Spirits of the Noh (5 page)

The impossible had happened. Things that she had never imagined could exist had torn down her expectations about the world, and what was real and true. Sakura had already had to deal with her sister’s murder, and Miho had helped her through that as best she could. Growing up, it had never occurred to her that someone she knew might be murdered. Such things happened in movies and books. Adjusting to the truth had matured her. But the supernatural? That was the province of folk tales and Noh plays.

And now her life.

“Earth to Miho.”

She glanced up to find Kara standing by her desk, and everyone else already returning their books to the lockers at the back of the classroom. The words had been spoken in English, so there was a lag time as her mind switched over from Japanese.

“I’m still on Earth, don’t worry,” she said, replying in English as well.

Kara did look concerned, though. “Your body’s in that chair, but your brain’s definitely been elsewhere all day.”

Miho sighed and slid back in her seat. She rubbed her eyes and switched back to Japanese. “I’m too tired to think in two languages right now. Sorry.”

The worry on Kara’s face deepened. “Let’s go try to talk to Sakura and Hachiro before o-soji starts,” she said.

Miho nodded and stood up. The girls stashed their books in the lockers—they would worry later about what they needed to bring home for homework—and hurried out into the corridor. They did not have far to look. Hachiro stood waiting outside their homeroom, and Miho spotted Sakura just down the hall, headed their way.

“Hi,” Kara said, reaching out to touch Hachiro’s hand.

Hachiro’s smile was sad and fleeting. “Hi.”

“Are you all right?” Miho asked him. She knew Daisuke from Noh club, but he loved baseball, too.

Hachiro shrugged. “As all right as anyone. I didn’t know him that well. We talked about baseball sometimes, but he didn’t live in the dorm and he wasn’t in my class. What really bothers me is that nobody mentioned he’s missing. Not at morning assembly or during any of my classes. It’s like it didn’t happen.”

Sakura walked up while he was talking.

“Maybe he came back,” she suggested hopefully. “Maybe no one said anything because he’s home now.”

Neither Kara nor Hachiro said a word. Miho glanced at Sakura, who looked disheveled, and who wore several of her favorite pins—a couple of them rude—on the outside of her uniform today, as if angry at someone but unsure how to unleash that anger, or upon whom.

“You don’t really believe that,” Miho said.

She blinked, surprised that the words had come from her. Her friends all looked at her oddly. Her role was so often the voice of hope and reason, but she didn’t feel up to it today. After months of worry, she had allowed herself to believe the curse had been only words, that it was over, and her life could go back to normal. Now she had to confront her fear that it never would.

“Daisuke
might
really have run away, you know,” Kara said.

“Unless something happens to convince me otherwise, I’m going to assume that’s exactly what happened,” Hachiro added.

“That’s not what Mai thinks,” Sakura said quietly, glancing around as if saying Mai’s name might make her appear.

“I don’t care what she thinks,” Kara said. Then she lowered her gaze, unwilling to look at any of them, and reached out for Hachiro’s hand. “But I’m not as convinced as Hachiro. If this is really the … if it’s what we think it is, I want to know, so we can at least try to protect ourselves.”

“We should tell someone,” Sakura said, in a tone that reminded them that she had made the suggestion before.

Hachiro shook his head. “No. Who would believe it? We would look like fools or liars. At best, they would punish us. At worst, they would contact our parents, embarrassing everyone.”

Sakura stared at Kara. “Your father—”

“Not unless we know we’re in danger that we can’t protect ourselves from. Talking to my dad is a final option, for all of the reasons Hachiro just explained. I’ve caused him enough stress since we moved here, and it’s difficult enough for him as a
gaijin,
without me causing him humiliation. Besides, he’ll think I’m going crazy.”

“Aritomo-sensei would help, if we could get her to believe us,” Sakura said.

“Same problem,” Kara said, lowering her voice. “Look, right now we don’t know anything. We can’t panic every time someone breaks curfew or runs away from home or stumbles on the stairs. There’s no reason to think this has anything to do with us.”

“Except we’re cursed,” Miho said softly.

For a moment, none of them spoke. Other students were already at work on their tasks for o-soji, sweeping and taking out the trash. Chairs were being picked up in the classroom they had just left. They’d kept their voices low, but they were getting dirty looks because they weren’t helping.

“We should look into it, just to be sure,” Miho said.

“How?” Kara asked.

