Islands of Protest

by Davinder L. Bhowmik

  It occurred to me that it would be faster to pass through the thicket into Ufudā to get to the village instead of returning along the beach the way I had come. If I climbed the hill and headed east, the Ōmichi home would be the first house I came to. I headed up the beach in the opposite direction from which I had come. When I reached Ufudā, I discovered that the path leading up the hill was covered by dense vegetation. I couldn’t even find it at first. I soon realized that the Ōmichi home was much further than I had imagined, but I had no choice but to continue searching for the road and then head up the hill.

  I finally reached the front gate of the house, where a small group of villagers with anxious looks on their faces were gathered. A large, dark-blue automobile that seemed out of place on such a small island occupied the entire width of the narrow road. The unusual solemnity of the scene reminded me of the sending off of a hearse, which caused me to freeze in my tracks. I glanced toward the house. Toki was being carried toward the car on the back of a man wearing a light-blue polo shirt. They were followed by a tall man in a white coat, Morio, and Morio’s parents. The man in the polo shirt was Hideo, whose small frame now had a bulging stomach and huge shoulders. He raised his head and acknowledged me. I could see a look of pain in the narrow eyes inherited from his mother as he gave me a little smile. Sensing that he didn’t blame me, I felt relieved.

  Yet we had no time to exchange words. Overwhelmed by the tense atmosphere of the gathered villagers, I drew back. Toki, in her bedclothes, was placed in the backseat. A travel bag, likely packed with Toki’s clothes, was stuffed in behind her. Morio’s parents poked their heads through the windows and started giving Toki some last-minute instructions. Once Morio climbed into the driver’s seat, the accompanying doctor took up position in the passenger seat, and Hideo climbed in the back with his mother. They were ready to leave. But the five or six villagers pressing in around the car prevented their departure.

  Hideo pushed through the group and came toward me. Apparently, Toki wanted to see me. The door of the car swung open. Toki, who for forty years had endured her blatant rejection by the community, beckoned me with a look that seemed to be staring at some distant scene. I went up to her and took the hand held out to me.

  “Oh, this has turned into such a big fuss! There’s not much I can do about it, so I guess for now, I’ll go to the hospital in the city. Hideo insists. But I’ll be back for the Kitsugan Festival. Until then, you’ll take my place here, won’t you?”

  I turned around and looked at the crowd behind me. A few of them had their eyes glued to me, but no one raised an objection—as if an agreement had already been reached. Morio’s mother waddled over to us. Her ample breasts pressed against my back as she glanced over at Toki.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll fill her in later. You really need to get to the hospital. That’s one of your bad traits. Instead of worrying about the Kitsugan Festival, you need to start thinking about yourself.”

  The young doctor in the passenger seat was also pressuring Toki to leave. Hideo climbed in the backseat and looked over to me. “I’ll give you a call when we arrive. If you aren’t too busy, keep an eye on the house while we’re …” His words trailed away as the car started to move away. Through a cloud of dust and the rear window, I could see him holding his mother. The dark-blue car turned at a bend in the road and sped off to the waiting helicopter. Before long, we heard a thunderous roar, and those of us left behind gazed up at the shaking belly of the black fuselage, rising up into the air. After the helicopter made a half turn and flew off to the east, the final group of stragglers, still whispering among themselves, headed home.

  I strolled through the front gate. The door of the house was wide open, and I could see the costumes hanging between the two empty rooms. Swinging in the wind, they looked like a row of dancers waiting in the wings, ready to appear onstage.

  Notes

    1. Most critics agree that this refers to Iriomote Island, where Sakiyama was born and raised. The island that Takako is visiting is most likely Kohama Island, located less than two miles to the west of Iriomote Island.

    2. “Climbing Kagu-yama and Looking upon the Land” is one of the most famous poems from the Manyōshū [Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves], the revered collection of ancient Japanese poems. Written by Emperor Jomei (593–641), the poem describes the author’s view of Japan from the mountaintop. The poem reads,

  Countless are the mountains in Yamato,

  But perfect is the heavenly hill of Kagu;

  When I climb it and survey my realm,

  Over the wide plain the smoke-wreaths rise and rise,

  Over the wide lake the gulls are on the wing;

  A beautiful land it is, the Land of Yamato!

