The cat was sitting on my desk when I woke up, watching me the way you’d watch a pot that was taking too long to boil.
“Good morning,” it said. “You snore. Not much. A little whistle at the end, like a kettle with a cold. Is there breakfast?”
I lay there and looked at it.
Sunday light was coming around the edge of the curtain. Down the hall Mom’s door was shut, and from Mio’s room came the slow breathing of someone who wouldn’t be up before lunch. The cuff was warm on my wrist. I had half hoped, in the night, that I’d wake up and find the whole thing gone, the way a fever goes.
It hadn’t gone.
Neither had the cat.
“You said you’d explain,” I said.
“I said I’d explain at home, and I’d be fed. One of those has happened.” It stood up, stretched, front legs and then back, and sat down again. “Also, I’m not an it. I heard you thinking it all the way down the hill.”
“You can hear me think?”
“No. But you’ve got the kind of face that says it about cats.” It lifted its chin. “I’ve been a she since before your town had a shogun. Kohaku will do, or you can just say she, like a civilized person.”
“Sorry. She.”
“Thank you.” She looked at the door. “Now. Breakfast.”
* * *
There was nothing in the fridge a cat would want except a packet of whitebait for Mom’s lunch, so I put on my jacket and walked her down the hill to the convenience store by the station. It was half past seven on a Sunday and the streets were empty except for an old man hosing the sidewalk outside a dry cleaner’s. Kohaku walked beside me with her tail up, looking at everything.
“Where are the horses?” she asked.
“What horses?”
“For the carts. There used to be carts.” She stopped and looked hard at a parked delivery van, then at the sidewalk under it, then at the whole clean empty street. “And nobody’s shoveling.”
“Shoveling what?”
“Exactly. Where does it all go?” She walked on. “A train went past in the night. It didn’t whistle. It just went. A train that doesn’t whistle is up to something.”
“They don’t whistle anymore. They haven’t for, I don’t know. Sixty years. More.”
“Then how does anyone know to get off the line?”
“There are fences.”
“Fences,” said Kohaku, as if I’d told her the trains had been taught to knock.
She thought about this.
“When I was last awake,” she said, “wristwatches were new. A girl I knew got one, and her mother said no good ever came of a girl who wore the time on her arm. That was 1923.”
“You’ve been asleep for a hundred years?”
“Asleep is a big word. It’s more like being put away in a drawer.” She looked up at me. “The bracelet sleeps, and I sleep with it. It woke, and so did I. It took me a while to find my feet. Do they still have those little round cakes in the paper with the bean paste?”
“Probably.”
They had them. She didn’t want them.
The convenience store door chimed when we went in, and Kohaku flattened her ears at the chime, and then she put her front paws up on the counter by the register and saw the warmer cabinet, the one with the fried chicken in it under a hot orange light.
She went very still.
“What,” she said, “is that.”
“Fried chicken.”
“In a glass box. Kept hot. On a Sunday morning.” She didn’t take her eyes off it. “Who thought of that?”
“I don’t know. Somebody.”
The man at the register was watching me with polite curiosity, since as far as he could see I was standing at his counter alone, staring at the chicken. I bought two pieces. Outside on the bench by the bus stop, Kohaku ate one piece and most of the other, bones and all, with small precise bites and her eyes half closed.
She licked her paw, one side and then the other.
“Right,” she said. “I’ll stay.”
* * *
She told me the rest in my room with the door shut, sitting on the end of my bed with her paws tucked under her, while I sat on the floor with my back against the wardrobe.
It wasn’t much.
A Lady had made the bracelet, a long time ago. Kohaku said it the way people say the name of someone in their family, with a capital letter. The Lady had made it for a reason, and the reason was that something was coming. When something came, the bracelet woke up, and it rang for whoever was meant to wear it, and they followed the ringing until they found it.
“So something’s coming,” I said.
“Something’s coming.” She licked a paw and looked at it. “It always does, sooner or later. That’s what it’s for.”
“What kind of something?”
“We’ll get to that.”
“Why me?”
“You heard it ring.”
“Lots of people must have walked past that hill in six days.”
“Lots of people did. You were the only one who stopped and put your hands over your ears.” She looked at me with her amber eyes. “You’re the one it chose.”
“I’m a boy,” I said.
“So you said.” She went back to her paw. “Do you want to know what it does?”
I did want to know.
That was the strange part. I’d been awake half the night with the cuff warm on my chest, and under all the ordinary fear there had been something else, small and bright, that I hadn’t let myself look at. I kept thinking about the floor of the cave falling away under my feet.
