AN IDOL FOR EMIKO

Travis Heermann

I

We all suspected that Emiko would give in soon. We had long prepared her “funeral” ceremony to signify her passage from this world to the other, but all these years, she had resisted.

The fishermen sometimes reported sighting her on her veranda, looking out over the Ariake Sea, a lone, hunched figure. They saw her waist-deep in surging froth, a bulwark against the tide, even in winter, head bowed under the weight of age and ugliness and stubbornness. She would have suffered less if she had listened to us.

Sometimes, the fishermen even claimed to see her out there, with her idiot son huddled next to her, his spindly arms and lumpen features like a pale, crumpled spider. Of course, that was impossible.

When Taro was alive, those two had kept to themselves, secluded in that decrepit house with the portion of once-resplendent tiled roof now collapsed in disrepair, that house which had once belonged to the proud Otomo clan. Before Taro’s crimes, he would sometimes answer the door and gaze up at the visitor, all slack face and watery eyes, tongue licking absently at cracked lips. He would croak something to his mother and she would shout back from the depths of the house to send the visitor away.

The nail that sticks up must be pounded down, as the saying goes, and ever since the village had grown prosperous, Emiko had been like a jagged splinter hiding in a freshly polished floor.

Her grandfather came from old samurai blood, but after Tokugawa’s rise to power, much of the Otomo clan had been scattered like leaves in an autumn wind. Emiko’s grandfather had been one of those leaves. To proclaim his loyalty to the new Shogunate – and escape likely execution – he had given up his swords for the life of a nori-farmer, but he had kept the family’s ancestral property. A farmer’s livelihood had not been sufficient to maintain such a house.

When Emiko was little, her family weathered those starveling years like the rest of us. Fields blighted by war and drought. Fisheries disappearing like schools of smelt into the cerulean depths. Even the offshore crop of nori refused to grow. The village’s nori was sought throughout the domain for its quality and even in lean times, the nori-farmers had always been able to sustain themselves. Then the Shogunate imposed crushing taxes to refill its coffers after decades of war. Small villages like ours staggered under the weight. Perhaps we had been cursed. The priest purified the village again and again, without improvement, until finally, he departed. We discussed bringing an augurer from Yedo, but there was no money to pay such a person. The onmyouji were all well-employed as the shogun and his samurai lords worked to consolidate their power. The tax collector, Takehisa, came and demanded more than we could give. He berated us, “Work harder! Fish more!” We could not, and he took his due anyway, and we starved.

Along with many of us, Emiko prayed to the gods and Buddhas for the village’s survival. The old shrine to Fugen, reachable only by an arduous trek across treacherous tide pools, up the boulder-strewn cliff side, was too difficult for many of us, but Emiko went. A portion of the shrine was devoted to mothers praying for bountiful milk, festooned with cloth effigies of opulent breasts. She and her friend Haruka would pray together and sometimes, sit for hours and look out over the sea.

After Emiko’s shame, the village women said, “What does she think she’s doing up there? Her dugs are withered. Her womb is a shriveled persimmon.” Even before the flower of her youth had decayed, they said, “No man will ever marry her again after what happened.”

Even after Taro was gone, she offered sake and rice balls to the shrine. Even just before the end, a fisherman spoke of seeing her up there: a corpulent, hunched figure, nearly hairless, kneeling, pasty hands clasped against her forehead, as if her breasts would ever again swell with milk.

It had not always been so with Emiko. A precocious child, youngest of six who survived, inquisitive, thoughtful, bright-eyed, tousle-haired, giggling, a joy amidst the village during the hard times. She and Haruka. This adventurous duo had often left behind Emiko’s younger sister, Yukiko, bereft and wailing, but that was the nature of children.

Yasuhiro had wept when he sent Haruka away with the hairy barbarians, but this father’s selfless act saved us all.

