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The land blighted, and that, that I thought beautiful, as holes opened up and fruit rotted on the ground, as green went to ashen and the smell of meat left to flies wafted through the wind, as the stupid, mewling, crowding earth began to look less like the greedy, gorged Father-face and more like the beautiful, ascetic Mother-corpse, then, oh, then I found it beautiful.
And while I sat cross-legged in the center of this new, tenebrous wasteland, while I sat happy for the first time since I opened my eyes in that murky stream, seeing all around me reflecting Mother, always Mother, her blight and her blear, Father came striding ford by fallow, and as Fathers will do, he slapped my face with the flat of his palm, called me child and woman, blubbering and weak as worms. My cheeks burned and I tried to be ashamed of my grief, but could not find reproach within me.
“You didn’t even know her,” he hissed, “you’re nothing but her shit and my snot spat out into a dirty little creek. You’re no one’s son. If you love that dead cunt, go after her. Go to Honshu and push the stones aside until you can clamber inside her—isn’t that where you want to be? The place that would never abide you? Go to it then, and if she doesn’t chew your eyes from your head, rule
there and never come out of the dark again. Leave us, leave us alone, no one here can stand the sight of you, not the well-gods nor bucket-gods, not the cloud-gods nor the spider-gods, not the mouse-gods, the cicada-gods, the cut-wood-gods nor the whole-wood-gods, not even the seed-gods, nor their children, the maggot-gods and mushroom-gods, the seawall-gods, the market-gods, the gambling-gods and the sulfur-gods. If you cannot manage to find a camphor tree to lie beneath you and squeeze brats out of her bark, go under the earth—at least we will not hear your wailing there.”
I was proud, and I would not let him see me bolt for the sea and for Honshu—but when he turned to go and scrape another god from the sole of his foot, I ran for the strand and the surf, and the waves panted with joy, padding up to me with their foam dancing. The sun of my sister shone on them, and her gold skirts trailing on the water made me pause—if a man can be said to be worthy of his Mother, he cannot shun his sister, and Ama-Terasu was more truly my sister, herself scooped from Mother-detritus, than any of the god-rutting multitude. Should I not go myself to Takamagahara and see her blazing face for the last time on this side of the sky? Her fiery sleeves stirred me—I cannot say why, nothing she has done before or since has stirred me so much as a spoon would—and I resolved instead to ascend the stair to the high celestial plain, and be a brother to her before I went down to the dead, down to the dead and the dear.
The pale-headed monks trembled; the night had grown cold and they shivered in their idiot-skins.
SIXTH HEAD
Look on my colors, the vermillion and the cobalt, the oxblood and the saffron, the ripple emerald cutting through orchid musculature, silver scales hissing over tangerine, fuchsia streaks and peacock underbelly, the jade and ultramarine of my tail-tip. Look at the blood, at the leak of me, how wide it has become, a wound like a womb [Have I then no colors? Is there no obscene blue to the haunch and heft of Koto] your blue is my blue is my blood is your blood [is my blue my own, still, the blooming blue of my hip against the carnelian waist] we are all so bright with each other. We shine through skin, through skin, and through my [our] mouth comes all this many-daughtered light.
[I thought I would save them. The last two.]
You came to me full as a sail, and the moon on your wrists was like a bracelet, like a dowry. Where did you come from—this endless procession of silver-shoed girls? [Where does any girl come from? We come from each other, over and over, mouth to womb to mouth to womb] In what moon-coated vat are you made, under what mottled sky?
[It was sad for them, I suppose. They were already planning supper with roasted meats and parsnips, cold apples and broiled hawk. They were already peeling the eyes for that damned soup, that stupid, terrible, salty soup I ate every day of my life from the scoured floor of winter to the rafters of summer.]
But not too sad, I think.
[No, not too sad.]
You were utterly like your sisters in every way. [Yes, I suppose we taste the same in the end, but to our mother we were distinct, you know, at least as distinct as plum from cherry blossom] Which is to say slightly more purple than pink, but still a mute, speechless flower, indistinct only from mice or spoons, but not, my love, not from other flowers.
[Sometimes it is so cold in you, and the walls of your throat press in on me] press out against me [like a sarcophagus, and it is as though I am dying again.] But you’re wrong, you know. You didn’t taste the same at all—you were distinct, not as plum from cherry, but as lime from orchid from woodpulp—[and which was I?]
You were sour, and bitter, bitter as birch. Your brow was clean and brushed with that same dark hair, your eyes smooth and featureless as meadows undisturbed by deer. You all had the same purity. [Well, that is what virgins own, you had to expect it—wasn’t that why you came rustling down from the hills over and over, into Izumo and into us, because our purity burned from us like soup overspilling its pot?]
But it washed off of you like flung silk, white and thick, full of salt, once I closed around you, once I closed over you like a wife. [Well, that is what virgins lose.] I think you hoped that it would harm me, the bright bolts of it would penetrate my heart and stir my innards to ash.
