To a Star Beyond All Reach, and Still She Wrote Her Wish

A wish is a strange thing.

There is no knowing whether it will ever come true, and yet merely to speak it aloud is never enough for us. We offer up cloth, we hang out threads, and at last we write the wish in letters and raise it up high — as if to say, carry this to the stars.

In the night sky of the seventh month there are two stars that shine brighter than all the rest — great stars with a bluish cast, facing one another across a river. That one they called Shokujo, the Weaver Maid, and this one Kengyū, the Oxherd, and the people of old believed that the two met but once in the year. It was a tale that had come to us from across the sea.

To that Weaver star, people prayed for skill in weaving and needlework. Kikkōden, the rite was called — the characters mean "to beg for skill, and to make an offering." In elegant gardens they set out threads and needles and the flowering grasses of autumn, and the noble folk gazed up at the stars far into the night. This was the beginning of what would in time come to be called Tanabata, the Star Festival. But in those days it belonged to a very few, to those within the walls alone.

What I saw was just that moment when it began to seep out over the walls of the palace and spread, little by little, toward the town.

◇ ◇ ◇

The seventh month of 1054 (Tengi 2). This was in the capital.

In those days I made my way from province to province, peddling small wares, and that year I had settled myself for the summer near the market of the capital. I carried paper and brushes on my back and sold them as I went, so wherever there were people who wanted letters written, I could manage to scrape a living.

At the start of that month, something I had never seen before began to appear at the crossroads of the capital. Bamboo grass — sasatake. Leafy stalks of bamboo lashed to the eaves, hung with goshiki, threads of five colours, and scraps of cloth in every hue. Each time the wind passed through, the green leaves rustled softly, and the knotted cloths fluttered and turned like the tails of fish.

Puzzled, I asked someone nearby. It seemed there was an elegant rite at the palace for honouring the stars, and the townsfolk, having caught wind of it from somewhere, were now imitating it as best they could by eye. What went on within the walls, the townsfolk could not truly know. And not knowing, they let down their threads, hung up their cloths, and turned their faces toward the stars. Even so, there was something merry about it.

That morning too, I was walking the crossroads with my load on my shoulder. The sun was already high, and the earth of the road scorched the soles of my feet. Sweat ran down my brow and dripped. If only I could find some shade soon, and catch my breath — and it was while I walked thinking such things that, all at once, my feet came to a halt beneath one of the bamboo stalks.

A woman stood there alone, quite still, beneath the bamboo. Forty or so, by the look of her. Her hands were sunburnt and knotted at the knuckles — hands that had worked the year round, before a field or before a loom. In one of them she gripped a single scrap of white cloth.

She would look up at the bamboo, then drop her eyes to the cloth, and this she repeated over and over. It was the face of someone who wished to write something down and could not. She had something in her breast she longed to raise up high, and no means of giving it shape, and so she only stood there, gripping the cloth.

"Excuse me. Are you meaning to make a wish on that?"

When I spoke to her, the woman gave a start and hid the cloth behind her back. Then — ashamed, no doubt, to have been seen by a peddler she had never laid eyes on — she hung her head low.

"...It's that I can't write, you see."

Her voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

It was about her daughter, she told me. She had a daughter of an age to go into hōkō, service in another household, and soon. If only the girl might grow deft at needlework, then she would be cherished where she served. That was what the mother wished to beg of the stars.

"At the shrine, they say, they beg the stars to make them better at weaving and sewing. I know it's only aping our betters, the likes of them… but even so, I thought, for my girl too—"

But the one thing that mattered — the means of writing the wish — she did not have. In all her life the woman had never once had the leisure to learn her letters, I suppose. And so she stood beneath the bamboo, gripping only her cloth. The people of the house next door wrote their letters with an easy hand and hung them up. And watching them from the corner of her eye, she found that her wish alone would not come down onto the cloth.

I set down my load.

"If you'll allow me, I'll write it for you. It's my trade, after all."

