The Mists of Osorezan

by Zoe Drake

  He couldn’t hear the voices anymore.

  He quickly crossed over to the storehouse, looking around to see if anyone was watching him. He unlocked it and went inside. He took down a te-ushi, a tool used to plough the fields, and also a small scythe. Hefting them in his hands, he went back outside.

  Nobody around. No signs of any people or unfamiliar cars. The news reports from last year came vividly back to him; it had been a dry rainy season, and so the rice yields and harvest were very poor. Criminals had driven around the countryside in trucks, stealing the rice crops in the middle of the night. They hadn’t stolen the bags of rice; they had gone in before the harvest and actually stolen the plants themselves, ripping them right out of the paddies. Probably Chinese gangs, he thought, or Koreans. A homegrown Yakuza wouldn’t stoop so low as to steal the rice out of another Japanese mouth.

  Tsutsumi pulled out his packet of Caster Mild from his jacket pocket and lit one up. Whatever had woken him up had gone now. He stared contemplatively into the night, watching the moon reflected in the still water. The seedlings stood proud, their stalks dotting the surface of the paddies. Within no time at all they would be up to his thigh, swaying in the wind, readying themselves for the autumn.

  His reverie was disturbed by another noise. He heard it again, that strange, bubbling sound. He looked around for the source; it sounded like someone wading through mud. It was close. Very close. He froze, his body tense, the cigarette in his hand forgotten.

  He looked down into the rice paddies. The plants themselves were shaking, as if something were moving through them, swimming through the water and pushing them aside. As he stared, a clump of plants suddenly disappeared, as if they’d been pulled under the water. He kept staring, and another clump disappeared.

  “Hey!” Stepping closer to the edge, he reached in with his te-ushi and started raking through the plants, trying to see what was causing the problem. Resistance. A tug against his fingers. To his shock, the wooden tool was plucked from his grasp, disappearing into the water with a throaty squelch.

  He stood and stared at the rebellious rice paddy in bewilderment. Was it some kind of animal? Foxes and raccoon-dogs could cause trouble, but none of them went into the water.

  As he stood peering down into the wet darkness, something launched itself from the pool and grabbed his boot. He was jerked off his feet, and pulled down the side of the field, the cigarette thrown from his hand. Without thinking, he lashed out with the scythe. He struck at the slimy, ropy tentacle in his panic, and it suddenly let go, uncoiling and whipping itself back into the plants with a splash.

  Shaking, Tsutsumi scrambled back and stood at a safe distance, looking back at the rice paddy. What in the name of the Amida Buddha had that been?

  The waters of the rice paddy parted. Something slithered upwards, into the moonlight. Tsutsumi watched in disbelieving horror. The bloated thing kept coming, up out of the mud, bulbous, phosphorescent eyes staring fixedly at him through a tangled weed-covered mess of a head. It was the size of a man – but its skin was as vile and pale as a worm, and its snakelike arms writhed above its rubbery body–

  With a throat-scraping scream, Tsutsumi ran into the house, locking the back door with trembling fingers. The Dorotaboh, he thought. He remembered his grandfather hanging amulets from a post next to the rice paddies. “If you don’t take care of the fields,” his grandfather had said, “the Dorotaboh mud-spirit will make his home there. And then you’ll never get rid of him.”

  “Emiko,” he yelled. “Emiko, get the children into the spare room and lock it! There’s something – there’s something outside!”

  The bedroom was empty. He heard something: the same gurgling laugh. “What…”

  The bathroom door opened.

  Someone stood in the doorway, dead white skin, hair dishevelled and covering her eyes. A woman he’d never seen before. Her white yukata robe was soaking wet and stained with dirt and blood. She stared at Tsutsumi, and opened her raw, red mouth in an evil laugh.

  He screamed, and hit her with the scythe. The rusty metal curve sank deep into the flesh of her neck, but there was no blood, just a dark trickle of mud.

