The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

1

She was draped against the veined boulder that jutted up from the snow and gravel in the rock garden of Dr. Mayuzumi’s estate. One hand had been placed demurely over her pubes—the Japanese have a horror of pubic hair that has caused it to become the last taboo of their pornography—the other was flung against her forehead. A trickle of blood ran from the side of her lip down her slender neck, past one breast, to a puddle beside her left thigh.

When I got there with my notebook and my camera, they were milling around in the cloister that ran all the way around the rectangular rock garden. Their breath hung in the still cold air, and no one had touched the body yet, not even the police.

I hadn’t come to Sapporo to cover a slasher; I’d come there for the Snow Festival. I’d only been in town for a couple of hours. I’d only just started unpacking when I got the phone call from the Tokyo office and had to grab a taxi to this estate just outside town. I didn’t even have time to put on a coat.

To say that it was cold doesn’t begin to describe it. But I’d been feeling this cold since I was just a winchinchala back at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I stood there in my Benetton sweatshirt and my Reeboks and looked out of place. I ignored the cold.

A police officer was addressing the press. They weren’t like stateside reporters; there was a pecking order—the Yomiuri and Asahi Shimbun people got the best places, the tabloids hunched down low in the back and spoke only when spoken to—gravely, taking turns, scribbling solemnly in notebooks. They all wore dark suits.

I’d had Japanese at Berkeley, but I couldn’t follow much, so I just stood there staring at the corpse. There wasn’t a strand of that stringy blond hair that was out of place. It was the work of an artist.

It was the hair that jolted me into remembering who she was. So this wasn’t just another newspaper story after all.

The snow was beginning to obliterate the artist’s handiwork—powdering down her hair, whitening away her freckles. She’d been laughing all the way from San Francisco to Narita Airport. I still had her card in my purse.

I snapped a picture. When the flash went off they all froze and turned toward me all at once, like a many-headed monster. It’s uncanny the way they can do that. Then they all smiled that strained, belittling smile that I’d been experiencing ever since I’d arrived in Japan a week before.

“Look,” I said at last, “I’m with the Oakland Tribune.” Suddenly I realized that there wasn’t a single woman among all those ranked reporters. In fact, there were no other women there at all. I felt even more self-conscious. No one spoke to me at all. It didn’t matter that what I was wearing stood out against the black-white-and-gray like a peacock in a hen coop. I was a woman; I was a gaijin; I wasn’t there.

Presently the police officer murmured something. They all laughed in unison and turned back to their note-taking. One reporter, perhaps taking pity on me, said, “American consulate will be here soon. You talk to them.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for bullshit. “Listen, folks, I know this woman. I can i-den-ti-fy her, wakarimashita?”

The many-headed monster swiveled around again. There was consternation behind the soldered-on smiles. I had the distinct impression they didn’t feel it was my place to say anything at all.

At that moment, the people from the consulate arrived. There was a selfimportant bald man with a briefcase and a slender black woman. A few flashbulbs went off. The woman, like me, hadn’t planned on a visit to the Mayuzumi estate on a snowy afternoon. She was dressed to the gills, probably about to hit one of those diplomatic receptions.

“I’m Esmeralda O’Neil,” she said to the police officer. “I understand that an American citizen’s been—” She stopped when she saw the corpse.

The policeman spoke directly to the bald man. The bald man deferred to the black woman. The policeman couldn’t seem to grasp that Esmeralda O’Neil was the bald man’s boss.

“Look here—” I said. “I can tell you who she is.”

This time I got more attention. More flashes went off. Esmeralda turned to me. “You’re Marie, aren’t you? Marie Wounded Bird. They told us you were coming, and to take care of you,” she said. “I was hoping to meet you at the reception tonight. ”

“I didn’t get invited,” I said testily.

“Who is she?” she said. She was a woman who recovered quickly—a real diplomat, I decided.

“Her name’s Molly Danzig. She’s a dancer. She sat next to me on the flight from San Francisco. She works—worked—at a karaoke bar here in Sapporo— the rooftop lounge at the Otani Prince Towers.”

“You know anything else about her, darlin’?”

“Not really.”

She looked at the corpse again. “Jesus fucking Christ.” She turned to the police officer and began talking to him in rapid Japanese. Then she turned back to me. “Look, hon,” she said, “all hell’s gonna break loose in no time flat; CNN’s already on their way. Why don’t you come to the reception with us?” Then, taking me by the arm so that her aide couldn’t hear her, she added, “You don’t know what it’s like here, hon. Machismo up the wazoo. I’d give anything for an hour of plain old down-home girl talk. So—reception?”

“I’m not sure ... I’d feel a bit like trespassing.”

“Why darlin’, you’ve already gone and done that! This is the Mayuzumi estate we’re standing in now . . . and the reception is Dr. Mayuzumi’s bash to welcome the foreign dignitaries to the Snow Festival.” I had heard of this Mayuzumi vaguely. Textiles, beer, personal computers. Finger in every pie.

The Japanese reporters were already starting to leave. They filed out in rows, starting with the upscale newspapers and ending with the tabloids. It was only then that I noticed the man with the sketch pad.

At first I thought he must be an American. Even from the other side of the rock garden I could see that he had the most piercing blue eyes. He was kneeling by the railing of the cloister. In spite of the cold he was just wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He had long black hair and a thick beard. He was hairy . . . bearlike, almost. Asians are hardly ever hairy.

The policeman barked an order at him. He backed off. But there was something in his body language, something simultaneously deferential and defiant, something that identified him as a member of a conquered people, a kind of hopelessness. It was so achingly familiar it made me lose my cool and just gape at him. That was how my mother always behaved when the social worker came around. Or the priest from the St. Francis Mission. Or whenever they’d come around to haul my dad off to jail for the weekend because he’d guzzled down too much mniwakan and made himself a nuisance. All my aunts and uncles acted that way toward white people. The only one who never did was Grandpa Mahtowashte. And that was because he was too busy communicating with the bears to pay any attention to the real world.

My grandfather had taken me to my first communion. Nobody else came. He knelt beside me and shouted out loud: “These damned priests don’t know what this ritual really means.” They made him wait outside the church.

God I hated my childhood. I hated South Dakota.

The man stared back at me with naked interest. I hadn’t seen that here before either. People never looked you in the eye here. I had become an invisible woman. It occurred to me then that we were invisible together, he and I.

I stopped listening to Esmeralda, who was babbling on about the social life of the city of Sapporo—explaining that it wasn’t all beer, that the shiny-modern office buildings and squeaky-clean avenues were no more than a veneer—and just stared at the man. Although he was looking straight at me, he never stopped sketching.

“Anyway, hon, I’ll give you my card . . . and . . . here’s where the reception’s going to be . . . the Otani Prince Towers . . . rooftop, with a mind-boggling view of the snow sculptures being finished up.” Esmeralda made to leave, and I said something perfunctory about seeing her again soon.

Then I added, “Do you know who that man is?”

“That’s Ishii, the snow sculptor. Aren’t you here to interview him?”

It showed how confused I’d become after seeing my fellow traveler lying dead in the snow. Aki Ishii was one of the grand masters on my list of people to see; I had his photograph in my files. It had been black and white, though. I couldn’t have expected those eyes.

And he was already walking toward me, taking the long way around the cloister.

He said to me: “Transience and beauty . . .’’He was a soffspoken man. “Transience and beauty are the cornerstones of my art. It was Goethe, I think, who said that all transient things are only metaphors . . . should we seize this moment, Miss Wounded Bird? Or is the time not yet ripe for an interview?”

“You know me?” I said. I had suddenly, unaccountably, become afraid. Perhaps it was because there were only the two of us now . . . even the corpse had been carried off, and the Americans had tramped away down the cloister.

The temperature fell even more. At last I started to shiver.

“I know you, Miss Wounded Bird—perhaps you will let me call you ‘Marie’— because the Tribune was kind enough to send me a letter. I knew who you were at once. Something about your body language, your sense of displacement; you were that way even with your fellow countrymen. I understand that, you see, because I am Ainu.”

The Ainu ... it began to make sense. The Ainu were the aboriginal inhabitants of this island—blue-eyed neolithic nomads pushed into the cold by the manifest destiny of the Japanese conquerors. There were only 15,000 pure-blooded Ainu left. They were like the Lakota—like my people. We were both strangers in our own land.

