And then, at the start of that night, that fateful night, Mustah, supposedly gone off to work, came flying back. Yoji was close behind him, seemingly in a panic, and grabbed hold of Mustah’s arm as if to try to stop him.
What’s all this? I looked up from my textbook.
The look on Mustah’s face was one of absolute fury. I’d never seen him so angry. I figured for sure he’d found out I hadn’t been going to class, and a shiver ran through me.
“Kyo!” His voice was fierce. “Who is this?!” He shoved a photograph at me.
I gasped. It was a picture of me and Marika. From that time when she’d come inside and mistakenly pressed the shutter. I’d carelessly left the film in the camera.
“Um…” I looked up fearfully. “My new friend.”
“Is she human? No! She’s Bamboo, isn’t she?”
“Um…”
“And I’ve never seen her face at the meetings. A stray Bamboo, huh? And that’s this room behind you, isn’t it? You didn’t actually let her in here?!”
“Mustah—”
“What have you been doing at night with a stray Bamboo?!”
“But she’s…not…a bad kid,” I started to say, and then closed my mouth. Because the truth was I knew only too well that Marika was a bad kid. That she wasn’t like Mustah and Yoji, that she was a dangerous anarchist monster. And now I was doing things I totally could never tell them about. Playing at stealing the flames of other humans…
Mustah flipped the table over violently and then moved on to overturning all kinds of other things. All I could do was stagger fearfully along behind him like an idiot. I heard Yoji’s chiding voice, but it seemed like Mustah didn’t.
“Um, okay, it’s ’cause, like, I can’t be close with you and Yoji anymore.”
“Huh?” He whirled his terrible face around.
“I was lonely. And then I met this Bamboo, and she was sincerely, for real, happy to be with me…”
“We can’t be close? What are you even talking about?! We’re the same as always. We’ve just been fighting a bit lately.”
“But you’re going to go off and leave me…”
“You’re totally wrong. We’re not going to run off and leave you. You’re going to grow up and be an amazing person someday. Seriously, Kyo, you gotta get it together!”
“I just thought…like, maybe, if we were friends, she might make me a Bamboo…”
Mustah suddenly fell silent. He narrowed his eyes sharply and stared at me. This was much scarier than the outburst before. I trembled violently and nervously looked down at him. His shoulders slumped heavily.
“What the hell…”
“But, I mean, I—”
“I should never have taken in a kid like you! I should’ve left you where I found you! It would have been better if those men had shot you!”
“Mustah! Take that back!” I shouted.
I tried to grab at him, and Yoji flew between us to stop me. He turned not toward me, but toward Mustah. “That is not okay! Talking so violently like that! Right, Kyo, hon? You’ll just scare the poor boy.”
“But, I mean—no matter what we say, he just doesn’t get it! Is he an idiot?!”
“Mustah! Come on. Maybe he didn’t turn out exactly how we wanted, but you can’t blame Kyo for that.”
“Huh?”
“The flame is free. That’s exactly why it’s a flame.”
“Unh. Well…”
“But when he’s courting danger, we have to sit him down and tell him that. We have to discuss it,” Yoji insisted, quietly.
Mustah slowly nodded and sat down on the sofa. He was about to say something, but then he spat, “I can’t! My blood’s all gone to my head!”
So it was Yoji who sat me down on the sofa next to him and started telling me about how dangerous a stray Bamboo could be. I sat quietly and listened. Mustah went out onto the terrace, turned his back to me, and sat on the bench.
When Yoji was done talking, I knew things I hadn’t before. I promised I wouldn’t see Marika anymore. The Bamboo flew off into the night sky once more. Yoji looked back and nodded gently, as if to say it was okay. Mustah didn’t look at me at all. I hung my head and pulled my knees to my chest.
