Emperor of the Eight Islands

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  Frail indeed must be

  Cross threads of frost and drawn threads

  Fashioned of dewdrops

  For brocades in the mountains

  Are woven only to scatter

  —from Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, translated by Helen Craig McCullough

  THE TALE OF SHIKANOKO LIST OF CHARACTERS

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  Kumayama no Kazumaru, later known as Shikanoko or Shika

  Nishimi no Akihime, the Autumn Princess, Aki

  Kuromori no Kiyoyori, the Kuromori lord

  Lady Tama, his wife, the Matsutani lady

  Masachika, Kiyoyori’s younger brother

  Hina, sometimes known as Yayoi, his daughter

  Tsumaru, his son

  Bara or Ibara, Hina’s servant

  Yoshimori, also Yoshimaru, the Hidden Emperor, Yoshi

  Takeyoshi, also Takemaru, son of Shikanoko and Akihime, Take

  Lady Tora

  Shisoku, the mountain sorcerer

  Sesshin, an old wise man

  The Prince Abbot

  Akuzenji, King of the Mountain, a bandit

  Hisoku, Lady Tama’s retainer

  THE MIBOSHI CLAN

  Lord Aritomo, head of the clan, also known as the Minatogura lord

  Yukikuni no Takaakira

  The Yukikuni lady, his wife

  Takauji, their son

  Arinori, lord of the Aomizu area, a sea captain

  Yamada Keisaku, Masachika’s adoptive father

  Gensaku, one of Takaakira’s retinue

  Yasuie, one of Masachika’s men

  Yasunobu, his brother

  THE KAKIZUKI CLAN

  Lord Keita, head of the clan

  Hosokawa no Masafusa, a kinsman of Kiyoyori

  Tsuneto, one of Kiyoyori’s warriors

  Sadaike, one of Kiyoyori’s warriors

  Tachiyama no Enryo, one of Kiyoyori’s warriors

  Hatsu, his wife

  Kongyo, Kiyoyori’s senior retainer

  Haru, his wife

  Chikamaru, later Motochika, Chika, his son

  Kaze, his daughter

  Hironaga, a retainer at Kuromori

  Tsunesada, a retainer at Kuromori

  Taro, a servant in Kiyoyori’s household in Miyako

  THE IMPERIAL COURT

  The Emperor

  Prince Momozono, the Crown Prince

  Lady Shinmei’in, his wife, Yoshimori’s mother

  Daigen, his younger brother, later Emperor

  Lady Natsue, Daigen’s mother, sister of the Prince Abbot

  Yoriie, an attendant

  Nishimi no Hidetake, Aki’s father, foster father to Yoshimori

  Kai, his adopted daughter

  AT THE TEMPLE OF RYUSONJI

  Gessho, a warrior monk

  Eisei, a young monk, later one of the Burnt Twins

  AT KUMAYAMA

  Shigetomo, Shikanoko’s father

  Sademasa, his brother, Shikanoko’s uncle, now lord of the estate

  Nobuto, one of his warriors

  Tsunemasa, one of his warriors

  Naganori, one of his warriors

  Nagatomo, Naganori’s son, Shika’s childhood friend, later one of the Burnt Twins

  AT NISHIMI

  Lady Sadako and Lady Masako, Hina’s teachers

  Saburo, a groom

  THE RIVERBANK PEOPLE

  Lady Fuji, the mistress of the pleasure boats

  Asagao, a musician and entertainer

  Yuri, Sen, Sada, and Teru, young girls at the convent

  Sarumaru, Saru, an acrobat and monkey trainer

  Kinmaru and Monmaru, acrobats and monkey trainers

  THE SPIDER TRIBE

  Kiku, later Master Kikuta, Lady Tora’s oldest son

  Mu, her second son

  Kuro, her third son

  Ima, her fourth son

  Ku, her fifth son

  Tsunetomo, a warrior, Kiku’s retainer

  Shida, Mu’s wife, a fox woman

  Kinpoge, their daughter

  Unagi, a merchant in Kitakami

  SUPERNATURAL BEINGS

  Tadashii, a tengu

  Hidari and Migi, guardian spirits of Matsutani

  The dragon child

  Ban, a flying horse

  Gen, a fake wolf

  Kon and Zen, werehawks

  HORSES

  Nyorin, Akuzenji’s white stallion, later Shikanoko’s

  Risu, a bad-tempered brown mare

