by Alan Booth
Ah, floating bridge!
Why does the ferryman grow older?
asked the poet Hosokawa Yusai, disappointed perhaps that, on the Bridge of Heaven, men, like pine trees, shake and bend as they age.
By tradition, the finest view of Amanohashidate is obtained neither by walking along it nor by circling it in a boat, but by climbing the hill at the northern end and looking down at it from the height of Kasamatsu Park—the Park of the Umbrella Pine. Nor, as I discovered on traipsing up to the park, do you simply stand and look at it—that would be far too earthly. What you do is climb onto one of three stone benches, stand with your back to the Bay of Miyazu, and then bend down and look at the Bridge of Heaven from between your spread thighs. This remarkable method of viewing scenery is supposed to give you the impression that the Floating Bridge is actually floating; and it is worth wondering what the person who first made that discovery was up to at the time.
Anyway, the sight of group after group of Japanese tourists going through the motions of this obligatory ritual provided me with a solid hour's entertainment. I especially liked the attempts of the girls wearing skirts to prevent the stiff sea breeze from revealing other heavenly things and the attempts of the middle-aged businessmen to keep both their dignity and their spectacles intact. Best of all I enjoyed the performance of one keen amateur photographer who, not content with simply peering at the sandbar through his thighs, exposed about half a roll of film through them too, which involved a dexterity that one had to envy. (Questions about why he didn't take his photographs the right way up and stick them in his album upside down are idle: he was having A Good Time.) He was also just about the only viewer in an hour who looked at the heavenly bridge for more than two or three seconds. Most got it over with as quickly as possible, climbing down off the benches and resuming an upright position with a great flood of relief on their faces. Some months before, the Mona Lisa had been exhibited at a Tokyo gallery and had attracted such throngs of art lovers that the time each was allowed to spend in front of it had to be carefully rationed. The gallery owners decided eventually that the optimum time for viewing the Mona Lisa was seven seconds, and this was felt by most art lovers to be satisfactory. It is not surprising, then, that two or three seconds suffice for the Bridge of Heaven. Mount Fuji generally rates five or six and the Second Coming of Christ will merit ten.
Of course I couldn't end my visit to Kasamatsu Park without testing tradition for myself so when a break finally occurred in the long stream of people, I marched to the middle bench, stepped up onto it, bent down smartly, and looked at the sandbar through my thighs. It did a jackknife, a triple somersault, and a belly flop, though I am prepared to believe that its acrobatic talents owed as much to the three bottles of beer I had drunk as to any bodily contortions. (Later on I tried viewing the Umbrella Pine through my thighs, but it was much less frisky and looked nothing like an umbrella.)
In the early evening, back on the road, the four black chimneys of the Iwataki Power Station added their own thick clouds to the September dusk that was creeping down. One by one the lights went on in the ring of hotels round Miyazu Bay, quiet now, but soon to pack in the droves who descend annually when the leaves turn. Ahead of me, a mass of gray-blue shadows, lay the mountains of western Honshu, which I must cross in a grueling two-week trek before meeting the coast again at Hiroshima. The lights were coming on in the city of Miyazu, too, and in the last few pleasure boats of the afternoon as they made their rounds of the sandbar. Steeped in its own shadows, with the clouds darkening above it, Amanohashidate lay now like some half-exhausted Nessie—no heavenly bridge at all, but an earth-bound prankster that came home each evening gratefully to roost.
7
The Thunder God's Eye
From almost all the wooden worksheds along the roads of rural Kyoto came the clop and click of handlooms weaving sashes for the kimono shops of the old capital. On a small grassy plot near one of the worksheds a woman tended a bed of fat white silkworms, churning them round and round with their mulberry leaves as though she were churning cheese. I passed a small pond of carp—part ornament, part pantry—and I remembered being told by my twenty-three-year-old actress friend—gone, alas, with the wind—that the gold variety of carp is never eaten, security being a privilege of the beautiful.
Three or four of the houses in one small village were being sprayed inside and out with a foul-smelling pesticide—probably in an effort to rid them of white ants, but no doubt equally effective against the cockroaches that are the everlasting companions to the Japanese summer. Japanese literature has made much of the insect world—usually to evoke that elegant sense of pathos, called sabi, with which so much Japanese poetry is redolent. This is a haiku by the master, Basho:
The pity of it...
beneath the helmet cries
the long-horned grasshopper.
This one is by Shohaku:
The pine cricket
sings in vain
in my house abandoned to the weeds.
But I have never come across an elegantly pathetic cockroach, nor heard of one being celebrated in verse. To be born a gokiburi (even the Japanese word for the thing is spat out of the mouth with three nasty plosives) is to be born eternally despised.
The lodging I found on my eighty-first night was in a little ryokan that adjoined a dark, cramped restaurant where, despite appearances, I had one of the best dinners of my journey. Throughout it, the old man and woman who ran the place—and who seemed quite content with one customer for the evening—quizzed me about my experiences since birth, the old woman confining herself to practical matters such as how I had managed to survive the London fog (all Japanese people are brought up believing that the residents of London wage a perpetual battle to breathe), while the old man ventured a deeper line of inquiry that ranged from comparisons between Queen Elizabeth and the emperor to reflections on war and the price of defeat.
