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

by Unknown

  The faces of her parents have faded, but not that taste, that texture of a mouthful of fish. Even the shore of her birth has gone. It doesn’t look the same anymore; no point revisiting. Two hundred years short of a thousand: if she’s learned anything it is the calculus of letting go.

  Except this. Any equation, any formula, requires at least one constant to be of use.

  “I haven’t much time,” Kazuyo says. As the world breaks down, so do the oceans. Humans might survive, spirits and demons of most types. But not those who depend on the sea.

  In the bath the women scrub each other’s back and Kazuyo washes Ayaka’s hair. She separates the strands, pins them up, shampooing them handful by handful; the mouth hates the taste of any soap. After that she cleans around the pallid lips, wiping away traces of custard and pastry as one would off a child. The teeth used to snap at Kazuyo, but they have become docile, an animal recognizing that hers is a hand that grooms and feeds.

  A futakuchi-onna is not of the cave or the cloud, the river or the lake; she is of no element save misfortune and poverty. A point of kinship between them, human made other, mortal made demon. Across centuries, though there is no relation between them in blood or origin, they are nearly family.

  When they have dried off, they lie down side by side on a hard, thin mattress. Hands touch beneath the sheets, chaste.

  At first Kazuyo chased an end but lacked the courage to try the knife, the cliff, the deep. Cutting or shattering or drowning—she did not want those; she only wanted to gaze into the mirror and see what anyone else might in time. The softening of flesh, the loss of definition, skin gathering up and crinkling. When that did not come she turned to ordainment in search of peace, but that did not satisfy for long.

  She tries to remember the turning point. If it was Ayaka who tipped the balance, who gave her a reason. If it was her own heart fruiting with a desire for life, if it was her body straining toward survival. One day she wanted finality, the one subsequent she wanted to carry on.

  Recollection dilutes, hemorrhaging potency like tea leaves in a scalding cup. When she dreams at all, it is of being pulled down.

  Broad daylight this time, a morning so cold. A sky gridded by the nets that bride-veil and entrap the aviary—vestigial, for these days maintaining birds for their beauty is too frivolous even for a city so powerful.

  Kazuyo straightens, turns: a jerk of the head, a hardening of the jaw. Beside her Ayaka grimaces, well used and alert to this look.

  “I’ll just be a moment,” Kazuyo says, her heartbeat racing ahead. A hard sharp spike, as might presage cardiac arrest.

  “It’s going to take you more than a moment. Isn’t it enough—”

  “I’m falling apart.” Like the world outside the barrier. She is already away, tugged forward, the end of a red thread but not the one that binds for love.

  (Having lived this long, romantic want is almost beside the point. That thread is for people who endure, at most, to a hundred.)

  She walks, marches, runs. Bridge and evergreen canopies blur beneath her.

  The mermaid sits on a bench, hands primly folded. Anticlimactic despite the gun Kazuyo carries, heavy and barely used. She’s had few reasons to, is rarely cornered to a point where it is the lone option.

  Their eyes met, one pair human and the other not.

  “Do you talk?” Kazuyo says softly, for after all who can tell.

  The mermaid’s head tilts, this way then that, a long moment before she speaks. No music to this voice: it is opaque, seafloor-shade. “Yes.” The strangest accent. Not much of an answer.

  In the ensuing absence of conversation Kazuyo stands motionless. It is a public place and there are security cameras; she may not pull out a knife, slash, and excavate until a heart falls out. She may not give chase, for the mermaid gives no sign of flight.

  Slowly the creature lifts her wrist, peels away a lavender sleeve. Little marks like bites where the scales were stripped, the skin filleted. “You’ve got something that belongs to me.”

  Kazuyo exhales, tenses; this she can comprehend—a fight, a hunt.

  The mermaid moves too fast to avoid and grips Kazuyo’s arm. She is not like the others, the wispy selkies and the lithe sirens. There’s nothing delicate in this one. “I need your heart.”

  Kazuyo flinches, her words from the mermaid’s mouth. “You?”

