ANTARA 001 / Kabukimono

A Short Story

Read more stories from ANTARA here.

---

THE DAY THE old man dies in He-Ong, Antara, he’s telling me a story told a thousand times over. He brings me into a close, furtive whisper—but not because it’s a secret. His reasoning? Speaking crudely would disturb the fiction. And so, he whispers. It’s important he cares for the fiction.

Wafer-thin hands cup around my ear, building a tunnel of blackness for him to reach me.

“We descended from the machi yakko, Kiyoshi. The defenders of the village. You remember them, right?”

He tags a ‘right’ at the end of the sentence as if it’s somehow my memory that’s treacherous, not his. The phlegm in his voice is a peak he cannot overcome.

“Farmers, carpenters, painters, even some of the homeless—all joined together to guard their towns from those bastard kabukimono,” he shakes his head, “the kabukimono were damned psychos. They knew nothing of purpose, humanity, discipline. You remember what they used to do?”

He says ‘you remember’ like I was there. If I pretend I was, does it become true? I entertain his fantasy, bowing my head before saying, “tsujigiri.”

“Tsujigiri. That’s right. First thing kabukimono did when they got brand-new swords was to test it out on unsuspecting villagers. They came like foxes from the dark to cleave heads off, leaving women wailing in the night, and for what? What good was shedding innocent blood for? There was no logic, no rule to it. It was worse than evil. It was thoughtless,” he speaks between coughs, “blood may only be shed for something higher. Every drop must carry purpose. Blood for blood’s sake, or worse yet, for mercenary’s sake—that is the devil’s work.”

I have no heart to tell him how I’ve been hearing about tsujigiri being the devil’s work since I was thirteen. Before he and his yakuza followers—my brothers—scarred me with my first peony-and-dragon tattoo. Before I watched my brothers and uncles and forefathers slice their fingers. Before I did it to myself. I see few reasons to tamper with his already-tattered sense of self. So I do not judge. Instead I watch, listen, and wait as I’ve always done—down on worshipper knees, hands flat on my lap, guard’s faces shrouded in shadow around me, and the old man giving it his last all.

He sends for a chimpira with a flutter of his fingers. The kid—Singaporean—enters with a high-strung energy that makes you question if he’s a child of summer, or truly committed to the cause. The child bows, leaves through the shoji, then returns to set down a set of saké. Me and the old man take turns pouring liquid into lacquered wood, where it settles, forms, adapts. In this final sakazuki ceremony—anointed with an atmosphere of rice and family—we watch each other through ghostly carnations.

He rubs his eyes. “Why is it so dark? Isn’t it morning?”

“It’s morning.” I wear my P.R. smile like a Sunday best. “The windows are just closed, is all.”

You can see the blue moon, but he doesn’t need to know that.

“Oh, well. In any case, I’m going to go home today,” he turns his neck to look out beyond the casement, into a night of promises, of stolen territories, of forgotten equities, of scrawled stars. Then he sips again. “I’ve been working a little too hard, I think. All this moving to and fro. There’s the Adelstein meeting, the Mitsubishi event.”

Don’t tell him they were fifteen years ago. Just nod and smile.

“I miss Kaori and Chorei, especially Chorei’s katsudon. It’s just the best when it comes from her. Could you call them for me? Tell Kazuchiko I’ll be down by the lot in ten minutes, I just need to lie down. Thank you, son. Oh, thank you.”

Don’t tell him they’re gone, too. We must preserve the fiction.

When we finish, he lies on vomit-green tatami, too careworn for the compassion of his bed covers. I hold his hand in artificial light, never clasping too hard, only strong enough for him to know I’m there. As slow as the crawl of centuries, his hand retreats into slivery recesses where no moonlight strikes, where chiaroscuro lords over, pulling me in, in, in.

I should let go. Let go, Kiyoshi. Count slowly. Inhale before every number, exhale after. Breathe, one, breathe, two, breathe—

But I never make it to three.

---

ANTARA’S DARKNESS IMPOSES like a plastic bag over my head. I breathe and breathe, but I’ve no oxygen.

