Читать книгу Chojun - Goran Powell - Страница 10

The Striking Post

My fourteenth birthday was a special day. Mother cooked imokuzu—potato pancakes—for breakfast, and father presented me with a new penknife like the one he used on his boat. I was thrilled and ran to fetch his sharpening stone. He gave me advice, and though I’d sharpened knives many times before, I listened attentively and did as he instructed. I didn’t wish to anger him, especially not today. When it was time to go to school, I stood before him and waited to be invited to speak. My father raised his eyebrows at my sudden formality—we didn’t stand on ceremony in our household. I think he could guess what I was about to ask.

“Father, I am fourteen now,” I began, then waited a moment to gauge his reaction. He nodded once, as if to say there was no doubting it was true. “Do you remember Master Miyagi, who we met a few years ago?” I continued.

“Miyagi? Miyagi?” he said, his brow furrowing as he tried to recall where he’d heard the name before, “there is a noble family in Naha by that name…”

“The to-te man!” I said, frustrated by his forgetfulness.

“Yes, I do believe Chojun Miyagi is a to-te teacher,” he said slowly, as if dredging up some long-forgotten memory from the past.

“The typhoon-man!” I exclaimed, fit to burst with impatience.

“That was Chojun Miyagi?” he asked, wide-eyed.

I stared at him in disbelief until I noticed the twinkle in his eye. “You know it is!” I shouted, all formality forgotten.

“Yes, I know all about Master Miyagi,” he said. “Now what about him?”

“He told me I could begin training in to-te when I was fourteen,” I said breathlessly, “and I am fourteen now, and there is a to-te class tonight.”

“You know where his dojo is?”

“Yes, in the elementary school in Naha.”

“Naha is a long way, Kenichi.”

“I’ll come home at once, as soon as the training is finished,” I promised.

“Make sure you do!” he said sternly.

It took a moment for it to sink in. “Thank you, father!” I said loudly.

“One more thing,” he said, reaching behind his back. He handed me a small flat parcel wrapped in brown paper. I took it and stared at it dumbly. “Open it,” he urged gently.

Inside was a crisp white cloth. I looked at him questioningly. “You can wear it as a headband, if Miyagi permits,” he said. “It’ll stop the sweat stinging your eyes.”

I was touched that my father knew me so well and didn’t know what to say. Father filled the silence for me. “When you train, do so with all your body and soul. Don’t waste Master Miyagi’s time.”

“I won’t,” I promised.

“I know you won’t,” he smiled.

I rolled the cloth into a band and he tied it around my head. I hurried out of the house. Our exchange had made me late for school, and I’d have to run all the way to avoid a ticking-off by Mr. Kojima.

As it happened, Mr. Kojima ignored my hasty entrance that morning. He even overlooked the headband that I’d forgotten to take off when I bowed to the emperor’s portrait. He had a very special announcement to make and nothing was going to distract him from that task.

“Today is a proud day for the school,” he began, beaming with delight, “a very proud day! One of our teachers—a former student here himself, Mr. Uchihara—has been afforded the singular honor of fighting for the emperor!” At this point Mr. Kojima was so moved by the depth of his own emotions that he was forced to pause for breath. When he spoke again, he hurried to end his sentence before his passion overwhelmed him. “Mr. Uchihara will be leaving for Manchuria in the morning. There is passing-out parade taking place for him now by the school gate.”

We made our way into the yard and Mr. Kojima formed us into two lines that created a path that led to the gate. Some of the other teachers distributed flags and banners bearing good-luck messages and slogans: Protect the Home Front—National Unity—Do Your Best For Your Country. The girl beside me was given a banner that was too big for her to hold up alone, so I helped her. Our slogan read, Reproduce and Multiply! We held it high, beaming with delight, the irony of our particular message lost on us in our youthful zeal.

Mr. Uchihara appeared, accompanied by the head-teacher, who spoke at length of the honor and privilege of serving the emperor. He called Mr. Uchihara a flower of Japan, a hero. When the speech was over, one of the senior girls presented Mr. Uchihara with a senninbari, a traditional belt made up of a thousand stitches—a good-luck talisman given to soldiers by wives and daughters. Finally, Mr. Uchihara walked through the lines of students and banners to the car that was waiting to take him to Naha port.

That evening, I made my way to the elementary school in Naha where Miyagi taught to-te. It was larger than my own school, though similar in layout: three sturdy brick buildings with roofs of corrugated iron and a dusty yard. A row of trees had been planted around the outer edge as a windbreak, a common sight in Okinawa. As I walked I planned what to say to Sensei Miyagi, changing my mind several times on the way. When I arrived, the school gate was open and I wandered inside. I already knew which building Miyagi used as a dojo. The door was ajar and I peered in. Miyagi wasn’t there, but there was a small group of boys chatting and three other boys were practicing punches and blocks. Among them I saw Jinan Shinzato, the talented gymnast from my school. One of the boys ambled over to me. “Are you lost?” he asked.

