Memory insists with its sea voice,
muttering from its bone cave.
Memory wraps us
like the shell wraps the sea.
Nothing to carry,
some stones to fill our pockets,
to give weight to what we have.

Anne Michaels

Requiem

A portrait of Amachi set to the background of countless lilies, the scent of lit incense in the air. Amachi is smiling.

This shrine was started sometime between 2019 and 2021. For years, it slumbered as a cathedral in my mind until I dared to finish dreaming it into existence in January 2026 as my entry for the Ghost of You Challenge.

Site Title

What do you call something whose shape used to elude you? I contemplated titles dark and bitter, as an echo of what had been done to Amachi, of Shimizu’s beautiful and macabre renditions of the human body, and of the feelings of sorrow that accompany my every reading of the story. If this shrine was to be a way to process Amachi’s passing, however, I wanted it to be a peaceful resting place, one that reflects her beautiful mind and dreams, the very things that left such an impression on me.

“Dreaming through the Noise” is the title of Vienna Teng’s third album from 2006, likely derived from a verse from the album’s final track, “Recessional” (lyrics). The song is a tender, melancholic snapshot of two persons in an undefined relationship as they enjoy one last moment together at the airport before one of them departs. Just as the airport is a liminal space, so does their relationship seem to linger over a threshold. According to warmstrangers.com, a site that has kindly collected various background information on Teng’s songs (imparted by the singer herself during her performances), Teng likens the song to “a reverse striptease”: like putting the clothes back on, starting from the end of the relationship and going back to the beginning, to a point in time before the relationship. The moment captured in song is so delicate, one gets the feeling that it must not be disturbed, lest whatever exists between the two of them might dissolve forever — a tension true to the fragility that colours Shimizu’s stories.

The term “recessional” itself refers to a hymn or other piece of music played at the conclusion of a church service as the clergy and the choir ceremonially withdraw from the chancel to the vestry, and as the congregation files out.

Design

The background pattern was chosen to allude to the vague shapes that appear before the mind’s eye as a person is drifting off to sleep (stage N1 in the sleep cycle), so-called visual hypnagogic hallucinations. It is also the inverse of the background on Dornenkaefig, my shrine to Idike from Kaori Yuki’s manga Ludwig Revolution — a lost sleeping princess found by her prince in a dream, rescued by being seen and understood at long last, however briefly.

The green accent colours refer to the forests of Amachi’s dreams and the verses “and walk with you through that lucent / wavering forest of bluegreen leaves” in Atwood’s poem. They are in turn inspired by the colour palette of the Sleeping Forest, a location in Final Fantasy VII, where Aerith appears to Cloud in a dream to say goodbye. (Did Cloud see her, and if so, at what point?)

While the living Amachi’s forests must be lush in colour (manga is a black and white medium), all colours are eventually drained from her dream, and so the world of ice reappears in Aoki’s dream. The barren trees here thus call to Michaels’ verse: “At dusk, birch forest is a shore of bones.”

And naturally, some of the floral flourishes represent metaphors from Atwood’s verses “I would like to give you the silver / branch, the small white flower”.

Poetry

One of my favourite moments in the story is Aoki’s genuine awe when he first beholds the magnificent landscape of Amachi’s dreams. His first thought: ‘Why… Why didn’t she go into film or art?’ — a reaction as much as an admission that he has not given her enough credit, that truly, he does not know her at all. That sense of wonder along with, perhaps, the sudden feeling of being oh so small reminds me of a key moment in the film “Contact”(1997), directed by Robert Zemeckis on the basis of Carl Sagan’s novel (1985). When its protagonist, an astronomer by profession, becomes witness to unimaginable otherworldly beauty, as the sole human no less, words fail her. She breathes: “They should have sent a poet.” How else to capture something beyond your comprehension?

This shrine calls on lyric poetry to give expression to grief: grief, which (believes it) has need for words, but cannot find them, and so looks to music; lyric poetry, which sits somewhere between words and music. Poetry, here, allows me to wrap my mind around something that refuses to take shape in its entirety so that I may embrace it, hold it before letting it pass.

