Where the Wild Ladies Are

put together all the information she’d accumulated over time, Enoki had no choice but to conclude that human beings derived joy from twisting things and attaching a sexual meaning to them. It was pathetic. Were they idiots? Was that it? And then to cap it all, they turned to Enoki, who wasn’t even a mother, and their mouths formed the words breast milk. Enoki hated the very sound of it: breast milk. There was a precariousness to it. It could ruin you if you weren’t careful. She couldn’t explain it, but Enoki knew that instinctively. She hated that she’d been dragged into all of this—that parts of her had been dragged into all of this.

And yet, the sadness those women felt—that was different. That was real. Enoki can still vividly recall the faces of all the women who came to visit her. She feels awful for women who lived back then, before formula milk existed. Of course, nowadays, with the humans’ deep-rooted devotion to the religion of breastfeeding, women still suffer a lot, but the invention of formula must have improved things. There’s a sizeable difference between having something to serve as a replacement, and having no such thing. Options are crucial, and women suffered in the past because they had none.

Speaking of which . . . Once upon a time there was a woman called Okise. She was raped by a man who threatened to kill her baby if she refused to have sex with him. He continued to rape her, then killed her husband and assumed his place as her new spouse.

That’s barbaric enough as it is, but it gets worse, because from that point on, Okise stopped producing breast milk. Her new husband suggested that if she couldn’t produce milk of her own, she ought to give her baby away. Unable to nourish her own child, Okise had no choice but to hand over her beloved boy to someone else. If only there had been formula milk back in those days!

“It’s okay. I can just use formula,” Okise would have replied coolly, clasping her son close. The husband, realizing how unfeasible his suggestion was, would have dropped the subject.

Anyway, it turned out that the old man to whom the baby was entrusted had been instructed by the husband to kill it. Fortunately, though, he was won over by the adorable baby, and decided to raise the child in secret.

Funnily enough, the thing the old man struggled most with was securing breast milk for the baby. As an old man, there were no strings he could pull in that regard, so he had little choice but to rely on the goodwill of various women he met. After just about scraping by that way for a while, the old man caught wind of a rumor, and not long after, he appeared in front of Enoki. That was how Enoki came to know of Okise. The baby drank the “milk” coming out of Enoki’s “breasts” and grew up to be healthy and strong. Of course, this only consolidated the myth of Enoki’s magic, and so she became a bona fide legend. Yet Enoki still finds the whole thing very suspicious. It was just too outlandish to believe. The old man must have been feeding the baby something else as well. In any case, Enoki wants to believe that he was, because she definitely doesn’t have such powers.

Okise, on the other hand, subsequently gave birth to the child of her new husband, but because she couldn’t produce milk, the baby died. Not long after, a mysterious growth appeared on Okise’s breasts, and she went crazy and died too. Why is it that a woman who was repeatedly raped, then had her child stolen away from her, had to meet with such a cruel fate? Why did a series of such awful things have to befall her breasts? Well, gods? Don’t you think that’s overkill?

And the tale of Okise was just one example. The pain and the sadness that women felt when it came to breast milk reached depths Enoki could not fathom. Enoki’s sticky old resin was the last ray of hope for those women. So they clung to her. Through her thick bark, she sensed the enormous determination coming off their bodies. She felt, too, the tenderness and the strength of their breasts. How different they were from Enoki’s hard, knobbly ones. She felt like it was an insult to these women to call her organs by the same name. Enoki couldn’t bear it. These women were doing all they could to be saved by her nonexistent supernatural powers, and she couldn’t do a thing for them. She knew that it was hardly her fault, but still she found it tough.

These days, hardly anyone comes to visit Enoki. She’s become nothing but an old relic. On rare occasions, some strange type with a fixation for legends of the past will take the trip out to see her. “Ah, it must be that one,” she’ll hear someone say. They look at her as if she’s a museum exhibit and take photos. Women at their wits’ end no longer come to see Enoki. She’s sure they must still exist, but in any case, they have no need to rely on her anymore.

Enoki has never for a second believed that she has the special powers that everyone thinks she has, but just hypothetically speaking, if she had, then she would have served a function not dissimilar to that of formula milk in the days before it existed. With this in mind, she feels she can finally accept the crazy commotion that descended on her back then.

The shrine grounds are quiet. Enoki can hear a bird somewhere off in the distance. The wind ruffles her leaves indifferently. Now nothing, nobody, pays Enoki any attention. The days pass. The seasons change. Enoki isn’t lonely. If anything, she is relieved. The pressure on her has finally lifted. As it has always been, really, her