"No one respects the emperor nowadays—not since we Japanese lost the war. The crown prince, yes; and there is a lot of affection for Princess Michiko (the commoner the crown prince met on a tennis court and married), but not for the emperor, not since we lost. Japan is such a small country, you see—not able to sustain a loss like that.
"I should have thought Japan sustained it pretty well," I said, "judging by the prevailing economy. We used to have a joke in England during the sixties: if Japan loses another war, she'll rule the world."
"Ah," replied the old man with a sharp intake of breath, "such jokes are part of the spoils of victory. The people who make jokes like that have never known how it feels to be defeated."
The conversation turned to my walk through Japan, and the old man made a comment that I have thought about often and still don't understand:
"You're walking from Hokkaido to Kyushu. You're lucky. No Japanese could do that since we lost the war. Our spirits shrank with defeat, you see. We're not big enough for such a journey."
In the morning, over a breakfast of grilled fish and fresh green peppers, the old man brought out an old battered photo album and showed me a picture of two American girls who had stayed at his ryokan, how long ago he couldn't remember. Neither of the girls could speak Japanese, he explained, and the man in the picture with them was a local schoolteacher who had been called in as an interpreter. After breakfast the old man insisted on taking pictures of me too,
standing first with him, then with the old woman, then with two grandchildren who had been summoned from a house across the street, and finally with a man who I think had come to read the gas meter.
The old woman had washed my jeans and shirt for me the previous evening, and we discovered that they were not quite dry. She was almost beside herself with dismay.
"Oh, couldn't you stay another day? You could keep your yukata on and go out for a stroll in that, and I know they'd be beautifully dry by tomorrow...."
No, I laughed, I had to be on my way, and I pulled the damp clothes on and fastened my pack straps.
"Sign the visitors' book for us," the old man said, and as I did I noticed that I was the only guest who had signed the book all summer.
"You have a large spirit," was the old man's parting comment. "It doesn't surprise me that you won."
Though the mornings and evenings had grown cooler, there was still only a faint tinge of autumn in the hills. The narrow road—no longer a highway—rose steeply away from the already distant coast, and large tourist buses lumbered down it on their way to Amanohashidate, the drivers honking me off the curves, the passengers scuffling to gape at me through the large rear windows.
At noon that day I left Kyoto and entered the middle hills of Hyogo Prefecture. Only three prefectures in Honshu span the width of the whole island from the Japan Sea coast to the Pacific or the Inland Sea, and Hyogo is one of them. Perhaps because of this, I found it a prefecture with a comparatively rich spread of rural dialects. In Kobe, the prefectural capital, they often swear blind they can't understand a word the old women say up on the northern coast, and during the three hard days I spent trekking through Hyogo's central mountains I'm certain I encountered more oddities of language than I did on most other parts of my journey. This will surprise a lot of Japanese people, who have been taught to think of Aomori and Kagoshima, at the extreme ends of the mainland, as offering the ultimate in quirky Japanese. I have never found this: partly because Aomori is one of the prefectures I know best, but also because, in those faraway places, most people make a conscious effort, when confronted with a foreign face, to speak as straightforward a form of the language as they can. In Hyogo they simply didn't bother—which put a strain on my ears as well as on my feet.
Still the rattle of the weavers looms echoed along the twisting roads, punctuated occasionally by the suppressed hysteria of a long triple row of battery hens. In the grocer's shops I stopped in for refreshment I was told again and again and again how small a country Japan is, and asked what military base I was from. If I was in a conversational mood, I would sometimes take the opportunity to point out that Japan is twice the size of my country, larger than all but three of the something-like-thirty countries of Europe, that Holland (where many of Japan's original ideas about the outside world came from) is one-twentieth Japan's size, and that Switzerland (which Japanese advertisements depict as a vast, airy country with great tracts of pasture and limitless ski slopes) would fit comfortably inside the island of Kyushu. I didn't take this opportunity too often, though, because I could see that I was not believed; and if I had added that I was neither in the military nor even an American, I should have run the risk of being hounded out of the shops as an inveterate liar.
Fewer kites wheeled over the fields, for here, in these high villages, most of the rice had yet to be harvested and the rats and snakes were still hidden safe among it. The further I walked the steeper the hills grew, the thicker, darker, and smokier the woods, till late in the after-noon, just outside the little town of Oya, a car stopped and the driver directed me without any preamble to the local church.
"Church?"
"You're a Christian, aren't you?"
"No, I'm not."
"Oh well, then, better try the police box."
And with dusk already settling on the roofs and an audience of schoolboys trailing after me, I decided I was weary enough to take the driver's advice; so I located the one police box in Oya—a tiny lean-to in front of a private house—strolled into it, and introduced myself to Officer Uehara of the Hyogo Constabulary.