  (translated by the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai, Japanese Classics Translation Committee)

  SWAYING, SWINGING (2003)

  Sakiyama Tami

  Translated by Kyoko Selden and Alisa Freedman

  WHEN SOMEONE DIES, THE BODY is not cremated or buried. After the wake, it is wrapped all over with ikadakazura, “raft vines” or bougainvillea, and floated out to sea just before the sunrise. This is the funeral ceremony on Hotara Island.

  Exposed to the morning sun that soon begins to dye the surface of the sea, the corpse is rocked on the waves; in some cases, it ends up sinking deep underwater to the bottom of a submarine trench lying on the border between Hotara and the neighboring island. Suppose it belongs to a woman, a child, or an invalid lacking sufficient weight to sink completely. It first floats to the offing but is drawn into the tide that forms a gentle eddy just a little beyond the trench and flows backward toward the northern shore of Hotara, so that once again it travels to the island. Prey to fishes and what not, the flabby, swollen body reaches the shore in sad shape, with eyes gouged or limbs lost on one side. Left like that on the shore, while drying up and weathering, it becomes covered with sand all the way to the marrows. So it has been told.

  For this reason, there is no place for burial on Hotara. If one must come up with a place, they might say it is the area of the sea including the northern shore, where corpses sink and accumulate. Hotara folk refer to that northern beach, where some of the dead reach and weather, as Niraipama, or “yonder shore.”

  On the other hand, the soul that has left the corpse dissolves in water on the forty-ninth day.1 It neither rises to heaven nor attains nirvana; nor does it become a deity after the thirty-third anniversary. Hotara folk merely float underwater forever as hitodama, human souls—or so it is said.

  Thanks to the ritual repeated each time someone dies, it has come to be that, in the sea around Hotara, human souls jostle one another for space. According to the results of the calculations formulated by a certain special method, the briny water in the sea several kilometers all around the island will soon be saturated with the remnants of human souls. If this is so, where in the world would the souls of the Hotara dead go in the future? Some islanders who have outlived the dead have recently begun to loudly voice the anxiety hovering faintly over the island community. Possibly because of the spread of this anxiety, the island population is steadily declining and rapidly at that.

  Fed up with tedious island days ever monotonously repeated on the rhythm of the surf that ebbs and flows, people might be expected to scramble to be the first to leave Hotara. But that is not the case. To begin with, Hotara folk all firmly believe that they would not be able to live away from the place of their birth. So no one leaves the island voluntarily unless there is a particularly compelling situation. They appear almost obstinate about that, I hear. However, it is totally impossible to tell whether that nearly religious attachment to the island is good or bad for the future of Hotara, even as it has by now become the islanders’ temperament.

  Because none of the Hotara folk wishes to leave, it might seem odd that the island population is declining, but the actual situation is quite simple. In other words, it seems that these people only die, without producing new livi
ng bodies. In fact, if one examines the island office’s birth registers over the past decades, there is not a single baby’s name entered. There seems to be a situation in which male-female relationships here have ceased to perform the function of leaving progeny. A man and a woman who happen to form a bond might visit each other’s homes and might, on occasion, live and eat under one roof as a couple with mutual affection. This age-old custom still exists; yet it has become an implicit virtue not to have children.

  How did this trend come to prevail on the island, causing women to stop giving birth? Did it prevail precisely because women ceased to have children, or is the severity of the anxiety about losing space for the dead souls leading people unconsciously in this direction? Even now, what is at the root of this cause-and-effect relationship is unclear.

  When the situation developed, however, Hotara folk did not take it very seriously. In general, not thinking of any matter too profoundly has been their predisposition from time immemorial. Thoroughly accustomed to accepting any given situation in its entirety as something that is bound to happen, they somehow believe that whatever befalls the island is completely “natural,” the result of a course of events that was meant to be.

