The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: The Counterfeiter, Obasute, The Full Moon

by Inoue Yasushi

  We talked along lines that I guess were appropriate enough for a brother and sister who had not seen each other for a long time. There were many things that I, from the standpoint of being her older brother, could have said—about her separation from her family and about her behavior since then—but I didn't touch on these subjects at all. All of those things were problems about which nothing much could be done any more. Because she had run away from home even at the cost of leaving her two children, I felt that she must be a very resolutely strong-minded woman, a woman unto herself, with her own reasons for what she did.

  I only chose matters concerning our parents and our brother and sister to talk about.

  "Mama's still acting that way about obasute I said.

  Ever since the time when our mother had said that she wanted to be left at Obasute, the term obasute had been used by my brothers and sisters and me when we were talking amongst ourselves. It was a convenient word for us to use. Actually, it was just like my mother to say that she wanted to be left at Obasute—she was likely to say this at any time—and this illustrated both the best that was in her and the worst. Nevertheless, inherent in the words "still acting that way about obasute " there was some implied mild criticism of Mama's pride and her spoiled and unreasonable nature. On the other hand, for her children, who were able to accept the fact that she was all of these things, the phrase also embraced a feeling of sympathy toward her.

  At my words, there was a look on Kiyoko's face for a moment as if she were biting her lips to restrain some oncoming laughter, but she only said, "Talking about obasute, I wonder if at that time Mama didn't mean that she really wanted to be left on Mount Obasute."

  "Why?"

  "Why? Just because I felt that way. I honestly wonder if she didn't really want to be left by herself, to get entirely away from constantly becoming involved in everything that was happening around her, to be left alone in the mountains somewhere."

  "Aw, cut it out!" said I, rather thoughtlessly. There was something in the way Kiyoko spoke that somehow startled me.

  "Was that your impression even way back then?"

  "No. It just came to me now. When you used the word "obasute" I suddenly got that impression—-just now."

  I again began to visualize the scene in that vision of mine when I was wandering about in the vicinity of Obasute carrying my mother on my back. And at the thought of it, I felt shivers come over me for a second time, just as they had then.

  As if she had been thinking this matter over for a while, Kiyoko a bit later said, "In my case, I had that kind of feeling too when I ran away from home. It was like this—how should I put it?—I just had to be alone, to get away immediately and completely from all the annoyances, so . . ."

  "So, you too wanted to be left alone—obasute-style?"

  "Well . . ."

  "But you make such a young grandma."

  "Yes, it'll still be quite a while before I'm seventy."

  Then and only then did Kiyoko smile, but it was a sad smile. I could have taken all this to mean that she was obliquely using this conversation of ours to justify her own past behavior, but on the other hand, her real attitude at the time might very well have been something completely different from that.

  About the children whom she had deserted I said nothing. She too may have wanted to make some passing reference to the children, but she acted as though she was well able to endure not talking about them.

  If Kiyoko had said she was worried about the children, I would have had no alternative but to tell her that this was natural but that she should have known from the start that such would be the case. She knew that—and I did too.

  She stayed overnight with me, sharing my room. Like so many inns at these coal-mining villages, the building had all sorts of labyrinthine annexes lumped together under one roof, and there must have been a banquet or something going on in a section somewhere off in the distance. The sounds of a samisen, the loud voices of men, and charming feminine voices could be heard until very late.

  The next morning I went down to the station with my sister to see her off. It would take her about an hour to get back to her place by electric train. Although it was early in the morning, the sooty streets were already filled with lots of people walking around. It was a town of about sixty thousand, but according to what the maid at the inn said, it was in a constant state of flux, and if you added the suburbs, the population would probably be about double that figure. To be sure, the same restlessness that seemed to fill the streets was also to be found in the make-up of the stores on both sides of the avenue and in the way the pedestrians moved about. The smoke that came pouring out of the chimneys of the briquet factories was clouding up the sky and making the air murky.

  En route, as I walked along the road beside my sister, I could see two huge pyramidal slag heaps. Kiyoko told me that slag heaps like these could also be seen along the railway line of the electric train she was about to take.

  After we arrived at the station and just before she went through the gate, Kiyoko said with a sort of slight melancholy smile, "You know, I'd like to go back to Tokyo. But, for the time being . . ."

  "If you had the same kind of work, wouldn't you be just as well off in Tokyo?"

  There was a quizzical expression on her face. "But if I work here a while longer, I'll acquire some real skill at this. When I say that it's because I'm getting good as this work—I mean—I think it's better here because I'm working with foreigners."

  It occurred to me that apart from the question of acquiring technical proficiency, Kiyoko probably felt that she wanted to live somewhat isolated from the home she had deserted.

  "I wondered if I was going to be scolded severely and I was nervous about coming—but I'm glad I came," she said.

  "I wouldn't scold you. Scolding doesn't undo what's been done, does it?"

  "Is it all right if I write to you from now on?" she asked.

  "There's no question of its being all right or not all right."

  "Well then . . ."

