Читать книгу The Chimera and the Shadowfox Griefer and Other Curious People - A. R. Morlan - Страница 7

THE HIKIKOMORI’S CARTOON KIMONO

“...we have to answer the challenge of modernity: what is a kimono, or what will it become, if it ceases to be a thing worn?”

Kunihiko Moriguchi

(one of Japan’s pre-eminent

kimono painters) from:

“The Kimono Painter,” by Judith Thurman,

The New Yorker, October 17, 2005

I.

(Obi)

“The nail that sticks out gets hammered in.”

Japanese saying

It didn’t matter how many times Masafumi saw Harumi Ishii walk through the doorway of the autoclave room in the back of his employers’ tattoo parlor, his reaction was invariably the same: First, a sharp sudden intake of breath, not unlike his response to the initial visits of his rescue sister Mieko back in Japan, in his parents’ house. Back in Tokyo, the reflexive shortness of breath was understandable—there was a strange woman standing on the other side of his bedroom door, her bare knuckles touching the thin wood in a patient, persistent rapraprap, waiting with that trained politeness born of dozens of previous encounters with other men of his kind, those suffering from hikikomori, the withdrawal. Masafumi used to wonder, there in the comfortable, yet painfully familiar confines of the room he so seldom left for all those months, those years, if women like Mieko looked upon their jobs as a form of service, or as something more insidious, a means of forcing those who had chosen to withdraw form life, from society, and ultimately from unwanted responsibility to become a part of that hellish social miasma...simply because they, the rescue sisters (plus the occasional rescue brother), hadn’t had the self-reliance necessary to withdraw form life, as Masafumi and his fellow hikikomori had done with such ease, such completeness.

But no matter what he had thought of Mieko (with her school-girlish mini-skirt and bleached-to-coarse-orange streaks in her long hair, despite her three-decades-plus age), she had kept on coming, twice a week, to stand for hours at his door, knocking and imploring, begging and rapping, until her sheer tenacity eventually wore him down, and he’d opened his door—only a crack, just enough to take a quick glance at her—and simply asked, “What?” Not the Why? or the How? which he’d longed to ask (for he knew all too well that the Why? was cultural pressure, his country’s need for everyone to have a place, to be successful, to fit in, just as the How? was the result of his parents finally calling for the aid of a rescue sister to cajole him into leaving his room).

“Because I’d like to get to know you.” That was all she’d needed to say; as rehearsed as her words sounded, there had been something in her eyes, in the quirky flicker of a smile on her lips, which had been simply enough, at least then, to make him open the door just a bit wider....

But that was Mieko; as far as Harumi (she of the naturally brown-orange hair, worn in elaborate quasi-Incan khipus of braided, knotted and wooden-beaded gently swaying tresses, and the persistently minimal clothing) went, the second thing Masafumi would do was lower his eyes, their lashes forming a Capri-shell screen between him and the object of his fascination, as if this woman would be offended by his stare.

(As his boss kept telling him, “Kid, if she didn’t want people to look at her, why would she have had all that ink drilled into her hide? Or do her hair up in those coked-up dreads?”)

For her part, as usual, Harumi either pretended not to notice his persistent shyness, or didn’t notice him in any real sense aside from merely being aware that there was another space-taking, breathing form in the small room. True, she literally had her hands full of the wooden trays of momengoshi, that firm, well-drained “cotton” tofu which her employer had flown in daily from Japan, to be served an hour or so from now, after Harumi worked her magic wand across those waiting pliant creamy white surfaces. Masafumi was proud of himself for having learned that early nickname for a tattoo gun from one of his boss’ many repeat customers; on occasion, he would shyly remark about it while Harumi worked, and often, she would smile.

Setting the layered trays of momengoshi on the low table nearest the outlet across from the autoclave, she began peeling back the cheesecloth coverings, to reveal the waiting slabs of skin-solid tofu, uncovering one tray at a time, prior to picking up the small prefilled ink bottles which contained freshly squeezed yuzu juice and onion skin dye, and attaching them to the old, slow-vibrating tattoo machine Masafumi’s employer had given to Harumi for her exclusive use. After plugging in the tattoo gun, she turned it on, filling the small space with the insect-like drone of the quick-darting three-needle cluster.

The tired yet apt cliché, Only in America, spun around in Masafumi’s brain as he watched Harumi work: Without the need for a stencil spotted onto the waiting surface, she worked the business end of the wand-like machine over the tofu, leaving gently weeping sprays of pale, citrus-scented pigment on the smoothly gelid upper layer of processed bean curd. Her designs varied by her moods; today, Masafumi surmised that she was troubled, obviously agitated, judging by the wild waves-breaking-on-rocks choppiness of her design. Having finished one tray, she shoved it aside with a dismissive thrust of her lower left palm, moving her hand so quickly that the smooth-bottomed wooden tray nearly slid off the low table—until Masafumi put out both hands and stopped its momentum.

This time, Harumi did notice him; letting out a shuddering exhalation that smelled of cinnamon and cloves, she locked her hazel eyes onto Masafumi’s dark brown counterparts, and said, “You saved my ass—no way no how I could bring that back to the restaurant with tatami-mat lint on it. The chef, he’d know.”

Masafumi nodded.

Shutting off her tattoo gun, Harumi let out another sign, and went on, “Your boss, he wouldn’t want me smoking, in here...but when I’m done, you wanna join me for a stick? They’re clove, no nicotine—”

Masafumi started to shake his head, then mumbled, “I’ll stand with you while you smoke. I don’t.”

Harumi shook her head, and her intricately braided and embellished strands of light hair rustled and whispered, like the silk-on-silk sound of a woman wearing a layered kimono as she delicately stepped along a subway platform. A sound Masafumi has not heard in all the years he’d lived here, in this particular United State called Minnesota, yet the simple motion of this woman’s head brought it all back, so vividly....

“You are something else, you know that? Not many guys are willing to breathe in used air, but you...why am I not surprised that you would do it?”

(Over time, Masafumi had learned enough about the intricate nature of the English language to know better than to consider her questioning tone of voice to actually be a question. A yoko meshi thing, that inherent stressfulness of mastering, and not merely learning, another tongue.)

Harumi uncovered another waiting tray of naked tofu, and switched ink bottles on her gun, this time taking up the pale reddish-brown onion-skin ink she’d distilled herself, back in the restaurant down the block from the tattoo parlor. Watching her work the vibrating needles across the slightly yielding, flesh-like foodstuff, as the tattooed woman created starbursts of sunset-ruddy pigment, Masafumi found himself actually uttering a thought which had been coming and going in his brain each time he’d watched her work, “Why do you not do this in the restaurant? You...carry the trays here, then carry them back, while the gun stays—”

Speaking over the ear-numbing drone of the gun, she replied, “My boss and the other cooks, they can’t stand the sound. And some of the early customers, they can hear it, and it ruins the whole exotic dining experience. Now the inkjet printer they use to print the designs on the starch-paper, that thing’s pretty quiet, compared to this thing. But if you ask me, aside form being useful for wrapping up rolls of sushi, a piece of starch paper covered with pictures of maki rolls and pin-wheels made of amazu shoga and heni shoga is just a piece of starch paper, y’know? It’s still something extra. Which you don’t need. But this, what I’m doing here...this is what I call true edible art. ’Cause the art is in it, a part of it, even if it is a subtle taste thing. I mean, I know these slabs are going to be chopped up, and steeped in broth, so all the customer will see is a hint of color on each piece, and maybe will detect a hint of onion or citrus if their taste buds are halfway alive, but still, what I’m doing is there. A part of it. Not some coating of cartoon sushi which someone slapped on as an afterthought, all because some guy down in Chicago came up with it a couple of decades ago in his restaurant. I dunno...does this make any sense at all to you?”

