Yoshino Arrowroot - Chapter 3

The Hatsune Drum

From Kamiichi to Miyataki, the road continues up the left-hand side of the Yoshino River. As we go deeper into the mountains, the sense of autumn reaches its height. We regularly pass through groves of sawtooth oak, whose thick carpet of fallen leaves rustles as we walk through. There are relatively few maples in this section, and they are not clumped together in groups. But this is the absolute peak of the autumn leaves, and against the backdrop of the mountains mostly covered in cedars, the ivy, wax trees and sumacs, among others, stand out here and there, with their leaves displaying the full spectrum of colours from deepest crimson to palest yellow. We talk simplistically of “autumn leaves”, but when you see them like this you get a real sense of the wide range of different varieties, from yellow to deep brown and crimson. Even among the yellow leaves, there are dozens of different shades of yellow. It is said that everybody’s face turns red in the autumn in Shiobara, in Shimotsuke Province, and it’s certainly a beautiful sight when the leaves are all the same colour, but the leaves here are not bad either. We use phrases like “a profusion of blooms”, or “a multitude of colours” to describe fields of spring flowers, but apart from the emphasis on the yellow tones of autumn, I think the extraordinary variety of the palette here is just as impressive as those spring fields. The leaves catch the sunlight flooding into the mountain valleys in the spaces between the peaks, and sometimes they fall into the water, glittering like gold dust.

The Emperor Tenmu’s Yoshino pleasure palace, referred to in the Manyōshū at the point where “the Emperor travels to Yoshino,” and described by Kasa no Asomi Kanamura as “the imperial villa on the bank of the Yoshino rapids”, is said to be near this village of Miyataki, as are other landmarks including Mount Mifune and the fields of Akitsu, which are mentioned in Hitomaro’s poems. We soon left the road, part-way through the village, and crossed to the opposite side of the river. At this point the valley finally narrows and the banks become steep precipices, with the raging water striking against enormous rocks on the riverbed, or forming clear blue pools by the banks. The Utatane (“napping”) Bridge crosses the river at the point where the Kisa brook emerges from the depths of the thickly-forested Kisa valley, slows to a faint trickle, and flows into the main river. The story that this is the bridge on which Yoshitsune took a nap was probably invented by later generations. This frail and precarious bridge, almost hidden by thick trees, has a base consisting of just a single rope across the clear water, and a pretty thatched roof like that of a traditional pleasure boat, though I think this is more to protect it from falling leaves than from rain. It feels as though if the roof were not there, at this time of year the bridge would immediately be buried in leaves. Two farmhouses just by the bridge seem to be using part of the area under its roof as private storage space, so there are bundles of firewood piled up, leaving only just enough room for people to get past. This place is called Higuchi, and from here the path divides into two, with one arm following the river bank to the village of Natsumi, and the other crossing the Utatane Bridge, passing Sakuragi Shrine and Kisadani village, going through the “upper thousand” cherry tree area and coming out at Shimizu and Saigyō’s hut. The “person who entered pushing aside the mountain’s white snow with his feet” in Shizuka’s poem presumably crossed this bridge and passed through the mountains behind Yoshino on his way to the valley of Naka-no-In.

We suddenly realised that the steep mountains, which we had hardly noticed, were now towering right in front of us. The visible area of sky had shrunk further, and we were in a gorge in which it looked as though the flowing Yoshino River, the houses, and the road, were all about to come to a dead end. But human habitation spreads wherever there is space, it seems, so a ledge had been built on the narrow sloping bank of the river, thatched roofs had been thrown up, and fields had been created, in a hollow like the bottom of a bag, surrounded on three sides by mountain peaks. This, apparently, was the village of Natsumi.

With its tumbling water and looming mountains, it did indeed look like the sort of place where a defeated warrior would choose to perch.

I realized at once when we reached the house marked Ōtani. About five or six hundred yards from the entrance to the village, there was a house with a notably fine roof standing among the mulberry fields facing the river. It was surrounded by tall mulberry trees, so all that one could see from a distance was the traditional-style thatched roof ridge and tiled eaves, which looked as if they were floating on the mulberry leaves like an island in the sea – a very charming sight. But notwithstanding its fine roof, the actual house was more or less a typical peasant’s house, with two interconnecting rooms facing the fields serving as a living and reception room. When we slid open the door facing onto the road in front, a man of about forty was sitting in the more formal of the two rooms; he appeared to be the owner. On seeing the two of us, he came out to greet us without waiting to see our visiting cards, and turned out to be just a simple honest farmer with a firm, deeply-tanned face, an amiable, blinking expression, a small neck, and broad shoulders.

