The yearly festival of the famous Grand Shrine of Mishima was fast approaching. The young ruffians who gathered at Sakichi’s shop were all members of the festival committee, and each day they excitedly hashed out their various plans and ideas—dancing platforms, parades, floats, fireworks, what have you. I was told that Mishima’s fireworks display boasted a long tradition and included a special event in which fireworks were set up in the shrine’s pond so that, reflected on the water, they appeared to come bubbling up from the depths. Large, printed programs listing the names of some hundred different fireworks to be launched were distributed to all the houses, and with each passing day the festival spirit began to infuse the town with a strangely poignant, pulsating buoyancy.
On the morning of the day of the festival the weather was fine. When I went out to the well to wash my face, Sakichi’s younger sister took the kerchief from her head, bowed deeply, and said, “Congratulations,” and I surprised myself by returning this traditional festival greeting with minimal awkwardness. I found Sakichi dressed in everyday clothes and maintaining an aloof attitude as he puttered about in his shop. When the usual gang began to arrive dressed in gaudy yukata with the same wave-shaped pattern, festival fans stuck in their sashes and matching hand towels draped around their necks, they all offered us their congratulations on the day. I’d felt rather restless since waking up that morning but didn’t have it in me to join the youths in pulling the floats through the streets, so I went upstairs and sat down to do a bit of work. Soon, however, I was back on my feet, pacing the room. I leaned on the window sill and looked down into the garden, where in the shade of a fig tree Sakichi’s sister was washing our clothes as if it were just another ordinary day.
“Sai-chan!” I shouted down to her. “You should be at the festival!”
“I hate watching men strut around!” she shouted back, and went on with her scrubbing. “It’s like when an alcoholic walks by a liquor shop,” she added in a normal tone of voice. “It makes me shiver all over.” I could tell she was laughing by the way her squarish shoulders jiggled. Though she was only twenty, the sister seemed more mature than Sakichi, who was twenty-two, or myself for that matter, her elder by four years. She had a healthy, energetic way about her and virtually acted as guardian to Sakichi and me.
Sakichi too displayed an irritable edginess that day. Though he would have liked to enjoy himself frolicking about with the boys, his pride positively forbade him to don a gaudy wave-pattern yukata, and he reacted by taking a particularly cynical view of the whole affair. “Ah, what a load of rot this is,” he said. “I’m closing the store for the day. We’re not selling saké to anyone!” And with that he got on his bicycle and rode off. Shortly afterward I received a telephone call from him, telling me to come join him at the usual place. I changed into my clean yukata and flew out of the house, feeling as if I’d been rescued. The “usual place” was the shop with the old man who was so proud of having warmed saké for fifty years. I found Sakichi and another young man named Ejima there, drinking grimly. I had drunk with Ejima two or three times before. He, like Sakichi, was the disaffected son of a wealthy family, and as far as I could tell he did nothing each day but seethe with anger toward the world. He was every bit as handsome as Sakichi, who you must know possessed what could only be called a beautiful face. And, sure enough, Ejima too took a dim view of the festival and was expressing his defiance by deliberately putting on his shabbiest everyday clothes and hunkering down in this dark shop, sipping at his saké as if it were poison. I joined them, and we sat drinking in silence for some time; but outside it was growing ever noisier, with throngs of people clumping by, firecrackers going off, and sellers loudly hawking their wares, until Ejima, apparently unable to bear it another moment, stood up abruptly. “Come on. Let’s go to the river,” he said, and strode out of the shop without even waiting to hear our response.
The three of us tramped through the town, intentionally choosing back streets, each of us casting meaningless aspersions on the festival. (“Shit. Just listen to those idiots!”) We were soon outside the town limits, heading in the direction of Numazu, and by sundown we’d reached Ejima’s summer home on the bank of the Kano River. We went in through the back door and discovered an elderly man, clad only in a shirt, in the drawing room.
Ejima shouted at him: “What the hell? How long you been here? Out gambling all night again, were you? Leave us. Go home. I brought some guests.”
The old man scrambled to his feet and briefly flashed us a courteous smile, whereupon Sakichi bowed so deeply and respectfully that I was startled.
