Niichan hesitated. “Are you joking?”
“I wish,” I said. “I need to know how to make the ink go dormant, Niichan. For Tomo’s sake, so he doesn’t...lose himself. And I have to make this guy Takahashi Jun’s power go away, too, or he’s going to destroy everything.”
“Wait, wait. Takahashi Jun, the kendo champ? He’s a Kami? Katie, tell me everything.”
I grabbed a mug and held it under our hot water dispenser as I filled in Niichan on the details. “Jun told me there are two kinds of Kami, right? Imperial ones, descended from Amaterasu. That’s the royal line, all the emperors and stuff. But there were also Kami in the samurai families, and they showed up through a bunch of different ways. Marriages, affairs, even different kami ancestors than Amaterasu.”
“Right,” Niichan said. “You said to me that day you were scared Yuu was descended from Susanou.”
“I was wrong,” I said, dipping a genmai tea bag into the hot water, smoothing the little string attached over the ceramic lip. The side of the mug burned my finger and I pulled away, the string slipping into the cup. “It was Jun—Takahashi—that got his ink bloodline from Susanou. Tomo is descended from Amaterasu on his dad’s side, and Tsukiyomi on his mother’s.”
Niichan was silent for a moment, and then he let out a shaky breath. “Maji de,” he said. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s true,” I said. “And I need a way for the power to go dormant. There’s got to be a way, Niichan.”
“Maybe, but I... I’m sorry, Katie. I don’t know.”
My heart sank. I curled my fingers around the handle of the mug. “Not even any ideas?”
“No pleasant ones,” he said. His list was probably about the same as mine. 1) Leave Japan. 2) Die.
“Well...can you at least tell me more about Tsukiyomi?” I said. “Jun said he went crazy and murdered kami. Is that true?”
“They’re myths, Katie. How do we know what’s true? And remember what I told you about judgment calls—times have changed. You can’t judge what the kami did by the way society works now.”
“I know,” I said. “I just need to know what happened. Maybe there’s some detail that can help us, Niichan. Please.”
“Ee to,” he said, deep in thought. I could hear a sound across the phone, like a pencil tapping against a chair. “Well, Amaterasu, Tsukiyomi and Susanou were all created at the same time by the August Ones.”
August Ones. Where had I heard that before? The vision of the dead samurai snapped back into my memory. Amaterasu had mentioned them. I had to stop him, before he destroyed everything the August Ones had made. What had she meant? “Who are the August Ones?”
“The first kami, Izanagi and Izanami. They created Japan, and then they gave birth to all the other kami. Well, a lot of them. The three you mentioned were created by Izanagi.”
“So Tsukiyomi was going to destroy Japan?”
“Destroy Japan?” Niichan’s surprise reminded me I hadn’t told him about the nightmare. “I don’t think that’s in the legends.”
“Then what happened?”
“Let me think. It’s been a while since I studied it. So Amaterasu and Susanou fought, that I remember. She hid in a cave—solar eclipse, ne? And they tricked her back out again. They threw a big party and fooled her into glancing at herself in a mirror to draw her out, and they hung the Magatama jewel in a tree to tempt her out, too.”
The Imperial Treasures. That was two of them linked to Amaterasu and Susanou. But it didn’t make any sense. How could the treasures be involved? “What about the Kusanagi?”
“The sword? It belonged to Susanou.” That made sense. Jun had always had the sword beside him in my nightmares.
I remembered Tomo in the nightmare, unconscious, dripping in dark ink. Jun’s head bowed, his apology.
Oh god. What if that hadn’t been ink spilling from Tomo’s wounds?
I was an idiot. A complete idiot. But it was just a dream. I couldn’t let Jun hurt him.
“How does Tsukiyomi fit in? He was Amaterasu’s lover, right?” I yanked the cutlery drawer open and dug for a spoon; my tea was already way too strong, but I dipped the spoon into the mug to chase down the tea bag, anyway.
“At first. But then he killed another kami. Amaterasu banished him from the heavens. That’s why the sun and moon are separated, right? Night and day. It’s just a creation myth, Katie.”
But the Amaterasu I’d met hadn’t banished him. She’d killed him. Why? “She didn’t...hurt him?”
“I don’t think so. She had a lot more trouble with Susanou, but she was a gentle ruler. She’s always been considered benevolent, a protector of Japan.”
“She gave the first emperor the Imperial Treasures,” I said. “I looked it up.”
“Yeah,” Niichan said. “They each represented a trait she wanted him to rule with. The mirror is honesty, the sword is bravery and the jewel is love. She gave them to Jimmu, her descendent, and I guess one of the first humans to have the powers of the kami.”
Emperor Jimmu. I tried to picture him, an ancient figure who was half myth himself. What had he thought when his ink kanji had started to move on their scrolls? Or had Amaterasu explained to him how to control it? Was that knowledge somehow lost over time like Jun had said?
“I’m sorry I can’t help more,” Niichan said. “I don’t know enough about how this all ties in.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m really glad you called me back, Niichan. You’ve helped, really.” At least I understood the stories a little better. The Imperial Treasures had been handed down through the line of Kami. They had to be linked. If only one of them had been a paintbrush or something. That would’ve made a lot more sense as a starting point.
“Katie? Be careful, okay? For your sake and Yuki’s, too. There have been powerful Kami in Japan’s history, and they always changed the landscape. I don’t know what Takahashi is up to, but stay back. At the kind of power level you’re suggesting, the ink is uncontrollable. He may just burn himself out.”
I took a sip of my tea; it had gone cold as we’d talked. “I hope so.”
But somehow, I didn’t think it would be that easy.
Yuki and I sat with our backs straight and our knees folded underneath us, our hands barely touching the tatami of the school’s traditional room. It was our weekly Tea Ceremony Club meeting, and we sat in a row along the wall while Yuki’s friend Ayako whirred the bamboo whisk through the milky green tea.
It was getting harder to go through the motions of everyday life when I felt like the world hung in the balance. Diane had passed me the newspaper that morning to practice reading my kanji, and I’d pushed it away, too frightened to see another headline about dead Yakuza. It was almost impossible not to hear about it, since it was the most sensational thing that had happened in Shizuoka City