The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  "Say goodnight to Aran-san."

  "Goodnight, Piko-san," I said.

  The old woman quietly turned out the light and, with her friend, disappeared down the dark passage toward her kitchen.

  The morning of September seventh, the seventy-first morning of my walk, was another baking hot one, and these Ishikawa roads were be-having oddly—continuing for several kilometers broad and tree-lined between smart little ball-valve factories and neat green lawns, then trailing off into thin rubble tracks, then suddenly broad and surfaced again. There was absolutely no traffic. The little village of Ataka, where I stopped to ask directions, seemed as empty as a ghost town, and I had to rattle the doors of three shops before I found one open. In the dark, dusty cool of the shop, a tall old man with white hair and no teeth treated me to a lecture on village history, while a fighter plane screamed low over the rooftops, circled tightly out to sea, then screamed back round the same circuit like a toy plane on a wire.

  "That's the trouble," the old man said, growling up at the ceiling from which small specks of dust were flaking down onto his bananas. "The commercial jets we could put up with; there's only half a dozen a day. But these blasted Self-Defense Force training flights—take-offs and landings and what have you—an you wonder people move away, and the ones that don't stay locked up indoors? In fine weather it goes on from morning till night. It's enough to make you pray for a storm."

  Where was the airport, I asked, looking at my map.

  "About three kilometers down the road. There was an airfield there during the war. Then the Americans came and chewed it up with bulldozers, and we were all allowed to farm the land. Everyone grew plots of rice there, me included, and we got a couple of fair harvests out of it. But as soon as this Self-Defense lark started, the government— the Japanese government, mind you―came and took the land away again with not so much as a please or thank you, so today we've got cracked eardrums instead of suppers."

  The old man gave me the directions I wanted to the site of the Ataka barrier gate. He also gave me a withering scowl.

  "What on earth d'you want to go and see that for?"

  "I'm interested in history."

  He squinted down at the little cassette recorder that I carried in a pouch on my belt for making notes.

  "You a writer, then?" he asked, perceptively (someone else had thought it was a digital brandy flask). Yes, I told him, I had written a few things.

  "Well, just you remember this," he said, getting up off his stool for the conclusion of his lecture, so that he stood a good deal taller than I did: "A country is like a sheet of paper; it's got two sides. On one side there's a lot of fancy lettering—that's the side that gets flaunted about in public. But there's always a reverse side to a piece of paper— a side that might have ugly doodlings on it, or bits of graffiti, or goodness knows what. If you're going to write about a country, make good and sure you write about both sides."

  With this admonition swimming in my head, I crossed the narrow Ataka River and clumped down through a grove of silent pine trees to the welcoming, one-sided sea.

  The dune at Ataka where the pine trees stand, amid which—

  How clear! This ancient barrier gate!

  That poem was written in 1933, and the poet was, quite properly, exercising her fancy. There is no barrier gate, nor was there one then. In the eight hundred years since the shogun Yoritomo is supposed to have set up a barrier here, the sea has eaten a good half kilometer into the coast, and the gate, if it ever existed in physical form, is now a mass of barnacles. But the site is that of one of the best-known incidents in Japanese legend—an incident celebrated in the popular Kabuki play Kanjincho (The Subscription List). It is worth summarizing the plot of this play for the example it contains of the tension between duty (giri) and humanity (ninjo), a tension that some maintain still forms the basis of much Japanese thought and behavior.

  The shogun's younger brother, Yoshitsune, a victim of fraternal jealousy, fled the capital in 1187 and made for the far north. To prevent his escape, the shogun commanded the setting up of barrier gates in all the provinces. Yoshitsune was fortunate in having as a retainer a man of prodigious wit and strength called Benkei. (The relationship between Yoshitsune and Benkei is similar to that between their con-temporaries Robin Hood and Little John, and, interestingly, legend has them meet in the same way—on a bridge where they fight each other to establish superiority. In the English story Little John wins but sees in his adversary a leader worth following. This would never do in Japan, where feudal propriety requires the lord to hold all the trump cards, so Yoshitsune gains the victory, turning Benkei's subservience into a nice uncomplicated norm.)

