The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by Неизвестный

  “Which way is the kakure village?” I asked. The priest pointed in the opposite direction to that from which I had come. I couldn’t see any lights, perhaps because the mountains obstructed my view. In the age of persecution, to escape the eyes of the officials, the kakure Christians had settled as much as possible in secluded mountain fastnesses or on inaccessible coastlines. Undoubtedly that was the case here. We’ll have to walk quite a way tomorrow, I thought, surveying my own rather fragile body. Seven years before, I had undergone chest surgery, and though I had recovered, I still had little faith in my physical strength.

  I dreamed of my mother. In my dream I had just been brought out of the operating theater and was sprawled out on my bed like a corpse. A rubber tube connected to an oxygen tank was thrust into my nostril, and intravenous needles pierced my right arm and leg, carrying blood from the transfusion bottles dangling over my bed.

  Although I should have been half-unconscious, through the languid weight of the anesthetic I recognized the gray shadow that held my hand. It was my mother. Strangely, neither my wife nor any of the doctors was in the room.

  I have had that dream many times. Frequently I wake up unable to distinguish dream from reality and lie in a daze on my bed until I realize with a sigh that I am not in the hospital where I spent three years, but in my own home.

  I have not told my wife about that dream. She was the one who watched over me through every night after each of my three operations, and I felt remorseful that my wife did not even seem to exist in my dreams. The main reason I said nothing to her, however, was my distasteful realization that the firm bonds between my mother and myself—stronger than even I had suspected—continued to link us some twenty years after her death, even in my dreams.

  I know little about psychoanalysis, so I have no idea exactly what this dream means. In it, I cannot actually see my mother’s face. Nor are her movements distinct. When I reflect back on the dream, the figure seems to be my mother, but I cannot positively say that it is. But it most definitely is not my wife or any kind of nurse or attendant, or even a doctor.

  So far as my memory serves me, I can recollect no experience in my youth when I lay ill in bed with my mother holding my hand. Normally the image of my mother that pops into my mind is the figure of a woman who lived her life fervently.

  When I was five years old, we were living in Dairen in Manchuria in connection with my father’s work. I can still vividly recall the icicles that hung down past the windows of our tiny house like the teeth of a fish. The sky is overcast, and it looks as if it will begin to snow at any moment, but the snow never comes. In a nine-by-twelve room, my mother is practicing the violin. For hours on end she practices the same melody over and over again. With the violin wedged under her chin, her face is hard, stonelike, and her eyes are fixed on a single point in space as she seems to be trying to isolate that one true note somewhere in the void. Unable to find that elusive note, she heaves a sigh; her irritation mounts, and she continues to scrape the bow across the strings. The brownish calluses on her chin were familiar to me. They had formed when she was still a student at the music academy and had kept her violin tucked constantly under her chin. The tips of her fingers, too, were as hard to the touch as pebbles, the result of the many thousands of times she had pressed down on the strings in her quest for that one note.

  The image of my mother in my school days—that image within my heart was of a woman abandoned by her husband. She sits like a stone statue on the sofa in that dark room at nightfall in Dairen. As a child I could not bear to see her struggling so to endure her grief. I sat near her, pretending to do my homework but concentrating every nerve in my body on her. Because I could not fathom the complex situation, I was all the more affected by the picture of her suffering, her hand pressed against her forehead. I was in torment, not knowing what I should do.

  Those dismal days stretched from autumn into winter. Determined not to see her sitting in that darkened room, I walked home from school as slowly as I could. I followed the old White Russian who sold Russian bread everywhere he went. Around sunset I finally turned toward home, kicking pebbles along the side of the road.

  One day, when my father had taken me out on one of our rare walks together, he said suddenly, “Your mother . . . she’s going back to Japan on an important errand. . . . Would you like to go with her?”

  Detecting a grown-up’s lie, I grunted, “Uh-huh” and went on walking along behind him in silence, kicking at every rock I could find. The following month, with financial assistance from her older sister in Kobe, my mother took me back to Japan.