This time, she was asking a question. But how to answer her? Even as she spoke of food, novelty dishes, to be precise, Masafumi had been reminded of his former art, that of kimono-painting...that same art which had eventually brought him to such a state of despair, of utter inability to decide on something as simple as which new outfit to wear upon waking, that he had taken the route of no road, of no destination. Merely staying in his room, week after month after year, where nothing associated with his former art could be found—no aobana ink, no tiny zinc granules of makinori waiting to be sprinkled across silk, then fixed in place with rice paste, prior to being coated with wood wax and fixed on the fabric with soy juice...and no disassembled eight panels of silk, waiting to be painted, resist-dyed and then sewn back into that ancient “T” configuration which had been the staple of kimono design for centuries. Eight waiting panels of cloth, eight chances to turn the two-dimensional into the three-dimensional, once the final element of his art was included...the woman who wore the kimono. And while Harumi understood the artificial excess of something merely added, Masafumi didn’t know if she would understand the inherent obstacle of his art in itself—there was the design to be added to the kimono and then there was the woman within, who would give life to the design but in the middle was the kimono itself, those inevitable eight panels of cloth, two each for the back and front of the garment, the remaining four for the sleeves, culminating in what was literally a “thing worn”—always, no matter how one decorated the kimono, in anticipation of the woman who was to wear it, the “thing worn” itself had become his creative nemesis. When those eight pieces of cloth began to insinuate themselves between Masafumi and his artistic ideal, preventing him from instilling his creative will directly onto the being which would give it real life, he had given up, withdrawn, become a twilight ghost who only ventured out of his house for short trips to the neighborhood konbini, the Japanese answer to the convenience stores which popped up in fungal stealth seemingly by the day in his new country, his adopted city.

True, cartoon sushi and hand-painted kimono had little in common save for being something worn by something else (with both things being equally edible, if not uniformly desirable as such), but Masafumi didn’t know if Harumi could really care about his entire hikikomori episode, his lost years...even if she had asked him a direct question about her own art, and its purposefulness.

“I suppose...one is an embellishment, while the other is an...ingredient. Both are edible, but only one is essential.”

She smiled at that. For the first time, Masafumi felt bold enough to sit down on the tatami mat next to hers, his chest level with the already-tattooed sheets of momongoshi. He wasn’t certain, but he thought he could smell the faint odor of citrus and onions against the creamy bland near-nothingness of the tofu itself. Leaning over to peer at her freeform designs, he surprised himself by suggesting, “If they serve kinugoshi, do you think that branding the tofu first would survive the deep-frying process?” He hadn’t thought of kinugoshi in years, not since he had left Japan, but the mere utterance of the word itself brought back that creamy, custard-like texture of the silken tofu’s interior, after one had bitten through the deep-fried exterior, which rested unseen but curiously felt on the tip of his tongue, like a lingering aftertaste combined with the phantom sensation of silken smoothness.

“Oh man...they could call it ‘kiss of fire’ tofu, or whatever the Japanese is for that. Me, I mostly know kitchen-Japanese, just what my father’s people used to use when they cooked stuff for family gatherings. That’s what happens when races intermarry...my name is more Japanese than I am. Can you guess how many different nationalities I could check off on my census form?”

How to answer that? Not only was her hair an autumn-leaves-on-wet-cement mingling of browns, oranges and a hint of red, while her eyes were that sparkling green-brown hazel hue, but her very skin was creamy pale, even more so than that of mainland Chinese women. The shape of her eyes was closer to almond than Asian, with only the slightest corners-tilt of the eyelids to hint at an ancestry not wholly European. And her voice was purely Minnesotian, with that closed-mouth way of speaking, and rounded “o” sounds within words. But with a certain lilt that remind Masafumi of bamboo wind chimes....

“Eight.” She shut off her magic wand, and began ticking off the nationalities on her fingers and thumbs: “Japanese, on my dad’s side of course. Norwegian, English, Irish, Swedish, German, Polish, and again on my dad’s side, Chinese, from some mess during one of the wars nobody in the family would speak about. But it’s all in there. Every generation on his side, the people’s hair and eyes got lighter and lighter, and their eyes got rounder. But they still go for Japanese first names. Drives everyone else nuts. And I’m shit out of luck if I ever get sick and need a bone marrow transplant, or some new organ. No way no how they’ll ever find a matching donor for me...which is why I decided a long time ago that I’m gonna live the way I want, ’cause there’s no turning back for me. I can’t go abusing myself with the back-up plan of getting a new liver or kidney from someone else, so I can start tearing myself down all over again. I consider myself like a statue I’m carving out day by day...if something gets hacked off, it has to stay off. Even if the end result is something other than I was envisioning for myself. I mean, some art is meant to be disposable, no?”

Another question waiting for an answer. Not sure how to reply, he demurred, “So that is why you tattoo and brand yourself, because you are your own artwork. And do this with your hair—”

“Yeah...I thought I’d visually add another ethnicity into the mix. ’Dreads, on account of nobody in my family hooking up with a black person. But I like them...I don’t need to wear a hairnet or scarf while I cook.”

“So, you don’t serve at the restaurant?”

“Do I look like I fit in with the décor?”

One of those rhetorical questions, which could safely be ignored.

“That idea of yours, about branding the tofu...that might work. Mind if I run it past my boss, see what he says?”

A shrug, followed by a smile from her. Putting aside her gun, she got to her feet and began pulling the cheesecloth over the wooden trays, prior to re-stacking them. After slipping the bottles of edible dye into her shorts pockets, Harmui stood up and as she lifted the trays, said, “You’ll come by the back of the restaurant, later on, ok? I get a smoke break after one. Can your boss let you go for half an hour or so? I just gotta talk to someone. You’ll be there, right?”

So many individual questions, but thankfully, a lone answer.

“Yes...I will be there. He’ll let me go.”

(Masafumi was still something of an apprentice in the tattooing business, so his main duty each day was to sterilize the equipment, and dye the batches of carbon nano-tube ribbon some of the customers wanted implanted in their skin—an off-the-books procedure, thanks to the increase invasiveness of the implantation process—unless some off-the-street skin-virgin wanted a bit of off-the-wall flash spotted onto their skin from a pre-dawn stencil...“tourist” tattoos, his boss called them, basic, simple designs which Masafumi was deemed suitable to embellish into their waiting flesh.)

“Good. See ya then,” and she was gone, moving quickly through the beads-on-long strings shielded doorway, leaving only the smack-smack of her flip-flops thwacking against the soles of her feet echoing in Masafumi’s ears.

Once she’d left the building, Masafumi’s boss, Ignazio, pushed aside the beaded curtain and stood there grinning at Masafumi, his bare chest (embellished with flames both tattooed on and carbon nano-tube augmented, so that the flames actually seemed to flicker in the early morning sunlight coming in through the small alley-facing window behind Masafumi, their fiery edges luminescent) already sheened with a fine coating of sweat from the July heat, while his thin sushi-pale lips curled into a smile over his slightly protruding front teeth.

“How ’bout you convince her to do her thing out in the main area, where the customers could watch her, huh? She’d bring in more business.”

“But it is not sanitary...there is blood, out there...there is none back here—”

“Not so literal, Masa, not so literal...just wishin’. I know ’bout all the health regs for the food business. I’m just sayin’, she’s one fine lookin’ woman, and yes, you can go meet her at one. Now don’t go givin’ me the look, kid, remember, this door’s got air holes.” He gave the strings of beads a clinking shake for mock emphasis, then went on, “I’m just yankin’ your chain. Sounds to me like she’s got somethin’ on her mind, and believe you me, there’s nothin’ more intimate than when a woman starts unloadin’ from the inside out. Better then her takin’ off her clothes. Clothes, they come off, they’re off, but a woman who’ll unburden, that’s a one-way ticket to real intimacy. Some guys, they don’t want no part of it when a woman dumps a mental load on them, but take ’er from me, that’s when you can get real close to ’em. And that one is worth getting’ next to, from the inside-out. Now me, I’ve done all her inkslinging, and I’ve felt damn near every part of her, but do I like know her? She don’t say so much as ‘ouch’ when I’ve worked on her. Not even when I’ve given her the kiss of fire with a branding tool. But you, you got the e-ticket, man. She’s gonna have A Talk with you. Tell you whatever’s been makin’ her so jumpy lately. Now that is getting’ close, my man. Consider yourself blessed. Uh-oh, I hear someone comin’ in. But enjoy the flavor, man. That woman, she is how you folks say, oishii. Peace, man,” and with that, he was gone, headed for the main section of the establishment, leaving Masafumi to his stainless teel autoclave, and his low-sided vats of dye-bathed nano-tube ribbons.

