Amanda Sun - Rain

“Gift shop?” I wondered.

“This is where a lot of the Shizuoka tea is made,” Tomo said. “They sell some of it in there.”

“Oh,” I said. “So these are the rolling lands of your dad’s tea empire.” I poked him sharply just above his hip and he jumped a mile.

“Oi!” he snapped. He reached for me and I raced toward the tea shop. The sound of grinding gears and wire scraping against itself stopped me in my tracks. Tomo crashed into me, grabbing me around my waist and lifting me off the ground.

“Hey!” I shouted as he laughed. A few of the Japanese tourists looked over and then quickly away. I was a foreigner, so they made it their business to politely ignore the shenanigans I was causing.

My feet touched the ground again and Tomo broke off his hold on me.

“That’s the ropeway,” he said, following my gaze.

Little cable cars bounced up and down on the wires as they whirred slowly through the air, rolling along the thick cord toward a distant mountain peak.

“Is that where we’re going?”

“Not exactly, but we can take a detour. There’s a shrine up there, so there’ll be more tourists. But on the edges of the shrine are forests, and no fence.”

“Got it,” I grinned. “Let’s ride the ropeway. I want to be surrounded by forest.”

He grinned. “Ikuzo.” Let’s go.

We’d lost something important without Toro Iseki. We needed to be alone among the trees and the birds, somewhere horses could come to life if we wanted them to.

The thought was sobering. No, we couldn’t bring anything like that to life again. No horses, no butterflies, not even any furin chimes in the trees. They’d been dangerous, sinister, but they’d been beautiful, too. It made me sad to think I would never see those things again.

I noticed a weird frame covered in brass squares while we waited to enter the cable car. A large metal frame held a dozen rows of silver pipes, and along these pipes hung hundreds of brass padlocks like on vintage high-school lockers or construction-site fences.

“What’s this about?” I said.

Tomohiro rested his hand on the locks, giving them a shove so they swayed back and forth. Now that I looked closer, kanji names had been written down the sides of the locks in black pen.

“Lovers’ locks,” he said. “Lock your heart here so your relationship lasts forever.”

I felt too warm then, looking at the rows of locks. Were these couples all still together? Every lock had a keyhole at the bottom, but no keys in sight. The locks weren’t going anywhere.

Tomo spoke beside me, his breath warm on my ear. “They threw the keys away,” he said. “Guess they’re stuck together until the end. Maybe I should get a lock for us, too.”

“You sure you want to be stuck with each other that long?” I was joking, but what Shiori had said still stung, leaving an uneasy hole at the edge of my confidence where it seeped away into the shadows.

Tomo took a deep breath as the cable car arrived, a lady opening the door and announcing it was time to board. “It’s not that long until the end for me,” he said, and I shivered.

We crowded into the cable car with the tourists and lifted into the air.

“So we can fly after all,” Tomohiro said, but his voice was sad. He’d thought once he could fly safely on a dragon, but that didn’t end well. Now here we were, suspended by a cord, bouncing over every pole along the ropeway.

“At least this mode of transportation won’t try to eat you,” I said. “Although it is kind of rickety.”

“Well, it’s run fine for the past fifty years,” Tomo said, his eyes gleaming. “I guess it’s due to break down and throw us to our untimely deaths.”

“You better grow feathers fast if that happens.”

He tucked his bangs behind his ears—where they stayed for a few seconds before tumbling back—and closed his eyes. I knew he was pretending we weren’t surrounded by tourists.

At the end of the ropeway, we followed the crowd as they curved around the platform and toward a staircase of what looked like a hundred giant stone steps. They rose sharply from the cable-car platform, and I gasped when I saw the roumon gateway at the top.

It looked like the entrance to an ancient castle, a fortified gate of deep crimson and white. The roof tilted up like a bird raising its wings, the black rounded tiles stubbed with crests of shining gold. A thick rope wound around the gate, little thunderbolts made of white cloth hanging down from it and swaying in the breeze.

“Kunozan Toshogu Shrine,” Tomohiro said. “That’s just the entrance.”

We walked up the steps slowly. “A shrine? So it’s Shinto, then, not Buddhist.”

“Yeah,” said Tomohiro. “Dedicated to the most famous Kami of Shizuoka, Tokugawa Ieyasu.”

“That sounds like a person’s name, not a mythical kami, ” I smirked.

Tomohiro stopped climbing the stairs to look at me. “It is,” he said. “He built Shizuoka Castle. And when he died, after months of sickness and nightmares, he was buried here.”

I felt the blood drain from my face.

“When?” I whispered.

“Sixteen-hundred-something,” Tomohiro said, and he kept climbing. I followed him. “Don’t worry. I’m sure the ghost is long gone.”

“And you think he was really...?”

“A Kami?” Tomohiro stopped to catch his breath and then continued up the stone steps. “Well, let’s see. He was kidnapped during an uprising when he was six. The abductors demanded Tokugawa’s father break ties with their enemy clan or they’d kill his son. And his father said, ‘Go ahead.’”

I raised my hand to my mouth, my eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Tomo said. “And after three years of the boy suffering in their hands, his captors suddenly dropped dead. So did his father. So did half the Japanese in the area.”

Shit.

“Tomo,” I said, my throat dry. “How do you know all this?”

“I’m just looking for answers,” he said. “It used to be Taira no Kiyomori in my nightmares. Now it’s Tokugawa. And I want to understand why.”

“I thought we were looking for a new place to be alone.”

“We are,” Tomohiro said. “But you wanted to come here, and I felt the pull, too. I feel like I’m supposed to be here. He led a lot of successful battles in his time. Maybe he knew something I don’t about controlling the ink.”

We’d reached the gateway now and could see the shrine before us. It was a flurry of bright rainbow colors. I’d never seen any shrine or temple like it in Japan. The posts and foundation of the house were painted bright red, but the walls were a deep black and covered in bright images of dogs and birds. Every surface shone with elaborate whorls of intricate gold. The painted dogs curled around the building had blue and white spots, with tails and manes like lions. Once-brass lanterns, now turned green and scaly with time, hung from thick chains in the roof. Just under the ceiling beams wove an elaborate pattern of blue, red, white and green flowers and shapes. Everything gleamed like it was alive.

“Tomo,” I said, stepping forward. My breath caught in my throat.

That was when I heard the gasp, like air being wrenched from his lungs.

The painted dog’s lip curled back with the sound of wood snapping and grinding, a growl echoing from his mouth of sharply drawn teeth.

I turned just as Tomohiro collapsed in the gateway, his head cracking against the stone. Ink pooled around his skull like blood.