Officer Uehara was a short tubby man with a short tubby wife who bustled away to put the kettle on. The schoolboys had trailed me right up to the police box and were crowding round the open doorway watching Officer Uehara fidget with the collar of his brown sports shirt.
"I am a Japanese policeman," he announced to start the conversation off, tapping his nose with his index finger.
"I thought you were," I said. "You're sitting in a Japanese police box."
"Yes," he agreed. "That's right. I am."
The schoolboys kicked one another.
"Show me your passport, will you, please?"
I produced once again the alien registration card that all foreign residents are obliged to carry. Officer Uehara took it gingerly in his fingers and read it through from beginning to end. He noted with approval that the photograph was recent and that the fingerprint was nice and clear.
"Do you know," he said, handing it back, that's the first time I've ever seen one of these alien's cards. They're handy, aren't they?"
"Handy?"
"For remembering things. Your address and so on. Now, what can I do for you?" And he glared at the schoolboys who glared solemnly back at him.
I asked if he could recommend a place to stay, and after a few moments' thought, he picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. But the ringing tone had scarcely begun when an idea occurred to him and he quietly placed the receiver back on its rest. His wife brought two bowls of tea to the table and shooed the schoolboys away from the doorway with a single imperious gesture. They were clearly far more awed by her than they were by Officer Uehara.
"Would you mind showing me the contents of your wallet?"
"Wallet?"
"Just the notes, I mean."
I counted my money out onto the table and Officer Uehara viewed it with great satisfaction.
"It's Japanese money!"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, that's a relief isn't it?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Quite a relief. Yes, I see. You can put it away now. Come on, I'll take you to the ryokan."
Which he did, but the ryokan was closed, so we strolled across the road to a second ryokan, but the owner had to go to Osaka early in the morning and was not accepting any guests.
"Have you eaten?" asked Officer Uehara as we stood at a loss outside the ryokan door.
"No, I was expecting to eat when I'd found a room."
"Tell you what," he said, rubbing his chin, "there's a minshuku at Nakama, about six kilometers up into the hills. People stay there when they go fishing in the river. It's a nice place. I'll give them a ring for you. They won't be full this time of year, but I doubt if they'll do dinner at such short notice. You can eat in the restaurant here if you like, and then I'll run you up there in the car."
"That's very kind of you, but I'll have to walk."
"Eh?"
"I'm on a walking trip, you see."
It was dark now, and the wife had switched on the light in the police box. The first evening stars glowed faintly above the low hills and Officer Uehara stood biting his lip.
"Curry rice?"
"Whatever you like."
"You can't walk, you know. It's already dark."
"I've got a pocket torch."
"It's not safe."
"I'm used to walking."
"Not in these hills. We'll eat here."
And he steered me into a small, dimly lit shop where a man with one eye was serving two teenage motorcyclists a couple of fatty pork cutlets.
"Curry rice," ordered Officer Uehara, "and a bottle of beer. He's got a passport."
But before the beer came he was biting his lip again.
"It'd be no trouble. The car, I mean. We could be there inside twenty minutes. Walking, it'll take you a couple of hours, and the road's a mess—bridges and turnings, and no lights, none at all."
"I'll find my way."
"It's not that easy."
"There's absolutely nothing to worry about."
"Please..."
"What?"
The curry came, with rice and beer the same temperature. Officer Uehara went into the back room to telephone the minshuku and one of the spotty motorcyclists, who had listened to our conversation with bated breath, hissed at me across the table:
"Are you a friend of Uehara's?"
"I suppose I am."
"He swears something terrible."
"... he's got a passport and everything," came the officer's voice
on the telephone, and a minute later he was back to tell me that the minshuku in the hills had a room for me.
"Look, won't you reconsider about the car? I wouldn't mind a drive, honestly..."
"No, really. I haven't been inside any kind of vehicle for nearly three months and I don't want to get inside one now. Besides, six kilometers is nothing when you've walked two thousand and sixty-seven."
"It's just..."
"What?"
"Be careful."
"What of?"
Officer Uehara was silent for a long moment, and I was spooning up the last of the curry rice when he said, softly but quite distinctly:
"Foxes."
"What?"
"Be careful of the foxes. Their spirits can bewitch you."
I looked up expecting to see a broad grin, but there was not the least trace of humor in his face.
We said goodbye at the door of the restaurant, and Officer Uehara looked sheepishly down at his feet.
"Don't think badly of us, will you?"
"What do you mean?"
"That business about the alien's card and the money and so on. Don't take it the wrong way. Remember us kindly when you think about Oya."
"Thanks for the meal."
"You re very welcome."
"And I'll take special care to avoid the foxes."
Officer Uehara's tubby face showed not the remotest flicker of a smile.
In the starlight the narrow road wound up and up into the hills, crossing dark streams on small stone bridges, winding past the last isolated buildings of the town and into the darkness of the forest. I stopped outside one lonely house and listened to a woman singing in her bath-room. The night air was warm, the stars bright silver, and by the time I reached the minshuku at Nakama the white moon had risen high over the woods.
