VIII. Moth-Eaten[1]
“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; “but when you have to turn into a chrysalis - you will some day you know - and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?”
“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice: “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.”
“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?”
-from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” by Lewis Carroll
Tenri City, Nara Prefecture. June.
The night air is hot and almost syrupy with humidity. I sneak out of my dormitory through a back alley, restless, to wander the near-empty Tenri streets. Just a block away is the train station, fronted by hundreds, perhaps a thousand, abandoned bicycles. It is a dead and shadowed place this time of night, steel tracks dull below the moonless sky. The only light in the place is the pale glare of vending machines selling Fanta Orange Soda and Green Tea and Lemon Water. I walk around the train station, hear a traffic signal at a nearby intersection cuckoo for the ears of blind pedestrians.
Behind the station is a small park, a cramped affair with claustrophobic pine trees growing on landscape folded like a wrinkled, crumpled napkin. Somewhere in the shadows of the park, very close to the path that winds through it, maybe on beds of pine needles between gnarled roots, or in narrow crow’s feet gullies, teenage kids make love, filling the air with rustles, and inarticulate cries like bubbled dreams bursting.
The sounds set me alight and away, to the far side of the park.
There, near the entrance to the Hondori, the main market lane, a lone halogen streetlight high above attracts and repels its own cloud of moths, scaled wings tracing singed arcs.
I think of Satsuki.
And a bell rings.
Kannonji Temple, Tsuruimura Village. Hokkaido. February.
“Who are you?”
Shodo asks the question into the cold winter air, his breath like silky smoke. It is the same question he has asked me every morning for the past three months. And, much as I would like to after today’s morning meditation (a session wasted on a vivid daydream of two seasons past), I cannot offer him anything. I kneel before him, my palms up and empty above my bowed head, as though to show him my understanding, as though to beg him for the truth.
“You are a fool.” Shodo raises the ornately shaped bell to his left and rings it. It is a sign of disapproval and dismissal.
I rise from prostration and prepare to leave the alcove, as I have every day since coming here.
“Wait,” Shodo says, laying the bell down carefully beside him.
I pause, uncertain as to how to proceed. There is a ritual for everything, including leaving the presence of your master. I had been about to perform it, I had been about to bow precisely so, to step back precisely so, chillblained feet on cold wood, when his voice cut through the silence.
“Come here,” Shodo says, pointing to the tatami immediately in front of him. “Sit.”
I obey, cautiously folding the ends of my moth-eaten koromo as I kneel in seiza.
Shodo slides a hand into his inner magenta robe. When it emerges again, it holds an off-white envelope, scrawled over with small script, and sealed with a circle of stamped red wax. He hands the envelope to me.
“It is an invitation,” he says simply.
“An invitation?” I ask. I examine it briefly. The writing on the envelope is a set of instructions. The very first instruction says that no one, not even the recipient, is to break the wax seal and open the envelope until he or she is in Kyoto. Before reading the rest, I ask, “What is this?”
“An invitation to return.”
“Return?”
“You come from a world of stories,” he continues softly. “Perhaps it is time for you to return to it.”
I struggle to find words. Is he ousting me from the temple? “But Shodo, I-“
”You are at an impasse,” Shodo cleanly interrupts. “There is nothing more I can do for you here.”
I sigh in exasperation. “But given time, I may be-“
”Time is an excuse!” Shodo shouts suddenly, his eyes flashing. “There is no such thing as time!” He closes his eyes, his face returning to cold placidity. “Accept the invitation,” he urges, commands.
I realize there is nothing more to say. I bow low, and carefully exit the room...
I catch a red-eye ANA jet plane to Kyoto, the source of the invitation.
As I settle in for the brief flight, carry-ons stowed, pillows adjusted, seat belts buckled, I recall the events that have brought me to this very moment. It is a habit I have, just before any plane flight, whether long or short. After all, when you’re about to go somewhere, it helps to reflect on where you’ve been.
I came to Japan in early spring of 1995, not long after Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system, and religion became not so much an unseen and unquestioned presence in Japanese society, as a hidden reflection of some of its most gangrenous aspects. I was an aspiring author, and had come to Japan, ironically, to find material in the study and practice of the two religious traditions in my family, Tenrikyo and Zen Buddhism. I intended to spend the first half of the year in Tenri City, and the second half in a small Rinzai Zen temple in Hokkaido. It was to be a perfectly symmetrical year.
