Asura Girl

by Otaro Maijo

  “No…no…I think I’m good just like this.”

  «Do you mean you’re not going to give back the young lady’s spirit?»

  “Well, if she just popped inside me, she must be okay with that.”

  «It’s not a matter of ‘being okay’…»

  Does this guy ever shut up?!

  “I said I’m good, so fuck off!”

  «Please don’t get excited.»

  “I’ll show you excited—I’ll bash your head in!”

  Then chop you up and throw you in the river!

  Huh?

  What’s happening? What’s that on my back?

  «What should we do? Tie him up and take him to the hospital?»

  «That’s a good idea, though it might not be so easy.»

  Ah, over there! A cop!

  “Officer, officer! Over here!”

  «Please! Don’t make such a fuss, especially on a solemn occasion like this.»

  «Yes, please be quiet.»

  “Let me go!”

  «Relax, buddy. You’re not going anywhere.»

  “Do you know who you’re dealing with?”

  «Okay boys, hang on to him!»

  “Get your hands off me!”

  Got to get away!

  “No! Let me go! Let me go!”

  La di da di da di da. Shitbread, di di dum di dum.

  Shitty di shit, his di dum gently embrace di dum di dum the shitbread. Di di di dum di dum. Di di li dum. I spy with my little eye a loverly prize buried deep in…shit! He he he he, ho ho ho ho, ha ha ha ha. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to…shit oh shit upon a shooting star…

  That building over there should do…

  And I’ve still got the four thousand in my pocket. I didn’t give it to the Yoshibas after all. Who would have thought things would turn out like this? Life’s funny that way. But I guess this is all I can expect. I’m free, and I can call my own shots.

  The fire escape is down! Up we go!

  I must be out of shape—feel all heavy.

  La di da di da di dum di dum di shit, shit, shit, shit!

  Some guy’s coming after me, fast! He’s going to catch me…got to…hurry!

  Made it! The roof.

  Over this fence!

  No!

  Uhhhhhh!

  «Where do you think you’re going? Give us back the girl!»

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I don’t know any girl!”

  «Don’t lie to me!»

  “I’m telling the truth!”

  I really don’t! I have no idea what’s going on!

  I’ll poke your fucking eyes out!

  «Huh?»

  “You asshole!”

  Shitbread di dum di dum. The last time. For all the world’s a shitbread, and we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…

  Heh!

  Chofu’s a great big beautiful place!

  Look at all those people down there. Try not to land on any of them.

  Shit! I didn’t think I would die before the old lady.

  So, you’re still here.

  Would have liked to leave this world just a little better than I found it.

  Wish I’d had time to finish my Asura Man, the little Buddha I was going to make out of those kids. That would have been a statue like the world has never seen!

  Oh well. The Round-and-Round will now perform his patented quadruple somersault in the laid-out position…

  1

  What am I? How did the monster inside me get plugged right into the Round-and-Round Devil? What’s the link between the Round-and-Round and me?

  The Round-and-Round is a different person, but somehow, metaphorically speaking, he’s also another me. I’m a woman and he’s a man, but that’s the difference of just one sex chromosome. It doesn’t amount to much. These days you’ve got men who like men and women who like women, people who feel like women living in men’s bodies, and vice versa. You’ve got fairies and dykes and gays and homos and lesbians—and on top of that you’ve got half the people faking it. When it’s all that confused, no one’s going to care that the Round-and-Round’s a man and I’m a woman. Come to think of it, it’s not a bad analogy—you can’t tell the difference between men and women anymore, just like the Round-and-Round and I can’t tell who’s who between the two of us, can’t figure out where I leave off and he starts. It’s almost like we’re the same person—which may be more common than you think these days, now that we’re all reading each other’s thoughts online all the time. Kind of screws with the idea of the individual—one big group consciousness, like all those people on V of H following everything we do.

  I guess you get all those creeps together inside one head and you actually make a monster.

