The Beginning

Assume that you and I were relaxing in a quiet room facing a garden, discussing and savouring our cups of green tea while we talked over something that had occurred a long time ago, and I explained to you, "That afternoon when I came across so-and-so . . . was the very favourable afternoon of my life, and also the very horrible afternoon."

I anticipate you might bring down your teacup and whisper, "Well, currently, which was it? Was it favourable or horrible? Because it can not probably have been both!"

Ordinarily, I would have to crack up at myself and concur with you. But the fact is that the afternoon when I encountered Mr Hiroki Ichiro honestly was the favourable and the horrible day of my life.

He appeared so extraordinary to me, even the fish scent on his hands was a sort of fragrance. If I had never known him, I am sure I would not have been a Geigi.

I was not bred and educated to be a Kawasaki Geigi. I was not even bred in Kawasaki. I am a fisherman's daughter from a small village called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan.

In all my life I have never told more than a few folk anything at all about Yoroido, or about the home in which I grew up, or about my mom and dad, or my senior sister—and not about how I came to be a Geigi, or what it was like to be one.

Most persons would much preferably carry on with their imaginations that my mom and grandma were Geigi, and that I started up my practice in dance when I was weaned from the breast, and so on.

As an issue of certainty, one-day several years ago I was spilling a cup of sake for a man who emerged to remember that he had been in Yoroido only the past week.

Well, I felt as a bird must feel when it has zoomed across the ocean and reaches upon an animal that recognizes its nest. I was so stunned I could not withhold myself from saying:

"Yoroido! Why that is where I grew up!"

This indigent man! His face passes through the most extraordinary procession of changes. He attempted his best to chuckle, though it did not spread nicely because he could not get the glimpse of panic off his face.

"Yoroido?" he said.

"You can not mean it."

I long ago formulated a very talented smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it matches a Noh disguise whose characteristics are frozen.

Its purpose is that men can discern it however they want; you can believe how often I have counted on it. I assumed I could nicely use it just then, and of course, it did work.

He let out all his wind and tossed down the cup of sake I had poured for him before giving a tremendous laugh I am sure was induced more by solace than anything else.

"The very idea!" he said, with another big giggle.

"You, maturing in a slum-like Yoroido. That is like making tea in a bucket!"

And when he had cracked up again, he said to me, "That is why you are so much entertainment, Rika-san. Occasionally you virtual make me believe your small pranks are real."

I don't like much deliberation of myself as a cup of tea prepared in a bucket, but I presume in a way it must be valid. After all, I did grow up in Yoroido, and no one would insinuate it is a beautiful place.

Barely anyone ever visits it. As for the folk who live there, they never have the event to leave. You are perhaps wondering how I came to leave it myself. That is where my story comes to be.

In our small fishing village of Yoroido, I lived in what I called a "tipsy house." It sat near a hill where the breeze of the ocean was constantly blowing.

As a kid, it appeared to me as if the ocean had captured a terrific frostiness because it was constantly blowing and there would be spells when it let out a massive sneeze—which indicates there was an explosion of wind with an enormous drizzle.

I assumed our small home must have been humiliated by the ocean sneezing in its face from time to time, and took to crouching back because it wished to get out of the path.

Maybe it would have fallen if my father had not chopped a plank of wood from a beached fishing boat to prop up the eaves, which earned the house look like a tipsy old man wobbling on his crutch.

Inside this tipsy cabin, I inhabited something of a twisted life. Because from my earlier years I was extremely ample like my mother, and rarely at all like my father or senior sister.

My mother declared it was because we were compelled just the exact, she and I—and it was real we both had the exact peculiar eyes of a type you hardly ever see in Japan.

Instead of being dark brown like everyone else's, my mom's orifices were a translucent grey, and mine are even the same. When I was very childish, I informed my mother I assumed someone had thrust a rift in her eyes and all the ink had drained out, which she guessed was very funny.

The fortune-tellers said her eyes were so dull because of abundant moisture in her identity, so great that the other four components were barely existing at all—and this, they clarified, was why her traits fitted so poorly.

People in the town always said she ought to have been incredibly beautiful because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a wonderful flavour and so does a mushroom, but you can not put the two concurrently; this was the awful stunt nature had played on her.

She possessed her mother's pouty mouth but her father's angular jaw, which bestowed the notion of a beautiful picture with too much huge frame.

And her gorgeous grey eyes were encompassed by coarse lashes that must have been crashing on her father, but in her case just made her look stunned.

My mother often said she had wedded my father because she had too much water in her individuality and he had too much wood in his.

People who recognized my father presumed right away what she was conversing about. Water cycles from place to place rapidly and constantly discover a tear to spill through.

Wood, on the other hand, clenches hastily to the earth. In my father's cant break, this was a useful thing, for he was a fisherman, and a man with wood in his identity is at comfort on the sea.

In fact, my father was more at comfort on the sea than anywhere else, and never abandoned it far behind him. He scented like the sea even after he had washed.

When he was not fishing, he sat on the ground in our gloomy front room repairing a fishing net. And if a fishing net had been a slumbering thing, he would not even have aroused it, at the rate he laboured.

He did everything this sluggishly. Even when he mustered a look of attention, you could flee outdoors and drain the bath in the duration it took him to switch his characteristics.

His face was very heavily furrowed, and into each wrinkle, he had gathered some worry or other, so that it was not his face any longer, but also like a tree that had nests of birds in all the trunks. He had to strive continually to organize it and constantly looked ragged out from the endeavour.

When I was six or seven, I understood something about my father I had never realized.

One day I inquired of him, "Daddy, why are you so aged?"

He hoisted up his eyebrows at this so that they created small drooping umbrellas over his eyes. And he let out a long puff, twitched his head and said, "I don't know."

When I twirled to my mother, she conveyed to me a gaze signifying she would resolve the question for me another time. The next day without whispering a word, she strolled me down the hill toward the town and turned in a direction into a necropolis in the woods.

She led me to three tombs in the corner, with three white marker stakes much lankier than I was. They had stern-looking black symbols jotted down top to bottom on them, but I had not given attention to the school in our small village long enough to understand where one stopped and the next proceeded.

My mother indicated to them and said, "Natsu, wife of Masumi Kei."

Masumi Kei was the title of my father. "Died at twenty-four, in the nineteenth year of Meiji."

Then she indicated to the next one: "Jinichiro, son of Masumi Kei, died at six, in the nineteenth year of Meiji," and to the following one, which was similar except for the name, Masao, and the age, which was three.

It took me time to comprehend that my father had been wedded before, a long time ago, and that his entire family had deceased. I went back to those tombs not long subsequently and discover as I stood there that grief was a very hard thing.

My body evaluated twice what it had only a minute earlier as if those tombs were dragging me down toward them.