got to start things off by singing,” so I sang a verse from the Bon festival dance from my hometown. They said that it was much like their own, and the grandmothers happily began to sing. To moisten their throats I poured them sake, and they drank freely. That was when the singing really started. Their voices were pretty. Thinking that if I took out my notebook I’d ruin the mood, I decided only to listen. When one woman had sung and grown short of breath, the next would begin. Many of the songs were from the Kabuki stage, and there was always dancing with the hands. Moving their hips, standing on their knees, although they danced only with their upper bodies, they radiated beauty from deep within. I was unable to see them simply as old farming women.
The young, seated men were attacked and disparaged by the older women, who called them artless monkeys. I learned that Bon festival dancing had thrived in Tsushima and that there was Bon dancing in nearly every inlet, up every creek. During this Bon dancing, they also had a scene from Kabuki, and it had become an important occasion for the learning of folksongs as well. But in Sasuna, for some reason, Bon dancing had fallen out of practice. This, it would seem, had reduced the number of opportunities for the elderly to pass on their knowledge to the young.
When the old women had sung, they demanded a song of me as well. I don’t know all that many songs, but for every three times they asked, I’d sing once. This, I thought, is how singing competitions came to pass. As the singing became more excited, more and more of the lyrics had to do with sex. The young people shrieked with elation, but the old women remained relatively composed. It had grown late, and the singing voices were loud, so people in the neighborhood gathered in front of the house. The singing continued in this way until about three. Of course, during that time there was also animated conversation. And so it was that I first came to have a notion, though faint, of what sing-offs in these parts had been like.
Chapter 3
Grandpa Kajita Tomigoro
[Tsushima Island, Nagasaki Prefecture, July 1950]
I called on Grandpa Kajita Tomigoro on a clear, bright morning late in July 1950, in the Azamo section of Tsutsu Village, on the island of Tsushima. Earlier at the post office, in the course of a conversation with the postmaster about various aspects of this village, I had learned that only one person from among the village’s first settlers was still alive. That was Grandpa Kajita. “Try visiting him,” the postmaster encouraged me. “He’s over eighty, but in good health, and he’s quite capable of conversation.”
Here was a person who had watched a village grow from its very beginnings. This was really something. I took my leave of the postmaster and went to visit the home of Grandpa Kajita nearby. He had retired from his position as head of the household and was living with his elderly wife. His son lived in the house just below theirs, where he also ran a confectionery store. I found Grandpa sitting and making fishing tackle on the wooden floor of a house that was blackened inside by the soot from wood fires.
I greeted him, saying, “Grandpa, I hear you were born in Kuka, in Yamaguchi Prefecture. I’m from Nishigata, to the east of Kuka. So I feel nostalgic, coming to visit you . . . ”
“Really, you’re from Nishigata? You’ve come a long way,” he mused. “It’s been ages since I’ve been to Kuka. I imagine it’s changed a lot.”
The old man spoke entirely in the language of my home, so right from the start he didn’t feel like a stranger. And when I said, “I was thinking maybe you could tell me about things from the distant past . . . ” he started to speak without hesitation.
It was long ago that I first came here. I was seven at the time, and I didn’t know east from west. I’d had bad luck with my parents. My father had died on me when I was just three and my mother around that same time. My brothers all died young as well, so, as for relations, I had just one grandmother and she took me in. Then, as it happened, there was a man named Masamura Jisaburo who didn’t have any children; he said he’d try raising me, so I went to live with him and stayed until I was seven. I don’t recall much from my childhood. My grandmother’s family, they were confectioners. Sometimes I’d go there and be given a toffee to lick, and I looked forward to that.
You ask how it is that I came here to Azamo? Well, they had what were called meshi morai [literally, “food receivers”] on Kuka’s large fishing boats. It was custom to put five- or six-year-old orphans on these boats, and I was placed on one too. As fishing boats go these were large, with five or six people on a vessel. But they didn’t fish off the coast of Kuka. Instead, they all went far away. Since way back, Kuka’s fishermen had been going to Tsuno Island in Nagato to fish for sea bream, half a dozen boats to a group. The oldest among these fishermen would become the “big captain” and when they went over to Tsuno he did all the bargaining with the people there, and decided both where they’d fish and where they’d lodge at night. After that everyone worked as they pleased. Then, when it came time to return, all of the crews and the locals would gather together to talk and the big captain would address the people of Tsuno Island, saying, “There were no troubles, so all went well.” And the fishermen would all return to Kuka. On the way, their boats traveled in pairs and helped one another out when there was an accident.
They didn’t just go to Tsuno Island. Some fishing crews went to Karatsu, too, on the west side of Kyushu. And in time they were even able to go to Tsushima. The Kuka fishermen were the first to make the journey. I’ve heard that, long before I was born, a feudal lord from Hiroshima married off his daughter to Lord So Sukekuni in Tsushima. After that, people started to go back and forth between Hiroshima and Tsushima, fishermen included. Crews from Hiroshima would come and fish off the coast of Kuka and probably the guys from Kuka heard their big stories right there because the Kuka fishermen came back with some tall tales. The visitors claimed there were fish in Tsushima that were fabulously large, and that the sea was filled with fish. Well, if there were that many fish, the Kuka fishermen wanted to go too, and so they followed the crews from Mukainada, in Hiroshima, and crossed over to Tsushima. That was all more than thirty years before I was born.
As it happened, the boat I was put on was going to Tsushima. I’ll never forget. It was in 1876. We left Kuka and it took any number of days before we arrived here. On windy days, we’d attach a tiny sail to the bow of the boat. When there was no wind, we’d put the oars in. When we got as far as Hakata, we took on miso, soy sauce, salt, and rice. Then we waited for good weather on Genkai Island, at the mouth of Hakata’s harbor, and when we thought the weather would hold for a few days, we departed. My young mind couldn’t believe that the first boat I’d ever been on was suddenly going to Tsushima. The little town of Kuka had been my playground, and now wherever I looked there were only waves. The boat wouldn’t stay still. We were rocked up and down and it was more than I could bear, so I held on to the side and just watched the big waves. The adults were something else, rowing along on the tops of those big waves. They rowed even at night, and I was relieved when we arrived at Iki Island. Climbing up on the hill at Katsumoto, on Iki, we could see mountains far to the north. When I was told that this was probably Tsushima, I was discouraged to think we still had that far to go.
Boy sleeping on fishing nets. Yamaguchi Prefecture.
August 1962.
As an orphaned child taken aboard, I didn’t have any work to do. I was supposed to just play quietly on the boat. It was so small, though, and there was really no way to amuse myself so it did get boring, but the fishermen all doted on me and I somehow made it through. On the boat, when night fell, I’d take a cloth patchwork kimono from the stern and, covering myself with that, would burrow down under the rush mats. On rainy days, I’d make a roof of these rush mats and do nothing but sleep all day.
We
