Looking for the Lost, page 21
The rain stopped at five o’clock but the maggots were still there when I finally got up. So twice in the space of a couple of hours I was glad that rural Japanese-style lavatories, which have no flush and normally no drainage, did not require my bum to come in contact with the porcelain. Hygienic-minded people have praised the arrangement on this account, though I can think of several drawbacks: the smell for one, and the pains and cramps that an unsupported squat must inflict on the elderly, the ill, the crippled, or the heavily pregnant. And here were a few dozen more little drawbacks, doing orange congas round the inside of the bowl.
What the girl had failed to tell me was that the men all went to work at half past six, and it was after seven by the time I dragged myself down the stairs and limped across the yard to breakfast. Would her mother know the old roads? No, she wouldn’t have the faintest notion and anyway she had gone into Nobeoka on the early bus. Well, hadn’t the girl played along them herself or gone up them looking for streaked bamboo? No, she hadn’t. That is to say, she had. But she had no idea that any of the tracks (tracks they were really; you couldn’t call them roads) went all the way to Shishigawa. She had never heard of anyone walking there from here. There were plenty of old tracks through the hills; loggers’ tracks, hunters’ tracks, foragers’ tracks, charcoal burners’ tracks. But so far as she knew, they all went up into the trees somewhere and stopped. The best plan she could think of was for me to sit here and wait until midday, when one or two of the men would be in for lunch. But if I did that, I pointed out, there would be no time left for me to make use of what they told me. That was true, she admitted brightly, and gave me a bowl of seaweed soup.
Eventually, I got her to telephone an acquaintance in Lower Hori who was supposed to know the tracks (it turned out to be the old man at the booze shop), and who offered me once again this recommendation: Don’t go anywhere near them. They’ll be totally overgrown in summer. The one you’re looking for hasn’t been used for at least a quarter of a century. And, what’s more, all of those old mountain paths are alive with…
“…wasps and adders.”
At nine o’clock, ignoring everyone’s advice, I went in search of Saigo’s vanished track. I knew (it is recorded in local history books) that Saigo had spent the night of the 19th, as I had, in Upper Hori and that he had stayed at the home of a Mr. Ono Kumayoshi, the whereabouts of which had been as unfamiliar to the girl as were the tracks that were supposed to start outside her shop. As the crow flies, Upper Shishigawa, which Saigo had reached by the evening of the 20th, is not much more than nine kilometers away. The largest-scale map I had with me showed a faint dotted line connecting Upper Hori with Upper Shishigawa along the crest of a range of hills and over a peak 1,103 meters high. The dotted line was even labeled at this point “The Shishigawa Pass,” and the map had been published only nine months before, so I had no reason not to trust it.
The last person I consulted before leaving the little hamlet was a red, lumpy-faced old woman, who pointed airily in several directions. The map showed four different dotted lines fanning out from Upper Hori.
“Which is the path to Shishigawa?” I asked her.
“That one,” she said, indicating all of them, one after the other.
“And is it possible to walk there?”
“No, not at all.”
I decided that the most promising-looking path was the one that followed the heavy-duty plastic pipe which brought the hamlet’s water supply down from the hills. This black pipe ran sometimes beside my feet and sometimes high in the branches of the trees, jerking and sighing like an injured animal whenever an unseen tap fed off its contents. But it wasn’t long before my woodland track had merged with a loose-surfaced motor road of which my nine-month-old map showed no sign at all. I followed the motor road for forty minutes, as it curved and twisted round the sides of the hills instead of going straight up and down them as the old tracks had. Then it forked, one branch plunging steeply down and the other climbing steadily up. It was impossible to take a compass bearing on a road that twined and wound like this, since on average it doubled back on itself about twice every quarter of an hour. I took the upper fork and tramped on for another fifty minutes, until the road ended in a logged glade where two women in track suits and headscarves and black splay-toed rubber boots sat boiling a charred kettle over a log fire and eating tomatoes.
