Nagashibina
By
Kassandra Alvarado
Copyright 2014
Cover Art designed by author with special thanks to Cinnamon Sin: https://cinnamonsin.deviantart.com/
Table of Contents
Nagashibina
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Dedicated to Sam for her fourth birthday
Nagashibina
hosoki hi ni yosugara hina no hikari kana
softly lit...
all night the hina dolls
faintly shining
Buson (1716-1784), Tr. Shigeki Matsumura
Dolls are curious things, are they not? Loved, cherished, only to be thrown away when maturity beckons with parties, drinking and boyfriends. There are some who believe that a doll can gain a soul through a child’s love. I wouldn’t know if there were some truth in that, but just the other day I struck up a conversation with a woman in a toy store on a hot summer day while I was buying a gift for my youngest cousin; she told me her experiences with a similar doll.
I’ll let you be the judge of her story:
The doll came to the Sato family through slightly unusual means. The family had consisted of a mother, an aging father whose company provided housing in a recently rebuilt section of a ward that suffered damage during the Tsunami, the woman in her teens and a younger sister who was much spoilt by their parents. They let the girl have her way with toys, friends and other things that had belonged to her older sister - who for the purposes of this narrative, we will call, Fumi.
Fumi was tasked often with taking care of her younger sister, Aimi, after school and during weekends. Fumi never complained much, with the watchfulness instilled in her at an early age. One day on a muggy August afternoon, Fumi escorted her sister to small festival being held at the sacred Kiyomizu Kannondo within the grounds of Ueno-koen. The area there’s beautiful, steeped in history when the ruling Emperors sent their young daughters to the temple, tucking them away from court life. On display during such Hokyo-ji festivals, are a plethora of dolls sent by the royal family to keep the young princesses company.
The doll in question was among other once-treasured possessions left by bystanders, situated on long tables out for temporary display until the ceremonial burning while young women in traditional Miko costume provided ambiance, stoking the sacred fires dedicated to the Goddess Kannon. The doll itself was clad in a summer yukata of bright color, she wore a headkerchief over a simplistic peach hairstyle. Simple geta sandals and a parasol completed the doll’s summery appearance. Her one peculiar feature was the fading of the eyes as though water had damaged them. The tiny face seemed to smile with a secret only she knew.
Aimi at once took a liking to the doll and took her home despite Fumi’s protests. Her sister could do little to dissuade the child from keeping the Goddess’s offering; she didn’t tell her parents where Aimi had gotten the doll, not exactly. Things were normal in the beginning, the girls went school, their father worked and their mother took care of the house. In the evening, the family would have dinner together, talk about their day then retire to the Family Room, for a few hours of TV.
Then, the dreams began. Isolated houses made of wood and thatched roofs, small gardens, barefoot children at play. There was a hint of something sinister in the surrounding woods, a vague sense of something not quite right with their stilted faces and crooked smiles. Fumi thought they’d come from mentions of her grandmother who lived in the countryside, in a town similar to the one manufactured in her dream. Her maternal grandmother was ailing and there was talk at the dinner table of her mother leaving for a time to tend to her. The responsibilities of the house would fall solely on Fumi’s shoulders. Her freedom would lessen and any spare moments would be dedicated to keeping the house in order and watching over her younger sister.
Fumi had little say in the matter and her mother soon left before the onset of winter. I know it seems as though these were commonplace interactions, never the things classic hauntings are made of. The dreams continued with the addition of a little girl in a western-style pinafore. Her long sheet of black hair fell down her back, she was always facing away from Fumi who never saw her face, but recognized the doll lying beside the girl.
One evening when her mother had been away for two weeks or so, Fumi was upstairs listening to music. She said she had her headphones on, lying sprawled across her bed. She said she wouldn’t have heard the sound but for a change in songs. Someone rapped small and quiet upon the wall, three times in a certain pattern only known to her and her sister. They’d used it to communicate between rooms, like a secret code of sorts.
Fumi paused the music and listened intently. It came again in a syllabic note of three knocks. She leaned over and responded something to the effect of what is it? She’d assumed her sister had gone up from the family room and left their father below. The reply came in a different set of knocks, somehow much lower than if Aimi had been sitting at her desk; come find me. Fumi smiled at her sister’s childishness, hide and seek, she had many memories of them playing that game. As she left her room, entering the darkened hallway, she lightly knocked along the walls. Down below, she could hear the sound of the TV and canned child’s laughter along with her father’s.
In the near darkness, she found the handle to Aimi’s room. The knocking had ceased as it always had and light flooded the room when she found the switch. The bedroom was almost identical to hers, with a smaller twin-size bed, a chest of toys and a desk against the wall beside the closet adjoining hers. Fumi whipped the bedspread high, grinning from ear to ear, but no one was hiding under there. She turned to the closet and opened the door quickly.
“I’ve found you-?”
Beside the rows of dresses, pants, T-shirts and rows of shoes down below, the doll taken from the Kiyomizu Kannondo shrine, lay on the floor, indifferent to the girl’s perplexity. Fumi left Aimi’s room and headed downstairs to confront her, where she found her in nearly the same position as when she herself had gone upstairs.
“Weren’t you just...upstairs?”
Aimi looked confused, “no, why would I be? My favorite show’s on.”
“Aimi, don’t lie to me. I just heard you knocking on the wall. I didn’t - ...,” a suspicion had begun to take root in Fumi’s mind. She saw her sister’s face screwing up ready for violent protest and simply shook her head. “Forget it, it’s nothing.” Was it?
The next day, while her father had gone out to buy dinner and taken Aimi along with him; Fumi was gathering a load of laundry, doing some light housework before they came back. It wasn’t easy to take care of a household and she appreciated her mother even more for doing the work without ever complaining. She had just gone and picked up scattered school clothes from Aimi’s room when she espied a sheaf of drawings jammed behind the desk.
Curious, she pulled them out, laundry forgotten. They varied in range and color, some of autumn forests and skeletal trees of winter. There were few with subjects, adults, children. A family picture of a sad father, a thin mother and a frail little girl with the parents hands on her shoulders. In the background of the picture, a small boyish figure stood apart, looking on at the happy family with an angry expression on his face. Fumi didn’t know who the boy was...a friend from the elementary school? That seemed likely until she looked at the last one - a crayon drawing of traditional style houses, children at play with a solitary girl in the center, her long black hair shielded most of her face, except for the slightest sliver where a single eye stared back at the viewer.
It was nearly the mirror image of her dream. Fumi hastily dropped the pictures, stunned. What was going on? How had Aimi seen the same images from her dreams?! Nothing made sense and the girl replaced the pictures where she’d fou
nd them, going downstairs to wait for her father and sister to return. She didn’t ask Aimi about the pictures for there was a strange distance growing between them. A detachment of sorts that she couldn’t seem to bridge. Aimi rarely spoke to her now; rarely joked or smiled or chattered happily about her friends at the elementary school. Alarmingly, she seemed to be growing more attached to the doll. The creation of clay and plaster rarely left her side.
Most disturbingly, another incident occurred within a few days to leave Fumi with little doubt as to where her family’s problems lied. The next-door neighbor, Yomiuri Sae-san,