My latest short story
Shōjō is now available free on Smashwords, and can be downloaded there in a variety of formats, with my best wishes. For more of my writing, click
here.
A disillusioned author rediscovers her sense of wonder at a fantasy convention
in Japan during the mid-autumn festival, a time rumored to open gates to other worlds.
Arigato gozaimasu to Kenji Ichishima,
whose gracious hospitality and superb sake inspired this tale.
Shōjō
5 October 2017, Wednesday
Yuki lowered the blinds to mute
the rising light, and turned to face the body on the morgue gurney.
Gently pulling back the sheet that covered it, she gave a deep bow
and mentally reassured the corpse.
I didn't want us to meet this
way, Umigame-sama. Perhaps I'm being punished for hoping too much.
But at any rate, I promise that this won't be an autopsy. Nothing
intrusive that might offend your remains. I wouldn't dream of it.
Across the little bay she could
hear the bass throb of pop music emanating from the deck of the
conference hotel. This was the big night of the gathering, and most
of the attendees were as yet unaware that one of the guest authors had been found washed up on the shore only an hour ago—an
old woman freshly dead, recently drowned. Even fewer would have known
the woman's real name, since for decades she had gone by the
pseudonym of Umigame, or sea turtle.
I read every
one of your books,
Yuki thought. Cover
to cover, again and again. They helped me through so many hard times.
I brought my favorite for you to sign. Her
attention fixed on the slim green branch as yet inextricably clutched in one of the dead
woman's rigored hands, and her heart twitched. If
only you hadn't picked up that damned bamboo, you'd still be alive.
If it hadn't been for Sumida's stomach flu that made me have to fill
in for him tonight, you and I would have met. I'd been looking
forward to this night all year. So many things I wanted to say, but
now ...
Blinking back angry tears, Yuki
drew a deep calming breath and continued her examination, recalling
the words of one of the police, a young man new to the force and
still impressionable.
"At least she died smiling,"
he'd said. However, anyone with experience would have judged the
expression to be a rictus caused by terror at the onset of death,
especially since the corpse's eyes were open.
But I know
better, Yuki
thought, her gaze moving from the fixed pale-blue stare to the
unmoving enigmatic lips. Your
true face was the most beautiful mask in all of Noh, the waka-onna. The
face of a young girl of high birth, a maiden of the emperor's
court or the celestial realm. The sort of girl you used to write
about, gentle and fearless, that so many girls like me identified with.
Yuki would note in her report
that the cause of death was drowning, but that the subject's long history
of heart disease had very likely played a part. And there was another
factor that only Yuki could ascertain.
"Forgive
the intrusion," she whispered to the corpse. Unwrapping a
syringe, she folded back one of the damp haori sleeves to bare the
arm, and took a blood sample. The results of the analysis should have
shocked her, but she merely drew in and let out a long, slow breath.
The blood's alcohol content was far too high to be possible, most certainly beyond
anything ever recorded, but the reporters downstairs waiting for
their story would never know. Yuki had no intention of stripping and
scalpeling the rest of the inert form and its interior. She had
observed, examined and recorded a great deal of death, and for her
the bodies of the aged were books she didn't want to read because
they were so grimly sad. The wrinkles, the ravages, the scars. Umi of
course would have her share of them. Yuki had no right to know. The
very thought felt sacrilegious.
4
October 2017, Wednesday evening
The Tanuki Brothers were rocking
the house. Umi had seen them wandering the conference all day, three
plump and jovial raccoon-dogs with trademark massive testicles
roguishly a-waggle. Now, as the sun began to set, the trio had
progressed to the hotel's outdoor bar to perform an energetic
scrotum-swinging line dance as the happy-hour crowd bellowed a
cherished childhood song:
Tan tan tanuki kintama wa
Kaze mo nai no ni bura bura
Tan tan tanuki's giant baaaaalls
Wobble-wobble with no breeze at
aaaaall!
Umi
watched the innocently ribald show as she sipped her Kirin and
considered how the congregation of her Alabama hometown's Baptist
church might have reacted to find one of their favorite hymns so
enthusiastically appropriated. Smiling, she joined her voice to the
tipsy roar.
