Nagisa was fond of telling me that the gods are dead. It was a statement inspired by Nietzsche, and which she evidently found clever, but unlike the philosopher she was referring to the Shinto kami. She meant no one actually believed anymore that our gods, if they were there at all, could influence the fate or fortunes of those who prayed at their shrines.
I could never decide whether or not I agreed with her. In truth, the only thing I’d ever summoned in the solitude of a shrine was myself, as though a great silver mirror rose up behind my lids, which showed not my face, or my hands pressed together below my chin, but some truth or courage or weakness shrouded in the corridors of my heart.
Between the two of us, Nagisa liked to refer to me as the weird one, due to what she considered to be an overly fertile imagination on my part. She had little ways to mock me about it. Often, when we were walking past a shadowy section of the woods, or a dense copse at the edge of a field, she would stop suddenly and ask if I felt something, and when I paused she would make a show of casting her eyes about and teasingly add that they must be watching us.
By “they” she’d be referring to foxes. This was because from the time we first met, in middle school, I’d expressed an interest in the old Japanese folklore surrounding the creatures, which held foxes to be intelligent and magical beings, capable of shape-shifting into human form. Nagisa, ever the realist, considered this lore to be outdated hogwash, in the same camp as all other supernaturalphenomena and unworthy of genuine attention from modern minds.
I’d been interested in foxes, as she knew, ever since I’d spotted two of them crossing the road on Nihondaira one night as a young girl, out the back window of our car. Another vehicle coming around the bend behind us had caught them in the glare of its headlights, stretching their shadows out far up the road, and for a moment the elongated shadows had seemed to morph into those of two slender humans, scampering for the shelter of the woods on the other side. No one in our car besides me had seen the animals or their mysterious shadows—the foxes been too fast and too sly, sneaking across the ribbon of pavement in an instant.
Nagisa had a particular look she’d make in lieu of saying I was the weird one, such as when she heard me recounting to others that night on Nihondaira. She perfected it sometime in high school, and it was all she needed to do when she knew I was thinking something odd or about to make unusual statement: one eyebrow cocked a fraction higher than the other, while her eyes narrowed sardonically and the sides of her mouth dimpled with the hint of a smile.
That was the look she gave me at Cenova, on the day we sat at the wrong table.
Cenova was less than a year old at the time, the newest shopping complex in Shizuoka City. We’d bought two sourdough donuts and a coffee each, feeling refined because we were fourth-year university students and opting to drink the coffee black, with no sugar, in honor of our maturity. Each of us was privately bracing for its bitterness.
The seating area was packed that day, but after surveying the room we spotted an empty table with just a single lidless paper cup on it. We went to it and checked the cup to find it half full with water. I caught the two girls sitting at the next table exchanging furtive glances as we sat down, but we pushed the cup to the side nonetheless and set our steaming mugs before us.
We’d only just raised the coffee to our lips when there was a purposeful loud grunt, and we turned to find a short, gaunt man, who appeared to be somewhere in his seventies, staring down at us. His eyes in their hollows were rheumy, yet somehow introspective; they settled first on me, then Nagisa.
Faintly, I heard the girls beside us stifle giggles.
“This is my seat,” said the old man. His voice was a stony rasp, as though his vocal chords were in the process of fossilization.
He was the strangest person I’d ever seen in the city, and in fact the strangest person I’d had standing before me at all in my twenty-two years, resembling some magical caricature out of a Hollywood fantasy film. His longish white hair was thin and unkempt; his face, bearing high cheekbones, was deeply lined and bearded with unshaven scruff that matched his bushy eyebrows. He had a frayed woolen scarf around his neck, which I imagined must be hot in the well-heated indoors, and it hung over the partially buttoned front of a raggedy coat—dark green felt, patched at the elbows and speckled with lint of various colors—which looked like it might have been new when he was my age.
He carried some kind of walking stick in his hand, time worn like the rest of him, hand-crafted out of a knobby branch. There was a hole through it at the top, above where his dark, gnarled claw gripped the wood, as though that hand were carved from the same long-dead tree. A small, faded Shinto amulet, roughly the color of his coat, was looped through the hole.
The introspectiveness I thought I’d seen at first in his eyes had melted away, and a momentary confusion clouded his eyes. It looked like he wasn’t fully aware of where he’d found himself.
“Oh,” said Nagisa, clearly annoyed. “We didn’t know it was yours. Um, sorry.”
