Chapter 3 — Tenmaya, the Conjurer (Part 2)

That following weekend I fled the revelry of Yoiyama and the Gion Festival and crossed through the old Ōsaka no Seki checkpoint to Lake Biwa. I exited the turnstiles of Hamaōtsu Station and crossed through a green park to find water as far as the eye could see. Sitting on the edge of the breakwater and dangling my feet over the lake, I must have looked like a student going through a quarter-life crisis.

And to be honest, I was a little down.

The Tenmaya incident had earned me a tongue-lashing from Yaichirō, which included an order to remain within the confines of the Tadasu Forest. Considering that my ursine rampage through the streets had occurred in broad daylight, I couldn’t blame him for being furious with me. I knew it was my fault. That’s what made me angriest of all.

There were extenuating circumstances, though, given that I’d only challenged Tenmaya at Chujirō’s request. He and the haberdasher came to the Tadasu Forest to explain this to Yaichirō, who eventually relented on keeping me in the forest.

My rampage made the paper and the evening news, which had the effect of trumpeting my defeat to Tenmaya to every corner of the earth. I heard through the grapevine that Kinkaku and Ginkaku were gleefully spreading the story every chance they got.

“Beaten by a human, he’s a disgrace to all tanuki, without question!”

“Yes, without question!”

Of course, they never mentioned the fact that there was no other tanuki in the world who would have dared try to stand up to Tenmaya in the first place.

“You’re pathetic. How’re you just going to sit here and mope?” I murmured, gently swinging my legs.

Waves lapped softly beneath my feet, the swells glimmering dully beneath the setting summer sun, and further out the distant expanses of the vast lake blurred like a mirage. At the wharf on my left, sightseeing boats were lit up for the evening, waiting to embark. With the lake breeze whispering by, I felt as if I were a long way from home.

As I took in that lonesome, magnificent view, I suddenly thought of Benten.

Benten originally hailed from the shores of Lake Biwa. At the time that Master Akadama had carried her off, she had just been a young human girl, trudging along the snowy lakeside. But now she was a half-tengu, easily able to fly over the whole of the lake, and steadily climbing the ladder towards one day becoming a full-fledged tengu.

It’d been disappointing how she’d been absent from Kyoto for such a long time, gone to foreign shores on a whim. Once she heard about the Tenmaya incident she’d be slapping her knee with mirth, no question. That tengu cackle of hers would wipe all my mortification clean away. The thought of getting a laugh out of her thrilled me.

Whenever they’re faced with something great, tanuki always burst into laughter.

“All the world’s my oyster,” I said to myself, getting to my feet.

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The residence where the artist known as Ayameike had lived for half a century was located in a quiet neighborhood, behind which lay the ancient temple of Onjōji on Mount Nagara.

I was walking along a row of cherry trees, their new leaves silhouetted against the indigo canvas above, near where the canals of Lake Biwa tunnel beneath Mount Nagara. Dark water flowed soundlessly through the canals beneath the embankments lush with summer grass. Nestled in the quiet neighborhood was an odd house where the plants grew wild and untamed, and affixed to the stone gate was a thin wooden plaque on which was written in brushstroke the name “Ayameike”. Peering through the gate, I saw a rough trail trodden through the overgrown grass leading up to a sliding door, which glowed orange beneath the electric light. It was exactly the type of house where you’d expect a human with an affinity for tanuki to live.

“Hello?” I called after sliding the door open, but there was no response.

I went inside, padding along the wooden floorboards down the corridor. On the right I found a dining room, and beyond it was a kitchen, where a woman with an apron was running water noisily in the sink. On the left was a disorganized room containing a bureau and a low table, and sitting smack in the middle of that room was Professor Yodogawa.

The professor was staring intently at a set of tanuki pictures. He’d been smitten with them ever since he found them last month at a bar in Yontomi Kaikan, and contacted his daughter who worked at Ōtsu city hall. Since then he’d become a veritable regular at the Ayameike residence, and earned the artist’s trust.

“Evening, professor.”

“Ah, hello! Aren’t these pictures just marvelous?”

I sat down beside Professor Yodogawa and looked at a picture. It depicted a roly-poly collection of tanuki and daruma and pebbles in simple, unornamented brushstrokes. It was hard to tell the tanuki from the daruma from the pebbles, it was all so childishly drawn. As a tanuki myself, I couldn’t help but be a little miffed that the artist had put so little effort into drawing the tanuki faces.

