many waters
There are many things that I intend to take care of with this post. The first is this: I have returned to Japan from Seoul, South Korea. And thus I post the updated map:
create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands
I didn't keep a journal while I was in Seoul; there were a thousand things I could have written about, but I simply didn't have time. Any free writing-moments I had were spent working on a Certain Thing a Certain Someone has been persistently asking of me for quite some time. Despite my conviction that the universe is deeply unfair by human standards and unlikely to change anytime soon, I felt like hard work and persistence deserved some sort of reward. I'm almost finished, but might delay sending in order to finish more/make revisions. We shall see.
While visiting sites neglected over the past two weeks, I found the following article: Prince William Fells Prince Willem-Alexander Of The Netherlands In Crucial Joust. Read it, because it is excellent.
I hate it when anime series are licensed by American companies, and I don't bother expending the energy required to hate many things. But. I HATE IT. Because generally it means that the fansubbers stop hosting and producing episodes, and that means that (aside from raws and any summaries fans with superior language skills are willing to type up) my access to the series is completely cut off. American releases are generally very slow, making you go months between DVDs, while fansubbers often finish within a week or two of the Japanese release. Also, DVDs are expensive and very hard for me to obtain while living overseas. The picture quality is no better than current standards available via bittorrent.
The dubs, which is probably the reason why American releases take so long, generally make me wince in pain. Even on those rare occasions when they don't, I still tend to prefer the Japanese-- I like to watch TV and movies in its original language in almost all cases. I would prefer to read poetry and comics and books in their original languages, too, if I could. Also, I find that the quality of the fansubs is actually higher than the official subs. Fansubbers often add painstaking cultural notes and research to their translations. They also don't try to make changes in an effort to make the show appeal to "a broader commercial audience" or "an American audience" or "a younger audience," or any of the rot that American production companies use to justify the changes imposed by their censoring boards. Unless the anime company happens to be run by a guy named Miyazaki, animation studios have no ability whatsoever to protect the integrity of their work when it's presented overseas; and it's not really worth their while anyway.
All I need to do is point to a few examples to illustrate my points: the dubs of InuYasha and Martian Successor Nadesico. The subs for Hellsing (do not get me started. My Hellsing obsession of that time rivaled my present-day Saiunkoku obsession. I nearly put my fist through my dorm window at one point, I was so angry). Gods, even the dub for Spirited Away, which was otherwise acceptable to me, made changes to the actual dialogue because they thought Americans were too stupid to connect the dots by themselves.
I could go on. I will not.
The above is prompted by the announcement that Saiunkoku Monogatari is licensed, and the two fansubbers who were working on it have dropped the series. So here we are with the exciting events of second season just beginning . . . and there are no subs. And the official American releases won't even get to season two for at least a year. Meanwhile I watch raws and read summaries and beg my Chinese-speaking friends to translate scenes from the Chinese subs, and it's not enough. My personal projects, my writings for the series, are going to end up halted because I don't know what's going on. Or I'll continue writing, trying to go by my limited knowledge, and will end up getting things completely wrong because I misunderstood some crucial detail.
Not to mention-- not to mention-- no. stop.
SO ANGRY ABOUT THIS.
Various people are doing doodle-a-day or drabble-a-day postings for the month of May, and inspired by their excellent example I have decided that I'm going to do likewise. However, due to lack of time and very possibly lack of creativity and lack of talent, I am going to cheat . . . or rather, play the game by my own rules. I have notebooks dating back from 2001, and files on my computer dating back from even earlier. So I will be posting as-yet unposted writings from . . . well, wherever I like, on whatever subject I like, featuring whatever characters I like. There will be no rhyme or reason to it (my methods, that is, not necessarily the entries themselves). Some will be long, some short. Some will be interesting, some will be boring. The only standard will be that I have written all of them, and still find something virtuous about them.
I will occasionally post several at once in order to catch up on missed days. And seeing as I'm already behind . . .
May 1: General Prologue: Graceland Tales
Written in 1998 for a school project in which we had to do an alternate version of the Canterbury Tales.
In January, month of rain and cool,
When parents keep sick children home from school,
The year is new, but people hide their heads
Beneath the quilts and pillows of their beds.
They stay indoors, and many go insane
Of cabin fever. "Stop this awful rain!"
"And cold!" Each day, it seems to pass so slow,
And so they look for somewhere else to go.
It's then they come, by bus and car and wing,
Unto this 'bode, the birthplace of the King.
To pledge their life and service, each one gives
His vow, and raise his voice up, "Elvis lives!"
In travel they do congregate en masse
And, like now, it sometimes comes to pass
That they team up, as at this time is found
A group of them in back seat of Greyhound.