“I’ll talk to some of his friends in Noh club and find out if anyone has ever gone home with Daisuke. If they have, they would know how to get to his house. We can only guess at his actual route last night, but we could walk it. Try our best to walk the same route and see if we encounter anything … strange.”

Hachiro cocked his head, staring at her. “You know the odds of finding anything? The police have probably already—”

“Not to mention,” Sakura interrupted, “that if something’s come here because of Kyuketsuki’s curse, I don’t want to go anywhere near it.”

Miho took a deep breath and shifted her gaze back to Kara. “Don’t you want to
know
?”

After a moment, Kara nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

Then Mr. Sato appeared, practically in their midst, clearing his throat and glaring at them all with stern disapproval. They scattered, all four of them moving off to complete their o-soji tasks, but Miho knew an agreement had been reached. If Kara agreed, then Hachiro and Sakura would go along with the plan. A tight knot of ice formed in Miho’s stomach, and she recognized it as dread.

As far as she was concerned, they had only two choices—do something, or do nothing—and she couldn’t simply sit around holding her breath, waiting to find out if evil had returned to Miyazu City.

5

K
ara stood just outside a small noodle shop, holding her breath to avoid inhaling the fumes from a battered taxi. Otherwise, she thought this street was one of the lovelier spots in Miyazu City. Despite its parks and gardens and temples, much of the city had an urban feel, and many neighborhoods were old and gray, almost the Japanese equivalent of some of the uglier areas in and around Boston, and in Medford, where she’d grown up, just minutes north of the city.

But although they called it Miyazu City, much of its heart remained the same town it had been during Japan’s Edo period. Downtown there were still homes of wealthy merchants from that era, and she had even been inside one of them, Mikami-ke House, which was open to tourists.

Here on Nariai Street, it seemed a perfect blend of old and new. A small temple rose from the middle of the block, up ahead on the left, and some of the buildings had been apartments or houses at some point, while others were shops of indeterminate age. All of the older buildings had been renovated. An old woman stood with a young girl on the corner across from Kara, selling flowers, though the summer-evening light had begun to fade into dusk.

Straight ahead, down the gentle slope of the street, she could see the water of the bay, glistening with the golden sheen of twilight. This would’ve been a nice, even romantic, place for her to have come with Hachiro any other time.

Now she doubted she would ever be able to come here again without thinking of what brought them here this first time—not just her and Hachiro, but Miho and Sakura, and Ren, who had volunteered to join them, though he still was not one hundred percent convinced that they had not all hallucinated the Kyuketsuki incident.

According to Miho, Miss Aritomo had made only one comment about Daisuke’s absence during the Noh club meeting, explaining that his parents were concerned about him, that he appeared to have run away, and if anyone heard from him, they should inform her right away. She’d made a similar plea during the rehearsal for
Dojoji
, but Kara, Sakura, and Ren had all been there for that. One kid had actually had the utter callousness to ask who would be taking Daisuke’s part if he didn’t come back to school. Miss Aritomo had gone cold and told the guy she would await Daisuke’s return, that she was certain his parents would locate him.

Beyond that, everyone behaved as though it was business as usual. And, maybe, if things had been different, Kara would have done the same.

“This is accomplishing nothing.” Sakura sighed, tromping up to stand beside her, a bit of petulance in her stance. She lit a cigarette, the pack and lighter appearing from and vanishing into her jacket pockets as if by magic.

The rest of them had changed clothes, but Sakura still wore her sailor fuku with the jacket turned inside out, all kinds of patches and pins on display, skirt hiked up too high, hair in short pigtails. This was a chance for her to act out, and she’d taken it. The Goth Lolita thing wasn’t her style, but she verged on the borders of it from time to time.

“It was a …,” Kara began, but she didn’t know how to say
long shot
in Japanese. “It was worth a try,” she said instead. “Though I admit, my feet are killing me.”

Sakura smiled.
Killing me
was a bit of idiomatic American slang that she’d managed to translate into Japanese and explain to her friends, and they’d quickly adopted it as their own.

They stood together, Sakura shifting slightly so that the breeze off the bay would not blow her smoke into Kara’s face, and glanced back the way they had come. Hachiro had stopped to talk to a pretty woman in front of a dress shop, trying to figure out the most direct way to get from this street to Daisuke’s address. Miho and Ren waited and listened, but didn’t seem to be adding anything to the conversation.

“Here they come,” Kara said, as Hachiro waved to the dress shop woman and the three of them started to come down the street.

