Short Story: The Fulfilment of Your Will, Part Two
‘Only one monk left,’ announced Zaitsev. Kirishima sat in an office that they had commandeered, looking out over the small city that they were in. ‘Hirobumi and his folks shot the other two.’
‘And that Anglican priest’s been apprehended in the Sea of Japan,’ said Kirishima. ‘That leaves one monk, as you said…two random miko down on Honshu…and our miko.’
‘Why her specifically?’ asked Popolov. ‘Why is she ‘our’ miko?’
‘Because Ame no Kitsune was our responsibility,’ said Kirishima. ‘The other shrines were not.’
Popolov nodded and took a drink of water. ‘Do you want our miko dead or imprisoned, then?’
‘One or the other depending upon whether she recants her insane religious babblings,’ said Kirishima. She held a thermos filled with lukewarm soup.
‘We found a house that she may have stayed in,’ said Zaitsev. ‘Shall we visit it?’
‘Where is it, in general?’
‘It’s about three kilometres north-west of the shrine. Five kilometres north-east of here. The resident is an old woman; apparently a widow of an officer killed during the last war.’
‘It’d be a bad idea to punish this widow even if she did shelter the miko,’ said Popolov.
‘And why is that?’ asked Kirishima sharply, rounding on the sergeants.
‘Because it would alienate the populace,’ said Popolov. ‘Killing little old ladies doesn’t make people fear you. It just makes them hate you.’
‘This is a country ruled by fear and trust, not love and hate or ethical considerations,’ said Kirishima. ‘It’s disgusting, but it’s the way it is. The key here is to make fear become the heart of love.’
‘You sound very theological when you say that,’ said Popolov.
Kirishima’s fingers tightened on her thermos. ‘The difference between me saying that about the revolution and somebody saying that about God is that the revolution wasn’t a perverse misuse of human creativity, and that the revolution actually destroys bad ideas.’
‘I was joking, Commissar.’
‘Good.’ Kirishima took a gulp of soup and stood up. ‘All right, let’s get going. Let’s find this old woman.’
The miko had just finished eating a rack of ribs. She was in a small village with an abandoned farm stand from which she had stolen it. In desperation she had utterly disregarded ethics and manners, just grabbing the raw ribs, tearing into them with her teeth, and continuing until there was no more meet left and the bones were riddled with tooth marks. She had stolen from another and dirtied herself and almost as soon as she was finished she felt a profound dirtiness and need for purification.
She went past a few farms, whose occupants looked sullenly out at her from narrow papered windows, suspicious of any unfamiliar face in these times. When she reached a brook she washed her hands in the cold water and quietly said ‘I accuse myself of violating integrity and succumbing to impurity and thought and deed, and so perform the Great Purification.’ She rattled off the prayer as quickly as she could and, upon finishing, scooped up more of the water into her mouth.
The miko had not been very socially engaged in her childhood. She was just barely old enough to feel a sense of nostalgia for the last peaceful times on Earth. Her shrine duties had brought her close to the other two miko at Ame no Kitsune beginning when she had started the holy work around the beginning of the last war and continuing throughout the war itself. The war had made them spiritually huddle together, hiding within themselves and one another like a dog during a thunderstorm. The miko idly wondered if they had at least been sent to the same gulag.
Presently the miko took refuge under a maple tree during a brief, light drizzle. She slept for a few minutes, fluttered awake to the sound of a produce lorry rolling by, and continued on her seemingly endless journey.
East of a small line of hills the miko came to a good-sized town. She found that it was hard to mingle with the people milling about the streets. They were all dressed in modern clothing. For the first time the miko had occasion to question an aspect of her elderly saviour’s judgment.
‘Hey, you,’ said a man of middle age. ‘Yeah, you in the haori!’
‘Huh?’ The miko turned. ‘Yes, sir? What is it?’
‘You look tired. Like you’ve been travelling a while.’ The man narrowed his eyes.
‘I have.’
‘The government says there’s a runaway miko in the area. Escaped a shrine getting trashed about thirty, thirty-five kilometres west of here a couple of days ago. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ said the miko. She saw the drab grey-green of military fatigues over the man’s right shoulder; her eyes darted. Oh! -thank goodness. It was only a woman in a particularly drab ‘patriot suit’.
