Yoshino Arrowroot - Chapter 4

The Fox’s Lament

“By the way, when you looked at that scroll, it said that the Hatsune drum was left by Shizuka Gozen, but it didn’t say anything about fox skins, did it?”

“That’s right – so I think the drum must have existed before the play was written. If the drum had been made later, they would surely have contrived to make it fit the story in the play a bit better. Just as the author of Mount Imo and Mount Se thought up his plot after seeing the actual scenery there, I suppose the author of The Thousand Cherry Trees must have visited the Ōtani house or heard about it from somewhere, and that’s what gave him the idea. The author of The Thousand Cherry Trees was Takeda Izumo, of course, so he must have completed the text no later than the 1750s, which leaves a question mark over the fact that the scroll is newer than that, since it’s dated 1855. But since it states that it was “faithfully transcribed by Ōtani Genbei, aged 76”, it could have been handed down from much earlier than that. Even if the drum is a fake, we can surely suppose that it dates not from 1855, but from much earlier.”

“But that drum definitely looks quite recent, doesn’t it?”

“No, the scroll may be recent, but the drum has been re-lacquered and put back together, so it’s two or three generations old. And I think that before that drum, there was an older one packed away in that paulownia box.”

To get back from the village of Natsumi to Miyataki on the opposite bank, you have to cross the brushwood bridge, which is a famous sight in its own right. We sat on the rocks by the bridge and chatted about it for a while.

In his Travels around Japan, Kaibara Ekiken writes “There is no waterfall at Miyataki [“taki” means waterfall], but the Yoshino River flows between large rocks on both sides, and the river banks themselves are great rocks, rising vertically like folding screens to a height of thirty feet. Where the river narrows to around twenty feet wide between these banks, there is a bridge, and because the mighty river is narrow at this point, the water here is very deep and the scenery is spectacular.” This view from the rocks we are resting on must be exactly the one he was talking about. “The village people engage in what they call “rock-diving”, which they perform to visitors for money. They leap into the river from the top of the rocks, swim underwater, and then reappear. I am told that when they dive, they put both their arms to their sides and keep their feet together; when they reach a depth of around ten feet, they put their arms out again and float up to the surface.” There is a picture of this rock-diving in an Edo-period collection of pictures of famous places, and the shape of the banks and the flow of the water are exactly as the picture shows. At this point there is a sharp bend in the river, which splashes white spray as it tumbles down between the enormous rocks. According to what we have just heard at the Ōtani house, every year it is quite common for rafts to smash against these rocks and sink. The villagers who do the rock-diving usually spend their time fishing near here or cultivating crops, and if a traveller happens to pass by, they immediately ask them if they would like to see this special stunt of theirs. They charge one hundred mon for diving from the slightly lower rock on the opposite bank, and two hundred mon for diving from the higher rock on this side, so they call the opposite rock Hundred Mon Rock, and the rock on this side Two-Hundred Mon Rock – these names survive to the present day. The farmer in the Ōtani house told us that he had seen this rock-diving when he was young, but recently very few tourists came to see it, and at some point it had died out.

“You know, I think in the old days when people went cherry blossom viewing at Yoshino, the road hadn’t been opened up as it is today, so people must have come round through the Uda district, and a lot of people would have come past here. In other words, I think the route that Yoshitsune took when he fled probably wasn’t the normal one. So people like Takeda Izumo would certainly have come here and seen the Hatsune Drum.”

Sitting there on the rocks, Tsumura still seemed to be worrying about the Hatsune Drum for some reason. “I’m not the Tadanobu fox,” he said, “but my yearning for the Hatsune drum is even greater than that fox’s, and in some strange way, when I saw that drum I felt as though I was meeting my parents.”

At this point I need to give the reader a rough description of what sort of person this young man Tsumura was. In reality, I myself had very little idea until he poured out his heart to me as we sat on those rocks. As I mentioned a bit earlier, he and I were classmates at Tokyo First Middle School, and we were close friends in those days. But when the time came to start university, he went back to his parents’ house in Osaka for family reasons, and that was the end of his scholastic career. According to what I had heard at the time, Tsumura came from a long-established family that had run a pawnbroker for generations in the Shimanouchi district of Osaka. Besides him, there were two sisters, but his parents had died young, and the children were mainly brought up by their grandmother. His elder sister had married into another family at a young age, and once a husband had also been decided on for the younger sister, Tsumura’s grandmother gradually became lonely, and wanted her grandson to move back in with her. There was nobody else to look after the family business, so that was why he suddenly decided to give up his schooling. I had suggested that in that case, he could go to Kyoto University, but at that time Tsumura’s heart was more set on creative writing than on scholarship. Since he could entrust the family business to the chief clerk, he apparently intended to enjoy a comfortable life and occasionally write the odd novel.

