Islands of Protest

by Davinder L. Bhowmik

  But suddenly, all communication from Yūkichi came to a halt. Toki, who had no way of knowing whether this was due to the chaotic mail service or some accident befalling her friend, resolved to visit him on his island in the south. What she learned upon her arrival was that Yūkichi was dead. Failing to notice the tubercular infection in his lungs acquired during the war, he continued to labor in the rice fields on the island. His naturally stoic character worked against him, and by the time he began to complain of his ailment, there was a large shadow on one of his lungs. His family was unable to acquire any streptomycin, the specific remedy for tuberculosis, and without any other means at their disposal, the disease was left to follow its natural course until he died.

  Toki told me all this that evening long ago.

  “Pretty soon I’ll have been here for forty years. It’s too late to ever get away.”

  Her twinkling eyes were already dry. She put her arms down on the low table in a circle as if to gently embrace the reeled-in memories, and then she commenced what seemed the continuation of the story from long ago.

  “Yūkichi had sent me a kind of farewell letter just before he died. It arrived just after I left Nagasaki, so I didn’t get it until it was returned to sender here. In the letter, he wrote that he was going to die and that he wanted me to forget our promise and live my own life. If I had gotten the letter in Nagasaki, I might never have come here.”

  Toki didn’t complain at all about this cruel twist of fate. She seemed to have completely given up on everything. Had she even given up hope for the occasional visits of her son and his family and of one day enjoying the modest old-age pleasures of watching her grandchildren grow up?

  Nodding to herself, she added, “I’ll never forget one thing he wrote. It’s the one thing that’s kept me going.…” Determined to retrieve the distant past, Toki slowly lifted her head and sat up straight. “Yūkichi inherited from his father the most beautiful voice in the village. He was more proud of that than anything. He often sang to me in the hills toward the end of the war. In his letter, he wrote that singing the Ininuri Bushi with his father at the Kitsugan Festival was like having his dream come true. And you know what else? He said he had a vision of me dancing to his song.”

  I was quite astonished to see her titter and a slight blush form on her cheek. Could it be that her obsession with this vision of herself, seen by Yūkichi before his death, was what had tied her to the island all these years? As for why she had stayed in the first place, I heard that the Ōmichi family had urged her to stay because they knew she had no family to return to in Nagasaki. Afterwards, she ended up marrying Yūkichi’s older brother, Eikichi.

  “It sounds like some clichéd old drama, doesn’t it?” said Toki quietly. “But at the time, I had no choice but to rely on the goodwill of others.”

  Toki turned a pained profile toward me. I shifted my legs and stared at her.

  “You know, Takako …” She turned her head slightly and looked at me. “When you came here with Hideo, I thought I was looking at myself when I first arrived. That really brought back the memories.…”

  Her voice faltered, and I felt a tug of emotion. Toki’s gaze shifted from me to some point hanging in the air.

  “But I didn’t want to push any of my ideas on you. I knew all too well how difficult it could be for an outsider trying to live here.”

  When I saw a smile form on her lips, I averted my gaze. Even after all these years, Toki’s Japanese had remained untainted by the local dialect, though it was not exactly a Nagasaki accent, either. Her smooth and flat use of standard Japanese made clear that, although she blended in with the island atmosphere, she had surrendered nothing of her independent spirit.

  Feeling anxious about Toki’s haggard expression, I suggested we retire for the evening. After cleaning up the room and putting away the food on the table, we went to bed—me in the room with the altar and Toki in the back room—shortly after ten o’clock.

  I awoke suddenly to the sensation of some black presence weighing down upon me from the ceiling. Four enormous eyeballs were staring me straight in the face. In a state of shock, I couldn’t move my arms or legs. I opened my mouth, but no sound escaped. The inside of my throat felt parched, and my forehead throbbed violently. I struggled to breathe, yet even those exertions left me motionless. I often experienced this bizarre sensation of not being able to move, so I knew what was happening. Even so, the fear and breathing difficulty only intensified.

  When I regained my senses, cold sweat was dripping down my back and sides, and I was hugging a ball of crumpled sheets. I decided to get a glass of water to relieve my raging thirst. I could get to the kitchen by opening the sliding doors and passing through the adjacent room. But when I went to get up, I noticed light coming from the next room. Could Toki still be awake? I froze with an ominous foreboding. Being careful not to make the floor squeak, I crawled over to the sliding doors. When I stood up, a strong smell of awamori assaulted my nostrils. Intrigued, I peeked through the crack between the doors, gasped, and stood transfixed. I shook my head in disbelief. Gazing through the crack from my dark room, I could clearly see the well-lit scene in the kitchen.

  Toki, sitting on the wooden floor and holding a bottle of awamori in one hand, was gulping down glasses of liquor so fast that the act of pouring seemed to be a nuisance. She gulped down a glassful, took a deep breath, and then gulped down another. The hand holding the glass was shaking, and her nightgown was flung open, immodestly exposing her bony thighs and shins. The way she wiped the liquid dripping from her mouth with her sleeve reminded me of a drunken bum sitting cross-legged on a park bench. And the way she thrust her fists against the floor conveyed the eerie sense of someone rebelling against some unknown force.

