A Small Charred Face Read online

  Mustah.

  Mustah.

  “Back when I was a human, okay? When I was small like this kid here, someone gave me this jar of jam. ’Cause I was poor, y’know? I held on to it like it was made of gold.”

  Ah, Mustah’s voice. I heard it from far away.

  “I lapped up a teeny bit of it every day. It was like, as long as I was careful like that, I could savor it forever. So basically—how about we put the kid on the shelf like that jam, and we just drink his blood bit by bit? Good idea, right? Just enough so he doesn’t die.”

  “Mustah, you—he’s tiny,” someone else said. His voice was higher and thinner than Mustah’s, but it was a man’s. Whose?

  “So then we go hard!”

  “Honestly. Let’s have this be the last of threatening children. It’s just embarrassing, okay?”

  “So then, like—hey! I’ll eat you all up tonight, damned brat!” There was the sound of a door being yanked open.

  I curled up more tightly into myself and rubbed my eyes.

  “Oh, come on. He’s sleeping.” Mustah sounded disappointed.

  “Humans sleep at night, Mustah. And there’s no point in going out of your way to threaten him after you saved him, now is there? You crossed a dangerous bridge because you wanted to. You’re a weird one.”

  “Excuuuuse me!”

  “What?”

  “You’re in this now too, Yoji.” His name was Yoji then? The other person with the quiet voice.

  “Mm. Well, yeah.”

  “We’re definitely going to have to leave him.”

  It was quiet for a while.

  “He’s really out, eh? Almost like a picture of an angel. Kids have such round faces, don’t they? I-I just had no idea.”

  Someone’s finger touched my cheek lightly. It was so cold that it startled me and made me shiver, and my eyelids twitched as if to open. But I was sinking down to the bottom of a deep sleep, and I didn’t know what was what anymore.

  “He’s super warm. Like a fire!”

  “Right?”

  “Mustah… This boy’s alive!” The thin voice shook with extreme emotion.

  From farther away, I felt like I heard a dry laughter too. I didn’t know whose voice it was. Maybe Mama’s. No, maybe God’s. As if to say, “See? You cursed and railed at me, but I saved you in the end, didn’t I?” The darkness of night grew steadily thicker.

  When I woke up, it was past noon. How deeply and how long had I slept?

  I looked around and found I had been put to sleep on top of a pile of towels spread out over a wooden floor. The pile was neatly arranged, but for all that, it felt kind of strange to be directly on the floor.

  I was in a living room, about sixteen and a half square meters, furnished with an old but well-maintained sofa and wooden table, along with an antique organ. I was cold; a shiver ran through me. One wall of the room was taken up entirely by glass doors, which had been left slightly open. I could see the pale sand of the beach and the ocean beyond it. Wind coming in off the sea surged inside and whirled around me, an invisible vortex. I hurriedly got to my feet and yanked the doors shut. My fingers and toes were nearly frozen.

  I slumped down absently onto the sofa. And then I listened for the presence of anyone else. It appeared I was alone.

  The room was small and modest, totally unlike the mansion I’d lived in until the day before. But it was clean and quiet. There were some onigiri rice balls, a pack of fried eggs, and a plastic bottle of juice on the table. I guess the Bamboo had bought them somewhere. My stomach growled abruptly, and I reached out to the table. I saw that my arm was pale, bloodless. But it had finally stopped shaking.

  The cold onigiri was delicious. The fried eggs too. Because I was alive.

  A change of clothes had also been left for me, so I spread them out, thinking maybe they’d protect me against the cold. A black winter skirt made out of heavy fabric, a white sweater, and a silk blouse with a square necktie. Girl clothes. I sighed in disappointment. Did I maybe look like a girl? No, that couldn’t have been it. I mean, he’d kept calling me boyo, boyo.

  Wondering curiously about how I’d ended up with girl clothes, I pulled the sweater on and then settled back down onto the sofa, curling myself up into a ball.