“You’d better put something on,” Ejima said indifferently, “or you’ll catch a cold. Oh, and before you leave, call up and have some beer delivered, and something to eat. The festival’s a bore, so we’re going to sit here and drink ourselves blind.”
“Very well, my lord,” the old man waggishly replied. He draped himself in his kimono and trotted off, and no sooner was he gone than Sakichi burst out laughing and said: “That’s Ejima’s father. He thinks his son is heaven’s gift to the world. ‘Very well, my lord’—did you hear that?”
Before long the beer arrived, along with a variety of tasty dishes, and I remember us at some point harmonizing on a lyric I couldn’t make any sense of whatsoever. Blanketed in the evening haze, the swollen river before us flowed leisurely along, lapping the green leaves on either bank. Its waters were a deep and astounding shade of blue, and, apropos of absolutely nothing, I found myself thinking that this must be what the Rhine looked like.
When the beer ran out, we headed back to Mishima. It was quite a long hike, and even as I shuffled along I nodded and nearly dozed off any number of times. Catching myself, I’d open my eyes a slit and see a firefly zip past my brow. When we got back to Sakichi’s house, his mother was there, having come from Numazu for a visit. I excused myself, went upstairs, hung my mosquito netting, and went to sleep, only to awaken shortly to the sound of loud voices. I looked out the window and saw that a ladder had been propped up against the eaves. Sakichi and his mother were on the ground at the foot of the ladder, engaged in a beautiful dispute.
For the finale of the fireworks display, they were going to send up the “two-footer,” a rocket two feet in diameter that had for days been the topic of excited discussion among the young people in town. It was almost time for the two-footer to be launched. Sakichi intended to have his mother see it, and wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He was still quite drunk.
“I wanna show it to you—what, you don’t wanna see it? We’ll have a good view on the roof... I told you, I’ll carry you up there. All you gotta do is grab hold of me!”
His mother was balking at the idea. I saw the sister there, too, her outline pale in the dim light, and she seemed to be chuckling to herself. Though no one else was around, the mother looked about timidly, then finally sealed her resolve and climbed on Sakichi’s back.
“All right. Up we go!” The mother was about sixty, and definitely on the plump side. Sakichi didn’t seem to be having an easy time of it.
“No problem, no problem,” he said, slowly pulling himself up the first rungs of the ladder. I watched them and thought: That’s it. That’s why Sakichi’s mother is so devoted to him. That’s why, however selfish and reckless his way of life, she’s willing to defend him even if it means pitting herself against her eldest son. I went back to bed contented, feeling I’d seen something better than a two-foot skyrocket.
I have many other vivid memories of Mishima, but I’ll save them for some other time. “Romanesque,” the piece I wrote that summer, was praised by a few people, and it has been my fate ever since, in spite of an utter lack of belief in myself, to carry on with my clumsy attempts at writing. Mishima is a place I’ll never forget. The impact that summer had on my life was such that it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that all the work I’ve done since has been the result of what I learned there.
Now, eight years later, it’s no longer pos
sible for me to wheedle money from my sister; I’m out of touch with my family and am merely another undernourished, impoverished writer. Recently, having finally come into a fair amount of ready cash, I took an overnight trip to Izu with my wife and her mother and younger sister. We got off the train at Shimizu, visited Miho and Shuzenji, and the following day, on the way home, we stopped at Mishima. It’s a great place, a really great place, I kept telling the ladies as I whisked them off the train, and while I showed them about the town I tried to work myself into high spirits, recounting my memories of Mishima as amusingly as I could but gradually growing more and more crestfallen and finally slipping into such a funk that I completely lost the will to speak. The Mishima before my eyes was a desolate place, inhabited by strangers. Sakichi and his sister were no longer there. Ejima probably wasn’t either. The youths who’d once assembled each day at Sakichi’s shop were undoubtedly at home, yelling at their wives with sour, know-it-all looks on their faces. I couldn’t find a trace of the old atmosphere anywhere. But perhaps it wasn’t that Mishima’s colors had faded but simply that my own heart had grown old and withered. That carefree Imperial University student has since had eight solid years of trial and tribulation. I’ve aged a good two decades in those eight years.
