For six days I had been hearing a sound that nobody else could hear.
It started on the Sunday. I woke at about four in the morning with a thin high ringing in both ears, like someone running a wet finger around the rim of a glass in the next room. By the time Mom’s alarm went off at half past four and I heard her fill the kettle, it had settled into something I could almost ignore.
Almost.
I looked it up under the covers. Tinnitus, the internet said, and gave me a list of causes, most of which were things old men had. I told Mom on Tuesday. She looked at me over her miso soup.
“Drink more water.”
She said the same thing the winter I had flu, and the night Mio’s boyfriend broke up with her by text.
I drank more water. It kept ringing.
It was worse at night and better on the train. It was worst on Friday, on the walk from Kamakura station to school, when for about a minute it rose into a clear sweet note like a temple bell a long way off. I had to stop on Wakamiya-oji with my hand over one ear while a woman with a dog walked around me.
By Saturday I’d decided that if I was going to hear things, I might as well hear them somewhere quiet.
* * *
I walk the hills behind Kamakura most weekends. A trail runs along the ridge from the back of Kenchoji, up through the trees and along the top, with the town on one side and nothing much on the other. On a clear day you can see the sea from the lookout, and Mount Fuji off to the west if it feels like being seen.
I like it because nobody looks at you on a mountain.
On the train, at school, at the convenience store, people look at you. They look, and then they look again. The second look is the one where they’re working out whether I’m a boy or a girl. I’ve been getting it since elementary school. I’ve got my mother’s face and almost nothing to shave, and my voice broke halfway when I was thirteen and then seemed to lose interest. They don’t mean anything by it.
I’ve never liked mirrors much, either. The one in our bathroom at home faces the door, so I learned years ago to brush my teeth looking at the faucet.
On a mountain, people look at the view. Old couples in matching windbreakers say hello as they pass, and then they go back to the view.
I took the train from Ofuna one stop to Kita-Kamakura at about one o’clock. I paid at the gate of Kenchoji and walked up through the temple, past the big wooden gate and the halls and the people taking photos of the halls. Then I climbed the long stone steps behind them. By the time I reached the lookout my legs were burning.
The ringing was louder than it had ever been.
I stood at the railing with everyone else and looked at Kamakura spread out below in the April sun. The sea was a silver strip beyond the rooftops. Somebody’s child was asking if the mountain over there was Fuji. It wasn’t. It was a cloud.
The ringing rose and rose. I put my hands over my ears. It made no difference, and an old man next to me gave me a worried look.
“Are you all right, young… young man?”
“Fine. Thank you. It’s just loud.”
He listened politely to the silent afternoon. Then he went back to his view.
* * *
The trail runs east from the lookout along the ridge, up and down over roots and soft yellow rock worn into steps by eight hundred years of feet. After about forty minutes you come to the yagura.
Yagura are old cave tombs. People in Kamakura cut them into the cliffs seven or eight hundred years ago, when there was no flat land left for graves. At the place on the trail they call the Hyakuhachi yagura, the hundred and eight, there are dozens of them cut into the rock faces all around you, square dark openings in tiers, some with small worn stone figures still sitting inside. Moss grows on everything. It’s quiet there, even on a Saturday.
When I came around the corner, the ringing was so loud I nearly sat down.
It didn’t hurt, exactly. It filled my teeth and the soles of my feet. I leaned against the cool rock beside one of the openings and closed my eyes and waited for it to pass.
When I opened them again, there was a cat on the path.
It was sitting in the middle of the trail about five meters away, looking at me. It was small and dark gray, the gray of charcoal, with long soft fur that stood out around it like smoke, a white chest and white paws, and its eyes were a clear deep amber, like light through a glass of tea.
It looked at me for a while. I looked at it.
Then it got up, turned around and walked off the trail into the bamboo.
It stopped after a few meters and looked back over its shoulder. When I didn’t move, it sat down and waited with great patience.
The ringing was coming from the same direction as the cat.
I was tired of the ringing.
I climbed over the low rope and followed it.
* * *
The ground behind the yagura was steep and overgrown, and the bamboo grew so thickly that the afternoon went green and dim. The cat moved through it without a sound. I moved through it like a vending machine falling down a staircase. After a couple of minutes we came out onto a small level space under an overhang of rock, where the old leaves lay deep and soft and the air smelled of earth and wet stone.
