The Beastly Bride

THE HIKIKOMORI Hiromi Goto

“Masako-chan.” Her mother’s slightly muffled voice was inflected with a smile. “A young lady from Community Health is here to see you.”

Despite the wall and closed door, her mother’s voice nonetheless quavered with layers of feelings. Masako could identify each of them with a coroner’s disengagement: guilt, shame, pride, resentment, a clasping love, pity, self-pity. Hate.

Masako did not respond.

“Please,” her mother begged, her voice beginning to rise.

“She’s here to help you. To help us! I can’t bear it anymore! Just open the door!” She was beginning to shatter. The sharp edges in her voice. Masako imagined shards of glass inside her throat. Rising up to fill her mouth.

Go away! I can’t go back! They hate me. I can’t bear it. They hurt me. They’ll see me. I can’t bear their eyes. They whisper. Don’t find me. You’re not coming in! There’s something wrong with me. There’s something wrong with me. Leave me. Alone.

“Masako-san!”

The voice, crisp, clear, unfamiliar, cut through Masako’s darting, sweaty fears.

“My name is Moriya. I am your liaison from the Community Health Center, Family and Youth Department. I will be arriving every morning at nine A.M. to visit you, Monday through Saturday. You will grow accustomed to me over time. And you will open your door. You will be able to join society once more. You are not alone.”

Masako stared at the blue screen of her laptop. Who was this stranger? Who did she think she was? To think that she, a stranger, could march into their house and tell her what would happen. With her life. As if she knew her already.

Would she force the door? Would she? Break into her sanctuary?

“I look forward to meeting you.” The woman’s voice rang clearly. “I’ll be here tomorrow,” she promised.

Voices murmured in the hallway. Masako could almost feel her mother bowing her gratitude to the stranger. Appalling. The voices receded with the creaks of the wooden staircase as they descended to the first floor.

She could hear the front door open, then close. The Moriya woman had left their home and entered daylight.

Masako knew if she stepped out into sunlight, now, it would eat her up. She only made rare forays outside in the stillest part of darkness. When distant sirens wailed the tragedies of others. When her shame-filled parents were folded into exhausted sleep. When night people were in the middle of their shifts and day people lay unconscious to the life of shadow. Then people like her crawled out of their sanctuaries. If only for a brief moment of starlight. To breathe moonlight and drink in the sweet night air.

Masako shuddered with longing and fear. It was growing more and more difficult to leave her room. And now, this Moriya creature here to harass and torment her during the days. It was unbearable.

If only she could leave. Cast everything from her, like an exoskeleton, and emerge new and naked into a new life. She would do it gladly.

But fifteen-year-old girls trapped in a Chiba suburb did not do such things, especially someone like her.

Outcast from school, fat in a land of skinny, and named after the Imperial Prince’s neurotic bride, Masako was trapped in this hell until she died.

“Princess Lump,” they had sneered. “Princess Landfill.” They had filled her plastic slippers with shit. They had snapped photos of her sitting on the toilet with their cell phones and had posted them on student Web sites. They had mashed her face into skinny Ryo’s acne-filled cheek screaming, “Love! Love! Love!” And the teachers just turned aside their gaze. As if in witnessing this abuse they would somehow be sullied themselves. The teachers had no authority. The cliques of students, sneering and aloof, ruled the school.

One morning she had changed into her school uniform, but she could not leave her room. She had crawled back into bed and retreated into silence. All of her mother’s entreaties, threats, bribes, manufactured kindness, and a final failed attempt at spanking had done nothing to change her mind.

Masako had become a hikikomori.

The three-quarter moon streamed a pale light through the gauzy curtains. Masako shook her head, blinking her eyes in confusion.

She had been standing at the open refrigerator, cramming leftover croquettes and salty cucumbers into her mouth, gulping sweet liquid yogurt. She could not remember entering the living room. She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand. Bread crumbs fell to the floor.

The hard edges of the neighborhood were softer in the night. There were shadows, plenty of dark pockets where one could hide, and the narrow street, aglow with orange lights, looked as if it had been washed in a golden rinse. Like old-fashioned tinted photos. It beckoned.

The cool night air sank into her face, her skin, and she raised trembling hands to push back her monstrous hair. Her fingers caught in the unwashed hanks of her knotted strands. But she felt like she was aglow.

