Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 73
“Of course!” Onogawa said proudly. “I’m a modern sort of fellow.”
“That’s the sort of power we need today. Civilization and Enlightenment. When you rode the train, did you see how the backward villagers in Omori come out to pour water on the engine? To cool it off, as if the railway engine were a tired horse!” Encho shook his head in contempt.
Onogawa accepted another small cup of bourbon. “So they pour water,” he said judiciously. “Well, I can’t see that it does any harm.”
“It’s rank superstition!” said Encho. “Don’t you see, we have to learn to deal with those machine-spirits, just as the foreigners do. Treating them as horses can only insult them. Isn’t that so, Taiso?”
Yoshitoshi looked up guiltily from his absentminded study of his latest drawing. “I’m sorry, Encho-san, you were saying?”
“What’s that you’re working on? May I see?” Encho crept nearer.
Yoshitoshi hastily plucked out pins and rolled up his paper. “Oh, no, no, you wouldn’t want to see this one just yet. It’s not ready. But I can show you another recent one … ” He reached to a nearby stack and dexterously plucked a printed sheet from the unsteady pile. “I’m calling this series Beauties of the Seven Nights.”
Encho courteously held up the print so that both he and Onogawa could see it. It showed a woman in her underrobe; she had thrown her scarlet-lined outer kimono over a nearby screen. She had both natural and artificial eyebrows, lending a double seductiveness to her high forehead. Her mane of jet black hair had a killing little wispy fringe at the back of the neck; it seemed to cry out to be bitten. She stood at some lucky man’s doorway, bending to blow out the light of a lantern in the hall. And her tiny, but piercingly red mouth was clamped down over a roll of paper towels.
“I get it!” Onogawa said. “That beautiful whore is blowing out the light so she can creep into some fellow’s bed in the dark! And she’s taking those handy paper towels in her teeth to mop up with, after they’re through playing mortar-and-pestle.”
Encho examined the print more closely. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This caption reads ‘Her Ladyship Yanagihara Aiko.’ This is an Imperial lady-in-waiting!”
“Some of my newspaper friends gave me the idea,” Yoshitoshi said, nodding. “Why should prints always be of tiresome, stale old actors and warriors and geishas? This is the modern age!”
“But this print, Taiso … it clearly implies that the Emperor sleeps with his ladies-in-waiting.”
“No, just with Lady Yanagihara Aiko,” Yoshitoshi said reasonably. “After all, everyone knows she’s his special favorite. The rest of the Seven Beauties of the Imperial Court are drawn, oh, putting on their makeup, arranging flowers, and so forth.” He smiled. “I expect big sales from this series. It’s very topical, don’t you think?”
Onogawa was shocked. “But this is rank scandal-mongering! What happened to the good old days, with the nice gouts of blood and so on?”
“No one buys those anymore!” Yoshitoshi protested. “Believe me, I’ve tried everything! I did A Yoshitoshi Miscellany of Figures from Literature. Very edifying, beautifully drawn classical figures, the best. It died on the stands. Then I did Raving Beauties at Tokyo Restaurants. Really hot girls, but old-fashioned geishas done in the old style. Another total waste of time. We were dead broke, not a copper piece to our names! I had to pull up the floorboards of my house for fuel! I had to work on fabric designs—two yen for a week’s work! My wife left me! My apprentices walked out! And then my health … my brain began to … I had nothing to eat … nothing … But … But that’s all over now.”
Yoshitoshi shook himself, dabbed sweat from his pasty upper lip, and poured another cup of bourbon with a steady hand. “I changed with the times, that’s all. It was a hard lesson, but I learned it. I call myself Taiso now, Taiso, meaning ‘Great Rebirth.’ Newspapers! That’s where the excitement is today! Tokyo Illustrated News pays plenty for political cartoons and murder illustrations. They do ten thousand impressions at a stroke. My work goes everywhere—not just Edo, the whole nation. The nation, gentlemen!” He raised his cup and drank. “And that’s just the beginning. The Lamp of Liberty is knocking them dead! The Liberal Party committee has promised me a raise next year, and my own rickshaw.”
