Myths of Origin (32 page)

IV
Ohoyashima

Mother did her best, you see.

But with the dew forming like infant pearls on infant oysters, clinging to his matted thighs, Izanagi seized the pillar which had been Izanagi by the rope-taut length of her hair to the pillar which was stone in the center of the Room of Eight Footsteps. With the dew forming like infant oysters choking on their litters of pearls, clinging to the only woman yet in the world in the fist of the only man yet in Onogoro, he hissed at her.

“We will do it again, we will do it again and you will not speak unless I speak to you. We will walk the eight footsteps as though there had never been another eight, and we will do it in the proper way, and I will fill you up with islands like this one, and you will not speak, you will not speak, you will never tell anyone about the other eight. I will speak for you. Walk, woman, and fasten your mouth to itself.”

Izanami walked. She placed one delicate foot before the other, eight times, as before, and she kept her eyes on the weeping floor. The dew made the green into a churning sea, and she thought of the bridge of heaven, and the light singing down the suspensors, and first of all things which lament, she mourned the loss of the perfect and silent bridge.

At the eighth step, Izanami and Izanagi met, and Izanagi cried out so loudly that the jellyfish paused in their flagellate, and their bodies fluttered up in the echoes like wings.

“Oh,” he crowed, “what a beauty you are!”

Izanami stood still, and her eyes were full of pity as a basin catching rain. Her gaze did not falter or change as he pushed her against the wall, her shoulder blades scraping at the scarlet-gold paint which lettered the lacquer. She did not look away in modesty or try to encourage him as he lifted her off of her feet and sunk his teeth into her, sunk his body into her, sunk an island chain into her womb as he grinned into her unsweating skin.

They were already awake inside her when he pulled back from her, let her body slump against the wall. Dirt and worms and long grasses, camphor and plum and snails and milking goats, rivers full of silver silt and mosquitoes hovering over the shallows, spiders flinging their webs over their arms like winter sweaters, pelicans with their gullets fish-bulging—she swelled up with them in the little house on Onogoro, and the jellyfish sluiced into each other on the beach, wet, suddenly, with the first rain of all things that fall.

Izanagi was not there when the first of them was born. He was digging in the translucent corpses, shoving the pale, shapeless forms into his cheeks, sucking his fingers dry, slurping at their feeble, still-wavering tendrils. To him, they tasted of his first breath, and he licked his lips hungrily as he swallowed them down.

And in the house of the pillar, Izanami squatted on the tortoise-floor, biting her hands to keep back screams as the Ohoyashima dropped out of her in a knotted chain, like a necklace popping from her flesh, bead by bead, and she wept, first of all creatures that bled in birth. Awaji fell, already cracked with earthquakes, then Shikoku, so small she hardly felt it clatter from her. The Oki islands came next, shimmering like drops of her own sweat, then Kyushu red with volcanoes, and this scorched her spotless thighs with streaks of black like footprints. Iki and Tsushima emerged amid a thousand blades, and Sado swaddled in green. Then Honshu, and the inlets, the streams and the wide peak of Fuji opened the bones of her hips, and the crack of the bones was terrible, terrible and quiet, echoing only in the empty Room of Eight Footsteps.

Izanagi entered as Honshu left the womb of Izanami in a clatter of blasted rock, as it was carried away with the others on the churning sea, beneath the bridge of heaven and away. And so it was that he saw none of their first children, and only later walked on their fields and bones. But he saw their first limbed child, he saw it slither from her like an afterbirth, silvery and spineless, its piscine hands clutching helplessly at the air, the colorless blood languid within it, as though it were merely a sack sloshing with water.

Izanagi saw it with delight and went to devour it, for in its shapeless mass it looked like nothing so much as the pathetic, directionless jellyfish of which he had so much pleasure.

“No,” hissed Izanami, “it is our child, our firstborn, and I have called it Hiruko.”

Izanagi snorted. “That soft and stupid thing is no child—not any child of mine, if it is alive at all. You ought not to name the clots that squirm out of you, any more than you name your excrement, or your vomit. Let me eat it, and I will fill you up again.”