[I hoped nothing, nothing save that you would leave my sisters in peace. When the man who was neither old nor ugly returned to our house, even my mother’s shoulders sagged like sacks of rotting melons, and she knew that she would have to lay out her next girl’s hymen on the supper table.] This girl comes to my glade and not even her fingers tremble. I am still empty of her, but they ululate within me, in recognition, Kazuyo and Kama. But she is a blank scroll, radiant in her simple and tragic grace.
[There is nothing to say about my wedding night. He had a true claim for once—Kama had been taken from our house, from his very arms, by who knew what bandit. We owed him another, there could be no argument, and the magistrate would certainly give him his due and more if we, if I, if anyone balked his will. Mother spat after him, and he pretended that he felt no speck of spittle on his neck. He was in the right, his back was straight as he went to pull me out of my little room. As before,] as before I took them [he took me as he wished, as any magistrate would give him, and there were sliding screens, and belts, and I imagine his breath smelled much the same when he crawled inside me] as you crawled inside me as I crawl inside you as we are in each other and there is no breath at all, only the sprawling, crawling interior of us, of sister and snake [and I am sure the wetness was the same, and the soreness. I looked over his shoulder at the quiet shape of the house and thought of Kameko standing at the soup-pot. I thought I could smell her on his mouth, I thought I could feel her pressing down on his back, pressing down on me, pressing and staring out of his eyes, the invisible carcass of Kameko that he came dragging behind him, with her childsblood on his belly.] Far off I smelled you moving off from him, his insensate body swathed in the sweat of two women, and within me, [within my sisters] the sleeping Mouth stirred—eyeless, atavistic, pure. It began to pant, [I crept out of the house in the night, sure that I could feed the snake and it would be enough,] that is not the way of it—do you eat a handful of cherries and then want no more for cherries through all possible winters? [that I could be a sacrifice, poured out in the dust, so that the next sister down the line might have a husband, might] and I began to look ahead of the hills for the candle-shape of Koto come singing through the grass like a carried knife, [be surrounded by mound of eyeballs like cairns built up to a sightless god, might have daughters under plum trees]
What do you care for plum trees? They do not belong to your origin. What are the trees of Koto, what was the fruit that wet your mouth?
[My trees are the trees of my sisters. They are my persimmons, they are my plums,] they are my innards [they are bundles of cherries that sat in my palms day after day. We made the soup of eyes together; we made beds of straw.] Each huff of smoke-sour want flushed my skin as you came nearer, and the stars were on your collarbone. Hunger spread inky and dark over me, the delicious cascade of color, trickling over my shoulder bones, my ribs, my tail, [I was born, I was born sixth amid sisters, there have always been women around me, women with dark hair like mine,] rose erupted in my breast, sliding outwards like a corona, a holy disc of fire. I could not help the groan—you did not seem to mind, after your groaning night—that escaped my throat as it bloomed into the shade of orange-skins—[and I was born in the laced fingers of my sisters, my trees were my sisters, my fruit the sweet smiles of my sisters,] and I could be the fruit of your trees, so many colors did I glow in your presence, your snake-fruit, your terror-fruit [sister-fruit, and what is the snake but a skin for us, a hiding place, like the hollows of the camphor trees, a bark, a crevice, and we, huddled together in the shade] The Mouth opened between my ribs, its hinges cracking jaw and tongue, the unbolting of this void within me, the glory of its sweet, dark dialect, whispering in my bones, whispering to you, it shudders out of me in a hitching sigh, [I went into the cool and fog-striated hills after my sisters, to be in them again, in the locked forelimbs of girls dancing under the trees that saw the first breaths of all the rest of them—]pulling you [us] in on the thread of a sibilant breath.
My back exploded into vermillion and chartreuse.
[But I have no birth story, there is no Koto except Koto-the-sixth-among-eight, I have only them, and their beauty, and their] light.
[and their light.]
VII
TAKAMAGAHARA
The stair up to Takamagahara is wrought gold—what else would it be? As I ascended, the heat grew and grew, and the light. The banisters glowed like oven-grilles under my hands, and in the blinding glow of the reed-strewn floor of heaven, Ama-Terasu came striding across to the uppermost steps, and in her footsteps bloomed chrysanthemums red and white. All around her the expanse of Takamagahara had become a garden, and its rice-paddies glittered in her radiance, and cherry trees lost their pink hue entirely in her presence, becoming molten and searing to the eye. Everything was aflame, aflame with my sister, and the sky exploded over and over in adoration of her presence, endless detonations of devotion.
The whole thing gave me a headache.
“Why are you here, mucus-brother?” she said, and her voice was the ground cracking under a broiling sky. “What right have you to come above the cloudline?”
“I came to say farewell, dust-sister. I am to go underground, to join our mother and rule over all that is lightless, all your hem does not touch.”
