathed.

  "Like I told you, it's the Kurokabe - the Black Wall," the driver answered casually, "and it's a gateway. They say that one appears somewhere in this world every time a fox is born."

  Kaori tried to tear her eyes away from the endless blackness of the thing in front, and noticed something inside the car. The driver's ID card, on the left side of the dashboard, had turned the same, featureless, icy black.

  "What's happening?"

  "I've been trying to tell you," the driver said wearily. "But you weren't listening, were you, young lady? All alone ... with so many problems."

  He clucked his tongue and laughed. "I've been trying to tell you that the compassion of the Lord Buddha knows no boundaries, and forgets nothing."

  Kaori glanced into the rearview mirror, and then quickly turned her head away, unable to face what she saw glowing in the driver's eyes. "You were one of the lucky ones. You wanted to go back so badly, I almost lost you. You almost got picked up by one of them, by one of the suffering. But I found you. And, if you remember, I said I was going to take you home."

  The taxi surged forward, crossing the intersection, picking up speed as it advanced towards the mouth of the tunnel.

  There are many rumors concerning the underpasses that traverse Tokyo, the tunnels that lie beneath the city like splinters beneath the skin. Some say that they have witnessed terrible and inexplicable things while driving through them. Faces glimpsed in the rearview mirror. Shadowy figures that appear and disappear.

  And a few claim that they saw taxis vanish, silently and utterly, as they crossed the threshold of a certain place, at a certain time.

  Dream Island, they called it. It's made out of trash.

  The whole of Odaiba, down by Tokyo bay, is built on reclaimed land. And what that really means is a landfill.

  Tokyo throws away enough garbage every year to fill the Tokyo Dome six times over. Every day the incinerators burn at maximum capacity, and the trucks and the container ships bring the ashes of the burnable garbage here for us to bury along with the non-burnable garbage.

  We take all the trash the city throws out, bury it, cover it with concrete and sand, and put buildings on it. That's what our shining new city by the bay is built on — and that's my job. Waste Disposal Technician, Hideo Yamaguchi, that's me. But this story isn't about me. It's about my best buddy, a friend from high school who joined the Utilities Department the same time I did - Taro Urashima.

  At high school Taro was always kind of a dreamer. When the other kids were putting their heads down on the desks and sleeping through the lessons, he'd be wide awake but looking out the windows, staring off into the distance.

  It's no wonder that it was his daydreaming that killed him. A couple of weeks back one of the earthmovers was ready to bulldoze trash into one of the pits, and all of 'B' team was getting out of the way. Except for Taro. A workman noticed him still down there, and gave a shout, but it was too late. We looked down and he'd disappeared. Where he'd been standing was just a big pile of refuse.

  So we dug him out. We jumped down onto the heap and we started shoveling away with spades, picks, our hands, anything we could. We dug through plastic, styrofoam, metal and aluminum foil, individual plastic wrappers and containers for Pocky, Chipstar, Morinaga hotcake mix and chocolate chip cookies, umeboshikombu, jagariko, Meiji chocolate. We were archeologists of our colleague, shifting aside containers of instant ramen, bento boxes and disposable chopsticks, curry rice containers, cup noodle containers. We located his fingers and began tugging at his arms to lift him free, scraping ketchup and mayonnaise bottle wrappers away from his face, brushing balled-up saran wrap away from his eyes, frantically pulling coffee cream cups and sweet-bean-jelly snack containers out of his mouth so he could breath. We gave him the kiss of life, we pounded his chest, and when he opened his eyes the only thing he could say was ...

  "Why did you bring me back?"

  I went to see him in hospital afterward, and he told me the craziest tale you could imagine. He said that when all the shit came down on him, he survived because it knocked him through a hole. He fell through a hole and he kept on falling, falling into darkness until he landed on something, something that turned out to be the back of the biggest turtle he'd ever seen. The turtle took him along an underground river out to sea and to a fantastic kingdom, a country ruled by the Dragon King. It was the most beautiful country, he said, a country where the plants slept and the oceans dreamed, where there were people made of sand and cities made of coral. The water was full of music and there were fish dances, octopus dances, clam dances, starfish dances, eel dances - the fish would dance just for the pure joy of it. This was the country, he said, wher
e he settled down, and lived for two years — until we had pulled him back. Back out of the hole.

