Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan

by Unknown

  Once, in college, my (white) roommate and I both dyed our hair electric blue. Everyone said her hair looked “totally punk rock.”

  Everyone said my hair looked “totally anime.”

  It’s everywhere, you have to understand. It’s the air we breathe.

  I’m a person. I’m a woman. I’m an American. I am not a plant out of place.

  My hair’s not blue anymore. For my first—my only—date with the monster hunter, I wanted my hair to be straight and black and exactly what he wanted and expected to see.

  Some people have a genetic predisposition to depression, or color-blindness, or perfect pitch, or tetrachromatic vision, or they’re super tasters. Some people have heads that can detach at night and roam the world.

  That doesn’t make any of them monsters. Only actions make you a monster. A woman whose head can fly, who uses her power to glide among the clouds and watch the city lights below, who’s never hurt a human and hasn’t even bothered a cow or a sheep or a squirrel in years … a woman like that is less of a monster than a man in a fedora with samurai swords who stalks that woman.

  “My username on the site is AmericanRonin, and yours is AmericanGeisha,” the monster hunter says, reaching across the table and touching my hand. “It’s like we were made for each other.”

  I look down at my mostly untouched rice bowl and giggle and say, “Yes.”

  The problem is, I can’t suggest going back to his place. Not without blowing the whole submissive pretense. I worry it might take a second date, that he won’t be bold enough to invite me home—he didn’t with Misaki—and the thought of spending another evening in his company is not appealing.

  But I suppose killing the nukekubi must have improved his confidence, because he says, “Hey, I live right near here—did you want to come over and check out my swords?”

  I’ve been writing all of this in present tense, because that’s the natural voice of online dating profiles—“I love sea kayaking and like to go mountain biking on weekends and am so good at cunnilingus you just would not believe”—but it’s not really the right tense. Not for the monster hunter, anyway.

  I’ll say this for the monster hunter: he kept his swords sharp. It didn’t take much encouragement for him to tell me everything—to confirm my suspicions, to turn my fears into certainties. Once I was sure he’d done what I thought, I did what I’d expected to do.

  The head of a nukekubi detaches bloodlessly, by magic. The same can’t be said for the heads of ordinary humans.

  Someone might have seen me leave his house after it started burning down—fire attracts attention. If there were witnesses, I’m sure they’re looking for a dark-haired Asian woman, age somewhere between nineteen and forty. In the Bay Area, where a quarter of the population is Asian. And where I don’t live anyway. Still, the police are smart, and there are connections, paths to follow, especially on the Internet, which will lead to me. That’s all right. My family is used to being driven away and starting over somewhere else. We have the skill set. I wouldn’t post this here, as a message and a warning and a boast and a confession, if I were all that worried about keeping my life unchanged. After I hit “post” here, I’m gone.

  My sister never killed anyone, which is more than I can say for the monster hunter. More than I can say for myself, now.

  I’m sure you’re wondering: Am I a monster too? Part of a nest of nukekubi, a squirming horde of monsters pretending to be human? Or was my sister adopted? Or is being a nukekubi a curse, instead of a condition of birth? If it is a curse, did it die with my sister, or is it passed on to someone else in the family?

  You’ll have to decide for yourself if I’m a monster. I just hope your definition doesn’t hinge on whether or not my head can separate from my body and go flying through the dark skies at night, looking down on a world turned small by distance, while the onrushing wind—surely nothing more than the wind—brings tears to my eyes.

  Gold foil stars sat in the twenty-eight lunar lodges, forming a square around the constellations Shiho and Hokkyoku. Red lines connected the stars within each constellation. The silver foil moon lit the space. The gold foil sun waited to rise.

  Underneath the map of the sky, Inari crouched.

