Agerasia:
"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."-Dr. Seuss
I spent the majority of my time sleeping for months after my rebirth, and when I wasn't asleep, I was plagued by either hunger or bodily functions. The woman taking care of me- my mother, I suppose -tried her very best to keep up with my needs, but it seemed like she was constantly struggling to feed the both of us. Everyday life revolved around just the two of us struggling to survive. The little I did glimpse of the world around us was when my mother ran her errands with me swaddled on her back and it was bleak. There was little to no sunshine. Rain poured from the heavens in what seemed like a never ending flow, saturating the dirt street that crossed through the small, impoverished village where we lived. The village itself was just a cluster of small, worn shacks, our home amongst them. They were crafted of some type of cheap wood that warped under the constant battering of rain, and I knew from firsthand experience that the roofs did nothing to prevent water from dripping inside. Everything was damp from the bed mat to the blanket I was swaddled in, and I couldn't remember a time where I'd ever been so uncomfortable.
During the painstaking months of life before I could talk or walk or even express myself in ways other than rudimentary expressions, I spent the time thinking. How could this have happened to me? What happened to Heaven, or even Hell, for that matter? What happened to my body?
When I thought about my body, probably lost in the sea as a source of food for the fish, memories of my past life, of my mom, my older brother, and my friends flooded my mind. Did they cry for me? An overwhelming measure of grief overtook me for what seemed like weeks. It felt as if something was sitting on my chest and I couldn't breathe or think past the loss of my family. The place where I ended up did not look anything like home. There were no shiny cars, no flat-screen televisions, and no ridiculous advertisements. Electricity was a luxury that no one in this town could ever dream to afford. In this place, there was no comfortable middle class- there wasn't even an upper class to beg for charity. Everyone around me looked beaten and exhausted with the day-to-day back-breaking labor and the cruelties of life. I, supposedly just a baby, someone who hadn't even had a chance to experience life, felt the desperation of this place. And that was the saddest part of all.
As the months passed, my grief and shock faded little by little until it just became a dull ache lingering in my chest. Progressively, I got more and more perceptive of the world around me and needed less sleep. To my mother's weary delight, I was a quiet baby- content to observe the world around me rather than fussing and crying. The few babies I did see around the village cried constantly from the pain of hunger, so I was considered an oddity. I think my mother, Hina, as I learned she was called, was worried that there was something wrong with me, but there was nothing she could do with her limited resources.
One bitterly cold night, when a wicked thunderstorm rolled through, my mother cradled me in her arms as she rested on the hard pallet that served as the bed in our one-room hut and spoke to me in small murmurs. Her pale face was strained with tension, making her look harsh and older than her actual age, which was probably somewhere in the early twenties, but her hands were still soft, lacking the coarse calluses I'd seen on the other women around the village. I wasn't terribly surprised by her appearance, as I had seen it multiple times during my earlier months, but her eyes shocked me into silence. Her eyes were an average shade of brown, not too pretty and not too ugly, but that wasn't what stopped me figuratively in my tracks. It was the pure, unadulterated love in her eyes as she spoke to me. Logically, I shouldn't have been all that surprised since she was my biological mother in this life, but it was overwhelming and humbling to see it for myself. I felt warm and loved and so unbelievably lucky to have even one person in this harsh world to look after me; however, underneath all of that, guilt welled inside me, slowly devouring my happiness. I was not her daughter, not mentally at least. I was a sham- a lie. I was just a replacement for the child that she was supposed to have. The distress must have shown on my face because the next thing I knew, she cradled my head against her shoulder and she sung me to sleep. I had never felt more safe or content. It was that night that I finally learned my new name. My mother chose a name that would carry her well-wishes for my future. I was named Chieko, a child supposedly blessed with wisdom. The irony did not fly over my head.