  Taro, I said to him, you've had a Near-Death Experience. Your brain was shutting down because of lack of oxygen and you were hallucinating. It happens to a lot of people, their brain cells fire away and they think they're leaving their body, floating away into heaven on some silver thread. I knew about all that shit, I'd just read an article on it in the Shukan Jitsuwa. But all Taro did was shake his head like I was the one to feel sorry for.

  "I got married," he said. "I married the Dragon King's daughter, Otohime. You took me away from my wife."

  A couple of days after that he got discharged from hospital, but he wouldn't come back to work. I went round to his apartment, trying to get him out. Trying to get him back to the things we used to do before, when we hung out together — the pachinko, the billiards, the snack bars, the hostess bars where the girls get their tits out and give you a squeeze-all-you-like deal for 6000. But nothing worked. He just stayed, shut up in his six-mat tatami, and the Dragon Kingdom was all he talked about.

  Until that day, two days ago. I was on the early shift that morning, and I was the first one to spot it. Out on Dream Island, at pretty much the same site where the accident happened, we found Taro's uniform. Neatly folded, recently dry-cleaned, his work-boots and hard-hat placed on top. About a meter away was a hole. A gap torn into the mess of plastic egg cartons, onigiri wrappers, UCC creamer packets, peanut cream jars, broken coat hangers, frayed connection cables and dead batteries. It was a hole. It looked like the hole had been dug with bare hands. We never did find Taro's body. But we did find a letter, tucked into one of his work-boots. Inside, was one sentence only;

  The more you put in, the smaller it gets.

  The story goes like this:

  At the end of the school day, the kids are coming out of elementary school, ready for the journey home. They've got everything packed up in their big randoseru satchels and they're shouting, running, all on a high because now the play can go right on till bedtime. It's late afternoon, but it's already threatening to get dark - that smoky, sultry dusk that comes only in the Japanese midsummer.

  A couple of kids catch sight of a woman standing alone near the school gate. Nobody else seems to notice her. She's wearing one of those white gauze masks over the lower part of her face that people have when they've got colds or hay fever. The kids can only see the woman's eyes. Wide open. Staring.

  The woman walks closer to the kids and says hello. They return the greeting nervously.

  The woman points to her face and says, "Do you think I'm beautiful?" The kids are too scared to answer so the woman says again, "Under this mask ... do you think I'm beautiful?" There's still no answer, so the woman says, "Well, why don't you find out?"

  She takes off her mask. Underneath, her face is split from ear to ear. Her mouth is a wide red gash that opens wetly, widens as the children begin to scream, it opens in a grin to reveal rows of sharpened teeth receding into her skull ...

  "Do you want to be beautiful, like me?"

  Whack! The fat guy sitting on the train seat over to the left, and diagonally opposite Trisha, had just dropped his comic for the third time. Every few moments his actions repeated themselves. He flicked open a manga comic magazine the size of the New Jersey phonebook and started to read it, but after a few seconds his eyes rolled back, his jaw slackened, and he dozed until the comic slipped from numb fingers and hit the floor of the railway carriage. Whack! Like that. And then the guy would wake up, reach down and pick it up, and instead of putting it away and grabbing some shut-eye he opened it again and tried to carry on reading until he flaked out again, and the comic followed the line of least resistance once more.

  Trisha lifted her paperback - trashy, but it was second-hand and in English - higher, trying to screen out the fat guy's face and by, association, the sound of the comic. The Chuo line train, carrying Trisha back to her apartment in Koenji, wasn't crowded at this time of the early evening; there were even some empty seats. Trying to concentrate on the novel, she noticed - over the barrier of the open pages - the eyes of the middle-aged guy in the navy blue suit and obvious under-shirt sitting opposite. Jeez, she thought sourly, why do they have to stare all the time? After all, this is Tokyo, not some hick town in the mountains. Foreigners are everywhere here, just open your window and throw out a rice ball in uptown Aoyama, you're bound to hit some gaijin. They're on the TV every few minutes in some trendy commercial; Tommy Lee Jones selling canned coffee or Brad Pitt driving a Toyota or whatever, what's the problem? Okay, she thought, I don't look bad ... I'm kinda good-looking but I'm no model, no way.

  She stopped reading, and locked eyes with the guy opposite. He looked away. He could be a pervert, Trisha thought. He was certainly old enough to be one, although you had to watch out for even young guys these days. Yeah, he had perverted little eyes.

