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His brother’s footsteps make no sound and when they walk together Michikatsu must trace Yoriichi’s progress by watching the shadow he casts, two or three steps behind his own as always. If they are sneaking out through the estate’s storehouse gate at sunrise to go fly a kite Michikatsu usually carries along the big paper kite itself, bearing it valiantly aloft like a battlefield nobori, while Yoriichi and his shadow follow in procession holding the kite’s silk-ribbon tails and its spool, although one morning Michikatsu glances back over his shoulder to discover that by some miscreant, mysterious process Yoriichi has gotten himself hopelessly entangled.
He sets aside the kite and reaches out with both hands.
Yoriichi passes him the unraveled spool, turning himself in a shuffling, drowsy circle while Michikatsu rolls the kite’s red string up again. They are six years, two months, one week, five days, twelve hours and three or fifteen minutes old, respectively, since a great deal hangs upon this chronological difference, and are soaked past their waists with dew because they do not stand appreciably taller than the meadow of summer foxtail grass they have been wading through. The kite was given to Michikatsu as a gift for Tango no Sekku earlier in the year; he had been given chimaki, too, sweet sticky rice wrapped with an iris leaf, but the uneaten latter half of this chimaki got smashed flat because he tripped while bringing it to Yoriichi hidden under his kimono.
Yoriichi accepts the kite’s gathered spool when it is passed to him. Michikatsu’s palms have already got little barnacled calluses on them from the hours he spends each day swinging his bokken the prescribed five hundred times.
“There. Now stop being silly. If you do that again, I won’t help you,” Michikatsu says. “We’re pretending to be hatamoto. Remember? You’ve got to guard our banner more carefully, so don’t let go.”
His brother blinks. He nods, making the wooden earrings go click-clack. Michikatsu turns and his shadow does likewise.
When it rains they have better luck at games of igo or sugoroku than they do with Michikatsu’s deck of funny suited playing cards, which he bartered away from some equally funny Portuguese merchant-sailors during a journey with Father down to Edo. Those men read their books from left to right, he informs Yoriichi, with the regaling showmanship of a shadow-puppeteer. They make sacrificial offerings of bread and wine to a god they call the Firstborn of the Dead. Michikatsu does not understand why certain cards in this waterlogged deck belong to the Coin Clan while others belong to the Sword Clan — in exchange the sailors had bemusedly accepted Michikatsu’s spinning taketombo toy — yet he must pretend for the sake of appearance that he does. Yoriichi lays out a fantail of four cards and Michikatsu expounds upon the meaning of their pictures in obscure, officious detail.
“This armored warrior on the horse is holding a coin,” he explains. “That means he’s pledged himself to the coin lord, over here on the throne. The lord wants the winged lion-dog with the sword to help the warrior prove his worthiness so he can marry the coin lord’s daughter. She’s the maiden holding the cup.”
There may be an inkling of skepticism in the way Yoriichi angles his chin at this statement. Centuries later, when he is someone and something else, Michikatsu will learn that mounted men in foreign armor are called knights and lions with wings are called griffins, but in any case the creatures printed on these sailor’s playing cards are meant to be dragons — the blood of sailors and fishermen, he will learn as well, has either the parched, corked taste of salt water or the sweet, slaking taste of fresh water kept in a cedar cask — except it would never occur to Michikatsu that a dragon would need wings. He puts one hand on the poorly-shuffled deck as if to swear by it.
“Oh, and what’s that look for? Do you think I’m lying?”
Yoriichi shakes his head and lifts up the card with the maiden’s picture on it, studying her tranquil face more closely. The proper name for the cup she holds in her hand is a chalice.
Occasionally they also try playing ohajiki, despite this being a girlish pastime, but there is something apparently irresistible about the game’s pretty blue porcelain pieces. Michikatsu will glance away towards the three-tatami room’s door for the count of two, four, six to confirm no servants are eavesdropping there and when he looks down again several of the ohajiki pieces will have found their way into Yoriichi’s sleeve-pockets, or behind his ears, as if put there with some conjuring trick performed by an imperial administrator for the Department of Divinities.
“How do you do that so fast?” asks Michikatsu. He waits and thinks how laughing would be undignified, unmanful. Yoriichi’s mouth remains steady in its same humorless line. “Give them back.”
Yoriichi does.
