THE ENIGMA OF THE FOURTH CENTURY: SIDE STORY
Mihato's Wooden Tablets, or, A Record of Thirty-Seven Generations
Book Three—Final
Foreword
At the end of Chapter One of the main volume, Ran Hiiragi's record says:
"I named my daughter MIHATO—child as clear as the water of this land."
And the main narrative closes its eyes on her lineage.
Thirty-seven generations. Roughly a thousand years.
This thousand years, written nowhere in the main volume or the prequel, is written here.
This is the record of a girl who lost her mother from the future at five, living with her mother's wooden boards without knowing her mother's face—and the record of how those boards continued to be protected for nearly a thousand years, even after losing their original meaning.
History gets buried. Letters fade, names are forgotten, meanings change, but objects stubbornly remain.
Mihato's story is about things that remain even after losing their meaning.
Chapter 1: Winter at Five
Mihato lost her mother in the winter when she was five.
No one remembered the exact year. Only that the winter had little snow, but a dry wind blew continuously, as the old later told.
Her mother had a fever and died on the seventh day.
Mihato didn't remember her dead face well. She only remembered: the day before her death, her mother took Mihato's small hands trembling, and washed them with hot water.
"If you get a wound, always wash it with hot water."
Mihato didn't understand the meaning yet.
After her mother died, she was taken in by the older woman who had first picked up her mother in the marsh—called ANE in the village. Ane already had grandchildren, but raised Mihato like a real grandchild.
Children sometimes called Mihato the strange girl from the north—an extension of her mother being accepted as the strange woman from the north who knew medicinal herbs. Mihato herself didn't truly know where her mother came from. Her mother had never told her details.
Only, in a corner of the house, were many wooden boards her mother had treasured, densely carved with unknown letters.
Chapter 2: Unreadable Letters
At ten, Ane said: "Your mother left something on those boards. When you grow up, try to read them for her."
Mihato took the boards. Hard wood carved with a metal needle. Katakana—different from any language of the archipelago.
At first she thought they were pictures—wave lines, deer horns, face lines. But the same shapes repeated many times. Gradually she realized they represented sounds.
Her mother's small black board—a portable terminal from four thousand years in the future—had lost its light long before her mother died, becoming just a cold, heavy black stone. Mihato kept it as a keepsake with the wooden boards, but the black stone was lost over the years. Only the wooden boards carved by her mother's own hand remained.
At fifteen, she asked an old shaman to write down fragments she remembered her mother sometimes saying—te o arau, netsu o dasu, mirai kara—matching those sounds with her mother's board letters, trying to assemble a reading.
She could not fully read them.
Still, she noticed some letter strings appeared repeatedly.
te wo arau
The same shape as the words her mother had repeated.
Mihato became convinced the boards wrote about washing hands.
Chapter 3: Child as Clear
At eighteen, Mihato married a young fisherman.
Her husband didn't care about her origin. As her name implied—a child as clear as water—Mihato was known as a quiet, strong woman.
She passed her mother's habits to her family:
Wash hands before meals. Wash wounds with hot water. For a baby, always drink water once boiled.
Village women called it the custom of the House of Ane of Ihato. Many had already forgotten who her mother was. Only a vague reputation remained: the house of the woman from the north, where people wash their hands since ancient times.
Mihato bore three children.
Eldest Mina, second Sayo, eldest son Takeru—names of this age, unrelated to the far future.
She decided to entrust the boards to the eldest, Mina.
"This is what your grandmother left. You don't need to read it. Just keep it safe."
Mina nodded. She too could barely read them.
Mihato died at forty-two. Not a short life for this age.
At her dying moment, she told her daughters, as later family tradition recorded:
"Even if the meaning of the letters becomes unknown, this is the warmth mother left us. Don't burn it, don't throw it away, don't lose it. Pass it to the next child. That's enough."
