But she can see it.
Head tilts downward, eyes pan over the contents of the glass-topped vanity before her: rouge, combs and brushes, scattered lipsticks, and a squat black pot of kohl. What here could protect against the dissolution of her face, what could fix her features in place to stop that blurring trembling erasure she sees beginning in the mirror?
Her hand reaches for the kohl and she presses her finger into the solid mass, swirling and swirling until it forms a thick paste warmed by her skin. She considers the slick black that now coats her fingers.
The mirror shows the kohl-blackened hand reaching up and a sudden flash of teeth as she begins rubbing, darkening her teeth with broader and broader strokes. Soon she moves beyond just teeth, dipping fingers back into the kohl to smear more across the border of her mouth, tasting waxy nothing and feeling the fine sand-crunch of grit. The face that regards her in the mirror is exaggerated now, mouth elongated and teeth lost to the kohl.
The reflection’s eyes shift to her hair.
The kohl-stained hand now pulls a honeyed-gold teak comb through long black hair. If she presses down, firmly, teeth digging into the pale white of her scalp, she can stop the trembling, she is certain of it.
How many times did she need to run the comb through her hair?
One hundred strokes, her mother’s voice comes to her now, One hundred strokes each night, my daughter, and your hair will be so beautiful.
The comb flashes briefly in the mirror, hovering above the point of her widow’s peak before it bites down again, catching bright flashes of red that cake each tooth for a split second before disappearing further into a black cascade. She long lost count of how many times she has dragged the comb through her hair. And still her hand keeps its mechanical movement up, down, through.
Yes, mother, but how many times before I am beautiful?
As her eyes fix on her image in the mirror, she sees the hair clump, thick coils beginning to curl upwards in disarray no matter how hard she presses down. The comb no longer moves fluidly and she has to wrench it out several times. She takes no notice of the droplets of red that spread across the stark white of her nightgown. She continues combing.
How many times?
The comb suddenly catches, sharp teeth caught on a wet matted knot, slipping out of her hand. Without missing a beat her hand compulsively continues its path, fingers digging in and moving around the comb now embedded in the slick mass that seems to grow with each pass. She reaches up with her other hand, clawing through her hair with increasingly jerky motions. As her hands rake through the full length of her hair, they came away with handfuls of glistening red-black coils.
In one sudden move she gathers her hair in both hands, wringing it firmly. A thick rivulet of blood drips from the ends, pooling onto the tiled floor.
“And, cut!”
Suiko instantly relaxed, holding out her red-black dripping hands to the assistant that dutifully appeared at her side with a towel. Off to the side the director gives her a preliminary thumbs up, the bright stage lights glinting off thick tortoise-shell glasses while the rest of the crew bustled around the set.
Amid the activity, Suiko suddenly smelled a thick, acrid tang in the air, like the pressure of the sky bearing down just before a storm breaks.
She instinctively glanced around.
From behind the production crew and the large camera rig situated several feet from her mark she saw a single glassy eye glinting within a sheet of long, scraggly hair.
#
Suiko had been skeptical about taking the role when her agent first approached her about a reimagining of the Yotsuya kaidan some boutique American studio was putting together.
“The casting director told me they’re making it a point to cast Japanese speaking actors for all the roles and it seems they’ve managed to fill out most of the cast. All they need is someone to play Oiwa.” He looked meaningfully here at Suiko, “There’s been a few influential movies with older women protagonists in the U.S., so they’re attempting to age Oiwa up for this. They think you would be perfect.”
Back in her trailer, Suiko sat at her own vanity and considered her face in the mirror, now devoid of the thick paste of makeup, stage blood, and smeared kohl from the scene.
It had been several decades since Suiko had decided to try her hand at aging mortally. She had known it would be risky for a being like her to be in the public eye for so long, even if she kept her true nature hidden. Yet, Suiko found the prospect of such a dedicated performance utterly irresistible—a tanuki living as a naturally aging human pretending to be other humans on film and stage.