Soon after that, the fish returned – strange though they were – and rains blew in from the sea to replenish the fields. The sea gave us gold and beautiful stones. The Portuguese came every year to trade for our fish and jewelry. But that was when Emiko’s troubles started.

Only Emiko blamed Yasuhiro for what he had done; everyone else kept their reproach rightfully to themselves. Haruka’s family, also of old samurai blood, was among the first to prosper. Their fishing boats rode low in the water, laden with catch, and their coffers brimmed with strange, golden ryo from the sea.

Emiko’s family was also among the first. One day, her father flaunted a strange, golden coin in the marketplace. No one would accept it for payment – it was too much – so he just tucked it into his purse with a smug grin. He soon promised Emiko to Haruka’s older brother, Ryuichi, but Emiko refused.

Her poor parents were frantic – afraid that she had been kidnapped by ronin brigands – the night she ran away to Omuta village. Word came back from Omuta a few days later that she had married a man named ‘Kenta’, a woodcrafter’s son. She had met Kenta on the family’s trips to Omuta to sell their nori and buy supplies with their newfound gold. Marriage to a tradesman was a decline in station that the son of a samurai would not accept. Takeyo and her other three brothers brought her home. The hearts of some went out to her, with her eyes bloodshot from weeping, downcast from shame, brow furrowed from anger, cheek swollen.

She would never speak of what they had done to her ‘husband’, but Kenta never came to claim her. In those days, she often was seen turning a yearning gaze down the road toward Omuta.

Later that year, the sea claimed the first of us, among them Emiko’s parents and two of her brothers. It all happened so fast, we could only watch them go.

In spite of Emiko’s shame, Ryuichi’s family reasserted their proposal. In hopes of forcing her to submit, Takeyo agreed. Bruises on her arms and face bespoke a struggle of wills within the old Otomo house. Nevertheless, Emiko’s stubborn refusal outraged Ryuichi and his family, and most of the village. Ryuichi’s family had changed all of our fortunes. Who was she to be so selfish and disloyal? Takeyo could hardly be expected to support her forever. Emiko was still comely. Ryuichi swore he would one day take her to wife, even after the next shameful incident.

One evening, she ran through the village, gasping, eyes wide with madness, babbling to everyone about what she had seen coming out of the sea. No one could believe – then – such a wild story, especially coming from her.

Two years passed, three, with Ryuichi pressing his fruitless pledge for Emiko’s hand. It happened one midwinter night, with a cold rain that threatened snow. Takeyo and Ryuichi were drinking shochu in the izakaya, gorging themselves on the new kind of fish that had appeared in our nets in such abundance. Emiko was home alone; her younger sister Yukiko had just been married to Chiba, the fisherman Yoba’s son. Ryuichi and Takeyo exchanged pointed glances, after which, Ryuichi politely excused himself.

Later that night, Ryuichi ran screaming through the village – even though his legs had gnarled and he had bloated somewhat by this time – as if an oni were snarling at his heels. Some said he clutched his trousers about his waist with one hand, the other wrist bleeding or broken. Others said that he strode through town like the well-to-do man he was.

Emiko sought solace with Yukiko, but Chiba scorned Emiko for having brought all this trouble on herself. He forbade Yukiko from seeing her. Yukiko had enough worries, a house to tend, a plentiful catch to cure for market, without troubling herself over so difficult and stubborn a person.

Ryuichi avoided Emiko, especially when she grew large with child. She never implied that he should claim the child. Taro’s birth came in the hottest part of summer. Takeyo relegated her to a decrepit wing of the property to prevent the blood of the birth from tainting the rest of the house. The village children stole out there and peeked through decaying walls into Emiko’s sequestered world, bringing back stories of the pale, blue-veined, croaking infant who suckled and slurped at her breast.

II

Years later, after Taro was able to shamble beside her, she journeyed again to Omuta. When she returned, she faced from us a mix of disapproval and curiosity. Had she found Kenta? Would he be coming to join her? Did he still want her now that she had an idiot bastard to raise?

