Tsukumogami for Rent!

Stories

## Prologue

Taiwan edition. Transcribed from the Stray Dog Novel Circle.

Hey! Kid! You—I'm talking to you!

Where are you looking? Ow! Glance left, glance right, you still won't see me. Right now somebody's wrapped me in cloth, stuffed me in a little pouch, and slung me on a shield! That's why you can't see me!

What? What pouch? You're asking who I am? Oh, I'm a very old pendant, carved in the shape of a bat. The name is Yate. The workmanship is so fine that every collector who owned me treasured me, and that is how I turned into—

"A tsukumogami."

That's right. A hundred years after a thing is made, some of them become tsukumogami. I started out as ordinary as anything, and now I've risen right to the top of the yokai world!

Turn into a yokai and you get yokai power! I can open my mouth, and I understand human speech. Why? Because I became a yokai, that's why!

Still, distinguished as I am, not everything goes my way. The things people treasure are precious, so they tend to keep them shut away in a storehouse forever. Day after day I sat in that dark paulownia box, and somewhere along the line I grew sick of that life.

So when my master, pressed for money, decided to sell me, I was delighted! I was sold to an antique shop in Fukagawa that also ran a rental business. The shop was called Izumoya.

The moment I heard, I panicked. A rental shop makes its living by renting things out. That meant I'd be taken out of the box and lent all over the place!

At first, every time I went out I curled up tight with nerves, worrying...

## Rikyu Gray

1

Early one morning, a curious young man walked along the canal in Nakachō, Fukagawa, in Edo.

He was handsome, neatly turned out, and there was nothing strange to see about him. He wore a kimono patterned with wave stripes and strode along quickly, alone.

If anything about him was odd, it was this: he himself said nothing, and yet voices carried on a conversation right beside him. It was not one person talking to himself. Three voices took turns. The man paid them no mind and went on walking in silence.

He passed a shop front hung with a broad sun-shade noren, and from inside came the sound of someone calling out to him. At that moment the strange voices stopped.

"Well, well! Seiji, hard at it so early. Which shop are you off to this morning?"

"Morning, ma'am. I'm headed for Matsubaiya."

The man called Seiji smiled faintly, and at once the women behind the noren stirred in a flurry. Seiji called a greeting through the curtain and went on past the shops that lined the street. Those shops, packed eave to eave, were Nakachō's dining teahouses, and this district was Fukagawa's famous pleasure quarter.

Fukagawa lies east of Edo Castle in Chiyoda. Cross Eitai Bridge, between Shin-Ōhashi at the end of the Sumida River and Tsukudajima, and there you are.

Besides Tomioka Hachimangū, famous for the Fukagawa Festival, one of Edo's three great festivals, and besides the Tatsumi geisha, known for their spirit and their frank charm, the place was also a pleasure district of wide renown.

Ever since the teahouses in front of Fukagawa Hachimangū, built in the first year of Kan'ei, were permitted to take in women of the trade, the quarter's night-flower business took off...

## Underside of the Willow Leaf

1

I am Uraha Yanagi.

I offer a name that sounds far removed from the dust of the world... yes. I was born into that world. In life I was a slender, handsome young man.

Only... will you hear a little of it? Truly, it is a tragedy to bring tears. Once I had a lover. We went to the theater together—the first Danjūrō in The Great Ledger: The Gathering at Nagoya, and the like. But I fell too ill, and left the world too soon.

Was it that I had lived decently, or that I was simply too young, dead before I had time to do wrong? In the ordinary way I should long since have reported to the Buddha's Pure Land.

But I could not bear to die like that!

My clinging to love ran deeper than I had imagined. I had poured my whole heart into it, and the thought of bidding that life farewell was more pain than I could stand. I could not let my beloved go, though I kept attendance at the Buddha's side.

So, when my last breath was nearly gone, there happened to be at my pillow a celadon incense burner I had always loved, and I simply lodged my soul in it and stayed.

It was a burner of the finest kind, a brighter celadon than one usually sees, like the underside of willow leaves in early spring, and so it was named Uraha Yanagi and put to careful use. Once I had attached myself to it, though, word spread that a figure flickered in the smoke when incense was burned, and the burner was sold on to an antique shop.

That is how I came to Izumoya, the antique shop and rental shop in Fukagawa, and I was truly startled when I arrived. The place is rather interesting!

