Sado: Japan's Island in Exile Page 6
Shape-changing animals are found in most countries — Coyote in North America is probably the most famous — but in Japan, such trickery is much more commonly associated with the fox, whose exploits are recounted in tales and legends all over the country. On Sado, however, it is the exclusive province of the mujina. The reason is simple: there are no foxes on Sado. A characteristic island story explains why.
One day, a mujina called Danzaburo took a boat and crossed over the sea from Sado to the mainland to visit some of his old friends there. As he was walking along the road beside the coast, he met a fox.
"Danzaburo," said the fox in a friendly voice, "you're just the fellow I was hoping to meet. Will you take me over to Sado with you, so that I can live there too? I hear it's a fine place."
Danzaburo thought for a moment and then agreed.
"All right," he said. "You can come back to Sado with me if you want to. But I may as well tell you now, you'd better turn out to be good at shapechanging. People onSado are accustomed to a high level of skill and won't give you much of a welcome if you can't deliver."
"Hm, I see," replied the fox. "Well, there shouldn't be any problem. Why don't I give you a demonstration of what I can do? Just name the trick. What would you like me to change into?"
"Well, just before I met you I was about to turn myself into a human traveler," replied Danzaburo. "How about turning yourself into something I can wear — like a pair of sandals?"
"Excellent idea," said the fox. And quick as a flash, he changed into a fine pair of sturdy wooden sandals.
Danzaburo put on the sandals, made his way down onto the beach, and found a boat. He pushed it to the water's edge, jumped in, and put to sea. When he had gone some distance from shore, he took the sandals off his feet and threw them over the side into the water. The fox drowned — and ever since then there have been no foxes on Sado.
Every mujina has an extensive repertoire of tricks, including the ability to impersonate real people, and is equipped with an enormous scrotum that he drags about like a train, wraps around himself like a kimono, or stretches out and beats on like a drum. Particular individuals develop specialties of their own, like stealing people's belongings from houses or temples, conjuring up ghostly lights, or bursting into song from inside bushes. One nasty-minded specimen makes a habit of lurking along dark roadsides bent double, with his muzzle pushed between his back legs to represent the female vulva, hoping to lure some passing drunk into a mistake too horrible to contemplate. But although their shape-changing skills are sometimes highly imaginative, they are usually employed in the service of more modest ambitions. One Sado story tells of a man who went to town and bought five fish. On the way home, he had to cross a river, and while in midstream he suddenly noticed that his load felt much lighter than before. He opened his bag and found that the fish were no longer fish but had turned into five ordinary sticks. Disgusted, he took them out and flung them in the river. At that, of course, they turned back into fish, whereupon they were caught and eaten by a mujina waiting a little way downstream.
They also have the power of possession, which they may exercise out of malice or to revenge some slight, such as disturbance to their lair or injury to their cubs. Others work directly for a sorcerer, who wins their loyalty by feeding a pregnant female and later receiving one of her cubs as a gift in return. After this, the sorcerer can summon the cub at any time in invisible form and use it to possess or harass an individual, usually at the behest of an enemy, who pays for the service. Or else he can ask it questions about the future, or about other people's plans and secrets.
At the same time, mujina are also known to perform acts of kindness and are scrupulous about repaying favors. One story describes how a farmer was working in his field one day when he heard an anguished crying coming from down by the beach. A mujina had got its paw caught inside a shell, so the man helped it to get free. A few days later, the same man was out fishing in a little boat by himself when he suddenly heard a voice calling "Hey! Watch out for that octopus!" Looking round, he saw that a large octopus he had caught was clambering out of its container and trying to get back into the water. Thanks to the mujina's shouted warning, he was able to recapture it.
Or again, there is the story of a mujina that disguised itself as a human and went to ask a midwife to come to its home and help with a difficult delivery. The midwife accompanied him to a splendid house she had never seen before and there supervised the birth, which was eventually concluded without mishap. But by the time her work was finished it had grown late, and the family in the big house invited her to have some dinner and then stay the night. When she awoke the next morning, she found herself out of doors under a big tree. The house had disappeared and the money she had been paid, which she had carefully stowed away in her purse, turned out to be only dried leaves. Realizing that she had been "over there," as it were, she carried the leaves home and dedicated them on the altar of her household shrine. A few years later, the village where she lived suffered a severe fire in which many houses were burnt down. But the midwife's, of course, was spared.
