Japanese Gothic Tales (14 page)

5

The three members of the gang came back from their morning bath, and everyone sat down to a game of cards, including Kumazawa, who had finally emerged from the toilet. Breakfast turned out to be sushi, stewed tofu, and a little
sake
. Amaya suggested that with tea they
have some of the Soma crackers that were made and sold in an alley in Miyamoto-cha, just at the bottom of the steep flight of steps running down Myojin Hill. They would be his treat to Osen—salted and crisp, flecked with soy sauce, and marked with horse-bit patterns. It was Sokichi's misfortune to be the one sent to buy them.

Ah, the appetite of a seventeen-year-old! He could barely manage to get three meals a day; and though this was by no means a difficult errand, his hunger pangs became even sharper than they had been earlier that morning. The pain spread to the bottom of his stomach, as deep as a tumble down a steep flight of steps. Tempura, noodles, baked sweet potatoes—the smell of any one of these would have tested anyone's ability to endure. But a whiff of the golden-brown Soma crackers made Sokichi's hands tremble with desire. He was nearly starved, and the beads of cold sweat that began running down his body were impossible to ignore.

Seven
sen
still bought a lot of crackers in those days. From a large bagful, Sokichi stole just two, two crackers as round as silver coins. He paused at a landing where the path up the hill was so steep he could reach out and touch the steps before him. Shielded only by a thin covering of ginkgo leaves and the branches of the firs and Chinese nettles towering far above, Sokichi faced the drainage ditch that ran along the cliff and partook of forbidden fruit for the first time in his life. He chomped down on the hard crackers like a horse champing down on a bit. How wonderfully delicious!

But he was immediately overwhelmed with guilt and embarrassment, as if he had thrown himself into a ditch and fallen to pieces like the crackers that seemed to break apart inside his stomach rather than in his mouth. It was as if he had bumped his head on an overhanging cave and poked his eye on a spike, his entire body warm with the spurting blood as he crawled like a snake up the serpentine stairway. He felt like the love-tortured Oshichi, dashing up the steps to watch the city burn, the sunlight glaring in his eyes, turning blood-red, flowing down the steps toward him. He washed himself at the Myojin Temple's holy laver and felt a horrifying chill run through his entire body.

"Heh, heh, heh!"

The men had sat down to play a game of cards, laughing among themselves. Sokichi immediately sensed the danger when he entered the room, feeling his face flush with guilt as he handed the bag of crackers to Amaya.

Turning over a card and aligning it with another, Amaya passed the bag to Osen. She looked tired and hadn't joined the game. "Here. See what you think."

Osen received the bag from where she was sitting on the opposite side of the brazier. She put it down by her knees, peered in, and innocently said, "I'll check for poison." How those words pained Sokichi! Had his guilt been all he had to bear, the story would have ended here. But there was more.

"Heh, heh, heh!"

The sound of muffled laughter had entered Sokichi's ear from the very moment he returned. Looking away from the cracker that Osen picked from the bag, he was struck from the side by the snickering of Small Plate Heishiro. With his fat cheeks, diamond-shaped face, and narrow, deeply set eyes, he laughed and crinkled his stubby nose.
"Heh, heh!"

Small Plate seemed to have drawn a bad hand and was out of the game. Holding his silver-plated pipe, he propped up one knee, placed his cheek on top of it, and laughed uncontrollably.

6

"Take that." The landlord turned over a card, and the priest flashed his red sleeves.

"Damn you!" The priest threw his card down.

Small Plate's snickering was louder now.

Kumazawa reached for his
sake
cup with one hand as he stared down at the contest of bush clover, iris, cherry, and peony as the cards fell one by one onto the velvet cushion. "What's wrong with you?" He glanced over at Small Plate, who laughed again, as if he were a bug that had just eaten a mouthful of pepper.

"Idiot!" Kumazawa licked the corner of his mouth and held out his cup. Osen took the heated
sake
flask from its copper boiler and paused. "Something wrong?"

"Sorry." Small Plate laughed again. "Can't help it."

"He's been possessed," Amaya mumbled in disgust.

Everyone fell silent, but with the silence came only more laughter. Small Plate fell over on his side, beating his ribs with the gooseneck of his pipe as he writhed on the tatami. "Help
! Ho, heh, heh!
I can't stand it!"

The red-faced Small Plate, eyes watering, squirming in agony, found a cup of cold tea, gulped it down, and immediately started to choke. He reached for an ash pot, but it was too late. He coughed and sent up a cloud of ashes.

