As if to reproduce the indescribably strange feeling he had then experienced, he narrowed his shriveled eyes even more to look afar, spellbound with the gaze of a dreaming young woman. Regaining himself, he blinked a few times and suddenly opened his eyes with determination. He stared, fixedly, into the air before him. Then, relaxing his eyes, he held his shoulders with both hands. He even groaned, ooh, as if withstanding cold shivers. Releasing his bony hands from his shoulders, he brought them to his face. Then he roughly stroked his deeply wrinkled, wave-sculpted cheeks.
Looking askance at Jirā, who staged an interlude in the conversation by way of this silent show, Tarā ran his fingers over his gray hair, which was thick for a man his age. He thought to himself, sighing,
—I’m shocked. You put on quite an act, Jirā, didn’t you?
Anyway, Tarā thought, someone should say something at this point, or there could be trouble in the future. He leaned toward Jirā, who was still looking vacant, his hands on his cheeks, and began:
—Hey, Jirā, that’s dream talk. It’s not something real.
The firstborn son of an aristocratic family, Tarā was a rare type on Hotara, with his peculiarly gallant nature and dislike for ambiguities. At age eighty-eight, he was still a high-spirited youth by Hotara standards. With all due respect for Jirā’s seniority, he was beginning to feel nonplussed about having to listen further to this story of feigned innocence. Yet, despite the fact that he began energetically, his objection was kicked back by Jirā’s stony gaze, which had started showing something that one might call determination as his narrative gradually developed.
—It’s no dream, Tarā! This is no dream talk. It’s a real fact. I don’t tell lies.
Childishly pouting his shrunken lips, the toothless Jirā loudly said,
—Sanrā, I don’t.
Tarā was speechless. Jirā’s carefree yet staunchly serious nature, famous throughout Hotara, did not change no matter how old he became; rather, as he aged, it had become all the more inflexible. Thus, when he declared that he did not lie, Tarā could not refute.
—Is that a true story?
Shrugging his shoulders, Tarā stopped meddling. As his spirits dampened, to smooth things over, he reached over to the teapot and poured more tea into the cup he had just refilled, so that it nearly overflowed.
For some time, Sanrā had been casting his eyes on the edge of the verandah. It was not that he was determined to stay out of the exchange between Jirā and Tarā. He was intently listening to Jirā’s muttering because something rang a bell. Sanrā was related to Tarā on his father’s side and was a distant relative of Jirā in a somewhat complicated way. Having just turned eighty and younger than anyone else on Hotara Island, Sanrā was, so to speak, a newborn member of the elderly. With all his senses, like a baby’s, responding susceptibly to the outside world, he was equipped with the ability to catch the delicate truth of the matter that lodged in the lingering overtone of Jirā’s voice. Something did indeed ring a bell for Sanrā about the identity of the thing that had crawled out of the water and appeared before Jirā.
He felt the impulse to ascertain as soon as possible whether or not his hunch had hit the mark. He tried to make his feelings rest in the shade of the imaginary tree that had begun to extend its branches in all directions the moment it entered his thoughts, but he broke through this foliage by force. Calming his excitement, he decided to stay silent and patiently wait to see where Jirā’s story was going. This was because he had second thoughts: whatever the reality of the matter, the main character of this story had to be, for now, Jirā, who’d had the rare experience of enjoying shared moments with the water spirit.
Both Tarā and Sanrā had to gradually notice Jirā’s way of talking that day, languid yet suggestive of unusual determination. Jirā perceived with his entire body the shadow of death creeping up on him. This, the two realized, drove him to storytelling while he himself remained unaware of it. Tarā, making up his mind not to interrupt until Jirā closed his mouth completely, no longer averted his eyes from Jirā’s mouth as he muttered, mumbled, and sputtered. Sanrā turned his face away from the edge of the porch and, sitting straight, looked at Jirā’s deeply wrinkled, long chira, face.
