The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife

[captainb]

ooc: A closed tale for melusine and captainb

* * * * * *

The fog was thick. It always was, this early in the morning. Sea fog, rolling in during the night to lap along the rocks and seaweed, drifting up the mottled slope to snuffle at the thin walls of the huts along the shore. Morning brought a gray light, a soft glow of nestling cloud scattering light everywhere and nowhere, shadowless.

Tomohito squinted into the shapeless mist, finding little to focus on. This was nothing new. Every morning he squinted out the door at the fog, then sighed and turned back to the coals in the small clay stove. This morning, he also sighed and turned back to the coals in the small clay stove. Ginyo padded out of the smaller room, the larger room only larger in comparison. The whole hut could be traveled in twelve paces back and forth. It wasn’t luxury, but husband and wife had never known luxury and so should not have missed it.

Tomohito watched Ginyo feed the coals and bring the fire up for the kettle, as she did every morning. She would soon bring him a bowl of rice and warm tea, and after eating he would pick up his straw basket of nets and weights and floaters, and he would leave and walk to the shore to load them into his tiny boat, just like the other men from the village. They would nod greetings at each other and push their boats into the water and paddle off to their particular spots, to cast their nets and lines into the waves and pray that fish would offer their bodies so that the men could return in triumph, with food for their wives and children and parents, to survive another day until the next morning when they would again wake to squint at the fog.

Tomohito scraped the last rice from the wooden bowl and slurped the last bit of tea, handing the bowl back to Ginyo. Her eyes met his briefly, then averted. He didn’t know why he suddenly felt ashamed, but a flush crept up his cheeks. She did not judge him, he knew that. This was their life, and so it would remain. There would be no change, no excitement, no earth-shaking crisis. Their life would remain thus, him and her with no children to alarm and excite and weep over. Their lives simply rolled in and out like the fog. Their bodies became wispy and formless as they lay next to each other at night, their rarely-shared touch as tenuous and brief as the pale white wisps along the wet rocks.

He turned to settle into his rowing as the boat rocked with the shallow waves in the mist-shrouded harbor. Looking up, he saw Ginyo standing on the shore, as she always did every morning. They did not wave. She stood and watched, and he rowed and watched, until their outlines faded into the rolling white-shrouded sea that surrounded the little island.

 

[melusine]

Ginyo

As she did every morning, Ginyo stood on the strand and watched her husband's boat as it sailed away into the cold, salt mist.

Her kimono was thin, the blue and white pattern almost washed out of the cotton cloth. Even with her arms wrapped around herself for warmth, her teeth chattered.

She had been married for four years. Four years of patching worn clothes and pounding rice into flour and gathering seaweed in a basket to add to the evening's soup.

Though she tried hard to forget it, Ginyo had not been born to such a life.

Her father was a cloth-dyer with seven workers in his employ. Her parents kept a maid to do the heavy work in their house. But Ginyo as a young girl had fallen in love with a man her parents could not approve of. She had run away from their village with him, and for less than a year had known the happiness of being his wife.

When he died, he left nothing but debts. Ginyo, in danger of prosecution, had been forced to leave the small house beside the wisteria tree where he and she had been so happy together. For a month she had wandered through the open spaces, the woods, the wastes. Everywhere she had gone, she had prayed to Kwannon, the goddess of mercy. In all the world, there was no one else of whom she could beg help.

When she came to the sea, she had nothing left. Nothing but her sad, sweet face, and the empty bag in which she had carried her food.

Tomohito had found her trying to fight off a druken knot of sailors who had taken her for a whore.

Though she wept and clawed at his eyes and struggled, he had carried her off to his own tiny hut beside the waves. She had been ill for many weeks, but doggedly he had cared for her, asking nothing of her in return except that she get well.

And afterwards...how could she explain it? It had seemed to her that her place was beside Tomohito. She knew he had come to love her, though he never spoke of it aloud. Sometimes, when he thought that she was sleeping, she caught him looking at her. She did not think she had ever seen eyes so sad...not even in her own face. He was always careful around her. He never touched her at all, except to help her steady herself when finally she was well enough to stand again. But even in that brief contact, she could feel the fire that pulsed through his veins. A fire that was banked beneath ashes.

He did not know her history. He did not press her for it, and she did not know what he thought privately. They never spoke much, except of ordinary things like the tides or the cost of rice.

At some point he declared to her that now she should consider herself his wife, and Ginyo was not displeased, for Tomohito was kinder to her than any living being had ever been.

Then he did touch her. She remembered that his hands were trembling. And afterwards, he turned away from her, like a man who was ashamed.