And Hiruko reached out to its father, gills opening in its skin like cracks in opal. It whimpered, and in its infant cry Izanagi heard jellyfish dying, dying, and his own belly gurgling with their weight. He drew back from the silver hand, his throat squeezing itself like a fist.

“It is my child,” said Izanami calmly, her black hair hanging over her face, “it is beautiful, and if you eat it I will unhinge myself to eat you. I have borne the earth within me; you will be no trouble.”

“It is a punishment,” he growled, “a curse, because you spoke first. It is a monster, a leech that has become fat on your blood—stamp it out, stamp it out, and atone for your wicked mouth. Crush it with your feet, woman, and your next child will be whole, it will come from my words, not your twisted, rotted exhalations.”

Izanami held her child to her breast, and its nacre-mouth fastened to its mother—Izanagi watched in revulsion as the first milk of the world flowed into that tiny, boneless body, he could see the white droplets moving under its skin, which flushed in strange colors as it drank. If nothing else about it could be said to be healthy it drank as though dying, as though the breast locked between its toothless gums were all the world, and the sweet sounds of its sighing and mewing, slurping and swallowing filled the house, as such sounds would come to fill houses like habits.

“Throw it to the floor and crush its skull,” Izanagi screeched, and he tore the leech-child from its cradle of arms and milk. A bellow he could not imagine would have come from such a pitiful chest tore through his ears, and Izanami clawed at him, tearing away the flesh of his arm after her child—and thus the second being in all the world learned to bleed. He took Hiruko, wailing its gruesome song to the grasses of Onogoro, out of the little house and down to the beach—and Izanami was close behind, her black hair streaming like serpents behind her, and she did not scream, but her mouth curled like a wound.

Into the sucking morass of thin tentacles and curving, transparent bells, he cast the leech-child’s silvery body, and its awful cry stopped as it sank into the striations of corpses, its eyes confused and stricken, vestigial eyelids opening and closing without understanding. The other bodies closed over Hiruko, its limbs little different from theirs, one more who could not tell where the sea might end.

Izanagi took the only woman yet in the world by the arm and hauled her back up to the house, to the Room of Eight Footsteps, to the tortoise-floor now grey and slick with tears and blood and seed, and into this he threw her, and fell upon her, and though she made no sound beneath him, he whispered obscenities into the hollow of her throat as he filled her this time with a son, a son she could already feel flaring red and orange within her, and he too could feel the heat of it pouring from her even before he pulled himself off of her body.

He was gorging again when she bore it, and there was sand between his teeth, and the ruined diamond slush of the creatures dribbling from his chin. He would not have gone to see the new child at all—the feast was waiting, after all—except that something bright and hot swirled up from the house of the pillar, and he turned his head to the top of the bluffs, where first of all things in the world that burned, the little house vomited smoke black as Izanami’s hair into the clear sky.

“Kagu-tsuchi!” came a howl from the blaze.

He ran up the sliding sands, half-curious at the beauty of the strange gold thing eating his house.

“Kagu-tsuchi!” came the howl like a tree-trunk tearing in two.

Izanagi stepped through the shattered door, which had once been carved so prettily, as if to welcome them, and saw the only woman yet in the world standing on the tortoise-floor, her body wrapped up in red, in orange, in blue and white. Her flesh bubbled on her bones, and her once-swelling belly sagged as if it meant to fall from her; her thighs were burnt black and crisp, and the smell of the meat of her filled the hall. The hot, ropy light pulled back her lips from her teeth, her lids from her eyes, and what stared at him was a skull, save that her hair still streamed back from it, as though it had all along been conspirator to the flames.

In her hands she held a flashing, flaring thing, its limbs splayed out and full of the boiling scarlet stuff, tongues of it licking around his chubby infant’s arms, his mouth full of it, his eyes too bright, too bright, burning already in its head.

“Kagu-tsuchi!”
she snarled, thrusting the inferno-child at Izanagi. “This is Kagu-tsuchi, this is Fire, it is born to us, it is your longed-for son, from your pure and perfect words! Take him, take him and may he burn you out from the inside, may he hollow you like a gourd, as he has done to me.”

All around them, the house buckled and creaked, the fire of Kagu-tsuchi lapping hungrily at its mother’s breast, at his mother’s feet, at anything that would burn. Happily he nursed at the floor and rafters, at the ruined words carved on the holy wall. Izanagi held out his hand to his wife.

