WHEN onearth was it that I first heard the legends about abandoning the old people on Mount Obasute?
I come from a mountain village in the central part of the Izu Peninsula. There I was educated during my childhood days. In the Toi region on the west coast of the peninsula, tales about discarding old folks in the mountains in ancient times have been handed down from generation to generation. In all likelihood, it was along with these tales that I heard the Legend of Mount Obasute, a mountain whose very name means to discard old people, and it caused my small heart to swell with sorrow.
Wasn't I about five or six at that time? On hearing that story I went out onto a porch and screamed and sobbed. I have no recollection of where that place was exactly, but what I do recall in my faint memory is that my grandmother—or was it my mother?—anyhow, a member of my family immediately came flying out to the porch and said something to me—just a few words. Of course, I could not comprehend the story itself, but the sadness of the whole idea of carrying my mother on my back and taking her up a mountain and abandoning her there became an abstraction which oozed into my heart like waterdrops dripping between rocks. I shrieked and cried, unable to endure the sorrow of being separated from my mother.
It was only after I became ten or eleven that I was able to grasp the full meaning of the story of Mount Obasute in its entirety. Occasionally I used to get picture books from an aunt of mine who lived in a small town about twenty miles away. In one of those volumes there was a tale called Obasute-Yama. Apparently all sorts of variations of the legend about abandoning old folks on Mount Obasute are in circulation with slightly altered details. But the one that I know is based entirely on that book, and it continues to hold to this day without modification. It can easily be discerned how strong an impression that picture book Obasute-Yama imprinted on my mind when I was a child. Of all the tales that I heard in my childhood, the two that I can't forget even now are the story of Ishidomaru, who went to visit his father on Mount Koya, and the Legend of Mount Obasute. Both have as their themes the anguish of separation of a parent and child.
Years later, during my university days, when I was back home on summer vacation, I fortuitously rediscovered this Obasute-Yama picture book in the cupboard of our godown, and I looked it over again. Only the frontispiece was in color; the illustrations on several other pages were in black-and-white relief; and the Legend of Obasute was written in a literary style that might be considered a little too difficult for children.
In ancient times in the Province of Shinano there was a feudal lord who hated old people. So he decreed throughout the land that when old people became seventy years of age, they were, without exception, to be taken to the mountains and left there. One bright moonlit night a young farmer climbed up a mountain carrying his mother on his back. Since his mother had reached the age of seventy, he had to discard her there. However, the young man could not bear the thought of leaving her there—no matter what! He brought her back home again, dug a hole under the floor so no one would see her, and hid her there. About this time, an envoy from a neighboring province appeared before the feudal lord and laid down a very difficult proposal. He posed three problems, and if these were not solved, the Province of Shinano would be attacked and destroyed. The three problems were: to make a rope out of ashes; to pass a thread through a nine-sided jewel; and to make a drum beat by itself. The feudal lord was perplexed, and he issued a proclamation throughout the land calling upon the wise men to solve these difficult problems. When the young farmer told this to his mother, who was hidden under the floor, the mother instantly explained to him how the problems could be solved. The young farmer immediately went to the home of the feudal lord and told him. Because of this the province was able to be saved from its difficulties. On learning from the young man that all this was due to the wisdom of an old woman, the feudal lord became enlightened and understood that old people should be respected, and without any further hesitation he proceeded to abolish the decree.
So went the story.
The colored frontispiece was a drawing of a young man wearing a hood like the headgear of court nobles. Carrying his aged mother on his back, he was making his way through the thick underbrush as he climed up a steep mountain. The mother's hair was white but her face seemed exceedingly young, so that the combination produced a slightly weird effect. The rays of the full moon tinted the entire scene blue everywhere—the trees and grass and earth—and the shadows of the two people were imprinted in bold relief in black over the ground like spilled ink. It was just a coarse, common picture, but even so the sadness inherent in the story and the scene still rose from the superficies of the character of the picture. For the minds of children, it was probably adequately stimulating.