That mighty bus of speed and strength they find
To leave all other vehicles behind.
The way to go, if you would win a race!
And so they hurry to that holy place
Called Graceland; Memphis, Tennessee-
Symbol of beauty, strength, and liberty!
May 2: Mage RPG: Ashura's Backstory
Ashura was my roleplaying character back in the Mage game I played in 2004-05. With permission, I lifted her name and her temper from one of majochan's characters. And then I cheerfully broke my "don't mess with time!" rule and had a thoroughly good time coming up with a complex backstory for her. It was the first time I ever tried to play a character with a blazing temper, and it was . . . actually a great deal of fun, although very difficult at first.
Ashura staggered, and solid bark met her seeking fingers. There was only a burning whiteness in front of her eyes-- I’ve gone blind, she thought muzzilly, unable to tell if they were open or shut. It was hard to keep her feet under her, as if the ground was somehow in the wrong place. She felt like a rock that had skipped across the surface of the water and now was sinking, plunging into the depths.
Gradually her stomach unknotted, and the hot whiteness faded to shadow, refreshingly cool to her abused nerves. The tree was solid against her back, comforting-- save for the fact that it should not be there.
Opening her eyes verified the evidence of her other senses, but did nothing to absolve her confusion. She was in a park, that much was obvious. There were trees around her, and beyond them a road and an expanse of manicured lawn. People, as well, normal faces and voices, but wearing strange clothing, with odd haircuts and even odder hair colors.
She didn’t have to close her eyes to recall what had been before her just a moment before. The slightly dingy and very utilitarian buildings that had huddled beside the streets, electric wires strung in a criss-cross pattern overlying the trolley line set into the street. She had not been alone, there had been a few men walking this way or that with their business suits and serious expressions, there had been a shopkeeper’s helper in a stained apron carrying a heavy wrapped bundle on his back. There had been a column of school kids in neat grey uniforms, heading to one of the building sites downtown. She could remember the sound of their voices, she could remember the sudden scream of the air raid sirens, she remembered looking around her, annoyed, turning her eyes to the sky. An air raid? There had been no bombing raids on Hiroshima since the war began, what was--
She remembered a black dot, high up, remembered picking out wings against the sky. Had she really seen them? But she remembered them, remembered a tiny black shape parting from that winged form. Remembered it and remembered the images in her mind superimposed over it, nightmare visions of fiery infernos, of flesh charred in an instant, a high-frequency shriek, and then the sounds of people screaming--
--and then the hot whiteness, and the quiet buzz of conversation that now hummed in her ears. Cautiously, she stepped away from the tree, and the ground stayed reassuringly firm under her feet. Feeling as if she was in a dream, she joined the flow of people walking through the unfamiliar park.
She was shocked to stillness by the sight of a blasted-out, skeletal dome across the river, because she had walked by that same dome a mere few minutes before, and it had been neither blasted-out nor skeletal. Someone jostled her and murmured an apology she could not understand, and then she had something new to stare at, because that person was very obviously a foreigner: chestnut-haired, too tall, pale skinned, and balancing a baby on one generously curved hip.
She finally got her legs moving again, became a drop of water in the stream instead of a rock in its path. She walked without mind, past a long expanse of fountain, past a low-burning orange flame, past a strange shape in silver metal-- a statue?--toward a building more flat, sleek, and functional than any she had ever seen. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, she read off the sign as she walked in past the impossibly large glass doors.
The next few hours passed in a blur, they dragged on forever, she didn’t notice them passing. She knew that she read every panel, that she understood nothing and everything. She stared at photos of a sweeping plane of twisted rubble. Listened to recordings through alien black headsets with spiraling cords connected to the wall. Watched images of people on screens set into holes. Plastic cases held items that might have been familiar once, but now were charred almost beyond recognition.
She bit back a scream at the first picture of mutilated human flesh, the bubbled scarring ragged across a bony back. Pleading, agonized eyes met hers from a bony, bleeding, wasted face-- were they the same eyes she had met when she was young, running through the streets in pursuit of mischief and her own childish designs? She turned a corner and began shaking, because there was a scene from one of her terrible visions: a ruined city in flames, the sky a lurid red, and a child in bare, dangling rags-- no, not rags, peeling strips of flesh-- reaching out with skeletal hands where the skin had charred away--
She came out of the building running, she couldn’t even recall descending the stairs. Pine trees with low, concealing skirts grew just beyond, and she set her eyes on one. She threw her body at the ground beneath it and used her momentum to roll beneath the branches until her ribs smacked bruisingly against the trunk. It stunned her, and she stared at the dirt and needles up against her face. Words floated through her head-- destroyed, atomic bomb, aggression, target, stockpile, unconditional, forty-five years ago . . .
An hour later, she began to cry.