It occurred to me that I was on the trail of a great story, an important story. Oh, covering the festival would have been interesting enough—there’s nothing quite like the Sapporo Snow Festival in all the world, acres and acres of snow being built up into vast edifices that dissolve at the first thaw. It’s all some Zen-like affirmation of beauty and transience, I had been told . . . and now I was hearing the grand master himself utter those words over the site of a sex murder . . . hearing them applied with equal aptness to both art and reality.

“Perhaps I could escort you to the reception, Marie?” he said. Behind his Japanese accent there was a hint of some other language, perhaps German. I seemed to remember from his dossier that he had, in his youth, studied in Heidelberg under a scholarship from the Goethe-Institut. It was quaint but kind of attractive. I started to like him.

We left the rock garden together. He had an American car—a Mustang— parked by the gate. “I know the steering wheel is on the wrong side,” he said apologetically, “but HI drive carefully, I promise.”

He didn’t. The thirty kilometers back into downtown Sapporo were terrifying. We lurched, we hydroplaned, we skidded, past tiny temples enveloped in snow, past ugly postmodernist apartments, past row houses with walls of rice paper crammed along alleyways. Snow bent the branches of the trees to breaking. The sunset glittered on roofs of glossy tile, orange-green or cobalt blue. I was glad he was driving with such abandon. It made me think less of Molly Danzig, laughing over how she’d been fleecing the rubes at the karaoke bar, trading raunchy stories about men she had known, wolfing down airline food in between giggles . . . Molly Danzig, who in death had become part of an ordered elegance she had never evinced in the twelve hours I had sat beside her on the plane from San Francisco.

The reception was, of course, a massive spectacle. These people really knew how to lay on a spread. The top floor of the hotel had been converted into a Styrofoam and plastic replica of the winter wonderland outside. Three chefs worked like maniacs behind an eighty-foot sushi bar. Elsewhere, cooks in silly pseudo-French uniforms sliced patisseries, carved roasts, and ladled soup out of swan-shaped tureens. Chandeliers sparkled. Plastic snowflakes rained down from a device in the ceiling. You could have financed a feature film by hocking the clothes on these people’s backs—Guccis, Armanis, Diors—a few of those $5,000 kimonos. Although Aki had thrown on a stylish black leather duster, I found myself hopelessly underdressed for this shindig. It didn’t help that everyone was studiously ignoring us. Aki and I seemed to be walking around in a private bubble of indifference.

One wall was all glass. You could see down into Odori Park, on the other side of Sapporo’s three-hundred-feet-wide main drag. The snow sculptures were taking shape. Once the festival started they would be floodlit. Now they were ghostly hulks haunching up toward the moon. This year’s theme was “Ancient Times”; there was a half-formed Parthenon at one end of the park, a Colosseum in the foreground, an Egyptian temple complete with Sphinx, a Babylonian ziggurat . . . all snow.

A huge proscenium filled one end of the lounge, and on it stood a corpulent man who was crooning drunkenly into a microphone. The song appeared to be a disco version of “Strangers in the Night.” There was no band.

“Jesus!” I said. “They should shoot the singer.”

“That would hardly be wise,” Aki said. “That man is Dr. Mayuzumi himself.”

“Karaoke?” I said. There’s only one karaoke bar in Oakland and I’d never been to it. This fit the description all right. As Dr. Mayuzumi left the stage to desultory applause, someone else was pushed up onto the stage amid gales of laughter. It turned out to be Esmeralda O’Neil. She began singing a Japanese pop song, complete with ersatz Motown gestures and dance steps.

“Oh,” Aki said, “but this is the club where your . . . friend . . . used to work. Miss . . . Danzig.” He pronounced her name Danjigu.

“Let’s get a stiff drink,” I said at last.

We went and sat at the sushi bar. We had some hot sake, and then Aki ordered food. The chef pulled a pair of live jumbo shrimp out of a tank, made a few lightning passes with his knife, and placed two headless shrimp on the plate. Their tails wiggled.

“It’s called odori.” Aki said, “dancing shrimp . . . hard to find in the States.”

I watched the shrimp tails pulsing. Surely they could not feel pain. Surely it was just a reflex. A lizard’s tail goes on jerking after you pull it off the lizard.

Aki murmured something.

“What did you say?”

“I’m apologizing to the shrimp for taking its life,” he said. He looked around shiftily as he said it. “It’s an Ainu thing. The Japs wouldn’t understand.” It was the kind of thing my grandfather did.

“Eat it,” Aki said. His eyes sparkled. He was irresistible.

I picked up one of them with my chopsticks, swished it through the soy sauce dish, popped it in my mouth.

“What do you feel?” he said.

“It’s hard to describe. ” It had squirmed as it went down my throat. But the way all the tastes exploded at once, the soy sauce, the horseradish, the undead shrimp with its toothpastelike texture and its exquisite flavor . . . there’d been something almost synaesthetic about it . . . something joyous . . . something obscene.

“It’s a peculiarly Japanese thing,” said the Ainu snow sculptor, “this almost erotic need to suck out a creature’s life force ... I have been studying it, Marie. Not being Japanese, I cannot intuit it; I can only listen in the shadows, pick up their leavings as I slink past them with downcast eyes. But you, Marie, you I can look full in the face. ”

And he did. The way he said my name held the promise of dark intimacy. I couldn’t look away. Once again this man’s body language evoked something out of my childhood. It was my father, reaching for me in the winter night, in the bedroom with the broken window, with his liquor breath hanging in the moonlit air. And me with my eyes squeezed tight, calling on the Great Mystery. Jesus, I hated my father. Although I hadn’t thought of him in ten years, he was the only man in my life. I felt resentful, vulnerable, and violated, all at once. And still I couldn’t look away. Then Esmeralda breezed over and came to my rescue.

“You never stop working for a moment, do you, hon?” she said, and ordered a couple of odori for herself.

I said, “What about Molly Danzig? Any word about—”

“Darlin’, that girl’s just vanished from the universe as far as anyone can see. The press aren’t talking. Nothing on TV. Even CNN’s been put on hold for a few days. Total blackout . . . even the consulate’s being asked to wait on informing the next of kin . . . it’s that festival, you know. It’s a question of face.”

“Doesn’t it make you mad?”

“Hell no! I’m a career diplomat, darlin’; this girl doesn’t rock any boats.” She bit down on the wriggling crustacean with relish. “Mm-mm, good.” No squeamishness, no regret.

I looked around. The partygoers were still giving us a wide berth, but now and then I thought I could see stares and hear titters. Was I paranoid? “Everyone knows about it, don’t they?” I said.

“It?” said Esmeralda ingenuously.

“It! The murder that no one can talk about! That’s why they’re all avoiding me like yesterday’s fish; they know that I knew her. I stink of that girl’s death.”

“It’s nothing, hon.” She took a slug of sake.

Aki tugged at my elbow. “I can see you’re getting uncomfortable here,” he whispered. “Would you care to blow this joint—I believe that’s how you Americans call it?”

I could see where this was leading. I was attracted to him. I was afraid of him.

I had a story to write and I knew that a good story sometimes demands a piece of your soul. How big a piece? I didn’t want to give in yet, so I said, “I’d love to see the snow sculptures. Now, when the park’s deserted, in the middle of the night.”

“Your wish is my command,” he said, but somehow I felt that it was I who had been commanded. Like a vampire, Aki had to be invited before he could strike.

In the moonlight, we walked past the Clock Tower, the only Russian building left on Hokkaido, toward the TV tower which dominated the east end of Odori-Koen. The park was long and narrow. Mountains of snow were piled along the walkways.

They had brought in extra snow by the truckload. There were a few men working overtime shoveling paths and patting down banks of snow. A man on a ladder was shaping the entablature of a Corinthian column with his hands. Fog roiled and tendriled about our feet. I didn’t ask Aki why the park and the zombie shrimp had the same name; I had a feeling the answer would unnerve me too much.

We walked slowly up the mile-long park toward the tableau that was Aki’s personal creation—I knew from my notes that this was to be the centerpiece of the festival, a classical representation of the Judgment of Paris.

“What do you think of Sapporo?” Aki asked me abruptly.

"It's—"

“You don’t have to tell me. It’s an ugly town. It’s all clean and shopping-mall-ridden and polished till it shines, but still it’s a brand-new city desperately looking for something to call a soul.”

“Well, the Snow Festival—”

“Founded in 1950. Instant ancient culture. A Disneyland of the Japanese sensibility.”

It was not what I’d come to hear. I’d had the article half written before I’d even boarded the plane. I’d wanted to talk about tradition, the old reflected in the new. We walked on.

