YOKO LI
Setting: World of Darkness, Geist
“YOU ARE SUZUKI YOKO?”
The voice was deep, rough, and very loud. It startled me out of… had I been asleep? I couldn’t remember. I also couldn’t remember where I was. What I could remember was… pain? Sort of a fading sensation of pain, but somehow very distant. Everything was dark. I couldn’t feel if my eyes were open or not. I couldn’t feel anything.
“YOU ARE SUZUKI YOKO?”
That damn voice again. It seemed like it’d rattle my teeth, but I couldn’t feel that, either. I couldn’t move, and I wasn’t sure if I was breathing or not. What the hell?
“YOU ARE SUZUKI YOKO?”
“My name’s Yoko Li.”
It took me a moment to realize it was my own voice. I still couldn’t feel if I was talking or even breathing, but that didn’t seem to matter. I thought the words, and they happened.
“YOU ARE SUZUKI YOKO?”
The voice was getting really annoying.
“My name’s Yoko Li,” I said. “My friends call me Ko.”
“YOU ARE SUZUKI YOKO?”
“Kay oh. Like knockout? It’s a stupid joke. ‘Yo, Ko!’ Get it? My friends can be dumb.”
“YOU ARE SUZUKI YOKO?”
“Suzuki is my mom’s name. From before she got married.”
“YOU ARE SUZUKI YOKO?”
“Okay, fine! Yes, I’m Suzuki fucking Yoko.”
“LAST HEIR OF THE SUZUKI CLAN?”
“There’s millions of Suzukis, dumbass. It’s a common name.”
“LAST HEIR OF THE SUZUKI CLAN?”
“I think it means something like bell or tree or whatever. Peasants.”
“LAST HEIR OF THE SUZUKI CLAN?”
“Fuck it, whatever. Sure.”
I still couldn’t feel or see anything, but that voice was definitely getting on my nerves. What the hell kind of questions were those? Like I cared about clans and that shit. I guess that was the right answer, though, because suddenly I could see this old set of samurai armor in front of me. It had a lot of shiny black plates, with red and gold accents, but a lot of the detail seemed… blurry, as if I wasn’t entirely certain what that part looked like. Or someone wasn’t, anyway. I don’t remember what that kind of armor is called, but it had the face mask and everything, and wasn’t on a stand. It was standing there like someone was wearing it, but as near as I could tell, it was empty.
“I AM KNOWN AS THE LAST SAMURAI. I AM THE ANCESTRAL SPIRIT OF YOUR CLAN.”
That voice again, and now it was coming from the armor. Okay. I wasn’t sure what sort of drug made you hallucinate talking armor, and I couldn’t remember taking anything. I was having trouble even remembering where I’d been before the empty black void. I’d been going… somewhere. Did I get drugged there? Because I didn’t do drugs. My mom would kill me.
“Okay,” I said. “First, I’m pretty sure there’s thousands of samurai. Second, peasants aren’t samurai, and third, where the fuck am I?”
“THERE HAVE BEEN NO TRUE SAMURAI FOR OVER A CENTURY.”
“I’m sure they’d love to hear that.”
“I SPEAK ONLY THE TRUTH.”
“So tell me where I am.”
“YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE IT IS TIME.”
“That’s not telling me where the fuck I am.”
“IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO TAKE UP THE MANTLE OF YOUR ANCESTORS.”
“Still not telling me where the fuck I am.”
“IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO WALK THE ANCIENT PATH.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO BECOME A SAMURAI.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Racist much?” I said. This had to be some kind of bad joke. “Japanese does not automatically mean samurai. And I’m only a quarter Japanese, okay? My mom is half white, half Japanese, and my dad is half white, half Chinese. Get it? That’s why my last name’s Li.” I guess I sort of looked Japanese — black hair, slanted eyes, triangular face — but I got mistaken for a lot of different types of Asian by white people, and Asians tended to see me as a half-breed. I didn’t identify as Asian, regardless, and the whole bamboo ceiling thing pissed me off.
“YOU MUST NOW TAKE UP YOUR CLAN’S SWORD.”
“Peasants don’t get a clan sword, asshole.” Which was one of the few things I actually knew about Japanese samurai traditions. I usually tried to avoid that entire part of the world.
“YOU MUST NOW WALK THE PATH OF STEEL AND BLOOD.”
“Yeah, not going to happen.”
“YOU MUST NOW HONOR THE TRADITIONS OF YOUR FAMILY.”
