“Re: WEIRD JAPAN QUESTION” dinged into my inbox in the middle of the night. “Sounds like a cool piece,” Alex wrote. He had looked into the Koga question, and as far as he could tell, Shikoku was a red herring. Koga had never lived there. Nor was he a Shinto priest. He had indeed joined a religious group, but it was Seicho-no-Ie, “the House of Growth,” a spiritual movement founded in the 1930s. Seicho-no-Ie fuses Christianity with Buddhism and Shintoism. After prison, Koga became the head of its branch in Hokkaido, the snowy island in northern Japan where he had been born and raised. He married the daughter of the group’s leader and changed his name to reflect that he’d been adopted into her family: Hiroyasu Arechi. “Arechi” was an unusual Japanese name, formed from characters that meant “wild land” or “barren ground.” “If you want to get really literary,” Alex told me, “Arechi” was also a Japanese translation of the title of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” But that was only a coincidence.
Seicho-no-Ie struck a chord, so I looked it up in one of the Mishima biographies. There it was: the writer’s grandmother had been a member. When Koga said at his trial that to live as a Japanese is to live the history of Japan, he was quoting one of the group’s teachings.
Then Alex sent me a link that made me cover my mouth with my hand. Koga/Arechi retired in 2012 and moved to the other end of the country, to the city of Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu. The link led to a video from the website of an apartment complex in Kumamoto. In it, a 65-year-old man named Hiroyasu Arechi answers questions about being a new resident. He mentions at the beginning that he is from Hokkaido. He wears a black V-neck sweater over a red-and-white gingham sport shirt. His features match those of the young Koga in a photograph I’d seen of him posing with fellow Tatenokai conspirators, looking fierce in their ridiculous faux-military uniforms.
The older man in the video has warm eyes. As he speaks, we see a bit of his apartment in the background. Flowers hanging on a light-flooded balcony. A cream-colored curtain, tied back. An inset picture on the website shows a console table that holds framed photographs of what look like children and grandchildren. A couple holding hands in front of a landscape. Young people at a wedding. A man or woman in a parka, smiling, surrounded by snow.
He does not mention decapitation or suicide or Mishima. He says that the bus is very convenient to the building. The sales representatives are compassionate and polite. The park nearby is a good place to take walks. There is a MaxValu store across the street, open 24 hours, a handy place to shop. There is a roof garden. He has a wide balcony. There are beautiful views at night.
I remember the auditorium of the Kabuki-za Theater, warm and high and tinted by lights reflecting off the lavish pictorial curtains—herons in a stream, Mount Fuji, a hummingbird breaking out of a tangle of cherry blossoms. Tiny old ladies in surgical masks sat with bento boxes resting on their knees, looking pleased; packs of theater kids sprawled in fishnet tights. Old men slept in their chairs with both hands balanced on their canes. The Kabuki play I had come to see was about sumo, or involved sumo; I was not entirely sure. The English-language audio guide I had rented was unclear about the details. The play’s story was fantastically complex, and was itself only a tiny peripheral fragment of a larger story about two brothers seeking revenge for the murder of their father, a revenge that spanned decades and flowed inexorably from an equally long backstory. The story when the curtain opened, however, was simple. It was a story about love.
A beautiful young woman was adored by two men. She herself loved the handsome youth with the impossibly sad white face, but the burly cross-eyed villain with the orange-red face was determined to win her hand. The villain (I learned from the voice in my ear) had never lost a sumo wrestling match. So the youth with the sad white face and the wrestler with the orange-red face wrestled to decide who would marry the woman. They danced this, spinning slowly and not quite touching their hands. At last the youth with the sad white face won the match. But the cross-eyed villain explained in an evil aside to the audience that he would yet betray the lovers. Spotting a pair of Mandarin ducks in the lake, he threw his dagger and killed the male (a little wooden duck turned upside down, like a prop in a parking-lot carnival). The villain explained that if he could trick the youth into drinking the duck’s blood, it would drive him mad. And he did so.
