Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan Read online

  PHANTASM JAPAN

  © 2014 VIZ Media

  See Copyright Acknowledgements for individual story copyrights.

  Cover art by Yuko Shimizu

  Design by Fawn Lau

  No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

  HAIKASORU

  Published by

  VIZ Media, LLC

  1355 Market Street, Suite 200

  San Francisco, CA 94103

  www.haikasoru.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Phantasm Japan : fantasies light and dark, from and about Japan / edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4215-7174-4 (paperback)

  1. Japan—Fiction. 2. Fantasy fiction, American. 3. Fantasy fiction, English. 4. Fantasy fiction, Japanese. 5. Ghost stories, Japanese. I. Mamatas, Nick, editor. II. Washington, Masumi, editor.

  PS648.J29P48 2014

  813'.0108952—dc23

  2014024324

  Haikasoru eBook edition

  ISBN: 978-1-4215-7981-8

  Introduction: The Eight Millionth and First Spirit Nick Mamatas

  Foreword Masumi Washington

  A Tale of Japan: In His Wake Zachary Mason

  Shikata Ga Nai: The Bag Lady’s Tale Gary A. Braunbeck

  Scissors or Claws, and Holes Yusaku Kitano

  Her Last Appearance Lauren Naturale

  He Dreads the Cold James A. Moore

  A Tale of Japan: A Successful Ruse Zachary Mason

  Girl, I Love You Nadia Bulkin

  The Last Packet of Tea Quentin S. Crisp

  The Parrot Stone Seia Tanabe

  神 懸 (Kamigakari) Jacqueline Koyanagi

  A Tale of Japan: The True Bodhisattva Zachary Mason

  From the Nothing, With Love Project Itoh

  Those Who Hunt Monster Hunters Tim Pratt

  Inari Updates the Map of Rice Fields Alex Dally MacFarlane

  The Street of Fruiting Bodies Sayuri Ueda

  A Tale of Japan: Mesalliance Zachary Mason

  Chiyoko Miyuki Miyabe

  Ningyo Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self Joseph Tomaras

  Sisyphean Dempow Torishima

  A Tale of Japan: Tengu of the Wood Zachary Mason

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  It is said that Japan is the home of ya-o-yorozu no kami—eight million spirits. Of course, such a thing is often said by Westerners, who simply just heard the phrase somewhere. Even after decades of globalization and cultural exchange—my mother watched Astro Boy on TV as a kid, I grew up with Battle of the Planets, and there are adults in the United States today that have never known life without some kind of Power Ranger—Japan remains a mystery to too many. Lafcadio Hearn, the famed writer and popularizer of Japanese ghost stories, said of the Japanese language after learning it and becoming a naturalized Japanese citizen over a century ago, “Experience in the acquisition of European languages can help you to learn Japanese about as much as it could help you to acquire the language spoken by the inhabitants of Mars.”

  Of course, Japan is no more mysterious than the haunted cornfields of Iowa or the strange and twisting labyrinths of the New York City subway system. Everything human is ultimately comprehendible, and no nation is ever mysterious to its own population. Hearn published his Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation in 1904, so perhaps could be forgiven for his crack about mutual incomprehensibility. One hundred and ten years later, one of Hearn’s statements from the book still holds true: “Any true comprehension of social conditions requires more than a superficial acquaintance with religious conditions.” Not just for Japan, but for anywhere. Study the local religious beliefs—and this includes folk beliefs about the supernatural and the acknowledged fictions about the supernatural that any society creates—and you’ll gain some insights into that society.

  Phantasm Japan seeks to use the fantastic not to mystify, but to demystify, to bring to the English-speaking world not only traditional stories of tanuki (raccoon dogs) and kitsune (foxes), of ghosts and yokai, but the bleeding edge of the Japanese fantastic. Japanese fantasy is in a dialogue not only with Japan’s spiritual traditions and modern experience, but with Western ghost stories and science fiction. Japanese fantasy is in dialogue with virtually everything, from the New Weird to the real-life horror of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which spawned several new ghost stories in the evacuee camps.

  So a Japanese author can write of the occult truth behind the long career of James Bond, an American author can rewrite several ancient tales from Japan, and an author from the United Kingdom can wonder aloud if Japan had ever existed, or if it was just a dream—and then subvert that notion. We even have a story about a samurai, and a long, illustrated tale from Japan that just may change everything you think you know about fantasy … and the workplace.

  Fantasy is more than just an escape; it is a way of communicating about real life and across cultures. You don’t need to know Japanese, or Martian for that matter, to know something about Japan. Take a look at a culture’s fantasy, and you may learn some of its deepest secrets.

  When we finished editing the translation for “Sisyphean,” the longest story in this anthology, I sent the text to Tetsuya Kohama, the story’s original editor, who told me of the enormous amount of time he spent editing the novella before publishing it. I thought he should be the first reader to see how the translation went because people in Japan—including me, initially—thought that would be too difficult, complicated, and perplexing to be translated.

  Kohama-san first congratulated us on actually managing it, then said, “The English translation reminded me of what this story actually is—besides all those neologisms, the composition itself is structurally very clear. What perplexed us is that the text is too complex to see what’s what.”

