fishing village at sunrise in autumn
—
He dreams he's in the mountains, in a snow-covered house with a steep-pitched roof. It's deafeningly quiet and Suzu's warm arms surround him, as her brother sleeps his deep sleep through the winter in the other room.
He wakes a thousand miles away next to someone else, with the early autumn sun in his eye and the faint sounds of the ocean whispering in his ears. The nights have been growing longer again, but the biteless chill of the air reminds him it is still a while yet before winter. And before the snow drives him back to that mountain town.
He can't recall her scent from his dream, or if he had even dreamt of it. Everyone here has the smell of the sea in them—the fishermen and the women who sell the day's catch. It's in everyone except Adashino, who just smells precisely how one would expect a country doctor to: faintly like herbs and the dry, musty scent of old paper and bindings—a scent not altogether different from that of autumn leaves that makes a person feel learned for simply having it in his nostrils. It saturates the house, the futon and the pillow. It is what Ginko smells on Adashino's skin as his face remains pressed into his shoulder.
It brings to mind sifting through the curiosities that fill almost every room of this house while they share tales of mushi or things more mundane; rifling through haphazard piles of texts to find one they can't remember the title or the author of but at the same time can't get out of their minds; arguing about the title or the author of the text they can't remember the title or author of; sitting in the next room with a cigarette between his lips, listening to Adashino reassure his latest patient's family of the treatment's effectiveness. The sun that beats down on the shoreline has penetrated that skin only a fraction of the depth it has the other townsfolk, the sea even less.
As he lies in Adashino's futon breathing in and out against him, consciousness slowly returns to Ginko. It chases away the last echoing softness of the Suzu of his dream, replacing it with uncertain memories of last night, as though replaying for his foggy brain exactly how he came to be here. A little drink between friends. A stare that stretched too long and was awkward from the start. Needs ignored for so long they were grateful to be satisfied in whatever way they could.
The same story every time. It helps that Adashino has a not-entirely-scientific fascination with his body—or, more precisely, what the mushi did to it. If he were honest with himself, however, Ginko would find he had to admit a part of him is actually flattered by that attention, even if he can't for the life of him understand it.
He pushes himself up on one elbow to get his bearings. A blurry shape glimpsed out of the corner of his eye draws his attention to the pillow his head was just resting on, where a harvestman sits unmoving next to Adashino's hair. Its eight curly, thread-like legs stretch out in either direction as it sits flush against the linen, so flush it can't even cast a shadow. For a moment Ginko wonders if it has come inside for the molds that attack the books, before a closer look reveals its somewhat transparent, faintly luminous body and—now he notices—extra pair of legs are not those of a harvestman but of a mushi imitating one. It did not come inside for the books but for him. It was his head it crawled under while he was asleep.
While he has no concern this type of mushi will harm either of them, just the fact that it was drawn to him is all the warning he needs: he's begun to overstay his welcome in this place. Right now it's a harmless one, but there's no way to know how long will it be before his being here invites something truly unpleasant, something with which he does not care to burden his friend. The end of the week, or another day perhaps. Or a month from now. The safest bet is always the same: keep moving.
Careful not to disturb it, he reaches for the small, brown cigarettes he left beside the lamp at the head of the bed and lights one up. At the first puff of smoke, the mushi stirs back to life and begins to lumber away in a harvestman's bouncing gait across the tatami. There is no reluctance in its retreat, nor haste neither, only an instinctual aversion to the chemicals in the smoke that, as with any of its kind, can be boiled down to a simple cause-and-effect equation.
The mushi is not the only one affected by the smoke. Adashino stirs in his sleep as well.
"Ginko. . . ." he murmurs. In whatever dream he was in he must have recognized the medicinal odors of the smoke curling around him, because after a groggy stretch he cracks his eyes open and says, "Are you up already? Madness. . . ."
"Already? You any idea how much a person can accomplish before sunup?"