Her slippers slid and slopped on the pavement, her bare feet simultaneously sweaty and cold. The sound echoed against the city of concrete. Masako glanced down. She had left the house wearing her inside Hello Kitty slippers, her filthy school uniform, without a jacket.

She must look appalling, she thought. But the air was as sweet as sugar water. Masako slip-slopped down the dark sidewalk, eyes half-closed, mouth half-open. She wanted to swallow the night and carry it inside her.

Masako wasn’t mad. She knew that she looked mad, and that if anyone saw her in public this way they would call the police or chase her away. So she turned away from the headlights of some four A.M. shift employee on their way to work and ducked down a side street.

In the near distance a dog barked, a hopeful ring in the sound.

Teeth clacking, fingers aching, she walked more quickly, moving with purpose toward a glowing Lawson’s sign. She cast furtive glances all around as she stood by the door. She peered into the hyperbrightness of the interior, her eyes tearing even more at the shocking artificial lighting. The late-night convenience store was empty. The clerk sat propped behind a book, his head bobbing with sleep. Probably a university student, she thought.

The door chimed its two tones, and the store clerk jerked upright. “Wel—” choking off when he caught sight of her hair, her filthy and crusty school uniform. Her indoor Hello Kitty slippers on bare feet.

The clerk cleared his throat, loudly, as if to assert something. Masako’s ears burned. She stared at the display of manga, tabloids, and soft-core porn magazines. They were all wrapped in plastic so that no one could browse. Her lower lip wobbled, her vision blurring.

The door chimed once more.

The store clerk made his noise again: disapproving and also a warning.

Someone shuffled. The slap, pad, slap, pad of uncaring feet. Masako, eyes cast downward, watched as a pair of filthy sneakers came into view. The wearer had to drag his shoes, which were devoid of laces, in order to keep them on. The hems of the navy blue school uniform pants were ragged and caked with mud and pine needles. The cloth tattered and worn.

That smell.

He did not reek with the tang of urine and unwashed flesh. Of the musty sweet animal oil of filthy human hair.

He smelled of trees.

A bony hand clamped around her wrist.

Masako froze.

The too-thin hand, almost tenderly, turned her wrist over so that her palm faced upward.

He gently placed a small something in her hand. Then folded her fingers to close over it.

Masako shook and shook. Someone had touched her. She could feel something small, slightly oblong, inside her fist.

He had touched her.

Unable to help herself she glanced upward. Just as the thin dirty young student strode on, his gaping sneakers dragging loudly. She only caught one glimpse of a pockmarked profile before he was past her.

His face.

Were there wrinkles? Gray stubble mixed in with black? The student looked like he was over thirty years old. Was he an old pervert, pretending to be a high school student?

Masako grimaced.

The tiny object enfolded in her fingers burned. What vile thing had he put into her hand? Quaking, she slowly revealed the dubious gift.

On her dirty palm lay what could only be a seed. Pale yellow. Slightly conical. She had seen it somewhere before, she was sure of it. But she couldn’t say what it was. Gross. It almost looked like a little tooth. What did the hentai want?

She raised her head to glare angrily at the middle-aged man.

But he wasn’t there.

Masako’s arms pimpled with a skittering cool breeze and the hairs on her neck tingled.

A motion. Low. Upon the floor. Masako’s eyes shifted in time to see the long naked tail of a rat disappear behind an ice cream freezer.

She shook her head. It didn’t make any sense. What did it mean? How could a man disappear? He had to have been at least 185 centimeters tall! There wasn’t an exit in the back of the store. The only way out of the Lawson’s was the way they had come in.

Could it be.?

The tiny dubious gift clenched inside her hand, Masako lowered to her haunches and peered cautiously behind the freezer. It was dark and dusty. Was there a small hole in the wall?

“Kora! Kora!”A rude foot jabbed her right buttock. “You’re not going to puke inside. Get out! Get outta here, you freaky kid!”

Masako, startled, began to topple, and she extended her hands to catch her fall. The little seed fell to the dirty floor.

She desperately scrabbled after the tiny gift.

“Hey!” the store clerk exclaimed. “What did you steal! Give it back, I’m calling the police!”

Masako popped the seed into her mouth.

She squeezed her molars together, grit from the floor grinding disgustingly against her tooth enamel, then a rich oily flavor began to fill her mouth, nutty and slightly sweet.

