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♦ Village Children

At half past three each day, the afternoon silence of the village would evaporate as the bright voices of children returning home slowly increased in volume the nearer they approached the village down the hill from the school. Their voices filled the village lanes like noisy flocks of birds alighting in the branches of a tree. They carried a transformative energy with them—samurai battles, Martian expeditions, circuses of wild beasts, the strange walks and body postures of internal theater—a troupe of diminutive players and shape-shifters from the shamanic primary school over the hill, terrorizing the village cats and mesmerizing the dogs. Usually, behind the main cast of these impromptu performances came, straggling solitarily, a girl of about seven years of age who was mentally disabled in some way, locked in sometimes earnest, sometimes excited conversations with herself or some spectral companion. We never discovered the nature of her condition.

On spring and summer afternoons, the children would disperse to their various homes, only to reappear mounted on bicycles, circumnavigating the village in Formula One races or orbiting space stations, or to amble silenced and trancelike from the village shop, their worlds suddenly centripetal and constellated around the taste-aura of an ice cream or candy bar.

On summer evenings after dark, the street-lit arena of the vermilion bridge would become the focus of small, excitedly chattering crouched bodies collecting kabutomushi (the Atlas beetle, which is shaped like a samurai helmet and known in Japan as the "helmet beetle"), prized pets among village children, as they were felled from the night air by the seductive and illusory sun of the street lamp, which was always shaded by a frenetic galaxy of bugs and moths.

Sadly, the evidence of such nocturnal hunts would sometimes be only too obvious the following morning, with a litter of insect armory scattered across the road like the aftermath of a medieval battle observed from the air.

♦ Summer Nights

On summer nights it was often too hot to remain in the house, and there was a need to seek out the water's edge. The best way was to walk through the village main street to the space in front of the temple. There the air was cool, where it had been steeping over the water.

The street was unlit, except for a lamp over the vermilion bridge and another near the front of the temple at the other end of the village. Apart from these, there were only the dim lights in the houses, lights that strayed only a few feet from their source and offered no illumination to the street.

This darkness, with the lack of visual distraction, however, became the bed on which a multilayered soup of olfactory and aural delights was laid down—a place for sensory-sipping at the village's most intimate and interior life. As you passed down the street, at every few breath-steps a particular stratum of this blend would separate and predominate briefly before fusing back into the environmental mix. The smells of incense, feces, cooking, kerosene, urine, cedar-wood smoke, seawater, freshly sawn pine, fish, diesel oil, warm clay walls, and old rope. These scents, subtle and mysterious, familiar and alien, coarse and refined, stench and perfume, were accompanied by an evening raga of sounds—household altar-bells and evening sutra chanting, shrill-echoing bathroom voices of children, sliding karakami, television, the slap of water on hulls as a passageway to the quay was passed, rhythmic chopping from a kitchen window, complaining cats, and the distant roar of a boat opening its throttle to the dark bay beyond.

It was these smells and sounds, more than the visual environment, that transmitted the unfamiliar and seemingly secret life of the village that first year and created an impression of mystery and strangeness. Yet paradoxically, at the same time there was present a recognition and resonance—in some very deep place an almost forgotten familiarity—like recognizing, at a culturally and historically undifferentiated, collective level, a rhythm-texture of life that combines the mundane-domestic with something ancient and sacred, which still lingers on the horizon of recall.

In the night,

the voice

of an unknown bird,

passes

from one dream

to another.

♦ "Second Home" Villages

Between the villages of Sora and Kabuto, on a curve in the coast that rounds out from the east end of Sora and into the little bay of Zenzuka to the Sora side of Helmet Mountain, there is an abandoned hamlet of some twelve or so houses. They are holiday or weekend homes and vary in design from pseudo-backwoods cabins to much more substantial constructions complete with gardens and small outhouses. This holiday hamlet was established at the time of Japan's "bubble economy" when there was a plan to build a bridge from this part of the peninsula across to Noto Island. Someone with an eye to rapid yen bought the land, cleared it, and divided it into building plots, which they sold to city dwellers who, along with their new acquisition of wealth, were also buying the idea of a "second home"—a fairly new but increasingly popular concept in Japan.

Eventually the site of the planned bridge was moved some fifty miles down the coast, and the "bubble," having risen to insupportable heights, burst as bubbles must, leaving houses that had only been used for a season or two empty and the promise of as-yet-unconnected electricity broken along with the bubble.

The hamlet is left deserted, but as though families might have been going to return after an outing, since many of the houses are still equipped with the basic domestic necessities. They remain waiting, with the slow onset of decay setting in on wooden porches, etching through the thin metal of domestic kerosene tanks attached to the outside walls of bathrooms, and discoloring the pods of gas bottles below kitchen windows. Now, bamboo and wild camellias push up against walls and doors and trail across roofs, slowly reclaiming the site for the forest, while spiders stand sentinel at the center of their mandalas, across gateways and porches, or move in and furnish silent rooms with soft drapes.

It is like a hamlet that has fallen victim to ethnic cleansing or rampant plague. There is a melancholy along this shore below the houses on summer evenings, of broken dreams. But by autumn, the low afternoon light translates this into another language—the bitter images of dereliction and thwarted greed.

As I walked along the potholed road by the shore past these empty dwellings, I could not help thinking of the "cardboard cities" of the homeless within the cities of Britain and now Tokyo, too, in these days of recession. The waste of money, workmanship, and materials not to mention land, once wild and beautiful, disturbed to no purpose contrasting achingly with the rice fields around Sora, shaped by devotion, while at the same time shaping that devotion, for generations; a land whose elemental energies are still honored, but a land that is fast-changing.

