A portraiture of the deceased—the owner of that voice— rose into focus in my mind’s eye: a round face, wide at the cordillera of her cheekbones but otherwise gaunt, the flesh whittled by hunger and worms, her complexion waxen. Hair waterfalling ragged and black, still impaled in places by sharp golden pins.
“I don’t think you can be hot after so many years dead.”
“Have some imagination. Sure, the corporeal body might have suffered from decomposition. But her spiritual manifestation is probably something else.”
“You’re crass, Phillip.” My laugh sounded wet, thick, false, forced. But Phillip didn’t notice, grinning wide. I couldn’t stop thinking about what might have been under his feet.
“Just a hot-blooded male,” he confessed. “Doing what hot-blooded males do.”
“Cute.” The edge of a lip went up further than demure. “Promise me you’ll rein it in.”
“I promise I’ll try.” He fisted a hand and placed it over his heart, an admiral’s salute, spine and shoulders lancing straight. That grin again, that cocksure state-funded presidential candidate smirk.
“Talk to the hand.” I threw a raised palm in his direction and looked back to the fusuma. It wasn’t just tanuki on exhibit. There were other yokai. It was all yokai, a veritable parade: kitsune in elaborate tomesode, tails curling with questions. Ningyo crawling from the jeweled sea. Kappa and towering oni, negotiating for baskets heaped with cucumbers. Everywhere, every last brush-painted face in sight. Even the housewives: some with eyes, some only with lips, some with gaping smiles sliced into place. Every last one of them. All fucking yokai.
“Just trying to make you laugh, Cat. That’s all.”
“That’s what he said.”
He swept his fringe from his eyes and palmed his chest with both hands, expression become grotesque with false despair. “You wound me.”
“Your ego wounds you. I was just its instrument.”
And he laughed then. Like it didn’t matter, like it couldn’t matter, not for him, not ever, not when so much of the world waited, eager, to tithe him everything for a kiss. Phillip wouldn’t pauper himself with a grudge, not with the blessed largesse of his straight, white, rich-boy life.
“You’re good people, Cat. You know that, right? And good people deserve happiness.”
“I think that’s overstating things,” I told him with a half-smile for a tip. However tedious the best wishes, I couldn’t fault his intent. More than anything else, I was tired. Tired of being unhappy, and even more tired of feeling sorry for the fact that I was unhappy. It was easier to agree than it was to argue, what with the immovable object that was Phillip’s faith in his worldview. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.
A whisper, so quiet the cerebellum wouldn’t acknowledge its receipt. The words were drowned by the reverb of Faiz’s voice calling, an afterimage, an impression of teeth on skin. We exited the room, the future falling into place behind us. Like a wedding veil, a mourning caul. Like froth on the lip of a bride drowning on soil.
2
The mansion was colossal. Bigger than it should have been. Taller. In the dregs of my mind, a voice frothed with questions: is it meant to be so big? Had I misremembered? Were all Heian houses two storeys or more?
It didn’t make sense.
But here the house stood. Though only two storeys, each floor spanned at least twelve rooms and several self-contained courtyards, its symmetries united by ascetically decorated corridors. Every wall in the building was lavish with corroding artwork of the yokai: kappa and two-tailed nekomata; kitsune cowled like housewives, bartering with egrets for fresh fish. Domesticity as interpreted through the lens of the demonic.
We poured across its spaces, alone and together, sifting through the ruins. In one room sat terracotta monks, heads weighted with an ancient regret. In another, dolls with mouths lacquered black. In another, books, or at least the corpses of books. The volumes were mulch, eaten by insects, infested; edifices, turgid with egg chambers, writhed from the rot. Despite the horror of the visuals, they did not smell of anything but a green dark wetness.
The night stretched, chandeliered with fireflies and stars and the last cicada songs of the year, the world coloring indigo-dark. Music wafted from the next room: Taylor Swift and Coldplay and Carly Rae Jepsen. We’d chosen one of the ground-floor dining halls as a loci for our celebrations. There were shoji screens here—these held imagery of tengu at repose—to allow us to box-cut the space into rooms. A little privacy, we joked, for the spouses-to-be.