Spirits of the Noh

1

Kara Harper sat in the back of the classroom, trying valiantly to stay awake. The windows of Room 2-C were open, but no breeze came off Miyazu Bay that Friday afternoon. It was the third week of August and Monju-no-Chie school had been back in session for a scant handful of sweltering days. The weather had been beautiful during the holiday weeks that separated the spring and summer terms. This far to the north of Kyoto Province, so close to the Sea of Japan, and with the school situated right on the bay, it was rare for the heat to reach brutal levels.

But now classes were back in session, and the summer had turned ugly.

Kara didn’t mind so much. After the terrors of the spring, a little hot weather was nothing to complain about. She was just glad that she and her friends were all still alive to feel the heat.

During those terrifying days, she and her father had nearly decided to pack it all in and return home. Sometimes Kara wondered if they had made the right decision in staying, but mostly she was glad. It would have broken her heart to say a premature farewell to the friends she had made here-some of the best friends of her life. And though sometimes she still had nightmares, the shadows were receding.

Kara blinked. People were getting up. While her mind had been drifting, school had ended. With a grateful sigh, she stood and stretched, sticky clothes pulling away from her body. She wanted a shower, but she had hours of other responsibilities to contend with. Her calligraphy club met after school, but first came o-soji, the cleaning of the school, which students performed every day at the conclusion of classes. Japanese schools had maintenance staff to deal with blocked toilets and broken lightbulbs and such, but the basic cleaning-bathrooms and classrooms and garbage duty-was done by students.

The class started to head for the lockers at the back of the room. Kara’s friend Miho stopped by her desk and fixed her with an odd look. She often hid behind her glasses and the long veil of her straight, black hair, but today it was pulled back with a clip on one side.

“You awake?” Miho asked.

“Barely,” Kara said, in Japanese. Even with her father, she spoke Japanese nearly all the time now, to continue improving her fluency with the language. “Between the heat and Mr. Sato’s monotone, I was very tempted to take a nap.”

Miho smiled. “Really? A couple of times, I glanced over at you and it seemed like you had given in to temptation.”

Kara arched an eyebrow. “Could be.”

Since Kara had become friends with Miho and her roommate, Sakura, the Japanese girls had begun to hone their skills at American-style sarcasm. Miho had a fondness for American pop culture and she tried to persuade Kara to speak in English whenever possible so she could practice the language. She was actually starting to get pretty good at it, whereas Sakura mostly liked to learn new and different ways to say filthy things in foreign languages.

“I wish we could get out of here,” Kara said.

“You don’t love o-soji?” Miho asked, her expression innocent. Yes, she was getting much better at the whole sarcasm thing.

They put their things away in their lockers and then headed out through the open sliding door. In the corridor, they joined the rest of the herd of students who were getting their cleanup assignments. Mr. Sato gave Miho sweeping duty, while Kara and two other students had to gather the trash on the entire second floor.

As they parted ways, Kara noticed Mr. Sato watching her and Miho with obvious disapproval, and she quickened her pace. The man oozed irritation, and she wanted to avoid trouble. With her father a member of the faculty, Kara tried to stay on her best behavior so that she did not bring him dishonor. Honor was just as important in Japan as she had always read-maybe even more so.

She weaved her way around students who were filtering into classrooms to perform their appointed tasks, some already sweeping the corridor and stairs. Kara needed trash bags from the hall closet, but a group of students had gathered in the hall. One of them was Mai, a girl from her homeroom who Kara tended to avoid as much as possible.

In every school Kara had ever attended, there always seemed to be a group of girls who hid their cruel smiles behind their hands, putting themselves above everyone else simply by excluding others from their whispers. And for every clique of catty bitches, there was one who led the way and set the tone. When Kara had first arrived at Monju-no-Chie school, that had been a friend of Mai’s named Ume. But Ume had been far worse than just some bitchy high school girl; she had been a murderer.

Or close enough. When Ume learned that her boyfriend had fallen in love with another girl, she’d followed the girl down to the shore of the bay one rainy night, a bunch of her friends in tow. Whether or not they had intended to kill her didn’t really matter. They had beaten her and drowned her in the bay. The police had never found any evidence linking Ume, or anyone else, to the crime, but Kara knew Ume had killed the girl-Akane, Sakura’s sister.

Ume should have been in prison, along with all of the other girls who had helped her beat Akane that night. Instead, she had transferred to another school.