At the end of the hamlet where the road dwindles and fades out into wilderness, there is a track that leads past an abandoned clubhouse down to the shore, where two huge stone images of Daikoku and Ebisu (gods of rice farming and fishing, respectively) stand on either side of a thin path that ends on a tiny, rocky promontory. On the promontory stands a single, small wind-bent pine, and at its foot there is a small Shintō shrine dedicated to the tutelary deity of sailors, Konpira. Ironically, and symptomatic of the changing tide of consciousness, the area around this shrine is littered with the debris of picnic meals and discarded equipment left by weekend fishermen. An area once considered sacred is now ignored and polluted—Daikoku and Ebisu, increasingly strangers in their own land.

Some miles to the other side of Sora between the villages of Kanami and Iwaguruma there is another larger settlement of "second homes." This one and the one at Zenzuka, though, present a stark contrast. Here, one emerges from the rough single-track road past rice fields and areas of scrub onto, or rather into, something that makes you feel you suddenly changed discs in a virtual reality visor or crossed an environmental/time Rubicon between two realities. You cruise into a world of macadamized and discretely lamped suburban politeness, between brown raised brows of shaved and dehydrated lawns fronting wooden kit houses that seem to have been birthed from between the sheets of a catalogue of the American Dream. This is a "second home" village with clout and image and gardens, where anything natural is crucified and a sofa and two armchairs would not look out of place on the lawn. It is situated just above and beyond a small marina, ironically called Tsubaki-ga-saki ("Camellia Headland"), since the camellias were served eviction notices, and where they have survived (perhaps brought in from a garden center) have been forced to conform with the plastic garden-furniture.

From this instant village to its adjacent marina with antiseptic gleams from hulls of fiberglass and alloy craft, resembling an uneasy hybrid of high-tech jewelry and kitchen gadgetry, all express a bleakness of spirit and make you feel you have somehow been teleported into a television commercial. It is a sudden impact of culture shock and lasts for three to five minutes, depending on the speed with which you pass through.

♦ Noto Roads

For the first few months after our arrival in Sora, we decided that we were going to walk wherever the distance was walkable (for example, to the railway station in the next village) and hire a taxi for any longer journeys. After a few months, however, we bought bicycles to try and save some money on taxi fares. Finally, after nearly a year, because of our precarious financial state and a request for me to hold English classes in the nearest town, Anamizu, we succumbed to buying a very cheap secondhand car.

The car was white and shaped like a shoe. Not only was it shaped like a shoe but it was about the size of a large shoe. It was almost necessary for me to shoehorn myself into it, and for the first few days I was convinced I would never be able to drive it, as my thighs were jammed up against the steering wheel! Slowly, over a period of weeks some kind of fusion occurred between my body length and the tiny car's interior, and we—car and I—drove. I felt like a cyborg.

Driving to and from my English class in Anamizu throughout the year, the roads and lanes provided a kind of seasonal calendar with the creatures that frequented their surfaces and made driving a hazardous business, not least of course for them. Winter was a fairly void period, except for the obvious dangers of snow, ice, and the occasional cat. Spring, however, sprung in with frogs. Tiny, green plastic-contents-of-a-Christmas-cracker-looking frogs, which leapt about all over the road like extras in an Old Testament epic. Frogs that played chicken as they crossed the road, causing you to swerve from one side to the other and appear around corners to oncoming tractors, on the wrong side.

On the disappearance of these kamikaze leapers, they were replaced by huge bloated bullfrogs, that while not frenetically suicidal were as static as bollards in their waiting game with karma. These amphibians were natural meditators and in no way disturbed by the approach of a motor vehicle.

As soon as the temperature rose and evenings lengthened, this became the cue for queues of snakes, some huge six-foot serpents, to lie like hoses or temporary traffic-light cables across the road, bringing your forehead sharply up against the warm glass of the windscreen as you jammed your foot down on the brake to make detours, gingerly at 3 kph, as though you feared your tires might get bitten. Most often, you sadly passed the poor creatures already gutted, dissected; their heads bruised by nothing more transcendental than a Bridgestone tire.

The snakes remained until early autumn, and although the car was furnished with the obligatory talisman from a Buddhist temple and a charm from a Shinto shrine, prayer was still a necessary adjunct. But no sooner was it on your lips than "it" appeared. Manifested in thousands of small praying forms on the asphalt before you were praying mantises, hunched like little monks on an autumnal pilgrimage.

♦ Helmet Mountain (Kabuto Yama)

Shortly after our arrival in Sora we walked to Helmet Mountain, a forested hill that juts out into the sea. It is shaped like a samurai helmet, hence its name, and is situated about equidistantly, two miles either way, between the villages of Sora and Kabuto, a village named after the hill. At the top of Helmet Mountain there is a Shintō shrine, the object of our visit.

The shrine is reached by a long flight of weathered and eroded steps, which stretch from the granite torii (shrine gateway) at the bottom of the hill to the shrine at the top. Just before you arrive at the top, there is a kind of landing or break in the flight of steps intersected by paths leading to the left and to the right. These are in fact one and the same path which forms a circle just beneath the summit of the hill where the shrine is located. I assumed that this path must have been used in some of the Shinto ceremonies, for circumambulating the shrine in a clockwise (sunwise) direction, and on a later inquiry found this to be so.

The shrine, typical of those in the area, consists of two attached buildings, one behind the other, with the larger one in front, the smaller (the inner sanctum) behind. The front part of the shrine contains the usual paraphernalia, including a large drum, the mikoshi (an elaborate palanquin-like portable shrine in which the kami, or something representing the kami, is temporarily housed while it is carried through the district over which it presides) mounted on two trestles, and a box for donations. In front of the donation box hangs a red-and-white rope at the top of which is a slit bell, like a large cow bell, which emits a dull metallic rattling sound when shaken by the rope in order to attract the attention of the kami and to concentrate and calm the mind of the worshiper before he or she prays to the kami. Above the donation box hangs a board on which are painted the names of the war dead, and to the left, a model of a fishing boat, presumably left there by the owner of the vessel for protection. Or perhaps by families of the fishermen who have already perished with the boat.

