Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure

by Hideo Furukawa

  Then, after standing transfixed in front of two vending machines that had not been toppled by the tsunami (I was staring at the address written on its side; city, ward, street, number), after one slight step onto the plot of a half-destroyed house (and the small shrine that I assumed commemorated the family’s clan god; it was undamaged), after looking over the swaying white lace curtains, the swaying hangers now without clothes to dry (had the wind been blowing on that day? Were there sea breezes?), after that, it was after that, that we returned to the car.

  Had to wonder why they had not been crushed.

  Today (April 20) I learn from the morning paper that preschools and elementary and middle schools in Fukushima, thirteen such schools in all, are required to hold all activities indoors. The Ministry of Education had informed the Fukushima Prefectural Board of Education that dosage limits had been exceeded. “Dose,” of course, means a dose of radioactivity. This is not for the area within the twenty-kilometer radius around Fukushima Daiichi. This is only for the thirteen schools within the cities of Fukushima, Kōriyama, and Date. Apparently the news came out yesterday, but I have overlooked real-time news. The Kōriyama Board of Education had already decreed that its eighty-six schools “should avoid outdoor activities.” Did I really overlook the real-time news flow? Maybe not, maybe this was just not disseminated across the “entire country.” The pace of news reporting continues to slow.

  We set off again, leaving behind us that couple-hundred-meter stretch leading to the coast. Double-checking the map shows that there are many shrines in this vicinity. The map spread before us was at 1:55,000 scale. We also had the car navigation system, iPads, and iPhones. I had seen one of the shrines on the map identified as “Tenshōkōtaijin”—the name suggests an imperial shrine and points to the founding goddess Amaterasu—and had asked Ms. S and young S if we could check it out. I knew from experience that if we determined a target and set off without giving any consideration to local conditions or anything else we would find things we had never expected. And further, given that the shrine and torii located near the coastline were not to be found, I wanted even more to find one that was still there. Even so, with a name like that, I thought to myself. This “Tenshō” is the most elevated of gods—“Kōtaijin” being “highest imperial deity”—not just “imperial” but “Amaterasu,” which, of course, brings to my mind that most ancient of records, the Kojiki. Now, I don’t think about the Nihonshoki (the equally ancient imperial collection of records). Why? Because as a historical document, that one is too structured; records that are that rationally systematized do not count as history, in my thinking. Why am I so stuck on this thing? It is Amaterasu who emerges as the central deity of the Takamagahara mythological heavenly plain, and it is the same Amaterasu who makes her appearance in the Kojiki and Nihonshoki. Amaterasu who is the first in the line of emperors, the sun goddess.

  We left the prefectural highway and headed north. The wet paddy area was divided in two. On the right side of the car, the eastern side, that is, the fields were almost entirely submerged, ravaged by the tsunami, which is to say, by sea water, which had still not receded. I assume there is no real need to point it out, but there was no overlooking the salt damage. Indeed, breezes now ripple the surface and stir small waves; seems the area has turned into ocean. Maybe that turns this into the new coastline. Now-dead rice fields reflecting sunlight. I got out of the car. For a minute, maybe two, wanted to think things over. Not sure what, exactly. The water surface is like a mirror. Blue sky reflects off it, albeit slightly cloudy. The sun is going down into that mirror surface. The setting sun, the sun. The august imperial ancestral sun goddess.

  Why death to the rice fields? Why death here, too?

  We encountered members of the Self-Defense Forces. Behind them the disaster-relief trucks. We were ordered to avoid the area.

  They guided us from impassable roads to passable ones, onto farm roads.

  Then, the Kojiki. It seems to me that the role of the myriad gods, and the emperor, is to petition for an abundant harvest of the five grains, of which rice is the first among equals. I am not going so far as to reference the postwar symbolic emperor system, nor all that led up to it. Speaking personally, I find heroic qualities in the Meiji and Shōwa emperors. Nonetheless, I do, of course, reference the original ancient Yamato imperial court, and I reference the myths, the legends about a land that proceeded from the rising sun. Then what of a Kojiki phrase to “honor the land”? How does one sing praises to this national land? Especially now, given that there is a second sun in the nuclear core? A meltdown that has taken its name from Fukushima. Can a name be given to this particular sun deity?

