Yoshino Arrowroot - Chapter 2
Mount Imo and Mount Se
The arrangement was that Tsumura would leave Osaka on such and such a day, and he had booked an inn called Musashino, on the lower slopes of Mount Wakakusa in Nara. So I left Tokyo on the night train, stayed a night in Kyoto on the way, and arrived in Nara the following morning. The inn called Musashino is still there, but it seems there has been a change of owner over the last twenty years; in those days the building felt old-fashioned and elegant. Musashino and a place called Kikusui were the best places to stay at that time – the Ministry of Railways hotel wasn’t built until a little later. Tsumura seemed fed up with waiting and looked as though he was keen to get started, and I too had visited Nara before, so after admiring Mount Wakakusa for just an hour or two from the window of our room, we decided it was best to set off right away while the fine weather held.
We changed train at Yoshino-guchi onto the rattly light railway that runs to Yoshino Station, and from there we travelled on foot up the road that runs along the River Yoshino. At the pool of Muda, which is mentioned in the Manyoushū poetry anthology, the road splits into two by the Yanagi ferry crossing. The turning to the right leads to Mount Yoshino, famed for its cherry blossoms, and once you cross the bridge you soon reach the “lower thousand” cherries, the “barrier” cherries, the Zaō Gongen statues, the Kissui-in Monastery, and the “middle thousand” cherries – these places are thronged with cherry blossom viewers every spring. As a matter of fact, I myself had come cherry blossom viewing in Yoshino twice – once when I was little, on a sightseeing tour of the Kansai region with my mother, and once later, when I was at high school. I remembered walking among the crowds up the mountain path to the right, but this was the first time I had taken the path to the left.
Nowadays you can reach the “middle thousand” cherries by car or cable car, so probably nobody walks along here taking in the scenery any more. But in the past, people who came to see the cherries must have taken the right hand path here where the road forks, and stood on the bridge at the Pool of Muda enjoying the view along the banks of the Yoshino River.
“Hey, look over there – those are Mount Imo and Mount Se. The one on the left is Mount Imo, and the one on the right is Mount Se,” said the rickshaw man who was showing us around, stilling his customers’ walking sticks and pointing upstream from the guardrail of the bridge. My mother, too had stopped the rickshaw in the middle of the bridge, and cuddling innocent little me on her lap, had softly murmured, “you remember the play about Mount Imo and Mount Se, don’t you? He says that’s the actual Mount Imo and Mount Se.” I was only little at the time, so I don’t remember all that clearly, but it was the middle of April, when there is still a chill in the air up there in the mountains. Amid the evening spring haze, with the white of the sky blurring into the distance, tiny crepe ripples appeared where the wind ruffled the surface of the Yoshino River as it flowed down from the distant mountain gorges folded in layers above us. In an opening between the larger mountains, two pretty little peaks were faintly visible, wreathed in evening mist. One couldn’t tell that they faced each other across the river, but I knew from the play that there was one on either side. In the kabuki play Mount Imo and Mount Se, the son of Chief Justice Kiyozumi, whose name is Koganosuke, and his fiancée, a young lady by the name of Hinadori, live in high pavilions they have set up facing the valley – one on Mount Se, and the other on Mount Imo. Even within the play, the scene is notable for its vivid colours, like a children’s story, which is probably why it made a deep impression on my young heart. So when I heard my mother’s words on that occasion, I thought, “Aah, so those are Mount Imo and Mount Se!” Even now, I entertained a childish fantasy that if I went there, I might meet Koganosuke and Hinadori. I have never forgotten the view from that bridge, and it comes back to me at unexpected moments, accompanied by fond memories. When I visited Yoshino for the second time, in the spring of my 21st or 22nd year, I leant once again on the railing of this bridge, absorbed myself in the view up the river, and thought nostalgically about my late mother. At just around this point on the lower slopes of Mount Yoshino, the river runs through slightly more open country, so it starts to transform from a powerful mountain torrent to a gentler river of the sort that “flows through a province with no mountains”. As you look upstream, Kamiichi is on the left bank, with the mountains looming over it. In front there is a single-track road that runs along the edge of the water, with a row of simple white-walled country dwellings dotted along it.
