Yoshino Arrowroot - Chapter 5

Kuzu

From here on I will tell Tsumura’s story in my own words.

As explained above, one reason why Tsumura felt a special fondness for the Yoshino area was the influence of the play The Thousand Cherry Trees, but another reason was that he had heard in the past that his mother was from Yamato Province. Where in Yamato she had come from, though, and whether her childhood home still existed – all this had long been veiled in mystery. Tsumura had wanted to learn as much as possible about his mother’s history while his grandmother was still alive, so he had asked her all sorts of questions, but his grandmother couldn’t remember anything much, and he had been unable to get satisfactory responses. He tried asking his uncles and aunts, and various other relatives, but oddly, nobody knew about his mother’s family. Given that the Tsumuras were a long-established family, relatives from two or three generations back regularly visited the household as a matter of course, but it appeared that in fact his mother had not come directly from Yamato to marry his father, but had been sold into the Osaka pleasure quarters as a child, and from there had been adopted into a decent family and gone on to get married. It stated in the household register that she had been born in 1863, had been living in the household of Urakado Kijūrō of Imabashi 3rd district in 1877 when she married into the Tsumura family at the age of 15, and had died in 1891 at the age of 29. At the time he graduated from middle school, this was just about all that Tsumura knew about his mother. With hindsight, he thought that the reason why his grandmother and other older relatives wouldn’t tell him much about her was that given the circumstances of her background, they probably preferred not to talk about it. But the fact that his mother had grown up in difficult circumstances only increased Tsumura’s sense of how much he missed her, and he did not feel it was anything to feel particularly ashamed of or unhappy about.  Even given that people married young in those days, his mother had married into the family at the age of fifteen, so she had had relatively little opportunity to be sullied by the world of the pleasure quarters, and had probably not lost her innocent girlishness. Indeed, that probably explained why she had had as many as three children. On marrying into his father’s family, the innocent young bride had presumably undergone various training suitable for the wife of a long-established household. Tsumura had previously seen a practice book for songs accompanied by the koto, which his mother had copied out by hand when she was seventeen or eighteen. She had folded a sheet of calligraphy paper into quarters and written out the words of the songs horizontally, painstakingly entering the koto music in red between the lines in a beautiful specimen of fine brushwork.

Later on Tsumura had gone to Tokyo to pursue his studies, which had naturally weakened his ties to his family back at home, but even after that, his desire to track down his mother’s ancestral home had only intensified. Frankly speaking, it was fair to say that he had spent his youth yearning for his mother. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a passing interest in the townswomen, young ladies, geisha, actresses and so on that he happened to meet, but the ones who attracted his attention were always those with a face that reminded him of his mother’s features, as he knew them from photographs. The reason why he had thrown up his studies and returned to Osaka, too, was not just because of his grandmother’s wishes, but also because he himself had felt drawn to that place he longed for – the place just that little bit closer to his mother’s birthplace, the house in Shimanouchi where she had spent half of her short life. His mother was a Kansai woman, in any case, so it was rare to meet a woman in Tokyo who looked really like her – but living in Osaka, one did bump into a woman like that occasionally. He knew only that his mother had been raised in the pleasure quarters, and rued the fact that he did not know which specific district. Even so, in the hope of meeting someone who looked like his mother he befriended the women of the demimonde, and often went drinking in tea houses. He had a number of affairs as a result, and earned himself a reputation as a playboy. But in reality, this was something that only started because he missed his mother, so he had never become deeply involved with anybody, and he had remained a virgin to this day.

After he had spent two or three years in this fashion, his grandmother died.