This is just his odd little brother’s way of expressing an interest in the world and its underfoot treasures. If Yoriichi finds a white pebble with shiny golden-brown speckles on it, he puts this pebble into his mouth and carries it there like a pleasing line of verse for the remainder of the day, or until Michikatsu makes him spit it out after verifying Yoriichi has not broken any teeth. Yoriichi collects the caps off acorns that drop from the daimyo oaks and arranges them on his fingertips like tiny kabuto helmets to create a ten-man battle formation. Behind the western pavilion is a rock garden, islanded with patches of sunagoke moss, and after rainstorms Yoriichi will lay himself atop these mossy green patches until Michikatsu in exasperation kneels beside him to observe what becomes a huge, sparkling cloud-forest when viewed down at eye-level; he allows this buffoonery for roughly five minutes, after which he pulls Yoriichi upright to go dry his soaked yukata against a sun-heated stone somewhere. Yoriichi sits on the roof to watch the reddish autumn moon of Kannazuki rising and Michkatsu sits gripping him around the shoulders to ensure he does not fall.
“There’s a rabbit in the moon, you know.” With his finger Michikatsu outlines a shape upon the moon’s surface, created by patches of shadow that early astronomers elsewhere in the world named the maria, or seas, but are in fact basaltic plains formed ages ago by lava flowing into impact craters, deep vales where the sunlight has not reached in eons. “Those are the rabbit’s ears, and there’s his nose and tail. Do you see it?"
Yoriichi likewise raises a hand against the starlit air and his finger likewise outlines the same shape. He looks from the moon to Michikatsu and back up at the moon.
"The story goes that one day the ruler of heaven came to earth disguised as a poor starving man in rags," says Michikatsu. "The man begged Rabbit for some food to eat and Rabbit realized he didn't have anything special he could give, since he was just a small weak creature who couldn't hunt or fish or gather fruit off the trees, so he asked the beggar-man to build a big fire and when the fire was ready Rabbit threw himself into it. The only gift he could offer the man was his own flesh and blood — but then the beggar-man showed who truly he was, to save Rabbit from dying, and to honor his kindness the ruler of heaven carried him back home to live there in the sky forever.”
Michikatsu pauses. Yoriichi has turned away once more from the moon to look at him.
His brother has an irksome habit, Michikatsu has realized, of often holding his breath whenever they happen to be touching one another, and he sees that Yoriichi is doing it now: as if he is hiding from the seeker in a kakurenbo game, hoping to avoid detection. But why? Does he think Michikatsu smells bad? Is he superstitious, like Father, who never sleeps with his head turned northward to prevent an early death?
"Well, maybe it doesn't look like a rabbit to you," Michikatsu adds. "Other people say the shapes make a man’s face. I can’t decide. Which one do you think it is?”
As he says this he takes his arm away from around Yoriichi’s shoulders. Yoriichi exhales, slowly, when he does, and nods. Michikatsu sighs.
“That’s not an answer."
Yoriichi draws his knees against his chest. They divide between themselves a mostly-unsquished millet dumpling Michikatsu has carried up here wrapped in a cloth and stay on the roof until their hands and feet get numb from keeping still too long.
Late one winter afternoon he cannot find Yoriichi anywhere, in the house or the gardens, so Michikatsu goes clambering over a wall to search for him in the forest, even if the sun is setting and he knows farmers throughout the countryside are at this hour lighting their wisteria incense to ward off other unspeakable things that dwell in the dark. When he almost trips over Yoriichi curled up asleep in a brake of dead-dry ferns, content as the little hero-boy Momotaro in his peach, Michikatsu takes two furious fistfuls of these dead ferns and pummels his brother with them, a brief and mostly dissatisfying endeavor because Yoriichi never reciprocates in proper roughhouse fashion. Breathing techniques are Michikatsu’s second-least favorite aspect of daily training, with his least-favorite being the act of simply standing immersed to his chest in the frigid water of a pond and remaining there until his instructor tells him otherwise; as he sits counting inhales and exhales Yoriichi will occasionally wander up holding a seeded dandelion to keep it there under Michikatsu’s nose until either the dandelion’s tiny white parasols all float away or Michikatsu sneezes. One mild spring day he catches sight of Yoriichi crawling beneath the engawa so he can visit what turns out to be three roly-poly baby badgers and their mother, who finds the intrusion rather offensive.
A popular symbol carried by samurai is the dragonfly, since it cannot move backwards and therefore cannot call a retreat, but Michikatsu supposes there should be a few honorable exceptions to this rule. He hauls Yoriichi out by the ankles and they do not cease their wholly honorable retreat until they are halfway up the tallest pine tree in the main courtyard.
