Seiobo There Below (43 page)

Oota was the name of the gulf where such vessels, carrying the exiled, traditionally moored; namely that here they had to lower the anchor, at the gulf of Oota, where, in accordance with the command, they had to disembark onto Sado Island, and disembark here they did; day was already turning to night, and after the exhaustion of the trip, lasting at least a full week, though this full week seemed much longer to him, more like a week of eternity extending into some kind of timelessness; they did not remain on deck, of course, but embarked onto the shore, following the stipulation only to travel by day, and spent the first evening, in view of the narrow range of possibilities, in a small fisherman’s hut; no sleep came to him that night, the journey had worn him down, his every limb was aching, in addition underneath his head was a piece of stone but even this did not capture his attention as they lay down in the kitchen to rest, but rather he thought of his children, his wife, and his beloved son-in-law Komparu Zenchiku, to whom he had entrusted those he loved; later on there drifted in among his thoughts a few lines from a poem by Ariwara Motokata, from the Kokinshu, about how autumn was approaching, and whether the mountain, with its shape like a rain-hat, would protect the maple trees from the ravages of the weather, or something to that effect; it was strange that exactly this mountain, Kasatori, shaped like a rain-hat, Kasatori of Yamashiro came into his mind from that poem, this Kasatori emerging from utter nothingness; he could not connect it to anything; as to why, he could not explain it in any terms, as to what caused precisely this verse to emerge in his memories in the depths of night — Kasatori, he tasted the word in his mouth, and he called forth in his mind the form of the mountain, recalled the wondrous colors of the maples of the land plunged into autumn, Kasatori, Kasatori, then suddenly the entire thing fell away from his brain; he looked at the unknown, cold, simple objects in the hut’s gloomy dark; he adjusted the position of his head on the stone, turning now to the left and now to the right, but it wasn’t good anywhere on the stone, which was his head-rest for this night, and although dawn broke with difficulty, with great difficulty, in the end he couldn’t even have said that he was too exhausted as he awaited this dawn, at his age one usually spent one’s time just like that, in a great waiting, even in Kyōto it was almost always like this, long hours in the silence after a brief sleep, a Kyōto dawn — Kyōto, a sacred, immortal, eternally radiant Buddha, it was all so far away already, as if it had been obliterated from reality once and for all, to exist from now on only within himself, oh Kyōto, he sighed, stepping outside through the door of the hut, sniffing the biting sea air, Kyōto, how horrendously far away you are already — but then he was helped onto one of the horses stationed here, as instructed by the Shinpo, and the procession began to head upward along a mountain path, his imagination was already taking him back to an autumnal dawn of long, long ago, not only did he see the unparalleled strength of its crimson, but he even sensed in the depth of the maple trees that unmistakable scent that made him so giddy at such times, for example, an autumn in Ariwara, on the mountain-side celebrated in song; they struggled upward along the path, he searched for the maple trees, but here they were not to be seen anywhere, the journey was wearing the horses down, the tiny path was serpentine and it was steep; the guide who had been entrusted to lead him on horseback slipped at times in his hemp-woven sandals — the worn-down waraji — on the stony ground, and at such times the reins grabbed him, rather than him grabbing the reins, it went on for a long time like this, and why deny it, he could hardly bear it, he couldn’t even name the year when he had last been seated atop a horse, and now on this dangerous ground; their one bit of luck was that it wasn’t raining, he determined, and in vain did he try to discover a beautiful glade in the forest along the path, or catch the song of a nightingale or a bulbul, continually he was forced to concentrate on not falling off the horse, on not sliding down from the saddle during a perilous washed-out stretch, he had no strength left for anything else, so that when they finally reached the Kasakari Pass and he addressed the peasant leading his horse saying, is this not Kasatori? — No, the peasant shook his head, but then there is something here in common with that word; the convicted man pressed him further, with the Kasatori in Yamashiro, no there isn’t, the peasant replied in confusion, this is Kasakari, so nothing, the rider pondered, and was he completely certain of this? he asked, but did not even wait for a reply, almost simultaneously with his question he conveyed that the journey had worn him out a bit, and he requested a stop to rest, just a brief rest, which did him well, too, and they spent just one half-hour underneath the thick foliage of a wild mulberry tree, yet his strength returned, he spoke saying they could now go on, he was helped again onto the horse, the procession started again, and they quickly reached the Hasedera Temple, which as he knew from the peasant, belonged to the Shingon sect, but to whom else would it belong; he would have smiled to himself if this name hadn’t evoked in him the memory from home of the Hasadera in Nara, which, however, was so painful that he said nothing to the peasant, only