“I don’t know who he is. I’ve only written one other scene with him. He seems to be working with a powerful organization, like maybe the government or underworld.”
“Underworld? With demons?”
“With criminals.” She frowned as “demons” rolled around in her mind. Her hypergraphia liked the idea that Scary Cat Dude was linked to something otherworldly. Normally she would embrace such a notion, but then, normally, every thing in her books stayed fiction. The burned down shrine and the dead bodies were inescapable truth.
“He was at the shrine?” Atsumori asked.
“Yes.” She flipped back through her notebook. She hadn’t had a chance to type in the scene. “That was his first scene.” She read over the pages, aware that Atsumori seemed to be scanning them with her. Did Japanese gods read English? She supposed it wouldn’t be very godlike if they couldn’t.
Atsumori thought aloud with a deep “Hmm.”
Nikki really wished that if she could hear him, she could also see him. “What?”
“The tanuki, it killed the gaijin?”
“Yes, Harada killed . . .” She was now confusing her character name with the real man. Which was which? Not a good sign. “. . .him. In my story, the gaijin worked for an American insurance company.” Was it true for the real man, too? She hated the idea of assuming what she wrote as fiction to be the whole truth. The fiction, though, explained why a businessman would suddenly become a criminal overnight. The real man kept rope in his bedroom dresser. “He had some kinks that would be illegal in the United States. He liked the image clubs in Dontonbori.”
An image club had a variety of fantasy settings, and their prostitutes would dress up in costumes. As long as full penetration didn’t take place, it was perfectly legal. He liked his women as young as possible, in a school uniform, either in a subway car or a classroom. “He kept pushing the limits of the law until he found a yakuza-run image club that let him go beyond them.”
The club, had brought him into the orbit of Harada and various other characters in her book. They gave him a twelve-year-old Chinese girl and enough rope to hang himself with.
“They took videos of him with a child. It would have gotten him arrested here in Japan, but in United States, he would have been labeled as a monster for the rest of his life.”
“So it was these yakuza that sent him to my shrine?” Atsumori asked.
She nodded. “They told him to get a camera and pretend to be a tourist. To walk around and take pictures. He could go where no Japanese could. Where no Japanese would. He didn’t believe in kami; he wasn’t afraid of their wrath. They talked as if he would be safe from the kami.”
“Humans like him are rare. If Misa had not taken my shintai off the shrine grounds, I would have only been able to protect her indirectly. I couldn’t stop him. Not before he killed her. Nor afterwards. He was like scrabbling against polished stone.”
“Harada had heard of the fire at the shrine and guessed that Gregory had set it. He went to Gregory’s place disguised and, once inside the apartment, demanded the sword.” The scene had confused her, as Gregory had started out treating Harada as an old friend that he was trying to brush off and then realized that he was talking to the tanuki. Until Harada broke the blender’s glass pitcher against Gregory’s head, the scene had been all dialogue and no description. Then everything had been Gregory—his pain, his screams, his blood. There hadn’t been anything about his killer. She hadn’t even been sure that Harada was a “he.” It was as if she knew describing him would be useless, that she knew that he could utterly change his appearance.
Self-referential delusions, she reminded herself. She clicked her ballpoint.
The great entrance of the Inari Shrine was within a stone’s throw of the tiny train station. As Nikki walked under the towering gate, Atsumori appeared beside her. It was weirdly comforting to be able to see him. In the timeless entrance plaza, he looked proper for the setting despite the sober kimono and topknot.
The shrine was the biggest she had ever seen. There were dozens of buildings within sight, gilded and brightly painted. A large bronze statue of a fox sat beside stairs leading up to the main temple, a red bib tied about its neck. It seemed to frown down at her, a large granary key in its mouth. Originally the god of rice, Inari had moved into the modern day by becoming the god of success and prosperity in business. The lavish temple was proof of the Japanese’s belief in the god. There had been two Inari shrines within walking distance of Nikki’s apartment in Otemae. She had toured them with curiosity but without reverence. She didn’t believe in her mothers’ one god; her childhood had been too unjust for there to be a benevolent protecting spirit. She certainly hadn’t believed in the complex Japanese mythology. Why a mischievous fox as the god of business? It seemed at once charming, childlike, and completely random.
If the kami Atsumori was real, and evidence was amounting that she wasn’t completely delusional, what of Inari?
“Please, pray.” Atsumori motioned to the front of the main shrine building. There were nearly a score of sturdy ropes leading up to bells hung overhead. Obviously he meant for her to pray like the Japanese did.
She fished out her coin purse and peered into it. How much should she offer? Normally people offered five-and ten-yen coins—basically the equivalent of nickel and dimes. She’d used up all her small coins making the phone call to Pixii. She only had one-yen and five-hundred-yen coins. Dropping four pennies into the offering box seemed insulting, but tossing five dollars in seemed too extravagant, but if there was a slim chance that Inari was going to answer her prayer, she wanted to be on his good side. She read once that the offering boxes were constructed so that the noise of coins falling would be loud, drawing the god’s attention. Thinking of how Atsumori had slept through Misa’s death, she dropped a five-hundred-yen coin into the box, shook the rope forcefully to ring the bell loudly, and then clapped her hands as hard as she could.
