by Kurt Caswell
On our way back to the hotel, we stopped at the shrine. It was not a building, but a little Shinto kiosk, with cars speeding by behind us on the road.
“Now we make-a-wish,” Kazuko said.
We each pitched a hundred-yen coin into the offering box.
Walking along the Chitose River one summer night in the rain, I stopped near the bridge leading into Aoba Park. The river makes a dogleg here and swirls into a wide pool. The rain came softly, and I watched the fish-marks on the river. On the opposite bank, a red fox in the rain. It stopped to look at me. I felt something pass between us, and then the fox wasn’t there anymore.
I felt happy then and also sad, walking back to my apartment in the rain.
The old woman at Seven-Eleven greets me with “good morning” when I enter. Her face is deeply creased. Her hair is tied in a neat bun. And her two gold teeth flash when she smiles. I know where the bread and milk are, but I pass through all the aisles like a child in a toy store. In the cooler, I find melon milk next to the orange juice. I find a nondairy creamer called Creap. Here are scores of instant noodles, dried squid, and a fried spaghetti sandwich near the bento, a ready lunch. When I have my milk and loaf of bread, I inspect the oden steaming at the counter: various boiled sea creatures, eggs, vegetables, and odd-shaped soy products in light soup.
Back home, the cats are on the tin roof again. I say hello to them as I pass. Inside, my apartment is warm and dry. Spring light plays against the tatami. I slide the window open just enough and set down a bowl of milk. I hear the water boil, and the room fills with that familiar smell when the toaster chimes. I work at my desk, listening for the sound of cat-feet on the floor.
Early dawn,
Young white fish
Shining in ephemeral white
Hardly an inch long.
— Matsuo Bash
You already know this. Salmon are anadromous fish, traveling up freshwater rivers and streams from the sea to lay their eggs in the fall. The female will carve out a depression with her tail in the riverbed. She lays her eggs while a male circles, waiting. When she is finished, the male releases his sperm over the deposit, fertilizing the eggs. And here the eggs remain all winter, the tiny salmon growing inside. In the spring, before the snow has receded into the sun, the salmon hatch and grow and swarm. Many become food for heron and kingfisher and for larger fish. The survivors travel downstream through spring into the summer sea. Their body chemistry transitions from fresh- to saltwater. Salmon live for about three years at sea, and then, drawn by some urgency inside them that they can do nothing about, they begin the journey back to their birthplace, back home, to spawn.
You also know that they will die. Salmon come from the sea to the river to lay their eggs and die. The flesh and bone melts into the streambed that made them. They live their whole life in preparation for this one moment, this one returning, this one good death.
We peel out of the eddy, my red C-1 river right, Noguchi’s blue C-1 river left, our boats carving an arc around the rock in the middle. We float side by side, attending the shallows for salmon.
I feel the fall air tightening my face, but I am warm and comfortable inside my dry jacket. The stiff nylon jacket crackles when I take another stroke, guiding my canoe downstream. I spot salmon, here and here and here. I see their bright backs beneath the water, their rolling motions in the current. I see healthy vibrant fish that run up the river when my boat passes by, and I see dying, decaying fish. The banks, shallows, and eddies are littered with broken corpses.
A dragonfly lands on my foredeck. It sits a moment, flexes its four wings, and turns its head like a mechanical cuckoo before rising again on cool air as I reach my paddle forward. It doesn’t flee like a bird but lingers like a fly, flying around and around and landing on the shaft of my paddle. I stare deep into its bulbous eyes. Do you know you will die soon, dragonfly? Do you know your life is about to slip away?
We paddle down, in no hurry, drifting as slow or fast as the river. I make strokes with my paddle, moving the white blade like smooth ivory through the soft water. The sound is so light, it is even quieter than no sound at all.
Noguchi has pulled up into an eddy behind an old log. He points into the pool, and I slip in behind him to have a look.
“Salmon,” he says. “Big one.”
A long, fat, male drifting in the pool, his flesh coming apart. It rolls onto its side, then rights itself. Its tail is torn and ragged. All the fins—dorsal, pelvic, anal—are torn and ragged. The fish turns over again, and the eddy takes it in a circle. We paddle on.