Only Yukiko would Emiko speak to. Emiko sobbed as she told of Kenta. The villagers in Omuta told her that he spoke often of Takeyo being “not right,” of “some darkness behind Takeyo’s eyes,” something that had shaken Kenta to the depths of his belly. He wanted away from Omuta, from being too close to the sea. Worse, he ceased practicing his trade, drank up all the family’s money, and drowned in his own vomit. Village gossip condemned his weakness. Why would any woman want such a spineless man? Why would any man want such a shamed woman?

Emiko stopped eating any fish and kept herself removed from her brothers, making her quarters with Taro in the decrepit wing of the house. Takeyo, even with his wealth of new gold, kept her in poverty.

Against this ocean of troubles, Emiko burned incense and supplicated herself at the feet of the cliff-top Fugen for hours a day, with little Taro picking at the detritus clinging to the cliff-top, gnawing at bits of lichen, leaping and gibbering at the gulls dipping in the sea breeze.

Yukiko had the village’s new goldsmith fashion the idol for Emiko, a fine image of Fugen, with a translucent, oily-green stone embedded in its belly. The stone was found on the beach amidst a small scattering of other, brightly coloured stones that appeared one morning after the ebb of the tide.

But they were not just stones. Pearls, rubies, sapphires, and others none could identify. The children who found them divided them up as pretty trinkets and took them home, unsuspecting of their worth. Soon, many of us wore fine new clothes and built larger houses.

Emiko refused to share in this prosperity or take part in its celebration. The greater the size of the catch or the more plentiful the rain on the fields, the more she spurned our society.

Among the children, she became “Ugly Old Emiko”, even though she was hardly old. They sometimes hid outside the house and taunted Taro when Emiko was away. When Taro charged them like an enraged monkey, they fled, and Taro withdrew and sulked, his yellow eyes scheming hatred. When Emiko was within, they clattered stones across the roof or lobbed them into the garden until she came out and raged at them. They left the carcasses of birds, fish, and small forest creatures near the house, or thrown onto the roof, or stuffed into crannies, cursing the place with the perpetual miasma of death. Some children, in their furtive peekings and lurkings, spoke of little Taro discovering these unpleasant gifts and hiding with them, devouring them, crunching the little bones and gnawing desiccated flesh and dry feathers and sunken eyes with his protuberant yellow teeth. Some called these tales unbelievable – what human being would do such a thing? – while others just shrugged, as if such behaviour were perfectly understandable from a boy of his lineage. His father had been among the first to embrace the changes.

The Shogun’s tax collector, Takehisa, once encountered Taro on the path into the forest. The warrior’s disdainful gaze must have soured at the sight of the boy’s sallow, moist-looking skin, matted hair and soiled loincloth. Taro would have been about ten years old, then. Takehisa related later, over cups with the village constable in the izakaya, that the boy had reeked of death and shit and the sea. The boy’s feral grin had unnerved Takehisa more than he would ever admit, especially after Taro approached tentatively and licked the samurai’s hand. Tasting him. Takehisa spurned the boy with his foot, hand on his hilt to draw. Some mad, mute, animal look in the boy’s eye, like a shark’s, stayed the samurai’s blade.

Emiko would sometimes venture from the house to retrieve her errant son, occasionally even apologizing for his behaviour. She dragged him back home with her iron grip, deaf to his bleating and mewling.

She encountered Takehisa once in the street, during one of her retrievals. The samurai demanded the year’s taxes from her within the week and she faced him with wrath, heedless that he could cut her down with impunity, or have her thrown into the street, left to beg for the same scraps her son found. Her beleaguered face, waxy from lack of sunlight, furrowed with anger. “What taxes can you expect from me? I have nothing! The entire village is crawling with gold! Fish practically jump into the boats. Jewels enough to ransom ten emperors wash onto the beach as if a hundred treasure ships had sunk offshore! When I was a girl, there was barely a bowl of rice to share among the entire village! And now!” She rolled her watery eyes. “You, with your new, golden fittings on your scabbard and fine, silken clothes, brought all the way from Yedo. You can find more than my share of ‘taxes’ just by taking a walk across the sand on a morning. I’ll have none of it!”

