A BOX FOR MUSES

The way Matsugae Kiyoaki learned that he could see ghosts wasn’t due to any wandering spirits at his family home, though with both a grandfather and two uncles dead, there should be ample chance to, one might think. No, the way the young Kiyoaki realized that he could see things that were not visible to others was due to that photo in his home, the otherwise insignificant piece of wartime memorabilia, a panorama of a memorial at Tokuri Temple in June, 1904. The photo, kept in muted sepia and notes of greyish brown, hung among the other decorations on their walls, yet carried a certain draw on Kiyoaki that none of the other family portraits or paintings exerted on him. Whenever he would pass by, which was several times a day, he would pause briefly and glance at it, as if to check that the motif hadn’t changed, the number of soldiers still vast and uncountable, the arrangement still holding that air of the artificial that perfection does by nature.

It was always the same. The same shadows and the same trees and the same hakama-clad man in the middle of it, raising his sword above the head of a man sitting at the foot of the cenotaph, curled up on himself like a child. Although clad in a Japanese army uniform, Kiyoaki understood by now that he didn’t belong to the hoards of living soldiers gathered around in the picture. He, as well as the stranger in the hakama with his long hair done up, were not part of the set-up of this photograph, their presence was momentary and captured as such, no doubt by accident.

The reason he could say this for sure was that he had once asked his father, when he was younger and more prone to speak freely, without hesitation or caution, who the man in the hakama was and what he was doing to the seated soldier. His father had frowned and leaned in towards the photograph, studying it intently.

“None of the soldiers are sitting, Kiyoaki, that would be disrespectful at such an event,” he replied, “and as for hakama, there is only the priest there, wearing one. I don’t know where you get these ideas.”

Nevertheless, although his father ventured onwards down the corridor of their traditionally styled house, humming contentedly to himself at his own wisdom, Kiyoaki stood as if frozen in front of the picture for a long time, staring straight at the man in the middle with his sword at work and his hair showing movement, though the sun did not reflect in the blade and the colour of the strands weren’t done justice by the sepia ink.

He knew this first hand by now.

About a decade after the capturing of that photo, Kiyoaki still saw him sometimes around the city, whenever the sense of spiritual motion wrung at his innards like a clenched fist. In the light and in the flesh, if you could even say that about a man who his father had no idea existed and who stood outside the scope of any frame he ended up in, it felt like, he resembled a flash of red lightening, always on the move, never in one place for long and often gone before Kiyoaki could blink.

He's here for the dead, he thought to himself every time, a slight shudder running through him, because it left him wondering what that might mean to him, to Kiyoaki who was still very much alive and breathing. What fate awaited, with that man walking a path in plain sight right next to him, extending from the past into the present? Which one of them held the right to his future, then?

And because there was only one way of owning anything, which is by holding on to it, when the day came that their eyes met across the distance, Kiyoaki for once not shifting his focus or pretending he didn’t see, he instead held the stranger’s gaze and stood his ground. Across from him, the man in the dark hakama startled visibly at being recognised, then his expression tightened and he disappeared again from one second to the next, like stepping into the wind and being carried along.

Yet, Kiyoaki wasn’t worried, not about this, at least.

That man would come for him. At one point or another. So perhaps, in the end, the future would belong to the both of them, together.