Storm (7 page)

I woke to the sound of my
keitai
buzzing beside my laptop. I blinked, trying to orient myself in the dark room. Had Diane come home? I hadn’t heard her. The rain was quiet now; the storm must have stopped. The phone screen was too bright to look at with my tired eyes, so I lifted it to my ear as I stretched out my legs.

“Hello?”

“Katie-chan?” It was Niichan, Yuki’s brother. I realized my mistake then, that I’d answered the phone in English.

“Oh, hi,” I said, switching to Japanese.

“Sorry, is it too late to call? I think I woke you.”

“No, no,” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes. “I was in the bath.” I stopped midrub. That was more embarrassing. “I mean, um, the rain is really something, huh?” Bath was
furo
, and the verb for raining was
furu
. Maybe I’d get away with it.

Niichan sounded like his face was bright red. “Uh, I...don’t know,” he said. “It’s not raining in Miyajima.”

“Right,” I said, squeezing my eyes closed.

“Is everything okay? I was worried about calling so late, but you sounded nervous on your message.”

I shook my head and flicked on my bedside light so I wouldn’t crash into anything as I talked. “I need to talk to you about the
kami
,” I said. “Things are out of control, Niichan, and I don’t know how to stop them.”

“You didn’t stay away from him, huh?”

“It’s more complicated now,” I said, sliding my door open and stumbling into the hallway. I was relieved to see Diane’s shoes in the
genkan
. She must have figured I’d gone to bed and so she hadn’t woken me. “There’s a rogue Kami out there and he’s trying to take over the world.”

Niichan hesitated. “Are you joking?”

“I wish,” I said. “I need to know how to make the ink go dormant, Niichan. For Tomo’s sake, so he doesn’t...lose himself. And I have to make this guy Takahashi Jun’s power go away, too, or he’s going to destroy everything.”

“Wait, wait. Takahashi Jun, the kendo champ? He’s a Kami? Katie, tell me everything.”

I grabbed a mug and held it under our hot water dispenser as I filled in Niichan on the details. “Jun told me there are two kinds of Kami, right? Imperial ones, descended from Amaterasu. That’s the royal line, all the emperors and stuff. But there were also Kami in the samurai families, and they showed up through a bunch of different ways. Marriages, affairs, even different
kami
ancestors than Amaterasu.”

“Right,” Niichan said. “You said to me that day you were scared Yuu was descended from Susanou.”

“I was wrong,” I said, dipping a
genmai
tea bag into the hot water, smoothing the little string attached over the ceramic lip. The side of the mug burned my finger and I pulled away, the string slipping into the cup. “It was Jun—Takahashi—that got his ink bloodline from Susanou. Tomo is descended from Amaterasu on his dad’s side, and Tsukiyomi on his mother’s.”

Niichan was silent for a moment, and then he let out a shaky breath.
“Maji de,”
he said. “That’s impossible.”

“It’s true,” I said. “And I need a way for the power to go dormant. There’s got to be a way, Niichan.”

“Maybe, but I... I’m sorry, Katie. I don’t know.”

My heart sank. I curled my fingers around the handle of the mug. “Not even any ideas?”

“No pleasant ones,” he said. His list was probably about the same as mine. 1) Leave Japan. 2) Die.

“Well...can you at least tell me more about Tsukiyomi?” I said. “Jun said he went crazy and murdered
kami
. Is that true?”

“They’re myths, Katie. How do we know what’s true? And remember what I told you about judgment calls—times have changed. You can’t judge what the
kami
did by the way society works now.”

“I know,” I said. “I just need to know what happened. Maybe there’s some detail that can help us, Niichan. Please.”

“Ee to,”
he said, deep in thought. I could hear a sound across the phone, like a pencil tapping against a chair. “Well, Amaterasu, Tsukiyomi and Susanou were all created at the same time by the August Ones.”

August Ones. Where had I heard that before? The vision of the dead samurai snapped back into my memory. Amaterasu had mentioned them.
I had to stop him, before he destroyed everything the August Ones had made.
What had she meant? “Who are the August Ones?”

“The first
kami
, Izanagi and Izanami. They created Japan, and then they gave birth to all the other
kami
. Well, a lot of them. The three you mentioned were created by Izanagi.”

“So Tsukiyomi was going to destroy Japan?”

“Destroy Japan?” Niichan’s surprise reminded me I hadn’t told him about the nightmare. “I don’t think that’s in the legends.”

“Then what happened?”

“Let me think. It’s been a while since I studied it. So Amaterasu and Susanou fought, that I remember. She hid in a cave—solar eclipse,
ne
? And they tricked her back out again. They threw a big party and fooled her into glancing at herself in a mirror to draw her out, and they hung the Magatama jewel in a tree to tempt her out, too.”