  Kiyoko slipped through the gate as though she were escaping. She raised her right hand and waved it, just from the wrist. She was like a little girl. Her conduct was not that of a woman who had suffered.

  As there were still about two hours before I was to depart from this town with the group that came down with me, I passed through the main street and strolled over to the edge of town. The place was jam-packed with restaurants, inns, and pachinko parlors, and that was all there was to see. Since I had heard the previous day from the people of this area that sometimes the ground around here caved in and houses toppled because there had been mines under this town, I walked with caution, but I didn't encounter any such toppling houses. But here and there, while I was at the edge of town, I did come across puddles of all dimensions. And I wondered if these too weren't because of the depressions which resulted when the ground caved in. This Chikuho coal-belt continues right on northward to the sea coast, and my sister has just gone back to the beauty parlor at the air base on that sea coast, I thought.

  My sister had taken a very womanish point of view toward my mother's attitude of wanting to be abandoned on Mount Obasute. But when I thought about this, there seemed a bit more justification for Kiyoko to be spending almost two years in a corner of the Kyushu coalfield belt watching the moon come out over an obasute-yama designed out of coal and possessing man-made artificiality.

  Suddenly, I stopped in my tracks. Ever since Kiyoko had said something yesterday, I had felt as though there was something I had to ponder. It was an uneasy feeling, but right now I felt that the true nature of what I had to ponder was suddenly flashing in my brain in a clear form. Mightn't it be said that the idea that had once come over my mother—that she wanted to be left at Obasute—was obviously a form of pessimism toward life? And for whatever reasons she might have had, didn't Kiyoko's pessimistic disposition, which was somewhat of the same nature as Mama's, play a role in her desertion of her family, which is something t
hat just doesn't happen to ordinary people?

  As I thought about this, I also recalled an incident involving my younger brother, Shoji. It happened during the third year after the end of the war. One day Shoji, who at that time was working in the political department of one of the leading newspapers, came to have dinner with me at my place. At the bus stop when he was going home, he said to me, "I've suddenly become fed up with the newspaper office. This kind of work didn't suit my nature right from the beginning, but recently it's gotten so terrible that I can't stand it. I think I'd like to switch completely to a job where there's much less contact with people."

  Shoji, from every angle, had a bright disposition, good for attracting friends. At first glance he seemed just perfect as a newspaper reporter, so such talk, which seemed suddenly to reveal what was deep down in his heart, surprised me. I recognized, however, that newspaper work had now really gotten on his nerves. And I realized that my brother must doubtless have had this sort of attitude ever since childhood.

  "If you dislike it that much, wouldn't it be a good idea to quit and change to some other line of work?"

  "I want to. Honestly."

  "Go ahead. You're still young."

  I spoke as though I were almost advising him to do that. It was not out of irresponsibility that I did so; it was just that there was something about my brother at that time that made it impossible for me to say anything else.

  About two months later Shoji formally resigned from the newspaper company, moved to a city in the vicinity of his wife's parental home, and got a job at a small bank there. It occurred to me that his personality, which might even be characterised as misanthropic and which he had so unexpectedly revealed to me, would not change at the small local bank any more than it had at the newspaper company. But Shoji is working there to this day.

  Even in Shoji's case—he too had developed in such a way that he suddenly wanted to withdraw quietly from a society in which masses of people were crowded up against each other. Wasn't that the driving force in his mind, just as with my mother and sister? Had it turned out that misanthropic blood like that flowed through the veins of all the members of my family? I have still another relative on my mother's side who attempted to shut himself off from his environment.

  My mother's brother, the one next down the line in age, or to put it another way, my uncle who has just passed the age of sixty, is also a person who behaved similarly, changing his job suddenly and voluntarily. In spite of the fact that he had acquired some status as a successful man in the position of president of a civil engineering company, for no apparent reason at all, he retired immediately after the end of the war. Completely without rhyme or reason, he carried out this resignation as if to say that he couldn't stand it any longer and was running off. Sometimes my uncle advanced a plausible explanation to the effect that as the president of a small company he couldn't really earn a living and that confrontations with subordinate personnel had become extremely unpleasant for him. Viewed by outsiders, his position was completely incomprehensible, but if this was to be explained in more understandable terms, one needed only to recall his sudden feelings of antipathy toward the environment which he felt was closing in around him. My uncle thereafter started two or three businesses with a little capital, a patent-medicine business, a general store, and maybe something else, but it certainly cannot be said that things went well with any of these. Like my mother, he was a person of strong pride who never complained about how badly things were going, but it was pathetic to watch him.

  I could not say that I myself do not have that kind of blood coursing through my body. In a meaningless sort of way, I felt a certain compassion for both Kiyoko and Shoji, and I could apparently also arrive at some understanding of my uncle, even with respect to his suffering and changing from job to job. For doing what they did rather than behaving unlike themselves, I loved them.

  I came to the end of the street and walked around a block alongside the miners' homes and continued to think about such things.