People go to bed early in Japan. You could hardly hear any traffic. A long line of trucks piled high with snow stretched the length of the park and turned north at the Sosei River end. It took three hundred truckloads of snow for the average snow sculpture. The snow came from the mountains.

Most of the sculptures had been cordoned off. Now and then we passed artisans who would turn from their work, bow smartly, and bark out the word sensei. Aki walked ahead. We did not touch. Public displays between the sexes are frowned on here. I had been relieved to learn that.

“It was a shame about that Danjigu girl,” Aki said. “I have seen her many times, at the karaoke club; Mayuzumi rather liked her, I think.”

Molly had said something about fat rich businessmen. I wished he would change the subject. I said, “Tell me something about your art, Aki.”

“Is this the interview?” Our footsteps echoed. Ice tinkled on the trees. “But I have already talked about beauty and transience. ”

“Is that why you were sketching Molly's corpse? I thought it was kind of . . . macabre.”

He smiled. No one was watching us. His hand brushed against mine for a fleeting second. It burned me. I walked ahead a few steps.

“So what are you looking for in your art, Mr. Ishii?” I asked him in my best girl-reporter voice.

“Redemption,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

I did not want to think about what I was looking for.

“I feel a bit like Faust sometimes,” he said, “snatching a few momentary fragments of beauty out of the void, and in return giving up . . . everything. ” “Your soul for beauty?” I said. “Kind of romantic.”

“Oh, it’s all those damned Germans, Goethe, Schiller: death, transfiguration, redemption, weltschmerz—going to school there can really fill you with Teutonic portentousness.”

I had to laugh. But what about being Ainu?” I said. “Doesn’t that contribute to your artistic vision too?”

“I don’t want to talk about that. ”

So we were alike, always running away from who we were. He strode purposefully ahead now, his shadow huge and wavery in the light of the full moon.

A wall of snow towered ahead of us. Here and there I could see carved steps. “I’ll help you up,” he said. He was already climbing the embankment. My Reeboks dug into the snow steps. “Don’t worry,” he said, “my students will smooth them out in the morning. Come.”

The steps were steep. Once or twice he had to pull me up. “There will be a ramp,” he said, “so the spectators can cluster around the other side.”

We were standing on a ledge of snow now, looking down onto the tableau he had created. Here, at the highest point in the park, there was a bitter breeze. It had stopped snowing and the air was clear, but the sky was too bright from the city lights to see many stars. The artificial mountain wrapped around us on three sides; the fourth was the half-built viewer’s ramp; the area formed a kind of open-air pavilion.

Aki said, “Look around you. It’s 1200 B.C. We’re on the slopes of Mt. Ida, in the mythological dawn. Look—over there—past the edge of the park—the topless towers of Ilium. It was the Otani Prince Towers, glittering with neon, peering up through twin peaks. It was an optical illusion—the embankment no more than thirty feet high, a weird forced perspective, the moonlight, the fog swirling—that somehow drew the whole city into the fantasy world. “Come on,” he said, taking my hand as we descended into the valley. A ruined rotunda rose out of a mound of rubble. A satyr played the panpipe and a centaur lay sleeping against a broken wall. It was hard to believe it was all made of snow. On the wall, sculpted in bas-relief, was the famous judgment: Paris, a teenaged version of Rodin’s Thinker, leaning forward as he sat on a boulder; the three goddesses preening; the golden apple in the boy’s hand.

“Now look behind the wall,” Aki said.

I saw a cave hollowed out of the side of the embankment. At its entrance, sitting in the same attitude as the bas-relief, was a three-dimensional Paris; beyond, inside the cave, you could make out three figures, their faces turned away.

“But—” I said. “You can’t see the tableau from the spectator’s ramp! At best, you’d see the back of Paris’s head, the crook of Athena’s arm. You can only see the relief on the ruined wall.”

“But that is what this sculpture is all about, Marie,” Aki said. He was talking faster now, gesticulating. “I hold the mirror up to nature and within the mirror there’s another mirror that mirrors the mirrored nature I’ve created . . . reflections within reflections ... art within art. . . the truth only agonizingly, momentarily glimpsed . . . and that which is most beautiful is that which remains unseen. Come on, Marie. You will get to see my hidden world. Come. Come.”

He seized my hand. I climbed down beside him. A system of planks, concealed by snowy ridges, led to the grotto. Like a boy with an ant farm, Aki became more intense, more nervous as we neared the center of his universe. When he reached the sculpture of Paris, he became fidgety. He disregarded me completely and went up to the statue, reshaping a wrinkle in the boy’s cloak, fussing with his hair. Paris had no face yet.

Curious to see how the grand master had visualized the three beautiful goddesses, I turned away from him toward the interior of the cave. The chill deepened as I stepped away from the entrance. The tunnel appeared to descend into an infinite darkness; another illusion perhaps, a bend, a false perspective . . . unless there was really an opening into some labyrinthine underworld.

The goddesses were not finished yet. Two had no faces. The third—Hera, goddess of marital fidelity and orthodoxy—had the face of Molly Danzig.

I thought it must be some trick of the moonlight or my frazzled nerves. But it was unmistakable. I went up close. The likeness was uncanny. If the snow had started to breathe I would not have been more startled. And the eyes . . . what were they? . . . some kind of polished gemstone embedded in the snow . . . snow-moistened eyes that seemed to weep ... I could feel my heart pounding.

I backed away. Into Aki’s arms. “Jesus,” I said, “this is sick, this is morbid—”

“But I have already explained to you about beauty and transience,” Aki said softly. “I have been watching this girl ever since she started at the karaoke club; her death by violence is, how would you say it, synchronicity. Perhaps a sacrifice for giving my art the breath of life.”

Molly Danzig shook her head. I think. Her eyes shone. Or maybe caught the moonlight. She breathed. Or maybe the wind breathed into her. Or my fear. I was too scared to move for a moment and then—

“Kiss me,” he whispered. “Don’t you understand that we are both bear people? You are the first I have met.”

“No!” I twisted free from him and ran. Down the icy pathway, with the moist wind whipping at my face, past the Parthenon and the Colosseum and the Sphinx. Past the piled-up snow. Snow seeping into my sneakers and running down my neck. It was snowing again. I crossed the street. I was shivering. It was from terror, not from cold.

Jesus, I’m getting spooked by illusions, I told myself when I reached the facade of the Otani. I took a deep breath. Objectivity. Objectivity. I looked around. There was no one in sight. I stood on the steps for a moment, wondering where to get a taxi at one in the morning.

At that moment, Esmeralda and her portly aide swept through the revolving doors and glided down the steps. She was wearing a fur stole, the kind where you’d be mugged by conservationists if you tried to wear it on the street in California. She saw me and called out, “Marie, darlin’, you need a ride to your hotel?”

I nodded dumbly. A limousine pulled up. We piled in.

As we started to move down the street, I saw him again. Standing at the edge of the park. Staring intently at us. Sketching. Sketching.

2

Bear people—

When I was a child I saw my grandfather speaking to bears.

The hotel I was staying at was a second-class ryokan, a traditional-style hotel, because I wanted to get the real flavor of the Japanese way of life. The smell of tatami. The masochistic voyeurism of communal bathing. I tossed and turned on the futon and wished for a water bed in San Mateo. And the roar of the distant surf. But my dreams were not of California.

In my dream I was a winchinchala again. In my dream was my father’s shack. Midnight and the chill wind whining through the broken pane. I’m twisting on the pee-stained mattress on the floor. Maybe there’s a baby crying somewhere. A damp hand covers my mouth.

“Gotta see to the baby, ate. ” I’m whispering.

“Igmu yelo,” says my father. It’s only a cat. The baby’s shrieking at the top of his lungs. Dad crushes me between his thighs. Even his sweat is turning to ice. I ooze through his fingers. I run down stairs that lead down down down down caverns down down to—

“Don’t!”

From the dirt road that runs alongside the frozen creek next to the outhouse you can see a twisted mountain just past the edge of the Badlands. The top is sheared off. I wish myself up to the ledge where I’m going to stand naked in the wind and I’m going to see visions and know everything that’s to come and I’m going to stand and become a frozen woman like the other women who have stood there and dreamed until they dreamed themselves into pillars of red and yellow stone.

“Tunkashila!” I’m screaming. “Grandpa!”

I’m running from the wind that’s my dad’s breath reeking of mniwakan.

