The Implementation of J.A. Seazer and other stories.
.
Upon the inspiration of one etrangere, I present, the crossover I should have written back when this all got started:
Title: Noppera-Bou
Fandoms: Shoujo Kakumei Utena, Tokyo Babylon
Characters: Subaru, Anshi, others.
Rating: PG. It's Utena.
Words: 4300
Spoilers: Implicit for the end of Utena, explicit for the end of TB.
Irony Cudgel Index: Mokushi kushimo shimoku kumoshi moshiku shikumo.
Warnings: J.A. Seazer pastiche.
Summary: The little prince vowed to become a witch himself! But was this really such a good idea?
-
Years ago, though we are not given to know precisely how many, there was a little prince; and he was distraught, for his heart had been stolen, and then broken, by a witch disguised as a king. Before this prince appeared another witch, a lady-witch, riding upon a red horse. She had a docile bearing and a shimmering smile. And she wrapped the little prince in an embrace that felt of roses, and wiped the tears from his eyes.
“Little one bearing up alone under grief,” said she, “do not forget your strength and your nobility, even as you grow up. But be wary of your selflessness, for that which is hollow shall be eroded from within as well as without; do not let flow all of your tears, and you shall retain your power.”
And she left him after this meeting, which was all well and good; but the little prince was so impressed by the witch’s advice, and so angered by the forbearance upon his grief, that he vowed to become a witch himself.
But was that really such a good idea?
Noppera-Bou
shoujo kakumei utena / tokyo babylon
Mithrigil Galtirglin
1991.12.15
04:10
He was up all night before his first real job too. How long ago, now? Five years? He’d been excited, agitated, almost too jittery to meditate-what if he failed, what if he unleashed something worse, what if succeeding wasn’t enough to make it better for the people who had hired him? He remembers how twisted his blanket was in the morning, how flat and hot the pillow, with all the down pushed to the sides, the case wet and threadbare in the center. He remembers shivering long after the purification rites were done, remembers being afraid to touch the doorknob because what if an impurity got on his gloves, or worse, his shikifuku, could he even call himself an onmyouji if he wasn’t clean?
Forgive him for not laughing.
It’s past four in the morning, it’s been past four in the morning, he’s convinced that the clock’s face is illusion like everything else in his life and that time’s just a way to define when in it you are. Up all night before this job as well, it seems, first job since Seishirou, like Seishirou’s a way to define when you are.
Not just that. A way to define who you are.
Subaru’s not even trying to sleep. He’s sitting with his back against the sliding door to the gardens, legs spread out limp on the hardwood floor like a doll’s, socks hanging off his ankles like lichen. He doesn’t wear pyjamas anymore, just underwear, for sleep, and he can feel the glass at his bare back, condensation at the band of his shorts. The cold’s keeping him up as much as anything else. It could be a vigil, if he’d done anything with the incense but watch it burn and think of cigarettes instead. Of what precise color those embers are, who else it belongs to. Who else he belongs to.
But he’s not worried at all about whether the proof of that will get in the way of his purity. Purity is less vital to the craft of onmyoujutsu than Subaru’s always been led to believe.
The incense is almost done for-the red glow of the room subsides, obfuscates so much, including the clock’s face in its own shadow. Subaru straightens-his skin creaks on the glass, wet, and the sound scissors through the air. At some point, it started raining out there, blurred the sounds of the brook and the grass. He rolls his shoulders, feels the cold sweat slide, feels his shorter hair catch and twitter on nothing.
-
12:43
Nerima still doesn’t feel like part of Tokyo. Subaru’d thought that might have changed, like everything else. But no, the streets are too narrow, the fences too even, the distant skyline obscured by factories and clouds that can’t make up their mind, higher or lower, rain or don’t. Once he’s close enough to the apartment complex he can’t even see anything else, the fog’s so thick and noxious. He’d wonder if the cab waited, if he cared. He doesn’t.
It’s three stories, with half-barred balconies and grey fronts, the telephone poles nearby seeming dangerously close. The landlord’s office, left corner, has a chime to be rung by swinging a pentagon of balsa wood around. It’s not a particularly cheerful bell, but it does its job (oh, the irony, thinks Subaru), and soon there’s a withered woman with factory-hands knuckling on the inside of the glass and pushing it open for Subaru. “You’re my twelve-o’clock, aren’t you dear?” she doesn’t quite ask, ushering him in. “I was afraid you wouldn’t show up.”
“No.” Subaru sighs. “I’m the onmyouji.”
He doesn’t look it-that’s what she isn’t saying. It’s true, though. Has he ever, really? (Has he ever looked like anything?) But of course a teenager in a winter jacket and jeans looks more like a Nerima boarder than a conduit for the divine.
Forgive him for not laughing.
“Ah, sorry, sorry,” the old woman goes on, then bows to him with a propriety that’s a bit out of place with how informal her speech still is. Subaru’s not sure whether to feel refreshed or offended. “Shirai Eiko, I run this place. Call me Eiko, no one does if I don’t tell him to. And have a seat,” she says, indicating, not waiting for a name. Name and face don’t matter, it seems, just the profession, speaking of refreshed or offended. Subaru sits where he’s told, in a chair with skewed arms and a run beneath the plastic-covered cushion. The whole layout of the room feels much the same, preserving for the sake of preserving and plastic, plastic outboxes and teacups and files and frames. It should be more colorful than it is, feel more colorful than it does. “Figure I should just give you the whole story, hm?”
“In your own words,” Subaru says, shrugging. The briefing was pretty detailed, but the context would be nice.
