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Chapter Text

It is the end of the day, and you can almost distinguish the last rays of the sun through the heavy fog that hangs above the horizon.

Your day was not particularly busy. It reached its most interesting point when Mioko, the oldest of the Ashikano siblings, had brought you a weird-shaped fish and inquired if they could eat it. No one else had come since then, so you had time to prepare some tea and sit idly on the edge of the patio, looking out for signs of Ginko’s arrival. White eyelashes, the strange odor of his cigarettes, the slow pad of his feet, a natural or surreal disaster, a horde of mushis... He’s been away since dawn, allegedly to find a particular kind of shell that you cannot see, but you have noticed his restlessness upon discovering the changes that have befallen the town during his two-year absence. You are guessing he spent the day the same way he has yesterday, threading the new streets and examining clues of the impact the city’s development had on mushi life.

Perhaps not only mushi life, you think when Ginko finally appears on the path that leads to the front door and, before you have time to say anything, announces:

"They cut down another tree this afternoon."

Ginko pronounces the word tree as if it means limb. Maybe it does, for him, and those who like him see things that, to others, choose to remain invisible. You observe him silently as he approaches and sits next to you. His hair and eye are ever the same, uncanny and ghostly and bright; an odd beauty, something out of a dream, of a ghost, or a mushi. But there is a pallor to his skin, a slowness to his demeanor, that do not befit him. They have been cutting trees since the beginning of times, you want to tell him. It’s not like you lost a limb! But you know it is different for him now, in this time. It is true that they have been cutting many trees; too many, perhaps. Already the forest on the eastern hills has halfway disappeared, its lovely edge replaced with new buildings. The harbor has grown, and with it the population of the village-become-city, and of course its needs.

You imagine the way Ginko must have stood, close by the location where they were cutting down that tree, the way his head tilted down, down, down, the way he must have mourned, along with the animals and mushis that had slept in this tree, eaten its fruits, scratched its bark. As you imagine the scene you begin to ache too, for the tree that has died today, again, another tree, another small universe. But you also think of the house or the street that will stand in its place, of the wealth of goods that will cross the path to the tree’s grave; there is nothing to be done. A limb for a house: life goes on.

"I know what you think," Ginko says quietly. You do not doubt he does; he’s always had this uncanny way of guessing your thoughts, of seeing the deeper truth and its layers. So with a shrug you reply:

"Life must go on."

Ginko does not reply. You think you might have hurt him; you do not know what to do, what to say to make this somehow unfamiliar, tired Ginko content again. Some things have to go, you are tempted to say. But you do not: you would not want him to think he has to go, too.

When you wake up the next day, Ginko is gone. You know it will not be just for the day, this time. He will be back in a few months, at the end of Winter. Although that is only your guess.

Chapter Text

Autumn has passed like a sweet dream, and given its last red and yellow farewells. Now the sweet smell of rotting leaves and life recedes, as frost clings to twigs and shadows. It is no longer easy to keep track of time, now. How many hours of daylight will there be today, how many were there yesterday? How much time has been given up to the night, to hollow gaps, to mist and the beautiful moonlight? Even the colors of the sea have changed, and with them the sky’s, as the world tips into the silver pale, glacial gray winter.

The glow of the white sand at night has dimmed down to a shimmer. Creatures retreat into their shells, fish turn toward warmer streams. Your feet slide farther down the blanket, towards his, and you breath in at the same time he breathes in.

Something stirs in the shadows.

You think of what he told you, and try to remember the things you heard but didn’t listen to. Your feet slide farther down the blanket, trying to find his, and you breathe out at the same time you realize he isn’t here.

Tomorrow up on the hill, they will cut down an old yakusugi. The roots are the most troublesome part, the apothecary told you -- they dug deep into the earth, in-between rocks. The villagers will have to leave them there. They are part of the hill now. They hold it all together.

