Thomas Randall - Spirits of the Noh

Miho took a deep breath and shifted her gaze back to Kara. “Don’t you want to know?”

After a moment, Kara nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

Then Mr. Sato appeared, practically in their midst, clearing his throat and glaring at them all with stern disapproval. They scattered, all four of them moving off to complete their o-soji tasks, but Miho knew an agreement had been reached. If Kara agreed, then Hachiro and Sakura would go along with the plan. A tight knot of ice formed in Miho’s stomach, and she recognized it as dread.

As far as she was concerned, they had only two choices-do something, or do nothing-and she couldn’t simply sit around holding her breath, waiting to find out if evil had returned to Miyazu City.

K ara stood just outside a small noodle shop, holding her breath to avoid inhaling the fumes from a battered taxi. Otherwise, she thought this street was one of the lovelier spots in Miyazu City. Despite its parks and gardens and temples, much of the city had an urban feel, and many neighborhoods were old and gray, almost the Japanese equivalent of some of the uglier areas in and around Boston, and in Medford, where she’d grown up, just minutes north of the city.

But although they called it Miyazu City, much of its heart remained the same town it had been during Japan’s Edo period. Downtown there were still homes of wealthy merchants from that era, and she had even been inside one of them, Mikami-ke House, which was open to tourists.

Here on Nariai Street, it seemed a perfect blend of old and new. A small temple rose from the middle of the block, up ahead on the left, and some of the buildings had been apartments or houses at some point, while others were shops of indeterminate age. All of the older buildings had been renovated. An old woman stood with a young girl on the corner across from Kara, selling flowers, though the summer-evening light had begun to fade into dusk.

Straight ahead, down the gentle slope of the street, she could see the water of the bay, glistening with the golden sheen of twilight. This would’ve been a nice, even romantic, place for her to have come with Hachiro any other time.

Now she doubted she would ever be able to come here again without thinking of what brought them here this first time-not just her and Hachiro, but Miho and Sakura, and Ren, who had volunteered to join them, though he still was not one hundred percent convinced that they had not all hallucinated the Kyuketsuki incident.

According to Miho, Miss Aritomo had made only one comment about Daisuke’s absence during the Noh club meeting, explaining that his parents were concerned about him, that he appeared to have run away, and if anyone heard from him, they should inform her right away. She’d made a similar plea during the rehearsal for Dojoji, but Kara, Sakura, and Ren had all been there for that. One kid had actually had the utter callousness to ask who would be taking Daisuke’s part if he didn’t come back to school. Miss Aritomo had gone cold and told the guy she would await Daisuke’s return, that she was certain his parents would locate him.

Beyond that, everyone behaved as though it was business as usual. And, maybe, if things had been different, Kara would have done the same.

“This is accomplishing nothing.” Sakura sighed, tromping up to stand beside her, a bit of petulance in her stance. She lit a cigarette, the pack and lighter appearing from and vanishing into her jacket pockets as if by magic.

The rest of them had changed clothes, but Sakura still wore her sailor fuku with the jacket turned inside out, all kinds of patches and pins on display, skirt hiked up too high, hair in short pigtails. This was a chance for her to act out, and she’d taken it. The Goth Lolita thing wasn’t her style, but she verged on the borders of it from time to time.

“It was a…,” Kara began, but she didn’t know how to say long shot in Japanese. “It was worth a try,” she said instead. “Though I admit, my feet are killing me.”

Sakura smiled. Killing me was a bit of idiomatic American slang that she’d managed to translate into Japanese and explain to her friends, and they’d quickly adopted it as their own.

They stood together, Sakura shifting slightly so that the breeze off the bay would not blow her smoke into Kara’s face, and glanced back the way they had come. Hachiro had stopped to talk to a pretty woman in front of a dress shop, trying to figure out the most direct way to get from this street to Daisuke’s address. Miho and Ren waited and listened, but didn’t seem to be adding anything to the conversation.

“Here they come,” Kara said, as Hachiro waved to the dress shop woman and the three of them started to come down the street.

“Oh, good. More walking,” Sakura mumbled around the cigarette clenched between her teeth.

It wasn’t just Kara’s feet that hurt. Her calves ached, and her stomach growled from lack of food. The aromas wafting from the noodle shop smelled wonderful. Kara had been concerned that her father would balk at her hanging out with her friends tonight, as it was a school night and she had homework yet to do. But when she had brought it up right after o-soji, he had been all for it. He had, he said, been thinking of taking Miss Aritomo out for a quiet dinner somewhere to distract her from her worries about the missing student, and if Kara and her friends were going out, she could fend for herself dinner-wise, and that would work out nicely.

Which all seemed fairly sensible and convenient, except that she felt sure her father and Miss Aritomo were having dinner by now, maybe even dessert, and she was famished.

“So?” Sakura asked as Hachiro, Ren, and Miho walked up. “What now?”

Miho gave a small shrug, a sheepish expression on her face. “This seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“I’m not sure it ever seemed like a good idea,” Hachiro said, giving her a sidelong glance. “But it did seem like something we had to do. Now, I don’t know. I suppose I thought that if something happened to him, maybe we would find a clue, or some hint about where he went.”

Ren pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head, longish bronze hair framing his face. “Really? The way Sakura described it, I thought we were looking for a body, or maybe his bike.”

Hachiro nodded grimly. “That, too. But none of us really knows Daisuke. I talked to him more than any of you, but only ever about baseball. And if he was dead on the side of the road somewhere, the police would have found him.”

Miho pointed across the street, where the flower sellers-the old woman and little girl-were packing up for the night. Twilight gathered around them. It would be truly dark soon.

“That road is the most likely one for him to have taken to get home. But it’s not the only one,” Miho said, shrugging again. “Daisuke could have stopped for a drink, or there might be a road that he’s used to taking, a shortcut we don’t know about.”

Hachiro continued. “The woman at the dress shop said any of the four streets that branch off this one would lead down toward the old fishery area, and Daisuke’s neighborhood is just beyond that.”

Kara could see where all this was going. Sakura caught her eye, taking a drag off of her cigarette, and nodded. They were both thinking the same thing.

“It’s getting dark,” Sakura said, holding the cigarette down by her side as she blew out a lungful of smoke. “We won’t be able to see anything.”

“She’s right,” Kara said, glancing at Miho. This whole thing had been her idea, so she had to be the one to call it off.

Miho seemed reluctant a moment, and shifted her gaze away from them, looking down the street toward the bay. Ren and Hachiro stood on either side of her, almost protectively, though Kara could tell both of them wanted to call it quits as well. They had to be realistic about it. They didn’t know which way Daisuke had gone, and weren’t going to find anything in the dark.