by Alan Booth
The Amidaji temple is also the scene of one of the best-known ghost stories in Japan, the story of Hoichi the Earless. Ironically, this tale—originally part of an eighteenth-century collection—would probably have been lost to the modem reader if it had not been retold in a book called Kwaidan (Ghost Stories) by the expatriate author Lafcadio Hearn, who came to Japan in 1890 and stayed until his death in 1904. Hearn's version is deeply moving, and his elegant English both enhances the legend and magnifies its horror. But the English of the handwritten, mimeographed pamphlet presented to me by the old priest at the temple is well worth preserving too, since, in its way, it is quite as remarkable as Hearn's:
The History of Earless Hoichi
The blind priest, Hoichi lived in the Amida Temple. As he was too famous as a biwa priest, the ghosts of the Heike clan should like to listen to his biwa (lute) and came out secretly one night. The warriors sitting in a row waited on Hoichi in a dignified. Someone commanded, "Welcome. Please play and talk the state of the battle of Dannoura." When Hoichi did so, the warriors who assumed a grave air were shedding tears and the ladies were in a blubber. "We've been very satisfied with your performance this night. Please come and play tomorrow and the day after to-morrow for a week night." Hoichi was asked so, and bid farewell to them. Thus, as he kept going out every night, the priests in the temple noticed his suspicious action. The priests were keeping watch for Hoichi with bated breath from behind of a sliding door. They followed him at once but he disappeared. When they re-turned to the Temple inevitably, the sounds of biwa was heard loudly in the wood. They ran up to him in a great hurry pushing aside grass. Hoichi with a grim look seated alone in front of the graves in darkness and played the biwa with all his might. The friar's lanterns flickered around him and the ghastly scene was too ugly to look at. They felt a shudder in spite of their social position of the priests. They woke up and brought back him. When they told everything to a Buddhist priest in the Amida Temple, he was very surprised. "The ghosts of the Heike clan having a grudge are about to take away to the beyond," he told Hoichi and wrote down the Hannyashin sutra on Hoichi's whole body.
On that night, when Hoichi seated alone as usual, he sensed the ghosts coming up at last night. The lukewarm wind blew and the steps stopped in front of him. While Hoichi wondered. He was called, "Hoichi!" Though the ghosts called Hoichi in a loud voice again, they could listen to nothing. "We can't listen to his voice and watch even his figure to night." When they saw casually they could see only his ears in the darkness. They hold his ears with their cold and iron hands, and pluck off them. Then they left somewhere. The Buddhist priest thought that Hoichi had been safe very today. But he was surprised. "Oh," he was petrified vacantly. He watched at Hoichi's loosing his own ear and murmured, "Oh, I was under the impression that I had written the Buddhist scriptures on his whole body, but forgot writing on only his ear." Since then, this is called "Earless Hoichi."
Another pamphlet in English about the history of the shrine (which has clearly invested in its own copying equipment) explains that "Once it was a first-class Government shrine" and that at its annual festival in April "a prostitute parade on 24th is famous all over the country." I bitterly regretted not being able to see this, though later that evening, down near the docks, between the Korean Education Center and a street full of yarrow-stalk-rattling fortune tellers, I ran into something that, while not a parade, was at least a congregation.
The third pamphlet given to me in Shimonoseki was part of the stock of a young American called Dennis, whom I met while browsing in a bookshop next day. Dennis belonged to a group called the Children of God and had been sleeping rough in Japan for two years without money or a job. He was on his way to Korea (there is a boat that leaves from Shimonoseki), and the pamphlet he gave me, by "Moses David," predicted among other things the destruction of the motor car ("All of a sudden they are turned into carriages, wagon wheels and buggies!"). Dennis himself went a step further and predicted the destruction of America. This was a shame, he admitted, because his parents continued to live there, but every time he went back to America he was forced to be humble and polite because the people were all so much bigger than he was, and it was time God took a hand. Dennis also told me that spirits travel in bottles, and that at an exhibition of Chinese antiquities in London some spirits had jumped out of ancient bottles and entered carefully selected Englishmen. I escaped from Dennis fairly briskly and spent much of the afternoon in a coffee shop chatting to an old workman with large spaces between his teeth, which I glimpsed often because when he paused for breath he opened his mouth wide enough to trap half the bottled spirits in Shimonoseki.