Had Mai been one of the girls with Ume that night? Kara didn’t know. Of all of the girls Ume had been friends with-the soccer club girls-Mai would have been the last one Kara would have imagined taking up the queen bitch crown in Ume’s absence, but she had filled the role as though she’d been waiting for it her entire life. Maybe she had. The girl had even changed her name. Her real name was Maiko, but now that she was queen bitch, she had started going by the nickname “Mai,” insisting everyone call her that. It had taken Kara some getting used to.

Mai took a dustpan and brush from the closet. When she looked up and saw Kara, a slanted, almost sneering smile appeared on her face.

“Bonsai,” she said, exuding false charm. “Let me guess. You’re on trash duty? How appropriate. Leave it to the American to know garbage when she sees it.”

Kara smiled. Ume had been the one to give her the nickname “bonsai,” a play on the trees whose branches were pruned and replanted to grow somewhere else. Mai and her friends used it as if it were a term of endearment, but Kara knew it was anything but.

“You’re right about one thing,” Kara said, pulling several plastic bags out of the closet. “I know garbage when I see it. Unfortunately, some kinds of trash are more difficult to get rid of than others.”

As Mai started to reply, Kara turned and walked into the nearest classroom. The girl thrived on nastiness, and Kara had no interest in wasting another second with her. After the cleanup, she had a calligraphy club meeting, and then she was free until Monday morning. She wouldn’t let Mai-or anyone else-ruin that.

Kara had never been the New-Agey, burning incense, feng-shui type. She knew a couple of girls back home in Medford, Massachusetts, who talked about their chi and had gotten totally into yoga as if they’d been brainwashed into a cult. Not that yoga wasn’t good for you. Kara had tried it for a few months and enjoyed the sort of meditative state it put her into. But she liked her exercise sweaty and rigorous, and preferred to keep any chi-cleansing activities private, except for playing her guitar, which she also did on her own most of the time.

Calligraphy had been a kind of revelation for her. It soothed her. Using the different brushes to inscribe kanji characters onto the hanshi paper properly took both skill and artistry, both concentration and a freedom of expression that made stress evaporate.

Now that they were in the second term, the club’s faculty advisor, Miss Kaneda, had begun to work more closely with beginners on the variation of line thickness and the effects of certain stylized flourishes. The fiftyish, gray-haired woman had a slow, drowsy voice that reminded Kara of the way hypnotists spoke to their patients in old movies, trying to lull them into altered states of consciousness.

Sakura sat beside Kara, occasionally whispering to their friend Ren, whose seat was in front of hers. Ren had thin, clever features, so he looked almost like a fox, and his bronze hair-which he insisted was its natural color-only added to his unique appearance. Last term, Miho had nursed a crush on Ren, but she seemed to have gotten over it, which relieved Kara and Sakura of having to break the news to Miho that Ren didn’t like girls.

“Hey,” Kara whispered, while Miss Kaneda was busy helping another student at the front of the room.

“What?” Sakura said.

Kara arched an eyebrow, and kept her voice low. “Some of us are trying to concentrate.”

Sakura and Ren exchanged grins and then both sat up a bit straighter, adopting mock-serious expressions, holding their brushes straight, arms stiff. Good-natured snickering followed. Several other students glanced around at them, including a snooty senpai -or senior-named Reiko, and Sora, a girl from Kara’s homeroom.

“I know where you live, Murakami,” Kara warned.

But Sakura only rolled her eyes. As they had gotten to know each other better, they teased each other more and more frequently. Kara enjoyed the sparring-she’d never had a sister, but if she had, she would have been happy with two like Sakura and Miho. The two girls were opposites, but at their core they shared the best traits: loyalty, honesty, and unselfishness.

Of course, if Kara had said as much to Sakura, the girl would have feigned shock. She liked to present herself to the world as a rebel, from her hair-which was cut short in back, but in diagonal slashes in front, framing her face-to the many patches and buttons she wore inside the jacket of her sailor fuku uniform, turned inside out whenever she could get away with it. Sakura was proud of her status as different in a society that valued conformity so highly.

“Kara,” Ren whispered.

She had just bent to her work again, and now her brush twitched the tiniest bit, ruining the line of the kanji character she had begun.

“Sorry,” he said, glancing to make sure Miss Kaneda was not paying attention. “Sakura showed me the last few pages of the manga you guys are doing. It’s pretty dark stuff.”

