An interlocking system of myths

An interlocking system of myths is the branching story-world Nutmeg Akasaka and Cinnamon Akasaka made together from a memory she had kept secret for years: the killing of the animals in her father’s zoo in August 1945, while an American submarine prepared to sink the transport ship on which she was watching. What began as a whispered recollection grew, through repetition and shared elaboration, into a world with no apparent end. Its eventual disappearance from their conversations gives the intimate act of storytelling a darker consequence: Nutmeg later understands Cinnamon’s silence as the loss of his words in the very labyrinth their stories had opened.

Origin in a Withheld Memory

For a long time Nutmeg told no one what she had seen from the transport ship. She describes having moved silently through a gloomy labyrinth between illusion and truth, carrying the zoo and submarine episode as an experience she could not share. Cinnamon’s birth changed whom she imagined she could tell: even before he understood language, she began recounting the episode to him in a near whisper, giving voice to a memory that had remained private.

The telling did not merely retrieve a fixed account. As Nutmeg spoke, its scenes came alive in vivid colors, as if she had lifted a lid and released what was inside. The story therefore begins both as testimony about wartime violence and as a means by which a suppressed memory becomes perceptible again. Its growth depends on narration: what Nutmeg can see, she tries to put into words for Cinnamon.

A Story That Branches

Once Cinnamon understood language, he repeatedly asked to hear the story again. Nutmeg estimates that she told it a hundred, two hundred, perhaps five hundred times, but the repetitions did not simply reproduce the same account. Cinnamon would ask for a smaller story contained within the larger one, directing her toward another branch of the same tree. Nutmeg followed the branches he chose, and the shared narrative enlarged.

Their attention extended well beyond the central sequence of the zoo and the ship. They talked for hours about the animals’ names, the sheen of their fur and the color of their eyes; the different smells in the air; the individual soldiers’ names and faces, their births and childhoods; their rifles and the weight of their ammunition; their fears and thirst; and the shapes of clouds overhead. These particulars make the imagined world at once historical and intimate. The violence remains its origin, but the mother and son also populate it with the small, specific attributes through which people, animals, and a place become imaginable.

Nutmeg says she could see the colors and shapes with perfect clarity as she told the story and could find the exact words needed to convey them. Yet the account remained open: there was always another detail to fill in, and it grew deeper and larger. Its completeness did not come from reaching a final version. It came from the ongoing exchange between Nutmeg’s recollection and Cinnamon’s questions.

The Shared Myth and Its End

Nutmeg identifies the result as an interlocking system of myths that the two of them created together. The phrase describes more than a single embellished story: each requested side-story connects to the larger account, while further details make new branches possible. Mother and son become both listeners and narrators, sustaining the story through their repeated conversations. The system is shared not because they tell an identical, finished text, but because Cinnamon’s requests shape what Nutmeg recalls and tells next.

That daily exchange ended one February morning, when Cinnamon stopped talking and stopped sharing stories with Nutmeg. The contrast is stark: the narrative that had seemed to have no end was abruptly cut off in ordinary life. Nutmeg pauses in recounting this break to light a cigarette, then says that she now knows what happened. In her interpretation, Cinnamon’s words were lost in the labyrinth and swallowed by the world of the stories; something that came out of its stones snatched away his tongue. She also connects that force to the death of her husband a few years later. The passage presents this as Nutmeg’s retrospective understanding, not as an independently explained or verified mechanism.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The system’s making and its ending are joined by the image of the labyrinth. Nutmeg first uses that image for her long silence between illusion and truth; later, she understands the expanding world of stories as the place that swallowed Cinnamon’s words. Storytelling is thus both a passage out of silence and, in her account, the setting of a new loss. The text does not resolve the tension between those meanings by explaining the labyrinth literally. Instead, Nutmeg’s explanation preserves the eerie overlap of memory, imagination, and consequence.

The childhood story also binds private family memory to the violence of 1945. Its recurring details keep the animals, soldiers, ship, and looming submarine available to the imagination, while Cinnamon’s questions transform a solitary recollection into a shared narrative inheritance. The ending reverses that movement: the son who once asked for more branches falls silent, and the mother is left to interpret the disappearance of their stories through the same dark world they had made together.