People in the old days would talk when they had something to say, and would not say unnecessary things. Even when they said something they had to, they would say it not in many words but in its essence. My late father and mother were like that, too.
When my father was seventy-five years old, he contracted typhus. When he seemed close to death, a doctor came and recommended
doku-jint
.1 My father used to say, “It may be all right for young people. But when you’re old, it’s bad to forget your life is limited
and try to prolong it miserably with medicine. You must always keep this in mind.”
Remembering these words of his, someone wondered how he would confront this situation. But with the sudden disease and heavy breathing making even the onlookers feel the pain, the medicine, along with ginger juice, was given him. With that he began to breathe better, and in the end was cured of that illness.
“Well,” he replied, “even when I had an extreme headache, I had never shown my suffering to others. So I thought it wouldn’t do if I behaved differently. Also, I had seen many people in their fevers say the wrong things, so I thought the best thing would be not to say anything. That’s why I behaved the way I did.”
From incidents like this, you can guess his conduct in normal times. Because he was like that, to my regret, I found it hard even to ask him what I did want to ask, and in time he passed away. As a result, many things remained unasked.
My father said, “They say that for some reason my father lost the land he governed and retired in the same land. His eyes were big, he had an ample beard, and he looked intimidating, but as I recall, when he died he still had no gray hair.
“Every time he ate a meal, he would take chopsticks out of a chopstick case, which was lacquered black, with a picture of irises. When he was done eating, he would put them back in the case and place the case by his side.
“I once asked the old maid who had brought me up about this. ‘In a battle long ago,’ she said, ‘he brought the head of an enemy of good standing to the camp of his general. “You must be tired from fighting. This is for you,” the general said and, pushing forward the portable meal table he was eating from, gave it to him along with the chopsticks. It was an honor at the time. That’s why even now he keeps them close by.’
“I asked about this when I was just a little boy, and it isn’t clear to me when and where the battle took place, who ‘the general’ was. The only thing he said to me that I remember even now was when I was playing with a friend my age. He heard me say, ‘You say such insulting things,’ and said, ‘For a man to be insulted is a disgrace. What you just said you may have said playfully, but it’s like allowing yourself to be insulted. You shouldn’t do that.’ ”
When my father was young, the times were not far removed from the days of warring states,2 and people loved to act righteously and valued being principled in ways, I hear, that are different from today in many respects.
My father spent a number of years running about east and west, without settling down in one place. When he was thirty-one, shortly after he began service with Assistant Minister of Popular Affairs Minamoto no Toshinao,3 he was put in charge of three foot soldiers who were alleged to have committed robbery by night and were arrested and shut up in the lookout tower atop the main gate. Told of this, he said, “Sir, as long as you are putting me in charge of these men, I request that you not take their long and short swords away from them.”
His request granted, he was given the swords. He had someone carry them, climbed up to the lookout tower, and handed them back to the three men.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “if you want to escape, cut off my head first. It’s not possible for me alone to fight the three of you. This means my own swords are utterly useless.”
As he said this, he tied up his own swords with a three-foot-long towel and threw them down. He then stayed with them, sleeping
and eating with them. About ten days later, it was determined that the talk about the three men’s robbery was unfounded. They
were nonetheless deemed unfit for service and were eased out of the Koh
’s house.4 When the time for them to leave came, the three men said to my father:
“How unspeakably worthless did our master find us, that he should put us in the hands of one man? We must make him realize our worth, we thought, but if we killed you when you weren’t even carrying your swords, he would conclude that we were worthless after all, and that pained us. So we decided, If we were put to death, that would be that. But should we survive, we will find some way of easing our pain by avenging ourselves.
“As it turned out, because of your compassion we were not deprived of our swords, and now we can mingle among samurai once again. We tell ourselves never to forget your compassion, and we feel our pain dissipate.”
This is what he told me.
As I remember him after I was old enough to notice things, my father had set daily routines and never changed them a bit. Around four in the morning he would get up without fail, wash his body with water, and do his hair by himself.
On cold nights my mother would say, “You should use hot water.” But he would restrain her, saying, “We shouldn’t even dream of troubling our servants.”
When he passed seventy, my mother would say, “I’ve grown so old myself I can’t bear the cold of the night.” She would bury the burning charcoal in the ashes of the fireplace, putting her feet in the fireplace as she lay close to it. She would also put near the fire a kettle with water in it and give my father hot water when he got up.
