by Kōji Suzuki
In a somewhat depressed mood, Kaoru opened the door to the apartment and called out, “I’m home.”
No reply. Thinking nothing of it, he took off his shoes and placed them in the cabinet by the door. When he looked up again, his mother Machiko had appeared as though out of nowhere.
“Would you come here a minute?”
She grabbed his arm and dragged him to her room before he could respond. Her eyes flashed with the excitement of discovery.
“What is it, Mom?”
Flustered, he offered no resistance, but let himself be dragged along by her intensity.
It had been some time since he’d set foot in his mother’s room. Once the room was neat, but now it was piled high with disorderly stacks of books and magazines and photocopies. His mother’s expression had changed, too. In fact, she looked like a changed person. Although they lived together, Kaoru felt it had been a long time since he’d really looked at her face.
“Would you tell me what’s going on?” Kaoru’s nerves were frayed, it being so soon after Ryoji’s suicide. He worried about his mother’s psychological state.
She seemed blissfully unaware of Kaoru’s concern.
“I want you to take a look at this.”
She handed him a magazine. The Fantastic World, the title read in English.
“What about it?” he asked in disgust. The title told him all he needed to know about it. Machiko grabbed the magazine from his hands and flipped through it. Opening it to page forty-seven, she handed it back to him with uncharacteristic roughness.
“Read this article.”
Kaoru did as he was told. The article was titled “Back from the Brink: A Full Recovery from Final-Stage Cancer”.
Another one of these. He understood now. Lately his mother had been pouring all her energy and devotion into looking for a revolutionary way to treat cancer. But she was looking for it outside the bounds of modern medicine, in the “fantastic world” of myths and folk-tales. It was easy enough for him to dismiss it all as just so much alchemical nonsense. But she was his mother, and he had to humor her even if it was uncomfortable. He started reading the article.
Franz Boer, a retired surveyor living in Portland, Oregon, had been infected with the MHC virus several years ago. The cancer had spread throughout his body, and doctors had given him three months to live.
But he’d rejected the doctors’ recommended course of treatment, instead embarking on a journey. As part of his trip he spent two weeks in a certain unnamed place. When he finally returned to Portland after a month, the doctor who examined him shook his head in disbelief. His inoperable cancer had completely disappeared. Cells were collected from the 57-year-old man and tested to see how many times they had undergone cellular division. The result was a far greater number of times than was normal for a man his age.
In other words, Franz Boer had gained two things in that unidentified place: a reprieve from his sentence of death, and, not the same thing, longevity. But Boer, who lived alone, died in an accident before he could tell anybody where he’d obtained his miracle. Now everybody was frantically trying to figure out where he’d gone and what he’d done.
There was little to go on. One persistent reporter had learned that, soon after he’d been told he was dying, Boer had rented a car in Los Angeles. But there was nothing to indicate where he’d be going.
That was the gist of the article.
Machiko watched eagerly for Kaoru’s reaction. Stories of miracle recoveries were everywhere these days. But he knew she was expecting something from him. He raised his head slowly with a quizzical expression.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Boer had probably taken a plane from Portland to L.A. Renting a car there, it was possible he’d been heading for the Arizona-New Mexico desert. It fit.
“I know what you’re trying to say: Franz Boer was making for the longevity zone I’ve been talking about for so long.”
His mother didn’t bother to nod. She just leaned closer with her burning gaze. That gaze told him that she was sure of it.
“There’s one more piece of evidence.”
“And what would that be?”
“Look at this.”
She brought out from behind her back a foreign book and handed it to Kaoru.
The title read North American Indian Folklore. Beneath the title was an illustration of the sun with a man standing beneath it on a hilltop catching the sun’s rays full in the face. The man wore a feathered headdress, and his figure was blackened, silhouetted by the sun, as he stood in an attitude of prayer. The book looked to be old: its cover was faded and the edges of its pages dirty from handling.
As soon as Machiko handed him the book, Kaoru turned to the table of contents. It ran to three pages, seventy-four items. Each heading contained at least one word he was unfamiliar with. Hiaqua, for example—he’d never seen that word before, but he could tell at a glance it wasn’t to be found in an English dictionary. He flipped through a few more pages, until he came to a series of photographs. One showed an Indian on one knee with bow and arrow.
Kaoru looked from the book to his mother’s face, seeking an explanation.
“It’s a book of North American Indian folktales.”
“I can see that. What I want to know is, what does it have to do with that article you just had me read?”
Machiko shifted her weight. Her glee at being able to teach her son something came out in her body language.
“The Native Americans had all sorts of myths and traditions, but they had no written language, so most of them come down to us through generations of oral transmission.”
She took the book back and paged through it.
“That means that most of these seventy-four tales were gathered and recorded by non-Indians. Look.” She pointed to a page. “See? At the beginning of each story there’s a notation by the title saying who collected it, when, and where. It also says what tribe the story was handed down in.”
Kaoru looked at the title of the story Machiko was pointing to.
