I GREW up suckling at the breast of my eldest sister, Ichiko.

I had seven older sisters. They were all beautiful—the napes of their necks, their heels, their breasts. Still, Ichiko’s breasts were exceptional. Though she was not yet twenty, they were firm and full—tiny pale blue veins crisscrossed their immaculate whiteness, and when I sucked, what seemed an endless supply of milk came gushing out.

I preferred Ichiko’s milk to my own mother’s, which created a distance between us. My eyelashes had not yet grown in when I began spending all my nights and days in Ichiko’s bed. I learned to crawl, then to walk, but still I showed no sign of wanting to leave that bed. The two times of day I ventured outside were at dusk and just before daybreak, when the light was dim, and objects wavered in the air. Then I would slip out of bed, open the shoji, and step down from the veranda. Once the soles of my feet hit the dirt, I would go skipping about the dark yard, which was hemmed in on all four sides by a dense grove of beech trees, while a beaming Ichiko looked on. Aa-chan, she would call out to me happily, you’re such a good boy, the best. Buoyed by her words, I skipped even faster, faster than seemed humanly possible.

When darkness fell or the sun rose in the sky, I scampered up to the veranda and back into Ichiko’s bed. Wringing out a cloth, Ichiko carefully wiped the dirt off my feet. Then she licked the soles with her tongue to cleanse them. All that hard exercise had set my blood racing, so I sucked her firm breasts even more greedily than usual, gulping as I drank. By the end, her breasts were drained and soft.

Ichiko and I slept curled together, like two magatama beads. We slept deeply, and long. At times, I would wake during the day to find her no longer beside me. Instead, she would be in a corner of the room, munching on a piece of meat. A platter of raw meat sat directly on the tatami and I could hear her chomping away, though her back was to me.

Ichiko could always tell when I was waking up. She would slowly turn to me and grin, strips of meat dangling from her mouth. When her lips parted, I could see small bits sticking to her perfectly straight teeth.

When she needed to use the toilet, Ichiko would pick me up and take me with her. Half dreaming, half awake, I would feel her hands under my knees as she suspended my bottom over the porcelain receptacle. When I had finished, she would squat and do her business. From deep below came a plop, followed by a sucking sound. I listened through ears dulled with sleep. Crouching in the darkness under the sink in the hall, I waited outside the open door until she’d finished. Ichiko carefully wiped herself, then hoisted me on her back and carried me back to our still-warm bed. In a matter of moments, both of us were fast asleep again.

Ichiko nursed me until I was five years old. Because I subsisted solely on breast milk, my bones were thinner than those of other children my age, and my complexion was disturbingly pale. I only came to realize this much later, though, since as long as I was breastfeeding I met no other children. I spent all that time in Ichiko’s bed, enraptured.

IT WAS my second elder sister, Futaba, who dragged me from that bed.

Futaba was always blowing a small bird whistle that went churichurichururu. I could hear it from the room where I lay, warbling at the far reaches of the corridor. And then, almost immediately, would come the faint flapping of wings. A great flock of birds was on its way.

One day, I awoke in the middle of the afternoon, unusual for me. Ichiko was fast asleep, and I was nuzzling her breasts. It was bright outside; light filtered through the shoji and splashed across the tatami. I could hear the sound of the bird whistle and beating wings coming up the corridor: churichuri.

I crept out of bed and cracked open the shoji ever so slightly. I could see Futaba walking toward me. Actually, all I could see of her was her legs and torso, for her head and shoulders were covered with small birds. The birds were brightly colored—blue, yellow, and green predominated—some swirling about her face, others perching on her shoulders and arms.

A scattering of fallen feathers lay in Futaba’s wake. I crawled out to the corridor and began picking them up. Scouring the passageway, I was able to gather several dozen, which I bunched together to make a kind of bouquet. The moment Futaba stopped blowing her whistle, the birds all flew away.

“You’re Ichiko’s kid, aren’t you?” she asked me.

“No, I’m not,” I answered, clutching my bouquet of feathers.

“Well, whose then?”

“I don’t know.”