  The old wall clock ticked out a quiet rhythm. When I sat there silent, visions of all the things I’d lost the night before began to shoot through my mind. My sister’s screams, her uniform strewn about, Mama’s long legs splayed, the snow blowing in through the window, the black shadow of a man drinking blood…

  I leaped to my feet. After carefully inspecting the entire room, I slid the glass door open and stepped resolutely outside.

  The ocean was calm, the chilly waves glittering. Gray sand blown up by the wind covered the wooden deck, and the grains flickered and shone as they caught the light. The wooden bench set out there was also an antique and well cared for. I stepped down onto the beach before I realized my feet were bare. The sensation of cold sand on the soles of my feet was electric.

  When I looked at the house from outside, I saw that it was a small bungalow. Squarish, made of wood. Perhaps the exterior had been damaged; it was reinforced here and there with plywood and sheet metal, which came together in some kind of mysterious pattern. I looked around to see similarly rough houses dotting the area. The town continued down the peninsula toward the ocean, over a hill of impoverished shacks, and finally reached the shore. This was apparently the end of it.

  I went inside. It was cold.

  I opened a door that led farther into the house and found a tiny kitchen on my left. It appeared to be mostly unused and more of a storage space piled high with cardboard boxes. An oversized commercial refrigerator rose up from among them, emitting an unpleasant electrical hum. On my right was a small room the light didn’t reach.

  I stepped inside. There was a large wooden chest situated imposingly on the floor there, seeming just as out of place as the refrigerator in the kitchen. I went over and kneeled down before it. Pressed my cheek to it. It was cold. I listened carefully, but I couldn’t hear anything.

  I tried calling him. “Mustah.” My Bamboo. I suddenly felt very fond of him, and I called his name again. “Mustah!” I got no answer. But I had this feeling that he was there.

  “Hey, Mustah?” My own voice was surprisingly sweet. I reached out a pale arm and slowly lifted the lid of the chest.

  Instantly, I was assaulted by cold air. My breath froze into a white puff. This was the coldest place in the house, a deeper freeze than outside. I peeked in, terrified, and finally, from within the white fog, two faces appeared. Like waxwork, motionless. Two adult men facing each other, almost embracing, their eyes closed. They weren’t wearing clothes; they were totally naked.

  One had a strong face with dark skin. His long eyelashes created a shadow below his eyes. Mustah. The other one was Asian with tawny skin and fine features. His eyelids were chilled and seemed sad somehow, while his thin lips were pursed tightly in a way that made him seem high-strung. This in contrast to Mustah’s sunny eyes and half-open mouth.

  Their right fists touched their exposed chests. It was like they were dead. The words “lovers’ suicide pact” floated up in my mind. A sweet, eternal rite of people in love.

  And then my heart throbbed painfully. It felt bad. What was this emotion?

  Right. The other voice I’d heard last night, that gentle, thin voice, had probably been his. The second I had this thought, Mustah’s eyes snapped open, the dead coming back to life. I was surprised but not scared. I had no doubt used up my lifetime allotment of terror the previous night.

  His black eyes alone moved, unnaturally, like those of a mechanical doll. His waxen body didn’t so much as twitch. The skin of his face was also taunt, artificial.

  “Wait. Until night. Little Kyo.”

  “…But it�
�s cold.”

  “Ooh, cold?” There suddenly came a very displeased voice, and the cold air shuddered fiercely, pushing me back.

  My hands slipped off the lid of the chest, and it fell back down with a thud.

  “Right! Humans get cold, y’know, Yoji! I totally forgot!”

  “They do, huh? I didn’t know that to begin with. So listen then.”

  “Huh? What?”

  “You have to take proper care of this kid, okay, Mustah?”

  “…Yeah.”

  “Don’t make it seem like such a huge hassle. You’re the one who brought him home. And.”

  “Hmm?”

  “And look how happy you are now. Being reminded after all this time that human beings get cold.”

  “…Well, there is that.”

