*It didn’t matter, in the end. The man who was neither alive nor dead cut his belly open on our stoop before the day was out. He had seen the snake too many times, I suppose. Mother sighed and sat heavily against the house—I was safe. Kushinada was safe. She had two daughters left to her, and the snake would not come, she thought, now that the offending husband was a cairn of meat on our steps.* It was not him, it was never him, but the blood, the blood sang for you, Kaori, it throbbed hot and thick, and called your name: Ka-o-ri! *I sat out in front of our little house that night, that warm night, and looked at the stain his suicide had made on the stones. It was such a sad little mark.*
They are sticking out of me like pins, and I can smell them, yes, the trees, all their trees, plum and cherry and dogwood and waist-high reeds persimmon and even the eyes, Kyoko’s eyes, they blink on the shell of my back, among the trees, and the trees split me open, they witness my second birth, no longer snake but woman *And my trees, the orange trees of Kaori, white as paroxysms, which saw my birth in the garden, my hardly-marked birth, seventh among daughters, my mother’s womb barely felt me leave it, so oiled and hinged by other births was the poor, wrung-dry thing* yes, yours too, and the fruit is heavy, round as suns, so heavy and I can hardly drag myself among the hills, down to the city, and I know the fruits have no sugar to give, only more blood, more blood, and they will burst and wet the roots again, and they will grow taller and it will go on and on* but she gave me the meat of the orange to suck, her breasts gone dry with too much milking, and I was calmed by the sweetness of it, the stinging gold of summer, and she sang to me as I nursed the thready fruit, my eyes sliding shut in her arms.*
I slid through the empty streets after a virgin like an opium-eater after a den. *I wondered, I remember, I wondered if you would come anyway* and I saw you sitting as though you expected me, and the blood was so thick on the alleys and I moaned and all these voices came out of me, you turned as though you knew them *I knew the voice of Kazuyo, and Kameko, and Kiyomi, and Kyoko, and Kaya, and little Koto, I knew them like my own, and standing on the mark of their dead husband I saw the terrible thing that had eaten them, with their love pouring out of its mouths* I tried to say ‘come to me,’ and it came out ‘sister, wife, be our sister, be our wife.’ * and I knew them for what they were, and I saw the saplings on your poor back, and I knew them for the birth-wardens of my family, and I would not be left out, I would not be left behind, they wanted me, and I ran to you* you ran to me, and your hair flew like veins behind you *I ran to you with open arms, and you were so weak* I could not eat, though the Mouth churned in itself, demanded you, throbbed your name in the midst of all that blood: Ka-o-ri! *you could not take me; I opened your seventh head myself, and the air from within you smelled of orange blossoms, I patted your head, your blistered, root-ridden, suffering head* and you stepped inside me with all the trust of a lost child who sees the end of the wood *and darkness closed around me, but not silence, never silence.*
It took all night to stumble out of the village, my belly so bloodied it might have been a heart, but we were safe, all of us, beyond the blue ridges by the time the sun rose *They married me to him anyway, of course. It was felt that propriety demanded a final marriage for both lost souls—I had said I wanted him, had I not? And he so fond of our family. He should not go down into Ne no Kuni alone.* We watched, our heads resting thoughtfully on a boulder, as the ghost-wedding proceeded through the village, and a priest said words over empty space, and a feast was eaten while weeping, and an empty bed laid out, clean and white, for the weight of ghosts to rest upon.
*I laughed, and the orange trees on my* our *back shook, to see my* our *sepulchral maidenhead vanish into the cloth*
while we wet the mountains with our red and ruined flesh.
VIII
IZUMO
It was the colt that she could not abide. She would have forgiven the rice and the shit, eventually. But she held its bloodied, skinless skull in her arms like an infant, looked up at me over the whites of its eyes with such betrayal in her stare—for a moment I was shamed, I stood before her like a child caught stealing sweets, but the storm-seed laughed and danced in a puddle of his own making, and I could not conceal, not really, not from her, the joy I took in our daughters chaotic cries, in her own red-streaked gown. She was more beautiful to me in that moment than when she first descended the stair of heaven, cloaked in all the sun’s regalia. Her hair was matted with black clots and her sleeves dripped scarlet onto the floor, her fine cheeks were painted with horseblood and I loved her so, I loved her filthy and squalid, swimming in death.
She took me in her arms, finally, and both I and the storm-seed exulted in her heat, her nearness, her light pouring from the spaces between the streaks of horsefat. She took me in her arms and pressed me close, and the gold of her ribs cracked the grey-blue bone of my own, and her face was a boil of grief, and her fire rose up all around me, as it must have risen from Mother, Mother and her boy burning her from the womb out, and my sister burned me from the mouth in, her punishing kiss scouring my flesh of storm, of cloud, of lightning, of sky.