‘Well, it’s damn annoying,’ said the man. He did not make it clear which he found annoying, the remaining clerics or the soldiers hunting them.
The miko saw another man holding a very small child. She regretted that it was unlikely now that she would ever be able to have a peaceful family life. This was the only thing that could have induced her to become sexually active without getting ordained or married, and there simply wasn’t time or energy enough in the world for her any more.
The miko had no money, so her one recourse now was to find a traditional inn and just beg to be taken in. The revolution really hadn’t changed very many aspects of monetary transactions in daily life, she noted grimly.
Near the centre of the town she saw a small building that had once been a post office. It was unclear what it was now, but she assumed that the whitewashing poorly applied over ‘post office’ meant that its time serving that function was done. And so, with very few options left, the miko approached.
The building was abandoned, but locked. The miko hammered on the door for a few minutes, then set about thinking up more sophisticated ways to get in. A post office, even an ex-post office, was bound to have some supplies.
The soldiers left the old woman’s house. The old woman lay in a pool of blood, gaping like a carp, whimpering in her death throes.
‘It’s to be hoped that such shows of force will draw our miko out into the open,’ said Kirishima coldly. ‘So, she went east. Possibly a little south, towards the sea. Isn’t there a fairly large town in that direction?’
‘Yes,’ said Zaitsev. ‘It should only take an hour or so by car, assuming she’s sojourned there.’
‘Which is a big assumption,’ said Popolov.
‘Well,’ said Kirishima, ‘she was going in that direction anyway. And civilian travellers are scarce these days. People would remember if a young woman whom they didn’t recognise went by.’
‘Certainly,’ said Zaitsev. ‘We should get the jump on her, then; let’s go!’
They ran over to their Jeeps. The rest of the soldiers followed them.
After interrogating several farmers who had not seen the miko, Kirishima finally got some information out of one.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘she’s definitely more-or-less where we thought she was. I’d say we should just go to that town.’
‘There’s a village along the way,’ said Popolov. ‘Might want to stop over there first.’
‘Of course.’
The miko sat in the abandoned post office, once again hugging her knees in a sort of vertical foetal position. There was so much that she regretted now never being able to do. Had she wanted to be ordained? Had she wanted to start a family? Had she wanted to be loved? She did now. She had failed so miserably at human relationships, and only a little less miserably at her vocation. She did not regret never having experienced sex or drugs. She regretted never having experienced professional validation or personal closeness to somebody not in her immediate family.
Perhaps she had experienced these things, and was just now telling herself that she had not so that she, masochistic in a horrific situation, could beat herself up inside.
She had had some coffee and a raw, half-thawed chicken breast since breaking into the post office. This was probably the best meal-like event in her life since leaving the old woman’s house a day and a half ago. The miko couldn’t believe that it had only been three days since the assault on the shrine.
The miko saw some clothes lying about, both traditional and modern. She would never cease to be amazed by the extent to which clothing could become detritus of war and hard times in the most unlikely places.
Then she heard shouts outside, and the tramp of booted feet.
‘…found her,’ said a voice that she recognised as that of the suspicious man from earlier.
‘So she’s hiding out in an abandoned government building,’ said the silky voice of Commissar Kirishima. ‘Cute.’
‘I think…’ the miko said to herself as the soldiers began pounding on the door ‘…that I’d like to be wearing a red hakama for this.’
She took off the black and gold, put on the red, ran her fingers through her hair, tied it back with a strip of cloth torn from the old woman’s haori, and marched outside to face the soldiers.
‘So,’ said Kirishima, ‘you’ve decided to put in an appearance on your own time, have you? Why do you insist on wearing the clothes of somebody deluded enough to be a priestess?’
‘Why do you insist on wearing the clothes of somebody deluded enough to be a soldier?’ asked the miko.
‘All you do when you spout your lies is betray and worsen the human condition,’ Kirishima said.
‘The human condition?’ asked the miko softly. She looked around at Popolov, Zaitsev, and the man from earlier-and behind them the mass of army grunts. ‘Am I correct in assuming that I’m the only religious worker left in the area?’
‘Of any kind,’ said Kirishima with something like pride in her voice. ‘What would you rather I have done? It’s my job. I love my job.’