  IV

  IT WAS this fall that I actually set foot on the soil of Obasute myself. I had gone to Shiga Heights in connection with my work, and on the way back I suddenly took it into my head to take a stab at visiting the place called Obasute. It was evening when I got off the train at Togura Station on the Shin-etsu Line. There I stayed overnight at a hot-springs Japanese inn, and the next day I hired a car and headed for Obasute Station.

  After leaving the town of Togura, the car followed the bank of the Chikuma River heading downstream, but on leaving this route we started to climb a small hillock.

  "It better not rain, huh?" said the middle-aged driver. The sky was dark and overcast, and the weather was chilly. It looked as if it were going to rain.

  The mountains along the route that the car took were all bedecked in autumn colors. Before and behind the car the various types of yellow-brown serrate-leafed oaks exuded a redness as if they were aflame, and intermittently there was just the green of pine trees.

  We passed two or three hamlets. They were tiny hamlets, all affiliated with the township of Sarashina. Beside each of the houses in these hamlets there was a field where large white radishes and onions had been planted.

  As we were passing a hamlet called Uo, we saw five or six old women walking in the road up ahead. The women moved off the road and stood there at the side, waiting for the car to pass.

  "Lots of old women, aren't there? Must have been abandoned," I said jokingly.

  "Not very likely," said the driver. "If they got left in this area, they could all go back home!"

  "In the old days, it was probably very deserted in this area," I ventured.

  "I'm sure this was a pretty deserted road. But, it does no good to abandon anybody here with villages so nearby. They still call the area around here Obasute, but the real Mount Obasute is Mount Kamuriki. You can't see it from here, but pretty soon we'll come to a place where you can."

  The Mount Kamuriki the driver was talking about was the obasute-yama of the Middle Ages, as I knew from the tanka. "What about Mount Obase?" I asked, but the driver appeared not to know anything at all about the obasute-yama of Early Ancient Times. Or perhaps Mount Obase was currently called something else.

  In about thirty minutes the car reached Obasute Station. At the square in front of the station, I got out of the car, and ushered on by the driver, I headed down the road alongside the station toward Choraku Temple, which is known to be a famous moon-viewing site. Step by step we walked right into the scene that I had viewed so often from train windows.

  Everywhere the mountains and fields before my eyes were an autumnal red. As we were descending the fairly rapid slope ahead of us, the driver looked back over his shoulder as though he had just remembered something which he had forgotten until then.

  "That's Mount Kamuriki" he informed me. There, looking as though it had been piled up beyond the hill, halfway up whose slope that station stood, was a part of the form of Mount Kamuriki, its summit enveloped in clouds. I did not know whether or not this was the obasute-yama of the Legend of Obasute, but in any case this Mount Kamuriki was much too high and distant a mountain for people to be able to climb easily. Mama too, if she saw this mountain, probably would not say even jokingly that she wanted to be left on that mountain, I thought.

  However, I immediately changed my mind. In my mind, thought I, I had arbitrarily envisioned my own obasute-yama and had pictured myself wandering around there carrying Mama on my back. But Mama—being Mama and being completely different from me—might very well have imagined her obasute-yama as a big steep mountain like Mount Kamuriki.

  In the first place, an obasute-yama ought to be a mountain like this one. Come to think of it, even the obasute-yama into which Kiyoko had flung herself, and Shoji's too, must certainly have been much closer to the percipitous Mount Kamuriki than they were to the gently rolling hillocks adorned with autumnal colors over which I had just now been strolling.

  As we went down the
slanting road, I noticed that the slope of the hillock was swarming with stone monuments on which poems had been engraved. Since the letters on the faces of these stones were eroded, I couldn't tell how old or new they were. But the tanka and haiku and Chinese-style poems which were inscribed on the stones must have been written in appreciation of the bright moon as seen from here. I proceeded down the road and again found that a number of poem-inscribed stones had been erected here and there all over the slope. When I envisioned these stones illuminated by moonbeams, for some reason they gave an uncanny feeling completely irrelevant to their elegance and taste.

  Fairly soon the road ended in a gigantic boulder which, by its nature, in itself constituted a precipice. This rock is called Ubaishi—The Old Woman Rock. They say that this is an old woman turned to stone. This rock too was uncanny. But the prospect of Zenjoji Plain, which I could see by standing on this rock, was beautiful with the Chikuma River flowing through the center of the flatlands, the hamlets here and there dotting the solid yellow plain, and the mountains on the opposite side of the Chikuma aflame with the colors of fall.

  The steep stone steps alongside the Ubaishi were covered with little maple leaves red as blood, and the narrow precincts of Choraku Temple at the foot of the steps were covered with the yellow leaves of gingko trees. Even when we called out, there wasn't a single sound of anyone emerging from the interior of the priests' living quarters, though there were several children playing in front of them.

  We entered a small building, a moon-viewing hall, and rested there. The faces of the votive tablets and votive pictures were all worn away because of the long passage of years. These things were now nothing more than musty old white plates.

  "The fall colors seem better than the moon, don't you think?" said my driver. Right then, I had had exactly the same thought.