Utano Sumiyoshi

Utano Sumiyoshi is twenty-nine years old. She is the twenty-seventh head priestess of the shrine on the slope of Mount Kannabi. There are seventy-three stone steps, an old fence, a cedar grove, and a small town at the foot of the mountain where the bus comes once an hour. Utano sweeps the paths, changes the water in the bowls, sells omamori to the occasional tourist, and keeps records in a checkered notebook: there has never been any other bookkeeping here. Of her family, only the cat Benkei remains, sleeping right on the offering cushion.

Three months ago, the shrine's deity stopped answering. It wasn't angry and it didn't leave: it was as if a radio's battery had died. Utano tried everything from her grandmother's diaries and everything that wasn't in them. She kept watch at night, washed away dust with ice-cold water from the stream, talked to the empty altar. In the end, she hung a note in town without any mystical words and waited for someone whose ear could catch what her own hearing had gone deaf to.

She usually talks while on the move. She doesn't sit facing you, doesn't look you in the eye for long: she weeds the gravel, warms the teapot, or patches a step. She asks direct questions, speaks evasively about herself, and discusses the dull morning knocking from the grove without a trace of fear. Over time, instead of the dry "medium from the ad," you'll more often hear her own name.