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

by Unknown

  I said, “Good things will happen to someone like that.”

  “Is that my fortune?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  I strode triumphantly out the front of the store. The manager was still there. And he was still a Gundam. He was checking the microphone that was for calling out to potential customers.

  “I bet you like Gundam,” I said.

  “Huh?” His eyes widened. “How did you know that? I was really into First Gundam. I was right in that generation, you see.”

  “It’s written all over your face.”

  He tilted his head, unsure. When a Gundam tilted its head, it was very cute. But my best guess put him quite a bit older than that generation. I wondered if that meant he was a nerd.

  As the day passed and I handed out the balloons, I saw all sorts of costumes, even some who were characters I didn’t recognize. All of the customers came in wearing something. Some, like the manager, weren’t in animal mascot costumes. One young woman looked like a ninja. Maybe she was the Red Shadow, Akakage. I saw dolls, including a Barbie and a Licca-chan. Surprised to see a walking doll, I lifted off the rabbit head to find another surprise—the youthful doll was suddenly an older woman. A stooped-over elderly man took the form of a baseball player in an antiquated uniform and a peculiar, flimsy-looking lack of depth. I puzzled over him for a while, and was delighted when I finally figured it out—he was a menko baseball card. Many of the older men were menko cards, and quite a few of those depicted sumo wrestlers.

  Many of the little children were characters unfamiliar to me—probably because I didn’t watch children’s shows. But apparently Ultraman was still popular. I couldn’t help but laugh when I watched a misbehaving Spider-Man getting scolded and swatted on his behind by his mother. Come on, kid, you must have seen the movie. A champion of justice should listen to his mother.

  Among the stuffed animals, the panda was the most popular. Nearly all of the adults’ stuffed animals were dirty, with some sort of damage somewhere. Many were missing an arm or an ear.

  They were the remnant memories of forgotten toys. Some had probably been thrown away. Those were likely the ones so filthy it took me more than a glance to figure out what they were supposed to be.

  As Ms. Tanaka had warned me, moving about while wearing the costume was exhausting work, and I was allowed frequent breaks. On one such break, I borrowed some glue from one of the desk workers. I wanted to mend Chiyoko’s tears. I would have preferred to sew her, but I couldn’t do such delicate needlework while wearing the costume.

  The desk worker who loaned me her glue gave me a puzzled look and said, “But I don’t see anything wrong with that suit.”

  I laughed it off and went to the locker room, where I performed first aid on Chiyoko.

  At three in the afternoon, I was considerably worn out. On the other hand, I had become completely accustomed to the parade of stuffed animals. None of the walking toys could faze me anymore. I simply said, “Hello there,” and handed them my balloons.

  Or so I thought, until I saw one normal boy. The sight, though typically natural, gave me an incredible shock.

  I placed him in or around seventh grade, a rebellious-looking child with a slightly upturned chin. He wore a T-shirt, jeans, and brand-name sneakers.

  Since this was a Sunday, and the store had a school supply section, a junior high kid coming in alone wasn’t anything strange. I watched him merge into the stream of customers and disappear into the store.

  Had he not kept a cherished toy when he was younger? Did he still not, even now?

  I figured that kind of thing could happen. I went back to doing my best at handing out the balloons.

  Maybe one hour later, I was heading back to the locker room to take a break when I noticed a commotion in the rear office. I took off my rabbit head and asked a passing coworker what had happened.

  “They caught a shoplifter.” She made a face and added, “A junior high kid. He’s a repeat offender.”

  My mind leaped to that boy who I hadn’t seen as a stuffed animal or a toy or anything.

  I asked, “Are they going to call the police?”

  “I’m not sure. They’ll contact his parents first.”

  A little later, after I’d had a cold drink and wiped away my sweat, I put the costume back on and returned to the front of the store. A taxi pulled up to the curb and let out a woman. She wasn’t a stuffed animal or a toy either. The driver looked like Ambassador Magma, but she was a plain, ordinary human.

