Oni wa Soto
“Out with the devil! Oni wa soto!”
Something small and hard stings Sasaki’s cheek, the first volley in a barrage of soybeans pelting his last good suit. He jerks out of his comfortable daze on the park bench to find himself eye level with an ogre, ears scrubbed pink and shirt buttoned to the neck.
“I’m sorry,” the monster’s mother says, as she bends, or rather hunches, in a brief bow. The ogre lifts his mask to produce a feeble squeak of contrition, jaw dipping beneath the cardboard rim to reveal a row of baby teeth, sticky with green mochi.
“You’re a little late for Setsubun.” Sasaki plucks a stray bean from his pocket. The rite of tsuina, when people ward off bad luck by hurling beans at the devil, was yesterday; he guesses this woman is merely indulgent. He flicks the bean into the grass, feeling a twinge of pleasure as both woman and boy inch backward.
“He couldn’t last night.” She places a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder. “My mother has been very ill.”
Sasaki knows this, or has approximated something close via the plump, large eyed talisman dangling from the strap of her Louis Vuitton. It’s Hanchan, a mayoke he’s nurtured from conception to inflated retail value at Talismate Ltd: an endearing, gap-toothed sprite meant to ease the passage of the terminally ill. In her case, he thinks it’s more or less part of an act.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
He presents the boy with a chilly smile before turning away, allowing them to escape. The rain stopped less than twenty minutes ago, and already Ueno Park teems like a discarded candy wrapper covered in ants. Young, stupidly hopeful couples vie with packs of middle-aged women in lines for sweets and cartoon portraits, making him wince as they scrape the muddied tips of their umbrellas over the pavement. But he waits, waits and counts the endless assortment of mayoke swinging from bags, cell phones, and bracelets, grinning symbols of his better days.
There’s Kakuremi, the blindfolded penguin, who pecks away chance encounters with bores, and Nikkyu, paw in mouth, who buyers swear keeps them from blurting out the wrong thing during job interviews and wedding speeches. The protection charms once exclusively sold at shrines have branched out, become profitable by stretching their tendrils into all of life’s trivial desires.
Sasaki frowns and tugs absently at his jacket. He kicks away a crumpled can of Chu-hai at his feet, recoiling as the stench of alcohol floats around him like a cloud of apprehension. Her voice comes from behind.
“I was right. It is you.”
~
The call came a week ago, rattling the bottom drawer of his exile. Two months ago, Sasaki was Talismate Ltd’s rising star, peddling cheap hope for unheard of profits. Now he sat day after day, legs boxed into a windowless ‘window seat,’ while they waited for him to resign, commit suicide, or both. The drawer rattled again, and Sasaki banged his knee as he yanked it open. His phone wriggled and sang, beckoning from the empty darkness.
“Are you alone?” she asked.
The voice was brusque but elegant. Sasaki’s gaze swept the room, paranoid. Of course, he was alone. His superiors, his co-workers, if he could still call them that, were out at a business lunch, celebrating Hattori’s latest success, some badger-like creature with a polo mallet meant to ward off the tall in movie theaters. They were all tucking into gratis bentos about now, laden with decorative flowers carved from scallop and wagyu. All the better to exclude him with. “Yes,” he said, picking up a dry, half-eaten rice ball he’d brought in for lunch. “But I assume you knew that already.”
This call was obviously a prank of some sort, meant to inch him just a little bit closer to early retirement. He sniffed the rice ball before tossing it into the waste bin, smiling bitterly as he heard her sigh on the other end.
“Well then, Mr. Sasaki. I’ll get right to the point before you misunderstand further. My name is Koriyama. I run a small, but very profitable company called Akustats. You may have even heard of us?”
He hadn’t. He reached absently for a paper clip he’d contorted into a fork and started cleaning his fingernails.
“I’d like to set up a meeting with you. This Saturday afternoon, if possible.”
“May I ask why?” He was suddenly aware of a droplet of sweat tickling his shoulder blade. He reached behind to scratch, cursing silently as he smacked his hand against the now empty coat rack.
“We’ve been made to understand that your services will soon be available.”
“Well, you’d be wrong.” Despite the punitive cut to his bonus, Sasaki’s contract would let him draw salary at Talismate for another two years, and having wasted his savings on hostess bars and drink, he’d stayed, enduring the silence, the secret glances, and the deliberate imposition of boredom, studying it as if it were happening to someone else.
He glanced at the drab schoolroom clock above his desk. It was almost one o’clock. They would be back soon. “Listen. Can we talk about this later, perhaps?”
“Mr. Sasaki, I can sense your uncertainty. But I assure that this is not a joke. This is why I want to meet you, to explain everything, as right now one of your co-workers is on his way into the building.”
