Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

We had driven from Kyoto to the Jingû Shrines of Ise along a beautiful modern highway; then to the southern tip of the Ku Peninsula along a highway neither beautiful nor modern; and then, bumping westerward along the coast, surely one of the most exquisite in Japan, to Ohdowa. At Ohdowa we turned away from the sea and up through the mountains, to follow a dirt-road pitted and eroded from the disastrous typhoons of the previous autumn and the rains which had followed them.

     ‘Oughtn’t we to buy some more gas?’ my interpreter-driver, Takahashi, asked as we passed a Caltex station.

     ‘Better not to mix it.’

     ‘But we may run out before we can find some Shell.’

     ‘We can get to Nara on what we now have,’ I replied with an optimism based, not on a knowledge of the countryside, but on a reading of my map. Takahashi looked doubtful, as he had every reason to look and as he usually looks when I have a map open before me.

     On and on we slithered, bumped and rocked, swallowing the dust of the vehicles in front of us or the vehicles which passed us, as we peered through dust to read signs which in fact did not exist and to locate that Shell station.

     ‘If your car had air-conditioning, we could close all the windows and then we should be fine,’ Takahashi suddenly mused.

     ‘Yes. But it hasn’t. And we can’t. Air-conditioning wasn’t invented that long ago.

     After a time, perhaps thinking that his previous remark might have hurt my feelings, he added: ‘The engine is good.’

     ‘Thank you. At this rate, it’ll soon be all that’s left of the car.

     That was our last exchange before I fell asleep. When I awoke, it was to find that we were stationary and that Takahashi had picked up the guide-book which had been lying on the seat between us and had started to read. He had the book open at the section on Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, some hundreds of miles away from where we were situated. Facing us, bumper to bumper, was a truck piled high with logs.

     ‘What’s up?’ I asked, yawning as I did so.

     His head still lowered, Takahashi hissed: ‘It is for him to back, not us. Please take no notice.’

     As if in answer to this, the truck-driver began a maniacal hooting, while his companion, thrusting his shaved head out of the cabin-window from which his bare, horny feet had already been protruding, added his shouts. Soon both of them were shouting to a fanfare on the horn. ‘Please take no notice,’ Takahashi repeated, still pretending to read.

     At last, after the hooting and yelling had risen to a crescendo, the truck-driver gave in and started to retreat. ‘Anta baha ne?’ he bellowed down, as we scraped past his right mudguard.

     ‘What does that mean?’

     ‘It is of no importance,’ Takahashi answered coolly. ‘It was for him to back. . . . Peasants!’ he added.

     
‘No Shell station,’ I said an hour later.

     ‘No station of any kind,’ Takahashi corrected ominously, and we both at the same moment eyed the gauge. ‘People here do not have cars. There are buses and there are trucks.’

     ‘But buses and trucks need petrol.’

     ‘They have their own gasoline.’ (Takahashi refuses to adopt my anglicisms.) ‘Private gasoline.’

     ‘I see.’

     When we next hit a village, our tank almost empty, we decided to stop. At once a crowd of tiny children swarmed around the car. But, having once caught sight of us, they scattered in all directions, to hide behind any convenient object of defence — an adult, a tree, a handcart, a bicycle — from whence they then started to screech ‘Gai jin, gai jin, gai jin!’ Politeness usually makes the Japanese feign a complete indifference to sights far more unusual than that of a dusty, ramshackle Englishman scrambling out of a dusty, ramshackle car, and I was so taken aback that I must have actually cringed.

     ‘These people are not used to foreigners,’ Takahashi explained. ‘Please do not worry.’

     One small girl now approached intrepidly, squinting at me from under a sleek fringe while she dragged an even smaller child — boy or girl, it was impossible to say which — behind her. This companion, terrified, was struggling to get free. ‘Gai jin,’ she piped in a matter-of-fact voice as one might say at a zoo ‘Lion’ or ‘Rhinoceros’. She inserted the forefinger of her free hand into her left nostril and repeated ‘Gai jin’.

     ‘You must tell her, Takahashi, that it is impolite to call a foreigner a “Gai jin”. Make her say in English “Good morning, sir. I hope that you like our village.”’

     Takahashi instructed the child accordingly. Bending down, he rehearsed her and then I rehearsed her; until, to my amazement, first the girl and then the tot both repeated our words as faultlessly as a tape-recorder. I hastened back to the car to fetch some chocolate with which to reward them. Gravely the older child accepted the slab, her companion equally grave behind her; but then, overcome by their success, they at once rushed off, doubled over with giggles and chanting ‘Good morning, sir. Good morning, sir’. To teach high school and university students in Japan to say the same words with the same perfection would have taken me days and perhaps even weeks.

