With the birdcage in one hand and a bird net in the other, Uncle Isa set out on the road beside the rice fields and headed in the direction of the water’s edge. He entered the grove of pine trees planted there to prevent the sand from blowing far away. He stretched a net between the trees and placed the cage at the base. When he realized that the boy was taking this all in with wide eyes, he said, “It’s a boy, you see.… The male bird sings, you see. He sings and then the girls come.” He then moved off a short distance and picked up a number of largish stones and placed them together. Following that he gathered some dry pine branches and needles, piled them on top of the stones, and lit them with a match. It developed into such a roaring flame that it left the boy worried that it would jump and catch neighboring trees on fire, but Isa seemed unconcerned and only piled on more branches and needles. He seemed to have no worries about starting a great fire. After he had judged that the stones had heated sufficiently he took the boy with him and drew closer to the netting. He realized that at various spots in the netting were caught little birds, much more subdued in their coloring than the one in the cage. Isa, with no change of expression, reached into the net, grabbed one of the birds, and pulled it loose from the trap. At the same moment that he freed it from the netting he twisted its neck and killed it; tearing off the feathers with his fingers he made his way toward the fire and heated stones. Without their feathers they seemed more like matchsticks, with skinny bodies only slightly bigger than the boy’s thumb. He then cut open the stomachs with his fingernail and pulled out the slight organs. It was hard to imagine from this the shape of the bird from just a minute ago, looking now like nothing more than a bloody scrap of meat. Slapping this on top of a hot stone it immediately raised the sound of burning flesh and sent up white smoke. Uncle Isa pulled a small cloth bag from his pants pocket. For whatever reason this bag was always on his person, a bag of salt from which he extracted a pinch and shook it onto the meat. When he thought it was about cooked through he whisked it from the stone and with a “Looky there” thrust it in front of the boy’s nose.
“You eat it starting with the head,” Hitoshi had told him. “Midwinter sparrows are the fattiest, but even though these finches were rather small, they were quite juicy with fat. Kinda silky, a little like fish oil; sounds kinda gross, I guess, but they taste good,” he had continued. He relayed all this to Kakujirō, who had leaned forward in his chair in front of the bookshelf and drew on his cigarette. “In those days, I guess we did that kind of stuff, huh?” he said, nodding.
Shōji had hitched a ride with Hitoshi, after he had gotten off work, to Kakujirō’s house in Hamazawa. The town was about thirty minutes straight north by the road that hugged the sea. A place of rice patties and strawberry fields, and being near the sea it had some industry with salmon and other marine products. Shōji’s parents’ house was in this town as well, close to Kakujirō’s, no more than five minutes’ walk, but he had not yet told anyone that he had returned. Being in such close proximity without letting anyone at his parents’ know he was there left him feeling, somehow, that he had turned into a ghost.
This was not the first time he had visited Kakujirō at his house. Back when he was in school he had written an essay for a small literary magazine published in Hachinohe. Kakujirō was, at that time, writing a series of articles about the old days of salmon fishing in Hamazawa village, now called Hamazawa town. That’s how Shōji had met Kakujirō, through the magazine. Even though Kakujirō, until well into his forties, had wandered the entire country from construction job to construction job, he had always been a voracious reader. He was always an interesting conversationalist, having read everything, from foreign literature to the Japanese classics, so whenever Shōji wrote something he would send it first to Kakujirō for feedback. Eventually he stopped sending his fiction to him. Even so, perhaps in part because it was made easier since Kakujirō was a childhood friend of Shōji’s father, on occasion he would visit with Kakujirō when he returned home. At those times, there would sometimes be tales about Uncle Isa. Kakujirō was three years older than Isa. Perhaps because Kakujirō brooked no flattery, Isa felt some connection to him; as a kid he had often followed him around.