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By the time I had reached the grand age of nine months, I couldn't tolerate being carried around like a sack of potatoes any longer. On a particularly rainy day, when nothing of use could have been accomplished outside due to the torrential down pour, my mother sat me down on the floor with a few, well-worn wooden toys scattered around to keep me entertained while she went about patching together shabby clothing. I bided my time, waiting for her to be fully immersed in her work before attempting to stand on my two unsteady legs. Rather than immediately taking off into a wobbly walk like I had optimistically hoped for, I fell right back onto my butt. Releasing a sigh uncharacteristic of an infant, I pulled myself up using one of the rough wooden walls and attempted to walk, only to fall again. I tried over and over for the better part of an hour before I could finally stand on my own two feet again with the support of the wall. It took a few more attempts to take my first step, but I achieved it and moved clumsily across the floor to my mother. I felt liberated, like a burden had been lifted off my already weary shoulders. As I clamored over to her, she finally lifted her head from her work and addressed me with a shocked expression, then a smile before swooping over to pick me up into a hug.
That night, she celebrated by showing me something that must have been a family heirloom. She had it stashed away in a dusty wooden box, so it looked nondescript until she opened it. Rolled within thin pieces of white tissue paper, there was a silk tapestry laced with brightly colored threads that looked new despite the obvious age of the overall piece. The tapestry showed a gruesome battle between what looked like two powerful men and bodies lie strewn about the ground around them like some type of macabre mosaic. Wryly, I wondered if showing images of horrible battles to children was a normal practice in this new world; nonetheless, I was fascinated by what I saw. Something seemed eerily similar about the two men in the image to me and it niggled at the back of my mind like an insatiable itch. One man held something that looked rather like a large metal war fan, and the other one had what looked like woven tree branches wrapped around his arms. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what it was about the image that stirred my memory. I tried to reach out to touch the delicately woven threads, but my mother caught my chubby hand gently and made a chiding sound before she pointed to the image depicted on the cloth and uttered one word that almost stopped my heart. Shinobi.
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I would have loved to say that I went on with my daily life unaffected whatsoever by that night, but that would be a total, shamefaced lie. I was paranoid for what seemed like weeks, but was really just a matter of days. I constantly watched everything around me, as if a shinobi would pop out of the shadows and brutally rip us apart, and I would refuse to fall asleep at night, much to my mother's distress. I think it might have been a remnant of the irrational fear from my rebirth because, honestly, who would believe that magical assassins were real? Both of us were hopelessly sleep deprived by the end of the week and I'm sure my mother was ready to rip her hair out from the stress by the time I finally pulled myself together. There was no way that shinobi could possibly exist. That was just the stuff of childish stories, right?
And, true to my belief, I saw neither a hide nor hair of any shinobi during the time I spent watching my surroundings vigilantly, so I let it go. I dismissed the tapestry as just an elaborate showcasing of skill in order to depict a fictional event. Tons of cultures did that with their myths back home, like the Greeks with their pottery art, and the Chinese with their silk screens. The glorification of battle was often displayed through art, so I felt certain with my theory and gradually adapted back into my regular routine.
Time flew by and before I knew it, I hit the milestone of my first birthday. By that point, I had finally begun to pick up my new home's native language, but out of embarrassment from saying things incorrectly, I stayed silent most of the time. Over my first year I had realized that the new language my mother spoke had a lot of similarities to Japanese, which was a language I studied very briefly during my first year of college, but flunked spectacularly. Of course I would end up in a place where I would have benefited from paying attention in the only class I ever failed. I knew my language skills would be horrid if I even tried to converse with so little knowledge of the new dialect. I could tell that my refusal to speak frustrated my mother, especially when she'd attempt to get me to interact with the other children around my age. She tried for months to coax me to repeat words after her and to babble with the other kids I "played" with. I was determined to maintain what little dignity I had left though and making the speech mistakes common of babies and toddlers would certainly destroy that facade.
The other women in the village would titter behind their worn hands about how prideful I was, even at just a year old. If I didn't have the mentality of an adult, I would never have noticed the glares they shot towards my mother and me and how they constantly referred to my mother as yariman, rather than her name. I didn't know what it meant, but their tone while saying it was enough to know that it wasn't a compliment. Despite my insistence of mentally referring to her as just a caretaker rather than my mother, I found myself getting defensive over Hina. I would purposefully stare at the group of gossiping women whenever I'd see them start to talk about her and focus all of my attention on them. It took a few tries at it for them to fully notice, but I'm proud to say my intense staring freaked them out enough to scatter the group. After that, I overheard some of the women mumble under their breath about how strange I was and how I must've gotten it from my mother, but I didn't catch them gossiping again.
