UNCLASSIFIED DOCUMENT, PINE-SOOT INK ON MULBERRY PAPER, STORED IN A LACQUERED BOX IN NAMONAKI VILLAGE, NEAR KYOTO, 1450 CE
I am trembling almost too much to write this.
At dawn, an elderly naked man appeared at our door, with cedar needles poking out of his hair. He greeted us with a wobbly bow and a confused smile, as if he were drunk, and he spoke in a dialect so strange and an accent so bizarre that we could hardly understand what he said. Because we live on the very edge of the village, we are accustomed to receiving travelers from Kyoto in need of shelter—but not of clothing.
“He is from either elsewhere or else-when,” my wife whispered to me, eyes wide. “There is glamour all about him.”
We invited him to sit on the veranda while he rinsed his feet and brushed the cedar needles from his hair. As he patted his feet dry, he looked up and about vaguely, studying the steep incline of the roof as if he were trying to calculate how fast it might shed its snow-load. “Wooden shingles,” he said to us, as if this were new information. “Not bamboo. That’s interesting, isn’t it? They must be very loosely attached to let the smoke escape.”
“Of course,” I said, wondering why he considered this a topic for discussion.
Once he entered, he gazed at every mundane detail of our home with an expression of dazed wonder: the sanded wooden runners of the sliding doors; the tatami mats around the sunken hearth; the kettle suspended from the ceiling; our small family shrine. Indifferent to his own nakedness, he made a circuit, glancing at us and smiling before returning his attention to whatever next fascinated him. I wondered if he was simple.
“Clothes,” my wife hissed at me, and once I had fetched it, she presented him with my extra kimono. He accepted it with much bowing and thanks and apologies, seeming distracted and amused by the exchange, as if he were sleepwalking through a Noh play. Again I wondered about his mental state.
However, once he was clothed, he turned his focused attention to us, his hosts. His accent and dialect remained a challenge to understand, but now there was a keen intelligence in his eyes. He introduced himself as Oda.
He had chosen our home, he told us, because he had ascertained that my wife is a witch, and he requested her services to be Homed, by magic, to where he had come from, once he had completed the task that brought him to our village. Seiko was astonished by this situation, for she has never before received an else-when traveler, but of course she agreed.
He told us he had come to examine a painted wooden box in the village shrine. We knew which box he spoke of. Legend says it was brought to the shrine centuries ago by a terrifying sea goddess with huge eyes and hair like fire. Sometimes she is said to be a tsukimono-suji with a fox familiar, which explains her strange hair. We asked him questions: What was in the box? What did he want to do with it? And why?
“Pardon, but it is not allowed for me to tell you anything about that,” he said.
My wife said, “Then you are surely from the future,” and he bowed.
We offered him tea and rice, which he accepted, but only to perform the correct etiquette of a guest, for he now seemed impatient to begin his errand. We explained that many in the village visit the shrine each morning, and therefore we should wait until they had made their offerings and departed to their labors. Reluctantly he agreed, and we passed the time in conversation of a most uncommon sort. For example, he did not ask questions about our karesansui garden beside the river, but rather queried us on the engineering details of the dams upstream.
When we determined the morning crowd had dispersed, we offered him a pair of sandals and walked with him to the shrine. This is in a small clearing surrounded by cedars, a stone’s throw from the steep riverbank. We entered through the torii and paused at the outdoor basin to rinse our hands and mouths. Oda-san studied us from the corner of his eye, uncertain of the local customs. We had timed our arrival well: only the priest was present, and as we approached, he headed to the inner sanctum, to attend to the gods. So we had the shrine to ourselves.
“That is the box,” said Oda-san happily, pointing to a painted wooden cube on the altar. It was about the size of a human head and off to the side of the more usual offerings and incense. Although it is taboo for us to approach even the outer altar, there is no physical barrier that prevents it, and Oda-san began to walk toward it. We hung back, fearing to trespass.
Suddenly, out of the cedars, as if she had risen straight up from the depths of the river, an astonishing woman appeared and began to stride right toward us. This was surely the tsukimono-suji herself, original owner of the box, for she had unruly hair the color of a sunset and large pale eyes and skin of an unhealthy pinkish hue; she wore her kimono without an obi, just tied loosely around her waist, barely covering her breasts. She veered directly toward Oda-san, and his eyes widened as if in recognition.