“No, this is not the road you want,” one of them said. “And looking for it will be a waste of time. Once they’ve built a motor road like this, you can’t even see where the old ones stopped and started.”
“Mind you, there’s no point in talking to us,” said the other one. “We don’t know anything; we’re only women. If you want to know about roads, you see, you’ve got to ask the men.”
“Aren’t you a foreign person?” the first woman asked shyly, after I’d been standing chatting to them for about five minutes.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I am,” I said.
“Mmm,” said the other woman, and she gave me a mug of iced sugar water and a slab of crumbly cake. They were waiting for their husbands, they explained, who were away in the forest sawing up trees. If I wanted to sit with them I was welcome. The men would be back before evening, and they could give me a lift down from the hills in their truck.
Thanking the women for their cake, I trudged off back in the direction of Upper Hori.
By midday I was sitting in the restaurant drinking a draft Kirin and watching the schoolgirl hum busily to herself as she grilled me a trout. What was I going to do now, she wanted to know. I was going to drink two more draft beers, I told her, and eat another trout, and then I was going to put my boots on again and walk the thirty kilometers back to Nobeoka.
“Oh, yes?” she said, and gave me a lovely smile; the sort that psychiatric nurses reserve for the incurable.
“Take care of yourself,” she chirped to me as I trudged away down the only route by which her shop now appeared to communicate with the rest of the world, the same paved, unshaded road up which I had trudged the previous day. I passed the well-stocked booze shop, cursed, muttered, sighed, swam, narrowly avoided treading on a three-foot-long snake, refused a lift in a loggers’ van, passed the workmen sprawled out snoozing in exactly the same positions in which they had been sprawled out snoozing the day before, and the two grey uniformed security guards with helmets and walkie-talkie radios who were posted at either end of the road works to protect the snoozing workmen from nonexistent traffic. I met two junior high school girls who bowed to me and said O-kaeri nasai (the greeting which schoolchildren are taught to use when they meet their elders in this part of the countryside, and which, roughly translated, means “Welcome back”) and two junior high school boys who giggled and yelled Gaijin! I drank one beer sitting at a plastic-covered table at the little grocer’s shop in the hamlet of Myomachi, smelled the ripening rice till my mouth started watering, passed birds fishing in the silvery river and a man exercising his slavering dogs by making them run on leashes behind his scooter. By dusk, I was lurching once again through the narrow streets around the rayon factory. I had walked ninety-five kilometers in three days and arrived back precisely where I’d started.
I went out to a restaurant late that evening and was so weary that I stumbled against a pile of crates outside the restaurant’s entrance and knocked a dozen empty shochu bottles into the street. At the table I dropped my rice bowl into the tempura sauce and the waitress who came to mop up the mess gave me a look that she had obviously been practicing in a mirror and that she saved up for difficult drunks. The arcade loudspeakers were still broadcasting Paul Anka songs and, in the coffee shop where I fell asleep over a cup of Kilimanjaro, the Percy Faith Orchestra was playing “Some Enchanted Evening.” I would have no choice the next morning but to head directly for the town of Takachiho, fifty-five kilometers straight up National Highway 218 according to the road signs. Saigo had reached Takachiho by August 21st and, if I forgot about the old tracks and stuck to the busy highway, I reckoned that I could rejoin his route by the morning of the 23rd. Then the blisters on the balls of my feet and the smaller ones on the joints of my toes began arguing a case for the 24th. And my calves and thighs and ankles and knees chimed in to propose the 25th. What the hell, I shrugged as I stood up to leave the coffee shop, clinging briefly to a potted palm tree. Saigo was fifty-eight hours ahead of me and my legs had decided he could stay there.
2
The Highway of Myth and Legend
The lesson I had learnt about the old roads in these three frustrating days would stand me in good stead for the rest of my journey. Though the old roads appeared on my map as dotted lines, though the very elderly sometimes remembered them, and though they still played an important and widely acknowledged part in the life cycle of wasps and adders, they were nowadays practically all invisible or impassable.
