“Do you want to gallop?”
“Yes.”
“Hang on tight.”
He struck the horse’s sides with the heels of his boots and the horse altered its pace and went faster and faster. She felt the horse’s body working beneath her and for a fraction of a second all three of them were hurtling through the air and a moment later hitting the ground and she felt as if she were caught in the midst of a struggle between two ancient forces, one that distanced them from the ground and the other that pulled them back and she felt that the ground and the earth beneath her were trying to strike at her through the horse but the horse was absorbing the shock with its body to protect her from the blows.
Monsieur Robertson turned his head a little and cried:
“Are you afraid?”
She wrapped her arms around him a bit tighter and said:
“No.”
自害 (Jigai)
The men say:
She came from the ends of the earth with pebbles in her pockets.
We never knew anything else. Very little, in any case.
She came from the ends of the earth with pebbles in her pockets, and she lived for a while in the boarding house of Akira Gengei, the innkeeper. He knew her best. But very little, he says. He does know that back there, where she came from, things happened to her that shouldn’t happen to a woman and especially not a child. He says he doesn’t know why she came here, and probably neither does she. After, she bought old Mifune’s house and we never learned anything more.
We don’t much like foreigners around here, but even if this was before the war, there was already a fascination, in the cities and the countryside, for the West. For America, especially.
She made a place for herself. We never knew if she truly became a subject of the Empire, but after a while she had herself called Misaka. Because she never gave any other name. And since soon the people of Sapporo and Asahikawa began to send young people her way to board with her during the summer so they’d learn America’s customs and languages, we all began to call her Misaka-sensei.
She’d come from the ends of the earth and she’d landed here, on the peninsula.
Did she know that Shiretoko, in the language of the Ainus, meant just that, “the ends of the earth?”
Misaka says:
I came from the ends of the earth with pebbles in my pockets.
They may have told you so. They may have added that Shiretoko means “ends of the earth,” but they are mistaken. My host, Akira Gengei, was half Ainu. He hid it of course, but not from me. People often hide nothing from me. Akira Gengei belonged to the last generation that spoke the language well. Everywhere in Hokkaido, at the time, Ainu parents raised their children in ignorance. They thought that the best way to protect them from others’ scorn was to conceal from them their origins. They thought that the suffering of their race would disappear along with the shame of belonging to that race. They were not afraid of dying out in the process, because they believed that a people is still itself, no matter what name it assumes. Gengei-san explained to me that a more accurate translation of Shiretoko would have been “there where the world goes beyond itself,” or “there where the world bursts its banks.” That pleased me enormously. We were not, in Rausu, at the outer limits of everything, but already on the other side.
I came from the ends of the earth with pebbles in my pockets.
They may have told you. They couldn’t have told you why. No one ever knew. Other than Reiko. I brought them to sow, like seeds, and carry with me a bit of my native landscape. You can plant pebbles where you like and nothing of them will sprout, nothing of them will grow, and that’s perhaps a sad notion for people here and elsewhere, but not for me. I spread them on the road one night, among pebbles just like themselves. The pebbles, like the landscapes, were the same. There was nothing of myself to bring here, and I didn’t come for that. I was far away now, where no one could ever find me, but I soon realized that I’d chosen the identical land, that I had always been, as here, remote from the world, and there would be no elsewhere, never an elsewhere, until I transcended myself.
The village was called Rausu, but the elders still called it Uembetsu, because it had for a long time borne that name. The summers were mild here and the village full of visitors, but the winters were terrible, just like where I’d come from, for months they cut off all of Hokkaido’s north coast from the world. That’s when I most liked the life here. There were the same long mountains everywhere, a bit soft, a bit lazy, that stretched out low in the landscape as far as the eye could see, and the trees were like at home, I won’t say where, black silhouettes that kept their needles for the whole year, and held the snow in their branches until they were like great soft ghosts frozen into the winter.
Reiko says:
It’s my uncle who took care of me after the boat carrying my parents sank to the bottom of the sea of Okhotsk. He was already looking after me before that, and as a little girl I felt as if my father, my mother and myself were dolls with porcelain faces on exhibit at the Inoué property, curios gathering dust while waiting for my uncle’s visits. My mother dusted and sewed. My father drank, in the village and at home, but was always able to eat with us in silence and to climb stiff-backed up to his room. When my uncle arrived, my parents became servants and I became the lady of the manor. Rausu was the summer estate of my uncle Inoué. He was the master and father and the unofficial mayor of the village, and he never came in the winter and it seemed that we ourselves in the winter didn’t really exist.
My uncle spent part of the summer with me, the little orphan. When cold began to creep into the air, he had the idea of finding this woman, Misaka, and asking her to be my governess. My uncle was rich. He did business in Sapporo. He had enough money to pay a governess for me, and enough money so that all I wore was silk. When I was small he said that I was the flower of Nemuro, the sub-prefecture, and that now I was the flower of Hokkaido, and when he spoke to me about this woman, he told me that with her lessons I would be both a true Japanese and a real American, that I could be the most beautiful woman on earth, both the flower of the Empire and of the entire world. When that became so, I would go to live with him in the capital and perhaps, one day, we would visit Paris, London and New York together.
She was a strange woman, Misaka. Tall. With red hair and green eyes. I’d never seen a woman like that, not in Rausu, but I recognized her right away. In front of my uncle she talked to me as to a little girl. She stroked my hair and I looked right into her eyes and I knew that deep down this woman didn’t like children. I saw that she’d never wanted life inside of her, but that she would have wanted me inside her, and that she wanted me for herself. So I played the flower of Hokkaido. I threw myself into her arms, smiling and hugging her tight. My uncle also smiled.
“I told you she’d love you, Misaka-sensei.”
Oh, you have every right to call me a liar and tell me I couldn’t feel that way when I was eleven. As for me, I have the right to stick out my tongue at you and tell you that you’re the liars, you’re the dogs.
2
Misaka says:
I can tell you how it all began.
I found her one morning, on her bed, naked from waist to feet, her thin legs and pink sex settled on the covers. She was in the midst of cutting a deep gash in the flesh of her right thigh with a tracing wheel. There was blood on the sheets, blood on her fingers, and blood at the corners of her lips. For that instant, for that instant only, I will be judged. I could have run to her and taken her in my arms and asked her why she was doing what she was doing, and told her it must end, told her I’d help her to stop, that I knew how to make her stop.