“An unexpected business matter awaits my attention in Ōsaka,” he claimed. “A change in travel plans is unavoidable,” he said and handed to me a list of the villages and inns where he had intended to travel with you—but not with me—in the weeks to come. “You may find this helpful,” he added.
I nodded but could not think of anything appropriate to say. Nishida-san did. “A honeymoon is a ritual for two,” he said, his eyes cast downward, as though he were reading an inscription on the tatami.
Habit took over once again, and I said, formal as if he were Father, “I see. I will try my best.”
Nishida-san could not hide his smile. The vision of me “trying my best” during a honeymoon was embarrassing to us both. Upon exchanging a deep bow to hide the color of our cheeks, he departed for Ōsaka, and I returned to your room.
To travel with you, Yakumo, was to be always by your side.
Nishida-san had taken care of every detail during our stay in Kitzuki and our day trips thereabouts, from hiring the small boat that took us from Inasa bay to Hinomisaki—where you were pleased to learn yet again that you were the first Westerner to visit a remote village and its Shintō shrine—to interpreting every question that you had for the two fishermen who rowed that boat.
“Is there a name for these rock formations?” you had asked Nishida-san, and he had asked the fishermen. “Why do the people call them ‘tortoise-shell stones’?” you wanted to know, and Nishida-san asked on your behalf. After some back-and-forth between the two fishermen, one of them offered Nishida-san a story, and he offered it to you. I was left to enjoy the passing seascape with its huddles and crags jutting from the depth.
But once the travels without Nishida-san began, I was the one who had to connect you to the land and to the sea. I learned that the border between the two was where you preferred to travel, the villages that clung to a sea cliff or clustered around a protected bay or, better still, on the islands that barely rose from the Sea of Japan and appeared to sink back into it at dusk. You said the shoreline was what a traveler to an island touches first, and what the traveler touches last. Sacred, you named it.
I tried my best, Yakumo.
In Matsue, I knew the shop owners, the bathhouse attendants, the peddlers, the purveyors of foodstuffs, or I knew of someone who did. The destinations that Nishida-san had chosen were all in neighboring Hoki Province. He had intended to travel with you to the villages along its coast and then eastward and inland toward Lake Togo. I knew no one in Hoki Province, Yakumo.
Early in the journey, you and I had arrived at an inn, spacious and lively with prosperous, merrymaking guests. The innkeeper greeted us, and after a cursory look around, you greeted him with a lone English word. Then in Herun-san’s language, you said “Hell!” shaking your head. “Hell!” you repeated, but this time directed toward me. You went out to the awaiting jinrikisha, leaving me to apologize to the innkeeper for your offense.
After a long, silent ride to another inn—a very small one run by an ancient-looking husband and wife, who gasped when she saw your face—you explained with the assistance of the Dictionary, a constant traveling companion but a poor stand-in for Nishida-san, that “Hell!” in both languages meant that the first inn was too smoky, too loud, and the men drinking there were all too Tani-no-oto from their new wealth, and if you had wanted that, you would have stayed in Matsue and gone to the merchant Orihara’s.
I did not err again, Yakumo.
For the duration of the journey, I made certain to ask the jinrikisha men, before I hired them, whether they knew of inns at the intended destinations that were built long ago, very clean, provided excellent food, and yet had the fewest number of guests. “Haunted ones?” they joked with me.
At the seaside village of Hamamura, we were lodging at a small inn that met with all of your requirements, plus another that you said was somewhat elusive but was best described by the English word “cozy.” How the body feels when you drink a cup of hot tea on a very cold night, I remember, was your definition. We had timed our arrival in Hamamura for the Obon, as Nishida-san had thought that its Bon-odori, the annual dance to welcome back the spirits of the ancestors, would intrigue you. He had heard that the dance was different from village to village along the Hoki coast. What Nishida-san had not anticipated was that the people of Hamamura and the nearby villages did not want a foreigner to frighten their ancestors upon their yearly return. The villagers refused to perform their Bon-odori in front of you, Yakumo. The innkeeper, her face wrinkled as a dried, salted plum, was the one who informed me. Once the people of Hamamura had made up their minds, the other villages followed suit, dispatching representatives to the inn to warn the innkeeper not to send the foreigner and his rashamen their way.
“The foreigner is harmless,” I heard myself saying to the old woman. “In his yukata and straw hat worn low, none of the returning spirits will even know.”
Her eyes—their lids pried wide open by unseen fingers—informed me that I had overstepped the bounds of honor. To deceive the ancestors on the one night of their return from the unseen world, I could see on her ashen face, was an unforgivable offense.
“Cholera,” I said to you instead. “All large gatherings are forbidden. No Bon-odori this year. A shame,” I added.
Husband, you believed me.
Even when the villagers of Hamamura threw fistfuls of sand at us as we departed, you believed me. Forgive me, Yakumo, but even you were not blind to their bodies, their arms tensing and uncoiling.
What I feared more was their silence. The villagers thought that you would not understand if they jeered or shouted, so they did not waste their words.
We were seen but unseen. We were the returning spirits but with no families there to greet us. We had died among strangers. A curse, Yakumo.
