Kusamakura (8 page)

By now it’s nearly twelve, but there is still no sign of my meal. I’m beginning to feel distinctly hungry, but I set about mentally identifying myself with the hermit poet in his words “vast empty mountains, no one to be seen,” and manage to induce a state in which I feel not the least regret at having to skimp a little.
³
Drawing a picture feels like too much trouble just now, and as for coming up with a poem, my mind is already immersed in the poetic—to actually compose something would be merely a waste of breath. Nor do I have any inclination to undo the box of two or three books that I’ve brought along, tied to my tripod, and read. I feel perfect happiness simply lolling here on the balcony in the company of the shadow cast by the blossoms, my back toasting in the warm spring sunlight. To think would be to sink into error.

Movement seems perilous. I would cease even to breathe if I could. I want to live like this for a whole fortnight, motionless, like a plant rooted deep in the floor beneath me.

At last footsteps are heard coming along the corridor and climbing the stairs. Listening, I realize that two people are approaching. The footsteps stop before my room, then one person wordlessly retreats. The sliding door opens, and I guess it will be the woman I saw earlier that morning, but in fact it’s the maid of the previous evening who enters. I register a touch of disappointment.

“I’m sorry this is so late.” She sets down the tray table containing my lunch. There is no explanation for the lack of breakfast. The tray contains a plate with a grilled fish and a garnishment of greenery, and when I lift the lid of the bowl beside it, a red and white prawn is revealed nestling there in a bed of fresh fern shoots. I gaze into the bowl, savoring the colors.

“Don’t you like it?” asks the maid.

“No, no, I’m just about to have it,” I reply, but in fact it looks too beautiful to eat. I once read somewhere an anecdote about the artist Turner at a banquet, remarking to his neighbor as he gazed at the salad piled on the plate before him that this cool fresh color was the sort he himself used. I would love to show Turner the color of these fern shoots and prawn. Not a single Western food has a color that could be called beautiful—the only exceptions I can think of are salad and radishes. I’m in no position to speak of its nutritional value, but to the artist’s eye it is a thoroughly uncivilized cuisine. On the other hand, artistically speaking, everything on a Japanese menu, from the soups to the hors d’oeuvres to the raw fish, is beautifully conceived. If you did no more than gaze at the banquet tray set before you at an elegant restaurant, without lifting a chopstick, and then go home again, the feast for the eyes would have been more than sufficient to make the visit worth your while.

“There’s a young lady in the household, isn’t there?” I inquire as I put down the bowl.

“Yes.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s the young mistress.”

“Is there an older mistress here as well?”

“She died last year.”

“What about the master?”

“Yes, he’s here. She’s his daughter.”

“You mean the young lady?”

“Yes.”

“Are there any other guests?”

“No one.”

“I’m the only one?”

“Yes.”

“How does the young mistress spend her days?”

“Well, she sews . . .”

“What else?”

“She plays the
shamisen.
”

This is a surprise. Intrigued, I continue. “And what else?”

“She visits the temple,” replies the maid.

This is also surprising. There’s something peculiar in this visiting temples and playing the
shamisen
.

“She goes there to pray?”

“No, she visits the priest.”

“Is the priest learning the
shamisen,
then?”

“No.”

“Well, why does she go there?”

“She visits Mr. Daitetsu.”

Ah yes, this must be the same Daitetsu who did the framed piece of calligraphy above my door. To judge from its content, he’s clearly a Zen priest. That volume of Hakuin’s sermons in the cupboard, then, must be her personal property.

“Who normally uses this room?”

“The young mistress is normally here.”

“So she would have been here until I arrived last night?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry I’ve turned her out. So what does she go to Mr. Daitetsu’s place for?”

“I don’t know.”

“What else, then?”

“Sorry?”

“What else does she do?”

“Um, various things . . .”

“What sort of things?”

“I don’t know.”

The conversation comes to a halt. I finish my meal, and the maid withdraws the tray table.

