Yurei No Kabe


When I was a student living in Okinawa Prefecture, I would occasionally hear about a little-known tourist attraction called Yurei No Kabe, or, The Wall of Ghostly Voices. Located on Iriomote Island near the Maryudu Falls, you’ll find hidden amid the dense overgrowth and lush coves of orchids and sweet alyssum, a deeply pocked overhang stretching seventeen metres tall. I have tried to find it on Google’s satellite imagery, but alas, close-in detail is not yet available.

According to legend, Buddhist monks, upon breaking their vows of silence were banished from the monastery and sealed into the caves where they lived out the remainder of their lives. Their voices, longing to be heard even after death, escaped their physical confines and tunneled into the caves to keep others from falling into similar unhappy fates. Visitors came to the site to to listen at the walls of the cave and could find answers to their most worrisome questions, just by speaking into a hole in the cave.

In the past, answers came swiftly and accurately, but over time, the answers have degraded to the point where they are incomprehensible or not even forthcoming.

The reality, however, is that dime-sized fissures in the wall penetrate deep into the rockbed, some tunneling several hundred metres to reach the other side of the cliff. These tunnels are lined with an unusual specimen of flatworms, each only a couple centimetres long. Suckers at the head and tail allow these indigenous creatures to suction themselves to a surface such that their mucousy forms can either sway slack or stretch taut. In this manner, the slightest breeze of damp tunneled air causes the millions of worms to audibly vibrate at a frequency similar to a human voice.

Their bodies are sensitive enough that they can register the subtle nuances of human language and shift their forms to correspond in a complementary way to the question just posed. In this manner, their vibrations were able to provide “answers” to the hopeless souls that stumbled by the cliff.

Recent climactic fluctuations, however, have irreversibly altered their fragile environment to the point where their sensitivities have declined and the species as a whole are quickly becoming extinct. An acquaintance of mine who recently visited the cave tells me how some of the fissures are so clogged with the deteriorating bodies of dead worms that human intervention is periodically necessary to clear out the debris to provide ventilation for the remaining flatworms.

Whispering a question into one of the clear passages, “What can we do to help you?” my friend received the following cryptic reply, “No creature stands still for long.”

®2009

Creep Fruit


A young woman and a young man peer into the chain-link fence to catch a glimpse of the arboreal mystery. The army of guards and researchers make it very well impossible, but every once in a while, inside the compound, one—if one is patient and lucky enough—can catch said glimpse of a dwarf and wrinkled tree bearing dull green grey fruit of a most peculiar shape—round with several banana-shaped nodules, not unlike a human hand. One bite of this strange fruit, it is rumoured, and the aging process screeches back to a death-defying crawl, or “creep.” That’s the rumour anyway.

The news agencies keep it conservative. Mice on a diet of daily fruit rations seem to be living, on average, two months longer than control mice. Except for the ones that don’t. A twenty-seven-year-old chimpanzee on an exclusive diet of the anti-aging fruit since its discovery twelve years ago has stopped aging completely.

The young woman and man—a couple—read these reports ravenously. Both the skeptically conservative and the wildly imaginative. They, like every other single person on the planet, want a fruit for themselves. And their chance of getting one is two in the population of the world. There is no orchard of these fruit trees with a smiling farmer in overalls filling up barrels by the bushel and sending them off to market. Only this single tree. Bearing its strange, completely sterile fruit. Origins yet to be determined.

The tree receives the full scrutiny of scores of botanists and researchers, but they search in vain. A nine-year-old discovered the tree on the outlying land of her parents’ property. Tasted it under a friend’s dare. The parents slowly grew aware of something being wrong when the child failed to outgrow her clothes for two consecutive years. Apparently she had been secretly eating the fruit with reckless abandon since she had discovered it. The study of her growth (or lack thereof) was cut short however, when a car struck her dead in a Walmart parking lot.

Researchers daily run tests to discover the tree’s origins. Pore over meteorological studies searching for the possibility of an asteroid impact twelve years ago that may have lain some alien spore, seed, bulb. Still. Origins remained yet to be determined.

The following week, the young woman attends a small dinner party of her closest friends. After dinner, with the china whisked away, the host stands up. Flings back her dark waves, smuggles a mischievous laugh. “You will not believe what I have got my hands on.” Her accomplice enters, carrying, on a teak Dansk serving tray, a hairy greenish orb with six fingers.

Chairs fly back. The guests gasp, they swear, they exclaim disbelief. “NO WAY.” declares our young heroine. The accomplice sets down the tray.

“How the hell did you get that?”

“My father. One of the guys he golfs with owns one of the research stations…” she trails off. Slides a fine Wüsthof from the table. “I’m not sure exactly how this works.” She attempts to peel the hoary skin, but ends up spilling some of the flesh using this method. “Okay, this isn’t it. It’s like Jello pudding in there.”

“Do the knobby pieces break off?” wonders aloud an olive-skinned woman.

The host looks up, mentally counting the guests. Eight. “Maybe.” She saws off the fruit’s protrusions, careful to contain the custard. “Someone has to share the big piece with me.” Our heroine volunteers.

The other women huddle around to claim their respective shares. “Oh my god,” exhales a red-haired woman. “It’s divine!” The other women chime in their agreement. “Totally.” “Utter oo-mami.” “So good!” The guests linger, the wine runs dry, and the night sky outside stretches taut, threatening to leak light.

The next day, the young woman relays the novel experience to the young man. The young man feels a twinge of jealousy, but mostly, he feels happy vicariously. And now they have a source. Which is lucky. Because the young woman and her friends are soon going to need it. A few days later, the cravings begin. Clamorous, maddening, insatiable. Even more distressful, ignoring the cravings results in accelerated aging.

It seems that while researchers had exerted extensive energy studying the anti-aging effects of consuming the fruit, not until recently had anyone considered the effects of not consuming the fruit. How very unlucky for our young woman. And thus the black market explodes, no price being too much for a hopeful drop of this elixir. The father does not want to live with the weight of his daughter’s death on his hands. Nor that of her friends’.

Of course the tree could hardly produce fruit quickly enough to supply eight people with regular rations. Let alone the countless others who had unsuspectingly tried it. So it is only a matter of months before the young woman receives her last ration, the tree now completely barren with no signs of producing additional fruit—at least not anytime soon. The young man left a long time ago.

The no-longer-young woman and the no-longer-young host sit next to each other on the back porch steps at the host’s house. They have aged considerably. The host much less so. She keeps secret a stash of creep fruit in the shed behind her house. Unbeknownst to her, the no-longer-young woman already knows this.

“I’m sorry. Beyond words.” sheepishly confides the old host.

“I know.” replies the old woman. Hidden in her jacket pocket is a key to the shed. And the quick sharp blade of a Wüstof. “I am too.”

® 2009