by Zoe Drake
“You had to jump? Was he the instructor?”
“I’m not sure. I have a feeling that the jump was punishment for something, but I can’t remember. Anyway, he didn’t push me, I jumped of my own accord. And that’s when it happened.”
“You became aware that you were dreaming?”
“Yes! I told myself I had to move my legs to steer my body, so my legs were pumping around like riding a bicycle. I was falling through the air with a crystal blue sea below me, and I could see the color so vividly. All at once I realized it was a dream. I thought I could make the drop shorter, so I told myself the sea wasn’t far away, that it was only a few feet. So I hit the water, really softly, and went under.”
Nozaki looked up. “So you actually changed the environment of your dream?”
“I guess so. The water was really shallow, and I waded to the beach on an island, where some people were gathered around a fire. Have you ever seen that TV show ‘Lost’?”
Nozaki shook his head. “That’s the point when you woke up?”
David nodded.
“Most impressive,” the researcher stated. “There’s plenty there for you to analyze when you have time. That moment of lucidity is quite encouraging.”
Turning back to his desk, he took two transparencies and placed them on the coffee table so that David could see. The two images lay side by side on the desk. Both of them were David’s head in profile. The image on the left was divided into two smooth colors, the brain area a uniform light green, the face beneath the eyes a deep purplish blue. In the image on the right, the green had retreated to the area occupying David’s forehead: above it, a yellowish wave pattern, shifting to a fiery orange-red that occupied the whole of the cranium.
“Fantastic!” said David. “Is that what was going on when I was asleep?”
“When you were dreaming, yes. The highlighted area is the occipital lobe, which is related to the sense of vision, and it seems to be accessing this part of the brain here…the temporal lobe, where we believe memories are stored.”
He put his clipboard aside, leaning animatedly towards David. “I’d like you to try something. You’ve obviously done well with the kanji for dream, so how about this.” David watched the strokes being traced on the Japanese man’s broad, sweat-lined palm.
“Kagi,” said David. Meaning key. He smiled as the joke dawned on him. “The key to the subconscious, maybe?”
“That’s right.”
Many of the differences between Japan and the UK were things that most people wouldn’t notice. The ubiquity of going to work by train. The shape of a bathtub. The genkan lobby with its shoes tidily lined up and pointing towards the door.
The insects.
Living in Japan presented David with a profusion of insect life he’d never come across before. The dragonflies and damselflies that buzzed at head height through the back streets. The constant sound of crickets. The big, black armored beetles with their horns and pincers. The occasional glimpse of a praying mantis and its wholly alien posture.
Getting off at Hiroseki station, fifteen minutes before school was about to start, David walked briskly up the long shopping street, a crocodile of laughing, chattering schoolgirls on the opposite side of the road to him. The sun’s heat was an uncomfortably physical presence, a ghostly lid pressing down on his naked head. Some of the girls were holding up parasols to protect their skin. Dragonflies and other bugs hovered through the thick air, bumbling towards David’s face and then swerving away.
Despite the heat, David felt remarkably refreshed. Last night’s nap at the hospital had been a deep, relaxing one; the effects of the Sleep Modulator were really making themselves felt.
He stepped up his pace, taking deep breaths of humid air. The shopping street around them made its lethargic preparations to face the day, steel shutters sliding upwards with a drawn-out squeal, matrons throwing buckets of water across their storefront steps. Middle-aged women wearing lacy long-sleeved cardigans and ankle-length skirts, their faces hidden beneath parasols, walked past David on the way to the station. An elderly man in a string vest and track suit bottoms crossed the road, his waxy, naked shoulders drawn up in a hunch, his feet shuffling along as if they were chained together.
At the end of the street, David crossed over another main road to the top of the slope, the sweat dripping down his brow and making his shirt stick to his skin. The park on the other side of the road was bursting with all manner of green life, sky-blue flowers with soft, threadlike leaves nestling among the bushes. The air hummed with the sound of insect wings.
Arriving at the school, David slipped his shoes into the teacher’s shoe-cabinet and put on his trainers, then entered the refreshingly cool staff-room with a breezy, smiling greeting. He took a seat at his desk, bowing to the teachers around him.
“Ohio Gazaimasu,” the Vice-Principal announced. The morning staff meeting was about to start.
“Ohio Gozaimasu,” the assembled teachers replied in chorus. Good morning. Across the rows of desks receding to the back wall, teachers craned their necks above the stacks of files and folders and plastic drawers, trying to see and be seen.
Microphone in hand, the Vice-Principal, Ogura-sensei, declared that the morning meeting of Wednesday August the tenth was about to begin. He and the Principal were the only people standing in the staff room; all of the other teachers, David included, were seated at their desks, looking attentively at their superior at the front of the room.
This morning, as David listened to the flow of Japanese speech he realized the Vice-Principal wasn’t sticking to the usual script and explaining the day’s schedule. Instead, it seemed that the Principal had something important to say – so David looked up as the Principal got to her feet, and he boggled in surprise as he saw what she was holding.
It was a clear plastic bag containing fragments of grey and black. The other teachers around David craned their necks as they peered at it, but he knew what it was. It was the stuff in the trashcan that he’d doused with water the night before.
