Any child in national primary school would surely sense something wrong with a plotline in which the tanuki is subjected to such a tragic and horrible undoing for the minor crime of scratching an old woman (as the picture books nowadays have it). The rabbit toys with him sadistically, sets fire to his hide, slathers red hot pepper paste on the burns, and finally fools him into boarding a boat made of mud and sailing to a watery grave. But even if the tanuki was guilty of the heinous grandmother stew plot—let alone a mere clawing incident—why not confront him openly? Why not declare your name and grievance and cut him down with a righteous sword?
The fact that rabbits are physically unimposing is no excuse. All vendettas must be carried out openly, whatever the odds. God is on the side of justice. Even if you have no chance of winning, you must attack head on, calling out for divine assistance! If you’re weaker than the enemy, then you must toughen up: expose yourself to hardship and privation by going somewhere remote like Mount Kurama and training assiduously in swordsmanship and all that sort of thing. Most of the great Japanese heroes of the past did something along those lines. There seem to be, on the other hand, no other revenge tales in our nation in which, whatever the provocation, deceptive wiles are employed to worry the enemy to death. In short, there’s something unsavory about the vendetta portrayed in Click-Clack Mountain. It’s not the least bit manly in nature, and any child, or any adult—anyone who aspires to justice—must surely experience a certain discomfort when hearing the tale.
But never fear. I gave this a lot of thought, and the answer is clear to me now. It’s only natural that there was nothing manly about the rabbit’s way of doing things, because the rabbit wasn’t a man. This is definitive; there can be no question about it. The rabbit was a sixteen-year-old maiden. Nothing sexual about her yet, but a real beauty. And it is precisely this sort of woman that is the cruelest of human types. In Greek myths we find a number of beautiful goddesses, but apparently the virgin goddess Artemis was considered, aside from Aphrodite, the most attractive. As you probably know, Artemis was a lunar goddess, and a shiny, silver-white crescent moon adorned her forehead. She was agile and headstrong—a sort of female version of Apollo—and all the fearsome wild beasts of the earth were her vassals. But by no means was she one of those big, tough, rawboned females. She was, rather, a vixenish little thing, petite and slender, with lithe, graceful limbs. Though she was small-breasted and lacked the voluptuous “womanliness” of Aphrodite, her face was so bewitchingly pretty it could give you the chills. But Artemis thought nothing of doing the cruelest things to anyone who displeased her. She once angrily splashed water on a man who surprised her while bathing, thereby turning him into an antlered stag. That was for catching a glimpse of her in the nude–imagine if you tried holding her hand! Any man who fell in love with a woman like this would be sure to suffer unendurable humiliation. And yet men, particularly men of negligible intelligence, are often drawn to such dangerous types. The result is always fairly predictable.
Anyone who doubts this need only observe our poor tanuki. He’s been secretly in love with his “Bunny” for some time. Knowing as we do that the rabbit is a young female of the Artemis type, we can only nod deeply and sigh. Typical of men who fall in love with Artemisians, the tanuki cuts a sorry figure even among his peers. He’s a dimwitted, gluttonous boor, and the forthcoming tragedy is, sadly, all too predictable.
The tanuki, trapped by Ojii-san and about to be made into tanuki stew, struggles for his life, desperate to see his beloved Bunny once again, and escapes to the mountain, where he walks about muttering to himself as he searches for her. Finally their paths cross.
“Be glad for me!” he barks proudly. “I just came this close to dying! While the old man was away, I gave the old woman what for and ran like hell. I’m a lucky fellow, I tell you,” he says, and describes in detail his brush with disaster, punctuating the story with flying spit. The rabbit hops back a step to dodge the precipitation and shoots him a disdainful look.
“Say it, don’t spray it! Disgusting. And why should I be glad? Ojii-san and Obaa-san are my friends. Didn’t you know that?”
“Really?” The tanuki droops. “I didn’t realize. Forgive me. If I’d known they were your friends, I’d have gone ahead and let them make me into tanuki stew, or whatever they wanted!”