“But I like the old pictures,” Onogawa said.
“Maybe you do, but you don’t buy them,” Yoshitoshi insisted. “Modern people want to see what’s happening now! Take an old theme picture—Yorimitsu chopping an ogre’s arm off, for instance. Draw a thing like that today and it gets you nowhere. People’s tastes are more refined today. They want to see real cannonballs blowing off real arms. Like my eyewitness illustrations of the Battle of Ueno. A sensation! People don’t want print peddlers anymore. ‘Journalist illustrator’—that’s what they call me now.”
“Don’t laugh,” said Encho, nodding in drunken profundity. “You should hear what they say about me. I mean the modern writer fellows, down from the University. They come in with their French novels under their arms, and their spectacles and slicked-down hair, and all sit in the front row together. So I tell them a vaudeville tale or two. Am I ‘spinning a good yarn’? Not anymore. They tell me I’m ‘creating naturalistic prose in a vigorous popular vernacular.’ They want to publish me in a book.” He sighed and had another drink. “This stuffs poison, Taiso. My head’s spinning.”
“Mine, too,” Onogawa said. An autumn wind had sprung up outside. They sat in doped silence for a moment. They were all much drunker than they had realized. The foreign liquor seemed to bubble in their stomachs like tofu fermenting in a tub.
The foreign spirits had crept up on them. The very room itself seemed drunk. Wind sang through the telegraph wires outside Yoshitoshi’s shuttered window. A low eerie moan.
The moan built in intensity. It seemed to creep into the room with them. The walls hummed with it. Hair rose on their arms.
“Stop that!” Yoshitoshi said suddenly. Encho stopped his ventriloquial moaning, and giggled. “He’s trying to scare us,” Yoshitoshi said. “He loves ghost stories.”
Onogawa lurched to his feet. “Demon in the wires,” he said thickly. “I heard it moaning at us.” He blinked, red-faced, and staggered to the shuttered window. He fumbled loudly at the lock, ignoring Yoshitoshi’s protests, and flung it open.
Moonlit wire clustered at the top of a wooden pole, in plain sight a few feet away. It was a junction of cables, and leftover coils of wire dangled from the pole’s crossarm like thin black guts. Onogawa flung up the casement with a bang. A chilling gust of fresh air entered the stale room, and the prints danced on the walls. “Hey, you foreign demon!” Onogawa shouted. “Leave honest men in peace!”
The artist and entertainer exchanged unhappy glances. “We drank too much,” Encho said. He lurched to his knees and onto one unsteady foot. “Leave off, big fellow. What we need now … ” He belched. “Women, that’s what.”
But the air outside the window seemed to have roused Onogawa. “We didn’t ask for you!” he shouted. “We don’t need you! Things were fine before you came, demon! You and your foreign servants … ” He turned half-round, looking red-eyed into the room. “Where’s my pipe? I’ve a mind to give these wires a good thrashing.”
He spotted the pipe again, stumbled into the room and picked it up. He lost his balance for a moment, then brandished the pipe threateningly. “Don’t do it,” Encho said, getting to his feet. “Be reasonable. I know some girls in Asakusa, they have a piano … ” He reached out.
Onogawa shoved him aside. “I’ve had enough!” he announced. “When my blood’s up, I’m a different man! Cut them down before they attack first, that’s my motto! Sonno joi!”
He lurched across the room toward the open window. Before he could reach it there was a sudden hiss of steam, like the breath of a locomotive. The demon, its patience exhausted by Onogawa’s taunts, gushed from its wire. It puffed through the window, a gray gaseous thing, its lumpy misshapen head glaring furiously. It gave a steam-whistle roar, and its great lantern eyes glowed.
All three men screeched aloud. The armless, legless monster, like a gray cloud on a tether, rolled its glassy eyes at all of them. Its steel teeth gnashed, and sparks showed down its throat. It whistled again and made a sudden gnashing lurch at Onogawa.