This time I went straight past the Muda Bridge, taking the left fork in the path, and headed in the direction of Mounts Imo and Se, which until now I had only ever seen from downstream. The road climbs straight up, following the bank of the river, and while it looks very flat and easily walkable, after Kamiichi it apparently passes through Miyataki, Kuzu, Ōtaki, Sako and Kashiwagi. From there it gradually penetrates into the deeper mountain areas of Yoshino, reaches the source of the Yoshino River, crosses the watershed between the provinces of Yamato and Kii, and eventually emerges at the sea at Kumano.
We had left Nara early, so we reached the town of Kamiichi just after noon. As I had imagined when I was standing on the bridge, the houses along the side of the road were very simple and traditional. In some places the buildings were only on one side, with no houses on the side of the road next to the river, but most of the time the view of the river was blocked by a continuous row of low two-storey houses on both sides, built with soot-blackened latticework, and loft spaces above the ground floor. We glanced into the dim spaces behind the lattices as we walked along, and could see that they had standard country-style earth floors stretching to the back door. At the entrance to the earth floor, most of them had a dark blue fabric sign hung up with the house number and the name of the owner picked out in white. It seems they normally hang this kind of sign out even if it does not double as a shop and is only a house. From the front, the eaves of all these houses visibly sagged as though they had been squashed down, and the frontages onto the street were narrow. But sometimes beyond the cloth entrance sign one caught a glimpse of an inner garden with a clump of trees, or there were additional buildings visible at the back. I would guess that the houses in this area are over fifty years old, and that some of them have been there for one or two hundred years. But though the houses were old, they all had new paper on their sliding windows. The pasted paper was as spotless as though it had just been replaced, and any small tears had been painstakingly repaired with patches cut in the shape of flower petals. The paper stood out cold and white in the crystal-clear autumn air. One reason it is so clean might be that there is no dust on it, but another might be that in the absence of glass doors and windows, the residents are fussier about their paper than city people. Ideally they would have another layer of glass on the outside, like houses in the Tokyo area. But without that, it would evidently be dark inside the houses if the paper were dirty, and draughts would come in through any holes. In any case, the refreshing whiteness of those paper windows gave the closely-serried lattices and soot-blackened fittings a clean and elegant look, like a poor but beautiful girl who takes care of her appearance. As I gazed at the colour of the sun shining on the paper, it really sank in that yes, this was autumn.
The sky was perfectly clear, but although the light reflecting from the paper windows was bright, it was not the kind of brightness that makes your eyes water; rather, it had a beauty that sank into your senses. The sun was now coming round to the river side of the street, so it was shining on the paper windows on the left, but the reflected light reached all the way into the houses on the opposite side. The persimmons laid out in front of the grocer’s shop were particularly beautiful. Tree-ripened persimmons, Nara persimmons, Mino persimmons – the different types all absorbed the sunlight into their lustrous coral-coloured surfaces and glistened like the pupils of so many eyes. Even the balls of noodles on display in glass boxes in the udon shop had a vivid clarity. Partly-burned charcoal was being dried on straw mats and in baskets laid out on the street in front of the eaves, and I could hear the sounds of a smith’s hammer and the soughing of a rice-hulling machine coming from somewhere.