  Eventually, the Hotara population was reduced to old folk over eighty years of age. The oldest man on the island, age 133 this year, has begun to lament, murmuring to himself so quietly that others do not hear, that the years he has lived outnumber the inhabitants on the island. Some of the various traditional rituals have been discontinued because of the increase in people who cannot get around on their own. One exception is the enigmatic midsummer festival only involving women who celebrate Ushumē-ganashi, the founder deity of the island. Called Hotara-upunaka, until recent decades, it was apparently performed with pomp and ceremony as testimony to Hotara being Hotara. In a way, the Hotara folk’s profound passion for this ritual, related to the founding of the island, is said to have helped them sustain themselves on the island until now.

  Although nobody knows when the secret ritual of Hotara-upunaka was discontinued, in recent years a rumor has circulated that something strange is occurring on the beach of the island. The incident always occurs unbeknownst to anyone, it is said, at low tide between sunset and midnight in the summer.

  This is a panasu, a story that relates one of the Seven Wonders of Hotara that derived from the teatime chats of an old man named Jirā, who happened to personally witness the incident. But it has been said that Jirā himself, already 117 years old, recently became a spirit, a fiery ball that exits the human body and floats on the seawater. It is indeed a regrettable story.

  Well, the strange occurrence that Jirā claimed to have witnessed is said to have been more a natural phenomenon than an incident, nothing special unless one paid particular attention. It was just a visible oval bubble bobbing on the water at the shoreline. Yet it did not appear to be a bubble that simply emerges because of the wind’s playfulness or something along those lines, only to vanish in no time. Rather, it seemed to be the phenomenon of one of the human spirits, which had reached the saturation point in the sea near Hotara, being flicked from the water by some accident.

  As Jirā watched intently, the bubble burbled audibly. Dumbfounded, he saw it swell and glide across the water, he said, burbling toward the beach as if it had a will of its own. A bubble that crosses the water and crawls up, burbling, toward the sand left by the surf—this was itself a terribly odd story; but according to the witness Jirā, that bubble began something that might be called a bubble dance, if not a Bub-bon dance.2

  The glistening, transparent, oval body that had swollen to a diameter of around 150 centimeters stretched and shrank horizontally and vertically, kicking the sand in a bobbing rhythm. This single bubble flew along the evening dusk sand as freely as if it owned the beach. This was such an odd story that Sanrā and Tarā, the two chums sipping tea on the veranda of Jirā’s house in the afternoon as the sun began to fade, almost spat their drinks at each other. Tarā nearly spat out his false teeth. It was such an unexpected development for a tea-drinking story that Sanrā and Tarā thought they had better find fault with it for the time being, despite their reserve with Jirā, who was the eldest of the three. So they started to speak to Jirā at the same time.

  —Hey, Jirā.

  But Jirā, who had the habit of repeatedly nodding to himself while talking, did not seem at all bothered by his listeners’ response. Meeting his serious look, both Tarā and Sanrā were at a loss as to what to do with their gaping mouths. They swallowed and tightly closed their mouths in one quick motion and used the edges of sleeves and such to wipe their cheeks, which were sprayed with tea. After a little while, Tarā bent forward and looked into the eyes of Jirā, whose lips moved, searching for the next words to say—

  —Water dance.

  —That’s strange, Jirā. So what happened then to that so-called water dance?

  Instead of pouring water to dampen the story, Tarā seemed to have unintentionally poured oil over it.

  So the story about one of the Seven Wonders of Hotara rolled on, with no hint of where it would end, with the old man Jirā’s tediously repetitive narrative undulation that seemed to accompany the slowly setting summer sun.