Method acting taken to an entirely new level, she had thought grandly.
Her current face had settled with the graceful weight of six human decades, the slight pouching here and there, the softness of jowls and cheeks, the series of horizontal creases that folded when she lifted her eyebrows, all meticulously and lovingly crafted from years of painstaking practice. The deep, cheerful crinkling of skin around her eyes radiating out towards her temples when she smiled was her favorite touch.
As she was pulling up her hair into a bun, the scent of murky brackish water flooded the trailer and she repressed a groan. Not again.
A hunched figure materialized in one corner of the trailer, a ragged kimono hung on her frail frame and pooled at her feet. A sheet of long black hair hanging limply over part of her face, which tilted slightly from a neck that hung at an unnatural angle. Suiko turned to face the apparition.
“Well?” She asked, trying to keep her tone even.
The figure adjusted itself to cast its gaze toward Suiko and let out a bubbling, choked laugh.
“I have seen better.” It said, its voice reverberating within the small confines of Suiko’s trailer, the sound bouncing off the walls like a stone clattering to the bottom of a well.
“Can you lower your voice please, Oiwa.” Suiko said with a wince, reflexively reaching up to her ears. She forgot how grating it was to speak with the dead.
The ghost let out a gurgling sigh, but pitched her voice lower.
“Your performance today was adequate.” Oiwa said, “Certainly there has been improvement over the last several weeks. Though why the playwright—”
“—screenwriter—”
“Why the writer insists on forcing the angle of madness is beyond me. I find it quite tedious that my supposed madness always remains the central focus for most of these stories. Even now, when I am to be portrayed as an older woman, the madness remains.”
Suiko was used to Oiwa’s pontifications by this point and knew it was best to simply let things run its course. Suiko herself had been alive long before the murders that occurred in Yotsuya Ward, watching the legend morph first hand from the Yotsuya zotan, a book presented as something supposedly written by an official from within the ward, to the plays and rakugo performances that had made Oiwa’s story so famous. It was a far more robust canon than most of the stories she had come across for those of her own kind. A bulk of those stories depicted tanuki as almost exclusively male with huge scrotums, for heaven’s sake.
“I don’t understand why you fuss about all this,” Suiko finally cut in, “You’re one of the most well-known ghosts and you’ve inspired so many other stories. There are even shrines erected in your name throughout Tokyo! Surely that must count for something?”
The ghost hung silently in the clammy air for a moment, thin tendrils of mist coalescing faintly around her.
“These stories do not feel quite right,” Oiwa said, her voice now the gentler trickle of a creek, “I believe it is because of the humans themselves who were trying to portray me—how could they possibly get it right? I had hope that a tanuki actress would be able to do something different.”
“And I am, aren’t I? You have to admit the bit with the kohl on the face and the fight against the dissolution of being was pretty good.”
The ghost offered a spasming grimace that Suiko decided to interpret as a smile.
“Yes, you do manage to capture something of what I imagine, even if it appears to be accidental at times.”
“Well, maybe we could achieve your artistic vision more quickly if you haunted the director, or any member of the crew, rather than me.” Suiko said with some irritation.
Oiwa’s laugh bubbled up one last time as she dissolved fully back into the air.
#
There are no mirrors here nor any gleaming surface at all to catch her shape as she moves down the hallway. There are no lights to cast her form in sharp relief against the oak-paneled walls, just a faint glow that seems to follow her wherever she glides. She cannot even feel the smooth tile beneath her feet. Was it simply too cold to feel her feet her hands her body? Surely there was something of her here, something that moves, something that perceives the space around her.
In the distance she hears the soft, intermittent beating of a drum, its rhythm weaving through the eerie piping strains of a flute.
Something propels her forward, an impulse that drags her down the long hall to peer in each open door. What, or who, calls to her?
One of the doors is nearly closed and from behind it are the sound of voices, hushed and hurried. She pauses, listening. The voices muddle together before eventually pulling apart and while she cannot tell what they say, she recognizes some of them now: it is her husband, two of his close friends, and the neighbor.