The cat stopped in the middle of the space and sat down.
The ringing stopped.
It stopped all at once, for the first time in six days. In the quiet my own heart was loud. A crow called somewhere, and the bamboo creaked.
“Oh,” I said, out loud. “Oh, thank god.”
I took one step toward the cat.
The ground underneath the leaves wasn’t there.
* * *
I fell for what was probably two seconds. It was long enough to think a whole sentence, and the sentence was I really should have stayed on the trail.
Then I hit the bottom.
I landed on my right foot, on rock, and something in my ankle made a sound I felt in my back teeth. I fell over sideways and lay on cold stone in the dark, with leaves and dirt pattering down on my face from the hole above.
I didn’t scream. I made a long high wheeze like a bicycle pump, and I lay there making it for some time.
When I could think again, I looked up. The hole was a ragged patch of green-white light about six meters above me, fringed with roots. Too high to climb. Much too high to jump.
I looked down at my ankle.
My foot was pointing in a direction feet don’t point.
“Okay,” I said to nobody. My voice echoed. “Okay. That’s broken. That’s fine. That’s a normal amount of broken.”
I got my phone out of my jacket pocket with shaking hands. No signal. Not one bar. I held it up toward the hole at arm’s length, the way people do, as if the bars were up there somewhere and just needed reaching.
Nothing changed.
Then I turned on the flashlight, and saw the walls.
* * *
I was in a cave, and not a natural one. The walls were too smooth, and the ceiling curved in a careful dome, the way the yagura were cut, except that this one had been sealed. A long time ago someone had closed the entrance, and the roots had come down through the gap until the hill forgot it was there.
There was a woman in it.
She was standing against the far wall, and for a second my heart stopped. Then the flashlight found her properly, and she was stone. A statue, about the height of a real person, cut out of the rock of the cave itself and never cut free of it at the back. She was very old and worn. Water had run down her for so long that her face was nearly gone, only the shape of a face, and her long hair and wide sleeves and pleated skirt had gone soft at every edge, like a bar of soap that’s been used.
Her right arm was raised, the wrist turned out, as if she were showing me something on it. Carved around the stone wrist was a plain band.
Her left hand was held out in front of her, low, palm up, like a hand held out for change.
Something was sitting in it.
It was a cuff. A plain solid band about as wide as two fingers, made of some dark gray metal that drank up the flashlight beam instead of reflecting it, with one hairline seam of gold running around the middle. No clasp. No hinge. No decoration. It sat in the stone palm as if somebody had put it there a minute ago and stepped out.
The ringing had stopped when I was standing right on top of it.
I sat on the floor of the cave with my broken ankle and my phone’s flashlight and stared at it.
Don’t.
Then, since I was sixteen and in a great deal of pain, and there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, I dragged myself across the floor on my hands and my good knee. I reached up and took it.
It was warm.
It weighed almost nothing. I turned it over in my fingers, looking for a join, a way to open it, and lifted it toward the flashlight to see the gold seam. My hand went through the middle of it, and it slid down over my knuckles onto my wrist.
And closed.
There was no snap or click. One moment it was a loose band hanging on my wrist, and the next it was snug, the exact size of my wrist and no bigger, warm against the skin all the way around, and there was no seam in it anywhere.
I pulled at it. It didn’t move. I pulled harder, until it hurt, and it didn’t budge.
“No,” I said. “No, no, no, no.”
Above me, something dropped softly through the hole and landed on the cave floor beside me with a small, neat thump.
It was the cat.
It sat down in the circle of my flashlight, curled its tail around its white paws and studied me.
Then it opened its mouth.
“Oh, thank goodness,” said the cat. “Hello, new girl.”
* * *
I don’t know how long I sat there.
The cat waited. It seemed used to waiting.
“I’m a boy,” I said finally. “My name’s Asakura Haruto. I’m sixteen. I go to Wakamiya High in Kamakura. I’m a boy.”
The cat looked at me the way Mom looks at a fish someone has brought back to the counter claiming it’s off.
“Mm-hm,” said the cat.
