She tried to explain to him. ‘Keiko says I must go.’ To herself she thought that when she left the summer island, Tamio would be the easiest to forget. That is what she thought. She would miss the women and Hana, she would be
sabishi
without the smell of the sea and the long days of sun, the hot and the cold of diving. But Tamio, this man attached to her hand with the grip of an octopus, what was he?
So a man with food scoffs at the idea of famine. In the heat of summer we cannot believe in the pain of cold. Vera had Tamio’s comfort and therefore she felt she had little need of it. She could embrace him at will. And let him embrace her. She could tangle her legs in his, wrap them around his thighs, squeeze, bringing his hard body in to the concave place at her centre. She accepted his importuning, his sweet smell and his eagerness as if they were hers by right. She could not know what it would be to lose it all. Because he was the first she did not understand longing.
‘It is for you,’ Tamio said, and she did not know if he meant his heart that was beating so visibly in his chest. She put her hand – their hands, the fist that they’d made of their two hands – on it.
‘No,’ he said, and pushed their hands away.
She did not understand.
‘It is for you,’ he repeated. This in English. Someone had taught him to say that. Who? she wondered. He did not speak her language well or easily. He had gone and deliberately learned this phrase.
‘It is for you,’ he insisted, almost crying.
Not his heart.
She brought his hand up to her mouth.
He tugged it from her. Not his hand.
‘What is?’ she asked.
And he gestured all around, to the water and the silent street of small greying houses.
‘The summer island?’ she guessed.
‘No, not,’ he said. ‘To know. Not Keiko. For you to say.’ He made the gesture of speaking with his hand, but still she didn’t understand.
He walked away from her, and then waited for her to catch up to him. A breeze moved in from beyond the harbour, bringing cooler air. There was no one in sight but a woman with the
ama
kerchief on her head. He walked beside her, staring at the sheen that had overcome the sand. But he only repeated what he had said. ‘It is for you.’
So that she understood what he meant: it was for her to decide. The decision was hers: whether she would go away, or whether she would stay.
O-Bon
began the next day.
The people said that the dead came back from the water where they abide. They said that this year Hanako would not come; it was too soon. She would not be developed yet as a spirit. How ironic that the voyage – a voyage the
ama
made over and over, daily, all summer long, flitting from the bottom of the sea up to the bottom of the boat, and back again – was judged too dangerous for her.
At first light the women came out of their homes with their washcloths and buckets to converge at the well. The sea was dimpled and orange with dawn. They washed soberly, thoroughly, and went home dripping. After breakfast they appeared in bright
yakata.
They put clothing on the children too, for the first time since summer began, and tied their hair up on the tops of their heads.
The boats were lined up on the shore, decorated with banners that snapped briskly, one above the other, on the rising wind. Red and white pieces of rag were woven into the ropes.
The women went one by one down the path to the temple. They were beating with sticks on small hand-drums like tambourines. The priest gathered them around him, while he played his flute. Its song was soon lost to the wind, and the purple robes
he wore flapped around his legs. The shrine did not resemble a shrine at all, but a fort of old stone walls to break the sea-wind. There was a timber shed behind it that creaked in the wind. When he had finished playing his song the priest opened the shed to reveal treasures normally unseen. There were portraits of the Emperor and the Empress. They had been in the dark all year and now their eyes looked astonished to be in the air in front of living folk. The women all fell to their knees. Vera didn’t understand. These were the same old pictures that everyone had in their houses. There were also relics of a sailing ship that had sunk, and old books of poetry that probably only Ikkanshi-san read.
But what filled the shed was the great chariot. It was called the
mikoshi,
and weighed six hundred pounds. It had no wheels, but long handles at the front and back, so that it had to be carried. There were curtains at the windows so that if anyone were inside it, he or she could not be seen. But no one was inside, except, perhaps, a spirit. It was newly lacquered in gold – a gift from Mikimoto Taisho himself.