nodded, it’s well that it belongs to the Shingon sect, and although magnificent flowers suddenly came into view by the side of the temple — from where he was it seemed for a moment that they could have been well-tended azaleas — he didn’t call out to stop the horse, because he didn’t want to, he didn’t want a memory from Nara to torment him anymore, because right then he would have been tormented further by his daughter’s dear face and his son-in-law’s dear face and the picture of Fugan-ji, their family temple, the memory of an important prayer uttered there would have tormented him; well, better to be tormented by the journey, then, let us go on, he motioned, but the peasant, misunderstanding him or believing an account would bring joy to the venerable gentleman from Kyōto, spoke to him as they went along, and so the peasant was continually pointing backward toward Hasadera, where there, before the main altar, was a statue of the Eleven-Headed Kannon, but the gentleman from Kyōto didn’t say anything, so the peasant did not even begin to enumerate in detail what this famous Kannon in the Hasadera even was; he just trudged upward along the pass, grasping the horse’s reins, and he didn’t even dare to speak until they reached Shinpo, when night was already falling, and thus the district regent, insisting fully on the strictest of formalities, had already designated for the exiled man a place in a nearby temple, the Manpuku-ji, which could not convey to Ze’ami anything of itself on that day, as Ze’ami was so exhausted that they had him lie down on the spot prepared for him, he had already closed his eyes, lying on his back as always, he adjusted the blanket and immediately fell into a deep sleep, and slept for nearly four hours straight, so that the temple displayed itself to him, not then, but only the next day, only then did the convicted man from Kyōto see what kind of a place he had ended up in, he pushed back his blanket, pulled on his robe, and went out into the temple garden, which later on, until he changed his residence, was to give him so much joy, particularly one pine tree which he discovered at the edge of a high cliff, and which grew out and clung to this cliff as if it were holding tight to it, and this sight was often heart-wrenching for him, and at such times, so not to be overcome again by profound emotion, in the face of which he proved, during this period, to be so weak, he listened to the mountain winds as they caressed the foliage in the trees, or in the shadow of a tree he watched water trickling down the tiny veins of a moss-patch, he watched and he listened, he asked nothing of anyone, and no one asked anything of him, the silence within him became immutable and this silence around him became irrevocable too; he looked at the water in the little rivulets in the moss, he listened to the murmuring of the mountain winds up above, and from every quarter he was inundated with memories, no matter where he looked, an ancient recollection, dim and distant, fell upon the image or the sound, and he began to pass the days in such a way that he no longer could sense that one morning had come and then the next, because the first morning was exactly the same as the one that followed it, so that he began to feel that not only were they coming one after the other, but that all told, there was just one single day — one single morning and one single evening — he stepped out of time and returned to it only occasionally, and even then just temporarily, and on these occasions it was as if he were seeing the Manpuku-ji from a great height, or the Golden Hall in the middle of the garden, with the Yakushi Buddha inside it on the main altar, all from a great height, from the height of a slowly circling hawk; well at such times it occasionally happened that he came back for a little while and, sitting underneath a beautiful cypress tree in the moss garden, he said aloud to himself: so, this is my grave, that of the blameless, this is my grave, here, this temporary residence in the Manpuku-ji, then he sank back into that particular inner silence, and this was not looked upon favorably in the office of the Regent of Shinpo, he should be doing something, he was advised one time when he, the District Regent, came himself to pay a visit, whereupon Ze’ami, in order to stave off any further exhortations of this kind, asked for a piece of hinoki cypress wood and tools, and he set about to carve a so-called o-beshimi rain-making mask, which was not in use in the Noh, as might have been expected, but in the bugaku, the renowned worship-dance: he worked out the forehead and the eyebrows in a completely detailed fashion, and the eyes and the ridge of the nose delicately and movingly, but then he didn’t have enough attention for the rest: the ridge of the nose, the ear, the mouth, and the chin, remained in a crude state, as if in the course of things he had lost interest, or as if his thoughts had continuously wandered off somewhere between the ridge and the lower edge of the nose, and moreover he worked slowly, in contradiction to his nature, which was quick; he created this mask with many slow movements, and now he chose the appropriate, the precisely necessary chisel with great meticulousness, even with too much care, then he dug into the soft material with the chisel, so cautiously, so dilatorily, that anyone who knew him could well believe that he was working upon a truly extraordinary task, but here, of course, no one knew him, there was no question of any sort of extraordinary task, as among the higher-ranking officials no