“Gentle and silent” was what you would say to Nishida-san, upon our return to Matsue.
“The villagers on the Hoki coast were gentle and silent?” Nishida-san asked me if those words were true. Friends of his, passing through Hamamura, had heard the villagers tell a very different story.
My face burned with the shame that I had felt in Hamamura and that I could not show there.
Nishida-san quickly apologized for having made such an error in judgment. “I should not have sent Herun-san to the Hoki coast,” he said. “But he takes such pleasure from being the first, as you know,” he explained.
“I know.”
“I should have thought about you, Setsu,” he said. It was the first and only time that Nishida-san would call me by my true name.
Upon hearing “Setsu” released from his lips—an intimacy implied, an affection kindled, a heart so near to mine—I heard my true name for what it had been until then, an afterthought in the lives of men.
“I know,” I repeated with a sharpness in tone that took him by surprise.
You continued to believe, Yakumo.
We would again find ourselves in remote villages where your Western face was the first. At each location, you professed—and I voiced for you—a keen interest in Shintō shrines, Buddhist temples, and the local folklore, superstitions, and beliefs, but the faith that you harbored within you was the one that you wanted most to find. You looked at the bodies around you, and you deemed them gentle. You wanted to see in those bodies something distant and apart from the brutal ones that you had known.
A body is a body, Yakumo, gentle and brutal. Nothing, in truth, separated yours from theirs.
I know you remember the heat and the odors rising from the bodies that surrounded us in Mitsu-ura. Two and a half hours from Matsue by jinrikisha and then the remainder of the journey on foot—a steep climb followed by a slippery descent via a narrow, crumbling path—before we reached the tiny fishing village of Mitsu-ura, and it was not even the final destination of the day. Someone in Matsue—may he make that journey for an eternity—had told you about a se
a cave that was said to be visited every night by the spirits of young children, who leave behind their footprints on a sandbank where there is a statue of Jizō, the Buddhist god who protects their spirits and eases their loneliness in the unseen world. Mitsu-ura was where we could hire a boat to take us to that sea cave.
While the jinrikisha man went to find someone to row us to the cave, we waited inside the dwelling of a fisherman to whom I had paid a considerable sum because it was there or under the hot sun. The village was too small to have an inn, and no one was able to name even a teahouse. Soon the narrow alleys separating the fisherman’s house from his neighbors were swarming with villagers. I asked the fisherman to slide close the walls of his house. He was reluctant because of the summer heat and because he was now a part of an entertaining show.
In Mitsu-ura there was also silence, Yakumo.
You nodded and offered your greetings in Herun-san’s language to the assembled villagers. They came closer each time, as if you had invited them to take a better look. The fisherman soon had no choice but to close up his house as I had asked, but its shōji walls were torn in so many places that the sight of the foreigner and his rashamen simply became smaller and more haphazardly framed. The viewing continued, and the fisherman demanded loudly from within his dwelling that his neighbors pay due respect to his “foreign visitor.” It took all of my will not to inform the fisherman that you were not there to visit with him. As sweat beads ran down your face, Yakumo, a shadow or a memory darkened your eye.
When the jinrikisha man returned, he wove his way through the dense crowd, and together we headed for the boat and its two rowers, a husband and wife. The villagers parted to allow us a clear path, but they followed closely behind and stood at the shoreline until we were a dot in the offing. They were not there to bid us farewell or safe passage. They were waiting, same as children watching a fish on a hook take its last openmouthed breath.
As the boat left the bay of Mitsu-ura, you jumped into the water. I assured the husband and wife that you had not changed your mind. I asked them to continue rowing, as I knew that you would swim behind the boat until you needed a rest. The boatwoman stared at me, as if she were unsure how I could be speaking the same language as she. He is the foreigner, not me! I wanted to say to her but did not because it was, perhaps, no longer true. Instead, I kept quiet and kept watch for your arms, slicing up and through the water’s surface, and for your familiar face.
The questions began as soon as you climbed aboard the boat, refreshed and cleansed. To the rowers, Herun-san’s language was entirely foreign, and I was its interpreter, unreliable at best. The boatman refused to address me directly. He answered my questions, which were your questions, as if his wife had been the one to ask and thus the appropriate recipient of his answers. As the boat glided into the entrance of the caves—it was not one, as you had been told, but a series of caves connected by a sunlit pool of water, all hidden from view behind the cliff face—the boatwoman picked up a rock by her bare feet and tapped the side of the boat. The echoes grew so loud that you covered your ears. I did the same. Then you wanted to know why she had behaved so, and I asked her. The boatwoman replied that all who came into these caves announced themselves in this way. To whom, you wanted to know and I asked. The boatwoman did not answer right away and seemed to be searching her memory for the correct reply. But before she could offer one, you swung a leg over the side of the boat and were about to slip into the water for another swim. The boatwoman grabbed the interpreter’s arm—the strength of her grip made me grab on to yours. The boat swayed from side to side, and the boatman watched without saying a word, as the three lurching bodies stilled themselves and eased back into place.
“It is forbidden!” the boatwoman warned me.
