I couldn’t help wondering who might sleep in my room that night. Emi would be there, with her mother, but who else? Would Kaori or Ichikawa Yuki lie along a wall near me, where I could see them silhouetted even in the darkest hours of the night?
After we finished our beer and stew, Emi came in from the wildflowers to corral Miss Arai and Ichikawa Yuki, taking them off to a swallow’s nest, and I hadn’t seen Kaori since she got out of the van. When I went to take my nap - it was on the agenda - I discovered that someone had laid futon equidistant around the room, with my bag placed on one of them. Except for Mrs. Suzuki, who sat opposite me reading and didn’t look up, no one was there, so I stretched out on my futon with the bizarre idea of putting Ichikawa Yuki and Kaori at the center of my mind in order to see who might stay there as I fell asleep. It may seem a pitiful thing to do, but I often played such games, as if there were a me who wasn’t me, a me inside of me who knew better what I felt, better what I hoped for, than I did.
The moment I lay down, however, who should pop out from behind a curtain in my mind but Natasha? I chased her off but she twirled back in, showing one side of her body, then the other, like a magician proving she had nothing up her sleeves. When I banished her a second time she stayed put, but I feared she’d return if I tried to think of the others, so I emptied my mind and waited for sleep, which soon rolled in and took me with it when it rolled back out again.
When I awoke two hours later, dazed after such a long nap, I had no time to get up slowly, for everyone else who might have slept in my room - Emi, her mother, Mrs. Suzuki, perhaps even the women Natasha’s policing guarded against - had already risen and gone for their walks. So I stood and dressed in the only other clothes I’d brought - a pair of walking shorts and an old gray sweatshirt - before stepping past the shoji, into my shoes, down off that walkway and into the bamboo forest, late but determined to stick to the agenda.
Forests had loomed large in the stories I liked growing up: Grimm’s Fairytales, The Jungle Book, Midsummer Night’s Dream, even Walden, but for Japanese forests I had to rely on Kurosawa’s great Rashomon, which I’d seen when taking that film class in Tokyo. Takashi Shimura was among its stars again, this time playing a woodcutter.
I spotted a path as soon as I passed the first of the trees, and decided that I wouldn’t diverge from it, since I didn’t want to risk getting lost and not finding my way back in time for the firefly viewing. I listened for others but heard nothing. I was still a little wobbly from sleep, but with each step I felt better, more myself than I had since before my arrival in Kyoto. The trees that surrounded me varied in their verdancy from that of the bamboo, the palest, to that of some ancient Douglas firs, like those I’d played amongst in the forests of my childhood.
My path was narrow, but so well-maintained that I imagined some Sugiyama ancestors had cleared it centuries ago, trusting that each successive generation would keep it clean - making it, in a way, a path from them to me. Leaves padded its floor, soft underfoot, and the branches above it were filigreed, letting the afternoon sunlight dapple my arms and chest and the ground beneath my feet. For a while my mood stayed light, even when some clouds descended, as if at an appointed hour, to fix themselves like cotton balls atop the trees.
I came to a spot where the path forked left and right, defeating my intention not to veer off of it. I tried to see a greater width in one of the forks, or whether one seemed less taken, but they were equal in every way. I tried to determine if the arriving fog favored one, if there was a sunny side and a shady side of the street, so to speak, but the fog spread uniformly, too. It did occur to me that I could assign one fork to Kaori and the other to Ichikawa Yuki, but I’d still have to decide which to follow, and I didn’t want Natasha showing up again on either fork.
I stood there dumbly for a minute, before shaking myself loose and choosing the right fork, for no other reason than I thought it more likely moved toward the front of the farmhouse, where I had to be for firefly viewing. I hadn’t taken twenty steps, however, before I walked out of the forest and onto an old dirt road. We’d been given the impression that the forest was massive, that the farmhouse sat on its lip as a freighter sits on the crest of an ocean. The fact that it wasn’t, that I would likely have found this road no matter which fork I took, made me laugh. And right away others laughed, too, for along the road in either direction my fellow firefly weekenders had also come out of the forest. We were laughing at the fact that nothing was as it seemed, but stopped when the further understanding came to us that laughing at what the Sugiyamas had planned for us was not what proper guests should do.
The others stepped back into the forest, but I crossed to the other side of the road, for just past an initial copse of new bamboo I spotted a stand of cedars, not replenished like the bamboo, but steadily growing since… since when, I wondered… since forever? I could see swirls of ancient growth at the base of the nearest cedar, which I determined to go stand against, maybe hoping its size would put things in perspective.
