Japan-2025

  It was Rebecca’s fourth day in Japan. She had just moved to Tokyo to teach English at an elementary school not far from her new apartment. As she walked down the street, she saw a small, almost hidden antique shop. Tilting her head, she cautiously stepped in, the bell above the door ringing gently.

  Behind the counter, a woman who looked to be in her mid-50s looked up and said in accented English, “Hello, how may I help you, young lady?”

  Rebecca startled slightly, not expecting the woman to greet her. It was still odd, how polite Japanese people were, but she shook her head slightly and said, “Just browsing. I just moved here a few days ago, and I was looking for some furniture.”

  The woman smiled and bowed her head, “This is good. I do not get many foreign customers. Please, take your time. There is tea, if you wish.” She gestured to a chipped porcelain pot on a low table, the kind Rebecca associated with black-and-white movies about geisha and ghosts.

  Rebecca shuffled past a display of bone-white dolls with painted scarlet lips, their tiny hands forever frozen mid-gesture. The shop’s air was dense and earthy, layers of incense and old wood, and the faintest note of something floral, almost rotting. She paused at a shelf lined with various knick-knacks, a lucky cat, a tanuki, a swan, and finally, her eyes landed on a beautiful, bronze hand mirror.

  It was smaller than she expected; the tin on the front was only about three or three and a half inches in diameter, and she almost could have mistaken it for a spoon. The designs around the reflective surface almost looked like sakura flowers.

  Rebecca picked it up. It had a satisfying weight, like the kind of object that survived in a drawer for centuries, passed from careful hand to careful hand. She ran her finger along the edge, and suddenly, the sakura flowers lit up, and before she could even process what was going on, she landed directly on her tailbone in the middle of the night on some path. What struck her as odd, though, was the blood-red light being cast as far as the eye could see, making the trees, fields, paths, and everything look unsettlingly eerie.

  She staggered upright, the hand mirror clattering out of her grasp and landing in a patch of dry grass. The air was colder here, biting into the sweat at her nape. She was in the countryside, no, not just countryside. It felt sharper, older. The silence was overwhelmingly total. She spun, searching for some sign of civilization, but behind her, there was only a dirt trail, the kind she recognized from ukiyo-e prints, and a super blood moon dominating the sky, more vivid than she understood them to be.

  Rebecca pressed her thumb into her palm, willing herself to wake up. The sensation was too crisp, too insistent, for a dream. Her mouth tasted like metal. She knelt and retrieved the hand mirror, still warm from her touch. The sakura petals in its border pulsed faintly in the red moonlight, as if alive.

  She walked, because what else was she going to do? Each step crackled through frost-rimed grass, and her sneakers felt wrong in the dirt. She followed the path until it emptied into a small village, the kind that should only exist in nostalgia: thatched roofs, squat clay walls, lanterns slung from posts. The homes were hunched against the night, their shoji windows dark, as if no one lived there.

  Rebecca kept walking, suddenly feeling like she was being watched, even though she couldn’t see anyone. Then, out of nowhere, an arm wrapped around her waist, and she was lifted onto a black stallion. Her first instinct was to scream, to fight, but whoever had lifted her hushed her as they rode into a bamboo forest.

  She immediately jumped off the horse, then she backed herself up, only to run into bamboo, and expected the worst. Then the figure hopped off the horse and turned to face her. He was dressed in what she could only assume was some strange period attire from the Sengoku Period, and he was handsome, even in the eerie red light, likely not much older than her, and he pulled something out of a bag.

  She tried to back up more, only to be stopped by more bamboo, when suddenly a blanket was tossed at her, and the man said, “Cover yourself, then explain to me why you are in my lands.”

  Rebecca stared at the man, then at the blanket, then at her own body. She was fully clothed, in capri pants and a button-down shirt. The notion that she was somehow exposed struck her as absurd, but the man’s tone didn’t carry any indecency, more the brisk authority of a cop asking for ID.

  She fumbled with the blanket anyway, her hands shaking, and draped it over her shoulders. It was practical and well-made, far from the scratchy wool she expected.

  “Who are you?” she said, surprised to hear her own voice crack. “What is this place?”

  The man stepped into the moonlight. His hair was so black it reflected the red; his armor looked less cosplay than she expected up close. It was shiny, well-maintained, and dark as night. He regarded Rebecca with the cautious intensity of someone about to poke a wild animal, “My name is Kinoshita Takehide,” he said finally. The syllables landed with a weight that made her think she should remember them. “You are trespassing.”

  Rebecca clutched the blanket around her shoulders. Trespassing? Is that what this was? “I’m not supposed to be here,” she said. “I—”

  “Correct, you are not supposed to be here. So tell me why you are.” The man said, cutting her off.

  Rebecca shivered. The cold bit an icy line up her spine, making something petulant and wild flare inside her: Why was he so calm? Why was she the one being treated like a trespasser?

  She drew herself up to her full, unimpressive height, “I told you,” she said sternly, “I don’t know how I got here.”

  The man looked taken aback, like he’d never heard a woman snap at him like that. He blinked, “You are foreign,” he finally said, less as a question, more as a diagnosis. “But you speak our language.”

