A Bridge for Passing: A Meditation on Love, Loss, and Faith

by Pearl S. Buck

  The last scene of that burning day was outside in the barnyard. It was nearly twilight, the crowd was now several hundred people of all ages. They ringed us around, always quiet and respectful, while the actors prepared the set, complete with cart, ox, produce and farm family. This time our family included Setsu’s pet duck and her dog. The duck, which in the script is a little duck, in reality turned out to be a huge duck, the great-grandfather of all living ducks, and when our Setsu struggled to hold him under her arms I was reminded of Alice in Wonderland and the flamingo in the croquet game with the Duchess. The dog, a gay fox terrier type—although the tail was wrong, so I did not know quite what it was—would not gambol about harmlessly as it was supposed to do, but insisted upon chasing chickens madly, thereby upsetting a mother hen with a large family of chicks, not to mention an unknown number of white pullets, who apparently had never seen a dog before. The duck was carried off stage by Setsu, and the dog controlled and chastened and the scene proceeded.

  At this moment I heard human cackles behind me as Father unloaded the cart. The cackles were hoots of laughter from two dirt farmers in the crowd who were overcome with amusement at Father’s unrealistic handling of the pole and two baskets. They obviously did not believe in him as a fanner. As for Mother, when she appeared it was the women’s turn to laugh. Not one of them was pretty, and Mother was pretty. So how could she be a farmer’s wife? It was a question. Perhaps Mother was too pretty. But can a woman be too pretty in a movie?

  The scene was over at last and we were getting ready for the next one, rushing against the darkness falling so fast in this hot climate, when suddenly I heard loud barks, as though from an immense and aged dog. I could not imagine what it was. There was no dog indigenous to the farm. I advanced to the stable to investigate and I smelled pig. It could not be pig, because it barked like dog. But it was pig, an enormous tough-looking old pig, male gender, barking like a cross old dog. I inquired through an interpreter why the pig barked like a dog when he was not a dog. The answer was simple. “We do not know why pig barks like dog.” That was all. The pig continued to bark, the darkness fell, the assistant cameraman announced that we could not finish the next scene because the light on the mountain had faded. We gathered ourselves together and left. The pig stopped barking, the crowd ebbed away into the night, and we ebbed, too. Another day had passed. Tomorrow was a Sunday and we were to rest, although we had been warned that we were not to expect more Sundays off. From now on it was seven days a week, twelve hours a day. Sufficient unto the day—I thought only of bath and bed. Japanese bath and Japanese bed.

  Such a wind arose in the night that I dreamed we were having a typhoon. The dream was a remnant of childhood, I suppose, or of former life upon the island, or perhaps only of The Big Wave itself, created by my own mind. Perhaps it was no more than a conversation the night before with the innkeeper’s wife. This inn, she told me, had often been struck by typhoons, the last only last year, when the sea rushed into this very room, where I lived. At any rate, I woke, listening to the wind, and I remembered an August afternoon, long ago. I had stood upon a mountainside facing the sea, south of Japan. A typhoon was brewing somewhere over the horizon. We had been given warning and in all common sense I should have been safe inside a house with the windows battened down and the doors barred. No one knows what a typhoon will do. It is uncontrolled and therefore unpredictable. It is a release of senseless force and its only accomplishment is destruction.

  I had seen many typhoons, however, in my Asian childhood and I had the wish, that day, to see one more. A typhoon is very much like a hurricane but the hurricanes I had seen in New England and Pennsylvania were not typhoons. The tropics or near tropics provide a volcanic power for wind and rain. We lived in a sub-tropical climate two hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, and yet to this day I can remember my father’s stern command and my mother’s anxious face.

  “There’s a typhoon coming! Get the shutters barred and the doors locked!”

  While the sky darkened and the first low growl of the winds rose into a sullen roar, we sat waiting and listening. Trees would break and walls would crumble and the house itself would quiver when the attack came, but we could do nothing except wait and listen. When it was over and silence fell at last, we opened the doors and windows. What we saw was always the same—destruction everywhere.

  “Stupid,” my mother would say. “So stupid!”

