Ink

Chapter 7

Tomohiro and I barely spoke at kendo, but that suited me just fine. I wanted to keep my distance from Ishikawa, and from the way he glared at me, he felt the same. He and Tomohiro had a few faint bruises on their faces, and I didn’t really want to think about how they’d got them. We went on through club practices like we didn’t know each other at all, and we kept our trips to Toro Iseki secret. Tomohiro feared his dad would learn he was drawing, despite him forbidding it—which I thought was crazy, but I chalked it up to a strict, unhappy workaholic—and I was scared of trespassing charges.

“What if they deport me?” I ranted, but Tomohiro smirked.

“Isn’t that what you want anyway?”

Just like in our kendo matches, where we only felt briefly safe with our shinai thrust between us, keeping each other at arm’s distance was the only way to trust each other. That way, no one would lunge, and either of us could retreat.

We lived in parallel worlds, somehow held together by the axis of each other.

The vibrant greens of spring dulled and the chirps of the wagtails drowned under the whirr of summer cicadas.

Two weeks before the big Aoi Ward tournament, Tomohiro didn’t show up in the courtyard after school. He texted me that night that his uncle had died and he was going with his father to Chiba for the funeral.

I felt his absence more strongly than I’d expected. I felt off balance when he wasn’t there, and while Eto-sensei droned on about world history, I thought about Tomohiro, how he had changed somehow. Maybe he hadn’t changed at all, just opened like a bud on the rough branch of the sakura tree, suddenly blooming and floating on the breeze; free, wheel-ing wherever he might land, dragged only by the current.

His kendo movements were unpredictable like that. No one could keep up with him except Ishikawa, and the two were the hope for the tournament. But no matter how Tomohiro unwrapped his strategies to me, I couldn’t match him in the gym, when all the eyes were watching and we were both shrieking our kiais at each other. The kendo teachers were always pairing us with kendouka we had no chance of beating. For the experience, they said. If we only fought at our own level, we’d never be challenged, never improve. But it was frightening to fight with Tomohiro. When he shouted and brought the shinai toward me, all I could think about was Koji, even though I’d mostly figured out the truth. It still frightened me, what Tomohiro might be capable of.

And yet, against all common sense, I’d fallen for him. I’d told myself for a while it was to figure out what was going on, to get my life back. He understood about my mom. But I wasn’t sure anymore what I wanted. I just knew I wanted to be near him.

Tomohiro was absent from practice for the funeral, but there was hardly time to think as Watanabe-sensei barked out the orders. One hundred push-ups for the junior members, twice as many for seniors. One thousand men strikes and countless laps of footwork around the gym. We would be up against some of the toughest schools in the ward, Nakamura-sensei said, in particular Katakou High. They had one of the best kendo clubs in the ward, and their secret weapon? National kendouka champion Takahashi.

“All our hope this year is placed in Ishikawa and Yuu,”

Watanabe said, “so give them your support.”

So the juniors could “improve” for the tournament, and the seniors could practice beating us to a pulp, the sensei paired us with older kendouka.

“Not today.” I sighed to myself. I didn’t feel like getting my butt handed to me.

“Greene and Ishikawa!” Watanabe belted out, and the pins and needles rushed up my neck.

You’re kidding.

Ishikawa flattened his mop of bleached hair under a tight headband and slipped on his men. My breath condensed on the mesh of the helmet’s screen; the stiflingly hot armor had become almost unbearable.

It had to be a joke. He was a much higher level than me.

Pairing me with Tomohiro was bad, but pairing me with Ishikawa was suicide. He wouldn’t go easy on me the way Tomohiro did.

“Sensei?” I said to Watanabe, but he nodded at me.

“We want you to compete in the tournament,” he said. “It would look great for our club to have more girls and more gaijin competing. So you need as many challenges as we can give you before you go out there. Take it lightly, Ishikawa, okay? Let her get warmed up first.” Ishikawa gave a faint nod, but his eyes were piercing. He wasn’t going to go easy on me. I knew that.