“Fuck that,” I said. This was just getting more and more stupid. “What traditions? Being demure? Popping out babies whenever the man wants? Being good at math? Well, I suck at math, and both my grandmothers tried to teach me that ‘wifely duty’ shit and got pissed when I told them to fuck off, and I’ll have kids when I fucking want to. Racist asshole. And you still haven’t told me where the fuck I am. I’m not doing shit until you tell me.”
“YOU ARE IN THE TRAINING HALL.”
And I was. Not like I’d suddenly moved from one place to another, but more like I’d been there all the time and I hadn’t noticed. It was… pretty much like the dojo or whatever it’s called from every samurai movie I’d been forced to watch. Mats on the floor, scrolls on the walls, flowers, those wooden posts, sliding doors, all of it. But slightly out of focus, so the details weren’t clear, just like the old samurai armor I’d talked to before. The stupid suit of armor was now kneeling on the floor in front of me. I was also kneeling, and could more or less feel my body. It still felt a little distant, like parts of me had gone to sleep. I looked down at myself.
I was wearing a kimono. I hated kimonos. I always had to wear one when I went to visit grandma Suzuki as a girl, and it was always pink with stupid flowers on it. But the worst part was that both my mom and my grandma would freak out if I even smudged the stupid thing, so I always wound up sitting around doing nothing and being incredibly bored. I stopped putting up with kimonos when I was thirteen, and the visits to grandma Suzuki stopped right after. But to be honest, I didn’t feel like my mom fought very hard to keep the visits going, either. My Dad’s family at least understood they were Americans. I liked them better. Mostly. Grandma Li still tried to teach me to wife.
The kimono I was wearing was pink, with stupid flowers. I hated it.
“Okay, I don’t know who you are or how you’re doing this,” I said, “But I’m getting really pissed off here. Stop fucking around and tell me what’s happening.”
“I AM THE ANCESTRAL SPIRIT OF THE SUZUKI CLAN.”
The stupid armor was definitely talking, but the face mask didn’t move.
“I got that,” I glared at the armor. “Where the hell am I really?”
“YOU ARE IN AN ALLEY.”
“What?”
The scene changed again. The training hall was gone, which I didn’t miss, and so was the kimono, which I missed even less, but my body was gone too, and I was in an alley somewhere that seemed sort of familiar. The three other people in the alley did not. All three were male, and all three were dressed like Asian street gang members, which I only recognized because my mom pointed some out once and told me to stay away from them. Tattoos and piercings and stupid hair and everything. Two of them were standing over what looked like a body on the ground, and the third was looking out towards the entrance to the alley. Outside was a street that also seemed familiar.
“We got her,” the tallest one said, grinning down at the body. “We did it.”
“We’re fucking made now,” said the shortest and ugliest one, also standing over the body.
“Shut up, you guys,” said the one at the entrance. “Someone might hear us.”
“No one’s going to hear us,” the shortest one said.
“Says you,” the middle one said. “I don’t want to fuck this up.”
“Check her,” the short one told the tall one. “Let’s make sure.”
“Why me?” the tall one asked. He sounded a little whiny.
“This was your idea,” the short one said.
The tall one didn’t seem happy about it, but he bent down and started going through the pockets of the body. It seemed to be female, and wearing a hoodie and jeans, and was lying in a pool of blood. Very definitely blood, and the body looked extremely familiar.
I didn’t think I could get a stomach ache with no body, but right then, I got one.
“Shit,” the tall one said, standing up with a bloodstained wallet in his hand.
“What?” the middle one said.
“We got the wrong bitch,” the tall one said.
“You sure?” the short one asked.
“Yeah,” the tall one told him. He held up a card, probably an ID. “Says her name was Yoko Li.”
“Fuck,” the middle one said. “We fucked up. Now what?”
Right then, all three of them froze. My perspective drifted forward, and I could clearly make out what very much seemed to be my own body, lying lifeless in a pool of my blood.
“Am I… dead?” I asked. Or thought. Or something.
“YES.”
“What happened?”
“THEY ARE PART OF A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION. THEY THOUGHT YOU WERE THE NIECE OF THE LEADER OF A RIVAL ORGANIZATION. THEY HOPED TO BE PROMOTED BY KILLING HER. THEY GRABBED YOU ON YOUR WAY HOME FROM THE LIBRARY WHERE YOU WERE STUDYING FOR A TEST. THEY STABBED YOU TWENTY TIMES. IT WAS THE ACT OF COWARDS, NOT WARRIORS.”
I looked at the three frozen gangsters. They looked… Japanese, I thought. Yakuza?
Did it even matter?
“What happens now?” I didn’t really want to know, but I asked anyway.
“THEY WILL DUMP YOUR BODY IN THE RIVER AND LOOK FOR THE CORRECT VICTIM.”
