by Zoe Drake
This was the weekend of the Nebuta Matsuri, the festival that took over the entire city of Aomori for five nights every year in early August. Two hundred and seventy years old, and bringing in three million people every year over five days, it was one of the biggest events in the Japanese calendar – and for David and his foreign colleagues, it was something they simply had to experience.
The beginning of the month had seen the rainy season finally end and temperatures start to rise. The muggy night was filled with the smells of grilled meat from the pavement stalls, the chants and howls of the float pushers, the relentless drums and bamboo flutes piped from the loudspeakers lining the road. It was sensory overload; the movement of the crowd behind them threatened at any moment to dislodge them from their places, and every minute, a new giant reared up to amaze them, Kabuki warriors riding horses, demons with flaming swords, the revelers jerking the float sharply to make it look as if the figure was alive.
“Check out that guy over there!” Mike shouted, pointing with the hand holding his beer.
One of the men had broken away from the float to perform his own impromptu dance. He carried a paper lantern covered with amuletic signs on a long wooden pole, and twirled it around like a baton, to the cheers of the crowd. Behind him, a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices took up the chant.
“Rasse-ra! Rasse-ra!”
“David,” Guilherme said, in a low voice meant only for the two of them “How’s that volunteer thing going?”
“At the hospital?” David shrugged his shoulders. “I’m thinking about whether I should keep on with it. I’ve had a look around at what they do, how they do it.”
A new float appeared before them, taller and wider that anything they’d seen before. A huge, man-shaped creature with bat-like wings glared down at them, a sword clenched between its teeth. Through its paper skin, the crosshatching of the bamboo skeleton showed up clearly as geometric black lines, lit from within by dozens of light bulbs stitched and hung inside the body.
“You know what the weird thing is?” Guilherme said, looking out at the floats. “This festival is all about the same thing as that hospital research program.”
“What do you mean?”
Guilherme smiled. His cheeks were tinted red with the alcohol, making his curly hair and beard stand out even more against his skin. “Well, this summer heat makes everyone sleepy, yeah? The idea of the festival is to wake everyone up so it won’t interfere with the work of harvesting. There was another ceremony called Neburi-nagashi, where paper figures resembling the spirits of sleep were cast into the river to be carried away into the sea. Kind of like what you’re doing. Nebuta is the name of the god of sleep, like Morpheus, or Hypnos.”
“Really?” David looked up and down the street at the illuminated paper giants shaking their heads and waving their fists in the glowing city night. A bright red demon filled the sky in front of a department store, its beard and hair artfully constructed to look like tongues of fire.
David had always seen the name Nebuta written in hiragana, but he realized now it must have been derived from the word neru, meaning to sleep.
“I heard the dance is something to do with approaching an enemy.” The girls behind had stopped their conversation and had now grabbed on to the coattails of theirs. “Like, advancing and waving the lamps in front of them, those shouts meaning – we’re over here! We’re coming to get you!”
“Are you sure? I heard those lamps stand for the light of an anglerfish. You know, the light goes ahead in the dark, and behind it, the jaws of the fish…”
Mike pushed forward, gesturing at the street with his beer-can. “Yeah, the jaws of whatever. I tell you something, this music’s starting to freak me out.”
“It’s traditional Matsuri music,” Rhea told them.
“Yeah, but hasn’t it got any kind of a tune? It sounds like mindless whistling and banging going on forever.”
David nodded. The repetitive sound of shrill flutes accompanied by a frenzied pounding of drums blasted from the speakers atop the lampposts, with no gap between songs, the discordant noise just going on and on.
Trying to find a pub or restaurant with free tables would have been impossible, so they decided to head back to Aomori central station, and go one stop along the line in search of a quiet part of town. Draining the last of their beers, they shuffled back into the surge of slowly pushing hands, elbows, knees and feet.
Halfway down the street, Guilherme tapped David on the shoulder, interrupting a conversation with Colin. “Hey, you want to get some yakitori?”