  In order to pass the Ataka barrier, Benkei and the other retainers have disguised themselves as yamabushi, or mountain priests," fierce Buddhist mendicants who went about armed with iron-tipped staves. Yoshitsune, at Benkei's suggestion, is inconspicuously dressed as their bearer and brings up the rear. But the guardian of the gate, a samurai called Togashi, has been forewarned of Benkei's ruse and has made up his mind to kill all yamabushi on sight, so when the fugitives approach the barrier, their plight is more serious than they realize.

  Benkei confronts Togashi with the story that they are collecting donations for the restoration of a great temple and Togashi abruptly demands to see his list of subscribers. Benkei, of course, has no such list, but he calmly draws a blank scroll from his pack, holds it close to his face so that Togashi cannot read it, and brilliantly improvises the sort of elaborate formal preamble that such a document would require. Togashi's suspicions are aroused, however, and he sneaks a glimpse of the blank scroll, which plunges him straight into the giri-versus-ninjo dilemma. Benkei is lying, and Togashi's duty demands that he kill or take them all prisoner. But, as a man, he cannot help admiring the fearless way in which Benkei is conducting himself; so instead of ordering their arrest, he cross-examines Benkei on the garments, habits, and beliefs of yamabushi. Benkei, whose father was a priest and who has taken religious orders himself, answers all the questions faultlessly, displaying an astonishing knowledge of Buddhist arcana. Togashi is so overawed that he gives permission for the fugitives to march through the barrier, which they begin to do. But then the disguised Yoshitsune is pointed out to him, and the conflict between admiration and duty flares up once again. Togashi orders the bearer to halt.

  Benkei now delivers his masterstroke. Pretending to be angry that the bearer's sluggish pace has caused them to be delayed again, he seizes a staff and beats Yoshitsune, threatening to kill him. Togashi is aghast. Raising a hand against one's lord is an unpardonable sin, and if the bearer really is Yoshitsune, then by all the codes of feudal behavior Benkei has no recourse but suicide. So moved is Togashi that he swiftly restrains Benkei and sends the whole party on its way.

  As soon as Togashi is out of sight Benkei grovels apologetically be-fore Yoshitsune, who nobly forgives him for saving his life and then priggishly recites the tale of his own woes, especially the persecution he has suffered at the hands of his brother, to whom he was completely loyal, thus rounding out the theme of fidelity and disgrace. Finally Togashi reappears and offers Benkei some sake, which he consumes in massive doses out of the lid of a tub. He then performs a lively dance while the members of his party steal away, having "trodden on the tail of a tiger."

  The Greeks wouldn't have seen a play in it at all. Shakespeare might have turned it into an entertaining episode (a bit like Gad's Hill probably), though his attention would no doubt have focused on Togashi, the complex man of divided loyalties, caught between the worlds of responsibility and moral courage. But for the Japanese dramatist and his audience, the real hero of the affair is Benkei, a figure of simple-minded devotion, taking his life into his hands for a lord who displays far less wit and invention than he does. His heroic stature is enhanced by the fact that he drinks like a fish and is uncommonly clever with words.

  At the cash desk of the little Ataka museum the custodian yawned and dr
owsed, while an endless tape droned out the tale of the subscription list to the ears of a bronze Togashi and Benkei, who stood immortalized on a large plinth outside the shuttered "rest house." The noodle shops and restaurants were all closed, including the Tea Room Sydney. Plywood cutouts of the three Kabuki characters, with holes for sightseers to poke their faces through, had been set up in front of a big hooded camera; but there were no sightseers, no cameraman, no movement or sound whatever—only the endless drone of the tape and the soft wash of the patient sea that, eight hundred years into the future, will have found all these lovely new monuments to lavish barnacles on.

  It began to rain as I was tramping through the nearby hot spring resort of Katayamazu, but none of the huge Western-style hotels (The Grand Hotel, The Kaga Plaza) looked inviting enough for me to want to spend the night in them. Nor did the flashy little boutiques, nor the neon strip joints, nor the Adult Shop Venus entice me on this stormy afternoon; though it was nice to think of Yoshitsune and his friends emerging from their perils at the Ataka barrier to find all these entertainments waiting for them: honey traps more sticky than the shogun could devise.

