‘But wouldn’t you stand out?’ I asked. ‘I don’t imagine there’d be many ladies at the kabuki dressed like you.’
‘You could lend me one of your kimonos. It would be like being ordinary again.’ She sounded so happy at the prospect that I wondered if she sometimes regretted her marriage. And yet she loved her husband . . . didn’t she? ‘Please, Kasumi.’ She looked almost desperate. Surely this wasn’t just about a passion for kabuki. Perhaps her excursion with the ladies of the domain had made her restless, had reminded her of a life with fewer restrictions. Looking around at the beautiful house, I remembered my early weeks here, when I had felt like a prisoner.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. Did she really mean to go through with this? ‘It doesn’t seem right that we should go without Lord Shimizu’s permission.’
‘I’ll tell my husband when he returns. I just . . . I feel like a caged cricket.’ Her hands gripped the edge of the kotatsu, knuckles white with tension.
‘How would we get there?’
‘We can walk. It’s not very far.’
‘But what about the servants? Would we tell them where we were going?’ I wasn’t sure how much they knew about Misaki’s background, whether they knew she wasn’t really a samurai. I had a sudden memory of Ishi saying, Like the moon and the turtle. She would have known Lord Shimizu’s first wife, the daimyo’s daughter. Had she been comparing Misaki to Lady Aimi?
Misaki hesitated, then said, ‘I’ll say we’re going to visit the shrine at Asakusa.’
It was a turnaround that she should be so eager to go out while I was reluctant. Not so long ago I had been longing to leave the confines of our house but now I felt cautious. I must have still been shaken by the incident that had occurred while she was away. But that had happened here at home, I reminded myself.
‘I suppose we could,’ I said at last.
Misaki clapped her hands in delight. ‘You know the story, don’t you, Kasumi? The Treasury of Loyal Retainers? It’s based on the tale of the forty-seven rōnin.’
‘I’ve heard of it,’ I said. ‘But I can’t remember the details.’ I felt a trickle of unease at the mention of rōnin. I gave myself a mental shake. This was nothing to do with the present; the story of the forty-seven rōnin was an old one.
I picked up the tray and carried it to the kitchen. Ishi had prepared a mushroom soup for our dinner, and I swapped the cups on the tray for steaming bowls.
When I returned Misaki said, ‘Come sit down and I’ll tell you the story.’ She rearranged the quilt over her legs and settled herself more comfortably. I slipped my legs under the kotatsu; the warmth and the earthy scent of mushrooms were soothing.
Misaki began. ‘There once was a daimyo who, having been insulted, drew a sword against a powerful Shogunate official while in Edo castle. Of course, this was forbidden, and the daimyo was ordered to perform seppuku, ritual suicide.’
Her eyes bright but her tone hushed, Misaki went on to describe how the forty-seven samurai retainers who had been left masterless on their daimyo’s death swore a secret oath to revenge their lord, and came up with a devious plan. Now rōnin, they dispersed and took on different jobs — as builders, tradesmen, merchants and monks; their leader, Oishi, even appeared to surrender himself to drunkenness.
Misaki sipped from her bowl then continued, ‘But all the time they were waiting, plotting. They secretly smuggled weapons into Edo, and familiarised themselves with the layout of the official’s house. One man even married the daughter of a builder who had worked on the house so that he could get his hands on the plans. Meanwhile the official, fearing revenge, sent out spies to watch them, but they discovered nothing. Finally, after two years, the official began to relax his guard.’
Lowering her voice dramatically, Misaki told of a dark winter morning, the heavy snow, the freezing wind. Despite the warmth of the kotatsu, of the bowl between my hands, I felt a cold chill between my shoulder blades as the band of rōnin split into two groups, one to attack the house from the rear, the other from the front. Misaki started to beat her hand on the table in imitation of Oishi pounding a drum to signal the start of the attack, and my own heart thumped in time. As she described the scene — the battle between the rōnin and the official’s retainers, the search for the official, who had fled from his bed, and the scene in which he was finally killed — I held my breath, releasing it in a rush as the rōnin, though criminals, were allowed to commit seppuku and die with honour in recognition of the loyalty they had shown their master.
