In the long line of those who have inherited the Heavenly Emperor's will, Nisegami Douma was not considered an anomaly, because whatever rebellion he enforced and was going to enforce had already been considered. This didn't change on his penultimate day as sole tenure, and for most of the ultimate neither.

On that distant evening, when he encountered Giyuu Tomioka for the second time outside his dreams, Douma must have seen the world before him. In the backdrop of chrysanthemum he stood there watching him sleep. The earliest day of the original demon until the last. All of it cooked down into one–and–a–half metres of snot and shy boy. The indelible impression it made on him was that if one were to reach the end of his life and recall its entirety.

Nevertheless, Douma at that moment imparted the greener part of his soul. He went on his knees and put his hands out. The rite was performed. He felt invincible, unreal, profane, when he said to Giyuu afterwards: "the world is yours."


That day I felt so content in the chrysanthemum field, and the air was so fragrant under a sky of hurrying clouds, I hardly noticed such a beaming sun in February, and the only thing startling was the woman next to me who draped around her figure the red kimono I'd come to associate with her so dearly.

The azure eyes grounded Tsutako Tomioka. She was fixing a reproving look into mine and speaking. I cleared my hearing.

"What're you thinking about?" she asked.

Without saying anything and without thinking, I replied: "I have to go back tomorrow." It wasn't my voice neither; far more resounding, and low. In other terms a grown man.

"Go back for what?" Tsutako went on.

"I'm obligated to."

"Obligated?"

"For my brother."

On its own my hand picked a hair from my eye, and seeing that I also had no authority of movement, it was cemented to me with queer ease. I approached the imaginative conclusion that I had been dropped into another's body in another time, without realising I would be proven right.

Now the attention was allowed back to Tsutako. My eyes were free, and I observed her in the clarity of memory. The distinctive braid that hung to her waist and its tissued bow all remained. She still walked with a shepherd's gait and in chocolate–coloured sandals, and still her narcissist's nose and cerulean eyes announced a face that was like no other in the world. Yet beyond that I felt nothing.

"Well, when'll you be back?" Tsutako asked.

"I… don't know."

Tsutako looked at me slightly derisive. She repeated: "You don't know?" and stood up holding a blue straw hat over her head, trailing a long white ribbon, that she took off and held her against her stomach.

I gave her unusual scrutiny, perhaps amalgamated by the mind of the person I was in.

Her sagging collar, weighed by winter clothes, disclosed her apple–coloured neck, and above that the haughty chin, flanked by the half–moon dimple resting below her lips –– balmed, not painted. She pulled up her sleeve, and the thin line the red kimono traced over her marble shoulders had no sure start and end, like some sort of lavish metaphor meant to represent infinite wealth, and as my eyes went further…

Disgusted when I realised the type of attention I had given her, I reeled my eyes, but the inevitable moment that my adolescent mind grasped was coming closer and closer, and Tsutako leaned in, the championed virtue slipping…

It was only a kiss, and one stopped halfway. Tsutako backed away laughing and revealed the glittering ring on her finger. She said: "Just come back in time for the wedding," and went on to state, if anyone, Giyuu would miss me the most if I were gone.

Despite the terribly surreal nature of her statement, that was not what caught me. I still couldn't remember Tsutako. I stared for a long time into her eyes, trying to rediscover, in a mind attuned to nursery fantasies, some glass shard of memory that had been scuttled in that sea, but nothing. Twelve years of sentimentality had fled over the shoreline like a dog looking for his bone, and even if I was a person who should've loved her, and had usurped the position of one who must have loved her the other way, I felt nothing for Tsutako Tomioka at all.


I awoke from the nap in a field of white chrysanthemum with a startle, only that it wasn't a field of white chrysanthemum but a jumbled–looking cottage with a charred, dingy feeling, whose old wood had taken on the immediate and unpleasant odour of ammonia. The whole place wasn't larger than the foyer of a suburban church, and beside my futon was the masked vanguard in the blue jinbei kimono, who attended to a system of tea on an iron tray and who conducted himself with the impression of a veteran. He noticed me.

"Tea," the man said. "To drink."

