Spirits of the Noh

This one’s for every kid
who’s ever been a part of
the Drama Club at St. Joe’s

PROLOGUE

D
emons covered one entire wall of Yuuka Aritomo’s classroom. At least, that was how other people would have seen her collection of Noh theater masks. Some were monsters, some evil spirits, and others merely distorted representations of gods, crazy people, and fierce warriors. Most of them were tragic figures, and many were hideous to behold, but Miss Aritomo thought them all quite beautiful.

A shiver went through her, a sudden feeling of dread that spider-walked up the back of her neck. She turned to stare at the shadowed corner of the art room, troubled by the certainty that something had just darted out of view. For a moment, it felt as though the masks were staring at her.

Stop. You’re frightening yourself.

Alone in the room, the school so quiet, it was easy to get spooked, but this was something more than nerves. Something had made her uneasy. Something had flitted through the shadows in her peripheral vision.

No. Stop.

“You’re a grown woman,” she said aloud, and the sound of her own voice comforted her. She might be an adult, a teacher, but at heart she was still the little girl who had been afraid of her own shadow.

It’s just the murders
, she thought, and shivered again. Several students and one teacher had died on the campus of Monju-no-Chie school this past spring, and another girl had been drowned the previous fall. They hadn’t all been murders, at least according to the police, but she could not help feeling claustrophobic there, alone in her classroom, with the echoes of those deaths—the cruelty, the malice, the evil—lingering in her mind.

She could only imagine how the students must feel. Which was why she had decided to do something to take their minds off such a grim reality. The summer term was about to begin and she had just come from a meeting with the school’s principal, Mr. Yamato, who had approved her request to give her students a once-in-a-lifetime experience—they would put on a Noh play, complete with actors, musicians, and traditional dance. The club would build their own Noh stage and create costumes and props and masks.

Miss Aritomo looked at the masks again and smiled. They were just masks, after all. She had loved Noh theater since she was nine years old, when her father had taken her to a performance of The
Lady Aoi
and told her that in an earlier era, commoners had been forbidden to learn the music and dance of the Noh. Now, while she loved teaching and enjoyed all forms of art, her greatest pleasure came from her role as faculty advisor to the Noh theater club.

She studied the various masks on the wall, and felt nine years old again, studying the faces of gods and monsters.

Should they perform a realistic
genzai no
, or a more fantastical
mugen no
? After the tragic deaths of the last year, it seemed more respectful to choose a genzai no. But her Noh club would doubtless prefer some wild fantasy. It was a difficult decision.

Miss Aritomo let her gaze wander over the masks. There was Satokagura, a furious red devil with white hair and beard, and Torakumadoji, whose ivory devil face was made almost comic by the huge brushes of his bristly eyebrows. There were long-jawed gods with golden faces, dragons and elementals, and several versions of the fox-mask of Kitsune.

From the bookshelf by her desk, she plucked a thick volume that listed every Noh play included in the modern repertoire, as well as older variations that had gone out of fashion. There were fewer than three hundred to choose from, and it would be a simple matter to narrow it down now that she had decided upon some parameters.

She started to riffle through the pages, glancing at them casually. She intended to wait until the second week of the summer term to reveal her plan to the Noh club, to make certain that a few transfer students would have time to adjust to the club and decide if they wanted to remain before she sprang the surprise.

A contented smile settled upon her features as she turned pages and thought about the effort and dedication it would require of her students. Yet she knew they would love every moment of it, just as much as she did.

Perhaps not just as much
, she corrected herself,
but nearly
.

Rob would love it, though. When she had discovered that Professor Harper shared her interest in the arts, she realized that they had the potential to develop a real relationship. Yuuka had no desire to compete with the memory of his late wife, but Rob was still a young man. He had a future to look forward to, and though she knew it was much too early to be thinking so seriously, she could not pretend that she had not wondered if they might share that future together.

Don’t get ahead of yourself
, she thought. No matter how strong her feelings for Rob were growing, his lingering devotion to his wife created a barrier between them, and the powerful bond he shared with his daughter, Kara, meant that she would always be foremost in his mind.

That’s as it should be. He’s her father
, Miss Aritomo reminded herself.

And yet she could not help feeling at least a little jealous.

The book fell open to
Lady Aoi
. She had read and reread the description of that play dozens of times, so it was no wonder that the binding naturally opened there, upon the first Noh she had ever seen. It would have been wonderful to do that one, but it was too grim and too fantastical, and the disturbing presence of the Hannya made it everything she didn’t want for the first production of the Noh club.

First production?
Her smile widened as she realized she had already begun thinking of it in this way. But she told herself to slow down and focus. So much would be involved in this performance that it would be foolish to assume she would be able to do it again, or that Mr. Yamato would allow it.

