Maiden Voyages (66 page)

“Bad weather,” grumbles Nagata-san in local slang. Though she can understand my standard Japanese, she speaks the rough, uneven Kagoshima ben. Young people don’t learn the dialect, saying that they don’t want to sound like hicks, but it is still the common speech of village elders. And although Kobe-born Reiko won’t have it spoken in the house, in the workshop Nagayoshi-san talks on the phone to his mother and brother in nearby Sendai, to friends and even to me in the thick dialect. I speak it sometimes. I like the way the sounds roll off the tongue, rising and falling in lazy circles. “
Jiyashtonah
,” I answer, Kagoshima slang for “I see,” and keep on walking. The rain is worrying. If the rice gets wet it may rot on the stalk. We must finish harvesting her three fields today.

Across from the Aiko food store, the small valley of terraced rice paddies spreads out in a mosaic of green and brown where harvested and unharvested fields meet. Nagata-san pushes the teetering wheelbarrow off the main road and down a narrow grass pathway twisting like a brown snake down the slope. Late-maturing fields still wave wet and green. But most paddies, drained of water and shaved of rice, extend in neat rows of brown stubble. Harvested rice, bound in broom-shaped bundles, hangs chest-high over long bamboo poles suspended by props at each end. Each harvested field is full of identical racks of drying rice, bridging the fields in straight lines.

Though most farmers in Miyama use machines to till, plant and thresh, Nagata-san avoids them. “
Kikai?
Machines? They’re terrible,”
she says. “They tear up the mud, and lose the grain in harvest. No, by hand is much better!” One hundred years ago swaybacked oxen lumbered through the thick mud during planting and harvest. But today the only bovines in Miyama are a herd of white-and-black Holsteins in the small dairy farm on the hill. Some Miyama farmers now use machinery to plant and thresh, but many small farmers like Nagata-san, who plants only three small fields, barter help with friends instead. During the summer she will work alone, weeding, managing the water, and spraying the fields for rice stalk borers, paddy-borers, plant hoppers and rice blight, which, if unattended, would smother the heads of grain in a deadly white film.

We head across the valley where two bent figures make steady progress across the field of waving yellow. Where they pass, the yellow-green rice falls. The rhythmic swishing of sickles cutting through straw grows louder as we approach. Even under the gray sky the arching blades glint silver. I recognize the pair as Takara-san and Nagai-san, the two old women who had helped in the June rice planting.

Ohayō. Ohayō. Ohayō
.

We exchange morning greetings. Nagata-san motions for me to join the other women. Sickle in hand, I step down onto the firm mud of the drained paddy. The soil smells rank and sour, a combination of musty old hay and ripe sulfur—Nagata-san’s source of fertilizer is her outhouse. I stand still for a minute, pretending to adjust my gloves while my stomach turns. Dark-eyed Takara-san, the youngest of the three and the most talkative, works toward where I stand. Her upturned face catches my gaze and she flashes a set of gold-filled teeth.

“Well, you’re back. Didn’t you go back to America to see your parents?” she says quickly. “Did you see Brooke Shields? Did you bring me some Sunkist oranges?”

“Oh, I’ve been back two weeks now, but my family grows apples, not oranges. Where they live is about as cold as Sapporo.”

“I see,” answers Takara-san, still smiling. “Well, I’ve never had an American apple.”

I quickly change the subject. I had been in the States for two weeks. Returning with
omiyage
, travel souvenirs, was a mandatory gesture. For Eri, who was interested in fashion and design, I had brought copies of
Vogue
. For Keisuke, studying photography in Tokyo, I had found a book on Ansel Adams. To my teacher I gave a thick art book about the Mimbres Indian pottery of the Southwest, and for Reiko I had purchased an entire deerhide. Half of my luggage had consisted of boxes of maple sugar candy, soaps, university pins, decals, T-shirts and stationery, New York City mementos, postcards of Niagara Falls and assorted towels and key rings. Even so, the presents ran out. “Just don’t tell anyone you ever left,” Reiko said firmly. But within days everyone in the village knew that the yellow-haired apprentice had gone on a trip.

I step out onto the rice paddy, following Takara-san and doing my best to imitate her swinging movements.

“That’s not too bad. Not even young Japanese girls these days know how to harvest rice,” shouts Takara-san. “Why don’t you find a nice Japanese man and settle down here!” She laughs, glancing at me from the corner of her eye as she works. I grunt a noncommittal reply, too busy trying to manage the swinging sickle to converse.

“Yes, what about
omiai?
” a quiet voice pipes up on my right. “It’s about time for you to get married, anyway.” Working her way up next to me, Nagai-san is not going to miss out on the fun.

“Me, an okusan?
Muri gowandonah
—impossible,” I banter back. “I can’t make miso soup, and I’m hopeless at tea ceremony. And anyhow, I’m not looking for a husband—I’m too busy.”

Nagai-san giggles softly, her long face hidden by her wide sunbonnet. But Takara-san laughs so hard she misses a swing and her sickle gets stuck in the mud. Across the field Nagata-san, busy setting up props and cross poles to hang the rice, hears the laughter and turns with a dark face. “Hurry up, and stop joking around,” she scolds. “It’s going to rain.”

The cutters progress in an even horizontal line across the field, felling several clumps of rice with each sweep of their curved blades. I fall into line with Takara-san, working toward her so that when we meet we finish a row and then move on. Underfoot, the rice paddy feels as slippery as a fresh cow pie. Beneath the dark mud lie streaks of clay and russet iron-rich sand dug for centuries by Miyama potters as the crucial ingredient in the deep black glaze for kuromon. Cutting the straw off evenly to leave a clean two-inch stub is a craft requiring skill,
not power. I hack at a clump of rice in frustration. The straw bends like flax, scattering rice grains in the mud. I stoop to pick them up and Takara-san catches sight of me. She comes over and demonstrates how to hook a straw clump with the blade’s sharp side and pull upward with a quick tug. A hearty ripping sound, and fallen straw lies flat and even behind her. I try again, and this time, my blade hooks neatly over the base, then cuts through the straw with a loud rip.