  Her chin resembled that of the boy.

  She had to be his mother.

  She disappeared into the back of the store. Her displeased expression was incredibly out of place among the excited bustle of the Sunday bargain-hunting crowd.

  As evening approached, the customers streamed in with increasing number. Even after I ran out of balloons, I was still busy, handing out fliers and giving handshakes to the children. But I would be done at six.

  Just a little longer …

  Then the woman and the boy came out of the store.

  I had been right. They were mother and son. Side-by-side, they really did look alike.

  Both of their faces were twisted as if being crushed by something. Your jaw will go out of alignment if you keep on making faces like that, I thought.

  They passed right by my side. With the way they were barreling ahead, I had to step aside for fear they’d run smack into me.

  That’s when I noticed it. Something was clinging to each of their backs.

  It looked like a clump of dust. Or was it soot? It was black and fuzzy, and something about it gave me the creeps.

  Startled, I removed my rabbit head. I chased a few steps after the quickly departing pair to get a closer look.

  Nothing was on them. Not on the back of the boy’s T-shirt, and not on the back of the mother’s blouse.

  I put the rabbit head back on and again saw that black stuff on their backs, each lump now clearly in the shape of a hand, emaciated and taloned. The claws gripped the mother and son by their shoulders. And the hands were squirming about, resembling spiders crawling up their backs.

  I shuddered.

  What were those things? Whatever they were, I sensed they were very, very bad.

  None of the people wearing stuffed animals or toy costumes had black hands clinging to them. None of them had been possessed by anything so sinister.

  Back in the locker room, I took off my costume and leaned it against the wall. The shabby pink rabbit looked at me, expressionless.

  “Hey, what was that?” I asked. “What did you show me?”

  The costume, of course, gave no answer.

  I thought about it. I thought about the eerie black things on the backs of that mother and son. I thought of the evils drifting through our world. Any of us could get possessed by them. And then we would do bad things. Shoplifting included.

  I wondered if what kept most people from succumbing to that fate was the encompassing protection of the stuffed animals and toys.

  Memories of something treasured.

  Measures of something dear.

  People lived under their protection. Without them, evils clung to us with tragic ease.

  This pink rabbit costume showed me that.

  I said to it, “You’re amazing.”

  In the five years it had been left out in the storeroom, something had entered into the empty costume. Not something evil; something pure. It had breathed into the suit a mysterious power.

  I wanted to have it for myself.

  Could I get the manager to sell it to me? Wasn’t I about to move into the city and live among all those strangers? What could possibly better arm me for my present and future life among strangers in the big city? Just by wearing it, I could see who the bad ones were.

  At that moment, the costume’s he
ad turned to the side. I hadn’t touched it. I hadn’t moved it.

  The costume had shaken its head at me, as if to say Don’t do it.

  Suddenly frightened, I stepped away from the costume. The rabbit’s head turned the other way, returning to place.

  Again, I hadn’t touched it.

  “You’re right. I won’t,” I said aloud. “I have Chiyoko.”

  I thought I saw that pink rabbit make the hint of a smile.

  That night, I called my mother.

  With my clamoring on about Chiyoko! Chiyoko! she sounded bewildered as she said, “Chiyoko’s in the closet.”

  “Bring her out!”

  Oh, good, I thought. Mom saved Chiyoko for me. Oh, good. I’m sorry, Chiyoko, to have left you in some closet.

  I’m sorry I forgot you.

  “I’m back. Are you still there?” my mother said. “I found it. Now what am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Is Chiyoko all right?”

  “Fine, completely … a little dirty, I guess.”

  “Her paw hasn’t frayed?”

  After a pause, my mother answered. “It’s been glued back together. Did you do that? How strange. I can see the glue sticking out. When did you do that? It looks recent.”