“What kind of a priest do they think you’re going to be?” asks Michikatsu. They are slapping dirt off their unalike clothes and their hair so alike in both its texture and unusual rutilance, the red within the black like living coals. “You’ll probably let the birds build nests in your hat. That’s the kind of crazy thing poets do, I’ll bet. Maybe you should become a poet instead. Would you like that better? You could sit all day and write about butterflies, and frogs, and the —” he tries to remember his lessons; the only thing Michikatsu recalls is that opening line from The Tale of the Heike, meant to be chanted to the accompaniment of a biwa “— impermanence of all things.”
They have chosen the same branch-whorl on which to sit but have taken opposite sides so that now they face one another around the tree’s trunk. Splintery lights and shadows rearrange themselves as the pine branches shift in a passing breeze.
Yoriichi blinks. Michikatsu guesses this was too many words at once and tries a second time.
“The impermanence…” he repeats "…of all…things.”
Yoriichi stares. Viewed from this place of reposition his dark, dreadful birthmark more nearly resembles the tail on a comet than the flame on a torch.
It is a little strange, maybe a little frightening, the peaceful yet piercing, sorrowful yet serene way Yoriichi occasionally looks at people, though not quite frightening in the way Michikatsu the Samurai secretly thinks earthquakes, typhoons, orbweaver spiders, plague-sickness and nights with no moon — as well as, it appears, wrathful mother badgers — are frightening. The pain this fear creates in him is different, too, than what he feels whenever Mother and Father shout at each other so loudly their voices carry through the house and into whatever corner Michikatsu is sitting in with his hands pressed over his ears. During those moments he feels pulled upon like a tightening New Year’s Eve finger-puzzle until he worries his chest is going to rip apart down its middle; the pain he feels when his brother stares at him as if the whole trackless expanse of a sea or a valley separates them from one another is some sweeping and wider, vaster thing like loneliness, like loss.
How much do you really understand? That is the kind of thing Michikatsu wishes he could ask Yoriichi. Do you get this same big all-over hurt as I do, when Mother and Father quarrel about us, even if you can’t hear them? Can you feel anything at all? Father often asks me, where have you been, Michikatsu, what have you been doing, Michikatsu, and I have never once answered him: Nowhere, Father. Nothing, Father. No, Father, I was alone.
Even if I know telling the truth will make him strike me across my face, and this will hurt me in the same all-over way, I have never said those words to him.
Doesn't that make any difference to you?
And in answer to these questions, he figures Yoriichi might nod or shake his head. Yoriichi might do nothing. The frictionless calm of his brother’s face would never tell Michikatsu one way or another whether Yoriichi could truly comprehend anything Michikatsu said, or asked him, no matter how much Michikatsu waved his hands or held up papers with his writing scribbled on them or spoke slowly and clearly so voiceless, soundless Yoriichi could watch his mouth as it formed the words.
Michikatsu slaps his hands resolutely against the pine tree’s trunk.
“I think she’s gone now.” He surveys the garden below them, just in case. “Letting those snake-eggs hatch inside the picnic jubako is still the dumbest thing you’ve ever done. It’s a good thing I took the blame for that, ah? You should’ve heard everyone screaming.”
Yoriichi nods. Click-clack, say his earrings.
Mother made those for Yoriichi herself, Michikatsu knows. The wood chosen to carve them had come from her favorite tree in the garden, a whitebark magnolia that grows perfumed blossoms almost the size of teacups. She had mixed the safflower pigments for their bright red paint and held the sharpened bone needle over a lamp-flame to purify it before lanceting its point deftly, tenderly through Yoriichi’s ears, right and left so the sun deity might shine warmly upon them.
She had not made earrings for Michikatsu.
But this does not bother him much. Mother belongs to Yoriichi and therefore all her truest, loudest prayers must be for Yoriichi, too. It is only to be expected. Yoriichi needs the help far more than Michikatsu does anyway.
They climb down from the pine tree together but walk in separate directions. Seven days later Father finds them playing with those funny Portuguese picture-cards and this time he hits Michikatsu across the face so hard it leaves a bruise; Yoriichi’s expression does not change at all as he watches this happen; eight days later Michikatsu uses his kaiken dagger to carve a little flute from a segment of bamboo, stabbing his fingers what seems to be approximately a thousand times during the attempt but is presumably more like four or five.
“Blow this if you ever need help,” he instructs Yoriichi, when the flute is finished, “and your big brother will come running right away to save you, so don’t worry.”
