Kusamakura (20 page)

“Really? Where did he come from?”

“He came from the town down there.”

“That’s a long way. And where is he going?”

“Well, it seems he’s going to Manchuria.”

“What will he do there?”

“What will he do there? I don’t know, he may make some money, or he may die.”

I raise my eyes to look at her. The little smile that has been hovering on her lips is rapidly disappearing. I can’t guess the meaning of her words.

“That man is my husband.”

Quick as a flash, she has landed me a slashing blow! I’m utterly caught by surprise. I had of course had no intention of asking who he was; nor had I expected her to expose herself to me like this.

“How was that? Did I surprise you?” she said.

“Yes, you did a bit.”

“He’s not my present husband. He’s the one I had to sever relations with.”

“I see. So . . .”

“So nothing. That’s all.”

“I see. . . . That fine white-walled house over there in the mandarin orchard, it’s in a nice place, isn’t it? Whose house is it?”

“That’s my older brother’s house. Let’s call there on the way home.”

“Do you have some business there?”

“Yes, he’s asked me to do something.”

“I’ll come with you, then.”

When we reach the beginning of the path down the mountainside, we don’t descend but turn right and, after a climb of a little over a hundred yards, arrive at the front gate of the house. Rather than proceeding straight to the entrance, we go to the garden at one side. Nami strides boldly along, so I follow suit. Three or four palms stand in the south-facing garden. Immediately beyond the earth wall, the mandarin orchard begins.

Without preliminaries, Nami seats herself on the edge of the veranda and remarks, “It’s a fine view. Look.”

“Yes, it certainly is.”

Behind the sliding doors to the house, all is quiet. Nothing suggests anyone is home. Nami shows no sign of calling on anyone. She simply sits at her ease, gazing down at the slope of mandarin orchard beyond. I feel rather puzzled. What business has actually brought her here?

Our conversation has petered out, and we sit on in silence, looking at the mandarin trees. The noonday sun floods the mountain with its warm rays, and the mandarin leaves that fill our vision seem to steam and glitter. After a while a cock crows loudly in the barn behind the house.

“Good heavens, it’s noon!” Nami exclaims. “I was forgetting what I had to do. Kyuichi! Kyuichi!” She reaches over and slides open the door with a slight clatter. I can see a large empty room; a pair of scrolls in the style of the Kano School hang somehow mournfully in the alcove.
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“Kyūichi!”

At last an answering voice is heard from the barn. The approaching steps pause behind the sliding door. It opens, and in an instant the dagger in its white wooden sheath is tumbling over the matting.

“A farewell gift from your uncle for you!” Nami announces.

I had no inkling of the moment when her hand went to her waistband. The dagger somersaults two or three times, then slides smoothly across the matting to Kyuichi’s feet. It has slipped a little from the loose sheath, to reveal an inch or so of cold glinting steel.

It is the day of Kyuichi’s departure. We are accompanying him by boat down the river as far as Yoshida Station. Besides Kyuichi, our boat contains Mr. Shioda, Nami, her brother, Genbei, and myself, of course merely in the capacity of invitee.

I am happy to go along as “invitee”—indeed, I am happy to go along without puzzling over reasons and roles at all. Prudence, after all, can play no part in the “nonemotional” journey.

Our boat is a flat-bottomed one, rather like a raft with sides added. The old man is seated in the middle, Nami and myself in the stern, and Kyuichi and Nami’s brother in the bow. Genbei sits apart, looking after the luggage.

“Kyūichi, how do you feel about war?” Nami inquires. “Do you like it?”

“I won’t know till I’m in it. There’ll be suffering, I should think, but perhaps there’ll be pleasures too” is his innocent reply.

“No matter the suffering,” the old gentleman remarks, “it’s for the sake of the nation.”

Nami’s next question is equally odd. “Surely you’re inclined to go to war and see what it’s all about, now that you’ve been given a dagger?”

“Yes, I guess so,” Kyuichi responds with a light nod. The old gentleman laughs and tugs at his beard. His son pretends to have heard nothing.