Pine nut.

The store clerk angrily grabbed the back of her neck.

But she never felt his touch.

The ground zoomed toward her as everything swelled, up, away, the tins of food, the shelves of sanitary napkins and contact lens solution rearing away from her, receding into a blurry backdrop. The floor accelerated, growing suddenly enormous, the details of the seams between tiles in high resolution, filled with crumbs, rock particles, oily smears, and strands of long black yarn.

She had lost her slippers. Because she was on all fours, upon the ground.

“Oh!” Masako gasped.

But the sound that escaped her mouth was a high-pitched squeal.

Her hands.

They were not her own.

The nails were thin, narrow claws. A fine pale fur covered them. In wonder, she turned one over. It was as close to a hand as it could be. But it was still a paw.

“Uhhhhh! Rat!” a voice bellowed, the sound of thunder. An enormous shoe swung toward her with the slow-fast speed of a pendulum.

Instincts took over. And she flipped with a twist, shooting into the safety of darkness behind the refrigeration unit.

Masako could smell something clean and fresh. It was coming from the small hole in the wall. She shot through as a foot dropped downward, just missing her tail by a hair’s width.

Hair’s width, she thought in one part of her mind. The strands of black on the floor weren’t lengths of yarn; they were human hair.

She had become so very small.

She slowed her headlong plunge and came to a stop. She sniffed and sniffed in the darkness, her whiskers bobbing.

A most marvelous breeze stroked each and every whisker; she could scarcely bear the pleasure. Like when she was a small child and her mother scratched her back for her with long slow strokes. except that the delicious sensation ran along the length of each and every one of her strands of hair.

And the smells. She could smell everything! Each scent was as precise and individual as snowflakes. Wet mud, loamy and rich. She could virtually taste the acid in the soil, as sour as grapefruit. The spiciness of pine and cedar, sweet and sharp. The nuanced flavor of rain. A banquet of complex and compelling scents—

And a rat.

He was middle-aged, with his own signature scent.

He did not reek with testosterone and aggression. He was tired. But not exhausted. He’d eaten a Mossburger with rice in the past two hours. No potato fries. He had two sisters and one older brother. His father was dead. She could smell-taste all his details from the tiny droplets of urine markings he’d left behind. In the minute vapors that hung in the air.

Come outside.

If it was a voice, it was without words. And if anything had been uttered, she had not heard it with her ears, but with every sense of her body.

She had been turned into a rat.

Delayed reaction set in, and she began to shiver. She crouched low, pulling her legs beneath her body, curling her tail around her. A rounded hump of fear.

Her tail. She clutched it with her front paws. It felt cool in the furrowed heat of her ratty palms. It was a small comfort.

Come with me, the voice called once more. Don’t be frightened.

Masako ground her teeth. The loud noise filled her sensitive ears. She clutched her tail firmly and shook her head.

It’s nice here, the voice continued. That’s why I thought you’d like to join me. But it’s not for humans. That’s why you had to change, first. Into your true form.

Masako froze. In the silence her heart tripped faster than it had ever beat before. Her true form?

You better hurry, the voice continued. I have things to do. Masako turned her muzzle toward the enticing scent of fresh green forest. It was dizzying in its complexity and richness. A pale golden light shone through.

I’m going. The voice was receding.

Wait! Masako actually squeaked.

Startled at the foreignness of her own voice, she bolted outside.

She plunged blindly. All or nothing. It could be a trap, but it was too late. She was out in the open, terror vibrating in each and every hair on her body, running as if she were being chased by demons.

She crashed into coarse, thick fur, and they both squealed, tumbling end over end in a flurry of leaf litter and small snapping branches.

Claws clamped down upon her, and Masako realized that she was going to die now. She was probably actually dead, in fact. She had died and been reincarnated as a rat, moving down the enlightenment path, because she had brought shame and suffering to her parents, and now, after so briefly being a rat, she was going to be killed probably to be reincarnated even lower down the chain, as a slug or mollusk.

She heard a strange sound. On the highest threshold of her auditory frequency. A barely discernible chirping chortling rat laughter.

The tickling contagious sound filled her senses, and she began chirping her pleasure.

Don’t be stupid, the male rat said affectionately. Your true form is rat. Your true form will always be rat. I recognized you for who you were as soon as I saw you in the store.

