White Ninja, page 43
What were the questions that neither Haha-san nor the River Man could answer, the questions that had driven him to seek out Zhuji and the tanjian? When he had arrived here, Senjin thought he knew: what had happened to the River Man here? Wasn’t there more to learn than the musings of dead men which passed for philosophy? Where was the Truth in the world, the answer to the universal questions: why am I here, where am I going, what will I become afterward?
But now Senjin knew that he needed to know more even than that. Why am I rage? he kept asking himself, his hands full of manure. Why am I anger? his mouth filled with beetles. Why am I fury? crouched in the night, his dark, metallic aura clamped tightly around him, a bird with its wings bound.
Neither Mubao nor any of the other elders took the slightest notice when Senjin asked them about the experience of the River Man in Zhuji. He had been scheming for some time to find some way to get them to open up, when an opportunity presented itself from an unlikely source.
There was a strictly enforced ban against the younger males and females getting together save for mealtimes, which were always communal. Still, here and there boys and girls managed their trysts. Senjin could never quite figure out whether these clandestine affairs went unnoticed by the elders or whether the lengths to which the couples went in order to hide their meetings were part of the Tau-tau training.
It happened there was a girl who seemed confused by much of the instruction. She seemed never to understand her lessons fully or to perform to the standards set by the elders. As a result, she was reviled and ridiculed in much the same manner as Senjin was.
Her name was Xu, and she was very beautiful. She had porcelain skin and the face of a doll, almost hypnotic in its perfection. It seemed ironic to Senjin that she was so physically perfect yet so inept at her lessons. Senjin, ever the consummate liar, told himself that he was drawn to her because he adored perfection in any form. He saw himself as a sculptor and Xu a half-formed lump of clay from which he could fashion a masterpiece. The truth was that in this strange community, he could not bear his absolute isolation. Yet he could not admit to himself that this inner pain drove him to seek out someone who was very much like himself: reviled, scorned, a beautiful outsider. And it was his own need for companionship that blinded him to her own weaknesses, which in other circumstances he would have despised. He was aware only of Xu’s degradation, and saw in her suffering face his own reflection.
At first he observed her humiliation as the others did, although not enjoying it as they obviously did. But soon her treatment became so painful for him that he was obliged to intervene. He saw the concerted cruelty as a transgression—not against any spoken or implied law of the tanjian, which meant nothing to him—but against his own internal code, which was becoming more manifest to him day by day.
Outside, in the cold surrounding the privies, he watched as Xu was taunted by a group of girls. They began by verbally abusing her. This quickly escalated to pushing and shoving, sending her stumbling over the rocky ground, until she slid into the cesspit he was digging.
Senjin stopped what he was doing. He saw Xu biting so hard on her lower lip that it began to bleed, trying desperately not to cry. She pulled herself into a ball, thrusting herself into the dirt of the pit’s side in a pathetic attempt to hide from the laughing, mocking girls.
These girls were how standing at the edge of the cesspit, bending over, hands on their knees, calling out to Xu. One of them spit in her direction; it struck Senjin on the cheek. This made the girls laugh even more.
“Oh, look,” they cried, “it’s Shit-boy! We didn’t see you digging there, Shit-boy!” Tears of laughter streamed down their faces.
Senjin looked down, saw Xu trembling, staring up at the gob of spittle on his cheek. He saw the tears that she had been so valiantly holding back begin to slide down her face. She wept for him where she would not weep for herself.
Senjin closed his eyes, found that place inside himself where dwelled the dark metallic rings of his aura. This place was distant in both time and place, very near the place where the membrane kokoro hung suspended. Now Senjin began his repetitions, and soon the energy he emitted began to excite the membrane, setting it to vibrating.
Now he moved his essence outward, grabbing hold of his aura and casting it into space and time. A moment later the earth gave a lurch in the way a wild boar will convulse when a spear is struck through its back.
