The human mind and spirit are advanced by what is written with pleasure.     Jean Giono

fabric of life

weaving threads, what hues

the colours that come in my

old age!  more durable

this cloth, made by many hands

and one surrendered spirit

someday

the time will come when

i at last escape myself

forgo the treadwheel

i trod these seventy years:

my merry-go-round of life

a humble thought

my gravestone is up:

unknown, unvisited, this

virgin rock perhaps

one day will kisses cover

like oscars in père lachaise

two prayers for simplicity

people decorate

layer upon layer of

unnecessary

decoration until blind

my life too has been like that

i am satisfied

what are you satisfied with?

i am satisfied

its only that cant you see

in spring the peaks are still white

GREEN PIGEON MAN OF THE FOUR PINES

The winter had been long, cold and hard, but now it was spring.

In the last story about our university hospital hero I may have given you the impression that he was serene with his illness and impending fate.

This is misleading. In truth, his body was changing in all sorts of strange and unsettling ways, while his mind was far too active for its own good. Nervous exhaustion had led to insomnia and a reliance on sleeping medication. Along with the hot bath before his evening meal, the daily sleeping pill was one of the highlights of his generally drab and colourless life.

A palliative consultant at the hospital had said that he was suffering from anxiety and depression.

Well, it was never going to be easy. Mortality was something that you avoided facing until it looked you straight in the eyes.

During a normal day he tried to stay active, but was never sure if the fatigue that he so often felt was the result of his physical or mental state.

He experienced a tingling sensation all over his body. Was it caused by nerves? Or was it his increasingly dysfunctional liver? He didn't know.

In the mornings he usually found a task with which to occupy himself. But it was the afternoons that were difficult.

This particular afternoon he was more jittery than ever. He really didn't know what to do. It was impossible to rest. So, at the risk of tiring himself, he set off on a walk up the mountain behind his house.

His destination was a place where in his younger days he used to cut firewood for the winter and bring it down on his back when it was dry and ready to be burnt. But he hadn't been there for a long, long time.

The forest through which he passed was a place inhabited by deer, wild boar, raccoons, a few foxes and the odd bear, where it was guaranteed that you would never meet another fellow human. Now that the snow had melted, it seemed to welcome him with its spring softness and expectation. Once fields where the villagers grew rice, potatoes and feed for their animals, the land had been abandoned in the 1960s during the country's period of rapid economic growth, when so many rural dwellers had given up agriculture to move into the cities and towns. Pine, oak, chestnut and other local varieties of tree had self-seeded and were now quite tall. Trees felled by periodic typhoons and heavy snowfall lay on the humus-layered earth rotting. It was a completely natural forest, light and airy, touched by no human hand since the farmers had left all those years ago. No one managed, maintained or manicured it.

Walking through the forest, he immediately knew that this was what he had long needed. To get away from the human race and all the signs of their civilisation. Meeting even a single person in the forest that day would have ruined his experience. But, thankfully, that wouldn't happen.

If anything could help loosen and untangle the unstoppable train of thoughts in his confused and weary head, it was here.

A long time ago he had decided that here was the ideal place for his grave. Somewhere in the forest he could have his ashes scattered, and perhaps mark the spot with a distinctively shaped rock.

As he walked through the forest he thought about this. He knew more or less where he wanted it to be. The place was a clearing, about thirty minutes' walk from his house, where there was a small Buddhist memorial erected by villagers in commemoration of the farm animals that had once worked for them. It was beautiful spot, looking out to the high mountains across the valley, It was also adjacent to the place where he had cut down trees for firewood all those years ago.

He walked very slowly, still not confident whether his body wouldn't be damaged by the exertion.

But, so far, it seemed to be holding up.

As he neared his destination he saw an uncommon bird flying horizontally through the trees. Jays and rooks were common here, but it wasn't one of those. By the flash of colour that he had caught sight of he identified it as an aobato, a green pigeon, a bird whose distinctive call he occasionally heard, but which he had only actually seen a few times.

To see it today of all days seemed auspicious.

Immediately he decided that in accordance with the Buddhist custom of taking a new name after death he would call himself aobato-koji - Green Pigeon Man.

It was a joke. But he was also serious. Green Pigeon Man.

Presently he arrived at the clearing where the small statue for the dead farm animals stood. He searched for a suitable place to put the stone that would commemorate him, the Green Pigeon Man. About ten metres away he found four closely grouped pines. He would put his stone here between the trees.

Thus he would become the Green Pigeon Man of the Four Pines.

Then, satisfied with what he had accomplished, he set off back down the mountain.

He didn't see the green pigeon again, but, in the forest just above his house, did faintly hear its call.

Later, he selected a suitable stone - one that was simple and naturally shaped but distinctive and with a nice grain - and got one of his younger friends to carry it up the mountain with him.

On this second visit it occurred to him that to put the stone between the four pines might, one day in the far future, hinder their growth. So he decided to position it away from the pines, and also not too close to the Buddhist memorial for the farm animals, in a space of its own.

With a trowel he dug into the soft leaf and humus-layered earth, avoiding the roots of the nearby trees.

The stone of the Green Pigeon Man looked good in the clearing in the forest, across the valley from the snow-covered mountains.

The task completed, he and his young friend now made their way down the mountain. They didn't see a green pigeon, but did encounter a young wild boar, which stood gazing at them from afar before hurrying back to its mother.

March 2022

new york waka (cb)

The Chrysler Building

Great monument to Mammon

Mighty God of Wealth

Thrusting toward the heavens

Terrible in it's Beauty

Exhilaration

Pulses of man and machine

Throbbing all around

Incessant motion and sound.

The peace shock of Central Park

a response (me)

there is no such thing

as progress. visit new york

to see for yourself:

humans caught in illusions

beneath the azure spring sky 

waka to send cb winging on his way 2 (new york)

a friend travelling

the globe, rolling back the years

with keith and loogie

sends billet doux poems on

art deco, japanese style 

DISCARDING WITH LOVE

sorting old things

in my life

i do mean THINGS

books, tapes, worn shoes, cd roms, computer manuals, xmas cards, letters...

most purchased as a paid-up member of the materialist civilisation,

some received from friends.

the books were read, reread, others never read.

now i discard them、

like a participant in the festival of broken needles.

so much better that i do this myself

than leave it to someone else.

(the winter is gone

and the spring is here.)

it really is a necessary chore

this discarding with love.

February 2022

WASHING-UP (DOING THE DISHES)

i like washing-up said my daughter

well, that's what we have in common

in head, in bed

enclosed in the shell

of oneself

in the cold winter

too ill

too lazy

to leave the warmth

of the heavy quilts

and moreover lacking motivation

but one night at three

(when i always wake)

i got up again

(it had been such a long time

since I had done this)

i gathered the strength

to reassess my life

over the kitchen sink

as always

alone

so it has to be

at the end

there is no escape

i reach for the first dish

gently sponge and soap

it, rinse

under the warm water

a grater is next

takes a little more

effort to clean

the uneven surface

but soon is done

and now im talking happily to myself

as I take the knives forks and spoons:

'prefer the contradictory

the challenging heresy'

(though no one will understand)

its good

to have this in common

with my daughter

because most things said

are lost 

words so difficult

if not impossible

this simple love of washing-up

makes a connection 

between us

gentle words for old age

yes there is a place

for suffering in this life

to know it, renounce

let faith forth, its natural

dont be afraid, just relax

waka to send cb winging on his way (stockholm, helsinki)

we are obsessed

by images: please think again,

venture into the

black edges: explore that part

of you without form, time, fear 

neither poetry nor prose 

i tell you the secret of living in the winter cold of the mountains where you wake up to find that the water in the pot which had been boiling before you went to sleep is by the morning frozen. the secret is just that - a secret. its the secret of a hermit trying to reach his or her inner core. its what humans have always done, before this materialistic civilisation of ours diverted our attention away to all those practical things that fill our days. i search for the transcendent, which is sacred, extreme and uncontrollable. in a similar way, my secret is the uninvited guest carrying me through life and death, whom i have no choice but to follow.
the night is quiet. the warmth coming from the stove weakens, the fingers of the cold reach towards me and in the end i come to accept it all, though sometimes i may want to escape.

December　2021

THE SCHOOLGATE

era quella di un continuo, minutissimo sgretolamento della personalità congiunto però al presagio vago del riedificarsi altrove di una individualità (grazie a Dio) meno cosciente ma più larga  Il gattopardo

Then the penny dropped.

- We've all got to die.

It was so stupidly simple. You were born, you lived and you died, and as your life became less relevant - as it always did with old people - you concentrated less on the living and more on the dying. You grew into dying, so to speak.

He watched the spontaneity, the creativity, the natural energy with which his three-year-old grandson was growing up. Meanwhile, the boy's father and mother were making lives for themselves and their family in interesting and useful ways. It was what humans had always done.

But for him it was finished. At least the living part was over. People were no longer interested in him, and, to be frank, he was no longer interested in most of them.

Everyday life was extremely superficial due to the ascendency of the materialist culture over the world's population and the preference of modern people to exclude adventure and chance from their lives. Instagram, Netflix, computer games... These were the sort of things that they all did, all talked about.

For someone who had learnt to love books by traveling all over London to read or borrow them, and, at other times, liked nothing more than to shoulder a rucksack and take to the open road, the present culture was frankly boring.

Technology, science and reason had, indeed, created a very impressive civilisation in which the average life expectancy had risen from sixty-six to seventy-nine years during his own lifetime. He decided that he would take six of those years, but decline the remaining seven.  

Another thing that he noticed was that the great mystery of death was no longer coming to seem much of a mystery. Sure, it was a bit of a riddle in that no one had ever come back from the grave to talk about it. Otherwise, it could be stated as a mathematical formula:

Nothing = Nothing

you were nothing before you were born

and are nothing after you die

An easy proposition to accept.

And although there were countless ways of dying they all led to the same end.

Think about it. There is something rather wonderful going on here. We are all unique individuals, but inherently the same.

To prepare for the death that he wanted he asked a friend to make him a coffin - the simplest one possible, just a box with a lid. In plain wood.

He also realised that he must stop himself from thinking so much about his illness. How far had it progressed? How long he had to live?

The only thing that would concern him is whether he was in pain. This was the sole reason for which he would see a doctor.

This also helped him to forget himself. He wanted to move away from being the person that he had been during his life. There was absolutely no benefit in being that person any more.

Consciousness too became a hindrance. You don't get anywhere by 'considering' things.  

He found conversations with friends going nowhere, repeating themselves or getting lost. It was all so pointless.  

A great peace descended upon him at nights when he went into the garden and looked at the black and silver of the mountains and moon. In life or death, a human is always in nature. Thus he summed up what seventy-two years of life had taught him. 

Preparing to walk out of life seemed as natural as walking out of the school gate at the age of eighteen. He had enjoyed and benefitted from his school years, but now was the time for something new and he intended to embrace it.

THE POETIC MOMENT 

I initiated an old school friend into the art of Japanese waka poems, and over the past year we've been exchanging verses. How different our styles of poetic expression!  Still, I hope that you can also see what draws us together.

(C)

The Golden Lion,

Incandescent with intent

Rages from the sea.

Flames showering from his coat,

His mission unstoppable

A snow-capped mountain,

Summit of a volcano

Once fire and lava.

Spiritually potent -

Even to one with no faith.

Trees are now naked.

Eloquent desolation.

Creaking in cold winds,

Shivering branches trembling,

Shorn of all their foliage.

Dancing life away

To a saraband's rhythm;

The beat triple time,

Prolonged on the second beat,

As is breath's exhalation.

A silence of snow

And brittle glittering frosts.

The icy journey

Of pale light, from stars long dead.

Winter's cold hand touches me.

(s)

at seventy-one

sweet freedom sitting looking

as the day rolls out

cloud gathers on the mountain

the awaited darkness seems far

perfumes abounding

in the forest where we stroll

my daughter and i

lilies, flowers of kudzu

givenchy ange ou demon

signs of the autumn

are already in the air:

the morning chill and

this grey sky, rain falling as

i read a friend's sad letter

in some brittle but

invigorating season

our friendship flowered

boyhood friends we never were

from whence came this winter glow?

this last one is a joint composition

coming from nothing

he returns to nothingness

no trace is discernible

but an echo of music

a sound of loving chatter

rainy december

i have earned this rest today

love yourself! i say

and go where it takes you

like singing sea spray

look past the garden

snow mountains are welcoming

stars the confetti

today a renku (linked verse): charles (pic) supplied the first three lines , simon the last two

coming from nothing

he returns to nothingness

no trace is discernible

but an echo of music

 a sound of loving chatter

November 2021

HAPPINESS

as long as i can mix and knead bread at midnight

leaven it in the warmth of the day

bake it it at eventide

then i am happy

outside

the sky is rinsed of its last light

and darkens like the sea;

when I shut the gates

i smell the fragrance

of the wood smoke in the cold garden

inside

i partake of the bread -

a body searching for soul and spirit,

a companion to the flames

that lap against the iron walls

SAN GIORGIO

Freedom is a great thing. But we're all human, all suffer from the same irrational ego-driven goals. The prospect of dying at seventy-two (or at best seventy-three) had made a big dent in his confidence. So he spent the next few weeks attempting to explain to himself how having cancer could actually become a plus in his life.

It was not easy.

But then again it was not impossible.

Nothing is impossible.

From the hospital records he discovered that he had first consulted a dermatologist about the problem spot on his back in 2014. That was seven years ago! The doctor had brushed aside his worries. It was a harmless seborrheic keratosis he said, but he could cut it out for him if he wanted. He should come back in the winter when it would heal more quickly.

This he didn't do. Obviously. The doctor had made a misdiagnosis, but at least he had offered to remove it. So, you could say that they were both to blame.

When he looked back over his life, he came to see that he had generally avoided modern medicine. His father, who had died at the age of ninety from probably oesophageal cancer (no one ever knew for sure), had been even more evasive. His mother too. She had died shortly before her seventy-sixth birthday a few weeks after a heart attack, having refused the normal follow-up tests and the medication or treatments that might have prolonged her life a little longer. So, in a sense the attitude was in his genes.

One winter some years later a friend with whom he was staying had noticed the spot and said that he should get someone to check it. So that spring he went to the annual health check at the village clinic, during which he drew the doctor's attention to the spot. Though he wasn't a specialist, the doctor said that it wasn't melanoma, but that 'he should keep an eye on it'. A ridiculous remark really, because when a suspicious spot gets to look like melanoma it's already too late. But he forgave the doctor, because he had never really expected much of him - a typical village doctor with probably next to no practical experience of this relatively rare cancer.

Thereafter he forgot about the spot for long periods of time. Then, when for some reason it bothered him, he would try to study it in the mirror, or get someone to take a photo and compare that to the countless photos available on Internet sites. Of course, seborrheic keratosis and melanoma often look very similar. This Internet check was no more than an exercise conducted to convince himself that he was fine. He believed what he wanted to believe - an extremely common human failing.

Reviewing his life, he noticed how many of the decisions that he had made had been mistaken. Expanding on this, he began to wonder how much of human progress occurred because of mistakes. At least, now he didn't feel so bad. In fact, he felt surprised that he had survived into his seventies, despite all those bad decisions.

Conclusion: humans should try to make fewer mistakes. Right?

On this he wasn't completely sure.

Some strange things had happened both before and after his cancer diagnosis. Earlier in the year he had had a premonition that someone close to him would die. He recognised it as the same feeling he had experienced a couple of months before his wife had given birth to the couple's first child stillborn.

When he found out that this time it was going to be him, it was both a shock and a relief. After all, he had already logged up his biblical lifespan. It was for the common good that it was going to be him rather than someone younger.

The preceding winter he had felt the need to tidy an old storehouse full of documents, photos and other personal stuff. While sifting through the old snaps he had come across one of a woman doctor friend and her artist-poet partner. They were on a visit to his house and the doctor was talking avidly to his youngest daughter, while her partner was sitting in the garden sketching. He had such good memories of the couple that he framed the two photos and put them on his desk.

Why were these two people so special?

Like him she was a European who had settled in the east. She could read and write Japanese, had even qualified in Japan as a practicing doctor, having passed the difficult national examination, while her partner was a former English literature professor and translator who had taken early retirement to buy a house in a picturesque mountain location and there, surrounded by nature, paint and write.

But there was something more than these cultural similarities that appealed to him. He had watched both the doctor and the artist die and been inspired by the ways in which they had chosen to go about it. She had died at the age of seventy-one after developing leukemia and refusing treatment. Some years later the old man had died at the age of ninety-two after a lengthy illness during which, despite paralysis, he had always maintained a satisfied and content air. They had both died what could be called 'good deaths'.

Now it was his turn to die a good death.

Among the remarkable things that had occurred after the diagnosis was the dramatic change in the attitude of his wife. On being told, she immediately invited him to her house for a daily massage. When his visit was in the late afternoon he sometimes stayed for a bath and dinner.

He had not given much thought to the reasons for the long period - over two decades - of acrid relations between him and his wife, but now he was more willing than before to admit that his own introverted and selfish character was at least partly to blame. Notice of one's mortality snaps a few illusions. Now they met every day. Living together would have put too much of a strain on this newfound interest in each other. Mutual interest in each other and mutual sympathy - a joint recognition of what two free, independent and mature people have in common, have shared in their past and can help each other with in the future.

Thus, the awareness that his life was coming to an end had made him a little less selfish, and a little more appreciative of those around him. But not much. 

He began to wonder what part fate had played in his present 'unlucky' situation. But, fate was a concept that hardly anyone these days, among them him, understood. Still, despite this ignorance, he felt respect for what he knew the ancients had believed to be a key in understanding the passage of a man or woman through life on this earth.

Was his determination to ignore the suspicious skin blemish over the years somehow 'fateful'? he asked himself. And why had two doctors given him the same wretched advice? It seemed something more than simple bad luck.

He came across a comment that he had written in an old notebook a decade before: 

'Everyone is trying to live for long. I hate it. Already doing my bucket list.'

This amusing comment now struck him as prophetic.

Observing old people, hanging out with his elderly friends had given him an ambiguous attitude towards surviving for too long.

'It could not have happened any other way,' wrote a sympathetic female friend. 

He too wanted to see it that way.

So he came to accept it all. He would coexist with his cancer, which he knew in time would kill him. He thought of himself as St. George and cancer as the dragon, but in this story the dragon would win. Fine. He recalled a trip that he had made to Sardinia one winter a few years back and the bright pictures of the island's patron saint San Giorgio in combat with 'il drago' that were painted on houses and countryside barn walls.

Yes, he would become the anti-San Giorgio.

His life took on a mythic dimension. Even without the cancer he had reached an age when death was a possibility high on the agenda of things to be considered. It was now high time to think about death, and he would confront it as nobly as he could.

The myth would aim to make some sense of the things that had happened to him. It's what humans seeking solutions to intractable problems have done since the beginning of time.

Meanwhile, some of the few acquaintances with whom he had shared details of his condition sent him gifts.

That evening, drinking a glass of exceptional wine received from two far off friends close to his heart, he  welcomed the fact that death - and life - would always remain a mystery.

ENDGAME

his life was at an end he knew

but there was one thing more that

he must do,

a feeling inchoate but true

one day it takes your life away,

may it  be what you need to do

to stay

in touch with life's vitality?

can such a contradiction be,

in sacrificing life, the two extremes

together we

connect in living unity?

the sacred joins with the profane

ephemera, eternity are

one and same

and thus the circle moves again

just then the morning sun rose up

sending sunbeams overflowing

in his lap,

dissolving  shadow and dispute

UNLEARNING

you can see the surprise

in an animal's eyes

when danger appears.

but in the next instant

it's action not dread,

its reaction as natural

as water or bread.

it's fatal to tarry

to think, to consider,

to seek to control

is a futile endeavour.

our long life's a time

that we're given to learn

to regress, thus progress

to our animal selves;

to advance to the past,

to unlearn what they taught

us in school, to get smart

without pride

and never to hide 

the ways of the heart.

October 2021 

THE FRENCH QUARTER

Watching YouTube videos is often a waste of time. But once in a while you come across something that is original or charming or for some other unexplainable reason attracts your attention.

Recently, resting up with a bout of lumbago, I had such an encounter. But before I share the link, please take a couple of minutes to read and I hope enjoy the poetry of the song that I'm going to introduce:

Well I spoke too soon
Down the son of the moon

Well I'm dizzy so dizzy with desire
As I'm feasting heavy by the fire

No goodbyes on our minds
Just a couple of delicate grapes hanging on a vine

Well these wine soaked whispers pour from my mouth
I'm asleep by the fire and I never want out

And all the stars were out that night
And I watched an empty sky 

And the sinking feeling of emptiness by my side
Well I'll never forget those nights we shared
It was nice to know it was nice to know someone cared

[Chorus]
And all the stars were the only light
And all the stars were out that night
And all the stars were the only light
And all the stars, they were out that night

Well I spoke too soon
Down the son of the moon

Well I'm dizzy so dizzy with desire
As I'm feasting heavy by the fire

[Chorus]
And all the stars were the only light
And all the stars were out that night
And all the stars were the only light
And all the stars, they were out that night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68p0mJzKOL8&ab_channel=hottcarlson

So there I was sitting on the sofa by the wood stove in my old house, with my laptop balanced on my knees. Alone but satisfied. My company was a glass of red wine and a lifetime of experiences, memories that I could call up. No, that's wrong, you don't 'call up' memories. They just appear from some part of your consciousness. At first I was attracted to the screen by the two characterful buskers - he's a joyful poet type, while she's sassy and full of freedom. In the background there is an intriguing homeless guy, while the people who walk past seem content and happy, but don't stop to listen until at the very end a smartly dressed lady is drawn in to dance a few elegant steps.

Delightful.

I watched it a couple more times and tried to hear what they were singing, but without much success apart from the beginning 'I spoke too soon' and the chorus about the stars being out. The names of the two musicians were there so I googled 'Shine Delphi I spoke too soon' and, to my surprise, a link with the lyrics came up, along with a website (yeh, even buskers have websites). Somewhat synchronistically, the lyrics - 'feasting by the fire', 'delicate grapes', 'wine-soaked whispers', not to mention the starry sky outside - fitted my present situation. I was also a little shocked to come across a reference to emptiness, because it was something - emptiness with a big E - that I had been writing about in my diary that very morning.

Since then the girl has been scouted by a Nashville record company,  released a CD and will perform at the city's Grand Ole Opry next month. She is all over the Internet, but fame has changed her. That pure sense of freedom is gone. Or is it just the passing years?

As for Shine Delphi, according to his website, he still 'travels this world with a resonator guitar and a few words to share'. Like Suemarr, he seems unlikely ever to change.

.

September 2021 

what sort of people

drink the moonlight at midnight

waking from their sleep

with the philosopher kings

to woo the world in secret?

SOME SPIRITUAL EXERCISES

MY FAMILY shows me that I continue through my children and their children. A kind of eternal life.

BEING ALONE paradoxically shows me that I am not alone. Without being able even to begin to explain, I sense my connection to the fields and forest, the rivers, mountains. I feel comforted by the moon, in awe of the stars, warmed and nourished by the sun, moistened by the rain. I listen to the song of the birds and insects, watch the play of light and shadow on the landscape, while the leaves move in the wind.

UNDERSTANDING THE NATURAL PROCESS is best achieved by reducing self, resisting the illusion of control.

WHEN ACTION CEASES, life moves naturally towards quietness and darkness.

UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL

This was the third visit that he had made in a month to the big university hospital. With each round trip taking at least three hours, along with the time spent waiting to see the doctor, the appointment itself and the wait at the end to pay, it was always an exhausting experience. The hospital was crowded and the atmosphere suffocating. For someone who loved fresh air and open spaces just being there felt like a bad dream. Exiting the building at the end was the ultimate relief.

Today's appointment was to notify him of the results of the MRI scan that he had had the previous visit. Cancer was suspected and if this so it would probably be a death sentence.

Well, he was seventy-three and felt that he could be philosophical about it. No one wants to die, but one day everyone must. It would have been different if he had been young, but he wasn't. Not any longer.

He arrived towards the end of the morning session and there were a lot of people milling around. Using his patient's card he checked himself in at one of the machines in the ground floor reception and was given a number.

1924. By coincidence it was the date of his father's birth. His father had died seven years previously at the grand old age of ninety.

Taking the central staircase he climbed to the first floor and found himself a seat towards the back of the waiting area. Patients' numbers came up on three electronic boards that also informed you approximately how long you would have to wait. However, there was no approximate waiting time for the doctor that he had to see. So he just sat there. Waiting. Didn't have a book or newspaper or smartphone to read. Didn't want to. Just vaguely observed what was going on around him. But in a relaxed way. He didn't feel tense, but it was hot and he was sweating a little. Having found a couple of interesting-looking people he watched them in a vague sort of way. It was simply something to do while he waited. But after a few minutes the interest evaporated.

On the previous visit to the university hospital - the one when he had had the MRI scan - the place had reminded him of a supermax jail. The endless corridors were mostly empty, though occasionally he did encounter a doctor or a nurse or a patient wheeling a drip, corridors of standard colour, standard design, made of metal, glass and plastic. In one of the many little rooms that led off from one of the corridors he glimpsed people waiting to give blood samples. In a conference room a couple of medics in blue scrubs were sitting at a table talking.

Doctors, nurses, patients, technicians, patients, cleaners, janitors all incarcerated in the university supermax. Some willingly, others less so. The MRI room was in the basement, in the bowels of the cancer section. Three people were sitting in the windowless waiting area, watching a television show in which a veteran entertainer was blithely performing a hit song of yesteryear.

After his thirty-minute scan was over, he again wandered the corridors, getting lost in the maze. Finally he found his way back to the central reception, paid his bill and quickly left.

At least today's visit did not feel as bad as that. But the waiting was beginning to irritate.

1924. His number was displayed on one of the electronic boards.

He rose from his seat and entered the doctor's room.

There in the tiny consulting cubicle sat the woman doctor who had seen him on his first visit and who had ordered the scan.

On that first visit her manner had been somewhat brusque. But today she was different.

Her computer was on, but she had printed out a wad of papers, which she was sifting through. Finally she found the piece that she had been searching for and showed it to him. On it were pictures of the scan.

- These show sections through your liver and spleen, she began. The white spots are where the cancer has metastasized.

- Here, here, here. She pointed to the pictures.

- And there is a tiny spot in the rib here, and in this vertebra.

She paused and looked at him.

- We only took the scan of your lower trunk. It's probably metastasized in other places too.

To be honest, he did not feel at all shocked. It was something that he had pretty much expected.

He shrugged in a casual sort of way.

Then she began to talk about the therapy options. The latest drugs. He recalled that a doctor at the smaller hospital he had attended had called them 'sophisticated'. For some reason this had amused him.

The drugs were basically aimed at 'maximising' a person's immune system, she explained, by turning off its checks. There were often autoimmune problems. But these could be controlled with steroids and other drugs. Each patient's response was different, but the new therapies had enabled some people to live for ten years or more.

She began to outline what the treatments consisted of, their side effects, success rates and so on. And so on.

She was wearing the standard navy blue scrubs that all the other doctors wore, but he noticed that around her neck she had a small gold necklace with a miniature teddy bear pendant, so tiny you would never have normally noticed it.

The observation gave him a strangely light feeling.

The doctor's stylish black slippers he identified as Keen Women's Howsers - not cheap, but obviously no prob for someone on a university hospital doctor's salary.

He had no intention of signing up for treatment, which would mean periodic incarceration in the university supermax. Still, it heartened him to see these small signs of individuality in the otherwise business-like lady doctor. Now, he recalled the false eyelashes of the girl who had fixed his IV before the MRI scan, imagining how she had attached them in a hurry that morning after a late lie-in with her lover (the male MRI technician?).

In contrast, he saw the lady doctor as divorced and living alone, and the teddy bear necklace as a present from her only daughter. He pictured her in front of the mirror putting it on that morning after the cursory few minutes spent making up her face.

With this his reverie came to an end, and he once more tried to concentrate on the doctor's explanation.

She was going through the motions. She knew very well that he was going to say no.

Finally she came to an end and looked up.

He breathed in, then said, Thank you, but I think that I'll let nature take its course.

The interview did not finish here. Now that he was signing himself off from the university hospital the doctor set about writing letters to the doctors at the smaller hospital who would help him with the palliative care that at some future time he would need. This she did quickly and in silence.

Then she handed him the envelopes, together with the pictures of his scan and some other pages of information that she had printed out.

He received them, stood up and bowed.

She rose from her chair in front of the computer and returned his bow.

Down in reception the wait to pay was interminably long.

When mercifully his number at last came up on the electronic display he hurried to the machine and paid.

Then he walked out of the building, a free man. 

the following two pieces on the oshika-related activities of two historical figures - one from the fourteenth and the other from the nineteenth century - were posted a while back in the VILLAGERS section of this website. however as its misleading to call them 'villagers' they are being relocated here.  

Walter Weston (1860-1940)

This is an account by the British missionary-turned-mountaineer of a visit that he made to Oshika in 1892. There is a reference to Weston in the memories of I.S. immediately following.

By six o'clock we came to a halt at Ichiba (20 miles from Takato), where scattered cottages are dotted about the sides of the picturesque ravine, through which the Kashio-gawa flows. Crossing the long bridge that spans the stream, we put up at a modest inn called Dai-maruya ("the house of the great circle"). As usual, the pack-horse was well in the rear, but as it was still quite early, I preferred to wait for my own provisions, which the baggage contained, and meanwhile accepted an invitation to "deign to enter the honourable hot water." To one unaccustomed to Japanese country ways the position would have had its drawbacks. The oval bath-tub stood in a conspicuous place outside the front verandah, and in full view of the villagers as they passed up and down the narrow stony path. Possibly, as I have often seen else where, it was so arranged in order to allow the occupant to see and chat with his friends as they ambled to and fro. .

