by Неизвестный
“Are there any kakure on Mount Fudō?” I asked.
“None. Everyone there belongs to our parish.” He thrust out his chest a bit as he spoke, and Jirō and Nakamura nodded solemnly. I had noticed that morning how these people seemed to look down upon the kakure and regard them with contempt.
“There’s nothing we can do about them. They won’t have anything to do with us. Those people behave like some kind of secret society.”
The kakure of Gotō and Ikitsuki were no longer as withdrawn as those on this island. Here even the Catholics appeared to be wary of the secretiveness of the kakure. But Jirō and Mr. Nakamura had kakure among their ancestors. It was rather amusing that the two of them now seemed to be oblivious of that fact.
“What exactly do they worship?”
“What do they worship? Well, it’s no longer true Christianity.” The priest sighed in consternation. “It’s a form of superstition.”
They gave me another interesting piece of information. The Catholics on the island celebrate Christmas and Easter according to the Western calendar, but the kakure secretly continue to observe the same festivals according to the old lunar calendar.
“Once when I went up the mountain, I found them all gathered together on the sly. Later I asked around and discovered they were celebrating their Easter.”
After Nakamura and Jirō left, I returned to my room. My head felt feverish, perhaps due to the saké, and I opened the window. The ocean was pounding like a drum. Darkness had spread thickly in all directions. It seemed to me that the drumming of the waves deepened the darkness and the silence. I have spent nights in many different places, but I have never known a night as fathomless as this.
I was moved beyond words as I reflected on the many long years that the kakure on this island would have listened to the sound of this ocean. They were the offspring of traitors who had abandoned their religious beliefs because of the fear of death and the infirmities of their flesh. Scorned by the officials and by the Buddhist laity, the kakure had moved to Gotō, to Ikitsuki, and here to this island. Nevertheless, they had been unable to cast off the teachings of their ancestors, nor did they have the courage to defend their faith boldly like the martyrs of old. They had lived amid their shame ever since.
Over the years, that shame had shaped the unique features of their faces. They were all the same—the four or five men who had ridden with me on the ferryboat, Jirō, and Mr. Nakamura. Occasionally a look of duplicity mingled with cowardice would dart across their faces.
Although there were minor differences between the kakure village organizations on this island and those in the settlements on Gotō or Ikitsuki, in each village the role of the priest was filled either by the “Watchman” or the “Village Elder.” The latter would teach the people the essential prayers and important festival days. Baptism was administered to newly born infants by the “Waterworks Official.” In some villages the positions of “Village Elder” and “Waterworks Official” were assumed by the same individual. In many instances these offices had been passed down through the patriarchal line for many generations. On Ikitsuki I had observed a case where units of organization had been established for every five households.
In front of the officials, the kakure had, of course, pretended to be practicing Buddhists. They belonged to their own parish temples and had their names recorded as Buddhist believers in the religious registry.
Like their ancestors, at certain times they were forced to trample on the fumie in the presence of the authorities. On the days when they had trodden on the sacred image, they returned to their villages filled with remorse over their own cowardice and filthiness, and there they scourged themselves with ropes woven of fibers, which they called “tempensha.” The word originally meant “whip” and was derived from their misinterpretation of the Portuguese word for “scourge.” I have seen one of these “tempensha” at the home of a Tokyo scholar of the Christian era. It was made from forty-six strands of rope, woven together, and did in fact cause a considerable amount of pain when I struck my wrist with it. The kakure had flogged their bodies with such whips.
Even this act of penitence did not assuage their guilt. The humiliation and anxiety of a traitor do not simply evaporate. The relentless gaze of their martyred comrades and the missionaries who had guided them continued to torment them from afar. No matter how diligently they tried, they could not be rid of those accusing eyes. Their prayers are therefore unlike the awkwardly translated Catholic invocations of the present day; rather, they are filled with faltering expressions of grief and phrases imploring forgiveness. These prayers, uttered from the stammering mouths of illiterate kakure, all sprang from the midst of their humiliation. “Santa Maria, Mother of God, be merciful to us sinners in the hour of death.” “We beseech thee, as we weep and moan in this vale of tears. Intercede for us, and turn eyes filled with mercy upon us.”
As I listened to the thrashing of the sea in the darkness, I thought of the kakure, finished with their labors in the fields and their fishing upon the waters, muttering these prayers in their rasping voices. They could only pray that the mediation of the Holy Mother would bring forgiveness of their frailties. For to the kakure, God was a stern paternal figure, and as a child asks its mother to intercede with its father, the kakure prayed for the Virgin Mary to intervene on their behalf. Faith in Mary was particularly strong among the kakure, and I concluded that their weakness had also prompted them to worship a figure that was a composite of the Holy Mother and Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy.
I could not sleep even after I crawled into bed. As I lay beneath the thin coverlet, I tried to sing the words of the song that Jirō had performed that evening, but I couldn’t remember them.