One striking feature of tales about mujina, especially to anyone whose idea of fairy stories involves drama and dragons and princesses being rescued from the jaws of unspeakable death, is their generally mundane story line and unexceptional details. The magic is of a very muted variety, lacking sensational climaxes and satisfying triumphs of good over evil. Instead, the tales record events and experiences that could happen to anyone. One reason may be that such stories did derive from real events, in which the strange or inexplicable element was ascribed to a mujina instead of to its more probable source, the ascetic priest-hermit-wanderers known as yamabushi ("one who sleeps in the mountains"). Yamabushi are fewer today but were widespread in medieval Japan, including Sado, and practised many of the skills — writing, healing, predicting the future, influencing the outcome of events — that mujina were supposed to possess. And since such skills were potential sources of money and power, unscrupulous yamabushi encouraged superstitious country folk to regard them with awe and hire them to solve their problems.
A further clue is contained in mujina names, which were often compounded with the names of sacred places such as rocks, waterfalls, or caves — Fuya ("Bamboo Grove") Mujina, for example, or Futatsuiwa ("Two Rocks") Mujina. Other names included suffixes (Tonchi-bo, Seichi-bo, Rei-in) normally applied to the names of priests. These compounds suggest a connection with Shinto worship in general and with yamabushi in particular, who lived in the wild, slept in caves, and gained power by fasting, walking long distances, and standing under icy waterfalls. Mujina may therefore have played the role of mediums, or familiars. But living so close for so many centuries, humans must have noticed long before the days of the yamabushi that their wild neighbor was weird, different, untamable; no good for food, or for work, or for companionship. Bold and cunning, it got into people's lives and even their homes and then vanished, leaving mysteries no-one could solve. What more natural source of tales and tricks could there be? It even spooked the language, spawning expressions like furu-danuki, meaning a crafty person, or tanuki-neiri, pretending to be asleep. Belief in its power was not belief in something unseen, but a matter of common experience. Worship at its shrines, too, was not deference to a superior but a simple enactment of rites designed to maintain the best available status quo: respect, food and money from one side, restraint from the other.
The dilapidated shrine at Seki, dedicated to the worship of a mujina called Sabuto, was a vestigial relic of this once-popular cult. Evidently it was still in periodic use — the presence of the guardians and the pile of sake bottles proved that — and while not exactly secret, was hidden in the woods, away from public view, detached from mainstream religious practice. Although not yet completely obliterated, the trail into this strange cultural cul-de-sac is already badly overgrown and will soon, most likely, disappear forever.
***
Mujina apart, Seki has always been one of the
gloomiest villages on Sado, and now that it's bypassed by a new stretch of road, it has lost even the feeble status conferred by having the public bus service pass through its main street. Instead, it has shrunk back to its former insignificance, huddled silently against the wooded mountains. There was no-one in sight as I walked along the lane that wound between the houses, not even a dog or a cat. To one side of a low, rickety shack was a short flight of stone steps leading up to a path that disappeared into a clump of bamboo; the steps were so little used that they had become completely overgrown with clumps of daisies and patches of bright green moss. Irregular vegetable patches fronting onto narrow alleys, rusty wooden-handled farming tools leaning against plank-walled sheds, and piled-up bundles of straw and firewood all reinforced the impression of a hamlet barely changed since the Middle Ages. But signs of the twentieth century could be seen too, creeping over the village like a new strain of fungus. One battered old wooden house had been given an expensive face-lift with a new roof of bright red tiles, new double-glazed windows, and a gleaming white circular dish for receiving satellite TV.