The samurai blustered and protested, but, with infinite rudeness, she turned her back without bowing, clenched her son’s hand, and left Takehisa standing there in his fume.

Emiko wore the same threadbare kimono every day for years, bought the most meager supplies of cheap millet, and ate vegetables that only she would grow. To spite her stubbornness, Takeyo and his brother, when their time came, dragged their sack full of gold with them into the sea.

Yukiko tried to share some of her wealth with Emiko, to ease her poverty, but Emiko would not accept a single piece of gold. She shrilled at Yukiko, and at anyone else who would listen, that all of it was ill-gotten, corrupt. Yukiko discovered that Emiko had accumulated a substantial debt with the village merchant, in spite of the austerity of her life. The debt had accrued over many years. Yukiko paid this debt and even a sum forward, so that Emiko could feed herself and Taro. Yukiko’s husband did not approve, but it was the woman’s place to secure the house’s financial dealings. When Emiko discovered what Yukiko had done, she never visited the merchant again.

Except for the blight that Emiko and her son became, the village was as happy as ever. We held festivals at the dark of every moon to thank the sea gods and Buddhas for our good fortune. We gorged ourselves on the new fish and sake and shochu.

Some of the lads hunted for boar in the hills and, on the occasions of their success, we feasted on meat. One of our young men, grown incredibly large and powerful thanks to his diet of new fish, felled a charging boar with a single blow of his fist.

Such tales made our bonfires livelier. Before long, most of the village was joining us out on the reef as we piled our bonfire high, and danced to the skin drum and raucous piping of the bamboo flute. Those who refused, like Emiko, we left to sulk in their decaying houses. Those nails eventually would be pounded down, as well. The old, ineffectual Shinto priest disappeared without a word, abandoning his temple on Clear Water Mountain. The new priest, with his golden headdress and strange shimmering robes, led our revelry.

Those were heady years. Forgetting about Emiko and Taro was easier with a warm sake jar in hand, the juicy taste of boar on the tongue, and golden ryo heavy in the purse.

III

The hairy barbarians in their strange ships came to the village every year to trade for supplies and jewelry, bringing exotic spices, silk from China, steel, spirits. The gaijin captain had learned to speak since that first meeting years ago. His interpreter had had a thick Nagasaki accent. The captain was impressed with how prosperous the village had become in the years since his first visit. Over sake and foreign castella cakes in the izakaya with the village leaders, the captain regaled us with his travels.

Ryuichi asked after his sister, Haruka, gone with the captain these many years.

The captain replied, “Unfortunate, but Haruka is dead. She sick and die last winter. She was good woman.” He sucked his teeth and sighed. “That was good trade, yes? I give you gold charm. Your father throw into sea and say words. Magic work. Everything change. Everything here good now, yes?”

Ryuichi nodded, cradling in his lap the wrist that had never properly healed. He squatted like a round-eyed toad on the tatami. “Father was wise to trade her to you. We could not afford to feed her, anymore. I’m happy that you found her valuable.” The flaps in his throat made his voice difficult by then.

The captain’s bear-like face split into a gap-toothed grin. “Charm was good, yes? I need new wife, now. Have any more to trade?”

The village elders considered this and the following day, brought a handful of teenage girls to him. With a sour examination, he shook his head. “Ugly! What happened? I remember many girls beautiful here. Long ago time.”

The elders could only shrug and shuffle their feet.

“Skin white. Bad hair. Buggy eyes.” The disgust on the captain’s face was plain. He never came back. We cursed him for a barbarian.