Futaba laughed as if to mock my stupidity. Then she wheeled and walked away. Alarmed, I hurried after her. Whenever a feather fell from my tiny hands, I stopped to pick it up. Futaba walked fast. It was all that I could do to keep from losing sight of her. The corridor was full of twists and turns, a real labyrinth. I followed her for hours, stopping each time she paused to decide which turn to take. From time to time, she would come to a halt and blow on her whistle, whereupon a flock of birds would stream out of the beech trees surrounding the yard and fly around her head. When the whistle went quiet, the birds all returned to the trees, as if being swallowed up. For a second, they mingled together there, a scattering of blues, yellows, and greens in the upper branches. The next instant, they were sucked into the dark treetops, and those colors disappeared. They must have been sucked very deep indeed.

The sun was setting when we finally reached Futaba’s room. The lights were brightly lit, and there were signs of people everywhere. When Futaba slid open the shoji, the children in the room all turned to look at her.

“I’m back,” she greeted them.

“Welcome home,” they answered as one.

“I brought along a new kid,” she said, nodding in my direction. The children swarmed around me. Their bodies gave off a warm, childish odor that made me grimace.

“He’s small, isn’t he?” they whispered to each other. “So pale!” “His eyebrows haven’t grown in.” “His hair’s a shaggy mess.” “He’s got no clothes on!”

The children had me hemmed in on all sides; I had no room to breathe. How I longed to run back to Ichiko’s bed. But navigating that long, twisting corridor was beyond me—no way could I manage that. The children combed my tangled hair and dressed me in clothes that fit, so that I had the appearance of a proper child. Then mealtime was called, and Futaba and the children gathered around a big table and began to eat. Some children served the food, others cleaned up afterward. When they were finished, a piece of paper was placed in front of each child, and everyone settled down to practice writing with a brush. After that came playtime, games like tossing a ball back and forth or playing war. Their shrill voices made me recoil. I had never stayed up so late before, and couldn’t keep my eyes open. Following Futaba’s instructions, the children laid out a straw pallet for me. The straw made me itchy, back, front, all over. I could see the children playing and quarreling from where I lay. Surrounded by their shrieks and laughter, lying on the straw, I fell asleep at last.

I DID get used to living with other children, though.

It turned out I had the shrillest voice of all. I hadn’t used it before, so even I was taken aback when it burst from my body.

About twenty children lived in Futaba’s room. There were some comings and goings, however. The child I grew closest to was a big boy with a mangled ear. He showed up not long after my arrival. The kids dubbed him One Ear. The name they gave me was Peewee, since I was so small. Peewee. One Ear. We grew to be close friends, calling each other by those nicknames. Whether it was cleaning up after meals or practicing calligraphy, we were always together. I stood out because of my loud voice, One Ear because he could pee farther than anyone else. We slept side by side on the same straw pallet. Sometimes I would wake at night to find his heavy arm draped over me. One Ear, I would gasp, I can’t breathe. Still half-asleep, he would groan and remove it.

Every so often, Futaba threw a fit. She would take a long ruler and go around whacking kids on the arm or bottom with it. One Ear caught Futaba’s eye because he was so big, so he came in for more than his share of whacks. He just glared coldly back at her. That made her whale on him all the harder.

One Ear and I had a secret hideaway, a place that was just our own. If we stepped down from the veranda, circled the thick stand of rushes, and crossed the barren stretch of sodden ground on the other side, we would come to a small pond. This “pond” was little more than a puddle grown big. No plants or living creatures lived there; only the occasional water strider skimmed its surface. A narrow stream of water seeped from the pond. I guess there must have been a spring feeding it from below. That stream trickled through the underbrush of the beech grove. Sometimes it seemed to disappear, but it always popped up again a little farther along. Deep within the trees it suddenly increased in size until it became a waterfall, spilling over the cliff on the far side of the grove.

None of the other kids knew a waterfall was there. In fact, the other children never ventured into the trees, not a single one. All we had to do when One Ear and I wanted to be alone was slip out the door when Futaba wasn’t looking and take off for the waterfall.

