CHAPTER 12

The sun was glaring as hard as the villagers who wanted to kill me.

“Let’s reconsider this idea first,” Haruka-sama was telling them. “This is a modern age, and we are not at direct disadvantage when it comes to this young woman.”

“Spirits are immortal!” one of the elder ladies yelled. “We should kill her before she grows into her evil powers!”

It was Katashi’s aunt Midori, who lived just three houses away from my home. Katashi himself was Ren’s promised sweetheart. Ren had followed him when he went to the city to get a better life.

Ren had always been the more favored sister. After all, she did come from the Takahashi family, and I came from under a tree at Haruka-sama’s backyard crop. I was a nobody. I was related to no one by blood. I was disposable.

Especially now that they had a reason to dispose me.

“Now, that is just superstition,” Haruka-sama said. “We have no proof that she really is the spirit. And even if she is, remember that the spirits have been in our favor in the war.”

“And look where that got us!” another of them yelled. “Look at us—desperately waiting for the next harvest, fearing the war, fearing the next wave of tsunami, fearing a young woman who has the face of Moriko—we don’t need another Tamamo-no-Mae in our homeland! We should banish her before she did what Moriko did!”

Moriko. Moriko was a famous legend in our village, of a woman who had lived for generations and never aged. She was notorious for being the most beautiful lady of the village, one who stole the rich landlords from their wives’ arms. According to the stories about her, she was a witch with features of a fox. High cheekbones, fox eyes, vixen grin.

Legend said she was a kitsune, and no one dared to cross her. A witch. A cunning vixen. As the local Tamamo-no-Mae, she had hunters on her trail, and they usually fell dead not so later after they saw her fox form.

Of course that was just a superstition. The lady Moriko must have had the rumors running about her because she was caught hiding an American soldier in her chamber back in the war. And though Moriko could be called a Geisha of higher class, she never was one who served in brothels. A Japanese woman with respect shouldn’t, by the eyes of society, let an American take her to his bed without a fight. Should she be forced, she should kill herself and never endure being used by the American.

Katashi’s grandmother said that the local Japanese soldiers came for him and killed him on the spot, while Moriko ran into the woods in shame and never came back.

Moriko’s painting was still hung in some rich lords’ homes. The summer I turned fifteen, they had begun the rumors about my resemblance to her. I had just gotten taller that summer; my chest had just begun to finally fill out. But people began to talk about how I was too tall, how the shape of my eyes looked western, and how the men in the village had behaved around me. It had happened before, with Moriko.

They said I must be her daughter. The offspring of a witch with the enemy’s blood.

“She is not welcome here,” I had heard Noboru-sama tell Haruka-sama in one breezy afternoon. He was an old family friend. “For her own good, you should send her to the city or another village.”

“She shouldn’t have to leave,” Haruka-sama insisted, strong even in his sickly state. He was almost a real father to me, but his old age had withered him into a feebler projection of the man he once was. “She has the right to live here.”

But that was before the villagers began coming to our front yard.

At first it was just five of them, some elder ladies from our neighborhood. And then they grew, into some farmers and the younger people who believed that I would bring bad luck over them. Haruka-sama, the patient man he was, ignored them and told me to live my life the way I always did. His sickness had worsened, but he always tried to smile at me. But I knew what Noboru-sama had said was creeping into his mind. It was just a matter of time before I was truly cast out.

Eventually I had stopped going to school and stayed at house to take care of Haruka-sama. The only things I learned were from Ren’s old books.

So the last time they were there, he spoke up and stood up for me.

“When I took her and Ren as my daughters, I promised to myself that I would give them a life they deserved. I promised to protect them. If you want to hurt her, you will cross me.”

“You are a fool, old man!” one of them protested. “If you feed the snake with your hand, it will bite your hand one day. You’re already dying. Only the gods know what she’ll do with your land.”

They went away.

That night, I lay awake in the house, for I could feel them coming. I packed a lightweight of my things—some clothes, letter papers, pencils, and a small empty jug—and went to Haruka’s room to wake him up.

He didn’t wake up when I shook his arm, and nor did he when I shook him harder and called his name.

I felt for his breathing and his pulse.

Haruka-sama had died in his sleep.

I saw their shadows before I saw the flames. They were coming from every side of the house, except for the backyard.

And then the torches lit the house.