Giving the nearest tub of crimson-dye a gentle slosh, to better infuse the nearly transparent ribbons (far thinner than human hair) with a shimmering wash of color, Masafumi winced as he thought of his boss’ misuse of the word “delicious”...true, in a vulgar sense the word might apply to a woman, if one were to think of her in such a crass way, but in a more elemental sense, Harumi was oishii, if one merely thought of something delicious as that which leaves a beautiful memory of its flavor in one’s mind. Not like his memories of Meiko, she of the underlying bitter emotional aftertaste. Even as she had helped him, she had also taken something from him, and that created the sour lingering lack of palatability which forever clouded her good intentions in his impression of her.

But what Ignacio had said, about someone who unburdens themselves becoming more naked than one who merely disrobed (not that the Miami transplant had uttered anything that eloquent), only served to remind Masafumi of his former passion and nemesis, the kimono...given that there are so many layers to a kimono, one cannot begin to remove it without first untying the obi which bound all the individual robes into one garment....

II.

(Osode)

“Ancora Imparo (“I Am Still Learning”)

Michaelangelo

When she saw Masafumi walking toward her, Harumi held out two black lacquered bowls of zaru dofu, the mauvish-blue-colored “black” variety he had not seen since he’d left Japan, and each bowl had a spoon stuck directly in the center of the moussé-textured tofu. Masafumi’s spoon was sliding downward to the east as he took his bowl from her, but he’d grabbed the long silver handle of the utensil and shoveled a frothy rounded spoonful into his mouth before the handle had a chance to fall against the side of the shiny bowl.

As he swallowed down the delectable treat, Harumi said, “I didn’t know if you like zaru dofu, but I figured it was way too hot out for me to bring over a plate of katsu-dou.”

Considering that a fried pork cutlet with scrambled eggs and sweet donburi sauce-covered rice might be considered by most non-Asians to be a breakfast dish, and since Harumi was seven-eighths non-Asian, Masafumi decided that this was a joke. Smiling as he swallowed down his next spoonful of fluffy tofu, added shyly, “And two orders of tekka-don might be too messy to carry, no? The strips of raw tuna and pressed seaweed might fall off the rice?”

“I’ve been telling my boss that he needs to start putting food like that in a wrap, pita bread or a soft taco, but the man’s a purist. He totally jumped on the couch when I suggested he put zaru dofu in his big soft drink cups, and stick a straw in it. I mean, the straw part was the joke.”

The image of a tall plastic cup filled with white, green or black mousse-like tofu was a funny one. Chuckling as he scraped the bottom of the bowl clean with his spoon, Masafumi said, “Ignacio, my boss, he likes to repeat something that singer Johnny Cash once said. ‘You know you’ve made it when your face is on a Slurpee cup.’ Or perhaps it was ‘famous’...sometimes Ignacio says that, too.”

“Ignazzy’s a cool dude. He did all my ink, he tell you that? I thought so. He wants to put pictures of me, on his wall, but I told him no. Last time I refused, he said he’d sign the next fineline work he does on me. Ever hear what he says about doing portraits, on customers?”

Ignazio was the type of employer who spoke so much, and so often, it was difficult for Masafumi to try to take in everything he said, especially while trying to do his own inkslinging, so he merely shook his head.

“Ignazzy says, ‘If you’re doin’ a dude’s face, and it ain’t turnin’ out so hot, turn it into Johnny Depp. He’s already played everybody there is, so chances are whoever you’re tryin’ to ink looks like him anyhow: I thought he was talking just to hear himself, but I looked into it. And Ignazzy wasn’t lying. Depp was Hunter S. Thompson, John Dillinger, Ed Wood, George Jung, that dude who pretended to be Donnie Drasco only I can’t remember what his real name was, the guy who wrote Peter Pan, some English poet who was like a total sexual pig back when guys all wore those high powdered wigs, and somebody else I know I’m forgetting—”

“The chocolate maker?”

“Yeah, only he was a character in a book, but yeah, he was him, too. He played everybody at some point or another, though. So chances are, you put his face on somebody’s arm, they’re gonna be pleased, even if they wanted something else. But you should listen to Ignazzy more often...he was smart enough to get his butt out of Miami before that big hurricane hit in ’24. A lot of people didn’t learn from Katrina twenty years before that...of course, Miami wasn’t way under sea level like New Orleans was, but still, who would’ve known they’d get the category five one they did—”

Masafumi wondered if the mental unburdening his boss had spoken of was preceded by a woman clearing her mind of inconsequential trivia; he doubted that her concerns over Ignazio’s portrait tattooing methods or his fortuitous flight from pre-Hurricane Xenia’s path had made her so nervous this morning that she’d almost knocked over a tray full of freshly inked tofu.

Between blurted out observations about his boss (“—he told me the other day that white and green zaru dofu would ‘give Wayne Thiebaud a boner’ and I had to go on the ‘net to find out who he was, turns out he was a guy who mainly painted desserts...cakes with layers of frosting, with the paint so thick you could spoon it off the canvas—”) Harumi slid spoonfuls of the frothy tofu into her mouth, and when her bowl was empty, she set it down on the ground next to Masafumi’s discarded bowl and spoon, and began pawing through her shorts pockets for her pack of clove cigarettes and a lighter.

It took her a few puffs of her smoke to calm Harumi down, but once she began tapping fragrant ash upon the back wall of the building she was leaning against, she half-closed her eyes and asked, “Does a wanna-be donut-graveyard named Walker Ulger still come into your boss’ shop? Sorta fat dude, in a security guard uniform? Has this shapeless round face, like a maniu?”

Masafumi tried to picture a man with a face which resembled a bean cake filled with red azuki bean paste and sugar, but it was difficult. Yet, there was something about her description which had the vague half-remembered reality of a post-dawn dream—“If you’d seen him, you’d remember him...has these fat fleshy upper ears, like thick-sliced amazu shoga—”

While the maniu reference had failed, the comparison to pickled pink ginger succeeded. Only Ignazio didn’t use food as a point of comparison—

(“If that slug-eared rent-a-pig comes through that door again, I will personally cover his pink hide with sorry marks made with my own fingernails—”)

Masafumi had found the mental picture of his boss creating Aboriginal ritual scars on someone’s body to be a disturbing one, so much so that he never let Ignazio know that he’d been listening in on his conversation with that customer who was getting the fine-line full-back design of the Corpse Bride and her reluctant pinched-faced groom. The customer was a city councilman, or so Ignazio claimed, and Masafumi had felt it unseemly to admit he’d been listening in when a government official—no matter how minor—was involved. But that hadn’t meant that he didn’t hear what the man with the increasingly animated back had to say in replay:

(“Not to worry, Iggs. After what that guy did back in the Mall of America, when he was assigned to that kiddie park section, no way no how is he going to get anyone to give him a nano-ribbon jacket. As if he’s going to be hired anytime soon by a real cop-shop. He’s lucky to be wearing that Halloween costume and Happy Meal badge of his—”)

“I have not seen him...but I have heard about him. A little. But not by name.”

“Oh, there can’t be two of him...nature wouldn’t be that cruel, or that damned stupid. I suppose Ignazzy still does nano-tube body armor, under the table, on real cops?”