“But we’re on our way to a restaurant…”
The reply was accompanied by a totally unsubtle wink. “Yeah, but I could really do with something right now, if you know what I mean. Hey, everyone, we’ll catch you up at the station, okay? Wait for us, we won’t be long.”
The two of them stood at a yakitori grilled chicken stall, pointing at the skewered lumps of flesh to order them.
“So, how’s your student, Dave?”
“Which student?”
“You know, your private student. The one who’s trying to sue the hospital.”
“Oh.” David ripped a chunk of chicken meat away from the stick with his teeth, trying not to let the fat spatter onto his T-shirt. “I’m trying to sort things out. The whole situation’s pretty weird.”
Guilherme nodded, chewing on gristle. “Look – a word to the wise, friend. Be careful. Don’t get too involved. If the JATP thinks you’re getting too close to a schoolgirl, they’ll have you sacked and on a plane back to London faster than you can say gomen nasai.”
“But she’s not one of the students I’m teaching…”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s a Japanese schoolgirl, Dave, and they’re always trouble.”
David hardened his expression. “I appreciate your concern, Guilherme, but I know what I’m doing.”
“I hope you do.” The Brazilian tossed the used wooden skewer into the stall’s refuse can, and looked speculatively into the night. “You know, maybe the family’s right. I don’t think messing around with your dream life is such a good thing. Like, dreams are meant to be vague and mysterious, you know? So why don’t we leave them that way.”
David frowned. “But don’t you get curious? Wouldn’t you like to know what dreams are all about?”
Guilherme thought for a moment, then shrugged. “No. There’s too much tampering with natural things, you know, that’s our problem. If you ask me, dreaming is like the brain’s program for cleaning out the toxins in your head. Do we really need the money makers and the scientists involved?”
He shook his head and answered his own question. “I don’t think so.”
The train back home afterwards stank of garlic, beer and sweat.
David stood against the door. Nebuta, he thought, god of sleep. I can’t get away from it, he thought. Maybe someone’s trying to tell me something.
He took out the notebook. Ayano’s dream diary. He turned again to a page near the middle of the book. Something had been pasted into the diary, a picture obviously photocopied from a book Ayano had found. David studied it again.
The picture was in the Edo-period ukiyo-e style and it was of some kind of animal. The four-legged beast stood on a vague, misty background, its haunches high in the air, its head down as if feeding upon something on the ground. Its body and cloven hooves resembled that of a goat, but it had three sets of eyes upon its skull, one above the other. Even stranger were the eyes along its body, open and staring, nestling among the hairs on its flank. The whole effect was deeply unsettling, and made David feel as if his own eyes were blurring and distorting if he looked at it too long.
Sometimes, he thought, when he stopped to reflect upon his recent life, the bizarreness of it all rendered him speechless. The first year he’d been in Japan, he’d been surprised and confused on a daily basis. And now here he was, thousands of miles away from the UK, in a city where giants danced in the streets. On a train,
reading a dream diary written by a dead schoolgirl. What the hell am I doing, he thought.
Why did I have to get involved?
Chapter Nineteen
A Stain on the Tatami
Mrs. Kuroki sat in formal seiza position, gazing down at the stain.
She had tried to clean it away. Every day, she dusted, cleaned and polished the house like a dutiful Japanese wife and mother, and since the little accident a few days ago, she had tried several times to get rid of the offending smear.
She had dropped the iron on one of her plates. Her arms had been full with both the iron and the laundry basket, and her husband had left one of his dirty plates on the floor after dinner. A plate smeared with soy sauce, ginger, wasabi paste. She had dropped the iron onto the plate and it instantly cracked apart, the metal and ceramics rubbing the mess of discarded sauce into the tatami matting beneath.
She looked at it now in mounting irritation. The stain had a faintly regular shape; it seemed to have followed the lines of the cracks made in the plate.