  The start of the night. The winter day had quickly drawn to a close, and the moon had begun to shine coldly when the lid of the chest clattered and opened up. The grass monsters were awake. Despite the fact that he had only just ordered Mustah to take care of me himself, the one called Yoji pulled a coat over his naked body, then hurried out to get me an antique heater. He turned it on, and warmth began to fill the room. I thanked him with a smile.

  And then the first ritual of their day began. Still naked, they went around to light all the candles in the candlesticks scattered around the house. Like it was something very important. Very carefully, one by one. The room brightened faintly. Then they took turns washing their faces before turning toward each other and vigorously combing one another’s hair. They slipped their arms through the sleeves of starched cotton shirts. Mustah’s was black, Yoji’s white. They fixed each other’s collars, and then Mustah pulled on leather pants, while Yoji dressed in jeans. They inspected the other’s appearance very carefully. Rather than any kind of intimate gesture, this dance looked more like the habit of long years.

  Crouched in front of the heater, I felt a strange restlessness. “Hey? Why?”

  “Huh?” Mustah looked back at me.

  “Um, I was just wondering why you don’t do all this yourself, but do it to each other instead. It’s weird.”

  Mustah indicated the window with his chin. The glass of one wall, naked of curtains or any other kind of covering, hazily reflected the inside of the room. Sofa, table, organ. Wall clock. Heater. Me crouching. But the figures of Mustah and Yoji standing facing each other were nowhere to be seen.

  I stood up in surprise. “Neither of you is there!”

  “That’s why.” It was Yoji who answered. He looked down at me and smiled gently.

  “So then.” I wound myself around him. “You’ve never seen your own face in a mirror?”

  “I have, a long time ago.” Mustah shrugged lightly.

  “Not once,” Yoji replied softly.

  Apparently finished dressing, Mustah bobbed his head around, satisfied. And then he reached a hand out to the bookshelf against the wall where an antique camera sat. “And we show up in media. So if you really have to see your face, you can just take a picture.”

  “Wow.”

  “Digital’s no good, though. No one knows why. We show up in print photos. And films, y’know? Like, if you got an eight-millimeter motion picture camera, you could get us moving.” Mustah lifted up an old black machine and laughed playfully. He turned the old camera toward me.

  I looked up absently, and Yoji came over and pretended to bite my neck. But playing like this was apparently not in his nature, so, blushing, he stopped. Mustah handed him the camera and delightedly lifted me up with one hand. He tossed me at the ceiling and then caught me when I came back down. That hard lump, the chunk of ice in the bottom of my stomach, melted. Being alive was fun again. I squealed with laughter. The camera followed us.

  Then Yoshi pulled something out of the large refrigerator. Red liquid in a plastic bag. They poured it into pottery that looked like a Japanese-style flower vase and set it down on the table. They poured from this into vessels like teacups, like large sake cups, before sitting down across from each other and drinking from them quietly.

  From time to time, they talked, haltingly. Maybe because they’d been together for so long, their conversation was the brief back-and-forth of close friends; they understood each other with a few easy words. I settled into Mustah’s lap. My heart made a curious snapping sound again.

  They drank the blood slowly. Like they were enjoying fine sake. The meal of the Bamboo in Japan today…

  I sat between the two of them and quietly compared their faces. Mustah’s was sullen, while Yoji’s still sported a faint smile. Both of them were well-mannered, calm, and quiet. Aah, I thought. Now I get it. The town at war I lived in until yesterday is a much bloodier place than this one. I also thought that was strange somehow.

  “The mountains of China? Well, I guess that’s basically it. To be honest, I don’t really know either. What I heard is that we traditionally lived somewhere deep in the mountains in the middle of the continent. But people gradually came in and opened those areas up too. It got harder to hide. So sometime in the last century, one group just up and moved to Japan, y’know? Came out from the mountains, down the river, crossed the ocean.”

  “Mustah’s from the other side of the ocean too.”

  “Am not! I’m a Japan-born Bamboo!”