Sasaki turned his chair around, straining to see through the grimy glass of the tiny window. All he could make out was the entrance to a greasy spoon across the street, a place that served curry so runny you could drink it with a straw. There was no sign of Hattori, and certainly no sign of any mysterious woman, but the thought of another week without hope, of scrimping and saving every last bit of income toward his future survival was enough.
“Saturday, you said?”
“Ueno. The Museum of Western Art. Out front at noon sharp.”
The phone went dead just as Hattori whistled into the room, manicured fingers loosening the knot of his Hermes tie. His usual smugness had been traded in for a self-righteous display of sleeve rolling. He didn’t greet Sasaki, didn’t even bother to look at him, just frowned at a memo before slipping into his newly painted office and slamming the door.
~
From her voice he’d expected someone hardened and much older, but Koriyama is surprisingly young, beautiful even. Her hair is pulled back into a sleek chignon, and there’s something timeless and furtively alien about her, like an actress from Toho’s golden age. He turns and presents her with a poorly executed bow.
She does not return the formality. “I was watching you as I approached.” She smiles. “Running off that poor woman and her child. You’re as bad as I’d hoped.”
Koriyama slips a gloved hand into a simple black handbag, charm free, of course. No one in the business wears them. In his ten years at Talismate, Sasaki has never once heard a colleague profess to belief in anything but profit margins.
She hands him her business card, its translucent paper tastefully frayed along the edges, and that’s when he spots it, her pinky finger bending stiffly away from the rest. He looks away just as she catches him.
“It’s okay.” She holds out both of her hands. “It was a long time ago. Back when home economics classes began including boys. My kitchen partner was screwing around with a knife.”
She takes her pinky between left thumb and forefinger, and tugs the prosthesis all the way back to her wrist. Sasaki stops breathing.
“See? It doesn’t bother me anymore.”
He shifts his gaze back to the card, feels his cheeks burn. There is no address, no telephone number, just ‘Rie Koriyama’ next to the company logo and an email address. In some inchoate reflex, he is about to offer his own, when she looks at him like he’s just picked up the wrong fork.
“I know how to contact you.” And with a sudden surprising gesture, she slips her arm through his, her silk sleeve rustling against his suit as they turn lockstep, like one of those stupid couples, toward the museum entrance.
The museum is practically empty, for the exhibit is not the usual basan pleasing watercolors or collections from the Musee D’Orsay, but a mix of darker works, entitled ‘Damned Art.’ Sasaki savors the sudden silence and warmth as Koriyama produces two tickets from her billfold, embossed with a patchwork mouth of gray and black devouring a pair of legs. It’s a Rauschenberg, and he feels a sudden rush of pride at being able to name the artist. He’s seen it once before during his college days, back when he’d fancied himself to be genuinely creative and not just another idea man in a suit.
“May I ask why we didn’t just meet at your office?”
Koriyama passes their tickets to the usher, who directs them inside.
“I could have done that,” she says. “We have quite a nice office. Good for intimidating clients. But I thought this would be better space for us to talk. More creative?”
He follows her along the velvet ropes into the first exhibit, a twisted forest of rod iron sculpture around which the walls have been painted a deep, viscous red, like the inside of a heart. It’s so quiet that for a moment he thinks he can hear it beating, but it’s just the blood rushing through his ears, his head ringing after another week of mortification.
Koriyama steps up to one of the sculptures, ignoring the “Do Not Touch” sign to run a finger over it. It is, or was, a man, his body melting, transforming into some hideous, Boschian creature, all nose and wings.
“So, what do you think? Do you like any of them?” she asks.
He knows this is a test, another trendy, unconventional attempt to see how an employee might react to unusual circumstances. He steps back to give the room a once over, each object a blackened, petrified stump left after some ancient eruption. He does not know who the artist is this time. He only muses that, shoved the wrong way, a child might lose an eye.
“Like isn’t the word I’d choose. I suppose it’s enough to say they’re
interesting.”
Koriyama kneels to get a better look at the workmanship, her eyes turning the same color as the scorched metal. “I meant people.” Her gaze stays on the sculpture, but Sasaki feels another presence, as if he’s being watched by the blackened forms that now encircle him like a barbed wire fence.
“Well in that case, not many.”
She straightens and smiles. “I’d be hard pressed not to agree with you. This, however…” She crosses the room to take in another piece, this one spiny, like something charbroiled during the Cambrian era. “This is exquisite. I could get a lot of ideas from just this alone, couldn’t you?”
“I could answer you better if I knew what you meant,” he says.
But Koriyama is already gesturing toward the next exhibit. They pass through the entrance to halt before a large canvass. It’s a Goya, Sasaki guesses, although he’s not close enough to read the plaque. Within the frame, a saint holds a crucifix over a writhing, naked figure. Above him, a black plume pours through the window, obscuring the bitten fingernail of a moon.