We sometimes corresponded with each other after that, but there was never any sign of him writing anything. Even with the best of intentions, once you become a young gentleman who can live comfortably at home without hardship, you naturally tend to lose your ambition. At some point, then, Tsumura too became accustomed to his circumstances, and fell into a peaceful and contented Osaka lifestyle. One day about two years later, I received a letter from him which opened with the news that his grandmother had died, so I imagined that he would soon take a wife suitable to be the “lady of the house”, and would end up as a typical affluent young merchant of the Shimanouchi district.

Those were the circumstances, and although Tsumura had subsequently visited Tokyo two or three times, this was the first time since leaving school that I had had the chance to have a long talk with him. I had the impression that my old friend’s situation was more or less as I had imagined. When they finish their studies and start living a family life, both men and women change physically, becoming paler and putting on a bit of weight, as though they are suddenly better fed. Tsumura’s appearance had somehow taken on the subtle roundness of a young Osaka gentleman, and although he still used the language of a student in digs in Tokyo, there was a Kansai accent mixed in now – it had always been there to some extent, but it was much more marked than before. That description should give the reader a rough grasp of the external features of the person called Tsumura.

It will take me quite a while to give the details of what Tsumura told me on those rocks about the Hatsune drum and its connection to his own destiny – the reasons that had led him to suggest our current trip, and the secret objective he was concealing in his heart – but in what follows I will try to transmit the gist of what he said as briefly as possible.

His feelings – said Tsumura – were probably completely incomprehensible unless you were from Osaka, and like him, had lost your mother and father early, so you did not know the faces of your parents. As I knew, there were three musical forms specific to Osaka – jōruri, koto music of the Ikuta school, and jiuta, the local style of singing. It was not that he was especially fond of music, but he often came into contact with these styles because they were traditional in the area, so of course he heard them regularly, and they gradually and imperceptibly came to have an effect on him. One occasion that he particularly remembered even now was that when he was four or five years old, an elegant town lady with white skin and a calm expression was playing koto and shamisen with a blind tutor in a room at the back of their Shimanouchi house – he particularly remembered that image. He himself believed that that memory of the elegant lady playing the koto was his only remaining image of his mother, but in reality it was not clear whether the lady actually was his mother. According to what his grandmother had told him in later years, the lady he remembered was probably his grandmother, and his mother had in fact already died a little before that. But remarkably he also remembered that the piece that the lady and her tutor were playing was a song called The Fox’s Lament. In his household, presumably not only his grandmother but also his two sisters had both been pupils of that tutor, so he must have heard the song The Fox’s Lament again from time to time after that, refreshing his impression of it each time. The words of the song, by the way, were:

Alas! The mother’s flower-like beauty suddenly changes,

And drooping in a bed bedewed with tears

Even the mirror of knowledge becomes clouded, when she meets the priest.

When he signals to his mother she looks back;

Unable even to say goodbye

He can do nothing but weep.

Crossing fields, crossing mountains and passing villages

For whom have I come?

For you.

For whom have I come, for whom have I come? For you.

Are you leaving? How bitter.

I return to my home in the forest

In my loving heart, my loving heart, rocks and ivy cover the white chrysanthemums,

And when I walk the narrow path through dwarf bamboos,

The voices of insects are charming.

It is raining, look, it is raining, even this morning,

Even this morning.

Here my footsteps have disappeared

To the West the ridges between the rice fields are dangerous.

I scamper back through valley and mountain,

Crossing that mountain, crossing this mountain,

Yearning, yearning and full of sadness.

He himself had now completely memorised the melody and the interjections to be made during the piece. But the fact that he retained such a distinct memory of hearing it performed by that lady with her tutor must be because there was something in those words that left a deep impression on his innocent young heart.

