Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge

by Kimura Yūsuke

  ISA’S DELUGE

  Some said it had taken place way out in waters off Hachinohe, past where the twinkle of city lights could be seen, farther out than that even. But others said over in the waters off Niigata, on the other side of the island. Who knows?

  It’s usually just a lonely expanse of night sea, enveloped in deep gloom. But on that night many fishing boats, following the schools of squid, had congregated there; squid lures hung from each boat, each in its own idiosyncratic style, illuminating the surface of the water. Only the undulating waves spread across the wide expanse of broad ocean. A seemingly infinite number of boats, with their accompanying lights and their reflections, had gathered at this spot; taken together one could be forgiven for thinking a parade of boats had suddenly risen out of the night’s gloom. Beneath the lights one could further make out the roiling waves shooting spray as they broke. In spots where the light glanced from the surface of the inky soup, the black sea displayed patches of deep-emerald skin. Squid, impaled on the tips of long spears, seemed to float across the surface of the water translucent in white raiment.

  “Jeez Hitoshi, think maybe you’re laying it on a little thick there?”

  That was Shōji, swigging shōchū and water while listening to his cousin tell the story; six years separated them. They had started drinking at Hitoshi’s house at dusk; that was now hours ago, and Shōji showed no sign of slowing down. Hard to believe that his depressed self that had departed Tokyo just a few hours earlier was now in such high spirits.

  These days the lightbulbs clustered onboard a squid boat are about the size and shape of rugby balls, but back in those days, who knows? Who knows what boats were made of then, or what size they came in, or even what shape. And the banners they raise in the middle of the night after a big catch, they would have been … wait, no way they would have been up, right? At any rate, all the other boats went to work, like a battle had begun, with the crews pulling in squid hand over hand. But one boat had not yet begun any work; a group of men were crowded at the front, on deck. Seems a likely scenario, anyway. And there in the middle of that group of tough fishermen, some from Hachinohe, some that had blown in from other regions looking to make their way in the world—this while the men looked on anxiously, some out of naked curiosity—anyway, in the middle was a man with a towel wrapped around his head and a heavy fish knife in his hand—that would be Uncle Isa. He was also my uncle, Uncle Isao, but Hitoshi always called him Uncle Isa. There he was, “Uncle Isa,” facing down a much older man, a much-respected senior fisherman with a long history. No one could ever say why exactly, but in fishing it always seemed there were more squid to be caught at the front and back of a boat. And since in those days wages were calculated on straight commission from the amount of fish you pulled in, this was probably a dispute about the spot that the captain had ordered them to fish from. Or maybe something to do with relations between the higher and lower ranks of men on board. Anyway, something made my uncle blow up. Maybe it was that someone had lost at gambling and was feeling pressure to pay his debts, fighting over a spot. Could have been any of those reasons. You could hear a voice rising above the melee: “All right already, enough. Nobody be an ass here. Let it go, let it go”—but Uncle Isa was having none of it. He squared his shoulders and silently pursued his opponent to the front of the boat. But his opponent had also stood on many a battlefield. So, while still jockeying for position he bellowed taunts to provoke my uncle, still in his thirties: “Hah! So you not tough enough to take me without holding something in your hand?! Is that it?! All right, come on, come on, come at me, you spineless bastard!”

  Uncle Isa flinched; the taunt had hit home. Then, at just that moment, the wave on which the boat had been riding pulled the prow forward and tilted it to one side. His opponent lost his balance. Isa was not about to let the moment pass. He timed his plunge to catch the other man as he pitched forward. In response to the knife thrust the man raised his hand to cover his face. Uncle gave it everything he had and sliced his opponent’s hand and then, taking aim at the stomach, which was now unprotected, he thrust the point of the knife in deep.…

  “Just a shallow cut, though,” said Hitoshi, laughing.

  “Shallow?”

  “Yep. Seemed to slow down midthrust. Didn’t go very deep. People called him Shallow Isa after that.”

  “Shallow Isa? That’s bullshit.”

  “Okay, fine. That’s the name I gave him.”

  “Whaddya mean? You just made up a name for him?”

