Ink

“Katie.” Tomohiro’s gentle voice cut through my sobs.

He reached out his hands for the sketchbook, or for me. I wasn’t sure.

I took a shaky breath and moved toward him. I pressed the notebook into his hands, the metal spiral cold beneath my trembling fingers.

“You can’t tell anyone,” he said, and I snorted.

“That’s your major concern here?”

“Please,” he said again. “Especially Sato.”

“Tell them what?” I said. “That your drawings come to life? They’d send me to the loony bin.”

He shook his head. “Satoshi will believe you,” he said quietly. “He’s been trying to prove it for years and I’ve always denied it. If he knew the truth… He’ll try and get the Yakuza to use me. Do you understand? It will put us both in serious trouble if anyone knows.”

“But knows what? ”

Tomohiro sighed, and his eyes brimmed with tears that he blinked back.

In a shaky whisper he said, “I’m a Kami.”

“Kami?” My head cycled through its mini-dictionary of Japanese. Kami meant “paper,” but something else sparked in my mind. Kami also meant “god.”

“Shinto talks about the kami, right?” Tomohiro said.

“There are thousands of them.”

“Gods, you mean?”

“Gods,” he said. “Or spirits. Beings that inhabit things in nature, like trees, or waterfalls or stuff. Shinto’s all about a spark of life in everything.”

“So you’re some kind of spirit, is that it?”

“That’s just Shinto tradition. But there’s more than that.

There’s a reason kami means ‘paper’ and ‘spirit,’ Katie.”

“Just spit it out, Yuu.”

“Okay. The most famous kami is Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun. She’s part of the creation story. But she’s more than that.” Tomohiro stared into the distance. “Amaterasu was real.

Not a goddess maybe, but a real person with some kind of…

power. And the real Kami are descendants of that power.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Did you, or did you not, see the drawings move?”

“Point taken.”

“There was a time when the Kami were well-known. We can…do something with our minds. I don’t understand it.

Anyway, all the myths come from bits of truth. The drawings, poems, folklore…it’s all by Japanese trying to understand where the Kami came from.”

“And you’re one of these Kami,” I said, but he didn’t answer.

“Do you know what one of the conditions of surrender was at the end of World War Two?” he asked. “Emperor Hirohito had to publicly deny his divinity. Japanese always believed emperors were descended from Amaterasu. I guess Westerners thought it would be humiliating for Hirohito to denounce this claim.”

“So it sort of knocked him down a rank?” I said.

Tomohiro leaned in. “Yeah, but it wasn’t just a tradition of myth. The royal family really are Kami,” he said. “When Hirohito denounced his power, it was a message to the Kami to scatter. Families with the ability went into hiding, and now those who know the truth keep quiet out of fear. There are dangerous people in Japan, you know.”

“You said Ishikawa would make you work for the Yakuza,”

I said.

“I’m afraid of it,” he said, and I saw the fear in his eyes, that he was freaked out by all of this, too.

“So these Kami, they can all draw things that become real?”

“I’m not sure. For me, it’s something in my mind when I draw. I don’t really know any other Kami.”

“You’ve thought it all out,” I said.

“My dad told me most of it. But I’ve tried to learn more since he won’t tell me everything.”

“Your dad knows about this?”

“It’s why he’s forbidden me from drawing,” he said.

“Is he a Kami, too?”

Tomohiro shook his head. “He won’t give me a clear answer, but I know my mom was. She’d have to be, to pass the power down to me.” A sudden thought sparked through my head, and I was almost too afraid to say it.

“Yuu,” I whispered, “your mom…”

“It had to do with her accident, yes.”

My throat felt thick.

“That’s why you can’t tell anyone, Katie. We’d both be in danger.”

“But why did my drawing move? Why did the pen explode?”

“The pen was me,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do.

If the drawings had reached you…” He didn’t need to complete the thought. They might have been tiny, but mouths of razor-sharp teeth don’t lie. “So I burst the pen and drowned them before they could get to you. I just told the ink to go every direction, and it was strong enough to break the plastic.”

“But I’m not a Kami,” I said. “Why would my drawings move?”

“It’s all my fault,” he said and crouched on the ground, his hands in his hair. “They were reacting to me being there. I didn’t do it, but I couldn’t stop it, either. I’ve tried so hard to keep it a secret, but somehow when you’re around I can’t control the ink as well. I’ve been trying to figure it out, believe me. But when I’m near you, I can’t—it’s like everything gets fuzzy.”

“What do you mean, ‘fuzzy’?”

He sighed. “The ink wants something from you. I don’t know what it is, believe me. You’re some kind of ink magnet or something. It’s getting really hard to control my drawings, to—to control myself.”

“Stop drawing, then,” I choked. After me? Why?

Tomohiro twisted the tall grasses around his fingers. “I have to draw. But I don’t use inkstones or sumi anymore. It’s too dangerous. I couldn’t even think straight, like it wasn’t my own mind or something.”

“The time you cut yourself,” I said, and he frowned.

“I cut myself on the kanji,” he said. “The last stroke of sword flicks to the left. When I drew the line across the page, the word cut into my wrist. I was lucky it didn’t kill me.”

“Shit,” I said, crouching beside him. And then another thought occurred to me.

“Koji,” I whispered. He looked at me with glassy eyes.

“I was just a stupid kid,” he said, his voice barely audible.

“I tried to hide it from him, but…he just wanted me to show him what I could do.”

There was no breakin, no guard dog. I realized that now.

The drawing, whatever it was, had ripped into Koji. And Koji had protected Tomohiro even then.

“I never told Sato about the ink. It would’ve been a death sentence for him to know. But I can control things better now.

You don’t have to worry. I would never let it happen to you.

But Koji—oh god, Katie. I still have nightmares about it.”

I took his hand and flipped it palm up, pushed his shirtsleeve back to expose the scars and cuts up his arm.

“Sometimes the drawings still scratch or bite me. This long one is from a dragon claw.”

“Dragon?” I said. “Like the tail I saw? It moved even though the page was ripped.”

“I don’t really understand how it works,” he said, gazing down at the scars. “Destroying the pictures doesn’t