Come. And the male rat turned and ran into the underbrush. It is not entirely safe here, as we might wish it to be, but it is more beautiful than we could ever speak of.

But I can barely see, Masako complained, still clinging to her memories of human sight.

See with all of your senses, her friend said. See with your entire body and spirit.

They dashed through patches of dark and light, staying close to shadow and narrow spaces. The night was thick with currents of air, water vapor dense with flavors. It was so overwhelming, and Masako soon grew tired as they scurried on, between brief moments of rest, deeper, deeper into the forest.

They scuttled for what felt like hours.

Wait. Masako could scarcely stand.

Here. Her friend passed her a pine nut, and she greedily snatched it with her mobile paws. Fingers, she thought. They were more like fingers than animal paws. But the rich oils and sugars of the pine nut overwhelmed her, and she began nibbling furiously.

Masako sighed with contentment. She could not remember the last time she felt so — so complete. And to think that she could feel this way by being a rat instead of human.

Where are we going? Masako asked.

I’m taking you to the Lady, so she can explain. The male rat’s back was turned toward her. His posture rather stiff.

What lady? Masako looked around, the surrounding blur of forest night. Explain what? For some reason she had imagined she had come to a place far from human. And it had been such a relief. Dismay began to grow inside her, as if the seeds she’d eaten were beginning to sprout.

The Lady of the Pine was the one who first came to me.The male rat’s whiskers bobbed in the sweet breeze. To tell me about my true form. She set me free. Come, he said rather urgently. Rat time moves far more quickly than human. They raced on, from shadow to shadow, following the most sheltered trail, until they finally came to a stop.

Look. Her friend actually pointed.

Masako looked up, up. She saw the dark blurry shadow of an enormous tree. The monstrous limbs grew broad and wide, bark thick and deeply ridged. Masako’s whiskers quivered. Something was missing. The tree should have smelled sweet and biting with sap and needles, but the odor was faint. She blinked nearsightedly.

The branches were practically bare.

Only the lowest branches retained their needles. The upper branches of the tree were already dead. A violent storm would likely snap the tree in half. Something gray ringed the torso of the enormous, dying tree. Masako could not make out what it was.

Lady, her friend called out. Lady of the Pine. I have found another.

Masako began to shiver. Another what?

A pale figure seemed to slip out from the trunk of the tree. Her long hair was pale and bright, the color of moonlight. Her face was young and worn with age. Her dress made of the thinnest silk, woven lovingly by the multitude of spiders she housed in her ample branches. Masako breathed with wonder. The Lady was so very lovely. She felt coarse and common before her. She wrapped her tail tightly around her body and quivered with self-consciousness.

The Lady slowly swept her gaze about until she caught sight of the small creatures in the deep moss. She crouched down with a groan, as if carrying an unbearable weight.

Masako anxiously glanced up at her glorious beauty.

The Lady’s skin was pale and smooth, but dark worn shadows cupped her eyes, and her eyelids were wrinkled with age and experience. She looked like she could be sixteen or a hundred years old.

Friend Rat.She smiled. Her breath was sweet, but her eyes were dark with pain. Guardian. Protector. I am most honored by your kind visit.

Me? Masako squeaked disbelievingly.

Yes, you.The Lady lowered her hand, and Masako crawled upon her palm. She bowed her head, humbled by the Lady’s demeanor. The pale Lady raised her hand, and Masako resisted the urge to dig her claws into her skin.

The Rats have always been my most trusted guards: loyal, wise, brave. But for a thousand years I have been bound by a curse, dying so slowly, every day. MyGuardians were scattered and lost. Lost from me, and lost in themselves. My Guards were flung to the outer realms, far beyond the Forest of Dreams. As the centuries passed, I learned to pull my spirit from my body. The Lady stroked her free hand lovingly against the coarse bark of the great pine. She took that hand and then rested the palm upon her chest. In this form, I traveled to distant realms to search for my trusted Guards who have lost all memory of their origin.

A golden tear of sap slowly formed in the corner of her pale eye. I had thought that if they ate a seed from my tree they would remember and return to me. Return they did, but only to ravage my branches for more seeds, ripping off my needles in their need to consume them. They ate and ate until they died. And yet I am not yet free. Of the hundreds of Rats I have found and brought back to me, none remain except this one.She gestured gracefully toward the middle-aged male rat.