To face the storyteller in this manner was to show the greatest respect to one born on Hotara Island who had spent his life as a Hotara resident and was about to complete it. Both Tarā and Sanrā knew well that this was a scene of life that would eventually befall them as well. When it was yumangī, evening dusk, Jirā left his dilapidated abode, spacious yet with no one to take care of it, for a walk with his cane. Since that day, it had become his daily routine to walk until well into the night.
The moment the sun disappeared and Jirā’s skin sensed the wind from the sea, his decrepit body assumed a strange vitality. Before he realized it, his limbs began twitching excitedly. Picking up the cane left by the door, he started walking with creaks and jerks. Dividing the foliage of a yūna tree, he reached the Irizaki point on the western part of the island, where he gazed across the sea for a while and then threw down his cane in the usual place. He crouched under the screw pine and waited eagerly. He waited for a single water drop to emerge, shimmering gold, from the now-dark sea, cross the water, and take the form of a woman, twisting and bobbing rhythmically. When that day had almost become the next, he hobbled back, covered with sand as if in a dream, to the humble, dark house where he lived alone. The moment he crawled up onto the verandah, he fell fast asleep. When he awoke by warmth on his earlobes from the sun that was high in the sky, it was already past noon. Jirā repeated this routine for several days.
He had no idea what it was that had happened to him. The female spirit had pressed its soft, fresh skin to his old, decrepit body. Jirā did not even for a minute try to think about whom she had been when she was still human. Rather than his own senility, the sweetness of this single event deprived him of even the briefest moment for thinking of anything. Still, he somehow felt that the female spirit was not his wife, Nabii. Nabii had not only possessed more jinbun, wisdom, than anyone else on Hotara but had also taken pride in her dark-complexioned, well-built, Hotara-like churakagī, lovely appearance. Even so, no matter how many times they had lain together or how closely they associated, she had kept something obstinate in her body and had never freely offered such soft, full breasts as this female spirit did.
Nabii was the heiress of the nīmutu, root family, which had maintained the Hotara Island’s traditional formalities. Although she had been married to Jirā since he reached his maturity at age sixteen, she associated with him rather distantly as a commuting wife who returned to her mutuyā, original house, seven or eight days out of ten. On Hotara, both the institution of marriage and the practice or ethics of maintaining a household were merely nominal. Even if Nabii was a nīmutu daughter who would inherit the traditional formalities, if only temporarily, the ties between Nabii and her family were no more than a token that existed only for the Hotara-upunaka ritual held once a year in the island’s unā, sacred garden, at the peak of the summer. It was, therefore, unthinkable for Jirā or Nabii to use institutions or customs as an excuse to bind each other. If the truth of the matter were to be known, their hearts were dried out to the extent that, starting around the time Jirā turned twenty, four years after their commuting marriage had begun, clattering could be heard coming from inside their chests even as they brought themselves together. Their bodies, it was said, were like parched seashells on a rocky shore. Even so, due to the sadness of being alive as a man and woman with youthful bodies and in response to the warmth of their skin that accidentally touched, they did make advances, pushed each other down, and entwined. There were countless times that once that had happened, oblivious to all other thoughts, they continued to be intimate throughout the night. The male-female contact, however, had ceased around the time Nabii turned seventy and Jirā was over sixty. Nabii was older than Jirā by as many as nine years.
It was during Nabii’s genera
tion that the nīmutu family ceased to have any descendants. It is unknown whether the cause was in her womb or in his seeds. With no children born to the nīmutu household, the island’s future existence was in danger; yet somehow there was no one, even within the family, who regarded this as problematic.
It was the year of Nabii’s seventy-third shōnin-yuē, birthday celebration. Her mother, Ufunabii, two years before reaching age one hundred, had held Nabii’s hand, which was somewhat large for a woman’s, and said, at the rite of passing called the igun denju, will revelation, customarily performed on Hotara by one approaching death:
—It will be all right. It will be, Nabii. The future will take care of itself. No need to worry.
The hand that held her daughter’s was weak, but Ufunabii’s face wore a smile.