  And then my mother during my middle-school days. Though I have various memories of her, they all congeal on one spot. Just as she had once played her violin in search of the one true note, she subsequently adopted a stern, solitary life in quest of the one true religion. On wintry mornings, at the frozen fissure of dawn, I often noticed a light in her room. I knew what she was doing in there. She was fingering the beads of her rosary and praying. Eventually she would take me with her on the first Hankyū-line train of the day and set out for Mass. On the deserted train I slouched back in my seat and pretended to be rowing a boat. But occasionally I would open my eyes and see my mother’s fingers gliding along those rosary beads.

  In the darkness, I opened my eyes to the sound of rain. I dressed hurriedly and ran from my bungalow to the brick chapel across the way.

  The chapel was almost too ornate for this beggarly island village. The previous evening, the priest had told me that the village Christians had worked for two years to erect this chapel, hauling the stones and cutting the wood themselves. They say that three hundred years ago, the faithful also built churches with their own hands to please the foreign missionaries. That custom has been passed down undiluted on this remote island off Kyushu.

  In the dimly lit chapel knelt three peasant women in their work attire, with white cloths covering their heads. There were also two men in working clothes. Since the nave was bereft of kneelers or benches, they each knelt on straw mats to offer up their prayers. One had the impression that as soon as Mass was over, they would pick up their hoes and head straight for the fields or the sea. At the altar, the priest turned his sunken eyes toward the tiny congregation, lifted up the chalice with both hands, and intoned the prayer of Consecration. The light from the candles illuminated the text of the large Latin missal. I thought of my mother. I couldn’t help but feel that this chapel somehow resembled the church she and I had attended thirty years before.

  When we stepped outside after Mass, the rain had stopped but a dense fog had settled in. The direction in which the kakure village lay was shrouded in a milky haze; the silhouettes of trees hovered like ghosts amid the fog.

  “It doesn’t look like you’ll be able to set out in all this fog,” the priest muttered from behind me, rubbing his hands together. “The mountain roads are very slippery. You’d better spend the day resting yourself. Why don’t you go tomorrow?”

  He proposed a tour of the Christian graves in his village for the afternoon. Since the kakure district lay deep in the mountains, it would be no easy matter for even a local resident to make the climb, and with only one lung I certainly did not have the strength to walk there in the dense, soaking mist.

  Through breaks in the fog, the ocean appeared, black and cold. Not a single boat had ventured out. Even from where I stood, I could make out the frothy white fangs of the waves.

  I had breakfast with the priest and went to lie down in the six-mat room that had been provided for me. In bed I reread a book about the history of this region. A thin rain began to fall; its sound, like shifting sands, deepened the solitude within my room, which was bare except for a bus timetable tacked to the wall. Suddenly I wanted to go back to Tokyo.

  According to the historical documents, the persecution of Christians in this area commenced in 1607 and was at its fiercest between 1615 and 1617.

  Father Pedro de San Dominico

  Matthia
s

  Francisco Gorosuke

  Miguel Shin’emon

  Dominico Kisuke

  This list includes only the names of the priests and monks who were martyred in the village in 1615. No doubt there were many more nameless peasants and fisherwomen who gave up their lives for the faith. In the past, as I devoted my free time to reading the history of Christian martyrdoms in Japan, I formulated within my mind an audacious theory. My hypothesis is that these public executions might have been carried out as warnings to the leaders of each village rather than to each individual believer. This will, of course, never be anything more than my own private conjecture so long as the historical records offer no supportive evidence. But I can’t help feeling that the faithful in those days, rather than deciding individually whether to die for the faith or to apostatize, were instead bowing to the will of the entire community.