“Why don’t you ask those shrine spirits of yours to clean it up?” her husband had said. “They can probably take care of this place better that you can.”
She had said nothing. Her husband frequently made fun of her visits to the local Inari shrine, and she knew that it was a source of amusement to his golfing companions, but she said nothing. Her respect for the local priests was enough.
Putting on her rubber gloves once more, Mrs. Kuroki applied a cloth soaked in greenish liquid. As she scrubbed, her eyes traced the shape of the stain. For some reason it reminded her of something familiar, something that held a meaning…like a half-remembered kanji. Yes, it reminded her of a complicated kanji character, like those written on the Shinto charms they hung up at the shrine.
After ten minutes, she stopped and looked at the soaked, acrid-smelling area. Her work didn’t seem to have made much of a difference. Still, it was getting late. Her husband would soon be home, expecting her dinner. What more could she do?
Mrs. Kuroki lay on her futon, waiting for sleep to come. Beside her, her husband lay snoring, his brow lathered with thick, alcohol-smelling sweat.
Her dreams, when they came at last, were full of frantic but silent activity. All of the Kuroki family’s possessions were flying about the bedroom. The rice cooker, the pots, the pans, the iron, the TV set, all of them swooping gracefully though the house in mid-air, flying in through the bedroom door, circling the futon, and flying out again. The stereo compo loomed above her head, as threatening as a dislodged block of masonry, yet somehow failing to fall and crush her skull. It all seemed to be quite acceptable within the logic of the dream. The Kami from the Inari shrine danced through her house, their invisible hands lifting and caressing each item, silently cleaning the house while she slept.
The next morning, Mrs. Kuroki knelt once more in formal position upon the tatami. Taking up the rug that had been hiding it, she looked at the stain. The cleaning fluid seemed to have made no impression on it whatsoever. It lay there, its peculiar shape etched into the matting, like some undecipherable symbol. Her act of dropping the iron had been as sudden as that which inspires a Japanese calligrapher. The stain was her ‘writing’, and seemed to resonate into ideas and spaces far beyond its apparent shape.
Was it her imagination, or did it look bigger than it had yesterday?
One more scrub should do it. She pulled on her rubber gloves, and applied the special cleaning agents she had bought on her weekend trip into Aomori city.
After lunch, she sat watching the TV, killing time before she went shopping for dinner. Afternoon family sitcoms, the latest trendy Korean talents, the kind of thing housewives wanted to watch, they said.
Her gaze kept wandering from the TV screen to the rug covering the stain.
Sighing, she pushed herself out of her seat and shuffled on her knees over to the rug. Surely, she thought, it must have gone by now, after using all those special chemicals.
She lifted up the rug.
The stain had festered like a wound.
It was black, swollen, the kanji character elongated and misshapen. It was monstrous; it was growing out of the tatami itself. She crawled away backward, staring with fascinated revulsion. The stain had taken over her front room, and the voices on the television had nothing to tell her.
She put back the rug. Stop thinking about it, she told herself. It couldn’t be helped. Her husband would be back soon, and he’d be expecting his dinner. One problem at a time.
It was sometime later, after dark. Her husband’s drunken snores rose and fell from the bedroom upstairs.
Mrs. Kuroki was sitting perfectly still in the living room, but before her gaze, the house was a scene of furious activity.
All of the Kuroki family’s possessions were flying around the room, propelled by unseen choreographers. They rejoiced in a life that was utterly independent of her; she was just a mute spectator. She was in the presence of the Kami, and she realized there was a pattern to the apparent chaos that was taking place. The broom swept the floor. The vacuum cleaner inched forward, pressing its snout firmly against the tatami as it sucked. She felt the cold slap of metal against her chest, and looking down, saw the iron slide up and down her torso, faithfully trying to smooth out the creases in her yukata. Fortunately, it was not plugged in.
The Kami can take care of the place much better than I can, she thought. They don’t need me at all.