My first birthday was subdued because we didn't have any friends or family in the village, but as a special treat, my mother gave me a single blue ribbon after dinner while I sat in her lap next to the fire. My stomach clenched as I ran my tiny hands across the smooth fabric; it was aqua- the exact same shade of the water I was submerged in during the last moments of my previous life. I felt tears well in my eyes at the sudden and completely unexpected reminder of the life I was ripped away from so abruptly and tucked my face in my mother's stomach in a futile attempt to hide myself from the smothering grief that accompanied the memories of home. I missed everything about home, even the little things like the scent of freshly mowed grass on a summer day and the call of mourning doves during a relaxing Sunday walk. The heartache that I had done so well to repress hit me all at once and I couldn't hold back the tears that streamed down my pallid cheeks.
The guilt welled up again; here I was, crying over my past life when I had been given another chance to live. I should have been grateful to even reach my first birthday. Over the first year of my life, seven other babies had died from starvation alone, while many other kids just a little bit older had died from a strange sickness that seemed an awful lot like tuberculosis. I was lucky to be alive. My mother had worked well into the night repairing clothing for other families just to keep food on the table, but even then, we were lucky. Compared to other families around us, we only had two mouths to feed, rather than the seven in the Tanaka residence next door and the nine in the Higurashi house across the road.
It took me several deep breaths and my mother's soothing hand rubbing my back before I regained the strength to face the world again. Clutching the ribbon tightly in my hand, I sat up and looked at my mother with determined eyes. There was nothing about this new life that I couldn't conquer. I could make do and survive- maybe even thrive. I was determined to succeed, and nothing would get in my way. My only enemies were destitution and self-pity.
I had no idea how wrong I was.
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Life progressed in a constant cycle of waking up to the humid morning air, surviving the day through the pouring rain, and then falling into a restless sleep on our damp bed mat. Around the time that I turned three years old, my grasp on the language was decent enough to get the answers from my mom that I'd had floating in my mind for months. It took me a few weeks of following her around silently, quite like I had done since she finally let me walk with her on my own for the first time over a year earlier, before I mustered up the courage to voice my curiosity.
We were sitting near the fire pit in our hut while the rain pattered softly on the roof and my mother was hunched over a battered cloak while trying to patch together a large gash. I had sat there across from her, patiently waiting for her to finish as I surveyed the only home I'd known during my first three years of this new life. For the first year or so, the scent of mildew and smoke from the fire in our hut was overwhelming and I struggled to breathe properly, but I suppose I adapted and I grew to associate it with the scent of home. There were new sheets of thin wood in patches on the wall from holes and rot that had threatened to cave in the house multiple times and the single dusty window we had looked out over the shadowy forest behind our house. The roof still leaked like a faulty faucet, which had caused problems with rot a few times over the years. I can remember my mother pacing about the house to dry up all the puddles to try and save the floor from decay, and she constantly wrapped my feet in dry strips of cloth for as long as possible at night. It took me a while to realize that she was trying to keep me from suffering trench foot, which I had seen firsthand on a little boy around my age just a month before my third birthday. I don't think I will ever forget the sight of the peeling lesions on his feet or the overpowering scent of decay in the air of their hut. Nobody directly told me what happened to him, but when I saw the new child-sized grave marker in the overly full cemetery the next day with his mother draped over it sobbing, I got a pretty good idea.
During my life in the town that I learned was aptly named Yokoburi, or Driving Rain, I witnessed a total of three days without rain, and on only one of those days the sun shone. While I followed my mother around the town dutifully during the latter half of my second year, I tried for many days to puzzle out how it was possible for this town to receive so much rain. I had heard of monsoons before, but the amount of rain this town got was way above that. Monsoons supposedly lasted six months before a six month period of dry weather, like what happened in some parts of India. Apparently in Yokoburi, there was no such thing as dry weather. Even on the single sunny day we got in the "summer" of my second year, everything was still muddy and wet from the thunderstorm the day before. As a result, that day was horrendously warm and humid, and the air felt like some screwed up version of a sauna. We never left the town, so I had no idea what our surroundings were like, but I was willing to bet we were in some type of rainforest hell, at least from what I garnered from the weather and the strange plant life surrounding the town. It would also explain the ridiculously large bugs I kept finding all over the hut.
