by Alan Booth
On the outskirts of the villages stood little shops selling giant radishes and plastic spaceships. I learned to tell from a considerable distance which shops stocked beer. Those that did not had large red Coca-Cola signs or blue Fanta Grape signs tacked to their walls. Those that did displayed advertisements for the local brands of sake in bold black calligraphy: Full Bloom, High Spring Water, Heavenly Longevity, Akita's Glory. There is an ancient dispute among the men of Tohoku as to which of the six prefectures produces the best sake. The keenest rivalry is between Akita in the west and its larger Pacific-coast neighbor, Iwate. The men of Iwate state flatly that their sake is better because their rice is better. The men of Akita counter that their sake is better because their water is better. I have studiously avoided taking sides in this dispute because I have found that, by maintaining a noncommittal silence, I have cup after cup of free sake urged upon me in an effort to elicit the judgment I shall never give. Solomon in all his glory lacked this simple wisdom, or perhaps wasn't thirsty.
At a fork in the road at Kakumagawa I asked two old grandmothers sitting under a tree which road would take me to Hiraka. The one I asked first turned to her companion and giggled into her scarf Her companion smiled toothlessly and jerked her thumb with no apparent conviction towards the road on the left.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
The first giggled, the second nodded. I set off down the road to the left. Thirty minutes later I was back at the tree. The grandmothers had disappeared.
"Hiraka?" said a young man tying six boxes of apples over the rear mudguard of his bicycle. "No problem at all. Road on the right."
Obtaining directions is an artful business and I had blundered. I had named a town twelve kilometers away whereas, had I asked the grandmothers the way to the next village, I might have saved myself half an hour of boot rubber. The trouble was that, much of the time, I couldn't read the characters for the smaller villages, and when I showed my map to grocers and truck drivers and restaurant owners, it turned out that they couldn't read them either.
Along the road, small wayside shrines held empty twisted candle-sticks. Wax had guttered down them and they looked as though they had been basted with pus. At Nozaki—a village so completely hidden among trees that it appeared to have been walled to withstand a siege— a woman told me that in winter the snow is as high as the second-story windows and the villagers tunnel from house to house and from shop to shop like moles. At the next village a pretty girl in Levi shorts skipped up to me, panting, and asked me to write my name in her notepad. She was, I suppose, eighteen. Her notepad had teddy bears printed at the bottom of each page and I signed it with her luminous orange pen.
"I... I saw you from my window," she gasped, hopping from one foot to the other, "... and I... couldn't let a chance... like this... go by." I handed back her pen with a smile whose charm would have melted a two-story snowdrift. She fled.
From far away across the late afternoon fields came the sound of shot-guns, double-echoing through the valley. Three lank black crows hung high in the wind, flapping from a clothesline. And then I saw a man of straw. He was standing in one corner of a ripening field beside a small farm crossroads. He wore a long straw cape and a tattered conical hat, and the stick in his belt proclaimed him. a warrior. His belt was made of twisted rope like the rope that decorates the gateways of shrines. A thicker rope was nailed to the tree above his head and from it hung the white twists of paper that, in Shinto, are the universal charm against evil. He had a face of stuffed white cloth. His features were carefully outlined in black ink, and he stared, not at the crows in the field, but at the deserted crossroads. I started with surprise when I saw him, and I shivered when I turned away and his eyes were on my back.
Outside Hiraka a little girl, perhaps ten years old, had just pulled her knickers down and was getting ready to piss in her front garden. Her two schoolfriends were ecstatic.
"Oooo! Are you going to? Are you really going to?"
I passed the front garden. The little girl saw me, hoisted her knickers, and with a wail of despair vanished into the woodshed.