Both were devoted to Buddhism. After doing his hair every morning my father never neglected to change his clothes and offer prayers to the Buddha. On the days commemorating the deaths of their parents they themselves cooked rice and offered it to the departed souls. They never asked their servants to do the work.
If the day had not yet broken after all this was done, my father would sit to wait for the morning and, after daybreak, would leave for work. His quarters were to the south, and the gate from which he left to work was to the north. In the morning he would take the path on the east side and in the evening the path on the west side. He wore setta, sandals with leather soles, and as he passed, he made sure to make loud footsteps, so that everyone heard him approach; infants would stop crying.
In the eighth month every year the Koh went to Mta County, in Kazusa Province, which he governed, and came back in the middle
of the twelfth month.5 After his return, he would never fail to summon my father and, in private, question him on what had happened during his absence.6 Every year, my father would only say, “There’s nothing particular to report, sir.”
Years passed in a similar fashion, until finally the Koh said, “Our house may certainly be small, but it isn’t as though
only a few men were left during my absence. It isn’t possible, is it, that in all these years nothing has happened? Still, year after
year, you tell me, ‘There’s nothing particular to report.’ I don’t see how this can be.’ ”
“Sir, important matters are reported to you at once,” my father replied. “As for minor matters, I discuss them with the people in charge of affairs during your absence and settle them. As a result, there is as yet nothing particular for me to report to you.”
After this, too, the Koh would summon my father without fail upon his return from Kazusa Province. He would tell him things
he saw while there and, after many hours had passed, allow him to take his leave.
“He never asked what happened in his absence again,” my father said.
In the fall of the second year of Shh [1645], when the Koh was assigned his turn in guarding Suruga Castle,7 my father had some business to tend to at the Koh’s place in Kazusa Province and went there, so did not join the group accompanying
him. When the next spring came around, he was told by messenger to make his appearance in a hurry. At once he went from Kazusa
Province to Suruga.
“In those days the residential quarters for the men on duty at the castle were still only surrounded with fences made of bamboo
tied together,” my father said. “As a result, every night many of the young samurai climbed over the fences to go out and
play, and the elders accompanying the lord would say, ‘There’s no way of stopping them.’ That’s why the Koh had summoned
me.
“In these circumstances, I thought, our reputation will suffer even if just one man is accused of doing anything criminal. I had an idea.
“Soon I toured the area around the residential quarters and placed guards at appropriate places. I had four or five guard houses built and placed two foot soldiers in each for protection. Every night, after sunset until daybreak, I myself made an inspection tour, commending those who were not neglecting their guard duty while warning those who were. I did this until our shift was over, without sleeping a single night. As a result, the matter ended without anyone going out to play in the night.”
In the fourth year of Shh [1647], the Koh was assigned fire-watch duty on Mt. Nikk8 and was required to stay there for a hundred consecutive days. In the following year he was also assigned guard duty9 at Osaka Castle. At that time, too, he took my father along. After he left here, until he got there, stopping at various
places on the way, my father did not lie down to sleep for a single night. On the road he would doze on horseback and, after
arriving there, while at work during the day, he would only take a catnap sitting up when he had the time to do so. Because
he did not lie down to sleep night or day, after a long while he ended up suffering from something close to night blindness.
One day on his way back from Osaka, the evening fell as he neared Mishima Station, but he was unable to see the lamps lit
at each house, as he recalled, laughing.
“Sir, why did you do what you did at the time?” I asked him later.
“Well, there was a reason for that, son,” my father said. “There was this so-and-so, a young hereditary samurai, who committed
a grave crime. He thought that if it came to light he wouldn’t be able to escape punishment, so before bolting, he killed
a young one with a sword in order to make it look as though the crime were to repay some grudge. The Koh hated him for this
act and searched for him but couldn’t find him.
“So he thought that if he arrested the man’s aged mother, the man might come out. He arrested and held her, but the man didn’t
come out. As months and days passed, the mother died in jail. Then someone secretly told me that the fugitive was stalking
the Koh in the guise of an itinerant priest.10
“If what I’ve heard is true, I thought, he’s likely to seek a chance while the Koh is traveling like this. That’s why I inconspicuously
deployed guard soldiers every night and did the inspection myself, just as I had done in Suruga. Everybody thought that I
was merely doing the things I’d done before.”
After he resigned his post, my father told me a story in relation to something that had just happened:
“I was there without making a reply. After a while, he said, ‘You didn’t say anything in response. Is it because you have thoughts of your own?’
“‘Yes, I do, sir,’ I said. ‘Ashizawa often says, “I lost my father when an infant, but I have managed to grow up like this because of my master’s vast kindness. For me to repay his favor, I can’t be like an ordinary man.”
