The women of Dejima Island could never pinpoint when their dreams began to change, but they knew it had something to do with the tradesmen’s tales. The foreigners who arrived at the docks were hard men, chiseled by salt and wind and all the horrors of two hundred days at sea. Their shouts and curses filled the cracked sunlight of the shipyard as they hoisted down chests of silk and shark skin and anatomy books—but by night those same filthy mouths spilled open with stories from the far ends of the world.

Their audience of islanders understood more and more of their language every day, but still, by necessity, the tales the tradesmen told were simple, parsed out in split tongues, and traded like baubles across low tables stained with tea. Perhaps too much was lost in translation; but perhaps just enough got through. The local men listened politely and gave the liquor-soaked stories little thought. It was the women of Dejima—listening through the walls and peeking through the cracks—who were pulled under. They began to lose sleep every time the ships came to port.

For the ravenous old man in the shadows and the misshapen creature named Baku, waddling through the ether, this was a time of great abundance. The two were neither allies nor enemies, but, come sunset, both were absolutely famished, and so their goal was the same. Their means, however, were somewhat at odds.

Amidst the indigo skies and failing fires of dusk, the old man was always the first to limp into corporeality. His walk was a rolling meander, right leg dragging. His tattered robe hung loose, and so passersby averted their glances from the thin skin clinging stickily to the ridges of his ribs. His hunger was made achingly plain. But he did not come for the vendors hawking the salt-sweet broth of oden or chunks of stewed meat. Instead, he came for the stories.

Where the voices from the inns and bars spilled into the streets, the old man lingered, listening, until the moon rose and he could go to work. The old man who was not a man at all had learned to count on these new traders to fill the spaces and whispers between day and night with their strange, new bric-a-brac, like so many bewildering jewels. Perfect for his rumbling guts stretched thin. The old man grinned and his toothless mouth became a maw. Standing in the middle of the street, the moon high above, all eyes slid off his gaunt form like rain droplets bouncing. He reached out his hand towards the star-pocked sky. He waved. He beckoned. And the night’s bounty descended.

This is what the seirei of dreams took from the tradesmen, free of charge:

In a house nearby, the Mitsunaga sisters resisted sleep. They could tell reality from idle teahouse chatter easily enough in the waking world, but as their eyelids drooped, they fell headfirst into fitful dreams of apples: White and red. Tart and firm. The eldest, Yurika, crawled out from a pile of bruised fruit only to find the crunch of snow beneath her stinging palms. The cold slit her smooth skin like shards of broken glass. She shivered, lost, until, at the back of her throat, she felt first a tickle, then a lump.

She coughed.

She gasped.

She choked.

A chunk of apple, thick with saliva, came loose. It was the yellow of human flesh. It pulsed against her palms, steady as a human heart. When she flinched away, dropping the masticated core, it became clear that the glittering snow along the ground was actually the ruined remnants of a mirror, cracked and cold and now speckled with Yurika’s spittle. An old man watched from beneath, grinning wildly, his face pressed close. Yurika felt another intrusion pressing at the back of her tongue, tart and jagged and insistent—and so she could not cry out.

In that same instance, the younger Mitsunaga girl, quiet Kaede, plucked an apple from a nearby branch and brought it to her lips. She tore into the pome with her strong teeth, juice dripping. She pulled a kiss from the meat with her sweet, shy tongue—and gravity upended. She could almost swear that she saw an old man, ghastly and frail, tilting his head to watch as she fell, but then she was surrounded by the sweet smell of ripening fruit and she drifted. The world fell black as a sheet of hair falling down a woman’s back like a sigh. Though she fought, Kaede could not open her eyes, and so she waited patiently. It seemed hours before the touch came, drifting and lazy. It alighted on her crown and brow, her collars and breasts, her navel, her thighs, the soft dip of her calves. It stopped at her feet. Her cool, bare toes. She could not move once that soft touch became a firm grip. Before she could open her eyes, the shoes were shoved on, searing into her soles. They glowed red-hot. The smoke rising smelled of burnt meat. Kaede screamed and screamed until the heat became cool grass again. The world righted. There was an apple tree, heavy with its bounty. She reached out again, innocent, sweet…and desirous.

Out in the dark of the true world, the seirei swayed, ghastly and frail, blissful and light-headed, too lost in ecstasy to notice the shuffling creature drawing near.

