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  Ishida continued on. “We were together for nine years. Kano was all that I could hope for in a wife. She was attentive to my needs, strong enough to handle whatever burdens came our way, and careful with our son and daughter alike. We would have been happy forever, I think, but then the message came from her mother warning that her father was ill.”

  Ishida sighed. “She asked me if she could go to him, and I said yes. The war was not upon us yet, and everything seemed simpler. Because she wanted to move quickly, the children stayed with me. Because I had work to attend to, I asked my mother if she could watch over her grandchildren while I took to the fields and made certain that the harvest was prepared. The winter was coming. I remember that.”

  Again Ishida let out a long sigh and shook his head. “A foolish thing. A simple thing. I did not think to tell my mother that the children could only be bathed by Kano. It was not a thing I had to think about. It was just her way, and I had long accepted it.”

  Ishida grew silent. His face might as well have been carved from wood. He barely even seemed to breathe while he contemplated how to continue.

  Maeda looked around once more, his eyes straining to see what it was that continued to catch his attention among the endless white forms that defied wind and sunlight and held onto their coats of ice and snow.

  There was something. He knew that, and he was considering telling Ishida about it, but despite his misgivings, when the man spoke again he found himself listening.

  “On the third day I came home to my mother in tears. She had prepared the bathwaters as she always had, and because Kanbei and Aki were small, she set them into the waters together.”

  The man’s face worked and he blinked rapidly, fighting against tears perhaps or merely against the winds that were picking up again.

  “She said the children screamed and thrashed, and she tried to lift Aki from the waters, but my daughter’s flesh fell away, sloughed back into the waters, and melted as if it were nothing more than snow. The boy as well.”

  Once more the winds blew harder and the skittering ice rattled its way down the limbs of trees buried under layers of white. That sense of things moving grew more pervasive, and Maeda looked carefully around the area. There was nothing to see but the shapes and the snow. He couldn’t even see any of the other riders any longer.

  “Ishida, we’ve lost the others, I think.”

  Ishida did not answer him at first. When he spoke again it was to continue his tale.

  “I searched the tub and the land around my house and even in the closets, thinking at first that my mother was joking or that she had lost her mind. At first I checked the house and lands carefully and then called for my children and sought them in any possible hiding place, screaming until I lost my voice. My mother wailed and apologized, and I sent her back to my father. I did not speak with her again until long after Kenekori came home.

  “Kano returned to a house without children. When she asked me what had happened I had no choice but to tell her. I was not prepared for her fury.”

  Ishida shook, though with grief or cold Maeda could not say.

  “Have you ever heard of the Yuki Onna? The Snow Woman?”

  Maeda looked at his commander. “Of course. But I think you are not listening to me. I believe we have lost the others, Ishida. We have lost our way.”

  Ishida shook his head and sighed. “No, Maeda. We have not lost the others. They have been taken.”

  “Taken? Who could take them? We have heard no horses, seen no soldiers. I can see that you still grieve, Ishida.”

  The kashira waved his comment aside. “I will always grieve. My wife left me and cursed me as she started toward her ancestral home. She said, ‘You have betrayed your words to my father and now I must leave. You have taken my children from me with your lies and left me lonely. Throughout the year you may be with whomever you desire, but in the cold months you are mine alone.’

  “I thought her words were merely anger when she left. I did not understand. But I learned.”

  Maeda thought to interrupt again but decided against it. They would find the rest of the riders. They had to. And when they did he would discuss the madness that was gripping Ishida with a few of the other men, and they would decide together how best to handle the matter.

  “Within a month of my wife’s leaving, winter came. The cold that year was very fierce. I spent most of the first weeks of winter alone in my house. Blizzards buried everything, and the windows outside of my home were covered with snow. When I could no longer stand to stay inside I opened the door and forced my way past the snow drifts.

