Across the surface of the ruins were scattered shards of porcelain tile—pale blue, like whenever she was happy. He bent down to pick one up. On the back side of the glossy rhomboid plate, there clung a piece of reddish flesh.
It’s from a petaurista, Hanishibe thought as he crawled around on the pile of wreckage. He discovered a number of objects that were apparently fingers, and it was as he was averting his eyes from them that he spotted a geometric pattern peeking out through a gap in the bonebricks and hemomochi. In a sudden panic, he clawed away the wreckage.
Yatsuo’s form—buried lying on its side—began to appear, her body severely twisted. Her crushed head was split into four large pieces, from between which peeked eyeballs and rows of amethyst teeth.
In eyes that had no pigment—in eyes he was seeing for the very first time—there yet dwelled some life. Even as they fluttered from left to right, they were staring at Hanishibe. The rows of teeth opened wider as she wrung out words in a faint voice. Hanishibe put his ear next to her mouth. From the rents in her face, hot breath was escaping.
“I … I knew.”
“Knew what? No wait, don’t talk.”
“… knew you. ’Cause of … the kind of person … you are.” Yatsuo swallowed down her pooled saliva with evident pain. “Now you … listen close … my dearest …”
He drew so close that his ear entered the gap in her sundered face.
“Don’t offer … my magatama … to the shrine. Keep it yourself. It’s in my head … And in your Heretofore …”
“In mine?”
“And then —”
“And then … what?”
“You … are the only one … who can stop you. You alone.”
Hanishibe took hold of Yatsuo’s digitless hand and remained bent over by her side.
At last he looked up, as if awakening from a light sleep, and reached in with his hand through the gouge in Yatsuo’s head, sinking his fingers deep into her soft brain. When his fingertips felt a hard surface, he pulled it out without a sound.
“Come on, let’s go home,” said his grandfather. “The rest is the Level Association’s job.”
“Grandpa, what are you not telling me?” Hanishibe said. His back turned on him, he squeezed the blood-smeared magatama.
“I’m not hiding anything. It’s just that … you can’t recollect it.”
“She had a very deep relationship with me, didn’t she?”
“She did. The two of you were husband and wife.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it wasn’t …” Hanishibe’s grandfather fumbled for the words. “It wasn’t a very happy marriage.”
3
The petaurista disposal center stood along the petraderm of the lowest city level, whose ring enclosed the filthbed.
An abandoned building there had been refurbished for the job. Its ceiling was covered in a patchwork of peritoneum sheets, and its floor was covered with straw mats, where momonji of all shapes and sizes were laid out on their backs.
Amid a thick miasma that hung on the air, many taxonomists and ebisus were hard at work. Once the momonji were classified and disassembled, they were carried to the auction block next door, which was already buzzing with people involved in the processing industry.
The grandfather who was a taxonomist and his grandson who was studying to be one were staring at a relatively undamaged momonji from a vantage point near its head. Three ebisus had also taken position—one on its left, one on its right, and one on its stomach.
When Hanishibe’s grandfather gave a nod, the ebisu on its stomach used his palm-spike to pierce the center of the momonji’s brain and started cutting it open between its rows of claw-legs. At the same time, the other two ebisus started pulling off its fur from both sides. They scraped out its yellow fatty layer and divided it between them, stuffing it into huge, wide-mouthed jars. Then, removing several fragments of elastic shelleton, they exposed the birthingsac—swollen large and pale crimson with bloodshot capillaries. When they cut open its thick sacwall, a beast covered in black fur appeared—a monkey, apparently.
Hanishibe’s grandfather stood in front of the monkey, but unlike the other taxonomists, he checked neither its pulse with his fingertips nor listened to its heart with his horn-shaped instrument. Instead, he simply stared at it with his many ocules and stuck a syringe into its thick-furred neck.
Spasming, the monkey sat up, coughing violently. Hanishibe’s grandfather slapped it on the back. It vomited up gastric juice, and then it spoke.
“Where am I?”
The returnee was led away by a purifier from the shrine, and then they moved on to the next momonji, where the same operations were repeated. When the thick, sticky protoplasm came spilling out of the birthingsac this time, all that they found inside was a nerve plexus. Next was a pig without arms or legs, but after that they found a man who was quite close to the human baseform. Due to the shock of impact, however, he had terrible internal bleeding and they weren’t able to save him.
When they had finished work on the seventh momonji, the ebisu in charge of signaling came into the disposal center from his post outside and informed Hanishibe’s grandfather that the Shrine Chieftain was requesting his presence: a momonji too gigantic to move had fallen onto the mound of dead petauristas, he said, so he wanted the disassembly to be performed on-site.
Outside, petauristas were still being hauled in, and the acidic odor that was beginning to drift through the air no doubt meant that the filthbed was becoming active. The mound of petauristas was moving up and down as though it were breathing and slowly rotating as well. A Pillar would be rising within the next few toki.
Hanishibe, having been warned that it was dangerous, stayed behind at the disposal site as he was told. His grandfather, still limping, headed off toward the mound. His figure receded gradually into the distance, and then he started climbing.