  I trudged on into the city of Daishoji, where the woman who ran the ryokan I stayed at delivered opinions on the weather with the air of a professional meteorologist.

  "It's not going to rain today," she promised as I left her looking up at the sky next morning. Parts of the streets had dried out in the night but the wind was still high and the clouds dark and ugly. Within five minutes of the womans forecast great spots of rain had begun to come down again—first a drizzle, then a downpour—and this was to prove the most memorable rain of a long rainy summer.

  In April the cherry blossoms open and fall; in June the steady rains come, coating the shoes in the shoe cupboard with white mold. In October the maples turn startling crimson; in the winter months, on the Japan Sea coast, the snow lies so deep that in the mountain villages people must burrow about like moles. Japan is a land of vivid seasons, glowing, cruel, blessed, or cursed. Autumn brings the fiery leaves and it also brings typhoons.

  The worst typhoon of the year was Typhoon 9. The Americans christened it Babe, but in Japan it was called the Okinoerabu Typhoon after the small island, 350 kilometers south of the southernmost tip of Kyushu, where towards midnight on September ninth it caused the lowest atmospheric pressure ever recorded in the Japanese islands (907.3 millibars). The eye of Typhoon 9 never came closer than that to the mainland. It was spawned eight thousand kilometers away in the South Pacific and finally blew itself out in China after striking land near the mouth of the Yangtze River. But its claws had a ferocious reach. In Japan Typhoon 9 sparked fifty-seven landslides, killed one person and injured scores, closed four hundred roads, buried or blew down five thousand houses and flooded three thousand more. It dumped rain in torrents all over the country. In poor little Okinoerabu, at its height, an incredible 1.37 inches fell in the space of ten minutes, while the wind screeched through the treetops at more than 196 feet a second.

  Here, as I crossed the prefectural boundary from Ishikawa into Fukui on the morning of the eighth, the wind loosened rooftiles, overturned bicycles, and spun plastic detergent containers in wild pink dances across the teeming roads. The rain ran down my face like little rivers, and in the streaming chill of it my bones ached. There was nowhere to shelter, nothing to do but to trudge on singing songs to myself that I could barely hear above the noise the wind made. In the rain and wind of Typhoon 9 I climbed the thirty-six kilometers of twisting mountain roads that lead to the great Zen temple of Eiheiji.

  It was dark when I reached the gate of the temple and too late to stay

  there as a guest. The government lodging house was full, and the man at the desk looked stunned when I interrupted his careful explanation of how to get to the youth hostel and told him I would rather stay at a ryokan.

  "Do you mean a Japanese ryokan...?"

  But there were no ryokans of any kind to be had that night. It was shiizun ofu. (offseason), the man explained, and they would all be either closed or reluctant to take anything short of a busload. In the end I found a room above one of the small souvenir shops that crowded the road to the temple gate, and collapsed gratefully onto the floor of it. Drenched, cold, and very tired, I hung my dripping clothes over an electric fire to dry them and lay down to sleep as soon as dinner was over. The wind still roared and the rain beat upon the windows of my room as though they were taiko drums. All night the claws of the typhoon ripped at the shuttered streets, at the six-hundred-year-old cedar trees, and at the carved wooden gates and thin paper screens of Eiheiji, the Temple of Eternal Peace.

  By morning the claws had worn themselves blunt and a quieter, gentler rain was falling. In the gentler rain, as I strolled round Eiheiji, the roofs of the temple shone like old silver, and the green moss in the cluttered gardens looked preened and vibrant and freshly alive. Eiheiji is a vast, beautiful temple, its rooms and halls connected to each other by corridors and long flights of covered wooden steps. Black-robed monks with shaven heads and trainee monks in loose black jackets and trousers sauntered through the corridors and halls with little smirks on their scrubbed faces, ignoring the tourists who were being ushered about, shuffling and whispering; and as the rain still fell, the rustle of robes, the ring of curious fingers brushing a gong, the patter of slippered feet on the cold, smooth boards or the shush of silk tabi socks over soft straw matting—all rose and fell in volume like the gasps of air in a bamboo flute and left in their wake a greater silence than before.

