The Plum Rains and Other Stories

by Givens John

  Praise for The Plum Rains

  ‘Givens is not just a gifted storyteller – these stories are freighted with a deep knowledge and cultural understanding of Japan; he was a student of its art and literature in both Kyoto and Tokyo and lived in Japan for 12 years…. The Plum Rains doesn’t confine itself to poetry and there are glimpses into the pleasure quarters of the “floating world”, monasteries, and, occasionally, the rigours of Zen Buddhism. Indeed many of the stories function as modernised versions of Buddhist debate dialogue and have something of the koan clarity about them. Givens’s prose and dialogues are so authentic that it’s almost as if these stories were handed down or were translated from original sources.’ – Joseph Woods, The Irish Times

  ‘Givens’ remarkable collection of stories, each one set in 17th century Japan, are steeped in the ancient lore and customs of that far off era, as samurai Japan begins it awkward, halting dance with the complicating influences of the west…. Givens simply writes unforgettably lyrical stories about the mysteries located right in the heart of life – the persistence of desire, the callowness of youth, the sorrows of old age, the finality of death. This collection marks the most interesting work from an Irish American writer I have read in two decades.’ – Cahir O’Doherty, The Irish Voice

  ‘Stories about seventeenth-century Japan … when the samurai sword began to be blunted by poetry, pleasure, commerce and with the modern world beckoning. The Plum Rains is literally a fabulous collection: subtle and exotic yet steeped in authenticity. The style is elegant, stately. All the stories are illuminating, many poetic, some stunning. And as contemporary as human nature.’ – Michael J. Farrell, author of Life in the Universe

  ‘Prising apart the bamboo curtain, The Plum Rains offers us a rare glimpse into the world of Japan’s mercenaries, prostitutes, monks, poets and misfits, where fate is an irresistible force and violence is never far away. Seventeenth century history never looked like this before.’ – Frank Shouldice, playwright and Producer/Director at RTE’s Prime Time

  ‘… fantastic, mesmerizing. The language is pristine, the pacing expertly controlled …’ – William Litton, Editor, Wag’s Revue

  ‘John Givens stands tall among those who know Japan and can write about it with power, authority, and a fine and subtle artistry. There is quite simply no collection remotely like The Plum Rains, packed as it is with the living, breathing members of a long dead world, brought back to life by a master.’ – Richard Wiley, author of Soldiers in Hiding and Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show.

  Praise for Other Books by John Givens

  A Friend in the Police

  (now available as an ebook from Concord ePress)

  ‘With Detective Sergeant Xlong, Givens has created one of those classically conflicted characters, the kind of fictional creation with the power to influence future generations of writers. Xlong is the perfect mixture of farce and tragedy – a celibate police sergeant … hounded by a tragic family history, obsessed with his police manual and its practical suggestions …’ – Michelle Bailat-Jones, Necessary Fiction

  ‘Somehow, John Givens moves from Waugh’s world to Conrad’s. That he could do so without visibly changing gears, or without forsaking his highly charged language, seems to me a very neat trick indeed.’ – Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

  ‘A Friend in the Police suggests a parody of Conrad and Graham Greene by Nathaniel West: it’s an exhilarating novel, an important satire, a comic vision phrased in energetic and constantly surprising prose.’ – John Hawkes

  Living Alone

  ‘There is a fine purity about this book, whose title, incidentally, is ironic. Living Alone is about not living alone, about the solitude of congestion; and it has the clear, deep humor that lies a brave step beyond farce, in the darker, larger regions of the absurd.’ – Edith Milton, New York Times Book Review

  ‘Living Alone exhibs an almost perfect union of talent and subject. Givens is a brilliant satirist … (with) as fine an eye as anyone for neurotic style, but he is content to let it yield satire. Yet in the best satire there is a kind of love for that which is satirized…. His eye is merciless, but a fondness informs his fine, dry prose.’ – Larry Mc-Murty, Chicago Tribune Bookworld

