Stranger In An Oddly Familiar Land

The forest enveloped me like the tide.

The few lambent moonbeams that penetrated the thick canopy were set a’dancing as it rustled gently in the night wind; a constantly morphing kaleidoscope of light and darkness. More than enough for my NVGs, but the underbrush was bountiful and thick, and when I caught glimpses of longer avenues between the tree-trunks the grainy picture faded fast. T’was small wonder why forests were reputed to devour armies; large hosts were strained by the close-set trunks, sifted out of rank and file to creep on alone through their own little reality bubble; battles dissolving into brief duels of blades in the dark.

For the first time since I landed in that koi pond, I felt like I knew exactly where I was. No matter where you are, forests are always the same.

They’re dangerous.

I felt a shadow steal over my soul; an electric thrill of alarm racing through my nerves in answer. The rifle snapped to my shoulder, eyes scanning the grainy two-tone underbrush through the NVGs as stale breath burned forgotten in my lungs.

Nothing happened – but the shadow remained.

I lowered the rifle slowly to dangle on its sling, reaching behind my back to grasp the familiar stippled Bakelite of the bayonet. Flipping the NVGs up, I let my eyes unfocus into the dancing shadows, steel whispering on fiberglass as I drew. Just like the first time I’d drawn it in the Pine Barrens, it felt right; a cheap tool for dirty work in the dark.

Together in the dark we waited.

The shadows seemed to thin; no longer pressing reality in so close and claustrophobic. I took a deep breath, then a few more to quiet my hammering heart. With bayonet in a close guard, I prowled forward.

From the gloom a darker shadow loomed like a wall; broader than my outstretched arms and towering away out of sight. I brought down the NVGs and found a small outdoor shrine; looking almost as faded as the titanic cedar tree it crouched beneath. The trunk was ancient; eclipsing the new-growth forest all around, and the shrine wasn’t much better; faded almost as gray as the trunk behind it. But the shimenawa ‘round the tree looked new enough, as did the small pile of papier-mâché dolls laid between its roots.

I stood there a moment, looking at the ancient remainder of an entire forest long since felled, a tree-shrine that was fully grown when the Roman Empire was at its height.

I sheathed my blade and touched my helmet in salute. “Just passing through,” I said quietly.

I received no reply.

* * *

Kenta hadn’t been joking about the “throw a rock and hit a shrine” thing, as I passed another one on the downhill slope, this time without incident. I emerged from the woods near several polytunnel greenhouses, and concealed my short rifle beneath my jacket, and my helmet and NVGs in my pack before marching on. Cutting north-east across a two-lane road I found myself walking through a quiet little area of indeterminate zoning. Decorative stone walls or lush landscaped hedges bordering properties hemmed in the narrow streets, and I passed more greenhouses, an auto repair shop, homes (small and big, most looking quite traditionally Japanese,) and interspersed among them multiple small farm plots; well-kept but barely big enough to qualify as a front yard in the rural midwest I’d grown up in; much less useful agriculture. But the humble yet beautifully landscaped homes, the weather-worn barns that were clearly being patched and re-patched to keep them in service, the heavily used but well-kept work trucks, and the lush greenery all around – especially in the silver light of a waxing moon, with the crickets singing loud, felt just like home.

I followed the roads and my compass north-east till I found a proper expanse of fields, four hundred meters wide and six hundred long, with only irrigation ditches in my way. I struck out from one corner heading for the opposite. Striding through the warm night along tractor paths, I felt like I was doing a night ruck in Basic Combat Training again.

Hard to believe I was only eighty kilometers from Tokyo. It wasn’t hard to drive from dense urbanity to vast rolling fields in that distance back home, but from a big city that barely got you to the suburbs – and Tokyo was the greatest metropolis on Earth. But even here, for all its familiarity, there was something different – everything so tidy and compact. I didn’t know anything about Japan aside from anecdotes from guys who’d deployed there and whatever anime we scraped up from the depths of someone’s hard drive to watch on a laptop screen in a barely habitable FOB. Sum total; they were very polite, staidly formal and prone to trusting their teenagers with transforming battle-mecha.

But apparently not a Yankee with a machine gun.

Small wonder, considering. There was a cedar in Ohio three thousand years old; but no shrine beneath it. Shinto was directly descended from the animism of their prehistory; practices in place thousands of years before Christ was born; their river-valley villages hemmed in close by the hills and mountains where dwelt the gods. Between a river spirit and Yankee-Doodle-Dumbass, I must’ve seemed the more unfamiliar element by far.

In short, my gut instinct had been right – they really didn’t have a clue what they were dealing with.