‘As a little girl,’ said the miko, ‘you saw some of the atrocities of the China War, didn’t you?’
‘I did. I’m from an old military family, though until me all for the wrong side. My father fought in China.’
‘Has it not occurred to you, then, that when you slaughter people for having religious beliefs you’re hardly any better than what happened in Nanking? Have you ever thought that, if this is what you make the ‘human condition’, some of us will want no part of it?’
‘Again,’ said Kirishima, her face contorted in frustration, ‘what would you rather I do?’
‘Let’s pray,’ said the miko. She did not even regret the words as they left her mouth. Right then and there, she didn’t care about the weapons around her.
‘Excuse me?’ snapped Kirishima.
‘With all the respect from the depth of our hearts,’ said the miko, ‘we ask that they hear us, such as the spirit that hears our intent, with sharpened ears, together with spirits of the sky and the land.’
‘You are to stop!’ said Kirishima shrilly.
‘Take the badnesses, disasters, and sins and purify all,’ the miko said.
‘If you are going to be incorrigible and irredeemable,’ said Kirishima, ‘I’m afraid there’s no recourse.’
‘I warn you against this, Commissar,’ said Popolov.
‘Against what?’ asked Kirishima.
‘If you kill her people will not be fond of the revolution,’ said Popolov. ‘It’ll be a news story, you know. ‘Religion entirely wiped out in Red Japan.’ It’ll get out no matter what we do, and nobody except us will think that that’s a good thing.’
‘Their opinions matter to you?’ sneered Kirishima. ‘Tolerating religion threatens the survival of civilisation, Yekaterina!’
‘Miroku Ōmikami,’ said the miko, ‘you bless us and protect us.’
The guns of the soldiers trained fully upon her. Kirishima raised and lowered her right hand. The guns cocked.
‘One more chance,’ said Kirishima.
‘Meishu-sama,’ said the miko, ‘you bless us and protect us. For the expansion of our souls and the fulfilment of your will.’
‘There is no room for this drivel in a human-based world!’ shouted Kirishima. She grabbed the miko’s chin and turned it up so that their eyes met.
‘RELIGION IS THE HUMAN CONDITION!’ the miko roared back in Kirishima’s face. Kirishima grabbed her under the arms and hurled her heavily to the ground. She drew and reloaded her sidearm and pointed it at the miko’s chest.
‘You’re presented with a choice here,’ said Kirishima.
‘Do tell,’ said the miko, eyeing Popolov, the aim of whose gun was finding its way inch by inch away from her and towards Kirishima.
‘You can recant your perverse misuse of human society and embrace rationality,’ said Kirishima.
‘I’ve already done the second,’ said the miko. ‘Weirdly it wasn’t necessary to do the first.’
‘Yes it was and no you haven’t! Given the absence of any reason to think that this whole kami business is anything but a fraud I fail to see why what I’m presenting you with is a choice at all!’
‘I lived in the shrine,’ the miko said. ‘I think I know more about it and the kami than you do.’
‘You mystical idiot!’ Kirishima’s finger twitched, fidgeted on the trigger. Yekaterina Popolov was by now aiming directly at Kirishima’s legs, ready to shoot to wound and to save; nobody but the miko could see from their perspectives. The miko could tell that if she antagonised Kirishima any further, both guns would go off and it would be simply a question of trigger-readiness and timing. ‘Tell me…’ croaked Kirishima ‘…tell me…’
The miko sighed. Thinking hard, she did not consider a life in a gulag something worth lying for, even if death was the price of honesty. ‘All right,’ she said, her eyes darting one last time past Kirishima and Popolov to the sky above and the forest beyond, ‘I’ll tell you if that’s what you want.’ She smiled devilishly. ‘I declare in the presence of the sovereign gods of the Harvest: If the sovereign gods will bestow, in many-bundled spikes and in luxuriant spikes, the late-ripening harvest which they will bestow…’
Author’s Notes
This is where I feel the need to point out something, very clearly, that will probably have affected most readers’ appreciation of ‘The Fulfilment of Your Will’. That is this fact: THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE LIKE JOSEPH STALIN AND THE LEAGUE OF THE MILITANT GODLESS ACTUALLY DID TO THE RELIGIOUS. This is a necessary point to get across because if this historical fact is not borne in mind the story reads like the sort of anti-atheist propagandist screed that somebody like Tim LaHaye might write. But-as in The Power and the Glory, the Graham Greene novel that inspired this story-it’s a simple fact that this is simply the way people behave when they have political and military power over people they don’t like, and some of the worst excesses in human history came from the atheist dictatorships of the twentieth century.