Then he introduced himself as Sakonji Urokodaki. The beverage, on the other hand, was the precise reception I had received from the madame Kochou, and the totality of the night returned to me.

"Are they safe?!" I asked without thinking.

But Urokodaki had an assured reply. "Shinobu and Kanae? Yes."

Afterwards I realised he knew them, but did not have enough immediate confidence to ask how. He went on with the tea and I observed the room further. Through one chink in the wall the glory of dawn was beginning to illuminate the desolate cabin, and the features trickled in succession: a low desk at the corner with rusted braces, the stained inkwell atop and hatchet above, a pile of dusty cushions clamoured against the wall, a ceramic pillow, a dragon–lacquered pot, and strangely, what looked a sword, a true and steel blade, cross–hung on the door. Urokodaki interrupted me in a sharp voice.

"Drink the tea," he commanded. "It's expensive."

I finally assembled the courage.

"…How would you know they're fine?"

"Won't say," he replied flatly, and once again insisted on the tea.

Sakonji Urokodaki, with an old voice ground by stone, was sixty–five that year, and would seem to remain sixty–five for all years, like the eight taps of his name, rolling and then ceasing suddenly. Urokodaki, faceless Urokodaki, as Sensei was in Kokoro, who never divulged anything, and was always masked, in one way or the other. Teacher of many and also me. Kamados and right–wingers all the same. I finished the tea.

"I found you asleep in the snow," Urokodaki said. "Are you from around here?"

"Yeah."

"Whereabouts?"

"Matsuyama."

"And who're you staying with?"

"…No–one," I said, and began to feel exhausted. I wished I could forget everything, sleep my whole life backwards, and wake up on February 8th, 1900, at two in the morning, ready to do it all over again. But I felt myself threatened by Urokodaki's wood–carved glare.

"Stand up," he suddenly said, "and take those shoes there and follow."

We went outside. Other than us, the cottage, the bouquet of dried chillies hanging from the façade, and the torrid gravel paths crossing the odourless cedar forest, the yet unnamed Sagiri Mountain was deserted. At the foot of the range in the far valley was the snow, but at our height it permeated only as sparse white dust, and the air here was weak and I couldn't breathe properly.

"Awfully girly kimono for a boy," Urokodaki commented, and began the road.

In later measurements down the same route, it took seven minutes from end–to–end, but the first time felt like we were descending the length of the nation. Passing a famished barnyard, we entered a grove in the forest, where the paper–dry leaves reflected the diluted green canopy, and I saw it in the half–light: the dull graves, akin to braille soldiers, lining the hill until the end, each bearing in its granite heart a name, a date, a cause. The first one I read:

真菰 Makomo
5 · 5 · 1904
Final Selection

I recalled a Makomo, though the memory was dying. I stepped closer but encountered a stinging odour that had me recoil, and Urokodaki passed me and shook his head.

"The fuckers," he said. "The demons have gone and pissed over the graves again."

Makomo's grave was the last in its row. Urokodaki went and appeared again with a mop, a broom, a cloth, and a container of water, then began to clean without saying anything. Dutifully scrubbing, while I watched, with fingers as calloused as a barber's strop, before rinsing it with the soapy foam, leaving in its decadent wake fresh death that shone in the sun, and with no smell. He performed it all with rigorous parsimony and with no thought of anything else. Then I was called.

"You sweep and I wash," he said, and I couldn't deny him. So we swept and washed, every grave in its yard, until it was high day and we could feel the sun again between the trees.

Urokodaki sat on a mound of grass. Even then, as sweat rolled down his leather neck, he wouldn't take off the mask.

"It's been, I reckon, sixteen years since the demon slayers left Shikoku. And they've been getting more and more daring because. Now, they don't even fear me."

"Demon slayers?" I asked.

"There, I've caught you. You know about demons. Though, I smelled it already."

"Everyone knows."

Urokodaki hmphed, stopped the interrogation, and looked out onto the yard. With shadows of muscle knots in his jaw, he asked how many graves I thought were here.

"Roundabout ten?" I said.

"Twelve. And do you know how many bodies?"

"Twelve?"

"No. Not one. Bits and pieces, maybe. But not one whole."