  The Plum Rains

  & Other Stories

  John Givens

  The Liffey Press

  Contents

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  The Green Summer Wind

  The Plantain

  The Buddha-nature of the Horse

  Under Blossoming Boughs

  The Palace Orphan

  Winter Seclusion

  Abnegation

  Solitary Rambler on the Withered Moor

  The Emptiness Monk

  The Narrow Road to Dewa

  Lightness

  The Arsonist’s Widow

  The Plum Rains

  Poems in The Plum Rains

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  After centuries of feudal warfare, the Tokugawa family unified Japan in 1601 and established a new capital in Edo, the city that would eventually become Tokyo. The Tokugawa were samurai, the hereditary warrior class defined by the mediaeval code of bushidō. Loyalty, frugality, mastery of martial arts, and personal honour were essential principles for the samurai. Peace meant their fighting skills were no longer required, however, and as samurai were not permitted to work at any other kind of occupation, many became destitute.

  The decline of the samurai was matched by the rise of the merchant; the city replaced the castle as the centre of culture and commerce; and medieval aesthetics yielded to popular new urban forms, such as the kabuki theatre, haikai linked poetry – precursor to haiku – and even the novel. Some samurai became professional artists and poets, notably among them Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), widely regarded as Japan’s greatest writer. But there were also samurai who could not accept the new world that was arriving, and they became hired swords or even brigands.

  These stories are set in the last decade of the seventeenth century. Bashō is at the centre of several of them. Others describe characters who are unwilling or unable to find a place for themselves. There are impoverished samurai struggling against their own uselessness, young female pleasure providers who wish to be more than playthings for rich merchants, gamblers and shogunate officials, and an outcast who rises through his own merit.

  Some of these stories function as martial tales, and some as modernised versions of Buddhist debate dialogues. The travel narrative is particularly Japanese, and many of these stories portray figures in motion through a landscape. A form unique to Japan is the haibun, a prose version of haikai poetry which evolved out of head notes setting the scene for poems and often seems both discursive and compressed. My aim with these stories is to present a world that while very different from our own, still resonates with the pleasure of what it means to be human.

  John Givens

  Howth

  June 2012

  THE GREEN SUMMER WIND

  The old man sat gazing out on summer mountains stacked beneath the low white sky, the heated masses of green and blue-green fading into more distant layers of brown and beige and dove grey before leaching away finally into a pale wash of heat haze.

  Bashō removed his flat round sun hat and dried his face and head then picked up his hat and fanned himself with it. His road companion – a youth postponing the burdens of adult responsibility – sprawled beside him and ignored the view. The two travellers were dressed alike in the lightweight summer robes of Buddhist monks. Each wore a travel satchel and sleeping quilt tied diagonally across one shoulder, and each had a water gourd sus
pended from his obi sash. Their hands and forearms were darkened from the summer sun; summer road dust coated their feet and ankles.

  You must be getting tired, Bashō said; and Chibi-kun looked away and said nothing, the better to enjoy feeling sorry for himself.

  They had shaved their heads on the day of departure, shaved them again after twenty days on the road, and the stubble now was of a length that made the old haikai poet long for the bite of a fat-blade razor. He had equipped himself with a walking staff in emulation of the poet-wanderers of the past, and Chibi-kun was outfitted with a woven bamboo carryall for the gear they required. The boy wouldn’t wear his sun hat – he thought he looked better without it – but he had various amulets tucked away on his person as a defence against goblins and water sprites. Although his birth-status allowed him to wear the two swords of a samurai, Old Master Bashō would permit neither of them to carry a weapon, much to his companion’s disgust.

  Shall we continue?

  I’m too tired.

  You want to stay here?

  Here? The boy looked around as if to assess their surroundings. This wretched place?

  Bashō drank from his water gourd then replaced the stopper. He tied on his sun hat then hitched up his summer robe and tucked the hem under his sash in the style of the old-fashioned foot-pilgrims.

