Bamboo

The snow danced through the air. A dance of death. I alone was motionless, my fingers numb with cold. My hands, my feet.

My teeth began to chatter, pebbles clacking up against each other. If they had been flints, flames would have sprung to life in my mouth.

Was I going to die too?

I could hear the warm blood flowing out of Mama’s body from where she lay in the hallway, her long legs splayed. The slow oozing had been echoing in my ears like the trumpets of the apocalypse. My teeth were chattering in time with the music. My tears froze solid on my cheeks.

The glass doors leading out to the terrace had been left open; huge drifts of pure-white snow gusted in. The heavy velvet curtains flapped threateningly in the direction of the gilded Japanese-style floor desk under which I hid.

From the neighboring hall, I heard my older sister start to scream. I squeezed my eyes shut. My shaking started to take on a noticeable rhythm.

The men’s feet on the hard floor reverberated throughout the house.

In between wailing sobs, my sister groaned, “Kill me, kill me.”

“This is some house!” I heard one man say.

“Take a look at that! This fucking fancy piano,” another commented. “The sofa. And these sculptures!”

“I can’t take it. Kill—”

An irritated gunshot cut my sister off.

Instantly, my eyes flew open. The sky said evening. The blue-gray light of late winter, colored with despair, poured into the room. The snow grew heavier. I curled into a ball, clutched my knees, tried to make myself almost impossibly small.

I heard the echoes of rough footfalls.

“Said to kill everyone?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re done here then. The woman and the kids. Three servants. A cook, a cleaning woman, and a washerwoman. Five people.”

“There’s still the son. He’s like ten or something. I’ve seen him before. No one’s come across him, huh?”

“He’s probably out somewhere. We’ll wait downstairs. One shot through the door when he comes back and we’re done.”

“Ten, huh? If he’s as cute as his mother and sister…”

“Pft! You do what you want.”

The men’s footfalls faded down the stairs. The curtains fluttered up again in the wind, a gust mixed with icy snow, the breath of the god of death.

They were getting drunk downstairs. The bodies of the servants were still there in the kitchen.

On the other side of the window, dusk was falling too slowly, taunting me. It felt like a hundred years had passed already.

This town was nothing but organization men and people under their thumbs. Even if I did manage to somehow make it out of the house, there was nowhere for me to run. Nowhere in the world. This was the end.

Night finally fell, painting the other side of the window a chilly ultramarine. Shivering, I crawled out from under the low writing desk. An unflinching farewell.

Sister.

The thought of trying to walk without making any noise set me to trembling so badly I couldn’t stay on my feet. Crawling awkwardly on all fours, I went out into the hallway and slipped slowly past Mama into the hall beyond her. My sister’s eyes were wide open and glassy; she was dead. Her hands were clenched into tight fists, and she wasn’t wearing any clothes. Her prestigious junior high uniform, the dream of every girl, was currently spread out all over the room, strewn across the furniture.

I crawled over to her. With a shaking hand, I closed her eyelids. I touched a finger to the hole between her eyebrows. Her eyelids were cold already, but the wound opening still held a faint warmth.

My sister…

I heard a sound and quickly looked over my shoulder. It couldn’t have been the men coming back up here. They were talking about something downstairs.

I strained my ears. The glass doors? Had someone come in through the open doors in the next room?

The chattering of my teeth stopped. I listened with my whole body, with every suspicious, wary nerve ending.

The faintest of footsteps. Feet shuffling. Feet dragging? Who?

Whoever it was cut across the room, stumbled upon the desk I had only recently been hiding under, and then came out into the hallway.

I drew closer to the hallway and peered out quietly. There was someone in the shadows. The light of the winter moon carved out the silhouette of a young man—not too tall, with broad shoulders. In the time it took me to blink, he crouched down soundlessly. Right where Mama had fallen.

I squinted harder into the darkness. Held my breath. And then…

Slp, slp, slp. I heard the sound of drinking. Blood.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Mama half-naked, her gold blouse stained red, striped miniskirt ripped. The man pressed his mouth to her neck and slurped up her blood.

This…this wasn’t someone from the organization. The clothes he wore, the way he looked were just too different. I mean, he wasn’t even human.

I remembered a scary story my second papa had told me a long, long time ago about a race of monsters that came from deep in the mountains of China. They were called the Bamboo. And true to their name, they were monsters of those tall grasses, carnivorous plants that drank the lifeblood of humans and ate their still-living flesh. They were nearly human in appearance. But unable to stand under the light of the sun, they walked the night…

That’s why you weren’t supposed to go out walking alone after the sun set. The Bamboo would find you and eat you.

Mama had looked at me shaking in fear and laughed in her high-pitched voice. “Isn’t that just a story to frighten children?”

And now Mama was dead, crumpled on the floor like a marionette with its strings cut, and something was eagerly lapping at her blood.

I heard a noise like a blade slicing through flesh. It was that…thing lifting his face. My whole body shook. My teeth started chattering like crazed castanets again.

The man seemed sincerely surprised to find a living creature before him. I couldn’t see his face. Only the blood around his mouth was visible, glistening in the dark.

“You.” Was he smiling? “You’re seriously good at making yourself invisible, boyo!” Surprisingly, the voice fell somewhere between that of a boy and a young man. It was teasing and unexpectedly gentle.

“Who are you?”

“Bamboo.”

“Do the Bamboo really exist?”

“What? You’ve heard of us?”

“You walk at night! Drink lifeblood! Eat flesh!”

“Dummy. We don’t drink lifeblood. We have laws, y’know.”

“Laws?”

The men downstairs stopped talking abruptly. The Bamboo held his index finger up to his lips. Shh! That finger also glistened with fresh blood.

I stared at him, bewitched. Strangely, I wasn’t frightened, even though I had cried so hard when my second papa had told me the story. I mean, I was going to die either way.

Downstairs, the men started speaking again.

The Bamboo in front of me slowly began to move his mouth once more, and something—hair wet with blood—bobbed up and down. “The smell of blood called out to me. I mean, this town constantly reeks of blood, y’know? All the different organizations fighting all the time. They never get sick of it. But what’s the big hubbub here?”

“My papa slept with the boss’s woman, and they found out,” I replied, my voice absurdly calm. “He took the woman and the money and the goods and ran off. So they killed Mama and my sister and me tonight, as a lesson.”

“Huh, makes sense. But you’re still alive, aren’t you?”

I closed my mouth.

There was a group of hitmen downstairs now, happily drinking the night away. Probably everyone in town knew by now that the only one they hadn’t taken out yet was the son. I could never trust a living human being again.

But if I could choose the method of my death in a last moment of selfishness… Please, God. I took one step, then another, walking toward the unearthly monster.

“Huh? What?”

I reached out both hands. I wanted to be released from my terror! I’d had more than enough of this tired human instinct to survive working on overdrive, ordering me to run away, to push back against destiny, to fight desperately to live right up until the last, all despite the fact that the end result would be the same, no matter what I did—I would lose the battle and die. The finish line was the same. But somehow, I was supposed to fight, to resist. Any god that would order me to do something like that was a thoughtless, spoiled brat.

I heard muffled laughter—heh heh heh—and opened my eyes.

He was looking down on me, his own eyes large and turned downward at the corners, his eyelashes thick and long. In the darkness, his eyes and the red blood around his mouth alone seemed transparent; they shone with an eerie clarity.

“Meat on a plate then! Blood that flies into the cup! First time I’ve seen that!”

“Don’t…make fun of me,” I protested, my voice trembling. Don’t laugh at my last hope.

The Bamboo stopped his snickering. And then he crouched down and met my eyes. “Hey, you’re shaking.” He touched my shoulders lightly, playfully exasperated.

“Okay, boyo,” he said, kindly. “Listen up. We Bamboo have rules. Y’know? We have our own—well, I guess it’s something like a government. It’s different from the country you human beings have made, but it’s ours. And we have our own strict laws. Or maybe you’d call them precepts? I dunno how it was in China in the beginning. I dunno anything about way back then. But for the Bamboo living in Japan right now, it’s a thing that you’re only allowed to eat the dead. Like, we can only drink the blood of the dead.” The Bamboo cocked his head to one side slowly. “But maybe this is all over your head?”

“What happens if you break the rule?”

“You get locked up for sixty years! They stuff you in a barrel and bury you in the ground!”

“You’d be an old man after that!”

“Huh? Would not. Why would I?” the Bamboo retorted, curiously.

Now that he mentioned it, my second papa had said that the Bamboo were young forever. They never aged. And he said that, just like bamboo, just once, when they’re around 120 years old, they bloom, bursting into a spray of white flowers. Then they disappear into nothingness.

The one who had left this morning with the boss’s woman and money and stuff was my fourth papa. He had come to Japan from somewhere in Latin America. He’d joined one of the organizations in this town, the one for people from the same place as him, and had moved up through the ranks. After my poor Japanese mama had latched on to him, life in our family had suddenly gotten a whole lot easier. But that had ended this morning.

The wind whirled and carved out a circle, winding through the room. In the blink of an eye, the Bamboo was sitting on the edge of the open window. He waved. “Later, kid!”

I cocked my head to one side and stared at him. The icy light of the moon illuminated his face for the first time. His large eyes were dry like desert sand. His eyebrows were thick, and a beard covered the lower half of his face. His clothing was oddly neat. It wasn’t expensive like the stuff Papa and Mama wore, but it was well cut, and he wore it with dignity. With his sharply defined features, he looked half-Latino and half-Japanese. The way the moonlight caught his dark skin made me think, Aah, if only he didn’t have that beard, he could be one of those beautiful boys the girls love.

But if the Bamboo had a rule, I guess that was that. I smiled. Goodbye, Bamboo. So the story about the bloodsucking grass monsters was true, after all. I wouldn’t tell anyone, though, just because I’d seen one. I mean, I had no tomorrow.

Perhaps the men had heard our footsteps; there was an intent silence coming from down below, like they were straining their ears, listening. This was followed by the sound of feet climbing the stairs. The rustling of guns being drawn.

The Bamboo twisted his face up.

The footsteps came closer.

My teeth chattered. My whole body shook again.

My sister’s wide-open eyes. Her scattered uniform. Her trampled dignity. Would I also tell them I couldn’t stand it and beg them to kill me? The warmth of the wound between her eyebrows. My sister. The footsteps reached the hallway. My terror made me a stone statue. I closed my eyes.

Do the weak not even get to choose the way we die? Preyed upon, tormented, we die.

“The rule’s absolute,” the Bamboo muttered, almost like he was making excuses. “I’d get more than the barrel underground for sixty years for this. I mean, punishment by fire’s no joke, y’know? It’s pretty much the most painful way for us to disappear from this world. So it’s a no-go. Sorry, ’kay?” For some reason, the words that followed sounded like he was whispering right in my ear. “I don’t owe you anything. Right? Yeah?”

What was he talking about?

The men approached from the hallway. They entered the room, moved to turn on the light and banish the pitch-black dark.

“Aah, dammit… Goddammit! Quit making that face at me!” The Bamboo clicked his tongue surprisingly loudly. “Quit crying!”

Click. The lights came on. I knew even with my eyes shut that they were painfully bright.

Aah, they’ve finally found me. It’s the end of today, of tomorrow, of yesterday, of forever.

And then the wind was roaring in my ears.

When I opened my eyes, I was flying through the night sky, the snow fluttering down like a lie, like a dream. It was beautiful.

Was I dead? It was surprisingly comfortable. I felt no pain, no shame. It felt somewhat anticlimactic.

I looked to one side. I was wrong. I wasn’t dead. The Bamboo was clutching me for some reason; we flew through the air in a wobbly fashion that did not inspire confidence. The chill sky was painted ultramarine. The cold clung to everything. I slowly looked back over my shoulder.

The peninsula jutted out into the Pacific Ocean. It looks just like Santa Claus’s boot, eh? my sister used to say, giggling. A little place in eastern Japan. Several narrow roads wound around the hill toward the ocean like capillaries. At the top was the domain of the very wealthy, where we lived. Mansions gave way to shacks and huts the closer you got to the ocean. There was basically no movement between the town at the top of the hill and the slum at the bottom. Almost like they were separate countries.

I had been convinced that I’d never get out of there alive. But the sumptuous estate, complete with pool, gradually receded from my sight, along with the luxurious town laid out like some kind of Shangri-la.

“So you saved me?” I asked the Bamboo’s face in profile.

“Swear your loyalty to me.”

“Let me think about that.”

“You cheeky brat! And you’re a crybaby on top of that!”

A warm relief spread through me, although the core of my heart was still frozen with terror. But, bit by bit, I was finding my way back. And then an abnormally powerful desire to sleep, like an evil spirit, assaulted my consciousness.

“Hey!” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“Quiet! I’ll drop you, y’know. I’m trying to concentrate on flying here!”

“You have a name?”

“Course I do.”

“I’m Kyo.”

“Mustah.”

“…Mustah!” Murmuring the name, I clung tightly to his solid chest. It was cold like a corpse’s. The temperature of the night. The faint green scent of bamboo clung to him.

This is my Bamboo! I’ll swear my loyalty. Not out loud, though.

I hugged him tightly.

My Bamboo was unfortunately not very good at flying, it seemed. If he were driving, he would have had one of those new driver stickers on the bumper to warn others on the road. Or maybe it was because I was too heavy? Mustah swung dangerously back and forth, threatening to drop me into the abyss at any second as we floated awkwardly toward the bottom of the peninsula shaped like Santa Claus’s boot, toward the impoverished town near the ocean.

Mustah.

Mustah.

“Back when I was a human, okay? When I was small like this kid here, someone gave me this jar of jam. ’Cause I was poor, y’know? I held on to it like it was made of gold.”

Ah, Mustah’s voice. I heard it from far away.

“I lapped up a teeny bit of it every day. It was like, as long as I was careful like that, I could savor it forever. So basically—how about we put the kid on the shelf like that jam, and we just drink his blood bit by bit? Good idea, right? Just enough so he doesn’t die.”

“Mustah, you—he’s tiny,” someone else said. His voice was higher and thinner than Mustah’s, but it was a man’s. Whose?

“So then we go hard!”

“Honestly. Let’s have this be the last of threatening children. It’s just embarrassing, okay?”

“So then, like—hey! I’ll eat you all up tonight, damned brat!” There was the sound of a door being yanked open.

I curled up more tightly into myself and rubbed my eyes.

“Oh, come on. He’s sleeping.” Mustah sounded disappointed.

“Humans sleep at night, Mustah. And there’s no point in going out of your way to threaten him after you saved him, now is there? You crossed a dangerous bridge because you wanted to. You’re a weird one.”

“Excuuuuse me!”

“What?”

“You’re in this now too, Yoji.” His name was Yoji then? The other person with the quiet voice.

“Mm. Well, yeah.”

“We’re definitely going to have to leave him.”

It was quiet for a while.

“He’s really out, eh? Almost like a picture of an angel. Kids have such round faces, don’t they? I-I just had no idea.”

Someone’s finger touched my cheek lightly. It was so cold that it startled me and made me shiver, and my eyelids twitched as if to open. But I was sinking down to the bottom of a deep sleep, and I didn’t know what was what anymore.

“He’s super warm. Like a fire!”

“Right?”

“Mustah… This boy’s alive!” The thin voice shook with extreme emotion.

From farther away, I felt like I heard a dry laughter too. I didn’t know whose voice it was. Maybe Mama’s. No, maybe God’s. As if to say, “See? You cursed and railed at me, but I saved you in the end, didn’t I?” The darkness of night grew steadily thicker.

When I woke up, it was past noon. How deeply and how long had I slept?

I looked around and found I had been put to sleep on top of a pile of towels spread out over a wooden floor. The pile was neatly arranged, but for all that, it felt kind of strange to be directly on the floor.

I was in a living room, about sixteen and a half square meters, furnished with an old but well-maintained sofa and wooden table, along with an antique organ. I was cold; a shiver ran through me. One wall of the room was taken up entirely by glass doors, which had been left slightly open. I could see the pale sand of the beach and the ocean beyond it. Wind coming in off the sea surged inside and whirled around me, an invisible vortex. I hurriedly got to my feet and yanked the doors shut. My fingers and toes were nearly frozen.

I slumped down absently onto the sofa. And then I listened for the presence of anyone else. It appeared I was alone.

The room was small and modest, totally unlike the mansion I’d lived in until the day before. But it was clean and quiet. There were some onigiri rice balls, a pack of fried eggs, and a plastic bottle of juice on the table. I guess the Bamboo had bought them somewhere. My stomach growled abruptly, and I reached out to the table. I saw that my arm was pale, bloodless. But it had finally stopped shaking.

The cold onigiri was delicious. The fried eggs too. Because I was alive.

A change of clothes had also been left for me, so I spread them out, thinking maybe they’d protect me against the cold. A black winter skirt made out of heavy fabric, a white sweater, and a silk blouse with a square necktie. Girl clothes. I sighed in disappointment. Did I maybe look like a girl? No, that couldn’t have been it. I mean, he’d kept calling me boyo, boyo.

Wondering curiously about how I’d ended up with girl clothes, I pulled the sweater on and then settled back down onto the sofa, curling myself up into a ball.

The old wall clock ticked out a quiet rhythm. When I sat there silent, visions of all the things I’d lost the night before began to shoot through my mind. My sister’s screams, her uniform strewn about, Mama’s long legs splayed, the snow blowing in through the window, the black shadow of a man drinking blood…

I leaped to my feet. After carefully inspecting the entire room, I slid the glass door open and stepped resolutely outside.

The ocean was calm, the chilly waves glittering. Gray sand blown up by the wind covered the wooden deck, and the grains flickered and shone as they caught the light. The wooden bench set out there was also an antique and well cared for. I stepped down onto the beach before I realized my feet were bare. The sensation of cold sand on the soles of my feet was electric.

When I looked at the house from outside, I saw that it was a small bungalow. Squarish, made of wood. Perhaps the exterior had been damaged; it was reinforced here and there with plywood and sheet metal, which came together in some kind of mysterious pattern. I looked around to see similarly rough houses dotting the area. The town continued down the peninsula toward the ocean, over a hill of impoverished shacks, and finally reached the shore. This was apparently the end of it.

I went inside. It was cold.

I opened a door that led farther into the house and found a tiny kitchen on my left. It appeared to be mostly unused and more of a storage space piled high with cardboard boxes. An oversized commercial refrigerator rose up from among them, emitting an unpleasant electrical hum. On my right was a small room the light didn’t reach.

I stepped inside. There was a large wooden chest situated imposingly on the floor there, seeming just as out of place as the refrigerator in the kitchen. I went over and kneeled down before it. Pressed my cheek to it. It was cold. I listened carefully, but I couldn’t hear anything.

I tried calling him. “Mustah.” My Bamboo. I suddenly felt very fond of him, and I called his name again. “Mustah!” I got no answer. But I had this feeling that he was there.

“Hey, Mustah?” My own voice was surprisingly sweet. I reached out a pale arm and slowly lifted the lid of the chest.

Instantly, I was assaulted by cold air. My breath froze into a white puff. This was the coldest place in the house, a deeper freeze than outside. I peeked in, terrified, and finally, from within the white fog, two faces appeared. Like waxwork, motionless. Two adult men facing each other, almost embracing, their eyes closed. They weren’t wearing clothes; they were totally naked.

One had a strong face with dark skin. His long eyelashes created a shadow below his eyes. Mustah. The other one was Asian with tawny skin and fine features. His eyelids were chilled and seemed sad somehow, while his thin lips were pursed tightly in a way that made him seem high-strung. This in contrast to Mustah’s sunny eyes and half-open mouth.

Their right fists touched their exposed chests. It was like they were dead. The words “lovers’ suicide pact” floated up in my mind. A sweet, eternal rite of people in love.

And then my heart throbbed painfully. It felt bad. What was this emotion?

Right. The other voice I’d heard last night, that gentle, thin voice, had probably been his. The second I had this thought, Mustah’s eyes snapped open, the dead coming back to life. I was surprised but not scared. I had no doubt used up my lifetime allotment of terror the previous night.

His black eyes alone moved, unnaturally, like those of a mechanical doll. His waxen body didn’t so much as twitch. The skin of his face was also taunt, artificial.

“Wait. Until night. Little Kyo.”

“…But it’s cold.”

“Ooh, cold?” There suddenly came a very displeased voice, and the cold air shuddered fiercely, pushing me back.

My hands slipped off the lid of the chest, and it fell back down with a thud.

“Right! Humans get cold, y’know, Yoji! I totally forgot!”

“They do, huh? I didn’t know that to begin with. So listen then.”

“Huh? What?”

“You have to take proper care of this kid, okay, Mustah?”

“…Yeah.”

“Don’t make it seem like such a huge hassle. You’re the one who brought him home. And.”

“Hmm?”