Many and long were the hours that dragged on as I afterwards waited, Micawber-like, for "something to turn up" in the shape of my baggage and the food it held. It was all in vain, though, and, after once declining the proffered dinner of native food, I had to eat humble-pie and recall the rejected meal. Only a little rice, however, was left, as the rest had been devoured in the kitchen. When midnight arrived. I was compelled to turn in, or rather simply to turn over on the futon on which for the past five hours I had been reclining in fruitless expectation. Misery is commonly supposed to acquaint a man with strange bedfellows, but those who shared my couch that night were all too familiar to be agreeable. I was faint enough for want of sustenance myself, but the fleas had certainly no cause for complaint.

The sun was already well up in the sky on the morrow when the truant pack-horse and his laggard leader appeared. On demanding the reason for the 14 hours' delay, I was told the horse had suddenly "become weak by the way." The excuse could deceive no one, for on going out and unloading the animal I found that the rascal had piled up a large burden belonging to some one else he had met en route, and he expected to get payment from this person in addition to the liberal price I had already promised to give.

Opposite our inn a narrow ravine on the left bank of the stream is the site of some salt springs, which rise up in wells a hundred feet or so in depth. The water is pumped up on to the top of layers of bamboo leaves and stems, which form a sort of sieve, through which it trickles into a pan below. It then goes through a process of boiling and subsequent evaporation. Beyond Ichiba our torrent joined the Koshibu-gawa at right angles, just where that stream takes an abrupt turn westwards to join the Tenryū, near lida. Grand bluffs rise straight from the water's edge at the bend, and higher up the Koshibu valley the brown cottages of the hamlet of Ōkawara nestle cosily amidst well-cultivated fields. On the hill-side above, a picturesque temple peeps out from its security under the protection of a grove of splendid cryptomeria. In spite of the remote situation of the village, its inhabitants are evidently thoroughly go-ahead folk. A primitive belfry stands in the middle of the fields to summon the peasants together whenever common consultation is desirable. It consists of a flat board of very hard wood, in shape like the ordinary notice-boards of the country, suspended between a couple of tall posts. When thwacked with a stout truncheon that hangs by the side, the board gives out a note that resounds far and wide up the valley and in the hills. In contrast with this relic of bygone days, now rarely seen but in the most primitive spots, stands the village school, recently erected in "foreign style," with glass windows and whitewashed walls. Kindness itself was the treatment accorded on seeking out the little, so-called "inn" of Imai Takijirõ, and so zealously did he and his whole family run about and otherwise exert themselves on my behalf, that I fared better here than anywhere else on my tour. A desk and a table were, spontaneously, sent for to the school. The policeman in charge of the district, who had come with us from Ichiba, set out to search for someone who could pilot me up Akaiishi. Soon he returned with the very man I needed. This was a hunter who a year ago had succeeded in reaching the summit with a War Office surveyor, and who now was ready to guide me also. A. walk of six miles up a wild gorge that leads out of the prosperous valley took us to a yuba, or bath-house, standing on a steep slope above the bed of the torrent, known as Koshibu-no-yu. Rustics resort hither for the sake of the sulphur springs, which are conducted into two large tanks standing on a platform in front of the rough châlet which does duty for an inn. In one tank the water is heated to nearly 120° Fahr., in the other to about 65°. From hot to cold is, therefore, but a step, an advantage not to be neglected.

The fortunes of this out-of-the-world establishment are presided over by a grey old patriarch of three score and thirteen. How politely he received me, full of apologies for the dirt and discomfort he said I should find so trying ! With modest pride he presented me with a packet of yubana ("hot-water flowers "), the solidified deposit of the solfatara, which he assured me would make me a grand bath when I got back home beyond reach of the real thing. The way he skipped about was astonishing for one of his years, and no effort did he spare to make me comfortable. To my subsequent regret, he turned out, unknown to me, a party to whom he had given the best room (such as it was), and begged me to only grant him one favour in return for his humble efforts ---that I would allow him to see me eat in " foreign style." Never shall I forget the wonderment with which he watched me performing on a tin of curried fowl, supplemented with rice and jam, helped down with cocoa. As he sat down deprecatingly on the top step of the rough stairs, he might have been a visitor at the - Zoo" watching the wild beasts feeding. Yet never, in or out of Japan, have I met a truer gentleman than this poor "untutored rustic," who had spent all his days in one of the remotest valleys in the Empire.

On the following day I left at 6 a.m., in lovely weather, for my climb. From the bathhouse a faint track descended the steep side of the ravine, and then lost itself in the bed of the stream. For the next 2 hours the perpendicular cliffs on either hand forced us to keep to the torrent bed entirely. On the right bank a fine cascade, called nana kama ("the seven cauldrons "), falls in a succession of leaps into the main stream, which a score of times we had to cross and recross by flying leaps from rock to rock, or by wading through the cold rushing water. Occasionally it filled its channel deeply from side to side, and then we had glorious scrambles over the face of the cliff that overhung clear green pools. The coolies, unfortunately, disliked this method of advance, and on the descent avoided such places wherever they could. At length the ravine forked into two branches. One gradually fades in the wooded slopes in front, and the other opens out into a still grander defile running far into the western base of Akaiishi on the left, and forms the source of the Koshibugawa. The meeting of the waters is called Hirokawara.

(extract from MOUNTAINEERING AND EXPLORATION IN THE JAPANESE ALPS by Walter Weston, published by John Murray, 1896) 

Prince Munenaga (1311-1385)

He is one of Oshika's most famous villagers. As a prelude to an account of the life of the imperial prince, Buddfhist priest, poet and military general, here are three of his tanka poems.

とにかくに道ある君が御代ならばことしげくとも誰か惑はむ

Whatever may happen, if a virtuous lord rules, amid even chaos, who will be confused?

A reference to his father Godaigo, emperor of the Southern Court, and to the benefits of imperial rule on the stability of the country. It was written during an age in which samurai landlords were competing for power all over Japan. In most places, it was the samurai bosses that ruled.

偽りの言の葉にのみききなれて人のまことぞなき世なりける

With the people accustomed to hearing only deceitful words, sincerity has disappeared from our world.

Sound familiar? As they say, plus ça change, c'est plus que la même chose. Nothing really changes.

我が齢共にかたぶく月なれば身をかくすべき山のはもなし

Like my years, the moon is on its way down, and will set behind the mountain, while for me there is no hiding-place.

This was the most difficult one to translate. I hope that its meaning is clear. In view of the setting it was probably written during one of the fugitive prince's many long sojourns at his base deep in these mountains.

August 2021 

HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR WIFE?

No one can escape old age, and after a fairly active and healthy life I'm begining to feel its effects. Still, it's not all bad news. Thanks to it I'm getting regular massages from my wife M, with whom I have been on far from good terms for longer than I can remember. We've been living apart for over twenty years, but have never divorced. She rents a house in the same little mountain community as me, less than ten minutes' walk away.

As I prefer the quiet life and, apart from a couple of excursions to the sea (nowadays I don't have enough money to go to Europe), I rarely leave Oshika, M's massage is often the highlight of my day.

Most days it happens late afternoon or early evening at her place.

When the massage is over I don't immediately return home. Over tea we talk about this and that.

Last night, we were talking about music and I asked her what she listens to. I'd just discovered the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson and wanted to introduce him to her.

She said that usually she listens to CDs and put one on.

I wasn't paying a lot of attention, but there was something familiar about the voice. Then when the third or fourth song came on I knew exactly who it was: Gregory err... Can't remember his surname, but he lives on a farm in Colorado.

- Eh, you know Gregory Alan Isakov?

- Sure, I've met him. When I went to L.A. to stay with H last year I saw him perform a couple of songs at rich guy's mansion in Hollywood Hills on the eve of the Grammys.

Afterwards I asked him 'Who are you?', adding 'I really like your music.' He told me his name and we talked for a few minutes about the places in the world he had toured. Rather stupidly I invited him to do a home concert at my place if he ever came to Japan. Then I asked him if he minded having his photo taken with me, and the manager, of Joe, who had got me the invite to the party in the first place, took what turned out to be a really shitty shot. But still.

When she heard this my wife began to get excited.

- You met Gregory Isakov, you met Gregory Isakov. I don't believe it!'

It turned out that she had heard him on the radio and had fallen in love with his music. She owned all the albums that he had ever made.

I had no idea. It made me realise how little I know her. I ought to get to know her better.

Anyway, here's Gregory 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BJ7MDOmLPE&ab_channel=GregoryAlanIsakov/

the morning sky red

with tears streaming down my face

alone the dawn comes

why this happiness sadness?

the vision of a life unknown 

inspired by saigyō and bach

なにごとの おはしますかは 知らねども かたじけなさに 涙こぼるる

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGXBudB_reM&ab_channel=DeutscheGrammophon-DG/

泳ぐ夏　

 マイ　シンプル　サマー　

July 2021

 THE POLITICS OF BLUEBERRY-PICKING

I haven't seen the movie Nomadland yet, or read the book, though do know that it's about old people making do with seasonal jobs.

I've been picking blueberries for several mornings now, beginning at sometime after five and finishing at around eight. But this morning I'm not needed, so am enjoying the luxury of sitting in bed typing out my thoughts.

Parallel lives.

Could one be living in two existences... at the same time?

It's a delicious possibility that came to me in a semi-comatose state early this morning before the dawn. It happened like this. I was lying there mindfully, allowing my thoughts to appear and disappear when a memory of something that had happened to me sometime previously - but when? - arose. As I was trying to locate this memory in my life another one popped up, and then another. They formed a sequence and were now running from one to the next, quite beyond my control. I knew that if I relaxed my attention everything would disappear, but, at the same time, I must not concentrate too hard. It felt as if the memories were indeed mine, but, as the sequence continued, I realised that they were not things that had happened to me during the life I knew. Nor were they from a past life (reincarnation is such a bore). So, could they be from a parallel one, a life running on a different level to the one that I usually inhabit?

Talk about Nomadland, it sounds more like something from The Matrix.

Incidentally, blueberry-picking suits me fine as a part-time job, thank you. Nice to get home at around the time most other people are going off to work. I have a coffee, make myself something to eat and then take a few books up the my new workspace at the very top of the garden. Recently I've been reading some of the volumes that I was intending to recycle, among them the doctor/Zen priest Iida Tōin's commentaries on the Hekiganroku koan collection. I think that I'll definitely keep this one. Perhaps I'll even have a go at translating one of the cases in a future blog. We'll see.

In the meantime, summer has arrived, hot, yet up here at over a thousand metres the ambient conditions are near perfect. As you may have seen in a recent photo that I posted the whole house is now open. Plus there is just about enough produce in the garden for me to find something fresh and interesting to eat each day. I don't know why, but the broccoli - a vegetable that is usually easy to grow here - is a complete failure this year. As a replacement I have a few Chinese cabbages, whose leaves I gather, along with some late lettuce. Coming up are the cucumbers and lots of thin celery. Although tomatoes' growth is very poor, there are plenty of herbs for interesting sauces, and tomorrow I will dig the potatoes that I planted in Iida (the ones in my garden here will take about three more weeks, keeping fingers crossed that the wild boar who last devoured them won't return again).

Must try not to think that this beautiful summer will end in around a month's time. The heat remains until September, but come mid-August there is a subtle melancholy-inducing change. Enjoy while it lasts, I tell myself.

Sorry about the misleading title. I changed tack while writing, but thought I'd keep it nonetheless. 

Question: How much politics is there in blueberry-picking?

Answer: As much as there is Zen in motorcycle maintenance.

 COVID AND THE DOWNSIDE OF LIFE

How good to live like an impoverished king, a life of total simplicity, going from one unpaid task to another, doing more or less exactly what I want.

It's now over two years since I last earned any money, and although I've made a few token attempts to find work to supplement my quite inadequate pension I'm left wondering whether the best way out isn't just to economise, to downsize.

- But, can I really live on so little?

So far, no. Still I'm slowly reducing spending. Avoiding the temptation of buying this, doing that.

This letting go feels completely natural. Not to force things. I have no aim, and yet am perfectly happy.

And perfectly alone. By and large I'm coping well with loneliness, avoiding meaningless social interactions. While staying optimistic and charitable, I hope.

So where does covid come in? I think that it's part of the drive for simplicity to trust my body to look after my body. Not to confuse my dear immune system by sending it strange instructions that will create the semblance of a foe - an imaginary one - that then requires to be defeated. Sounds like a computer game approach to health. I'd prefer to leave things to nature, and not do what the politicians and newspapers are telling me to.

Sheaves under the eaves. As it's the monsoon, the smell of our newly harvested wheat and rye hanging under the roof overhang outside the shed seems unseasonal. It's a luxury to have this clean, fresh smell of straw mixing with the warm soapy smell of the nearby bathhouse.

Likewise, when cutting grass along the cedar-perfumed forest path I was assailed by the tangy smell of a sanshō branch that I had just cut. A fine morning with a blue sky. One of those rare days when I just wanted to work...

June 2021

SAY YES TO NOTO  3

Tuesday turned out to be very warm.

During my morning swim I noticed two uniformed figures on the shore trying to attract my attention.

- Oh dear, did someone tell the police that there was an illegal camper on the beach?

They seem a little agitated and are calling out, but I can't hear what they are saying, so I make a signal to them that I'm coming.

- How tiresome if they are going to tell me to go, I think.

But they don't!

In fact, they are rather apologetic. And they are not police, but members of the local fire and ambulance service.

Well, the problem is that a helicopter is imminently going to land on the soccer field nearby and they're worried that when it does it will blow my little tent into the sea. Ha ha!

So I quickly move the tent, then sitting on the concrete walkway at the top of the shore, play at lookout for the approaching heli.

After that little hullabaloo, peace once more reigned. I swam again in the afternoon. At other times I sat in the shade of a pine tree, reading.

As usual I went to the hot spring at around four-thirty. In the car park I passed a family of Caucasians getting out of their smart black wagon. I noticed that it had a Nagoya numberplate, and, as I passed, I listened to hear what language they were speaking. It was English, but didn't sound either like English English or American English. Later, in the bath, when the father came in with his son, I tried to decode the accent. It was foreign - like a Dutch or German or Danish person speaking English. Only after introducing myself in the jacuzzi and participating in a direct conversation did the penny finally drop.

- You're from Scotland?

- Yes, do you come from England?

- I do originally, central England

It turned out that he was an aircraft engineer working for Mitsubishi. He and his family were at the end of a two-and-a-half year stint, which they had really enjoyed. Sitting in the bath together, we talked for a while exchanging, as travellers do, details of some of the places they had visited before, wishing each other well, we said goodbye.

It was a gorgeous early evening and when I returned to my car another father and son were kicking a ball around on the soccer pitch where earlier that day the helicopter had landed.

The sun was going down. It had been another beautiful day. In fact everything was so perfect that I had a feeling that the next day, Wednesday, would be an anti-climax. I had planned to drive back on Thurrsday, but as rain was forecast for that day I decided there and then to get on the road before this good spell of weather broke. The route too now seemed obvious. I'd go via Toyama and Itoigawa and then inland to Hakuba.

So I packed up everything. Then one last walk along the seafront, followed by bed at around 7:30.

I slept until two a.m. The waning moon was low in the eastern sky and everything was so quiet that it felt as if time was standing still. On the west side of the peninsula, listening to sound of the waves beating on the shore had given me the impression that time was perhaps circular. Of course, if you live by a river it seems that time flows. But here by the sea in Notojima time seemed to be standing still. But, is this possible?

I'm writing this in a car park alongside Route 8 near Oyashirazu. On one side there is a continuous stream of trucks and on the other a fairly busy freight train line. It's a completely different mix of time and place - a little overpowering, yes, and not easy to understand.

SAY YES TO NOTO 2

On the road, away from home and routine. At night I sleep for three or four before moving on. At least, this was the pattern on Friday and Saturday.

In the early hours of Sunday morning I crossed to Suzu on from the east side of the peninsula, escaping the persistent wind, and during the day travelled down the coast, which is characterised by quiet inlets, where the water laps against a wooded shore - a complete contrast to the rocky west side. I spent the morning lazing in a flower-filled field reading, occasionally dozing off in the gentle sunshine. Although the sleep only lasted for a few minutes, it was deep - the sort that takes you to different places in your soul, away from the shallow anxiety that so often inhabits your head at home.

Just after midday I passed Tsukumo Bay (九十九湾) with its infamous giant squid - a rather unsightly model purchased using millions of yen received as a subsidy to compensate for economic damage done by the coronavirus to the local tourist industry.

https://www.timeout.jp/tokyo/ja/news/giant-squid-monument-in-noto-041321/

I got my first swim of this holiday in Oura (小浦) on a beach by the Hachiman shrine, then headed south to Ushitsu (宇出津), where someone seems to have decided that tennis is the key to the health of the citizens. Located on top of a hill overlooking the sea, the town's sports field is dominated by tennis courts. There is even an indoor facility - yes, more tennis courts - in a building resembling an enormous circus tent that I had spotted from at least twenty kilometres away. I reached the sad conclusion that this was just another questionable use of the huge public funds that are poured into these depopulated country areas.

Thankfully there were no more of these conspicuous follies in the latter part of the drive, which was slowly taking me to today's destination in Notojima. Instead I drank in the picturesque rural scenery - the newly planted rice fields, the gentle curves of the indented coastline and their lake-like bays; the small communities and the well-kept gardens of their houses; all bathed in the golden light of the late afternoon sun.

This coast road goes all the way to Notojima, which you access by one of the two long bridges that now link this former island to the Noto mainland. It had been a rather long drive but at just before seven in the evening I arrived in the Notojima Marine Park, located next to the Hyokkori spa. That gave me enough time to put up my tent on the beach, and, having done that, I was soon fast asleep.

It's Monday. This may be the best place in the whole of the Noto peninsula. Amid the song of the birds and the tender touch of the sea, it has a mystical tranquility. There is no one else camping, though now and again I see some unintrusive soul strolling along the beach or at the water's edge. A kind of quiet heaven.

SAY YES TO NOTO  1

Deconnect was the name of the game as I drove my van along the empty roads of the valley towards Mt. Ontake. Just clear the mind to let in the passing images - the trees, grassland and still snowy mountains. I was travelling exactly the same route as I had a year ago. Back then I had made a couple of wrong turns that added to what was always going to be a long journey. This year, though, I corrected those mistakes.

I took a thirty-minute break at a 7-Eleven on the outskirts of Takayama before getting on the expressway. Sitting in the back of my van with the flap up, I sipped a coffee. It was late afternoon and I watched the traffic going to and fro. How different from last year's experience! Now it was light and fine. Then it had been dark and rainy, and the traffic lights through which I passed had seemed endless.

The first hour on the expressway from Takayama going towards Toyama is mostly tunnels. This can be quite exhausting. But not today. In deconnect mode, everything felt fine.

When you thankfully exit the last of these tunnels you see the Toyama plain stretching to the Japan Sea. It was the hour of the sunset, and the flooded rice fields gleamed in that last light.

Bound for the Noto peninsula, I decided to head to the west rather than east coast.

An old road took me over the pass and I was at Chirigahama just before dark. There happened to be a conveniently located roadside station, and here I rested up. Then, after waking at around midnight, I set off again. But when it began to rain hard I took another stop and more sleep. At dawn I was in Kotogahama, the singing sands. There was still thunder in the air, but once that cleared it was going to be fine.

Sojiji, one of Japan's most famous Zen temples is located at Monzen. I was the first visitor when the temple opened at eight.

- You've got it all to yourself, said the man to whom I paid my five-hundred-yen entry fee.

Compared to the other great Soto Zen temple of Eiheiji, the scale is smaller. Still, it is a fine example of garan architecture, a garan (the shortened form of shichidō garan 七堂伽藍, lit. 'seven halls of a temple') being a Buddhist  a temple for both worship and living. As one would expect, it also has a beautiful garden. Its design and atmosphere serve the purpose of Zen, alerting even the casual visitor to a concept of time and space different to that of the common world. While there you are under its spell. But when you leave you return to our materialist civilization with all its distractions and insensitivities.

In Wajima I indulged my materialistic desires by shopping for food and wine at the town's famous 'morning market'. Covid having driven away the tourists, the shopkeepers were desperate to do some trade. At a store selling hats and pottery I purchased a small black Suzu ware cup for sake. At another place I stocked up with green peas, fresh tomatoes and mochi rice cakes, and then bought some overpriced (by local standards at least) hatahata fish. The vendors, who were all women, were uncharacteristically pushy, though in a good-natured way. So it was a relief to find that at the shop of a local sake brewery there was a male, who was mild and softly spoken. After tasting four rather good brands I chose the one that would go best with the fish.

But I was getting tired of the wind, which was ubiquitous here on the peninsula's west coast. At the tourist office I asked

-Could you suggest a sheltered spot where I could make myself a picnic lunch?

The sun-tanned, late middle-aged man looked sad,

-No, the wind goes round and round here. It's everywhere.

Among the pine trees on a cove at the edge of the town I found the least windy place that I could and grilled the fish, later throwing the bones, tails and innards to a flock of kites that had got wind of the situation. Still, it was a good meal. I had a few cups of sake and finished up liking the town.

Then I moved on.

North of Wajima, in the golden sunshine of the late afternoon, I filled the van at a tiny petrol station run by two friendly women. Nearby were two beautiful old houses built by the descendants of Heike nobles who had fled to this remote region following the clan's defeat by the Minamoto in the 12th century and become rich by making and selling salt.

Nearby, in Iwamado, I passed the first half of the night in the pocket roadside station, where by the time that the sun had set over the sea, I was the only one left. Listening to the waves as I tried to sleep, I was reminded that the English word tide comes from Zeit, the German word for time. Time and space. We live in a conceptual world where time and space are discussed as scientific problems. But to the ancients time was nothing other than  the repeated washing in and out of the tide. Against this audio backdrop I would hear the occasional motor vehicle passing through the village - humans using speed to attack and escape from time. They know only too well that time is stalking them, and will one day will inevitably catch up with them. Likewise humans try to dominate space by motion - another impossible endeavour. But you have to give it to the humans, determined as they are 'to be free'.

For me, voyaging offers the space and time to reflect, which is why I like to travel alone.

(to be contd)

May 2021

RAINY SEASON BLUES 

The days seem to dissolve into each other.

Today was the birthday of one of my daughters, so after breakfast I skype with her, and then do some work in the garden.

Mid-morning I came back inside and switched the computer on. Out of curiosity I googled 'Richard Douthwaite', an English economist, whose book I'd been given years ago and had been dipping into the day before. Douthwaite, it turned out, had died of cancer back in 2011 at the age of sixty-nine. Reading about him in the Guardian led me to another obit - that of the Far East conservationist Tony Whitten, unluckily killed while cycling in Cambridge a few years later. He was only sixty-four.

Lunchtime arrived and, after picking some lettuce and herbs from the garden, I made myself a really delicious spring salad to go with my equally delicious spaghetti Bolognese, followed by an experimental cheese cake which included tofu, nagaimo and carrot among the ingredients. If I had eaten this meal in a restaurant I would have been well satisfied. That made me feel so happy that I decided to have a cigar - my first in months - smoked next to the stove while sipping a cup of coffee.

I've been rearranging my house for the summer. Now that the weather is warmer all the rooms become habitable again. I've already blogged about creating a nice new upstairs guest room that catches the late afternoon sun. Now I'm spending time tidying and cleaning parts of the main house where things have lain for years in dusty corners. By moving the long table in the stove room I can get at the A - M section of my book shelves much more easily. I've even positioned a small Vietnamese tea stool (part of Laughlin's legacy) at the end of the row along with a light so I can take a volume, sit down and browse it, just as you would do in a library or book store. Incidentally I made these changes one night between two and five a.m., a time usually reserved for washing the dishes, making bread and other practical tasks.

Order creates peace, I guess. At least, that was one of the aims.

Meanwhile, outside, it's raining again.  

今月の十年前、友だちの赤池アムさんがなくなりましたった。これを記念するため、何か書こうと思っていましたが、時間がなくて、今のところほんの少ししか出来上がっていません。下記は一片に過ぎません。 

加島祥造と赤池アムの思い出話

先日、家の蔵を掃除していた時、懐かしい写真の箱が見付かりました。２０年ぐらい前のもので、もしかしたら私がロールフィルムで撮った最後の写真だった。中には、詩人の加島祥造の写真もあった。隣り村に住んでいた加島さんは我が家の庭でスケッチをしている。もう一枚の写真には加島さんの仲のいい友だちアムさんも私の三女鹿林と一緒に写っている。

加島さんは中川村、私は大鹿村。同じ信州の伊那谷だが、大鹿は赤石山脈の中腹にあるちょっと寂しげの山里と比べ、中川は高台から天竜川を見下ろす広々とした農村だ。中川にはJRの駅もあるのに対して、大鹿には電車の線路は通っていない。写真のころ鹿島さんはもうすでに西洋文学の大学教授から東洋思想の自然主義者への様変わりを果たし、本の執筆で金稼ぎして暮らしていた。画家としての活動もあって、ときには個展も開いていた。

加島さんの友だちアムさんは元々ドイツ生まれ育ちの医師だった。ドイツで知り合った日本人と結婚して、日本へ渡り、ここでも国家医師試験にめでたく合格し、開業していたが、旦那さんの突然の死により人生の岐路に立たされた。あげくの果て、タイの新天地を選んだが、十年後、日本へ帰り、加島さんと知り合った。

私が加島さんの名前を一番最初に聞いたのは松本民芸家具の社長池田三四郎さんからだった。加島さんの絵の個展を見に行ってきた池田さんは、同じ伊那谷の自然派だから会ってみればと私に訪ねることを勧めた。また、私がアムさんと知り合ったのはタイから大鹿へ引っ越してきたMさんのおかげだった。あのころ、自分の健康状態を気になっていた私だったが、アムさんの松本の自宅まで出かけて身体を診てもらったこともあった。帰ろうとした時、お金を受け取らいので、最終的には、前彼女がタイで活躍していたAIDSの患者のための施設に金額を寄付した。再び遊びに行った時、近くのうどん屋でお昼を一緒に食べた。その祭、自分の旦那がアルコール依存症でなくなったことを彼女から初めて聞いてびっくりした。泥沼化した関係の中自分も駄目になるという危険性を感じたアムは旦那の死の半年前離婚に踏み切った。

皮膚病で悩んでいた私の次女もアムさんのお世話になった。毎月松本から中川村の鹿島さんの家へ泊まりに来る時、アムさんはついでに飯島でホメオパシーの勉強会を開いていた。そこへ、娘を連れて診てもらった。現代医学の行き過ぎを警戒し、自分の豊かな経験と物事に縛られない自由な姿勢で患者の治療を考えようとしたアム先生は、炎症を起こした皮膚の部分には薬を付ける代わりに、朝晩、塩水だけで洗えば治るよと娘に伝えた。

診断が終わった加

「加島さんに会いません？」と私に言った。

「いいですか？」

「もちろんとも。行きましょう。」

伊那谷の老子と呼ばれた加島さんの住んでいる家は案外町に近くて、また造りは特にひなびたもんではなく、ごく普通現代農家ふうだった。その日私と娘は彼と一緒にそばを食べた。（続）

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annerose_Akaike/

https://kajimashozo.com/

April 2021 

excuse me for reproducing something that i wrote back in 2012:

why was oh taesuk's tempest the most memorable piece of theatre i had experienced since as a 17-year-old being taken to see a production of peter brooks 'us' by the rsc at londons aldwych theatre?

because here was a man realizing imagination as the most sacred and precious of our human attributes.

coincidentally i had seen a fine production of the same play in london back in september, with ralph fiennes the greatest living speaker of shakespearean verse at the height of his powers... reminiscent of olivier.

watching fiennes was like witnessing the dharma heir of richard burbidge samuel kean henry irving... the epitome of a cultural tradition called shakespeare on the british stage. many british people consider shakespeare a religion, and if so fiennes is the high priest saying mass in the cathedral.

in contrast oh's prospero celebrated the human imagination. his prospero expressed himself in a smile, in a slight gesture, in a bow, throwing open his fan with a seemingly tiny movement of the hand. some would call it a taoist interpretation, and of course it was oriental. but it belonged to that great oriental tradition of just wanting to be human, celebrating the fact that we have been born as humans, giving thanks by art and etiquette for the beauty and mystery of our finite lives and the infinite universe of which they are part. while refusing to commit the original sin of taking ourselves too seriously.

prospero just wants to be free, in the last scene he hands over his magicians fan to a member of the audience. it reminded me of the end of akutagawa ryunosuke's delightful little chinese fable toshishun.

and then there is ariel! normally portrayed as the mercurial and harrassed male sprite servant of the philosopher, but here a good-humoured lady (who at times reminded me of a buddhist nun) and one whom prospero took into his confidence almost as an equal.

and then miranda! smiling miranda! prospero's virginal daughter of nature effortlessly in control of the aristocratic boy with whom she had fallen in love. as in this and other action we watch the impotence of the courtiers, the uselessness and illusion of their supposedly sophisticated ways.

caliban is a two-headed monster played by conjoined female actors.

and prosperos island is inhabited by a variety of creatures that move in animal-inspired folk dance that could have been choreographed by a japanese.

its korean but almost instantly recognizable as belonging to a much wider cultural nexus. this and my enthusiasm led me to commit a error of etiquette when at the end i found the director standing at the back of the theatre with a fellow korean woman. she was the interpretor. did they speak english? no neither did. nihongo dekimasu ka? i asked. for a very brief moment the woman looked at me puzzled, then replied quite simply, 'we're korean.'

so we conducted the conversation in italian translated into korean. benissimo.

later i stopped off at cana for a nightcap, a smooth sweet passito dessert wine from nero d'avola.

back at the hotel the mixture of caffeine alcohol andrenalin and excitement didn't really allow me to get much rest. at one point i woke from a shallow sleep thinking that i was going to suffocate.

https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/tempest-oh-tae-suk-2011/#video=tempest-oh-tae-suk-2011/

 ONCE-IN-A-YEAR CHERRY BLOSSOM

I had an afternoon dental check on the day that the cherry blossom in Oshika's Onishi Park burst open, unseasonably early - it was still March.