‘You told that so well I half expected rōnin to overrun the house at any moment!’ I said.
‘I love scary stories. Have you ever played A Gathering of One Hundred Kaidan?’
I shook my head. Kaidan were ghost stories, I knew, but I’d never heard of the game.
‘We used to play it with our neighbours when my mother was still alive. You need three rooms. You light one hundred lanterns in a room with a mirror, then everyone takes it in turn to tell a story. When you’ve finished your story, you have to walk from the first room and through the second, which is kept in complete darkness, into the room with the lanterns. You have to extinguish one of them and then look in the mirror.’ She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘The darker the room gets the safer it is for spirits.’
I stared back, my heart still racing from the story she had just told.
‘Should we play?’ Her eyes were gleaming now.
‘We can’t tell a hundred stories,’ I protested. ‘I don’t know that many. Besides, it would take too long. And do we even have that many lanterns?’ I both did and didn’t want to play. I was still haunted by the shadow in the yard, my slashed bed, the night I had been alone in the house. Sometimes it seemed to me that I must have seen a spirit that night; none of us who were there had spoken of it since. Sometimes I exchanged looks with Ishi, or Goro would give me an encouraging smile, but my brush with death was never mentioned out loud.
‘That’s a lot of objections.’ Misaki’s lips curved into a smile. ‘But you’re right: I don’t know that many stories either. And I don’t think we do have a hundred lanterns. But we can still play — let’s do it with ten lanterns. Unless you’re too scared?’
‘I’m not!’ I was. And it wasn’t just the thought of my slashed quilt, or of provoking spirits with our game: it was Misaki, with her too-bright eyes, her sudden taste for risk and rebellion. I wondered fleetingly if she had been possessed by a spirit herself.
She was already pressing ahead with arrangements for the game. We would tell the stories in her room, then cross the hall into the room that stood between my sleeping alcove and the reception room; this room would be dark, and in the reception room we would arrange the lanterns and the mirror.
I was relieved when Misaki suggested I unroll my futon in her room that night.
‘I’ll start,’ Misaki offered. We sat facing each other, quilts wrapped around our shoulders for warmth — and in my case comfort. I didn’t feel entirely easy about the prospect of waking the spirits. ‘I’m going to tell the story of Okiku and the Nine Plates.’
I was caught between a groan and a smile at the mention of Chiyo’s favourite tale. Misaki began to relate, in an almost conversational tone, the tale of the samurai Aoyama Harima, who fell in love with a servant girl named Okiku and promised to marry her, even after he received another more suitable proposal.
‘But Okiku doubted him,’ Misaki said. ‘She decided to test his resolve. One day, she broke a plate — not just any plate, but one of ten priceless heirlooms of the Aoyama family . . . and the traditional punishment for breaking one of those special plates was death.’ Her eyes were huge in the lamplight. ‘But Harima assumed that Okiku had broken the plate by accident, and he pardoned her. Then Okiku revealed that she had broken the plate to test him — and Harima was furious! In a rage, he killed Okiku and threw her body into the well. Every night after that, Okiku’s ghost would enter the house and count the plates aloud one through nine.’
&nb
sp; As Misaki crossed the corridor and walked through the dark room to extinguish one of the lanterns in the reception room, I thought of the body in the well . . . well-cleaning . . . Tanabata. I remembered Shimizu arriving home, his face as stricken as if he himself had seen a ghost — the revelation that he had been witness to an attack, had seen members of his circle killed. The trouble with ghost stories, I thought, was not with what was invented but the reminders of what was true.
When Misaki returned I recounted the story of Hoichi the Earless, a blind musician who is bewitched by ghosts, and Misaki responded with a story about jikininki, ghosts who scavenge for the corpses of the newly dead, which made us both shriek with horrified laughter.
I could still hear her giggling, somewhat nervously, as she went to extinguish the third lantern.