  I didn’t really understand.

  “We’re all over the place.”

  “Well, not really. After that group came to Japan, they splintered into several smaller groups and scattered. I heard that there’s not even a single one of us in some areas. There’s such a mess of different tribes and people on this peninsula, so it’s easy to live in hiding here, y’know? This might be the town with the most Bamboo in all of Japan. We have, like, meetings on nights of the full moon.”

  “Like cats!”

  “Not cats. Bamboo.”

  “Right.”

  “About two hundred of us, maybe? Or wait, maybe more. I dunno. Never properly counted.”

  “Are you called Bamboo in China too?”

  “Dunno. Although I think maybe we started being called that after we came to Japan. In China, they probably called us something Chinese.”

  “So how can we tell who’s Bamboo and who’s not?”

  “No idea. Well, anyone who works the night shift and doesn’t eat, they’re definitely suspicious!” Mustah stood up nonchalantly, and I tumbled from his lap. I sat on the floor and looked at the two of them.

  Mustah’s body odor, the faintest scent of bamboo, remained in my nose. I liked this smell.

  Yoji was walking through the room at a measured pace, cleaning almost neurotically and closing up the doors. Mustah just opened up the cupboards, picked up the camera, and touched his beard busily. His face in profile seemed quite whimsical. Finally, Yoji grabbed his endlessly dawdling partner by the arm and practically yanked him toward the front door.

  I became uneasy. “Where are you going?”

  “We work at night, like I said,” Mustah said, sounding annoyed, his back to me, before he turned around abruptly. A grin made his beard shake.

  “We’re assistant nurses,” Yoji told me, hands firmly clasped around Mustah’s shoulders, dragging him along. “Emergency room. They’re understaffed, so it’s easy to get hired.” And then he screwed up his face like a worried mother. “Please go to bed. Don’t go walking around at night. It’s not safe.”

  “Because the Bamboo are also walking around at night!” Mustah added, jokingly, and laughed at his own words.

  I waved. The pair looked relieved, and each returned the gesture in his own way.

  I heard something like a strong wind blowing. The thought had no sooner crossed my mind than they were gone. That was indeed the way a monster disappeared, like a whirlwind of the night.

  I took over the sofa, covered myself in towels, lay down, and fell asleep, but only
for a brief period. I opened my eyes in the middle of the night. I cleared my ears. There was no one there.

  The candles in the room flickered restlessly in ancient candlesticks of Japanese, Western, Chinese, and Persian design. They had burned down a fair bit; the flames were low.

  I suddenly thought of my sister. How she had been a good person. Kind. She had never asked too much of the help. She had treated Mama well too. And me. She had been shy only with men, and faced with one, she would turn red, unable to speak at all. Those wide-open eyes of hers came back to me.

  There was something hard inside the sofa, and the corner of it jabbed my back. I reached my hand back, ready for anything.

  It was a book with a red cover. An old collection of poems. When I opened it, I found traces of tears on the pages. Chinese poetry maybe. I tried to read the poems. But they were too difficult, and I simply couldn’t see why they had made the owner of the book cry.

  Finally, one candle and then another disappeared with a sizzle, until at last the room was pitch-black, and my body was tossed into a darkness like death.

  I awoke suddenly. I felt like I had heard the sound of wind.

  I got up from the sofa, and a man in a white shirt soundlessly appeared, moving with beautiful grace on the beach on the other side of the glass. I could see he hadn’t come from either side but from above. Yoji. Remembering Mustah’s dangerous, wobbly flight last night, I had the vague thought that Yoji was maybe the better flier.

  And then a man in a black shirt plummeted down, off-balance, just barely managing not to tumble to the ground. My Bamboo! He smiled, almost self-consciously. Like he was saying, I just can’t fly too good. My heart started pounding again.

  Now Yoji flew, gliding along the surface of the earth, opened the window, and came into the room. He was uncharacteristically flustered, and once he’d stopped, he did another empty spin right there in midair.