“‘Ashizawa is born to be bold, but he’s still young and does many stupid things. What monstrous thing has he done now? Still, someone who isn’t like him when young perhaps can’t do anything useful when he grows old. As I was thinking these things, I failed to respond at once. I apologize, sir.’
“The Koh did not say another word and I, too, had nothing more to say. After a while, he said, ‘Mosquitoes have collected
on your face. Shoo them away.’ I moved my face, and six or seven mosquitoes, which, bloated with blood, had grown to look
like silverberries, fluttered down to the ground. I took out a tissue from my breast, wrapped them in it, put it in my sleeve,
and waited. After another while, he said, ‘You may go home to rest.’ So I left.
“The man in question always liked to drink and would at times become wild when drunk. So I spoke to a man by the name of Seki, who was his good friend, and the two of us forced him to give up drinking, not neglecting to warn him against it all the time. As a result, after years and months, he was even given his father’s position.
“Now, the Koh is dead, but I hope Ashizawa will not trash what we initially told him but carry out his duties to the end.”
He said this when the gentleman in question, after a long interval, got drunk again and behaved terribly.
In the Koh house was a man by the name of Kat. He looked a little over sixty when I was about twenty. His grandfather is
said to have been a general of soldiers11 in Satomi, in Awa, and defended a castle in a place called Sanuki, in Kazusa Province. In his house were two treasured swords
called the Snake Sword and the Monkey Leader. I saw the Snake Sword myself. The blade was on the slender side and it was about
three feet long.
The Monkey Leader was so called, it was said, because it was a sword he’d begged from a monkey leader. I was supposed to have
seen it. When he was sixteen, Kat killed his own young retainer with it. He slashed at the man when the latter was preparing
marinated fish, and as he did so, he also cut a celadon bowl in two, crosswise. That was what everyone said.
After my father resigned his post, I happened to mention this sword to him.
“We have no one else with us now, so I’ll tell you this,” he said. “You shouldn’t accept everything people say at face value. The sword that cut the bowl was the one I gave you when you were small.
“At the time Kat lived in a row house and was my next-door neighbor. He lived on the second floor. Once the master and servant
quarreled loudly and I was concerned about it, when I heard Kat run down the stairs. Here we go, I thought, grabbed my sword,
and rushed to the place. Kat had already given his man a slash, but his arms weren’t strong enough perhaps, the wound hadn’t
had much effect. The servant man was about to attack him with a cutting knife, so no sooner had I drawn my sword than I struck
him, and I struck him aslant, from shoulder down, together with the bowl that was in front of him. After a pause, I said to
Kat, ‘Give him the finishing stroke,’ wiped the blood off my sword, put it back in its sheath, and hurried home. Later, people
gathered and the whole thing eventually turned into an honor for the Monkey Leader.
“My sword originally belonged to a man by the name of Got, who was from Kzuke Province. His older brother once made a sideways
swipe with this sword and sliced his enemy’s head horizontally into two. Got said he used to play with the skull as an infant.
After I heard that, I begged him for the sword, and did so for a number of years, until he let me have it. You must take exceptional
care to keep it close to you, so that you may hand it down.”
This is the sword now placed in a slender decorated sheath, the one called The Lion.
For that matter, my excellent short sword, which Kiyokuni made, used to be owned by a grandson of someone who was said to
be Governor of Tamba Okabe, who was with the house of Takeda, of Kai.12 He was a cousin of the Koh’s father, Tadanao, and lived in Echizen Province. Tadanao, when young, asked him to join him,
wanting to make him a direct vassal, but Tadanao passed away not long afterward, and this gentleman ended up spending his
whole life in the Koh house.
When this gentleman was thirteen, sometime in the fall, he went out into the field, alone with a servant-boy who was sixteen, to catch shrikes. Suddenly a wounded wild boar emerged. The servant, abandoning his master, climbed up a nearby pine tree. The master, who was thirteen, waited with his back against the pine tree. The boar ran straight toward him and was about to ram into him. He drew his short sword and stabbed the beast, but the beast grabbed the sword frontally with his mouth, up to its sword guard, and tried to run him down. His back against a large tree, the boy could not easily be pushed down. As the boar pushed and pushed, he bent back the sword guard, which was made of silver, by about an inch, and split his own head from the snout halfway to the brain; with the sword swallowed up to its sword guard he dropped dead.
Being a grandson of a man of great reputation, this gentleman had had many such experiences since he was an innocent boy. My father asked for and got the sword and bequeathed it to me.
