Japanese Gothic Tales Page 2

  One Day in Spring

  (Shunchu and Shunchu gokoku, 1906)

  Part One

  "Who, me?"

  The still of the spring day, no doubt, had made it possible for the reply to come so quickly, like an echo to the wanderer's "Excuse me, sir." How else could it be? The old man, wearing a loosely fitting headband on his wrinkled forehead, had a sleepy, almost drunken expression as he calmly worked the soft ground warmed by the sun. The damp and sweaty plum blossoms nearby, a flame ready to flutter away into the crimson sunset, swayed brilliantly with the chatter of small birds. Their voices sounded like conversation, but the old man, even in his rapturous trance, must have known that the sound of a human voice could only be calling for him.

  Had he known the farmer would answer so promptly, the passerby might have thought twice about saying anything. After all, he was just out for a walk and could have decided the matter by dropping his stick on the road: if it fell north, toward Kamakura, he would tell the old man; and if it toppled south he would continue his walk without saying a word. Chances are the old man wouldn't hear him anyway, and then he'd soon be on his way again. But he had to say something, even if it was none of his business.

  "Who, me?"

  Surprised by the prompt response, the wanderer stepped over to a low lattice fence and slowly stretched his back as he glanced behind him. There wasn't a blade of grass between him and the man. The three rows of earth the farmer had so industriously spaded gave forth a pleasing, joyful smell. And yet there was something lonely about the field, the clumps of milk vetch showing here and there, and the green, dust-covered fava-bean sprouts, severed from their roots and returned to the soil.

  The wanderer put a hand to his tweed hunting cap. "Is that yours, the house on the corner?"

  The old man turned slowly, his wizened face catching a full measure of sunlight. Against the shadowed plum blossoms, the roof tiles of the house across the way rose high into a midday sky that was baking the wheat fields with its brightness. "Which house?"

  "The one with two stories."

  "That's not mine." The answer seemed a little abrupt, but the farmer didn't seem as though he meant to cut him off The old man moved his shoulders, turned his hoe upside down, and set it down on the ground. Then he looked over at the passerby.

  "Well, then, sorry to have bothered you," the wanderer said, ready to move on.

  The old man pulled off his headband. "No trouble at all. Are you looking for something? The front gate's shut, but they're not renting if that's what you're asking." The old man hiked up the skirt of his kimono and tucked it and his neckerchief under his sash. He kept his fingers stuck there, making it look as though he didn't intend to let the wanderer get away easily.

  "It's nothing so important."

  "What's that?"

  "I said, if that was your house, I was going to tell you something, and not because I'm looking for a place to rent either. I know it's not empty. I heard voices coming from inside."

  "Two young ladies live there." The farmer nodded.

  "Well, it's about those two. As I was walking past their house, by that stone wad along the gutter, I saw it crawling there—a long one."

  1

  The sun shone brightly on the old man's forehead as he knit his eye-brows. Without looking down, tie produced a tobacco pouch from his sleeve.

  "You don't say."

  "I've never been one for snakes, really." The wanderer laughed and tried to smile. "That's why I stopped and watched. It crawled halfway through the fence and flopped its tail right into the gutter. Then I'll be damned if it didn't stick its head right into the clapboards. I thought it might be headed for the bathing area, or maybe the kitchen. Anyway, I could hear voices, and I was afraid somebody might be in for a scare. A snake like that could easily squirm its way into a sitting room or pantry. No terrible thing, maybe. But what if it curled up on the floor somewhere and someone stumbled over it? I know, it's really none of my business. But then I saw you, and the house was right there. So I thought, well, if that's your place, I should say something. On the other hand, maybe you people don't think anything of a snake or two."

  "Garden snake most likely." The old man opened his mouth to laugh, and the gentle rays of sunlight poured onto his tongue. "Wouldn't say it's nothing to worry about, though. Those people are from Tokyo and had quite a little scare just a while back. I'll go take a look. Most likely the snake's long gone by now, but I'm good friends with the girls who work in the kitchen."