By walking through the middle of Seki I had missed the shortcut provided by the new main road, which passed under a chunky headland through a short, curving tunnel smoothly lined with concrete slabs and illuminated by glaring halogen lights. Sado's coast now has several of these airport-type tunnels, built to replace dubious sections of the old road that followed the very edge of the shore until forced to pass through short tunnels of their own. With their jagged, dripping walls, those tunnels were like galleries in an old mine: a modern safety inspector would close them without a second thought. But they weren't closed because of safety. They were simply too small for the modern buses that thunder up and down the island's roads in the summer tourist season.
The sort of vehicles that the islanders use could pass through these big new tunnels four abreast: when one drives through on its own, it looks like a child's toy puttering through an aircraft hanger. Apart from the charabancs, the only large-size traffic on the island is concrete mixer trucks. Nearly all the locals drive pickups or small sedans. Varieties of style and color are remarkably limited. Foreign car companies are fond of complaining that the Japanese market is rigged to keep them out, and so it is. But domestic shares are rigged as well. On Sado, for instance, Honda is preeminent: it looks to have the place stitched up like a sack of grain. There are also some Subarus and a few Toyotas, but hardly any Nissans, and I had walked all day without seeing a single Mazda. Osaka, by contrast, is Toyota country. Yokohama leans toward Nissan. That way, competition is restricted and profitability preserved. It's a crooked deal in the cities, but it makes sense in remote areas because the volume of demand is simply too low for all the manufacturers to maintain a presence, compete equally, and still make a profit. When the buyers are mostly low-income farmers and fishermen who all need basically the same thing, the most practical solution is to offer them one model in one color and pare costs to the bone. On Sado, the model is the Honda pickup and the color is white.
Tunnels have another use for the traveler on foot — shelter from the rain. It was just starting to spatter as I approached the tunnel outside a village called Koda. The sound of Snake Frightener clunking on the road disturbed a wild duck, which had been sitting in the long grass a few yards away beside a pebble-bedded stream. Straight away she flapped up into the air and flew around me in wide circles, emitting anxious honks. She had a nest down there and was trying to make it clear that she would feel a lot better if I went away. Taking the hint, I sprinted for the tunnel entrance just as the sky gave a rumble and rain from a black cloud began to thrash the tarmac.
I waited for ten minutes but the rain didn't stop. So I dragged on a plastic motorcycling suit, laid a short towel over my head and shoulders, jammed my cap back on my head, and set out again, looking like a cross between an Arab and an Albanian. Not that it mattered. No foreigner looks weirder than any other foreigner on Sado. See one, you've seen them all.
Koda was a nothing sort of village, just a shabby string of miserable-looking shanties with a little shop on the ground floor of the only concrete building. This was the headquarters of the local Nokyo, or Agricultural Cooperative, where the area's farmers brought their produce to be boxed up and shipped to town. The shop sold cans of fish and fruit juice, jumbo-size bottles of soy sauce, and various dried foods in plastic packets. I asked if they had any fresh fruit, but they didn't. Come to that, there were no fresh vegetables either.
The rain was blowing in squalls from the north, making patterns of dancing circles on the surface of the rice paddies and turning the soft, cool gray of the timber-walled houses to a wet, slimy brown. But there were flowers everywhere, tenacious climbing roses, clumps of oxeye daisies, and tall purple irises with three or four flowers to a stem. Each of these had three mauve-colored petals that curved upwards and folded together at the top to form a little tent, and another three, darker in color, like protruding tongues, with dabs of yellow pollen on the end of their stamens. As I examined them, I heard voices call out a greeting from the other side of the road. Some young children were playing in the precincts of the village temple, sheltered from the rain by some tall cedars. They had been taking turns to ride a small, rusty bicycle, but the game had been interrupted because one of the stabilizer wheels had fallen off. "Can you fix it?" they asked. I looked around and found the retaining pin, which had come loose and dropped on the ground, and then replaced the wheel. "Are you a foreigner?" asked one. "Are you going camping?" said another. "What's camping?" asked the smallest.
