Dark Lanterns Read online

  "This morning," said Mama, "I came in here and the dolls were all over the floor. Heartbreaking, it was. The Emperor and his wife had rolled into the corner were just lying there. Now please, Atsuko, be honest. Did you get up during the night and come into this room?"

  Atsuko slowly shook her head. "Maybe there was an earthquake?"

  "Don't talk to me like that, child. The only doll left on the shelf was the Emperor's daughter. Now if you say it wasn't you, I believe you, but ... well, I'm just glad that I get up before Papa does. I put them back on the shelf before he saw anything. There I was, just about ready to open the rice-cooker and start on his lunchbox, and ..."

  Atsuko wished Mama would stop. She was too old to worry about dolls, she thought. She was a woman now. She frowned at the dolls on the top shelf, the tiny delicate eyes and mouths of the Emperor and his wife. The sound last night must have been the dolls falling off the shelves. What had happened?

  Only the dolls knew, and they weren't saying anything.

  Atsuko planned her move very carefully. After school, she went to the local supermarket to look at the Valentine displays. The collections swam before her eyes — the juxtaposition of smooth, dark chocolate, and brightly colored wrapping bringing her out in a sweat, her mouth watering in anticipation.

  She finally decided on one that looked cute and was the right price for her meager collection of pocket money. Heart and gut suffused with a warm, satisfied glow, she returned home, thinking of the treat that was, for once, intended for the hands of some one else. She was doing something for another person! Wasn't she kind? This was what the Principal was always going on about in his anti-bullying speeches; you have to think about the preciousness of life. Now she understood what he meant. What could be more precious than giving sweets to the boy you...

  To the boy you...

  She was finding it difficult to breath. What would she get for White Day, that day in March when the boys were obliged to return the favor? Would he bow in front of her with his white candy — followed by soft words, and the soft touch of his hands?

  What would they do together? She tried to imagine, but couldn't. The whole thing remained behind a screen of the sweetest mystery. In her mind there was a box, wrapped up in the cutest of paper, and inside were Atsuko and Ryuji, flowing with each other, melting into each other and forming a couple.

  Valentine's day. At last.

  Atsuko came to school hiding the elaborately wrapped box hidden inside amongst the schoolbooks, snacks and comics. She was taking no chances; she didn't want any inquisitive eyes noticing the package and asking questions before the big moment. All through the first lesson, Atsuko was sitting at the back as usual. The homeroom teacher had re-organized the seating plan after the oshogatsu vacation, but the cool girls sat where they wanted, and refused to sit next to Atsuko. The lesson lasted fifty minutes and Atsuko couldn't concentrate — even thinking about her comics was no good; it was difficult to draw breath.

  The bell rang for the first recess. Atsuko bided her time, glancing around her, the pulse hammering in her dry throat until she felt she was being choked.

  Most students had left their seats and were crowding together in the aisles, gossiping. She glanced behind her. Ryuji was alone, putting his books into his bag, wearing his usual sullen expression.

  Now was her chance. She pulled the package out of her bag, concealing it by pressing it against her navy blue sweater, and half-stumbled, half-ran to the desks at the back.

  "This is nothing special," she mumbled nervously, "but I'd like you to have it."

  Ryuji started, as if he'd just been slapped in the face. "What?"

  "It's Valentine's Day," she said, with the brightest smile she could manage. "And ... this is for you."

  His face warped, as if he couldn't control his muscles. He stared at the box, at the wrapping, and his eyes opened wide. "Atsuko, I can't take that."

  "Why not?" She grinned again, feeling a sudden tremor in her voice. "Go on. Take it. It's a Valentine's present."

  Ryuji took his eyes off the box, but he didn't look at Atsuko. He flashed a glance over his shoulder, across the room, at the students goofing around near the door. He was embarrassed, and he wasn't smiling. And his eyes...

  "I'm sorry," he said, "but I can't take it." Then, he scooped the rest of his books into his bag and pushed past her with a mumbled apology.

  Atsuko stood facing the spot where Ryuji had been.