  "You know what happened to me on the train last week?" This was her friend Sue, from Ohio, talking to her in the student cafeteria yesterday. "I was on the local train one afternoon, and this guy was sitting opposite, right? Quite a young guy, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that screamed 'I am a fruitcake'. There weren't that many people around because it was just after lunch. So I was kind of tired and I was zoning out, you know? I must have dozed off for a couple of minutes."

  Trisha nodded, beginning to realize what was coming.

  "So like, I open my eyes and there's the guy opposite, and his fly's open and he's got his dick in his hands."

  Trisha was appropriately shocked in her reaction.

  Sue continued. "He was holding his briefcase by his side so the people on his right couldn't see what he was doing, yeah? And there was nobody sitting on his left so it was just him and me, and I was like, well, excuse me!"

  Sue paused and took a fast drag from her Salem Lite, then carried on talking, the smoke leaking out of her mouth behind her words. Trisha could see why Sue would be the centre of attention. She was short but was packing a lot of weight, with stocky hips and a big bust, a real magnet for the chubby-chasers. Added to that she had very long, straight, white hair - not blonde, but almost pure white. Even Trisha found herself staring at it in class sometimes.

  "So you know what I did, don't you? I mean, I can't let something like that pass by. So I close my book, stand up, walk over to him, and say -

  "If it's that small, I don't recommend taking it out in public," the two girls chorused in heavily accented Japanese.

  "I mean, Jeez." She stubbed out her Salem Lite, warming to her theme. "I wish I knew how to say, 'I'll help you get it out, if I could find my eyebrow tweezers'."

  Back to the present moment. The train had arrived at Koenji, and Trisha was relieved to find that the pervert guy didn't try to follow her when she got off.

  Outside the station, the night was hot, wet and still, like a warm towel across the brow. The lights of streetlamps, convenience store signs, and vending machines glowed softly in the enveloping warmness. Red lanterns hung outside the yakitori and ramen shops. Trisha started the ten-minute walk to her apartment.

  "Japan is still a very safety country," her students at the part-time English classes would mispronounce, whenever talk turned to relationships between Japan and the US.

  Not any more, she thought. There are all kinds of freaks creeping out of the woodwork. Something's been stewing in this pressure-cooker ever since the War and a few years ago, someone took the lid off.

  Notes from the dissertation of Patricia Holly.

  Japanese culture — from the earliest folk tales, to the Kabuki, Noh and Ukiyo-e paintings of the feudal Edo period, to the modern film genre of J-Horror — has always been saturated with the supernatural.

  Japanese ghost stories, known as "kaidan" and sometimes mistakenly pronounced as "kwaidan", are in cultural terms very different from what we understand to be ghost stories in the West. Western ghost stories are very often associated with the winter, partly due to the ancien
t festival of Samhain (now known as Halloween), which associates the beginning of the winter with the return of spirits to this world. In more recent times, the popularity of the British writers Charles Dickens and M. R. James established a tradition of enjoying the vicarious chill of the unknown on or around Christmas Eve, accompanied by a mature cheese and a glass of vintage port. We were used to our ghosts stalking the snow-covered woods, rattling the door handles and tapping at the windows, while we retreat to the warmth and light of the hearth.

  In Japan, however, ghost stories are a product of the summer. They are part of the social and cultural activities that the whole community participates in at that time. The Japanese summer is often cruel in its sub-tropical heat and humidity, and from the feudal Edo period ways to escape its heat included the eating of watermelons, the liberal use of ornate fans, and the hanging of wind-chimes, whose clear, crystal tones brought visions of snow-laden mountain streams into the listener's mind.

  More than a social thermostat, however, kaidan were part of the festivities surrounding the summer festival of O-Bon. This festival takes places in either July or August, depending on the locality. Over a period of three days, the spirits of the ancestors return to the world of the living, and the occasion is marked by offerings, visits to family grave plots and the Bon-Odori ritual dance. I have personally attended several of these, and considering that most people complain here how traditional Japanese culture is on the decline, I have always been impressed at how well-attended these open-air summer festivals are. Young adults in their summer yukata robes, the cloth holding a soft phosphorescence in the night. Children buying cheap plastic masks of demons and goblins along with those of their favorite anime characters. Dozens joining in with the slow, dreamlike dance of Bon-Odori, raising their hands to the stars. They dance around a special platform in the center of the festival field, holding the musicians who dictate the dance's rhythms with their huge ceremonial Taiko drums.