“And look how happy you are now. Being reminded after all this time that human beings get cold.”

“…Well, there is that.”

The start of the night. The winter day had quickly drawn to a close, and the moon had begun to shine coldly when the lid of the chest clattered and opened up. The grass monsters were awake. Despite the fact that he had only just ordered Mustah to take care of me himself, the one called Yoji pulled a coat over his naked body, then hurried out to get me an antique heater. He turned it on, and warmth began to fill the room. I thanked him with a smile.

And then the first ritual of their day began. Still naked, they went around to light all the candles in the candlesticks scattered around the house. Like it was something very important. Very carefully, one by one. The room brightened faintly. Then they took turns washing their faces before turning toward each other and vigorously combing one another’s hair. They slipped their arms through the sleeves of starched cotton shirts. Mustah’s was black, Yoji’s white. They fixed each other’s collars, and then Mustah pulled on leather pants, while Yoji dressed in jeans. They inspected the other’s appearance very carefully. Rather than any kind of intimate gesture, this dance looked more like the habit of long years.

Crouched in front of the heater, I felt a strange restlessness. “Hey? Why?”

“Huh?” Mustah looked back at me.

“Um, I was just wondering why you don’t do all this yourself, but do it to each other instead. It’s weird.”

Mustah indicated the window with his chin. The glass of one wall, naked of curtains or any other kind of covering, hazily reflected the inside of the room. Sofa, table, organ. Wall clock. Heater. Me crouching. But the figures of Mustah and Yoji standing facing each other were nowhere to be seen.

I stood up in surprise. “Neither of you is there!”

“That’s why.” It was Yoji who answered. He looked down at me and smiled gently.

“So then.” I wound myself around him. “You’ve never seen your own face in a mirror?”

“I have, a long time ago.” Mustah shrugged lightly.

“Not once,” Yoji replied softly.

Apparently finished dressing, Mustah bobbed his head around, satisfied. And then he reached a hand out to the bookshelf against the wall where an antique camera sat. “And we show up in media. So if you really have to see your face, you can just take a picture.”

“Wow.”

“Digital’s no good, though. No one knows why. We show up in print photos. And films, y’know? Like, if you got an eight-millimeter motion picture camera, you could get us moving.” Mustah lifted up an old black machine and laughed playfully. He turned the old camera toward me.

I looked up absently, and Yoji came over and pretended to bite my neck. But playing like this was apparently not in his nature, so, blushing, he stopped. Mustah handed him the camera and delightedly lifted me up with one hand. He tossed me at the ceiling and then caught me when I came back down. That hard lump, the chunk of ice in the bottom of my stomach, melted. Being alive was fun again. I squealed with laughter. The camera followed us.

Then Yoshi pulled something out of the large refrigerator. Red liquid in a plastic bag. They poured it into pottery that looked like a Japanese-style flower vase and set it down on the table. They poured from this into vessels like teacups, like large sake cups, before sitting down across from each other and drinking from them quietly.

From time to time, they talked, haltingly. Maybe because they’d been together for so long, their conversation was the brief back-and-forth of close friends; they understood each other with a few easy words. I settled into Mustah’s lap. My heart made a curious snapping sound again.

They drank the blood slowly. Like they were enjoying fine sake. The meal of the Bamboo in Japan today…

I sat between the two of them and quietly compared their faces. Mustah’s was sullen, while Yoji’s still sported a faint smile. Both of them were well-mannered, calm, and quiet. Aah, I thought. Now I get it. The town at war I lived in until yesterday is a much bloodier place than this one. I also thought that was strange somehow.

“The mountains of China? Well, I guess that’s basically it. To be honest, I don’t really know either. What I heard is that we traditionally lived somewhere deep in the mountains in the middle of the continent. But people gradually came in and opened those areas up too. It got harder to hide. So sometime in the last century, one group just up and moved to Japan, y’know? Came out from the mountains, down the river, crossed the ocean.”

“Mustah’s from the other side of the ocean too.”

“Am not! I’m a Japan-born Bamboo!”

I didn’t really understand.

“We’re all over the place.”

“Well, not really. After that group came to Japan, they splintered into several smaller groups and scattered. I heard that there’s not even a single one of us in some areas. There’s such a mess of different tribes and people on this peninsula, so it’s easy to live in hiding here, y’know? This might be the town with the most Bamboo in all of Japan. We have, like, meetings on nights of the full moon.”

“Like cats!”

“Not cats. Bamboo.”

“Right.”

“About two hundred of us, maybe? Or wait, maybe more. I dunno. Never properly counted.”

“Are you called Bamboo in China too?”

“Dunno. Although I think maybe we started being called that after we came to Japan. In China, they probably called us something Chinese.”

“So how can we tell who’s Bamboo and who’s not?”

“No idea. Well, anyone who works the night shift and doesn’t eat, they’re definitely suspicious!” Mustah stood up nonchalantly, and I tumbled from his lap. I sat on the floor and looked at the two of them.

Mustah’s body odor, the faintest scent of bamboo, remained in my nose. I liked this smell.

Yoji was walking through the room at a measured pace, cleaning almost neurotically and closing up the doors. Mustah just opened up the cupboards, picked up the camera, and touched his beard busily. His face in profile seemed quite whimsical. Finally, Yoji grabbed his endlessly dawdling partner by the arm and practically yanked him toward the front door.

I became uneasy. “Where are you going?”

“We work at night, like I said,” Mustah said, sounding annoyed, his back to me, before he turned around abruptly. A grin made his beard shake.

“We’re assistant nurses,” Yoji told me, hands firmly clasped around Mustah’s shoulders, dragging him along. “Emergency room. They’re understaffed, so it’s easy to get hired.” And then he screwed up his face like a worried mother. “Please go to bed. Don’t go walking around at night. It’s not safe.”

“Because the Bamboo are also walking around at night!” Mustah added, jokingly, and laughed at his own words.

I waved. The pair looked relieved, and each returned the gesture in his own way.

I heard something like a strong wind blowing. The thought had no sooner crossed my mind than they were gone. That was indeed the way a monster disappeared, like a whirlwind of the night.

I took over the sofa, covered myself in towels, lay down, and fell asleep, but only for a brief period. I opened my eyes in the middle of the night. I cleared my ears. There was no one there.

The candles in the room flickered restlessly in ancient candlesticks of Japanese, Western, Chinese, and Persian design. They had burned down a fair bit; the flames were low.

I suddenly thought of my sister. How she had been a good person. Kind. She had never asked too much of the help. She had treated Mama well too. And me. She had been shy only with men, and faced with one, she would turn red, unable to speak at all. Those wide-open eyes of hers came back to me.

There was something hard inside the sofa, and the corner of it jabbed my back. I reached my hand back, ready for anything.

It was a book with a red cover. An old collection of poems. When I opened it, I found traces of tears on the pages. Chinese poetry maybe. I tried to read the poems. But they were too difficult, and I simply couldn’t see why they had made the owner of the book cry.

Finally, one candle and then another disappeared with a sizzle, until at last the room was pitch-black, and my body was tossed into a darkness like death.

I awoke suddenly. I felt like I had heard the sound of wind.

I got up from the sofa, and a man in a white shirt soundlessly appeared, moving with beautiful grace on the beach on the other side of the glass. I could see he hadn’t come from either side but from above. Yoji. Remembering Mustah’s dangerous, wobbly flight last night, I had the vague thought that Yoji was maybe the better flier.

And then a man in a black shirt plummeted down, off-balance, just barely managing not to tumble to the ground. My Bamboo! He smiled, almost self-consciously. Like he was saying, I just can’t fly too good. My heart started pounding again.

Now Yoji flew, gliding along the surface of the earth, opened the window, and came into the room. He was uncharacteristically flustered, and once he’d stopped, he did another empty spin right there in midair.

Dawn was imminent. The morning was approaching across the surface of the ocean.

I could see that the faces of the two Bamboo were both paler than they had been at the start of the night. Maybe because morning was near. In one hand, Yoji held a liter-sized pack of blood. I assumed they had bought it at the hospital where they worked.

“Little Kyo, it seems you are a wanted man.” For all his hurried flying, Yoji sounded cool and relaxed. I stared at him blankly.

“That boss guy you were talking about.” Mustah walked, rather than flew, in. “Heard he’s got a bunch of feelers out for a little boy they accidentally let get away in the town up there. I seriously doubt they’d come all the way down here, though. And the people who live here have basically nothing to do with them. But Yoji’s all worried and kicking up a fuss, all ‘Oh, the danger!’ ”

“Mustah, it’s just like you said. We should make him wear a disguise. Even after he grows up too. Definitely.”

After I grow up?

Mustah nodded. “Take a look, Kyo!” And he pointed at something.

The change of clothes that had been left on the table. The silk blouse and the long black skirt. The girl’s school uniform?

I got up in a panic. “I won’t. No way.”

“Look, you. They’ve got their eyes peeled for a boy, right? So if you be a girl and stay here for a while, like, once you grow up, maybe…” Mustah cut himself off and met Yoji’s eyes. They nodded at each other.

What was it?

I was upset, but the two grown-ups talked me down, and eventually I resigned myself to putting the uniform on. Yoji stared hard at me when I was naked, very interested somehow. “Quit it,” I said, turning my back to him.

The blouse with the square necktie. The white sweater. The black skirt with the pleats. I stared fearfully at my reflection in the glass. I was still holding myself like a boy, so the effect was weird.

Yoji and Mustah both let out a sigh, like they could finally relax. They flopped down on the sofa on either side of me at the same time.

The only thing reflected in the glass was the new me; the two men seated behind me to my right and my left were nowhere to be found.

Mustah slapped my butt hard. “I don’t know if you really look like a girl, though. But people here have too much on their own plates to go around looking at a kid in a skirt and spending brain power wondering if she isn’t really a boy. Right, Yoji?”

Yoji was silent, looking at me with concern. And then said, “Yes.”

Mustah let out another relieved sigh. The scent of bamboo wafted up to my nostrils.

They stood up and started to undress. This part, they each did themselves. Mustah let his clothes fall where he stood, and Yoji picked them up and folded them.

I got sleepy again and rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand.

Weak light came in through the glass, as if to announce that morning would soon arrive. So did that mean that human time was finally starting? The gentle grass monsters slipped sluggishly into the small, cold room at the back. They opened the lid of the chest, and a chill instantly filled the air. The lid slowly closed, and all sense of their presence disappeared.

I went to sleep again on the sofa. Wearing the girl clothes.

That night, I had a dream. In it, I was still in the town above. I was desperately fleeing along a dark road at night. The men were chasing me. I ducked into an alley to catch my breath. When I looked back, the men weren’t running along the road, but flying through the air, ready to dance down at any moment and snap my windpipe. Ah! Bamboo are after me! I started to scream.

Then another Bamboo flew in from somewhere… Mustah, maybe?

It was Mustah!

He flicked a hand out, wrapped his arm around my waist, and then immediately flew up high into the night sky. His flight was a little erratic, but he skillfully lost my pursuers, and we kept flying, drifting through the starry sky.

Thank goodness. You saved me…

Grinning, I started to say something in his ear. But even though it was a dream, my eyelids suddenly grew incredibly heavy. I started to drift off. Secure, I fell into a deep sleep in that beautiful starry night. The wind on my skin felt good too, and even as I slept, an unconscious smile crept across my face.

School

Wake up in the morning. The antique alarm clock Yoji bought me rings at seven sharp. Wash my face, tie my hair—now down to my shoulders—back into pigtails. Get dressed.

Breakfast is always on the table. Onigiri rice balls, bread in packages. Sometimes several cans of fish are piled up there for some reason.

Yoji comes flying home at dawn with a pack of blood in one hand and food for me in the other. He leaves the food on the table with a note, but from time to time, Mustah plays games with me and hides the stuff inside a cupboard or something. One time, when I can’t find it and have to leave with an empty stomach, Yoji gets mad at him, and Mustah is sad.

Black leather bag I carry on my back. Inside, a bundle of papers copied from the textbook and my notebooks. Run out of the house.

The Bamboo are asleep. Actually, you could even say dead maybe. They won’t come back to life until nightfall, those mysterious grass monsters from the other side of the ocean.

“Morning, Nako!”

In a corner of the prefab school lot, the morning was dazzling with the light bouncing back off the ocean. Beads of sweat dripped down my face.

The lower town no longer had a respectable school. There was just a small cram-school-type place, like the temple elementary schools they used to have way back when. Prefab buildings on the verge of crumbling dotted the empty factory lot, one unit for each grade. And a teacher in each one too. I went to this school dressed as a girl, under the name of my dead sister. A disguise so the men from above wouldn’t find me.

I was an excellent student. Because the only thing I could do to stay alive right then was study. If I was going to stay in this town forever, I would need something. Maybe I could be a teacher. Being an assistant nurse like Mustah and Yoji wouldn’t be too bad, either, but I’d probably be stuck in a hand-to-mouth life with a job like that.

…If I was going to live. And so I worked.

The boy who called out to me had become a friend. He had dark skin and long eyelashes. He was super skinny but always full of energy. He wasn’t good at school, so I’d help him sometimes. I was easy to talk to for a girl. He often said to me, “Nako, you just really get stuff.” Of course. I was really a boy, after all.

“Niita! Morning!”

“Lemme see your homework.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

We went into the classroom, pushing and shoving and joking around. Desks and chairs of disparate design, size, and color had been forced into rows. They were things that had been picked up here and there. Like the children of this town with their various eye colors and skin tones.

My seat was a low Japanese-style desk of a design very much like the one I had dived under that night. I’d shuddered at the thought that it might actually be the very desk, but I’d soon gotten used to it.

The past was passing. So the terror would disappear at some point too. Right now, I was just sweet little Nako. The teacher apparently thought Yoji was my older brother. That was fine.

Niita took out a pencil and began enthusiastically copying from my notebook. The teacher came in suddenly through the window. This was faster than going around to the actual door, so it wasn’t like he was fooling around or anything. Mr. Yu was a surprisingly large man. He was nice and a little weird, with a strange expression like he was always suppressing a laugh. He caught Niita cheating now and said, “Hey now!” but he wasn’t threatening at all.

“Now, let’s begin. We’ll start with Language Arts.”

I spread out my copy of the textbook, sat up straight, and stared at the whiteboard.

Once evening fell, school was over. A third of the children stayed until the last class. The others disappeared one after another to help with their parents’ work or head to their own part-time jobs. So the key lessons were held in the morning. The afternoon was music or art or gym.

Once the students were gone, the janitor would start his rounds. A large man of unknown age with gray skin. In the beginning, I suspected he might have been Bamboo. He didn’t work until after sunset, and his gait was exceedingly stiff, like one of the walking dead. But one day, I saw him open his big mouth and scarf down instant yakisoba noodles, and I realized with disappointment that he wasn’t.

“Quit it!”

I heard Niita shout from the shadow of the prefab classroom. Calling “Niitaaaa,” I stretched my neck out and peered in to see the janitor holding Niita’s wrist tightly. And pulling down his own pants with his free hand. He looked idiotic, his lower half alone bared to the world. Still half bent over, he glared when he saw me. Maybe this made him loosen his grip on my friend’s wrist; Niita twisted and pulled himself free and then ran away as fast as he could. He grabbed my hand, and we fled the scene.

The evening light painted the town red. And with the setting of the sun, it was a lot colder out. Off in the distance, a crow cawed.

“What was that?” I asked.

“A regular grown-up,” came the cold response.

I was dumbfounded. “What? Regular?”

“Yeah. But! As if I’d let him do anything for free!” Niita was seriously angry. “I have a price. Mama makes sure to set one. Changing it in line with what the market will bear. He’s a thief. Well, I’m not gonna be stolen!”

As I ran along with him, I learned one more thing about this town. That I had to get out. That I had to fight if I was going to live. Even still…

Niita’s face in profile as he ran alongside me was dark and tense, like those of the organization men I had seen from beneath the desk that night in the mansion. Impassive like a rusted grown-up.

The evening sun sank above us. It was so heavy I closed my eyes.

“Kyo! Hon! Over here!”

I headed down along the beach, all signs of people and houses gradually disappearing, before I finally arrived at the house.

The instant I stepped onto the worn wooden deck, Mustah called out to me from inside. The smile on his face was almost dazzling. His laughter made his thick hair move like a separate living creature on his head. Jumping up and down, he invited me over with a hand.

Yoji emerged from inside the small room and looked at me, also grinning.

Like a dog called by its master, I raced across the deck and flew into the room. My pigtails swung around and hit my shoulders. “What?”

“Wow! Your hair’s getting so long,” Mustah said, looking delighted.

Well, that was true, but what did it matter exactly? I cocked my head to one side, and a large hand reached out to stroke my head roughly. My head bent even farther to one side, threatening to snap off. Seeing my troubled look, Yoji burst out laughing. His snickering voice sounded warm and cozy.

“It’s not just your hair, either. Right, Yoji?”

“Right!”

“You’re taller too, Kyo.”

“Am I? I can’t tell.” As I spoke, they pushed me over to a pillar in the living room.

“Stand up taller! C’mon, give it some oomph!” they urged, excitedly. Mustah gouged out a mark with a utility knife right above my head on the pillar.

The three of us pressed our foreheads together and stared at it intently. Silence.

Yoji made a sound in his throat like a contented cat. Mustah laughed boisterously and praised me for some reason. “You did it,” “Nice work,” that kind of stuff.

“You’re being weird,” I said, and finally burst out laughing too.

The mark was six or seven centimeters higher than the one from when I first came to this house by the sea. I was steadily getting taller. Now that I thought about it, the black skirt had been fairly long, but it was actually getting pretty short. We had replaced the blouse twice already too.

Yoji grabbed my hand. Mustah continued to pat my head roughly. They chattered excitedly above me.

“His hair’s longer.”

“Yeah. And he just keeps growing.”

“He’s all tanned—he looks so healthy now.”

“And he’s getting cheekier and cheekier!”

“He’s changing every day, isn’t he? People grow up.”

“It’s ’cause he’s alive. Not like us. This kid’s alive!”

“Fire. This is fire!”

“Fire!”

…Fire?

The flames of countless candles burned in the candlesticks set out around the room. Blowing in from outside, the wind made them all flicker uneasily. The night had only just started, so the candles were still long. But as time passed, they would get shorter, bit by bit. And then, around the time that the night was ending, they would quiver abruptly and go out. The same thing happened every night. Maybe the Bamboo thought that this was what being alive was.

Showered in praise, I felt a little giddy. Their jobs didn’t pay a lot, and the blood packs they needed were expensive, so Mustah and Yoji didn’t have many luxuries in their lives. They lived modestly. Still, as much as they could, they worried about me and kept me safe. I knew kids living with their human parents who didn’t get the chance to study for their future, since their hands were full with the job of turning physical labor or humiliation into money every day. Like my friend Niita.

I was a blessed child. My close brush with death was only a bad dream, but my saviors were real. Was their fierce joy born from the fact that I was alive?

But from my perspective, Yoji—moved to tears by books of poetry—and Mustah—laughing loudly with his camera at the ready, constantly fooling around, hugging me with every muscle in his body—were alive just like me. Even if their hair and nails didn’t grow a single millimeter, even if they never got older, they were alive. Which meant…?

Did I think that it meant their hearts pumped? Did I feel like Mustah and Yoji were changing? Flames themselves, growing warmer, flaring out, and then sputtering and dying. I wondered.

At any rate, we unfortunately didn’t get to spend a long time talking intimately like this, human me and the Bamboo Mustah and Yoji. That night, again, it was getting to be time for them to head off to work. They fussed unconsciously with each other’s hair, pulled up their collars, and inspected appearances before nodding impassively at each other. The whole time, it was like a ritual. I somehow started to feel like it was too bad that I would never take part in this camaraderie.

Abruptly, I found the whole thing weird. One night, I asked Mustah, “Hey, do Bamboo all live in groups of two or three? And if they do, do they all groom one another like that? Forever?”

“Nah, a lot of Bamboo live alone.” Mustah shrugged. Lightly, as if to say that was a tragedy that would absolutely never happen to him. “You can tell pretty quick which ones are on their own, y’know.”

“How?”

“ ’Cause they’re filthy!”

Hearing this, Yoji frowned slightly.

“Like, their hair’s all over the place! And they’re not so much wearing their clothes as the clothes are just hanging off their bodies. They stand out at the meetings. Like Yoji here—I mean, he was like that when we first met, y’know.”

“What?” I replied, surprised. “No way!”

Combed black hair, neatly pressed shirt. That this boy who was neat nearly to the point of neurosis would have ever been dirty…

“So what about you, Mustah?”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

“…I was always like this.” Then he got tight-lipped, and I couldn’t get him to tell me anything else.