  … That day, Jirā sat alone under the screw pine leaves on Irizaki Beach, sunset point, the destination of his evening walks that were now part of his daily schedule. The sun had long set, but having lost the chance to stand up, he remained seated, vacantly looking at the sea. No matter how late his return might be, he no longer had to worry that anyone would mind. His parents were gone, his older brother and younger sister had died, and he had outlived his wife, Nabii, to whom he was long married. Like all the others, he had no children. As was the case with most old people of Hotara, he had lived by himself for decades. After sitting there past dusk until it truly felt like night, he finally thought of leaving the beach. With one hand on his lower back and the other on the sand, he firmly planted one foot. It was then that he spotted a little crystal ball, glistening with particular brilliance on the dark sea. He had a sensation of a thin piece of pale silk descending across the darkness. On the other side of this faint, translucent screen hanging before his eyes was clearly visible the bubble of water that had crawled toward him on the sand, burbling.

  —Hey, what can that be?

  Even as he wondered, the ball of water began to twist around, as though it were trying to flick itself into the air. Adding a twist with each turn, it kicked the sand about; with a sway of its hips back and forth, left and right, it sprung upward.

  —This must be the water dance.

  The merrily laughing bubble dance was so adorable that, before Jirā knew it, he tried to get up, extending his arms toward it. The reason that he did not get up right away was because dragging his legs on his cane, with his lean body bent like a hook, was, at age 117, the best he could do to move from place to place. His legs had become quite weak. Still, he finally stood, his bent upper body supported on his cane, one hand on his lower back. Sticking out his chin, he eyed the surface of the sand.

  Then the bubble stretched sideways. It spun around. It shrunk, then swelled, and almost burst. Amid these changes, it sprang agilely in a bobbing rhythm and undulated with delight. It made Jirā feel itchy around the chest and scratchy around the limbs. He realized that he was imitating, if clumsily, the twisting, sprightly motions of the bubble dance. His bent back, unsteady legs, and wooden arms began snaking with dreamy agility. It was indeed curious. Moreover, music came from somewhere unknown. Although quite hard of hearing by now, he strained his ears and caught the sound that seemed to approach him from far out at sea. It seemed to him that, tossed by the wind, the very undulation of the waves that crossed the sea turned into a melody. Becoming louder, the throbbing rhythm shook his body from the feet up. It was as if it unwound and moistened his dry body, which was ready to crumble to dust. On listening more carefully, rather than the sound of waves, it was a lilting echo of plucked strings that tre
mbled in the wind: tete tenten, tete tete te-e-n, ton, toto, totototo, ton, ten tete ten, ten, tete tete, toto toto … toto toto ten ten … to-o-n, tu-u-n, te-e-n, ten, toto, ton ton te te, te te toto toto … tete ten tenten … to-o-n, tu-u-n .… It was the sound of a three-stringed instrument. Nearly disappearing, then swelling again, it pressed from afar, embracing him.

  The distant, surging whirlpool would shake any listener’s heart and body. Jirā felt hot from the flow of the sound, light yet tenderly warm. Overwhelmed by unreasonable nostalgia, sudden tears escaped and fell. Just when one teardrop flew on the wind, the water bubble sprang up in amorphous motions. It stretched upward, bent, divided into branches, parts slipping and sliding outward. It was not unlike, say, an automatically created water sculpture. Its motions then slackened to stillness. A colorless, transparent water image stood a distance in front of him. Jirā opened his shriveled eyes as widely as possible.

  —Oh no, it’s a human, and a woman at that.

  As he looked up, mouth agape, the bulges flaunted before his nose were indecently exposed breasts of water. They shook and rippled. The water figure was entirely smooth and transparent; yet a profound expression hovered around the egg white that seemed to be its face and lured him in an exceedingly charming manner. A sudden, deep human smell from the swaying water stiffened him. It was the female fragrance that had long disappeared from this island. He did his best to support his body on his cane. The water sculpture sidled up toward his cheeks—Jirā was transfixed with bewilderment. Suddenly, it pressed against him its lapping breasts.

  —What on earth is this?, he shouted, even more immobile than before.

  When his stiff body relaxed, little by little, in response to the tenderness of her breasts, a certain odd sentiment slowly spread within his body. It perhaps resembled the cool sensation poured from the skin of transparent water, the icy air felt in the first bodily contact with this world, or the tension experienced when being thrown into the endless sky. It was, as the story went, like the pain that permeated into one’s entrails when torn apart by an object of desire.