The sound of my mother's weary sigh drew my attention to her as she folded the cloak and placed it in a large pile to her left. As she reached for the next article of clothing, I finally spoke up.
"Mama," I started hesitantly, "where are we?"
For a second, she just looked at me with a strange expression on her face before answering bluntly as she threaded her next needle, "We're home, Chieko-chan."
"I know that, but where is home?" I tried to dig deeper while stumbling slightly over the words I was just beginning to master.
She paused in her action of stitching the first section, looking deep in thought before saying, "We're in the middle of the Land of Rain."
I furrowed my brows as I got the niggling feeling that the name sounded familiar, but how was that possible? I was fairly certain I had never heard of Yokoburi before, and I had come to the conclusion that I was nowhere near the same place as I had been in my previous life, so why did it sound so familiar? Timidly, I voiced my next question, "Where is the Land of Rain?"
I heard her breath out deeply through her nose before she set the needle and pants she was mending aside and focused her full attention on me. "Where did all these questions come from, Chieko-chan? You're usually so quiet," she asked as she gestured for me to sit in her lap.
As I settled in against her, I mumbled, "I want to know more about home." Her arms wrapped around me and I cuddled into her warmth against the freezing fall night air that slipped through the cracks of our house. We sat there silently for a few moments as she rested her cheek against the top of my head before she asked, "What do you want to know?"
Taking her question as an invitation to ask everything that had been bothering me, I started simply, "Why does it always rain? And are there sunny places near Yokoburi?"
The second question may seem stupid to some, but after living in a place where rain was the forecast for 99.9% of the time, I felt it was a valid question. For all I knew, I landed on some type of island that was constantly battered by hurricanes and thunderstorms.
"Well, to your first question, the Land of Rain is between the Land of Wind, the Land of Fire, and the Land of Earth," Hina started with a steady voice, "and all of those countries get a lot of sun."
I nodded slowly as I wrapped my mind around the information I had been given. It seemed like it was a common practice to name countries after elements wherever I had ended up; however, I noticed she had skipped over a question. "But why does it always rain? Why do we never get sun like the other countries?"
Hina pet my hair softly and shook her head, "I don't know, but some say that the gods are crying for our country. They weep for the lives lost because of meaningless violence, and that is why it rains every day."
I don't know why, but that statement made me inexplicably sad. In my past life, I had been an avid pacifist; I even went to rallies protesting the wars in other countries that my home had dallied into. I hated the violence and the unnecessary evil that war brought upon people, and I had made it my life mission to subtly include those ideals in my lessons while teaching so that maybe the next generation would prompt change. I suppose that attitude carried over into this lifetime. The fact that it was a belief of my countrymen that the gods were continually crying because of the unnecessary bloodshed in the Land of Rain said more than a thousand words ever could. It appeared that I managed to land myself in a place not just struck by poverty, but also by war and violence. I sat there on my mother's lap for a long period of time coming to terms with that fact while she stroked my hair before I could form the words of my next question, "Mama, do you remember that night when you showed me that tapestry?"
She made a sound of assent, so I continued, "You said a word that night, but I didn't know what you meant. What did you mean by shinobi?" Her movements stilled at my question as she grew stiff, and it didn't take a genius to understand that my question worried her.
"Chieko-chan," She started warily, "how do you remember what I said that night? You weren't even a year old."
I really should've expected that question, but it caught me off guard. Of course an infant wouldn't remember words spoken to them after being alive for such a short period of time. Remembering the image of the tapestry was entirely possible because of how bright and memorable the design was, but remembering words? My mouth clacked up and down for a few seconds while I attempted to come up with an answer that wouldn't result in her thinking I was insane. Finally, after drawing blank on anything else, I settled on the truth, or at least part of it, "I just do. I remember a lot of things."
Hina hummed to herself in thought then asked, "What else do you remember, Chieko?"
Immediately, I noticed that she dropped the affectionate '-chan' at the end of my name and winced internally. This conversation would not be an easy one. How was one supposed to cover the fact that they had the mind of a 20-something year old in a toddler's body without sounding like a loon? I had a feeling that unless I somehow satisfied her curiosity, I would be royally screwed. After all, she was the woman who provided for me. Where would I be without her?
