KJ
Selections
DOWN
IN THE COUNTRY,
OUT IN THE BUSH
Royall
Tyler (from KJ#37,
Inaka Bookzine)
Kore
wa miyako ni sumai itasu mono de gozaru.
I am a man from the Capital: London, Washington, Paris, New York, Tokyo,
Kyoto, Oslo, Canberra, not counting the dropouts and the doublings back.
Boston, Columbus, Madison — state capitals, anyway. Kyoto as I
write, the real Miyako. What do I know about inaka?
I remember sitting around long ago with friends, stoned of course, on
Manhattan, minds leaping in ecological angst to the future when forests
would all be gone and wood would be (“See my ring here?”) as precious
as that — as jade. Big city talk.
What do I know? What do they know, whose four wheel drive bombs
clutter parking lots from New York to Kyoto to Sydney? Tourists
out for scenery and quaint ways on Bali or Ishigaki? Pushers of
power stations and dams, floggers of crop pesticides? And, yes,
romantic believers in “le bons sens du cultivateur” (the farmer’s
native good sense) — a French friend’s expression, gesturing bitterly
towards signs of rural folly and greed.
So I tried to learn... No, what happened was
that urban wars of the heart drove me out of town and landed me where
I might learn something if I looked: farthest New Mexico. Peace
and landscape, I was after. Landscape is what I got.
From a rancher who swerved to miss a white flower
blooming in the dirt track I learned that fine people (kokoro aru
hito) turn up anywhere. And I learned that landscape is not
enough. I climbed the southernmost peak on the continental divide,
and with the vast heavens above me, the boundless desert spreading below
the mystery of its twilight colors, and, right at hand, an eerily rich
swarm of red ladybugs, my thoughts were just as insistently dumb as
anywhere else. Then there was Burt, a local kid, who shot the
Mexican he had been hanging out with. The austere majesty of the
Peloncillos and the Chiricahuas had not made him a better man either.
He had been married a few months. She was pregnant. I went
to see her after he did it. In slanting sun she sat beside the
broken down Conoco station, and the great valley stretched away on either
side to the mountain walls. She looked like a stricken angel.
In Lordsburg jail Burt strangled his trigger finger with thread till
it dropped off, they say. No, natural beauty does not save, though
that may be hard to believe from downtown.
Even for a young Genji.
These days I am translating The Tale of Genji,
so I meet Genji often. He used to live in Miyako, too, and though
he never existed, he is far more real than most people who did.
He first traveled out of the city at eighteen, when he had malaria,
to visit a healer at a temple in the Northern Mountains (Kitayama).
Kurama, the place may have been.
It was spring. In the city the cherry
blossoms were over, but not up there. He started well before dawn,
and when he arrived the healer got right to work. Then came time
for a break.
Genji was wondering as the sun rose towards
noon and he continued the rite how his fever would now behave, when
one of his men remarked, “My lord, rather than simply worry, you should
somehow get your mind off the matter"; and so Genji went onto the mountain
behind the temple and looked out towards the City.
Mist veiled the landscape into the distance, and
the budding trees everywhere were as though swathed in smoke.
"It all looks just like a painting," he said. “No one living here
could wish for more!”
Who has not felt that way, time and again, before mountains, rivers,
seas? I did some years ago, in Australia, passing a beautiful
view. Next thing I knew, I had bought it, or at least a bit of
it. Knowing more than Genji did at eighteen made no difference
at all.
“But my lord, this is nothing yet," said a
companion. “How much finer the painting would be if only you had
before your eyes the mountains and seas of other provinces!” Someone
else extolled Mt. Fuji and another peak [probably Mt. Asama in Kai].
They then went on to divert him further by describing the lovely seaside
villages and rocky shores of the provinces to the west.
When my mother-in-law came visiting we took
her out there. She was not impressed. Who could blame her?
Her picture windows, outside Albuquerque, look onto the Sangre de Cristo
mountains. Nothing in Australia resembles the Sangre de Cristo
mountains, which make our Currockbilly look dumpy. They make Kurama
look dumpy, too. Just then, though, Genji saw only the Northern
Mountains.
The talk shifted next, as talk will, to gossip —
gossip about someone who actually left the Capital to live in the wilds.
“Among nearer places," another companion went
on, “the shore at Akashi in Harima to my mind deserves special mention.
Not that any single feature of it is so extraordinary, but the view
there over the sea is somehow more peaceful than anywhere else.