  Some of the shrines appear in the in-car navigation system and on our other maps, but many do not appear. In our to-and-fro meandering, looking for the site of the Tenshōkōtaijin, we realized the extent to which this was so. We found ourselves in front of truly meager structures, shrines not on any official ranking, not even rising to the official level of “village shrine.” I assume they were there to honor the pioneers of that area. It must have taken much strength of will to settle this area. Many souls that now need placating. In one of those shrines, a big 1.8-liter sake bottle lies empty on its side. Somebody had paid their respects. The ruckus of a large celebration, the prayers for auspicious events. Finally, when we arrived at the shrine we were looking for, we found that the pair of big stone lanterns right behind the torii gate had collapsed into rubble. We climbed the stone steps, arrived at the second torii gate and the purification fountain to find that the area had been roped off, with a sign reading, “Danger, do not enter.” The scars of a massive earthquake; sacred precincts to which entrance is forbidden. We were only there for a few minutes. The four of us then descended the stone steps. I took a photograph of the first gate, looking skyward from below the two crossbeams. The other three were already back in the parked car. I was the last into that small rental car with Kashiwa plates. Young S was already in the driver’s seat with his hands on the wheel. Ms. S was in the passenger seat punching an address into the car navigation screen. Y was in the backseat. And there, tightly squeezed into that space where one expects the armrest, I saw him. I was the last one to get into the car.

  It was him.

  There is this command: “Write.” OK. I will write this. I am writing: Inuzuka Gyūichirō was there. A fifth passenger. The fifth person in our party. “Write”: The oldest brother of The Holy Family, the one with “dog” in the family name and “cow” in the given name, was in the car with us. But if I write that, I’ve got fiction, and this essay turns into a novel. But I have my integrity to preserve in this; there has not been a single fabrication in what I have written thus far. I may have been hesitant, but no fabrications. By making this essay a definitive “real account,” I was hoping for something, for a definitive salvation. Am still hoping, in fact. I am aware that this is a kind of requiem. There are parameters to this. I had my own limits, which, in this case, was “that accumulation” of ninety-plus handwritten manuscript pages. Even so, even so…“Write.”

  Did I really not see this? Can I really say that I have not had the experience, the physical experience, of being able to see invisible things? Is that not part of who I am, pain-filled qualities though they may be? Has this not happened to me before, hearing things that other people cannot, being unable to hear things that others can? What about colors? I had already made public about half a year ago that I am disabled by partial colorblindness. I did not want that fact—it is a trivial fact, an affliction in no way comparable to full color blindness, slight even—to be brought to bear on things within the works that I had published in the past, so I hadn’t said anything about it. But what I had come to write about had to do with invisible colors, imperceptible sounds, and ghostly letters. As a novelist I had written about illiterates, and, of course, of invisible worlds and invisible people. Why? In The Holy Family I had written of Inuzuka Gyūichirō as though he were a sum total of things. He is
the oldest son, the eldest of the three siblings, and he was given the names of two varieties of animal, the dog and the cow; was he not living in an invisible world? And is it not true that I did not ever, not even once, deny that this is “entirely factual.” His reality is not fabrication, nor is it the product of madness. Is it not because I keep piling up these denials that my work is not understood? But will not someone misunderstand? What is it with this whining? Have I not become aware that I am myself an older brother? OK, I know it’s an unseen family, but I am still the eldest son. I have to have faith in the expansiveness of that family. I have to have faith in trust.

  “Write!” It was definitely him.

