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  For Rebecca, who made this road possible

  1

  Aiko was the first. Nothing about her was that different, really. She liked things any fifteen-year-old girl in Japan likes. Flowers, I guess. Hair accessories—bows and stuff. Hello Kitty, maybe? I have no idea what girls like. Which is why I’ve been on exactly one … two … oh, wait, no dates ever. I sat behind Aiko for two years and in all that time I only managed to have two real conversations with her. One of them was in homeroom. The last was at her funeral.

  It was the crows. Aiko started seeing them at the beginning of first year. A few weeks later she died. Coincidence? Could be—there are crows all over Japan. But the crows of Kusaka Town are not normal crows. They watch you, clicking their beaks and flicking their wings, hungry to break into your mind. They’ll push their way into the deepest tunnels of your thoughts, and once they’re inside, you can never get them out.

  WELCOME TO KUSAKA!

  LOVELY BAMBOO FORESTS, MISTY MOUNTAINS, RICE FIELDS AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE. WELCOME TO THIS TOTALLY NORMAL JAPANESE TOWN!

  If our town had a sign, it would read something like that. And you might believe it because, you know, it’s a sign. But I’ve got news for you: that sign is a liar. Not a single word about crows, or mountain demons, or river trolls. And it’s never good when someone has to promise that they’re normal. If you meet a person and the first thing she does is tell you that she’s “totally normal,” you can be one hundred percent sure that she is not. Kusaka Town is like that.

  On the day the crows took Aiko away, I was standing in front of my homeroom class, a neatly written piece of paper in hand.

  “In the year Hōan 4, Prince Akihito became emperor of all of Japan. He was a generous ruler,” I recited, “but when he was twenty-seven his brother tried to steal the throne.”

  I glanced back at my teacher, Shimizu-sensei. “I added that part about him being generous. I mean, who really knows, right? His brother was probably jealous that Akihito-tenno was getting all the ladies and, like, drinking all the sake or whatever.”

  “Koda.”

  “I mean, I don’t have a brother, but if I did and he was emperor and drinking all the rice wine, I would probably hate his guts, too.”

  “Koda.”

  “I wouldn’t care if I had a brother now, obviously. Not much to be jealous of when your family owns a shiitake farm. Well, joke’s on you, brother I don’t have—I hate shiitake mushrooms. The farm’s all yours.”

  “Koda!”

  “What?”

  “Gods above, can you focus on something for five minutes? Look at me. Look right here. Okay. Now, finish your report.”

  “And so—”

  “Not to me. To your classmates.”

  As I turned back to the class, Shimizu-sensei buried his face in his hands.

  “And so began the Hōgen Rebellion, which eventually forced Emperor Akihito from the Chrysanthemum Throne. After being exiled, Emperor Akihito became obsessed. He searched out ancient Chinese texts that told of eternal life and the revenge of the damned. The emperor supposedly died in the year Chōkan 2, but most historians believe he entered the Tengu Road.”

  “Most historians?” broke in Kenji, whom I hate.

  “Many historians,” I shot back.

  “Liar. How many exactly?”

  “One hundred and seventeen. You smart-ass.” I mumbled that last part.

  “Koda, just finish your report,” Shimizu-sensei said.

  “And start with ‘I read on the Internet that,’” Kenji helpfully interjected.

  I tried to ignore him. “Most, or some, or one historian believes Akihito-tenno entered the Tengu Road and was transformed into a mountain demon of immense power. As a tengu, he could change himself into a giant condor. He flew all over Japan starting civil wars and samurai rebellions, causing earthquakes and monsoons—he even brought about the fall of the imperial throne itself.”

  When I stopped and looked up, two kids in my class waited a moment and then clapped. Weakly. Kenji hissed, “Usotsuki,” and threw a pencil at me.

  “Baka,” I shot back at him.

  Shimizu-sensei leaned forward in his seat. “Stop it. Both of you. Just … Koda, go sit down.”

  I squeezed along the aisle to my seat, avoiding Kenji’s stupid face. When I dropped into my chair, Aiko turned back just a bit.

  “You’re not a liar,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, well, some people don’t believe in mountain demons, I guess. Their mothers probably don’t love them enough to teach them important things.”

  “I believe in tengu,” Aiko whispered. “My mother left my family to live with a salaryman named Hiroshi, though. So maybe I don’t believe in them after all.”

  “Oh,” I started, “I didn’t mean…” but then trailed off and sat there in silence.

  Aiko slowly turned back to the front. Which is pretty much how all our interactions began and ended: with awkward silence.

  Shimizu-sensei walked up to the chalkboard and wrote down our next assignment. “You’re first-year students in high school now,” he said. “I expect your compositions to be at least ten pages. This will be due next Friday, and your topic will be as follows.”

  He wrote on the chalkboard:

  Something I Regret

  “And it has to be real. Something you actually experienced. I’m talking to you, Koda. Koda, did you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did I just say?”

  “Write a report.”

  “On?”

  “On, let’s say, airplanes?”

