Kusamakura (16 page)

When my eye falls on the camellia blooms on the far shore, I think to myself, Yes, better if you had not seen. The color of that flower is no mere red. In the far recesses of its dazzling gaudiness lies some inexpressible sunken darkness. The sight of a pear blossom sodden and despondent in the rain will provoke a simple pity; a coolly enchanting aronia blossom in moonlight calls forth only delighted affection. But the sunken darkness of the camellia is of a different order. It has a terrifying taste of blackness, of venom. And yet, with such darkness down there at its core, it decks out its surface in most flamboyant bright display. What’s more, it does not set out to entice or even to attract the human eye. Flowers open and drop, drop and open, over the passage of how many hundred springs, while the camellia dwells on in tranquillity deep in the mountain shadow, unseen by mortal eyes. A single glance, and all is over! He who once lays eyes upon her will in no way escape this lady’s bewitchment. No, the color of that flower is no mere red. It is like the red of a slaughtered criminal’s blood, drawing the unwilling eye and filling the heart with unease.

As I watch, one of these red creatures plops onto the water. In all the quietness of that spring moment, only this flower has motion. A little while later another drops. These flowers never scatter their petals when they fall. They part from the branch whole and unbroken. The parting is so clean that they may strike us as admirably resolute and unclinging, yet there’s something malignant in the sight of them lying whole where they have fallen. Another drops. If this continues, I think, the pool’s water will grow red with them; indeed, the area surrounding these quietly floating flowers seems already tinged with crimson. There goes another. It floats there so still that one can scarcely guess whether it has landed on solid earth or on water. Another falls. Do they ever sink? I wonder. Perhaps the million camellia blooms that fall through the years lie steeped in water till the color leaches from them, till they rot, and finally disintegrate to mud on the bottom. Perhaps thousands of years hence and unbeknownst to men, all the fallen camellias will eventually fill this ancient pool till it reverts to the flat plain it once was. And now yet another tumbles to bloody the water, like a human soul in death. And another. A little shower of them plops to the water. Endlessly, they fall.

I wander back and have another cigarette, thinking idly as I puff that this might be a scene for my painting of the beautiful floating woman. Nami’s joking words at the inn yesterday come snaking insidiously back into my memory. My heart rocks like a plank on a high sea. I will use that face, float it on the water beneath that camellia bush, and have the red flowers fall on it. I want to give a sense of the flowers falling eternally over the eternally floating woman—but can I achieve this in a picture? In Lessing’s
Laocoön
—but no, who cares what Lessing said? It doesn’t matter whether I choose to follow principles, what I’m after is the feeling. Still, remaining within the human realm, while seeking to express a sense of eternity that transcends the human, is no easy matter.

The face is the first problem. Even if I borrow her face, that expression of hers won’t do. Suffering would dominate, and that would ruin everything. On the other hand, too great a sense of ease would also destroy the effect. Perhaps I should choose a different face altogether. I count off various possibilities, but none are suitable. Yes, Nami’s face does seem to be the right one. Yet something about it isn’t quite satisfactory. This much I know, but just where the problem lies is unclear to me, and consequently I can’t simply change that face on some fanciful whim.

What would happen if I added a touch of jealousy to it? I wonder. No, jealousy has too much anxiety in it. What about hatred, then? No, too fierce. Rage? But that would wreck the harmony completely. Bitterness? No, too vulgar, unless it had a poetic air of romance to it. After pondering this and that possibility, I finally light on the answer: the one emotion that I’ve forgotten to include in my list is pity. Pity is an emotion unknown to the gods, yet of all the human emotions it is closest to them. In Nami’s expression there is not one jot of pity. This is its great lack. When on an instant’s impulse that emotion registers on her face, that will be the moment when my picture is complete. But when might I ever see this happen? The usual expression to be seen on that face is a hovering smile of derision and the intently furrowed brow of someone with a frantic desire to win. This is quite useless for my purpose.