     We asked an old man for a petrol pump, but he said that there was none. A young man confirmed this (I put every such question at least twice when travelling in Japan), but suggested that we might be able to buy some petrol at the bus depot. At the depôt everyone was friendly—I was given a chair and a cup of green tea while Takahashi explained our predicament—but although we could see a petrol pump, we were told that it could only be used for the taxis and buses owned by the company. Couldn’t they make an exception in this case, since otherwise we should be stranded? Sa .... They drew in their breaths. Unfortunately, they explained, the ‘master’ was away and no one else had the authority to make such a decision. To show their goodwill they then tested the tyres and filled up the radiator, and gave Takahashi a cup of green tea too.

     ‘What are we to do? Now we can’t even turn back.’

     ‘Do not worry. We shall find some gasoline.’

     We wandered into a small, murky udon-shop, opposite the bus depot, where a number of people were eating in a silence broken only by the hiss of the elastic noodles being sucked into their mouths. In Japan it is impolite to talk excessively while eating; but to make an excessive noise is merely to express one’s appreciation. We too ordered bowls of udon and I felt relieved that Takahashi could make a noise as satisfactory as the best of them. I had been afraid that, in his prolonged contact with Westerners, he might have lost the knack.

     Soon he struck up a conversation: first with the woman who owned the shop, then with an old man one of whose eyes was sealed with a quivering blob of cataract, and then with an ageless, shrivelled labourer, his skin like shammy-leather, who had kept glancing up at me with small, bright eyes in between gouging at his gums with a bamboo tooth-pick. I guessed that Takahashi was telling them of our troubles and obliquely appealing for their aid. I knew that all this would take a long time and, being impatient by nature, told myself to be patient. But after some twenty minutes I could restrain myself no longer. ‘Well, what’s all this about?’ I demanded.

     ‘This man thinks . . . it is just possible . . . please wait a moment . . .’

     I waited, for another five, ten, fifteen minutes. Then Takahashi turned:
‘We can go with him.’

     ‘Go with him? Where?’

     ‘He will take us.’

     When we emerged on to the street the children, huddled like barnyard fowl on walls, rocks, tree trunks or the road itself, at once scattered in all directions. They then re-formed their flock to follow us from afar. The labourer, one of whose legs had proved to be shorter than the other, having got into the car beside Takahashi and I having got into the back, we left the village by the way we had entered it. Looking out of the rear window, I could see that the children were still following, some on bicycles too large for them and others skimming along on foot. We crossed a small bridge, leaving the track which was marked as a ‘national highway’ on my map and lurched along another track which zigzagged beside a deep-sunk stream. Sunlight gleamed on some corrugated iron roofs below us: a settlement huddled in a crook of the ravine, far more poverty-stricken than the poverty-stricken parent village from which we had travelled and lacking all its charm. We left the car, and descended by a stone path. Outside one of the shacks, our guide stopped and shouted: ‘Gomen kudasai, gomen kudasai!’ in a hoarse, rasping voice which sounded as if he were coughing. The door opened and a young woman emerged, grubby but handsome, larger than the majority of Japanese women, and with bright red cheeks. She was wearing work-trousers patched at the knees, a blouse, and a cloth about her head. I bowed to her, with what she probably considered to be an exaggerated politeness, since she giggled behind a raised hand, and then Takahashi bowed to her, and our guide bowed, and she bowed, and we all see-sawed back and forth for several seconds on end, like those celluloid Japanese dolls which cannot be tipped over.

     Her husband was away, and she did not really know if she could sell us petrol in his absence; she had no part in his business transactions, she was only a woman. There was the petrol, over there, in those two tin drums. Once again she giggled behind her raised hand: no, she had no idea what kind of petrol it was, but her husband sold it for motor-bicycles and used it for his own. Our guide now began to wheedle and flatter her, and Takahashi followed suit. I could not do so, since I had not the Japanese, but whenever she glanced at me I switched on what I hoped was an irresistible smile. At the third smile she seemed all at once to relent: yes, we could have the petrol, she would fetch us a bucket to carry it to the car. As she retreated into the shack, Takahashi whispered: ‘She is Korean.’

     ‘Oh. Is she?’

     Takahashi pulled a face as if he had eaten something bitter.

     When we had all but filled the tank, the first of the children swooped down — those who had come by bicycle. Then there was a put-put-put from the direction of the dilapidated little bridge and a motor-bicycle whirled round towards us in a cloud of ochre dust. A huge man with a broken nose and hair sticking out in a peak, like a badger’s tail, in front of him, jumped off the antiquated machine, kicked down the rest, and then strode towards us. One could see at once that he was furious. Our guide backed and squeaked at him; Takahashi did not back, but he stopped pouring the petrol from the pail into the tank.