Nami now abruptly thrusts her pale face close to Kyuichi and demands, “How are you going to be able to fight with that sort of nonchalant attitude?”

“You’d make a fine soldier, Nami,” says her brother. These are the first words he has spoken to her. His tone indicates that the remark is not intended as a joke.

“Me? Me, a soldier? If I could become a soldier, I’d have done it long ago. I’d be dead by now. Kyuichi, you must die too. You’ll lose your honor if you come home alive.”

“Good heavens, hold your tongue!” exclaims her father. “No, no, you must return in triumph. Death is not the only way to serve one’s nation. I plan to live a couple of years yet. We’ll be able to meet again.” The old man’s last drawn-out words tremble and are lost in tears; only the imperative of manliness prevents him from spilling all that is in his heart. Kyuichi says nothing but simply sits with his head turned aside, looking at the riverbank.

There’s a large willow on the bank, and beneath it sits a man in a little boat moored to the tree, staring at his fishing line. As our boat goes by, trailing its rocking wake, the man glances up, and his eyes meet Kyuichi’s. No acknowledging charge flows between the two. The man’s mind is focused on his fishing, while Kyuichi’s busy thoughts have no space for so much as a single fish. Our boat floats calmly on past the unknown fisherman.

If you were to stand in the middle of the street, as a street-car director does, at the approach to Tokyo’s Nihonbashi Bridge, and stop every one of the hundreds who pass by every minute and learn each one’s trials and troubles, this world of ours would seem to you an appallingly difficult place in which to live. We humans meet and part as strangers—if this were not so, who would be willing to take on the job of standing there directing the milling streetcars? It’s a lucky thing that our unknown fisherman seeks no explanation for Kyuichi’s tearful face. When I turn back to look, he is calmly watching his float. He’ll likely go on sitting there, gazing at that float, until the Russian War is over.

The river is shallow and quite narrow; the current flows gently. Our boat slips along through the water, moving inexorably on and on through the passing spring toward some other place, a place full of noisy people who love to collide with one another. This young man with the brutal mark of bloodshed upon his brow is drawing us mercilessly along with him. The bonds of fate are compelling him to a dark and fearsome land far to the north, and we whose fate is tangled with his are likewise compelled to travel with him until the ties that bind us at last give way. When this happens, something between us will audibly snap; he alone will be reeled inescapably in by the hand of his own fate, while we in turn are fated to remain behind. Beg and struggle though we might, he will be powerless to draw us with him.

It is delightful how gently the boat floats on. Those must be field horsetails covering either bank; farther up are stands of willows. Here and there among them a low farmhouse reveals a thatched roof and a glimpse of a sooty window; occasionally a few white geese spill forth and waddle cackling into the river.

That flash of brightness between those willows must be a white peach tree in bloom. A loom knocks and clatters, and from within its rhythm the sound of a woman’s plangent singing drifts across the water; the song is impossible to recognize.

“Would you do a portrait of me?” Nami suddenly says to me. Kyuichi and her brother are deep in military talk, and the old man has nodded off.

“Certainly,” I say obligingly. Taking out my sketchbook, I jot down the following poem and pass it to her:

She laughs. “It’s no good just dashing something off like this. You must put a bit of care into it, and do something that reveals my temperament.”

“I’ve been wanting to do the same thing myself, but somehow that face of yours just won’t compose itself into a picture the way it is.”

“That’s a charming answer, I must say! So what should I do to get a picture?”

“Oh, I could do one right now. It’s just that there’s something lacking. It would be a shame to draw you without it.”

“What do you mean, lacking? It’s the face I was born with, so there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“The face one’s born with can change in all manner of ways.”

“You mean I can change it?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t treat me like a fool just because I’m a woman.”

“On the contrary, it’s because you’re a woman that you say foolish things like that.”

“Well then, let’s see you make some changes to your own face.”

“It already changes quite enough from day to day.”