The months and years flew by. I left the university. About the time I first started working at a newspaper company, I got hold of a volume entitled New Thoughts about Mount Obasute and read it. At that time, I must say, I lacked the patience to read books with any substance; but in a desultory sort of way I usually just dabbled capriciously in any of the miscellaneous books that happened to come my way. It was entirely by a stroke of good luck at the time that I chanced upon this monograph New Thoughts about Mount Obasute, which was one of the "Publications of the Shinano Topographical Society," and I set it aside in my library.
The evening that I bought it, I looked thoroughly over the first part of the volume, lost interest in the later sections, and closed the book. Even at that, however, I was able to acquire a certain amount of knowledge of the thinking with regard to Mount Obasute, knowledge which could not possibly be of any earthly use to me as a reporter.
As a result of the labors of the author of New Thoughts about Mount Obasute, I learned:
that the Mount Obasute legends about abandoning elderly people first appeared as literature in the Tales of Yamato;
that these tales concerning the disposal of old people probably were imported from India but set in a local environment and were transplanted into Japan along with the importation of Buddhism;
that apart from these importations, the practice of obasute must have existed in Japan in very ancient times;
that legends about the practice of obasute had been handed down in the oral tradition of every province, but except for the Legend of Mount Obasute of Shinano Province, into which many of the other legends were incorporated, the others have all been lost;
that, presumably, the fact that Mount Obasute became famous as a moon-viewing site in itself contributed to the assimilation of all such legends into the Legend of Mount Obasute;
that, furthermore, the obasute practice itself had been attributed to different mountains in various historical eras—Obase-yama,* in ancient times; Kamuriki-yama, in the Middle Ages;
that it was only in modern times that the area around Obasute Station on the Shinonoi Railway Line emerged for the first time under the name of Mount Obasute.
These things I learned from the travails of the author of New Thoughts about Mount Obasute.
After the passage of several more years, I read the book again for an entirely different purpose, (incidentally, assembled in this book there were virtually all the haiku and tanka relating to moon-viewing at Mount Obasute by all the great poets in the literary history of Japan) because I was interested in determining how the various famous poets dealt with the same subject, moon-viewing against the backdrop of the same setting, Sarashina. From this point of view, I guess I had a pretty punctilious concern about such matters.
The haiku, excerpts from several collections such as Obasute and Lotus and Cutting Rice-Plants, were assembled from the works of a host of haiku-poets led by Basho, Buson, Issa, and others. The tanka were selected only from poems which thematicized Mount Obasute, but they were drawn from anthologies of every era and included the names of such poets as Tsurayuki, Saigyo, Sanetomo, Teika, and Norinaga.
But what I remember as being the most deeply moving among all these great haiku and tanka was one which the young man who appears in the Tales of Tamato composed as he watched the moon hanging over Mount Obasute after returning home from leaving his mother on the mountain. The poem goes:
Seeing the clear moon
Hang o'er Mount Obasute,
Oh, Sarashina!
What solace is there for me—
How can my heart be consoled?
Leaving aside the entire question of the skill of execution of the poem itself, I could visualize this one as a poem by the hero of the story and not simply a moon-viewing verse, and the drama behind it gripped me.
From the pure aesthetics of tanka of course, its value probably could be questioned, but more than any work on moon-viewing at Mount Obasute, this poem by the man in the story stirred me immensely. The theme of this tale, which had been etched on my heart during my childhood, returned to me transformed here as a poem.
FOR A long time I really knew nothing about either Obasute Station on the Shinonoi Line or the immediately surrounding area. I had made trips in that direction, but mostly I came to that area at night, or even if it was during the day, I passed the station without noticing it and never had any particular connection with it.
It was my mother who sometime later provided me with the occasion to recall the Legend of Mount Obasute. Apropos of nothing, my mother suddenly said, "They say that Mount Obasute's a famous place for moon-viewing, so the old folks may have been quite happy even though they were abandoned there. If even now there was an ordinance that old people had to be gotten rid of, I'd go happily. I think it would be just fine to be able to live alone. Besides, if you have to be discarded, you may even get used to it."
