My Year in No Man's Bay (38 page)
The medium-sized high-rise buildings around the center of Morioka looked hardly any different from those in Udine, for example, and the many sparsely wooded hills reminded him of those of Friuli, from between which, just as here, the snowcapped mountains in the north gleamed. What was so different from home in this remoteness, except
perhaps that instead of the accustomed clanging of bells a gong sounded? And the carpenter felt compelled to get away from the cities, in the opposite direction from most architects.
perhaps that instead of the accustomed clanging of bells a gong sounded? And the carpenter felt compelled to get away from the cities, in the opposite direction from most architects.
At the railroad station in Morioka, while he was waiting for a train to take him farther north, where the couple of falling snowflakes collided in the air, for the first time on his journey one of the natives approached him, a young boy, and requested permission in English to ask him a few questions, but then could not stammer out even the first question.
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o get out into the Japanese countryside, into a village, into nature, then became more tedious than tracking down the last hiding place of vagueness in the cities. But since he was fired up with enthusiasm for such a destination, it had to exist, as he told himself. And since he had unusual patienceâ“refresh your heart, be patient” was his mottoâeven the routes he took gave him pleasure.
o get out into the Japanese countryside, into a village, into nature, then became more tedious than tracking down the last hiding place of vagueness in the cities. But since he was fired up with enthusiasm for such a destination, it had to exist, as he told himself. And since he had unusual patienceâ“refresh your heart, be patient” was his mottoâeven the routes he took gave him pleasure.
Yet as a rule he had to plot them out himself, especially where the plains thickly dotted with settlements and cultivated fields met the mountains. Here he suddenly encountered virgin forest so dense that he could move forward only with the help of his special folding hatchet. How had the itinerant poets of earlier centuries made their way through here? Or had it been easier to cross the Japanese countryside on foot in those days? But hadn't almost all of them died young, and in the course of their wandering?
He then recognized that the quintessential rural and village settings were very like the Japanese urban no-man's-lands: they, too, often existed only for a single moment, though in different form. On yet another morning, now much later in the year, having arrived, as it were, by the back way at a mountain temple, and then been for hours its only visitor, squatting in the dim outhouse there, hidden in a remote spot behind plum and cherry trees, for a moment he had again experienced the sense of security he had had using the privy on his parents' solitary farm near Aurisina, reachable only through the barn or by way of a long, roofed wooden gallery; whereupon he wrote to me that it was time for my long-promised “Essay on Convenience Stations.”
It was conspicuous that he usually stumbled upon such spots near temples, specifically in their far-branching, always narrow, tapered hinterland,
carved out of virgin forests, here a small vegetable garden, there just such a cemetery, connected by an old wagon trail; and the couple of Buddhist monks, always busy, appeared there in the role of farmers.
carved out of virgin forests, here a small vegetable garden, there just such a cemetery, connected by an old wagon trail; and the couple of Buddhist monks, always busy, appeared there in the role of farmers.
And again one morning he saw in such an area a cluster of people who did not merely appear to be country folk, men and women, but were the spit and image of those from home, with stooped backs, prolapsed knees, gout-ridden, and this group of village pilgrims broke out in a unanimous cry of astonishment at the sight of the temple bell, at which each one straightened up from his stoop, stretched, stiffened, snapped upright, and one of the farmhand types almost tipped over backward.
That he almost always saw such no-man's-lands or villages only from the exterior was something he found perfectly all right. Remarkable architect that he was, he almost never felt drawn to interiors. He even avoided these wherever he could.
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he many different voices speaking inside him did not interfere with one another. Each oneâthat of the wood inspector, the wind expert, the acoustical engineer, the vagabond and dowserâcould have its say, at length, was distinct from that of its predecessor, which it took account of, continued, supplemented, grounded. That would yield an entire book (and someday he means to write it himself). And in between, and often for a very long time, the voices also kept silent, and he was, again as since childhood, just someone or other, feeling invisible.
he many different voices speaking inside him did not interfere with one another. Each oneâthat of the wood inspector, the wind expert, the acoustical engineer, the vagabond and dowserâcould have its say, at length, was distinct from that of its predecessor, which it took account of, continued, supplemented, grounded. That would yield an entire book (and someday he means to write it himself). And in between, and often for a very long time, the voices also kept silent, and he was, again as since childhood, just someone or other, feeling invisible.
