My mother-in-law, beside me, was fidgeting. “We don’t need all that,” she said. “It’ll just go to waste.” There was no way I could have explained the anguish in my heart, and that only made it all the more unbearable. I’ve never felt more depressed in my life.
TARO THE WIZARD
nce upon a time, in the village of Kanagi in Tsugaru Province, there lived a country squire by the name of Kuwagata Sosuke. Sosuke was forty-nine before he was blessed with his first child, a son whom he named Taro. No sooner had Taro come into the world than he spread his jaws in a yawn, the prodigious size of which so tormented Sosuke that when relatives came to offer their congratulations he was unable even to look them in the eye. Sosuke’s fears were soon to prove warranted. Upon waking in the morning, Taro never crawled eagerly out of bed but would lie there with his eyes closed for an extra hour or two, pretending to be asleep; held in the folds of his mother’s kimono, he wouldn’t bother to seek out her breast but would merely let his mouth hang open and wearily wait for the nipple to brush against his lips; and when he was given a swivel-necked papier-mâché tiger with which to amuse himself, he made no effort to play with the toy but only gazed listlessly at its comically bobbing head. He was, in short, a child whose nature it was to despise any sort of unnecessary exertion. And yet, when he was three years old, Taro was responsible for a little incident that lent his name considerable notoriety among the people of the village. It was by no means an incident of the sort that gets written up in newspapers; you may rest assured, therefore, that it really happened. Taro went for a walk... and just kept walking.
It was a night in early spring. Taro slipped silently from his mother’s embrace, tumbled out of bed, rolled to the dirt floor of the entrance hall, and continued rolling, right out the door. Once outside, he climbed to his feet. Sosuke and his wife, meanwhile, slept on unaware.
A mist-blurred full moon hung low in the sky, just inches above Taro’s forehead. Barefoot and dressed in an underkimono with a killifish motif and a padded cotton vest with a pattern of arrowhead roots, he headed east along the horsedung-littered road. He walked with his sleepy eyes half-closed, breathing in short, hurried little huffs and puffs.
The next morning the village was in an uproar. Taro had been found sleeping innocently in the middle of an apple orchard on Rolling Springs Mountain, more than two miles from the village. Rolling Springs Mountain was shaped like a half-melted block of ice. The peak consisted of three softly curved undulations, and the western side formed a gentle slope that resembled water flowing. The reason Taro had ended up atop a three-hundred-foot mountain wasn’t clear. There was no doubt that he’d gone alone. But no one could figure out why.
He was discovered by a young woman who’d been out gathering ferns. She placed him in her basket and carried him, gently rocking from side to side, back to the village. Those villagers who came up to peer into the basket, creasing their brows with dark, greasy wrinkles, whispered of goblins and nodded to one another knowingly.
When Sosuke saw his son home safe and sound, all he could say was: “Well, well.” He didn’t say he was upset and didn’t say he was relieved. Taro’s mother, for her part, scarcely seemed agitated at all. She lifted Taro from the girl’s basket, replacing him with a roll of cotton toweling as a reward, then set a large tub on the dirt floor of the entrance hall, filled it to the brim with hot water, and calmly began to bathe the boy. Not that Taro was the least bit dirty; his naked body was plump and round and white. Sosuke paced back and forth restlessly beside the tub until at last he tripped against it and sent water splashing over the floor from wall to wall. Though his wife scolded him for this in a shrill and angry voice, he remained where he was, peeking over her shoulder at Taro’s face and saying, again and again: “Taro, what did you see? What did you see, Taro?” Taro, after yawning any number of times, shouted in a broken babble: “Peebo stobuu, beezee buunee.”