And so their life went on, each day exactly like the last. It was all so much like a dream, so much like the mists that floated aimlessly above the dull and moaning sea.

Sometimes Ginyo wondered if she were still alive.

 

[captainb]

The beast crawled slowly over the horizon. Hundreds of miles wide, its shadow darkened the ocean underneath. Wavetips sharpened into white serrated edges, reaching up toward the rolling, heavy gloom that swirled and howled overhead. Their leaps pulled hundreds of tons of water upward, sucking the sea at their sides down into dense green troughs only to fill them again with a thundering rush of phosphorescent foam, repeated endlessly as the wave-kin rolled in a mad dance under the blind bludgeoning fury.

Tomohito had seen the storm signs since early morning. He knew there was plenty of time before it arrived: the little fishing boats quickly scattered to their favorite spots and, with an eye on them, he rowed his craft around the peninsula at the northern tip of the island. He’d noticed an unusual concentration of seagulls near a cove for the past several days, and thought there might be a new gathering spot for the elusive schools. The flock appeared again as he rounded the sharp rocks, the white flapping wings a bit farther away than they used to be. He pulled at the oars and slowly approached, gliding into the mildly choppy waves under the cries of the gulls. He dropped the anchor-stone over the side then cast his net. The weights along its edge pulled it into a circle as it spun, smacking flat onto the water and sinking around the tiny flashes under the surface. When he pulled the net in, a smile broke over his brown face. So many fish! They were small, but the quantity more than made up for it.

Cast, gather, pull, empty. He repeated the motion countless times, thanking the gods with each shiny harvest that spilled into the bottom of his boat. With such a bounty, he could stay at home the next two days, possibly more! There would be hard work, to be sure, in order for the fish not to spoil, but it would be a pleasant diversion from the daily monotony of fishing. It would even give him and Ginyo time together, doing something in common. That would be refreshing, he mused. He had long desired to be near his wife. But their life was hard and survival took energy. Many times he had wanted to come to her in the night, to feel her kiss on his lips, to touch her body and feel she had a need, a want for him. But they were always tired and, beside, he could not dishonor her. She would think he saw her as nothing more than a whore, as those drunken sailors had thought. He would treat her like a lady, as much as he could. If that meant sacrificing physical happiness… well, wasn’t the sum of their life together greater than its parts? She made no overtures toward him. When he did summon the courage to approach her, he always rushed to reach the end. Not that it wasn’t pleasurable, their coupling in the darkness. But his obligation as a husband was to give her children, and she never gave him reason to think she wanted anything more. Though he knew that pleasure was part of sex, she always seemed relieved when he had finished. They never spoke of it, and part of him was troubled by her unknown past. He had never had a wife before. Had there been another before him? What or who went through her mind when they united?

She did not conceive. The gods turned away with a silent eye. But if, he thought, heaving at the laden net. If it we accept our destiny to not have children, could that change things? If we spend a few days together, away from being separated, working at the same task, talking of the same work, talking of... her? Could that not open something new for us? His heart beat stronger as he remembered lying awake next to Ginyo, tracing the dark outline of her nose and lips with his eyes, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest, feeling the warmth from her that was somehow so difficult to touch…

A wave slapped the side of the boat, sending him to his knees. Tomohito looked around in sudden alarm. The storm had swept in faster than he had expected. He cursed himself for not paying attention. He hauled in the net for the last time and threw it on top of the shimmering, shifting pile of fish, hand-over-handed the anchor into the boat, sat, grabbed the oars, and heaved. The sky was darkening rapidly and the sea grew rougher by the minute. He strained at the oars as a wave breached the side of the boat, splashing cold salt water around his ankles. He quickly looked around but saw no sign of the other boats. Undoubtedly they had scrambled for shore at the first sign of the approaching storm, like any sane fisherman would.

The boat tilted and rose, and he felt himself leave the seat as it crested a wave. He crashed back onto the wooden plank as fish scales bounced around him. Salt spray plastered his head and back as he scrabbled for the oars, their handles slick with sea-foam. Rain suddenly fell and he was surrounded by water, solid below, stinging like pebbles above, and aerated for several feet above the boat and water. The dim shoreline vanished behind the twin curtains of rain and wave. He pulled at the oars, not knowing which direction he was going but needing to keep moving. The fish he had captured were flapping in the boat, many of them now swimming around his ankles, their fins making tiny cuts along his skin. His net lay half over the side. The waves rose and fell around him as the boat fell and rose, and he finally pulled the oars in and gripped the sides of the boat with white knuckles. There was no way he would make progress against the waves. He could only hope to somehow ride the storm out, or at least get close enough to shore to have a chance of swimming there. He remembered the jagged rocks along the peninsula and shuddered.

