A man old enough to know better shouldn't talk like that. While walking, I agonized over whether I should go home. Again I found myself in front of M's Pharmaceutical Wholesale. I may not have a second chance. Being disgraced doesn't bother me. I'm going in. I immediately prepared to enter.
"Excuse me," I called into the shop.
M came out. "Ah, hey. Well, well," he stuttered with excitement and invited me to come into the sitting room without speaking and forced me to sit in front of the alcove.
"Hey, bring sake," he called to others in the house. In a few minutes, the sake arrived. In fact, it came quickly.
"It's been a long time. So long," said M as he gulped down his drink, "How long has it been since you've been in Kizukuri?"
"Let me see. I came when we were kids, so about thirty years."
"Yes, it's been that long. Well, please drink. You've come to Kizukuri, so make yourself at home. It's great you came. It's truly wonderful you're here."
The floor plan of the house was fairly close to that of our house in Kanagi. I heard that the current house in Kanagi underwent major renovations using a design by my father when he arrived in Kanagi as the son-in-law who married into his bride's family and took their name, but the changes didn't matter. My father simply went to Kanagi and reproduced the identical floor plan of his birth home in Kizukuri. I thought about the mental state of my father as the son-in-law and smiled. This led me to ponder the similarities in the arrangement of plants and rocks in the garden. By discovering this minor fact, I felt like I touched the human of my late father. I thought this was the reason I came to M's house. M was determined to entertain me.
"No thank you, I've had enough. I have to catch the one o'clock train to Fukaura."
"To Fukaura? What will you do there?"
"Nothing special. I just want to see it one time."
"Are you writing?"
"Yes, I'm doing that too."
I couldn't say something to him that would spoil the fun like "I don't know when I'm going to die."
"So you'll write about Kizukuri. If you're writing about Kizukuri…," said M candidly, "First of all, you should write about the quantity of rice delivered. By comparing the jurisdictions of the police stations, the jurisdiction of the Kizukuri Police Station is first in the nation. Why? It is Japan's best. I believe it does no harm to say it is a monument to our hard work. When the water dried up in a band of fields in this area, I went to the neighboring villages for water and was very successful. I transformed into a huge tiger and was called the Water Tiger God. We're also landowners and have no time to fool around. Despite my bad back, I weed the fields. This time, I'll supply you and your people in Tokyo with a lot of good rice."
He was utterly dependable. Since we were small, M had a generous spirit. His big, round eyes, like a child's, were filled with charm. All the people in this area seemed to love and respect him. I prayed in my heart for M's happiness. Being delayed made me break into a sweat, but I left and was able to make the one o'clock train to Fukaura.
About thirty minutes after leaving Kizukuri on the Gono Line, the train passed Narusawa and Ajigasawa. Tsugaru Plain comes to an end in this area. Then the train ran along the coast of the Sea of Japan. I gazed through the window on my right at the sea and was soon admiring the mountains at the northern end of the Dewa hills as they evolved in about an hour into the scenic beauty of Odose. The rocks in this area are all sharp, jagged rocks of volcanic ash. This bedrock had been eroded flat by the sea and spotted with green. It erupted from the sea like a monster at the end of the Edo period and became a parlor large enough to hold a banquet for hundreds of people on the beach. This place was dubbed Senjojiki (a thousand tatami mats). Places here and there in this bedrock had sunken into curved shapes. When flooded with seawater, they resembled large cups filled to the brim with sake. This place should be called the Swamp of Cups, but the many large holes with diameters from one to two feet resembling cups led to the name of the Big Boozer.
If bizarre rock formations were chiseled on the seashore in this area and those tentacles continuously washed by angry waves, it's probably written about in guidebooks about famous places. Lacking an air of eeriness like the seashore in the northern end of Sotogahama, it becomes an ordinary landscape to the rest of the country. The atmosphere is not particularly hard to understand by people from other provinces who say it's the rigidity peculiar to Tsugaru. In short, Tsugaru is opening up to the world but is underrated in the eyes of people accustomed to it. In A Brief History of Aomori Prefecture, Takeuchi Umpei wrote that a long time ago, the region south of this area was not a part of Tsugaru but of Akita. In year 8 of Keicho (1603), after consulting with the neighboring Satake clan, this land was incorporated into the Tsugaru domain. This is only the irresponsible intuition of a vagabond like me, but somehow this area does not feel like Tsugaru. The unfortunate fate of Tsugaru is missing. The essential badness particular to Tsugaru is not in this area. I knew only by looking at the mountain streams. All of them were wise, culturally speaking. A