  I could hear my knees knocking together. Toki’s transformed appearance seemed like that of a goblin threatening me under the cover of darkness. I could hardly believe my eyes, let alone run out and stop her. Terrified that she might notice me watching her like this, I lowered my shaky knees to the floor and crawled back to bed. The feeling of paralysis returned, and my heart throbbed violently in my chest. Was the alcohol she purchased at the rate of a bottle every three days consumed in this way every night?

  The lights in the next room went out. Apparently, Toki had returned to her room. The house became silent. But lying in the still night, I couldn’t erase the wild apparition of Toki plastered on the ceiling. Nausea welled up in my throat. I took a deep breath to avoid making any noise, fought back the urge to retch, and sat up. When I did, I sensed someone glaring at me from the side. I turned my head. Staring at me from the pale-blue glow of the shrine in the middle of the room were the memorial photographs of Eikichi and his mother. I became frozen to the spot, my head still turned to the side. The darkness spread across the island, congealed into a thick wall, and shut me off from the world.

  When I opened my eyes, the sun was high in the sky, and the room was filled with fresh air. The nighttime incident had vanished like a bad dream, and my spirits revived in the subdued morning light. My exhausted nerves, which the previous night had given out under the strain, must have made me drowsy, for I had dropped off again in the early morning. I got up and made myself ready. When I opened the sliding doors, I could hear the swooshing of Toki’s bamboo broom in the yard.

  “Good morning,” I called from the veranda. “I’m sorry I overslept.” Continuing with her sweeping, Toki raised her head and smiled lightheartedly in the fresh air.

  “Did you sleep well? I hope you feel rested.” Her voice was calm. So had my vision of her swilling down alcohol been the trick of some goblin after all?

  Toki seemed to be self-conscious about being so thin. She wore a dress with a tuck that created a bulge below the waist. The blue-and-white-striped dress looked like one she had made herself. By wearing an apron over it, she managed to make her skinny body look somewhat plump.

  Disoriented at first by the yard’s brightness, I looked out and discovered
that the dark-brown yard of the day before was now scattered with sand. Staring at the dazzling whiteness, I remembered that preparations for the Kitsugan Festival were about to begin. Neither the festival nor any other public events would be held for another month, but every home in the village would soon be entering the period of purification to welcome the gods. During that time, white sand would be sprinkled periodically around their homes. I spotted the crumbling remains of a pile of sand in the corner of the yard. When did Toki carry all this sand from the beach?

  As the bamboo broom moved, the vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines formed themselves into a pattern of waves. To my newly awakened eyes, the small yard looked like the undulating waves of the ocean as seen from the deck of a ship. I felt like I was on the swaying ferry again, and my body teetered precariously. As I began to fall backwards, Toki seemed to move off toward the horizon with her broom. From my vantage point, the receding area beyond the waves became too distant to discern. All of a sudden, Toki accelerated and darted away from me.

  “Wait!”

  Chagrined at being left behind, I jumped down from my perch. I felt my body contract as if I had plunged into a tank of water. When I kicked up with my legs, which had momentarily given way, I tumbled forward. I tried to catch myself, but my right foot got twisted under my haphazardly worn geta, I stumbled a few steps, and I ended up sprawled out in an unsightly heap in the coarse sand.

  “What’s wrong, Takako?” asked Toki, running up to me.

  Seeing her face up close snapped me out of my delusion. When I tried to stand up, I felt a sharp pain in my ankle. Unable to bear the agony, I plopped down and clutched my leg.

  “Oh, dear, you’ve sprained your ankle. Why on earth were you in such a hurry?”

  “I guess I was still half asleep.”

  “Oh, dear!” she said again and smiled at me in dismay.

  The pain didn’t pass, and soon my ankle began to swell. I felt a stabbing twinge whenever I tried to move, so I asked Toki for a compress and spent the morning in my room with my leg elevated. Toki took care of me as if I were an invalid. She changed the compress many times and brought me drinks and meals. I felt a bit guilty, but she seemed so happy that I allowed myself to be pampered.

  Toki kept herself busy the entire time. She rummaged around in the back room, and before long, the smell of mothballs filled the room. I noticed that she had spread out some dance costumes, variously colored in vermillion, purple, muddy yellow, and both deeply dyed and lightly dyed indigo. The sliding doors were thrown open, and the costumes were hung on wooden hangers that dangled from the lintels. She was airing them out, since they had been folded up in the cabinet. She bustled about cheerfully. I was somewhat amazed at her transformation from the day before, but her movements, which appeared so uninhibited, lifted my spirits. It was a bit early for taking out the costumes, but this was Toki’s meticulous way of doing things.

  “Not too long until the Kitsugan Festival, is it?” I called out, still stuck in my room. “Yes, it’s that time of year again. A year passes so quickly, doesn’t it? It’s still early, but you need to prepare little by little, like this. Before long, you know, dance practice will begin. And after that, I’ll be busy with one thing or another.”

  So once again, the sanshin and drums would be ringing out every night. My visiting at this time of year was a mere coincidence, but I felt I had been made to go through all this again by some ironic twist of fate. My sense of guilt at having repudiated the island made it difficult for me to face Toki’s restless excitement.