I had a dream. It seemed that my operation was over and I had just been wheeled back to my room; I lay back on the bed like a dead man. A rubber tube connected to an oxygen tank was thrust into my nostril, and transfusion needles from the plasma bottles hung over my bed had been inserted into my right arm and leg. My consciousness should have been blurred, but I recognized the grayish shadow that clutched my hand. It was my mother, and she was alone with me in my hospital room. There were no doctors; not even my wife.
I saw my mother in other places, too. As I walked over a bridge at dusk, her face would sometimes appear suddenly in the gathering clouds overhead. Occasionally I would be in a bar, talking with the hostesses; when the conversation broke off and a sense of empty meaninglessness stole across my heart, I would feel my mother’s presence beside me. As I bent over my work desk late in the night, I would abruptly sense her standing behind me. She seemed to be peering over my shoulder at the movements of my pen. I had strictly forbidden my children and even my wife to disturb me while I was working, but strangely it did not bother me to have my mother there. I felt no irritation whatsoever.
At such times, the figure of my mother that appeared to me was not the impassioned woman who had played her violin in search of the one perfect note. Nor was it the woman who had groped for her rosary each morning on the first Hankyū-line train, deserted except for the conductor. It was, rather, a figure of my mother with her hands joined in front of her, watching me from behind with a look of gentle sorrow in her eyes.
I must have built up that image of my mother within myself the way a translucent pearl is gradually formed inside an oyster shell. For I have no concrete memory of ever seeing my mother look at me with that weary, plaintive expression.
I now know how that image came to be formed. I superimposed on her face that of a statue of “Mater Dolorosa,” the Holy Mother of Sorrows, which my mother used to own.
After my mother’s death, people came to take away her kimonos and obis and other possessions, one after another. They claimed to be sharing out mementos of my mother, but to my young eyes, my aunts seemed to be going through the drawers of her dresser like shoppers rifling through goods in a department store. Yet they paid no attention to her most valued possessions—the old violin, t
he well-used prayer book she had kept for so many years, and the rosary with a string that was ready to break. And among the items my aunts had left behind was that cheap statue of the Holy Mother, the sort sold at every church.
Once my mother was dead, I took those few precious things with me in a box every time I moved from one lodging-house to another. Eventually the strings on the violin snapped and cracks formed in the wood. The cover was torn off her prayer book. And the statue of Mary was burned in an air raid in the winter of 1945.
The sky was a stunning blue the morning after the air raid. Charred ruins stretched from Yotsuya to Shinjuku, and all around, the embers were still smoldering. I crouched down in the remains of my apartment building in Yotsuya and picked through the ashes with a stick, pulling out broken bowls and a dictionary that had only a few unburned pages left. Eventually I struck something hard. I reached into the still warm ashes with my hand and pulled out the broken upper half of that statue. The plaster was badly scorched, and the plain face was even uglier than before. Today, with the passage of time the facial features have grown vaguer. After I was married, my wife once dropped the statue. I repaired it with glue, with the result that the expression on the face is all the more indistinct.
When I went into hospital, I placed the statue in my room. After the first operation failed and I began my second year in hospital, I had reached the end of my rope both financially and emotionally. The doctors had all but given up hope for my recovery, and my income had dissolved to nothing.
At night, beneath the dim lights, I would often stare from my bed at the face of the Holy Mother. For some reason her face seemed sad, and she appeared to be returning my gaze. It was unlike any Western painting or sculpture of the Mother of God that I had ever seen. Its face was cracked from age and from the air raid, and it was missing its nose; where the face had once been, only sorrow remained. When I studied in France, I saw scores of statues and portraits of the “Mater Dolorosa,” but this memento of my mother had lost all traces of its origins. Only that sorrow lingered.
At some point I must have blended together the look on my mother’s face and the expression on that statue. At times the face of the Holy Mother of Sorrows seemed to resemble my mother’s face when she died. I still remember clearly how she looked laid out on top of her quilt, with that shadow of pain etched into her brow.
Only once did I ever tell my wife about my mother appearing to me. The one time I did say something, she gave some sort of reply, but a look of evident displeasure flickered on her face.
There was fog everywhere.
The squawking of crows could be heard in the mist, so we knew that the village was near at hand. With my reduced lung capacity, it was quite a struggle to make it all this way. The mountain path was very steep, but my greatest difficulty was that the boots which Jirō had lent me kept slipping in the sticky clay.
Even so, Mr. Nakamura explained, we were having an easier time of it than in the old days. Back then—and we couldn’t see it now because of the fog— there had been just one mountain path to the south, and it had taken half a day to reach the village. The resourceful kakure had deliberately chosen such a remote location for their village in order to avoid surveillance by the officials.
There were terraced fields on both sides of the path, and the black silhouettes of trees emerged from the fog. The shrieking of the crows grew louder. I remembered the flock of crows that had circled the summit of the Isle of Rocks on the previous day.
Mr. Nakamura called out to a mother and child working in the fields. The mother removed the towel that covered her face and bowed to him politely.
“Kawahara Kikuichi’s house is just down this way, isn’t it?” Nakamura asked. “There’s a sensei from Tokyo here who’d like to talk to him.”
The woman’s child gawked at me curiously until his mother scolded him, at which point he charged off into the field.