“Can do,” Eiko says, smiling, with gaps in her dark teeth. “Have a million of those, you know, words.” She stands on her side of the desk-would it matter if she sat, or would that just hide her?-and talks with her hands. “I get a lot of foreigners here,” she starts, “exchange students, couple downright vagrants, Americans thinking to chase poor Takahashi-sensei down. So I’ve got to be accommodating, you know, can’t always ask for references, check out stories. I go with my intuition, who’ll get enough to pay me, who won’t. But just ‘cause someone’ll pay me on time doesn’t mean she’s the right kind of person to stay here, you know?”
Subaru wonders who rented Seishirou his clinic.
“So I get this young lady in maybe two months ago, she’s from India. She’s got this gorgeous car and the money up front, tells me she’s here on an extended pleasure trip, getting away from where she’d been, taking a couple classes at Musashino. Piano. I mean, this girl, she looks like a princess, she was so polite, so exotic, I probably should’ve been suspicious but money talks. And she’s living up in 303 now, has been.”
It’s not so hard falling back into how these jobs work, but still Subaru’s never wanted to fill in the blank before, and the problem is,
“There’s always light under the door, colored light-funny smells, funny sounds. Got her neighbors complaining of a poltergeist, since these things keep happening when she’s not here and the door’s still locked. I peeked in, you know, spare key, and she’d barely furnished the place at all. Not a lamp in sight. Just clothes in the closet and a spread on the tatami.”
“And the girl?”
“Just smiled when I asked her about it, said she didn’t see anything wrong. She’s the one paying for you, you know, not me. I’ll have Biiko take you up there if you don’t have any more questions.” And she reaches up, tugs one of the chimes on the wall, to summon whomever anyway. Those are square at the bottom, oblong up, peaked at the top. Heavy bells.
Subaru does have questions, though, perfunctory ones, asks them in the space he’s got. Whether anything else untoward has happened, repercussions-repercussions there are, of course, there always are, and the one that Eiko’s concerned about is that she’s got tenants leaving, cutting their leases short. Money talks. Isn’t that technically why Subaru’s here too? He asks more about this young woman, what else she does-gets a name, Himemiya Anshi, spelled with the kanji for relax and die. “Figured that was a translation,” Eiko says. “People have strange names in foreign countries. I wonder.”
-
13:02
Biiko’s no younger than Eiko but a good deal more mobile, with her hair in heaps on either side of her head like a geisha the morning after. She’s also no quieter, actually asks Subaru his name so she can use it to talk at him on the way up. There’s an elevator but they don’t take it-“Creepy old thing,” says Biiko once they pass it, “groundskeeper’s the only one who uses it and even then it’s only because he’s hauling so much.” She leads Subaru along so quickly, so irreverently, that he’s actually not sure he’s seen her face.
Room 303 isn’t far from the stairs. The hall’s not badly kept, hardwood, hard see-your-shadow-in-it wood, there’s probably not a carpet to be found in this place. The lighting’s dry, except for the one sconce that’s flickering, needs to be changed before it burns out.
Forgive him for not laughing.
Biiko raps on the door, knuckles curled like a scythe. “Himemiya-san! The Sumeragi’s here to see you!”
…There had been light beneath the door. He notices it only when it fades.
“A moment,” someone presumably Himemiya responds, and relax or die is just as apt as princess of the shrine to describe the voice. It’s high, peaceful, pulsing, like cricket-thighs in autumn. It’s startling to hear the cutting of bolts and the turning of the doorknob after that, enough that Subaru’s eyes are closed when he should be getting a first impression.
He opens, them, though. And it’s an impression.
Instantly, he can see why Eiko trusted her from the start. Exotic, yes, but unassuming, that tenuous balance between features that could be plain if they were ordinary. Her skin is dark, the bindhi on her forehead is a simple black dot-a black not the same as her hair, which is black more the way grapes are. She’s probably never cut it in her life, and it’s the worse for it at the ends, but with hair that length and that texture someone will always say it’s beautiful, even if it’s not. She squints as if she’s lost her glasses, smiles as if she’s lost her mind.
“Do come in, Sumeragi-sama,” she says, “I’ve been expecting you.”
Biiko steps aside, lets him through, and he doesn’t look back.
The room reeks of roses. They’re everywhere-curling around the legs of the table, the bar of the icebox, the handles on the cabinet. There are dozens-hundreds-of simple green pots on the floor, and as many colors and states of bloom as that, some that shouldn’t exist-some under infrared lamps, others white halogen, others blacklight like in dance clubs and siphoned aside-there’s a dressing screen that’s strangled by them, would tilt and topple if a single rose bloomed ahead of time-an upright piano bursting with them, thorns chipping the paint on the wall behind. They’ve devoured the bookshelf, captured the radiator, stampeded toward the window in a clamor for sun-and there is sun, spearing through where grey had been, and no wonder it doesn’t feel like Tokyo, it’s not.
The door clicks shut, scrapes, bolts. “Something wrong, Sumeragi-sama?” that cricket-thigh voice asks, all innocence.
Subaru’s own voice is hoarse around pollen. “Everything,” he says.
-
“Extra, extra!”
Upon taking up a pole and an evocative hat: “I am a fisherman! Aaah, alas, alack, it is too hot, too crowded at the river! I shall not venture there today-the Emperor’s koi pond should suffice.”
Upon slipping that off for hairsticks and a ladle: “No no no, husband, do not dare! The Emperor’s koi pond is sacred ground, you must not taint it with your fishing rod!”
Upon replacing the pole and the still-evocative hat: “Fear not, wife, this is all in the name of supper!”
A pause, in which the scene is spun about, and the pond in question illustrated.
Upon the fisherman’s arrival: “Yes! I shall fish in the Emperor’s koi pond!”