Why would her husband invite company without telling her?
She tries to push through the doorway to get a better look, but she is now suddenly immobile, her back pressing up near the ceiling opposite the door. Around her is that soft halo of warm light and she can see the faint shadows of what must be her body struggling to be free of the wall, of the corridor, of whatever is pinning her aloft. In desperation she reaches out a hand, clawing at the wall around her, and tears out thick chunks of panelling that clatter to the floor. She screams with her mouth wide open and it is the dry sound of tearing paper.
From within the room she hears a shout, sees the rush of movement as a man swiftly opens the door. It is Kaiho, one of her husband’s friends. His eyes rove the hall before he pushes the door open fully to step out.
“Did you hear that, Iemon?” He asks nervously, eyes drifting to the jagged pile of panelling and fine scraps of paper that lie in a heap on the floor before moving up to the gouged marks in the wall, then up to the ceiling to look her in the face. His eyes meet hers and he screams, tumbling backwards in his haste to get away. Before she can speak he convulses violently, clutching desperately at his chest. He lets out one final cry and he is dead.
She feels her rasping breath catch in her chest, the round cavity created by the bamboo ribbing feels far too tight. As she struggles her mouth tears open wider, a ragged horizontal cut that allows the light to pour out and illuminate the corridor more brightly.
Her husband rushes to the doorway, peering wide-eyed at the corpse of his friend lying contorted in the hall. When his eyes finally look upon where her torn paper crepe form hangs, he looks straight through her.
#
“Your movement is still completely wrong!”
Oiwa’s voice and its echo buzzed in Suiko’s head, making her teeth stand on edge.
She was growing weary of this haunting and of the smothering dampness that clung to the trailer whenever Oiwa paid her a visit.
“The director would beg to differ,” Suiko said tensely from the couch, a heating pad warming the small of her back. The team had initially wanted to use a series of ropes and pulleys against a green screen backdrop to achieve the hallway scene. She had managed to convince them otherwise, focusing instead on how she held her body hunched and how she shuffled her feet fluidly across the polished floors to create the impression of weightlessness.
The director had been thrilled with her performance, raving about the impact of practical effects.
“No, no, no. Too much bulk, too much being,” Oiwa insisted, “There is still too much to be believable. No one with any self respect would see this performance as anything more than a cheap sham. You must do more than rely on old kabuki stage tricks!”
Suiko sighed, rubbing at the tension pounding in her temples.
“And how exactly do I lessen my being?” She asked, “I am still very alive and corporeal, so there is not much I can do about being embodied. Besides, I’m much closer to achieving whatever perfection you are after than any other human actor would be, aren’t I? Why isn’t this good enough for you?” As she spoke, she felt her frustration mounting, “You’re lucky I’m even listening to you! What right do you have to come in here and dictate how to play this role?”
“You are portraying me.”
“This is just a character, Oiwa, and unfortunately for you they aren’t interested in creating a pseudo-documentary of what happened in Yotsuya Ward three hundred years ago, even if such a thing were possible.” Suiko snapped, “I understand that your story is all you have left, but you can’t honestly believe you have any ownership over it now. None of us have any say in how we’ve been depicted. Look at what happened to my friend, the fox, look at how those like her have been demonized for centuries. She never had any say when someone would throw her out of her village simply because they had their own ideas about what a fox was. She only survived by hiding who she was for most of her lives.”
“Your friend still had the chance to be whoever she wanted to be, even when others tried to dictate her story for her.” Oiwa’s voice rose with her agitation, pounding off the trailer walls like a churning sea, “She chose to go along with the story written for her and therefore suffered the consequences.”
Suiko stood up abruptly, squaring off with the ghost.
“You and I both know it’s more complicated than that.” She hissed.