  “Especially the dance costumes. They’ve been in deep storage for a whole year now, right? So I need to air them out like this many times before the festival, you see? That way, we can feel clean and pure when we offer up our performances, you know?”

  Even her tone of voice sounded hectic. The intonation rose at the end of her sentences, as she got herself worked up.

  “But, you see, there aren’t any young women on the island anymore, so all the female dancers are old ladies. It’s not easy hiding all the wrinkles with makeup, you know. Old ladies disguised as young dancers! It sounds like a comedy, I know, but everyone on the island’s used to it. People that come here for vacation are probably amused, though.”

  Drawn by her cheerful voice, I glanced over at her. The jerky movements were gone from her step. Perhaps her disability had moved into me in the form of a sprained ankle. But of course that’s impossible, I thought. Whenever a festival approached, the spirits of those who silently endured boring lives suddenly brightened. Perhaps that was what had brought the bounce to her step.

  Not surprisingly, though, when she’d finished airing out the costumes and headed out the gate to do the shopping, her feet were dragging again. Even after she moved out of view, the forlorn image remained stuck in my mind. Would she be able to continue living on her own as she grew even older? Feeling utterly helpless, I stared blankly at the yard. The light reflecting from the scattered sand made the yard seem to expand into a white mass, and the whole house looked as if it were floating up to the surface.

  In the evening, the pain and swelling of my ankle no longer bothered me, so I helped put away the costumes that had been airing out. Toki started showing me how to fold them. She explained that the costumes, which needed to be stored for a long time, were susceptible to damage from frequent ironing and had to be folded in a special way to prevent wrinkling.

  “You wanted to wear this sudina, didn’t you, Takako?”

  Toki’s bony hand caressed the collar of the loose-fitting coat with slits along the sides. The contrast of the coat’s translucent colors—the vermillion of the lapel against the deep-indigo background—enticed me. I recalled voicing a desire to try on the costume when I had first laid eyes on it. If I had become a resident of the village, that desire might already have been fulfilled. But now it was a distant fantasy. Suddenly, Toki stopped folding the costumes. Her hand, still gripping the sleeve of the partially folded sudina, had become frozen. For what seemed an eternity, she remained perfectly still. A shadow fell across her downcast face, and her shoulders began to tremble.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, leaning forward.

  The face that turned toward me had become purple, and her eyes were glazed over. Her lips seemed contorted in agony.

  “You’re in pain, aren’t you?”

  Toki threw back her head and groaned. Seeing her suffering like this took my breath away. I kicked aside the newly folded-up costumes and pulled her into my arms.

  “Get the liquor … the liquor, Takako … over there.…”

  She pointed toward the kitchen, undoubtedly referring to the bottle of awamori from the night before. As instructed, I fetched the bottle from under the sink. Then I poured some of the liquor into a cup and handed it to her. She tossed it down in one gulp and immediately demanded another. But even after downing four undiluted cups of the strong liquor in rapid succession, she continued to quiver in pain.

  “Over there … in that drawer … there’s a medicine box.… Could you … get it for me?”

  I took out the medicine box out and opened it. It was stuffed with an enormous number of nonprescription aspirin. Without even bothering to count, Toki snatched up a handful of the white pills, tossed them into her mouth, and washed them down with a swig of awamori.

  “What the hell are you doing?! Taking that much medicine!” I screamed, losing control.

  My worst premonition about her seemed to be coming true. She was on the verge of losing consciousness, so I roughly shook her shoulders. Her upper body fell heavily against me. I lifted up her head, and her eyes opened slightly.

  “The alcohol and pills … won’t work much longer.…”

  Her lips were quivering, and she heaved a violent sigh. Spittle spewed from her mouth. I pulled up her apron and wiped it away. Her vacant eyes didn’t seem to be looking at me. Her forehead was covered with a greasy film, and her body smelled of sweat and awamori. Toki was neither an alcoholi
c nor a substance abuser. She used massive amounts of alcohol and painkillers to anesthetize herself against the intense pain coursing through her body. The likely cause of the pain came to mind. I wanted to deny the disease’s name, but what else could have driven Toki to such dire straits? Turning pale, I shook her.

  “You’re very sick, aren’t you? Have you been to a doctor? How could you have left this untreated for so long? You’ll never get better with this outrageous self-treatment.”

  Toki slowly lifted her head and turned her unfocused eyes toward the ceiling. The convulsing muscles of her face contorted into a faint smile.

  “The pains are getting stronger and stronger … and they’re coming faster and faster. I need some morphine … but unless I’m hospitalized, I can’t …”

  The words that sprung from Toki’s dim consciousness made clear that pain was her chief concern. At the very least, she knew what illness she was dealing with. As she started to slip from my weakening arms, I pulled her tightly to my bosom and felt the heat of her body. Her scrawny frame settled easily into my embrace as if she were a teenage girl. I felt overcome by an emotion somewhere between anger and sadness. Now I knew that Toki’s tears during our phone conversation three days earlier had not just been from nostalgia.