Beyond the donation box suspended between two pillars is a rope made of rice straw with strips of white paper cut in zigzags hanging from it at intervals. Called a shimenawa, it indicates that the area beyond the rope is the sacred dwelling place of the kami. At the back of this space and directly in front of the entrance to the inner sanctum, there is a large mounted mirror of polished metal, symbolizing both the numinous and pure nature of the kami as well as the fidelity of the worshiper. On either side of the mirror are ancient wooden images of two former priests.

The energy at the top of Helmet Mountain is very powerful, and it always affected my body in some way or other, at certain times more powerfully than at others. We were told by a local farmer that it had once been a nesting place of eagles. It was a place I would return to quite regularly.

A shrine like this has no resident priest living within its compound. It is only visited at certain festival or ceremonial occasions. The rest of the year it is a silent and solitary place, except for the occasional visit by a local on some personal business.

As we descended the hillside and walked through the forest, we came across a clearing where someone had made a vegetable garden. While admiring the neatly weeded rows of winter vegetables, a very ancient-looking woman who might have stepped out of a folktale emerged from the forest to one side of the garden. On seeing us, she broke into a smile and we all bowed "Konnichiwa." "Where are you from?" she asked, looking from Masako to me, and obviously surprised to see a foreigner.

"We've just moved into Sora. Into Mr. Sawada's house beside the vermilion bridge," answered Masako. "My husband is from Britain and I'm from Tokyo. But we've decided to live in the Japanese countryside."

"Ah, good. Mr. Sawada's house. Yes, I know," she said smiling. "You've come to a good place. The land here is very soft and gentle, like the people. We never have earthquakes here. In all my years I never remember there being an earthquake."

Three nights later, I had just gone upstairs and begun to undress when, as I put out my hand to hang my shirt on a large ikō (a lacquered stand for hanging kimono), it appeared to move away from me. At the same time, my body registered that certain feeling of instability that had become familiar while I was living in Tokyo. But I did not, in those few seconds, make the connection, after the reassurance we had received from the old woman on Helmet Mountain, until I realized that not only the ikō but the room, in fact, the whole house was moving—we were having an earthquake!

We hurried to the radio and waited for any reports, and learned that the epicenter had apparently been deep under the sea near the town of Wajima on the other side of the peninsula. There had been some damage to the harbor, and a car had fallen into the sea, but there had been no injuries or loss of life.

I hoped that the locals would not associate the appearance of a foreigner in their midst with the earthquake, as some form of retribution devised by the local kami.

♦ An Offer I Could Not Refuse

While trying to acquaint ourselves with the topography of the area, we were walking through the village one afternoon when something made me turn and glance over my shoulder. I just caught sight of the back of a priest in yellow-and-white robes disappearing around the corner of a house. The experience for some reason gave me a powerful feeling of déjà vu that registered in my body physically, like a shock. I had expected to see the black robes of a priest of the Jōdo Shin sect of Pure Land Buddhism in the village, but this brief flash was far more exotic. Without thinking of any other Japanese sect, I had for some reason immediately associated the image with Tibetan monks, some of whose robes share similar colors of yellow and white. Nevertheless, when I thought about it I realized that this association possibly made sense, if in fact the temple in the village belonged to the Shingon sect, since there are many shared features between the two forms of Buddhism; hence, my association at some subliminal level, perhaps.

We had already decided that we should call on the temple, and I was now curious to see if my hunch was correct. A few days later we paid a visit, bearing the customary gifts, only to find that the priest was out, but to be invited back later by the priest's wife, who told us that the temple did indeed belong to the Shingon sect. A day or two later, the priest, Reverend Tani, phoned and invited us to dinner the following evening.

When we arrived at the temple, we were shown into a room at the back of Reverend Tani's house, where he served us green tea while we sat around a hibachi (a traditional form of heating). Almost his first words were: "How long do you think you will stay in this village?"

I answered him honestly, that I never tried to plan too much ahead in my life but rather preferred to wait and see which direction it tended toward. After a few more minutes of general conversation he suddenly asked: "Do you think you can live in this village?"

My reply, in the affirmative, seemed to please him, because he extended an arm across the hibachi and warmly shook my hand with a broad smile on his face. Then Mrs. Tani silently slid open the karakami and announced that dinner was ready.

We were shown into a large, long room with three low, lacquered tables placed end to end and covered in dishes containing various kinds of vegetables, shellfish, meats, and fish. Already sitting at the tables were Mrs. Tani's uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Shinde, who live in the fishing port town of Ushitsu some thirty kilometers up the coast from Sora, and her father, Reverend Terakoshi, also a Shingon priest.

We introduced ourselves in the traditional, formal Japanese manner, kneeling on the tatami and bowing deeply to each other. It was explained that Mr. Shinde worked in a senior post on the Ushitsu District Council and had played a key role in preserving and promoting interest in a large Jōmon period (Neolithic) site close to where he had also been in charge of the founding of a hot-spring spa (onsen), to which we were later to become frequent visitors. Reverend Terakoshi had a large and beautiful temple in a nearby town.

Seated on cushions (zabuton) at the table, we first toasted each other with chilled Japanese beer before commencing the feast that was set before us. I had hardly lifted my bowl of miso soup, however, when Reverend Tani turned to me and said: "I want you to come and look after this temple and live in it rent free. We have to go to another temple in Nakai. Do you think you can do that?"

