Harbour Town

Shun found himself remembering – that they never built houses with stone. Trees and bamboo were everywhere around the farmland, and over the hills around the town; stones were in the mountains, beyond the delta, beyond the tidal flats, and among the gods. There were some things cut from rock: flagstones on a garden path; lanterns and statues in the shrines and temples. Metal, too, had been used here and there: steel frames, shutters, gateposts, vehicles. There had been concrete, and asphalt, used to make the dock and pier and breakwater, and on the surface of the roads in town. But houses and shops, outbuildings and warehouses, all buildings large and small – they had all been made of wood, with mud and bamboo walls, and tiled roofs in town, and thatch beside the fields. They had all collapsed, had all returned to the soil. Over there, Shun could see a pile of roof tiles high at the sides and low in the middle – dark moss underneath, where the posts and beams rotted into the leaf-litter – and the smell of damp living earth and trees enveloped everything. He sat on a patch of exposed rock, at the edge of the old road, staring at the vegetable rubble in front of his eyes, and wondering at what he could see.

Shun was sitting beside the post road leading into town, on the east side of a small river, at a point that ought to have been familiar to him. The sun was high in the sky, but the air was hazy, and there was little warmth in the light. He was not cold: there were seasons, he recalled, and this one was called spring, and one was never entirely cold in spring. Shun’s arms felt heavy, and he looked down. He was dressed in a long, white garment, with very deep sleeves, which was why his arms felt heavy, because he had raised his arms, and had been covering his ears with his hands. It did not occur to him that it was odd: that he could not remember lifting his arms, or why he should be covering his ears. His arms were weary, and he took his hands from his ears. There was a moment of intense sound, when his hands pulled away from his ears, and the suction pressure made his eardrums buckle. At that moment, a breeze shook his sleeves and hissed through the leaves around him, and he sat holding his arms in the air, with the deep sleeves swaying, and his hands open at the level of his face. He felt something move on his head, and he raised his hands again. Shun was wearing a hat: it was stiff, and brimless, and rose above the crown of his head like a fin, and it was secured with a ribbon that tied under his chin. Dropping his arms, he looked down, and shifted his feet. He was wearing bright, shiny shoes, like lacquered clogs. This costume of his, it looked like formal dress, like a kind of uniform. It had something to do with his function, with his place in the world. There was a wooden object at his feet, and he recognised it as his, and bent forward to recover it: a flat, plain wooden paddle, with straight sides, wider at the top than it was at the bottom. It was a little mace: a badge of office. He tucked it into the sash he wore around his robe at the waist, and stood up.

A crow called out in the distance, and there was an answering cry from somewhere above and behind him. Shun noticed a powerful perfume in the air, and looked around to see what it might be. He moved away from his seat, and began to explore the vegetation around the remains of the house. Not far from the south-eastern edge of the tumble of tiles, he found the source of the perfume. It was a patch of hyacinths and daffodils. One could guess that this had been a garden. This was a spring garden, with perennial bulbs. Shun stood above the flowers, breathing deeply; with every breath, the fragrance became more familiar, more suggestive of something he could almost remember. His nose remembered hyacinths, and fire: the scent of flowers, and of smoke. It was such a comfortable, domestic smell that he found himself becoming unbearably sad, because the memory of fire was only in his nose: it was nowhere in the world around him. There were tears in his eyes now, as he stared vacantly at the flowers, green and blue, green and yellow, cheerful in the riot of weeds choking the little garden. Shun shook his head, and squeezed the liquid from his eyes. Without thinking, he took the mace from his sash, and held it upright in his right hand, with his left hand in front, level with his stomach. He turned away from the ruined house, and made his way carefully to the road, his robes whispering and his heavy shoes grinding leaf-litter and gravel with his steps. Gradually, the perfume faded from his senses, and he began to smell the trees again, and the dampness of the river beyond.

