In the Year of the Tiger...
Once upon a time there was a certain neighborhood in Tokyo that was very naughty. It was called "Kabukichō " although it never had a proper Kabuki theater. And while our story will get to Kabukichō, we're going to start very far away in a very different place.
Our very different place called "Idaho." It's been one of the United States of America since July 3, 1890. Our story will begin in an Idaho county we'll call "Basalt." It's a big county, but has only a few thousand people. "Basalt" is a good name for it; an awful lot of it is basalt, or, to put it differently, lava. There haven't been any eruptions for a long while, but there is still lots of lava: Old volcanoes; cinder cones; lava flats that are not very flat at all. There are not many roads through the lava flats; roadways had to be blasted and filled.
The county is big, as I have said, so there are other things besides lava stuff. There are mountains, which grow larger and higher; one range includes the highest mountain in the state, though that peak is in the next county. On either side of this range there are valleys carved by rivers, not very big rivers, but big enough to irrigate at least part of the valleys for farms and ranches. There aren't as many farms now as there were a couple of generations ago, when the government was doing things in the southeastern wasteland because if something went wrong, they figured they couldn't make it much worse. There are less than half as many children, even though each child usually has two or three siblings, often more. Most of them find lives outside the county once they grow up, sometimes very far away.
There are fewer churches than there used to be. The Lutherans are still hanging on in their black-stone church on Main in the county seat, the oldest in the county (though it started out Methodist.) There's a small Catholic church dating from the 1960s. The Kingdom Hall, formerly a home, is an (empty) home again; the last Jehovah's Witness left in the 1990s. There are three more churches in the county, but they belong to the same Church—we'll just call it "The Church" from now on. Most of the people who still live in Basalt County belong to The Church, as do a majority of the people in the state.
There are quite a lot of Youngs in Basalt County—quite a lot of Youngs in the state and in neighboring states. One set of Youngs (the dentist and his family) are Korean. However, like all the other Youngs in the county, they belong to The Church. There once was a Young in the county who was one of the Youngs from way back and stubbornly remained a Methodist, but he passed on childless during the Nixon Presidency. The Church still hasn't given up on that one; we won't explain further at this point.
Caldwell Young was firmly in the bosom of The Church, so much so that he was about to go on a mission for it. On the last night he expected to be sleeping at home for at least two years, he had disturbing dreams after he finally went to sleep. "You were talking in your sleep," said his mother when he came down to breakfast. "Did you have a bad dream?"
"You kept saying 'Kathy'," alleged his youngest sister.
"I didn't hear that," said his other younger sister, "But you were trying to talk Jap."
"Japanese, Martha. You know better," said his mother. "Were you dreaming about your mission?"
"I guess. Crazy dream."
"I made you some Postum." The Church forbid coffee and tea; Postum was an acceptable stand-in. The product had been taken out of production in 2007, but good Church wives knew the recipe, and there were other coffee substitutes, but everyone in Basalt County and in most of Idaho called them "Postum" anyway.
"Thank you," said Caldwell, drinking in the taste of early morning at home. The sun wouldn't rise above Mount King for more than an hour, but the stars were already fading above the valley.
"Mary, Martha, finish up," ordered his mother. "If you're not dressed and ready when I start the car, you're not going." The girls whined, but obeyed, as always. Caldwell started working on his oatmeal, which had cooled. He wondered why his mother had let him sleep as long as she had, though he wasn't in much danger of missing the ten o'clock flight out of Idaho Falls unless they had car trouble.
His mother was already dressed, hair done more carefully than Caldwell had seen in a long time. When the girls had been gone for maybe a minute, she put one hand on his shoulder and said, "That dream, there was more to it, wasn't there?"
"More crazy stuff."
"Sometimes dreams tell us things. Tell me. Hurry, before the girls come back down."
Caldwell Young compressed a sigh to a slight puff of breath, and said, "Japanese stuff—geisha girls, robots, samurai, soldiers from World War Two, sumo wrestlers, judo guys, baseball players...a little old lady with a silver pipe...a big stupid looking bug making noise...a little girl with a talking cat...a woman with long claws and sharp teeth...and a carhop on roller skates, except that instead of a tray, she had a scythe. A shinigami..."
"She knee gaw me?" repeated his mother.
"A death goddess," he explained. "Sort of a Japanese valkyrie. She actually said to me 'watashi wa shinigami,', 'I am a shinigami.'"
His mother was squeezing his shoulder rather hard now. Caldwell managed to shrug. "Just a dream," he said, gently removing her hand. He left his oatmeal unfinished. "Sorry I slept so late. I'll get dressed now."