“It’s a little late for that now. What a terrible liar you are, though, saying you didn’t know! I know you know that I play in their yard sometimes, and that sometimes they give me those soft, yummy beans to eat. Well, from this moment on consider me your mortal enemy.” Cold words, but the seeds of vengeance are already germinating in the rabbit’s heart. A maiden’s fury is bitter to the root. She knows no mercy, particularly for the ugly and stupid.
“Forgive me! I really didn’t know! I’m not a liar! Please believe me!” The tanuki pleads and whines, his neck extending as his head hangs low. He spots a nut lying at his feet, plucks it from the ground and pops it into his mouth. His eyes dart about in search of others as he continues: “I mean, when you get mad at me like this, I swear, I just want to die.”
“Listen to you. All you ever think about is eating!” The rabbit lifts her nose and turns away with a great display of scorn. “You’re not only a filthy pig, you’re a voracious pig!”
“Please don’t judge me for my hunger!” He takes a step forward, still searching the ground for fallen nuts. “I wish I could make you understand how I’m suffering inside.”
“I told you not to get so close to me. You smell bad. Step back. They say you ate a lizard. That’s right, I heard all about it. And then—what a scream!—someone said you ate a piece of poop!”
“That’s ridiculous!” The tanuki grins sheepishly. For whatever reason, however, he seems unable to deny the accusation with any vehemence, merely twisting his lips and feebly repeating, “Ridiculous.”
“You’re not fooling anyone. The stink of you tells the story.”
No sooner has she delivered this stunning blow than the rabbit suddenly lights up as if a wonderful thought has occurred to her. She turns to the tanuki with shining eyes and what looks like a suppressed smile.
“Well, all right. I’ll forgive you, just this once. Whoa—I told you to stand back! Can’t take my eye off you for two seconds. How about wiping that drool? Your jowls are soaked with it. Now calm down and listen. I’ll forgive you this one time, but there’s a condition. Ojii-san must be terribly dispirited right now. He probably doesn’t even have the energy to go to the mountains to gather firewood. So let’s gather some for him.”
“You and me? Together?” Glimmerings of hope flicker in the tanuki’s small, cloudy eyes.
“You don’t want to?”
“‘Don’t want to’? Are you kidding me? We can go today—right now!” His voice is hoarse with ecstasy.
“Let’s make it tomorrow, all right? Early morning. You’ve been through a lot today, and I suppose you could use a meal and some rest.” Her tone is eerily compassionate.
“Oh, I appreciate that! Tomorrow I’ll make a big box lunch to take, and we’ll go, and I’ll work with total and complete single-minded devotion, and I’ll cut a whole bushel of firewood and deliver it to Ojii-san’s house! If I do that, you’ll forgive me, right? You’ll be friends with me, right?”
“Suddenly you’re laying down conditions? Well, it all depends on your results, of course. Maybe we could become friends.”
“Eh, heh, heh!” The tanuki leers, suddenly displaying his lecherous side. “That’s a coy way to put it. She’s sly, this one. I’m just—” he starts to say but pauses to snag a passing spider with his tongue and slurp it down. “I’m just so happy. I almost feel like crying.”
He rubs his nose and pretends to wipe a tear.
It’s a brisk, invigorating summer morning. The surface of Lake Kawaguchi is shrouded in smoky white mist. Up on the mountainside, the tanuki and the rabbit are drenched in that mist as they toil away cutting and bundling sticks.
; The tanuki displays not the single-minded devotion he promised, so much as a mindless frenzy, and it makes for a disturbing sight. Groaning exaggeratedly—Unngh! Unngh!—he swings his sickle with reckless abandon, letting out occasional howls of pain. He dashes left and right and back and forth in his fanatical quest for dead sticks, clearly wanting only to show his beloved Bunny what a hard worker he is. It isn’t long, of course, before he runs out of steam. Wearing a look of utter exhaustion, he tosses the sickle aside.