When she slides open the door to leave, suddenly there beyond, on the second-floor balcony across the shrubs of the little inner garden, I see revealed the head of that same woman, under its
ichogaeshi
curves of hair. Her cheek rests elegantly upon a raised hand, and her gaze is directed downward like the enlightened figure of the “Willow Branch” Kannon bodhisattva.
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In contrast to my earlier sight of her that morning, she now presents a deeply serene figure. Doubtless it’s because her face is lowered and her eyes do not so much as quiver in my direction that her features are transformed in this way. It used to be said that “the eye is the finest thing in the human form,”
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and certainly its incomparably vivid expressiveness will always shine through. Beneath the railing with its twisted patterning where she quietly leans, two butterflies flutter upward, now drawing together, now dancing apart.

Because my door has been opened suddenly, the woman swiftly raises her eyes from the butterflies toward my room. Her gaze pierces the air between us like a poisoned dart and falls upon my brow without a flicker of recognition or greeting. Before I can recover from my astonishment, the maid has once more clapped the door shut, leaving behind her the easy-going indifference of spring.

I settle down to sprawl on the mat once more. The following lines spring immediately to mind:

Imagine that I have fallen in love with the figure I’ve just seen, and have determined to dedicate my life itself to achieving a meeting with her, only to be smitten at that very instant by such a parting glance as this, a glance that fills my being with astonished delight or anguish. In that state I would undoubtedly have written just such sentiments in just such a poem as this. I might even have added the next two lines:

Happily, I am by now well past any susceptibility to the triteness of love and heartache, and I couldn’t become afflicted with such agonies even should I wish it. Yet these few lines are richly redolent with the poetry of the event that has just occurred. Though in fact no such painful longing binds me to the figure opposite, I find it amusing to project our relationship into the scene of this poem, and to apply the poem’s sentiments to our present situation. A thin karmic thread winds between us, linking us through something the poem holds that is true to this moment. But a karmic bond that consists of such a very tenuous thread is scarcely, after all, a burdensome matter. Nor is it any ordinary thread—it is like some rainbow arching in the sky, a mist that trails over the plain, a spider’s web glittering in the dew, a fragile thing that, though marvelously beautiful to the eye, must snap at the first touch. What if this thread were to swell before my eyes into the sturdy thickness of a rope? I wonder. But there’s no danger of this. I am an artist. And she is far from the common run of woman.

The door suddenly slides open again. I roll over to see, and there stands my karmic companion, poised on the threshold, bearing a tray that holds a green celadon bowl.

“You’re sleeping again, are you? I must have disturbed you last night. I do keep disturbing you, don’t I?” and she laughs. She shows not the least sign of shyness or concealment, let alone embarrassment. She has simply seized the initiative.

“Thank you for your help this morning,” I say again. This is the third time I’ve responded with a brief polite formula, I realize, and furthermore it has consisted each time simply of the words “thank you.”

I am about to rise, but she swiftly seats herself on the floor beside me.

“Oh, don’t get up. We can talk as you lie there,” she says airily. That’s true enough, I think, and for the time being I content myself with rolling over onto my stomach and lying chin in hands, elbows propped on the matting.

“I thought you must be bored, so I’ve made you some tea.”

“Thank you.” There are those words again.

The plate of tea sweets contains some splendid slices of the firm bean jelly known as
yokan Yokan
happens to be my very favorite tea sweet. Not that I particularly want to eat it, but that velvety, dense texture, with its semitranslucent glow, makes it a work of art by any standards. I especially enjoy the sight of
yokan
that has a slightly blue-green sheen, like a mixture of gemstones and alabaster—and this bluish
yokan
piled on the plate glistens as if it has just this moment been born from within the celadon, so that my hand almost twitches with the urge to reach out and stroke it. No Western sweet gives this degree of pleasure. The color of cream is quite soft, I grant you, but it’s rather oppressive. Jelly looks at first sight like a jewel, but it trembles and lacks the weightiness of
yokan.
And as for those tiered pagodas of white sugar and milk, they’re simply execrable.