My mother was just seventy. Her words grated on the ears of the members of my family who heard them just like sarcasm. My younger brother and sisters were also there at the time, and they all took on expressions of surprise and shock. This occurred at a time when there were those post-war shortages of everything; it was a time when the general attitude toward the family system showed signs of hysterical change, and there were all those petty disputes that happen between the young people and the old men and women. My family was certainly no exception, but by this I do not mean that every problem was of such magnitude as to make my mother consider escaping from the family, so to speak. My mother, realizing that she had just reached seventy, the age to be left in the mountains in the world of obasute legends, presumably because of the strength of her pride and the spirit of stalwartness with which she was born, took it into her head instantly to defy the atmosphere of this post-war period which so closely resembled something in those legends.
Like the old character depicted in that children's picture book, my mother's hair was white, but she had a bright youthful complexion and there wasn't a single wrinkle in her face. For a while, I eyed her face without a word. She had been raised with a dislike for old people, but now she herself was chronologically a creditably old woman. I felt a compassion for this mother of mine who had become so conscious of her old age and had such a defiant attitude about it. Curiously, from then on, I became obsessed by the whole setting of the Shinano obasute story.
Shortly after that I had many opportunities to take trips in connection with my work, and several times a year I had to go to the Shinano area. When I used the Chuo Line, I often passed the small Obasute Station nestled in among the hills. It became impossible for me to regard with the same dispassion as I viewed the scenery at other places either the Zenkoji Plain, which opens out from there in a vast expanse, or the Chikuma River, which meanders over that plain in a thousand curves, as its name implies, glittering with a cold luster like the belly of a snake. On the other hand, sometimes I took the Shin-etsu Line. Since trains on this line run along the low-lying plain which I used to look out across from the Chuo Line, on reaching the area around Togura, above the window sill I could spot the slope of the hill opposite Obasute Station, which I could just about identify by the red roof of the station. Always, as I looked out across that whole stretch of land in this vicinity, I was filled with a sort of emotion as I wondered about things connected with obasute.
I of course had practically no interest in Obasute as a moon-viewing site. True enough, I recognized that there undoubtedly was a splendor in looking at' the moon filling the clear Shinano air and shining across the entire panorama of the open country which contained the Chikuma and Sai Rivers, but I didn't believe that the Obasute moon could ever surpass the moon I had watched shining over the bleak flatlands of Manchuria during the war. Without exception, when I passed through the vicinity around Obasute, a deep emotion began to take hold of me—that my aged mother was certainly sitting up there. One time, when I passed Obasute Station, there floated before my eyes an apparition of me tramping around in that area carrying my mother on my back.
Of course, the setting is in ancient times. I do not see the flourish of modern homes which dot the hillocks at the foot of the mountain and extend out over the bleak plain. Besides, it is night and the moonbeams are falling, blue over the surrounding area, just like in the illustration in the Obasute-Yama picture book. Only my mother's shadow and mine are black.
"Where on earth do you say you'll leave me?" asks my mother.
She is past seventy and her entire body has become miniscule. Her body is so light that it is depressing, but nevertheless I am tired anyhow, exhausted from walking around all over with a human being on my back. There is a giddiness in my legs with every step I take.
"How about here?" I ask. "If I build a small hut around here ..."
"A place like this? Ugh!" My mother has a young voice. Her body is frail but she is strong-willed, and not the slightest abatement in her uncompromising nature shows through even under circumstances like these, when I'm in the process of abandoning her. "Isn't it dangerous beside the cliffs when it rains? What if there are landslides? I wonder if there isn't a more sensible place?"
"I don't think so. Your demands are too extravagant, Mama. Still, how would it be if I rented the outhouse of that temple we just saw?"
"Oh, no! No! No!" Mother, on my back, kicks her feet and pounds with her hands like a spoiled child. "There would be lots of mosquitoes there in the summer. Besides, the building is old. And wouldn't that room be dark and gloomy? You're unkind. Really you are!"
I am bewildered, at a loss.
"If that's the case," say I, "I'd just as soon take you back home again. I don't know why it wouldn't be better to go back home to a crowded, noisy place with everybody around rather than to be here in a place like this."
"Again you're talking like that! Now that I've purposely left home, I wouldn't return for anything in the world. I wouldn't be back with everybody again for anything. 1 don't like the people at home; I don't like the people in the village. I only have a few years left, so I won't be satisfied unless I'm allowed to live alone and do as I please."