In Matsukawa the blossom was already mankai  (full open) and so when I passed H's house by the river I dropped in to suggest we do a mini-hanami together later. It seemed the thing to do today, as we had done the previous year, in the garden of the small shrine close to H's house.

Having a bit of spare time before my appointment, I got myself a bottle of sake from the local liquor store. Then I went to the dentist.

Later, after that was over, I bought some seed potatoes from the garden shop opposite. This was a must-do, unlike the other items on my shopping list, which could be left for another day.

Getting to H's place, I was pleased that she hadn't changed her mind. I suspect somewhere H is quite a strong character, but she either hides it or is too polite or lacks the confidence, or perhaps she is just a modest person. I always dominate the conversation - surprise, surprise - when we are together.

If anything, this year was better than last. The blossom on the oldest of the cherry trees was absolutely gorgeous. Although the sun had set, the pale pink flowers seemed luminescent. I talked about history and some of the people she knows in Oshika and other things, and she listened without directly looking at me, making dispassionate, non-committal remarks. Still, she seemed relaxed, perhaps even to be enjoying herself.

Driving back to Oshika, I had a strong feeling that the evening should not end there.

I would have dropped by at Wagen, the village karaoke bar that I used to go to, but it was closed, so I tried Deer Eater, which luckily was open. It is an izakaya that I have never been to, though I know the woman who runs it.

It turned out to be a good choice. The proprietress Y was very welcoming and the intimate bistro-like atmosphere suited my mood better than the louder sports-bar vibe of Wagen. Also, M, who owns the village petrol station, was sitting there alone enjoying a beer, so there was someone to talk to.

Y also likes to talk and she had some Aomori sake, which was good to drink, following on from the Yamagata sake I had shared with H.

Perfect hanami.

Here let me give you my views on cherry-blossom viewing:

It should be spontaneous rather than planned.

It's not really family-friendly.

It's mildly subversive - an opportunity to escape everyday social norms.

Y was expecting a couple of guests who had reserved dinner. While awaiting them the three of us caught up on some village topics.

M believes that the maglev railway project is good for the village and, although I wouldn't agree, I wasn't going to get into a big discussion about that.

Besides, we had plenty of other stuff to talk about, and then when the guests arrived we got into a friendly conversation with them too (they had come from Tokyo).

It's a while since I've been sitting in a bar and chatting. And to be quite honest, I didn't really give it a thought that the people I was drinking with came from covid-hit Tokyo. 

Finally M left, the two guests returned to their camping car, but I stayed. Then, at around nine-thirty, I-san, who lives at the other end of the village, appeared.

For someone who is normally in bed before nine, it's interesting for me to see what goes on after dark in the village.

What did we talk about? I can't remember. By that time I was feeling tired, as well as having had quite a bit to drink. Eventually, though, I did manage to make it home.

The next morning I was a little hungover, but felt relieved that I'd done my cherry-blossom viewing for the year and now could gently decline all further invitations.

Covid continues, but life in the village goes on. 

March 2021 

 PARTYING WITH THE GRANDCHILDREN

Allein, wir sind allein

Wir kommen und wir gehen ganz allein

Wir mögen noch so sehr geliebt, von Zuneigung umgeben sein

Die Kreuzwege des Lebens gehen wir immer ganz allein

Allein, wir sind allein

Wir kommen und wir gehen ganz allein

from a song by Reinhard Mey

My daughter K was waitressing at Oshika's new restaurant. Her husband T would look after baby K, and I had been asked to take care of their son T and his seven-year-old cousin N, who was staying over during his school holidays.

I was more than happy to.

The present closed country policy has made life a bit lonely. In the 'pre-Covid era' European friends used to turn up with regularity to stay at my mountain home and help out. That's no longer possible.

But today I get to party with the grandkids, which is kind of cool.

Lunch menu is baked potatoes, black soy beans and fried fish. (Forget salad where kids are concerned. They won't eat it.)

I've had the beans slowly cooking all night on the stove and will now flavour them in a sauce made from canned tomatoes, fried onions, dried oregano, a couple of bay leaves, soy sauce, mirin and a bit of sugar.

The potatoes? They've been roasting in the stove oven since breakfast time.

I walk down to K and T's house. Two-year-old T is super-excited. He always gets this way when big cousin N is comes to stay.

N comes down the stairs from T's computer game room.

Then we all go back to my place. Though no sooner have we arrived than N has a suggestion.

- How about going down to Michi-no-eki (the tourist place in the village) to eat some ice cream?

I look at him, then say

- Do you have any money?

Now is not a bad time to remind N, who started school last year, that home cooking tastes better than what you buy in the shops. First lesson in an attempt to show him an alternative to the consumer lifestyle.

Anyway, while I'm frying the fish, in the living room the two are already overturning chairs and other furniture to create the props for their games. They know that I don't mind what they do, provided they keep their hands off the computer and its equipment.

When I complained to my friend Sebastian in Berlin that 'hier ist langweilig' he responded by sending me a very good bottle of Spanish wine from the Canary Islands. It's called Taganan and is made from the grapes of long-abandoned vineyards, where wild red and white vines appear from between the rocks seemingly at random. The makers say that rather than trying to create something commercial they give priority to the place and personality of their produce.

Sounds promising. And although I had intended to enjoy the gift with someone who would appreciate it, it occurs to me that perhaps today is the right time. 

From the living room it sounds like the party has already started.

So I open the bottle and pour myself a glass. Looking from the kitchen window towards the three thousand metre high snow-covered Akaishi Mts I take a sip of a wine that originated in the rocky hills overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. A bioregion that happens to be located on the other side of the world, but at around the same latitude as Oshika. So we do have something in common.

One world.

One humanity.

I'm alone, but don't feel at all lonely, I think, reminding myself of solitude's ambiguities.

A meditation while frying fish. Grâce au vin.

So I dish up. We will eat outside on a blue tarp that I have spread over the grass in front of the house. Sitting the kids on the ground at a low table is so much easier than having them on chairs.

Luckily, they seem to like the meal.

N wants some milk, but I bring them both a glass of water.

They are hungrily attacking the food.

Today manners don't matter.

When the meal is over the dirty plates stay on the table, N and T go back to the living room to resume their play. I retire to the kitchen to get myself another glass of wine and listen to Jesca Hoop, a choice that turns out to be the perfect complement to the wine.

The music energises me to make a luxury dessert - bavarois with thinly sliced baked apple and custard made from the yolks of T's chickens' eggs. This time we eat at the kitchen table.

Later when we go on a hike up the mountain to an old forester's shelter that I had told the kids was 'a secret hideout'. I was amazed that T managed the steep thirty-minute climb more or less without my help.

We sat around in the sunshine throwing stones at tin cans. 

Then we raced down the mountain.

Shouting and singing as we went.

 REEMPLOYMENT AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Put yourself in a place where grace can flow   Robert Lax

It was exactly two years ago that I learnt the translation job that I had been doing for the previous twenty-seven years - thank you very much - was going to come to an end. I would soon be sixty-nine, so could immediately apply for my pension, which I'd been backdating, and, although meagre, would be quite enough, along with my equally meagre savings, to keep me going for the next two years, I calculated. Then, when I turned seventy-one, I'd find myself another job to supplement the pension. That wouldn't be too hard, I thought.

I guess what I hadn't factored into the equation was the possibility that I might not want to go back to work.

Indeed, so far, retirement has been a delight. No more senseless TV programmes to translate, no more getting up in the middle of the night to meet early morning deadlines, no more uneasy feelings of 'should I really be wasting my time on this ephemera?'

And in its place the joy of organising my day in exactly the way I want. After two years I still wake up with a feeling of exhilarating freedom.

However, from the financial point of view, this can't go on forever, I know.

So I have been looking for a job. Sort of.

One morning I pumped myself up sufficiently to write out a cv and apply for a well-paid English teaching job using Zoom. I was pretty honest in my application, and quite surprised when, having learnt that there were over a hundred applicants, I was invited for a Zoom interview. In the end I didn't get the position. But they said they may want to use me in group lessons or special events.

The fact that I was neither accepted nor rejected seems to suit my ambiguous attitude. I can't escape the feeling that English teaching is too soft an option. Shouldn't I really be trying to do something new.

So how about Airbnb?

Up in the mountains here I have a great property, a cosy little cottage for guests, and these days my cooking skills are not at all bad. Would my customers be satisfied? Probably not. But even then it would be amusing to read their disparaging comments.

So I went on line to explore how easy it is to become a host. A friend from Italy had once told me that it only took thirty minutes.

I guess that that was before covid.

Airbnb have now introduced a '5-step enhanced cleaning process' that is mandatory for all hosts and requires you to sanitize the rooms of guests with industrial chemicals before they arrive.

Is the world going crazy?

Yesterday and the day before it rained. So I sat in bed for two mornings reading. The books are still there on the tatami by my futon:

Satyrica  Petronius   A new translation by R. Bracht Branham and Daniel Kinney

Fellini Satyricon a cura di Dario Zanelli

Les particules élémentaires   Michel Houellebecq

Atomised  English translation of the above by Frank Wynne

New Seeds of Contemplation  Thomas Merton

求めない　加島祥造

motomenai - ohne verlangen German translation of the above by Annerose Akaike

オール読物　１９８７年一月

French Poetry 1820-1950 Edited by William Rees

Gargantua  Rabelais

Japanese and German dictionaries

I did at one time (and actually still do) have the idea that I could make a little money for myself by writing articles in Japanese and English. Hence, my intellectual pretensions.

But it's all a game really.

Isn't it?

The Houellebecq I was reading for the second time. It's a very entertaining book with several topical themes, though you have to stand back a bit to see them. As far as the future of the world goes, Houellebecq is a pessimist, but you could say that his irony conceals a measured amount of optimism.

 The オール読物 magazine contains a long article on Mishima Yukio by Nosaka Akiyuki that I keep meaning to read. In certain ways Nosaka reminds me of Houellebecq. Seeing them on TV you can be forgiven for thinking that they are both piss artists, but actually they are serious writers. It is Mishima who turns out to be the piss artist.

With Satyrica, I just felt in the mood for something irreverent that would take me out of this current depressing world of covid. I enjoyed Trimalchio's feast and appreciated his encouragement to the guests to let rip if they felt like farting. Kind of civilised chaos.

The Thomas Merton had come from the toilet bookshelves, where volumes that I have decided I no longer need are offered free to allcomers. I'm glad that I took him back because I discovered one or two things that seem to apply to me.

Fickleness and indecision are signs of self-love... Before you finish one book you begin another, and every book you read you change the whole plan of your interior life.

If you do not know the difference between pleasure and spiritual joy you have not yet begun to live.

Still, Merton was a very open-minded man, who I think would have seen the good in both Houellebecq and Petronius.

Lastly, dear old Kajima-san, a translator and poet who lived over the mountain in the next village. And his partner Annerose. They are the only ones among these authors whom I was personally acquainted with.

What a joy to own books by people whom you knew and loved!

PS If I gave you the impression that Michel Houellebecq is a novelist worth reading I should add that everything by him that I have read since Les particules élémentaires has left me disappointed. I am wondering if he is one of those people who only ever had one book to write. D.M. Thomas, author of The White Hotel, is someone else who falls into this category.

 TWO REALITIES

working on my field

in the forest

i paused for a moment

to look at the sun

shining through the trees

onto the path

the sunlit path

nearby, a small sakaki bush

moved in the breeze

while in the shrine

the gods sat silently 

i couldnt see them 

but could imagine

so ancient was the scene

humans need meaning

to make life liveable

some simple belief

but deep

that descends for a moment

but then 

the machines sounded

laying claim to another reality

assertive and persistent

but shallower in years

February 2021

 OH LORD, PLEASE DON'T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD

Had an experience the other day that on reflection produced some intriguing thoughts on life and death. Yes, this is another of my attempts to come to terms with certain big existential questions but in a low-key way.

This is what happened.

E rang to inform me of the death of Y, a cousin of her father, at the age of ninety-three. E lives in Tokyo, but her grandfather was born in Oshika, and the grave of both her her parents are here too. Although Y later moved to Matsukawa, he spent most of his life in Oshika. He is among the people whose oral histories I recorded in the VILLAGERS section of this website.

The news that Y, who had been in hospital since April last year, had died was no surprise. But it was good to hear the voice of E, who is a longtime friend and, like other Tokyoites, has been suffering under the constraints of the pandemic. It was a while since I had spoken to her and I had been wondering how she was.

We talked about the funeral and how they might arrange it and if she would be welcome. Then we discussed the situation in Tokyo and I told her that I had stolen away to Izu for a week. She admitted that despite the emergency she too had been skiing in Nozawa. In fact, at that moment she was in Aomori on another skiing weekend.

- Glad that she's getting a change of mood by escaping from Tokyo, I thought. 

Then I had a few words with her partner A.

The total call lasted about twenty minutes.

After I had put down the receiver it struck me that I had made hardly any commments to E about the deceased Y. But now, alone again, I was remembering him, his character and the events of his life that he had shared with me.

Well, in my defence I can only say that the death of a very old person is so unremarkable that it no longer even seems sad to me. Moreover, the older I get the more utterly absorbed I have become in the miracle of being alive. Put simply, I'm alive, E is alive, but Y is dead.

Neither do I want to indulge belief in the cult of dead ancestors who return to earth now and then.

So I wasn't being disrespectful to Y. But that was probably how I sounded to E.

When a Japanese telephones to tell you that someone has died, typically they say something like:

'This morning at 5:43 ＊＊ passed away in ＊＊ Hospital.' 

They are almost always precise about the time. It's a formula, and the answer too should suit the occasion.

'That's a great pity. I know he had been in hospital for a long time. But, still, it must have come as a shock to his wife.'

I omitted this, and that's because over the years I've developed a sceptical attitude to participating in prepackaged social situations. My tack is to be as honest and natural as I can without causing offense. Which I hope I did, although it's never usually quite as simple as that.

I'm well acquainted with the niceties of Japanese etiquette, but in certain situations something drives me to be anti-Japanese. 

I wonder what it could be..

oshika tanka (5-5-5-5-5)

 i caught the moment

that the clouds lifted

and the sun returned

watched the rainbow arc

walked the moistened earth

IZU THEN AND NOW

1 Feb

Spent the second night after setting out from Oshika on the windy beach at Odoi, watching the sunset, and then getting an early night in the back of my improvised camping car. Soon after dark it began to rain, inspiring me to write

is this music?

rain on the roof 

crashing of waves

loneliness opens her arms

while the wind rocks me to sleep

Haha, very dramatic!

2 Feb

After a morning bath at Yodo-no-sho on the outskirts of Matsuzaki I strolled up the river valley towards the mountains. In the village of Osawa I came across a stone statue that I had passed during a hiking trip made back in the late 1970s. There had been four of us - M, my wife-to-be, an English friend of mine, his girlfriend and me. It wasn't a successful weekend by any means, M having decided that my friend talked too much and that she would ignore him. My wife does this sort of thing all the time, so it's no big deal. Actually I have a good memory of the trip because in crossing a remote old pass we walked through some beautiful mountain scenery with distant views to the sea.

But how strange to rediscover the place in this surprise way, along with all the memories of my youth and the deep thoughts about Time and its flow that comparing then to now gave me.

3 Feb

Interesting day, which began just after midnight with a couple of young cops shining their flashlights through the windows of the van in which I was sleeping. Apparently I had parked my vehicle in a 'suspicious way', quite heedless to the white lines painted on the tarmac of the car park. The several other cars in the Matsuzaki michi-no-eki roadside station were all immaculately positioned.

It's true. I have a 'cavalier' attitude to certain things. To quote the definition of the word in the Cambridge English Dictionary, I'm 'not serious enough about matters that other people are serious about'.

- It's not illegal is it? I asked one of the cops.

- No, no, he said. But it's suspicious.

Indeed. I couldn't argue with that. It is something that Japanese people never do.

After checking my driver's license and resident's identity card, they left me in peace.

I soon went back to sleep and enjoyed the best night's rest since setting out a few days before.

Of course, many people would regard the simple fact that I dared to go on holiday during the covid epidemic as extremely 'cavalier'. Still, I had already decided that it would be okay.

And it was. It was a decidedly fun week.

That same day ended on the headland of Cape Suzaki, on the east side of the peninsula (Matsuzaki is on the west). I had been looking out to the islands that lie off the coast and wondering about the names of a couple of them. As I turned to walk back up the hill to my car I met a friendly old man, and he told me.

We were the only two people up on the headland, and we talked for a while. I told him that I used to come to Izu when I lived in Tokyo over four decades ago. Then I asked him his age. He was ninety-five.

4 Feb

Having spent the night at the Shimoda michi-no-eki, I returned to Suzaki to watch the sun rise, then headed north along the east coast to Kawazu, aiming to take the small road over the pass back to Matsuzaki as I had done forty years ago. However much I tried I couldn't locate the turning, and so just followed the road deeper and deeper into the mountains. On the way I passed the seven waterfalls of Kawazu, a setting for a famous scene in Kawabata Yasunari's short story The Dancing Girl of Izu.

One good reason for getting away from the coast was to escape from the more or less incessant wind. In contrast, the forest of maple, cryptomeria and camellia trees through which I climbed was quiet and sunlit in the clearings. Down in the valley wasabi was being cultivated in beds alongside the stream. I asked a farmer and he directed me to the Shotsubo Pass. After walking for a good ninety minutes I retraced the trail back to my car, satisfied with the exercise and the glimpses of inland Izu that the hike had given me. Following a late breakfast in the shelter and sunshine of the forest I drove back to Matsuzaki over the intriguingly named Basara Pass.

In the Jade Cafe I met an ikebana teacher who lent me a fascinating picture book about local myths and legends, one of which told the story of a mountain spring called 'Omanko mizu', omanko being the vulgar word for vagina. It is located just below the Kunibashira Shrine, where one of the deities is a goddess. Apparently all the local people know the spring by this name, and, in the old days, kids on their way to school would stop by for a drink. I gather that the path by the spring isn't used much now, but I hope that that the name won't disappear.

5 Feb

My last day in Matsubara was spent strolling around the town, which was pretty much deserted. The chessboard-patterned streets have small houses and gardens and there is a beautiful river that runs through the middle of the town. My guess is that it is probably a rather conservative place, but everything was so serene, I couldn't help feeling at home and wanting to return someday. By the river I came across a cafe in one of the bigger riverside houses with a traditional garden. It had been started by the local tourist office and was staffed by senior citizens who, having served you coffee and sweets, would share their knowledge of the town's history. From them I heard about the trade and merchants that had made the town rich and an earthquake and tsunami that had completely destroyed it in 1854. I asked about the origin of the Basara Pass, but did not feel confident enough to broach the subject of Omanko mizu. Then I went to swimming in the town's natural hot spring swimming pool - a thoroughly basara (self-indulgent) experience.

At five in the early evening I hit the home road and was back in Oshika the next day.

izu tanka (5-7-5-7-7)

still studying life

in my seventieth  year

i dissect this day

wistfully and without blame 

zipped up in my sleeping bag

January 2021

HAIKU NOTEBOOK for 22 JANUARY 

indeed it was rain, but such a warm, moist and fecund day in the deep depths of winter have i never known! at just before four i took a pause from reading about elizabeths german garden.

the walk from kamasawa to goshodaira heads due east. making my way up the gentle slope of the mountain road i gazed back to where the sun had just set

西見れば春来つつある錯覚を

if you look west, the illusion of coming spring

indeed it really felt like the seasons were about to change.

あたたかさ！熊起きてくる真冬日や

the warmth! will the bear awaken? this midwinter day

i reached the turn-around point at a place where the rains of last summer had caused the road to collapse. on the way back it was already beginning to get dark and from afar i saw the lights of a car heading down the road into the centre of the hamlet. it would soon pass the house of my daughters family, continuing on in the direction of where my wife lives.

前照灯つけ帰りたるばあちゃんカー

- its grannys car! my little grandson would be exclaiming.

passing banes house, i tried - ultimately in vain - not to alert his dogs to my presence, but luckily this time none of them rushed out to greet(?) me and after loading a couple of logs onto my carrying rack i made my way along that well-trodden path through the woods back home.  

おかえりと迎えてくれるマイホーム

(haiku are sometimes too simple to make any poetic sense in english. in these cases i dont bother to translate.) 

 DONDOYAKI AND OTHER STUFF

Well, over a year has gone by since covid-19 hit the world, and, if anything, things seem to be getting worse. Looks like we are going to be experiencing its effects for quite a while yet.

Last year in L.A. I was reading Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a novel about the inner world of Aschenbach, a writer who, having suddenly found that success has failed to bring him satisfaction, follows what may be an unconscious death wish to its logical end, strangely emboldened by a beautiful boy he glimpsed. It's an extremely personnal book. In contrast, Albert Camus' La peste is a rather wonderful account of how different people living in an Algerian city react to the situation that occurs when the bubonic plague breaks out. This book is a study in human types and human behaviour.

At the moment I am rereading Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, a much longer book than Death in Venice and quite different in many ways, but still similar in that the main character Joseph Kneckt, like Aschenbach, feels unfulfilled, despite his achievements, and embarks on a quest for what he says is 'reality', but may be something more questionable.

What is it that both Kneckt and Aschenbach chase? Is it an illusion? Or perhaps we are already in that universe where opposites unify and turn out to be the same.

I'm far from sure if this has anything at all to do with this year's dondoyaki (ceremonial bonfire of past year and New Year decorations), but it may do. Read on and you'll find out.

Evening on the fourteenth of Janaury is the traditional time for the dondoyaki bonfire, and although many of the other communities in this mountain village have switched to a Sunday afternoon we in Kamasawa stick to the old way.

On the morning of the fourteenth we go to the forest and cut ten long bamboos to make a frame into which leaves, wood and other inflammable materials are stuffed. I call it a bonfire, but actually it is a shrine to the sei no kami (god of sex or life), who is represented by a wooden phallus that will be burnt and given to some lucky person. The god and his altar are decorated with the old year and New Year ornaments.

This year the weather was fine. It had snowed a couple of days before, leaving a thin layer of snow covering the dry undergrowth of the forest.

By around midday the dondoyaki was complete and prayers made to the sex god, along with an offering of sake. I stayed around and finished the bottle of sake with a couple of friends, but then they headed home. We would all come back at around six to light the dondoyaki and bask in the protective warmth of the fire.

Matsuri is the Japanese word for a traditional festival that links the past to the living present.

The older I get the more I feel that these days are special, and call for celebration, which I simply interpret as an expression of happiness to be alive among other humans in this strange adventure of human life. The role of alchohol too seems quite central. Indeed, Shinto has a few things in common with ancient Greece.

It was much too nice to go back home and spend an ordinary afternoon there, so I decided to head down to the village, where I would purchase the best bottle of wine and drink it in the sunshine with someone who, like me, would hopefully appreciate it.

One of the village supermarkets stocks a range of wines that I helped to select, and I had been itching to taste the most expensive bottle from Priorat, a remote part of Spain where the rocky terrain and mineral soils produce a very distinctive taste.

I knew that the manager of the supermarket was interested in wine. Did he want to share the bottle with me during his two-hour lunch break

Yes, but unfortunately he had deliveries to make.

Instead he pointed me in the direction of Minayama, which, like Kamasawa, was doing its dondoyaki today. Sounded good. I knew that S, a woman a year older than me, enjoyed wine. I could get lunch at her place in exchange for sharing the bottle of Priorat.

A note about Minayama. It is a cold and mountainous part of Oshika that was not settled until after World War II. When Japan's economy took off a decade or so later, most people left. But then in the late 1970s, early 1980s it was resettled by back-to-the-landers from the city, many of them influenced by the hippy movement. They stayed, raised their own families and are still there, now respected members of village society.

So I headed up the snowy road to Minayama and came to S's house, where outside about half a dozen people were building the bonfire.

- You guys up here really take your time, I said laughing. We've already finished ours.

- Hey, Simon, drop by, said A, S's husband. 

- That's what I intend to do, I replied. I've brought a bottle.

And I went in.

All those pots and pans on the stove! Looked like S was busy.

Turned out, though, that the food was for the evening. Unfortunately, they'd already eaten lunch.

Still, I sat myself down by the stove and opened the bottle. She brought two glasses, and we had our first sip.

- If you're hungry I could do some mochi, she said.

- I'd appreciate that.

Settled in the warmth of the stove, I surveyed the house. It's old-fashioned cosiness I already knew, but there was a new extension I hadn't seen before that looked right across the valley to Futagoyama, where we had spread the ashes of Akira, who was the first of the hippy newcomers in the 1970s and whose character and lifestyle became an inspiration for the resettled Minayama.

And today was matsuri. Everywhere had that feeling.

I was glad that I had come, I thought, as I sipped the wine. Good to taste this honest grape, along with the minerals of the rocky soil that had nourished it.

I munched the homemade mochi, and poured more wine.

Having finished the Minayama dondoyaki, A came in.

At some point I got sleepy, but I can't recall exactly when, apart from remembering A opening a bottle of white.

When I woke up it was already dark, and I had neither the strength nor the confidence to drive all the way back to Kamasawa. So I stayed where I was.

Later, still by the stove, I heard the bamboos bursting like firecrackers. Heard all the happy voices.

Near the end when I mustered up the energy to go outside I was met by a wave of physical warmth and human goodwill.

Cavorting gods come down to earth to inhabit the everyday bodies of the humans.

Later inside adults, children, grandchildren sat in lines along the tables filled with food.

Thus, I missed attending the Kamasawa dondoyaki for the first time in thirty-one years. 

Just thought that I'd tell you about something that happened to me during the Age of Covid.

Stop press: less than an hour after posting this I was sitting at home, wondering what to do for exercise on this rainy day when from the road below came an almighty chorus of barking dogs along with the shouts of human. Guessing what was going on, I ran down armed with an iron bar just as a friend walking his two dogs was escaping. He'd been attacked by several of my neighbour's hunting dogs and bitten on the hand, but apart from that was in one piece.  Dangerous year. Be careful everyone - and not just of the virus.

 POST-NEW YEAR

What gives me pleasure?

Since turning seventy my views have changed a little.

I like solitude, but I also yearn for human interaction. Well, meaningful human interation.

But, after a New Year of Zoom calls, I'm beginning to understand why my friend J's computer doesn't have a webcam. So I made a New Year resolution to stay off Zoom for the next month, that is, excepting family calls, which are different. Immediately got four 'meaningful' emails, which was encouraging. Well, since no one write letters these days, emailing is the next best thing, isn't it?

W sent me corrections and thoughts on a short Thomas Mann piece that I had dared to translate from German into English. Here's my offering

Die Beobachtungen und Begegnisse des Einsam-Stummen sind zugleich verschwommener und eindringlicher als die des Geselligen, seine Gedanken schwerer, wunderlicher und nie ohne einen Anflug von Traurigkeit. Bilder und Wahrnehmungen, die mit einem Blick, einem Lachen, einem Urteilsaustausch leichthin abzutun wären, beschäftigen ihn über Gebühr, vertiefen sich im Schweigen, werden bedeutsam, Erlebnis, Abenteuer, Gefühl. Einsamkeit zeitigt das Originale, das gewagt und befremdend Schöne, das Gedicht. Einsamkeit zeitigt aber auch das Verkehrte, das Unverhältnismäßige, das Absurde und Unerlaubte.

The observations and encounters of a solitary person who speaks little are, at the same time, less defined but more intense than someone who is gregarious. His thoughts both weigh upon him and give rise to fancy, always tinged with melancholy. Images and perceptions that would normally warrant no more than a glance, a smile or a few exchanged comments occupy him above their worth, becoming the important objects of deep and silent attention, and eventually part of his experiences, adventures and feelings. Solitude produces what is original, a daring and disconcerting beauty that we call poetry. But solitude also produces the opposite of this - the unreasonable, absurd and unlawful.

and here's what W suggested

The observations and impressions of the lonely-silent are more penetrating yet blurred at the same time than of those of gregarious nature; his thoughts are deeper yet more wondrous, but never without melancholy.... Solitude reveals the character, the daring and strangely beautiful, it can turn life into a poem, but it shows, too, the hollow shell, bares what is wrong, ungainly ...absurd.

I found W's translation of das Originale as 'the character' very interesting. In other words, to be original is simply to be true to yourself. In contrast, das Verkehrte is your false self. W continues

What the author wants to say here is that solitude strips you bare of all pretense, all the masquerade and shows what one puts up to hide one's own weakness, emptiness, fear even of being exposed to the silence of being lonely/alone. "Das Unerlaubte" definitely has a moral tenor, another flaw in one's character laid bare by solitude. I'd see it as something you allow yourself to do in order to evade confronting your inner emptiness: drug yourself on social contacts, cultivate "entertainment" ...just to run away from the fact that you are cheating yourself.

