the house I thatched with reed stalks

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I. the rains of Hachijō-jima.

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He wakes up, and drops are falling on his face.

This is not a dream, his mind supplies, it's raining. He's on the beach of Hachijō-jima and the fog is on the rise, it's not cold, but his skin feels like it's on fire. It's the fever -he knows.

He remembers the rains of Hachijō-jima.

Heavy hands that seem without body hoist him up from under his armpits, roughly? Probably. He knows this place and he knows this rain, these hands have beat him a million times or something: he's inside a memory.

There's seabirds crying aloft, picking out the sand-filled eyes of the bloated ones who were a wee luckier than he was. But him, him they take in irons and at the point of many swords. He curses. He curses so much his parched throat is scratched raw; when he swallows he tastes blood.

It's a long way to the barracks. He relives this without remembering what his bare feet felt like, what his sunburnt arms felt like, what being led like a dog felt like. Without remembering if the needles entering his skin deeper than their depth are for malice or for his relentless struggling against the chains that bind him.

Despite his crimes, he gets, they say, more tattoos than he should, but mercifully less than he could, because he's 16 and he's been refusing to die for months. Because there are priests around- and one says that he (of all people) could have a destiny.

Well, he thinks, fucking-tastic great. Maybe all along I was gonna be a hero.

That priest, he spits at him once his body lets him stand. They beat him up before he roughs him up, but his eyes cannot be tamed.

'Only hell can wait for you after this, punk,' says to him a guard restraining him.

He remembers. This new island-prison swallows his days and his nights and his months and his will to live; and it's even worse than his island-prison-home, and he thought nothing could beat that place.

I'll get out of here, he thinks, every morning, his eyes trained on the seamless yonder where the sea meets the sky. He'll go there, forget himself where the horizon is endless. I'm gonna live.

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Hachijō-jima: one of the two prison-islands south of Edo, in the Edo period.

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to be continued