“Show me,” I said.
“Lock the door,” said Kohaku. “And put the sweatband on the bed. It’ll only get in the way.”
* * *
It should have been easier the second time.
I stood in the middle of the room, closed my eyes and thought about the stone woman with her wrist raised, and the cuff stayed exactly as it was.
I thought harder. Nothing happened at all.
“Yes,” I said, the way I had in the cave.
The cuff didn’t so much as warm.
“That was her asking,” said Kohaku. “In the cave. She asked, and you said yes, and that was the door opening. Now it’s open, and it’s your turn. You have to say it.”
“Say what?”
“The word.” Kohaku sat up straight on the bed, the way she does when something matters. “The girls at her shrine said it at the forge, twelve hundred years ago. Every one of mine said it. Transform.”
“That’s what they say on TV.”
“Where do you think the television got it?” said Kohaku. “I don’t make it up.”
I felt stupid saying it to nobody, so I said it to the wardrobe, fast, under my breath, like a password.
“Transform.”
The gold seam lit.
The warmth came up my arm into my chest, the room went up around me as I came down into myself, my hair was falling down my back again, and the cuff slid off my wrist into my right hand and poured out long and cold. The rings at the top of the staff hit the lampshade and set it swinging. When I opened my eyes I was standing in the middle of my own bedroom in red hakama and white split-toe boots, glowing faintly, between a pile of manga and a basket of laundry I’d been meant to put away on Friday.
My desk came up to my ribs.
The top of the wardrobe, where I kept my winter jacket, was out of reach. I’d have needed the chair. I stood in my own room and it was somebody else’s room, a bigger person’s, and I was a visitor in it.
The light was the hardest part to get used to. It came off my hands. It made the posters on my wall look new.
I kept my back to the window, where my reflection would be.
“Good,” said Kohaku. “Put the stick down. Now pick up a sock.”
“With what?”
“With your hand. What do you think hands are for?”
I looked around for somewhere to lean the staff.
“Not like that,” said Kohaku. “Put it away. It’s yours. You don’t have to carry it about like an umbrella. Think it small.”
I thought it small. The staff ran short in my hand, both ends at once, and curled around my wrist and closed. It was the cuff again, dark and warm, with the gold seam glowing faintly. I was still changed. I was glowing. My hands were just empty.
“Better,” said Kohaku. “Now it’ll come when you want it. Sock.”
I reached into the laundry basket. I picked up a sock, the gray one with the hole.
It came apart in my fingers like wet paper.
I looked at the two halves.
“Gently,” said Kohaku.
I tried another. It came apart too, and so did the third. I put the fourth down on the desk without touching it any more than I had to and picked up my mug instead, to get away from socks.
The mug went to pieces in my hand with a dry crunch, like a rice cracker. There was still some cold tea in the bottom of it, and the tea went on the carpet.
Kohaku had sat down on the desk to watch, with her tail around her paws. She was making a noise like a kettle.
“Don’t,” I said.
I picked up a pencil to write myself a note about the carpet, and it snapped. I sat down on the bed to think, put my hand on the bed rail to steady myself, and the bed rail bent. It went slowly, under my palm, like a spoon in a magic trick on television.
Kohaku laughed so hard she fell off the desk.
* * *
It took most of an hour.
By the end of it I could pick up a sock out of a heap of clothes without tearing it, and then a shirt, and then the second-to-last mug in the house, which Kohaku made me fetch from the kitchen while nobody was looking. It was like threading a needle with gloves on. Underneath it all, very faint, the wet-glass note from the cave sang in the cuff, a little higher when I gripped harder. I kept quiet about the note. It didn’t seem to need saying.
“Now,” said Kohaku, “the nice part.”
She was back on the desk, with her ears up and her eyes bright, the way Mio looks when she’s about to show you a video.
“Hold your hand out. Flat, like you’re waiting for change. Don’t think about up, or about anything. Just think about the light, and put it in your hand.”
I held out my hand.
The glow that came off me all the time, without my trying, came together in my palm, slowly, the way water collects in a dip in the road. Then there was a light sitting in my hand, white and gold, about the size of a plum. It was warm. It made the ceiling look like morning.
“What’s it for?”
“Them,” said Kohaku. “When they come. It only does anything in the right place.”
“Where’s the right place?”
She thought about it, properly, with her head on one side.
“I’ve never been able to say. You’ll know it when you get there. The others always did.”
Then she made me push the light out flat, away from me, into the air. It came out wobbly at first and then flat and still, a round sheet of light the size of a dinner plate, hanging in front of my chest like frosted glass with a gold rim. I could feel it, the way you feel something you’re carrying.