“The cat is talking,” I said. “Okay. I hit my head. That’s what this is.”
“You didn’t hit your head. You broke your ankle. I watched.” The cat leaned forward and sniffed the cuff on my wrist, delicately, then looked up at my face again, very interested. “Well. That’s never happened before.”
“What hasn’t?”
“Never mind. It’s on now. That’s the main thing.” The cat stood up and turned around once, briskly, the way cats do before they get down to business. “Right. Your ankle’s broken, you’re six meters down a hole, nobody knows you’re here, and you’ve got no signal. Am I right?”
“How do you know what a signal is?”
“I’ve been watching people on this hill for six days. They hold up those little glass plates and shout about bars.” The cat sat down again and straightened up. “Stand up and say yes.”
“I can’t stand up. My foot’s facing backward.”
“It’s facing sideways. Don’t be dramatic. Put your weight on your good foot and your hands on the wall, stand up, and say yes.”
“Say yes to what?”
The cat glanced up at the statue, at her raised wrist. When it looked back at me, its voice had changed, just slightly.
It was softer.
“To her,” it said. “She made it. She’s asking. Say yes.”
I looked at the cat. I looked at the stone woman. I looked at my foot.
This is a dream. This is a concussion. This is the part where I wake up on the trail with an old couple in windbreakers standing over me.
I put my hands flat on the cold stone and pushed myself up onto my good leg, shaking and sweating, with the broken one dangling and my phone on the floor where I’d dropped it, its flashlight pointing at the ceiling.
“Fine,” I said. “Yes. Whatever. Yes.”
* * *
The cuff lit up.
The gold seam around the middle of it went bright, and then the whole dark band went bright, a clean white-gold light. It came up my arm and into my chest, warm as a bath, and spread from there into everything.
My ankle went back where it belonged.
No pain. It was like a knot being untied. One moment the bone was wrong and the next it simply wasn’t, and I was standing on two feet.
Then other things changed.
My hair moved. It was falling, sliding down past my ears and my neck, over my shoulders and down my back, heavy and soft. My clothes moved against me, and they weren’t my clothes anymore. My jacket, my jeans and my old sneakers were gone. There was something wide and pleated around my legs, a sash pulled snug at my waist, and boots. My whole body settled into place, and it settled downward. The floor came up toward me. The cave got taller. The stone woman, who had been about my height, stood over me now by a head and more.
The cuff moved.
It slid off my wrist on its own, down over my knuckles into my palm, and it didn’t stop. It ran out of both ends of my fist at once, the dark gray metal pouring longer and longer, the gold seam winding around it as it went, until I was holding a pole of dark iron with a thin line of gold up it, taller than I was by a head. The weight of it dragged my arm down so hard I nearly dropped it. Then, while I was still bracing, it weighed nothing at all. At the top it ended in a loop of iron hung with loose rings, and they knocked together over my head with a small dull clink, like keys.
The light faded down to a glow.
I was standing in the middle of the cave, and I wasn’t in the dark anymore.
The light was coming from me.
At my feet, where water had seeped down through the rock over the years, there was a shallow pool on the cave floor, still and black.
I looked down into it.
A girl looked back up at me.
Her face was about my age. The rest of her was small. If I’d been standing next to her, the top of her head would have come up to my collarbone, maybe not that far. She had hair down to her waist, loose, silver-white at the crown and going pink toward the ends, like the inside of a shell, and it glowed faintly where it was pinkest. Her eyes were gold. She was wearing a white top cut like a kimono, with wide sleeves tied back out of the way by a gold cord that crossed behind her shoulders. Small gold stars were scattered over the sleeves. Below it, pleated hakama of a deep soft red, the red of a camellia, fell to her ankles, and the hems glowed faintly like coals. Over everything hung a sheer white over-robe, light as mist and printed with more gold stars, which stirred around her though there was no wind in the cave. The ends of the gold cord were tied in bows at her elbows. Her boots were white, with split toes. In her right hand was a tall iron staff with rings at the top, the kind the wandering priests carry in picture books.
