Kusamakura (15 page)

“What’s a Doge?”

“It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s the name of the people who used to rule Venice long ago. They ruled for generations; I’m not sure how many. Their palace still stands there.”

“So who are this man and woman?”

“I’ve no more idea than you do. That’s why it’s interesting. It doesn’t matter what relationship they’ve had till now. The interest lies in the scene before us at this moment, their being here together—just like you and me.”

“You think so? They seem to be in a boat, don’t they?”

“In a boat, on a hill, what does it matter? You just take it as it’s written. Once you start asking why, it all turns into detective work.”

She gives a laugh. “All right then, I won’t ask.”

“The usual novels are all invented by detectives. There’s nothing nonemotional about them—they’re utterly boring.”

“Well then, let’s hear the next bit of your nonemotional story. What happens now?”

“‘Venice continued to sink from sight, until it became nothing more than a faint smudge of line against the sky. The line broke now into a series of points. Here and there, round pillars stood out against the opal sky. At last, the topmost belltower sank from sight. It is gone, said the woman. The heart of this woman bidding farewell to Venice was free as the wind. Yet the now hidden city still held her heart in a painful grip, and she knew she must return there. The man and the woman fixed their gaze on the dark bay. The stars multiplied above them. The gently rocking sea was flecked with foam. The man took the woman’s hand, and it felt to him as if he held a singing bowstring.’”

“This doesn’t sound very nonemotional.”

“Oh no, you can hear it as nonemotional if you care to. But if you don’t like it, we can skip a bit.”

“No, I’m quite happy.”

“I’m even happier than you are. Now where was I? Er . . . this part is somewhat trickier. I’m not sure I can . . . no, this is too difficult.”

“Leave it out if it’s hard to read.”

“Yes, I won’t bother too much. ‘This one night, the woman said. One night? he cried. Heartless to speak of a single night. There must be many.’”

“Does the woman say this, or the man?”

“The man does. She doesn’t want to go back to Venice, see, so he’s comforting her. ‘The man lay there on the midnight deck, his head pillowed on a coil of rigging rope; that moment in his memory, the instant like a single drop of hot blood when he had grasped her hand, now swayed in him like a vast wave. Gazing up into the black sky, he determined that come what may he must save her from the abyss of a forced marriage. With this decision, he closed his eyes.’”

“What about the woman?”

“‘The woman seemed as one lost and oblivious to where she strayed. Like one stolen and borne up into thin air, only a strange infinity . . .’ The rest is a bit difficult. I can’t make sense of the phrasing. ‘A strange infinity’ . . . surely there’s a verb here somewhere?”

“Why should you need a verb? That’s enough on its own, isn’t it?”

“Eh?”

There is a sudden deep rumble, and all the trees on the nearby mountain moan and rustle. Our eyes turn to each other instinctively, and at this moment the camellia in the little vase on the desk trembles. “An earthquake!” she cries softly, shifting from her knees and leaning forward against the desk where I sit. Our bodies brush each other as they shake. With a high-pitched clatter of wings, a pheasant bursts out of the thicket close by.

“Wasn’t that a pheasant?” I say, looking out of the window.

“Where?” she inquires, leaning her pliant body against mine. Our faces are almost close enough to touch. The soft breath that emerges from her delicate nostrils brushes my mustache.

“Nonemotional, remember!” she says sternly as she swiftly straightens herself.

“Of course,” I promptly reply.

In the aftermath of the little earthquake, the startled water in the hollow of the garden rock continues to sway gently to and fro; the shock has risen up through the water in a swelling wave that does not break the surface, creating instead a fine lacework pattern of tiny ripples in irregular curves. Were it to exist, the expression “tranquil motion” would describe this perfectly. The wild cherry tree that steeps its calm reflection there wavers in the rocking water, stretching and shrinking, curving and twisting; yet I am fascinated to observe that however its shape changes, it still preserves the unmistakable form of a cherry tree.

What an enchanting sight—so beautiful and shifting. This is how motion should be.

“If we humans could only move in that way, we could move all we liked, couldn’t we?” she says.

“You have to be nonemotional to move like that, you know.”

She gives a laugh. “You’re certainly fond of this ‘nonemotional, ’ aren’t you!”

“I wouldn’t say you were exactly averse to it either. That performance with the wedding kimono yesterday, for instance.”

