佐木島

The ferry from Mihara crosses a narrow strip of the Seto Inland Sea, and within minutes the engine cuts back as the hull eases toward one of the small ports — Sagi, Sunoue, or Mukaida. Sagishima rises in two peaks, Ohirayama and Inuyama, between which terraced fields fall toward the coast. Citrus trees, melon, watermelon, and wakegi onion shape the agricultural year, and the slopes are worked patiently, the way they have long been worked.

Walking inland, one encounters a layering of small devotions: the Magai Wareishi Jizō, said to sit in the sea beside Mukaida port, a marker of the island's old prohibition on the taking of life; the thirty-three Kannon of Terayama, placed in the late eighteenth century after a famine; the eighty-eight Jizō scattered along a pilgrimage circuit set down in the early Taishō years. None of these announce themselves. They appear at the edges of paths, near stone walls, by turns in the road. The Mukaida Kameyama Hachimangū, whose deity was invited from Kyoto in the twelfth century, carries the same understated presence.

Life on the island moves with its own modest calendar — the New Year road race, the Yassa festival borrowed from Mihara, the bon dances, a triathlon in season, the autumn rites at the shrine. Surrounded by Innoshima, Ikuchijima, and Takanejima, Sagishima sits inside the Seto Inland Sea's quieter pockets, neither isolated nor connected in any hurried sense. The ferry timetable, the slope of a terraced field, the weathered stone of a Jizō: these are the units by which the days here are measured.