A ripple of unease went through Kara. Months had passed, but she still didn’t like to talk about what had happened in April. Not that Ren had asked about that-he just wanted to know about the graphic novel she and Sakura had been working on-but Kara couldn’t discuss one without being haunted by the memory of the other. The manga faithfully adapted a Noh theater play about the demon Kyuketsuki. Very few people knew that during the first term, she and Sakura, Miho, and another student, Hachiro, had encountered the real Kyuketsuki, an ancient, almost-forgotten demon spirit summoned by the violent murder of Akane, and the rage and grief of Sakura.

“The subject matter is pretty dark,” Kara whispered, with a sidelong glance at Sakura. “I’m glad to be done with it.”

“You mean you don’t like it?” Ren said. “It’s really good. Sakura’s art gets better with every page, and your script is excellent. So creepy and tragic.”

Kara shrugged. “It’s the way the play was written. I can’t take credit for it.”

They had managed to stop the spirit from stepping fully into the modern world, but before it had vanished, it cursed them. In the time since, the girls had not encountered anything remotely supernatural. No hauntings, no violence, no demons. Sakura and Miho had even begun to believe that Kyuketsuki had grown so ancient that its curse no longer wielded its original power. But Kara did not feel so sure. She still had nightmares sometimes, though they were ordinary enough, not the unnatural dreams the Kyuketsuki had once created.

“Don’t be so modest,” Sakura said. “You did an excellent job. Even Aritomo-sensei said so, and you know how worried she was that we would disrespect the source material.”

Kara wished the conversation would end. She and Sakura shared a sad and knowing look, but Ren seemed not to notice.

“So what are you going to do next?” he asked.

“Next?” Kara echoed.

“For your second manga. Sakura’s getting so much better, you have to do another one,” Ren said.

Kara looked at Sakura. “I hadn’t really-”

Miss Kaneda cleared her throat. All three of them stiffened and looked up at the teacher, whose disapproving glance was enough to make Kara feel terribly guilty.

“I’m sorry, sensei,” she said.

Miss Kaneda gave a small bow of her head. Kara returned the gesture, and lifted her brush, focusing again on her calligraphy. But as she got back to work, she couldn’t seem to slide back into the peaceful, meditative state she’d been in before.

Next? They had just finished the manga about Kyuketsuki. She didn’t want to think about what came next.

To Kara, the best part of summer had always been the long, golden twilight of early evening, when the day had come to an end but night had not yet arrived. On that Friday night, as the heat of the day began at last to break, she sat on a fence across the road from the tiny house she shared with her father, playing her guitar and softly singing along. It was a song about tragic romance, and though Kara had never had the kind of relationship the song depicted, she could imagine heartbreak all too well. Perhaps for that very reason, there were times when the idea of falling in love terrified her.

Or maybe you’re just sending a message, she thought.

A tiny smile played at the corners of her lips, but then guilt drove it away. Her father and Miss Aritomo were inside the house, and surely could not hear her singing. Even if they could, they wouldn’t have been able to make out the words. Still, she faltered, losing interest in the song, and moved on to another.

Kara had plenty of homework and she wanted to try to get as much of it as possible done tonight, because she had plans for tomorrow. But hitting the books could wait a while, especially since Miss Aritomo was inside cooking dinner with her father. The two teachers had been getting closer over the past couple of months. Though her dad kept insisting they were just friends, it was obvious to Kara-and to anyone else paying attention-that they liked each other a great deal. What was going on was more than friendship. Dating, at least. Maybe other things that she refused to think about.

At first Kara had encouraged it. Miss Aritomo taught art at Monju-no-Chie school and was the faculty advisor to the Noh theater club. While Kara and Sakura had been working on their manga, she had been a huge help.

Pretty and petite, with gorgeous eyes, Miss Aritomo had seemed to take to Rob Harper immediately. Kara had wanted her father to be happy, to smile more, and she had seen him noticing Miss Aritomo. She’d smiled and teased her dad to let him know it was all okay with her, had told him that her mother would never have wanted him to be alone.

Those sentiments had felt true at the time. But now that her father and Miss Aritomo were getting closer-maybe a lot closer-Kara was having a difficult time with it, and she refused to let her father see that it bothered her. He didn’t deserve that.

So she sat on the fence across from the house and looked out over Miyazu Bay below and played her guitar. It didn’t hurt that the view was considered one of the two or three most beautiful in all of Japan. A spit of land thrust out from the shore, a three-mile sandbar that had been there long enough for eight thousand pine trees to grow along its length. Ama-no-Hashidate-this finger of land-was a major tourist attraction, and Kara always smiled to see people coming to view it in the traditional way. From various vantage points, they would turn their backs to Ama-no-Hashidate and bend over, looking at it upside down through their open legs. It looked ridiculous, but she had tried it, and from that angle, the spit did indeed look like a bridge in the heavens, which was a rough English translation of its name.