“Well? Splendid tanuki, wouldn’t you say? A fine display of the staggering genius of Ayameike. There’s a power in looking at things. To truly look at something is to love it. It’s love for the tanuki that lets the artist draw these lines so bold and true. Each line contains the furriness, the cuteness, the softness, the sheer liberty of the tanuki!”

“This one just looks like a furry rock to me.”

“A furry rock, you say? You had better look again!”

The professor stabbed his finger at the picture, but even then all I could still only make out a pebble with hair.

“Here is depicted the luxurious fur coat of the tanuki. Certainly well fed, I should think, and what fecund droppings it must produce! But what I should call the most sublime aspect is how, cloaked in that wonderfully soft coat, the tanuki attempts to hide its unease. That would be the call of the wild, no? Even a tanuki cannot live off of cuteness alone. See how it plainly snarls, I would eat anything to survive! That is indispensable. This is its true state, its true nature, the Platonic Idea! These are the paintings of a master, shining a light on the hidden reality of the tanuki world. Hallelujah!”

“Is that what it is?” I scratched my head.

The professor suddenly glanced toward the veranda and stood up. “My, but how dark it has gotten!”

The garden was indeed dark as midnight. The setting sun still lingered in the sky, but the dense foliage blocked all its rays. I went out to the veranda, breathing in the scent of the mosquito coils, and squinted at the trees.

“To the artist, this garden is his whole universe. He hasn’t stepped foot off the property this past quarter-century, you see. He’s a terrible recluse, he is, the lord of this garden.” The professor let out an ardent sigh.

The sound of chopping from the kitchen stopped, and the aproned woman came into the room, dusting off her hands. Seeing me there, she exclaimed, “Now what is wrong with me, not even realizing we had a visitor!”

Every inch of her eighty-year-old frame exuded the grace of a lady with a proper upbringing, from her neatly pinned white hair to her immaculate apron. She was the artist’s wife.

I dipped my head and introduced myself. “My name is Yasaburō.”

“A young man like you must be quite hungry at this hour, and we’re just about ready for a hot pot. Is he still out there?”—this last to the professor.

“Oh yes, he’s still in the garden.”

“He must be with the tanuki. Once he’s taken an interest in something he forgets the time until it’s dark.”

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The secret society known as the Friday Fellows is famous throughout the city for its consumption of tanuki stew at its year-end party. In order to combat this cabal of gastronomic blackguards, Professor Yodogawa founded an organization of his own, called the Thursday Fellows.

We two were its only members.

We went to gatherings of the Friday Fellows and tossed flyers declaring, “Tanuki meat is murder!” into the air, but all they did was ridicule us, hardly giving us the time of day. When it came down to it we were more like drinking buddies than an actual secret society. Professor Yodogawa and I would hold the occasional evening get-together, talking over plates of delicious food.

The professor apparently specialized in nutritional science, and he was surprisingly well traveled, trotting all over the globe in his tireless quest for new culinary heights. The outrageous chronicles of his gluttony-fueled adventures were well worth a listen, for they gave you a glimpse of just how indomitable the professor truly was. Without that toughness he wouldn’t have been able to spout sophistry such as, “Restraining yourself from eating something is also love!” or been able to turn over a new leaf and be expelled from the Friday Fellows with a smile on his face.

There was only one thing that Professor Yodogawa regretted with regard to his expulsion, and that was Benten.

“Remember that night when we took that walk with Benten? Say, do you suppose that if she comes back we could pick up where we left off? I’m planning on giving her a gift, you see—Belle’s Nosehair. It’s a fruit that I found in South America, and quite tasty, despite the name.”

“Well, you can never know with Benten.”

“Not a whisker of a chance, then?”

“She’s just out of our league.”

“I see. Out of our league, that she is.” The professor’s eyes glazed over, as if he was recalling something from long ago.

As he got progressively drunker, teardrops began to spill from his eyes as he thought about tanuki.

“I did eat you, didn’t I? I ate you all,” he muttered to some unseen audience. “Ah, but I couldn’t help it.”

The Friday Fellows held a considerable amount of sway in the shadows of the human world, and ever since his expulsion at the end of last year Professor Yodogawa had tasted more than his share of privation. Yet rather than complain, he set up the Thursday Fellows, and redoubled his efforts to visit his righteous wrath on the Friday Fellows.

His was a truly noble spirit, with a most self-sacrificing love of tanuki.