Of course jiuta lyrics are full of inconsistencies and grammatical solecisms, and there are often places where one thinks that the author must have obscured the meaning on purpose. This song, furthermore, is based on an old legend treated in Noh and puppet theatre, so without knowing the context of the song, it is all the more difficult to interpret it, and much of this song The Fox’s Lament probably comes from various other sources. He thought, nevertheless, that when he heard the words “Alas! The mother’s flower-like beauty suddenly changes,” and “When he signals to his mother she looks back; Unable even to say goodbye”, even as a young child, he must have felt that it contained the sadness of a young boy yearning for his vanishing mother. Moreover, in the phrases “Crossing fields, crossing mountains and passing villages,” and “Crossing that mountain, crossing this mountain” there was something that felt like a lullaby. He can’t have understood either the kanji or the meaning of the title The Fox’s Lament, but as a result of hearing the song several more times after that, he didn’t know exactly how, but he came to realise vaguely that the song seemed to have something to do with a fox.

Because he was often taken by his grandmother to puppet plays at the Bunraku-za and Horie-za theatres, perhaps he unconsciously came to understand this when he saw the scene of “Kuzunoha’s Parting from her Child” there. The clack-clacking of the yarn guide when the fox-mother is weaving at her loom inside the paper sliding doors in the autumn twilight. And the poem, “If you love me, come and visit me, in Izumi…” that she writes on the paper door in her sadness at parting from her sleeping child. The force with which that scene would strike home to a child who never knew his mother is perhaps unimaginable to someone who has not been in the same position. For him, even as a child, in the phrases of the song such as “I return to my home in the forest” and “In my loving heart, my loving heart, rocks and ivy cover the white chrysanthemums, And when I walk the narrow path through dwarf bamboos”, he could see the vanishing form of the lone white fox running back to her former home in the forest through paths fringed with the variegated colours of autumn. Comparing his own situation to that of the child who runs, yearningly, after the fox’s footsteps, he must have been overwhelmed by feelings of longing for his beloved mother.

In fact, perhaps because Shinoda Forest is close to Osaka, there were several children’s games linked to nursery rhymes about the fox-mother Kuzunoha, though he himself could only remember two of them:

Let’s catch her, let’s catch her

Let’s catch Mrs. Fox

of Shinoda Forest

This was sung in a game in which one person would be the fox, while two others would be hunters. The hunters would hold both ends of a string with a noose in it, and would pretend to be catching the fox. He had heard that there was a similar game played in Tokyo households, and he had once got a geisha to play it in a tea house there, but both the words and the tune were a bit different from the Osaka version. In Tokyo they play this game sitting down, but in Osaka they normally play it standing up, so the person who is the fox plays along with the song by making exaggerated fox-like movements as they gradually approach the edge of the noose. It is particularly sweet if that person happens to be a charming Osaka girl or a young bride. Even now he could not forget how, in his boyhood, when they had played this game at the houses of relatives, for instance in the evenings at New Year, there was one delightful young wife who was particularly lovely as she imitated the fox’s movements with extraordinary skill. In the other game, the majority of the players sit in a circle holding hands, while they sit the player who is “it” in the middle of the ring. Then they hide a small object like a bean in their hands so that the “it” can’t see it, and pass it from person to person while singing a song.  When the song ends they all freeze, and ask the “it” which player is holding the bean. The words of that song were as follows:

Grab the barley,

Grab the mugwort,

There are ni-ne beans in your hands

More than the ni-ne beans

Missing your parents’ home

If you miss me

Come and see me

Mo-urnful Kuzunoha of Shinoda Fo-orest

He felt that this song contained a faint sense of homesickness. In the urban districts of Osaka, the shop boys and maidservants working on indentured contracts were often from Kawachi, Izumi and the surrounding countryside. In many of the commercial households in Senba or Shimanouchi, it was the practice on cold winter evenings for those indentured servants to shut up the front of the shop, snuggle around the brazier with the members of the family, sing the song, and play the associated game. If you thought about it, for those children, who had left the lush greenery of their country villages and come to Osaka to learn a trade or polite manners, when they innocently warbled “missing your parents’ home”, it must have brought back memories of their father and mother lying down in the dim back room of a reed-thatched cottage. In his later life he himself had unexpectedly heard this song coming from the musicians’ enclosure in the sixth act of Chūshingura, at the point where the two samurai in their conical monks’ hats come to visit, and was impressed at how appropriate it was to the lot in life of characters like Yoichibei, Okaya and Okaru.