“No, I’ve come to learn to-te,” I answered.

“You can’t just turn up like this. You need to make arrangements with Master Miyagi. He’s not taking any new students at the moment.”

“I have made arrangements with Master Miyagi,” I blurted out, praying Miyagi would remember me after such a long time. The boy shrugged and returned to his friends. I stepped a little way farther inside the training hall and stood with my back against the wall. Jinan Shinzato glanced over at me, but if he recognized me from school, he didn’t let on. Like the other boys, he was bare-skinned save for a pair of rough cut-off pants and his body was already covered in a sheen of sweat. He was the shortest in the class, but his muscles were broad and well defined and he looked the most powerful of them all. It was clear that Shinzato had trained hard with the iron weights that lay around the edge of the room.

I took a closer look at the equipment. Among the barbells and dumbbells, I saw several curious pieces: a short wooden handle sticking out of a stone, a set of iron rings, a giant oval ring about three feet long, two pairs of iron clogs, and several tall earthenware jars. Suddenly all the boys came to attention and I turned to see Miyagi’s broad frame in the doorway. They bowed and he returned their bow. I bowed hastily and opened my mouth to speak, but my carefully prepared speech had deserted me. Miyagi waited expectantly. “Master,” I stammered finally, “I’ve come because I am fourteen.”

Miyagi peered at me in the dim light. There was no indication that he recognized me. “It’s your birthday today?”

“Yes.”

I heard the faintest snigger from the other boys behind me, but didn’t turn around, “You said, when I met you before, that I should come when I am fourteen…”

“You have come to celebrate your birthday with us?”

“I have come to learn to-te,” I corrected him.

“Ah, well why didn’t you say so in the first place,” Miyagi said, “because we do not hold birthday parties in here.”

The older boys laughed openly now and I felt my cheeks burning with shame. “I can pay,” I said quickly.

Miyagi ignored this remark. “Remove your shirt,” he said instead.

“Can I wear a headband?” I asked.

“If you think it will help you,” he said.

“It will keep the sweat from my eyes,” I told him.

“Then wear it,” he said, and tiring suddenly of our conversation, he turned and clapped his hands loudly for the class to begin. The boys hurried to form a circle in the hall. There was no space left for me to stand, so I stood apart, in the corner, and aped their actions. Miyagi led the class through a series of warming up exercises that stretched every part of our bodies, starting with our toes and finishing with our heads. By the time we had finished, there was a puddle of sweat on the floor beneath each of us. Next, each student took up a different piece of training equipment and began to work out. I’d no idea what to do and turned to Miyagi with a question on my lips.

“You can train with me,” he said before I could ask, “since it is your birthday.”

He led me outside, to a small area of rough ground behind the dojo where two wooden planks were sunk into the ground. Each one had a straw pad near the top, positioned at chest height and covered with tightly wound string. Both pads had a dark red-brown stain in the middle that spread out and down, getting lighter at the edges. Miyagi placed his fist against one of the pads and planted his feet firmly on the ground. He waited until I’d done the same on the other, then stepped across and adjusted my fist until only the front two knuckles touched the pad.

“Now punch,” he ordered.

I struck the pad. The straw offered little padding and the plank didn’t bend.

“Again.”

I struck again.

“Harder!”

I struck a third time.

Miyagi shook his head in disappointment. “The first and last weapon of a to-te fighter is his punch,” he told me. “One punch, one kill. That is our motto. Again!”

I hit the board as hard as I could. A sharp pain shot through my hand.

“Grip your hand tightly when you strike,” he told me.

I did.

“Again!”

I struck again.

“That is how you must punch,” he told me.

I stopped, eager to leave the painful striking post and move onto the next exercise, but Miyagi didn’t move, and it dawned on me that the exercise wasn’t over.

“One hundred times, with each hand,” he said.

I stared at him dumbly, hoping he was joking. “We’ll do it together, since it’s your birthday,” he said. I realized he wasn’t.

Miyagi readied himself before the other striking post, then waited for me to do the same. I placed my trembling fist against the pad. He nodded for me to begin. I drew my hand back and struck. At the same moment, there was an explosion beside me. I jumped away in fear, the pain in my hand forgotten. Miyagi had hit the post. He smashed it again. The plank bent back at an impossible angle, then righted itself, only to be driven back by another tremendous blow. Each time he struck, there was an ear-splitting crash and the groaning of wood as the plank bent back. The pounding went on and on until, after perhaps fifteen strikes, he stopped and glared at me. There was a look in his eyes that can only be described as predatory—he was ready to tear me apart like some savage beast from the jungle. I took an involuntary step back. He held me in his gaze, until I realized he was waiting for me to punch and returned to my position.

