Dororo: A Novel
Tsuji Masaki
Part Three
The Tale of Bandai
Chapter 1
Hyakkimaru and Dororo’s journey to search out demons had
begun. Calling it a “search” would be a bit generous,
though. Neither Dororo nor Hyakkimaru knew where the remaining
thirty and some-odd demons were. They were stumbling around in
the dark, waiting to be caught in some demon’s net that they
would have to fight their way out of. That was the nature of
their journey.
For days and days and nights and nights,
the two of them saw nothing but houses and villages and rice
fields laid out in neat lines.
There were fields, but no harvest. The sun
shone low in the western sky, hidden by the shadow of a
mountain. As the sun set, the world plunged into hopeless
gloom. There was a strange sound in the distance, faint at
first, but growing louder.
By good luck, Dororo and Hyakkimaru had
chosen to make camp in a grassy area on the edge of a marsh.
The wind carried sounds a far distance across the plain.
Hyakkimaru heard the sound with plenty of advance warning to
prepare for it.
Hyakkimaru stood up, then turned to Dororo.
“Are you sleeping?” he asked.
It was autumn, but the weather was still
warm. Neither Dororo nor Hyakkimaru minded sleeping out in the
open.
Dororo snored. He slept flat on his back
with his face turned upwards and didn’t even twitch when
Hyakkimaru called out to him.
Every once in a while, Dororo’s snoring
changed cadence. His breathing wasn’t even. He was probably
pretending to be asleep.
Dororo turned over, then grabbed onto
Hyakkimaru’s right arm. His eyes were closed. He muttered
wordlessly and pulled.
Hyakkimaru yanked his arm away.
Dororo’s eyes snapped open. Two huge
eyeballs gazed down at him the darkness. He froze for a moment
in fear. He’d tried to lure Hyakkimaru in by snoring
loudly and feigning sleep, but he knew when he was caught.
Dororo went limp and let his eyes slip
closed again. He snored like he had before, but he was very
obviously awake.
Hyakkimaru smiled. “Nice try, Dororo. You
know that my eyes are only decoration, right? They’re glass. I
can’t actually see, but I’m aware of everything around me,
even when I’m asleep.”
Dororo groaned in frustration. “That’s not
fair! It means you never let down your guard at all! How am I
supposed to steal your sword arms if...” he trailed off.
Hyakkimaru shook his head. “Don’t be
stupid. It seems like you never let your guard down, either.
Doesn’t that make us evenly matched?”
“Not even close,” Dororo muttered
darkly.
Suddenly, Hyakkimaru tensed. The wry smile
playing around the corners of his mouth flashed off.
“Something’s coming,” he said.
Before he finished speaking, the clear
tinkling of a bell rang out, very nearby.
Ring-ring.
The sound of the bell echoed across the
marsh.
Ring-ring.
A hulking figure standing between the
grassy plain and the marsh came into view, illuminated by
moonlight. The figure moved closer, slowly but steadily.
Ring-ring.
“Hide,” Hyakkimaru whispered. He
pushed Dororo’s head down, so that it was hidden in tall grass
along with the rest of him.
“Is it a demon?” Dororo whispered
back.
“No,” Hyakkimaru said. “But it’s not
human, either.”
“Huh? Then what is it?”
“Sh.”
Ring-ring.
The sound of the bell drew nearer,
accompanied by the squelching sound of muddy feet walking
through the marsh. The enormous figure climbed up a steep hill
to Dororo and Hyakkimaru’s camp.
“Gah!” Dororo cried out.
Hyakkimaru put his hand over Dororo’s mouth
to muffle his cry.
The figure before them stood in a puddle.
The moon illuminated it fully, along with the sparkling water
of the marshland.
The figure definitely wasn’t human. All its
limbs were puffed up and swollen--especially its head. The
figure’s face was twice the size of the rest of it. Calling it
a face at all seemed wrong. The face was made up of countless
little folds and creases from which the eyes, nose and mouth
peeped out as slits. Since none of the figure’s features stood
out from the thick skin of its face, the face itself looked
flat as a brick. The skin of the figure was a sickly pale
yellow that shone in the light of the moon. There wasn’t a
single hair on the figure anywhere.
And it was coming closer. It was unclear if
it was a child or an adult, and it seemed entirely unaware of
its surroundings. The figure came nearer and nearer to
Hyakkimaru and Dororo, ringing the bell in its right hand with
every new step forward. While the figure was frightening, its
manner and the sound of the bell were not.
Dororo stood stock-still, staring, and
thought,
I feel like I’ve seen that face before... but where would I have seen
it?
Dororo shook his head.
We need to run. He’d been granted more than his
fair share of guts and boldness at birth, but he knew when he
was facing down someone--or something--he couldn’t fight.
But then, the figure climbed out of the
water and sat down, nestled inside a bamboo grove. It rung its
bell again.
Ring-ring.
The bell kept ringing at regular intervals,
but the sound also seemed to grow fainter over time, as if the
bell that made it was fading away. The figure itself
shrank, becoming small. Eventually, the figure--which had
started off larger than Hyakkimaru--wound up being smaller
than Dororo, and then even smaller than a little kitten.
The figure spun in a circle, rang the bell
one more time, and vanished.
“It’s gone!” Dororo said.
The figure was nowhere to be seen. It was
as if it had been swallowed up by the earth, so complete and
total was its disappearance. No trace of the figure’s passage
was left behind.
For a few moments, it seemed like the bell
kept ringing--faint and getting fainter--before that sound,
too, ceased completely.
Dororo stood standing with his mouth open.
He sucked in a giant breath and cried out, “What the hell was
that thing?!”
Instead of answering, Hyakkimaru pointed at
the ground where the strange figure had vanished. “Dororo. We
have to dig here. Help me.”
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