Kusamakura (5 page)

“Yes, it’s close on two miles. You’re heading for the hot spring, are you, sir?”

“I thought I might stay there for a bit, if it’s not crowded. I’ll see how I feel.”

“Oh no, it won’t be. Since the war began, the guests have dropped right off. It’s as good as closed now.”
⁴

“That’s odd. Well, perhaps they won’t put me up there, then.”

“No, they’re happy to put up anyone who asks.”

“There’s only one place to stay, isn’t there?”

“Yes, just ask for Shioda’s, and you’ll have no trouble finding it. It’s hard to tell whether Mr. Shioda keeps it more as an inn or as his own country retreat.”

“So it wouldn’t matter to him if there weren’t any guests, then.”

“Is this your first visit, sir?”

“No, I came through once a long time ago.”

The conversation flags. I open up my sketchbook again and peacefully set about sketching the chickens. Then, deep in the quietness, the soft clang of a distant horse bell begins to penetrate my ears. It sets up a rhythm inside my head that grows into a kind of tune. It’s like the dreamy feeling of being half aware, as you doze, of the soft, insistent sound of a hand mill turning next door. I pause in my sketching to jot down on the side of the page

I have already come across five or six horses on my way up the mountain, all of them elaborately girthed in the old style, and belled. They seemed scarcely to belong to the present world.

Before long the tranquil strains of a packhorse driver’s song break through my poetic reveries of an unpeopled path winding on among empty mountains into the far depths of spring. There is something carefree within the plaintive sorrow of that singing voice, and it strikes my ears as might a song from a painting.

Having jotted these words diagonally on the page, I realize it is not in fact my own poem.
⁷

“Someone else has come,” remarks the old woman, half to herself.

Since there is only one path across the mountains, all who come and go must pass her teahouse. Each of those five or six horses I’ve met would have come down the path, and climbed back up it again, to these same murmured words. Here in this tiny settlement, strewn blossom-deep wherever feet might tread, down the years she has counted the bells, through the changeless springs along the hushed and lonely road, till now her hair is white with the years of counting. Turning over a page, I write

But the poem doesn’t manage to express all I’m feeling; it will need some further thought. Staring at the tip of my pencil, I am pondering how I might combine the phrase “white hair” with “age-old melody” and the theme words “the driver’s song,” add a season word for spring, and put it all into a haiku’s seventeen syllables, when a loud voice cries “Hello there!” and in front of the shop stands the packhorse driver himself.

“Well, well, so it’s you, Gen. You’re off down to town again, eh?”

“If you have anything you want from there, just let me know and I’ll bring it up for you.”

“Well then, if you’re passing through the Kaji-cho area, could you bring me a Reigan Temple talisman for my daughter?”

“Right, I’ll get one for you. Just one? Your Aki’s made a fine marriage. It’s a happy thing. Isn’t that so?”

“Praise be, she wants for nothing in daily life. I suppose that’s a happy thing, yes.”

“Of course it is! Just compare her with the Nakoi girl.”

“Yes, poor thing. And so good-looking too. Is she any better these days?”

“Nah, just the same as ever.”

“What a shame!” The old woman heaves a sigh.

“A shame it is,” Gen agrees, stroking his horse’s nose.

The rain that has streamed out of that distant sky is still held pooled in every leaf and blossom of the luxuriantly branching cherry tree nearby, and a passing gust of wind chooses this moment to catch the tree off guard, so that it finds itself toppling the heavy drops down from their precarious home aloft, with a sudden shower of sound. Startled, the horse tosses its long mane up and down.

“Whoa there!” scolds Gen, his voice combining with the clanging of the horse’s bell to break through my meditations.

“You know, Gen,” the old woman goes on, “I can still see before my eyes the sight of her when she went off as a bride. Sitting there on the horse, in that lovely long-sleeved wedding kimono with the patterned hem, and her hair up in the
takashimada
style . . .”
⁸

“Yes, she didn’t go down by boat, did she. We used the horse. She stopped off here on her way through, I remember.”

“That’s right. The horse stopped under that cherry there, and just then there was a little flurry of falling petals. That splendid
takashimada
hair was all dotted with them.”

I open my sketchbook again. This scene could be a painting, or a poem. I picture in my mind’s eye the figure of the bride, imagine the scene as if it were before me. Pleased with myself, I jot down

The odd thing is that, although I can clearly picture her clothes and hair, and the horse and the cherry tree, I simply cannot visualize the bride’s face. I try out this one and that, until suddenly the face of Ophelia in Millais’s painting springs unbidden to my mind, fitting itself perfectly under the
takashimada
hair.
⁹
This won’t do, I think, hastily dismantling my careful picture in order to start afresh. But though the clothes and hair, and the horse and cherry tree, all disappear instantly from the scene, the figure of Ophelia, floating, hands folded, down the stream, still hovers dimly in the depths of consciousness, like smoke that a ragged broom cannot quite manage to dispel from the air. I have a weird sense of something like foreboding, as if I have witnessed a comet suddenly trail its light across the sky.

“Right then, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off,” says Gen.

“Drop in again on your way back through. I’m afraid all that rain will have made the Seven Bends difficult to get around.”

“Yes, it’s a bit hard going,” Gen replies as he moves away. His horse sets off behind him.
Clang, clang
goes the bell.

“He’s from Nakoi, is he?”

“Yes, his name’s Genbei.”

“He once led some bride over the pass on his horse?”

“When Shioda’s daughter went down to the town as a bride, they put her on a white horse for the bridal procession, and she came along past here with Genbei on the lead rein. Good heavens, how time flies—it’ll be five years ago this year.”