  Translating Japanese into English involves more than just replacing words and sentences between the two very different languages. The translator has to dive into the story, sometimes deeper than the author did, to find what things it has shown. That is a series of processes for interpretation. The translator has to determine how he or she interprets what they read in Japanese. In the end, the efforts open up a door to show to English-speaking audiences what’s what in the story—they are not just letters or words anymore.

  The theme of Phantasm Japan involves a similar process for the English-writing authors, who interpret themes and stories that don’t belong in their own cultural backgrounds. They dove into the sea and grabbed something with which to tell their own stories. It amazed me what they were actually bringing from the sea. Yes, I was afraid we would receive a ton of kappa or bakeneko stories. Instead, who could imagine that we’d have Kairakutei Black and US internment camps in fantasy stories? I just took my hat off.

  This is our second anthology, and I am glad to have such interesting stories, not only from Western countries and Japan, as the first one was, but also from other areas in Asia. Thank you very much to the all contributors who participated and our internal staff that helped with the production. This time, I am especially grateful to Haikasoru’s fabulous translators, Jocelyne Allen, Nathan Collins, Jim Hubbert, and Daniel Huddleston. We would not be able to publish a single word without you.

  Soon after dying, the warrior Suzano found himself before the gate of the heaven of storms. There appeared a guardian of fiercely leonine aspect who said, �
��Your life was a righteous one, your courage indefatigable, and your discipline relentless. If you had a flaw, it was in your unyielding harshness, but you were harder with yourself than any other.” Suzano nodded, and the guardian said, “You will be reborn as a protector spirit of the first class, but until your next incarnation the gates of this heaven swing wide for you.”

  “Is my father here, though dead these thirty years?” asked Suzano.

  “Ah,” said the guardian. “No. I’m afraid he was not quite …”

  “No,” said Suzano. “Where, may I ask, is he?”

  The guardian met his eyes with an effort and said, “The hell of tar and shadow.”

  “I must postpone my acceptance of your gracious hospitality,” Suzano said, “until I have retrieved him.”

  “Filial piety has a term,” said the guardian. “You performed his funeral rites, you mourned for a year, you sacrificed before his tomb. What is right, you have done. You are finished.”

  “I would be grateful if you would tell me how to find the hell of tar and shadow.”

  “He was an evil man,” said the guardian, but then he saw Suzano’s face and pointed out the long road.

  The gate of that hell was a hundred feet high and carved of bone but burst open when Suzano struck it with his fist. Iron corridors fell away before him, branching and multiplying into red heat and darkness, and he plunged forward without a thought. He called his father’s name, but the only response was a door creaking open and then a demon rushing out, its talons like scythes, but Suzano found to his relief that even there his sword was at his side, and his rage was incandescent as he made the one cut that sent the demon’s spiked head rolling to the floor, and hell echoed with his battle-cry. The noise roused the pit and legions of demons seethed from the shadows, but their numbers and savagery availed them nothing, for his swordsmanship was flawless and his will immovable, and soon hell was quiet but for Suzano calling his father’s name.

  That was long ago, but he is there to this day and still bent on his task. Some nights the worst sinners dream of the ruin in his wake. The demons have learned to avoid him and to imitate his father’s voice.

  We find her, as expected, in her favorite place: the iron bench on the courthouse lawn, the one with the sculpted bronze figures of two old women doing cross-stitch sitting on it. It’s fortunate that it’s a big bench, because the old lady needs a good deal of room, she does, for her bags and blankets and such. Judging by her face, she’s not a day over fifty, yet she claims to be in her early eighties. No one knows her name, or where she lives, or if she has a home at all. But we know her, in a way. As a neutrino has no mass or electrical charge and can pass through the planet in a blink, so this bag lady’s existence can pass through this world; she, like the neutrino, is a ghost, yet both are real, both exist and have presence, even if that presence is unseen or ignored.

  We take a place near the little garden a few yards behind the bench and watch as she begins to unfold the quilt; we listen as she tells the story to her still bronze companions, who never seem to tire of hearing it:

  “Gene got himself shot overseas during the war and it did something to the bones in his leg, and the doctors, they had to insert all these pins and build him a new kneecap and calf bone—it was awful. Thing is, when this happened, he only had ten months of service left. He was disabled bad enough that he couldn’t return to combat but not so bad that they’d give him an early discharge, so they sent him back home and assigned him guard duty at one of them camps they set up here in the states to hold all those Jap-Americans.

  “Gene guarded the gate at the south end of the camp, and I guess it was a pretty big camp, kind of triangle-shaped, with watchtowers and searchlights and barbed wire, the whole shebang. There was this old Jap tailor being held there with his family and this guy, he started talking to Gene during his watch every night. This guy was working on a quilt, you see, and since a needle was considered a weapon he could only work on the thing while a guard watched him, and when he was done for the night he’d have to give the needle back. Well, Gene, he was the guy who pulled ‘Needle Patrol.’

