Firebirds Soaring Read online

  Gongitsune is about a little motherless fox named Gon, who finds a small village while he is out looking for food and begins to steal from the villagers. One day Gon steals an eel from a man named Hyoju. The eel was supposed to be for Hyoju’s sick old mother. And because Gon stole the mother’s meal, the old woman dies. When Gon discovers the consequence of his actions, he tries to repent by secretly giving things he steals from other villagers to Hyoju. But the villagers see that Hyoju has their things and they beat him up, thinking he’s the thief. From then on, Gon only brings Hyoju mushrooms and nuts from the forest. Hyoju is grateful, but doesn’t know who brings him the gifts, or why. Then one day he sees a fox in the woods and, remembering the fox that stole the eel for his dying mother, he shoots, and Gon dies. It’s only afterward, when the gifts of mushrooms and nuts stop showing up on his doorstep, that he realizes it was Gon who had been bringing them all along.

  “And what is the moral of this story?” our sensei asked after we finished our reading.

  We waited with our eyes open, our mouths sealed tight. We knew that she would deliver the answer the very next moment, that our input was not important.

  “The moral is that there is an order to the world, that everything is as it is for a reason. Gon’s mother dies, Hyoju’s mother dies, Gon is shot while he tries to make amends for his mistakes, and Hyoju feels guilty after realizing he’s killed the creature that’s been helping him. But nothing can be done about this. Everyone must accept their own fate.”

  We stayed silent. A few children nodded. But I didn’t like what the sensei said. I didn’t think the story was about accepting fate. I thought it was about how stupid Hyoju was for not trying to find out who was leaving mushrooms and nuts. Gon wasn’t that clever really. Hyoju, if he wanted to know, could have discovered Gon at any time. Instead he chose the human way. He chose the path humans almost always choose. The path of ignorance.

  Poor Gon, I thought as I sat at my desk. Poor little fox. I stroked the picture of him struck down by stupid Hyoju’s bullet, his fur glowing white as moonlight.

  And there, in that moment, I realized it was Gon’s tribe that I belonged to, not the human family. I was a kitsune, I realized. I was a fox.

  Every kitsune has a silver ball that contains part of its essence. Why hadn’t I understood this when my mother gave it to me years before? I’d thought she was just telling me another of her stories, the kind she was always telling me, the kind that I hadn’t really, until that day, believed. The silver ball holds a piece of the kitsune’s spirit so that when it changes shape it’s never entirely separated from its original form. It made sense now. It all washed over my mind like a clear spring rain, and I stood and walked to the back of the room to gather my things. Sensei turned around when she heard me shuffling the backpack onto my shoulders and cried out, “Midori chan, what are you doing?”

  “Going home,” I said. I slid the door of the classroom open and walked down the hallway. Sensei rushed and caught me by my shoulder as I was walking out the front entrance, but I shrugged her hand off and stared up at her, making the most defiant face I could summon, and said, “Never touch me in such a way again.”

  She slowly took her hand off my shoulder. Her face dropped, all the muscles relaxing, and in this way she revealed the fear I’d instilled in her. When you are a kitsune, you can use your powers to persuade and affect human emotions. It’s a simple trick really, especially because most humans have little control over their own emotions anyway. So even so soon after realizing what I was, I knew how to use one of the powers that is a right of all kitsune.

  At home I put my school things away and pulled my futon from the closet, unfolded it, and sat down, folding my legs under me. I took the silver ball from a box of toys and rolled it around in the palms of my hands, pressing it against my cheek occasionally. It was as warm as my own flesh, and when I held it to my ear I heard a pulse and a thump, a heart beating over and over.

  When my mother came in from hanging out the wash, she found me with the ball held against my ear and said, “Midori chan, what are you doing home already? School isn’t over.”

  “I left,” I said.

  “What?! Why did you leave?” she asked, her face creased with worry. It was the face that I would watch over the years as it became her final mask, it was the face that would make her an old woman before her time.

  “I was sick,” I lied. “I phoned, but you didn’t answer. They had me lie down in the clinic, but I left when no one was looking. I wanted to come home.”

  “Oh my,” she said, and left the room to call the principal, to let him know I’d arrived home safely. When she returned a little while later, she said, “Midori,” and her voice dripped with disappointment. “You trust me so little that you lie to me now?”

  I nodded, but did not say any more. After all, why was I in the care of these people anyway? Simply because my mother had found me lost in the woods one day and brought me home? They were my jailers, for all I knew. Such was my thinking at that moment.

  “Well then,” she said, “now that you’ve gone and done it, you’ll have to clean up your own mess at school. But don’t tell Father! If he knows, I’m not sure what he’ll do.”

  “I won’t tell,” I said, taking the beat of my own heart away from my ear finally. “But you must tell me more about myself,” I said. “About my true nature.”

  “Your true nature?” she said. “What do you mean?”

  “I am a kitsune,” I said, “aren’t I?”

  She frowned and laughed a little, and put one hand against her face and shook her head. “Midori chan, I should never have told you that story. You’re getting a little old for that now, aren’t you?”