Nodding, Masafumi replied, “Since it is still something of a medical procedure, it is not fully legal, but considering how expensive doctors can be....” He let his voice trail off, knowing that she knew full well that inserting nano-tube ribbons into the top-most layer of flesh was a quasi-legal enterprise at best. Technically, there were no laws against it, just as there were no laws against a bod-mod expert doing just about anything to a willing client—as long as no anesthetics were used. A nano-vest installation was uncomfortable, but far less painful than the kiss of fire from a branding, or a full back tattoo. What happened was this: Ultra-fine ribbons of pulled and spun nano-tube “yarn” was laid onto lightly-scored flesh, along the neck, upper shoulders and the outside of the armpit, all the spots where a traditional Kevlar vest failed to cover the body. He’d never seen it done, but had seen a tape of the operation on public access digital TV. Akin to a hair transplant, fine shallow hash-marks and cross-hatching was incised with a raked tool, barely scoring the epidermis, then a baster-like syringe loaded with miles of “yarn” was laid down and drawn—while depositing single strands of “yarn”—across every last incised spot, laying down an invisible internal bulletproof webbing. Once all the vulnerable segments of skin had been seeded, everything was wrapped up, and within a few weeks, the incisions healed, and the cross-woven nano-ribbons within formed unseen body armor. It was said (if the voice-over on the public access program was to be believed) that this application of nano-technology had saved over one hundred officers from death due to bullets which missed their Kevlar body armor and hit their necks, armpits, and so on. All Masafumi had thought at the time he was watching was that the whole thing was far more disgusting than tattooing, branding, or piercing could ever be, although he still had reservations about traditional Irezumi tattooing back home, which used to involve literally tapping the ink into the flesh with a multi-toothed stick and mallet.

It had also reminded him of the complex process of yuzen-zome resist dying, the painstaking delicacy which was an inherent part of the kimono-dying process, or worse yet, the application of tiny poppy-seed-sized makinori...he winced at the memory of those hours upon hours spent arranging the minute zinc particles on the cloth, after mixing them with rice paste and sprinkling the sticky mess onto wet silk, then coating the silk with wood wax to prevent the design from cracking, before fixing the entire swath of cloth with soy juice...and then picking off each piece of makinori after it was dry, just to achieve a mist-like subtle pattern in the background of the main design. Why he had ever thought that such intense, yet nearly intangible labors were his chosen life’s work, his life’s purpose, now escaped him.

All of it made his current work, that of quickly yet painfully piercing flesh, crating a fine wash of blood which constantly had to be wiped away from his work field, seem far more simple in comparison.

“—but that doesn’t stop Ulger from wanting his own nano-armor, even if he isn’t entitled to it,” Harumi was saying between puffs of her second clove cigarette, its incense-pungent smoke wafting around her head of khipus-like braids like morning mists encircling snow-dusted mountain peaks.

“Does he not carry a gun? To me, that might mean getting shot—”

“It’s strictly a Barney—empty, no bullets, and I’m guessing you never watch TV Land, do you?—something the store owners gave him for window dressing. Like putting up a security camera with no film in it, just a battery to make the red light go on. But I wouldn’t be surprised if someone still didn’t want to take a shot at him, for the hell of it...or not,” she added with a noisy draw on the end of her smoke, before dropping the spent conical butt onto the asphalt and grinding it into a shapeless grainy mass with her flip-flop sole.

“I...was under impression that he made my boss rather angry. So he has done the same with other people?”

“Ohhhh yeah, you could say that. Again. I don’t know for sure what he did to Ignazzy personally, but given that he’s a he, it sure isn’t what he did to me...but I figure it must have been equally rotten.”

“This Ulger person—”

“Walker. Walker Ulger, rhymes with ‘stalker’—”

“This Walker Ulger, he...did not behave as a man should toward a woman?”

(Memories of Masafumi’s initial reaction after his rescue sister’s first unwelcome beyond-his-closed-door visit, when he’d punched his walls in frustration just because she’d been where he hadn’t wanted her to be, came back to him in a shameful wash of crimson.)

“Uhmmm...you could say that. I started out sort of innocently enough.... I was smoking in the alley behind the restaurant, one of these clove jobbies, and he starts in about me smoking weed, insisting that this was a joint, when it looks next to nothing like a doobie, and I finally give him the center finger salute, and he starts in on me that he’ll report me to my boss for ‘assaulting’ an officer of the law, only all he was was a play-cop, and I told him as much, but then he goes, ‘I’m still on the payroll of your boss and every other boss on this block, so that makes me the law of this land’ and then he makes a grab for my smoke, and I mash it onto his arm, and then he goes medieval on my ass, and...ever since then, he’s been on my case, riding me for not genuflecting when I see his badge just about. Keeps claiming that he’ll stop harassing me if I get him an in with Ignazzy, convince him to give manju-head a nano-yarn sweater. Which I know Ignazzy wouldn’t do if...if I don’t know what. But he won’t do it. I know that much. And I don’t blame him...whatever he had to have done to Ignazzy must’ve been as obnoxious as what he tried with me. What I’m thinking is this, somewhere down the line, old amazu-shoga­-ears must’ve leaned on the wrong person, which is why he feels that he needs a nano-yarn wrap. I can feel the fear on him, which makes him all the meaner...anyhow, every day, he comes into the restaurant for miso zuke dofu, only he never pays for it, even though it is an expensive dish, and while he’s eating he keeps asking my boss about me, making all these suggestive remarks, telling him he should try adding a living sushi bar on Saturday nights, that I would be better than cartoon sushi under the raw tuna...things like that. And all the while, I stay hidden in the kitchen, wondering if Ulger will mention me burning his arm with that cigarette, which I know will get me canned if the boss hears it...and every day, when I’m getting ready to go home, he tries to keep pace with me as I pedal my bike, saying ‘All you have to do is put in a good word with Ignazio...I know he has the extra nano-yarn, in his autoclave room. Too much of it for just us cops,’ and crap like that. So...that’s what’s been making me crazy lately. Enough to dump a tray of tofu onto the floor—”

“Tokugawa Shogunate...,” Masafumi found himself whispering, as he made a connection between Harumi’s ongoing troubles and that fifteenth-century restrictive emasure which ultimately created the entire painted kimono tradition. It was so simple a connection, yet explained so much—

“‘Toku’...what?”

“‘Tokugawa Shogunate’...something initiated in fifteenth century Japan to cut down on the excessive spending of the merchant class by forbidding its members from wearing embroidered silk, or any cloth woven with gold threads...basically, to stop them from emulating the royal classes. But the merchant class members’ wives still wanted fine kimono, so painting of silk circumvented the Shogunate. It was because of this desire for finely-decorated kimono that artist like Miyazaki Yuzen switched from painting fans to painting silk meant for kimono construction. Like...cartoon kimono. The embroidery designs, only flat, not embroidery. But nonetheless difficult to produce. Eventually, kimono painters would become ningen kokuho, the same as any other fine artist in Japan—”

“Remember me telling you I’m only one-eighth Japanese? Translation, please?”

“It means ‘holder of an intangible cultural property’ a great honor—”

“Oh, like those Kennedy Center Awards they give to old people?”

“I...suppose. It is something to be...strived for, within any artistic community. To be name ningen kokuho implies more than a mere mastery of one’s craft—”

“Like, you’re the best of the best?”

Wondering if she literally meant “you’re” to signify him, or if she was merely being linguistically imprecise, Masafumi slowly replied, “You are beyond ‘best’...you are interwoven with the entire culture of Japan. What you have done has become part of Japan. Something which cannot be disconnected from its origins.”

“Oh...like when you stick nano-ribbons into someone, and there’s no way to pull them out once they’ve healed?”

Glancing down at his watch, and seeing that they’d spent far more time in the alley than his boss had allotted to him, Masafumi avoided comment on her incorrect analogy by merely nodding vaguely and saing, “Break time is over...I must return to the shop—”

“Yeah, me too...old Ulger should be in soon, to mooch his miso zuke dofu...I swear, one of these days I should substitute a slice of old rubber tire for the knobu wrapping, just to see if the oaf knows the difference between retread and dried kelp. Now that would really be a dish with some ‘bite’ to it!”

Glad that Harumi could make even a weak joke about her tormentor, Masafumi picked up the empty bowls from the ground at their feet and handed them to her, saying, “Tell your boss the zaru dofu was oishii—and thank you again.”

“Anytime, Masa,” she smiled, then smacked back to the rear door of the restaurant, the echo of her hard soles hitting the rubbery insides of her flip-flops following him as he walked back to his job.