Toward the end of the afternoon, I reached a place called Kogi. My feet were aching, and I was about ready to call it a day. The rain had stopped and the sky had cleared; all I was wanted to sit by the sea, drink beer, and then look around for a place to sleep. But Kogi didn't make it. It looked like a war zone. Another massive harbor was under construction, with rusty power shovels hard at work, bulldozer tracks all over the muddy ground, and huge piles of building materials lying silently under sodden tarpaulins. I half expected a destroyer to appear, or at least a couple of MTBs, but as usual, all this building overkill was for the benefit of the local fishing industry. Tied up at the quay was a brand new squid catcher, apparently being made ready for its maiden voyage. Its paintwork was factory fresh, its varnished deck timbers gleamed a uniform golden yellow, and it bristled from bow to stern with the latest high-tech equipment — 49 pairs of fat, elongated glass bulbs for the electric lamps, 8 radio masts, and 12 pairs of two-man reels, 6 along each side. But jutting out of the top of the wheelhouse, where I would have expected a flag on a pole, there was a long bamboo sapling with its leaves still attached and a couple of dozen folded twists of paper inscribed with prayers. Half a dozen men were sitting on the deck sharing a large bottle of sake. Either they were shy or else did not want to be interrupted: whichever it was, they all looked pointedly in other directions as I passed by.
I had better luck in Sembon, the next village down the coast. There was a scruffy campground with no-one on it and a little roadside shop where I bought packaged noodles, an onion, and a few green peppers. I filled my water bottle from a tap in the yard outside, then went down onto the pebble beach and collected a pile of driftwood. It took two large cans of beer before the fire had stopped blazing and settled down enough to cook on. Dicing the vegetables into rough chunks, I gave them a minute or two in the water, heaved in the noodles, and then slurped up the mixture like a thirsty dog, gasping as it scalded the inside of my mouth.
Afterward I cleared a place by the fire to lay my sleeping bag and then wandered out onto a group of rocks at the end of the beach where there was a red torii gateway and a little shrine. The rock was badly faulted and trended sharply toward the sea at about 45 degrees. The shrine was set up on a grassy ledge to one side of it; beyond were a few short sets of iron steps and walkways linking several huge boulders that enclosed a network of deep, sheltered pools. A man in long waders was crouching in one of t
he pools. He stood up when he heard my footsteps, and I saw that he was holding a dripping wire basket half filled with sazae shells. He gave me a few of the smaller ones, and I carried them back to the fire, arranged them points downward in the embers, tipped in a little soy sauce, and waited for them to start bubbling, which lifts off the hard protective cap and lets you get at the flesh inside. You pull them out with a toothpick or the point of a knife, and don't bother to examine them too closely because they look like twisty, three-inch sections of animal gut with some dark, sludgy, half-digested goo inside, which is pretty much exactly what they are. Just eat them hot and watch out for the grit. The flavor is bitter, but the flesh is tender and tastes of nothing but the sea.
Day 3
Heart Of Gold
The sound of someone singing made me step off the road and down to a little shingle beach behind some big rocks. In the hour since I had set off I had seen no-one at all, nothing but the dawn breaking over an empty world of stones and trees, wild yellow lilies coming into flower on the cliffsides, and the sea sloshing softly against the edge of the pebbly shore. Only the birds were busy, swooping and soaring across a wide blue sky peppered with blobs of white cloud that drifted slowly by like puffs of gunsmoke from some battle beyond the horizon.
A little old woman in dark trousers, a dark blue shirt, and a sleeveless woolen tunic was moving slowly along the beach collecting seaweed. In her left hand she held a bunch of what looked like long brown ribbons that glistened in the sunshine and in her right a thin bamboo pole tipped with a short sickle. Here and there she splashed out into the water and reached out with the pole to cut another of the fleshy plants and add it to her collection. As she worked, she repeated a strange, tuneless little chant, the same few sounds over and over again, one of the old work songs of Sado.
When she had gathered enough, she hobbled over to a rock near where I was sitting and slipped on a pair of pink straw sandals with thongs of white rope. She didn't seem surprised to see me, nor alarmed by my foreign appearance. "Look at this," she said with a sigh, brandishing her bunch of seaweed. "It's no good any more, the wakame. Getting thin, and old. The season's coming to an end, you see. Soon it'll all be gone. And then we'll have to have arame instead — not nearly so tasty. And anyway, you need a boat. I won't be able to get it for myself."