by Marianne Kimura

After a tailor hits seven flies with one swipe, he embroiders the words “Seven at One Blow” on his belt and sets out to advertise his prowess to the world. 

Age 18
A golden September day and she is returning to her dorm, Canaday Hall, the boxy, modern Harvard freshman dormitory, from a shopping trip. Classes have not yet begun. The sky is a gorgeous, ethereal blue color, and it almost seems like it would be a waste of planetary beauty to go inside.

A young man with sandy hair and a bright smile stops in his tracks and focuses his gaze on her.
“Are you a student here?” he asks brightly, then, “I’m Peter. Have you heard the good news about Jesus Christ?”

Peter is a Harvard student too. A nearby dorm room will shortly be the scene of a prayer gathering and he enthusiastically sweeps his arm around her shoulders and propels her to the stairs of his dorm nearby. She tries to think of an excuse to escape, but is worried about rudely offending a fellow Harvard student so early on in the year. Soon they are in the room and a crowd of the devout is gathered. Peter introduces her, everyone claps and then another male student, some sort of leader with a Bible, gives some introductory remarks. Then everyone closes their eyes and starts swaying while making strange glottal utterances with their tongues and lips.

Amazed, she watches them for a few seconds and then the phrase “speaking in tongues” floats to the surface of her brain.
She has gotten that puzzlement out of the way. Now what?

She spies the door just on the other side of the room. Everyone’s eyes are thankfully still shut, Peter’s too, and she walks carefully to the edge of the room unnoticed, moving around the people who are all raising their hands, lifting their faces and crying out in their devotion. She quietly turns the door handle and slips out, then hurries down the stairs, free.

For weeks she dreads running into Peter again, but fortunately, she never does. It is as though he never existed.

Age 46
A tiny college in a rural part of Hofu has hired me on a part-time basis to teach English every Wednesday afternoon starting at 1pm. There is another English teacher, a Japanese woman named Ueda-san. Her English class is held the same time and day as mine.

In the teacher’s lounge after classes Ueda-san casually mentions a certain “light temple” she belongs to.
“A light temple?”
“Where we all give each other light”, Ueda-san says.
“Light? How does that work?”
“Let me show you.”

Still sitting in her chair beside mine, Ueda-san holds both her palms about 30 centimeters away from my arm, like a character in a comic book doing a magic spell. Her hands hover above my body and after a minute or so, she shifts her hands to another spot.
“Do you feel anything?” she asks.
“Hmmm, not really.”

From Ueda-san, I learn various things about the light temple. Its founder has built a magnificent compound in the mountains of Wakayama Prefecture, about five hours away, and all the devout are expected to visit every month and bring large cash gifts to support the temple’s many activities.

Unfailingly and a bit surreally, Ueda-san always insists on “giving me light” every week as I sit sipping canned green tea and skimming through students’ essays in the lounge after class.

My two kids laugh with glee to hear about Ueda-san later when I get home and tell them about her over dinner. (Then in school, my children are old enough to know that grownups are much weirder than we purport to be.)

I am invited again and again, by Ueda-san, to attend light sessions at the local light temple with her, but luckily she always takes my refusals with a gracious and good humor.
A few years later I move to Kyoto and Ueda-san and I don’t stay in touch.

Age 18, part 2
Same Harvard dorm, Canaday. But this time inside the spacious suite, four rooms for three roommates. That is, they each have a bedroom and there is one common room, for socializing, and it seems, now also for proselytizing. For one roommate is a devout Catholic and is bent on saving the souls of the other two roommates, who are not interested in religions at all.

Many invitations to attend sermons at the Catholic Church on Sunday are extended, parried and refused. Finally the smiling face who belongs to the devout Catholic roommate, named Fran, starts to frown and a threat is tossed out one day in their common room: those who fail to convert will inevitably meet with the standard theological fate.

“Do you understand what that means?” Fran asks us, with dread and impatience in her voice like a school teacher at the end of her tether.
“Hmmmm”, says one of the irreligious roommates, pretending she has never heard the lore. Though she was raised as a religious “none” (a relative rarity back in those days in America), her mother, a former Lutheran, who had become an atheist before marriage, had explained the rumors to her out of her concern that her daughter would understand western culture.

