The Miko - 02 by Eric Van Lustbader

empty space in the display case caused by the present he had bought Justine. Yukio was gone just as the boxwood comb was gone from the case.
    The spotlights’ glare was harder in just that spot, magnifying the nothingness. He wondered what had ever become of Yukio’s magical boxwood comb. Had Saigō hurled it after her into the Straits of Shimonoseki? Had she been wearing it when he clubbed her, stunning her, then binding her for the long rowboat ride across those haunted waters? Or had some small child found the artifact among her abandoned belongings and was wearing it today?
    Nicholas found that his eyes were full of tears. Despite his vow never to relive the moment when his evil cousin had told him of Yukio’s death, he had done it. His heart was breaking anew; he felt her loss as keenly this moment as he had a year ago. Perhaps this was one wound that time would never heal.
    Blindly he received the exquisitely wrapped package, signed the American Express receipt. It was as if Yukio’s kami had appeared at his side, linking arms with him, and, standing by his side, was now looking down at the display of boxwood combs with him.
    And for that moment it was as if death had been banished from the world of man, as if there was no dark barrier between life and death, the unknown becoming suddenly known and accepted. Did he walk with the dead, or had Yukio crossed over to live again at his side?
    With a start, Nicholas found himself alone again in the shop. The saleswoman was looking at him oddly, not certain whether to smile or frown at the peculiar expression on his face.
    Back on the Nakamise-dōri, he returned to the precincts of the Sensoji Temple, where rice crackers and tortoiseshell sticks were still sold just as they had been a hundred years before. He wanted to stay immersed in the past, unwilling as yet to let go of the last sweetly painful tendrils of his waking dream. At a streetside stall he paused to buy a confection made of egg and flour poured into a doll-shaped mold before bean jam was squeezed on and the whole was grilled with the deftly economical movements of the ancient vendor.
    But, once holding the tiny cake in his hand, he found that he had no taste for food, especially sweets. The past was like the taste of ash in his mouth. He had thought that with Saigō’s death the detritus of his earlier life would dry up and blow away like the soft shed skin of a snake. But he saw now on his return to Japan that this was not so. It could not be. There was a certain continuity to life that was not to be denied. As Nicholas’ father, the Colonel, had often said: this is the only true lesson of history, and those who do not heed it, perish because of their ignorance.
    Now, at the doorway to the Sensōji Temple, he gave the unwanted food to an old man with a back as thin and bent as a sapling’s trunk in a high wind. The old man, in a black snapbrim hat and Western dress, nodded his thanks but made no effort to smile.
    As Nicholas went into the temple itself, echoes and the ripples of history seemed to reach out from the dim incense-filled interior with its high vaulting ceiling and cool stone floor, to remind him once again of all that he dare not forget.
    When he reemerged into the spangled night of shitamachi , Tokyo’s downtown, the old man was still where Nicholas had left him, one hand curled around the thick copper rim of the huge vessel used to burn incense.
    Nicholas had had enough of old Japan and the tangled web of memories it had unearthed in him. He longed for the spark and dazzle of the new Tokyo, the soaring, ugly buildings so new the lacquer had not yet dried in their towering gallerylike lobbies; he longed for the bustle of the young Japanese, so chic and beautiful in their wide-shouldered jackets, their loose blousey shirts, and their high-waisted trousers.
    Underground, he took the Ginza Line nine stops, transferring to the Hibiya Line for the short trip to Roppongi. He emerged from the