At the time there were a lot of servants in his house in Shimanouchi, and when he saw them singing this song as they played, he was at the same time sympathetic but also jealous. Although it had been hard for them to leave their parents and go to live in somebody else’s house, the servants at least had parents they could meet whenever they wanted to if they returned to their home districts, while he had none. For that reason he fantasised that if he went to Shinoda Forest he might be able to meet his mother. Indeed, when he was in the second or third year of primary school he had taken a classmate and quietly sneaked off there without telling his family. Even today, it’s an inconvenient location involving a walk of over a mile from the Nankai railway line, and at that time there may have been a train for part of the way, but for the most part it involved travelling in a rickety horse-drawn cart, and he thought he must have walked a long way too. When he got there, amid the forest of large camphor trees, a small shrine to Kuzunoha had been erected, and there was also a well called Princess Kuzunoha’s Mirror. Looking at the votive tablets hanging up with raised cloth pictures of places where people had been separated from their children, and gazing at the face of Kuzunoha in the form of a portrait of Jakuemon or some other actor playing her, he left the forest feeling slightly consoled.  But on his way home, he repeatedly heard the clacking of looms escaping from behind the paper doors of peasant houses here and there, which gave him an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. Perhaps there were a lot of houses with people working at looms because that road passes through the area where Kawachi cotton is produced. In any case the sound had immeasurably heightened his yearnings.

But one thing he found odd was that it was mainly his mother that he yearned for in this way, and he didn’t have the same strength of feeling about his father. Having said that, his father had died before his mother, so while he might possibly have retained a memory of what his mother looked like, he couldn’t have had any memory of his father. And from that perspective, wasn’t his feeling of love for his mother related to a vague yearning for “the woman he did not yet know” – in other words the germ of love, established during childhood? In his case, both the person who was his mother in the past, and the person who would become his wife in the future, were “women he did not yet know”, and they were both the same in being connected to him by an invisible thread of destiny. Probably this sort of state of mind was latent in anybody, even if they were not in a similar situation to himself. As further evidence of this, the words of The Fox’s Lament seem to be about a child longing for his mother, but “For whom have I come? For you,” and “Are you leaving? How bitter,” also seem to sing of the sadness of parting and the bitterness of separation for a man and woman in love with each other. Hadn’t the author of this song deliberately blurred its meaning so that it could be taken in both ways?

Be that as it may, he couldn’t accept that from the first time he heard the song, it was only a vision of his mother that he was imagining. He felt that the vision was of his wife as well as his mother. So the image of his mother that he treasured in his childish heart was not that of an old lady, but a woman eternally young and beautiful. That wet nurse Shigenoi who appears in the play about Sankichi the packhorse driver – a gorgeous lady wearing a fine kimono and serving a daimyo’s daughter – the mother that he saw in his dreams was like Sankichi’s mother, and sometimes in his dreams, he himself was Sankichi.

The authors of Edo period kyōgen plays may in fact have been fiendishly clever, and skilled at appealing to the complex emotions concealed in the depths of their audience’s consciousness. This play about Sankichi, and others like it, by making one character an aristocrat’s daughter and another a boy driving a pack-horse, and interposing between them a court lady who is wet nurse to one and mother to the other, certainly dealt with the love between parent and child in both cases, but the fleeting romances of youth are also hinted at in the background to some extent. From Sankichi’s point of view, at least, the princess and his mother, living in the grandeur of a daimyo’s palace, can both equally be the object of his yearning. In the play about Kuzunoha, both the father and the son share the same feeling of love for the mother, but in this case through the device of the mother being a fox, the viewer’s fantasy becomes all the sweeter. He always thought how jealous he was of Abe’s son, and wished that his own mother had been a fox like the one in the play. Since his mother had been human, he had no hope of meeting her again in this world, but if she had been a fox masquerading as human, there would have been no reason why she could not appear again in the guise of his mother. Any motherless child watching that play would certainly harbour the same feeling. But in the story of The Thousand Cherry Trees the associations between mother, fox, beautiful woman and love are even closer. In this case both the parents and the child are foxes, and while it is written as though Shizuka and the fox Tadanobu are mistress and servant, it is designed so that they apparently echo the behaviour of lovers. Maybe it was for this reason that he especially enjoyed watching this particular dance-drama. He compared himself to the fox Tadanobu, and he imagined that it was his destiny, drawn by the sound of the drum whose skins were those of the parent foxes, to follow in the footsteps of Shizuka Gozen while walking through Mount Yoshino’s clouds of blossom. In any case, he had been so affected by the story that he thought the least he could do was to learn the dance and act the part of Tadanobu on stage in an informal revue.

“But that’s not everything,” said Tsumura, having told me all this while we gazed at the forested view of Natsumi village on the opposite bank, where it had already started to get dark. “In effect, this time it is actually the Hatsune drum that has drawn me to Yoshino.”

As he said this, a smile whose meaning I didn’t understand hovered in the kindly hollows around his eyes.