Seiobo There Below (42 page)

all of Kyōto
; the Western friend perceived this when at last they reached the peak of Daimonji mountain, and Kawamoto-san stood aside, and he could look down from the heights, and there down below — completely encompassing the horizon — was in actuality the entire city, darkness had by this point almost completely fallen, the lights were burning down below in the distance already, and they didn’t say anything; he, because the sight had left him at a complete loss for words, and Kawamoto because he was afraid that he was showing this in vain, that his friend — who had helped him form a connection between his solitary life and the world, due to which he owed him eternal gratitude — didn’t understand, and it wasn’t possible to explain: here, on the peak of the Daimonji, this was not the world of words; this gigantic evening picture of the city encircled by mountains said, without a single word, everything that he wanted to tell his friend before bidding farewell: an evening picture, as the glimmer of twilight was disappearing into nothingness, and darkness finally descended, down below there was an enormous city, with the tiny lights of its stars setting out an enormous surface for itself, and up here above were the two of them, Kawamoto Akio and his friend, who although he was pleased that his friend wasn’t talking and was only staring downward below with dazzled eyes here from the heights, he was also aware that it was in vain, this friend saw nothing, the Western eye only saw the firefly-like sparkling of the evening city, but nothing of what he wanted to tell him, of what this hopeless, solitary, trembling land was signaling to one from down there below, certainly this place merely signified to him the wondrous gardens, the wondrous monasteries, and the wondrous mountains all around, so that Kawamoto had already turned around, and set off on the path leading downward, when this friend, his eyes filled with wonder, crowning an already irreparable misunderstanding, and, as it were, to offer thanks for this enchanting gift, spoke to him, and certain of an affirmative reply, asked the following question: Akio-san, you really love Kyōto, don’t you; which in a single instant caused a complete breakdown in Kawamoto, and he could only say in a hoarse voice, as he headed downward in the thick darkness of the path, just this much, going back, that no, not in the least, I loathe this city.

1597

ZE’AMI IS LEAVING

Everyone says that he wasn’t at all sad, that the cruel exile hadn’t weakened him, on the contrary, that he understood the Sadogashima judgment to be a kind of completion, a sort of merciful judgment, the higher divine contradiction of “willing evil but creating good,” and this is the opinion of Miss Matisoff and Erika de Poorter, Kunio Komparu and Akira Oomote, Dr. Benl and Professor Amano — no point in enumerating them — for it is Stanford and Leiden, Tokyo and Tokyo, Hamburg and Osaka, that most decisively claim, and in unison, that he was born Yuusaki Saburo Motokiyo, bearing the name of Fujiwaka in his youth, then Shio Zempoo as a monk, widely known as Ze’ami Motokiyo — that is to say, the condemned, who departed in 1434 for his exile in an almost happy state, and there, on Sado Island, the traditional destination of exile for the most highly ranked offenders, he felt that Fate had directly elevated him to Paradise: this is what they all write, this is what they imply, they spread this lie as if they — the Japanese and non-Japanese alike — had all previously agreed upon it: that the ignominy, monstrous and unparalleled, of even dispatching one of the greatest artistic figures in the history of the world, this tiny, frail, and otherwise already broken old man, seventy-two years of age, onto a perilous journey and then, to crown it all, to our even greater ignominy, if not to the direct cretinization of our ignorant present age, by having us believe that he felt just fine, he made the trip and on the distant island spent a period of time left unspecified, in accordance with custom, which therefore might as well have been for all eternity, in a harmonious, balanced state of mind; we have no sources to indicate the contrary, they all spread their hands wide in unison, we may rely, they proclaim, only and exclusively upon the enchantingly beautiful Kintoosho, referring to his short masterpiece written in 1436, and thus beyond doubt entrusted to paper during the period of the Sado exile; surely this farewell-pearl of his aesthetic oeuvre, this exquisite ornamental gemstone, this ravishing cadenza, cannot be read otherwise, cannot be interpreted as anything else but the ceremonial swan-song of a soul sunk into silence, of a being who has overcome inconstant fate, capable of contemplating worldly existence only alongside heavenly existence; but this is all a deliberate intrigue and a lie, a mystification and a conspiracy, because he certainly was sad, infinitely, inconsolably sad; they injured him, more precisely they injured that artist in whom there was already hardly any strength to endure a verdict that was thoroughly unjust, both to him and to the instigators of this command; he was already very tired, he was weak, and life had worn him out; and in the impotent court and the residence of the crazed Shogun, everyone knew that even just the mere tone of a superficial, an insensitive, an unfeeling remark was enough for Ze’ami to feel eternally wounded; well then, after such a verdict as this, after all that had come before — his career, with its luminous beginnings, decisively shaken in 1408 by the death of Shogun Yoshimitsu, well, and still after