The house was a traditional Japanese home, unlike the ones in the city. Most of it was made of wood and oil papers as the walls. Our water access was the well in the backyard. Panic clawed at my throat, at my chest. I hadn’t even turned sixteen—I wasn’t ready to die.

Someone was pounding into my back door. I reached for one of the knives in the kitchen, my other hand still holding the things I had packed.

The door’s lock broke, and the door slid freely.

It was Noboru-sama.

“Follow me,” he said.

I did, and kept the knife inside my packed things. I took one last look at the burning house. My home. My childhood playground. The place Haruka-sama had raised me and Ren for more than fifteen years. And he was gone now. I was on my own.

Noboru-sama led me out of the fire, deep into the woods until the villagers’ sound dimmed out. It was cold and dark inside the forest. My footwear had tears from the uneven route.

“I can only help you until here,” he said. “Walk straight north. You will find a small hut. Give this to him.” Noboru-sama handed me a pile of things wrapped up in a cloth similar to mine. His smile was as grave as it was compassionate. “Hopefully he’ll be grateful enough to assist you in finding the next village. Don’t come back.”

“Thank you, Noboru-sama,” I said.

He nodded. “I’ll pray for Haruka’s soul.”

And then he left me alone in the woods.

The walk north wasn’t easy. I had no torch to light my way, and the moon wasn’t full enough to illuminate my path. Under less dense trees, I could see barks and several branches that hung low, but occasionally some thorns would tear my clothes and my skin. In the darkness the sounds that the wild animals made were eerie and chilling.

When the dawn broke, I could finally see everything clearer. Some birds chirped at rising sun. A snake slithered behind a log of tree, curling its tail around a rabbit. I felt like I was in one of those western bedtime stories, the one where the girl lost herself in a wonderland.

Ren liked the western culture so much that she always bought some cheap secondhand books home from her short visits to the city. Most of them were Japanese translations, but sometimes they were in the original language English. Our knowledge of the language was so limited that we rarely paged through the English books, but after Ren went to live in the city permanently I had picked up a dictionary and learn some bits and pieces.

Not that it would be any good now. All the books must have been burned in the fire.

Sometime later in the noon, I stopped and rested on a bark of tree. I was exhausted, dirty and thirsty. I hadn’t found any source of water, and it hadn’t rained once. I began to wonder if my navigation in the dark last night had gotten me lost. After all breathing in the smoke and the grief over losing my home and Haruka-sama had disoriented me. Dizzy, my mind slipped into rest, and I let my eyes drift shut.

I dreamed of fire and smoke in my nap. People were celebrating that the witch had been burned, that the village was now safe from the devil. There was a long table with rice, meat, and vegetables. A big jug of water sat in the middle of all the food, and the water filled out by itself until it was full and dripping onto the table. They all held up high a torch each, and they burned the bowls with their torches. The air warmed as the water inside the jug boiled. It got hotter and hotter, like warm breath breathed right into my face.

They began chanting.

“…to kill…the fool…to kill…kill…”

A low guttural growl woke me up with a gasp.

I opened my eyes and saw a big black animal that was too big to be a fox and too furry to be a dog. Its teeth were sharp and they looked more than capable to bite my face off when it snapped them in front of my face.

It was a wolf.

I had never heard of a wolf in our forest.

The black wolf growled again, inching its face closer to me. It blew a hot breath on my face. And then, in a flash, a nude man was bracing his hands on the ground, his face even more startling than the wolf’s that my head jumped and hit the bark.

It would hurt later, but I was too frightened to register the pain at the time.

“Western!” I exclaimed in the crudest Japanese expression of the word.

The western man had dark hair and light eyes, the color of clouds in storm. He was a big man, his shoulders wider than those of any local men I had seen. His arms looked strong, and I believed they could either strangle me to death or hold a big gun. He looked too young to be one of the leftover American soldiers, though; twenty, perhaps, like Katashi.

And the western man spoke Japanese.

“Are you the bait? Have they sent you to lure me out and kill me?” he asked. “Do you villagers think I am so foolish that I would give in to a helpless beautiful woman? Do you really think I would fall for this? Hear me and send my message, woman. I’ll let you live only because you’re pretty and I haven’t had or even seen a woman in a long, long time but—”

“You talk too much Japanese for a western man!” I said through my dry lips. “And certainly too much for a male.”