There’s an idea currently fashionable in Western academic circles that atheists are ex officio more reasonable and emotionally stable than religious people. This is not true, but at many colleges (including my own) practising Christian professors are actually de facto forbidden from many any reference to this fact in any context. As much as I disagree with the late William F. Buckley’s politics, there may have been something to God and Man at Yale.
Among others, the second-rate-biologist-and-first-rate-writer-turned-fourth-rate-philospher-of-religion Richard Dawkins has been extremely influential in spreading this conceit. In his book The God Delusion, which inexplicably won some critical acclaim, Dawkins advanced the thesis that phenomena like stabbing and freezing priests and nuns in communist countries somehow do not actually have anything to do with atheism. To any scholar of the history of Anti-Revisionist Marxism this statement is uninformed at best and psychotic and worst. The reason for Dawkins (and others, like Christopher Hitchens) advancing this idea is clear, however, and clearly mercenary: the study of events such as what happened to Hieromartyr Gregory Petrov make religious people look very, very sympathetic, and so it is in the best interests of Dawkins’s programme of demonisation and verbal abuse to downplay or outright deny them.
When he is in the safety of his own magisterial, pyramidal, authoritarian personal Webspace, Dawkins frequently uses rhetoric very redolent of that of Kirishima, which in turn I made deliberately redolent of that used by such people has Stalin and Mao, the latter of whom once wiped out an entire species of dolphin because he thought that it would get people to stop being Taoists. The difference is that Dawkins, to give himself plausible deniability of being an incendiary ranting demagogue, will put in paragraphs like this (from the column in which he advances the same programme of ‘naked contempt’ for the religious that Kirishima does):
‘I emphatically don’t mean we should use foul-mouthed rants. Nor should we raise our voices and shout at them: let’s have no D’Souzereignty here. Instead, what we need is sarcastic, cutting wit. A good model might be Peter Medawar, who would never dream of shouting, but instead quietly wielded the rapier.’
Coming as this does immediately after several paragraphs in which he refers to religious people as ‘irremediable’ ‘faith-heads’, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart as a ‘yammering fumblewit’ (a word which I hyphenated when Kirishima says it because it does not in fact exist in English-nor is it a legitimate Japanese calque, for that matter!), and Sam Harris and PZ Myers as ‘scathingly witty’ (I’m sorry, what? Is Dawkins in fact Bizarro? It is a mystery), it is easy for some people to interpret it as modifying the preceding augur of [un?]holy war. But I am a committed writer and familiar enough with how ideas are presented to see it as a frankly transparent attempt at a disclaimer, really no different to ‘any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental’ in a work featuring Margaret Thatcher as a supervillain. Dawkins has never, to my knowledge, admitted any genuine good of any theologian, living or dead, and his words about his well-liked, respected colleague Alister McGrath simply must be read to be believed. At least McGrath doesn’t call people with atheist friends ‘appeasers’.
(I will confess that one aspect of McGrath’s work really annoys me, and that’s a habit that he has where he uses this bizarre syntax in which entire phrases can serve as semantically empty cupolas. I’ve also seen this in C.S. Lewis and Garth Ennis, so maybe it originates from some dialectical feature of Northern Ireland.)
I am, of course, perfectly aware that most atheists have unambiguously rejected Stalin, in the same way that most Christians unambiguously reject Fred Phelps. But there’s a difference between rejecting somebody and pretending that there’s nothing to reject. And it is quite haughty to, as Dawkins does, assume that one’s own beliefs are so unimpeachable in every regard that anybody who does not agree with all of them is ‘uneducated’, ‘stupid’, ‘inferior’, ‘delusional’, and ‘irremediable’.
The problem with Kirishima isn’t her beliefs. People of all beliefs and of no beliefs are capable of monstrosities and of great and holy acts. The problem with Kirishima is that she’s a smug, self-superior hypocrite who treats people like shit and then kills them. That’s the whole point of this story. But then, Kirishima isn’t based on Dawkins and his ilk anyway. She’s based on Plutarco Calles.