Senjin heard screaming, a rumble, and opening his eyes, he observed through slitted lids that the ground had given way beneath the feet of the gaggle of girls, so that now they lay in a tangled heap below the level where he stood. They were screaming and crying in terror.
He laughed, threw down his shovel. “Look, Xu,” he said, “my morning’s work is done. The new cesspit has been dug for me.”
Xu was wide-eyed beside him. He leaped up out of the shallow pit and, bending, drew her upward beside him. He watched, content, as Xu lifted up her skirt, squatted, and inaugurated the new cesspit.
Xu, her self-respect restored, took his hand, leading him wordlessly up along a twisting path. Solemn mountain goats, munching tufts of dried grass, observed their ascent with huge liquid-brown eyes. Jackrabbits bounded out of their way, and once, they caught sight of a thick ruddy tail, then a glimpse of a large triangular head as a fox sought to avoid them.
She took him off the path a distance before it petered out on bare rock, and they moved carefully down the scree. Behind a pair of enormous boulders they came upon a small grassy clearing. It was shielded in every direction, utterly private.
“How do you know of this place?” Senjin said.
“I come here when I want to be alone, when I can no longer bear the taunts.”
“You won’t have to worry about them anymore.”
“Oh, no one else would have done that for me!” Xu said, then immediately blushed.
“You could have done that yourself,” Senjin pointed out. “You didn’t really need me—or anyone.”
“Oh, yes. But I do,” Xu said. Her eyes darted away at him as she spun around. “It’s so beautiful here.” She took a deep breath. “The air is so different high up, so sweet, like a baby’s smell.”
Senjin had other things on his mind. He watched her, wondering how he could change her so that she would reach perfection. But then a sad thought crept into his mind: if he should ever form her into a masterpiece, he would have no choice but to destroy her.
He grabbed her wrist. “Why did you bring me up here?”
“Why?” She seemed confused, as she did when asked to perform with her gift what the elder had just demonstrated. “Oh, to share all this with me.”
“Share all what?”
“Well, this.” Xu threw out her arms to encompass everything around them.
“This patch of dirt and rock looks like every other one.”
“No,” Xu said, catching his eyes with hers. “This one is different, special. Like you.” She took his hands in hers. “Because it's mine.”
Then, for the first time, Senjin felt her gift. He thought that it must be very weak, although much later, after he had left Zhuji, he began to suspect that perhaps she was expert in shielding the existence of her gift from other tanjian, and he regretted not getting to know her better.
But for the moment, he felt only pity for the feebleness of an aura that needed all this space and solitude to make its presence felt. Still, it was beautiful, as striking as Xu’s face, and he surrounded it with the powerful rings of dark steel so that its light would reflect back on itself, better illuminating it. Immediately he saw that Xu had been right: this spot was made beautiful by the projection of her will.
“It is said that you come from Asama.” Xu looked up into his face. “Is this true?”
“Yes.” He felt the tension come into her frame, and decided to allow her to ask all the questions of him she desired.
“Do you know a tanjian from there known as Aichi?”
“No.” But instinctively Senjin knew that he had made a mistake. “What does he look like?” he asked.
Xu described the River Man.
“I know him,” Senjin said. “For many years he has been my father.”
“Your father!” Xu exclaimed.
Senjin explained how the River Man was Haha-san’s brother, and how he had been his first sensei.
“Oh, that explains it, then,” Xu said. “Why the elders are afraid of you.”
“Mubao and the others are afraid of me?” Senjin was incredulous. “Then why did they take me in?”
“They were bound to accept you,” she said. “They had no choice. You are tanjian and they cannot refuse you. But coming as you do from Aichi, the man who tried to steal the emeralds of the tanjian—”
“Wait,” Senjin said. “I thought the sixteen emeralds had been stolen many years ago by a traitorous woman named Liang.”
“There were originally twenty-four emeralds,” Xu said. “Eight still reside here. These were the emeralds that Aichi tried to steal.”
“What happened?”
“He was caught,” Xu said. “He was tried, sentenced, and banished. Now I see that he returned to Asama and has begun teaching his own version of Tau-tau. This is strictly forbidden.”