I could almost see a series of cogs grinding behind the man’s brow.
“No, no,” he said after a pause, raising a shaky hand. “It’s all right.”
“Really,” I chimed in, indicating the paper cup with a little nod. “You were here first. Please, sit.”
As I rose, I studied him closely, trying not to blatantly stare but finding it hard to avoid doing so. I’d never seen someone so out of place in their surroundings, and not only for the fact that he was still dressed as though he were outdoors; all around was the shining newness of the Cenova shopping center, bright and spotlessly clean, smelling like freshly unboxed clothes and trays of warm pastries, while the relic standing next to us gave off a curious scent like damp green undergrowth. The room around us was bustling with bag-toting women, clacking in heels, cheerful young families enjoying their fast-food, chattering students and primly dressed old folks, all existing in contrast so stark to the seat-grubbing stranger before us that he seemed to have shimmered into being there from another era, or a parallel reality.
At last he accepted our offer of the seat. He didn’t smile, but as he lowered himself into the chair where Nagisa had been a moment before, supported by his walking stick, I caught a glimpse of bright white teeth behind thin, chapped lips. Those teeth were at once uncanny in that aged and unkempt head, for in the same glimpse I saw how long and straight they were, like the posts of a neatly painted fence.
We walked away and entered the food court opposite, trying to hold back our giggles, no different from the girls that had been sitting next to us.
“He looks like a hermit from the mountains,” whispered Nagisa, once we’d put some distance behind us. She dissolved into laughter. “Must be his first time back to civilization in a while.”
I shushed her, but I was laughing as well.
In the food court we managed to snag two chairs, still cupping hands over our snickering mouths. Upon sitting, I tried to get another look at the man, our angle affording us a clear view, and was baffled to see that the table was again empty. The paper cup still rested on it, exactly as it had been.
“What on earth?” said Nagisa, shooting me a bemused look. “Where’d he go?”
The girls who’d been at the next table before were already gone, and a young couple had taken their place, chattering animatedly over their food. That left only Nagisa and I to be puzzled over the man’sreturn to absence.
We sipped at our black coffees. As we chatted, both of us continued to snatch glances at the empty table. Shortly after I’d shifted my focus to the discussion at hand, Nagisa’s eyes flicked in that direction once again—and paused there. I followed her gaze and saw that two boys in high school uniforms were standing by the old man’s table, holding trays. One looked into the paper cup, shrugged and said something to his companion. They slid the cup to the side and sat down.
One corner of Nagisa’s mouth turned up in a smirk.
“How about that?” she said.
“Totally strange.”
“Guess we came a few minutes too early for the hermit’s comf—”
She stopped. Her eyes had gone back to the table, but now she stared agog.
The old man was hobbling up to the table with his cane. The boys, noticing his attention upon them, craned their heads in unison, mouths full of donut.
I could read the man’s lips even from where we were sitting: This is my seat.
“Are you seeing this?” asked Nagisa.
The boys looked from the man to each other, then pushed away from the table, offering half-hearted nods of apology as they rose. As they walked away, one bent his head, chortling audibly, and the other slapped his back in mirth.
That was when a new thought came to me, a crazy one, snowballing larger as I rolled it around in my mind—and I knew that once it left my lips there would be no easy end to Nagisa’s ridicule.
“He’s not a mountain hermit,” I said, trying my best to keep my composure. “Didn’t you get any other feeling off of him? A different kind of impression?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I leaned in, until my throat hovered over the rim of my coffee cup.
“What if he’s not human at all?”
“Go on,” said Nagisa, one eyebrow cocking, eyes narrowing, cheeks dimpling.
“Get that dumb look off your face.”
“What look? There’s no look.”
“Sure. Well I’ll just say it then: what if that guy just looks like a man? What if he’s something else, from the wilderness?”
“Wow, here we go.”
“You said yourself that he looks like he just got here from the mountains.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you. I just said ‘here we go.’”
“Shut up,” I laughed.
Nagisa’s smirk was back, but she made a zipping motion across her lips.
“Remember Beauty and the Beast? The Disney cartoon?”
She made a grunt of acknowledgment, pretending her mouth was still zippered closed.
“There’s a beautiful witch at the beginning, and she disguises herself as an old beggar woman, then asks a prince for shelter in his castle. He’s disgusted by her and refuses, and she punishes him by turning him into the Beast. It turns out she was testing him, trying to see if he was good and generous, and he failed. Following me?”