We struck up a rhythm together. With the sound and fury of Miyagi’s punches, I couldn’t concentrate on the dreadful pain in my hand. To my astonishment, Miyagi’s punches got harder and harder, until the plank began to split and soon broke in two, leaving only a jagged stump sticking up from the ground. Miyagi turned and went back inside the dojo without a word.

I continued tapping my pad, the blood from my torn knuckles adding fresh color to the old brown stain. When I reached one hundred punches, I checked to see if Miyagi was watching. I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t dare to cheat—he had a sixth sense, after all. I placed the front two knuckles of my left hand against the pad and punched as hard as I could.

When I’d finished, I took a leaf from a nearby tree and dabbed at my bleeding hands to avoid getting blood on my clothes. Mother would be angry, or worse, she might prevent me from training.

I went back inside the hall and watched the older boys. Their training didn’t resemble fighting. Jinan Shinzato was holding a heavy earthenware jar in each hand, fingers splayed around the rim, and was walking in slow deliberate steps. Another tall slim boy was training with the stone-hammer known as the chiishi. Squatting low with his arm extended, he turned the chiishi up and down to build strength in his wrist. Another boy was moving the giant oval ring called the kongoken around his body. Beside him, an older boy was practicing with heavy iron rings on his forearms, while the last of them held a barbell across his shoulders and, leaning forward, rolled it down the length of his back, controlling it with his arms.

Miyagi saw me and came over to inspect my knuckles. Without a word, he led me to a tap and ran cold water over my hands until all traces of blood were gone. Taking a clean cloth from a cupboard, he dabbed my hands until they were dry. He reached for a bottle of dark liquid and splashed a little into his palm before rubbing it gently into my shredded skin. I clenched my teeth to avoid making a sound. Finally, he cut two strips of bandages and wrapped them slowly around my hands, securing them with a neat knot. I could hear his steady breathing as he did so and felt a little ashamed that he was forced to spend so long on my injuries. When he’d finished, he clapped his hands twice and each student took up a new piece of equipment.

“Jiru!” he called out, and Jinan Shinzato stepped forward, “Sanchin.”

Jiru was Miyagi’s nickname for Shinzato. No one else called him by that name. I watched as Shinzato began to perform the same movements I’d seen Miyagi do in the typhoon. This was Sanchin. Miyagi took up position behind Shinzato and began to probe the muscles around Shinzato’s shoulder and back with his fingers, testing their condition, searching for weakness, muttering as he did, “Yes, yes.” He continued down Shinzato’s spine to his hips and onward, down his legs to his feet. All the while Shinzato continued his performance, punching slowly and with tension. Suddenly Miyagi clapped his palms across Shinzato’s shoulders and the slap of skin on sweat-soaked skin rang out around the room. He struck Shinzato’s sides and his stomach in the same way, and Shinzato kept these areas tense to withstand Miyagi’s blows. When Shinzato had finished, Miyagi nodded, but it seemed he wasn’t completely satisfied. “Again,” he demanded quietly, and Shinzato began once more.

I went to try my hand at the strength training, eager to develop a physique like Shinzato’s. The earthenware jars were sitting unused on the floor and I bent to lift them. To my surprise, I found they had been filled with water and were impossibly heavy. I planted my feet firmly between the jars and tried again. I succeeded in raising them off the ground, but when I took a step forward, I felt the jars slipping from my grasp. The thought of broken jars and water over Miyagi’s floor was too frightful. I put them back down. Just then, Miyagi clapped his hands and ordered the equipment to be cleared away.

“Kata!” he said loudly, and each student began to practice a sequence of punches, blocks, kicks, and strikes. Sometimes they struck with open hands, using the palm, fingertips, or edge of the hand. I looked on, bewildered, until Miyagi came and put his hand on my shoulder. “You can go home now,” he said. “It is getting dark and your lesson is finished for today.”

I wanted to stay and watch the other boys, but I dared not contradict him. Instead, I bowed and thanked him for instructing me. I offered to pay but he shook his head and told me I’d already paid. As I left the training hall and followed the long road home, I wondered what he meant by that. It would be some years before I understood.

The next evening when I returned to the dojo, Miyagi wasn’t there and Jinan Shinzato was teaching the class instead. They had begun early, and I was left to wait in the doorway for five minutes until Shinzato beckoned me to join in. He led us through the same warm-up exercises that Miyagi had done, then ordered us to begin our strength training with the weights and jars. I looked to Shinzato for instruction, but he shook his head and led me outside saying simply, “Makiwara.”

I didn’t know what a makiwara was and expected to find some new training aid waiting for me outside, but Shinzato sauntered over to the striking posts, one smashed and broken in two, the other darkened with my blood from the day before, and waited for me to join him. Each step was a step filled with despair. Shinzato glared at me, daring me to contradict him. I looked into his hard eyes, wondering if he really didn’t know that we went to the same school, then placed my raw knuckles against the red-brown stain and got set to punch.