Just downstream, we slip into the dead water of a wide eddy, our boats brushing the sandy bottom. On the bank, overhung with branches and long tendrils of leaves, Noguchi points up. “Wild grapes,” he says. “Here. Taste them.”
To get to this hot spring, Noguchi and I walk up a shallow riverbed, following other walkers as we go. The river drains over wide flat shelves of rock, pooling here and there. The farther you go toward the source, the hotter the water gets. At a bend in the river, we arrive. Twenty or thirty people crowd into a few little pools. Everyone wears a swimsuit.
“Why is everyone wearing a swimsuit?” I ask. “I thought people always undress for the hot springs.”
“No, not here,” Noguchi says.
“Why not here?”
“Here, no people do it,” Noguchi says. “But naked maybe no problem. Please try, if you have a confidence.”
Morning ice bends dwarf bamboo down, the leaf tips riding the surface of the Chitose River. Shush, shush, shush. Shush, shush, shush, as a kingfisher speeds downstream and the jungle crows crowd the tall trees, laughing, because salmon are traveling into the mountains from the Japan Sea, and the birds expect the universe will provide a free lunch. I plant my paddle into the slack water at the top of the eddy, pull my C-1 forward and up and in beside Noguchi, who washes sideways with my motion to make room for me. We bob side by side in our boats, arms clasped like brothers.
Not all rivers are created equal, but all rivers are equally created, and it was here on the water I felt most at home in Japan. My friendship with Noguchi grew because we both love to paddle.
“Try pee-vot!” Noguchi calls to me.
“OK,” I say, and peel out, the bow of my boat riding up on the fast water, riding up on the edge of upright and downright upside down, until I go just too far and crash and roll and roll back up, laughing. “Oohh!” I hear Noguchi say. “Head, maybe like a ice cream!”
It is a beautiful time of year on the river, with grey heron standing in the shallows around every corner; the water, gray too with the fall snow and the overcast Hokkaido sky. And the salmon, moving upriver in great bands of bright red and streaks of gray, the lot of them sweeping across the river in one motion like a dragon’s tail to avoid our boats coming on.
In later weeks, when the early snows have melted in resurging summer sun, and the trees have lost all their leaves, the salmon are spent of eggs, milt, and life and lie broken in the shallows like hulls of rice, scoured, to be swilled away.
We find a deep pool downstream, and I pull my spray skirt back to fish out my diving mask, a window on a salmon’s world. I pull it over my nose and eyes, give Noguchi my thumbs-up, and turn my boat over into the deep pool. I hang from it, as if suspended from a fishing bobber with my one big breath to keep me down. I can see the roots of trees at the under-river edge, a few small trout, and the bottom designed with stones. And there in this green watery world is a broad-backed male salmon, its lower jaw hooked like a boxer. It looks tired and spent, its skin graying like an old man’s hair. I watch it for as long as I can, sculling in its fins to keep its place, a kind of active sleep. The fish doesn’t seem to notice me. My chest tightens, and I pull up on my paddle as quietly as I can, the cold water pouring off my shoulders and helmet.
I draw a few deep breaths and enter that world again. I hear water underwater, and there is Noguchi hanging under his boat like me. We smile because our faces are m
asked and gravity drawn, and he says something that sounds like bubbles. We roll back up, laughing. How silly we look upside down in our boats. And how terrifyingly good we are at getting into places we really don’t belong.
I draw breath again and go under. The salmon is there. I take one hand off the safety of my paddle and search the deep for the fish. I lay my hand across the crest of the head. It doesn’t move, this fish in my hand, and I draw down its back with my fingers as smooth as the current of water that freshens the space between us. I near the end of my breath as the motion of my touch threatens to press the fish away. I stretch out my reach until I feel myself coming loose from my seat upside down.
