Juliet is the Sun

By Gemma Nishiyama

A cross between "The DaVinci Code" and "Wuthering Heights"! Viola, the heroine, an English teacher in Japan has been "shipwrecked" by Fukushima and a crumbling marriage. She moves to a small town in the mountains of Western Japan and when Shakespeare's ghost starts visiting her, things start getting much better. Inspired by her conversations with the ghost, as well as his bravura performances, Viola starts investigating whether Giordano Bruno, the heretic executed at the stake by the Catholic Church in 1600, may be secretly "hiding" in a work of Shakespeare's. She conducts her research in the world of the supernatural and must fight as a real ninja, meet Japanese ghosts from the folklore of Japan, and attend a moonlit "sacred marriage" ceremony on a mountain, where, to her surprise, her husband appears!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626752467

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Chapter 1

Stand and unfold yourself

One morning, about nine, I returned home from walking our tiny Yorkshire terrier and discovered an astonishing vision in the tatami mat room, where the rumpled futons were still covering the floor. A man in brown velvet pants, and strange thick wool stockings of grey, with a frilled linen shirt that was perhaps off-white or yellowed with age, stood beside the shoji doors.

I take an interest in hand-woven cloth. I like artful things which take time and satisfy the eye and the touch, but cannot compete commercially. So I knew at one glance that this man’s clothes were not standard industrial ones: the style, the colors, the fabrics---all were strangeness and irregularity. I wanted to scream, but hesitated: I have a passion for natural dyes and could tell that his clothes were not modern, not industrially made or colored. He sat cross-legged near the paper sliding doors, and he looked, if I may summarize his attitude, apologetic.

I’m sorry if I startled you, a low voice, a soft voice, and gentle. He spoke English, and not with an American accent, but this was not a surprise somehow. He did not seem to be Japanese although his hair was dark and his beard was dark brown or black, like sable, but silvered a bit. I noticed that he was not getting up to attack me. He remained seated and I noticed an odd phenomenon then as I came closer to him: his skin had a whitish-greenish glow, his face, his hands, everywhere where you could see his skin, there was a faint but bizarre and pearly luminescence. I wanted to scream again.

Usually I am a calmer person. But this odd meeting had unnerved me, perhaps because I myself had recently fled from the prefecture next to Fukushima. Was he an installation artist from the exclusion zone, or an obscure activist on the run, strangely attired and wearing the latest in nano-technologically derived make-up designed to glow artificially? Perhaps his impromptu visit here, a prank no doubt being recorded, was next to be uploaded on YouTube, then go viral, to be viewed by millions. Did an Internet debacle await me?

But no. He sat calmly. There was no telltale laptop, blinking, at the edge of the room. There seemed to be no wires or tiny cameras. I noticed he was darkly handsome, a bit older than me, and he was smiling, and the word gentle could not be avoided again in my brain as I tried to summarize, for myself, my own impression of him: gentle smile, gentle voice, gentle manner, gentle touch. For now his fingers pressed lightly on my finger tips, his palm swept softly against mine. In his handshake, I felt his touch to be cooler than the ordinary temperature of a human body. I dared to look deeply into his brown eyes, now that he had shown himself through gestures to be kind and friendly, and here I sensed an odd warmth.

In Japan, we, I am happy to say, have many ghosts. They have not been banished from the scene. Children know all the names of the famous ghosts: Rokurokubi, a classically beautiful woman with an infinitely and rapidly extending neck, whose head can therefore chase you down a mountain as you flee; Noperabo, magically taking any gender, any form of a body, but whose pale powdered face lacks eyes and a nose, though she has a mouth, and Hitotsumekozo, a one-eyed young monk. Local ghosts here in the Western part of Japan, such as the samurai Chichibei, fatally tricked by a rival, or the fisherman Oraemon who walks the rocky beach of Horiuki at night, are many and their histories are handed around. I delight in all such stories, as do most people I know here. So then why, why, was it that when I did finally meet a real ghost, despite all my years of a really decent—though haphazard--- education in ghosts and occult lore here in Japan-----why, O why, did I fail so utterly to perceive the truth?

I sat down on the edge of my futon to make further acquaintance with this strange man. What did he want? Surely it was time for honesty and calm. All right then.

Who are you? I asked. I tried to ask it severely, and to display my dominance and no-nonsense manner.

Ah, yes! I thought you might ask that. He said these words sadly, looked mournful, somber, and cast his eyes down theatrically on to the tatami mat where his stockinged legs crossed rather athletically in front of him. He had the muscles of an actor or a tennis player or a professional nurse, someone who walked or ran.

I felt annoyed.

My name is Viola Matsumura, I said, trying to sound calm and patient, like a social worker who has suddenly come across a wandering stranger in need of assistance, is there anything I can do for you? Any relative or friend I can call to help you? Can you speak Japanese? Are you lost perhaps? Do you have a working mobile phone? Are you a traveler in distress?

