Shadow (paper gods)

by Amanda Sun

  I scrunched the paper into a ball. “Assholes,” I said. “You know who it was?”

  She shook her head again, her voice almost a whisper. She looked as pale as the lockers, like if I touched her shoulder she might just vanish completely.

  One of the girls leaned over, her hands clasped in front of her. “Um...are you her boyfriend? I don’t think you’re supposed to be here—”

  “Shut it,” I snapped, and she held her hands up.

  “Mou! Just trying to warn you. You want to get her in more trouble?”

  I stood up, my bangs falling into my eyes as I stared at her. “If you girls looked out for each other I wouldn’t have to be here,” I growled. “What, are you going to just let her sit there in a pile of hate mail? What if it was you, huh? What if you had the whole school breathing down your neck because they weren’t getting any?”

  “Tomo-kun, stop.” Shiori’s voice trembled and the rage in me melted away. What the hell was with me today?

  The other girl looked at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t care. “Sorry,” I mumbled to Shiori, and started scooping up armfuls of the paper. The girl stood watching for a minute, then turned and left silently. Like she wasn’t just ignoring the bullying. I cursed under my breath.

  “It’s okay,” Shiori said. “It’s nice that you’re mad.”

  “Mad? I’m furious. Fuming, you might say.” She fought a smile, so I kept pushing. “I’m enraged. Incensed!” A small smile broke through, and I grinned. Back in control, finally. “Let’s get a bag to put these in, and then I’m taking you to get shabu shabu for dinner.”

  “Be serious,” Shiori said. “Like you have the money for that.”

  “Okay, maybe not,” I grinned. “But udon I could handle.”

  “Um, Yamada-san?” came the nervous voice, calling Shiori formally by her last name. I looked up. The girl had returned, a white plastic bag held open in her outstretched hands.

  Shiori just stared. Finally, she breathed, “Thank you.”

  I lifted the pile of papers in my arms and shoved them into the bag, nodding at the girl. She nodded back.

  Just a little kindness. That’s all anyone needed. Not to be alone. Why was it so hard for any of us to give?

  Deep thoughts for a Demon Son. The thought sent me whirling back to the history lesson. Taira no Kiyomori was real. The nightmares were real. What did it mean?

  I wanted to be alone all of a sudden, to figure it out. But Shiori was already at my side, a new smile on her lips, her eyes puffy from dried tears. I’d worry about it later.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and she nodded.

  We wove through the pathways of Sunpu Park in the crisp February sunlight.

  “Don’t let me eat too much this time,” Shiori laughed. “I’m getting fat.” She patted her stomach.

  I grinned, but inside I felt drained, frozen. I couldn’t keep this up anymore. One wrong move and everything would shatter.

  “Shiori,” I said, stopping on the path.

  “You okay?” she said, but I didn’t answer. I stared down the grassy hill to the moat around the park. The murky water rippled under the cold breeze. Not quite spring, but not quite winter. Caught in between, like me. How had I lost control of my own life?

  I slumped down on the bench, running a hand through my hair. She sat down delicately beside me.

  “Shiori, you can’t—you can’t let them keep bullying you like this. I’m not always going to be around to help you.”

  She smiled, hooking her elbows over the back of the bench as she crossed her legs. “You always say that,” she said. “And yet you always come.”

  “But what if I couldn’t?” I said. “What if something happened to me?”

  She frowned. “What’s wrong, Tomo-kun?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. It scared me to know the nightmares might be real, visions of the past or something. It scared me because it meant maybe they were true.

  How much time did I have before it consumed me? Is that what had happened to Taira?

  Shiori’s small hand curled into mine, and I looked up, surprised. Her skin felt cold and soft, fragile. Something precious. “Tomo-kun,” she said. “I’ll try to be tougher, okay? I won’t let them get to me. I don’t want to be a trouble to you anymore.”

  “You’re not,” I said. “You could never be. I just hate to see them hurt you, Shiori. I don’t want that for you.”