It wasn’t until late that night, as Sosuke lay in bed, that he finally perceived the meaning of these words. They were from Emperor Nintoku’s famous poem: “Climbing the palace tower / I see smoke fill the air / The people’s stoves are busily burning.” Such was the impact of this realization that Sosuke reflexively tried to slap his knee, and might have succeeded had he not been hindered by the heavy quilts; as it was, he ended up striking himself, quite painfully, on the bellybutton. The son of a squire, he reflected, is the father of a squire. At the age of three the boy is already concerned for the people’s welfare. Ah—a blessed ray of hope! No doubt Taro had gazed down from Rolling Springs Mountain upon Kanagi Village awaking in the dawn and envisioned the chimneys of all the houses sending up prosperous billows of smoke as the people cooked their morning meals. By heaven, it’s the pious wish of a noble, lofty soul. What a godsend this child is! I must take special care of him. Sosuke sat up quietly, reached over to where Taro was sleeping between him and his wife, and carefully rearranged the quilts. Then, stretching even farther, he did the same for his wife, albeit somewhat less carefully. The wife wasn’t pleasant to look at when she slept; Sosuke turned his head sternly to one side and muttered to himself as he tugged at her bedding: “This is the woman who gave birth to Taro. I must take good care of her too.”
Taro’s babbled words proved prophetic. That spring, all the apple orchards in the village burst into bloom with oversized rouge blossoms whose fragrance wafted as far as the castle town, some twenty-five miles away. Autumn brought even better things: apples as big as grapefruit and as red as coral hung from the trees in dense clusters. So juicy were these apples th
at if you plucked one and bit into it, the skin would burst with a loud crack, and sweet, cold spray would gush out to soak your nose and cheeks. On New Year’s Day the following year, an auspicious event occurred: a thousand cranes appeared from out of the east. The entire village came out to point and gasp as the cranes slowly circled overhead in the blue New Year’s sky and finally soared off to the west. That fall, too, at harvest time, the ears of rice produced ears of rice and the boughs of the apple trees bent low with the weight of clusters of fruit every bit as wonderful as the previous year’s. The village began to prosper. Sosuke was convinced that it was all because of his son’s prophetic powers, but he refrained from telling the villagers this. Perhaps he didn’t want to be sneered at for being a blindly doting father. Or—who knows?—perhaps he had some vague ulterior motive and hoped to use Taro’s gift to line his own pockets.
Sadly, however, after two or three years, the infant prodigy began to stray from the path of virtue. At some point the villagers took to referring to him as “Taro the Lazy,” and even Sosuke had to admit that it was only to be expected. At six and seven years of age Taro never went out to the fields and paddies and riverbanks to play as other children did; in summer he’d sit at the window ledge with his chin on his hand and gaze at the scenery outside, and in winter he’d lie by the hearth and stare at the firewood going up in flames. He seemed to take pleasure only in riddles. One winter night, as he lay in a heap by the fire, he squinted up at the face of Sosuke beside him and drawled: “What is it... that can fall in the water... without getting wet?” Sosuke slowly swiveled his head to the left, then to the right, then back again, as he pondered. “I don’t know,” he said at last. Taro let his eyelids droop shut before giving the answer: “A shadow.” Sosuke was more vexed with his son at that moment than ever before. This child is a moron, he thought. No doubt about it—he’s an idiot. A worthless lazybones, just as the villagers say.
And so it went until the autumn of Taro’s tenth year, when the village was devastated by a flood. Kanagi River, normally a stream no more than five yards across that flowed lazily along the northern edge of the village, was driven to a mad rage by a month of steadily falling rain. The muddy headwaters swelled, forming whirlpools great and small, and the six branches of the river merged to rush down the mountain at a furious speed, sweeping away hundreds of freshly cut logs, uprooting the oaks and firs and poplars that grew on the banks and hurling them downstream, gathering in a great pool at the foot of the mountain and then overflowing in one mighty upheaval to smash against the village bridge, demolishing it as if it were made of straw, crashing through the embankments, and spreading out like a vast sea that licked at the walls of all the houses and set the pigs to swimming and the ten thousand sheaves of newly harvested rice to floating upon its rolling waves. It was five days before the rain stopped; ten days later the waters began to recede, and, twenty days after that, Kanagi River was once again a leisurely little stream flowing along the northern border of the village.