A rustling crunch of approaching footsteps shatters my ideas for the painting well before they have arrived at a final form. Looking up, I see a man in tight-sleeved workman’s clothing tramping along through the dwarf bamboo with a load of firewood on his back, making toward Kankaiji temple. He must have come down from the nearby mountain.

“Lovely weather,” he says, taking off the little towel wrapped around his head and greeting me. As he bows, light flashes along the blade of the hatchet thrust into his belt. He’s a strapping fellow, whom I guess to be in his forties. I feel I’ve seen him before somewhere, and he too behaves with the familiarity of an old acquaintance.

“You paint pictures too, do you, sir?” he asks. My painting box is open beside me.

“Yes, I came along hoping to paint the pool. It’s a lonely sort of place, isn’t it? No one passes this way.”

“That’s true. It’s certainly deep in the hills here. But tell me, sir—you’d have had a good soaking coming over the pass after we met the other day, I should think.”

“Eh? Ah yes, you’re the packhorse driver I met, aren’t you?”

“Yes. This is what I do, cut firewood like this and take it down to the town,” says Genbei. He proceeds to lower his bundle to the ground and sit on it. A tobacco pouch comes out—an old one, whether paper or leather I can’t tell. I offer him a match.

“So you cross that pass every day, eh? That’s hard work.”

“No, I’m quite used to it, really. And anyway, I don’t go over every day. It’s once every three days, sometimes even four.”

“I wouldn’t want to do it even once every four days, I must say.”

He laughs. “Well, I’m sorry for the horse, so I try to keep it down to about every four days.”

“That’s good of you. So the horse is more important than you are, eh?” I remark with a laugh.

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. . . .”

“By the way, this pool strikes me as very old. How long can it have been here?”

“It’s been here a long while.”

“A long while? How long?”

“A very long while, believe me.”

“A very long while? I see.”

“I’ll tell you this, it’s been here since the Shioda girl threw herself in a long while ago.”

“You mean the Shiodas who run the hot spring inn?”

“That’s right, yes.”

“You say the girl threw herself in? But she’s alive and well, is she not?”

“No, not that girl. This one lived a long while ago.”

“A long while ago? When would that have been?”

“Oh, a very long while ago, believe me.”

“And why did that girl from a long while ago throw herself in here?”

“Well, she was a beauty, you know, like the present girl is, sir. . . .”

“Ah?”

“And one day, one of them bonzes came along . . .”

“You mean a begging monk?”

“Yes, one of them bonzes that plays the bamboo flute and goes about begging. Well, when he was staying over at Shioda’s place—he was the village headman at the time—that beautiful young girl fell head over heels for him. Call it karma if you will, but at all events she wept and declared she simply had to marry him.”

“Wept, did she? Hmm.”

“But headman Shioda wouldn’t hear of it. He said no bonze would be marrying his daughter. And in the end he cried, ‘Be off with you!’”

“To the monk?”

“That’s right. So then the young girl, she takes off after him and comes as far as the pool here—and throws herself in, right over there, where you can see that pine tree. And it all caused quite a stir, I can tell you. They say she was carrying a mirror on her, and that’s how this pool got its name.”

“Well, well, so someone’s thrown themselves in here before, eh?”

“A dreadful business, sir.”

“How many generations back would it be, do you think?”

“All I can say is it’s a good long while ago. And I’ll tell you another thing—well, this is just between you and me, sir.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s been crazies in the Shiodas since generations back.”

“Fancy that.”

“It’s a curse, that’s what it is. And the present young lady too, everyone’s been looking askance lately and muttering about how she’s gone a bit peculiar.”

“Surely that’s not so!” I exclaim with a laugh.

“You think not? But her mom was a bit peculiar, you know.”

“Is she at home there?”

“No, died last year.”

“Hmm,” I say, and make no further comment, but simply watch the thin curl of smoke rising from the end of my cigarette. Heaving the bundle of firewood onto his back again, Genbei goes on his way.