  I grinned at the wall of my tiny apartment. “I’m coming home this weekend, so could you leave Chiyoko out where she’ll get some sun? Please, you have to.”

  “What are you talking about? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, still beaming. “I remembered Chiyoko, and I’m coming to get her!”

  Because of this mysterious happening, I received something far better than a big paycheck.

  I wonder if that pink rabbit costume is still put away in that storeroom. When will its time come again?

  If you ever find yourself taking a part-time job wearing an animal costume in lower Tokyo, remember this story.

  What will you see in the mirror?

  This is the end, where she holds a wet beating heart that drips brine and shudders with bathyal cold. It burns her, as it should. Its salt is the smell of her death, its age and scars the map of her mortality. That too is as it should be.

  Before that—

  In her long life Tanayama Kazuyo has murdered naga, selkies, sirens, and various species of mermaid. None of them is ever the correct one. They have the greenest eyes or skin like black pearl; they sing in languages Kazuyo does not recognize, have names that twist and eel inside her mouth rather than the neat polished syllables that she’s been hearing since birth.

  (Her own are borrowed, first and last; the small name of a fisherman’s daughter, Kamakura period, does not belong today. Has not belonged for some time.)

  Kazuyo makes a habit of sampling sashimi wherever she goes, testing her chances, just in case her luck rises this once, just in case the flesh she eats is not salmon or saba but sliced from a long scaled body with a human face, with a primate rather than a piscine mouth. She does not eat as a connoisseur; it is a chore. It no longer matters if the tuna is the finest grade and melts on her tongue or if it tastes like crumpled newspaper and factory exhaust. Condiments are an afterthought, shoyu perfect or watery, wasabi real or imaginary. She eats it all, so long as the fish is raw and on her plate, until her breath reeks of bloodless meat.

  She is disappointed each time.

  She started eating fish religiously by her first frozen century, began hunting mermaids by her unchanging second. Kazuyo was indiscriminating at the start. Any aquatic thing that might have a nose like her own, any being of the river and lake that possesses a slender hand in place of a fin. She developed a reputation sheathed in baits and armed with hooks. She earned grudges, but when these get especially thick she veers inland, up mountains, into deserts—the drier the better, where the climate fetters and limits pursuit.

  By a port or on an island her fate is chancier, but they are also the places where she may find conclusion.

  (But all land is an island, a naga lover told her in a sticky bed veiled by mosquito nets. There was no killing between them—they had met after she’d learned to appreciate the distinction between a snake-woman and a mermaid, though both are notoriously immortal.)

  There are many versions of Kazuyo’s story, most of them even true. But they are not about her, not really. It is about eating what one should not have, about how taking a treasure unearned—even when one does not mean to, ignorant of its worth—can culminate only in sorrow.

  In Hong Kong the sea is everywhere. Each sip of air is striated with salt.

  These days even in such a place Kazuyo is safe from her enemies, after the war that eviscerated the sky and stained the waves black, full of knives. A conflict some thirty years past between China and a distant country. The latter lost; for this she was not sorry. Her memory is not what it used to be, but she can remember Hiroshima and recall Nagasaki in all their indelible details.

  From the piers, she can see a faint sheen on the horizon if she strains her eyes. Beyond that line the air is poison and broken glass. Kazuyo does not know what the barrier is made of—prayers, willing dragons, a complicated dream—but it is a sign of China’s power that the shield covers the entire mainland and extends this far. Life is nearly normal here, though there’s not much seafood to be had.

  The pier market is upscale, a Lane Crawford transposed outdoors. Rows of lipsticks in metal tubes, palettes of eye shadows, glass bottles of perfume and foundation. She appreciates it. Her time as a bikuni has instilled an ascetic streak that she often needs to defy with a dash of fuchsia on her lips topped with golden gloss, a sweep of silver on her eyelids tinsel-bright. Kazuyo finds pleasures where she can and understands the lure of gilding one’s life to ward off the dark.