Yoriichi says nothing.
In the decades and centuries hence, these words will gradually lose their shape and color within Michikatsu’s memory until he forgets them. He will forget the way Yoriichi reaches out to receive the gift; he will forget the hours he has spent playing the same tuneless few notes, over and over, reworking the flute with his dagger to try making its pitch truer, louder, because what if he is far away when Yoriichi tries to call for him? He will forget holding up his coarsened little palms to see how the blood from his wounded fingers has stained them; he will forget the florid bruise made by his father’s hand, though he will eventually contemplate how there is a certain grave-cold peace in being the unloved servant to a loveless master who commands him to go there, come here, do this, expecting nothing less than perfect obedience yet expecting nothing more, either.
He will forget how much it hurts his swollen cheek to smile and the fact that he smiles at his brother anyway.
What Kokushibo will remember in those ensuing centuries is only the crude shape of the ugly, worthless flute and, of course, Yoriichi’s silence, because eventually it will be proved that Yoriichi has always been able to hear him, to answer him. All this dumbshow nonsense has been nothing but his superior brother’s pitying indulgence of an inferior, disposable, equally ugly and worthless laggard whose struggles have been futile, whose suffering has been powerless. He will not be able to recollect a single detail about his mother’s face or features but will remember seeing Mother at her desk in the study-alcove several days later and how she had smiled gently through its open window at him without saying anything, either.
When did you understand she was dying? There is another question he might have asked Yoriichi, but in the end he never does. Why didn’t you tell me anything? If I had been born the younger twin, with that dreadful mark, yet you had still been her prayed-for child destined to be the blazing star around which all the other luminary bodies of heaven move in their fixed courses, do you suppose she would've let Father drown me?
Yet after Mother dies, and Yoriichi vanishes, Father never strikes Michikatsu again. He becomes a man of distracted quietude who stands beside Michikatsu on the pond’s arched red bridge to help him feed the koi fish; he brings Michikatsu many presents, paper balloons and twirling beigoma tops made from seashells; he sits with Michikatsu at the shoji window to watch snow falling between the trees; several times he even sets his hand softly on Michikatsu’s head or shoulder until, politely, Michikatsu steps away, shame and rage and sadness flooding him down to his fingertips: the family’s heir because there is nobody stronger to take his place, an object of kindly affection because there is nobody preferable left behind to receive it.
He will forget these things, but they will somehow remain with him, within him, because as he stands there under a red moon staring at the cleaved-apart flute amidst the aged, sundered ruin of his brother’s dead body — his own body and soul, doubled — that familiar valley-wide pain will pass through him. Kokushibo will kneel to gather the flute in both hands as he goes on weeping like the wretched weak creature he has always been and knows now he will always be.
At the time, however, watching Yoriichi accept the gift, Michikatsu thinks his twin brother’s silence is all right.
Yoriichi cannot change what he is. Why should the world ask anything different from him? Stupid people. Michikatsu has been given two good ears with which to hear and a mouth with which to speak; if he has also been given the lifelong keepership of this second shadow, this defenseless and simple and extremely odd, occasionally wondrous being called his brother, then that is clearly the duty to which fate has committed him.
It is why he is so strong. It is why he was born first, why he was born at all.
And when he finally becomes master of the house, Michikatsu decides he will go to the temple where Yoriichi has been sent. He will travel all night without rest. Oh, but what if he does not know which temple Yoriichi has been sent to? What if Father keeps it a secret? Well, then, Michikatsu will search. He will find it. He will knock at the temple's gates while it is still dark outside, thump-thump-thump. Somebody will greet him with a lantern to ask irritably what business he could have at such an hour, and this is what will happen next:
My brother is here, he will explain. He was sent many years ago, but if he wishes to go home again then I have come to bring him back. I will ask him things, speak to him of things, and perhaps now that we are older we will know what we are truly saying to one another.
I will say, I have kept you close to me all this time. I have never left you, I have never lost you. I have always needed you.
Go and tell him that, please. Tell him, look. Listen. Your brother is here. Do you hear him calling for you, even if it isn’t with your ears? He is waiting, and if you wish to finally leave this place then he will not depart without you beside him. He will wait as long as it requires.
What will your answer to him be?
So he will wait, there on the threshold, though his wait may be very, very, very long indeed, but at last the gates will open and at last his brother will come forth to him in the morning sunlight, then they will grab hold of one another and in this way they will be together again.
…