by Matsuda Aoko
—
These days, hardly anyone comes to visit Enoki. She’s become nothing but an old relic. On rare occasions, some strange type with a fixation for legends of the past will take the trip out to see her. ‘Ah, it must be that one,’ she’ll hear someone say. They look at her as if she’s a museum exhibit and take photos. Women at their wits’ end no longer come to see Enoki. She’s sure they must still exist, but in any case, they have no need to rely on her any more.
Enoki has never for a second believed that she has the special powers that everyone thinks she has, but just hypothetically speaking, if she had, then she would have served a function not dissimilar to that of formula milk in the days before it existed. With this in mind, she feels she can finally accept the crazy commotion that had descended on her back then.
The shrine grounds are quiet. Enoki can hear a bird somewhere off in the distance. The wind ruffles her leaves indifferently. Now nothing, nobody, pays Enoki any attention. The days pass. The seasons change. Enoki isn’t lonely. If anything, she is relieved. The pressure on her has finally lifted. Like it has always been, really, her resin is now just resin, and her burrs are just burrs.
At last, Enoki can be just a tree.
Silently Burning
In Japan, every Buddhist temple and Shinto shrine has several unique woodcut stamps, or shuin. For a small fee, worshippers can have the temple or shrine calligrapher (often one of the monks or the kannushi) print these stamps in scarlet ink on a piece of paper, and write the name of the temple, the day of the visit and so on around the stamped portions. People often collect these stamps in purpose-made albums called shuinchō.
It always makes me nervous when they stare at my hands. Taking care not to falter, I set my brush down on the open page of the album I’ve been entrusted with and begin to write. Whatever happens, I mustn’t make a mistake. Meanwhile, the owner of the album stands on the other side of the counter of the small temple office, staring fixedly at my handiwork. Maybe she isn’t actually staring, but I feel like she is.
The visitor is a woman in her fifties. She’s most likely concerned because I appear too young to be doing this job. I’m not wearing any make-up, and with my jet-black hair in a simple shoulder-length cut, I probably look even younger than I am. I have a fringe, which doesn’t help matters either. As more people hand over their albums to me, their hesitation is palpable. ‘Is the chief priest not in today?’ some of them ask, their eyes full of misgivings. Their fervent hope that it’ll be the chief priest who writes in their album rather than me spills out of their every pore.
All this makes me a bit despondent, but I can understand why they would feel that way. The younger someone is, the less accomplished their calligraphy is likely to be – that’s the simple fact of the matter. People treasure their shuin albums, and if they’ve gone out of their way to get them signed and stamped, then they want them to look as elegant as possible. They want the calligraphy to be beautiful. I don’t have an album but if I did, I’m sure I’d feel the same. Ultimately, though, everyone gets it: album-signing is about the unpredictable, unrepeatable encounter between calligrapher and album owner. That’s all part of the fun.
When I’ve finished, I cover my handiwork with a piece of thin blotting paper cut to exactly the right size, then close the album. With the blotting paper on top I can still see the letters I have inked, but it looks as if the text has suddenly moved further away, something I always find a bit disconcerting. Cutting pieces of blotting paper in half so that they fit the albums is one of several tasks I perform when I’m at a loose end. There is always a good number of people visiting the temple to collect stamps, so if I don’t cut up fresh batches of blotting paper regularly, I often end up short.
‘That’s three hundred yen,’ I say, returning the album with its prettily patterned washi cover to its owner. The woman must have had her money ready because it appears on my palm instantly, like some magic trick. Under the overcast, drizzling sky, the three silver coins are dazzlingly bright.
I assume the woman must have checked my handiwork then and there, because as I am putting the money away, I hear her speak.
‘But what lovely writing!’ Her words seem to have flown out of her mouth of their own accord.
‘Thank you,’ I say, looking up and then immediately dipping my head. I’m not very good at looking people in the eye while I talk.
There is a particular expression that most people’s faces take on when they see my calligraphy, somewhere between surprise and satisfaction. Their expressions also say: I’m glad I got this girl to write in my album. It seems like the more they doubt my abilities to begin with, the more overjoyed they are when they see the results. It’s hardly my fault if they decide to underestimate what a young woman like me is capable of, but I’m still relieved to see them looking pleased.
—
I’ve been studying calligraphy since I was small. The other kids I knew all turned their noses up at it because it was uncool, but I liked the hush that would settle upon my insides when I was doing it. The simplicity of the world that took shape on the page in front of me, a world made up of ink, and ink alone, provided me with an escape route from the blaring clatter of the outside world.
While I was at university, the chief priest at my local temple began to suffer from chronic back pain, and a neighbour introduced me as a potential replacement. That was how I came by my first temporary job as temple calligrapher. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t just calligraphy I was doing – there were other menial tasks involved, but I enjoyed those too. There was something deeply satisfying about having a fixed, unchanging set of duties to accomplish.