I’ve come here to paint, but at this rate, with my head full of such musings and my ear full of such talk, days will pass without me producing a single picture. Well, I’ve set everything up, so at least I must go through the motions and make a preliminary sketch or two. The scenery of the opposite shore will more or less do for what I want. I’ll try my hand at it, just for form’s sake.

A blue-black rock towers ten feet or more into the air, straight up from the bottom of the pool; to the right of its sheer face, where the dark water lies in a curve at the jutting corner, dwarf bamboo crowds densely all the way down the steep mountainside to the very water’s edge. Above the rock a large pine tree at least three arm-spans thick thrusts its twisted, vine-clad trunk out at an angle that leans precariously half over the water. Perhaps it was from this rock that the girl leaped, the mirror tucked in her bosom.

I settle myself before the easel and survey the elements of the scene—pine, dwarf bamboo, rock, and water. I can’t decide how much of the water to include. The rock and its shadow each measure about ten feet. One could almost believe that the luxuriance of dwarf bamboo extends beyond the water’s edge on down into the water, so vividly does its reflection seem to penetrate right to the bottom. As for the pine, it appears to soar as high as the eye can see, while the reflection it casts is likewise extremely long and thin. Reproducing the actual dimensions of what lies before me wouldn’t work as a composition. Perhaps it would be interesting to give up all thought of depicting the objects themselves and simply show their reflections. People would no doubt be startled to be shown a picture consisting only of water and the reflections in it. But it’s pointless simply to surprise the viewer; what must surprise them is the realization that this is successful as a picture. What to do
?
I wonder, gazing intently at the surface of the water.

These weird shapes alone, however, simply don’t resolve into a composition. Perhaps I could plan my composition around a comparison of the real objects with their reflections, so I let my gaze move slowly and smoothly upward, from the tip of the rock’s reflection to the point where it meets the water’s edge, then slowly on up; my eyes savor that glistening shape and climb attentively on over each curve and crevice. When finally they have completed their ascent and have arrived at the perilous summit, I freeze in astonishment, like a frog suddenly caught in the glaring sights of a snake. The brush falls from my hand.

There, vividly etched against the blue-black rock lit by the late spring sunlight, and framed from behind by the setting sun through green branches, is a woman’s face—the same one that first startled me beneath falling blossoms, then as a ghostly form entering my room, then as a figure in flowing wedding robes, and yet again through the steam of the bathhouse.

My eyes are pinned there, unable to move from that pale face; she too remains perfectly motionless, stretched to her full supple height on the peak of the towering rock. What a moment it is!

Then without thinking, I spring to my feet. The woman twists swiftly about, and the next instant she is leaping away down the far side, with just a flash of what must be a red camellia tucked at her waist. The light from the setting sun brushes the treetops, softly tingeing the pine tree’s trunk; the green of the dwarf bamboo intensifies.

She has astonished me yet again.

I set off for a stroll, to savor the soft dusk of this mountain village. Climbing up the stone steps of Kankaiji temple, my mind produces the following lines for a poem in Chinese:

I have no particular business with the abbot, nor any inclination to indulge in idle conversation with him. I’ve simply stepped out of the inn on impulse, letting my straying feet carry me where they will, and found myself at the base of these stairs. I pause here awhile, to run my hand over the stone pillar on which is carved the prohibition found at the entrance to every Zen monastery: “No alcohol or pungent vegetables permitted beyond this gate.” But then a sudden flood of happiness sets me climbing the stairs.

In Sterne’s novel
Tristram Shandy
the author claims that this book was written in the highest accordance with the will of God. The first sentence was created by himself, he says; the rest simply came to him, written while his thoughts were fixed on the Lord. He had no plan of what to write: though it was he who wrote the words, the words themselves were the Lord’s, and therefore he holds no responsibility for them. Well, my stroll is of precisely this nature, though the irresponsibility is compounded in my case by the fact that I do not pray to God. Sterne managed very neatly to avoid responsibility by blaming it all on the Lord, while I, who have no God to take the blame on my behalf, simply cast mine into a passing ditch.