Kohaku jumped onto it to test it.
It held her for a second. Then it cracked straight across with a sound like ice on a puddle and dropped her on my bed.
“Thicker,” she said, from the duvet. “And bigger. Next time.”
I bent down to pick up the pieces of the first mug, and my hair fell forward over my shoulder, all of it, pale pink and heavy. I found I was holding the end of it between my finger and thumb, turning it like a leaf I’d picked up on a walk.
I let go of it.
“Why am I a girl?” I said.
That wasn’t what I’d meant to ask. I’d meant the bracelet. I said it again, fast, the right way around.
“Why does it make me one, I mean.”
Kohaku had heard the first one. She looked at me a moment longer than she needed to, and then she answered the second.
“It’s always been girls. Every one of mine.” She looked at the carpet. “Pick up that mug. All of the bits.”
There was a knock on my door.
“Haruto?” Mio’s voice. “Are you up? Mom says the rice cooker’s making a noise.”
I let go. The light dropped off me like a coat. The cuff was warm on my wrist, the way it always would be now, and I was sitting on my own bed in my own clothes with my own short hair and a handful of broken mug. I grabbed the sweatband off the duvet and pulled it on over the cuff and opened the door.
Mio stood in the doorway in a huge sweatshirt with her hair in a clip, holding her phone. She looked past me into my room. She looked at the torn socks, the tea on the carpet, the snapped pencil, and the bed rail, which now had a dip in it the shape of a hand.
“Why is your bed rail bent?”
“I sat on it.”
“You weigh nothing.”
“I sat on it hard.”
She looked at me for a long time. Then she looked at the socks again.
“Are you okay?” she said. “Like, actually okay?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” She looked once more around the room. “It’s weird. Don’t do it again.”
She went off down the hall. I heard her tell Mom the rice cooker was fine and Haruto had broken his bed. Mom asked if I was hurt. Mio said no, I’d sat on it. Mom said, “Then he can fix it.” Mio said, “Can he, though?”
Kohaku, invisible to my sister and sitting in the exact middle of my duvet, was purring.
* * *
On Sunday evening Mio had the mannequin head at the kitchen table again. She’d done the whole of it in pinned curls this time, a solid helmet of tight brown rings with a hundred pins in it, for an exam on Friday. I sat across from her eating rice crackers, carefully.
“Look,” she said, without being asked. It was the first thing she’d said to me all weekend that wasn’t about dirt.
She turned the head around to show me the back of it, low down, where the curls met the neck. One pin went in sideways there, under all the others, longer than the rest.
“This one’s the anchor. Everything else is pinned to everything else, but they’re all hanging off this. Pull it and the whole thing comes down.”
“Then why put it in?”
“Because without it you can’t build the rest.” She looked at the head with real pride. “Watch.”
She pulled it, to prove it.
Half the curls slid down the mannequin’s neck at once like snow off a roof, and Mio looked at what she’d done to two hours of work and said a word Mom doesn’t let her say at the table.
That night I lay in the dark with Kohaku on my feet and the cuff warm on my chest.
It hadn’t felt like wearing someone else’s clothes, in my room, with the hair over my shoulder. That was the part that kept me awake. I tried to work out what it had felt like instead.
I stopped before I got there.
* * *
On Monday I went to school.
Wakamiya High is in Kamakura, a fifteen-minute walk from the station along the side streets off Wakamiya-oji, past the long avenue of cherry trees that had finished flowering by then and gone to green. It’s a prefectural school, old and concrete, with a sandy playing field and a gym at the far end of it and a rusty iron fire bell on a little steel tower by the field gate that nobody has rung in living memory.
Kohaku had come with me as far as the station and then said she would see me at four, and went off down a side street with her tail up as if she had business there.
The morning announcements came on at eight thirty-five.
“Good morning,” said Ueda Saki’s voice over the speaker.
Saki is our class representative, and on Mondays she reads the announcements for the student council, slowly and clearly, as if everyone in the building had just woken up and needed things explained.
“Today’s notices. The library will be closed at lunchtime for stocktaking. The second-years’ parent meetings are on Thursday. And a reminder that the council is collecting signatures to have the old fire bell by the field gate taken down. It’s rusted through at the base and it is a hazard. Please sign the sheet in your homeroom. Thank you.”
“She’s going to get that bell,” said Shun, from the desk next to mine. “She’s been on about it since school started. It’s like a crusade.”
“It does look like it’s going to fall on someone.”