“Please help us purify Atsumori’s shintai.” She bowed.
Atsumori bowed along side her.
After a minute of silence, she asked. “Now what?”
“Five hundred yen for a purification?”
She jerked around, yelping in surprise.
A handsome Japanese boy grinned down at her. His hair was cut and styled into wild spikes, and he wore a high school uniform with disheveled grace. “Five hundred yen not nearly enough.”
“How much is it?”
“What do you have?” He had her backpack off her shoulder and unzipped before she even realized he was reaching for it.
“Give that back!”
He pushed the paper bag containing the panty liners into her outstretched hands. “Don’t need that. Hmm, this is interesting.”
He was pulling her computer out of her backpack.
“No!” She dropped the panty liners and jerked her computer out of his hands. Hugging it to her chest, she backed away from it. “This isn’t for trade, baka.” It was one of the few Japanese insults that she knew. “We have yen. We can pay for it. Just tell us how much.”
“What’s the fun of that?” He strolled away, still rooting through her backpack.
“Hey!” She snatched up her panty liners and chased after him. “That is mine.”
“That’s up for debate.” He waved one of two rice balls she had saved for her lunch in the air before biting into it.
“It is not! That is my backpack, my belongings, my lunch!”
“Yet you come begging for a purification.”
“I was not begging.”
“Yes, we were,” Atsumori murmured.
Nikki glared at him.
“I asked you to pray to Inari for help,” Atsumori said. “Prayer is to ask earnestly for help from one greater than yourself. That is begging.”
“I don’t want to argue semantics right now,” Nikki whispered to Atsumori. “Can we have this discussion at some other time?”
“No, we’re having it now,” the boy mumbl
ed around the remains of her rice ball. “You should always understand the nature of the relationship that you’re entering into before you commit to it.”
“Give me back my backpack, and then we’ll have this conversation.”
He stole the second rice ball and the mini bottle of wine out of her backpack and then tossed it to her. “Number one: humans are like rocks.”
“What?” Nikki carefully tucked her computer back into place and zipped her backpack shut.
“I’m defining the nature of the relationship.” The boy beckoned, continuing up the staircase out of the grand square. “Humans can be porous as sand or solid as granite.”
“You mean in terms of a kami affecting them?”
“Exactly. Number two: kami are like water. They flow. How well they can flow into a human depends on how porous the human is.”
“What does this have to do with purifying the katana?”
The boy laughed and twisted the lid off the wine. “Everything.” He took a swig. “Or nothing. That is what you need to decide.”
The stairs led up and up through countless bright red torii spaced less a foot apart. It was one thing to know from the guidebooks that they numbered over ten thousand, but it was another thing to see them marching up the mountainside, seemingly without end. It felt like some odd twist to reality.
“I don’t understand,” Nikki said.
“Number one: humans are like rocks.”
“You said that.”
“It bears repeating until you understand it. Most humans are somewhat porous, but they’re not easy for a kami to flow into. Most humans need to perform rituals to open themselves up for a kami to enter. Some humans are solid as granite; not even Susanoo can push his way into them. A handful of humans are like sand.”
Atsumori had taken her over without a ritual.
“I’m like sand?” Nikki said.
“Are you?” The boy smiled innocently.
Nikki considered the boy. Who was he? What was he? Could he see and hear Atsumori—or had he merely reacted to her side of the conversation? “I don’t know.”
The boy took another swig of wine. “I would think that would be a very dangerous thing not to know about oneself.”
“How is it dangerous?
“Number two: kami are like water.” He laughed at the look of disgust she gave him, and then he sobered. “Have you ever seen what water can do to rocks?”
They had been steadily climbing the gentle wooded slope of the mountain flanking Kyoto. The path weaved back and forth through the trees, nearly continuously flanked by the red-painted torii. It had rained that morning, and the water dripped from the leaves.
They were suddenly overrun by a dozen high school student girls in tan skirts and blazers coming down the mountain. The girls went by silent and shy as a herd of deer. Atsumori and the boy had stepped off the path, so there was no way to judge if the girls had seen either one.
Was their guide a kami pretending to be a high school student? Or was he a human possessed by a god? Or just a kid messing with Nikki’s head? The only godlike thing about the boy was that he spoke English as fluently as Atsumori.
Of course, that all looped back to the possibility that she might be alone, wondering around lost. Certainly she had no idea where they were headed except “up.”
“Where are we going?” Nikki asked.
The boy drifted out into the middle of path, walking backwards as he spoke. “A shrine maiden will have to do the purification. After it is done, your angry friend will be free to wreak his revenge, whether you want to join in or not.”
“Revenge?” Nikki turned to look at Atsumori.
“I will not force you,” Atsumori said quietly. “The gaijin was merely a tool that could be safely used. If we do not deal with the yakuza . . .”
“No.” Nikki stopped walking.
“ . . . they will be free to use someone else to take my shintai.”
She unslung the katana from her shoulder.
Atsumori’s eyes went wide. “Please, I beg you, do not abandon me.”
Their guide took three quick steps back, distancing himself from her. “No, I can not take it.”