But Onogawa’s old sword-training had soaked deep into his bones. He leapt aside reflexively, with only a trace of stagger, and gave the thing a smart overhead riposte with his pipe. The demon’s head bonged like an iron kettle. It began chattering angrily, and hot steam curled from its nose. Onogawa hit it again. Its head dented. It winced, then glared at the other men.
The townsmen quickly scrambled into line behind their champion. “Get him!” Encho shrieked. Onogawa dodged a halfhearted snap of teeth and bashed the monster across the eye. Glass cracked and the bowl flew from Onogawa’s pipe.
But the demon had had enough. With a grumble and crunch like dying gearworks, it retreated back toward its wires, sucking itself back within them, like an octopus into its hole. It vanished, but hissing sparks continued to drip from the wire.
“You humiliated it!” Encho said, his voice filled with awe and admiration. “That was amazing!”
“Had enough, eh!” shouted Onogawa furiously, leaning on the sill. “Easy enough mumbling your dirty spells behind our backs! But try an Imperial warrior face to face, and it’s a different story! Hah!”
“What a feat of arms!” said Yoshitoshi, his pudgy face glowing. “I’ll do a picture. Onogawa Humiliates a Ghoul. Wonderful!”
The sparks began to travel down the wire, away from the window. “It’s getting away!” Onogawa shouted. “Follow me!”
He shoved himself from the window and ran headlong from the studio. He tripped at the top of the stairs, but did an inspired shoulder-roll and landed on his feet at the door. He yanked it open.
Encho followed him headlong. They had no time to lace on their leather shoes, so they kicked on the wooden clogs of Yoshitoshi and his apprentice and dashed out. Soon they stood under the wires, where the little nest of sparks still clung. “Come down here, you rascal,” Onogawa demanded. “Show some fighting honor, you skulking wretch!”
The thing moved back and forth, hissing, on the wire. More sparks dripped. It dodged back and forth, like a cornered rat in an alley. Then it made a sudden run for it.
“It’s heading south!” said Onogawa. “Follow me!”
They ran in hot pursuit, Encho bringing up the rear, for he had slipped his feet into the apprentice’s clogs and the shoes were too big for him.
They pursued the thing across the Ginza. It had settled down to headlong running now, and dropped fewer sparks.
“I wonder what message it carries,” panted Encho.
“Nothing good, I’ll warrant,” said Onogawa grimly. They had to struggle to match the thing’s pace. They burst from the southern edge of the Ginza Bricktown and into the darkness of unpaved streets. This was Shiba District, home of the thieves’ market and the great Zojoji Temple. They followed the wires. “Aha!” cried Onogawa. “It’s heading for Shinbashi Railway Station and its friends the locomotives!”
With a determined burst of speed, Onogawa outdistanced the thing and stood beneath the path of the wire, waving his broken pipe frantically. “Whoa! Go back!”
The thing slowed briefly, well over his head. Stinking flakes of ash and sparks poured from it, raining down harmlessly on the ex-samurai. Onogawa leapt aside in disgust, brushing the filth from his derby and frock coat. “Phew!”
The thing rolled on. Encho caught up with the larger man. “Not the locomotives,” the comedian gasped. “We can’t face those.”
Onogawa drew himself up. He tried to dust more streaks of filthy ash from his soiled coat. “Well, I think we taught the nasty thing a lesson, anyway.”
“No doubt,” said Encho, breathing hard. He went green suddenly, then leaned against a nearby wooden fence, clustered with tall autumn grass. He was loudly sick.
They looked about themselves. Autumn. Darkness. And the moon. A pair of cats squabbled loudly in an adjacent alley.
Onogawa suddenly realized that he was brandishing, not a sword, but a splintered stick of ironbound bamboo. He began to tremble. Then he flung the thing away with a cry of disgust. “They took our swords away,” he said. “Let them give us honest soldiers our swords back. We’d make short work of such foreign foulness. Look what it did to my coat, the filthy creature. It defiled me.”