There was no sense of intimacy or love in the hands that reached out to make the other presentable again tonight. In fact, it looked like a silent boxing match. I was sitting on the floor, looking up at them performing this dance, like I did every evening without ever getting bored of it.

Mustah gasped and reached a hand out toward me. Jokingly, he tugged on the collar of my blouse too. I was secretly delighted, but at the same time, it made my heart hurt for some reason. Like I alone was different.

Right, my Bamboo?

That night.

After they left for the night shift, I sat on the floor by myself and spread out my copied textbook pages. I had read all of them so many times that I had almost memorized them.

I was resisting. With help from the mysterious Bamboo. Facing forward, walking straight ahead. But sometimes, those wide-open eyes would swoop down at me. When I let my guard down, the nightmare would descend from the town above. Like when I’d be running around with Niita and the others. And they’d be all, “No girl runs that fast,” “How come you can run like that, huh?” Comments like those practically made me jump out of my skin.

I looked up from the textbook pages and stood up. Despite the fact that it was summer, a chill hung in the room, the candles flickering in all kinds of different candlesticks.

As if called to it, I went into the small room. I pushed the lid of the large chest up and stealthily slipped inside. A white fog instantly coiled around me. Cold like the inside of a refrigerator. Seen from inside the chest, the dark ceiling was infinitely far off, and the real world seemed somewhere off in the distance. It was almost like I was dead. Or like I had become the roots of a plant, buried deep within the earth.

I slowly closed my eyes. My lips twitched.

Bamboo. The ones who walk the night. Grass monsters from the depths of China.

I opened my eyes with a gasp. I was shivering inside the chest. Perhaps because of the cold.

I hurriedly crawled out and carefully closed the lid so they wouldn’t find out what I’d been up to. I returned to where my papers lay spread out on the living room table.

The summer-night breeze twisted itself around me once more, and my body temperature returned to normal. I solved the math problems. My fingers numb with cold gradually warmed up. The candles crackled.

“Anyway, you can’t go out tonight. Hey! Are you listening, Kyo? Stray Bamboo are always prowling around on meeting night. Although, actually, this area at night is pretty much totally unsafe all the time. Hey! Mustah, tell him.”

“Why should we both tell him the same thing? I’d just look like an idiot for saying it second. No thanks.”

“Because he listens to you. Kyo likes you better, Mustah. I mean, he’s always going on with that ‘My Bamboo, my Bamboo’ business. I’m sure he loves you more than anything else in this world.”

Mustah felt silent, embarrassed, and scratched his head. “Stay,” he growled. “In the house!”

“…Whatever!”

“Hey, Yoji. The kid’s not listening to me, like, at all, is he? He’s been pretty snarky with us lately, y’know.”

“Probably just a rebellious phase? I’m pretty sure I heard humans get sick like that… Mustah, how was it for you?”

“I don’t remember!”

The two Bamboo griped and shouted as hands shot out to arrange the other’s hair and clothing, the nightly choreographed fight. This ritual of theirs, so quiet and functional when I first saw it, had grown quite animated, a heated exchange of opinions on child-rearing.

I suppressed a laugh and slowly brought my eyes back to the world history reference book opened up on the table. It was actually more along the lines of what they studied in high school. Mr. Yu had lent it to me. Maybe he had even gone to the trouble of buying it with his own money. But he’d skittered away like he always did when I went to thank him. He’d also asked me if I was interested in applying for scholarships and going on to high school. But I’d told him I would ask my guardian, and that had been the end of it.

My appearance had changed a lot already. I never cut my hair, so it had grown all the way to my waist. Maybe through some gene I had inherited from Mama, it was a brownish black with ends that twisted like I’d gotten a perm.

Yoji apparently took comfort in the idea that no one would discover I was a boy if my hair was this long; he said it was okay for me not to wear a skirt. So when my T-shirt or sweater had a girlish design, I got to wear jeans on my bottom half.

With each passing day, Yoji turned into more of a worrywart, while Mustah spoiled me in equal measure. The three of us found our balance like this.

“Where’s the meeting?”

“Can’t tell humans.”

“Tch! So I don’t get to be part of the group…”

“Ha ha ha!”

I was being serious, half-disappointed, but Mustah laughed like it was the funniest thing I’d ever said. Yoji also suppressed a laugh, like he was faced with a pouting child.

“What? What’s with you two?”

“Telling anyone other than a Bamboo the time or place of the meeting is against the rules. Our laws are fairly strict.”

“Will you end up buried in a hole?”

“No, they wouldn’t go that far, but still.” Yoji shrugged lightly. “They’d cut an arm off.”

“…Would it grow back?”

“It would not.”

I shuddered and decided I was definitely giving up on asking about the meeting place. I imagined an arm from Mustah and one from Yoji dropping to the floor with a pair of thuds. The scent of bamboo would puff up, but because they weren’t built like humans, the fallen arms would instantly dry up and turn to dust, to be carried away on the wind. A chill ran up my spine, and I shook my head.

“Oh,” I said. “But what’s a stray Bamboo?”

“Some of ’em don’t take the meetings seriously! Mostly the ones who live on their own, y’know? I think it’s not like they’re extremists, all antigovernment or something, but more like they think the whole thing’s just a hassle. Anarchists, I guess? But there aren’t any other Bamboo in town on meeting nights, so there’s some guys who take advantage and do bad stuff to humans. Only sometimes, but still.”

I looked up, pencil wedged beneath my nose. I figured Mustah was more of the hassle type, which made me wonder at how he seemed not to like the anarchist Bamboo.

“Well, if a Bamboo starts going around killing humans, the government’ll find them and make sure to drive them out of town. And the people who go after them are professionals. A murderer’s got no chance of avoiding exile. Eventually, that Bamboo’ll get sixty years in a barrel in the ground.”

“That doesn’t bring the dead person back, though.” Mustah’s voice was dark. And then he looked back at me. “That’s why, Kyo, babe. You seriously cannot go out on the night of the full moon.”

“Okay.”

“Hey, you hear me? Ever since you started going out wandering around at night, we’ve been worried, y’know!”

“I told you, I’m just meeting friends. Everyone has to work, so we basically can’t hang out until evening, okay?”

“What kind of work?”

“Package handling down at the port, a little laundry, some prostitution.”

They both looked back at me at the same time, mouths open, ready to speak. Then they looked at each other and clamped them shut again. And then they floated up from the floor and flew out with a whoosh.

For some reason, on meeting nights, Yoji would always have a big red hat on him. Mustah had nothing.

Once they were out on the deck, they locked the door from outside, looking stern. I hurriedly stood up and protested—“C’mon! Again?!”—my long hair swinging from side to side. Yoji feigned ignorance and flew up into the sky. Mustah looked at me, clapped his palms together, pressed the back of his hand to his cheek, telling me to be good and go to bed.

I started to sulk. Tch! How long were they going to treat me like a child?

Spinning as he headed upward with his shaky, dangerous style of flying, Mustah’s figure vanished in the blink of an eye.

I guess the Bamboo hadn’t noticed yet that there was an exit hidden behind all the stuff piled up in the kitchen. I took down one box after another and opened the small kitchen door.

The autumn sky was dull, the color of muddy water. The moon was hazy too.

I threw my arms up and stretched for all I was worth. The overprotective grass monsters had finally left me alone! I kicked at the ground with my sneakers, then ran along the deserted, unpaved road hugging the coast. Ruts from wheels were dug out of the pebble-strewn surface. The night of the Bamboo meeting meant the night of a wonderful full moon, and because I was really a boy, of course, I raced through the night, practically exploding with energy.

“Yer late, Nako!”

“Yeah, my brother wouldn’t shut up, you know?”

“Well, yeah, he’s prob’ly worried about his adorable baby sister going out at night.”

I looked down at my own body. “That’s not it.”

“Huh? What?”

“Nah, it’s nothing.”

Niita’s room. In a run-down place in the center of town where shacks were clustered together.

Niita had basically stopped coming to school. Over half of the people in my class had vanished from the classroom. In the small room, with four three-tiered beds against the walls, those former classmates gathered like ghosts.

I sat down on a bottom bunk and pulled a reference book from my black leather bag. “Let’s do world history.”

“I’m with Nako. I mean, we need math the most, but it’s also super boring, y’know? Once a month’s enough of that.”

“We’ll get right to it,” I said. “This is a world map. Japan is this long, thin island.”

“Whoa! It’s tiny!”

“This is China.”

“It’s huge! So big!”

“My parents are from Argentina.”

“Um, this is their homeland then.”

“Really? Isn’t that too far away?”

We met like this sometimes after night fell so I could teach them what I’d learned in school. I picked things people needed to actually live in the world and offered up awkward lectures. Like math and accounting and English and geography.

Mustah and Yoji didn’t know about these nighttime lessons, but Mr. Yu had probably figured it out. He’d sometimes ask me how everyone was. Each time, I’d answer briefly, Good.

Everyone pushed and shoved and jostled to peer at the world map. The balance of power and the state of trade between countries. Religious beliefs and ethnic issues. As I related various facts and concepts, Niita and the others would say that, now that I mentioned it, a customer from this ethnic group had been like this, or that such-and-such kind of cargo had come to the port recently.

“You know that janitor guy?” Niita said, suddenly. It was right around the time the conversation was petering out and we were opening the candy drops someone had brought.

I remembered him yanking on Niita’s arm, naked from the waist down, and I frowned as I nodded.

“Turns out he’s actually the same age as Mr. Yu.” Niita was casual.

“Noooo way. He’s so old, though.”

“It’s true, though! I guess they were kids together in school. And on top of that, the old man was actually smarter or something.”

It felt like the air had suddenly got thinner. I wondered what it was.

“But he couldn’t go to high school or anything, so he started working, y’know? And then he didn’t have any money, and he was stuck here. And in this place, even if you don’t start out garbage, you turn into garbage. So basically, he ended up like that. I guess he asked Mr. Yu for that job as the janitor.”

“Is that what happened.” There was a hard edge to my voice.

Niita slowly lifted his face. He looked right into my eyes, something he didn’t usually do. “Nako, don’t you end up like that.”

“Come on! What’s that, out of the blue! There’s no way I would. A total pervert like that. Quit it!” I leaned forward resolutely.

The other guys were also surprised, wondering what this was about, and they looked at Niita. His face was incredibly serious.

“I’ll always be on your side. Okay? You just keep being our Miss Nako, our teacher. I like you and all, but I never feel like I like you like you, you know? But anyway, you’re a good kid, like you were brought up right. And, like, you make my head spin. So it’s like, you know.”

“I know what? You’re creeping me out, Niita.”

“If you grow up and turn into garbage, then there’ll be nothing for me to believe in in this town.”

Niita walked me to the meandering road that ran along the coast. I badly missed the time when he had sat beside me in the slanting prefab school that was a school in name only. It’d only been a couple of years since then, but all kinds of things had changed.

Niita waved his hand vigorously and then went back the way we had come. Alone, I started running toward the house, the moon full in the sky. The autumn wind was already cool. I shivered. All I could hear was the sound of my own feet. Orange sneakers. I was getting pretty tired. Somewhere, a cat meowed. Gradually, I slowed down to a walk.

And then, suddenly, I heard a sound from somewhere—ominous, like something slicing through the air. I gasped and turned around.

I don’t know if it came from behind or hurled itself from the side. A shadow much larger than I was hung over me, and before I knew it, I was on the ground. My first thought was that it was a stray Bamboo. I was wrong.

My shirt was immediately ripped open. My jeans were yanked down. My sneakers sailed through the air a surprisingly long distance. Ah! He thinks I’m a girl.

I came back to myself and tried to scream. Instantly, a thick mitt of a hand clamped down over my mouth. I can’t breathe! My eyeballs were on the verge of popping out of my skull. I spasmed violently. I reached out and grabbed my attacker’s wrist. But he didn’t even flinch.

The hazy moon swelled up. The night grew eerily deeper. My consciousness started to fade. All the strength drained from my limbs. I was basically naked by this point. But the man couldn’t get my jeans to come off and was visibly annoyed. He pulled out a knife and cut into the fabric. The blade hit my thigh and dug into my skin. He pulled it back and brandished it, nicking my chest. The scent of blood spread out around us.

I didn’t have enough air. A weird noise came from my throat. Maybe I was going to die. This suddenly. Even though I had just been laughing and having fun with my friends.

Then I saw a black shadow closing in on me, obstructing the large moon. Eyes I had started to close opened wide in surprise. Relieved tears welled up in the corners. The face of a young man with dark skin filled my blurry field of view.

Mustah!

I had a dream like this once.

In the next instant, the man hanging over me flew off to one side. Lightly, like a scrap of fabric. I tried to say something, but my throat could only produce a weak croak.

The knife the man still clutched grazed Mustah’s cheek, making the faintest of sounds. Shf! A straight line appeared on Mustah’s cheek, and the green smell of grass unfurled around us. Liquid—I couldn’t tell if it was red or green or clear—fell from the wound and landed with a splat on my chest, atop my own wound, making my chest throb painfully for some reason.

The wound on Mustah’s cheek closed like magic. His beautiful skin was unblemished again. It was like watching a video in rewind.

I heard Yoji’s sharp cry. In the blink of an eye, he was standing beside me. He was pointing at me and shouting shrilly—so very different from the usual gentle, calm Yoji.

Hazily, I looked down to see what he was pointing at. The nick on my chest from the knife, red blood oozing from it. And the liquid from Mustah’s cheek slowly melting into it, illuminated by the light of the moon. Gently.

“Yoji! Yoji! Yoji!”

“Shout all you want—it’s not going to change anything. Mustah, bring Kyo over here. Hurry.”

“Ah…ah…unh.” I had my hands full with breathing, now that I was finally able to again. I eagerly gulped down fresh air, my throat wheezing.

Mustah timidly stepped forward and easily picked me up. Me, half-naked and covered in blood. In too much of a panic, he flew up high in the night sky, spinning around in place and descending abruptly to bring me over to the deserted lot to one side. Finally, he lowered me to the ground.

Yoji peered into my eyes. “How do you feel right now?”

“Um. I’m getting cold. And I feel kinda weird, I guess.”

Next to me, Mustah groaned. But what exactly was all this? I mean, the hoodlum was gone now, and neither of the cuts he’d given me qualified as lethal.

Yoji bared his teeth. His appearance suddenly changed completely. This was the face of a ferocious, supernatural monster that walked the night. He put his lips to my bared chest. I twitched and reflexively pulled back as Yoji licked at the cut. Mustah was silent, still panicked. Yoji sucked up the blood oozing from my wound.

“Unh!”

“Just hang on, Kyo. Okay?” Mustah said, sounding like he was about to burst into tears. He kneaded his hands together restlessly, his face crumpled up.

Yoji lifted his head and spat out blood. And then he brought his lips back down. Suck it up, spit it out. And again and again.

I began to fade from consciousness.

“Kyo, you okay?” Mustah hung his head. “Sorry, okay? Sorry.”

“What? Is…”

“And Yoji, you too! I’m sorry!”

“You don’t need to apologize, Mustah. It’s finished now.” Yoji lifted his head again. His lips were dyed red with my blood. This, along with his pale skin, made him look he had been made up for his own funeral.

“Yoji, that’s some nice work there. If it was me, I’d just keep drinking. And then I’d actually kill Kyo…”

“We’ve just had different experience as Bamboo, that’s all,” Yoji said, lightly, his face still covered in blood. “You only know seventeen or so years of Bamboo life, right? But I witnessed the war and the revolution. I’ve seen a lot of history. And I was Bamboo the whole time.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. For the first time in a long time, I remembered the tearstained book of Chinese poetry. Idly, I wondered if Yoji was one of the Bamboo who had come flowing down an eternal river from a distant foreign land.

The moon suddenly became very blurry. And then I passed out.

The next thing I knew, I was back at the house.

Mustah had probably flown home with me in his arms again. Like the first time he’d brought me to this house. What was different this time, though, was that now his face was drained of all color, and he was silently clutching my hand. He wasn’t threatening me either; no Quit fooling around, you brat, I’ll eat you up like jam or anything.

As for Yoji, he went out and came back again carrying a pile of straw rope for some reason. His face was tenser than I’d ever seen it. He wound the rope around me and tied me to a pillar.

“Poor thing. Our little Kyo…”

“It’d be a real problem if something happened during the day. We wouldn’t be able to protect him.”

“Yeah. But—aah, I really am so sorry, Kyo!”

Sorry, he says. If something happened, he says. What?

The two grass monsters sat still by my side, both silent, until moments before dawn. Only the flames of the candles moved. And then they headed to the small room, looking back regretfully, and climbed into the chest. The lid slowly closed, and I was alone in the living room.

The morning sun began to shine on the other side of the glass doors. The sea also shone whitely, announcing the start of a new day.

I closed my eyes, and the afterimage of the morning was on the backs of my eyelids. It was maybe the first time I’d ever gone to sleep at this hour, I thought, and in the next instant, I lost consciousness. Wrapped in light, I slept.

In the evening, someone came to visit. I thought it might have been Mr. Yu. It was unusual for sweet little Nako to miss school, so maybe he was worried about me. Kind Mr. Yu, always pretending he didn’t care, was in reality a worrywart.

“Hallo!” came a forlorn voice. It was Mr. Yu. “Nako?” How weak it sounded. “Come back to school. Come tomorrow… I mean, how could you stop just like that? Your teacher here’s had enough of that. All you kids, you just disappear… No matter what I teach you… That it should all be in vain… It’s not! Halloooo!”

And then, just when I thought he’d gone, he continued, “Think about the scholarship. I’ll sit down and talk to your brother!”

Right. Mr. Yu had checked into a scholarship for me so that I could go on to high school. But I had kind of put off talking about it with Mustah and Yoji.

No one came out to welcome him in, so after a while, Mr. Yu gave up and went home. No doubt he would have been shocked to find out his student was tied up with straw rope behind the sofa.

Mr. Yu… Yoji. Hey, Mustah…

I drifted off to sleep again.

Around the time the sun was starting to go down, I woke up again. My mind, which had been filled with cotton since last night, was finally crystal clear. I couldn’t sit up or stand, but I moved my head back and forth and took some deep breaths. Outside, the sea twisted gently.

Just as I thought, Aah, the sun’s setting, I heard a loud bang. I looked back and saw the lid of the chest in the center of the small room popping up, exploding outward. Two faces appeared simultaneously above the side of the chest.

Rather than standing up slowly and gracefully like they usually did, the Bamboo leaped out, pushing and shoving at each other, panicked. Yoji leaped in my direction, but he overshot, missing me by quite a bit, while Mustah flew up and slammed his head against the ceiling, like a bird that had somehow gotten into a human house.

Finally, two sets of eyes peered at me from either side. The Bamboo held their breath.

I looked back at them in confusion. “What?”

They said nothing. With no other choice, I waited.

“Aah, thank God,” Yoji sighed, eventually.

“Yeah! You’re not a Bamboo! Honestly, goddammit! I—aah, you did it, Kyo!” Nothing Mustah said as he roughly wrapped his arms around me made a lick of sense. His beard stabbed my cheek painfully. The thick scent of bamboo filled my nostrils. The ticking of the wall clock seemed excessively loud.

They looked at each other and nodded slowly.

“The flame’s not out!”

“Mm. Thank God. I thought I’d maybe put it out by accident. Like I’d done something I couldn’t take back. But I was wrong. The flame’s still here!”

“Kyo! Aah, this is just great, Kyo!”

My mind grew even clearer. “What do you mean, I’m not a Bamboo?” I asked as they finally untied me, my voice slightly hard.

They looked at me together, expressionless. Their eyes glowed eerily with a glittering chill, utterly inhuman.

“So, with Bamboo, you see? Some Bamboo were born Bamboo, and then there are the Bamboo who were once human, who got turned into Bamboo,” said Yoji. “I’ve been a Bamboo ever since I was born. I’ve seen a lot of history, albeit from deep in the mountains. If I told you my real age, I’m sure you wouldn’t believe me. When I came to Japan from China, I changed my name and everything else to start a new life.”

“And I was born a human and got turned into a Bamboo. There’s a whole bunch of stuff I’m still not quite used to. That’s why I’m so stupid and slow. Tch!” said Mustah.

“How does a person become a Bamboo?”

“It’s a blood infection.”

“So that’s why, okay? Something like yesterday was so dangerous. If human blood and our blood… Well, that liquid, if they mix, you turn into a Bamboo. And once that happens, you’re stuck being a miserable creature that lives on blood and can only go out at night. And that’s the end of your growth too—middle school for a century. It’s an existence without a flame. So that was seriously a close call, y’know.”

“I sucked out the blood before it could circulate through your body,” Yoji said. “Well, I’ve been around for a while, so I just sort of knew.”

“But, Kyo, hon, are you really okay?” Mustah asked. “You do look pale, actually.”

