Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances

by Amanda DeWees

  The words exited her lips on a puff of visible fog. The shopgirl, frozen in the corner, gave a small nod and bowed her head after the briefest of glances towards Yukiko. In her trembling hand, she clutched the gaijin magazine Yukiko had shoved in her face upon entering the store. The glossy pages showed black and white photos of the famous Japanese woman who had captured the attention of the singer from the British band. This dress was not an exact copy, but Yukiko wore the flowing fabric of this style much better. Her hair was straighter and glossier, and her skin was smooth and porcelain-pale.

  She spun again, faster. Tiny ice crystals filled the air of the Harajuku district boutique and the girl in the corner tried to shrink into the wall as she shivered. Yukiko stopped, staring into her own eyes in the mirror. Deep and black, properly almond-shaped, but she did not have the poise of the rock and roll star’s bride. The Ono bride stared up from the pages direct, daring the reader to stare into her soul. Yukiko could not even stare into her own soul for more than the lifespan of a snowflake. “Do I resemble this bride?” She repeated her question, this time more harshly, and the tinkling sound of cracking ice could be heard as she turned away from the newly frosted mirror.

  The shopgirl’s eyes darted to her again, only looking for a second before returning her gaze to her bright pink slippers. Her knees, encased in pastel-hued tights, knocked together. “Y-yes.”

  Yukiko stepped down from the dais. “I will wear this.” She lifted her chin towards an older woman in traditional garb, who stood against the wall, still as a statue.

  Her companion, stern disapproval setting her features, glided forward. “It is not tradition.”

  Yukiko tossed her hair. “Modern men do not wish for tradition.” She stalked to the exit, the white boots and their thick heels making her feel as if she strode on icebergs that carved out great holes in the world.

  From her corner, the shopgirl squeaked. It was a tiny noise, but one that stopped Yukiko and her obasan in their tracks. When Yukiko turned at the disturbance, she saw the girl step forward. “Y-you m-m-must p-pay.”

  Heat flared beneath Yukiko’s pale skin. She dares to speak to me? But on its heels came trepidation that gave her anger pause. Terrible things happened to her people if they incurred a debt.

  Obasan saved her embarrassment. “Without question.” From her blue and lavender patterned kimono, Yukiko’s aunt withdrew her hand and passed it over the cheap porcelain maneki-neko sitting on the counter near the door. Frost formed on the lucky cat’s upraised paw. “The cold wind brings you prosperity for an entire season.”

  The girl tried to keep her expression set, but her lip quivered. Obasan knew about payment, but not modern payment. This was not like the village, where Obasan’s blessing was payment enough. Tokyo was a modern city, with modern expectations. Even the temples required real coin. Yukiko unzipped the tiny handbag she’d bought earlier that day and withdrew a thick roll of paper bills. She didn’t know their denomination, nor did she care. But she set the money on the counter. “This will pay my debt for the dress and your time.”

  She glanced at the girl again, whose eyes had gone as big as the lucky cat’s ears. “Y-yes, my lady. More than enough.”

  Obasan spoke again. “Prosperity. For an entire season. Speak of this to no one.” She held the door open for Yukiko, who stepped out into the cold, windy night. The late evening streets of the Ginza were nearly deserted, and Obasan did not hesitate to speak her mind as Yukiko turned her face to the wind on the front stoop of the shop.

  “What care you of the tastes of modern men? You have only to become a bride. The man is of no matter.”

  Yukiko would find herself tormented by demons if she actually spoke the words waiting on her tongue. Is that what your mother said about the man who fathered you? But she held her tongue against the insult. “I will be the Bride because our people need a Bride. But I will not weaken our people with a hunch-backed peasant.” She fought the bitterness forking her tongue as the serpent’s. I will not weaken myself, nor curse my daughter with such a father.

  “You think to entice a husband by pretending to be Western?” Obasan tucked her hands into her kimono sleeves.

  “Why not?” She could not explain to her aunt that when she read how the bride in the magazine had bewitched the bearded man, that she, too, wanted that power. “I can’t rely on appearing helpless by the roadside when trains and automobiles climb the mountain more than woodcutters these days.”