“Mmph.”
“You can unzip.”
“Thanks.”
“Well there’re stories like that from all around the world, creatures and other beings that disguise themselves as humans, and sometimes they do it to test people, like that witch. So what if the old man was like that? What if he’s a shape-shifter, testing us to see if we’d be nice enough to give the table back?”
“A lot of ‘ifs’ here.”
“Bear with me. Which creatures in Japan are shape-shifters? The clever ones?”
“Oh no . . . just say it.”
I took a swig of my coffee, pretending to savor it while she waited for the obvious answer. “Foxes.”
Nagisa put her face in her hands, shaking her head. “This,” she said. “This is so 100% you.”
I wasn’t serious about the whole thing, but kept a straight face, because I got the impression that Nagisa believed I just might be.
“How do you know I’m wrong?” I asked.
“Oh, c’mon. Prove to me you’re not then.
“Okay, how about this—let’s follow him when he leaves here.”
“Seriously?”
“Don’t put on that act with me. You said you wanted me to prove it. Well, we’ll follow him and see if he turns into a fox, or runs off into the woods or something.”
Nagisa studied me. The tips of my ears prickled with a blush as it sunk in what I’d proposed, but I kept my face impassive until a devilish glint entered her eyes and she said, “Deal.”
It took a long time before we went anywhere—until just before Cenova closed that night. The man would get up, leave, and come back frequently, calmly guilting those who happened to sit at the table into moving. In one instance, an obstinate and exhausted-looking man in a suit, his briefcase occupying the chair opposite, refused to get up, shaking his head and barely looking the scruffy misfit in the face, at which point the latter gathered his cup of water in hand and migrated to another empty table. Each time he got up was to go to the alcove down which the washrooms were located, and Nagisa, ribbing me on, suggested that he wasn’t able to hold his human shape for long stretches at a time, so he had to hide himself periodically in a toilet stall and morph back into a fox for a short while.
At long last he came back from the washroom for a final time, when the seating area had largely emptied out, finished what remained of his water and hobbled away in the direction of the escalators. As he passed close to us we kept our heads down, unspeaking, trying to remain unnoticed. Our phones were long dead, we’d finished the school work that was left in our bags, and we were bored out of our minds.
Once he was on the escalator we rose and scurried after him.
Darkness had fallen long ago outside. We followed our subject through pools of orange lamp light at the shambling snail’s pace he set. His route took us past Shizuoka station, where people drifted out of the bright arrival hall and alarms sounded the arrival of the late trains.
At length his walking grew irregular. He staggered, dropping the walking stick, and his hands went to his front. I heard Nagisa’s breath catch in her throat at the same time mine did. The old man bent over with a grunt and a wheeze to retrieve the stick, then continued at a quickened pace. A moment later he abruptly left the sidewalk, entering a small public park. We approached the entrance carefully, to where he’d disappeared from view behind a hedge.
The sound of retching came to us, and a miserable groan as hot stomach contents were ejected onto the ground. Nagisa turned to me, looking both bewildered and wary. I couldn’t bring myself to go closer, but she’d always been bolder than me, and so she sidled up to the hedge and peered quickly around it. When she fell back she ushered me away in the direction we’d come, until we were for certain out of hearing range.
“He’s throwing up in the grass there,” she said. “Trying to keep it off the path by the looks of it. Something’s pretty wrong with him, I guess.”
“Yeah,” I intoned, starting to feel terrible about what we were up to. A breeze of icy vapor was rising inside me, printing frost patterns onto my gut.
“Let’s just see,” said Nagisa, still whispering, reading my face in the half-light, sensing the feeling coming over me and preparing to challenge it. “You said you’d prove it to me, didn’t you?”
“That he’s really a fox.”
“Right. Let’s follow just a little bit longer. He’s headed somewhere.”
The vomiting stopped. The man came back out of the park and continued down the sidewalk. He went left and crossed the street, and we followed until we found ourselves a block behind him, two distant shadows on a small street where only a few amber-colored lights shone. It was utterly silent there.
All at once the old man veered to the side and vanished through an opening off the sidewalk. As we closed the distance to that spot, seeing at last where he’d gone, fresh goose bumps rose on my covered arms.