  The churches of Europe—the great ones—soar up in dizzying verticals at the sky. Eiheyi hugs the contours of the earth. When the sun strikes the stained-glass windows of a cathedral they explode in primary colors like a carousel. But the colors of Eiheiji are earth colors—the somber greens of the garden, the browns and grays of smooth polished wood and slate, the soft gold color of old tatami. The builders of the Christian churches of Europe―churches in which a religion of humility is preached—seem often boastful, often to be saying to us: "Now, look here, this is the House of God. It is here—here—not over the road with those dingy Presbyterians but here in this church that God dwells." The builders of Eiheiji were a lot less strident: "Oh, God dwells in our temple, if you like. But then, he dwells in everything else as well—in clods of earth, in the eyes of the blind, in the pebbles of the seashore as well as in our shrines."

  The landscape of the mountains,

  the sound of streams—

  all are the body and voice of Buddha.

  Eiheiji was founded in the middle of the thirteenth century by the author of that poem, a priest named Dogen. Dogen had spent four of his most formative years in China, being trained in Zen at Mount T'ien-t'ung, and because the Chinese are a practical people, his revelations, when they came, were of a practical kind. Dogen did not look for spirits in the air or worship an arcane, invisible Buddha who moved only in mysterious ways. "The truth is everywhere," he insisted. "The truth is where we are. One small step separates earth from heaven."

  Despite the comparative sobriety of its architecture, Zen often seems to inspire in its adherents a supercilious attitude to the rest of mankind; an attitude that delights in one-upmanship, in riddles, puzzles, and the power of extraordinary experience. But Dogen maintained that in order to grasp the meaning of existence it was not necessary for a per-son to be unusually clever or to spend his life doing remarkable things. Simply by "sitting still and doing nothing" a man could discover what there was to be learned about life. Prayer and ritual .were important to Dogen, but not much more so than cooking or sweeping the yard. All functions of the body, including the most basic, became, in the temple he founded, limbs of Zen. The toilet in Eiheiji contains an altar to Ususama Myo-o (The Guardian of the Impure), and together with the bath and the meditation hall, it is one of the three places in the temple where speech is forbidden and where a particularly strict code of contemplative behavior is observed by everyone who enters. It was D
ogen's intention to make of Zen not an abstract philosophy, but a practice. The advice he gave his meditating disciples was blunt, straightforward, and mind-wrenchingly practical:

  Think of not thinking.

  How do you think of not thinking?

  By not thinking.

  The rain had stopped when I left Eiheiji and began the long descent of the mountain. Blue dragonflies danced over the grass by the road-side and parched brown grasshoppers with lemon-colored wings flitted with soft clicks from stalk to stalk. I imagined the dragonflies dancing around Dogen on his trips to and from the temple, and his seeing in them, as he saw in all things, an endlessly renewable shard of the Buddha.

  Then, as I walked, I noticed that several of the dragonflies had stopped dancing and were beating their wings against the dirt. I bent to look at them and I saw at once that all the dragonflies were dying. There was not a soul on the road and no sound but the click of the lemon-winged grasshoppers. I watched the dragonflies for a while as they shook in this heat that had come after the typhoon. Then I stood up and walked down the mountain, across the highway and the shady river, and on into the meadows of Fukui.

  That afternoon I felt more drained than at any other time on this four-month journey. It was not a depression exactly, nor one of the passing spells of frustration that I had grown so used to dealing with, but a deep emptiness not rooted in anything that I could readily ex-plain or shrug away. I tramped on through the harvest wondering why it was I felt like this. Because the summer was ending? Because dragonflies die? Because I knew, as I had known for years, that I did not have the strength or the patience to sit for so much as an hour and think of not thinking?

  The sun came out near the town of Sabae and shone on the trees, still green and wonderfully fresh from the rain. It shone on the brown faces of village women who smiled at me on their way home from the fields. It shone on the golden heads of rice that were waiting for the women to come and cut them. The holiness of living things can scoop a terrible hollow in a pilgrim's stomach. Blake would have got along well with Dogen.