  “I have seen him.” There, I put it in writing. He is there, in the back seat of the rental car, the fifth in our party. Inuzuka Gyūichirō, there in the car with us. This is how I start writing a novel. For example, with the sound of a voice saying, “Go there.” And then, “Come here.” Young S signaled that he was about to start driving. We took off. We were now leaving Minami Sōma’s Kashima Ward. From thinking about the Kojiki, a chain of associations naturally led me to think about The Holy Family. I thought of all those poems by emperors about looking over the land, and, thinking more broadly than waka poetry, I was thinking simply of poetry, thinking maybe it was a masterpiece of poetry that I was after. I turned to Ms. S: “We never did see any white birds, did we?…There were no seagulls, we couldn’t see them, could we?” I asked. Ms. S responded that there were no seagulls because, perhaps, there were no more fish. I was totally convinced by that response; then I said to him, in a Fukushima accent, “What’re you doing here?” To which Inuzuka Gyūichirō responded, “Because I have chosen to continue forever as the eldest son.” Then, augmented with dialect, “Ya see?”

  Sounds more like that half-made-up language that was tweaked and inserted into The Holy Family.

  So I asked, “Forever?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s not like I don’t know, but still.”

  Even as I was answering, I felt pretty sure that I was following him.

  He grunted in agreement. “You see?” His composed tone brought me back to the realm of standard speech.

  “In other words, you are to be the eternal firstborn,” I said.

  “Isn’t that what I just said?” he shot back.

  “When?”

  “Now. Just a minute ago. So now what are you thinking? You trying to say that that’s what you said? You trying to say that this was some pronouncement of yours, that I am some temporary construction you came up with?”

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “If you continue with these stupid antics,” he said, “you’re going to lose your mind, you know.”

  I kept silent.

  I think we had turned onto national Route 6. Heading away from Tokyo (by which is meant “heading north”) along what everyone there calls the “Rikuzen Beach Highway,” which is to say, crossing more of these invisible regional and city boundary lines, moving from Minami Sōma into Sōma City. The route might have been slightly different. I don’t fully remember, but anyway, compared to that narrow farm road still torn up by the earthquake, this was smooth sailing down a well-kept major thoroughfare. It felt like we were flying. The sense of floating on air, to put it into words. The sense that this has already happened, the sense that this is someone else’s experience.

  He said, “I have nephews. What about you?”

  “I have two.”

  “I have just one, I guess. My younger sister is pregnant, and in the sonogram you can see the baby in her womb, which looks to be a boy. But you can’t exactly include an unborn nephew in the calculation, can you? So, I have just one nephew. But you have two, then?”

  “From my older brother.”

  “Older brother?”

  “That’s right. Nieces and nephews: my older brother has three kids, and my older sister has three as well,” I said.

  “Three siblings,” he said. “It’s interesting how blood lines work. Lets you trace things.”

  “I guess,” I responded. Three persons’ worth of propagation; more precisely, the propagation of my three siblings, but I have no kids. So I change the subject. I want to avoid the topic. “Have you met him? How often?”

  “Who?”

  “Your nephew?”

  “Just once.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Must’ve been around five. Could’ve been three or four. No, would’ve been too developed for that. Must have been about five.”

  “Smart, was he?” I asked.

  “Just like my little sister. No question about it. They look nothing alike, though.” He drew it out slowly, exposing deep feelings. “It’s really true. Looks absolutely nothing like the mother. And, you know, he looks a little too much like a cat. Like one of those big feral cats.”

  “More than the dogs, the inu of the Inuzuka family?”

  That’s when he explained that his nephew doesn’t have that family name. I felt afloat, having spent these dusky hours in the too-smooth movement of the rental car, feeling like I was bobbing through the air. The “forever” of that phrase was a little too perfect here. Young S had his hands on the steering wheel.

  He had described how his nephew looked. So I feel compelled to describe his features as well. I am duty-bound. I looked at the hands of this Inuzuka Gyūichirō who carried the dog (inu犬) in his family name, and a cow (gyū牛) in his given name. But even before looking closely to observe, my line of vision was drawn of its own accord, given how much they had changed.

