The Grave on the Wall. Brandon Shimoda
a village is on the edge of extinction is to say that its future is strictly memorial. That the village’s inhabitants are few in number and decreasing, without likelihood or possibility, even, of being succeeded. Maybe it is a diagnosis that makes it easier to colonize a living place with the presumptive and proprietary desires of the imagination.
At the far western edge of the village was a small graveyard, well-kept and proud, surrounded by bushes, overwhelmed by the sound of cicadas. They were loudest in the trees above the graveyard. The village itself might have been a momentary resurrection for the benefit of the nostalgic youth who followed his great-grandmother and her fading, still sonorous bell.
There are, traditionally, two graves: the burial grave and the ritual grave. The burial grave is where the dead are buried. The ritual grave is where the living go to visit the dead. Sometimes these graves are the same. Sometimes not. The ritual grave could be divided: where the dead were born, where the dead died, anywhere, in whatever form, the dead may be perceived and remembered. An altar in the house of the living, a stone in a graveyard, a painting in an alcove, a book.
I live with Kawaki’s picture bride photograph; it rests against a large (3-foot-by-5-foot) mirror. The mirror and its reflection, over Kawaki’s shoulder, are descendants of the painted body of water behind her, and I worry that the photograph tethers Kawaki to dimensions she would not recognize. She would not recognize my face, coming in and out of focus, attending, so I think, to her memory, which is synonymous with trying to keep it alive.
A grave is anywhere we leave an unrepeatable part of ourselves. A part that has broken away. It provides ritual guidance to the vulnerable, oftentimes humiliating, necessarily mundane act of waiting to die. The grave of what living remains.
The hour was silent. The water held the ghost of a temblor. The boats, moored to the seawall, rocked, making low, gulping sounds. A starfish was stuck to the end of the wall, drying out in the sun. Viscera clung to its mouth. Or asshole. Still wet. There was still life in the star, even though its own life had ended. Like an old, elongated, mysteriously maintained mirror that once hung on the wall of a shrine, maybe a house, above a memorial shelf. A mirror in which smoke from incense, vaguely colored, light purple or green, had imprinted itself as a streak. In which foreheads were always creased, eyes closed, eyebrows drawn together. In which the trees overhanging the stone stairs were reflected more accurately, and more often, than the faces that showed up in the foreground. A star burning into the sea, to live on in the blood of perpetual waves.
The ancestors are always arranging, the hands reaching from all generations to locate me in a body that is also theirs.
We returned to Katsuragahama. It was the weekend of the summer festival. A stage was erected in the pines, facing the sea. Eight young women in spandex, sports bras, and windbreakers were rehearsing a dance to Missy Elliott’s “Work It,” a coda for the poet’s ancient ode to the pines. For the next several hours, boats entered the harbor. The beach filled with people. Umbrellas and tents mushroomed in the five hundred pines. The fireworks started in daylight, filling the gray-blue sky with pale flowers. Jellyfish propelled down through the color spectrum until colors could not go any further. The faces of the five hundred pines flashed. Night rose. The silhouette of the poet, and his passage back into the life he lamented, sparked, then withdrew. The burning ends of each explosion twirled, for a moment, like spirits communicating the order of their future, then turned away from each other, enclosed in their own autonomous orbits, before vanishing into the sea.
1. Making Waves: Japanese American Photography, 1920–1940, February-June 2016.
2. Amarnath Ravva, American Canyon (Los Angeles: Kaya Press, 2013).
3. Hiromi Ito, “Eels and Catfish,” translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles.
4. Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).
5. Raymond Leslie Buell, “The Development of the Anti-Japanese Agitation in the United States,” Political Science Quarterly, December 1922.
6. Etel Adnan, “Sea.”
7. Akira Kurosawa, Dreams.
8. Akira Kurosawa, Dreams.
FACES
Come again in one hundred years, the woman says. The colors will be at their peak.
Flowers are mounted on a wall. The wall is in a small room near the front of a temple. The flowers are pink with white highlights on green, but if it is one hundred years before their colors will be at their peak, how can I be sure? I mourn not knowing, then wonder: will it always be one hundred years?
By then the camellias will be perfect, the woman says.
Perfect, I think . . .
Sounds like, over . . .
Then says, They will be most themselves.
The flowers float on a paper scroll. They seem already old, at least one hundred years. They look like they are sleeping or meditating. Why are we looking at the flowers? We are trying to get into the temple, but the woman has stopped us. What does she want us to see? The temple, the city surrounding the temple, the mountains surrounding the city, one hundred years surrounding the living.
The flowers elucidate the vision, in my mind, of a family: green, conductors of the sun, the ancestors; white, highlights of the sun, inspiration; and pink, the suggestive face, the spectacle of the new generation. But the flowers do not promise anything. It is the woman who is asking us not only to imagine the flowers, but ourselves, our own faces, in one hundred years. My face: pressed through the back of itself, will have evaporated, will be waves.
And it is not the flowers, exactly, but their colors. The colors are alive, still in the process of manifesting themselves. Are they real? Many scores of people face the wall. How much do I love them? Perfect: everyone is walking slowly, compelled through the illustrations of the landscape by faces that are, depending on each second, as beautiful and coherent as they are a tragic, unfathomable dough. The colors flash and improve over time, but what about one hundred years after that? Time, light, weather, attention, though the woman does not say what will happen.
At night, the white disappears. Sky, clarified, concentrates a small panic.
When will I be most myself? Will I ever be? Is it only a matter of time?
The woman, meanwhile, stands with strangers in front of the wall and talks about the flowers. She repeats herself over and over. She will not be alive in one hundred years either, so even she, who knows the flowers better than anyone, better even than the soul who painted them, will never really know the flowers. She is a stranger too. I love what the woman is saying and I love looking with her at the flowers on the wall, because I know that I will not be coming again in one hundred years and that one hundred years has already passed.
Do not simply look at the bewitching lights, a voice says. You should also pay attention to the areas of shadow.
When Midori was nine, he boarded a boat. The boat was long and large, and it loomed, to Midori, like a small, floating city. It was black on the bottom, white and open on top. It had black and gold chimneys. Thick rope grew from the boat to the shore where it was knotted around enormous white anvils. People ascended gangplanks and disappeared into holes. Four hundred thousand people lived in the city facing the small, floating city. Fish rose and turned mid-air, disappearing into ovals on the still surface of the harbor.
Midori arrived with his three older brothers, but only he was to board the boat. Setsuo, Makeo, and Yoshio had failed the health exam. They would have to stay behind. Midori would have to go alone. The small, floating city was not only the passage between the brothers’ world and the new world, it was already the new world. Midori and his brothers shared the same body. At home, they were four. In the unknown, they were one. They shared the same health. It was being divided that made them unhealthy.
Many years later, after Midori died, June began writing, in two journals, her recollection