We’d come to the front of a small shrine, nestled between a closed bicycle repair shop and a two-story apartment building, with alow vermillion torii gate separating it from the street. What had puckered my arms and neck into goose flesh, however, were the stone foxes on either side of the gate: this was an Inari shrine, house of worship to the kami of foxes.
Nagisa stopped cold in her tracks, as did I, and not only because we were about to be visible to anyone within the shrine. She had gripped hold of my arm, tightly.
“No way,” she breathed.
Though I had hoped to play it cool, I knew my own face was mirroring hers.
“This is impossible,” I mouthed back, feeling a strange giddiness coming over me. I bit down on my tongue to sober myself.
I took a step forward, wanting to see into the shrine, but Nagisa held me back. There was no trace of skepticism discernible in her expression. I had never seen her like this.
“Foxes are the messengers,” she squeaked out. “They’re the messengers to Inari. You don’t think . . . that it could have been a test, like you said? That he’s reporting back?” Her legs were trembling. Something wild had come into her eyes.
“Get it together,” I told her, straightening up. Despite being spooked myself, I suddenly relished this chance to act as the rational one, to turn the tables on her after years of teasing me for my fanciful streak.
We made not a sound, barely dared to draw breath, as we peeked into the shrine from our place on the sidewalk. There were no lights inside the sacred space, only a dim residual glow filtering in from the street, and my eyes had to adjust before I could make out any detail.
The old man was standing before the offering box. Whether he’d thrown a coin in I didn’t know. He took the thick rope in hand and rang the suzu hanging above. The dull rolling of the bell was startlingly loud in the night stillness, reverberating off the modern walls on either side of the shrine.
A light flicked on behind a curtained window on the second floor of the apartment building. Until then I hadn’t even taken note of the window, shrouded in darkness as it had been—the only one on the side of the building facing the shrine.
At the offering box, the man’s head was bowed, his walking stick on the ground at his feet. We watched him, as still as the stone foxes themselves. Presently he clapped to end his prayer and bent slowly to retrieve his stick.
We were about to retreat when a movement above us caught our attention. The curtain was cast aside and the lighted window opened outward with a rusty squeal. The pale face of a middle-aged man appeared.
Our supposed shape-shifter gazed up, and addressed the man in the window as kannushi—the master of the shrine. He bowed deeply, at which the man above insisted that the formality was unnecessary.
“Come around back. The door’s open.”
“Thank you,” said the old man, a tremble in his gravelly voice, and bowed again. “Thank you so much.”
“All fine,” the priest told him casually, disappearing from view. The curtain fell back into place.
I noticed for the first time the narrow alley running along the wall of the apartment building, leading to the rear of the shrine.
Nagisa was tugging at my sleeve.
“Come on,” she said excitedly, “let’s follow.”
“Are you nuts?”
“Don’t you want to know where he’s going.”
I sighed, studying her face to determine how serious she was, but her eyes remained large and imploring in the gloom.
“Okay,” I told her, and looked up to see the that the man had nearly reached the far end of the alley. “Let’s hurry then.”
We darted between the foxes and beneath the torii, then down the shrine’s short path of flagstones into the alley. We made our way so carefully and quietly that it seemed to me we were floating just above the ground.
At the end of the alley we stopped to listen. I held a burning lungful of air.
A door was being opened nearby, to the left.
It was now or never. Leaving behind our concern of being noticed, we stepped around the corner, holding fast to each other’s wrists.
Another alleyway ran right to left, wider than the one we’d just stepped out of, and the only illumination in it came from the very end, where a soft orange glow spilled around the old man from the door he’d just opened.
I caught a glimpse of several people beyond the doorway, some reclined on the floor wrapped in blankets, some sitting up. I saw bowls and chopsticks full of steaming rice. There were unintelligible words spoken, but I caught ones bidding this newest arrival come in out of the cold, and another saying that there was a plenty of food left to eat. Then a keen pair of eyes caught sight of us from within, and I heard the question, “Who . . .?”
I had lost myself in trying to make sense out of what I was seeing, as had Nagisa, and we didn’t move until the old man swiveled around to finally take us in.
Nagisa yelped, leaping from sight and yanking me back with her, and then we were pounding up the alleyway, over the flagstones, onto the sidewalk and up the street, huffing and puffing, until we’d put several blocks behind us and come onto the Ishida Highway. I was sweating beneath my winter clothes by the time we slowed down.