  “Outside I saw several sets of footprints on top of the snow. They did not fall into the snow, though. It was like powder, and I could not stand on it myself. I did not see anyone, but I heard the sound of laughter from around the side of my house. It was a sound I knew from before my children disappeared and my wife left. It was the sound of my family.

  “Maeda, I think I went mad. I tried to reach them, clawing my way through the snow that was as high as my chest and calling out their names until my throat was raw and I could not stop shivering. Footsteps surrounded a dozen trees and I climbed through the snow and scaled those trees looking for where my wife and children might hide, but there was nothing. There was no one.

  “Eventually I went back into my house. I took ill and stayed there for several days, often hearing the sounds of laughter and my beloved wife singing to our children. I might have died. I feel certain that I would have, but when my fever was at its worst I felt Kano’s hand on my brow and heard her soothing words and I slept. When I awoke the fever was gone, and the worst of the storm was finished.

  “After a few more days I went to see my parents. I wanted to tell them all that had happened. Instead I learned that my mother was dead. She had wandered into the storm, and when I was at my worst, lost in fever and dreams, they found her body near the riverside, frozen to the ground.”

  Ishida coughed into his hand and looked around, his eyes wide and wet. His expression was not one that Maeda was used to from the kashira. Maeda could not think of the words to calm the fear he saw in his commander.

  “They are all gone now.”

  “Your family? Your wife took your father as well?”

  “No, Maeda. Yes, she killed him as well. He was found the following winter, frozen in his bed with the window in his bedchambers opened to the storm. However, I mean the rest of our troops are gone now.” Ishida’s face still looked as frightened as before, but his voice was calm.

  “I was trying to tell you that. We’ve lost them. If we go back—”

  Ishida interrupted him. “It is too late for that. She is here with us. She has come to pay her respects to me and to keep her vow that I will be hers alone.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean, Ishida?”

  The kashira looked at the ground and then looked up, staring hard into Maeda’s eyes.

  “I mean it is your time to die, and I am very sorry for that. I wanted to be back home before the storms came. I wanted to be alone where there was no one for her to seek.”

  “You are mad, Ishida. The cold has stolen your wits.” But even as he said the words Maeda had his doubts. The rest of the troop was gone from his sight, and he heard nothing from them, not even the sound of a horse snorting in the distance. The towering shapes around him seemed to move whenever he was not looking directly at them.

  “I wish I were, Maeda. I truly wish I were mad. I am so very sorry for this.”

  When he saw the woman Maeda stopped and stared. Her clothes were thin to the point of translucence, and her skin was as white as the snow. Her hair and eyes were the color of snow-laden shadows and the expression on her face was both frightening and seductive. If this truly was Ishida’s wife, she was as lovely as the man claimed.

  The snow woman came to him, her face a porcelain m
ask against the endless frost. He had to squint to see her past the glare of the day.

  When she touched his wrist above his glove and below his jacket, the contact burned and blackened his skin. He felt his blood freezing where her fingertips grazed his flesh. He would have screamed but could not find the strength.

  Had there ever been a woman so beautiful? Had there ever been a kiss so terrible?

  The last Maeda heard was Ishida once again offering his apologies past the sound of the sighing wind.

  One day a tengu of the lower rank watched a squire and his wife move into a house in the middle of his wood. The wife, who was barely twenty, had black eyes and skin like snow, and was prone to lounging by her window and staring out into the trees. The squire had become devout in middle age, telling his rosary beads for hours every night, and often reading the Lotus Sutra aloud, which irritated the tengu, who detested the Chinese religion, and made a point of tormenting any monk he caught alone.

  One night the tengu appeared to the squire in the semblance of the Bodhisattva Jizo. In a ringing voice the tengu intoned, “I have heard your prayers and born witness to your piety, and have therefore come to instruct you in the mysteries. The way is not without difficulty—are you prepared?” The squire nodded, his eyes streaming.