"You're just like a spoiled child. You really are, Mama."
"Then I'm a spoiled child. It's my nature to be spoiled, so I can't help it. Even so, you just look me in the face and say 'you're spoiled, you're spoiled!' What's 'spoiled' about being abandoned?"
"Damn!"
" 'Damn' all you want, but I'm not going back home-So hurry up and get rid of me."
"Even if I wanted to get rid of you, the problem is that I can't find a suitable place for you."
"You can't find one if you don't look for it. You won't be punished for looking for a place to leave your mother!"
"Didn't I just walk my feet off looking all this time? You probably realize that I'm staggering. I wonder just how far I have walked: We've gone to see ten houses already."
"But I don't fancy any of them. Was there a single house that looked habitable to you?"
"So, I've given up trying to rent a house. I said I would find a place that suited you and would build a hut for you, didn't I? But you complain wherever I go."
" 'Complain,' you say! I'm an old woman. Oh, I wonder if there really is any place where I can live quietly alone. Couldn't you look harder? Oh! My back hurts! Couldn't you carry me on your back somehow so I'd be more comfortable? It's gotten cold! It feels as if the moonbeams are making my skin prickle."
"Be still, please, Mama, and don't kick up such a fuss. I'm tired too. It's fine for you, Mama. You're getting carried, but I'm the one who's doing the carrying, huh? Please, I beg you. Please, let's just go back home. It'll be a relief to everybody."
"No," snaps my mother.
"I don't understand your no's. We're not going to wander around like this all night. Honestly, we're going back home." When I say that, my mother raises her weak voice in a sudden and drastic change.
"Show a little bit of patience. Just in this, show a little bit of patience. All you want to do is take me home. I won't say anything else. Anything at all will be fine with me. Just leave me. You won't have to call me 'spoiled.' Over there you can see a hut. That one will be fine too. Just leave me there."
"Just a little while ago when we looked at that hut, didn't you say it was drafty and cold and that, besides, it leaks when it rains?"
"It doesn't particularly appeal to me, but that can't be helped. I'll put up with it. It's a house and secluded, and I possibly can live in it quietly and free from all worries and cares."
"But it's awful there. As your child, I can't leave you there."
"It doesn't matter to me if it's awful. Now hurry, go ahead and leave me there," says my mother. Then, as I linger there, the moonbeams bite their way into my body.
This is the sort of play-act I imagined taking place with my mother. My conversations with my mother coursed smoothly and naturally through my brain. My mother is spoiled, but there is a look of real earnestness on her face. Reality breaks through to me as I am being badgered by my mother—"Go ahead and leave me; go ahead and leave me; go ahead ..."
It was strange how really naturally a character resembling my mother had been fused into the mother of my vision. This visionary one-act play—with me serving as the stage for this obasute-drama—was fairly far removed from the theme of the Legend of Obasute on which it was patterned because, in my case, it was the wish of the mother herself to be abandoned; because she persisted in saying that she wanted to be left and then did not agree to anything; and because I remained there carrying my mother on my back as I wandered around the Obasute hills. But that strangeness in particular, I felt, had set something like a small lump of ice somewhere in my heart. But when that funny feeling had vanished, in its stead chills spread all over my body.
It was awful to have imagined my mother badgering me about wanting to be left. But, perhaps, imagining such a scene as this in which I was abandoning my mother might have been a way of getting something off my chest.
Even so, why did I imagine my mother like that? I have often thought about this for long periods of time. And I have tried putting myself on my own back in place of my mother. And I have thought that when I get to be an old man, I may be just like the mother of my vision.
THIS SUMMER, I went to deliver a lecture at a coalmining town on the bank of the Enga River in northern Kyushu. There, at a Japanese-style inn, I met my younger sister Kiyoko whom I hadn't seen for two years. Kiyoko is the youngest of the four children in our family. She was married during the war and had two children, but there had been some sort of incident and she had fled from her husband's house, leaving him and the two children; for a while she returned to our parents' home; but now she had fled from that too on the grounds that she wanted to make her own way of life.