One day after his grandmother’s death, when he was in the process of sorting out the items he had inherited, he was going through the drawers of a kimono chest in the storehouse. Among documents in his grandmother’s handwriting, he found some documents and scraps of paper he had never seen before. These were love letters exchanged between his father and mother while his mother was still working as an apprentice, a letter addressed to his mother from a person who appeared to be her birth mother in Yamato, and some formal certificates in koto, shamisen, ikebana, tea ceremony and the like. There were three love letters from his father and two from his mother. They were only a silly exchange of sweet nothings between a boy and girl in the full flush of first love, but it was apparent that they were both doing their best to keep the whole affair from public knowledge. Even though the actual brush strokes were faltering, his mother’s writing in particular was strikingly advanced for a fifteen-year old girl – with phrases like “please pay no attention to my heart’s foolish confessions of love, and I beg you, be a little understanding of the liberty I am taking in sending you this letter” or “I am so happy that someone as notable as yourself has deigned to take an interest in me, even though I have told you all about my own humble origins…” The letters gave a sense of how men and women matured at a young age in those days. Next, there was just a single letter sent from his mother’s original family in the country. It was addressed to “resident in the Kokawa household at No. 9 Shinmachi, Osaka”, while the sender was ”the household of Konbu Jozaemon, Kubokaido, Kuzu Village, Yoshino, Yamato Province”. It began “I humbly write to you on this occasion in gratitude for your kindness to your parents. The weather will soon be turning colder but your father and mother are very glad to hear that you are in good health….” This was followed by a long list of instructions to consider the master of her establishment as a father and treat him with great respect, to work hard at practising her artistic accomplishments, not to be envious of the possessions of others, and to have faith in the gods.

Sitting on the dusty warehouse floor, Tsumura read this letter again in the dim light. When he resurfaced, he realised that the sun had set, so now he took the letter back to his study and spread it out under an electric light. Above that long scroll of letter paper, which extended several yards when rolled out, there floated in his imagination the figure of an old lady squatting down in a peasant house in Kuzu, Yoshino, perhaps thirty or forty years before, repeatedly rubbing the mucus out of her aged eyes as she carefully spelt out her words to her daughter by the flickering light of a paper lantern. The vocabulary and kana used in the letter included some shaky places redolent of the writing of an old lady in the country, but the brush use itself was surprisingly assured, and the elegantly correct cursive style did not seem altogether that of an impoverished peasant. But presumably the family finances had got into some difficulty, and as a result they had exchanged their daughter for money. Disappointingly, the date was only given as December 7^th, with no year given, but it seemed likely that this was the first letter after they sent their daughter off to Osaka. Even so the poor aged parents, with not long to live, had written things like “this is your mother’s last request,” and “even if we should die, we will do our best to support you”. In the midst of all the various warnings not to do this or that, it was interesting that his mother was warned at some length to take care of paper. “Your sister Orito and I made this paper ourselves, so please make absolutely sure to keep it carefully with you. However luxurious your life may be, you should not waste paper. Orito and I have taken great pains in making this paper, chapping our fingers on its edges every day” – she took as many as twenty lines to say this. This enabled Tsumura to establish that his mother’s birth family were paper-makers. And he also gathered that his mother had had a sister who was still living in the household. Another lady, called “Oei”, also appeared in the letter, as follows: “Oei goes every day to dig arrowroot in the heavy snow of the mountains so that we can come and visit you when we have earned enough money for the journey, so that is something to look forward to”, and she ended with a poem, “The heart of a parent longing for her child is as lonely as the Kuragari pass in the darkness.” The “Kuragari pass” mentioned in this poem is on the road that crosses the mountains between Osaka and Yamato, and used to be famous for cuckoos, so Tsumura had been there once in his middle school days. Indeed one night in around June, when he was resting at a temple on the mountain, he had suddenly heard a single cuckoo calling at around four or five in the morning, in the early glimmerings of dawn. This was followed by a second and a third call, either from the same bird or from different cuckoos, and eventually the air was filled with cuckoos calling. When he read the poem, Tsumura suddenly remembered the calls of those cuckoos, which at the time he had hardly thought about, with an unbearable sense of nostalgia. And he realised how very natural it was that people in the past likened the calls of those birds to the souls of the dead, referring to them as “spirits of the Shu kingdom” and “those unable to return.”