“Oh, good. More walking,” Sakura mumbled around the cigarette clenched between her teeth.

It wasn’t just Kara’s feet that hurt. Her calves ached, and her stomach growled from lack of food. The aromas wafting from the noodle shop smelled wonderful. Kara had been concerned that her father would balk at her hanging out with her friends tonight, as it was a school night and she had homework yet to do. But when she had brought it up right after o-soji, he had been all for it. He had, he said, been thinking of taking Miss Aritomo out for a quiet dinner somewhere to distract her from her worries about the missing student, and if Kara and her friends were going out, she could fend for herself dinner-wise, and that would work out nicely.

Which all seemed fairly sensible and convenient, except that she felt sure her father and Miss Aritomo were having dinner by now, maybe even dessert, and she was famished.

“So?” Sakura asked as Hachiro, Ren, and Miho walked up. “What now?”

Miho gave a small shrug, a sheepish expression on her face. “This seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“I’m not sure it ever seemed like a good idea,” Hachiro said, giving her a sidelong glance. “But it did seem like something we had to do. Now, I don’t know. I suppose I thought that if something happened to him, maybe we would find a clue, or some hint about where he went.”

Ren pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head, longish bronze hair framing his face. “Really? The way Sakura described it, I thought we were looking for a body, or maybe his bike.”

Hachiro nodded grimly. “That, too. But none of us really knows Daisuke. I talked to him more than any of you, but only ever about baseball. And if he was dead on the side of the road somewhere, the police would have found him.”

Miho pointed across the street, where the flower sellers—the old woman and little girl—were packing up for the night. Twilight gathered around them. It would be truly dark soon.

“That road is the most likely one for him to have taken to get home. But it’s not the only one,” Miho said, shrugging again. “Daisuke could have stopped for a drink, or there might be a road that he’s used to taking, a shortcut we don’t know about.”

Hachiro continued. “The woman at the dress shop said any of the four streets that branch off this one would lead down toward the old fishery area, and Daisuke’s neighborhood is just beyond that.”

Kara could see where all this was going. Sakura caught her eye, taking a drag off of her cigarette, and nodded. They were both thinking the same thing.

“It’s getting dark,” Sakura said, holding the cigarette down by her side as she blew out a lungful of smoke. “We won’t be able to see anything.”

“She’s right,” Kara said, glancing at Miho. This whole thing had been her idea, so she had to be the one to call it off.

Miho seemed reluctant a moment, and shifted her gaze away from them, looking down the street toward the bay. Ren and Hachiro stood on either side of her, almost protectively, though Kara could tell both of them wanted to call it quits as well. They had to be realistic about it. They didn’t know which way Daisuke had gone, and weren’t going to find anything in the dark.

“We really don’t have any reason to think the curse has anything to do with this,” Miho said.

Ren gave a short bow. “Thank you. That is what I’ve been saying for the past hour.” He took Miho’s hand and, with a gallant, courtly flourish, bent to kiss it. “Your heart is gentle, fair lady, but logic wins the day.”

Miho blushed deeply. “All right, all right.” She glanced at Kara. “But I hope he really did run away. This is going to haunt me until I know for sure.”

Kara forced herself to smile. “Anyone up for noodles?” she said. “I’m starving.”

But what she would have said, if she weren’t worried about troubling Miho even more deeply, was,
Me, too
.

Mai stood in the shower, warm water sluicing down her body, pushing her fingers through her hair to rinse out the shampoo. She took a breath and placed the palms of her hands against the wall, letting the hot spray massage her shoulders, hoping it would ease the tight stress knots in her muscles. Normally she got up early and showered before school, like most of the other girls on her floor, but tonight she just needed to be out of her room and away from Wakana.

The girls had nothing in common. Mai hadn’t even spoken to Wakana prior to the school year beginning in April. But Wakana had been new to Monju-no-Chie school, transferring in as a second-year student, and Mai’s roommate had not returned, so they had been thrown in together. Mai had tried to make the most of it—she was still trying. She thought of herself as a good person, and it wasn’t as though Wakana had ever been anything but nice to her. They were just such opposites that they had nothing to talk about, and Wakana’s natural shyness would have made that difficult even if they had.

For the past twenty-four hours, though, Wakana had been insufferable. All the crying had gotten under Mai’s skin so much that she could barely stand to be in the same room with the girl—which was a problem, since they were roommates. Wakana had been talking about Daisuke nonstop since May. The two of them had met in Noh club and were apparently boyfriend and girlfriend, although they never really went out anywhere, so Mai had her doubts that they could be considered a couple. If Daisuke really liked Wakana, he would have taken her to dinner, or done
something
romantic with her. At least, that was what Mai had told Wakana, over and over.