“Shall we gather at the river,
The beautiful, beautiful
river...”
It was because of such wry
cultural rifts that she had chosen to call herself Umigame. She'd
felt like a hatchling once, shucking out of her tight leathery egg
and making her way alone with fierce swift-flippered determination to
the sea. Now she was a ponderous old tortoise with a battered shell,
peering and sluggish, but she had swum far through wide waters to get
where she was now. It had been a long time since she'd attended a
conference, but she was an honored guest at this one, and tonight's
awards ceremony would recognize her lifetime achievement as a
novelist of fantasy based on Japanese lore and legend.
I should be
thrilled,
Umi thought, fixing her gaze on the last of her lukewarm brew as the
song ended and the tanuki bounded away and J-pop once again bumped
and blared on the sound system. Heaven
knows I've tried to be.
But it hadn't
been possible. She was now part of the past, her books seldom read
and increasingly unknown. Current trends ruled the conference
proceedings, and the several thousand attendees that thronged the
place were mostly very young and disguised as movie monsters and
video-game characters and comic-book superbeings. The dealer's room
was devoted mostly to tie-in tchotchkes, and the panels and talks
were dominated by celebrities half her age. A
cheery thirtyish attendee in futuristic pirate gear, evidently
intrigued by Umi's monkish aspect—haori, hakama, zori,
driftwood-gray close-cropped hair and paintless face now
gender-neutral with age—had asked her who she represented. She had
replied Umigame, received a puzzled stare and a hurried phone-search
in turn, and learned that her moniker was shared by several anime
entities, none of whom she resembled in the slightest.
Dismissing that memory with a
sigh, Umi pushed aside her empty glass and considered the evening's
options. The outdoor bar was growing ever more thronged and raucous
as dusk drew on, since the cloudless broiling days of an unforeseen
heat wave had persuaded most of the conference attendees, especially
those as cumbrously costumed as the Tanuki Brothers, to stay indoors
until sunset. The awards reception wouldn't start for another hour.
Umi had been invited to join some fellow elders for drinks in the
Westernized, well-cushioned, air-conditioned, oldies-rock-themed
lounge, but the sea-breeze of the impending evening was delicious,
drawing her to the beach. She hadn't been down to the ocean since the
conference started, and tonight the moon would be full; she didn't
want to miss its rising.
The Japanese tradition of moon-viewing, tsukimi, was a ritual of quiet contemplation and impromptu poetry. Umi decided to
create one just for herself, and with that aim moved away from the
hotel down to the sands. She sought to compose her thoughts, but
memories begun with the tanukis' dance
scudded through her mind like wind-driven mists.
During her
Tuscaloosa childhood her only link to Japan had been a yard-sale
music box that when opened played an alien, poignant tune while a
little pink plastic ballerina whirled about. Umi had wound and
rewound the music as she dreamily wondered about the pointed
buildings and robed ladies on the lid’s painted landscape, until
her grandfather, a Navy gunner in the Pacific during the second world
war, kicked the "heathen Jap trash" to pieces during one of his rotgut
rages. Umi had coldly avoided the old man ever afterward, during
which time she discovered that the sad little song was Kojo no Tsuki,
Moon Over the Ruined Castle, and that the odd structures were
pagodas. In time she inevitably learned, too, that the box she’d
thought so dazzling was cheaply made and gaudy. Now she owned an
Edo-period incense cabinet of exquisitely worked makie,
but still kept the rescued ballerina in one of its drawers.
The box had made
her write stories about it, which she never showed to anyone lest she
be laughed at. She kept writing them through high school, helped
along by library books that told her the Tale of Genji and introduced
her to the wry serenity of Basho's haiku and the restless acerbity of
Kenko's reflections, the still acceptance of Zen, the way of the
sword, the ritual of tea, the mysteries of kimono, the arts of
geisha. Scorning every discouragement, she had been the first of her
family to go to college, where she'd immersed herself in Japanese
culture and grown fluent in the language, versed in the land's
history, its many unique and wondrous arts, the treasures of its
literature and the uncanny profusion of its folklore. Then at last,
when she finally felt herself deserving, came the union with the land
itself that had become her first and only love, the inspiration for
the books that found publishers and readers and entirely unexpected success.
