by Marianne Kimura

Kyoto has several colorful and bustling craft markets. held monthly at shrines and temples, where people peddle unique wares: hand-made clothes, plant-dyed yarn, wooden cutting boards, knitted hats, honey, dried flowers, and tons more besides. As she lives in Kyoto, Mona has bought several skirts made of antique indigo-dyed fabric over the years at these fairs, but sometimes, because she wears them so often the old cloth frays and small holes appear. So this Saturday afternoon Mona is carefully sewing up one of the holes with a tiny patch, also made of antique indigo cloth. 

Unfortunately, her mind is not on her task. For, through one of the spiritual gurus on TikTok, Mona has learned about the thousands and thousands of reincarnations each person’s soul goes through, and her imagination is like an unhappily captured soldier. 

Reincarnation, which she had thought was careful, slow, curated and considered, turns out to be, if this guru is correct, more like washing up on the beach and then floating back to sea, and later reappearing, as lightly as sea foam or a piece of driftwood, on another promontory of land, ready and fresh for another life, thousands and thousands and millions of times! 

After some indeterminate period as a ghost, your hourglass is turned over again, and a just-born person springs up on a new shore, awakened to their material self, now present as a baby in the maternity wing in the hushed dead of night, a quotidian slice of moon visible through the window. 

And this baby grows up and then commences to slowly die all over again. In and out like the tide, like breathing. Thousands of times. Millions of planets are involved, in an infinite number of solar systems, not just here, but everywhere. And the baby might be a tree, a rock, a space alien. 

While Mona is being assailed by these momentous thoughts, across the dining table from her, Junpei, her husband, five years away from retirement, is busily scrolling through photos of old traditional houses in the Japanese countryside. It is their dream, it has been their dream for decades, to buy an old house for a song (that’s all they can afford) and retire in the fresh air, near a butterfly meadow and a tiny train station, for neither of them can drive nor knows the first thing about cars. 

But, understanding now about souls, Mona realizes, the countless journeys they take back and forth between being and nothingness, she wants to ask Junpei if there is any purpose to trying so hard and working so much for a goal, a house, that is just fleeting, like everything else in this material world. She knows what Junpei will say to her: “Well, we still have some time before we die. We should spend that time in a nice place.” 

Quietly stitching, Mona looks around the deathly cold old cheap rental house they live in. The main virtues of the house are its proximity to a tiny train station on the Eiden Line and the excellent grocery stores near Kitayama. However, built in the economically go-go 1960s, the house is neither old enough nor well-built enough to be solid, or beautiful, or traditional. On the plus side, it is spacious, made of real wood and has a couple of rooms with tatami mat floors as well as a small lush garden. On the minus side, an ill-considered renovation in the 1980s means that almost all the surfaces are covered with cheap pressed board paneling or dusty vinyl. The kitchen floor beneath their feet is an expanse of yellow plastic vinyl that was decades ago unfurled and pasted to the floor like a particularly large and heavy sticker. 

Yet she thinks she is about as happy here as she could be anywhere. Her university covers one-third of the rent, meaning they pay about as much for their house in the foothills of Mt. Hiei as an ordinary three-room apartment would cost.

Besides these practical matters, side-by-side in her mind with them is always the image of the galaxy as a night sea, souls floating, bobbing, little sprinkling lights of stars surrounding them like boats pitched in a torrent of waves. 

The thought silences her, stills her tongue, saps her ability to speak or to act decisively. It’s so ironic that she herself has finally become a dithering and effete Hamlet, only after she studied that play to death as a scholar. 

But then the soft span of indigo colored cloth, the color of her favorite blue hour of dusk, falls across her knees, dips and grazes her ankles. She clutches it and holds it as if it is her life itself pulling away from her, dropping her needle and thread. The thread, caught in the sway of fabric, pulls taut then comes out of the eye of the falling needle, which lands on the plastic floor. 

Watching this tiny matter of the needle, she realizes that she is still here, on this one particular alien beach, after all. Even Kyoto, as nice as it is, is still just one more alien beach, where needles fall and plastic reigns. 

Junpei, busily typing away on his PC, looks up at her quizzically, as she silently dips down to pluck the needle from the floor. Usually she can chatter on for hours without stopping. He must be wondering what’s gotten into her today. 

“What is the next place, waiting for me”, she can’t help but wonder as she stares at the threatening little sharp metallic point in her cold hand. And if I get there, will I still feel this way? Will I know then too that there are thousands of reincarnations and that it never stops, like a ghost ship sailing on, followed by a spectral albatross? She has never seen an albatross, and she wants to see one in flight. Another complication, isn’t it? Her eyes roll at this. Hasn’t she read somewhere that the brains of post-menopausal women are said to become more aware of spiritual matters?

She threads the needle again, on the first try. It is always like winning a prize if she can do it the first time. Then she puts down her sewing and decides, with finality, to tell him about the amazing vision of the thousands of lives souls go through that she has learned on TikTok. What if he is rendered similarly becalmed and amazed? But she knows already ‘that will never be’, as Macbeth once foolishly told the three witches. 

Maybe this is because Junpei is a man of action, not given to moping and moaning like she is, about being sent thousands of times off into infinite space? Maybe partly because he is Japanese, and the people here are inured to reincarnation, weathered to it, weaned on it. Hundreds of famous literary and anime characters have been reincarnated. A princess reincarnated as a spider monster. A man reincarnated as a magic cat. Everyone knows someone. He might even laugh at her. If reincarnation is now like a galaxy bordering a dark and infinite beach for her, it is no doubt different for Junpei. It must be more familiar and friendlier. Maybe a bell, a bird, or a bone? 

For Junpei, she realizes, reincarnation is like moss in a shadowy place, something that you are aware of yet not aware of, as you stand before an old temple garden in a corner of Kyoto and take it all in under sunlight filtered and dappled by tree leaves, there but not really there. Glance back when you leave through the gate, say your goodbyes slowly, for, as you now know, you have all the time in the world.

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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.