She looked like a shrine maiden from a New Year poster at Tsurugaoka Hachimangu, redrawn for the last shot of a magical-girl anime opening, the one where the heroine stands against the sky and the title comes up. I knew that shot. When I was very small I’d had a favorite magical girl, on Sunday mornings, and I’d watched that shot every week with my nose nearly on the screen. I hadn’t thought about her in years.
She looked horrified.
I lifted my hand. The girl in the water lifted hers. I touched my face. She touched hers. I opened my mouth.
“Excuse me,” I said.
The voice that came out was light and clear and nothing like mine.
The worst part was that it didn’t sound wrong.
“I would like,” I said, in the clear light voice, “to report a fault.”
Under the horror there was something else. It lasted about a second. The girl in the water looked like somebody I would have liked to be, if anyone had ever asked me. Nobody had. I hadn’t either. Then the horror came back, and I was glad of it.
“There’s no fault,” said the cat. It had come right up to the edge of the pool and was looking up at me with its whole face. “Oh, look at you. Look at the sleeves. You’re a little one, aren’t you? You look lovely. You’ll get used to it.”
“I’m a magical girl.”
“I don’t know what that is, but yes, probably.”
“I’m in a cave and I’m a magical girl and I can’t get the bracelet off, and I’ve got a stick.”
“It’s a staff,” said the cat. “Don’t be rude about it. She made that herself.”
Then it looked at my face again, longer than it needed to, with its head on one side, as if it were trying to remember where it had put something. Then it looked away.
It tipped its head back to look at the rings above me, and it was smiling, as far as a cat can, and counting under its breath.
It got to the end and stopped.
There were eight rings. Seven of them were dark and dull, worn smooth. The eighth was new. It was as bright as a ring in a jeweler’s window, and apart from me it was the only thing in the cave giving off any light.
The cat looked at it with its ears flat and didn’t move. When it spoke, all the brightness had gone out of its voice, and it said it to the ring, not to me.
“That’s a new one.”
The rings clinked. Somewhere above us the bamboo creaked.
Then the cat shook itself all over and said, much too loudly, “Well! Fly, then.”
It came back too fast, the way Mio comes back from crying when someone knocks on the bathroom door. I noticed it, and kept my mouth shut.
“Fly?” I said.
“Fly.” The cat nodded upward at the hole, the green-white patch of afternoon six meters above us. “It’s the easiest one. Think up.”
* * *
I thought up.
I didn’t believe it would work.
My feet left the floor.
It wasn’t like an elevator or a jump. There was no push. It was more like the floor had stopped being interested in me. I rose a little way and hung there in the air in the middle of the cave, a meter off the stone, with the staff upright in my hand and my long hair drifting around me. My sleeves and the sheer over-robe floated out, and the glow from my own body lit up the stone woman against the wall, with one wrist raised and the other hand held out, empty.
The ringing had started again, very faint, the same wet-glass note as the last six days.
It was coming from the staff in my hand.
“Oh,” I said.
“Higher,” said the cat. “Mind the roots.”
I went up.
I went up through the hole, through the dangling roots and the dirt and the leaves, out into the green dimness of the bamboo, and then I didn’t stop. I went up between the stalks, past the tops of them, into the light.
The sky opened around me.
I was hanging above the hills of Kamakura in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Below me the ridge ran off east and west, dark green and folded, with the trail a thin brown line along the top of it. Beyond the ridge the town lay in its little valley, roofs and temple roofs and the long straight avenue of Wakamiya-oji running down to the sea. The sea was there, all of it, huge and silver and wrinkled with light, all the way out to where it met the sky.
The wind moved my hair. It was warm and smelled of leaves.
For about ten seconds, nothing was wrong with anything.
The flying was amazing, but it was the smaller part. For ten seconds, high up over the hills in the sun, I wasn’t thinking about my hands, or my face, or what anyone could see when they looked at me, or how I was standing. I was just there, the whole of me at once, and it was the easiest I had ever been in my life.
Then a crow went past about two meters away and gave me a look of real outrage.
Right. I was a magical girl, floating over a popular hiking trail, in broad daylight.
I panicked.
The light went out. It dropped away from me, and for one awful second I was falling. Then I was standing on the leaves in the little clearing next to the hole, breathing hard, in my own jeans, my own jacket and my own muddy sneakers. My right hand was empty. The staff had gone with the light.