“It hasn’t stopped him.”
“Obviously,” Xu said.
Then something occurred to him. “This law you mentioned, that the elders were bound to take me in. I have not heard of it.”
“It exists, I assure you.”
Something in her eyes drove him to say harshly, “But that’s not all of it.” He evoked the projection of his will, just a little bit.
“No,” Xu whispered, “it’s not all. The law affects only tanjian descended from the prime line.”
Senjin was stunned. “Are you saying that I am—”
“You are descended from Zhao Hsia, the martyr who—”
“Was drowned in the falls by So-Peng.”
“Yes.” Sunlight drenched Xu. Her eyes were liquid. Her face was pure gold. She broke from his grip, moving until she was against his chest.
He felt a stirring of his darkness, the metallic rings that were the projection of his will, which still enclosed her aura. He felt a kind of expansion, a rhythmic pulsing that flooded him with pleasure.
Senjin had already discovered that he could enjoy an odd kind of nontactile sex with his sister. For him, if not for her, it was a game of sorts, of mastery, of dominance. He had loved to feel Shisei’s will dissolving beneath the onslaught of his own prodigious aura, his massive coils that encircled hers, until her pleasure was so great that it spilled over into him.
But this was something far different. It was happening to him from the inside out, his coils being manipulated by that which they enfolded, and the intensity was so great that for an instant he was totally disoriented, floating in time as well as in space. He had no control, had ceded all movement to this other will which possessed him utterly, which made even the questions that had burned themselves upon his spirit disappear behind a veil of delight.
When it was over, Senjin was so shaken that he could not stand up. He slid down Xu’s form, grasping weakly at her ankles. He closed his eyes and for one brilliant moment he was at peace. Then the questions began to reassert their dominance over him, and he was himself again.
Senjin and Xu never returned to that spot in the Taihang Shan; they never came together in that way again. Perhaps she would have wanted to, but Senjin never gave her the opportunity to suggest it. Part of him reveled in the rape (for there was no other word to adequately describe what had happened), in the kind of wild pleasure she had given him. But another, deeper, more dominant part of him remained so terrified of the experience of ceding all control to another that it would not allow the merging to be repeated.
Three months after coming to Zhuji, Senjin saw that the River Man’s truth was not the truth. Three years after that, he discovered that the Tau-tau truth was also not the truth.
Then he thought of Shisei, who he had not thought of in a very long time. He recalled their conversation when she had asked him, “Why is it that you see everything inverted?” He had had no answer for her then, but he suspected that he did now. He longed to drink her in with all his senses, with his finely-attuned aura, and while thus merged with her, say to her, “I see everything inverted because I know that in this world there is no truth, only many supposed truths. Each man has his own or appropriates another’s, and this is why life is based on conflict.”
Three years and three months after Senjin began his work in Tau-tau at Zhuji, the elders cast the runes. This was a neolithic ritual which took place over the course of a week. It was a week of constant repetitions, constant chanting, and Senjin saw in the elders’ rituals the increased excitation of the membrane of kokoro, a building of energy that rang in his ears like a silent shout until sleep was out of the question and every movement, every gesture, was put toward the beating of kokoro.
At the end of this time, the elders met within the center of one of the stone temples set high up in the side of the mountains. Here a massive fire had been lit by the women, who tended it constantly. Senjin, when he was led in, could see the stars through a hole high up in the roof of the room.
Here the elders were hard at work etching runic messages on the inside of long shards of tortoiseshell. Senjin was reminded of the River Man’s story, of how So-Peng and Zhao Hsia, as boys, had stolen and eaten the tortoise eggs on the beach at Rantau Abang.
These messages were questions the tanjian elders wished answered about the future. When they were done with their etching, the week-long rite culminated with the elders throwing the shards into the fire. The chanting rose to a crescendo, men slowly subsided.