“Nothing’s ever going to fall on anyone at this school.” He was drawing in the margin of his math book: the back of the math teacher’s head, the bald patch and the one hair that always stood up, exactly. “Nothing ever happens here.”
Kurihara Shun has been my best friend since the first year of middle school, when we were seated next to each other alphabetically by accident and discovered that we both thought the school’s drama club were too loud. He’s tall and untidy, with ink on his hands most days. He draws all the time, in the margins of everything, mostly people who don’t know he’s doing it: old men asleep on the train, the woman who sells taiyaki by the station, the baseball team’s hands on their bats. He’s very good. He says he’s not. He lives on the other side of Ofuna and rides his bicycle to the station every morning.
At lunch Saki came around with the clipboard.
“Asakura-kun,” she said, standing by my desk with it. She has neat short hair and very straight posture, and she always says your name as if she’s checking it against a list. “You look rested.”
“Do I?”
“You usually look like you’ve been up all night. Today you don’t.” She held out the clipboard. “Would you like to sign?”
“Maybe later.”
She nodded as if that was a reasonable answer, which it was, and moved on to Shun. He signed it without reading it and drew a tiny Saki next to his name, clipboard, posture and all, in about four seconds.
* * *
PE was fourth period.
We had it outside on the field, boys and girls together that week, with the girls’ teacher off sick, running laps in the cold April sunshine while the PE teacher stood in the middle with a stopwatch and a whistle.
I changed in the corner of the changing room the way I always had, quickly, facing the wall, with my back to everyone. I’ve done it that way since middle school, since a boy in the first year called me Asakura-hime in front of everyone and it stuck until the summer. Nobody comments anymore. I pulled my sleeve down over the sweatband before I went out, and it made no difference at all, because the first thing the PE teacher said when we lined up was:
“Asakura. What’s on your wrist?”
Everyone looked.
“A sweatband, Sensei.”
“That’s not uniform. You know the rules. Take it off.”
I took it off. I peeled the sweatband down over my hand and held it out to him, and underneath it, on my wrist, was the cuff, dark gray, with its thin gold seam.
The PE teacher looked at it.
“That too,” he said.
“I can’t, Sensei.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“It doesn’t come off.”
He sighed the sigh of a man who has heard every excuse invented by sixteen-year-olds and expects to hear a few more before he retires. He took my wrist in one big hand and took hold of the cuff with the other, and pulled.
It didn’t move.
He pulled harder. He turned my wrist one way and the cuff the other. He tried to get a thumbnail under the edge of it, and there was no edge, and he frowned at it as if it had insulted him.
“How did you get it on?”
“It sort of closed.”
“Sensei.”
Saki had stepped out of the line. She stood very straight with her hands at her sides.
“It’s a medical thing. He can’t take it off.”
The PE teacher looked at her. I looked at her. She didn’t look at me at all.
“A medical thing,” he said.
“Yes, Sensei.”
He looked at the cuff once more, and at Saki, who was the class representative and had never been wrong about anything in front of him, and he let go of my wrist.
“Get a note,” he said to me. “Ten laps. Go.”
I ran ten laps. On the third one Saki came up beside me, running at exactly the same speed with perfect form.
“Thank you,” I said. “How did you know it was a medical thing?”
“I didn’t,” said Saki.
She ran on ahead without changing her expression, and I watched the back of her head all the way around the field.
* * *
After school I walked to Kamakura station with Shun and rode the train back to Ofuna, and we went down the stairs at the west exit to get his bicycle.
The bicycle parking at Ofuna is under the pedestrian deck that runs from the station across the bus rotary, a long dim space of concrete pillars beside the Kashio River, with racks of bicycles packed in rows so close together you have to turn sideways to get between them. There must be four or five hundred bicycles under there. On one side is the river, down in its concrete channel, with steps going down to the water, and above everything is the white shape of the Ofuna Kannon on her hill, looking down at the rotary.
Shun’s bicycle was near the river end. When he tried to wheel it out, it wouldn’t go.
The chain had gone solid.
“It was fine in March,” he said, staring at it.
The chain was orange. Every link was crusted with rust and stuck to the next one, so that it had stopped being a chain and become a stiff orange rod. The rain all winter had blown in under the deck from the river side, and it had stood there every school day since November.
“It was fine in March,” he said again.
“It wasn’t, though.”
I had a small can of oil in my school bag, because I had a bicycle too, once, before I started walking everywhere. I crouched down and dripped oil into the chain link by link while Shun held the back wheel up and turned the pedal and complained. It took twenty minutes. By the end of it my fingers were orange and black and the chain moved again, stiffly, with a grinding sound.
