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| Author: |
Takako Arai |
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Critic and poet, Takako Arai’s Top 5 Films:
J: The California Dolls (1981 – Robert Aldrich)
A: 24 City (2008 – Jia Zhangke)
P: Hula Girls (2006 – Lee Sang Il)
A: Bombay (1995 – Mani Ratnam)
N: The Bicycle Thief (1948 – Vittorio De Sica)
[Author photo by Naoto Kurasawa]
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| Submission Date: |
| 08 Dec 2009 |
Category: |
Poetry
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In Chap-book
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Video clip of Lee Sang Il's film, Hula Girls
Mohei’s Fire
As soon as I got out of the station I was in front of a high-rise building under construction, two long construction crane necks lifting into the air. I walked down the left side of an excavated path through a town on the edge of old downtown Tokyo, with a bridge at my side where a carillon rings on the hour. I walked past shops selling jellied sweet potato cake and deli foods, and pressed the elevator button to an apartment with a teahouse on the ground floor. The door was dark green, far in the back. Takejirô-san welcomed me with his sturdy bare feet, bowing many times.
While his left hand kept scratching at his neck, under his clean-cut hair, and while his short gray eyelashes seemed to brush against each other, he recalled this and that, telling me stories. Eighty-some years ago, when he was born, this place was a farming village. They grew leeks, ginger and mustard spinach, put their baskets on a cart and took them to the market in Komagome, called “Yachaba.” And although it is now sunken into a culvert, the Yata River, a clear stream about four yards wide, once ran in front of the Inari water god shrine. They would clean the soil off the harvested vegetables in the washing area under the big nettle tree, and catch small fish in a net. There were even days when a giant carp would swim upstream from the Shinobazu-no-ike pond, through the Yata river flowing into it. There were no excavations in those days, and a slope of about nine feet would just continue on through the woods…
His hoarse voice broke between every single word, making me of think of a slightly rusty scythe as it cropped bundles of stem fiber. I listened to him while straining the backs of my eyelids, trying to focus on a very distant scenery that was now long gone. At that moment, Takejirô-san burst into a small laugh, and hesitantly said, “This is a bit funny…a strange thing…,” while a faint rose-color filled in his wrinkled cheeks. I caught his infectious laugh, as he began the following story:
*
Grandpa Mohei has long since left us, but this was back when he was young, and the young folks around here used to gather in the morning and go over to Senju to work.
One day while it was still very, very dark, our grandpa called upon his friends and went to work. They followed the empty field path, rubbing their sleepy eyes and yawning.
It was when they got close to Nippori. Except, for some reason, a single long candle towered over him, right in their way. It must have been the work of a fox or a raccoon dog. The candle was clutched by a tail, which was also on fire. So Mohei bent over and peered down, but could not see what was going on. He tried scaring it by smacking the ground with a piece of wood, like a cane, but the candle stayed there without moving an inch. The red flame was blocking his way, adamantly not letting him pass.
What to do…?
Mohei then flipped around so his rear end faced forward. He tapped his cane while walking backwards. And at that, the old fox flipped up his tail in surprise and took to his heels, and disappeared.
*
…so the story goes.
A while later, Grandpa had been tending some plants, and is said to have made a very beautiful weeping plum tree, called the “Weeping Mohei.” But one day he lost all of his property, because of a large fire that some stranger had set. All the houses down the block also burned down. From then on, he came to fear even electricity, let alone the thatching on the roof. Could it be that the electric currents that ran through the wires appeared to him like arrows of fire? The whole family then went on by guarding the precious and very thin light of the paper lantern, until Mohei-san passed away in the early Shôwa period. Those were dark, black nights. They say that no matter how hard the people around him tried to convince him otherwise, he would not have a word of it.
As I listened slowly to his story, the paper lantern sitting upon the thin plate gradually began to overlap with the candle held by the fox. Wavering, the two flames become one. Was this the single lovely light that twinkled at the bottommost depth of Mohei-san’s heart, after that seething fire? He entered the darkness every night, carrying with him a small flame that grew sweeter the more it burned. The foxes bent their bodies and came running in one by one. The smell of the burning hair on their soft tails moved to the left and to the right, with strangely wavering clusters of fire streaming behind.
This light has remained lit, faintly but firmly, at the bottom of Takejirô-san’s memory. His wife, who had been hanging around the door at first, came out in the middle of the conversation and sat next to him, saying that she had never heard such a story in the sixty or so years that they had been together. Takejirô-san said that he had finally spoken from his own mouth the story he had heard as a child from his grandmother, as she put him to bed. Hearing this unexpected story while seated in front of the old couple, I felt as if I had been given a small portion of that grain of fire from the palm of their hands.
If you dig up the ground around here, you can still come across some old foxholes. They contain a deep, distant air, like the inside of a vase. Beneath the ground, under the office buildings and homes, several phantom foxes lurk, running around to protect that light. And just what kind of voice do they wrap around it?
Like being excited or dazed…I remember having quickly passed the shadows of the cranes by the station, but coming back home I find today’s train ticket in my pocket and wonder if I had flown past that ticket gate too…
Notes: Some of the distances described in old Japanese units of measurement have been converted into feet and yards. Thus the phrase “four yards” has been translated from ni-ken, and “nine feet” from kyu-shaku. The Inari water god shrine is said to have a fox as its messenger. Thus the common food item, Inari-sushi, made with fried tofu, is derived from the idea that foxes love oily foods. Shinobazu-no-ike pond is located in Ueno, one of the centers of downtown Tokyo. The early Shôwa period refers to the years from the latter half of the 1920s into the 1930s. Translated by Sawako Nakayasu and You Nakai, this work was first published in Four From Japan (Litmus Press/Belladonna Books, 2006).
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