There was no car trouble, and the flight was on time. Idaho Falls had never been troubled with airport overcrowding. Caldwell changed planes twice, first in Salt Lake City, and then in at SeaTac, the enormous airport halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. This flight was the very last to leave that night. Because of an earlier canceled flight, every seat was filled, and while the seat to his left was filled by one of the other missionaries, the seat on his right, a window seat, was occupied by a woman, a woman with long, black, scented hair. She had a Seattle Mariners cap pulled down over most of her face, but her lips were visible, and lipsticked. Loose-fitting jeans and a jacket obscured any further evaluation.
The airline was saving a bit of fuel by cutting down on air replacement, so the cabin smelled much like a Basalt county school bus for most of the flight. This wasn't exactly a pleasant smell, but perhaps because it was familiar, or perhaps because the long scented hair compensated, Caldwell Young soon fell asleep...
"You want her, don't you?" a woman's voice hissed, purred, growled, and more, all at once, and he heard not only with his ears but with his bones.
Caldwell Young turned away from the woman with the perfumed hair. No one else was in the cabin now, except for the woman on his left. That woman had bone-white hair, and glowing red eyes, and streaks of red warpaint. "Yes, and I see you want me," she said, thrusting a rude, clawed hand between his legs. She laughed, and the points of her teeth lengthened. Her tongue became forked. She smelled of gunsmoke. Another hand closed on his shoulder...
"Hey, what's with you?" It was a woman's voice, not the gunsmoke-smelling woman...
Caldwell Young sat up. The cabin was as it was before, crowded, smelly. He realized he was holding the woman's wrist. "Sorry," he said, releasing it. "Dream...sorry."
"Musta been some dream," said the woman. The ball cap had fallen into Caldwell's lap. She retrieved it. "Forget it. Just let me out, I need to use the restroom."
The woman was Asian, but her English tumbled out of her mouth in familiar ways. In fact, she sounded quite a lot like Kathy Ullman... "Of course." He made way for her as best he could manage. He was still awake when she returned, this time with her hair tied into a ponytail, and minus the smudged lipstick. She stepped nimbly over the snoring missionary on the aisle, but she seemed to have more trouble getting past Caldwell. When she finally settled into her seat, she asked, "What's your name, Caldwell or Young?"
"Oh, it's Young. Caldwell comes from one of my mom's grandfathers. You read my name tag?"
"Duh," said the woman. "I'm Heather Saotome. Ring any bells?"
"Ah, no," said Caldwell.
"I didn't think so," she said, adjusting her hair. "Maybe I will have it cut...anyway, I'm a reporter. I almost got on the air on my last job." She laughed softly and cynically. "The guy at the sports desk is like a god in Seattle. He read all my questions like he was doing my interview. Well, that's how it is a lot, you know. The research people really get the stories, but the on-camera talent gets the credit. And the big bucks, of course...nice to talk to someone who isn't all about ego and money."
"Thank you," said Caldwell. "Do you mind if—"
"I'm a Catholic, Mr. Young. More or less. Where are you from? Salt Lake?"
"No, I'm from Idaho. I grew up on a farm. And you?"
"Seattle. All my life except when I was in college," said the woman.
She's older than I thought. Caldwell wondered why that popped into his mind. "I went to a two-year place. You would never have heard of it."
"They taught you good manners," said the woman. "You were having a nightmare before, weren't you?"
"I don't remember," Caldwell Young lied. Later he could have sworn he saw the red-eyed woman again, but when he got a clear look, it was one of the flight attendants.
The plane had left in darkness, and it arrived in darkness, flying ahead of sunrise as it crossed the north Pacific. Heather-whatever vanished from his life, presumably forever—until Caldwell Young's Mission President (or "MP" in the jargon of The Church) asked, "You were talking to a young women on the plane, weren't you?"
"I was seated next to a woman. We talked for a few minutes. But that was it."
"You made it clear you were a missionary, didn't you?"
"Yes, sir," said Caldwell.
"What was her name?"
"Heather...Saotome, I think. Yes. Saotome. It's a very common Japanese name."
"Heather...," repeated the MP, doodling on the notepad on his desk, apparently unconsciously, because his eyes did not turn away from Caldwell. "You were seated next to your partner. Did he talk with Heather as well?"
"He was asleep."
"And you didn't want to wake him up," said the MP. "Of course. Well, I'm sure that was innocent enough. What about the others?"
"There weren't any others," said Caldwell. "I talked to an older woman while we waited for a restroom."
"How old?" asked the MP.
"My mother's age. At least." Caldwell wondered who told the MP he had been talking to women alone.
"You should be more careful, son," said the MP, shaking his head. "You're the most fluent Japanese speaker we've had here for quite a while. I asked for you. I'm expecting a lot from you."