But it was something else in the old lady’s letter that Tsumura felt to be the most curious coincidence. This lady – his maternal grandmother  – made frequent reference in the letter to foxes. ”I shall make absolutely sure in future to go without fail every single morning to pray to the fox-god and the white fox Lady Shin at the shrine. As you know, all as a result of our devotions, the fox comes to your father’s side when he calls.” And, “therefore on this occasion everything is completely thanks to the white fox, and from now on I shall pray daily for the good fortune and prosperity of the household you are living in and that no illness befall you, and I have absolute faith in this”. In the light of what was written here, it is clear that his grandmother and her husband were unusually firm adherents to the “Inari” cult. We can imagine that by “the fox-god…at the shrine” she was referring to a small shrine she was praying to that had been built within the grounds of the house. The white fox she called “Lady Shin”, who was the messenger of the god Inari, had presumably made its earth somewhere near that small shrine. When she wrote, “As you know,… the fox comes to your father’s side when he calls,” it was not clear whether the white fox responded to the grandfather’s voice by actually appearing from its earth, or whether it was just its spirit that was transferred and entered into his grandmother, or into his grandfather himself. But one can imagine that with the grandfather able to summon the fox at will, and the fox duly attending to the wishes of the old couple, it controlled the destiny of the household.

Of the paper of the letter, the old lady had written, “Your sister Orito and I made this paper ourselves, so please make absolutely sure to keep it carefully with you.” Tsumura did in fact keep it carefully with him. The letter must have been sent before 1877 at the latest, so assuming that it dated from shortly after his mother had been sold into Osaka, it was now thirty or forty years old, and had yellowed so that it looked as though it had been lightly toasted. But it was high-quality paper with a denser texture than you find in paper nowadays, and it was strong. As he turned the paper up to the sunlight and looked at the lines of the fine strong fibres running through it, Tsumura remembered the statement “Orito and I have taken great pains in making this paper, chapping our fingers on its edges every day.” He felt that each thin sheet of paper, just like the skin of an elderly person, contained the blood of the woman who had given birth to his mother. And when he thought that perhaps his mother, too, when she received this letter at the Shinmachi establishment, had kept it close to her just as he did, and treated it with great reverence, this old letter which “had the fragrance of a person long ago” became a doubly fascinating and precious memento.

There is probably no need to write at much length about the process by which Tsumura managed to use the information in the letter to track down the house where his mother had been born. Since the letter dated from around thirty or forty years before our trip, the various changes that took place around the time of the 1868 Meiji Restoration presented some difficulties. The Kokawa household at No. 9 Shinmachi into which his mother had been sold, and the Urakado household at Imabashi into which she had temporarily been adopted before her marriage, had now both disappeared and the families who had lived there could not be traced. The establishments of the tea ceremony, ikebana, koto and shamisen teachers who had signed her diplomas had also largely disappeared, so as a result, the letter described above was the only remaining clue. The simplest approach was to go and visit Kuzu in the district of Yoshino in Yamato Province, and indeed there was really no feasible alternative. So in the winter of the year when his Osaka grandmother died, Tsumura completed the required hundred days of Buddhist memorial rites, and then without revealing his true purpose even to his closest friends, he pretended that he was just going off traveling on his own on a casual trip, and set out determinedly for Kuzu village.

By comparison with Osaka, rural districts had probably not seen such dramatic changes. On the contrary, given the nature of the countryside, and considering that the village was in the remoter part of the Yoshino district, near where the road petered out in the deep mountains, even a poor peasant’s house was unlikely to have disappeared without trace in a matter of just two or three generations. Taking this optimistic view, one fine morning in December Tsumura hired a rickshaw from Kamiichi and hurried to Kuzu along the same road by which we had walked here today. When he saw the quaint old houses, the very first thing that caught his eye was the paper spread out everywhere, drying beneath the eaves. Just like seaweed being dried in a fishing village, the rectangular sheets of paper had been carefully spread out on boards, as though clean white sheets of cardboard had been scattered everywhere. When he saw them brightly reflecting the cold winter sun on both sides of the road, and in layers all the way up the terraced hillsides, tears sprang to his eyes for some reason. This was the land of his forebears. He was finally treading the soil of his mother’s ancestral home, of which he had so long dreamed. At the time of his mother’s birth, this little village in its eternal mountain valley had probably shown the same peaceful scene he could now see before him. Tsumura felt that he had come within touching distance of the past. If he closed his eyes for a brief moment and reopened them, his mother might appear in a group of young girls playing somewhere within those rustic garden fences.