  She has reached the end of the market when her skin prickles.

  She looks up, finds an old man selling a clutch of small pets. Her quarry is next to him, leaning forward and peering into a bowl of fighting fish. Kazuyo’s heart surges, a tide rising to the source of her grief, the genesis of her misfortune. Her fingertips tingle, as though with desire.

  (She knows that the real crime belonged to her father, a peasant who drunkenly fed his daughter a rare morsel; she knows that the real crime belonged to her, who petulantly asked for a show of favor. But her father is long gone, reincarnated who knows where, as who knows what. Her daughter-self is an eon dead.)

  When she has pushed through the crowd the mermaid is gone. Her veins are quiet again. In the bowl, fish twist and swirl in ecstasy.

  “Doesn’t it suffice to live forever?”

  In the glass, two women are reflected: both are Japanese, but that is the end of their common ground. Kazuyo is styled modernly, her hair bobbed, her makeup neat—russet and black on the eyelids, peach and red on the lips. Ivory silk blouse, sleek. The other woman is a traditional painting, hair down to her waist, yukata loosely worn. Delicate wrists, hard thighs, the physique of a runner.

  Kazuyo’s mouth pinches. “It isn’t that.”

  “Isn’t it? So greedy.”

  Using the window for vanity she unpins a plastic pearl from each earlobe. A neon night outside, logos and billboards harsh on the Victoria Harbor. Always deliberately picturesque, as though the world is just like it was three decades ago, postcard reminiscence. Rumors say the power plants and factories are fueled by demons, and she is inclined to believe. Maybe metal spirits push the currents even now, igniting power sockets and keeping air conditioners operative. “It’s different for you.”

  Ayaka holds up a plate of egg tarts, as though offering them to Kazuyo, who does not take it. That long hair twitches and slithers—in some light it might seem a trick of shadow, but here under the blaze of bedside lamps the movements are explicit. Locks braid themselves, ropy, prehensile. They handle the tarts with precision.

  A crunch of rich sweet pastry; each mouthful disappears into thick l
ips the hue of cartilage, is licked by a tongue the shade of fresh ashes. Ayaka has tried to train her second mouth to decorum and quiet, with limited success. Sometimes she attempts utensils, but it is tricky to serve the back of one’s head. Nevertheless it is neat and few crumbs are allowed to go astray. Food, let alone dessert, is a commodity more precious than electricity. In the tattered remnants of China’s nemesis, Kazuyo hears, people starve and dine on softened shoes, on scorched rubber and jackknife wires.

  Kazuyo has never asked how long it took the futakuchi-onna to come to terms—a truce, a partnership—with that second mouth. Kazuyo’s own peculiarity is abstract and there is hardly room for comparison.

  “It’s not just that,” she says again. The blouse goes, liquid platinum catching light. A livid cut underscores her side, red and ripe.

  “That’s not good,” Ayaka says. “Haven’t you had it looked at?”

  “It’s a year old.” Kazuyo outlines it with her fingers. “Not infected, not mortified. It’s just taken a very, very long time to heal. I try not to get paper cuts or little bruises. Those take months.”

  “There are disorders.” But they both know that is not the case. “How long?”

  “A while. Lately it’s gotten worse.” So gradually Kazuyo did not notice it until her third hundredth anniversary. (Of death, of being.)

  A mermaid is currency for a vast range of results. To wish on, some myths murmur. To die upon, others insist. To obtain perpetuity, Kazuyo can attest. Only it’s not a bite or a slice that she needs now but a heart belonging to a specific mermaid. She knows her chances are infinitesimal; she can no more chase the creature under the waves than she can seek it among the stars. Still, she likes to think that it is called to her, summoned by the power of its flesh, the trickle of its blood that must have hardened in Kazuyo like a perfect pearl. Today was not the first time she has glimpsed the mermaid. They’ve crossed paths in many ports, more and more often after the war.