The men and boys came shouting along the path, pushing the bearers out in front of them. As they had been the year before, and the year before that, these young men were dressed as women. They made round Os out of their lipsticked mouths, and minced in tightly-wrapped kimonos. Vera remembered the pictures she had stared at in the warehouse of Lowinger and McBean, where she could not tell the men from the women. Tamio was one of them, and looked like a stranger to her.
‘Why do the men dress up as women?’ Vera had asked Keiko every year.
And every year Keiko said that she didn’t know. It was the old way. Once there must have been a reason for it.
Then the young men shouted and their low voices gave them away. The women, watching, laughed with their hands over their mouths. The priest handed another bottle of sake around. The men and boys took many drinks.
In the early afternoon, the parade formed. The chariot was
pulled out into the sun where it shone wickedly. The bearers surrounded it and hoisted it onto their shoulders. It was heavy; walking together, they could only manage it for a few dozen paces. Each year, their task was to carry it down the length of the island to the far end, past the smaller shrine, and dip it in the water – perhaps it would greet the dead as they returned? Vera did not know. Then they had to take it back to its home.
‘Thirsty work!’ The old man laughed, to cheer them on, and handed in a sake bottle.
The sake was intended to bolster their strength. They shifted, staggered a bit, and then walked on. After twenty or thirty paces, one stopped to accept a drink from a bottle offered by a crowd member.
Vera was reeling: the heat of the sun, the baffling wind, exhausted her. She could sometimes catch sight of Tamio, in his blue patterned costume, and sometimes not. Tamio shouldered the burden along with his friends, and laughed with them, and staggered, too, when he’d had his fourth or fifth sake break. His black eye-paint ran down his cheeks, so that he looked like a sad clown. He put his back to the work, and grunted with the rest. But he seemed to Vera to be in another place in his mind, and not wholly present in these rituals.
The wind from the sea gusted in and out of the procession, so that sometimes the songs carried full voice, and sometimes the voices were blown off and nothing remained but the rushing waves and the strange feminine progression of the men.
Everyone was there, from the Headman and his sons and daughter, to the schoolteacher, to the oldest crippled great grandfather, to the fattest baby. The day was hot and the path was narrow. The chariot wobbled its square way along, and the men sweated and strained as if they had never done this before. Then there was more sake, and the bearers hoisted their burden again. Vera walked beside Tamio and poured water into his mouth – his hands were occupied. He flashed his eyes at her but did not speak.
Down the path they went, through the straggling houses, past
the bath, onto the uneven ground from the far end of the town where the temple was, and into the bamboo grass. It was a long way, and a poor path. The wind was rising, and made their task more difficult.
An hour passed, and then an hour and a half. The men were sweating, and their feet were not so sure on the stones. The square chariot lurched this way and that, and each time it lurched, it imperilled the procession. People screamed in delighted mock terror and ran out of the way. The wind lifted sand into their eyes.
Tamio’s make-up was nearly gone: black lines ran from his temples to his jawbone. The lipstick had become a ring around his lips, where he drank the sake. The white paint was still there, chalky, but in patches it was thin, and Vera could see that he was actually red in the face. He was hot, and drunk too.
The farther they walked, the more drunk they became; the more difficult their task, and the greater the enjoyment of the crowd. These women-who-had-been-men yesterday, and today were not either women nor men but some grotesque being in between, were a mockery of both strength and delicacy. The sun was still hot. The drinking went on. Tamio’s face was distorted. Sweat made black lines of the make-up, so that he looked like one of the faces in the old prints, huge, exaggerated, his expressions classic – rage, sadness, fear – each one extreme.
Finally the sun began to sink. The bearers were drunk now; they could hardly stand up. The leader staggered and fell to his knee, sending his comrades into paroxysms of laughter. One and then another found his robe too constricting, or ripped it with a carelessly placed foot. Half naked, staggering, swearing, tripping, the fourteen boys and men approached the small Buddhist shrine. Perhaps they would stop here until tomorrow. But the old men strongly disagreed. Eventually it was decided: they would carry on into the night and dip the
mikoshi
in the sea, as they had always done. A few families separated from the crowd and went home. Most remained to cheer the bearers.
