The Mists of Osorezan

by Zoe Drake

  The living room was small and untidy. A vacuum cleaner and an open metal box filled with documents lay on the tatami next to the low table. A pair of reading spectacles sat on top of the documents.

  “You want a beer? Some shochu?”

  “No, no, I’m very weak when it comes to alcohol. I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  “Well, I’ll see if we’ve got any green tea left.” The man lurched off into the kitchen.

  In the living room’s Buddhist altar, Nozaki noted a photograph of a middle-aged woman in formal kimono, her face dominated by her prim mouth and tinted spectacles. Above it, on the wall, hung the kaimyo; the lady’s posthumous name, rendered in immaculate, doubtlessly expensive calligraphy.

  “The funeral was three days ago, but to be honest, it’s a good thing you people didn’t turn up,” Kuroki called from the kitchen. “Everyone was in a terrible state, and the priest didn’t help. I told him to make the chants shorter, because sitting in seiza position is too painful on the legs, and anyway nobody understands that old-fashioned Buddhist dirge. But did he? No, of course he didn’t. Quick enough to accept his money, though. Then he was straight off back to the temple.”

  He entered with two tiny cups of iced green tea on a tray and set them down on the table.

  “Toshiyuki’s staying with relatives at the moment,” he said, seating himself on the floor. “If he were here, he wouldn’t spend a moment with you. Me, I can’t see how things could get any worse, so I’m prepared to give anyone a chance. I suppose you’re asking about psychiatric problems?”

  “Were you aware of any?”

  He shrugged. “Whenever I came around, she looked tired. But then, a middle-aged woman is supposed to look tired, isn’t she? All that cleaning, cooking, taking care of relatives whenever they come round. That’s all these old dames talk about whenever they get together – how exhausted they are.”

  “Did Mrs. Kuroki’s fatigue seem to be worse than the usual fatigue?”

  “How should I know?”

  Nozaki sipped his tea thoughtfully, and then leaned forward, his face serious. “I’m very sorry to be intrusive, but I need to ask you something. Did your brother say anything about what time of night Mrs. Kuroki – passed away?”

  The other man frowned. “I’m not sure. I think he said it was early in the morning.” He drained his cup, staring at the tiny sediment left in the bottom. “Four o’clock. Yes, he said it was about four o’clock in the morning, because he looked at the clock when he was woken by…”

  Kuroki stared down at his cup, his lips curled in disgust. “He said he was woken up by the sound of the drill.”

  Returning along the same stretch of highway, Nozaki’s attention flickered back and forth between the road, the traffic, what Mr. Kuroki had told him, and the contents of the folder on the passenger seat next to him. Around him on both sides, flat squares of rice fields and upland farms stretched away to the conifer plantations and electricity pylons outlined against the mountains on the horizon. Everywhere, he could see signs of the hands of humanity, shaping the environment he drove through.

  He stopped on the outskirts of Aomori city, finding space in the parking lot of a Skylark family restaurant. He took the plastic folder out with him, sat down in the restaurant and ordered spaghetti and a Caesar salad. After the waitress had bowed and disappeared into the work area, he opened the folder, laying the contents gingerly upon the table.

  In the front of the folder were newspaper clippings, reports of the deaths of Mrs. Kuroki and Mrs. Yoshitada. Underneath them were brain maps. Charts and wave patterns from two of his subjects, Suzuki and Mizuno. He stared once more at the irregular spikes and patterns of lines scribbled across the printouts.

  Gamma waves.

  The highest frequency of brain waves, produced by the neurons emitting electrical signals of forty hertz or higher. Gamma waves indicated higher mental activity, neuronal firing usually associated with a cognitive act, such as perception.

  Or perhaps premonition.

  Up until now, there had been seven cases in the Sleep Modulator project of abnormal gamma wave activity during REM sleep, beginning with…

  No. It was important not to think about her. There were only six cases.

  The waitress brought the salad and the spaghetti to his table, and Nozaki hastily cleared the scans away. He looked around. The restaurant was filling up with a party of elderly hikers, taking seats at tables over by the windows. He stared at their identical sunhats, their pursed lips beneath tinted glasses, the walking sticks clasped tightly in wrinkled hands.

