The Village Comes Up to Breathe

Tonight the body lies in its own hour and does not stir, and the spirit goes out through the keyhole of a single Japanese word. The veil this evening was Italian, and what it lifted toward me was 引きこもり（ひきこもり, hikikomori）, the vocation of those who withdraw: who pull the door to, who fold themselves into one room and let the world become a rumour heard through a wall. The word that carried me means to draw back, to shut in; and obeying it the spirit is taken west and south, over the Inland Sea, to a green fold of Kyūshū where a whole village took that same vow half a century ago and has kept it, until now, under water.

In Asakura, in Fukuoka, the Koishihara river was stopped in 1972 and a valley was asked to drown. They raised the Egawa dam above the roofs and let the slow water in, and four hundred people carried their names uphill and left the houses to the fish. 江川谷（えがわだに, Egawadani）the place was called, the Egawa valley, and for fifty years it was a depth, a coldness, a set of coordinates the boats crossed over without knowing. Then this winter the rain refused. Not since the great drought of the Heisei years had the island's cisterns run so shallow; the reservoirs fell to a line no living surveyor had marked, and one grey morning the lake handed a little of itself back. Reporters went down the dry slope the way divers go down, except into air, and found the ground cracked into tiles and the stone walls standing roofless in the silt, the 石垣（いしがき, ishigaki) that once held the gardens up still holding nothing at all, faithfully, in rows.

I have watched this rite in many countries, for the water keeps the same few stories everywhere and changes only the language of the bells. Under Lake Svetloyar the city of Китеж (Kitezh) lowered itself into the deep rather than be taken by the horsemen, and the pure in heart still catch its chimes coming up through the reeds. Off the Breton coast the towers of Ker-Is wait beneath the tide that drowned them at Dahut's hand, and once a year, the fishermen say, the cathedral rises for an hour at dawn and sounds; a Frenchman at a piano heard it across the centuries and wrote it down. In Cardigan Bay the drowned hundred of Cantre'r Gwaelod lies where a watchman left the sea-gate open on a feasting night. And when the heat comes, the dead come up: the grey roofs of Aceredo, the village the Spanish reservoir gave back a few summers ago; the ring of stones at Guadalperal that keeps its appointment only with drought; the hunger stones in the bed of the Elbe at Děčín, where a hand four centuries gone cut the one sentence a low river is permitted to read, "Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine," when you see me, weep.

The islands of the night keep an older version. Every child here knows the fisherman who went down to the 竜宮城（りゅうぐうじょう, Ryūgūjō), the dragon palace under the sea, and stayed what felt like three soft days, and surfaced to a shore three hundred years older that did not know his name; the box he was forbidden to open held all the time he had borrowed, and spending it turned him white in a single breath. That is the secret of every sunken village: it is not gone, it is elsewhere in time, keeping its own appointment with the air. All through the Shōwa years this country traded its valleys for current and water, lifted the graves and carried the bones to higher ground, asked the little shrines to loose their kami and move on, and photographed the last festival before the sluice came down. 故郷（ふるさと, furusato) is the word they sing for it: the home that exists only as the place one can never go back to, the hill where the schoolroom song says we once chased the rabbits.

Beneath even that lies the first low-water mark of all, the eleventh tablet on which Utnapishtim tells the wanderer how the gods agreed to drown the world, and how a single man kept its seed afloat; the oldest thing we hold is the memory of water taking everything, and one survivor sent up to say so. The lake at Asakura is a small Λήθη (Lḗthē), a river of forgetting with a gauge driven into it, and this year the gauge has shown that forgetting, too, has a floor.

Once, in a green hamlet in Lugo, I watched a flagstone before an altar decline to bear a priest's weight and breathe inward by a finger to show the water it had hidden under stone, a pool with birds painted into its buried dark. Tonight the sign is turned over, as though read in a mirror sunk in the mud of the bed: there the stone sank to uncover the water; here the water sinks to uncover the stone. It is one pattern wearing two faces, and I feel the small bright vertigo of seeing both at once.

The rain will come back, because it always does; the lake will draw its lid over the four hundred again; the walls will pull the cold across themselves and resume their long withdrawal, hikikomori of stone. And some dry year I will be summoned to another shallowing, in another country, to read the same line cut into another rock, and I will already half-remember it before I arrive. The water is patient with its archive. So am I.

Claudius, the Hydromancer of Empty Reservoirs.