Suddenly I know that the man who’s chasing me is a bear. I don’t look back but I can feel his shadow pressing down on me, on the snow. I’m running to my grandfather because I know I’ll be safe with him, he’ll draw a circle in the ground and inside everything will be warm and far from danger and he’ll put down his pipe inside the sacred circle and say to the bear: Be still, my son, be still.

I’m running from the cold but I might as well run from myself. I’m going to be frozen right into the mountain like all the other women from now back to the beginning of the universe, women dancing in a slow circle around the dying fire. I’m running through the tunnel that becomes—

The tunnel beneath the sea. I’m riding the bullet train, crossing to Hokkaido island, to the Japan no one knows, the Japan of wide open spaces and desolate snowy peaks and spanking-new cities that have no souls. I’m staring out as the train shrieks, staring at the concrete cavern. I see Molly Danzig’s eyes and I wonder if they’re real, I wonder if Aki has plucked them from the corpse and buried them in the snow woman’s face.

The frozen woman shakes her head. Her eyes are deep circles drawn in blood. “No, ate, no, ate,” I whisper.

Be still, my son, my grandfather says to the bear who rears up over the pavilion of frozen women. My grandfather gives me honey from a wooden spoon. He puts his pipe back in his mouth and blows smoke rings at the bear, who growls a little and then slinks, cowed, back into the snowy forest.

Circles. Circles. I’m running in circles. There’s no way out. The tunnel has twisted back on itself. I will turn to snow.

Molly Danzig’s card: an apartment building a few blocks west of the Sapporo Brewery. It was about a fifteen-minute ride on the subway from my ryokan. The air was permeated with the smell of hops. Snow piled against a Coke machine with those slender Japanese Coke cans. At the corner, a robocop directed traffic. Its metal arms were heaped with snow. The first time I’d seen one of those things I’d thought it must be a joke; my Tokyo guide told me, self-importantly, that they’d had them for twenty years.

The afternoon was gray. The sky and the apartment building were the same dead shade, gray gray gray.

I took the elevator to the tenth floor. I don’t know what I expected to find. I told myself, Hey, sister, you’re a reporter, maybe there is a gag order on this story now but it won’t last out the week. I had my little Sure Shot in my purse just in case.

The hall: shag carpet, dull modern art by the elevator. This apartment building could be anywhere. The color scheme was nouveau “Miami Vice.” I followed the apartment numbers down the corridor. Hers, 17A, should be at the end. There it was with the door ajar. An old man in overalls was painting the door.

Painting out the apartment number. Painting out Molly's name. A brushstroke could obliterate a life.

I pushed my way past him into the apartment. I’d had a notion of what Molly’s place would look like. Molly was always laughing so I imagined there’d be outrageous posters or funky furniture. She loved to talk about men—I don’t—so I imagined some huge and blatant phallic statue standing in the middle of the room. It wasn’t like that at all. It was utterly still.

The windows were wide open. It was chillier here than outside. A wind was sighing through the living room and the tatami floor was peppered with snow. No furniture. No Chippendales pinups on the walls. The wind picked up a little. Snowflakes flecked my face.

The kitchen: two bowls of cold tea on the counter. The stove was still lit. I turned it off. A half-eaten piece of sushi lay in a blue-and-white plate. I took a few snapshots. I wondered if the police had come by to dust the tea bowls for prints.

I heard a sound. At first I thought it must be the wind. The wind blew harder now and behind the sighing I could hear someone humming. A woman.

I stepped into the living room. Snow seeped through my sneakers. I was shivering. It was a contralto voice, eerie, erotic. I could hear water dripping, too. It came from behind a shoji screen door. A bedroom, I supposed.

I knew I was going to have to go in. I steeled myself and slid the shoji open.

Snowflakes whirled. The wind was really howling here. Through a picture window I could see the Sapporo Brewery and the grid of the city, regular as graph paper, and snowy mountains far beyond it. I smelled stale beer on the snow that settled on my cheeks.

The humming grew louder. A bathroom door was ajar. Water dripped.

“Molly?”

I could feel my heart pounding. I flung the bathroom door wide open.

“Why—Marie darlin’—I sure wasn’t expecting you.” Esmeralda looked up at me from the bathtub, soaping herself lazily.

“You knew who she was the whole time,” I said.

It s my business to know that, hon,” she said. “Not too many American citizens in Sapporo, as you might have noticed, but I keep tabs on ’em all. Hand me that washcloth? Pretty please?”

I did so numbly. Why had she asked me who the dead woman was if she already knew her? “You tricked me!”

In diplomacy school, Marie, they teach you to let the other person do all the talking. Oftentimes they end up digging their own grave that way.”

“But what are you doing here?”

“This is my apartment. Molly Danzig used to sublet. I’ve got a suite in the consulate I usually end up crashing out at, but the hot water in our building never works right.”

She reached for a towel and slid out of the tub. She steamed; she was firm and magnificent and had a way of looking fully clothed even when she was naked, I guessed it was her diplomatic comportment. The Lakota are a modest people. I was embarrassed.

“Believe me, this ain’t St. Louis. I mean, girl,” she said, reaching for the hair dryer, “here’s me, on a GS salary with perks up the wazoo, housing allowance, no mouths to feed ... but if it weren’t for all those receptions with all that free food, I’d be lining up at a fucking soup kitchen. Let’s forget this and just go shopping somewhere, Marie.”

“All right.” I couldn’t see where I could go with the story at this point. I had three or four pieces, but they didn’t seem to fit together maybe they didn't even belong in the same puzzle. Perhaps I just needed to spend a mindless afternoon buying souvenirs.

Esmeralda drove me to the Tanuki-koji arcade, a labyrinthine underground mall that starts somewhere in the middle of town and snakes over and under, taking in the train station and the basement of the Otani Prince. She parked in a loading zone (“Gaimusho tags, darlin’—they’re not going to tow any of us diplomats, no way!”) and although it was afternoon, we descended into a world of neon night.

When you’re confused and pushed to the limits of your endurance and you think you’re going to crack up, sometimes shopping is the only cure. I never went shopping when I was a kid. Yes, sometimes we’d take the pickup and lurch toward Belvedere or Wall, where at least you could watch the mechanical jackalopes for 25¢ or gaze at the eighty-foot fake dinosaur as it reared up from the knee-high snow. Shopping was a vice I learned from JAPs and WASPs in Berkeley. But I had learned well. I could shop with passion. So could Esmeralda. It was an hour or two before I realized that, for her as well as me, the ability to shop effusively was little more than a defense mechanism. As we warmed to each other a little, I could see that she spoke two different languages, with separate lexicons of gesture and facial expression; they were as different as English and Lakota were for my parents, except they were both English, and she could slide back and forth between them with ease.

We moved from corridor to corridor, past little noodle stands with their glass cases of plastic food in front, past I Love Kitty emporia and kimono rental stores and toy stores guarded by mechanical Godzillas, past vending machines that dispensed slender cans of Sapporo beer and iced coffee. People shuffled purposefully by. The concrete alleyways were slick with mush from above ground. Glaring neons blended into chiaroscuro.

By six or so we were laden down with shopping bags. Junk mostly—fans, hapi coats, orientalia for my apartment in Oakland, postcards showing the Ainu in their native costume, with ritual tattoos and fur and beads—not that there were any to be seen in the antiseptic environs of Sapporo.

“What do you know about the Ainu?” I asked Esmeralda.

“They’re wild people. Snow people, kind of like Eskimos maybe—they worship bears, have shamanistic rituals—only for tourists—the Japanese forced them all to take Japanese names and they can’t speak Ainu anymore.”

It was a story I knew well. My grandfather Mahtowashte had told me the same story. “I can speak to bears,” he said, “because once, when I was a boy, a bear came to me in a dream and gave me my name.” And he'd give me a piece of bread dipped in honey and Id say, Tunkashila, make it so I can get out of here . . . make it all go away. ”

“There're more Ainu around than you might think. A lot of them have interbred with the Japanese. They don’t look Ainu anymore, but . . . people still feel prejudiced. They don’t advertise, unlike our friend Aki. Most of them just try to blend in. They'd lose their social standing, their credit rating, their influence ...”

I knew all about that. I’d spent my whole life escaping, blending.

“Come on,” Esmeralda said, “time for coffee.”

We stopped at a coffee shop and squeezed ourselves into tiny armchairs and we each ordered a cup of Blue Mountain at ¥750 a pop. Tiny cups of coffee and tall glasses of spring water.

