Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (5 page)

And now a sound was growing. Jostled, hands before me, palms out, fearing collision, fearing falling, I heard it as a growling coming nearer as we raced along. But I was wrong—it was us.

It was the festival chant, heard when pulling the great wheeled float or shouldering the
omikoshi
, but now—no longer redolent of effort—it was pure sound, like surf, like wind in the pines.
Yu-sha, yu-sha, yu-sha-
repeated endlessly, a chain of sound on which we moved, our steps running to its beat. It was all around, filling my eyes and nose as well as ears. And then I heard it deep inside me. It was coming from myself as well.

Possession. We were all possessed by this deity toward whom we were rushing. Chanting, I recalled what I had heard. A Shinto deity and thus without features, name, or disposition—simply a
kami
like the myriad others—this one, however, retained a quality. He—the gender seemed inevitable—liked darkness. Just as the sequestered
kami
in the carried
omikoshi
loved to be jostled and jerked about, tossed and turned, so this god adored the dark and all that happened there.

Abruptly, there was a sharp wrench, a fracture in our chant as though a windpipe had been seized, and the crush was suddenly so great that I was lifted off my feet. We were passing through a narrower gate, I guessed, and into the compound of the shrine itself.

Then there were cries from up ahead and the sound of scuffles, and the chant was broken off; the bodies about me pressed hard into mine, and our whole enormous mass rolled to a halt.

We were in the shrine and from its other gates had pushed in gangs as large as ours; we had collided as we had for generations past, and those left outside were still pushing, pushing their way inside.

I had, I now realized, lost both shoes. My shirt was open, buttons torn away, and I was so flattened against someone's back that we seemed fused together.

At the same time I suddenly heard the silence. It was as startling as any noise. Utter darkness; complete silence. I moved my head away from it as one moves back from a too bright light. But it was not the silence of solitude, though just as complete. It was vastly peopled, and in it I was slowly being crushed by all these bodies. And the pressure became greater and greater as those outside forced their way in, fighting to join the swarm, to become one with it.

While I could still see in the phosphorescent dark, while I too could chant and run with the rest, then I had been exhilarated. But now in the sudden grip of alien skin and muscle, beginning to feel the sweat seeping out of me, sensing the seams of my clothing pulling, then giving with the strain, I became afraid.

What was I doing here in the midst of all these strangers?—a different race, animated by different thoughts and different feelings. Perhaps they could tolerate such barbarous ceremonies as this, but not I. I must escape. There must be some way out of this solid multitude. I thought of Tokyo, of the jeep. And in a few hours I was thinking of home, America.

For in these hours there had been no movement, none was possible. The only sensation was the graduaDy steadying pressure which now made even breathing hard. That and the few small shifts that occur when water freezes, when a plant expands. The body next to mine had suddenly found a way to turn, a movement as sudden and as meaningless as a bubble of trapped air rising swiftly to the surface.

My imprisoned hands were now a part of someone else. Moving my fingers, I felt warm, damp flesh—someone's back perhaps. Behind me a thigh shifted. Then a weight on my shoulder, the quick fall of a head—the man beside me—as though it had been severed, or as though the man had died, crushed to death, upright.

There we stood, rooted like trees. And I was terrified, seeing myself trapped here forever. There was no pushing my way free, no climbing over heads and shoulders or crawling between legs to find a way out. To sink to the ground could only mean a final, hopeless fall.

Thus my imagination gripped me. But since there was truly no escape, I just stood there and, with the other trees, endured. Then, as the hours passed, I felt rather than heard a new chant—low, soft, rhythmic, a measured breathing. With it came, at first almost indiscernibly, a gentle movement, as though this packed and standing forest was being swayed by a distant breeze.

As the chant gained, the swaying grew. Damp, hard limbs, a hip perhaps or a shoulder, rubbed me like a branch. And as the night deepened, we chanted—
yu-sha, yu-sha, yu-sha.

I felt my fear depart. It lifted slowly and I thought no more about our differences. We were now a single mass crammed into this narrow vessel, and there was no telling us apart.

Cradled, we were slowly merging. This I knew, looking up at the dusty stars, losing all feeling in arms, in legs, smelling the hot rice odor which was now mine as well. I, the man I thought I knew, was gone, become a thousand others. I let my head drop.

It fell across a shoulder or a neck and I realized that I was floating. My feet were no longer on the ground. The pressure had pushed me up, and I was being held aloft by this tight network of bodies, swaying but supporting.

There was no more fear of falling. For the first time I no longer fought for my inch of earth. I lay back and with this came support as more and more of those swaying bodies accepted more and more of me. Or so I felt. But at the same time I knew, an ear suddenly against my cheek, that I was in turn supporting them. And then...

And then, I suppose, I must have slept. The deity had had his way with us. His darkness had made us one. Perhaps we all slept, slung in the air, soles off the ground—whole thousands levitating.

I remember only, after a long, long time, raising my head and seeing that pale glow which is earliest morning. Seeing also the breathing profile of the boy asleep beside me, turning and looking deep into his armpit, for his arm was flung about my neck. And I shut my eyes again, not wanting to move, to wake up. I shut my eyes as one pulls the covers over one's head, unwilling to rise.

What had terrified me now consoled me. How secure, how safe, how warm, those bodies molding mine, those several near, those hundreds farther off. This was as it should have been. Like cells we were within a single form, all breathing, all feeling together. And now it was being alone I dreaded—once more, exposed.

Yet, one by one, all of us were waking up. And those at the farthest ends, whole miles away it seemed, were now stumbling off; slowly the pressure was growing less. I was standing on the ground, the earth strange against my soles, and shortly I could turn and even stoop to retrieve parts of my trampled clothing, the jeep keys still there in the pocket, safe.

