Islands of Protest

by Davinder L. Bhowmik

  One day, Ufuchirā pretended to have gone out for farmwork as usual. But returning before noon, she sat in the grass of the yard to watch Chirū, who was alone at home. Chirū, unable to suppress her excitement before a tryst, was walking on air, humming. Then she began to scrutinize her clothes, of which she did not have many, and wander around the house. As she was about to slip out the back door, her hands full of food, Ufuchirā and her oldest son, Tarugani, stopped her together from both sides.

  Boiled millet balls spilled from Chirū’s arms, as she flung them open, caught by surprise. The grains formed yellow specks all over Ufuchirā’s face. The one who raised her voice and turned red with indignation was, unexpectedly, Chirū.

  —What’s this, mother, taking me by surprise!

  Opening wide her naturally round eyes, Chirū, the purimun daughter, glared at her mother, Ufuchirā, who barred her way. As the mother momentarily wavered, the daughter, agitated, pushed her round chest.

  —Don’t stand in my way, mother.

  —I’ve got a date to keep!

  This wild, fearful conduct was thoroughly unanticipated from Chirū’s usual gentle demeanor. Perhaps it was what love wrought. Agitated, indignant, ready to lose all control, she flared up at Tarugani as he sprung out from the bushes where he had hidden and caught hold of her arms.

  —Hey!

  What are you up to, big brother? You want to stand in the way of my love, too?

  Pressed by Chirū, Tarugani had no response. He had no particular complaint about the object of his sister’s affection.

  —Look, that’s not it.…

  This was all he said, rolling his eyes.

  Ufuchirā pulled herself together right away. She brushed the sticky millet grains from her face with her left hand, while she firmly held Chirū’s arm with her right hand.

  —Look, Chirū. Today, listen to what your mother has to say.

  Calming the palpitations of her heart, she gently spoke to Chirū out of motherly responsibility.

  —That man you visit every day is a drifter quirk. It is better not to think about him.

  No matter what you believe, he’s a drifter quirk, a quirk, you know, he’s a quirk .…

  Chirū’s screeching voice cut off Ufuchirā’s admonition.

  —Mother, by saying “quirk, quirk,” you’re getting on my nerves.

  Opening her eyes even wider, she glared at her mother.

  —I’m a quirk, too, a quirk falling in love with a quirk. What’s wrong with that? A quirk and a quirk are made for each other.

  —Oh, Chirū.…

  Ufuchirā had no reply.

  Chirū continued:

  —You say “drifter quirk,” but that quirk is an honest man. My man is that quirk. There is no one else!

  Her counterattack was completely unexpected. Ufuchirā was overwhelmed by Chirū’s impeccably logical purimun speech.

  Ufuchirā, speechless with her spirits dampened, reflexively loosened her hold on Chirū, who swiftly took the chance to shake her arm free from Tarugani’s grip. Jumping over the fence, she ran through the wind as fast as she could. Tarugani backed off, dumbfounded by her spellbinding vehemence. Ufuchirā simply repeated her daughter’s name:

  —Chirū, Chirū.…

  Ignoring their dismay, Chirū ran toward the Fools’ Lodge, where the purimun drifter waited for her.

  Soon, Ufuchirā’s fears came to a head.

  As might be expected, it was nothing other than Chirū’s pregnancy. Now apparently too languid to visit her man, Chirū closed herself in the rear room and continued to vomit whatever she ate. As Ufuchirā watched the way Chirū’s body, like a piece of wood, grew thinner by the day, she also lost her own appetite and began to lose as much weight, as if affected by her daughter’s morning sickness. Given that a purimun inagu who did no work had become pregnant with the child of a nagarimun purimun ikiga, male drifter quirk, the situation oppressed Ufuchirā as a twofold and threefold burden.

  As Chirū spent days in agony, suddenly the words of an old woman of the sumunuyā, lower residence, came back to life for Ufuchirā. It was evident to everyone that the old woman’s death was imminent when she whispered something toward the end of her usual yuntaku storytelling in an intermittent voice that could no longer be easily heard. Her story, resembling a ray of light that faintly burned afar, was recalled from the past in ways that mitigated Ufuchirā’s agony.