Shun turned right as he walked away from the flowers, because something caught his eye. There were two mounds of stone next to the river, and, between them, a small wooden enclosure above a breeze-block wall. Roof tiles were scattered about the enclosure, but the roof itself was intact, and a few ridge tiles were still in place. Shun felt himself drawn to the stones and to the little building between them. He understood: this was a shrine, and the stones were votive objects, and the enclosure had contained a god. There were a number of spiky plants between the smaller of the stone mounds and the shrine, blocking the entrance to the enclosure. Shun walked around the stones to the right, to see if he could find a way through. He stopped short. The wood above the breeze-blocks had fallen away on this side, and he could see through to the objects within. It was shaded, and dark, and he was not sure of what he was seeing. Something was there. It was stone, and had been shaped by hands, and it looked like a weathered image of a seated figure. There were plants there, too, and what appeared to be pieces of broken white dishes and vases, and the sound, the feeling, of movement among them. He heard a rustling noise, and there was no wind. Shun bent closer to the opening. He brought his left hand up to his nose, because there was a powerful stench of decay coming from somewhere near the enclosure. He lowered his head, and stared into the green darkness. Something moved, behind the sculpted stone. A piece of white porcelain moved slightly, and Shun quickly righted himself and backed away, because there was a white snake in there. He moved around to the front of the stones again, and paused between them, and bowed toward the little shrine. He began to examine the stones. There were traces of incised characters on the one beside him, but they were no longer legible. The larger stone, to his left, had been more deeply carved than its neighbour, and he could make out certain things. He saw the word ‘gate’, and he remembered a house by the river, and a cooking fire. He saw the words ‘new fields’, and he remembered the sound of water flowing along an irrigation canal. He saw the words ‘four hundred years’, and he knew that this place had once been much closer to the ocean, and that the little river had been part of a broad delta, and that many hands had carried rocks and buckets of soil to this place, and, over many years, they had built a system of new fields. Shun began to feel anxious, and he thought about the town. He bowed again, turned back to the road, and began to walk.

First, he had to make his way across the river. Directly ahead, along the path followed by the post road, there was a tangle of metal rods and rusted beams, and two piers of rough stones and concrete set on either side of the river. The rods and beams rose in a rough arch between the posts; they were thick with the remains of last summer’s growth of vines, which were just beginning to send out new shoots. Shun slid down the bank to the left of the road, and pushed out between the reeds and marsh grasses to the edge of the river. It was the season between spring floods and early summer rains, and the river was low, and ran through its bed along narrow, irregular channels. There were many gaps and flat stones, and Shun picked his way among them, with an egret watching him curiously from a few metres away. He paused in mid-stream and looked out along the river, to where it joined with a larger river and flowed out into the sea. He heard water moving over sand and stones, and the popping of fish breaking the surface, and the crows still calling in the distance. Wind pushed below the collar of his robe, and he shuddered. The stones around him were slick with moss and river grasses. Shun continued on to the far bank, and returned to the road, and proceeded with measured steps, neither fast nor slow, toward the town. About two hundred metres from the river, the road split in two, and Shun followed the route to the left. A few minutes later, he sensed the beginning of the town: the piles of rotting wood, the mounds of tile, the crumbling breeze-blocks and fractured concrete; Shun remembered the smell of sweat and lye, and the look of hands, shaping things, building. He turned right again, then left; a crow called from somewhere close beside him, and he stopped walking, and swung quickly around to the sound. There was a perfume in the air again, a scent he could not place; and the crow was watching him from an overturned bell. It was massive, this bell, and half-buried in the muck beside the road. Shun took two steps toward it, and the crow called again, and flew a short distance, to a new perch on a mound of stones. This was a temple. Shun gripped his mace tighter, and narrowed his eyes, and he heard his own voice pronouncing names: the names of his parents, and his grandparents, and his children. The crow rubbed its beak on the broken tombs, and called once again, and flew away.

Memories were beginning to move in Shun’s consciousness, but they were not yet his own memories: they were images of hands, and scents, and sounds, and textures – all connected with the ruins, with the roads and fields, and with the temple and its surroundings. In the quiet movement of wind around him, he imagined the dying echoes of the great bell, whispering. He was walking again: turning right and right again, circling around the temple and proceeding deeper into town. He was walking away from a large hill, the hill that marked the southern edge of his town. He knew that this was his town, now. If he continued in this direction, he would soon reach the harbour. He noticed that the houses and buildings were better preserved here: there were clear walls and roofs, and sagging glass in some of the windows. Signs poked out among vines and branches. There was a movement ahead of him, between two walls. Shun paused, and waited. Nothing came. He walked a few steps more, and drifted toward the other side of the street. Suddenly, the sound of collapsing wood, of breaking glass, behind him. He whipped around, and saw a puff of dust rising from the debris of a shop, and in a shadow beyond, a pair of green eyes reflected the light back at him. An acrid smell came to him, and he saw another cat, approaching cautiously from behind a tree. He turned and looked across the street. Another cat was watching him from the top of a wall. Was it watching him? Shun turned again, and the first cat was moving in the darkness, and the second cat was still beside the tree. The cats were watching each other: they were aware of Shun, but they were looking through him. As he continued on toward the harbour, he came across more and more cats, one or more in every house and shop. Some of them were watching Shun, and one appeared to be following him. He forgot them for a moment, when he first tasted the sea in the wind.