I was sitting quietly on the sofa, listening to Mustah and Yoji seated on either side of me. Yoji was holding my hand, while Mustah had a hand on the nape of my neck. They were super overprotective and treated me too much like a child, but for tonight at least, there was probably nothing I could do about it.

My feelings were complicated after finding out that I had just barely avoided being transformed into a Bamboo. Even I didn’t how exactly I felt. Was it fear? Or…

“Mustah, what happened to you?”

“I was almost dead. It was either die or be a Bamboo. So I became a Bamboo.”

“Back then, I came to Japan as an immigrant. I was alone, and I guess I was pretty dirty looking. So people stayed away from me. And I could hardly get any real work,” Yoji said.

“This one night, I was racing along on my motorcycle, delivering kebabs, when I happened to run into some thugs from some organization up on the hill. Stray bullet hits my carotid artery.” Mustah pointed to the side of his neck. “That was that, y’know?”

“I found him, though,” Yoji said. “The scent of blood lured me in. But we have a rule that you can only eat the dead, so I couldn’t drink his blood until he’d died. So I was just waiting politely.”

“Like, for me to die completely. What a creep, huh!”

“No, it’s just nature.”

“But I guess he changed his mind all of sudden. Like, he looked into my eyes and saw something that made him think, ‘Oh ho! Maybe I could get along with this guy.’ ”

“He was dying, but he looks up at me and says, ‘Wash your face. It’s filthy!’ and laughs. And then I realized with a gasp that that was why I couldn’t get a job, why no one would come near me, why I was alone,” Yoji said.

“So he decided to make me his comrade. He infected me. And then he locked me up the first day, y’know? Because I’d get crazed. And it’s true—all your organs and everything in your body change. It’s impossibly painful. But I guess it was a fair bit better than dying like a dog on the side of the road.”

“And then, once it was the two of us, I found work right away. Maybe because I had someone to groom me, to clean me up,” Yoji said. “Well, I still have to change jobs every few years or so, since I don’t visibly age. But it’s a peaceful life. To the point where you have to wonder if it’s actually a good thing.”

“Because you won’t die, no matter what happens.”

“Right. But that’s because there’s no flame. So it won’t go out,” Yoji said.

Having said that, Yoji and Mustah looked at each other. A sad silence rolled by. No, more than sad—regretful. Like they couldn’t completely accept the fact that there was no flame.

Yoji stroked my head. Mustah squeezed my hand.

Even as I thought it was maybe weird to say it now, my teacher’s voice came back to life in my ears. “Um, hey?” I said suddenly. “Can I go to high school?”

They both stared at me blankly, so my voice got smaller.

“I-I was going to say something, you know, but… Mr. Yu checked out scholarships for me. Told me to ask my brother. I mean…anyway, it’s still next year, but…”

The expressions on their faces slowly softened.

“What? You’re going to study, take the entrance exam, go to high school? Amazing!”

“And then you’ll be all grown-up, and you’ll take the exam for employment somewhere and be a full member of society? You? But you were so little! Aah, really?”

“What? So…it’s okay?”

The two of them stood and held hands. And then they looked down on me and, almost overcome with emotion, said, “Of course it’s okay. Thank you, Kyo!”

“Huh?”

“Do you have any idea how happy we are that you’re so filled with hope, so bright, so healthy? How delightful every day is?” said Yoji.

“Okay, now you’re being over-the-top. Right, Mustah?” I looked up toward the other Bamboo. His lips were also pulled tightly together, and his eyes glittered with something like tears. “C’mon, even you, Mustah?”

“Aah, you just keep getting bigger, huh, Kyo! Already in high school next year! You really—y’know, you’re growing up so fast, you’re so adorable.”

“Come on…”

Their smiling faces were dazzling, entirely free of shadow. So I smiled back, albeit bewilderedly. Beyond the glass windows, the sea rolled in and pushed back out, and rolled in again.

Mustah said he wanted to measure my height and led me over to the pillar. He held the ruler up and made a mark. “Whoa! You grew almost another whole centimeter!”

Delighted, Yoji came over. “Kyo, maybe you—you might end up being a real beanpole. I don’t know what we’ll do if you get even bigger than we are!”

“As if!”

The pair exploded with laughter.

The ocean twisted gently on the other side of the window. The lazy breeze seemed soft, and everything looked serene. The flames of the candles, now fairly small, flickered quietly.

Fair

“Kyo. Kyo, hon! Come on! Wake up!”

“Ah!”

“It’s morning, sleepyhead!” Yoji said in his kind voice, and then Mustah got in on the act by poking me, so I hurriedly yanked myself up.

The breaking dawn on the other side of the window burned red. Inside the room, the flickering flames of the candles on their candlesticks were so small they looked like they would go out at any second.

I suddenly remembered the night when, in that very place, I’d rejoiced with the two Bamboo that I hadn’t been infected with Mustah’s blood. It still seemed like yesterday, despite the time that had passed since then.

When I got up from the sofa, Yoji was putting blood packs into the large refrigerator. Mustah took the old camera down from the bookshelf and fooled around with taking my picture while I was still foggy headed. I grumbled to myself, but I couldn’t be angry when I saw that cloudless smile. Quietly shrugging to myself, I went to wash my face. Lately, the pair annoyed me in the way of adorable children who never shut up.

I changed into my uniform—my high school blazer and pleated navy skirt. It was getting chillier these days, so I wrapped a scarf around my neck too. A cute one with a heart pattern to make Yoji relax. Pulled back my brown hair in a ponytail. It really was long like a horse’s tail, and the ends curled up and around.

By the time I returned to the living room, they were already gone. Turning around, I saw the lid of the chest in the middle of the small room slowly being lowered.

“Okay, I’m off then!” I said, just in case.

“Okay! Good night!”

“Don’t forget to take your breakfast with you, Kyo!” came Yoji’s voice.

And then Mustah spoke, sounding dissatisfied. “And what do you hope to get out of making him any bigger than he already is? Kyo’s head is going to go right through the roof…”

Their giggling voices receded and then disappeared completely when the lid came down, leaving behind nothing but a faint white fog. The sense of something else alive in the house abruptly vanished.

I turned on my heel, picked up my heavy bag, and went out the door. Dawn.

Outside the house was a vintage scooter. Not a single one of the students in the high school in the town above was broke enough to be forced to ride a machine like this, but it didn’t really bother me. The custom job Mustah had done on it was perfect, so the thing ran well, at any rate. I set out, riding roughly on the pockmarked road along the coast at daybreak. My shining future was just up ahead.

I climbed the hill. When I went around the curves, the bike and I both listed to one side. My eyes ran over the people of the lower town who were out on the job already, one after another. Delivery. Construction. I often spotted children mixed in among them. I’m sure my old friends were in there somewhere too. But we hadn’t talked in a long time; I wouldn’t have noticed them in that crowd. And I mean, from their side, in my uniform I would have looked like nothing other than one of the high school students from above that they always saw.

I pursed my lips and abruptly remembered something Mr. Yu had told me. Nako, it would be great if you went to high school, studied hard, and then got to go on to higher education. It’d really open up your future options. You’d have a real stable life waiting for you then.

And I want to give you the help you need, he’d continued, with something like a sigh. I don’t want to see any more talented kids trapped in dead ends. I used to be a helpless little kid once too, but I’m a teacher now, so I should be able to prevent at least a few of those hard destinies.

As I approached the town above, the streets started to change. High-class mansions and broad roads like a theme park. There was almost no one out working at that hour.

I drew closer to the school. I could see the cross rising up. Housed in a building that at first glance looked like a church, the Korean-funded school was Christian. I raced onto school grounds, the engine roaring like the machine was angry. I dashed into the library through the back entrance, took my seat, and opened my textbook. I had always been good at slipping in through the kitchen door or sneaking in through a back entrance.

I got right down to studying. Above all else, a scholarship student needed to have grades that were far and away superior to any rivals in the same grade. And that applied double if you wanted another scholarship to go on to university. If you were burning with ambition, you had to put in the effort.

I had never expected to return to the town above in this form. But seeing the person I was now, no one would connect me with the boy who had disappeared without a trace from the organization’s tight grip that night long ago.

Hymns wafted down to me from the school chapel, and I unconsciously started humming along, joining my voice with those of the singers, who were so certain of the love God had for them. Eventually, I twisted the words into blasphemous lyrics that fit neatly with the song to accompany the melody.

Dear Lord of this town. I survived. A miracle. And I came back here. Can you see me? Or maybe you’ve long since forgotten the events of that night, you shitheel of a god?

During class, my head stuck out above the others since I was taller than even the boys. But no one suspected that this girl was actually a boy. It was a strange thing.

A few of the girls could have been called cute, but that was basically as far as it went for me. Maybe I didn’t really have time for that. I desperately followed the characters as they were spelled out on the blackboard.

After class, I worked part-time in a cozy, expensive cake shop. Yoji had reacted with “Someone might find you!” but Mustah had had my back. Scratching his bearded chin, he’d said, “Whoa, whoa, take a look at him, though. Does this look like the same Kyo from back then? He’s about five times as tall. And he’s a girl, y’know? Plus, if he gets a job down here, we’ll never stop worrying about his safety.”

As always, they were both overprotective. And even though they were just barely making ends meet, they absolutely refused to take the money I made at my job. They went and made “Little Kyo’s Piggy Bank” and tucked every bit of it away for me.

Around the time the sun was setting, I changed back into my school uniform and headed back down to the town below. I sped up as I descended the hill. It was cold out. As forward-looking and hardworking as I was, I loved danger and thrills for some reason. So I didn’t let up on the accelerator, not even on the curves.

“Nako!”

When I had gone around the ninth curve, a skinny man jumped out from the side of the plant where they canned the fish brought into the port. This was where they made the cans that Yoji often brought home for me. I nearly ran the man down but managed to come to a screeching stop.

Black, tanned from the sun, eyes sunken. Only when I peered into those black eyes did I finally realize I was looking at one of my friends from that old prefab school. I didn’t jump off the scooter but stayed as I was with my hands on the handlebars. If I let my guard down just because it was someone I knew, I could get punched or have my money or even my scooter stolen. You had to steel yourself, or you’d die pretty quick down here.

For a second, the boy looked like he’d taken a punch to the nose at this wariness from an old friend. He held his tongue regretfully. And then, “Mr. Yu died.”

“Huh?” My voice was high.

The boy went ahead and straddled the back of the scooter without asking. As if he’d completely forgotten that the world we lived in had changed and I had been afraid of him only seconds earlier. He wrapped his skinny arms around my waist.

“Last night! Stabbed on the road near the school. They said his wallet was missing! Even though there couldn’t have been much in it, eh? It was too late when they found him, just a bit ago. He was thrown onto the side of the road like a piece of garbage.”

“Mr. Yu…” I repeated. I heard my voice trembling. “Hey, where’s Niita?” Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen him in ages. My best friend when I was a kid.

I got a sigh from behind. “So, like, I dunno, right? I guess he’s going all over the place to make a buck. When I saw him last month, he said his price had dropped since he got bigger, and it was tough going. ’Cause everyone wants kids. I thought about getting him to tell you or something, but no one knows where he is now. That’s why I was waiting for you, Nako. Here.”

“You were, huh? Thanks!”

“No big. Anyway, they took Mr. Yu back to his house already. His mom and dad’re crying like crazy. His old students are going over there too. You know where his place is?”

Of course I knew. Before I started high school, I would go over there to get textbooks and reference books and plain old books. Like a stray dog hopefully visiting the house of someone who fed it. All the time back then. His house was the usual type of shack, with a roof and walls that just barely kept the wind and rain out.

I gripped the handlebars tightly. Engine humming, I started out again. The wind blew at my skirt.

“Whoa, Nako!” the boy cried out. “Your skirt! People’ll see your legs!” He reached out a hand to try to pull it back down. Even though they were just boys’ legs.

I said nothing and accelerated. My driving became dangerous.

“Nako, don’t cry!” I heard from behind me. “I mean, crying’s not gonna bring Mr. Yu back. He’s gone, you know. Somewhere far away. To a peaceful sky.”

The evening sun chased us from behind. The red light of a sun setting like a sob.

“Kyo! You’re late. We were worr—Kyo?”

Yoji and Mustah came out to meet me when I arrived home around the time the sun had set completely. My eyes were swollen from crying. They had been standing on the patio outside, waiting for me fretfully even though it was well past the time they should have left for work. When I looked up, instead of being properly groomed as usual, their hair and clothes and cuffs were all slightly off.

“Kyo?”

I told them that Mr. Yu was dead, and Yoji gasped. Mustah hugged me silently. I was much taller than they were now. I pressed my face against Mustah’s smooth black hair and breathed deeply of the scent of bamboo I loved so much. We stayed like that for a while, and then I pulled away. I reached out and gently fixed Mustah’s messy hair with my fingers.

“You’re huge, you know,” he said, almost blushing.

“I’m alive.” These words came out of my mouth instead of the usual laugh. It was too much, and I started weeping again. Yoji came around from behind to stroke my shuddering back.

And then the two of them quietly flew off to the north, where the hospital was. I set myself down on the bench on the patio and saw them off, waving. The surging ocean broke against the shore, then retreated.

The figure of Mr. Yu hopping in through the window, his serious face in profile when he looked into scholarships for me. Whenever I showed my face at his shack, he would lend me books to study, tell me about how there were all kinds of jobs in this world. I remembered how he was large and yet somehow ephemeral, like a shadow puppet. And then the face in death I’d just seen. He would never again think or worry about his students, search for hope together with them. He had gone somewhere far away, by himself. To a peaceful sky.

I curled up on the bench. For the first time in a long time, that day I thought I’d forgotten came charging in from the distant past. My sister. A good person with no sins to be punished for. But she had died cruelly, her hopes and future and dignity all ripped up from the roots. Did it even matter that that had happened? Was that really okay? Did the god of our town occasionally look away?

People died young, especially in this town. Without any particular reason. No matter how amazing the person. Even if they worked hard. Mr. Yu hadn’t been given any special treatment as a soul worthy of life. And once you died, you never got to see anyone again. Even the people closest to you—you didn’t get to be with them again for even a split second.

I threw my bag as hard as I could. It opened up, and my textbooks and notebooks spilled out. But I couldn’t muster the energy to pick them up.

I stood stock-still, shaking, and howled for Mr. Yu and for my sister.

Daybreak. The time of day when the echoes of the waves crashing in and receding was at its zenith. Winter was approaching and the days were shorter, so it was still dark outside. Mustah and Yoji came flying home through the night sky.

The sofa, the table, everything in the house was flipped upside down. The place was such a disaster that it was almost surprising it hadn’t somehow spontaneously caught fire too. I stood vacantly in the middle of it all.

Still standing where he’d touched down by the window, Mustah was frozen in place like a Bamboo statue. Yoji slowly came inside in his stead.

“Please.” I was trembling all over. It was the first time I’d even spoken to my beloved Bamboo like this. “I’ll never ask for anything else. Make me a Bamboo.”

“Why on earth would you ask for that, Kyo?” Yoji’s voice was very soft. I’d never heard it that soft before. It was at the lower limit of what a person could produce with a voice. My heart throbbed in my chest.

“Because people die.” My voice was shaking too.

“Don’t you think that’s exactly why the fact that you’re alive has such serious value, Kyo?”

I shook my head stubbornly from side to side.

Mustah winced, as if in shock. It was like the air itself had shuddered.

“I mean, people just die. No matter how hard you try, how hard you fight, it doesn’t mean anything. We can’t escape death. Even the most wonderful life ends eventually. And so cruelly on top of that.”

“But, you see, Kyo—”

“I mean, me! If I go to school today, I might not make it home again! I could be killed by someone, I could be in an accident!”

“Kyo!”

“If I die, I won’t get to see you ever again, Mustah!” I shouted out my true feelings, and then I was running without even realizing it. I wrapped my arms around Mustah, who was slumped lifelessly against the window frame, and hugged him as hard as I could.

He jumped like he’d been burned. Nervous that this fierce love was perhaps a burden, I tried to pull away. And then he reached his arms out, grabbed my shoulders, and pulled me in closer.

My heart was full of pain and joy. Mustah, so tiny now. My nose hit the top of his head. It broke my heart, filled my heart. My Bamboo. My papa. My friend. My lover. My Bamboo. Mustah.

His mouth was at my neck, his shuddering breath warm on my skin. He was silent for a long time.

When I peered softly at his face, he was staring not at me, but at Yoji with a pleading look. Hurt at the idea that this was troubling for him, I hurriedly pulled away and leaned against the wall, averting my eyes.

Yoji stepped over the many things scattered on the floor and walked with a deliberate step toward me. “You have a flame.” His voice still quiet. “Why can’t you see the value of that?”

“But it’s a fire that goes out so fast! If a strong wind blows… If the candle burns down… So soon…”

“And that’s why we love you. We will always love you this deeply.”

Don’t say that again. I mean, love. Tears poured from my eyes.

“Please don’t forget, Kyo, hon.”

“Forget what?!”

“We won’t steal your fire. We want to protect it.”

I suddenly loved him too much, which put me in a truly perverse mood. My words were harsh, directed more toward Mustah that Yoji. “So is it, like, maybe—if you turned a person into a Bamboo, something’ll happen to you if they find out? Like they’ll punish you by burying you in a barrel or cutting off one of your arms or something? Because the Bamboo rules are strict, right? And you don’t want that, right?”

Yoji snorted with laughter at my sulking words. I was startled at the cold look on his face. Afraid that maybe I had really made him mad.

“No, that’s not it, Kyo,” he said, his voice hushed and even. “In fact, just the opposite. The gravest sin for a Bamboo is not to kill a human being, nor is it to tell them the location of our meetings.”

“So what is it then?”

“It’s to live with a human being.”

I gasped. Unconsciously, I looked back at Mustah. He averted his eyes awkwardly, and with that, I knew it was true.

I remembered the words of the Bamboo man who had come along a very long time ago, when I shook and shivered all alone in a mansion in the town above: I’d get more than the barrel underground for sixty years for this. I mean, punishment by fire’s no joke, y’know? It’s pretty much the most painful way for us to disappear from this world. So it’s a no-go. Sorry, ’kay?

The gravest sin? Punishment by fire?

“Bamboo can never tell humans who they really are, and we can absolutely never live with them. I mean, in terms of the bigger picture, it’s a danger for the entire tribe. But Mustah and I have kept the flame that you are a secret for almost seven years now. Because this joy is greater than anything else we’ve known. Rescuing you, helping you grow up, and finally sending you out into the world. Our bodies are cold, and yet our hearts are filled with warmth.”

“Send me out?” Yoji suddenly felt very far away. Almost like a stranger. His voice was cool, his face too devoid of expression. I panicked. “Yoji, what are you talking about? We’re going to live together forever, right? The three of us, always, you know? But I’m the only one who’s human, so I’ll get old. I’m already this tall and all. I’ll grow up, I’ll get old, and someday, I’ll die. You’ll be sad. If that kind of goodbye’s coming, then don’t you think it’d be better to just go ahead and make me a Bamboo too, like just do it?”

“No, I don’t think so,” came the cold voice of refusal.

I looked at Mustah imploringly. But he continued to avert his eyes. His profile was in shadow, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face.

“You—that’s a lie…”

“No. Right at the start, we made it very clear with each other. We’d raise you properly until you were eighteen.”

“Eighteen? Th-that’s soon! So then once I’m eighteen…you won’t protect me anymore? We can’t live together? The two of you won’t be with me forever, after all…”

“Please understand.” Yoji looked pained. “We care about you more than anything else in this world. We want you to grow up and leave this nest. And you’ve been living up to our every expectation. You decided yourself to go on to high school. You’re fighting every day. All the work you’ve done, everything you’ve gotten in return—it’s filled our hearts with pride. You can’t live in this impoverished town with grass monsters forever. It doesn’t suit the wonderful person you’ve become… That’s how it will be in the near future. So, Kyo, hon.”

Vrrm! I felt like I heard the humming of the scooter’s motor. The winding road I climbed every morning to the town above. I loved these people so much that it sparked a desire, an ambition in me to try to fight, to crawl away from my horrible fate. How could I leave them? It was too awful.

It felt like my heart was being yanked out by an invisible hook. My only thought was of Yoji and Mustah trying to get rid of me. And then they would go back to their carefree life, just the two of them. Close, quiet, for however many decades. Without ever growing older. Without changing either. Sleeping naked, facing each other inside the chilled chest. And then they would gradually forget me. On the other side of deep time.

I couldn’t stand it. “Make me a Bamboo too!” I screamed. “If you do it now, there’s still time! Please!”

“We can’t!”

“But I want to be with you forever. I love you so much it hurts. Both of you…Mustah…”

“We do too. We really understand, Kyo.”

