Amabiko

Dark flashes rip through the mudflats, tearing open fetid sludge, bursting and regorging, and vomiting onto itself. The chlorophyllic reflux glimmers below the belly of the full moon deep into the gut of the open sea. Seventy nights in the muddy shores of the Ariake lagoon, the corpses shimmer in slime, gut, blood, and reek of human waste. Remains tumble across the wrinkling sludge only to sink into the shadows of war.  A nebulous voice reaches through the void.

“heyyy..are you still awakkgh… (gurgling) don’t you go sleepphg…you woon’t gett bacgk heerergh…(gurglegagging)”

A nameless and limbless young ronin plows through the mire dragging by his teeth, shoveling  towards a hint of water shining under the hazy moonlight. Gritting and grinding, he bursts.

“I will not fucking die with this shit in my mouth!!” 

Spewing out the accumulated muck, he rolls headfirst into the pool. Half immersed and half alive, the eyes gaze deep into the black sky.

“Ahhhhh!!….if I fall asleep, they will find me here bathed in that crazy purple moonlight!”

It is the usual April moon, deaf to his calling, hiding and slipping into the veils of the night. Mud enters his ears. He cannot hear the outer world anymore.  A heavy muffled tone drowns out his thoughts to a single point between his eyes. The eyes are free and uninterrupted, but don’t know where and what to see.  

“Lord Hōjō, your kamikaze (wind-god) has exorcised the Mongol invaders. But what is my loyalty to you?! A conscripted farmer, untrained, obligatory foot soldier I’m forced into battle, abducted from family, maimed, disposed as a pawn of meat waiting to rot in this cesspool .”

Tears streak the young man’s bony cheeks in rolling into luminescent purple beads and then lifting off his burnt skin.

“What am I to youuu..!.!. what am…youuu.!. youu…..”

The cry flashes through the killing field, its echo pulsing over throbbing faceless corpses. The final pulse evaporates into the bluster of desolate winds. With the air whistling around his head, the beaded teardrops morph into a cluster of fireflies forming an orb over his face. Two of those fireflies drop out only to be replaced with a set of emerald eyes fading into its void. The eyes lock onto the unknown soldier’s gaze. Visions of unseen events stream before his watering eyes. Formations of six Mitsubishi Zeros fly into the maddening sunset. The humming of the propellers and buzzing fireflies vibrate in the air, as the radiant green eyes sink into the young man’s eye socket.  His mouth opens wide.  A long-lost postwar song plays from his throat.

Akai ringo ni (As your lips touch)

Kuchibiru yosette (The red apple)

Damatte miteiru (The blue sky)

Aoi sora (Watches in silence)

Ringo wa nanimo (An apple is something)

Iwanai keredo (That won’t speak, but)

Ringo no kimochi wa (The apple’s feelings)

Yoku wakaru (Are well understood)

Ringo kawaii ya (The apple is lovely)

Kawaii ya ringo (Lovely apple)

Ringo kawaii ya (The apple is lovely)

Kawaii ya ringo (Lovely apple) 

The beating sun and the unyielding stagnant air ended the summer of 1972 at Minamata Bay.  A speeding Toyota 2000 GT screeches to a halt at wharf’s edge, almost thrusting the vehicle into the harbor. A gray bearded slouching man falls out of the driver’s seat hanging onto the swung-out door with the radio blaring behind him.

“So lucky! Haha!! Death will never catch up with me!”

“I will cheat death every time!”

He roars in laughter, his body gyrating to the bouncing wharf. The seagulls and crows perched on the fence, throw a cold stare towards this anomalous being. Pulling out his heavy medical bag, sighing in short breath, he resents his age. Fatigued by the needs of others, and less of his own, he hated how his patients would sum him up as a careless grunt. 

“My body may be deadweight, but my mind is free!”

He notices the malodorous garbage dumps along the shoreline, undulating infestations in the high-noon tide. The birds were also perched on these swelling heaps of trash, shrieking, shredding and picking at the decomposing pollutants. The fishing harbor was in a state of severe indigestion, the dumping site of industrial wastewater containing methylmercury discharged from the Chisso chemical company. These floating abscesses fed the fish and shellfish which were then passed on to the locals who collectively ingested the toxins. Many have died. Even more have been crippled in deformity, losing mobile coordination and senses of touch, taste and vision. 

“How unfortunate… when you live in the downstream. No one is to be seen. They have moved out of their homes. All moved into those monstrous concrete deathbeds…”

A thick ocean cloud drifts into the bay, obscuring all available light from the cobalt blue sky. The shuffling tide is silenced, the birds frozen in flight, and a stretching shadow creeping at the doctor’s toes. The car radio falls out of tune into white noise. Even his exhaling sigh is inaudible. An uncanny iridescent creature surfaces from beneath the shadow. Fox-like in silhouette, glittering in technicolor, dressed in sequins from neck to toe, with equally coiffured hair, but missing one leg. The doctor prepares to run.