Hunger woke her late the next morning. A protective numbness had settled over her, enough to allow her to enter the museum again and use their bathroom to clean up. Her own eyes, reflected in the mirror, seemed too dark and deeply injured. Later, she promised herself, later. Forty-five years-- it was not something she could come to terms with over night. Perhaps it was something she could never come to terms with, a yawning and non-existent chasm in the path of her life.
“Dead,” she whispered to reflection. “Forty-five years.” Her reflection still looked the same, still looked haggard and grim. “Dead.”
She was not dead, her stomach informed her. The master, memory replied, had always said her stomach was as impatient as the rest of her, especially when he was pounding her on the back for the upteenth time after she had, in her haste, mistaken her air pipe for her food pipe. Remembrance made her smile. It was a stunted, twisted thing, but it was a start.
Food was the next step, and she set out without direction into the strange streets that ran among the massive buildings. Once she had known Hiroshima as she knew every knot and whorl in the floor of the monastery’s meditation hall, but all of that had been wiped clean. She tried to tune in to the beat of the city, but every turn she made presented such a drastic surprise that she quickly grew impatient and simply wandered.
The huge food market was one of those shocks. Ashura had never seen so much food in her life, not in one place. Many things were strange to her, and she spent a good amount of time squinting at the labels of the brightly colored boxes, trying to figure out what was inside. But the best thing was undoubtedly the tables where people were giving food away. A simple cantrip allowed her many visits, enough to take the edge off her hunger. She grabbed a magazine off a rack near the checkout and used it as cover to watch the people being rung through. The money she had on her was useless, she quickly figured out, watching brightly colored bills change hands. Sometimes the customers handed over strange rectangular cards, then wrote something on a piece of paper and got them back again.
She found the rest of her meal in the alleyway behind the store. There was a lot of food there, obviously rejected but still perfectly fine to Ashura’s eyes and stomach. Once she was full, she felt significantly more hopeful about her situation.
“Well now. An what’n hell’re you doin’ here, eh?”
The words were all but incomprehensible around slang and accent, but the intention was clear enough. Ashura tossed aside the remains of her half-eaten rice ball and sized up the man in the mouth of the alley. He was big, and utterly unfamiliar, but she recognized his stance from long familiarity-- legs widespread, hip cocked, shoulders slouched, head thrown back. His suit was rumpled, his hairstyle ridiculous even compared to the ones she’d seen, and when he raised his cigarette to his mouth she could see that two of his fingers ended at the second joint. Obviously a man who’s belief in his own abilities went far beyond any actual skill he had-- she could hear her master’s voice in her head as if he stood at her shoulder.
She found herself smiling as she took up her stance, wild and ready. The man was talking again, swaggering forward a few steps, but she didn’t bother trying to figure out what he was saying. She was, however, becoming impatient with watching him strut around. “Look, you low-life bastard, are we going to talk or are we going to fight?”
He charged her with a roar, and she let him come. Duck, feint-- he was obviously no match for her, but she drew the battle out for a good minute and a half, enjoying the sound of her own blood singing in her ears, the easy pattern and thrill of combat. Finally she got tired of playing with him and laid him out cold on the ground with a single well-aimed punch. As a lesson in the transitive nature of material possessions, she relieved him of his wallet before she left.
The magic of credit cards was apparently a widespread phenomena, and her attacker’s wallet contained a few of them. With them, she acquired modern clothing, a serviceable jacket, new shoes (amazingly comfortable compared to the straw sandals she was used to), a sturdy backpack and enough food to fill it. An outdoors store provided a sleeping bag and a few other useful items. She found a martial arts store tucked among the clothing boutiques and made a few practical and aesthetic choices. When she stumbled on the bookstore, she spent a good five minutes staring through the window, astounded by the incredible number of choices, at least a hundred brightly-colored covers all warring for attention. Wandering through the aisles, she found a book on recent Japanese history (one with good pictures), an atlas of road maps, and a guide to Hiroshima.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this time, so far removed from the pre-war Japan of her memories, was that there was so much of everything, and it was all so easily available. Choices threw themselves at her from all sides with astounding variety. Much of it completely mystified her; she could not understand wanting even half of what she saw, let alone needing it. It was with some relief that she took stock of her supplies and decided that it was more than enough. Why, then, was she hesitating?
She closed her eyes under the pain of memory, of how she had argued with her master before she left the monastery, thinking only of her driving purpose. She had left determined, certain that it was time for her to act, that she could stop the catastrophe she saw in her visions. It was sheer arrogance, she knew now. She had been wrong, and worse than wrong. Her hot words of a mere seven days-- forty-five years!-- before were a terrible burden of shame.