He walked along the broad inner dock, weaving through piles of wreckage and streaks of flotsam thrown up by the wind and tide. He stopped some distance from the breakwater, his path barred by the shells of four long metal buildings. Shun looked back at the town. The outlines of buildings were easily visible in the hazy light; he could even make out shapes in the distance, back toward the temple and the country beyond. His heartbeat boomed in his ears, and his breathing became louder than the wind. As he watched, the light grew a bit stronger, and the colours deepened: rich green up behind the town; blue and white shimmering on the water; and everywhere between them, the yellow-brown of construction. They built with mud and bamboo here, they built with wood and clay; they put flat rocks on the soil, and raised posts above them, and ran beams between them. They had fired the clay in ovens to make tiles for the roofs, and offering-bowls and votive vases for the shrines and temples. At the far end of the pier, the remains of a fishing boat were draped over some kind of harness, or support: some time ago, before a festival, it had been hauled ashore for repairs, or to be taken out of service. The decision had not been finished when the boat had been brought out of the water and raised in its harness. Hands had touched the keel, hands had run along the hull, and had felt their way between the rust-stains to the truth below the water line. Now, when the boats in the water were little more than platforms for barnacles and weeds, this shore-bound wreck was the only vessel to retain its shape. Looking at it from across the harbour, Shun could imagine it seaworthy still. He could remember launching it, and many more, with straw ropes and paper streamers on their bows, and brightly coloured flags, and the smell of liquor and drying fish everywhere along the dock. He sat on a bollard and looked out to sea. What was out there? A few islands; a cape reaching out and away from this bay; a small mountain rising above the headland. Everything was green – blue-green in the hazy light – and moist: the balance of a morning mist clung to the upper slopes of the mountain, and light grey clouds hung down low over the slowly pulsating water. Shun noticed that his breathing was slower now, that his breath and the rhythm of his heartbeats were slowly adjusting themselves to the pace of waves breaking softly on the dock. He knew it was time for him to move down to the beach.

Shun walked back along the pier, retracing his steps, and turned right to follow the line of docks down to the end of the harbour. About a third of the way along, there was a large central dock jutting out into the harbour. At the far end of the dock, Shun recognised a hollow concrete block, still showing traces of brown paint, as the fishing co-operative building. Closer to the shoreline, another building, white and solid, displayed the character ‘ice’ in chipped red brushwork. On the ocean side, high up at the top of the building, brown, faded traces of the same character covered several square metres of the wall. Shun remembered a old custom, of displaying the ice sign prominently on the ocean side, so it could be read from far out to sea. He passed the pier and breakwater at the far end of the harbour, and climbed down to the beach. It was a quiet semicircle of sand, with large stones in and out of the water, and a few shore birds wading in the shallows. A third of the way down the beach, a line of rocks interrupted his progress over the sand. Covered with mosses and water weeds, they would be under water soon, when the tide reversed. He turned his attention to the sand at his feet, squatted down, and scanned the surface from the edge of the water to the murky tidal pools around the base of the rocks. There was a dead puffer fish twined in a knot of loose kelp, set about with bits of driftwood. Shun had perceived the sand to be smooth; but, looking closer, he saw dozens of small depressions filled with water, and fragments of shells everywhere. As he watched, one of the little holes in the sand began to bubble, and he saw the slick foot of a mollusc disappear below. He shifted his position, looked closer at the rocks and tidal pools. They were moving: the surface of the rocks rippled with the quick, irregular movements of a swarm of water cockroaches. The wind picked up, and Shun felt overpowered by the smell of old fish and the sea: of drying salt water, and the stale tidal pools. Moving to leave, he looked further along the beach. Near the water birds, a great, smooth, rounded stone rose above the water. The top half was the colour of sand; the bottom half had been stained black in the water. It looked like it had been tossed down from the mountain, and rolled into the sea. Shun climbed over the rocks, fording the stream of water cockroaches, and went up to the great stone. He placed his hand on the landward side, and felt that it was warm. A red flash caught his eye, and he bent to the sand. Among the shells, he found a shard of pottery: glazed blue and white, with a red dot in the centre; it gleamed in the soft light behind the stone.