  “Go away!” he screamed. The ghost-woman thing fell forward, against his coat, and as he felt the clammy touch of her hands he kept hitting her in a frenzy of disgust.

  “Don’t touch me! Get out! Get out!”

  Yoshitada Tsutsumi awoke in his futon and lay very still.

  Around him, the quiet bedroom was lit by early morning sunlight glowing from the paper squares over the windows. He blinked, rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He waited for his eyes to adjust, straining his ears to listen.

  He sat up in his futon, his middle-aged bones giving loud snaps and creaks. The clock said two minutes past five.

  What a nightmare he’d had.

  Something about his body felt strange – and he lifted up his arms to realize he was wearing his yukata robe in bed – and also a pair of muddy trainers. What the–? What could possess him to walk over the tatami in his shoes and get in his futon? He’d never hear the end of it from Emiko…

  He looked over to her side of the futon, but she wasn’t there. He stood up, calling her name. It was too early to make the breakfast and the lunchboxes, surely?

  He slid open the bedroom door, switched on the light in the corridor, and froze. A figure lay prone outside the bathroom door.

  “Emiko?”

  He prayed that he was mistaken, that he was looking at a pile of laundry, that it wasn’t a human being at all.

  But the blood was still seeping from her throat, her face, her arms. It had already soaked the tatami.

  And the scythe was lying right next to her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tell Saori

  In the coolness of the debriefing room, David lay back in the chair and went through his notes. Instead of writing in English or Japanese, David had drawn a number of images from the dream – a technique that Nozaki had regarded with solemn approval. As David looked at the images once more, sipping from a glass of orange juice, Nozaki settled in opposite him with his questionnaire-holding clipboard.

  A crowded train station. A group of travelers wheeling their suitcases in front of them. A clicking noise, like someone typing on a computer keyboard. A few seconds before waking, a noise like a fire alarm.

  In the big leather chair opposite him, Nozaki scribbled a comment on his clipboard, looking pleased. “That’s good. Very good. Now, there are a few things I’d like to go through with you, David.”

  The big man took a slender notebook from his desk and held it out. “I’d like you to record your dreams at home, so that we can monitor progress. There’s a questionnaire on the inside for things to consider.”

  Opening the notebook, David saw a printed sheet pasted on the inside cover, ten Japanese words typed in bold script. He recognized the Kanji for ‘recall’, ‘activity’, ‘speech’, and ‘strangeness’; others were more obscure.

  Nozaki smiled. “I think that’s all quite clear, don’t you? When you wake up, remember to lie still in the same position for a few moments, and try to recall as much dream content as you can. Then make a report in this book. If you wake up in the middle of the night, please try to write down the contents of the dream straight away. There’s a great temptation to turn over and say I’ll do it in the morning, but of course, when the morning comes, you’ll have forgotten what it was that impressed you.”

  “Thank you. Is there anything else?”

  “Why, yes. There are exercises you can do before you go to sleep. Some of our volunteers find them very helpful for lucid dreaming.” Nozaki pushed back his seat, then held up both hands. “When you go to bed, look at your hands. Look at them very carefully, and on one of them, with your finger, write the character for ‘dream’.”

  Holding up his left hand, palm open, Nozaki traced the kanji for dream, stoke by stroke.

  David held up his hands and copied the motion. Writing out u
nfamiliar kanji on their palms to get the stroke sequence right was one of the habitual gestures he’d seen Japanese do, both children and adults. Following Nozaki’s lead, he drew the word ‘yume’ stroke by stroke. First, the three crowning marks; beneath it, the element for ‘eye’; beneath that, the element for the moon, rising. ‘Yu-me’. Literally, it meant something you saw with your eyes closed at night.

  David made a note of the instruction in his new notebook and then slipped it into his rucksack.

  Nozaki peered intently at David. “Do you always write like that?”

  The foreigner smiled in embarrassment. “When I was a child, I used to write with my hand bent around, like this…it still comes out, sometimes.”

  “Is anyone in your family left-handed?”