But she had to go back, had to stand before him and apologize for her terrible mistake, her hasty words. He would still be alive, even after forty-five years, a master could preserve his life for centuries if he chose. She longed suddenly and fiercely for the peace of the meditation hall, for a place where she belonged completely and without question. This was not her world, not anymore.
She was not one to hesitate once she’d made up her mind. Shrugging into the straps of the backpack, she set her face towards the mountains, and began walking.
The air got clearer as she got farther from the city. Her head cleared with it; the time to think was welcome. Surprises were nowhere near so rude along the road now. The family homes she passed, though different in form, carried the same purpose as the ones in her memories. The first small shrine she came across, with its worn statue and faded bib, lifted her spirits enormously. This was still her home, her country, even though it had changed so she hardly recognized it, even though forty-five years had passed.
Ashura started the history book that night by the light of her small fire. At a certain point she set it aside and stared into the flames.
“My family is dead,” she told the fire. She could see the registry page from the museum in front of her, her father’s name, her mother’s, her two brothers. Gone as if they never had been. Did saying it aloud make it real? She had not gone to see them when she had returned to Hiroshima-- too much urgency had driven her. It had been nearly a year since she’d seen them last.
But it still seemed like a dream, a bizarre nightmare that dragged on and on, one she could not wake up from. Except she never dreamed like this, they were always fast and flashing and unintelligible. Even her visions were sharp, tearing and inevitable, and the pain that was their hallmark came and left as swiftly as a knife’s thrust.
She set her mind on her goal, on the low peaked roofs of the monastery, of the perfect peace of moss and maple in the garden, and closed her eyes to sleep.
It took her two days of walking before she left the roads and struck out into the mountains. The forest was familiar, and the structure and contours of the earth had not changed. She let them guide her steps, let the bone-deep knowledge trace out her path upward. There was a flow to the land, to the webwork of life stretched in tangles across it, to the magic that wove through it all, an energy she could tune her entire body to. It linked her first step to her next, a long chain of steps, one that culminated when she set her foot on the first stone stair.
Stone lanterns were interspersed with the trees along the way now, mossy, worn smooth by years of rain and weather. Leaves piled up against their bases, and spilled in falls across the cracked stone stairs.
Eagerness quickened her pace. This was familiar, this she knew. She had first climbed these stairs as a child, following her master’s footsteps. She could almost see his tall, straight form in front of her on the steps, his broad hat, could almost hear the faint shush of his straw sandals on the stone. Even now they would round the final bend and face the two stone guardians who flanked the final gate.
Except there were no stone guardians, only two heaps of broken rubble. The gate was only partially standing; one half was a mass of charred and broken timbers. She stepped through it into greater devastation.
The complex of buildings from her memory, the covered walkways and thickly tiled roofs-- all of it was gone. Piles of charred timber and foundation stones marked the meditation hall, the monks’ quarters, the training hall. Charred and melted areas scarred the flagstones; unexpected pockets of cool air pooled in hollows pressed into the rock.
She felt a curious emptiness as she wandered among the ruins. The destruction was old, though there was no way to tell how old. Once carefully maintained, the gardens were overgrown where they were not destroyed, the pools and miniature waterfalls choked with weeds and scum. The rock garden was buried under leaves, and saplings and vines climbed through a cracked hole in the wall that had once protected it. The brass fittings that had capped banisters and beams were twisted and tarnished.
There was no one there, and no one had been there for a long time. She could find no trace of recent human habitation, no human remains. Nothing appeared to either human or other senses, save that something terrible had happened, some cataclysm or attack that had razed the monastery to the ground.
She kept poking around the piles of wreckage, her mind empty. What did she expect to find? There was no trace to tell her what had happened, and all clues she might have found were long since washed away by the mountain weather.
She stopped between one step and the next, her feet balanced on a charred roof beam. What was it she felt? It was beyond anger, beyond pain. There was only numbness, and it went on and on.
Something bright caught her eye, a corner of metal exposed in a pile of ash and dirt. She brushed it away to find a small box, once polished, now dull and scarred by fire. It was a struggle to open, but after persistent effort the metal catch gave way to her fingers. The inside was dry, miraculously untouched and whole. Nestled within was a scroll, carefully wrapped in silk, and a small ritual staff, bronze and shaped like a thunderbolt. The matching bell that should have accompanied it was missing, an empty hollow that ached at her, pulled at the edge of her mind. She identified the scroll as some sutra, but couldn’t tell from the label which one.
She did not cry. She sat there on the stone step that had once led to the porch of the meditation hall, the box on her lap, the burnt timbers rising like splintered masts around her. She watched as the shadows crept across the battered, worn flagstones, watched the sun set. Remembered a hundred other sunsets, the shadows of peaked roofs and rambling walkways.