The great trunk road to Fukushima shudders with the constant pounding of container trucks, and the dust they raise clogs the air in the narrowing valley and swirls in the bottlenecks of the gray Omono River. A day of it coating the roof of my mouth made me long for the cool of the uplands and hills or the sea that was still a week away. But Michinoku plays hide-and-seek among the trucks and clogging dust. The old sake warehouses of Yuzawa have the elaborate frontage of ancient ryokans. The windows are slatted with smooth, grained wood, and the roof tiles are stamped with the crest of the Satake clan, the former daimyo of the valley. In the jammed main street of the old commercial city, narrower than some of the country lanes I had tramped down, the beer shops sell bean curd and the hardware shops sell eel baskets. Through the dust and petroleum haze of the street, the foothills and slopes to the east of Mount Chokai looked as distant as they had from Kakunodate, though I knew they were less than a day away and that by tomorrow night they would lie behind me.
In the early hours of the forty-sixth morning rain began to fall. I hung about after breakfast in the ryokan at Yokobori, drinking cups of green tea and watching the sky. But when I finally set out it was through a slicing rainstorm that hammered the highway and gave the trucks swishing through it the appearance of snowploughs. The rain would ease, then hammer, then ease. In the lulls I could see the splashes of white and gray mist that clung to the slopes of the nearer hills. The further hills were lost to sight, and before the mist could part to reveal them, the rainstorm descended like a net and it was more than I could do to look up from the streaming road.
As the road climbed more and more steeply into the hills, the storm drains beside it swirled faster and faster till the water was churning too fast to be contained and spilled out of them over boots and gutter. There was some shelter under the snowshields that protected the hairpin bends in the highway as it crawled blindly up the flooded mountain. At midday I entered an unlit tunnel and stamped through the chill of it to emerge in front of a battered white signboard that told me I had just crossed the prefectural boundary from Akita into Yamagata.
The rain still eased, then slashed down, then eased. I stopped at a restaurant for lunch, but there was no food. I stopped at a village to buy some food, but all the shops were closed. The road twisted sharply down through the hills until it reached the northern edge of the flat plain of Shinjo, where a narrower road forked off to follow the railway in a sweep to Mamurogawa. August thirteenth—the first day of O-Bon—and on the Shinjo Plain the narrow road was quiet, the railway line curved away gray and gleaming, and the paddies shone like polished slate. If the dead are abroad, I thought, it's because they've been flooded out of their graves.
But the rain had not kept the living at home, and as the afternoon wore on, more and more families came out of their houses and marched to the graveyards. I passed children skipping along in cotton yukatas, fathers carrying babies on their backs, mothers loaded down with kettles and flowers, and grandmothers splashing through the puddles in rainboots, chatting to each other under paper umbrellas. Everyone I saw wore bright summer clothes, the children giggled excitedly, all of the women chuckled and joked, and when I passed them they nodded sagely to each other and said, "Look, he must have been up in the mountains. Look, he's just come down from the mountains."
In the first graveyard a mother and her daughter had set up a small bamboo table in front of a grave. On the table they had placed handfuls of cooked rice wrapped in lotus leaves, slices of watermelon, a tomato, some beans, crackers still in their cellophane wrappings, and a little cup of the cold green tea they were sitting drinking. The rain ran down their umbrellas and pattered onto the plastic sheets they sat on, but they laughed as they talked and drank their tea.
In the next graveyard the same makeshift tables had been set up for half a dozen graves, and although they were a good way back from the road, I could hear t
he noisy chatter of the families, spreading their mats, unwrapping their riceballs, trying to light sticks of incense in the rain, trying to keep their candles dry for evening. Children played hide-and-seek among the trees, the girls in pink, the boys in blue. By the time I reached the third graveyard the rain had given way to a fine damp mist and dusk had started to gather.
One by one the candles on the graves flickered and settled into a glow. In the distance the tiny pricks of light pinpointed another grave-yard and, beyond that, another, stretching back towards the dark shape of the mountains. The rusty cola tins in the wayside shrines had been replaced with bright red new ones, candles scorched the cobwebs inside the shrines, and the old guttered wax melted slowly into life. From the nearest graves the dry sweet smell of incense leavened the odd stench of burning I had smelled all day. Across the darkening fields came the sound of a shotgun, like a ripple back and forth down the valley, and as I walked into the little town of Mamurogawa I could hear the low steady note of a temple bell.