Chapter 4: Record of Thirty-Seven Generations (Overview)
From here, reconstructed via family tradition and archaeological estimation, is a fast chronicle.
After Mihato's death, the boards, as the Treasure of the House of Ihato, were passed to the eldest Mina's line. By the third and fourth generations, no one could read them. The letters were treated as a purification spell bestowed from a god or ancestors.
In the seventh generation, the house left the village and moved to a larger chief's domain. For fear of burning during the move, the boards were placed in an earthen jar and buried under the floor. From then on, the boards became a secret—an unopened guardian spirit—known only to the head of the house.
By the fourteenth generation, the house was known nearby as the House of Hand-Washing. Researchers later estimated that infant mortality in this household was slightly lower than in others. No one knew the reason. Only the habit survived as a daily ritual.
In the twenty-second generation, the existence of the boards was secret even to some heads. One head misunderstood the boards as a foreign curse talisman and asked a village shaman to decipher them. The shaman couldn't, but warned: "These are terrifying god's letters; you must not touch them." The fear increased, but the boards were kept safe.
By the thirtieth generation, the house was part of a powerful clan. The boards were stored in an unopened box deep within the hall of heirlooms. A woman of this generation reportedly opened it and saw the boards. A written fragment remains: "Left by ancestors. Cannot be read, but revered. Pass down without reading."
Chapter 5: End and After
In the thirty-seventh generation, the house was caught in a large war.
An enemy clan burned the hall, and many of the family were killed. The house effectively ended.
After the hall burned, the jar buried under the floor remained in the soil for centuries. Later, it was excavated by a man of a completely different clan.
He found the bundle of old wooden boards inside the jar.
He could not read them. The letters were too old, too alien. He could not tell if they were ominous or precious, but hesitating to treat them roughly, he donated them to a nearby mountain temple.
The temple stored them deep in its storehouse alongside other old offerings.
As the storehouse aged and rotted, the boards mingled with other old documents, and eventually, no one cared for them.
Epilogue: Like Clear Water
What Mihato inherited from her mother was not letters.
The letters became unreadable within three generations.
What Mihato inherited, and what her descendants continued for nearly a thousand years—even while losing its meaning—was simply the act of keeping something precious safe.
The meaning was lost. But the act remained.
The habit of washing hands became a ritual, then a spell, and finally the enduring reputation of a household. The letters on the boards became a spell, a source of awe, and then quietly slept deep in a temple storehouse.
The single unglazed jar excavated on the small Seto island that reached Division 7 in AD 4493 contained Shiori's letter and the records of the seven travellers. Ran Hiiragi's wooden boards, without ever reaching the conference room in the far future, still sleep deep in a nameless temple storehouse today—or perhaps have long since rotted back into the soil of the archipelago.
Still, this book records:
For thirty-seven generations, nearly a thousand years, a family continued to cherish an important thing without understanding why.
It will never be in history textbooks.
But that is how nameless people carry history.
Mihato lived as her name meant.
Clear water does not ask where it came from.
It just keeps flowing, changing its shape from person to person, vessel to vessel.
History is probably like that too.
— End of Side Story —
Afterword
With the main volume and the prequel, this side story concludes the trilogy.
Biochemist Ran Hiiragi—a woman who stepped from the future into the ancient world—what did she leave behind? The main volume focused on her scientific knowledge and her message to the future: History with a capital H. What I wanted to depict here is smaller, but surer: history with a small h.
The story of Mihato, the girl who lost her mother at five, is a story where advanced information like written letters and future science gets cut off. However, no matter how unreadable letters become and how completely meaning is lost, the memory of love handed down from parent to child, and a small habit like washing hands, survived a thousand years.
History is not made only by heroes and grand events in textbooks. Countless baton relays of nameless people who continued to cherish important things without knowing their full meaning support the flow of time.
With clear Mihato's life and the thousand-year quiet walk of her descendants in mind, I want to thank all the readers who accompanied this long journey.
