water from the tub, which filled the entire pit before it reached the drain, where its escape became impeded by fur and small pieces of bone that I had to remove by hand.
The stench had become so powerful during this operation—its last molecular onslaught being augmented by the water—that it became indelibly imprinted on my olfactory processes and associated with the bathroom scent of soap. For weeks afterward, each time I came to bathe it was as though I soaped my body with the corpse of the rat!
♦ The Toilet (Benjo)
The toilet in our house was a traditional Japanese benjo; that is, basically just a hole in the floor that accessed to a large dark cavern beneath the house over which one crouched, not unlike lavatories in many other parts of the world. And since we owned no rice field on which to use the contents as fertilizer, it had to be emptied by a local firm at regular intervals, usually according to the number of people visiting the house. Once it was emptied, the heavy dark smell that emerged from it and permeated the house, and probably our clothes as well, gave way to a strange scent like a bouquet of ozone, and the first turds of the new cycle echoed like hymn books being dropped in a cathedral.
This ecclesiastical image is not entirely out of place, as I remember once, when I was staying in a Zen temple, that it was my duty to clean the benjo. This task entailed scraping the day's feces from a wooden chute just below the hole into the pit. This operation was performed with the help of a large wooden spatula with a prayer written on its handle and was considered an important spiritual practice.
On the occasion of having our benjo emptied for the first time after moving in, added to the expected contents it was discovered to contain six pairs of slippers! This find, from then on, seemed to endow the space below the house with the powers of some lower-world purgatory.
After some months, we learned that the Korean family firm who owned the vacuum truck used in this operation also ran the best restaurant in the local town of Anamizu. Taking care of both ends of the process seemed to make perfect sense. It reminded me of a Vietnamese restaurant that we once discovered in Tokyo called "Mai Dung."
♦ Rice Fields (Tambo)
In early spring as the air gets warmer, the rice fields are flooded in preparation for planting. Suddenly, the landscape becomes filled with light, as if the land was laid out with mirrors reflecting the sky and the forested hills, opening up the earth and doubling the world. At night, the fields become holes in the ground to another sky beyond, which is filled with a chorus of croaking stars. And as early summer draws up the green shoots from the water, so some of those stars, too, rise from that other sky and fly as galaxies of fireflies.
In spring, the airspace above the village becomes filled with the excited cries of swallows flying back and forth over the roofs, as though dowsing, refamiliarizing themselves with its topography and relocating the sites of the previous year's nests. The village streets fill with the noise of tractors and people on foot, coming and going back and forth between their homes and their fields.
These first few weeks are a time when bodies that had been housebound all winter, or at least far less active, suffer from the sudden intense physical activity.
Whereas at one time all the processes involved in the cultivation of rice were done by hand, except for those like ploughing where the bullock was used, today ploughing and planting are most often mechanized. In some of the smaller fields around the village, however, the work is still done by hand.
The bodies of the old people, particularly the women, bear witness to decades of hard work in the fields. It is a very common sight in country areas to see the backs of old women that are so permanently bent from a lifetime of stooping to plant, weed, and harvest that their spines, from the waist up, are horizontal with the ground. They have to support themselves on sticks or on infant's buggies, which they wheel before them, often with their shopping or produce from their fields on board.
I never failed to be moved by the way the women spoke of their love for the land on which they worked and lived in a reciprocal relationship—a relationship that had often given them hardship and pain, and shaped it into their bodies. They did not speak of this love per se, it was simply in the language they used when talking of the earth, the plants, or the seasons, or in the manner in which a woman farmer would unconsciously touch the grass on the bank surrounding a field while she talked, in the way you might stroke the hair of a child or a beloved spouse, or in the glance at a field as she passed. One of the women described to me how, when she was young, she hated and resented having to work in the fields but how now she had learned to love it.
I frequently heard the villagers express grief at the sight of an abandoned rice field, as though their own bodies carried the pain and loneliness of the field's neglect. Rice fields are inherited and worked, very often for centuries by one family, so that the cessation of a field's cultivation means a rupture in a tradition of continuity of work and generation, as though a limb of the cultural body had died. Many of the farmers' graves are located beside or between the fields they cultivated in life—their bones planted with the rice in death.
Slowly, many of the fields around villages like Sora are becoming overgrown with weeds, their drainage ditches clogged, and the banks around the fields all but disappeared. As the fields die, so they become a visual barometer of the demise of the villages and of a way of life—the severing of a living link between the villagers themselves, future generations, their ancestors, and their gods, as they pass by on their way to and from their toil.
The rice grown in Sora was the best I had ever tasted, as was the local saké brewed from that rice. And in the cultivation of their own personal rice fields and vegetable gardens, they never made use of either chemical insecticides or artificial fertilizers. For fertilizer they simply used the contents of their cesspits and the rice husks as a mulch. The only place they used chemical fertilizers and insecticides was on the rice and tobacco grown for the government, in accordance with that government's directives. And even though the harvest of our final summer in Sora was ruined by a disastrous drought, we never needed to buy rice for the whole of the following winter, due to the selfless generosity of our neighbors.
In their gratitude for rice and their close identification with its propagation, the old people, particularly the women, seemed to feel a duty to continue the cultivation of their own family fields, long after the remaining members of the family had died or moved away and there was no longer any practical need. They would be the last in their family line to do so, even though they were so stricken by age and a lifetime's labor that they could only literally crawl around their fields on their hands and knees, going to and from them with the support of their prams. It was this extraordinary spiritual energy that enabled many of the women we knew to transcend serious illness and continue an active life.
The village is divided into groups of five households. These households share the work and responsibility for the upkeep and care of their particular part of the village, as well as sharing work at times of planting and harvesting both rice and tobacco. After the war, however, because of the difficulties in maintaining what had always been a self-sufficient agrarian economy, it was customary for the active members of families to leave the village and work in the cities on building sites and road construction in order to supplement incomes derived from their fields and fishing and support elderly parents or parents-in-law. Fortunately, nowadays several small, light industries have been introduced into the village in order to prevent the necessity for leaving. These vary from hand-weaving silk for kimono, which are made up in Kyoto, to small electric-loom shops, rice-straw rope making, and the machine production of curtains.
The women weavers of kimono material weave when the weather is bad and farm when the weather is fine, their hands moving naturally from the fields to the shuttle and loom and back again. In winter when the fields are at rest, they marry warp and weft as skillfully for a kimono to be worn at a spring tea ceremony as they plant out rice