Upon the removal of all the fisherman’s attributes and a descent into the pond itself to emerge wet and presumably lovely, at least in silhouette: “Please, no no no, do not dare! This pond is sacred ground, you must not taint it with your fishing rod!”
Upon the reprisal of the pole and the as-yet-unchangedly evocative hat: “I must! I shall! I will bait these koi and bring them to my wife in the name of supper-”
Upon the descent into the pond and the removal of all the fisherman’s attributes, including the entire face: “I am Noppera-bou, the faceless maiden!”
Upon the hasty re-application of the fisherman’s persona: “AAAAAAH! Running-home-must tell my wife-wait. Wait.”
Upon the brief resumption of the faceless one: “Wait what?”
The fisherman, triumphant: “We’re in a shadowplay. None of us have faces.”
The faceless one, pristine: “That’s right. You don’t.”
The fisherman: “… … … -AAAAAAAAAH-”
-
13:07
“You have some idea of what I am, don’t you?”
Less than you think, Subaru admits to himself-and the words that actually do come out are that much more incriminating. “I don’t know anything anymore,” he says-it’s choked, humid. None of the petals in the room are falling, no, that’d be too obvious, but the way they clutter the air they might as well be. Subaru turns back to the young woman and winds up staggering, clinging to a vine.
It doesn’t jump up and wrap around his arm.
Himemiya comes nearer, reaches out to touch him, to do what the roses aren’t. Fewer thorns that way, Subaru thinks, for things that are essentially the same. “I do hope you won’t take this away from me,” she says. “It’s how I intend to find my prince again.”
If only it was that easy, Subaru wants to say, doesn’t. “You knew it was going to draw my people. It’s probably-him too, he must have noticed too, and he’s definitely not your prince-”
“But I had to come here and look for her,” Himemiya says. She pulls on Subaru, draws him toward a glass-and-iron table, curling and patterned and stained across the topface, sakura-pink. “I intend to move on once I have found her, or found proof that she’s not here.”
His knees buckle before he sits. “I won’t stand in your way. I-I can’t. But you’re a threat to the state, your magic’s a threat to the state, and I hope you’re glad you drew me in first-”
“I am, Sumeragi-sama,” she says, “and for more than one reason.”
The sun’s at his back, the roses all bowing to him, expectant, supplicating-or are they Himemiya’s army with shields raised and thorns for armor? She sits, gingerly, hair tumbling to the floor, frayed edges catching on brambles, staining with white and gold. Her hands fold in her lap.
“Though I am in exile,” she says, “I retain my power. This garden is proof of that-this beacon is proof of that.” Beneath the table, her hands spread, smooth down her red skirt. “It is because I do not think she is lost. Because I do not grieve. I have hope where she does not.”
The idea of Seishirou having any hope at all sends the pollen in the air straight through the wound in Subaru’s lung, fraying the edges like a cigarette burn.
“She could draw my heart out of my chest, once. She could borrow my power. I doubt she will be able to do such things if I find her again-but even so, I would like for there to still be a heart, just in case. For there to still be power.” She smiles-the reason is private, the gesture is not.
Subaru’s grimace is the same. “It means something else in this world, for someone to draw your heart out of your chest.” He uses the other word for heart, shinzou instead of just kokoro, to make his point.
“I suppose it does.” Himemiya shrugs, and preens. “But the gesture is the same, even if the meaning is not.”
“And as far as I know, I don’t even have the kind of heart you’re talking about,” he says-there’s snarl in it, because teeth hold back tears and he’s not letting that happen. “He ripped it out, and shredded it, and he still has it.”
Her smile glints with the sunlight, sets creases up at the corners of her closed, raised eyes. “In that case, you’d best not cry. You need to get your power from somewhere.”
The smell of roses cloys, tightens-Subaru grips the edge of the table, wonders if there’s a rose here the color his knuckles are turning. There probably is.
She says, and he doesn’t watch her speak, not now: “If you must cry for yourself, cry for yourself. But that, I believe, is all that you can spare. I know you must continue to serve others, but do not take their troubles for your own, anymore. If he’s taken your heart, at least cling to your pride. How else will you amass the strength to live?”
“I hope,” Subaru starts, and it’s the wrong word, but he keeps it, “I hope that if you find your prince, she still loves what you’ve become.”
The world upends, but the petals still don’t fall.
-
----.--.--
--:--
Music plays; driven music, operatic rock of the era, upon tangled drum machines and an electric bass that cannot quite support itself. The bass wails as if indicating an imminent earthquake, and in doing so heralds the rest of the music, synthesizer tracks and rhythm guitars, front guitar and choir. It is melodically reminiscent of a traditional children’s song, pentatonic and classically Japanese. That is about the only way the song is classically Japanese.
In young female voices, mostly, in unison the choir goes on about koi, which of course has multiple meanings, punning with koe, voice, and kao, face. The hard consonants are like the blades that are drawn on the air, the damp vowels like the sheaths of those blades, which have been dropped. Subaru is wielding two of them, feathered ceremonial daggers, each the length of his forearm. Their blades are veined blue, the feathers an equally blue version of grey. An ivory rose, ivory, not white, ivory the color of bone, is pinned to the front of his shikifuku.
hisshi no hi, kao ga kawaii
kichinichi, koe ga kawari, sings the choir:
On that day of certain death, your face is cute;
On that lucky day, your voice has changed, is more or less what the lyrics mean.
kotoshi, kurushii, kurete kudasai
kotoshi, this year, koroshi, killing, as opposed to suffering, kurete kudasai, and at this point the melody is moving upward, dozens of voices begging for this sort of thing to happen.
The duel cannot decide between the titles of UNMEI and SADAME. Perhaps that is what the fight is actually about.