  I stared at her, my face burning, but did not answer.

  “Midori,” she said. “Really, you are an impossible child.”

  My mother—or my human mother, as I came to think of her more often after that day—suddenly had very little to tell me. So for the second time that day, I snuck away. Out the back door I went, taking a small trail that lay between my father’s cabbage fields and a persimmon orchard. It was autumn and the persimmons were growing to ripeness, their golden-orange globes fattening day by day, weighing down the tree limbs. Mother always picked baskets of them to bring back and cut into slivers for dessert.

  When I reached the end of the persimmon orchard and cabbage field, there was a small road that led out to the main road in town. On the other side of the road was a forest of bamboo and pine trees. I looked both ways, and when I was satisfied that all was safe, I hurried across the road, into the forest.

  I was not certain where I was going, but I stepped with certain strides, as if I knew the path like the inside of my heart. The forest floor was mostly clean. Only a few branches littered the ground. Light filtered down through the treetops like shafts of molten gold. When I finally stopped, I stood in a clearing before a tiny house on a small wooden platform beneath a fir tree. The house’s miniature double doors were locked, and there were little steps leading down to the platform it sat upon. Coins and colored strings and bottles of tea had been left on the steps. It was an old shrine, dilapidated, the wood gray and moldy. A home for the spirits of this place. I looked around, staring up at the canopy of trees surrounding me, and thought, Yes, I remember. These woods are my home.

  My father’s father had made this shrine many years ago, to honor the spirit of this land, and I was that very same spirit. My mother had found me lost in the woods and brought me home with her. This land belonged to me. I was a kitsune, as I’d realized, and this was the land to which I was bound.

  How, then, had I come to be a human child? That was a much more difficult story to put together. But, oh, I was one smart fox.

  My father had worked this land for many years, as had his father before him, with a decent enough crop each year, until suddenly one year a blight plagued his cabbage and persimmon and anything else he tried to grow. He was baffled, but he never thought to h
onor the spirit of the land as his father had. It was my mother who must have reminded him. She was always saying how he’d forgotten his ancestors, how he’d forgotten the spirits of the land. Yes, I thought, she had to have been the one to remind him of this shrine his father had built years ago.

  So he restored the shrine to appease whatever gods may have been roaming nearby, and soon the land gave forth again. But this only angered him more. He didn’t like that his land did not truly belong to him. So he waited and watched until he saw a small fox visiting the shrine at dusk, sniffing around the steps where he’d left his offerings. “A kitsune!” he shouted through the house that night. And soon he was plotting. “They are the trickiest of all,” he told my mother, “but their weakness is that they’re in love with their own cleverness.”

  This is true, unfortunately. This is very, very true.

  So he began to leave even more offerings at the spirit house, until its steps were full. I could imagine him as he left the door of the shrine open one evening, and sure enough, when the little fox came by, it stood on its hind legs to pull itself up the steps, knocking off the other offerings to see what had been placed inside. And when the fox poked its head through the doorway, my father jumped out from his hiding place and pushed the fox in the rest of the way. Then he barred the door, locking it. The land would be under his control as long as he held me in his power. But it was my mother who would find the silver ball.

  Days later, she visited the shrine to tidy it up. She couldn’t stand the idea of what had happened, and wanted in some way to let the kitsune know that she was loyal to it. She could not speak of her feelings to my father for fear of being thought disloyal, or to others for fear of being thought crazy, so while she arranged offerings on the steps and chattered to the spirit locked in the house about how she couldn’t help it even if she wanted because he had the key, she noticed a silver ball sitting on the forest floor, just beneath the platform the house stood upon. She knelt down and picked it up, and that is when I told her how she could help me.

  She would bring me into this world as her child, so that I could eventually free myself. Do not worry, I told her through the ball. I will be the source of my own liberation.

  I did not see my human father as my enemy, as some may think would be my natural feelings toward the man. Instead I thought him very clever to trap my spirit. Not clever enough to remember a kitsune has tricks up her sleeve even in the worst of conditions, but clever nonetheless. I also felt indebted to him, for it’s a rare opportunity for those born in the spirit realm to receive the chance to be human, and it’s through human suffering that one can enter nirvana most easily. I decided to welcome this entrapment as a step on the path to eternity. The Buddha himself is said to be like a lotus flower, growing upward from the mud at the bottom of a pond, for the time he spent in the world allowed his bright wisdom to flow forth. Instead of despising my conditions, I would learn from others, I thought. Now that I knew my position in the world, I could carry on with life, with fate, more easily. I would grow into a young woman and try my best to please my teachers and parents.

  Later, when I returned from the woods, I told my mother not to worry. That all would be well. I told her I would apologize to sensei and make everything right at school again, that Father would never have to know what had happened. She stroked my cheek and said, “Now that’s my good girl, Midori. That’s my good girl.”

  When I went back to school the next day, sensei didn’t say anything to me. She pretended as if nothing strange at all had happened. I could have allowed her to remain in fear of me forever, but I decided that, as I was a human for the moment, I would go to her and apologize for my behavior, as humans do.