AMABIKO: “Stay where you are old curmudgeon! I will tell you the tale of fox-trapping.”

DOCTOR: “Hmmmm?!.. I have no interests in foxes or hunting. Can you lift the clouds, please?”

AMABIKO: “Only if you listen and learn. This human trapping needs to be cured.”

Doctor: “What kind of crap is this going to be about foxes?! I don’t need to be here. People are going to die one way or another. I can drive off in my car!”

AMABIKO: “You can’t. You are deep in that trap too. Your pride is your death sentence.”

The old doctor realizes that he too has frozen and lost mobility except for his unstoppable contending lips. If he could, he would roll his eyes. If he could, he would shrug his shoulders. If he allowed himself, he would abandon his profession of service. 

DOCTOR: “I don’t have a choice.”

AMABIKO: “You never allowed yourself the joy of choice. A life of defaults sugarcoated by temporal exhilaration.”

The overhanging cloud pours cascades onto the wharf in wall form, all precipitating particles suspended in its space, sparkling into a mirage of a past event. A massive crowd is seen swarming upstream where the chemical company used to be, dancing in a religious ritual but suspiciously in cultish movements. 

“Eejanaika! EEJANAIKA! Eejanaika!! Who cares? I don’t care! A horses’ ass is better than yours!” Eejanaika! EEJANAIKA! Eejanaika!! Who cares if we are hungry and naked! Who cares if we have sex?  They don’t give a damn! Eejanaika! EEJANAIKA! Eejanaika!!”

It was the magical rain dance for the dead. The ceremony of showering amulets, cross-dressing,  and calling for human defiance of the crumbling Tokugawa shogunate government of June 1867. The farmers, merchants, and foot soldiers rose in interdependence demanding reform of the great disappointment and lack of political leadership leading to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The trade-off was a Western-styled and modernization of the nation phasing into imperialism over autocracy. The growing movement spread throughout the nation ending in mob violence. The radicals vanished. 

DOCTOR: “Nice visual effects there…clap clap.. (by words, not hands). And what the hell was the fox-trapping about??”

AMABIKO: “There is a tale of a creature named Tamamo, the ‘algae jewel.’ She had the power to orchestrate light in every corner of the world and send winds to move oceans and mountains. When an ancient Emperor witnessed this phenomenon, he felt so insecurely challenged that he had his ninja spy on her. From surveillance, it was told that Tamamo was in fact a fox in disguise who took the lives of rulers. The Emperor fell ill and passed. His successors pursued Tamamo and cornered her in the northern region of the snow-capped mountains. The fox was slain but it congealed itself onto a giant rock that it perished on. Since then, any living being that crossed over this rock’s path lost its life.”

DOCTOR: “So?? Are you kidding? That’s it?!… … …Who cares if I’m old and cranky! Who cares if I’m opportunistic? They don’t give a damn! Eejanaika! EEJANAIKA! Eejanaika!! Eeja..naika… Eeja…E?”

The car radio tunes back into a nearby U.S. marine base broadcast of Casey Kasem’s Top 40.

“…Now, here’s the other one, the one at the very top. (drum roll) The most popular song in the land for the third consecutive week. At number 1, The O’Jays “Back Stabbers.” 

“…All the time they want to take your place. The back stabbers (back stabbers). (They smilin’ in your face). All the time they want to take your place. The back stabbers (back stabbers). All you fellows who have someone and you really care, yeah, yeah. Then it’s all of you fellows who better beware, yeah yeah…”

The morning sun swells above the ocean’s surface, mute and in suspended thought. In a blink, the sky collapses into blinding and deafening flashes, bursting into fierce winds cutting open the water, plowing down everything in its path. An oncoming fishing boat explodes on impact, sending shards of glass, wood, metal and a crew of six men hurled into dead space. The sheer blast passes scorching light through their hurtled bodies. Flickering wildly in a monstrous mushrooming cloud, their bones, teeth, nails, eyes and blood vessels convulse uncontrollably. 

The Lucky Dragon No.9 sailed into the cursed Bikini Atoll in search of a mythical fish that would protect the fate of the poisoned villagers. After numerous attempts in neighboring islands, they have spent and lost all but one last trawl net. Their only guide was a trailing comet illuminating the open sea at night. The crew were survivors of the Pacific war and the region was a familiar battle-site for them where they dug in deep in the caves waiting for the enemy that never arrived. The same enemy which now plays the apocalypse.

Still suspended in time and space among the ship’s detritus, the crew gasps at their radiating bodies. The captain’s fidgety arms swing out in a frenzy calling attention to the warping sky and sea. The ocean below rapidly swirls up into a tornado climbing and piercing into the sky regurgitating and sucking the blueness and whiteness of the heavens into the ocean’s abyss.