I left the house and began walking down the night road. Almost as if she’d been waiting impatiently for me, Marika swooped down in great delight, causing gusts of wind to spring up around me. Her playful grin really did resemble Mustah’s look of deep affection, a face I didn’t get to see very often these days. And to be honest, I didn’t want to let this smiling face go. But…
I had very clearly promised Yoji, so in a small voice, I announced, “Sorry, I can’t see you like this anymore, Marika.”
Marika was dumfounded. Her lips trembled. “Got it!” she barked, sounding angry. “Your master told you not to, huh!”
“No. And he’s not my master. If I had to say, he’s my papa. My fifth papa.”
“Fifth?”
“Yeah. The first four were human, though. My Bamboo papa’s the nicest of them all.”
“Weird! But we were having so much fun together every night!”
“Hey, Marika?” I grew worried. In a small voice, I said, “So, like, go find a proper Bamboo partner, instead of human like me. And start going to the meetings, okay?”
The instant I gave voice to this, I realized that, at some point, I had stopped wanting so desperately to be made into a Bamboo. The things my beloved papas had told me over and over and over again—I had taken the long way round and was starting, bit by bit, to accept the idea of growing up, stoking the fire and becoming an adult, and finally, of getting old.
Marika twisted up her face. “I’m not going to any meetings!” she yelled. “They’ll arrest me!”
“Oh, right. The punishment’s sixty years buried in a barrel, right?” I smiled.
“Yeah. Well! I only kill the bad ones, so maybe they’ll take that into consideration and make it shorter. And, like, if they catch me now, there’s that thing in fifteen years.”
“That thing?”
“The dude sitting on the throne at the meeting, all full of himself? Name’s Ruirui, one of the royal family from China, ’kay? Still, he’s nothing more than the shabby king of the Bamboo in this town now, maybe two hundred of ’em at best. There’s this thing, like a festival, celebrating fifty years since his enthronement. So maybe the prisoners in barrels’ll be given amnesty.”
“You sure know a lot about it, Marika.”
A fair bit of snow had piled up on either side of the road. I slipped and nearly fell, and Marika reached out a hand to hold me up. I laughed to myself. Humans are so weird. On a snowy road like this we should just fly, and yet we can’t do that.
The sky was pitch-black. The falling snowflakes shone individually, reflecting the little light there was.
Ah, it’s so beautiful. And you know, it had been a long time since I’d really looked at the sky. This was maybe the first time since the night of the big fight. I felt like I was finally waking up from a bad dream.
The world during the day was actually beautiful. The way the ocean glittered in the morning. The giant columns of clouds that spread out in the summer sky. The radiant green leaves. The heat of the sand on the soles of your feet. The fragrant scent when the sweat that came along with that heat dried instantly in the sunlight.
The Bamboo couldn’t experience this daytime world. They didn’t grow, either. So they didn’t get the fond feeling that this brilliance was only for the present moment. The conviction that I wanted to be a Bamboo started to fade soundlessly from my heart.
“Bamboo life’s kinda weird,” I said, jokingly.
Marika grinned, playfully. And then her face got serious. “So, like, Nako?”
“Yeah.”
“This has been kinda bugging me. But this is g
oodbye, so I guess I’ll just ask you. Are you, like, a boy?”
“What?!” I panicked.
Which made Marika flustered too. “No!” she continued, hurriedly. “I mean, it’s no big deal. It’s just, you smell different from girls! It started to bug me, you know? But why are you pretending to be a girl? And since when?”
“That’s—ever since I was ten. People are after me, you know? My Bamboo are worried about me, so they made me dress like this. Said I’d be killed if anyone found out I was a boy.”
Marika suddenly got a serious look on her face and nodded. “So that’s it. Okay, I’ll keep it to myself. I won’t tell a soul. You can relax.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, but…are we really not going to hang out anymore?” Her voice was sad. Her eyes seemed soft. She was actually incredibly cute. I could hardly stand it.
I went to answer her but stopped abruptly. “Huh? Marika, did you hear something? From above?”
The next moment, something, not snow, shone in the night sky… Several silhouettes dropped down, lustrous capes fluttering.