What I never planned on was meeting Satsuki.
She was a small, diminutive girl from Kyoto, whose effortless and simple charm partially masked deep and fiery passions. I met her one day before morning service at the Main Sanctuary in Tenri City. Although my Japanese at the time was still an infant’s crawl, and her English was stillborn, there was no doubt about what her eyes communicated. We stumbled through conversations for a few days, held hands, exchanged a single strawberry flavored kiss.
But then, suddenly, things got complicated.
It wasn’t anything she did.
It wasn’t anything I did.
An old question, one that had pursued me my whole life, had finally crossed the vast sea and several time zones into the tomorrow of Japan to find me. And, like the Osaka earthquake, it seized me in the dead of night, in the unconscious faith of sleep, felled the walls around me, trenched and tilted the ground beneath me, until nothing was the same again.
Nothing was the same. Again.
On that awful night, I wandered the Tenri streets, trying to feel, trying to escape Satsuki. Suddenly, through the relentless attraction contained within her very being, she asked a question I couldn’t answer. A question that burned me to touch.
It is not hard to disappear when you don’t want to be found. And even in those moments when we passed each other on the Tenri streets, it is easy to pretend not to see, to pretend not to hear. To pretend not to feel. After all, there was no way for me to explain. I couldn’t explain it well in English, much less in Japanese. It was fundamentally inexplicable.
When winter came, I was allowed to stay and practice under Shodo-san, a Rinzai Zen priest. By strange coincidence, the koan that he assigned me to meditate on was the very question I had struggled so long to escape, that most insoluble of questions:
“Who are you?”
“Silk is the fabric of stories,” comes a voice, from somewhere behind me.
The plane has taken off long enough ago for the Seat Belt sign to turn off. Most people, me included, have just settled in for the kind of sleep that floats on the constant roar of jet engines, thousands of feet above the ground.
The voice speaks in the middle distance of eavesdropping, far enough to be anonymous, but close enough to distinguish words. It stands out because it speaks in English, clear and carefully enunciated, as though it wants to be heard, wants to be recognized as interesting, educated. It is the voice of a man; but then again, it could be the voice of an older woman who smokes.
“What do you mean?”
Behind closed eyes, I imagine the second voice to belong to a large, childlike figure.
The first voice elaborates. “Spit of worms, fashioned into coccoons, unwound to become the most precious thread. Do you not remember Daedalus?”
“You mean Icarus’s father?”
“Yes,” chuckles the first voice. “Everyone remembers Icarus. All hail that spectacular high dive from the stratosphere! It was he what gave a moral to the myth, something to do with moderation or humility. Or maybe it was simply a lesson in the effects of heat on wax, or lack of oxygen on a young brain.” A sigh. “But few look at Daedalus, few understand him.”
“And you do?”
“Let me refresh your memory,” the first voice says. “Daedalus was hired by King Minos to construct the Labyrinth, a vast maze. And, just when he completed it, King Minos imprisoned him within it, setting loose the Minotaur to guard him. Imagine that! A man trapped within a prison of his own making. He is the anthropomorphization of the silkworm, which also fashions its own prison, of sorts. A cocoon.”
A pause. “Is that all?” the second voice asks. “The connection, I mean? Cocoons?”
“Let me continue,” the first voice says. “Within the heart of the Labyrinth, Daedalus sat and waited. He gathered feathers fallen from the wings of the birds that flew overhead. He hoarded the candles that Minos had allowed him to burn, that he might draw futile plans late into the night. And when he had enough of both, he began his slow, secret construction. Imagine that. Fallen feathers sealed with wax. A formula for freedom, both for himself, and his son. And it was a formula that worked. Only, there was an inadvertent cost.”
“So,” sighs the second voice, with not a little impatience, “Daedalus is a silkworm and a moth. And silk is the fabric of stories because?”