The Principal went on in her fluting, Japanese old-lady voice, addressing the teachers, but David wasn’t really listening; he was looking at the stuff in the bag. He hadn’t paid attention to it last night, he’d handed the metal can straight to the security guard. As he looked at it now, though, he could tell there was something odd about it. He kept watching in puzzlement as the principal opened the bag and held up two scorched fragments of cardboard, the Hiragana characters still visible on them.
“Kokkuri-san,” the Principal declared firmly.
Around David, an apprehensive mutter went through the entire staff room.
“Wada-sensei,” David asked politely, “this morning’s meeting…what was all that about the burnt cardboard? There were quite a few things I didn’t get.”
It was in the last recess, the fifteen minutes between the end of the lessons and the beginning of club activities. Over her cup of green tea, and her sweet bean-paste bun laid out on the desk on a paper tissue, Wada-sensei sighed and smiled an obviously forced smile.
“Yes, there are quite a few things we don’t understand about it. Kokkuri-san is when two people, or more, draw the hiragana alphabet in a circle on a piece of paper. Then they hold a pen loosely with the tip touching the paper. They ask questions and the answer is spelt out by the spirits moving the pen. It’s something the children do to scare themselves and their friends, David-sensei. They say things like Kokkuri-san, Kokkuri-san, when will I die?”
It’s a Ouija board. David breathed quietly, waiting for Wada-sensei to continue.
“We’re trying to find out which girls are responsible, because this kind of thing can upset the whole school.”
“But surely it’s only a bit of nonsense? When I was a kid, we had ghost stories. Every school had its own ghost story. You can’t stop girls making that kind of stuff up.”
She laughed, again in a forced kind of way. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. We have our own ghost st
ory, too. Everybody knows.”
“I don’t. But if I do,” he said with a smile, “I’ll know not to mention anything by mistake.”
She looked at him sharply. “Do you know that elevator in the north wing?”
“The one that doesn’t work?.”
“It used to be a freight elevator for deliveries, but nobody uses it anymore. It is said that two girls died there. They hanged themselves. It’s not true, of course, no such thing ever happened here. It’s one of those…what do you say…a story that everyone hears until they think it is true?”
“An urban legend,” David said, nodding slowly.
To the Japanese, the seat of the human spirit wasn’t the heart, as was taken for granted in Western culture, but the stomach, the hara. That’s why one form of ritual suicide in the past had been hara-kiri, the cutting of the stomach to release the spirit from the bonds of the flesh. The stomach was the seat of the ki, the essential life force; understanding other people and situations was hara-gei, the art of the stomach. Gut feelings.
A feeling in the gut was exactly what David experienced as he rode the train towards Tsugarumiyata. A queasy, unsettled feeling. The Ouija board incident had upset him in ways that he couldn’t explain, spoiling the morning’s good mood. On top of that, he’d emailed Saori to ask if the Wednesday lesson was still on, but received the polite Japanese phrase ‘I’m waiting for you’ in reply. No indication as to whether she was still angry.
The Yoshida family welcomed him with their usual cheer, and Saori, in her hip-hugging jeans and black hooded top, led him through to the back room.
“Well, how’ve you been?” David asked brightly.
David sat down, and Saori took out a pamphlet from a drawer and silently placed it in front of him. On the front was the same photograph of Ayano Yoshida that stood in the family’s Buddhist altar.
He picked it up and skimmed through it, looking for the kanji characters that he could read.
“My parents had this printed and they’re going to distribute copies to every student and teacher in our school,” Saori explained. “It’s an appeal for information. If anyone noticed Ayano in pain, or remembers hearing her talk about heart problems or other health problems, we’re asking them to come forward. It’s possible that she did have a heart condition, but she was too afraid to admit it to her family.”
David put down the pamphlet. “I’m sorry to get in the way of what you’re trying to do. I should resign from the program.”
She shook her head. “No, no, maybe I was too strict. I’ve been thinking about you, David.”
He couldn’t help his eyes widening.
“There’s things I want to ask you,” she continued, “and I feel – I don’t know, I can talk to you about things that I can’t with anyone else. Did you read her diary?”
He nodded. “It was like going through her private thoughts.”
“Was there anything that – how can I say this – was standing out for you?”
He opened the diary, leafing slowly through the pages of elegantly written ideograms, Manga-type sketches, pastings of photos and photocopies. “The project is trying to teach people lucid dreaming, so they can control their own dreams,” he said. “Seems like Ayano was very good at it. Some of these dreams were…well, if all of this true, she was able to predict things that really happened, like she was a little bit…psychic?”
Saori nodded. “My parents both knew that Ayano was reikan – she had some kind of gift. Maybe she could have been a healer. They supported her, they told her not to worry about it.” Saori smiled. “Must have made a good impression, because she met her parents a lot in her dreams.”
“Yes, but they may not be her parents,” David ventured, relieved that Saori was in a mood to communicate. “I’ve been doing some research into dreams, you know, looking up stuff on the Internet. There’s this thing called the royal couple, who come as a good sign of something. They’re a man and woman joined together in some way.”