  —This is a strange, truly strange story,

  the old woman began in her hoarse voice. She then proceeded to mutter one of the stories that were never to be told openly. When Hotara was eventually no longer Hotara, the story went, there would be one that would make it Hotara again:

  —To tell the truth, the seed of a drifter carried in a Hotara woman’s womb will live a drifter’s life.

  So she said.

  At the time, there was nothing to do but to think of this as merely a senile tale. But now, this part of the old woman’s narration, hardly acceptable from Hotara’s worldview, came back to Ufuchirā’s memory because of the depth of her concern for her purimun daughter, and it gained new meaning within her as she sought to pursue her unfinished dream.

  Ufuchirā began to make great efforts to help Chirū, who was weak from morning sickness. A hard worker and the family’s only support, Ufuchirā never used to neglect farmwork unless there was a particularly compelling reason. Now she let these chores slide by so that she could take good care of her daughter, despite her protests, as she started to become noticeably larger. Ufuchirā seemed to be completely possessed by the revealing of the secret story that the old woman near death had muttered, haltingly, in her croaky voice.

  This was around the time of urizun, early to mid-spring, the following year. Pushed by the force of full tide, the baby, like an ingua, puppy, just barely past prematurity, was born after a hard labor and difficult delivery from Chirū’s abnormally protruding, swollen abdomen. It was an inagungua, little girl, with a pointed nose on a wrinkly gumachiru, little face, extremely vigorous cry, and blue eyes on dark skin—its incongruous features made it hard to tell which race it belonged to. From the secret wish of its grandmother Ufuchirā, as the story goes, it was named Umichiru, “a thousand azure thoughts”.

  The setting sun, hazy vermillion, began to shed light over the fence, where a pot, refilled to the brim a number of times, had run dry. Only two or three pieces remained of kuruzātā, the brown sugar that accompanies tea. Still, there was no sign that Jirā’s narration was coming to an end. On the contrary, he nodded even more vigorously at his own talk.

  To begin with, because Jirā’s overflowing thoughts and words were at odds, he had spat an excessive amount of saliva out of his front-toothless mouth. Whenever Jirā’s narrative reached a peak, Sanrā and Tarā sat up, their backs and necks as straight as Fudō, the Buddhist deity known as the Immovable One. But they sparkled when his saliva fell on their faces, which was frequent, and when they no longer could put up with its stickiness, they had to wipe their foreheads, the tips of their noses, and their cheeks and chins with their sleeves.

  It was a lonely night several weeks later, when the moon of the sixteenth night brightly lodged in the sky and when the excitement of that summer’s Hotara-upunaka festival, which turned out to be the last ever, had begun to fade.

  … There was a quiet knock on the front gate to Jirā’s house, which was the sumunuyâ, lower residence. Jirā was lightly snoring at the sweetest moment of sleep. The one who intruded into his interior room across the middle room, where his family lay, was Mamuya, Nabii’s younger female friend and a member of a family in service to the nīmutu household. Jirā was always impervious to all circumstances, but perhaps because his ecstasies had been disturbed by the strange stir in the air, he turned over in his sleep. When he opened his eyes, feeling as if he had awakened from a nightmare, he unexpectedly sensed a faint but sweet female fragrance. Momentarily relieved, Jirā thought that a woman had come to visit, lured by the summer moon. He slowly e
xtended his arms toward the form of the woman that flickered nearby. The moment he tried to pull her closer to him by her waist in his habitual manner, a fierce slap flew through the dark, striking his cheek.

  —Stop! What are you thinking! Get up, wake up, Jirā. It’s gotten serious, Nabii’s in critical condition.

  Mamuya’s fierce voice shot at Jirā’s head. Jirā crouched with his hands weakly propping up his chin. His parents and siblings sprang up in response, wondering if there had been an earthquake or thunderstorm, a fire or tsunami, but they only looked at one another without moving. Mamuya explained Nabii’s ichidēji, seriousness. She yanked the sash of Jirā’s nightwear, as he remained crouched on the floor, pulled him up, and with a shout—urihyaa!—kicked his lazy body outside.

  In general, Hotara inagu are made to turn to brute force in this kind of emergency, although normally in their daily lives of silent, continuous work, they try only to show respect to ikiga.