He didn’t know if his boss would consider this encounter to have been “getting’ close” to Harumi, but in his own mind, Masafumi decided that this meeting was the equivalent of gently freeing a woman’s big-sleeved outer osode kimono from the remaining layers of kimono beneath. Even as that unveiling had served to reveal emotional layers of his own psyche which he had tried his best to keep pinned down, much like the weights placed on freshly-made tofu, in order to squeeze out the remaining nigari, that salty coagulating agent which both created the tofu, and threatened to ruin its taste if it were not expelled from the cured tofu. Just as his own thwarted creative urges had had to be expelled from his being, lest they dilute his present artistic course.

But yet, as he let himself into the back door of the shop, he realized for the first time since he’d ended his years of isolation, of hikikomori, he’d actually managed to come back to, and not distance himself from, that which had made him retreat into himself in the first place. Always that maddening conundrum: How to make that which is merely worn into something which comes alive because it is worn?

He had thought that his new vocation, that of inkslinging, was more direct than kimono painting—you spot the stencil on someone’s body, you ink it in, and after wiping away the blood and bandaging it, your job is finished. But after spending time with Harumi, taking sly glances at her tattooed body (an Irezumi-like body covering from collarbones to elbows, and down to the bottoms of her thighs, in a swirl of native Japanese flowers, clouds, and distant mountains, surrounded by foamy-crested curlicue waves), and listening to her rant about that fat-eared security guard, Masafumi had come to realize that with each movement of her body, each rapid fuming breath she took between words, her tattoos ceased to be mere ink imbedded in flesh, but an additional garment in and of themselves. An article of indelible clothing which had no doubt helped to make her a target of that goon with the toy gun, who nonetheless wanted her to procure him that suit of nano-armor. For Masafumi doubted that Harumi was the only person in this city who smoked clove cigarettes (which even he realized did not smell anything like cannibas).

“Well, my man, you score?” Ignazio’s sweaty face was open-eyed and leering, showing virtually all his teeth in a tight white stacked-stone line. Masafumi debated about mentioning that Ulger person, but decided not to; instead, he slipped past Ignazio and walked into the main part of the building, the tattooing room with the various paper-on-a-roll covered chairs and padded tables, whose walls were covered with glass-fronted flash design displays, and print-outs of digital photos of most of their customers’ finished tattoos. Sitting down in one of the chairs, Masafumi said carefully, “I learned what has been bothering her. It is a private matter...but one she could share. In part. She brought me some black zara dofu. It was very good.”

“Yeah, I suppose it hit the spot. Me, I like the green and white kind better. Why don’t you ever go in there, where she works? I’ve never seen you in there—”

There was no way to explain to his boss that back in Japan, Masafumi would have eaten the same dish at a riyori, a tofu restaurant, and not at a place which served a multitude of dishes, from sushi to katsu-don to yudofu, plus a wide variety of sakis to go along with the simple manju dessert. The extreme mixing of various culinary disciplines was far more alien to Masafumi than the fast food hamburger place down the block where he chose to eat instead. There, the mixing of seemingly unsuited foods was a normal thing, and thus not bewildering.

“This is my country, now. So...I eat what others eat. To go back to my origins in one way would mean wishing to go back to them in all ways.”

“You are one weird duck, kiddo. But cool. Seriously cool, my man. Best worker I’ve had since this place opened. Know what? You’ve been doin’ flash for too long. Time you started to branch out. Start learnin’ how to work the nano-ribbons. Insert ’em, the whole ball o’wax. Now I’m aware you still can’t brand nobody, and as far as the piercings go, you’re still gonna have to take some classes which I’m not gonna pay for, so you’re gonna have to spring for those, but seein’ that there ain’t no place you’re gonna officially learn how to work nano-ribbons, classes start as soon as someone comes in here wanting some work done, ok?”

Biting his lip so that he couldn’t ask about Ulger, and his thwarted efforts to “get some work done” Masafumi nodded, before saying, “You are the boss...you want me to learn the ribbons, I will learn them.”

—even as his mind began to whirl like suminagashi, leaving whorls of half-formed ideas and urges to settle like ink swirls on marble paper, as he realized how he just might be able to solve Harumi’s problem...not to mention the central puzzle of his own creative existence.

If he told her next to nothing beforehand....

III.

(Kosode)

“Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true.”

Bruce Nauman

“So you have never worn a kimono?”

Harumi worked the tattoo gun over the tray of momengoshi without speaking for a few seconds, then said, without looking up, “No, in my family, we were lucky to know what tofu was when I was a kid. I have an old picture of my great-great-to-the-I-don’t-know-what power grandma-san wearing one, but that’s about it. The picture wasn’t in color, either, so I don’t know what it really looked like. There were clusters of birds on it, I think. Plus this big sash around her middle, with what looked like a flat pillow on her back. But the whole kimono trailed onto the ground in back of her—”

“Obi. The sash was an obi.”

“Ohhh...be. Ok. And the sleeves were huge, and hung down—”

“That would be the osode...they resemble dewlaps, the sleeves. The osode goes on over the kosode, or the undergarment. That picture had to have been very old...by the time I left Japan, most women who still wore the kimono for important functions wore only the kosode, as the main garment. By the Edo period, kosode was no longer thought of as a mere undergarment, but as a thing to be worn alone. Many years before that, women would wear up to twelve kimono, each one positioned so as to reveal just a bit of the one beneath.”

“I can’t see how anyone could move in that many layers—they must’ve looked like sumo wrestlers.” Shutting off the gun, Harumi began stacking the wooden trays, but as she got up to her feet, something in Masafumi made him shout past the beaded doorway, “Ignazio, do you mind if I help Harumi carry these to the restaurant?”

Above the whining drone of his own tattoo gun, his boss shouted back, “Go on, kid...get yourself a bite while you’re there. I’ll be a while with this guy,” and as easily as that, Masafumi, with two of the trays in hand, left the shop and began to follow Harumi to her workplace. As she walked ahead of him, Masafumi wondered how her arms and legs would look, if she were to add additional designed bands just under her existing torso-and-upper-limbs tattoo, in a different pattern, like layered kosode—

“Awww, looks like Queen Mary Jane has a court now.” A brief sideways glance past Harumi’s stiffening back revealed a bulky tan-suited shape, surmounted by a blob of a face topped with limp bristles of short-cut dull-brown hair, and balanced on each side by thick slug-meaty ears.

Walker Ulger. He of the empty pistol and the unfulfilled longing for that unseen armor. From what Harumi had been telling Masafumi over the last few weeks, ever since she’d opened up to him in the alleyway, Ulger had been making more and more stops at her employer’s restaurant; no longer content to settle for his free meal of saffron-hued momengoshi steeped in fermented miso wrapped in konbu, he had begun to wait around the inside of the place while others were eating, watching them, and making strange comments about the food, and the people eating it. But since this part of the city was seldom if ever visited by the police (whose budget cuts were legendary, according to the headlines of the various daily papers on sale in those hinged metal boxes on every other street corner), the shop owners put up with their private security guard’s antics, least he, too, turn on them, as the Vietnamese street gangs in the Twin Cities had gutted those two cities back in the teens.

And always, whenever he saw Harumi, he would bring up the nano-yarn sweater, as she dismissively dubbed the carbon-nano-tube body armor he so persistently sought. And daily, she would tell Masafumi...who merely sat and nodded, waiting for the autoclave to finish sterilizing the various implements of his trade, even as he’d steal glances at the vats of nano-ribbons steeping in the brilliant pigments. Harumi like to talk, so he seldom had to say much to her, and he never mentioned the lessons in nano-ribbon implantation Ignazio had been giving to him. In exchange for a full body tattoo, one of his boss’ customers—a worker at a sporting goods company a few cities away whose products (various athletic balls) used nano-technology, and whose workers actually made the ribbons of the stuff in their spare time, since all one had to do was attach a small slip of sticky paper to a patch of nano-tubes only one-third of a millimeter high, then keep pulling the nano-tubes, which clung to each other, and formed a long transparent sheet, which was then pulled into ribbons, something which was automated in some other plants, but done by hand locally—would “pay” Ignazio for his work with bundles of the stuff. Thus, the nano-tubes used by Ignazio weren’t the same kind used by doctors to create living body armor...while composed of the same carbon nano-tubes, the “official” nano-ribbons began their existence in plants devoted to nothing but their creation, resulting in a more uniform product, always two meters long in sheet form, while the hand-pulled ones were only around a meter in length. Which boiled down to a simple difference: “official” body armor was far more dense and therefore stronger, due to the person laying it down being able to work for a longer period of time with the same continuous strand or “ribbon” before going on to the next piece.

