The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
“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.”