It had traveled for thousands of miles. The rolling mass caused barely a ripple over the deep ocean, only gathering upon itself near the shallower coastline. Born of a far undersea quake, fueled by the typhoon winds, channeled by the geometry of erosion, the leviathan piled into the sharply rising seabed and, having nowhere else to go, went up. The little man in the little boat heard a roar unlike anything he had ever heard before. A wall of water forty feet high looked down upon him as his head turned. It cared as little for him as for the seaweed and silver fish caught in its grip. The boat rose up its flank, tumbled in a glittering arc, and vanished.

Tomohito saw the fish spill from the boat. They were elated, he thought incongruously, to be freed from their brief imprisonment. He tried drawing a breath, but the cold water splashed over his face before he could. He twisted and tumbled, caught in the wave’s ceaseless roll. All sense of up or down was gone; even the bubbles trapped with him scattered in all directions. His chest burned, screaming for air, and without thought his body betrayed him. Water rushed into his lungs and then he felt himself truly begin to sink as blackness crawled in from the edges of his vision. Something fluttered along his legs and Ginyo’s face rose unbidden before him. His mouth formed her name and he reached for her. His arm remained extended as he sank, eyes wide open and mouth shaped with the last unspoken sound of her name.

And the sea wiped his mark clean from its eternal surface.

 

[melusine]

Ginyo

Ginyo was standing on an outcropping of rock far above the beach when the tidal wave struck the headland to the north. She saw it in the distance, a monstrous bunching of blue muscle that rolled, and drew back, and then hammered against the distant shore, crushing everything in its wake. Her heart was in her mouth as she watched, the salt wind whipping her long hair free of its knot. She had climbed up to this isolated vantage point when it became clear that Tomohito's boat was not amongst those of the returning fishermen. Her whole body was flooded with sickness as she watched helplessly. Somewhere out there, where the water now glistened and danced, Tomohito had been claimed by Owatatsumi, the god of the sea.

She had not witnessed his struggle. Hidden by the shoulder of the headland, he had fought his last battle completely alone. Somehow this tore at Ginyo's heart almost more than all the rest of his tragedy. Even in death, Tomohito had been so alone! Ginyo's legs refused to support her, and she sat down hard, not even feeling the pain as the rocks of the escarpment scraped her bare thighs.

Sorrow poured out of her. There was no way to stop it. Like the tsunami, it overwhelmed her, pushing up from the pit of her belly in an inexorable wave, choking her, making it impossible for her to breathe. She drowned in her sobs, her whole body shaking, and rocked herself helplessly as her wails pierced the sky.

This sorrow now mingled with the old pain, the old loss, the old feeling of complete detachment from the world. How was it that one woman could so be destined to lose everything, not once, but over and over? Could her karma truly be so bad?

I am being punished, she told herself. In another life, Tomohito and I must have been linked in a way that I did not perceive until now. If I had recognized him, and treated him with love and honour, then perhaps he would not be dead now! But I shut him out of my heart. I repaid his goodness to me only with my pride. Every day I let him see that he was only a shadow in my world. I thought only of that other one, my lost love, and I treated Tomohito like a ghost.

Ginyo laid her head against the bare rock and wept while the sea laughed and sang beneath her.

When night fell, she staggered back down the crag, losing her footing several times in the darkness. In the village, all of the doors were shut, but they opened as she walked past, and silent faces looked out at her. There was not a soul in the village who did not know of her loss.

Ginyo had never been someone who encouraged familiarity. Even the women who knelt beside her at the stream washing clothes day after day never had felt they could speak with her easily. Now no one came forward to offer her comfort, but they looked out at her, showing a silent respect for her grief.

In her own hut, a fire was burning in the brazier. Some kind neighbour had left it for her, to cheer the damp coldness of the night. There was a cup of rice wine too, and a fish wrapped in damp leaves. By this token, Ginyo saw that her neighbours were offering her what help they could for the days to come. It was not for her own sake, she realized, but for Tomohito's. He had always been the first to help anyone who was in need. Now she would share in his legacy and live forever in his debt.

Beside the brazier, Ginyo knelt, and her long hair fell in tangles around her thin shoulders, wet from the salt spray and sprinkled with blown sand. In the corner, the roughly carved image of Funadama, the kami who protected fishermen, looked out at her with serene and compassionate eyes.