In a hundred years maybe, people will try to dig there and find the roots still alive, somehow, without the trunk. Maybe they will be gone, rotten away, eaten away, and only the faults and hollows left like a scar in the core of the hill will remain; a few ghostly signs. The houses that were built in its place will be gone, too. You try to imagine other houses and other trees, other people, other languages. You try to imagine yourself mourning for all those things that were, all those things that will disappear, and will never be remembered. A smudge of sadness forms in your belly for the tiny things: the kettle your grandmother used (and that someone broke by accident, one day), the tea leaves you use in the morning (their flavor never exactly the same). For the big things, the sadness is a lake so dark you dare not let it engulf you completely: the mushis you’ve never seen (will you ever?), Ginko sitting there in the room with you. All these things already livid, pale, a glaze of what they once were, slowly tipping back into the darkness : what was the color of the kettle, how much tea is there left, will the mushis ever let themselves be seen, or simply become even more invisible?

Tomorrow I will go up on the hill, you think. Ginko would go. I will see things differently, if I see them cutting it down. Aoi Ashikano refused to eat meat the moment she saw a villager skin a rabbit. Perhaps I will understand.

You fall back asleep like this, wishing as a scientist would, let a thing that is observed let itself be understood. The next day the sound of the tree toppling down (the wood creaking, squeaking, groaning like any dying creature) will not outwardly tell you anything new, but the grave, almost somber expression on the faces of those that are present will.

And so for some time you stay standing next to the trunk, your head full with its presence, the leafy green sappy smell of it, the remaining living signs of it. Big and tiny things, gone, or rather, going.

Bark, branches, trunk…

And you let yourself feel sorrow for the big and tiny things that will remain.

Hill, roots, faults, scars…

And then, you head back home.

During your walk downhill you think – ah, you think: how foolish, how immature, how absurd! There is no way you, Adashino, could fully understand, or even entirely experience the death of a tree -- how many more eyes would you need? How many more lungs, arms, how many more visions and dreams? A shudder comes, as it always does, as you let yourself acknowledge how impossible those things you cannot see are. Mushis are invisible. Death is invisible. Nobody remembers the kettle’s color: has anyone even noticed it is gone, now? Did anyone pay attention to its sound when it shattered?

And so you ache for Ginko’s sly smile, for his warmth.

The woods (those will be gone soon, too) calm you down with their murmur. Birds and their chatter, chestnuts tumbling down the crown of their trees, the wind detaching leaves from their branches. But soon the path leads you out of the blubbering forest, onto the cleared flank of the hill. The sky is already turning to darker shades in the east. As you descend, for a moment the entire city turns gray under your gaze, as gray as the sea. Only the vegetation burns red and yellow, auburn and brown. Then the view is hidden, the colors come back, the smells of the city (fish, smoke, people), its sounds, its agitation crowd your senses.

You halt in front of your house, slightly out of breath, and smile at the apparition that is sitting right by the door.

“It’s rare seeing you out. At a patient’s?” Ginko says, smelling even from a few meters away of his smoke.

“I wasn’t expecting you so soon,” you reply. “No, I was…” You hesitate, feeling oddly out of place. “It was a sort of funeral.”

Ginko frowns at the expression, puzzled. He leaves you some time (time enough to recover your breath and sit next to him) before asking:

“Has someone sort of died?”

“The yakusugi up that hill,” you answer, pointing at the hill on the far left. “It caught a disease, and was struck by lightning in June.” And the town needed the space to build some more houses.

Ginko nods to that, as chatty as usual. Through his coat you can feel his warmth.

The silence of winter is a tremor in your chest, a quiver in your stomach. A light chill on your thoughts that pushes them toward the gaps all around you, a buzz, a growl, a hum, something that disturbs without seeming to, and tips your dreams to unseemly fields. You are used to this silence. You have spent many winter nights like this, lying awake as the whole village sleeps. Yet something tonight is different, a door left ajar letting in the cold.