We sat at a corner table. A young businessman had been trying out his English on me when the workman came up and asked if he could sit with us and, when he did, the businessman grew bored and went away with a polite goodbye but without paying for his coffee. I hardly noticed he had gone. The workman was telling me the story of his life—or the story of his death, which was more intriguing.
"They told my family I'd been killed in the war—told them I died on Saipan. Sent them a telegram—very polite. Gave them the date and everything. Said I was killed on the fifteenth of August at three o'clock in the afternoon."
Carefully, the old workman tore a page out of the notebook he used for his jobbing accounts and wrote the date out for me with a red felt pen—August 15, 1944—so that I wouldn't forget it.
"I've got a grave in Horyuji temple in Nara. A really splendid affair it is. I went to see it when I got back home. My little daughter didn't recognize me and screamed whenever I came near her. Then, when she finally realized it was me, she kept saying over and over again, 'August fifteenth, three o'clock; August fifteenth, three o'clock.' Over and over. Like the time on the telephone."
We had an argument about who would pay for the coffees. The old workman wanted to pay for them all, including the businessman's, but I wouldn't let him. So outside in the street he took a tiny silver-colored bell from his pocket and tied it to my belt with a red cord.
"For luck," he said, like a man who knew what luck was.
My hike through Honshu was over. I had crossed a dozen prefectures—2,048 kilometers—in seventy-eight and a half days, and had had my share of good luck and bad luck. Kyushu lay ahead of me now, and the route I had planned would take me through the mountainous center of the island, over the volcanoes Aso and Kirishima, round the skirts of Sakurajima, till the last of all the roads to Sata brought me out on the island's southernmost tip. Five hundred and fifty-odd kilometers to go. I expected it would take me another three weeks. October was flying, the nights were closing, and I reckoned I would need as much of the old workman's luck as he could spare me.
9
Landscapes of the Moon
The kammon pedestrian tunnel, which links the suburbs of Shimonoseki with the port of Moji in Kyushu, is less popular with strollers than the bridge was. At noon on the 108th day of my walk I had all four-fifths of a kilometer of it to myself and the elevator attendant on the Shimonoseki side was so delighted at having a foreign patron that he waived the twenty-yen fee I owed him. I emerged on the last of my three Japanese islands to find trams rumbling along the roads, office workers playing volleyball in a car park, and small dusty palm trees doing their best to enliven one of the grimmest, clangiest, and therefore most prosperous industrial complexes in the country.
Moji was once a city in its own right, and it is still the largest international port in Kyushu. But in 1963, in a move seemingly aimed at stifling municipal pride in favor of "rationalization" (that shoddiest of bureaucratic terms), Moji was lumped together with four of its neighbors to produce the sprawling, bureaucratically named "North Kyushu City." The other four small cities had mostly owed their livelihoods to heavy industry—in particular, coal mining and iron and steel—so the resulting industrial hybrid is not the cheeriest of environments to walk in. For four hours I trudged through the built-up strip between the tanker-clogged straits and
the smoky, gray-green conical hills. In the doorway of a little ironmonger's an elderly man in long white underwear fenced a grimy gilt wall clock with a pink feather duster, and a workman in gray overalls and a yellow steel helmet had a long public piss in the middle of the high street. By late afternoon I was still nowhere near leaving the five-cities-in-one behind me, but I had managed to reach one of its less clangy sectors, so I took a room in a quiet little ryokan called Spring Beauty on the banks of a scummy river.