Soon three or four rows of straw lie behind us. Takara-san motions me to follow her to the head of the field.

“Well, that’s not bad. But two people cutting are enough. Follow behind us now and tie the bundles,” she says.

I nod and follow. Already my arms ache from the constant swinging. Taking up a thick armful of scratchy straw, she binds it with three or four strands from the sides. She works quickly, placing a bundle between her knees and twisting the straw deftly despite her thick cotton work gloves.

As a child I loved to braid onion tops, bending and plaiting the rough stems until the whole pile of freshly pulled bulbs hung like a clump of ghostly grapes. This should be easy. I hold up my first effort to have a look: strands of straw stick out from the sides, the whole bundle threatens to collapse. Hung on a pole to dry, this clump would soon be blown across the village. I untie the loose ends, now limp and tangled as wet hair, and start again.

“Pretty bad, huh.”

“Watch again,” she says, and shows me how to tie the bundle tight, without knocking off grain or breaking the straw.

Imitating her quick movements, I hold the rough rice straw tightly between my own knees and reach around the outside for the straw binders. Tied together, they form a compact sheaf.

“I guess that will do. You’re not bad—better than my daughter,” jokes Takara-san, pushing back her bonnet. “She’s hopeless—won’t even come out here!”

“Why not?”

“Her job is studying!” answers Takara-san proudly. Like most children and young people in Miyama, Takara-san’s teenage daughter doesn’t help in the rice fields or even much at home. Overweight and suffering
from acne, she looks as if a day in the sun would go her good. Like Western teenagers, she has a penchant for junk food, especially Coca-Cola and chocolate. The only time I have seen her outside is when she heads off in her blue knee-length uniform to the local high school in Ijuin. For the past month Takara-san has been working an extra night job in order to buy her a red motor scooter so that she won’t have to ride the bus to school.

Around where we work many of the tambo lie fallow; the owners are too busy at jobs in Kagoshima City or nearby towns, or like American wheat farmers, they receive government subsidies not to plant. After one or two weeks of good weather, when the husks and straw are thoroughly dried, Nagata-san will send the rice to a thresher in the next town. Last week I’d seen Suzuki-san sit down in his formal garden before a manual wooden thresher. All morning clouds of dust and a loud clatter came over the hedge. By noon, when Nagayoshi-san and I went to have a look, straw was piled up in the yard next to a heap of ivory rice. Suzuki-san’s khaki clothes were white with rice chaff and dust.

Rice straw has been used in Miyama for generations to thatch roofs, insulate walls, fill futons, make tatami and rope, and provide ash for pottery glaze. Inside the roaring kiln the ash melts, fusing with the clay and leaving a shiny silicate surface on the pottery. The first Korean potters in Miyama in the early seventeenth century knew to mix small amounts of wood ash with water and crushed iron-rich rock containing traces of feldspar to make the black glaze for kuromon. Later, potters began mixing wood ash, water and finely ground white clay from Kaseda to make a clear glaze for shiromon. Still later, the potters began to use rice straw ash, which opacifies the glaze and creates a distinct bluish-white finish.

Every fall Nagayoshi-san waits like a farmer for the rice to mature. When the rice is shorn, he returns to his mother’s fields and burns great bonfires of straw. The fire rises up orange against the sky, reaching for oxygen to consume the piles of dry stalks. When all that is left is a cool black mound, he gathers it up in bags for the year’s supply of glaze.

(1831-1904)

From
A LADY
’
S LIFE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS

Cheyenne, Wyoming
, December 12

The last evening came. I did not wish to realise it, as I looked at the snow-peaks glistening in the moonlight. No woman will be seen in the Park till next May. Young Lyman talked in a “hifalutin” style, but with some truth in it, of the influence of a woman’s presence, how “low, mean, vulgar talk” had died out on my return, how they had “all pulled themselves up,” and how Mr. Kavan and Mr. Buchan had said they would like always to be as quiet and gentlemanly as when a lady was with them. “By May,” he said, “we shall be little better than brutes, in our manners at least.” I have seen a great deal of the roughest class of men both on sea and land during the last two years, and the more important I think the “mission” of every quiet, refined, self-respecting woman—the more mistaken I think those who would forfeit it by noisy self-assertion, masculinity, or fastness. In all this wild West the influence of woman is second only in its benefits to the influence of religion, and
where the last unhappily does not exist the first continually exerts its restraining power. The last morning came. I cleaned up my room and sat at the window watching the red and gold of one of the most glorious of winter sunrises, and the slow lighting-up of one peak after another. I have written that this scenery is not lovable, but I love it.

I left on Birdie at 11 o’clock, Evans riding with me as far as Mr. Nugent’s. He was telling me so many things, that at the top of the hill I forgot to turn round and take a last look at my colossal, resplendent, lonely, sunlit den, but it was needless, for I carry it away with me. I should not have been able to leave if Mr. Nugent had not offered his services. His chivalry to women is so well known, that Evans said I could be safer and better cared for with no one. He added, “His heart is good and kind, as kind a heart as ever beat. He’s a great enemy of his own, but he’s been living pretty quietly for the last four years.” At the door of his den I took leave of Birdie, who had been my faithful companion for more than 700 miles of travelling, and of Evans, who had been uniformly kind to me and just in all his dealings, even to paying to me at that moment the very last dollar he owes me. May God bless him and his! He was obliged to return before I could get off, and as he commended me to Mr. Nugent’s care, the two men shook hands kindly.
^*