Its water tasted sweet. We would be out of breath from all the running, but still One Ear and I scooped up the water in both hands and drank it. I call it a cliff, but it really wasn’t that big. Scrambling through vines and over rocks to the very bottom posed no problem for us. One Ear taught me that the deep pool at the foot of the falls was called a basin.

“When I was born,” he said, “I was given my first bath in a basin like that. How about you, Peewee?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

That was the only answer I could give. I knew absolutely nothing. Not even the face of my own mother. Until the day that I went running after Futaba, my whole world had been Ichiko. I didn’t know my own name. I didn’t know why I had been born into this world. I had no idea what would become of me.

“They call a waterfall ‘the roar’ where I grew up,” One Ear said.

“The roar.”

“Not a little guy like this. No, I’m talking about the roar that seems to fall from heaven. More than a few waterfalls like that in the mountains.”

“Why did you leave your hometown, One Ear?”

He didn’t answer.

“They gave me my first bath in the biggest basin of all.”

That’s why he could bear up under Futaba’s beatings, he went on. He glanced down and scooped up another handful of water.

One day, as she was whaling away, One Ear reached up with a big palm, grabbed the hand that was holding the ruler, and twisted it hard. Futaba’s anger knew no bounds: she looked the very incarnation of wrath. She beat One Ear all the more furiously. In the end, his body was so swollen he couldn’t get up. I spent the whole night tending to him as he lay stretched out, groaning on our straw pallet. One after another, I soaked compresses in an herbal infusion and laid them on his bruises. The treatment worked—by daybreak the swelling was gone, and he was as good as new. He sat up abruptly, gathered his few possessions, and prepared to make his departure.

“I’m leaving,” he said, giving me a quick hug.

“For good, right?” I asked. He nodded.

“You’ve got a wiener, Peewee, so eat a lot and grow as big as you can.” Now it was my turn to nod.

When the sun was up, One Ear set off through the yard. I saw him off as far as the waterfall. The beech trees were rustling in the breeze. Just once, One Ear looked back and gave me a wave. Then he was swallowed by the thick stand of trees.

SEVEN YEARS I spent there, at Futaba’s. I made no more close friends after One Ear left. I did as he had told me, though, eating everything I could lay my hands on. Meat of uncertain origin, weirdly iridescent stewed fish—whatever was placed before me I crunched up, bones and all, and swallowed. When a pile of boiled uncut vegetables was served, I chewed them down to the core. I grew and grew until, before I knew it, I had passed Futaba in height. By that time, I was the old-timer of the group, the kid who had been there the longest. Futaba began to rely on me for things like overseeing the children’s studies and keeping an eye on those who served and cleaned up after meals. Sometimes, she even let me blow on her bird whistle. When she used the whistle, countless small birds gathered, whereas my whistling attracted much larger birds.

One day, I was blowing on the whistle on the veranda when the biggest bird I had ever seen flew up to me. Deftly, it grabbed me with its talons and carried me high into the sky. Those talons were razor sharp, yet my body was unharmed. The grove of beech trees grew smaller and smaller as the bird ascended, until we had soared so high it was just a black dot, where no branch or leaf could be made out. The Residence, its yard, the surrounding grove of beech trees, everything had become jumbled together, then reduced to a single point. The bird cut through the wind with a great swoosh. We crossed continents. We passed the dividing line between night and day. On and on we sped, until we came upon an island in the sea. The bird swooped down again and released me. I fell. As I tumbled, the familiar beech grove came into view. The top branches of a tree broke my fall. When I had clambered down to the ground, a woman I had never seen before was waiting for me. It was my third elder sister, Mitsue.

Mitsue was a funny sort of woman. Her moods, if you can call them that, were in constant flux. One day she would lord it over me, forcing me to massage every corner of her body—not just her legs and back, either—until my fingers became stiff and numb. Then the next day she was so attentive that she would warm my underwear against her chest. When I told her I didn’t like her doing things like that, she wept silently and then vomited up a stream of small coins from her mouth. It was her habit to disgorge all sorts of things when something upset her.