"Look at the sky," a barber told me, standing rooted in the road outside his shop. I turned and looked. In the space of perhaps five minutes the entire western sky had turned a brilliant flaming orange, the color of tangerine peel, the color of bonfires.
"I've seen that once before in my life," said the barber, hardly moving his lips. "Only once. This is the second time."
At a ryokan I slid open the door and called out in a loud voice from the entrance hall. There was no reply. I called out again; there was no reply. I waited a minute and called out again; there was no reply. I heaved off my pack and stamped about in the damp entrance hall, making as many loud noises as I could. A voice asked me to wait. I waited three minutes and called out again. There was no reply. I called out again. Finally, the screen inched slowly open and an old man in blue-and-white striped pajamas peered round the doorpost.
"Are there any rooms free?"
"Rooms?" the old man wheezed.
"Rooms, yes."
"But today is O-Bon."
"You mean you re closed?"
"Of course we're closed."
The old man shook his head and started to chuckle. He was still chuckling as I trudged off towards the station.
At the second ryokan I got exactly the same response, but this time I was dealing with a motherly woman and with motherly women I am on firmer ground.
"What terrible weather! What an exhausting day! Would you believe I've walked all the way from..."
In two minutes I had a room, a dry kimono, and was slipping into a warm bath, my mind adrift among hillocks of hot food. When I came out of the bathroom the woman was waiting for me.
"O-niisan (elder brother)," she began, "I suppose you know that today is O-Bon, so naturally we haven't got any meat."
"That's all right," I said, brightly, "I didn't expect meat."
"We haven't got any fish either."
"Ah..."(less brightly).
"And there's no cooked rice—except for the graves. And we haven't boiled any vegetables. And the shops were all closed so we didn't buy fruit. In fact, there isn't anything at all."
The woman beamed up at me cheerfully. I grinned the grin of the thoroughly desperate.
"But we've got a few pickles and a drop of sake, so if you'd like to sit with my son and me..."
I spent the evening sitting in the living room with the woman and her twenty-year-old son, eating tiny pickles out of a tiny dish, drinking steaming hot cups of "First Grandchild" till the bottle was finished, and when the bottle was finished, we opened another. Later on, we sang the song of Mamurogawa.
I am a plum flower of Mamurogawa,
you are a nightingale of Shinjo.
You do not wait for my flower to bloom;
you come while I'm still in bud.
I dreamed a dream, I dreamed a dream,
I dreamed of us and of our wedding;
our marriage cups were full and flowing;
we raised them—and I woke.
From time to time I heard an old man muttering and laughing to himself in the room next door. Once or twice the woman got up and took a jug of sake into the room, and when she did this the sound of the old man's laughter grew louder. Then she would come back, closing the door quietly behind her, and the laughter would settle into a gurgle again. Who was it, I wondered? Her husband in his cups? Or some dead ancestor come back to watch a half-starved foreigner eat tiny vegetables out of a tiny dish?
This was O-Bon. The real O-Bon. There is nothing like it in the cities. The people of Tokyo may visit the odd grave, but they still demand their hamburger steaks and knock back their whiskeys-and-water. Mamurogawa was a different world. I felt curiously content as I crawled into my futon that night, and the thought of O-Bon in the northern mountains warmed my stomach even though it was empty.
4
Summer Lights, Summer Shadows
A wind blew through the gorge of the Mogami River, whitening the choppy water as it swirled in midstream. The water swirled one way, the wind blew the other, buffeting the long thin tourist boats that skimmed down the rapids toward the city of Sakata.
The seventeenth-century poet Basho Matsuo came wandering down this same windy gorge on the northern journey he described in Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the End of the World). Basho is considered one of the supreme masters of haiku―poems consisting of a bare seventeen syllables that seek to evoke a mood or tone through the fleeting juxtaposition of images and sounds. The trouble is that when you start trying to translate haiku into English, their surface simplicity can cause them to resemble the captions in somebody's snapshot album:
Swelled by early summer rain,
swiftly flows Mogami River.