Creeping out from the wet, shadowed alley was Baku, little more than a limp rag of fur with tiger’s paws for feet and a drooping trunk for a snout. He was cobbled together from leftovers and thus always left wanting. His hunger was prodigious, but unlike the seirei, his nature was as gentle as his animal parts. Slowly rolling his head on his wooly neck, he scented the sleep in the city and paused to consider. The night sky over Dejima Island was full of dreams. Full of nightmares. He knew whom he had to find for the tastiest tidbits.

Baku did not regard the seirei as his enemy, only followed where he went, seeking dropped crumbs and a seat at the table. The images mattered little to him. He pattered down the streets, seeking out the seirei’s scent. Where the wraith conjured his visions from the tradesmen’s tales, the nightmares screamed the loudest. Baku’s empty stomach swelled in welcome.

This is how he laid his feast:

Baku gave the Mitsunaga sisters no time to change their fates. They had no opportunity to fight back against the seirei’s conjurings. Instead, while they shifted restlessly in their sleep, Baku ate their dreams whole. He left behind the cool, empty blanket of the deepest, sweetest sleep. The sisters’ nightmares tasted of the bitter crunch of apple seeds at the heart of the girls’ fear. The sisters settled again, dreamlessly.

Outside, on the streets, the seirei stumbled back as though pushed away from a banquet table, mouth half-full, stomach unslaked. Grumbling, he whirled, already looking around his knees to kick Baku away. But the gentle creature was as greedy as the seirei of dreams was hungry. This was why the old man knew better than to spin his visions in one place. He never lingered too long, aware that Baku was always on his trail. Though Baku would catch on to a taste here or there, it still took him an entire night to weasel out the myriad morsels across Dejima Island, like buried truffles. In the meantime, the seirei drank down his self-made horrors—and they were light as rice wine and just as fragrant—down his gullet.

So it went: Halfway across Dejima, an elderly woman traced out the shape of a strange instrument, a wheel and a thread and a point. She dashed herself against it, murmuring lullabies all the while. (Swooning, staggering, the seirei exalted until Baku swept through, crunching on the spindle and sucking down the thread like an endless noodle.) Another woman walked naked through walls of jagged bramble, dark as ash, sharp as scorn. From every scratch and gouge bloomed roses that trembled against her blue veins. Their thorns pierced her eyes, scratched the rims of her nostrils and lips as petals blossomed from her face. If she closed her eyes, she couldn’t be sure whether sleep or death would swallow her whole first. (Baku devoured the bramble and blood and they both settled pleasantly in his sunken stomach. The woman’s fear tasted only of blushing rosebuds. The thorns provided the most tender crunch.) In a small house along the seashore, a child dreamt of voices coming in off the shore, so sweet and tempting that she stumbled down her front steps, right up to the water line. Every step felt like the slashing whisper of a sharp knife. As soon as the girl’s toes touched saltwater, her skin began to dissolve into frothing bubbles. She became sea foam, shimmering, shivering. Screaming. (Baku drank down the entire ocean and sighed, refreshed.)

The feast went on for hours. Wheeling beneath the planets, the seirei exalted in the town’s trapped wanderings, their paralyzed wonder, their unabashed dismay. Within each dream, he found sustenance, thin streams of imaginings that trickled down his parched throat, settling in his sunken stomach that gurgled happily as a cauldron set ablaze. Slowly following his trail through town, Baku only pattered on as the night flew by. He swallowed down the terrors and labyrinths with a careful prod of his clumsy trunk and a lolling roll of his wide, sad eyes. Spiked and bloody though they were, the nightmares slid down his gullet with satisfying simplicity.

When dawn approached, the two spirits found one another in the fading shadows. Their bellies bulged, protruded, ached.

“A pleasant evening, my friend,” the seirei murmured. Now strong and sans limp, by that evening the old man would be skin and bones and broken once again, yet, he had gleaned much to use from the foreign traders, between conjurings and the night’s delicacies, served on wobbling platters of flesh and bone. He would learn more in the nights to come.

“Until tonight,” Baku trumpeted, wagging his ox tail from side to side.

At sunrise, there was once again movement on the docks. The foreign traders yelled orders to one another, unloading and packing up shipments. They would have need of rice liquor again come sundown. Their tales would continue. Satisfied, Baku and the seirei disappeared between sunbeams.

The women of Dejima Island woke with daybreak, unsettled. Exhausted. And empty.

© 2024 Cheri Kamei