Yoshino Arrowroot - Chapter 6

Shionoha

“So what’s the reason for your trip here this time…?”

The two of us were lying on the rocks oblivious to the fact that the twilight was gathering around us; I asked this question when there was a pause in Tsumura’s lengthy narrative.

“…Is it some business to do with your aunt?”

“Well, actually there’s still a part of the story I haven’t told you yet.”

In the twilight, I could only just make out the white foam of the rapids crashing against the rocks beneath our eyes, but there were certain indications telling me that Tsumura’s face had reddened slightly as he said this.

“I mentioned, didn’t I, that when I stood outside the fence of my aunt’s house that first time, there was a girl of seventeen or eighteen making paper in there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Actually, I was told that she is the granddaughter of my other aunt, Aunt Oei, who has died. She happened to be helping out at the Konbu house at the time.”

In line with my suspicions, Tsumura’s voice gradually weakened and became a bit hoarse as he said this.

“As I said a moment ago, that girl is very much a country lass and by no means a beauty. Because she works with water like that all through the winter, her arms and legs are not at all dainty – they are chapped all over. But maybe taking my cue from that phrase in the letter “chapping our fingers on its edges every day“, I took a strange fancy to that girl from the first time I saw her red hands plunging into the water. And there was something in her face that reminded me of my mother’s face, as I know it from photographs. Given her upbringing, she’s the servant type, of course, but she might become more like my mother if she were polished up a bit.”

“I see. So she’s your Hatsune Drum, then?”

“Well, yes, that’s right. What do you think? I’m thinking of marrying that girl…”

The girl’s name was Owasa. The old lady Oei’s daughter, Omoto, had married into a farming family called Ichida near Kashiwagi, and Owasa had been born there. But her birth family were in straitened circumstances, so after she had completed her elementary schooling, she was put out as an apprentice maid in Gojōnochō in Kashihara. When she had turned seventeen, her family had been short-handed, so she had taken leave of absence and returned home. Since then she had been helping on the farm, but there was nothing to do there in the winter, so she had been sent to the Konbu household to help with the paper-making. She would soon be coming this year as well, but she probably hadn’t arrived yet. So Tsumura had come not so much to see her as to declare his intentions first to Aunt Orito and to Yoshimatsu and his wife. Then if all went well, he would either get them to summon Owasa to them straight away, or would go and visit her.

“So if everything goes well, I’ll have the chance to meet Owasa too, won’t I?”

“Yes, the reason I asked you to come on this trip with me is that I really wanted you to meet her and to ask you what you thought of her. Our stations in life are so different that I must admit I am not completely confident she will be happy if I marry her. I’m sure enough about myself, though.”

In any case I got up from where I had been sitting on the rocks, and urged Tsumura to do the same. We hired a rickshaw from Miyataki, and by the time we arrived at the Konbu house in Kuzu, where it had been decided we would stay the night, it was completely dark – night had well and truly fallen. If I were to record my impressions of Aunt Orito and her family, the condition of their house, the state of their paper-making business, and so on, it would take too long, and would largely repeat the description above, so I will skip all that, and just mention two or three things I remember. Electric lighting had not yet reached the area at the time, so we sat round a large hearth and chatted with the family in the lamplight, giving us a strong sense of being in a house in the mountains. They burnt various types of wood in the hearth, including both evergreen and sawtooth oak, along with mulberry, but they said it was mulberry which burnt best, with a gentle heat, so they burnt great quantities of mulberry logs with a startling extravagance unimaginable in the city. In the light from the blazing fire, the beams and the ceiling above the hearth glistened pitch black, like freshly-applied coal tar. The Kumano mackerel they served as part of the evening meal was unusually delicious. They told me that this mackerel is caught in the sea at Kumano, sewn into bamboo leaves, and brought over the mountains for sale. In the period of up to a week or so that this takes, it naturally weathers and dries out, and is sometimes stolen by foxes. These are some of the things I remember.

