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
