by Zoe Drake
Dogs were one of the subjects that Mrs. Suzuki took very seriously. A routine of sleeping, waking and working was another. She had made it clear that she thought the Kageyama Treatment could make her more productive.
From behind the camera came Nozaki’s first question. “Can I ask you if your body felt distorted at all in the dream? Did it feel as if you were in your usual body?”
“Well of course it was my usual body, Mr. Nozaki, I think I know it well enough.” The stone on her chest glimmered and winked again.
“The location was a beauty salon. In fact, I know exactly I know which salon it was – the one I always go to, Mr. Imai’s salon in Aomori city. I was sitting in a chair, waiting my turn, reading a magazine. I remember very clearly what was on the table in front of me: a telephone book, four different dictionaries, and a sewing basket. A basket full of tangled yarn, tiny wooden beads, buttons, that kind of thing.”
She coughed briefly, then continued.
“There’s also a sign on the wall, but it wasn’t written in Japanese – it was a language I’d never seen before, a little bit like Korean Hangul. Now, I’m not sure why, but at that point I knew I was dreaming. It’s your, what do call it, luminosity.”
“Lucidity.”
“Yes, that’s it. Then one of my old friends came into the salon, Mrs. Kuroki.”
“Do you know this person in waking life?”
“Oh yes, of course. She belongs to the Wafu School of Flower Arrangement, but apart from that, she’s a very nice person. Well, the funny thing is, she tried to pay for her hairdo before having it. She took out a fifty-thousand yen note – which, of course, doesn’t exist in real life. The receptionist couldn’t accept it, and asked if she had smaller bills, which made Mrs. Kuroki quite flustered.”
Nozaki made a comment on the form: subject is hoping for change.
“So I decided to help the poor woman, and I went to the receptionist and said, I’ll pay. She was very grateful, and she put on the plastic apron, had her hair washed, and sat back down in the special chair. Then one of the assistants came up behind me and produced a horrible-looking machine – a large, ugly thing it was – and would you believe it, he started drilling into the back of her head.”
“Not the hair, you mean? Drilling into the skull?”
“Well, yes. I was a little surprised and I said, what’s that you’re doing? And she said, we’re going to use Mrs. Kuroki’s head to make a database.”
“So how did you feel about that?”
“Well, I was shocked, but what could I do? I didn’t want to make a fuss in public. I thought, it can’t be helped, Mr. Imai knows what he’s doing. And Mrs. Kuroki didn’t seem to mind, she just sat there reading her copy of Ikebana International.”
“Does this Mr. Imai really exist?”
“Oh, yes, of course he does. A dear, dear friend of mine, and a very clever man. He studied hairdressing in London, you know. But the extraordinary thing is, at that point, a kind of mist started to come out of the machine. A thick, grey mist. It spread out until it quite covered Mrs. Kuroki, and I couldn’t see her any more.”
Her voice paused at last, and when it resumed, she sounded quite nonplussed. “That’s all I remember, Mr. Nozaki. What do you think it means?”
“I’ll do some research into that,” Nozaki had answered. “The thing is, no dream is truly random. There’s always a relationship to what’s going on in your life, so I advise you to think carefully about your relationship with Mrs. Kuroki, and what it means to you. In general, how are you finding your sleeping habits? Are you managing to get more time asleep?”
She let out an extraordinary noise, somewhere between a sigh and one of the Japanese words for ‘not at all’.
“I’m very busy, Mr. Nozaki, and I have my family to take care of, because that’s what they expect from me. If I looked tired, they might feel responsible, and that would only dampen their spirits. But Dr. Kageyama said I would feel better because of this program, and it’s true. I do feel more energetic.”
He recalled how Mrs. Suzuki straightened her shoulders and sat up in the armchair. “We all have to carry on, do we not? I can persevere. That’s the old Japanese spirit, we can all persevere when times are not so good. I am like the tuna, you see. I have to keep moving, otherwise I will die.”
Nozaki frowned. “Like a shark.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I think it’s the shark that has to keep swimming, otherwise it’ll die.”