“Konbu” is an unusual surname, so he initially expected that he would quickly find the right house, but when he went to the section of the village called Kubokaido, the surname “Konbu” was extremely common, and it was not at all clear how he was going to find the house he was looking for. His and his rickshaw man had no alternative but to visit all the houses with the surname “Konbu” one by one, but they told him that they had not heard of anyone in the past called “Konbu Jozaemon”, and neither was there anyone of that name now. Eventually an elderly person who appeared from the back of a cheap sweet shop and was standing on his veranda said “it may be over there, then,” pointing at a thatched roof that could be seen on a slight rise on the left hand side of the road. Tsumura asked the rickshaw man to wait in front of the sweet shop. Folllowing an old path that led up the hill, set back about fifty yards from the road, he climbed up towards the thatched roof. It was a noticeably chilly morning, but this spot backed onto a mountain that sloped gently upward behind it, and the three or four households there, in a mild sunny location sheltered from the wind, were all busy making paper. As he climbed up the slope, Tsumura became aware that the young women of these houses on the hill had put aside their work and were staring down at what must have been an unusual sight in those parts – a smart young city gentleman coming up the slope towards them. It seemed that paper-making was a job for daughters and wives, so all the people working in the gardens next to the houses were wearing small towels on their heads as women generally do. In the crisp, fresh light that reflected from the paper and the towels, Tsumura walked up to the house that had been indicated to him. He looked at the name plate, which said “Konbu Yoshimatsu” – the name Jozaemon was not listed. Next to the main house stood a shed that looked like an outhouse, on the wooden floor of which squatted a girl of seventeen or eighteen who was plunging both her arms into milky water that looked like the water left after rice has been washed, and using a wooden frame to sieve and quickly scoop up the water. The girl precipitated the milky water in the frame into the form of paper at the bottom of bamboo mats shaped like steaming baskets, placed these mats in order on the floor, and then quickly thrust the frame back into the water. Since the door at the front of the shed was open, Tsumura lingered the other side of a fading clump of wild chrysanthemums in the hedge and watched as the girl deftly formed two or three sheets. Her movements were smooth, but he was disappointed to see that she was a typical country girl – sturdy, thickset and big-boned. Her cheeks were puffed out with rude health, and she gleamed with youth, but it was her fingers steeped in the water that touched him most deeply, because through them he could sense the truth of the phrase “chapping our fingers on its edges every day“. Those fingers were painful to look at, being red and swollen with the bitter cold. But there was a sense in them of the unstoppable force of the girl’s daily growth, and he felt that they contained a sort of pathetic beauty.

Suddenly an old Inari shrine at the left-hand corner of the main house caught his attention. Tsumura instinctively advanced past the hedge. He walked up to a lady of twenty-four or twenty-five, who seemed to be the mistress of the house, and was working at drying strips of paper in the garden.

When he told this lady why he had come, she seemed to find it all rather sudden and hesitated for a moment, but when he took out the letter and showed it to her as evidence, she gradually accepted it. “I don’t know, so please speak to somebody older,” she said, and she summoned out from the recesses of the main house an old lady apparently in her sixties. She was the “Orito” mentioned in the letter – Tsumura’s mother’s older sister.