He wanted to see the boat: that fishing boat left in its harness by the dock. He wanted to find something more that had been fashioned by familiar hands. Quickly, slipping over the rocks, and skidding up the loose dirt of the path away from the beach, he returned to the harbour. The boat sat about ten metres from the water line, above a rail skid, and a ramp that disappeared into the black water behind the pier. Shun walked around the boat; he ran his hands along its bows, and felt the quality of its paintwork, and the rough surfaces where the rust had spread. The rudder was stiff, and he slid his mace back into his sash to free up his right hand. After a few seconds effort, the rudder gave, and moved beneath his weight with a shriek like the voice of the crows. Another shriek, when he twisted the rudder back to its first position. Turning from the boat, he saw a long workshop alongside a dirt road that ran away from the dry dock and up toward the mountain. The workshop sagged and buckled; the walls had been patched time and again with corrugated iron sheets, which were now seared with rust-stains and looked like fire-blackened wood. A row of windows reflected the clouds, and Shun was pleased to see that almost all the glass was still in place. He walked along the length of the warehouse; when he reached the far side, he bent down and peered though a gap in the wall. The interior – tall and open, and with fewer plants than he expected – was a scattering of building materials, and tools, and bits and pieces of things removed from their original uses and tossed into this space, because they would be useful somehow. Light poured into the workshop from the open wall on the harbour side, blinding Shun, and he closed his eyes. He breathed deeply, of the dry wood and the cold metal, and he remembered many things. There were many memories involved with discarded tools and what the makers saved to be used another day. There was life, not only cats and crows, and not only molluscs, fish, and shore birds – Shun’s people were there as well.

He had walked from home to the harbour: the ruined house by the river was his birthplace, and the temple the place of his ancestors, and the town his family’s responsibility. Shun remembered the sights and sounds and scents of the town festivals, and ultimately realised that he was the major celebrant: that his family were priests at the town’s major shrine, and that he was engaged in the celebration even now. Turning from the workshop, he found himself at the gate of a small shrine. This was a branch of his own shrine, and it represented the town’s bargain with the ocean: it was the still point between what they offered, and what they hoped to receive. The straw rope marking off sacred space was still draped across the main gate, and he was surprised at how fresh it seemed. They wove a new rope every year, and burned the old one. This rope, here, beside the devastation of his town, was a new rope: he could smell the fresh straw as he drew closer to the gate. Shun took the mace from his sash again, and held it in his right hand, the right hand cradled by the left. He drew himself up to his full height, and lifted his head, and looked through the gates to the shrine precincts. He recognised two carved stones on either side of the approach, within the gate: they were badly weathered, and retained little of their original shape; but Shun knew what they were. On the right, the alpha guardian; on the left, the omega. Two guard dogs carved in stone: the right, its mouth open, spoke the first syllable; the left, its mouth closed, spoke the last. Together they marked off the space of divine influence: the beginning and the end of everything. Shun bowed, and passed through the gate, and between the stones, and walked straight along the approach to the shrine.

There were no shrine buildings here: only the sanctuary itself, carved in stone, built against the hillside, and resting on a large granite slab. On the front, facing the approach, a pair of stone doors stood slightly ajar; the sanctuary was surmounted by a triangular stone roof, and decorated with another fresh straw rope. Shun paused by the steps leading up to the sanctuary, and closed his eyes. His breathing, slow and steady now, began to come as counterpoint to the breeze. Ocean wind, gusting then receding, smarted against his cheek on the seaward side. He heard the blood flow to his temples; but above the rhythm of his heartbeats, he perceived a different beat, insistent – of drums at the beginning of the festival. They were behind him now, on the town side, participating in the celebration, waiting for him to carry on. Uneasiness returned as he knew this sanctuary was not the main object of his ceremony: that it was an outer point in a longer passage. He was in the wrong place. Shun turned to his left, and walked around the base of the sanctuary. To the left, directly behind the omega stone, a row of red lacquered gates led away from the main approach, and curved in toward the hill. Shun walked along this path, ducking to pass below the low gates, and soon arrived at another carved stone, set before the mouth of a cave. The cave opening, and the marker stone, were decorated with straw ropes.