Shoals of light swim through the sky. Down here, smiling lampposts stand in rows along the sidewalks, arching over anaconda roads. The sounds of people enjoying their red light nights echoes out, cavorts around, reminding me of filial failings. Beneath an eave rimmed with hot-pink neon, protected from rainfall, my ojiki and I break bread at my favorite Indian restaurant, the one at the corner of Electric and Sinecure.

“You should eat.” He chomps discoloured teeth into fluffy naan, wolfing like a hog. He never used to look like that, but times are a-changing. “It’s getting cold."

“Sorry. I’m just,” I straighten my napkin onto my lap, “thinking.”

There’s Viet talk here. Some Tagalog. Bengali. Bahasa. Tamil. Tamil’s how you know this place bears at least some authenticity.

Two of our black-suited butōha sit inside the restaurant, in the far-left, past wine glasses whining and cavalcades of conversations. We put them there to keep an eye out. Last thing I want is to deal with flat-headed police or an expat journalist seeking their fifteen minutes.

“You’re worried it won’t be you?” Kaito-san looks at me from under his Jacques Marie shades, still chewing. He doesn’t notice the little drool trailing down like a mustardy tear on his suit. It makes him buffoonish. “I wouldn’t blame you. I was hungry too, once. Same way you are.”

I stir aimlessly into my roghan ghosht. There’s a skin-stump where my joint used to be, which makes holding things difficult. “I’m not hungry.”

He laughs loud, robbing attention from a murder of crowing teens—Malaysians, Thais, dirty Koreans. When they see us, they stop in their tracks, iridescent vapes caught between their mouths, sienna faces gleaming with something like panic, but not quite. Then they travel ten paces faster than before, knowing better than to loiter in our presence.

Once they leave, Kaito-san snickers, then gets back on topic. “Don’t kid yourself, Kiyoshi-kun. Of course you are, same as me. You want what I want, and you shouldn’t deny it. Acknowledging it at least gives you permission to poke fun at yourself. Once you’ve done that, then you’ll stop feeling so strange.”

He plunges his piece into a spicy garlic dip. The smell’s enough to make me scream, but I don’t, and I won’t, because I am kashira, the son of precepts, of structure, of order, of coolness, of a magnificent past.

“I get it, though,” he swallows, “more than you ever will. He was my brother, after all. Blood or not, that’s what he was. You know he only ever had the utmost of respect for you, right? More than any other kobun. He knew you were good. But he also knew you too well to think you ought to have the seat.”

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb, Kiyoshi. Everyone knows about the girls. You’re lucky the Kura-Taika-Kai’s definition of ‘chivalrous’ behaviour has changed over the years. Had you done the things you’ve done during my prime, well,” he shakes his head and laughs again.

I don’t dignify it with a response. Oyabun-sama told me as much, having witnessed my most delighted atrocities committed on a person. He was never shy about sharing his thoughts, especially when it came to me. He saw my potential, yet never let its brilliance blind me. I’ve heard it all before. But Kaito-san bringing it up feels like a parasite of newfound information. It infects my hopes, assails my confidence.

I decide to let my social mask slip a little, that way I don’t go insane. Enough to reveal the brows of my soul, if not my eyes.

“Look.” I start eating and don’t stop. I speak between mouthfuls. “We’ve known he was going to pass for years. We basically stood at his door waiting for it to happen. But he was still oyabun. I mean that’s—there’s a totality to that role, isn’t there? For our oyabun, knowing a man, any man, meant seeing all of him. His flaws, his greatnesses. It’s why he plucked me from my old life—because he saw something in me I never did. I can’t forget that. So whoever comes next needs to not just uphold his ideals, but also who he used to be. The others,” click of my tongue, “look, I just don’t know, okay?”

“Okay,” he says in a way that really says ‘no, it isn’t.’ But I press on.

“Free Antara Press used to write headlines about the Kura-Taika-Kai. We ate enough page space to scare everyone from Pandan Bay to Noroko. We could bring a battalions’ worth onto the streets—weapons hot—and never have the cops so much as bat an eye. Now?” I blew out imaginary smoke. “They order us around. Tell us where and when to operate. Guys from Standard Chartered and HSBC tell us that we can’t join hands with them because, what, we’re yakuza? As if they haven’t got their own closets with skeletons inside? What makes them so different from us, huh?”

