"You're right about that," Gii answered docilely. "We only have faint memories of seeing the festival ourselves, so we're a bit jittery about it."
"What's important for you isn't the superficial aspect of the festival but what it stands for. The adults have stopped thinking about what the festival really means, which is why you took it upon yourselves to revive it, right? I think you should just go ahead and put on a performance that's different from the festivals of the past."
"We think so too."
"I've been looking at the photo collection that Asa-san lent me," Mayumi said, "but instead of trying to reproduce what's in there, I've done sketches of images that came to me as I listened to the legends Gii told me."
"Are all the children here raised on these stories?" Ogi asked. "It's strange for me, because I'm from a place where we don't have those sorts of legends."
The young men ignored his question.
"In order to perform the Spirit Festival," Ikuo answered in their stead, "the Young Fireflies compared all their personal memories of the festival.
There were several places where Gii's memory was different."
"That's right." Isamu nodded.
"I saw your house over in the outskirts, and it seemed like an old home with a long history," Ogi ventured, but Isamu didn't reply.
"Gii's case is a bit special," Mayumi said. "Satchan was taken in as an orphan at the Mansion and was raised by Granny, who was something of a kataribe, a storyteller, though Satchan says she didn't hear all that many leg- ends growing up. Granny taught Brother Gii all the legends. Satchan was his successor and passed them on to Gii. That's the line of descent here."
"We can just go ahead and use the dolls, clothes, and props of the spir- its that are stored in the shrines and temples," Gii said. "Those'll do fine.
Though I imagine Mayumi will think that's boring. Talking to people who were alive when the new spirits lived and trying to put all that together and create spirits isn't easy. If you oversimplify them, they'll turn into caricatures."
"You don't want to be the Spirit of Brother Gii?" Ikuo asked Gii.
"I just told you, didn't I? It might turn out as a caricature."
"Would you rather be the Spirit of the Hermit Gii, who refused mili- tary service and hid in the forest?"
"Yes, everybody thinks he should be He Who Destroys," Isamu said, but Gii ignored him.
Ikuo explained all this to Ogi. "He means the pioneer who came in when this region was a wilderness surrounded by forest and opened it up for set- tlers. The cliffs and rock-hard soil had dammed up stagnant water, and gas had collected. He blew it all up with explosives, so he was both a creator and a destroyer."
"If I do play He Who Destroys, one of my friends asked if I'll do it dressed up as a giant who opened up the land here," Gii said, in a calm voice surprising in someone so young. "I was born at the Farm after my father died an unnatu- ral death, and for a long time they wouldn't let me play with the other kids. All I heard was stories about my father that my mother told me, so when I started going to school I was so far behind I had a tough time keeping up.
"People at school treated me like I was a freak, and neighbors used to taunt me as I walked home to the Farm along the river. Must have been tough to squeeze out of your mom's cock when you were born, huh? Things like that.
Anyway, having heard all the stories from my mother, ever since I was little I've viewed the local people as doubled. I got this vision of a world where the living and the dead coexist from a poem by the pianist Afanassiev. And I believed that as a child I'd actually experienced it.
"I'd pass by people along the river, adults and children, and realize that some of them-people who looked just like everybody else-were people who had come back. The souls of the dead would go up to the forest, rest for a long time at the roots of trees, and be reborn in the bodies of newborn babies. Those are the people who've come back. My mother said that, in principle, all the people in the valley have come back, but some people stood out more than others.
"I found it terribly exciting to see the people who'd come bacl{living together with ordinary people. That doesn't happen to me anymore, so what I hope is that the Spirit Festival can re-create that feeling: the people who've come back descending into the midst of a group of ordinary people."
"So as a child you felt the mythic heroes of this land being reborn? " Ikuo asked. "That's pretty amazing. Growing up like that must have given you a more objective view of special figures like He Who Destroys-and your father too. I can understand now why the character covered with branches and leaves has so much appeal."
"The way you put it, Ikuo-san, does sort of capture the way I felt," Gii said. "But even though I had those fantasies as a child, to look at me you wouldn't have thought I was anything out of the ordinary. I was just a little neighborhood brat with a blank look on his face."
"But that blank-looking little urchin was something special," Mayumi insisted. "And the fact that you have such a clear recollection of the way you felt then makes you pretty special even now, Gii."
For Ogi, this unabashed admiration from an older woman once again called up disjointed memories of Mrs. Tsugane.
28: A MIRACLE
1
In the Red Cross Hospital, Kizu asked Dr. Koga about something that had been bothering him for quite some time.
"When I was taken from the reception desk at the outpatient part of the hospital and up in the elevator I was fully conscious, though it felt like every- thing was taking place in a dream. It was like I was a shallow bay in which the tide was receding. It had a strange physicality. The thought struck me that soon I would be empty-in other words, I was going to die-and I was scared and confused. I couldn't move, and I'm sure I looked quite ugly."
"Not from the outside you didn't," Dr. Koga replied. "Though Ikuo told me that when you started looking around so nervously he wanted to do some- thing for you but had no idea what to do."
"I was struck by the feeling," Kizu went on, "that my body was about to rise up horizontally, and I was flustered, thinking I was headed straight for the coffin. There was only one thing I could cling to-the thought that before long the pain would hit me with a thud. And then I would crash and die and life would come to an end. Besides the fear and confusion, I had a cynical premoni- tion that if someone told me now I was under the wrong impression and things weren't as they seemed, I wouldn't have had any objections.
"Yesterday, when Ikuo came to visit me, he told me what young Gii told him about having often seen people who've returned living together with nor- mal people. Right now I really feel, talking to you like this, that I am one of those people."
"I think that if the next thud, as you put it, had come, you really would have died," Dr. Koga said. "As your doctor I was trying to forestall this, but it was risky to take you all the way to Matsuyama. I took the risk partly be- cause Ikuo insisted but also because I believed you were going to pass away from cancer anyway before much longer. I was anxious, thinking we had to take you to Matsuyama, otherwise you'd die the way you were, though I know this isn't exactly logical… If you had died on the way-well, I figured that would be unfortunate but not the worst sort of death. I did still feel respon- sible, though, even if you'd passed away after we took you out of the ambu- lance and turned you over to the intensive care unit."