  “Easy there, Shōji. You were laughing too.”

  “Maybe, but so were you; you makin’ fun of me now?”

  “Not me! As if!”

  Hitoshi laughed broadly. A large man weighing nearly one hundred kilograms, he shifted his position. He was still laughing like he couldn’t help himself. Shōji, nearly his equal in size, laughed out loud again. Even though their conversation centered on the darkest stain in the Kawamura family lineage, they had both been rolling in laughter on the topic for some time. Maybe the laughter had something to do with it, but while Shōji’s style of speech usually retained the standard Tokyo speech patterns for a while after returning home, he had now completely reverted to the Nambu dialect of the region.

  “Yeah, well, whatever, maybe you’re right; who knows. He may not have missed, you know. Uncle Isa, he’d get lots of cuts in, but he never killed anyone, ya know what I mean? When I think about it now—he always had a knife on him, even walking in town, ya know?—I think maybe he was really that good, able to precisely control his cuts.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah, for sure, for Uncle Isa, those knives were like a part of his body. He always had a knife, one of those magiri knives, stuck in his haramaki, under his shirt, as he walked through town.”

  “Magiri? That’s a knife?”

  “You never seen one? A double-edged knife. The fishermen use it to cut ropes and stuff, to chop up chum and fish bait. One of those knives.”

  “Don’t think so. Don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”

  “Well, whatever. I think it’s technically a makiri. I’ve had a look at a dictionary once or twice ya know; seems it’s an old Ainu word for a little knife.”

  “An Ainu word?”

  “Yep. From the Emishi who long ago lived up here in Tohoku and used language close to the Ainu ways of speaking. You never heard about that? North of Sendai, as far as Akita, and around the border of Yamagata Prefecture, lots of places still have names that come from Ainu words.”

  Shōji was nodding along like he had heard this all before, “I see, I see,” but it was all new.

  “Other times Uncle Isa’d be walkin’ around with a knife in his hand, he would often show up at the main house, maybe because it belonged to his older brother. Most of those times he’d already been pretty soused before he arrived. He’d sit at the low kotatsu table, sloppy drunk, and raise the top of the table and stick his knife in there, between the tabletop and the futon.”

  “Why? Why would he do that?”

  “No particular reason. Just there. Kinda like you, putting your cell phone on the table every time you sit down; same thing. ‘Cell knife’ we should call it, huh?!”

  Shōji was bent in half in laughter again. Even as he laughed he was impressed, as he always was, by Hitoshi’s sharp observations and clever use of language.

  Hitoshi’s father had been killed in a car accident while Hitoshi was still a kid, so he started delivering newspapers in elementary school in order to contribute to the household finances, helping support his brother and four older sisters. And then his still-young mother died, shortly after. His brother, and then the sisters too, all left home before long, and he took on responsibility for keeping the house going by himself. Shōji always figured that all the hardships that Hitoshi had suffered explained his ability to be calm and unmoved in the face of things, that it explained why he was always upbeat and positive, always able to deliver kindhearted commentary while making fun of
people. His father had always been telling him to be more like Hitoshi. While he was annoyed at this overbearing pressure he couldn’t deny its wisdom either. It still grated on him, this feeling that he would never be like Hitoshi. Hitoshi’s smiling, inviting expression remained as it had for years, even though his hair was now significantly grayer.

  Shōji had come back from Tokyo to his hometown of Hachinohe because he wanted to hear these stories about this uncle. He had never met this uncle, Kawamura Isao, four years younger than his father. Isao would now be seventy-one years old by the ancient way of counting; that would be sixty-nine or seventy in the modern style. With his habit of property damage, violence, and, of course, the wounds inflicted in onboard knife fights, he was a man with more than ten offenses on his record. Everyone assumed he was still alive somewhere, but there was no one who knew for sure where. Isao was the fifth of six children. The oldest brother was Chōkichi; followed in order by the oldest daughter, Akemi; then the second son—Hitoshi’s father—Kōjirō; then Shōji’s father, Yūsaku; and then the youngest brother, Maruō. Chōkichi, Kōjirō, and Maruō had already passed on.