Ishikawa and I crouched to the floor, shinai at our sides.

We pulled them from their imaginary sheaths and pointed the tied bamboo slats at each other.

Ishikawa shrieked as he ran at me, and two thoughts snapped into my head: how different his movements and kiai were from Tomohiro’s, and how his yell rattled even Tomohiro. He often said Ishikawa would be the better fighter if he didn’t let the rage block his thinking, but the upcoming tournament had made him ferocious, so that panic grasped my mind as his shinai came at me. I tried to block, but within a minute his shinai slammed down on my wrist for a migi-kote point.

It was like I forgot all my training, like I was regressing.

Watanabe barked combinations at me, but my mind was so murky I could barely hear him. I was drowning in my own fear, off balance. Through the metal screen, Ishikawa’s dark eyes glared at me, a shock of white hair clinging to his forehead.

When the match finished, Ishikawa had managed four good hits, and I’d only had one pathetic swing to his dou.

And missed.

Class wrapped up, and Ishikawa pulled off his men and walked toward me, towering over me the way Tomohiro had done before.

“You think you’re so important to Yuuto,” he sneered, his voice low and hushed. His hot breath was in my ear, and the sounds of students unfastening armor and pushing open the change room doors all blurred into the background. “But he’ll lose interest in you, like he did in Myu. He always does.”

“We’re just friends,” I said quietly, but Ishikawa snorted.

“Yuuto always liked girls who were weak,” he said. “His interest in you will end, and then he’ll cast you aside.”

“Shut up,” I said. My whole body shook and my ears buzzed from the blood rushing through them. “What do you care anyway?”

“Because he’s my best friend,” Ishikawa said, combing a hand through his bleached hair. “And you’re distracting him.”

“From what?”

“His destiny,” he said. “Anyway,” he added, cupping his arm around his helmet, “he already has a girlfriend, so you’re wasting your time.”

My fingers squeezed so hard against my palms that I could feel my nails digging in. “Not that I care, but some best friend you are. He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

Ishikawa looked blank for a moment and started to laugh.

It was a wicked laugh, cold and scornful, and as much I wanted to tell him to go to hell, the sound of it made my whole body shudder.

Ishikawa leaned in right beside my ear. He smelled of kendo leather and sweat.

“What did Yuuto tell you?” he said quietly. “Did he tell you his pregnant girlfriend was only a cousin? A sister? A family friend?” He smirked and turned away, his gray hakama swaying as he walked.

The words pulsed in my head. I felt like I’d lost my sense of direction, like I’d just spiral down to the floor and collapse.

I forced myself into the change room, unfastened all the bogu armor and pulled the tenugui headband from my sweaty hair.

My head was spinning, and I could think of nowhere to go to clear it but Toro Iseki. I didn’t have Diane’s bike, so I hurried for the local yellow-and-green bus that Tomohiro and I often took on rainy days. It cut the trip in half, which was a good thing because I felt like I might pass out on the way.

I tried to call Tomohiro’s keitai, but it was off. I started a text, but the kanji kept grouping into the wrong ones and I was too embarrassed to send a message with only phonetic hiragana. Damn auto spell! Eventually I sent a message in English.

Call me when you’re back from Chiba. —Katie I hit Send, but when I pushed the button, I immediately regretted it. He would get the message at his uncle’s funeral, and for what? So I could accuse him of lying to me?

No, it wasn’t that. Tomohiro and I had become close, and Ishikawa was jealous. He was just trying to piss me off. I was sure of it. But I also knew it had worked, and I needed help to pull myself out of the spiral.

Renovations at Toro Iseki were almost complete by the summer. I ducked under the fence with no trouble and stepped into the belt of forest around the site. The pungent smell of humid summer forest flooded my nostrils and clogged up my nose. Damn allergies. I wove between the trees, trying to avoid the patches of wildflowers. Cicadas whirred all around me, and the wagtails leaped from branch to branch above, their tails bobbing like they’d had too much caffeine.

I leaned against a tree trunk, finally able to face what Ishikawa had said.