  And then there’s the monster made out of pieces of all those kids in that dark forest inside me. Totally scary, stealing sounds and voices and doing all that evil shit. That was made by chopping up me and the Round-and-Round and a whole bunch of other kids and sticking us all together. I suppose it’s still in there, chopping up more people and slapping them on to make itself even bigger. When you get so much bad karma together, something pretty monstrous happens. Like Armageddon.

  So I guess that monster makes sense in a way, metaphorically speaking.

  And even the Round-and-Round—he might be something that was already inside me.

  I’m one single person, but I’ve got all of these different personalities and voices inside me. And that monster that took them and turned them all into those terrible songs…that was just me too. Which means—I’m just guessing here—that the way it looked, that awful crammed-together body, was somehow an image of something deep inside me, some fundamental core. Like my “ego” or something? Who knows? Or maybe it’s more like…I’m somewhere deep inside myself in that dark forest and I’m sucking up all those people, all the ones inside of me, and cutting them up and incorporating them into myself, making them part of me and making myself bigger and bigger. Maybe that’s it: I’m the monster. But I bet it’s probably the same for everybody—we’ve all got a monster inside, in our own dark forest, grubbing up parts from a whole lot of other people.

  That’s probably it—we need to feed on others to make our inner monster grow. In the forest inside us, it’s all-powerful, but what it wants is to be totally scary on the outside. And maybe the boundaries between those forests aren’t always as clear as you think. Maybe some people have special powers that let them come and go from one to another whenever they want.

  Tansetsu Sakurazuki. That pale, chubby, shaggy geek. Maybe he couldn’t exactly come right into my forest, but once I was there, he managed to reach in and grab me. And all the weird stuff that happened to me on the way to the forest—all that must have been inside me as well. I mean, how likely is it that you’d escape from a hammer-swinging classmate and run into a bunch of TV celebrities, then get on the wrong train and end up being chased by the Mafia? All that must have been my imagination. But Tansetsu Sakurazuki came right in and collared me there by the cliff. Pretty cool. And if he can do it, then there must be other people who can too. And if people can get in and out of these inner-self places, that means there must be paths of some sort leading back and forth—even if not everybody has the power to use them. Paths between me and Tansetsu, between the Round-and-Round and me, between me and everybody else, between all of us.

  Not that that makes me feel any better. The point here is that totally scary monster. I think it was probably just something inside me, but it might also be totally possible that it really exists somewhere. That out there in some real dark forest—not inside me or anybody else—a monster is really catching little kids, cutting them up in pieces, and sticking them onto its own body. If so, then maybe, while I was wandering around in limbo like that, I got called to tha
t real dark forest, and those real kids—with names I invented for them—helped me battle the monster.

  Now that’s a scary thought.

  Then just suppose I really was eaten up by someone—someone I just decided to call “Olle”—whose face was on top of the monster’s head, and that the monster really did swallow me. If you suppose all that, then maybe I’m still in the monster now. And I just haven’t realized it yet since I’m still living in the world of phantasms.

  But how can you tell? Am I still alive? Or did I die back there and it’s just taking me a really long time to realize it? Am I just fooling around with all these illusions until I finish dying? I don’t think I can tell the difference. I know I’ve been doing a lot of really crazy stuff, but have I really been doing it?—that’s where I’m not so sure. I’ve been to all these totally weird places, and now it seems like I’m back where I started, one complete lap—but how do I know I’m back? Or not? And having Tansetsu Sakurazuki around isn’t helping anything—he’s so totally bizarre I don’t know what he’s going to do or where we’re going to go. It wouldn’t surprise me if he suddenly looked at his watch and said he was late, late for a very important date, and had to be going—but that he’d take me with him, anywhere I wanted to go, in exchange for a pair of my panties, and then giggle and take my hand and tap his heels together and we’d fly up into the sky. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.