Point taken: true self = opening to your inner emptiness

Also, had a long email from T, who lives in London. My friendship with T goes back to the late 1970s, when we both worked as assistants to two Japanese journalists in the Yomiuri Shimbun European head office, a rather grand title for an operation that was basically two salarymen reading the British newspapers and sending token news items to their headquarters in Tokyo. Incidentally, at just under ten million, the Yomiuri Shimbun has the highest circulation of any daily newspaper in the world. That was the year that Margaret Thatcher became British prime minister, and I 'covered' the election. A year younger than me, Tim who is now writing a book about Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's involvement with the abolition of the slave trade in 19th-century Britain, had this to say about the situation in my home country

Things are dire in the UK - with Conservative politicians simply patching together knee-jerk policy on the hoof - figures would have been much lower under Keir Starmer -- at least 75,00 deaths, 24,000 in hospitals (the ICUs are full) - over 57,000 new cases today alone, thanks to the new virus strain - and also to all those mule-headed Brits not bothering to wear masks in crowded places - at least they are part of the culture in Japan. The libraries were closed for a long time - they have staged a limited spaced-seat reopening - you have to be very quick on the keyboard to book a slot - managed to bag two back-to-back at the Bodleian next Friday while the students are away - but the British Library has shut down again under the new Tier 4 restrictions. Thank goodness for Google Books' 25 million scans and my own shoe-string Romantics/slave trade library. Let's hope the new Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine - cheap and not requiring ultra-refrigeration - will have turned things around by the time we get to summer...

and himself

(Sunday evening) Back from a 20-mile spin as far as the Fulham/Putney area of the Thames -- my neck of the woods in my late 20s -- in the heights of the gritty north-west we sometimes forget that London is built around a river. Wonderful feeling when using a new chain and rear sprockets and the gear shifting (I have 30 of them) is in absolute synch -- the Zen of cycling!

Hmmm...

An unexpected mail came from A, a classmate at Towcester Grammar School, a high school in Northamptonshire that I attended back in the 1960s. She is Welsh born, which immediately made her a little different in that conservative part of the English countryside where I passed my formative years. I think that she is also a Welsh speaker. Anyway she replied to something that I had sent to an Xmas alumni group message. It was the first time that I heard from her for over fifty years, and looking at her website, she seems a super-interesting person. It's here

https://knittinggloves.wordpress.com/

Lastly, got a short mail from U.S. musician T, whom around this time last year I was meeting in L.A. He was there as a Grammy-nominated artist and got me an invite to three Hollywood parties. Years ago he used to live in the next village, and that's how we became friends.

Well, he was ready to begin a six-month tour of the States with his band Che Apalache when covid-19 burst onto the scene. Since then he's been out of work. Actually that's not true. He used some of the time to front Pickin' for Progress, a fascinating fifteen-part series aimed at getting voters to the polls in the U.S. presidential election. 

But when that finished that he holed up alone in the North Carolina countryside just like me here in Oshika-mura. The last time that I talked to him on Zoom the first thing that he said to me was

- What's the pont of life?

There followed a heavy existential discussion. It seemed no more than a simple case of cabin fever, but the next day, just to be sure, I mailed him.

Simon Piggott <camasawa@gmail.com>

Sat, 2 Jan, 12:35 (3 days ago)

to joe

dont do it!

Sure enough the reply came back

Joe Troop

Mon, 4 Jan, 13:38 (1 day ago)

to me

I'm not going to kill myself. I'm far too lazy to do that. Can't wait to get back to Oshika!

December 2020 

today

today

the light at the end of the tunnel took on a new meaning

could this be where im travelling?

headlights full beam as i pass a truck

pressing on

pressing on with my life

through the darkness

enjoying the music from the stereo

and lost in my thoughts too.

but the dazzling light 

at the end of the tunnel...

im not sure

except sure that

one day i will reach it

emerge into the sunshine

in the meantime

i exit higashiyama tunnel

bright december day

continuing my journey

AUTHENTIC GRANDDAD

 I must say, I do like this photo that Karin took of me and Kyna, who already seems quite at ease in the world after just two months. At first, though, to be honest, I wasn't so happy with it. Well, you can see why,

 I mean, I thought

- Who is this dishevelled old guy in dire need of a haircut, his Sicilian cappola rakishly angled like Al Pacino in The Godfather? LOL!

-  Dishevelled? More like disintegrated, soon to be subjected to the second law of thermodynamics - the entropy one. I mean, it's probably only fifty-fifty that he'll be here this time next year.

- Still. What can you do?

- Well, first thing is get a haircut!

Which I did.

Oh yes, thats better - the derelict but kind-looking old man by the window having been replaced by the dispassionate intellectual in his study. Perhaps he does have a few more years in him after all.

Hmmm. Life. Human nature. Reality. Illusion. Welcome to the roller-coaster, Kyna baby.

Karin comments: Haha, I thought you might not like the picture but I also thought the smile was a nice natural jiji baka face.

 COLD MORNINGS AND OLD HOUSES

december has come and i wake

and i think with joy how whatever, now or in the future,

nothing can take

away...

What is it about old houses that make the winter cold so attractive? Pleasing to both body and mind.

I vividly recall a New Year visit to Nikko with friends back in the early Seventies. We stayed in the old villa of the American ambassador. Constructed back in the Meiji era, it was an enormous. rambling house that hardly anyone used. An attempt by native carpenters to create a Western-style building, it had a large living room with a fireplace and chimney that didn't work - it was always smokey in there. But many of the upstairs rooms were traditional, with tatami and shoji, and that is where I made my nest, in some far corner of the building.

The windows had no glass, just paper, as protection against the cold - outside it was well below zero. I did the best I could to keep warm with thick old quilts, musty-smelling, but I didn't mind.

When I came to Oshika in autumn 1989 I remember having the same feeling. One night in late November I woke up alone in the house that would be the home of me and my family for the next fifteeen years. Difficult to rationalise, but the cold seemed to represent purity? Or was it authenticity? Or perhaps relief at having simplifed my life. Something.

In Kamasawa there are three cold months, and although their onset - especially that of the daikan, when the temperature goes down to around minus fifteen - is not something I look forward to, the attraction of that midnight seance which I have struggled to describe remains. In fact, one such experience occurred just last night.

In any season nighttime brings us closer to nature, and the cold, by discouraging activity, deepens this silent communion. Perhaps that is what I am searching to express.

(The opening quote is adapted from a poem by Louis MacNiece.)

師走 (shiwasu)

life leads to death

december will be a good month for this meditation

the bare forest more wonderful even

than the joyful coming of spring

silence and solitude

my companions 

in the endeavour

SADO DAYS

 As the rest of the country twists its knickers in anxiety over the second (or is it the third?) covid wave, Sado is busily welcoming city dwellers who gave up on life in the contaminated metropolis. Theatre costume designer J has moved his workshop to a disused elementary school in the hamlet of Ōsaki...

while 'strange performers' T and his wife now run a secondhand book store just down the road next to a traditional soba restaurant and a popular doughnut shop.

Another newcomer is I, an agriculture college graduate, who grows rice and dreams of marrying an irorita (irori + Lolita) - that is a woman who combines a 'Lolita'-style fashion sense with a love of traditional rural life. If he succeeds it will be the birth of a new subgenre alongside Sweet Lolita, Angelic Pretty, Classic Lolita, Victorian Maiden, Gothic Lolita, etc. This would also be a second feather in the cap of Ōsaki, already famous as the place where Bunya puppets originated.

Sorry, I don't have a photo of I, but here is a video of T and his wife in their Tokyo performing days. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZBlV0iYRL8&ab_channel=gogonewguinea

If you fancy a move to Sado there are plenty of empty old houses. 

Photo: Afternoon sun peeking onto the windows of a remote farmhouse with its own small shop. The sign requests customers not to ask for credit when buying liqour. Deep in the forested mountains of Shizudaira. I imagine a fox arriving with an earthenware jar, into which the farmer's wife solemnly ladles the sake. When she has finished the fox pays with a few copper coins. I see the fox returning into the forest, as the woman watches... 

 HIDDEN JOYS OF THE MAILING LIST

When I use my Saimontei mailing list to send out details of a coming event it is not just requests for reservations that arrive back in my mailbox.

Bruce, who gave a poetry reading here a few years back, writes from Bradford, sending his impressions on life in Britain during the corona virus epidemic.

From Asheville in North Carolina I get a delightful message from Anya with the lyrics to a new song that she wants to perform with Suemarr one day. She has already sent him details, but wants to make sure he really understands.

It's a beautiful number song about a Nagoya izakaya that burnt down along with the old guy who ran it. She and Sue had played there a few times and she loved the bar's lost-in-time vibe.

I'm happy to make a Japanese rendition of her English lyrics and throw in a suggestion that Sue add two of his own verses in Japanese. I'm hoping that it will turn into something as good as the beautiful bilingual song Deep Snow in Tokyo that they performed at Saimontei last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw3eEX7mgRs&ab_channel=BlindSue/

And here's the new song

Kitemiteya

ANYA　（英語）

come and see

a little old place that means something to me

lost in my memory

down the alley through the valley of time

old places like this can't be found

after they've burned down to the ground

but come in and see

through these weary eyes of mine

(きてみてや

私にとって何かを意味する古くて小さい場所へ

記憶から消えそうな場所

路地を通りながら時間の谷をさ迷ってゆく

このような古い場所は珍しくて

まして、焼けてしまったら終わりだ

でもきてみてや

何だかぱっとしない気分だが、案内しましょう)

SUEMARR　（日本語）

作成中　

ANYA+SUEMARR （英語）

through the alley in the heart of town

tall buildings standing all around

come in and I'll sing you a song

drink until it's time to go home

（町の中心部の路地を通って

周りに立っている高層ビル

入ってくれたら、あなたに歌を歌うよ

家に帰る時間になるまで飲もう）

ANYA　（英語）

let me introduce if i can

the lonely old barman

leaves his cigarette burnin

serves your drink with a drink in his hand

time has passed him by

the lights turned down low in the whites of his eyes

come in and see, listen to me, it's the only way that you can

（紹介しよう

年老いた孤独そうななバーマンを

彼は火の付いたタバコを置いて

片手に自分の飲み物、もう片手に客の飲み物を注ぐ

時間に取り残された彼の顔には

しょんぼりした哀れな目

きてみてや、私の話に耳を傾けば。それしかない）

SUEMARR　（日本語）

作成中　 

ANYA+SUEMARR （英語）

through the alley in the heart of town

tall buildings standing all around

come in and I'll sing you a song

drink until it's time to go home

（町の中心部の路地を通って

周りに立っている高層ビル

入ってくれたら、あなたに歌を歌うよ

家に帰る時間になるまで飲もう）

ANYA　（英語）

things disappear

but they'll always be dear

（物事が消えますが、

その記憶はいつまでも大切です）

If you want to hear Anya singing it, drop me a line and I'll send you the audiofile.

October 2020

ISOLATION

At the moment I'm self-isolating along with my daughter and her two children, who are visiting from Los Angeles. What can I say about the experience - which, quite honestly, is not all that different from my normal life here in Kamasawa? Well, we're eating lots of good food, and I get to spend time with my grandkids, playing with them, reading to Len, who, I'm happy to find out, has a liking for books, going on walks, sitting by the river throwing stones into the water. Simple things like this.

On the subject of epidemics, students of Oshika and its history may find the following memory of a typhus outbreak that occurred in the village nearly a century ago of interest. It was recounted to me by a man born in 1926 and is reproduced from the VILLAGERS section of this site. Incidentally, the Matsukawa Yasuo mentioned at the very beginning is the documentary director of Oshika no mura, which I recently uploaded to my Youtube channel.  

Matsukawa Yasuo is the son of my mother's elder brother. She came from Bunman. That family lost most of its members during an outbreak of typhus in 1929. The patients were put into isolation in a hut just above the old road by the present Oshika Saiseki gravel plant. My mother went to nurse her relatives. The old folk all died. The disease was brought into the village by a woman who went on a trip to Kyoto. When she came back and died of some stomach complaint, people didn't realize that it was typhus, so they held the normal wake and funeral. A lot of the relatives who attended contracted the disease. My mother took my elder brother to the funeral and he caught the disease, but he survived. It's strange - I was only three at the time but I can remember it very clearly. The railway carrying timber for the Kuhara company passed in front of the garden of our old house. Someone had stretched rope all around the limits of our garden. As we weren't allowed out, our next door neighbour, who returned to Oshika after living in Manchuria, had to bring us our water. I could see my friends and I wanted to go out and play, but couldn't go past the rope. I remember watching the children on their way to school, holding their noses as they dashed past our house. There's another thing I remember. Kinoshita Kōji's father - actually he was my cousin - was a bit of a character. In the evenings, I would hear a noise in the mulberry field above and he would bring little presents wrapped up in newspaper - a balloon or a whistle. Looking back, I really feel grateful to him for that. He waited until dark so that he would not be seen coming through the rope into the forbidden area. The isolation hut wasn't used much after that. People with tuberculosis would usually be kept at home in an isolated room.

K.Y., who told me this story is still alive, at present living in Kami-Katagiri in Matsukawa. He has had quite an eventful life, going to Manchuria in the 1940s and managing to return home in the chaos at the end of the Pacific War, when so many of the other settlers died.  He also witnessed the Mt. Onishi landslide of 1961, another event in the village's history that caused great loss of life.

 A DREAM

I had a dream last night, from which, although the dream was not so clear, two quite striking impressions remained.

I was in someone's house, where people were arriving for a party. I think a lot of them were my relatives, most of whom are now dead. I remember particularly an uncle - my mother's elder brother, whom, my mother used to say, I resembled in character. He managed a garage, where I worked part-time as a teenager serving petrol at weekends and during the school holidays.

Anyway, he was at this party. I was struck by how well he looked.

- You seem younger than when I last saw you, I said to him, and he smiled.

In the hall people were arriving, among them my cousin A, whom I greeted with a lip kiss that lingered, along with a hug that transmitted to me the warmth and hospitability of her body.

As other people whom I vaguely knew filed past I was aware of the gap between the polite manner in which I greeted them and the depth of my feeling for A.

When I woke up it was already light outside. Because of the dream I was feeling unusually good. The sight of my rejuvenated uncle and the physical connection made with my cousin had a sort of purity - simple but deep.

Another satisfying thing was that in dreamland time had felt different to that of my waking conscious life - more ambiguous, not necessarily flowing in one direction, like the river to the sea.

Scientists and philosophers have analysed the nature of time in a variety of learned ways, reaching conclusions that are often too sophisticated or complex for an ordinary person to follow. But we all have dreams and, through them can experience a different sense of time. To try to figure out what it is and what, if anything, it means seems difficult to say the least, because the dreams originate in a part of our brain that we have absolutely no conscious control over.

Nothing to do but to accept them as gifts and ask nothing.

 BUS STORY （バス亭） 2

Spent my first night in the bus.

Back from the Niimi exhibition I noticed that tonight would be the harvest full moon. Good weather forecast too. So, even though I felt a bit tired I decided to go for it.

What was I expecting? To see the moon travelling down a river valley that runs east-west. To see animals coming to drink at the river in the moonlight.

So I packed what I needed - a foldup beach bed, sleeping bag, food, gas ring, kettle, etc. In the end it was a fairly heavy load, but I managed to get it to the bus without slipping on the stones as I crossed the river or losing my balance as I clambered up the steep banks left by the swollen waters of the July rains.

Then, as darkness fell, I set up my bed and boiled some water for tea and ate a dinner from the lunch leftovers that I had brought with me. After that there was nothing more to do but lie down.

It was seven o'clock.

The moon came up from behind the mountains at around nine. But I couldn't see any animals by the river.

Actually, from down in the valley the moon looked far less impressive that it does from my home on the side of the mountain. So this was not really an occasion for moon-viewing.

I woke up at ten-thirty, then slept again until two-thirty. Then lay awake, looking out at the river from the window of the bus. Nothing though was happening at all there.

The only sound was that of the water, flowing ceaselessly, like time.

This was a novelty - to listen to the water instead of hearing dogs.

My mind was slack - that is, in a condition where I am not trying to do anything - not to think about anything nor to not think about anything. As I knew from past experience, this is the perfect prelude for a dream.

The dream, when it finally came, wasn't dramatic. But even a banal dream is interesting, I thought, as I woke up, recounting what had happened.

I noticed that it was around five.

I was wondering whether there was going to be any dawn activity by the river. But there wasn't.

Just the sound of the river.

This was really a world of wabi and sabi.

Loneliness and boredom.

But not without meaning.

I took my bed and placed it outside, from where I watched the western sky at the end of the valley getting bluer. This was another novelty, because in Kamasawa the west is blocked off by mountains. In the sky above, clouds were now moving, and I watched them. The beautiful clouds - les nuages merveilleux - had replaced my expectations of animals and the moon.

It is extremely difficult for a human being to do nothing at all. Even if you are trying to meditate there is usually a hidden agenda.

One expectation fails, another arises. And so it goes on.

I couldn't see the sun yet, but I could see its light in the west slowly moving down the valley towards me.  

 ROVING AROUND YAHAGI RIVER 2

Driving along route 153 out of Inabu, I again felt the urge to explore. Randomly I turned off at an interesting-looking junction. The road went sharply down the hill, past houses on the valley side, then into a forest of crytomeria - tall trees fringing the road, with a rushing, rocky stream to the left.

Down, down.

No houses anymore. this was wonderfully remote country. I didn't meet another vehicle for the next fifteen minutes. By that time I was at the bottom of the valley, close to the Yahagi dam.

Below the dam, the Yahagi river flowed quietly through a broad valley. Presently I came to the town of Asahi (旭), bathed, as its name, in the early morning sun.

I found a cafe on a headland overlooking the river, which surprisingly - it was still only eight o'clock - was open. I chose a table by the large plate-glass window and ordered the 'morning set'. There was only one other customer - a white-haired old woman sitting by the counter.

- Beautiful little town, I said to her.

- I've lived around here all my life. Well, I was born in A, she said, pointing up into the mountain on the east of the river. My husband was in the construction business. He made a lot of money then lost it all.

She laughed.

We chatted for around fifteen minutes. During the conversation I asked her old she was.

I'm ninety-five, she said.

The road from Asahi followed the course of the Yahagi river, passing through the hot spring town of Sasado and then on towards car-manufacturing Toyota.

At Shidare I came across an old small-gauge railway line running along the bank of the river. A brightly pained trolley car stood by the small station platform. For fun I pushed it along the line for a couple of hundred metres, thinking how much my grandkids would enjoy it. Then I headed away from the river, towards Nisshin and the exhibition venue of Mori no Oto.

Arriving at ten o'clock, I was the first visitor on the first day.

Niimi's handmade clothes were hanging from a long rack and I had the pick, trying on half a dozen pairs of trousers before deciding on two of them.

Soon after, three men with shaven heads, one of them an aged Buddhist priest who had recently appeared on the NHK religious programme Kokoro no jidai, arrived. We talked a bit about Zen.

Next came three women, all from Toyohashi - one elderly, perhaps a year or two older than me, the other two perhaps early sixties, very stylishly geared out in ecowear, they reminded me of a local doctor's wife. For Niimi's exhibition I was wearing the very first pair of trousers that I had ever purchased from him - wornout and ragged. I had wondered it anyone would notice.

- Nice, commented the elderly of the three women, running her hand done the side of my leg. Cleary a fashion cognoscente who knew quality and character when she saw it. Later, when I was slow to admire something that she had decided to buy, she slapped me playfully on the butt. It was so unJapanese. Quite charming.

Then there was a potter from Okazaki - Kaneda-san - with his wife. He was a tall man in smart jeans and braces, while she, her grey hair elegantly pinned up, had an easy sociability.

So many interesting people!

I got one of the younger Toyohashi women to draw something in my mini-album. She did a cute sketch of a nekojarashi, which is a type of autumn grass. A nice touch, I thought, that she had given her picture a seasonal relevance.

But it was time to go. By now it was around two in the afternoon. Far too late to rush back to Oshika. Better to spend another night on the road.

I'd enjoyed the Yahagi river valley so much on the way down that I thought I'd now aim myself in the same direction.

Above the Yahagi dam I took a windy road along the Kamimura river. Very picturesque, it's probably popular with daytrippers from Nagoya and Toyota at weekends, I thought. Joyriding bikers tend to like these country roads, a fact confirmed by signs recording fatal accidents in at least two places.

The local residents live in small depopulated communities that not long ago would have been admired as Nihon no genfūkei. Now the empty houses outnumber those inhabited. What we see is the result of the industrial policies pursued so enthusiastically after World War II, which, seventy-five years later, have led to the choices of urban living and consumer culture over the tradition ways.

I was musing about time in the first part of this essay - when I visited the deathsite of Takeda Shingen. Unlike Shingen, whose name lives on in history books and samurai movies, these settlements by the Kamimura river, in the mountainous borderlands of northern Aichi and southern Gifu, will, sometime during the next century, disappear without a trace.

Before taking the right turn that would lead me to Hiraya and back into Shinshu, I passed through the town of Kami-Yahagi, obviously once prosperous, but now, in the semi-darkness of the late evenning, eerily quiet. A town in old age waiting to die. It's one of the thousands of such places all over Japan.

I spent the night in the car park of the Shinshu Hiraya roadside station, which, like Inabu, has a fine spa. There was a large heated outdoor pool, quite deserted, where I even managed a swim.

Later, in the men's changing room, I stood naked chatting to a friendly female cleaner from neighbouring Neba. I don't know why but, after the city, the experience left me with a pleasant feeling of rural homeliness.

(End)

For anyone interested, here is the link to the NHK programme mentioned above

こころの時代

https://youtu.be/xugqAtF3Q90/

 ROVING AROUND YAHAGI RIVER 1

Hara Project actor, furniture craftsman and garment maker Niimi Kiyohiko is holding his biennial exhibition in Nisshin, a suburban town near Nagoya. It's an event that I never miss. In the past I have driven there and back in one day, but this year there was no reason to hurry, so I stretched it out over three.

Day one had me leaving Oshika at around midday to drive down to Inabu along route 153. On the way I dropped by to see my daughter in Iida. My wife happened to be in the nearby coffee shop, so I chatted to her too, then set off, travelling along the backroads to get out of the city.

The July rains had caused structural problems at a number of spots along the national route, so it was a bit stop-and-go at first, but then over the Jibu Pass things got better.

In Neba, I stopped off at the Shingenzuka, a historical monument that I had passed numerous times before. It marks the spot that the sixteenth-century warlord Takeda Shingen died on the way home after a campaign in Mikawa against Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The old name for route 153 is Sanshū kaidō or Chūma kaidō. Like route 152 (Akiba kaidō), which runs north-south through Oshika, it is an ancient highway that has played a big part in Japanese history. Travelling along it feels like a journey through both space and time. Here 'time' is not the hours and minutes that it is going to take me to reach my destination, but something deeper.

And, what a joy it was to 'take my time'.

I searched out an old bathing spot on the Yahagi river, and then, as it was getting late and I was getting hungry, ate an early dinner - it was just after five o'clock - at a restaurant with a distinct Showa-era ambience that turned out to be the last building in the last village before the Shinshu-Aichi border. There was a friendly group of old people in the restaurant who, when I told them I was on my way to Inabu and wondered whether there was a hot spring bath there, said yes that there was one right next to the roadside station in which I was going to stay.

It turned out to be a great place.

These days you get used to people putting a gun to your head - a temperature gun. But I passed the test and they let me in.

One highlight of this hot spring is a maze-like bath in which, as you walk around, powerful jets of water massage your tired muscles or spurt invigoratingly into your anus, like an extreme version of a toilet washlet.

Please give it a try.

Anyway, following the bath I ate a delicious rum-flavoured custard pudding at a tiny cake shop run by a man who turned out to be a friend of Okamoto Makota (the Nagoya firework maker who has a holiday home in Aoki).

What a small world it is!

The next morning, refreshed by a peaceful night of sleep in my car, I took a stroll around the town of Inabu (breakfast was figs from a roadside tree). Also, bumped into Makoto-kun's friend, bringing a WWOOF worker who had been staying at his farm to the bus.

Thus, the formerly faceless town of Inabu acquired a character that I could begin to relate to.

September 2020

 BUS STORY  1

Some of you may have thought it excessive of me to recently post five photos of an old bus that I unexpectedly came across during a walk along a valley near my home.

That morning, with the river low and a sunny day forecast, I had set out on my annual hike up the Koshibu river.

Most of the people who climb Mt. Akaishi, the 3120-metre peak that I can see from my home, make the ascent from the Shizuoka side of the mountain, or by the long traverse along the ridge from Yamanashi or the Sanpuku Pass. However, there is also another route - and this one, in my opinion, is the most interesting and most beautiful. It takes you up the valley of the Koshibu river to the foot of the mountain, from where it is about a five-hour walk to the  summit.

The only time that I have ever climbed Mt. Akaishi was over thirty years ago, but I hike up the river valley at least once a year. There is no path as such, one just follows the river, crossing it on numerous occasions. If the water is high this can be dangerous, so I always pick my day carefully.

Anyway, this year I was also wanting to see what changes had occurred due to the torrential rains of July.

The drive to the trailhead at Nanakama is along a forestry road and takes about half an hour from my home. After five minutes, however, a landslide made the road impassable.

That answered my question about the effects of the July rains.

So, instead of beginning at the trailhead I decided to walk the river from where it passes below our little hamlet.

Hiking up the valley I could soon see the destruction - whole tracts of forest through which the road used to run, had slipped a couple of hundred metres to the river.

- It's going to take years to fix this, I thought.

Strangely I had never hiked this part of the river before. Located close to a silt dam, at first glance, it is a sort of desert. The flat valley of sand, pebble and rock extends across a width of around three hundred metres. Somewhere in the middle of this the river runs through.

However, the further upstream I advanced the narrower the valley got. Ahead I could see the beginning of a gorge.

Just before that I came to  the bus. It was standing amid a grove of trees on a flat raised bank.

There must have been a time - probably in the early 1960s - when you could have driven a vehicle along the riverside. That is utterly impossible today, and this time-slip gave the bus, despite its forlorn state, a certain surreal aspect.

Almost but not quite a surreal grandeur.

Naturally I explored.

The only seats remaining were the driver's, the front passenger's and a long bench seat at the very back. The others had been removed. Scattered over the floor was what looked like heavy welding tools, along with tins of oil, some empty, others full, gas canisters and numerous rods, bolts and other spare parts. The inside of the bus had obviously been used as a workshop, but looking around the surrounding countryside there was no trace of any development remotely industrial. This was deep nature, and the vehicle sitting there made me think of the 'magic bus' in which Alaskan adventurer Chris McCandless had starved to death.

Fewer than two hundred metres upstream from the bus I came to a pool with wonderfully blue water. It was bigger than any of the pools in the Ogouchizawa valley, where I usually do my summer swimming. This too made the bus seem special.

I walked for another thirty minutes through a picturesque gorge before coming to a dam. This prevented me from going any further, so I turned around and walked back, stopping off at the pool for a marvellous swim.

The water was deep in places and there were currents that could carry you over the edge, so I was very cautious at first, as I'm not a strong swimmer. But after a while I felt more confident. I concluded that the pool was characterful, playful and, despite the obvious force of the water, even gentle. Not at all malicious. 

- Yes, I shall have to come here again, I thought.

It had been an enjoyable half-day hike.

Back home, I experienced a sense of enchantment at what had happened. The image of the bus among the trees reminded me of a picture book that I used to read to my children, about a bear who discovers an abandoned tram in the forest, which becomes a meeting place and, one stormy night, a refuge for the other creatures.

On the sandy riverside near the bus I had observed all sorts of animal tracks - mostly deer, but perhaps also a bear.

- How wonderful it would be to on a moonlit night, to watch what/who came out of the forest!

The next day, having loaded a bucket, scrubbing brush, cloth, broom and other cleaning things onto my carrying rack, I headed back. 

August 2020

 tendrils of my thoughts....

there are some truths that need to be repeated. no matter how refined a piece of art, how skillfully executed a piece of music, how genuinely expressive of human character a piece of writing, none will ever equal the living experience. one lies in bed on a morning in late summer waiting for the sun to rise. through the net covering of the window a faint breeze enters the room. one feels the coolness of the air on one's face. that's all. then the sun's rays appear in the garden, and another day begins. a bee flies into a purple morning glory to extract the pollen. the same breeze as the one that a moment ago caressed my face momentarily moves a small white towel hanging outside on the verandah to dry. the living moment.

another truth is that physical activity is ultimately superior to mental activity - a statement that may bring howls of disapproval but one that nevertheless i've found time and again to be true. i think it's simply because this activity involves us in living contact rather than in the often illusionary world of self.

one sees a dog, a butterfly, even a leaf on a tree enjoying the breeze. it's something common to all living things. the democracy of nature. and it's both amusing and sort of tragic to ponder how far the human race has come from that.          

夏の句

by 9 a.m. it was already very hot

in the shade

i brushed against the gong

the sound of loneliness

山道で遇う若坊主盂蘭盆会　　　祭文

カビ生えたかけぶとん陽に干しておく　　　祭文

 R. R. DAVIES

Between 1968 and 1971 I was a student in the history department of University College London. It was an interesting and enjoyable three years, during which I studied a bit of British and European history, and learnt, for the first time in my life, how to absorb knowledge from reading books. Then I went to Japan and basically forgot about it.

Still I've always enjoyed history, and now that I'm researching the life and times of 14th-century Prince Munenaga, my mind goes back to those early years.

I had been offered a place at UCL following an interview conducted by a late middle-aged Scot who introduced himself as Professor Burns and a young lecturer in medieval history with a strong Welsh accent by the name of Dr. Davies.