‘And that Anglican priest’s been apprehended in the Sea of Japan,’ said Kirishima. ‘That leaves one monk, as you said…two random miko down on Honshu…and our miko.’
‘Why her specifically?’ asked Popolov. ‘Why is she ‘our’ miko?’
‘Because Ame no Kitsune was our responsibility,’ said Kirishima. ‘The other shrines were not.’
Popolov nodded and took a drink of water. ‘Do you want our miko dead or imprisoned, then?’
‘One or the other depending upon whether she recants her insane religious babblings,’ said Kirishima. She held a thermos filled with lukewarm soup.
‘We found a house that she may have stayed in,’ said Zaitsev. ‘Shall we visit it?’
‘Where is it, in general?’
‘It’s about three kilometres north-west of the shrine. Five kilometres north-east of here. The resident is an old woman; apparently a widow of an officer killed during the last war.’
‘It’d be a bad idea to punish this widow even if she did shelter the miko,’ said Popolov.
‘And why is that?’ asked Kirishima sharply, rounding on the sergeants.
‘Because it would alienate the populace,’ said Popolov. ‘Killing little old ladies doesn’t make people fear you. It just makes them hate you.’
‘This is a country ruled by fear and trust, not love and hate or ethical considerations,’ said Kirishima. ‘It’s disgusting, but it’s the way it is. The key here is to make fear become the heart of love.’
‘You sound very theological when you say that,’ said Popolov.
Kirishima’s fingers tightened on her thermos. ‘The difference between me saying that about the revolution and somebody saying that about God is that the revolution wasn’t a perverse misuse of human creativity, and that the revolution actually destroys bad ideas.’
‘I was joking, Commissar.’
‘Good.’ Kirishima took a gulp of soup and stood up. ‘All right, let’s get going. Let’s find this old woman.’
The miko had just finished eating a rack of ribs. She was in a small village with an abandoned farm stand from which she had stolen it. In desperation she had utterly disregarded ethics and manners, just grabbing the raw ribs, tearing into them with her teeth, and continuing until there was no more meet left and the bones were riddled with tooth marks. She had stolen from another and dirtied herself and almost as soon as she was finished she felt a profound dirtiness and need for purification.
She went past a few farms, whose occupants looked sullenly out at her from narrow papered windows, suspicious of any unfamiliar face in these times. When she reached a brook she washed her hands in the cold water and quietly said ‘I accuse myself of violating integrity and succumbing to impurity and thought and deed, and so perform the Great Purification.’ She rattled off the prayer as quickly as she could and, upon finishing, scooped up more of the water into her mouth.
The miko had not been very socially engaged in her childhood. She was just barely old enough to feel a sense of nostalgia for the last peaceful times on Earth. Her shrine duties had brought her close to the other two miko at Ame no Kitsune beginning when she had started the holy work around the beginning of the last war and continuing throughout the war itself. The war had made them spiritually huddle together, hiding within themselves and one another like a dog during a thunderstorm. The miko idly wondered if they had at least been sent to the same gulag.
Presently the miko took refuge under a maple tree during a brief, light drizzle. She slept for a few minutes, fluttered awake to the sound of a produce lorry rolling by, and continued on her seemingly endless journey.
East of a small line of hills the miko came to a good-sized town. She found that it was hard to mingle with the people milling about the streets. They were all dressed in modern clothing. For the first time the miko had occasion to question an aspect of her elderly saviour’s judgment.
‘Hey, you,’ said a man of middle age. ‘Yeah, you in the haori!’
‘Huh?’ The miko turned. ‘Yes, sir? What is it?’
‘You look tired. Like you’ve been travelling a while.’ The man narrowed his eyes.
‘I have.’
‘The government says there’s a runaway miko in the area. Escaped a shrine getting trashed about thirty, thirty-five kilometres west of here a couple of days ago. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ said the miko. She saw the drab grey-green of military fatigues over the man’s right shoulder; her eyes darted. Oh! -thank goodness. It was only a woman in a particularly drab ‘patriot suit’.
‘Well, it’s damn annoying,’ said the man. He did not make it clear which he found annoying, the remaining clerics or the soldiers hunting them.