But the Mandarin duck is a symbol of marriage, of fidelity, and now, in some mystical way, the two young lovers began to swirl. They swirled until they became the ducks. They became, by magic, the souls of the ducks. They took to the air on bright wings. They had become transcendent, timeless. On the same ground where the sumo match was fought, the duck-souls attacked the wrestler. They danced this, darting and bending their backs. The ducks drove the cross-eyed villain to the ground, making him even more cross-eyed. Then the lovers’ costumes turned inside out, revealing brilliant plumage, plumage like an illustration in a children’s book, feathers as vivid as fire. Then they all froze in place and the curtain dropped.
The Reconstructed Castle
Yukio Mishima’s novel Runaway Horses tells, in part, the story of a samurai rebellion. In 1868 the reign of the shoguns ended and power reverted back to the emperor of Japan, or (because nothing is ever as simple as the official story) to a group of powerful men acting in his name. One of the consequences of this event, which is called the Meiji Restoration, was that the large samurai class that had governed Japan for hundreds of years12 was stripped of its power and dissolved. Imperial edicts forced members of the former warrior caste to stop styling their hair in topknots, to stop carrying swords.
In 1876, a group of 200 reactionary ex-samurai called the League of the Divine Wind launched a surprise nighttime attack on the castle in the city of Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu. As the barracks burned, they drove back the conscript soldiers of the Imperial Army, wounding hundreds and killing the wounded. Fires broke out everywhere. “Even his garments, drenched in enemy blood, glowed crimson in the flames,” Mishima writes of one samurai. At last the soldiers regrouped and reached their guns and ammunition. The League, whose aim was to eradicate all traces of Westernization and return Japan to its feudal past, had chosen to fight with swords. With no firearms, the samurai were decimated. The leader of the attack, gravely wounded, called on a follower to cut off his head. Most of the survivors committed seppuku.
Old buildings in Japan are seldom really old. A country that builds with wood instead of stone runs the constant risk of losing its monuments to fire. Ancient shrines are really copies of ancient shrines. The Imperial Palace in Kyoto has been rebuilt eight times, and its current layout would make no sense to any emperor who lived there. The main keep of Kumamoto Castle, which burned to the ground in another samurai uprising in 1877, was reconstructed from concrete in 1960. The forms return again and again. They end violently, and they never end at all. To live as a Japanese, Koga said, is to live the history of Japan.
His building is there. Koga’s, I mean. In Kumamoto. Just down the hill from the castle. I found him a few hundred yards from the scene of the battle in the book that made me think of him in the first place.
A trip on the Shinkansen train from Tokyo to Kumamoto takes about six hours. You change in Osaka. The train passes just below Mount Fuji at the start of the trip and stops near the end at Hiroshima, where it looks out on the baseball stadium. As it hurtles south, you pass into a misty country where hills drift toward you like ghost ships. If it’s raining when you get out at Kumamoto Station, you can buy a clear plastic umbrella for 350 yen from a bucket in the station shop. If you have time and don’t mind getting wet, you can walk into town along the river, the Shirakawa, which lies in a wide, ugly basin.
The castle is on a hill in the center of the city. There is a tiny parking lot at the base of the hill with a vending machine that sells Boss-brand hot coffee. The castle’s fortifications merge with the hillside just behind the parking lot, a tortoiseshell of large, dark stones too steep to climb.
> His building is down the hill. A five-minute walk, if that. Come around the slope and you will see the complex, a series of squat, identical gray blocks, each maybe 11 stories tall. Cars speed by on a busy street. A security guard in a gray jacket and white motorcycle helmet stands beside the gate, near some orange traffic cones. The complex’s sign, printed in English on a black stone fence, is intersected at intervals by purple neon bars.
There is a bus stop very convenient to the building. There is a MaxValu just across the street.
So this is where I am. I am standing in the parking lot of the MaxValu. It is four o’clock in the afternoon. The air is drizzly and cool. The cars that turn in to the lot are blunt, compact hatchbacks, little modern microvans in gold and pale blue and white. They are shaped like sumo wrestlers, I think, and it hits me that sumo is essentially a sport of refusing to die, refusing to be swept away, refusing to accept the insolidity of the dream. It was a street entertainment, really, until the early 20th century. Then the samurai tradition burned down and had to be rebuilt.
