On the houseboats floating near the Deilith, the ebisus were always dangling their long arms over the sides, digging out the small filthtail shrimp that burrowed between the pleated folds of the filthbed. Even when you peeled off a filthtail’s vermilion lacquer shell, there was only a small part inside that was nontoxic and could be eaten. Moreover, their unpleasant odor was strong, and even flies wouldn’t come near them. Yet they were the ebisus’ main source of nutrition.
Hanishibe, when he was still unaccustomed to the stench of the filthbed and unable to get his food down, had once tried to do as the Shrine Chieftain did and give his lunch to an ebisu. Not one of them, however, would accept food from him. Unwilling to admit defeat, he had been about to place it in one of the boats when a voice had called to him from behind: “We can’t eat anything except filthtail shrimp and shellfish.” It was an ebisu who had been hired as a washerwoman. A number of wet garments hung from one of her forearms.
“I’ve seen you people wolfing down smoked meat.”
“Our stomachs can’t handle it.”
“Don’t tell me you throw it all up afterward?”
The washerwoman spread out the wrinkles in some dried clothes with her other hand. Hanishibe had a feeling he had seen the burn marks and fracture bumps on those arms before.
“Do you just force it down because you can’t refuse?”
The woman tilted her head, not understanding.
“You’re the one who picked up my lantern that time, aren’t you?”
The woman held the laundry up high at a diagonal incline, then closed her eyes. She intended to stand that way until it dried.
Later, Hanishibe learned why the Shrine Chieftain bestowed gifts of food on the ebisus: it was in order to make them vomit up the store of fiber that was in their stomachs. “If I don’t do that periodically,” he said, “large masses of fiber will grow inside them and become impossible to remove without surgery.”
As for the washerwoman, she was relaxing her guard little by little each time she ran into Hanishibe on the Deilith.
Ebisus had no names and didn’t like to be named, so it was in secret that Hanishibe began calling her Matamade, meaning “hands like fine jewels.” When through Matamade’s good offices Hanishibe gained opportunities to speak with other ebisus, he began to realize that they were naturally low of intellect and unable to think about things at all unless the necessity arose. When sleeping, they experienced vivid dreams of the Hereafter, and it was said that even during the daytime, the fragrance of lawns would start to drift through the air if they grew drowsy, and the Hereafter would come breaking through.
Hanishibe, who harbored a strong interest in dreams of the Hereafter, volunteered for the duty of almsgiving and on that pretext made the rounds of the filthbed’s houseboats one by one.
There were about twenty houseboats floating on the filthbed. All of these small boats were constructed by joining together momonji exoshelletons, so no fewer than ten would be living in the hut that took up most of each boat’s deck space.
Several ebisus were sitting on either side of their houseboat’s flat roof, fishing. Hanishibe came up and stood beside them, dodging the filthtails, nightclams, and grimeshells being tossed backhanded into the gutter in the center of the roof.With persistent questioning, he wheedled stories about their dreams from their reticent lips.
When there was no longer anything to catch, one ebisu thrust a spike from the palm of his hand into the meatpleats of the filthbed, causing powerful undulations that moved the houseboat. Unable to stand while the meat waves were rolling, Hanishibe evacuated to the hut. Beneath a ceiling hung with several birthingsacs, transparent through their webs of capillaries, sat a number of ebisus, arms and legs all tangled together as they peeled filthtails, ground them into paste, and crushed their shells into powder with a millstone. Hanishibe got them to tell him their stories as he helped them with these things. All the while, he was sweating profusely as he sipped at a boiled soup made from filthtail shells, brought out to show him hospitality.
When night fell, the ebisus curled up in birthingsacs like candies in their wrappers and slept. Or perhaps they were awakening into their dream.
What he was able to get from the ebisus’ fragmented, halting words were detailed—one might say unnecessarily detailed—descriptions of everything under the sun, descriptions which differed vastly from what most people remembered of the Hereafter. Hanishibe, though dazzled by the torrent of information, was making many tweaks to the model he had hypothesized and focusing in on its essence. What was unfolding before him was a lakeside town with a pleasant climate, spreading out beneath a blue sky.
In that town, the four hundred households that he had been able to identify were living utterly ordinary, peaceful lives. The temporal axis of each was intermittent, but whatever correlation table one might draw, there was one family on which these segments converged, who lived lives free of interruption.
Facing the clear lake was a grassy garden enclosed by trees. Amid the chirping of birds and the refreshing aroma of the cut lawn, a little boy was running around trying to catch a dog with extremely short legs. The dog nimbly escaped from his little hands, and the young boy fell down into the grass. At the sight of this, a lovely young girl laughed and threw a ball. The dog leapt over the boy’s back and lit out after it. Enjoying dark brown tea as they watched all this from their chairs on the terrace was their tolerant father and deeply affectionate mother—
No sooner did he put the story together in sequence than most of the things he’d been told would fade away.
Though it was true he felt envious of that peaceful lifestyle—so unlike that of Cavumville—Hanishibe had no words for such a world and could only describe it in pat, hackneyed phrases. As such, he couldn’t escape the feeling that it was a boring place without any appeal for him. Before long, he had lost interest in that city by the lake.