Sometime later, Hanishibe was looking on intently as another taxonomist put his skills to work, when without warning the ebisus all rose to their feet as though they had forgotten what they were doing. Following their gaze, Hanishibe turned around and looked back. Through the peritoneum, he could see countless petauristas being thrown up and down on the top of the mound.
A mysterious lump of black flesh was sticking up from the top of it. It writhed about fiercely and then, as he watched, sank down, pushing petauristas out of its way like so much gravel. The mound itself began to collapse.
A huge wave of petauristas came rolling in. It smashed through the walls of the disposal center, closing in on Hanishibe and the others. Instinctively, Hanishibe dove into a momonji’s hollowed-out abdominal cavity.
The world turned over again and again. Hanishibe was deafened by the violent crashing of meat and exoshelleton.
When the suffocating stillness became too much to bear, he tried to crawl out of the momonji, but a translucent membrane got stuck to his face. He ripped it apart at the seam with his hands and at last escaped, only to be greeted by an acrid miasma that stung his eyes.
It was said that disposal centers were constructed simply and designed from the start with the expectation of avalanches, which was why they collapsed so easily. Those ichor-splattered workers who had managed to hold body and soul together were already starting classification on the petauristas that had been swept over to them.
Out on the filthbed, geysers of bedfluid were now spouting here and there from what had become a lower, more gently sloping mound. Pungent steam clung to it like a thin gauze curtain and rose higher, taking on the form known as the Pillar, reminiscent of a white serpent. Mishaguchi, the red-mawed god of old who had descended with the innumerable petauristas, dwelt therein. From now until the time that the Pillar dissipated, divers oracles would be bestowed by way of the Divine Gate.
If only he had run. Those were the words spoken regretfu
lly by the Shrine Chieftain.
Hanishibe’s grandfather, he said, had been on top of the mound attending to the laparotomy of a momonji the size of a house. Jet-black skin had appeared from a rip in its gigantic birthingsac, and the moment that his grandfather touched it, he had immediately ordered everyone else to evacuate. An ebisu who had been rescued after being caught up in the avalanche had witnessed his grandfather’s final moments. A dark, sinister-looking thing had burrowed from the topmost portion of the mound deep down toward the Abyss at the center of the filthbed, he said, and from there, a whirlpool suddenly began to expand outward. Hanishibe’s grandfather, still only about midway down the slope, had just kept walking. There was no room for doubt: it was because of the injury to his leg he had received while rescuing Hanishibe.
When the whirlpool swallowed him, the ebisu said, the knot on his back had burst open, and a long, ropelike thing had shot up into the air. And then his grandfather had sunk into the whirlpool; it had not been a lifeline to save him.
His grandmother, having heard the news, had been rushing down toward the bottom city level when she was attacked on the way and beaten to death by citizens wielding giant shell hammers spiked at both ends.
They had mistaken her for a petaurista.
In the Descent from Heaven that day, thirty-six people lost their lives and twelve houses were destroyed. Two hundred sixty-seven momonji were disassembled, and from them were harvested forty-one returnees, seventy-eight large mammals, twelve lumps of clay bearing seeds of various plants, and many aquatic creatures and small animals in great variety.
Chapter 3:
The Bonds of Fate
1
The funerals for Hanishibe’s grandparents were held at the main shrine, a shinmei-zukuri-style building that stood in the center of the Deilith.
Beneath the steep, straight lines of its gabled roof, Hanishibe was staring in a state of utmost lethargy at the sacred branches offered by the mourners.
Even after the funeral, he was unable to move from where he stood.
When he came to himself, he realized that someone was standing in front of him.
Without preamble, the man stated his business. “Why don’t you come and live at the shrine?” he said.
Realizing that it was the Shrine Chieftain, Hanishibe looked up.
He required no explanation to understand that the Shrine Chieftain was feeling responsible for his grandfather’s death. Hanishibe felt a resistance toward living in these filthbed-enclosed surroundings, but when he learned that he would be assisting the Reuniter-Pancarnate, he accepted the request.
The grounds of the Deilith felt even more cramped than when viewed from the upper levels. In back of the solemn main shrine stood the shrine office, a four-story building with an area of only about two hundred tsubo. It looked like nothing more than a rocky mountain. A small, simple room on its third floor was Hanishibe’s new quarters. Contrary to what the public might imagine, the rooms where the Shrine Chieftain’s family lived were a far cry from luxurious as well.
His meals were usually taken together with the shrine purifiers in the second-story cafeteria, although he was also occasionally invited to dine with the Shrine Chieftain’s family.
The Shrine Chieftain’s wife, whom Narikabura and Hanishibe both held in high esteem, had retained her beautiful baseform without mutation, as had her two children—a six-year-old daughter who adored her father, and a three-year-old son who was always playing with a baby momonji. The simple petaurista cuisine, as befitted the priesthood, was mostly just carapaceans, yet the Shrine Chieftain’s family would dig into it as though it were a sumptuous feast.