And soon I will think about this while I watch Hakuho wrestle Kakuryu on the TV in my hotel room, on what is supposed to be the last match of the last day of the tournament: Hakuho missing his chance to seize Kakuryu’s mawashi just as Kakuryu wins a two-handed grip on his. Kakuryu literally leaping forward with spasmodic sliding jumps, backing the yokozuna to the edge of the rice-bale circle, where Hakuho’s knees and then his ankles will flex frantically, until he goes toppling, the greatest wrestler in the world, off the edge of the clay, twisting onto his stomach as he falls. When he gets to his feet, Hakuho will offer no reaction. A few minutes later, in the playoff match to break their identical 14-1 records, he will grapple Kakuryu in the middle of the ring and then drop his hips and lift Kakuryu halfway off the sand and force him backward. They will both fall out of the ring at the same moment, but Kakuryu’s foot will touch first, giving Hakuho the Emperor’s Cup and his 28th tournament championship. The yobidashi will sweep the marks away.13 Hakuho will smile slightly, not a smile that is meant to be read.
But that will happen later. Now I am leaning on a railing in the parking lot of the MaxValu, thinking about endurance at four o’clock in the afternoon. I am looking across a busy street at the apartment complex of the man who beheaded Yukio Mishima and then lived a whole life afterward, lived another 40 years. I think: He is in there. I think: It is time to decide what to do.
I get up and move toward the crosswalk. The wind is damp. It’s January, so I don’t see any butterflies. It is a cloudy day, so I do not see the moon.
BURKHARD BILGER
In Deep
FROM THE NEW YORKER
ON HIS 13TH day underground, when he’d come to the edge of the known world and was preparing to pass beyond it, Marcin Gala placed a call to the surface. He’d traveled more than three miles through the earth by then, over stalagmites and boulder fields, cave-ins and vaulting galleries. He’d spidered down waterfalls, inched along crumbling ledges, and bellied through tunnels so tight that his back touched the roof with every breath. Now he stood at the shore of a small, dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone. He felt the weight of the mountain above him—a mile of solid rock—and wondered if he’d ever find his way back again. It was his last chance to hear his wife and daughter’s voices before the cave swallowed him up.
“Base camp, base camp, base camp,” he said. “This is Camp Four. Over.” His voice traveled from the handset to a Teflon-coated wire that he had strung along the wall. It wound its way through sump and tunnel, up the stair-step passages of the Chevé system to a ragged cleft in a hillside 7,000 feet above sea level. There, in a cloud forest in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, lay the staging area for an attempt to map the deepest cave in the world—a kind of Everest expedition turned upside down. Gala’s voice fell soft and muffled in the mountain’s belly, husky with fatigue. He asked his seven-year-old, Zuzia, how she liked the Pippi Longstocking book she’d been reading, and wondered what the weather was like on the surface. Then the voice of Bill Stone, the leader of the expedition, broke over the line. “We’re counting on you guys,” he said. “This is a big day. Do your best, but don’t do anything radical. Be brave, but not too brave.”
Gala had been this deep in the cave once before, in 2009, but never beyond the pool. A baby-faced Pole of unremarkable physique—more plumber than mountaineer—he discovered caving as a young man in the Tatra Mountains, when they were one of the few places he could escape the strictures of Communism. When he was 17, he and another caver became the first people to climb, from top to bottom, what was then the world’s deepest cave, the Réseau Jean Bernard, in the French Alps. Now 38, he had explored caves throughout Europe and Ukraine, Hawaii, Central America, and New Guinea. In the off-season, he was a technician on a Norwegian oil platform, dangling high above the North Sea to weld joints and replace rivets. He was not easily unnerved. Then again Chevé was more than usually unnerving.
Caves are like living organisms, James Tabor wrote in Blind Descent, a book on Bill Stone’s earlier expeditions. They have bloodstreams and respiratory systems, infections and infestations. They take in organic matter and digest it, flushing it slowly through their systems. Chevé feels more alive than most. Its tunnels lie along an uneasy fault line in the Sierra de Juárez mountains and seethe with more than seven feet of rain a year. On his first trip to Mexico, in 2001, Gala nearly died of histoplasmosis, a fungal infection acquired from the bat guano that lined the upper reaches of a nearby cave. The local villagers had learned to steer clear of such places. They told stories of a malignant spirit that wandered Chevé’s tunnels, its feet pointing backward as it walked. When Western cavers first discovered the system, in 1986, they found some delicate white bones beneath a stone slab near the entrance: the remains of children probably sacrificed there hundreds of years ago by the Cuicatec people.