  Nozaki despised those who talked about psychic powers. He firmly believed that mind was the product of the brain. But Mrs. Suzuki and the young Mizuno had experienced what he could only term prophetic dreams. There was a possibility these dreams occurred during periods of intense gamma wave activity. What’s more, if the statements were to be believed, they had dreamed of these events at almost the exact time the events occurred in waking life. Then there was the appearance of a written medium – a cryptic, unknown language. It all added up to a phenomenon he hadn’t foreseen and couldn’t explain.

  It repelled and yet fascinated him. It was evidence that he couldn’t use. He didn’t dare to show this to anyone else.

  But he couldn’t dare to ignore it.

  She lay beneath him. Silent. Still. Her eyes closed. Aiko knew what her husband liked. She lay on the futon sheets, motionless, holding the pose as long as she could while Nozaki worked at her, until the climax broke the illusion, jolted her eyes open and brought a gasp from her lips.

  Afterwards he slept. Falling once more into the world defined by a strip of beach along an endless sea. Unaware of his daytime self, a character in an ambiguous drama, Nozaki scanned the horizon for signs of the girl, and soon found them. The splashing of the arms, the pale bobbing of her head. She needed help.

  Nozaki dived into the waves. Strong, powerful strokes of his arms took him out into deep water. He opened his eyes, and could see clearly all the way down to the sea bottom. The scintillating colors of coral glittered beneath him. Rainbow-striped fish darted away from his turbulence.

  On the sand of the ocean floor something caught his eye. It looked like a heavy golden necklace, as if a lady had cast her jewelry into the sea, or pirates had dropped part of their treasure overboard. Then he realized it was a ring of starfish, their tentacles touching each other.

  As he stared, fascinated, something rippled in the center of each starfish. Scales peeled back in a single coordinated movement, revealing hard white orbs. Eyes.

  The ring of eyes stared back at Tetsuo Nozaki, following his passage through the water.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Shingomura

  The ancient village of Herai, in northern Japan, was more widely known by the name of Shingomura. The hotel that Namiko had booked for Professor Weiss turned out to be a minshuku – a small family-run business with only two rooms to let, and in which he seemed to be the only guest.

  The night he arrived, the hotel owner, a middle-aged woman with a rudimentary knowledge of English, ran him a bath and then invited him to the dining room at the back. Under walls decorated with replicas of Aomori prefecture’s prehistoric past – masks, furs, spears and figurines – they served him a huge venison pot stew (deer hunted and killed in Hokkaido, by her husband, the woman had said) with sashimi, pickles and a concoction called kamaboko that tasted remarkably like gefilte fish. The owners had no problems with kosher food, they said; they occasionally had Jewish scholars stay here, in Japan to study the village’s alleged Judaic links.

  They woke him at eight the next morning. Weiss took another bath, trying to come to terms with the mild feeling of disorientation. The bathroom was smaller than he’d expected, and the water in the sunken tub was piping hot. As Namiko had advised him, he made sure to wash his body clean with the shower and to avoid getting soap in the bath. Japan, he thought. It’s like walking through the looking gla
ss. Washing yourself before you get in the bath. Doors that you pull instead of push. Books and magazines where you read the front by turning to the back.

  But then, he thought as the hot water soaked the ache in his bones away, I’ve been living behind the looking glass all my life.

  At breakfast, he declined the oily fried fish and ate the white rice with pickled vegetables. There seemed to be no division between the dining room and the minshuku’s kitchens, and the landlady moved perpetually in and out of the room, carrying dead game birds over her shoulder. The grandmother sat on a stool beside the door, smiling pleasantly at Weiss, occasionally waving away the fat black bluebottle that refused to leave the kitchen.

  “Taxi,” he said after the dishes had been cleared away. The landlady replied in what Namiko had called Tohoku dialect, something that rendered normally difficult Japanese language close to incomprehensible.

