Dororo: A Novel
Tsuji Masaki
Part Three
The Tale of Bandai
Chapter 4
Huh? Where the heck am I?
Dororo thought.
He was obviously inside Lady
Bandai’s estate, and the room was clean and well-appointed. The
demon must have passed this way when it had fled, but there was no
sign of its passage.
Where did that demon get to,
anyway?
Lady Bandai wasn’t in her room,
but her futon was unmade. Dororo crawled along the floor, staying
low. He sniffed the air, trying to determine if he could smell the
demon from here.
“I do smell something… yes, the
demon definitely passed through here.”
All the evidence pointed to Lady
Bandai being the frog demon. She hadn’t gotten up from her futon
that afternoon—pretending to be sick—but now, she was out of her
futon. That probably meant she could move on her own.
Yikes! Lady Bandai sure is
dangerous.
Dororo was about to slide open
the door of the room and enter the hallway when he heard a sound
like rustling silk. Lady Bandai was coming back!
Dororo dashed to the hole he’d
come out of and tried to shift the floorboards so that he could
hide under them. But the floorboards wouldn’t budge so much as an
inch. Dororo’s eyes darted around frantically, searching for a
place to hide.
Lady Bandai’s pillow was
large—ridiculously large: maybe big enough to hide a person.
Dororo ripped a long tear in the pillow in his desperation, then
crawled inside it. He couldn’t poke his head out or he might be
found, so he scrunched himself small inside the pillow and waited.
The pillow was stuffed with white down, and after awhile it got a
little hard to breathe.
Suddenly, Dororo smelled the
demon again, and the scent was stronger this time.
Yuck! That must mean the demon
uses this pillow!
Dororo thought. The smell had saturated the pillow all the way
through. Dororo was enveloped by it.
“Ah… ah… ah…” Dororo struggled to
hold back a sneeze. He heard a voice nearby and held his breath.
It’s Lady Bandai!
Lady Bandai sat on the futon.
Dororo couldn’t see, but he felt the pillow shift.
“Oh, it hurts,” Lady Bandai said.
“I put medicine on the wounds, but there is still so much pain!”
Dororo didn’t need any more proof. Lady Bandai must be the
demon! Hyakkimaru had attacked and injured it.
“I underestimated them,” Lady
Bandai said with a little sigh. “This is my own fault. I wonder if
my reckless attackers will chase me down…” She stood up from the
futon.
Dororo found it difficult to
define himself as a “reckless attacker,” given that Lady Bandai
had attacked first.
“Ah!” Lady Bandai let out a
shrill cry.
There was a sound of floorboards
creaking and being moved out of the way. At the same time, Dororo
heard a low voice.
“It’s Hyakkimaru.”
“Aniki!” Dororo hadn’t meant to
speak. His voice came out as quiet as a whisper. Hyakkimaru had
finally caught up with him.
“Someone, please help me!” Lady
Bandai yelled. At her call, four men rushed into the room from the
hallway.
“Lady Bandai? What on earth is
wrong?” The old man who had led Dororo and Hyakkimaru to the shed
spoke before the others.
“Did those thieves come
back?”
“Are there bandits?”
Lady Bandai’s four defenders
sized up Hyakkimaru, surrounding him in a loose circle.
“Please let me pass,” Hyakkimaru
said brusquely. “I won’t ask twice. I have business with your
lady.”
“We won’t let you threaten her!”
the old man said. “Where were you hiding? Why hide, unless you
intended some harm?”
“You should listen before you
accuse me of anything,” Hyakkimaru said. “The passage behind me
leads to the well in the shed you took us to. A monster attacked
us there. And when I followed it, I wound up here.” He turned to
Lady Bandai. “And so, Miss Bandai, I am going to have to ask you
where the monster went, and where my little friend ended up after
he got here.”
“Hahaha!” Lady Bandai’s laugh was
low and deep. “A monster? What would I know of that?”
Lady Bandai sat on the futon
again. Dororo started trembling slightly.
“It sounds to me like you had a
nightmare,” Lady Bandai said.
Dororo willed himself to be
still. The pillow smelled like the demon, and Lady Bandai’s
nearness intensified the smell even more.
“A nightmare? And is the passage
behind me nothing but mist and dream?” Hyakkimaru asked.
“You’re thieves,” Lady Bandai
said airily. “I assume you dug the passage so that you could reach
the house and carry away your plunder.”
Dororo held his hands over his
nose. He couldn’t sneeze now, and he couldn’t move. Lady Bandai
rested her weight on the pillow he was hiding in. He felt
something slimy inside the pillow with him, brushing against his
arm, and went still as a statue.
“I know that a demon is here,”
Hyakkimaru said.
“How long do you intend to let
this ruffian keep standing here in my chambers?” Lady Bandai said
imperiously. Her expression changed subtly; it looked like she was
pleased at winning some game. “Remove him at once!”
The villagers drew near to
Hyakkimaru, boxing him in.
“Stay back!” Hyakkimaru said.
“You don’t know what that woman is!”
