Chapter Text
Osaragi was about five or six when she realised that the gods had not made like other children.
She and the neighbouring children had been playing hide and seek in her family’s rice warehouse. The stacked rice sacks provided the perfect walls of a maze for the three of them.
‘Found you!!’ She giggled, as she followed Miyuki’s giggle round the corner, only to come to a dead end. I’ll just move the sacks she thought, lifting a heavy pile taller than her away.
She would never forget Miyuki’s strangled scream as she saw her friend easily carrying a stack of five fifty kilogram rice sacks like they were a pile of books.
‘Monster!!!!’ the girl screamed, running as fast as she could away from Osaragi. Her brother Arata followed suit, their cries of ‘Monster!!!’ fading away into the distance.
What? What monster? Osaragi put the pile down slowly, her brow furrowed. Could they have meant me?
‘Osa-chan! It’s dinner time!’ Her grandmother’s familiar voice called out. Mulling over it, she made her way back to the dilapidated little traditional house where she lived with her grandmother and Uncle Hiroshi.
Her parents had died in an accident soon after she was born, and she was raised primarily by her maternal grandmother and uncle, who grew rice in the famed Shikamura terraces. Though set in one of the most beautiful regions of Japan, it was a harsh life, highly dependent on the weather and changing seasons.
From her grandmother, she learnt the solemn intonations needed to address the gods at their shrines, to pray for a bountiful harvest. Deeply religious and getting more so in her old age, Osaragi’s grandmother instilled in her the old rituals and superstitions.
How to clasp her hands to give thanks at a shrine, how to make rain charms to invite the rain, never to stick her chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice. The latter was considered especially heinous and disrespectful, given that their livelihood depended on rice.
‘Obaa-chan, I’m back,’ she said, slipping her shoes off at the genkan. Her grandmother Fumiko bustled in, her tall figure getting stooped with old age, and gave her a smile.
‘Let’s eat.’
They sat together at the low wooden table in the tatami-lined living room, helping themselves to rice and miso soup, homemade pickled vegetables and grilled fish. Today was just her and Obaa-chan, Uncle Hiroshi had gone drinking again. His absence lent the meal a relaxed, casual family atmosphere.
The Koshihikari rice they grew was sweet and chewy in Osaragi’s mouth, it was a taste she had grown up with all her life. She was halfway through her bowl of rice when she finally asked:
’Obaa-chan? Am I a monster?’
Her grandmother’s face paled. ‘Oh my goodness, no! Why would you think that, Osa-chan…?’
‘Because…because the other kids…’ she gulped back the sob that seemed to have been stuck in her throat since the warehouse. Haltingly, she related the story to her grandmother.
Fumiko appeared very grave. ‘Osaragi…’ she said. ‘There is something I must tell you. Listen well.’
Osaragi rubbed her eyes and stared at her grandmother across the table, rice forgotten.
‘The women in our family have been blessed with certain…gifts throughout the centuries. It does skip a generation or two sometimes. Your mother had none, I myself only have a touch. You remember when I broke my leg earlier this year?’
Osaragi nodded. Her grandmother had not seemed to be in pain despite the unnatural angle at which the bone seemed to be sticking out of her leg.
Fumiko had simply bound it up, retired to bed for the day, then got up the next morning to make breakfast as if nothing had happened. Osaragi had observed this all through her dark, quiet gaze, and then simply come to one conclusion: it must be normal.
‘But for you to manifest it at such a young age, and to have such great strength…the gods have blessed you, Osa-chan. Tomorrow we must go to the shrine and give thanks.’
‘But…why did they run away, then?’
Her grandmother came over to her and took her hand. ‘They run because they do not understand the great strength within you. But you must try to hide it, Osaragi, or life will go hard for you. The gods must have a purpose for you, you must bide your time and wait to see what it is.’
Years later, at eighteen, Osaragi was still yet to discover what that purpose was. Was it really rice farming? Uncle Hiroshi had long discovered how strong she was, purely by accident, and had immediately put her to work since she was a child, pulling her out of school to do farm chores on the flimsiest of excuses.
And despite her grandmother’s stern admonitions and her best efforts to hide her preternatural strength, she had the occasional slip, and a dark cloud of rumours and gossip swirled round her.
In their isolated and highly superstitious village, people generally avoided her. Even if she wasn’t an aberration of nature, she was still an orphan, her uncle was a drunk, and to the younger villagers, her grandmother seemed to be something of a witch herself.
To protect herself from their quiet discomfort (the kind ones), their outright sneers (the cruel ones), Osaragi built walls and built them high. But the walls slowly closed around her, leaving her no path of escape.