The path into the new forest - into the old forest on this new side of the road - was so dimly visible beneath the overgrowth that I knew without question I was off the Sugiyama’s property, that I could be trespassing on a neighbor who might appear and chase me away. Twice I caught a foot on a protruding vine and once I saw a snake, as thick as two thumbs and as pale as the praying mantises, all before arriving at the cedar, which had appeared to be near, but was far away. I saw a flash of something red retreat around its massive trunk a minute later, and then appear again, this time recognizable as a hunter’s jacket. If it was the neighbor I didn’t want to be seen by him, let alone be mistaken for his prey, so I stopped and had just begun to crouch when the hunter called my name.
“Cornelius, is that you? Be careful, there are vipers on this side of the road. What are you doing over here?”
The voice belonged to old Mr. Sugiyama, who, far from hunting animals, was searching for wood for the renewal of his cauldron fire. I knew it because he held up a piece of sappy cedar and shook it at me.
“I came to help,” I said. “I thought you might need a hand.”
Big fat lie.
“Hurry then,” he said. “These vipers are opportunists. Raise your feet up high.”
“This wood is too green,” he said when I got to him. “It will crackle and spit, ruining our solitude if I try to burn it under my cauldron.”
Some bark was stacked on a tarpaulin beside him, good enough for kindling, but dry pieces of actual wood were nowhere to be found. When I said, “We could try relying on the bark alone,” his face became a rictus of the bark itself. “It won’t get things hot enough,” he said, so I asked him what he used for last week’s stargazers.
He sat down on a nearby stump, the breadth of a circus trampoline and probably the weight of a railroad car. “Wood that we bought a year ago from the owner of this forest. But the man has died, his company’s out of business, and we used the last of it when cooking our stew this morning. My nephew said we had enough to get us through the weekend, but we don’t.”
When I sat beside him we both laid back and stretched our arms above us, wiggling our fingers at the sky. I could hear my spine crack, in faint imitation of a green wood fire. He said, “I wanted my nephew to take our van to town, where wood is sold in bushels, but I couldn’t find my nephew.”
He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, in what I knew to be a yoga position, so I did the same. Two men on a Cedar stump, staring at the sky, the clouds of which had parted enough to make a cat’s eye opening, giving them a blue oval. When I asked, “Are you worried about losing Emi? Do you think her father might take her away?” the cat’s eye began to close, as if letting me know I’d been too intrusive. But when Mr. Sugiyama spoke there was an ease in his voice.
“It’s a heavy burden, isn’t it, being an observant person? It lets you in on the secrets of others but it is also the reason you don’t understand your own life well, for an observant person looks outward. I know of what I speak, Cornelius, being an observant person myself.”
I pictured him walking through that swinging kitchen door at Mountain Cabin; stretching before our morning calisthenics; running his hand along the fuselage of the Zero in that park… Were those moments of his observations, when he saw past the veneer that the rest of us put up?
“Tell me what you’ve observed about me,” I said.
This time he took so long to answer that I thought he might be sleeping.
But then he said, “You can’t accept a drink from a woman without suspecting her motives; you want everyone else’s cards on the table before you lay down your own; and you want to be wanted, but when you are the satisfaction you get from it makes you care less.”
He said “care less” carefully, perhaps so I wouldn’t think it was “careless.”
But that last one was Bill, not me, and the first two didn’t have much weight to them.
“Tell me what you think I should do about it,” I said.
“Why, ask yourself a primary question, of course… If, that is, you know such a question and can wait for the answer to it patiently.”
A primary question? Not only did I not know one, I didn’t know what it was.
“Is it something like a primary color?” I asked.
He ignored the facetiousness that I hadn’t intended anyway, saying only, “There are such questions hanging around each of us, but we often go through life ignoring them. “It’s a shame, for they come with the intention of helping us decide which path to choose.”
“What primary questions have you asked yourself, and how long did you have to wait for the answers?” I asked. “Patience isn’t my strong suit.”
“There’s a problem in telling you, for a primary question must be asked and answered in the quiet of a person’s mind and heart, but I will say that I have asked three of them: one when I was young, one during the war, and one quite recently, concerning my coming death. Thus far, only two have been answered.”
As he spoke I realized that I did know one question that I had asked myself often during my youth - whether or not to believe in, or simply to believe, my grandmother. So I guessed that was ‘primary’, and that I ought to be on the lookout, right about now, for another one.