  The house where all these siblings had been born was now called “the main house” by Shōji’s and Hitoshi’s families, and also by the others who had moved on to set up their own residences. Chōkichi had continued in the original house, but after he died it was the second of his five daughters, Yaeko, who kept it going. It was Yaeko’s husband, Masahiro, who had married into the family, who told me that Isao had been living on government benefits for a while but had then suffered a stroke or something that had left him disabled. Apparently he was now living down in Kanagawa Prefecture in a facility for old people with no family support.

  The facts about this relative came not from Shōji’s parents but from Hitoshi and also from Kakujirō, who lived close to the main house. Kakujirō was a childhood friend of Shōji’s father. Shōji had been only half paying attention when these details were being relayed; he then forgot about them entirely. Later in life there was a period when he was quietly holed up in his apartment. He had quit the company where he had worked for five years; during that period he remembered the stories again. Then he started having a recurring dream in which this “uncle” began appearing. That was about two months ago, right before the Great East Japan Earthquake, which is to say around the beginning of March.

  So, an uncle with a criminal record; a stain on the bloodline. Whenever the uncle got drunk he would show up at the main house and start breaking things. Not even his brothers and relatives could contain him. He found it a strange and surprising thing that he, who lived a life without any connection to violence and crime, had such an uncle. It was like he had become entranced by this surprising fact; ever since the appearances in his dreams, he couldn’t get him out of his head. Maybe if I look into this some more, he thought, gather materials, maybe then I could write a story about it, take care of it somehow. He had written some fiction while a university student, but he had given no thought to becoming a writer until this moment, now forty years old. Yes, he was in Tokyo, but it was not like he had anything to do other than send out job applications and collect rejection letters.

  “So, then, those times Uncle Isa would show up,” Hitoshi continued. “Well, hah, so my mom and sister would lock themselves in their rooms. They’d say, ‘Go on, go on’ and push me in his direction. ‘You’re the one he wants,’ they’d say. ‘It’ll be fine.’ ‘Oh great,’ I wondered, ‘like what’s gonna be “fine” about this?’ Always the same it was: Uncle Isa would sit down at the kotatsu and make me sit there next to him. Put his arms tight around my shoulders he would, like this, and then rub his cheek against mine. More like lick the side of my face. His eyes were totally bloodshot, his breath sour with sake, he reeked of BO, and that scratchy beard really hurt. So, me, what was I to do but stiffen up and be rigid? Oh man he stank. If you ask me that’s still the strongest impression I have of him—that incredible unwashed stench. I don’t know how to express it really … the smell of old hawsers. Not like you would know, huh, Shōji? You know what I mean by a hawser? Those ropes they use to tie boats to the dock. You know what they’re like? All old motor oil and rust and dog shit kind of smelling; really awful. I mean, really. If someone stepped in dog shit and wiped their feet off on those big ropes—that’s how it smelled, just like that,” he chortled. “Think about what it would be like, you know, that smelly old uncle comes up behind you while you’re sleeping at the kotatsu and he crawls in close and tight. Worse thing ever. Even to me, I tell you, little as I was, I knew in my heart that there was something weird and creepy about it. Kid’s skin, it’s all nice and smooth, right? He seemed to really like that smoothness.”

  “You mean, what you’re sayin’ is, kinda like a pedophile?” Shōji asked.

  Hitoshi just crossed his arms in answer, “umm,” before he continued: “I dunno, maybe not so much that, but more like a powerful complex toward women, inferiority complex, like he never felt good enough for women. And so, in that case, maybe hugging me was a way to get rid of that feeling. And then Uncle Isa, you know, he was the ugliest one of the lot. Real bowlegged and all. Wait—Shōji: you ever seen a picture of Uncle Isa? We got one here somewhere, in the next room I think.”

  Hitoshi got up and went to the next room, where the Buddhist funerary memorials were displayed. While Hitoshi was searching around the room, Shōji was thinking about this idea of an inferiority complex toward women. He couldn’t remember a time when he had actually received a clear refusal from a woman. In fact, it was upon seeing women walking in Tokyo, especially the dazzling ones with the short pants and long white legs, that he began to suddenly feel anxious, realizing that he had never had nor ever would have any contact with such women. But society seems to turn on “commodities” and “sex,” and he seemed to have been cast aside by that society. Those feelings began to overlap with his thoughts about his uncle.