  I suppose if that happened, I’d just have to cope. Maybe I’d end up someplace in the real world but still totally lost, or maybe we’d go to some other world. Who knows, I might even give him a pair of my panties, if I felt like it. It might be worth it just to see the look on his face.

  But the one place I wouldn’t want to go is back to that forest. I don’t care whether it was real or a total fantasy. I don’t ever want to be that scared again. If that’s some sort of place you’ve got to pass through right before you die, then I may have to live forever.

  So I guess for now I’m going to believe that the monster and the forest were things I made up inside me somewhere—that the world and I made up together. I don’t much care whether the monster is just another me, or whether it’s actually some sort of bridge between me and the Round-and-Round, or even a thread linking all of us together. As long as it’s not really cutting up flesh-and-blood kids and mashing them together, it’s all the same to me.

  Though I guess if it’s all just stuff I made up in my head, then there’s a chance I’m not real either. “I think, therefore I am”—or something like that, but if I’m somehow stuck together with another person and we can go back and forth like that, then how do I know it’s really “I” doing the “thinking”? I may think I’m “thinking,” but it’s possible that it’s the other guy who’s really thinking. You may think you’re thinking all you want, but if it’s someone else doing all that thinking, it doesn’t add up to “I am.” I guess.

  So no one really knows whether they even exist or not—and they don’t even realize they don’t know. Because they haven’t been through all this stuff that’s been happening to me. But now I know. I have absolutely no idea what’s real and what’s made up, but at least I know that I don’t know.

  I know that the whole “I think therefore I am” thing is a pile of shit, but I also know there’s nothing I can do about it. I can see that the “I am” part is pretty sketchy, but in the end that’s fine by me. Shit, I’m pretty much fine with “I’m not.” If anybody out there doubts my existence, I’m not putting up an argument.

  And I’ll tell you why: because all this stuff I’ve been doing, this whole life of mine—living with my brother, mooning over Yoji, fooling around with people other than Yoji for no good reason, the meaningless fights, dying, coming back—all of it has been a hell of a lot of fun. And that feeling—that fun—is absolutely real. I’m sure of it. So in the end, everything else is okay too. It’s all okay. Not a problem. I even enjoy doubting my own existence. The ultimate purpose of life is to have fun. Even for people who don’t think that’s what they’re aiming for, it still ends up coming first—always. People who are suffering end up enjoying the suffering, and people who are struggling like the struggle. Whatever it is you’re doing now, you chose it on some level, and for you it’s the most fun thing there is. So maybe that’s why I totally rejected the monster and made the dark forest go away, because I really don’t like fear and pain…which is why I’m here enjoying myself now—wherever here is.

  It’s great here.

  Even though everything’s still as stupid as it’s always been.

  2

  In the north corner of Chofu, near the Nogawa River, there’s a temple called Eiganji, and in that temple is an old statue of Asura, dark and gloomy, with the gold leaf peeling in places. The statue was supposedly carved by a man named Yoshitaka Koyama, though there’s no way to know for sure. Anyway, this Yoshitaka Koyama was something of a known bad boy in these parts, and after doing something to totally piss off his parents, he ran away to the temple, and there, after various adventures, he saw the error of his ways and started carving images of the Buddha. At least that’s how the story goes: bad boy mends his ways and takes up life as saintly artisan.

  But I have a different theory. I think his interest in Buddha-carving actually came before he had this change of heart. It may have gone more like this: this Koyama is pretty much a creep of a guy…but even he can see that Buddha statues are beautiful…so why not try carving one?…and carving turns out to be fun…so why not take it up full time?…and a full-time Buddha-carver looks pretty much like a respectable guy…so now the creep looks respectable…and then it turns out it’s actually easier to make your living respectably…so why not just be a respectable guy? At some point the question of whether you really are or aren’t loses its meaning. Anyway, that’s my theory about Koyama.