My hair was short. My hands were my hands. My ankle was fine. I was my own height again, and the ground looked a long way down.
I was back in my own body. It felt like a coat that had been left out in the rain, still mine and still the right size, and cold all the way through.
The cuff was back on my wrist, dark gray again, with its thin gold seam, as if it had never been anything else.
The cat came up out of the hole a moment later. It jumped out lightly, sat down on the leaves in front of me and licked one white paw.
“That was quite good,” it said, delighted. “For a first go. You went all the way up! Most of you just bob about.”
Most of you.
I let that one go past. I had a lot of things going past.
* * *
Its name was Kohaku. It told me that on the walk down, trotting beside me on the trail, invisible, it said, to everyone but me. Two hikers passed us going the other way and said hello. Neither of them looked at the cat.
It asked about everything. It wanted to know what a woman at the lookout was doing with a phone on a stick, and whether there was a person inside the vending machine at the bottom of the steps, and where all the hats had gone.
“Everyone had a hat,” it said, watching a bald man go past with nothing on his head at all, as if he’d come out without his pants.
It was thrilled by the vending machine. It sat in front of it for a whole minute while the lights went around.
“Where did the stick go?” I asked.
“Staff.” Kohaku was still watching the vending machine. “You’re wearing it.”
I looked at the cuff on my wrist. Then I pulled my sleeve down over it and didn’t look again.
It wouldn’t tell me anything else.
“I’ll explain everything at home,” it said, whenever I asked. “It’s a long story, and you’ll want to be sitting down for it, and I’ll want to be fed. Do you have fish?”
“My mom runs a fish counter.”
Kohaku stopped walking. Its amber eyes went wide.
“Oh,” it said, with deep feeling. “Oh, the bracelet’s done well this time.”
I tried the cuff in the restroom at Kenchoji, with soap. I tried soap and cold water, then soap, cold water and pulling until my eyes watered. It sat there on my wrist, exactly the right size, like it was waiting for me to stop being silly.
At Kita-Kamakura station I pulled my jacket sleeve down over it and held the end of the sleeve in my fist. I rode one stop to Ofuna like that, with the cat sitting on the seat beside me, and nobody looked at us at all.
The station building at Ofuna has a sports shop on the ground floor that sells sneakers and badminton rackets and smells of new rubber. I had walked past it a thousand times. I had never been inside.
The sweatbands hung on a hook by the register, thick terry cloth ones in black, navy, white and pink. Any of them would cover a band two fingers wide with room to spare. They were 550 yen.
“How athletic,” said Kohaku from the floor.
My hand went to the pink one first.
I put it back and took the black.
In the restroom by the ticket gates I tore off the tag and pulled it on over the cuff. It hid the dark band completely. With my sleeve down you couldn’t see it at all. With my sleeve up it was a sweatband, and nobody looks twice at a sweatband.
* * *
We live on the fourth floor of an old apartment block on the west side of Ofuna, up the hill from the station. If you lean out of the kitchen window and look left, you can see the Ofuna Kannon on her hill above the trees, a huge white goddess’s head and shoulders with her eyes half closed, looking down at the railway lines. When I was little I thought she was looking at me. Now I think she’s just looking at the trains.
Mio was at the kitchen table when I came in, with a mannequin head clamped to the edge of it. The head had long brown hair, half of which Mio had pinned into small tight curls. She had a comb in her teeth and a spray bottle in one hand. She’s twenty and in her second year at a hair and makeup college in Yokohama. Our kitchen table has had a head on it most evenings for a year and a half.
Mio and I don’t really talk. We did when I was small. Then Dad left, and the next year she started middle school, and somewhere in there she stopped, and I never worked out how to start again. These days she speaks to me about once a week, mostly to tell me what’s wrong with my hair.
“You’re filthy,” said Mio, around the comb, without looking up.
“I fell over.”
“Where?”
“The hills.”
She looked at me properly then, from my muddy jeans to my face to the leaves in my hair. Her eyes stopped on my wrist.
“What’s that?”
“A sweatband.”
“I know it’s a sweatband. Since when do you wear sweatbands? You hate sport.”
“Since today,” I said, and went to the bathroom to wash my face, looking at the faucet.