Even after graduating from university I continued to attend calligraphy lessons, and so the job offers kept coming. Sometimes I’d go to different temples on different days of the week, but my tasks were always pretty much the same. Every day, I would sit there, brush in hand, and write.
I found I liked sitting in the spot reserved for the calligrapher inside the temple office, which sold talismans and ema – wooden plaques for people to write their prayers on. All kinds of people would come by, do whatever they’d come to do, and leave. There were always certain locals who came day in day out, and whom I got to know by sight. Sometimes they would give me boiled sweets or little cakes. Perhaps they found it funny, seeing a young person like me sitting there so solemnly in my monk’s work clothes. I’ve always been told that I don’t have a very expressive face.
People come to temples to pray for different things: safety for their family, academic success, safety on the roads, warding off evil, luck in love, and so on.
They pray, and I watch. I come to the temple practically every day, but I’ve never once prayed. I guess it’s not just expressiveness I’m lacking in, but feelings too – by which I mean to say, I don’t have any idea what I’d pray for. I don’t have any wishes. Even when I was little, and all the other kids would write their wishes on coloured strips of paper to be strung up for the tanabata festival, I would never have anything to write. But I liked the act of writing on those little slips so much, I’d invent wishes just so I could write them all down, filling in strips on my friends’ behalf too.
Even romantic relationships hold little interest for me. They come and they go, without my ever feeling any real sense of involvement.
Anyway, as I worked between different temples I realised that I had become a kind of travelling calligrapher. Every time I visited a new temple and showed the chief priest and his wife a sample of my calligraphy, they would look both pleased and relieved, and comment that they could see they were in safe hands with me. Whatever kind of day it was – sunny, or rainy, or white with snow – the world seen from the temple office always looked a little distant, and tranquil, as if I was standing on the edge of the world looking in.
—
‘What are these netsuke supposed to be?’ a woman whose album I’d just
signed addresses me suddenly. I’d assumed our interaction was over when I saw her tuck away the finished album inside her LeSportsac bag, so I’d tuned out. Now I have no idea what she’s talking about and feel flustered. I am rarely asked questions, and it takes me a while to gear up to answer them.
I follow the direction of the woman’s gaze and see that she is looking at the metal netsuke, arranged next to the talismans to ward off fire. The netsuke are little oblong ornaments with tiny bells attached to them, and the sections intended to signify empty spaces have been filled in with patterns, so I can see how they might be hard to identify. They look a bit like miniature slatted fences.
‘Oh, those… They’re… They’re ladders.’
The woman’s face instantly resolves itself into a look of comprehension.
‘Oh, of course! This is the Oshichi temple, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
The woman nods, then briskly walks away.
—
Visitors to this temple fall roughly into three categories:
People who happen to be passing and decide to drop in;
People who come with a purpose – maybe because they’re collecting temple stamps, or they want to pray – but aren’t really aware what kind of temple this is;
People who come here because of Oshichi, the greengrocer’s daughter.
(You can subdivide this last category into two further categories: a) those who aren’t in love with anyone at the minute but feel a connection with Oshichi and want to pay her a visit; and b) those who have a special someone in mind and come to pray to Oshichi for luck in love.)
I’ve been working at this temple for a few years now, and in this regard, it’s a little different from all the others. Visitors to other temples fall exclusively into categories one and two, but because this temple has Oshichi’s grave inside its grounds, it boasts this unique third category of attendees.
I wasn’t aware of this until I started working here, but it is believed that Oshichi was an actual person, burned to death a few hundred years ago for arson. Allegedly, it was rare for women to be dealt that punishment at that time, but somehow Oshichi managed it. What was more, her reason for committing arson was none other than love. So badly had she yearned to see her beloved again, she’d set her house on fire so she could take refuge in the temple where he worked. Her story captured people’s imaginations, and has been retold goodness knows how many times since. Some accounts claim she didn’t actually set anything on fire, that she had merely climbed up the ladder in the village and sounded the bell and beat the drum and done all the other things that were done back in the day to alert the villagers to a fire, thereby creating an excuse to see her love. She was an old-school romantic type, you could say, definitely on the obsessive end of the spectrum. So, it follows that people who fall into the third category – those who deliberately come here to pray for luck in love at Oshichi’s temple – often seem to be of that same type. I can identify them immediately. All threes – for some reason the threes are almost always women – tend to behave exactly the same way.
A three enters the temple grounds with a determined stride and heads straight to Oshichi’s grave. Like Oshichi, her unerring gaze is fixed on one thing alone, and she registers interest in nothing else. Her prayers are protracted. Her offerings are more generous than those of other visitors. She places flowers on Oshichi’s grave or presents her with other gifts she has brought. Then she stands there for a curiously long time. Possibly she is talking to Oshichi inside her head, telling her the things that she can’t tell other people. On occasion, the length of time that a three spends in front of the grave will beggar belief.