The villagers gathered each night in one house or another to discuss what was to be done, and the conclusion was always the same: Sure don’t fancy starvin’ to death! This consensus was always the starting point of the following night’s discussion, during which many questions would be raised but only one conclusion reached: Sure don’t fancy starvin’ to death! They were making no progress at all and beginning to panic when at last a valiant, public-spirited soul stepped forward. Ten-year-old Taro turned one day to his father, Sosuke, who sat with his head cradled in his arms, sighing, and ventured an opinion: “Seems to me there’s a simple solution. Someone should go to the castle and ask the daimyo to send emergency relief. I volunteer.” It was like a bolt of lightning; Sosuke shot up in his seat and let out a joyful shout. The shout ended in another sigh of despair, however, as he realized what a rash suggestion this was. He frowned and buried his head in his arms again. “It may sound simple to a child like you, but an adult would know better. Make a direct appeal to the daimyo and it could cost you your life. It’s out of the question. Forget it. Don’t even consider it.” That night, however, Taro strolled casually out of the house and then, unbeknownst to anyone, hurried straight for the castle town.
Luck was with him. The direct appeal was a success. Far from demanding Taro’s head, the daimyo actually bestowed a reward upon him. It may have been that the daimyo of that time had grown a bit senile and neatly forgotten the laws of the land, but, in any case, thanks to Taro, the village was saved from extinction. And the following year it began to prosper once again.
For two or three years afterward, the villagers spoke well of Taro. In time, however, they completely forgot their debt of gratitude and came up with a new name for him: “the squire’s idiot son.” He spent almost every day in the storehouse, reading at random the books in his father’s library. From time to time he came across volumes full of indecent pictures, but these, too, he merely leafed through with an indifferent look on his face.
At some point, however, he discovered a book on wizardry, and this he read with great fervor, devouring it from cover to cover and memorizing every word. After a year of study and practice he acquired the ability to transform himself variously into a mouse, an eagle, and a snake. Casting the spell that made him a mouse, he’d dash about inside the storehouse, stopping every now and then to let out a squeak; as an eagle, he’d spread his wings, fly out the window, and soar through the sky to his heart’s content; and in the form of a snake, he’d crawl under the storehouse floor, dodging the cobwebs, and slide through the cool, shadowy weeds on his scaly belly. Before long he learned how to turn himself into a praying mantis as well, but this proved disappointing. There was nothing particularly fun about being a praying mantis.
Sosuke had by now given up on his son entirely. Reluctant to admit defeat, however, he would sometimes turn to his wife and say: “The boy was simply too gifted, that’s all.”
At sixteen Taro fell in love. The girl, who was the daughter of the oil-seller next door, was a marvelously skilled flutist. Taro loved to sit in the storehouse in the form of a mouse or a snake and listen to her play. Ah, he would think, to have that maiden fall in love with me! If only I were the handsomest man in the province! At last it occurred to him to concentrate his wizardly powers on attaining this goal. Discovering an incantation that might help him become handsome, he pronounced it again and again, day after day, and on the tenth day succeeded in casting the spell.
Taro approached the mirror with his heart in his throat... and received the shock of a lifetime. His skin was so white as to be almost colorless; his cheeks were full and round and soft and smooth; his eyes were the narrowest conceivable slits; and a long, stringy mustache drooped down to below his chin. It was a face that would have looked right at home on any eighth-century Buddhist statue. And even the splendid article between his legs resembled those of the men of old, hanging down long and fat and heavy. Imagine Taro’s chagrin when he realized what had happened: The wizardry book was too old; it had been written during the Tempyo era and was hopelessly out of date. I’m not going to get anywhere looking like this, he thought, and decided to start all over. When he tried to undo the spell, however, he discovered that it could not be undone. Apparently if a wizard uses his magic to satisfy his own selfish desires, he’s stuck with the result, for better or worse. For three days, four days straight, Taro expended his efforts in vain, and on the fifth day he resigned himself. The girl next door was scarcely likely to find him attractive now, but the world was wide and surely not devoid of women with eccentric tastes. Taro, stripped of his wizardly powers, stepped out of the storehouse with his round, plump cheeks and long, stringy mustache.
