The Spirits of Shinpi Farm - Chapter One

"A house divided cannot stand."

—Matthew (12:25), Bible

1

Today I learn how a ten minute drive can reduce everything I’ve ever known to a smudge on the horizon. How it can shrink sky-piercing monoliths enough to cover them with my thumb. I peer through the rear window and steel myself for when the city finally vanishes. It seems important to catch that exact moment, for some reason. To say some kind of good bye. Is that what people do when their life slips out of reach?

“Are we moving forever, Daddy?” Conrad says.

There’s a squeak of leather as Father stiffens in the driver’s seat. When no words follow, Conrad sighs and gazes outside.

I watch him watch the world go by.

His question sparks another in my head, and an urgency to ask it. Though if Father has nothing to offer Conrad, he’ll have less to offer me. Sometimes, to avoid Father’s rage, I talk to him inside my head. I imagine his grave face, forehead trenched with frown lines. How his bushy eyebrows knit together before I’ve even said a word.

“Father?”

“Henrik,” he’d say—an acknowledgement of my presence rather than an invitation to continue.

“Why are we leaving the city?”

Even in my imagination his voice is gruff. “Your mother died.”

The answer is simple and obvious. Yet when Father made us pack our clothes into suitcases earlier this morning, it didn’t once occur to me that Mother could be the reason. It’s been almost a year since she passed, so this must be some kind of delayed reaction, I suppose. I know grief can make people act in peculiar ways. Like Hakishi-Sensei, my chemistry professor. His wife was diagnosed with an incurable brain disease. After she slipped away in her sleep, he stopped showing up at school, and when a relative finally went to check on him, he was found dead on the floor of his study, surrounded by towers of medical textbooks and scribbles of equations and formulas. If grief can befuddle a scientist to such an extent, it can cause Father to uproot our lives and move us to the countryside. By comparison, Father might even seem ordinary.

“Beautiful,” Conrad says, voice breathy and hollow, like he wants to be cheery but forgot how that’s supposed to sound. I stare out the window with him. I’d been too caught up with the world we’re leaving to notice the one we’re entering. The road stretches to a point in the distance, hemmed with cherry blossoms, their bittersweet aroma wafting through the windows. They’re in full bloom, shedding pink petals into the atmosphere, a perfect imitation of snowfall. Mother would always say something stupid at this time of year. Like how the sakura tree symbolises “the fragility of life”, and how the flowers fall quickly after they bloom to remind us that life is “limitlessly beautiful and often cut short”. Or she’d scream at me for tracking petals into the house.

Her face—delicate and framed with yellow curls like Conrad’s—starts to appear in my mind. I feel a sudden urge to talk, shatter the image.

“The city has sakura.”

“I didn’t think you cared much for the city,” Father says. Our eyes meet in the rear-view mirror and some odd force compels me to look away.

He’s both right and wrong; I don’t care much for the city. But I know the city. I know the pollution-stained buildings. The neon lights in every shopfront. The people’s incessant habit to string lanterns everywhere. I know the bento lunches are cheaper at Mrs. Goto’s convenience store, but I’ll only see Conrad smile if I buy his at the train station, where they decorate the rice balls into panda bears. I don’t know anything about what’s ahead of me. The only thing I can expect from my future is that it would be stupid to expect anything at all. My head starts to spin with this thought. Things, like people, are always better when you know the exact place they have in your life. When they promise you forever.

I steal one last glance over my shoulder. The city has all but vanished, lost to the distance we put in front of it, veiled by a swarm of gentle blossoms caught in the car’s slipstream.

*

When I start awake, I forget for one glorious second that we’ve left our lives behind.

The cherry blossoms are long gone, replaced with scratchy tufts of yellow grass and miles of barren, rolling landscapes. Ahead, a rickety bridge offers a passage over a river. The flaky struts are painted red, and atop the guardrails are many lanterns that provide a soft glow in the waning daylight. Who’d bother to come out here and light them? Perhaps if country folk are as obsessed with lanterns as we are in the city then things won’t be so different after all.

Gravel crunches underneath as Father slows the car to a crawl, lining up our entry onto the deck. Conrad stirs with the shift in momentum. “Oh, a river,” he says, then tugs my sleeve, a hint of excitement in his navy eyes. “Look, Hen. Jellyfish.”

I strain against my seatbelt to see, but we’ve already exited the bridge, the slats groaning with the release of our weight. The rare glimmer of joy in Conrad’s eyes goes out like the flame blown from a match. There’s a sinking sensation in my stomach, as though I’ve lost a great opportunity that will never present itself again.