The miko saw another man holding a very small child. She regretted that it was unlikely now that she would ever be able to have a peaceful family life. This was the only thing that could have induced her to become sexually active without getting ordained or married, and there simply wasn’t time or energy enough in the world for her any more.
The miko had no money, so her one recourse now was to find a traditional inn and just beg to be taken in. The revolution really hadn’t changed very many aspects of monetary transactions in daily life, she noted grimly.
Near the centre of the town she saw a small building that had once been a post office. It was unclear what it was now, but she assumed that the whitewashing poorly applied over ‘post office’ meant that its time serving that function was done. And so, with very few options left, the miko approached.
The building was abandoned, but locked. The miko hammered on the door for a few minutes, then set about thinking up more sophisticated ways to get in. A post office, even an ex-post office, was bound to have some supplies.
The soldiers left the old woman’s house. The old woman lay in a pool of blood, gaping like a carp, whimpering in her death throes.
‘It’s to be hoped that such shows of force will draw our miko out into the open,’ said Kirishima coldly. ‘So, she went east. Possibly a little south, towards the sea. Isn’t there a fairly large town in that direction?’
‘Yes,’ said Zaitsev. ‘It should only take an hour or so by car, assuming she’s sojourned there.’
‘Which is a big assumption,’ said Popolov.
‘Well,’ said Kirishima, ‘she was going in that direction anyway. And civilian travellers are scarce these days. People would remember if a young woman whom they didn’t recognise went by.’
‘Certainly,’ said Zaitsev. ‘We should get the jump on her, then; let’s go!’
They ran over to their Jeeps. The rest of the soldiers followed them.
After interrogating several farmers who had not seen the miko, Kirishima finally got some information out of one.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘she’s definitely more-or-less where we thought she was. I’d say we should just go to that town.’
‘There’s a village along the way,’ said Popolov. ‘Might want to stop over there first.’
‘Of course.’
The miko sat in the abandoned post office, once again hugging her knees in a sort of vertical foetal position. There was so much that she regretted now never being able to do. Had she wanted to be ordained? Had she wanted to start a family? Had she wanted to be loved? She did now. She had failed so miserably at human relationships, and only a little less miserably at her vocation. She did not regret never having experienced sex or drugs. She regretted never having experienced professional validation or personal closeness to somebody not in her immediate family.
Perhaps she had experienced these things, and was just now telling herself that she had not so that she, masochistic in a horrific situation, could beat herself up inside.
She had had some coffee and a raw, half-thawed chicken breast since breaking into the post office. This was probably the best meal-like event in her life since leaving the old woman’s house a day and a half ago. The miko couldn’t believe that it had only been three days since the assault on the shrine.
The miko saw some clothes lying about, both traditional and modern. She would never cease to be amazed by the extent to which clothing could become detritus of war and hard times in the most unlikely places.
Then she heard shouts outside, and the tramp of booted feet.
‘…found her,’ said a voice that she recognised as that of the suspicious man from earlier.
‘So she’s hiding out in an abandoned government building,’ said the silky voice of Commissar Kirishima. ‘Cute.’
‘I think…’ the miko said to herself as the soldiers began pounding on the door ‘…that I’d like to be wearing a red hakama for this.’
She took off the black and gold, put on the red, ran her fingers through her hair, tied it back with a strip of cloth torn from the old woman’s haori, and marched outside to face the soldiers.
‘So,’ said Kirishima, ‘you’ve decided to put in an appearance on your own time, have you? Why do you insist on wearing the clothes of somebody deluded enough to be a priestess?’
‘Why do you insist on wearing the clothes of somebody deluded enough to be a soldier?’ asked the miko.
‘All you do when you spout your lies is betray and worsen the human condition,’ Kirishima said.
‘The human condition?’ asked the miko softly. She looked around at Popolov, Zaitsev, and the man from earlier-and behind them the mass of army grunts. ‘Am I correct in assuming that I’m the only religious worker left in the area?’
‘Of any kind,’ said Kirishima with something like pride in her voice. ‘What would you rather I have done? It’s my job. I love my job.’
‘As a little girl,’ said the miko, ‘you saw some of the atrocities of the China War, didn’t you?’
