Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
In the park they stopped in front of a cart selling sweet jellied tofu and he purchased small paper cones filled with the confection for both of them.
The sky was clear and sparkling, so hard seeming that it reminded Akiko of a piece of green glass she had found by the seashore, its edges rounded and smoothed by the constant immersion at the verge of the tidal pull.
Shimada pointed upward, showing her the orange and green box kite with a fierce tiger’s head. Akiko laughed as it dipped and swooped in the wind.
She ate her tofu hungrily and Shimada wiped her cheeks with his snow-white handkerchief. It felt very soft against her skin.
But most of all she remembered the cherry blossoms. It was so quiet here that Akiko thought she could hear the drift of the light pink petals through the clear air and they seemed suspended in time, all motion attenuated, all the world attuned to their drift.
Lifting up her head, she laughed out loud with delight, skipping away from Shimada and back again, grabbing onto his trousers’ leg, pulling him forward, wanting in her own inarticulate way for him to dance too.
She never saw Shimada again, and it was a long time before she understood why. During her time with him she had no inkling that he was her father. Certainly he had never even broached the subject. But yet when she thought back on it through the prism of time, she saw that she had known immediately that he was unlike all the other men she had met in her short life and would meet in the passing years. Shimada was special, just as that memory, piercing the veil of time with such pristine clarity, was special.
What she had not been able to understand was why he had taken his life not more than twenty-four hours after he had watched her, smiling, as she capered through the last hours of the cherry blossoms. She thought she could never forgive him for that and then, upon learning the terrible truth, thought she could never forgive herself.
As for Ikan, she was never the same after Shimada’s death. Like a blossom at
hanami
she had reached her peak of beauty and, having slid past it, could never go back. An intense form of melancholia stole over her like a shroud, etching lines into a face that had been filled with perfection. She drank copious quantities of sakē, often passing out insensate in the middle of an assignation as if the mere state of consciousness was too much for her.
Those who ran
Fuyajo
were understandably perturbed and then, as Dean’s state declined rapidly, filled with anger. She had many more years left in her and, they felt, after she had passed beyond the barriers where sexual union was paramount, she could still fulfill her potential as the house’s finest
sensei
, training the younger women.
But such was not to be. In the spring of 1958, when Akiko was thirteen, Ikan could not be roused from her
futon.
Fright flew through
Fuyajo
like an evil
kami
, turning the girls nervous and short-tempered. All conversation dropped to a whisper as the doctor arrived and took the long, slow climb up to her room. Akiko was kept with a group of the girls and they forcibly restrained her from ascending.
There was no life left within Dean’s glorious husk. The old physician shook his head from side to side and clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He sat on the edge of her
futon
and stared down upon the pale face and thought that he had never seen such magnificent human beauty in his life.
By her side he found an empty bottle of sakē and a small vial. This, too, was empty, save for a light dusting of white powder along its curved inside. The doctor dipped his little finger and touched the white tip to his tongue. His head nodded again, his tongue continued its clucking.
He heard movement behind him and he quickly pocketed the vial. Perhaps there was something for him to do here, he thought. For when those who ran
Fuyajo
asked him the cause of death, he lifted his shoulders, let them fall resignedly, and told them she had died of heart failure, which in a sense was true.
He felt no compunction about lying to them or even falsifying the death certificate. In fact he felt ennobled by the deed. He had read the papers concerning Vice-Minister Shimada’s shocking suicide and in its aftermath the unraveling of the evidence against him. This woman had endured enough, he thought. Let her death be a peaceful, natural one; a death that will cause no further ripples of evil talk.
Those who ran
Fuyajo
wasted no time in explaining to Akiko what had happened. And at last it dawned on her what the composition of her life would be from this moment on until the day she died, perhaps in precisely the same manner that her mother had expired. And that knowledge was totally unacceptable to her.
That night she gathered up her belongings, much as Ikan had done the night before her departure from her family’s farm deep in the countryside, and several items of her mother’s that she loved and did not want to leave to the scavengers at
Fuyajo.
Stuffing these, too, into a small, battered bamboo suitcase, she stole out of the building in the dead of night. The height of the varied activities served to shield her from discovery.
Soon she was crossing the narrow street and, turning a corner, hurried down a dark alley, moving quickly and surely until she had left the
Yoshiwara
far behind her. She never once looked back, and she never returned.
They came after her, of course. They had every right to. She was an enormously valuable commodity and they had a great many years invested in her. There were no
Yakuza
involved in running
Fuyajo
and the
Boryokudan
held no piece of it. Still, those who had founded the Castle That Knows No Night were hard businessmen and their descendants to whom the running of the brothel now devolved were much like their ancestors. And though the Occupation Forces had begun to disband the
Yoshiwara
, and
Fuyajo
was thus forced to move, they did not take kindly to Akiko’s defection. In fact, they wished to put an end to it as swiftly as possible. To that end they dispatched two thugs to return her to her proper home and, if that were not practical, to exact from her the highest possible penalty for her treacherous deed.
The first Akiko suspected that she was being followed was when she saw two shadows moving at once, one slightly ahead of her and one perhaps two blocks behind her. She would never have seen the shadows at all—for they were absolutely silent—had it not been for the cat. Four tiny kittens had been suckling at the cat’s distended teats when Akiko stumbled into her territory and, startled, she had arisen and, arching her back, hissed at the intruding shape, baring her teeth and glaring carnelian eyes into the wan light.
Akiko gasped, her heart pounding painfully in her chest, and she skidded to one side, her head and shoulders moving away from the angered cat even as her feet and legs were still sliding along the pavement toward it. That’s when she saw the twin movements, and her eyes went wide.
She pressed herself against a cool wall, looked to front and back. Now there was nothing. Silence. The absence of traffic was eerie and not even a
kōban
, a police call box, around.