  Just the slightest oddity in form, I guess. They were fighter’s hands. I know from experience that if you hit someone, your hands swell up. Especially the knuckles of the index and middle fingers, if you get in solid hits (especially in the activity of continuous striking), from there to the back of the hand swells up greenish-purple, just for a day or two; it is proof of the rank amateur. But he had hands that had, already, been swollen and gnarled. I have seen hands like that before, in a certain strain of karate black belts. In fact, those guys have gnarled toenails as well, the result of their training. I will limit myself here to describing his, Gyūichirō’s, hands. It was obvious just how hard the skin of those hands was. They had the odd appearance and color of hardened gelatin. The knuckles were swollen one to two centimeters more than usual; the second finger joints were also gnarled, from index finger to pinky, on both hands. And then the thumbs, which looked to be twice the size of normal thumbs. They had already been thoroughly toughened up, from extended drumming on hard objects. They call this buildup of calluses the “forging of iron skin.”

  They prepare this way because they fight in close combat, especially with bare hands. It takes five years, ten, fifteen. Takes more than that. Self-inflicted pain, self-torture of the muscle structure, of the bones, of the skin.

  For example, human fingers: if you pack a barrel-sized vessel full of round, smooth stones—river stones are especially good for this, but small pebbles will work too—and then nearly every day you jam those fingers into it, a couple of things happen. First, the fingers turn into a sort of “instrument” and don’t get jammed, and then they turn into a substitute that is almost as good as an instrument fashioned from steel. This allows pinpoint precision in striking, much more than a fist allows. A strike can go straight to the vital spots, all the weak spots of the human body (easy to imagine these: eyeballs or eye sockets, for example).

  I am writing about strange things here. I am aware of this. I am talking here not just about martial arts but very particular physical skills, almost all of which are “military tactics.” Right up there with sword training and spear tactics, antimodern tactics. But, even so, what I am trying to say is that, in a world different from our contemporary world it might have been sort of normal. I am about to touch on Japanese history. This is unbearably uncomfortable, to me anyway, all this history stuff.

  Our history, the history of the Japanese, is nothing more
than a history of killing people.

  I am not sure of the best way to phrase things, given that rather inflammatory start. I will explain things as simply as I can. We live within the echoes of the Warring States period. For example, bushō, the term for military leaders, circulates as a commodity in contemporary society, and, thus, it continues to echo in everyday Japan. By the “Warring States period” I include the Azuchi Momoyama period right up to the beginning of the Edo period (1573–1603). I am not sure if the Azuchi Momoyama period is still taught as a single historical period in schools (elementary, middle, and up through high school). But I am quite sure that everyone learns that there was a period when Oda Nobunaga and then Toyotomi Hideyoshi ruled supreme. For example, we consume these two men as commodities all the time. When I say we “consume” them as commodities, I mean how we see them as “heroic” and think of them positively. Why would that be? These two were a rare form of military leader, which is also to say, on the other hand, and precisely because of that, that they were a rarely seen form of murderer. I can lay out details from the historical record. I will use both reign-era names and Western calendar dates. In the second year of Genki (1571) Nobunaga burned down the Enryakuji Temple compound outside Kyoto, murdering three to four thousand people. Among them women and children who had begged for mercy. Those very women and children were, one by one, beheaded. In the second year of Tenshō (1574), Nobunaga crushed the Ikkō-ikki uprising in Echizen. More than half of those that were confined by the siege were driven to starvation, and then, to give but one example, he built multiple fences around their compound to cut off all exits and then set fire to the entire thing, from all sides. More than twenty thousand people were burned to death. He would not even consider their requests for surrender. In the third year of Tenshō (1575), Nobunaga crushed the Ikkō-ikki uprising in Nagashima. He wrote of this in his own hand: “Nothing but corpses in the towns.” This in a letter addressed to the military officer stationed in Kyoto.