The Imperial Treasures. That was two of them linked to Amaterasu and Susanou. But it didn’t make any sense. How could the treasures be involved? “What about the Kusanagi?”

“The sword? It belonged to Susanou.” That made sense. Jun had always had the sword beside him in my nightmares.

I remembered Tomo in the nightmare, unconscious, dripping in dark ink. Jun’s head bowed, his apology.

Oh god. What if that hadn’t been ink spilling from Tomo’s wounds?

I was an idiot. A complete idiot. But it was just a dream. I couldn’t let Jun hurt him.

“How does Tsukiyomi fit in? He was Amaterasu’s lover, right?” I yanked the cutlery drawer open and dug for a spoon; my tea was already way too strong, but I dipped the spoon into the mug to chase down the tea bag, anyway.

“At first. But then he killed another
kami
. Amaterasu banished him from the heavens. That’s why the sun and moon are separated, right? Night and day. It’s just a creation myth, Katie.”

But the Amaterasu I’d met hadn’t banished him. She’d killed him. Why? “She didn’t...hurt him?”

“I don’t think so. She had a lot more trouble with Susanou, but she was a gentle ruler. She’s always been considered benevolent, a protector of Japan.”

“She gave the first emperor the Imperial Treasures,” I said. “I looked it up.”

“Yeah,” Niichan said. “They each represented a trait she wanted him to rule with. The mirror is honesty, the sword is bravery and the jewel is love. She gave them to Jimmu, her descendent, and I guess one of the first humans to have the powers of the
kami
.”

Emperor Jimmu. I tried to picture him, an ancient figure who was half myth himself. What had he thought when his ink kanji had started to move on their scrolls? Or had Amaterasu explained to him how to control it? Was that knowledge somehow lost over time like Jun had said?

“I’m sorry I can’t help more,” Niichan said. “I don’t know enough about how this all ties in.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m really glad you called me back, Niichan. You’ve helped, really.” At least I understood the stories a little better. The Imperial Treasures had been handed down through the line of Kami. They had to be linked. If only one of them had been a paintbrush or something. That would’ve made a lot more sense as a starting point.

“Katie? Be careful, okay? For your sake and Yuki’s, too. There have been powerful Kami in Japan’s history, and they always changed the landscape. I don’t know what Takahashi is up to, but stay back. At the kind of power level you’re suggesting, the ink is uncontrollable. He may just burn himself out.”

I took a sip of my tea; it had gone cold as we’d talked. “I hope so.”

But somehow, I didn’t think it would be that easy.

Yuki and I sat with our backs straight and our knees folded underneath us, our hands barely touching the tatami of the school’s traditional room. It was our weekly Tea Ceremony Club meeting, and we sat in a row along the wall while Yuki’s friend Ayako whirred the bamboo whisk through the milky green tea.

It was getting harder to go through the motions of everyday life when I felt like the world hung in the balance. Diane had passed me the newspaper that morning to practice reading my kanji, and I’d pushed it away, too frightened to see another headline about dead Yakuza. It was almost impossible not to hear about it, since it was the most sensational thing that had happened in Shizuoka City in a long time. Theories abounded among my classmates before homeroom had started; what did the ink snake mean? Was it a rival gang, or a Yakuza civil war?

I wondered if Jun would reveal himself or his motive at some point. What was the point of a revolution if no one knew it was happening?

Ayako shuffled toward me and placed a
chawan
of matcha tea on the tatami in front of me. I bowed gently, my face to the floor.
“O temae choudai itashimasu,”
I recited from memory, reaching for the teacup and placing it on my palm to admire the cherry blossoms drifting around its ceramic surface.

I thought of Tomo in Sunpu Park, the cherry blossoms swirling around him.

The tea was always more bitter than it looked. The taste of it surprised me every time.

“So?” Yuki whispered next to me. I looked at her with warning—we weren’t supposed to talk while receiving tea—but she looked straight ahead, as if she hadn’t spoken. Ayako was serving the next girl in line, and the teacher hadn’t seemed to notice us talking.

“So what?” I whispered back, tilting the
chawan
toward my mouth to take another sip.

“Did you and Tomohiro do it yet?”

I choked on the tea, coughing and sputtering as I clunked the cup down on the floor. Ayako looked over with wide eyes, and the teacher shook her head disapprovingly. Yuki pulled out her hand towel and passed it to me. I wiped up the tea spatter on my chin.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Yuki said. “What’s taking you so long?”

I could feel the heat as it spread across my face. I guess saving the world had taken priority over other thoughts, for once.
I see you finally have your priorities straight, Greene. Better late than never.
“I’m just... I’m not ready yet.”

Yuki frowned, reaching for her
kuromoji
, a tiny bamboo stick she used to carve a bite off of the pink bean cake in front of her. “You’re thinking about it too much. You’re not in America anymore, Katie. It’s not such a big deal here. Just go for it.”