She was still in the Asakusa district, filled with the old traditional ways, Tokyo’s last remnants from ages gone by. The buildings here were small and low, of wood and oiled paper as they once had been throughout Japan, no steel and glass towers as in other sectors of the city.
Akiko, her heart still in her throat, sidled away from the bristling cat, certain now that the long arm of
Fuyajo
was stalking her. But there was no way they were going to bring her back to that hated place, she decided. She would die first. And not before she hurt someone badly.
A red rage beat through her like a tide, an accumulated sizzling she was still only dimly aware of. Quickly she knelt down and as she did so, a dark flicker came to the corner of her eye, a swift blur like a racing cloud obscuring for a moment the face of the moon.
Unhesitatingly she opened her bamboo suitcase and took out the pistol. It was fairly small, a pearl-handled .22 caliber, well oiled and in good operating condition. It was fully loaded, she had double-checked that before she had removed it from its hiding place beneath her mother’s
futon.
Why Ikan would have such an implement in her possession Akiko could not fathom, but the day she had discovered it more than a year ago she had had enough sense not to tell anyone, not even her mother, what she had found. And tonight she had not wanted to leave it behind. Now she knew why.
They were closing in. Akiko swiftly closed her suitcase and stood calmly, the pistol hidden behind her. Curiously, she felt no fear. She had been born into the night, and darkness held none of the primitive terror it did for many people. She was at home in its furtive light and rather enjoyed the anonymity its shadows afforded her. Night at
Fuyajo
would find her rising from her
futon
to roam the many rooms at will, honing her instincts and her hand-eye coordination, stealthily climbing back stairs and crawling through vent passageways in order to observe the myriad couples.
One came. Lithe and slender, he blended into the darkness so that he was almost upon her before she became aware of his presence. She turned her head, startled despite herself, giving a strangled little cry, angry with herself for not sensing him sooner.
“What do you want?” Her voice was a husky whisper, little more than the night wind which rustled the leaves of the cypress above her head.
Sound, too, could betray him, so he remained silent. And now, unbidden, Akiko felt fear flutter her heart. Her eyes were open wide, the pupils dilated to their maximum as she peered into the blackness in order to pick out some tiny gleam that would make of him something more than a wraith.
“I know you’re there,” she said softly, willing her voice not to tremble. “If you come near me, I’ll kill you.” But despite her bravado, she began to tremble. She felt chilled to the bone and everything around her seemed strange and forbidding.
On the verge of tears, Akiko made a decision. She knew that the longer she waited the more certain it was that she would lose her nerve. Already tremors coursed through her tightly coiled muscles, wracking her like ague. It was now or never, and she would just have to trust her eyes. She had not seen him move from the patch of shadow so close to her so that must mean that he had not. Visions of ghosts and shape-changing creatures were for children.
I am afraid, she told herself in the calmest inner voice she could summon up. But he’ll kill me if I let him or, at the very least, drag me back to
Fuyajo
, which would certainly be worse than death.
She was just bringing the pistol out from behind her when she felt the presence to her left and thought, The second one! She felt pressure on her larynx and, of course, reflexively tried to breathe. When she could not, panic rose within her and she cried out, bringing the pistol up in a blur, her forefinger already squeezing, squeezing, anything to get oxygen into her straining lungs.
The roar of the discharge caused her to scream in rage and fear. Concussion struck her eardrums like a physical blow and she staggered, already retching from the intense stench of the cordite and the heat, searing and instantaneous, that had brushed by her like the hand of death.
Light blinded her and she fetched up against a wooden wall, sliding down it as her legs gave out. Something was in her eyes and she put her free hand up, wiping at her forehead. Her hair was matted and wet, filled with grit that rolled slickly through her fingers.
Blood black on the night, its coppery stench filling her nostrils, making her gag all over again, making her wipe again and again at her face, crying now in great gulping sobs.
A shadow looming over her and instinctively she brought the pistol upward, almost all control gone now so that the barrel weaved back and forth. She tried to get at the trigger again but her finger wouldn’t respond to her commands and then the gun was gone from her weakened grasp and she was broken, sobbing still, whispering through it, “Don’t take me back, I don’t want to go back.”
Lifted bodily off the street, a breeze against her hot, streaked cheek for an instant and then a creak, a slam, the noises of a bolt being shot home and the warmth of a house, stealing over her, a place unfamiliar but only one fact surfacing: it was not
Fuyajo.
Her head went down…
A face swam into view, like the man in the moon, pockmarked and huge, descending through a network of sere branches as spiky as a stag’s antlers.
Akiko cried out, tried to throw her arms across her face to protect it. She had the sensation of falling and shooting forward at the same time, spinning like a leaf in the wind, toppling from the safety of…what?
The man in the moon lifted away, and it was like a weight being pulled off her chest.
“Is this better?” The voice was soft and lilting, a country accent.
“I can’t…breathe.” Her voice was like a rodent’s squeak and she realized that her mouth and throat were so parched that she could not summon up saliva.
“In time you will be able to do everything.” The man in the moon smiled, or so it seemed to Akiko. She still had trouble seeing as if she were peering through a windowpane streaked with running rainwater.
“You look blurry,” she whispered through cracked lips.
“When you stop crying,” the gentle voice told her, “you will no longer have that problem.”
She slept for a time after that, sliding down into a vertiginous whirlpool, a troubled slumber in which her fear, brought to the surface, would not allow her to slip deeply into unconsciousness.
Rather, she fought in a series of battle-scarred dreams, on the cusp of sleep, her eyelids fluttering constantly, her limbs thrashing and twitching like a dog’s.
When, at last, she awoke it was near night again and it was as if no time had passed though, in reality, more than eighteen hours had elapsed from her ordeal in the street.