“CFAs and CAIAs.”

“I have all that and then some. Remember Taoka?”

“Why are you even asking me that?”

“‘From now on, yakuza must read economic newspapers.’” That’s the Japanese Al Capone talking. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Come on, now. I was raised on a steady diet of Bloomberg and the Economist. But I’m also canny enough to know it takes far more than book smarts to lead our family. I’m effective. Intelligent. Capable. I’m not just good to be the next oyabun—I’m the only option.”

I want him to speak, to comprehend my abilities. But he only eats and says nothing. I knot my fists until crimson leaves for blue.

“Point is,” I look down, “we used to be honest, ojiki. We could talk about who we were, why we were family. So what if they enacted new legislation? We didn’t let that stop us six, even four years ago. We’re missing fire. Passion. When did we get so damn scared, huh?”

Kaito-san sighs a lungful. This is a recursive discussion. Every time it boomerangs back, he appears to grow older and older. His face is a sagging mass of skin-folds by now. “They didn’t monitor us the way they do now. Or lethally inject low-ranking members for minor infractions. Not to mention, we had far more suits-and-ties sticking their fingers in our back pockets. They left when they realised our word wasn’t worth it. They knew we couldn’t protect the people like we used to. So it makes sense they don’t trust us. You remember Mann, American guy?”

“Imperialist?”

“No. Not every American’s an imperialist, for god’s sake,” he downs a glass of hot water. “Mann makes pinku films. We used to get ten-percent on all his box office revenues. Now? He doesn’t even pick up my calls anymore.”

At least he isn’t ranting about me being thirty-something hot-head this time. Like somehow thirty’s fucking young. I shake my head. I swear I see my face in my bowl—haggard and toothed. “We’ve been made into prey, ojiki. We’ve lost our divinity. And it’s our fault.”

“To hell with fault. To hell with divinity. We’re businessmen, Kiyoshi-kun. We make money, we lose money. It’s tug of war, and nothing more. That’s what happened. You can’t ignore it. And you can’t rock the boat, unless you want us, and everyone we know to end up like stuck pigs in Penjara State.”

I did my time there several lifetimes ago, back when I was actually as junior and heady as Kaito-san thinks I am. But I was a smoke-up-his-ass chimpira back then. My weight was barely enough to keep myself on the ground, let alone heavy enough to wrangle officers into my orbit.

Now, given time and chance, I could command the stars.

I’m looking at armies of them struggling against the darkness when Kaito-san interrupts me. “Family’s your backbone, Kiyoshi-kun. You’ll never be able to stand without it. Come to the Omiyamairi, alright? Put your name down if you really want to. But hedge your bets. Your kyōdaibun, even anego are running. And you know people have all sorts of opinions, so just,” he gestures downwards, signalling chill.

“To be reborn seven times is to serve the country.”

“What?”

I look at him dead-on. “To be reborn seven times is to serve the country.”

He doesn’t know whether to snicker or lambast, so he goes for both. “You’re talking nonsense, boy. Eat your food.”

Between him and me is the division of young and old, wise and wizened. In his late-stage capital senility, my ojiki has foregone martyrdom. He’s no saint—just a shell.

Then I lean my head back to search for the ghostly moon above. I can’t find it, so I watch the rain instead. My imagination turns droplets into bullets, beating blood out of these revenant roads.

---

I leave on a mission to kill my night. Later, the booze-slicked floor beneath me and her pulses with darkwave D&B, a collage of synths and hi-hats in precarious praxis. Her name’s Michelle. I try and recall the family name but I’m bad with them, and there’s no point. We sway in balletic kinetics against strobe light rainbows, living off of courage and spirits. Hands to hips, arms around necks, eye to eye, face to face, lip upon lip, enough kisses to drag me down into Wonderland.

But only for the night. When erotics are emptied and the sex of the scene is cut short, I’m sitting and smoking cigarettes at the white edge of the hotel bed, watching the earth break water before heading into labour.