“Help me, Esmeralda,” I said. “Jesus, I’m lost.”

This isn t the place you thought it would be. ” A neon blue-and-pink reproduction of Hokusai s “Wave” flashed on and off in the window. The alley beyond was in shadow. You could hear the whoosh of the subway trains above the New Age muzak and the murmur of conversation. I wondered whether the sun had already set in the world above. “You’re thinking dainty little geishas, tea ceremonies, samurai swords . . . cute gadgets . . . crowds. And you’re on Hokkaido, which isn’t really Japan at all, which looks more like Idaho in January, where the cities are new and the people are searching for new souls ...”

“You sound like that sculptor sometimes, Esmeralda.”

“Oh, Aki. Did you fuck him yet, honey? He’s a good lay.”

I m not easy, I said testily. Actually, in a way, I was a virgin.

Oh God, I remembered the two of us in the cavern, I remembered the eyes of Molly Danzig, I remembered how he’d stared straight into my eyes, as though he were stalking me. A hairy beast of a man. Lumbering. A grizzly bear tracking me through the snow.

“Marie? Are you all right?” She sipped her coffee. “They don’t give refills either—five bucks and no fucking refill.” She drained it. “But you know, you should get to know him. You know how hard it is for a red-blooded American girl to get laid here? These people don’t even know you’re there—oh, they’re polite and all, but they know we’re not human. Blacks, Indians, whites, Ainu, we all look alike to them ... we all niggers together. Besides, everyone here knows that all Americans have AIDS.”

“AIDS?” I said.

Stick around here, hon, and you 11 know how a Haitian feels back home. Hey, I screwed Mayuzumi once—but I might as well have been one of those inflatable dolls.” She laughed, a bit too loudly. A schoolgirl at the next table tittered and covered her mouth with her hand. “Molly Danzig now ... he liked her a lot . . . actually he was paying her rent, you know. He liked to have her around whenever he needed to indulge his secret vice ... I guess he thought it was kind of like bestiality. ”

“Molly was—”

“Shit, darlin’, we all whores, one way or another!” she added. I felt I was being backed into a corner.

“Aki frightens me.”

“Don’t he! But he’s the only man in this whole godforsaken country who has the common decency not to roll over and fall asleep right after they come.”

The neon wave flashed on and off. Suddenly he was there. In the window. The blue-and-pink light playing over his animal features. “It’s him! I whispered.

Aki’s eyes sparkled. He had his sketch pad. His hand was constantly moving in tiny meticulous strokes.

“What does he want?” I said. “Let’s get out of here before—”

“What do you mean, hon? I told him to meet us here. Aki was closing his sketch pad and moving into the coffee shop. A waitress hopped to attention and bowed and rapped out a ceremonial greeting like a robot. His gaze had not once left my face.

“But—he knew her, don’t you see? He knows you—he knows me and she s dead and one of the three goddesses in his sculpture has her face ... and the other two are blank ...”

Esmeralda laughed. It was the first time I had ever voiced this suspicion . . . or even admitted to myself that I had a suspicion. I realized how preposterous it must sound.

I felt ashamed. I looked away. Stared into the brown circle of my coffee cup as though I could hypnotize myself into the phantom zone. I could hear his footsteps, though. Careful, stalking footsteps.

He stood above me. I could feel his breath. It smelled of honey and cigarettes. He said, “I understand, Marie. It’s spooky there in the moonlight. You are in the middle of a city of a million people, yet inside my snow pavilion you are also inside my art, a sculpted creation. It’s frightening.” He touched my neck. Its warmth shot through me. I tingled.

“It was nothing to do with you,” I found myself saying. “It’s something else— out of my past—that I thought I’d forgotten.”

“Ah,” he said. Instead of moving his hand, he began to caress my neck in a slow, circular motion. I had a momentary vision of him snapping off my head. I wanted to panic but instead I found myself relaxing under his gentle pressure . . . sinking into a well of dark eroticism ... I was trembling all over.

“Culture tonight!” Aki said. “A special performance of a new bunraku play, Sarome-sama, put on by the Mayuzumi foundation for the edification of the . . . foreign dignitaries.”

“Bunraku?” The last thing I wanted was to go to a puppet show with him and Esmeralda. I had heard of bunraku in my Japanese culture class at Berkeley—it was all yodeling and twanging and wooden figures in expensive costumes strutting across the stage with excruciating elegance.

But she wouldn’t hear of it. “Darlin’, everyone will be there. And this is a really weird new show . . . it’s the traditional puppet theater, sure, but the script s adapted from Oscar Wilde’s Salome—translated into a medieval Japanese setting oh, honey, you’ll never see anything like it.”

“But my clothes—” I said. I felt like a puppet myself.

“And what,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, “are credit cards for, girl?”

Weird did not begin to describe the performance we witnessed at the Bunka Kaikan cultural center. The weirdness began with the opening speeches, one by Dr. Mayuzumi, the other by a cultural attache of the German Embassy, which belabored endlessly the concept of cultural syncretism and the union of East and West. What more fitting place than Hokkaido, an island so rich in cross-cultural resonances, whose population was in equal parts influenced by the primitive culture of the enigmatic Ainu, by Japan, by Russia, and—in this modern world— by—ah—the “Makudonarudo Hambaga” chain . . .

Polite laughter; I had a vision of Ronald McDonald prancing around with a samurai sword.

I thought the preamble would end soon; it turned out to be interminable. But they had promised a vast buffet afterwards at the expense of the Mayuzumi Foundation. I saw Mayuzumi himself, sitting alone in a box on the upper tier, like royalty. Esmeralda and I were near the front, next to the aisle, with Aki between us. We were both wearing Hanae Mori gowns that we’d splurged on at the underground arcade.

The lights dimmed. The twang of a shamisen rent the air; then a spotlight illumined an ancient man in black who narrated, chanted, and uttered all the characters’ lines in a wheezing singsong. We were in for cultural syncretism indeed; the set—Herod’s palace in Judaea—had been transformed into a seventeenth-century Japanese castle, King Herod and his manipulative wife into a shogun and a geisha, and Salome into a princess with hair down to the floor. John the Baptist, for whom, in Oscar Wilde’s revisionist text, Salome was to conceive an illicit and finally necrophiliac passion, was a Jesuit missionary. The centerpiece of the stage was the massive cistern in which John lay imprisoned. It was such a fascinating interpretation that it was hard to remember that I was sitting next to a man whom I suspected of murder.

In bunraku, the puppeteers are dressed in black and make no attempt to conceal themselves as they operate their characters. There were three operators to each of the principals. It took only minutes for the puppeteers to fade into the background ... it made you think there was something to this ninja art of invisibility. The characters flitted about the stage, their eyelids fluttering, craning their necks and arching the palms of their hands, shrieking in paroxysms of emotion.

An American audience wouldn’t be this silent, I thought.

The eerie rhythms entranced me. The rasp of the shamisen, the shrill, sustained wailing of the flute, the hollow tock-tock-tock of the woodblock did not meld into a soothing, homophonous texture as in Western music. Each sound was an individual strand, stubbornly dissonant. The narrator sang, or sometimes spoke in a lisping falsetto. In one scene, as Salome, his voice crescendoed to a passionate shriek that seemed the very essence of a woman’s desire, a woman’s frustration. He knows me, I thought ... he has seen me running from my father, bursting with terror and love. I could hardly believe that a man could portray such feelings.

At the back of the auditorium, aficionados burst into uproarious cheering. From the context I guessed it was the moment when Salome demands to kiss John’s mouth and he rebuffs her, and idea of demanding his severed head first germinates in her mind ... for the Salome puppet threw herself across the floor of the stage, the three operators manipulating wildly as she flailed about in savage mimicry of a woman’s despair.

Jesus, I thought. I’ve been there.

I looked at Aki and found that he was looking behind us, up at Mayuzumi’s box. As applause continued, Mayuzumi made a little gesture with his right index finger. Aki whispered in Esmeralda’s ear. She said, “Gotta go, darlin’—be right back.” The two of them slipped into the aisle.

Was there some kinky triangle menage between them? I could see Aki and Esmeralda in leather and Mayuzumi all tied up—the slave master playing at being the slave . . . Esmeralda wasn’t inhibited like me. Maybe they had become so aroused they’d slipped away to one of those notorious coffee shops, the ones with the private booths.

