Nagashibina Read online

slower in following, reaching the small foyer as the stair creaked above. Small nightlights adorned the wall above the rail lending patches of illumination to the lightless stairwell. Fumi hesitated on calling out, her eyes fixated suddenly on the small figure of her sister clad in pink moving steadily upward and behind her cast into relief by the circle of light against the wall, a blackness darker than the surrounding night, blotted out Aimi’s shadow. Fumi covered her mouth with a trembling hand; the child reached the landing and disappeared down the turn of the upper hallway.

  Dad!

  She ran up the stairs and made it to the top as the door to her parent’s bedroom closed softly. Fumi said now that everything’s a blur. She remembered a struggle, a great force shoving her back against the wall and her sister screaming. When the light came on, she held the large kitchen knife she’d wrestled from Aimi. One can only imagine the scene with sympathy for the disbelieved. In the ensuing chaos, Fumi was thrown out of the house with her father threatening to call the police. She’d been able to take back her cell phone and call Hinohara-san who arrived within the hour.

  Hinohara-san attempted to tell all she knew of the doll and its growing malignant hold on the youngest daughter of the Sato family, but to no avail. Both girls were told to leave with the situation escalating to the point of the neighbors gathering on the curb. Hinohara-san saw the doll in the young girl’s arms and recognized it for certain as the one that had haunted her family for years. She confirmed as much to Fumi as she drove them back to her apartment on the edges of Setagaya-ku, some distance away.

  Fumi remembered her dream and when she mentioned what she’d been called; Hinohara-san became very quiet. “I had a brother,” Hinohara-san said at length, “he was older than me by a few years. I was around six years old at the time when the accident occurred. I’d been sick with pneumonia and was staying overnight in the hospital...my brother had been falling asleep in the room with me when our parents decided to head home. The police said it was an accident..., that my dad lost control of the car and they went into the canal. They all drowned, but you know what the strange thing is...?”

  “What?”

  “The police report listed a doll among the items recovered from the crash site, but in the box given to me...there was no doll. It was still on the shelf in my parents room when I went to look.”

  “So, your grandmother knew their deaths were connected..., but why? Why is this happening?” Fumi asked aloud, her voice wavering with emotion. “Who was the girl in Aimi-chan’s drawing and in my nightmares? What does she want?”

  “I don’t know if we’ll ever know.” Hinohara-san said gloomily, turning onto her street.

  “Don’t say that! We’ll find out...you couldn’t save your family, but maybe this time we can prevent a new tragedy from happening.”

  The next day they began in earnest spreading their search out of the university library to larger libraries throughout Tokyo’s twenty-three wards. Fumi got a job after school to help with expenses and the girls subsequently grew closer as friends then slowly as family. Hinohara-san had taken extensive pictures of the doll while it had been in her grandmother’s possession and used them to cross-reference styles from the early Showa period. Eventually the break came through one day while perusing a book of a walking tour taken by Norimasa Taisuke, an obscure twentieth century chronicler of Nipponese customs. He had traveled extensively in and around the Kanto area documenting changing lifestyles and village religions.

  “Unusual Hina-Matsuri display of Tsukumogami objects in the shrine’s care.” Hinohara-san read from a paperback book. Laying it down between them, she held a magnifying glass over a black and white image of a cloth-covered table holding an assortment of objects. Umbrellas, metal pots, broken fans and among the superstitions, a painted face smiled out from the decades.

  “Good eye!” Fumi exclaimed, taking the glass and studying the image intently. Hinohara-san smiled happily. “Says here, the objects were entrusted by local families to the Shinto priests as a way of appeasing the spirits with prayer and offerings. Simply destroying the objects by fire wouldn’t sever the connection between spirit and object, other means are necessary to dismiss the spirit that had taken up residence within the inanimate object.” Fumi moved onto the next page. “Oh! A more peculiar object is found within the Nagashibina of a local girl who was stricken in her sixth year of life. She was the daughter of a rural doll-maker famous in these parts for his life-like creations.”

  “Does it say more?”