"…Dismembered?"

"Uh–huh. But entire or not entire, the demons hate us all the same."

He said it lightly, and topped it off: "Though, that is only natural for the solitary hunter."

At last I asked him, "Are you a demon slayer?", and Urokodaki told me quickly that he was, though retired, though forgotten. Instantly the sword on the door became a hue more transparent, and his solitude not so strange anymore.

We returned to his home. Urokokaki made tea again, brought the cup to his chin and lifted his mask partly, but stopped. He gave it to me instead, and asked where I stayed. When I couldn't produce a true lie under his perennial gaze, he lunged his hand across the table, seized me by the shoulder of the red kimono, and shook hard.

"Awfully girly kimono," he said again. "Was it a girl who died?"

"What?"

"A mother? Sibling? It's evident you were at the Kochou people last night. However, I smell older blood."

Urokodaki let go, apologised, but resumed his vehemence. He explained the accuracy of his nose so duly, and with no effort to hide its strangeness, I easily accepted the truth that 'he could sniff black from white'. So, he had smelled blood, a woman, and a demon too. I saw no fit reason anymore to hide my condition.

"Tsutako Tomioka," he repeated, treading softly around the syllables. "Then you're Giyuu?"

"Huh?"

"I knew her. Small place, hmm? Well…" Urokodaki scratched his chin, and wouldn't look at me. "I'm sorry. But you do grieve well."

Then he stood up and told me I was free to stay here, without saying anything else, and he left the house in haste to return only too late, at an hour when darkness befell the sky, and there was nothing in the world besides the iridescent moon and the cottage lost in the isolation of the forest. I imagined Açores already had some sort of vendetta on me, so I didn't go yet.


Instinctively, I knew it was a continuation of the last dream, when I fell into slumber and awoke in the featureless dimension that smelled like lavender toilette, and saw Nisegami Douma in the light of a fake sun. The vanguard shoulders and flaxen hair that stood out in the white clarity of night was unmistakable. I stood without thinking, put my fists out, and was confronted back palms flat.

"Punch," I was ordered.

The moment I did, my ankle was snatched from below and I buckled backwards, and was caught by the wrist before I hit the floor. It was Douma again. He had launched his leg and slipped me. Smiling, but differently. He pointed to his eyes, and only then did I see they were not rainbow–coloured but green.

"I'm not Douma," he told me. "Though we are two of the same."

"Then who?"

The man let my hand go, and said Nisegami Youma: the greener part of Douma's soul, his thorn and his patron, exhibit B to A and my undercover benefactor; a dead man who defied death; in other words not simpler, the brother of Tsutako Tomioka's killer, and her fiancé. Check out this tangle of thorns, Nabokov.

"But it's natural that you've forgotten me," Youma said. "Just like you did Tsutako. It is only the effects of the transplant."

Youma, immediately an easy–going man, had wider eyes than mine and a Soviet jaw, and was apparently western, though his Japanese was spotless. He must have been nearly the same age as Douma, but his body looked younger and more solid than any human's: it might have been conjured from the nexus of heaven. His gallow–white neck was knotted by ribbons of muscle, his heavy shoulders were square as the logs in a temple roof; the reflection of light off the ground traced silver over his arms and cast into gold a vein bulging on his hand. Above all, it was his perilous, glittering gaze that took me. Indeed, I had never met this man in my life. But suddenly: there was no telling if I was right.

We were in a poor replica of Urokodaki's cabin. The slit of the sliding door, which replaced the normal one, was what allowed the light in, and Youma opened it and sat on the porch. He pat the floor next to him. Apart from the shack, there was nothing in this land but a glimmering, frozen river below the skyline, of resin perhaps, running along a small bank with some dahlias at the foot. It looked too far to reach. Beside me, Youma looked fondly toward it, and passed his hand over the horizon making walking legs with his fingers.

"Remember, Giyuu," he said, "when we went to the Niyodo River? With your sister. The water there's clear as glass. And you were too afraid to swim, but I made you anyway."

I said that I didn't, and Youma smiled, sadly.

"Well, anything's worth a try. That memory I showed you brought out nothing, either."

