It suggested that the Shintō shrine on Helmet Mountain had once been associated with a Shingon temple in the area, most likely Senjuin, the temple in Sora. As we were walking away from the stone, Old Man Gonsaku suddenly emerged from some bushes beside the path ahead of us with a sheaf of leaves in his hand. When he saw us approaching, he explained that he had been picking small branches of the sakaki tree, which is sacred to Shinto, to offer to the kami of his household shrine.
We walked with him to where he had left his bicycle and watched him as he stripped some unwanted leaves from the twigs and placed them in a basket mounted on the front. Then the three of us walked back toward the village, Old Man Gonsaku pushing his bicycle, which was almost as tall as he was. As we walked, he talked (punctuated with giggling which we came to learn was a feature of and accompaniment to any conversation with Old Man Gonsaku), of how once Eikoku (Great Britain) and Japan had been enemies. And how Eikoku had won and we were now friends. He said that now the West was above Japan, describing it in terms of the feudal image of a pyramidal hierarchy. He told us how the priest at the shrine used to exhort them to pray for victory in the war against America and its allies.
As we entered the village, we passed by an old image of the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizō enshrined by the roadside. I asked him if he knew anything about this particular image's history. He said that he did, and that it was a very interesting story. I asked him if he would mind coming to our house to tell us about it, and we made an arrangement for tea time the following day.
By half-past four the next day, Old Man Gonsaku had not appeared. Looking toward his house, I could see no sign of movement, so assumed he must either have been sleeping or gone out and forgotten. Having not walked that day, I decided to go out, saying to Masako, "I bet you, as soon as I open the door he'll arrive." I put my notebook into a small hessian bag and, slinging it over my shoulder, I slipped into my shoes in the genkan. Sure enough, as I slid back the front door, there was Old Man Gonsaku emerging from his own house. He spotted me and called, "Oh, you're going out."
"No," I shouted back. And beckoned, "Come in, we're waiting for you."
It was the first time Old Man Gonsaku had been in our house. He entered the genkan shyly, removing his cap and carrying it in one hand with a lime-green hand towel in the other. I showed him into the large room that contained the household altar and offered him a cushion in the place of honor in front of the tokonoma. At first he refused it, but after a little persuasion, he finally settled down onto it, placing his blue, peaked cap beside him on the tatami and his green towel in his lap.
Masako came into the room with a tray of small cups and glasses and a bottle of saké. A broad smile spread across his face and he giggled as he turned the bottle around so that he could read the label: Sōgen (a good local saké in Far Noto). Although we normally prefer to heat it, the weather was already very hot and humid so we decided to drink it cold.
Old Man Gonsaku was unshaven as usual, having a bristly mustache and bearded chin, while the rest of his face was naturally hairless. His head hair was abundant and very coarse, so that it stuck up like a brush. His ears were huge with long broad lobes, like the ears on the images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The upper lids of his eyes had relaxed with age and all but obscured his vision so that in order to see ahead he had to tilt his head back slightly. As was also usual, his fly was open.
I passed him the tray of cups and glasses and he chose a medium-sized cup. Masako and I both chose a glass each. I poured out the saké and the three of us toasted, "Kanpai!" I then turned on the tape recorder, after asking him if he objected to it, and reminded him that he was going to tell us the story of the Jizō image we had passed the previous day.
Old Man Gonsaku's face was glistening with sweat and he scrubbed it with his green towel. Then laying the towel to one side, he began to rub his knees with the palms of each hand in a circular motion, as though trying to raise the energy of the story up from his legs that had walked him into the situation of telling it in the first place. As he spoke he frequently broke off in giggles which seemed to percolate from the extremities of his body and converge in his chest, so that their collective momentum caused his body to bob up and down as his throat acted as their escape valve. "A long, long time ago, we had no doctors and no midwives in this village. Only the old women of the village. By the way, we call the midwife toriage babā, a woman who takes a baby out of its mother's body. In those days, it was a very serious and worrying business for women, you know, if their babies had difficulty getting out of their bodies.
"In this village, when a woman gives birth her husband's not allowed in the room. Not even any of her boy children should be there. It's all women's business. Not men's. I was told that if I broke that custom, I would have been punished. I don't know what sort of punishment I would have had," he giggled. "Anyway, only women could attend, to help in the birth.
"The village people began to think they needed some kind of protection for women in childbirth. Eventually, they decided to have Jizō-sama [sama is an honorific], and one of the village people carved a Jizō-sama out of stone." Then he added, scratching his belly, "I don't know where the stone came from." He picked up his cup and, looking lovingly into it, took a sip.
"People knew that spirit should be put into Jizō-sama, you know, otherwise it would only be a piece of stone. It is the same as putting spirit into a carved hotoke-sama [hotoke is colloquial for Buddha]. But none of the village people knew how to do it.
"Now we have a temple here, and you know the temple people very well. But a long time ago there was no monk here. There might have been someone like an unqualified monk, but he didn't know how to put spirit into Jizō-sama. So the people decided to wait for a traveling monk to visit the temple. You know, in those days lots of monks traveled from village to village chanting and begging.
"One day at last a monk arrived, and one of the men asked him, 'Aren't you Ikkyū-sama?' And the monk replied, 'Yes.' I don't know whether he was a Zen monk or a Shingon monk, but I was told his name was Ikkyū. Anyway, people asked Ikkyū-sama to put a spirit into Jizō-sama, and they were very curious to know how he would do it." He took a careful sip of saké and then started a giggling fit. "So they gathered round and watched Ikkyū-sama with great interest. Do you know what he did?" He was bobbing up and down and giggling uncontrollably. "Ikkyū-sama tucked up his robe and he pissed all over Jizō-sama's head!"
It took a time for our collective laughter to subside, and I realized at this point that he had for the last few minutes been intermittently touching his genitals, as if contacting the source of the story's charge or completely identifying with the narrative. "Then Ikkyū-sama said, 'Well, this Jizō's now got a spirit so it is all-powerful. If you believe in this Jizō, women in the village can deliver their babies safely.' Then he left."
He was giggling again. "The villagers looked at each other. They were a bit upset. 'How disgusting! How filthy!' they said to each other. And they decided that this Jizō-sama should be cleaned, so they carried it down to the river and scrubbed it.
"That night, Jizō-sama appeared in the house of one of the men who had washed it and said, 'Why did you wash me? I want to be pissed on again, otherwise I can't be Koyasu Jizō. And don't wash me again!' Then Jizō-sama disappeared. I think it was a kind of revelation he had in a dream."
I refilled his cup and our glasses, and he mopped his face very thoroughly with his towel as I asked him why he thought Jizō needed to be pissed over in order to put spirit into him. He was silent and looked up at the ceiling and then down at the table. He took in a breath and let it out and stared off into a horizonless perspective. "I've been wondering why Jizō-sama needed to be pissed on over his head. You know, I think the reason is this. A baby comes out around this area." He was pointing toward his still-open fly, and I was wondering if it was actually pissing that was involved here and not something else. "I heard this story from old people when I was small. I might be the only person who knows this story, that's why I can tell it to you. Was it interesting?" We assured him that it was very interesting. "Do you think I'm a funny old man? A long, long time ago old people told me this story," he repeated, as though trying to emphasize a genuine provenance for it. "These days we have a clinic in Kabuto and a hospital in Anamizu, but still people are looking after Jizō-sama."
As I refilled his cup again, I thought