“What do you think?” Koriyama asks. “It’s not very convincing, is it?”
Sasaki shakes his head. He’s seen scarier things scrawled on the desks at his old junior high school. But as he stares into the dark expanse of pigment, pale hints of grey begin to take on definition, tracing an outline around something monstrous and alive.
“My thoughts exactly,” she says. “Just a bunch of primitive scare tactics. The devil’s more complicated than this simplistic binary, or he wouldn’t be in the details.”
Sasaki starts as her fingers close around his shoulder, surprisingly firm as she turns him toward her, like a small child away from an accident scene.
“I’m not trying to be deliberately opaque, Mr. Sasaki. But I’ve asked you here because I think you are in the wrong business, have always been in the wrong business. Why create harmless little mayoke, when there’s money to be made in their counterparts?”
Koriyama glances toward the canvass, the demonic figure now fully realized, as it bears down on its victim. Sasaki’s left hand starts to shake. He wonders if Koriyama notices, if she registers the tic that’s just started in his forehead as months of forced atonement slip a mental latch into place. “The production of mayoke for negative purposes,” he says, “is against the law.”
He almost stutters when he says this, using the same timorous voice he used at work, when they made him say it over and over. Only then, he’d been on his knees.
~
Trouble came in the Sunday edition of the Asahi shimbun, an op-ed, brief but cloying enough to shriek for attention. Until then, Sasaki had been riding high on his latest creation, Ojin, a sleepy caricature of an Edo era traveler whose chin rested snugly on a walking stick of real wood.
The mayoke market had long been swamped with hundreds of charms promising to battle the hell of the Tokyo commute. They offered protection against the groping fingers of chikan, first dibs on choice seats over the heater, or in the tidy secluded corners of each compartment. But none, Sasaki had argued, assured undisturbed protection of one’s spot through the entire ride. Talismate’s legion of Todai educated mathematicians, who mined and divined data from social networks, health statistics, and the latest U.S. and Chinese food import flubs, initially pooh-poohed the idea, but within weeks of his debut, Ojin’s sales soared, and Sasaki was given carte blanche on a new line of charms.
If the writer of the column hadn’t uncovered another motive behind Ojin’s popularity, relating with odious sanctimony the story of a Saitama grandmother who had boarded a packed train for Ikebukuro and arrived splayed out on the compartment floor, he might have been given his own division.
“I would have taken a silver seat,” she’d rasped from her hospital bed, “but they were full.” Meanwhile the others, which should have been offered, were guarded as closely as cash bonuses on the way to the bank. Instead of being given a seat, the old woman had confronted row after row of Ojin, dangling sleepily from the handbags and briefcases, the cell phones of the happily seated, his tiny canes pointing at her like furtive middle fingers.
“Ojin is not protection,” the writer railed, “He is a not-so-subtle message to anyone elderly, infirm or with child to stay the hell away and guilt someone else out of his seat.”
Within weeks, the media was bleating about the loss of manners, the selfishness of a people who could not be bothered to sacrifice even a train seat to someone in need. Some pundits went as far as to compare Ojin to ubasute, the ancient rural custom in which villagers carried the old into the mountains to die.
“But that’s the whole point of mayoke,” Sasaki sputtered when they’d called him up to head office. “Of the gods themselves. They don’t make us better people. But through them we can reveal our humanity. However tacitly, we can say ‘Yes! I am weak. I fear and hate and shirk responsibility, just like everyone else!’”
He finished his plea just in time to see the drops of spittle dotting the dark cherry finish of his manager’s desk. He dabbed at them gingerly with a pack of pocket tissue from a hostess bar he frequented, and then they escorted him out.
~
Koriyama’s laughter cuts sharp into his disgrace.
“Of course it’s illegal. I should like to add that pachinko is illegal, too. If you play for money.”
She is referring to the greatest pretense in the game, that one plays not for money, but stale macadamia nuts and stuffed toys, to be traded if one wishes for cash at a back alley window.
“At Akustats,” she says, “We’ve found a similar way around the law. Our own bartering system.”
“And how does that work?”
He watches her expression sober as a group of uniformed schoolgirls bursts into the room. They point and giggle at the hunched nude figures, the obscenities hidden in the paintings, all torture scenes and hellfire. Koriyama pulls Sasaki to a tiny landscape on the opposite wall, glancing back at their loudly embroidered blazers as if trying to identify something.
“We sell our mayoke for the same things Talismate does. Little things, diet charms, protection against inconvenience or irritation. How are we to stop people from trading them with collectors?”
“Collectors?”