  “No...we need a name. The village isn’t given, but the section’s on Hakone. It must’ve been on the Tokkaido road.” Narrowing their search, the girls found a mention of a lot of handmade toys from the Showa era on an auctioning site. Among them, was a male doll with marks matching those on Makiko’s left heel. From there, they discovered the doll-maker’s name was Ichinose and he’d hailed from a town called Yamashita-cho which had long since disappeared with its residents relocating to the surrounding towns of Moto Hakone and Hakone Yumoto.

  Going through city directories, they narrowed down the lead even further to an elderly man who lived in Moto Hakone, his profession had been listed as doll-maker. On the weekend, they planned on making a trip down to see him as per the time of their appointment. “A nagashibina...,” Hinohara-san said on the train ride over. “Now, that’s something I haven’t heard in a long time. Fumi was only vaguely familiar with the term and looked at the other questioningly.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a doll,” she said, “a doll created in the image of a girl child to take upon it sickness meant for the child. There’s very few places in Japan that still celebrate that aspect of the Hina-Matsuri.”

  “Then, it wasn’t simply a plaything..., somebody created it for a specific purpose.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  On that note, their conversation lapsed and the silver high-speed rail devoured the miles between them and their destination. Moto Hakone lakeside on Lake Ashi is a favored tourist destination for many reasons, among those for its beautiful crystal waters, spiritualism and history as part of the old Tokkaido road. The girls left the train station upon arrival, following directions Hinohara-san had downloaded to her phone.

  At the residence located on a quiet street, they were greeted by an older woman with her steel gray hair pinned back in a severe bun. She wore a traditional kimono and spoke crisp, archaic Japanese from another era. The girls were guided into a sparsely furnished outer room; a wizened old man leaning heavily on a cane and wrapped in a dark blue wrapper, entered presently.

  “Ichinose-san? We spoke on the phone, I’m Hinohara Mai and this is my sister, Fumi. We were interested in what you could tell us about this doll.” Hinohara-san produced the photos she’d taken of the nagashibina and the old man took out his spectacles from his inner robe, studying them intently.

  “I remember this doll. She was a special one.” He said quietly, never taking his tired eyes from the photo.

  “Who was she made for?”

  “My sister, Makiko. She was a very spoiled child, the blossom of my father’s eye. Very pretty, very delicate...everyone loved Makiko save for myself. I was jealous, you see, jealous of the attention our parents lavished on her. Disillusioned, I suppose is another word for it. Small animals used to disappear around our family compound. Cats, dogs, small squirrels, they were found gutted and strewn about the forest floor. Villages said a pack of wild dogs had savaged the beasts.” Ichinose-san nodded slightly, gravely. “But, I knew better.”

  “Makiko was struck down one winter with a terrible wasting disease. Healers were brought in, offers burnt at the Minoru shrine. Still, nothing cured her. She wasted away before our eyes, growing thinner and paler by the day until it seemed she would be swallowed up by the blankets our parents had piled around her. In desperation, my father created this Nagashibina in Makiko’s exact likeness. He threaded the fallen strands of her hair lost during her il
lness through the clay scalp and dressed the doll in clothes cut from my sister’s yukata.”

  He had stopped speaking, his face turning an alarming shade of gray.

  “What happened then?” Fumi probed gently.

  The old man’s shoulders sagged. “She died. My grief-stricken mother refused to allow monks from the shrine to take her baby away. Father locked himself up in his studio and was found dead three days later. I was sent with a relative in the village to stay with until the services were over. At the end of the fourth day, a joint funeral was held for my father and sister. I was left to return with my mother who never left Makiko’s image. She carried the doll on her back and began telling people that my sister was alive.”

  Ichinose-san sipped his tea and sat up straighter. “I must conclude this tale, you ladies have waited patiently for an old man to blunder on. My apologies if my recollections weren’t quite what you expected.”

  “Oh, no! No, no! We’re sorry for taking your time!” Hinohara-san soothed; they bowed to him.

  “Please go on.”

  “Very well,” he said quietly, voice strengthening. “This all happened when I was a little boy, but I still remember the day the head monk came to admonish my mother for refusing to let go of the doll. He