“Mmm, that looks splendid.”

“Genbei has just brought it back from town. I imagine you’d be happy to eat something like this.”

Genbei appears to have spent the night in town. I make no reply but simply continue to gaze at the
yokan
. I have no interest in who has brought it or from where—I’m more than happy simply to be registering a beautiful thing as beautiful.

“This celadon plate has a very fine shape. A wonderful color too. It’s scarcely inferior to the
yokan
,” I remark.

She titters, and a faint, contemptuous smirk plays for a moment on her lips. She must have interpreted my words as intended to be clever. Considered thus, my remark does indeed deserve to be despised—it’s exactly the kind of thing a stupid man will come out with in a misguided attempt to sound sophisticated.

“Is it Chinese?”

“What?” She isn’t aware of the plate at all.

“It certainly looks like it to me,” I say, lifting the plate to examine the inscription on its base.

“If you like this sort of thing, I can show you more.”

“Yes, please do.”

“My father loves antiques, so there are a lot of such things here. I’ll tell him you’re interested, and you can have tea together sometime so he can show you.”

I shrink a little at the mention of tea. No one is more tediously pompous than a tea ceremony master, who will fancy himself the quintessence of elegant refinement. Your typical tea master is deeply conceited, not to mention affected and fastidious to a fault. He ostentatiously clings to the cramped little territory he’s marked out for himself within the wide world of sensibility, savoring his bowl of foam and bubbles with a quite ridiculous reverence. If that abominably complex set of rules and regulations that makes up the tea ceremony contains any refinement, then a crack army corps must positively reek of elegant sophistication! All those “right about turn! quick march!” fellows must to a man be the equivalent of the great tea masters. The art of the tea ceremony is something that the common merchant and townsman, lacking any education in the finer matters of taste, dreamed up through their ignorance of how refinement really works, by mindlessly swallowing whole and in mechanical fashion the rules that were invented after Rikyu’s day.
⁷
Their pitiful conviction that it constitutes the height of refinement only makes a mockery of true sensibility.

“When you say tea, you mean the ceremonial sort?”

“No, there’s no ceremony about it at all. It’s the kind of tea you don’t have to drink if you don’t want to.”

“Well then, I’d be more than happy to have a cup while I’m there.”

She titters again. “My father loves to have someone to show his collection to. . . .”

“Does that mean I have to praise his things?”

“He’s an old man, so he’d be thrilled if you did.”

“All right, I’ll give them a bit of praise, then.”

“Oh, come on, why not make it a discount and praise them lots?”

It’s my turn to laugh. “By the way,” I remark, “you don’t use the language of a country girl, do you?”

“You mean, even though I have the character of one?”

“As to character, country people are better than city folk.”

“Well then, I’ve got the upper hand there.”

“But you must have spent time in Tokyo, surely?”

“Yes, and in Kyoto too. I’m a wanderer, so I’ve been all over the place.”

“Which do you prefer, this village or Tokyo?”

“There’s no difference.”

“Doesn’t life feel easier in a quiet place like this?”

“Easy, difficult—you can make it whatever you want, depending on your state of mind. There’s no point in moving to the land of mosquitoes because you’re sick of the land of fleas.”

“You could go to a land of neither fleas nor mosquitoes.”

“If you know such a place, go ahead and show me. Go on,” she persists, leaning closer, “show me!”

“I’ll show you if you want,” I say, picking up my sketchbook, and I draw—not a picture, since it’s done quite on impulse—just a hasty sketch of a woman on horseback looking at a mountain cherry tree. “Here,” I say, thrusting it under her nose, “come inside this world. There are no fleas or mosquitoes here.” Will she register surprise? Embarrassment? I watch her, certain that she won’t be upset.