We had been in the temple little more than half an hour, and already we were being asked if we would take care of it. I was so taken aback that without any space to think about it I immediately agreed, saying we would be very pleased to do so. Later, Reverend Tani told us he too was taken completely by surprise, as he had had no idea of making such a request. To add to the strangeness of the circumstances of the offer, Reverend Tani, at the time, had no idea that I had been a Buddhist for nearly twenty years, albeit of a different school from the Shingon sect. Or that I had on two previous occasions in my life, been on the point of taking ordination as a Buddhist priest.

Only one thing concerned me, and that was how the people of such a small conservative village would accept the idea of a foreigner moving into their temple. This had obviously occurred to Reverend Tani also, because a few days later he asked us not to mention it to anyone until he had had a meeting with the temple elders, since the unexpectedness of his asking us had preempted any plans that would need to be made.

Some weeks later, we had gone for a walk through the village at night, when suddenly there were voices up ahead of us in the dark, coming from the temple end of the village. Against the only street lamp at that end of the village, the silhouettes of a group of people could be seen coming toward us. As they drew close and we greeted one another, they recognized us and one of the men detached himself from the group, while the others carried on down the street.

Approaching us in the dark, the man bowed and said to Masako, "We are delighted that you are going to take care of the temple and we would like it if your husband would use one of the rooms over the temple to work in. But I'm sorry, we do find it a bit difficult to think of anyone but a priest living there because all our ancestors are there."

We explained that we understood their feelings completely and thanked them for their generosity in allowing me to work there, while promising to do our best in looking after the temple.

As we continued our walk, it dawned on us that they must have just come from a meeting with Reverend Tani, and we hoped they would not think that we were already on our way to the temple on some prearrangement with him to be informed of the outcome of the meeting.

By the end of the year, the barrier to our living in the temple had dissolved, but by that time I had found that cycling or walking to and from the temple each day, and dividing the hours between working at my desk and working in the temple and its garden, a very agreeable rhythm.

All spring and summer long and well into the autumn, I worked upstairs in the temple, and during breaks, cleaned the hondō (the main hall containing the image of the Buddha or Buddhist deity to which the temple is dedicated) and weeded the garden. In the winter, however, it became too cold to remain in the temple without heating of some kind, and I took to working at home and visiting the temple daily just to burn incense and make a daily check, particularly if there had been bad weather, or to make things secure if a typhoon had been forecast.

On arriving at the temple at any time of the year, I often found small offerings left either inside the hondō before the main altar or outside in front of the images of Jizō, Kannon, or Fudō-myōō. These offerings ranged from rice left at the main altar in brilliantly colored silk bags made from the remnants of old kimono to small balls of rice, wildflowers and grasses, hundred-yen pieces, candles and incense placed where someone had prayed on their way to their fields in the early morning.

From my workroom window at the temple, overlooking the road and the sea, I often saw that the old people still retained the custom of bowing to the temple as they passed by either on foot, bicycle, or tractor.

Not being involved in farming or fishing, but remaining in the village and working at my table while everyone else worked in the surrounding fields or at sea, at first made me wish for a boat or a field. But I soon realized that making ourselves available for driving our neighbors from one place to another and caretaking the temple meant that we could at least offer something to the community, which helped make us feel a little more integrated.

The sun's dying

slowly

dims the village,

but the cackle of

an old crone

suddenly

gifts the dusk

with gold!

♦ Ao-Daishō (Great Blue Snake)

One spring morning when I was still working at home, I was sitting at my worktable when for some reason I turned my head to the left toward the window on that side of the room. There, pressed up against the glass, was the head of a huge snake. I got up from the table and went over to look at it. It seemed to be staring straight into my eyes. I spoke to it for a while, more in the way of expressing surprise to myself and wondering aloud what it might be wanting. Then, slowly sliding the window open, I found that its body extended the length of the wall to the right of the window and then out of sight somewhere around the side of the house. The snake was quite obviously over six feet in length, with a strange green-bluish hue, reminding me that this was a snake someone had described to us. It is called ao-daishō, or "great blue snake," is harmless and seen as auspicious—it is a guardian snake. Snakes are often understood as messengers of a kami or indeed a manifestation of the kami itself.

Ao-daishō remained staring into the room for fifteen minutes or more without moving a scale. Then it slowly moved back down the windowpane and entered the house through a hole in the weatherboarding just beneath the sill and into the space between my workroom floor and the room below containing the Buddhist altar. From this time on, the house, which had been overrun by a plague of mice, became entirely mouse-free.

Often, in the early hours before the village had woken, I would hear a sound in the house that was different from the sparrows stirring under the eaves or the contact-sound of the feet of a heron or kite on the roof. It was the sound of footless walking—ao-daishō moving through the interior of the house on a dawn glide.

♦ Koyasu Jizō (Bodhisattva that protects women in childbirth)

I had been examining a stone which was standing to one side of the toni gate at the foot of Helmet Mountain one afternoon and noticed that carved on the stone was a Sanskrit character, known in esoteric Buddhism as a "seed syllable" (bija), enthroned on a lotus blossom. It suggested that the Shintō shrine on Helmet Mountain had once been associated with a Shingon temple in the area, most likely Senjuin, the temple in Sora. As we were walking away from the stone, Old Man Gonsaku suddenly emerged from some bushes beside the path ahead of us with a sheaf of leaves in his hand. When he saw us approaching, he explained that he had been picking small branches of the sakaki tree, which is sacred to Shinto, to offer to the kami of his household shrine.