He had been raising a pine nut to his incisors, but he dropped it with a sudden flurry, transparently trying to hide the evidence beneath his hind paw.

The Lady of the Pine smiled sadly. And my most loyal one; even he is rather flawed.

Masako blinked her small black eyes. She sniffed and sniffed, her whiskers sweeping. How many pine nuts were left? How could there be any left if the tree was so barren?

Masako-san, the Lady said gently.

Masako stopped sniffing the air and rose up on her hind legs. Can you free me from my thousand-year-old curse? Masako nervously scrubbed her whiskers with both paws. I’ll try,she squeaked. I can try.

The Lady of the Pine closed her eyes. Her eyelids were ridged like tree bark. Suddenly she looked so very ancient, Masako could not help but bow with reverence.

The Lady of the Pine began to lower Masako, but she stopped at her midriff. See, the Lady whispered. I am bound, here, and it is killing my spirit, stopping the flow of my life sap.

Masako gasped. There. A cord. It was tightly bound around her middle. But it was much too narrow and it cut into her dress, her flesh, down to the bone. Golden sap oozed from the circumference of pain. She was slowly being cut in half.

A great spasm shook the Lady, and Masako clung desperately to her fingers with her claws.

The Lady regained control and gracefully dabbed the sleeve of her dress to the corner of her lips. A golden stain marked the silver cloth. I fear my time is near, she said calmly.

What must I do?Masako held the Lady’s thumb with both tiny paws. She could try. She could try to get through to the rope with her teeth.

The Lady sadly shook her head. If it was such a task, little Guardian. she whispered. She raised her free hand toward the great barren tree and pointed upward. High above them, perhaps twenty feet or more, Masako could make out something lighter colored than the bark encircling the massive trunk.

There, the Lady said gently. That is the binding that is upon me. That is the binding that must be broken.

Masako closed her eyes. Her tiny heart tripped like a windup toy. She didn’t have to help her. The pine tree and her spirit were nothing to her. She could just turn around and follow the loud scent trail back to the store and crawl back out to her own world. She had no obligation to come to the Lady’s aid. Masako sighed. Opened her eyes.

She leapt.

The thick hide of the tree was ridged and provided easy paw-holds for a scampering rat. But the vertical climb was intense, and Masako was soon panting and wheezing with exhaustion. She was not made for endurance, only for brief spurts of speed. She was extremely grateful not to be able to see details farther than a few feet away. She had a horrible fear of heights.

Masako climbed and climbed. Her paws were growing raw with pain. She could scarcely breathe. She had no idea how much farther she had left to go, and she was growing so weary. But she continued her upward clamber long after she had burned through her initial altruism. Now she was frightened that the only thing keeping her from falling was her upward momentum.

A humming vibration broke through her flutter of heart, the blood ringing inside her ears. Something glowed, pale, white, like a winter grub.

The rope! She had reached the rope that choked the great tree!

Masako set a quivering paw upon the binding, but as soon as her tiny nails pricked the surface, the great rope moved, turning half an inch clockwise away from the point of contact.

From deep inside its roots the tree groaned.

Far, far below a woman’s voice gasped.

Oh! Masako gnawed her teeth together, her fur standing on end, her whiskers horizontal with horror.

The rope was alive. And it tightened when it was touched.

How? How on earth was she to take it off if she couldn’t touch it?

Incisors clattering, Masako began to crawl horizontally around the tree trunk, directly beneath the squeezing white rope. It was much more difficult going around than it had been climbing upward. Stretched out to the tips of her hind paws, she reached for a distant protrusion of bark. Just as her tiny claws made contact, the brittle piece flaked beneath her weight. Gravity yanked at her round middle, and she screamed as she began to plummet. Her tail, with a life of its own, swung desperately toward the tree and embedded its length inside the ruts of bark just as her opposite paw found purchase. She dug her tiny claws into the bark and sobbed with relief.

When she finally opened her eyes, the great white rope was right before her.

The rope. It was much thicker, here, than it had been where she had started.

It was not the same width all the way around.

What did that mean?

Masako climbed more carefully, planting her tail in the grooves of the tree before moving forward. One inch at a time, she slowly made her way around the trunk, her ears and tail growing red from the blood and exertion. She would climb around the ring of rope. To see if there was a flaw, a weakness that she might discover. To somehow break the binding.

