The Black Isle (63 page)

We are headed south by southwest, on the nonstop express.

The seats are hard but the toilets are clean. Classic Japan. I don’t complain. I stare like a cat at the mad tangle of telephone wires and the residential blocks that define every suburb for a hundred miles beyond Tokyo. I can’t tear my eyes away, waiting for the scenery to start. Hiroshige-san has promised me Mount Fuji. Mount Fuji before death.

“You left very few clues, Cassandra. Then one day, I contacted the War Crimes library in Tokyo and discovered that you’re a regular, which only makes sense, I suppose. You could never let things go.”

“That makes two of us, then.”

She looks out her window with a smile.

Distant and gauzy, beyond low-slung villages that will never matter, Mount Fuji juts into view like Mother Earth’s ancient pudendum, the white hairs combed neatly flat. She stays with us a good while, and I feel a chill just seeing all that snow. When we leave the mount behind, the real countryside begins, with alpine hillsides blanketed thick and white. A blizzard whips by in a hurry, making the entire carriage rattle.

By the time we arrive in Kyoto, the air is clear again. But still frigid. The cold has tinted Agnes’s cheeks pink, like a child in an old Chinese lithograph. There really is a lot of Daniel in her look—more so than Violet, really—and I feel a sort of tender kinship toward her. She’s almost family, after all. We both represent the end of our respective bloodlines. We’re each the last woman standing.

Outside the station, she hails a taxi and hands the driver an address. He nods and off we go. To the end of my hunting—or so she claimed.

Kyoto is old and calm, not just an anagram but a mirror image of Tokyo. The city itself is split through the middle by the Kamo River, its banks lined with ancient wood houses and shops with slanting tile roofs. Each resembles a little temple, and many of them are precisely that, shrines to handmade crafts: roasted rice crackers, sandalwood incense, powdered green tea. I’ve long assumed that Tokyo’s lifeblood was its countless octogenarians, but Kyoto truly is the city of the old. The toothless and the bent claim every pedestrian crossing, independent and lively as they go about their day on wooden clogs. No self-pity. And maybe related to it, the ghost population is almost nil.

We get out at a sedate temple district on the edge of the city, aglow with lantern light. The sky has turned brooding, overcast. Agnes leads me along a walled street and through tall red-orange doors. And lo, we’re in an enormous compound, with long, tile-roof buildings and a dry rock garden. Perfectly manicured pine trees shoot out of perfectly measured spots in the gravel.

I glance around. There are English words on a sign:
SANJUSANGENDO TEMPLE.

“Has this been a kind of pilgrimage?” I ask. “I haven’t been religious, not for a long while now.”

“Nobody’s making you pray, Cassandra. Quite the contrary.”

It is closing time—four o’clock, with the setting sun, not that I could see it for the clouds. Tourists and pilgrims brush by us as they leave in one continuous trickle, nodding and smiling. The entire complex is suddenly deserted. A handful of lonesome figures in samurai garb wander the property, but I don’t count them—they will likely remain here long after the doors are locked.

Steady chanting emerges from some unseen sanctum, keeping rhythm with a wood percussion bell. Monks.

I envy the monks their tranquillity.

A robed groundskeeper monk has emerged from one of the shorter wooden buildings. He doesn’t so much as glance up at us, becoming instantly absorbed in the serious business of floor sweeping. Beyond this building sits a crowd of gravestones.

“Are we going there?” I point, following my instincts.

“If you like.”

We walk over, slowly because gravel is hard on my feet, and finally reach the temple’s miniature cemetery. The stones are arrayed in flawless blocks, some with long wooden tablets covered in well-wishes. I search among them for the name I know, the name I expect, but the kanji letters are engraved too tightly for my eyes.

“Which one is he?” I ask.

“What you’re looking for isn’t here,” says Agnes. “These graves are much too old, much too valuable. This temple was built in 1164 for a retired
emperor
.” She indicates the longest building, which stretches over a hundred yards. “I mean, in that hall, there are a thousand and one gold statues of Kannon, the goddess of mercy. They’re really magnificent. Shame we got here too late to see them.”

“But I’ve seen them,” I assert. “On TV not long ago. You can also buy charms in their shop to ward off headaches, knickknacks that guarantee high marks on exams. The gods here are bribable, apparently.”

