Yūko had already discussed the matter with Kōji, and it had been apparent from their first meeting that the priest considered them to be different from the run-of-the-mill sort of people he usually came into contact with. And because of this, the priest, too, had behaved in a way that made him stand out from that small portrait. This was painful for Yūko and Kōji. They had both been terribly fond of the priest’s small portrait and had even wanted to be included in a corner of it. The priest had lived in this peaceful village for a long time, and it was evident that he thirsted after people’s suffering. Of course, Iro had seen a lot of unhappiness: death, old age, sickness, poverty, domestic trouble, the sadness of parents with disabled children born of incestuous marriage, shipwrecked fishermen, the grief of the bereaved family left behind. However, in this countryside region, there was no “Great Doubt” of the sort encountered by Master Bankei when he was twelve or thirteen years old. In this village, there was none of that particular type of spiritual awakening—that craving for “seeing one’s true nature”—so characteristic of the Rinzai school of Zen.
It seemed the priest had been casting his net out for a considerable time—trying for a good catch. But for many years now the spiritual yield had been poor. When Yūko first came to the village and introduced herself, the priest must have sniffed out in this seemingly lively and cheerful, handsome-faced city girl the prey he had long been searching for. It was the smell of anguish, a smell that one with a nose for it could detect well in advance—a smell that Yūko herself had possibly not been aware of.
And what was more, this time, an unusually well-behaved, diffident, and hardworking young man had also come along—again, with that same smell. That delicious smell. There was no doubt that only the priest had detected it. He had been very kind to both Ippei and his wife and to Kōji, showing them warm friendship. It was a kindness born out of consideration for the delicious prey he had been craving for so long. All this was, of course, pure conjecture on the part of Yūko and Kōji. The priest had not once asked any probing questions; neither had Yūko nor Kōji volunteered information about their personal circumstances without being asked.
“Where are you all off to?” asked the priest in a loud voice from where he stood in the middle of the garden.
“For a picnic at the waterfall,” replied Yūko.
“That will be hard work in this heat. Your husband will be all right, won’t he?”
“He needs an outing to exercise his legs.”
“Oh, that’s extremely commendable. And, Kōji, I see you are the picnic bearer, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Kōji, laughing, swinging the large picnic hamper up for him to see. In that instant his heart, which had until then been filled with happiness, clouded over at the sight of the priest’s smiling face. Kōji recalled the reception he had received when, several days earlier, he had gone down to the village barber’s and tobacconist.
When he entered the barber’s shop, he had sensed that the conversation between the barber and his customers had abruptly come to an end, and while he was having his hair cut, the shop was enveloped in an eerie silence, so that all he could hear was the noise of scissors and clippers. And on the way home, when he stopped off at the tobacconist, the shop assistant’s familiar face suddenly tightened when she laid eyes on him. He had bought some cigarettes and then left. Behind him, he heard the girl’s feet kick off the tatami mats as she turned and hurried toward the back of the shop.
Kōji sensed he had seen in the priest’s carefree smile just now the two different faces of the village’s reaction to his presence.
“I’m tired. I’m tired,” began Ippei as they approached the eastern fringes of the village, turned left in front of the local shrine, and began at last to climb the mountain path.
With nothing else to do, they sat down on a rock in the shade of a tree. Yūko had Kōji take a picture of her with Ippei, and then she took one of Kōji and Ippei together. She was uneasy about giving the camera to Ippei, and so there was no picture of just her and Kōji.
When they were stuck for conversation, Kōji talked about prison. Yūko would frown at this but Ippei, seemingly pleased with the subject, leaned forward on his knees in an effort to understand as much as possible. Kōji, solely for Ippei’s benefit, slowly and concisely enunciated each and every word as he spoke. During the conversation, Yūko carefully brushed off an ant that had been crawling up Ippei’s unmoving right leg.
Kōji took out a small comb from the back pocket of his jeans, and with the light sifting down through the trees onto its candy-colored mock tortoiseshell, he showed it to Ippei and asked him what it was.
“Co… mb,” replied Ippei, after a few seconds, extremely pleased with himself at seeing Kōji’s acknowledgment.
Like a conjurer, Kōji turned the comb over and stroked its spine. “Can you see? It’s not worn down at all, is it?”
Yūko, also interested, moved her face closer and gave off a whiff of the perfume she had applied to the base of her ears.
“The inmates’ combs are all worn away here. In the worst cases, they are worn pretty much all the way down to the base of the teeth. And can you guess why? Well, I’ll tell you—it’s called ‘gori.’ What you do is you make a celluloid powder by rubbing the back of the comb on the windowpane in the toilets. Then you tightly wrap the powder in cotton, about the thickness of a cigarette, add a little tooth powder, and then rub it hard on a board until it ignites. You use it to light any cigarettes you manage to filch. If this gori is discovered, it’s two weeks in solitary. There was a guy who used to sing ‘Even without a match, a butt is lighted; distant yet so close, passions are ignited.’ ”
He lit his own cigarette, drew deeply on it, and narrowed his eyes.
“Does it taste good?” asked Yūko.
“Yeah, it’s good,” he replied, in a slightly ill-humored manner. It bothered him that cigarettes were no longer as good as they had been just before his release from prison.
Anyone looking at the garbage-filled river mouth by the wharf would find it hard to believe that this river had its origin in the great waterfall deep in the Taiya Mountains, hard to believe that it was the same as that limpid mountain stream water that seethed over the riverbed, sending spray over the moss-covered rocks.
They followed the mountain path—which could hardly be described as being very steep—upstream, and as they came to the top of the wide trail, the sunlight came through the trees and carried with it on the wind the chirring of cicadas, as if the dappled sunlight itself was in full chorus. And then they were in the pleasantly cool deep shade of a clump of cedar trees.
“I’m tired,” repeated Ippei.
By the time they reached the waterfall, they had taken four long impromptu breaks, and although they had planned to eat lunch at the plunge pool below the waterfall, they had polished off their lunch boxes at the third stop, on account of Kōji constantly complaining that he was hungry. That was already after noon. And, because each time they stopped to rest, Kōji always descended the valley to dip Yūko’s mountain lily into the stream, so that it retained its beautiful fragrance and vigor.
The waterfall couldn’t be much farther now.
Ippei clambered to his feet—signaling, in theatrical fashion, that they should start. Clearly he was aware that he was clowning around. He thrust forward his walking stick and knickerbocker-clad left leg—“Off we go!”—and then swung the whole of his body around from the right, lifting his right leg up like a heavy crane.