Asleep in Nara (Short Story Series, Pt. 6)

Note: This entry continues the short story series about Sebastian, an American abroad and in over his head in Nara, Japan. The story will be around seven or eight parts long. Maybe nine. Definitely not ten. (Okay, fine, it could be ten… but no mas!)

You can find the previous chapters here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

After what his burning lungs insisted had been an eternity of running, Sebastian found a faint glimmer of hope. Literally, on the path up ahead, he spotted a light. He could make out moving shadows. He couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but there were definitely people there, and that meant backup to help him fight off the sociopath chasing him through the park with some weird ass bladed weapon.

Sebastian smiled. He threw his head back and laughed aloud. What were the odds of finding people out here in the middle of the night? His luck was finally turning!

As Sebastian neared the group, he quickly took in his surroundings. He was on an inclined stone path, peppered with the occasional steps. The sides of the path were completely lined with hundreds of tachidōrō, tall stone lanterns on pedestals. Sebastian wasn’t impressed by the deer effigies carved into them. He couldn’t figure out the obsession with deer in Nara. Mangy, ubiquitous creatures randomly rearing up and attacking tourists, carrying fleas, begging for food everywhere. Disgusting animals. These Nara deer weren’t even big enough to be fit for eating.

The group Sebastian had spotted was ahead, up a five steps and just beyond an enormous orange torii, a gate-like structure, that framed the path atop those steps. An orange fence extended on either side of the torii, separating Sebastian’s side from that of the people he hoped to contact.

As for those people, Sebastian could just make out that they were dressed in muted colors: dark blues and blacks. They were crowded into an amorphous circle, lit up by what Sebastian assumed were gas lamps or maybe battery-powered ones, knowing how high-tech everything was in Japan. Regardless, he was happy to find some other humans.

His joy, however, wouldn’t last long.

As he neared, a few men in the outer ring noticed him. They were young and nervously exchanged looks. After some quiet debate, three of them turned toward Sebastian, blocked the steps leading up to their group, and shooed him away.

Sebastian was incensed. I thought the Japanese were known for their politeness? Can’t they see I’m practically bleeding out here?

He held up his lacerated forearm to show them. Their eyes widened in fear, and they only shooed him more forcefully. Sebastian, however, would not be deterred. He didn’t care what kind of stupid Dead Japanese Poets’ Society they were running out here in the moonlight in Nara Park. He was getting their attention and getting an escort to a hospital. And one of them would be contacting the police, too, damn it.

Sebastian straightened up his back and approached. The young men who had first noticed him--they couldn’t have been out of their teens, with their birdcage-framed chests, prominent ribs, and the taut wires that pass for muscles in youth--looked around at one another in a panic.

Tattooed arms reached for katanas suspended at their waists. More weapons Sebastian hadn’t noticed that night. He was used to guns and bows, but not the blade. In America, blades were utility items. Something brandished at the hip to pop caps off bottles at a party or maybe to skin an errant deer after it ran into the front of your truck on a country road. He’d never imagined actually using any blade as a weapon.

But he was learning.

More men in the crowd noticed Sebastian’s approach. He was calling out to them now. The young men who first noticed him ungripped their weapons and receded into the darkness. The circle opened up as men turned to face him, no one willing to face him directly. Hands clutched katana grips all along the circle.

“Tomare!” A voice erupted from the crowd.

Two men stood in the center of the circle. Both were shirtless and tattooed from the neck down. Ink stretched across every contour of their necks, shoulders, arms. The ink stopped on their forearms, far enough back so long sleeves would cover them up. More tattoos reached down the length of their chests. Magnificent patterns--waterfalls, cherry blossoms, dragons--streaked along their torsos and continued past their waistlines.

Sebastian got caught up following the ink greens and blues and blacks and reds as they traced down abs and rolled along hip sockets, continuing unseen patterns below the waist. After staring for what he belatedly realized was too long, Sebastian averted his eyes and made an effort to stare off into the distance behind the men.

One of the men was older, maybe in his early 50s, with slicked-back gray hair that was turning white. His tattoos sported fewer colors than the significantly younger man. The young man, maybe in his late 20s or early 30s, held what Sebastian thought was a peculiar stance, left foot forward, his blade held in front of him at eye level, pointed straight toward his, and his arms crossed as they gripped the blade.

The older man, meanwhile, maintained an even stranger stance to Sebastian: right foot forward, arms out in a praying mantis-looking posture, hands separated by at least eight inches on the katana grip, the blade again at eye level and pointed toward the opponent, but curving downward, with the slicing edge facing the heavens. Sebastian couldn’t possibly imagine transitioning from that stance into anything remotely helpful in a fight.

He felt a white hot pain rush up his back, reminding him of the wound Jael had inflicted there.

“Hospital!” Sebastian shouted, stumbling his way toward the group of men. They didn’t move. “Hosupitalu kudasai!” Sebastian yelled.