When the three finally tears herself away from Oshichi, she proceeds to the main temple, where once again she spends a long time in prayer. She doesn’t scrimp on her offering there, either. Then she drops by the temple office where I am sitting, and wordlessly buys up ladder netsuke and various talismans, as if she has researched them all beforehand and knows exactly what they signify. At this time, she reminds me of a diehard fan stocking up on merchandise. Finally, the three calls in one more time at Oshichi’s grave, offers another protracted prayer, and then leaves the temple with the same determined stride that marked her entrance.
Watching this sequence from the temple office, I am awed. I don’t have an obsessive personality, but these women remind me a lot of certain friends of mine who are fixated on something – figure skating, a particular pop star, a hobby, what have you. Somewhere inside, these people are all quietly on fire.
I get the feeling that Japanese women have a peculiar capacity for obsession. When they are truly into something, they are absolutely single-minded in their fixation. They give it all they have. They throw heaps of money at it, research it endlessly, and do whatever seems necessary to draw closer to it. You sense real passion there.
Imagine if someone like that fell for, say, a work colleague, with the same passion. As a full-grown adult, she can hardly let those roaring flames in her chest govern her behaviour, and so necessarily, some of her passion is left unspent. Maybe that’s why such women visit Oshichi’s grave. They want to pay their respects to the woman who allowed the flames of her passion to blaze to their fullest, and who was herself burned to death as a result. Most likely they feel like Oshichi is the only one who can understand the fire inside them. The very idea that you have to rein in your heat even as love’s passion sets you ablaze… How restrictive life as a functional adult is!
When I first started working at the Oshichi temple, the idea of praying for luck in love to someone who’d been burned at the stake for her excess of passion seemed like a sick joke, but as I watched the threes visit, I started to understand their motivation a lot better. By coming here, these women feel themselves connected with Oshichi across time. I started to think myself lucky to be working at such a temple, where all the Oshichi personality types congregate.
—
Seeing now that the temple grounds are empty, I step out of the office and quickly stroll around to check that everything is in order, then move over to Oshichi’s grave and sweep away the leaves that have gathered there. The fine drizzle has stopped, but the sky is still clouded over. Then, noticing an elderly man on the narrow path leading up to the temple, I slip back inside the office inconspicuously.
As I settle down on my floor cushion, I realise I’ve left the radio on. It’s an old bright red model that the priest has let me use so long as nobody is around. The voice coming from the speakers says something about a skeleton that has gone missing from some research institute. The police are currently investigating the identity of a mystery woman discovered on the security camera footage. The news item comes to an end, and I turn the radio off.
A skeleton? I cock my head in disbelief as I quickly wipe down my desk. The phrase ‘mystery woman’ makes me instantly picture a long-haired figure in a trench coat and sunglasses, but what did she really look like, I wonder. What could she have wanted badly enough with a skeleton that she would steal it from a research institute? A peculiar news item and no mistake. Still, peculiar things happen from time to time.
The old man appears outside the office, so I slide open the glass window and he holds out his album. I can see that slightly anxious expression on his face which means: surely it’s not this girl who’s going to do it?
‘Just a moment, please,’ I say quietly, ink up the stamps and press them onto the page, then take out my brush. The man moves two or three steps back and waits, fidgeting. I write the date in the corner followed by the usual characters, then place a square of blotting paper on top.
‘Here you are,’ I say hesitantly, calling to the grey-haired man who has now moved a little way off, and return his album. He hands me his three hundred yen, nods in thanks, and moves off. As he walks away, I see him open it up to check its newest entry, then turn back to glance at me, a look of
astonishment on his face.
—
With nothing in particular to do, I decide to take stock of the office supplies. Noticing that we are down to the very last surplus page – the pages we pre-prepare for people who have come without their albums, so they can stick them in at a later date – I set about creating some more.
As I am writing away on those bits of paper cut to match the size of the shuin album, the priest’s wife pops in to see how I am getting on.
‘Someone brought these round for us earlier.’ She places a little paper-wrapped cake on the corner of my desk together with a cup of green tea, then stands there watching me, a satisfied expression on her face.
‘You know, there’s something about the way you write. It’s not just proficient – there’s something a little fierce, a little passionate about it. Fiery, I suppose you could say. It just goes to show that you really can’t judge a book by its cover.’
This isn’t the first time the priest’s wife has paid me a compliment of this kind. Though I’m not too sure what they mean, both the chief priest and his wife seem to be under the impression that my calligraphy is a perfect match for Oshichi.
After the priest’s wife leaves, I continue making the surplus pages. There are two other part-time workers at the temple, but they can’t do calligraphy, so it seems like a good idea to get a bunch done while I have the chance.