Yes, Ginyo thought to herself, one hand stretching out to touch the cheek of the idol gently. It was compassion you showed when you loosed Tomohito's spirit from mine. And now she wept to think of so many past nights, her husband gazing at her in the darkness as she pretended to sleep, unwilling to force upon her a love she so clearly did not desire. "His was an unhappy life, here with me," she whispered, and hung her head.

Nothing Tomohito had ever done had escaped her notice, though tirelessly she had built the wall that kept him always on the other side. She could still feel the way he shuddered when he was buried deep inside of her, his groan something between a sigh and a sob. He had always kept his face buried in her shoulder at such moments, not wanting to see the impassive mask of her own face. He thought that she felt nothing, for she wanted him to think that. To share with him a part of herself that she had pledged irrevocably to Eizo, her first husband, would have been a betrayal in her eyes. She had struggled, all these years, to keep back the part of herself that yearned and clamoured and hungered for the touch of a man. Even when her fingers longed to press deep into the sweat-streaked flesh of Tomohito's shoulders, even when her hips fought to strain against his, she had always battled the feeling down. That joy, that blessed annihilation, she kept always for Eizo, her first beloved, who no longer could share them with her, even in dreams.

In the darkness, the sea rolled on, heedless of the puny human hearts onshore. Ginyo's eyes swept through the hut and lingered on Tomohito's spare kimono, washed only yesterday at the stream. When Eizo had died, she had slept for weeks with her face buried in an old yukata of his, straining to catch the ghost of his scent on the soft cotton cloth. Of Tomohito now there was no trace. Nothing lingered at all to show that he ever had lived.

 

[captainb]

The sea rolled its silent passenger, the limp body tumbling slowly as the currents tugged. Life had fled, the mind vanishing with it as a candle flame gutters and disappears in the wind. Long dark tendrils of black seaweed reached out to caress the figure as it slowly settled onto the soft floor of the ocean.

In the muted whisper of stirred sand grains, behind the whistles, clicks, bubbles, and moans of myriad unseen creatures, below the deep rustle of water pressing upon itself in its endless rush to nowhere, the sea murmured in a mélange of anger, regret, and desire.

It is failure. Everything I ever dreamed, ever wanted, all lost. I never reached out to her, never took the chance. The knot of fear in my stomach bested me every time, staying my hand, curling my fingers around empty air until I turned away with my heart pounding and head swollen in hot shame, too miserable to relieve my own need, too fearful that she would refuse the same. Fear was the key, the great killer. It slew any chance of happiness I could have had with her, with my wife. Too late did I realize what we could have together, waiting for the capricious whim of a bounty of fish to tempt me with what might have been, only to drown everything in irrelevant contempt. I have failed.

Oh, would that I could have done it different, better, done it right. I was afraid of what she might have been, who she might have known, how I would be compared to nameless, faceless phantoms. I chose her, yes, I saved her. But she stayed. She remained with me. She did not have to accept my declaration, but she stayed. Out of her own fear? Maybe. Maybe that stayed her from turning to me in the night. But why would she, when I did not show her the truth of my desire? Oh Ginyo, I want you so. I am so sorry. If I could have one more chance, one more chance to gaze upon you, to touch you, to stroke your long black hair and smooth belly, to look upon your breasts and thighs, to taste the musky salt of your skin, the scent of your lips. I would show you the arousal that you bring, impale you upon my desire, feed you and feast on you until the end of time. Until the end…

Always too late in the end. I have no rest even now, no relief from the pain that was my lot in life. Oh gods, I never meant to live such a lie. I wanted to give her passion and show her the truth. My love, my eternal, undying love……..

The moon’s cracked image danced in a thousand reflections as the waves broke onto the harbor shore. The fog would not come for hours yet. No firelights shone in the village as it dozed under the chill of the midnight sky. No eyes noticed the lump floating in the surf, being pushed toward the shore, rolling with the breakers and left on the wet sand as the waves retreated. No one saw the figure stir, head rising to blankly stare at the beach, its body following with streamers of seaweed trailing from its limbs, rising without effort to stand swaying on the shore. One hesitant step followed the other, leaving no impressions in the soft wet sand. It passed the boats lying upside down by their oars and, gaining strength, continued toward the lone hut at the edge of the village.

 

[melusine]

Outside the door of the hut, Ginyo washed her hands carefully, and then lifted the wooden dipper to rinse out her mouth. The ceaseless tumble and crash of the surf was the only aural accompaniment to the slow movements of the ritual. When she had set the dipper down again, she entered the hut and walked slowly to the small Shinto shrine that had been nailed to the wall in the corner. In her hands she carried the fish wrapped in leaves that her neighbour, Old Gon, had left for her. This would be her offering to the dead.