As if things weren’t bad enough, it began to rain. My wife and her mother and sister did their best to praise the town, saying it was nice and quiet and relaxed, but their faces betrayed their perplexity and discomfort. Exasperated, I guided them to the drinking shop I’d once frequented. The building was so filthy that the women hesitated before passing through the gate, but I insisted, raising my voice in spite of myself, saying: “It’s a foul-looking place, but the saké’s good. There’s an old man here who’s spent the better part of a century doing nothing but heating up saké. This shop’s a legend in Mishima.” Once we were inside, however, I saw that the old man in the red shirt was no longer there. An insipid-looking waitress came out and took our order. The tables and benches were the same as before, but an electric phonograph occupied one corner of the shop, a large poster featuring a vulgar illustration of a movie actress hung on the wall, and the atmosphere was thick with decline. Hoping to sweep away the gloom by at least bringing a festive mood to the table, I ordered an extravagant spread.
“We’ll have broiled eel, grilled prawns, and egg custard, four of each. If you can’t prepare it here, send out for it. And bring us some saké.”
My mother-in-law, beside me, was fidgeting. “We don’t need all that,” she said. “It’ll just go to waste.” There was no way I could have explained the anguish in my heart, and that only made it all the more unbearable. I’ve never felt more depressed in my life.
TARO THE WIZARD
nce upon a time, in the village of Kanagi in Tsugaru Province, there lived a country squire by the name of Kuwagata Sosuke. Sosuke was forty-nine before he was blessed with his first child, a son whom he named Taro. No sooner had Taro come into the world than he spread his jaws in a yawn, the prodigious size of which so tormented Sosuke that when relatives came to offer their congratulations he was unable even to look them in the eye. Sosuke’s fears were soon to prove warranted. Upon waking in the morning, Taro never crawled eagerly out of bed but would lie there with his eyes closed for an extra hour or two, pretending to be asleep; held in the folds of his mother’s kimono, he wouldn’t bother to seek out her breast but would merely let his mouth hang open and wearily wait for the nipple to brush against his lips; and when he was given a swivel-necked papier-mâché tiger with which to amuse himself, he made no effort to play with the toy but only gazed listlessly at its comically bobbing head. He was, in short, a child whose nature it was to despise any sort of unnecessary exertion. And yet, when he was three years old, Taro was responsible for a little incident that lent his name considerable notoriety among the people of the village. It was by no means an incident of the sort that gets written up in newspapers; you may rest assured, therefore, that it really happened. Taro went for a walk... and just kept walking.
It was a night in early spring. Taro slipped silently from his mother’s embrace, tumbled out of bed, rolled to the dirt floor of the entrance hall, and continued rolling, right out the door. Once outside, he climbed to his feet. Sosuke and his wife, meanwhile, slept on unaware.
A mist-blurred full moon hung low in the sky, just inches above Taro’s forehead. Barefoot and dressed in an underkimono with a killifish motif and a padded cotton vest with a pattern of arrowhead roots, he headed east along the horsedung-littered road. He walked with his sleepy eyes half-closed, breathing in short, hurried little huffs and puffs.
The next morning the village was in an uproar. Taro had been found sleeping innocently in the middle of an apple orchard on Rolling Springs Mountain, more than two miles from the village. Rolling Springs Mountain was shaped like a half-melted block of ice. The peak consisted of three softly curved undulations, and the western side formed a gentle slope that resembled water flowing. The reason Taro had ended up atop a three-hundred-foot mountain wasn’t clear. There was no doubt that he’d gone alone. But no one could figure out why.
He was discovered by a young woman who’d been out gathering ferns. She placed him in her basket and carried him, gently rocking from side to side, back to the village. Those villagers who came up to peer into the basket, creasing their brows with dark, greasy wrinkles, whispered of goblins and nodded to one another knowingly.