We walked with him to where he had left his bicycle and watched him as he stripped some unwanted leaves from the twigs and placed them in a basket mounted on the front. Then the three of us walked back toward the village, Old Man Gonsaku pushing his bicycle, which was almost as tall as he was. As we walked, he talked (punctuated with giggling which we came to learn was a feature of and accompaniment to any conversation with Old Man Gonsaku), of how once Eikoku (Great Britain) and Japan had been enemies. And how Eikoku had won and we were now friends. He said that now the West was above Japan, describing it in terms of the feudal image of a pyramidal hierarchy. He told us how the priest at the shrine used to exhort them to pray for victory in the war against America and its allies.

As we entered the village, we passed by an old image of the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizō enshrined by the roadside. I asked him if he knew anything about this particular image's history. He said that he did, and that it was a very interesting story. I asked him if he would mind coming to our house to tell us about it, and we made an arrangement for tea time the following day.

By half-past four the next day, Old Man Gonsaku had not appeared. Looking toward his house, I could see no sign of movement, so assumed he must either have been sleeping or gone out and forgotten. Having not walked that day, I decided to go out, saying to Masako, "I bet you, as soon as I open the door he'll arrive." I put my notebook into a small hessian bag and, slinging it over my shoulder, I slipped into my shoes in the genkan. Sure enough, as I slid back the front door, there was Old Man Gonsaku emerging from his own house. He spotted me and called, "Oh, you're going out."

"No," I shouted back. And beckoned, "Come in, we're waiting for you."

It was the first time Old Man Gonsaku had been in our house. He entered the genkan shyly, removing his cap and carrying it in one hand with a lime-green hand towel in the other. I showed him into the large room that contained the household altar and offered him a cushion in the place of honor in front of the tokonoma. At first he refused it, but after a little persuasion, he finally settled down onto it, placing his blue, peaked cap beside him on the tatami and his green towel in his lap.

Masako came into the room with a tray of small cups and glasses and a bottle of saké. A broad smile spread across his face and he giggled as he turned the bottle around so that he could read the label: Sōgen (a good local saké in Far Noto). Although we normally prefer to heat it, the weather was already very hot and humid so we decided to drink it cold.

Old Man Gonsaku was unshaven as usual, having a bristly mustache and bearded chin, while the rest of his face was naturally hairless. His head hair was abundant and very coarse, so that it stuck up like a brush. His ears were huge with long broad lobes, like the ears on the images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The upper lids of his eyes had relaxed with age and all but obscured his vision so that in order to see ahead he had to tilt his head back slightly. As was also usual, his fly was open.

I passed him the tray of cups and glasses and he chose a medium-sized cup. Masako and I both chose a glass each. I poured out the saké and the three of us toasted, "Kanpai!" I then turned on the tape recorder, after asking him if he objected to it, and reminded him that he was going to tell us the story of the Jizō image we had passed the previous day.

Old Man Gonsaku's face was glistening with sweat and he scrubbed it with his green towel. Then laying the towel to one side, he began to rub his knees with the palms of each hand in a circular motion, as though trying to raise the energy of the story up from his legs that had walked him into the situation of telling it in the first place. As he spoke he frequently broke off in giggles which seemed to percolate from the extremities of his body and converge in his chest, so that their collective momentum caused his body to bob up and down as his throat acted as their escape valve. "A long, long time ago, we had no doctors and no midwives in this village. Only the old women of the village. By the way, we call the midwife toriage babā, a woman who takes a baby out of its mother's body. In those days, it was a very serious and worrying business for women, you know, if their babies had difficulty getting out of their bodies.

"In this village, when a woman gives birth her husband's not allowed in the room. Not even any of her boy children should be there. It's all women's business. Not men's. I was told that if I broke that custom, I would have been punished. I don't know what sort of punishment I would have had," he giggled. "Anyway, only women could attend, to help in the birth.

"The village people began to think they needed some kind of protection for women in childbirth. Eventually, they decided to have Jizō-sama [sama is an honorific], and one of the village people carved a Jizō-sama out of stone." Then he added, scratching his belly, "I don't know where the stone came from." He picked up his cup and, looking lovingly into it, took a sip.

"People knew that spirit should be put into Jizō-sama, you know, otherwise it would only be a piece of stone. It is the same as putting spirit into a carved hotoke-sama [hotoke is colloquial for Buddha]. But none of the village people knew how to do it.

"Now we have a temple here, and you know the temple people very well. But a long time ago there was no monk here. There might have been someone like an unqualified monk, but he didn't know how to put spirit into Jizō-sama. So the people decided to wait for a traveling monk to visit the temple. You know, in those days lots of monks traveled from village to village chanting and begging.

"One day at last a monk arrived, and one of the men asked him, 'Aren't you Ikkyū-sama?' And the monk replied, 'Yes.' I don't know whether he was a Zen monk or a Shingon monk, but I was told his name was Ikkyū. Anyway, people asked Ikkyū-sama to put a spirit into Jizō-sama, and they were very curious to know how he would do it." He took a careful sip of saké and then started a giggling fit. "So they gathered round and watched Ikkyū-sama with great interest. Do you know what he did?" He was bobbing up and down and giggling uncontrollably. "Ikkyū-sama tucked up his robe and he pissed all over Jizō-sama's head!"

It took a time for our collective laughter to subside, and I realized at this point that he had for the last few minutes been intermittently touching his genitals, as if contacting the source of the story's charge or completely identifying with the narrative. "Then Ikkyū-sama said, 'Well, this Jizō's now got a spirit so it is all-powerful. If you believe in this Jizō, women in the village can deliver their babies safely.' Then he left."

He was giggling again. "The villagers looked at each other. They were a bit upset. 'How disgusting! How filthy!' they said to each other. And they decided that this Jizō-sama should be cleaned, so they carried it down to the river and scrubbed it.