“So then—”

“But we can’t.” Yoji came over to me and set a hand on my shoulder. His face came into view below. Afraid, I turned my eyes away. The gentle echo had returned to his voice. “Our dream is for you to grow up and live. And it doesn’t matter a bit if you get busy and naturally forget all this about having lived with some weird grass monsters. Because that is in itself growing up, living and changing.”

“Kyo.” Mustah’s voice came to me from far away. “You understand, yeah?”

“I don’t!”

“It’s like, I mean, everyone, y’know? They all have a monster or two they were friends with when they were kids. If they’re human, that is. But they all forget, they grow up. There might be some faithful ones, sometimes, who remember again once they get old. But for the most part, people get busy, they burn brightly, they live their lives, forever forgetting. That’s…”

Fire? Is that living? Mustah. Yoji. Liars! As if I’d believe something like that!

I thought about coming home to this house one day when I’d turned eighteen and finding no one there, like no one had ever been there, like it had been just a long dream. I didn’t think it was a loneliness I could endure. I didn’t want that, I totally didn’t want that. Mustah, don’t go away. I shook my head, and Yoji slowly held out his hand. His figure standing there before me threatened to disappear even in that moment, and I howled sadly like I’d been bitten, sinking to the floor on the spot.

The night of the full moon. Winter had come. The air around me was frozen, breaking and snapping each time I took a step. The breath I exhaled was white. The moon was stupidly bright. I narrowed my eyes and kept walking endlessly.

…How many weeks had passed? Since that night, Yoji had returned to his usual self. I, however, had become very quiet, and Mustah had been in a bad mood the whole time.

Ordered to return the disaster of a room to its original state, I cleaned it up myself. One of Mustah’s precious cameras was broken, but he didn’t get mad at me in words. In fact, it was so awkward that neither of us could look the other in the eye. He acted like he was poking bruised skin whenever we talked, and I choked at coming face-to-face with the Bamboo in the house.

I hadn’t actually been going to school since then either. It was like the thread of tension that had kept me working like a dog ever since I came to the lower town had been cut with a neat snip. When I thought about getting on my scooter in the morning, my body stopped moving. I simply couldn’t muster the energy to prepare for classes or review or study for exams. The Bamboo couldn’t see me during the day, so they hadn’t noticed yet. I used that to my advantage and spent my days wandering around.

And tonight in particular, the full moon meant that the Bamboo were at their meeting, so I didn’t need to worry about them finding me, no matter how much I noodled around outside. Which was why I was simply walking to nowhere in particular down the frozen coastal road.

I felt like I had seen something move in the shadows. I had walked listlessly to the area where the shacks were most heavily concentrated. People were moving around in rooms here and there, but it wasn’t safe outside, so there was basically no one out walking. The shacks were illuminated by the blinding light of the moon.

The movement was followed by a sound from a corner of the ruined remains of one of the shacks. I went over and peered inside to see a mountain of stiff fabric squirming. A person wearing rags. No, two of them. The one on the bottom was a man in work clothes, while the one on top was a person with horribly tangled long hair. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The arms of the man below were reaching out in my direction, twitching. And then, exhausted of strength, they fell heavily to the ground. Apparently, the person on top was biting his neck. And then that person noticed me and turned around.

It was a woman. Young. She looked about the same age as me. Maybe a girl still in her teens. Her round eyes were dangerous, glittering. Blood was smeared around her mouth.

The face of the man on the ground was in shadow, so I couldn’t see it. But blood was oozing from his neck. When I realized, Ah! This is a Bamboo’s meal, the girl slowly turned up the corners of her bloody mouth. She was smiling.

“Yer pretty good at making yourself invisible.”

And my chest throbbed like it was shrinking. So bittersweet, those words. Like I was hearing them from the distant past. I smiled like I was about to suddenly cry. “Yeah…I’ve always been like that.”

“What?” The girl blinked. That mischievous expression was also like him.

I suddenly felt close to her. “So you’re Bamboo then.”

“You know about us?”

“Walkers of the nights! Drinkers of human blood! You eat living flesh!”

“That’s about it.” The girl smiled again. “You sure know a lot, huh?”

I looked her over carefully. Her pale face was filthy with dust and dirt. Her neck and arms were also jet-black, and she was wearing layers of rags that looked like they’d been thrown away. Even in the town down here, known for its poverty, it was rare to see someone this destitute. Especially a young woman.

And then the bloody mouth. The palms of her hands were red too.

A stray Bamboo then. All alone, she couldn’t groom herself because she didn’t show up in mirrors, so she’d gotten quite filthy. And the fact that she was in a place like this on a night of the full moon meant she was one of those anarchists who didn’t attend the meetings.

She met my eyes and smiled mischievously.

Aah, I thought again. I know the look in those eyes. This particular look, like she was troubled, like she was laughing. Maybe it was a Bamboo thing.

I guess I didn’t look the slightest bit afraid, so the girl approached me quietly. I really wasn’t scared, though. I’d started to feel like I didn’t care if I died right then and there, like nothing mattered anymore.

“What’s your name?”

“Nako.”

“Me, so, like, I’m Marika.”

“Are we maybe around the same age?”

“I became a Bamboo when I was fifteen, and, um…so maybe sixty years ago? Huh? Maybe more? I dunno anymore!”

I slowly reached out a hand to wipe away the dirt from her face. She yanked her jaw away in surprise.

Just then, snow started to fall. We both looked up at the sky at the same time. The first snow of the year, it was desperately beautiful as it danced down. The clouds slid by, and the full moon half disappeared.

I set to work getting most of the dirt off her face. Marika stood still and narrowed her eyes happily. I was just glad I could make friends with another Bamboo like this. Because things were difficult at home. So maybe that was why—or maybe it was because I’d gotten a little weird, after all—I wasn’t really bothered by the fact that there was a dead body right next to me.

“You’re not going to the meeting?” I untangled her hair while I was at it.

“Huh?! You really know your stuff, huh, Nako?”

“Oh. Yeah. Um…”

“I don’t go! Too annoying! But at least I know where the meeting is held!” she declared, thrusting her chest out. And then she looked at me and muttered, “Hey, maybe I could take you?” like she wanted me to like her or something. I nodded, delighted.

Marika had me climb on her back and then shot up into the night sky without any preamble whatsoever. The winter wind howled as it bit at my cheeks. I held my breath, and we cut through the night.

We raced upward through the night sky to a point halfway between the town below and the town above. And then Marika cocked her head as if to say “Huh?” and came back down. Apparently, she’d passed it.

Dropping down suddenly near a slanted factory on the road to school, she let me off behind a tree and stepped toward the building on tiptoes. The exterior walls were covered in galvanized sheet iron and pocked with holes here and there. Then she beckoned me with a hand, and I drew close too. I peered inside as instructed.

The fish cannery. The production line operated or didn’t depending on the day, perhaps because of the poor economy, so even if you were lucky enough to get hired on, there were lots of days when there was no work. Yoji still brought cans home for me all the time, though.

Inside, countless candles flickered and shimmered, densely packed together. The flames were dazzling. People were also in there, standing among the candlesticks. Lots of them. Silent. Stiff, like unlit candles.

Aah! So this is the meeting!

I couldn’t believe how easily I’d made it to this secret place. Lost in the moment, I looked for my Bamboo, Mustah, in his black shirt. But the plant was filled with so many people it was hard to pick him out of the crowd.

The majority of people were wearing hats in primary colors like red and blue, or massive crowns, or had silver decorations swinging on their heads. Right. On meeting nights, Yoji always left the house carrying a red hat. When I saw the Bamboo in a group like this, the hats looked like these festival costumes I’d seen somewhere a long time ago, on indigenous tribes up in the mountains in China. Which I guess meant these were ancient Bamboo who had crossed the ocean from that far-off country. Oh, and sprinkled through the crowd were also people in simple clothing, like what Mustah wore. Maybe these were the younger ones who’d become Bamboo in Japan.

I listened in and heard someone talking. The voice was that of a child. And there was something like a shining silver throne in the center?

Marika yanked on my ear roughly.

“Ow!” I was startled. “W-what?”

“We’re going. They’ll see us.”

“Oh! So like—” She abruptly shoved me onto her back, and in the blink of an eye, we were dancing up into the night sky again. Hyoooo! The wind howled in my ears.

Then I remembered that if you told a human being the time or the place of the meeting, they cut off one of your arms as punishment. But when I thought about it, this stray Bamboo had just killed a living human being and drank his blood. That was a much more serious crime. She’d be locked up in a barrel and buried in the ground for that. So this Marika didn’t go to meetings, and she didn’t care about the rules at all?

I finally started to be a little afraid. Maybe my head had cleared. When I remembered Mustah, I felt homesick suddenly and started wanting to make it home alive again. I was angry and hurt, but I didn’t actually want it to end like this, with me never seeing Mustah and Yoji again.

We flew straight ahead into the night sky. Marika was clearly used to flying since she was pretty good at it, but the ride was a bit bumpy. We began making our way back to the town below.

“So you don’t worry about the rules, huh?” I asked.

Marika snorted in surprise. “Nako, you really do know your stuff, huh! But, like, it doesn’t matter what I do. No, I mean, like, I decide what I do. I always follow my own rules.”

The snowfall grew heavier. The full moon began to disappear. My breath was frozen. I was freezing. Maybe because the body of this stray Bamboo was cold as ice.

“I only eat the bad ones.”

“Huh?”

“Like, guys who kill people and don’t get caught! Guys who trap people and then pretend like they had nothing to do with it! I only pick guys like that.”

So you’re not like God then, eh? I replied, but only in my head.

The god of this town stole lives, ripped them up from the root, and it didn’t matter how good the person was or how hard they were working to move forward. None of that mattered to this god. This god did the deed like a starving beast. Was Marika’s eating people any different?

We danced back down to the place we had started from. The man in the work clothes was already frozen solid. Marika kicked at his body violently and sent it flying. Her long black hair was swept up in the wind and swung around wildly, and I watched in fascination.

“This guy here, he killed somebody!”

“What?”

“I been living under the prefab school for ages. I hear all kinds of things down there. Last month, the teacher there, he got killed, you know. This is the guy who did it. For money, that’s all.”

My whole body shook. I peered at the body lying on its back, a block of ice on the ground. It was the old janitor guy. Mr. Yu’s childhood friend, the one who used to go to school with him way back when. He had aged terribly these last few years. His frosted eyebrows had gray hairs in among the black.

God never did this for me. Retribution. Punishing the wicked.

I stood stock-still and looked down at the terrible death agony on his face.

“Can we hang out again?” Marika’s voice wavered unsteadily and was yet somehow sweet.

The question brought me back to myself. I nodded slowly. It felt like the earth under my feet had tilted off to one side and a tiny me had slipped and fell into the hands of something very bad. But I wanted to see her again. I did. Before I knew it, I was peeking at her wide eyes and returning her smile.

The snowfall grew still heavier.

“It’s time for you to pull yourself together, Kyo! You’ve been totally spaced out for I don’t know how many weeks, and now you’re really losing it!”

“I’m not losing it. Whatever. Shut up.”

“Now, look!”

The next night, I sat on the sofa, mouth half-open, absent even as they nagged and yelled. Yoji was pacing intently around me, while Mustah just watched from the side.

I hadn’t gone to school again. Because I’d been up until dawn, I’d slept the whole day. And when I’d woken up in the evening, I was annoyed at the idea of sitting and waiting for the whiny Bamboo to leave for work. I wanted to go and see Marika.

Yoji had somehow realized that something was going on, but he had no idea what it was, and he was irritated. This was annoying, and I kept my eyes turned away.

“Enough! Just leave him!” Mustah said, in an unusually cold voice.

What? I felt my heart jump and shrink.

“Mustah. You say that, but it’ll be too late once something actually happens. It’s just, what exactly is the something…”

“That’s why I’m telling you—just leave him!”

“Why on earth am I so worried, though? Hmm, Mustah?”

“Let’s just go, Yoji!”

After they finished their nimble boxing-match grooming session, they flew off into the night sky, from where the snow that had started last night continued to fall. I saw them off out of the corner of my eye.

A complicated jumble of emotions welled up in my heart; I was relieved but also so sad I could hardly stand it. At any rate, the straightforward love I had had for them, the simple joy of just being with them, that profound happiness—it all felt like a fond memory to me now. Maybe it was because I had been a child then. Growing up, changing. That complexity.

The flames of the candles flickered fiercely in the frozen wind.

Snowflakes wafted down to the icy ground. My breath was white. The ends of my fingers were cold. The tips of my long hair were almost frozen now. As I wiped at her face, Marika looked like she could hardly contain her delight. She grinned, flashing the pearly teeth in her large mouth. This grin, the look of her face—it was all very Bamboo indeed, so I was also utterly delighted.

Tonight made it a whole week of going to hang out with Marika once night fell. I’d washed her ragged clothing, done up the buttons the right way. Her hair had been tangled like a rat’s nest, so I’d cut it short. I’d put lipstick on her too, a little mark of femininity for the girl Bamboo. And Marika actually cleaned up pretty well, revealing a good-looking girl beneath the mess of hair and rags. But every night, by the time we met, she would be filthy again. I got used to it soon enough and set about tidying her up, my own little boxing match. It was fun.

“But, like, okay.”

“Whaaat?”

“You’re the only one who gets to grin here, Nako. I mean, I can’t see my own face! I haven’t seen it in aaaaaages.”

“But, I mean, you should show up in photos, right?”

“Liar! I did that forever ago, and it didn’t work.”

“Probably ’cause you used a digital camera. Bamboo totally show up on film. I don’t know why, though… Right. You wanna try it?” I said, wanting her to like me.

Marika nodded gleefully, so I got even happier. She let me on her back, and we whooshed through the night sky. When I stepped into my empty house, Marika followed me, ever so timid. She still had her shoes on, though, so I hurriedly got them off of her. And of course the soles of her bare feet were filthy too, so I wiped them off with a cloth.

I pulled a Polaroid camera off the shelf and took her picture. Marika leaped back like a wild animal at the sound of the shutter, and I laughed. I dried the photo that slid out of the machine and handed it to her.

“Whoa! My face!”

“You look really cute in this, huh?”

“Okay! You too!”

“Oh! No, I do—”

Marika grabbed a different camera and pressed the shutter roughly. At an angle so that I was in it too. I snatched the machine from her hands.

“This camera, you have to take the film in to be developed. And if we do that, they’ll find out.”

“They? Who?”

“Oh! Umm.”

“And, like, this house—whose is it?”

I tried to answer, said nothing.

“I got it!” Marika scrunched her face up spitefully, like she was suddenly burning with jealousy. “Some idiot Bamboo’s keeping you here as a pet, right, Nako?”

“No! That’s not it! It’s…” I fell silent for a moment. And then: “They’re raising me. They love me.”

“…Why are you mad? You got a super-scary look on your face!”

“I’m not mad. It’s just, like, I don’t care what you say about me, but I don’t want anyone to say anything bad about them.”

When I rebuked her, Marika’s face grew even stiffer for some reason. She took up the thread seriously and began to mock me. “Oooh, Nako! Bamboo pet! A big ol’ dummy who’ll do whatever a Bamboo says!”

“Marika!”

“Do what I tell you too!”

I was surprised by how cute her angry face was. So cute that I swooned, and my knees almost buckled beneath me. I’d never gotten the appeal of girls, but in that moment, I felt it like a flash of insight. I was seized by some power I didn’t understand. My shoulders slumped, and I hung my head. “Fine. But what am I supposed to do, Marika?”

The girl gave me a triumphant grin.

From that night on, surprisingly, I began to obey Marika’s orders. She made me look into all kinds of things during the day. Which is why I started wearing my uniform, riding my scooter, and going to school again. That said, I didn’t go to class; I just stayed in the library all day. After sunset, I’d meet up with Marika and tell her what I’d learned.

At some point, it started to feel like a dream. Aah, if only I could be close like this with Marika forever. I mean, this Bamboo needed me. So I also secretly thought that someday, perhaps in the near future, she would transform me.

Looking at it from this perspective, I really appreciated how keenly Bamboo needed partners. Since meeting me, Marika was a different person. She was clean, her face animated. The time alone must be too great a burden for grass monsters, given that they couldn’t see themselves in mirrors, lived such long lives, and walked the night. Yoji had probably been like that too, back when he was all alone. He’d been reborn when he’d found the partner he had in Mustah.

But I wondered whom I’d want to be with if I managed to become a Bamboo. Would I hang out forever with my sweet Marika like this? Or would he become my beloved, after all? I didn’t really know myself. I had only just met Marika. But I had been with Mustah since I was ten years old. He hadn’t changed a bit from that night. He was still my Bamboo.

My research during the day was about crimes that happened in the town above—murders, corruption, cold cases. In both the town above and the town below, the police and the courts were ineffectual. It was rare for anyone to be arrested, no matter how terrible the crime. Meanwhile, Marika needed to eat. And also sought the thrill of the hunt. Which was why I found the criminals, and Marika flew.

High up in the winter sky, an Asian girl with short hair and red lipstick appeared, and by the time she was charging down toward your carotid artery, it was already too late. For organization men in expensive suits, getting out of foreign luxury cars. For groups of youths who attacked shops in the middle of the night and left the ancient owners dying in pools of blood. For a man who had “accidentally” knocked his stepchild into a well. Divine punishment dropped down from the sky.

God might not have been able to tell the difference between good souls and bad, but Marika could.

The extraordinary blood-soaked memory of what I had experienced that night long ago lived on in my heart. It had been there the whole time. I was loved, I had a happy life, I worked hard in school—but it was still there. It was always there. Holding its breath, hiding. Which was why this little game of “stealing flames” was so cruelly enjoyable.

One night, we were walking along together when we heard a scream. Instantly, Marika got excited and flew off. I chased after her to find a woman on the ground. A prostitute, still young, slender, elegant. Her makeup was on the thick side, but I could tell she was around the same age as me. She had been knocked unconscious. The ass of the man hunched over her was swarthy, shining. The snow danced down around him, and his skin glistened wetly.

Marika was pleased. She dropped down in a straight line. The man looked over his shoulder.

“Ah! Marika!” There was a strange edge to my voice.

“What?!” Marika stopped and floated in the sky, turning baffled eyes on me. “Stay out of my way!”

“Let him go. Please… He’s a friend.”

“Hey, is that maybe Professor Nako?” Niita called to me quietly. His pants down around his ankles, he stared at me, looking foolish, naked from the waist down. His knees were on the ground, which was wet from the snow.

“Huh? Your friend? This sick pervert?” The look on Marika’s face said she was having none of it. And she wanted blood. She bared her teeth ferociously. I probably wouldn’t be able to stop her again.

I screwed up my face and shouted, “Niita! Run!”

“Huh?”

“You know criminals are being hunted down and killed lately, right? It’s all been me and this girl! So listen, just run! Go! Hurry!”

“You and your friend? Killing criminals? Huh? But what happened to high school?”

“I’m telling you, go! Don’t look back, just run! Don’t ever let me see your face again—” My throat choked shut.

In my ears, I suddenly heard Niita’s clear voice from that day long ago.

Nako! he called, in a voice filled with affection. If you grow up and turn into garbage, then there’ll be nothing for me to believe in in this town.

I dropped to my knees on the spot and buried my face in my hands. I thought of the time that had passed. Grieved for the things I’d loved.

The snow sparkled and scattered, fluttering down in the sky. A faint wind blew. I heard footsteps, Niita running away with my past. The snowflakes were beautiful again tonight.

Niita had changed. And so had I. Now I was partner to a stray Bamboo who hunted people at night. I had also become someone who stole flames.

For a few days after that, I stayed home, even after night fell. I kept my head down when Marika came flying around outside the window. She might have been a stray Bamboo, but even she hesitated to actually come all the way into the house. After a while, she’d give up and fly off somewhere. But she’d be back again the next night, sitting still in the darkness, like a dog waiting for its master.

I opened up my textbooks, thinking I might start going to class again, though it was fairly late for that. But it would be winter break soon, and if I worked really hard, I could probably catch up—that’s what I thought. I wondered if it would work.

And then, at the start of that night, that fateful night, Mustah, supposedly gone off to work, came flying back. Yoji was close behind him, seemingly in a panic, and grabbed hold of Mustah’s arm as if to try to stop him.

What’s all this? I looked up from my textbook.

The look on Mustah’s face was one of absolute fury. I’d never seen him so angry. I figured for sure he’d found out I hadn’t been going to class, and a shiver ran through me.

“Kyo!” His voice was fierce. “Who is this?!” He shoved a photograph at me.

I gasped. It was a picture of me and Marika. From that time when she’d come inside and mistakenly pressed the shutter. I’d carelessly left the film in the camera.

“Um…” I looked up fearfully. “My new friend.”

“Is she human? No! She’s Bamboo, isn’t she?”