We walked up the highway in the direction of the station, which loomed just ahead, with its bright interior and perpetual line of idling taxis by the doors. The excitement of our flight died away as I processed what we’d seen.
“What was that all about?” asked Nagisa, beaming with the afterglow of our adventure.
“He’s homeless, don’t you see? All of them in there are.”
“You really think?”
I turned to face her, an unanticipated spark of anger rising in my chest. “Of course that’s what it is. What don’t you get? That shrine master, he must let homeless people stay the night in that room. He might even be giving them food. It was just a poor, homeless man and we stalked him tonight like he was an animal.”
“That’s not it,” said Nagisa flatly, clearly taken aback by my tone. “We followed him because he was super weird, leaving the table again and again and then telling people it was his. We got curious.”
“He’s sick, he was probably going to the toilet to vomit, just like he did in the park. He’s a sick old man without a home, and we made a game out of him . . .”
I resented the hot sensation of a tear running down my cheek; when Nagisa saw it she took my forearms in her hands and drew me into a quick, tight hug, which was the only kind she ever gave.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess we went too far.”
“We did.” I shook my head, sniffling, embarrassed at my outburst and staring at space between our feet.
We parted ways at the station and went home, where I drifted, after much tossing and turning, into an uneasy sleep.
The next day I returned to Cenova in the early afternoon, alone. I made my way to the same coffee shop, but bypassed it to walk straight into the seating area.
He was there, the old man, in the same outfit as the day before, but he was sitting now near the back corner of the room. A lidless cup sat before him on the small, one-person table.
I went to the counter and bought a hot coffee, with cream instead of black, and two sourdough donuts.
The man didn’t look up as I approached, but by the time I stood across from him he had raised his eyes to my face. I tried to read whether he recognized me, but he was inscrutable. He studied me in a confused, sad sort of way, mouth moving wordlessly.
“Is this your table?” he asked quietly, and looked to his walking stick leaning against the back of the chair, as though preparing to take it in hand and go.
“No, it’s not.” My own voice was tiny in my ears. “I need to go in just a minute, actually. The thing is, I picked these snacks up for a friend and I, but she just called and asked me to meet her at another place, so I have to hurry off. I was wondering if you might like them.”
I placed the tray with the donuts and coffee on the table next to his cup.
“I . . .”
“It’s no problem, really. No use letting them go to waste. Please, enjoy.”
I could smell him. Not the green scent of forest undergrowth I’d detected the day before, but merely that of musty body odor, long-unwashed garments, and the sour underlying stench of illness.
He smiled, and my own lips pulled into a grin as well, as if I were his warped reflection. His teeth, I saw, were not white or long or straight. Those are what the teeth of a fox might look like, or of one who has taken the shape of a man; the teeth I saw in that mouth were yellow, crooked and worn down, blunted by the passage of decades. They were utterly human.
“Thank you,” he said—and I understood that he had recognized me. His smile didn’t fade, and like the day before it seemed that a series of cogs, a few of them faulty, perhaps, turned slowly behind his weathered brow. “You have a kind heart.”
“No, I—I mean, it’s no problem at all. Anyway, I really have to go.”
I left him, striding for the escalators, descending to the ground floor and exiting the gleaming department store.
The street was bright and clean in the sunshine, the people were bright and clean, the shop windows and store fronts and sales banners—all bright and clean. Around us the poverty was nowhere to be seen, and when it was, when it appeared in the city center uncloaked, so crude was its disparity as to hint at the supernatural. Those shades of indigence were present, tucked away on winter nights behind the Inari shrine, and I wondered how many more such places there were.
The winter faded into spring, when the days warmed and a person, if they had blankets and a secluded place to lie down, might sleep through the night outside. All through that time I continued to think about the priest of the little Inari shrine, the secret provider of sustenance and shelter. It was not only Inari—god of foxes, god of rice and prosperity—who was summoned by the toll of the suzu on a late January night, but a man. It was a man who fed the hungry.
I know now that Nagisa was wrong: the gods are not dead. As the cities rose across our plains, the kami flowed into them from the outside, from the villages, mountains and forests where they’d originated. They are the spirits revealed in the phantom mirror we call forth in prayer, as real as any other beings.
There’s always a god that can be called upon to listen, I believe, whether outside us or housed within the deep places of the heart—and I know one shrine where it sometimes answers back.