“We have hobby shops in Shimokita, Koenji, all over the city. They sell model sets, Gundam figurines, the usual. But you can also trade your mayoke for one that suits your purposes. One that we’ve designed.”
She nods toward the group of girls, now whispering conspiratorially before an Edvard Munch. “Look closely at the girl on the right. Do you recognize her charm?”
Sasaki stares at the small figurine hanging from her satchel. He can’t identify the make, at least not in this light. But its owner, he sees, is not at all like her friends. He watches her pull a younger, weaker member of the group aside, eyes shifting about the room as she leans in to whisper what can only be deliciously cruel.
“It’s just another one for entrance exams,” he says.
“And you would be right. Now look at the one her friend is wearing. The mousy girl with the spectacles.”
He nods once as he spots the charm dangling from the weaker girl’s bracelet. It’s tiny, almost indiscernible from the other hearts and bells cluttering her wrist.
“That’s one of ours,” Koriyama says. “And if you were to stand just a little bit closer, look at the chest, you’d also see the tiniest of red brown scratches. The ink is mixed with blood. We import it from the Caribbean, leftovers from Santeria rituals.”
He almost laughs. “Isn’t that going a bit far?”
“When it comes to perceived efficacy, Mr. Sasaki, you can never go too far. We also import powder ground from Mayan skulls. That’s a little more expensive, as it requires theft from archeological digs and museums, but our market research shows it to be a very strong sales point, and we’ve got a growing reputation to protect. That girl’s parents paid extra for those streaks of color. A little over a million yen.”
“Why would anyone…”
Koriyama leans in, lifting a finger to silence him, her cold breath tickling his ear. “Because as you might have noticed, her friend is a problem.”
Sasaki nods. He recognizes the malevolent stealth in the girl’s eyes, a craftiness honed by rejection. The weaker girl obediently steps away from the group, taking a seat on the bench in the center of the room.
“A previous classmate who’d been unlucky enough to befriend her wound up hanging in a broom closet. But no one could prove anything. They had to do something.”
“By cursing her?” Sasaki moves away from her, and his shoulder bumps against a gilt frame on the wall, turning it slightly askew. “I doubt that’s very effective.”
The girls slip away into the next room, leaving their freshly designated outcast behind on the bench. She’s free now to weep quietly, oblivious to the two adults.
“Today,” Koriyama whispers. “Today that girl’s problem is going to walk out of this museum. She’s going to leave her friends at the station and board the train. Then something will happen to her, quite random, and maybe not even that soon, but certainly commensurate to the pain she’s inflicted on our client. A falling tree branch blamed on a shoddy landscaping job, a pathogen in her lovingly constructed bento. Whatever it is, we won’t know until it happens, and sometimes even then we’re not sure. Our ‘spirits,’ are rather good at being discrete.”
Sasaki would like to pretend outrage, or at least mild shock, but as he stares at the girl on the bench he thinks of Hattori, and starts to calculate the interest in his savings account.
“Ojin was brilliant, Mr. Sasaki. You’ve a knack for people’s darker sides, and unlike many, you’ve got both the stomach and the imagination for what we do.”
He sneaks a glance at Koriyama’s gloved hands. The home ec story had been so convincing. He tests his own fingers, flexing them in his pocket, finds something. Another soybean, such a tiny thing meant to ward off an entire year of pain.
“Are you interested in coming to work for us? It’s very simple, actually. You create monsters. We sell them.” She reaches over to pluck a stray thread from one of his jacket buttons. “And there’s the matter of money, of course. It’s quite good.”
Sasaki looks back at the girl, and thinks of Hattori with his stupid litter frog and his polo mallets, charms for a passive aggressive mindset that can never own up to its own vice. He thinks of the lunches he’s been left out of, the artfully formed fishcakes, the bright, tiny orbs of pickled plum on beds of rice harvested in Tohoku. Envy, covetousness, the darkness of the soul that when acknowledged can be a beautiful thing is, at least, something he can believe in.
“You know, I’ve had enough hell for one day,” he says. “Might we discuss the details over lunch?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
They step outside and make their way past an army homeless men in line for hot tea and bread. Sasaki rolls the soybean between his fingers and offers Koriyama his arm. They could drive out the devil for as long as they liked, just as they could banish him to a corner window in a gray, fourth floor office. He would always find a way back inside.
Sara Kate Ellis lives in Tokyo where she is a master of seat nabbing during crowded commutes. Her short fiction has recently appeared in Brain Harvest and Electric Spec, with stories forthcoming in Bête Noire and the Rockets, Swords and Rainbows anthology. She is a 2011 Lambda fellow in genre fiction and can be found now and then at mojikashite/wordpress.com.
© 2011 All rights reserved Sara Kate Ellis.
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And now I’m dying for the second chapter….