The heat spread down my neck. I was in Japan, yeah, but I was still myself.

“You like him, right?”

I stared at her like she was from another planet. “Yeah.”

“Then just do it already.”

“You say it like it’s such a casual thing,” I said. I lifted the
chawan
up to my lips so I could hide behind it. The other girls had to have heard her. Whispering or not, there’s no way they wouldn’t hear her.

“Yeah, but you two make a cute couple,” she said. “Tan-kun tells me Tomohiro’s a good guy. So what’s to think about?”

“I don’t know,” I said, spearing a piece of my pink flower cake with the
kuromoji
. It wasn’t really the thought of it that was tripping me up. It was the way Yuki could talk about it like it was no big deal. To me, it felt like something that should live in the quiet shadows of conversations with Tomo, not in a sunlit tea ceremony room at school surrounded by other students.

Of course I’d thought about it, but I didn’t trust my own judgment. My heart and my mind couldn’t agree. What did I really want? Would I regret it? Would I regret not doing it? What exactly was I waiting for, and why? It was so hard to know what was true when I was already drowning in an ocean of ink, when the waves were already thrashing us against a nightmare shore.

“The first time’s the hardest,” she said. “After that, it’s easy. Anyway, I’m sure Tomohiro’s done it before. Lots.”

“Oh my god. Do you listen to the words that come out of your mouth?”

“What?” Yuki said. The teacher glared at us and we looked straight forward, not speaking for a minute. Then Yuki added in a whisper, “He’s a Third Year.”

“Yuki!” The last thing I wanted to picture was Tomo with another girl. It was embarrassing enough to think about him with me. Had he really done it before? Had he done it with Myu? Great, so if we did go through with it, he’d be all experienced and I would completely humiliate myself. Anyway, the fact that I couldn’t even think about it without choking on my tea just reinforced that I wasn’t ready, right? It was easy to put off the idea back in New York, when the dates I’d gone on hadn’t been serious, when nothing had sparked for me. But Tomo was made of sparks and embers, every touch of his skin against mine burning away thought and reason, lighting the darkness with stars.

No, I knew how hard it was to stop with Tomo—how hard it was to think straight when he was all warmth and softness and sound. God, that sound he made in his throat when we kissed. And the tickle of his spiked hair on my neck. Being with him always felt right. Maybe Yuki was right. I was overthinking it.

Yuki leaned toward me, her shoulder bumping mine. “You’re imagining it right now, aren’t you?”

“Stop.” I giggled, shoving her with my shoulder. She pressed her lips in a tight line as Ayako shuffled in front of us to receive our teacups. She eyed us suspiciously as we shook with the effort not to laugh. The
chawan
rocked on my palm a little as Ayako took the cup from me, and then from Yuki. The minute she turned her back, we burst into laughter.

Under the glare of the teacher, Yuki and I helped collect the
washi
papers, oily from the imprints of the flower-shaped bean cakes. “Do you think Tan-kun’s done it before?” Yuki asked.

“Ew,” I blurted out. She raised an eyebrow. “It’s not that
he’s
gross,” I clarified, tossing the
washi
in the garbage bin. “It’s just that I don’t want to think about my friend like
that
.”

“Well,” Yuki said, “I don’t mind if he hasn’t.”

I turned to look at her; her cheeks looked a little pink, but not much. I admired how she could talk about all this without getting as flustered as I did.

“Yuki, are you and Tanaka going to...?”

“Probably not in this lifetime.” She sighed. “He has yet to ask
me
out on a real date.”

We walked down the hallway together. She and Tan-kun had always been a unit, although when I thought about it, I’d never asked her to clarify exactly what that unit was. Best friends? Couple? Unrequited love? No, that couldn’t be it. Yuki was awesome, and Tanaka spent all his time with her. He had to feel the same, so why hadn’t he made a move?

“Love is way too complicated,” Yuki said.

That was the truth.

Yuki slid open the door to the
genkan
and jumped down all three steps in one go. “
Ne
, did you fill out your Future Plan assignment yet?”

I followed her over to our cubbies; they were on opposite sides of the aisle, but close enough that we could still chat while changing shoes. “Not yet,” I said, holding the wall to keep from falling over as I slid the slipper off. “I don’t even know where to start.” It was an assessment they did with all First Year students at Suntaba. They wanted to make sure you stayed focused on an end goal, that you thought about where you were headed after high school. So much of our time was focused on entrance exams that you needed to have a plan early so you could have enough time to prepare.

“You don’t know what you want to do?” Yuki said, blinking at me.

There was so much to face in my life right now that I couldn’t think so far ahead. “Well, I’d always thought about journalism. My mom did that.”