  She smiled and nodded, her hand pulling away from me. Emptiness where her fingers once were. I was alone again, somehow.

  She looked out over the moat, strands of her hair pulled loose from her ponytail and clinging to her neck.

  As a rule, I never sketched people. It was too dangerous, the ink taking off in ways I couldn’t control. But looking at her sitting there, with her sad eyes and her slender fingers curled around the nape of her neck, I couldn’t fight the urge to capture it. I wanted to hold on to this moment like nothing else. It was quiet, peaceful. Normal. Everything I wanted.

  And as dangerous as the ink was, if there was anything in me at all that wasn’t monstrous, it would protect Shiori. Maybe I could trust myself to protect her—I always had.

  “Shiori,” I said.

  “Nani?” she smiled. “What is it?”

  “I want to sketch you.”

  She tilted her head. “What? But you never draw people.”

  “Just this once.”

  “Why?”

  I looked at her, wanting to tell her but not sure how to express it. Her eyes fell away from me and back to the moat. “Ii yo,” she relented. “Sure.” She knew when to stop asking questions. She protected me too. And I wanted to remember this moment, before everything fell apart again. This one, normal moment, when we were just a boy and a girl in Sunpu Park.

  I opened my sketchbook and clicked the end of my pen. I sketched the lines furiously, reaching with a gentle hand to tilt her chin for the portrait, to smooth the hair beside her ear.

  I watched for inkblots, for the lines to drip the way they had in class. I watched for the warning signs that I should stop, but they didn’t come. Even the shadows were frightened to break the fragile moment.

  It was nice, pretending to be normal. Later, when I’d tucked the sketch away, we walked to the department store on Miyuki Road and ate udon together, seeing who could shove the most noodles in their mouth without laughing. I choked on the spicy broth and gulped down my water as the waiters eyed me with suspicion.

  But the darkness always waited, always lurked in the corners. It couldn’t stay like this forever. And when the time came, the claws would reach for me again, and I would be engulfed in darkness.

  Chapter Nine

  Katie

  “Katie!” Diane shrieked, waving wildly at me. She was easy to spot on the other side of the crowds. It’s not that she was really overweight or anything, but she had, as Mom put it, a “healthy appetite.” With her build, height and pale skin among the bustling Japanese crowd, she was like a sad version of Where’s Waldo?

  But once we’d hugged and I trailed her to the lower level of Narita airport, everything changed. She wasn’t awkward. She wasn’t the piece that didn’t fit, the difference that needed circling. She spoke fluently to everyone, placing a ticket in my hand for the Narita Express train—the NEX—and standing with the crowd, watching the kanji fly by on the digital board to tell us which platform and which car to line up for.

  I was the one who didn’t fit, not her. I stared at her, awed.

  She smiled. “You’ll pick it up quickly, too,” she said as we took our seats on the train.

  I tilted my head back against the fuzzy headrest.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “I studied for four months and I could barely nod my way through customs.”

  “Just give it four or five months here, and you’ll speak like a pro,” Diane said. “It’s completely different when you’re immersed in the language.”

  “Okay,” I said, halfway between not believing and not
caring. I was too exhausted from the jet lag to worry about it much. The train tunneled out of the darkness and to the outside, the February trees bare and the grass brown as mud.

  “Just forget English,” Diane said, folding her hands in front of her. “Don’t even think of it as an option. Don’t translate things in your head—just go with what sounds right. If you translate, you’re not really thinking in Japanese, right?”

  “I guess.”

  Diane smiled. “Never mind. Rest a bit. We still have to take the bullet train after this.”

  I peered out the window at the tracks, nestled between two steep hillsides so that I could see nothing of Japan but the slopes of winter forest. The train swayed from side to side gently, and a stream of steady Japanese echoed in the train car, announcements telling us something or other about the train and the destinations. The tracks clacked underneath us in a steady rhythm—click-clack, click-clack. Then another tunnel and out again, and the hills pulled away briefly.