  “A yuki-onna is bound to the mountains and the snow, a kappa to a single river or a pond, a kamaitachi to the direction of the winds. It’s our nature to have limits. But the seas have become what they are, and soon I’ll need to seek elsewhere for a home or else shrivel. Your heart will give me the world and a human’s freedom. Of all who partook of my flesh you alone survive; by that bond I’ll subsist on your pulse.”

  “I’m not going to die for you.”

  The mermaid frowns. “You’ve had close to eternity, far more than any human needs. And the part of me that you consumed won’t always last.”

  Years ago—or decades or centuries—Kazuyo would have agreed, would have surrendered and bared her throat. Instead she draws with her free hand. Not her dominant one, but she’s learned to be ambidextrous with most things. “No.” A gun’s weight is definite, better than words.

  “You want to continue?” The mermaid glances down at the muzzle, curious. “It can’t be a happy existence. It’s not meant for you.”

  Kazuyo does not move.

  “A trade. Your heart for mine, to fortify your vigor, buttress the reef and branches of your marrow. No sickness will take you and no fleshly hurt will wound you. You’ll be vital as the deep.”

  “I’m not going to shrivel up in your place, either.” Her fingers twitch toward the trigger.

  “You’ll be shackled to the ports and the shores, that is all. Having my heart won’t change your essential nature, won’t make you grow scales. A trade; we both live.”

  “Give me time.” This close the mermaid smells of silt and seaweeds. “I’ve to decide.”

  She doesn’t wait for an answer; she breaks free, away. When Ayaka finds her shaking and panting at the park’s exit, her hair is dripping wet, her skin ice.

  It takes hours for Kazuyo’s temperature to stabilize, for the shivering to stop. Ayaka’s mouth is pursed tight as she wipes Kazuyo down, squeezing the briny damp from her hair.

  “You aren’t going to say anything?” Kazuyo licks her salt-parched lips. Her teeth have just stopped chattering. “It—she—offered me a deal.”

  Ayaka dips a cloth in oil, dabbing it at the smeared makeup under Kazuyo’s eyes. “Why would you believe her? She’s a demon.”

  “By most definitions, so are we.”

  “She’s never been human.”

  “How would you know?” But Ayaka is right. “History’s littered with people who got the better of demons.”

  “And people who were destroyed by them more often than not, their souls shredded or gobbled up, their bodies cursed. Look at the world; do you think it’ll survive an age more? What is the point of taking a gamble that might trap you or worse, if there’s nowhere habitable in five, six centuries? As it is you can keep going for a long time, no risk.”

  “Easy for you to say.” She rubs away a smudge of eyeliner, blue-purple on her thumb, as of blood before oxygen exposure. More quietly, “I thought she’d be easy to kill. All the rest never resisted very hard, like they didn’t believe anyone could or would want to. They were like goldfish.”

  “And this one a shark?” Ayaka passes her a mug.

  Just water and flavorless steam. Kazuyo holds it close the way she might have held a cup of potent snake wine. “No. I don’t know. She doesn’t even mind that I wanted … I don’t think she cares.” She sips. “She’s not interested in hurting me, just in surviving.”

  “For that she doesn’t need you alive.”

  In bed, they do more tha
n hold hands, but not by much. Ayaka’s warm fingers between her own, binding as a knot.

  When she thinks Ayaka is asleep Kazuyo loosens them, puts on a coat, and slips out of the room.

  It’s not winter, but the weather has changed so much that it is rarely less than frigid whatever the month. She can’t remember the last time she felt rather than saw sunlight, and even that is a glimpse through clouds shot with sand and concrete dust. Look at the world. Perhaps Ayaka is right, despite China’s vast fount of resources technological and supernatural or Tokyo’s peculiarly bureaucratic collaboration with the gods and spirits of the land. People can’t go on without sunlight, without summer or spring.

  The piers are quiet this hour, too late for street vendors. Deserted other than late-night strollers who come out in search of what she can’t imagine. Peace, release. Perhaps suicide. Those are not uncommon.

  No guardrail keeps her from the waves. The Victoria Harbor pushes and pulls, a beat between her joints.