Even since I was small, I had liked this sister best of all my brothers and sisters, but I felt that there was something unpardonable in her selfish behavior. It wasn't anything like a cardinal sin, anything worth breaking relations over or never speaking to each other again—but Kiyoko, with her innate sensitivity, apparently realizing how I felt, did not write me a single letter after leaving home. For my part, all I even knew about her now was that she was working in northern Kyushu.
When I decided to make the trip to Kyushu, however, I considered going to see my sister. Accordingly, before I left Tokyo, I asked my mother for her address and sent her a telegram saying that I wanted to meet her. "Kiyoko might come to meet me, and then again she might not come," I thought.
That night when I returned to the inn from the lecture hall, my sister was sitting in a corner of my room near the veranda. Her face was brighter than I expected; her figure was trim; she was wearing a grey skirt and a pure-white sweater; her hair was cut fashionably short. While she actually was thirty-four years old, at first glance she looked as if she was only twenty-four or twenty-five.
"As far as my living goes, well, I'm eating—but I'm not living in luxury," said Kiyoko.
Her present job was at a beauty parlor at the air base in a coastal town near the mouth of the Enga River. There, Kiyoko had somehow or other come to be in charge of several girls who were around twenty years old, and she was working catering to foreign women.
We talked along lines that I guess were appropriate enough for a brother and sister who had not seen each other for a long time. There were many things that I, from the standpoint of being her older brother, could have said—about her separation from her family and about her behavior since then—but I didn't touch on these subjects at all. All of those things were problems about which nothing much could be done any more. Because she had run away from home even at the cost of leaving her two children, I felt that she must be a very resolutely strong-minded woman, a woman unto herself, with her own reasons for what she did.
I only chose matters concerning our parents and our brother and sister to talk about.
"Mama's still acting that way about obasute I said.
Ever since the time when our mother had said that she wanted to be left at Obasute, the term obasute had been used by my brothers and sisters and me when we were talking amongst ourselves. It was a convenient word for us to use. Actually, it was just like my mother to say that she wanted to be left at Obasute—she was likely to say this at any time—and this illustrated both the best that was in her and the worst. Nevertheless, inherent in the words "still acting that way about obasute " there was some implied mild criticism of Mama's pride and her spoiled and unreasonable nature. On the other hand, for her children, who were able to accept the fact that she was all of these things, the phrase also embraced a feeling of sympathy toward her.
At my words, there was a look on Kiyoko's face for a moment as if she were biting her lips to restrain some oncoming laughter, but she only said, "Talking about obasute, I wonder if at that time Mama didn't mean that she really wanted to be left on Mount Obasute."
"Why?"
"Why? Just because I felt that way. I honestly wonder if she didn't really want to be left by herself, to get entirely away from constantly becoming involved in everything that was happening around her, to be left alone in the mountains somewhere."
"Aw, cut it out!" said I, rather thoughtlessly. There was something in the way Kiyoko spoke that somehow startled me.
"Was that your impression even way back then?"
"No. It just came to me now. When you used the word "obasute" I suddenly got that impression—-just now."
I again began to visualize the scene in that vision of mine when I was wandering about in the vicinity of Obasute carrying my mother on my back. And at the thought of it, I felt shivers come over me for a second time, just as they had then.
As if she had been thinking this matter over for a while, Kiyoko a bit later said, "In my case, I had that kind of feeling too when I ran away from home. It was like this—how should I put it?—I just had to be alone, to get away immediately and completely from all the annoyances, so . . ."
"So, you too wanted to be left alone—obasute-style?"
"Well . . ."
"But you make such a young grandma."
"Yes, it'll still be quite a while before I'm seventy."
Then and only then did Kiyoko smile, but it was a sad smile. I could have taken all this to mean that she was obliquely using this conversation of ours to justify her own past behavior, but on the other hand, her real attitude at the time might very well have been something completely different from that.
About the children whom she had deserted I said nothing. She too may have wanted to make some passing reference to the children, but she acted as though she was well able to endure not talking about them.
If Kiyoko had said she was worried about the children, I would have had no alternative but to tell her that this was natural but that she should have known from the start that such would be the case. She knew that—and I did too.