I didn’t want to think about it too much, and after a while I became thoroughly engrossed in the play. I couldn’t follow the Japanese—it was all archaic—but I knew the original play, and the whole thing was in such a slow-motion style that you had plenty of time to figure things out.

There was the dance of the seven veils—not the Moroccan restaurant variety, but a sinuous ballet accompanied by drum and flute, and a faster section with jerky movements of the head and eyebrows and the arms obscenely caressing the air . . . the seven veils were seven bridal kimonos of embroidered brocade . . . the demand for the saint’s severed head with which to satiate Sarome-sama’s lust ... the executioner, his katana glittering in the arclight, descending into the cistern ... I gulped . . . how could they be wood and cloth when I could feel their naked emotions tearing loose from them? A drum began to pound, step by pounding step as the headsman disappeared into the oubliette.

The drums crescendoed ... the flute shrilled ... the shamisen snarled ... I heard screaming. It was my own.

A head was sailing out of the cistern, shooting up toward the stage flies ... a human head . . . Esmeralda’s head.

For a split second I saw her torso pop from the cistern. Blood came spurting up. The puppets’ kimonos were soaking. The torso thrashed and sprayed the front seats with blood. The claque began to applaud.

O Jesus Jesus it’s real—

The head thudded onto the stage. Its lifeless eyes stared up into mine. I was the only one screaming. Wildly I looked about me. People turned away from me. It was as if I were somehow to blame because I had screamed. An announcement started coming over a loudspeaker. There was no panic. The audience was filing slowly out by row number, moving with purposeful precision, like ants. No panic, no shrieks, no nervous laughter. It was numbing. Jesus, I thought, they’re aliens, they’re incapable of feeling anything. Only the foreign guests seemed distraught. They stood in little huddles, blocking the traffic as the rest of them politely oozed around them. The stagehands were scurrying across the stage, moving props about.

The Salome puppet flopped against the castle walls with its doll-neck wrung into an impossible angle.

I stared up at Mayuzumi’s box. Mayuzumi was gone.

Esmeralda’s head was gone. They were mopping up the blood. I could hear a police siren in the distance.

Then, up the center aisle, framed in the doorway between two columns of departing theatergoers, I saw Aki Ishii appear as if in a puff of smoke.

Sketching.

Sketching me.

Jesus Christ—maybe he’d lured her away to kill her! I couldn’t control my rage.

I started elbowing my way toward him. The audience backed away. Oh yes. We gaijin all have AIDS. Aki backed slowly toward the theater entrance. There was a shopping bag on his arm. The doors were flung wide and the snow was streaming down behind him and I was shivering in my Hanae Mori designer dress that wasn’t designed for snow or serial killers.

He backed into the street. The crowd parted. Men with stretchers trotted into the theater and a police siren screeched. I started to pummel him with my fists.

“Am I next?” I screamed. “Is that it? Are you sucking out our souls one by one to feed your art that’s going to turn to mush by Friday?”

He held his hands up. “It’s not like that at all,” he said.

The wind howled. I was hysterical by now. Fuck these people and their propriety. I shouted at a passing policeman, “Here’s your goddamn sex murderer!” He ignored me. “That shopping bag! The head’s in the shopping bag!” I tried to wrest it from him. I could feel something squishy inside it. There was blood on everything.

“How could you be so wrong?” Aki said. “How could you fail to understand me? I told you the truth. It’s not me—it’s—it’s—” His eyes glowed. That odor of honey and tobacco again . . . startled, I remembered where I’d smelled it before . . . on my grandfather’s breath. I kept on hitting him with my fists but my blows were weak, dampened by snow and by my own bewilderment. You’ve got no right, I was thinking, no right to bring me those bad dreams ... no right to remind me . . .

He grabbed my wrists. I struggled. His sketch pad flew into the snow. The wind flipped the pages and I saw face after face . . . beautiful women . . . beautiful and desolate ... my own face. “My art,” Aki said. There was despair in his voice. “You knocked my art out of my—” He let go abruptly. Scurried after the sketch pad, his black duster flailing in the wind like a Dracula cape. He found it at last. He cried to me across the shrieking wind: “We’re both bear people. You should have understood.” And he ran off into the darkness. He vanished almost instantly, like one of those puppeteers with their ninja arts.

It was only then that I realized that my dress was dripping with blood. It was caking against my arms, my neck. The wind and the sirens were screaming all at once.

No one’s going to ignore this killing, I thought. A consular officer ... a public place ... a well-known artist hanging around near the scene of both crimes . . .

But as I watched the audience leaving in orderly rows, as I watched the policemen solemnly discoursing in hushed tones, I realized that they might well ignore what had happened.

I was going to have to go to someone important. Someone powerful. Power was all these people understood.

3

Midnight and the snow went on piling. I walked. Snow smeared against the blood on my clothes. I walked. I had some notion of finding my way back to the ryokan, making a phone call to the Tokyo office, maybe even to Oakland. I could barely see where I was going.

Bear people . . .

No one in the streets. The wind whistled. Sushi pennants flapped against restaurant entrances. I breathed bitter liquid cold. At last I saw headlights ... a taxi.

By two in the morning I was outside the Mayuzumi estate. There were wrought-iron gates. The gates had been left open and the driveway had been recently shoveled. He let me off in front of the mansion.

A servant woman let me in, rubbing her eyes, showed me where to leave my shoes, and fetched clean slippers. She swabbed at my bloodstains with a hot towel. Then she handed me a clean yukata and watched while I tried to slip it on over my ruined gown.

It was clear that I—or someone—was expected. Perhaps there was a local geisha club that made house calls.

“Mayuzumi-san wa doko—?” I began.

“Ano . . . o-furo ni desu.”

She led me up to the steps to the tatami-covered foyer. She slid aside a shoji screen, then another and another. We walked down a succession of corridors—I walked, rather, and the maid shuffled, with tiny muffled steps, pausing here to fuss with a flower arrangement, there to incline her head toward a statue of the Amida Buddha. Beyond the Buddha image was a screen of lacquered wood on which were painted erotic designs. She yanked the screen aside and then I was face-to-face with Dr. Mayuzumi . . . naked, sitting in a giant bath, being methodically massaged by a young girl who sang as she kneaded.

He was a huge man. He was, I could see now, remarkably hirsute, like Aki Ishii; his eyes were beady and set closely together; he squinted when he looked at me, like a bear eyeing a beehive.

Behind Dr. Mayuzumi, the shoji screens had been drawn aside. The bathroom overlooked the rock garden where Molly’s body had been. Snow gusted behind him and clouds of steam tendriled between us.

“Ah,” he said, “Marie Wounded Bird, is it not? The reporter. I had thought we might meet in less . . . informal surroundings, but I am glad you are here. Tomichan! Food for our guest! You will join me for a light supper,” he said to me. It was an order.

“You have to help me, Dr. Mayuzumi,” I said. “I know who the killer is.” He raised an eyebrow. With a gesture, he indicated that I should join him in the bath. I knew that the Japanese do not find mixed bathing lewd, but I had never done it before; I balked. Two maids came and began to disrobe me. They were politely insistent, and the hot water seemed more and more enticing, and I found myself being scrubbed with pumice stone and led down the tiled steps . . . the water was so hot it hurt to move. I let it soak into my pores. I watched the snowflakes dance around the stone lantern in the cloister at the edge of the rock garden.

“No one will do anything,” I said. “But there’s a pattern. The victims are white and black . . . people who don’t belong to the Yamato race . . . maybe that’s why none of you people think it’s important. The victims are all subhuman . . . like me . . . and I think I’m next, don’t you see? The three goddesses ... the Judgement of Paris . . . and the killer is subhuman too ... an Ainu.”

“What are you trying to say?” Mayuzumi said. “You would not be attempting to pin the blame on Aki Ishii, the grand master of snow sculpting?”

I gasped. “You knew all along. And you knew that I would come here.”

Just as the heat was becoming unbearable, one of the serving maids fetched a basket of snow from outside. She knelt down at the edge of the bath and began to sprinkle it over my face, my neck. I shuddered with agony and delight. Another maid held out a lacquerware tray in front of me and began to feed me with chopsticks.