  “The old guy told Gene that this thing he was working on was a ‘memory quilt’ that he was making from all the pieces of his family’s history. I guess he’d been working on the thing section by section for most of his life—’cording to what he told Gene, it’d been started by his great-great-great-great-grandfather. The tailor—this fella in the camp with Gene, that is—he had part of the blanket his own mother had used to wrap him in when he was born, plus he had his son’s first sleeping gown, the tea dress his daughter had worn when she was four, and a piece of a velvet slipper worn by his wife the night she gave birth to their son.

  “What he’d do, see, is he’d cut the material into a certain shape and then use stuff like paint or other pieces of cloth stuffed with cotton in order to make pictures or symbols on each of the patches. Gene said this old Jap’d start at one corner of the quilt with the first patch and tell him who it had belonged to, what they’d done for a living, where they’d lived, what they’d looked like, how many kids they’d had, the names of their kids and their kids’ kids, describe the house they had lived in, the countryside where the house’d been … I guess it was really something, all right. Gene said it made him feel good, listening to this old guy’s stories, ’cause the guy trusted him enough to tell him these things, you see? Even though he was a prisoner of war and Gene was his guard, he told him these things. Gene said it also made him feel kind of sad, ’cause he’d get to thinking about how most people don’t even know their great-grandma’s maiden name, let alone the story of her whole life. But this old Jap—’scuse me, I guess I really oughtn’t use that word, should I? Don’t show the proper respect for the man or his culture—but you gotta understand, back then, the Japs was the enemy, what with bombing Pear Harbor and all …

  “Where was I? Oh yeah—this old tailor, he knew the history of every last member of his family. He’d finish talking about the first patch, then he’d keep going, talking on about what all the paintings and symbols and shapes meant, and by the time he came round to the last completed patch in the quilt, I guess he’d covered something like six hundred years of his family’s history. ‘Every patch has one hundred-hundred stories.’ That’s what the old guy said.

  “The idea was that the quilt represented all the memories of your life—not just your own, but them ones that was passed down to you from your ancestors too. The deal was, at the end of your life, you were supposed to give the quilt to a younger member of your family and it’d be up to them to keeping adding to it; that way, the spirit never really died because there’d always be someone and something to remember that you’d existed, that your life’d meant something. This old tailor was really concerned about that. He said that a person dies twice when others forget that you had lived.

  “Well, Gene, he starts noticing that this tailor, he seemed really … I don’t know … scared of something all the time. These camps, they weren’t nearly as bad as them ones the Nazis built for the Jews, but that ain’t saying much. Some of ’em was filthy and cramped and stank to high heaven, but this camp Gene was at—I can’t remember its name, dammit—it had this sign tacked up over the entrance gate, and this sign was on the inside of the gate so everyone in the camp could read it, and it said, ‘Shikata ga nai.’ It was this old tailor that had made the sign and hung it up, you see. He told Gene that it meant, ‘It cannot be helped.’ I guess a lot of them poor folks jammed into them camps felt that way, y’know? Like there wasn’t nothing they could do about it and never would be.

  “Gene finally got around to asking the tailor what his name was. The guards weren’t supposed to get too familiar with the prisoners, I guess, and asking one for their name was against the rules something terrible, but Gene was a decorated war hero and figured, what the hell are they gonna try and do to me, anyway? So when he notices that the tailo
r has been acting real scared, he tries to talk with him, calm him down, right? The tailor tells Gene he needs to tell him a story first, before he tells his name, and then he says—get this—he says that he’s older than any piece of land anywhere on Earth. He’s crazy, right?

  “And then he tells Gene this story. He says that when a child dies its soul has to cross the Sanzu River; that when a person dies, they can cross the river at three different spots—depending on how they lived their lives. Since children ain’t lived long enough to have done something with their lives, they can’t cross the thing. At the edge of the river, these children’s souls are met by this hag named Datsueba, and she takes their clothes and tells them to build a pile of pebbles so they can climb up it to reach paradise. But before the pile can get high enough for the children to reach paradise, the hag and her gang of demons knock it down. If the soul is an adult’s, Datsueba makes them take off their clothes, and the old man Keneo hangs these clothes on a riverside branch, and that branch, it bends against the weight of that soul’s sins. If the sinner doesn’t have no clothes, Datsueba strips them of their skin.

  “That’s when the old tailor, he told Gene that his name was Keneo, that he’d escaped the underworld and Datsueba because he couldn’t take part in her behavior no more. He couldn’t watch them poor kids trying to climb their piles of pebbles or them adults stripped of their skin. He said that when he escaped the underworld, he stole every piece of clothing that had ever been left by the Sanzu River, because if he could find a way to make a quilt with one section of cloth from each piece of clothing, them souls would be released and there wouldn’t be nothing Datsueba could do about it. But in order to give the quilt this power, the clothes from them souls in the underworld had to be stitched alongside pieces of clothes from the living, and that’s why it was taking the tailor so long to finish it. The guy, it turns out, didn’t have any grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-great-grandfather. They was all him! Gene, he thought the old guy had himself quite the imagination, so he just smiled and handed him his needle and watched him do his work.