  David frowned. “I’m not sure. I don’t think so, why?”

  “Oh, no particular reason.” Nozaki smiled and bowed slightly. “Well, thank you David, that will be all for today. I shall see you next Thursday evening.”

  Time to make a move, David told himself, leaning forward. “So how does all this work, Dr. Nozaki?”

  “I’m not a doctor, I’m a researcher…and I thought I explained this at the orientation.”

  “Yes, but I’m still not sure. I mean, how can you actually modulate someone’s brain waves? How is it possible?”

  Nozaki made a brushing motion with his hand. “I don’t have time to give you the exact technical data, but remember one thing, one common misconception; sleep is an active process. You see, the body may be relaxed during most phases of sleep, but the brain doesn’t switch off to retune itself. Brain activity actually increases dramatically. What we are doing is simply recording and analyzing that activity, and giving it a little push in certain directions.”

  “Thanks,” David offered. “I wasn’t trying to steal any of your secrets.”

  “They are not secrets.” Nozaki was starting to look offended. “Here at the hospital we practice total transparency and accountability.”

  “Look, I was only joking!”

  “Ah, yes,” Nozaki replied. “American joke.” As if that explained everything.

  Getting off at Tsugarumiyata station, when the dusk had just reached the tipping point into night, David noticed a huge wall of glowing lanterns recently set up in the parking lot opposite. Not only the traditional red and white, but also sky blue, salmon pink, bamboo-shoot green. This, he realized, was to be the site of the local Bon-Odori festival. A wooden platform stood half-erected in the middle of the grounds, around which the dancers were to perform, to the sounds of folk songs and the pounding of the Taiko drum.

  Midsummer was the time when the whole of Japan prepared itself to welcome the returning dead. The O-Bon Buddhist holiday was the time when the gates to the world beyond opened, and the spirits of the ancestors returned to visit their living relations. The celebrations to welcome the visiting ghosts were complex and, to David, arcane and intriguing.

  David had attended the Bon-Odori for the first time last August, in the town where he’d been housed. He had watched the dancers in fascination, mostly women in yukata robes and light summer kimonos. They danced in rhythmic steps in a circle around the wooden tower, making slow, dreamy movements with their hands.

  I wonder what the Yoshida family is planning for the return of their dear departed daughter, he thought, as he made his way to their house.

  Wednesday night was the night for his weekly lesson with Saori – although with a girl as fluent as her, it wasn’t exactly a lesson. The family had lived for three years in the USA, in Los Angeles, thanks to Mr. Yoshida’s job with a firm that manufactured medical equipment. Saori’s formative years had been spent in a private school, with lessons in English. Every week David brought magazines and news articles printed out from online news sites and they went through them together, with him letting her talk about the things that caught her eye, answering her questions on the things she wanted to know.

  “Ayano used to like stuff like that,” she said several times during tonight’s lesson, her face unreadable. Even though it was summer, Saori wore black; she’d once told David it was the easiest color to wear, it went with everything. A gold leaf and pearl pendant stood out against her black long-sleeved cotton top. She leaned over the table, the strands of her sheeny hair falling over her face, and then straightened up again, looking at him with those extraordinary eyes, the wide, smooth rim of lid between eyebrows and long, long lashes.

  The drawing room door slid open without warning, and Mrs. Yoshida leaned into the room, her smiling face fixed upon David.

  “David-sensei, you must be very tired. Would you like some green tea?”

  “That would be nice.”

  The two tiny cups of steaming liquid were placed upon the table almost instantly. “Do your best,” she said in English to Saori, then retreated.

  After he sipped the almost scalding tea, he looked at her and began, “Saori, so how’s school?”

  “I hate school.”

  She said it in her soft, American-tinted English, and David sat silent for a moment. After a pause, she let out a long sigh and looked David squarely in the face. “I can’t stand the other girls, they want everything to be kawaii – to be cute. They say it all the time, about boys, pop idols, the Disney character dolls they hang from the straps of their bags, they think the whole world is full of cute, childish things.”