  The roar of an engine reached their ears and a lighted bus stopped at the corner, disgorging a group of passengers. “And I don’t want to rely on a dim-witted peasant’s ignorance of his wife’s nature.” Or endure a dim-witted peasant’s touch.

  She wanted a man to look upon her with the same hungry gaze as the singer, who looked upon his bride as if she were his goddess.

  * * *

  Spencer Czernecki followed his friend and squadmate off the bus leading to the Tokyo shopping district. In spite of his twenty-two inch bell-bottoms and paisley-print tunic, he still felt like he had the “US ARMY” label inked as indelibly on his forehead as it was on the rest of his gear. Toshiro stepped onto the pavement and pointed into the night. “It’s down this way.”

  “You couldn’t have brought me around when the shops were open?”

  “My uncle’s an herbalist. He stays open late.”

  “So much for souvenirs.” Spencer winced as the pavement jarred his bad leg. Burning pain shot up the back of his leg all the way to the base of his skull and he sucked air past his gritted teeth as the world went white for half a second.

  “You okay, buddy?” Toshiro stopped in mid-stride and turned back to him. “Maybe this was a bad idea. I know the docs cleared us for leave, but if you–”

  Spencer waved his hand to cut off his friend. “I’m fine,” he muttered. Past the hissing in his ears that was no longer his own breath. He lifted his gaze to the lit-up night of Tokyo’s skyline, and of the street in front of him while the crushing weight of dread crawled into the fibers of his neck muscles and squatted there, like the forty-pound loudspeaker rig he’d worn in the jungle.

  The jungle that night…

  The rushing in his ears got louder. He felt the weight of the loudspeaker pack all over again, heard the recording blaring into his ears. The noise of a Vietnamese funeral following me, hoping to spook a few Charlies into surrender.

  “Come on, man. This was a bad idea.” Toshiro’s voice dragged him out of the jungle, out of the chaos of flickering lightning burning his eyes with afterimages that made no sense, and back to the chilly Tokyo night. The sweat prickling on his forehead cooled with a wintry breeze. He took a breath.

  Around him, people wore wool coats and hats. Saigon was hundreds of miles away.

  He took another breath. Its ghosts had followed him here.

  The lights of the Ginza burned steady. The shops had closed, but their display windows remained illuminated, tossing pools of golden light out onto the darkened street. Many had weak versions of Christmas decorations in them, in the hopes of attracting Western customers. It doesn’t even feel like Christmas Eve.

  But Christmas Eve it was, and their pass was good for six hours. Spencer started forward. “I’m all right.”

  Toshiro glanced back at him. Like Spencer, he wore nothing but shirt sleeves in the middle of the December night, while all around them wool coats and hats graced the pedestrians. “No, you’re not all right. Neither am I.”

  Spencer grimaced. “Yeah, but I can walk. Let’s go see if this uncle of yours can help us.”

  Toshiro started down the sidewalk, skirting around a pair of young men. Spencer followed his friend until they came to a group of what he called “Obaasan”. His own immigrant grandparents would have called them some variant of “babicka,” and they were ubiquitous as dandelions. Even in the Vietnamese villages through which his unit passed had them. They were Grandmothers with a capital-G, and they would not be rushed.

  Toshiro glanced hi
s way. The slow pace of the trio of elderly women allowed him to catch up to the San Francisco native. They were no longer connected by wires between the battery Toshiro carried and the loudspeaker on Spencer’s own back, but they still found themselves keeping close to each other out of habit. Maybe too close, because people back at the base hospital were starting to talk. Things like “psych discharge” and “behavioral issues.” Things that would lose a guy his GI Bill and kill his chances for returning to academia back home.

  The walkway widened enough for them to move around the grandmothers and into a crowd of bus passengers. They passed the intersection and Spencer felt the wind strike at him from around the building on the corner. The hissing, which had subsided during the walk, rushed back and he lifted his head.

  In the alcove of the next doorway, light spilled out as the door opened. An older woman in elaborate traditional dress stepped out onto the sidewalk. Spencer slowed to avoid barreling his way over the woman, when her companion emerged from the doorway and two things happened to him.