“I’ve been expecting you. Mr Konbu in Kuzu told me you were coming,” he said, in a strong country accent that made it hard to understand even these simple words. When we asked him for things, he did not make even perfunctory replies, but simply gave a straightforward bow and showed them to us. On reflection, this household was probably quite poor now and had lost all traces of its former glory, but in any case I found it easier to get on with a person like this. “We apologize for disturbing you when you are busy,” I ventured. “We have heard that you look after your family treasures with great care and rarely show them to anybody, but we have nevertheless taken the liberty of coming here in the hope of seeing them.” Looking embarrassed, he hesitantly replied, “I wouldn’t say I don’t show them to anybody.” He told us there was a family tradition that the objects should not be taken out unless anyone wanting to see them had first undergone a seven-day religious purification. It wasn’t realistic to make such onerous stipulations nowadays, so his intention was to show the items without fuss to anybody who wanted to see them. But given the pressures of his everyday farm work, he didn’t have time to deal with people who turned up unexpectedly. Particularly at the moment, he was still busy dealing with the autumn silkworms, so normally the tatami would have been taken up throughout the house, and if guests appeared suddenly there was nowhere he could show them to to sit down. That being the case, if guests could give a little advance warning, he could just about manage to make the place fit to receive them. All this he explained with apparent reluctance, resting his hands, with their long and completely black fingernails, on his knees.

It was indeed apparent that he had taken the trouble of laying out tatami in these two rooms specially for our visit today.  When I peeked through a crack in the sliding screens into the storeroom beyond, there were no tatami, only floorboards, and an assortment of agricultural tools lying there as though they had been hastily shoved in there out of the way. A number of treasures were already on display in the raised alcove, and the owner reverently placed these items in front of us one by one.

The items consisted of a scroll entitled “From the Village of Natsumi”, several long and short swords bestowed by Lord Yoshitsune, along with an inventory of them, sword guards, quivers, an earthenware jug, and the Hatsune Drum received from Shizuka Gozen. It was stated at the end of the scroll From the Village of Natsumi that “In accordance with instructions given by the magistrate Naitō Mokuzaemon, while he was magistrate of the Gojō District, this document was faithfully transcribed by Ōtani Genbei, aged 76, and left to our family.” It was dated “Summer, 1855”. The family tradition is that in that year of 1855, when the magistrate Naitō Mokuzaemon visited the village, one of the ancestors of the current owner, an old man called Ōtani Genbei, made obeisance to him and was interviewed by him. But on being shown this document, the magistrate is said to have given up his seat and himself made obeisance. The paper of the scroll is filthy and charred as though it has been burnt, so it is very hard to decipher, and is accompanied by a separate fair copy. I don’t know about the original document, but the copy is riddled with grammatical and kanji errors, and there are lots of places where the explanatory kana glosses look dubious, so it cannot possibly have come from the brush of anyone with a formal education. Be that as it may, according to the document, the ancestors of this family have been living on this land since before the eighth century Nara Period. In the Jinshin War of 672, the steward of the Murakuni manor, a man called Oyori, allied himself with the Emperor Tenmu and helped him to defeat Prince Ōtomo. At that time the steward controlled three or four miles of land, as far as Kamiichi, and that section of the Yoshino River used to be called the Natsumi River. As for Yoshitsune, the scroll says, “After celebrating the Spring Festival at Mount Shiraya in Kawakami, Lord Minamoto no Yoshitsune came down and spent thirty or forty days here in the Murakuni manor. When he saw the brushwood bridge at Miyataki he recited the following poems.“ Two classical poems are then given. I still have no idea even today whether any poems by Yoshitsune exist, but the poems in that manuscript are absolute doggerel that couldn’t have been written by even the rankest amateur when court culture was at its lowest ebb. Turning next to Shizuka Gozen, the manuscript states “At that time Shizuka Gozen, the beloved concubine of Lord Yoshitsune, sojourned in the house of the Murakuni family, and on being left helpless after Lord Yoshitsune fled to the north, it is said that she killed herself by throwing herself into a well, which is known as Shizuka’s Well” – so it states that she died here. And furthermore, “Plagued by her longings at having been separated from Lord Yoshitsune, however, Shizuka Gozen turned into a ball of fire which came out of the aforementioned well every night and haunted the area around Iigai Village for around three hundred years. Then the priest Rennyo, who had laid many troubled spirits to rest, was requested by the villagers to perform these rites for Shizuka. He set her on the path to the pure land without any difficulty, and inscribed a poem on her long-sleeved kimono, which was held in safekeeping by the Ōtani household.” The poem is given.