Michelle can’t hide the sulfuric, chemical scent coming from her LV bag, no matter how liberally she employs the Vera Wang cover-up. I know meth when I see it—or in this case, smell it. Kura-Taika-Kai okite says that if you so much as look at the damn quartz, you lose your hand. So I don’t play. But she didn’t smell bad last night. Didn’t fuck so bad, either. She looks pretty where she is. The white bedsheet dangles off her bare leg like one of the nine tails of a kumiho.

I don’t leave until she wakes. I want to give it another go but she insists on a Mevius of her own. Reckoning with the accuracy of my appetite, I sigh, take one out and light it for her. In a hotel room with hung woodblocks, we trade ashen rings.

“Why’d you come here?” She speaks in English. Southern trill suggests Guangzhou, which explains why she sounds so irritating and uncivilised.

“It was the one nearest to Heaven’s Date,” I say, a little conscious of my accent. HD, of course, being where we came from, where youths go to scrap, where sorrows rush to die.

“No, no,” she giggles schoolgirl-like, which jiggles her breasts, “I meant Antara.”

“Who wouldn’t? It’s the place to be.”

“Oh, I see. You’re a mystery man.” She wears an elvish smile. “Well, mystery man, why’s it the place to be? Beyond your, uh, underworld reasons.”

You must always decide what truths you tell a stranger. She’s already seen the tattoos. Allow her to become party to certain information, but no more, no less. She’s young, she won’t get your reverence. She won’t understand how prideful you are of your people.

“I’ve lived here since I was fourteen, but I was born in Tokushima. Spent half of my childhood there. I left because,” and I stop, waiting for a fated ‘because’ to explain my anxiousness away. A ‘because’ which doesn’t tell about the tattooed people you grew up with, about the pit your father fell into and never crawled out of, about how you became his currency for a happier life. About how he sent you away and never looked back. The fiction must be cared for. “My boss chose me. He saw that I couldn’t live the way I was living, so he helped me out.”

“What about your parents?”

“My father was a priest. Died on the job.” I take a bigger puff this time. “My mother was a whore. She makes me wonder if I was born sick.”

The mention of my mother frightens her. I’m not sure why. She brushes it off and starts blowing the last shreds of smoke away from me. “Do you like what you do?”

“I used to.”

We chuckle in arid accordance. When she completes her cancer stick, she puts it out on a jade deva ashtray, staining Buddhas with soot. I see my home in her Neanderthal eyes, far away from here. Not too shabby for a savage.

“My parents said I could make a lot of money here. My extended family said I could find a good husband here. All my friends from IB to university told me I could buy a nice house at the end of the lane, right by the best beaches in the world. It’s been about eight years or so, and now I’m lucky to rent a room with five strangers in Xuan’er. One-half out of three’s not the worst, I’d say. What do you think?”

I shrug. “Money’s just money. There are higher concepts, but you don’t see that.”

She half-smirks in disbelief, same way my ojiki did earlier tonight. “Yeah? And you figured that out from me how? Are you a fortune teller, mystery man?”

“You’re just like everyone else in this city,” I rise up, unaware of how forcefully I’m sucking my lips, “here, one’s humanity gets grinded between gesture and geography. There is no room for the royal ‘you’ in Antara, let alone other people.”

She crawls towards me. Good girl. “So am I just here to please you, then?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“It’s what you’re saying.”

I shake my head for the second time today.

“You’re coy, and it’s cute. But we both know what this is, don’t we?” She puts fingers to my lips, then traces the dragon from my shoulder down to my arm. I wish it would come to life and breathe fire. “There’s something inside you, mystery man. Something hollow that I can’t fill.”

When we eventually fuck again, I think of Takeji Fujushima and his ‘Sunrise over the Eastern Sea.’ I ache to be the dawn as she aches for me, but I am not hers. A Kashira cannot be of the flesh. There is creed to consider. Tradition to tend to. Family to fix. When I spill my light onto her, when I thrash and bash her, I pray she will not wither in my violent syzygy. But she is who she is, and I am who I am.