Mrs. Suzuki looked at him as if he had insulted her best flower arrangement. “Oh no, Mr. Nozaki. I’m not like a shark at all.”
The video clip came to an end. From Subject Forty-Eight’s folder, he slipped a sheet of notepaper. He’d asked Mrs. Suzuki to write down the language she had seen written on the salon notice board, and he looked now at the spiky, angular hieroglyphics she’d drawn in ball pen. They were indeed curious. Nozaki couldn’t think of a writing system that looked similar.
How could these marks be considered a form of communication? In one way, he knew, dreams themselves were a language. Dreams communicated through images and symbols, and usually not through words. The cherry blossom, for example. For most Japanese, it represented the beginning of spring, the beauty of nature, and an excuse for an open-air party. But for those traditionally-minded, it represented the impermanence of life and its beauty. The luckiest dream in Japanese culture was to dream of Mount Fuji, a hawk, or an eggplant on the night of January the first, which would predict good fortune for the next twelve months. Three symbols, each with a message to communicate.
In dreams, the outstanding symbols and images were known to psychologists as dreamsigns. Previous studies reported that lucidity could be triggered by awareness of and concentration on a dreamsign. Also there was the mist Mrs. Suzuki had reported, similar to the image in Ishida’s dream. What could that mean?
The next file was the foreigner. David Keall. He had reviewed David’s file the day before, and considering that he had joined the project recently, the young man had made remarkable progress. Perhaps Dr. Kageyama had indeed been correct; having a non-Japanese as part of the experiments would be an interesting scientific control. As David spoke Japanese, it would be interesting to see whether he would dream in Japanese as well as English. He was certainly immersed in the language, having taken up residence in a place such as Tohoku.
Still, Nozaki had reservations.
He’d been initially been very reluctant to have a foreigner involved in the program. It was true that Westerners and Japanese looked at the world in different ways – scientifically true. As an undergraduate, Nozaki had read of a research project by the University of Michigan. They had tracked the eye movements of a number of subjects while looking at a series of pictures. The North Americans of European descent paid more attention to the objects in the immediate foreground, while the Chinese and Japanese subjects spent more time studying the background and taking in the entire scene as a whole.
There was also the Japanese concept of ishin denshin. Over the centuries, the nation had been traditionally structured into rigid categories of sex, age, class and occupation. As a result of this homogenization, it was possible to understand another Japanese without the need for verbose explanations. These shared cultural cues united the country in a kind of cultural telepathy. In theory, it would be possible for a Japanese to easily interpret another Japanese person’s dreams. The concept fascinated Nozaki.
Despite his reservations, though, he was impressed at David’s results. The foreigner’s dreams would need more careful consideration. At another time. He looked at his watch; it was almost time to go on duty. He put the folders back in the cabinet, switched off his laptop, and left the room.
In the laboratory, standing in the control room looking down on the main floor, he saw Yamada already at work, striding down the beds in his white coat gesturing at the other assistants, clipboard in his hands. Nozaki picked up the clipboard with the subject roster on it, sca
nning the names.
“So who’s absent tonight…Saito, Katsuma…Mizuno? The schoolboy? That’s unusual, he’s very enthusiastic.”
Yamada stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up. “Yes, Mr. Nozaki. Isn’t it terrible?”
He blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“Haven’t you heard? It was in the papers. That farmer who killed his wife?”
Nozaki’s eyes widened. “Yes?”
“That was the boy’s grandfather.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sacred Ground
She was waiting for him in the stark white, sparsely populated surroundings of the Narita Airport arrivals lounge. Benjamin Weiss pushed his trolley through the open gate, scanning the line of Japanese faces politely looking around and through him, and then he saw his name on a large white card – held by a tall, long haired woman. He moved his trolley past the line and she came to greet him.
“Professor Weiss! Welcome to Japan. My name is Namiko Gozen.”