“No!” he said.

I waited, expecting him to correct some aspect of my stance, but instead he pointed to the broken makiwara. “You need to replace it.” I must have looked at him dumbly because he spoke as if talking to an imbecile. “Master Miyagi said that if you came tonight, you should build a new makiwara, since you broke it.”

“I didn’t break it,” I protested. “You must know that.”

He shrugged, “Miyagi said it’s broken because of you, so you can be the one to fix it. There are tools in the shed over there, and some new planks. When you’ve finished, come back inside and rejoin the class.”

That evening I discovered that despite being a simple piece of apparatus, the makiwara is quite difficult to replace. The plank was sunk deep into the ground and the earth around it trodden down hard. A spade made no impression on the sunbaked ground and I was forced to resort to a pickaxe. An hour later, I was down near the base. It was then that I discovered the plank had two crossbars for stability, so I was forced to dig wide as well. When the jagged stump was finally out, I set about making a new one.

I collected a new plank from the shed. It was already tapered at one end, presumably for just such a purpose. I also found straw, rope, and glue and set about replicating the broken makiwara. I was good with wood, thanks to all the time I’d spent with my father mending his boat and recreated the crossbars on the base quite accurately. Next, I attached the straw padding, wrapped over it with rope, and glued it down in a faithful reproduction of the previous makiwara. It wasn’t until I’d sunk my new creation into the hole that I noticed night had fallen. I was still stamping the earth down when Shinzato reappeared. He held the makiwara and shook it to check how solid it was, then stamped on the ground to make it firmer. Finally, he balled his fist and struck the pad. I held my breath, praying it would stand up to his blows.

“It’s time to go now,” he said, without commenting on the makiwara. “Put the tools back and hurry, so I can lock up.”

I returned the tools to the shed and then followed him to the gate. The other boys had already left.

“Where was Master Miyagi tonight, Sempai?” I asked, using the polite form of address for the class senior.

“At a meeting in Shuri,” Shinzato said, “But don’t worry. He’ll be back next time.”

I wanted to tell Shinzato I wasn’t worried, that I would have been happy to learn to-te from him, but it might have sounded stupid. “Goodnight Sempai,” I said as he held the gate open for me. I didn’t know what else to say.

Shinzato grunted a reply as he turned the key in the lock and I walked down the road casually until I’d turned the corner, then ran, eager to get home and tell father how I’d built a makiwara for Sensei Miyagi.

On my third training session, Miyagi taught me Sanchin. He showed me how to grip the ground with my feet, rooting myself to the floorboards, just as he had rooted himself to the cliff-tops in the storm. He showed me how to create a fist and punch, how to block, and how to breathe slowly and deeply into my tanden, the central point of the body two inches below the navel, in the same way he’d shown me to breathe when I was diving.

Sanchin was just one of the sequences known as “kata.” It was simple to learn, but, Miyagi warned me, difficult to master. “Practice Sanchin deeply each day and you will always be strong,” he said. The other kata were more complex than Sanchin, yet to Miyagi, Sanchin was the trunk from which all the others branched out and the root that pulled them all together.

No one but Miyagi was allowed to teach kata to a student, since it took too long to unlearn bad habits, and no one else was allowed to do the painful shime testing that I’d seen him perform on Shinzato. Miyagi stood behind me and pressed my muscles with his fingers.

“Tense here,” he would say, tapping my shoulder, or my side, or my thigh. “Bring your muscle up. Good!” If his fingers felt a lack of response, his iron hard palm would slap until I brought the required tension to that part of my body. I was aware that he was slapping very lightly compared to what he had done to Shinzato, but the impact of his heavy hands was still quite dreadful. After what seemed like an hour, but was more likely ten minutes, he placed his palm on my stomach. Exhausted, I tensed nonetheless, but he tapped my belly gently.

“You have been diving for pearls?” he asked.

“Yes Sensei,” I said, delighted that he had remembered our conversation of some years earlier.

“Did you find any?”

“Not yet.”

“One day, perhaps.”

“If I find one, I will give it to you,” I said, “as payment for your teachings.”

“And I will be happy to accept it,” he smiled. “Now practice for a while,” he said lightly, turning his attention to another boy.

I performed Sanchin once again, alone this time.

Sanchin means Three Battles, and the first of my battles had begun. In this never-ending struggle to achieve harmony between mind, body, and spirit, the first battle was the body, the simple struggle to position myself correctly and make myself strong. Later, the second battle would join the first, as I sought to develop the subtlety of technique that makes Sanchin so powerful. And lastly, the final battle would enter the fray, the struggle to understand the effect of such an exercise on a man’s innermost soul. This final battle was one that I would wage for many years to come.