But like so many of the beings she created, she would always be
apart, no longer of her homeland yet irrevocably alien to the world
she had chosen; and she learned to make that bittersweet anomie the
focus of her tales, the strength of her protagonists who never quite fit in yet would always
overcome and triumph, but always at a cost.
She had been
walking faster and faster, and now her heart was beating much too hard. Halting to gasp for breath, she opened the little
dragonfly-decorated inro
that held her meds. As she swallowed one of the precious case's
assortment of pills, Umi found that she’d wandered away from the
bristle of high-rise hotels to a region of empty dunes. In her
spirit's depths she had always lived at the edge of the sea, neither
on water nor on land, part of the shifting foam, tied to nothing.
As if summoned by her thoughts, a
branch of bamboo still fresh and green tumbled onto the shore, close
to her feet. Umi waited for the tide to take it back, but it only
pushed the branch closer, as if insistently. Wryly remembering old
lore, Umi bent to retrieve the stalk, shaking it free of the salt
water that clung to the leaves and resting the branch on her shoulder
as she looked out to sea. At that moment the moon began its rise,
heralding its entrance with a pale glow at the horizon’s edge. The
tsukimi was about to begin. Umi watched, and whispered a poem.
“Wabinureba
mi
wo ukikusa no
ne wo taete
saso fu midu araba
inamu to zo
omo fu...”
Alone and desolate
Like a
water-weed:
Cut my roots and
Let me drift – if the stream
did that,
I should go, I think.
Soft applause startled Umi out of
her reverie. A listener was standing a little distance away, likewise
contemplating the nascent moonrise: one of the conference attendees,
a young man she’d privately christened Kitsune-dono because of his
dashing style, assured urbanity and slightly vulpine charm. He'd been
one of the few young people at her reading, and unlike his
counterparts had sat near the front row and asked a couple of good
questions afterward. He was in his late twenties, slender and
tautly-shaped, with the theatrical flair of a kabuki actor. Although
his conference garb had been offhandedly trendy, he now wore a
striking purple and white yukata, and his long hair was tied back
near the top of his head in a sheaf that waved in the sea-breeze. Umi
reflected that had she been anywhere close to his age she'd have
exerted herself to know him better, but now...
To her
unlooked-for happiness he approached her and bowed low. “Komban
wa, sensei.”
Then he straightened and switched to English. “It’s a good night
for quoting Lady Komachi.”
“You have remarkable ears,”
Umi replied, reciprocating his bow with a grateful nod. “Then
again, I should have expected it.”
The young man surprised Umi by
flashing a grin and putting his upright index fingers aside his
temples. But the fox-gesture lasted only an instant before shifting
to another. “Are you sure you want to be carrying that?” Lowering
one hand to indicate the bamboo she carried, he tapped the side of
his head with the other's forefinger and lifted an implicative brow.
Mindful of lore, Umi gave a
patient but slightly weary smile. “Because it means that I’m
either out of my mind, entering the realm of the spirits, or both?”
“It could be. This is a special
night. The mid-autumn moon.”
A stray breeze wafted the hectic
throb of pop bass from the hotel, and Umi smiled in her wonted
tight-lipped way. “I suppose that explains the celebration at the
bar, and why we're the only ones here. Mid-autumn's a far bigger
deal in China, but I have to say I prefer mochi to moon cake.”
The young man
smiled as if in agreement. “Still, every temple in town will be
welcoming the good kami
and asking the bad ones to behave themselves.” His keen glance
surveyed the sky, the beach, the sea, the division where tide met
land. “Don't you wonder why this area isn't developed? It's
because it's sacred to the kami.
Has been for centuries.” Kitsune-dono reached out and ran a finger
over one of Umi’s bamboo leaves. “Anything’s possible,
tonight.”
His oblique beauty, his soft
voice with its polished perfect English, his youth that seemed
endless, made Umi turn away. He was mocking her, or trying to
frighten her, or both; and he would not succeed. “I’ve learned
that a great many things that could happen never do, and never will,”
she said, less calmly than she wished as she met his eyes again.