Her face was fine-boned and, he thought, very Japanese. It was dominated by her dark, arresting eyes, their epicanthic folds accentuated by the graceful, arching eyebrows above. Her nose was small and slightly upturned, her lips full and glossed. Thick black hair billowed in a lush mane down to her shoulders. She wore seamed tights, a white skirt and a light, lacy blue shawl over a red blouse that had a crest printed just below the collar – something to do with her shrine, he guessed.
“You must be tired. May I help you with your luggage?”
“No, no, that’s quite all right.”
Wheeling the trolley outside, Weiss became aware of the heat for the first time. A moist, pressing heat radiated down from a cloudless sky, nothing like the mild London afternoons he knew. They wheeled the trolley across to a spacious parking lot, where Namiko led him to her car, a pristine-looking Toyota Camel. “Is this your first time in Tokyo, Professor?” she asked.
“That’s right, although I’ve been to Hong Kong a few times.”
“Ah yes, I’ve read about it in the archives. Working with the Five Heavenly Tigers.”
Weiss smiled. “Indeed. The last time I saw them was at the handover ceremony.”
Waving off his protests, Namiko took the bags out of the trolley and arranged them quickly and efficiently in the car’s trunk. “I think you’ll find Tokyo very different from Hong Kong, Professor.”
“I’m sure I will.”
The interior of the car was deliciously cool and smelt of lime air freshener. Namiko took her place in the front seat next to the Professor, clipped herself in, and eased the car out of the parking lot.
The landscape, at least near the airport, didn’t look particularly Japanese. Anonymous grey slabs of buildings, either factories or warehouses, were partly hidden behind groves of conifers; the only thing that struck him as different was the number of power lines running low above the roadsides, thick black cables that branched off to who knew where.
The car pulled up to the rear of a traffic jam, and they stopped. Namiko took her hands off the wheel and looked directly at the Professor.
“The messenger said the second Book of the Veils is probably hidden somewhere in Japan.”
Weiss nodded slowly.
“I see.” The woman turned back to the dashboard, staring straight out at the cars ahead. “Can I ask you what makes you think it’s here?”
“Well, to cut a long story short, we came across a certain inscription in Hebrew which didn’t seem to make any sense. But if you listen to the pronunciation of the phonemes Zain, Pe and Nun, I believe that it was transcribed onto an old map as shi-pe-n, rendered into Latin as Cipangu.”
She gave him a sharp look. “Are you saying that’s where the ancient name of Japan came from?”
“According to my research, Japan had a lot of different names in the past. After Fra Mauro created his map, the name Cipangu or Zipang, and all its variations, came into use.”
Namiko resumed looking straight ahead, her eyebrows raised. “This goes deep, doesn’t it?”
“It’s getting deeper all the time.”
They drove on in silence.
“Professor, why don’t you get some rest?”
“Thank you, my dear. Long plane journeys tend to take it out of me, at my age.”
Weiss drifted in and out of sleep, his sinuses still dehydrated from the flight, trying to ignore the flutterings in his stomach that he knew were yet more warnings. Hypnogogic images filled his dozing mind; scenes and characters engaged in intricate mini-dramas, elements stolen from Poveglia and elsewhere.
When he opened his eyes fully, he realized they were in Tokyo.
From an expressway on elevated pillars rising above the streets, Weiss looked past Namiko’s arms on the wheel into a canyon of steel, glass and concrete. It was a crystallization of modernity, a toy town erected by a fiercely concentrating child, sparkling new building blocks donated by a strangely absent parent.
The skyscrapers were adorned with signs, some of which were in English – Sanyo, Toyo, NKF – but most were in kanji characters. Sermons in concrete and neon; another book the professor couldn’t read.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Namiko said.
Weiss turned his head, cocking an eyebrow. “You do?”
“You’re probably thinking, why is it that the Japanese say they’ve got such a special relationship with nature, but they’ve covered almost the entire country with concrete.”