Tomohiro was drawn to me because I was weak. He really did have a pregnant girlfriend. I was keeping him from his destiny.

What destiny? We’d kept our meetings private, so he couldn’t mean study time for entrance exams. Was I distracting him from kendo? But that wasn’t his destiny.

Joining the Yakuza? Maybe.

The wagtails’ songs turned erratic and I looked up, trying to figure out what had happened. They jumped around and chirped high-pitched warnings to each other. Were they that worried about me?

Then I saw the problem—an intruder among the birds. It was another wagtail, but his tail feathers stretched out longer than the others, his round eyes void and vacant like…like the sketched girl in the genkan. All the wagtails were white and black, but this one looked papery, like he would crinkle in the breeze. His feathers were jagged, messy scrawls, and when he beat his wings to move to another branch, little swirls of shimmering dust trailed his flight.

Oh my god. He’s…he’s a sketch.

The wagtail hopped toward another bird and lunged. Red sprayed across the black-and-white victim, and the shock of color sent my head spinning.

He’s attacking them. The way my drawings came after me.

In a flurry of feathers, the sketched wagtail lunged at the others, clawing at them, pecking at their eyes and throats.

I flailed my arms around to scare him away, then found a twig and threw it at the patch of birds. It clipped his wing and he took off into the air, chased by some of the puffier wagtails. He soared across the clearing of Toro Iseki, the trail of black dust following him. I took off after him.

Suddenly my keitai phone chimed with a text, and the sound scattered the whole flock of wagtails, their wings beating like a crashing waterfall. My heart pounded at the sudden electronic notes beeping through the chirps of the birds.

And just as suddenly, the sketched wagtail stopped in midair like he’d slammed into a glass wall. He plummeted to the ground, landing with a thud in the grass.

I stepped out of the trees and ran to where he fell. I scanned the long grasses, but I couldn’t find his body anywhere. Black dust fell from the sky like snow, gathering on my shoulders like an oily sheen.

“Katie?” a voice said, and I knew it instantly.

Tomohiro.

I turned and saw him there, sitting with his sketchbook balanced on his knees.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“The wagtail,” I said. “It— What are you doing here? I thought you were in Chiba for the funeral.”

Tomohiro motioned to the blazer he’d discarded beside him, a bracelet of wooden Buddhist prayer beads resting on top of it. He wore his red-and-navy-striped tie, part of the boys’ school uniform, but he’d loosened the knot so it hung unkempt around his neck.

“The funeral was this morning,” he said. “My dad had a business meeting, so we caught the afternoon train back.

Are you okay?”

“Not really,” I said. My head was pounding. Tomohiro’s face wrinkled with concern and he patted the ground beside him.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I have to find the bird,” I said, scanning the ground.

“What bird?”

“Didn’t you see it? It attacked the other birds,” I said. I crouched down and bent the grasses out of the way with my hand.

“You mean like rabies? I didn’t see anything.”

“Maybe. But it looked weird. There was something wrong with its feathers. And it just dropped all of a sudden out of the sky, like it smacked into something. It looked like it was…

made of paper.”

“Katie, sit down,” Tomohiro said, and there was something in his voice that made my thoughts snap into place. I turned to him, all my suspicions colliding in my head.

“Yuu, why do you destroy your drawings?”

“What?”

“I swear to God I saw them move.”

“We’ve been over this.”

“And the dragon tail.”

“The what?”

“I found a scrap from your notebook. It moved, too.”

“Katie, what the hell?” Tomohiro snapped. “Do you know how crazy you sound?” He sounded ticked off, but somehow his face didn’t line up. It didn’t add up.

What was Tomohiro’s destiny, and why did Ishikawa think I was in the way?

“Ishikawa said Shiori is your girlfriend,” I said. Tomohiro narrowed his eyes.

“Satoshi is full of shit,” he said darkly.

“Is he?”

“Katie! You seriously believe him over me? He’s just messing with you. I told you Shiori is like a sister. She’s a family friend.” He looked down at his closed sketchbook, and his bangs fanned over his dark eyes.