The field’s end terminated my musing. I followed some train tracks another four-hundred meters back into suburbinity and at the next road crossing, espied my intended destination – the glowing sign of a 7-11. I strolled in and paused near the door a moment, fluffing out my jacket a bit as the air-conditioned air chilled the sweat – the hike hadn’t been long, under three clicks, and the hills weren’t that steep – but the night was still warm, high seventies at least. Scanning, I found my goal – an ATM. The night clerk’s eyes tracked me like lasers as I walked to it. I fished out a credit card – one of my own, so it wouldn’t ping NAIC immediately – and did a couple of cash transfers till I had three hundred thousand yen in hand, or about two grand in dead presidents. I fumbled my card withdrawing it and when I bent down to pick it up, my rifle – hanging from a sling currently configured as one-point – swung away from my shoulder like a pendulum. I snatched it against my body hastily, but I’d already heard an outcry from the front counter.

“Yappari sōdatta! Yappari ne!” the clerk exclaimed as he closed the distance like greased lightning. He pointed at my jacket. “Five-elevuhnu!” My pants. “Cray!” My boots. “Uhh… very niceu.”

I squinted. “What’s wrong with Georgia Boot?”

“Fine, fine, for now,” he allowed. “That!” He pointed at the suspicious lump beneath my jacket, and excited Japanese issued forth interspersed with “Daniel Defensu,” “PEQ-15,” “Surefire,” and “EOTech.” He paused, pointing at what was visible of my plate carrier through the unzipped jacket, and said, “Spiritu?”

“Uhh….” I said, searching my memory. “Yeah, I think it is.”

“Magazine,” the young man pondered, squinting, and since I was made anyways I slipped the retaining bungee off and pulled one up. “Lancer!” he exclaimed immediately, and when he saw the brass cartridges through the clear plastic, he brightened even more. “Sheru haishutsu-shiki!” He nodded companionably and tapped his chest. “Marushin, for me.” Producing his phone he pulled up a picture and proffered it.

I squinted at what appeared to be… “An AR-10 with an LVPO and… oh, you run a Vickers sling too?” I pulled back my jacket and showed him the sling on my SBR, then demonstrated how it switched from one to two point with a quick-attach. He was absolutely enthralled, and as long as he wasn’t calling the cops on me I was happy to nod along. I managed to snag a few energy drinks (picking them via recognized brand logos) as we sort of migrated to the counter, carrying on an increasingly surreal conversation.

“Amazonu!” he exclaimed with pure glee, and showed me a listing for the Vickers 221 sling on his phone.

“Huh, so it is! A bit uh… money, lots?” I waggled my wallet and encompassed Big Space with my arms. With hand motions and a sad shake of his head he conveyed his current sling was trash and he was in the market anyway, so why not? He cheerfully checked me out, and since we were talking already I inquired about getting a taxi.

“Hai hai, tak-u-shii,” he grinned, snagged the landline and made the call. We shot the shit a little more while I waited. He inquired as to the pistol mags riding in the pouches atop the rifle pockets and was delighted all over again to see they were single-stack, showing me a picture of his own GI-grade nickel-planted 1911 with unrecognizable logos on it. Sensing my confusion he tapped at his phone and brought up a picture of an anime girl with bunny ears and what looked like… wait. I had seen this one. It’d occasioned vigorous speculation amongst my squad over whether the animators had been arrested for the broomstick riding episode. “Yeager?” The clerk high-fived me.

The taxi soon arrived; trailed by a cloud of blue smoke that mingled with the emanations of the driver’s cigarette. My new friend escorted me outside, and even opened the rear door for me. I’d zipped up my jacket but the cabbie still looked me up-and-down suspiciously, then said something sour in Japanese. The clerk retorted swiftly. To me: “You is never too old for airsoftu.” He jerked his thumb at the cabbie. “He too old for fun!” With that, he ushered me in. I showed the cabbie the crossroads I’d picked on my phone, and with another dour grumble he roared away, gunning it a bit to really smoke out the young guy who was waving goodbye and pinching his nose with one hand.

I turned to the cabbie. “Airsoft?”

“New field,” he grunted, taking each word slow. “Tourists.” His hand pantomimed a mouth yapping, then a gun evacuating his skull.

I pondered that for a long moment. “… what even IS this goddamn country?”

“Shit,” the older man said. “Ooohhh~ shrine here, oooh, shrine there! Urghf.” He tapped the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray. “Is because evil ghost there. Evil ghost here. Everywhere! City so clean but at what cost? We all one soul, and now soul is nephew,” he jerked his thumb at the dwindling 7-11, “no wife, just animu!”

I silently offered him one of my energy drinks, and though he looked surprised, he accepted it with an “arigatou gozaimasu” and tucked in, draining a quarter in one go. We rode in companionable silence for the next twenty clicks or so, and he eventually pulled up to the exact crossroads I’d picked during my earlier (google) maps recon without once checking his GPS. I paid him, took my change, and was stopped when he saw me counting the smaller bills for a tip, hoisting the energy drink and nodding with the suggestion of a smile. He cruised off into the night, and I was left alone among sprawling wheat fields in a cloud of blue smoke.

I unzipped my jacket, and adjusted my sling but left the NVGs in my bag. I’d had him drop me about a thousand meters shy of where I wanted to start in case the “Monster Division” had a picket cordon out, and it didn’t pay to stand out if they did. But once I was past that…

… it would be time to hunt.