Spirits of the Noh (3 page)

Miho huffed and rolled her eyes. “Hello?” she said, an affectation she’d picked up from Kara, who often translated her American idiom slang into Japanese. “I just got out of a Noh club meeting.”

“Ohhhh,” Kara said, smiling. Now she got it.

“Oh, what?” Sakura asked.

Miho grinned at her. “Aritomo-sensei just announced that this term, the Noh club will be producing and performing an actual Noh play! Everything! The acting, the music, the sets! I can’t believe it. I knew she was cool, but I never thought she would let us do something like this, especially since she takes Noh theater so seriously. That she’d entrust us with an actual performance … it’s just amazing!”

“That
is
great news,” Sakura said. “Of course she trusts you all with it—the club takes it just as seriously as she does. Especially you, Miho. Why did you think Kara already knew about this?”

“On the way out of the meeting, Aritomo-sensei told me she did,” Miho said, looking at Kara, once again sweeping her hair back from her eyes. “In fact, she said she’d suggested you two do the same play as your next manga.”

Sakura crossed her arms. “So why am I just hearing about it now?”

Kara shrugged. “Aritomo-sensei told me about it when she came over to my house the other night. She and my father were making dinner together. That was strange enough. Anyway, she swore me to secrecy about the play until she had announced it to the Noh club, which” — she made a flourish of her hands—“she now has.”

Without conferring about it, the three of them fell into step together, working their way around the baseball field, heading back toward the dorm. Kara waved to Hachiro, who grinned but kept his baseball glove down, focused on the game.

“So what is this Noh play, anyway?” Sakura asked. “Why does Aritomo-sensei think it would be a good manga for us?”

“Apparently because you’ve already done one gruesome manga,” Miho said. “This one is a horrible story about a woman driven mad by love, who becomes a flesh-eating snake demon.”

Sakura smiled thinly. “Lovely.”

“It really would make a cool manga though,” Miho said, a bit defensive of anything having to do with Noh. She adjusted her glasses. “The Hannya is fearsome and the story is tragic.”

“Aren’t they all?” Kara asked.

Sakura bumped her purposely as they walked. “So your father and Aritomo-sensei are getting pretty close.”

Kara nodded. “Looks that way. But I’d much rather talk about anything else.”

A look of concern crossed Miho’s face. “I didn’t know it was bothering you so much.”

“I’ll be fine,” Kara said. “I want my father to be happy, and I really like Aritomo-sensei. It’s just, I don’t know, weird.”

They reached the dorm and Sakura used her ID card to open the door. She turned to Kara. “You still want to do a new manga, though, right? This awkwardness with Aritomo-sensei won’t keep you from working with her?”

Kara smiled. “Not at all. I was worried that you wouldn’t want to start a new manga right away, that you might need a rest first. I’ve got the easier job, after all. Illustrating the pages takes a lot more time than writing them. And anyway, Aritomo-sensei knows everything there is to know about Noh theater, and almost that much about manga. She’s a huge help. No, I’ll adjust. The awkwardness will go away eventually.”

“Good,” Miho said, as they walked up the stairs to the second floor. “Because I already asked Aritomo-sensei if you two could help out for the play. Noh club will be running late, so if you want, you could come down after calligraphy club and work with us. It might help with your manga.”

Sakura and Kara exchanged glances.

“I’m up for it if you are,” Sakura said.

Kara nodded. “Okay.” Then she looked at Miho. “I’m just surprised, I guess. Doesn’t it seem a little strange that she would choose such a violent play after what the school has been through this year?”

“I had the same thought,” Sakura said.

“Maybe a little strange,” Miho agreed. “But, after all, it’s only a play.”

In Miho and Sakura’s room, they looked through the finished pages of the manga Sakura and Kara had done about ketsuki, and then—as Miho told them the story of
Dojoji,
the Noh play that the club intended to perform—Sakura began to sketch what the characters might look like in a manga version. As she drew the lines that would make the demon serpent woman, Hannya, Kara shuddered. She’d had enough of monsters for a while.

