The evening is a strange and unsettling one.
It is eight oa€™clock at night by the time I arrive at the inn, so even my sense of direction is somewhat confused, let alone my grasp of the layout of the house and the type of garden it has. I am taken along a very winding passageway of some sort, and final y shown into a smal , six-mat-sized room. The place is quite unlike my memory of it from the previous visit. I have my dinner, take a bath, return to my room, and am sipping tea when the maid arrives and offers to lay out the bedding. The strange thing is that it is this same maid who has done everything since I arriveda€”answering the door to me, serving the evening meal, showing me to the bathhouse, and now laying out my bed. Whata€™s more, she has scarcely spoken a word, though she doesna€™t seem particularly countrified in her ways. Earlier I fol owed behind this girl as she wound along the endless passageway-cum-staircase to my room, a chastely knotted red obi around her waist and an old-fashioned oil taper in her hand, and then I fol owed the same obi and oil taper down the same passageway-cum-staircase, on and on, as she led me to the bathhouse, feeling almost as if I was a figure coming and going in a painting.
While serving my evening meal, she apologizes that I have to put up with a room normal y used for other purposes, since the recent lack of guests means the guest rooms havena€™t been cleaned. Later, as she leaves after preparing the bedding, she says a gentle, slow a€?Good nighta€
that has some human warmth to it. But after her footsteps have grown distant and vanished down the twisting corridor, al is hushed and stil , and I am uncomfortably aware of the lack of any sense of human presence in the place.
I have had this experience only once before. It was the time I traveled across Boshu province1 from Tateyama and fol owed the coast around on foot between Kazusa and Choshi. One night I stayed at a certain place along the roada€”I cana€™t put it any more clearly, since both the name of the area and the name of the inn are now quite forgotten. In fact, Ia€™m not even sure it was an inn where I stayed. It was a high-roofed house, containing only two women. I asked if they could put me up; the older woman said yes, and the younger invited me to fol ow her. We passed through a number of large, dilapidated rooms to the farthest room, on the mezzanine floor. Having mounted the three steps from the corridor, I was about to enter the room when a clump of bamboo leaning in under the eaves swayed in the evening breeze and brushed its leaves over me from shoulder to head, sending a chil down my spine. The balcony boards were rotting. I observed to the girl that in another year the bamboo shoots would penetrate the balcony and the room would become overwhelmed by bamboo, but her only response was to grin and leave.
That night I couldna€™t sleep for the rustling of the bamboo near my pil ow. Opening the screen doors to the balcony, I looked out and discovered that the garden was a sea of grass. I let my eyes travel out over the scene through the bright summery moonlight; the grass flowed on into a great grassy hil beyond, without any intervening hedge or wal . Directly beyond the hil the breakers of the mighty ocean thundered in to menace the world of man. I didna€™t sleep a wink until dawn, and as I lay there grimly, hour upon hour inside the eerie tent of the mosquito net, I felt I had strayed into the gothic realm of those popular romantic tales of a previous era.
I have been on many journeys since then, but never again until this night in Nakoi have I had a similar experience.
Lying there on my back, I happen to open my eyes and notice hanging above the sliding doors a piece of cal igraphy framed in red lacquer. Even from where I lie, I can clearly read the words: a€?Bamboo shadows sweep the stair, but no dust moves.a€2 I can also make out that the signature seal gives the cal igraphera€™s name as Daitetsu. Now I am in no way a connoisseur of cal igraphy, but I have always loved the style of the Obaku Zen priest Kosen. Therea€™s a lot to be said for the cal igraphy of Ingen, Sokuhi, and Mokuan as wel ,3 but Kosena€™s writing is the most powerful and meticulous. Looking at these seven characters before me now, both the handling of the brush and the flow of the writing hand convince me that it must be the work of Kosen. But this cannot be so, as the signature is Daitetsu. I consider the possibility that there might also have been a priest named Daitetsu in the Obaku sect at that time, but the paper looks far too new. It can surely only be a recent work.
I turn on my side. Now my eyes take in the painting of cranes by Jakucho that hangs in the alcove.4 Art being my line of work, I registered this as a superb piece when I first entered the room. Most of Jakuchua€™s works have a quite delicate coloration, but this crane is executed with a single defiant brushstroke. The featherlight, egg- shaped body poised jauntily on its single leg has a wonderful rightness to it, and the sense of nonchalant ease continues right down to the tip of the beak. Beside the alcove is a single shelf with a cupboard beyond. What is in the cupboard I cannot tel .
I slip into a peaceful sleep, into dream.
The Nagara maiden in her long-sleeved kimono is riding over the mountain pass on a white horse when suddenly the Sasada man and the Sasabe man leap out on her from either side and both begin to pul at her. The girl now suddenly becomes Ophelia, lying upon a drifting wil ow branch in the watera€™s flow, singing beautiful y. I pick up a long pole and race along the bank in search of a place from which to rescue her, but she floats away and is lost to sight, singing and smiling, apparently perfectly at ease. I stand cal ing desperately after her, the pole over my shoulder.
Then I awaken. My armpits are soaked with sweat. What an extraordinary jumble of the poetic and the vulgar that dream was! I think in bemusement. The early Zen priest Daie is said to have suffered greatly from the fact that even the enlightened mind, which has mastered the il usion of reality, is stil troubled by dreams of the vulgar world. I can quite see his point. One whose cal ing in life is the arts surely doesna €™t cut much of a figure if his dreams arena€™t a bit more tasteful than the norm. I rol over, thinking to myself that most of my dream is quite useless from the point of view of a painting or a poema€”and suddenly moonlight is pouring in through the paper screen doors onto the balcony, steeping them with the slanting shadows of several branches from the tree beyond. It is a bril iantly clear spring night.
Perhaps I am imagining it, but I think I can hear someone softly singing. I strain to catch the sound, wondering whether the song of my dream has somehow slipped out into the real world, or whether a voice from the real world has insinuated itself into the distant realm of my dream. Yes, someone is definitely singing. Smal , low voice though it is, a thin thread of sound is pulsing faintly in the sleepy spring night. Strangely, ita€™s not only the melody that comes to me; when I concentrate, I can also make out the songa€™s words, though catching them from such distant singing would seem impossible. They are repeating over and over the song of the Nagara maiden: As the autumna€™s dew
that lies a moment on the tips
of the seeding grass,
so do I know that I too must
fade and be gone from this brief world.
At first the voice sounds quite close to the balcony, but it grows gradual y fainter and more distant. When a thing finishes abruptly, you register the abruptness of its ending, and the loss is not deeply moving to you. A voice that breaks off decisively wil produce a decisive feeling of completion in the listener. But when a phenomenon