  Mamuya, eyes turned upward, was fiercely determined to bring Jirā to Nabii as soon as possible and by whatever means. She pressed him to get on the horse-drawn wagon waiting for him. Thus, he clip-clopped toward the nīmutu house to see Nabii in her critical condition, along the dew-drenched night road that was dimly lit as far as he could see. It was not that Jirā’s brain firmly grasped the situation. He was absently looking up at the moon afloat in the night sky.

  When Nabii came out of the Hotarayama sanctuary, after her retreat there for that year’s Hotara-upunaka festival, she looked extremely worn out, apparently not just from her age. Not a single person had noticed, not even Nabii herself. Her mother, Ufunabii, who would have noticed even sooner than Nabii, had already left this world. The timing of Nabii’s own death aside, she had for some time had a clear vision of Hotara’s sachi, future. As a woman of the nīmutu household, she had presided over the ritual that originated at the birth of the island and had preserved the Hotara-upunaka festival in order to pray for Hotara’s everlasting existence and peace. She never gave birth to a child, nor was there any practice or idea of adoption in Hotara society. The society was doomed to eventually perish after her death. That was self-evident to everyone, as long as the one who communed with Hotara-Ushumēganashi, the island’s guardian deity, was to be lost from the island.

  But however the world might appear in Nabii’s vision of the future, accepting Hotara as it was meant to be was the igun, dying will, of Ufunabii handed down to her. With Nabii, the Hotara folk had watched the course of the island as it had developed. And what igun oracle would now come from Nabii, who turned out to be the very last inagu of the nīmutu line? This was the main concern of the island folk, who were about to be left with no future promise. The one in the position to directly hear that igun was Jirā, the officially adopted husband of Nabii, bereaved of her parents and siblings and left in this world merely as a nīmutū woman.

  Since the early evening, religious priestesses had chanted for Nabii’s recovery at the uganju, place of worship, behind the nīmutu house, but they had already withdrawn. The elderly, ufutsukasa, major priestess, saw firsthand how Nabii writhed in torment as her soul lost rest due to the power of ugan, prayers, of the priestesses who tried to force her to stay in this world, and unable to watch any longer, she suggested that they leave it up to what her soul wished to do. The destination of the spirit of Nabii, who had presided over the Hotara-upunaka ritual and ruled Hotara itself, determined the future of Hotara, and as it was said—wattâ ya tin, unu nagari nu mama du yaru, “we, too, go as our tide goes.”

  The ritual of igun, passing, was about to begin before the relatives had fully lined up by Nabii’s bedside. Jirā, who tottered in barely on time, moved across the array of old folk from throughout the island to stand where he could closely face Nabii. While everyone watched, he grasped Nabii’s hand with all his might, as she breathed faintly on her deathbed.

  —Nabii.…

  This was all he said, as he gazed at her face, drained of color and now somewhat bony. He grew pale and opened his eyes wide.

  It was not that his spirit left him, and, tōrubari, in a daze, words were lost from his lips. Rather, even at this late point, he did not fully grasp the situation or understand how to behave. Jirā, who was by nature staunchly serious yet nonka, carefree, had no intuition or quick wit, regardless of the situation in which he found himself. Even so, after a few minutes, he did utter some words from his umui, yearning, for Nabii, with whom he had shared a long life.

  —Nabii, what’s happening to you? If you die, what will happen to me? What am I to do, oh Nabii .…

  He was in a state of tōrumāru, confusion, as he spoke in a tearful voice.

  Nabii most likely caught a glimpse of Jirā’s utterly deplorable behavior as her breath weakened and her eyelids began to close. Then, whose power moved her no one knows, but she suddenly lifted her torso with a strange show of spirit. Her dark-skinned face, now pale, surrounded by white hair that covered both ears, faced the ceiling with resolution. While the people around her drew back, Jirā hurriedly placed his hand on her back to support her. As if in response, Nabii seemed to lightly lean on his chest. Then, she shook her long, white hair just once. Her hair brushed his eyes, but he did not let go of her back. From her slowly opened mouth, pursed as if ready to pronounce the sound “wa,” she exhaled warm breath at Jirā’s ear, and then a sonorous, resounding voice struck the ears of people around her.

