Tokyo
Sakura Jinja
I sat in meditation, my eyes closed and the thoughts I allowed to reign as they would. In what is known as, ‘Spanda Meditation,’ this method is much like Zen in that one allows the mind, one’s environs free reign to dance; kind of, like white noise lulls you off to sleep on a train or plane.
I was absorbed in the gentle flickering of the flames, my only companion. I sat cross-legged in my short red meditation tunic, my head bowed, and hair hanging over my eyes and pouring into my lap. Feet bare, my slippers in their usual place outside the Fire Room.
‘Daughter...’
While in my deep state of meditation, the voice felt soothing and warm. I was unperturbed. I then saw a pair of luminous electric-blue orbs suspended in a void staring back at me. I felt naked and vulnerable. I gasped. Feeling weightless, the velvet black holding me in its grasp as the blue flames embraced me. Then I saw it, a whirlpool of cerulean light flecked with silver and I was drifting towards it.
‘Daughter of Fire, your time is come!’
I jumped, the flames dancing before my eyes. That vision again, but ‘she’ sounded as if she were here in this room with me.
I had begun my meditation at 5 AM and now it was 7 AM, I knew this because my Ojii-san was with me. I could hear his quiet footfalls as he moved about the chamber performing his own rituals and cleaning the altars.
I took comfort in the fact he was hovering nearby, checking the braziers and filling those that required fresh incense. He replaced the extinguished candle stubs and the wilted flowers of the day before in the jade and black marble vases with their Shinto motifs.
He chanted in a low voice, the sound I always found comforting and made my head tingle with a sensation I had only begun to realize was not an experience I’d ever had outside the confines of the shrine. But in that moment, the tranquility, so much a part of our daily routine was interrupted in a most violent way.
A cold wind burst forth from the fire pit, smothering the flames. I was unable to move. Father was chanting a protection mantra, normally if negative energies were detected, the atmosphere would calm and negative egrigores, or thought form entities, would vanish. But something about this was radically different.
I then caught sight of something black, slimy and reptilian moving across the floor and tried to warn my Ojii-san. But try as I might, I couldn’t move my lips. I was locked to the spot. Then the beast of stone reared, and in a succession of coils, it hissed, the head of the Youma as big as a lion’s, for I knew now exactly what this thing was. I was petrified. Tears ran down my face as my Ojii-san opened his palm and a blue light appeared, I couldn’t believe it, I had never seen him display such abilities in my life beforehand. But I hadn’t seen anything like this either and knew this was out of my league and hoped he’d be all right.
“Asuka Ajari!” it hissed in a seductive female voice. “Are you not moved by my power, that I, Kiyohime-agami, the maiden of darkness would bless your shrine?”
“Be gone witch, I call upon the power of Amaterasu to banish you from this place and our world!”
“Not so fast my lovely man, don’t you want to see what I have in store for you? Behold!”
I gasped, as the woman appeared, her body lithe, her breasts bare, her legs, arms and belly covered in tattoos of various species of snake, her body hair shaven clean but for her red locks that cascaded over her voluptuous curves. Her eyes serpentine, glowed red, her tongue was like that of a snake, flickering, and with every breath she took; a hissing sound accompanied its hellish refrain.
My Ojii-san was drawing the woman away from where I sat before the fire pit. Then the woman’s blazing ruby orbs turned towards me and I was sure she had recognized something in me she hadn’t accounted for, but what that something was, I had no idea.
“Perhaps Ajari, you might like to imagine your sexy and beautiful granddaughter naked, receptive, moisten like a nectar sodden bloom offering you, comfort and pleasuring you as she does her clientele-?”
“Shut up and be gone, you accursed Youma!” he shouted.
My Ojii-san produced a charm and fired off an incantation and this sent the woman flying across the room against the opposite wall by a blast of silver light. But she had fast recovered and assumed my form and danced suggestively. My Ojii-san, white with shock and rage as he stared at the figure in disbelief as my doppelganger performed her erotic dance. Her body secreted a honey-like scent and she cackled as hundreds of tiny vipers appeared, covering her from head to toe.