Hyakkimaru’s words made Dororo
gasp. Since Lady Bandai was the demon, that meant the demon was
right in the room with them. She might transform at any time! The
smell of her was like sewage and rot; Dororo remembered it from
his time in the shed and wrinkled his nose. The slimy thing was
getting closer. Dororo wasn’t sure what to do about it. When it
darted toward his head, he sank his teeth into it and didn’t let
go.
Damn it. The slimy
tentacle thrashed; Dororo focused all of his attention on holding
it in place. His jaw was as strong as a mountain monkey’s.
“Gyaaah!” With a sharp cry, Lady
Bandai fell backward onto the futon, partly crushing Dororo inside
the pillow.
Dororo grunted, then called out, “Aniki! We found the demon!” He spilled out of the rip in the pillow and got to his feet, pointing at Lady Bandai… but since when did Lady Bandai have a tail?!
The slimy tentacle thing turned
out to be Lady Bandai's tail. Her futon and blanket were in
disarray. It was clear now that only her top half looked human,
while her lower half was wet and slimy like a toad.
Hyakkimaru attacked the villagers
to get them out of the way. They screamed and stepped back. There
was a flash of strange light, and as it faded, Dororo watched Lady
Bandai start transforming from the most beautiful woman he’d ever
seen to the most hideous creature on the face of the earth.
The demon had dressed itself in a
sick woman’s skin, but that was just a disguise.
“Hahahaha!” Lady Bandai’s laugh
was loud and echoing. “Were you curious about my tail this whole
time? Did you expect it to transform?” The demon’s tail swayed
back and forth. It grew in girth as if it were swelling up. As the
size of the tail increased, so did the size of Lady Bandai’s body,
until it was hard to recognize her. Like a reptile shedding its
skin, the demon sloughed off Lady Bandai’s shape and form and
revealed itself.
“Hahahaha!” Lady Bandai’s laugh
was replaced by the demon’s weird croaking voice. The demon
whipped its tail around the room in threat.
Dororo jumped over the lashing
tail and rolled, then got to his feet. “Prepare yourself, demon!”
he said.
Hyakkimaru’s sword arms glinted
in the low light.
“Oh?” The demon looked at him
speculatively—or perhaps hungrily. It was hard to believe the
demon’s face had been as lovely as Lady Bandai’s. The demon jumped
out of the way when Hyakkimaru pressed the attack, but Hyakkimaru
had expected that.
“Eat shit, demon!”
The next moment, Hyakkimaru’s
legs came off below the knee with a hissing sound overheated metal
being cooled in water. An unidentifiable liquid shot out, straight
at the demon’s face.
“Gyaaah!” The demon shrieked and
bent over backwards. The air was choked with the foul odor of
burning flesh. Screaming in alarm, the demon retreated from the
room and ran toward the garden.
Just what was that stuff hidden
inside Hyakkimaru’s legs, anyway? At the time, people called it
burning water, but in today’s day and age, we would call it a
strong acid. The doctor who had made Hyakkimaru’s prosthetic body
had originally built cavities in the arms and legs for carrying
medicine, and when it came time for Hyakkimaru to go out into the
world, he’d weaponized Hyakkimaru’s legs as well as his arms.
“Dororo, run!”
There was a bell tower in the
garden. The demon climbed up, staring down at Hyakkimaru with eyes
as red as blood. Half of the demon’s face had been obliterated by
acid. It was truly a hideous sight to behold.
While Hyakkimaru and the demon
engaged in a brief stare-down, Dororo found a T-shaped wooden bell
hammer and picked it up. “One, two, three!” Dororo spun in a
circle with the heavy hammer, releasing it on the count of three.
The hammer soared through the air at the demon and struck it in
the back.
“Guaaah!” The demon screeched and
lost its footing on the bell tower. It nearly fell, but hung on
for dear life by one over-stretched front leg.
“One more time!” Dororo retrieved
the bell hammer and prepared to throw it again.
“Guaaah!” The demon’s tail jumped
in distress, elongating to an alarming degree. The tail tripped
Dororo; he fell down flat on his back near the bell tower and
rolled from the force of the demon’s strike.
“Dororo!” Hyakkimaru had put his
legs back on, and now he dashed to Dororo’s aid. He was about to
pick Dororo up when he remembered the sword arms.
“I’m fine,” Dororo gasped. “Just
kill the demon!”
Hyakkimaru shook his head. “The
demon’s doing a fine job dying on its own.”
He was right. The demon’s tail
was moving sluggishly, and some of the bloody redness of its eyes
was dimmed. The demon’s skin turned a pale gray. Its body shrank
and fell from the bell tower, becoming Lady Bandai again, this
time with a mutilated face and tail. Dororo held his breath,
watching, but the demon didn’t move. It was dead.
Hyakkimaru placed his prosthetics
on over his sword arms, then helped Dororo to his feet. Dororo was
injured from his fall and couldn’t walk well, so Hyakkimaru picked
him up and carried him. Then Hyakkimaru walked over to the demon’s
corpse and indicated a lump protruding from Lady Bandai’s tail.
“That’s a jinmensō1—a demon that looks like a tumor much of the time, but it can
mimic human faces.”