She had rounded over three-quarters of the massive trunk. The rope had gradually widened, until, at one point, it was easily three times her width, but after that it had begun to slowly taper once more.

She had never once seen a spot where it was weakened or frayed. She dared not touch it again, to check, in case it choked the Lady further. She wouldn’t even let her sensitive whiskers whisper over the surface.

The rope that had been narrowing so subtly suddenly bulged. Thick, rounded. The fur along her spine tingled with abject disgust. She would have retched if rats were capable of retching. But she only convulsed with revulsion, red tears of stress forming in the corners of her eyes.

Even as her very essence screamed at her to flee, she continued onward. Looking for the weakest point of the binding rope.

The bulging roundness continued until it came to a point where what might be the tail end of the rope seemed to be embedded inside the bulbous portion. There was nothing on the rope that suggested weakness. The only change was one thick black vertical line, a marking of some kind, and the place where the two ends appeared to be attached.

Movement. The vertical black line was slowly growing thinner, finer, even as it drew closer toward Masako, who clung fiercely to the bark with all her claws.

It was an eye.

The black vertical stripe was its pupil.

Of a snake.

The largest snake in the world. Squeezed tightly around the Lady Pine, its tail clamped inside its jaws.

Masako screamed.

The snake tightened its noose; a wet cracking sound rang from below.

No! Masako screamed. She flung herself at the snake and began biting in a crazed frenzy. But the snake’s scales were not mortal. Masako’s teeth skittered and clattered against its skin, as if she were biting metal. And still she did not desist. She bit and screamed, bit and screamed, until her small ineffectual teeth splintered into fragments. Her muzzle red with blood, she spat out her teeth, despair filling her tiny fluttering heart.

She could not help the Lady.

They would both die.

Why should two die? When it could be one?

Masako shivered with exhaustion. Her mouth, her paws, a mess of broken teeth, ripped claws.

She moved. Crawled toward the rounded point of the snake’s snout and discerned its narrow nostrils. She scrambled up the slippery form to crouch enticingly close. Her shivering rodent life, her tripping vibrant heart. The scent of her rich blood, the pulsing warmth of her individual life. She twitched her tail so that his eyes had something seductive to trace as her scent began to seep into his time-dulled reptilian brain.

Come, take this life,Masako invited. Flicking her paws. Scraping her claws against the coarse bark.

The snake’s scales shrieked metallic as he loosed his hold from his tail and whipped his head around.

He clamped down with the hunger of a thousand years.

Bright red light roared behind Masako’s eyes.

She thought she heard a gasp far far below.

She could not feel the snake’s fangs as they began to plummet. They twisted through the cold night, like acrobats, like falling angels.

The air was screaming.

It came so fast she didn’t gasp.

She was surrounded in darkness.

Falling, falling.

Rain fell upon her face, icy cold, shocking. She opened her eyes, and her entire body seized with pain. She felt as though she had been crawling over a mountain of broken glass.

Copper taste in her mouth.

She could see. Forest. Wet and cold with morning. Her breath misting in front of her face. Blood on yellow fallen leaves. She ran her tongue over her teeth.

Several were missing. And her head ached. Like she had been punched and kicked. An aching fire in her fingers. She raised her hands and stared with confusion.

Not at the raw, bloody palms and lost fingernails.

But her hands.

They were like a stranger’s.

Creased and worn, filthy, bloody, and so human. No longer a rat. She shook her head. And frowned at the heaviness of her head, the weight and the surreal length of her matted locks.

Her wretched hair, covered in pine needles, twigs, and brambles, was long enough to reach the back of her calves.

Her thoughts churned so slowly. There must be a reason, she thought vaguely. The Lady. Had she failed her after all?

Masako raised her head.

She was in a forest. Early evening, a red cast to the glimmer of skies between the thick branches of trees, birds twittering and chirruping unseen, and somewhere a woodpecker’s staccato. The distant roar of traffic, commuters wending their way home. The dark silhouette of a torii against the backdrop of trees.

It was the gate at the Shinto shrine. The one she had gone to during a school trip in elementary school when they were studying leaves. She had friends, then. It had been such a pleasant excursion.

Something caught the corner of her eye.

A ragged piece of rope.