  When she turns around the mermaid is there. The creature does not demand, simply studies her with that same alien detachment. Kazuyo couldn’t see it before in the day, but the mermaid’s eyes shine, the sclera undulating with anglerfish glow and jellyfish gleaming on shark bellies.

  “I’ve made my choice,” she says, extending her hand.

  The mermaid nods, once. She takes Kazuyo’s wrist. She pulls them off the pier.

  They don’t fall. The air softens. A silhouette of fins and tail, a visual trick.

  In Hong Kong, the sea is everywhere.

  On her feet, on land. Not under, where the black currents crush and the toothed fish sing for her fat and tendons. Her shoes sink into wet sand.

  Lamma Island, Kazuyo thinks, approximates. In the distance ferry horns blare and Kowloon glows. The beach is deserted, the mountains rearing about them frayed and thin. This is outside the shield, but her lungs are not full of shrapnel, her flesh not blacked with radiative heat. Here it is not night; the time is a suspended minute between sunset and dusk. She thinks of Urashima Taro’s dislocation in time.

  In the shallows, the mermaid kneels with a yellowed knife balanced between her palms, shark or whale bone. She turns it in her hands as though to test its weight, to find the right angle. She strokes the flat of it, pinches the point between thumb and forefinger. When she is satisfied, she plunges it into her chest.

  What spills is not blood; it is too black and too thin, a pelagic venting all cold and salt. The creature is silent, her expression disinterested, as she opens herself and the fluids of her veins rush.

  Kazuyo catches the heart as it emerges gleaming. The organ is flesh and it is not, muscles and facets, the gravity of it gripping her fast; she can’t let go of it even if she wanted to. She holds the mermaid’s gaze. But those rippling eyes are indifferent, unreadable to the end.

  To eat the heart of a mermaid might grant death or else life everlasting. It is a gamble. No one knows for certain; no one has lived to record it and no myth holds a definite answer. And perhaps even if she wins, all she will have is a lifetime to spend in decay as the world spins its last.

  She puts the heart to her mouth and bites.

  1. After a restless night of torrenting bootleg hentai manga and trying to translate the contents of the speech bubbles, Aaron Burch, an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and new resident of North Glamis, Maine, had his tatemae and his honne come unstuck from one another as he was mowing the one-acre lawn of his new family home.

  2. The distinction made in the Japanese language between tatemae (建前) and honne (本音) does not appear analogous to the partitions of the soul made in other world philosophies. The first refers to the attitudes and behaviors human beings adopt in order to get along in society; the second, to what we inwardly hold, our true selves.

  3. The first kanji of honne is hon (本), book. The second, ne, comes from the Chinese character 音 meaning sound. But the ne pronunciation is a particle conferring emphasis. To be a honne is to be a closed book, whose interpretation is no longer subject to dispute, not so much the words contained within as the noise of gross finality it makes when slammed shut.

  4. Tatemae’s translation seems more straightforward: a constructed front. Yet the passive voice frustrates the Anglophone demand for definitiveness: Constructed by whom?

  5. As used in Japanese, the distinction appears to be discursive and heuristic, rather than substantive and metaphysical. It does not refer to discrete entities, but to different ways of talking and thinking about the self. In this sense it is partially homologous to the Hegelian contradiction between essence and appearance, in that both taken together comprise a reality that cannot be apprehended in a single glance.

  6. Therefore, a Japanese person would no more expect a honne to assume an existence separate from the corresponding tatemae than one would expect a shadow to detach itself from the body casting it. But just as stories are told in every world culture of such autonomous shadows, it is reasonable to expect incidents of such a separation between the tatemae and the honne.

  7. Aaron Burch’s tatemae—henceforth to be referred to as Aaron-T—continued mowing the lawn in a strict rectilinear progression, waving to the neighbors on each side as he saw them.

  8. It should not be surprising that a tatemae would be capable of operating a push lawnmower, but perhaps for some readers it is. While in Western philosophical traditions it is customary to treat appearances as ephemeral, a moment’s thought should make it clear that the tatemae has much greater need of the body’s physical form than the honne. Whether bowing at the waist, offering a firm handshake, making air kisses, backslaps or bear hugs, our social being makes regular use of our corporality.

