Cassandra Khaw's use of language and crafting of storylines are so wonderful in the first book I read from her that I decided to borrow two other titles and read them in succession. Let's talk about this one first, 'Nothing But Blackened Teeth' (2021) . (Reviews here, here and here.)
This is another novella of a hundred pages, making it an easy read. The first two pages made me laugh. I'm not certain that the author didn't include this Crazy Rich Asian action/spending and reference just for kicks. LOL
⚠️ STOP READING AT THIS POINT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING. PLENTY OF SPOILERS AHEAD.
Wedding couple Talia and Faiz wanted to tie the knot in a haunted house. Fellow thrill-seeker friends Phillip, Cat and Lin marked the happy occasion with them on a celebratory trip from Malaysia to Japan. This group of friends are ghost hunters checking out spooky spots in Kuala Lumpur. Now, they're celebrating a wedding with a ghost-hunting trip to Japan. and went on this celebration trip in a supposedly haunted nameless Heian-era Japanese manor. However, there're undercurrents of emotions and tensions at play within the group, and inner conflict with one another, typical of relationships and disagreements within any group of long-term friends who used to date one another.
But here the house stood. Though only two storeys, each floor spanned at least twelve rooms and several self-contained courtyards, its symmetries united by ascetically decorated corridors. Every wall in the building was lavish with corroding artwork of the yokai: kappa and two-tailed nekomata; kitsune cowled like housewives, bartering with egrets for fresh fish. Domesticity as interpreted through the lens of the demonic.
The story's first-person narrator is Cat. She studies Japanese literature. She has extra-sensory perceptions and has just emerged from a six-month voluntary self-imposed home exile completing a psychiatric-care program after six days in a psychiatric hospital for suicidal tendencies and "terminal ennui, exhaustion so acute it couldn't be sanitized with sleep, couldn't be remedied by anything but a twist of rope tugged tight."
The story of this mansion is, it was the site of a wedding way back in Heian period 794-1185. The groom never showed up. He died along the way, and the bride told her wedding guests to bury her alive in the foundation of the house. She wanted to wait for him and she would keep the house standing until his ghost came home. And for dunno-what macabre reason, every year after that, they buried a new girl in the walls, alive.
The moment Cat walked into the mansion decorated with yokai wall murals and paintings, she vaguely heard a girl's voice utter these lines, "Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu." It was repeated again and again, and I knew I had to find out what it meant before the story ends. (But yes, the narrator explained what this line is much later on.) I had to guess at the phonetics. The best I could arrive at is this, 「末の松山浪もこえなむ」, a line from an old-form of Japanese poem/waka (古今和歌集). Only then I googled. Ooof. Ohhh... it's a declaration of love and steadfastness and a vague curse that if one's heart changes, then a tsunami hits Matsuyama:-
「君をおきて あだし心を 我がもたば 末の松山 浪も越えなむ」
"Cat, this is literally the part where the supporting cast dies horribly. You're bisexual. I'm the comic relief. It's going to be one of us."
"But—"
"Philip's white. He'll be fine. Faiz's the hero so he won't die in the first fucking act. And Talia's, well, maybe Talia's thoroughly fucked. But I don't care about her." He said it so casually. Like it was the easiest line in the universe, simpler even than hey, how ya doing, I didn't miss you at my wedding at all, and I'll never ask why you didn't RSVP, didn't stop to tell me your world was crashing down.
The ohaguro-bettari appeared fast and took Talia. Ahhh... the title of this story literally is the yokai haunting said mansion. Ohaguro (お歯黒) is a practice among samurai and aristocratic married women in Japanese society, and geisha. Some geisha today still do it. Ohaguro means 'blackened teeth', achieved with a solution of iron fillings and vinegar. Besides acting as a dental sealant, it was the aesthetic of the Heian and Edo eras. The ohaguro-bettari お歯黒べったり in this story, is literally a demon dressed in wedding dress and has a face of 'nothing but blackened teeth'. This one wants a life and will only exchange a life for a life.
There was a hitobashira ritual that would return Talia. It's a human sacrificial ritual involving internal organs, bone and blood. There wasn't an intended sacrifice save for Faiz volunteering to do it because it's his fiancée who was taken. Then there was a fight between Faiz and Phillip. Faiz stabbed Phillip, disemboweling him. They were too far out for medical help. Phone lines were down. With that chilling finality, the narrator clinically used Phillip for said ritual. The ones who walked out of the mansion alive, burnt it all down.
We said nothing. After everything that had happened, how could we? We tucked the lie of Phillip's death between Starbucks pick-me-ups and takeout dinners, Skype conversations and police interrogations, kept repeating its specifics until we almost believed it. Then, we tucked ourselves into our own lives, drifting until we were nothing but Facebook notifications to each other, an endless circuit of birthdays and likes and curated photographs.
.....................
Lately, I've begun to wonder if the ohaguro-bettari followed us from the manor. I see her, sometimes. Or at least, I think I do. Reflected in the windows, her face as wan as mine. But it is always my reflection, the eyes smudged of definition, the mouth blotted in shadow so it looks like there's nothing but blackened teeth.
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