A former Governor of the province — a gentleman who has now taken up
the religious life and is looking after his daughter — has an impressive
residence there. Being descended from a Minister, he ought to
have done well in the world, but he is so eccentric that he never mixed
with society, resigned his post as a Captain of the Palace Guards and
requested his posting as Governor himself. Even so, he became
a bit of a laughing stock in his province and was so embarrassed that
rather than return to the City he shaved his head. Not that he
retired to any sheltered spot in the hills, for he put himself right
on the sea, which was an odd choice. It is true, though, that
while the province has many places suitable for retirement, a village
deep in the mountains would have been miserably lonely for his wife
and young daughter; and besides, I imagine he feels more comfortable
there himself. Some time ago, when I was down there, I went for
a look at his establishment. No doubt he never made a place for
himself in the City, but the sheer scale of the tract he has claimed
makes it obvious that he has arranged things — after all, he was the
Governor — so as to spend the rest of his life in luxury. He does
all his devotions to prepare for the life to come, and in fact he makes
a better monk than he ever did a gentleman."
“Yes," said Genji, “but what about his daughter?”
From an excited account of a strange old man,
Genji has retained one notion: GIRL. Here I part company with
him for a while. I am too old by now, and anyway, I have my girl:
she is looking after one large, fractious dog, three cats, fifteen alpacas,
and a cranky water pump, beautiful view and all, while I translate Genji
in Kyoto; the roos, wombats, and marsupial mice mind themselves.
Yesterday, as I write, a bolt of lightning blew up her phone and electrocuted
a neighbor’s cow.
At Akashi, the girl is about nine at present, but
yes, in time Genji will have her. Does that sound bad? Just
think what was in store for her otherwise.
“My lord,”
the young man replied, “I gather she has her share of both looks and
character. One Governor after another, I hear, has respectfully
shown interest in her, but her father rejects every one. 'It is
all very well for me to have sunk this low,' he says, 'but she is all
I have, and I have other things in mind for her'. 'If you outlive
me,' he tells her, 'if my hopes for you fail and the future I want for
you is not to be, then you are to drown yourself in the sea.'
That, they say, what he always solemnly tells her."
Genji was indeed amused.
Her seaside upbringing has made her a country girl.
Genji would never have heard of her otherwise and, later on, in exile,
would never have met her. She is the human face of the beauty
he has glimpsed in the wild: the romance of inaka.
Things were different, then, and not just in Japan.
All of medieval Europe, from Spain to Germany, had its songs about the
lord, down in the country, who spots a pretty shepherd girl and comes
on to her. In Japan the sea girl, the ama, the saltmaker
or diver for seaweed and shellfish, had the same thing happen to her.
A lord down in the country was bound to be lonely, and there she was,
the shepherd or sea girl, out in the open, looking tasty. In the
European songs the lord may rape her or she may talk him out of it,
but either way, he never sees her again. In Japan (in literature),
she wins his respect, and he may even marry her. This happens
with the Akashi girl and Genji.
Eight years have passed, and he is twenty-six.
Not long ago he got himself into big trouble and had to leave town.
Now he is languishing in disgrace on the shore, at Suma. His quaintly
rustic house does not console him. He has a few young men with
him, of course, but all are terribly lonely, and this loneliness gets
mixed up with the very beauty—the heart-rending beauty—of the wild seaside.
Murasaki Shikibu, the author, leans into the theme a little:
One lovely twilight, with the nearby garden
in riotous bloom, Genji stepped onto a gallery that gave him a view
of the sea, and such was the supernal grace of his motionless figure
that he seemed in that setting not to be of this world at all.
Over soft, white silk twill and violet he wore a dress cloak of deep
blue, its sash only very casually tied; and his voice slowly chanting,
“I, a disciple of Shakyamuni...” was to their ears more beautiful than
any heard before. From boats rowing by at sea came a chorus of
singing voices. With a pang he watched them, dim in the offing,
like little birds borne on the waters, and sank into a reverie as cries
from lines of geese on high mingled with the creaking of oars, until
tears welled forth, and he brushed them away with a hand so gracefully
pale against the black of his rosary that the young gentlemen pining
for their sweethearts at home were all consoled.
Genji in this lyrical tableau stands briefly for
the lovely ama girl, but he himself is as miserable as ever The
next spring a terrible storm lashes the coast. He dreams that
the dragon king is calling him down into the sea, then dreams again
of his father, the late Emperor, warning him to leave Suma. The
storm has hardly subsided when a boat arrives, sent by the old man he
heard about all those years before. It has come to bring him to
Akashi.
He is soon in the lap of luxury, but this is still
the country, and he is still lonely. What about the girl, then?