‘I did. I’m from an old military family, though until me all for the wrong side. My father fought in China.’
‘Has it not occurred to you, then, that when you slaughter people for having religious beliefs you’re hardly any better than what happened in Nanking? Have you ever thought that, if this is what you make the ‘human condition’, some of us will want no part of it?’
‘Again,’ said Kirishima, her face contorted in frustration, ‘what would you rather I do?’
‘Let’s pray,’ said the miko. She did not even regret the words as they left her mouth. Right then and there, she didn’t care about the weapons around her.
‘Excuse me?’ snapped Kirishima.
‘With all the respect from the depth of our hearts,’ said the miko, ‘we ask that they hear us, such as the spirit that hears our intent, with sharpened ears, together with spirits of the sky and the land.’
‘You are to stop!’ said Kirishima shrilly.
‘Take the badnesses, disasters, and sins and purify all,’ the miko said.
‘If you are going to be incorrigible and irredeemable,’ said Kirishima, ‘I’m afraid there’s no recourse.’
‘I warn you against this, Commissar,’ said Popolov.
‘Against what?’ asked Kirishima.
‘If you kill her people will not be fond of the revolution,’ said Popolov. ‘It’ll be a news story, you know. ‘Religion entirely wiped out in Red Japan.’ It’ll get out no matter what we do, and nobody except us will think that that’s a good thing.’
‘Their opinions matter to you?’ sneered Kirishima. ‘Tolerating religion threatens the survival of civilisation, Yekaterina!’
‘Miroku Ōmikami,’ said the miko, ‘you bless us and protect us.’
The guns of the soldiers trained fully upon her. Kirishima raised and lowered her right hand. The guns cocked.
‘One more chance,’ said Kirishima.
‘Meishu-sama,’ said the miko, ‘you bless us and protect us. For the expansion of our souls and the fulfilment of your will.’
‘There is no room for this drivel in a human-based world!’ shouted Kirishima. She grabbed the miko’s chin and turned it up so that their eyes met.
‘RELIGION IS THE HUMAN CONDITION!’ the miko roared back in Kirishima’s face. Kirishima grabbed her under the arms and hurled her heavily to the ground. She drew and reloaded her sidearm and pointed it at the miko’s chest.
‘You’re presented with a choice here,’ said Kirishima.
‘Do tell,’ said the miko, eyeing Popolov, the aim of whose gun was finding its way inch by inch away from her and towards Kirishima.
‘You can recant your perverse misuse of human society and embrace rationality,’ said Kirishima.
‘I’ve already done the second,’ said the miko. ‘Weirdly it wasn’t necessary to do the first.’
‘Yes it was and no you haven’t! Given the absence of any reason to think that this whole kami business is anything but a fraud I fail to see why what I’m presenting you with is a choice at all!’
‘I lived in the shrine,’ the miko said. ‘I think I know more about it and the kami than you do.’
‘You mystical idiot!’ Kirishima’s finger twitched, fidgeted on the trigger. Yekaterina Popolov was by now aiming directly at Kirishima’s legs, ready to shoot to wound and to save; nobody but the miko could see from their perspectives. The miko could tell that if she antagonised Kirishima any further, both guns would go off and it would be simply a question of trigger-readiness and timing. ‘Tell me…’ croaked Kirishima ‘…tell me…’
The miko sighed. Thinking hard, she did not consider a life in a gulag something worth lying for, even if death was the price of honesty. ‘All right,’ she said, her eyes darting one last time past Kirishima and Popolov to the sky above and the forest beyond, ‘I’ll tell you if that’s what you want.’ She smiled devilishly. ‘I declare in the presence of the sovereign gods of the Harvest: If the sovereign gods will bestow, in many-bundled spikes and in luxuriant spikes, the late-ripening harvest which they will bestow…’
Author’s Notes
This is where I feel the need to point out something, very clearly, that will probably have affected most readers’ appreciation of ‘The Fulfilment of Your Will’. That is this fact: THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE LIKE JOSEPH STALIN AND THE LEAGUE OF THE MILITANT GODLESS ACTUALLY DID TO THE RELIGIOUS. This is a necessary point to get across because if this historical fact is not borne in mind the story reads like the sort of anti-atheist propagandist screed that somebody like Tim LaHaye might write. But-as in The Power and the Glory, the Graham Greene novel that inspired this story-it’s a simple fact that this is simply the way people behave when they have political and military power over people they don’t like, and some of the worst excesses in human history came from the atheist dictatorships of the twentieth century.