She falls silent and turns away. The riverbanks are now level with the water, and the flat expanse of unplanted rice fields beyond is deep in flowering milk vetch. A vast sea of flowers stretches away forever, blurred with the haze of spring so that it seems a recent rain has half-dissolved those vivid dots of red and run them all together. Looking up, I see the towering form of a steep peak half-blocking the sky, with a wisp of spring cloud spilled out across its flank.

“That’s the mountain you crossed.” Nami extends a white hand over the side of the boat and points to the dreamlike peak.

“Is Tengu Rock around there?”

“See that patch of purple below the dark green part?”

“That shadowy bit?”

“Is it shadow? It looks like a bald patch to me.”

“Come now, it’s a hollow. If it was bald, it would have more brown in it.”

“Is that so? Anyway, Tengu Rock is apparently in behind that.”

“So the Seven Bends would be a little farther to the left, then.”

“They’re way off somewhere else, on a mountain behind that one.”

“Ah yes, that’s true. But I’d guess they’re about where that bit of cloud is hanging.”

“Yes, that’s the direction.”

At this point the elbow of the old man slips from the edge of the boat where he’s propped it to doze, and he awakens with a start.

“Not there yet?”

He stretches, chest out, right elbow drawn back, left arm thrust straight before him, then does an imitation of releasing an arrow from the bow. Nami chuckles.

“Don’t mind me, it’s a habit of mine.”

I too laugh. “I see you like archery,” I remark.

“I could draw a good thick bow in my youth,” he replies, patting his left shoulder, “and even now my left-hand action is still remarkably steady.”

Up in the bow, the talk of war is in full swing.

At length, the boat enters a townscape. I notice a sign painted on the low paper window of a little bar, “Drinks and Snacks,” and farther on an old-fashioned tavern. We pass a lumberyard. Occasionally the sound of a rickshaw comes from the road beyond. Swallows twist and twitter in the air; geese honk.

Now our little party leaves the boat, and we make our way to the station.

We are being dragged yet deeper into the real world, which I define as the world that contains trains. Nothing can be more quintessentially representative of twentieth-century civilization than the steam train. It roars along, packed tight with hundreds of people in the one box, merciless in its progress, and all those hundreds crammed in there must travel at the same speed, stop at the same places, and submit to a baptismal submersion in the same swirling steam. Some say that people “ride” in a train, but I would say they are thrust into it; some speak of “going” by train, but it seems to me they are transported by it. Nothing is more disdainful of individuality. Having expended all its means to develop the individual, civilization then proceeds to crush it by all possible means. Present civilization gives each person his little patch of earth and tells him he may wake and sleep as he pleases on it—but then it throws up an iron railing around it, and threatens us with dire consequences if we should put a foot outside this barrier. Those who can act as they please in their own little patch naturally feel the urge to do the same beyond it, so the pitiful citizens of this world spend their days biting and raging at the boundary fence that hems them in. Civilization, having given individuals their freedom and turned them into wild beasts thereby, then maintains the peace by throwing these unfortunates behind bars. This isn’t real peace, it’s the peace of the zoo, where the tiger lies in his cage glaring out at the gaping sightseers. Should one bar of that cage come loose, the world would fall apart. Then we will have our second French Revolution. Indeed, the revolution is already under way night and day among individuals; the great European playwright Ibsen has provided us with detailed examples of the conditions necessary for it to occur. I must say, whenever I see one of those fierce trains hurtling along, treating all on board indiscriminately as so much freight, and mentally balance the individuals crammed in there against the train’s utter disregard for their individuality—I can only say, Watch out, this could be nasty if you’re not careful! Modern civilization in fact reeks of such dangers. The steam train hurtling blindly into the darkness ahead is simply one of them.

I sit in a tea shop at the station, staring thoughtfully at the piece of cake before me as I ponder this train theory of mine. I can’t very well write it down in my sketchbook, and I feel no need to talk to anyone about it, so I simply sit here in silence, eating my cake and drinking my tea.