"That night, Jizō-sama appeared in the house of one of the men who had washed it and said, 'Why did you wash me? I want to be pissed on again, otherwise I can't be Koyasu Jizō. And don't wash me again!' Then Jizō-sama disappeared. I think it was a kind of revelation he had in a dream."

I refilled his cup and our glasses, and he mopped his face very thoroughly with his towel as I asked him why he thought Jizō needed to be pissed over in order to put spirit into him. He was silent and looked up at the ceiling and then down at the table. He took in a breath and let it out and stared off into a horizonless perspective. "I've been wondering why Jizō-sama needed to be pissed on over his head. You know, I think the reason is this. A baby comes out around this area." He was pointing toward his still-open fly, and I was wondering if it was actually pissing that was involved here and not something else. "I heard this story from old people when I was small. I might be the only person who knows this story, that's why I can tell it to you. Was it interesting?" We assured him that it was very interesting. "Do you think I'm a funny old man? A long, long time ago old people told me this story," he repeated, as though trying to emphasize a genuine provenance for it. "These days we have a clinic in Kabuto and a hospital in Anamizu, but still people are looking after Jizō-sama."

As I refilled his cup again, I thought how this story must have attracted him since he was such a great public pisser himself. He replaced his cup on the table after it was filled and told us how he was only allowed to drink two cups a day, but they were big cups, and the cup he was presently drinking from was small by comparison. This was followed by more giggles, before he continued, "The other Jizō-sama near the school is not old. It was put there in my parents' day. When I was young, the road up the hill to Kabuto was very narrow and lonely, so a village man donated the Jizō-sama to guard people traveling along it. He died about thirty years ago."

There had once been a very strong shamanistic tradition, particularly amongst the women in these country areas, and I was curious about his memories of any local healers. He thought for a moment. "Old Woman Yoshioka, who lived two doors away from my house, used to heal people. But when doctors arrived in the area, people gradually stopped visiting her.

"I also knew a man and a woman in Ukawa [a nearby village] who healed people. They could even talk with your dead relations for you. The man made people sit and pray in front of a folding gold screen, which was supposed to produce healing energy. I heard that one very rich man bought the screen and slept in front of it every night, but that he was never healed and just got worse. In the end, he became skin and bone. By the time his family took him to a doctor it was too late. The healer was reported to the police, but he earned lots of money with his swindles.

"I think there used to be healers in all the villages. I knew a man who destroyed a Buddha image he had bought from someone who had told him that if he worshiped it his sick daughter would be healed. But his pretty daughter died. I knew an old woman in this village. Her house was near the farmer's cooperative. I don't know whether she could really heal or not."

Old Man Gonsaku sipped at his saké and, giggling, seemed to change raconteural gear. "I once worked as a boatman, shipping logs and charcoal and other things from this village, Kabuto, and Ukawa to Takaoka City on the other side of the bay. I was employed by a Toyama man."

He suddenly stopped and pointed at the tape recorder with a thick, hardworked forefinger that bore evidence of a lifetime's labor. "This small machine is recording what I am saying now?" I assured him that it was. I was constantly intrigued by many of the villager's amazement at and apparent ignorance of the sophisticated technologies their own country produced. "Yes," I told him, "You'll be able to listen to your voice later on."

He was giggling and holding his genitals again. "I used to be . . ." he hesitated and looked from me to Masako and then back again to me. "I used to be a bit of a waster, indeed. I spent all my money on, you know, sixteen is very young, and all my fellow boatmen were older than me. They took me to a brothel. I was probably only fifteen at the time. They all clapped, saying that I had become a man. Of course, it was before I got married. Anyway, I wasted all my money. So in the end my employer and my parents made an agreement that I wasn't to be paid directly. It was to go to them first."

From time to time he picked up his cap and looked inside it. I thought at first that this action meant he was preparing to go home but soon came to realize that it was like a ritual for recollection or concentration—almost as though the circle of the cap kept him within the sphere of the particular arena of memories he was recounting.

He was silent for a while and raised his head to look up at the ceiling. Suddenly he was bouncing up and down again and giggling. "My taiko drumming is the same type as Wajima's (a town on the peninsula, famous for taiko). In Wajima four drummers play on one drum, but in this village two drummers play on one drum at festivals. One of the drummers died some years ago, so now I'm the only drummer here. I never learned from anyone how to play; I just watched and listened to others playing. You can see me drumming on the day of the festival. You must come.

"Sora is a very small village, but there used to be maybe five shrines altogether. But I think it was in Taishō 3 (1914) that all the shrines were made into one shrine— the present one. You know, Sora Shrine. The kami-sama in that shrine is the ancestor of the Hosoki family. You know, the house with the gate with the thatched roof. That's theirs. They were the oldest and richest family in the village. The present owner of that house is now living in Osaka.

"When we had five shrines it seemed everyday was a festival! People from other villages joked, 'You had a festival only yesterday, and again today?'" He put on a mask of amazement and we all laughed. "These days we only celebrate twice a year, April and September." He picked up his cup. "In those days the roads were very narrow so it was difficult to carry the portable shrine through the village. Sometimes we had to put it in a boat. These days it's easy but we don't have enough young men to carry the mikoshi on their shoulders."

He suddenly stood up. Whenever he stood up or sat down, it always took me by surprise. The effect was due to the shortness of his legs, causing his body to be already close to the ground. It was more as though the earth came up to meet him or fell away from him, similar to the way a baby is all of a sudden sitting or standing. "I must get back to my babā (old wife). She'll be wondering where I am."

I followed him to the genkan and watched him carefully negotiate the step and put on his shoes. He backed out through the doorway, bowing deeply and thanking us politely. We met his bows and thanked him also politely and very gratefully.