When she returned I told the fourth story, another of Chiyo’s, about Yuki-onna, a beautiful woman in a white kimono. I described her long black hair and pale skin, her lips blue with cold, how she appeared to travellers in snowstorms and killed them with an icy kiss.
Rising, I walked across the darkened room. The skin prickled on the back of my neck as if someone other than Misaki were watching me.
I snuffed out one of the lanterns and the light in the room dimmed. I shivered. Had a cold breeze passed through the room? Or was it a spirit? Yuki-onna’s cool breath . . .
I hurried back to the light and warmth of Misaki’s room.
With each trip into the lantern room, it grew darker and darker.
For the ninth tale, Misaki told the story of the peony lantern. ‘It happened during Obon,’ she began. ‘A samurai who had lost his wife saw a beautiful woman and her maid walk past his house, holding a lantern with peonies painted on it. He fell in love with the woman, and from then on she began to visit his house every evening at dusk, always leaving before dawn. One evening a neighbour, suspicious, peered through the samurai’s window. But instead of a beautiful woman, he saw the samurai and . . .’ Misaki leaned forwards so that her face was above the lantern, and I leaned in too to hear her whispered words: ‘. . . a skeleton.’
With a gasp, I reared back.
‘The next day the neighbour told the samurai what he’d seen and the samurai went to see a priest, who told him he must resist the woman. The priest gave the samurai prayer strips to protect his house so the woman couldn’t enter. That evening, as usual, the beautiful woman came to the samurai’s house at dusk, accompanied by her maid with the peony lantern. She tried to enter the house but couldn’t, so she called to her lover from outside. The samurai couldn’t resist her pleas. He came outside, and she led him back to her house. But her house . . . it was a grave in the cemetery.’ She stopped, drew an unsteady breath. ‘And that was where his dead body was found the next morning.’
Misaki had finished her story but she didn’t move. Finally she said, ‘I can’t go in there by myself. Come with me.’
‘Isn’t that against the rules?’
‘I don’t care.’
Reluctantly I rose and followed her across the corridor. We stood at the threshold for a moment, the blackness between us and the dimly illuminated reception room as heavy and impenetrable as a fog. My heart was pounding as we stepped into the dark room, our feet whispering like ghosts on the tatami, the shapes of the furniture in the reception room ahead looking strange and unfamiliar.
We entered the nearly dark room with its two remaining lanterns and I stood beside Misaki as she snuffed out the ninth flame. Neither of us were giggling now; our earlier bravado had been extinguished along with the light.
We looked in the mirror together and in the dim glow saw our drawn faces, made eerie with the shadows that quivered on the ceiling and walls.
Beside me Misaki swallowed. ‘It’s time for the last story.’ Her voice sounded hoarse.
‘I . . . I can’t,’ I whispered. I feared that if we extinguished the final lantern, demons would flood the room.
‘Me neither.’
‘Let’s light the lanterns again,’ I suggested in a shaky voice.
We laughed at ourselves, lighting lanterns in order to go to bed, but my laughter was tinged with dread. I had the uncanny sense that we had awakened the spirits anyway, that demons danced just beyond the circle of light.
We sat for a while in the reception room, drinking tea and talking about anything but the game we had just played.
‘I think I’m feeling sleepy. You?’ Misaki asked.
‘I suppose.’
One by one we extinguished the lanterns until only a single lantern in the bedroom remained.
‘Are you ready?’ Misaki asked, her voice breathy.
No, I thought. I closed my eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said aloud. My own voice sounded thin.
Misaki snuffed out the lantern and we were plunged into darkness. It was the same darkness as every other night yet it felt different. But perhaps darkness was like a river; every moment a river is new, it is never the same water. And so this darkness was new, turning the rustle of leaves in the garden into sighs, the calls of night birds into the cries of lonely spirits.
Linking arms, we stumbled to our futons.
‘Goodnight,’ Misaki said.
‘Goodnight.’