I post a cheque she never asked for. She covers up her indigo eye. I tell her to forget me. I lock, leave, and thrust myself back into my demon of a life. She wails through the walls, but it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.

---

They tell me of a skirmish in Maynila Green between us and the Kala Kachcha. Apparently, I sent an assortment of our youngest, handsomest and finest marching straight towards certain ends—ends of times, ends of blades. (Guns are getting rarer. Even machetes have become a liability. If they catch your blade longer than seven centimetres, the pigs will gut you.)

They remind me of names like Kiryu and Togawa and Ichiro, but they might as well be alien monikers to me. I’ve no room for them in my mental complex, not when I’m preoccupied with economies of scale and rituals for the future. Save some grief for their next-of-kin.

Our favourite Weibo gurus say going for a walk is good. It clears the head, sanctifies you from the terrible providence of Western colonialism. I take their advice to heart. Northeast is where the wind winnows through limestone two-storeys and bricked three-storeys like they’re tuning forks. In my culture, we call this direction kimon—’demon gate.’ It isn’t very auspicious, to say the least.

I pay attention to criss-cutting trains overhead, to double-deckers filleted with siren children, to yum cha shops hemming in Cantonese opposite from the Lahpet hawing in Burmese. People get roped up in their webs of lives and lies with no eye for anything but the next ladder rung. When they fight and steal and cheat, they seek absolution in a thousand different places—an incensed Taoist temple by Thoke Avenue, a paling Buddhist soothsayer by Ulan Block, a monstrous Catholic cathedral in Berbakti Drive.

I’m not superstitious, and I don’t want holiness.

I just want to meet someone who walks the same ground I do.

---

The bulleted rain pauses. Corporal Climate holds its fire. A road leads to a pavillion which leads to a tunnel which leads to a torii gate. I tighten the straps on my social mask and step towards the shrine, through this ancient red-edged ribcage. Its maw waits for me with candlelight teeth. I follow my intuition and am led into the belly, where I smell the beast’s love for sandalwood. The scent envelops me like an invisible dandelion in reverse bloom, inviting me to regard fluted red pillars and tiny gold statuettes dedicated to Amaterasu and Susanoo-no-Mikoto. Chills come in with their lady-like caresses, sympathising with my tired bones.

I fetch five Antara one-cent coins. Dead Prime Ministers look up to me from their bronzed surfaces. I feed them into a bamboo basket, then lock my hands together, bowing once, then twice. That’s the tradition here. You have to pay respects to the temple, otherwise it wont pay respects to you.

“What do you claim?”

A voice of brimstone behind me. Granite and brimstone. It chews stones between its canines and reeks of the mountains. He sounds like my father.

Do I dare look? Do I dare stay? I’ve trapped myself in frozen devotion. Think of the sunrise again, away from the wooden flooring, the sibilant whispers.

“Who is your father?”

But I am denied the light. I must let the river of my fear flow through me like I were a sieve. When I open my eyes, there is a warm hand on my shoulder, ringed in rot, bigger than my father’s, bigger than God’s. It leans over my left side, smelling sickly enough to make me curl.

“I—I—” I push, even as the scent of centuries cloys me, “I am of the machi yakko. Peasant saints. I—I am their reincarnation. I am of the people. Of a time lost and forgotten.”

Its silence casts a shadow over my soul. It encroaches my covenanted spaces, my sacred guarantees between myself and my dreams. I hear the stretch of mortified skin. The sound of flesh scything into a smile. But I don’t look. My eyes will do no justice to my mind. To look is to cause violence. To see is to be scared so I must not—

“Look.”

And so I do, at its sabred teeth, at its lashing tongue. But only them, only them.

“Machi yakko. You speak of the old man's story, not yours.”

Only them, only them. Its shadow is a void now, a pitch-black gravity well draining all the shade and sacrosanctness out of me.

“Are you not kabukimono, Kiyoshi? Masterless, pitiless, boundless?”

A magnitude ten earthquake starts in my chest, making me shudder like an eel before I cocoon into place, before I am raptured by a scorn I have never seen. Floors and partitions cave inwards, coming for me, seeing me for all the paper I am, all the frailty I have excused.

