to which the temple is dedicated) and weeded the garden. In the winter, however, it became too cold to remain in the temple without heating of some kind, and I took to working at home and visiting the temple daily just to burn incense and make a daily check, particularly if there had been bad weather, or to make things secure if a typhoon had been forecast.
On arriving at the temple at any time of the year, I often found small offerings left either inside the hondō before the main altar or outside in front of the images of Jizō, Kannon, or Fudō-myōō. These offerings ranged from rice left at the main altar in brilliantly colored silk bags made from the remnants of old kimono to small balls of rice, wildflowers and grasses, hundred-yen pieces, candles and incense placed where someone had prayed on their way to their fields in the early morning.
From my workroom window at the temple, overlooking the road and the sea, I often saw that the old people still retained the custom of bowing to the temple as they passed by either on foot, bicycle, or tractor.
Not being involved in farming or fishing, but remaining in the village and working at my table while everyone else worked in the surrounding fields or at sea, at first made me wish for a boat or a field. But I soon realized that making ourselves available for driving our neighbors from one place to another and caretaking the temple meant that we could at least offer something to the community, which helped make us feel a little more integrated.
The sun's dying
slowly
dims the village,
but the cackle of
an old crone
suddenly
gifts the dusk
with gold!
♦ Ao-Daishō (Great Blue Snake)
One spring morning when I was still working at home, I was sitting at my worktable when for some reason I turned my head to the left toward the window on that side of the room. There, pressed up against the glass, was the head of a huge snake. I got up from the table and went over to look at it. It seemed to be staring straight into my eyes. I spoke to it for a while, more in the way of expressing surprise to myself and wondering aloud what it might be wanting. Then, slowly sliding the window open, I found that its body extended the length of the wall to the right of the window and then out of sight somewhere around the side of the house. The snake was quite obviously over six feet in length, with a strange green-bluish hue, reminding me that this was a snake someone had described to us. It is called ao-daishō, or "great blue snake," is harmless and seen as auspicious—it is a guardian snake. Snakes are often understood as messengers of a kami or indeed a manifestation of the kami itself.
Ao-daishō remained staring into the room for fifteen minutes or more without moving a scale. Then it slowly moved back down the windowpane and entered the house through a hole in the weatherboarding just beneath the sill and into the space between my workroom floor and the room below containing the Buddhist altar. From this time on, the house, which had been overrun by a plague of mice, became entirely mouse-free.
Often, in the early hours before the village had woken, I would hear a sound in the house that was different from the sparrows stirring under the eaves or the contact-sound of the feet of a heron or kite on the roof. It was the sound of footless walking—ao-daishō moving through the interior of the house on a dawn glide.
♦ Koyasu Jizō (Bodhisattva that protects women in childbirth)
I had been examining a stone which was standing to one side of the toni gate at the foot of Helmet Mountain one afternoon and noticed that carved on the stone was a Sanskrit character, known in esoteric Buddhism as a "seed syllable" (bija), enthroned on a lotus blossom. It suggested that the Shintō shrine on Helmet Mountain had once been associated with a Shingon temple in the area, most likely Senjuin, the temple in Sora. As we were walking away from the stone, Old Man Gonsaku suddenly emerged from some bushes beside the path ahead of us with a sheaf of leaves in his hand. When he saw us approaching, he explained that he had been picking small branches of the sakaki tree, which is sacred to Shinto, to offer to the kami of his household shrine.
We walked with him to where he had left his bicycle and watched him as he stripped some unwanted leaves from the twigs and placed them in a basket mounted on the front. Then the three of us walked back toward the village, Old Man Gonsaku pushing his bicycle, which was almost as tall as he was. As we walked, he talked (punctuated with giggling which we came to learn was a feature of and accompaniment to any conversation with Old Man Gonsaku), of how once Eikoku (Great Britain) and Japan had been enemies. And how Eikoku had won and we were now friends. He said that now the West was above Japan, describing it in terms of the feudal image of a pyramidal hierarchy. He told us how the priest at the shrine used to exhort them to pray for victory in the war against America and its allies.
As we entered the village, we passed by an old image of the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizō enshrined by the roadside. I asked him if he knew anything about this particular image's history. He said that he did, and that it was a very interesting story. I asked him if he would mind coming to our house to tell us about it, and we made an arrangement for tea time the following day.
By half-past four the next day, Old Man Gonsaku had not appeared. Looking toward his house, I could see no sign of movement, so assumed he must either have been sleeping or gone out and forgotten. Having not walked that day, I decided to go out, saying to Masako, "I bet you, as soon as I open the door he'll arrive." I put my notebook into a small hessian bag and, slinging it over my shoulder, I slipped into my shoes in the genkan. Sure enough, as I slid back the front door, there was Old Man Gonsaku emerging from his own house. He spotted me and called, "Oh, you're going out."
"No," I shouted back. And beckoned, "Come in, we're waiting for you."
It was the first time Old Man Gonsaku had been in our house. He entered the genkan shyly, removing his cap and carrying it in one hand with a lime-green hand towel in the other. I showed him into the large room that contained the household altar and offered him a cushion in the place of honor in front of the tokonoma. At first he refused it, but after a little persuasion, he finally settled down onto it, placing his blue, peaked cap beside him on the tatami and his green towel in his lap.
Masako came into the room with a tray of small cups and glasses and a bottle of saké. A broad smile spread across his face and he giggled as he turned the bottle around so that he could read the label: Sōgen (a good local saké in Far Noto). Although we normally prefer to heat it, the weather was already very hot and humid so we decided to drink it cold.
Old Man Gonsaku was unshaven as usual, having a bristly mustache and bearded chin, while the rest of his face was naturally hairless. His head hair was abundant and very coarse, so that it stuck up like a brush. His ears were huge with long broad lobes, like the ears on the images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The upper lids of his eyes had relaxed with age and all but obscured his vision so that in order to see ahead he had to tilt his head back slightly. As was also usual, his fly was open.
I passed him the tray of cups and glasses and he chose a medium-sized cup. Masako and I both chose a glass each. I poured out the saké and the three of us toasted, "Kanpai!" I then turned on the tape recorder, after asking him if he objected to it, and reminded him that he was going to tell us the story of the Jizō image we had passed the previous day.
Old Man Gonsaku's face was glistening with sweat and he scrubbed it with his green towel. Then laying the towel to one side, he began to rub his knees with the palms of each hand in a circular motion, as though trying to raise the energy of the story up from his legs that had walked him into the situation of telling it in the first place. As he spoke he frequently broke off in giggles which
