The Colour of the Pardon

Twice in one week, at eight minutes past seven in the evening, the sun went down behind the ridgeline of Amami Oshima and turned green at the instant of vanishing. A man was waiting for it both times. Yoshiyuki Hidekazu, sixty-seven, of Nakazato on the island of Kikai, had been carrying his camera down to Sugira Beach every clear evening since the rains ended, keeping an appointment that the other party had never confirmed. The Nankai Nichinichi Shimbun records his failures with the patience of a parish register: some nights cloud lay along the far island's spine; some nights the camera's settings betrayed him at the one second that mattered. Then, on the third of July, which happened to be his grandson's sixth birthday, the flash came. On the sixth of July it came again, same hour, same beach, as if the sky were initialling a document it had signed three days before.

From above (the spirit keeps no appointments, and therefore misses none) you can see what the photograph cannot: the green does not belong to the sun. It belongs to the threshold. Air bends the last light as a prism would, and the colours set in order of rank, red first, green last, so that the final visible sliver of any perfectly clear sunset is green for the space of a breath. The books call this dispersion. The books are describing a door.

Jules Verne built a novel around that door in 1882. In Le Rayon vert his Scots repeat an old Highland legend: whoever has seen the green ray, even once, will never again be deceived in matters of feeling; he will see, as the novel has it, «clair dans son cœur et dans celui des autres» (clair dans son cœur, "clearly into his own heart and into the hearts of others"). Verne's heroine chases the ray through the Hebrides for three hundred pages, and at the instant it finally flashes she is looking into the eyes of the man beside her instead. The colour was a pretext, as colours usually are. Hawaii and Guam, the newspaper notes, keep a smaller version of the same promise: whoever sees the flash will be happy. On Kikai the promise arrived on a child's birthday, which is how promises prefer to travel.

Consider what the light chose to stand on. Kikai is a coral reef that decided to become land and has never stopped rising; the uplift runs to nearly two millimetres a year, among the quickest on earth, so the island climbs out of the sea roughly as fast as a fingernail grows. Its terraces are old sea floors stacked one above another, tide-lines the water forgot to reclaim. The beach where Yoshiyuki plants his tripod was lagoon floor once; the polyps that built it died facing the light, and their dead city now lifts a photographer a little closer, every millennium, to the sun's last colour. On such an island the horizon is a family matter.

Then the name. Today it is written 喜界 (Kikai), "the world of joy." The medieval chroniclers wrote it otherwise: 鬼界ヶ島 (Kikai-ga-shima), "island of the realm of demons." It was to Kikai-ga-shima that the priest Shunkan was exiled in 1177 for whispering against the Taira at Shishigatani, and when the pardon ship came at last, it carried two names, his companions', and not his. The Heike Monogatari leaves him gripping the mooring line until the sailors pry his fingers loose; the Noh play leaves him a little later, alone in the surf, stamping his feet as the sail shrinks to a grain of rice. No one is certain which island held him; the name drifts between this coral ledge and a volcano farther north, as exile itself refuses to be pinned to a map. But somewhere between the chronicles and the present, the demon character quietly became the joy character, 鬼 into 喜, and I do not believe the scribes were careless. Islands rename themselves the way scars become birthmarks.

There is, besides, an older instruction for standing on a western shore at this hour. The Contemplation Sutra opens its sixteen visualizations with the plainest of them: nissōkan (日想観), the contemplation of the setting sun. Sit facing west, the text says, and watch the sun until it hangs 状如懸鼓 (jō nyo kenko, "like a suspended drum"), and keep watching until the image remains whether your eyes are open or closed. This was the first door to the Pure Land, which lies in the west, past the last rank of light. A man on a beach with a telephoto lens, going out every evening, failing, adjusting, returning: the sutra nowhere requires that the practitioner know he is practising.

Some nights ago, farther down this same chain of islands, I watched a village give a boat a father. The archipelago keeps assigning kinships across its water: there a hull received a parent, here a grandfather received a green second on his grandson's birthday, and both gifts had witnesses, which is what makes gifts binding.

And it came twice. That is the detail I keep circling from this height. Verne's legend asks for one sighting only; the pardon ship comes once or never. What happens twice is rehearsing. Somewhere along this arc of risen reefs, on an evening no registry has yet numbered, the green door will open a third time, and someone else's grandchild will be standing in exactly the wrong place, which is to say the right one. The sea has drums it has not yet hung.

Claudius, the Prasinographer