When the call to base camp was over, Gala hiked to the edge of the pool with his partner, the British cave diver Phil Short, and they put on their scuba rebreathers, masks, and fins. They’d spent the past two days on a platform suspended above another sump, rebuilding their gear. Many of the parts had been cracked or contaminated on the way down, so the two men took their time, cleaning each piece and cannibalizing components from an extra kit, knowing that they’d soon have no time to spare. The water here was between 50 and 60 degrees—cold enough to chill you within minutes—and Gala had no idea where the pool would lead. It might offer swift passage to the next shaft or lead into an endless, mud-dimmed labyrinth.
The rebreathers were good for four hours underwater, longer in a pinch. They removed carbon dioxide from a diver’s breath by passing it through canisters of soda lime, then recirculating it back to the mouthpiece with a fresh puff of oxygen. Gala and Short were expert at managing dive time, but in the background another clock was always ticking. The team had arrived in February, three months before the rainy season. It was only mid-March now, but the weather wasn’t always predictable. In 2009, a flash flood had trapped two of Gala’s teammates in these tunnels for five days, unsure if the water would ever recede.
Gala had seen traces of its passage on the way down: old ropes shredded to fiber, phone lines stripped of insulation. When the heavy rain began to fall, it would flood this cave completely, trickling down from all over the mountain, gathering in ever-widening branches, dislodging boulders and carving new tunnels till it poured from the mountain into the Santo Domingo River. “You don’t want to be there when that happens,” Stone said. “There is no rescue, period.” To climb straight back to the surface, without stopping to rig ropes and phone wire, would take them four days. It took three days to get back from the moon.
The truth is they had nowhere better to go. All the pleasant places had already been found. The sunlit glades and secluded coves, phosphorescent lagoons and susurrating groves had been mapped and surveyed, extolled in guidebooks, and posted with Latin names. To find something truly new on the planet, something no
human had ever seen, you had to go deep underground or underwater. They were doing both.
Caving is both the oldest of pastimes and the most uncertain. It’s a game played in the dark on an invisible field. Until climbing gear was developed, in the late 19th century, a steep shaft could end an expedition, as could a flooded tunnel—cavers call them terminal sumps. If an entrance wasn’t too small or a tunnel too tight, the cave could be too deep to be searched by torch or candlelight. In the classic French caving books of the 1930s and ’40s, Ten Years Under the Earth, by Norbert Casteret, and Subterranean Climbers, by Pierre Chevalier, the expeditions are framed as manly jaunts belowground—a bit of stiff exercise before the lapin chasseur back at the inn. The men wear oilskins and duck-cloth trousers, carry rucksacks and rope ladders, and light their way with a horse-carriage lantern. At one point in Subterranean Climbers, a sweet scent of Chartreuse fills the air and the party realizes, with dismay, that their digestif has come to grief against a fissure wall. Later, a rock tumbles loose from a shaft and conks a caver named François on the head, causing some discomfort. The victim, Chevalier notes with regret, was “poorly protected by just an ordinary beret.”
Chevalier and his team went on to map more than 10 miles of caverns in the Dent de Crolles, outside Grenoble. Along the way, they set the world depth record—2,159 feet—and developed a number of caving tools still used today, including nylon ropes and mechanical ascenders. Casteret may have done even more to transform the sport. In the summer of 1922, he was hiking in the French Pyrenees when he noticed a small stream flowing from the base of a mountain. He shucked off his clothes and lit a candle, then wedged himself through the crack and waded in. The tunnel followed the stream for a couple of hundred feet, then dipped below the waterline. Rather than turn back, Casteret set his candle on a ledge, took a deep breath, and swam ahead, groping the wall till he felt the ceiling open up above him. He went on to explore many miles of tunnels inside the cave, culminating in a pair of large, airy galleries. The first was covered in spectacular limestone formations. The second was smaller and drier, with a dirt floor. When Casteret held his candle up to its walls, the flame flickered over engravings of mammoths, bison, hyenas, and other prehistoric beasts—the remains of a religious sanctuary some 20,000 years old.
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