  “Very well. Your discipline shall be this—every night, from dusk till dawn, you must, ah, count every bean in that sack. Keep Amida Buddha in your heart,” the tengu counseled sternly, “and ignore whatever noises come from the rest of the house. It is not unlikely that some spirit of the wood will try to distract you.”

  The squire, declaring himself wholly committed to the task, emptied the beans onto the floor and began counting. The tengu slipped off to the bedroom where the squire’s wife was sleeping; he exchanged Jizo’s semblance for the squire’s and slipped into bed with the wife, where he was warmly received.

  The tengu called on the squire’s wife every night and was pleased with his success. “Surely, I’m only doing good here,” he thought. “I’m happy, my lover is happy, and the squire is getting at least as much benefit from counting beans as he was from prayer.”

  One night a month later the tengu and the wife were embracing when the squire burst into the bedroom, his face shining. He cried, “My prayers have been heard! Jizo himself gave me a secret training, and now he tells me that I’m moments away from being raised up into the Toro heaven! My love, I must leave you—forgive me.”

  His wife stared at him. The tengu said, “I think there has been a …” but as he spoke the squire flickered like a candle flame and vanished.

  The tengu sniffed the air skeptically but smelled no foxes, no badgers, and no other tengu. He said, “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it,” and disappeared.

  The wife sold the house and moved to the capital, where she lived on her late husband’s estate. She never took another lover nor had anything to do with religion. As for the tengu, he was quieter after that and let the monks be, even when he found one alone on a cold winter road.

  My best friend, my blood-sister, decided to make the Ultimate Sacrifice to destroy Asami Ogino. We were drinking chuhai on an overpass, and as the world roared beneath us, Yurie showed me the letter she planned to send to the Ministry of Education. It was a four-page, four-year chronicle of the sins Asami had visited upon her. She had, of course, used a PO box and Anonymity Seal. She wrote: Don’t try to find me. Just make it stop. I almost let the letter fly over the barbed wire toward the smoke-covered sun, because I already knew the ministry wouldn’t care, just like our teachers didn’t care. That was the difference between me and Yurie: I had accepted that life was shit, not just in school but beyond; Yurie still had this perverse expectation of joy. All that tightly wound, brightly colored hope was her downfall.

  “If I don’t hear back in a week,” she said, “I’m doing it.”

  This is something people often misunderstand: Yurie didn’t want to do the Ultimate Sacrifice. But she had already tried everything else. Two dozen Vengeance Charms bought from skeletal bloodhounds in the grimy alleys behind malls, cooked up from the bloody floor planks of haunted houses. A zip file of a black-market video-bomb, Grudge of a Predator: a so-called documentary on our so-called war crimes (she refused to tell me how much she paid for that one). We also took a two-hour bus ride up to Rika Yamazaki’s shrine so Yurie could wish for Asami’s death. Miss Yamazaki had an 80 percent satisfaction rate, on account of the enormous rage cloud that spawns when you’re shoved off a balcony by a jealous ex-boyfriend—but even then, Asami was fine.

  Asami was so fine that she had some of her friends burn Yurie’s arms with cigarettes before school. I hadn’t been there—I was slumped at the foot of my bed, staring at the clock—but I saw Yurie showing off the bleeding black wounds to curious first-years. The math teacher scolded her for upsetting everyone; I wondered if Yurie had lost her mind. Maybe this is where Love of Life takes you, in the end.

  “That Yamazaki bitch just sits on people’s wishes,” Yurie complained, but Miss Yamazaki did have a lot of wishes to answer. It wasn’t just junior high students anymore, but sad middle-aged couples and bespectacled professionals and families with little kids in bear hats. I thought it was fucked up to take your kids to the grave of an angry murdered stranger, but who am I to judge. “That’s why we need regulations on shrines. Not that this government can get anything passed.”