Weiss gave an embarrassed laugh, looked away. “There’s an old story from the Talmud,” he related with a smile, “about a Rabbi’s son who was badly injured and had what people today call a ‘near-death experience’. His soul returned to his body, and he woke up in his infirmary bed. When his father came to visit him, the young man said, ‘Father, I’ve seen the olam ha-ba, the world to come! My spirit left my body and ascended to the next world, and it was like this one, but everything was upside down!’ And the Rabbi said to him, ‘No, my son. What you saw was the true form of the world. This world where we live is the one where everything is turned upside down.’”
Namiko laughed as she turned the car onto an exit ramp. It was, Weiss thought, a genuine and very lovely sound.
“We’re going to Arakawa ward,” she told him. “It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods of Tokyo.”
“Is that where your shrine is?”
She nodded. “Shiori Jingu. I’ve been the High Priestess of the Sarume Order here for about fifteen years now. The shrine has been handed down through my family for many generations, and my parents were recruited to the Lamed Vav in the forty-second year of the Emperor Showa. That’s 1967 to most people. I trained at the Yamakage Shrine in Aichi prefecture, and when my mother passed on, I became the Miko – the head priestess of Shiori Jingu. Arakawa, you see, is in the northeast of Tokyo; and in the Japanese cosmology, the northeast is known as the Kimon – a direction vulnerable to intrusion by evil spirits.”
“So Shiori Jingu stands guard at the gate, so to speak,” Weiss mused.
Namiko pulled the car off the main streets and through a gateway flanked by trees and moss-encrusted stone lanterns. As the car settled into its designated parking spot, Weiss looked down the gravel-strewn driveway at a tall, curiously shaped gate in bright vermilion – the torii – and the rows of ancient cedar, maple and ginkgo trees stretching up to block out the surrounding buildings.
“Professor, would you mind washing your hands before you enter?” As they left the car, Namiko indicated a covered stonework well a few meters away. Weiss approached it, picked up a long-handled tin ladle, and poured water over his hands in turn. The water was refreshingly cold.
“From what I understand of Shinto,” he remarked, “it’s basically very similar to pagan beliefs. No barriers between man and nature, no theology, no dogma concerning the afterlife. Every natural phenomenon is a manifestation of the spirits – the Kami.”
“Shinto is so old it didn’t even have a name until Buddhism was brought ov
er from China and the Japanese had to distinguish between the two. One more thing, Professor…” After washing her hands, Namiko carefully refilled the long spoon and set it down. “We always leave some water in the ladle.”
Their footsteps crunching on the pebbles, the two of them passed through the torii and approached the shrine itself, a one-story building of massive blackened pillars, its curving, tiled roof bristling with decorative beams and gables.
Weiss stopped and breathed in the sultry air. From the trees came a sound that made him aware of how far he’d traveled: the atavistic drone of cicadas, rising and falling.
“What do those white paper strips mean?” he asked, pointing at the shrine entrance. “The ones shaped like lightning bolts?”
“They are O-shide. They are hung from the Shimenawa – the straw ropes – to show the boundary of the sacred area. We also hang them upon sacred trees to mark the presence of the Kami within.”
“So we’re now entering sacred ground.”
Sliding open the door to the shrine’s main building, they both removed their shoes and placed them in handsome wooden boxes to the side. Inside the shrine’s main building, Weiss was intrigued to see that it was arranged as one huge room, sub-divided with screens and doors of paper and wood. She led him to the guest quarters at the back, an airy chamber lined with windows running from floor to ceiling, a panoramic mural of vivid red camellias running along the sliding screen doors that made up the side wall. The room was carpeted with what Weiss recognized as tatami, the traditional Japanese form of straw matting.
Over by the far window rested a tall black lacquered table and two folding lawn chairs. “Perhaps you would like a chair by the window, Professor?”
“You’re very kind. My back and my knees thank you.”
“Let me get you something to drink…milk tea? Japanese green tea? Or would you prefer a beer?”
“Green tea would be fine, thank you.”
Weiss lowered himself into the chair and gazed outside at the well tended garden, unfamiliar flowers among the dark rich green of the lawn.