  It has been my long-held supposition that because the sense of community, based on blood relationships, was so much stronger among villagers in those days, it was not left up to individuals to determine whether they would endure persecution or succumb. Instead this matter was decided by the village as a whole. In other words, the officials, knowing that they would be exterminating their labor force if they executed an entire community that stubbornly clung to its faith, would only kill selected representatives of the village. In cases where there was no choice but apostasy, the villagers would renounce their beliefs en masse to ensure the preservation of the community. That, I felt, was the fundamental distinction between Japanese Christian martyrdoms and the martyrs in foreign lands.

  The historical documents clearly indicate that in former times, nearly fifteen hundred Christians lived on this ten-by three-and-a-half-kilometer island. The most active proselytizer on the island in those days was the Portuguese father Camillo Constanzo, who was burned at the stake on the beach of Tabira in 1622. They say that even after the fire was lit and his body was engulfed in black smoke, the crowd could hear him singing the Laudate Dominum. When he finished singing, he cried “Holy! Holy!” five times and breathed his last.

  Peasants and fishermen found to be practicing Christianity were executed on a craggy islet—appropriately named the Isle of Rocks—about a half hour from here by rowboat. They were bound hand and foot, taken to the top of the sheer precipice of the island, and hurled to their deaths. At the height of the persecutions, the number of believers killed on the Isle of Rocks never fell below ten per month, according to contemporary reports. To simplify matters, the officers would sometimes bind several prisoners together in a rush mat and toss them into the frigid seas. Virtually none of the bodies of these martyrs was ever recovered.

  I read over the grisly history of the island’s martyrs until past noon. The drizzling rain continued to fall.

  At lunchtime the priest was nowhere to be seen. A sunburned, middle-aged woman with jutting cheekbones served my meal. I judged her to be the wife of some fisherman, but in the course of conversation, I learned to my surprise that she was a nun who had devoted herself to a life of celibate service. The image I had always fostered of nuns was limited to those women I often saw in Tokyo with their peculiar black robes. This woman told me about the order of sisters in this area, known in the local jargon as “The Servants’ Quarters.” The order, to which she belonged, practiced communal living, worked in the fields the same as the other farm women, looked after children at the nursery school, and tended the sick in the hospital.

  “Father went on his motorcycle to Mount Fudō. He said he’d be back around three o’clock.” Her eyes shifted toward the rain-splattered window. “With this awful weather, you must be terribly bored, Sensei. Jirō from the office said he’d be by soon to show you the Christian graves.”

  Jirō was the young man with the bicycle who had been standing beside the priest when I arrived the previous night.

  Just as she predicted, Jirō appeared soon after I had finished lunch and invited me to accompany him. He even brought along a pair of boots for me to wear.

  “I didn’t think you’d want to get your shoes all muddy.”

  He apologized that the boots were so old, bowing his head so incessantly that I was embarrassed.

  “I’m ashamed to make you ride in a truck like this,” he added.

  As we drove along the streets in his little van, I found that the mental picture I had drawn the previous night was accurate. All the houses were squat, and the village reeked of fish. At the dock, about ten small boats were preparing to go to sea. The only buildings made of reinforced concrete were the village office and the primary school. Even the “main street” gave way to thatched-roofed farmhouses after less than five minutes. The telephone poles were plastered with rain-soaked advertisements for a strip show. They featured a picture of a nude woman cupping her breasts; the show bore the dreadful title “The Sovereign of Sex.”

  “Father is heading a campaign to stop these shows in the village.”

  “But I’ll bet the young men spend all their free time there. Even the young Christians . . .”

  My attempt at humor fell on deaf ears as Jirō tightened his grip on the steering wheel. I quickly changed the subject.

  “About how many Christians are there on the island now?”

  “I think around a thousand.”

  In the seventeenth century, the number had been calculated at fifteen hundred, meaning a loss of about one-third since that time.

  “And how many kakure?”

  “I’m really not sure. I imagine they get fewer in number every year. Only the old people stick to their practices. The young ones say the whole thing’s ridiculous.”