Adashino ignores his sarcasm as he reaches blindly over his head for his monocle. It's never far from the pillow or the lamp, just like the cigarettes, and his fingers strike upon them before finding the cool glass of the lens. He grumbles unintelligibly to himself in the process. In as long as Ginko has known him, Adashino has never been a morning person, which he will equate to his scholarly lifestyle if anyone asks him. Getting up at the crack of dawn is for fishermen and salesmen, he said once, which Ginko took as a personal jibe, with pride. Put at his fingertips all the knowledge in the world, he says, and as long as he has oil in the lamp he's content to feast his mind all night—which is probably how he ruined his eyesight.
As though reading Ginko's train of thought, Adashino fixes him a hard stare once he's got the lens in. Ginko can't be sure if this is his way of showing his disapproval for being woken up, or if Adashino is trying once again to bore through the fringe of hair that hides where his left eye used to be with his gaze. He remains fascinated by it no matter how many times Ginko tries to convince him there's nothing of interest under there; that isn't how his mind works. He's never satisfied until he's experienced a thing with his own five senses.
It makes Ginko uncomfortable, that stare; and it becomes harder and harder to hold the cigarette between his lips the wider and more painful his grin becomes.
"What?" He chuckles.
"You stink," Adashino says. He means the cigarette smoke, but it's probably true in a general sense, too.
"So do you."
"Shove off," comes the slurred response. Then: "Come here."
He combs his fingers through Ginko's hair; so Ginko takes the cigarette from his mouth and allows himself to be pulled down. Adashino's lips part against his, his teeth gently scraping Ginko's lower lip, his breath tickling Ginko's cheek as he exhales though his nose. He tastes the herbs of the cigarette on his tongue, and Ginko isn't fooled: Adashino says they stink, but every action of his tells Ginko he can't get enough of them, bitterness and all, because that taste represents something mysterious to him, and the unknown turns him on.
The time of day apparently isn't a determining factor. Ginko grins lopsidedly when they part. "So much for the virtue of doctors."
And Adashino's face darkens beneath the monocle.
He pushes himself up, pausing only to subdue the sudden rush of blood to the brain with fingertips to the temple before tugging last night's clothes properly around himself and rising from the bed. Ginko can't help but think he's escaping too easily, as he turns onto his back and watches his friend cinch his sash tight. "I thought it was too early to get up," he murmurs around the cigarette.
"You'll be wanting breakfast, yeah?"
"Sure. That sounds good."
"For the love of . . ." Adashino mutters as he steps toward the doorway. "Virtue, huh? Who was it was bellyaching about the lonely existence of a traveling mushishi last night, Ginko?"
"Ah, but I know this upstanding doctor who can alleviate that," Ginko says after him, but Adashino won't dignify that with a response.
"By the way," he says instead, "I thought you said you wouldn't smoke in bed."
"I saw a mushi."
"Heh? In my house, really?" He tries his hardest not to look around, but he can't quite keep the childlike excitement out of his voice. "Is it still here?"
With a sigh, Ginko raises himself on an elbow and turns his head. The mushi that looks like a harvestman is still there, just beyond the reach of the cigarette's repellent smoke, as though waiting for its first chance to come back over. It watches them with eyes that can't really be said to be alive, but aren't dead either.
He knows Adashino can't see it so he lies. "No. It's gone."
If he told the truth, Adashino would want it pointed out to him, and Ginko doesn't want to disappoint him yet again.
"Oh," Adashino says. "Too bad."
"Not really."
Ginko blows one last, long stream of smoke at the mushi. He doesn't like the way it sticks around; usually that kind aren't so stubborn. Maybe being in Adashino's house has rubbed off on it; maybe it feels a kinship with his collection.
But Ginko keeps that thought to himself as well. It would be just the kind of justification his friend craves.
As he dresses on the edge of the bed and the aroma of home cooking slowly permeates the room, the bustle of the streets below them reaches into the house. Neighbors call out to one another in salutation, hawking this morning's catch. The vague strains of a country song someone is singing as they go to sea swell as the chirping of the crickets under the floorboards that has been ringing unwittingly in his ears all night fades somewhat with the sunlight piercing the boughs of the trees in the yard. That light squeezes into the room through a crack in the outer shutters, setting the dust motes that float on the air alight. Even in a village such as this one that clings to the hills on the edge of the shifting sea, there remains invariably this most persistent trait of a place well lived in.
Ginko wonders what it will take for Adashino to forgive him when he leaves two days before he had planned.