The fish market and the shopping arcades, lit up in all their nightly neon, were a lot livelier and more flourishing-looking than the gas tanks and steel mills that had loured at me all afternoon. For dinner I wandered into a restaurant where the staff greeted each new customer by smacking a massive iron gong—music to your ears if you knew it was coming, the fright of your life if you didn't. There I sat next to a professional cyclist who spent his days ("like a masterless samurai," he told me) traveling from one race track to another—fifty tracks scattered the length of the country. He asked me if I liked raw sea urchin (a specialty of the Shimonoseki straits) and when he discovered that I loved it, but that the restaurant had none, he made them send out for a special order. We sat at the counter with the wooden dish of sea urchin between us, and the cyclist told me, over and over, what a pleasure it was to watch me eat.
On the banks of the scummy river a huge brown rat sniffed nonchalantly at a pile of rotting cardboard boxes, and gray-suited salary-men staggered up and down with their arms round one another's necks. North Kyushu City on a mid-October Friday night is a bouncy, bedraggled place to be. I lost my ryokan and found it again by remembering that an office cleaning agency called Happiness stood on a corner of the same street. In the night—too late to wake the owner for a coil—silent mosquitoes launched kamikaze raids from the river and scored eleven bites on my face and neck and fourteen on my fingers, arms, and wrists.
It is hard to say whether the haze that hung over North Kyushu City next morning was natural or bureaucratic. The scum on the river was supporting more cans, bags, and detergent containers than I remembered from the night before, and it was with a great deal of relief that I set off south again—the direction that sooner or later must bring me to the uncluttered hills I recalled from past journeys. Still, for more than three hours I trudged through the dreary built-up sprawl, stopping once for coffee in a shop where the owner spent ten minutes eulogizing
the dapperness of a regular customer: Oh, his new sebiro (Savile Row) was so sumaato (smart) and she was astonished how hansamu (handsome) he looked in a suutsu (suit)! It was good to be leaving the city behind me, and the city vocabulary as well.
The road continued fumy and congested, even when it began to pass between rows of wooden buildings instead of grimy concrete ones, and finally into less hazy air through which high hills and mountains loomed dead ahead. In a little supermarket where I stopped to get some apples, a woman with dyed red hair who worked at one of the cash registers had a good old giggle about me with the customer she was serving.
"Don't laugh too loud," the customer warned her. "He might understand Japanese, you know." And this notion struck the red-haired woman as so outrageous that she giggled frantically till I was out of the shop.
By the time dusk had fallen I was still not into the real countryside, though I had walked more than thirty kilometers since morning. At a taxi company office outside a small suburban station I asked if there were any ryokans in the neighborhood. The old man in charge made me an exquisite reply:
"Well, it wouldn't be true exactly to say that there aren't any, but it's a little difficult to say precisely that there are."
I fled on in top gear to the little satellite city of Tagawa, where I found a room, dumped my pack, and went out for a dinner of grilled scallops and peppers.
For dinner companions I had two businessmen who sat next to me at the restaurant counter and who struck up a depressingly familiar sort of conversation. The younger of the two would ask me a question, such as how old I was or whether I could eat fermented beans. Then, before the first three words were out of my mouth, he would turn to his more senior colleague, ignoring my answer completely, and marvel at length and very loudly at how fluently I spoke Japanese. This is sometimes a bit of a backhanded compliment because the Japanese word for conversational fluency―pera-pera—has a lot of the sense of "to gabble" about it, so that the businessmen were not so much admiring a serious attainment as congratulating me on my sleight of mouth. In point of fact, they were not really congratulating me at all; they were congratulating each other on having landed an evening of cheap entertainment, and their irritatingly loud offers to buy me more beer("Don't worry about the bill!") were meant, I felt—albeit ungratefully —to impress the other customers in the shop as much as to quench any thirst of mine.
When they had finally gone—after insisting on an ostentatious ex-change of addresses, followed by a long round of hand pumping and back slapping—the older man sitting on the other side of me, who had remained completely silent throughout, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You're a very good-natured man, aren't you?"
"On the contrary," I said, "it was they who were good-natured. After all, they bought me two bottles of beer."
"If I had been you," the man said seriously, "I would have poured the beer all over their heads."