  “Takushii,” the grandmother echoed. “Takushii de iku ban ya.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about the pyramid?” Weiss asked.

  The landlady shrugged, and the old woman behind her shook her toothless head. “Wakarapi,” she said firmly.

  The taxi took him out on a drive through a valley of nothing. Beneath an overcast sky, fields stretched back to the forest-covered mountains in the distance, the thickened metal skeletons of pylons marching back with them. They drove past farmhouses, gas stations, garages, warehouses, greenhouses with dusty plastic windows ripped and flapping in a listless breeze. Through the open gates of the warehouses, carpenters in overalls stood bent over their tasks.

  Weiss was puzzled by the appearance of several baby strollers lying abandoned in the fields. Perhaps they were used to carry farming tools, he thought. Once the taxi drove past the familiar scarlet shape of a torii gate, but the structure behind it wasn’t a shrine, but the rusting hulk of a metal shipping container with lightning-shaped strips of paper strung across its open hatch.

  He thought of what Namiko had said; Tohoku is the Japanese Outback, she’d said. Yes, the description had been apt. Outback. Aomori prefecture had escaped the ravages of 2011’s triple crisis, but there was still a sense of desolation, of humanity giving up in the face of the wilderness.

  Dragonflies skimmed across the surface of the road, threatening to hurl themselves against the car wheels like kamikaze helicopters. Weiss looked through the windows as the valley slipped by. Using his phrase book, he asked if they were still in the village of Shingo.

  “Kono atari wa Shingomura ba,” the taxi driver gestured with a white gloved hand. “All. All village.”

  Eventually, the taxi turned right and started up a hill that led to a rich forest ahead. Trucks passed them going down the hill, the legend ISUZU gleaming in chrome from their radiator grills, their dumpers full of rubble.

  As the taxi continued up the hill, Weiss became aware of the change. Like moving through a porous membrane, he was alerted to a presence, another consciousness in the Noosphere surrounding him. The hairs on his skin prickled.

  The taxi entered the forest and its canopy of leaf-dappled shade. On the roadside, Weiss saw the incongruous flash of red amongst the green, and noticed the familiar torii gate and straw rope of a small Shinto shrine. Half a mile in, the driver slowed to a halt and pointed to the right.

  “Asoko,” he said.

  Weiss got out and peered at where the driver had indicated. A sign had been erected at the side of the road. The only part he could read was ‘200 m’ – and the arrow pointed straight up. Weiss peered up the side of the hill. A narrow path could barely be made out, climbing up the hill at a steep angle until it disappeared in a tangle of ferns and tree roots.

  “And how on Earth am I supposed to get up there?” he mused aloud.

  Taking off his panama hat and wiping his brow, Weiss returned to the taxi. Eventually he made the driver understand that he wanted to go back to the shrine they’d passed minutes before, and they performed an elegant three-point turn.

  The shrine, on closer inspection, turned out to be unlike anything Weiss had seen so far. It had the familiar pi-shape of the torii that he’d seen in Tokyo, and it also had charms written on twisted white paper hung on rope beneath it – but behind there was no shrine building at all, simply an offertory box and several boulders of dark, moss-covered stone. “This,” said the taxi driver, recalling some elementary English in his excitement, “This also pyramid.”

  Weiss got out and approached the aged, moss-peppered stone. He walked past the shrine, knelt down and peered at the side.

  There were clearly marks there arranged in a circle. They were faint, worn away by the passage of what must have been centuries, but they were unmistakable. Weiss caught his breath and leaned closer. Hieroglyphics from one of the pages of the Book of the Veils, arranged in the familiar pattern of three concentric circles. There was something else: a crack in the rock. Weiss reached out to gingerly brush it with his fingers. An unmistakable cleft in the stone, going downward and directly through the arrangement of spiral symbols, effectively bisecting them.

  Had there been a fissure like that when the symbols had been drawn? If not, what could have caused it?

  He knelt down close to the stone, pulling his miniature digital camera from his pocket. Adjusting the settings, he carefully took photographs of every carved mark he could see.