that, his career approaching consummation, interrupted by the death in 1428 of Shogun Yoshimochi, and yet still after that, the final blow, crushing the genius so defenseless — indeed, he was already susceptible to even the slightest blows of fate — the loss of his utterly adored son, his heir, and the embodiment of the future of the Yuuzaki Association, and therefore of the Noh itself, Juro Motomasa, whom he, Ze’ami, held to be a greater talent than both himself and his own father; still, how could anyone, Japanese or non-Japanese alike, believe that after all this, that this thoroughly megalomaniacal, ignoble, idiotic, and arrogant decision, to send such an elderly person to certain death, would make that person, the subject of that decision, happy, and that in his eyes Sado would be truly identical with that described in the Kintoosho, identical with the center of the Wasp and the Diamond Mandalas, with the Cosmic Unity, the Endless Course of Regeneration of Gods and Humans — no, that is not Sado, just as no location in the Kintoosho is identical with even one location of the story of his exile; what a shameless deception, what a depraved falsification; for in reality — and not in the Kintoosho — it was a sad, wounded, broken old man that had to depart from Kyōto in 1434, subsequently reaching Wakasa prefecture by boat and from there the place of his exile; it is altogether as if we were expected to believe that when Ze’ami received the order to go into exile from Muromachi Dendoo, the residence of the shogun, he was filled with the greatest happiness, oh, at last I can get to Sado, oh, his heart was flooded with warmth, at long last here is the possibility for me to attain in this world, as a reward for my entire life, that which is not worldly, the Realm of the Wasp and the Diamond Mandalas — should we imagine it like this?! really?! — no! a thousand times no! in reality the entire thing happened completely differently, for there was every reason for him to sense that ill fortune, personified by Shogun Yoshinori, did not merely wish to drive him away, but wanted, like a sledgehammer, to crush him to bits, to destroy him, annihilate him, to clear this disobeyer of his wishes from his path; Ze’ami knew very well that if he left Kyōto, fulfilling the order of exile, a command that nonetheless he had to fulfill, that he would never see Kyōto again in his lifetime, so then in what other atmosphere could this have taken place than one of farewell for all eternity; everyone in the house wept, the servants of the retinue from the very youngest to the most hardened elders all wept; he gently reassured them that everything would be fine, but he knew full well that from this point, nothing would be fine, he bowed before all the members of his family, he bowed to his beloved wife, but all the while he was bidding farewell to the house as well: the objects, the rays of light, the delicate scent of incense; and the hour came and they set off through the streets of Kyōto, and then he bid farewell to the streets of Kyōto, farewell to the Gosha, to the Arashiyama bridge, then farewell to the Kamo River as well, it was the fourth day of the fifth month, the sixth year of Eikyo when they left the city in silence, at the time, with the retinue, specified in the command, and they arrived only the next day at the port of Obama in Wakasa prefecture, there stood the boat; Ze’ami tried to evoke his memories of the place because he was certain he had been here before, but he could not recall what had brought him to this place or when it might have been and in whose company his visit might have occurred, he hardly remembered anything anymore, maybe he wasn’t sure that he had even been here before, perhaps it only seemed that way to him, the burden of more than seventy years weighing down upon his memories, and these memories functioned in a particular way, namely that everything swirled around, completely helter-skelter, in his shattered heart and mind, the memory-pictures came, flowed, surged, continually floating one after the other, and drawn from everything that he had encountered in reality, some old image drifted into his mind; there were no important, no essential memories, because now each and every memory was important, essential; although one single face returned again and again, one face kept continually floating into these transient memories: the dear face of his beloved son, whom he had lost, and whom he knew — until the day he departed from this earth and with the most merciless suddenness left him behind — to be his worthy successor; he saw Motomasa-san now as well, until the picture grew pale, and the mountains surrounding the shore, and the gentle clouds above the waves, evoked in his mind the renowned Chinese work “Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang”, then he thought about this picture and a poem was beginning to formulate itself inside him, there was more than enough time for that, as having embarked onto the boat they were obliged to wait, and for a long time, in the dead calm and utter stillness; no wind blew the entire night, only in the morning and then in the wrong direction, not from the direction for which they had to wait, but then that wind came too, the wind blowing in the right direction; they raised the anchor, they sailed off, above the waves; and he looked back and he saw that they were moving farther and farther away, away from the land that he had loved so much, already he was very far from the city that he must now leave once and for all, he really must bid it farewell now, and although he had been hoping until the very last minute that