Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure

by Hideo Furukawa

  He murdered thirty to forty thousand people.

  That’s the kind of man that that Oda Nobunaga was. How can we see him as heroic?

  Given such figures, and to sum up those figures with none-too-fine a phrasing, one can see in Oda Nobunaga an “antipathy toward religion,” and it is not hard to imagine that he found in the Buddhism of his time what amounted to an outdated system, a system of rigid factions that cohered around particular religious schools of thought. He intended to pulverize the entire thing. Thinking about it that way, I cannot claim lack of sympathy for his position. But even so, it is simply too gruesome. Still, there is an emotional part of me that sympathizes with him, tells me there is a richness and depth to this Oda Nobunaga. I find myself telling myself that I have to accept aspects that I do not want to accept; in some contexts, I need to restrain myself. Then what of Toyotomi Hideyoshi? Toward Toyotomi I feel none of the richness that I feel towards Nobunaga. More, I see in him a cold emptiness that horrifies me. A nothingness. Nothing there. Maybe just a meaningless, foolish, rare idiocy, an unbridled desire to possess. And nothing more. I feel I need to lay out, as simple data, his two military incursions into the Korean peninsula. The first would be the first year of Bunroku (1592), when Hideyoshi organized nine army units with 160,000 soldiers, although he dispatched only 150,000 of them. Then again, in the second year of Keichō (1597), he dispatched 140,000 soldiers. In total, that makes seven years of Korean invasion. Too many details: I cannot organize them into written form right now. I am much too incensed by these details; I just cannot organize them into written form. Nonetheless, since I wrote about this very thing in The Holy Family, I will quote from that. Hideyoshi initiated a sword hunt—confiscating all the weapons from every peasant in the land—and in so doing established the beginnings of a caste system that placed the samurai warriors in a class completely separate from the farming peasants; my writing continued after an explanation of that development. The author of that work, me, wrote the following:

  What did the samurai warriors do? Having unified this “Japanese” archipelago, they set off on an invasive war against the Yi Dynasty of Korea. They quickly ravaged the peninsula. Then this man said, he would go on to say, “Kill all of the Yi Koreans, render that peninsula desolate.” Then he went on to say to his military generals, the daimyō, “As proof of your military prowess, slice the noses off the victims and have them sent back to our ‘Japan.’ ” Instead of their heads, their noses. They were, in fact, shipped back. Preserved in salt, preserved in vinegar, packed in barrels, boxes, and casks, and loaded onto ships. In number, they far exceeded 100,000. He personally commanded this. It was a standing order. Troops were sent to the Korean peninsula, after which they were ordered to gather Korean noses.

  This man, this Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

  Our ruler, under heaven.

  There are parts I couldn’t write. Those gathered noses are memorialized in a grave mound in front of a temple in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto. A nose grave mound. Mixed among those noses are those of noncombatants, of women and children. There are ears in there. All those ears, those noses, the quantity of them was to demonstrate military might. All of them, one by one, brutally chopped off. The supreme commander of this aggressive war was Toyotomi Hideyoshi. I don’t know how anyone could be empathetic toward him. I certainly cannot. There is a vacuity within Hideyoshi; it is the result of his sterile hunger, his inferiority complex. If we look across the last century, which is to say, the twentieth century according to the Christian calendar, if we look across the history—the world history—of that period and try to search out a similar figure, everyone will say Adolf Hitler; there is no denying it. But is it even possible to make Hitler the object of heroic veneration in post–World War II Germany—the nation including both East and West Germany? Hideyoshi and Hitler share a great deal, such as the inferiority complex of the small man, and humble births. But to return to Hideyoshi and Japanese history: Toyotomi Hideyoshi enacted repressive measures against Christians as well, but his famous “antipathy toward religion” is nothing more than empty form. It is nothing more than a mania to grab territories (a detail of Hideyoshi, and of the Western world, that has been covered up). He was successful in establishing the foundations for the four-part caste system of Japanese society (warriors, farmers, craftsmen, merchants), but being, himself, of the farmer caste, likely the child of peasants, he tried to suppress all of this in his official biography. He left hints that he might be the bastard child of an emperor. Thus Hideyoshi consummates his nihilism in those evil, totally senseless campaigns during the Keichō era, the campaigns during the Bunroku era; he dirties his hands by sending across the sea first 150,000 men and then 140,000. And at that time, military horses were dispatched as well. Sent to the Korean peninsula, maybe thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, unknown numbers of horses. Lost to the annals of history, not a jot written about them, these horses. I only mentioned this historical fact in The Holy Family. Even though I wrote it for the horses.