In those days university education was pretty laid-back. There were at most a couple of daily lectures relevant to the course, at which, although not compulsory, attendance was expected. Ideally, the rest of the time was to be spent in the library consulting books for the essay that each student was required to present and discuss at their weekly personal tutorial.

Naturally, many of the staff that taught me are now dead. Their lives and achievements can be checked out on the internet. A few of them became authorities in their fields, and their names will live on in their books.

I remember Dr. Davies as a very efficient teacher who packed his lectures with details. That's all. So, it came as a surprise to discover that he was in fact the eminent Oxford professor Sir Rees Davies, knighted by the Queen shortly before his death in 2005 at the age of sixty-six.

There are some examples of Davies's work available free on the internet, along with long obituaries in all of Britain's leading daily newspapers, and, having read these, I now see him in  a different light.

Robert Rees Davies was born in 1937, the son of a hill farmer in a valley of the river Dee near Lake Bala, an area that during the medieval era had been part of the Welsh Marches. In these remote frontier territories native lords claiming descent from ancient Celtic dynasties but having sworn fealty to English king ruled as semi-independent chieftains often owing no taxation to the crown and dispensing justice according to their own tribal customs.

Davies's first language was Welsh. Of the area's people, Nobel literature laureate Elias Canetti, who visited there in the 1960s, says 'Words mean everything to them - more than a sacred scripture, they have a sacred tongue.'

Apparently Davies didn't learn the English language until he was seven or eight, and may not have been writing it until he attended secondary school. But if you read him in English, you will be struck by his elegant, lucid and stylish command of the language. Naturally he also wrote in Welsh. In fact, his best-known work Owain Glyn Ddŵr: Prince of Wales is a translation of a volume originally published in Welsh to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the famous revolt that seriously threatened the English crown. 

The subjects that Davies focused on during his academic career concerned the social, economic and political ties upon which power rested in the British Isles. As I said, he was a medievalist working in an area of British history that began with the Norman invasion of 1066 and ended with the 16th-century coming of the Tudor kings and queens. His studies trace the ways in which the Anglo-Saxon ruling class of England was initially replaced by a French-speaking Norman monarchy and nobility, which over time evolved into an English-speaking Anglo-Norman aristocracy. As the countries of Wales, Scotland and Ireland are absorbed by military and other means, what had once been the land of Britain becomes 'England's empire'.

A meticulous scholar, Davies tells a story that is more about domination than conquest. It deals with the pragmatic ways in which power-based relationships are forged - a complex process that now, with England's empire in a terminal phase, offers a realistic picture of the historical background to our present troubles. The golden age of Arthurian Britain may indeed be more myth than fact, but it is a powerful vision of a bygone era in which Britain was probably a more ethnically balanced country. Now that the English millenium is over, could the vision  be of any use to post-Brexit Britain? This is probably wishful thinking. As Davies never tires of reminding his reader: Wales, Scotland and Ireland, apart from suffering the common fate of being subjected to the English will, are individual countries with certain cultural similarities that have evolved in quite different ways.

Davies remained at UCL for twelve years before returning to Wales as professor of history at Aberystwyth University, a post that enabled him to become a leading figure in the cultural and educational renaissance taking place in his native land. These comments from the website gwales.com give details of one particular achievement of his:

As President of the Association of History Teachers in Wales at the end of the 1980s and Chair of the National Curriculum History Committee for Wales, he pulled off the remarkable feat of securing a statutory place for Welsh history in the curriculum of state schools in Wales for the first time in their history. Modesty and a razor sharp intellect succeeded at once in disarming and running rings around the Secretary of State for Education at the time, Kenneth Baker, whose preference was for a Kiplingesque version of pan-British patriotism.

In 1995 Davies accepted the post of Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford, an unsurprising appointment in view of the respect in which he was now held in academic and government circles. Presumably also a deeply satisfying climax to a stellar career, along with a new challenge - or rather an old one - that of juggling his Welsh and British identities in a quintessentially English environment.

Back in late sixties' UCL, as an eighteen-year-old Englisher, who had at the time had never set a foot out of England, let alone Britain, I paid little attention to the fact that Dr. Davies was bilingual and bicultural. Now, in with a similar dualistic status myself - acquired by choice, rather than birth - I can appreciate the tension that inevitably results. As globalisation progresses there are more and more people like us.

At the same time there is more ideology, more pressure to commit and conform, more angry denunciation of present-day injustices based on the sins of past generations. Personally I think it's fine to topple statues from time to time, when public emotion erupts. But I feel that change should be based on cool and reasoned thinking rather than anger. It's a tribute to the psychological depth at which Rees Davies's historical analyses operate that reading a book on early medieval Britain suddenly seems so relevant today!

Despite being a historian with the expressed intent of promoting Welsh history, Davies was always extremely careful when explaining the roles that national or patriotic motives played in the past. His scrupulous attention to detail as a researcher, conversely, opened his eyes to the wider picture.  

I'm going to finish with an excerpt from Professor R. J. W. Evans' entry on Rees Davies in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

In an eisteddfod talk in 1998 he spoke from the heart about the British dimension of his Welshness, and vice versa: how England's unique achievement of a '1000-year Reich' had undermined the pristine equilibria of the 'Matter of Britain'. Now in its decline there was a need to rebuild the crumbling edifice of Britishness, as the best carapace for the survival of Welsh culture too. For all his emphasis on mythology, identity and other cultural markers, Davies always saw material authority as very real, enduring and irreducible. Thence his feeling for those looser-limped traditions of marcher lordship, with which he began his career, and to which he returned in the widest sense of European seigneurie and Herrschaft.

 TOP OF THE MORNING

I usually try to avoid turning on my computer too early in the morning. These days the temptation is a little easier to resist, with the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard libel trial over. Haha. Actually, reading the closing speeches of the two rival lawyers yesterday reminded me of Albert Camus's L'étranger, in which anti-hero Meursault reacts with a similar sense of disbelief and alienation to the proceedings of his murder trial.

- Can this be me that they are talking about?

It's true. In a courtroom, people take little notice of the person in the dock. Once in motion the wheels of justice roll inexorably on. Like sausages, you don't want to see how justice is made (I think it was Bismarck who said this). The British courtroom in particular is characterised by hyperbole, arrogance and exclusion. Like Parliament, it's an oudated institution that needs to be rethought.

So I began my morning with L'étranger and a couple of English translations. It's a short, but wonderful novel that I never tire of. As Camus himself pointed out Meursault is simply a man in love with the sun who refuses to lie. His 'truth' may be a negative one, but without this basic attitude human life is worthless.

And, let me say, to avoid any misunderstanding, I see nothing of Meursault in either Johnny or Amber.

In contrast, when I did finally switch on my computer and read today's online newspapers, I came across a Japanese man in the spotlight - the Kyoto University epidemiologist Yasuhiko Kamikubo. With coronavirus victims here again beginning to rise, Kamikubo is on record as saying that he guesses over sixty percent of Japanese have already acquired immunity to the disease, so there is no need for a lockdown. If you are interested and understand Japanese, there's a good interview with him here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF0HBmIFWMs/

Otherwise you can download Kamikubo's findings in English from this site

https://www.cambridge.org/engage/coe/article-details/5eed5ac5f1b696001869033f/

Happy reading!

For all the confusion and controversy, it is certainly a fascinating subject. En route you discover lots of amazing details about how you own body works - natural immunity, acquired immunity, antibodies, antigens, etc.

In the end I felt quite positive about it all.

July 2020

 PIZZA PAN IN JAPAN

if you want to eat pizza in japan...

go into a take

away

dont stay

pay

choose pizza

or pizza pan

but pizza isnt pizza

in japan

its pisa

lo dici come la torre

say pisa

or pisa pan

not peter pan

pisa pan

nor pisa pants

dont piss your pants

say

pronto/pisa/pleeese

then pay

dont stay

its easier

to take it

away

to eat

give yourself a treat

become a fan

of pisa pan

in japan

A FEW UPDATES ON MY LIFE

It's turning out to be an interesting year. Attention has been dominated by the corona virus, but, now here in Japan, it's the rain that seems more threatening. We've already had plenty in the last few days, blocking roads with landslides and fallen trees, but the worst may be yet to come.

A wild boar has been helping itself to the potatoes I planted back in April. There were two rows remaining in my bottom field, which I knew it would return to eat. Could I stop him or her by setting up an electric fence - something that I accomplished on a rainy afternoon with the help of my neighbour Bane? That night I switched on the electricity and went to sleep, hoping to be woken by an agonized animal expletive as the pig's snout was hit by 2500 volts. Unfortunately that didn't happen. Instead, I woke up to find that he'd avoided the fence and got in another way. I'd been easily outwitted. We humans have this laughable illusion of control, which at times Nature, by way of influenza epidemics, torrential rain or wild boars, must remind us is just that - an illusion. Is reality that bad we can only live by denying it? It's something to think about,

Anway, now I have an electric fence without a purpose. I can't leave it up until next year because it belongs to Bane and he needs it for the autumn to protect his honey from the bears.

I wonder how much of our lives is wasted on ultimately useless endeavours? I had spent that morning engaged in another questionable project - my attempt to find out more about medieval Prince Munenaga, whose grave is located just below the ruins of my potato field. The more that I learn about him, the stronger the impression that he too was committed to lost causes, obsessed as he was by memories of a father who believed in the divine right of emperors to rule and a mother who wrote verses based on a poetic tradition that had changed little over five centuries.

After a listless morning spent trying to make contact with the ghost of Munenaga, it felt like a real adventure to be working under the no-nonsense guidance of chthonic action man Bane.

If there is a message in any of this, it's to accept what Nature throws at us, with neither feelings of defeatism, nor thoughts of purpose or gain. Isn't it?

                 Written on a wet and windy day

surrounded by cloud

i search for the truth

in the dancing trees

June 2020

A MOMENT IN THE LANDSCAPE

a warbler sings in the pine grove

by the shore

while rain makes rings on the surface

of the sea

and flowers impart their thoughts

to the wind

far off a figure hoes the fields

close by a heron lands

a human asleep on the sand 

awakens

May 2020

                                                          LOVE AND MARRIAGE

As humans we are generally satisfied when we encounter something that we like. It also makes us happy when another person likes us.

- I don't like it!

- She doesn't like me.

If only we could rid the world of these negative feelings.

Of course it's impossible, and, if you think about about it, not really preferable....

I printed a free music score off the Internet yesterday. Here are half the lyrics to Killing Me Softly With His Song:

I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him, and listen for a while
And there he was, this young boy, a stranger to my eyes

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words

Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly, with his song

It has a beautiful melody, and the lyrics are even better.

Becoming curious about what inspired it I did a quick search.

Who is this strange Apollo whose words mystically mirror the mood of the woman who walks into the club on the casual recommendation of a friend?

As I had expected the lyrics tell a true story. The two protagonists are actually both singer-songwriters: Don McLean and Lori Liebermann. You can learn all about it on the Web, along with a side story that occurred four decades later. The essential details relate to a visit that the 20-year-old Libermann made to L.A.'s Troubador club, where the relatively unknown McLean was performing. And the number he sang that pierced her heart was a song entitled Empty Chairs. Later Liebermann mentioned this to her two songwriting managers, who, based on what she told them, came up with Killing Me Softly.

Anyway, the episode impressed me enough to take a deeper look at Don McLean, whose only other song I knew was American Pie. On Youtube I found Empty Chairs and Vincent. Yes, I can see why she was so entranced. It's a beautiful song. When, forty years later, Liebermann's two money-grabbing ex-managers attempted to deny her role in the song's creation, McLean came to her aid with evidence that showed the two money-grabbing men for what they were. I kinda liked him for that too.

At the end of McLean's Wikipedia entry, however, was a reference to a fine that he had paid in 2017 - he was then 71 years old at the time - for violence against his wife Patrisha. Later the couple divorced, but things did not end there, because Patrisha is now publicising details of her wretched 30-year marriage on a website where women in other abusive relationships are invited to share their experiences. Patrishia describes examples of her husband's egoism, controlling habits and occasional violence, though, rather than alienating her, his behaviour may have actually brought them closer together. She became totally dependent on him, dreading his threats to leave her even more than the times he said he was going to kill her.

There is another song that I sometimes mix up Killing Me Softly with, they're so similar. And Roberta Flack made international hits of both. It's called The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and was written by Ewan MacColl the British folk singer.

The first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes,
And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark and the empty skies, my love,
To the dark and the empty skies.

The first time ever I kissed your mouth
I felt the earth turn in my hand,
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird
That was there at my command, my love,
That was there at my command.

Like Killing Me Softly, it sounds as if it's based on an actual incident. And so it is. The song depicts MacColl's first meeting with 20-year-old musician Peggy Seeger. That encounter eventually led to marriage, and, though, like McLean, MacColl was a controversial figure, the marriage endured until his death in 1989. During this time Seeger also fell in love with a woman whom, she says, she loved in a deeper way than her husband.

I didn't call myself a lesbian. I didn't love women. I just loved a woman. I never called myself a heterasexual because I loved Ewan. I just loved a man. Love is.

Seeger makes it sound simple. But don't be misled. No two relationships are the same. And I guess that's a good reason not to make stereotyped judgments about them.

We live in an age when the power balance in male-female relationships is more equal than it used to be. On the other hand, there may be less freedom in the options we have when discussing the subject. I mean, political correctness discourages ambiguity. So I could get into hot water by saying that, in my experience, there is an instinctive aspect of a woman that expects a man to protect her, which sort of plays into the hands of a male who seeks to control his mate.

And, while, in the stories I've sketched above, my sympathies lie with the two women, I can't make a confident judgement about the rights and wrongs of the protagonists' conduct. The simple fact is that I don't know enough.

Anyway, this brings me to my last point, which, yes, was again suggested by something I came across on the Internet. The third set of partners I'd like to introduce have a far more complex male-female relationship than that of Don and Patrisha McLean, or Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl. Robert Graves and Laura Riding were both poets and writers who seemed to thrive by challenging not just mainstream thinking, but pretty much anyone or anything else that came into view. And, by the way, unlike the the other two partnerships, here the woman led the man. Graves called Riding his muse. Read about them in detail on the Net if you're interested. Here I will confine myself to one of Riding's observations. She says that hate can be more powerful than love, that it can create a deeper intimacy than strong romantic feelings, physical passion or intellectual affinity. Think about it.

Love/hate. Like/dislike. Neither exist in the natural world, where interaction among living organisms seems to be based on a different set of causes and effects. That in itself should alert us not to take them for granted. Love. Hate. It's an interesting exercise to try to work out what they really mean, and why they have come to play such an enormous part in our lives as humans.   

久しぶり日本語で原稿を書いた

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 大鹿の日々

1970年代初期のころ一冊の本が世界で話題となった。「スモール イズ ビューティフル」。

著者のＥ．Ｆ．シューマッハは元々ドイツ生まれの経済学者で、祖国がナチス政権となった時、イギリスへ逃げ、そこで、ケインズ経済学の創始者ジョン・メイナード・ケインズ の側近となった。第二次大戦が終わってもシューマッハはイギリスに残り、産業経営、エネルギー政策などで活躍していた。抜群な分析力で知られ、官民ともに大きい信頼を得たシューマッハだったが、その後、自分独自のオルタナティブ的な考えを打ち出し始めた。それは、アジアの当時いわゆる「経済途上国」を顧問として訪れた際、規模が大き過ぎる経済政策の結果を観察して、強い疑問を感じたからだ。狭い観点で見た経済効果は、結局、長期的な発展につながらないだけではなく、深いダメージを本来の人間社会にももたらしていた。開発は適切な規模で、適切な技術を使って行うべきだと、彼は最終的に結論をだした。　

日本でもシューマッハの「スモール イズ ビューティフル」が評価されて、ベストセラーとなったのは中小企業と小規模農家の大切さだけではなく、日本人の社会性のきめ細かさと手作り文化など、いろいろなことが関わっていると思う。

いずれにしても、1972年から東京で仕事を続けていた私は、1980年代になると、都会での生活の限度を感じ東京を去った。その後、奥多摩、松本などを経て、最終的には家族と共に南信州の大鹿村へ来て、そこに根を下ろした。その後、大鹿では、三人の子どもを育ち、その子どもが大人になり、自分の家族を持つようになった。

今日、日本の経済は依然として都市型中心で、農村では相変わらず過疎が続いている。しかし、この経済的な集中がある反面、政治的には、案外、地方の分権が残っている。少なくとも、私が生まれ育ったイギリスと比べ、日本の方がずっとましだ。例えば、小泉政権の下に国が20年前進めていた市町村合併事業計画は強制的ではなく、自治体が選択権を持っていた。上からの政治的な圧力はあったに違いないと思うが、決断は一応各自治体の自由だった。大鹿では、当時の村長は隣の町との合併を推進したが、村民の強い反発によって住民投票になり、独立を守ることができた。合併を選んだ他の村は自分の役場が出張所に格下げ、職員を大幅に減らされて、教育をはじめ、以前、管轄下にあった業務の自治権を失った。それを避けることができた小さな大鹿はよく頑張ったと思う。隣の静岡では、「村」がなくなったのに、この信州にはなんと３５村が今でも存在している。この数は断然日本一だ。信州人の政治に対する熱情を物語ると同時に、この山国の人たちがいかに生活基盤を「スモール・コミュニティ」に置きたがる証拠でもあると思う。

私の経験から見れば、「村」に暮らせていて、とても幸せだ。

都会では経済成長が主な目的で、そのために人々は自分の生活を犠牲にして生きる一方、村では人々は生活を大事にして生きる。ここでは、物事を「成長させる」より「育てる」ことが重視されている。

小さな自治体に住んでいる人は自分の日常生活に必要な物事を自給することが多い。土、空気、水、食、エネルギー。責任感をもって、これらを手に入れて、その質と安定した供給を維持する。小さな自治体は有機的なものでもあり、それを構成する人、風土、習慣などの関係は緻密で、長い年月の間培われた。そのため、バランスがよく取れて、浪費は少ない。また、協力しながらつくり上げた小さな人間社会のなかでは、個人面でも、一人ひとりが努力して自分が望む人生を探っていく機会が十分ある。

これと比べて都会の生活を見よう。水・食・エネルギーは消費するものとされ、代金を払えば、何の責任も持たないという考え方が一般的だ。また、人と人のつながりは、地域社会よりも経済（会社）が優先される。この状況の中では、ゆっくり自己追及し、自分らしい生活を目指すという生き方よりも、最新生とか流行などに目を奪われる。いうまでもなく 、おしゃれな生活をするにはお金が要るので、気が付かないうちに金稼ぎが人生の主な目的になってしまう。これは大規模消費社会の本質だ。

「ビッグ」より「スモール」、「ファスト」より「スロー」、「機械製」より「手作り」など、ごく自然的な流れがあろう。簡単に聞こえるが、深いものもある。この「概念」をただの考えとしてではなく、積極的に「実践」すればいいじゃないか。もちろん自己流で。

この大鹿では、ここ三十年間、私はそうしている。

命がある限り、そう続けていきたいと思う。

LOCKDOWN

Don't pay any attention to the caption. These is no lockdown here. Though there is a feeling, even in Oshika, that out there in the world something has changed.

I went for my first swim of the year yesterday in the Kogouchi river - a place where it's more statistically likely I'll meet a bear than a fellow human, so I don't feel I'm committing any crime. I knew that the water was going to be cold. Last year I didn't take my first dip until early June. Still, with the air temperature up in the late twenties Celsius, it was an inviting prospect. In short, it felt right.

Yes, the water was cold. Shedding my clothes, I managed to wade up to my thighs, even though I could feel my toes getting frostbitten. The big warning, however, came when my testicles touched the water's surface. That sounded the alarm. This is an extremely senstivie part of a man's body, and, as it's against my nature to do anything excessive, I changed tack. 

Instead I decided to explore the valley of the little stream that flows into the river close to my favourite bathing spot. Naturally tout nu.

The sun was shining from a cloudless sky, and as the stream has its source at a lower altitude than the main river the water was a degree or two warmer.  That makes quite a big difference. I climbed over the rocks, enjoying sunny pools where I had fun splashing around.

Turned out to be a great hike. So far I'd never been any higher than the mystic zelkova tree that seems to grow out of a rock, but above that the land, though steep, has a surprisingly gentle feel. The rocks are smooth and walking the soft forest floor on bare feet is a particularly sensuous experience. 

Higher up I came to a small waterfall - about four metres high - that offered an inviting alternative to the failed swim. In the Buddhist world it's called takigyō  - you stand under the cascade, while chanting a prayer or sutra. The invigorating experience certainly makes you want to shout out something. The challenge is not so much the coldness of the water, but the force with which it hits you.

 Back down by the big river I lay on a sun-warmed rock and rested. Then got dressed and returned to my house and life under lockdown.

It had been a beautiful day.

April 2020

 FIRST LIGHT (2)

Although these days the main access road to Oshika is through the valley - along the Koshibu river - most of the old roads went over the mountains. I can think of at least four such passes - the Bungui Pass going north to Takato and Suwa is one that I often use myself, along with Gando, which goes through Ikuta to Toyooka and on to Iida. But there are also a couple of others - Jizo Pass, which takes you south into Kamimura along the old Akiba Highway, and Orikusa Pass, which goes west to Komagane. This last one is hardly used, but condition of the narrow road is fine. In a way it's the most beautiful, although I don't travel along it so often.

But I did yesterday.

Near the small communities on either side of the pass there were flowering trees in full bloom. Ethereal Somei Yoshino along the first stretch of the road in Kuwabara and exuberantly colourful varieties of cherry, peach and forsythia in Nakazawa on the northern side.

In Kuwabara I stopped by at the house of a friend whom I hadn't seen in half a year, drank tea and heard about the doctor-farmer who advises him on his health and about a trip that he made in his younger days from Los Angeles across America to deliver a new limousine.

Another pass links Komagane to eastern Ina. It's called the Hiyama Pass. Although the majority of the traffic takes the national highway by the Tenryu River, there are still quite a few people using the old Hiyama road. Likewise, the Tsuetsuki Pass between Takato and Chino. After Orikusa this was the way that I was headed.

Today is a long journey - to Kofu and back. So when I get to Chino I decide to break it by jumping on the train for the last hour.

Unfortunately when I'm in the station, which is almost empty, I realise that I left my face mask in the car.

- Shucks!

But it's all so relaxed. Everywhere is, well, devoid of people, except for cars that you can see from the carriage window hurrying along the roads.

Such a strange feeling of freedom.

- Could be a good time to go travelling. Maybe Shikoku, which I've always wanted to see.

Not everybody was wearing a mask. One young woman who got on at a small country station wasn't, and later I noticed others in Kofu Station too.

Neither did anyone reprimand me in the immigration bureau branch office where I went to get my new resident's card.

At around three thirty it suddenly starts getting cooler. Cloud covers up the sun and the wind blows.

Luckily a train bound for Nagano City is waiting. So I jump on.

From Chino the drive route that I take back to Oshika is exactly the same as the one out. Yeh, I even chose the up and down hill road over the Orikusa Pass. It was dusk and full of deer, some of which crossed right in front of me. But, during the thirty-minute drive I don't see another car.    

FIRST LIGHT

For longer than I can remember I have awoken before dawn, often to do a translation to meet a morning deadline. These days, even though I am not working, the habit continues.

One of the joys of living alone is the quietness of the night. Through the paper doors something shines. Is it the moon? Or the first light of the dawn?

This morning it was the last half of the waning moon, along with three particularly bright stars, arranged in a line to the east. One is Jupiter, but what are the other two?

I arise with a good feeling of clean and warm physicality.

Yesterday it rained and even snowed a little, but today the weather seems fine.

Have to go to the government office in Kofu to renew my alien resident's card, and decide to get an early start. I'll take Route 152, heading north to Suwa, and from there either hop on a train or drive all the way along Route 20. Depends on how I feel.

The first sun hits my house at just after six thirty. I breakfast on a buckwheat pancake and a cup of strong black coffee, take a cursory look at the newspapers and answer a couple of emails, then hit the road just after eight.

It's such a fine day. Still cold, but from a cloudless blue sky, the sunshine creates crisp outlines of the trees on the tarmac of the road.

Passing through Kashio, I notice that the small supermarket isn't even open yet.

The Kashio hamlets are still in the shade. Here the valley is narrower than in Okawara, the other half of Oshika, the one where my house is. Okawara vs. Kashio. The sunshine-shadow ration is reflected in the characteristics of the inhabitants. Okawara folk are sunnier, more outgoing, while Kashio folk tend to be less talkative, slower to express their opinions. They save their money, whereas Okawara spend it. For this reason Y, who comes from Kashio, set up her karaoke bar in Okawara. Back in the old days, there were even Okawara geisha, I heard.

The last hamlet on the Kashio river goes by and the road begins a gradual incline to the Bungui Pass. From there Route 152 will descend into Hase and Takato, before rising to another pass, and then dropping steeply to Suwa.

With about fifteen minutes to the pass, there are remnants of yesterday's snow on the road. It's icy and slippy, so I put the car into four-wheel-drive.

A few more minutes up the road the snow is getting deeper. A tree has fallen across the road, but I somehow manage to remove the obstructing branch and drive the car under.

Hadn't expected this.

Round the next corner, a much bigger tree has come down, again I stop the car and get out to take a look.

- No way!

Back down and out of the snow, A, who works for one of the village construction companies, is standing by the road. He says that a snow plough is on the way. However, the fallen trees could take longer to deal with.

Nothing to do but head home.

The Kashio supermarket is now open, so I stop to get some cheap gasoline, and stock up with a few groceries, before realising that I don't have enough money to pay.

- That's okay, I'll put it on a tab for you, says T.

- Thanks, my pension comes in tomorrow.

- Strange to think of you getting a pension, Simon-san.

- Yeh, me too.

Then in the Okawara store I use my credit card to get a bottle of wine, before replenishing my water supply from a spring by the road. M passes by in his car and stops to talk. He is taking an old man who lives in the top house to the day care centre.

Across the valley the little community of Wago beckons with its red and yellow flowers.

Small, but deeply satisfying pleasures.

Yes, the day has developed in an unexpected way.

Now it's time to get home and open the wine.

白く降り白く咲きたる山の春　　　　　祭文

  OFF-PISTE ON THE EVE OF MY 70TH BIRTHDAY

But definitley not pissed off.

Just like an animal awakening from hibernation, this morning I detected a surge of something. Was it the human equivalent of rising sap?

Anyway, never one to let a chance slip, I decided to grab the day, and take my first trip to the river.

take the old man to the river is mercy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpig7uyd7M8/

Starting at the usual point of entry, I began cutting my way through the overgrown bamboos to create a new path that would lead me to the rocky ridge. I figured that this would be safer than the valley side that I usually take. Here it's so steep that I slide over the earth, grabbing roots and hanging on to tree trunks.

Indeed, the ridge was an easier way of descending, and after passing by some beautiful old rocks and a majestic katsura tree, I reached the river.

Usually this is the cue for me to shed footwear, peel off socks and splash through the water, making my way to my favourite bathing pool. But in early April it's still kinda cold. So I clambered over the rocks instead. I noticed that a couple of heavy rainfalls last autumn had completely changed the topography of the riverbed. Then in one tiny pool, I came across this.

It's toad spawn.

At the side of the pool there was a single toad. I imagined it to be the female, resting after laying all her eggs. There were thousands of them. She looked very relaxed, even pensive. It struck me that perhaps she had been waiting for a male - someone that would fertilise her eggs - but no one had turned up.

Meanwhile in other parts streams and rivers orgies were taking place.

Have you ever seen toads mating? It's chaos. Numerous males trying to mount the woman. Talk about rough sex. There are dead bodies lying around - men killed in fights, a female that drowned under her burdensome suitors.

But here a lady toad waited in vain for her prince charming.

- Could this human be my prince in disguise?!

I had to disappoint her.

Leaving the poor toad to her thoughts, I skirted the side of the mountain just above the water.

I was keen to check for another possible route down to the water along a rocky ridge further upstream. I followed a deer track that seemed promising, but about a hundred metres above the river I found myself on a steep slope of scree and loose soil with no handholds. It was time to return to safety.

A couple of wrens were in full song midst the trees on the opposite bank. Other than that the water rippled and rushed without either an end or perceptible beginning.

The river is fed by several streams of the purest water flowing down over mossy rocks.

Later I passed a lonely cherry tree on a the bank that would be bursting into blossom in a couple of weeks' time.

- Could be a good spot to put a tent for the summer.

Then I headed up the hill along the zigzag road back to my car.

March 2020

 UNGARETTI'S GIFT

Ungaretti put his hand into his pants

And pulled a hair

Then held it up and studied it

With a pause he said

This I donate to my poet friends

Do what you will with it

And said no more

Just smiled

Ginsberg took the precious hair

Head bowed in reverence

He held it up and studied it

It's white! he pronounced

Ungaretti: love was a tempest

Strong seas, shipwrecks, insomnia

But now no more

He smiled again

Now it's a guiding light, and me

An old sea captain

Following its soft insistence

As I head for port

https://allenginsberg.org/2012/06/giuseppe-ungaretti-1888-1970/

 BANE

Neighbour H has been the bane of my life for the last three decades.

- How many dogs does your neighbour have? is a typical question people who visit ask me.

- No idea. At a rough estimate over forty. Perhaps more.

In short, H is a dog hoarder.

There is no law restricting the number of dogs you can keep and, anyway, in past years I've called out everyone from the police to the welfare office - several times - over H's animals. I've done all that I can. But the problem won't go away. So I have kind of given up. We've skirmished - sometimes he won, other times me. Actually, responding to his challenges can be quite educative. I have to imagine what's going on in his mind, though that's kind of impossible.