One sweltering summer day, Mitsue was kneeling beside me, sending a cool breeze in my direction with a large fan. She had begun fanning me that morning, the moment I sat down at my desk to read. A number of tall bookshelves were lined up in the corridor outside Mitsue’s room. On them sat countless volumes, old and new. I spent my days poring over Mitsue’s books. When I asked if she had read them all, she responded with an ambiguous movement of her head, a nod that could have been taken as either yes or no. Yes, I’ve read them, she said after a pause, but I can’t remember anything in them. A moment later, without warning, she opened the front of her kimono and out popped a breast. There was no rhyme or reason to the things she did.

Mitsue fanned me all that day—even when noontime came around, she refused to budge from her spot on the floor. I could feel my neck and shoulders on that side growing stiff from the constant breeze. In fact, that whole side of my body had grown completely rigid. Yet I feared what might come out of Mitsue’s mouth if I disturbed her. The time before, it had been jellyfish. She had vomited up a number of the transparent creatures, all very much alive, right on the tatami. Wasting no time, we filled a big earthenware pot with water, and set them loose in it. Two are still alive. The rest apparently dissolved in the water.

Mitsue was half-naked. Plying the fan with such total concentration was making her sweat. A rivulet was coursing between her beautiful breasts. I found myself troubled by a strange and unfamiliar feeling. Shall I make some lunch? I asked. She nodded. I went to the kitchen, boiled some green vegetables, and whipped up some fermented soybeans. Mitsue kept fanning me the whole time, following me to the kitchen and standing beside me as I stood at the sink chopping vegetables.

I put our lunch on a tray and carried it to the table. Let’s eat, I said. You’ve fanned me long enough. But she wouldn’t stop. The food will get cold, I coaxed her. Fanning just cools it down. I could see my entreaties were falling on deaf ears. I’m getting cold, I said at last. Give it a break, won’t you? This seemed to fluster her. She knitted her eyebrows and began pacing the room in her half-dressed state. Then she disgorged something.

This time, it was a small dragonfly bead made of colored glass. With green and white stripes. Still shaken, Mitsue picked it off the floor and squeezed it in her fist. Then, bead still in hand, she took her chopsticks, shoveled some fermented soybeans on her rice and stirred them together. In the process, the dragonfly bead fell on the tatami. She and I reached down to pick it up at precisely the same moment, so that our upper bodies pressed together. The sensation of her breasts against my shoulder gave me a massive erection. I pushed her on her back on the tatami and buried my face in those breasts. Stop it! she cried, but I couldn’t stop. I could see the dragonfly bead on the floor. Stop it, stop it! Mitsue cried a few more times. Then she fell silent.

My face had worked its way down to Mitsue’s navel when I felt things landing on my neck. Cold and clammy things. Whatever they were began slapping against my neck and shoulders. Alarmed, I jumped up, and they fell to the tatami. Salamanders, vomited up from Mitsue’s mouth. My erection withered away to nothing.

Mitsue went on a while longer, disgorging more salamanders in her agitation. Some clustered around the dragonfly bead while others scampered under the chest of drawers, but by evening they had all crawled down into the yard in search of a moister place. Mitsue was quick to recover. I apologized for my behavior, and she nodded.

Three years I spent in Mitsue’s room. When I announced my departure, what she vomited up that last time were lotus seeds. I placed the seeds in the amulet pouch she had sewed for me. It also contained the dragonfly bead. The seeds rattled when they came into contact with the bead. When we said goodbye, Mitsue took her breasts from her kimono and swung them back and forth as a token of our parting. I had not touched them since the salamander episode. They moved beautifully. I stared at them for a few moments, then turned and walked out. I looked back twice. Her breasts still swayed, and there was a sad expression on her face.

I WANDERED down the corridor, no particular destination in mind, until a light came into view in the distance. Once I passed Mitsue’s bookshelves, the corridor became dark. At first, there was a faint glow behind me, but, before long, all was pitch black, so black I couldn’t see the tip of my own nose.

I proceeded with one hand against the wall. Once in a while, one of my feet would step on the other. I jumped in alarm each time that happened.