In spite of Emiko’s perpetual stubbornness, Yukiko tried to keep good relations. Yukiko wanted Emiko to fit in with us. One day, not long after Yukiko’s third son was born, Emiko came with a meager arrangement of flowers she had cut to celebrate the infant’s birth. They walked through the village holding hands. Yukiko’s older sons clung to their mother’s legs. As they walked, we all listened.

Yukiko said, “Why must you live the way you do? My husband has grown wealthy. Let me share some of it with you. You need not starve. Give Taro some good fish and yourself some new clothes.”

“I cannot.”

“Why?”

“On the evening your son was born, it was nearly dark, the sun slipping into the sea. I saw Taro sitting in a tide pool, as he often does. The light was ... just so. When Taro stood up, he started to walk toward the reef with this strange walk.”

“Strange?”

“Yes, not like a man.”

“But he’s a boy.”

“No, like something not a human being. I was suddenly reminded of that night I saw it. That thing.”

“Oh. That night.” Yukiko sighed. We had all heard about it.

“I was digging clams in the evening and I had my bucket and father’s shovel, digging, digging. And a man came out of the waves.”

“A man? From the sea?”

“But not a man. Something else. As if a blowfish grew legs and arms, but didn’t know how to walk on land. It saw me. Its eyes were like black sake bowls. I dropped my shovel and ran. Father beat me for leaving the bucket and shovel to be swept away by the tide.”

“Yes, but he went out to retrieve it.”

“Do you remember how frightened he was when he came back?”

Yukiko cleared her throat.

“Do you remember the strange, square golden coin that father so adored?”

“Yes, with the strange writing, as big as my palm. Mother said he slept with it.”

Emiko’s face turned to stone. “There are far too many of such coins in the village now. He found that one in my clam bucket that night. I hadn’t thought about that in years. Isn’t it a strange thing to remember that just now?” Emiko’s gaze went distant. “Isn’t that strange ....”

“And Takeyo ....”

Emiko’s face hardened again. “Takeyo found some of those coins in the bellies of those strange fish. Their fins are so odd, not like fins at all, like little fingers and legs ....”

“Ugly things, but they are so tasty!”

Emiko shuddered. “And the little faces in the net, not like fish faces. Like Ryuichi’s face.” She spat on the ground and looked hard at who Yukiko had become. “We shouldn’t have eaten them. That is why I live as I do.”

Yukiko wetly cleared her throat and patted Emiko’s hand. “Please tell me you’re not trekking all the way up to that Fugen shrine, anymore. It is such an arduous walk. Please tell me that you love the Fugen statue. I had it made just for you. I want to make your life easier, just a little.”

Emiko sighed. “I keep it on the kamidana, next to grandfather’s swords and mother’s and father’s funeral tablets. Sometimes, Taro stares at it for hours. He says it pulls at him, that the whorls in the stone change.” She laughed to dispel the foolishness of the idea. “What’s a mother to do?”

Yukiko laughed. Her two sons walked hand-in-hand with a still-normal, childlike gait. “Taro is 13 now? Such a fine boy. Especially now, he takes after his –” She froze. The hard-shouldered stiffness reappeared in Emiko’s stance. Their walk was soon over.

The first trouble in many years came when the children began to disappear. First, the woodcutter’s young daughter, then one of the sake-brewer’s sons, five and six years old. Like Emiko, their families had also shunned the village’s prosperity, allowing only as much as they needed to support themselves. They were adorable children, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed. They simply vanished. We searched the woods and seashore and caverns to the south, where the new priest left offerings to the sea gods.

The bones were discovered, half-buried under a thin carpet of bamboo leaves, cracked and gnawed, the marrow sucked out, as if devoured by a beast. We combed the forest for signs of bears and wolves, even though bears had never lived on Kyushu and no one had seen wolves in generations. Parents kept their children under close watch. If not for their precautions, Taro might have gotten away with more.