After explaining everything to his parents, who stared at him with mouths agape, he finally convinced them to accept what had happened and to close their mouths. That night, leaving only a note that said “Gone on a journey,” he left the house abruptly. A full moon hung in the sky. The outline of the moon looked a bit blurred, but it wasn’t because of mist; it was because his eyes were so narrow.
Ambling aimlessly along, Taro reflected upon the riddle of good looks. Why should a face that would have been handsome long ago seem so ridiculous now? It just didn’t make sense. What was wrong with the way he looked? This was an awfully difficult riddle, however, and though Taro pondered it as he passed through the woods outside the neighboring village, as he made his way to the castle town, and even as he crossed the border out of Tsugaru, he was still nowhere near coming up with an answer.
Incidentally, it’s said that the secret to Taro’s wizardry involved leaning languidly against a pillar or fence with folded arms and muttering the incantation, “What a bore, what a bore, what a bore,” again and again, hundreds of times, until he entered a state of egolessness.
JIROBEI THE FIGHTER
Once upon a time, in the town of Mishima, a stopover point on the Tokaido Road, there lived a man by the name of Shikamaya Ippei. Ippei’s family had been in the business of brewing saké since his great-grandfather’s generation. It’s said that saké reflects the personality of the brewer, and Ippei’s saké, which was called Waterwheel, was crystal clear and extremely dry. Ippei had fourteen children—six boys and eight girls. The eldest son was rather slow when it came to understanding the ways of the world, as a result of which he did just as Ippei told him and put the family business before all other things in life. Though he had no confidence in his own ideas, the eldest son would occasionally hazard an opinion in his father’s presence. His courage would fail him even as he spoke, however, and he’d end up retracting his own argument, saying things like: “At least, such would appear to be the case, but then again, one can only conclude that this line of thought is riddled with misconceptions, and I’m sure it’s quite wrong, but what do you think, Father? It somehow seems to me I’ve got it all wrong.” To which Ippei would issue a terse reply: “You’ve got
it all wrong.”
Matters were a bit different for the second son, Jirobei. There was in his nature a tendency to display a taste for fairness and justice—not the “fairness and justice” that politicians are forever carrying on about, but fairness and justice in the true, original sense of the words. As a consequence, the people of Mishima regarded him as a troublemaker and kept their distance.
Jirobei disliked what is known as the tradesman spirit. The world, he maintained, wasn’t an abacus. Convinced that the only things of true worth were those without any monetary value whatsoever, he spent most of his days drinking. He refused to drink the saké his family brewed, however, having seen with his own eyes the excessive profit they turned on the stuff. In fact, if he discovered that he’d inadvertently drained a cup of Waterwheel, he would promptly stick a finger down his throat and force it back up. Day after day Jirobei wandered about the town drinking, but his father, Ippei, never reproached him for it. Ippei was a clearheaded fellow, and it pleased him that at least one of his many children had turned out to be a ne’er-do-well: it lent color to the group. He was also the head of the Mishima fire brigade, an honorary post to which he hoped one day to have Jirobei succeed him. Farsighted man that he was, Ippei held that if his son were to continue to gallivant about like a wild horse, it would only help him to accumulate the qualifications required of the future head of the fire brigade, and he turned a blind eye to his second son’s scandalous behavior.
In the summer of his twenty-second year, Jirobei decided that, come what may, he was going to make himself into a formidable fighter. There was a reason for this.
On August 15 every year a festival was held at the Great Shrine of Mishima, and tens of thousands of people—not only the townsfolk, but residents of the surrounding mountains and nearby fishing villages—would gather there, all with colorful festival fans stuck in their sashes. For longer than anyone could remember, it had always rained on the day of the festival. Mishima people have a taste for flamboyance, however, and would stand in the rain flapping their fans, drenched to the skin and clenching their teeth to endure the cold as they watched the wheeled dancing platforms and floats passing by and marveled at the fireworks display.