But surely everyone had seen cartoons of heaven and hell anyway. The pearly gates, the angels, the clouds, the halos, the bearded deity, the horned devil. These are the clichéd tropes that every school kid knew and it was bizarre that Fran thought her roommates had never been exposed to such common mythology.

In her frustration, Fran’s face turns a pinched red and white color and she announces the cruel edict of doom.
“You will burn in hell!”
Despite this being pretty banal information, it’s still a shocking moment.
A violent image hangs in the air―of licking flames and the devil prancing around supervising the roasting of any obstinately heretical or heathen roommates.

But at least Fran’s invitations to them to accompany her to church cease.
A true blessing.

Age 56
A neighbor, Mrs. N, is one of those quiet yet kind people, around 65. Her hobbies are feeding stray cats in the neighborhood and gardening. Since I have four cats, we start chatting about cats and plants. Soon we are quite good friends.

One day recently, she brings me a pamphlet from her Buddhist new religion. I smile and say I cannot join any religion because my research, on Shakespeare and his pantheist ideas, necessitates that I must be as spiritually as free as the air. She appears to accept my refusal, but a potted blue flower is sitting in our genkan one day when I return from work and my son tells me she brought it over for me.

I feel an ominous sense of puzzlement but don’t (stupidly) link it to the pamphlet, because I’ve forgotten all about the pamphlet. A few days later, on a weekend (when I am almost certain to be home), Mrs. N, this time accompanied by her daughter, appears again, this time with some mochi rice cakes.

“Special ones from a good shop in Kyoto Station!” Mrs N says smiling, “my daughter here bought them for you on her way here from Ayabe!”
“Thank you!” I warily accept the cakes.

I am busily, of course, wondering why she is bringing me gifts.

Then Mrs. N tells me about her friend (living a few streets away) who belongs to the same Buddhist new religion, and I then remember the pamphlet.

This friend, who I will call Mrs. S, apparently lived in Canada for 13 years and is married to a Canadian. Apparently this fact is somehow supposed to make me more inclined to join the group?

Mrs. N then asks if she and Mrs. S can come over the next day to tell me all about their new Buddhist religion. I want to say no, but I’ve already accepted the rice cakes.

So I agree, though reluctantly, and brace myself for battle.

The next day, Mrs. N and Mrs. S appear and we stand at my gate to chat. After introductions they ask me about my work, so I tell them my standard story about my research on Romeo and Juliet.

“I’ve found an allegory in the play about the history of man and the sun. Romeo meets Juliet and they use the language of religion. This is paganism, like other countries used to have, and Japan still has.”
I give them both a mischievous little smile.

“Then in the next scene where they meet, Juliet is on the balcony. This represents monotheism, Christianity, and so forth. Nature is removed from humans as a spiritual being. Humans can still see nature, but Juliet’s distance represents the new separation. Actually, this spiritual separation did not happen in Japan. Shinto is still here”, I pause and smile (I’m subtly signaling, as part of my resistance strategy, that if I have any loyalties it is to Shinto, which thankfully, as far as I can tell, has no groups), “and Christianity was kept out during sakoku, for two hundred and fifty years. In his play, Shakespeare was, of course, trying to characterize his own society and Europe, not Japan.”

They look intrigued. I continue

“The third scene in the series about mankind and the sun is where Romeo escapes after spending one night with Juliet.”
Mrs. S furrows her brow.
“I don’t remember that scene”, she says.
Mrs. N smiles, “Oh, I saw the movie with DiCaprio many times”, she says, “I remember this scene. Romeo has been exiled, so he has to flee from Verona.”

“Right”, I say, “in the allegory, this scene represents when people became separated from the sun economically. In England that was happening fast in the last few decades of the 1500s as coal production increased massively. Forests couldn’t supply the booming population with enough fuel, especially in the cities. And the first line of the play is “Gregory, on my word, we won’t carry coals”.
Gregory, honto ni, sekitan wo hakobanai.

Mrs. N and Mrs. S are listening attentively, despite the fact that I am pretty sure my Japanese vocabulary level is probably not quite adequate to my task.

I continue, “Of course, in Japan, this separation in economic terms happened after the feudal system ended with the forced opening of Japan by Colonel Perry and the United States Navy. Did you know Perry’s ships ran on coal?”
They both smile and nod at me again.

