Winter 2027 – Kelvin Anania – Japanese Gothic

Chapter 1

The ghost next to you in your coffin is the only thing keeping you company. No, calling it a coffin is putting it too kindly; the box is half the length of a standard coffin, so both your legs had to be broken to fit you inside. You didn’t mind — you hadn’t raised a complaint when your father dislocated your shoulders so he could tie your arms behind you either. No light reaches down into your coffin, but you look something like a contortionist’s rendition of The Hanged Man.

The ache of the hardwood against your bones has faded with time. You’re comfortable now, and the ghost is friendly enough. Of course, you can’t speak to her — the air ran out long ago, and the box is too cramped for your ribs to expand if you were to breathe.

Still, the dark and quiet would undoubtedly have wolfed away at your sanity had she not found you.

She asks if you sincerely think you have any sanity left.

(You’re not sure how to answer, even if you could, but she seems happy enough just to know you’re listening.)

Your ghost is “next” to you in the same way your shadow is next to you. She is beside you, and around you, and inside you all at once. But unlike shadows she can make herself felt — to you, at least. For hours every day her cold fingers trace your skin as if you’re braille. You wonder what she’s looking for and you truly hope she finds it, even as her fingers sink through your flesh and strum your tendons like a guitar. She has offered to reshape you several times, to make you more comfortable. But you always, wordlessly, refuse.

Your mind inevitably drifts, and your thoughts, as always, are besieged by your father. He must be lonely up there, you imagine. He must miss you.

You think you’re proven right when you hear something above you. A shovel striking ground. Digging, digging, until it thuds into the hardwood. Soon your box is taken out of the dirt, and you’re dragged back inside the house.

Chapter 2

Your father is far older than when you last saw him. His face is slit with deep wrinkles, and only some thin strands of hair still haunt his liver-spotted scalp. (How long were you down there? Ten years? Twenty?)

Digging you up consumed so much of his energy that you had to give him a hand in stuffing you inside a suitcase. The suitcase is smaller still than your last accommodation, so a few more bones had to be smashed to fit you.

A door creaks open, then bangs shut hard enough to tremor the floor as your father returns to the living room. (He does this with every open door, though it’s not your place to ask why.)

You hear him take a seat on the couch across from you. You can’t see it from inside the suitcase, but the living room is your father’s own box, furnished with all he needs to be comfortable — yourself included.

He sighs, and he says, “This suits you better, son.”

Are you a boy? You don’t remember. But if he says it’s true, you’re happy to be whatever he wants you to be.

Then he asks if you would like to hear a ghost story.

“Yes,” you lie. You don’t like ghost stories. No, that’s not true. What you don’t like is the amalgamation of those two words, because the former implies that the latter is capable of dying.

“This story really happened,” he promises. His already papery voice is muffled by the boy-suitcase. “This is a true story.”

“He’s lying.”

“I know,” you answer.

“Then why say nothing?”

i. Japanese Gothic

Your father leans back on the couch. “There was once a samurai — one of the very last — who tried to teach his daughter all he knew. The government at the time demanded that all who clung to the title of samurai must abandon their ways in the interest of the country’s modernization. The father refused; he would not have his traditions erased. So his family became fugitives. The girl, though, never questioned her father’s authority, despite their impoverished state. He told his family that life would go back to what it was like before, if only they did as he bid them to. And he taught the girl that, to be a samurai, she must stop fearing death. And to stop fearing death, she must tell herself ‘I am already dead.’”

(This story is not about you, nor is it about your ghost. Remember this.)

Chapter 3

Years pass in your suitcase, and you hear your father shrivel with every month. His footsteps slow, and you can tell he has trouble getting around. The floor no longer tremors when he slams doors shut.

One day you hear him say this suitcase doesn’t suit you anymore.

On the table in the living room are three gift boxes. They differ in styles so drastically that you don’t think they should belong together, but it’s not your place to say anything. Your father pants heavily as he hacks you apart, and more than once he fails to break through bone. He seems a pathetic echo of the man you think you once knew. You wish he had another you, one already shaped as he wanted so he wouldn’t have to exert himself so much.

You gently take over for him, though he gives you exact instructions on how to fit yourself inside his boxes. Your arms, feet, and some organs go into the largest box, your head and torso are fit into the middle one, and the smallest one is still sizable enough to hold your legs. After you’ve placed yourself inside them he stacks them on top of each other, largest to smallest. You’d like to imagine you look something like a snowman.

“Now this,” he says. “This is you, kid.”

