CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GHOSTS
Hiroki saw himself saying her name, but did not feel any movement of lips or tongue, nor did he hear any sound. The lady seemed to have heard him, though, because she turned to look at him and she was horrible to behold:
Her hair was unwound and hung all down her body, parted front and back and from side to side; and on each part of the quartered mass of glossy black was a broad, white streak. Her eyes, staring at him, were filmed the same unearthly white, the white of the streak in her hair that was also the white of her burial robe. He knew what he would see when he looked down, did not want to look, but looked nevertheless.
Lady Tomiko’s legs and gown faded into mist below her knees; there were no ankles, no feet.
A ghost, he thought. I am talking with a ghost.
The instant Hiroki thought the words, Lady Tomiko threw back her head and screamed. The sound pierced his belly as a sword or lance would, and the pain it brought was as icicles stabbing into his brain. He wanted to run, but could not move.
Eventually her scream resolved into words. Aki, he heard.
Aki is in the realm of the Yama Kings, Tomiko said. She pointed to where her feet should have been, and now Hiroki saw a crumpled, tiny body hovering beneath the ghost.
The Yama Kings ruled the eighteen hells of Buddhist scripture, but you had to be dead to be subservient to them. Didn’t you? That cannot be, Hiroki told the ghost. I am certain I saw her — tonight? When was this?
Lady Tomiko stared with her sightless eyes into his own, and her voice came like a sudden flood.
I was killed because I ceased to do good, she said.
That couldn’t be. Lady Tomiko was a person of whom no ill could be spoken. She was the victim of a crime, Hiroki knew, and would be the victim of a second crime if he failed and was unable to provide the justice her soul required before it could continue its journey toward rebirth.
Find the ink-stone.
Hiroki saw himself shaking his head. What did ink have to do with anything? Was this a reference to Katsumi? Should he not have been teaching her the writing of poetry?
My family is a broken reed.
Now he seemed to step outside himself, to be aware of the fact that he was in a dream, was listening to a ghost from inside of a dream. You can’t dispute what she has said about her family, he told himself. But even accepting what she had said, this didn’t tell him much of any use. With all under heaven as disordered as it now was, it was hard to think of a single family in the empire that wasn’t as much at war with itself as with every other family.
Find the brush.
Now she was leaning over him, and her bloodless lips opened as if to suck the soul from his body. I was killed because good was no longer done for me.
And now she was screaming again, and the sound was so painful it made his dream-body shake. Yet he could somehow clearly understand every word that burst from her like a typhoon: I have seen the years to come and they are wet with tears and blood and sharp with the splinters of broken bones.
Hiroki knew this to be true, because he had had similar visions while engaged in ritual purification. Japan was sundered and it would require many years and the sacrifice of many lives before the land of Amaterasu’s descendants could be made whole again. But what, he asked the ghost, does this have to do with your murder?
If Lady Tomiko’s ghost heard him she ignored the question, and instead of answering she asked, Does love betray itself? Perhaps she really hadn’t heard him; once again he had not heard himself ask the question, merely was aware of having asked it.
Then she began to fade, first her legs vanishing, then her hips, and then the body. All the while she repeated: Aki has entered the realm of the Yama Kings.
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