“Finally”, I rush onwards, “the tomb scene represents when people will return to using the sun. The sun looks dead from an economic standpoint because it supplies so little of our energy. About 3%. But anyway, fossil fuels have a limited future.”

“Sugoi,” they both say. Gosh.

“Thank you”, I say, “But there is one more scene, symmetrically in the middle, the one where Romeo and Juliet marry,” I continue, “this represents Shakespeare always trying to bring the sun and people together. Shakespeare cloaks himself in the persona of Friar Lawrence, a spiritual and monkish figure”.

I pause and look up at the gorgeous blue sky. Sometimes I wondered if his ghost was hanging around listening to all the theories I had come up with related to his work. What would he say? Would he agree with me? Or would he laugh and say “oh no, that’s not what I meant at all!”

“I think you should know that I’ve understood what Shakespeare had to say only because I live here in Japan, because I noticed some things here that I could never have noticed had I stayed in America.”

I am trying to tell them indirectly that it is absolutely no good to try to bring me into any organized religion, that I am tied through my research to the natural world only, but of course they refuse to take the hint.

The next thing I know, Mrs. S is fishing her smartphone out of her purse and scrolling through it.

“If you like Shakespeare”, she begins in a dramatically warm and enthusiastic tone, like a kindergarten teacher, “our dear founder has written a beautiful essay regarding King Lear”.
I cringe inside, fully expecting what I would hear next, which is, indeed exactly what she comes out with: “King Lear is about suffering but still continuing to love our near and dear to our utmost.”

“Nah”, I say dismissively. I don’t recall how that came out in Japanese. (This was the heat of the battle, you see.) I think I may have said chigaimasu.

I continue, “King Lear is just another allegory like Romeo and Juliet about the sun. The stupid old man exiles and rejects the simple good daughter, Cordelia, the sun, and chooses the nasty cruel and overly suave wicked daughters, who represent coal”.

Mrs. S and Mrs. N digest this information and their jaws drop slightly.
There is silence.

From that point on, the whole tone shifts. I cheerfully steer the conversation to my favorite topics of witches, good luck charms, the moon and magic. It almost seems that it is me who is trying to convert them, which is quite funny, I think, and not at all the case. Maybe it is slightly beyond the pale, but I even end up telling them that they may be witches.

“You like plants and cats, do you not?” I say to Mrs. N., who nods happily.
“Well there you go then, yappari”, I say, “and you” (I turn to Mrs. S) “you are most likely a witch as well. ”

She looks quite happy to hear this.

The conversation is now just fantasy and speculation. It is time to end it. Mrs. S. has 3 school-age children and needs to get back home. I’m amazed she could even stay here for as long as she has.

When I check the clock in the kitchen a few minutes later after they leave, I note that my successfully failed conversion took one hour and ten minutes.
Time for a cup of tea.

Dear reader, you are probably wondering why I’ve only given you four accounts of people trying unsuccessfully to convert me when the title of this story specifically promises seven cases.

In truth, I was born under the sign of the moon, and the moon having three phases, 3 is therefore my lucky number, so I contend that the extra three accounts can be grouped briefly under the three headings of Bahai, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons.

Some Bahai people are good friends of mine here in Japan and they have in general not particularly tried to convert me, although once in a while some ventured to invite me to their religious study groups (I always demurred, having no interest at all in religion of any kind).

Jehovah’s Witnesses appear at my door from time to time and I always quickly close it as soon as I figure out who they are.

The Mormons are an interesting case as far as Japan goes because, it now occurs to me, they used to knock at doors, including mine, to convert people to Mormonism about 20 years ago or so, but for some time (way before Covid), I’ve not seen a single Mormon anywhere. They’ve vanished, like moths or sparrows might disappear, with no excuse or explanation. It is as though they never existed.

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For more by Marianne Kimura, please see her story of Last Snow. Or an account of how her second novel, The Hamlet Paradigm, was taken up by an independent publisher. Or her double life as academic and fiction writer, or her third prize winning entry for the Writers in Kyoto Competition. See also an extract from a work in progress, Seven Forms of Infiltration; an interview with her about goddesses and ninjas; or an extract from her first novel, The Hamlet Paradigm. For her original story, ‘Kaguya Himeko’, please see here, and for a short story about a witch see here.