(Are you a kid? You don’t remember. (Does he?))

ii. Japanese Gothic

“There was once, also, a boy, who was staying in the girl’s house a century and a half after her death. The boy had a schizophrenic mother who nearly killed him many times. The boy loved her even if she was unwell, but the father told her to stop acting strange in front of the boy. He deserves a normal mom. She couldn’t help herself. So the boy’s father killed her. The end of his mother was the beginning of something bigger. The police and the boy thought her disappearance was the work of human traffickers. Without a mother, the boy only had his father. Be normal, the father told the boy, afraid that his mother’s schizophrenia would find root inside him too. And so the boy learned to sedate himself with Benadryl every day to keep his mind quiet, to not disappoint his father.”

You’re struggling to tell which parts of his story are real, or if any of them are.

Chapter 4

As if you didn’t have enough questions plaguing you, your ghost chimes in.

“Where do you start now?” she asks, poking you simultaneously in each of the three boxes. “And where do you end? Which box actually holds you?

How many yous are there now?

Can any of those yous ever fit together again?”

What you’ve been looking for in these boxes is some truth. About yourself, or selves, or the absence thereof.  But more and more your ghost makes you question what you really mean by “truth.”

“He’s making you up. Are you alive in there? Are you dead? Are you a ghost?

Did you ever really live?

You must have, right? So why can’t you remember a world outside these boxes?

Are you really in them at all?”

iii. Japanese Gothic

“The boy and the girl were both happy. Their fathers’ love gave them both comfort, purpose — above all, it gave them shape. Then one day, the boy found a door in his room. It opened to the girl’s world, and her time, and they could step into each other’s worlds. They soon corrupted each other. The boy stopped sedating himself, and the girl began to question her father. Then the boy discovered his father had killed his mother, and the girl discovered that her father was a coward afraid of both life and death. And so the boy and the girl were unmoored, and they began to lose their shape, morphing into formless things they had no words to describe, and then they died. Did you hear? They died. Their “wisdom” was a fragile, juvenile thing. They should’ve never trusted it above their fathers.”

Chapter 5

You’re not sure when your father dies — or, really, if he is dead. You only know that some months ago you stopped hearing his footsteps in the living room, stopped hearing the doors creaking open and then slamming shut as if every open door was a wound he was desperate to seal. He may simply be rotting a few meters away from you in his bedroom, or he may have abandoned you and gone somewhere more pleasant. You don’t know which you’d prefer.

Part of you, however, is glad to be free of his ghost stories. They always made you feel claustrophobic.

A year passes, and then another. Water drips onto your boxes from holes in the ceiling whenever it rains. Your boxes are decaying, scarred with mold, falling apart. They cannot be maintained without he who put you in them. Around the fourth year after his departure/death/deformation, you conclude that he would no longer be pleased with these deteriorating, unseemly boxes. You have your ghost put some of your pieces together so you can move around a little.

You need something new to hold you. The house is a cemetery for memories you’re not sure are yours. Almost every inch of the place is buried under a layer of dust. In the kitchen, you find the cabinets are stacked with rows and rows of lunch boxes. You calculate that you would perhaps need a hundred or so to fit every piece of you and you make a mental list of the ways you’d have to break yourself apart to fit inside them: smash most bones, cleave your head in four, hack through tendons, puncture organs to empty them, then garnish the boxes with shattered bits of your spine.

You know your father well. It would please him to find you in all these lunch boxes. It would please him to see you’ve made yourself digestible.

(At least, your constructed version of him would be pleased. But what is a fiction if not autonomy? And what is autonomy if not power? And what is power if not the capacity to construct your preferred reality?)

“He is gone.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You don’t even love him. You don’t even want his love.

What you want is for someone else to mold you because it’s easier than doing it yourself.”

You say nothing.

“Maybe the world makes it easier for you to sympathize with another’s fictional version of you. Or maybe if you’re a fiction then you won’t have to fear your ending. And the world out there will cram you into new containers, and you’ll make a home out of some of those, and maybe you’ll feel comfortable in them and you’ll feel comfortable when you stop being yourself and you’ll be a war fought on behalf of so many forces you can’t grasp them all and you’ll die — and worse, you will end. But should you really keep breaking your-

self just to fit someone else’s fiction of you?

Should a box ever be allowed to make a corpse out of its contents?

Again, you’re not sure how to answer her.

The cabinet door hangs open before you. Your father would have told you to slam it shut, and slam it shut quick.

Chapter 1

You leave it open.

---