“Can we stop?” I ask abruptly. Conrad raises his head.

“We’ve almost arrived,” Father says. “Soon we’ll have a river in our own garden.”

“With jellyfish?” Conrad says.

“Maybe. You’ll have to check for us.”

Conrad gazes out the window, and when he sees nothing but withered grass in every direction, nuzzles into my side.

The bridge signposts our re-entrance into civilization. Minutes later the landscape dips tremendously, and when the car goes over the apex, we find ourselves gazing into a wide valley. The road swoops all the way into its heart, where it divides a hamlet nestled there at the bottom. On the far side of these dwellings, a river—perhaps the same one as before—winds perpendicular, reflecting the sun’s departure from the pink sky. The opposite side of the valley is spread with evergreens, their canopies linked together as though to hide the incline on which they stand. This seamless sea of green rolls to the base of a mountain range, a sheer face of brown rock with a flat peak.

Father stops the car and gets out without a word, like he’s overcome by some kind of dream-like urge. Conrad and I share a glance and wait for him to come back inside. When he does, he swivels in his seat, and there’s a strange look in his brown eyes, similar to the ghost of excitement I saw in Conrad’s when we crossed the river. He nods, lips pressed together into a thin line of determination, and we continue on.

As we grumble further into the valley, some details come into focus: Oxen grazing in patchy fields. Staggered, flooded parcels of land along the riverbank. An overturned rice transplanter, its frame glinting in the sunset. Each new detail makes my stomach sink a little further.

“The houses look funny,” Conrad says as we pass the first set. Their thatched gable roofs are overly prominent, like giant books propped into steep triangles. The bottom halves of the dwellings consist of shoji-paper walls, latticed with strips of bamboo. The top halves boast a row of white-panelled windows.

“They’re called minka,” Father says as we stop beside the last two. Behind a door to our right, a yellow glow appears, bleeding through the translucent paper. The door rolls aside to reveal a hunched, elderly woman in ragged kimono, clutching an andon lamp. Her straw sandals grate on the pebble-strewn road as she closes the distance to the car. When she arrives at Father’s window, she bows her head lower than it already is and holds this pose. Father mimics her gesture as well as he can from inside the car.

The woman straightens and regards us with a focused expression. I expect a frail croak, but instead she speaks with a precise tongue. “Welcome to Shinpi Farm. You may address me as Miiko.”

“Good evening, Miiko,” Father says. “Mr. Yamazaki.”

“I must ask you to continue the journey on foot, Mr. Yamazaki.” Miiko says. “The next bridge hasn’t been tested with a vehicle for quite some time.”

We exit the car with stiff joints. Father abandons us beside the old woman so he can rifle through the back of the car. She stares down at us with an unreadable expression. “Tell me, children. Are you prepared for life on the farm?”

I decide not to answer, because everything I want to say would be ruder than not saying anything. Though I’m unsure why, she unnerves me. Maybe it’s the way her lantern casts unflattering shadows over her face. She seems to mean well by her question, yet at the same time there’s a calculated gleam in her glassy eyes.

“Yes, Miiko,” Conrad says, bowing into the shape of a minka roof. The woman chuckles as Father appears from behind the car, arms wrapped around a misshapen box.

Miiko says, “You haven’t introduced me to your children, Mr. Yamazaki.”

“My apologies. That’s Henrik, he’s fourteen—” I offer an awkward wave “—and that’s Conrad, eight.”

Miiko scrutinises us for a few seconds. Then we take off along the road and come to a frail bridge like the one from before. The lanterns are unlit and most of the red paint has peeled away. There’s an odd tension in the air; everyone remains quiet as we traverse across, as though this will prevent the deck from collapsing. The silence is broken by the groan of wood under our feet, and a foul stench permeates the air from Miiko’s smoking lantern. What does she have in there, rotten flesh?

“You’ve come at an appropriate time,” Miiko says as we come onto the opposite bank. “Spring is a time for new beginnings. Can I trust your children will help seed the rice paddies?”

“They’ll be glad to,” Father says.

“I’m pleased. The families of Hato Village no longer send their children to support us.”

“Their fear is understandable.”

The woman stumbles in spite of the unencumbered path. I feel as though she set up some kind of test for Father and his response struck her as much as it did me. My mind scrambles to memorise their conversation.

We come to stop in front of one last minka on the forest’s edge. Its placement seems odd, how it’s the only one on this side of the river, like it’s watching over the hamlet on the other side. And it seems shrouded to an unnatural degree, as though it clings greedily to the shadows cast by the evergreens.