“Um…”

“And I’ve never seen her face at the meetings. A stray Bamboo, huh? And that’s this room behind you, isn’t it? You didn’t actually let her in here?!”

“Mustah—”

“What have you been doing at night with a stray Bamboo?!”

“But she’s…not…a bad kid,” I started to say, and then closed my mouth. Because the truth was I knew only too well that Marika was a bad kid. That she wasn’t like Mustah and Yoji, that she was a dangerous anarchist monster. And now I was doing things I totally could never tell them about. Playing at stealing the flames of other humans…

Mustah flipped the table over violently and then moved on to overturning all kinds of other things. All I could do was stagger fearfully along behind him like an idiot. I heard Yoji’s chiding voice, but it seemed like Mustah didn’t.

“Um, okay, it’s ’cause, like, I can’t be close with you and Yoji anymore.”

“Huh?” He whirled his terrible face around.

“I was lonely. And then I met this Bamboo, and she was sincerely, for real, happy to be with me…”

“We can’t be close? What are you even talking about?! We’re the same as always. We’ve just been fighting a bit lately.”

“But you’re going to go off and leave me…”

“You’re totally wrong. We’re not going to run off and leave you. You’re going to grow up and be an amazing person someday. Seriously, Kyo, you gotta get it together!”

“I just thought…like, maybe, if we were friends, she might make me a Bamboo…”

Mustah suddenly fell silent. He narrowed his eyes sharply and stared at me. This was much scarier than the outburst before. I trembled violently and nervously looked down at him. His shoulders slumped heavily.

“What the hell…”

“But, I mean, I—”

“I should never have taken in a kid like you! I should’ve left you where I found you! It would have been better if those men had shot you!”

“Mustah! Take that back!” I shouted.

I tried to grab at him, and Yoji flew between us to stop me. He turned not toward me, but toward Mustah. “That is not okay! Talking so violently like that! Right, Kyo, hon? You’ll just scare the poor boy.”

“But, I mean—no matter what we say, he just doesn’t get it! Is he an idiot?!”

“Mustah! Come on. Maybe he didn’t turn out exactly how we wanted, but you can’t blame Kyo for that.”

“Huh?”

“The flame is free. That’s exactly why it’s a flame.”

“Unh. Well…”

“But when he’s courting danger, we have to sit him down and tell him that. We have to discuss it,” Yoji insisted, quietly.

Mustah slowly nodded and sat down on the sofa. He was about to say something, but then he spat, “I can’t! My blood’s all gone to my head!”

So it was Yoji who sat me down on the sofa next to him and started telling me about how dangerous a stray Bamboo could be. I sat quietly and listened. Mustah went out onto the terrace, turned his back to me, and sat on the bench.

When Yoji was done talking, I knew things I hadn’t before. I promised I wouldn’t see Marika anymore. The Bamboo flew off into the night sky once more. Yoji looked back and nodded gently, as if to say it was okay. Mustah didn’t look at me at all. I hung my head and pulled my knees to my chest.

I left the house and began walking down the night road. Almost as if she’d been waiting impatiently for me, Marika swooped down in great delight, causing gusts of wind to spring up around me. Her playful grin really did resemble Mustah’s look of deep affection, a face I didn’t get to see very often these days. And to be honest, I didn’t want to let this smiling face go. But…

I had very clearly promised Yoji, so in a small voice, I announced, “Sorry, I can’t see you like this anymore, Marika.”

Marika was dumfounded. Her lips trembled. “Got it!” she barked, sounding angry. “Your master told you not to, huh!”

“No. And he’s not my master. If I had to say, he’s my papa. My fifth papa.”

“Fifth?”

“Yeah. The first four were human, though. My Bamboo papa’s the nicest of them all.”

“Weird! But we were having so much fun together every night!”

“Hey, Marika?” I grew worried. In a small voice, I said, “So, like, go find a proper Bamboo partner, instead of human like me. And start going to the meetings, okay?”

The instant I gave voice to this, I realized that, at some point, I had stopped wanting so desperately to be made into a Bamboo. The things my beloved papas had told me over and over and over again—I had taken the long way round and was starting, bit by bit, to accept the idea of growing up, stoking the fire and becoming an adult, and finally, of getting old.

Marika twisted up her face. “I’m not going to any meetings!” she yelled. “They’ll arrest me!”

“Oh, right. The punishment’s sixty years buried in a barrel, right?” I smiled.

“Yeah. Well! I only kill the bad ones, so maybe they’ll take that into consideration and make it shorter. And, like, if they catch me now, there’s that thing in fifteen years.”

“That thing?”

“The dude sitting on the throne at the meeting, all full of himself? Name’s Ruirui, one of the royal family from China, ’kay? Still, he’s nothing more than the shabby king of the Bamboo in this town now, maybe two hundred of ’em at best. There’s this thing, like a festival, celebrating fifty years since his enthronement. So maybe the prisoners in barrels’ll be given amnesty.”

“You sure know a lot about it, Marika.”

A fair bit of snow had piled up on either side of the road. I slipped and nearly fell, and Marika reached out a hand to hold me up. I laughed to myself. Humans are so weird. On a snowy road like this we should just fly, and yet we can’t do that.

The sky was pitch-black. The falling snowflakes shone individually, reflecting the little light there was.

Ah, it’s so beautiful. And you know, it had been a long time since I’d really looked at the sky. This was maybe the first time since the night of the big fight. I felt like I was finally waking up from a bad dream.

The world during the day was actually beautiful. The way the ocean glittered in the morning. The giant columns of clouds that spread out in the summer sky. The radiant green leaves. The heat of the sand on the soles of your feet. The fragrant scent when the sweat that came along with that heat dried instantly in the sunlight.

The Bamboo couldn’t experience this daytime world. They didn’t grow, either. So they didn’t get the fond feeling that this brilliance was only for the present moment. The conviction that I wanted to be a Bamboo started to fade soundlessly from my heart.

“Bamboo life’s kinda weird,” I said, jokingly.

Marika grinned, playfully. And then her face got serious. “So, like, Nako?”

“Yeah.”

“This has been kinda bugging me. But this is goodbye, so I guess I’ll just ask you. Are you, like, a boy?”

“What?!” I panicked.

Which made Marika flustered too. “No!” she continued, hurriedly. “I mean, it’s no big deal. It’s just, you smell different from girls! It started to bug me, you know? But why are you pretending to be a girl? And since when?”

“That’s—ever since I was ten. People are after me, you know? My Bamboo are worried about me, so they made me dress like this. Said I’d be killed if anyone found out I was a boy.”

Marika suddenly got a serious look on her face and nodded. “So that’s it. Okay, I’ll keep it to myself. I won’t tell a soul. You can relax.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, but…are we really not going to hang out anymore?” Her voice was sad. Her eyes seemed soft. She was actually incredibly cute. I could hardly stand it.

I went to answer her but stopped abruptly. “Huh? Marika, did you hear something? From above?”

The next moment, something, not snow, shone in the night sky… Several silhouettes dropped down, lustrous capes fluttering.

“Huh?” Before we knew it, we were completely surrounded. Me and Marika.

Adult men and women. More than ten of them. Most were Asian or Central or South American, but there were also two white Russians. From the way they held themselves, they were definitely not amateurs. They were different from even the guys on the bottom rung of the organization in the town above. There was no wasted movement. They were eerily expressionless.

And they had come flying down from the sky. I thought, They’re Bamboo!

Yoji’s voice came back to me: First of all, people are after her. You can’t run from them.

Marika grabbed my wrist and tried to leap into the sky, but she was slapped down like a mosquito and fell to the ground. She hit the snow hard. My arms were twisted back, and I was pushed down face-first.

From above us, I heard a low voice. “Secured!”

“Two offenders.”

The open but nonoperational cannery. Past midnight. Candlesticks were set out, and candles in a variety of designs hurriedly lit. Then, in what had looked like a vast, empty darkness, I saw face after pale face emerge into the shallow light. They had been there in the darkness. They had been there the whole time. People in garish primary-colored hats and head dressings. The Bamboo who walked the night.

No one said anything; they simply glared in my direction, looking angry. They looked like Mustah when he was in a bad mood. Aah, there really is a Bamboo look, I thought.

In the center of the immense space was the ancient silver throne. Sitting there was a child of twelve or thirteen from the looks of him, a heavy, shiny blue thing on his head that swung each time he moved. At least, he was probably a boy. The pitch of his voice, untouched by puberty, was innocent, in total dissonance with the fierceness of the edge in it. He held a sheet of orange paper in his hand, and this he spread out importantly.

I was in the center of this apparently hastily convened meeting, made to sit on my knees on the ground. One of my wrists was bound by handcuffs, locked to a post driven into the dirt floor.

“Now, now, the first one.” The boy raised his hand ponderously, accompanied by the rustling of fabric, and the Bamboo let their eyes roam.

The boy was probably the one Marika had told me about—Ruirui, the son of the royal family who had come from the depths of China on an immigrant ship. He looked like he had just started junior high school, but I was sure he was actually a super-old man. There was an indescribable coldness in the depths of his eyes. Just like with the other Bamboo, I couldn’t read the look on his face. Not anger, not contempt, nothing. His eyes frightened me to the core; they made me feel like I would be sucked into their pitch-black centers at any moment, trapped in the oxygenless depths of outer space.

On his signal, Marika was dragged out and roughly tossed before him.

“Ah!” I cried out, because I could see at a glance she’d been tortured. Her left arm had been torn off—it was completely gone—and one of her ears was missing. When I looked carefully, I saw that the tip of her nose had also been shaved away. She was half-naked. Her head lolled to one side, her whole body limp. She didn’t meet my eyes.

“Marika…” Had her arm been ripped off because she’d told me, a human, where the meeting was? Had they found out? I was the one who’d made her tell me, though. She’d just been trying to make this human happy.

And then a middle-aged man stepped up to the throne, elegant, with perfect posture, and handed the boy a paper to read. “Name: Marika,” he announced, in a plain-spoken voice. “Age: estimated to be around seventy. Gender: female. And her crimes are two. First, the crime of bringing a human to the meeting place and allowing the human to see, half in jest.”

A murmur rose up. All at once, all Bamboo eyes were on me. I shrank back.

Suddenly, I wondered if my Bamboo were among the crowd. I lifted my face and quickly looked around. But all I could see were pale faces and hats and feet lit up here and there in the thick darkness, so I couldn’t really tell.

“And the crime of killing and eating humans. At least seven confirmed.”

Ruirui continued. “Thus, our judgment is—”

“W-wait!” I shouted desperately, to stop Ruirui from continuing his stilted speech in his high voice, like he was reading from the orange paper.

“Eh?” His voice could not have been colder. With his gaze, he looked at me as though he were peering down at a stray dog on the side of the road.

When I met those eyes, I shivered again. Such cold, empty eyes. But I mustered up my courage. I mean, Marika had said, after all, that they might take that extra stuff into consideration and give her a shorter sentence. And she was in such pain she couldn’t speak anymore. I had to…

“It’s true that Marika did kill people. But…” The Bamboo stirred once again. “She only targeted criminals, liars, and cheats. People who hadn’t been caught for doing bad things. I know it was still wrong and against the law. But, please…have even just a little mercy on her.”

“We have investigated.” Ruirui’s tone was unchanged, still icy. He gave a signal to the older man next to him.

The man explained, “With the cooperation of a human accomplice, Marika found and attacked criminals. The accomplice’s investigative skills were indeed solid, and I think quite sharp for a high school student. Unfortunately, the human she killed before the accomplice appeared was falsely accused.”

“…Falsely accused?”

“A school teacher was assaulted and killed by a thief. Marika attacked the man she assumed to be the criminal. A janitor from the same workplace.”

The image of Marika crouched over him, drinking his blood the night we first met, came back to my mind. So it was that time…

“But he was not the perpetrator.”

“No way…”

“The locals have an inkling of this as well, but it seems they didn’t go out of their way to report it. The criminal is rumored to be a man who was once his student. Someone who lives in poverty and has committed repeated acts of violence on the road at night. Apparently, in this case, he didn’t realize that his target was someone he knew. His name is Niita.”

Niita? I stared up at the man, dumbfounded.

He stared down at me. “The residents started to say this a few days after the incident. No one told you, hmm?”

Ashamed, I slowly shook my head. I mean, I hadn’t seen anyone. The more I chased my dreams, the further away I got from my old friends.

The wind blew in through the open doors, bringing gusts of snow with it. The flames of the candles flickered.

I hung my head.

“Thus it is deemed that there are no extenuating circumstances to consider in this crime,” Ruirui continued in his high voice. “Marika shall be imprisoned for sixty years! Given her presumed age of approximately seventy, she will likely reach the end of her life in the earth, burst into bloom alone, and disappear. Hmph! It’s quite the fitting punishment. Ready the barrel!”

An elliptical-looking barrel came rolling out from somewhere noisily, and they threw Marika in roughly, like she was a thing. Then a heavy machine roared into the factory and started digging a hole in the earth. Dirt came flying in my direction. A lid was placed on the barrel, and then the whole thing was dropped into the hole. Marika’s anguished screams filled the vast space.

I wanted to plug my ears. My knees shook in fear. Earth was tossed onto the barrel in the hole until I could no longer see the top of it. Marika’s voice gradually grew fainter until it faded from my ears.

Silence fell. There was only the sound of the blowing wind now. The candles flickered gently.

“Now, then.” His voice fearsome, Ruirui turned toward me. As if to say, this is where the real party starts.

I trembled, but I didn’t avert my eyes.

“A problem! There is a grave problem! According to Marika’s testimony, this human has extremely detailed knowledge about the life of the Bamboo, yes? Ladies and gentlemen, can this be tolerated? It means that someone has taught this human about us. Someone among the Bamboo gathered together here tonight! From what we’ve heard, this human was somehow lovingly raised by Bamboo instead of receiving the love of a parent, yes?!” Ruirui shouted all in one breath.

I didn’t know how he’d managed his declaration without a moment to inhale. That was scary too, and I was frozen in place, all the courage drained out of me. The chain attached to my wrist shook every so often. The uncomfortable clamoring of the Bamboo grew louder.

“It did take some time to get all this out of her, however. Fwoh! Fwoh! Fwoh! Gyah! Gyah!” Ruirui had a strange way of laughing. His appearance and voice were those of a child, but the way he wrinkled up his face and curled into himself as he guffawed was all old man.

I remembered Marika’s shaved nose, her missing ear. A Bamboo’s injuries closed over soon enough, but anything cut off wouldn’t grow back. She had been tortured because she’d become friends with me. I bit my lip. What was I going to do? Marika!

“This girl…”

Huh?

Ruirui stretched out a plump, childish hand and pointed at me, and I realized that Marika hadn’t told them I was actually a boy, in hiding because the organization in the town above was after my life. Even after being tortured like that, she hadn’t given them a single extra thing.

So that’s it. Okay, I’ll keep it to myself. I won’t tell a soul. You can relax. Marika’s animated voice filled my ears, and I held back my tears.

“Who, I wonder,” Ruirui continued, “is this master Marika spoke of?”

Someone came up from behind me and twisted my arm in the opposite direction. I cried out in pain.

“All we know is the address. A small cottage by the beach. Now, there aren’t too many Bamboo living in that area. Because we are descended from a mountain people and do not care for the sea, hmm? So it would seem we have a somewhat eccentric Bamboo on our hands. We were, however, not able to get a name from the criminal, unfortunately. Now then, let us see…”

The cavernous space was utterly silent. My own cries were the only interruption.

Finally, they dragged people out of the herd of Bamboo. One from deep on the right. And one more from the opposite side. A man with dark skin and a beard in a black shirt—Mustah. A red hat in the folk tradition and a white shirt—Yoji. Both were expressionless, like waxwork. They were trying not to look at me. I too desperately tried to avert my eyes. My arm was wrenched again, and I screamed. Yoji twitched and looked back reflexively. I twisted my neck and tried to get them out of my field of view.

“About the only ones who live in that area are these two, hmm? Gyah gyah gyah!”

“I don’t know. Either. I’ve. Never seen. These people! Ah!” My arm was jerked back so fiercely I thought it would be ripped off.

“It’s obviously one of them!” Ruirui continued in his high voice. With a look in his eyes that said he wouldn’t let us get away. “Or should we burn both?”

Burn? Execution by fire?

I gasped.

Noticing that the color had drained from my face, Ruirui flashed me a curious smile. “Now then, who raised you?”

My mouth was dry. Outside, a bird sang. The sky had been pitch-black, but now a faint light was starting to grow in the direction of the ocean. The flames of the candles flickered and snapped in the wind. The snow was ice-cold.

“It’s getting to be dawn. We’re out of time. Aah, such a bother. It’d just be easier to punish them both, hmm?”

“Stop. Please stop.” I shook my head. And I looked at Mustah and Yoji, my face still turned to the ground.

They both had someone behind them twisting their arms and pushing them forward. I couldn’t read either of their faces. They weren’t signaling me in any way, either, not trying to tell me, Kyo, do this, Kyo, do that. Yoji with his pale skin, his quiet eyes. Mustah’s entire body was stiff either in anger or in fear.

I remembered that I’d fought with Mustah before and we still hadn’t made up. Lately, it was always like that. It had been better when I was a kid. I hated this. I couldn’t stand it.

“Now then, now then.” Ruirui’s voice echoed through the great hall. It was almost like he was speaking right next to my ear. A hypnotic echo.

I inhaled sharply. The snowy wind blew in from outside, threatening to extinguish the flames of the candles. The color of the sky gradually changed.

“Which one were you raised by, Nako, or whatever you’re called?”

“Stop… Don’t ask me…”

“Then they’ll both die. Is that what you want?”

“No! No!”

Mustah. My Bamboo. Please! Don’t die!

I reached out a trembling hand and pointed squarely at the Bamboo in the white shirt.

In that instant, I knew it. I was still only seventeen years old, but this was the greatest sin of my life, the one I’d never be able to atone for. Even so, I couldn’t not commit this sin.

I was basically the same as the shitheel god of this town! Someone who happily destroyed good people without any distinction between the good or evil of their souls.

Or… It suddenly hit me.

Maybe God had never been happy about any of this.

Maybe.

I didn’t know anything. I was so very foolish.

Day started to break, and the Bamboo disappeared one by one from the cannery. The flames of the candles were also extinguished and the candlesticks put away. A stake was hammered into the ground near the entrance, and they chained Yoji to it. And not just one hand like me; they wound the chain tightly around both hands, both feet, his neck, and his torso.

“Now, then!” Finally, I heard Ruirui’s voice echoing throughout the now nearly empty cannery. He too was making to leave, receding step-by-step to somewhere. “Yoji shall be burned at the stake. For the crime of taking in a human child, raising it, and teaching it details about the Bamboo. This is a very serious crime. Gyah!”

Mustah had vanished at some point. Ruirui’s laughter also departed up into the night sky, while I sat stunned on the ground.

Yoji had only just talked with me at the house. Calmly but clearly, he had carefully explained to me the reasons why I couldn’t spend time with a stray Bamboo. In the end, I had agreed, and we had nodded at each other in understanding. Even though he had had such a small amount of time left in this life of raising me, of courting this danger.

“Accept everything,” Yoji said, mysteriously. And then he cocked his head to one side and stared at me.

Yoji! That face! I would never forget it as long as I lived.

Finally, all of the Bamboo were gone from the plant, leaving only Yoji and me, chained up. The sun slowly rose in the eastern sky, and the weak light of winter shone in through the open doors. A cold white fog—no, smoke started to rise up from Yoji’s body. I let out a long scream.

He looked straight up at the sun. Eyes narrowed at the brilliance of it. His body was still, like he was praying. It wasn’t fear.

But the moment I understood that it was all over—that face in profile! What can I say?

As I watched his pale skin burn black, my face crumpled. His body also writhed and burned, smoking. He was ostensibly being burned at the stake, but there were hardly any flames. Yoji gradually grew smaller, charred. There was the smell of charcoal, and then finally he shook slightly. And vanished.

Yoji had been around for a long time. Since long before I had been born. He had seen history. He was the kind of person who reread a book of poetry he’d brought over from China and wept. Gentle, lyrical, and wholehearted in raising the human child he had taken in for just over seven years.

What does it mean to be alive? I asked myself. The answer was, of course, the same.

That your heart moves. Love someone, find something beautiful, seek growth, be incredibly ashamed of yourself. And feel strongly.

This Bamboo’s kind heart had moved like that in life. And yet.

All the good people went too soon. The boss had taken my sister. Niita, Mr. Yu. Me, Yoji. We had made them die!

The peaceful sky somewhere off in the distance was overcrowded with the souls of good people.

Staring at the charred ground, nothing but the stake and chains remaining, I sent my heart off into space. I fled into my memories of sweet, pleasurable days.