It is highly unlikely in the above story about the Koyasu Jizō, that the monk called Ikkyū was in fact the famous fourteenth-century Zen Master and poet of the same name, in spite of his eccentric and wild reputation. There is, however, an apocryphal story about him that, while expressing something of his own personality and the spirit of his Zen, does concern pissing.

Ikkyū was on a ferry where he met a fellow passenger who was a monk from one of the esoteric schools, most probably Shingon. The monk criticized Zen for ignoring magic, and in order to impress his captive audience he proceeded to invoke a tutelary deity called Fudō-Myōō (considered to be a manifestation of the Cosmic Sun Buddha Dainichi), who appeared in a halo of fire. Everyone was very frightened except Ikkyū, who calmly announced that he would match the monk's magic with his own. He would produce water from his body and extinguish the flames. So saying, he lifted his robes and pissed on the flames until Fudō-Myōō disappeared.

The roof of a temple

hangs in the dusk,

like the wings

of a great bird,

hatching Buddhas.

♦ The Story of Zenzuka

In the summer and up until late autumn, we were in the habit of swimming daily from the small beach in the little bay of Zenzuka, which was to the Sora side of Helmet Mountain surrounded by forest and small rice fields. We later learned from one of the women who worked in the fields around Zenzuka that they had been wondering all summer long what it was we did in the sea each day. They had come to the conclusion that we must have been diving for shellfish or something. Swimming for its own sake was not something that had entered their minds.

Sadly, the beach at Zenzuka collected a great deal of rubbish at times, thrown into the sea from villages down the coast and from over the sides of ships. A lot of the items washed up bore Korean hangul characters. It was sometimes necessary after a storm to clear up the beach before entering the water, which was always crystal clear and filled with an extraordinary variety of fish.

Zenzuka had always been a special place to me. Even the name "Zenzuka" carries an exotic and mysterious resonance like Zanzibar or Mandalay, and on hot summer days with a cool breeze off the sea, kites fishing in the bay, snakes sunbathing on the paths between the rice fields, and cicadas buzzing like mysterious energies coiling and uncoiling among the trees on the slopes of Helmet Mountain, it was like briefly being on a day visit to one of the heavenly realms. I was not at all surprised then to discover that there was a story about Zenzuka.

During the Kyōhō period (1716-36) there was a great famine in Noto that affected Sora very seriously. One day a boat carrying rice from Sakata in Yamagata prefecture was forced by a strong headwind to anchor in the tiny harbor of Sora to wait for a more favorable wind before continuing its voyage south. As soon as the starving villagers saw the boat, they thought a shipment of relief rice had reached them at last. Realizing their mistake, some of the villagers were forced to beg. On seeing their desperate plight and the pitiful condition of their skeletal bodies, and remembering how his master's warehouses were so filled with rice that even the mice were well-fed, the captain decided to unload at Sora.

That night the god Ebisu appeared beside the captain's pillow and told him to stop at Zenzuka on his way back to Sakata. But since they had already unloaded the rice there was no reason for them to continue their voyage. The next day, however, the weather was so beautiful they decided to set sail. As they were passing Zenzuka, a man appeared on the small rocky promontory (described in "Second Homes") and, waving with a fan, beckoned them into the tiny bay. As the boat came within earshot of the man, he shouted, "These rocks are precious, so load up with as many as you can."

The captain, thinking this to be a very strange order, was about to reconfirm what the man had said when the man disappeared. Then, remembering the words of Ebisu in his strange dream the previous night, and realizing that the man on the rocky promontory must have been Ebisu, he told his crew about it and ordered them to load the boat with rocks. By the time the boat had reached its home port of Sakata, the rocks in the boat had turned to gold.

The story of the completion of the voyage was carried back to Sora by the crews of other boats, and since that time a shrine has always been maintained on top of the small rocky promontory. In more recent times, giant statues of both Ebisu and Daikoku have stood guard at the entrance to the shrine.

♦ The Ideal Restaurant

While eating lunch in the Korean restaurant in Anamizu, the owner of which also ran the cesspit-emptying business, the person with whom I was lunching told me about a restaurant in Tokyo that a friend of his had told him about. While I suspect that the genesis of this story is probably to be found in an only-too-common enough experience in restaurants and has acquired a patination of fact through its entry into gastronomic folklore, it nevertheless carries an attractive idea. Apparently, this friend of his had gone into a restaurant, sat down, and after perusing the menu had ordered a meal from one of the waiters. When the meal was placed before him, he saw to his displeasure that it was not the meal he had asked for. He immediately complained to the waiter, who replied, "The policy of this restaurant is not to give people what they order."

This kind of restaurant is precisely what we need, I believe, as the perfect antidote to the hell of multichoice pampering that confuses us in so many areas of our consumer life. The idea that we should have everything we imagine we want rather than what we actually might need confines our lives even more blindly to the dictates of our narrowly conditioned egos, so limiting the possibilities of experiencing something we might be unprepared for or might otherwise wish to avoid—experiences that just might contain germs of new growth and knowledge. The nightmarish, extreme scenario in this respect is extended by the future prospect of genetic menus with "the baby of your choice," etc.—a world designed for those who can only live by the assurance of what is going to happen or of what conditions will be in the next second. A world of insurances and lawsuits against the unexpected, against life itself. In our optimism at finding such an establishment, however, we searched out this restaurant for ourselves on a trip to Tokyo, only to find that if it had existed, it had now vanished off the face of Japan.