It had been Mr. Nakamura’s sensible suggestion that we bring along a bottle of saké from the village as a gift for Mr. Kawahara. Jirō had carried it for me on our trek, but at this point I took it from him and followed the two men into the village. A radio was playing a popular song. Some of the houses had motorcycles parked in their sheds.
“All the young people want to get out of this place.”
“Do they come to town?”
“No, a lot of them go to work in Sasebo or Hirado. I suppose it’s hard for them to find work on the island when they’re known as children of the kakure.”
The crows were still following us along the road. They settled on the thatched roof of a house and cawed. It was as if they were warning the villagers of our arrival.
The house of Kawahara Kikuichi was somewhat larger than the others in the village, with a tiled roof and a giant camphor tree growing at the back. A single look at the house and it was obvious Kikuichi was the “Village Elder,” the individual who performed the role of priest in this community.
Leaving me outside, Mr. Nakamura went into the house and negotiated with the family for a few minutes. The child we had seen in the field watched us from a distance, his hands thrust into trousers that had half fallen down. I glanced at him and realized that his bare feet were covered with mud. The crows squawked again.
I turned to Jirō. “It looks as though he doesn’t want to meet us.”
“Oh, no. With Mr. Nakamura talking to him, everything will be just fine,” he reassured me.
Finally an agreement was reached. When I stepped inside the earthen entranceway, a woman was staring at me from the dark interior. I held out the bottle of saké and told her it was a small token of my gratitude, but there was no response.
Inside the house it was incredibly dark. The weather was partly to blame, but it was so dark I had the feeling it would be little different on a clear day. And there was a peculiar smell.
Kawahara Kikuichi was a man of about sixty. He never looked directly at me but always kept his fearful eyes focused on some other spot in the room as he spoke. His replies were truncated, and he gave the impression that he wanted us to leave as soon as possible. Each time the conversation faltered, my eyes shifted to different corners of the room, to the stone mortar in the entranceway, to the straw matting, or to the sheaves of straw. I was searching for the characteristic staff that belonged to the “Village Elder” and for the place where they had concealed their icons.
The Village Elder’s staff was something only he was allowed to possess. When he went to perform baptisms, he carried a staff made of oak; to drive evil spirits from a home, he used a silverberry staff. His staff was never made from bamboo. Clearly these staffs were an imitation of the croziers carried by priests in the Christian age.
I searched carefully, but I was unable to locate either a staff or the closet where the icons were hidden away. Eventually I was able to hear the prayers handed down to Kikuichi from his ancestors, but the hesitant expressions of grief and the pleas for forgiveness were like every other kakure supplication I had heard.
“We beseech thee, as we weep and moan in this vale of tears.” As he intoned the melody, Kikuichi stared into space. “Intercede for us, and turn eyes filled with mercy upon us.” Like the song Jirō had crooned the previous evening, this was just a string of clumsy phrases addressed as an appeal to someone.
“As we weep and moan in this vale of tears . . .” I repeated Kikuichi’s words, trying to commit the tune to memory.
“We beseech thee . . .”
“We beseech thee.”
“. . . Turn eyes filled with mercy . . .”
“Turn eyes filled with mercy . . .”
In the back of my mind was an image of the kakure returning to their village one night each year after being forced to trample on the fumie and pay their respects at the Buddhist altars. Back in their darkened homes, they recited these words of prayer. “Intercede for us, and turn eyes filled with mercy upon us. . . .”
The crows shrieked. For a few moments we were all silent, staring out
at the thick mist that drifted past the veranda. A wind must have got up, for the milky fog swirled by more quickly than before.
“Could you perhaps show me your . . . your altar icons?” I stammered through my request, but Kikuichi’s eyes remained fixed in another direction, and he gave no answer. The term “altar icons” is not Christian jargon, of course, but refers more generally to the Buddhist deities which are worshiped in an inner room of the house. Among the kakure, however, the object to which they prayed was concealed in the most inconspicuous part of the house; to deceive the officials, they referred to these images as their “altar icons.” Even today, when they have full freedom of worship, they do not like to show these images to nonbelievers. Many of them believe that they defile their hidden icons by displaying them to outsiders.
Mr. Nakamura was somewhat firmer in his request. “He’s come all the way from Tokyo. Why don’t you show them to him?”
Finally Kikuichi stood up.
We followed him through the entranceway. The eyes of the woman in the darkened room were riveted on our movements.
“Watch your head!” Jirō called out from behind as we entered the inner room. The door was so low we had to bend over in order to go in. The tiny room, darker than the entranceway, was filled with the musty smells of straw and potatoes. Straight ahead of us was a small Buddhist altar decorated with a candle. This was certainly a decoy. Kikuichi’s eyes shifted to the left. Two pale blue curtains hung there, though I had not noticed them when we came through the door. Rice cakes and a white bottle of offertory wine had been placed on the altar stand. Kikuichi’s wrinkled hand slowly drew aside the curtains. Gradually the sections of an ocher-colored hanging scroll were revealed to us.
Behind us, Jirō sighed, “It’s just a picture.”