In ancient times in the Province of Shinano there was a feudal lord who hated old people. So he decreed throughout the land that when old people became seventy years of age, they were, without exception, to be taken to the mountains and left there. One bright moonlit night a young farmer climbed up a mountain carrying his mother on his back. Since his mother had reached the age of seventy, he had to discard her there. However, the young man could not bear the thought of leaving her there—no matter what! He brought her back home again, dug a hole under the floor so no one would see her, and hid her there. About this time, an envoy from a neighboring province appeared before the feudal lord and laid down a very difficult proposal. He posed three problems, and if these were not solved, the Province of Shinano would be attacked and destroyed. The three problems were: to make a rope out of ashes; to pass a thread through a nine-sided jewel; and to make a drum beat by itself. The feudal lord was perplexed, and he issued a proclamation throughout the land calling upon the wise men to solve these difficult problems. When the young farmer told this to his mother, who was hidden under the floor, the mother instantly explained to him how the problems could be solved. The young farmer immediately went to the home of the feudal lord and told him. Because of this the province was able to be saved from its difficulties. On learning from the young man that all this was due to the wisdom of an old woman, the feudal lord became enlightened and understood that old people should be respected, and without any further hesitation he proceeded to abolish the decree.
So went the story.
The colored frontispiece was a drawing of a young man wearing a hood like the headgear of court nobles. Carrying his aged mother on his back, he was making his way through the thick underbrush as he climed up a steep mountain. The mother's hair was white but her face seemed exceedingly young, so that the combination produced a slightly weird effect. The rays of the full moon tinted the entire scene blue everywhere—the trees and grass and earth—and the shadows of the two people were imprinted in bold relief in black over the ground like spilled ink. It was just a coarse, common picture, but even so the sadness inherent in the story and the scene still rose from the superficies of the character of the picture. For the minds of children, it was probably adequately stimulating.
The months and years flew by. I left the university. About the time I first started working at a newspaper company, I got hold of a volume entitled New Thoughts about Mount Obasute and read it. At that time, I must say, I lacked the patience to read books with any substance; but in a desultory sort of way I usually just dabbled capriciously in any of the miscellaneous books that happened to come my way. It was entirely by a stroke of good luck at the time that I chanced upon this monograph New Thoughts about Mount Obasute, which was one of the "Publications of the Shinano Topographical Society/' and I set it aside in my library.
The evening that I bought it, I looked thoroughly over the first part of the volume, lost interest in the later sections, and closed the book. Even at that, however, I was able to acquire a certain amount of knowledge of the thinking with regard to Mount Obasute, knowledge which could not possibly be of any earthly use to me as a reporter.
As a result of the labors of the author of New Thoughts about Mount Obasute, I learned:
that the Mount Obasute legends about abandoning elderly people first appeared as literature in the Tales of Tamato;
that these tales concerning the disposal of old people probably were imported from India but set in a local environment and were transplanted into Japan along with the importation of Buddhism;
that apart from these importations, the practice of obasute must have existed in Japan in very ancient times;
that legends about the practice of obasute had been handed down in the oral tradition of every province, but except for the Legend of Mount Obasute of Shinano Province, into which many of the other legends were incorporated, the others have all been lost; that, presumably, the fact that Mount Obasute became famous as a moon-viewing site in itself contributed to the assimilation of all such legends into the Legend of Mount Obasute;
that, furthermore, the obasute practice itself had been attributed to different mountains in various historical eras—Obase-yama,* in ancient times; Kamuriki-yama, in the Middle Ages;
that it was only in modern times that the area around Obasute Station on the Shinonoi Railway Line emerged for the first time under the name of Mount Obasute.
These things I learned from the travails of the author of New Thoughts about Mount Obasute.
After the passage of several more years, I read the book again for an entirely different purpose, (incidentally, assembled in this book there were virtually all the haiku and tanka relating to moon-viewing at Mount Obasute by all the great poets in the literary history of Japan) because I was interested in determining how the various famous poets dealt with the same subject, moon-viewing against the backdrop of the same setting, Sarashina. From this point of view, I guess I had a pretty punctilious concern about such matters.
The haiku, excerpts from several collections such as Obasute and Lotus and Cutting Rice-Plants, were assembled from the works of a host of haiku-poets led by Basho, Buson, Issa, and others. The tanka were selected only from poems which thematicized Mount Obasute, but they were drawn from anthologies of every era and included the names of such poets as Tsurayuki, Saigyo, Sanetomo, Teika, and Norinaga.
But what I remember as being the most deeply moving among all these great haiku and tanka was one which the young man who appears in the Tales of Tamato composed as he watched the moon hanging over Mount Obasute after returning home from leaving his mother on the mountain. The poem goes:
Seeing the clear moon
Hang o'er Mount Obasute,
Oh, Sarashina!
What solace is there for me—
How can my heart be consoled?
Leaving aside the entire question of the skill of execution of the poem itself, I could visualize this one as a poem by the hero of the story and not simply a moon-viewing verse, and the drama behind it gripped me.