She passed her days in a haze of boredom and loneliness, barely finishing high school, taking on more farm labour to forget her pain. Uncle Hiroshi was delighted. He let her drive the tractor to clear the weeds. He even gave her his broken buzzsaw and told her to go clear the forest behind their farmhouse. She found she enjoyed using it, found it fit in her hands perfectly.
‘Look, there she goes, the freak…’ the gang of teenaged boys loitering by the village grocery store hissed at her as she walked past, her arms full. It was only mid afternoon, and they were already drunk on cheap sake. Osaragi ignored them and continued walking.
‘Freak!’ Arata, Miyuki’s brother, spat near her feet. ‘My mother says you sold your soul to the devil.’ Conventionally good looking, he had turned into a well built, sturdy young man who the village girls swooned over. To Osaragi, he was like a puffed up, arrogant rooster, and she would have liked nothing more than to punch him in the face.
His friend Seiya, a thin, rangy fellow (rat, thought Osaragi) piped up in a reedy voice:
‘My mother says your parents died because the gods were punishing them for their evil deeds.’
Osaragi almost paused at this, her shoulders trembled a little but she kept walking.
‘Hey!’ Arata’s large body was suddenly behind hers. He made an aggressive grab for her bottom. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’
It happened so fast that she could barely register what she had done. Time froze, or it seemed to slow to a snail’s pace, she felt his hand squeeze her bottom and she had dropped the grocery bags on the floor and twisted it roughly. In less than a second, his agonised howl echoed through the main street.
‘Arghhhhhh!!! You bitch!!! You broke my hand!!!!!’
Eyes. So many eyes. Osaragi, never one to waste food, dropped to her knees to scoop the apples that had rolled out of the bags, and ran out of there as quickly as she could.
There was no hiding it, after that. Arata and his family twisted the story, making him an innocent victim, targeted by an outcast.
Osaragi made no effort to correct it. The whispers and jeers, darkening her path before, now turned into outright social shunning. The elderly temple priest who was always kind to her and her grandmother gently suggested they attend at a less busy hour, to avoid attracting attention.
One day, Uncle Hiroshi came to the clearing at the back of their house where she was using the buzzsaw to cut firewood. It was one of the tasks she enjoyed, she liked the fresh, clean smell of the pine and cyprus trees as she worked.
‘Osaragi,’ he said. ‘I need you to do something for me.’
Osaragi set the buzzsaw down. ‘What?’ she asked, careful as usual not to betray any emotion. The more emotion she showed, the more others enjoyed tormenting her. From the corner of her eye, she observed two shadows watching them from a distance.
‘You see those two men up there? That’s Boss Tanaka and his man Sato.’ Uncle Hiroshi made a rough gesture. Osaragi nodded. Some kind of local yakuza, she guessed. She had never seen them before.
Her dark gaze gave away nothing, but she had already noted the gun hilt sticking out of one’s suit pants pocket and the tattoos covering the wrist of the other as he casually played with his knife. Years of evading and fighting off gangs of tormentors had hardened her, heightened her senses.
‘Well….I owe them money. A lot of money.’ Uncle Hiroshi looked away from her, wringing his hands nervously. ‘They’ve come for the farm, and for this house. Your grandmother and I are to be thrown out unless…’
Osaragi’s fists clenched. Her once proud grandmother had grown senile, talked nonstop about the gods this and the gods that, insisted on doing countless ancient country rituals ‘for good luck’. Was afraid to step outside the door if the omens were not ‘good’. Moving out of this house in which she had lived for over seventy years would kill her.
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless you do what they say, Osaragi. I’ve already told them what you can do. They think you’ll be useful. If you do what they want, your grandmother and I will be well looked after.’
Osaragi said nothing. Since that day on Main Street, a part of her had always expected something terrible to happen. Now it had.
She contemplated her options briefly, then gave up. It didn’t seem like there was a way out. Besides, her obaa-chan needed her.
‘Okay, uncle,’ she replied, tonelessly.
Uncle Hiroshi stared at her, hardly daring to believe that had been so easy.
‘O-okay? Okay!’ He gave a thumbs up to the two men watching, they nodded and slowly retreated away.
‘They will be in contact with you soon. You were always a good girl, Osaragi,’ he said, charitably, rubbing his hands gleefully as he went back to the house.
Osaragi ignored this last remark, staring after his retreating back with outright contempt. After he had gone, she realised she had been clutching the buzzsaw by its handle once more, so hard that it had left marks on her hands.