“You’re a hero,” said Shun. “I’ll draw you.”
“Don’t.”
“Holding the oilcan. Like a saint in an old painting, with the light coming down.” He was already getting out his pen.
Chained to the same rack was a child’s bicycle, small and red, with a white plastic basket on the front and a bell on the handlebars shaped like a ladybug. When Shun stood up, his elbow knocked it, and the bell gave one tiny bright ring under the deck.
He said sorry to it.
I wiped my orange fingers on a tissue and didn’t think about it again.
* * *
On Tuesday night, when Mom had gone to bed and Mio was in her room with her headphones on, I went up to the roof.
You aren’t really supposed to go up there. There’s a door at the top of the stairwell with a sign on it, but the lock has been broken since before we moved in, and on summer nights some of the old men from the second floor go up and smoke. On a Tuesday in April it was empty. The concrete was still warm from the day. The air smelled of the sea. You can’t see it from our building, but it’s always there, five kilometers south, behind the hills.
Kohaku sat on the parapet with her tail hanging over the edge.
“Here?”
“Here.”
I took off the sweatband and put it in my pocket and stood in the middle of the roof.
“Transform,” I told the water tank, not very loud.
The light came. The water tank got taller, and my hair fell down my back, and the sheer over-robe moved around me though there was hardly any wind. My light lit up the water tank and the satellite dishes and a pair of old flowerpots somebody had left up there with nothing in them. The staff was in my hand, as tall as a fishing rod. I put it over my shoulder like one.
I thought up, and the roof stopped being interested in me.
Kohaku jumped. She landed on my shoulder with all four paws and her claws hooked into the white cloth.
“Go on, then,” she said into my ear.
I went up.
The roof dropped away, then our building, then the next building, then the street with its lines of parked cars and lit vending machines. The whole of Ofuna lay underneath me: the station, the tangle of railway lines going off in every direction, white, orange and green under the lights, and a train sliding into the platform like something being posted. On her hill, the Ofuna Kannon turned her great white face toward me as I went past, or seemed to, with her eyes half closed.
I leaned toward the sea and went.
The monorail runs from Ofuna to Enoshima on a single rail high above the streets, with the cars hanging underneath it. I followed it south over the hills, over the dark roofs and the lit-up crossings, and a late car came along under the rail with its windows full of yellow light and three tired people in it.
“What is that?” said Kohaku, digging her claws in.
“The monorail.”
“It’s hanging upside down.”
“It’s meant to.”
“Nothing is meant to hang upside down. Bats do it, and look at bats.” She watched the car go by under us with her claws in to the hilt. “That’s an animal. That’s some kind of long animal, and you’ve all agreed to pretend it’s a train.”
The hills ended.
There was the coast, a long dark curve with lights along it, and the sea beyond, black and enormous, breathing against the sand. Enoshima stood up out of the water at the end of its causeway, and on top of it the lighthouse turned its slow beam round and round. I flew out along the causeway and around the island, around the lighthouse, so close that the beam went right through me and lit me up white and then left me behind.
Then I kept going, out over the open water, where there was nothing at all except the dark and the sound of the sea under me and the wind pulling at my hair.
Kohaku was swearing.
She was swearing steadily into my ear in words I’d never heard, words a hundred years old, something about a donkey and somebody’s grandmother and the Ministry of Railways. Her claws had gone right through the over-robe. I didn’t care. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe properly. I turned over on my back in the air, with the sea below me, the stars above me and a cat clinging to my collarbone. The note in the staff sang high and clear.
I laughed until my eyes ran.
When I looked back, the whole coast was laid out behind me, Kamakura, Enoshima and Fujisawa, a string of lights from one end of the dark to the other, small, far away and quiet.
* * *
We came back an hour later.
I landed on the roof by the water tank and let the light go. I was myself again, short-haired, in a T-shirt and track pants, with salt on my face. My legs were shaking a little, the way they do after a long run.
My hair smelled of the sea. I sat down on the warm concrete with my back against the tank and waited for my heart to slow down.
Kohaku didn’t come and sit with me.
She went to the edge of the roof, the side that faces south, and sat on the parapet facing the bay, where the sea was, out beyond the hills in the dark. She sat very still with her tail wrapped around her paws.
“Oharu liked the sea at night,” she said, to the bay.
Her voice had gone flat and quiet, the way it had in the cave when she looked at the ring.
“She said it sounded like someone breathing next to you.”
That was all. I waited for the rest of it, and there wasn’t any.
I said her name once.
She didn’t turn around.