By now she is eighteen. He does not just run into her. She
lives in a house up against the hills, while he and his host occupy
a house on the shore. The old man longs desperately to give her
to him, but these things take time, and there is her own dignity to
be considered. Late one evening, the old man and Genji talk.
So late in the night the sea breeze had cooled, and
the sinking moon shone with a pure light. When all was quiet the
old man poured forth his tale to Genji, little by little describing
his plans on first moving to this shore, his practice for the life to
come, and, all unasked, his daughter herself. Genji was amused
but often touched as well.
“If I may allow myself to say so, my lord,” his host
went on, “I believe that your brief stay in this land to you so strange
may be a trial devised for you by the gods and buddhas in compassionate
response to an old monk’s years of prayer. I say so because for
eighteen years now I have placed my trust in the God of Sumiyoshi.
I have had certain ambitions for my daughter ever since she was small,
and twice a year, in spring and autumn, we go on pilgrimage to his Shrine.
In all my devotions through the hours of day and night, quite apart
from my own prayers for birth on the lotus, I beg only to be granted
my high aims on her behalf. It must be for my sins in lives past
that I have become, as you see, a hopeless mountain rustic, but my father
held the office of Minister. Yes, I myself now belong to the country,
and I sadly wonder what life awaits those who will follow me if we remain
this low; and yet I have had hope ever since she was born. I wish
to give her to a great lord from the Capital, and that desire runs so
deep in me that, for my presumption, I have incurred the enmity of many
and suffered much unpleasantness; but none of this matters to me.
I tell her, ‘As long as I live, I will do my poor best to look after
you. If I go while you are still as you are now, then drown yourself
among the waves.’" Between frequent spells of weeping, he told
Genji this and much else that defies a full account.
For Genji, too, this was a troubled time, and he
listened with tears in his eyes. “I had been wondering for what
crime I was falsely accused, to wander an alien land, but all that you
have said tonight leaves me certain and, I may say, moved, that this
is indeed a bond of some strength from past lives. Why did you
tell me nothing of what you have seen so clearly? Ever since putting
the City behind me, I have been sickened by the treachery of life, and
with only my devotions to occupy my months and days, my spirits have
sunk very low. Although distant rumour had told me of such a lady,
I had sadly assumed that she would recoil from a ne’er-do-well; but
I gather now that you wish to take me to her. Her solace will
see me through these lonely nights.”
The old man was transported with delight...
Things are under way at last, but slowly. The
young woman is shy, she is proud, and she knows how far above her he
is. She does not want to play shepherd girl and agrees only to
exchange letters. Meanwhile autumn (the season of parting and
loss) comes, and Genji is more forlorn than ever.
At Akashi there was, as always, something new in
the autumn wind, and for Genji sleeping by himself was so horribly lonely
that now and again he approached his host. “Do bring her here
on one excuse or another,” he would say; for he did not feel that he
could go to her, and she showed no sign of encouraging him. It
was miserable country girls, she had heard, who foolishly surrendered
that way to the flattering talk of a gentlemen briefly down from the
City. Since he could not possibly have any respect for her, she
would only burden herself with grief. No doubt, while she remained
unmarried, her parents, with their impossible ambitions, entertained
affectionately fanciful visions of her future, but she herself would
only suffer for them. No, she decided, it was quite enough for
her to correspond with him like this while he remained here on their
shore. Here at her own home where, after years of rumours, she
had never thought even to glimpse such a man, she had caught a little
look at him after all, had heard on the wind the music of his koto,
which was said to be marvellous, and knew a good deal about how he spent
his time; and the very idea that he should deign to take enough notice
of her to court her was simply too much for one whose life had been
wasted among seafolk like these. Such were her thoughts, and the
more embarrassed she grew, the less she could even contemplate allowing
him closer.
Her father finally has to nudge things along himself,
which he does decisively. One evening, all is ready, and he lets
Genji know the time has come. Genji rides through the moonlight
to her house. What happens next is told with great discretion.
(The sentences in italics are poems.)
The house, a fine one, was magnificently situated
deep among the trees. The mansion by the sea was curious and imposing,
but here, he felt with a pang, life would be lonely, and one would know
every shade of melancholy. The bell of the nearby meditation hall
rang mournfully through the wind’s sighing among the pines, and the
pines’ roots gripping the rocks had a dignity of their own. In
the garden by the house every sort of insect was singing. He looked
carefully about him. The part given to his host’s daughter was
done up with special care, and the handsome door to let in the moonlight
stood a little ajar.
So deep ran her reluctance to expose her person to
any liberties from him that his hesitant tries at conversation met only
mournful resistance. What airs she puts on! he thought.