2
When seventeen Descents from Heaven had occurred since Hanishibe came to live at the shrine, and when the number of returnees’ reunions he had declared had risen as high as seven hundred, Hanishibe’s promotion to court enforcer was announced, with words of appreciation from the Shrine Chieftain.
When told that it was work that only he—who knew the individual registry inside and out—could do, he did not feel uninterested and was grateful to be released from reunion declarations. Still, though, it bothered him that he had not yet been able to attend on the revivifications of his grandfather, his grandmother, and Yatsuo.
His first assignment as court enforcer was an unbearable one for him: to bring in for inquisition the astronomer Kubutsutsui, who had stirred up the people by promoting the Theory of Celestial Motion, a theory which rocked the very foundations of Shinto.
Hanishibe, having received his orders in the dead of night, greeted the dawn without having slept a wink and, leading a pair of purifiers, set out for the heretic’s house. When he stood before the entrance, he inhaled deeply to steady his breathing, then knocked on the door.
When Narikabura appeared in the doorway, he thrust out his badge of divine office and ran quickly upstairs to the second floor. There Hanishibe sucked in his breath as he took in the sight of Narikabura’s father. What had once been an adorable, baseform little baby had transformed into a mutated shape that was just like the body of a water flea. Through the whitish, translucent softshell of his head could be seen a series of multiple crystalline bodies. Apparently, it was no lie that he could perform observations of the heavenly bodies with his naked eyes alone.
Narikabura clung to his father, weeping and shouting. Hanishibe pulled him away and gave orders to the purifiers to take him in.
The inquisition was carried out as a holy rite in the midst of the main shrine.
“No annual parallax or aberration can be measured. Objective observations of this have led us to thith twuththat.”Kubutsutsui’s thick to
ngue writhed stickily in his thin softshell as he expounded upon his views. “The celestial sphere, on which the earth and the stars are projected, revolves around the moon where we are located, giving rise to the false Theory of Terrestrial Motion. This deep and profound universe is exceedingly small—far smaller than we had previously imagined. And now a distortion has begun to appear in the celestial sphere—and our destruction is at hand.”
It was the kind of comment frequently heard from false prophets. The part that was most problematic theologically was the eschatological idea, which denied eternal recollection.
Surely Narikabura hadn’t put such hard work into raising his father just so he could spread idiotic hypotheses like the Theory of Celestial Motion.
Hanishibe’s chest was tight with sorrow and pity as the Shrine Chieftain handed him a fortune slip that turned his blood to ice. Hanishibe’s voice went shrill as he obeyed the oracle written therein and pronounced on Kubutsutsui the sentence of death by sinking.
The pleated folds of flesh that ran throughout the filthbed converged in a depression called the Abyss, and it was there that Kubutsutsui was standing buried up to his waist. The thick, meaty tongue that had spread wide his heresies was tightly bound. The meatpleats, squirming like countless annelids, were swallowing up Kubutsutsui’s entire body little by little.
As Kubutsutsui sank unresisting into the Abyss, packed crowds of residents lined the loop-lanes, staring on at him expressionlessly. From his vantage point in the execution boat, Hanishibe was unable to see Narikabura anywhere.
That night, sleep would not come to Hanishibe as he lay in his bed. His eyes, wide open, were turned toward a translucent universe globe that glowed dimly on the shelf. It had been fashioned from one of the countless minute air bubbles scattered throughout a momonji’s eyeball. Although he had confiscated it from Kubutsutsui on confirming that it expressed a heretical view of the universe, he knew that it was really nothing more than a teaching aid commonly used in the astronomy department and modeled after a Divine Implement.
During the week following Kubutsutsui’s execution by sinking, two eschatologists were arrested on charges of holding illegal assemblies, and again, executions by sinking had to be carried out.
It came to be that when Hanishibe walked the streets of Cavumville, rotten organs and human feces would be flung at him. Classmates whom he passed in the way also stopped meeting his gaze. These were signs that eschatological thinking and the Theory of Celestial Motion had made much greater headway in the world at large than he had imagined.
Someone on duty in the watchtower discovered a series of long, large bumps rising from the upper part of the moon’s outer crust and extending toward its backside in the direction of Ox and Tiger. This resulted in a huge uproar. In swift succession, ridges of bumps were also confirmed in the directions of Ram and Monkey, Dragon and Serpent, and Dog and Boar, spurring on greater devotion for heresy.
To the geologists, however, these bumps were nothing more than projections whose growth had been under observation since long ago. But although they argued that this was probably something no different than the expansion of petraderm caused by landsoup, the furor did not settle down. A connection was drawn between those projections on the lunar surface and earthquakes that had long occurred at irregular intervals. People were reading signs of the Eschaton into all manner of things.
At last, three young men employed a giant kite in an attempt to descend from the watchtower down to the earth. They never returned.
Inside the watchtower, a satirical sketch was found showing Hanishibe pushing the backs of that trio.
