summer evenings after dark, the street-lit arena of the vermilion bridge would become the focus of small, excitedly chattering crouched bodies collecting kabutomushi (the Atlas beetle, which is shaped like a samurai helmet and known in Japan as the "helmet beetle"), prized pets among village children, as they were felled from the night air by the seductive and illusory sun of the street lamp, which was always shaded by a frenetic galaxy of bugs and moths.
Sadly, the evidence of such nocturnal hunts would sometimes be only too obvious the following morning, with a litter of insect armory scattered across the road like the aftermath of a medieval battle observed from the air.
♦ Summer Nights
On summer nights it was often too hot to remain in the house, and there was a need to seek out the water's edge. The best way was to walk through the village main street to the space in front of the temple. There the air was cool, where it had been steeping over the water.
The street was unlit, except for a lamp over the vermilion bridge and another near the front of the temple at the other end of the village. Apart from these, there were only the dim lights in the houses, lights that strayed only a few feet from their source and offered no illumination to the street.
This darkness, with the lack of visual distraction, however, became the bed on which a multilayered soup of olfactory and aural delights was laid down—a place for sensory-sipping at the village's most intimate and interior life. As you passed down the street, at every few breath-steps a particular stratum of this blend would separate and predominate briefly before fusing back into the environmental mix. The smells of incense, feces, cooking, kerosene, urine, cedar-wood smoke, seawater, freshly sawn pine, fish, diesel oil, warm clay walls, and old rope. These scents, subtle and mysterious, familiar and alien, coarse and refined, stench and perfume, were accompanied by an evening raga of sounds—household altar-bells and evening sutra chanting, shrill-echoing bathroom voices of children, sliding karakami, television, the slap of water on hulls as a passageway to the quay was passed, rhythmic chopping from a kitchen window, complaining cats, and the distant roar of a boat opening its throttle to the dark bay beyond.
It was these smells and sounds, more than the visual environment, that transmitted the unfamiliar and seemingly secret life of the village that first year and created an impression of mystery and strangeness. Yet paradoxically, at the same time there was present a recognition and resonance—in some very deep place an almost forgotten familiarity—like recognizing, at a culturally and historically undifferentiated, collective level, a rhythm-texture of life that combines the mundane-domestic with something ancient and sacred, which still lingers on the horizon of recall.
In the night,
the voice
of an unknown bird,
passes
from one dream
to another.
♦ "Second Home" Villages
Between the villages of Sora and Kabuto, on a curve in the coast that rounds out from the east end of Sora and into the little bay of Zenzuka to the Sora side of Helmet Mountain, there is an abandoned hamlet of some twelve or so houses. They are holiday or weekend homes and vary in design from pseudo-backwoods cabins to much more substantial constructions complete with gardens and small outhouses. This holiday hamlet was established at the time of Japan's "bubble economy" when there was a plan to build a bridge from this part of the peninsula across to Noto Island. Someone with an eye to rapid yen bought the land, cleared it, and divided it into building plots, which they sold to city dwellers who, along with their new acquisition of wealth, were also buying the idea of a "second home"—a fairly new but increasingly popular concept in Japan.
Eventually the site of the planned bridge was moved some fifty miles down the coast, and the "bubble," having risen to insupportable heights, burst as bubbles must, leaving houses that had only been used for a season or two empty and the promise of as-yet-unconnected electricity broken along with the bubble.
The hamlet is left deserted, but as though families might have been going to return after an outing, since many of the houses are still equipped with the basic domestic necessities. They remain waiting, with the slow onset of decay setting in on wooden porches, etching through the thin metal of domestic kerosene tanks attached to the outside walls of bathrooms, and discoloring the pods of gas bottles below kitchen windows. Now, bamboo and wild camellias push up against walls and doors and trail across roofs, slowly reclaiming the site for the forest, while spiders stand sentinel at the center of their mandalas, across gateways and porches, or move in and furnish silent rooms with soft drapes.
It is like a hamlet that has fallen victim to ethnic cleansing or rampant plague. There is a melancholy along this shore below the houses on summer evenings, of broken dreams. But by autumn, the low afternoon light translates this into another language—the bitter images of dereliction and thwarted greed.
As I walked along the potholed road by the shore past these empty dwellings, I could not help thinking of the "cardboard cities" of the homeless within the cities of Britain and now Tokyo, too, in these days of recession. The waste of money, workmanship, and materials not to mention land, once wild and beautiful, disturbed to no purpose contrasting achingly with the rice fields around Sora, shaped by devotion, while at the same time shaping that devotion, for generations; a land whose elemental energies are still honored, but a land that is fast-changing.
At the end of the hamlet where the road dwindles and fades out into wilderness, there is a track that leads past an abandoned clubhouse down to the shore, where two huge stone images of Daikoku and Ebisu (gods of rice farming and fishing, respectively) stand on either side of a thin path that ends on a tiny, rocky promontory. On the promontory stands a single, small wind-bent pine, and at its foot there is a small Shintō shrine dedicated to the tutelary deity of sailors, Konpira. Ironically, and symptomatic of the changing tide of consciousness, the area around this shrine is littered with the debris of picnic meals and discarded equipment left by weekend fishermen. An area once considered sacred is now ignored and polluted—Daikoku and Ebisu, increasingly strangers in their own land.
Some miles to the other side of Sora between the villages of Kanami and Iwaguruma there is another larger settlement of "second homes." This one and the one at Zenzuka, though, present a stark contrast. Here, one emerges from the rough single-track road past rice fields and areas of scrub onto, or rather into, something that makes you feel you suddenly changed discs in a virtual reality visor or crossed an environmental/time Rubicon between two realities. You cruise into a world of macadamized and discretely lamped suburban politeness, between brown raised brows of shaved and dehydrated lawns fronting wooden kit houses that seem to have been birthed from between the sheets of a catalogue of the American Dream. This is a "second home" village with clout and image and gardens, where anything natural is crucified and a sofa and two armchairs would not look out of place on the lawn. It is situated just above and beyond a small marina, ironically called Tsubaki-ga-saki ("Camellia Headland"), since the camellias were served eviction notices, and where they have survived (perhaps brought in from a garden center) have been forced to conform with the plastic garden-furniture.
From this instant village to its adjacent marina with antiseptic gleams from hulls of fiberglass and alloy craft, resembling an uneasy hybrid of high-tech jewelry and kitchen gadgetry, all express a bleakness of spirit and make you feel you have somehow been teleported into a television commercial. It is a sudden impact of culture shock and lasts for three to five minutes, depending on the speed with which you pass through.
♦ Noto Roads
For the first few months after our arrival in Sora, we decided that we were going to walk wherever the distance was walkable (for example, to the railway station in the next village) and hire a taxi for any longer journeys. After a few months, however, we bought bicycles to try and save some money on taxi fares. Finally, after nearly a year, because of our precarious financial state and a request for me to hold English classes in the nearest town, Anamizu, we succumbed to buying a very cheap secondhand car.
The car was white and shaped like a shoe. Not only was it shaped like a shoe but it was about the size of a large shoe. It was almost necessary for me to shoehorn myself into it, and for the first