But for Ignazio’s purposes, the shorter lengths of “yarn” worked out exceptionally well...once Masafumi became used to wearing the magnifying goggles needed for such minute work, he soon became adept at judging just how much “ribbon” he would need per body design to be augmented. All he had to do was gently score the flesh, just a shade harder than a fingernail scrape, then drop on the nano-ribbon, and let it settle down onto the waiting depression in the skin. In many ways the work reminded Masafumi of the African and South Pacific body ornamentation resulting from opening wounds on the body, then putting something in them, to prevent them from healing flat and smooth.

And once the ribbons were in place, with their inherent capability to store solar energy, they would make even the most basic tattoo (or raised brand) look virtually alive. As he studied under his boss, Masafumi wondered if that was part of the allure of body armor for this Walker Ulger person...the subtle sheen of augmented flesh, like a badge that could never be removed, or a pistol which never needed to be polished. It was sad, how lacking this Ulger person had to be, to desire such outward amplification of his being, of his status, such as it was....

When Harumi said nothing to the man, but kept on walking, he moved directly in front of her, blocking the sidewalk with his spread-apart feet and his elbows-jutting arms, his hands placed on both hips. The restaurant was only half a block away, but Masafumi knew that even if he and Harumi were to try and walk in the street, alongside the passing cars, Ulger would find some other way to block their path, perhaps one which would leave her morning’s work lying in fleshy piles on the heat-shimmered asphalt.

“You want to carry these? Because if you do, I already have help.”

“Yeah, I see that...is he your new tattoo-boy? He gonna finish up your arms and legs for you? Or is he gonna outline what you do have with nano-yarn? He gonna quilt you? I think he’s gonna turn you into a coloring book, black outlines around everything—”

“Yes, he is. Are you satisfied? Or do you intend to stick around and watch him do it?”

“I thought he was a tattoo-boy...only he don’t like to do what he does to others, does he?” Ulger looked at Masafumi with a chin-first thrust of his shapeless, bristled head, peering at the Japanese man’s ink-free arms and lower legs.

Considering Ulger’s law enforcement skills, Masafumi decided that giving the city over to any street gang, of any ethnicity, would be a more pleasant option.

“I wouldn’t know, I haven’t seen him naked. But my friend here is full of surprises, so I’m not assuming anything about him.” Harumi shifted her tray of tofu from one arm to the other, then made a break for it in the narrow space between Ulger’s left elbow and the brick façade of the storefront next to the Japanese eatery. Masafumi likewise slipped past the rent-a-pseudo-cop, albeit making sure that he grazed the man’s mushrooming waistline with the hard corner of one of the wooden trays. Noticing that the man failed to flinch at the glancing blow, Masafumi smiled, and followed Harumi into the pungent-smelling interior of the restaurant. Behind him, he felt the heavier footfalls of Ulger, so he didn’t startle when he heard the blatty voice say in his ear, “And where do you think you’re going, huh?”

“Into the kitchen, where do you think the tofu goes, huh?” Harumi snapped over her shoulder, and then Masafumi and the young woman were in the kitchen, past the swinging doors which smacked directly into Ulger’s belly as they shuddered to a stop. The kitchen was hot, filled with sizzling, boiling and sputtering meat noises, and lest he be overcome by a torrent of culinary nostalgia for his homeland, Masafumi simply asked, “Where’s the back door?” and followed Harumi’s pointing finger, before hurrying past the stooped black-haired cooks hovering over the flaming burners, and quitting the room for the somewhat less humid alleyway beyond.

It wasn’t until he was a couple of back-doors away from his own boss’ shop that Masafumi realized he had company, there in the alley. Ulger. Waddle-stomping toward him from between two buildings, his manju-shaped face working into a doughy frown. But before the man could speak, Masafumi said quietly, “Sir, you do not wish to harass me. Not if you still desire a...what do you call it, ‘nano-yarn-sweater’? I am more than a...‘tattoo boy.’ I am a learner, in the process of learning.”

Real cop or play cop, nothing Masafumi had said would give the man cause to harm him, or so he hoped, and counted on.

“Harumi, she tell you—”

“Harumi? No, she has said nothing about it. Nothing at all. But this desire of yours, it is known to others. Who have in turn enabled me to fulfill your wish. If you still desire it to be made so.”

“You sure Harumi didn’t tell you?”

“Very sure. As I said, others have mentioned it, in passing. And I have heard them. Just as I have heard that doctors will not do this for those who do not carry an official badge, and wear loaded guns, but there are others who will perform such a service—”

“Not that Miami reject boss of yours—”

“I did not mention him. But there are those who will perform this service, regardless of whether one’s pistol fires bullets or air.”

“I know Harumi said—”

“No, nor does she know how to...knit such a garment. But I do. And I would be happy to do so, upon request.”

“‘Upon request’ like you’d do it for free?”

“Being an apprentice, I am not in the position to require a fee...but one must consider the worth of that which costs nothing. But...it is your choice. Excuse me, I must get back to work,” and before the man could speak again, Masafumi was inside the tattoo parlor’s autoclave room, and over the now comforting drone of Ignacio’s needle, he heard his boss shout, “You and Harumi, you two have a nice walk?”

Giving the nearest low-walled vat of dye-bathed nano-tube ribbons a gentle shake, watching the wave-like undulation of the transparent fibers within, Masafumi smiled and yelled past the beaded curtain, “Nice...you could say that.”

“That’s my kiddo...next time she comes in here for more ink, I’ll let you do the slinging, ok with you?”

Images of narrow bands of patterned flesh warred with far more graphic, if equally fine-spun mental pictures of oozing human cross-hatching within Masafumi’s brain, as he echoed, “Ok by me....”

* * * *

“’Fumi, remember what you said about women wearing layered kimono, how a little bit of each kimono showed...were you joking?”

Pretending to be engrossed in the wild spiking arcs of the onion peel-juiced lines Harumi was inking into the surface of the firm tofu, Masafumi nodded, then said, “It was the Hsian period...around the late 700s, through the eleventh century. You can read about it, if you can find the novel The Tale of the Genji by Lady Moraski....She describes how the nobility of Kyoto and Nava wore layered kimono. I read it back in Japan...it was one of my mother’s favorite books. I think she still has her copy.”

“You think?”

“She and I...we seldom write, or call. She and my father...they were eager for me to leave the house, to leave Japan. It was an...understandable parting of the ways.”

“Oh...like you mean they kicked you out?”

“Not precisely...but it is partly true. They kicked me out of my room, within their house. Your family, when they gather, do they ever speak of hikikomori? Perhaps, someone on your father’s side, may have witnessed this...disorder? It is common, in Japan, less so in Taiwan, South Korea....”

Sliding her finished tray over toward Masafumi, Harumi uncovered the next slab of flesh-firm momengoshi and ventured cautiously, “You’re talking about those guys who sued to stay in their rooms, for months, years even? Not talking or eating with their folks? My dad’s dad used to mention something like that....I didn’t know what it was called. So...you’re...one of them?”

“Was one. My parents, they hired a woman, a ‘rescue sister’ to come to my door, and lure me out of my room. Once I came out, she took me to this place, in Tokyo, called New Start. A meeting-place for fellow hikikomori...here, you might call it a boy’s club. There was one female hikikomori there, while I was in attendance, but she was an...aberration. Far more males do...what I did.”