When I came back out, Kohaku was sitting on the kitchen counter beside the rice cooker, peering at Mio’s mannequin head with deep suspicion. Mio didn’t look at it. She went on pinning curls. Kohaku looked at me and mouthed something that might have been who’s that. I shook my head slightly.
Mom came out of her room at six, in her old gray sweatshirt with her hair wet from the shower. She does the early shift at the supermarket on Saturdays, five until two. She comes home and sleeps for two hours, then gets up and makes dinner as if she’d had a full night. She’s forty-six. She has small hands with a lot of old nicks on them, and she can take a mackerel down to two fillets and a skeleton in under a minute.
She was taking one apart now, at the counter, about half a meter from where the cat was sitting. Kohaku watched the knife without blinking.
“Your son’s wearing a sweatband,” Mio told her.
Mom glanced at my wrist, then at my face, then back at the fish.
“Taking up tennis, Haruto?” she said. “What happened to your jeans?”
“I fell on the trail.”
“Is anything broken?”
“No.”
“Then take a bath,” said Mom. “And drink more water.”
Kohaku made a small noise that might have been a laugh.
* * *
We ate dinner at the kitchen table with the mannequin head watching from the counter, where Mio had moved it. Grilled mackerel, miso soup, rice, pickles. The television was on with the sound low, the way it always is, the evening news murmuring away to itself while Mio told Mom about a teacher at her college who did eyebrows like a war criminal.
I was only half listening to either of them. Mostly I was listening to the quiet in my head.
The ringing was gone. For six days it had been there, under everything, and now there was nothing at all, just the hum of the fridge and the television and the clink of chopsticks. It was strange how loud that was.
“…called off the search for the six crew members of the Kotobuki Maru,” said the newsreader. “The fishing boat, which operated out of Koshigoe, was reported missing off Enoshima early last Sunday morning. The Japan Coast Guard said today that no wreckage has been found.”
On the screen there was a small white fishing boat tied up at a harbor wall, and then the gray sea off Enoshima with a coast guard boat moving slowly across it.
“That’s a Koshigoe boat,” said Mom, looking up. “We used to buy their whitebait.”
“That’s awful,” said Mio.
Mom nodded. She watched the screen a moment longer, the gray sea and the small boat crossing it. Then the news moved on to the weather, and she went back to her rice, and so did Mio, and so did I.
Kohaku, on the counter, had gone still. It was staring at the television with its ears flat, and it didn’t take its eyes off the screen until the weather map came up.
I let that go. I had enough to think about.
* * *
That night I took the sweatband off and put it on the shelf by my bed, next to my phone, and lay in the dark with my wrist on my chest.
The cuff was warm. It was always warm, I’d find out, as if there was something alive inside it, small and far away. I could feel the gold seam under my fingertip if I pressed, a thin raised line all the way around.
Kohaku was curled at the foot of the bed on top of my feet, a small warm weight. It had eaten a whole mackerel skeleton out of the trash when nobody was looking, head included, and seemed satisfied with life.
“You said you’d explain,” I said into the dark.
“Tomorrow,” said Kohaku sleepily. “It’s late. You’ve had a big day. Your first day is always a big day.”
“First day of what?”
Kohaku didn’t answer that.
I lay there and looked at the ceiling. The streetlight from the road made a long pale stripe across it through the gap in the curtains. Somewhere a train went by on its way to Yokohama. I thought about the cave, and the stone woman with her raised wrist and her empty hand. I thought about the girl in the black water with the long pale hair, and about hanging in the sky over Kamakura, for ten seconds, with nothing wrong.
I put that last thought away somewhere and closed the drawer on it.
I was almost asleep when Kohaku moved. The cat had gotten up and walked up the bed, and it was standing beside my arm. I opened my eyes a crack. In the stripe of streetlight it was looking down at the cuff on my wrist.
It reached out one white paw and touched the band, very gently, just once, the way you’d touch the forehead of someone sleeping.
“Please,” said Kohaku, so softly I almost missed it, “live longer than the last one.”
Then it went back down the bed, turned around twice, and curled up on my feet again.
I lay awake for a long time afterward, listening to how quiet it was.
The last one.