“Right then, if you’l excuse me, I’l be off,†says Gen.
“Drop in again on your way back through. I’m afraid al that rain wil have made the Seven Bends difficult to get around.â€
“Yes, it’s a bit hard going,†Gen replies as he moves away. His horse sets off behind him. Clang, clang goes the bel .
“He’s from Nakoi, is he?â€
“Yes, his name’s Genbei.â€
“He once led some bride over the pass on his horse?â€
“When Shioda’s daughter went down to the town as a bride, they put her on a white horse for the bridal procession, and she came along past here with Genbei on the lead rein. Good heavens, how time flies—it’l be five years ago this year.â€
One who laments her white hair only when she looks in a mirror must be accounted among the happy. This old woman, who first comprehends the swiftness of the turning wheel of Time as she counts off on bent fingers the passage of five years, must then surely be closer to the unworldly mountain immortals than to us humans.
“She would have made a beautiful sight. I wish I’d come to see.â€
The old woman gives a chuckle. “You can see her stil . If you cal in at the hot spring inn, she’l be sure to come out and greet you.â€
“Aha, so she’s in the vil age now, is she? If only she were stil dressed in that wedding kimono with her hair up in the takashimada.â€
“She may wel dress up for you if you ask.â€
I very much doubt this, but the old woman does seem remarkably serious. This is just the sort of situation that a journey undertaken in the spirit of artistic “nonemotion†needs to encounter to make it worthwhile.
“She’s very like the Nagara maiden, actual y,†remarks the old woman.
“Her face, you mean?â€
“No, I mean the way things turned out for her.â€
“Real y? Who’s this Nagara maiden?â€
“The story goes that there was once a beautiful daughter of the vil age rich man, who went by the name of ‘the Nagara maiden.’â€
“Yes?â€
“Wel , my dear, two men went and fel in love with her at the same time.â€
“I see.â€
“Her days and nights were spent tossing in an agony over whether she should give her heart to the Sasada man or whether it should be the Sasabe man, and she was sorely torn between them, til final y she composed a poem that went: As the autumn’s dew
that lies a moment on the tips
of the seeding grass,
so do I know that I too must
fade and be gone from this brief world.10
And then she threw herself into a pool and drowned.â€
Little could I have dreamed that I would find myself in such a poetic place, hearing from such a poetic figure this elegant, time-worn tale, told in such elegant language!
“You ought to take a look at the Nagara maiden’s grave while you’re on your way through. If you go a little over half a mile east from here, you’l find the old stone grave marker.â€
I immediately decide I wil do just that.
The old woman continues, “The Nakoi girl had the same il fortune of being loved by two men, you see. One was a man she met while she was off training in Kyoto. The other was the richest man in the local town.â€
“Aha, and which did she give her heart to?â€
“She was set on marrying the man in Kyoto, but her parents, no doubt for their own good reasons, made her accept the local man.â€
“Wel , it’s a blessing she didn’t have to end up throwing herself in a pool, isn’t it.â€
“Ah, but . . . this man wanted her on account of her beauty and talent. He may have been very good to her for al I know, but she’d been forced into the marriage and apparently she never got along with him. The family seemed very worried about how it was al going. And then along came this war, and the bank where her husband worked went bankrupt. After that she came back home to Nakoi. People say al sorts of things about her—that she’s heartless and unfeeling, and so on. She was always such a gentle, reserved girl, but these days she’s apparently turning a bit wild. Every time Genbei comes through here, he tel s me how worrying she is.â€
It would ruin my planned picture to hear any more. I feel rather as if I have at last stumbled upon the magic feather cloak that wil turn me into a mountain immortal, only to have some heavenly being come along and demand that I return it.11 To find myself dragged back down into the vulgar world again, after having braved the perils of those Seven Bends to arrive at this place at last, would destroy the whole point of my aimless journey.
If you let yourself become involved with worldly gossip past a certain point, the stench of the human world seeps in through the pores of your skin, and its grime begins to weigh you down.
“This road goes straight through to Nakoi, doesn’t it?†I inquire, rising to my feet and tossing a smal coin onto the table.
“If you take a shortcut by fol owing the path down to the right from the Nagara maiden’s gravestone, it’s a quick half mile. The path’s rough, but it’s probably the better way for a young gentleman like yourself. . . . This is very generous payment, sir. . . . Take good care.â€
CHAPTER 3
The evening is a strange and unsettling one.
It is eight o’clock at night by the time I arrive at the inn, so even my sense of direction is somewhat confused, let alone my grasp of the layout of the house and the type of garden it has. I am taken along a very winding passageway of some sort, and final y shown into a smal , six-mat-sized room. The place is quite unlike my memory of it from the previous visit. I have my dinner, take a bath, return to my room, and am sipping tea when the maid arrives and offers to lay out the bedding. The strange thing is that it is this same maid who has done everything since I arrived—answering the door to me, serving the evening meal, showing me to the bathhouse, and now laying out my bed. What’s more, she has scarcely spoken a word, though she doesn’t seem particularly countrified in her ways. Earlier I fol owed behind this girl as she wound along the endless passageway-cum-staircase to my room, a chastely knotted red obi around her waist and an old-fashioned oil taper in her hand, and then I fol owed the same obi and oil taper down the same passageway-cum-staircase, on and on, as she led me to the bathhouse, feeling almost as if I was a figure coming and going in a painting.
While serving my evening meal, she apologizes that I have to put up with a room normal y used for other purposes, since the recent lack of guests means the guest rooms haven’t been cleaned. Later, as she leaves after preparing the bedding, she says a gentle, slow “Good nightâ€
that has some human warmth to it. But after her footsteps have grown distant and vanished down the twisting corridor, al is hushed and stil , and I am uncomfortably aware of the lack of any sense of human presence in the place.
I have had this experience only once before. It was the time I traveled across Boshu province1 from Tateyama and fol owed the coast around on foot between Kazusa and Choshi. One night I stayed at a certain place along the road—I can’t put it any more clearly, since both the name of the area and the name of the inn are now quite forgotten. In fact, I’m not even sure it was an inn where I stayed. It was a high-roofed house, containing only two women. I asked if they could put me up; the older woman said yes, and the younger invited me to fol ow her. We passed through a number of large, dilapidated rooms to the farthest room, on the mezzanine floor. Having mounted the three steps from the corridor, I was about to enter the room when a clump of bamboo leaning in under the eaves swayed in the evening breeze and brushed its leaves over me from shoulder to head, sending a chil down my spine. The balcony boards were rotting. I observed to the girl that in another year the bamboo shoots would penetrate the balcony and the room would become overwhelmed by bamboo, but her only response was to grin and leave.