  Inari Facing East

  Inari crouched with the word west near her feet and the word east on the far side of the map, distant as a horizon. In between: hemp paper, a vast expanse. In its center, thin black lines depicted a simple grid of the land and its thousands of rice fields in thirty-six squares, numbered in the chidori shiki system: the numbers increasing south to north and then, turning, in north to south, back and forth across the grid like a shuttle moving across a weft. Some squares were bare. Others were filled with writing, describing the rice fields. The words a village planting rice filled one square. The words rice develops replaced it as Inari watched.

  The curving parallel lines of a river cut through several squares. Four of the nearest squares described irrigation channels. No other natural features were drawn on the map, but some descriptions remembered them: ten rice fields reclaimed from forest and eight rice fields reclaimed from wetland. The blank squares could not avoid revealing the gaps in arable land.

  Inari stamped each arable square with her seal in red ink.

  In between each stamp, when her hand was raised into the air with the wooden block held in it, Inari disappeared. Her form appeared within a single square on the map: a tall woman, robed in mountain-patterned silk, her hairstyle elaborate.

  Inari walked through the square, through the villages with their playful children, along the roads leading to other villages—and, eventually, the city at the heart of the map—and turned from the roads to walk along the dividing banks of earth between each rice field. Green shoots in neat rows like formal writing reached above the water. Small fish swam between each plant, flashing pale and orange, drawing ducks. Soon the green would grow, obscuring the water. Inari crouched to run a hand over the shoots, enjoying the tickle of their tips against her palm. A planting song came to her lips, a month late. Sitting on a bank of earth, she sang it anyway.

  Bent backs, bent legs

  It aches—

  A small structure caught her attention. At the edge of a field, the people of the nearby village had built a small shrine of wooden walls and woven reeds sloping like a house’s roof. Inari ate the cooked rice offered in small, unglazed bowls.

  The people noticed and bowed toward a mountain with three rounded peaks covered in cedar forest in one of the grid’s blank squares.

  Inari stamped the square, satisfied, and lifted her hand above the next.

  In it, a feud raged, a brother and a sister fighting over the fields that had belonged to their father, each arming their villagers with sharp blades and padded tunics. The sister’s villagers fought well. The brother, in his rage, began tearing up the rice and kicking apart the earth between the fields. Inari waded through the water to the sister’s side, saying, “If I may …”

  The sister bowed deeply.

  The rice stems snapped like cries of pain in the brother’s hands. Inari called across a broken bank of earth, “Stop this now and you will still know the prosperity of your sister’s lands.”

  Too angry to truly see Inari, the brother shouted, “You will know death if you come closer!” He raised his sword.

  Inari had no need of a weapon. With a touch of her hand, the brother turned into flame—a blink of light, bright as the sun. For the rest of the day and into the night, Inari repaired the brother’s damage in the fields. Bending her back and her knees, singing, she rebuilt the banks of earth. The snapped stems returned to life in her hands. The sister insisted on joining her, and together they restored the neat rows, their hands occasionally touching like stems swayed together by the wind. Inari stayed with the sister in her house for the rest of the night.

  The sister soon began construction of a new temple, w
ith ten torii gleaming red like the sash of Inari’s robe.

  Crouched at the map of rice fields, her hand raised in the air, Inari smiled.

  In the next arable square, rice grew well. Inari stood in the center of a field, her robes raised to let the rice brush against her lower legs, and sighed in contentment. Then a fox darted from the neighboring forest and bit off the undeveloped sheaves of three rice plants. Inari shouted a word that fixed the fox in its place. Its tail still flicked. “Open your mouth.” The three green sheaves fell from its jaw and splashed in the field. “You must not do that,” she told the fox as she released it. It retreated into the forest. “The rice must prosper.”

  Crouched at the map of rice fields, Inari frowned.

  Inari Facing South

  The descriptions of the rice fields were not orientated for Inari to read them: the words lay on their sides, running left to right. Inari ignored them.

  The lines of the grid extended beyond the rice fields. The last squares at the north described—unread by Inari—fields ascending like steps toward the mountains. The north-south lines ascended further, amid mountains outlined in black ink and shaded blue to represent distance. Simply drawn trees grew on the mountainsides: lines like words to depict a trunk, several branches, bare of leaves despite the growing season.