The two poems that frame my interpretation of the story are:

I do not remember which impetus came first: my first reading of the manga, my meeting of “Memoriam”, or the parallels I perceived between the two poems. What I can say with certainty is that Michaels’ solitary verse “The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.”, a break in the poem’s structure in more than one respect, strikes me with a force and from an angle so akin to this story’s ending that I cannot think of one without the other. The verse stayed with me for years as I tried again and again to grasp the poem, on its own as much as as an interpretation of this story. At some point, I came across “Variation on the Word Sleep” again (of which I had previously only seen or retained the final stanza) and noted the likeness of the two poems’ imagery (the presence or absence of sleep; fear, grief, forests), the virtually opposite ends of these verses most of all:

  • “I would like to give you the silver / branch, the small white flower, the one / word that will protect you / from the grief at the center / of your dream, from the grief / at the center.” (Atwood), and
  • “I have nothing to give you, nothing to carry, / some words to make me less afraid, to say / you gave me this.” (Michaels)

Doesn’t that hopeless polarity sum up the key moments of Amachi and Aoki’s relationship in their final encounters, in waking and dreaming, so well? And then there is the disparity in weight between the flower and the air on the one hand and the stones on the other. Out of all these associations and links rose the necessity to make this shrine.

“Memoriam” is — and this is only one of my interpretations — written from two perspectives: the self standing inside of grief, and the self watching the self standing inside of grief from a distance away. If “Variation on the Word Sleep” is Amachi’s voice, “Memoriam” is Aoki engaging in conversation with Amachi, failing at first to recognize that the Amachi he sees is himself. Ultimately, it is a conversation Aoki is having with himself by the end of the story, with the self of the past that cannot undo the actions that have led to Amachi’s fate. (Of course, it is also possible that “Memoriam” is Amachi’s voice, part of her voice at least. We cannot rule out that there was resentment from her side. Whether or not Amachi did feel resentment we do not know, and she cannot tell us, for she is dead.)

If the first few pages of the site start with Atwood’s poem, that is because they are narrated by Amachi from when she was still alive. Mind, however, that the shrine itself starts with regret: a verse from Michaels’ poem, a story told from Aoki’s point of view. In the latter part of the shrine, Amachi cannot narrate her story anymore, but remains as an echo, as a reminder of who she once was — who she truly was, had she been seen. It is a person Aoki will never meet.

Credits

Special thanks to Larissa for helping me make the Ghost of You Challenge happen so that this shrine could finally be born, and to the event participants for being part of the momentum.

Links

If you would like to link this shrine, feel free to use one of the following buttons and direct it to https://shimizu.six-chances.net/amachi. Please do not direct link buttons.

200x40 button 200x40 button

Below is a list of links loosely related to this story or this shrine, further reading so to speak. For a curated list of links related to The Top Secret and further works by Reiko Shimizu, refer to Refugium.

  • Scientists Read Dreams, Nature, 2012 / Scientists “read dreams” using brain scans, BBC, 2013
  • Heather Heckman-McKenna, Redefining Love in Margaret Atwood’s “Variation on the Word Sleep”, The Explicator, 74:2, 2016 — Highly recommended in conjunction with my piece “The Trappings of Gender”.

  • On Body and Soul (trailer), directed by Ildikó Enyedi, 2017 — For the sensitivity and poetic quality of its vision and for its themes: the gap between dream and reality as a representation of the gap between our internal world and what we feel, versus our external world and what we are capable of expressing (within the confines of social norms at that); the condition of being corporeal, and the challenge and limitations of verbal communication in human yearning for true connection, intimacy and security; tenderness, brutality and the sensuality of both; the relationship between body and soul, and the inescapability and necessity of their connection.

    Intriguing on a conceptional level, but botched by poor execution and its insistent depiction of a heteronormative romance with its stereotypes. Strongest when it does not focus on romance, and when the struggles of autism and physical disability are thematical, symbolical — representations of shared otherness rather than portrayals of insurmountable specificity.

    Take this film as an indirect answer perhaps, no, as food for thought regarding the question where Amachi’s soul resided — where any of our souls reside.

Dream Portals

The following are shrines under The Wither and Bloom Network that may be of interest to you if you enjoyed this one. Thank you for the visit!

button to Refugium
The Top Secret (pilot chapter) by Reiko Shimizu
― on the sanctum of mind in light of eroding privacy
button to Dornenkaefig
Idike from Ludwig Revolution by Kaori Yuki
― a sleeping beauty imprisoned in her dream
button to In Another Dream
Chikyuu wa Boku ga Mawasu by Nawo Inoue
― on an adolescent boy who seeks refuge in a dream loop
button to Setting Sun
Dream Saga by Megumi Tachikawa
― on a magical girl with a destiny in the world of dreams