The first voice chuckles, then clucks disapprovingly. “Patience is only a virtue if it endures. But to answer. All stories are about the imprisonment of existence. And all stories posit the existence of a freedom from that prison, and the cost of that freedom. Whether it is realized or not determines the tone of the story. So. The reason Daedalus is especially significant is because he authored the terms of his own conditions. It was he who built the maze that imprisoned himself, and it was he who fashioned the wings that killed his son. It is he who is ultimately responsible. And just as Daedalus is the author of his own tragic tale, so too is silk, the product of the silkworm, the fabric of stories. Silk is built from a cocoon, a self-made imprisonment. It is made from the spit of the lowliest of worms, denatured and spun into something priceless, a thread which links the exotic distance and the skin-close intimate. Silk, like a story, is a recreation of a prison. A prison of recreation.”
“I see,” mutters the second voice, clearly confused and disappointed.
The first voice continues, as though “on a roll.” “Few understand Daedalus. He was such a clever man. And yet, such a fool. What was he trying to accomplish? And who was he?”
I struggle to follow the thread of this strange conversation, but it quickly grows fine and soft, and slips from my grasp. As I lose touch, and fall headlong into a dream, I hear, as from a great distance, a repetition of the last question: “Who was he?”
“Who are you?”
I look up from my position of prostration. The voice is familiar, but it speaks in perfect English.
Satsuki sits before me, dressed in a kimono, bright red silk covered with a pattern of silver moths. She is as beautiful as ever, her expression inscrutable.
“Satsuki-“ I breathe softly.
“Who are you?” she repeats.
I rise up, lean forwards, “Satsuki, it’s me-“
Satsuki looks away, like Jacob’s Ladders suddenly eclipsed by winter clouds. “You? You are a fool,” she says.
I shake my head no. I tell her what I should have told her seasons ago. “Satsuki, I couldn’t say the words earlier, but I love you-“
She looks back at me, her eyes suddenly fierce and brilliant. “Love?” she spits. “What is love? A hollow, fictitious thing.”
I feel stung to the core, unable to say another word.
“You come from a world of stories,” she continues, softly, cruelly. “You spit words from your gut like a desperate thread, seeking to touch and spellbind the world with it. But you touch only yourself, over and over, always repeating the same tale, find yourself, lose yourself, find yourself again. What is love to someone like you? Who are you, anyway?”
She sighs, and for a moment, her voice transforms, becoming soft, warm, like the aura around a candle flame. “There was once a time when we could have shared something akin to love. A secret darkness, a touching of the blinding heat of each other’s presence. But that is long gone. Now, there is only time left for you to return.”
Then Satsuki turns around and rises suddenly. The kimono falls from her bare shoulders like the veil of a dream, and the world becomes scarlet sky, and silver moths fluttering...
A bell rings.
I wake.
A crisp female voice chimes over the speakers, announcing the plane’s descent, and requesting seat belts be fastened.
I rub my bleary eyes, and lean to look out the window.
The silver wing of the plane cuts through the stratosphere. Heading southwest, the sun rises behind us. Dawn is temporarily slowed, frozen even, as it pursues us across the sky.
I look down at the city of Kyoto, an urban constellation slowly fading into day, a vast pattern of frost melting.
And, as if to confirm reality, I reach for the envelope in my coat pocket.
I feel the texture of the strange wax seal, still unbroken.
The envelope containing a secret.
A cocoon wrapped around a question:
“Who are you?”
[1] “Moth-Eaten” was one of my first formal short stories (if it can be considered such). I wrote it during a limbo period in my life, after I had returned from Japan (failing to secure enlightenment, or love), and before I formally started classes in acupuncture. It was actually written as a contribution to an internet news group for science fiction writers. The exercise which this was ostensibly supposed to be a part involved different writers contributing chapters to an ongoing, linked story. The “interactive storyline,” up to this point, dealt with a mysterious invitation, sent to various, apparently unrelated individuals. I continued upon this thread by mentioning this same invitation within my chapter.
The chapter (and the storyline which it was supposed to participate in) was lost, by the way. I have not been able to find an original record of it. Therefore, this story has been reconstructed from (imperfect) memory.
The story hearkens back to my stay at Kannonji temple in Tsuruimura, Hokkaido, a period which is also addressed (to a different woman) in the next story “Letters from the Village of the Cranes.” Satsuki, the woman in this story, perhaps the representative of the cute Japanese girl, is the same figure who briefly appears in the story, “Sudoku.”
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