It turned out that he was a businessman too, though while the others had been dressed in their eternal suits and ties, he wore a dark red open-necked shirt and an old pair of corduroys, and he confessed that he didn't much like company life and frequently took days off to go fishing. I had been scratching a large red mosquito bite on the back of my hand—one of the twenty-five souvenirs of my overnight stay at Spring Beauty—and the man told me he'd taken it for an "anger spot" that had come up in reaction to my two companions.
"I thought you were exhibiting great self-control," he said, "just like Winston Churchill used to. Churchill always had a radiance in his face, even when he was dealing with nincompoops like them."
Winston Churchill remains a hero to an astonishing number of Japanese men in their fifties and sixties, an age which presupposes firsthand memories of the war. I probed a bit, observing that Churchill's had been one of the three signatures on the Potsdam Declaration, which had called for Japan's unconditional surrender and threatened the "prompt and utter destruction" that Nagasaki and Hiroshima had suffered.
"Potsdam was one of his off days," the man replied, "but even then he had a radiant face." And he told me, too, that if I wanted to be a real author, I must write "a novel as good as Churchill's—Churchill's or Bernard Shaw's."
When we said goodnight and I got up to leave, I was stopped in my tracks by two sharp pains that shot up my legs as far as my knees. Perhaps more "anger spots" were lurking in my feet, or perhaps the chill that was threading these mid-October nights had joined the ranks of the other perils—mountains, mosquitoes, businessmen—which called down at last on the long-distance walker a weariness he was bound to succumb to.
In some ways the island of Kyushu is as "foreign" as Hokkaido. It was in Kyushu that the first Western ships anchored, in Kyushu that the first Westerners were permitted to live, in Kyushu that the first Western languages were learned—under the tutelage of Spanish and Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, the pioneer among whom was Saint Francis Xavier—and in Kyushu that Xavier and his successors built the first Christian churches. Even during the 215 years of sakoku (national isolation), when the doors of Japan were double-bolted to the world, when Japanese people were forcibly prevented from traveling abroad and the foreigners who landed in Japan were beheaded, there was a foreign settlement in the west of Kyushu (the tiny Dutch and Chinese trading post at Dejima in Nagasaki), and, through Kyushu, foreign goods were imported into the country—tobacco, oil paints, medicine, and guns.
Kyushu has long been a center for pottery—and despite the Korean origins of many local ceramic techniques, pottery is an art that one thinks of as typically Japanes
e. Yet, Japanese pottery owes some of its character and current popularity to Kyushu's foreign contacts, too, for it was in the tiny Kyushu village of Onta that the English potter Bernard Leach lived and worked, and Leach was instrumental in bringing about a significant revival of the folk pottery upon which some of the rural areas of Kyushu now thrive.
About nine kilometers from Onta lies the larger village of Koishiwara, the principal pottery center in Fukuoka, the prefecture through which I had been tramping for the last two days. Almost all of the shops in Koishiwara are pottery shops, many of them doubling as restaurants to cater to the tourist trade. In the stream you can see the old communal water wheel that, in pre-electric days, pounded the clay. And in the narrow sloping main street of the village you can watch the potters throwing, glazing, firing, lazing, boozing, and making money. Koishiwara attracts a fair number of visitors, foreigners included, and it never occurred to me that I would have any trouble finding such a well-known place. But it was on the way to Koishiwara that, for the first and last time on this long journey, I got hopelessly lost.
The day had begun well. The weather was good, the city at long, long last was behind me, the knobbly mountains to my right were sharp and blue in the autumn sunshine, and near the small town of Soeda I was photographed by a genial man in a car who clearly felt that I was a form of wildlife requiring conservation. I strolled cheer-fully along till, at about two o'clock in the afternoon, I reached the little village of Masuda. My map indicated that to get to Koishiwara I would have to leave the road I was on and take a narrower track over the hills, so I stopped an old man in khaki dungarees on a bicycle and asked him which track I should follow.
"Go straight on as far as Hikosan," he wheezed. "Then take the right fork where the road crosses the railway. There's only one road going that way and it's clearly marked. You can't miss it."