  I stared at the low buildings. They looked strange, somehow, deep reds and browns, with black-tiled roofs and gray brick walls.

  “This isn’t exactly how I pictured Tokyo,” I said.

  “Oh? What did you expect?” Diane peered out the window to look with me.

  The hills blotted out the buildings again.

  “I guess—skyscrapers? Pagodas? Millions of people?” But the glimpses of road that sped past were empty.

  “Well, we’re not really in Tokyo for one thing. It’ll be an hour before we get there.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling ridiculous. Wasn’t Narita Airport in Tokyo? Just how big was a sprawling city of 13 million people? I couldn’t picture it.

  I closed my eyes, the jet lag hitting me as the train rocked me from side to side. When I opened them again, Diane was gently prodding my arm as she grabbed the handle of my suitcase.

  “We need to transfer to the Shinkansen,” she said. “We’re in Tokyo Station now.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I slept that long?”

  “You’re like a pro already,” she said. “Lots of people sleep on the trains here.”

  We left the doors of the NEX and stepped onto the platform. The air smelled musty like train stations do, and I followed Diane quickly through the thick crowds. A tune chimed from the speakers followed by a steady stream of polite Japanese—some sort of train announcement, I guessed.

  Everywhere there were men in business suits and teens in school uniforms. All the boys in blazers and dress pants, the girls in pleated skirts.

  That’s going to be me, I thought. I’m going to wear one of those.

  One student passed me, a white mask over her mouth and hooked over her ears like she was a hospital patient. Weird. We kept walking, and then a businessman passed by with one on.

  “What’s up with the masks?” I said.

  “Huh?” Diane said. It wasn’t even foreign to her anymore. “Oh, those? It’s a courtesy because they have a cold. They don’t want to spread the germs, you know?”

  “Seriously?” I guess it was a nice gesture, but it was strange to see them walking around like they were fresh from an operating room or something.

  Another happy tune chimed as I tripped over a thick strip of yellow plastic bumps.

  “So what about all the songs?” I said. “And the bumps?”

  Diane smiled. “The chimes make the announcements more pleasant, right?” she said. “And the bumps are to help the blind get around. You’ll get the hang of it, Katie. It’s a lot all at once. Are you hungry?” She stopped at a kiosk, breaking into rapid Japanese that I couldn’t follow. If I couldn’t even understand Diane, I was definitely doomed.

  I tried to listen to the announcements as I waited for her, concentrating to hear any words I knew. Okay, got a particle. Got a past tense marker. But nothing concrete. I couldn’t grasp a single full sentence. They could be announcing Godzilla was about to smash the station into pieces and I’d be the only one who hung around and got crushed.

  I was completely helpless, like some kind of little kid. I hated the feeling.

  Diane came over a minute later and pressed a green triangular thing wrapped in plastic into my palm.

  I turned it over, staring at the kanji on the label. “Um,” I said. “Thanks?”

  “Onigiri,” she said patiently. “Rice ball wrapped in seaweed. Well, rice triangle I guess. It’s got salmon inside.”

  I clung to Diane’s side as she led us through the noisy station. I felt like the stupidest person in the world. Who was I kidding to think I could live in Japan? It felt like I’d dropped off the face of the earth. Was this even the same planet?

  I unwrapped the onigiri, taking a cautious bite. The seaweed crinkled like paper and the cold rice stuck to my teeth. Not awful, but strange. Everything was strange.

  The Shinkansen was way worse than the NEX. The train sped along at something like a million miles per hour, which is the speed that makes your ears pop and sting like they’re going to fall off.

  “Thank god we’re only going an hour out of Tokyo,” I said, and Diane frowned a little.

  “Do you want me to get you a drink from the trolley when it comes past? It might help.”

  I shook my head, remembering the bitter taste of the green bean tea on the plane. “I’m okay.”

  She shrugged and reached into her purse, unwrapping a candy for me.

  “Strawberry milk,” she said, pressing it into my hand.