The boatmen, sitting hunched over the outboard motors that power their craft through the slicks of the current, celebrate their profession with the same simplicity. A loudspeaker in the stern of the boat sends their old work song echoing through the riverside drive-ins where it competes with the taped Hawaiian guitars; and the tourists in the boats, fortified against the wind with whiskey, sit cooing, clapping, and attempting to sing the chorus:
Look after yourself while I'm in Sakata.
Mind you don't catch influenza.
Enya-ee! Enya-ee-to!
Enya-kora! Makase!
As the valley widened down to the plain the wind blew stronger, raking the rice in long supple waves. To the north the peak of Mount Chokai was awash with clouds that scurried past it like waifs from an ogre. I sat on a grass bank oiling my boots and was tormented by children.
"Hey, yoo! Hey, yoo! Ziss iz a penn! Jap'neze boy! Goooh! Goooh! Wass yah naymu? Wass yah naymu?"
"Look," I said wearily, "why don't you all go for a nice long swim in the rapids?"
A hush fell over the children while their stunned little minds tackled the unimaginable: the thing could speak intelligible language. They came a step closer.
"You speak Japanese?"
"Not a word," I said in Japanese. "You'd better get an interpreter."
I screwed the cap on my tin of oil and stuffed it back inside my pack.
"Would you like to play catchball?"
"Sorry, I've got to go."
"Would you like to meet a married woman?"
"Next time round."
I laced my boots and trudged off down the bank, pondering my answers to both those questions.
Outside the little resort of Kusanagi the moored boats tossed in the narrowed river. The boatmen sprawled smoking on the boathouse ramps or readied their outboard motors for the slow chug back up-stream. The last of the afternoon pleasure craft came gliding into sight round the final bend, the passengers singing in the August chill, the boatman patting the wooden tiller.
...bear me no grudge, but blame the wind.
Enya-kora! Makase!
The wind shunted me up the long main street of the little town of Karikawa, spinning the yellowed paper lanterns that hung in the gateways of almost all the houses. Above the lanterns, t
ied to the gateposts, bundles of pampas grass and bush clover whipped this way and that, whirring and crackling, and outside the little supermarket a man was setting up a taiko drum.
It was the first night of the Dance of the Dead. The woman at the ryokan brought me a pounded rice cake covered with green and purple beanpaste. When dark had fallen I left the ryokan and clumped through the empty streets in a pair of geta that scraped the skin off my heels. The rattling lanterns were all alight and the furry pampas grass stropped the gateposts in the darkness. There was no one on the streets, and the absence of any light but the pale jerking lanterns lent an eeriness to the rustle of the leaves and the hollow clack of my geta.
In a quarter of an hour I had found the gravelly car park where the dancing was to take place, with its squat wooden tower and its strings of pink lights madly bouncing. Most small-town Bon dances take place in school playgrounds or in the spaces in front of public buildings. Here, as usual, a little tower had been set up in the middle of the dancing area and hung with red and white festival cloths that twisted and flapped in the northern wind. The tower houses the source of the music, whether live or recorded, and the two small makeshift taiko tied to the rail at the top of this one were hardly larger than saucepan lids. Children clambered up and down the tower ladder and took turns banging the taiko, but the sound they produced was inaudible above the hideously amplified noise of The Ventures playing "Jingle Bell Rock."
I crunched about the gravel round the edge of the car park, wincing in my geta and looking for a beer stall. The teenagers of the town were gyrating in neat lines while their kimonoed parents stood winking approval. Two little primary school girls performed a complex bit of hip-swiveling choreography with their faces buried in candyfloss (there was a candyfloss stall but it sold no beer). At eight, just as I had made up my mind to go in search of a more fluid celebration, the rock music stopped. The teenagers and their kimonoed parents formed two concentric circles round the tower, a ten-ton needle thumped into a record groove, the loudspeakers crackled with static, and the first bars of "Dewa Sanzan Ondo," outtwanging The Ventures by about fifty phons, ushered in for the little town of Karikawa its annual flirtation with the ghosts.