Kakujirō’s opening words were “Well, then, first a drink”; with beer can in hand Shōji looked around at the bookshelves that covered the three sides of the small six-mat room. On the shelf before him was a multivolume collection of Latin American literature, of which he recognized the names García Márquez and Borges, but he had to wonder about Fuentes and Sábato. He found there the two volumes of the Record of the Rokkasho Nuclear Reprocessing Plant and books about the emperor system, and then also the complete Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and also The Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Japanese classics were on the left-hand side: Man’yōshū, Tales from the Ōchō Reign, The Tale of Genji, and also on the right: Uji Shūi Tales and Tales of Times Now Past among many more shelves of books. There was also a collection of Ishikawa Jun, Kakujirō’s favorite author. There was, of course, also a number of recent books by young authors. On the shelves a collection of books not so different from Shōji’s own: the difference here was that Kakujirō had probably read them all. It left him humbled.
“Did I ever tell you how, at his place, he treated me to dog meat?” Kakujirō asked with a gentle smile. He had a round face, a moustache, and some hair on the sides of his otherwise completely bald head. It was an amiable enough face, although when he wore his black pirate’s eye patch he had a fearsome air about him.
“Dog?”
“Yep. This when we were still pretty young. Isa had gotten ahold of me, ‘You interested in eating some meat? If so, get over here,’ ” he says to me. So I went over to his place. So I get there, right? Him and a bunch of his scary-looking friends. They’d been drinking hard since lunchtime. So then that bastard Isa says, ‘Okay, I’m goin’ to get our meat,’ and no sooner had he stepped outside when I heard a yelp. Don’t ya know he returns a minute later holding on to a white dog, still with a collar around its neck.”
“Gah … You’re kidding, right? So whaddya do? You eat it?”
“Well, yeah. What else was I gonna do?”
“Was it any good?”
“Well, tastewise I don’t know. They just started a pot of water boiling and then threw in a pile of green onions, and then a lot of salt. No idea whose dog it had been, ya know? Taste was not much on my mind.” His laughter was strained. There seemed to be laughter in both of his eyes; Shōji couldn’t tell which of them was the blind one.
Maybe because he had spent too much time on machines cutting concrete, but the pointer and middles fingers that held his cigarette were twisted at the first joint, slanted toward his thumb. With his worn-out blue sweatshirt and gray work pants, in dress and build he looked less the intellectual and more like an old farmer, like someone who had been working close to the earth for many years. He never hid behind his learning to look down on people, and with his humor and easygoing attitude he easily blended in with everyone else in the area. One result was that he knew everything that was going on in town.
“Can I ask you another question?” said Shōji, who had been taking notes on this conversation. “Did you also work on the squid boats before you left town for other work?”
“Of course. I mean, all of us who were young then, we all wanted to be squid men.”
“Oh really?”
“You bet. Fishermen, you know, we had this image that they all had a woman in every port. Me too, all of us, we wanted to be doin’ that. We thought of nothing else, being a fisherman was the career to have.”
When he got to the “that” of “we all wanted to be doin’ that” he turned the fingers of both hands and twitched them slightly inward. With that look of ecstasy washing over Kakujirō’s face, Shōji found himself laughing.
“So, those squid boats then. Uncle Isa, when he was working those boats, did some serious damage in two different knife fights, or so I hear, anyway. What was
that all about? What started those fights?”
“On board a ship there were very strict unspoken rules governing relations between the upper and lower ranks. Newcomers had it tough, hazing almost. Kinda normal, though, as you can imagine. Any trivial thing and the old-timers would smack you about the head. Happened to Isa too.”
“And you too, did that kind of thing happen to you?”
“You better believe it,” he said with a big nod. “The newbies were all made to be ‘cooks,’ ya see. All the boats had a kitchen area. I had my turn too. So then what? Somebody doesn’t like the taste of something, or someone thinks you didn’t put enough in their bowl, or they don’t like how you answer, didn’t really matter, for any reason at all, and you’d get a pounding. Happened to me too. Pissed me off. I’m thinkin’, “You little fuckers” and pissed into the just-washed rice. Well, then I cooked and served it up to everyone.”
“No way. Don’t tell me you ate it too.”
“’Course I did. A little salty. But not bad at all.”
“Gross.” Shōji imagined just-cooked white rice with a slight lemon color to it.
“So,” Kakujirō interjected, “why you lookin’ into this stuff about Isa again?”