“Huh?” Before we knew it, we were completely surrounded. Me and Marika.
Adult men and women. More than ten of them. Most were Asian or Central or South American, but there were also two white Russians. From the way they held themselves, they were definitely not amateurs. They were different from even the guys on the bottom rung of the organization in the town above. There was no wasted movement. They were eerily expressionless.
And they had come flying down from the sky. I thought, They’re Bamboo!
Yoji’s voice came back to me: First of all, people are after her. You can’t run from them.
Marika grabbed my wrist and tried to leap into the sky, but she was slapped down like a mosquito and fell to the ground. She hit the snow hard. My arms were twisted back, and I was pushed down face-first.
From above us, I heard a low voice. “Secured!”
“Two offenders.”
The open but nonoperational cannery. Past midnight. Candlesticks were set out, and candles in a variety of designs hurriedly lit. Then, in what had looked like a vast, empty darkness, I saw face after pale face emerge into the shallow light. They had been there in the darkness. They had been there the whole time. People in garish primary-colored hats and head dressings. The Bamboo who walked the night.
No one said anything; they simply glared in my direction, looking angry. They looked like Mustah when he was in a bad mood. Aah, there really is a Bamboo look, I thought.
In the center of the immense space was the ancient silver throne. Sitting there was a child of twelve or thirteen from the looks of him, a heavy, shiny blue thing on his head that swung each time he moved. At least, he was probably a boy. The pitch of his voice, untouched by puberty, was innocent, in total dissonance with the fierceness of the edge in it. He held a sheet of orange paper in his hand, and this he spread out importantly.
I was in the center of this apparently hastily convened meeting, made to sit on my knees on the ground. One of my wrists was bound by handcuffs, locked to a post driven into the dirt floor.
“Now, now, the first one.” The boy raised his hand ponderously, accompanied by the rustling of fabric, and the Bamboo let their eyes roam.
The boy was probably the one Marika had told me about—Ruirui, the son of the royal family who had come from the depths of China on an immigrant ship. He looked like he had just started junior high school, but I was sure he was actually a super-old man. There was an indescribable coldness in the depths of his eyes. Just like with the other Bamboo, I couldn’t read the look on his face. Not anger, not contempt, nothing. His eyes frightened me to the core; they made me feel like I would be sucked into their pitch-black centers at any moment, trapped in the oxygenless depths of outer space.
On his signal, Marika was dragged out and roughly tossed before him.
“Ah!” I cried out, because I could see at a glance she’d been tortured. Her left arm had been torn off—it was completely gone—and one of her ears was missing. When I looked carefully, I saw that the tip of her nose had also been shaved away. She was half-naked. Her head lolled to one side, her whole body limp. She didn’t meet my eyes.
“Marika…” Had her arm been ripped off because she’d told me, a human, where the meeting was? Had they found out? I was the one who’d made her tell me, though. She’d just been trying to make this human happy.
And then a middle-aged man stepped up to the throne, elegant, with perfect posture, and handed the boy a paper to read. “Name: Marika,” he announced, in a plain-spoken voice. “Age: estimated to be around seventy. Gender: female. And her crimes are two. First, the crime of bringing a human to the meeting place and allowing the human to see, half in jest.”
A murmur rose up. All at once, all Bamboo eyes were on me. I shrank back.
Suddenly, I wondered if my Bamboo were among the crowd. I lifted my face and quickly looked around. But all I could see were pale faces and hats and feet lit up here and there in the thick darkness, so I couldn’t really tell.
“And the crime of killing and eating humans. At least seven confirmed.”
Ruirui continued. “Thus, our judgment is—”
“W-wait!” I shouted desperately, to stop Ruirui from continuing his stilted speech in his high voice, like he was reading from the orange paper.
“Eh?” His voice could not have been colder. With his gaze, he looked at me as though he were peering down at a stray dog on the side of the road.