  “Not even close. Look at the board, Koda.”

  “Huh. Question: Can we write about airplanes if we want to? I’d like to be a pilot someday, so I think I could do a really good job on this report—if it was about airplanes.”

  Kenji raised his hand. “Koda probably hit his head and doesn’t understand the assignment. Maybe it would help if he put his bicycle helmet on. Then he could hear what you’re saying better.”

  I glared at him. “That doesn’t even make sense. I’d hear worse with the helmet on. Besides I only need it when I’m riding my bike … or if my head feels, you know, sleepy or whatever.”

  “Weirdo,” Kenji said.

  The bell rang.

  “Thank the gods,” our teacher said. “Dismissed.”

  * * *

  Aiko walked up the aisle before I could say something like, Sorry for insulting the fabric of your broken family life. My bad. She stopped in front of Shimizu-sensei’s desk while most of our class filed out into the hallway.

  “I regret something,” she said. “I regret not freeing the black birds.”

  Shimizu-sensei looked up from his papers.

  “Sooner, that is. For not freeing the black birds sooner.”

  “Sure thing. Birds,” our teacher said, returning to his papers.


  “They’re crying,” Aiko continued.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “No,” she whispered, leaning in close. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Aiko Fujiwara was smart, despite how that last conversation made her sound. She’d started saying increasingly strange things in those weeks, the weeks before she died, but she was usually quiet, so no one really noticed. Even on good days Aiko floated along in her own little world. Which can be attractive to a guy like me. In an isolated and bizarre sort of way.

  Aiko was prettier than a lot of the other girls in our class. She had bright black hair that fell down to her waist and she always wore this silver barrette pinned above her bangs. Her eyes were brown and huge, and she had long, delicate fingers. She was the kind of girl who makes the words in your mouth start wrestling to see which will come out first. Of course, when I opened my mouth, all those words usually ran off like a bunch of cowards. But that’s how it’d always been with Aiko.

  She turned without looking back and left the room.

  “Until we meet again,” I blurted out from my desk. Because apparently I turn into a forty-year-old with a monocle when I try to say goodbye to girls I like. Shimizu-sensei looked up from his desk, shook his head, and then went back to his papers.

  Aiko: five hundred points. My words: zero.

  The students of Kusaka High School made their way downstairs to the first floor. They stepped out of their school slippers. They laughed and shoved each other while pulling on their street shoes in the genkan entrance, then turned and walked out into the sunlight.

  Most of the students unlocked their back tires and rode their bicycles home, but a few lived far enough into the mountains that the school hired a bus driver to take them back and forth. Yori, the driver, swung the doors open.

  “Everybody on,” he called out at the top of his voice. “If you get left behind, a water troll will suck out your life-energy.”

  The students laughed and pushed their way into the empty seats.

  “I’m serious,” Yori said. “You will be a dry and bitter husk. And we’re off!” Yori cheerfully folded the door shut, and the bus pulled away from Kusaka High School. The kids on bicycles rode out like a flock of birds into the rice fields and the neighborhoods below.

  I ran back inside the school and returned my copy of The Hōgen Rebellion to the library, but I wasn’t fast enough. Ino-sensei, the school counselor, caught me on the stairs.

  “Koda.”

  I looked up, still fishing through the front pocket of my slacks for my bicycle key. “Konnichiwa,” I said.

  Ino-sensei smiled and replied, “Konnichiwa, Koda-kun.” And then stood there. Still smiling.

  Okay. Now it was my turn to talk? “I was returning a book,” I said.

  She nodded. Even the creases in her eyes were smiling.

  Ino-sensei and I had these interactions once in a while. I didn’t really mind meeting with a counselor, considering my … personal issue, but there was an awful lot of smiling that went on. And I am not a good smiler. Picture a bullfrog getting choked, and that’s pretty much what my smile looks like. So I shifted a bit, forced my signature froggy grin, and realized my hand was still pretty deep in my pocket. Ino-sensei suddenly noticed it, too.

  “Sorry,” I said, yanking my hand out. Ino-sensei was twenty-three years old, and other guys in class talked about how pretty she was. That’s a nice way of putting what they said about her. I didn’t talk like that. I didn’t even think like that. Most of the time I honestly didn’t understand the words they were using.

  When I pulled my hand out of my pocket, my bike key, along with a huge Pikachu bobblehead keychain, popped out. Listen, just about every businessman in Japan walks around with a cutesy charm dangling off his cell phone. It’s not that weird. But as I stood there grinning, Pikachu bouncing back and forth against my leg, the following thought passed through my mind: Maybe boys in high school shouldn’t be carrying these around.

  Ino-sensei motioned to the counseling room. “Do you have a minute, Koda-kun?”

  “Hai,” I said. Anything to stop the grinning and the bobbling.

  “You did well today,” she said, sliding the counseling door behind me. “Very well. I’m proud of you.”

  “Proud that I didn’t fall asleep during my report today?”

  She knelt down at the low table on the tatami mat floor. “Reports can be stressful.”