Especially the shop's various wares...

## Secret S

1

Giving your name to someone you've only just met is a little embarrassing.

But if no one knows your name, talking gets awkward, so allow me to introduce myself. I am Goi.

You say the name is rare, and grand? Well now, Karakusa, I'm no more human than you are! As an Edo person would put it... yes, we are tsukumogami. Yokai, that is.

As you can see, I am an elegant pipe painted with night herons, and a fine piece at that! Right? So collectors always took special care of me. By the time I noticed, a hundred years had passed—the age when an object gains a soul—and so I became a tsukumogami.

A tsukumogami isn't quite the same as a person, but in Edo we aren't rare at all. Take this antique-and-rental shop, Izumoya, where you and I are now. Plenty of companions here, aren't there?

Kid, you're a tsukumogami and they sent you to a rental shop. You must have been worried at first. Being lent out is frightening, I'll grant you. A rental shop earns its rent by hiring out its goods, so there's some risk in it. If you get lent to some wretched place and come back hurt or broken, that would be a disaster.

The Izumoya where we live is run by just one young brother and sister, and the shop is tiny! If they don't lend us out, what are they supposed to eat? So if we got discontented and ran off, they'd be too pitiful.

Both of them have no father and no mother, and no other kin. Seiji and Beni were never blessed with family.

This shop, Izumoya, was started by Beni's uncle...

## False Purple

1

Good morning. A pleasure to meet you. My name is Kōkun.

Like the rest of you, I am a yokai born when a hundred-year-old object changed—that is, a tsukumogami.

As you see, I am an obidome made of noble amber (Note 18). Because I am a clear, pure yellow, I was given this name.

Being sold to this shop and gathering with all of you on the same shelf is a kind of bond. Seniors who are tsukumogami as I am—Lord Goi of the pipe, Lady Ningyō-hime, Brother Yate the bat pendant, Brother Usagi the comb, Elder Brother Tsukuyomi of the hanging scroll, and all the other seniors—I offer you my respects.

May I ask... Izumoya is an antique shop, is it not? I stayed in a shop of that kind once before, but this one... seems a little different. Oh, the shop is a rental shop as well? I see... and what, may I ask, is a rental shop?

Oh. A rental shop cheaply hires out whatever is in the shop—pots, bowls, ladles, basins, kimono, even open-seat infant trousers—and takes a fee for it! I see. My experience is shallow. Please forgive me, a newcomer still foolish and ignorant.

I have always lived around Nihonbashi, and only now do I find that Fukagawa is lively too. That is wonderful. The mistresses who used to buy me always cherished me, only... they all had far too many obidome already, so they kept me shut in a cabinet the whole time. I was bored nearly to death.

To be in a shop now where I can hear the peddlers calling outside, talking with all of you, is pure delight. So just now, before the shopkeeper went out, I kept my mouth clamped shut with all my might, until it was so hard...

## Sappanwood

1

Say, this is the first time I've seen you in this shop, isn't it? Oh, you're the pendant, Lord Cat-God. Hello, hello.

I'm Tsukuyomi, a fine hanging scroll, just as the picture says! A painting of the moon as exquisite as mine isn't so easy to find.

As the verse goes: "Tsukuyomi—the moon comes into the eye; through ten thousand remembered nights, a beauty white as snow at my side!"

So everyone prized me above all things and stored me away with the greatest care for a hundred years, and I gained a soul and rose to become a tsukumogami—same as you, Lord Cat-God! Edo, mind you, sits right under the shogun's heel. Stumble around and you'll bump into tsukumogami by the handful.

Look, this shop of yours has quite a few good things too, hasn't it? They're still fresh goods, not yet of an age to be tsukumogami, but the incense burner beside me is pretty fine. Give it another ninety years and this one will be able to open its mouth! Eh? You say it came from Osaka?

Oh, so Lord Cat-God is from Osaka? Then for the two of us to meet way out here in Shinagawa is a real bond. What? You say you've hardly ever spoken with a tsukumogami until now? Eh? How can that be? Aren't there tsukumogami around the capital too?

Oh, because even when fellows run into one another, they don't strike up a chat? Well, I know, I know. We have to think about where we speak. If someone caught us chatting like this, that would be terrible. They'd take us for yokai and burn us for sure.

So you were startled just now when you heard me open my mouth? My, I really am sorry. I'm always like this...