A Castaway Ishmael Who Turned to Stone in the Amami Islands

As always, I enjoyed your performative storytelling piece “Call Me Ishi-maru.” Most of all, the title’s suggestive pun. Immediately after I read this provocative, unconsciously prophetic continuum of Ishmael to Ishimaru, another playful pun flashed across my mind. What I did is just turn it upside down.

Maru-Ishi, instead of Ishi-maru.

Your protagonist’s name is a combination of “Ishi,” namely “stone,” and “Maru,” literally “round,” which was also used as a suffix for male names. So “Ishi-maru” sounds completely human, a kind of primitive man with some animistic spirit of stone. But in Japanese, there is another term “Maru-Ishi,” which is not human but a big round stone worshiped as a tutelary deity of the village, the worship of which dates back to the Jomon era, some ten thousand years ago.

I have my own “Maru-Ishi” at the village of Isu, Amami Oshima, where my Shamisen master Eikichi Sato was born at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Now, the village has turned into my fictive birthplace, the center of my epistemological universe, one of the most symbolic points on Earth for me to think about the fundamental meaning of life and existence.

Recently standing beside my favorite filao tree on the shore of the village, I had a daydream about what might have happened to the fate of our drifting narrator Ishmael if the broken whaler Pequod had drifted by accident from the South Seas to the shore of the Amami archipelago. What kind of story can be heard by Ishimaru turned into Maru-Ishi, another stranger-god who newly created the archipelagic universe and witnessed all the counter-history that occurred at the shore: the shore between the sea and the land, the past and the present, the dead and the living, the capitalism and the gift economy, violence and mercy?

So, here is a fragment of the story I heard from the stone whose voice was mingling with the wind in the filao needles.

Call me Maru-Ishi, a big round stone on the shore of the island of Amami. As the island is encircled by coral reefs, and the beach was entirely covered by splendid white coral sands, you find no stones of this size in this island.

So I look very strange, out of place, solitary at a glance.

Visitors always ask about my history.

There is a local legend.

Once upon a time, the ancestor-god Ibi-ganashi came from across the sea to the shore of the village of Isu, riding on a big round stone blown by Hai, a strong south wind. The people got surprised with the unexpected visit of the stranger, but they gave a warm reception to the god and the stone and entertained them with dances and local foods. Being pleased, the god decided to stay there forever as a foundation stone of the village. The second, and the true genesis of the world.

Since then I lie here in the village’s square, under this huge Banyan tree by the seashore. People of the village always come here to sing their prayer:

I-su nu i-bi-ga-na-shika-di nu u-ya ti-shi-gama-ha-i ka-di ta-bo-reti-shi-ri u-ga-ma

The stone-god of Isuwho is the forefather of the wind.Please send us a south windwe are praying to you, fatherby joining our palms together.

Fishermen want a strong south wind for the purpose of their daily modest fishery, trade, and sailing. A south wind is the most fundamental source of the lives and happiness for the people who have been managing their sailing boat from ancient times. The sea wind dominates all the people’s lives, but the force of the wind is incarnated in a lonely round stone set up and worshiped on the seashore.

But I am not a stern father.

I am generous.

Always smiling.

So, I lie down here in the village’s square...