Malta is the Mediterranean island that gave Malta Kano her professional name and became the setting for a three-year retreat devoted to a spring whose water she believed could alter the body’s elements. In the sisters’ shared history, however, Malta also stands for distance: Malta’s period of isolation coincided with Creta Kano’s most difficult years, when she had no way to reach the sister to whom she had once been closest.

The Island and Its Water

Malta Kano explained that “Malta” was not her real name: Kano was her family name, while Malta was a professional name taken from the island. She had lived there for three years, from 1976 to 1979, in a small village at the foot of a mountain. The ordinary water she encountered on the island was unpleasantly salty; it tasted, she said, like diluted seawater, and the bread made with it was salty too, though she liked the bread.

The water that drew her to Malta was different. In the mountains, several hours’ climb from the village, a particular spring supplied water she described as mystical and beneficial to the body’s elements. Its influence, she believed, depended on drinking it at the source: carried elsewhere, it lost its power. She connected the spring to documents from the Crusades, in which the water was called spirit water, and mentioned that Allen Ginsberg and Keith Richards had also visited to drink it.

A Discipline of Retreat

Malta Kano made the spring part of a rigorous personal practice. She climbed to it every day, and for one week drank nothing but its water, taking no food. She described this abstinence as a religious austerity: the discipline required that nothing else pass her lips, and she understood the practice as a way to purify the body. The island was therefore more than a place of residence; its geography, with the village below and the remote spring above, organized a repeated journey and a demanding form of bodily attention.

After three years of training, Malta Kano planned to return to Japan permanently. The account of her stay presents the period as a chosen seclusion, but it also fixes the limits of her availability to her sister. While Malta was on the island, Creta could not simply visit or call on her: she did not know Malta’s address and had no way to contact her.

Malta in the Sisters’ Separation

Before Malta’s retreat, Creta had spent two years on Kauai in a commune, where the local water had, she believed, brought her spiritual powers into greater harmony with her physical being. She left when the place no longer suited her, traveled through Canada and the northern United States, and continued to Europe in search of water. Malta’s letters kept the sisters emotionally connected during this wandering; Creta recalled receiving long accounts, often nearly every week, about where Malta was and what she was doing.

That correspondence mattered, but it could not replace physical presence. Creta remembered the later years of her adolescence as a time when she needed Malta, while Malta was far away on the island and living in seclusion. The contrast gives Malta a double meaning in their relationship: the island’s water was central to Malta’s spiritual work, while the distance it represented left Creta to face her own experiences without her sister’s direct support.

Return and Retrospective Meaning

When Malta Kano wrote that her three years of training were complete and that she would be back in Japan within a week, Creta was thrilled at the prospect of seeing her after nearly eight years apart. Creta regarded Malta as the one person to whom she could freely tell everything in her heart. On Malta’s return, she listened to Creta’s long account without interrupting or asking questions. The island retreat thus ends, in the sisters’ narrative, not with the spring itself but with Malta’s return and the disclosure that her absence had made difficult.

Malta’s stay also belongs to a broader pursuit rather than an isolated episode. Before settling at the island’s spring, she had traveled widely looking for water with unusual effects; after years of wandering, Malta became the destination of that search. Her professional name preserves the place as a personal marker, while the sisters’ letters and eventual reunion preserve it as a turning point in a relationship shaped by both intimacy and separation.