“So one morning you just decided to hide. Not get up, or not leave the room? I think everyone I know has felt that way at least once—”

“Not the same...not at all. For me, for us, the staying-in is a response to pressure, to expectations...when one cannot fulfill one’s destiny, it is better to retreat than to exist as a failure.”

“If that’s the case, then old Walker Ulger should be hiding under his futon in his apartment....I can’t think of anything worse than running around pretending to be a cop, down to wanting body armor to take up the slack from a bullet-proof vest he doesn’t even own.”

“Walker is not Japanese. And I doubt many expectations were placed upon him,” Masafumi said succinctly, while Harumi sat there, fingers resting on the long armature of her tattoo gun, mentally digesting what she’d just heard. Then, as she lowered the vibrating needles onto the waiting surface, she said, “To me, he’s a more likely candidate for being a hicky-whatever than you could be...you’re just a kid now, and you said you were locked away in your folks’ house for how long?”

“I did not say how long...it was enough time. I was at an age where my future should have been set, but...my doubts diluted my artistic destiny. My parents, my teachers, they were sure of what I was to be, but me...the uncertainty, the inexactitude of my calling, all of this served to render me unable to do anything more than simply be, in my room. It is difficult to explain further. The people at New Start, they advised me to change paths, seek other outlets for what minimal talents I possessed—”

“I’ve seen your work, ’Fumi...there isn’t much more that Ignazzy can teach you about inkslinging that you don’t already know. How long have you been working for him, two, three years? Your work is fine, just fine...in fact—” here her voice took on a different tone, less conciliatory, more eager, “—what you said a couple of days ago about the layered kimonos thing got me to thinking...what I have on me right now is sort of like a short kimono, no? but what if I add bands along each arm, and each leg, with a suggestion of the pattern of some more kimonos underneath? Y’know? With thick bands of black to delineate the difference between each ‘sleeve’...sort of like what that pretend-pig suggested, a quilting-type of thing.”

Masafumi felt emotionally, creatively, naked, sitting there on the tatimi mat next to Harumi....Ignazio had also suggested that he work on Harumi, and now, she herself was requesting that he ink her, a most personal, and even intimate request. As if his own wishes had been made flesh...but as he pictured her future bodily illumination, his mind echoed with another imagined transformation, that of a lowly play-badge-for-hire into something slightly more legally augmented. That the two creative works were so thoroughly linked in his consciousness somehow tainted the former while increasing the repugnance of the latter.

But she was expecting an answer...just as that slug-eared thug had been badgering him for the last few days, constantly requesting a specific date—and a suitable price—for his own transformation.

Realizing that to honor one request must inevitably mean fulfilling the other as well, Masafumi said slowly, “Would you be open to a form of...barter, as payment for my work? It is not the most pleasant option, but one which I think will turn out to be satisfying for you...in how you people say it, ‘the long run’?”

“By saying ‘not the most pleasant option’ do you mean unpleasant, as in...say, that Ulger freak?”

Nodding, Masafumi anticipated her refusal, but was pleasantly shocked when she said, “You can do anything you want to me in front of him, as long as it culminates in him getting off my back....”

* * * *

“So...you kids sure ole Iggy-nazzy won’t come back in here, spoil our inkslinging party?”

Outside the lowered shades of the tattoo parlor windows, the last rays of the setting sun cast narrow deep orange shafts of light on Harumi’s body as she stood still in the middle of the room, while Masafumi spotted the freshly inked narrow stencils around each of her upper arms just above the elbows, and encircled each of her thighs with a two-inch wide band of intricately patterned freehand flash. Once he was done rubbing the transfer paper against her skin, Masafumi stepped back to view his efforts, and make sure all the elements of each design had successfully spotted onto her skin. For his part, Ulger squirmed around in one of the tattooing chairs, eyes narrowed, upper lip curled back over his flat-bottomed, oyster white teeth, breath coming in short noisy hitches through his flaring nostrils. He had accepted Masafumi’s terms readily; if he was allowed to watch the “tattoo-boy” apply four around-the-limbs tattoos to Harumi, he would be given that elusive nano-yarn-sweater...if he never bothered Harumi again. And if he were to break his promise, and continue to harass her, the real police would get a call, reporting a non-official bearer of the otherwise restricted body armor nano-weave.

Luckily, Harumi’s limbs were thin, and the single-needle black outlining of her tattoos went quickly, if somewhat awkwardly (to allow him to tattoo the backs of her thighs and arms, she had to lie face down on the tattooing bed, resting on her already-inked limbs), and once the outsides of each new leaf, each new flower were inked, Masafumi switched to a seven-needle cluster, to create the background wash of color...given that his needles touched his previous finely incised inked lines with every pass, it was inevitable that Harumi’s eyes began to water, even as she defiantly refused to let out a sound, least she increase her audience’s pleasure at her discomfort. Masafumi could hear Ulger’s panting breaths over the drone of the tattoo gun, and when he was done laying down the pale greenish-white background (which rendered some of the single needle fineline a subtle shade of grey), he gave Harumi an I’m so sorry wince, as he put a three-needle tip onto his tattoo gun, and began inking in all of the deep green leaves.

Five more colors later, and countless swipes of his now-bloodied wipe cloth, Harumi’s limbs shone with brilliant, slightly-raised bands of color...the merest hints of a far more intricate design not quite fully seen “beneath” her previous tattoos. But her fleshy kimono was now layered, and as she gingerly walked toward the mirror on the back wall of the shop, ignoring Ulger’s wolf-whistles in her direction, Masafumi pictured her wearing a real kimono, over her tattoos...but one made of a transparent fabric, gauze, or perhaps even un-cut sheets of that nano-fabric those factories made in bulk. This was the answer to his imponderable quandary, that unbridgeable gap between the artistic vision and the material reality. A design that literally moved as the woman wearing it moved, even as she still maintained the formality of the now-outdated kimono’s restrictive T-shape....In his excitement, he almost forgot about Ulger sitting there, waiting for his “payment” that evening, so beautiful was Harumi, in all her inked glory. Only her pale shorts and narrow tube top marred the perfection of her fleshy garment, but didn’t Ignazio tell Masafumi that the people who attended those Tattoo and Body Art conventions often took the judging stage all but naked, to better show off their ink? If Harumi would allow him to create additional “layers” of kimono on her skin, could she not wear a transparent kimono when taking the stage?—

“I’m outta here...Masa, you’re the man...and Walker...what can I say? You ain’t,” Harumi hissed the last two words through a tightly puckered pair of red-shaded lips, then, after blowing a kiss to Masafumi, quitted the parlor, stepping raw and bandageless into the early evening street beyond. Sure that she would be able to tend to her own fresh tattoos, Masafumi slowly turned his attention to Ulger, who was busy fishing something out of his breast pocket...a syringe, filled with a pale clear liquid. Grinning and squinting at Masafumi, Ulger said, “I do guard duty for that pharmacy down the block...and I know they ain’t gonna miss this. Just like I know you ain’t gonna say squat about me using it, right?”

Realizing that whatever Ulger had stolen had to be an anesthetic, the one thing forbidden to anyone undergoing non-medically sanctioned body modifications, Masafjumi merely shook his head, disgusted by the man’s cowardice, yet simultaneously elated by the sight of Ulger feeling his own neck for a vein, then shooting the contents of the syringe into his body. And from what Ignazio had told Masfjumi, nano-tube implantation was far less painful than even the smallest tattoo could ever be. Wanting to snap, Too bad you didn’t bring enough to share with Harumi, he instead waited until Ulge’s eyes grew dazed, and his head started to loll, before saying succinctly, “Remove your shirt. And put your arms on the armrests. Another thing...you’d best not try to speak as I work.”

With the cheerful obedience of a cow marching along the slaughterhouse tunnel, Ulger started to say “Ok” then substituted the finger-sign for Ok instead...before his eyelids drooped down low over his eyes, and Masafumi told himself, This...will be so good....

