Let me out, Lee, she said.
His mother had loved telling him ghost stories too. Like she was preparing him, knowing she would become one. Lee had to believe in ghosts, because otherwise, he’d lost his mind.
Hina moved easily through the house, and Lee followed behind her, nearly smacking his head on the low ceiling. Some parts of the ceiling had wood panels that hung strangely low, soLee had to duck whenever he stepped into the hall. Lee knew he was probably taller than the average Japanese man, but he wasn’t even six feet tall, so the low ceilings felt like an intentional slight.
Hina laughed at him, toeing her house shoes off at the door.
“I’m too tall for Japan,” Lee said, grimacing.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Hina said. “This was a samurai house.”
“And samurai...” He struggled to form his question, the sedatives gluing his words together. “They were short?” he managed.
Hina shook her head. “The ceilings are low so you can’t raise a sword indoors,” she said, mimicking raising a katana above her head and striking down. “If you wanted to kill someone by sword, you had to do it outside. Less blood to mop up.”
“Really?” Lee said, running his hand over the polished wood, which he now noticed had thin marks scoring across it. He ran his finger along the groove. Had someone tried raising a sword here? Had they tried to kill someone?
Lee could picture it now—the glint of plated samurai armor clicking together like dragon scales, the lacquered wood of the face mask and golden horns on the helmet. Lee had researched samurai in middle school with one of his dad’s girlfriends whose name he could no longer remember. But the sedatives turned his memory to watercolors, and he couldn’t recall what all the different parts of the armor were called anymore.
The samurai in his mind raised his blade, but the image dissolved as it struck the low ceiling. Visualization was another thing the sedatives had taken from him, but it was better that way. He needed to stay grounded in the present, not get lost in worlds that no one else could see.
“Well, no, the part about cleaning up blood was a joke,”Hina said. “It probably had more to do with not wanting to be decapitated in their sleep.”
“Fair enough,” Lee said, cramming his feet into his sneakers by the door and following Hina outside.
She led Lee to a small stone well at the edge of the yard, just before the forest. The frayed end of a rope hung limp over the rim. Lee peered down at the watery darkness.
“Tell me the ghost story,” he said.
Hina cleared her throat, then leaned over the well, so that her words echoed as they cascaded down the lightless chasm.
“Once, there was a servant girl named Okiku who worked in a castle,” Hina said. “She was so beautiful that she caught the attention of a man named Aoyama. But she didn’t love him, so he came up with a plan to make her his bride...”
Lee leaned farther across the well, as did the echo of his reflection in the dark water.
“Aoyama framed Okiku for stealing her master’s plates,” Hina said. “He made her count them again and again, but one was missing, because Aoyama had stolen it. Okiku would have been executed for theft, but Aoyama offered to protect her if she became his mistress. But still, she refused him.”
A bead of sweat dripped from Lee’s face and splashed into the shallow water below, his reflection rippling and distorting in the darkness.
“Aoyama was furious,” Hina said. “He beat Okiku and tortured her, then stabbed her and dropped her body down a well. But at night, he could still hear her counting plates, her voice echoing up from the bottom of the wet darkness.One... two... three... four... five...”
The light shifted overhead, casting a sharp ray of sun down at the water. The water became clear and bright, and Lee looked closer...
At the clear rainwater at the bottom. Nothing but stones and moss. No death or secrets. How disappointing.
“You want me to think there’s a corpse in this well?” Lee said.
“Oh, of course not,” Hina said. “That happened in a palace in Hyogo, far north of here.”
Lee glanced down at the water once more, but the light had already stripped away the mystery, the fear. “Then why are you telling me about Okiku?”
“Because,” Hina said, grinning, “the man who killed her was a samurai.”
“A samurai?” Lee said. “Aren’t samurai supposed to be...” He struggled for words again, the second dose of Benadryl slowing his tongue even more than his mind. From what little he could recall about samurai, he thought of them as skilled warriors who valued honor above all else. Killing a servant and dropping her down a well didn’t exactly fit that image.
As always, Hina knew what he was trying to say.
“The samurai were not all heroes,” she said quietly. “They were warriors, then they were bullies, then they were bureaucrats. Then one day, all at once, they were gone.”
