But any mother would choose her child, wouldn’t she?”
Mariko took her by her soft little hand. “I’m sorry, Shoji-san, I still don’t understand.”
“My child or the others. That was what I saw. But I thought it meant the medicine. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. Maybe Furukawa stole his drugs from a laboratory. Maybe one more experiment there would have helped more children. But you must understand, my son was hurting himself. It happens with schizophrenics. He climbed out a window once, trying to escape whatever he was hallucinating. When he fell—can you imagine, Mariko-san? Seeing your son lying there unconscious, his leg broken in five places, and being thankful? We lived on the third floor. It could have been so much worse. . . .”
An ice-cold dread settled in Mariko’s stomach, malignant as a tumor. “Shoji-san, what’s your son’s name?”
Shoji gave her a sweet, sad smile. “Makoto. Makoto-kun. It means ‘truth.’”
Shoji Makoto. But the kanji for sho could also be read ko. Koji Makoto. Shoji’s son was Joko Daishi.
As soon as the thought struck her, Mariko knew it was true. The weight of it crushed the breath out of her. There was a saying in English, one that had always stuck with Mariko because it seemed so Japanese: the child is the father of the man. In Joko Daishi’s case, the child with a badly broken leg became the man with a rolling limp. The child suffering from schizophrenia became the delusional man with a god complex. The goze’s child became the man who claimed to foresee the future—a man who was utterly fearless because he believed he’d already seen the hour of his death.
Mariko was a little ashamed that she hadn’t seen the connection between Shoji and Joko Daishi before—though if she was honest with herself, there was no reason she should have caught it. Shoji and Koji were both common surnames. Since they shared the same kanji, on a police report they’d look identical. It was unusual for a son to change his surname, but perfectly ordinary among Japanese religions for a person to take a new name when taking on the cloth. Japan’s most famous monks and nuns were all known by their Buddhist names, not their given names. The daishi of Joko Daishi was clearly meant to evoke this tradition; it meant Great Teacher, just as in Kobo Daishi, one of the greatest figures in Japanese Buddhism. Perhaps Koji Makoto would have changed his name more dramatically, but his mother had already given him the perfect name for a religious leader: read literally, the kanji for Koji Makoto meant Short Path to the Truth.
Why change from Shoji to Koji? Maybe to save his mother from a shameful association, once his name finally became public? Even if he saw himself as bringing enlightenment to the masses, he had to know everyone else would see him as a monster. In his warped mind, changing his name was probably an act of compassion.
Mariko remembered the one time she talked with him. It was hard to forget; she’d never encountered anyone who spoke of mass murder with such childlike delight. My mother is the future and my father is the past. Gibberish at the time, but now Mariko understood at least the first half: his mother, a goze, could see the future. So who was his father? Shoji made no mention of any husband. In fact, the conspicuous absence of a husband in her story suggested that she had raised her son alone. What a scandal that must have been, to be a single mother in the sixties. Compound that with being blind in an era when there was no social tolerance for disability, then add schizophrenia to the picture. Was it any wonder she turned to someone for help? Even if it came from the Wind?
Little wonder, too, that the Wind would be interested in a seer. They were an intelligence agency first and foremost; all the political scheming was founded on having more information than anyone else. And Shoji had the ear of the Imperial house. She was the Emperor’s personal seer. Not that heads of state used fortune-tellers and soothsayers anymore, but Furukawa would find surely some use for a woman who could get herself an invitation to tea at the Imperial palace.
Shoji was crying again, and now it made sense. Her son’s name was all over the news. Goze or not, Shoji had probably been telling herself what any mother