The priest pointed toward the wall. "Sokichi. Open the window!"

As if leaping from a mattress of needles, Sokichi jumped up and slid the paper-covered shutter to the side. Quickly, the blizzard of ash was sucked out the bay window and into the blue sky, disappearing over the ocean of Shinagawa. Standing at the window, Sokichi could see the chimneys of the Kuramae district and Asakusa's twelve-story Ryoun Pavilion to the north. Directly below was the avalanche of a cliff, and slightly beyond the clutter of rooftops were the oiled paper doors of the place where he had bought the crackers. The small shop was clearly visible in a patch of sunlight.

He could also see, running off into a deep, dark hollow, the flight of stone steps he had taken. It twisted sharply up Myojin Hill like a huge centipede. It gnashed its teeth at the dead end, crawled out of the gutter, ran along the black spike-topped fence, and squirmed in an ugly, filthy line, its tongue licking a morsel of bread. Sokichi felt the blood drain from his face. He knew at that moment that he had been seen eating the crackers! Small Plate, who was wiping drool from his knee, had seen him from the window! Small Plate let out a loud sigh, and the last rumblings of his laughter echoed in Sokichi's ear.

"Sokichi, " Osen asked, "aren't you going to have a cracker?"

Had the cliff been more jagged, Sokichi would have jumped out the window at that very moment, with the sound of Osen's voice still ringing in his ears. It was because of her that his shame was so unbearable, and he wanted to dash himself into pieces. Wasn't she the one who had protected his eyebrows? Wasn't she the one who had made him yearn for the woman who had given him life?

"I've got something to do at home," he managed to say.

By "home" he meant the row house in the alley. But Sokichi walked right past it and on to the Myojin Shrine, where he wandered the grounds and hid from the stares of others, forgetting even his hunger, crying until the stars appeared in the cloudy sky.

That night he said to Matsuda's woman, "I'll take the razor to the barbershop if you like. I'm going that way anyway."

Sokichi purposely avoided the front door. He sneaked into the mistress' quarters by way of the kitchen and got the razor from Matsuda. He felt Osen's presence in the next room and even smelled the fragrance of her perfume. But she made no attempt to come to him.

Out in the alley he could see the silhouettes of Kumazawa, the priest, even Small Plate, outlined beneath the row house's red lights. He could hear their voices, too. Luckily, no one heard or saw him leave.

7

"What are you doing? What do you think you're doing?"

She seemed like a wondrous bird with a beautiful woman's face, sweeping down from the trees to grab his sleeve. He was leaning back against the trunk of a ginkgo tree that was being used as a corner post for one of the empty stalls behind the main temple. Just as he was about to slash his throat, Osen came. She wrested the razor from his hand. Everything seemed like a dream.

"Thank goodness I got here in time!" Osen turned and prayed to the shrine while still holding Sokichi in one arm. "I had a premonition about this. I heard you. . . say in the kitchen that. . . you were going to take the razor. My heart nearly stopped! `Hata-san! Hata¬san!' I called for you. But you had already gone. I couldn't help thinking you might try something like this, so I came looking. I didn't know where to look. I stopped at the barbershop near the main gate, but they said they hadn't seen you. 'Too late,' I thought. I was in a daze, but thank the gods who led me here. Hata-san, it wasn't me who saved you. Your parents are looking after you. Do you understand?"

Like a child, Sokichi buried himself in the softness of her bosom. He wrapped his arms tightly around her sash and girdle.

"Look, the moon," she said. "The Buddha."

He never forgot that moment. The half-moon seemed to be descending from a black cloud, its light shining upon the treetops of the ginkgo towering above, like the gentle contour of his dead mother's breast.

"The future's yours," said Osen. "Even if you were a woman, this would be the springtime of your life. So why would you want to kill yourself? Unless it's . . because of me." Sokichi could feel her chest tremble against his. "Why end your life just because they say you ate those crackers? It doesn't matter. You know that I'll always . . ." She paused, then continued. "Anyway, come to my house. No one's there tonight."

Urging him on, she searched for her wooden sandals, the crimson of her undergarment showing against her white legs. Osen seemed beside herself. Without thinking to get Sokichi's shoes, she grabbed his hand and breathlessly hurried him away, escaping from the horror.

When they passed the temple, she scooped water from the holy laver and sprinkled a few drops on Sokichi's head. Was she trying to ward off evil spirits? Was it the god of death she feared?