The light ahead reminded me that I had eyes. That’s how dark it had been. It was shining through a crack in the fusuma. Only a single ray, but more than enough to allow someone emerging from utter darkness to see. I ran to the fusuma and opened it.

Two identical women were seated on cushions, facing me. They were the picture of calm, as if I had somehow been expected.

“My name is Shima,” said one.

“Mine is Goma,” said the other.

I asked if they were twins, and they nodded together.

“Yes, we’re twins, your fourth and fifth elder sisters,” they chimed in unison.

I missed Mitsue’s room already. Shima and Goma looked like crystal dolls. Not a single hair was out of place, and their voices cut like knives. No way did I want to live with them. Quietly, I took hold of the fusuma, intending to slide it open and make a run for it, but in that split-second, and with unanticipated speed, Shima, still kneeling on her cushion, flew to stay my hand. Goma circled to the other side and pressed down on my feet with her cushion.

“That will never do,” Shima intoned solemnly.

“You are to remain here with us while you learn the workings of the world,” Goma said, not to be outdone.

It took me an entire year to escape the clutches of Shima and Goma. Their training was rigorous and centered around two things: how to make unimpeachable apologies and how to flawlessly reprimand others. My apologies had to elicit tears from either Shima or Goma; my reprimands too had to make them cry from remorse. Otherwise, I had no hope of graduating from their instruction. Let me tell you, that instruction was strict!

One day, they let their guard down, and I was finally able to escape. I had never felt any closeness to them, not even for a moment. I flew down the corridor, pausing only when the light from their room was no longer visible. The amulet pouch was hanging around my neck, and I could hear the rustle of the dragonfly bead and the rattling of the lotus seeds.

The corridor stretched on and on, straight as an arrow. It never forked, nor were there any turns. I ran all day and all night until I arrived at Mutsumi’s room.

Mutsumi was my sixth elder sister, the one who became my wife.

MUTSUMI WAS always distracted, her head in the clouds.

Her room was an absolute mess. An incense burner was perched atop a scattered pile of love letters from various men. A rice bowl studded with desiccated grains of rice overflowed with pills.

Our married life began the very day of my arrival. Mutsumi lay down on the mattress she left out on the floor and called me to her side as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Then we made love as if that was equally natural.

It was my first time, so I was in heaven. From morning till night, I entered Mutsumi’s body at will. Mutsumi didn’t seem to mind, letting me do whatever I wanted, but I could tell that her mind was elsewhere.

Mutsumi would disappear from time to time. Sometimes she would be gone three days, but it could take as long as a month for her to return. How I yearned for her there in that chaotic room.

Where have you been, I would ask when she got back. But she would never answer. If I pressed her hard, she might shrug and say she’d been visiting her sisters. I sure didn’t want to talk about Shima and Goma, so that was the end of that conversation.

It was by sheer accident that I discovered she’d been visiting a man, and not Shima and Goma. She always chose the early afternoon to make her sudden departures, a time when I was taking my nap. I would open my eyes and she would be gone. It was that strange time of day when the air distorts things, so when I realized I had been abandoned there in her room it would feel terribly lonely. So lonely, in fact, that I would have another big erection, which made me feel even lonelier. All I could do was roll over and go back to sleep.

On this occasion, however, it seems I slept less deeply than usual. I heard Mutsumi trying to slip quietly out of the room. I opened my eyes and called her name, but there was no answer. I could hear her pace quicken when she reached the corridor. I jumped up and took off after her. For a while, Mutsumi followed the corridor toward Shima and Goma’s, but eventually she drew to a halt and stepped down. She cut across the yard, and entered the grove of beech trees. I followed after, taking care to make my steps as quiet as possible. A foul sweat was seeping from my armpits and back. Mutsumi walked at a regular pace—I could tell that she had taken this path before. She entered the solitary house that stood at the end of the path. I circled around to the back to see what I could find. I heard Mutsumi’s voice inside. A man’s voice as well. The voices rose and fell, and continued for a long time.