  But then I actually went to Eiganji. Which I think was the first time I’d ever been to a temple. And I got to thinking about what it would be like to actually live there—in this really, really simple place where you do Zen, sitting all day every day, scrubbing the floors and reading sutras and all, and it occurred to me you might really turn into a stand-up guy in a place like that, might feel like you had to start carving Buddhas. I mean, human beings can’t live without finding something enjoyable in life.

  But for some reason, this Yoshitaka Koyama ended up making the same Asura over and over without ever being satisfied. He was apparently a real pro when it came to carving other Buddhas, popping them out like clockwork, but he could never finish the Asura. The head priest kept seeing his Asuras when they were almost finished, and he thought they were fantastic. He would even show up sometimes with collectors who wanted to buy them and were willing to pay top dollar, but Koyama would always say there was something wrong with the carving and immediately take an axe to it. The priest would be horrified, but he had no choice but to let him be. The rumor at the temple was that Koyama somehow saw some link between his former wicked self and the Asura statue, and since he was forever searching for a version of himself he could totally accept, he was forever remaking the statue. But I think that sort of misses the point. I think they were right that Koyama was identifying with the Asura, that he thought of it as somehow a double of himself, but I don’t think he kept making it over because he was looking for some perfect version. I think Koyama found his own special bliss in the act of destroying the Asura. In other words, since the Asura was him, by chopping it to bits again and again and again, he was actually obliterating himself.

  I’d go further than that. I think that deep down most people would be tempted to destroy themselves—as long as it didn’t involve any real, bullet-to-the-brain kind of pain. We’re not all totally in love with ourselves—not by a mile. And for those of us who aren’t, for the ones who don’t really like themselves much at all, destroying the self can look like a pretty decent option, especially if it comes with the chance of a fresh start. Lots of peop
le feel there’s something missing in the self they got dealt, something incomplete, unripe. So what’s the point of struggling on with it? These folks opt for destroying the old, unsatisfactory self in favor of a new one. Basically, they just hit the reset button on life. And what about that wouldn’t be great? Totally awesome. I suppose most of us feel that way, at least a little bit, some of the time. I know I do. For instance, when I was there by the cliff, and Yoji told me he didn’t really feel “that way” about me, what did I do? I let go of Tansetsu’s hand—because I felt for a minute that I wanted to die. Something inside me was tempted by the idea of being reborn as someone else, moving on in the great circle of transmigrating souls. If I could have looked back at myself just then, I would have probably wanted to take an axe to that failed monster called “me.”

  On the other hand, how do you know the new you is going to be any better? You don’t, of course. Anyway, to get back to the point: the Asura statue.

  Koyama saw himself in the Asura because Asura himself had been something of a bad boy at the beginning. I don’t know the details, but apparently before he became a god he went around making trouble for the Buddha and generally acting out. But clearly something happened; he underwent some sort of conversion under the Buddha’s influence, and he became a good god himself.

  Never underestimate the Buddha.

  I know I don’t. Though I have to admit I’ve got my own personal image of Him, my own personal-version God—put together just the way I like Him.

  My God doesn’t punish people like the Christian god, or scold them or test them. He just waits, with infinite compassion, for people to achieve enlightenment. He’s never impatient. Time doesn’t matter one bit to my God. Those impatient gods tend to make up trials and tribulations and punish you if you don’t get them right, but my God is easygoing and optimistic, so He’s willing to wait, with those narrow, smiley eyes of His, until you have a change of heart. Just wait and wait. He knows that if He waits long enough, any bad boy—or bad god, for that matter—will eventually see the light and stop doing all that bad stuff. Just like you eventually get tired of playing the same character all the time in a computer game, you eventually get tired of being bad; and when you’re really tired of it, when you’re fed up with it completely, you might end up doing something just a little bit good. And doing something even a little bit good means you must have some good in you, and people who have some good in them are basically good people. Or good gods. From there, even though they may have had just a tiny little taste of the doing-good-life, it’s a sure bet these newly good people, or gods, when confronted with the totally amazing, totally infinite compassion of my God, will totally figure out that it’s actually easier to live as a good guy.