The track up Enodake was still available to mountain-climbing crazies, and the road along the river bank to Upper Hori still furnished a trickle of a livelihood to one old man in a booze shop, one grocer and her seventeen-year-old daughter, and a handful of snoozing, local government-contracted workers and uniformed security guards who were charged with the task of maintaining it. But neither road went where it once had, and most of the rest went nowhere at all. The advent of motor transport was, of course, the heaviest nail in their coffin. They had struck out once, like old roads the world over, in straighter lines and up steeper slopes than motor transport could cope with. And besides, the wholesale exodus from the rural areas to the industrial cities—the most damaging and intractable of the social upheavals that affluence, or the search for it, continues to wreak on Japan—has meant that countrymen looking for work do not nowadays go into the hills where they once went, to collect mushrooms or burn charcoal, and so they do not need the steep, straight tracks. Instead they pile their families into trains and buses and go to Tokyo or Osaka or their environs, where about forty percent of the nation’s working people now cram themselves into tiny two or three-room apartments that will never belong to them because the cost of the land would plunge them into debt for two generations, and maintain, for the sake of government surveys about “lifestyle,” that they are “middle-class.”
Coming down a now-vanished track—according to one of the best-known anecdotes about him—Saigo Takamori, near the beginning of his retreat, somewhere between Enodake and Hori, when his campaign had miscarried, the bulk of his army had surrendered or scattered, and his own death was a foregone conclusion, met two peasants also on their way down from the hills and these stood aside from the track to let Saigo pass. According to one of Saigo’s biographers, the two peasants were a certain Maki and a little boy named Kawakami Takeshi.
“What is the matter?” the little boy had asked.
“We must get out of the way,” whispered Maki. “Sensei is coming.”
In later life, the little boy recalled that Saigo had been walking quietly, wearing a sword at his side and a uniform cap from one of his own private schools. His face had worn a benign smile. He had looked as though he were out hunting in peaceful hills, quite indifferent to the encroaching nearness of his enemies. The little boy remembered thinking then that Saigo was “the greatest hero that the world had ever seen.”
“How great a man Sensei is!” he had murmured to Maki.
“Yes,” Maki had answered, “he is a god.”
Then Saigo had drawn level with the two peasants, they had bowed deeply, and he had acknowledged their bows.
That’s all. That is the anecdote. Saigo was a doomed man, a samurai, a former Marshal of the Army and Counselor of State. And he had acknowledged the bows of two peasants who met him at the time of his defeat on a mountain track. Those peasants wouldn’t have known what a “lifestyle” was. They weren’t even “middle-class.”
Interestingly, the little boy’s recollection (as represented in this particular biography) continues to the point where the two peasants reach the valley and see Saigo once again, this time in a less benign mood:
“I have never forgotten the image of Great Saigo then. He was squatting with his elbows on his knees, the hilt of his sword thrust forward, his left shoulder a little higher than the right, his lips tightly pursed, his eyes glaring fiercely at his men who were following him down the track. The terrible glare must have been a reproof for their tardiness. A wild animal crouching ready to spring on its prey could not have looked more ferocious.”
Together with the first anecdote, this exemplifies perfectly the two sides of Saigo Takamori or, rather, the two sides that subsequent biographers, apologists, patriots, and worshippers have beaten each other about the head with, some crying “Saigo the Humanist!” and others “Saigo the War God!”
The biographer who records these two childhood recollections is the well-known novelist, poet, and essayist, Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885–1976), himself a man in whom contradictory natures resoundingly collided. During the 1920s, Mushanokoji, an aristocrat by birth, devoted eight years of his life to developing a Utopian commune called Atarashiki Mura (New Village), which he had founded only a few miles from the spot where the defeated Saigo met the peasants. This followed his publication in 1916 of a polemic vigorously opposing the First World War. The commune was idealistic and democratic in nature and, even after he himself had left it, Mushanokoji remained its guiding spirit. But his pacifist and egalitarian sentiments did not prevent him from publishing in 1942 a book called Daitoa Senso Shikan (My Feelings on the Great East Asian War), which, unlike his earlier work, expressed uncritical approval of Japan’s World War II policies and actions, and which later resulted in Mushanokoji’s being removed from public office (the House of Peers) under the Occupation Purge.