The man in front whose back I knew so well stirred and turned. The man behind released me, his flesh becoming separate. The boy whose armpit I had studied was now a plain farmhand who gave a sleepy smile, turned to look for his lost loincloth, searched, gave up.

Then, completely naked, or with dirty loincloths newly tied, or, in my case, the rags of a shirt and most of a pair of trousers, we moved slowly away from each other and out into the brightening day.

We walked, stumbled, streaked with sweat, with dirt, as though newborn and unsure on our feet, as though our eyes, blinded by the dark so long, were not fully open. There was no smell—except for that of urine, pungent, but not unclean. And now I could see, revealed in the gaps in the thinning crowd, that we were making for the font, the great stone urn in front of every shrine, where we could drink.

When my turn came I pushed my whole head into that cold, holy water, taking great gulps as though I were breathing it. I came up dripping and the farmboy led me off to a veranda.

There, on the edge of this large but ordinary shrine, we sat, uncovered in the morning light, and watched the others, our comrades, ourselves, vanish into the empty streets, each alone, silent, surrounded now only by space.

I felt lost, as though my family were deserting me, as though the world were ending, and when an old priest in his high lacquered hat came by, saw the white foreigner, stopped, surprised, then smiled, I asked: And is the
kami
happy?

He nodded, affirmed. The
kami
was happy.

It did not occur to me to ask, as it certainly would have twelve hours before, just what this ceremony was all about anyway and why we should stand there all night and why nothing had happened, or had it?

And so we sat there, recovering, and the priest with his little acolytes, either up early or up all night, brought us small cups of milky ceremonial saké; and the farmer's son, whose raw young body I knew as well as I knew my own, turned with a smile, not at all surprised that I spoke, and asked me my name.

I told him, then asked his. He told me. What was it? Tadao ... Tadashi? Nakajima ... Nakamura?

But before long the sun was up, the streets were emptying. Cleansed, tired, staggering, satisfied young men were going off by the hundred, their shadows long behind them. And I found the jeep just as I had left it, and was surprised that the engine turned over—that the gasoline had not evaporated during my century asleep—and drove back to Tokyo, disheveled, content, at peace.

Over the following year I often thought of this experience. And of the single person it had somehow become: Tadashi Nakajima ... was that his name? Somehow it now seemed to belong to the whole experience, it was the name of everything, of everybody.

And a year later I went back, not because of young Tadashi, whose face I had quite forgotten, whose very name was blurred. No, because of this experience and what it had meant to me.

But now it was 1947, and already the local authorities were cleaning things up. Such relics as the Yami Matsuri did not look right in this new and modern age. Barbaric they seemed, and it couldn't have been good for the health of those poor boys jammed together in the shrine all night long.

So hundreds of years of history were brought to an end, the chain of generations severed. The Festival of Darkness was stopped—I had attended, become a part of, the very last.

Oh, Fuchu still has a Yami Matsuri of sorts—even now, forty years later—but it is not the real one and the
kami
is not, I believe, happy. This god is happy only when people return to their real state, when humans again become human, when we are as we truly are. And this can occur only in darkness and in trust.

We often met during the summer before his death. All of Mishima's friends saw more of him during that 1970 summer. He phoned more, wrote more letters, paid more attention to us. He was going away and would not see us again, but that we did not know then.

One late summer day he called again and asked me to join him at the Tokyo Hilton, a hotel he liked. Here he could, apparently unrecognized, book a room for writing or for other purposes.

He was not alone. With him was a young man whom I did not know but whose type I recognized. Limp, callow, probably literary—the kind of youth who resembled the young Mishima himself, the sort to whom the author now extended part of his patronage.

We sat in the mirrored bar and talked, and it became clear that the youth, a literary major (French), was a present for me. I was to continue, to take over, the patronage. Mishima told me this while the young man looked modestly down at his folded hands.

I laughed and said: Yukio, this will not do. You know me better than that. If you want to give me a present it should be someone from the other half of those you patronize.

But he did not know me better than that, though we had known each other for almost twenty years. The reason was that he rarely took one's character into account, scarcely even noticed it. It was not important. What was important was the role one was to play in his life. Mishima himself decided what this was to be. Who one actually was, how one really felt, had little to do with it.

Kawabata was to be the older protector, looking after the young author's interests, and was not to be hurt in the slightest when that relationship was falsified in
Forbidden Colors.
Donald Keene was to be major foreign critic, interested only in the work and allowed not a single glimpse, assuming he would have wanted one, into the private life. I, on the other hand, along with a few others, was to be of service only in the private life, and whatever opinions I might have of the work and the writer were not to be taken seriously.

My refusal upset him. He frowned at himself in the mirror. I was not playing my assigned role, that of confidant to the hero. He is a very serious boy, he said seriously. I laughed, but there was no answering smile. Mishima, though he could be amusingly malicious, had no feeling for humor. Unlike many Japanese he also had little sense of the ridiculous. His great barking laugh was not infectious; it was a statement of amusement, not amusement itself.

This conversation was carried on in front of its subject, but this embarrassed neither of us. For one thing, such is common in Japan; for another, we were speaking English, a language presumably not understood by the young man. That I had declined the gift, however, embarrassed Mishima, who had apparently been talking up my qualifications.

The awkwardness was resolved by sending the youth away after he had enjoyed a glass of fresh orange juice, and then settling for a talk. I remember this talk in particular because it was literary, and Mishima and I almost never spoke of literature since that was not included in the province he allotted me.