Eventually, the sun grew high in the sky, and I could hear the voices of children playing from afar. But I couldn’t bring myself to cry out “Someone!” for help. My head still hanging, noon came, and then the day fell back into shadow bit by bit.

And then, around the time the dusk shone red, announcing the arrival of night, the sound of footfalls came from a distance. When I lifted my head, I saw a human silhouette racing into the plant. I strained my eyes.

It was a man covered head to toe in black fabric. Something like the curtain for a darkroom. His face was hidden beneath it; I couldn’t see a bit of it. He held a large ax in his right hand. He looked like the god of death himself. But I wouldn’t flee anymore. I simply stared up at him.

There was a voice. “Kyo!”

The brandished ax shot into the air. The blade glittered sharply.

“I’m here!” Mustah’s voice.

The ax was brought down heavily. With a dry sound, the chain binding me to the stake was cut. I felt a yank on my arm, and then I was inside the thick, black fabric. Before I knew it, arms were wrapped tightly around me. The scent of bamboo filled my nostrils.

You came to save me? But it’s so dangerous still. The sun’s not down yet. Yet you worry about someone like me? How deep does your kindness go exactly?

Mustah…

I tried to say I was sorry, but the words wouldn’t come out. Even so, I forced my voice out to apologize finally, trembling.

“Kyo.” Mustah’s low voice came in my ear. “Look.”

“I’m sorry, Mustah. I’m so sorry. Yoji… I…I…”

“You, okay, you stayed with a couple of guys like us.”

“Mustah.”

“And don’t go saying you didn’t have anywhere else to go!”

“Uh-huh…”

“Come on. Don’t hurt like this, Kyo. Forget it already. Everything about this night. This had to be our fate, the three of us. The good stuff, the bad stuff, all of it… This kind of thing’s in that book of Chinese poetry Yoji liked. Although I can’t actually read it. A long time ago, he told me. On a night when we sat next to each other on the bench and talked.”

I wiped my tears away and looked at Mustah. Under the black fabric, I couldn’t really see his face. I couldn’t tell if he was grinning foolishly or was morose and sullen.

He helped wipe my tears away with the back of his hand, clumsily. I held my breath inside the fabric.

“Mustah…”

I heard a noise and saw a different blade had appeared in his hand at some point. Scissors. He cut off the hair that hung down to my waist. My head shorn, I covered it with both hands.

“Change your clothes.” He handed me Yoji’s shirt and jeans.

Why? I asked with my eyes inside the black fabric.

“You’re not safe anymore. I mean, you know too much about the Bamboo. They won’t kill you, y’know, but they’ll probably lock you up somewhere and keep you there until you die.”

“Then…”

Mustah’s eyes glittered under the fabric. I stared back at him, clutching the clothing to my chest. The answer came back to me.

“So! You have to run!” And we flew.

Given that he had fabric over his head and was holding me on top of that, Mustah’s flying was much more erratic than usual. He spun round and round, descending abruptly until we were scraping along the ground before pulling back up again. Still, we somehow managed to finally make it to the small train station in the town above.

The sun sank down into the horizon. Mustah threw the fabric aside and finally revealed his face to me. I was relieved to see his usual smile. Or maybe he was just trying to put me at ease.

We slipped through the gates of the station and ran into the building together. Now that night had fallen, people would be coming to find me once they realized I’d escaped the cannery. Mustah found a train heading toward a distant town, the next one to depart from the station, and he thrust me onto the platform, practically flying even now.

“Kyo, this one!”

I leaped aboard the train in a trance, and then something was shoved at me from behind. Something cold. I took it wordlessly. “Little Kyo’s Piggy Bank.” With all the money I had made at my part-time job.

I didn’t have time now to think through all the different things going on. I had to live. Fight. I had to run.

But…Mustah! Wait, my Bamboo!

“I won’t see you again?!” I shouted, and everything felt wrong somehow. I mean, I was back to looking like a boy now. For the first time in seven years. Once my long hair was cut, my cute scarf removed, my skirt tossed aside, I was instantly the very picture of a seventeen-year-old boy. My thin, girlish voice was strange now. My words floated off into space, blown away by the winter wind. I felt like they might even shatter like actual ice.

But still. I did actually adore my Bamboo the way a girl my age would.

“Is this the end? For us?”

“It’s not gonna be the end or anything, Kyo!”

“Mustah…”

“I mean, the end of us is your real beginning, y’know!”

“Mustah!” I shouted, resisting. No, not that. I knew it. I don’t want this. To forget, how awful, no. Mustah…

More and more people crowded onto the platform. Mustah quickly looked around in a panic, fearful of the possible pursuers among them, thinking that they might have already found us. And then he peered at my face.

I was crying again. I sounded pathetic. “I’ll never see you again? That can’t be, Mustah. My—Mustah! I mean, Yoji’s gone now too. If I go away too, like…”

“What, you worried about me? Hey, come on, I’ll be fine!”

“That’s—” I hiccupped. “But who’s going to comb your hair all nice and neat every night? Who’s going to straighten the collar of your shirt for you? You’re not actually going to live with another Bamboo? Not with me, not with Yoji? That’s…”

The house where the three of us had lived popped up in the back of my mind. The house I had left last night like always, not expecting that I’d never be able to go home to it again. That beloved house filled with memories. A new Bamboo, a stranger to me, would come and go, sit next to Mustah on the bench, and then together… Rage suddenly started to burn coldly in my chest.

Mustah shook his head. “He was the only partner for me.”

These words, spoken with such conviction, now slowly wounded me for some reason. “H-he was…”

“So, from now on, well, I’ll just go it alone.”

“Alone?”

“Stop crying, Kyo. As of tonight, you’re a boy again. No, as of a long time ago—the truth is, you were always a wonderful boy.”

“Mustah!”

The time for the train to depart was approaching. Crowds of people walked along the platform. People jumping onto the train in a panic, buying things at kiosks. I still had things I wanted to say, but I could no longer speak. And then the doors rattled shut, and we were separated by glass.

In a panic, I ran along inside the carriage and yanked open a window. Mustah also ran down the platform, drawing closer.

“Mustah!” I could only say his name, my heart filled with love.

He put a hand to my chest. Huh? What’s he doing?

“Don’t forget, Kyo!”

“What? What? Mustah!”

His eyes were terribly quiet. I held my breath. A powerfully gentle light shone on his face as though the late Yoji had possessed him. Like Yoji was there too, guiding me somehow.

“You have a flame here. You’ve always had it, from the moment you were born. That’s why we protected you so desperately. You are fire. Until their very last day, until their lives are exhausted, humans are fire.”

“Mustah…”

“Humans are fire!” The train started moving with a klank. “Don’t forget!”

Mustah ran along the platform, chasing the train. I heard the voice of that other Bamboo, the one who was gone now, gently overlaid on Mustah’s.

“As long as you always remember that, you can live through anything, no matter what kind of hard times life has in store for you. Fire! We loved that bright, special flame so deeply it practically made us crazy! No one else in this world could ever take your place. Each and every human being is a special fire! So don’t go out. Live. Please, promise me you’ll try. Say you’ll fight. An eternal promise between the flame in your chest and your Bamboo, a promise that can never, ever be broken!”

“Mustah!” I bobbed my head up and down. “I promise. I promise. My Bamboo. My fire for you.”

I promise to live. So you don’t have to worry about me anymore. Don’t fret over me. Don’t hurt for me. I’m okay now. I know I’ll get stronger. Tomorrow I’ll be a different me. And the day after that, yet a different me. So…

I stretched my arm out as far as I could and gripped my Bamboo’s hand. His dark skin. The palm of his hand, cold like ice. My own hand was horribly hot, like it might melt my Bamboo’s.

I wanted to say, I love you. I wanted to become docile like a small child again and just tell him how I felt. I wanted to be straightforward. But I couldn’t say it. I had already gotten too big for that.

So instead of words of love, I simply said his name over and over.

Rocking back and forth, the train picked up speed. And then…

Mustah.

Mustah.

The train pulled away from the platform. I stuck my head out the window and strained my eyes and watched as the silhouette of my Bamboo standing stock-still on the end of the platform, seeing me off, grew more and more distant.

The train hurtled forward. Time, too, passed instantaneously, a train itself running along a different set of rails.

Girl

Fifteen years passed. I managed to live undiscovered and uncaptured by the Bamboo administration of that distant town.

When I thought about it, they had cast a fairly tight net around that place with their power, but perhaps it was something like a spiderweb, a barrier stretching out in the sky above the town. If a human being ran far enough away, their power suddenly couldn’t reach you. Plus, they would have been looking for a girl.

That night, on the train, I ran from them, with nowhere in particular to run to. And then I got off in a town far, far away. Completely unlike the town where I was born and raised, it was an easygoing, peaceful place, with none of those tribal organizations of my home. And without the gangs, the economy of this town was quietly stable, so there was no great difference between the haves and have-nots.

I didn’t have parents or an academic record. Even if I’d still burned with it, the ambition I’d had to go on to higher education, to move up in the world, to become rich—almost like a desire for revenge against fate—was impossible for me to realize now. But like a fever being cured, that desire had completely vanished from within me.

Other things were more important to me now. Living in peace. Finding people to love, loving them. Being grateful.

I worked part-time at a cake shop, helping customers. Eventually, I was allowed to watch the bakers and learn their jobs so that I could help out, but only when there weren’t enough people around to get the job done. My hands were nimble, and I was a quick learner, so soon I was working in both the front and the back of the shop. Three years into it, the owner said she’d make me a regular salaried employee. That said, I was a contract employee, and that contract had to be renewed every year.

Sometimes, I’d remember the time I worked at the cake shop back when I was going to that academic school. It would suddenly hit me that I’d worked as a girl then, and it felt strange. Almost like it hadn’t actually been me.

Shortcake, chocolate cake, fruit mousse, cookies—I learned how to make them all with my eyes closed. Some evenings, my older colleagues would take me out to drink. I started spending time with girls too, although I never had anything like the dazzling radiance of a first love. Maybe because I was used to girls, having been one. The fact that my first love had actually been a Bamboo and a murderer started to fade from my mind.

In my midtwenties, at the invitation of a man I’d gotten to know at a bar, I joined an amateur theater group as a hobby. I was tall, if nothing else, and there were few male actors, so I was a priceless treasure. I got a fair number of speaking roles. And some people came specifically to see me, so that was fun. It tickled me to hear my own name shouted out from the audience. Aah, I’m alive, I’d think. I wasn’t going by my real name, Kyo, though, or my sister’s name, Nako. I was using yet another, different, name.

And so the days passed like this. I came to cherish the people I met in this new town. When I thought that I might suddenly never see them or the town again, all of it felt unbearably precious to me.

I had friends too, and sometimes lovers. The theater troupe disbanded after I turned thirty. That night was like the end of a festival. At the closing party, we all slapped each other’s shoulders, telling each other, “Aah, we were so young, eh?”

Eventually, the cake shop, which was in a residential area, opened up a small branch in front of the station, and it was decided that I would work there. I thought about maybe moving closer to my new workplace. Closer to the station, the rent was higher, but I could get a smaller place to offset that, and at any rate it was just me living by myself. I talked it over with my lover, and she was really put out for some reason. “Hey, whoa,” she chided me. Like, wasn’t it about time I settled down, wasn’t I getting to be a little old for this?

Maybe it was inevitable, but, well, I did love her, and before I knew it, she was about to be put onto my family register. I couldn’t help feeling that she’d played me a bit like the proverbial fiddle, though. Well, whatever. In any case, it had been fifteen years. You grow up. I worked hard, and I laughed every day.

It was a hot summer day that year, a day the news said was the hottest of the year. That night, to celebrate our engagement, a friend had planned a simple party for me and my fiancée. I closed the shop and cleaned up, and then I checked the clock and flew out the door.

There was a girl standing at the bus stop in front of the station, looking extremely troubled. She seemed like she wasn’t from around here. Her clothing was somehow different. And when I saw her looking up at the bus schedules, then peering at a map, I figured she was lost.

She was wearing a large white medical mask, the kind you wear when you have a cold or it’s allergy season. Her long hair wasn’t done; it fluttered in the wind, a black curtain. Her physique was small, and she was thin to the point of being skinny. Well, she was like a lot of teenage girls. She wasn’t incredibly attractive, but she wasn’t bad either. Uninterested and in a hurry, I passed by her.

“Uh, um.” The girl looked up at me.

“Hmm? Me?” With no other choice, I brought my feet to a halt, and the map was thrust at me. I was surprised. No greeting, no “excuse me,” no “could you tell me,” no “please” or “thank you.” It was clear she wanted to ask the way, but still, the kids these days honestly had no manners. Exasperated, I begrudgingly took the map.

“Where are you trying to go? You can give me the map, but I still don’t know what you want.” I was also in a hurry, so my reply was curt. But I couldn’t just walk away from a child in trouble. The whole situation was annoying.

The girl stared at me like she was horribly disappointed. I looked back at her, my face blank. Finally, she pointed vaguely at some spot on the map. She was so sullen it was almost rude. I realized her pale finger was shaking, and an odd feeling sprang up in me.

“What? Here? That’s close. Don’t get on at this stop. You’ll want to get on the number five over there, okay? Get off at the seventh stop, and it’ll be on the other side of the road. But, listen, what business does a kid have in a place like that? It’s a temple, you know?”

“Huh? A temple?”

“Hey now, you. You pointed to this spot yourself, didn’t you?”

“I know!”

“Huh?”

“I know already!” She sounded even more obstinate. But at the end of her declaration, she shuddered, like she was about to burst into tears.

Bewildered, I looked at her again. Maybe I knew her? But the outline of her face covered by the mask and the two eyes didn’t look familiar.

“Thanks, Nako. Okay, bye!”

I blinked.

“Take care, ’kay?”

In that instant, I felt a cold wind blowing at my feet, mixed with snow, knocking me back to the other side of the distant past.

Beautiful tears like pearls welled up in the girl’s eyes. One dropped onto the mask and wet it. Her hair was long, and it covered her ears, so I couldn’t tell if both ears were there or not. Unconsciously, I shifted my gaze to the arm opposite the one that had thrust the map out at me. The long-sleeved shirt flapped in the wind. She was missing an arm.

But…I couldn’t remember her name!

Then the bus arrived, and passengers came trudging out of it. The sidewalk in front of the station was suddenly full of people. The girl turned on her heel and started walking away quickly, as if to flee.

What was your name…?

I stood there rooted to the spot for a while and then hurriedly moved to go after her. My first love—she had come all the way from the distant past, that winter’s day fifteen years ago, to see me.

Just like she had been then, she was young. No, childish. And like always, she was straightforward. Right—she had protected me, hadn’t she? Even though they had tortured her so horribly. She probably still hadn’t told them I was actually a boy, that they’d never find a girl no matter how hard they looked. We had loved each other that much…

What was your name?

I seriously couldn’t remember. Memories of how close we had been surged back into my heart, a mysterious surf. But I couldn’t remember her name. I…

I pushed through the crowd, advancing slowly. I never said thank you. I left, and that was the last time I saw you.

Aah!

You told me, didn’t you? That in fifteen years, there’d be the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Ruirui’s enthronement, the descendant of the royal family currently wearing the crown. You said criminals might be pardoned then. It had been exactly fifteen years. Did you spend all those years alone, buried deep underground in the cannery of that far-off town? And then you were finally dug up from the earth, let out of the barrel, and you went looking for me. Tonight, you found me, you came to see me. Talked to me, pretending to ask for directions…

Did you believe with your uncomplicated heart that we would smile at each other and delight in our reunion? For a Bamboo, the memory would have been like yesterday, after all.

You. That day long ago, you…

Who on earth are you?

“Heeey!” I called the girl, idiotically. “It’s you, isn’t it? It’s me! I can remember. I know I can remember. So just hold on. Heey! Heeey…”

Heeey…

The crowd in front of the station only grew larger. For the briefest moment, I thought I saw an empty sleeve flapping in the summer wind, but I quickly lost sight of it.

I ran. Sweating, I kept looking for her. But she was already nowhere to be found, this ghost of the past who had come to me for a fleeting moment on a summer day fifteen years after the fact.

Her voice came back to me, so intent on that long-ago evening: Weird! But we were having so much fun together every night!

Bamboo…

Bamboo don’t change. They keep thinking the whole time. Throughout their long lives, the whole time. They don’t get older, so the nature of their thinking doesn’t change either. It wasn’t the Bamboo. No. It was the humans who actually forgot that they had been close.

I finally understood what the two gentle Bamboo had told me back then.

Our dream is for you to grow up and live. And it doesn’t matter a bit if you get busy and naturally forget all this about having lived with some weird grass monsters. Because that is in itself growing up, living and changing.

I stood frozen in the throng and bustle, watching the vision of the girl departing, feeling at my wit’s end as I watched the last traces of the past glittering and disappearing. And then I started slowly walking in the opposite direction. I staggered and stumbled in my sadness and shame.

I was fairly late by the time I showed up at the restaurant where my friends were gathered. My fiancée was sick of waiting for me and looked up with relief at my arrival.

“Sorry I’m late.” I smiled. “Sorry, guys.”

They raised their voices in welcome, and I was suddenly relieved. Aah, I thought, with a pain in my heart, still feeling the same shame at myself as before I’d stepped into the restaurant.

I had to at least cherish this now. That was all I could do. I had promised to live. To change. To never give up. That day…

My Bamboo, supposedly more precious to me than anything. Aah, that day…

Kyo! Humans are fire!

One of my friends started a toast. Glasses were clinked. A bus drove by outside, rocking from side to side. I heard the sound of the engine. The taillights shone hazily, but it passed by soon enough, and it grew dark again.

Aah. But…your… What’s your name? Aah…

And then, just like the buses that roared as they drove by the restaurant, time passed. Years in the blink of an eye.

Face

Krnch. Krnch. The soles of my leather shoes on the ground. My head was hanging, my eyes resting on the tips of those shoes. The hot, dry sand swallowed my feet and released them again. Sweat on my temples ran down the back of my neck. I could hear the crashing of the waves from the ocean behind me. The merciless summer sun felt like it would melt anything and everything.

“There it is! The cottage there!” The young man was a little ahead of me, but now he stopped and stretched a hand out slowly, pointing.

I squinted. And there it was, that familiar house, a distant mirage in the summer afternoon. Aah, it hadn’t changed at all. Or maybe it was a bit weathered by wind and rain; the color seemed like it had faded. Or maybe it was just that I remembered it wrong.

A sign was stabbed into the ground at an angle, for rent in big red letters.

I smiled slowly, sinking into the sand.

I stepped timidly onto the wooden terrace once so familiar to me. Grains of sand were stuck to it, but the wooden bench where the two young men had so often sat next to each other was exactly as it had been.

“Well, it is an old building. But the price is very reasonable for just that reason. I’ll open it up now! Whoops! The fitting’s a bit off, hmm? Have to get that fixed… Oh! The former residents just left everything behind—furniture, boxes, a whole bunch of stuff. If you wanted to rent the place, though, of course we’d take care of all of that for you… Wait, what?”

“I said, it’s fine the way it is. You don’t have to throw anything out. I’ll take it.”

“Really! Hmm, this place?” The young real estate agent looked up at me curiously. Perhaps he was starting to think that this tall older man was actually a mysterious character.

I laughed quietly for him. “The truth is, when I was a boy, I used to live around here. I left when I was seventeen, but when you hit my age, you suddenly get homesick. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia, you know? Ha ha! At any rate, seniors can’t exactly pay a fortune in rent, either, hmm?”

“What? Around here?”

“Mm-hmm. Back then, we had all these prefab houses crammed together in that empty lot, you know? It was an elementary and junior high school. I suppose it’s long gone, though.”

“Oh, no, it’s still there!” The man suddenly grew overly familiar and came closer. A cloud-free smile popped up on his face. “I went to school there too. So you’re an alumnus, hmm?”

“Oh! Looks like we have something in common then.”

We smiled brightly at each other. The lease was proffered, and I accepted it. We went inside.

My heart suddenly started pounding wildly. The living room was basically unchanged from the way it had been back then. The same sofa and table. The bookshelf. Only the wall clock was different; the hands were frozen, motionless.

“Hmm? What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing.” I shook my head. I noticed the exaggerated look of surprise on the young man’s face, as though he were worried that the mysterious old man might collapse and die right then and there. I grinned reassuringly and then breathed deeply to calm my heart. I sat down on the dusty sofa and spread the lease out before me.

Beyond the glass doors, the dazzling summer light. The glittering blue ocean. The waves echoed invitingly.

After that night, I made my fiancée an official member of my family register. Eventually, we had a single child, a boy. I was put in charge of a new branch of the cake shop, and I moved my family to a bedroom town. Our son grew up, got a job, started his own family.