  She leaned closer, frowning, her eyes downcast and looking at the table. “Japanese language is so weird, don’t you think? At school they use new words all the time. You know, slang. Tera kawaii, they say, tera kimoi. Anyway, in the future Japanese will be probably mixed with Korean.”

  “Korean? Korean language?”

  “Yeah, because it’s so trendy. Anyang. Ko mah wahyo. Anyang tera kimoi. Ko mah wahyo giza kimoi.”

  She laughed, with a trace of contempt. “I don’t like school. The buildings are damp, and old, and I can’t stand my classmates. They go around acting like a bunch of complete idiots. They don’t like me, either. They feel threatened by me.”

  “Saori, I would never call you threatening.”

  “They say I’m so gloomy. Walking down the corridors all gloomy and cloudy.”

  David closed his notebook, rubbed his mouth with his hand. He knew what Japanese people were like in general, and high school students in particular. What did they say about her behind her back? Did they say, yeah, it’s that girl, the one whose sister died? The one whose family won’t stop making trouble about it?

  Saori looked up at him, her face brightening. “Look, let’s talk about something else. Tell me about yourself, David-sensei. Tell me about your girlfriend.”

  “Like what?”

  “How did you meet?”

  David sat back in his chair. This was one question the Japanese had asked him over and over again since he’d arrived in this country. Why this vicarious obsession with other people’s love lives? Was it something that bound people together across the world?

  “We met in Istanbul, when we were both working there,” David said. “I was teaching in Turkey for three months before we came to Japan. One day I’d gone into a carpet shop to buy one of those Kilim rugs, you know, the kind of rugs you hang on the wall because they’re so decorative. I saw this girl in the shop – she was with a friend of hers, but there was something about her, something so attractive, that I had to try to talk to her. So I went up to them and tried to impress her with this little speech about Turkish rugs and Persian rugs, you know, how they reflect the cosmology of the Arabian universe…”

  “Wow! Are you an expert?”

  “No, not at all. I’d read this article in the guidebook over lunch. So there I was, trying to sound intelligent and impress this girl, but I didn’t know that Lisa had studied art and design at college and she knew much more about Persian carpets than I did. But anyway, she let me carry on, I made her laugh, and we went out for a drink that night.”

  “Great!”

  “Y
eah, we had a good chuckle over that rug thing later on.”

  “Don’t you miss her?”

  David grinned nervously. “Well, yes, but she’s coming over soon. The thing is, it’s important to make plans together, so you’ve got something to work towards. A long-distance relationship is…well, it’s difficult, but we’re managing.”

  He swallowed hard. The tang of Saori’s perfume was in his nose. It was a heady, unmistakable scent, clearly different from the vase of flowers at the other end of the table.

  “That’s a nice story.” Saori turned, looked to the side. “Ayano and I used to talk about boys, we used to share everything, you know? Since she’s gone, there’s nobody I can really talk to – nobody I feel really close to…”

  Despite the drink he’d just had, his throat felt dry and parched. Go on, a voice inside him screamed. Tell her. You’ll have to tell her sometime.

  “Saori…I’ve got something to tell you.”

  “Are you going to tell me a secret?” she cut in with a charming smile.

  “Well, no, not really…well, perhaps, yes.” He leaned forward. “I’ve enrolled at the sleep research program at Aomori.”

  There – he’d said it. It was followed by a silence, and he thought maybe he’d spoken too fast for her, maybe she hadn’t caught what he’d said.

  “I’m working with this guy called Nozaki, and I’m watching what he does very carefully. I think maybe I can…”

  “Nande?” she finally said, screwing up her face. The Japanese word for why, or sometimes, depending on the intonation, what the hell are you talking about.

  “I thought maybe I could get some information you could use. You know, with me on the inside of the hospital, seeing what really goes on. If there’s something suspicious with the project, something that may have affected your sister…maybe I could spot it.”