When I met those eyes, I shivered again. Such cold, empty eyes. But I mustered up my courage. I mean, Marika had said, after all, that they might take that extra stuff into consideration and give her a shorter sentence. And she was in such pain she couldn’t speak anymore. I had to…
“It’s true that Marika did kill people. But…” The Bamboo stirred once again. “She only targeted criminals, liars, and cheats. People who hadn’t been caught for doing bad things. I know it was still wrong and against the law. But, please…have even just a little mercy on her.”
“We have investigated.” Ruirui’s tone was unchanged, still icy. He gave a signal to the older man next to him.
The man explained, “With the cooperation of a human accomplice, Marika found and attacked criminals. The accomplice’s investigative skills were indeed solid, and I think quite sharp for a high school student. Unfortunately, the human she killed before the accomplice appeared was falsely accused.”
“…Falsely accused?”
“A school teacher was assaulted and killed by a thief. Marika attacked the man she assumed to be the criminal. A janitor from the same workplace.”
The image of Marika crouched over him, drinking his blood the night we first met, came back to my mind. So it was that time…
“But he was not the perpetrator.”
“No way…”
“The locals have an inkling of this as well, but it seems they didn’t go out of their way to report it. The criminal is rumored to be a man who was once his student. Someone who lives in poverty and has committed repeated acts of violence on the road at night. Apparently, in this case, he didn’t realize that his target was someone he knew. His name is Niita.”
Niita? I stared up at the man, dumbfounded.
He stared down at me. “The residents started to say this a few days after the incident. No one told you, hmm?”
Ashamed, I slowly shook my head. I mean, I hadn’t seen anyone. The more I chased my dreams, the further away I got from my old friends.
The wind blew in through the open doors, bringing gusts of snow with it. The flames of the candles flickered.
I hung my head.
“Thus it is deemed that there are no extenuating circumstances to consider in this crime,” Ruirui continued in his high voice. “Marika shall be imprisoned for sixty years! Given her presume
d age of approximately seventy, she will likely reach the end of her life in the earth, burst into bloom alone, and disappear. Hmph! It’s quite the fitting punishment. Ready the barrel!”
An elliptical-looking barrel came rolling out from somewhere noisily, and they threw Marika in roughly, like she was a thing. Then a heavy machine roared into the factory and started digging a hole in the earth. Dirt came flying in my direction. A lid was placed on the barrel, and then the whole thing was dropped into the hole. Marika’s anguished screams filled the vast space.
I wanted to plug my ears. My knees shook in fear. Earth was tossed onto the barrel in the hole until I could no longer see the top of it. Marika’s voice gradually grew fainter until it faded from my ears.
Silence fell. There was only the sound of the blowing wind now. The candles flickered gently.
“Now, then.” His voice fearsome, Ruirui turned toward me. As if to say, this is where the real party starts.
I trembled, but I didn’t avert my eyes.
“A problem! There is a grave problem! According to Marika’s testimony, this human has extremely detailed knowledge about the life of the Bamboo, yes? Ladies and gentlemen, can this be tolerated? It means that someone has taught this human about us. Someone among the Bamboo gathered together here tonight! From what we’ve heard, this human was somehow lovingly raised by Bamboo instead of receiving the love of a parent, yes?!” Ruirui shouted all in one breath.
I didn’t know how he’d managed his declaration without a moment to inhale. That was scary too, and I was frozen in place, all the courage drained out of me. The chain attached to my wrist shook every so often. The uncomfortable clamoring of the Bamboo grew louder.
“It did take some time to get all this out of her, however. Fwoh! Fwoh! Fwoh! Gyah! Gyah!” Ruirui had a strange way of laughing. His appearance and voice were those of a child, but the way he wrinkled up his face and curled into himself as he guffawed was all old man.
I remembered Marika’s shaved nose, her missing ear. A Bamboo’s injuries closed over soon enough, but anything cut off wouldn’t grow back. She had been tortured because she’d become friends with me. I bit my lip. What was I going to do? Marika!
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