“How do I know?” I said. “Tell me why my drawings moved, Yuu. Tell me why my pen blew up and why I saw ink on your hands that wasn’t there. Tell me what really happened to Koji. You’ve always been keeping something from me. Ishikawa said you’re drawn to me because I’m weak.

What does he mean?”

“How are you weak, Katie?” Tomohiro looked up at me, his eyes shining. “You’re far from home, in a country you don’t fully understand, speaking a language you haven’t fully mastered, and all of that leaves you isolated to deal with your mom’s death.” Tomohiro stepped toward me and placed his hands on my arms. His palms felt warm through the thin summer sleeves of my uniform. “Tell me how that’s weak,”

he urged quietly.

“You wanted me to stay away from you,” I said. “I thought it was because of the Yakuza. But there’s more, isn’t there?”

Tomohiro smiled. “There’s nothing more—”

“Cut the crap,” I shouted and shook his hands off. He stood staring at me and I felt the shame rise in me. But I had to know.

“Show me your sketchbook,” I said.

“What?”

“I want to see your sketchbook,” I said, pointing at the black cover. Tomohiro turned and stared at it. “Maybe Ishikawa was messing with me. I don’t know. But I need to know what’s going on. Please, Yuu.”

“Katie. Just trust me, and don’t ask this.” Tomohiro’s eyes were wide and gazed at mine with pleading. But I’d gone this far, and I couldn’t go back.

“Yuu, you know I have to see it.” He hesitated. “Please,”

I said.

He backed up slowly, each foot dragging through the grass, then bent over and picked up the sketchbook. He held it out to me with one hand, and I took it, even though his eyes looked so sad.

My hands shook as I pressed my fingers into the cover.

I pulled it open slowly, flipping through the drawings I’d seen him sketch over the past several weeks. They all looked weird, in poses I didn’t remember, each with the same thick lines scribbled through them, scraped right through the pictures, rendering them ugly and useless. The horse had his nostrils flared, his head over his shoulder—not the way he had been drawn.

I fanned the pages until I reached the blank ones, and turned backward until the last sketch came into view.

I stopped and looked at the drawing.

A wagtail, with a thick X across its neck. His eyes gleamed like vacant pools of ink, and his feathers jagged out in awkward directions.

I stared at the picture. Tomohiro said nothing.

I looked up at him slowly.

“You drew him,” I said. “You made that wagtail.”

He didn’t make any excuses. He just looked at me with a heaviness in his eyes.

“How did you do this?” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

“What’s going on?”

His gaze was piercing and I wished he’d drop his eyes to the ground. Shivers of fear pulsed through my body, but I couldn’t tear myself away from him. I’d had my suspicions, but they couldn’t have prepared me for the truth. My heart pounded in my ears.

“What are you?” I said.

“Katie. Calm down.”

“Calm down? Either your fucking drawings are coming to life or I’m losing my mind! How the hell am I supposed to calm down?”

“It’s not you, okay? Sit down, and—and I’ll answer your questions.”

“Well, you better!” I shouted, but he looked about as threatening as a puppy. When I thought about it, he actually looked more frightened than me.

I stayed standing.

“Is this why you quit calligraphy?” I asked.

He gazed at me with gleaming eyes. “Yes.”

“Is this why you destroy your drawings?”

Another pause. Then a nod.

“And the girl really looked at me, in the genkan. And you made my pen explode.”

“Yes.”

My mind went blank. Hot tears carved their way down my cheeks. I sobbed and didn’t care how wretched I looked.

The reality I’d believed in and the reality that existed were too different, and there was no way to reconcile them. It was like seeing a ghost or a miracle, or someone fly. Something impossible. My brain throbbed as I tried to rationalize it.

“Katie.” Tomohiro’s gentle voice cut through my sobs.

He reached out his hands for the sketchbook, or for me. I wasn’t sure.

I took a shaky breath and moved toward him. I pressed the notebook into his hands, the metal spiral cold beneath my trembling fingers.

“You can’t tell anyone,” he said, and I snorted.