  Behind her, she heard the voices of the other students. A squall of laughter ripped though the air, so shrill it hurt her ears. She daren't look. She daren't listen. Maybe they weren't laughing at her, but soon, they would be.

  He didn't take the chocolates, she thought. I'm standing here, holding them, and I have to go back to my own desk and put them back in my bag.

  But I can't. I can't walk past the other girls with these chocolates in my hand. I just can't.

  She was a woman now, but he hadn't taken the chocolates. He hadn't even said thank you.

  It started as a rippling beneath the floor.

  The classroom chatter and laughter died as the windows began to rattle and the cupboards rocked back and forth against the walls.

  Earthquake, everyone cried, in voices shrill and tight. This was Japan; everyone was prepared for earthquakes.

  What they were not prepared for was the wooden boards of the classroom flooring shattering and exploding upwards, pushed by a huge gushing of dark brown sludge. Once, twice, three times, four times in the different corners of the class, dark fountains of muck burst and spouted into the air, spattering the white sailor-suit blouses of the screaming girls, tarring the faces of the shouting boys.

  The students were a struggling mass at the doors, fighting and clawing at each other to get out, as the filthy black earth vented up from below and the building began to subside. Atsuko stood, alone, in the center of the classroom, her feet sinking into the mess.

  She closed her eyes. She waited for Ryuji to join her in the soft melting sweetness, oozing into each other, becoming one at last.

  The first thing Papa saw when he woke up in the morning was Paris. Mounted in a tarnished clip-frame, the picture hung on the wall, an aerial view of the Eiffel Tower and the surrounding avenues. Papa had cut it from a guidebook he'd found in a coin-laundry.

  After waking, Papa carried out the routine familiar through years of habit. He took a swig of the water from the plastic bottle by his bedside. He carefully rolled up his sleeping-bag, and shoved it under the sawn-off coffee-table. He wistfully scanned the pictures of children in kimonos tacked to the wall, next to the Eiffel tower. Then he put on his moldering sports shoes, and climbed out of his cardboard box to check the morning weather.

  March was a treacherous time to be homeless. It held the promise of spring, but a deliciously warm day could sometimes be followed by the vicious cold of a winter that refused to surrender. A cold that was, for many individuals Papa knew personally, potentially lethal. Leaving the twilight of the alley, and standing alone in the quiet alley outside, Papa scanned the sky. It would be clear today, but cold.

  The alley lay in a neglected corner of central Shibuya, in Tokyo, sheltering under a pedestrian bridge and bordered by the parking lot of a department store. At one end of the alley stood the steps leading to a small park, shunned by all except the young, aggressive, Shibukaji kids who carried out nameless deals in its dark, graffiti-stained corners. At the other end lay the bustling streets that carried bright young people to the restaurants and department stores. None of them bothered or interrupted Papa and his compatriots, as they nestled underneath the bridge in their forlorn village of boxes.

  Pulling his broom from behind the cardboard box, Papa stretched, hearing bones click like mah-jong tiles on a table, and began to methodically sweep the tunnel. The grit and discarded trash on the sidewalk could turn into an offensive dust when the wind picked up, getting into the eyes and the clothes of the alley's population. The tunnel was not frequented b
y many; most were unaware of its existence, and the few salarymen who traversed it, seeking a short cut to the station, marched through with heads bowed, eyes fixed on the ground or on their own slim leather briefcases.

  Papa constantly badgered the rest of the tunnel's inmates to follow his example. In the morning, clear up and sort through any new garbage that had been placed in the surrounding area. Go to the station, and when the subway trains had pulled in and had disgorged their passengers, scan the racks for manga left behind. On a street near their tunnel, Papa and his compatriots would take turns throughout the day and evening, selling their finds for one hundred yen each. In the afternoon, he would take anyone who was well enough to the nearby temple or the charity centre, for hot food doled out by volunteers. Sometimes he would go alone to the back entrance of a nearby tonkatsu shop, where the sympathetic owner would give him bags of leftovers. He was a rare one, and an old acquaintance of Papa's; most managers would now deliberately grind cigarette ash and broken crockery in with the food scraps, to keep away the homeless. After leaving the discreet corner where they sold their manga, Papa and whoever he was with would carry their stock home, and in his box, Papa read from his store of books by a flashlight he taped in place on the ceiling.