A clatter came from behind her. Frowning, she turned to see that one of the masks had fallen off its hook.

“Oh, no,” she said, hurrying to pick it up.

She put a finger into the book to hold her page and crouched to reach for the mask. Even as her fingers brushed its surface, she realized with a shudder that it was the Hannya mask. Knees bent, she turned it over and stared in astonishment when she saw that it was unharmed. There were no cracks, the reddish paint was not chipped, and—even more surprising—the delicate horns and metallic fangs were intact.

Yet what she felt was not relief. Her brow knitted with an unease she did not understand, and as she began to rise, a wave of disorientation swept over her. She felt cold and unsteady and her vision began to blur, and Miss Aritomo fell, book and mask both dropping from her hands.

It might have been minutes or merely seconds later that she opened her eyes and found herself sprawled on the floor. Her head ached from the impact of her fall and she felt strangely thirsty. Blinking, breathing steadily, she moved carefully into a sitting position, afraid she would faint again. She had only ever passed out once before, on a hot, humid morning when she had been a schoolgirl.

Shaken, she glanced around. The Hannya mask lay on the floor a few feet away, still intact, staring up at the ceiling with what she’d always thought of as gleeful malice. The book had fallen open a few feet from the mask, and now Miss Aritomo reached out to retrieve it.

Curious, she saw that the book had fallen open on
Dojoji
, a horrific play that, like
Lady Aoi
, also featured the Hannya.
Dojoji
concerned the spirit of a young woman who had been spurned by her lover and transformed into a demonic serpent—the Hannya—to take her vengeance.

Miss Aritomo smiled and reached for the Hannya mask. A small voice in the back of her mind objected, but she forced those concerns away and they were instantly forgotten.
Dojoji
seemed like the perfect choice for the Noh club.

Just perfect.

1

K
ara Harper sat in the back of the classroom, trying valiantly to stay awake. The windows of Room 2-C were open, but no breeze came off Miyazu Bay that Friday afternoon. It was the third week of August and Monju-no-Chie school had been back in session for a scant handful of sweltering days. The weather had been beautiful during the holiday weeks that separated the spring and summer terms. This far to the north of Kyoto Province, so close to the Sea of Japan, and with the school situated right on the bay, it was rare for the heat to reach brutal levels.

But now classes were back in session, and the summer had turned ugly.

Kara didn’t mind so much. After the terrors of the spring, a little hot weather was nothing to complain about. She was just glad that she and her friends were all still alive to feel the heat.

During those terrifying days, she and her father had nearly decided to pack it all in and return home. Sometimes Kara wondered if they had made the right decision in staying, but mostly she was glad. It would have broken her heart to say a premature farewell to the friends she had made here—some of the best friends of her life. And though sometimes she still had nightmares, the shadows were receding.

Kara blinked. People were getting up. While her mind had been drifting, school had ended. With a grateful sigh, she stood and stretched, sticky clothes pulling away from her body. She wanted a shower, but she had hours of other responsibilities to contend with. Her calligraphy club met after school, but first came
o-soji,
the cleaning of the school, which students performed every day at the conclusion of classes. Japanese schools had maintenance staff to deal with blocked toilets and broken lightbulbs and such, but the basic cleaning—bathrooms and classrooms and garbage duty—was done by students.

The class started to head for the lockers at the back of the room. Kara’s friend Miho stopped by her desk and fixed her with an odd look. She often hid behind her glasses and the long veil of her straight, black hair, but today it was pulled back with a clip on one side.

“You awake?” Miho asked.

“Barely,” Kara said, in Japanese. Even with her father, she spoke Japanese nearly all the time now, to continue improving her fluency with the language. “Between the heat and Mr. Sato’s monotone, I was very tempted to take a nap.”

Miho smiled. “Really? A couple of times, I glanced over at you and it seemed like you had given in to temptation.”

Kara arched an eyebrow. “Could be.”

Since Kara had become friends with Miho and her roommate, Sakura, the Japanese girls had begun to hone their skills at American-style sarcasm. Miho had a fondness for American pop culture and she tried to persuade Kara to speak in English whenever possible so she could practice the language. She was actually starting to get pretty good at it, whereas Sakura mostly liked to learn new and different ways to say filthy things in foreign languages.

“I wish we could get out of here,” Kara said.

“You don’t love o-soji?” Miho asked, her expression innocent. Yes, she was getting much better at the whole sarcasm thing.

They put their things away in their lockers and then headed out through the open sliding door. In the corridor, they joined the rest of the herd of students who were getting their cleanup assignments. Mr. Sato gave Miho sweeping duty, while Kara and two other students had to gather the trash on the entire second floor.