  Yurie didn’t like the prime minister—thought he was a fatalist unable to grab the wheel and stop this car crash we were all in. On my worst days, I worried she secretly thought the same about me. After all my father had been a bureaucrat, servant to the impotent government—very particular about following state recommendations on psychic energy, even though he hadn’t written them. He was in the labor ministry. Research. No research in the world can save you from your destiny, I guess.

  “It’s always a gamble, using dead people.”

  Yurie’s phone beeped. We didn’t need to look to know the message was some variant of DIE DIE DIE with UGLY and SLUT tossed in for extra color. I said, “None of them are worth anything.”

  “Michi, I lost everything. Choir, the girls I used to know, how teachers look at me … my stupid bicycle. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “I know what loss is like.”

  Her face crumpled with apology. She had been with me three years ago when, halfway through a crosswalk, I looked up at a giant screen and saw something about Riot and Government Worker and a somber photo of my father on top of the tortured remains of a black sedan. My brain had floated out through my eyes, trying to escape this new post-father existence, while my body stayed rooted in the street. It was Yurie’s screaming that brought me back to this shit-covered world.

  “But we’ve got weapons now. And I’m going to use them, even if you’re too scared.”

  Yurie called psychic energy an arsenal. She was always stocking up. But at a certain point you run out of money, out of options. I’d heard of precisely one dead banker with a 100 percent satisfaction rate, but his shrine was perched on an island in Matsushima, and who had the money for that? Eventually all you’ve got to spend is your soul. Traditional fortune-tellers call psychic energy “dismal energy,” probably because they’re afraid of losing their customers now that anyone can pluck that power out of the ether, but maybe they’re right: maybe nothing but suffering can come out of psychic energy.

  “And what are you paying for that weapon? It’s called Ultimate Sacrifice for a reason.”

  She snorted. “Life’s not much of a sacrifice. You know that.”

  Yeah, I knew. I was the one that pointed out black companies and the cyber-homeless. I was the one that buried my father after his car hit a cyclist and a mob stomped him to death. It wasn’t fair to ask me to argue for a beautiful future, and bam: I was angry. Yurie grabbed my sleeve.

  “Don’t hate me,” she hissed. I
thought, If I promise never to forgive you, will that keep you breathing? But I couldn’t keep my face stern, not to her tears. “I could never hate you,” I said.

  Of course Yurie never heard back from the Ministry of Education. Of course Asami never got pulled out of school. So Yurie bought the script for the Ultimate Sacrifice from a glass case in one of the city’s first psychic shops, a converted pharmacy with a red door. The old woman who unlocked the case asked her if she understood the sanctity of life, had her look at pictures of babies and ducklings.

  “What if I don’t want you to go,” I said. We were standing at the intersection where we’d have to part ways. I had used up everything in my own arsenal to dissuade her, and now I was down to the raw, wriggling emotional stuff that I hated handling. “Will that make you stay? Will you stay for me?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Instead she hugged me and said, “Girl, I love you,” before tugging the straps of her backpack and walking resolutely up the hill, like a Himalayan mountain climber. Her answer came that night, when Yurie’s mother called to say Yurie had jumped off a building to her death.

  I was calm, all things considered. Ever since my mother put her arms around me and said she had some terrible news, a numbing chill settled on my shoulders like a shawl. During Yurie’s funeral I could only think of how cold I was, how strange everyone was acting. People with faces out of half-remembered dreams kept asking how I was doing since Yurie’s “accident.” I’d never heard “I know you girls were close” so many times. I’d say, “Yurie’s coming back,” and that always made them look away.

  I spent a month waiting for Asami to die. I wanted front-row seats for Yurie’s Revenge—I was scared I’d miss it if I looked away for a second. But Asami kept on giggling, pointing, whispering—at me, at the fat sad kid, at the quiet soprano that had become her new whipping girl since Yurie died. Asami picked at the weak like the obsessive-compulsive pick at scabs; she just couldn’t seem to stop. When I nearly set everyone on fire in chemistry, Asami mouthed at me, “Kill yourself, worm.”