The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  The souls of these dead were a long time departing; it took thirty-three years to cross over. Rites and rituals helped them along on their journey. As Shimada pedaled past a clutch of such tombs, he wondered what it might have been like to hide inside one of them, among the bones and decaying flesh of one’s kin. He couldn’t imagine. But during the Battle of Okinawa, that’s exactly what happened, both on the main island and elsewhere: entire families, terrified and starved, taking refuge from the American maelstrom outside in darkened tombs where habu and ghosts dwelled, a world of hungry ghosts and restless souls, and it occurred to Shimada as he pedaled on that perhaps the foreigner was one such restless ghost.

  Perhaps the foreigner’s descendants had fallen lax, neglected his grave, forgotten to offer the proper prayers or foods. Maybe this foreigner who had washed up on Shimada’s shores was simply a soul untethered. It would certainly explain the agitation.

  He was traversing boundaries, the spirit tracks that crisscrossed the island. Buddhism had barely made an imprint on Hateruma—there were no temples anywhere—but the older religions were still very much in evidence, one just needed to know where to look, and how. Hateruma was overlaid with invisible prayer routes and sacred areas, utaki as they were known, rarely marked but always there, much like the spectral paths of the habu or the wanderings of ancestral ghosts. Contact points with the Nirai Kanai, the Other World, the utaki were everywhere—and nowhere. Sometimes it felt like a fairy tale to Shimada, a child’s story deserving of a small, indulgent smile. At other times, it felt as though the entire island were one extended utaki.

  When Shimada had first arrived at his post, the retiring inspector before him advised Shimada not to trespass on these spots. “Best not to enter any area the islanders consider sacred,” he said. “They take that sort of stuff seriously out here.”

  But the utaki could be anywhere, in a forested grove or a tramped-down clearing, beside a field, even hidden inside a coral cave. “How will I know?” he asked, to which the retiring inspector had laughed and said, “You’ll know it when someone comes out and yells at you.”

  There were utaki that even the locals avoided except on certain equinoctial cycles. Older calendars, lunar arcs. It confounded his sense of order.

  When he’d met and married his wife, Shimada had asked her how many utaki there were on Hateruma. “Three,” she’d said.

  “Just three?”

  “Three main ones. Five secondary ones. And another that encompasses the sea.”

  “So”—he counted it on his fingers—“nine?”

  “Oh no, more than that.” There were any number of minor utaki as well. “And some of the minor ones are more important than the major ones,” she explained with a cheerful lack of clarity. He felt dizzy trying to make sense of it.

  “There is no sense to make,” his wife said. “It just is.”

  As hard as it was for Shimada to believe, Hateruma Island was still under the sway of noro priestesses, women who acted as envoys to the Other Side, a human chain that stretched back into prehistory, older than Buddhism, older than Japan. Shimada had come across scorched earth in bamboo groves, blackened stones outside coastal caves, had wondered whether a nascent arsonist was in their midst only to be told, no, these were the work of the noro, drawing the gods out in order to placate and petition Hateruma’s obstinately moody deities. They always needed praising and prodding, these island gods.

  He’d seen one such ritual early on, at the sea’s edge, a young woman in white robes falling into a trance and then wading out only to return, cleansed and cold, robes clinging to her, as drums kept a doleful beat on the shore. When stronger rites were needed, the noro would sacrifice goats, sending out the severed heads on a makeshift raft that was intentionally designed to sink beneath the surface.

  Noro priestesses were no mere conjurers. When the spirits inhabited them, they didn’t merely speak for the gods, they were gods. Temporary gods, but gods nonetheless. In Hateruma, their status remained, stubborn and impenetrable and ancient and absolutely maddening to outsiders like Shimada.