  Tan, their foal

  WEAPONS

  Jato, Snake Sword

  Jinan, Second Son

  Ameyumi, Rain Bow

  Kodama, Echo

  1

  KAZUMARU

  “Did you see what happened?”

  “Where is your father?” Two men were standing above him, their shapes dark against the evening sky. One was his uncle, Sademasa, the other Nobuto, whom he didn’t like.

  Kazumaru said, “We heard a funny noise,” and he mimed placing stones on a board. “Clack, clack, clack. Father told me to wait here.”

  The men had come upon the seven-year-old hidden in the long grass, in the sort of form deer stamp out for their fawns. The horses had nearly stepped on him. When his uncle lifted him up the grass had printed deep lines on his cheek. He must have been there for hours.

  “Who brings a child on a scouting mission?” Nobuto said quietly.

  “He can’t be separated from him.”

  “I’ve never seen a father so besotted!”

  “Or a child so spoiled,” Sademasa replied. “If he were mine…”

  Kazumaru did not like their tone. He sensed their mockery. He said nothing but resolved to tell his father when he saw him.

  “Any sign of his horse?” Sademasa asked Nobuto.

  The older man looked toward the trees. “The tracks lead up there.”

  A small group of stunted trees clung to the side of the volcanic mountain. Some were dying, some already stumps. The air smelled of sulfur, and steam hissed from vents in the ground. The men went warily forward, their bows in their hands. Kazumaru followed them.

  “Cursed-looking place,” Nobuto said.

  The larger tree stumps were crisscrossed with faint lines. A few black stones, a handful of white shells were scattered on the ground.

  “Something bled here.” Nobuto pointed at a splash on a pale rock. He crouched and touched it with his finger. “Still wet.”

  The blood was dark, almost purple.

  “Is it his?” Sademasa whispered.

  “Doesn’t look human to me,” Nobuto replied. He sniffed his finger. “Doesn’t smell human either.” He wiped his hand on the rock and stood, looked around, then suddenly shouted, “Lord Shigetomo! Where are you?”

  You, you, you, came back the echo from the mountain, and behind the echo another sound, like a flock of
birds beating their wings.

  Kazumaru looked up as the flock passed overhead. He saw it was made up of strange-looking beings, with wings and beaks and talons like birds, but wearing clothes of a sort, red jackets, blue leggings. They looked down on him and pointed and laughed. One of them brandished a sword in one hand, a bow in the other.

  “Those are his weapons,” Nobuto cried. “That is Ameyumi.”

  “Then Shigetomo is dead,” Sademasa said. “He would never have surrendered the bow alive.”

  Afterward, Kazumaru was not sure what he remembered and what he had dreamed. His father and his clever, witty mother often played Go in the long, snowbound winters at Kumayama. He had grown up with their sounds, the quiet clack of stones on the boards, the rattle in the wooden bowls. That day he and his father heard them together. They had ridden far ahead of the others. His father always liked to be in the lead, and the black horse was strong and eager. It had been a present from Lord Kiyoyori, to whom the family were vassals and on whose orders they had ridden so far north.

  His father reined in the horse, dismounted, and lifted him down. The horse began to graze. They walked through the long grass and almost stepped on the fawn, lying in its form. He saw its dark eyes, its delicate mouth, and then it was on its feet and leaping away. He knew the other men would have killed it, had they been there, but his father laughed and let it go.