—Look, the call is here from beyond. I am going first. Take your time and come later. Take plenty of time. You mustn’t hurry. Nabii .…
With the beam on her cheeks still directed toward Nabii, Ufunabii is said to have breathed her last, as if falling asleep. Despite Ufunabii’s order that Nabii take her time, Nabii met too early a death by Hotara standards; she was not yet eighty.
With no children, Nabii and Jirā’s relationship remained dry, but in fact, there was something like an in’nen or a karmic bond, between Nabii and Jirā that made them inseparable through life. The word in’nen may invoke unmanageable human on’nen, vengeful thoughts, appalling male-female emotional entanglements. But with Nabii and Jirā, the matter began with an oracle-like word that was remote from such sentiments. Rumor has it that it was the igun, dying will, uttered in front of island elders by Nabii’s great-grandmother Ū-ufu-ufu-nabii, who took to her deathbed just after Nabii was born. That igun included a behest concerning the marriage between Nabii and a man born in the year of the Yang Water Dragon. That man, it was said, turned out to be Jirā, the second-born son of a family of plebeian descent, born nine years after Ū-ufu-ufu-nabii’s igun was passed.
For the Hotara community, which was quite removed from things like systems and institutions, igun words imparted by the dying seemed to have defined the way of living that folks had to adhere to above all else. Nabii’s own igun forced the continued existence of her nīmutu household, if only as another piece of wreckage that maintains this kind of Hotara-like community, even decades after her death.
Theirs was a family with a so-called female lineage. How many generations had preceded Nabii is unknown. They did not take the trouble of recording it, so the family history was uncertain, unreliable, and merely consisted of the oral transmission of ambiguous, fragmentary, and emotional memories. Even if one wished to ascertain the chronological circumstances, one would not be able to dig up the so-called physical evidence from some cellar, attempt comparison with other sources, and come up with sensible conclusions. Still, according to the memories of the generation upon generation of women in the nīmutu family, the household continued to exist through the genealogy of women bearing women and women giving birth in succession. Whenever anyone questioned this reasoning, they asserted that there was no room for doubt. Yet no nīmutu woman remains alive to orally hand down these memories.
Suppose a woman bears a child. Like it or not, it is necessary for her to have a connection with a man, or ikiga, as he is called on Hotara Island, as a provider of the source of conception. For the purpose of giving birth to, if not numerous descendants, at least enough lives to counterbalance those who die, women (incidentally, “woman” is inagu in Hotara dialect) put aside their likes and dislikes and handled every ikiga on the island as courteously as possible. Ikiga were also spared from having to live with competition and expectations in the Hotara world, where they had nothing to do but to yield to the midst of boundlessly floating time. They were so listless by the succession of tedious days that no room was left for inagu to pick or choose. While supporting ikiga, who idly passed their days, inagu remained in the background and exerted themselves by maintaining this Hotara-like society. This wore down the spiritual energy and physical strength of Hotara folk, who had taken pride in their island of longevity, so much so that it came to a point at which inagu would depart to the other world fourteen or fifteen years sooner than ikiga. Of the total remaining population of 130 at present, only 29 are inagu. Moreover, with the exception of Tarā’s mother, Kanimega, they are all bedridden, passing most of their time staring at the ceiling at the Niraikanai Home (niraikanai, meaning “the utopia beyond the sea”), a nursing home founded by the Hotara Community Business Office. Men, still in their eighties and capable of getting around, apparently attend to the women with meticulous care, partly to reciprocate their many years of kindnesses.
After the secret ritual of Hotara-upunaka inevitably became extinct due to Nabii’s death, what sustained the remaining ikiga were the island strolls that became their after-nap habit.
There is an interval of time when the sun mercilessly blazes down and clearly exposes Hotara Island’s ungainly appearance of evenly sprawling fields with no mountains or rivers worthy of mention. Afterwards, when the sun becomes gentler, the relatively healthy ikiga emerge from their homes. Chū ya kuma, acha ya ama, this way today, that way tomorrow—indicating their destination with their chins, here and there they look in on their like-minded dōshi-gua, chums, atcha-atcha-ing, walking this way and that.