  Words lay among the trees: The author drew details on the map sheltered from the hot sun.

  Inari crouched at the north of the map, looking south, looking at his return route drawn on the map in ink that only he could see. A map within a map. A journey scratched onto a cinnabar-coated surface. Inari saw the road curling through the mountains, crossing a river on a bridge drawn longer than the two-day distance between the river and the abandoned house where he had failed to sleep to the sound of foxes fighting. On the next mountain, two torii led to a temple. He had walked past. Trees thickened on the next mountain, then grew sparse. Birds hovered over a village. He had slept in one of the houses, fed soup by its occupants in return for a story of his travels. He had not shown them the rice sheaf. Words in the cinnabar: The map should not be shown to outsiders. The map continued. The road unbent as soon as it reached the grid of the other map: flying straight as a spear to the city, still small in the map’s center. The blank squares of the other map surrounded the palace and houses.

  Inari remembered his outward journey.

  It had happened in a time when all four edges of the map threatened to go up in flames at once, when the map had no grid, no rice fields, only the city and the villages clustered together at the center—the distances between them diminished—in fear. Inari had joined the armies that defended the center of the map against the enemies. Smaller armies had then gone out, defeating the enemies in their own villages. Inari had joined them. When they returned, full of their enemies’ fear, Inari had continued walking, wanting a more lasting end to the threats at the edges of the map.

  He had found people: some similar in face and different in voice, some different in face and similar in voice, eating recognizable food and counting a connected set of seasons. People and people and people, until he had reached the sea.

  At the shore, Inari had met a man from a farther land than he had reached, the land where many people ate rice. It lay across the sea. They had talked for many hours of the cultivation of rice, its history and its merits. Inari had returned to his city carrying a single sheaf. A great gift! “A great beginning!” Inari had told his people, who knew ample grains—sorghum, wheat, barnyard millet, foxtail millet—and added rice to only a few of their fields. “For safety. For strength.” Hunters and gatherers had continued their trades. In the fields, the rice sheaves had ripened like the tails of the foxes darting hungrily among them. Inari had seen a use.

  “Here,” Inari had told his people, “our foxes’ tails are like ripened sheaves of rice.”

  The man had told Inari that the land where many people ate rice lay at the middle of the world. In the four directions extended mapped lands: walls, distant mountains, vast deserts and oceans, and beyond them lands of dog-headed men and hairy milk-white women who lived near the water, without men, and suckled their water-sired children from white stems at the napes of their necks. No rice grew there. No threat passed the walls to the map’s center. In that map, Inari’s archipelago and Inari’s land within it were an artistic flourish: rocks among the waves.

  “Here,” Inari had told his people, “our fields are full of fox tails.”

  The man had told Inari that rice would only grow well in the archipelago’s central plains, not the cold climate of the north or the poor soils and unsuitable topography of the south.

  “Here, our land is like a bowl full of rice, held in the world’s hands. Safe. Beyond it, rice does not grow, foxes’ tails do not wave in the wind, the people eat different foods and lead different lives.”

  Inari had walked among the fields, spreading the rice, encouraging it—standing in the calf-deep water and letting his power seep into the soil until green filled the fields, until it ripened and the people ate well. The foxes had run into the fields. The stories had grown.

  Under a hot sun, Inari had climbed the three-peaked mountain to update the map.

  In a later time, when the enemies had returned, the people of the map had cried out, “They come from the land where the people eat only salmon and lily bulbs, and scrape the surface of their pots with the coarse edge of a wooden board!” The victory of the rice-eaters had been swift.

  Crouched at the map of rice fields, Inari looked over the long lines of the rice field grid and the scratched-in-cinnabar journey like retelling stories.