perhaps it would not, after all, come to pass, now that the certitude was irrefutable, he could not master his emotions and there was not even anyone in his vicinity who would have understood why his tears were flowing down, when the sailing craft — although following the coastline all the way — put off so far from shore that one could only know, and not see, that it remained back there, somewhere in the fog: they left him alone on deck and he stood there leaning against the rails, and for a good long while could not even bear to sit back down in the chair that they had fastened there for the old man; for his soul was bidding farewell to everything that had been his life, which was now ending, because what could come now, he asked himself, but he only saw waves as the boat cleaved through them, the waves, that was the answer to his question as to what could come, because — well, what could come; waves, waves, one after the other, thousands and thousands, millions and millions of waves, already he had known that it was going to happen — this thing and in this way; once when he was very young, sometime between childhood and youth, he had fallen passionately in love with Shogun Yoshimitsu, from whom afterward — completely independent of their feelings for each other, and purely thanks to the Shogun’s exceptional aesthetic sensitivity — he and his troupe — and with that the entire Sarugaki no Noh as they called it back then — were awarded the most elevated patronage; even then he already knew, already in the midst of this infinitely pure love known as wakashudo; and often he stood by the window in the Shogun’s bedroom, which had a view onto the exquisite garden; he stood there; at that moment, dawn had not yet begun to break, it was still dark but something had already begun to relent in this darkness, promising that later on the darkness would slowly, utterly slowly, be sifted through, like a delicate breath, with light; even then it occurred to him many times that one day this would come to an end, and that fate would not be kind to him, and truly fate was not kind to him, executing its judgments upon him without mercy, one after the other, so that now the final one was brought forth and was dispatching him on the decrepit vessel; neither in front of him, nor behind him, nor anywhere at all was there anything in sight, just water and endless water, how far is it to Sadogashima, he asked the captain, who replied after what seemed to him like a remarkably prolonged silence that oh, venerable sir, it is yet a very long, long journey; this is what he replied into the wind that had risen to a storm, or rather he yelled it out from the helm, yelled it out through two smaller gusts of wind, it is still a long, long journey; and so it was, too, they proceeded along, following the coastline, just water and water everywhere: sometimes rain poured down onto them, and there was no sign of summer, and it was possible to sense the mountain Shirayama faintly in the distance, and Hakusan with the mountain-shrine and its snowy peak, then out alongside, the pilgrimage harbors of Noto and Suzu and the Seven Islands, and maybe the sun set once, and the sun set two times, and perhaps still at times the gentle sparks of fireflies could be seen above the water near the shore, or perhaps it was just the last embers of the sinking sun, who knows, thought Ze’ami, and he could hardly even decide anymore whether he was seeing reality or just the mechanisms of his imagination, in any event, later on he distinctly recalled the fishermen’s boats: those were not the work of his not overly keen imagination, they definitely encountered fishermen’s boats, and the days came, and the nights came, and at times it seemed to him as if the boat wasn’t moving at all, but just swaying, and there next to him swayed the renowned pilgrimage temple on Tateyama, and then, one day, the peak of Mount Tonami, and they were just swaying there in the wind, while the prefectures of Echizen, Etchū, and Echigo slipped away; there was moonlight and there were smaller storms too, the days and the nights alternated with each other; he watched this, but the flashing pictures, between Shirayama and Echigo, were not pictures to stimulate his thoughts, because those, his thoughts, kept returning again and again to Kyōto, taking up the streets one after the other, the Suzaku Ōji running straight between Rashomon and Suzakumon, then Gosho above, and farther to the north, the Shogun’s palace; he went in one direction, as if he had entered into a dream, he turned at one corner then strolled on some more, and he saw in sequence the most important figures of his life, and finally he stood unexpectedly in front of his own house: and he would have opened the door already, pulled the door at the entrance gate, when a wave rocked the ship and he had to clutch onto its side, as the wave otherwise would have swept him overboard, the sailors cried out, they reefed the sail, the boat returned to its former position, and from the captain’s face one could see that nothing had happened, they cleaved on through the waves, and just water and water everywhere, and memories and memories, no matter where he looked, and the sadness, the pain in his heart now almost without object, and water and water, and waves and waves, he was tired, lonely, and very old, and then suddenly he was startled by something; he cried out to the captain where are we, to which the captain replied there it is already, it’s over there, and he pointed in some direction, grimacing but with a respectful expression, there is Sado island, my lord, that is certainly Sadogashima, venerable sir.