  The first thing that happened was that the hissing that haunted him became voices. Voices that he could almost understand, and finally let him know he wasn’t crazy, which was an unusual thing to think, because hearing voices usually meant the opposite. But where the static in his head had made him short-tempered during the day and haunted his sleep at night, the voices…the voices, he recognized. The voices were the same ones that screamed through his loudspeaker until the night of the storm when it all went to hell.

  As a guy who’d spent his life collecting ghost stories, Spencer appreciated the irony of becoming one himself. He and Toshiro, embedded with an infantry division in the southern region, stomped through the jungle like a mobile haunted house, playing recorded tapes of ghost stories and funerals to encourage the enemy to surrender, or send them running. Now, the Vietnamese funerary chants whispered in his ears and relief at finally naming them made him almost want to sing along.

  The second thing that broke his tenuous hold on reality was the ethereal enchantress that appeared in the shop doorway. The slip of a girl stepped onto the sidewalk wearing a slip of a dress and high, white go-go boots. The wind played with locks of glossy black hair that fell unbound well past her waist, lifting them into a cloud around her head. Her dark eyes lifted from the ground and met his for the briefest of seconds, during which Spencer would swear before a military tribunal and an academic board that she glowed. The hit-by-a-train feeling stopped everything—his breath, his movement, his brains—and he waited, frozen in a lightning-strike moment. The urge to sing funeral songs turned to the urge to sing The Doors. Hello, I love you…

  The girl’s eyes held his for a momentary eternity, her lips parted in astonishment. Spencer felt his own mouth curve up into a goofy smile. He even forgot the burning cramp in his weak leg.

  “Aiya!” A parasol of painted rice paper snapped up in front of his face, cutting him off from the enchanting creature. The older woman who’d uttered the exclamation moved the tip of the parasol dangerously close to Spencer’s face.

  Toshiro jerked him back. “Watch out, buddy.”

  A sudden gust kicked up around the building. The young vision remained blocked from his view by the parasol, but her chaperone shot him a suspicious look as the two women melted into the chilly night.

  “Spooky? You feelin’ it?”

  Spencer blinked. His friend hadn’t asked him that question since they left Saigon on the medical airlift.

  “Spooky? You feelin’ it?”

  “You’re dreamin’ it, ’Frisco.”

  That was how the exchange was supposed to go on every day patrol and every night run. Be alert. Take extra care, and we’ll get back to base in one piece.

  Toshiro hadn’t used his nickname since before the attack, as he hadn’t called his friend ’Frisco. He closed his eyes again.

  “Spooky? You feelin’ it?” Lightning flickered on and off so fast, he wanted to crack a joke about ’Frisco’s hometown and the hippies with their psychedelics. But the lightning flashed again, ozone-stink burning his nostrils, and his foot landed in something soft. Something not right.

  “I’m feelin’–” And everything erupted in fire.

  The voices in his ears turned to wails, and then to rushing static, and a tinkling bell brought him back to the present.

  “Oh!” A young woman emerged from the door of the shop with a key in her hand, bundled up against the winter’s night.

  Spencer returned to himself and stepped out of her way. Toshiro shook him. “Man, you’re in bad shape.”

  The cold wind died abruptly, leaving the two of them standing alone on the sidewalk in a pool of quiet stillness. The grandmothers had continued down the street. Toshiro eyed him with suspicion.

  Spencer glanced back towards the intersection. “Did you see her? Did you feel it, ’Frisco?”

  Toshiro’s face closed down. “I feel you getting into a load of trouble, Spooky. Come on.”

  * * *

  Toshiro’s uncle owned a dry, dusty, dimly-lit herbal shop on the second floor above an electronics store displaying the smallest transistor radios Spencer had ever seen. He’d have thought it was surreal to pass by the latest electronics equipment, including color TVs, to get to a shop where half the stuff looked five hundred years old, but so much surreal had colored his life that he couldn’t summon up the gumption to think twice. He wanted to close his eyes and remember the girl who glowed like the moon.

  Toshiro’s aunt set a tray down before them. They all sat around a kotatsu, a low table covered by a thick blanket, warmed by an electric heater. Toshiro and his uncle sat on their knees while Spencer sat with his bad leg stretched out to the side.