“It is forbidden!” I warned you.
“A quick swim,” you assured me.
“A quick swim,” I assured her.
Her response was to pick up the rock again and tap the side of the boat, harder and louder than before. The echoes felt like strong, unseen waves that could tip the boat over at any moment. When we could hear one another again, the boatman grunted a warning, and I said to you, “Shark!”
You believed me, Yakumo.
Once we were back in Matsue though, you, like the boatman, would not speak to me. We had had disagreements, minor and stemming from the day-to-day nature of living under the same roof, but never a raised word and never a raised hand. I did not even recognize your silence as anger, at first. I thought you were writing about the caves and thus cocooned in the elsewhere of your thoughts. The caves, I must admit, had been worth the difficulties of the journey. The tiny footprints in the sand were exactly as you had been promised. The heap of straw sandals left for the spirits of those children, by the pilgrims who had preceded us, haunted us more. The world of the living and the world of the unseen overlapped in those caves, and as the boat made its way out again we thought about all the tiny ones who would not.
When you awoke, still silent, four mornings in a row, I apologized for your disappointment. I thought that your ire toward me had to do with the missed opportunity to swim in that hidden, sun-dappled pool.
“You lied,” you said.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“I know the Japanese word for ‘ghost,’ Sweet Wife. The boatman said it, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you say ‘shark’ to me?” you asked.
I lowered my eyes.
“You know me, Sweet Wife,” you continued.
“Yes.”
“I want a ghost more than I want a swim.”
“Yes, Husband.”
“It is a shame not to hear a story, Sweet Wife.”
“It is, Husband.”
I would see the shadow in your eye again, Yakumo, in the village of Kaka-ura, and a year later in the town of Uragō on one of the Oki islands. You continued to believe, even when the crowd there became a mob and a policeman had to be summoned to keep the peace.
A body is a body, gentle and brutal, Yakumo.
With time, your anger toward me departed, and I welcomed the words of Herun-san’s language back to the house in the shadows of Matsue Castle, where it had kept that newly formed, sparsely populated country running smoothly. Yao, the maid, was soon to bid it farewell though, as she did not wish to move with the household to Kumamoto City. We left the bush warbler with her, as he would have died brokenhearted without her. Hinoko had found a feral mate and departed with him months ago.
On the fifteenth day of November, 1891, the 24th year of Meiji, your students, more than two hundred of them, escorted us to the wharf in Matsue, where your fellow teachers were among those who had gathered to bid us safe passage to Kumamoto City. Foster Grandfather, foster Father, and foster Mother were there too, but soon they would embark on the same journey in order to be with us again. Yao was there. Kamata was there. The jinrikisha men who waited in front of the Tomitaya were there. Tsune, Onobu, and even Oman were there. I searched the faces for Nishida-san’s. Only illness would have prevented him from saying his farewells. Even on his better days, his fits of coughing brought with them droplets of blood. I saw them when we three were in Kitzuki that summer.
Nishida-san’s absence at the wharf and then the shores of Matsue receding became one moment of loss for me, Yakumo. I could never think of Matsue without thinking of Nishida-san. I could never long for Matsue without longing for Nishida-san. When he passed from this world too soon, Matsue did as well. It was as if that city had only one inhabitant, thirty-four years of age, and when he departed for the unseen world, the city faded from all of memory’s maps. In the years since, I have asked myself, How can one man have carried within him an entire city?
A wife cannot say such words to a husband. A husband cannot hear such words from a wife without demanding, Why am I not the man married with Matsue?
Please believ
e me, Husband. I did not know that the second telling of your story would unearth Nishida-san’s and mine. Brief and barely begun, it is a story that I have carried within me, written and rewritten many times in the language that he and I share, but there was no place for it to go after Kitzuki, no words to continue it after “Setsu” and “I know.” His was my second heart, Yakumo. Yours was the one that was near.
It is better that you hear this now, Husband. When I join you in the unseen world, the wound of it will have healed.
Before we leave Matsue behind us, Yakumo, this was the ghost story that you had been so sore to miss:
The boatman, as you heard, had said “Ghost!”—and not “Shark!” as I had claimed—but he was not warning you. He was warning the ghost. Same as their fellow villagers, this man and woman of Mitsu-ura saw you, Yakumo, as a body that did not belong there. Same as the villagers on the Hoki coast, their allegiances were not with the foreigner and his rashamen but with the dead among them. In the hands of this man and woman, I had entrusted your life. On their boat, your body and mine had been taken behind the face of a sea cliff so remote that, if we were to scream when the boatman brained us with a rock or a hardwood oar, no one would have heard, and the echoes of our cries, like us, would have died.
I yelled “Shark!” because I needed you to comply, Yakumo. The boatwoman did not want you to sully the sacred waters of the sea caves. Her husband was of the same clear opinion. I needed you to stay with me. I did not want us to perish there. No one would have looked for us until it was too late. The villagers of Mitsu-ura would have claimed that they never saw us depart from their bay. Fearful of being falsely blamed, the jinrikisha man who had taken us there from Matsue would have denied any receipt of the fare.
The Sweetest Fruits Page 21