  It was the memory of her invariable comment that had given me the idea of the typhoon for a story, and had sent me to the mountainside that morning long ago on a previous visit to Japan. The radio had announced a typhoon.

  It had come just after one o’clock, preceded by a strange distant sound over the lifting horizon. I had taken shelter under the rock of what was a sort of cave, having made sure that this rock was part of the spine of the mountain and not some treacherous boulder to crash down upon me in the storm. I had made sure, too, that I was high enough on the mountain so that the sea could not reach me. And I had to take heed that there were no trees near by to fall upon me. All in all, I was as safe as a person could be who had decided upon risk.

  There I sat, then waiting but this time alone and without family or house to shelter me. It was a profound experience, terrifying and rewarding, and it provided the scene I wanted for the beginning of the story. Let me describe it as best I can. The typhoon came out of the sea first as a deep hollow roar. Then it appeared as a monstrous black cloud. The cloud seemed a thing alive, shaping itself this way and that, torn by contending winds. However it might stretch to right or left, it continued to spread upward and reach toward east and west. The day darkened to twilight and the dreaded roar of sound came rushing toward me from out of the depths. I crouched behind my rock and waited.

  At first, I remember, there was no rain, only the wild winds and the tossing sea. An hour earlier the sea had been calm and blue. Now it was black and streaked with crests of white foam. When the rain came it was all of a sudden, as though the clouds had opened and spilled. A curtain of rain fell between mountain and sea, a solid sheet of water three feet away from me. The grass and brush on the mountainside flattened under the wind and the rain. I was surrounded by the madness, the unreason, of uncontrolled, undisciplined energy. None of this made any sense. It was worse than useless—it was nature destroying its own creation—its own self. To create by the long process of growth and then to destroy by a fit of wild emotion—was this not madness, was this not unreason? I had the beginning of my story.

  The storm spent itself at last. The winds dispersed, the rain slackened to a drizzle and a mist, the cloud fell apart and the sun shone through. I came out from my shelter and surveyed the ruin left behind. Trees had fallen on the lower levels, gullies were dug into the earth between the rocks, the very grass and underbrush lay flat and exhausted. I could only guess what havoc had been wreaked upon the villages along the coast, the fishing boats broken and tossed out to sea, houses smashed, breakwaters wrenched apart, sea walls crumbled. It was, as my mother had said, all very stupid. It was useless.

  I have seen this same waste take place in human life, in human beings, in terms of human emotions.

  I lay there in my Japanese bed, years later, and mused on the similarity of typhoon energy and energy of human emotion. Uncontrolled, it destroys. But must emotion be destructive? And if not, when is it valuable and why? How can we use emotion as helpful energy, necessary energy for living? What are the uses of emotion and what are the disciplines necessary for its helpful use? These were the questions I longed to answer, first for myself and then for others. I put myself first for I am the lens through which I view others.

  And as always, when I cannot answer my own questions, I send my mind, my heart, in search of him. He could not answer, not always, but he had a talent for directing the search by questions of his own, skillful and enlarging. His was not a profound mind. I cannot pretend that he could always follow me in the search to the conclusions that come one by one, through
which one proceeds not as absolutes but as steps toward truth. Truth itself is, of course, no absolute. Perhaps, indeed, it pervades the process, existing in everything and everywhere as eternally as time itself, a wholeness of which at any stage we see only part. He did not possess the conceptual mind nor had he the scholar’s disciplines, in which I have been trained. It was understood that there was much that we could not share. Our natures were essentially different. Our enjoyments even in music and literature were unlike. We both loved music, for example, but I am happiest when I am working on a Beethoven sonata or with Chopin. He enjoyed lighter music, which I also enjoy, but only as caviar. On the other hand I am deeply interested in jazz, not so much musically as psychologically, and he had no interest in jazz on any terms. He had no interest, either, in science, although he did have an academic interest in technology. Since he was a determined atheist, he could accept but not share my unending involvement with theoretician physicists, and the tremendous significance of their recent discoveries.