Shun was mildly surprised to realise that, until now, he had not been afraid. The state of the town, and his lack of clear memories, and the empty world he found himself in – these were natural facts, given to him from his first moment of consciousness, seated there next to the river. Step by step, as he approached this cave, he began to understand – to feel – the presence of other possibilities. There were worlds in which Shun did not exist. There were times unknown and unknowable to him. His memory was clouded, but the closer he came to the darkness, the clearer everything seemed to be; and the clarity was frightening. He felt the pressure of responsibility: that he and he alone held the balance between a continuation of the ruin he had discovered on his progress to the shrine, and the cessation of decay – the rebirth of the town.

Soon after the entrance, Shun found that he could stand upright, and walk with little difficulty. The passage was gently curved, and sloped upward; the balance between curve and slope kept Shun on a path straight down the middle. His clogs ground damp stones, and he heard water dripping, and water flowing along a channel, and cold damp pressed against his cheeks. The air held a suggestion of iron, and every breath was like inhaling blood and metal. Shun’s eyes grew accustomed to the dimness early on. In the first part of the passage, his robes glowed in the light that penetrated from the mouth of the cave. Later on, as the curve drew him away from the light, there was nothing but blank emptiness. It was perfectly dark. He imagined himself floating through ocean water, felt as though his arms and torso were many leagues above his legs and feet, that his body had become elongated, exaggerated, by the weight of stone around him. But these were sensations; and his thoughts were elsewhere. Shun was populating the town by memory, as he went deeper and deeper into the mountain: he spoke the names of everyone living in the harbour town, the names of every family, and on every tomb. With every name, he added a voice to his celebration. That was his function here: the reason for his presence in the town and in the cave. By offering a celebration in their sanctuary, Shun petitioned the town’s gods to present their benign face to the town, to offer favour and not destruction. The town’s gods, by nature, could dispose in either direction, or in both at once, or in neither. The people could live; they could disappear. Until the celebration in the sanctuary, and Shun’s return to the outer shrine, he would not know which outcome to expect. The only choice was to move as his position directed him to move, to proceed as custom and ceremony said he must, to follow the steps of his parents and grandparents through the harbour town to the mountain.

The sound of his footsteps changed, and he stopped. His breathing was like a swimmer’s now: one long breath, drawn in and held, then released in one long exhalation. Shun was in a chamber, cut into the centre of the hill – whether by the action of hands or water had been long forgotten. The darkness was still absolute; there was no source of light. Despite this, Shun could see a mirror and a collection of votive objects on a shelf of rock in the far corner of the chamber. He was now in the inner sanctuary. He bowed toward the mirror, and slid the mace back into his sash. He crossed the chamber, bent down, and put his hand out, confident, in the direction of a niche below the shelf. His hand found a box of matches, and he struck one, and lit the two small candles the light revealed on either side of the mirror. Moving back, he sat on a rock, reached out again, and found a small drum. Shun spoke again, reciting, invoking an old text that his family used only for this celebration. When he finished, he began to speak the names again, calling out to people the town, asking that they survive and prosper. He concluded his ceremony by beating out a complex, staggered rhythm on the drum. In the last moments of sound following the last beat of the drum, a voice spoke the name ‘Shuntarô’ – his own full name – and he was not sure if the voice was his.

With this, the celebration was over. All that remained was for Shun to turn away from the chamber, walk back along the passage, and return to the light outside. He felt very sad now – with the grief that does not express itself in tears, but which makes the heart beat faster, and makes one forget to breathe. It was not exactly apprehension, or anticipation; although he was still uncertain about the world he would soon return to. He knew now that he had performed this ceremony before, and expected to perform it again. Shun was sad, and his sadness involved hope, and love: the hope and love gave meaning to the grief. Bold, and confident, he walked through the darkness; as the passage curved toward the mouth of the cave, little by little, light returned. The crows called; the wind and the waves rolled together; the drums of the festival sounded. Shun could smell cooking fires, and charred fish, and he heard voices from the harbour. Blinded momentarily, but aware of the people waiting to greet him, Shun emerged from the sanctuary into the light.