  9. The honne, in contrast, has the luxury of becoming spectral. Aaron’s honne—henceforth to be referred to as Aaron-H—chased after a blue-winged grasshopper trying to evade the mower blades.

  10. “Please accept my apologies, O Blue-Winged Grasshopper, for cutting down the tall grass in which you were hiding,” said Aaron-H. “I hope a bird does not eat you.”

  11. The grasshopper, being unfamiliar with the notion of apologies, mistook Aaron-H’s cries for the wing beats of a blue jay and fled farther, taking shelter underneath a yellow toolshed. Aaron-H followed him there.

  12. It was at this point Aaron-H realized that he had detached from Aaron-T, his tatemae, since otherwise he would not have been able to fit under a toolshed.

  13. Aaron-T noticed no change, nor any grasshoppers, and continued mowing the lawn.

  14. In fact Aaron-T remained oblivious through the remainder of the day, as the movers arrived with their possessions, and his wife, Chloe, and young son, Jared, followed behind, Chloe taking charge of directing the movers on the correct placement of their various goods and Aaron-T pitching in by shifting furnishings, repairing light fixtures, and otherwise acting as the very image of a good husband.

  15. It was not until nine-thirty that night, after Jared had gone to bed and he and Chloe rested on the couch, both too tired to climb the stairs to bed, that he noticed anything different. What he noticed was not something, but the absence of something, namely the compulsion to retire to his office and begin torrenting.

  16. For Aaron-H, Aaron Burch’s true self, was a bit of a porn addict.

  17. Strictly speaking that is not true. Aaron Burch’s porn addiction was merely the sublimated form taken by an assemblage of Aaron-H’s desires and fetishes that could not be acted upon directly in any manner compatible with the constructed front that was Aaron-T. In Aaron-H, these desires and fetishes were now unleashed.

  18. So Aaron-T and Chloe briefly watched a rerun of Top Chef, then assisted one another in heaving their exhausted carcasses up to bed, as Aaron-H, having wearied of his meticulous exploration of the strange world under the toolshed, began wandering the town of North Glamis to satisfy his fetish: the musky smell of a young boy’s anus.

  19. Of course Aaron Burch
had smelled his own son’s anus many times, at diaper changes, bath times and bedtimes, but never could he acknowledge to himself that this was the smell he found so deeply satisfying. To do so might have called too starkly to mind a detailed recollection of his first Cub Scout camping trip. Instead, he would rustle Jared’s hair and put his nose to the back of his neck, reassuring himself that all he felt was simple paternal affection for his beloved child. This night Aaron-T had not even done that, simply pecking his son on the cheek.

  20. For years Jared Burch had felt mostly safe but increasingly ill at ease with his father’s rituals. Twenty years later, after several more-or-less abusive relationships with older men, he would in a particularly searing session of psychotherapy recall this night and date it as the moment that his father had begun to pull away, depriving him of what he believed love to be and continued to seek thereafter.

  21. Aaron-H, however, did not venture into the Burch house. What he desired, he believed, would hurt his son, and he did not ever want to do that. Detachment was a gift. At last, he could flee and spare his child any pain.

  22. It is only fair to assume that all parents who flee their responsibilities experience similar thoughts, sincerely believing that in fleeing they are sparing the child or children they love the agony of realizing what monsters the world set over them as caregivers.

  23. For Aaron-H, at least, this belief was more true than self-serving.

  24. That a detached honne can be spectral in nature does not mean that at all times it must be. If a true self ’s desire requires physicality for its attainment then it may assume a form corresponding to its self-image. Thus a detached honne in physical form usually looks much like the body from which it came, though often a bit younger, perhaps thinner, and with less definite facial features. So at various times over the next thirteen months, the residents of North Glamis homes in which there lived boys aged four through eleven would hear doors latching or unlatching, century-old wooden floors creaking, rustling in hampers full of dirty underwear, and occasionally, at night, the fearful cries of a child. As they searched the house for the intruder—often with a shotgun at the ready, for this is Maine—they might catch a glimpse of someone in the mirror, only to have him vanish before they could turn and aim.