Okishmia, Island of the Heike

In 1991, I spent an entire month on an island in the middle of southern Japan's largest freshwater lake. The lake is Biwa, the island, Okishima. The fact that the people on Oki Island supposedly descended from the famed Heike clan, who fled the more powerful Genji clan in the 12th Century was supposed to be the story's hook, but what interested me more was the life of the people as they lived it. Ostensibly this was my honeymoon with my first husband, a Japanese artist, but in fact it was my happy introduction to the diversity of Japan, to the rural state of mind and lifestyle that I had only just glimpsed from Tokyo, and that in fact underlies the Japanese psyche everywhere. In a house rented from a man who'd left for the mainland, we lived for the month of April on Oki Island. It was a two-story house with two upstairs bedrooms, one carpeted with an awful bright green, one with a deep red. The pungent odor of 'dokudami', a leaf used for tea, mixed with the smell of burning plastic garbage wafting in through the windows. There was limited refuse pickup, and Okishima's was a practical population.

The people fish for a living, naturally, and every household has its own version of the local delicacy; sticky stewed crayfish. It was here that I first tasted "funazushi", the forerunner to sushi, and on this island that I met my first mature wives, who wake up at 3 am to send their husbands out on the shrimp boats, and feed them breakfast at 8 when they return from the water. The older kids ride a "school boat" to the mainland high school, and supplies for the grocer come in once a week.

I don't remember much of the draft I wrote, but I do remember that there were a multitude of stray cats, one male dog, and one (plateless) truck on the island. At the time, the only TV was at the liquor store. I remember the novelty of non-politically-correct compassion, the way the elementary school kids knew one of their playmates was 'mentally challenged,' and they told us so, so we'd understand why she was different. There was a deaf newspaper delivery man who rode around the island on his bicycle, screeching his brakes so we all knew he was coming. Was that for the benefit of the hearing community? I remember the funeral we saw, and the kids showing us the next day how the body hadn't quite disintigrated in the simple crematorium; they told us with that glee kids show in gory stories that they'd have to burn it again. And I remember how a 40-something woman we called "O-Kay-chan" (her name was Keiko) kept in touch with us for years and years after we left the island. She, too, was a little slow, and still lived with her parents, but for some reason she latched onto us*.

A small island's life was what I wanted to chronicle, but I couldn't figure out how to sell the vision to Americans, who are so far away in space and spirit. Sometimes, a decade on in time now, I feel as if the whole experience was a dream.

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*We were literally in the midst of setting up a momentous visit for her to our house in the mountains north of Kyoto when a call came from the US that my father had died, and our connection with O-Kay-san was severed forever. She never called us again.