She stayed overnight with me, sharing my room. Like so many inns at these coal-mining villages, the building had all sorts of labyrinthine annexes lumped together under one roof, and there must have been a banquet or something going on in a section somewhere off in the distance. The sounds of a samisen, the loud voices of men, and charming feminine voices could be heard until very late.
The next morning I went down to the station with my sister to see her off. It would take her about an hour to get back to her place by electric train. Although it was early in the morning, the sooty streets were already filled with lots of people walking around. It was a town of about sixty thousand, but according to what the maid at the inn said, it was in a constant state of flux, and if you added the suburbs, the population would probably be about double that figure. To be sure, the same restlessness that seemed to fill the streets was also to be found in the make-up of the stores on both sides of the avenue and in the way the pedestrians moved about. The smoke that came pouring out of the chimneys of the briquet factories was clouding up the sky and making the air murky.
En route, as I walked along the road beside my sister, I could see two huge pyramidal slag heaps. Kiyoko told me that slag heaps like these could also be seen along the railway line of the electric train she was about to take.
After we arrived at the station and just before she went through the gate, Kiyoko said with a sort of slight melancholy smile, "You know, I'd like to go back to Tokyo. But, for the time being . . ."
"If you had the same kind of work, wouldn't you be just as well off in Tokyo?"
There was a quizzical expression on her face. "But if I work here a while longer, I'll acquire some real skill at this. When I say that it's because I'm getting good as this work—I mean—I think it's better here because I'm working with foreigners."
It occurred to me that apart from the question of acquiring technical proficiency, Kiyoko probably felt that she wanted to live somewhat isolated from the home she had deserted.
"I wondered if I was going to be scolded severely and I was nervous about coming—but I'm glad I came," she said.
"I wouldn't scold you. Scolding doesn't undo what's been done, does it?"
"Is it all right if I write to you from now on?" she asked.
"There's no question of its being all right or not all right."
"Well then . . ."
Kiyoko slipped through the gate as though she were escaping. She raised her right hand and waved it, just from the wrist. She was like a little girl. Her conduct was not that of a woman who had suffered.
As there were still about two hours before I was to depart from this town with the group that came down with me, I passed through the main street and strolled over to the edge of town. The place was jam-packed with restaurants, inns, and pachinko parlors, and that was all there was to see. Since I had heard the previous day from the people of this area that sometimes the ground around here caved in and houses toppled because there had been mines under this town, I walked with caution, but I didn't encounter any such toppling houses. But here and there, while I was at the edge of town, I did come across puddles of all dimensions. And I wondered if these too weren't because of the depressions which resulted when the ground caved in. This Chikuho coal-belt continues right on northward to the sea coast, and my sister has just gone back to the beauty parlor at the air base on that sea coast, I thought.
My sister had taken a very womanish point of view toward my mother's attitude of wanting to be abandoned on Mount Obasute. But when I thought about this, there seemed a bit more justification for Kiyoko to be spending almost two years in a corner of the Kyushu coalfield belt watching the moon come out over an obasute-yama designed out of coal and possessing man-made artificiality.
Suddenly, I stopped in my tracks. Ever since Kiyoko had said something yesterday, I had felt as though there was something I had to ponder. It was an uneasy feeling, but right now I felt that the true nature of what I had to ponder was suddenly flashing in my brain in a clear form. Mightn't it be said that the idea that had once come over my mother—that she wanted to be left at Obasute—was obviously a form of pessimism toward life? And for whatever reasons she might have had, didn't Kiyoko's pessimistic disposition, which was somewhat of the same nature as Mama's, play a role in her desertion of her family, which is something that just doesn't happen to ordinary people?
As I thought about this, I also recalled an incident involving my younger brother, Shoji. It happened during the third year after the end of the war. One day Shoji, who at that time was working in the political department of one of the leading newspapers, came to have dinner with me at my place. At the bus stop when he was going home, he said to me, "I've suddenly become fed up with the newspaper office. This kind of work didn't suit my nature right from the beginning, but recently it's gotten so terrible that I can't stand it. I think I'd like to switch completely to a job where there's much less contact with people."