I was past sixty now. One day—well, last winter, our son decided to take us on a trip in the name of filial piety. But I had work that clashed with the dates of the trip, and I was forced to stay home. So he and his mother flew alone together to Shanghai, since it was the time of year when the famed hairy crab was at peak deliciousness. There was an accident. A large something, a bird, possibly, flew into the engine of the commercial plane they had boarded. The airplane dropped into the ocean between Japan and China. Almost nothing was recovered.

I had two grandchildren, but my son’s wife and her parents took them in. Around the same time, I was diagnosed with an incurable illness, a disease which appeared to be slowly advancing. How much longer would I be able to keep fighting?

So I decided to move. The people who had pursued me in the past—be it the organization in the town above or the Bamboo government—had likely long forgotten about me, after all these years. In which case, I figured I would go back to the town where I had lived so long ago. And I ended up renting this beloved cottage. The lease was signed in no time at all.

This would most likely be my last residence.

Now, the following morning, I brought over my very few belongings and moved in right away. I had breakfast, and then I rolled up my sleeves and got to work cleaning the dust-covered floor.

It appeared that my Bamboo had left abruptly, taking basically nothing with him. What on earth had happened, I wondered. A foreboding feeling flitted through my heart; maybe he had long ago departed from this world. But when I went into the small interior room, the large wooden chest that should have been there was the only thing missing. So I reframed the situation. He was still in this world, he had just moved away. Probably someplace far away.

Other than the chest, though, pretty much everything was where it should have been. Even the candlesticks of assorted designs placed throughout the room.

I neatly wiped away the dust piled up on the furniture and casually opened the cupboard, where I got a surprise. The old cameras were all still there. Together with a neat pile of 8 mm camera film spools. I slowly reached out and picked one up. And then my eyes fell on another spool.

Abruptly, it felt like a hand was squeezing my heart tightly. Written on the spool was “Kyo,s here!” in magic marker.

I went and looked for the projector I was sure was in the interior room. My hands started to shake.

In the smaller room, dim in the evening light, I got ready to project the film onto the unfinished, dirty wall in place of a screen—and then stopped. I needed some time to prepare myself mentally. I made some tea, drank it, made another cup, and drank that down too before I finally stood up again.

I went back to the projector. I reached a hand out. The film started rolling, clacking away. I leaned against a pillar and watched closely with nervous eyes at a vision from the past.

A young man with pale skin and a shy, thoughtful look appeared on-screen. I groaned. Yoji.

In the back of my mind, I saw again Yoji’s face in profile, burning, bathed in the light of the morning sun. Accept everything. His voice filled my ears. My back still up against the pillar, my body jerked liked I had just been punched hard in the gut. The memory of my crime on that distant day came rushing back. I mustered up my courage and turned intently back to the screen.

Oh! I was stunned to see how young he had been. Much younger than my own son, of course. He looked somewhere between boy and man, didn’t he? I had relied on him so completely, so wholeheartedly, back then, this youth with his thin lines. It seemed funny to me now.

The camera moved down to the young man’s feet. And then, there…there was a little boy. I reeled in shock once more. The boy’s limbs were skinny and fine, and he looked pale.

This…what was this?

Objectively speaking, he was not at all cute. I couldn’t find any special appeal in him. Huh. So I was once nothing more than one of those surly children you so often see? An uncomfortable doubt grew in my heart. Why would they go out of their way to save the life of this dull child? Why had they risked such danger for him? And why had they loved him the way they did?

Yoji jokingly pretended to bite my neck. And quickly stopped, like he was embarrassed. The look on his face was so shy, so kindhearted. He slowly lifted his head. He looked this way and said something as he stretched out a slender arm.

Ohh, he’s changing places with the cameraman.

A bearded young man with large, jet-black eyes and dark skin appeared. Unblinking, I stared at the figure of my former Bamboo. He too was incredibly young. He looked almost childish. With an innocent smile on his face, he grabbed me and tossed me up toward the ceiling. A shrill laugh was ripped out of me. My voice wasn’t at all endearing, either. It sounded hysterical, an unpleasant din.

But he, my old Bamboo—he alone dazzled the eye each time he laughed, his face shining. In this scene from my past, the Bamboo were beautiful. And I was an ugly child.

Hey, Mustah? Yoji? Back then. Why…did you love me?

Klak, klak, klak. The projector sounded dull somehow.

Finally, the film ended. I let out a long breath. A mysterious pain lingered deep in my heart. As if a long period of time I could never get back had run right by me.

That night, thoroughly exhausted, I took my medicine, and I had no sooner sat down on the sofa than I was fast asleep.

The sofa was sweetly familiar, a fond memory. I had used it as a bed when I was a child. I had slept here with my feet sticking out even after I had started high school and had grown too tall for it. And now too, when I abruptly woke in the middle of the night, I found I had rolled over so that my legs were dangling from the knees down against the side of the sofa, feet on the floor.

I had woken up to the sound of someone apparently coming into the house. It was summer, but I felt a cold breeze on my face. I suddenly called out the names of my wife and son. Is it you? Are you here? But perhaps I only thought the dead had come for me because I was tired and still half-asleep. I opened my eyes and looked around, but there was no one there, of course. I was alone.

Well, whatever. I’ll just take it slow.

I fell once more into a deep sleep.

One day, rather belatedly, I realized that there was no clock among the meager possessions I’d brought with me, and I looked around, troubled.

I reached out to the old wall clock, frozen in a moment in time ever since who knew when. Now that I was an adult, my hand reached it easily. I adjusted the dusty thing and carefully wound it. The clock groaned unpleasantly, and then the hands started to move once more. I was overcome by the strange feeling that time wasn’t flowing into the future, but rather returning to the past with each tic of those hands. But it wasn’t a bad feeling. Unconsciously, I laughed silently.

I let my gaze wander casually over the pillar I had been leaning against. It felt like the clock had triggered some memory from the past.

Oh! I realized what it was. I crouched down on the spot and looked quietly at the marks on the surface of the pillar. Several horizontal lines. The day and year written in marker. The lowest mark was somewhere between my chest and my stomach.

Aah. The youthful voices of the Bamboo shouting in delight. They got so carried away as they measured me. I was so little back then. I could almost see the scene before me again, like it had also been restored to me in the 8 mm film.

I got to my knees and hung my head helplessly. I stared out of the corner of my eye. Had I really been that little? It was such a long time ago. I stroked the pillar endlessly with the palm of my hand.

I had felt confused, uncertain, the day I returned to the cottage, but over the past few days, those feelings had started to shift into something more peaceful. Each time these bits of the past drew close and gently wound around me, I was embraced by a familiar fondness and a distant love.

The waves sounded out as if to encourage me.

I got used to my life alone in the cottage. Eating through my meager savings, I read books, listened to music. I went to the hospital, got my medicine, came home.

Perhaps increasingly worried about the old man out on the coast, the young man from the real estate agency would check in on me from time to time. “Are you doing all right here?” He told me various things about the area whenever he stopped by, and it seemed that, both above and below, the towns were as they had been. That is to say, both were full of fighting. I supposed that the humans grew old and were just replaced one after another with new faces, while the town itself didn’t change much.

I baked cake and cookies for when he’d come by, and he took them home gladly. I guess he gave them to his mother. A friend removed in age—I’m not sure if I could call him that, but, well, he was nice to have around.

“It really isn’t safe around here. Make sure you lock your doors… That said, though, it doesn’t really look like there’s much here to steal, eh?”

“There’s not. Ha ha ha!”

“And you just laugh. You really are easygoing, huh?”

“I don’t have anything to protect anymore. That’ll make a person easygoing, you know? Oh, that reminds me. How’s your mom doing?”

“Good. Oh! That cake, she really liked it. Says she’d happily have more of it.”

“I can do that. I’ll bake another one for her.”

I wondered how many more years—no, months I’d be able to keep living here like this?

Either way, time gently flowed on.

And then, one night after two weeks or so. One fateful night.

I was sleeping on the sofa again. I had to force myself in there at an angle, which left my legs from the knees down dangling over the side. The sound of the waves outside was comforting. The ticking of the wall clock, functional once again, wasn’t too bad either.

Wait. There was another noise.

It came from the terrace. I cocked my head to the side, wondering if it was a burglar. It was, after all, a dangerous neighborhood. Plenty of people were cruelly killed for the bit of cash they had.

I didn’t want to deal with it. And for a while, I kept lying on the sofa, but eventually I got up reluctantly. And I saw a skinny girl in a summer school uniform standing like a ghost on the other side of the glass.

I blinked in surprise. I wasn’t scared. On the contrary, she looked like someone I knew well, and I even felt a deep affection.

“Nako? Sister?”

For a moment, I thought perhaps my ride from the other side had come for me.

But there was no answer.

I strained my eyes. Long hair hanging down past her shoulders, very shy eyes. She was stepping from one foot to the other, like something was upsetting her. From the look of her, she was still only thirteen or fourteen. I looked closely at her face.

No, I didn’t know this girl. This wasn’t my sister’s ghost.

The fog gradually cleared from my half-asleep brain. “What’s wrong? Are you lost?” I asked, gently.

Thinking about it, there was no way a girl in uniform could walk around safely by herself in a neighborhood this bad, this late at night. Which meant I was dealing with someone mysterious. I could be in danger if I carelessly opened the door. But I was already old, with not much longer left to me, and it seemed foolish somehow for a grown man to be afraid of a lone girl.

I stood up. I unlocked the glass doors and slid them open. I peered at the girl’s face. “Where’d you come from?”

The girl averted her eyes. She looked back and stared toward the darkness where the ocean spread out behind the house. Following her gaze, I turned my eyes that way as well, but of course there was no one there.

The summer night was humid and hot. The sandy beach held the day’s heat and shimmered slightly like a mirage. The light of the moon was very beautiful. A quiet night. The sound of the waves alone eased the heart. It was a good night to die. I wasn’t afraid.

I peered at the girl’s face again and offered her a joking smile. “Are you maybe a Bamboo? Something like that?”

“I am!” The answer came from the darkness.

I gasped and lifted my face.

Instantly, the girl turned on her heel and ran into the night. Her slender retreating figure shuddered violently, threatening to snap in half.

Aah, just now was… That was a voice I could never forget.

I was stunned into silence. And then I smiled slowly. I waited for him to come out of the darkness.

The young man strode up to the terrace lazily and stopped. The girl hid fearfully behind him and stared up at me.

I looked closely. At a glance, I could tell he was a lone stray Bamboo. He stood leaning to one side, but in a way that made it seem like he didn’t actually realize he was off-kilter. His dark skin was now jet-black with filth. His black hair was disheveled, tangled like a rat’s nest. His beard was gray with all the dust and dirt stuck to it. His clothes were also a disaster. Buried under layers of shirts and vests and coats, he looked like a mountain of old rags.

The many days since that night!

He was the only partner for me. So, from now on, well, I’ll just go it alone. His voice, trying so hard to be bright, flooded my ears.

I staggered into a run, nothing like the energetic dashes I’d managed back then, though. My legs got tangled up. Lurching, I managed to make it to him somehow. I reached out and hugged him. If he were a vision, he would have turned into white mist and disappeared the instant I touched him. I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if he had. It was that kind of night.

But he stayed in my arms, solid. The scent of bamboo tickled my nostrils. I tried to speak, and of course all I could do was say his name. “Aah, Mustah…”

“So you came back, huh, little Kyo!”

“Mustah! Mustah! Mustah!”

“I knew last week. I came to visit one night, and I saw you sleeping there. And then I couldn’t decide whether or not we should actually meet. But, you know…”

“You knew I was back? You should’ve come and seen me right away! I wanted to look for you, Mustah! But it’s not like a human would be able to tell me where to find a Bamboo. Oh!” I surprised myself and clapped a hand over my mouth. Because I had reverted to speaking like a girl again. It was as if, in the very instant of this reunion, that long-gone time had come rushing back to me.

I stared into his eyes. They were gentle, playful. He looked filthy, but his skin was as young as ever, his physique was exactly the same. Bamboo really didn’t age.

I suddenly became ashamed and started fidgeting. “I’ve gotten really old, huh? Mustah, don’t stare at me so much.”

“You turned out wonderfully, Kyo!” His voice swelled with pride.

I gasped and looked back at him. Now that I thought about it, he had watched over me in the film like I was so adorable he could hardly stand it, despite the fact that I was objectively a dull, small child. And that day we parted too, he kept telling me how I was a very special flame to them. So then, did I look like a special, wonderful something to Mustah’s eyes alone, even now?

“I’m a flame on the verge of going out.”

“A flame’s a flame! And, like…”

“Hmm?”

“Kyo, you kept your promise to me!” He looked up at me. In the middle of that dirty face, his beautiful eyes shone like stars. He reached out a hand and poked my head. It was the sort of thing you’d do to a small child. He grinned playfully. “You fought, huh, boyo? Just looking at you, I can tell. Yeah?”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah!” I was glad I was alive, I was glad I’d been born, I was glad I’d come back here.

I invited them both into the living room. The girl quickly devoured the cookie I offered her and then flopped down onto the sofa the way I used to, curled up, and fell asleep, as though she was completely exhausted.

“Oh!” Mustah found the 8 mm camera and turned the lens on me and the girl, cocking his head to one side as if wondering whether it still worked. And it did appear to be filming. I turned the camera on him then, and he grinned, embarrassed.

“The truth is, I have a favor to ask, Kyo.”

The small hours of the night. I was sitting on the floor across from Mustah, wiping the dirt off his skin, combing his hair. I also found a clean black shirt and put it on him. And some pants, although they were long enough to fit my lanky legs, so I had to roll them up twice for him. Gradually, he began to look the way I remembered him, and I saw that he was utterly unchanged, the same as he’d always been, like we’d parted only yesterday.

“A favor?” Somewhere in my heart, I was instinctively afraid. And then I swallowed that feeling down. “You can ask me anything. Go ahead!”

“My secret got out, y’know?”

“Oh! This girl?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s human, right?” I said in a quiet voice, turning my eyes on the sofa.

“You knew?”

“Well, it’s just when I offered her a cookie, she ate it, didn’t she? No matter which way you slice it, she’s a hungry human child.” Just like I used to be, eh? I added in my heart.

Mustah scratched his face, troubled. “I just sort of took her in. She was about to be killed, and there wasn’t a home she could go back to anymore. But I figured killer and victim were both humans, so that was that, and I was going to leave them be and fly off, y’know? But then, Kyo, I suddenly remembered you. Like, I sort of saw you in her.”

The girl rolled over in her sleep. Mustah hung his head, his face growing darker.

“But it’s totally not doable by myself. The only reason I managed to hide you and bring you up back then, Kyo, was because I had Yoji. I really get that now. They found out pretty quick, y’know?”

“Found out? Mustah…”

“Yeah.” There was resignation in his voice. “Ruirui’s guys came after us tonight.”

I said nothing but simply stared at him. Mustah looked straight into my eyes.

I vividly remembered the terror of that night, suddenly surrounded by more than ten Bamboo, male and female. And that face, Yoji bound by chains, left out in the morning light, burning to death, his charred face growing ever smaller. I shuddered. No one could ever completely escape them. The Bamboo government was relentless.

Mustah was… Then…

“Can I maybe ask you to take care of her, Kyo?” His voice was calm.

“You can.” I nodded immediately.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, Mustah!”

Until the girl was eighteen. Maybe four or five years. Could I keep going that long?

The only thing to do was to do it. I was still alive, after all. My flame had flickered to near nothing, but I’d fan it as best I could and keep going for a little while, albeit slowly. Until my final day.

After staring at my face for a while, Mustah grinned at me, relieved. His smile was the same as always, carefree, almost like cheerfulness itself. The bright innocence and enthusiasm of my Bamboo. I had yearned for him every day back then. My heart was full again. I pushed all these emotions back.

“The girl will be all right. But what will happen to you, Mustah? Will you…run?”

“Nah, I probably won’t be able to escape.”

“So then they’ll catch you. My voice was miserable again, like it had been back then.

“They won’t catch me!”

“What?”

“If it’s between that and being burned at the stake by them, I’ll go on my own terms.”

“On your own terms. You can’t mean…”

“Yeah.” Mustah’s face grew quiet. “If it means them catching me and burning me alive like Yoji, then I’ll do it myself. I mean, like, I’ve always made decisions about myself on my own, y’know?”

“B-but—”

“A Bamboo’s life’s not forever, right? It ends at some point. So I don’t mind a bit if that some point is dawn today.”

“Mustah…” I swallowed hard and watched over his profile.

“Look, Kyo. The night’s almost over.” Mustah pointed straight at the eastern sky.

The pitch-black ocean was steadily shifting to indigo. A new day was trying to come over from the other side. For me, another day in what was left of my life, not much different from any other. For the girl, it was certainly a wonderful, unknown time. And for the Bamboo, a mere instant, a clipping from a long succession of decades.

The sun would come up!

Soon.

Dawn!

Mustah laughed finally, as if to bolster his courage. He didn’t look sad or like he was suffering. He really was the same old Mustah.

Unable to stand it, I started crying, like I had returned to being a boy of ten. I was happy he had come to see me in the end, but it was too awful that he was going to die. That I would see both Bamboo vanish from this world. They should have long outlived me, these Bamboo, eternally young men, so dazzling I almost hated it, and me, a wrinkled old man. There was no way this was right.

A cold palm stroked my head gently. In my ear, I heard, “I am seriously one lucky Bamboo to get to see you again in the end, my little Kyo!”

As he stood, Mustah was the beautiful, charming young man of days gone by. Endlessly enthusiastic, always playing. Sitting on the ground next to him, I was already old, old enough to be his father, his grandfather.

He walked slowly out onto the terrace. His feet clacked against the wood. I watched him slump down onto the bench. It was the same artless gesture I had seen so often back then, the way he walked over and sat there. He used to welcome me home from school, chat with Yoji beside him about something or other. Sometimes, he would sit there with me, holding my hand amiably, and talk about school. I’d thought that he alone would never change.

He looked back at me and waved innocently. His lips moved in the shape of “Goodbye.”

The eastern sky gradually grew brighter.

I stood up and slowly went out onto the terrace. Mustah looked up at me in surprise. I sat down heavily next to him, like I so often had when I came home from school.

“Let me be here too. Please, Mustah.”

Hey. It’s okay, right? My Bamboo. Please.

He nodded like he had no choice. “But, like, it won’t look too good, y’know? I mean, I am going to burn.”

Shivering, I remembered that burning, shrinking face. “I know.”

“You do…? Oh, that’s right!”

“I want to be with you. Um, okay, I…”

I’ve always loved you. Ever since I was ten years old. The truth is, I never wanted to let anyone else have you. Not a man, not a woman, not Yoji, not some stranger. No one but me.

Half a century has passed since then, and now here I am, finally alone with you.

But I couldn’t put that into words. Even now, at this age, my feelings for Mustah were too hot, too chaotic. Love, sadness, hatred, pain, and yet so blessed. Alive, it was like my own small face was crumpling, burning with the heat of an invisible love.

Silently, I leaned my head on his shoulder. And then hurriedly pulled it up again. I was worried that I might put that troubled look back on his face. But when I glanced at his profile, he was smiling, carefree. I was relieved from the bottom of my heart.

“Hey. Hey, Mustah?”

“What? Are you a little kid now?”

“…I’ll get to see you again soon, right?”

Right…Mustah. In that place. In the peaceful sky. We get to see all the people who’ve gone before us again, right?

Mustah. Yoji. My sister. Mr. Yu. My wife. My son. My first love. Niita. All the people I’d loved.

And then I was sure I’d be able to say all the things I never could before. Apologies, words of love, appreciation. Tell them how I’d missed them. It wouldn’t be too late for anything. There’d be no sin I couldn’t atone for. Because I’d get to see them again.

At some point, the time came for each of those flames to go out. And what if, on that day, they flew into the peaceful sky…

Now, with the passage of time, I wanted to believe that. Otherwise, it was too much to have lost. I loved the things I’d lost too much. In the past, and now too, I kept losing people.

Mustah finally grinned at me. “I guess so! We’ll meet again!”

“Mustah, Mustah, Mustah!” I simply said his name.

“Ha ha!” He laughed fondly, slowly stroking my hair. “So we’ll say goodbye for a little while until then. Kyo, really, thank you. For coming to us. For making me and Yoji so happy. For showing us your wonderful flame. For warming up our frozen days. For calling me your Bamboo. Okay, you take care, Kyo, hon. I love you too, y’know. Whatever happens, you’re my son, my best friend, my lover, y’know.”

Dawn began to break.

“So, basically, you were just one human being, y’know?”

“Mustah. Mustah, I love you!” I finally said it.

He laughed delightedly. “Me too, Kyo!”

At last, the sun rose up over the horizon onto the water.