“And I’m just… dead? Even though they had the wrong person?”
“YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE.”
It took me a moment to realize what the voice had said.
“I don’t have to be… dead?” I asked.
“YES.”
“How?”
“I CAN HELP YOU.”
“Help me not be dead?”
“HELP YOU TAKE UP YOUR FAMILY SWORD. HELP YOU BECOME A SAMURAI.”
“And I won’t be dead?”
“NO, YOU WILL NOT.”
I looked down at my own body, lying on the ground. I sure looked dead. Smaller, from the outside. At some point, I guess I’d curled up around my own stomach, maybe because of being stabbed. I’d just been studying late, I could remember that now. And I was dead. I didn’t believe in the supernatural, especially the nonsense some of my older relatives talked about, and even though I was seeing it with my own… whatever I had that worked like eyes, I still couldn’t believe it. Being paranoid about a magic spirit or whatever who wants to help you not be dead might not be the wisest thing, but I’ve never pretended to have the wisdom of the ancients.
“How do I know I can trust you?” I asked.
“I HAVE ALREADY HELPED YOU.”
“How?”
“I HAVE HELPED YOU LEARN JAPANESE.”
Yeah, that was a bit too much to accept, even floating over my own dead body. “Yeah?” I said. “I know like five words of Japanese and six words of Chinese, and half of them are numbers.”
“WHAT DO YOU THINK WE ARE SPEAKING NOW?”
“Wait, what?”
“WHAT DO YOU THINK THE CRIMINALS SPOKE?”
Now that I thought about it, though, it did seem like I was understanding the meaning of what was said, but the words themselves seemed different. Like I was thinking in Japanese but didn’t realize it, which was an extremely weird feeling, even with all the other weirdness.
“How?” was all I could think of to ask.
“I GAVE YOU SOME OF MY KNOWLEDGE. IT WAS NECESSARY. I CAN GIVE YOU MORE.”
“More? Like what?”
“I CAN TEACH YOU THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI. THE WAY OF THE SWORD.”
“And you can… bring me back to life?”
“YES.”
“Why?”
“THERE ARE TASKS YOU MUST COMPLETE. A JOURNEY YOU MUST TAKE.”
“Right now?” It was stupid, but I hadn’t graduated yet, and I was still having a hard time accepting what was happening. Mystic quests seemed way out of the picture.
“WHEN YOU ARE READY.”
Well, that was good. At least I wouldn’t have to go running off after whatever this spirit was going to send me after before I was ready. I’d probably get killed. Again.
“So… what do I need to do?” I asked. “You want me to sign in blood? I’m not sure I’ve got a lot left at this point, but if you’ve got a pen, I could probably figure something out.”
“NO. YOU NEED ONLY TAKE UP THE SWORD.”
We were back in the dojo again. Or maybe we’d never left it. Honestly, where we actually were was hard to tell, and it wasn’t making any sense. But I was back in that stupid pink kimono, and now the suit of armor was holding out a katana like they do in samurai movies. It was black, red, and gold like the armor, and also had details that were blurry, like I was seeing them from a long ways away. Or, it occurred to me, like someone couldn’t quite remember what the details were.
“Okay,” I said. “But if you make me alive again, won’t those assholes just kill me?”
“NO. I WILL HELP YOU DEFEAT THEM.”
“You mean kill them.”
“THEY ARE CRIMINALS.”
“Yes, but you can’t just murder people.”
“THEY STRUCK YOU DOWN. DEATH IS THE ONLY PUNISHMENT.”
“Yeah, we’re going to need to talk about that. But I don’t want to die.”
“THEN TAKE UP THE SWORD.”
The armor hadn’t moved at all, and was still holding out the slightly blurry katana. I still wasn’t sure what was going on. I read something once, that the human body didn’t die all at once, and a dying brain might hallucinate things as it shut down. I could have been hallucinating. Or… it could be real, and an ancestral spirit was offering me a chance to live. I didn’t want to die.
“I CANNOT HOLD OFF DEATH FOREVER.”
When in doubt, choose life. I reached out, and closed my hand around the katana’s handle. It felt… familiar, somehow. But also incomplete, and I wasn’t sure how I knew that.
“IT IS DONE.”
I don’t know what I was expecting. Some dramatic flash, maybe, or a whole lot of special effects going off, like I’d seen in movies. Some sort of indication of empowerment. Instead, I was just back in the alley, laying on the ground. The only things that seemed to have changed were that I was alive, and was now holding the sword in the real world.