Nikki considered just laying the sword down and trying to walk away. Would Atsumori let her? Could she actually do it? He’d been trapped with the locker at the crowded train station, hundreds of thousands of people walking past him and not one able to help him. Here he would be stuck on the path until someone came: a high school student, a priest, or a random businessman. He would be at their mercy. Knowing the lawfulness of the Japanese, the sword would be taken to the local police station.
“Nikki, please, for a thousand years, my family has guarded my shintai. Those men sent a gaijin to kill my beloved child and burn down my home. They sent a tanuki to kill you and take me back. We cannot just ignore them and hope they leave us both alone.”
She glanced to their guide, who took another step back.
It would be like walking away from a man without legs as he pleaded with her for help. How far could Atsumori follow her, begging her to come back? All the way down the mountain to the shrine’s gate?
Meanwhile, the police would recognize the katana as the one stolen from Misa and probably dust it for prints and check for blood. They’d find Harada’s blood and Nikki’s fingerprints. Thanks to Gregory’s murder, her prints were in the Japanese database.
The sword was real. Atsumori might be nothing more than her own madness. Leaving the sword would not distance herself from her own insanity.
“Fine.” She shouldered the katana again. “But you will not use me to kill the yakuza.”
Atsumori studied the ground for a moment, his jaw set. “I will not force you.”
Somehow they had circled back to the first courtyard of the shrine. A heavy downpour started, clearing the plaza as people darted for cover. Most gathered in the little gift shop along the left wall of the square. Their guide dashed to the kaguraden. Nikki followed, annoyed that they had walked up and down the mountain for no reason—unless the reason was just to give her time to understand how completely screwed she was.
The open stage of the kaguraden was worn bare by hundreds of years of use. The sliding doors of the back wall had been painted with a mural nearly worn off. Only the suggestion of green treetops or mountain ranges remained. Shrine maidens in brilliant red trousers and crisp white short kimono tops had gathered along with musicians in kimonos. They went still in surprise as Nikki came up the stairs, dripping wet.
The oldest of the shrine maidens padded up to Nikki. “You wait.” She pointed across the square to the gift shop crowded with tourists.
“Sumimasen,” Nikki bowed and apologized.
“Akane, she is my honored guest,” the boy said in English.
The woman gasped slightly, her hand going to her mouth. She whispered something in Japanese.
It triggered an oddly stilted conversation.
“She has a sword that needs to be purified,” the boy continued in English. “Burn what she is wearing.”
“What?” Nikki cried.
The woman asked a question.
“You smell of blood,” the boy said. “You will need to be purified as well as the sword.”
“I’m a size eight. Do you know how hard it is to find jeans in Japan for me? Girls are like little twigs here!”
“You can wear a yukata.”
Nikki squeaked in protest. “I—I—I stand out enough.”
The woman asked another question in Japanese.
“You’re a blonde-hair, blue-eyed female, and traveling alone,” the boy said. “You couldn’t stand out any more than if you wore a monkey suit. A yukata won’t make a difference.”
Nikki noticed that none of the shrine maidens were actually looking at the boy as he spoke. Most of them were staring at Nikki as if she’d grown two heads. She supposed that a dripping wet woman with a sword would get that reaction. She wished she understood what the shrine maiden was sayin
g to confirm that she wasn’t the only one seeing the boy.
“You can stop at Isetan at the station,” the boy said. “I promise you there will be a pair your size.”
Could he promise that because he was Inari, god of good fortune? Or was he just a schoolboy saying whatever he needed to say to get her to cooperate?
The shrine maiden said something in Japanese, and the others stirred out of their confusion. Before she even knew what was happening, she was led back to a prehistoric bath and four women were attempting to strip her.
“No, no, no!” She smacked away their hands as she flashed suddenly to her first compliancy hearing, where her mother had done everything in her power to put Nikki’s hypergraphia into overdrive. For some stupid reason, the laws allowed “emergency hospitalization” for seventy-two hours before a commitment hearing. “Harrowing” didn’t even come close to describing the showers that the orderlies put her through for three days prior to the hearing. She swung up the katana to block their attempts, gripping the hilt in a way that should translate in any language. “Don’t touch me! Don’t fucking touch . . .”
. . . she was kneeling in the kaguraden as the shrine maidens danced around her to drum and flute. She was dressed in a white yukata, smelling faintly of soap. Her hair was gathered into a ponytail, still damp against the back of her neck. The katana lay on the worn wooden floor in front of her. Atsumori knelt beside her.
“I told you not to do that,” she growled and started to rise.
“That was not me.” Atsumori spoke in a rush, motioning for her to stay kneeling. “Lord Inari did not want you to harm his servants. You should not have threatened them with the katana.”
She glared at him but gravity and her knees forced her to sink back into a kneeling position. “You should have stopped him.”
“I cannot.” Atsumori bowed his head to the floor. “I know that I told you that I would protect you, but the truth is that I am not a match in power to Lord Inari. He is a god. I am a simple samurai.”
Or a complex psychosis brought on by years of abuse.
She glanced about her for some indication that someone else was aware of Atsumori.