On another occasion my father said to me, “You should never say to someone, face to face, that what you carry is a sharp blade. When I was young, someone heard someone else say that his sword cut exceptionally well, so the man said, ‘By Heaven, you act rudely as if no one else is around you. Do you suppose anyone would carry a sword that doesn’t cut? Come on, man, see for yourself whether my sword cuts or doesn’t cut!’ and he drew his sword. It was only because the men who happened to be with them restrained him that nothing came of it in the end. People in the old days were like that.”
By the time I began to notice things, my father had few strands of dark hair left. His face was squarish, his forehead rose high, his eyes were large, and he had an ample beard; he was short but large-boned, and he looked strong. He was by nature too disinclined to show joy or anger. Even when he laughed, I don’t remember him doing so loudly. Much less so when he scolded someone; I never heard him raise his voice. When he said something, it was sparingly; he never carried himself lightly. I never saw him act surprised, make a fuss, or look bewildered. For example, when he had moxa treatment, he would say, “It’s useless to have a few, small moxa pieces,” and he had large moxa pieces, and not a few of them, placed in five to seven spots, and had them burn at the same time, showing no pain whatsoever.
In quiet moments he would always clean his quarters, hang an old painting on the wall, and, with a couple of flowers of spring or fall thrown in a vase, spend the whole day facing them, sitting with his eyes closed. Or at times he would do some drawing, but he did not like to use colors.
Except when he was ill, my father would not ask other people to do things for him; he always did everything for himself. At morning and evening meals, he did not have more than two bowls of rice.
“When you hold your bowl in your hand,” he would say, “from its weight you can tell whether there’s more or less rice in it. Depending on the weight of the rice, eat more or less of other things, and try not to take an amount exceeding what’s needed to fill your stomach.
“Even if it’s something that’s agreeable to your palate, don’t eat too much of one thing. You may be hurt by it. If you aren’t selective but eat a little bit of everything, things perhaps control one another, and you seldom are hurt by the food, I think.”
Normally he would eat whatever you offered him, never saying, “I’d like to eat this or that.” As the exception, he would say, “Please serve whatever becomes available and fresh at the start of each season,” and he would enjoy it together with his family. As for sake, a mere drop through his throat would make him terribly drunk, so he would simply hold a cup in his hand to share the conviviality of the occasion. He liked to drink tea.
As for the clothes he wore, when at home he would wear things washed clean, never wearing soiled ones even when he went to sleep. When he went out he made sure to wear new and fresh things. Even then he never used articles that weren’t proper to his state.
“In the old days,” he would say, “people always took great care not to look bad even if they were to die suddenly.”
This was even true of things like fans.13 “You might drop your fan in a crowd or forget it somewhere,” he would say. “Even from something like a fan you can guess what its owner is like.”
His fan, accordingly, was of the so-called old style: About a foot long, its ribs were unlacquered, its paper had gold and silver dust blown on the ground, and for the picture on it, he would make certain to select one painted by a craftsman of good repute. When it comes to weapons, such as the long and short swords, I don’t have to say a word.
After he passed seventy, my father developed pain in his left elbow. On account of this he offered to resign from his post,
but the Koh would have none of it. From then on he went to work wearing only a sayamaki sword14 that was two inches wide and about a foot long, making a servant carry his long sword until he reached his office. When I
think of it now, it must have presented a strange spectacle, but people didn’t object to it, and of course the Koh didn’t
seem to want to say anything. Come to think of it, my father must have thought, If something happens, it won’t do if you carry
a sword but can’t use it. On the other hand, I have pain and can’t possibly use a sword. Well then, if it’s something useless,
I might as well not carry it myself.
Until his death my father always kept this sayamaki close at hand and, following the word he left when he died, I sent it to the person he adopted as a child and brought up, who now lives in Michinoku. As for its decorations, the iron part had waves carved on it; the sheath was lacquered black except for the part called “thousand coils,” which had gold foil underneath. After taking the tonsure, he kept it in a bag made of “toad-skin” leather.
Many years after my father’s death, Ryya, a former resident monk of Ktoku Temple, told me a story.
“I didn’t have a chance to see your father when he was young,” he said. “When he was past eighty I had occasion to see him in action right in front of my eyes.
“A deranged drunk broke in here and, brandishing his sword, chased people away. There was no one who would go out and face him, except your father: Leaning on his cane, he came out of his room. I wondered if he knew what was going on, and was worried about the danger, but there was nothing I could do. I was merely watching through the crack in the gate.