  A team of researchers from a university in Osaka had come tromping through, not so long ago, looking for tales of the noro. They called themselves anthropologists, folklorists, but really, they were thieves. That was how his wife put it. Here to record for posterity what was already timeless. They had contacted his wife when they first arrived. But why? Why his wife, of all people? It was Shimada’s first inkling of something moving below the surface. When was that, three years ago? Four? They’d brought in a woman from Australia as well, or maybe America, he couldn’t recall. The Japanese interpreter, from Tokyo, a keen young woman fascinated by “island ways,” was soon bogged down in frustration and ambiguity while trying to translate Okinawan terms for the foreigner. These were concepts that barely fit into Japanese, let alone English. The women sat around a table as Shimada hovered in the background, listening in, but it soon became clear that they not only spoke different languages, they also inhabited entirely different worlds: his wife, the foreign woman, the lady from the Japanese university. No stories changed hands that day, not as far as Shimada was aware.

  “We don’t like to talk about it,” his wife said over sashimi and grated daikon, after the other women had left in a flurry of bows and overly polite thank yous. Japanese were always so much more formal than Okinawans.

  Mrs. Shimada dipped a small slab of mahi-mahi into the vinegared sauce, dripped it across the table to her plate.

  During the interview, she’d let slip that several of her childhood friends had been high priestesses, and now that the others had gone, Shimada asked, “Is that true?”

  “Sure. You know Mrs. Kagawa?”

  “The one who owns the sweets shop?”

  “That’s right. She was a top-notch priestess back in the day, when she was younger.”

  Shimada stopped, chopsticks poised midair, hovering over the loosely arranged plate of sashimi. “Mrs. Kagawa? The one who’s always off-key at karaoke? The one who forgets to bring her futon in at night? Her?”

  “She was the head noro. Her daughter has taken over now.”

  “Her daughter, the public nurse? The one with the wonky eye?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “But she’s—she’s medically trained. In science. Surely she’s not some sort of magician as well.”

  His wife laughed. “People can live in more than one world.” She delicately shoveled more slices of the fast-melting fish into her mouth, and at that moment he knew—knew without having to ask—that his wife had also been, perhaps still was, a noro of the under-realm herself. She smiled at her husband as she chewed.

  THE DOOR TO NUMBER FOUR

  HE COULD FEEL IT IN his thighs now, the gradual rise in elevation, had to lean forward to avoid changing gears (he only had the three to choose from), could hear his breath whistle in his chest as he approached the height of land—little more than a subtle swell in topography; but on an island as level as Hateruma, that was all that was needed. Beyond these heights, such as they were, the road began its long, graceful descent toward the harbor. His pedaling was done. Officer Shimada could now coast to whatever it was that was waiting for him at the end of this. He picked up speed, avoiding his brakes, arcing from one curve to the next, his tightly tugged police cap almost flying off at times.

  Along the way, he passed the island’s forlorn cement factory, where a chalky taste hung in the air, and, soon after, the sugarcane processing plant and the island’s distillery, where Hateruma’s version of awamori was aged in clay vats much the way bodies were stored in tombs. Sixty proof and highly flammable, spiced with cinnamon and honey on occasion to lessen the blow, but still lethal, awamori was the island’s liquor of choice. Folk legends told of a drunkard who, having overimbibed, put a lit cigarette into his mouth the wrong way and set his insides on fire. Just a story, to be sure, but Shimada had never developed a taste for this witch’s brew either way. He had only ever drunk it down
, deeply and wholly, once, on the night of the dry wood. That was how he thought of the moment he discovered his wife’s infidelities.

  It was a sliding door that did it, the swollen wood having first expanded with humidity and then dried over time, a common problem on Hateruma, where doors often stuck, often didn’t close properly. Officer Shimada was coming back from a night of beer at the izakaya, was walking down a lane past the junky backyards of the teachers’ residences, two-floor row housing, lined up, in poor repair. The coral walls that surrounded Hateruma’s homes did more than protect against typhoons, they also shielded inhabitants from their neighbors’ gaze. Several of the walls out back of the teacherage had crumbled into piles of rubble, and as Shimada made his way down the lane, warmed by beer and good cheer, he saw, under the light of a partial moon, a sliver of brightness from one of the rooms. A back door hadn’t slid closed all the way, leaving a noticeable gap, and Shimada, ever the policeman and concerned over possible burglars and (equally unlikely) wayward habu, decided to investigate.