You push away the blanket, unnerved -- something about its warmth, how heavy it feels on your limbs, against your chest.

From the corner of your eyes, you think you notice a mushi rubbing its faint presence on the ceiling. It is gone when you turn your head to see it.

Adashino, you whisper to yourself. Adashino, and your name works like a spell, breaking the dreamy bubble that you had found yourself in. Ginko has told you about mushis that contain people’s dreams, unravel them or distort them until reality itself has become the reverie. Although this time you are the only one to blame, as you had far too much warm sake the night before. You sigh, and pull back the blanket over yourself. The silence is back now, and with it the cold. You sigh again, and fall back asleep.

A mushi rubs its faint presence on a corner of the ceiling. No one is here to see it.

Chapter Text

This year like every year, spring comes with the swallows’ shrill cries echoing through the last rays of sunlight. It comes with longer days, shorter nights. When it gets dark, the colors of the sky match those of the sea. 

In a poorly translated book you bought from a foreign merchant, you read that in some land faraway, up North, come summer there is no night. And vice versa, when it’s winter there is barely any daylight. Ginko listens carefully when you tell him about the things you read about the world; impossible stories, scientifically doubtful stories, incredible stories. Some very similar to the ones he used to tell. 

Ginko always listens to them with the same intensity, but this time he frowns at the end of it.

Do you miss it? You almost ask him. You don’t. 

Instead you let him go on a walk without you, and hope he’ll be back by nightfall. 

The whimsy cloud rushes past the town
The word you think of first, “whimsy”,
“Clumsy” second,
“Beautiful” third,
(the way the light hits it just right — 
its white so stark against the blue of today’s sky)
None of these words really fit, you think.
Each cloud serves a purpose, not truly its own
Its goal its own end
And each cloud blind to it.
The cloud doesn’t know where it’ll meet its fall.

Ginko is staying.

He doesn’t say why. You can only guess the reasons — the reason why he can stay, after so long a journey, or the reason why he chose this town, this house, your home.

For so long you had pictured him as the type of person who would never change. Ginko had been as the tide: ever-returning, but never lastingly. Always he had been like the water that laps at your feet before retreating. 

He just hadn’t been someone who could stop, let alone to stay with you.

It had been part of his charm. He perpetuated his wandering just like a spider spun its net, and sometimes caught in it more people and stories in a day you would meet and hear in this lifetime. At the same time, he knew loneliness and silence acutely, had walked in the same direction for days without meeting another human being. He had seen ethereal things that were beyond your touch and beyond your sight. He was different from everybody else, because he was part of another world. Ginko had always been the same; somehow an unchanged man when he came back after a long absence. His new scars would blend unseen onto his sun-freckled skin, bruises would fade, stories would be told (or not), new understandings would be passed on to other mushishis and his friend Tanyu, and new calluses would cover old ones. Ginko himself would appear and disappear just as quickly; a mirage of a man, a cloud perhaps.

But now, all will change; everything is different: Ginko is staying.

In spring here, green life and green smells spur up, buzzing hello and goodbye in the same breath. Tomorrow the flowers will wither, tomorrow the skies will tarnish. But first everything will have to burn through summer. You no longer care about the days that will come. Time changes with the seasons. How easy it is to live in these smells and these births, the chirping days of awakening. You eagerly let yourself go with them. You get lost in the deep blue of the sea, the smell of salt, of the moss in the garden. 

The light blinds you halfway. Creatures come out of their shells, fish fill up the fishermen’s nets. You turn your nose to his neck, lick the salt of his sweat, feel his heartbeat in the palm of your hand.

Something stirs, it stirs in the shadows, and slides towards the light.

Now there is time to see what before had been imperceptible. Changes in the lines of a face, in the movements of a body, changes also in words, phrasing, accent. Soon, you muse, you will notice other things you don’t even notice in yourself. Ginko will become real. 

Hadn’t he been real before? 