He made his way up some stone stairs, an incline, more stairs. He approached the massive torii separating him from the men. He nearly reached it.

As Sebastian’s foot landed on the third step, one of the youngest men at the edge of the circle dashed forward, blade at the ready. He jammed it into Sebastian’s right shoulder, just under the clavicle, and Sebastian let out a howl to wake the dead.

The young man twisted the sword, planted a foot into Sebastian’s gut, and kicked him off the blade. Sebastian tumbled to the ground, rolling back down the path.

Some quick exchanges occurred. Sebastian couldn’t make out all the words, but he heard the Japanese words for “kill” and “escape.” He was finally coming to terms with exactly how dire his situation was.

As the mumbling tittered through the group, Sebastian climbed back onto his feet. So now his back was in excruciating pain, his left forearm was still welling up and dripping blood, and his entire right arm was nigh unusable. He tried lifting it a few times, but couldn’t raise it past chest height without an angry pain bolting through his side and down the length of his arm and back. The men, meanwhile, were still debating what to do with him.

Then came a moment of serendipity.

As the men, ninkyōdantai, as they would call themselves, debated, the eldest man in the center of the circle moved swiftly. Without warning, he ran his blade through the younger man he had been set to duel. The young man, having lowered his weapon in all the commotion, was caught completely off guard, and his inexperience was his undoing.

Chaos erupted. The older man cut through four more opponents before the group scrambled to react. A few more challenged him, and a few more died. His opponents were young and agile, but nothing compared with his experience.

One side of the circle rushed at the other, forgetting Sebastian altogether for the moment. Realizing he wasn’t getting any help here, Sebastian tried retreating.

A body ran into him from behind. He saw the edge of a blade scrape along his right side and was thankful it missed his abdomen. It took him a second to realize it wasn’t a katana, but a much shorter weapon. One he was also now all too familiar with.

Jael wrapped an arm around Sebastian’s side, pressed the flat of her palm against his chest, and pulled his body into hers. She leaned her head onto his injured right shoulder and moved her lips right up to his ear. She kept the katar at his side, ready to be turned and swiped into him at any moment. Sebastian gulped.

“Now the real fun begins,” she whispered.

Jael shoved Sebastian aside. He fell to the stone path and had to watch the action from there, paralyzed with fear.

Jael moved through the crowd like a beam of light. Sebastian could only keep up with every second or third kill. She attacked with the katar, but her killing blows were always some vicious punch or snap of the neck. With one man who came too close to shaving her arm off with a katana, she bit his jugular and left him to clutch at his throat and bleed out as she moved on to the next one.

Sebastian, meanwhile, was losing his grip on reality. To him, Jael seemed to be practically teleporting through the crowd. He could have sworn he even saw her hit someone hard enough to launch him ten feet into the air, over the row of tachidōrō and into the forest.

Sebastian crawled away hand-over-hand along the path, searching for any egress. The tachidōrō were all along the sides and blocked any easy escape. He tried but couldn’t squeeze between them, injured as he was.

Finally, with some good fortune, he found a break in the stone wall of tachidōrō and clawed his way through, away from the violence breaking out around him. He struggled up a few steps, each separated from the other by inches that may as well have been infinitudes in that moment. His sight was fading. The sounds of battle raged on in the distance. So distant. So disinterested.

As the screams reached a crescendo, and then suddenly died down, Sebastian crawled deeper into the recess he had discovered. The path was all stone, but it felt warmer the more blood he lost.

This is it, he thought. This is the end.

He had led a right life. He had loved Jesus Christ. He’d done everything the Good Book ever said: believed in Jesus, asked for forgiveness, dutifully waited for the Second Coming. Everything. Everything done right. All to come down to this: an ignoble death outside some godforsaken pagan temple in fucking Nara, Japan.

As the screams around him subsided, the last dying breaths of teenagers escaping into the night sky, forever captured in the foliage overhead, Sebastian heard one last determined set of footsteps approaching his hiding place.

He opened his eyes and tried to stand, determined to die on his feet. He couldn’t, though. The tattooed figure loomed over him in silence, katana held out wide at his side in a posture even Sebastian recognized as one meant to prepare for a killing strike.

Sebastian inhaled and set his stony eyes against his assailant.

The white-and-gray-haired man swiped his blade across Sebastian’s abdomen, ripping it wide open. Sebastian’s back arched, and he writhed, gritting his teeth, hearing the crunch of enamel and bone. He was determined not to beg or cry.

The older man, dissatisfied with Sebastian’s reaction, dipped the point of his katana into Sebastian’s insides and scrambled the blade around. He lifted his sword with one hand, facing some resistance as Sebastian’s intestines put up one last fight to not spill out onto the ground.

They lost that fight, and Sebastian’s will broke. Tears poured down his cheeks.