  It was good to have a routine.

  Papa would have no truck with the new breed of homeless, who went up to ordinary people and pestered them for money. Some of them, he had heard, approached gaijin to beg in broken English.

  Unacceptable. Papa had his routine, he had his tunnel, and he had his pride. He had seen many others come, and seen many go; but he always asked them to co-operate with each other.

  Arriving at the Shibuya Community Centre a little before twelve, Papa was shown a seat and given pork cutlets over rice, and a bowl of steaming miso soup. Papa savored his meal slowly, exchanging comments with those closest to him on the flimsy plastic table, watching from beneath the brim of his baseball cap the nervous, fresh-faced volunteers in the kitchen.

  On this afternoon, before he went on duty selling comics, he returned to his refuge and read some more - a novel he had read and admired many times, a great writer from the Meiji era. He sat in his Toshiba foldaway home, a threadbare rug over his knees, the flaps open to admit the dusty air. Every once in a while, Papa shifted position, when the grumbling from his back became too much.

  Sometime before evening, as dusk began to bleed the life out of the sky, Papa's concentration was broken. Furtive scrabbling came from the makeshift homestead next to Papa's, and the old man felt it as well as heard it, his neighbor's movements vibrating the cardboard wall behind Papa's head. Moments later, he heard it: a low groan of discomfort. It was followed by others, growing into a steady monotone of distress, a half-wailing that grated on the nerves.

  Papa frowned. His neighbour, Yamashita-san, was a little deficient in the mental department, but he was mostly quiet. He wasn't given to the horrible incoherent rambling that Papa had seen in some of his colleagues. Perhaps Yamashita-san was suffering from indigestion; very likely, considering the inedible trash he habitually shoveled into his mouth.

  "Are you all right?" Papa called, a little halfheartedly. Then he realized; Yamashita-san was on the south side of Papa's box. Behind him there was only the storage box that held the manga. Papa had no neighbor on the other side.

  Confused, concerned and a little angered, Papa climbed out to investigate. Squeezed into the space between Papa's box and the storage carton was a small hovel of cardboard and stiff paper. Papa could not remember seeing it before. Moreover, he could not think of who the tenant might be, and he prided himself on knowing all of the alley's occupants by name or nickname.

  He peered closely at the corporate labels half-washed away from the sides of the box. Either his eyesight was fading, or the Japanese characters were of a type unknown to him. He stood there wondering whether he should greet the new tenant. The moaning had stopped, and so had the movement. Presumably whoever was inside had fallen asleep. Shadows clinging to his stiff arms and legs, Papa climbed back into his box.

  It was not long before Papa was disturbed by his neighbor again. He had fallen into a fitful doze, the book falling onto his chest. He awoke with a start and a sudden feeling of alarm, as if there were the first rumblings of an earthquake.

  The moaning had returned, from a point a few centimeters behind Papa's head. This time it was mixed with sobbing, and spates of occasional deep, sour cursing. "Are you all right?" Papa called, in resentment as well as concern. "Hello! What's up?"

  This time he received an answer. "I've had enough," the voice said. It was a comment Papa had heard many times before. What shocked him now, though, was not the intensity of despair and scorn in the voice. What shocked him was that the voice belonged to a woman.

  "I've had enough," the voice repeated. It was an elderly voice; it could have been the voice of a grandmother. Papa had met several homeless women around Tokyo in the past few years, and the experience had always been deeply unsettling.

  "I've lived for too long," the quavering voice continued. "Why can't I just die? Why can't I just finish it?"

  "That's foolish talk!" Papa called in a stern voice. "There's always something to be learned from your troubles. It doesn't matter how bad things are. There's always a reason for living, if you can find it and hold onto it. "

  The moaning abated, and sank into a quiet, mournful, sniffing. After a while, the voice returned, calmer than before. "You're Papa, aren't you? They call you Papa. I know about you. I feel very encouraged to hear your voice."