  The boy ignored his departure. He studied his dirty pink toes. But when his companion rounded a bend and didn’t look back, he jumped up and scurried after him. Wait, can’t you! he cried. Such discourtesy!

  The path they followed led uphill into a dense cedar forest. It was wide enough for walking men to pass each other without loss of dignity, or even for men on horseback to manage it; but if two palanquins met, one would have to yield to the other, and even in this era of the Shogun’s Great Peace, such encounters were fraught.

  We should have gone another way, said Chibi-kun.

  There was no other way.

  Then we should have found one!

  Clever with words, a precocious literary prodigy, Old Bashō’s boy was the youngest of his linked poetry disciples and much coddled by him. During formal group sessions, Chibi-kun’s fertile imagination would send him flying past his more cautious elders, and he would burst out with suggestions even when it wasn’t his turn. Creating solitary sequences was more satisfying for the boy, and what delighted him most was the rapid-fire composition of a single-poet sequence before an audience of admirers. Haikai linked poems were composed of thirty-six stanzas, each building off the one before; but the boy so trusted his own vitality that he would take on the traditional hundred-stanza sequence and even the occasional thousand-stanza effort, audaciously tossing off link after link in a fever of creativity so that even two scribes with quick brushes had to scramble to keep up with him.

  Chibi-kun never rewrote. What audience ever cared to sit through the process of a revision? He trusted whatever occurred to him. Your first idea was your best idea. Sitting with some tedious old plodders as they struggled to choose between ‘winter drizzle’ and ‘wintery gusts’ left him fidgeting with impatience. He loved the bustle of the new cities of Edo and Osaka, with their theatres and teahouses and the salons of rich merchants; but what suited him best were the lush pleasure gardens of powerful daimyo warlords, where his charm and inventiveness could be savoured at leisure by himself and others. These wild mountains were disagreeable to the boy – nothing at all like the screen paintings of them he admired – and he trudged along thinking of what he could say to extend his catalogue of dissatisfactions.

  The two walkers continued up through the shadowy forest, their footsteps muffled by a thick duff of dry cedar bracts. The terrain grew steeper, and they rounded a bend to encounter a landslip spill of raw boulders blocking their path, like a tumble of petrified dragon scat rolled down out of the mountainside and leaving a ragged gash.

  Look at this mess! Chibi-kun cried. What a nuisance! The drop-off was precipitous, and they were obliged to negotiate the obstruction with care, loose scree giving way and rattling like hailstones into the gorge below. Who’s responsible for maintaining this road?

  Mountain bogeys, said the Old Master. Hopping goblins with long red noses.

  No doubt hoping for a poem from you, the boy muttered, disobliging himself by climbing over a large boulder instead of taking the easier way around it.

  Ogres and bogeys were real to the boy because of his own heightened sense of self-worth. Every event, every happenstance – no matter how remote – could still in his opinion be connected to him by the jewel-cord of a karmic irrevocability so that if a sea-fiend were known to have victimised some unfortunate wretch on a fishing boat far offshore, it was nevertheless still he himself who must have been the weird malignancy’s ultimate concern, and the shudder of compassion felt by Chibi-kun was always personal.

  How much farther?

  Do you want to rest?

  Here? You’d stop here?

  The cedar forest thinned as the walkers climbed higher, and the ferns and clumps of wild orchids that thrived in filtered light gave way to sturdy patches of dwarf bamboo grass and gaps choked with mahonia, the masses of prickly branches hung with shiny purple-black berries that glistened like death’s own seeds in the windy sunlight.

  You can’t eat those, Bashō cautioned, always willing to be helpful when help wasn’t needed; and Chibi-kun said nothing, hoping the old fellow might worry that he’d done so already.

  They came to an expanse of naked rock that extended under the summer sky like a gods’ platform, the grey sweep of it sun-flattened, wind-hammered, encrusted with lichens and gripped in places by the thick roots of stunted pines fitted down into crevice fractures. This is what we want, Bashō said, and they rounded a sweeping curve with their robe-sleeves flapping then emerged onto a broad shelf of granite that was thrust out over the void like an immense stone fist striking the empty air.