“Come out of this place,” he begged.

Izanami threw back her head, burned clean of flesh, and her voice sent the roof into conflagration. Her body opened as if on a hinge, and out of her blazing bones tore a child of green and forked branches, her mouth a cluster of bleeding berries, and this was Hani-yama-hime, who was the growing earth, and then a splash of water which did nothing to dampen the orange flames still lapping at the belly of Izanami, and a sopping, blue-skinned daughter descended from her mother: Midzu-ha-no-me, who was well-water and puddles and lakes, and her fingers dripped with scum and algae. They rolled on the smoking floor, and Midzu gurgled as she slapped out lazy sparks with her wet and plump hands.

Izanami held her son to her tightly, and flames poured from her blackened womb, from her shriveled breasts, it leapt out of her mouth, and Kagu-tsuchi laughed, patting his mother’s cheek with a flaming hand.

As she died, first of all women in the world to die, she thrust her son into Izanagi’s arms, and her knees buckled into ash beneath her, and her body blackened the green-tiled floor.

Izanagi ran from the holocaust-house, his arms full of children as of apples, and Kagu-tsuchi giggled in his arms. Midzu-ha-no-me started patting at her brother, dowsing his flames in places, while he struck back at her, trying to set her afire. Hani-yama kept her wooden arms far away from both of them, shuddering. Izanagi dowsed his son in the churning sea, and the flames beneath the baby’s skin banked to glowing embers, warm and cheerful. Midzu splashed happily, and her sister drank the waves with soft sighs. He drew his son from the water and stroked his cheek. The child turned his face towards his father’s finger.

All around them, the jellyfish curled at the edges like pages and turned black, shriveling to smears on the water, and then to nothing.

FOURTH HEAD

{Her belly had grown into a globe, swollen with her fourth daughter’s kicking life and round as a toy. She was become the moon, circular and symmetrical, a vast pale mass, pulling all the pulsing life of her youth into the new planet of her stomach, into the little red limbs floating inside her,}
floating, floating, within me, within her, circle and back, circle and back, into the interior churn, the water, the streaks of fat and lymph and blood, familiar as houses
{adrift on an inland sea, a thing which would be me, which once had gills and transparent skin like a salmon, that once swam in the universe of her body, but now pushed at the edges, outgrowing the space, impinging on tender organs and galaxies, stretching the tanned skin. She had become the Kaya-bird,}
my Kaya-bird
{her chest bright and out-thrust. Her movements were those of elephants, lumbering crocodiles.}
Ours are the movements of nesting, and the surfaces of nameless eggs, and soft, slithering things over the forest floor, and there is never any release for us, but we manage, don’t we, Kaya, we manage.
{She could no longer bear the pinch of shoes on her feet, and walked barefoot through her house, marveling at her own metamorphosis into a snarl-toothed hippopotamus.}

After the third, my skin was hot and crackling in its boil of color. Even my toes had gone blue as rocks on the floor of the sea. My eyes were still shut, slick and pale against saffron eyelids. Each of you made me heavier, warmer, as though I was incubating you. And the cut, the cut along my underside had widened, flushed redder and wetter, and begun to drip onto the thirsty ground.

{But still, the baby did not come. Eight months and she was simply enormous. She could hardly move
.
}
Gashed and daughter-full, I can hardly move, they hardly move within me, it was summer and everything was so still, so still.
{She felt as though she contained cities, river barges, farming communes. She could feel the corners of the rice-fields pressing on her left side, carved temple-reliefs on the other. In the centre swelled a sanguinary Fuji. Snow swirled at her peaks, dense jungle crowded her base. Once she had been lithe and small, delicate, even, not this glutted thing.}

They told me you were the middle child, the prettiest save the last, and that you never listen. They told me about the tall weeds, and your little, wiry hands.

{In the beginning, I think, she had dreamed about this child, that it would at last be a son, dreamed of his dark eyes and soft skin, how his laughter would sound. But by that summer she merely prayed for release, for the end of her enormity, the end of the sensation of being filled to the throat, a sack of rice packed as tightly as possible, sent to market with tufts of white flying out of the bindings.}