But here she suddenly breaks in coquettishly. “Give me a little reward!”

“What for?”

“You said you wanted to see me in my wedding kimono, didn’t you? So I went out of my way to show you.”

“I did?”

“I gather that the artist who came over the mountains put in a special request to the old lady up at the teahouse.”

I can produce no appropriate response, and she goes on unhesitatingly, “What’s the point of throwing my all into trying to please someone so hopelessly forgetful?” She speaks in a mocking, bitter tone. This is the second barb that has struck home, hitting me fair in the face, and the tide of battle is turning increasingly against me. She’s somehow managed to rally, and now that she holds the upper hand, her armor seems to have become impregnable.

“So that scene in the bathhouse last night was purely kindness too, was it?” I try, scrambling to save myself from the perilous situation. She is silent.

“I do apologize,” I go on, seizing the moment to advance when I can. “What should I give you as reward, then?” However, my sally has no effect. She is gazing with an innocent air at the piece of calligraphy by Daitetsu that hangs over the door.

After a pause she murmurs softly, “‘Bamboo shadow sweeps the stair, but no dust moves.’” Then she turns back to me and, as if suddenly recollecting, studiedly raises her voice. “What was that you said?” I’m not going to be trapped again, however.

I try taking my cue from the tranquil motion of the water after the earthquake. “I met that abbot just a while ago, you know.”

“The abbot from Kankaiji? He’s fat, isn’t he?”

“He asked me to do him a Western painting for his sliding door. These Zen priests say the most peculiar things, don’t they?”

“That’s how come he can get so fat.”

“I also met someone else there, a young man.”

“That would be Kyūichi.”

“That’s right, yes,” I say.

“How much you know!”

“Hardly. I only know Kyuichi. I’m quite ignorant otherwise. He doesn’t like talking, does he?”

“He’s just being polite. He’s still a child.”

“A child? He’s about the same age as you, surely.”

She laughs. “You think so? He’s my cousin, and he’s off to the war, so he’s come to take his leave of the family.”

“He’s staying here, is he?”

“No, he’s in my older brother’s house.”

“So he came here specially to take tea, then.”

“He likes plain hot water better than tea, actually. I do wish Father wouldn’t invite people to tea like that, but he will do it. I bet his legs went numb from all that formal sitting. If I’d been there, I would have sent him home early.”

“Where were you, in fact? The abbot was asking about it, guessing you must have gone off for a walk again.”

“Yes, I walked down to Mirror Pool and back.”

“I’d like to go there sometime. . . .”

“Please do.”

“Is it a good place to paint?”

“It’s a good place to drown yourself.”

“I don’t have any intention of doing that just yet.”

“I may do it quite soon.”

This joke is uncomfortably close to the bone for mere feminine banter, and I glance quickly at her face. She looks disconcertingly determined.

“Please paint a beautiful picture of me floating there—not lying there suffering, but drifting peacefully off to the other world.”

“Eh?”

“Aha, that surprised you, didn’t it! I’ve surprised you, I’ve surprised you!”

She rises smoothly to her feet. Three paces take her across to the door, where she turns and beams at me. I just sit there, lost in astonishment.

I have come to take a look at Mirror Pool.

The path behind Kankaiji temple drops down out of the cedar forest into a valley, forking before it begins to climb the mountain beyond, and there, enclosed by the two ways, lies Mirror Pool. Dwarf bamboo crowds its edges. In some places the leaves press in so densely on either side that you can barely avoid setting up a rustling as you pass. The water is visible from among the trees, but unless you actually go around it, you have no way of guessing where the pool begins and ends. A walk around its perimeter reveals that it’s surprisingly small, probably no more than three hundred fifty yards. However, the shape is highly irregular; large rocks jut out here and there into the water. What’s more, the exact point of the shoreline is as difficult to judge as the pool’s shape, for the lapping waves create a constant, irregular undulation along its edge.

The area around the pool is largely broadleaf woods, containing countless hundreds of trees, some not yet flush with spring leaf bud. Where the branches are relatively sparse there is even a carpet of young grass, sprouting in the warmth of the bright spring sunlight that filters through, and the tender forms of little wild violets peep out here and there.