  "By all means. Sorry for the trouble, then."

  "Not at all. The day's long. Not much else happening anyway."

  By the time the two men parted, the snake seemed to have vanished like a dragon, beyond the limits of the common imagination. When the wanderer turned around he heard the noise of weavers at work, their shuttles sounding like the beating of chicken's wings. He followed the road along the fence, passing beneath some plum trees and by a few farmhouses where two women were working at their looms. One was eighteen or nineteen, and the other was about thirty.

  He glimpsed the younger woman's profile through the half- opened shoji of her workroom. She wore a scarf on her head, and the whiteness of her arm flashed as she threw her shuttle. The older woman had spread a reed mat on the dry ground in front of the house and was sitting with her back to the road. She quickly lifted her feet from the pedal and her loom sang its gentle song—kin, kin,

  That was all he saw as he passed by. It was a nostalgic sight, the kind one rarely sees anymore except in illustrations of nineteenth- century romances such as "The Women of Imagawa." He wanted to stop and look, but there was no one else around, not even children. They were probably out in the fields with everyone else. Thinking the women might be embarrassed by the sight of a stranger, especially a man, he decided to keep walking. He let the road take him back to where he had seen the snake and turned at the corner where the two- story house stood. To his left was a wheat field. It sloped down and opened toward the beach, where white: waves fluttered delicately upon the pale-green wheat, and a large, Western-style villa stood vividly against a cloudless sky. Considering how the people here branded foreigners "Blue Goblins" and "Red Goblins" because of the bright paint they put on their houses, a man like himself, though lacking the required beard, would also be considered one of the hat- wearing bourgeoisie.

  If the villagers thought of Europeans as blue and red monsters, they no doubt thought of boat sails whenever a butterfly passed by. The area had long since opened its beaches to the modern pursuit of recreational swimming, but the mountains to the right were the same as before—pure black, like the wings of huge hawks piled on top of each other, the foothills stretching down from the peaks, one here and another there, encroaching on the fields of rice seedlings, squeezing the narrow valleys between them. Far up one of these valleys, where it dead-ended in darkness, he saw a simple thatched roof and a window that looked like the mountain's open eye, as if a giant toad had crawled up from the dawning sea and had made that his hiding place for the sunlit hours.

  2

  Continuing his walk, he saw a hillside kiln climbing higher than the tops of the houses. He passed an unidentified shrine, an abandoned graveyard, camellia blossoms falling one after another, huge leeches in the rice paddies. Here on the Shonan coast, in the small bays tucked into the meandering mountain range, white sails rode upon the waves of the floating world. For a brief moment, so long as the sea still harbored no thoughts of rushing up the valleys and flooding the land, the villagers turned their backs to the water and worked their fields in twos and threes. The young woman throwing her shuttle and the older woman stepping on the pedal of her loom also faced the mountains, unafraid of the menacing ocean.

  These seven or eight homes that were clustered around the two- story house on the corner formed the center of the village. Farther up the valley the houses became scattered; and a few hundred yards closer to the ocean they disappeared altogether. Crowded together on both sides of the crooke
d lane, these homes, plus another seven or eight that were spaced farther apart, formed a neighborhood.

  The wanderer came to a field of rape blossoms, where the sunlight was dazzling. The green of the cliff to his left and the blue-green mountain across the valley were the only suggestions that the field of pure yellow did not extend forever. Even the small stream, flowing at the wanderer's feet, did little to cut the color's brilliance.

  To his dazzled eyes, it was as if the two weavers at their looms had been vaguely copied onto a piece of white paper, and that the remaining space around them had been painted yellow. The contrast between the rape blossoms and the colors of the two women—their kimonos, their scarves, even the pieces of fabric they were weaving— made them stand out in his mind. Of course, he couldn't say if this method of highlighting was effective or not. But the image did hold him spellbound as he imagined a line of gold on red, the tip of a weaver's shuttle leaping in a circle, searing his eyes, flying into the grass by the stream's edge, disappearing like an extinguished flame.