Saori gave him an amused, quizzical smile. “Uh, yeah – like parents?”
“Well maybe not. There are these things called archetypes, you see, figures that are ideal types of something, or symbols from the collective thought patterns of the human race. Did you see this?”
He turned the pages of the notebook over until he had found what he was looking for.
“In this dream, she met her parents, but another couple had moved in with them. She called them an uncle and aunt, but she wrote down here that when she awoke, she realized that she’d never seen them before. They were strangers, and they came with a message, she said.”
Saori stared at the notebook, her eyes huge.
David turned to another page, the page where the photocopy of the shaggy, many-eyed beast had been pasted in. “Here’s another thing. She makes lots of references to something called the Baku, and I think it’s this…animal. Does it mean anything to you?”
Saori leaned forward. “The Baku is a creature from Chinese and Japanese mythology. It appears in dreams, and it will eat things in your dreams.”
“Eat them?”
She nodded. “Yes, it’s both good and bad. In old times people used to put a drawing of the Baku under their pillow as they slept, so that if they had a nightmare, the Baku would eat it and take it away.”
David stared at her, then lowered his eyes to the book. “Is that why she wrote this, then? Baku kurae, Baku kurae?”
“I guess so. It’s a chant that means Baku, Baku, please eat my nightmare.”
Saori turned away, her face suddenly pale, as if she had remembered something that upset her. David hesitated, but when she didn’t say anything he turned to another subject, another part of the notebook. “This is one of the last things she wrote. It’s not even in Japanese. Does it mean anything to you?”
He slid the notebook towards her. Half of the page was covered with a spiky, angular script. It wasn’t Japanese, but David hadn’t been able to place it as Korean, or Russian, or Greek, or anything he could recognize.
She shook her head. “I can’t read it.”
“I thought, you know, sometimes sisters make a private language for each other, to share secrets.”
“If it was a private language, it wasn’t made for me. Ayano shared almost everything, but she never showed me this notebook. I only read it after she died.”
David took a deep breath, thinking hard. “So what do we do know?”
Saori shrugged. “I don’t know. We carry on, I guess. You let the hospital experiment on you. You’re their research.” She smiled, unexpectedly. “Also, you are my experiment, too.”
“Your experiment?”
“Yeah.” She stared at him, her eyes teasing. “I don’t know much about British people, so you’re my number one research subject. I hope you’re a good sample.”
David heard movement behind the sliding door, and instinctively hid the dream diary under his textbook as the door opened. Mrs. Yoshida poked her head through, smiling benevolently.
“How is the lesson?” she asked.
David beamed back at her with a desperate grin. “We’re learning a lot,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Waves
When there is tension between two forces it can often result in energy being released in an unexpected direction; the thought went through Nozaki’s mind on the expressway south, to Hachinohe. In the early twentieth century, the two cities of Hachinohe and Hirosaki had competed for the position of capital city of Aomori prefecture. Several decades ago, the conflict had been resolved by the creation of a totally new urban center, simply named Aomori City.
Hachinohe’s claims to success had been sadly battered by the economic downturn, and then most tragically, the March 11th earthquake and tsunami. No lives had been lost in the city itself, thankfully, but the busy port that serviced the fishing grounds off the southeast coast of Hokkaido were destroyed by the heavy fishing boats washed inland by the surge of seawater, and over a hundre
d houses were so badly damaged their residents were forced to move out.
The city’s determination to survive and rebuild in the face of numerous woes seemed reflected in its choice of mascot; a black horse with a gold saddle and red plume, rearing up defiantly, two hooves in the air. Nozaki noted the mascot’s appearance on the billboard he passed, announcing his imminent arrival into the city’s border.
The Kuroki household wasn’t difficult to find. It was in one of the older suburbs of the city, a traditionally built detached house surrounded by a low brick wall. The profusion of cedar, pine and cherry trees behind the wall made it difficult to see the house at all.
Nozaki let himself in through the gate and approached the front entrance. The outside of the house still held the remains of the funeral ornaments – the wreath on the door and the beautifully inscribed Buddhist sutra on the scroll beneath it. He pressed the button on the grey box to the right of the door, noting the presence of a small camera beneath it.
After a few moments a middle-aged man in a polo shirt and golfing pants opened the door. His hair was cut short in salaryman style, the skin of his round face was pallid and flabby, his mouth with its protuberant bottom lip hung open. He regarded Nozaki fiercely with large, bulging eyes that were clearly the sign of an overactive thyroid.
“I’m terribly sorry to disturb you,” Nozaki began in humble Japanese, “but are you Mr. Toshiyuki Kuroki?”
“I’m Hiroshi Kuroki,” grunted the man, “his brother. Who are you?”
“My name is Nozaki, from Tsugaru University Hospital. I’m sorry to be so rude, but I have a few questions about Mrs. Kuroki’s…condition.”
“Condition? She’s dead! What more do you want to know?”
“I mean her mental condition. It might be possible to shed some light on what happened.”
“Oh, you’re that kind of doctor, are you?” he gave Nozaki a long, measured look. “All right, you can come in for a while.”