He gave the slightest shrug, the
faintest smile. “Your novel that featured the court mage Abe no
Seimei was one of my favorites. It was clear that you'd visited his
shrine in Kyoto, and crossed the bridge that joins worlds. Dipped
your fingers in the star well.” He gestured to the little silver
pendant around her neck. “You wear that star.”
Umi half-laughed. “I can't tell
you how many times it's been mistaken for a pentagram. I've even been wished a happy Mabon today. But thank
you for liking that story, because it's one of my favorites too.”
“Would you kindly autograph it
for me at the signing event tomorrow?”
“That and any other books
you've brought.”
He bowed very
deeply. “Domo.
I do love how all your stories feature yokai, by the way. How they
always make a difference, good or bad. But I’m sure I’m detaining
you. Enjoy your walk.”
Umi had wanted to ask him to join
her if he liked, but his gaze had moved to the drunken revels now
giggly with pretty girls in cute costumes. Nodding an almost curt farewell she
moved past him down the beach, fighting the loose sand clogging her
footsteps.
When after some distance she
halted to turn around, Kitsune-dono was gone. Umi felt a twinge of
regret perhaps tinted with anxiety, but she willed herself to ignore
it, remembering that she was here for beauty’s sake. Always in her
life beauty had rescued her, given her hope, made existence bearable.
Turning back to the water, she watched with mute awe as the moon
slipped free of the ocean and seemed to hesitate on the world's edge,
shy as a shrine-maiden. The sky was utterly cloudless, deep blue overhead fading into the palest rose where sky and sea converged. Filling her world with the rising silver
disk, Umi softly sang the lyrics to the music-box song.
Haru
koro no hana no en
Meguru
sakazuki kagesashite
Chiyo no
matsu gae wakeideshi
Mukashi
no hikari Ima izuko.
Cherry
blossom castle revels
Wine bright
with moon-glow;
Silver
gleams amid pine branches
Joys of
long ago.
Ah,
those joys. Ono no Komachi had known them to the full, in her days of
youth and beauty: the luxury of many-layered jewel-hued gossamer
silks perfumed with precious incense, the pride of knee-length
night-black hair and pearl-pale flawless skin, the heady revels at
glittering banquets, the secret language of fans, the whispered pleas
of noble lovers. Beyond doubt she would have regarded this place with
the same poignant awe which Umi now felt—the mingled pang of joy
and regret, mono
no aware.
For
a long time Umi drank in the perfect world around her—the lapping
quiet waves, the smooth pale sands, the tranquil gloaming, the moon's
nascent majesty. Then with the end of her bamboo branch she wrote her
name in the sand, her real one, and watched as the moonlit tide
reached out with careless white fingers of foam and dashed it away.
A noise in the near distance at
her back caught her attention, a faint hollow clanking that she now
realized had been going on for a long while. Turning, Umi discovered
a little derelict Shinto shrine surrounded by tall faded grass, its
vermilion-painted wood faded by time, its curved roof's shingles
splintered. Sea-breezes had stirred the worn rope of its rusty bell,
causing it to sound. The shrine had been built to honor the kami of
the sea, but it also welcomed the spirits inherent in all life, the
gods of every place and time, any human seeking union with the
infinite. Slipping out of her zori, Umi climbed the shrine’s steps
barefoot and slow, communing with the time-smoothed warmth of the
wooden planks beneath her naked soles. Lowering her head, she dropped
the bamboo branch so that she might join her palms together. No
words, no wishes, no hopes; only a stranded resignation. This last
blaze of heat, the final throes of a summer that refused to admit the
end, would all too soon give way to autumn with its evanescent
brilliance, and then yet another winter would strip the world bare
and shivering.
Blanking her mind, Umi let night
envelop her, giving herself over the secret world behind her closed
eyes. In that world was her own reality, woven of everything she
loved; countless times she had fled to it, and did so now, crossing
the threshold into the place she had learned from childhood to call
the peace that passeth understanding.
Her heartbeat calmed and her
thoughts untangled, and the peace began to glow. Turning about, Umi
opened her eyes to find that the moon now hovered aloft, a huge
silver gong chiming deep within, spreading its radiance like a vast
sheer shimmering cloak. Behind her, the shrine's tattered
paper-shaded lamps on either side of the steps were now inexplicably
alight, casting an echoing glow on the sand clear down to the
shoreline, leading her gaze to the solid, almost comic reality of a
large plump-sided sake jar sitting upright on the packed sand of the
ebbing tide.