One who laments her white hair only when she looks in a mirror must be accounted among the happy. This old woman, who first comprehends the swiftness of the turning wheel of Time as she counts off on bent fingers the passage of five years, must then surely be closer to the unworldly mountain immortals than to us humans.

“She would have made a beautiful sight. I wish I’d come to see.”

The old woman gives a chuckle. “You can see her still. If you call in at the hot spring inn, she’ll be sure to come out and greet you.”

“Aha, so she’s in the village now, is she? If only she were still dressed in that wedding kimono with her hair up in the
takashimada
.”

“She may well dress up for you if you ask.”

I very much doubt this, but the old woman does seem remarkably serious. This is just the sort of situation that a journey undertaken in the spirit of artistic “nonemotion” needs to encounter to make it worthwhile.

“She’s very like the Nagara maiden, actually,” remarks the old woman.

“Her face, you mean?”

“No, I mean the way things turned out for her.”

“Really? Who’s this Nagara maiden?”

“The story goes that there was once a beautiful daughter of the village rich man, who went by the name of ‘the Nagara maiden.’”

“Yes?”

“Well, my dear, two men went and fell in love with her at the same time.”

“I see.”

“Her days and nights were spent tossing in an agony over whether she should give her heart to the Sasada man or whether it should be the Sasabe man, and she was sorely torn between them, till finally she composed a poem that went:

And then she threw herself into a pool and drowned.”

Little could I have dreamed that I would find myself in such a poetic place, hearing from such a poetic figure this elegant, time-worn tale, told in such elegant language!

“You ought to take a look at the Nagara maiden’s grave while you’re on your way through. If you go a little over half a mile east from here, you’ll find the old stone grave marker.”

I immediately decide I will do just that.

The old woman continues, “The Nakoi girl had the same ill fortune of being loved by two men, you see. One was a man she met while she was off training in Kyoto. The other was the richest man in the local town.”

“Aha, and which did she give her heart to?”

“She was set on marrying the man in Kyoto, but her parents, no doubt for their own good reasons, made her accept the local man.”

“Well, it’s a blessing she didn’t have to end up throwing herself in a pool, isn’t it.”

“Ah, but . . . this man wanted her on account of her beauty and talent. He may have been very good to her for all I know, but she’d been forced into the marriage and apparently she never got along with him. The family seemed very worried about how it was all going. And then along came this war, and the bank where her husband worked went bankrupt. After that she came back home to Nakoi. People say all sorts of things about her—that she’s heartless and unfeeling, and so on. She was always such a gentle, reserved girl, but these days she’s apparently turning a bit wild. Every time Genbei comes through here, he tells me how worrying she is.”

It would ruin my planned picture to hear any more. I feel rather as if I have at last stumbled upon the magic feather cloak that will turn me into a mountain immortal, only to have some heavenly being come along and demand that I return it.
¹¹
To find myself dragged back down into the vulgar world again, after having braved the perils of those Seven Bends to arrive at this place at last, would destroy the whole point of my aimless journey. If you let yourself become involved with worldly gossip past a certain point, the stench of the human world seeps in through the pores of your skin, and its grime begins to weigh you down.

“This road goes straight through to Nakoi, doesn’t it?” I inquire, rising to my feet and tossing a small coin onto the table.

“If you take a shortcut by following the path down to the right from the Nagara maiden’s gravestone, it’s a quick half mile. The path’s rough, but it’s probably the better way for a young gentleman like yourself. . . . This is very generous payment, sir. . . . Take good care.”

The evening is a strange and unsettling one.

It is eight o’clock at night by the time I arrive at the inn, so even my sense of direction is somewhat confused, let alone my grasp of the layout of the house and the type of garden it has. I am taken along a very winding passageway of some sort, and finally shown into a small, six-mat-sized room. The place is quite unlike my memory of it from the previous visit. I have my dinner, take a bath, return to my room, and am sipping tea when the maid arrives and offers to lay out the bedding. The strange thing is that it is this same maid who has done everything since I arrived—answering the door to me, serving the evening meal, showing me to the bathhouse, and now laying out my bed. What’s more, she has scarcely spoken a word, though she doesn’t seem particularly countrified in her ways. Earlier I followed behind this girl as she wound along the endless passageway-cum-staircase to my room, a chastely knotted red obi around her waist and an old-fashioned oil taper in her hand, and then I followed the same obi and oil taper down the same passageway-cum-staircase, on and on, as she led me to the bathhouse, feeling almost as if I was a figure coming and going in a painting.

While serving my evening meal, she apologizes that I have to put up with a room normally used for other purposes, since the recent lack of guests means the guest rooms haven’t been cleaned. Later, as she leaves after preparing the bedding, she says a gentle, slow “Good night” that has some human warmth to it. But after her footsteps have grown distant and vanished down the twisting corridor, all is hushed and still, and I am uncomfortably aware of the lack of any sense of human presence in the place.

I have had this experience only once before. It was the time I traveled across Boshu province
¹
from Tateyama and followed the coast around on foot between Kazusa and Choshi. One night I stayed at a certain place along the road—I can’t put it any more clearly, since both the name of the area and the name of the inn are now quite forgotten. In fact, I’m not even sure it was an inn where I stayed. It was a high-roofed house, containing only two women. I asked if they could put me up; the older woman said yes, and the younger invited me to follow her. We passed through a number of large, dilapidated rooms to the farthest room, on the mezzanine floor. Having mounted the three steps from the corridor, I was about to enter the room when a clump of bamboo leaning in under the eaves swayed in the evening breeze and brushed its leaves over me from shoulder to head, sending a chill down my spine. The balcony boards were rotting. I observed to the girl that in another year the bamboo shoots would penetrate the balcony and the room would become overwhelmed by bamboo, but her only response was to grin and leave.