I felt her kiss push me down, down, like a hand on the head of a drowning man, and the sky was caustic, my bones lit up like braziers, and something came spiraling out of me—the strange pearl of Izanami’s flesh, the yellowed orb of what she had to give me, the clot of her dust and rot and flesh and Izanagi’s fluid—it tore out of me like semen, expelled into the fertile clouds, and who knows what storm it salted there.
It was in Izumo that I landed, face first in the mosquito-mottled grass. Izumo, meaningless village, just over the hills from the stink and sink and sick perfume of Hiroshima.
From far off, I heard my children weeping scarlet, scarlet and black.
KUSHINADA / EIGHTH HEAD
:: Look at you, great enfeebled thing, choking on my sisters, spitting them out of your mouths like chewed meat. ::
Look at you, look at how we sit, like teacher and pupil, you below me with that thoughtful stare, looking up into all these eyes, shaded by the wide camphors like a net of protecting arms. Don’t you think it’s funny, don’t you think it’s a classical pose, all the rituals of dragon and maiden observed? I am trying to decide not to eat you, but it is difficult, difficult.
:: I am naked here, and alone, and I am sure that is all as you imagined it, last girl among all the girls, eight, eight—there are always eight, eight of us and eight of you, the eightfold path, and I am at the end, Right Maiden, Right Prey. It is dark here, but my irises have widened, I can see my own mud-streaked limbs, white as poached snails, and I have rocked back and forth on the forest floor clutching them, and I have wondered, wondered when I would join the others, when you would speak to me in their voices, but you will not, you hold them back from me— ::
I hurt. I hurt so much there is no space left in my throats for the hunger. My belly is gape-open, there is so much blood,
{we} never thought (we)
had so much blood in
me/us,
|we|
didn’t know
*our*
flesh went so deep.
It is becoming confused, crowded, and the smell of flowers gags, oh, it
(chokes)
there was an I before this, I remember it, and all these heads fanned out from it like leaves, and I cannot find it now, it is like looking in a heap of jetsam for the one toy you loved as a child.
:: Look at the monster, holding its stunted hands out to its food, begging surcease. ::
This is your blood, it is all over me,
[we]
drown in it. Make it stop. I am finished with this now.
:: You wanted all the others—am I not sweet enough to join my sisters? I can hear, at night, the city not far off, the hurrying men with arms full of jars and clothing and cups, but all I see is trees, trees and you, green and terrible among them, and this place is sticky with blood and saliva and urine. It is our nest, and you are like a moth
er, ripped open to let her babies out, but nothing comes from you, they are stuck, stuck like hooks in a carp’s mouth, and I am telling you that I am willing, willing to go where they have gone— ::
Tell me about your trees, Kushinada, tell me what color they will be when they come cracking through
—our—
spine.
:: Far off from the house my mother :: Mother!
[Mother!]
Always Mother, sloughing her children off of herself like old robes, and then she vanishes, yes, vanishes, and there were no trees where I was born, none at all, but your
*our*
mother did it too, she spat you
[us]
out among the flowers and then filled you
/us/
up with fish eyes until it was time to give you
—us—
us, yes, us, give us all to the man who was
{neither old nor young,}
|who was neither handsome nor ugly,|
( who was neither fat nor thin,)
neither, neither, neither
:: my mother was fishing, sitting propped against a stone by a little pond, and the air was golden and still, golden and still under the flowering cassia, the yellow blossoms and the red bark, and the smell of cinnamon floating over the rippleless water :: Mother squeezed
me/us
out into the wriggling silver, the wriggling silver and the salt churn, she pushed and pushed and I
|we|
dribbled from her like pus, like a tumor, like a
:: she held the pole between her feet; it curved like a lazily drawn bow. ::
leech.
:: There were no tugs at the line; it hung limply as a spare koto-string. But, as afternoons will, the late sun brought a fish to the morsel of pig-gut on my mother’s crude hook, and in lurching forward to catch the suddenly taut pole from between her ankles, mother felt something tear inside her :: Ah, Kushinada!
*Kushinada!*
I know that tear! Please, I beg—yes, I beg, I am above nothing, lower than worms, than snails—make the blood stop. Be a good girl, be the good daughter,
(be a good girl)
{be the good daughter}
put your hands on me and plug up this wet mire
—reach up, baby sister, and we will carry you—
it will ooze between your fingers like menarche but don’t fear, don’t fear
:: and she caught her belly, gasped, fell forward on her knees and saw the fish in the water, pig-bowel dribbling from its piscine lip, looking at her through the filmy green pond. It blinked in the slant-light, and she breathed quick and fast :: there is a space in me
(there is a space in us)
the space from which all this miasma wells
/the place kept still and soft for you, Kushinada/
and that space was once empty, nothing more than a hollow between muscles
—it is not so bad here—
but now, now there are seven there, and their mouths make a chain, and they
|we|
are waiting for the weld of you, and
[we are the Mouth now,]
and I think if I could turn my heads just so
*if we could knot the body just so we might see ourselves*
I might see them inside me, holding hands, and out of their heads flower the branches that shiver my bones
:: quick and fast and low, and the grass was soaked with her water and her blood; her womb-water joined the green water and flowed in and out of the rosy fish’s gills ::
there were fish at my
(our)
birth, too, so many, all silvern and clear, and they smelled, oh, they smelled like
*sorrow*
lightning, and they weighed nothing at all, nothing—
:: and she bit down on a cassia branch in agony, and her mouth was flooded with the murky taste of cinnamon ::
(we remember how she told this story,)
|how she used to give you a flake of cinnamon bark|
/to suck when you teethed/
I
{we}
had no teeth, my
[our]
eyes would not open, I
|we|
could not stand, I
*we*
was nothing but a sack sloshing with water, and only the fish would take me,
—us—
would give me
(us)
their tentacles to suckle.