He chases his opponent across a floor emblazoned with sacrifices, red effigies beneath a hundred spectral desks. Atop each desk is perched a pair of incense sticks in a plain sanded pot, sandalwood smoke curling toward the air. No two pairs of incense sticks are up at the same angle. Subaru isn’t certain he should have noticed that, not when he should be running his opponent down, shattering the rose.
hisshi no hi, koi ga kawaii
kichinichi, koi ga kawari, sings the choir, and whether it’s the carp that’s cute and the love that’s changed or the other way around is something known only to the composer.
kotoshi, koroshi, kurete kudasai
Subaru lashes out, finds his blades parried each in turn by a thin solid saber, and then again when he redoubles, whirling and slicing through the air like thrown paper-and why isn’t he using his ofuda, anyway? The opponent leaps out of the path of Subaru’s daggers, lands expertly in a gorgeous red convertible car that careens around the arena’s perimeter to the sounds of cloth flapping and smoke rising and engines obscuring the meaning of the song. Battering wind flings back Subaru’s hair, sleeves, hakama, pelts his eyes with smog and dust. The car blasts along the wall, around it, but Subaru’s clothing doesn’t settle, the wind and the embers of incense swarm around and keep everything aloft.
The stars on his hands burn angrily to life.
fukou kousatsu, fukuzatsu kasaku
sougaku kotoba ga fusoku
futatabi kankei, kiken kekkai
kousai koto wo furikaenai
tragic death by hanging, complicated artifice
the sum of the words is insufficient
second relationship, dangerous barriers, and that’s a layered term in and of itself,
there’s no way to go back to acquaintance
Instead of renewing his attack, Subaru stays where he is, opens his arms, settles his legs apart. His long, piercing shadow now has serifs bleeding from its hands, the icicle-faces of his daggers black on the corpse-patterned ground. The incense dies and the glow of his scars and the glare of the convertible’s headlights blind each other, blind him, but the opponent never had a face to begin with and the saber shoving through him is framed in black-
futatabi kankei, kikenai kurushimi
shi yori kowai, kowashite kurete
kono kokoro no koto kumitatekurete
kumitatekurete!
Ironic, that just when the song was getting to the part about putting itself back together, the red car crashes.
Forgive him for not laughing.
-
1991.12.15
13:23
They’re falling now; at least one of the off-white petals from the rose she just cut for him is drifting to the floor, sliding on the thick, grey, noxious air. She extends the rose in his direction; it’s not mature, still hard in its bud but beginning to fan out, in the shape of the bells downstairs.
It’s also the only rose remaining in the room, though the reek of them persists and the light of them still warms the back of Subaru’s neck, even if it’s not shining.
He takes the rose, carefully, between two fingers-with his left hand, he smears an ofuda flat on the table, watches it glow. The pink glass burns to life between its iron pattern, holding all the bride’s unruly power in.
“Consider it the magical equivalent of a visa,” he says, staring at his jacitating shadow on the floor. It’s framed in red-at the edge of it, Himemiya’s shoes are red too, a dizzying metallic red. “You can look for your prince and call her until its effects run out. My people will keep an eye out for her as well. But after that, please, leave the country.”
“A fair compromise,” she says. Her already dark hands are smeared with purple-black petals withering to potpourri and crumbling to the floor. He looks past them to her face, her smile, wonders how it still glows the way it does when the room’s reverted to what it is, here. “I thank you, Sumeragi-sama, and am truly glad I drew you in first.”
He tries not to scoff at that, manages because of what he says next. “What would you have done if you hadn’t? If he’d found you first?”
She squints as if she’s lost her glasses, smiles as if she’s lost her mind.
-
13:30
The groundskeeper is bent double, mopping the hallway floor when Subaru gets out to it. Things shine, but not as much as they should-Subaru checks, and the magical signature of Himemiya’s room is as muted as it’s going to get, as protected as it has to be. A plastic yellow bucket is propping the grate of the elevator open; in there, there’s a cart, a half-dumpster, so much else. Subaru nods at the groundskeeper as he passes, sidesteps him for the door to the stairwell.
He sneezes, choo, when Subaru’s just next to him, and swipes an arm across his sleeve. It’s thick enough to hide his face but not his pierced ears. Subaru just heads down the stairs, slides one aching hand into his jacket pocket, and holds the half-bloomed ivory rose tightly in the other, instead of the banister. Thorns or no thorns, he thinks, thumbing at the flower’s base, the raised veins in the leaves.
---
---
More about Noppera-bou, including the legend I didn’t quite use.
Full translation of the duel song:
hisshi no hi, kao ga kawaii
kichinichi, koe ga kawari
kotoshi, kurushii, kurete kudasai
kotoshi, koroshi, kurete kudasai
hisshi no hi, koi ga kawaii
kichinichi, koi ga kawari
kotoshi, koroshi, kurete kudasai
fukou kousatsu, fukuzatsu kasaku
sougaku kotoba ga fusoku
futatabi kankei, kiken kekkai
kousai koto wo furikaenai
futatabi kankei, kikenai kurushimi
shi yori kowai, kowashite kurete
kono kokoro no koto kumitatekurete
kumitatekurete!
On that day of certain death, face is cute;
On that lucky day, voice has changed.
This year, please give me suffering.
This year, please kill me.
On that day of certain death, (love/carp) is cute;
On that lucky day, (carp/love) has changed.
This year, please kill me.
Tragic death by hanging, complicated artifice,
The sum of the words is insufficient.
Second relationship, dangerous barriers,
There’s no way to go back to our acquaintance.
Second relationship, pain you aren’t hearing,
Scarier than death, obliterate me.
Reassemble my heart,
Reassemble it!
Now if only my old Japanese teachers knew what I was doing with all this knowledge…
-
.