  What he did have was a brilliant intuitive mind, and what was more rare, the ability to appreciate what he could not comprehend. He stimulated by skillful questions, he seemed never to lead although he did not follow, he uncovered without shaping. He provided an atmosphere in which I could think more clearly, create more spontaneously than I might otherwise have been able to do. He could listen to me think aloud around and above and under a subject that interested me, allowing me to range freely as though I were alone, his questions never guideposts but invitations to pathways I might not have noticed for myself.

  I realize that now, alas, I have no one with whom to talk. Be still, my soul!

  The schedule called for outdoor work, a picnic scene with little Setsu and a harvest scene, then field and plowing but it was raining again. We proceeded nevertheless to within walking distance of the site, a charming place on a terraced hillside, and in the background a gray old Japanese cemetery. It was upon one of these stone graves that Setsu was to wait with food for Father and Yukio, with what disastrous and naughty results I must not here tell. The contrast of the mossy old tombstones and our pretty little girl was the contrast of life against death and I had looked forward to the scene. We waited in the cars while the rain poured down. A kind farm family invited us to shelter in their comfortable house, and we went in, gratefully. The farm wife prepared tea for us, and we discussed what to do. Mountains and sea here combined to make weather a mystery even more uncertain than in most parts of the world. The sky looked as though it would continue to empty itself for forty days. We decided to go to the farmhouse and shoot a rain scene, appropriately, and a kitchen interior. The assistant director was to go to Kitsu, our fishing village, and get boats ready for the scene when the boats put out for the shark beach in the rain.

  The morning was a disappointment, nevertheless. The rain continued into deluge. The farmyard became a lake of mud and the thatched eaves dripped dismally. Inside the farmhouse the crew worked without enthusiasm. The cameraman put off evil moments of beginning work, the director grew impatient and I grew bored. Again and again the first scene was set and again and again the camera made some monstrous mistake. It was twelve o’clock by the time we were ready to shoot the rain scene, and then the sun came out, weakly but enough to make it necessary to fake rain. So on a rainy day the men climbed on the farmhouse roof and rigged up the best rainmaking machine in the world, namely, a hollow bamboo pierced with holes, with a rubber hose attached to one end and the other end stopped. A beautiful flow of fake rain dripped over the eaves and down into the lake of mud made by the real rain. Finally we got a take, and lunch hour arrived. The day was so dismal it was not even a good lunch.

  The kitchen scene and the rainy beach scene were among our best. The kitchen scene was the earthquake. Our farm mother, in a daze, hurried about, trying to save her dishes. She was so distraught that she forgot to put down a basket of eggs and they broke and increased the confusion. There is, in fact, nothing more confusing than a basket of broken eggs, especially when a woman forgets to put them down before she rushes around her kitchen trying to save her dishes during an earthquake, and sees in addition that the oil lamp is burning and may set the house on fire. It was quite a scene and in her reality of acting our mother cut her foot twice on broken glass and the trained nurse, whom we were required to have with us at all times, at last had a chance to save someone’s life. She came forward with an air of importance and put some adhesive tape on Mother’s foot. We were impressed by this efficiency and felt somewhat cheered.

  Sheer stubbornness prevented me from giving up and wending my muddy way back to the hotel, and I was glad. With that inexplicable upturn which seems inevitable when the worst arrives, the afternoon work suddenly became exciting. The farmhouse actors were dismissed for the day and the fisherman’s family summoned for the beach scenes. The rainy scene finished, the sun had withdrawn and again rain fell in deluge. It became apparent now that the American director had every intention of dismissing me, too, on the grounds of the storm, rain, lashing waves and so forth. When I declined to be dismissed he put forth vague suggestions that I might break a leg or something on the steep and narrow path down to Kitsu, and he had had enough of falls. I refused this ridiculous reasoning, for my two favorite houses are in the countryside of Pennsylvania and the mountains of Vermont, and I walk prodigiously everywhere and climb like a goat—female—and never have slipped or fallen, unless someone dropped me as a baby, which I do not remember. I invited this director to pay no attention to me except to check before going back to the hotel in the evening in order to see that I was in some car or other, and so I went to Kitsu.