The gang came for her the very next day, making no effort to conceal themselves, ignoring Uncle Hiroshi’s frantic, spineless bows.
‘Hey Boss Tanaka, are you sure the old man didn’t trick us? She’s just a young girl. Not much meat on her bones either.’
The man with the gold front tooth and a slight hint of beer belly looked her up and down, leering. His hand started to reach towards her. ‘She could be cute if she cleaned herself up…’
‘Get away from her, Sato, unless you want your hand cut off,’ his boss replied, nodding at the buzzsaw raised in Osaragi’s hands, her pose defensive. The girl had reacted so quickly, in the blink of an eye. ‘Haven’t you heard the rumours?’ Sato took a nervous step back.
‘Let’s see if you are the genuine article, eh?’ Boss Tanaka felt around in his pocket, found a cigarette and casually lit it. The heavy gold rings shone on his fingers.
He puffed leisurely on the cigarette. ‘Show me what you can do.’
Osaragi lifted the buzzsaw. Broken long ago, it was unpowered, a long cord was dangling from it. She yanked on the cord with her immense strength and it immediately powered up, blades rotating at high speed.
She wielded it effortlessly, though it was heavy even for a grown man, and so fast that they almost missed it, with a deadly precision, she sliced through the trunks of four tall hinoki trees.
Sato and Boss Tanaka gaped at the sight. The cut had been so powerful, yet so clean and neat that the trees were still standing perfectly where they were. Birds nestled above chirruped happily, undisturbed.
Osaragi lifted her finger and gave each of the huge trees a slight push. They thumped into the clearing, the birds flying off in alarm.
‘…Impressive.’ Boss Tanaka finally found his voice. The girl was a prodigy. With a nudge in the right direction, she would be perfect for their purposes. What luck that her uncle was a weak, bumbling fool.
‘Now, imagine if those were men…’ he continued. ‘Welcome to the family, Osaragi-chan. You are going to be a very useful tool to us.’
In the year that followed, Osaragi learned. She learned to keep herself separate from what was happening, to only think of the men she was killing as targets to be eliminated. Trees to be chopped down.
She learned what colour blood was when it spurted out of a dying man’s neck. She learned what sounds his mouth made. How the buzzsaw in her hands sliced heads off just as easily as the hinoki trees in her backyard.
The first time she killed a man, her grandmother, completely senile, cowered from her in terror and said she could smell the blood on her hands.
‘You must pray, Osa-chan,’ Fumiko muttered urgently. And she would not have Osaragi near her, not even as she lay dying. Uncle Hiroshi spent the days passed out, liver slowly failing as he consumed the lifetime supply of cheap sake the yakuza had promised him.
The farm quickly fell into disrepair as no one tended it. With Osaragi busy, there was no one to plant or harvest the rice their family had relied on. Their fields were overgrown with weeds and stagnant water.
But as the farm withered away, the once fertile land simply left where it was, Osaragi’s body only grew stronger. Her naturally heightened sense of awareness, her agility, her monstrous physical strength and quick healing ability were all slowly awakening to the violent stimulus, like muscles that were being put through an intense training regime.
About a month ago, the gang had moved her into a tiny shoebox apartment in town. They had sold the farm, they said, and put Uncle Hiroshi in a home. Osaragi didn’t believe them for a second. She never saw him again, but never felt any remorse. After all, he had sold her to them.
She sometimes wondered if she could have left, after that. But with no family, and no place to go, she felt stuck, unable to move forward, and unable to go back. They gave her a meagre allowance every month, cash in a plain envelope, on which to survive on.
She knew the things Boss Tanaka and the rest of them were doing were bad. That she too was bad, for helping them. What she didn’t know was why the gods hadn’t punished her yet, like her grandmother said they would.
Don’t think too much, she told herself, cutting down yet another assassin. Lately Boss Tanaka seemed to have incurred the wrath of someone important. The assassins just kept coming, every few days there would be an attempt on his life. She was growing tired of it all, and yet…she didn’t feel ready to stop the pain and leave this world.
It was a hot, humid summer day, the first anniversary of her grandmother’s death, when she felt the urge to go back to her old house. To see the remains of her old life.
Buzzsaw in hand (she never went without it these days), she walked quietly along the back alleys where no one would see her.
The sun was high in the sky, and most of the villagers were indoors, cooling off and enjoying a midday meal. That reminded her, she was hungry, but three men had followed her off the bus, she was sure. She stopped when she came to the old rice warehouse where she had played so many years ago, now only containing rusty farming tools.