There was pain. A lot of pain. But it started fading immediately. I got a brief glimpse of some kind of strange white fluid filling up one of the stab wounds in my stomach as something that wasn’t me took over and flipped me to my feet like I’d seen in martial arts movies. After that… I don’t really remember what happened. Movement, screaming, and more blood. Some amount of time passed, and I came back to my senses. The pain was gone. I didn’t even feel light-headed, and now there were three bodies in the alley, lying in their own pools of blood. The three gangsters that had killed me were now dead, and I’d killed them. Or something else had killed them, through me.
Looking down at the bodies and realizing they were dead had a very un-samurai effect on me. I doubled over and threw up. I couldn’t help myself. After that, I started coughing my own blood out of my lungs. I had to lean against the alley wall to stay standing, which also meant that I wasn’t looking at the bodies anymore. It took a few minutes for me to recover.
“WE MUST KEEP MOVING.”
The voice was in my head in the real world now, just as loud and forceful, and I realized that I could feel another presence in my mind. Sort of like how people describe the voice of conscience, but actually speaking and definitely a separate thing. Or maybe how people describe schizophrenia. I looked at the katana in my hand, now dripping blood from the blade, and the details were still blurry in real life somehow. It couldn’t be real, but it was right there.
“You killed them!” I said. It came out panicked and upset, for good reason.
“THEY STRUCK YOU DOWN. DEATH IS THE ONLY PUNISHMENT.”
“You can’t just kill people! This isn’t a samurai movie!”
“THEY KILLED YOU.”
“They were criminals!”
“THEY HAVE BEEN PUNISHED FOR THEIR CRIMES.”
Yeah, we were going to have to talk about that, but standing in an alley with three fresh corpses I’d been forced to make wasn’t the time or the place. I edged around the bodies, not looking at them, still holding the katana, heading for the exit to the alley. I almost threw up again when I stepped in some of the blood, but as it turns out, it was my own pool of blood, so I suppose that’s not quite as bad. Once I got to the alley exit, I looked around, but no one was near, so I leaned against the wall. I still had questions for the thing now lurking in my brain.
“What now?” I asked. Not a great question, but I figured that I should know what it wanted. Otherwise, it might just march me along, and who else might get killed?
“GO HOME. I MUST PREPARE YOU FOR YOUR JOURNEY.”
“Prepare how?”
“YOUR BODY IS WEAK AND UNTRAINED.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I CANNOT ALWAYS FIGHT FOR YOU. YOU MUST LEARN TO DEFEND YOURSELF.”
“I’m not going to be a murderer!”
“IF YOU DO NOT FIGHT, YOU WILL DIE AGAIN.”
“Oh, so I can be killed?”
“IF YOU ARE STUPID.”
That line of questioning wasn’t going to go anywhere, so I tried a different one.
“Fine, whatever,” I said. “So what’s the deal with the journey?”
“THERE ARE THINGS WHICH MUST BE DONE. THINGS WHICH MUST BE LEARNED.”
I looked at the katana in my hand, at the parts that seemed blurry because someone had forgotten the details. “Like what it is you’ve forgotten?” I asked.
“YES. THE SWORD. THE ARMOR. ABOUT OUR CLAN.”
“Clan Suzuki? Which still doesn’t sound like a thing.”
“OUR CLAN HAD A DIFFERENT NAME ONCE. A REAL NAME, NOT A PEASANT NAME.”
“What happened?”
“THAT IS ONE OF THE DETAILS WE MUST LEARN.”
Great. So not only would I have to worry about a homicidal samurai in my head that could take over my body, but I’d also have to dig into a cultural history I didn’t even like. One with a bunch of stereotypes and traditions that the crazy spirit was going to try to force me to embody.
On the other hand, I wasn’t dead.
“Okay, then. Last question.” I looked down at myself. “What the hell am I wearing?” It was the samurai armor I spoke to before, as near as I could tell. Same colors, same blurry details. But somehow it had appeared in the real world, replacing my bloody and torn clothes. It had also changed form, into something more like the ridiculously skimpy samurai armor female anime characters got put in. Or maybe from a video game. Either way, the bare midriff was one of the least ridiculous parts of the “armor” and I’m just not going to go there with the rest of it.
“I… DO NOT KNOW.”
For the first time since I met him, The Last Samurai sounded something other than serious and demanding. He sounded… unsure of himself, and slightly disapproving.
“You don’t?”
“PERHAPS MODERN DISDAIN FOR THE ANCIENT TRADITIONS HAS WARPED MY ABILITY TO MANIFEST. PERHAPS YOUR IMPURE HERITAGE IS RESPONSIBLE. I DO NOT APPROVE.”
“Oh, we’re going to get along really well…”