"Health. Longevity. Learning. May our wish be granted." Her eyes were filled with tears as she pressed her wet hands together and bowed toward the shrine. The white of her neck showed in the moonlight.

"Now drink. Calm yourself. I'll drink, too." She slowly lifted the dipper to his mouth. "Look how I'm shaking."

Sokichi had already noticed.

"Hata-san, we're not going back to that place. You'll never have to go back there again. I'll risk my life to save you. Anyway, I just asked the shrine to forgive us. You know why? That water on your head, I sprinkled it on you so when we got home. . . I could give you a priest's haircut with this razor and then we could sleep together. That priest from Kishu was going to make love to me tonight anyway. It was all Kumazawa's and Amaya's idea. They were going to walk in on us so they could blackmail the priest. They made me go along with their plan.

"You see, the priest had brought some treasures from Mount Koya and was going to sell them here in Tokyo. But Kumazawa duped him. He said he'd sell them to some rich businessman for him. But what he really did was to pawn everything then spend all the money. When he was asked to pay it back, he thought of this scheme because he had noticed the priest looking at me.
"Sokichi, I'm not a strong person. I got mixed up with those people because I depended on Kumazawa's strength. But after hearing their plans . . . and seeing your eyebrows." Osen gently patted Sokichi's shoulder. "I hate Kumazawa. Imagine him barging in on me and the priest! I decided I was going to sleep with you instead. Then when he came in, I'd sit up and tell him exactly what I thought. We'd give him the satisfaction of seeing us run off together in the middle of the night. But I thought those men might do something to hurt you, and then it would be too late. So I'm not going through with my plan. No. Come on, Sokichi. Let's run away now. Leave everything to me. You can't go back there.”

As they descended the stone steps that led down the far slope of the hill, Sokichi felt as if he had passed over a wolf-haunted pass and could now see a valley of promise before him.

"This is the place, isn't it?" Osen smiled. She pulled a purse from her sash. The sash was a cheap-looking thing, but her purse was the color of spring.

"Let's walk while we eat," she said. "You're such a weakling."

In the dark alley leading to the main street, she fed him the rice crackers from her mouth sweet, fragrant, broken up by her teeth.

8

Returning home from night school, Sokichi walked the back streets of Okachimachi to a cheap tenement building that stood between a used-bottle store on one side and a rag shop on the other. He nearly collided with a man emerging from the front door.

Osen suddenly slid open the door and welcomed him into their one-room apartment. Her futon was already spread on the floor. Osen added charcoal to the brazier that was placed next to her pillow and fanned the coals with tissue paper. She grilled rice cakes for Sokichi on a battered wire rack lowered at an angle over the heat. When the cakes were done, she cooled them off by blowing on them while she told Sokichi the story of the lovely Urazato. Osen was even more beautiful than her heroine. And even though the snow wasn't falling as in the story, the cherry blossoms accumulating on the damp cinders of their small back garden were even more heartrending.

And there, behind the back fence! Was it Tokijiro, Urazato's lover, coming to rescue her with a bandanna tied over his head? Osen jumped to her feet and tried to close the back doors. But the man hurdled the fence and rushed to the veranda. The end of a snakelike tether was showing at his sleeve. "You're under arrest."

Osen fell back on her knees, pushing Sokichi behind her. "What about him?"

"The boy's none of my business."

"So-chan, for your breakfast tomorrow . . . I bought some beans. They're in the covered bowl. You can eat them with pickled ginger."

Carrying his sandals in one hand, the policeman opened the door to the front entry. Osen searched for her sandals while he unlocked the front door. As soon as they were out in the street he quickly tied her hands. Her slender waist suddenly disappeared beneath his rope, and her drooping shoulders floated before the dark willow trees. Osen had long since pawned her jacket and undergarments, and her skin showed whitely beneath a single layer of silk.

Walking barefoot, Sokichi followed. Through his tears he saw only darkness, a piercing gust of wind scattering cherry blossoms through the dim light of a street lamp.

"Please, sir." Osen suddenly stopped. "So-chan" Osen hung her head without looking back. But then she turned, and Sokichi, looking into her face, saw her eyebrows.

The young man was speechless.

"So-chan. I'll give you my spirit."

She folded it as the policeman pulled her along. Soon it was there, nestled in the palm of her hand, a crane of white tissue paper.

"Follow this to wherever it takes you." She blew her warm breath into the bird and it came to life. With the marks of her lips showing faintly red against the crane's bluish-white body, the bird flew among the floating blossoms, dancing in the air as it led Sokichi to the gate where he was taken in.