  “Not worth Ameyumi’s time,” he said. Ameyumi was the name of his bow, a family treasure, huge, perfectly balanced, made of many layers of compressed wood with intricate bindings.

  They went stealthily toward the trees from which the sounds came. He remembered feeling it was a game, tiptoeing through the grass that was as tall as he was.

  His father stopped, holding his breath, so Kazumaru knew something had startled him. He bent and picked him up and in that moment Kazumaru glimpsed the tengu playing Go beneath the trees, their wings, their beaked faces, their taloned hands.

  Then his father was striding back to the place where they had found the fawn. He could feel his father’s heart beating loud through his chest.

  “Wait here,” he said, placing his son in the trampled grass of the form. “Be like the deer’s child. Don’t move.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I am going to play Go,” he replied, laughing again. “How often do you get the chance to play Go against tengu?”

  Kazumaru didn’t want him to. He had heard stories about tengu, mountain goblins, very clever, very cruel. But his father was afraid of nothing and always did exactly as he pleased.

  The men found Shigetomo’s body later that day. Kazumaru was not allowed to see it, but he heard the shocked whispers, and remembered the beaks, the claws as the tengu flew overhead. They saw me, he thought. They know me.

  When they returned home, Sademasa reported that his older brother had been killed by wild tribes in the north, but Kazumaru knew, no matter who actually killed him, that he had died because he had played Go with the tengu and lost.

  * * *

  The news of his father’s death plunged Kazumaru’s mother into a grief so extreme, everyone feared she could not survive it. Sademasa pleaded with her to marry him in his brother’s place, saying he would bring Kazumaru up as his own son, even swearing an oath on a sacred ox-headed talisman.

  “Both of you remind me of him all the time,” she said. “No, I must cut my hair and become a nun, as far away from Kumayama as possible.” As soon as the winter was over, she left, with hardly a word of farewell, beyond telling Kazumaru to obey his uncle.

  The family held a small parcel of land, confirmed by Lord Kiyoyori, on the side of the mountain known as Kumayama. It was made up of steep crags and deep, sunless valleys, where a few rice paddies had been carved out on either side of the rivers that tumbled from the mountain between forests of cypress and cryptomeria, full of bears, wolves, serow and deer, and boars, and groves of bamboo, home to quail and pheasants. It was seven days’ journey east of the capital and four days in the other direction from the Miboshi stronghold of Minatogura.

  As the years went by, it became apparent that Sademasa was not going to keep his oath. He grew accustomed to being the Kumayama lord and was reluctant to give it up. Power, along with unease at his own faithlessness, unleashed his brutal nature. He treated his nephew harshly, under the pretext of turning him into a warrior. Before he was twelve years old, Kazumaru realized that each day he lived brought his uncle fresh disappointment that he was not dead.

  Some of Sademasa’s warriors, in particular one Naganori, whose son was a year older than Kazumaru, were saddened by the harsh treatment of their former lord’s son. Others such as Nobuto admired Sademasa for his ruthlessness. The rest shrugged their shoulders, especially after Sademasa married and had children of his own, thinking that it made no difference, as Kazumaru would probably never be allowed to grow up, let alone inherit the estate. Most of them were surprised that he survived his brutalizing childhood and even flourished in some ways, for he practiced obsessively with the bow and from his rages came a superhuman strength. At twelve years he suddenly grew tall, and soon after could string and draw a bow like a grown man. But he was as shy and fierce as a young wolf. Only Naganori’s son, who received the name Nagatomo in his coming-of-age ceremony, was in any way a friend.

  He was the only person to whom Kazumaru said goodbye when, in the autumn of his sixteenth year, his uncle announced he was taking him hunting in the mountains.

  “If I don’t come back, you’ll know he has killed me,” Kazumaru said. “Next year I come of age, but he will never step aside for me. He has grown too fond of being the lord of Kumayama. He intends to get rid of me in the forest.”

  “I wish I could come with you,” Nagatomo said. “But your uncle has expressly forbidden it.”