Then he stood up and asked me to walk with him, speaking all the while.

"How've you been, Giyuu?" he asked.

I ignored him. "I still don't know who you are."

"You do know. The memory's just not there. Much like Tsutako. Can you say you don't know her?"

"I remember my sister fine."

"Oh, really? Then what's her favourite food? Favourite colour? Favourite book? Name any one answer and you've passed."

In the end, I couldn't. Youma didn't chastise me.

"It's Gyoza, turquoise, and Records of the Two Songs, by the way," he said. "Anyway, now you've had your Tsutako and Youma memories taken. Big job. I would know. But there's a way to get out of it. And that's why I'm here, in spite of being dead."

Whatever he meant by dead, he would not say. The ground turned into an easy gradient, and we descended the side of a hill into a grassed valley without noticing the change. Bright mist flanked it above and at all ends, but the fjord was totally clear in its own space. Youma approached and held the trunk of a mandarin tree.

"These are my brother's favourite," he said, then glimpsed at me. "Oh. But it's understandable you don't want to hear about him."

"He killed my sister."

"And he killed my fiancé. I don't want to know him, too. But it can't be helped."

Now we were sat in a boat across each other. Youma held in his hands the oar, and I looked down and suddenly in mine was a fishing rod with its line cast somewhere into the darkness of the ocean.

"Nice, isn't it?" Youma said.

"You said you were dead?" I asked.

"I see. Yes, I'm dead."

"Then how're you…"

Youma told me purely: "I'm a ghost. Like that friend Tsutako had when she was younger. I think her name was Makomo."

"How'd you die?" I asked.

"Douma killed me. But in time, you'll know that story."

A tug came on the end of the line. At Youma's militant behest I reeled and heaved a crate onto deck, then opened it. A nightmarish thing: looking back at me was the shrunken head of Nisegami Douma.

"For you, should be a pleasant sight," Youma said, but it wasn't. I recoiled too far, and tipped in the water and fell to the next dimension. I was standing before a grand blue estate, solitary in the desert's night like a chopstick in rice, and Youma pointed and labelled it: "the Emperor's."

Inside, a visitor's chamber of a kind, and on the far end was the throne. A long candle in a brazier lit the room, and it made my shadow long as I was told to stand in the centre. I did not hear the axe when it came, didn't see it: only recognise dimly, the sensation of blade to back of neck, and my death, quick as a bolt from black.

We returned to the first cabin. Youma had killed me; he held the weapon but tossed it, smiling softly. Joking, he said, and for some reason I forgave him. Still, when we sat on the stoop, and he tried to take my shoulder, I refused. He told me then.

"I am a half–demon. That's how I met your sister in the sun."

"Sun?" I asked.

"The sun's poisonous to their kind. Nominally only, to mine. It slowly takes a little skin off me but I regen it. Almost like, uh, exfoliating. My brother's the same way."

"Cool talk," I said, but didn't care. "You said Douma killed you?"

"He did. Well, more like he lured me, and another actually executed…" Youma looked at his feet. "But he killed me nonetheless. Death or indirect death. And the day before I was to be wed. Though, it only demands equal retribution."

"And Tsutako?" I asked, because I still managed to not believe it. When Youma said yes, my lifetime was at last sealed.

"Though you may not remember it, you can imagine your sister raised you," Youma said. "When I appeared, she imparted a little of the responsibility to me. I was budding, of course, but only now I feel that responsibility has come full circle."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"I think I do. We are bound by heart and soul, after all."

Figurative thunder came across the sky. Youma seized the light across his face and leaned towards me. He began telling the history of his death.