/swssshhh/
She felt the subtle current of air just behind her ear, and didn’t bother to turn around, slicing into the assassin with a backhanded movement of her buzzsaw. He dropped the knife with a clatter, and fell to the floor.
Turning, she sliced the hand of the man holding his gun to her head before he had even pulled the trigger. The last man stared at her in horror and dropped his knife, but it was too late, he had gotten a clean cut to the abdomen and toppled over.
Targets eliminated, Osaragi sat on the floor, buzzsaw in hand, and stared bleakly into space. She felt unbelievably weary. At least her grandmother hadn’t seen her desecrate the family warehouse.
‘Whoa,’ a voice said from behind her.
Osaragi gave a start and whirled around. How had he snuck up on her? Surely that wasn’t possible?
A tall man stood in the doorway, his long blonde hair tied back in a loose pony tail. The sun reflecting on his golden hair into the dark warehouse gave him an almost celestial appearance.
Then he stepped forward, and Osaragi saw that he was just a man, a little older than her, dressed in a white shirt and black tie, suit jacket slung over one arm. The outfit looked similar to the generic ones government employees wore, but he wore it with a slouched, elegant languor. A pale puckered scar on his left chin marred his otherwise good looks. Not a god then, she supposed.
He did not give off the same killing energy towards her that the previous assassins had. Instead, he looked curious, and mildly impressed.
‘I heard a lot of assassins went missing in the Tohoku region, so I came to check it out…’ he said. ‘Did you do this?’
His warm, relaxed accent placed him as not-from-around-here. Osaragi would later learn that he was from Kyoto, and spoke Kansai dialect.
Osaragi felt her stomach rumble. She shrugged and walked outside, reaching in the pocket of her old, baggy, unflattering cotton dress. It was the same one she had used all these years to do the summer farm chores. The gang had never cared how she looked, as long as she did the job, and perhaps she cared even less.
She sat on a worn stone ledge and pulled three convenience store onigiri out of her pocket. They had been cheap, two hundred and fifty yen for three. She vaguely hoped the tuna mayo hadn’t gone bad in the hot weather.
The man followed her outside at a distance, before standing companionably near her as she sat on the ledge holding her onigiri.
A few moments passed while she munched, then Osaragi paused to ask:
‘Are you a god, Mister? Did you come here to kill me?’
‘Huh?’ He was holding a phone to his ear, it rang but no one picked up.
‘The gods punish you if you do bad things…’ Osaragi echoed her grandmother’s words.
He was still waiting for whoever it was to pick up. ‘Sorry, but I’m a bad guy too.’
‘Oh…’ she replied, taking another big bite of the onigiri. It was obviously made of inferior quality rice, but one had to make do. ‘That’s too bad…’
‘What, you wanna die?’ He flicked the call off and slid the phone back into his pocket.
‘No…’ she said, quietly. No one had ever bothered to ask her such a personal question before. ‘But I don’t think I should be here.’
The man suddenly looked at her piercingly, as if seeing her for the first time. Then his face relaxed into a smile.
‘Wanna come with me then? There’s a place for people like us.’
Osaragi stared at him in shock.
‘But….you don’t even know me.’
He stuck a hand out. ‘The name’s Shishiba. Nice to meet you, Miss….?’
She stared at his hand, leaving him hanging, before finally going with a formal bow, like how her grandmother had taught her.
‘Osaragi. Nice to meet you, Shishiba-san.’
Shishiba blinked, then withdrew his hand without missing a beat.
‘As I was saying, the JAA can’t be any worse than those small timers you’re working for. For one, it’s actually legal. We work with the government. And the pay’s pretty good.’
Osaragi perked up at this. She stood up and brushed stray grains of rice off her dress. The other two onigiri could wait, she decided, putting them back into her pocket. There were more important things to discuss. Besides, those two didn’t have any mayo in them, there was less chance of getting food poisoning…
‘What about Boss Tanaka and the rest of them?’ she asked, slowly.
He made an incredulous sound with his tongue. ‘Tch! Why are you concerned about those guys? Do you even know what you can do?’
Osaragi was silent, lost in doubt.
‘Tell you what,’ Shishiba said, speaking casually, as if he were talking to a friend about the weather. ‘Let’s get outta here. If they come after you, we’ll go kill ‘em together. Yeah?’
There was something about the sunlight shining through his blonde hair, his friendly, casual yet confident manner, his offer of a place for people like her…like us, he had said….was this man cursed like her? It all jolted her heart, making it beat excitedly, a feeling she had not felt in a long time.
What was that feeling, she wondered, as she followed him back to his car, buzzsaw in hand.
And as they sped off into the distance, she realised that it was hope.