  That was when he saw a second snake, shining brightly as it slithered among the rape plants. He shuddered and turned. Immediately before him, hidden by the treetops, a flight of stone steps led steeply up to a thatched temple roof hovering like a cloud in the sky. Blooming near the top of the roof, against the peak's hair of green and black, was a patch of purple irises, seeming close enough to touch.

  This is what our wanderer had come to see: the temple of the Kunoya Kannon. But as he stood at the bottom of the stairway, ready to go up to the main hall, a huge, shaggy face appeared from the dense undergrowth that surrounded the path. The animal was nearly as wide as the trail itself; and, as if that weren't surprising enough, there were more than one of them. Mane after mane, belly after belly, for about five or six meters, nothing but solid horse.

  Immediately, the wanderer planted his stick and stood back. He found himself enclosed in a triangle formed by a line that connected the snake at the corner house, the snake in the rape field, and this herd of horses.

  How very strange! But then again, as it says in the Lotus Sutra:

  If beset by savage beasts

  Armed with claws and sharp, mean teeth,

  Lizards, snakes, and scorpions, too,

  Their fiery breath a poison dew,

  Oh come! Thou One Who Sees Them All!

  3

  A horseman appeared alongside the horse, one of three animals that swaggered single file down the mountainside.

  "Thanks for waiting," the first horseman said.

  "Sorry to be in your way," said the second.

  "Excuse us,' said the third.

  The three horsemen greeted him as they passed. Trying to get out of the way, the wanderer stood at the stream's edge, feeling as though his eyes were being blanketed with horsehide.

  The path narrowed even more, but he found footing on the soft grass. With the sounds of the weavers lost in the distance, he came to the base of the steps, where the blue sky seeped down through the trees. The long flight was in poor repair, and the horses were hauling new stones to the back gate of the priest's quarters near the bottom of the steps.

  Climbing those steps was like crawling up an unsteady ladder. Some stones were missing, the corners of others worn away. Because the earth crumbled beneath his feet, the wanderer was forced to crawl up the hill. He progressed slowly, but the fields and paddies below grew steadily smaller and more distant, and the waves appeared blue as the surrounding mountains embraced the sea and closed in around his feet, everywhere the same.

  In the woods' deep shadows, among the green, mossy stones of the stairway, grew lavender firefly gowns, relatives of the Chinese bell flower. The early spring blossoms seemed to dampen the wanderer's mind. He felt hot and sweaty, as if he were climbing up where boiling water had once flowed down. Yet with the slightest breeze, he suddenly felt chilled.

  He finally reached the top of the stairway. The temple grounds were rather cramped. Behind the main hall with its thatched roof, wrapped around the walkways on either side, the mountain rose like a curtain, its undergrowth black as sumi ink, the wind moaning through the pines growing there. Or was the noise coming from some-where else?

  Down the mountain, the snow-tipped waves were spreading on the shore below, coupling with the beach and vanishing into the cliffs, their sound still faintly audible. Sadly gone, however, was the kiri hatari of the weaver's looms. From the vantage point of the mountain, he no longer saw the two weavers among the yellow rape blossoms. Now they were floating upon the waves, outlined by the blue of open sea.

  But first, let us pray.

  The temple, perched as high as a horse's back, was approached by five stone steps that had long since lost the balustrade's shadow. In its day, the building must have been marvelous to behold, with its vermilion-lacquered pillars, lintels carved with flower patterns, and beams painted Prussian blue. But now the golden dragons had a forlorn look, and the midday moonlight fell upon the temple's thatched roof, leaking down in butterfly patterns upon the Chinese-style doors. The building resembled an ancient painting done in the flamboyant Tosa style. Though not dazzling, it did possess a certain depth, a fineness, a feeling of nostalgia.