Readers, have you ever heard of a
jinmensō before? They start out as blisters and pimples. Then they get
bigger and bigger until pus comes out. After the pus is removed,
the jinmensō develops features. If you look really close, you might see
eyes, or a nose, or a mouth. This jinmensō had started out as a dimple on the demon’s tail, and now its
host body was dead. According to some books on the subject,
there are some jinmensō that develop so much that they gain the ability to speak.
Some are said to require food and drink.
Most pimples and blisters never
become jinmensō, of course. Many of the medicines used to treat skin ailments
are poison to jinmensō. But every once in a while, a jinmensō that can talk just like a person does develop.
The jinmensō attached to Lady Bandai’s tail was not ordinary by any
stretch of the imagination. It was large and misshapen:
ill-looking even for a tumor attached to a demon. Upon closer
inspection, the tumor had a fully defined face, with all the
normal human features.
“I wonder if this jinmensō possessed the woman first, or the other demon,” Hyakkimaru
said quietly. The jinmensō’s eyes were closed. It didn’t move. The longer Hyakkimaru and
Dororo stared, the paler the jinmensō’s face became. Like the demon, it was dead.
Rain fell in sheets from the
predawn sky. A golden glow lit the horizon: the autumn sun was
rising. The rain made a lonely sound on the roofs of the estate
and the bell tower.
“It’s like I thought.”
Hyakkimaru turned around, facing some of Lady Bandai’s
dumbstruck retainers. “Lady Bandai made you all rich. Then, at
night, she would transform into the demon and steal her money
back from you all. She gave you her money to get you on her
side, and she stole it back to keep herself rich. She hid the
money that she stole from you in that bamboo grove where you
found us and told you that it was there to lure thieves. And
when thieves came, she stole from them, too.”
“But why even do something like
that?” Dororo asked. “I don’t get it.” He looked up at
Hyakkimaru from the shelter of his arms, eyes barely open.
“I think it was cover,”
Hyakkimaru said. “The villagers couldn’t move against Lady
Bandai if she was propping up the whole town. That meant she was
safe during the day… and the villagers wouldn’t risk themselves
against the nightly demon attacks if they knew Lady Bandai would
replace some of what they’d lost in the morning. You saw how the
villagers treated her, Dororo. She was like their queen.”
“I don’t believe it,” the old man
who’d served Lady Bandai said. He could barely be heard over the
sound of the rain.
“But it’s all right now,”
Hyakkimaru said. “I—that is to say, Dororo and I—have killed the
demon. Your village is safe.”
Dororo had passed out from his
injuries. He was limp in Hyakkimaru’s hold.
“We’re travelers, not thieves,”
Hyakkimaru said. “I know you have reasons to distrust us, but may
we request a place to stay in the village? At least until the rain
stops?”
The old man shook his head. His
hair was soaked. “You cannot stay. We refuse.”
“Why?” Hyakkimaru asked. He
sounded shocked.
“You saved that kid,” the old man
said.
“Of course I did,” Hyakkimaru
said. “Who here wouldn’t save a child in danger?”
The old man’s eyes turned the
same color as the rain-gray sky. “We wish… it would be better for
the village if we hadn’t found out that Lady Bandai was a
demon.”
“What?” Hyakkimaru asked. His
lips trembled.
“Lady Bandai was beautiful and
kind. Everyone in the village loved her. We didn’t fear bandits
and thieves and monsters just because they stole our money—we were
worried for Lady Bandai’s safety. Even if bandits did come in and
strip the village bare, that would be all right, if… if only Lady
Bandai was still here with us. But now she’s gone. What you’ve
done is rip our hopes and dreams for the future up by the roots. I
hope you’re satisfied.”
All the blood drained out of
Hyakkimaru’s face as he took in what the old man was saying.
Hyakkimaru was angry, of course. This man had the gall to suggest
that the village would be better off with a demon in charge. “If
we hadn’t come, the demon would have bled you dry and devoured you
all!” That was what Hyakkimaru wanted to say, but he restrained
himself. He already knew what the old man would say in
response.
“We would have died for her,” the
old man said. “Every single one of us. Lady Bandai is dead, along
with the demon. That’s easy enough to explain. Our world is a
world at war, and there are casualties every day. This village
lived for a while, sheltered from the harshness of the world by
Lady Bandai’s kindness and compassion. We would have died happy if
she remained with us… demon or not. But now… what do we have to
live for?”
“Urgh… is the demon gone?” Dororo
asked as he came to. He shifted a little in Hyakkimaru’s arms.
The villagers formed a wall of
people at the entrance to Lady Bandai’s estate. It was clear that
the village wouldn’t welcome Dororo and Hyakkimaru for the
night—not now, and not ever.
Hyakkimaru let words of rage and
reproach die in his throat. He put his back to the villagers and
started walking away, keeping Dororo held close to his chest. The
rain fell, soaking him through, but he barely felt it.
The rain cleared Lady Bandai’s
face of blood and acid. It bathed the whole world impartially,
with ambivalence, but no amount of rain could wash the war-torn
world clean.
Where will Dororo and Hyakkimaru go now?
1 人面瘡: A jinmensō is a mythological growth or tumor that takes the shape of a human face. ↩
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