The woman looked at me as though she could not believe it. Then, timidly, she held out the cloth. It was hemp, creased and stiff, and when I looked closely I saw it had been mended here and there. Surely she had gone out of her way to bring the very finest cloth in her house.

I drew a brush from my yatate — the little brush-and-ink case I carried at my sash — and wet it with ink. There in the crossroads at the height of the day, the smell of ink alone rose up, suddenly cool.

"Your daughter's name?"

The woman said the name. Carefully I spelled it out on the cloth. Then, word by word, I copied down what she spoke.

May she grow skilled in the way of the needle. May her hands move well.

It was a halting sort of wish. Not one difficult word in it. And yet each time a single character appeared upon the cloth, the woman leaned in and stared at it as though she would devour it with her eyes. She could not read it, I suppose. But even unable to read, she could tell that the wish she had spoken with her own mouth was surely taking shape there before her.

"And this… is my girl's name?"

"It is. This is your daughter's name."

The woman traced those black strokes softly with a finger — very lightly, as if she feared that at a touch they might vanish.

◇ ◇ ◇

The finished cloth the woman received in both hands, raising it up almost as one receives something sacred. While she waited for the ink to dry, she held it out before her breast and gazed and gazed at it.

Then she turned to face the bamboo.

She rose on the tips of her toes. She reached for the highest, most supple branch of the bamboo, drawing it toward her to tie the cloth at its very end. She could not reach. Again and again she stretched up her hand, and at last, with a little hop, she caught the branch. And so, at long last, she tied it fast.

When she let go, the branch swung slowly back to its former height. The white cloth swayed there at the very top, among all the other cloths and threads of every colour. Each time the wind blew, it seemed to beckon toward the sky, fluttering.

For a long while the woman stood looking up at it. Long enough that her neck must have ached.

"Will it reach them now, I wonder… the stars?"

Whether it would reach them — if she had asked me that, I could not have said. The stars are only far away, and go on twinkling. Perhaps the cloth with its wish would merely dampen in the night dew, and fade in time, and tear, and return to the earth. And the stars, for their part, would wear the face of knowing nothing at all of it.

And yet, I thought.

The woman before she wrote and the woman after were utterly different in the face. The person who only a moment ago had stood hunched and downcast now held her back straight and looked up at the sky with a clear, bright face. The wish that had lain knotted deep in her breast had been given a "shape" she could touch, and with her own hands raised up to the nearest thing there was to the sky. That such a small thing alone could make a person's face so wholly different.

"Thank you kindly. A weight is off my shoulders now."

So saying, the woman bowed again and again, and vanished into the crowd of the crossroads. Many times, from now on, she would pass beneath that cloth. And each time she passed, she would look up.

From that year on, the bamboo at the crossroads of the capital grew more numerous season by season. Those who could write wrote for themselves; those who could not caught hold of a peddler like me and entrusted their wishes to him. The elegant rite of the palace had, before anyone quite noticed, changed its shape into the small, humble prayers of the townsfolk. The form of it was not yet fixed. Sometimes a scrap of cloth, sometimes a thread, sometimes a leaf from a tree. But one and all, they could not help but raise up something — toward the stars.

◇ ◇ ◇

Nowadays, when the seventh month comes round, bamboo is set up along the shopping streets. On leaves of made-up green, children hang tanzaku, strips of paper in every colour.

The substance of the wishes has changed a great deal over a thousand years. Hardly anyone now wishes to grow better at their letters or their needlework. May I pass my examinations. May I run faster. May all my family be well and whole. What people beg of the stars has shifted, exactly as much as the lives they lead in each passing age.

And yet, I think.

To a height there is no hope of reaching, still we cannot help but write our wishes and raise them up. That woman who could not write, rising on her toes to tie her cloth, looking up until her neck ached — that heart of hers. That one thing, a thousand years on, has not changed in the least.

The stars, tonight again, say nothing. They are only far away, and twinkle. And still, this year too, people will write their wishes on paper, I suppose. There are those who laugh — what good does writing it do. And still they write. They cannot help but write.

And I — I do not mind at all, watching people like that.

---