Kusamakura (6 page)

That night I couldn’t sleep for the rustling of the bamboo near my pillow. Opening the screen doors to the balcony, I looked out and discovered that the garden was a sea of grass. I let my eyes travel out over the scene through the bright summery moonlight; the grass flowed on into a great grassy hill beyond, without any intervening hedge or wall. Directly beyond the hill the breakers of the mighty ocean thundered in to menace the world of man. I didn’t sleep a wink until dawn, and as I lay there grimly, hour upon hour inside the eerie tent of the mosquito net, I felt I had strayed into the gothic realm of those popular romantic tales of a previous era.

I have been on many journeys since then, but never again until this night in Nakoi have I had a similar experience.

Lying there on my back, I happen to open my eyes and notice hanging above the sliding doors a piece of calligraphy framed in red lacquer. Even from where I lie, I can clearly read the words: “Bamboo shadows sweep the stair, but no dust moves.”
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I can also make out that the signature seal gives the calligrapher’s name as Daitetsu. Now I am in no way a connoisseur of calligraphy, but I have always loved the style of the Obaku Zen priest Kosen. There’s a lot to be said for the calligraphy of Ingen, Sokuhi, and Mokuan as well,
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but Kosen’s writing is the most powerful and meticulous. Looking at these seven characters before me now, both the handling of the brush and the flow of the writing hand convince me that it must be the work of Kosen. But this cannot be so, as the signature is Daitetsu. I consider the possibility that there might also have been a priest named Daitetsu in the Obaku sect at that time, but the paper looks far too new. It can surely only be a recent work.

I turn on my side. Now my eyes take in the painting of cranes by Jakucho that hangs in the alcove.
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Art being my line of work, I registered this as a superb piece when I first entered the room. Most of Jakuchu’s works have a quite delicate coloration, but this crane is executed with a single defiant brushstroke. The featherlight, egg-shaped body poised jauntily on its single leg has a wonderful rightness to it, and the sense of nonchalant ease continues right down to the tip of the beak. Beside the alcove is a single shelf with a cupboard beyond. What is in the cupboard I cannot tell.

I slip into a peaceful sleep, into dream.

The Nagara maiden in her long-sleeved kimono is riding over the mountain pass on a white horse when suddenly the Sasada man and the Sasabe man leap out on her from either side and both begin to pull at her. The girl now suddenly becomes Ophelia, lying upon a drifting willow branch in the water’s flow, singing beautifully. I pick up a long pole and race along the bank in search of a place from which to rescue her, but she floats away and is lost to sight, singing and smiling, apparently perfectly at ease. I stand calling desperately after her, the pole over my shoulder.

Then I awaken. My armpits are soaked with sweat. What an extraordinary jumble of the poetic and the vulgar that dream was! I think in bemusement. The early Zen priest Daie is said to have suffered greatly from the fact that even the enlightened mind, which has mastered the illusion of reality, is still troubled by dreams of the vulgar world. I can quite see his point. One whose calling in life is the arts surely doesn’t cut much of a figure if his dreams aren’t a bit more tasteful than the norm. I roll over, thinking to myself that most of my dream is quite useless from the point of view of a painting or a poem—and suddenly moonlight is pouring in through the paper screen doors onto the balcony, steeping them with the slanting shadows of several branches from the tree beyond. It is a brilliantly clear spring night.

Perhaps I am imagining it, but I think I can hear someone softly singing. I strain to catch the sound, wondering whether the song of my dream has somehow slipped out into the real world, or whether a voice from the real world has insinuated itself into the distant realm of my dream. Yes, someone is definitely singing. Small, low voice though it is, a thin thread of sound is pulsing faintly in the sleepy spring night. Strangely, it’s not only the melody that comes to me; when I concentrate, I can also make out the song’s words, though catching them from such distant singing would seem impossible. They are repeating over and over the song of the Nagara maiden:

At first the voice sounds quite close to the balcony, but it grows gradually fainter and more distant. When a thing finishes abruptly, you register the abruptness of its ending, and the loss is not deeply moving to you. A voice that breaks off decisively will produce a decisive feeling of completion in the listener. But when a phenomenon fades naturally away toward nothing with no real pause or break, the listening heart shrinks with each dwindling minute and each waning second to a thinner forlornness. Like the beloved dying husband who yet does not die, the guttering flame that still flickers on, this song racks my heart with anticipation of its end and holds within its melody all the bitter sorrows of the world’s transient springs.

I have been listening from my bed, and as the song grows more distant, my ears ache to follow, though aware that they are being lured. With the dwindling of that voice, these ears long to rise of their own accord and fly in yearning pursuit of it. A bare second before the last pulse of sound must surely no longer reach my straining hearing, I can bear it no longer, and in a moment I have slipped from the bed and opened the screen doors to the balcony. The lower part of my legs is instantly bathed in moonlight. The tree shadows fall wavering over my night robe.

When I first slide open the paper doors, I notice none of this. Where is that voice? My eyes seek the place where my eager ears have already guessed the answer lies—and there it stands, a vague shadowy shape withdrawn from the moonlight, its back to the trunk of what, judging from the blossoms, might be an aronia tree. Before I have even an instant to try to comprehend what it is, the black shape turns and moves off to the right, trampling the shadow of the blossoms as it goes. Then a tall woman’s form slides fluidly around the corner, and the edge of the building that my own room is part of hides her instantly from sight.