She clears her throat. “In any case, I haven’t brought you here to sightsee.”

“I hoped not.”

As we walk by the short wooden building, my eyes are drawn back to the lone groundskeeper in his saffron robe and thick white slipper stockings. He looks like a relic from a different millennium—if not the one before, then the one yet to come. It’s become clear that his job is not to chase the stragglers off the lot. He’s frightfully old, little more than a bald skeleton, living out the kind of fate I used to fear: manual labor unto death. Yet he looks blissful. Is this nirvana—or Japanese perversity?

His hands are brown and twiglike but they have a young man’s firm grip on the rake. The strokes are sturdy as he sweeps bits of errant gravel off the pathway and back into the rocky pool. This doesn’t look like a man whose back ever troubled him. He’s almost not a man but some walking essence of sagacious calm, ready to be distilled, bottled, and sold in the temple’s gift shop.

“See anything you want?” Agnes says.

I walk closer to the man. He still doesn’t notice us, though we couldn’t have been more than twenty yards away. His mind is fully engaged in the chanting of his colleagues: The body we see out in the yard is a mere vessel. Bit by bit, I click together the jigsaw of his features—the high, chiseled cheekbones, the straight Peking nose, the slant and hood of once-arrogant eyes, the hunch hinting at a taller, more vigorous youth.

Hands that once struck me, held me, caressed me, and struck me again.

Taro. My God, it really
is
him.

A surge of nausea rises up my chest. She really did find him! Yet why am I so surprised? She found
me
.

Agnes smiles. “Lieutenant Colonel Rukumoto. He’s why you went to the archive week after week, isn’t he? Looking for revenge.”

“I had a feeling. But only a feeling,” I gasp. “He’s so very, very old.”

My heart is racing.

It’s true I’ve sought him, all this time. I may have seen the beach house go up in flames, but I never met his ghost. And one of the surest things in this world is that a man like Taro would have a ghost, and an angry one, too. Searching for him, with its attendant promise of vengeance or news of his death, with its promise of relief, has sustained me, given structure to my later days. It became its own ritual, long after my rage had grown dim. Yet I never dreamed I’d actually find him, least of all with someone like Agnes.

But was this really a peace offering?

“You don’t forget and you don’t forgive, do you, Lady Midnight?”

Agnes is different now. Her eyes have a crystalline, automatic hardness. The contempt has returned to her voice, and I know she hasn’t had to dig deep to find it. She’s inherited her father’s talent for conjuring up slights and turning them into weapons.

It’s all right. I accept the wrath of this poor, fatherless girl. Because here we are, bound in this cold wind, under the heaving gray sky, staring at the very man whose long-ago actions turned us both into the monsters we are now. If this didn’t seal our weird kinship, then I don’t know what could have.

“Learning about my father has been my personal project. You’ve helped me. In return, I present to you
your
personal project.”

She reaches into her blazer and draws out an antique keris, ceremonial but sharp, perhaps stolen from a museum. She pushes its hilt into my palm.

“Go on. You
want
him, don’t you?” She turns my shoulders until I’m facing the oblivious monk. “This is a settlement between the damned. Trust me, nobody’s going to miss either of you.”

I cup the keris in my freezing hand, and an electric current runs through my arm. This is what temptation feels like—cold, tingling, stiff.

Taro is here for my taking, at one hundred years old. He looks so placid I wonder if he’d resist at all. Would he even recognize me, a miserable crone aged eighty-eight, coming at him for crimes committed seventy years ago? Our geriatric pas de deux would be the stuff of legend—or comedy.

Watching him sweep, vulnerable, in soft garments, I can almost believe he’s put himself here to await precisely this fate. Japanese perversity.

“Go on,” Agnes whispers behind me.

Telling Agnes my story has revived my rage, lured my bloodthirst back from the dead. Has she been auditioning me for this very moment?

One quick, delicious slash to his throat, and I will right the wrongs of seventy years. I will do it for Daniel, taken away from me before his time. Father, Mr. Wee, even Violet, too. There will be no witness but she who put me up to the task.

Look at that villain, Cassandra. Think of the dead. Here’s your chance.

I take a few steps toward him, Buddhist gravel crunching under my shoes.