“How the Mountaintops Reached the Sun”
—the Shopanka tribe
Next there was an entry telling how a white man had come in contact with the Shopanka tribe, heard the story, and written it down. Only then, at last, did the book go on to say how the mountaintops in fact reached the sun.
All seventy-four stories were short, mostly a page or two, and had similar titles—lengthy phrases, not single words.
“Kaoru, I’d like you to read this story.”
She had the book open to what seemed to be the thirty-fourth story: at least, it had the number 34 written above the title.
The title turned a light on in his brain.
Another coincidence?
The title was: “Watched by a Multitude of Eyes.”
The title was in the passive voice. There was no indication of who was being watched by what.
Kaoru stepped back, groped behind him for a chair, and sat down. He started reading. Without realizing it, he’d slipped into Machiko’s world.
Watched by a Multitude of Eyes
—the Talikeet tribe
[In 1862, at the height of the Civil War, a covered wagon train was crossing the Southwestern desert on its way west. A white minister, Benjamin Wycliffe, got separated from the wagons and was rescued by the Talikeet. He lived with them for several days.
One calm evening, the Indians gathered around the campfire to hear one of their elders speak. The Reverend Wycliffe happened to be nearby, and he heard the tale. The flames reaching up into the night sky combined with the elder’s singsong voice to make a powerful impression on Wycliffe’s mind. He recorded this story that very evening.]
All living things were born from the same source, long long ago. The sea and the rivers and the land, the sun and the moon and the stars, are birth-parents to people and animals, and love them mercifully, but they themselves are contained within the womb of a being larger than themselves. Man feel
s the land to be filled with spirits because his heart is connected to the heart of this being. When man does something bad, this great being is pained in his heart, and this causes disaster to fall upon man.
Once when the stars were flowing across the sky on the stream of the being’s blood, one of the stars came down to earth as a man called Talikeet. He married a lake named Rainier, and they had two sons. They lived together with their children happily on the land in the womb of the great being, never disobeying the will of the spirits.
The brothers grew up strong and were able to help their father and mother. They were skilled and courageous hunters, always bringing home game for their parents.
Then one day, Talikeet’s leg began to hurt, and he told this to his wife and children. They worried about him, but only Talikeet himself knew the reason why his body hurt.
Before he had drifted down to this land, he had been aware of being watched by a multitude of eyes. Men were permitted to hunt animals and eat them. Bigger animals were permitted to catch smaller animals and eat them. But they must not eat too much. And they must not store up too many animals they had killed. They must respect and honor the animals they hunted. To see that this was done, the great being who was also the father of all nature set a huge eye on a mountaintop. The eye which was set on top of the mountain was very large, but it was the only one, so it could not watch all men in all directions at all times. Eventually men began to hide from the eye and do things that went against the will of the great being.
Then the great being placed eyes within men’s bodies so that they could not escape his sight.
“It is that eye which is causing me pain now,” Talikeet explained to his wife and children.
“But, Father, I do not think you have disobeyed the will of the great being.”
“I’m sure I did without realizing it,” said Talikeet. Then he died.
The brothers and their mother were very sad, and they resented the actions of the great being.
Time passed, and then the older brother’s waist began to pain him. Then the younger brother’s back began to hurt. When they showed each other their bodies, they found fist-sized “eyes”, one on the older brother’s waist and one on the younger brother’s back. They were surprised and asked their mother Rainier for help.
Rainier went down the river and visited the forest spirit. There she learned how to help her sons.
This was the forest spirit’s answer. “Go due west and wait for a warrior to appear. Once you are sure of his true intentions, then follow his guidance.” So she took her sons and journeyed due west, waiting for a warrior to appear. The “eye” on the older brother’s waist grew larger, while the “eye” on the younger brother’s back even wept great tears.
Finally a powerful man appeared astride a beast and guided the brothers to a pass in the mountains.
They crossed many rivers. The prairies turned to deserts, and the mountains stretching down from the north broke off. Going around them to the south, they reached a high hill. Standing on the hilltop looking west, they saw water flowing from a mountaintop through a valley until it became a river which flowed into the great sea to the west. Looking east, they saw a like river flowing into the great sea to the east. They were on a bow-shaped ridge connecting valleys on either side of the mountains, at the source of two rivers flowing into the two seas.
At the very highest point of the ridge the warrior dismounted from his beast. They walked to a waterfall and climbed up it. A black cave gaped at the top of the waterfall, and inside the cave lived the Ancient One. The Ancient One told the brothers about the creation of heaven and earth. He knew much about the past, as if he had experienced it all himself, so the older brother asked the Ancient One his age. This was his answer.
“Look at me and decide for yourselves. Tell me what you think.”
But the answer came to neither brother, so they could not tell him.
Instead of telling them his age, the Ancient One said, “I have been here since the birth of all things.”
The brothers asked him to take away the eyes on the older brother’s waist and the younger brother’s back. He answered, “Very well. But from this day you must keep watch here instead of me.”