  “I wonder if that is all there is to it,” Shōji asked himself, pushing up his silver wire-rimmed glasses, which he’d had since his student days, now hopelessly out of fashion. He remembered something that had been said long ago, maybe it was from Hitoshi, something about how passions ran thick among all the relatives tied to the home place where his father and uncle were born—they called it the treasury. Not “deep” but “thick,” like something long simmered. Maybe because the parents got married even though they were cousins. But love and affection, as well as hatred, seemed to all come in excess in that family. So maybe his uncle’s displays of affection for Hitoshi were similar to the strength of love for one’s own children. Or maybe it was because this uncle, who felt no relationship to adult maturity, felt that the children were more like himself.

  There was the story about how his uncle had once, apparently with the intention of brightening Hitoshi’s day, brought home a male rhinoceros beetle that he had found somewhere. He had wanted to show how the beetle opens its wings and flies, so he tied a string to the beetle’s horn and began to swing it around. But he put too much force into it and in the next moment the body broke off and went soaring into the nearby field.

  “Got it, got it. Here it is. I found it. Uncle Isa. Here it is.” Hitoshi came back from the next room with an ancient-looking photo album, its thick paper cover cracked in some places and worn in others. He placed it open on the table and pointed to one of the yellowed black-and-white photos in the album.

  In front of a clapboard house that brought to mind poverty and long-ago lifestyles stood two men in sleeveless T-shirts and shorts. One of them had a deeply sculpted face, eyes narrowed and laughing. To his left a man much shorter in stature, with piercing narrow eyes and sharply protruding cheekbones, seemed to be staring in this direction. A smile played at the corners of his mouth, but he appeared to be feigning cynicism. Their hair was different too: the tall one had straight smooth locks, while the short one had stiffly curled hair. The dark complexion and the tautly muscular body may have been one reason for it, bu
t he gave the impression of a craggy boulder outcrop. And he found, just as he expected, when he confirmed with Hitoshi, that the compact short one was Uncle Isa.

  “So that’s what he looked like …”

  “As you expected?”

  “Maybe, but more than anything, he looks like a tough one.”

  “Got that right. He was a loud one too. His voice was wild.”

  “And who’s this other one, the one that looks like a foreign movie star or something?”

  “Well, that’s my father.”

  “Your father? Well, it’s the first time I’ve seen him. That face makes him look like he came from somewhere outside Japan.”

  “All the men from the treasury looked like that, like Greek statues. Chōkichi, the oldest brother, who died years ago, looked like that too, same as my old man. No foreign blood flowing in any of those veins, however. It was only Uncle Isa who looked like that, with a mug like a potato.”

  There was no question. They looked nothing alike. He blurted out his doubts, “You sure they’re related?”

  Hitoshi laughed at him, tobacco smoke pouring out of his nostrils: “They are absolutely related!”

  “Well, then, he’s much less rough looking than I expected.”

  “Well, they were still teenagers in this picture; still smooth skinned. But the Isa I knew had a face pockmarked with acne scars. And there at the right side of his mouth was a hollowed-out space and nasty scar.”

  “What happened?”

  “He’d gotten caught in the squid-fishing hooks. He also had a scar in his side from a knife fight.”

  “A knife scar?”

  “Yep. Looked like a scar from a bad burn—no hair grew on the shiny skin of the scar. They called it his little lantern, long and thin there on his side, shaped like a leaf.”

  Shōji then heard about a town called Konakano, a place not far from Hitoshi’s place, the sort of town that used to be found all through the Tohoku region, one that hosted a popular brothel. Isa had gotten into a dispute with a yakuza gangster type on one of the streets there. Isa took a beating and couldn’t get over his anger about it. Apparently he went and borrowed a sword from Hitoshi’s father, who was still alive at that time. Whether Isa was able to fully exact his revenge or not … well, Hitoshi didn’t know exactly how that story ended.