Afterward, the women were dispatched to retrieve the tortoiseshell from the ashes of the fire, and by the way each shard had been cracked by the heat, the elders thus could read the future.
Mubao was brought his tortoiseshell, and he signed for Senjin to join him. When Senjin had squatted down beside Mubao, the elder said, “This is your future.”
Senjin, staring at the sooty shard of tortoiseshell, could see nothing but a fine network of cracks bisecting the etched runes. “What is predicted?” he asked.
“A flood, a torrent, a rage of thunder, a detonation of energy,” Mubao intoned. “And after the deluge, xin.” By xin he meant the center or heart of things. Kokoro.
Senjin’s heart beat fast. “Is this what lies in wait for me?”
Mubao nodded. “In part.” His callused thumb rubbed the cracked tortoiseshell. “Death is strong. Its tone permeates the silent echoes we hear and which guide us. Death and more death.”
Mubao’s thumb paused over one spot on the shard. He looked at Senjin and said, “You must leave here. Our time of the day has passed.”
Senjin found it no hardship to leave Zhuji. In fact, he had in recent weeks grown bored with his schooling. He had absorbed everything that Mubao and the other elders had sought to teach him. Now, in his heart, in his own kokoro, he wished to teach them. They did not know the Truth, but he, Senjin, did. Then, after the casting of the runes, after Mubao had, in effect, delivered his sentence, Senjin understood that they would not understand even if they had given him a chance to tell them what he now knew: that there was no Truth.
It was not that what he had learned was either false or useless. Far from it. But the fact that both forms of Tau-tau were valid and were believed in wholeheartedly, delivered the reality of life to Senjin with the force of a hammer blow.
Nothing was true; nothing was sacred. In that case, there was no Law.
Thus did Senjin return to Japan at age twenty a dorokusai. And, to satisfy both his sense of yin-yang and his desire for irony, he became a policeman in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Force.
He did not return to Asama, to where he knew Haha-san and the River Man were like death, waiting for him. He did not return to Asama, where he assumed Shisei would be waiting for him. It did not matter; they met in Tokyo, on the glittering Ginza, where giant signs of snaking neon advertised the icons of a new age: SONY, MATSUSHITA, TOSHIBA, NEC, and CBS/SONY.
They were drawn together amid the winking, blinking electronic jungle, by the concentric circles that had bound them as children, the dark, oiled steel and the coil of sinuous perfume.
Their reunion was a joyous one, though no one looking at them could tell. There was no expression on their faces; everything was internalized. And everything was mended, settled.
Or so Shisei thought.
Senjin moved into his twin’s apartment. It was in the most fashionable area of the city. It was huge, filled with Western furniture covered in luxurious, snow-white fabrics. On the way to it that first night of their reunion, Senjin came across three enormous posters with Shisei’s face. He saw her on television, singing before a gargantuan crowd of screaming youngsters.
“I’m a talento,” Shisei said. “The most successful talento in Japan.”
Having been away for some time, Senjin did not know the term.
“I’m a kind of media star,” Shisei said. “I sing a little, dance a little, a dilettante entertainer. I give concerts, I’m about to star in my own television soap opera, I do commercial endorsements for all the big companies. Anything and everything. I’m a role model, held up to the hungry public for their inspection and adoration.”
“Does it make you happy?” Senjin asked. He was riveted by her image, blue and gold, moving across the screen, caressed by the television cameras. He was certain that the director must be in love with her.
“They’re all in love with me,” Shisei said. “The audience, the crew, the publicists, the corporate executives. Especially the corporate executives. That makes me very happy.” Her face clouded. “But as wonderful as it is, I know it can’t last. A talento must be young, dewy-fresh, virginal. Time is my most vicious enemy.”
“But how did this happen?” Senjin asked.
Each wanted to know everything that had happened to the other during the three years they had been separated. In a way, since the texture and complexities of the energies they threw off had changed, they knew. In other ways, they needed to be told verbally. Oddly, they were both reluctant, just as if they were shy newlyweds come to the moment of truth: their marriage bed.