“Not sure myself,” Shōji trailed off. It seemed that if he started talking about how Isa was appearing in his dreams, it would just seem creepy and weird, and not at all convincing as a reason. “Don’t know why exactly. Not really sure myself.”
“Don’t really know, but stuff is missing, and you just want to know—somethin’ like that?” Kakujirō asked, nodding his head toward Shōji, who was smiling uncomfortably.
“That’s about right,” he said.
“I think looking more into this stuff about Isa would be interesting, you know. I mean, all that violence that bubbled up and burst out, have to wonder where that came from. Human beings have these aspects that can’t be explained, and Isa sure had his share.”
“For sure. Then there’s Isa’s background … He was raised always being compared with all his brothers doing everything right. Probably just made him resentful and angry.”
“Who knows. That could’ve been part of it. But no matter what crazy ruckus he would raise the main house would always intervene and try to take care of it. They kinda spoiled him, I think.”
“Spoiled him?”
“He’d go to the main house and destroy things, right? He’d smash stuff up and injure people in the house, but no one in the main house would ever bring charges against Isa. ‘Just so sad, just too sad,’ they’d mutter.”
“Sad? Really?”
“Sure. There was an older sister, right? If people started talking about Isa, she would express concern for him and worry about what might happen. She had already left home, gotten married into another family and all, but then Chōkichi too, who had succeeded as the heir to the house, would stick up for him until he just couldn’t anymore.”
“Until he just couldn’t anymore,” thought Shōji, who assumed he was talking about the murder charges that followed Chōkichi from the time he went after Isa with a shovel.
“Did you know that in the old days you could write the word for ‘sad’ with the character for ‘love’? Then it took on the meanings of being so precious and lovely that it hurt, something extremely lovely. All the family members felt too much of this kind of affection for Isa, and they couldn’t ever cut him loose.”
“So, does that mean that all these emotions that the relatives felt toward him, that that’s what turned Isa into what he is?”
“You could say that,” Kakujirō agreed at first, “but,” he went on, with a shake of his head, “that’s not exactly what I’m saying. It’s not just the family’s emotions here, that can explain his uncontrollability.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know what to call it exactly, something to do with laws of nature, maybe. There’s something about people that leads them to want to break through of the arbitrary boundaries that humans have constructed. Maybe it’s like the most basic natural forces, with husks peeled back and now exposed. Maybe something like the uncontrollability found in the life force itself.” His eyes sparkled as he spoke. Shōji had seen the same thing when Hitoshi was talking. Shōji was wondering what it was that made everyone get so animated when talking about Uncle Isa. Kakujirō continued, “I wonder, maybe if he had lived back in the Warring States period he might have become a military leader or something. I dunno; the guy could never see the whole picture so probably would never have gotten to be a big shot or anything, but still … Dunno, something about Isa that makes him seem better suited to being one of the Emishi who lived in Tohoku way back in the past.
“Emishi?”
Kakujirō was stroking his mustache as he continued. “The thing about ‘Emishi’ is that it was only that bunch over in the west, back in the capital, that ever called them that; I don’t think the people around here ever thought of themselves as ‘Emishi.’ They had long taken care of horses, raised and bred horses, they were good with a bow and arrow while on the back of a horse, they were a fierce and strong group of fighters. So to that bunch back in the capital, these guys in Emishi country were located beyond the bounds of their own nation, and this country with all these strong men and their thundering ways was a place beyond anything they could imagine. I mean, call it a nation or a country, but it was really just a number of different roving bands that would gather to fight back and forth. Edo, Kyoto, they imagined them as just a bunch of barbarians with pelts wrapped around their shoulders who drank blood and had blood feuds with their own brothers and stuff. The imperial court, of course, followed this story that the emperor was the end-all and be-all and then tried over and over again to subjugate this uncivilized country, yet the Emishi were always able to resist. So, that bunch back in the capital continued to refer to the Emishi as ingrates, as wild savages. Hmm. Kinda sounds like Isa, don’ it?”