“That’s your major concern here?”

“Please,” he said again. “Especially Sato.”

“Tell them what?” I said. “That your drawings come to life? They’d send me to the loony bin.”

He shook his head. “Satoshi will believe you,” he said quietly. “He’s been trying to prove it for years and I’ve always denied it. If he knew the truth… He’ll try and get the Yakuza to use me. Do you understand? It will put us both in serious trouble if anyone knows.”

“But knows what? ”

Tomohiro sighed, and his eyes brimmed with tears that he blinked back.

In a shaky whisper he said, “I’m a Kami.”

“Kami?” My head cycled through its mini-dictionary of Japanese. Kami meant “paper,” but something else sparked in my mind. Kami also meant “god.”

“Shinto talks about the kami, right?” Tomohiro said.

“There are thousands of them.”

“Gods, you mean?”

“Gods,” he said. “Or spirits. Beings that inhabit things in nature, like trees, or waterfalls or stuff. Shinto’s all about a spark of life in everything.”

“So you’re some kind of spirit, is that it?”

“That’s just Shinto tradition. But there’s more than that.

There’s a reason kami means ‘paper’ and ‘spirit,’ Katie.”

“Just spit it out, Yuu.”

“Okay. The most famous kami is Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun. She’s part of the creation story. But she’s more than that.” Tomohiro stared into the distance. “Amaterasu was real.

Not a goddess maybe, but a real person with some kind of…

power. And the real Kami are descendants of that power.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Did you, or did you not, see the drawings move?”

“Point taken.”

“There was a time when the Kami were well-known. We can…do something with our minds. I don’t understand it.

Anyway, all the myths come from bits of truth. The drawings, poems, folklore…it’s all by Japanese trying to understand where the Kami came from.”

“And you’re one of these Kami,” I said, but he didn’t answer.

“Do you know what one of the conditions of surrender was at the end of World War Two?” he asked. “Emperor Hirohito had to publicly deny his divinity. Japanese always believed emperors were descended from Amaterasu. I guess Westerners thought it would be humiliating for Hirohito to denounce this claim.”

“So it sort of knocked him down a rank?” I said.

Tomohiro leaned in. “Yeah, but it wasn’t just a tradition of myth. The royal family really are Kami,” he said. “When Hirohito denounced his power, it was a message to the Kami to scatter. Families with the ability went into hiding, and now those who know the truth keep quiet out of fear. There are dangerous people in Japan, you know.”

“You said Ishikawa would make you work for the Yakuza,”

I said.

“I’m afraid of it,” he said, and I saw the fear in his eyes, that he was freaked out by all of this, too.

“So these Kami, they can all draw things that become real?”

“I’m not sure. For me, it’s something in my mind when I draw. I don’t really know any other Kami.”

“You’ve thought it all out,” I said.

“My dad told me most of it. But I’ve tried to learn more since he won’t tell me everything.”

“Your dad knows about this?”

“It’s why he’s forbidden me from drawing,” he said.

“Is he a Kami, too?”

Tomohiro shook his head. “He won’t give me a clear answer, but I know my mom was. She’d have to be, to pass the power down to me.” A sudden thought sparked through my head, and I was almost too afraid to say it.

“Yuu,” I whispered, “your mom…”

“It had to do with her accident, yes.”

My throat felt thick.

“That’s why you can’t tell anyone, Katie. We’d both be in danger.”

“But why did my drawing move? Why did the pen explode?”

“The pen was me,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do.

If the drawings had reached you…” He didn’t need to complete the thought. They might have been tiny, but mouths of razor-sharp teeth don’t lie. “So I burst the pen and drowned them before they could get to you. I just told the ink to go every direction, and it was strong enough to break the plastic.”

“But I’m not a Kami,” I said. “Why would my drawings move?”

“It’s all my fault,” he said and crouched on the ground, his hands in his hair. “They were reacting to me being there. I didn’t do it, but I couldn’t stop it, either. I’ve tried so hard to keep it a secret, but somehow when you’re around I can’t control the ink as well. I’ve been trying to figure it out, believe me. But when I’m near you, I can’t—it’s like everything gets fuzzy.”