The banal questions only seemed to deepen the stranger’s sad and quiet demeanor. After a silent pause, he suddenly reached out and in one graceful motion, brought my fingertips up to his cold lips, while his eyes mysteriously burned, a compelling and passionate warmth transferring rapidly into mine. The motions of his hands, and the motions of his eyes formed two separate sophisticated, almost surreal, planes of action, undoing me and strangely satisfying me at the same time. I had never been kissed in such a way before, on my hands. It seemed archaic, yet delightful! If only his skin and his lips were not so cold!

Pity me not, but do please listen to my story.

Yes, of course, I said, in what I recognized now finally as my real voice. I drew up my knees and clasped my hands around my legs.

Ah, dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair?

The phrase suddenly issued from nowhere, hung---or rather, nestled----in crooks in the air, from somewhere yet nowhere all at once, a bee sting, a pistol shot, then it was a swan feather floating in flotsam of the denser sounds from all around us. A sound impossible to deny, yet whose source was also impossible to find. It had not come from the stranger’s lips. It was then that I began to understand that the traveler was not from any country one could visit at will carrying just a credit card, or, as I had so doltishly mentioned, a working mobile phone. There was no one on this earth I could call to help this….person….or whatever or whoever he was. There was no dimension available to the living where I could turn to get an account of the full and true nature of this man. For I had just then decided, though by then I knew better, to call him a man.

At least until I find out what he really was.

I knew enough Shakespeare to have some idea of whose ghost this was.

Chapter 2

And what should I do in Illyria?

I should have made it clear that I majored in English Literature at Harvard College, twenty-three years ago. My two very favorite classes were both on Shakespeare’s plays (Early and Late), and taught by an inspiring professor named Margaret Greybard, with the liveliest, most poignant, most skillful delivery of Shakespeare’s famous lines I had ever heard. Sometimes I would close my eyes during lectures and let her convincing voice, after all the voice of an authentic, intuitive Shakespeare connoisseur, become a sort of heavenly music box playing Shakespeare.

And what should I do in Illyria?

Professor Greybard was standing at her podium in Sanders Theater, a huge lecture hall, but, listening to her evocative, ringing voice, I saw only the wide sky of Illyria, the beach and the shipwrecked heroine wearing a cape and the captain next to her. I saw the water, the waves with white crests.

Everything.

Nice clothes, dates, good grades, and other things that college students usually like were pallid and dreary compared to Shakespeare. But, naturally not wishing to be thought totally bizarre, I kept this personal feeling to myself.

This meeting with the ghost now seemed to be a fitting, elegant chance to relive my long-subdued, long-forgotten undergraduate passion.

Swear by his sword.

He was doing it again, magically zapping the air pockets all around me with ghostly vocal sounds which didn’t seem to come from his lips. The sound of the line, enhanced by the s sound of sword and swear, was eerily all around, like the delicate pink petals of the cherry blossoms now scattering outside in the cross currents of the wind along the river near the old wooden rented house where I live, here and everywhere.

hic et ubique

I wanted to calm him down, this ghost, my ghost now, or rather the ghost of my dreams. Obviously, he was distraught, quoting lines from his own plays out of all context, giving them a delivery which, while not unpleasurable, was strange because it was not vocalized normally, nor performed in any ordinary way. How does one understand what a ghost is thinking? How does one know when a ghost is restless and unsatisfied? There was no rattling of chains or moaning and other things ;like that, as you might see some famous ghosts doing in novels and films.

What ought I to call him? My dear William? Mr. Shakespeare? Will? Sir?

Mr. Shakespeare, I started, Please----

His face softened and the surreal glow surrounding his body seemed to become rosier and picked up in its fervor a little as I spoke. He suddenly seemed like a truly real ghost, and I wondered how I could have ever made the mistake of thinking him human at the beginning.

Viola Matsumura. How do you do? Indeed, I am the poet William Shakespeare.

If a ghost comes to call on you, should you offer him some tea? Should you apologize if your rumpled futons are not yet put away or some unwashed clothes are scattered on the floor? Should you be worried about impropriety-----sitting on a futon beside a strange man in your bedroom, a man who is not your husband? Or rather, a strange ghost who is not your husband.

What was he doing here?

Hamlet’s father returns as a ghost to tell Hamlet some disquieting news. In A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Jacob Marley visits Scrooge in order to beg him not to make the mistake of greed. Oraemon walks his beach, Chichibei the samurai searches for his long-dead rival. I now naturally wondered if there was an undelivered message or an unresolved problem that was preventing this particular visiting ghost from achieving eternal peace.

But when I looked up to ask him about this, he was gone. Only brilliant sunlight fell on the patch of tatami mat where he had been sitting. Beside me, the dog, Teru, had disobediently crawled onto a futon, and was asleep. I was still dazed, but I chased him off and started, paying hardly any attention at all, to fold up the futons and sheets and put them away.