Upon the inspiration of one etrangere, I present, the crossover I should have written back when this all got started:
Title: Noppera-Bou
Fandoms: Shoujo Kakumei Utena, Tokyo Babylon
Characters: Subaru, Anshi, others.
Rating: PG. It's Utena.
Words: 4300
Spoilers: Implicit for the end of Utena, explicit for the end of TB.
Irony Cudgel Index: Mokushi kushimo shimoku kumoshi moshiku shikumo.
Warnings: J.A. Seazer pastiche.
Summary: The little prince vowed to become a witch himself! But was this really such a good idea?
-
Years ago, though we are not given to know precisely how many, there was a little prince; and he was distraught, for his heart had been stolen, and then broken, by a witch disguised as a king. Before this prince appeared another witch, a lady-witch, riding upon a red horse. She had a docile bearing and a shimmering smile. And she wrapped the little prince in an embrace that felt of roses, and wiped the tears from his eyes.
“Little one bearing up alone under grief,” said she, “do not forget your strength and your nobility, even as you grow up. But be wary of your selflessness, for that which is hollow shall be eroded from within as well as without; do not let flow all of your tears, and you shall retain your power.”
And she left him after this meeting, which was all well and good; but the little prince was so impressed by the witch’s advice, and so angered by the forbearance upon his grief, that he vowed to become a witch himself.
But was that really such a good idea?
Noppera-Bou
shoujo kakumei utena / tokyo babylon
Mithrigil Galtirglin
1991.12.15
04:10
He was up all night before his first real job too. How long ago, now? Five years? He’d been excited, agitated, almost too jittery to meditate-what if he failed, what if he unleashed something worse, what if succeeding wasn’t enough to make it better for the people who had hired him? He remembers how twisted his blanket was in the morning, how flat and hot the pillow, with all the down pushed to the sides, the case wet and threadbare in the center. He remembers shivering long after the purification rites were done, remembers being afraid to touch the doorknob because what if an impurity got on his gloves, or worse, his shikifuku, could he even call himself an onmyouji if he wasn’t clean?
Forgive him for not laughing.
It’s past four in the morning, it’s been past four in the morning, he’s convinced that the clock’s face is illusion like everything else in his life and that time’s just a way to define when in it you are. Up all night before this job as well, it seems, first job since Seishirou, like Seishirou’s a way to define when you are.
Not just that. A way to define who you are.
Subaru’s not even trying to sleep. He’s sitting with his back against the sliding door to the gardens, legs spread out limp on the hardwood floor like a doll’s, socks hanging off his ankles like lichen. He doesn’t wear pyjamas anymore, just underwear, for sleep, and he can feel the glass at his bare back, condensation at the band of his shorts. The cold’s keeping him up as much as anything else. It could be a vigil, if he’d done anything with the incense but watch it burn and think of cigarettes instead. Of what precise color those embers are, who else it belongs to. Who else he belongs to.
But he’s not worried at all about whether the proof of that will get in the way of his purity. Purity is less vital to the craft of onmyoujutsu than Subaru’s always been led to believe.
The incense is almost done for-the red glow of the room subsides, obfuscates so much, including the clock’s face in its own shadow. Subaru straightens-his skin creaks on the glass, wet, and the sound scissors through the air. At some point, it started raining out there, blurred the sounds of the brook and the grass. He rolls his shoulders, feels the cold sweat slide, feels his shorter hair catch and twitter on nothing.
-
12:43
Nerima still doesn’t feel like part of Tokyo. Subaru’d thought that might have changed, like everything else. But no, the streets are too narrow, the fences too even, the distant skyline obscured by factories and clouds that can’t make up their mind, higher or lower, rain or don’t. Once he’s close enough to the apartment complex he can’t even see anything else, the fog’s so thick and noxious. He’d wonder if the cab waited, if he cared. He doesn’t.
It’s three stories, with half-barred balconies and grey fronts, the telephone poles nearby seeming dangerously close. The landlord’s office, left corner, has a chime to be rung by swinging a pentagon of balsa wood around. It’s not a particularly cheerful bell, but it does its job (oh, the irony, thinks Subaru), and soon there’s a withered woman with factory-hands knuckling on the inside of the glass and pushing it open for Subaru. “You’re my twelve-o’clock, aren’t you dear?” she doesn’t quite ask, ushering him in. “I was afraid you wouldn’t show up.”
“No.” Subaru sighs. “I’m the onmyouji.”
He doesn’t look it-that’s what she isn’t saying. It’s true, though. Has he ever, really? (Has he ever looked like anything?) But of course a teenager in a winter jacket and jeans looks more like a Nerima boarder than a conduit for the divine.
Forgive him for not laughing.
“Ah, sorry, sorry,” the old woman goes on, then bows to him with a propriety that’s a bit out of place with how informal her speech still is. Subaru’s not sure whether to feel refreshed or offended. “Shirai Eiko, I run this place. Call me Eiko, no one does if I don’t tell him to. And have a seat,” she says, indicating, not waiting for a name. Name and face don’t matter, it seems, just the profession, speaking of refreshed or offended. Subaru sits where he’s told, in a chair with skewed arms and a run beneath the plastic-covered cushion. The whole layout of the room feels much the same, preserving for the sake of preserving and plastic, plastic outboxes and teacups and files and frames. It should be more colorful than it is, feel more colorful than it does. “Figure I should just give you the whole story, hm?”
“In your own words,” Subaru says, shrugging. The briefing was pretty detailed, but the context would be nice.