* * * *

Through Ignacio’s magnifying goggles, the skin of Walker Ulger’s neck became a landscape of raked sand and occasional rock-like protuberances, dotted with short scruffy shafts of kelp-dark grass-hair. And as he minutely scored and hash-marked that barren soil of enlarged pores and pliant flesh, Masafumi forced himself to think of rough fabric, something not supple enough for a kimono, but perhaps suitable for an obi, that which surrounds and binds the layers of a kimono into a whole...and as he worked, incising, and laying down strands of nano-ribbon which looked nearly hair-thick under the most extreme magnification his lenses allowed, his artistic urges overtook his utilitarian purpose, as his realization that this was not a job meant to protect one who needed genuine armor, but merely a prop meant to prolong Ulger’s delusions of legal servitude, began to guide his hand, so that his efforts transcended their agreed-upon boundaries....

...and when he was finished, and had slathered the freshly-laid nano-ribbons with post-tattooing ointment, and bandaged over his creation, he kicked the bottom of the chair, to rouse Ulger.

“All through.”

“Uhmmmp? You done? I got my armor?”

“It is within you. Although the addition of an actual vest will greatly augment the protective element.”

Oblivious to Masafumi’s irony, Ulger shakily got up off the chair, and as he gingerly felt the bandages which criss-crossed over his neck, shoulders and under his arms, said, “You know where Harumi went to?”

That Ulger would ultimately seek to break his promise had been a given to Masafumi, but the quickness of his turnaround did rankle Masafumi, who replied, “No...and if I may remind you—”

“Nope, I didn’t tell you you could say squat to me.” Masafumi watched as Ulger labored to pull on his shirt, offering no help to the man as he struggled, other than to mildly suggest, “A beer might make whatever pain comes later go away.”

“Nah, I’m gonna get me some saki...and I’ll bet Harumi will be there to serve it to me, won’t she?”

Harumi had said nothing to Masafumi about her post-tattooing plans, but he doubted that she would consider working another shift that night, but he smiled and said, “Perhaps she will be. You should go then?”

“Damn right...and I’m gonna show everyone there what I got goin’ for me now. Teach them not to take me serious as a security guard. Once they see what I’m packing, they’ll take me real serious....”

With that, Ulger stepped out the door, but when Masafumi hurried over to peer through the sides of the drawn shades, he saw the rent-a-cop wannabe ripping and tearing at his gauze bandages, until they trailed over his shoulders like the fluttering tail of a squid.

It took all the resolve Masafumi had within him to resist the urge to follow the man into the restaurant, to watch the horrified reaction of those Japanese-reading patrons and workers when they saw what was nano-embroidered into Ulger’s flesh...the precisely drawn symbols for “I despise Japan and all that is Japanese” across his neck, or, if he managed to get his shirt off (or if it was removed for him), the phrases “I seek to destroy all Japanese women” and “Death to Japanese men” on each shoulder, or the best ones of all along the bottom of each armpit: “I am worthless slime” and “I am unworthy to live.”

Just as the long-ago Tokugawa Shogunate had inevitably spawned a far different, yet equally—if not more—involved form of kimono decoration, so Masafumi had decided that the current ban on non-police-officers obtaining a suit of nano-body-armor should also spawn a more decorative, if less protective, variant. And using bundles of nano-ribbon, vat-dyed to a brilliant, un-miss-able shade of crimson, made the individual characters of his work stand out vividly and unmistakably under Ulger’s exposed flesh, much as embroidery stands out above that which is to be embroidered.

Patient, and sure in the knowledge that his creation would be seen, and subsequently read, Masafumi busied himself cleaning up the shop, putting away bottles of ink, placing the used equipment in the autoclave, scrubbing down the chair Ulger had sat in, in case any invisible blood mist should still be clinging to the vinyl surfaces, until he heard the ever-closer wail of the sirens, be they police or an ambulance, it did not particularly matter to Masafumi.

That which he had been forced to create would soon be hidden, perhaps forever. Unlike Harumi, and her growing collection of fleshy kimono, of close-fitting skin kosode. If she would allow Masafumi to augment her three-dimensional garment, once she learned of Ulger’s inevitable fate.

Peddling to his small apartment that night, Masafumi wondered which would be more suitable—an osode of finest gauze, or the more daring nano-fabric....

IV.

(Heian kosode)

“...what is a kimono...if it ceases to be a thing worn?”

Kunihiko Moriguchi, 2005

“When no one chooses to wear kimono, might they not choose to become the kimono?”

Masafumi Saikaku (1999-2073)

From: “The Lives They Lived”

(“Emperor of the Epidermal Kimono”),

The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, January 2074

The next morning, Masafumi wasn’t too surprised when Harumi didn’t show up with her customary three trays of momengoshi, ready for her special hand-worked embellishment, but when Ignazio didn’t show up for work, either, he grew first puzzled, then...as he worked through each layer of their most recent words and actions, dwelling in particular on the seeming happenstance of their wants and needs, which managed to merge with his own artistic needs and wants, he became angry, shamed to the bone by their tandem deception, their dual interplay of common desire for him to act in their stead (the unspoken upset on Harumi’s part, Ignazio’s urging him to find out what was wrong, the revelation of their common nemesis...and Ignazio’s sudden urge to play Nano-Master to Masafumi’s unsuspecting Apprentice). But his anger washed away like unwanted dye form a resist painting when he ventured for the second time into the restaurant where Harumi had worked, and one of the waitresses hurried over to him, and said, “Harumi, she say for me to tell you something. She say Thank you, and she hope you not angry at her and her boyfriend. She say, they cannot be free unless common enemy is gone. But they cannot be the ones to stop enemy. She hope you understand, and forgive. And she say, she love the new kosode. When they come back, she want more. If you wish to make for her.”

“Did she...did they say where they were going?”

“Las Vegas. She say they have Skin Show there. She say she show off kosode, and will tell everyone you make. Ok? You have meal now?”

“I’m not hungry—”

“Not hungry now, ok...I put in box. Harumi, she pay ahead. She say serve you special dish...you sit, I go get,” and so Masafumi sat, surrounded by scents and memories and distant sounds of cooking, until the waitress placed a plate of kinugoshi before him, and the scent of the deep fried “silken” tofu filled his nostrils. As he picked up his chopsticks, he noticed in the room’s dim light that there was a design, deeply branded, in the center of the slab of kinugoshi:

The ancient symbol for a kimono....

As he lifted the oishii treat to his lips, prior to savoring the warm custard-like interior, Masafumi decided that no matter what it might cost him, or how many free tattoos he might have to give that nano-tech factory worker, he would somehow get the thirteen yards worth of transparent nano-fabric for Harumi’s osode...no other cloth would do, under the circumstances.

AFTERWORD TO “THE HIKIKOMORI’S CARTOON KIMONO”

This version of the novelette is the original manuscript which I submitted to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine back in 2006; the version which was published early the next year was somewhat shorter and slightly different in spots (including an ending which made it clear that the evil mall cop was actually killed by a mob of justifiably angry Japanese people); I needed to cut about 1,000 words for length alone before it sold, and I simply wanted to restore that material for those readers who might’ve wanted the story to go on just a bit longer. I also thought it would be interesting for readers who have the magazine version (it was in an anniversary issue, and was thus a “must buy” for many sf fans) to be able to compare the two texts, just to see how the editing process can result in small yet significant changes in a particular piece.

I am quite pleased with this work, be it in the original version or in the magazine version—for once I was able to blend many different themes and characters and make everything work as a unified whole.

The freakish rent-a-cop Ulger is based on a policeman in my city who has an inordinate fondness for grabbing small children and man-handling them, among other less acceptable sexual proclivities; while people have been complaining about him for years, the former chief adored him, and refused to acknowledge that his favorite “yes-man” is anything but a wonderful cop—even to the point of placing this goon in charge of security at the local high school. Talk about foxes in henhouses....

Masafumi is one of my favorite characters through; I am very fond of this shy young man who manages to take the otherwise bitter reality of being used for a nefarious act and turn it into something beautiful, and powerfully creative. I only wish I knew how I created him so well—coming up with a fellow like him is one of those rare, unpredictable literary feats that usually remain beyond one’s grasp....