Chapter Thirteen Whispers and Wax
Chapter Thirteen
Whispers and Wax
Tokyo had been a stopover on his way to his new job at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Gifu. His new home was a two-hour shinkansen ride away from Tokyo and then another thirty-minute ride on a local train. Keishin wasn’t expected at the research facility until Monday, and he had pictured spending the weekend rediscovering his old city.
He was eight when he and his father packed up their lives and moved across the Pacific. Keishin had not returned since. There had been no reason to. He no longer had any family in Japan, and all his childhood friends had long faded away. Still, Keishin held the hope that somewhere along the city’s streets, he would stumble upon a lost memory to welcome him home. There was one other thing that he hoped to find, but that was something he was never going to say out loud.
Keishin knew that his chances of finding fragments of his past were less than slim, but they were enough to draw him from under the covers of his hotel room’s warm bed to brave the early hours of an autumn morning. The sooner he got his nostalgia out of the way, the sooner the questions buzzing between his ears were going to quiet down and move on to more important things. Miyazaki Hayao’s Studio Ghibli was at the top of his to-do list, as it was unthinkable to leave Tokyo without making a pilgrimage to the home of one of his favorite animes, My Neighbor Totoro. The film’s Catbus character, a grinning, hollow, twelve-legged cat with windows and fluffy, furry seats, had made every car, bus, train, and plane ride Keishin had taken since watching the movie painfully mundane. But the pond in the pawnshop’s backyard put Catbus to shame. Traveling by pond trumped any mode of transportation, including ones covered in fur.
Finding words to describe how he had fallen through water and emerged completely dry on the other end was not a problem that had ever crossed Keishin’s mind. Today, it became one of two challenges that were going to haunt him for the rest of his life. The second was explaining how, when only moments before he had been standing over a pond in Tokyo, he had come to find himself in the middle of a seemingly endless sea of pampas grass. He turned to Hana, not realizing that he was still clutching her hand.
“You can let go now,” Hana said.
“Oh…uh…sorry.” Keishin dropped her hand, heat rising beneath his collar despite the chill in the air. “Where are we? How did we get here?”
“We jumped into a pond, remember?”
“Yes, but…” Keishin closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, unable to decide whether his experiment had succeeded or failed. To accept that a mossy pond had somehow teleported them was to call into question more scientific laws than he cared to enumerate. “That’s not possible.”
“And yet here we are.”
Keishin shook his head. “Ponds can’t—” He snapped his mouth shut, his eyes growing large. “Unless…”
“Unless?”
“It wasn’t a pond.”
Hana lifted a brow. “I was not aware that there was another name for the pool of water one watches the moon swim in.”
“There isn’t,” Keishin said. “But there is a word for things that connect two different points in space-time. An Einstein-Rosen Bridge. A wormhole. A wormhole, Hana! In your backyard! Do you have any idea what this means? My god. This could change everything.”
“It changes nothing.”
“Of course it does.” Keishin paced over the grass. “This is the discovery of the century! The applications are—”
“My father is still missing.”
Keishin stopped mid-step, sending a jumble of plans and possibilities crashing into the front of his skull. He winced. “Hana…I…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“I understand,” Hana said, her voice flat. She turned away from him and pointed at an empty field. “That is the Whispering Temple.”
Keishin scanned the swaths of grass swaying in the breeze. “There’s nothing there.”
“Things are not always as plain to see in my world as they are in yours.”
“ Your world? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The place where I am from and you are not. Does your science have a name for it too? I shall call it whatever you prefer, even though I still do not understand why you would rather call a pond a hole for worms.”
“I…” Keishin searched for a neat little label printed in bold, fifteen-point black font that he could stamp over the ground he stood on. Debating the existence of a multiverse was something he indulged Ramesh in, but only on Fridays after a few rounds of twelve-year-old Scotch.
Though Keishin was more than well-versed in every hypothesis and counterargument about parallel dimensions, he failed to find anything that could adequately describe the rustle of the grass around him, the sunlight warming his cheeks, and the patient gaze of the woman waiting for his answer. How her eyes were both impenetrable and inviting was a greater mystery than the impossible world a pond had whisked him to. “No, it doesn’t.”
“We do not have a name for it either. There has never been a need for one. We only have one world, and this is it,” Hana said. “But if you feel that you must call it something, then you may call it Isekai.”
Other world. Keishin translated the word in his head, convinced that his Japanese was rustier than he thought. “This is a dream,” he said, more to himself than to Hana. “It has to be.”
“If choosing to believe that this is a dream makes it easier to accept where you are, then I will not stop you. But if you wish to see the truth…” Hana handed him her mother’s glasses. “Wear these.”
—
Hana had first visited the Whispering Temple when she was seven years old. Her grandmother had asked Toshio to let Hana spend the weekend with her, and they had stopped by the temple on the way to her grandmother’s home.