  There was so much anger when I wrote that.

  But the horses: more of them later.

  But to return to these provocative statements. Our history is nothing more than a history of killing people. What do you think of that? I am hoping it sounds more straightforward this time. If so, I can proceed without catchy summaries. Anyway, the real issues are ahead. When history is treated as “official national history,” it is almost inevitable that you are going to get biases. Our love of our own history produces in the collective populace the power to suppress, perhaps unconsciously—perhaps even consciously—inconvenient facts. This is not the intentional undertaking of a particular individual (or thing) but a covering up, accomplished almost automatically, via an anonymous filtering system. Official history is, by definition, a filtering system. All the more reason why these bushō military leaders are consumed to this extent. I wonder if I possess the skills to resist this. History that has the ability to jolt us: that is ideal—what I consider ideal—history.

  Think of official history as a book. A book comes into view; it seems to suggest that it has no blank spaces, no margins. But it does, it contains blank spaces. In those spaces I cram my own notes, copious notes that are not yet articulated thoughts, and in the end weave a new book solely from the notes in the margins.

  It’s parallel history. That’s the basic premise of The Holy Family. The only way I could achieve, as a novelist, a critique of that official history, outfitted with its filtering systems, was to work with the marginal histories, the suppressed histories. Or this: as a novelist I am able to insert some wild ideas into the assemblage and then call it a work of fiction. People will understand the paraphrasing of those wild ideas in story form, and they will be easily understood. In other words, I said, “Let your imagination run wild with that topic” to give birth to a tale. Good ideas sprout easily from a critical sensibility. Allow me to lay out that process, step by step.

  Step A. As an example of this history of killing people, I consider Japan’s Warring States period (of which some distillate still remains, still reverberates, still smolders as the source of so much even today). I start from there. I provide some abbreviated thoughts. About those innumerable bushō military types that occupied the Japanese archipelago. All of them rivals of all the others, all with their own fiefdoms, little countries, which rendered the country of “Japan” an agglomerate of nations. All would have had their own borders, but the majority were invisible. We can, of course, bracket off the rivers, coastlines, and major thoroughfares that mark borders. But what about the rest?

  Step B. Mountains. I see mountains as representatives of invisible borders; they separate, are hard to cross. Which leads me to wonder, in that case, who (or what) crosses back and forth daily across those invisible borders? Simple: itinerant mountain ascetics. The Shugendō monks, known as yamabushi, the word written with two characters: one for mountain 山and one that comprises the person radical and the character for inu, dog, 伏: y
amabushi, 山伏. They are believers, practitioners, of a mountain-based religion, located on official Buddhism’s farthest peripheries. Precisely speaking, the ascetic practice of the Kumano religion is known as the main mountain—Honzan—school, one of the denominations of esoteric Tendai Buddhist practice. Then there is the Yoshino ascetic practice known as the Tōzan—present mountain—school, one of the denominations of Shingon Buddhism. My personal interest is to extend the strain of religious thought way beyond the boundaries of this system of factional religion or denomination (which may be the essence of Japanese Buddhism) and identify the school farthest from the system: the third strain of asceticism known as Haguro practice. Where does one go to find the holy ground of that practice system? The Three Mountains of Dewa. That would be in present-day Yamagata Prefecture: Mt. Gassan, Mt. Yudono, and Mt. Haguro.