Clumsily the cloud, silly cloud, turns pink yellow or red
or white, grey, blue
sometimes almost black
light or dark.
Clumsily the cloud shudders to a stop over a forest, over the sea, over your town, another town, a village, or tired travelers.
Pushed by mysterious winds, it sometimes shatters 
into puffs of smoke, fog, water.

Now there is time to understand what before had been doomed to remain mysterious. As he settles, Ginko becomes more open. He’s almost willing to show you the contents of the drawers of his wooden case. As the restless wanderer, he could never have spilled his secrets. But now that he has time to sit in the same place…

Your own curiosity seems to settle down with him. You don’t feel like asking about mushis. The more time passes, the less you see his gaze wandering to invisible movements.

His things will now be all over your house, when before he kept everything carefully tucked away in the room he slept in. Ginko himself, though remaining his usual secretive self, will also come loose somehow. He will let himself be included in future plans. First you will be careful, going one step at a time. 

A walk in a few hours, sowing shiso seeds in the afternoon…

And so the careful steps will slowly, eagerly become small leaps: a promise to go see Mitsuko-san’s baby when it is born in three-months’ time, thinking of the different ways one may use shiso in the kitchen… 

No new scars on his skin, no bruises except when he accidentally hits his foot against the table. The skin of his feet with soften.

Sometimes, when you think about it too long, a shudder runs down your back. Ginko’s loss feels like yours in these instants.

The cloud stops today, over you, 
And its light is not its light
For a brief moment it’s your light
But in a minute it might turn dark and stormy,
or pass by, to hide behind a summit. 

There are different types of clouds, you learn,
And some will come down to settle.
Perhaps those see in you a home they had never hoped for. 
You will have to be careful, but not too much
Flesh is not smoke 
Ginko is not made of water
Slowly he will pick up the rhythm that fits just right. 
Ginko is not a cloud, so he’ll settle
Whimsically, clumsily, beautifully. 

Chapter Text

With a gentle lull the boats list here on quiet waves. At the end of the day, a shining drape like silk easily falls on the sea, turning it blue almost white, almost clearer than the sky. Now, the sun is maybe an hour away from setting. The wind is calm, a placid breeze, barely enough to wisp away the heat of the day, yet the fishermen forebode a strong gale for the night. Never trust a summer’s sea. At least, that’s what they say. You never were a man of the sea, though you have lived next to it all your life. 

Walking beside you, Ginko seems absorbed in his inspection of the horizon. Soon it’ll be colored with pink, orange, maybe red. Now it is only blue, blue like no other blue, bluer than the blue that came before it, yet less blue than the one that will come. Like always, your stomach twists with this bittersweet sight.

Does his heart beat faster when he looks like this at the horizon? Does he frown like this when he spots a lonely cloud among the blue? And behind this question, more quietly you wonder: does he like being here with me? Does it hurt to think of the mountain paths, of the villages, of the fields and thousand wonders that lie behind the hills?

Were it not for the body aches, the weariness, the tired bones, would you still be here with me?

You would like to paint vivid this image of Ginko in your lungs. But what paint, what brush, what skill would be enough? It would require the same material, the same hand that made the sky this blue, that made the sunset colorful. And then the painting would disappear just as quickly as it had appeared, for anything so beautiful will only stay for one long stare. You stare, you stare. The lines of his face, the white of his eyebrows and of his hair, that your own hair now matches. The odd, mystical green of his one eye and, yes, the look he gives you when he notices you watching him. The timid smile that hangs between you two for a moment, floats on your minds both, lists here on waves that swing to and fro, to and fro. Ginko is here with you. 

It’s been years now. Somehow, you cannot yet believe it. Ginko is here, with me. 

He takes your hand in his.

You dream of a tree toppling down. There is a hissing sound, a creaking, a sound a wounded animal would make as it collapses. Its branches are dry, just a few green leaves have managed to grow on its old, dying body. Yet it makes the sound of something that was alive and will very soon be dead. Detached from its roots, it is condemned. 