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The professor and I split up in the garden to look for the artist.

“Mr. Ayameike! Mr. Ayameike!”

I waded through the grass and into the darkness of the trees.

What I found there was a wondrous place, a garden that transcended the very definition of a garden. There the grass was left to grow wild, unmolested by scythe or shears; boughs of trees whose trunks must have borne uncountable rings hung heavy with leaves. The air was stiflingly warm. It was impossible to see the evening sky above, and the garden seemed to go on forever. As I went further and further in, the light from the veranda faded from view, and I was enveloped in a blackness as unfathomable as the darkest moonless night.

Something moved in the weave of the grass, and I made out someone’s snout faintly glistening.

“What tanuki might you be?” asked the furry inquirer.

“I am Yasaburō, third son of Shimogamo Sōichirō,” I answered.

“I am Onjōji Kenzaburō. Your name is known to me; I had the privilege of meeting your brother Yaichirō at the Keiji Tanuki Conference some time ago. The artist is this way. Allow me to guide you.”

Sticking close to Kenzaburō’s tail I passed through the trees, and finally the sky popped into view above me. Here in the midst of the dense foliage was a small pit in the ground; around it in the evening light the grass was lush and green. At the bottom of the pit was a thin, elderly man in a faded workman’s smock, sitting on a wooden chair and smoking a rustic pipe that resembled the root of a tree.

“Mind your manners with him, now,” Onjōji Kenzaburō murmured behind me, hidden in the shadows of the grass. I sensed a number of other furry beings moving around me in the trees. It seemed that the entire Onjōji clan had turned out to keep an eye on me, this intruder who dared approach the artist.

The pit was as quiet as the bottom of a pond as I descended into it.

“Pardon me, Master Ayameike. I’ve come to fetch you.”

The artist didn’t seem to mind me much, smoke drifting through his long white beard.

“This pit was once a pond,” he calmly observed. “I dug it myself, some fifty years ago. I was young and sprightly then, and preferred to do most things myself. I enjoyed the pond for many years, but unfortunately the spring below dried up...But it is because of that I now have this wonderful pit. Sitting down here gives me a most pleasant feeling, as though I am a frog at the bottom of a well.”

He regarded me with his limpid eyes. His gaze was like that of a boy watching a grasshopper, and being under it made me start to squirm. For some reason his look made me want to undo my transformation.

“Dinner will be served soon. Shall we return to the house?”

“I suppose that will be all for today, then. Much obliged,” he muttered to no one in particular, standing up. I was expecting him to hobble out of the pit leaning on a cane, but instead he beat into the brush directly without the slightest bit of hesitation. Clearly he wasn’t called the lord of the garden for nothing, for he slipped between the trees as quick as the wind.

Suddenly he stopped and pricked his ears.

“If I am not mistaken, that is the sound of a festival. Now where might this festival be?”

And certainly I could hear from somewhere far away what seemed to be Gion festival music.

“Ha, I see that he has arrived,” muttered Ayameike.

“Who?”

“A visitor. He is wont to bring the festival with him wherever he goes.”

Ayameike soon took us back to the veranda, but Professor Yodogawa was nowhere in sight. I listened carefully and detected a voice calling for help somewhere in the trees. Having gone to find the artist, it seemed the professor had fallen into distress in this wondrous garden himself.

“I shall go retrieve him,” said Ayameike. “Perhaps I could trouble you to meet our guest at the door?”

Through the sliding door I could see the silhouette of the visitor, his head hanging low.

“Good evening. It is I, Tenmaya.”

The voice sounded quite familiar, as did the name, and half in disbelief I slid open the door. A bright red lantern was thrust inside, followed by that man in the red shirt, his sparkling white teeth ready to chew up all the oysters the world had to offer. I was so taken aback that for a second he appeared to me like a hellish ogre who had come to grind my bones to make his bread.

Seeing me there he stared for a moment before bursting into a chuckle. “Hah, I wasn’t expecting you’d be here tonight too! Good to see you again.”

“My name is Yasaburō.”

“Ah, an old-fashioned sort of name, old-fashioned and noble. Glad to make your acquaintance, Yasaburō. Tonight you’re going to feast upon something you don’t get to see every day, courtesy of yours truly!”

He thrust his hand into the sack next to him, and yanked out something black and slippery, holding it up proudly as it gleamed in the red lantern light.

It was a giant salamander.

