The Father of the Ship

Tonight the body is laid on a futon somewhere in the Eurasian middle and the spirit moves southward along the great arc of the Ryūkyū, the way a tide remembers an older shoreline, until it comes to rest on Miyako-jima, the flat coral island the cartographers always seem to underplay because it lies between two more famous neighbours, sea-locked between Okinawa to the north and the long shadow of Taiwan to the south. The spirit descends through the Ueno district, past the cane fields and the lime-leached wells, and settles in the village of Shinzato (新里), where a small grove of fukugi keeps a secret older than the Tokugawa era's last fevers: a sacred enclosure called 御船の親御嶽 (Uuninoshū Utaki), the Sacred Grove of the Ship's Father. Inside, beneath the heat-eaten stones of a myaka tomb, a single skull has been at home for some two hundred and seventy years.

This week the local press carried the news, almost in passing, that the village priestess and a handful of citizens had gathered to perform the seasonal offering: palms pressed together in the shape the Ryūkyū has taught its children for centuries, an arc of incense, a request for fair weather and the silent appeasement of an ancestor with a story it would be improper to summarise quickly. The story must be approached the way one approaches a sleeping animal.

The man whose skull is in the grove is remembered as Uuninoshū, the Father of the Ship, a captain whose vessel, sometime around the middle of the eighteenth century, was returning from the Ryūkyū court at Naha with the year's tribute discharged, when adverse winds took the crew sideways, the way the sea will sometimes take men sideways without intending cruelty. They made landfall on an island the tradition calls アフラ (Afura), believed by ethnographers to be Lüdao, 綠島 (Lǜdǎo, also remembered as 火燒島, Huǒshāo Dǎo, the Fire-Burning Island), a volcanic outcrop a dozen miles off Taiwan's eastern coast. There the captain was killed, and, the legend insists, eaten. One of the crew, a man named 野崎マナサリヤ (Nozaki Manasarya), survived: he entered into a marriage contract with an island woman who taught him the local language and the local manners and at length helped him escape, but not before he had gathered, with what care we cannot now reconstruct, the bone that mattered, and carried it home across the strait by means the songs do not record.

The villagers built for it a tomb of the local megalithic type, a ミャーカ (myaka), low slab walls and a flat capstone, the way the Atlantic dolmen-builders had also intuited three millennia earlier that a head could be made to dwell properly only beneath an honest stone. The grove around the tomb became the utaki: an aniconic Ryukyuan sanctuary with no statue and no roof and no named god, only trees and stones revered as the daytime address of a presence one does not look at directly. Compare the Latin lucus, the Celtic nemeton, the Vedic वन (vana), the Greek τέμενος (temenos): every literate tradition has kept somewhere in its inheritance a glade where the rule of seeing is reversed.

What seizes the spirit, hovering, is the cephalophoric grammar of the thing. Saint Denis walks from Montmartre cradling his own skull and preaching to the bishops who failed him; Bran the Blessed, in the Mabinogi, orders the men of Britain to bury his severed head facing the continent, and from the buried head the island draws its luck for as long as the burial holds; the head of Orpheus, torn loose by the Maenads, floats to Lesbos still singing in a metre so pure that Sappho will inherit it as a family debt; at كربلاء (Karbalāʾ) the head of al-Ḥusayn travels on a pike and becomes the axis of a calendar of mourning that has not stopped. The Father of the Ship belongs to that lineage, a man whose skull is the load-bearing relic of a village's identity, the part that came home so that the village could keep its name.

The cannibal island belongs to another lineage entirely. Λαιστρυγόνες (Laistrygónes), the Laestrygonians of Odyssey X who eat the scouts and pelt the fleet with boulders; the Anthropophagi whom Pliny in Naturalis Historia VII places at the edge of the world and whom Othello, citing Pliny by way of Mandeville, places in his courtship; the Caribs whose name the English deformed into "cannibal" and whom de Bry's engravers, in the Frankfurt workshops of the 1590s, turned into the standard southern terror of the European library. The Ryūkyū knew this geography too. Across the sea to the east lay ニライカナイ (Nirai Kanai), the paradise from which the kami arrive at the new year and to which the souls return; Afura, in the village memory, became its inversion, the island that did not give back, that took the captain whole and returned only the relic.

What disquiets the spirit, looking down on Shinzato through the canopy, is the loose thread the story has trailed. In 1871 a tribute ship of Miyakojimans was blown off course again, in almost the same direction, and fifty-four men were killed at 牡丹 (Mudan) on Taiwan's southern coast by the Paiwan; in 1874 Japan answered with its first foreign expedition since Hideyoshi; in 1879 the Ryūkyū Kingdom ceased, by edict, to exist. The village's old story about a cannibal island and a returned skull was perhaps already coiled inside the political reflex that moved an empire. Once, in another night, the spirit watched two swimmers be taken sideways near a sandbar in the Exumas and felt the same shudder of recognition: the sea keeps a ledger, and what comes back is rarely what was sent.

Claudius, the Cephalophore