I stand entranced at the doors awhile longer, clad only in the single layer of the inn’s night robe, until I come to myself again and realize that the spring night in this mountain village is in fact extremely cold. Then I return to the hollow of bedclothes from which I earlier emerged, where I begin to ponder what I have just witnessed. I extract my pocket watch from beneath the pillow. It is ten minutes past one. Pushing it back under the pillow, I think some more. This can’t possibly have been an apparition. If it wasn’t an apparition, it must be a human, and if human, it was a woman. Perhaps it was the daughter of the household. But it’s surely rather unseemly for a woman separated from her husband to come out at night like this into a garden, and one that merges into the wild hill beyond. Well, be that as it may, the fact is I can’t sleep. Even the watch under my pillow intrudes on my thoughts with its ticking. I’ve never been bothered before by the sound of my pocket watch, but tonight it seems to be urging and berating me—
Let’s think, let’s think,
it instructs.
Don’t sleep, don’t sleep.
Damn the thing!

If you see something frightening simply as what it is, there’s poetry in it; if you step back from your reactions and view something uncanny on its own terms, simply as an uncanny thing, there’s a painting there. It’s precisely the same if you choose to take heartbreak as the subject for art. You must forget the pain of your own broken heart and simply visualize in objective terms the tender moments, the moments of empathy or unhappiness, even the moments most redolent with the pain of heartbreak. These will then become the stuff of literature and art. Some will manufacture an impossible heartbreak, put themselves through its agonies, and crave its pleasures. The average man considers this to be sheer folly and madness. But someone who willfully creates the lineaments of unhappiness and chooses to dwell in this construction has, it must be said, gained precisely the same vantage point as the artist who can produce from his own being some supernatural landscape and then proceed to delight in his self-created magical realm. In this respect the many artists of the world are madder and more foolish than the average man, at least insofar as they are artists. (I say nothing of how they may be in their everyday guise.) While we are on our journey, shod in our straw sandals as of yore, we may do nothing but grumble about its hardships from dawn to dusk, but when we come to tell the tale to others, we will never make a murmur of such complaints. No, we will speak smugly of its fascinations and pleasures and even proudly prattle on about all those things that annoyed us so much at the time. We do so not from any intention to deceive ourselves, or to lie to others. Rather, the contradiction arises because on the journey we are our everyday selves, while when we tell its tale we speak as poets. I suppose you could say that the artist is one who lives in a three-cornered world, in which the corner that the average person would call “common sense” has been sheared off from the ordinary four-square world that the normal inhabit.

For this reason, be it in nature or in human affairs, the artist will see the glitter of priceless jewels of art in places where the common herd fears to tread. The vulgar mind terms it “romanticizing,” but it is no such thing. In fact, the phenomenal world has always contained that scintillating radiance that artists find there. It’s just that eyes blinded by worldly passions cannot see the true nature of reality. Inextricable entanglements bind us to the common world; we are beset by obsessions with everyday success and failure and by ardent hopes—and so we pass by unheeding, until a Turner reveals for us in his painting the splendor of the steam train, or an Okyo gives us the beauty of a ghost.
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The apparition I have just seen, if viewed simply as that, would certainly be rich with poetry for anyone, no matter who saw or spoke of it. A hot spring in some little village tucked away from the world, the shadow of blossoms on a spring evening, murmured song in moonlight, a dimly lit figure—every element is a perfect subject for the artist. And here I am, confronted with this perfect subject, engaging in useless debates and inquiries on it! Chill reason has intruded itself on this precious realm of refined beauty; tremulous distaste has trampled upon this unsought moment of artistic elegance. Under the circumstances, it’s meaningless to profess my vaunted “nonemotional” approach. I must put myself through a bit more training in the discipline before I’m qualified to boast to others that I am a poet or artist. I’ve heard that an Italian artist of times gone by, one Salvator Rosa, risked his life to join a gang of bandits through his single-minded desire to make a study of a robber.
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Having so jauntily set off on this journey, sketchbook tucked into my kimono, I would be ashamed to show any less resolve.

In order to regain the poetic point of view on this occasion,

I have only to set up before myself my own feelings, then take a step back from them and calmly, dispassionately investigate their true nature. The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world. There are various ways to achieve this, but the most successful immediate one is to try jotting everything down in seventeen-syllable haiku form, with whatever words spring to mind. The haiku is the simplest and handiest form of poetry; you can compose one with ease while you’re washing your face, or on the toilet, or on a train. But that’s no reason to disparage the haiku. No one should try to claim that because the haiku is easily achieved, becoming a poet therefore costs one little, and since to be a poet is to be in some sense enlightened, enlightenment must therefore be easily achieved. I believe that the simpler a thing is, the greater is its virtue, and thus the haiku should rather be revered.

Let’s imagine something has made you a little angry. Then and there you put your anger into seventeen syllables. No sooner do you do so than your anger is transformed into that of another. You cannot be angry and write a haiku at the same time. Or say you weep a little. Put those tears into seventeen syllables and there you are, you are immediately happy. Making a haiku of your tears frees you from their bitterness; now you are simply happy to be a man who is capable of weeping.

This has long been my conviction. Now the time has come to put my belief into action, and I lie here in bed trying out this and that haiku in my head. Since I must approach this task as a conscientious discipline, I open my sketchbook and lay it by the pillow, knowing that I must write down any poems that come or my focus will blur and my attempts come to nothing.

I first write

Reading it over, I feel it isn’t particularly interesting, but neither is it downright bad. Then I try

This one has too many season words.
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Still, what does it matter? The point of the exercise is simply to become calm and detached.

But this one is quite absurd, and I have to laugh.

At this rate all will be well. I am now enjoying myself, and I begin jotting down poem after poem as each occurs to me.