across the sky-reflecting fields around the village—rice that will fill bowls in the depths of winter.
I love these old women,
whose skin resembles
the earth they till,
and whose backs are bent
horizontal
from bowing to it
so long.
They laugh so easily,
these earthwomen,
and show the gold
that fills their mouths.
PART TWO
♦ Village Japan ♦
♦ Village Children
At half past three each day, the afternoon silence of the village would evaporate as the bright voices of children returning home slowly increased in volume the nearer they approached the village down the hill from the school. Their voices filled the village lanes like noisy flocks of birds alighting in the branches of a tree. They carried a transformative energy with them—samurai battles, Martian expeditions, circuses of wild beasts, the strange walks and body postures of internal theater—a troupe of diminutive players and shape-shifters from the shamanic primary school over the hill, terrorizing the village cats and mesmerizing the dogs. Usually, behind the main cast of these impromptu performances came, straggling solitarily, a girl of about seven years of age who was mentally disabled in some way, locked in sometimes earnest, sometimes excited conversations with herself or some spectral companion. We never discovered the nature of her condition.
On spring and summer afternoons, the children would disperse to their various homes, only to reappear mounted on bicycles, circumnavigating the village in Formula One races or orbiting space stations, or to amble silenced and trancelike from the village shop, their worlds suddenly centripetal and constellated around the taste-aura of an ice cream or candy bar.
On summer evenings after dark, the street-lit arena of the vermilion bridge would become the focus of small, excitedly chattering crouched bodies collecting kabutomushi (the Atlas beetle, which is shaped like a samurai helmet and known in Japan as the "helmet beetle"), prized pets among village children, as they were felled from the night air by the seductive and illusory sun of the street lamp, which was always shaded by a frenetic galaxy of bugs and moths.
Sadly, the evidence of such nocturnal hunts would sometimes be only too obvious the following morning, with a litter of insect armory scattered across the road like the aftermath of a medieval battle observed from the air.
♦ Summer Nights
On summer nights it was often too hot to remain in the house, and there was a need to seek out the water's edge. The best way was to walk through the village main street to the space in front of the temple. There the air was cool, where it had been steeping over the water.
The street was unlit, except for a lamp over the vermilion bridge and another near the front of the temple at the other end of the village. Apart from these, there were only the dim lights in the houses, lights that strayed only a few feet from their source and offered no illumination to the street.
This darkness, with the lack of visual distraction, however, became the bed on which a multilayered soup of olfactory and aural delights was laid down—a place for sensory-sipping at the village's most intimate and interior life. As you passed down the street, at every few breath-steps a particular stratum of this blend would separate and predominate briefly before fusing back into the environmental mix. The smells of incense, feces, cooking, kerosene, urine, cedar-wood smoke, seawater, freshly sawn pine, fish, diesel oil, warm clay walls, and old rope. These scents, subtle and mysterious, familiar and alien, coarse and refined, stench and perfume, were accompanied by an evening raga of sounds—household altar-bells and evening sutra chanting, shrill-echoing bathroom voices of children, sliding karakami, television, the slap of water on hulls as a passageway to the quay was passed, rhythmic chopping from a kitchen window, complaining cats, and the distant roar of a boat opening its throttle to the dark bay beyond.
It was these smells and sounds, more than the visual environment, that transmitted the unfamiliar and seemingly secret life of the village that first year and created an impression of mystery and strangeness. Yet paradoxically, at the same time there was present a recognition and resonance—in some very deep place an almost forgotten familiarity—like recognizing, at a culturally and historically undifferentiated, collective level, a rhythm-texture of life that combines the mundane-domestic with something ancient and sacred, which still lingers on the horizon of recall.
In the night,
the voice
of an unknown bird,
passes
from one dream
to another.
♦ "Second Home" Villages
Between the villages of Sora and Kabuto, on a curve in the coast that rounds out from the east end of Sora and into the little bay of Zenzuka to the Sora side of Helmet Mountain, there is an abandoned hamlet of some twelve or so houses. They are holiday or weekend homes and vary in design from pseudo-backwoods cabins to much more substantial constructions complete with gardens and small outhouses. This holiday hamlet was established at the time of Japan's "bubble economy" when there was a plan to build a bridge from this part of the peninsula across to Noto Island. Someone with an eye to rapid yen bought the land, cleared it, and divided it into building plots, which they sold to city dwellers who, along with their new acquisition of wealth, were also buying the idea of a "second home"—a fairly new but increasingly popular concept in Japan.
Eventually the site of the planned bridge was moved some fifty miles down the coast, and the "bubble," having risen to insupportable heights, burst as bubbles must, leaving houses that had only been used for a season or two empty and the promise of as-yet-unconnected electricity broken along with the bubble.
The hamlet is left deserted, but as though families might have been going to return after an outing, since many of the houses are still equipped with the basic domestic necessities. They remain waiting, with the slow onset of decay setting in on wooden porches, etching through the thin metal of domestic kerosene tanks attached to the outside walls of bathrooms, and discoloring the pods of gas bottles below kitchen windows. Now, bamboo and wild camellias push up against walls and doors and trail across roofs, slowly reclaiming the site for the forest, while spiders stand sentinel at the center of their mandalas, across gateways and porches, or move in and furnish silent rooms with soft drapes.
It is like a hamlet that has fallen victim to ethnic cleansing or rampant plague. There is a melancholy along this shore below the houses on summer evenings, of broken dreams. But by autumn, the low afternoon light translates this into another language—the bitter images of dereliction and thwarted greed.
As I walked along the potholed road by the shore past these empty dwellings, I could not help thinking of the "cardboard cities" of the homeless within the cities of Britain and now Tokyo, too, in these days of recession. The waste of money, workmanship, and materials not to mention land, once wild and beautiful, disturbed to no purpose contrasting achingly with the rice fields around Sora, shaped by devotion, while at the