He glared at me for interrupting him. “You dare to cross my territory and talk back to me?” he asked incredulously. “Know your place, woman. What were they thinking, sending a whore to me?” He leered at me. “If they think they could burn down my hut while I was busy making love to you, they’d be—”

“I am not a whore!” I cried. “They did not send me, they cast me out! Noboru-sama sent me to find a hut in the north—”

“Noboru?” the man said wonderingly. “Old man Noboru?”

I swallowed at the sudden change of expression on his face and nodded.

The man said something in English that sounded like a curse and drew himself back from me. As he did so, I saw more than I had ever seen in a man and brought my eyes instinctively.

I heard a chuckle. “You can open your eyes. You’re so innocent I don’t know how I could have mistaken you for a whore.”

I opened my eyes and saw that he had put on pants and a shirt. His strong arms were still visible, but it was a matter of my looking rather than his showing. The western man was squinting down at me with a curious expression. I stared back, daring him.

He smiled, showing teeth. “Come. Follow me.”

Warily, I stood and brought the two piles of the things I had brought with me. While I was tall for a Japanese girl, the man was even taller, his stance of a soldier’s. I thought of the stories running about the leftover American soldiers in our land. And then I thought of Haruka’s death and the fire that swallowed up our house.

I had nothing to lose.

I followed the man silently. He did not once look back to see if I was still there, but somehow his stance showed that he knew.

“Where is the wolf?” I asked his back.

“Hmm? Wolf? Where did you learn English?”

“Secondhand dictionary that comes with pictures. Where is the animal?”

“The animal is here.”

“I don’t see it.”

He turned and faced me. “You’re looking at it.”

I looked at his serious face and burst into laughter. It felt good, the laugh. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed at a jest since the rumors about me started.

“Thank you,” I told him. “I haven’t had a good laugh in a long time.”

He just stared at me with a contemplating expression.

And then he began to strip his clothes off.

I turned my back to him. “What are you doing? Don’t—”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Look at me. I’ll do it slower so you can—”

“No! I have never lain with a man—”

I heard an exasperated sigh. “I’m not going to take you against your will. Turn around, woman. I’m going to show you what I said about the wolf.”

“I bet you are.” But I turn around.

Just as I turn around, the man’s skin began to morph. His face lengthened, his ears sharpened. The hairs became black fur, and his limbs fell to the ground and became…

The wolf.

It was all over in a blink of an eye.

It—He bared his teeth in what I supposed was a grin.

I almost collapsed to the ground when he nudged my thigh with his nose.

And then there was a nude man instead of a wolf nudging my leg with his nose.

I squealed and stepped back.

He stood up and sniffed. “Females,” he said in English, like it was a curse. He went to get dressed.

“You’re—you’re a—a kitsune!” I sputtered. “It’s you, all along! And they cast me out because they thought I was one! You must be Moriko’s son, the offspring of that western soldier!”

He scoffed. “You villagers and your stories! I’m not a fox. I’m a wolf. A rougarou, actually, is what the people in my town used to call me. Though if you like the fancy popular words you can call me loup garou or werewolf.”

“Werewolf,” I said the English word, tasting it in my tongue. “It sounds familiar. One of the western monsters that comes out in full moon, right? Half-man, half-wolf.”

“You’re educated,” he said as if it surprised him. “Yes, that one. But I’m only half-man, half-wolf in full moons because of the pull that gets me trapped in-between forms. Most of the time I am in my human form or in my wolf form.”

“Gods,” I swore. “Do you eat people?”

“Only young innocent maidens who passed my land. Oh, don’t look like that. I eat what I hunt in the forest. Sometimes the old man Noboru left some food for me at the outskirts of my territory. Though I bet you must taste very good.”

“Is that your hut?”

“Yes. Come in.”

“Can you give me some water, please?”

“There is a jug I saved from the lake there.”

I went to the big jug and scooped some into my little jug and drank. It was so fresh that I gave a sigh of relief and took another gulp of it before handing the pile from Noboru-sama to the man.

“Noboru asked me to give you this.”

The man took the pile from me and opened the cloth on the floor. There were clothes, raw meat, fruits, and some other things I couldn’t see because he had already wrapped them up as soon as he peeked at them.

“Are you grateful?” I asked the man.

“Yes. Why?”

“He said that if you’re grateful you have to help my trip to another village. I don’t know where it is.”

“Neither do I.”