Vera turned back to the well in the centre of the now empty
town. Ikkanshi-san’s door was ajar. She looked in. He was there, seated before his grinding stones. But he was not grinding. He held a light fabric between his forefinger and his thumb; it was saturated with reddish oil.
‘Why are you not at the procession?’
‘I am putting another final polish on the cutting edge.’
The polish was a whitish colour and he told her it was called
boshi.
‘Do you remember which is the
ha?
That is the part that cuts.’ He showed her the sharpness. He was being very careful because he could ruin it at any time. He dipped the edge of his cloth in the
nugui.
‘Do you see the waving grain of the steel that is like wood, with layers, as if it had once been living? That is the
jihada.
The grain of the steel. It is now that the spirit of the blade begins to reveal itself. This is the most exciting part of my work.’
‘What do you think of your blade now? What is the spirit?’
‘I am not certain,’ he replied. ‘But I am waiting. I hope it will speak to me.’ He said this so quietly she did not know if he was addressing her, or himself. ‘It could be an angry spirit.’
‘Where will the sword go now?’ she asked. ‘Will the basket maker take it away?’
‘Someone will come.’ For him or for the sword; he did not say which.
‘Why did you agree to give it to them?’
‘I did not agree or disagree. I had to trust the sword. I could not protect it.’
There was a long silence then.
‘And your friend Hanako,’ he said heavily, ‘has she come back for
O-Bon?’
‘No’ said Vera. ‘The
ama
say the journey will be too difficult for her. But I don’t see why, because she knows the water better than anyone.’
‘That is what they believe,’ said Ikkanshi. ‘But you might believe otherwise.’
Vera went back to see the end of the procession. The sun was nearly down, an orange ball glowering on the horizon. The fierce
winds that had bedevilled the flags all day now put out the lanterns. The men were roaring with pain and staggering. They looked like little creatures on whom some inhuman golden monster had landed. One man set his end down entirely and the others stumbled around to keep the whole thing from overturning in the wind. Each shouted directions at the other; no one was heard. At last the bearers reached the edge of the sea. The sky was almost dark. The gold of the chariot winked on and off, reflecting a man here, a candle there, a ray of sunset orange there. The white make-up revealed, in a crooked row, a line of exhausted, slick faces.
At first she couldn’t see Tamio. She feared he might be crushed under the great gold box. She hung back, making herself invisible, until the bearers of the chariot lay sprawled, exhausted on the beach. Along the way they had abandoned their women’s clothes, and wore only loincloths as usual, their short, thick, strong legs exposed. Some were laughing. Some were snoring. The chariot sat on the beach looking out to sea. Tomorrow they would dip it in the water and carry it all the way back to the temple. Vera looked for Tamio’s face, but in the gloom she could not tell which one was him. She was afraid of these drunken men, and she left them.
Alone, she looped past them to the back of the island. She climbed up and over to the black rocks. These were the ones that flowed like lava, and had hardened in lips, the ones she had hated until Hana and she had played there. She sat, and remembered the manta ray that had come to the light. Hana had flashed her light into the water looking for the green things that the manta ray liked to eat. Tonight Vera flashed her lantern. Would Hana come? She did not believe it. She lay flat on the lip of the rock and let the light play in the water. She thought about the spirits of the dead, who were supposed to be coming, and wondered when they would arrive, and if she would feel them. If Hana came, she would say to her, ‘Who are you now? What are you? Where do you sleep? What sort of life do you live, is it really under the water?’
Tamio came up behind her and put his hands over her eyes. She cried out. ‘You frightened me!’
He spoke in rapid Japanese. ‘You are not frightened,’ he said. ‘You are angry.’
‘You are drunk.’
‘And angry too,’ he said. He put his arms around her.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because it will have to end.’
Vera leaned on his chest and let the tears that had been with her all day fall.