Night Boat. Alan Spence

true devotee, said Nisshin, can enter into a raging fire without being harmed.

      Indeed? said Tokimune. Let us put this to the test.

      I felt the fear again, for Nisshin, for myself. My throat was dry, a sick emptiness in my stomach. The voices and the music said the torturers were piling up firewood and setting it alight. I could smell it, I could feel the heat. Nisshin was ordered to walk through the flames. He moved forward, hands folded in front of him. He wavered a moment, as if from the intense heat, then he gathered himself again. The music grew louder and through it came the chant from the sutra.

      Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

      He stood, unscathed.

      This is the protection of Kannon Bodhisattva, he said, and I felt a thrill, a tingling in my spine. The audience shouted their approval, applauded. I thought the show was over. But the music changed again as Tokimune stepped forward.

      So you can bear a little heat, he said. But do you think this can be compared to the fires of hell?

      I would not be so arrogant, said Nisshin.

      We must give you a sterner test, said Tokimune. Now, kneel.

      The music changed again, thud of a deeper drum, screech and wail of the flute and strings. Two more figures appeared, summoned by Tokimune. They moved awkwardly, carried between them two poles, and suspended from the poles was an iron pot, a cauldron. Tokimune explained that the cauldron was red-hot and the two men could hardly bear the heat. Nisshin was kneeling in front of them, and with difficulty they raised the pot over his head as he chanted once more.

      Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

      The sky had darkened and a breeze made the lanterns flare. Steam and smoke rose from the cauldron as the two men shook from the effort of holding it up. The music grew louder still, the howling of demons, as the cauldron was placed on Nisshin’s head, and he flinched and the audience gasped and I thought my heart would stop. I clung to my mother’s sleeve.

      Courage, she said.

      Then we heard it, getting stronger, rising above the cacophony.

      Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

      The two bearers staggered back and let the cauldron fall to the ground. Nisshin stood up, folded his hands and continued his chant.

      Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

      There was a cheer and a few people at the back started chanting along with Nisshin.

      Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

      More and more people joined in, and my mother was chanting, and I was too, and so was everyone else in the audience.

      Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

      Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

      The voices rose together, like one great voice, into the night, and I felt lifted up, outside myself. I had tears in my eyes, and my mother wiped them with her sleeve. On the way home I told her I knew what I wanted to be. I would be like Nisshin. I would leave home and be a monk.

      Yes, she said. Yes. When it’s time.

      WISE CRANE

      I was fourteen and felt as if I had been practising these devotions all my young life. I got up every night, shocked myself awake with cold water, lit incense and sat chanting the sutras. It meant I began each day with a kind of strength and clarity, even if it faded as the day wore on. But lately it had been fading more and more quickly. Some little thing would jangle my nerves, make me angry, and it felt as if all the austerity was for nothing. Then that old fear of hell began to stir in me, and I was once again that frightened child, terrified of burning in the fires.

      Something else was stirring too. My body was changing, and the young girls at the bathhouse looked at me differently. They would whisper to each other and giggle, glance in my direction and turn away. It filled me with confusion and a huge dumb longing. The pale little lizard between my legs would harden and redden, rear up like a dragon, and I had to hide it behind my towel as I eased into the tub, praying for it to subside.

      It would leap up again in the night, this tough stubborn little dragon, when I woke from muddled dreams involving those girls from the bathhouse. I imagined when I doused myself with cold water it would hiss and steam. I could picture it, the way I could sometimes see the figures on a painted scroll, on the storyteller’s kamishibai screen, move around with a life of their own, animated. It was another world, or another way of looking at this world. It was this world exaggerated, made fluid, and it made me laugh.

      I took to making little drawings myself, using a brush and inkstone I’d found in an old box at the back of the shrine room. I’d beg scraps of rice paper from my mother – discarded wrapping paper, out-of-date bills and receipts. I’d turn them over, sketch on the blank side, practise my calligraphy. Sometimes an unintended drip or smear of ink would make an interesting shape and I’d turn it into a bird or an animal, a mountain or a twisted branch. One time an accidental swish of the brush became my mother’s kimono and I quickly sketched in her round face above it with the tip of the brush. Another time a smudge looked like my father’s thick eyebrows and I added the glowering eyes, the grim line of the mouth. I showed both the portraits to my mother and she laughed, said I’d got them just right. But I didn’t show them to my father.

      Once I doodled a shape that looked like my own body, naked, the way I saw it when I stepped out of the bath. The brush made a quick approximation of my face, then before I knew it I had drawn that little dragon between the legs, just the way I had imagined it with steam rising as if cold water had doused its fire. Again it made me laugh but then the laugh cut short, stopped. I saw the expression on the face I had drawn, a leer, demonic. I took the brush and tried to wipe out the drawing, but I only succeeded in blurring, smudging the shapes. The face was distorted now, ugly, and the dragon shape was still there, darker, more solid.

      I crumpled up the paper, crushed it to a ball in my fist, looked for somewhere to throw it away. But I didn’t want my mother, or even worse, my father, to find it. If I dropped it outside, I imagined the wind catching, unfurling it, blowing it into the village where one of my friends would find it. It would be passed around, pinned onto a noticeboard. The girls at the bathhouse would look at it and snigger. It might even blow all the way to Mishima where my brother was at school. He would find it and recognise it as mine.

      I could tear it into tiny pieces and scatter it, but the pieces would never be small enough. Somebody might gather them up, put them together again.

      This was madness, but it took hold of me. Then I realised the only thing to do with the drawing was burn it. There was a lamp burning in the shrine room and I bowed before it. I unfolded the drawing and held it carefully to the flame, catching one corner and setting it alight. But I hadn’t allowed for it flaring up so quick. I had to get it outside or I’d burn down the house. I stumbled towards the door and out into the yard, shook the burning paper from my hand just as the flame reached my fingers, scorched me. My eyes smarted. My fingers stung, red. They would blister.

      I tucked the hand under my armpit to numb the stinging. I stamped barefoot on the ash, on the charred remains of the page.

      My father stuck his head out the window.

      What is it this time?

      Nothing, I said. I was just burning something. Out here. Outside.

      He took in a breath, about to say something, but then stopped as if he truly, genuinely, had no idea where to begin.

      My burned fingers nipped for days. I eased them in cold water, dabbed them dry. My mother asked what had happened. I told her I’d burned my hand on the lamp.

      Testing yourself again? she asked.

      I’d gone through a spell, a year or two back, of holding my hand over a candle flame, seeing how long I could bear it.

      Not