  I shall never cease to be grateful that I did, for the experience gave me—well, here it is:

  I walked down the narrow winding cliff path without mishap, and descended to the beach, ostentatiously and unobtrusively pretending that I was not there. It was raining gloriously, a rough downpour, which I love. I was protected thoroughly by my raincoat and hat, and also by various umbrellas held over my head by kind villagers. My only complaint in Japan is that people are so kind that I always find an umbrella over my head, a fan in my hand, and a stool where I sit. While the director shaped up his scene and peered into the camera, I stood with my back to the high wall in front of Toru’s house and gazed out over the gray sea and gray sky. Our actor, Toru’s father, was a fisherman, and at the signal he began to blow the great conch shell for the boats.

  “Cut!” the director yelled.

  We cut. All the village was out under huge umbrellas to watch what was going on and some unwary boy had dashed across the scene to a better place on the other side. The village headman, who was our paid ally, had forbidden noise or movement, and at this he went into a fine paroxysm of fury. I speak and understand no Japanese, but I could see that he was calling his fellow villagers a lot of damned blockheads and did they want to show the world what idiots they were, not knowing that when you cross a camera you ruin the picture being made by Americans here in the village of Kitsu for the first time in history, a place unknown to the world until now as the home of children and fools? They all grinned sheepishly and fell back six inches or so. Suddenly another boy who had not been listening dashed between the frightfully bowed and hairy legs of the headman himself, not remembering to fold his umbrella first. The results were disastrous, the umbrella was ruined.

  Here I pause for a moment to remember fondly that headman in the village of Kitsu. He had a round, shaven head, a rugged, beaming face, legs as crooked as a crab’s, an iron will, and a heart fit for a king. He was a dictator, of course, and he ruled his people absolutely. Every night he told them what they could do the next day and what they must not do. Thus after the reprehensible behavior of the boys, the villagers were forbidden to stare at us or hang about. They were to continue their usual duties as though we were not there, except, as a special favor, for one hour between five and six in late afternoon and then they must stand no nearer than fifty feet away to watch
us, and in total silence. His enthusiasm for the picture was touching for he was convinced that the story is about him. Like Toru, his entire family was swept away by a tidal wave when he was only a little boy.

  Standing there, my back against the wet sea wall, I watched the cameraman get a lovely shot of fishermen carrying their nets and running down to the sea and putting off in their fishing boats through the waves and rain. Camera then raced to the big breakwater, which made an ideal platform from which to film the boats driving into the open sea. The villagers rushed after the camera and I was swallowed among the crowd. I was all but pushed off the breakwater into the sea, which would have made the director so eternally right that I daresay I would have had to take the next plane home in order to escape the wrath of God. But I was fortunately saved by a strong villager who breathed warmly into my face—he had halitosis, alas, and of the fiercest sort, a pity, for he was such a nice man. He told me, breathing hard, that he saw me on the Tokyo television and may he hold his umbrella over my head, and why isn’t someone looking after such an important person as I am? I said that no one ever looked after me when pictures were being made, and thanks, I don’t need the umbrella because I have a rain hat and so I escaped him to go and sit upon a stone pier and watch the matchless beauty of Japanese fishing boats putting out to open sea.

  I slap all the dull routine of their being told to come back and do it over again because of the cameraman’s locking the camera so that he could not pan and then his thinking something was wrong with the camera and the American saying bitterly that the only thing wrong was the cameraman, and all such small talk. Let me tell only of sitting there in the rain, that slanting rain which Hokusai loved so well to portray in his prints. Surrounded by the green and terraced hills and the higher mountains swathed in clouds, and gazing out over the endless sea, I watched for the boats to return and saw them as they rounded the end of the breakwater. How beautiful they were, how superb in shape and speed and grace! Three men sat in each boat, all rowing, not the choppy rowing of western boats, but smoothly as a fish swims, these rowers never lifted their oars from the water. I studied the rhythm of those oars. It was in contrapuntal thirds, no oar moving at exactly the same instant as the other, and yet all movement flowing. Suddenly I recognized the rhythm—it was that of the fins of a fish. The boats moved through the sea as a fish moves by its fins. I felt the deep satisfaction of right conclusion. That is exactly what it was and I was slow not to know it until this late date in my life, although I have been watching such boats since I was a child, spending my summers in Japan.