But we don't always fight. Sometimes I need his help - for example, he allowed me to lop the tops off trees of his that were blocking my sunshine. Other times he needs mine - like when he nearly severed his thumb with an electric saw, and I rushed him to the local A&E.

H also hoards building materials and other useful stuff, which once in a while he may share. Last year he not only gave me a load of secondhand drainage piping that would have been really expensive to buy new, but also let me run the piping across his land.

So neither of us wants to get into a long-running cold war with the other.

I think.

But I also have to say that he is the most selfish person I have ever met. And he hoards. Just as Nature abhors a vacuum, he will fill any empty space with his inconsiderate clutter.

Thus, over the past week I've noticed that he has been trucking in piles of recycled building materials and leaving them by the roadside. I may have given up with the dogs, but, Jesus, I'm not going to let him use the public highways and bye-ways for his mess.

- I need to talk with him, I thought.

So, one morning, when I felt I had the energy for it, I decided to go over. I know him well enough to ken how he would react. I mean, not only does that look in his eyes, when you criticize him, remind me of Francis Begbie, but also, like Franco, he has a thick local accent. This was how our conversation went:

- Hi, H-san, we've got a residents' meeting next week. Here are the details. Hope that you can come along.

- Un.

- And what's keeping you busy these days?

- Aye, ay'm bildin mer hoosuz fae mi dugs, he says happily.

- Aye, I seen all that stuff ye got parked doun there on the road, I say.

He eyes me suspiciously, anticipating what I'm going to say next,

- You know that that's a public space. I jist wanna reassure miself that ye's not goin' be leaving it aw there for long.

- Livin' it thurr? Dinnae giv me that shite. Ye yuz it yersel. Ye friends pit thur fuckin cars thur. Thur int nuthin wrong wi me yuzin that space like anyun else.

He calls me omae, an insulting Japanese word meaning you.

When I ask him not to do this, his buddy standing nearby laughs. Then H continues his rant. This time, though, I'm omae-san.Which makes me feel better.

- Whooz goin tae liv gud wud oot thur in th' ren? Eh? You tell me thit!

- Okay, okay, like I said. I jist wanted tae make sure. We need that space for the community firewood distribution from the trees that the people constructing that linea line are cutting doun and givin us.

- Firwud! Wot fuckin shite iz thit? Thits aw finishd. Wunt be nae mer firwud frae thim!

He's right. There probably won't be any more wood from the linea people.

- Okay, okay, I git the train ah what ye saying. Stop getting all werked oop, will yer? We're neighbours, like. It int easy for any aw us, ye know. Tanomu de.

This last phrase is what everyone around here says . It means I'm requesting you (to do it). As usual in Japan, the thing that I'm asking him to do is left vague. But, of course, he knows.

Whether or not he will move the wood from the road, or just throw a blue sheet over it and leave it there, like the many other piles of things he has in and around the village, I don't know. Truthfully I don't really care, either. The point of this morning was to make my point. Just as it's not good to wage war with him, it's not good to be friendly with him either. And it's even worse to say nothing and let him ride roughshod over you, like he does to everyone else. He says 'Fuck you' to everyone, so occasionally I like to say 'Fuck you' back to him. In my own way, of course.

Does he respect me for it? I doubt it.

Then I left the two of them to continue their building of kennels for more fucking dogs. Jesus.

As usual, the encounter left me tired and depressed, while H. seethed.

Has he ever considered hiring a bargain-priced Chinese hitman through one of his yakuza mates to rid himself of the interfering foreigner? It would be a super-easy job...

No, I'm sure he hasn't. He's not a bad guy, just horribly emotionally immature.

I tell myself.

Dear H., you have caused me a lot of trouble and I curse you for that, but I don't hate you.

The old villagers die and are replaced, for the most part, by well-intentioned but flaky New-Agers, unconvincing intellectuals, middle-class retirees from the city and others. H is an endangered species, fighting for survival. 

 I guess. 

CORONAVIRUS READING LIST 

 This is not the first time that I have experienced a crisis that the papers were calling apocalyptic. I was in Oshika in 2011 when Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant went into meltdown. Oshika is not as close as Tokyo, but it was quite near enough to get a sizeable dose of radiation if the blast had sent the radioactive particles higher into the atmosphere and the wind had been blowing in our direction. Luckily, it didn't happen, but it could have, and for a couple of months, no one really knew what was going on. Fukushima was a more frightening prospect than the coronavirus: the children would have been the victims, not the oldies, like now. As a felicitous piece of Zen calligraphy goes:

                                 Grandfather dies, Father dies, grandson dies

That is the natural order of things - the best we can hope for.

Now, let me tell you something that happened yesterday. I had begun the morning by reading the news, which had left me with a heightened awareness of the thin line between life and death. Still, it was a beautiful spring day as I drove to Matsukawa for a dental appointment. The early blossoms were on the trees, the sky blue and cloudless. Even the drive, which I've done thousands of times along that same road, had some unusual feeling of lightness. In the dentist's waiting room I saw that the books and magazines had been removed for reasons of hygiene, so amused myself by drawing a picture in my tiny sketch book.

Lying in the dentist's chair waiting for treatment to begin, I watched the wind moving the leaves on a decorative evergreen tree directly outside the window. Or perhaps they weren't actually moving, perhaps the sun's shimmering rays were causing an illusion of movement. Whatever it was, it was beyond beautiful. I was thinking: my whole life has been lived on the premise that I exist, that I'm me. But, actually, there is no importance in this me. Just then, I tried to move, but couldn't. In fact, I could have been a speck of dust, waiting to be picked up and blown away by the wind. And I would have ben quite happy if that had happened. The realisation that my entire life has been a complete waste of time made me smile.

Thus I was transported out of my ego world for a minute or two. At the same time it occurred to me that this, ideally, is how I would like to die. So I pictured myself ill with the coronavirus, and then smiled at my stupidity.

I spent the rest of the day doing some shopping in Komagane before driving home.

So I think that, for a start, our reading list might include some hints on shedding your egocentricity. Perhaps something by 13th-century Zen priest Dōgen. The Internet is full of his writings in English translation. For example, you can find eight different versions of his Genjō Kōan here

https://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/GenjoKoan8.htm/

Or you could start with the easier Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki,

https://global.sotozen-net.or.jp/eng/library/leaflet/Zuimonki/pdf/zuimonki.pdf 

 which was written by one of Dōgen's disciples about his master. That will give you a taste of this strange world, where 'body and mind drop off.'

INTERESTING DAYS

I'd actually been intending to use this quiet time between winter and spring to do some serious reading in Japanese on the history of Oshika. I tried, but my heart wasn't in it. Instead I was still thinking about LA, and trying to figure out the nature of this strange sprawling city and its bizarre life style. So I wasted a couple of hours, poring over google maps, seeing where actor James Dean had his fatal crash (turned out to be closer to San Luis Obispo than LA), where Marilyn Monroe committed suicide (Brentwood, about a kilometre from the Visvim shore), where Robert Kennedy was assassinated (at a hotel in Koreatown not far from MacArthur Park, another iconic 60s location). For reasons of curiosity or nostalgia I was going back over stark news events that happened during my own childhood and teenage years. What I began to get was a view of LA that only made sense to me.

At the same time I was finishing books that I began reading while in LA. Porno by Irvine Welsh is kinda fun, though there is only really one sympathetic human in the whole story. That's Spud. The others are all types that you would definitely avoid in real life. Still, I admit to a fascination in the ongoing development of Begbie's character, and am equally fascinated to hear that he is the subject of a sequel set in California called The Blade Artist. Will have to get that.

While in Hirono and Kazuya's house, I also came across a copy of D. H. Lawrence's Complete Poems. Here's one of them

Deeper than Love 

There is love, and it is a deep thing
but there are deeper things than love.

First and last, man is alone.
He is born alone, and alone he dies
and alone he is while he lives, in his deepest self.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy
and alone.

Love is a thing of twoness.
But underneath any twoness, man is alone.
And underneath the great turbulent emotions of love, the violent herbage,
lies the living rock of a single creature's pride,
the dark, naif pride.
And deeper even than the bedrock of pride
lies the ponderous fire of naked life
with its strange primordial consciousness of justice
and its primordial consciousness of connection,
connection with still deeper, still more terrible life-fire
and the old, old final life-truth.

Love is of twoness, and is lovely
like the living life on the earth
but below all roots of love lies the bedrock of naked pride, subterranean,
and deeper than the bedrock of pride is the primordial fire of the middle
which rests in connection with the further forever unknowable fire of all things
and which rocks with a sense of connection, religion
and trembles with a sense of truth, primordial consciousness
and is silent with a sense of justice, the fiery primordial imperative.

All this is deeper than love
deeper than love.

Lawrence has been called 'half a poet, half a prophet', and after reading this you can see why.  I followed this up with a biography entitled The Savage Pilgrimage by Catherine Carswell and then began rereading Lady Chatterley's Lover. However, at some point Lawrence's intolerance became suffocating. So that was a problem because deep truth should liberate. I respect and love Lawrence, but I wanted to see how someone, perhaps of the same era, someone quite different from Lawrence but with the same zest for life, expressed his passion. I found exactly what I needed in Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel, from which this passage comes

He remembered yet the East India Tea House at the Fair, the sandalwood, the turbans, and the robes, the cool interior and the smell of India tea; and he had felt now the nostalgic thrill of dew-wet mornings in Spring, the cherry scent, the cool clarion earth, the wet loaminess of the garden, the pungent breakfast smells and the floating snow of blossoms. He knew the inchoate sharp excitement of hot dandelions in young earth; in July, of watermelons bedded in sweethay, inside a farmer's covered wagon; of cantaloupe and crated peaches; and the scent of orange rind, bitter-sweet, before a fire of coals. He knew the good male smell of his father's sitting-room; of the smooth worn leather sofa, with the gaping horse-hair rent; of theblistered varnished wood upon the hearth; of the heated calf-skinbindings; of the flat moist plug of apple tobacco, stuck with a redflag; of wood-smoke and burnt leaves in October; of the brown tired autumn earth; of honey-suckle at night; of warm nasturtiums, of a clean ruddy farmer who comes weekly with printed butter, eggs, and milk; of fat limp underdone bacon and of coffee; of a bakery-oven in the wind; of large deep-hued stringbeans smoking-hot and seasoned well with salt and butter; of a room of old pine boards in which books and carpets have been stored, long closed; of Concord grapes in their long white baskets...

I think that you get the idea. Prophet vs. Artist. Puritan vs. Sensualist.

Life is rich, deep.

 THE WORLD TODAY

you're number 2, says a friendly voice

at this moment of awakening

it sounded satisfying

though the rest is a mystery

i mean who wants to be number 1?

and this is a city of freeways and intersections

manicured lawns

playparks

where parents chaperone their kids

empty sidewalks

and eternal sunshine

wake again

with blue skies and clouds

and the sound of the autos

wake again to the world today

in some never-again moment

this L.A. morning

 Suemarr on Suemarr

People often ask me questions such as: What kind of music influenced you? Are you a folk singer? What do think about the present music scene? I could give a short answer, but what I said would be shallow. This week I'm on Okinoshima in the Japan Sea, a place where time passes slowly, and so can give lots of thought to my reply.

When it comes to folk as a musical genre, I'm probably not a folk singer. That is because my repertory doesn't consist of songs about everyday things with simple lyrics, songs that readily appeal to the masses. However, I've undoubtedly been influenced by folk singers of the past. What they taught me was to go on singing. Whether at a scheduled gig or doing something impromptu, the aim is to share your song with the people present, to get close enough to communicate the song to them. I think that this influence is basic to me and will never disappear.

However, when it comes to lyrics and melodies, I try to offer more than the simple folk song. At least, I've arrived at my art by a more roundabout way.

Color, feeling, unconventionality and emotion I got from rock music.

Metaphor, irony, humor, beauty and caprice came largely from modern art.

When all is said and done it's through life that you accumulate influences. They penetrate into every corner of your body and mind. The words and music come from hidden springs and like water flow from stream to river. En route, a song may change in response to the different people that hear it. Some songs hit a deadend and dry up, while others reach the ocean. For these lucky ones it's the beginning of a never-ending journey. Some songs wash up on distant shores, while others - who knows? - may evaporate into the air, become clouds and eventually rain down on the mountains or towns. A sand grain on a beach too could be a song.

The more that I think about it, the more I realize that I will never command a wide audience. I play the acoustic guitar and banjo, but the sort of music I make is the opposite of what you would expect from these two instruments. Trying to define myself by genre or style is never going to be much use. But, for good or bad, that is the way of music in the world today.

What am I? I finally ask myself. Perhaps just someone who likes to drink, likes to talk, likes to sing. For whom happiness is getting into drunken conversations in a bar. Couldn't this become the raw material for a song? In theory, yes, but there is something that for some reason stops me...

-- You've chosen a very difficult job, someone once remarked.

-- With freedom and creativity, nothing is ever going to be easy.

in the late autumn

leaves that are still green

stir in the wind

the course of my life

as ever

unknown

It's a poem that I wrote while I was on Okinoshima and left in the local shrine.  

(Translated and edited from the original Japanese below)

 　離れ島にて　我が身の行方知れぬまま也

　隠岐の島前、海士町に今年も数日滞在している。何度も来ているので、夜のライブや宴

会以外は、宿や島の人たちも私のことを程良く放っておいてくれる。相変わらず静けさが

漂う隠岐神社でお参りをして、資料室に置かれているスケッチブックに歌をしたためた。

もういくつ詠んだであろうか。何冊か積まれているスケッチブックの中に『捨馬』の名で

潜んでいるのだが、探すことはしなかった。此処に来る時は、祀られている後鳥羽院の島

流しの地での想いを想像しながら、句を、又は歌を詠む。静寂が更に私を集中させる。

　幸運なことにお天気も暖かく晴れてくれた。離れ島での静かな時間。今の私にはとても

貴重な時間である。流刑の民のような気分で少しだけ自らを振り返ってみた。よく聞かれ

ることがある。「どのような音楽に影響を受けましたか？」「あなたはフォークシンガー

ですか？」「今の音楽の状況をどう思っていますか？」。このような質問に対して、ゆっ

くりと答える時間がないと、答えた内容が今ひとつ薄っぺらくなってしまう。今過ごして

いるこの時間なら、ゆっくり考えることが出来るので、綴ってみようと思う。

　音楽ジャンルという括りの中でのフォークと捉えるならば、おそらく私はフォークシン

ガーではない。解り易い日常的な歌詩で、大衆の心を掴むというような歌を持っていない

からである。それでも往年のFolk Singerたちからの影響を受けていることは間違いない。

その影響とは『歌い続けること』である。予定されていた場所でも、予定外な場所でも、

人前で歌い、その場にいる人たちと可能な限り近い距離で歌を共有する行為、そして歌い

継ぐということ。このような影響は基本的な在り方として消えることはないだろう。

　しかし遠回りをしてきた私にとって、言葉や音楽的なことになるとFolk Songに留まる

ことが出来ない。『色』『艶』『背徳』『発散』は明らかにロック・ミュージックから。

『比喩』『皮肉』『ユーモア』『美』『儚さ』は現代アートや詩人からの影響が大きい。

つまり、それは人生そのもの。と言えることでもあり、心身の隅々まで染み込んでしまっ

た影響というものが共存しているのである。そして発される言葉や音楽は、響き渡る影の

中に隠れている泉から湧き出た水となり、ゆっくりと川を流れてゆく。流れながら様々な

人々の耳に響き、姿形を変える。行き詰まり枯れ果ててしまう歌もあれば、運良く大海に

辿り着く歌もある。大海に流れ出した歌は、そこから更に終わりなき旅が始まる。遥か遠

くの国の岸辺に流れ着く歌や、水蒸気となり空へ舞い上がり、雲となって漂い、山々や街

に降り注ぐ歌もあるだろう。砂浜の砂のひと粒も、ひとつの歌であるのかも知れない。

　綴れば綴るほどに、やはり私は大衆的とは言えない。アコースティックギターとバンジ

ョーを弾いて歌う、というスタイルから想像させる音楽とは真逆だと思わせてしまうこと

もある。ジャンルやスタイルというのは、少なくとも私にとってあまり得をすることがな

い。それは同時に良くも悪くもこの時代の音楽の状況を物語っていると思っている。

　ふと我に返る。そんな私でも呑み屋ではくだらない話をし、酔っ払えるだけでも幸せな

のかも知れない。その幸せな気持や、くだらない気持を歌にすれば楽しいではないか。し

かし、どうしても何かが無意識のうちにブレーキをかける。「大変な道を選んでしまった

ね」。と私に言った人がいた。『自由』や『創造』はそんなものなのではないだろうか。

　離れ島での静かなる時間。こんな自分に呆れつつ煙草に火を付ける。夜は冷え込むが、

島の人が集まり暖かくしてくれる。たまには神社に残した今回の歌を披露してみよう。

　「晩秋いまだ緑なる葉は揺れて我が身の行方知れぬまま也　　ー捨馬ー」

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　二〇一九年　十月三十日　隠岐・海士町にて

December 2019

 miscellaneous thoughts at yearend

The Earth. Everything begins with the earth, that chemical mix of elements, that matrix from which we all come and to which we will all return.

We all belong to some place on the Earth. You may be born there, or you may need to search for that place. But once you find it your life will begin to make sense.

You take from this piece of earth what you need. You cultivate it and tend it.

You share it with your fellow humans and other living creatures. Sharing can be frustrating, even painful.

Your share it with nature, surrendering the order you've created, learning even from what yet you don't understand.

Over the centuries the humans that inhabited your piece of land formed ties. The community will have rules and ceremonies. Respect them. Respect your fellow residents. Without others your existence is meaningless.

Be aware of your community's history, especially its evolved knowledge, its cumulative culture.   

anya on oshika:

It's hard to describe the peacefulness of this village, in Oshikamura. To the eye, it kind of looks like a collection of fallen down shacks, broken places covered with tarps, broken panes reinforced with cardboard, cracked walls, broken floorboards, fallen down sheds, muddy paths. Sparkling high above the village is a bright white, snow-covered peak in the southern Japanese alps: majestic, imposing, breathtaking in the morning sun....

https://tellicoband.com/

here are the lyrics along with english translation to another suemarr song from the　album doromizu wa yureru. it is based on a poem by Nakahara Sōji (1949-2019).

あさき夢みし

作詞：中原蒼二

作曲：スーマー

かはたれどき

深く寂しい夢をみた

夢は目が覚めてしまうと

あちら側に置いてきたことに気づいて、

どういう夢だったかを

思い出せないものだが、

今朝も何故あんなに寂しかったのか

思い出せない

かはたれどき

深く寂しい夢をみた

秋の野山を歩いて

木漏れ日に舞う鳥の声を聴きながら、ふいに、

来年の秋、僕はもう

この星にいないかも知れない

今朝の夢はそんな懐かしい

夢だったかも知れない

かはたれどき

深く寂しい夢をみた

人に心があるなら

いつか水のような寂しさが満ちるだろう

まるで片口のような心の器

その底が抜けてしまって

今朝の夢は霙（みぞれ）が降りしきる

夢だったかも知れない

参照：　淋しさの底ぬけて降るみぞれかな 　　　丈草

HALF-FORGOTTEN DREAMS

in the twilight of the morning

i dreamt a very lonely dream.

but then awoke to find

everything had been laid aside

i could remember nothing

not even why i was lonely...

in the twilight of the morning

i dreamt a very lonely dream.

walking in the autumn forest

with the dance of birdsong

and sun coming through the trees

and then a sudden thought: next year, will i still be here?

me pining for the past...

in the twilight of the morning

i dreamt a very lonely dream.

imagine the heart as a lipped cup

well, some day loneliness will fill it to the brim

and then the bottom falls out

in the icy pouring rain... 

Note: the last verse is inspired by this haiku of Jōsō (1662-1704)

The sleet falls
As if coming through the bottom
Of loneliness 

 here are the lyrics to doromizu wa yureru, a song by suemarr, along with my english translation. the song is from the album of the same name, available at https://suemarr.com/

泥水は揺れる

ドブに落ちていたのさ　今の今まで
誰に気づかれもせず　今の今まで
待っていたかのように　君のことを
でも疑うことばかりの　泥水は揺れる

居場所がある君には　すべては幻
帰る家がある君には　外は幻かい？
汚れたら洗いましょう　きれいさっぱり
でも疑うことばかりの　泥水は揺れる

変わり者の独り言　吹き消されて
虚ろな目に真実が　映っていても
盗んだ絵の具の色　君のために
でも疑うことばかりの　泥水に溶かそう

どこまでも澄みきった　川のせせらぎ
緑深き山々に　心は弾む
鳥たちは羽ばたいて　夕陽は沈む
疑いたくはないけれど　泥水は揺れてる

ドブに落ちていたのさ　今の今まで
誰に気づかれもせず　今の今まで
待っていたかのように　君のことを

...

muddy waters swirl

fallen into the gutter     until just now

no one even noticed         until just now

then waiting for me     thoughts of you

but doubts stir         the muddy waters swirl

you've made yourself a place    that's full of dreams

shut yourself safely in 　 where even the world's a dream

lets clean off the dirt      everything will be pure

but doubts stir      the muddy waters swirl

crackpot mutters words     blown out like a flame

but I see the truth　  in his vacant eyes

paintbox colours stolen     all of them for you

lets dissolve our doubts  　in the muddy waters

the water in the stream      is always so clear

deep green mountains       move my heart

birds take to the wing      while the sun sets

i don't want to doubt 　　but muddy waters swirl

fallen into the gutter        until just now

no one even noticed         until just now

then waiting for me          thoughts of you....

 ode to the morning

 Non abbiamo che questa virtù: cominciare ogni giorno la vita - davanti alla terra sotto un cielo che tace - attendendo un risveglio.  Cesare Pavese

arcturus spica regulus

the three great stars of the spring

are as clear as crystals

in the still dark of

this december early morning

before the sun is up

im down the hill

to visit takao

whose wife recently died

hes different more friendly

and we talk about things

he explains how to start

a troublesome motor

then i drop by at tims

to borrow a tool

and make my way home

loading some wood from the shrine

over coffee i write a shopping list

fill out a form

check my email

read the newspaper fleetingly

watch the sun spread across the garden

and think about life

and what I will do today

                                          ２つのライブと１つの葬式 （俳文）

アーニャとスーマーの大鹿と飯田でのライブの直後、集落のおばさんがなくなり、自治会長としての連絡活動、儀式の参列などで、四日間も忙しかった。今朝になって、やっと諸任務から解放され元の生活に戻ることができました。といっても、一晩だけでは疲労が取れるわけではありません。いただいた供花は台所のバケツに水揚げされたまま。生かす力もない。

こういうときはちょっとした美味しいものを作れば元気が出ます。いただいたみずみずしい大根を薄く切り、塩で揉んで、ゆずの皮とトウガラシを添えて、レタスと一緒ににして、サラダを作りました。ドレッシングはちょっとだけのオリーブオイルと無花果の酢。それから、ごはんかパスタ？タリアテッレボロネーゼにしました。ソースは豚牛のひき肉、トマト、ニンニク、セロリ、ローズマリーなど。自家製葡萄酒の粕も少し入れました。

つぎの日、大分元気になりましたけれども、まだお葬式の花を飾る気にはなりませんでした。ちょうどそのとき、同じ集落に住んでいる娘が一歳半の息子と一緒に見えて、息子が独遊びをしている間、私がずっと後回しににしていた仕事をさっさと片付けてくれました。

お返しに、ごはんを用意し、それをみなで食べました。

またおいしかった。

そして、この句を詠みました

花と本が色とりどりの秋別れ　　　　祭文

November 2019 

 My Grandad

A news photo that I came across on an Internet website has brought memories of my own childhood, as well as triggering some thoughts on life then and now.

Okay, let's begin with a photo that is selling on the US stock photography Shutterstock's Japan site for over 22,000 yen. Here's the URL

https://www.shutterstock.com/editorial/image-editorial/miss-audrey-jeffs-and-headmaster-jl-piggott-of-kingsthorpe-grove-school-northampton-miss-jeffs-was-fined-for-caning-schoolchildren-in-her-class-for-full-caption-see-version-box-0573-010615-00096ajpg-4841983a/

It's not the first time that I have seen this photo, which appeared in one of the British national newspapers back in 1954 and which I remember despite being only four at the time. The facts surrounding the affair, as explained to me later by my father, were that a teacher at the Kingsthorpe Grove Primary School in Northampton, where my grandfather was the headmaster, caned a whole class of children as a punishment for unruly behaviour. This did not please some of the parents whose children were not among those guilty of causing the commotion and they reported the matter to the police. The investigation resulted in a court case at which the teacher, whose name was Audrey Jeffs, was found guilty and fined.

My grandfather supported Miss Jeffs, whom he accompanied to court and spoke on the behalf of. You can see by the cheerful look on his face that he was confident of his own opinion and did not intend to be intimidated by the pressure of the parents, police or magistrates. Miss Jeffs and he lost the case, but I don't think that bothered him. Excepting the most extreme circumstances he believed that a headmaster should support his teachers. For him it was a matter of principle. Anyway, that's how I remember my father explaining it to me.

These days it's pretty rare for managers to put their own head on the block when one of their staff commits an error of judgement, which Miss Jeffs had obviously done. At the same time it is well to remember that corporal punishment was quite legal and a common means of discipline in British schools for a long postwar period. I saw it administered on fellow pupils many times. In fact, in my third year at the same primary school I was in Miss Jeffs' class. She had been censured but not sacked and continued to teach at Kingsthorpe Grove School. She also continued to hand out corporal punishment, which I watched her doing by hitting the victim on the palm of the hand with a ruler two or three times. It was no big deal, and by hitting you on the palm instead of the knuckles, which hurt much more, it seemed symbolically shaming rather than physically painful. I also remember the classroom as light, sunny, clean and quiet, and Miss Jeffs'　lessons as interesting and easy to understand. If this had happened in 2019, she would have been fired for certain, perhaps even sent to gaol. But, back in the 1950s she was warned and allowed back. She was undoubtedly one of the school's better teachers. I also remember hearing that she was a divorced woman, something rare that at the time was socially frowned upon. Independent, determined, strong-willed... She would have be labelled a brutal authoritarian today. In truth she was probably one of the many women in postwar Britain who saw the new age as the opportunity to exert her individuality, to challenge accepted opinion.

My grandfather would have admired her determination. He possessed the same quality, having come from a working class background - my great grandfather, who never had a regular job, made his money by taking illegal bets. However, Len, as my grandfather was known (incidentally he was J.L. Piggott - John Leonard - not J.I., as the newspaper erroneously reported) was an ambitious young man who after serving as an infantry soldier in World War I became a teacher in his home town of Northampton. By the age of thirty-three he was the youngest headmaster in the town's history. He would remain as the headmaster of Kingsthorpe Grove School for the next thirty-two years, until his retirement. He then went into local politics, defeating the mayor of Northampton in an election, but died a few weeks later at the age of sixty-eight. I was thirteen at the time and well remember visiting him on his death bed, one May afternoon. I still have a clear image of him sitting up, conscious but not really able to talk, with the sun streaming through the open window.

Later, at the age of eighteen during the summer between finishing senior school and beginning university I stayed with my grandmother in the same house for four weeks while working at a local garage. We used to play cards and have long talks. She seemed to want to tell me about the man who had been her husband. I only knew him as my Grandad and the headmaster of the school that I had briefly attended. On many weekends I had visited his house with my father and in summer often spend time at a camp that he put up in the field of a farmer friend. Of course I didn't know then about the women in his life, something that my Grandma seemed to wanted to talk about.

- I loved him, but I don't know why, she would say wryly. 

Or the fact that, according to my Grandma, he had got his headship at Kingsthorpe Grove by consciously cultivating people in the right places. As a young man he joined the Conservative Club, where he ingratiated himself with the politicians who ran the town. But, he had always been a Socialist and when he beat the mayor Corrin he was standing as the candidate of the Labour Party. His pet cause was the abolition of the 11-plus entrance examination and the introduction of comprehensive schools - something that came to pass in the 1970s, but was then reversed under Mrs Thatcher.

Going back to my Grandma's revelation that he was a womaniser, I wonder if he and Miss Jeffs were romantically involved. I suppose it's possible.

I have a photo of myself that I guess was taken not long after the scandalous court case. I'm sitting at my Grandad's desk in his study at Kingsthorpe Grove. My mother took it. Perhaps she wanted to inspire me to become a headmaster too. And little Simon does look a mite supercilious, though I myself can only remember feeling nervous. I'm sure that I was egged on by Mum to place my hands on the desktop in that rather adult way - to ape my Grandad. I can hear her laughing with amusement and satisfaction at my pose.

In the end I never became a headmaster like my Grandad, didn't even become a teacher like so many members of the Piggott clan. What did I inherit from him then? Well, for a start, my middle names John Leonard. Fidelity towards friends and courage in the face of authority, I hope. Love of camping and the country life, deeply. Ambition and the desire for social recognition? Definitely not. His womanising ways? I don't think so. Sure, I've always been interested, but quite early on in my life came to realise that the outcome is rarely worth the effort. If my DNA map does contain a womanising gene I think that it was dormant and may have got passed on to another Len. Actually the forebear to whom that I've most often been told that I resemble is my Mum's father John Harris Townsend. But he died before I was born. And, anyway, that's another story.