Puffs of condensation flee my mouth as I exhale; they want no part of this. My fingers wrap themselves around the keris, trying their best to make the cold thing snug.

The monk goes on sweeping, his rhythm unchanged. He keeps his eyes fixed on the ground, either open to the entire universe or closed off from it—I can’t tell which.

All of a sudden, he stops sweeping and turns. My heart jolts. Has he seen me? But no, his head tilts up.

There is a shiver above us. The gray clouds shrug off specks of silver, and the air becomes gauzy. Snow is drifting down.

The old monk’s face comes alive with a boy’s delight. His eyes crease—there’s a sparkle to them I’d never seen before—and he unfurls his pink tongue, stretching it as far as it will go. He catches a few flakes and closes his mouth, greedily savoring them. I can almost feel what he’s thinking. He’s not saying hello; he’s saying good-bye.

I turn to Agnes. “That’s not him.”

Snow is beginning to pour down now, but the flakes only swirl around Agnes, not actually touching any part of her. The heat rising from her body seems to have created its own weather system, refusing solace, repelling peace. The tears stay liquid in her eyes. She has willed them not to fall.

I press the keris back into her soft hands. “Not anymore.”

At Kyoto Station, we part ways. But first we shake hands like foes at the inception of a duel. Before I let her go, I examine her fingers. Her fingertips are impossibly smooth, line-free.

“My father always said it was a gift,” she says. “But I always saw it as more of a curse. One of the few things we didn’t see eye to eye on.”

“Your father,” I say. “Thank you for bringing him to me one last time.”

Her face thaws. Curiosity, and something approximating hope—no, hunger—enlivens her eyes. In her desperation, I see the neglected girl who would do terrible things to win back her father’s heart—even after his death.

“By the way,” she says, feigning casualness, “did he say anything?”

“Yes.” And because this lost girl has brought me the peace I now feel in my soul, I lie: “He told me you were the only thing he ever loved.”

She bites her lip and smiles. “Thank you. But he would never use that word.”

I try to draw out our farewell, make her realize we’re nearly kin. She could have been my daughter; I was almost her aunt. “Will we meet again?”

“You and I?” She shakes her head. “I hope not.”

“Agnes, I do wish you’ll find a way to forgive me. To let go of all this history.”

My words are met with silence.

She puts me on the Shinkansen to Tokyo and remains on the platform, watching me as my train departs. I see her lips mouth “Good night” and her face is cold once more, but I knew her father too well to mistake this for a lack of feeling. What I can’t tell is if she’s going to stay on in this city of temples, or if she has tapes to burn, ashes to bury, as soon as I disappear from view.

It’s night on the train. I can see nothing out the window but blackness and my own reflection, greenish and pale beneath the pitiless lights. My eyes are tired now. I’m even cheated of Mount Fuji.

Night has come early, and along with it, the sobering truth.

Taro was now spent, penitent. Killing this changed man would only condemn me to an eternity of self-hatred and regret. Kenneth’s threat would be fulfilled: I would have become a ghost—as he has, for his own unforgivable acts.

Agnes is a clever girl, with her father’s sixth sense about deeds and consequences. Was this ultimate punishment what she intended for me all along? I’ll never have the answer. But my refusal to comply denied her story its rightful conclusion. She will have to dream up a happier ending.

I look around the compartment. What were her words again?
Trust me, nobody’s going to miss either of you
. Drunk salarymen snoring, old ladies nibbling on rice balls, a young man with a pair of Rollerblades on his lap, apparently dozing. I agree. None of these people will miss me.

So be it. My end will come. However it does, whenever it does, I vow to go peaceably. I have told my story. I will not be a ghost.

When I reach home tonight, I will celebrate like a grateful woman—with cognac, chocolate, and a good book. I’ll savor every sip, every bite, every word. And then at long last, I will close my eyes.

At Tokyo Station, I weave through the pulsating throng. It’s rush hour and I’m engulfed in one endless pinstriped horror, the combined detritus of the district’s office blocks, snaking toward the underground. I can’t walk fast enough. Finally, past the turnstiles, at the top of the down escalator, I stop moving altogether and let the hurrying bodies jostle, overtake, curse me for being old, slow, stupidly in their way, for I am what they all fear—sudden, aberrant stillness.