“They have forgotten the old ways, boy. They have forgotten the Sun’s Face.”

Down on worshipper knees again, I put my head in my shaking hands. The dragon on my arm comes to life.

"Show them.”

---

When I re-emerge from the torii, I have a new Face. It’s gnarled but also vermillion, the kind that recalls who our people used to be, before we were trodded upon, battered, betrayed. The old man would call it an oni face, but I know it is my Sun.

I decide to bring this new Face along with me so my family will understand my Chrysalis. I bring a kanabō club too, for good measure—another erection of my radiance. Back in He-Ong, on 49 Nanping Road. Back for the Omiyamairi. I entertain the grunts’ dozen-sword salute at the minimalist lobby before climbing through spiralling steps done in the shinden-zukuri architectural style. If only everything were done the way it used to be done.

In the ceremonial room, my family awaits me, one-hundred-fifty eyes and seventy-five heads, long-sleeved happi over their threadbare yukata (which, in turn, hides their shiny designer suits). Some lie on their haunches, while others stand and regard my new Face. They can’t see it under this red metal, but my smile is a scythe.

“Kiyoshi-kun?” Kaito-san’s hand hovers over his sword sheathe. “Are you putting your name down for the ballot?”

“There will be no ballot.” I drop my kanabō onto the mats and drag its spikes through straw. They recoil from me in awe.

“Be reasonable,” says Satoshi, whom I’ve always thought looked more Chinese than Japanese. More cunt than countryman. “What are you doing?”

“We have lost sight of ourselves. We chase lavish excess at the expense of our ideals. We were samurai, once. Now, we are hollow.”

Kazuchika, along with my other kyōdaibun, jerk as leashed dogs, unsheathing their short swords. “You disgrace yourself! Settle down, boy.”

“And so it may be. But no more of a disgrace than each of you. You’ve all wreaked havoc on our reputation. It’s only right that I have come here to repair it.”

My studded kanabō slices through strands of straw, creating a rift between them and me. Around us, I am greeted by woodblocks again, ones about the Ōnin War and Genji’s tale. Byōbu folding screens depicting our humble origins and bloody victories surround us in a papery wreath. They judge my family for their failures, but congratulate Me. They know I have come to rewrite what has been written.

That I have come to preserve the fiction.

And so I do. With their screams. Their sweat. Their crying. Their flailing and falling. My Hagiography comes in barbarous swings, in decimated skulls, in the thrones of the fallen. Five at a time. Six at a time. Seven. It’s a sexton’s hopscotch, counting those who have seen the Light, one by one by one by one. I drive Kazuchika downwards with my good baseball arm, his face in my hand, denting wood, gushing blood. His men follow suit, but I swing and swing and sswing, bodies moulding to my serrated weapon like clay against hand. Satoshi’s next, then he’s red, then he’s still as a stone. He is who he is, I am who I am.

When ojiki rests his hand flat against my palm as if in prostration, I am moved, profoundly so. This time, I let go—but only to raise my erect light again in my hands, higher and higher.

“Kiyoshi-kun, please—”

Count slowly, Kiyoshi. Inhale before every number, exhale after. Breathe, one, breathe, two, breathe—

“Please—”

Three.

He stops with the ‘please’s after that. His fingers start, stop once, then forever. There is a cavern of slimy scarlet snakes where his face used to be.

“Don’t worry,” I bow low and whisper to my loved ones, “your stories are safe with me.”

My smile scythes further as I sit down amidst all the fleeting and the fallen, content in the knowledge that they have scorched equally under my Sun. Look at them. Mouths forever open. Separated and dismayed. Twitching, twitching, twitching.

I like my new Face, but I know not to covet it. There remain more rebirths to come. But for now, at least, I am satisfied.

And so, I take myself to our balcony over the sea, where I watch a grateful sun rise on my Kura-Taika-Kai. On my Antara, my home away from home. My Hell away from Hell.

It’s what the old man would’ve wanted, I think.

---

Read more stories from ANTARA here.