With a private smile, she chided herself that she was being silly. Miho was right, after all. It
was
only a play.

Kara is at home, in her bedroom in Medford, Massachusetts. The walls are a pink wash and the curtains are sheer lace. A breeze washes through the windows, billowing the curtains, the smell of an imminent rainstorm in the air. The room is just as her mother decorated it for her, right down to the hand-painted fairies above the headboard of the bone-white sleigh bed.

They share a love of fairies, Kara and her mother.

She lies in bed, a sleepy smile on her face, turns over and settles deep into her bedclothes, relishing the cool breeze and the distant rumble of thunder. It’s heaven. Her mother created this little slice of paradise for Kara when she turned seven, as a present, and painted those fairies herself. This isn’t right, of course. Kara redecorated in the eighth grade, painted the walls white—too old for pink, now—and her mother even helped her brush thick, eggshell finish right over the fairies. That was not long before …

This isn’t right, but it’s perfection.

Bliss.

A soft rap comes at the door, punctuated by a crack of thunder, the rainstorm coming nearer. Sprinkles patter the windows as Kara rises on her elbow, genuinely curious.

“Who is it?”

The knob turns, the door opens a crack, and from deep inside her there comes a sense of painful longing, of fluttery, excited certainty that her mother is about to enter the room, perhaps to tell her that breakfast is ready.

But the door swings open on darkness. Green eyes—cat eyes—stare out at her from the black shadows, growing huge—a massive, bent, bestial silhouette separating itself from the deeper darkness. The face dips into the room, shadows coalescing around it, but she can see the horns and the twisted mouth and jutting fangs of Kyuketsuki, the demon whose ancient whispers spoke a curse upon her.

Terror seizes her, but all Kara can do is burrow deeper into the bed, a little girl again. Her breath catches in her throat and she bites her lower lip, tasting blood.

Something tumbles from the shadows, as though spilling from the Kyuketsuki’s own darkness, and sprawls to the floor.

Hachiro. Dead. Limbs twisted up like some castaway doll, eyes open, dull and glassy.

Kara opens her mouth to scream, but no sound emerges.

“It’s all right, sweet pea,” a voice says beside her.

Hope surges through her, and love, and a kind of lightness of spirit that she has forgotten is even possible. Kara turns in bed and looks up into the face of her mother, her sandy blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, blue eyes smiling.

“It’s all right, K-baby. It’s only a dream. Watch.”

Kara watches as her mother strides across the room, Hachiro’s broken body dispersing into smoke, and closes the door, shutting out the darkness and the demon and its curse.

“There, see?” Annette Harper says as she walks back to her daughter. “All gone. Trust me, honey. There’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there in the light.”

Kara’s mother climbs into bed beside her and Kara snuggles close, wrapped in her mother’s arms, her pulse slowing, relief and contentment sweeping through her. Outside the window, the rain begins to fall harder and the breeze kicks up, the curtains rising like ghosts. The storm is here now, but Kara doesn’t mind at all. She has her mother …

And she wakes.

When Kara opened her eyes she saw rain pelting the windows, the sky gray and heavy with storm. Tuesday morning had arrived, but it was impossible to discern the time from the gloomy daylight.

In the lingering embrace of the dream, she felt emotion well up within her and tears began to slip down her face. As she attempted to brush them away, her breath hitched, and she started to cry more fiercely.

Part of the dream had been a nightmare—but, really, it was only an ordinary nightmare. She had had others. The fear and unease would dissipate, as they always did.

But to dream of her mother—her smile and the comfort and security of her embrace—and to wake to the reality that she would never see her mother again—that was an anguish that would never go away, and a weight on her heart far worse than any nightmare.

Kara thought of those fairies on her bedroom wall back home, and how her mother must have felt the day she painted them over. A small thing, really, but God, how she wished she had seen the hurt of it then, even afterward, so that she could have apologized.

If only.

The two saddest, loneliest words in the world.

3

A
beautiful job, Kara. Keep up the good work.”