As they parted ways, Kara noticed Mr. Sato watching her and Miho with obvious disapproval, and she quickened her pace. The man oozed irritation, and she wanted to avoid trouble. With her father a member of the faculty, Kara tried to stay on her best behavior so that she did not bring him dishonor. Honor was just as important in Japan as she had always read—maybe even more so.

She weaved her way around students who were filtering into classrooms to perform their appointed tasks, some already sweeping the corridor and stairs. Kara needed trash bags from the hall closet, but a group of students had gathered in the hall. One of them was Mai, a girl from her homeroom who Kara tended to avoid as much as possible.

In every school Kara had ever attended, there always seemed to be a group of girls who hid their cruel smiles behind their hands, putting themselves above everyone else simply by excluding others from their whispers. And for every clique of catty bitches, there was one who led the way and set the tone. When Kara had first arrived at Monju-no-Chie school, that had been a friend of Mai’s named Ume. But Ume had been far worse than just some bitchy high school girl; she had been a murderer.

Or close enough. When Ume learned that her boyfriend had fallen in love with another girl, she’d followed the girl down to the shore of the bay one rainy night, a bunch of her friends in tow. Whether or not they had intended to kill her didn’t really matter. They had beaten her and drowned her in the bay. The police had never found any evidence linking Ume, or anyone else, to the crime, but Kara knew Ume had killed the girl—Akane, Sakura’s sister.

Ume should have been in prison, along with all of the other girls who had helped her beat Akane that night. Instead, she had transferred to another school.

Had Mai been one of the girls with Ume that night? Kara didn’t know. Of all of the girls Ume had been friends with—the soccer club girls—Mai would have been the last one Kara would have imagined taking up the queen bitch crown in Ume’s absence, but she had filled the role as though she’d been waiting for it her entire life. Maybe she had. The girl had even changed her name. Her real name was Maiko, but now that she was queen bitch, she had started going by the nickname “Mai,” insisting everyone call her that. It had taken Kara some getting used to.

Mai took a dustpan and brush from the closet. When she looked up and saw Kara, a slanted, almost sneering smile appeared on her face.

“Bonsai,” she said, exuding false charm. “Let me guess. You’re on trash duty? How appropriate. Leave it to the American to know garbage when she sees it.”

Kara smiled. Ume had been the one to give her the nickname “bonsai,” a play on the trees whose branches were pruned and replanted to grow somewhere else. Mai and her friends used it as if it were a term of endearment, but Kara knew it was anything but.

“You’re right about one thing,” Kara said, pulling several plastic bags out of the closet. “I know garbage when I see it. Unfortunately, some kinds of trash are more difficult to get rid of than others.”

As Mai started to reply, Kara turned and walked into the nearest classroom. The girl thrived on nastiness, and Kara had no interest in wasting another second with her. After the cleanup, she had a calligraphy club meeting, and then she was free until Monday morning. She wouldn’t let Mai—or anyone else—ruin that.

Kara had never been the New-Agey, burning incense, feng-shui type. She knew a couple of girls back home in Medford, Massachusetts, who talked about their
chi
and had gotten totally into yoga as if they’d been brainwashed into a cult. Not that yoga wasn’t good for you. Kara had tried it for a few months and enjoyed the sort of meditative state it put her into. But she liked her exercise sweaty and rigorous, and preferred to keep any chi-cleansing activities private, except for playing her guitar, which she also did on her own most of the time.

Calligraphy had been a kind of revelation for her. It soothed her. Using the different brushes to inscribe
kanji
characters onto the
hanshi
paper properly took both skill and artistry, both concentration and a freedom of expression that made stress evaporate.

Now that they were in the second term, the club’s faculty advisor, Miss Kaneda, had begun to work more closely with beginners on the variation of line thickness and the effects of certain stylized flourishes. The fiftyish, gray-haired woman had a slow, drowsy voice that reminded Kara of the way hypnotists spoke to their patients in old movies, trying to lull them into altered states of consciousness.

Sakura sat beside Kara, occasionally whispering to their friend Ren, whose seat was in front of hers. Ren had thin, clever features, so he looked almost like a fox, and his bronze hair—which he insisted was its natural color—only added to his unique appearance. Last term, Miho had nursed a crush on Ren, but she seemed to have gotten over it, which relieved Kara and Sakura of having to break the news to Miho that Ren didn’t like girls.

“Hey,” Kara whispered, while Miss Kaneda was busy helping another student at the front of the room.

“What?” Sakura said.

Kara arched an eyebrow, and kept her voice low. “Some of us are trying to concentrate.”

Sakura and Ren exchanged grins and then both sat up a bit straighter, adopting mock-serious expressions, holding their brushes straight, arms stiff. Good-natured snickering followed. Several other students glanced around at them, including a snooty
senpai
—or senior—named Reiko, and Sora, a girl from Kara’s homeroom.