Without warning, a red wave consumes me, salmon by the hundreds bucking and pulling from side to side, coursing, speeding, forcing the water out ahead. My pulse quickens as the big fish stream by, bigger than life, bigger than me, around my chest and under my arms and across the glass of my eyes. I have to breathe, but I force myself to stretch it out longer. I let go of my paddle to free up my arms and raise them now upside down to the bottom into the world under the river where the coursing salmon sing like God’s choir, and then I’m falling free, out of my plastic boat, out of the confines of my technology, and floating, flying, gasping for breath at the surface, and I dive deep down again spreading my arms and legs wide like wings, like fins in the current-air as the fish and my heart with the planet pulse home.
AFTER FAN CHENGDA: A RIVER DIARY
China, 1995
(1) In Guilin, that southern Chinese city on the great Li River, which flows a broad, smooth braid through those famed limestone towers covered over in greenery, I was in love; I was in love with being in love, in love with my youth, and in love with the road, so I followed my friends onto a flat-bottomed tourist boat that spring for a pleasant day standing at the rails and gazing onto the verdant countryside of rice fields and spires of stone. From the rooftop deck we could see both up and down the river, where we had been and where we were going, while off the back of the boat the kitchen boys prepared our lunch, heaving great buckets of slop over the rail to the fishes. And up and down the stairs between the decks came the staff women, dressed in their black pumps, sleek black skirts, and tan-yellow blouses buttoned up the front, the sleeves squared off at the elbows, cut low in the neck to offer those two lovely bones of the clavicle. For any young American man (such as myself) the roselike lips and coarse black hair of a Chinese woman offers a foregone exoticism. It was a pleasure to be young and alive because all the years before, I could not know that not being young and alive was an eventuality or that sometimes sorrow grows so unerringly in the heart as to break it or about betrayal. And in the tension of this difference now, I felt alive and mortal and powerfully fragile, so that any failure was a delight and any success was a boon, and nothing I did or did not do mattered at all in the long round of the expanding universe.
My companions, Kraig Donald and Kazuko Osogami, were happy too, leaning into the Chinese past and future, so easy with the idleness of the day, as if they had just finished their work and deserved a rest. Kraig and I were both English teachers in different schools in Chitose, a little city on Hokkaido, the most northerly island in Japan. Kraig grew up in Braintree, about half the distance between London and the North Sea. He was a large blonde man, a soft man, with an easy intelligence, a Prince Valiant haircut, and a buffoonish laugh, which I rather liked. He smoked, socially, and possessed an urbane sensibility that I associated with London. He taught me, among other things, to look at my own country from the outside. Apparently, not everyone thinks America is the greatest country in the world. “God,” he’d say, “an American. Bloody disgusting.” Or “Americans are so fucking belligerent,” at which he’d turn to me to check himself: “But you’re different, of course.” He had pierced his nose since coming to Japan; and one night, in a confusion of alcohol and darkness, he walked through the glass wall next to the glass door of a Tokyo hotel—walked through so that the glass separated into a million little sparkles on the pavement. Upon impact, that little stud in his nose pierced his septum, and, after having it forcibly removed, Kraig argued against but finally paid for the damages. It was the hotel’s fault, he initially said. Without proper lighting, that door was nearly invisible.
It was Kazuko who had dreamed up this journey into China, a Japanese package tour of Shanghai, Guilin, and Beijing, with a group of mostly retirees and honeymooners. She had long wanted to travel in China, for it held the distant nostalgia of home. Born near Beijing during the Japanese occupation, Kazuko held on to a few faint memories, a remote agitation somewhere in the blood that this landscape, this language was home. Kazuko’s husband, Shigeru Watanabe, a businessman with a diverse portfolio of investments and ventures, was locally known as the richest man in Hokkaido. He was also locally known as Hokkaido’s rich bachelor, for he was not legally married. Kazuko regarded herself as a kept woman. She loved Watanabe fiercely, and he loved her. When I spent time in their company, they would laugh and smile and hold each other’s gaze, and then Kazuko would clap me about the shoulders in a joke, and sometimes Watanabe would sing. This trip to China was his gift to Kraig and me, for Watanabe lived on the family estate, and he kept a modest apartment for Kazuko in town. He traveled a great deal on business, breezing in and out of her life, which, by my count, encouraged the passion of their love. One evening outside that wonderful Chitose restaurant that specialized in Korean yaki nikku, a quiet snow falling on the metal roof, Watanabe issued this charge: “Please,” he said carefully to me, “take care of my wife.”