The next morning, Tsumura and I had a discussion, and decided to go our own separate ways for a while. Tsumura would deal with his important business, putting his case to the Konbu family and trying to get everything sorted out on that front. I would be in the way if I stayed around while this was going on, so I would travel further up the Yoshino River for a planned five or six days, and penetrate the area near its source, with a view to unearthing material for my novel. On the first day I would leave Kuzu and go to Unogawa to pay my respects to the tomb of Prince Ogura, the son of Emperor Go-Kameyama. I would then cross the Gosha Pass into the Kawakami manor, going as far as Kashiwagi, where I would stay the night. On the second day, I would cross the Obagamine Pass and spend the night at Kawai, in the Kitayama manor. On the third day I would visit sites including the Rightful Prince’s palace at Ryūsenji Temple in Kotochi and the grave of Prince Katayama, and would climb Mount Ōdaigahara and stay the night on the mountain. On the fourth day I would pass the Goshiki hot spring and explore the Sannoko gorge, and if it proved possible to get that far, I would see Hachimandai and Kakushidai with my own eyes. I would either look to stay in a woodcutter’s hut, or would push on to Shionoha and stay there. On the fifth day I would return from Shionoha to Kashiwagi, and on that day or the next I would return to Kuzu.

I put this rough itinerary together in consultation with the Konbu family, who explained the geography of the area to me. Having agreed where I would meet up with Tsumura again, and with every good wish for his success, I set off. As I left, Tsumura said that depending on how things turned out, he might well set out to Owasa’s house in Kashiwagi himself, so I should just stop by at her house, in such-and-such a place, when I got back to Kashiwagi.

My trip proceeded more or less in line with the itinerary. When I asked, I was told that these days there was even a bus over the steep Obagamine Pass, so you could get as far as Kinomoto in Kii Province without having to walk. It felt like a completely different age from when I had travelled here before. I was also lucky with the weather, and was able to gather more material than I expected, so until the fourth day I pressed on without any sense at all that the route was steep or arduous. But then I really did get into difficulties when I entered the Sannoko valley. Of course, I had had some advance warning, having been told a few times before I got there, “That valley is very hard going,” or “Wow, are you really going to Sannoko?”. So on the fourth day I had adjusted my plans and spent the night at the Goshiki hot spring. Then I took a guide with me and set off early in the morning with a spring in my step.

The route descended following the Yoshino River, which has its source in Mount Ōdaigahara, as far as a place called Ninomata, where the Yoshino merges with another mountain river. There the path divided, with one fork going straight ahead to Shionoha, and the other turning off to the right, and soon bringing one into the Sannoko valley. But while the main route to Shionoha is definitely a “path”, the fork to the right is no more than a faint track, through thick stands of cryptomeria, in which one can only just about see where people have walked before. To make matters worse, it had rained the previous night, so the volume of water in the Ninomata River had risen sharply. Some of the log bridges had collapsed or broken, and the only way across was to jump from rock to rock with the torrent surging around you, and sometimes to get down and crawl on all fours. Further up from the Ninomata River is a river called the Okutama River, and from there until you wade across the Jizōgawara river bed and eventually reach the Sannoko River, the path between the two rivers threads its way along the eroded edge of a dauntingly high sheer precipice. In some places the path is too narrow to put your feet side by side, while in other places it disappears altogether, and twists its way meanderingly along the flank of the cliffs, crossing from one side to the other using logs, or planks with rungs, which have been slung across the sheer drop between the cliff on this side and the cliff on the other side. A proper mountaineer could easily walk this sort of route before breakfast, but I was hopeless at gymnastics when I was at middle school, and was always reduced to tears by horizontal bars, vaults, and pommel horses. In those days I was young, and not as stout as I am now, so on flat ground I could walk twenty miles or more, but in this kind of difficult terrain you have to use all four limbs, so it’s not a matter of how strong your legs are, but whether you can make use of your whole body. I think my face must have gone from deadly pale to bright red and back again several times. To be honest, if the guide hadn’t been with me, I might well have turned back long before, at the log bridge around Ninomata. But with the guide there, I was reluctant to lose face, and with every step I took, it became just as terrifying to go back as to go further forward, so I felt I had no alternative but to stagger onwards.