The crickets were loud before she stood, and walked back through the broken gate.
create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands
I didn't keep a journal while I was in Seoul; there were a thousand things I could have written about, but I simply didn't have time. Any free writing-moments I had were spent working on a Certain Thing a Certain Someone has been persistently asking of me for quite some time. Despite my conviction that the universe is deeply unfair by human standards and unlikely to change anytime soon, I felt like hard work and persistence deserved some sort of reward. I'm almost finished, but might delay sending in order to finish more/make revisions. We shall see.
While visiting sites neglected over the past two weeks, I found the following article: Prince William Fells Prince Willem-Alexander Of The Netherlands In Crucial Joust. Read it, because it is excellent.
I hate it when anime series are licensed by American companies, and I don't bother expending the energy required to hate many things. But. I HATE IT. Because generally it means that the fansubbers stop hosting and producing episodes, and that means that (aside from raws and any summaries fans with superior language skills are willing to type up) my access to the series is completely cut off. American releases are generally very slow, making you go months between DVDs, while fansubbers often finish within a week or two of the Japanese release. Also, DVDs are expensive and very hard for me to obtain while living overseas. The picture quality is no better than current standards available via bittorrent.
The dubs, which is probably the reason why American releases take so long, generally make me wince in pain. Even on those rare occasions when they don't, I still tend to prefer the Japanese-- I like to watch TV and movies in its original language in almost all cases. I would prefer to read poetry and comics and books in their original languages, too, if I could. Also, I find that the quality of the fansubs is actually higher than the official subs. Fansubbers often add painstaking cultural notes and research to their translations. They also don't try to make changes in an effort to make the show appeal to "a broader commercial audience" or "an American audience" or "a younger audience," or any of the rot that American production companies use to justify the changes imposed by their censoring boards. Unless the anime company happens to be run by a guy named Miyazaki, animation studios have no ability whatsoever to protect the integrity of their work when it's presented overseas; and it's not really worth their while anyway.
All I need to do is point to a few examples to illustrate my points: the dubs of InuYasha and Martian Successor Nadesico. The subs for Hellsing (do not get me started. My Hellsing obsession of that time rivaled my present-day Saiunkoku obsession. I nearly put my fist through my dorm window at one point, I was so angry). Gods, even the dub for Spirited Away, which was otherwise acceptable to me, made changes to the actual dialogue because they thought Americans were too stupid to connect the dots by themselves.
I could go on. I will not.
The above is prompted by the announcement that Saiunkoku Monogatari is licensed, and the two fansubbers who were working on it have dropped the series. So here we are with the exciting events of second season just beginning . . . and there are no subs. And the official American releases won't even get to season two for at least a year. Meanwhile I watch raws and read summaries and beg my Chinese-speaking friends to translate scenes from the Chinese subs, and it's not enough. My personal projects, my writings for the series, are going to end up halted because I don't know what's going on. Or I'll continue writing, trying to go by my limited knowledge, and will end up getting things completely wrong because I misunderstood some crucial detail.
Not to mention-- not to mention-- no. stop.
SO ANGRY ABOUT THIS.
Various people are doing doodle-a-day or drabble-a-day postings for the month of May, and inspired by their excellent example I have decided that I'm going to do likewise. However, due to lack of time and very possibly lack of creativity and lack of talent, I am going to cheat . . . or rather, play the game by my own rules. I have notebooks dating back from 2001, and files on my computer dating back from even earlier. So I will be posting as-yet unposted writings from . . . well, wherever I like, on whatever subject I like, featuring whatever characters I like. There will be no rhyme or reason to it (my methods, that is, not necessarily the entries themselves). Some will be long, some short. Some will be interesting, some will be boring. The only standard will be that I have written all of them, and still find something virtuous about them.
I will occasionally post several at once in order to catch up on missed days. And seeing as I'm already behind . . .
May 1: General Prologue: Graceland Tales
Written in 1998 for a school project in which we had to do an alternate version of the Canterbury Tales.
In January, month of rain and cool,
When parents keep sick children home from school,
The year is new, but people hide their heads
Beneath the quilts and pillows of their beds.
They stay indoors, and many go insane
Of cabin fever. "Stop this awful rain!"
"And cold!" Each day, it seems to pass so slow,
And so they look for somewhere else to go.
It's then they come, by bus and car and wing,
Unto this 'bode, the birthplace of the King.
To pledge their life and service, each one gives
His vow, and raise his voice up, "Elvis lives!"
In travel they do congregate en masse
And, like now, it sometimes comes to pass
That they team up, as at this time is found
A group of them in back seat of Greyhound.
That mighty bus of speed and strength they find
To leave all other vehicles behind.
The way to go, if you would win a race!