After all this courting, the most inaccessibly grand lady would have
yielded with good grace, but no, not she. Does she despise me,
then, for being out of favour? Annoyed, he pondered varied misgivings.
Heartlessly to force her would confound good sense; to lose a contest
of wills would do him no credit. A ribbon on a nearby standing
curtain, brushing the strings of a koto, called up a pleasant picture
of her playing alone, for pleasure. “Will you not at least let
me hear your famous koto?” he asked, multiplying his attempts to draw
her out. “Ah, for someone with whom to share secrets, that
this sad dream of a world might be gone!”
She answered, “Lost as I am in a night without
dawn, how could I know what to call a dream?” Her shadowy
form reminded him vividly of the Rokujo lady at Ise.
His sudden presence here, when she had been innocently
at her ease, was too much of a shock; she entered the neighbouring room
and somehow fastened the sliding panel so securely that he made no move
to force it open. And yet that could not very well be all.
Elegantly tall, she had such dignity that he was
abashed. The contrived character of their union, when he thought
of it, filled him with regret. His feeling for her only grew with
their closeness. The night, always so tediously long, seemed to
pass in a moment into dawn; anxious to be gone before anyone should
see him, he left her with heartfelt assurances of love.
Soon she is pregnant, then Genji is pardoned, and
after a sad farewell he returns to the Capital and glory. She
joins him in time, after their daughter is born, but not quite as his
wife because the country (her upbring and her father’s past as a provincial
governor) has marked her indelibly. Later on, though, after their
daughter has married the Heir Apparent, she gives birth to the next
Emperor. That strange old man had known what he was doing all
along.
That is all a long way from inaka, though.
The Akashi girl never really belonged to inaka after all. Like
theHagoromo angel, she was just visiting and got stuck down there
for a while; although certainly, for all she knew, she might have been
there forever. Her life in the Capital is not happy, but it is
privileged beyond a sea girl’s dreams.
Meanwhile, the real sea people, the ones so far below
Genji that they are beyond his ken, are still there at Suma. When
he was there he had them all around him. He heard them talking
to each other, when they clustered around his house after the worst
of the storm.
The humble seafolk now gathered where the gentleman
lived, and despite the strangeness of the jargon, to Genji’s ears impenetrable,
that they spoke among themselves, no one drove them away. “If
the wind had gone on much longer,” they were saying, “the tide would
have swallowed up everything. The gods were kind.”
Someone would have driven them off as a nuisance,
in normal times. Genji cannot even understand their language,
which sounds to him (if you take the idiom literally) like the twittering
of birds. Back when he looked out over the spring landscape from
Kurama, or wherever it was, he hardly knew such people existed.
Not long ago my wife and I (she was visiting)
went to Kyushu, the Kunisaki Peninsula. On the far end we found
a promising minshuku, high above the sea. Polished floors,
nice room, smiling faces, a playful group of students on an outing.
Out there, in the dim distance, the shadow of Honshu; closer in, jagged
capes, a neck out to a rugged island, grey-brown rock shores, concrete
jetties, old boats beached in a mud harbor at low tide. Before
the light failed we walked down through the hamlet.
The houses were disintegrating. Most
were abandoned, but the few that looked lived-in were falling to pieces
too. Weeds. Trash. Storage sheds full of mouldering
junk, their rusted-out corrugated panels flapping and gaping.
This really is the edge of the world, I thought. What must it
be like to live here? Who lives here? On the neck out to
the island, amid the ugly, brownish rocks and the rubbish washed in
by the tides, people were digging up gravel patches for shellfish.
I thought, This is where a man from the Capital draws the line.
“Hear you’ve bought a hobby farm,” people say.
Yes. The forest nearby full of birdcalls, the clear creek, parrots
shooting scarlet through dark trees; the moon, the sky full of clouds
and amazing stars; huge, grassy paddocks stretching away, and the animals
we love--we are amateurs. Will we have the gumption, skill, and
luck to do as well out there as that couple with their minshuku?
The bush is littered with broken lives and broken dreams.
Aria, Elisina, Edith and Princesse, Faith, Hope, Charity, Patience,
Gigi and Georgina; Neville, Smokey, Jesse, Chester, and Mo, and the
little ones not yet born. Their care is a privilege and an honour.
If we are worthy of them, perhaps we will get by.
Royall
Tyler has spent several years, of and on, in Kyoto. He has published
various studies and translations in the area of medieval Japanese literature
and religion, among them Japanese Tales (Pantheon, 1987), and
Japanese Noh Dramas (Penguin Classics, 1992), and is working
on a new translation of the Tale of Genji. He teaches at the Australian
National University and lives in the bush.
Copyright
held by the author
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