ITS JUST ANOTHER DAY

infinity, immortality...

an old man wakes up one morning still feeling tired - one eye aches and his back is stiff. it's misty outside and cold in the kitchen, so he turns on the electric heater, pauses and then begins to wonder how to start this unpromising day, to give it meaning. he has no idea other than to make himself a coffee, which he does. frischgemalenen kaffee für deisennoch-nicht-gemalenen tag. he also boils himself some oatmeal porridge, and, remembering he has a small carton of fresh cream, opens the fridge and gets that out, serving the porridge in a yellow dish, he pours on just a little of the cream. meanwhile, in the coffee maker, the coffee is ready.

so i sip the coffee and spoon up the porridge. as the nourishment begins to take away the aches and pains, i get the strength to do something, taking a german book in order to mull over a memorable sentence whose grammatical construction i couldn't quite figure out. here it is:

wer von berufs wegen genötig ist, über die jahre hinweg sich selbst auszubeuten, der wird zum verwerter von resten.

the first half is no problem - literally: a person who for reasons of job has been compelled over the years to exploit himself. but, in the second half i can't see exactly how der fits in. does it relate back to wer, i wonder. 'a person who becomes to exploit leftovers'? neither does the use of wird seem natural. still. i like the music of the sentence, especially the word verwerter. the prefix ver-, often mildly threatening, is in this case extremely benign, turning werten (judge) into verwerten (utilise). also, interesting that both verwerten and the preceding ausbeuten could be translated in english as exploit. when reading german i feel like an orchestra conductor reading through the score of a newly composed piece of music that he must conduct, trying to get to the heart of it.

whilst i'm engaged in this brainwork, the sun breaks through the mist. there is cloud in the valley, but, above that a view opens through the trees in my front garden to the mountains beyond. the sight of this sensuous landscape moistens my dry analytical thoughts. the meeting of the sensory and intellectual worlds feels effortless. its something that the human spirit conjures up. what's happening to me can't be broken down into a materialist explanation without ignoring the manifest spiritual reality of this eternal moment.

looking out from my kitchen window i see that you have descended from your room in the kura. you discover the misty sunshine, yawn, gaze at the view for a second, enter through the glass doors into the bath/barn, take a zen piss in the toilet, clatter into the kitchen, greet me with a kiss that leaves a taste of the coffee that i'm drinking on your lips, and on mine the moozy morning fragrance of your female physicality.

i'm not going to ask you about the german grammar. i know that if i do you will cry out 'oh no, simon!', and laugh aloud. instead i'll grind you some coffee beans. and as we wait for the machine to make your coffee, our day will begin.

ancient greek philosopher plato put into a nutshell when he said: every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. those who wish to sing always find a song. at the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

俳句瞬間

　　　　　　　　街道の歴史を隠す落ち葉かな　　　　後藤杜子

俳句ポスト

　　　　　　　　家と空をつなぎにたる女郎蜘蛛 　　　　後藤杜子

　今日の句

　　　　　　　　　　雲さがる秋の牧場で葡萄を狩る

MEMORY AND AUTHENTICITY

I've finally posted the last of all the oral histories that I took from people living in the village.  I think that browsing them will give you an idea of what the village was like in the first half of the 20thcentury.

In addition to the tapes, there are a number of publications about the village. As with any subject, the deeper you go, the more you realise how little you know about it. Editing the transcripts of the Oshika villagers' memories certainly made me feel that way. So, my next aim is to read the books on village history. Will this increase my understanding of the individuals whose lives were lived out against this backdrop? And by combining this subjective individual memory with objective analyses of historical events will an integrated view of Oshika village emerge? I doubt it but, at least it will be fun to try.

Countless oral histories are now freely available on the Internet. Recently, while listening to audio files on the website of the British Library I came across an interview with a woman called Daphne Hardy Henrion (1917-2003), a talented and successful sculptress, who, when she was living with the writer Arthur Koestler in wartime France (they shared a house in Provence) also became the translator of his novel about Stalinist Russia 'Darkness at Noon'. By all accounts she was someone with a strong personality who led an exciting life. Her reminiscences would surely be worth listening to? I thought. However, I'd forgotten that, while a lot of people are only too happy to talk about themselves and their lives, this is not necessarily the case for everyone. In response to the interviewer's clumsy attempts to draw her out, Hardy retreats into her shell. However, towards the end, when the topic turns to Hardy's present life, there is an amusing exchange:

Henrion - I have a friendship with a chap called David, who worked as a model once. We're quite - what can I say? -

Interviewer - companionable?

Henrion - Yes.

Interviewer - And he lives near you?

Henrion - Not very far.

Interviewer - Can you see him quite often?

Henrion - Most weeks he comes.

Interviewer - Do you have good chats together?

Henrion - Yes. Nothing very deep.

Interviewer - Is he a widower?

Henrion - (pause) No, he's a homosexual.

It's interesting how a tiny comment or a casual gesture can illuminate someone's personality. This is one such moment. Otherwise, it's all so excruciatingly English - the conversation of people, who, like the Japanese, strive to avoid offence（角が立たないように）. Or perhaps it is just that Hardy, who, by all accounts, was intellectual and cosmopolitan, is just bored. You can find out about her at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1447686/Daphne-Hardy-Henrion.html  and https://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Art/021M-C0466X0138XX-0100V0/

In another of the interviews, the sculptor David Nash (1945 - ), who spent many years living in the Welsh village of Blaenau Ffestiniog, recalls a neighbour, Phyllis Playter, the companion of the novelist John Cowper Powys and says this about her:

She smoked Woodbines and was very sociable and liked to offer people a cigarette, and she had this big chest of drawers and one of the top drawers she would heave open, she was very small and very frail, and it was full of every sort of cigarette you could imagine, and she would say, `Well help yourself'. Because she didn't want to oblige people to smoke Woodbines, which was her favourite cigarette. Gin and tonic and lemon also was always out. And then there was a clock that ticked in this room, and a beautiful mirror.

Nash never met Cowper Powys, but recalls hearing from his neighbours, who remembered seeing the octogerian writer

walking up the hill in his very thin-soled shoes because he wanted to feel the ground, and he would hit this stone with his walking stick and then walk back down again.

This too is memorable.

In life we mainly miss the target. The rare occasion we hit it occurs when we're no longer trying. In these two cases it happened as the two interviewees went off topic.

In ethnology, fieldwork interviews are not only a resource of facts relating to people's lives, but can also, with sensitivy,  throw light on some aspect of the person in focus. What strikes us at that moment is a feeling of truth. Not an opinion, but reality.

September 2019

桂香るこの道進む小渋川

      山奥の川へ泳ぎに行けば、砂での足跡の茂りたるに驚きて詠める

                御所平小河内川の渚にクマ、シシ、人も仲良くなれり

topical tanka

コンピューター問題解く快いコールセンターととき（時？解き？）共にす

優秀な酔っ払い2

I had a few drinks the night before last, probably one too many because the next morning I vomited. Since then, though, I've been fine. That night Y-san brought five bottles of top quality vine naturel to my house to enjoy with me and two of his friends. Since recovering, I've been finishing off what was left.

It's been quite a strenuous month! On Sunday too I'd had a bit to drink at the Okawara festival - very cheap Sauvignon blanc from Chile - what a difference! But when I say strenuous, I don't mean drinking. I'm talking about physical stuff.

The month started with me getting the itch to re-tar the roof - something that I hadn't done for a couple of years. I'd even begun to wonder whether I wasn't too old. But then, when a free day with the right weather (it must be hot, but not too hot, very dry and not windy) came along, I suddenly had the urge, along with the curiosity to see if I could still do it, to try.

So I climbed up onto the roof with a pail of tar and a brush, and began. In the end, even enjoyed it! Over two half days, I applied a fresh coat of tar to the iron panels, some of which were showing signs of rust. It was solid work that made me feel good.

Another big job was to shift a load of logs left down by the road up to the house, where they had to be cut, chopped and stacked for winter firewood. Then I had to go down to the village centre and get five more vanloads.

Then one of the rubber rollers came off the small carrier that I use to bring loads up to my mountain home (it's driven by a four-stroke engine and has caterpillar-like roller wheels). With Tim's help I put it back on, but then it came off again and latter snapped.  While bringing the disabled machine down the slope to the road, the other roller came off. Somehow I managed to get the carrier safely into the communal car park, where it will stay until I find can find some cheap replacement tyres.

A couple of days ago I watched an eighty-year-old man down at the village woodpile, getting logs. The man, who could hardly walk, was with his daughter and, as I knew both him and her, I asked the woman what was the matter with her father. She said he had a hernia that had affected mobility in his right leg. Then earlier this year he had suffered an impact fracture of a vertebra in his back, and that had weakened his left leg.

When I wondered aloud if he should you really be doing heavy work less than four months after breaking a vertebra, she said:

- I've told him the same thing myself, but he refuses to listen.

Yes, I know the man's feeling. If you're not moving, you're not living.

At some point being in the mind isn't enough. It's like sitting at a desk.

If anxiety stops you from sleeping, don't just lie there. Get up and do something - wash the dishes, make bread, tidy the room. Soon your problem no longer seems important. You've discovered that it wasn't a really a problem at all.

Occasionally I wonder what I will do when age no longer allows me to carry out the physical work that has become so much part of my life in Kamasawa. With a loss of mobility, willl I lose contact with reality? I have to find some strategy to prevent that happening to me.

The only thing that the following comic haibun, written many years ago after a drunken evening with a friend in Kyoto, has with Mishima's tetralogy Sea of Fertility, which I've recently been rereading, this time in Japanese, is that they both end in an encounter with the aged abbess of a Buddhist temple. However, the real inspiration for this irreverent little tale comes from a meeting between poets Allen Ginsburg and Guiseppe Ungaretti https://allenginsberg.org/2012/06/giuseppe-ungaretti-1888-1970/

Autumn

coffee lees

a tinge of incense

the undergarments of an old nun

How I came to find myself beneath the Buddhist robes of the famed Setouchi Jakucho is a long story. I had embarked on a campaign to raise money for a literary magazine founded to publicize the work of struggling poets that was now struggling itself. More specifically, I was looking for famous figures who would donate a few hairs from private places for public auction to support their unknown and unsung brothers and sisters.

- What the fuck is a pubic auction?

- A pubic auction is when the auctioneer uses his prick instead of a gavel.

Has there ever been such an event? Probably not. So, whom could I approach? A Kyoto friend suggested the bald Japan-based travel writer Pico Iyer, who was quick to respond with a surprisingly glossy black item of incredible length. The Nagano naturalist and Celtic poet C.W. Nickel was less forthcoming, but eventually conceded a grizzled hair from his pepper-and-salt beard.

Donald Keene was another from whom I had hoped for something. But, his 'son' refused my request point blank.

- If Donald K won't, how about the other Donald? I thought.

Donald Ritchie had died several years before, but I had a plan. Ritchie's estate was contested by three former lovers, and while the legal process inched its way towards a ruling his Japanese-style mansion in central Tokyo's Roppongi lay untouched. Surely, if one snuck in, there were random hairs to be found lying around on the tatami, in the plug hole of the ofuro...?

Then came the ladies:

Kusama Yayoi

Yoko Ono

Kawakubo Rei

These grand dames were also on my list. Postmenopausal pussy. I admit a fascination. An old man going after even older women. What's wrong with that?

It was only when my Kyoto friend mentioned the name of Setouchi Jakucho that I realized my omission. Now in her nineties, the venerable priestess of the Tendai sect had said that human weakness was a fertile ground for sainthood... Surely there was a chance that my quirky request would resonate with her media-savvy, touchy-feely brand of avant-garde eco-Buddhism?

The interview took place on one of those gorgeously clear late November days.

There was a breeze blowing through the bamboo grove that knocked together the tops of the trees.

Sagano autumn

the bamboos make

ancient music

The precincts of the small temple were immaculately clean. I made my way across the raked gravel to the entrance of the abbess's cottage. The sliding door had been left open a few centimeters - the sign that I was expected and welcome.

Ushered into her study by a female acolyte, I discovered myself face-to-face with the great woman. She smiled, before launching into a long monologue about herself, her beliefs, her various illnesses. Jesus, what a chatterbox! I sat listening. I was both bored and fascinated by this manifestation of human ego.

Then she wanted to know all about me. So I began talking, and this time she listened. Very intently, keeping me in her gaze and occasionally nodding sympathetically.

At least an hour had passed when at last I found an opportunity to mention the literary magazine and its financial problems. The delicate request that I then made seemed to surprise her. Had she not been told? More probably she had forgotten. But, picking up the bell on her desk, she rang for an assistant, said something that I was unable to hear, and the next minute two young women appeared at her door with a large chair, which they brought in through the narrow opening, and then, making a space, placed in the middle of the room.

Jakucho somehow levered her decrepit body up from the tatami and approached the ornate wooden chair, where, clinging to its armrests, she settled herself onto the purple cushion. Thus seated, she smiled, opened her robes and motioned me under.

The silence of the curtained hall in which I found myself contrasted starkly with the hitherto garrulous abbess's room. I was between two marble pillars - her legs. Only the toes of her feet touched the tatami mats, but perfectly balanced. The incense of her robes mixed with the smells of the human body. When I reached up with my tongue, I tasted ammonia. But, to my disappointment, there were only three straggly hairs around the lips of the orifice.

Having partaken in communion, though, I was happy to forgo my quest.

Buddhist Sagano:

the Christian Trinity

is worshipped here too 

気まぐれ句（川柳）

朝ご飯のホットケーキを蟻がいただく

萩色のジャケットまとい秋遊び

A SERIAL WOMANISER

...one deep yearning of our lives: to let everybody consider us great sinners  Milan Kundera

What do I want to be remembered as? With the advance of age and gradual ebb of the life force it's a question that I sometimes ask myself.

- A serial womaniser?

- 優秀な酔っ払い?

Here are two possibilities, both of which I would actually find quite attractive.

But let me explain.

The first I came across in a recent newspaper article on the late U.S. novelist John Steinbeck. In a long interview that his second wife had given to a British hack back in the 1970s, Steinbeck was apparently accused of being "a serial womaniser". I can think of far worse things to be called by an embittered ex-wife. Moreover, being raised in a society whose values were　once　based on chivalry, not to mention worship of the White Goddess, a man could hardly avoid not falling into the trap of defining his life quest as to be successful with women. According to medieval knights and Renaissance courtiers, union with the perfect woman, was what gave life its ultimate meaning.

So, regardless of whether or not he ultimately reaches his goal, someone who has been called "a serial womaniser" was obviously trying hard. Despite the negative light in which it may be seen today, I feel that to be remembered as such would actually be okay. And there is another reason - it's something that I've never achieved myself. In fact, I'm light years away from it. So, the irony of it also appeals. I mean, I was once called "a bit of a charmer", but never ever "a womaniser", let alone "a serial womaniser".

As we all know, it is appearance, rather than reality, that drives most social interaction. People hold their opinions, people act, not on the basis of how they really feel, but on the basis of how they want people to see them. When one understands and accepts this, one can appreciate the delicious irony of existence. If you get this, you experience life in a deeper way.  Remember: appearance is never reality.

So I will be happy to be remembered as "a serial womaniser". In fact, if you want, you can even carve it on my gravestone.

The second way by which I would be happy to be remembered is as a "優秀な酔っ払い". For those of you that don't read Japanese, a good translation would be "a smart drunk". To tell you the truth, I was called this a couple of weeks ago. It's not really necessary to detail the circumstances other than to say that I'd been drinking with friends down in the village all afternoon and by the early evening I was too inebriate and too tired to make it up the hill back to my house. So I just sort of went to sleep where I was and when I woke up an hour or two later finished the journey home.

Being "a smart drunk" is cool because it means that I'm not "a dumb drunk", and that's why I think I like it. The other thing is that, like "a serial womaniser", it's not true. These days, for reasons of economy, I've stopped drinking pretty much, the only alcohol I take being the odd glass of sake with a meal. However, once or twice a year, I do feel some sort of need to get legless. A touch of madness, maybe, but wasn't this was quite acceptable to the Greeks and Romans, before the Christian moralists came along?

So being "a smart drunk" too is fine. But I would like to draw the line at carving both "a smart drunk" and "a serial womaniser" on my gravestone. That, I feel, would be a little too much. You see, irony is subtle. If it's overdone it dies. And there will only be room for one of us down there. 

僕を愛して、僕の家も愛して

先日、今年5回目となるハラプロジェクトの歌舞伎舞踊劇が祭文亭（年に一度か二度小さな劇場となる我が家）で行われ、無事終了した。今年の出来は、俳優であり監督である原智彦氏と私の両人が、今までの中で最高のものだったと思えるものだった。舞踊歌舞伎の上演は、毎年梅雨時7月中旬の週末に行われているが、それも功を奏しており、少ないながらもようやくコアなファンも出来てきているようだ。

祭文亭の起こり

自分の家を演劇の舞台にしてみようと思いついたのは、2015年の冬ヨーロッパへの旅から帰ってきた時である。旅の終わりにさしかかる頃、ナポリの貧しいながらも躍動的な下町(リオーネ・サニタ地区）にある15世紀の屋敷、そしてメルジェリーナの海岸線にあるアパートに泊まることになった。私は南イタリアの街の雰囲気、その地域の文化、歴史、魅力的な風景に魅了された。正直なところ、日本に戻りたいと思えないほどだった。日本はもちろん私の住みたい場所なのだが、最近の日本文化～アニメ、漫画、ゲーム～には惹かれるところがないからだ。

では、私は日本のどこに惹かれるのか？自分の家と日本の食事、そして平安期から江戸時代末期までの日本文化だ。また、明治時代の文豪たちも好きだ。彼らは西洋文学や哲学に影響されながらも、深いところでは自分たちのアジア文化に根ざしているからだ。

原さんとの出会い

とにかく、ナポリで私は、日本文化への愛を再発見していこうという結論に至った。その数年前に、名古屋で「姥捨」（深沢七郎の中編小説を元にした劇）を観る機会があった。それはある男が、年老いた母を死ぬために山に連れて行くという話で、その演劇がよくできていたのを思い出したのだ。

もう一つ、私の住む大鹿村がその舞台として結構いいのではないかと思ったということがある。大鹿村にはまさに山があり、伝統的な民家と人々があり、昔ながらのきっちりとしたしかも穏やかな生活ぶりがある。

早く言えば、私は原さんの「姥捨」という演劇を大鹿に招いたのだ。それが2015年の夏だった。ある雨の週末、彼のスタッフが演劇のための舞台を私の庭に設営した。ところが、天気によってやむなく私達は家の中で上演することになってしまった。結果的に家の中に舞台を移したことはよかった。それ以降は、天候に関わらず家の中での上演となった。そして、外に作った舞台はみんなで食事をするテラスとなった。

愛する家が舞台に変わる

以前にも言ったが、私はこの家をこよなく愛している。ここが私の人生の中心になっているので、自分の家を劇場とする挑戦は、腑に落ちるものであった。

物事はは、習慣になってしまうと飽きが来てしまうものだ。人生はダイナミックであるべきだし、決して当たり前になってはいけない。私が新しいことに挑戦するのが好きなのはそれが理由だ。

日本の家では、障子が壁になり、空間は流動的だ。そして、これは偶然にそうなったわけではない。15世紀ごろから始まった書院造りは禅仏教の哲学によく影響された。

とにかく、原さんと一座の人たちが到着する前の一週間は、できるだけ家の中を簡素にしようと片付けた。テーブルの上の装飾品なども箱に詰めた。ふすまと障子を取り外し、裏の部屋に収納した。大きな窓も取り外し、土蔵の前に丁寧に置いた。こうして私の家が、私が初めて訪れた京都の建仁寺のミニバージョンに変身した。

私は、大小様々なモノたちを後で元の位置に戻すことができるように、ちゃんと覚えておこうと頑張った。しかし、頭がいっぱいになって、結局諦めることにした。しかし、心配は要らない。今までの経験では、何週間、あるいは何ヶ月かはかかるかもしれないが、最終的には物が元に戻ってくる。

人生舞台には面白いルールがある。秩序とカオス間におけるバランスだ。秩序とは効率であり明晰な思考、一方カオスはこれからの可能性と創造性をみせてくれるものだ。

土曜日、ハラプロジェクトのメンバーが到着する日だ。上演は2日間。一日目は夜の7時から始まり、2日目の日曜日は午後の2時スタートだ。いっちゃんはすでに到着している。彼女ははるばる岩手からきて、最後に落語的な劇を披露してくれることになっている。ちょうどお昼前に6人の一座がたくさんの備品、衣装などを抱えてやってきた。私の家までの急坂を　これらの荷物を持って運ばなくてはならない。でも今回で5回目なので、すべてなんなく済んだ。

30分強かかってすべての荷物が畳の上に運ばれた。早速それを解き、舞台を作る。「鬼の月」という舞踊劇の背景は福島の山の中で、老婆のみすぼらしい家です。

原さんは、いつも明確なヴィジョンを持ってやってくる、程なくしてすべてが原さんの指示の下に行われ、幕をつけ、琵琶奏者用の高い演台、竹やぶを演出した部屋に変容させた。私の方は、障子に色紙を貼ってデザインするなど楽しんだ。今年の舞台が出来上がっていく段階で、私の芸術的なお遊びも報われた。

私は、この外者たちが私の家を乗っ取っていくかのようなあり様を、興味深さと嫌な予感の入り混じったような感覚で眺めていた。彼らは時に私に一言断りを入れ、時には何も言わずに、あっという間に、ほとんどすべてを模様替えしてしまった。

演劇の極意　秩序とカオス

演劇の世界では、日常的な習慣や標準的なものは通用しない。一般常識はご法度だ。俳優や演技者が長い間権力者たちから疑いの目で見られていたのも無理はない。彼らは良く言えば並外れているし、悪く言えば社会の円滑的な流れにとっての脅威となるからだ。

18世紀の初頭、江戸城の大奥の女官は歌舞伎の公演を観に行き、その後、役者と会食した事件があった。それによってスキャンダルが起き、男優は離島に島流しになり、女性は、小さな城下町にある木の牢屋に数年間閉じ込められたという。これは絵島生島事件として知られていて、女官が送られた城下町は隣町の高遠だった。当時のエンタメ界の掟とありかたを知る手がかりとなる。

演劇というのも秩序とカオスの精妙なコンビネーションであると思う。演技のリハーサルには膨大な練習量が要求される。そして、そのほとんどが繰り返しで飽き飽きするようなものだ。しかし、最終的には自分の役柄をどれだけ身につけたかにかかわらず、ステージに立った時には、即興でもどうにかやるしかない。演技というのは、特定の瞬間においての生きた本物の動きである。ある種、これも禅であり、人生におけるすべての瞬間は唯一無二であるということを教えてくれている。

そして、これも付け加えておこう。コントロールしようとすればするほど、結果はうまくいかない。ステージに上る人は特にそうだろう。芝居の直前挨拶などをする私すらそれを感じる。

4部構成のプログラム

今週末の祭文亭でのプログラムは4部構成で、メインとなるのは原さんの劇だ。共演は磯和真帆さん、加藤けいさん。原さんが演ずる女性がカルマによって、憤慨する醜い老婆、鬼へと変貌する神話的な物語だ。

今回、再び原さんを舞台で見て、私は原さんの好演ぶりを再確認した。歌舞伎・能に始まり、前衛劇まで、さらにギルバートとサリヴァンのオペラもできる幅広い演技力を持っている原さん。73歳という年齢にして、申し分なく極まった演技者と言える。

30分の力作で、原さんは、家に旅僧を泊めてあげたが、旅僧が自分の秘密の部屋に入ったと知り、鬼婆に変貌する老婆を演じきった。

上演が終わってから、原さんはどんな準備をしてきたかを話してくれた。彼は、単に鬼婆伝説を勉強しただけでなく、11世紀の源氏物語やその他の日本文学に出てくる怨霊（執念深い霊）の心理に興味があると話してくれた。その他、私たちは人間のパーソナリティについて、ネガティブな感情、内なる悪魔を魂の奥深くに封印し、その存在さえも忘れてしまう人間についても語り合った。

プログラムは、琵琶奏者の独奏、コミカルなパフォーマンス、私の家の古いピアノを使った演奏とダンスで構成された。私の選曲は作曲家ジョン・ケージの「ある風景の中で」だった。

同じプログラムを2度見るのも面白いものだ。一回目はスポットライトとキャンドルを使った夜の劇、もう一つは日中の劇だ。観客はそう多くはないが、皆興味深く観てくれた。鑑賞眼をもった人たちが集まったと思う。

でも、みんな何を考えていたんだろうか？

2つのミステリアスな声

みんなと一緒に力を合わせるととかなりのことができる。この週末でこのことを再確信した。一方では、お互いに知り得ることはほんの少しでしかない、ということもわかった。人間であるということは幻想の世界に生きるという事だ。

一日目の上演が終わって、飲めや踊れやのパーティーをした。それは真夜中まで続いた。そして3時間くらい寝て　私をさとす一風変わった声で目が覚めた。その声は「人間がやることなんて何事も大したことではない」と囁いた。私はうなずき、また眠りについた。

次の朝、一番先に起きたのは私だった。庭先で小便をしているとき、私はまたもやささやきを聞いた。（昨夜の声とは違う声？）

「お前たち人間の頭は、決して自然界の本質を掴むことはできない。」

それは、もうすでに知っていたことだが、その声はいったいどこからくるだろう？内なる鬼はなぜ私を再教育しようとするだろうか？

すべては謎に包まれている。どうすることもできない・・・

台所に行って昨夜の皿洗いでもしよう。そして、コーヒーでもいれようか。

（終）

July 2019

                                                                  LOVE ME, LOVE MY HOUSE

The fifth Hara Project kabuki show at Saimontei, the little theatre that my house turns into once or twice every year,  recently ended.

Actor-director Hara Tomohiko and I both thought it was one of our best. In fact, the productions, which usually take place on a weekend towards the end of the rainy season in mid-July,  have all been good.

The idea that I should make my home into a performing arts space came to me on a trip to Europe back in the winter of 2015. I was reaching the end of a holiday in Naples that had included in stays in a fifteenth-century villa above the poor but vibrant shitamachi quarter of Rione Sanità, as well as in an apartment on the smart Mergellina seafront. I had enjoyed the ambiance of this southern Italian city, along with its culture, history and magical landscapes. In fact, I didn't really feel like returning to Japan at all. Japan was still the place where I wanted to live, but culturally modern Japan, with its anime, manga and game culture, didn't have much appeal.

So what do I like about Japan? I love my house, Japanese food, I like the culture from the Heian period up to the end of the Tokugawa/Edo era. I like Meiji and Taisho authors too, because although they were coming under the influence of Western literature and philosophy, they are still deeply rooted in their own Asian culture.

Anyway, there, in Naples, I came to the conclusion that I would try to rediscover my love of Japanese culture.

A few years before, in Nagoya, I had been taken to see Obasute, a play based on a novella by Fukuzawa Shichirō. It was about a man taking his aged mother to the mountains to die and I remember thinking how well the production worked.

I also thought how good it would look staged in my own village of Oshika-mura, where there were real mountains, traditional houses and people with a gentle but stoic view of life and death.

So, to cut a long story short, I invited Hara-san to bring his production of Obasute to Oshika-mura. That was in the summer of 2015. One rainy weekend, his staff built a stage in my garden for the performance. However, ultimately, the weather forced us to move the play inside and, this interior venue turned out to be so good that during the succeeding years that's where it stayed, even when the weather was fine. And the outdoor stage became a terrace where we would eat our communal meals.

For me, turning the inside of my house into a theatre is a very satisfying challenge. As I said before, the love affair that I have developed with this house has become central to my life. Relationships become boring when a routine develops. Life must be dynamic and never taken for granted. That's why I like to try new things. In a Japanese house, where paper doors replace walls, space is fluid. And this hasn't come about by accident. If you go back to the fifteenth-century, you also see the beginnings of Zen gardens and the Noh drama. It was a golden age, inspired by a particular Buddhist philosophy of life.

Anyway, in the week preceding the arrival of Hara-san and his troupe, I reduce my home's interior to its essential simplicity. Ornaments are cleared from tabletops and, along with other stuff, thrown into boxes. Fusuma and shōji are removed and stacked in one of the back rooms. Eventually, even the large glass windows will be taken out and placed carefully in front of my earthen-walled storehouse. What remains is a mini-version of the Kyoto temple Kenninji, the first place I visited that turned me on to the splendid emptiness and wonderful materials of traditional building.

The house is completely open, with just the pillars holding up the roof. From the wooden boards of the engawa, you walk straight onto the tatami mats of the living room.

I try to make a mental note of where my possessions have been relocated, of the places to which the objects big and small must be returned. But, my brain becomes overcrowded with details and so in the end I give up. From my experience of past Saimontei weekends, I know that everything will eventually turn up, though it could take weeks, even months.

Here there is also an interesting rule of life in play. It's the question of the balance between order and chaos, where order means efficiency and clear thinking, while chaos offers a view into the unknown: the possibility of creativity.

It's Saturday, and the day on which the members of Hara Project will arrive. We have two shows scheduled - one on Saturday evening beginning at seven and the other on Sunday at two in the afternoon. Icchan is already here. She made the long journey from Iwate to do her comic skit, which closes the show. Just before midday the main party of six arrive in cars with numerous boxes of props and equipment. These all have to be carried up the steep path to my mountain home. But this being the fifth time we've done it, everything goes smoothly.

In a little over thirty minutes all the stuff is sitting on the tatami waiting to be unpacked and turned into the set for a medieval dance drama set in the lonely countryside of Fukushima.

Hara-san always brings a clear mental plan of what he wants, and before long, everyone is following his instructions, putting up curtains, erecting a dais for the biwa player, even going out to cut bamboo that will be used to turn the room next to the kitchen into a bamboo forest. I myself am frequently called upon to dig up search out props - this year some shōji doors with coloured patterns that I created for fun one rainy afternoon become the doors of a lone woman's hut. 