It was also in 1942 that an English-language translation (or, as the Japanese translator preferred to call it, an “adaptation”) of Mushanokoji’s biography of Saigo was published in Tokyo. No English-language book could have been produced in Japan in that year unless it had been regarded by the official censor, or someone with similar responsibilities, as contributing to Japan’s war effort through the improvement of the Japanese image overseas. The translator makes clear in his own preface (and his own memorable English) how his work, entitled Great Saigo, accomplishes that aim. Saigo is to be regarded as exemplifying “the patriotism of the Japanese and the spiritual basis of the new Japan” (that is to say, circa 1942) and “foreigners who wish to understand the feelings and the dispositions and the views of life of those who are Japanese to the backbone, needs must know him.” The translator then proceeds to disarm potential skepticism by falling over himself to emphasize that, out of all the many Saigo biographies available for the sort of “adaptation” he had in mind, he chose Mushanokoji’s because it is “impartially written.”
Actually, the resulting “adaptation” is worshipful sometimes to the point of absurdity. On the very first page of the introduction, the hero of Great Saigo is introduced to the foreign reader as “a great man,” “every inch an Oriental-minded person,” “shining and serene in every sphere of his activity,” a man who exuded a “radiant impression,” whose every utterance “possesses something appealing and inimitable,” a man “who knew the secrets of the human heart.” And by the time we reach page xi we are being invited to compare the sayings of Saigo with those of Jesus Christ.
But from the very beginning, too, though it is the altruistic, super-wise, spiritual qualities of the hero that the “adaptor,” publisher, and censor are most anxious to purvey as “Japanese to the backbone,” the contradictions are difficult to suppress. So on page xi the Christ-like Saigo writes, “Heaven loves all men without discrimination, and we must love others with the love with which we love ourselves.” And on the previous page, the same Saigo has written, “if a government should fail to fulfill its duty out of fear of the word ‘war’ it might justly be called a commercial regulator, and should never be called a government.”
* * *
—
Some of these thoughts flitted through my head as I ambled past a monumental mason’s yard about an hour and a half along the highway from Nobeoka, peering at a large stone bust of Saigo that stood, newly carved, among the miniature pagodas and the pristine graves. Mushanokoji describes the physical Saigo as “a large-sized child who appeared rather slow-witted,” and that is precisely what the bust depicted.
It was another swelteringly hot day and the highway ran through a broad, unshaded valley. Already two people had stopped for me, a nut-brown truck driver with dazzling white teeth who had beckoned me up into his cabin and whose eyes and mouth had popped open in delight when I told him I would rather walk, and a motorist in a damp white shirt who crossed the road on foot to give me a can of cold Coca-Cola.
“No thanks,” I told him. “I’m not that fond of it.”
“Shall I buy you something else then? What would you like?”
Further up the highway a fish vendor with only one front tooth heaved herself off the pile of white styrofoam fish boxes that she was sitting on to buy me a can of a different sort of drink from the machine that supported her back. The drink she bought me was called Ambrosia, a brand I had never heard of, but that didn’t surprise me. New drinks proliferate in Japan at the same rate as porn videos and religious sects, the chief recommendation of any product being not quality or price or usefulness, but the endlessly touted trinity of newness: shintojo (newly available), shingata (new style), and shinhatsubai (newly on the market). Those three expressions form the basis, I would estimate, of about twenty percent of all the advertising copy written in Japan. I guzzled the Ambrosia cheerfully and washed the taste away with old-style beer.
“You’re silly to walk along a road in heat like this without a hat,” said the fish vendor, squatting back on her styrofoam boxes and probing her tooth with her loose upper lip. “If I were you I’d take the train. There’ll be one along in twenty-five minutes. The station’s down that little street. Don’t take the bus; it’s twice the price. And you should still get yourself a hat.”