The Shrine Chieftain was kind to his family. And to Hanishibe, and to the ebisus. He treated everyone with kindness and affection. He was also a passionate educator. He took his divinity students into the Deilith’s inner shrine—forbidden to the general public—and there he taught them about the eight million gods, training them in the use of Imperial Regalia such as the jeweled mirror that reflected the Sword of Gathering Clouds and the giant Magatama tied up with countless braided cords. He was also willing to seriously engage even the most preposterous discussions of Shinto ritual.
Komorizu, who had changed his major from taxonomy to theology, started dropping by Hanishibe’s room frequently on his way back from theology department training sessions.
To hear him tell it, his head was ready to burst with matters theological. “The way you ushe your head is totally different,” he would say. “I couldn’t be more shatisfied, but shomehow … yeah, my forgetfulnesh is getting a lot worsh than before, and it’s causing problems. Maybe thish is what they mean by ‘academic tunnel vision.’”
It was always a sure bet that whenever Komorizu visited Hanishibe’s room, something would turn up missing after he had gone.
Hanishibe began helping the elderly Reuniter-Pancarnate in the shrine office’s first-floor Reintroduction office. One thing was a constant whether he was walking back and forth among the shelves lining the four walls of the individual registry, flipping through dermasheets, or reading line after line of flowing, reddish-black characters recorded in elegant marrowpen script: his ears had no reprieve from the voice of the Reuniter-Pancarnate, sitting in the center of the room declaring reunions.
The Reuniter-Pancarnate died within six months of Hanishibe’s going to work there, but Hanishibe felt no unease about taking over the job.
Holed up in the Reintroduction office, Hanishibe attended to the stream of returnees freshly thrown into the Hereandnow. One after another, he dealt with each in turn, on and on with no end in sight. The returnees, having each attained their individual variations, were unable to remember even their names at first. Groping along blindly, Hanishibe would pile on question after question, unearthing their Heretofores little by little and comparing what he learned against what was recorded in the vast individual registry.
There were many who could not recollect anything right away. There were others who had to be investigated because their manner of conversation raised doubts about whether or not they were even people. Some of them, unable to accept their prior selves, spouted nothing but lies. There were even some imprisoned by ontological distresses, declaring, “I’m not me!” The declaration of a reunion required great fortitude and endurance. Tests of computational ability using divine letters and spirit numbers were administered, which thankfully made it possible to narrow down the possibilities somewhat. This was because most of those who showed superior ability turned out to have been theology students.
“There were buildings so tall they caressed the sky, rising up one after another like trees in a forest.”
Mixed in among their memories of the Heretofore, fragments of the collective unconscious that was the Hereafter also came leaking out sometimes. Hanishibe had a feeling that he had memories of those sights as well. But what he himself had told the Reuniter-Pancarnate of long ago was a frightening world full of man-made things resembling furniture and household appliances all jostling against one another.
Memories of the Hereafter, whose landscapes could vary so vastly depending on the teller, continued to be compiled in the Book of the Heritage of the Hereafter. In recent years, however, the details of the content recollected had become terribly vague, and new additions were hardly ever made to that record anymore. The uncertain history of the Hereafter—that piled accretion of lives and deaths, of people recklessly multiplying through san’e—felt unstable and distorted, as though the slightest nudge could send it all crashing down.
When his work was finished and he returned to his room, Hanishibe would collapse into bed and be asleep in the space of a breath, oblivious to the stains on his hand from his marrowpen. He was worn down to the point of breaking, but when he thought of the possibility that his grandfather, his grandmother, or Yatsuo might be among the returnees, it became impossible to cut corners in the interviews. Ye
t even if they were revivified, the sense of remorse that Hanishibe carried would most likely be with him forever. In a small way, even Hanishibe could understand the feelings of those who threw away their Heretofores.
There were all kinds of reasons that led people to seek the obliviation of their Heretofores. Once they had signed their consent, a purifier would appear and jab the hooked ends of a sharp bonerod deep into their nostrils, cutting the nerve-lines connected to their magatama.
These obliviates, now no different from newborns, were then entrusted to the village of the ebisus, who lived on the rafts that floated on the filthbed. Immediately following their obliviation, they seemed innocent and happy, although others might feel flashes of envy toward them as their bodily variations gradually receded and they returned to the human baseform. Later, though, as their lives on the filthbed continued, their forearms would grow to an unearthly length, and individual characteristics would disappear from their faces until it became impossible to see any kind of expression there. As far as most people were concerned, this was merely nature’s recompense for those who had fled their destinies.
For Hanishibe, stepping outside the shrine office at lunchtime made for a nice change of scenery.
Although the meat-colored expanse of the filthbed, strewn with bony debris, spread out before his eyes, and though the acidic smell of it was enough to burn his windpipe, the wife of the Shrine Chieftain, wrapped in an unbleached kimono and a beautiful pleated skirt, would often be out with her children for a stroll around the Deilith.
She would stare out across the houseboat-dotted filthbed as if lost in fascination, then spread out both arms as she took in a refreshing breath of air. From time to time, she would bow politely to no one in particular and sometimes delightedly let slip a few words spoken only to herself. Behind their mother, who was never quite in the same world as they, the children would chase around their baby momonji, smiling as though they hadn’t a care in the world. Occasionally, Hanishibe even joined them.
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