  “Sensei,” I said, “about yesterday, please excuse me. I’m so sorry. I myself don’t even know why I acted in such a way. I am truly sorry.”

  “Midori chan, I was so surprised!” she said. “But it’s all right. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Especially in the fall, when the wind from the mountains is bearing down on us.” She looked out the classroom window then and said, “Winter is coming.”

  We did not speak of this matter again, and I appreciated her easy forgiveness and the way she turned the discussion away from the matter of my guilt to the change of the season. I decided I would not give her so much trouble in the future. I would do my best to be a model student.

  The chime for class to begin sounded and all of us took our seats. I listened intently and volunteered to help in any way possible that day. After lunch, it was time for all of the students to clean the school. I was on hallway duty with a girl named Kazuko. She was from a good family in town. Out of all the children in my class, she was the only one who never made fun of me or my mother. But she was so quiet I wasn’t even sure how her voice would sound if she said something. Usually we wiped our section of the hall floor facing each other on hands and knees, her feet braced against the wall behind her, mine braced against the wall behind me, saying nothing. We had never spoken before, but on that day, while we wiped the dust and dirt away, Kazuko stopped working and looked up at me. I looked back and smiled. It was the first time I had tried to be friendly to someone. When she smiled back, I was thrilled. I had done this thing right.

  “Yesterday,” she said in a voice like a trickle of water, “what you did was amazing. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, This can’t be! But you did it! You walked out and sensei couldn’t do anything about it. You’re so strong. I envy you.”

  “It wasn’t anything,” I said, shrugging. “I regret it. It was too much. I apologized to sensei this morning.”

  “That’s what’s even more wonderful,” she said. “You showed her how you felt, and because it was rude you apologized—but you weren’t afraid. It’s all the same, don’t you see? You have no fear. I wish I was more like you.”

  I wanted to reach out and touch her face, to stroke her cheek like my mother stroked mine. I have a friend, I thought. “I wish I was like you, too,” I told her. “Why don’t we teach each other how?”

  She grinned and nodded, her bangs bouncing on her forehead under the red bandanna wrapped around her head. “We’ll be good friends for sure,” she said.

  “And even when we’re no longer near each other one day,” I said, unable to stop myself even then from predicting the future, “we’ll never be alone again.”

  From Kazuko I learned many things. How to tell a girl that her hairstyle was pretty, how to tell a boy that he was smart or funny, how to tell a teacher that he or she has been a great help to me, how deep I should bow according to a person’s status, how to seem excited about playing silly games like Fruit Basket when the foreign teacher from Australia came to teach us English. And later, after we began to grow fast and went to junior high, how if I wore my hair in two braids and smiled with my teeth I was the cutest girl in our class, how if I pretended to daydream while sitting at a picnic table in the school courtyard during afternoon recess, others would think I was poetic.

  When I went to Kazuko’s house, her family was so normal. Her mother was always cooking or cleaning or mending clothes; her father was always working or, on Sundays, watching sports on television; her older brothers constantly arguing while they played video games in a back bedroom. I could hear them back there even with their door slid shut. I learned from Kazuko and her family how to be human. I learned what it felt like to love others, to be loved, at least a little bit, even though I was not a member of their family. And from all that, I learned how to feel a great absence in my life when I was with my own mother and father, in my own home, wondering why I could not have the kind of life Kazuko’s family gave her.

  My self-pity never lasted long. I couldn’t allow it. I knew why my mother and father couldn’t love me in that way. My father because his wife didn’t give him the son he longed for. My mother because when she looked at me, I could see in her eyes his disappointment pressing down on her. None of us could give the other what they needed. We were doomed from th
e beginning.

  So in the end the universe had exacted a price for our cunning behavior. My father thought he’d tricked me by trapping me in the shrine, and I thought I’d tricked him by becoming his daughter. But all of our trickery was for nothing. Since my spirit was not truly trapped in the shrine, my father’s crops were still often blighted. And for me, what I’d thought would be an escape from the spirit world was instead an education in the sorrow of mortality. I learned how everything slips away in the moment we hold it. I learned from the beat of my human heart how we are forced to live in a world that will inevitably fade.

  This is not enough, I thought one day as I was hanging the laundry on the line for my mother. This is not enough, I was thinking still, when suddenly I heard a strange choking sound come from the nearby kitchen window. I dropped the sheet I was hanging and ran inside shouting, “Okaasan! Okaasan!” There was a pain in my heart before I even reached the kitchen, a throb in my chest as if someone had reached inside my chest and squeezed hard. When I arrived I found her on the floor, one arm across her chest.

  This is not enough, I had thought.

  And Death replied:

  “But this is what you have.”

  I was a third-grade student in high school that spring, seventeen years old and preparing to go to college in Tokyo with Kazuko. We had remained friends throughout the years, drawing closer and closer until we were more like sisters. My mother knew of our plans to go to university together in Tokyo. There would be trouble with Father, she’d told me, but she would take care of it. There was no need to worry.