“Look at this. Look at all the blisters on my hands. Ooh... They hurt. And I’m so thirsty! Hungry too. I mean, that was some serious manual labor I just did. Let’s take a little break, what? Open up the old box lunch, and... oof, foo, foo!” Laughing this odd-sounding, embarrassed laugh, he reaches for the lunch box, which is about the size of a large oilcan, opens it, sticks his nose inside, and begins slurping up the contents. This he does with genuine single-minded devotion, not to mention sound effects: mush-mush, gatz-gatz, pep-pech. The rabbit looks up from her work and gapes at him, aghast. She sidles over to look inside the container but immediately draws back, giving a little cry of horror and covering her face with both hands. It seems there are some rather extraordinary ingredients in that lunch.
But today, for reasons of her own, the rabbit isn’t heaping the usual abuse on the tanuki. She has remained silent all morning, wearing a manufactured half-smile on her lips, efficiently gathering firewood, and ignoring the overly excited tanuki’s manic behavior. Even after viewing the contents of the lunch and receiving a serious shock, she neither complains nor gags but goes right back to cutting wood. She’s downright tolerant today, and the tanuki is very pleased with himself: Is she finally falling for me, after seeing the way I cut firewood? Well, what woman wouldn’t be impressed by a muscular performance like that? Some lunch, though—I’m stuffed! Kinda sleepy too. Maybe a little nap... Convinced he’s earned a bit of self-indulgence, he stretches out and is soon snoring loudly. Whatever fool dreams he’s dreaming, he holds forth at some length in his sleep— “Love potions don’t work, I tell ya!”—and doesn’t awake until nearly noon.
“You slept a long time,” the rabbit says gently. “I’ve tied my firewood into one big bundle. You do the same, and we’ll carry it all down to Ojii-san’s house.”
“Let’s do that, yeah.” The tanuki yawns extravagantly, scratching his arm. “I’m starving. It’s not good for me to be sleeping the day away on an empty stomach,” he says, and gravely adds, “I’m sensitive, you know. All right, then, I’ll hurry up and bundle all that wood I cut. The lunch box is empty, after all. Time to wrap this up and find some food.”
They head back down the mountain, both bearing large bundles of sticks strapped to their backs.
“You go first,” says the rabbit. “I’m afraid there might be snakes around here.”
“Snakes? I’m not afraid of no snakes. If I see any, I’ll just catch ’em and—” He’s about to say eat ’em but swallows the words. “I’ll catch ’em and kill ’em. Just follow me.”
“It’s so nice to have a big, strong man around at times like this.”
“You flatter me,” the tanuki says, puffing out his chest. “But, really, you’re being awfully sweet today. Too sweet, almost. You’re not going to take me back to Ojii-san’s and have him make me into tanuki stew, are you? Ah, ha, ha, ha! Anything but that!”
“Well, if you’re so suspicious, you needn’t bother coming. I’ll go alone.”
“No! I didn’t mean it like that. I’ll go with you. It’s just... I’m not afraid of snakes, or anything else in this world, but that Ojii-san is a tough customer. I mean, he was going to eat me for dinner! Pretty barbaric, if you ask me. At least, it’s not exactly what you’d call genteel. Tell you what—I’ll carry this wood as far as the big hackberry tree just short of his yard, and you take it from there, all right? That’s as far as I go. I mean, if I came face to face with old Ojii-san right now, I wouldn’t know what to say. It’d just be awkward. Hey, what’s that? I hear something. What do you think it is? Hear it? It’s like a click, clack sound.”
“Well, what do you expect? This is Click-Clack Mountain.”
“Click-Clack Mountain? This one we’re on?”
“Yes. Didn’t you know that?”
“Nope. I never knew this mountain had a name. Pretty weird name too. You’re kidding me, right?”
“Heavens, no! All mountains have names, you know—Mount Fuji, Mount Nagao, Omuro Mountain. This one’s named after the sound it makes. There it goes again, hear it? Click, clack.”
“I hear it all right. Funny, though. I never heard it before, not even once. I was born on this mountain and in thirty-some-odd years here, I—”
“My! Is that how old you are? The other day you told me you were seventeen! You beast. I thought your face was too wrinkled and your back too bent for seventeen, but I didn’t think you’d try to shave off twenty whole years! You must be almost forty, right? That’s old.”