Then the Ancient One disappeared. At the same time, the “eyes” fell from their bodies, rolled over the stone floor, and turned into black rocks. The brothers became immortal, and watched over that land. With its rivers flowing into the sea east and west, it was a good land for keeping watch.
As soon as she saw he’d finished reading, Machiko spoke. “You understand what this means, right?”
Kaoru didn’t much care for this kind of story. He wasn’t a great reader of fiction to begin with, and he found folktales and myths in particular to be too incoherent, too lacking in reality. He had a hard time grasping them even when he did read them.
This one was like that. It developed too fast—what was it trying to say, exactly? The words sounded like they had significance, but they could be interpreted to mean anything. Kaoru felt that, no, he didn’t exactly “understand what this means”.
“Are the other stories pretty much like this, too?” he asked.
“Sort of.”
“This ‘Ancient One’. Are we to understand him literally as an old man?”
He imagined the Ancient One was a metaphor for something, along with the Multitude of Watching Eyes. Did the Ancient One represent a longevity zone? What did that make the Watching Eyes? It didn’t make sense to him.
“Here’s the problem,” Machiko said, taking out the map included at the end of the book and unfolding it before Kaoru. It was a map of North America, showing the names of the major Indian peoples.
“Folktales and myths: are they completely made-up? According to some scholars, myths are based on historical facts from early in a people’s existence. They contain that race’s deepest wishes. Traces of the Great Flood, for instance, we find all over the world, and it’s common knowledge now that the legend of the ark was at least somewhat based on fact.
“So let’s assume that the story you just read, Kaoru, has some element of fact in it. Okay? Now the Talikeet were part of the Okewah people of western Oklahoma.” She pointed with her pinky to a point on the map representing the current residence of the Talikeet tribe.
“It says in the story that the brothers went due west from here.” She began to move her finger to the left of the page, but then stopped. “Where were they heading? According to the story the hilltop they stood on was at a southern gap in a great mountain range, at the source of two rivers, one flowing to the great western sea and one flowing to the great eastern sea. Geographically, those mountains have to be the Rockies.”
She moved her finger along a north-south line, stopping at a point where the Rockies ended their long march down from Canada. The point was directly west from the Talikeet homeland, and just to the south of it stood a mountain of some twelve thousand feet. Which meant that the spot Machiko was pointing to was a huge valley supporting a bow-shaped strip of land. In the desert.
She traced an X over the bow-shaped rise with her finger. Just to the left of that spot could be seen the thin line of the Little Colorado River, which fed into the Colorado River, which flowed into the Gulf of California—the Pacific Ocean. Just to the right of that spot could be seen the uppermost reaches of the Rio Grande, which flowed into the Gulf of Mexico—the Atlantic Ocean. The sources of these two rivers flowing into the world’s two great oceans came together at this point, divided by this ridge, part of the Continental Divide.
It was the Four Corners region, where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado met. Site of the negative gravitational anomaly, where a longevity zone might, conjecturally, be located. Not far from the research labs at Los Alamos. Near where the deformed and swollen trees had been found. Right where Kaoru had drawn an X on his gravitational anomaly map ten years ago.
Kaoru felt dizzy. If he stood on that hill and looked west, he’d see wat
er bubbling up from the side of the mountain that would eventually reach the Pacific Ocean; if he looked east he’d see a similar sight. Glittering water slicing its way through a desert wasteland.
The landscape presented itself before his mind’s eye. He was standing unsteadily with one foot on either side of that ridge. He’d never been there, but from the contour lines on the map he could imagine it with clarity. But what shook him wasn’t that. It was his own guesswork … The longevity zone he’d speculated about was now taking on the air of reality. Something was waiting for him there. The thought struck him with awe. Kaoru no longer cared whether the myth was just a made-up story. What was important was how much of his own hope and desire he could pack into the myth he himself was making. His father wanted it. Reiko wanted it. And now his mother did, too.
Machiko put her hand on Kaoru’s knee and spoke to him. Her voice was a whisper, but it was full of assurance.
“You’ll go there for me, won’t you?”
But there were things he still wasn’t sure of.
“You’re positive this is where Franz Boer went, are you, Mom?”
Machiko grinned. “The article mentioned the work he’d been doing, didn’t it? Do you remember what it was?”
“He was a surveyor, wasn’t he?” Franz Boer, a retired surveyor living in Portland, Oregon, the article had begun.
“That was his day job, but he was also a member of the American Folklore Society. I bet you didn’t know that.”
“How could I?”
“This book,” she said, taking up North American Indian Folklore again, “was actually compiled by several people. At the end it says who was responsible for which story.”
In the back of the book there was a list of six editors, and beneath each name was a list of numbers corresponding to the stories in the volume each editor had been in charge of. The thirty-fourth story, “Watched by a Multitude of Eyes,” had been edited by none other than Franz Boer.
“I see.”