  The dark interior of the hall appeared through the open lattice doors. To the side of the small shrine, draped with curtains, white lotus blossoms stood with their faces held high. Positioning himself before them, the wanderer bowed his head and withdrew, first one step and then another. With peace in his heart, he looked up at the coffered ceiling, carved in red and white peonies. The fading blossoms of Chinese whites were scattered among the crimson, making him feel as though he were in a dream, gazing upward at a garden of flowers.

  Pasted over the flowers, the rounded pillars, the pedestals for the offerings, the paneled doors, and on the outer Chinese-style doors and crossbeams, wherever he looked were the small paper stickers that named the various pilgrims who had come to the temple. One read "Engraver Hon." Another read "Fishmonger Masa." There was "Yasu the Roofer," "Tetsu the Carpenter," "Goldsmith Sakan." One was from Tokyo's Asakusa District, another from Fukagawa. Others were from places far away—Sue, Mino, ami, Kaga, Noto, Echizen, Kumamoto in Higo, Tokushima in Awa. They were like birds from distant inlets and bays, the wagtail, the cuckoo. These stickers had been left behind by unseen visitors, all of them virtuous men and women who had stayed in cheap lodgings with nothing but the cold night for a pillow, who had traveled rainy nights on rush-roofed boats and had found a home for their dreams here. Even today, the spirits of those pilgrims must come back to frolic, here where the stickers served as doorplates to their spiritual homes.

  4

  For such pilgrims, this sacred spot was a place of equanimity and divine favor, an engaging garden of flowers. Those who heard the temple's call were willing to travel any distance—ten, one hundred, one thousand miles, even from the ends of the sea. At first chance, they came to watch the flowers falling through the air. They came to worship the moon in her robes of white. The fevered of mind drank droplets of dew from the riverbank willows. Those suffering from love sought to touch the supple hand of Kannon, wanting to be held in her embrace. For those who had lost their way, there were green tiles and jeweled fences of cinnabar, gilded pillars and red balustrades, agate stairways and flower-patterned Chinese doors. The visitors fantasized about jeweled chambers and golden palaces, about phoenixes dancing in the dragon's shrine, giraffes frolicking among the peonies, the morning light shining upon the lion's throne, even about mothers and children sleeping together, cherry blossoms for a quilt, moon- bright pearls for a pillow. Whatever the dream, the all-merciful, all- suffering Kannon would not find fault.

  "Engraver Hori," "Fishmonger Masa." Simply by looking at the names the pilgrims had left behind, proof that their spirits had passed this way, one could imagine which were men and which were women. One could guess their appearance, their deportment, their presence. If the donations published in the newspapers and the lists of donor
s posted at the temples were realism, these name tags were romanticism.

  Smiling, the wanderer inspected them one at a time.

  Looking back toward the door and the large, wooden donation coffer, he spotted a piece of tissue paper pasted to a huge, cracked, mortar-like pillar. On it was a poem written in a woman's flowing hand:

  In a nap at midday

  I met my beloved,

  Then did I begin to believe

  In the things we call dreams.

  Tamawaki Mio

  It was gently and beautifully written.

  "You'll want to come over here, sir."

  The wanderer had not seen the priest standing right beside him, the sleeves of his linen robe overlapping, his straw sandals visible beneath the hem of his skirt.

  He turned, and the priest greeted him with a smile.

  "Follow me."

  The priest walked past the donation box and leaned back toward the latticed doors. Standing directly before the shrine, he pulled his robe to the sides, produced a match from his sleeve, then reached up and lit a candle. He brought his hands to his forehead and pressed his palms together. Then he opened a door just in front of the wanderer, who was still standing in the main hall.

  A four-mat room was situated on the other side of its thick, worm-eaten threshold, built wide and set up a level from the hall floor. The wanderer could see trees through the cracks in the walls, but the unbordered tatami mats were new and green. The priest entered and sat down in front of a small table, its top completely cleared. Then he slid forward on his knees and pushed an ash-covered smoking box toward his guest. It contained a charcoal holder but no tobacco.