While we were reading this scroll the farmer offered no words of explanation but just sat in respectful silence. It was apparent from his expression that he harboured no doubts, and blindly believed every word of this account handed down by his ancestors. When we asked where the kimono was on which the priest had written the poem, he told us that in the time of his ancestors they had donated it to the temple in the village, called Saishōji, with the intention that services should be held to pray for Shizuka’s soul. But nobody knew who had it now, and it was no longer in the temple. When we took the long and short swords, the quiver, and the other objects into our hands and inspected them, they looked really very old, and the quiver in particular was badly damaged, but the two of us were not qualified to make a formal appraisal. The Hatsune drum we had come to see had no drumskin, but only the frame, stored in a paulownia box. I am no expert on this either, but the lacquer looked comparatively recent, and there was no design in gold or anything on it, so it just looked like a plain black wooden frame with absolutely no special features. But the wood may well have been old and just re-lacquered at some point. “Yes, that may be it,” answered the farmer, showing a total lack of interest.

Outside stood two dignified Buddhist gravestones with gates and small roofs. On one of the gates was a hollyhock crest and inside, the inscription, “Presented in respectful memory of the noble First Minister of State.” The other had a plum blossom crest, and in the centre was carved, “Memorial tablet to the soul of Lady Shōyo Keigyokushin”, while on the right it said “2^nd year of Genbun [1737],” and on the left, “November 10th”. But the farmer seemed to know nothing about these gravestones either. He just said they were supposed to be associated with people who were lords over the Ōtani family long ago, and that it was a tradition to make offerings to these graves on the first of January every year. The one with the Genbun era date on it may be that of Shizuka Gozen, he said, with a perfectly straight face.

Looking at the timid and downcast eyes of this excellent fellow, we felt it was better to say nothing. Now was not the time to explain when the Genbun era was, or to quote the Mirror of the East or Tale of the Heike as sources for the life of Shizuka Gozen. The person the farmer had in mind was not the specific Shizuka who danced in front of Yoritomo at the Tsurugaoka Shrine. She was, rather, a generic high-class lady imagined in the idealised past of his family’s distant ancestors. His vision of the individual court lady ‘Shizuka Gozen’ contained his feelings of reverence and yearning for ‘ancestors’, ‘feudal lords’, and ‘antiquity’. There was no point in asking whether that lady had actually requested to stay at this house and had pined away here. If he really believed it all, it was best for us not to disabuse him. To take a sympathetic viewpoint, maybe it wasn’t Shizuka, but a Princess of the Southern Court, or a defeated solider during the wars of the 16th century. Whatever the case may be, in the prosperous heyday of this household, some event of this sort occurred, and perhaps that became mixed up with the legend of Shizuka. When we excused ourselves and made to leave, he said “I can’t offer you any real hospitality, but please have some ‘zukushi’.” Then he made us some tea, and presented us with some persimmons, and an empty fire pan with no ash in it.

I suppose ‘zukushi’ must be ripe persimmons. It seemed the empty fire pan was not for us to put cigarette butts in, but to eat the sticky ripe persimmons from. Since he was very persistent in his offer, I gingerly took onto the palm of my hand one of these fruits, which looked as though it would fall apart at any minute. It was a large conical persimmon tapering to the bottom, but the fruit had ripened to a deep translucent red colour, and swelled up bulbously, like a bag made of rubber. When I held it up to the sunlight, it was as beautiful as a jewel made of fine red jade. However ripe they were, the barrel-aged persimmons sold in the market would never turn this remarkable colour, and they would lose their shape and fall apart before they became this soft. The farmer tells us that ‘zukushi’ can only be made from Mino persimmons with thick skins. They are picked from the branch when they are still hard and sour, and put in a box or a basket in as draught-free a place as possible. If you leave them for about ten days without any human intervention, the fruit inside the skin naturally becomes semi-liquid, and they turn as sweet as nectar. The inside melts away to become like water, rather than sticky like Mino persimmons. One way to eat them is to remove the stem and scoop them out with a spoon, like eating a soft-boiled egg. But even though you get your hands messy, they taste better if you put them in some receptacle and just peel the skin off and eat them. He told us that they are beautiful to look at and delicious to eat only for a short time after the ten-day preparation period. If you leave them for a day or two after that, ‘zukushi’ end up just turning into water.

I gazed for a while at the ball of dew on my hand as I listened to his explanation, feeling that the mysterious presence and sunlight of these mountains had somehow coalesced onto my palm. I have heard that when people from the country visited Kyoto, they used to wrap handfuls of the capital’s soil in paper as souvenirs, but if somebody asked me about the autumn colours in Yoshino, I would have to take one of these persimmons carefully back to them. In the end what interested me in the house of the Ōtani family, more than the drum and the old manuscript, was the “zukushi”. Enjoying the cool sensation that spread from our mouths down to the pits of our stomachs, Tsumura and I greedily devoured two of those sweet and sticky persimmons each. I crammed my mouth full of the Yoshino autumn, thinking that perhaps even the legendary Amla fruit found in Buddhist scripture was not as delicious as this.