♦ Mr. Nagao Speaks of Birth and Death

We met Mr. Nagao first at Sora Shrine on the occasion of the village spring festival. We had been told by Mr. Kitayama, the headman, that Mr. Nagao came from a very old family that had occupied the same land for over 360 years and that he had been headman some few years previously and had lots of stories. When we met him, he was dressed formally in black haori, bearing his clan emblem, and hakama (kimono coat and men's silk culottes) in his capacity as the leader of the procession who purifies the path of the kami as it progresses through the village. He was short with a well-earthed body that gave a powerful impression of contained energy. He had a deep crease, probably a scar that ran around his jaw like a chinstrap and merged into the natural creases on either side of his face. He appeared to be in his mid-seventies.

It was January before we were able to arrange to visit him, when he had time after the busy harvest and preparations for winter to sit and talk. His study, where he kept records of the village and received visitors, was a small room on the west side of the house, decorated with his own ink paintings and calligraphy and with a view of the garden. At its center was an open hearth (irori), which instead of containing a wood fire had been cleared to provide space for a large kerosene stove. The room was stiflingly hot after the cold outside, and my spectacles steamed up immediately upon entering the room so that I had to remove them and wave them above the stove to warm the lenses. A television on the north wall of the room and opposite to where I was invited to sit was showing a panorama of mountain peaks. It was unaccountably left switched on for the duration of our visit, drawing my attention away periodically into different areas of Japan, the facial topography of politicians, the occasional flash of a war zone, and so on.

Mr. Nagao made green tea and passed cups to us while directing our attention to several small plates of rice crackers. After passing our cups, he leaned over to some shelves to his right and pulled out a document. Opening it and smoothing it with his hand, he said, "Before the Meiji period (1868-1912) we commoners weren't allowed to have surnames." He pointed, and I noticed that the first joint of each forefinger was bent toward its neighbor. "You can see my ancestor's name here, Satoemon [a given name]. This document shows how much rice families paid as tax. Our family status was based on the size of our crop, the number of mountains [for timber], and the amount of land we farmed. After the war even peasants could own land according to the land reforms, which meant that a period of equality had begun." As he talked, he would now and then point in one direction or another, indicating a temple, house, or field, raising his arm to stress some point he was making. Whenever he did this, what I imagined to be his elbow emitted a loud crack.

"The old family hierarchy is still reflected in the order of sitting in the temples. For example, in our temple, we have kept the old seating arrangements and you are required to donate a certain amount according to your status when the temple needs money for restoration or something like that. My temple is in Yamanaka, about twelve kilometers from here. At present my share is ¥150,000."

He folded the document and replaced it among the shelves, and we started to eat the rice crackers. The television showed the imperial crown princess walking up a flight of steps. She paused at the top to wave to somebody before disappearing into what appeared to be a black hole.

"Our lives have related deeply to rice from our earliest days," he said, spilling cracker crumbs from his mouth. "My mother gave birth to me on rice straw with the assistance of the old woman from next-door. A mother fed her newborn baby three times a day. She had to work in the rice and vegetable fields all day, so she fed her baby in the early morning before she left, at lunch time, and finally in the evening when she returned home. During the day I was put into a kind of round-shaped basket made of rice straw, with a rice-straw rope across each of my shoulders to stop me from climbing out. This is how I grew up.

"In my time, we only had four years of compulsory education. Beyond that it didn't matter whether you carried on or not. I remember that lots of my classmates brought their younger brothers or sisters to school on their backs and looked after them while they studied. I was lucky though. Because I was the family heir I received extra education, but none of my brothers and sisters did.

"In those days, Senjuin temple was always full of people, young and old, daytime and evening. Now it's no good, the young people are not there anymore. I feel closer to the temple than I do to the shrine. When you compare the shrine and the temple, not many Shinto priests live by the shrine but monks always live in a house attached to the temple."

An extraordinary commercial for diapers that showed a baby pissing from a cloud snatched my eyes and held them captive for a few seconds. He produced another old document from the shelves and prodded at it with the crooked joint of a forefinger, "This was written by my grandfather. . . Here he notes the religious gatherings . . . so many . . . January 5, 11, 12, . . . they gathered at the temple." He traced his finger along the characters, speaking each as the tip of his finger contacted it, as though it transmitted the vibration of the brushstrokes to his vocal chords. "Many activities. . . My grandfather recorded what they did and when, and so on. He writes that seven families belong to the Shin sect, Otani subsect; eight to the Shin sect, Nishi Honganji subsect; three to the Nichiren sect; eight to the Sōtō Zen sect, and fifty-eight to the Shingon sect. And concerning the shrine, he recorded. . . No, this is about funerals." He folded the document up again and spoke while sliding his palm up the crease of the fold. "These days we burn the body at the town crematorium. But in the past we did it at the end of your road, where the six Jizō are now. That's where we used to burn the dead of the village.

"On the funeral eve, all the relations gathered and spent all night together in front of the funerary altar. We dressed the corpse in white with straw sandals on its feet and a rosary in its hand. This is understood to be Kūkai's [Kōbō Daishi] traveling outfit when he journeyed about Japan. The corpse was put into the coffin sitting up, not lying down like these days, and the coffin was shaped like a tub and made of cedar. After the funeral, the body was taken to that place at the end of your road to be burned by the family and their relations. We laid a fire of twigs and put the coffin on top. Then we covered it with rice straw and then pine logs, till the coffin was completely covered with rice straw and logs. We usually started to burn the pyre at four o'clock in the afternoon, and it took all night to completely burn the body." [Four is a number associated with death in Japan because the pronunciation of its character is the same for that which means "death".]

On the television, Buddhist monks were boarding a plane. "While we were waiting, all the relations were invited back to the house for a meal, which was served on red-lacquered, small, individual tray-tables (akazen). And we ate rice mixed with red beans (akameshi). This is a tradition we still keep. But every so often someone would go back to check the state of the fire and see whether the corpse was burning well or not." He laughed.