one was even that interested in what he was doing, just as long as he was doing something, the important thing was his person, and that he not be idle, and hence not die before his time, which for the higher-ranking officials and even the Regent himself would have meant only unpleasant questions and answers difficult to formulate, risks and obligations, so that, well, not even a flea was curious about this mask, they simply became aware of the news with acquiescence in the Shinpo Regent’s office and in its environs, that the tiny exiled old man was not just sitting around in the garden and idling away the entire day, as they expressed it, but was working on something, he is carving a mask, they repeated to each other, which then quickly spread among the general population of Sado, because the news was spread, not so much among the higher-ranking officials, but rather the lower-ranking ones, so that altogether 208 years after the death of the great emperor, and 154 years after the death of the founder of the faith, if we do not take the poet-minister into account, the residents of the island noted among themselves that the next famous exile from Kyōto is already here — but he wanted to move his residence to Shoho-ji, he nonetheless informed the Regent, in the future, he felt, the Shoho-ji temple would be a better place for him, assuming this would not represent any kind of bother for His Excellency the Regent, the old man said one day in his faint voice; the Shoho-ji, the Regent started back in astonishment, and he really could not conceal how shaken he was by the request from the condemned man from Kyōto, it wasn’t as if it would have made any kind of difference whether he was living in the Manpuku-ji or the Shoho-ji, that itself caused no problem whatsoever, but rather that — the Regent stammered in nervousness among his retinue — well, why is the Shoho-ji better, and why isn’t the Manpuku-ji good, and the people in the retinue looked at each other and they were perplexed, because they said, it didn’t mean anything if it were now the first or the second, but why the first and why the second, that was the question, and this question had to have an answer, they nodded enthusiastically, but then Ze’ami received permission and he changed residence, and no one ever asked him again why the first and why not the second, it was so inconsequential, it’s just that the question was not inconsequential and somehow — no one remembers how it happened — the problem sorted itself out, the Regent issued a command that the man exiled by Shogun Yoshinori should be transferred from Manpuku-ji to Shoho-ji, inasmuch as, the Regent wrote in the necessary documentation, inasmuch as this would not cause a burden to the venerable gentleman, and so in this way the Shoho-ji forthwith became the residence of Ze’ami, he took with himself the mask he was working on, and at times he still worked on it, but he never got beyond the ridge of the nose, he found an enormous boulder and attributed some kind of enormous significance to it, because from that point on, every day if it wasn’t raining, he went out to his cliff — there was no way of telling what he was doing there, the people covered all the possibilities: he was reciting poetry, singing, mumbling prayers, but in reality no one ever really knew, because no one ever dared to approach him, he could never make himself understood if some infrequent conversation might come about from time to time, he couldn’t even get them to stop calling him Your Honor, Venerable Sir, in vain did he tell them he was just an ordinary monk named Shio Zempoo, the Your Honors and Venerable Sirs remained, but it was also
true that they really didn’t dare approach him, not because he was frightening, he wasn’t frightening in the least, rather he was just a small, emaciated, frail, gentle creation, his hands trembling, ready to be blown away by the first large gust of wind; the only problem was that he was so different, they simply didn’t know how to approach him, his world and theirs were so far away from each other, like the stars in the heavens from a clump of earth in the ground, his movements seemed so peculiar here, he raised his trembling hand in such a different way, and the way he held his fingers was different too, his eyes as he slowly looked at someone were as if he were looking through this someone, as if he were seeing their great-great-grandfather through them, and they found it odd that his face, despite his advanced age, was like a young boy’s, and moreover that of a very beautiful boy; the smooth, white skin, the high smooth forehead, the narrow tapering nose, the finely chiseled chin, they were confused if they had to look at him, because he was beautiful, very beautiful, and no one had any explanation for this, here in Sado, where everyone, including the Regent himself, was cut as if from the same cloth, everyone’s face with the same dark-brown skin, and this skin pockmarked from the eternally blowing winds, and the women from higher-ranking families hardly dressed any better than the women from lower-ranking families, boats rarely arrived, and it was even rarer for something to arrive on these boats that these women could have used to smarten themselves up: the exile was truly, in a word, the envoy of a distant realm, and sometimes he alarmed the local gentry and their subordinates by speaking fluently in verse, if he felt so inclined, and he mixed up his words, it was impossible to tell if he was speaking of a dream from yesterday or a memory from twenty years ago; one thing was certain, he