The family shrine was very simple, carved of wood that had washed up from the sea. So many miles from any sacred place, the people of the village had had to make do with what they had. An old fisherman, too infirm to ply his craft on the water anymore, made the Kamidana for all the families who wanted them. Each one was a plain wooden shelf, carefully sanded and smoothed, upon which stood a miniature shrine building called a Jinja.The one Ginyo stood before now had belonged to Tomohito's parents. Inside the Jinja were wooden tablets that represented Amaterasu-Omikami , the Goddess of the Sun, and Ebisu, the patron god of fishermen.

There was a single priest in the district, who travelled from village to village, and he it was who inked prayers and talismans for worshippers upon slips of heavy rice paper for a small price. He would not, of course, officiate in a rite for the dead, for death was evil, and Shinto priests dealt only in the worship of the kami. Any ceremony to honour the dead was strictly the duty of the family, and all must be done properly according to Shinto rites, for otherwise, the spirit of the dead person might not journey to the Pure Land, but linger instead on the earthly plain as a Yurei or "Hungry Ghost".

This was Ginyo's greatest fear, for Tomohito had died a violent death, far from family and friends. She hung her head when she thought of this. Would his ghost have been less hungry even if he had died at home in her arms? So little love she had ever shown him! It was terrifying to imagine what his spirit must have gone through in those first moments after death when he realized that his hope for love was forever blighted.

Ginyo laid her offering of fresh fish reverently upon the shrine. She had lit a couple of rush-lights in the hut, and the warm glow made the homely shrine gleam as if it were leafed in gold. A fragrant sprig of evergreen sakaki, was fastened above the Jinja, along with a single strand of twisted straw upon which white paper kime were hung. Holding her breath so that not a drop would be spilled, Ginyo filled one of the offering cups before the Jinja with sweet water, and the other with saké. She bowed once lightly, and then twice deeply, as ritual demanded. Then and only then could she kneel upon the mat before the shrine and open her heart to the kami in prayer.

She tried to worship in a way that would give Tomohito's spirit peace, but with every heartbeat the cold shadow of fear fell more heavily upon her. She would have given anything at that moment to have the Shinto priest at her side to quiet her fears, or at least give her hope that somehow she might ease Tomohito's path through prayer and constant devotion.

What good was rice wine and fish to her lost man now? The impious thought shot through her like the blade of a knife. Tomohito's ghost would wander forever, crying that he had been cheated in life. No devotion she showed him now would help him!

Ginyo's shoulders shook with the effort to control her sobs. Never had she felt more alone.

 

[captainb]

A voice penetrated his consciousness. It did not sound across the sand or between the huts. The soft words rose from within his skull, tumbling softly around its inner edge. They did not reach his ears, but Tomohito was still tugged in a direction. His course altered slightly as he slowly shambled through the dark village.

A single light shone dimly from one hut's window. He stopped before the doorway, somehow confused. This hut was familiar, yet odd as if seen at a strange angle. But the inner voice was stronger, a prayer that sent him comfort and sorrow. There was also a scent: it struck suddenly, bring with it a powerful hunger and thirst that impelled his legs forward, forced his hand to push open the door.

A figure rose swiftly across the room, a sound of shock emerging as it did. But he was heedless. The voice had stopped, abruptly cut off, but the smell was overpowering. He stumbled across the room and fell to his knees before the wooden shrine. His fingers clutched at the folded leaves, tearing them aside and pulling the fish to his mouth. Never had he known such hunger. The fish went down his throat without taste, and the thirst suddenly became overwhelming. His shaking hands found the cup of water and swallowed it in one gulp.

He sat still for a moment with eyes closed, swaying slightly as the meager meal settled into his belly. The craving faded, and when his eyes opened again his vision had cleared. He looked up, the unadorned walls of the hut suddenly familiar. This is home, he realized. I am home. His eyes slowly scanned the room, leaping suddenly to the lithe figure in the corner. Ginyo, he thought. She had one hand raised to her mouth, palm outward. The details of the past were blurry. He could not remember the morning, nor entering the hut, nor why they both looked at the other like this. He slowly reached for the cup of saké and stood to face her. He raised it to his lips and sipped, then held it toward her. She stared back, her eyes large and dark in the flamelight. The thin cloth around her body moved slightly with her breath, the material nearly translucent as the light caught it. The curve of her hip and one breast were outlined softly, and a flush slowly rolled through him with the warmth of the wine. He took a step nearer, still holding out the cup. But why did she pull back at his approach? He stopped, staring in silence.