Only Komorizu continued to drop by his room at the shrine office as before. One day, as he was squeezing his way in through the door, several of his gourdlet clusters got stuck behind him. As soon as the now-doorframe-shaped Komorizu pushed himself over the threshold, however, they all snapped forward and knocked something off the shelf. Komorizu was fatter every time Hanashibe met him, so there was no helping the room being cramped.
Komorizu rotated his slimy head and frowned, flaring all three of his nostrils.
“What’s that shmell? Don’t tell me you’re eating filthtail shoup in here? If you take the ebishus side too much, you end up having more trouble than you need. Out in the world, they think you’re carrying out the shuppression on your own authority.”
Hanishibe couldn’t blame them. After all, he was the one carting people off, handing down their sentences, and standing witness as those sentences were carried out.
“The reputation of the great court enforsher has sunk deep down into the filthbed’s Abyss …” Komorizu sang with silly inflections, “… and without shaking anybody’s respect for the Shrine Chieftain.”
Hanishibe was made cognizant of his own moral responsibility every day.
Komorizu, returning the universe globe to the shelf, suddenly groaned and put his head down on the floor. The bulbous clusters covering his body bounced, many of them scattering trash.
“What’s wrong, Komorizu?”
“I … I’m fine.” Many pseudophalanges had stretched out from his bunched gourdlets and adhered to the walls. His pseudophalanges crawled up the walls, hauling his body back up again.
“Oh, man … lately my head’s jusht full. I’m reading the tracks of the gods in the cracks of burnt bones. How many times have I assembled the shpirit numbers and done the shilent chants? I’ve ushed my head too much, and it looks like I’ve caught a bad cold with a high fever. I shleep and I shleep, but no matter what I do, I can’t seem to shake the exhaustion. Everybody in the department is like this. We’ve had three martyrs already. I gotta get through this shomehow.”
“Martyrs, you say … ? Why something like that all of a sudden?”
“A divine edict’s come down, apparently. Probably shays that the folks upshtairs can’t wait any longer.”
After Komorizu had left, Hanishibe noticed a variety of items lying scattered around the floor and laughed out loud. There was the marrowpen Komorizu had taken off his desk in the classroom all those years ago.
Beside it was a bundle of dermasheets. They were covered in diffuse pointillistic designs, over which marks forming complicated curves had been traced. The diagrams thus created were spread out over three pages; you could only see the whole progression by laying the three sheets over one another. As he flipped through the dermasheets, marks that began from the same starting point transformed into many different shapes. These probably represented cracks in the burnt bones that Komorizu had spoken of, which showed the paths by which the gods had traversed it.
He picked up the celestial globe and stared at it for a moment. It looked like a part of it matched the density distribution of those points, but the starting point was not the moon. Far from it, it began in an area far removed from the solar system, where not a single star existed.
3
The next Descent from Heaven came, with the eschatological furor as yet unabated.
Hanashibe was standing by a third-story window at the shrine office, looking out at the mound formed by the accumulation of petauristas. Half the ground floor was completely buried, and the surface of the Deilith could not be seen at all. Out on the mound he could see many ebisus, each standing well apart from their fellows, signaling to one another in arm language.
An ebisu near the base of the mound took off running toward the shrine office, but Hanishibe was racing down the stairs already. Thanks to his time spent among the ebisus, he was now able to read their arm language.
When he climbed outside through a first-floor window, the ebisu was pointing toward a spot midway up the mound.
With uncertain footsteps, Hanishibe climbed up the wobbling mound of piled corpses, and when he reached the site, sure enough, an eschatological thinker who was supposed to have been disposed of by sinking was there, wedged in between the petaurista corpses. Had he been thrown free
when the momonji he was in struck the ground?
The man had vomited a great quantity of blood and was already dead. His body was covered in marks resembling a striped pattern of burns.
Hanishibe stood rooted to that spot for a time, unable to arrange his thoughts, and then realized that an ebisu standing near the top of the mound was waving at him vigorously.
Hanishibe set off running. When he reached the top of the mound, the ebisu was pointing at a hole from which a gigantic petaurista had been removed. “I saw him fall from the sky,” he was saying. Hanishibe got down on his stomach and peered down into the hole.
What he saw he couldn’t believe at first. Peeking out from between the shells, the chunks of flesh, and the entrails under which he was buried was his very own grandfather, looking just as he had in the past.
With the help of one of the ebisus, he dragged him up out of the hole. Drawing near, he called out to him. His grandfather’s facelid was closed though and did not open. He caressed the hard, rough skin, drenched though it was in a gravy of putrescence. His skin was much harder than it had been in the past. A long, ropelike flesh-tube was hanging out from the knot on his back, extending down into the hole, where it disappeared among the petauristas forming its walls. They hauled the flesh-tube in as they collapsed the wall and at its end discovered an object about the size of a human head that resembled a blob of glue. It was giving off a blue light.
Hanishibe stared at the torchburr-illuminated form of his grandfather lying in the bed. Sometime earlier, the blob’s blue light had gone out. Hanishibe took a bite of filthtail soup from his bonebowl and took in a breath of air. The obvious question rose up in his mind: why had his grandfather and that eschatologist fallen with the Descent from Heaven?
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