“Your minka has not been lived in for three decades,” Miiko says. “We kept it in repair for the previous owner, though they never appeared in person. How did you come to acquire it?”

Father pauses—a sign I’ve come to recognise as a precursor to a cagey reply. Sure enough he prompts a change in conversation by saying, “It’s a very uninteresting tale.”

“Please excuse a prying old lady.” Miiko offers an apologetic bow and hands Conrad her lantern. “You may borrow this if you return it tomorrow. The fish oil will burn for several hours.”

Fish oil. Explains the awful smell.

“Thank you,” Father says. They dip their heads one last time, then Miiko departs.

Father takes a moment to survey our minka. Satisfaction curls the corner of his mouth. “What do you think of our new home?”

I hope he means new to us, because this tired dwelling looks older than all of us combined.

“It’s great, Daddy,” Conrad says through a stifled yawn. He dawdles forward and slides the door aside, dispersing the pitch-black inside with his lantern. When I pass over the threshold, my skin prickles, as though we’ve disturbed a pocket of air that hasn’t moved in generations.

We discard our shoes on the dirt floor and step up into the next room, which is floored with smooth wood planks. Well, they’d be smooth without the layer of dust coating them. Miiko said she kept the minka in good repair, but I wonder if she did anything more than look out of her window once in a while to check it’s still standing.

The centre of the living quarters is dominated by a square, sunken hearth, with cushions dotted around it. A rod hangs above the pit for suspending pots over a flame; there’s a metal fish on the end with a hook coming out of its belly.

“We’ll sleep in here tonight,” Father advises. He plunks the wooden box down and sits with his back against a vast, timber pillar, then waves his arm as an instruction for us to settle on his right. He tears into the box and removes a lumpy grease-proof bag for each of us.

“You may eat,” Father says. We both withdraw a steamed bun and chomp into it, whilst Father finds a bundle of logs in a gloomy corner, arranges them in the hearth, then begins striking a flint and steel.

Soon a fire crackles below us and dispels the shadows from the exposed higher levels of the house. The orange blaze gleams off many timber posts that crisscross each other, creating the framework that supports the thatched roof. My eyes land on an inside balcony on the upper floor, which leads to an attic room on either side of the minka. An odd sense that someone is up there crosses my mind. I wonder if it crosses Father’s, too, because he leaves us to explore.

Conrad and I watch the occasional spark rise from the pit and snag on a bamboo shelf above it. The radiant heat melts the aches of a long journey from my bones. My eyes grow heavy until I can no longer trace the flying cinders, and my thoughts slow to a nonsensical haze.

At some point, Conrad says, “Hen?” His eyes are shiny and reflect the fire. He whispers, “Do you think we can be happy here?”

I fight the urge to look away. “Sure,” I tell him. “It’ll be like an adventure.”

He nods, offers a weak smile, then turns back to the fire.

*

I wake to Conrad whimpering beside me. We share a futon mattress beside the dying fire, though I can’t remember moving there.

Sweat gleams on his skin. His breathing is ragged and he shudders every few seconds, a sharp yelp piercing the air. I make shushing sounds and stroke the back of his hand until his breathing plateaus. As I do this, I scan through the dark and find another futon opposite ours. My eyes trace a flat surface. Father isn’t there. I can’t help but feel resentment rise inside me; Conrad hasn’t had nightmares like this for months, and it’s hardly a wonder what triggered their return.

Conrad’s eyes open and struggle to lock onto mine. “Hen,” he says, reaching for me. I help him into a sitting position and strip away our blanket so he can cool off.

“Just a nightmare,” I say.

“I know,” he sniffs. “It was about—” He catches himself midsentence, eyes searching through the dark.

“It’s okay; he isn’t here,” I say, though I lower my voice. “You can talk about her.”

He shakes his head and lowers himself onto the mattress. Again, anger spins inside me, and I wonder how much the move will set Conrad back. I won’t say things were starting to seem normal again, but recently I felt they could be, one day.

I lay back too, and several minutes pass, enough for me to think Conrad might have drifted off again.

Then he whispers, “Hen, do you remember the stories Momma used to tell us?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Course.”

He starts to say something, then seems to redirect himself again. “Me, too.”

We slip into another silence. I wonder if there are any words I can say that might help him. If there are, they don’t occur to me. In the end I simply pull the blanket back over us. Conrad takes my hand underneath it, and together we watch the wooden beams glisten above us as the last vestiges of light flicker in the firepit.