The man grinned and slid his blade back out of Sebastian’s gut. He assumed a wide stance, gripped at his weapon with both hands, and lifted his sword high, ready to chop downward and end Sebastian’s life.

Sebastian knew all about the end times. He’d devoured the book of Revelation as a kid--read it over and over and over again. It was the only book in the Bible that held his attention, really. So he was familiar with the Resurrection of dead believers that would occur during the rapture, and that’s where his mind went in his final moments. So, in some ways, he was surprised at how visceral, how physical, how literal, the Resurrection felt. But in other ways, his religion had prepared him for this inevitability all his life.

He was far too out of it at that point to question why his body would be physically rising from the ground at the moment of his death, being lifted by a force beyond his control, but he was ready and assumed this was his ascension, his spiritual resurrection, into Heaven.

He felt his right arm moving, again not of his own volition, across his chest. All was pain, but his right hand felt heavy. Heavy beyond the pain of so many injuries. He heard a gasp and smiled.

Yeah, fucker, sucks to be you killing a Christian at the instant of the rapture, huh? Sebastian thought. He dreamed of what Heaven would would be like, and he was happy to be reunited with his grandfather. For the first time that day, Sebastian was genuinely happy and at peace. The struggling was done.

Then his body crumpled back to the ground, a savage pain shooting through him.

He felt himself being dragged backwards by his right arm. He could feel fingers locked around wrist and deliriously wondered why Jesus was being so rough with this whole rapture/resurrection thing.

He glanced down and took note of his insides trailing bloodily along, leaving a slug-like path where his body had been dragged.

He searched for his attacker, but couldn’t find him. He heard the clang of metal at his side, and his right hand felt suddenly lighter. The katar had fallen free from his loose grip, and he was uncertain how it had ever ended up in his hand at all.

“Yeah, this should do in a pinch,” a disembodied voice said from behind him.

Sebastian stole one last glance at his surroundings. He couldn’t see the small orange shrine behind him, but he could tell he was right underneath another one of those damn orange torii and that more tachidōrō lined each side of the disjointed stone path he was lying on. The walkway wasn’t straight; it bent at a small angle under the torii as it approached the unseen shrine.

Jael circled around Sebastian’s head and crouched at his side. He groaned.

“Just end it, please, Jael,” he begged--the one thing he had hoped he wouldn’t do.

“That’s not my real name,” she said. “Call me Persephone.”

Sebastian sputtered and coughed. “Look, lady, I don’t care what your real name is. Just, if you’re going to kill me, kill me.” He coughed again.

“I’m going to make you a deal,” she replied. “It can save your life.”

“I don’t need a deal.” Hope welled up inside him, against all reason. “I need a doctor! Will you take me?”

Persephone shook her head. “I’m going to save your pathetic life, and in exchange, I need something from you.”

“What?” he asked and then began hacking. Blood was coming up now. “Anything.”

“I need ten years of your life. You’re going to help me.”

“And then what?” he asked, his head lolling on the ground.

“Seriously?” she asked. She leaned back and reflected for a moment. “There’s this great Buddhist story, you know?” she said rhetorically. Sebastian, of course, hardly knew any Buddhist stories. Persephone continued.

“A man was shot in the knee with an arrow. It’s okay, though. I mean, it’s just a knee. You can live with that injury. Except the tip was poisoned. Fortunately, however, there was a doctor nearby, and he had the antidote.”

Sebastian was fading fast. “Why are you…?” He trailed off. Persephone ignored him and continued on anyway.

“Before the doctor could administer the antidote, the dying man grabbed the doctor’s wrist and asked him what poison was killing him. The doctor was perplexed. Next, the man wanted to know what kind of arrow it had been. How was its edge sharpened? What kind of bow had his attacker used? Who was this attacker? Where did he come from? Did he come from a good family?”

“I get it, I get it,” Sebastian said, thinking that maybe he wasn’t getting to that hospital or getting anything else he wanted that night.

“Do you?” Persephone asked. “What I can tell you is that in about a minute or so, you are going to bleed to death. I don’t think you have the time to waste wondering what happens ten years from now. Worry about that later.”

Sebastian nodded. “I’ll take the deal,” he said.

“You want me to save your life?” Persephone clarified, “and in exchange you give me ten years of service?”

“Yes,” Sebastian said.

Persephone smiled. “Congratulations on your new lease on life, then.”

She bent over Sebastian, pressed her lips against his, and bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood. Sebastian didn’t recoil from the pain. He leaned into the kiss. As it continued on, too long, far too long, he felt strength returning to his limbs.

Persephone wrapped a hand around the back of Sebastian’s head and lifted him up. He could move his right arm again and wrapped it around the small of her back. And there under the torii, on a stone walkway in front of a small shrine along the path to Wakamiya, the resurrection of Sebastian Pilgrim was complete.

***[The photo is my own, taken along the entryway to Wakamiya Shrine in Nara Park]