Hana climbed out of a small puddle in the middle of the grassy field and stood up. “Where is the temple, Sobo?”
Oshima Asami smiled down at her granddaughter. She took her glasses off and offered them to Hana. “Look again.”
Hana put the glasses on. A towering, ornate building of red wax rose in front of her. A perfectly aligned row of more than a hundred red-and-black torii gates led up to imposing carved wax doors. The shape of the painted wooden gates reminded her of the kamidana her father kept at home. The building, however, was unlike anything she had ever seen. Spires reached for the sky from a large domed roof, and winged wax creatures with monstrous faces perched on arched buttresses. Some columns writhed and twisted like trees. It was as though the building had been melded from different places and times and left to grow as it pleased. Hana gasped. “It is beautiful.”
“It is.”
“Why are we here?” Hana said, unable to tear her eyes from the temple.
“I come here whenever I miss your mother.” Asami stroked Hana’s cheek. “You look so much like her.”
“Was she pretty?”
Asami nodded. “Your father fell in love with her as soon as she stepped into the temple on their wedding day. He could not hide how happy he was. Before that meeting, they had not even seen pictures of each other, and I imagine that he was very pleasantly surprised when he finally saw the face of the girl he was meant to marry.”
“Why do you come here when you miss her? Is this where my parents got married?”
“No. This is a different kind of temple. This is where all our prayers go.”
“How do prayers come here?”
“They are carried by smoke.” Asami dug through the woven bag slung across her chest and pulled out a small candle that had nearly burned to a stub. “This candle is near its end. This will probably be the last chance I get to light it. I wanted you to be able to hear your mother’s voice before it burns out.”
—
Keishin stepped inside the Whispering Temple, his sharp jaw slack. As large as the temple was on the outside, it was nothing compared to the cavernous hall that opened up within. Countless votive candles, cupped by tiny brass hands mounted along the wax walls, made the entire hall glow. A soft wind kissed Keishin’s cheek. In spite of the flames, the air inside the temple was pleasantly cool and swirled around the hall as it would in a meadow. Candles flickered in the breeze.
Hana walked up from behind him. “You do not need the glasses once you are inside.”
Keishin took the glasses off, bracing himself. Every second he spent with Hana ripped a stitch from the fabric of all he knew. It was not going to take much more to leave him utterly undone. “How is this real?”
“I sometimes find myself asking the same question when I see the things our clients bring from your world.”
“Clients?”
“The people who walk through a ramen restaurant’s door and find our pawnshop instead. They have the strangest things. Tiny buttons that play music in your ears, shiny—”
“Hold on.” His head pounded with every impossible thing he had crammed inside it since meeting Hana. “What are you saying? I was looking for the ramen restaurant when I found the pawnshop. Does that make me one of your clients?”
“I will explain everything later. But now we have to listen to my father’s prayer. We do not have much time. If the Shiikuin find out that he and the choice are missing—” Hana clamped her lips.
“The Shiikuin?” Keishin tried to remember the meaning of the word. “The Keepers? Like the caretakers of a zoo?”
“Later. I promise.” Hana set the candle she had taken from the kamidana on a pair of empty brass hands. A tiny flame flared up from the candle’s wick as though lit by an invisible match. Loud murmuring echoed through the hall.
“What is that?” Keishin strained to hear what the voices were saying. They talked over one another, making it impossible to tell where one word ended and another began.
“Every prayer every single person throughout history has made. When one candle whispers, the rest like to join in.” Hana brought her ear next to her father’s candle. “You need to listen closely if you want to hear what the candle has to say.”
Keishin leaned toward the candle, his face inches from Hana’s cheek. The candle’s flame danced to the rhythm of their breath.
Help me find her. Please.
Keishin inhaled sharply. “Did you hear that?”
“Yes, but…” Hana frowned. “That cannot be right.”
“Who is your father looking for?”
Hana leaned as close as she could to the candle’s flame without burning her skin. She closed her eyes, listening intently.
“Hana?”
Hana straightened, looking dazed. “I…do not understand.”
“ Help me find her. Your father’s prayer seems straightforward to me. It looks like your hunch was right. Your father isn’t missing. He’s gone off to look for someone. A woman.”
Hana stared into the candle’s flame. “There is only one woman my father has lost.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“Okay. Good. We have a lead then. Do you have any idea where she is?”
Hana blew the candle out with a trembling breath. “I thought I did.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mother is dead. She died on your side of the door. That is what my father told me. Now it seems that either this prayer is a lie or my entire life is.”
“Hana…”
“There is one way to learn the truth.” Hana took the candle from the wall. “I am sorry.”
“Sorry? For what?”
“For what must happen next. I am afraid that you are not going to like it.”