One moment, little Momoko was playing near one of the rice fields while her mother arranged some seedlings for planting and the next moment, the child was gone. A woman nearby spotted Taro scuttling into the bushes, dragging a limp little figure, like a monkey dragging a doll, except his strange gait suggested something other than monkey.

The women cried out in alarm. Several men charged after in pursuit, following a tenuous trail of blood to a hollow between some rocks at the skirts of Clear Water Mountain, near the old temple, abandoned and forgotten over a decade. We roared in horror and rage at the sight: Taro’s hideous shape, bedraggled hair, red-rimmed eyes, his almost-snout, bloody lips and yellow teeth tearing into the soft flesh of the little girl’s naked buttock. Her skull lay open, splattered on the rocks. We charged him, with our gaff hooks and rusty spears left over from the old wars, but he was faster than any monkey. With a snarl, a claw and a frog-like bounce, he tore out poor Bunta’s throat and soared over our vengeful band, tearing off into the forest.

Some of us gave chase; some of us carried poor Momoko back to the village.

When we beat upon Emiko’s door, she snarled as she came out, thinking to drive us off, but we would not be moved, in spite of the beginning changes in her. The idol was doing its work. Eyes grown larger and watery, skin sallow, body bloating. Such changes had spread throughout the village, faster in some than in others. We told her all of it and her face became a Noh mask. “I will find him,” she said.

“He’ll be punished!” we cried.

“Yes, he will.” Her eyes did not blink.

Emiko went back into her house and we joined the others in the search.

Emiko later came to the constable and the headman, and announced that Taro would never harm anyone again. The constable nearly arrested her, but something in her demeanor gave him pause, a resignation and regret as deep and solid as the basalt underlying a reef, as deep and sublime as the cities of the sea gods. He let her go. As she shuffled away, she clutched the golden idol of Fugen under her arm, with a tuft of bloody hair clinging to one of the hard edges.

Decades later, a fisherman saw Emiko shuffling, hopping across the tide pools toward the reef. Her remaining wisps of hair had gone stone-grey, unkempt and sodden. By this time, the flabby wattles around her throat had begun to form gills like those of the sea gods, her flesh grown pale, with the ever-present moist sheen. Her webbed fingers clutched the idol made with the strange, sickly green stone and gold given from the sea gods. Her shoulders hunched under the burden of silent tortures we could only imagine. She waited as the tide came in around her, rising up to her waist, then her chest. Then she lowered her head and disappeared under the waves.

When Yukiko and Chiba claimed the Otomo house by right of kinship, they could barely walk on land anymore, themselves. They found a skeleton carefully arranged near the kamidana, in the shadow of the Otomo swords and family funeral tablets.

The sharp, protruding teeth and twisted limbs marked the skeleton as Taro. A jagged cleft shattered the misshapen face. Yukiko made her husband swear – until they went into the sea – that he would never utter a word of the knife-and-tooth-marks on those bones.

Travis Heermann. Author, freelance writer, English instructor, poker player, biker, roustabout. His novel, Heart of the Ronin, is available now in trade paperback and e-book from E-Reads. He has sold short fiction to Cemetery Dance, OG’s Speculative Fiction, the British Fantasy Society’s Winter 2010 anthology, Library of Horror Press, and others. He taught English in Japan for three years and stands out there like a space alien with his head on fire.

The author speaks: This story is set in early-17th-century Japan, right after the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate, before trade with “hairy barbarians” was outlawed. The setting is the western coast of Kyushu, across the Ariake Sea from Nagasaki, a major trading port with the Portuguese. When I heard about this anthology, I knew I wanted to write a story set in Japan. An obvious direction was to explore Japan’s deep connection to the sea, juxtaposed with Lovecraft’s sea-borne horrors, but I wasn’t sure how to make it fresh. Then I happened to read “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner (a fantastic horror story in its own right) and I found my twist.