Kara smiled up at Miss Aritomo and gave a little bow of her head in silent gratitude. No matter how much she wrestled with her own feelings about her father dating the art teacher, she could never say the woman was anything but sweet. Even when she had first arrived at Monju-no-Chie school, Miss Aritomo had been incredibly nice.

But as Miss Aritomo walked away, Kara grimaced. With a sigh, she brushed her blond hair away from her eyes, and then realized she’d smeared green paint on her forehead and laughed at herself, bending to pick up her paintbrush again.

“You do not seem like a girl who is having a good time,” Sakura said.

Kara froze and shot a guilty glance over her shoulder, but Miss Aritomo had already left the room.

“Is it that obvious?” she asked.

Sakura nodded. “It probably helps that you’ve been complaining all week, but it’s obvious to me. Aritomo-sensei doesn’t seem to have noticed.”

Kara dipped the brush into a bucket of green paint and began applying a second coat to the carved piece of wood that would eventually represent a tree in the background of the set.

“Good,” she said.

“You could just tell her you want to quit, you know,” Sakura said, head cocked, eyes narrowed as though Kara was some puzzle she wanted to decipher.

“It isn’t that easy,” Kara replied. “Miho would be heartbroken.”

Sakura shrugged and went back to painting. Kara said nothing more, but she had other reasons as well. Her father had been so pleased that she had been spending this extra time under Miss Aritomo’s guidance that he would be upset if she bailed on it now. Though obviously he didn’t understand just how little time this volunteer gig provided for teacher–student interaction.

The previous Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, after she and Sakura had finished with calligraphy club, they had come down into the basement room where Miss Aritomo held the Noh meetings and volunteered their assistance. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time that Ren—who was also in calligraphy club—had joined them. If Hachiro hadn’t had baseball club and been wholly devoted to the game, he might have done the same.

Now Kara thought that Hachiro was the lucky one. After more than a week of helping the Noh club prepare for its performance, she was racking her brain, trying to figure out some way to gracefully excuse herself from the obligation.

Sakura and Ren didn’t seem nearly as bored. Noh theater had been fascinating to Kara in concept, but she had quickly learned that in execution, that fascination waned considerably. Back home in Medford, she had taken part in a couple of different school productions, including
My Fair Lady
and
A Christmas Carol.
The cast and crew would form a family unit, an easy camaraderie that created friendships between kids who might never have stopped to talk to one another in the cafeteria or the halls. Working on Miss Aritomo’s pet project, she had imagined a similar arrangement, but had encountered something entirely different.

She had known, on an intellectual level, that the performers rehearsed alone. But she had not truly understood how little actual collaboration was part of the process. Kara and Sakura had been tasked with painting the background, even as other students created the various pieces that made up the traditional Noh set. Every Noh play used the same elements for its stage, and the entire platform needed to be created. But Miss Aritomo had assigned certain students to build the platform in a corner of the gymnasium that the principal had loaned them for the show, leaving Kara, Sakura, and four other students to create and paint the background.

The Noh club learned the basics for the chants and music for the play during their official meetings, but every member of the cast, including those who would be playing music, practiced alone. Kara found the discipline this required staggering to even imagine. The performers would perfect their parts in isolation, so that the play only came together as a whole story, and a singular piece of art, when they all joined their disparate elements on the stage, in front of the audience. That meant most of the members of the Noh club weren’t in Miss Aritomo’s room at all during “rehearsals.” They weren’t really even rehearsals as Kara understood the word.

Preparations, yes. Rehearsals, not so much.

Even Miho wasn’t around. Like Miss Aritomo, she collected Noh masks, and so the teacher had put Miho in charge of the select group of her students who were making and painting the masks for the play. Miho seemed almost giddy with excitement. She talked about her work with the masks nonstop.

Worse yet, after volunteering mainly so he could hang around with the girls, Ren had been put on Miho’s “mask squad,” so they hadn’t seen much of him at all.