They can have a moment’s diversion, sipping tea with lumps of brown sugar, on the verandah of the house they visit, and engaging in yuntaku hintaku, leisurely chitchat. More often than not, the center of the yuntaku is the most senior person with the greatest signs of weakening among those who gather. It spontaneously turns out to be that way through the consideration of those around him who wish to respect, as much as possible, his desire to recount the events he has experienced before moving to the other world. Thinking of their now-short remaining life, they continue conversing as topics occur, regardless of the fact that there is no expectation for the content to be handed down to future generations. It has been proper for younger folk to refrain from interfering while the senior man performs his faltering narration.
What was told during those yuntaku hintaku, chitchats was the story of the Seven Wonders of Hotara. Incidentally, yuntaku refers to rambling talk in Hotara dialect. Hintaku is simply its pair word.
Well, then, Jirā’s yuntaku continued even as his mind became muddled. After the encounter with the water woman in his dream, when he happened to waken before dawn, tired from insufficient sleep, while lying on his stomach on the verandah of his decaying house, the following mysterious vision occurred with no dramatic introduction.
It was a scene from a distant memory that came back to life, triggered by the communion with the water woman:
—Jirā, Jirā.
He was lured by a sweet, high-pitched inagu-gui, female voice. It sounded as if it were calling through a rift in time, craving love. The moment he awoke, he stood right up.
—I have forgotten, tonight was the night I promised to see Umichiru.
On his hasty way out, Jirā turned around with one hand still on the sliding door. His grandfather and parents were fast asleep in the inner rooms. The grandfather was ikiga-uya, the male parent on the mother’s side. He was already starting to depart to the other world, so Jirā’s parents took turns sleeping beside him just in case something happened. Even if they noticed their son rattling the door open to go out in the middle of the night, they would never reproach him. No Hotara parent acted rudely. Rather, their profound wish was that their children would associate in their lives with as many women or men as possible and experience as many moments of bliss.
That night, once again, Nabii was not in the rear room. She had left Jirā alone for over ten days. He did not complain particularly, but it would be untrue to say that he did not feel unhappy about being left alone by the inagu more than ten days while they were a married couple. There was something physically quite difficult about the empty space at night for Jirā, a healthy man still in his midfifties.
Not that he held Umichiru in his arms as an occasional replacement; but it could not be helped that she reproachfully pointed out from time to time that his treatment of her somehow hinted at that sort of thing. Jirā was almost a model of indecisiveness, beautifully embodying the Hotara-like temperament that leaned toward making everything obscure and ambiguous. It was too difficult a chore for him to choose between the two inagu. When he saw Umichiru, he repeatedly whispered before, after, and during:
—I care for you, I care for you a lot, dear Umichiru.
When Nabii visited after a long while, even if he spoke little and acted bluntly while the sun was still out, once in bed, he had no time for words but bared her breasts, threw his arms around her, and clung to her.
As he went out, drawn by the call, Jirā saw Umichiru sodden with night dew under the hibiscus tree.
—Jirā … ,
she said, standing still. Her quietly silhouetted body was trembling. She was crying. Having waited in vain and unable to wait any longer, she had come from the place where they promised to meet. It was before dawn on a moonless summer night. Only her eyes, which stared at him, were steady, with the glitter of the point of a blade. Wishing to extinguish the resentful darts of light by covering them with his chest, he quickly ran toward her and tried to hug her shoulders, but her sudden, strong force fended him off. Hit by a flash of light, he rolled in a somersault, but ignoring him, she instantly turned around and flew away. Her intensity almost suggested that, just so as to do this, she had waited for him all night and called his name repeatedly. She ran into a distance, leaving him lying on his rear, his legs outstretched. Her hair hung down to her shoulders, and her loose clothes bellowed in the wind, bulking large and turning her into a black beast. From behind, she looked both frightful and sad.
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