The autumn colours in that valley were a wonderful sight, but my eyes were firmly fixed on where I was planting my feet, and I only looked up occasionally, such as when startled by the flapping wings of a great tit that flew up in front of me, so I am embarrassed to say I am not qualified to give a detailed description. But my guide was quite at home. He smoked pipe tobacco rolled up in camellia leaves instead of a pipe, and negotiated the precipitous path easily, pointing at the distant valley bottom and telling me the name of this or that waterfall or rock. “That rock is called “Gozen speaks”,” he said at one point. A little further on he said, “that rock is called “Berobedo””. It was as much as I could do to peep down fearfully at the valley floor, and I couldn’t clearly tell which rock was “Berobedo” and which rock was “Gozen speaks”, but according to the guide, from ancient times there was always a rock called “Gozen speaks” and a rock called “Berobedo” in the valley where the Prince lived. Four or five years earlier, a certain eminent person had come from Tokyo – he may have been a scholar, or a professor, or a government official, but in any case somebody important had come to see this valley, and when the guide had taken him there, that person had asked, “Is there a rock here called “Gozen speaks?””, so the guide had said, “Yes, Sir, there is,” and shown him the rock. Then the visitor had also asked, “Is there a rock called “Berobedo”, then?”, to which the guide had replied, “Yes, Sir, there is,” and shown him the rock in question. The person from Tokyo had been impressed and had gone home saying, “I see. Well in that case, this is definitely the place where the Rightful Prince was.” All this the guide told me, but he did not know where the strange names of those rocks had come from.

This guide also knew various other legends. A long time ago, a band of soldiers from the Kyoto court had sneaked into the area, but they could not find where the Rightful Prince’s palace was, so they went from mountain to mountain searching for it. One day when they had wandered into this gorge, they happened to glance down at the river, where they saw gold flowing down with the current. When they traced the origin of the gold back upstream, sure enough, they found the palace. After the Prince moved to the palace at Kitayama, he was in the habit of going every morning to the bank of the Kitayama River in front of the palace to wash his face, but he was always accompanied by two doubles so that nobody could tell which was the Prince. When the intruders asked an old woman from the village who happened to be passing by, the old woman told them “the one with white breath coming from his mouth is the Prince.” So the soldiers attacked the Prince and succeeded in taking his head – but the story runs that for generations thereafter, that old lady’s descendants were born deformed.

At about one o’clock in the afternoon I reached a hut in Hachimandaira, and I jotted those legends down in my notebook while I ate the lunch I had brought with me. From Hachimandaira to Kakushidaira and back was another seven miles or so, but the path between them was rather easier to walk than the one I had taken in the morning. But however much the Southern Court Princes may have wanted to conceal themselves from prying eyes, the far end of that valley is just too inaccessible. Surely it can’t have been here that Prince Katayama wrote his poem, “After making my escape I live in a brushwood hut deep in the mountains with my heart in tune with the moon.” In other words, I think that Sannoko is a place more of legends than of reality.

That day the guide and I stayed at the house of a woodsman in Hachimandaira, who treated us to rabbit for supper. The following day, we returned by the same route as before to Ninomata, and there I parted from the guide and went on to Shionoha. I had heard that it was only a couple of miles from here to Kashiwagi, and that there was a hot spring bubbling up by the side of the river, so I went over to the river to take a dip in the hot water. There was a rope bridge at a point where the Yoshino River, boosted by the Ninomata River, had become quite a wide mountain torrent, and when I crossed this, there was hot water bubbling out on the river bank right under the bridge. But when I put my hand in to test the temperature, it was only about as warm as a puddle in the sunshine, and a group of peasant women were busily washing daikon radishes in it.

“You can only bathe in this hot spring in the summer. If you want to bathe at this time of year, we can draw the water out into that tub over there and heat it up separately for you,” said the women, pointing over to a bathtub with a built-in stove sitting on the river bank.

Just as I was looking over at the bathtub, someone shouted, “Hey,” from the rope bridge above me. When I looked up, Tsumura was coming across it with a girl, presumably Owasa, following behind him. The rope bridge was shaking a little with the weight of two of them, and the clopping of their clogs was echoing down the valley.

I ended up defeated by the sheer volume of source material I had collected, so I never wrote my historical novel. But I need hardly say that Owasa, whom I saw on the bridge that day, is now Mrs. Tsumura. So the trip was more of a triumph for Tsumura than it was for me.