“What do you mean, ‘fuzzy’?”

He sighed. “The ink wants something from you. I don’t know what it is, believe me. You’re some kind of ink magnet or something. It’s getting really hard to control my drawings, to—to control myself.”

“Stop drawing, then,” I choked. After me? Why?

Tomohiro twisted the tall grasses around his fingers. “I have to draw. But I don’t use inkstones or sumi anymore. It’s too dangerous. I couldn’t even think straight, like it wasn’t my own mind or something.”

“The time you cut yourself,” I said, and he frowned.

“I cut myself on the kanji,” he said. “The last stroke of sword flicks to the left. When I drew the line across the page, the word cut into my wrist. I was lucky it didn’t kill me.”

“Shit,” I said, crouching beside him. And then another thought occurred to me.

“Koji,” I whispered. He looked at me with glassy eyes.

“I was just a stupid kid,” he said, his voice barely audible.

“I tried to hide it from him, but…he just wanted me to show him what I could do.”

There was no breakin, no guard dog. I realized that now.

The drawing, whatever it was, had ripped into Koji. And Koji had protected Tomohiro even then.

“I never told Sato about the ink. It would’ve been a death sentence for him to know. But I can control things better now.

You don’t have to worry. I would never let it happen to you.

But Koji—oh god, Katie. I still have nightmares about it.”

I took his hand and flipped it palm up, pushed his shirtsleeve back to expose the scars and cuts up his arm.

“Sometimes the drawings still scratch or bite me. This long one is from a dragon claw.”

“Dragon?” I said. “Like the tail I saw? It moved even though the page was ripped.”

“I don’t really understand how it works,” he said, gazing down at the scars. “Destroying the pictures doesn’t destroy the creatures. It contains them somehow, stops them from coming off the page. But they still move around.”

It was too much for me. My head filled with a fog of confusion. It ached to wade through this new, unwanted knowledge. I tried to focus on concrete things I knew were real.

The wagtails chirped and the breeze blew, first the scents of thatched wood and flowers, then the smell of Tomohiro’s hair gel and his skin. The smell of funeral incense clinging to his clothes. The fact that I was technically holding his hand. The heat of his skin where it touched mine.

The warmth rushed up my neck and into my cheeks. I dropped his hand, but I realized how close I was sitting to him, the way his loosened tie flapped in the wind. The little buttons undone at his throat. The soft tan skin of his collarbone.

“Yuu,” I said.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” he said. “Please.” He reached out for my hand with his. His fingers were softer than I’d thought, slender and gentle as they wrapped around mine.

My voice was barely a whisper. “I am afraid.”

“I know. But I would never hurt you, Katie. I would never let it hurt you.” He pulled me close to him, so that my face pressed against the fragrance of incense caught in his white shirt. The warmth of his neck and chin pressed against my hair, and I could feel his heartbeat pulsing against my shoulder. And the way his strong arms shook as they held me, I knew he was afraid, too. “I’ll fight it.”

I wanted to press myself closer to him, and at the same time I wanted to step away.

“Fight it?”

He leaned back and shook his head. “I’m marked, Katie.

That’s what the nightmares keep telling me, that there’s only suffering ahead. You saw the wagtail attack the other birds, right? There’s something darker than ink that seeps into the sketches. I don’t know if it’s the Kami bloodline or…or something in me. Maybe my true self is evil and it’s fighting its way to the surface.”

“You don’t believe that!” I said, but fear gripped my spine.

“I don’t know why it’s trying to get you. But I won’t let it.”

The power itself was as scary as hell, but the idea that it was something awful, that Tomohiro was something worthy of lurking in the shadows…

And that, whether it was him or something else, it was after me, too…

“That’s bullshit,” I said.

The corners of his mouth lifted, but the smile was brief.

“I hope so,” he said.

He pulled me close again and we stayed like that for a long time, the pages of the sketchbook flipping in the wind.