“Can do,” Eiko says, smiling, with gaps in her dark teeth. “Have a million of those, you know, words.” She stands on her side of the desk-would it matter if she sat, or would that just hide her?-and talks with her hands. “I get a lot of foreigners here,” she starts, “exchange students, couple downright vagrants, Americans thinking to chase poor Takahashi-sensei down. So I’ve got to be accommodating, you know, can’t always ask for references, check out stories. I go with my intuition, who’ll get enough to pay me, who won’t. But just ‘cause someone’ll pay me on time doesn’t mean she’s the right kind of person to stay here, you know?”
Subaru wonders who rented Seishirou his clinic.
“So I get this young lady in maybe two months ago, she’s from India. She’s got this gorgeous car and the money up front, tells me she’s here on an extended pleasure trip, getting away from where she’d been, taking a couple classes at Musashino. Piano. I mean, this girl, she looks like a princess, she was so polite, so exotic, I probably should’ve been suspicious but money talks. And she’s living up in 303 now, has been.”
It’s not so hard falling back into how these jobs work, but still Subaru’s never wanted to fill in the blank before, and the problem is,
“There’s always light under the door, colored light-funny smells, funny sounds. Got her neighbors complaining of a poltergeist, since these things keep happening when she’s not here and the door’s still locked. I peeked in, you know, spare key, and she’d barely furnished the place at all. Not a lamp in sight. Just clothes in the closet and a spread on the tatami.”
“And the girl?”
“Just smiled when I asked her about it, said she didn’t see anything wrong. She’s the one paying for you, you know, not me. I’ll have Biiko take you up there if you don’t have any more questions.” And she reaches up, tugs one of the chimes on the wall, to summon whomever anyway. Those are square at the bottom, oblong up, peaked at the top. Heavy bells.
Subaru does have questions, though, perfunctory ones, asks them in the space he’s got. Whether anything else untoward has happened, repercussions-repercussions there are, of course, there always are, and the one that Eiko’s concerned about is that she’s got tenants leaving, cutting their leases short. Money talks. Isn’t that technically why Subaru’s here too? He asks more about this young woman, what else she does-gets a name, Himemiya Anshi, spelled with the kanji for relax and die. “Figured that was a translation,” Eiko says. “People have strange names in foreign countries. I wonder.”
-
13:02
Biiko’s no younger than Eiko but a good deal more mobile, with her hair in heaps on either side of her head like a geisha the morning after. She’s also no quieter, actually asks Subaru his name so she can use it to talk at him on the way up. There’s an elevator but they don’t take it-“Creepy old thing,” says Biiko once they pass it, “groundskeeper’s the only one who uses it and even then it’s only because he’s hauling so much.” She leads Subaru along so quickly, so irreverently, that he’s actually not sure he’s seen her face.
Room 303 isn’t far from the stairs. The hall’s not badly kept, hardwood, hard see-your-shadow-in-it wood, there’s probably not a carpet to be found in this place. The lighting’s dry, except for the one sconce that’s flickering, needs to be changed before it burns out.
Forgive him for not laughing.
Biiko raps on the door, knuckles curled like a scythe. “Himemiya-san! The Sumeragi’s here to see you!”
…There had been light beneath the door. He notices it only when it fades.
“A moment,” someone presumably Himemiya responds, and relax or die is just as apt as princess of the shrine to describe the voice. It’s high, peaceful, pulsing, like cricket-thighs in autumn. It’s startling to hear the cutting of bolts and the turning of the doorknob after that, enough that Subaru’s eyes are closed when he should be getting a first impression.
He opens, them, though. And it’s an impression.
Instantly, he can see why Eiko trusted her from the start. Exotic, yes, but unassuming, that tenuous balance between features that could be plain if they were ordinary. Her skin is dark, the bindhi on her forehead is a simple black dot-a black not the same as her hair, which is black more the way grapes are. She’s probably never cut it in her life, and it’s the worse for it at the ends, but with hair that length and that texture someone will always say it’s beautiful, even if it’s not. She squints as if she’s lost her glasses, smiles as if she’s lost her mind.
“Do come in, Sumeragi-sama,” she says, “I’ve been expecting you.”
Biiko steps aside, lets him through, and he doesn’t look back.
The room reeks of roses. They’re everywhere-curling around the legs of the table, the bar of the icebox, the handles on the cabinet. There are dozens-hundreds-of simple green pots on the floor, and as many colors and states of bloom as that, some that shouldn’t exist-some under infrared lamps, others white halogen, others blacklight like in dance clubs and siphoned aside-there’s a dressing screen that’s strangled by them, would tilt and topple if a single rose bloomed ahead of time-an upright piano bursting with them, thorns chipping the paint on the wall behind. They’ve devoured the bookshelf, captured the radiator, stampeded toward the window in a clamor for sun-and there is sun, spearing through where grey had been, and no wonder it doesn’t feel like Tokyo, it’s not.
The door clicks shut, scrapes, bolts. “Something wrong, Sumeragi-sama?” that cricket-thigh voice asks, all innocence.
Subaru’s own voice is hoarse around pollen. “Everything,” he says.
-
“Extra, extra!”
Upon taking up a pole and an evocative hat: “I am a fisherman! Aaah, alas, alack, it is too hot, too crowded at the river! I shall not venture there today-the Emperor’s koi pond should suffice.”
Upon slipping that off for hairsticks and a ladle: “No no no, husband, do not dare! The Emperor’s koi pond is sacred ground, you must not taint it with your fishing rod!”
Upon replacing the pole and the still-evocative hat: “Fear not, wife, this is all in the name of supper!”
A pause, in which the scene is spun about, and the pond in question illustrated.
Upon the fisherman’s arrival: “Yes! I shall fish in the Emperor’s koi pond!”