  Inari Facing West

  Beyond the grid of rice fields with its growing, ripening text, beyond the lines extending into mountains, Inari drew an ocean. Waves roiled in thin lines of black ink under Inari’s fox-fur brush. Words fell into it like dye into a vat. Stories. Inari’s wrist ached.

  Islands emerged. Inari annotated them with a brush of a single fox hair.

  At one corner of the map: the Island of Women, isolated by sharp rocks and twisted currents and the stories hanging in the salt spray. Cannibalism splashed across the sea. A lengthy description of the dishes cooked from men’s flesh lingered like foam. Inari evoked a pot in a curve of coastline. After a rest to ease the wrist ache, Inari turned to the rocks at the island’s other shore. Erotic stories eddied and churned. Women loving other women. Men setting sail with ships full of shunga to please and arouse the women they met. Inari wrote all the stories, even those that made others uncomfortable, even those that belonged to the past or the future.

  At the north of the map: the Route of the Wild Geese, a rocky island uninhabited except for twice a year when the geese landed on it, resting on their journey between Inari’s land and the unknown north. Inari dreamed of the north. Unending ice, unlit. No rice grew there.

  Inari drew more islands that floated like teeth on the hair-straight sea, all of them far away from the map’s center: far from the archipelago, the shore, the mountains of Inari’s journey, the grid of rice fields. Inari missed it. From the sea, Inari saw the distant words rice prospers in this land. Inari saw the new king place rice in a shrine to commemorate his coronation and plan a new tradition of offering the first sheaves of rice from each year’s harvest.

  The map’s edges were not yet complete.

  At the west of the map, surrounded by ocean: an unnamed island. With the single fox-hair brush, Inari drew the simple lines of a shrine and a series of offerings. Stone pillars reached up to the sky like arms. A row of emptied husks and discarded seeds and the other inedible parts of fruits covering the low pedestals indicated the food offerings’ acceptance. Gold rings were neatly stacked on five pedestals. Metal horses and glass vessels were arranged behind them: gifts from further across the sea.

  Inari added a bowl of rice to the central pedestal: the finest part of the painting. A careful line repre
sented each grain. A palatial glaze decorated the bowl. The detail spasmed Inari’s wrist, sending a fine line along the bowl’s rim. A crack, Inari decided, to represent the longevity of the offering.

  Inari worked on, wanting the map to be complete.

  Stories swilled at the island’s shore, telling of the ships stopping there on their way between lands, making offerings—to the sea, to the sky, to the winds—and consulting their maps. Ships from Inari’s archipelago stopped there too. Sailors saw the familiar bowl of rice and the unfamiliar rings, metal horses, and glass, and knew they stood at a boundary. Inari painted the story: they stood at the furthest extension of the land where the king offered the first sheaves of rice. Beyond it, other people lived.

  At the far western end of the map, Inari painted coastlines: a peninsula, a hint of the great sweep of land beyond it. The land where many people ate rice. A neighbor state.

  Inari returned to the map’s center to walk through the fields. Foxes waited in the forests. “It’s your turn to get to work,” Inari told them.

  Inari Facing North

  A fox the color of ripened rice sat facing the north, watching the word mouse appear in one of the grid’s squares, disappear, and reappear in another. It waited, patient. It leapt. Its tail waved like a ripe sheaf of rice in the wind as it disappeared into the map. The word fox appeared. The word satisfied. The word protector.

  The descriptions of ripe rice disappeared: harvested. The fox reappeared on the map in the space under the red-joined constellations.

  “Perfect,” it said.

  Inari rolled up the map of rice fields, satisfied that the land would prosper.

  The map of the sky remained open overhead. Inari took the map of rice fields to a cabinet of kiri and cedar and gold, where all the maps of the archipelago’s lands were stored: the map of mountains, the map of earthquakes, the map of languages, the map of trade routes, the map of ghosts, the map of migrating birds, the map of work songs—uncountable maps. Pathways led between them. Inari stepped into the cabinet to tend the rice in other maps.