“Hey, you could be the first blonde reporter on NHK News!” Yuki giggled. “Or maybe you can play the token blonde extra in every café scene in the dramas.”

“There isn’t always a token blonde,” I said, tapping my toes against the floor to hammer on my black loafers.

“Well, the airport scenes, then. Or if they do a scene where the main characters travel abroad. I saw this one that was supposed to be set in France, but I could tell it was Tokyo.”

I shook my head. “I don’t really want to write ‘Professional Token Blonde’ on my Future Plan assignment.”

Yuki smiled again. She always seemed so cheerful, so full of energy. I smiled back; I couldn’t remember ever having such a best friend in Albany. I’d had some close friends, but they hadn’t stuck by me when I was depressed after Mom died. I didn’t blame them, of course—they had their own stuff to deal with, and I couldn’t pull myself out of my despair—but one of the things I loved about Yuki was how she just accepted me as I was. Who I was and how I was feeling was always okay with her.

“I put down ‘Fashion Designer,’” Yuki said. “I really want to own my own shop and work on my designs at night, when the store closes.”

“Fashion?” I said. Yuki had told me before, but I hadn’t really mulled it over as a viable option. “Can you go to university for that?”

“Sure you can. One university in Osaka even has a specialization in textiles.”

Osaka. The name hit me with more finality than I could have imagined. This life I was living would change so dramatically in two years. Everyone would go their own direction, and I’d have to start all over again. And Tomo? Where would he be, even next year? He’d pass his entrance exams, and would he go to Osaka, too, or to Tokyo? Wherever he went, he’d leave me behind.

Too far ahead
, I reminded myself. Right now I just had to make sure he wouldn’t get hurt. After Tsukiyomi was put to sleep forever, then I could worry about long-distance relationships and where my future was headed.

We stepped into the courtyard, and he was there, suddenly, like a dream. He wasn’t supposed to be at school for a month, and yet he leaned against the school wall near the gate, his copper hair pressed in spikes against the cool stone, his arms folded and his head bowed. He stood out from the rest of us, not dressed in his school uniform but instead in black jeans and a deep crimson coat. The memory of the nightmare flashed back to me, the dark black liquid pooling on Tomo’s skin. I shook the thought away. He was here, and alive. It was just a stupid dream.

“Tomo,” I said quietly, and Yuki looked over.

She frowned. “He’ll get in trouble if he’s seen. He’s not supposed to be on school grounds for a month.”

I walked toward him, Yuki trailing behind me while cautiously peeking for teachers. A stray maple leaf fell from the
momiji
tree in the courtyard, spiraling on the wind as it floated toward Tomo and smacked into the stone wall at his feet.

“Tomo,” I said as I reached him, and he looked up, his arms still folded.

“O,”
he said, a casual Japanese hello.

“O?”
I repeated. “All you can say is
‘O’
? You’ll get in trouble if the teachers notice you.” I grabbed his arm to pull him through the nearby gate, but he didn’t budge.

“Yuuto!” Ishikawa shouted across the courtyard, and Yuki turned to shush him. He shrugged, his green coat pressed up against his mop of white hair. He leaned his shoulder against the wall beside his friend. “Did you come to flaunt your suspension at us? Strike a little fear into our hearts?”

Tomo didn’t say anything, but he smirked. He was putting on his school act again, I could see that. Ishikawa had hit on the reason right away. He probably knew Tomo better than anyone.

“Yuu Tomohiro!” The voice startled me, and the smirks slid off Tomo’s and Ishikawa’s faces. Yuki and I turned to see Headmaster Yoshinoma across the courtyard, a hand on the still-open door to the school. He stuck his jaw out, his face filled with resolve. He was trying to look dignified, like he had authority, but he just looked super angry to me. He let go of the door and walked briskly toward us.

This couldn’t be good.

“Tomo, go,” I urged, pulling on his arm again. “Quick.” He didn’t move, his eyes meeting Yoshinoma’s.

“You are not allowed on school grounds,” the headmaster barked.

I looked at Tomo pleadingly. He pressed his heel against the stone wall, pushing himself upright from the slouch, rising to his full height. Relief flooded the pit of my stomach. I don’t know what dumb scheme he’d been up to, but he was going to leave now.

But Tomo didn’t turn toward the gate. He leaned forward until he collapsed into me, wrapping his arms around me and pressing his lips against mine.

I froze, shocked, his grip holding me tightly to him. Yuki gasped—public displays like this weren’t the norm here, and Tomo hadn’t even been one to hold my hand on the way to class. I could only see Yoshinoma out of the corner of my eye. The headmaster turned a deep red, the veins in his forehead looking like they would pop.

How was this even happening? This was the worst decision ever. I wasn’t sure what Tomo was trying to prove, but he was only going to earn himself more suspension time. But there was something in his eyes, something that pleaded with me to let him do this. What was he thinking?