  She did, and she hadn’t realized it. The words were different in her mouth, but somehow made sense to her, like a movie dubbed expertly over. Some piece of her brain wanted to analyze the phenomenon. The rest of her shut that down, because a stranger had just abducted her in what appeared to be a historical setting under a horror-movie moon.

  “Wait, what?” Rebecca blurted, the realization hitting her like a truck.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  The man observed her, tilting his head slightly, “You, a woman with skin as pale as moonlight and hair the color of autumn leaves touched by fire, are speaking our language.”

  Rebecca snorted, a sound that startled her as much as it probably startled him. “That’s not my hair color,” she shot back. “It’s just…you know what, never mind. How did you pick me up like that? You almost dislocated my hip.”

  His face barely changed, but she sensed a micro-expression, some twitch of apology, in the way he resettled his hands on his belt. “I apologize. I did not want others to see you.”

  She glanced back the way they’d come. The bamboo crowded in, thick and black in the lunar glow, the stalks so high and close together that they seemed to swallow all sound, making their small clearing feel like the only place left in the world. Rebecca wondered if this was all just a lucid dream. The obvious thing would be to pinch herself, but she didn’t want him to think she was about to attack.

  “What year is it?” she tried.

  He did not answer immediately. Instead, he cocked his head, as though the question were proof she was insane, “It is the fifth year of Eiroku. Year of The Water Dog.”

  Rebecca swallowed. She had no reference for that. She thought of Googling it, but she worried that if she reached into her pocket, he’d assume she was pulling a weapon.

  Rebecca slid her hand into her pocket, slow and deliberate so as not to spook him, and fished out her phone. The screen blinked to life, the digital clock, 11:02 p.m., and a battery indicator that made her want to curse out loud, 75%. But there was no service, no bars, just the SOS icon and a date: October 7th, some lingering effect of the mirror, she assumed.

  She turned the screen so he could see it, hoping that something would click for him, “What’s the year? By numbers? Digits?”

  He leaned over the phone, eyes narrowing. “1-5-6-2.”

  Rebecca’s heart lurched like it had dropped down an elevator shaft. The date, the super blood moon, the man in period clothes. She’d time-traveled. Or died. Or gone truly, irrevocably insane.

  “Okay,” she said, trying not to hyperventilate. “Okay. Um. I need to sit down.”

  She sat, knees buckling gracelessly. The bamboo stalks pressed against her back, grounding her. She forced slow breaths in and out, but her chest felt like it was wrapped in wire. She should have been panicking, but the absurdity of it all was too much; she almost started laughing.

  The man stared at her, silent. His expression was impossible to read as he glanced between her and her phone.

  “What…is that?” The man asked hesitantly.

  Shit, she thought, I just made the most cliché time travel mistake ever by showing this man an object that’s not gonna be around for 400 years.

  Rebecca closed her hand over the phone, pressing it to her chest as if she could shield them both from the weight of centuries. “It’s, uh, a device. For communication,” she said, then stopped, realizing the explanation wasn’t going to help. “Never mind. It’s not important.” She flipped the phone over, as if that could erase the electric glow from the air.

  The man, Kinoshita Takehide, her brain supplied, because she’d always been good at names, watched her for a long moment. She couldn’t read his mood, but the way his gaze lingered on her made her skin prickle with a strange mixture of exposure and frustration. What did he want from her? He wasn’t threatening her; he wasn’t demanding answers. He was just…staring.

  Rebecca’s stomach twisted as if the world had tilted. She ground the heel of her palm into her brow, hard enough to see constellations. When she looked up, the man’s stance had barely changed. She suddenly resented him for being so cool, so unruffled, like he expected people to drop into his bamboo thicket from the sky every day.

  She was still in the same squat, holding herself together, knees drawn up, and the blanket cinched like armor. The man’s silhouette was a slash of blackness against the moon. She estimated he was around 5’9” just from the seven-inch height difference she noticed earlier.

  He was waiting, she realized. Waiting for her to say something, or maybe to snap and run.

  Rebecca was good at talking, or at least she’d always thought she was. She’d never had to explain to someone, ‘Hey, so, I think I’ve traveled backward in time because of a magic hand mirror I found in a Tokyo antique store.’ The words tasted like a dare.

  “It’s a mistake,” she tried. “Me being here. I mean, I’m not supposed to exist in this time, right? You don’t have to worry. I’ll just…” What, walk back to the 21st century? That was dumb, and she knew it.

  “It is unsafe for a woman alone, you’ll come with me,” Takehide said, leaving no room for argument. “What is your name?”

  Rebecca cleared her throat and said, “Rebecca. Hayes Rebecca.”

  He seemed to consider that for a second, then nodded, like maybe her name was an answer to an unsolvable equation. “You will follow me,” he said, and before Rebecca could decide if that was a request or an order, he started walking towards his horse. She wanted to protest, but the weight of the moment, her body’s confusion, the cold, the weird thrill of all of it, kept her quiet.