Umi looked from the flickering
lamps to the radiant moon to the squat big vessel and back again,
recalling her conversation with Kitsune-dono. The warmth drained out
of the night as her mind filled with manga she’d seen in the
dealers’ room that had twisted time-hallowed legends into revolting
horrors. Her heart battered, and her hand groped for her inro; but as
she breathed deeply to calm herself, she caught the drifted scent of
the jar's rice-wine. Another haiku of the monk Basho came instantly
to mind, and she uttered its words slowly, clearly, like a
warding-spell:
Sukai no nami sake
Kusashi kyu no tsuki
Blue seas
Breaking waves fragrant with sake
Tonight's moon.
As she spoke the
last words the music quickened and lightened, and the glowing orb
seemed to quiver in the sky as if with gentle silent laughter. And
then the laughter became audible, soft and silvery. Lowering her eyes
to trace the sound, Umi was at first startled, but then smiled.
Standing at the tide's edge near the sake jar was one of the
conference attendees, still garbed in his elaborate Noh costume of a
shojo, the
legendary
wine-sprite, wearing the smiling mask of a beardless youth forever
flushed
by drink, and
wide silken robes of gold and rich colors lustrous despite the
moonlight. His hair, or rather wig, fell in a heavy gleaming mane of
scarlet red, reaching far down his back.
They greeted one
another with cordial bows, and then the shojo
removed his mask, revealing a face exactly like the disguise's save
that now the features were mobile and expressive, clearly savoring
Umi's stunned amazement. Beneath the heavy red fringe of hair—and
Umi now saw that it really was
his hair—the long bright eyes twinkled like jesting stars. A while
they regarded one another, silently in the silver light; and then the
shojo gestured toward the jar with invitation so disarming that Umi
at once descended the shrine's steps to join him.
The shojo
gave a little exclamation of delight as he leaned close and breathed
deeply of the heady aroma that mingled with the air's salt tang. Umi
likewise bent to enjoy the fragrance, and when she looked up again
she saw that her companion now held a sakazuki—a
flat wide bowl of black lacquer preciously worked in gold. Dipping
the vessel into the jar's wide mouth, he filled it nearly to the
brim.
For a time he and Umi both admired the moon's reflection that
glimmered in the drink, and then the shojo lifted the vessel to his
lips, making a little savoring murr in the back of his throat as he
emptied it. Again he filled the cup, and with a courtly gesture
offered it to Umi.
The sake
was celestially fine, and Umi drank it down in long deliberate sips,
sighing with such pleasure afterward that the shojo grinned in
delight,
throwing back his head so that his great red mane quivered and shook.
Again he and Umi drank, and once more; and then the sprite set the
cup down beside the jar and reached for his fan, snapping it open
with a deft wrist-flick. Music began, soft music that seemed to issue
from the sea, an ancient melody of flutes and drums, grave and
stately; and the wine-sprite began to dance in slow and measured
steps. With a gracious beckon of his fan he invited Umi to join him.
Hazy with drink and shamed by her
drab humanity, Umi was on the point of declining; but in that moment
a fragrance of incense enveloped her, and a rustle of silk. Looking
down, she found that she was clad in imperial Heian robes, light
unbelted layers of surpassing richness, and that her cropped gray
hair had become black, abundant, lustrous, silken, falling clear to
her knees. With halting steps she approached the sake jar that was
now full again, its surface a smooth mirror, and with trembling
hesitation looked in. What she beheld gave her a thrill of shock: a
still, smooth face white as the moon, with dark lips and brows; the
lips slightly parted, the brows high on the forehead. The mask of a
waka-onna, the most elegant and beautiful of the Noh theatre's female
characters, pricelessly carved.
Umi stared at the exquisite
immobile face in the mirror-smooth sake, and reached up to run her
fingers over the perfect features. She caught her breath at the sight
of her hand – a hand as smooth and pale as the mask, formed only to
hold a wine-cup, or pluck the strings of a koto, or guide an inked
brush over rice paper, or bestow a caress. She touched the cheek of
the mask with that hand, and it warmed under her fingers, and smiled
with sparkling eyes.