And so they hurry to that holy place
Called Graceland; Memphis, Tennessee-
Symbol of beauty, strength, and liberty!
May 2: Mage RPG: Ashura's Backstory
Ashura was my roleplaying character back in the Mage game I played in 2004-05. With permission, I lifted her name and her temper from one of majochan's characters. And then I cheerfully broke my "don't mess with time!" rule and had a thoroughly good time coming up with a complex backstory for her. It was the first time I ever tried to play a character with a blazing temper, and it was . . . actually a great deal of fun, although very difficult at first.
Ashura staggered, and solid bark met her seeking fingers. There was only a burning whiteness in front of her eyes-- I’ve gone blind, she thought muzzilly, unable to tell if they were open or shut. It was hard to keep her feet under her, as if the ground was somehow in the wrong place. She felt like a rock that had skipped across the surface of the water and now was sinking, plunging into the depths.
Gradually her stomach unknotted, and the hot whiteness faded to shadow, refreshingly cool to her abused nerves. The tree was solid against her back, comforting-- save for the fact that it should not be there.
Opening her eyes verified the evidence of her other senses, but did nothing to absolve her confusion. She was in a park, that much was obvious. There were trees around her, and beyond them a road and an expanse of manicured lawn. People, as well, normal faces and voices, but wearing strange clothing, with odd haircuts and even odder hair colors.
She didn’t have to close her eyes to recall what had been before her just a moment before. The slightly dingy and very utilitarian buildings that had huddled beside the streets, electric wires strung in a criss-cross pattern overlying the trolley line set into the street. She had not been alone, there had been a few men walking this way or that with their business suits and serious expressions, there had been a shopkeeper’s helper in a stained apron carrying a heavy wrapped bundle on his back. There had been a column of school kids in neat grey uniforms, heading to one of the building sites downtown. She could remember the sound of their voices, she could remember the sudden scream of the air raid sirens, she remembered looking around her, annoyed, turning her eyes to the sky. An air raid? There had been no bombing raids on Hiroshima since the war began, what was--
She remembered a black dot, high up, remembered picking out wings against the sky. Had she really seen them? But she remembered them, remembered a tiny black shape parting from that winged form. Remembered it and remembered the images in her mind superimposed over it, nightmare visions of fiery infernos, of flesh charred in an instant, a high-frequency shriek, and then the sounds of people screaming--
--and then the hot whiteness, and the quiet buzz of conversation that now hummed in her ears. Cautiously, she stepped away from the tree, and the ground stayed reassuringly firm under her feet. Feeling as if she was in a dream, she joined the flow of people walking through the unfamiliar park.
She was shocked to stillness by the sight of a blasted-out, skeletal dome across the river, because she had walked by that same dome a mere few minutes before, and it had been neither blasted-out nor skeletal. Someone jostled her and murmured an apology she could not understand, and then she had something new to stare at, because that person was very obviously a foreigner: chestnut-haired, too tall, pale skinned, and balancing a baby on one generously curved hip.
She finally got her legs moving again, became a drop of water in the stream instead of a rock in its path. She walked without mind, past a long expanse of fountain, past a low-burning orange flame, past a strange shape in silver metal-- a statue?--toward a building more flat, sleek, and functional than any she had ever seen. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, she read off the sign as she walked in past the impossibly large glass doors.
The next few hours passed in a blur, they dragged on forever, she didn’t notice them passing. She knew that she read every panel, that she understood nothing and everything. She stared at photos of a sweeping plane of twisted rubble. Listened to recordings through alien black headsets with spiraling cords connected to the wall. Watched images of people on screens set into holes. Plastic cases held items that might have been familiar once, but now were charred almost beyond recognition.
She bit back a scream at the first picture of mutilated human flesh, the bubbled scarring ragged across a bony back. Pleading, agonized eyes met hers from a bony, bleeding, wasted face-- were they the same eyes she had met when she was young, running through the streets in pursuit of mischief and her own childish designs? She turned a corner and began shaking, because there was a scene from one of her terrible visions: a ruined city in flames, the sky a lurid red, and a child in bare, dangling rags-- no, not rags, peeling strips of flesh-- reaching out with skeletal hands where the skin had charred away--
She came out of the building running, she couldn’t even recall descending the stairs. Pine trees with low, concealing skirts grew just beyond, and she set her eyes on one. She threw her body at the ground beneath it and used her momentum to roll beneath the branches until her ribs smacked bruisingly against the trunk. It stunned her, and she stared at the dirt and needles up against her face. Words floated through her head-- destroyed, atomic bomb, aggression, target, stockpile, unconditional, forty-five years ago . . .
An hour later, she began to cry.