  Jirō related an interesting story. In spite of frequent encouragement from the priests and believers, the kakure had refused to reconvert to Catholicism. They claimed that it was their brand of Christianity which had been handed down from their ancestors, making it the true original faith; they further insisted that the Catholicism brought back to Japan in the Meiji period was a reformed religion. Their suspicions were confirmed by the modern attire of the priests, which differed radically from that of the padres they had been told about over the generations.

  “And so one French priest had a brilliant idea. He dressed up like one of the padres from those days and went to visit the kakure.”

  “What happened?”

  “The kakure admitted he looked a lot like the real thing, but something was wrong. They just couldn’t believe him!”

  I sensed a degree of contempt toward the kakure in Jirō’s tale, but I laughed aloud anyway. Surely the French priest who went to all the trouble of dressing up like a friar from the seventeenth century had had a sense of humor about him. The story seemed somehow exhilaratingly typical of this island.

  Once we left the village, the gray road extended out along the coast. Mountains pressed in from our left, the ocean to our right. The waters churned, a leaden color, and when I rolled down the window an inch, a gust of rainy wind pelted my face.

  Jirō stopped his truck in the shelter of a windbreak and held out an umbrella for me. The earth was sandy, dotted here and there with growths of tiny pine shrubs. The Christian graveyard lay at the crest of a sand-dune perched precariously over the ocean. It hardly deserved to be called a graveyard. The single stone marker was so tiny that even I could have lifted it with a little effort, and a good third of it was buried beneath the sand. The face of the stone was bleached gray by the wind and rain; all that I could make out was a cross that seemed to have been scratched into the rock with some object, and the Roman letters “M” and “R.” Those two characters suggested a name like “Maria,” and I wondered if the Christian buried here might have been a woman.

  I had no idea why this solitary grave had been dug in a spot so far removed from the village. Perhaps some relative had quietly moved it to this inconspicuous location after the exterminations. Or possibly, during the persecution, this woman had been executed on this very beach.

  A choppy sea stretched o
ut beyond this forsaken Christian grave. The gusts pounding the windbreak sounded like electric wires chafing together. In the offing I could see a tiny black island, the Isle of Rocks where Christians from this district had been strung together like beads and hurled into the waters below.

  I learned how to lie to my mother.

  As I think back on it now, I suppose my lies must have sprung from some sort of complex I had about her. This woman, who had been driven to seek consolation in religion after being abandoned by her husband, had redirected the fervor she had once expended in search of the one true violin note toward a quest for the one true God. I can comprehend that zeal now, but as a child it suffocated me. The more she compelled me to share her faith, the more I fought her oppressive power, the way a drowning child struggles against the pressure of the water.

  One of my friends at school was a boy called Tamura. His father ran a brothel at Nishinomiya. He always had a filthy bandage wound about his neck, and he was often absent from school; I suppose he must have had tuberculosis even then. He had very few friends and was constantly mocked by the conscientious students. Certainly part of the reason I latched onto him was a desire to get back at my strict mother.

  The first time I smoked a cigarette under Tamura’s tutelage, I felt as though I was committing a horrid sin. Behind the archery range at school, Tamura, sensitive to every noise around us, stealthily pulled a crumpled cigarette pack from the pocket of his school uniform.

  “You can’t inhale deeply right at first. Try just a little puff at a time.”

  I hacked, choked by the piercing smoke that filled my nose and throat. At that moment, my mother’s face appeared before me. It was her face as she prayed with her rosary in the predawn darkness. I took a deeper drag on the cigarette to exorcise this vision.

  Another thing I learned from Tamura was going to movies on my way home from school. I slipped into the darkened Niban Theater near the Nishinomiya Hanshin Station, following Tamura like a criminal. The smell from the toilet filled the auditorium. Amid the sounds of crying babies and the coughs of old men, I listened to the monotonous gyrations of the movie projector. My whole mind was absorbed with thoughts of what my mother would be doing just then.