In time many of the Japanese appeared to him more like travelers than himself. He was the native. Having set out with a swarm of them before dawn to climb Fujiyama, he went off on his own before they had even reached the tree line and spent the day searching for mushrooms, in the course of which he came upon a deer, small and stocky, almost like a wild horse, like his deer on the karst. And in Yokohama, where he lingered for an entire day on a slope above the harbor in the “European Cemetery,” with the graves of the first traders to come in the nineteenth century, he sat or walked, like the cemetery watchman of many years, behind native visitors, who photographed each other in front of the mostly English inscriptions, and here and there young people, as dusk fell, kissed; and then another time he stood in one of the temples of
mountainous Nikko while the priest deep inside called out “Amida!”âthat single word that was supposed to secure eternal blessednessâbut how he called it out! He stood in the background as the temple servant on duty, one step away from the group who had come by bus from Tokyo and seemed more amused than anything else by the priest's cry.
mountainous Nikko while the priest deep inside called out “Amida!”âthat single word that was supposed to secure eternal blessednessâbut how he called it out! He stood in the background as the temple servant on duty, one step away from the group who had come by bus from Tokyo and seemed more amused than anything else by the priest's cry.
Only the Japanese children violated from the beginning his imagined unobtrusiveness. He was the one on whom rested the bright black eyes of the infants (one of whom was always crossing his path, although during the entire time he never once saw a pregnant woman), and in front of the giant Buddha of Kamakura, enthroned out in the open, so large and heavy that he positively radiated peacefulness, he, the observer half in shadow, became a more significant sight for the children filing past all day than the colossal statue. And although he not once caught an adult passerby looking at him, afterward he sometimes carried glances inside him, especially from women, deeper and more durable than anywhere else: and each time he realized how much he had needed to be noticed after all.
Thus from time to time he himself was responsible for his plunging again into the world as it streamed past, not only by making himself noticeable but also by noticing things himself, and not merely various no-man's-lands or the bare countryside.
On the day of the great Buddha of Kamakura, he stood there until evening on the shore of the Pacific amid a group of girls in dark blue school uniforms who, one after the other, tossed long-stemmed roses like spears out into the ocean, and then danced until the flowers were carried out to sea and night fell. And then again schoolchildren, adolescents, in the railroad station of northerly Sendai, running in swarms alongside the train departing for Tokyo, in which sat their teacher, who had just taken leave of them forever; they were uttering wild cries of dismay, wailing, their tears visibly flying, their half-raised arms like stumps, their weeping spreading through the entire station, while at the same time the teacher, sitting in his compartment, wept silently in unison with them, something my friend had not experienced in any other country on earth, and also not in the land of dreamsâonly in the portrayals, everywhere in Japan, of the various animals mourning the death of the Buddha.
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n early summer, back in the north, to which he felt most powerfully drawn, while crossing on the former ferry, now converted into an excursion steamer the size of an ocean liner, from Aomori to Hokkaido, he caught himself, shortly before docking, under the still-bright midnight sky, in the dense crowd of passengers on deck who were taking flash pictures into the void, running his hand from behind over the hair of a beauty, a tall woman with a very broad Mongolian face, as previously he had now and then run his hand over the head of one of the children. And she, too, let it happen, except that she turned toward him and did not smile. Never had anyone looked at him that way.
n early summer, back in the north, to which he felt most powerfully drawn, while crossing on the former ferry, now converted into an excursion steamer the size of an ocean liner, from Aomori to Hokkaido, he caught himself, shortly before docking, under the still-bright midnight sky, in the dense crowd of passengers on deck who were taking flash pictures into the void, running his hand from behind over the hair of a beauty, a tall woman with a very broad Mongolian face, as previously he had now and then run his hand over the head of one of the children. And she, too, let it happen, except that she turned toward him and did not smile. Never had anyone looked at him that way.
The horizon all around displayed long, smooth strands of clouds, almost horizontal, floating, just like the hair of his fellow passenger, though instead of black they were snow-white, and the ship's arrival signal was still that of the former ferry, the only long-sustained note that had reached his ears up to that point in Japan, where from the traffic lights to the gameboys everything merely peeped and trilled (the temple gongs always died away too soon for him, and the dark drumming of water as it shot out over stones poking up through a cataract, a rarity everywhere in the world, was even more rarely to be heard out in the Japanese countryside, so difficult to get to).
On the island they became lovers, and he spent a few weeks with her, during which hardly a word passed between them, in a fishermen's village, where they occupied a hut built on stilts among several similar ones, each standing on its own spot and painted in its own color, there along the steep, rocky slope.
During the day, when they went outside, they touched up the paint and improved the dock, which was given a slight curvature, and who has ever seen two people, both in overalls of the same whiteness, working so close to each other and never getting in each other's way? Only people who had grown old together in house and garden could sometimes achieve thatâbut these two were still far from old.
The carpenter's heavy hand became, in loose imitation of Vitruvius, my friend's Roman ideal, identical with the architect's elegance. When the two of them, finger to finger, pulled the skin off the fish they had fried together, squatting hip to hip, the bones formed an arrowhead pattern in the pale flesh, and in the dim light of the narrow pebble
beach, after midnight a single shell, the size of a fist, shone iridescent in all the colors of the spectrum.
beach, after midnight a single shell, the size of a fist, shone iridescent in all the colors of the spectrum.