There’s an idea currently fashionable in Western academic circles that atheists are ex officio more reasonable and emotionally stable than religious people. This is not true, but at many colleges (including my own) practising Christian professors are actually de facto forbidden from many any reference to this fact in any context. As much as I disagree with the late William F. Buckley’s politics, there may have been something to God and Man at Yale.
Among others, the second-rate-biologist-and-first-rate-writer-turned-fourth-rate-philospher-of-religion Richard Dawkins has been extremely influential in spreading this conceit. In his book The God Delusion, which inexplicably won some critical acclaim, Dawkins advanced the thesis that phenomena like stabbing and freezing priests and nuns in communist countries somehow do not actually have anything to do with atheism. To any scholar of the history of Anti-Revisionist Marxism this statement is uninformed at best and psychotic and worst. The reason for Dawkins (and others, like Christopher Hitchens) advancing this idea is clear, however, and clearly mercenary: the study of events such as what happened to Hieromartyr Gregory Petrov make religious people look very, very sympathetic, and so it is in the best interests of Dawkins’s programme of demonisation and verbal abuse to downplay or outright deny them.
When he is in the safety of his own magisterial, pyramidal, authoritarian personal Webspace, Dawkins frequently uses rhetoric very redolent of that of Kirishima, which in turn I made deliberately redolent of that used by such people has Stalin and Mao, the latter of whom once wiped out an entire species of dolphin because he thought that it would get people to stop being Taoists. The difference is that Dawkins, to give himself plausible deniability of being an incendiary ranting demagogue, will put in paragraphs like this (from the column in which he advances the same programme of ‘naked contempt’ for the religious that Kirishima does):
‘I emphatically don’t mean we should use foul-mouthed rants. Nor should we raise our voices and shout at them: let’s have no D’Souzereignty here. Instead, what we need is sarcastic, cutting wit. A good model might be Peter Medawar, who would never dream of shouting, but instead quietly wielded the rapier.’
Coming as this does immediately after several paragraphs in which he refers to religious people as ‘irremediable’ ‘faith-heads’, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart as a ‘yammering fumblewit’ (a word which I hyphenated when Kirishima says it because it does not in fact exist in English-nor is it a legitimate Japanese calque, for that matter!), and Sam Harris and PZ Myers as ‘scathingly witty’ (I’m sorry, what? Is Dawkins in fact Bizarro? It is a mystery), it is easy for some people to interpret it as modifying the preceding augur of [un?]holy war. But I am a committed writer and familiar enough with how ideas are presented to see it as a frankly transparent attempt at a disclaimer, really no different to ‘any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental’ in a work featuring Margaret Thatcher as a supervillain. Dawkins has never, to my knowledge, admitted any genuine good of any theologian, living or dead, and his words about his well-liked, respected colleague Alister McGrath simply must be read to be believed. At least McGrath doesn’t call people with atheist friends ‘appeasers’.
(I will confess that one aspect of McGrath’s work really annoys me, and that’s a habit that he has where he uses this bizarre syntax in which entire phrases can serve as semantically empty cupolas. I’ve also seen this in C.S. Lewis and Garth Ennis, so maybe it originates from some dialectical feature of Northern Ireland.)
I am, of course, perfectly aware that most atheists have unambiguously rejected Stalin, in the same way that most Christians unambiguously reject Fred Phelps. But there’s a difference between rejecting somebody and pretending that there’s nothing to reject. And it is quite haughty to, as Dawkins does, assume that one’s own beliefs are so unimpeachable in every regard that anybody who does not agree with all of them is ‘uneducated’, ‘stupid’, ‘inferior’, ‘delusional’, and ‘irremediable’.
The problem with Kirishima isn’t her beliefs. People of all beliefs and of no beliefs are capable of monstrosities and of great and holy acts. The problem with Kirishima is that she’s a smug, self-superior hypocrite who treats people like shit and then kills them. That’s the whole point of this story. But then, Kirishima isn’t based on Dawkins and his ilk anyway. She’s based on Plutarco Calles.