(2) The river journey would take us from Guilin to Yangshuo, a daylong passage with lunch. We would pass through the famed karst mountains, which the twelfth-century Chinese official Fan Chengda (1126–93) called “worthy to be rated first in the world.” Perhaps you’ve seen this dramatic landscape in the movies: It’s featured in The Painted Veil with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts (worth your time). It appears in a few scenes in The Joy Luck Club (not bad, a little schmaltzy). And in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, it is the planet Kashyyyk, or the Wookiee Planet C (not sure you should bother).
A karst landscape is a highly complex system of spires, shafts, sinkholes, caves, and disappearing streams made up of limestone, dolomite, or marble and sculpted by water. Limestone, which makes up the karst mountains of Guilin, is a nonclastic sedimentary rock, which means it is mostly composed of marine fossils laid down by an ancient sea. Once that sea receded, water—carrying enough carbon dioxide to form a weak carbonic acid—dissolved this limestone bedrock and, over a few million years of rain and rivers, left behind dramatic, if not weird, formations which people find highly romantic and will travel thousands of miles to have a look at. Auden, that English poet of considerable powers, thought it curious that we do so, for the karst landscape, like love, “dissolves in water.” His poem “In Praise of Limestone” offers this bleakness:
“I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.”
So off we went, the boat pulling away from the dock, Kazuko and Kraig at my side, and the great Li River drawing us downstream. We stood at the rail watching the cormorant fishermen work the gray waters from simple bamboo punts with a basket fixed in the center. The cormorant dove for the fish, while the fisherman did fairly nothing at all. When the bird surfaced, he took the catch from its mouth. The cormorant was fishing for itself, not the fisherman, only it couldn’t seem to remember that the fisherman had tied a cord around its neck, just tight enough that it couldn’t swallow.
As the tour boat made mid-channel, the wind came up, and Kazuko expressed her agitation. Dressed mostly in white, with a white cap over a white cloth neckshade that flowed down along her dark oriental hair and up around her square chin, her lips full and red (she looked like the Queen of the Nile), she took up my arm and said: “Kart. Take me inside.”
Most Japanese people pronounced my name “Ka-to,” but Kazuko spoke English well enough to know she had to try for a hard consonant at the end, but then there was that issue with L and R, so famous among the Japanese. You know: Fa Ra Ra Ra Raaaaa, Ra Ra, Ra, Raaa.
“It’s perfectly wonderful out here. Let’s stay outside,” I said.
“No more, da-me,” she said, mixing the two languages. “Take me inside. We take-a beer soon.”
“How about after we reach Elephant Trunk Hill,” I said, checking our route. “It’s not far. And we can’t miss it.”
“No,” she said. “Kart. OK. You stay here. You like outside, dakara. I know your mind.” She turned to Kraig. “Kray-g,” she said. “We go inside. OK? Take-a beer now?”
“OK,” Kraig told her, and they went below to take a table at the window.
(3) Fan Chengda, one of China’s greatest poets and travel writers, made his living as a government official during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279). He served as military governor of Guangxi province from April 1173 to February 1175, so he lived and worked in Guilin. Fan Chengda’s Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea is the seminal work on life in Guangxi during the Southern Song. In those days, Guilin (literally “cinnamon grove”) was considered a remote backwater, the post many government officials desired least. It was thinly populated, and most of the people were not Chinese but members of various indigenous groups. Though the Chinese had begun to arrive during the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), the region had not yet entered the “cultural orbit of Chinese civilization,” writes Fan Chengda’s translator, James M. Hargett. In fact, according to another historian, Guangxi did not come into “firm Chinese control” until 1949. The region was thought to be “infested by miasmas and malaria,” writes Hargett, “populated by spear-wielding, tattooed, and aggressive ‘barbarian’ peoples, and home to dense forests infested with savage beasts, venomous snakes, and leeches detachable from the body only by fire.” Naturally, Fan Chengda fell in love with the place right away.