  Papa chuckled, and nodded his head in acknowledgement. Even when homeless and destitute, he could still be charming.

  "Yes, I've heard about you," the voice said. "The people of this tunnel respect you a lot, even if they don't show it sometimes. You've helped them a lot. You've become quite a retainer for the homeless, haven't you? That's why I've been looking for you. That's why I followed you here."

  Papa shrugged off the blanket. He was not going to keep his peace of mind tonight, he realized grimly. "What are you talking about?"

  "I've been following you ever since Corridor 4, Papa," the voice replied.

  A freezing breath spiked its way down Papa's back, and he jerked upright, the book falling to the cardboard floor. "What do you know about that?" he snapped.

  "People respect you because of what happened all those months ago," the voice continued in its dry, dusty way. "On January 24th. The day when the police raided the largest homeless refuge in Shinjuku, the one in Subway Corridor 4. You helped organize the resistance against the police, Papa, an achievement you like to talk of."

  "That's only because people ask me about it," the old man said defensively.

  "And you tell them what they want to hear. Brave Papa, fighting the cold, faceless authorities." The voice hesitated, and when it returned, it had a hard, cold edge to it. "But you don't tell them the truth, do you? You conveniently forgot to tell them how you cowered under the truncheons and begged them not to hit you. How you managed to slip through a partition into a construction site in the confusion of the scene. Especially, how you managed to escape not only with your own possessions, but also a bag containing those of the other people in the shelter."

  "I was protecting them!" cried Papa, his voice harsh and strident, thrown back towards him by the muffling cardboard. "The people in the shelter gave me their stuff to look after. We couldn't let it be taken by the cops. I thought I'd be able to return it later, after things had settled down."

  "Did you? Did you even try? What happened to those watches? The cash? Not that there was much to begin with."

  Papa was silent. After a long pause he tilted his head slightly, his left ear pressed against the wall of the box. "How do you know about this? Who are you?"

  The cardboard buzzed with the answer, the cracked voice whispering directly into Papa's ear. "I am the one who's been looking for you ever since that day, Papa. It is my duty. It is my . . . curse."

 
A viscous gob of saliva caught in Papa's throat.

  "I am the Dodomeki. . . the Hundred Eyed Woman. I was once a lonely spinster, who stole from her friends and acquaintances. As my karma dictates, I must haunt those who have performed the same crime. That is why I have been looking for you, Papa. It was difficult, it took a long time ... but now I've found you."

  A memory slammed into Papa's mind, the force of it pinning him where he sat. The afternoon Kabuki plays he had seen, when in a better life. The eerie darkness of the stage, the sudden appearance of the avenging ghost, the bone-white face, the huge, staring eyes . . .

  Why did the ghosts always have to be female?

  "No!" With a speed that surprised himself, Papa was on his feet, bursting through the box's roof like a toy on a spring. With a rage that pushed him beyond conscious thought, he leant over the top of the box close to his, his fingers scrabbling at the flaps. "Who are you really?" he roared. "Why are you doing this?"

  The damp cardboard peeled open and the occupant within raised its hands, as if to ward off the glow of the street light above. Papa stopped, appalled by what he saw.

  At first he thought it was some skin disfigurement. The hands were wrapped around with rags, but through the rotten fabric Papa could see the bulges. Behind them was a face half-hidden by a hooded anorak and the shadows of the box, but Papa could see clearly enough the obtrusions that crowded over the skin - eyes, dozens of them, on the cheeks, on the palms and backs of the hands, beneath the hair, and on the neck and throat. Eyes separated by narrow margins of skin, a filthy, wrinkled skin alive with the rapid fluttering of eyelashes. And every eye was pellucid, stained milky white.

  "Gods help us," Papa whispered. "You're blind."

  The figure was short and dumpy, with rank, gray hair spilling from inside the hood. Her hands moved constantly, reaching towards Papa and then pulling back to protect her face, and attempting to hide a curious pouch she wore around her neck.