Adashino?

Adashino, you whisper to yourself.

Wake up, it is only a dream.

Only a dream, perhaps, but the sound stays with you when you open your eyes. The smell also, of rotting wood, of moss, of humid earth. Then there is the sound of Ginko breathing next to you, of your own breathing, and the smell of your storage room, of old things and old dust, of the spilled ink on the desk you fell asleep on.

You turn your head to look at Ginko. He looks back, and you understand he was the one talking to you in the dream. He’s younger than in your last memory of him. Less wrinkles on his face, less pallor to his skin. Oh, a dream. It was only a dream. All of it, the blue of the sky, the blue of the sea, the white of your own hair, staring at Ginko on the beach, Ginko staying.

It is autumn now, not summer, and you walked home after witnessing the death of the old yakusugi up on the easter hill. Ginko was waiting for you, you made him tea, then you went to the storage room to make a short account of the event in your journal, and somehow fell asleep after scribbling a few sentences. You tell yourself this is reality, but it seems a part of you is still deeply asleep. Part of you is still plunged in slumber, for the thought Ginko is staying lingers in your mind, anchored firmly on the shore of consciousness. As incompatible with the reality set before you — Ginko, still in his forties, his breath mingling with yours, the smell of old things and old dust, of spilled ink, of interrupted dreams — as it is, the delusion remains steady.

Ginko’s hand in yours 
quiet days in the city
the sound of a tree as it is cut down
the waves, your breathing mingling with Ginko’s

“You’re very close”, you tell him. 

His expression changes, seeming to say: are you alright?

Not now, you think. But you will be, later, when the dream fades into a fuzzy memory. You won’t tell him any of that. He doesn’t deserve this, your selfish desire and your selfish words, your sorrow at the thought that soon he’ll be gone, again, on a green path in the mountains while you remain here. 

“It was just a dream.”

“Seemed like a good dream. You were drooling on your journal.” You snort inelegantly. He moves away from you.

And like this the mood shifts, and Ginko rises at the first sign you make to get up, and you get out of the room together. You leave the smell of rotting wood and old dust behind you. You forget about the spilled ink. You make dinner with him and eat quietly, gazing at the garden. You do not forget about the dream, but you say nothing of it.

Life must go on. Life goes on, as it is, as it was, as it always will be, things shifting together like shadows and light, birds chirping, trees growing and their leaves falling. 

A few days later, you wave at Ginko as he takes the path away from your home.

He will be back. And you’ll be here, a part of you always anchored to the vision of Ginko and his white eyelashes, the strange odor of his cigarettes, the slow pad of his feet. A part of you always lingering on the signs that mark his passing: the extra bowl of rice, the dust gathering around in a square where his toolbox was, the sand on your blanket, the smell of incense in every corner of the house, the fresh sorrow that grips so tightly your lungs, and the silence of course, the silence. 

Unstoppable, unbreakable time passes. Life mustn’t go on, it just does.

Mioko Ashikano comes by from time to time to learn from you about the human body. You’re not sure how it happened, but you think she’s now your apprentice. Mitsuko-san’s baby is born with no trouble, his little hands grabbing at your finger. Other houses are built. The town expands. In the woods saplings grow steadily, their branches busy in the cacophonous activities of birds, squirrels, insects.

Sometimes you dream, shuddering at the thought of roots and the smell of Ginko’s cigarettes. Life goes on and time passes. You break two teacups, heal a shallow wound, give candy to Mioko’s little sisters. Winter slowly ebbs away. You wait. Ginko walks. He’ll be back soon enough. You know: you are part of this cycle. Like the teacup, like the newborn, like the old tree and the sapling. 

Yes, this is your cycle. Life goes on. You wait, and wait, and wait. He walks, and walks, and walks. In-between you’ll meet, and you’ll talk.