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Though their Japanese name means “giant pepper fish”, according to Professor Yodogawa Japanese giant salamanders are in fact the world’s largest amphibian. They crawl along the beds of streams and spend their days nibbling on frogs and freshwater crabs. They’re said to possess the ability to regenerate their bodies, even after being bisected (“though that’s most certainly codswallop, after all we’re not talking about planaria here”, added the professor), which had earned them the nickname, hanzaki, or “cut in two”. It wasn’t a hard story to swallow either, with their black-flecked, light brown bodies, and the odd warts around their heads, and their mean-looking mugs. Even the most gluttonous tanuki would think twice before trying to stick a fork into one of them.

Waving the salamander around, Tenmaya barged into the kitchen. “It’s salamander stew for us tonight!”

Tenmaya being Tenmaya, his words caused quite a commotion in the house.

“I certainly hope you’re not expecting me to eat that creepy, awful thing!” Ayameike’s wife frowned, while Professor Yodogawa wrinkled his nose and said, “Japanese giant salamanders are a protected species, and their trade is prohibited under the Washington Convention…” All the while Ayameike said nothing and ran his hands over the warts.

“Ah, but this ain’t a Japanese giant salamander, Professor Yodogawa,” winked Tenmaya.

“I’m quite sure that it is, sir,” the professor patiently replied.

“No, see, this ain’t nothin’ but a giant Japanese salamander.”

“Yes, and I am telling you that a giant Japanese salamander is, in other words, a Japanese giant salamander!”

“Come on, you know things aren’t ever as simple as that! Even professors don’t know everything, hey?”

“I would say the same of you, Tenmaya.”

I realized then that this was not the first time that Tenmaya and Professor Yodogawa had met, though they didn’t seem to be on particularly good terms.

“Alright, professor, let’s be real generous and say this is one of those protected species,” said Tenmaya, an oily, ill-bred grin on his face. “And Washington or Roosevelt or whoever you please says you ain’t allowed to eat them, fine, fine. But see, this adorable little fella’s already croaked, in what you might call an unfortunate accident, and all that’s left of it is an empty husk that cooks up into a real tasty broth. You ain’t about to let this poor little fella just rot away and be wasted, are you? And who do Washington or Roosevelt think they are, telling you not to eat it?”

Even the professor found himself flummoxed by this little bit of sophistry.

Tenyama pressed his advantage home. “I’ll bet you’d like to try a nibble, eh?”

“Well,” the professor said slowly. “I hear they are quite tasty.”

“Don’t you fret, I learned how to cook these babies up in the mountains of Okayama. They look like awful little critters at first glance, but you’ll understand once you’ve had a taste!”

Tenmaya grabbed hold of a large kitchen knife like an ogre, and with dazzling knifework prepared the carcass for the pot. He removed the guts, then chopped up the flesh leaving the skin attached, rinsing the large chunks under water. A wonderful peppery aroma spread from the kitchen into the room and even all the way into the garden.

After placing the meat into a stewpot along with some vegetables, Tenmaya reached into his sack and pulled out a strange bottle, sprinkling its black powdery contents into the pot.

“This here is Tenmaya’s secret stuff, guaranteed to make salamander meat as tender as tender gets!” he boasted.

Thus we all gathered around that salamander hotpot, but I was so enraptured by that scrumptious taste that I entirely forgot the closeness of that muggy July night. In stark contrast to its monstrous appearance, the taste of the salamander was pure and unclouded. The skin felt wonderfully springy in the mouth, and the more you chewed the tastier it got. I kept going back for more. We all moved our chopsticks, wordless, unconscious of the sweat that dripped down our faces, and I eventually realized that even the artist’s wife had done an about-face and was happily scarfing down a bowl of her own. The Japanese giant salamander is most certainly not to be underestimated.

Tenmaya looked around at all of us with pleasure as we smacked our lips.

“Tasty, eh? Eh?” he pressed. “This was a difficult one, I will say. I’ve traveled the world, seen the sights, tasted all the delicacies it’s got to offer. But I owe Ayameike too much to serve him something pedestrian, something plain. Why, then old Tenmaya would be a laughingstock! So I took a little walk by the Kamo River, and before I knew it I’d come to Kumogahata. The day was fading, the rain torrential as I perambulated along that river, when something black and slimy came hurtling down from the sky. Now that gave me such a shock! I poked around with my walking stick, and then I heard this awful little croak in the dark. Scared me out of my wits, I can tell you. So I looked down at my feet and saw our salamander friend here, breathing his last. An unfortunate end, to be sure, but I’d say it makes a pretty handsome present.”