He stopped and turned to face her. He took a deep breath, and then he nodded a little bit and adopted an air almost of resignation. He spoke to her softly, in a most bizarre language. It had no beauty to it, his language. He sounded like he was having a seizure. She laughed at him and responded in the same tongue, although from her it was more emphatic—both louder and more singsong.
She bore down on him with a fierceness as if she would strike him. I rushed to step between them, but she stepped around me and grabbed Oda-san by both shoulders, their faces only inches apart. She stared at him with those scary pale eyes, like the eyes of a ghost or a demon.
And she began to speak.
It was in their language, so I could not understand it. But the words had a simplistic, childlike pulse to them—da-da da-da da-da da-da—and the lines rhymed, as is the case with my wife’s spells sometimes. I looked to Seiko, questioning.
“This one is a witch,” she whispered. “I do not understand her language but I feel something . . .” She looked down at her hands and wiggled her fingers as if they were stiff. “My thumbs are prickling. Whatever the language is she speaks, she is casting a very wicked spell. We must get him away now. Now! Grab him away from her!” With growing panic on her face, she turned and ran back the way we had come, her shoes clattering on the stone walkway.
I know better than to grab hold of a witch while she is casting a spell, but I slapped this one’s arm to make her release Oda-san. She did not release him—in fact, she gripped tighter, and her words became louder. He was staring back into those freakish eyes with a look of confused disappointment on his face. The sound of her language was so guttural and strange that I cannot write even an approximation of the words; we have no characters for such sounds.
“Stop it, witch!” I shouted, and struck her hard across the cheek.
Or tried to. She released the grip of her right hand on Oda-san long enough to backhand me across the face—incredibly hard, as hard as a boxer might, knocking me onto my ass so hard I tumbled away and ended up two arm-spans distant. The spell she recites must give her an unnatural power, I thought, and I began to rise.
Before I was even to my knees, the effect of her spell on Oda-san had begun to take place. It was horrifying, beyond words. She was summoning a force field around him, as if he were enclosed in an egg. The air shimmered vividly and wildly about one handspan wide all around him, like a thousand dragonflies snagged in a net together. Then the trembling air seemed to implode—and penetrated him in a dazzling white flash. His entire body became translucent, wobbling and glimmering as if transformed into some otherworldly substance. Oda-san shouted—it sounded more like shock than pain—and then his voice was cut off.
I felt the charge in the air as if lightning had struck inches from my head, and the smell of singed flesh filled my nostrils and made my gorge rise. The egg-shaped clap of lightning briefly bulged out, and the very air seemed to be sucked toward it. On reflex, I dropped to the ground and rolled farther away from it, so that I would not be sucked into it too.
Then there was a deafening boom, as if an entire roll of thunder had been compressed into a snap. It made my bones and viscera shudder.
Then all was still.
And Oda-san was gone. There was only a small dusting of ash on the soft earth and a puff of smoke that wafted on the gentle breeze.
I rose, gaping in amazement at the witch. She grinned at me, laughing, her teeth large and ugly, everything about her strange and terrible. “Sayonara, Oda-sensei,” she said with satisfaction. She turned and strode off through the cedars with a gait like a samurai warrior.
I rushed to the ash on the ground. In texture, it resembled cremated remains, but there was very little of it, as if the body had mostly atomized from the force of whatever had claimed him.
My wife has described to me the unutterably horrific event known as okaji sendan. When magic causes something incorrect to happen in the cosmos, the cosmos must resort to violence to contain the incorrectness. But in all those descriptions, the violence is explosive and large—an entire village will go up in flames, or a mountain will transform into a volcano. In contrast, the spell this witch had uttered was controlled. It was as if she had funneled all the fury of okaji into one carefully restrained pocket of space-time, where Oda-san had stood . . . and she released it all on him.
Once the witch was out of sight in the trees, Seiko returned at a run. She bent over Oda-san’s ashes, sobbing.
“Dear one, do not weep. This is a tragedy, but we did not know the man.”
“I do not weep for him,” she said through her tears. “I weep for all of us.”