I remained hidden behind the house for five days, observing the two of them, and how they lived. I gnawed at handfuls of grass when hungry. I ate insects too. I felt I had become a child of the undergrowth, a strange, ragged creature. Mutsumi appeared to be taking this relationship a lot more seriously. She was keeping the house tidy, and her conversations sounded more forthright and sustained.

I returned to Mutsumi’s room on the sixth day, totally down in the dumps. When I got there, I collapsed on the tatami without bothering to remove my filthy clothes. I don’t know how long I slept, but when I awoke there was Mutsumi, snoring away on the bedding left out on the floor.

Where have you been, I grilled her. She sighed in her sleep. I slapped her face, and she woke. She looked vacantly up at me. I hit her. Her expression didn’t change. Don’t see that man anymore! I told her. She looked at me awhile. There was nothing in her gaze, no anger, no plea.

That’s not how things are, she said simply and closed her eyes. Before long she was snoring peacefully again.

Mutsumi and the man seem to have ended their relationship soon after that, but it didn’t take long for her to find another lover. I tried moving out, but I didn’t have the nerve. I just couldn’t leave her. I scattered the lotus seeds I had received from Mitsue in a pond within the beech grove. The next year, lotus shoots appeared in the water and, a few years later, flowers.

The flowers were large and pure white. They bloomed only when Mutsumi was off visiting some man or other. It would happen in the light of early dawn—I could actually hear the blossoms opening. I would walk to the edge of the pond to catch that sound. Standing there in the dark, I would wait for day to break with bated breath so as not to miss it. When the sun first brushed the tops of the beech trees, the buds swelled almost imperceptibly. Has the time come? I would wonder. Then the air around the buds would begin to shimmer, and the next instant the flowers popped open.

Every year, without fail, I went to the pond to hear that popping sound. Mutsumi remained the same. She was perpetually distracted, flying off without warning to see her man of the moment, yet keeping me under her spell. I spent twenty years there in her room. Then, one day, I flew into a rage over some trivial matter and strangled her. Just like that, she was gone. Even in death, she seemed distracted. I laid her out on her mattress and walked slowly to the pond in the beech grove. The day was about to break. When it did, a number of lotus flowers opened at the same time. The big blossoms, round and pure white, floated gently on the pond’s surface. I invoked the name of Amida Buddha to pacify Mutsumi’s soul, and wept.

I REMAINED nameless until the end.

My seventh elder sister, Nanayo, showed up about a year after Mutsumi’s death. I had buried Mutsumi beside the pond, and prayed to Amida Buddha for her each day.

Nanayo was most unobtrusive. She built a small hut for herself at the edge of the beech grove, and dwelt within it. I seldom encountered her. The few times I did was when we passed each other in front of the pond. She seemed to be spending long periods of time there. Nanayo’s breasts sagged. I guessed that, in former times, they had been firm and full, like the breasts of Ichiko, Mitsue, and Mutsumi. Her hair was turning white, and deep wrinkles were carved around her mouth and eyes.

Nanayo and I rarely spoke to each other. The exceptions were the few times we sat together beside the pond.

“You will die soon,” she said to me.

“Soon?” I replied.

“I will die soon too,” she went on.

“You too?”

“Your sisters have all died off.”

“You mean Futaba and Shima and Goma—they’re all dead?”

“Yes, they’ve all died.”

Nanayo’s eyes never left the pond as she told me this. Lotus flowers were floating on the water. At some point, they had begun blossoming regardless of the season, in an unending cycle. Whether in summer or winter, spring or fall, there were always at least one or two in full bloom—when plentiful, dozens might be floating on the surface.

Nanayo and I took each other’s hand and followed the water trickling from the pond. At first it formed no more than a small stream cutting through the trees, but eventually the flow increased. When it reached the edge of the cliff, it became a waterfall that cascaded down to the world below. Nanayo and I stood at the top and looked. Countless millions of people were milling around down there, in that world. Nanayo spoke. The waterfall is being sucked into its basin, she said. You’re right, I replied, it’s being sucked in. Still hand in hand, we walked into the waterfall. Then we joined the water and fell. The roar filled my ears. Endlessly, endlessly, we plunged.