Daisuke did like to hang around, though. He commuted from home to school, but every day he seemed to linger, quietly flirting with Wakana. As her roommate, Mai saw a lot of Daisuke as well, and against her better judgment—as much as it drove her crazy how much Wakana talked about him—she ended up liking the guy. He had a cute smile and a nice laugh and a self-effacing sense of humor that charmed Mai completely.

Now Daisuke was missing. Her roommate’s boyfriend. Ever since Mr. Sato and Mr. Yamato came to their room last night to ask if they had any idea where he might be, all Wakana had been able to do was cry, and Mai couldn’t listen to her anymore.

She stood in the shower, the water too hot now, the spray like tiny pinpricks, her skin almost scalding, but she didn’t turn it off. If she did, she would have to dry off and go back to her room and listen to Wakana cry. She wished she could stay in here until her roommate had cried herself to sleep. Mai especially did not want to go back into the room until she could stop her own tears, for she was crying for Daisuke as well.

You shouldn’t be. He’s not your boyfriend
, she told herself. Mai knew that there wasn’t anything wrong with crying out of worry for a friend’s safety. But the problem was, she had started to think of Daisuke as more than a friend—her roommate’s boyfriend or not. And if she went back into their room with tears in her eyes, she would never be able to hide that from Wakana.

Mai didn’t want that. Acting like a bitch to that teacher’s pet gaijin girl, Kara Harper, was one thing. But hurting Wakana, the most harmless person in the world, would not sit right in her heart. The other soccer girls, the ones who had worshipped Ume and were now turning that worship to Mai herself, would never understand such thoughts. They were merciless, those girls, and the only reason Mai stepped up into the queen bitch role was to prevent any of them from doing so. She had taken enough crap from Ume.

But Wakana … all she ever did was read, and try hard to stay out of the way. It was difficult enough for her to deal with Daisuke just vanishing, or running away, if that was really what happened. Mai just wished she would stop crying. And she wished that she could pretend Ume had never told her the crazy stories about ghosts and demons or whatever those things were back in April.

Mai hadn’t really believed Ume then, and though Daisuke’s disappearance had freaked her out, she didn’t really believe her now. But it had been clear from the fervor in her eyes that Ume had believed, and she found that deeply unsettling.

“Stop,” she whispered to herself, the word lost in the hiss of the shower. She took another deep breath. “Just stop.”

The command seemed to work. She turned and let the hot water spray her face, eyes tightly shut. When she shut off the water, grabbed her towel, and ran the soft cloth over her features, her tears had ceased. Mai paused a second to make sure they wouldn’t return, and then finished drying herself off before stepping out of the shower.

Clad in her robe with a towel wrapped around her head, she peeked into the hall to make sure there weren’t any boys out there. This time of night, the two sides of the dorm were off-limits to the opposite sexes, but rules were made to be broken. When she saw that the coast was clear, she darted down the hall, carrying the small shower caddy where she kept her shampoo and body wash, her room key dangling from a hook there.

Mai gave the door a quick rap and tried the knob, but it didn’t turn. She frowned. When she’d gone to shower, she had left it unlocked so that she wouldn’t have to disturb Wakana, but the girl had actually shaken herself from her sobbing long enough to lock the door behind her?

And people think
I’m
a bitch
, Mai thought.

With a sigh, she pushed her key into the lock. As she turned it, she heard a noise from inside the room—a kind of helpless, plaintive sound that was neither sob nor grunt, but something in between.

The door trembled, pressing slightly outward, and she felt a cool breeze come underneath it, sweeping past her feet. As the door resettled, she turned the key and pushed it open. She entered to discover one of the two windows wide open, as far as its frame would allow, which made no sense because the air-conditioning was humming along nicely. Another gust of wind came through the window as she went to close the door, snatching the knob from her damp hand and slamming it behind her, making her jump.

The dormitory rooms were small. Two beds, tatami mats, two tiny desks, a small futon-chair, built-in closets, and a mirror.

“Wakana?” Mai said, an odd feeling creeping up her spine.

It might have been possible for her roommate to fit into one of the closets, but only barely, and not without spilling clothes out onto the floor. And then there was the question: why? Besides, Mai could feel the emptiness of the room.