  Step C. Which leads me to examine the connections between the celebrated bushō military-leader types and the mountain ascetics who are as good as anonymous. The Warring States military leaders, the daimyō, had countless fierce soldiers at their command, but the rank-and-file troops could rarely cross the borders separating states. One reason being that many of them were in fact farmers called to serve as soldiers. But if one cannot cross borders, then military activities, particularly intelligence gathering, are severely constricted. It was those mountain ascetics who took this on; I take this as established historical fact. Which leads to the following query: strictly observant Buddhist monks would have forsworn marriage, but what about those Shūgendō monks? Among them would have been some seisō, who were the strictest in their observances. Probably a substantial number. Further, they were all “invisible soldiers” that were employed by the Warring States daimyō, and, naturally, they would have possessed military skills. Experts at sword, lance, or bow are too easy to spot, so what remains to a soldier if the obvious arts are unavailable? Body skills—martial arts—that’s what’s left. Out of necessity, the arts of hands and feet, surely. Extreme martial arts, which would have been effective during the Warring States period. That’s what I am thinking about.

  Step D. So I am examining the way these invisible martial arts, the combat of hands and feet, were handed down to successive generations. Obviously, monks who do not marry have no family lines, no succession of sons, to reveal knowledge to. It seems that there could have been only one way to pass on these arts, in secret. It would be through adopted sons. Sons that are not their natural offspring but serve as successors. But given the need for strict secrecy, a public adoption was not an option. It is my belief that they were kidnapped. I think this is what “spirited-away” was. Not hard to engage in some wild imaginings about the lineages of those kidnapped children: from the end of the Muromachi period into the present, the scions of those lines still exist, I imagine. And those wild imaginings get paraphrased as “fiction”; entirely appropriate, I think. Characters are born, and what follows are contemporary tragedies of murder.

  That’s as far as the process goes. From step A to D. This is the only way I could have developed the idea. In order to attack the “Japanese” history of murder that we have been saddled with I must create a murderer. Feels like a dead end; what do I do with that? Are these the skills needed for fiction, for creating, for fashioning?

  But he is not simply something I made up.

  Well, OK, those strange, deformed hands, I provided those.

  But he has his own memories.

  He is not made up, this Gyūichirō.

  “I have this memory,” he says.

  I was sixteen. I wasn’t driving yet. I would be soon, but not yet. But even so, “soon” was absolutely illegal. My means of transportation was limited to the bicycle. So that’s what I rode. Always, always. Like, every day. Out through the woods, onto the forest road, until the marsh came into view. I would go across it, that marshy ground. Every day, always at the same time. It was training, so what you’d expect. I went as far as the charcoal maker’s hut. Always on the bicycle. Everyone in the family knew it, the charcoal maker’s hut in the mountain behind our house. I had no use for the actual hut. My use was outside, in the clearing. I kept a lookout for bamboo stalks cut to the appropriate length and width, and suitable grass and sticks. All for training purposes. I also prepared the wooden box. A box that I filled with pebbles I had dried. Sometimes I would pack in quite a number of round stones that I had picked up from the river bottom, to make a training apparatus for forging calluses. You know, right, that I mean forging my fingers? I am talking about my two hands, right and left, and the tips of my eight fingers, not counting the two thumbs, and turning those fingers into tools, into lethal weapons. Takes years. Years and years, seems like. I heard a sound. I was always hearing sounds. Jarari is the sound of the river stones; if I thrust my fingers deep into them it sounds like zaa, zazzaa, zaa. Hearing things not just when I was sixteen but from years before.

  But what I remember is one particular day when I was sixteen.