  As he approached the back door, he stopped. Could see a pair of plastic slippers in the rear entranceway. His wife’s. Shimada recognized the broken strap and skewed daisies over the toeholds, even the way they had been kicked to one side—she never bothered to stop and line them up, as was considered proper protocol—and as he stood there, Shimada heard laughter coming from inside. A laughter that was very familiar. And he knew: His wife hadn’t been at a sick friend’s. She was administering to other needs.

  When Shimada got back to the station, he grabbed hold of a bottle of awamori, given as a gift on some congratulatory milestone, never opened, and drove the island’s sole patrol car down, and then onto, the beach. He threw it into park, stumbled to the water’s edge, and drank the liquor straight from the bottle, burning all the way down.

  That was the night he saw the sea turtle.

  He was lying on his back, staring up unfocused at the Milky Way, feeling unsteady and unsure. He missed her already, the wife he thought she used to be, her loud laugh and daikon legs. That’s the problem with marriage, even one astutely arranged through a matchmaker: love always gets tangled up, like seaweed in a net.

  Shimada under the moon, listening to the sigh and slap of waves along the shore, the shh-shh-shh of slippers on tatami, and he knew that nothing would really change. That was perhaps the worst part.

  He heard a splash, sat up, shirt crusted with sand. Another splash, softer than the first. Was it just the sea among the mangroves? Mangroves were strange creatures. Saltwater trees able to live in brackish waters, roots like legs—“walking trees,” they were called—they had colonized the tropical coastlines of Okinawa. Here they formed an ominous-looking wall along the beach amid the ebb and swirl of murky waters. But it wasn’t the mangroves and it wasn’t tidal waters he was hearing. It was a sea turtle, pulling itself out of the ocean, wet and rare and greenish-blue in the night. It lifted its head, looked around. It was an old man’s head squinting at the world with eyes at once wise and weary—and the wise are so often weary. It blinked, slowly, then slid back into the waters of the South China Sea, pushing itself into the foam, disappearing as cleanly as a dream. Shimada watched it go, could chart the turtle’s path below the water, in the trail it left behind.

  When he got home, his wife tutted, “Your bath. It’s gone cold.”

  “How’s your friend?” he asked, demanded.

  “Better.”

  He waited for her to confess, but she didn’t.

  “Good,” he said. I’m sure he is. I’m sure he’s much better.

  Officer Shimada had left his patrol car on the beach, had backed it up above the line of detritus that marked high tide and had made the long, drunken walk home alone.

  “Nami—” he said, for that was her name. But she didn’t let him finish.

  “You can’t take a bath now,” she said. “It’s too late and you’re too drunk. I’ll go drain the tub, heat up water for a shower instead.” Every year, drunken husbands drowned in bathtubs across Japan, often suspiciously so.

  Nami. It means “wave.”

  “I’m not drunk,” he said. He was the opposite of drunk. He was awake.

  But Nami had already left to drain the water, and he was now talking to himself. He stared down at the tabletop. “I saw a sea turtle,” he said.

  And now, here he is coasting into sunlight, down to the docks where the widow is waiting, standing outside her home, a pained smile on her plain face, hair parted and pulled back, streaks of early gray evident even from here, surprising in someone not yet old.

  She was wearing the same apron as his wife; there were only two clothing stores on the island, so it was a coin toss when it came to shopping. The widow bowed as he rolled up, bobbing from the waist. “Good morning, Mr. Walkabout.” It was an affectionate term for policemen in Japan, even when they arrived by bicycle. It suggested someone turning circles.

  Shimada came to a stop, bowed in return, still straddling his bicycle.

  “You knew I was coming?”

  “Your wife phoned.”

  “Ah.” It was Mrs. Shimada’s way of saying, by way of cheery reminder, “I know where he is, you know that I know, and I want you to know that he knows that I know.”

  Shimada dismounted, pushed his bike onto the stone-covered gutter in front of the widow’s door, kicked the stand down. Didn’t bother with the lock.