The one bit of good news was that the weekend was coming up, and with it the Toro Nagashi Firework Festival. Kara had missed being in the United States for the Fourth of July, so she was really looking forward to the fireworks, and even more so to see the lanterns that would float in the bay. Hachiro had asked her to go with him, formally, the most official date they’d had, though they had been out together many times. All of her friends would be there, but still, it would be romantic.

“Are you daydreaming about Hachiro again?” Sakura asked.

Kara grinned.

“Well,” Sakura said. “At least that earns a smile from you. And this will earn a second one.”

She pointed to the wall. Kara glanced up and saw that 6:30 had arrived, and they were finally free. Happily, she poured the remains of her green paint back into the can and sealed it, then cleaned her brush. She had done her work for the day, and she thought the background for the play was coming out very well.

Kara went to a sink to wash her hands, pulling off her smock as Sakura did the same. “Come on,” Kara said, wiping her hands on a rag. “Let’s get Miho and Ren and get out of here.”

The two girls said their good-byes to the other students who were part of their background crew and hurried into the corridor.

“Do you have a lot of homework tonight?” Sakura asked.

Kara shrugged. “What’s ‘a lot’? At least two hours’ worth, but probably not more than that. Why?”

“I think we deserve a treat. Would you like to go into the city for dinner? We’ll take Ren and Miho, and I’ll show you my favorite restaurant.”

“I’d love to,” Kara said, shooting her a curious look. “But I doubt I can afford it, and wouldn’t you and Miho get into trouble?”

Sakura scoffed. “This is me, remember?” she said in English, a line she must have stolen from a movie. Then she switched back to Japanese. “I’m inviting you to dinner, Kara. My parents only remember that I’m alive when I spend money on their credit card. Which is ironic, considering that they gave it to me so that they wouldn’t have to think about me at all.”

“I couldn’t let you pay—”

“You’re not listening. I’m not paying. My parents are. And they can afford it. As for getting into trouble, we can take the train and be back before nine. There might be a few raised eyebrows in the dormitory, perhaps even a small punishment, but we won’t be suspended or expelled. Let’s go. If you think your father will let you.”

The taunt was obvious and explicit, but all in good fun. Sakura threw up her hands as though to ask,
what could go wrong
? Kara hesitated, then grinned. Sakura wouldn’t be happy if she couldn’t make a few waves now and then.

“Well, when you put it that way, how can I say no?”

They reached the room where Miho’s mask squad was at work. Kara glanced inside and saw Miho painting close-up detail work on a mask representing a long-haired woman, with wide eyes meant to indicate either sorrow or fury; it was difficult to tell which. Ren stood near a rack where a couple other masks were drying, but they were the only two left in the room.

“No, no,” came a voice from a room across the hall. “Like this. It must be precisely like this.”

Kara frowned. She had never heard such intensity in Miss Aritomo’s voice before, not even when the art teacher had been insisting that she and Sakura be faithful to the original Noh when they were adapting a play into manga.

Miho and Ren weren’t quite ready, so Kara slipped across the hall and peeked into the room. A quick glance showed her Miss Aritomo working through a series of precise steps and hand motions with Otomo, one of the girls who would perform in the play.

When Sakura slipped up next to her, Kara pushed her back, and both of them went back to stand outside, waiting for Miho and Ren. Kara did not want to be caught spying.

“That’s strange, don’t you think?” she asked.

Sakura raised her eyebrows. “What is?”

Kara lowered her voice. “I thought all of the Noh performers were supposed to rehearse in isolation. No one’s supposed to see them until the play, like the way a groom’s not supposed to see his bride before the wedding. It doesn’t seem like Aritomo-sensei’s style to break the rules.”

Sakura shrugged. “You know how seriously she takes all of this. I’m sure she just wants to make certain they do it correctly.”

Kara frowned. “Yeah. I guess.”

But it didn’t sit right with her.

Hungry and tired, and with plenty of homework still ahead of him, Daisuke Sasaki rode his bicycle toward home, wondering what his mother had made for dinner. His parents could not afford to pay for him to live in the dormitory at Monju-no-Chie school, and anyway, they lived too close to the school even to consider it, but Daisuke didn’t mind. Even on a day like today, when he had finished school only to have Noh club—and then an additional rehearsal period for the club’s upcoming production—he loved the ride home.