  “Uncle Nobu” sat across from him, calmly regarding the tall gaijin with the horn-rimmed army glasses and the grown-out buzz cut while he mashed herbs with a mortar and pestle. The elderly man sniffed the ground plants, then tipped the pestle’s contents into a clay teapot.

  Toshiro’s aunt poured the hot water over the herbs and held out a small plate with a bow of her head. Spencer watched his friend carefully, and mimicked his movements precisely. The tea ceremony was informal, but in spite of being the outsider, Spencer felt more at home than he had anywhere in the past few months.

  Before the war, he’d studied folklore at college. He traveled all over the States, studying native cultures and collecting their stories, from Indian reservations in the Pacific northwest to mountain people living in West Virginia. He’d visited the ethnic neighborhoods in New York City, where the immigrant populations of dozens of countries settled in enclaves, and a few hippie communes in upstate New York. In each of these settings, he was the outsider, who made himself invisible by careful attention to the behaviors of others around him, and by shutting up and letting them talk.

  Ironically, it was his field of study that earned him his squad nickname, “Spooky,” because he specialized in ghost stories. He hadn’t intended to, but one thing led to another during his field work and he found himself collecting strange tales handed down from grandparents and local legends of every area he’d visited. The tendency landed him in PSYOP instead of infantry after his deferment, and he thought he’d gotten lucky writing propaganda leaflets and radio broadcast scripts. Until PSYOP sent him into the field with an infantry unit and a loudspeaker strapped to his back, broadcasting the spooky stories he’d helped to write.

  Toshiro spoke quietly, telling his aunt about her sister’s—his mother’s—life in San Francisco, and asking after the herbal shop’s business. At pauses in the slow-moving conversation, Toshiro quietly translated for Spencer. Spencer didn’t speak much Japanese beyond “please” and “thank you,” and a few other words he knew better than to utter because he didn’t trust Toshiro not to prank him into sounding like a jackass before native speakers, but he could understand a bit more.

  While they spoke, Spencer let the words flow and thought of the girl he’d seen in front of the fashion shop, and To
shiro’s reaction after she’d passed. Since they’d left combat, Toshiro didn’t get those “feelings”—the hunches that kept them both in one piece. And since we left combat, I haven’t yet walked without a limp, either.

  Uncle Nobu moved from his seat and waved a hand at Spencer. “He wants you to show him your leg,” Toshiro said.

  Spencer did as instructed. Uncle Nobu tested Spencer’s leg, tapping it and humming to himself. After Spencer rolled up his bell-bottomed pant leg and showed the scar, Uncle Nobu leaned down and sniffed the scar tissue. He shone a light in Spencer’s eyes, and even had him open his mouth. “Hm.”

  The old man gestured to the teacup in front of Spencer. His wife poured carefully while Toshiro murmured instructions. “Pick it up in both hands and sip. It’s thick winter tea, so be prepared—it’s not like English tea.”

  Spencer bowed his head to Auntie, bowed again to Uncle, and picked up the cup in both hands. “I’ve had green tea before, you know.” He even liked the unusual taste. He lifted the cup and sipped.

  Sudden fire roared down his throat and came out his nostrils with his exhale. His gut contracted in superhuman effort not to spit the tea back out in a spray of lava. He saved face with a huff and struggled to swallow, which ended in a slight cough. He could have sworn he’d seen smoke puff out his nose, but his eyes had begun to water.

  Beside him, Toshiro smirked. Across from him, Uncle Nobu’s lips twitched. He turned to his nephew and gestured. Toshiro’s face fell and Spencer knew that revenge was near. But his friend inhaled deeply and sipped his tea.

  When they were finished, the old man took the cups and peered into them. “Hm.” He glanced up at Spencer.

  Uncle Nobu sat back and spoke rapid-fire Japanese. Toshiro’s eyes grew wide and he began to nod. His aunt set down the pot and backed away from the table before disappearing behind a shoji screen. Uncle Nobu still spoke, making expansive gestures around his head while Toshiro lost more and more color in his cheeks. Spencer kept quiet and observed, and the more words that passed between the two, the more tension stiffened his own spine.