“I know where you live, Murakami,” Kara warned.

But Sakura only rolled her eyes. As they had gotten to know each other better, they teased each other more and more frequently. Kara enjoyed the sparring—she’d never had a sister, but if she had, she would have been happy with two like Sakura and Miho. The two girls were opposites, but at their core they shared the best traits: loyalty, honesty, and unselfishness.

Of course, if Kara had said as much to Sakura, the girl would have feigned shock. She liked to present herself to the world as a rebel, from her hair—which was cut short in back, but in diagonal slashes in front, framing her face—to the many patches and buttons she wore inside the jacket of her sailor
fuku
uniform, turned inside out whenever she could get away with it. Sakura was proud of her status as different in a society that valued conformity so highly.

“Kara,” Ren whispered.

She had just bent to her work again, and now her brush twitched the tiniest bit, ruining the line of the kanji character she had begun.

“Sorry,” he said, glancing to make sure Miss Kaneda was not paying attention. “Sakura showed me the last few pages of the manga you guys are doing. It’s pretty dark stuff.”

A ripple of unease went through Kara. Months had passed, but she still didn’t like to talk about what had happened in April. Not that Ren had asked about that—he just wanted to know about the graphic novel she and Sakura had been working on—but Kara couldn’t discuss one without being haunted by the memory of the other. The manga faithfully adapted a Noh theater play about the demon Kyuketsuki. Very few people knew that during the first term, she and Sakura, Miho, and another student, Hachiro, had encountered the real Kyuketsuki, an ancient, almost-forgotten demon spirit summoned by the violent murder of Akane, and the rage and grief of Sakura.

“The subject matter is pretty dark,” Kara whispered, with a sidelong glance at Sakura. “I’m glad to be done with it.”

“You mean you don’t like it?” Ren said. “It’s really good. Sakura’s art gets better with every page, and your script is excellent. So creepy and tragic.”

Kara shrugged. “It’s the way the play was written. I can’t take credit for it.”

They had managed to stop the spirit from stepping fully into the modern world, but before it had vanished, it cursed them. In the time since, the girls had not encountered anything remotely supernatural. No hauntings, no violence, no demons. Sakura and Miho had even begun to believe that Kyuketsuki had grown so ancient that its curse no longer wielded its original power. But Kara did not feel so sure. She still had nightmares sometimes, though they were ordinary enough, not the unnatural dreams the Kyuketsuki had once created.

“Don’t be so modest,” Sakura said. “You did an excellent job. Even Aritomo-sensei said so, and you know how worried she was that we would disrespect the source material.”

Kara wished the conversation would end. She and Sakura shared a sad and knowing look, but Ren seemed not to notice.

“So what are you going to do next?” he asked.

“Next?” Kara echoed.

“For your second manga. Sakura’s getting so much better, you have to do another one,” Ren said.

Kara looked at Sakura. “I hadn’t really—”

Miss Kaneda cleared her throat. All three of them stiffened and looked up at the teacher, whose disapproving glance was enough to make Kara feel terribly guilty.

“I’m sorry, sensei,” she said.

Miss Kaneda gave a small bow of her head. Kara returned the gesture, and lifted her brush, focusing again on her calligraphy. But as she got back to work, she couldn’t seem to slide back into the peaceful, meditative state she’d been in before.

Next?
They had just finished the manga about Kyuketsuki. She didn’t want to think about what came next.

To Kara, the best part of summer had always been the long, golden twilight of early evening, when the day had come to an end but night had not yet arrived. On that Friday night, as the heat of the day began at last to break, she sat on a fence across the road from the tiny house she shared with her father, playing her guitar and softly singing along. It was a song about tragic romance, and though Kara had never had the kind of relationship the song depicted, she could imagine heartbreak all too well. Perhaps for that very reason, there were times when the idea of falling in love terrified her.

Or maybe you’re just sending a message
, she thought.

A tiny smile played at the corners of her lips, but then guilt drove it away. Her father and Miss Aritomo were inside the house, and surely could not hear her singing. Even if they could, they wouldn’t have been able to make out the words. Still, she faltered, losing interest in the song, and moved on to another.

Kara had plenty of homework and she wanted to try to get as much of it as possible done tonight, because she had plans for tomorrow. But hitting the books could wait a while, especially since Miss Aritomo was inside cooking dinner with her father. The two teachers had been getting closer over the past couple of months. Though her dad kept insisting they were just friends, it was obvious to Kara—and to anyone else paying attention—that they liked each other a great deal. What was going on was more than friendship. Dating, at least. Maybe other things that she refused to think about.