Upon the removal of all the fisherman’s attributes and a descent into the pond itself to emerge wet and presumably lovely, at least in silhouette: “Please, no no no, do not dare! This pond is sacred ground, you must not taint it with your fishing rod!”
Upon the reprisal of the pole and the as-yet-unchangedly evocative hat: “I must! I shall! I will bait these koi and bring them to my wife in the name of supper-”
Upon the descent into the pond and the removal of all the fisherman’s attributes, including the entire face: “I am Noppera-bou, the faceless maiden!”
Upon the hasty re-application of the fisherman’s persona: “AAAAAAH! Running-home-must tell my wife-wait. Wait.”
Upon the brief resumption of the faceless one: “Wait what?”
The fisherman, triumphant: “We’re in a shadowplay. None of us have faces.”
The faceless one, pristine: “That’s right. You don’t.”
The fisherman: “… … … -AAAAAAAAAH-”
-
13:07
“You have some idea of what I am, don’t you?”
Less than you think, Subaru admits to himself-and the words that actually do come out are that much more incriminating. “I don’t know anything anymore,” he says-it’s choked, humid. None of the petals in the room are falling, no, that’d be too obvious, but the way they clutter the air they might as well be. Subaru turns back to the young woman and winds up staggering, clinging to a vine.
It doesn’t jump up and wrap around his arm.
Himemiya comes nearer, reaches out to touch him, to do what the roses aren’t. Fewer thorns that way, Subaru thinks, for things that are essentially the same. “I do hope you won’t take this away from me,” she says. “It’s how I intend to find my prince again.”
If only it was that easy, Subaru wants to say, doesn’t. “You knew it was going to draw my people. It’s probably-him too, he must have noticed too, and he’s definitely not your prince-”
“But I had to come here and look for her,” Himemiya says. She pulls on Subaru, draws him toward a glass-and-iron table, curling and patterned and stained across the topface, sakura-pink. “I intend to move on once I have found her, or found proof that she’s not here.”
His knees buckle before he sits. “I won’t stand in your way. I-I can’t. But you’re a threat to the state, your magic’s a threat to the state, and I hope you’re glad you drew me in first-”
“I am, Sumeragi-sama,” she says, “and for more than one reason.”
The sun’s at his back, the roses all bowing to him, expectant, supplicating-or are they Himemiya’s army with shields raised and thorns for armor? She sits, gingerly, hair tumbling to the floor, frayed edges catching on brambles, staining with white and gold. Her hands fold in her lap.
“Though I am in exile,” she says, “I retain my power. This garden is proof of that-this beacon is proof of that.” Beneath the table, her hands spread, smooth down her red skirt. “It is because I do not think she is lost. Because I do not grieve. I have hope where she does not.”
The idea of Seishirou having any hope at all sends the pollen in the air straight through the wound in Subaru’s lung, fraying the edges like a cigarette burn.
“She could draw my heart out of my chest, once. She could borrow my power. I doubt she will be able to do such things if I find her again-but even so, I would like for there to still be a heart, just in case. For there to still be power.” She smiles-the reason is private, the gesture is not.
Subaru’s grimace is the same. “It means something else in this world, for someone to draw your heart out of your chest.” He uses the other word for heart, shinzou instead of just kokoro, to make his point.
“I suppose it does.” Himemiya shrugs, and preens. “But the gesture is the same, even if the meaning is not.”
“And as far as I know, I don’t even have the kind of heart you’re talking about,” he says-there’s snarl in it, because teeth hold back tears and he’s not letting that happen. “He ripped it out, and shredded it, and he still has it.”
Her smile glints with the sunlight, sets creases up at the corners of her closed, raised eyes. “In that case, you’d best not cry. You need to get your power from somewhere.”
The smell of roses cloys, tightens-Subaru grips the edge of the table, wonders if there’s a rose here the color his knuckles are turning. There probably is.
She says, and he doesn’t watch her speak, not now: “If you must cry for yourself, cry for yourself. But that, I believe, is all that you can spare. I know you must continue to serve others, but do not take their troubles for your own, anymore. If he’s taken your heart, at least cling to your pride. How else will you amass the strength to live?”
“I hope,” Subaru starts, and it’s the wrong word, but he keeps it, “I hope that if you find your prince, she still loves what you’ve become.”
The world upends, but the petals still don’t fall.
-
----.--.--
--:--
Music plays; driven music, operatic rock of the era, upon tangled drum machines and an electric bass that cannot quite support itself. The bass wails as if indicating an imminent earthquake, and in doing so heralds the rest of the music, synthesizer tracks and rhythm guitars, front guitar and choir. It is melodically reminiscent of a traditional children’s song, pentatonic and classically Japanese. That is about the only way the song is classically Japanese.
In young female voices, mostly, in unison the choir goes on about koi, which of course has multiple meanings, punning with koe, voice, and kao, face. The hard consonants are like the blades that are drawn on the air, the damp vowels like the sheaths of those blades, which have been dropped. Subaru is wielding two of them, feathered ceremonial daggers, each the length of his forearm. Their blades are veined blue, the feathers an equally blue version of grey. An ivory rose, ivory, not white, ivory the color of bone, is pinned to the front of his shikifuku.
hisshi no hi, kao ga kawaii
kichinichi, koe ga kawari, sings the choir:
On that day of certain death, your face is cute;
On that lucky day, your voice has changed, is more or less what the lyrics mean.
kotoshi, kurushii, kurete kudasai
kotoshi, this year, koroshi, killing, as opposed to suffering, kurete kudasai, and at this point the melody is moving upward, dozens of voices begging for this sort of thing to happen.
The duel cannot decide between the titles of UNMEI and SADAME. Perhaps that is what the fight is actually about.