Trembling at the intensity of Tsumura’s questioning, this old lady slowly pulled together the threads of memories that had already started to fade, and with her toothless mouth, gradually told him what she knew. Sometimes she had completely forgotten and was unable to answer, sometimes her memory appeared to be deceiving her, and sometimes there were things she did not want to tell him, or there were inconsistencies between her earlier and her later answers. Her wheezy mumbling voice was often difficult to hear, and there were frequently occasions when she was unable to grasp Tsumura’s meaning however often he repeated the question, so more than half of what follows had to be filled in by Tsumura’s own imagination. In any event, this is what emerged from the process: To be sure, the old lady said that Tsumura’s mother was taken to Osaka in the Keiō era of 1865-8, but in fact, since at the time she herself, who was turning 67 this year, was fourteen or fifteen, while Tsumura’s mother was eleven or twelve, it must have been in the Meiji era, which started in 1868. So his mother can only have been an apprentice in Shinmachi for two to three years, or four years at most, before marrying straight into the Tsumura family. As far as he could learn from the old lady Orito, even though the Konbu family had been in financial difficulties at the time, they were a long-established family with a valued reputation, so they presumably hid as far as possible the fact that they sent their daughter to work in that sort of place. It was natural enough while the daughter was an apprentice, but even after she had married into a prominent family, they seemed not to have had much contact with her as a result of shame on the part of both the daughter and the Konbu family. At that time, people apprenticed into the pleasure quarters would be employed in various types of work, including as geisha, prostitutes or tea house girls. But regardless of the type of work they were doing, it was customary for them to break off contact with their parents once the contract of sale had been sealed, and however things developed after that, as live-in apprentices, the girls would probably have had no right to have any dealings with their real families. But the old lady faintly remembered that after her sister had married into the Tsumura family, her mother had gone once or twice to Osaka to see her, and there had been occasions when she had spoken of her surprise that her daughter had become the chatelaine of a rich family and had very much risen in the world. Orito herself had been strongly urged to visit her in Osaka, but she couldn’t visit a place like that in her shabby state. Her sister had never come back to visit her home village, so Orito had never met her sister after she became an adult. First her sister’s husband and then her sister herself had died, and then both her own parents had died, so that put a final stop to any contact there had been with the Tsumura family.

In speaking of her sister – Tsumura’s mother – the old lady Orito used the indirect expression “your mother”. This may have been out of politeness to Tsumura, but it may also be that she had forgotten her sister’s name. When he asked about the person “Oei” who “goes every day to dig arrowroot in the heavy snow of the mountains”, he was told that she was the eldest sister. Orito had been the second, and Tsumura’s mother had been the third and final daughter. But for some reason the eldest sister Oei had married out into a different family, so it was Orito’s husband who had been adopted into the family and carried on the Konbu family name. Both Oei and Orito’s husband had now died, so the household was presently headed by Orito’s son Yoshimatsu, and the woman who had received Tsumura in the garden shortly before was Yoshimatsu’s wife. While Orito’s mother had no doubt kept at least some documents and letters relating to her youngest daughter while she was still alive, the household was now in the third generation since then, so there was almost nothing left to speak of. So said Orita, but then as though she had suddenly remembered, she stood up, opened the door of the Buddhist altar, took out a single photograph that was on display to the side of the mortuary tablet, and brought it to show him. It was a wallet-sized portrait of his mother towards the end of her life that Tsumura recognised, and of which he had a copy in his own album.

“Oh, there is something of your mother’s,” added the old lady Orita as though she had again remembered something. “As well as the photograph, there was a koto. My mother used to treasure it as a memento of her Osaka daughter, but I haven’t taken it out and looked at it for a long time, so I wonder what’s happened to it…”

Tsumura was told that if somebody would look in the storeroom upstairs it was probably there, so he waited for Yoshimatsu to come home from the fields so that he could see it. He took the opportunity to eat lunch nearby, and when he came back, he helped the young couple to carry the bulky object, covered in dust, out onto the veranda to look at it in the light.