  As he worked, he felt his fingers tremble and from his guts there came a sharp, stabbing pain. He felt himself slip into a state of heightened awareness. There was the sense of presence, something vast and liquid beneath the landscape, hidden beneath the mountains and the fields. He lowered the camera and stared at the ancient, mossy stone. Was there something wrong with the shape of the rock? Were his eyes playing tricks, or was its geometry warped, its contours and angles subtly moving as if alive?

  Without warning, the stone and the trees before him were sucked away into a scene that replaced the land around him. Pale white walls. Numerous candles. The smell of incense.

  The study in his house, back in London.

  Before him, once more, was the chalk-white horse head of Orobas. It had uttered the Professor’s secret Angelic name. The Professor watched, forcing himself to be calm.

  Listen to me, the spirit voice rang in his head. You must use great caution. You are approaching a place where the walls between worlds have been pierced. Even the Howling will not approach.

  “But I have bound you to help me,” Weiss voiced in his head.

  That I shall. But beware the storm, and those who come riding before it.

  A pain began in his head, a dull pounding in his temples.

  Beware the coming storm.

  He was back in the forest, bent over on his knees in front of the stone. There were hands on his shoulder, and a voice at his ear, strangely muffled but becoming clearer as the seconds passed. “Daijobu? Daijobu sa?”

  He turned his head and saw a pair of white-gloved hands, the taxi driver in his business suit looming above him, his mouth open in concern. “Daijobu?”

  “I’m fine.” Weiss stood up, put the camera back in his pocket, brushed himself down. “I’m perfectly all right.” He felt a warmth at his nose, dabbed his nostrils with a handkerchief; it came away speckled with blood.

  Clearing his throat and trying to look as healthy as he could, Weiss took out his guidebook and smiled at the driver. “Take me to the Tomb of Christ,” he said in broken Japanese.

  When they arrived, the sky had swollen with clouds and a fitful, warm drizzle was falling. The museum was a small, non-descript building, set in the grounds of a park that bore no resemblance to any Christian or Jewish burial ground that Weiss had ever seen. There were perhaps half a dozen people in the grounds, some alone, some in couples, walking slowly across the immaculate grass beneath clear plastic umbrellas.

  Following signs written in English, Weiss moved through the park, climbed a brief flight of stairs and stood looking at two bare wooden crosses. He approached the crosses and stood
in front of two ancient mounds, rising gently out of the earth. Plaques were set into the earth, with inscriptions written in English, Hebrew and Japanese.

  This, the English and Hebrew inscriptions declared, was the last resting place of Jesus Christ, and the second grave belonged to his wife, Miyuko.

  Beneath it, like a signature, was a single letter: Kaf.

  Weiss solemnly put the palms of both hands together and bowed his head. A gesture of respect for the unknown wanderer.

  Inside the museum he found exhibits with English translations written on the outside of the glass cases. They told him that in the early twentieth century Kiyomaru Takeuchi, a Shinto priest, had visited Herai and had discovered (somehow) some very old documents. He found that one document was a description of Christ’s secret journey across the top of the northern hemisphere. It claimed that Christ had escaped crucifixion and his brother, known in Japanese as Isukiri, had died on the cross instead of him. The true Christ had traveled from the Middle East across Russia, landing in Japan at the port of Hachinohe in the reign of the eleventh Emperor, Suinin. Settling in Herai village, Christ had lived under the name of Daitenku Taro Jurai until his death at the noble age of a hundred and six.

  There was even a video display of the performance of an old folk song called the Nanyado Yara. Weiss watched the film footage of elderly women in blue and white kimonos, shuffling in a circle and moving their hands in slow, arcane gestures. It didn’t look at all familiar to him. Nor could he recognize the words as any kind of Hebrew.

  The notes said that a number of documents had been discovered in Shingomura, one of which was said to be the last will and testament of Jesus Christ. Was it all just bubbe meises?

  Or was it possible that the ancient Hebrew wanderer buried here was in fact Achaz, who ended his flight from the Holy Land here in Japan? Was one of the ‘other documents’ they’d found here actually the second Book of the Veils?