  What! You want to stop here?

  Old Master Bashō found a smooth spot and sank down facing the opposite slopes. The shimmering fabric of cedars and cypresses was splashed with brighter patches of maples and camphor trees, and the whole of it rose up in a steep green verticality that undulated beneath the combing fingers of the wind like the flapping of an immense sail.

  The boy flopped down beside him. These mountains all look the same.

  Bashō opened his travel pouch and removed his writing kit, a bronze brush-holder ending in a bulbous pot stuffed with ink-soaked cotton fibres, like a leek fused onto a ball onion.

  He sucked briefly on the dried tip of his brush to soften it, leaving a black smudge on his lips, then unrolled his travel journal. He stared out at the wind-flow on the flanks of the mountains, with the heat of the sun on the granite and the tumbling rush of a stream in the gorge far below; then he brush-wrote a couplet of parallel five-character lines in Chinese:

  Green upon green, the summer mountain wind.

  Farther and farther, the rustic gate at my hut.

  He scrutinised what he’d made then looked up. The wind gusted stronger, and the summer forests tossed and trembled as if the mountains were reaching out to each other.

  Can we go yet?

  I thought you were tired.

  Of course I’m tired!

  Then you should rest more.

  A furious racket erupted below them, and a troop of apes burst out of the stream-side bamboo, tumbling and screeching and baring their fangs, launching reprisals in all directions although nothing seemed to be threatening them. Advantages gained by one were soon lost to another, and the apes finally scattered out of sight, spun away by the centrifugal force of their own agitation.

  Old Master Bashō returned to his writing. He composed a phrase in Japanese, the words connected each to the next in a single, sinuous line of ink that swept down with casual ease:

  A summer gale in the mountains, and the wild monkeys also struggle to find shelter.

  Next to this he wrote:

  A summer downpour in the mountain
s, and the wild monkeys also seem to want little rain capes.

  He considered this line then blotted out A summer downpour in the mountains, hatching across each character with strokes like bird-tracks in snow.

  Now can we go?

  Bashō studied the flowing mountains before him then wrote The first drizzle beside the phrase he’d effaced, sat pondering what he’d done then added A winter shower next to that line then next to it Freezing sleet.

  Why are you doing all that?

  I’ll need ideas.

  Those are winter images. You can’t use them for an opening stanza made in summer.

  I know. But even in summer, mountains feel like a place for winter to me.

  To me, they’re just an inconvenience.

  The Old Master mulled over the phrases he had made then scraped the ink residue off his brush by drawing it backwards along the surface of a rock to maintain the integrity of the tip. He was known everywhere as a poet who looked closely at what he encountered, and who cherished his descriptions of the occurrences of the world yet who also distrusted this fondness for words so that the phrases he devised often left him dissatisfied. He would assemble variations even as he recognised the folly of trying to determine the one true way of saying what in his heart he knew could never be said.

  You get past one mountain and there’s another one, the boy declared. Like it was waiting for you.

  What Old Master Bashō wanted was to make statements of his own that could be placed beside those made by men in the past and deserve to be there with them. His journeys were pilgrimages, but his religion was the way of haikai linked poetry. He wandered through remote provinces in order to perfect his manner by testing himself against the austerities of travel, going where his precursors had gone and seeing the world as they’d seen it. But his celebrity preceded him wherever he went, and access to the past became buried beneath the importuning of those living in the present. Nothing could be done. Rustic magnates would insist on entertaining him for as long as he could be persuaded to stay. They would invite fellow aesthetes for linked poetry sessions; and after a sequence had been completed and each participant written out his own fair copy for the glory of his name and the edification of his heirs, they would fill the afternoons and evenings with feasting and singing so that the holy silence of the mountains rang loudly with their praise of it.