When Sosuke saw his son home safe and sound, all he could say was: “Well, well.” He didn’t say he was upset and didn’t say he was relieved. Taro’s mother, for her part, scarcely seemed agitated at all. She lifted Taro from the girl’s basket, replacing him with a roll of cotton toweling as a reward, then set a large tub on the dirt floor of the entrance hall, filled it to the brim with hot water, and calmly began to bathe the boy. Not that Taro was the least bit dirty; his naked body was plump and round and white. Sosuke paced back and forth restlessly beside the tub until at last he tripped against it and sent water splashing over the floor from wall to wall. Though his wife scolded him for this in a shrill and angry voice, he remained where he was, peeking over her shoulder at Taro’s face and saying, again and again: “Taro, what did you see? What did you see, Taro?” Taro, after yawning any number of times, shouted in a broken babble: “Peebo stobuu, beezee buunee.”
It wasn’t until late that night, as Sosuke lay in bed, that he finally perceived the meaning of these words. They were from Emperor Nintoku’s famous poem: “Climbing the palace tower / I see smoke fill the air / The people’s stoves are busily burning.” Such was the impact of this realization that Sosuke reflexively tried to slap his knee, and might have succeeded had he not been hindered by the heavy quilts; as it was, he ended up striking himself, quite painfully, on the bellybutton. The son of a squire, he reflected, is the father of a squire. At the age of three the boy is already concerned for the people’s welfare. Ah—a blessed ray of hope! No doubt Taro had gazed down from Rolling Springs Mountain upon Kanagi Village awaking in the dawn and envisioned the chimneys of all the houses sending up prosperous billows of smoke as the people cooked their morning meals. By heaven, it’s the pious wish of a noble, lofty soul. What a godsend this child is! I must take special care of him. Sosuke sat up quietly, reached over to where Taro was sleeping between him and his wife, and carefully rearranged the quilts. Then, stretching even farther, he did the same for his wife, albeit somewhat less carefully. The wife wasn’t pleasant to look at when she slept; Sosuke turned his head sternly to one side and muttered to himself as he tugged at her bedding: “This is the woman who gave birth to Taro. I must take good care of her too.”
Taro’s babbled words proved prophetic. That spring, all the apple orchards in the village burst into bloom with oversized rouge blossoms whose fragrance wafted as far as the castle town, some twenty-five miles away. Autumn brought even better things: apples as big as grapefruit and as red as coral hung from the trees in dense clusters. So juicy were these apples th
at if you plucked one and bit into it, the skin would burst with a loud crack, and sweet, cold spray would gush out to soak your nose and cheeks. On New Year’s Day the following year, an auspicious event occurred: a thousand cranes appeared from out of the east. The entire village came out to point and gasp as the cranes slowly circled overhead in the blue New Year’s sky and finally soared off to the west. That fall, too, at harvest time, the ears of rice produced ears of rice and the boughs of the apple trees bent low with the weight of clusters of fruit every bit as wonderful as the previous year’s. The village began to prosper. Sosuke was convinced that it was all because of his son’s prophetic powers, but he refrained from telling the villagers this. Perhaps he didn’t want to be sneered at for being a blindly doting father. Or—who knows?—perhaps he had some vague ulterior motive and hoped to use Taro’s gift to line his own pockets.
Sadly, however, after two or three years, the infant prodigy began to stray from the path of virtue. At some point the villagers took to referring to him as “Taro the Lazy,” and even Sosuke had to admit that it was only to be expected. At six and seven years of age Taro never went out to the fields and paddies and riverbanks to play as other children did; in summer he’d sit at the window ledge with his chin on his hand and gaze at the scenery outside, and in winter he’d lie by the hearth and stare at the firewood going up in flames. He seemed to take pleasure only in riddles. One winter night, as he lay in a heap by the fire, he squinted up at the face of Sosuke beside him and drawled: “What is it... that can fall in the water... without getting wet?” Sosuke slowly swiveled his head to the left, then to the right, then back again, as he pondered. “I don’t know,” he said at last. Taro let his eyelids droop shut before giving the answer: “A shadow.” Sosuke was more vexed with his son at that moment than ever before. This child is a moron, he thought. No doubt about it—he’s an idiot. A worthless lazybones, just as the villagers say.