In my mind's eye, I could only see two alternatives. I could play dumb and pretend that it was just a fluke that I remembered, but that was unlikely to go well. Hina was a smart woman, despite what the townswomen may think, and I'm sure she wouldn't fall for it, no matter how much I played up the toddler part. That left the other option, which was to accept the role as a child genius, or at the very least, a child with an unbelievable memory. Either way, it made me even more of a freak than I might've appeared originally and I wasn't sure if I wanted to stand out like that. In my past life I hadn't been anyone special; I blended in with the rest of society. If I went down the path of a genius, then I would forever be branded with that term. I suppose I was lucky that I was born in Yokoburi. There weren't many expectations for children out here, smart or otherwise.
My train of thought was cut off by a cough from my mother and I sighed inaudibly as I made my decision. I suppose it would have been a shame to stick to the same safe path as before, so I went with the more daring route. "I remember everything," was all I said as I shifted to look into her eyes earnestly. I watched as her eyes narrowed a bit, and I was surprised at the calculating gleam that shone in the dwindling fire light. As quick as that look came, it faded again into a neutral expression as she tightened her arms around me in a fierce hug. I relaxed to the rhythmic beat of her heart, despite how unsettled I felt about this new side of my mother that I had seen.
Several long moments passed as we sat there silently listening to the weather outside worsening into pouring rain. I began to shift impatiently as the quiet extended long past what I considered acceptable; I still had a question that needed to be answered, after all. My lips parted to ask my mother about shinobiagain, but before I could even force the words out, a deafening crack rung through the air followed by the harrowing sound of piercing screams. Faster than I had ever seen her move before, my mother leapt up and placed me on the ground before hurrying to grab the few precious items in our hut along with food and shoving it into a weathered knapsack. My heart raced as I observed her move about the hut and before I knew it, she had me crouching next to her near the door.
"Stay silent, Chieko," She whispered harshly as she reached for the door, "I mean it. Not a word."
I nodded fearfully and watched as she stealthily pried the door open and looked out onto the muddy street. I could see her face illuminated by something bright, and as she gestured me to follow her out of the hut, I finally found out where the screams had come from. The entire line of houses on the other side of the street was blazing with an uncontrollable fire that not even the heavy rain could extinguish. I would have stopped in my tracks and stared if Hina hadn't pulled me along with her to creep around the corner of the house. I could hear the clash of metal in the distance along with the battle cries of men, but even that couldn't prevent me from hearing the desperate shrieks from the Higurashi house that I knew were coming from the youngest children of the household as the wooden frame collapsed on them like a fiery inferno.
My mother hurried us along as the sound of battle drew closer and closer to the main village and as we were about a foot away from the cover of the forest, a tall figure emerged from the shadows with a sword drawn and the fire illuminating his pale features. Hina pulled me back into her arms and hunched over me as if that would protect me from the man's gaze. I studied him intently with the limited vision the fire gave me because if I was to die, I wanted to know exactly who I could blame. My heart was hammering in my chest and my thoughts ran wild as the adrenalin and fear spiked. Maybe I could even choose to be a ghost this time around? I had been killed by Mother Nature last time, so there was no one to blame but myself, but maybe I'd get an option for the afterlife this time? My plans for my impending demise were cut short as the man stepped forward with a scrunched up expression on his face while he studied my mother's face. It was almost as if he recognized her.
"You," He abruptly rasped as he stared at Hina, shocked, "You're the one he's been hunting for over three years!"
My mother's face looked horrified and I was about to cut in to ask who exactly was hunting my mother and why, but all my thoughts were brutally halted as my face was sprayed with a warm, metallic smelling liquid. I watched in shock as the man who was speaking just a second ago slumped to the ground with a permanent look of surprise etched on his face and a knife sticking out of his neck. It was as if my mind had completely ground to a halt and everything around me was muffled as my eyes locked on to the innocently shiny piece of metal that proudly rest on the now-deceased man's forehead. Four simple lines marked the center of the metal and the only thought that would cross my mind as my mother took the initiative to hurdle us through the forest was oh shit.
My two original enemies just gained an ally- shinobi.