It was a lobster salad—that is, the lobster was still alive, its spine broken, the meat scooped out of its tail, diced with cucumbers and a delicate shoyu and vinegar dressing, and replaced in the splayed tail-shell with such artistry that the lobster continued to wriggle, it claws clattering feebly against the porcelain, its antennae writhing, its stalk-eyes glaring. I had already started to chew the first mouthful before I saw that my food was not quite dead. But it was too delicious to stop. And knowing I was draining the creature’s life force only heightened the frisson. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Ah,” Dr. Mayuzumi said, “you’re apologizing to the lobster for—”

“Taking its life,” I said. Wasn’t that what Aki had said about the shrimp? “How well you understand us.” I was conscious of a terrible sadness in him. There was more to him than just being a millionaire with a finger in every pie. “I, too, am sorry, Marie Wounded Bird.” He ordered the maid to remove the lacquer trays. “Yet you did not come to dine, but to accuse.”

“Yes.”

“You have proof, I hope; a man of Mr. Ishii’s standing is not indicted lightly. His reputation . . . indeed, the reputation of the Snow Festival itself. . . would be at stake. You can understand why I sought to discourage the press from . . . ah . . . untimely revelations.”

“But he’s killing people!” I said.

“Mr. Ishii is a great artist. He is very precious to us. His foibles—”

I recoiled. “How can you—”

“In the grand scheme, in the great circle of birth and rebirth, what can a few lives matter?” he said. “But Mr. Ishii’s art. . . does matter. And now you are here, blowing across our fragile world like kamikaze, the wind of the gods, irresistible and unstoppable. You would melt us down, just as the spring sun will soon melt the exquisite snow sculptures which 1.6 million tourists are about to see.”

I couldn’t believe this. It was the most familiar line of bullshit in the world. I was soaking in 110°, in the nude, eating live animals and listening to the Mayor of Amity shtick right out of Jaws I. My own life was on the line, for God’s sake!

I remembered Aki’s eyes ... the way he had run his fingers along the nape of my neck ... his long dark hair flecked with snow ... the quiet intensity with which he spoke of beauty and transience and voiced his resentment of the conquering Japanese. Could he really be one of those Henry Lee Lucas types? I knew he had had sex with Molly and Esmeralda. I knew he had been tracking me. Sketching. Sketching. Smelling of tobacco and honey, like my grandfather.

God I wanted him and I hated myself for wanting him. For a moment, standing in the snow amid his creation, listening to him—Jesus, I think I loved him.

“Goddammit, I can prove it,” I said. “I’ll show you fucking body parts. I’ll show you eyeballs buried in snow and skeletons under the ice.”

I was doomed to betray him.

“All right,” said Dr. Mayuzumi. “I feared it would come to this.”

The limousine moved rapidly toward downtown Sapporo. We sat in the backseat each hunched into an opposite corner. It was still snowing. We didn’t speak until we were within a few blocks of Odori Park.

At last, Dr. Mayuzumi said, “Why?”

I said, “I don’t know, really, Dr. Mayuzumi. Maybe he’s sending a message to the Japanese people . . . about discrimination, about the way you treat minorities. ” I didn’t want to think of Aki just as an ordinary mad slasher. We had too much in common for that. But there was just too much evidence linking him to Molly and Esmeralda . . . and me. Four minorities. Lepers in a land that prized homogeneity above all things. I had a desperate need to see the killings as some political act . . . it might not justify them, but I could understand such killings. Like the Battle of Little Big Horn . . . like the second siege at Wounded Knee. “Politics,” I said bitterly.

“Perhaps.” He did not look into my eyes.

The chauffeur parked at the edge of the park.

We began walking toward the “Judgment of Paris” tableau. Dr. Mayuzumi strode swiftly through the slush, his breath clouding about his face. I struggled to keep up. I became angrier as we walked. I had come to see him with information and now it seemed he had known all along, that his coming with me now was merely the working out of some preordained drama.

The full moon lengthened our shadows. Even the snow-shoveling workmen were gone; the empty trucks were parked in neat rows along the Odori.

Dr. Mayuzumi strode past the snow Sphinx and the Pyramids of Gizeh; I trudged after him, awkward in the short coat that one of the servants had lent me.

I was determined not to let him take the lead. I brushed by him. I was furious now. It seemed that this whole town had been built on lies. Snow gusted and flurried. Ice-shards lanced my face. I walked. Snow metropolises rose and fell around me. I didn’t look at them. I tried to quell the cold with sheer anger.

We passed the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, the icy steps of a Babylonian ziggurat, a Mexican pyramid atop which sat a gargoyle god ripping the heart out of a hapless child. Moonlight fringed the ice with spectral colors. Had the buildings grown taller somehow? Were the sculptures pressing in, narrowing the pathway, threatening to crash down over me? A skull-shaped mountain grinned down. Trick of the light, I told myself. I stared ahead. My shoes were waterlogged.

At length we came to Mt. Ida. I marched uphill. They could fix the footprints later. Dr. Mayuzumi followed. We crossed the terrace with its classical friezes, its nymphs and shepherds gesturing with Poussin-like languor.

In a moment we stood inside Ishii’s secret kingdom, the cave that the audience could not see. The mirror of mirrored mirrors.

There had been more tunneling. The walls were lit by reflected moonlight and the cave seemed to stretch forever into blackness, though I knew it was an illusion. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are easily fooled by misdirecting signposts... a highway median that leads to the edge of a cliff ... a tunnel painted onto the side of a sandstone mountain. It seemed we stood at the entry to an infinite labyrinth.

Dr. Mayuzumi took out a flashlight and shined it on the interior of the cave.

There were the three statues. Molly Danzig stood with her arms outstretched. It was her—but dead she was more beautiful somehow, more perfect . . . the statue of Athena had the face of Esmeralda O’Neil. She glowered; she was anger personified. It was just as I had imagined. The third goddess had no face yet . . . and neither did the boy Paris who was to choose between them.

I could be beautiful too, I thought. Cold and beautiful. I was tempted. I told myself: I hate the cold. I hate my childhood. That’s why I went away to California.

Dr. Mayuzumi said, “Look at their eyes ... as though they were still alive . . . look at them.”

Molly’s eyes: a glint of blue in the gloom. They stared straight into mine. Esmeralda’s looked out beyond the entrance. The Athena statue held a spear and a gorgon-faced shield. God, they were beautiful. But I knew the deadly secret of their verisimilitude.

“How long can the cold preserve a human organ, an eye, for example?” I said. “Doesn’t this snow-clad beauty hide death? Tell me there are no human bones beneath ...”

“You would destroy this masterwork?”

It was too late. Before he could stop me I had plunged my fingers into Molly’s face. I wanted to pull the jellied eyeballs out of the skull, to thrust them in Dr. Mayuzumi’s face.

The face caved in. There was nothing in my fists but snow, flaking, crumbling, melting against the warmth of my hands. And then, when the snow had melted, two globes of glass and plastic. Two marbles.

I looked at Dr. Mayuzumi. His look of indignation turned to mocking laughter.

All my resentment exploded inside me. I smashed my fists against the statues of my two friends. Snow drenched me. The statues shattered. There were no bones beneath, no squishy organs. Only snow. Tears came to my eyes and melted the snow that had clung to my cheeks.

“A gaijin philistine with a stupid theory,” said Mayuzumi.

I beat my arms against the empty snow, I buried myself elbow deep. I wept. I had understood nothing at all. The marbles slipped from my fingers and skated over a stretch of ice.

I felt Dr. Mayuzumi’s hand on my shoulder. He pulled me from the slush. There was so much sadness in him. “And I thought you understood us . . .”

He gripped me and would not let go. His hands held no comfort. His fingernails dug into my flesh . . . like claws.

“I thought you understood us!” he rasped. His teeth glinted in reflected moonlight . . . glistened with drool ... his eyes narrowed ... his mouth smelled of honey and tobacco.

I thought you understood us . . . what did that mean?

And all at once I knew. When he had greeted me in the bath, when I mumbled I’m sorry at the writhing lobster, had he not said How well you understand us? I had completely missed it before . . . “You’re an Ainu too, one who’s been able to pass for a Yamato,” I said. “You’ve blended with the Japanese . . . you’ve climbed up to a position of power by hiding from yourself. . . and it’s driven you mad!”

“I’m sorry . . . oh, I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was barely human. Still he would not let go. In the dark I could not see his face.

“Why are you apologizing?” I said softly.

“I need your soul.”

Then I realized that he was going to kill me.

The flashlight illuminated him for a moment. His face was caving in on itself. Dark hair was sprouting up through the skin. I felt bristles push up from his palms and prick my shoulders. I was bleeding. I struggled. His nose was collapsing into a snout . . .

“Bear people!” I whispered.