Chapter 3

No, indeed, sir; the Lady Olivia has no folly: she will keep no fool, sir, till she be married; and fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings; the husband’s the bigger: I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words

After this experience, for the next few days, I was expecting to see the ghost again or rather, I was hoping to see him again. I was a rather a lonely person, not divorced exactly, but honestly, I could not say that my marriage was in good, or even in decent, condition. I had an idea of it as a chronically ill patient in some anonymous hospital, awaiting surgery that would probably fail. So I suppose I can add, guiltily, that it was a relief that my husband was far away, in Ibaraki Prefecture, which is just beside Fukushima Prefecture. I had made the decision to leave after the nuclear accident, of course because of health fears of radiation and radioactive fallout, but if I examine my feelings more closely, and if I am honest with myself, I can see that I also wanted to get away from my husband and the feelings of ennui, condescension and irritation we were feeling for each other and with each other.

Even were a ghost to show up in my life, if he would be kind and supportive, friendly, witty, interesting, if he would divert and amuse me-----I knew right away that I would be able to become attached emotionally and passionately to such a being, and I somehow knew that if it were Shakespeare’s ghost----Shakespeare being, of course, someone I assumed to be a supremely wise being--- I needed to have very little worry of being invited to dance in a graveyard, and other horrible stories one reads in books.

If nothing else, I felt, perhaps, that I had nothing very much to lose. My children, still in school, of course, rely on me. But they are quite old enough now to go around by themselves. My parents, in America, are elderly would not be very interested in the supernatural adventures of their middle-aged expatriate daughter. My father had always steadfastly explained to everyone that ghosts, gods, spirits, and such do not exist, and simply cannot exist, by definition----but my father has never lived here where I now live, nor seen what I have seen. My few friends here in Tsubame were as busy as I was. Where then, should I turn to find someone who can talk to me, make me laugh, and listen to my stupid jokes? My husband was not interested in the job, though he had been when we first met.

As a lowly English teacher and proofreader, I can make a small but sufficient living anywhere. I didn’t need to be in Tokyo, as I had explained many times to my husband. My job as an English teacher, I am proud to say it, is a sort of modern, minimalistic variation of what people in the Middle Ages in Europe called a court jester, or what people in the Edo Period in Japan called a geisha: for a small consideration, I entertain people for an hour at a time, with conversation that is calculated to please, to engage, to divert, and occasionally, I hope, to inspire. And in my job, where teaching English is only, in my opinion, a pretext, it is helpful to follow at all times the advice of King Lear’s Fool: "Nay, and thou canst not smile as the wind sits, thou’lt catch cold shortly".

It was not my fault that my husband wouldn’t follow me, his poor Fool, into banishment and poverty on the mountainous heaths of Western Japan: and, truthfully, I had made somewhat of a go of it. In fact, ending up nearer the green mountains and close to a clean river had made me relieved at last, instead of embarrassed, as I had been in the Tokyo area, to be and to always have been, something close to a court jester: foolish, simple and close to the ground, never serious about and never committed to academia.

Lately I had been thinking that after the children grew up and found their own lives, I would live alone forever, encased in a sort of ice cube emotionally, but not unpleasantly so. There was my teaching work, and then my hobbies, darning old socks, going to flea markets, keeping pet cats, a simple existence. These had seemed enough until now.

But now that a ghost, especially one of a luminous writer, had turned up in my life, I started to get expectations of happiness, as if the freezing ice cube I was encased in was melting. I reasoned, calculatedly perhaps, that a friendship with a ghost cannot be counted as infidelity. And probably a ghost would be able to maintain secrecy, being able to dissolve skillfully into the air if a husband should suddenly drop by inconveniently.

Of course, you cannot search for a ghost on the internet, or locate a useful email address for one. Nor are ghosts to be found on social media.

I would just have to wait.

Chapter 4

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments…..

The impediments to a steady romantic or platonic relationship with a ghost may be many. Indeed, I have mentioned some of them: contacting the beloved one in the world beyond, getting over ones understandable fears of the supernatural, the worry that one won’t be able to measure up as a conversational partner if the ghost is a famous superlative and popular genius, and so forth.

Yet I was to be pleasantly surprised in regard to impediments.

On Wednesdays I take the bus to a small junior college, where I teach one class, in the next town. The bus ride takes 45 minutes. I generally read a book or I sleep if I am tired, although I also love to watch the mountains as a sort of musical scenery, jumbles of haphazard little low green peaks, swooping down from the sky, or rather plunked down by it, gifts from the generous nature gods, now entirely homes for hawks, ravens, and other birds, whom indeed these gods must have once resembled.

About one month after the first encounter with Shakespeare’s ghost, I was on the bus on my way to this little college, and I was lightly dozing off when I felt a subtle sort of pressure next to me on my right arm and shoulder, as if someone were sitting down right next to me, rather too closely. The strange thing was that the bus had not just stopped to let anyone on!

The seats on this bus are generally sparsely populated, which is to say that most people have cars these days, except other impractical wanderers like me. There are usually five or so elderly passengers on the bus besides me, in other words, there are plenty of seats and no one need crowd anyone else or sit double to a seat.

So, in my lightly sleeping