Tenmaya looked at the pot and pressed his hands together. “May you find your way to paradise. Namu namu!”

While he was saying this, the salamander was already sitting comfortably at the bottom of our stomachs.

Professor Yodogawa and I went to the kitchen to wash the pot and dishes, using the sound of the running water to cover our hushed conversation. Tenmaya and Ayameike’s wife sat in the room drinking cold barley tea and appreciating the artist’s tanuki drawings.

“Who is this Tenmaya guy, anyways?”

“I’ve seen him with the Friday Fellows before, doing Jurōjin’s bidding.”

“That explains why he seems so shifty. He could be a spy!”

“It is odd, though,” Professor Yodogawa frowned. “Some years ago he brought Jurōjin’s wrath down on his head after fouling something up, and was forced to flee Kyoto. Why would he come back now?”

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As the night drew on, the wondrous garden outside was plunged into darkness, yet here and there the unnerving cries of animals and birds outside could still be heard, sounding perhaps even more animated than before. Ayameike leaned over the railing of the veranda and pointed out a clearing where the grass had been cut away and several stones had been placed. That was where the tanuki appeared.

“They always stay quite still when I am drawing. Clever, adorable little creatures they are.”

“So that’s how you create such marvelous pictures!” the professor gushed. As we talked, it became apparent that the picture that he had seen in Yontomi Kaikan had actually been sold to the bar by Tenmaya, who had received it as a gift from Ayameike.

“That is rather disappointing,” the artist said disapprovingly, but Tenmaya just rubbed his bald head and grinned like a kid who had been caught playing hooky.

“No offence intended, I can assure you! I hope you can understand that. I’ve never once done anything with malice aforethought, not once since I was a babe. Sure, I may trade in deception, but always with the best of intentions! Won’t deny that some people find it frightening, of course. You know what they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions...but enough about that.”

He really did enjoy listening to himself talk.

“Now you just say the word, and I can sell your pictures for a pretty penny. You can rest easy with me, your honor, I know people in galleries all over Shijō and Gion. I’ll even take care of the advertising! Want a TV spot? Not a problem. Advertising’s all about deception, when it comes down to it. You just gotta make people believe what you want them to believe. Once you start raking it in, you can spruce up the place, buy the lot out back to expand the garden, pump that old dried up pond full of water again. I owe you a great deal, your honor, and I just want you to live a better life.”

But the artist quietly demurred, “I am quite content with the life I have.”

“Ol’ Tenmaya’s just got no chance with someone as high-minded as you, sir,” Tenmaya sighed dramatically. “No chance at all, with a sage who contents himself with conversing with rocks and tanuki."

“I am no sage. Sure, I am not so illustrious as that.”

“You most certainly are not!” his wife agreed. “I couldn’t count the times this man has driven me out of my mind over the years. A sage, my foot!”

“A man of the world then, is he?”

“I quite assure you he is!”

“That’s fine, just fine. I’m a man of the world myself, you see. Huzzah for worldliness!” Tenmaya slapped his knee in a fit of mirth, forcing his mouth into a smile as though he was wrenching an iron plate into place. “A little performance, then, for this gathering of worldly folk.”

He lit a flame in the red lantern that he had brought, waving it back and forth before our eyes. My vision gradually started to blur. I remembered having felt this same sensation before.

“Oh!” gasped the artist’s wife, pointing at the garden.

Within the depths of the black trees, the flame of a lantern flickered to life. At first it was one, but soon there came another, and another, and in no time at all the forest was filled with an uncountable array of lanterns. The name Tenmaya burned brightly in the darkness as the lanterns advanced through the trees towards us. Soon this wall of red flowed over the edge of the veranda like a tsunami and flooded into the room. It was as bright as though the floats of the Gion Festival had come crashing in, and my ears rang with the jangling of the music of the Gion Festival. I recalled what the artist had whispered to me in the garden—He is wont to bring the festival with him wherever he goes.

“And scene!” The voice of Tenmaya rang through the air, and in an instant everything vanished as though it had been a dream.

The artist’s wife and Professor Yodogawa and myself had fled into the kitchen; only the artist and Tenmaya remained seated in the room, looking unperturbed.

“Now that’s what I call an illusion,” Tenmaya winked.