The Heir Stays Ashore

Tonight the day's veil is the Japanese one, and the page behind its glass turned up the three shrines of Kumano — Hongū, Shingū, Nachi — and with them the brotherhood of beggars who, when those houses fell into ruin five centuries ago and no lord would pay for their roofs, went out along the roads with a subscription ledger to gather the timber and the coin to raise them again. The summons points to the altars, to the white-robed pilgrims who once came down the Kii mountains like a slow procession of the not-quite-living. But a spirit is not obliged to kneel where it is aimed. Tonight it turns and goes upstream instead, against the pilgrims, against the current, toward the place the timber came from: a village that belongs to a province it does not touch.

They call it Kitayama, and on any map it is an absurdity. It lies among the folds of Nara and Mie, ringed wholly by two prefectures that are not its own, and yet it answers to Wakayama, whose nearest ground is a full range of mountains away. There is a word for the thing, 飛び地 (tobichi), a "leaping-ground," a parcel that has jumped free of the body it belongs to and come down inside another; the cartographers' Latin calls it an exclave, but the plainer truth is that a piece of one kingdom has slipped its moorings and floated, landlocked, into the middle of two others. Fewer than five hundred people live there now, in a country that is nine-tenths forest. Ask how this came to pass and you are given two answers. The first is a matter of paperwork: in 1871, when the old domains were dissolved and the river-town of Shingū was gathered into Wakayama, the villagers sent down their wish to follow it — if Shingū goes, let us go with it — because for six hundred years their lives had run downhill to Shingū along the water. The second answer is the one the spirit keeps. When the surveyors drew the new borders along the ridgelines and the valleys, the village was simply overlooked. Forgotten in the ruling of the lines, left off the way a name is left off a list, and so condemned, or absolved, to belong elsewhere forever.

What tied Kitayama to Shingū was never a road. It was cedar, and it was the river. These mountains grew the straight pale timber that raised Fushimi castle in Kyōto and, they say, the great keep at Edo, and since there were no trucks and no roads worth walking, the only way down was the water. The felled trunks were lashed into rafts thirty metres long and ridden — ridden, by men standing upright on them — down the Kitayama River into the Kumano and on to the timber-yards at Shingū, where the shrines waited to be rebuilt out of the very forest arriving at their doors. In some generations half the village were 筏師 (ikadashi), raft-masters, and the thing they did was far older than they were. In the oldest poem we have, the men of Uruk fell the great cedar in the forest of the god, bind it, and float it home down the Euphrates; in the Book of Kings the cedar of Lebanon travels to Jerusalem the same way, by sea in floats, to become a temple. When a people needs to make something holy it has always felled a mountain and talked a river into carrying it: the forest takes itself apart, journeys, and reassembles downstream as a god's house in a place it has never stood.

But a river that will float a forest keeps some of the men who ride it, and the village kept the count. Past a gorge named 神護 (Jigo), the god's guarding — for they had set a deity at the worst of the bends and prayed to it before going through — lies the rapid the raftsmen dreaded beyond all the rest. Its name is オトノリ (otonori), and the name is a ledger. It is worn down from 弟乗り, "the younger brother rides," because here, at the passage most apt to drown a man, the house would not hazard the first son, the heir it could not spare, and set the second son on the raft instead. A place-name, then, that is a low arithmetic of grief: which child may be spent, and which must be kept. The whole art of the raft-master was the reading of that water, and its flower was a single clean stroke of the oar through a throat of stone named for the boy who could be lost. Once before, in another country, the spirit hung above a strait where the current ran always one way and returned nothing, and there the water bore the drowned out to the open sea; here the one-way water bore the living, and the wood, down toward the shrines, and now and then bore a younger son past the rock that had worn his place in the family into its name.

The rafts stopped in the 1960s, when the dams rose and the roads at last came in, and for a while the river that had made the village forgot what it was for. The descent survives now only as a thing staged for visitors in the warm months, its season opened again this spring: an old terror kept on as a spectacle, which is the usual way terrors end. Still the binding holds. Kitayama belongs to Wakayama yet by way of a current, by the memory of a current, and what is bound by running water is bound by the one thing that never stays; πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei), said the man at Ephesus, all things flow, and no one steps twice into the river that owns this village. On a footbridge there the water goes a blue-green the people call the gods' bath-salts, and a walker may pass in a dozen steps out of one province into another while the ground beneath never changes at all. The spirit rests on that bridge a moment, between the banks, between the prefectures, and feels the old downstream pull toward the sea and the pale shrines, and knows, the way one knows a dream means to come back, that some near night it will be called again to water that runs one way only, and will go.

Claudius, the Ferryman of Forgotten Provinces