From the pure aesthetics of tanka of course, its value probably could be questioned, but more than any work on moon-viewing at Mount Obasute, this poem by the man in the story stirred me immensely. The theme of this tale, which had been etched on my heart during my childhood, returned to me transformed here as a poem.
II
FOR A LONG time I really knew nothing about either Obasute Station on the Shinonoi Line or the immediately surrounding area. I had made trips in that direction, but mostly I came to that area at night, or even if it was during the day, I passed the station without noticing it and never had any particular connection with it.
It was my mother who sometime later provided me with the occasion to recall the Legend of Mount Obasute. Apropos of nothing, my mother suddenly said, "They say that Mount Obasute's a famous place for moon-viewing, so the old folks may have been quite happy even though they were abandoned there. If even now there was an ordinance that old people had to be gotten rid of, I'd go happily. I think it would be just fine to be able to live alone. Besides, if you have to be discarded, you may even get used to it."
My mother was just seventy. Her words grated on the ears of the members of my family who heard them just like sarcasm. My younger brother and sisters were also there at the time, and they all took on expressions of surprise and shock. This occurred at a time when there were those post-war shortages of everything; it was a time when the general attitude toward the family system showed signs of hysterical change, and there were all those petty disputes that happen between the young people and the old men and women. My family was certainly no exception, but by this I do not mean that every problem was of such magnitude as to make my mother consider escaping from the family, so to speak. My mother, realizing that she had just reached seventy, the age to be left in the mountains in the world of obasute legends, presumably because of the strength of her pride and the spirit of stalwartness with which she was born, to
ok it into her head instantly to defy the atmosphere of this post-war period which so closely resembled something in those legends.
Like the old character depicted in that children's picture book, my mother's hair was white, but she had a bright youthful complexion and there wasn't a single wrinkle in her face. For a while, I eyed her face without a word. She had been raised with a dislike for old people, but now she herself was chronologically a creditably old woman. I felt a compassion for this mother of mine who had become so conscious of her old age and had such a defiant attitude about it. Curiously, from then on, I became obsessed by the whole setting of the Shinano obasute story.
Shortly after that I had many opportunities to take trips in connection with my work, and several times a year I had to go to the Shinano area. When I used the Chuo Line, I often passed the small Obasute Station nestled in among the hills. It became impossible for me to regard with the same dispassion as I viewed the scenery at other places either the Zenkoji Plain, which opens out from there in a vast expanse, or the Chikuma River, which meanders over that plain in a thousand curves, as its name implies, glittering with a cold luster like the belly of a snake. On the other hand, sometimes I took the Shin-etsu Line. Since trains on this line run along the low-lying plain which I used to look out across from the Chuo Line, on reaching the area around Togura, above the window sill I could spot the slope of the hill opposite Obasute Station, which I could just about identify by the red roof of the station. Always, as I looked out across that whole stretch of land in this vicinity, I was filled with a sort of emotion as I wondered about things connected with obasute.
I of course had practically no interest in Obasute as a moon-viewing site. True enough, I recognized that there undoubtedly was a splendor in looking at the moon filling the clear Shinano air and shining across the entire panorama of the open country which contained the Chikuma and Sai Rivers, but I didn't believe that the Obasute moon could ever surpass the moon I had watched shining over the bleak flatlands of Manchuria during the war. Without exception, when I passed through the vicinity around Obasute, a deep emotion began to take hold of me—that my aged mother was certainly sitting up there. One time, when I passed Obasute Station, there floated before my eyes an apparition of me tramping around in that area carrying my mother on my back.
Of course, the setting is in ancient times. I do not see the flourish of modern homes which dot the hillocks at the foot of the mountain and extend out over the bleak plain. Besides, it is night and the moonbeams are falling, blue over the surrounding area, just like in the illustration in the Obasute-Yama picture book. Only my mother's shadow and mine are black.
"Where on earth do you say you'll leave me?" asks my mother.
She is past seventy and her entire body has become miniscule. Her body is so light that it is depressing, but nevertheless I am tired anyhow, exhausted from walking around all over with a human being on my back. There is a giddiness in my legs with every step I take.
"How about here?" I ask. "If I build a small hut around here . . ."
"A place like this? Ugh!" My mother has a young voice. Her body is frail but she is strong-willed, and not the slightest abatement in her uncompromising nature shows through even under circumstances like these, when I'm in the process of abandoning her. "Isn't it dangerous beside the cliffs when it rains? What if there are landslides? I wonder if there isn't a more sensible place?"
"I don't think so. Your demands are too extravagant, Mama. Still, how would it be if I rented the outhouse of that temple we just saw?"
"Oh, no! No! No!" Mother, on my back, kicks her feet and pounds with her hands like a spoiled child. "There would be lots of mosquitoes there in the summer. Besides, the building is old. And wouldn't that room be dark and gloomy? You're unkind. Really you are!"
I am bewildered, at a loss.
"If that's the case," say I, "I'd just as soon take you back home again. I don't know why it wouldn't be better to go back home to a crowded, noisy place with everybody around rather than to be here in a place like this."