“No, no! Seventeen. I am seventeen. Seventeen. Hey, sometimes my back might look a little bent when I walk, but it’s not because of age. It’s just a natural reaction to hunger. When I said ‘thirty-odd-years,’ I was talking about my brother. My brother is always using that expression, see, and I just sort of picked it up. Expressions can be contagious, right? You know how it is, kid.”
He’s so flustered that he’s gone and called her “kid.”
“I see.” The rabbit remains cool. “But I never knew you had an older brother. In fact, I remember you saying, ‘Oh, I’m so lonely, I’m so alone, I have no parents or brothers or sisters.’ Those were your exact words. You told me I had no idea what it felt like to be all on your own. So?”
“Right. That’s right.” Not even the tanuki knows what he’s trying to say now. “That’s why everything is so complicated in this world. Nothing is black or white. Sometimes you might have a brother and sometimes you might not.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense,” the rabbit says disparagingly. “It’s just crazy talk.”
“Yeah, no, the truth is, I do have one brother. I hate even to say it, but he’s a drunkard and a layabout and just a complete embarrassment, and I’m really ashamed of him, but for thirty-some-odd years—I’m talking about my brother now—he’s been a burden to me. Ever since he was born.”
“That doesn’t make sense either. How can a seventeen-year-old carry a burden for thirty-some-odd years?”
The tanuki pretends not to hear this.
“There are a lot of things in this world that can’t be explained easily. At any rate, I disowned him long ago. He’s dead to me. Hey, what’s that? I smell something burning. Do you smell it?”
“No.”
“No?” Since the tanuki is always eating noisome things, he has little confidence in own nose. He tilts his head, a puzzled look on his face. “Is it just me? Hey, now it sounds like wood burning. Crackle-crackle, burn-burn. You hear that?”
“What do you expect? This is Crackle-Burn Mountain.”
“Don’t give me that. You just said it was called Click-Clack Mountain.”
“That’s right. The same mountain can have different names, depending on the location. On the slope of Mount Fuji is a big bump called Little Fuji, and Omuro Mountain and Mount Nagao are almost like parts of Fuji too. Didn’t you know that?”
“No, I did not. I’ve been here on this mountain for thirty-some-odd— I mean, according to my brother, they’ve always just called this the Mountain in Back. Phew! It’s getting awfully warm. This is a weird day. What’s next? An earthquake? Wow, it’s hot. Whoa! Hey! Ow, ow, ow! Damn! Help! The firewood’s burning! Owwwww!”
The next day, the tanuki is in his hole moaning and groaning.
“Oh, the pain! Is this the end? I must be the unluckiest man who ever lived. Just because I was born a bit better-looking than most, the women are afraid to approach me. A dapper and sophisticated man is at a real disadvantage, I tell you. They probably take me for a woman-hat
er. Hell, I’m no saint. I like women. But they all seem to think I’m some sort of high-minded idealist and never try to seduce me. It’s enough to make me run in circles, tearing my hair out and screaming. I love women! Ouch! These burns are no joke. Sting like hell. Just when I thought I’d escaped the tanuki stew fate, my luck runs out on Burncrackle Mountain or whatever it was. Stupid mountain. The firewood bursts into flames while it’s still on your back. Horrible place. Thirty-some-odd—” he starts to say, then looks around, as if to make sure no one is listening. “Hell, what’ve I got to hide? I’m thirty-seven this year. Ahem. What of it? In three more years I’ll be forty. I know that. It’s only natural, the natural course of nature, any—ouch!—body can see that. From the time I was born thirty-seven years ago I’ve lived and played on the Mountain in Back, but I’ve never had a weird experience like that before. Click-Clack Mountain, Crackle-Burn Mountain—even the names are strange. Something mysterious about it all.”
He racks his brain for answers, beating his own head with his fists, and only stops pummeling himself when he hears the voice of a medicine peddler outside.
“Wizard’s Gold Ointment! Get your Wizard’s Gold Ointment! Is anyone suffering from burns, cuts, or a swarthy complexion?”
More than burns, it’s the last-named affliction that catches the tanuki’s attention.