never spoke of what was here on Sado, or he always changed the topic, talking about things that had happened twenty or thirty years ago, or he gave an evasive reply, saying when they asked if everything was to his liking that, yes, it was to his liking, they were in fact heaping too much on him, he didn’t need so much food, during the day he ate just once, in the morning, and very little, a little cooked vegetables, fish, beans, that kind of thing, he was satisfied with everything, he never once complained about his circumstances, he nodded at everything in approval, he praised the people who brought him things and who served him, he seemed tranquil and peaceful, or impassive, it was only when he was near his boulder that he cried, sometimes they saw it, the group of children among the servants gave an account of it, they dared to come near him and they spied on him, and the most simple and most high-ranking residents of the island did not even say anything upon hearing this news, this at least they could understand, he’s thinking of home, they said to each other and they nodded, as those who are fully able to comprehend, they understood the matter very well, and no explanation at all was necessary as to who this man was and what he was feeling; nevertheless it was precisely the case that they understood nothing, absolutely nothing of the matter, in this entire god-given world, because of course how would they have been able to understand, how could they have even suspected that precisely on this occasion, not only did they not understand — this was in the end to be expected here on Sado, in this godforsaken place — no — but not a single person in the entire world existed who could have truly understood him, neither in Kyōto nor in Kamakura, neither in the Emperor’s Palace nor in the Muromachi Dendoo, nobody, nothing, never and not even in the slightest possible degree, not even the infinitely cultivated advisor to the Shogun, Nijo Yoshimoto, and not even Ashikaga Yoshimitsu himself, that Ze’ami was not one of many, not just a sarugaku performer whose star had risen and then set, no, altogether no, he had created the Noh, he had called into being and determined a new form of existence: he had not created a theater because the Noh is not theater, but a higher if not the very highest form of existence, when an individual, by dint of a cultivated sensibility, unique intuition, and genial introspection, the competence of a profound engagement with a tradition of the highest order, creates revolutionary forms, never before experienced, and in doing so elevates all human existence, elevates the whole, to a very high level; and now this situation, this death sentence: because human existence holds its own needs at a very low level, they have always been held at a very low level and will be held at a very low level for all eternity, for the human being simply has no need for anything save a full stomach and a full coin-box, he wants to be an animal, and there is no strength that could convince him otherwise or recommend anything else, and so cunning is the human being that he instinctively senses when something or someone wants to dislodge him from that place where the stomach and the coin-box are the only things that matter; don’t need it, he replies to the higher challenges, you can take your advice and shove it up your filthy ass, if he has to put it crudely, and at such times he does put it crudely, whether he is a nobleman or a commoner, it’s all one and the same, let them strut and mince about, give themselves airs at any time and for any reason, but he still won’t get up from the dinner-table and no one will be able to pry him away from the wonders of the coin-box, if the stomach and the coin-box are full then he has no need for anything else, leave him alone already, moreover he wouldn’t understand, even if he had good intentions, he still would never be able to understand that which is great, that which surpasses him to such a degree that he hasn’t the slightest hope of comprehension, and so, not even reverence, so that Ze’ami had to go, thought Ze’ami sitting on the boulder, and anyone could have executed him, he reflected, rolling a little pebble here and there with his foot; then one day he asked a servant for permission to go for walks on the island, special permission is not required, came the answer, in conformity with the Regent’s order that he could go wherever he wished on the island, so he set off immediately, because the weather was good, and he sought out Kuroki Gosho Ato, the location of the exiled great Emperor; he bowed his head before the memory of his predecessor, he placed flowers by the first column, on the right-hand side of the entrance to the remains of the building; then another day the sun was shining nicely again, not too warmly, but the light was filtering down just so, the birds were particularly lively, he went on horseback with his escort to the Hachiman shrine, where Kyogoku Tamekane, the great poet and minister, had lived during his exile, and although he venerated him and held Tamekane’s work to be truly great, at the same time he had grown very curious upon hearing the legend that circulated among the residents of the island, according to which the hototogisu, the cuckoo that could be heard everywhere, was here, and only here, silent, he did not wish to hear the legend again, although in his retinue there were many who, upon reaching this location, immediately wanted to relate it again, so that he allowed some of them to do so, but it was not the story that he wanted to hear, but