The goddess chronicles
Izanami claims that she suffers the way she does specifically because she a female god, and almost all the women in the novel share some parallel with her story – they suffer because of their social duties as women, they suffer because of the men they love, they suffer in childbirth. But her experiences and her allegiance also means that she’s biased, so the story she tells probably takes a biased perspective. She can do this because she’s suffered tragedy and injustice in ways that parallel Izanami’s story. My words may be dyed red with anger they may tremble in yearning after the living but they are all, each and every one, spoken to express the sentiments of the goddess.
This tale may be spun from my words but I speak for the goddess, the one who governs the Realm of the Dead. Having read Izanami’s story now that seems a bitter thing to say – surely not all women, even in traditional societies, are fated to suffer so much because they are women? But as Namima warns, everything she says represents her goddess: It would not be an overstatement to say that the fate she suffered is the fate that all the women of this land must bear. Izanami is the woman among women she is all women. She learns the story of Izanami and Izanaki – the Japanese creation myth based on the concepts of yin and yang, but also a tragic love story that ended with Izanaki trapping Izanami in the Realm of the Dead for all eternity.Īt the opening of the novel Namima tells us that: Because of the circumstances of her death, however, she finds herself in Yomi, the Realm of the Dead, where the goddess Izanami makes Namima her priestess. Angry, terrified and desperate, she defies the island’s law once again, only to die a tragic death. “It is your fate and you are powerless to change it” she is told, before being barricaded in the burial grounds where she expected to spend the rest of her life alone. She is supposed to stay a lifelong virgin too, but Namima broke that law before even knowing that she was bound by it. As priestess of the darkness, Namima must watch over the dead, never to return to the village, never to see her family except perhaps briefly, at funerals. They are opposites in balance – yin and yang.
When Kamikuu becomes the new Oracle, the priestess of light, Namima is told that she is now the priestess of death and darkness. It’s the island’s law.īut Namima breaks the law in an act of compassion leads to further transgressions and a love affair that becomes Namima’s downfall. Every single day she throws away food while she and the other islanders go hungry. Kamikuu never finishes the food, but Namima must throw the leftovers into the ocean so that no one else may touch it. Kamikuu is always given a delicious meal the likes of which the other islanders will probably never see in their lives.
IIts the only remaining connection she has with her sister, but it also disgusts her. In the years that follow, Namima’s duty is to deliver Kamikuu’s food to the Oracle’s hut. Namima is devastated, not only because she’s been parted from her beloved sister, but because she is considered “impure” and Kamikuu will be “defiled” if she speaks to her. She and her sister Kamikuu were born into a family of priestesses, and when Kamikuu is six years old, she is kept in isolation to be trained as the island’s next Oracle (the high priestess).
The island also has many cruel customs and these are what drive Namima’s story. Although it looks like paradise, food and timber are scarce so the people live in poverty. Like a teardrop, the island embodies beauty, sadness and great tragedy. Namima grows up on a tiny island in the shape of a teardrop, part of the archipelago that will eventually become Japan. Published: First published 9 March 2008 this edition published 6 August 2013 Translated: from Japanese by Rebecca Copeland