“Yeah, maybe, thing is I was beginning to think the same thing, like his is a return to the ancestors, like maybe the blood of the ancestors runs through his veins, or something,” Shōji couldn’t help himself from adding; he was energized by this idea. He didn’t really think that this was true, that this explained the origins of Isa’s violence; even so, for whatever reason, he couldn’t shake the strong temptation to want to think of Isa as somehow connected to the Emishi.
Kakujirō seemed to see through Shōji’s overheated words too. “Well, this is all just idle talk,” he said softly. “There was nothing heroic, or anything like it, in ol’ Isa. He couldn’t even make it as a punk yakuza-gangster type. Anyone ever tell you about the time your father got into it with Isa?”
“No …”
“It was one of those times when Isa got sloshed and headed for the main house. Somebody from up there came looking for Yūsaku to help them. So Yūsaku took off and got there as soon as he could only to find Isa, coming from the kitchen, with two knives. He had one in each hand, like in that two-handed sword style. Then Yūsaku called, ‘If you’re gonna cut then get cuttin’, ” and the two of them went at it. After a while Yūsaku slipped and fell and Isa jumped on his back. Everyone thought he was done for. But Isa wouldn’t cut him. He just hit him with the handle of the knife.”
Shōji had never considered that his father might have been involved in such violence. This was no joke, but he couldn’t help finding it humorous, even though it felt perverse to do so.
“So, no matter how much he mighta hated him he apparently didn’t want to cut him either. He didn’t have it in him to be a truly evil person. Even when people would make fun of him or something and he drew courage from sake and went on a rampage.”
Shōji nodded, following along.
“But even so, as far as Isa’s violence goes, people would blame it on that house, or on his alcoholism, or whatever, but I gotta say, that feels too easy an explanation to me.”
Shōji continued to nod along, but he was also wondering what it was exactly in that side of
Uncle Isa that had Kakujirō earlier push back against the idea that Isa was simply a good-for-nothing troublemaker.
Kakujirō continued, “But even so, I gotta say, this crazy idea that the guy is somehow connected to the Emishi, well, it’s an interesting idea. And, it seems to me that we might just need some people like that in today’s Tohoku.”
“What? What do you mean by that?”
Kakujirō looked at Shōji and laughed, “Ahh dunno, just everyone being too nice all the time.” He went on, “We all got beat up with the earthquake and then the nuclear plant explosion. Everyone chased out of their homes. And then the damage from malicious rumors and slanderous news stories. ‘Rumors on the wind,’ they call it, but the thing is, the land and sea really are polluted now; this is a seriously dangerous situation. All their damage has fallen on us, and we could be more explicit in arguing our pain and suffering; I mean, if we really thought about it there is all sorts of outrage that would be appropriate. But being people from Tohoku, it is just something we can’t do. So then all those people coming to gather information, we can’t help but try to please and talk about bright futures and shit. So the folks from the newspapers and television are quite happy to hear those stories and that’s what they print.”
“Well, that’s about right,” Shōji looked up and sighed. Kakujirō continued calmly, “So, well, I always thought that all this stuff about people having personalities like this or like that, based on where they were born, was all just bullshit. I mean really, all this talk that comes from people grumbling that ‘it’s not fair’ and all that, it’s bullshit, all of it. ‘Tohoku people, a silent populace’ and all that. People on the losing side when the Emishi were subjugated turned into a colony of Yamato. In an area not even appropriate for rice cultivation but turned into a society where wet-rice cultivation is standard, like the western part of the country, forced to grow rice whether they wanted to or not. And that led to many, many people starving to death and this long history of lives suffering in poverty and whatnot. The first time the people of Tohoku joined hands was to fight the imperial forces led by western clans in the Meiji Restoration wars of subjugation, but they lost then too. In other words, again and again losing to the western part of the country. Somebody, I don’t remember who, once talking about ‘north of Shirakawa, one mountain is worth a single dollar’ and wrote the whole area off as valueless with a few words, as a region that is dark and cold and poor. And we thought of our area the same way, living our lives burrowing around silently in the dark.… That’s been us, always keeping to ourselves, should’ve raised our voices, should’ve made noise about all this.”
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