“Tell me something,” I say as I poke at a piece of tofu with my chopsticks, trying to decide if I’m still hungry enough to eat more. “Why do the yokai think a shard of the Kusanagi is hidden in the Fujikawa Shrine? It’s a part of the Imperial Regalia belonging to the Emperor, which I thought was stored at the Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya.” Honestly, I didn’t know the sword had been shattered into pieces in the first place. None of the stories say anything about that.
Shiro picks up a piece of octopus with his chopsticks. “The sword in Nagoya is a fake.”
“Excuse me?” I say.
He pops the tentacle into his mouth and chews, thinking. “So in the first century, there was this emperor named—”
“Sujin, I know,” I say. “Because the Imperial Regalia confers power on our emperors, Sujin had copies made to protect the originals. At least one set of copies was thrown into the sea when the Taira clan lost the Battle of Dan-no-ura. Another was stolen in the fifth century by a Korean monk, or so the story goes. But the Imperial Family still retains the originals.”
“You know your history,” Shiro says with a wry smile. He pushes his half-empty ekiben box across his fold-down table, offering it to me. “Octopus?”
“No, thank you.”
He slides it back, plucks out another piece of fish with his chopsticks, and tosses it into his mouth. “Anyway, once the copy of the Kusanagi was recovered, the Atsuta priests refused to let anyone see the copies or the real Imperial Regalia. Why?”
“Historical records aren’t clear,” I say.
“Why, Kira?”
“Because . . .” I gasp as the idea hits me. “Because it wasn’t the copy of the Kusanagi that was stolen, but the real thing?”
“Exactly. All the stories are just that—stories,” Shiro says, replacing the cover on his ekiben, setting it down on the empty seat beside us, and reaching for a second box. “During the last blood moon, like, five hundred years ago, someone thought it would be a good idea to break the sword and send the pieces to shrines all over Japan. The Fujikawa Shrine must have received one of them.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” I say. “There are thousands of shrines—it would take ages to find them all.”
“But not forever,” Shiro says. “Shuten-doji now holds all of the pieces but one.”
I press my palms against my ears, mostly in jest, and squeeze my eyes closed. “So Shuten-doji needs one more shard of the Kusanagi no Tsurugi to reforge the blade,” I say slowly, as if I don’t really want to hear the answer.
Shiro dips his head in a nod. “Yup.”
I drop my hands in my lap. “If he finds it, he’ll use the sword to kill the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, thus bringing an eternal night down upon Japan.”
“And . . . y’know . . . ,” Shiro says, flattening his fox ears against his skull, “the rest of the world. . . . ”
Understanding steals over me slowly, drawing the light out of my soul. I recall the demon’s parting words at the shrine: The next full moon will rise as a blood moon, weakening the Sun Goddess’s power over this world. When that happens, our lord Shuten-doji will return to this mortal plane to make the Light suffer for the oppression of our people.
“We need to go back,” I say, throwing my napkin into my bento box, tossing my manners aside, along with my better sense. “We only have a month, Shiro. We need to get back to the shrine, to stop them from—”
“Kira, listen,” Shiro says, placing a hand on my wrist. “Shuten-doji’s yokai fled as soon as the police arrived. It’s safe, at least for now, and you and I need allies. We need my mother, and we need Goro, okay? We can’t face Shuten-doji alone.”
I suck in a breath. He’s right.
At least I hope he’s right.
Seven
The Red Oni
Tokyo, Japan
By the time we step out of the labyrinth of Tokyo Station, darkness still crowds the sky. The city’s lights gild the undersides of the clouds. I grew up in a large city, but Kyoto isn’t Tokyo.
Tokyo boasts ten thousand distractions. Candy-colored lights dance along every building in sight. The streets swell with people. Skyscrapers soar overhead. The residents here are fashionable and cosmopolitan; a lot of the young people on the streets look like idols. While I love Kyoto for its grace, beauty, and the wisdom in the city’s bones, Tokyo makes my heart thump. I could lose myself here, disappear in the masses of people and the colors, and forget what happened at the shrine. At least for a few minutes.
“I don’t see anyone following us.” Shiro scans the area as we head to the nearest subway station. “That’s one small thing to be happy about.”
“Don’t be too happy just yet, there are a lot of yokai around,” I say, searching the crowds on the street. One woman reaches up to scratch the back of her head. When she turns, I glimpse the glistening lips and teeth of the second mouth embedded in the back of her skull. She’s a futakuchi-onna, a yokai woman with two mouths. A faceless noppera-bo catches a cab. Spherical hitodama glow around an elderly woman’s shoulders, protective and bright. Every creature goes about their individual business, ignoring Shiro and me.
We take a train to the Shibuya district, then turn away from the city’s glitter and glow, moving down dark alleys and into a seedier area. Litter swirls across the sidewalks here. Black wads of flattened gum add age spots to the concrete. Trash cans spew their contents, stinking of rotten meat and urine. The stench isn’t helped by the narrowness of the streets—buildings huddle together, their awnings stretching like sagging wings overhead. Men whistle at us. Shouts echo off the buildings’ faces. Sirens, too.
Finally, Shiro stops in front of a building cast in bruised light. I pause beside him, reading the sign hung at a crooked angle above a dancing, horned yokai figure: The Red Oni.
Oni are ogre yokai, and Shuten-doji is their most famous leader.
The wind swirls around me, yanking at my clothes. Hugging myself, I rub one hand up and down my arm, wondering when it got so cold out here. My bracelet prickles with heat. “This seems like a stupid idea,” I say.
“The bar’s a little . . . over-the-top, yeah?” Shiro says, tapping his index finger on the tip of my nose. He inclines his head toward the door and pushes it halfway open for me. “But I promise, Mother isn’t allied with Shuten-doji.”
“You didn’t think your brother was allied with him, either,” I say, tucking my hair behind my ears, and not a little nervously.
He frowns. “I know, but this is the best chance we’ve got. C’mon.”
The inside of the bar is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before—a graffiti mural swirls across the walls, showing a reclining, bare-breasted woman with a snake’s tail where her legs should be. In the bruised, red-and-violet light, her tail’s tip curls, beckoning me closer. Overhead, twisting tree roots grow through the ceiling, reaching for the bar’s patrons like clawed hands. Tiny tree spirits cling to the gnarled branches, rattling their heads like dried gourds. Liquor bottles glow behind the bar, their colors jewel-like in the diabolical light.
Entering the room feels like walking into a solid wall of water. I choke on liquor-laden air, hardly able to breathe with the increased spiritual resonance in the room.