Shoji, from every angle, had a bright disposition, good for attracting friends. At first glance he seemed just perfect as a newspaper reporter, so such talk, which seemed suddenly to reveal what was deep down in his heart, surprised me. I recognized, however, that newspaper work had now really gotten on his nerves. And I realized that my brother must doubtless have had this sort of attitude ever since childhood.
"If you dislike it that much, wouldn't it be a good idea to quit and change to some other line of work?"
"I want to. Honestly."
"Go ahead. You're still young."
I spoke as though I were almost advising him to do that. It was not out of irresponsibility that I did so; it was just that there was something about my brother at that time that made it impossible for me to say anything else.
About two months later Shoji formally resigned from the newspaper company, moved to a city in the vicinity of his wife's parental home, and got a job at a small bank there. It occurred to me that his personality, which might even be characterised as misanthropic and which he had so unexpectedly revealed to me, would not change at the small local bank any more than it had at the newspaper company. But Shoji is working there to this day.
Even in Shoji's case—he too had developed in such a way that he suddenly wanted to withdraw quietly from a society in which masses of people were crowded up against each other. Wasn't that the driving force in his mind, just as with my mother and sister? Had it turned out that misanthropic blood like that flowed through the veins of all the members of my family? I have still another relative on my mother's side who attempted to shut himself off from his environment.
My mother's brother, the one next down the line in age, or to put it another way, my uncle who has just passed the age of sixty, is also a person who behaved similarly, changing his job suddenly and voluntarily. In spite of the fact that he had acquired some status as a successful man in the position of president of a civil engineering company, for no apparent reason at all, he retired immediately after the end of the war. Completely without rhyme or reason, he carried out this resignation as if to say that he couldn't stand it any longer and was running off. Sometimes my uncle advanced a plausible explanation to the effect that as the president of a small company he couldn't really earn a living and that confrontations with subordinate personnel had become extremely unpleasant for him. Viewed by outsiders, his position was completely incomprehensible, but if this was to be explained in more understandable terms, one needed only to recall his sudden feelings of antipathy toward the environment which he felt was closing in around him. My uncle thereafter started two or three businesses with a little capital, a patent-medicine business, a general store, and maybe something else, but it certainly cannot be said that things went well with any of these. Like my mother, he was a person of strong pride who never complained about how badly things were going, but it was pathetic to watch him.
I could not say that I myself do not have that kind of blood coursing through my body. In a meaningless sort of way, I felt a certain compassion for both Kiyoko and Shoji, and I could apparently also arrive at some understanding of my uncle, even with respect to his suffering and changing from job to job. For doing what they did rather than behaving unlike themselves, I loved them.
I came to the end of the street and walked around a block alongside the miners' homes and continued to think about such things.
IT WAS this fall that I actually set foot on the soil of Obasute myself. I had gone to Shiga Heights in connection with my work, and on the way back I suddenly took it into my head to take a stab at visiting the place called Obasute. It was evening when I got off the train at Togura Station on the Shin-etsu Line. There I stayed overnight at a hot-springs Japanese inn, and the next day I hired a car and headed for Obasute Station.
After leaving the town of Togura, the car followed the bank of the Chikuma River heading downstream, but on leaving this route we started to climb a small hillock.
"It better not rain, huh?" said the middle-aged driver. The sky was dark and overcast, and the weather was chilly. It looked as if it were going to rain.
The mountains along the route that the car took were all bedecked in autumn colors. Before and behind the car the various types of yellow-brown serrate-leafed oaks exuded a redness as if they were aflame, and intermittently there was just the green of pine trees.
We passed two or three hamlets. They were tiny hamlets, all affiliated with the township of Sarashina. Beside each of the houses in these hamlets there was a field where large white radishes and onions had been planted.
As we were passing a hamlet called Uo, we saw five or six old women walking in the road up ahead. The women moved off the road and stood there at the side, waiting for the car to pass.
"Lots of old women, aren't there? Must have been abandoned," I said jokingly.
"Not very likely," said the driver. "If they got left in this area, they could all go back home!"
"In the old days, it was probably very deserted in this area," I ventured.