She thought of her husband’s constant complaints, after he got back late from work, exhausted and intoxicated from his drinking sessions with coworkers. The rice was too soggy, he would slur, calling her by the insulting name of omae – the rudest form of ‘you’. The bathwater wasn’t hot enough, the sheets on the futon weren’t straightened properly. She thought of her son, down in Tokyo, living alone in a tiny, squalid dormitory for university students, too busy to send an email or call.
Disturbing her thoughts, the broom pushed at her knees, the vacuum cleaner poked its long snout into her ribs, and the iron started to rub even harder. As she watched the elegant dance, the truth dawned on her. She was the cause of the mess. The Kami weren’t cleaning up after her – they were trying to remove all trace of her existence. She was untidy. Awkward. Irrelevant.
The stain could still be seen in the darkness, glowing with internal phosphorescence. She stared at it. It changed shape as she watched, becoming a number of different kanji – evocative, half-remembered, but ultimately indecipherable.
The iron that had triggered this catastrophe was nudging at her yukata beneath her breasts, like an infant child trying to get her attention. She looked up from the stain, and saw her husband’s power drill float effortlessly through the air towards her, forcing its metal handle into her fingers. The cord snaked toward the wall socket, inserting its twin prongs into the aperture with unmistakable delight. This house is a mess, untidy, dirty, the Kami whispered to her. You must apologize. Show us how sorry you are.
The noise of the power drill broke the midnight silence. Mrs. Kuroki’s life sprayed outward across the paper screens covering the windows, drops of it spattering down, adding to the stain on the tatami.
Chapter Twenty
Research
Outside Tsugaru University Hospital, it was full night. The grounds were illuminated by the floodlights outside the Emergency Room, by the streetlights, by the hazy, almost transparent paper lanterns strung from the power lines. Across from the hospital building stood the forecourt of a driving school; the cars were lined up regimentally in perfect rows, all the same model, all with the kanji characters for the driving school’s name stamped on their doors. In the clear white wash of the security lamps they looked as small and cute as children’s toys.
Tetsuo Nozaki stood at the window of the debriefing room, on the tenth floor of the hospital, looking out into the night, the laptop behind him. I have an hour before the night shift begins, he thought. Where do I begin? How do I turn all this data into something coh
erent for the end-of-year paper?
In a few days time it would be the O-Bon holiday. For one week, the nation took their obligatory summer break to visit hometowns, parents and grandparents. The yearly ritual of getting up at two in the morning to beat the traffic, taking the wife and kids out onto freeways already crowded with other family cars, taking breaks in over-populated rest areas and family restaurants. Spending two days with the old folks, eating, sleeping, more eating, watching TV, eating. Getting up early for the return journey.
Nozaki would be busier; for the project, it meant more subjects coming in, as they had more time on their hands. More time they intended to spend unconscious. Better start viewing some reports, he told himself. He seated himself at his desk and opened the folder containing the video files.
Subject Forty-Eight; Mrs. Etsuko Suzuki. In the video she sat up straight in the armchair, elegant in polyester slacks, a black top with a glittery image of a Chinese dragon on the front, immaculate make-up and rimless glasses trying to conceal the wrinkles in the buttery skin.
Mrs. Suzuki, Nozaki knew, was a major presence in the local Ikebana Society – but more than that, her husband was also a doctor, and a member of the hospital’s board of trustees. Her presence among the volunteers was a strong sign of the ties of mutual obligations between the directors and Dr. Kageyama.
Although that fact was a sobering one to consider, Nozaki was more intimidated by the accessory that Mrs. Suzuki wore to each session. The pendant worn around her neck was a diamond, but not one of the usual variety: it was made of the cremated remains of her former pet dog, Shiro – compressed at extremely high pressure into crystal form and attached to a gold chain. She had pointed it out to Nozaki with great pride, on her first session. It glittered upon her chest, winking in the sunlight, catching Nozaki’s eye with an almost deliberate insolence.