Hunger woke her late the next morning. A protective numbness had settled over her, enough to allow her to enter the museum again and use their bathroom to clean up. Her own eyes, reflected in the mirror, seemed too dark and deeply injured. Later, she promised herself, later. Forty-five years-- it was not something she could come to terms with over night. Perhaps it was something she could never come to terms with, a yawning and non-existent chasm in the path of her life.
“Dead,” she whispered to reflection. “Forty-five years.” Her reflection still looked the same, still looked haggard and grim. “Dead.”
She was not dead, her stomach informed her. The master, memory replied, had always said her stomach was as impatient as the rest of her, especially when he was pounding her on the back for the upteenth time after she had, in her haste, mistaken her air pipe for her food pipe. Remembrance made her smile. It was a stunted, twisted thing, but it was a start.
Food was the next step, and she set out without direction into the strange streets that ran among the massive buildings. Once she had known Hiroshima as she knew every knot and whorl in the floor of the monastery’s meditation hall, but all of that had been wiped clean. She tried to tune in to the beat of the city, but every turn she made presented such a drastic surprise that she quickly grew impatient and simply wandered.
The huge food market was one of those shocks. Ashura had never seen so much food in her life, not in one place. Many things were strange to her, and she spent a good amount of time squinting at the labels of the brightly colored boxes, trying to figure out what was inside. But the best thing was undoubtedly the tables where people were giving food away. A simple cantrip allowed her many visits, enough to take the edge off her hunger. She grabbed a magazine off a rack near the checkout and used it as cover to watch the people being rung through. The money she had on her was useless, she quickly figured out, watching brightly colored bills change hands. Sometimes the customers handed over strange rectangular cards, then wrote something on a piece of paper and got them back again.
She found the rest of her meal in the alleyway behind the store. There was a lot of food there, obviously rejected but still perfectly fine to Ashura’s eyes and stomach. Once she was full, she felt significantly more hopeful about her situation.
“Well now. An what’n hell’re you doin’ here, eh?”
The words were all but incomprehensible around slang and accent, but the intention was clear enough. Ashura tossed aside the remains of her half-eaten rice ball and sized up the man in the mouth of the alley. He was big, and utterly unfamiliar, but she recognized his stance from long familiarity-- legs widespread, hip cocked, shoulders slouched, head thrown back. His suit was rumpled, his hairstyle ridiculous even compared to the ones she’d seen, and when he raised his cigarette to his mouth she could see that two of his fingers ended at the second joint. Obviously a man who’s belief in his own abilities went far beyond any actual skill he had-- she could hear her master’s voice in her head as if he stood at her shoulder.
She found herself smiling as she took up her stance, wild and ready. The man was talking again, swaggering forward a few steps, but she didn’t bother trying to figure out what he was saying. She was, however, becoming impatient with watching him strut around. “Look, you low-life bastard, are we going to talk or are we going to fight?”
He charged her with a roar, and she let him come. Duck, feint-- he was obviously no match for her, but she drew the battle out for a good minute and a half, enjoying the sound of her own blood singing in her ears, the easy pattern and thrill of combat. Finally she got tired of playing with him and laid him out cold on the ground with a single well-aimed punch. As a lesson in the transitive nature of material possessions, she relieved him of his wallet before she left.
The magic of credit cards was apparently a widespread phenomena, and her attacker’s wallet contained a few of them. With them, she acquired modern clothing, a serviceable jacket, new shoes (amazingly comfortable compared to the straw sandals she was used to), a sturdy backpack and enough food to fill it. An outdoors store provided a sleeping bag and a few other useful items. She found a martial arts store tucked among the clothing boutiques and made a few practical and aesthetic choices. When she stumbled on the bookstore, she spent a good five minutes staring through the window, astounded by the incredible number of choices, at least a hundred brightly-colored covers all warring for attention. Wandering through the aisles, she found a book on recent Japanese history (one with good pictures), an atlas of road maps, and a guide to Hiroshima.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this time, so far removed from the pre-war Japan of her memories, was that there was so much of everything, and it was all so easily available. Choices threw themselves at her from all sides with astounding variety. Much of it completely mystified her; she could not understand wanting even half of what she saw, let alone needing it. It was with some relief that she took stock of her supplies and decided that it was more than enough. Why, then, was she hesitating?
She closed her eyes under the pain of memory, of how she had argued with her master before she left the monastery, thinking only of her driving purpose. She had left determined, certain that it was time for her to act, that she could stop the catastrophe she saw in her visions. It was sheer arrogance, she knew now. She had been wrong, and worse than wrong. Her hot words of a mere seven days-- forty-five years!-- before were a terrible burden of shame.