“Your father walked straight up to the man. When the man raised his sword, he grabbed that arm. The next moment he took the man’s sword as he kicked him down, and threw it into a nearby ditch. Then he went back to his room.
“The man couldn’t even stand up, lying there in drunken stupor. Only then did our young monks come out from here and there, kept watch on him, and when he sobered up sent him away.”
When I was seventeen or eighteen, I happened to drop in front of my father what was called an “arresting cord,”15 which was used to tie up a man and was made of slender blue strings braided together, with a hook attached at its end, and which I then had in my breast.
“What is this?” my father said and picked it up. After a while he said, “When I still held my former post, I used to carry one like this in my flint bag. That’s because when there was someone who’d committed a crime, I would have my subordinates arrest him. I carried one in case they happened not to have one with them.
“After I was freed from my post, it became useless, so I used it to tie a cat, as you know. I don’t have to tell you that you must learn all the warrior’s skills. But there are skills that you must practice according to your station, and there are skills that you must not. This is not the kind of implement you should carry with you. You are not so young as not to realize something as simple as this.”
Another time he told me a story.
“When I was young, there was a man by the name of so-and-so of Echizen.16 He, too, disappeared and his whereabouts remained unknown.17 Years later, I left Michinoku and, on my way toward the San’y Road, reached the Oak Tree Slope.18 There I passed by a man carrying firewood on his back. When I had gone ahead by twenty to thirty yards, someone behind me
called my name, so I turned to look. The man carrying firewood on his back had taken down the firewood and was walking toward
me, removing the kerchief that wrapped his head. Puzzled, I walked back.
“‘It happened such a long time ago, sir, that you may have forgotten me,’ he said. ‘I am so-and-so. I wondered why in the world you are passing through a place like this all by yourself. All this feels like a fabulous mystery.’
“I looked, and, sure enough: Even though he didn’t resemble the person I used to see long ago when he was in his youthful prime, there were suggestions of the man I could not possibly forget. It all felt like a dream.
“‘Sir, how on earth have you become like this?’ I exclaimed, and told him a little about myself.
“‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you now have some moments of leisure. I’d like to hear about what has happened since we parted and about the people who used to be such good friends of mine. You must come to my place and stay with me tonight. Where I live isn’t far from here.’ So I went along.
“‘I have an aged father,’ he said, ‘but I ran out of means of supporting him. There was someone I knew in a place near here, called Higai, so I decided to come here to seek help from him. That’s why I ended up doing something like this to make a living. This is something I would have been too ashamed to volunteer to tell, but you reminded me of so much of the past that I couldn’t contain it but revealed myself.
“‘My father is extremely old-fashioned,’ he continued. ‘He may get unduly confused if someone he doesn’t know suddenly comes upon him. I think I should tell him what happened. Please wait here for a while.’
“He made me stay outside a ramshackle house and went in. A while later he came out to welcome me, so I went in. There was an old man, about eighty, making a fire, who said, ‘We’re having you, a visitor, stay with us, sir, but I’m afraid we have no decent food to offer. Still, I hear that you were my son’s good friend, and I shouldn’t really be ashamed of what we have to offer. Please share with us what helps father and son fend off starvation, and spend the night here.’
“The two of us, now left face to face, broke and burned firewood and continued to reminisce about what had happened long ago and more recently. When it was very late, our man went in where his father was lying and brought back two bamboo tubes that looked like carrying poles. He opened the parts that were their lids and took out a sword, about three feet long, and a short sword, about two feet long. Then he took out two sword guards from his breast and, turning his back against the light of the fire, unsheathed and inspected the two swords, then placed them in front of me. Both looked icy, their hilts decorated with gold; the sheaths were enfolded in kairagi leather.19
“‘Even when I was serving our lord,’ he said, ‘I was so incompetent that I wasn’t able to earn enough stipend to support my father. Then I became the only one to serve him. That is why I withdrew from society and took up work like this. In the circumstances I shouldn’t have regretted parting with any of the things I used to carry with me.
“‘Still, as long as I have any energy left, I thought I should keep at least a single set of swords with me. This is why I have so far steadfastly refused to let these go. As you can see, it may not be for long that my father remains in this world. If I’m lucky enough to carry out my filial duty, we may have another chance to meet.’
“As he said this, he shed tears.
“When the day broke, he prepared some meal and offered it to his father, and gave it to me, too. He accompanied me three miles before parting. After that, there was no way of hearing about him. I don’t know what happened to him; there was also no one who saw him again.”