“My children feed off your mother… As you can see, Asuka Ajari, they’re not concerned over any issue of incestuous prohibition, nor should you be. Why not take me, or if you prefer the real thing, how about little Estella? The thing slipped her hand over my hair and examined it.
“Keep away from her you filthy vermin!” he cried as a fiery torch appeared in his hand. She backed away, much to my relief.
Then I heard the woman’s voice once again in my head from the meditation earlier, ‘Believe in the power within. Call upon Mars to offer its protection and magic and put an end to this creature, a tool of darkness wielded by the Shachihoko, do this now and all will be explained later.’
I closed my eyes, focused on the image of a twin flame, and called upon the power of Mars to help me. The celestial bloom was pretty and spun like a top in that space called the Third Eye, a double helix of energy within the etheric body superimposed upon the pineal gland.
Then, a series of fiery roses appeared like a lattice of flickering flames, these, the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life. Each petal like that of a rose, but made up of flames. I stood up out of my physical body in my astral form. The Youma must have seen me as she stepped towards me, salivating, “Ah, I see you really are the Daughter of Fire. So play with me, take me and I will show you wonders you cannot imagine possible!”
The thing made me sick. I shook my head and plucked one of the fire roses hovering before me and only once I had touched it had the rose become visible to the snake Youma, no longer leering at my naked form. She had become frightened and her red eyes flashed dangerously.
I whispered an incantation in a tongue of which I had no knowledge. The words of power came forth from my mouth. I threw the rose and it flew like a dagger, pierced her left shoulder, and began to burn with furious abandon. Then I took another... and then another, throwing these in a continuous stream until the hideous snake woman, now a woman in shape only, burst into a ball of flames; the green amphibious skin of her true countenance replacing the bronzed image of a sex goddess. She screamed; her mouth opened to reveal sharp incisors, venom dripping from these. In a last ditch attempt to kill my Ojii-san, she jumped and tried to bite him. But I shouted again in that strange tongue, and a blast of purple light shot from my hands and enclosed the riving serpent in a bubble of pulsing light and I said only one word, “Dusted!”
The bubble exploded, or should I say, imploded and it was gone.
My grandfather rushed to my side and chanted. Much to my relief I could move, “Ojii-san, are you all right?”
“Yes Rei, but more important, are you all right?” he frowned, and went on, "You’re a daughter of fire, but how did this happen. Do you know the significance of all this?”
“Ojii-san, no, but I can tell you it wasn’t me. I had help, and I don’t even know if anything I had done was actually me. I was responding to the spirit, or Yami.”
The following day, after my harrowing experience in the Fire Room within the shrine, I asked Ojii-san to stay with my mother. He agreed. I assured him the shrine acolytes would look after the Sakura Jinja and I promised to join him for the cleansing ritual on the next full moon to expiate the malevolent spirits that had made their unwanted incursion upon sacred ground the night before.
Rising with the birds, determined to put the unearthly battle out of my mind, while clawing sleep from my eyes, I stumbled out of bed as was my way most mornings when not on tour.
I turned on the laptop, and read the email from the promotion company and smiled. My second album had sold just over a million copies a month after its release on the Japanese charts. What did surprise me was the fact it was selling in the US and European markets like hotcakes.
Humming one of my fave songs, ‘Oh Starry Night’ a song I recorded with a Gothic feel for the album, I poured myself a coffee, added a little milk, and bit into a waffle, an acquired taste for me. I dowsed it in maple syrup and a little plain yoghurt.
Back at my desk, and with a quick click of the mouse, I had begun to do a little surfing, the subject of my wanderings in cyberspace, my fave Manga and the international newscasts on display on the screen. Bite me, so I am a news freak, I needed this to ground me in certainty, my life was more than your average contradiction.
Then I saw it, a strange icon at the top right hand corner of the screen with the caption, Zirconia, ring mistress of the damned. It suddenly locked up my computer, and I had to shut it off. I had all my files backed up, so I packed away the laptop and would take it to Umino, a good friend who had attended Juuban Junior High with me and my friends when I was still attending school. He was their resident nerd and what he didn’t know about those mechanical tyrants, wasn’t worth knowing. I was enrolled in a correspondence course and enjoying it thoroughly.