“No, no,” Encho said, wiping his mouth. “You were incredible! A regular Shoki the Demon Queller.”
“Shoki,” Onogawa said. He dusted his hat against his knee. “I’ve seen drawings of Shoki. He’s the warrior demigod, with a red face and a big sword. Always hunting demons, isn’t he? But he doesn’t know there’s a little demon hiding on the top of his own head.”
“Well, a regular Yoshitsune, then,” said Encho, hastily grasping for a better compliment. Yoshitsune was a legendary master of swordsmanship. A national hero without parallel.
Unfortunately, the valorous Yoshitsune had ended up riddled with arrows by the agents of his treacherous half-brother, who had gone on to rule Japan. While Yoshitsune and his high ideals had to put up with a shadow existence in folklore. Neither Encho nor Onogawa had to mention this aloud, but the melancholy associated with the old tale seeped into their moods. Their world became heroic and fatal. Naturally all the bourbon helped.
“We’d better go back to Bricktown for our shoes,” Onogawa said.
“All right,” Encho said. Their feet had blistered in the commandeered clogs, and they walked back slowly and carefully.
Yoshitoshi met them in his downstairs landing. “Did you catch it?”
“It made a run for the railroads,” Encho said. “We couldn’t stop it; it was way above our heads.” He hesitated. “Say. You don’t suppose it will come back here, do you?”
“Probably,” Yoshitoshi said. “It lives in that knot of cables outside the window. That’s why I put the shutters there.”
“You mean you’ve seen it before?”
“Sure, I’ve seen it,” Yoshitoshi muttered. “In fact I’ve seen lots of things. It’s my business to see things. No matter what people say about me.”
The others looked at him, stricken. Yoshitoshi shrugged irritably. “The place has atmosphere. It’s quiet and no one bothers me here. Besides, it’s cheap.”
“Aren’t you afraid of the demon’s vengeance?” Onogawa said.
“I get along fine with that demon,” Yoshitoshi said. “We have an understanding. Like neighbors anywhere.”
“Oh,” Encho said. He cleared his throat. “Well, ah, we’ll be moving on, Taiso. It was good of you to give us the borubona.” He and Onogawa stuffed their feet hastily into their squeaking shoes. “You keep up the good work, pal, and don’t let those political fellows put anything over on you. Their ideas are weird, frankly. I don’t think the government’s going to put up with that kind of talk.”
“Someday they’ll have to,” Yoshitoshi said.
“Let’s go,” Onogawa said, with a sidelong glance at Yoshitoshi. The two men left.
Onogawa waited until they were well out of earshot. He kept a wary eye on the wires overhead. “Your friend certainly is a weird one,” he told the comedian. “What a night!”
Encho frowned. “He’s gonna get in trouble with that visionary stuff. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, you know.” They walked into the blaze of artificial gaslight. The Ginza crowd had thinned out considerably.
“Didn’t you say you knew some girls with a piano?” Onogawa said.
“Oh, right!” Encho said. He whistled shrilly and waved at a distant two-man rickshaw. “A piano. You won’t believe the thing; it makes amazing sounds. And what a great change after those dreary geisha samisen routines. So whiny and thin and wailing and sad! It’s always, ‘Oh, How Piteous Is A Courtesan’s Lot,’ and ‘Let’s Stab Each Other To Prove You Really Love Me.’ Who needs that old-fashioned stuff? Wait till you hear these gals pound out some ‘opera’ and ‘waltzes’ on their new machine.”
The rickshaw pulled up with a rattle and a chime of bells. “Where to, gentlemen?”
“Asakusa,” said Encho, climbing in.
“It’s getting late,” Onogawa said reluctantly. “I really ought to be getting back to the wife.”
“Come on,” said Encho, rolling his eyes. “Live a little. It’s not like you’re just cheating on the little woman. These are high-class modern girls. It’s a cultural experience.”
“Well, all right,” said Onogawa. “If it’s cultural.”
“You’ll learn a lot,” Encho promised.