  They began mounting the horse again; this time, he helped her up instead of grabbing her, then joined her. The gentleness caught her off guard after he had previously snatched her up by the waist, and she told herself not to think too much about it.

  Finally, they began riding again. The moon stalked them, red and huge, casting their shadows like spilled ink. Rebecca’s legs ached. The cold had an edge, unsoftened by city heat or car exhaust, and it hurt in a way she’d never felt before. Every so often, a night bird would call, impossibly close, and Rebecca’s heart would stutter. She wanted to ask a thousand questions, but couldn’t get her mouth around any of them. Who was he, really? Where were they going? Was there a way home, or had she just become a character in a story she never asked to be in?

  The forest broke suddenly into a clearing, where a cluster of buildings formed a compound. Low walls and tiled roofs, the lanterns out, but Rebecca could see in the north half of the compound, a large, imposing, traditional Japanese castle, and her breath caught in her throat. He hadn’t just been a man…Kinoshita Takehide was a Warlord, a Daimyo, and it sent a shiver up her spine. As they approached the compound, the lunar eclipse faded, leaving behind just the super moon and its regular pale moonlight.

  The horse’s gait was smoother than Rebecca anticipated, or maybe she was too numb to register anything, but the warmth of the animal and the warlord at her front. Takehide guided them through a series of metal gates, the moonlight glinting off of them, never needing to announce himself to the sentries. The few men she saw wore dark armor with painted masks, their eyes glinting with suspicion as she passed. She must have looked like a fever dream, a foreign woman in modern clothes, piggybacking on the Daimyo’s horse.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, she expected torches and the clang of an alarm, but the compound was silent, almost reverent. The only noise was the soft clop of the horse’s hooves and the whistle of the wind, raising goosebumps on her skin.

  They stopped at a smaller building, tucked behind the main house, where two women in layered kimono waited, eyes lowered. Takehide dismounted, then offered a hand to Rebecca, which she took before she could overthink it. The first woman’s reticence broke a little when Rebecca stumbled on the step, and she caught Rebecca’s elbow, steadying her before gliding up the stairs ahead.

  Inside, the air was thick with the scent of tatami and something sweet, like a red bean bun. Rebecca blinked, her eyes recalibrating to the warm, buttery light of paper lanterns. There was a low table, lacquered wood, set with bowls and delicate porcelain cups. The two women motioned for her to sit, their sleeves whispering as they worked. The blanket was taken, wordlessly, and replaced with a heavy indigo house robe. It was soft, and it made her feel less like she was starring in a time-traveling episode of Cops.

  The women worked in silence, their movements precise. One poured tea, the other laid out a handful of unfamiliar pickled vegetables and a small, perfect mound of rice. Rebecca could only stare. She felt like someone who had wandered into someone else’s family dinner.

  Takehide lingered by the doorway, hands at his sides, his gaze fixed on nothing in particular. He seemed less like a captor now and more like someone who’d brought home a stray. The women whispered to him, their words too quick and soft for Rebecca to catch, but she noticed the way their posture shifted, deferential and respectful. He nodded once, then stepped outside, closing the door behind him.

  Rebecca’s hands shook as she reached for the chopsticks and took a bite of the pickled vegetables. She cringed at how strong the taste was, and one of the women giggled lightly, clearly amused by her reaction.

  She forced herself to swallow, the sour burn of ginger and brine spiking up her sinuses. She tried the rice, then the tea, and found both tasted oddly comforting, as if her body knew what to do even when her mind had short-circuited.

  She kept her eyes averted, watching the women out of the corner of her gaze. Their hands were quick and quiet, and they never met her stare, but were always aware of her, like they were waiting for her to do something dumb or foreign. Probably not a bad bet, Rebecca thought.

  She wanted to ask them questions, but the sheer weight of her situation, of being in 1562 Japan, made the words catch in her throat. When she finally looked up, one of the women was kneeling beside her, folding a futon onto the tatami. The room was small, brightened by the lanterns and a single open panel that revealed the moonlit courtyard. Through it, Rebecca could see a sliver of the larger manor, the angle of its eaves so sharply clean it was almost mathematical.

  Beyond the open panel, the moon shone a pale, more natural white now, but Rebecca felt the afterimage of the super blood moon somewhere behind her eyes. She sat on her knees because it seemed right, the way the women did, and even though her calves screamed after ten seconds, she tried to mimic their posture. Maybe if she acted like she belonged here, her body would start to believe it.

  The women finished their silent chores and withdrew into the shadowed corridor. She pressed her hands flat on the table, feeling the lacquer’s chill, and only then let herself really look around. The room was simple, the walls a patchwork of creamy paper and dark wooden beams, the floor covered in gold-tinged tatami. A painted folding screen showed willows bending over a lonely bridge. It was beautiful, she had to admit.

  After awhile, she waited for the shock to hit, the tidal wave of panic she’d braced for since she landed here. Instead, a profound, humming exhaustion seeped through her, flattening everything else. She was so tired. She brought the tea to her lips, holding the cup with both hands, and it trembled there, but not as badly as she’d expected, and she finished her tea. Finally, she padded her way over to the futon and fell asleep.