  The guesthouse was a squat cement-walled arrangement, a study in muddy colors much like Shimada’s. On Hateruma you had two choices: wooden homes that breathed but tended to rot, or drab cement structures that did neither. The amenities offered at the widow’s guesthouse were simple to the point of severe: four separate rooms out back, each with its own door opening onto the outside. Beds, not futons, and cement floors rather than tatami, which was just as well. Tatami would have gone soft with mildew in the wet air of Hateruma. Shimada found his own cement-walled home suffocating at times, missed the dank scent of wood and tatami that he’d grown up with. (Whenever he dropped by the older homes on Hateruma, he always made a point of taking a deep breath, inhaling the smell of it, the calm of it.) If nostalgia had a smell, it would smell like aged tatami.

  Fortunately for the widow, her clientele wasn’t overly concerned with aesthetics. Dockworkers and road crews mainly. The occasional government inspector who had missed the last boat back. The pier was a short downhill walk from there; hers was the last home in Hateruma, and as they stood in the glare outside, Shimada could hear the distant bellow of an incoming ferry, a low bassoon above the high cry of cicadas.

  It was hot out. They agreed on that, and after further pleasantries and concerns about the weather and the asking after one’s health—mandatory in such situations—Shimada-san cleared his throat. “So…” he said, letting the unasked question hang in the air.

  The widow’s smile grew more pained. “He arrived last night.”

  Shimada knew that smile. It was a smile of distress, a smile of extreme discomfort, a smile that foreigners often mistook for friendliness, an invitation to come closer when it was in fact a polite hand raised to keep you at a distance. He had seen that smile at the memorial, that smile of pain. A husband washed away, never to resurface. She’d had to bury an empty tomb. No children, and bones gone missing.

  “American?”

  “English. He wrote his passport in the guestbook. ‘UK’ means English, right?”

  They’d built the guesthouse near the docks so that her husband could be close to his boat, the same boat that had returned empty, found floating off the coast, swamped with seawater. It was tied up at the pier even now, within sight of the guesthouse. Shimada took out his notepad, tried to clear his thoughts. Clicked his pen authoritatively several times, but didn’t write anything down. What was it like to see your husband’s boat every morning when you stepped outside to shake the doormats or hang up the laundry? Was it a blessing? Or a curse?

  “He was jumpy, looking around, like he was waitin
g for someone to show up.”

  “Afraid?”

  “I think so. He kept saying ‘Ichi-ban minami? Doko? Doko?’ ” The most south? Where? Where?

  “He could speak Japanese?” Perhaps Shimada wouldn’t need the embarrassing ritual of the phrasebook after all.

  “He did, yes.”

  “How?”

  “Like all foreigners, badly.”

  Shimada nodded. “Age?”

  “Hard to say, isn’t it? They always look so much older than they are. Could have been forty. Could have been twenty-two. I’m not really sure. Red hair. Maybe yellow. Large nose. He was loud, but not angry, just, you know, loud.” She was describing every foreigner that ever lived, the foreigner in the Mind of God. “He wasn’t very tall, though. Not for a foreigner. He was—your size. Kind of petite.”

  That stung.

  “May I?” he asked.

  “Certainly.”

  She ushered him into her home, through the sliding doors, and he stepped up, out of his shoes and into a pair of guest slippers.

  “He didn’t come out for breakfast,” she said by way of apology for not having cleared the plates before the officer arrived. “I thought it might be evidence of some sort. Best left undisturbed.”

  Shimada could see the rolled omelet and fried fish still at the table like offerings to an absent god, the way one might leave oranges and mochi at a family altar, more as a gesture than for any actual sustenance.

  “I went to check on him,” she said. He could hear the waver in her voice.

  They walked through the dim interior of the kitchen to the back door, stepped out of the guest slippers and into outdoor ones—memories of his wife’s errant footwear gnawing at the edge—then along a shaggy path behind the house, past a row of bicycles in a rusted rack, reserved for guests, he imagined. Four rooms. Four racks. Three bicycles.