Actually, he considered himself lucky. Many of his friends had to go to
juku,
or cram school, after finishing their regular classes for the day. But Daisuke had always been an excellent student.

He pedaled past the train station and down long streets in the warm, golden glow of the summer evening. After the rehearsal, he had lingered for a while to speak with some of his friends about the play, and then stopped at the dorm to talk baseball with several boys from the baseball club. Daisuke had an interest in Noh theater, but really only belonged to the club because it pleased his grandmother. His true love was baseball.

Still, as he rode he could not help but chant softly under his breath. He had only a small role—an old priest who warned his younger counterpart about the Hannya—but he would also be chanting several parts of the play, like many others in the club. As he had worked to memorize the chants, they stuck in his head, and now he found them as difficult to remove as the catchiest pop songs.

Daisuke rode down a short hill into a narrow street. He let the bike coast as he swung around a tight corner, and had to swerve to avoid an old man who stood in the road cradling some kind of lizard in his arms as if it were an infant.

“Be careful, young fool!” the old man shouted, and Daisuke looked back to see him brandishing a gnarled fist.

Now, that was strange. He knew from having his grandmother living in the house with him and his parents that old people could be peculiar. But the wide-eyed old man with his lizard-baby made his grandmother seem boring by comparison.
He ought to have a long, white beard. Crazy old men should all have long, white beards.

He raced past a library and an old church, then pedaled up a winding street among apartment buildings. A shortcut brought him buzzing down a lovely road lined with small shops, a wonderful view of Miyazu Bay ahead, and then Daisuke turned left, passed a park, and headed for a dingy, more industrial area of the city, where office buildings and noodle stands gave way to warehouses nearer the waterfront.

Blinking to clear his vision, he realized that twilight had snuck up on him. An indigo haze had replaced the golden light of early evening. Night came on late this time of year, but when it arrived, it did so swiftly.

Now he began to get tired, and wished he had taken the bus today, as he did in winter, instead of riding his bicycle. Ever since they had begun working on this play, the days had been longer, and he had been up later working on his homework. Daisuke decided that tomorrow, he would take the bus for sure.

Only a mile or so from home, he put an extra effort into pedaling. The wind had shifted and, though it had been a very warm day, the breeze off the bay cooled the back of his neck. As he passed a tiny restaurant where his father often took him when the women of the house were not at home, the smell of cooking fish filled his nostrils and his stomach growled painfully.

Daisuke began to daydream about what his mother might have cooked. He hoped for tuna and some curry bread. There would simply be no way for him to focus on his homework if he had to eat tempura and pickled plums again.

The darkness gathered around him, seeming to seep in from between the buildings as he reached the crest of a short hill. With a sigh, he stopped pedaling, grateful for the rest, letting the bike coast. He sat up high on the seat, guiding the bike with only his fingertips. The wind whipped at his hair and he breathed in the fresh bay air.

Something darted into the road in front of him. Daisuke scrabbled for the handlebars, fingers latching on, and twisted to avoid the figure looming up in front of him. He thought of the old man cradling the lizard, but in the gathering darkness he could make out only a silhouette, shifting and uncertain. He had the impression of hands reaching for him, but by then disaster had already struck. He’d swerved too far. The handlebars snapped sideways, the front tire following suit, and the bike pitched him forward. He flipped through the air, arms flailing, the world turned upside down.

Daisuke hadn’t time to utter a cry of panic before he struck the pavement and began to bounce and slide, pavement scouring the skin from his right arm, tearing his pants and scraping his leg. As he rolled, he struck his head, and the darkness closed in at the edges of his vision, swallowing him for long seconds.

When he opened his eyes, he lay on his side in the street, in the dark. A jagged shadow farther down the road he recognized as the wreckage of his bicycle. It hurt him just to breathe, and when he tried to shift, spikes of pain jabbed into his side and ran up his arm. Where he’d scraped the pavement, his skin sang with even more pain.