“Forgive me if I feel little sympathy for you long-lived beings. If you do not enjoy the life you live, you are able to begin anew. If you do not like the body you have, you create something anew. If you end up loving someone who does not love you in return, you can find love anew. On and on you can begin again unless you are foolish enough to get yourself killed. How many lives have you lived until you became Morinaka Suiko, star of the stage and screen? Hundreds? And yet you criticize me for wishing for some control over the one story of my life that has circulated centuries after I died.”
The ghost fixed its single watery eye at her, the rush of rage that swirled to its milky surface dissolving just as quickly back into an impenetrable black.
“I admit, though, I had imagined a tanuki, of all creatures, would be able to perfect this role by now.” Oiwa said snidely. Despite herself, Suiko bristled at those words.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You say you are embodied, yes, but are you not also a being that knows what it is to be unbodied, even for just a moment? I have seen your kind transform, it is not an instant switch from one state to another, but a gradual change. What happens to your body when you are moving between forms?”
Her words stopped Suiko, mouth already open and ready for a retort. She had never really considered what happened when her body shifted and molded itself in the same way she never really considered how each breath went in and out of her body. Yes, there was always a conscious element to it, a choice involved. But once she made the choice and the action began, her body simply took over.
She tried to picture it: her human body transforming itself back into the shape of a tanuki. First visualizing an outcome, then willing her body to bend itself, the transformation creeping along each element of her form, a cascade linking one part to another until each piece was touched by the one that came before, all holding echoes of the original but coaxed into a new shape.
“There would be some time, maybe less than a fraction of a second, where I would be something else. Something in the middle but not necessarily exactly half and half. ” She said thoughtfully, “I’ve never thought about it because the act of transforming always felt so natural to me, even when I was young. ”
Something of an approving smile glittered in Oiwa’s eye, her face gradually fading as she spoke.
“Tap into that in-between,” She said, “Hold that moment where the potential is balanced between one thing and another—tanuki, human, life, death—and try to move your body again.”
#
Will find, will chase, will hunt those responsible for this.
Unrestrained by the weight of atoms knit together, she moves through the trees that line the path through the forest. Under the cover of night she has already found the others, her ghastly pale wretched torn face the last thing seen before the end. The ones who conspired, the ones who stole all that she was are now no more. All that remains is her husband.
Iemon has run, but Iemon will not be able to hide.
Tonight it is Tanabata and in the course of her wild flight she looks up into the night sky and she sees the lovers Orihime and Hikoboshi drawing close to one another, for one night crossing the vastness of the Milky Way to touch. On this night she too seeks the one separated from her, the one who flees. And she will also draw him close.
She presses onwards.
In a broad sweeping motion she takes in the scene rising up before her: the forest opening up into a glade ringed with bamboo, hundreds of colorful strips of paper tied to the trees fluttering in the wind as she stops, a weightless hovering above the grass. From somewhere behind the far wall of bamboo she hears the sound of rushing water.
He is there at the opposite end of the glade tying up his own strip of paper. His back is to her and she feels a wide smile pull itself across her face savoring these few moments when he is so vulnerable and so oblivious as she had been before—
What is it you wish for, Iemon?
He straightens, as if he hears something moving in the trees.
No longer restrained by the weight of being, no longer bound by the fear of noncoporeality, she lets herself expand outwards, engulfing the bamboo and the glade until finally the edges of her reach him.
Come, Iemon.
She laughs when she sees him leap away from her touch, his hands scrabbling for something on his belt and she laughs harder when she sees the small knife he pulls out as she pulls him close so close and she holds them both tightly for what feels like an eternity before she releases him, the hilt of his own knife embedded in his chest catching the starlight as he falls back, tumbling into the river that snakes its way past the trees.
As the river carries his body away, something catches her eye.
Nestled among the bamboo and the dancing paper strips is a paper lantern, browned and yellowed with age. She looks closer and a face appears, the shadows of paper strips forming long black hair framing half-closed eyes, hint of nose, a slit of mouth formed by the slim backlit bamboo ribbing within.
Before her eyes the slit slowly widens, tearing bit by bit, as the lantern smiles its approval.