“But—”

“But I’m sure we can find it. Then I’ll send you off.”

It sounded too good to be true. “Really? Thank you very much! What is your name?”

“Duane.”

“Du-aen?”

He nodded. “Duane,” he repeated. “Now, will you tell me off why you were cast out?”

I told him, starting from how I was found as a baby in Haruka’s backyard to the villagers that burn my house. Duane was still a stranger, but I found that telling these things to a stranger felt better than telling someone who already knew parts of my life. He listened so attentively that I even told him about Ren and Katashi.

When I finished, his face was grave.

“They suspect you’re a kitsune,” he said.

“Yes, I said that.”

Duane leaned forward and buried his face in my hair. He inhaled. “You don’t smell like a fox,” he whispered, almost to himself. And then he caught himself and pulled back. “I apologize for the crudeness. Wolf ‘s sense of smell.”

I nodded, thinking that no man had ever been that close to me before.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m glad I’m not the fox-witch they—”

“No,” he interrupted. “But that story about the kitsune woman Moriko and the American soldier might be true.”

“What? How—”

“I am a rougarou. I don’t age, I don’t die. Unless someone kills me with the right weapon. I was a soldier in the war—it was how I ended up here.

“Noboru agreed to help me settle around here because he knew what I could do. I didn’t go anywhere near the occupation forces. But some of my fellows might have been in them. I heard of one of them being taken as a Japanese woman’s lover. Noboru has always helped me catch up with the news outside the forest. And around that time, I smelled a presence in the forest—she must have known my marked territory, because she didn’t trespass.”

He looked thoughtful, his gray eyes cloudy. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Must have been her. She smelled powerful, like a witch and a fox and a woman at once. And she was bearing a child inside her, from what I remember from the smell.”

“Why didn’t you go back to your land with your…fellow soldiers? Why stay around here?”

There was a faraway look in his eyes. “I don’t want to be the one who bear the news of my friends’ death. And winning the war isn’t something I’m proud of.” He cracked a grin. “I guess I’m just a coward.”

I changed the subject. “You said you smelled her. Did she smell…evil?”

“No… No,” He said firmly. “She didn’t. Kitsune isn’t a demon, that I can tell. A lot like my kind, actually, but with additional powers, from what I’ve heard of.”

Duane looked at me. “You might be their child, after all,” he decided. He must have noticed the look on my face because he continued, “It’s not a bad thing. Maybe you get the human side, and the kitsune side is weaker.”

I sighed in relief and reached for the water again. Duane threw something at me—a pear and a piece of meat. Cooked, fortunately. I took it gratefully and ate. As I did, he studied me.

“You’re certainly tall enough to be part-American. Your nose is long enough. Hmm…” I tried not to blanch at his inspecting eyes. “Your breasts are certainly big enough…”

“Breasts?” I wasn’t familiar with the English word.

“You know,” he gestured by cupping his chest on both sides.

I flushed, fighting the urge to cross my arms over mine. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Not a lot of thin Japanese women have—” Duane squinted at my chest. “What do you call them in Japanese?” He laughed at my expression. “How old are you that a beautiful woman such as you still hasn’t lain with a man?”

My face reddened even more. No one had ever called me beautiful. It sounded so good in English. “I turned fifteen this summer.”

Duane was so startled that he flinched back. “Fifteen. Do I get the translation wrong?” He held up his ten fingers. “This, plus—” He held up five fingers. “—this? Fifteen?”

“Um, yes?”

He took a step back and said something that sounded like ‘nihm’ under his breath.

“What did you say?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nymph,” he said. “It means a girl who is so beautiful that they could be mistaken for a grown young woman.”

“Oh…”

He must have taken pity after my loss for words, for he stepped forward and crouched to level his eyes with me.

“Well, little girl,” he said, “I’ll wait until you’re all grown up, and I’ll continue seducing you again.” He tapped my nose with his finger and grinned, his gray eyes smiling. “This pretty nose will not get any longer in a few years, I’m sure.” He tapped my nose again. “Aren’t you going to tell me your name, girl? Your name for mine.”

There was something in his wolfish smile that told me how he would want to devour me. It made my heart beat twice as fast as it usually did.  I could get myself lost in those gray clouds in his eyes for awhile and forget the fire and the people who wanted to hurt me.

“Eiko,” I said. “My name is Eiko.”

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