But she had to go back, had to stand before him and apologize for her terrible mistake, her hasty words. He would still be alive, even after forty-five years, a master could preserve his life for centuries if he chose. She longed suddenly and fiercely for the peace of the meditation hall, for a place where she belonged completely and without question. This was not her world, not anymore.
She was not one to hesitate once she’d made up her mind. Shrugging into the straps of the backpack, she set her face towards the mountains, and began walking.
The air got clearer as she got farther from the city. Her head cleared with it; the time to think was welcome. Surprises were nowhere near so rude along the road now. The family homes she passed, though different in form, carried the same purpose as the ones in her memories. The first small shrine she came across, with its worn statue and faded bib, lifted her spirits enormously. This was still her home, her country, even though it had changed so she hardly recognized it, even though forty-five years had passed.
Ashura started the history book that night by the light of her small fire. At a certain point she set it aside and stared into the flames.
“My family is dead,” she told the fire. She could see the registry page from the museum in front of her, her father’s name, her mother’s, her two brothers. Gone as if they never had been. Did saying it aloud make it real? She had not gone to see them when she had returned to Hiroshima-- too much urgency had driven her. It had been nearly a year since she’d seen them last.
But it still seemed like a dream, a bizarre nightmare that dragged on and on, one she could not wake up from. Except she never dreamed like this, they were always fast and flashing and unintelligible. Even her visions were sharp, tearing and inevitable, and the pain that was their hallmark came and left as swiftly as a knife’s thrust.
She set her mind on her goal, on the low peaked roofs of the monastery, of the perfect peace of moss and maple in the garden, and closed her eyes to sleep.
It took her two days of walking before she left the roads and struck out into the mountains. The forest was familiar, and the structure and contours of the earth had not changed. She let them guide her steps, let the bone-deep knowledge trace out her path upward. There was a flow to the land, to the webwork of life stretched in tangles across it, to the magic that wove through it all, an energy she could tune her entire body to. It linked her first step to her next, a long chain of steps, one that culminated when she set her foot on the first stone stair.
Stone lanterns were interspersed with the trees along the way now, mossy, worn smooth by years of rain and weather. Leaves piled up against their bases, and spilled in falls across the cracked stone stairs.
Eagerness quickened her pace. This was familiar, this she knew. She had first climbed these stairs as a child, following her master’s footsteps. She could almost see his tall, straight form in front of her on the steps, his broad hat, could almost hear the faint shush of his straw sandals on the stone. Even now they would round the final bend and face the two stone guardians who flanked the final gate.
Except there were no stone guardians, only two heaps of broken rubble. The gate was only partially standing; one half was a mass of charred and broken timbers. She stepped through it into greater devastation.
The complex of buildings from her memory, the covered walkways and thickly tiled roofs-- all of it was gone. Piles of charred timber and foundation stones marked the meditation hall, the monks’ quarters, the training hall. Charred and melted areas scarred the flagstones; unexpected pockets of cool air pooled in hollows pressed into the rock.
She felt a curious emptiness as she wandered among the ruins. The destruction was old, though there was no way to tell how old. Once carefully maintained, the gardens were overgrown where they were not destroyed, the pools and miniature waterfalls choked with weeds and scum. The rock garden was buried under leaves, and saplings and vines climbed through a cracked hole in the wall that had once protected it. The brass fittings that had capped banisters and beams were twisted and tarnished.
There was no one there, and no one had been there for a long time. She could find no trace of recent human habitation, no human remains. Nothing appeared to either human or other senses, save that something terrible had happened, some cataclysm or attack that had razed the monastery to the ground.
She kept poking around the piles of wreckage, her mind empty. What did she expect to find? There was no trace to tell her what had happened, and all clues she might have found were long since washed away by the mountain weather.
She stopped between one step and the next, her feet balanced on a charred roof beam. What was it she felt? It was beyond anger, beyond pain. There was only numbness, and it went on and on.
Something bright caught her eye, a corner of metal exposed in a pile of ash and dirt. She brushed it away to find a small box, once polished, now dull and scarred by fire. It was a struggle to open, but after persistent effort the metal catch gave way to her fingers. The inside was dry, miraculously untouched and whole. Nestled within was a scroll, carefully wrapped in silk, and a small ritual staff, bronze and shaped like a thunderbolt. The matching bell that should have accompanied it was missing, an empty hollow that ached at her, pulled at the edge of her mind. She identified the scroll as some sutra, but couldn’t tell from the label which one.
She did not cry. She sat there on the stone step that had once led to the porch of the meditation hall, the box on her lap, the burnt timbers rising like splintered masts around her. She watched as the shadows crept across the battered, worn flagstones, watched the sun set. Remembered a hundred other sunsets, the shadows of peaked roofs and rambling walkways.
The crickets were loud before she stood, and walked back through the broken gate.