  “That proves I am right,” Kazumaru replied. “But even if he doesn’t kill me I will not be coming back. There’s nothing for me here. I’ve only the vaguest memories of what it was like before. I remember not being afraid all the time, being loved and admired. Sometimes I daydream about what might have happened if my father had not died, if my mother had not left, if more of the men were loyal to me … but that’s the way it turned out. Don’t grieve for me. I can’t go on living in this way. I pray every day to escape somehow—if the only way is through death, so be it.”

  2

  KAZUMARU/SHIKANOKO

  The summer storms had abated and every day the stain of red leaves descended farther from the peaks. That year’s fawns were almost full grown but still followed their mothers through the shade-dappled forest.

  There was a famous old stag with a fine set of antlers that Sademasa had long desired, but the creature was cunning and cautious and never allowed itself to be encircled. This would be the year, Sademasa declared, that the stag would surrender to him.

  He took his nephew, his favorite retainer, Nobuto, and one other man. They went on foot, for the terrain was too rough even for the sure-footed horses that grazed on the lower slopes of Kumayama. They lived like wild men, gathering nuts and berries, shooting pheasants and setting traps for hares, every day going farther into the pathless forest, now and then catching glimpses of their prey, then losing it again until they came upon its tracks in the soft earth or its brown compact scat. Kazumaru expected his uncle to grow impatient, but instead Sademasa became almost jovial, as though he were about to be relieved of a burden he had carried for a long time. At night the men told ghost stories about tengu and mountain sorcerers, and all the ways young boys had disappeared. Kazumaru swore he would not let himself be killed along with the stag. He hardly dared sleep but sometimes fell into a kind of waking dream and heard the clack of Go stones and saw the eagle eyes of tengu turned toward him.

  They came one afternoon to the summit of a steep crag and the stag stood before them, its antlers gleaming in the western rays of the sun. Its flanks were heaving with the effort of the climb. The men were panting. There was a moment of stillness. Sa
demasa and Kazumaru both had their bows drawn. The other two men stood with knives ready. Sademasa gestured to Kazumaru to move around to the left, and drew his bow. Kazumaru was about to draw his, seeing where he would aim, right at the heart. The stag looked at him, its eyes wide with exertion and fear. Then its gaze flickered toward Sademasa and Kazumaru followed it. In that instant he saw his uncle’s bow was aimed not at the stag but at him. Then the stag was leaping straight at him in its desperate lunge to escape. The arrow flew, the stag collided with Kazumaru and sent him crashing down with it into the valley below.

  The animal broke his fall. As they both lay unmoving, winded, he could feel the frantic beat of its heart beneath him. He reached for the antlers and grasped them, then stood, fumbling for his knife. The deer was wounded, its legs broken. Its eyes watched him, unblinking. He prayed briefly and slit its throat, the hot blood pouring from it as its life slipped away.

  Thick bushes hid him from the men above. He could hear their shouts but made no sound in response. He wondered if his uncle’s desire for the antlers would be so great that he would follow him down the cliff, but the only way was to jump or fall. When silence returned he dragged the stag as far as he could, finding a small hollow under a bank filled with dry leaves. He lay down with the dead beast in his arms, slaking his thirst in its blood, reliving the moment on the cliff. It would have been easy to tell himself it was an accident, but it seemed important to face the truth. His uncle had aimed at him, but the stag had taken the arrow. It had saved his life. And then he felt again his own fall, the astonishment of flight, his hand gripping the bow as if it would hold him up, too young to believe in his own mortality yet expecting incredulously to die.

  All night he sensed wild animals circling, drawn by the smell of blood. He heard the pad of their feet, the rustling of leaves. The sky was ablaze with stars, the River of Heaven pouring light.

  At dawn the stag had cooled. He moved it into the clearing and set about skinning it, carefully cutting out the brainpan and the antlers, regretful for the way life had vanished so quickly from the eyes and face, wishing it could be restored, all the time filled with gratitude.