"Four days ago, I was called back home by my brother, and I told Tsutako when we met in the flower field, which is the memory you saw. My brother is a very powerful demon. This Açores told you already, what about the letters in his eyes. He's Kizuki. Anyway, their boss wanted me dead as the brother of a Kizuki going to marry a human wife, and he contracted Douma to do it, lest he have his position retracted. He chose his position, and when I arrived, I was ambushed.
"Though I was dead, he wasn't going to let my soul go. Did you know? Demons can absorb prey as opposed to eat them, which is like the same thing. When a human is absorbed, it is purely for sustenance. However when it is a demon, its soul is transplanted into the absorber.
"Take it as you learn a skill. Freshly there, you still have to ingrain it. But once you do, and the years pass, it becomes more and more inseparable.
"This is what happened to me. There's no exchange needed for this 'soul transplantation'; it can just happen. But if a soul can be loaded, it should be able to be unloaded, right? And, you know, since having a soul inside you interferes with your personality and memory and stuff, you'd probably want to get ride of it. After my brother absorbed me, he wanted out just like this. And when he went to kill Tsutako as part of the lord's orders of full retribution, he found you, a perfect dumping ground. Do you understand?"

"A little bit," I said.

"Good. You're bright. Anyway, when you want to get something like a soul off you, you have to pay a price, because that counts as prolonging someone's existence on earth. If you think that doesn't make sense don't try to find any behind it. That's just how it is. This priced exchange, we call Zhao's trade. What you can give for it is pretty abstract – not just souls – but this is the general rule: to receive something that you think is of value you must give something that the world deems as equal in value. The subjective in comparison to the objective.
"For an analogy, say there's a math test tomorrow. You haven't studied but you've got a wealth of knowledge in Japanese. It cannot be a proportion of Japanese knowledge given for an equal proportion of math knowledge. To get some math know–how, it's going to cost a lot, because you need it urgently, and you 'think', even subconsciously, it is more valuable. That is what subjective means. What the exchange rate of Japanese knowledge to that is, is the objective. And this is the principle my brother followed when he put my soul in you: your memories of Tsutako were taken in return for me."

I tried to quantify it. "That means… my memories of Tsutako were considered as… valuable as your soul?"

"Uh–huh. What you deem of most value, compared to what the world deems as of most value. Life is something the forces that be always holds in high regard."

I supposed it was jarring, but I understood somewhat. I went inside with Youma, and we sat at a table that appeared and poured ourselves tea. I took a tepid sip. It tasted bitter. Bartering something for another, as anyone knows, is a bitter game.

"Can I get the memories back?" I asked.

"You can. But it'll cost more than you can imagine."

"What's that?"

"The life of Nisegami Douma, taken by your hands."

Youma took his arms off the table and emphasised it. Your hands. Then he put them back on and added, with his help.

"I'm going to be here for a long time," he said, "but there's a first step I can't take for you."

"Wait. First step to what?"

Youma span his eye, held it in orbit, and looked at me sideways. "Your revenge. It's only natural for a boy."

I had never studied it, and more grievously, never felt for it. The table fell from under our elbows and then the room evaporated. The world began to shake. Youma pointed up, declared I sleep too little, and that our time was done.

"We'll see each other in your next dream," he said.

That dream would come. However, an intermittent time first. The rug of black fell over my eyes, and I slid into vanishment.


From my first waking moment, Urokodaki treated me as if I had always been there, and in this way not without distance but with, like he had done famously for so many of his students. The first objective was to cut the firewood, and we did that soundlessly. Then we had breakfast and went to tend the chestnut trees for their season, and the graveyards after that, and the barn. Urokodaki only kept a few chickens, but spoke of his little wish to one day own a cow, who he'd name Nanohana. Then he slaughtered a chicken while I looked away, and that was lunch. Not once yet had my condition been brought up, and Tsutako neither. Halfway I welcomed the reticence, because I thought mostly of Youma. Most of all, I considered what he told me. That my first step was mine alone to take, but what first step? That was the dilemma of the day. Then, abruptly, at rice–perfumed supper:

"What do you plan on doing now?" Urokodaki asked.

I knew what he meant and didn't delay. "I guess I'll fight."

"You're only saying that. I smell it."

We finished our food, and left the bowls soaking in a basin with water. The rest we washed.

"Me, I'm not an active demon slayer, despite how I make it sound…" Urokodaki said. "I'm retired, though still in–tune. Anyway, now I work as a trainer of new recruits."

"That's cool."

"You know what I'm getting at, Giyuu."