  Not the normal everyday, but a particular day. I can tell you what the day looked like; I can tell you what the sky looked like, hawks flying high in the sky. Four of them, in circles. Four circles, each different from the others, not drawing a single concentric spiral. My younger sister was already born. This is the sister that is now pregnant. My sister and I are nine years apart. Means she would’ve been seven. An elementary-school student, with her school backpack. I remember it as bright yellow. Yes, the color of that backpack, I have a vivid clear memory of it, canary yellow. Given the time of day, she must have been on her way home from school. It was a road through the forest that no one ever traveled, so hardly a school-commuter route; I guess she decided on her own to wander this road, aimlessly wandering around. I think she might’ve been pretending to be a wild forest animal. She just shows up where I was. Now, my sister never came home from school in a group like the others. And for many years now she has not said a word. No speech from the time she was four. She must’ve decided to be combative, that she just “wouldn’t talk.” And she didn’t. Anyway, this was a day like no other. I am remembering that day, truly unusual, when I was sixteen. Lift my eyes and see four hawks tracing circles in the sky. Lower my eyes back down and see my little sister with her yellow backpack. She had come to the charcoal maker’s hut and was now staring at me. Me there, forging my fingers, struggling to turn the eight fingers of my two hands into lethal weapons. Not a word, of course not. She then walked over a little closer, came over to where I was, still wordless; but of course.

  She took my hand.

  Took my left hand.

  She stroked the palm of my hand, then she rubbed each of my fingers, in order.

  “Hard,” she said. To get that one word out took some tens of seconds. In order to say “hard” required the effort of her entire body. Took all of her small body. I thought the backpack might slide right off of her. I was stunned, unable to say anything at first. I was just so surprised, rendered speechless for a moment, and then was able to say something. I said something, it was something having to do with our being born into this world. Something, maybe something like, “The three of us, two brothers and a sister, here, got ourselves born into this world.”

  There was a child. Until the appearance of a brother and then a sister, a single child, alone. Can’t become an elder brother that way. Four years old, then five, then six. This is not the first of his memories, but he remembers the scene. Back there on the Three Mountains of Dewa, he was spirited away. Having strayed off by himself, he could hear throughout the area, through the forest, across the space of the heavens, the ring of laughter, KERAKERA­KERA, KERAKERAKERAKERA. He was not found until three days later. He was out there in the mountains, five years old, maybe six, maybe four, standing still, in a trancelike state. It was after that that the younger brother, then the younger sister, were born. So the child finally became an older brother. Indeed, became an eldest son. He knew that had he not been born first none of the others would have been born; there would have be
en no brothers and sisters. He knew, “I had fashioned something.” Meaning he could not fail the younger brother and sister. Forever, unable to forsake them, forever to be an eldest son, cursed with it. But as he grew, he would see strange beings. He encountered the karasu tengu, the crow-billed goblin. Maybe a personality disorder? There was no escape for him. The fact was he was confined by those six prefectures in the northeast—Aomori and Akita and Iwate, Yamagata and Miyagi and Fukushima—and could not escape. Which of the memories should he believe? But the memories are there.

  I have this memory.

  I am talking with my younger brother: Really? You have to ask who John is? That’s Yoko’s husband. This John, he died long ago. It would have been the winter when I was three, when he was shot in New York City. So I have no memory of it. I never met the Beatles. They were not a rock band of my generation. But my encounter with them would have been when I was at the age you are now. During a high-school summer, during summer vacation, I first encountered the music of the Beatles. That was in Akita. I had stolen a station wagon. I had made a fake driver’s license. I changed the license plate. And that car, it had this car stereo in it. This was still a time of cassette tapes. CDs were not that popular yet. The car could only play cassettes. And that’s what they had, nothing but Beatles tapes. Tapes recorded off of vinyl records. With a handwritten song list on each one. I listened to them. Listening to them, me the high-school student, I took off into the mountains. I had a camping mess kit. I had rice, ready-to-heat curry pouches, cup ramen, a regular disaster-ready food stash. And I played all those songs. Windows wide open, played every last song. I really liked “Twist and Shout,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “I Am the Walrus.” And then I…