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:
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 . . .