Lying on the moss at the base of a large worn pine tree with a curiously pinched middle.

Masako’s breath caught in her throat.

She stumbled toward the tree and gently traced her fingers over the indented bark, the place of its deformity. Small threads were caught within the tree’s fiber, as if it had tried to grow around the binding. It oozed with golden sap, but the rope had been somehow torn off. The tree was wounded, possibly mortally, but it was finally free.

It was one of the knotted ropes that Shinto priests tied around special trees. But this pine — it had somehow been forgotten a long, long time ago. Off the main pathways, away from the shrine, it had continued growing with no one to loosen the binding as she grew, no one to tend to her needs.

As Masako turned away, she let the rope fall to the moss bed. Plastic Hello Kitty slippers. There. She would have laughed if she had any strength remaining. She toed them on and began walking toward lights that were beginning to wink into existence as evening turned toward night.

She finally reached her neighborhood as the sun was beginning to rise. She had no recollection of the path she took. Only the numbed sense of relief when she saw the familiar streets.

Only—

Only. they were familiar. but there was a certain off-ness. Like how she would feel if someone had gone into her bedroom while she was away, and then she had returned to find that everything had been rearranged.

The houses were almost the same. The trees were almost the same.

I am half-dreaming, Masako thought. I am half-asleep.

She clattered through the metal gate of her house and opened the door with her key.

The house smelled familiar. Yet musty. A little dirty. How unlike her mother, Masako thought numbly as she toed off her house slippers.

Her legs wobbled so much she had to crawl up the stairs on her hands and knees. Her raw palms, which had dried out during the long walk home, broke open beneath the weight of her body. She left red bloody handprints on the pale wood floor, her dirty long hair trailing behind her. She crawled down the hallway and rose up, once, to her knees, to open her door. She crawled into her room, her den, her safe hollow. And locked the door.

Knocking.

Insistent.

Masako pulled her blanket over her pounding and aching head. Something prickled unpleasantly beneath her back. She reached down and retrieved a dried twig. She slid her hand out the side of her comforters and dropped the debris onto the floor.

“Masako-chan,” her mother’s voice called. It was toneless. Nothing inflected. It wasn’t a collage of emotions. But flat. As if she didn’t feel any longer.

Masako raised her head.

Her mother’s voice.

The same.

But different.

“Masako-chan,” her mother repeated. “Moriya-san from Community Health is here to see you.”

Moriya, Masako mouthed, painfully with her swollen mouth.

“Masako-san,” a female voice rang out, like a wind chime on a clear summer morning. “Please come out. I would like to see you to thank you.”

A choking sound.

Her mother wasn’t crying.

She was laughing.

“Thank her!”she exclaimed. “Thank her for what? You are madder than she is. Coming here for fifteen years, every Monday through Saturday. And she has never once opened the door. Never once acknowledged you. And you want to thank her!” She laughed and laughed, and it was the ugliest thing Masako had ever heard.

Fifteen years?

What was her mother talking about?

Masako stared down at her ravaged hands.

The skin was slightly wrinkled. Diamond-patterned, with a crisscross of lines. The skin was not fine and smooth with the elasticity of youth.

Hand trembling, she grabbed her hank of long hair. There were white strands in among the black.

Fifteen years.

She tottered to her vanity, which was covered in a dusty blanket. She ripped it off, the clatter of items knocked off the stand as the clouds of dust were caught in diagonal lines of golden light.

Fifteen years.

Three stripes of light fell across her face.

A tormented overweight girl did not look back at her.

The person looking back was a woman. Grime and years etched into her skin. A mass of knotted and filthy hair surrounded her face. Her mouth an open pucker of newly lost teeth.

The floor tilted to one side and she staggered, grabbing hold of the stand with one grubby hand.

What had happened to her? What had been done to her? Masako’s lower lip wobbled.

How could she have lost so much?

So quickly?

Fury roared inside her ears. It burned her throat and filled her maw.

She lurched to her bedroom door and wrenched it open.

Her mother, back curved with age, hair white and bedraggled, raised a trembling hand to her wrinkled mouth. Her eyes were wide with shock.

Masako stared back. Disbelievingly.

Everyone. not just her.

“Masako-chan?” her mother croaked. “Masako-chan. you’ve opened your door. After fifteen years. After fifteen years,” her voice quavered in a low wail. Of relief, of sorrow.