I lay awake listening to Misaki’s calm breathing beside me, slowing and deepening into slumber. But sleep was the furthest thing from my mind. After everything that had happened — the attack on Shimizu at the restaurant, learning that the previous attacks were connected, knowing that even here at home we weren’t safe — I felt I might never sleep again, and yet from one minute to the next I had slipped into dreams that were haunted by demons.
I saw Shimizu’s first wife as a ghost, wooing him to her grave. Then I was dreaming of a rōnin, clad all in black. I heard him sliding open the shutter, the wood catching slightly. Saw him slipping into the house and creeping towards my futon with a sword.
He stepped into a beam of moonlight and I saw it was not a rōnin at all but Rin, her face distorted like a Hannya mask. There was the gentle tread of footsteps across the tatami. She paused by the reception room then stepped inside. From Misaki’s room I heard her take another step, then another, moving through the reception room into the one beside it, closer to the alcove where I slept. I was somehow aware that I was asleep, that it wasn’t real, and yet though I told myself to wake I couldn’t, I was trapped in the dream. A blade flashed in the moonlight, my breath caught in my throat and with a gasp I awoke.
Relieved, I opened my eyes, released at last from the dream. I willed my breathing to slow, but then I saw a lantern glowing through the screens separating the bedroom from the reception room, illuminating a large shadow moving stealthily towards my alcove . . .
Chapter
Nineteen
The drums are pounding
A curtain is slowly raised
To reveal a mask
I heard a faint sound beside me and realised that Misaki was awake too. I felt for her hand and clutched it as the shadow turned away from my alcove. It had to be Goro, I realised. Shimizu must have asked him to check on us while he was away. Yet still I began to tremble as the footsteps came our way, drew nearer. Surely the night guard would never dare enter Misaki’s room as she slept. I closed my eyes, feeling Misaki’s fingernails digging into the skin of my hand as she squeezed.
And then she was saying, in a voice high with fright, ‘Minoru! I didn’t know you were home.’
I opened my eyes to see Lord Shimizu standing above us.
‘I arrived in the city this afternoon but had to go straight to the mansion and from there to a meeting.’ He sagged, whether from fatigue or the weight of his cares I couldn’t tell. ‘There was another attack.’
‘Was anyone —?’
‘Two from the Aizu domain.’
Beside me, Misaki tensed. ‘And you? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine.’ His voice was firm.
‘But it could have been you!’ She was sitting up now. Even without makeup,
her face was pale in the lamplight, distraught. ‘You’ve been hurt once already.’
‘And you haven’t discovered the traitor,’ I said. ‘Your enemies still knew where to find you.’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s true.’
‘Come to bed,’ Misaki suggested. ‘You look exhausted.’
I scrambled to get out of bed and move my futon back to the alcove.
Shimizu stopped me with a raised palm. ‘Please, don’t disturb yourself, Kasumi. I’ll sleep in the reception room; I’ll be leaving again before daybreak.’
‘So soon?’ said Misaki.
‘I have to go with a representative of the Aizu domain to Aizu Wakamatsu. It’s where the men who were killed are from. I need to speak to their daimyo.’
He could have slept at the mansion, but had chosen to come home instead. Was he checking on us? He must be worried about our safety.
When I next opened my eyes, the outer shutters had been pulled back and muted sunlight was glowing softly through the paper screen. Misaki was already awake. ‘My husband has gone. Or was it just a dream?’
‘At first it was more like a nightmare.’
‘I’m almost relieved he’s going away,’ Misaki admitted. ‘It seems that he’s in more danger when he’s in Edo than when he’s travelling.’
‘But you miss him when he’s away, don’t you?’
‘It’s hard to be apart from those you care about,’ she agreed. Her expression was troubled, and I realised that she hadn’t really answered my question. It’s hard to be apart from those you care about. Surely she wasn’t thinking of Isamu? The ghost stories had distracted me so that I’d almost forgotten the scene I’d overheard the afternoon before. Maybe that had been her intention . . .
‘Don’t you sometimes wish that you could be a spirit?’ she went on dreamily. ‘Not one of the evil ones, but maybe a spirit who can travel with the wind to see other places.’
The Peony Lantern Page 16
