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.
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 irreversably altered their fragile environment to the point where their sensitivities have declined and the species as a whole are quickly becoming extinct. An acquaintence of mine who recently visited the wall 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