:: and the tear in her grinned wide :: wide, ah, wide! :: wider than the mouth of the watchful fish, and she thought her bones would shatter as she squatted by the green water. I came out of her :: like a leech-child :: and her hands on my soft head were red as paint, and the umbilicus was knotted round my neck
—yes, she always told it like this: she tore it with her teeth—
/oh, what a fish mother caught that day, with the pole-and-line of her ruined flesh!/
:: And gasping in the flotsam of her body she looked at the rosy fish again ::
the fish carried me
[it carried us—didn’t you feel that we were in you already,
the promise of us, the taste?]
away from Onogoro; I
(we floated with you, the seeds of our plums and our weeds)
rested on their backs like the bow of the boat of heaven, island to island, and the water tasted of mother, and I, I was so alone.
*Oh, beauty, oh self of our selves!*
(You are not alone, we are none of us alone!)
I was alone then, in the dark.
[Never again, we swear it]
|we would not let you go into the dark alone|
—not without our arms ringed round you—
:: floating still next to the line. It looked at her silently, without reproach, and slowly closed the morsel of pig-gut in its mouth ::
*and the tear was so wide and so great in her*
/that mother never gave the trees another daughter/
|and told us the story of the fish and the cassia|
{while we stirred the soup}
We birth each other, over and over, Mouth to Mouth, and it is still dark, but seven clutch each other,
(seven clutch you)
and seven clutch me, and I
[we]
do not remember any longer whether I am eighth or first or last,
*there are eight, always eight*
I do not remember any longer what mother looked like, but their
—our—
cool black braids lie over
/all of us/
me like first kisses.
:: My first meal was the mash of that fish’s black eyes ::
My first meal was the slippery skin of those velvet jellyfish, and in those days we were so like each other, but they did not speak to me like my selves do now, and
{we never bled}
|but we ate|
(and we grew)
:: Please, it is cold out here, and I am alone. I taste of cinnamon, and I will lie soft on your tongue. Let me touch your skin—it flames blue and sere!—but let me touch it, let me pry open your lips. It is cold, I want my sisters, I want to be eight-in-one, I have heard them whispering and I know they want me. Lonely little leech, I don’t want the soup of eyes. I don’t want the bitter tea. I don’t want the birth story, the cassia or the persimmon, the plum or the cherry, the weeds or the eyes. I will be your Onogoro, and you will be my Heaven-Spanning Bridge, and I will never leave you. ::
Kushinada, where will I go, when you are all inside me?
/Hush, now, we are infinitely tractable/
(Don’t you know how far women stretch?)
*There is room, there is room, always room for our sister, our jewel, our little cinnamon-suckling babe*
:: Let me in ::
Kushinada!
:: Oh, let me ::
But the blood!
*the blood is of us*
[and in us] —and because of us—
/ and from us/ |and it is us|
(and there is always blood)
{when new things are}
born.
IX
MT. HIBA
The white-capped monks shivered—it was night, and the stars gave no heat. Did they weep? I could not tell, their faces hunched together; they all refused to meet my eyes. They ought to have wept—it is that sort of story.
“You see how it was, now,” I sighed, “and you will not spread Izanagi’s lies any longer, I know.”
“No, musuko,” they murmured, and they turned their faces tighter towards each other.
“Musuko, musuko! What a stupid word. You have no sons at all. But please,” and here I leaned close in, hearing my knees creak into the crouch, “I will overlook your wormy vocabulary if you will only tell me why you have those carvings, of the eight-headed snake and I. Did you dream such a scene? Do you know where the snake is to be found?”
The abbot’s shining head rose bravely from the throng, which seemed to me in that moment to resemble most ridiculously a bouquet of flowers, bunched together and nodding in the breeze. “Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the serpent carved on our walls has plagued these valleys since my grandfather was a boy. It likes especially to eat maidens and young mothers. We made these icons in the hope that you would vanquish it, cut its heads and tails from its body, and add to your already immeasurable glory. They are our prayers.”