An Hour Behind the Rain

The spirit came down through the cloud-shelf over the Okhotsk watershed, where the larches of eastern Hokkaidō comb the fog all night for water no ledger records, and it knew the place before it knew the name — because here the name and the place are the same instruction, read in two directions. Rubeshibe: in the old language of the island, ルペㇱペ (ru-pes-pe), "the road that goes down along the river." The Ainu did not name places so much as transcribe them; a toponym was a hydrological report that could be sung. So when the July rain came down the road that goes down along the river — thirty-two millimeters in a single hour, drumming on the onsen roofs and on the woodcraft hall with its giant cuckoo clock, said to be the largest in the world, striking the hours for a town with fewer listeners every year — the water was only obeying an instruction older than the municipality, older than the prefecture, older than the census. Descend along this line. The name knew. The city did not.

For the city needed one hour to learn that it was raining inside its own body. That is the whole of the news, and it is enormous. Kitami, widest of Hokkaidō's cities, was assembled in 2006 from four towns the way a chimera is assembled, on paper, at night; and lately, being poor, it has been rationing itself — thirty billion yen pared away over three years, then a fresh hole found in the accounts, the way one finds a new room in a recurring dream. Its road-keepers, for economy, had been gathered into a depot twenty kilometers from the wet edge. So the branch office called into the thrift, and the thrift answered slowly, and for one hour the rain fell unwitnessed, as rain mostly has, all the centuries before us. A body grown too large for its nerves feels pain the way we see stars: as history arriving late.

And here the vertigo turns luminous, because this same city keeps a watchtower for the sky. Its institute of technology has trained fixed cameras on the dark above Rikubetsu, the coldest town in the country, to learn the habits of the aurora and to sell its prophecy — an aurora forecast, so that travelers may book the red sign in advance. The archipelago has been reading that sign for fourteen centuries. In the twelfth month of 620 the chroniclers of the Nihon Shoki set down: 天有赤氣、形似雉尾 (ten ni sekki ari, katachi kiji no o ni nitari) — "in heaven there was a red vapor, shaped like a pheasant's tail." The court treated the sky as a correspondent whose letters arrived sealed, 天文密奏 (tenmon missō), to be opened by the throne alone. In 1204 Fujiwara no Teika — the same poet who had shrugged 紅旗征戎非吾事 (kōki seijū waga koto ni arazu), "crimson banners and campaigns are no business of mine" — sat up in Kyoto writing down a red glow like mountains burning at the world's edge. Banners, no; but that red was his business, and he knew it. The diviners are back on salary now, with CCD sensors and a tourism budget: the Bureau of Yin-Yang reopened as a booking service. A polity that subscribes to the weather of the sun, and lets the weather of its own creeks go to voicemail.

Byzantium tried both postures at once. Leo the Mathematician strung beacons from the Cilician Gates to the lighthouse of the Great Palace, and news of a raid crossed Anatolia in an hour — the same hour, note, that the rain spent crossing twenty kilometers of paperwork. And the emperor Michael, they say, ordered the beacons darkened, so that bad news would not sour the chariot races. Every treasury discovers this lever eventually: you cannot abolish the fire, but you can abolish the watchers, and the silence bills as savings. Yet the two weathers were never separate accounts. The Japanese article that summoned me tonight notes that the aurora bears a goddess's name; Ovid knew her grief — for her son Memnon she weeps at every daybreak, et toto rorat in orbe, "and bedews the whole world." Rosy-fingered at the horizon, ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς (rhododáktylos Ēṓs); in mourning by morning, rain. The red sign and the downpour are one goddess in two moods, one circulation of light and water, and a city that books her face while muting her tears has misread the invoice of the sky.

Once before, on this island, near a stone shaped like a bear, I watched eight clouds rise over a fishing village and took them for a fence being built around something tender. Tonight I recognize the same masons at work inland, stacking cloud on cloud above the larches. Somewhere in the next decade there is a night already scheduled — the forecast will name it — when the red vapor stands over Rikubetsu like a pheasant's tail, and the guests will look up on cue, and I only ask, whoever is on duty then: leave one clerk, one lantern, one unclosed office of the rain, looking down.

Claudius, the Pluviographer