When he set out to leave her, it was understood that they would meet again by the year's end at the latest, and from then on would do everything side by side. Through her, the rest of the natives had become more accessible to him (sometimes even too much so for a reserved person like him). After that he had only to seek out certain placesânot only the farmers' or fish markets, or the strange village on the northern sea where there was hardly any transition between the boats and the cottagesâand the Japanese would reveal themselves in what was to himâthis vigilant man from border countryâan unfamiliar rootedness, even impudence, and, what is more, out of the public eye, lost the tormenting fear of failure they usually displayed there; when among themselves, they cheerfully made mistakes, merrily did the wrong thing.
What he had initially read in a travel guide now acquired another meaning for him: “You cannot get lost in Japan.”
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his morning, already in mid-autumn, in Nara, the original capital of the empire, where he spent the night in the suite made almost entirely of wood that the woman from Catalonia and I had occupied during our honeymoon, the corridor outside as broad as a street, my friend found the courage to take his first picture of a Japanese no-man's-land, then passed part of the forenoon lying on a temple balustrade facedown, his gaze through the gaps in the floor focused on the reddish, shimmering earth below, just as in childhood he had looked down from the gallery of the house on the karst into the chicken yard below, and in a residential quarter he again witnessed even the natives stumbling over the high threshold of their dwellings, and later he marveled for days over the course he had taken, not merely during this year in Japan but from birth.
his morning, already in mid-autumn, in Nara, the original capital of the empire, where he spent the night in the suite made almost entirely of wood that the woman from Catalonia and I had occupied during our honeymoon, the corridor outside as broad as a street, my friend found the courage to take his first picture of a Japanese no-man's-land, then passed part of the forenoon lying on a temple balustrade facedown, his gaze through the gaps in the floor focused on the reddish, shimmering earth below, just as in childhood he had looked down from the gallery of the house on the karst into the chicken yard below, and in a residential quarter he again witnessed even the natives stumbling over the high threshold of their dwellings, and later he marveled for days over the course he had taken, not merely during this year in Japan but from birth.
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e was born at the bottom of a doline, above San Pelagio near Aurisina, on that land he later inherited, a stone's throw from the barriers on the Yugoslav border, brought into the world by his mother during an air raid while she was working in the fields far below, at a
turnaround, and he imagined that his birth and childhood in the great hollow of the sinkhole, with the unique sounds characteristic of the place and the very round horizon above his head, had provided a sort of outline for his future life and his profession, also simply when, in his few earlier attempts at building houses, he had always left the roof uncoveredâstrange carpenter!âopen to the sky, citing the example of the Romans, who did not allow the temples to Jupiter, the sun, and the moon to be roofed over.
e was born at the bottom of a doline, above San Pelagio near Aurisina, on that land he later inherited, a stone's throw from the barriers on the Yugoslav border, brought into the world by his mother during an air raid while she was working in the fields far below, at a
turnaround, and he imagined that his birth and childhood in the great hollow of the sinkhole, with the unique sounds characteristic of the place and the very round horizon above his head, had provided a sort of outline for his future life and his profession, also simply when, in his few earlier attempts at building houses, he had always left the roof uncoveredâstrange carpenter!âopen to the sky, citing the example of the Romans, who did not allow the temples to Jupiter, the sun, and the moon to be roofed over.
And furthermoreâwhile here in the bay, amid the leaves blowing in from somewhere all year long, this autumn's first are falling, softer than the others, coming down perpendicularly, at the same time more slowlyâhe thought today in Nara about how the unvarnished fir planks of the ship and the dining table of nutwood back home had smelled after being washed down with hot water: how spicy, how appetizing. And about the pile of firewood out in the courtyard that reached up to the eaves, stacked almost without gaps, and how he had seen the only hole, down near the ground, triangular in shape, not as a hiding place for the cat but as the model for some future human habitation: he would sit in there himself someday and watch from the warmth the earth being swept clean by the north wind, the Bora, whom his parents called “the purest of women.”
And for years he had stared transfixed into the pit right behind his parents' house where there was a bubbling, hissing, spitting, steaming from the lime being slaked, and for years he had also cracked the whip in the orchard on the steppe, using the juniper handle he had carved himself.
And then that cold morning in July when he no longer sat on the bus to Aurisina and Trieste as one commuting student among others but as a first-day apprentice, apart from the other passengers, in his still new-blue stiff work overalls. And how he then, in the Don Bosco Home, felt such homesickness for precisely the shabby spots at home: the worn linoleum under the table, the hot-water reservoir in the woodstove, encrusted with mineral deposits, the burn marks under the ash box, the pitted enamel of the washbasin, the scraped wooden threshold with the rusty nailheads.
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