How did an object of this kind end up in a household like this? When they took off the patterned oilcloth cover, what appeared underneath certainly looked old, but it was a full-sized koto, six feet long, lacquered with gold makie decoration. The makie patterns covered almost the whole instrument apart from the soundboard. Both sides of the base showed what appeared to be scenes of the Sumiyoshi district of Osaka, with one side showing the main gate and curved bridge of the shrine among pine trees, while the other side depicted a tall lantern and windswept pine trees on a foreshore. There were numerous flying cranes depicted from the head of the instrument to the fixed bridge saddles and some way further down, while at the tail end, beneath the string coils, there were images of five-coloured clouds and celestial beings. The unlacquered sections of paulownia wood had darkened with age, so the colours of the makie and the other pictures struck the eyes with all the more elegance and brightness. Tsumura wiped the dust off the oilcloth cover and took another look at its dyed pattern. It was made out of what was probably fine Shioze silk, and in the upper part of the outer surface an eightfold plum crest had been picked out in white on a red base, while in the lower part was a kneeling Chinese beauty playing the koto on a high pavilion.  To the sides of the posts of the pavilion hung a pair of banners, on which were written in Chinese, “twenty-five strings plucked on a moonlit night”, and “they fly on untouched by regrets.” The underside of the cover depicted the moon and a skein of wild geese, and along the edge was written, “Is not a line of koto pegs like a flock of geese flying through the clouds?”

The eightfold plum, however, is not the crest of the Tsumura family, so he supposed it must have been either the crest of the Urakado family into which she was adopted, or just possibly that of the establishment in Shinmachi. Perhaps when she had married into the Tsumura family she had given to her family back at home a memento of her time in the pleasure quarters that she no longer needed? Or it might be that she had given it to her grandmother in the country to give to a daughter of marriageable age back at home. Or alternatively one might speculate that after being kept for a long time at the Shimanouchi house, it was sent back to her family in the country in accordance with the terms of her will. But neither the old lady Orito nor the young couple knew anything of the surrounding circumstances. They thought that certainly there had been a letter or something along with it, but it had now been lost, and all they could say was that they knew that the instrument had been inherited from “the person who was sent to Osaka”.

There was also a small paulownia box containing accessories, including some movable bridges and plectra. The moveable bridges were made from a blackish hardwood, but even these had pine, bamboo and plum motifs in makie on each one. The plectra were worn down as if well-used, and in a fit of nostalgia Tsumura fitted one of them, into which his mother must have put her slender fingers, onto his own little finger. There appeared for a moment in his mind’s eye that scene from his infancy in which an elegant lady and her tutor had played “The Fox’s Lament” in a room at the back of the house. That lady may not have been his mother, and that koto may not have been this koto, but his mother had probably used this koto several times to accompany herself as she sang that song. From that moment Tsumura thought that if possible, he would like to restore this instrument and ask a suitable person to play “The Fox’s Lament” on the anniversary of his mother’s death.

Generations of the family had prayed to a small fox shrine in the garden as a tutelary deity, so the young couple confirmed that it must be the one mentioned in the letter. Of course there was nobody in the family these days availing themselves of the services of a fox. When Yoshimatsu had been a child he had heard rumours that his grandfather used to do that, but the so-called “white fox Lady Shin” had over the generations ceased to appear. There only remained the earth in which the fox had once lived, in the shade of a beech tree behind the shrine, and when they took Tsumura to see it, he felt a pang of absence when he saw that a sacred rope had been hung across the entrance to the hole.

This all happened in the year of Tsumura’s grandmother’s death, so these events took place two or three years before he told them to me on the rocks of Miyataki. When he had written of his “relatives in Kuzu” in his communication to me, he was referring to Orito’s household. In any case, Orito was Tsumura’s maternal aunt, and her house was definitely the house where his mother was born, so after his initial visit he had maintained the renewed contact with this household and his relatives there. Not only that, but he was giving them some financial support, had built a separate annexe for his aunt, and had expanded their paper-making workshop. As a result the Konbu household, even though they were only engaged in modest manual work, had noticeably expanded their operations.