The Dark Issue 4 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: TDM Press
Published: 2014-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Yukimi Ogawa’s fiction has appeared or will soon appear in Strange Horizons, Clockwork Phoenix 4, and Ideomancer Speculative Fiction.

Phrase Book

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

hajimemashit: pleased to meet you.

I found animal tracks in the snow this morning. I don’t know what it is. A bear?

I’m a city person. This whole northern Ontario wilderness is terribly annoying. And Tetsuo is not even here. He had to fly back to Tokyo. Some family problem. He also forgot to load my box of books into the car, so I now have two boxes of Japanese books. Fortunately I packed the records myself.

I can’t read Japanese. I only speak it a bit.

I’m trying to spend more time with the dictionary and the phrase book. Trying to make this time in the middle of nothing count.

yoi ryokō o: have a good trip.

Tetsuo hasn’t phoned yet.

I’m going through the inugami book again because it’s mostly pictures and the plot is easy to follow even if you don’t know the words. The engravings tell the story.

Tetsuo’s thesis is on Japanese folklore, so he has a bunch of books about all kinds of funny creatures. The inugami is a dog spirit, bound to a family. To make an inugami you need:

One dog.

A hole to put the dog into.

Dishes with meat.

Place the dog in the hole, buried up to its neck.

Place dishes with meat around it, but don’t feed the dog.

When the dog is going mad, starved and terrified, cut off his head.

Bury the head under a busy road.

I don’t recall step five. But after that, you have yourself a spirit dog to command.

I’ve never liked dogs. Not since that Doberman bit my right hand back in third grade. I’m a cat person.

We have a fish tank in Toronto. James is sub-letting our apartment and he’s supposed to take care of the fish, but I don’t know how good a job he’s doing. He doesn’t even own a potted plant.

But this is where Tetsuo wanted to be: six months in Nowhere, Ontario, so he could complete his thesis.

Here I am, too.

I’m playing Mahler.

Wakarimasu: I understand.

Tetsuo makes fun of my Japanese but in all fairness my parents divorced when I was five. My father lives in Vancouver now. I’ve only been once to Japan. I speak French, but can’t trace a kanji to save my life.

Not so weird, though, when you grow up in Toronto by way of Cabbagetown.

Tetsuo’s stories of spirits and ghosts and all kinds of folklore have always seemed very new because of this. Oh, I’d heard a bit about women who are foxes and that story about a snow lady. Snow spirit? Some stuff about the inugami, but Tetsuo knows all about strange critters.

An inugami is a possession spirit. You send it against your enemies. The spirit dogs have an easier time possessing the emotionally unstable.

The inugami enters the victim through the ears and settles into the person’s chest. A person who dies while possessed by an inugami has claw and tooth markings on their body.

The inugami book, the one with the illustrations, begins in winter, with an outside view of a hut.

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