I watch with a mixture of a fascination and foreboding as these outsiders take over my house, sometimes asking, sometimes not, as they rearrange almost everything in super-fast time.

In the theatre world the customs of normal life don't apply. Common sense is suspended. No wonder that actors and entertainers have long been regarded with suspicion by those in power. At best they are irrelevant, at worst, a threat to the smooth running of society.

Back in the early eighteenth century, a high-ranking female officer from the part of Edo castle inhabited by the shogun's wives and concubines was discovered to have attended a kabuki performance and had dinner with one of the actors. The subsequent scandal resulted in the male actor being exiled to a distant island, while the poor woman was confined to a wooden cage for several years in the countryside of a small castle town quite near to my own village. It is known as the Ejima-Ikushima affair, and offers a good insight into the attitude of the then rulers to the entertainment world.

Theatre seems to be another subtle combination of order and chaos. Rehearsing for the performance requires a lot of hard and methodical work, which can be repetitive and tedious. However, ultimately, no matter how well an actor has learned his or her part, when he steps onto the stage, he must let go,  improvise. Performance is a fresh and authentic reaction to a specific moment. It's a kind of Zen, which teaches that every instant of every life is unique. And, one should also add that, the less you try to control it, the better you are likely to be.

Appearing on stage - even for someone like me, who only does the preliminary announcements - brings all this home.

This weekend the Saimontei program comprises four parts. The main item involves Hara-san, supported by Isowa Maho and Kato Kei, appearing as a woman whose karma - the experiences of her life and her reaction to them - has turned her into an embittered and aggressive old hag - a demon. It is the kind of folk story that psychologists like Jung and Joseph Campbell have written about - a myth to live by, a way of passing on wisdom by suggestion rather than rules or commands.

Seeing Hara-san on stage again I am reminded of how good a performer he is. His skills range from Kabuki and Noh to avant-garde and even Gilbert and Sullivan operettas! At seventy-three, he's the consummate performer. In the thirty-minute tour de force he plays a frail old woman who lets a travelling Buddhist priest stay in her mountain hovel before changing into a hate-spewing demon after realising that he has betrayed her confidence by venturing into a secret room. The demon jumps in rage, grimaces and threatens to devour the priest. But, though surreal and shocking, this is not a horror show. What we are watching is frustration and bitterness in an extreme form, the peeling back of a psychological skin to reveal the destructive instincts that we all possess.

Later, Hara-san talks about his preparation - not just his study of the onibaba myth, but also his interest in the psychology of onryō (vengeful spirits) as found in the eleventh-century Tale of Genji. Our conversation turns to the human psyche, with its many layers, where all sorts of negative emotions and inner devils dwell.

The program is completed with a separate recitation by the biwa player, a hilarious comic performance and a dance piece that I and a couple of friends quickly put together using the old piano in my house. The music that I chose was composer John Cage's In a Landscape.

It's fun watching the same program twice - once at night with spotlights and candles and the other in the daylight. Though not large, the audience is attentive and appreciative. But what are they all thinking? 

Working closely with others, you can achieve so much! During the weekend I am reminded of this and, conversely, how little we can ever know of each other. Being human is to live in a world of illusion. After the evening performance there is a party, with drinking and dancing, that goes on until midnight. After three or so hours of sleep I wake up with a strange little voice that tells me in a matter-of-fact way

- Nothing humans do will ever amount to anything.

I nod, and go back to sleep.

Later, with the new day beginning, I'm the first one up. Out in the garden, taking a piss, I hear the voice again (or is it a different voice?).

- Your human brain can never grasp the nature of reality.

That's not telling me anything that I didn't already know.  But, what smartass little demon deep in my own psyche is suddenly feeling the need to reeducate me? And why?

It's a mystery hinging on the moment, but soon disappears.

I shake my head.

There is nothing to do but go into the kitchen to wash last night's dishes and get myself a coffee.

                                                                           WILD SWIMMING 2

I made a fourth visit to my mountain bathing spot and another discovery! The leafy bed belongs not to a bear, but to a wild boar.

On my way down to the river this time I noted that the bed had recently been used. There were also fresh animal footprints in the sand along the river where I took my swim. Later, when I ascended the bank to begin the long walk back to my car I observed something moving in the nearby trees. I proceeded slowly, not wanting to surprise whatever it was, but as I passed by the animal came out. For a couple of seconds we looked at each other, but then it turned and loped off in the direction of the river. It was a smallish male wild boar - judging by its size it would have fitted the bed perfectly.

Anyway, that's nice to know. I think that I'm less likely to be attacked by a boar than by a bear. In addition to the two deer skulls and horns that I found in the forest, there were also a couple of boar skulls. There really are a lot of animals there.

I also got thinking of the walnut shells on the rock by the boar's bed. I wonder if the squirrel that left them there and the boar are friends? How delightful it would be if they were! I've been trying to imagine some of the conversations they might have:

Squee: Bo, old boy, you can't spend all day in bed. Rise and shine! It's a lovely day. Come on, get up. Get up!

Bo: (snores)

Squee: Time for breakfast, time for your morning cup of tea!

Bo: Please, Squee. You should know that I'm a nocturnal creature - I've just gone to bed! You can wake me up mid-afternoon for my daily walk by the river.

Squee: Did you see that the human has been around again. Why can't they leave us in peace?!

Bo: Indeed. Disgusting creatures! I've watched him from afar swimming in the river. You wouldn't believe how ugly humans' bodies are, and all the fuss they make over a little bit of cold water. I've never seen anything like it. 'Argh! Eeeh! No! Oh!' It's pathetic. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we see the end of the human race, the better!

Squee: You've got a point there, Bo.

Bo: Must remember to send in my contribution to Trump's re-election campaign. His policies are definitely getting us there.

Squee: And don't forget Bojo, Bo, in the UK. He's another make-it-up-as-you-go-along man.

Bo: Good thinking, Squee. Yes, let's encourage them to seminate their chaos. And - who knows? - it could be sooner rather than later that we get the forest and the river back to ourselves! But now, it's time for sleep!

Squee: Okay, Bo, sweet dreams. See you in this afternoon!

(to be continued)

WILD SWIMMING

River swimming in Oshika is the most glorious enjoyment of the summer for a tiny minority of the population (perhaps only me...). Anyway, the swimming season is here again. I took my first dip yesterday, and, although the water seemed a little cold, once I had made the plunge it was pure heaven.

No two days or weeks or seasons of our short lives should ever be the same. So, each year, when the spring comes and the warm weather beckons, I begin looking for new places to swim.

Up to now. I'd always taken my car to the river and started from there. However, earlier this year, it struck me that I ought to explore the forested sides of the valley through which the river runs. They're quite steep, so one has to be careful. Some parts are overgrown with bamboo, for which you'll  need a hatchet to hack a way through. After I disturbed a bear there one time, I began to realize that here was an animal paradise where the only humans you would ever see were the odd fisherman or two down by near the river.

Anyway, after a couple of afternoon trips to explore the area I decided on a rough itinerary for the swimming season. I say 'season', as if it's got a beginning and an end, which I suppose it has, but it only begins on the day that feels right for me - when the condition of my body tells me to go for it. It may not necessarily even be a hot day, it's all about feeling. And, this year, that day was yesterday!

The starting point is pretty close to Kamasawa, the place where I live. It's just a five-minute drive on the Goshodaira road. I leave my car parked on a tiny piece of grass above the forest and set off down the mountain towards the river. The last time I came was the time that I surprised a bear eating bamboo shoots. So today I'll take the path that I used on my first visit, with a small diversion to avoid a dangerous piece of steep slope.

Near the road I pass a rusted bear trap that probably hasn't been used in decades, then negotiate a tangled thicket of bamboo, most of which have collapsed, and are lying horizontally, blocking the way. Somehow I get through. Now I'm into the open forest. 

 Soon I arrive at a flat, grassy clearing. I can hear the river at the bottom of the valley. It feels good to be this deep in nature so soon. A sort of path winds down and I take that, pausing here and there at holes and rock crevices to look for evidence of animal habitation.

Then I find this

It's a bed that has been newly used - by a bear? Nearby there are walnut shells neatly laid out on the rock - I guess by a squirrel? Then I notice a deer antler among the leaves of the bed. It turns out to be the most beautiful set of stag antlers that I've ever found. Feeling a little bit like Goldilocks, I don't linger, but do accept the antlers as a gift. I'll clean them in the river, take them home and perhaps one day return them to the wild.

I arrive at the dried riverbed, wondering if I will get a glimpse of the bear. But this doesn't happen, and so my attention now moves to this year's first swim. On a previous visit I'd passed a likely looking pool, not so big, but with clear inviting water and a soft sandy bottom. The fengshui of it felt right - not cramped by other big rocks, but in its own space, about twenty meters from the trees, where one could leave one's clothes, and approach the pool across the rocky riverbed.

When it comes to river swimming, for me the approach is important. Take time to adjust your body to the water, its temperature, while enjoying the physical sensations and shocks. Here you are back in the natural world of your primeval ancestors far from civilization. We should all be able to appreciate - but how many of us can?

Sure, the water was cold, it felt a little too cold, but then it always does. Actually it wasn't too cold at all. It was just that my stupid mind was telling me so. After a good five minutes of edging my way, little by little, into deeper and deeper water, I finally swam. It was fine. Absolutely fine. In fact, I stayed in the water for around twenty minutes. I also washed the half -skull of the stag and antlers.

Having dried and dressed, I decided to walk the final stretch of riverbed and river barefoot.

Further upstream there are some beautiful little glades.

This is the spot where I finally clambered up the bank.

The rest of the walk, I guess, you could regard as part of your training, if you're into that kind of thing (which I'm not). A long service road for a nearby dam zigzags up the mountain. You could even try running it. But, at my age, a brisk walk is about the best that I can do.

Then you are at the top again, back on the Goshodaira road just below the small shrine. From there it was a short walk back to the car.

(from my diary)

When we're recording impressions, making what we believe to be accurate statements about the world around, I wonder if we are conscious enough of how our physical condition may affect the things that we are saying.

This thought came to me just recently when I was sick for several days. Fine for a few hours after waking up, I would begin to feel weak mid-morning. Despite having no appetite, I force myself to eat a bit of lunch. This, I invariably vomit later in the afternoon. I have a nap, but end up feeling no better. Determined to somehow throw off my condition by activity, I decide to take a short drive to the centre of the village to do some shopping, but this too ends badly when I get motion sickness and vomit again on the grass verge. Because I feel so rotten, the beauty of the newly planted paddy fields in the afternoon sun fails to impress. Casually encountering people I know is not the usual pleasure. I struggle back home in the car, feeling even worse than when I set out. Collapsing on the bed, I get a couple of hours sleep. When I wake up it's just getting dark, but rather than lying awake in bed, I get up and tidy the kitchen, make myself some boiled oats, to which I add milk and maple syrup. This feels more digestible than the spaghetti that ate for lunch (and later vomited). Then, after a few more I go back to bed.

It's four in the morning when I wake up, but I feel better and, as a result, the whole world suddenly is once again interesting. I get up (yeah, it's quite usual for me to go to bed before nine and get up at around four), finish washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen, then go into the garden, where the new day is breaking, to water some herbs, flowers and vegetables I recently planted. After that I tidy the other rooms of the house, have a cup of coffee with biscuits, and then wash some clothes. When the sun comes through the early morning clouds, the world looks wonderful. Once again it's good to be alive. 

佐渡句

佐渡ゲ島羽茂の素浜へ来て、テントを張り、そこで六日間も泊まった。

素浜にて塩水浴びて身を禊ぐ

on sobama beach i wash away my sins in the salt water

サドおとめ浪へ飛び込みワカメ採る

splashing into the waves goes the sado seaweed gatherer

疲れて星に抱かれ寝入りす

tired and taken by the stars i fall asleep 

far from the chatter of the cherry flowers the morning silence the song of the electric heater

lontano da fiori ciliegio cicaleggianti canticchia la stufa electrica nel silenzio del mattino

The Witches of S (fragments of a novelafter visiting a friend living in france)

1

Rocky liked to keep himself clean. With the soap in his right hand, he sudded his groin vigorously, using his left-hand to gently pull back his foreskin and clean his soft cock head with a gentle to-fro motion, moving on to his scrotum - even more vigorous scrubbing here - and continuing along the cleft, fingers extended, until their tips touched the hairless skin of his anus. He traced two varicose veins, cleaning these carefully before the muscular fingers pressed up into the cavity making a pleasing sound of compressed bubbles. After he had repeated this three times he cursorily soaped his armpits and chest, legs and feet and toes, the latter with difficulty due to the size of his belly. Then he rinsed off, looking up so that the droplets bombarded his eyelids and rivulets of hot water ran down his cheeks onto his shoulders and then down his back. On the tiled floor the suds swirled for a second before rushing towards the stainless steel grate and disappearing.

Outside it was the beginning of a glorious day. Having quickly dried himself, thrown on a pair of trousers (no underpants) and kicked his feet into a pair of black leather shoes (no socks either), Rocky was now in the garden watching this. It was early autumn, the sun's tongue was caressing the rolling Indre countryside, leaving a layer of saliva that sparkled like the dew.

In one of the white-walled village houses that looked down onto Rocky's garden the curtains of an upstairs window trembled. Or perhaps it was just a trick of the light.

2

During her brisk walk Flora too had been drawn to the relationship of sun and dew, pausing in a moment of silence to imagine the refracted colours as sounds, before Aster her dog, returning from a patch of woodland, disturbed her reverie. Flora had not taken up music as a hobby until her sixtieth year, and then not really by conscious choice, more the result of an importuning childhood classmate who had appeared out of nowhere on her doorstep one day and after hearing about the way in which she was spending her time had suggested taking up the piano. Soon after, a primer had been dispatched to her, again out of nowhere, and then as if by magic a notice in the office of the local veterinary surgeon had informed all and sundry that a woman by the name of Genevieve was offering her upright 1950s piano free of charge to anyone who would come and take it away. It turned out that Genevieve lived in the next village to Flora, though you could hardly call the three houses 'a village'. In short, when she went to see Genevieve, Flora had finished up acquiring not only the piano but also the friendship of the 63-year-old ex-librarian and the latter's 81-year-old mother, a former teacher who beneath a cheerful resignation to fate concealed an impish vitality.

To Flora the glistening dews appeared as laminated, glazed and tinctured colours from which quavers, crochets and minims rose up to make major chords with strong and hopeful statements. But then the hope was betrayed by a preponderance of minor chords, the certainty fading into a melancholic and ephemeral reality.

Thus Flora experienced the morning sunshine, whose warmth she began to feel on the freckled skin of her face.

3

Rocky decided that he needed to draw up a strategy. But first he made himself a cheese and beetroot sandwich. The cheese came from a farmer friend, the beetroot from his own garden. Good quality produce, but it was the symbolism of the ingredients that attracted him. He smiled to himself as he recalled the majestic purple root, which he had scrubbed clean with a Japanese-made hemp brush, before slow-boiling for two hours, cooling in a burst of tapwater, skinning and then combining with a mixture of sweet vinegar and its own purple juice. About the cheese he was less knowledgable, but his imagination made up for this with romantic embellishment. The lightly salted gouda cheese signified for him that feminine element so lacking in his life here in S, this strange village, where witches were once said to have lived. The beetroot was assertive, the cheese gentle and malleable, yet between the white sheets of the sliced pan de mie they came together as perfect bedmates. He took a bite, severing the sandwich with his incisors, before his agile tongue quickly conveyed the segment to his molars. The grinding action was strong but unexaggerated, and in the pauses the tongue reclaimed fragments, delivering them to the taste buds of his palate, which opened and closed like tiny sea anemones.

The sandwich tasted good. Gazing at it, Rocky noticed that along its mangled and mutilated edges the virginal white of the bread was soiled with traces of purple. Then he swallowed with satisfaction and took another bite.

4

Coincidentally Flora was lunching on cheese, but in her case cheddar. 'You can't beat a good cheddar cheese sandwich,' she would say. But alas, there was no beetroot. Instead she made do with a scrunchy apple.

Apple and cheese invariably made her think of England, a place from which she had flown, like a caged bird seeking its freedom.

What was it about the English? she would ask herself, never finding any really convincing argument to substantiate the vague prejudices that coexisted with some very specific antipathies. Never mind.

Like her life, Flora's thoughts were fragmentary.

Luck had not been kind to Flora in love. In retrospect she now saw that she should have married Barry, a gentle artist whom she had begun dating during her last year of grammar school in the west Midlands. But then she selected Bath as her choice of teacher training college, while Barry headed to Liverpool to study graphic design. The two continued their relationship for nearly eighteen months, periodically travelling to stay with each other for weekends during term time and meeting regularly when on holiday back home. Then one day James came along. A fellow student at Bath, he was also a very good sportsman, a county hockey player who had already won one national cap. James fell in love with Flora's red hair, while Flora found the attention of the sports hunk flattering. Twelve months later they were married, and shortly after Flora graduated the baby was born.

5

There was only one shop in S, a boulanger, but he made wonderful bread. Until last year there had been a bar, but now it was closed. A Romanesque church stood down a lane a short walk from the high street. For over ten years there had been no incumbent, instead a priest from the Catholic seminary in M came once a month to say mass.

Still it was a good place to live, if you liked life to be quiet. Flora, who had come to S ten years ago found the villagers neighbourly without being intrusive. Naturally they were curious when she purchased the 18th-century stone cottage (with a generous half-acre garden) that stood at the east end of the high street. All she told them was that she had taken early retirement after working for 25 years as a secondary school language teacher (French and German). She also shyly conceded that she had been married but was now divorced, then went on to announce with pride that her grown son worked as a university mathematics teacher. What she did not tell anyone was that her husband had left her for a younger woman in early middle age and that after her son went to university she herself had begun a disastrous affair with a British Asian ten years her junior. She was jilted when the man took an Asian woman in an arranged marriage.

6

Rocky sipped his coffee. He had drawn up his list, and there was only one name. Flora.

Meanwhile, Flora sat at the piano and slowly negotiated Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No.1. Her technique was still basic, but so strong was the empathy of her feelings with those of the composer that it sounded authentically poignant. Like Satie, Flora had renounced love, but still found beauty in life.

Puffy white clouds moved slowly across the blue sky above the woodland and harvested fields, which stretched as far as the eye could see. Sitting in an armchair Aster waited idly, as he always did during that long interlude between his morning and afternoon walks.

7

Jean-Luc Aquaviva lived in the old chateau. A specialist of ancient Middle East cultures, he had taught at the Sorbonne until his early fifties, but then one day abruptly resigned and come to live in S, acquiring a property that had been empty for over thirty years. His great-grandfather had been an Italian who had worked in Marseille and there was rumoured to be Jewish blood in the family too.

By coincidence, at exactly the same time that Flora had been tentatively tapping out Satie's Gymnopedie, Jean-Luc had been sitting in an armchair in an upstairs room of the chateau, listening to another piano piece, belonging to a similar period but of an entirely different nature. In 1912 the Russian composer Scriabin, during a highly charged emotional period of his life, had embarked upon a piece of piano music that later became known as the 'Black Mass Sonata'.

Lending an ear to the mysterious and menacing chords, Jean-Luc gazed through the elongated window at the steeple of S's Church and the roofs of the homes lining the village high street, among them Flora's. In the distance to the west stood the Catholic seminary. He could see the wrought-iron front gates and the long gravel drive that ran between two ponds before arriving in front of the imposing sandstone building. A car - too far away to identify, but large and shiny - was midway down the drive.

8

Flora did not have any difficulty finding herself a piano tuner. A certain M. Cle was recommended to her, and when she rang he offered to come over the next week.

When he arrived at the door twenty minutes earlier than scheduled on Thursday she saw a tall bespectacled man around the age of fifty with short silver-flecked hair, attired as one would expect a piano tuner. Conservative black blazer with an avuncular but chic cotton cardigan, louche banded-collar shirt (black too), navy slacks and black shoes with elastic gussets.

M. Cle was extremely polite, and, once invited in, stood patiently waiting to be shown to the instrument to begin his work, or to be offered a cup of tea and a chat.

In the event, Flora skilfully combined both options, ushering him into one of the rooms leading off from the hall - the guest room which was now to become 'the music room' - where she guided him to the piano before asking, 'What may I offer you, monsieur, tea or coffee?'

'Tea, thank you, madame.'

By the time Flora returned, M. Cle had already removed the upright piano's front panel and was proceeding to test the keys in combinations of chords and individual notes, pressing firmly in order to isolate unsatisfactory responses.

Flora noticed M. Cle's beautiful hands, large and manly with long fingers unfussily manicured. She decided to watch him at work, and without asking his permission she carried in a chair.

His fingers. They did not dance on the keys like those of a pianist, but rather marched, yes, they moved forward, methodically and with confidence.

Flora let her eyes wander through the window into the garden, where the wind was brushing against a willow tree, the light on the leaves like surf spray on the waves. When her gaze returned to the room Monsieur had a tuning wrench, which he was using to put further pressure onto the pins, minutely tightening the strings of the discordant notes. Occasionally when this failed he took a small iron hammer and delivered a smart blow to the head of the recalcitrant pin.

After a few minutes he stopped. Picking up his teacup from the side table upon which Flora had placed it, he sat down and addressed Madame.

'It is a good piano, rather old. Some of the pins have come loose from the backboard, and I'm trying to stabilise them by banging them back. They should hold for a while, but will probably come loose again. If it's a big problem I could tune it down by half a tone. But let's wait and see.'

'Fine,' said Flora and smiled. Then she took her tea, and for a second they both drank in silence, before Monsieur smiled, returned his cup the side table and returned to work.

10

The white Tibetan spaniel that Rocky had purchased in T began to explore its new home.

11

At certain times in the early morning Jean-Luc woke - it was still dark outside - and yearned for the presence of a woman, any woman, beside him. He heard the excited and confused chords of Scriabin's Black Mass, experienced anew the memory of newly spilt semen on the carpet of the pianist's room and felt his cock rising.

In the still dark chapel, by the light of two altar candles Father Alexander was saying the Daily Offices. 'O Lord in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch...' The changeless words, the structured rhythms. Outside the stars completed their journey through the night sky.

12

While Flora was eating her morning croissant the telephone rang. It was Rocky.

Flora was amazed to hear of Rocky's acquisition, and, yes, she would be delighted to have them accompany her and Aster on their morning walk.

She put the phone down and smiled to herself. Well, well, you never knew.

Returning to the kitchen, she resumed her croissant and coffee.

13

At ten o'clock there was a knock on Flora's front door. It was Rocky.

'I'd like to introduce you to Snowy,' he said with a mixture of pride and embarrassment.

Snowy? thought Flora. Could Rocky be a Tintin fan?

She smiled. 'Bring him in,' she said, 'I'm just clearing up.'

Aster in his chair reacted with a jerk.

'Stay!'

Rocky and Snowy entered the front room. Rocky took a place on the sofa, with Snowy on his lap.

'Whatever made you want to get a dog?' asked Flora. 'But he is rather nice, isn't he.'

'She.'

'Sorry.' How stupid of her to mistake a she for a he, thought Flora. Now she looked, it was patently obvious from the Snowy's gentle black eyes that it was a she and not a he.

'One of my father's friends in Paris used to keep Tibetan spaniels,' replied Rocky. 'Actually I wanted a male, but the pet shop in T only had this one. It just happened, me buying her. I hadn't intended to...'

But he seemed happy with his purchase.

14

Sitting in her front room, Genevieve looked out across the field and saw two figures. She could see that one was Rocky.

'Who is that?' said her mother.

'One looks like Rocky. But I can't see who the other is.' She screwed up her eyes and focused hard on the distant forms.

15

'He got stabbed in a fight with a Parisian drug dealer.'

Rocky had been telling Flora about the man with the Tibetan spaniel. His father's friend. An American jazz drummer whose life had spiralled out of control after divorce and despair-fuelled alcoholism.

16

Still naked, Jean-Luc left the bathroom and headed for the kitchen. From the large wood-burning stove that he had lit earlier emanated a gentle warmth. He stood in front of it, allowing the fingers of warm air to caress his back. Then he rubbed himself dry with the towel, lastly taking a tissue from the box on the dining table to clean out his ears and wipe dry the sensitive skin of his anus.

A bug awakened by the emanating warmth from its winter sleep in the bark of a log brought into the house from the wood pile that morning ended its life at that moment. Snatched up in the soiled tissue, it was crushed between the fingers of Jean-Luc and tossed into the stove.

17

A trace of the incense that had been lit that morning on the alcove altar still lingered in the corridor, Father Alexander noted appreciatively as he passed on his way to the kitchen. In a perfect world each room would possess its own smell, like a silent welcome. The corridor was chilly but he felt warmed by the perfume of the incense. In contrast, the smell of the bread baked that morning continued to resonate in the now empty kitchen. The silver tins in which it had been baked were already washed and drying on the wooden draining board.

18

Jean-Luc began every day with a clean set of soft cotton underwear. It had become a rite. As he became older sensual details like this assumed a quasi-spiritual quality. He was also sensitive to colours, and had one day experienced a moment of minor enlightenment when it had struck him that the soft cream of his pillow case was near to perfect.

23

The nearest thing to religion that Jean-Luc possessed was this: he hoped, no, rather he was trying to ensure that, if at some future time, near or further down the line of his life, he was incapacitated by one of those maladies that completely alter a person's character (he remembered a friend who had suffered an aggressive form of memory loss, another who had had a stroke) he would somehow see to it, even in midst of his misery, that, as long as he lived, some essential part of him remained.

But his religion admitted no essence. His pragmatic self had seen these two friends changed beyond all recognition by the destruction and deterioration of brain cells. If a person's character is part genetic input, part celestial influence, part individualistic quirks, cussedness and willpower, he could only conclude that this last sad and poignant chapter of his life would have to be a work of sheer willpower.

The triumph of the spirit over the flesh. Jean-Luc hesitated to call it that, but in the end conceded the quasi-religious origins of what had in the beginning seemed something quite personal.

46

the redstart

is welcome

this winter too

To Jean-Luc the early morning just before the dawn was always beautiful. As was breakfast time. Today more than ever, with the low sun dispatching tangible columns of pale yellow light through the kitchen window, whence it flowed diagonally across the room, identifying in its path dancing particles of dust that normally remained hidden. The detritus of the chateau's human inhabitants, its decaying wood and weathered stone and mortar were all carried along in this golden river.

The radio was on and playing a hit song of yesteryear by the chasonnier Serge Lama. Lifted by the mood of the sunlit room, Jean-Luc lent an ear to the lyrics and was pleasantly surprised. Actually they were rather poetic. Music was likened to an ocean, a flock of seagulls taking to the air. Here, apparently, love too had its place, in 'the plenitude of silence, where the birds sleep.'

Jean-Luc chuckled at the charming naivity of it all, but then became aware of an unusual feeling in his throat. He realised that he couldn't breathe. A moment of surprise followed by a sense of panic, and now he was desperately trying to dislodge the obstruction. But with no result. Was this the end? Mortality. It blazed in neon lights before his eyes. Then darkness.

Anyone watching Jean-Luc in those final moments would have seen the colour draining from his face as he lay on the kitchen floor of the chateau, his body twitching, head back, mouth open in the agonies of asphyxiation. Two hours later, rigor mortis had set in and the stillness of his body was sculptural.

The next day, discovering Jean-Luc's body, Flora was suddenly reminded of an ancient Egyptian corpse that she had glimpsed as a schoolgirl at the British Museum. From the telephone in the hall she called the police.

NOTES

(The old chateau was a walk of about twenty minutes from the village, along a track which ran through open fields and past two ponds.

(In past ages, it had been the seat of the Baron de S, a minor aristocrat whose tiny domain extended across the present-day villages of S and P up to the boundary of the powerful M fief. The aggressive Count of M had dominated the poor Baron, that is, until word had reached the royal court in Paris of his dangerous ambitions. An order from Louis XII had resulted in a short military campaign, the destruction of the city walls of M, the execution of the count and the placement of his huge territory under a representative of the king. Thereafter, life for the baron and the inhabitants of the two villages had become tranquil, perhaps even a shade bland. But, like the sea, life moves in waves, and in 1761 a veritable tsunami crashed onto the shore, leaving destruction and debris in its wake as it moved forward. The arrest on a minor charge of a woman living in a tiny hamlet close to P had revealed the existence of a witches' coven with members dotted across the region. The head witch had been put to death, a number of her minions imprisoned and still more women, many of whose only crime had been a preference for spinsterhood over marriage, had been driven from their homes in a campaign during which the Catholic Church exploited the void left by the tsunami together with the accompanying popular hysteria for its own material ends. Thus, the land owned by the real or imagined witches had been put under Church control, and a seminary had been built, a place where Jesuits and others came to study and later to teach. The circumstances of the institution's foundation led to the seminary developing as a centre of research into witchcraft, paganism and other heathen rituals that threatened, as the seminarians were quick to point out, not only the Church but also the social fabric and political authority. As things progressed it became a place where investigators into the occult and the art of exorcism received their training.

Even today the seminary continued, covertly, to fulfil this raison d'être, though it had, like the Church and Christianity all over France, greatly diminished in both scale and power. It retained a deeply conservative character, insisting on the Latin Mass and other rituals of the traditional liturgy.

Today five clerics resided at the seminary, maintaining it. It was a shadow of its bygone days, but that is more than could be said for the chateau.) The ancestors of the baron had vacated their family home in the 1950s and finally sold the property in the early 1990s. The purchaser was a teacher from the Sorbonne, a specialist of ancient Middle East cultures. He was known among the villagers as 'the Professor'. His name was Jean-Luc Aquaviva.)