We walked to the edge of the town and found a little place where we could sit on the tatami and have lunch. When I looked at them from the bridge I had the impression that Mounts Imo and Se were much further upstream, but from here, the two hills were right in front of us. The river runs between them, with the one on this side being Mount Imo, and the one on the other side being Mount Se. The author of Mount Imo and Mount Se: A Tale of Womanly Virtue probably got his inspiration from seeing the actual scenery here, but in reality the river at this point is still quite a bit wider than it appears on the stage, and much less of a narrow mountain torrent. Maybe the cherry-viewing pavilions of Koganosuke and Hinadori stood on these two hills, but I don’t think they would have been able to call across to each other like that. The ridge of Mount Se is connected to the mountain behind it, so it doesn’t have a clear shape, but the single conical hill of Mount Imo stands completely alone, clad in a luxurious robe of green trees. The town of Kamiichi continues up to its base, so that when you take in the panorama from the river, the two-storey houses at the back of the town look like three storeys, while the single-storey ones look like two storeys. Some of the houses have rigged up a zip wire from their upper floor to the riverbed, so that they can draw up water from the river by running a bucket along it using a rope.
“By the way, next after Mounts Imo and Se is The Thousand Cherry Trees of Yoshitsune, you know,” said Tsumura suddenly.
“The thousand cherry trees must be at Shimoichi. I’ve heard of the well-bucket sushi shop there, but…”
I had never been there, but I had heard a rumour that there was somebody living in Shimoichi who claimed to be a descendant of Taira no Koremori, based on the fictional jōruri puppet theatre story that Koremori had hidden by becoming the adopted son of a sushi shop owner. In any case, I understand that while there is nobody called Igami no Gonta there, they still call the daughter of the house Ozato, and sell sushi fished up in a bucket. But Tsumura came up with an alternative proposal, which was that in the village of Natsumi, which was ahead of us, on the opposite side of the river from Miyataki, there was a house whose family treasure was the Hatsune drum of the fabled Shizuka Gozen. His suggestion was that since it was on our way, we should go and see that.
The village of Natsumi, by the way, must be on the bank of the Natsumi River that is mentioned in the Noh play The Two Shizukas. ”Near the Natsumi River, a woman appeared from nowhere…” In this play, the spirit of Lady Shizuka appears there, and says “since my sins weigh on me very grievously, please copy a sutra for me in one day.” Afterwards there is a dance section, and one of the things she says is, “Although I am truly ashamed, my heart cannot forget what happened long ago… do not think that I am now that woman who shares her name Natsumi with the river of fair Yoshino.” Although this is a legend, there do seem to be significant grounds for thinking that there is a connection between the place Natsumi and the Lady Shizuka, so it may not be altogether nonsense. This oral tradition seems to have a long history, considering that in a source like the Collection of Pictures of Famous Places in Yamato it says “there is a famous well in Natsumi called Flower Basket Spring, and the remains of the house where Shizuka Gozen lived for a while”. The household that has the drum now call themselves Ōtani, but back in the past they were called Murakuni no Shōji, and according to the family annals, Yoshitsune and Shizuka Gozen stayed with them for a while when they escaped to Yoshino in the late 1180s. Furthermore, there are famous places nearby including the stream of Kisa, Utatane Bridge, and Murasaki Bridge. Some sightseers go to see the Hatsune drum, but on the basis that it is an important family heirloom, the Ōtani family refuse to show it to casual visitors unless they have received a request the day before through a suitable intermediary. With that in mind, Tsumura had asked his relative at Kuzu to speak to them, and he said he thought they would be expecting us around today.
“So that’s the drum made with the skins of the fox’s parents, so that when Shizuka Gozen taps it, the spirit of the Tadanobu fox appears, right?”
“Yes, that’s what happens in the play.”
“So there’s a family that actually has that drum?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Is it really made with fox skins?”
“I haven’t seen it myself, so I can’t tell you. The household certainly has good pedigree, anyway.”
“I wonder if that’s also just a myth like the bucket sushi shop? Probably some old fraud thought it up because of the existence of the Two Shizukas Noh play.”
“Well, that’s as may be, but actually I have an interest in that drum. I definitely want to pay a visit to the Ōtani family and see the Hatsune drum… I’ve been thinking that for some time, and it’s one of the purposes of this trip of ours.”
Tsumura apparently had some reason for saying this, but at this point he only said “I’ll tell you some other time”.