  “You must be proud of almost everyone in first-year Class B. Only two people fell asleep. Neither of them was me.”

  She smiled. “Would you like some o-cha?” she asked, twisting the cap from a bottle of green tea.

  “Arigatō gozaimasu.”

  As she poured a glass she asked if I’d considered wearing my helmet during the report.

  “It’s funny you say that, because I did consider it,” I said. “But then I remembered it’s autumn and indoor bicycle helmets aren’t really in fashion right now.”

  “Did you feel stress?” she asked, sliding the tea forward on a coaster.

  She meant the kind of stress that makes a kid in my condition fall asleep and smack his head on a desk corner. “Nope. Kenji even said he couldn’t believe how good my report was.”

  “He said that, did he?”

  “Or he said he couldn’t believe my report. It’s hard to remember.”

  “Was he right?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “Were you fibbing on your report?”

  “Not at all. I mean, mostly not. A little. There was one part. It’s called dramatic irony.”

  “Do you know what ‘irony’ means, Koda?”

  “I do not.”

  “And how did you respond to Kenji?”

  “Well, first I bowed. Then I thanked him for his razor-sharp wit and slowly backed out of the room so that my presence wouldn’t offend his ancestors any further.” I sipped from the glass. “Or I may have called him a stupid idiot.”

  “Probably the second one?”

  “Probably.”

  She nodded. “Well, I don’t want to keep you long. I’m sure you have fifteen-year-old things to do. I just want to remind you that this is a safe place to talk. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I finished the last of my tea and nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  She crossed her hands in her lap and said, “Thank you for coming, Koda-kun. I’m very proud of you. Well, mostly proud of you. Be careful out there.” She smiled and then bowed.

  I bowed lower and said, “Iro iro arigatō gozaimashita.”

  * * *

  I walked down the concrete steps of Kusaka High School and made my way toward the bicycle awning tucked back from the street. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to write for my composition assignment. “Something I Regret”? I regret not punching Kenji in his fat left eye.

  Pikachu’s head bobbled back and forth from the lock on my tire as I walked my bike toward the street. I lifted the enormous helmet out of my bicycle basket and latched it under my chin. Picture half a watermelon strapped to a broomstick and you get the general idea of what this thing looked like on me. Thankfully, it stayed in my basket. Most of the day.

  My last “incident” had been more than two months ago. Before that time, I hadn’t really had an attack for a year and a half. People like my parents and Ino-sensei were making too big a deal of this. If I was falling asleep every other day, fine, stick a giant helmet on my head. But once or twice a year? I’ll risk cracking my head on the floor. Believe it or not, helmets are not one of the socially accepted forms of high school headgear.

  I turned my front tire in the direction of my family’s mushroom farm and set my foot on the pedal. Then I heard the front door to the school open behind me. I looked back and saw Aiko walking down the concrete steps.

  She was carrying a few books in her arms, and as she made her way down the stairs she started mumbling to herself. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. The sounds just dripped off her lips and evaporated
into the mountain air. When she reached the bottom, she tripped and fell. It was a strange fall. Like she hadn’t realized she was falling until just before she hit the ground. One of the few times a soccer-ball-sized helmet would have done someone some good.

  I should have rushed forward and helped her pick up the books. I should have sprinted over and offered her my hand. I could have at least called out, “Daijōbu? Are you all right?” But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. Like so many times before, when it came to Aiko I couldn’t say anything at all.

  This time was different, though. Aiko pulled herself up from the pavement. Her eyes were glossy and faded. She looked like she’d been crying. Not from the fall. From before that. She left her books on the ground and walked over to me. My muscles seized.

  Aiko Fujiwara looked me straight in the eye, confused, like she didn’t recognize me. She pushed my helmet back and took my face in her hand. That was when the world went cold. Ice cold. Middle-of-space, pitch-black, sinking cold. I could feel it on my breath, in my hair, beneath my skin. I knew exactly what it meant. I was having another attack. And for the first time, I was glad I had that stupid helmet on.

  In my dream Aiko was bleeding from a cut on her knee. It was so cold that the blood should have frozen solid, but it seeped down into her wool sock and stained her leg bright red. The stain looked like a sakura flower—a cherry blossom in May. It made me think of picnic festivals and music and shrines.

  “I have to free the black birds,” Aiko said in my direction. “I have to do it by myself. There’s nowhere left to hide.”

  “What are you hiding from?” I asked the frigid air between us.

  “You won’t arrive, Yatagarasu,” Aiko whispered past me. “You won’t arrive in time.” Her lip trembled.

  “Crows fly.

  A traveler on the road

  Is lost.”

  That was new. Aiko was always a little odd, but I sure don’t remember her talking in haiku before.

  That’s when my vision flickered back. That’s when the air felt warm again. That’s when I saw my legs tangled up in my overturned bike frame. It had been two months since I’d fallen asleep like that, and now it’d happened in the parking lot of the school. In front of Aiko Fujiwara, of all people.