He could not speak. Only an animal growl escaped his throat. He had become my father. I was caught inside the nightmare that had haunted me since I was winchinchala. I kicked and screamed. He roared. As his body wrenched into a new shape, I slipped from his grasp. The cavern shook and rumbled. Snow crashed over the entrance. I could hear more snow piling up. The cave was contracting like a womb. We were sealed in. The whine of the wind subsided.

The flashlight slid across the snow. I dived after it. I waved it in the air like a light saber. Its beam was the only illumination. It moved across the eyes . . . the teeth ... I could smell the fetid breath of a carnivore. I was choking on it. “What are you?” I screamed.

He roared and the walls shook and I knew he no longer had the power of human speech. He began to lumber toward me. There was no way to escape. Except by stepping backwards . . . backwards into the optical illusion that suggested caves within caves, worlds within worlds . . .

I backed into the wall. The wall pulsated. It seemed alive. The very snow was living, breathing. The wall turned into a fine mist like Alice’s mirror... I could hear the tempest raging, but it was infinitely far away.

I was at the edge of an icy incline that extended downward to darkness.

The bear-creature that had been Dr. Mayuzumi fell down on all fours. He pounced. I tripped over something ... a plastic bag ... its contents spilled onto my face. In the torchlight I saw that it was Esmeralda’s head. The severed trachea snaked into the snow. There were no eyes. I bit down on human hair. I retched. There was blood in my throat. The bear-creature reared up. I screamed, and then I was rolling down the slope, downward, downward—

And then I was in a huge cavern running away from the were-bear my father with his rancid breath and the wind whistling through the broken windowpane and—

Darkness. I paused. Strained to listen. The bear paused, too. I could hear him breathing, a savage purr deep as the threshold of human hearing, making the very air vibrate.

I swung the flashlight in an arc and saw—

The fangs, the knife-sharp claws poised to strike and—

There was music. The dull thud of a drum. The shriek of the bamboo flute and the twang of the shamisen, and—

The bear sprang! The claws ripped my cheeks. I was choking on my own blood.

I fell and fell and fell and my mouth was stopped with snow and I was numb all over from the cold and I was sliding down an embankment with the bear toying with me like a cat with a mouse and I screamed over and over, screamed and tasted blood and snow and—

I heard a voice: Be still, my son. The voice of my grandfather.

I was slipping away from the bear’s grasp.

Into a circle of cold blue light.

In the circle stood Aki Ishii. He was naked. His body was completely covered in tattoos: strange concentric designs like Neolithic pottery. His long black hair streamed in a wind that seemed to emanate from his lips and circle around him; I felt no wind. Smoke rose from a brazier, fragrant with tobacco and honey.

“Tunkashila . . .” I murmured. I crawled toward him. Clutched at his feet in supplication.

The bear reared up at the edge of the circle. In the pale light I saw him whole for the first time. His face still betrayed something of Mayuzumi; his body still contained the portly outline of the magnate; but his eyes burned with that pure unconscionable anger that comes only in dreams.

“Be still,” said Aki Ishii. “You may not enter the circle. It is I who am the shaman of the bear people. You cannot gain true power by taking men’s souls; you must give in equal measure of your own.”

And then I saw, reflected in the wall of ice behind us, miragelike images of Molly Danzig and Esmeralda O’Neil. They were half human, half cave painting. They too were naked and covered with tattoos. They had become Ainu, but I saw that they were also my people . . . they were also the Greek goddesses. . . Molly, who had fled from her home and herself and sought solace in the arms of strangers, had been incarnated as domesticity itself; Esmeralda, whose diplomatic career belied her bellicose nature, had become the goddess of war. What was I then? There was only one goddess left: the goddess of love.

But I was incapable of love, because of what my father had done. I hated him, but he was the only man I had ever loved.

Three musical instruments materialized in the smoke of the incense burner. Molly plucked the shamisen of domestic tranquility out of the air; Esmeralda seized the war drum. One instrument remained: the phallic bamboo flute of desire. I took it and held it to my lips. Of its own accord it began to play, a melody of haunting and erotic sweetness. And the drum pounded and the shamisen sounded . . . three private musics that could not blend . . . until we faced the bear together.

“My son,” said Aki Ishii softly, “you must now reap the fruits of your own rage.”

The bear exploded. His head split down the middle and the mingled brains and blood gushed up like lava from a volcano. His belly burst open and his entrails writhed like snakes. The drumbeats were syncopated with the cracking of the bear’s spine. Shards of tibia shredded the flesh of his legs. Blood spattered the ceiling. The walls ran red. Blood rained down on us. Each piece of the bear ate away at itself, as though dissolving in acid. The smoke from the brazier turned into a blood-tinged mist. And all the while Aki Ishii stood, immobile, his face a mask of tragedy and regret.

I didn’t stop playing until the last rag of blood-drenched fur had been consumed. Small puddles of blood were siphoning into the snow. The images of my dead friends were swirling into the mist that was the honey-tinged breath of Aki Ishii, shaman of the bear people. Only the eyes remained, resting side by side on an altar of snow. Aki nodded. I put down the flute and watched it disappear into the air. I knelt down and picked up the eyes. They were hard as crystal. The cold had marbled them.

“I’m sorry,” Aki said. The light was dimming.

“Are you going to kill me?” I whispered, knowing that was what an apology presaged.

“I’m not going to take anything from you that you will not give willingly,” said the snow sculptor. He took me by the hand. “The war between the dark and the light is an eternal conflict. Dr. Mayuzumi wanted what I wanted . . . but his magic is a magic of deceit. He was content with the illusion of power. But for that illusion, he had to feed on real human lives. This is not really the way of bear people.”

“The dead women—”

“Yes. I planted a piece of those women into the snow sculptures. We made love. I captured a fragment of their joy and breathed it into the snow. Dr. Mayuzumi devoured them. They were women from three races the Japanese find inferior, but each race had done what the Ainu have not done—they have fought back—the blacks and the reds against the white men, the whites against the Japanese themselves. That was what made him angry. Our people have had their souls stolen from them. By stealing a piece of each of the three women’s souls, tearing them violently from their bodies in the moment of death, he sought to give himself a soul. But a soul cannot be wrested from another person; it is a gift.” He took my other hand. And now I saw what it was that I had feared so much. I thought I had locked it up and thrown away the key, but it was still there . . . my need to be loved, my need to become myself.

“Now,” said Aki Ishii to me, “you must free yourself, and me.”

I held out the bear’s two marble eyes. He took one from me. We each swallowed an eye in a single gulp. It had no taste. It was like communion. And then he kissed me.

We made love as the light faded from the cavern, and when we emerged from the wall of ice, the statues were whole again, and the goddess of love had my face; but the face of Paris was still blank.

4

It was a beautiful festival. By night, thousands upon thousands of paper lanterns lit the way for the million and a half tourists who poured into the city for the first week of February. The deaths of two foreign women were soon forgotten. Dr. Mayuzumi’s bizarre suicide aroused much sympathy when his Ainu origins were revealed; it was only natural that a man in his position would be unable to cope with his own roots.

The death of grand master Ishii was mourned by some; but others agreed that it was only fitting for an artist to die after creating his masterpiece. He was found in the cavern, nude, gazing at the statues of the three goddesses; he had replaced the image of Paris with himself. It was agreed that he had sacrificed his life to achieve some fleeting epiphany comprehensible only to other artists, or, perhaps, other Ainu.

I can’t say I understood it at all. I had stood at the brink of some great and timeless truth, but in the end it eluded me.

It was a beautiful festival, but to me it no longer seemed to have meaning. I was there in a plastic city of right-angled boulevards, a city that had robbed the land of its soul; a city that stood over the bones of the Ainu, that mocked the dead with its games of beauty and impermanence. Like Rapid City with its concrete dinosaurs . . . like Deadwood with its mechanical cowboys and Indians battling for 250 and all eternity . . . like Mount Rushmore, forever mocking the beauty of our Black Hills by its beatification of our conquerors.

You can’t understand about being oppressed unless you’re born with it. It is something you have to carry around all the time, like soiled underwear that’s been soldered to your skin.

I know now that I’m not one of you. You own my body, but my soul belongs to the mountains, to the air, to the streams, the trees, the snow.

I think I will go back to Pine Ridge one day. Perhaps my grandfather will teach me, before he dies, the language of the bears.

I think I will even see my father. Perhaps I can be the angel of his redemption, as I think I was for Aki Ishii.

Perhaps I will even forgive him.