He chases his opponent across a floor emblazoned with sacrifices, red effigies beneath a hundred spectral desks. Atop each desk is perched a pair of incense sticks in a plain sanded pot, sandalwood smoke curling toward the air. No two pairs of incense sticks are up at the same angle. Subaru isn’t certain he should have noticed that, not when he should be running his opponent down, shattering the rose.
hisshi no hi, koi ga kawaii
kichinichi, koi ga kawari, sings the choir, and whether it’s the carp that’s cute and the love that’s changed or the other way around is something known only to the composer.
kotoshi, koroshi, kurete kudasai
Subaru lashes out, finds his blades parried each in turn by a thin solid saber, and then again when he redoubles, whirling and slicing through the air like thrown paper-and why isn’t he using his ofuda, anyway? The opponent leaps out of the path of Subaru’s daggers, lands expertly in a gorgeous red convertible car that careens around the arena’s perimeter to the sounds of cloth flapping and smoke rising and engines obscuring the meaning of the song. Battering wind flings back Subaru’s hair, sleeves, hakama, pelts his eyes with smog and dust. The car blasts along the wall, around it, but Subaru’s clothing doesn’t settle, the wind and the embers of incense swarm around and keep everything aloft.
The stars on his hands burn angrily to life.
fukou kousatsu, fukuzatsu kasaku
sougaku kotoba ga fusoku
futatabi kankei, kiken kekkai
kousai koto wo furikaenai
tragic death by hanging, complicated artifice
the sum of the words is insufficient
second relationship, dangerous barriers, and that’s a layered term in and of itself,
there’s no way to go back to acquaintance
Instead of renewing his attack, Subaru stays where he is, opens his arms, settles his legs apart. His long, piercing shadow now has serifs bleeding from its hands, the icicle-faces of his daggers black on the corpse-patterned ground. The incense dies and the glow of his scars and the glare of the convertible’s headlights blind each other, blind him, but the opponent never had a face to begin with and the saber shoving through him is framed in black-
futatabi kankei, kikenai kurushimi
shi yori kowai, kowashite kurete
kono kokoro no koto kumitatekurete
kumitatekurete!
Ironic, that just when the song was getting to the part about putting itself back together, the red car crashes.
Forgive him for not laughing.
-
1991.12.15
13:23
They’re falling now; at least one of the off-white petals from the rose she just cut for him is drifting to the floor, sliding on the thick, grey, noxious air. She extends the rose in his direction; it’s not mature, still hard in its bud but beginning to fan out, in the shape of the bells downstairs.
It’s also the only rose remaining in the room, though the reek of them persists and the light of them still warms the back of Subaru’s neck, even if it’s not shining.
He takes the rose, carefully, between two fingers-with his left hand, he smears an ofuda flat on the table, watches it glow. The pink glass burns to life between its iron pattern, holding all the bride’s unruly power in.
“Consider it the magical equivalent of a visa,” he says, staring at his jacitating shadow on the floor. It’s framed in red-at the edge of it, Himemiya’s shoes are red too, a dizzying metallic red. “You can look for your prince and call her until its effects run out. My people will keep an eye out for her as well. But after that, please, leave the country.”
“A fair compromise,” she says. Her already dark hands are smeared with purple-black petals withering to potpourri and crumbling to the floor. He looks past them to her face, her smile, wonders how it still glows the way it does when the room’s reverted to what it is, here. “I thank you, Sumeragi-sama, and am truly glad I drew you in first.”
He tries not to scoff at that, manages because of what he says next. “What would you have done if you hadn’t? If he’d found you first?”
She squints as if she’s lost her glasses, smiles as if she’s lost her mind.
-
13:30
The groundskeeper is bent double, mopping the hallway floor when Subaru gets out to it. Things shine, but not as much as they should-Subaru checks, and the magical signature of Himemiya’s room is as muted as it’s going to get, as protected as it has to be. A plastic yellow bucket is propping the grate of the elevator open; in there, there’s a cart, a half-dumpster, so much else. Subaru nods at the groundskeeper as he passes, sidesteps him for the door to the stairwell.
He sneezes, choo, when Subaru’s just next to him, and swipes an arm across his sleeve. It’s thick enough to hide his face but not his pierced ears. Subaru just heads down the stairs, slides one aching hand into his jacket pocket, and holds the half-bloomed ivory rose tightly in the other, instead of the banister. Thorns or no thorns, he thinks, thumbing at the flower’s base, the raised veins in the leaves.
---
---
More about Noppera-bou, including the legend I didn’t quite use.
Full translation of the duel song:
hisshi no hi, kao ga kawaii
kichinichi, koe ga kawari
kotoshi, kurushii, kurete kudasai
kotoshi, koroshi, kurete kudasai
hisshi no hi, koi ga kawaii
kichinichi, koi ga kawari
kotoshi, koroshi, kurete kudasai
fukou kousatsu, fukuzatsu kasaku
sougaku kotoba ga fusoku
futatabi kankei, kiken kekkai
kousai koto wo furikaenai
futatabi kankei, kikenai kurushimi
shi yori kowai, kowashite kurete
kono kokoro no koto kumitatekurete
kumitatekurete!
On that day of certain death, face is cute;
On that lucky day, voice has changed.
This year, please give me suffering.
This year, please kill me.
On that day of certain death, (love/carp) is cute;
On that lucky day, (carp/love) has changed.
This year, please kill me.
Tragic death by hanging, complicated artifice,
The sum of the words is insufficient.
Second relationship, dangerous barriers,
There’s no way to go back to our acquaintance.
Second relationship, pain you aren’t hearing,
Scarier than death, obliterate me.
Reassemble my heart,
Reassemble it!
Now if only my old Japanese teachers knew what I was doing with all this knowledge…
-
.