It wasn’t until I shook myself loose, sat up and put my feet on the ground again, that I remembered the vipers. When I looked around, however, there was only Mr. Sugiyama’s bark-filled tarpaulin. So I tied it up, slung it over my shoulder, and carried it back to his farmhouse for him, since, by then, he had truly fallen into a viper-less slumber.
—
Emi was holding court again by the time I dropped off the bark and made it back to our room. Other than her mother and Mrs. Suzuki, the room was full of strangers, but that didn’t stop her from holding court. “It’s not dark yet but everyone should get ready,” she said. “Especially you, Cornelius. I never did ask what you are wearing.”
“Just the clothes I came in,” I said.
“We can’t have that. I’ll go find you something in the old clothes closet. You keep him here, Mama. Don’t let him escape again.”
She ran out of the room like a samurai on a raid, her sword banging hard against the doorjamb.
“She’s incorrigible,” Etsuko said. “Father says that I was that way, too, but it seems to me that I spent my childhood entirely within my imagination, no bother to anyone. I can’t help wishing things were that way now.”
She swept a hand out, letting it come to rest on my forearm. “I won’t be making any changes, Cornelius, but Fritz doesn’t know it yet,” she said, "and I don’t know how to tell him.”
“How about saying, ‘I won’t be making any changes’?” I said. “A surgeon doesn’t wait before she sticks the knife in, not if the operation’s necessary.”
She didn’t like that, so I asked, “But is the operation necessary because you don’t want Fritz, or because you can’t live without Emi?”
“Because I can’t live without Emi, of course. Her father’s threats aren’t idle. But how can I stay with him or, more to the point, he with me, after what happened? Fritz and I had our recent months, and we will always have our childhood, but all Mr. Sugiyama will have for the rest of his life is a bitter taste in his mouth.”
‘We will always have our childhood.’ Like Bogart and Bergman with Paris.
But that made me fear for Fritz, who had bet too heavily on that childhood. Still, I smiled at her use of her husband’s surname, at the respect shown by it, just as Emi rushed back in.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Cornelius, but except for a bunch of stinky old kimonos, there’s nothing for you to wear. So you’ll have to go as yourself, after all,” she said.
“What I’d like to do is learn to go everywhere as myself from now on, even if I’m wearing a costume. Just like you do, Emi,” I said.
Since I said it in English, Emi waited for her mother’s translation, then said, “but that makes no sense. A person’s got no choice but to go everywhere as himself, unless the person is crazy.”
She seemed miffed at having to explain such a thing, but determined not to let it get her down. “Anyway, do you see what I see when I look outside?” she asked.
She pointed at the still-open shoji.
“It’s getting dark,” said Etsuko, “but it has to be darker for fireflies.”
“Okay, listen now, Cornelius, here comes the hard part. Waiting until the time is right. It’s easy to jump the gun. And don’t forget to stick close to me when we do get out there. I’m the one who knows her way around.”
It truly was easy to jump the gun. Maybe my second primary question should be, “How can I learn to wait until the time is right?”
Mr. Sugiyama seemed to have limited the number of his primary questions to three, but now that I’d started thinking about them I knew I’d be able to come up with three in about an hour. And that, of course, was like asking no primary question at all.
Endnotes…
The idea of paths to choose, whether to go left or right or straight ahead, is older in the annals of human life, of course, than it is in literature. Who hasn’t thought, “If I hadn’t done this, then that wouldn’t have happened… If I hadn’t met him… If I hadn’t moved there…” etc., etc. My interests, though, more centrally lie in the choices we make when in the midst of creating a story. How a word changes a mood, a joke lightens or deepens an emotion, how a hand touching an arm works like a kind of signpost.
This has been the most difficult of my episodes so far to make “work”, as they say. Cornelius keeps wanting to dip his toes (or his nose) into the philosophical, not only concerning which path to take, but by inventing, through Mr. Sugiyama, this “primary questions,” thing, plus the notion, through Emi, of waiting until the time is right. None of these conundrums were “thought up” by me nearly so much as ‘pounded out” by my untrustworthy fingers as they came down on my keyboard. In that way they were not so much choices I made as choices made for me, by the story’s own ineffable intentions.
This is the penultimate episode of Part Two. Tune in again next week for more hands on arms than a body can deal with. Plus enough beaming fireflies to choke a horse.
My comment was too strange?