"Again you're talking like that! Now that I've purposely left home, I wouldn't return for anything in the world. I wouldn't be back with everybody again for anything. 1 don't like the people at home; I don't like the people in the village. I only have a few years left, so I won't be satisfied unless I'm allowed to live alone and do as I please."
"You're just like a spoiled child. You really are, Mama."
"Then I'm a spoiled child. It's my nature to be spoiled, so I can't help it. Even so, you just look me in the face and say 'you're spoiled, you're spoiled!' What's 'spoiled' about being abandoned?"
"Damn!"
"'Damn' all you want, but I'm not going back home. So hurry up and get rid of me."
"Even if I wanted to get rid of you, the problem is that I can't find a suitable place for you."
"You can't find one if you don't look for it. You won't be punished for looking for a place to leave your mother!"
"Didn't I just walk my feet off looking all this time? You probably realize that I'm staggering. I wonder just how far I have walked. We've gone to see ten houses already."
"But I don't fancy any of them. Was there a single house that looked habitable to you?"
"So, I've given up trying to rent a house. I said I would find a place that suited you and would build a hut for you, didn't I? But you complain wherever I go."
"'Complain,' you say! I'm an old woman. Oh, I wonder if there really is any place where I can live quietly alone. Couldn't you look harder? Oh! My back hurts! Couldn't you carry me on your back somehow so I'd be more comfortable? It's gotten cold! It feels as if the moonbeams are making my skin prickle."
"Be still, please, Mama, and don't kick up such a fuss. I'm tired too. It's fine for you, Mama. You're getting carried, but I'm the one who's doing the carrying, huh? Please, I beg you. Please, let's just go back home. It'll be a relief to everybody."
"No," snaps my mother.
"I don't understand your no's. We're not going to wander around like this all night. Honestly, we're going back home." When I say that, my mother raises her weak voice in a sudden and drastic change.
"Show a little bit of patience. Just in this, show a little bit of patience. All you want to do is take me home. I won't say anything else. Anything at all will be fine with me. Just leave me. You won't have to call me 'spoiled.' Over there you can see a hut. That one will be fine too. Just leave me there."
"Just a little while ago when we looked at that hut, didn't you say it was drafty and cold and that, besides, it leaks when it rains?"
"It doesn't particularly appeal to me, but that can't be helped. I'll put up with it. It's a house and secluded, and I possibly can live in it quietly and free from all worries and cares."
"But it's awful there. As your child, I can't leave you there."
"It doesn't matter to me if it's awful. Now hurry, go ahead and leave me there," says my mother. Then, as I linger there, the moonbeams bite their way into my body.
This is the sort of play-act I imagined taking place with my mother. My conversations with my mother coursed smoothly and naturally through my brain. My mother is spoiled, but there is a look of real earnestness on her face. Reality breaks through to me as I am being badgered by my mother—"Go ahead and leave me; go ahead and leave me; go ahead . . ."
It was strange how really naturally a character resembling my mother had been fused into the mother of my vision. This visionary one-act play—with me serving as the stage for this obasute-drama—was fairly far removed from the theme of the Legend of Obasute on which it was patterned because, in my case, it was the wish of the mother herself to be abandoned; because she persisted in saying that she wanted to be left and then did not agree to anything; and because I remained there carrying my mother on my back as I wandered around the Obasute hills. But that strangeness in particular, I felt, had set something like a small lump of ice somewhere in my heart. But when that funny feeling had vanished, in its st
ead chills spread all over my body.
It was awful to have imagined my mother badgering me about wanting to be left. But, perhaps, imagining such a scene as this in which I was abandoning my mother might have been a way of getting something off my chest.
Even so, why did I imagine my mother like that? I have often thought about this for long periods of time. And I have tried putting myself on my own back in place of my mother. And I have thought that when I get to be an old man, I may be just like the mother of my vision.
III
THIS SUMMER, I went to deliver a lecture at a coal-mining town on the bank of the Enga River in northern Kyushu. There, at a Japanese-style inn, I met my younger sister Kiyoko whom I hadn't seen for two years. Kiyoko is the youngest of the four children in our family. She was married during the war and had two children, but there had been some sort of incident and she had fled from her husband's house, leaving him and the two children; for a while she returned to our parents' home; but now she had fled from that too on the grounds that she wanted to make her own way of life.
Even since I was small, I had liked this sister best of all my brothers and sisters, but I felt that there was something unpardonable in her selfish behavior. It wasn't anything like a cardinal sin, anything worth breaking relations over or never speaking to each other again—but Kiyoko, with her innate sensitivity, apparently realizing how I felt, did not write me a single letter after leaving home. For my part, all I even knew about her now was that she was working in northern Kyushu.
When I decided to make the trip to Kyushu, however, I considered going to see my sister. Accordingly, before I left Tokyo, I asked my mother for her address and sent her a telegram saying that I wanted to meet her. "Kiyoko might come to meet me, and then again she might not come," I thought.
Counterfeiter and Other Stories Page 7