  —Subside, the voices of waves.

  Subside, the voices of winds.…

  She uttered this first couplet in an astonishingly clear voice. It was as if she was trying to control everything in the world with her raised voice. After a deep inhalation, she shook her shoulders and added the next lines:

  —May the Hotara Guardian’s honorable face be worshipped.…

  It was a brave, sublime farewell song, which could only be described as something that the gods made her chant. Having finished saying “miyunchii ugamaa,” her mouth half open and her eyes still looking up at the ceiling, Nabii relaxed her neck. Her cheeks loosened into a liberated expression that seemed to say that she had entrusted Hotara’s fate to her own raised voice. She looked across the people in the room with a faint smile and then quietly fell into Jirā’s arms. This, he said, was her last moment.

  Now, there is a coda to this farewell song that Nabii solemnly chanted with her failing breath at the ritual of her final words, as told by Jirā.

  Nabii’s song, a short verse in a rhythm unique to Hotara, proudly celebrated the coming of Hotara’s guardian deity, who was, as it was sadly clear to all, distancing himself from the island. By what route it is not known, but this song, which begins with “nami nu kuin tomare, kaji nu kuin tomare,” was transmitted to a yosojima, different island, with a few large cities, and is still today much discussed as a recitation poem composed by a female poet quite coincidentally by the same name.3

  According to what I have heard, one part of the crucial line has been inconspicuously replaced by another. As a result, in trying to seem genuine, this version unnecessarily flaunts power precisely because it is a sham. It is commonly discussed with added false details, or so it seems.

  Jirā wept again while recounting the scene of his farewell to Nabii. Tarā and Sanrā watched while his tears fell and moistened his sleeves as his umui, thoughts, overflowed, and they patiently served as listeners for Jirā’s yuntaku tale.

  Sanrā, who was calm and collected by nature, had followed Jirā’s yuntaku panasu, talk story while trying to show his real thoughts, but unable to tolerate Jirā’s many tears, he could no longer conceal his loss of interest. He looked down so as not to be caught by Jirā and let out a small sigh. When he looked up and focused his attention again, Tarā was crying. Eyes red and misty, Tarā seemed to be enduring something. This was odd to see because Tarā was a rikuchā, argumentative person, who, unlike usual Hotara folk, disliked yielding to emotions.

  Sanrā, tilting his head a little, looked Tarā in the face. Then something stirr
ed Sanrā’s memory. Behind Tarā’s unexpected tears, Sanrā realized, was a feeling of jealousy that Tarā himself was unaware of.

  When the dry, white winds begin to wash the island before the season of the mīnishi, north wind, the harvesting of millet, Hotara’s main grain, preoccupies all islanders. At a party for bugarinōshi, recovering from fatigue, after communal work, Tarā and Sanrā once had a yuntaku chat by themselves. It was over thirty years ago. Then, looking uncharacteristically thoughtful, Tarā shared a story for no particular reason. Sanrā realized that the story he had heard was the source of Tarā’s strange tears.

  Tarā had relations with an inagu for the first time in the spring of his fifteenth year. The one who initiated him was none other than Nabii.

  —Now that I confide in you how it happened, which is something I cannot discuss on yuntaku occasions, Tarā said, you and I are in the same boat.

  Nose wriggling and cheeks flushed, he whispered to her with an air of importance.

  It was a cloudy, moonless night three days before Tarā’s coming-of-age celebration. After twisting and turning on the floor, not knowing what to do with his agitation, he finally drifted off to sleep in the middle of the night. Then the form of a large woman stole into his house through the back door, which had opened soundlessly.

  Houses in Hotara shared more or less the same structure, and there was no custom of locking gates or doors. Anybody could enter at any time through either the front gate or the back door. Rather than isolating and protecting houses from the outside, gates and doors in Hotara were not much more than temporary markers for welcoming visitors inside. Back doors, in particular, were meant as entrances for night visits. If one entered the grounds through the back door and crossed the backyard, there was a rear room on the opposite side of the house from the verandah or the center room where the household altar is placed. The rear room, a bedroom for a member of the family expecting night visits, was usually assigned to ikiga with little or no experience. Tarā fell precisely into that category.