Her fingers lost their way on the strings, moving almost of their own accord, jumping from song to song before finally falling still.

With a sigh, Kara stood up, holding her guitar close, and stepped over the low fence. Off to her left, in the distance, she could see Monju-no-Chie school and the welcome arch at the edge of its grounds. As she started across the street, her father opened the door of their squat little house and blinked in surprise when he spotted her.

“Perfect timing,” he said with a smile.

“My stomach is psychically attuned to the precise moment of dinner’s readiness,” she said in English.

Her father arched an eyebrow as he stepped aside to let her in. “Hey. I thought we were supposed to stick to Japanese.”

Kara laughed. “You think I can say ‘psychically attuned’ in Japanese? You aren’t that good a teacher.”

He gaped in false astonishment and then glared with equally invented anger. “My dear,” he said in Japanese, “I am an exceptional teacher.”

“And modest, too.”

As they walked into the dining area, Miss Aritomo was pouring ice water into glasses from a pitcher. She smiled.

“You have a very pretty singing voice,” she said.

Kara bowed her head in thanks. “I didn’t realize I was singing so loud.”

“Not very loud,” Miss Aritomo replied. “But the window in the kitchen is open, and we could hear you while your father cooked the pork.”

Kara stared at her, forgetting for a moment to put on a smile for her father’s benefit. Miss Aritomo had sounded, for a moment, so much like a parent that it freaked her out. Part of her wanted to act out, to vanish into her bedroom and not come out, but that would be juvenile and it would be unfair to her father.

Instead she smiled. “Everything smells delicious.”

Miss Aritomo blinked, a moment of doubt shading her eyes. She’d sensed Kara’s hesitation, though Kara’s father seemed clueless. Before the situation could become awkward, Kara hurried to sit down. Dinner had already been served. There was a shiitake-mushroom rice and orange-simmered pork that really did smell wonderful.

“How was your day, Kara?” her father asked.

She smiled. “Hot.”

That set the three of them off on a conversation about the terrible heat of the week, combining misery with the relief that the forecast brought. It had cooled off significantly in the past few hours, and a thunderstorm was due to sweep through overnight, pushing the last of the heat wave out to sea. They talked and ate, and her father and Miss Aritomo had some plum wine, and soon any awkwardness Kara had felt dissipated. She was glad, for her father’s sake. But she couldn’t stop the little twinge it gave her heart to see the two of them smiling intimately at each other, talking sweetly, and just generally behaving like a couple-in-the-making.

Get over it, she told herself, time and again. It’s what Mom would want. And maybe that was true-she thought so-but for some reason, for once, what her mother would have wanted didn’t seem to be having much influence over her. Getting over it would be easier said than done.

“Tell me about your day,” her father said. “Did anything interesting happen?”

“Not really,” Kara replied.

“Good,” her father said, momentarily serious before his smile returned.

Swallowing a bite of pork-it was truly delicious, lean and infused with orange flavor-she gestured to both him and Miss Aritomo.

“Actually, at the calligraphy club meeting, Ren asked me and Sakura what our next manga was going to be.”

“Next?” her father said. “You just finished the first one.”

Kara nodded. “I know. Sakura’s been drawing like crazy for months. I’m sure she’s not in a rush to get started on another.”

“I don’t know about that,” Miss Aritomo said, taking a sip of plum wine. “She’s such a talented artist, and the manga has given her focus. I’m sure Sakura is already wondering the same thing. What is next for you two?”

Kara shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve barely thought about it. Another Noh play, maybe. Something else creepy.”

A thin smile appeared on Miss Aritomo’s face and she raised an eyebrow, studying Kara over the rim of her glass. “I know just the thing.”

“Really?” Kara’s father said.

Miss Aritomo nodded. “I haven’t told the Noh club yet, but I’ve decided that this term, we’re going to perform an actual Noh play.”

“Seriously?” Kara asked, intrigued. “Miho will love that!”

“I think they all will,” Miss Aritomo said. “And it really would be perfect as a manga for you and Sakura as well. The story is gruesome and full of evil, just the way you seem to like them.”

Kara forced a smile, trying to hide the way she shuddered. Such tales did make for excellent manga, but she thought like might be too strong a word.