  “Strawberry milk? What kind of flavor name is that?” I looked at it suspiciously, but popped it into my mouth anyway. The world turned pink and sweet.

  “Good, right?” Diane laughed. “Wait till you try the yuzu ones. You’ll forget lemons ever existed.”

  I stared out the window until we pulled into Shizuoka Station.

  “Why are the buildings all so short?” I said.

  “Earthquakes,” Diane said. “You know, for safety.”

  “Oh.”

  I followed her, groggy from all the travelling.

  “We could walk from here, but with the suitcase we’ll want to catch the bus,” she said.

  I gazed at the ground while we waited, pulling my peacoat tighter around me to keep out the chill. We hopped on the yellow-and-green bus from the back door, Diane carrying my bag through the crowd. I could barely look around or even make small talk. I’d seen enough—my tired brain was saturated. After a few stops, Diane shoved some yen in my hand and nudged me forward. The five yen coins had little holes drilled through the middles of them. I tipped the coins into the slot by the driver and stepped out the front door.

  Starting at the back of the bus, ending at the front. Life in reverse. Why not? Everything had turned on its head anyway.

  Shizuoka had these elaborately painted manhole covers and I stared at them as we walked from the bus to Diane’s apartment.

  “Mansion,” she corrected, but I was too tired to ask, just gazed at the chalklike drawings on the sewer covers as my suitcase bumped over them. Mt. Fuji in whites and blues, cherry blossoms in pinks and greens. Some weird temple with a samurai and a yellow sunset behind him.

  “Here we are. Welcome home,” Diane smiled.

  I looked up. It was a modern-looking building with tiny concrete balconies centered like giant steps up the five floors. The glass doors slid open as we approached the lobby, a giant chandelier hanging from the ceiling and rows of steel boxes stretching the length of the room.

  “Mailboxes,” Diane said, walking across the marble floor and toward the elevators.

  I’m clueless, I thought. So much for language. I don’t even know the context.

  We rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, where a pale green door led into whatever home awaited me. Diane smiled nervously, like even she didn’t know what was in store.

  As she opened the door, the burst of cold whisked past me.

  “Jeez,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

  “Sorry,” Diane said, flipping the light switch on as she
stepped into the foyer.

  “Why’s it so cold in here anyway?” I said, closing the door behind me and clicking it shut.

  “No central heating in most of Japan.”

  My jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s not so bad,” she said. “At least you’re here in February. It’ll get warmer by the day. And you’ll be happy to know the previous owners left their kotatsu table.” She motioned toward the small living room. Beside a tiny crime-against-fashion-purple couch stood the table, encircled by a thick gray blanket. “The table has an electric heater in it,” she said. “So you sit under the futon and get snug. The futon comes off for the summer, of course. Then it’s just a glorified coffee table.”

  “Wow,” I said. “All the same, I think I’ll keep my coat on for a bit.”

  “Sure,” Diane chuckled. “Want to see your room?”

  Yes.

  No.

  Sleep. I needed sleep. It was all too much. The dull buzzing came back, my blood pulsing, the taste in my mouth sour.

  “I’m so tired,” I said.

  Diane nodded. “It’s the middle of the night for you,” she said, and she pushed open my door.

  Unlike the rest of the house, the room was traditional, the floor woven with tatami mats and an alcove set in the wall displaying some kind of wall scroll and the scrawniest of fake bonsai trees. A Western-style bed had been placed on some special mat and pressed along the side of the alcove, taking up half the space in the tiny room. A cheery pink comforter lay over the bed, with a tiny glass coffee table beside it, low to the ground and covered with the inventory of my new life—an electronic Japanese dictionary, a vase of purple flowers, an intro package from the cram school I’d start attending on Friday and a pair of red-and-white Hello Kitty slippers. A desk had been shoved in the other corner by the window, beside a tiny dresser and bookshelf.

  It was small and crowded, but the effort was obvious. And on top of it all, Diane’s only electric heater rested beside the head of the bed.

  Diane shifted from foot to foot, looking at the floor.