Urokodaki, satisfied with this finishing line, left me there and went to read his book porchside. I stood hard upright and with my hands in the water, and considered – then, I realised there was nothing to consider. Urokodaki had offered me purely a tutorship, and what was unveiling to me gradually as Youma's idea of revengeance. My first step, I imagined, was my answer to the offering.

It took two nights before I slept with dreams again. I fell there under the sky of star–shot asphalt, and awoke to Nisegami Youma in his white world unexpectedly, but I took it as it came. For reasons innate, I no longer felt the impulse to appoint him as an enemy. But a comrade, and after that a brother–in–law; that, neither.

"I'll tell you this now," Youma said, "I can read your thoughts. In the waking world or here. And, I suppose you now have an idea of what I asked you last time."

I ignored him, and instead requested we go to the mandarin tree. He consented, and when we arrived, he helped me pick one. The ripe, alkaline flavour that washed through my gums brought back why I'd asked to come. I told Youma:

"I think these were Tsutako's favourite fruit."

For a moment his eyes glittered. "You remember?"

"No. When I left the house that night, I saw a lot of these peels in the bin."

Youma put on an exhumed expression, then recovered and we began our business.

"You want me to become a demon slayer," I said.

"It's the best way," he replied. "But I won't force you."

He picked the fibre out of his teeth and spat.

"I won't force you," Youma said again. "But I've had encounters with demon slayers before. If you can become like one of those Hashira, then maybe…"

Considering Youma, the pursuit of maybe's was an endless task. Maybe. Anyway, he would never allow me to hear explicitly what he meant. Kill his brother or take revenge or do both or do neither – in fogless retrospect, it was he who was unsure.

"But where will I start?" I asked.

Youma pointed up. "With Urokodaki. He offered you. You acknowledged it."

I turned away with a fast twist of my shoulders and looked at my palms and saw my life crooning between them. Day after day from dawn till dark until Douma was dead and I was too. All of it reduced to a drop of blood on a needle. I couldn't see anything after that.

I raised my head and peered into the crook of the valley. A cool wind going west. The formless sun above and Youma holding the tree. Bright. Fragrant. I took off the red haori and looked at that. The blood which was turning black and making itself seen. Tsutako's memory somewhere around here. Like a bug in the drawer. The quiet, too. I put it back on and made for the cabin. Youma opened the door, let me in, and closed it and the room was at once dark.

"I want you to make your decision before you leave," he said.

In fact I had already made it. But subtly enough, that it seemed Youma didn't see, or perhaps he pretended not to. All that was left was to ratify it. Say it out loud for someone to hear and know that it was going to be. Him or otherwise.

"I'll…" I began. Then, nonetheless: "I'm still thinking."

I awoke. Urokodaki was there in the room and he saw me get up and he called me. I kneeled the same way he did, before a shrine, an incense, a frame. The frame had no picture. But there was a name on the banner below it.

冨岡 蔦子 Tsutako Tomioka

"It's the honourable thing to do," Urokodaki said. "You light the incense."

I did, and for the first time my composure fell, and nobody could've been sure why. I told Urokodaki all about Douma and his game, the way he killed my sister and left her, that he saved me too, that he held me and told safety in my ear and I was so terribly sure I felt a regret, and that it was my final gambit to burn her body, and I took it. I hadn't even a photo of her to show for a shrine I didn't think to make. That was Giyuu's legacy. I felt burned, skinned, and humiliated, and surely if Youma had been watching, he would antagonise me too.

"But there's redemption," Urokodaki said. He smelled my turmoil. "Join the demon slayers…"

And fight, he finished. The first time he insisted anything, and it rumbled me. The answer I gave Urokodaki then can be imagined, but Youma was the ultimatum.

At the end of the day I was choked and ecstatic. In bed I murmured Douma's name and clenched the air where the sound floated. Twisting it between and powdering it. If it had not been him who turned the water in my heart to magma, then, it could only surely have been by penstroke order of the Heavenly Emperor. Then I turned over and hoped I slept with dreams, and I did. I watched a thread unravel to trace the figure of Nisegami Youma. I felt invincible, unreal, profane, when I told him: "forwards."


I'll kill them all.

All those monsters.

All those –

Who took her away from me.