Japanese violets seem asleep. No one would be tempted to describe them, as one Western poet has done, in the grandiose terms of “a divine conception” . . . but just as this thought crosses my mind, my feet come to a sudden halt. Now once your feet have stopped moving, you can find yourself standing in one place for an inordinate length of time—and lucky is the man who can do so. If your feet suddenly halt on a Tokyo street, you will very soon be killed by a passing tram, or moved on by a policeman. Peaceful folk are treated like beggars in the city, while fine wages are paid to detectives, who are no better than petty criminals.

I lower my peaceful rump onto the cushion of grass. No one will raise an objection even if I should choose simply to stay sitting here for the next five or six days. That is the wonderful thing about the natural world; while on the one hand it has neither pity nor remorse, on the other, it is neither fickle nor arbitrary in its dealings with people—it treats all indifferently alike. Many are prepared to turn their noses up at the rich and powerful, the Iwasakis and Mitsuis of this world.
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But who besides Nature can coolly turn his back on the ancient authority of emperors? The virtues of Nature far and away transcend our pitiful human world; there absolute equality holds eternal sway. Rather than associate with the vulgar and thus induce in yourself the kind of misanthropic fury felt by Timon of Athens,
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far better to follow the way of the sages of old, to cultivate flowers and herbs in your little plot and spend your days in peaceful coexistence with Nature. People like to speak loftily of “fairness” and “disinterest.” Well, if this means so much to them, surely we would do best to kill a thousand petty criminals a day and use their corpses to fertilize a world of gardens. . . .

But my thoughts have degenerated into mere tiresome quibbles. I haven’t come to Mirror Pool to engage in these schoolboy ramblings! I take a cigarette from the packet of Shikishima tucked in my sleeve and strike a match. Though my hand registers the rasp, no flame is visible. I apply it to the tip of the cigarette and draw, and only now, as smoke issues from my nose, can I be certain I am smoking a lit cigarette. In the short grass the discarded match sends up a little dragon curl of smoke, then expires. I now shift my seat slowly down to the shore. My grassy cushion slopes smoothly right on into the pool; I pause just at the edge, where any farther advance must bring the tepid water over my feet, and peer in.

The pool seems quite shallow for as far out as my gaze can reach. Long, delicate stems of waterweed lie sunk there, in a deathly trance—I can think of no other way to put it. The grasses on the hill will bend with the breeze; stems of seaweed await the wave’s tender, enticing touch. This sunken waterweed, immobile for a century and more, holds itself in constant readiness for motion; through the endless recurrence of days and nights, it waits, the tips of those long stems fraught with whole lifetimes of yearning, for that moment when it will find itself tousled at last into action. Yet in all this time it has never moved. Thus it lives on, unable still to die.

I stand and pick up from the grass two handy stones. I’ve decided to perform an act of charity for this waterweed. I toss one stone into the pool directly in front of me and watch as two large bubbles come gurgling up, to vanish in an instant.
Vanish in an instant, vanish in an instant,
my mind repeats. Gazing into the water, I can see three long stems of waterweed like strands of hair begin to sway languidly about, but in the next instant a swirl of muddy water wells up from the bottom to hide them from sight. I murmur a quick prayer.

The next stone I hurl with all my strength, right into the middle of the pool. There is a faint plop, but the tranquil pool refuses to be disturbed. At this, I lose the urge to throw any more stones; instead, I set off walking to the right, leaving my painting box and hat lying where they are.

The first few yards are an uphill climb. Large trees branch thickly overhead, and a sudden chill strikes me. A wild camellia bush is blooming in deep shade on the far bank. The green of camellia leaves seems to me altogether too dark, and there’s no cheerfulness in them even when bathed in the midday sunshine or lit by a patch of sunlight. And this particular camellia is growing quite deep within a crevice in the rocks, huddled there in quiet seclusion, so that if it weren’t for the flowers, one would never notice it. Those flowers! They are so many that a day’s counting could not number them—though now that I’ve noticed those brilliant blooms, I feel almost tempted to try. Bright though they are, they have nothing sunny in them. They seize your attention like little sudden flares, but as you continue to gaze, you feel for some reason an uncanny shudder. No flower is more deceptive. Every time I see a wild camellia in flower, I think of witchery—a bewitching woman who draws people in with her black eyes, then quickly slips a smiling poison into their unsuspecting veins. By the time they realize the trap, it is too late.