"I'm sure this was a pretty deserted road. But, it does no good to abandon anybody here with villages so nearby. They still call the area around here Obasute, but the real Mount Obasute is Mount Kamuriki. You can't see it from here, but pretty soon we'll come to a place where you can."
The Mount Kamuriki the driver was talking about was the obasute-yama of the Middle Ages, as I knew from the tanka. "What about Mount Obase?" I asked, but the driver appeared not to know anything at all about the obasute-yama of Early Ancient Times. Or perhaps Mount Obase was currently called something else.
In about thirty minutes the car reached Obasute Station. At the square in front of the station, I got out of the car, and ushered on by the driver, I headed down the road alongside the station toward Choraku Temple, which is known to be a famous moon-viewing site. Step by step we walked right into the scene that I had viewed so often from train windows.
Everywhere the mountains and fields before my eyes were an autumnal red. As we were descending the fairly rapid slope ahead of us, the driver looked back over his shoulder as though he had just remembered something which he had forgotten until then.
"That's Mount Kamuriki" he informed me. There, looking as though it had been piled up beyond the hill, halfway up whose slope that station stood, was a part of the form of Mount Kamuriki, its summit enveloped in clouds. I did not know whether or not this was the obasute-yama of the Legend of Obasute, but in any case this Mount Kamuriki was much too high and distant a mountain for people to be able to climb easily. Mama too, if she saw this mountain, probably would not say even jokingly that she wanted to be left on that mountain, I thought.
However, I immediately changed my mind. In my mind, thought I, I had arbitrarily envisioned my own obasute-yama and had pictured myself wandering around there carrying Mama on my back. But Mama—being Mama and being completely different from me—might very well have imagined her obasute-yama as a big steep mountain like Mount Kamuriki.
In the first place, an obasute-yama ought to be a mountain like this one. Come to think of it, even the obasute-yama into which Kiyoko had flung herself, and Shoji's too, must certainly have been much closer to the percipitous Mount Kamuriki than they were to the gently rolling hillocks adorned with autumnal colors over which I had just now been strolling.
As we went down the slanting road, I noticed that the slope of the hillock was swarming with stone monuments on which poems had been engraved. Since the letters on the faces of these stones were eroded, I couldn't tell how old or new they were. But the tanka and haiku and Chinese-style poems which were inscribed on the stones must have been written in appreciation of the bright moon as seen from here. I proceeded down the road and again found that a number of poem-inscribed stones had been erected here and there all over the slope. When I envisioned these stones illuminated by moonbeams, for some reason they gave an uncanny feeling completely irrelevant to their elegance and taste.
Fairly soon the road ended in a gigantic boulder which, by its nature, in itself constituted a precipice. This rock is called Ubaishi—The Old Woman Rock. They say that this is an old woman turned to stone. This rock too was uncanny. But the prospect of Zenjoji Plain, which I could see by standing on this rock, was beautiful with the Chikuma River flowing through the center of the flatlands, the hamlets here and there dotting the solid yellow plain, and the mountains on the opposite side of the Chikuma aflame with the colors of fall.
The steep stone steps alongside the Ubaishi were covered with little maple leaves red as blood, and the narrow precincts of Choraku Temple at the foot of the steps were covered with the yellow leaves of gingko trees. Even when we called out, there wasn't a single sound of anyone emerging from the interior of the priests' living quarters, though there were several children playing in front of them.
We entered a small building, a moon-viewing hall, and rested there. The faces of the votive tablets and votive pictures were all worn away because of the long passage of years. These things were now nothing more than musty old white plates.
"The fall colors seem better than the moon, don't you think?" said my driver. Right then, I had had exactly the same thought.
A corner of the plain was quickly becoming obscured, and just as I was thinking that I heard the sounds of an approaching shower, raindrops began to fall right where we were. We left the place.
That night, I stayed over at the Togura inn. And I wrote a letter to Kiyoko suggesting that she at least seriously consider working in Tokyo. At midnight the shower turned into a downpour.
* The near resemblance in sound of these two names is coincidental; obase, which means something like "little valley" has no connection with the meaning of obasute.