Daddy Daughter Decorum
THE MUSEUM OF MASKS AND HORRORS
As the ferry made dips on the choppy waves and the island’s lighthouse materialized out of the ocean’s haze, I lit up inside. I was about to discover what mischief demons wrought in the heart of the island.
A friend of mine stood at my side, spouting his theory that the folkloric demons were nothing more than Russians who found themselves stranded on the island and used the caves for shelter. The Japanese saw the tall figures with receding hairlines and burned skin and thought they were seeing horns and the kind of suntan one can only get from beneath.
It isn’t a bad theory, but I didn’t let it dissuade me. I was there to see evil horned creatures come hell or high water . . . in fact, the former would be preferable.
After we landed, I decided to check out the seashell-shaped museum that sat on the beach. I thought it might contain valuable information on how to avoid a demon attack.
I stepped through a black curtain into a circular room with dusty brown light. The walls were lined with wicked faces with widely exaggerated nostrils, chins, and tongues, each more grotesque than the last. Whether they laughed, cried, or wailed, the faces sang my doom.
In the corner of the room was a dark library nook filled with colorful books. I was struck with the same sense of wonder I had as a child as I flipped through the monster tomes, unable to discern the kanji brushstrokes, but struck breathless by the watercolor islanders running.
My reverie was interrupted when an entire wall screamed to life with laughing children and floating neon orbs.
I stepped out of the library and watched a low budget video on demons. At the beginning, a kid threw a piece of trash off the ferry, and I gave a knowing glance at the horrible faces that surrounded me. That poor kid.
To my great disappointment, the child was not devoured by demons at the end of the video.
THE SPLIT PATH
I left the museum and skipping the seemingly adventureless air-conditioned bus-ride, followed a series of squat, stone demon statues with fanged smiles pointing the way through a town that greatly resembled Goblin City. I wove my way through slumping houses, and marveled at deserted dirt streets and radishes the size of bowling balls sprouting from the earth.
The town was all but abandoned, save a few rough-handed farmers who peeked around corners. I wondered if they thought I was an Oni escaped (I’m not far off from the Russian description I gave before). To me, the quiet and solitude stood as a beacon for the eerie events to come. People stay away from islands possessed.
I followed the stony fingers and walked a circular path through dense forests and the harmless shrieks of cicadas.
At the top, the path split, stone demons encouraging me to the yawning caves to the right. To my left a great green Buddha head peeked over the tops of the trees.
I did what all people in my position would do, and I listened to the demons.
DEMONS
I ducked into the cave and almost headbutt a palm-sized bat. It yawned and stretched its wings, wondering if it should wake and spread evil throughout the land, then saw the blurry light of the sun seeping into the cave, and went to sleep again.
I stepped around the bloodsucker to see where the demons slept. Stalactites and stalagmites cut a jagged path into the depths. Beneath a dark arch there was a dimly-lit, pale girl hunched over a chest of gold. The demon’s keepsakes, apparently. Though I knew she was plastic, I thought I could see her shivering.
I rounded a gray wall and my haunted feeling was blasted away by pastel pinks and blues.
There were the demons, Disneyfied and about as horrifying as Count Chocula. I frowned at the animated hollowed monstrosities with chipped paint and could almost hear the echoes of visiting mothers, “Ooh! Look at that one, Johnny. Isn’t it scary?” a phrase that, once heard, christens the afternoon utterly nightmare-proof.
I left the cave, the romance wrung out of me, and unwound my anticipation on a neck brake speed on the bus down the mountain.
I wasn’t eager to return to Mengishima island. I felt that I had spelunked my way through one of life’s mysteries and found it not so mysterious after all. But a trigger-happy friend of mine had broken a tourist code and forgotten his camera. He was anxious to get back and take snap shots of the monsters with candy-coated skin.
So I returned to Demon Island.
But this time, I ignored the pleas of the demons and took the left path.
PATH OF THE BUDDHA
The Buddha’s copper green skin was also flaking, but he had a weather-worn and ancient look that set him apart from the cheapness of demons. I stood at his feet and looked in reverence at his stoic face, which commanded more attention than the tongue waggling creatures to the East.
There was an opening in the back of the large concrete slab he sat upon. I stepped in and found that the Buddha was hollow, which struck me as the perfect analogy of Nirvana. I exited, tried to make my head more like the Buddha’s, and walked a trail across the spine of the island.
The path was simple and had an archway of branches overhead. It brought me to the top of everything. I could see the gray city of Takamatsu, dull and distant. I could the glittering ocean through the trees. It was my first feeling I’ve had of being lost in Japan, folded in its mysteries with no sense of direction or place.
I drank it up through my skin.
I descended the steep, bristly back of the island with a small avalanche of pebbles. I grasped a splintery rope tied to the slanted trees and wove around kanji-carved wooden shafts sticking out of the earth.
At the bottom of the hill, neck unbroken, hands bloody and calloused, I discovered I’d been weaving through graves. The cemetery continued in a more orderly fashion through neat rows of dark granite blocks. I walked softly past red oil lamps and empty sake bottles. Stone children with corroded faces stared at me from flat marbled walls. I had my camera, but I didn’t dare take a picture, afraid that I might take the children’s essence with me off the island. Opposed to the manufactured monsters behind me, this fear was real.
In the middle of the great cemetery was a well built from stones. I thought my chances of finding a chest with a fifty ruby coin at the bottom were pretty slim, and the chances of making it back up the sheer mud walls even less, so I continued on.
The graves dwindled and opened onto a calm beach, empty save the skeletons of fishing boats. At the tail of the island was an immaculately white lighthouse jutting out from the sand. I found a rusty ladder up its side and made my shaky climb.
From my high vantage point, I could see the swell of the island and thought about the plastic horrors that dwelt in its heart, and the countless nights of debauchery where the distant figures of the evening were so enticing . . . until you met them face to face.
I breathed the sea in from atop the lighthouse, in what felt like the middle of nowhere.
And the voices of everything were lost to me.
-X