The shojo
had been watching, and met Umi's amazement with a reverent nod. Then
he moved
to the sea, dancing onto the tide that shed not so much as a drop on
his rich garments and white tabi, skimming the foam lightly as a cat
steps. Again he beckoned with a bow, and Umi reached for the fan
tucked into her sleeve and opened it to reveal a night sky of dark
blue with a disk of silver in its midst. Following the wine-sprite
she glided to the water, unastonished that it bore her up as lightly
as a leaf. By this time the moon hovered in such a way that its
narrowed light on the sea's surface made a path that seemed
to reach to the end of the world. Together
Umi and the shojo
danced side by side in the way of centuries past and worlds away, and
Umi realized that she had never in her life been happy until now.
But then
she remembered something, and stopped to look
back at the conference hotel, now a dim little blur far away. “I'm
missing the ceremony.”
The wine-sprite
halted too, and surprised Umi by speaking; but his voice was exactly
as she had imagined it might sound, mild and silvery with the barest
hint of tipsiness. “But that is where we're going, ojousama.
The great feast where both our kind and yours join in revelry to
amuse the moon.”
The term of address he'd used was
reserved for young women of high birth, and Umi felt a blush heat her
cheeks beneath the mask, but then the heat was driven out by cold.
“My kind?”
The shojo
gave an emphatic nod. “Hai!
You
will know some of them...”
And he named many of them, until Umi
felt her heart beating fast with a tangle of emotions. All were names
she knew, whose works had inspired her.
“But...why
would I be included?”
The
shojo's eyes sparkled. “The tanuki spoke highly in your favor.”
Never had
Umi felt more humbled, nor more bewildered. “The Tanuki Brothers?
But those were people in costumes.”
The
shojo made a polite demurring gesture. “They were tanuki in
costumes, ojousama.” He pointed his fan to the beach, and Umi
looked to find the Brothers merrily gathered around the sake vessel,
enjoying its contents along with a little crowd of kappa, tengu,
tsuchigumo, hanniya, oni, and other yokai. She realized that they'd
been there even before she'd taken her first drink, invisible to her.
One of them in particular made her gasp.
“Kitsune-dono!”
The
slim young fox-faced man in the elegant purple and white yukata bowed
with a vulpine smile, then leapt over the division of sand and sea to
tread the water with light bare feet, approaching Umi and the
wine-sprite on the moon-road, offering his paw-hand to guide her. The
others followed, lining up in a joyous procession; and the shojo
again laughed like scattered silver. “Our sake is ever so much
better than here! And the poetry too! Shall we proceed, ojousama?”
Umi
nodded as she pushed back some of her raven silken tresses that the
sea-breeze had disordered, and smiled a little sadly, but not for
herself. The doors between worlds stood open, and she was glad to let
them close behind her. “One moment.” Joining her palms together
in the gesture of gassho,
she bowed farewell to everything that had been; and then she turned
to fill her gaze with the radiant heavens as she and her retinue took
up the dance and began to sing, rollicking along the moon-path to the
edge of the world.
Tan tan
tanuki kintama wa...
Yuki
sighed as she gently settled the immaculate white sheet to cover the
body. Returning to the window, she found the moon riding high and
small, the sea-road vanished. Feeling very tired, she loosened the
hospital cap that covered her head, now focusing her gaze on her
reflection in the glass. Long black hair streamed down her shoulders,
and the ears of a cat peeked through the dark strands in soft white
points. Half smiling, Yuki made her ears twitch and wiggle awhile
before replacing the cowl again, fastening it firmly. They were only
visible once a year, at this time, and she had planned to surprise
Umi with the sight of them once they had a private moment together.
Like the woman she admired she too was between worlds, half neko and
half human. Long-lived perhaps, but not immortal. It made her glad.
“Someday, Umi-sama,” she whispered to the moon; and then she
smiled fully, turning to kneel and bend in a formal bow to the
shrouded form, before going to calmly, composedly speak to the
reporters waiting downstairs.
End
© Carolyn Kephart, 2023
