the festival. You must come.
"Sora is a very small village, but there used to be maybe five shrines altogether. But I think it was in Taishō 3 (1914) that all the shrines were made into one shrine— the present one. You know, Sora Shrine. The kami-sama in that shrine is the ancestor of the Hosoki family. You know, the house with the gate with the thatched roof. That's theirs. They were the oldest and richest family in the village. The present owner of that house is now living in Osaka.
"When we had five shrines it seemed everyday was a festival! People from other villages joked, 'You had a festival only yesterday, and again today?'" He put on a mask of amazement and we all laughed. "These days we only celebrate twice a year, April and September." He picked up his cup. "In those days the roads were very narrow so it was difficult to carry the portable shrine through the village. Sometimes we had to put it in a boat. These days it's easy but we don't have enough young men to carry the mikoshi on their shoulders."
He suddenly stood up. Whenever he stood up or sat down, it always took me by surprise. The effect was due to the shortness of his legs, causing his body to be already close to the ground. It was more as though the earth came up to meet him or fell away from him, similar to the way a baby is all of a sudden sitting or standing. "I must get back to my babā (old wife). She'll be wondering where I am."
I followed him to the genkan and watched him carefully negotiate the step and put on his shoes. He backed out through the doorway, bowing deeply and thanking us politely. We met his bows and thanked him also politely and very gratefully.
It is highly unlikely in the above story about the Koyasu Jizō, that the monk called Ikkyū was in fact the famous fourteenth-century Zen Master and poet of the same name, in spite of his eccentric and wild reputation. There is, however, an apocryphal story about him that, while expressing something of his own personality and the spirit of his Zen, does concern pissing.
Ikkyū was on a ferry where he met a fellow passenger who was a monk from one of the esoteric schools, most probably Shingon. The monk criticized Zen for ignoring magic, and in order to impress his captive audience he proceeded to invoke a tutelary deity called Fudō-Myōō (considered to be a manifestation of the Cosmic Sun Buddha Dainichi), who appeared in a halo of fire. Everyone was very frightened except Ikkyū, who calmly announced that he would match the monk's magic with his own. He would produce water from his body and extinguish the flames. So saying, he lifted his robes and pissed on the flames until Fudō-Myōō disappeared.
The roof of a temple
hangs in the dusk,
like the wings
of a great bird,
hatching Buddhas.
♦ The Story of Zenzuka
In the summer and up until late autumn, we were in the habit of swimming daily from the small beach in the little bay of Zenzuka, which was to the Sora side of Helmet Mountain surrounded by forest and small rice fields. We later learned from one of the women who worked in the fields around Zenzuka that they had been wondering all summer long what it was we did in the sea each day. They had come to the conclusion that we must have been diving for shellfish or something. Swimming for its own sake was not something that had entered their minds.
Sadly, the beach at Zenzuka collected a great deal of rubbish at times, thrown into the sea from villages down the coast and from over the sides of ships. A lot of the items washed up bore Korean hangul characters. It was sometimes necessary after a storm to clear up the beach before entering the water, which was always crystal clear and filled with an extraordinary variety of fish.
Zenzuka had always been a special place to me. Even the name "Zenzuka" carries an exotic and mysterious resonance like Zanzibar or Mandalay, and on hot summer days with a cool breeze off the sea, kites fishing in the bay, snakes sunbathing on the paths between the rice fields, and cicadas buzzing like mysterious energies coiling and uncoiling among the trees on the slopes of Helmet Mountain, it was like briefly being on a day visit to one of the heavenly realms. I was not at all surprised then to discover that there was a story about Zenzuka.
During the Kyōhō period (1716-36) there was a great famine in Noto that affected Sora very seriously. One day a boat carrying rice from Sakata in Yamagata prefecture was forced by a strong headwind to anchor in the tiny harbor of Sora to wait for a more favorable wind before continuing its voyage south. As soon as the starving villagers saw the boat, they thought a shipment of relief rice had reached them at last. Realizing their mistake, some of the villagers were forced to beg. On seeing their desperate plight and the pitiful condition of their skeletal bodies, and remembering how his master's warehouses were so filled with rice that even the mice were well-fed, the captain decided to unload at Sora.
That night the god Ebisu appeared beside the captain's pillow and told him to stop at Zenzuka on his way back to Sakata. But since they had already unloaded the rice there was no reason for them to continue their voyage. The next day, however, the weather was so beautiful they decided to set sail. As they were passing Zenzuka, a man appeared on the small rocky promontory (described in "Second Homes") and, waving with a fan, beckoned them into the tiny bay. As the boat came within earshot of the man, he shouted, "These rocks are precious, so load up with as many as you can."
The captain, thinking this to be a very strange order, was about to reconfirm what the man had said when the man disappeared. Then, remembering the words of Ebisu in his strange dream the previous night, and realizing that the man on the rocky promontory must have been Ebisu, he told his crew about it and ordered them to load the boat with rocks. By the time the boat had reached its home port of Sakata, the rocks in the boat had turned to gold.
The story of the completion of the voyage was carried back to Sora by the crews of other boats, and since that time a shrine has always been maintained on top of the small rocky promontory. In more recent times, giant statues of both Ebisu and Daikoku have stood guard at the entrance to the shrine.
♦ The Ideal Restaurant
While eating lunch in the Korean restaurant in Anamizu, the owner of which also ran the cesspit-emptying business, the person with whom I was lunching told me about a restaurant in Tokyo that a friend of his had told him about. While I suspect that the genesis of this story is probably to be found in an only-too-common enough experience in restaurants and has acquired a patination of fact through its entry into gastronomic folklore, it nevertheless carries an attractive idea. Apparently, this friend of his had gone into a restaurant, sat down, and after perusing the menu had ordered a meal from one of the waiters. When the meal was placed before him, he saw to his displeasure that it was not the meal he had asked for. He immediately complained to the waiter, who replied, "The policy of this restaurant is not to give people what they order."
This kind of restaurant is precisely what we need, I believe, as the perfect antidote to the hell of multichoice pampering that confuses us in so many areas of our consumer life. The idea that we should have everything we imagine we want rather than what we actually might need confines our lives even more blindly to the dictates of our narrowly conditioned egos, so limiting the possibilities of experiencing something we might be unprepared for or might otherwise wish to avoid—experiences that just might contain germs of new growth and knowledge. The nightmarish, extreme scenario in this respect is extended by the future prospect of genetic menus with "the baby of your choice," etc.—a world designed for those who can only live by the assurance of what is going to happen or of what conditions will be in the next second. A world of insurances and lawsuits against the unexpected, against life itself. In our optimism at finding such an establishment, however, we searched out this restaurant for ourselves on a trip to Tokyo, only to find that if it had existed, it had now vanished off the face of Japan.
♦ Mr. Nagao Speaks of Birth