A strong odor. Sharp. Sweet.

A second person, slightly behind her aged mother, stepped

forward.

The woman, dressed in a navy blue skirt suit, looked like any middle-aged government employee. She even had a name tag clipped to her chest. MORIYA. Her eyes. They were filled with myriad emotions. But strongest of all was respect.

The neat nondescript woman gracefully knelt to the dusty hallway floor without a hint of distaste or self-consciousness. She placed something at Masako’s feet, then bowed low.

“Thank you, Masako-san,” she said, her voice throbbing. “You have saved my life. I am in your debt. I, and all of my kin, will always be here for you should you ever need assistance. We will never forget.” The woman rose. She did not wipe the dust off her knees. Moriya-san’s eyes blazed, and Masako lowered her gaze with fear and confusion.

“You succeeded when everyone else failed,” Moriya-san said softly. “You are truly remarkable.”

Masako blinked, rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.

The thing on the floor.

It was a length of tattered rope, gray with lichen and years. The air in the hallway was filled with the biting sweet scent of pine.

Moriya-san held out her hand.

Masako, after several seconds, raised her arm waist high, palm facing upward.

Yes. She wanted to return to the forest. Let her leave human life with its pain and disappointments. She had never felt so alive as she did in that night forest. She wanted a pine seed with every cell of her body. Let it take her back to that place. She did not care that time passed more quickly for rats if she could live so vibrantly.

Moriya-san wrapped her fingers gently around her hand. There was no seed.

“Come,” Moriya-san said softly. “You may return to the forest when you come to your life’s end, but you still have much to do in this world, my Guardian and Hero.”

Masako slowly raised her head.

A roaring filled her head, a thundrous waterfall.

To leave her sanctuary without the cover of night—

To leave her sanctuary in the company of others—

She would self-destruct, she would fall to dust. She would be a mortal, exposed, naked among strangers.

Moriya-san’s eyes shone with a golden light. “Come,” she said firmly.

Masako closed her eyes.

She stepped over the threshold.

Her mother gasped.

The floorboards of the hallway were cool beneath Masako’s aching feet. She could feel her heart pounding in her palm. Moriya-san squeezed her hand with gentle strength.

Outside a small bird trilled, liquid, melodic. A distant train’s clatter punctuated the tofu seller’s scratchy nasal recording as he peddled his wares in their neighborhood. The sound of the plaintive horn on his small truck receded as he turned onto another street.

Moriya-san slowly led Masako toward the stairs that descended into light.

Masako did not burst apart into atoms.

She lived.

HIROMI GOTO was born in Japan and immigrated to Canada as a young child. Her novel The Kappa Childwas the 2001 winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was on the final ballot for the Sunburst Award and the Spectrum Award. In the same year she also published a children’s fantasy novel, The Water of Possibility. Her first novel for adults, Chorus of Mushrooms, was the recipient of the regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book, and was a co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Her first collection of short stories, Hopeful Monsters, was published in 2004. Her latest novel, an epic genre-bending fantasy called Half World, was published by Penguin Canada in 2009 and will be published by Viking in the United States.

Her Web site is www.hiromigoto.com

Currently I live and dream in British Columbia. Every day, I read, rather compulsively, several online newspapers, one of them the English version of a Japanese journal. I like to have a window open, even if it’s not a “neutral” framing, into the happenings of the country and people of my cultural heritage. And I can’t help but see how despair manifests in different ways in different cultures/countries. Long-term acute social withdrawal wreaks devastation upon the sufferers and their families. It has taken a particular form in Japan, but the triggers to the withdrawal are experienced the world over. Excessive social pressure, rigid parental expectations, school bullying; sometimes, hiding away is the most rational thing to do. But the retreat can turn into a prison sentence. and the hikikomori can lose the capacity to reenter the world. But I believe. I believe in the power of transformation, both literal and symbolic. Before we can change we must be able to imagine it. And if there is no spirit left inside you to begin this journey of the imagination, turn to the earth. The forest. The stream. Touch the bark of a living tree. See the flit of a chickadee. The perfection of the dragonfly’s flight. The loyalty of rats. Leave the concrete and the walls. Enter the living. Breathe.

(And a really good counselor is also capable of bringing light to a darkened path — so I have found.)