     ‘What’s the matter?’ I interjected, after the three men had talked for several minutes, the newcomer growing more and more ferocious as the other two became progressively more humble. ‘What is it?’

     ‘He says that he does not wish to sell the gasoline. There has been a landslide on the road we have come along, and the bridge across the River Kumano in front has been washed away by the floods. He does not know when he can get more gasoline.’

     At that moment the woman appeared in the doorway of the shack. Catching sight of her, the Korean let out a bellow of rage and raced down the slope. He gripped her by the hair, then snatched at the upraised hand with which she was about to scratch his face. With two abrupt jerks he dragged her within. At once the flock of children flew down to the shack and settled about it; some peering through cracks in the boarding at the sides, some squinting through the hall-open door, and others clambering atop the roof. We heard a screech and then a loud bang; and then two voices, one male and one female, raised in altercation. At the second bang, which was followed by a screech even more piercing than the first, I suggested to Takahashi that we ought to intervene. ‘No, no,’ he protested, appalled, and even clutched my sleeve. Our guide, who had guessed my suggestion, added his voice: ‘No, no, no’ in Japanese.

     ‘They are married,’ said Takahashi. ‘In such cases in Japan we do not interfere. And besides, they are Koreans.’

     Our guide now began to push us towards the car until, impatient at my slowness, he ran round in front of me and jumped into it first. Putting his head out of the window, he began to exhort us.

     ‘He says that, if we do not leave now, the man will want his gasoline back. And perhaps he will harm us. We must go. Quickly.’

     ‘But what shall we do — the money.... ?’

     ‘Quickly!’ At that Takahashi thrust me from behind and our guide caught at me from in front, and I stumbled into the car. Takahashi could not have made a faster start if we had just held up a bank.

     ‘But the money,’ I protested. ‘The money.

     ‘You can give it to this man. And please give him something extra for a bottle or two of saké as a present to the Korean.... He has to live in this place,’ Takahashi added in a tone which expressed both pity and the most withering contempt.

It was not until we were half-way to the next village (the engine of the car making a noise as if it were trying to regurgitate the petrol so dishonestly acquired) that we remembered what the Korean had said about floods having carried away the bridge over the River Kumano.

     ‘Do you think it’s true?’ I asked.

     ‘If he said it.’

     ‘Then what are we to do?’

     ‘If there is no bridge, then we cannot go on.

     But we did go on; for neither of us could bear the thought of travelling back that five-hour journey to the coast.

     ‘Shall I ask here about the bridge?’ Takahashi queried when we at last entered the next village. I nodded; and he stopped the car, got out and began to go into a shop here and a house there, making his inquiries. Meanwhile, inevitably, children were gathering around me; pressing their noses to the windows and peering in at me, as they chirruped ‘Gai jin, gai jin’ to each other.

     ‘The official who knows is in the barber-shop, farther down the road,’ Takahashi returned to announce. ‘We had better go and ask him.’ ‘Aku himu, aku himu,’ the children mimicked; and then giggled uncontrollably.

     A man lay tipped almost horizontally under a white sheet, while an ancient barber delicately shaved his eyebrows into small, glossy arcs. We watched as a fly settled on his nose, to be flicked off with the towel thrown across the barber’s right shoulder. ‘Excuse me,’ said the barber, bowing, whether to his customer or the fly, even lower than to us at our entry.

     Eventually the official returned to the vertical. Cleaning his ears on the towel and at the same time eyeing both us and himself in the mirror, he asked what he could do for us. Another long conversation followed.

     ‘Possibly the bridge will be mended by tonight. Possibly by tomorrow night,’ Takahashi at last announced.

     ‘You mean that we may have to stay here?’ I was horrified.

     Takahashi nodded.

     ‘How far is it to the bridge?’

     Takahashi consulted the official. ‘Seventeen kilometres.’

     ‘So if we go there and the bridge is not finished, then we shall have to come back.’

     ‘That’s right. The rains have been very heavy,’ he added apologetically. I clutched my head. ‘What are we to do? I have to give a lecture in Osaka the day after tomorrow.’ I knew that I should lose face and that Takahashi would lose face if I gave way to my despair and exasperation, and I hurriedly controlled myself. ‘Well, we must go on,’ I declared.

     ‘Yes,’ Takahashi agreed. ‘If you are there, it may make a difference.’

     ‘A difference?’

     ‘They may work more quickly.’

     ‘I can hardly believe that.’ But the idea was a flattering one. ‘Yes, we must push on. Somehow we’ll get through.’ I liked the heroic sound of that declaration. ‘Somehow we’ll get through,’ I repeated. But Takahashi was already exchanging bows with the official, each deeper than the last, and unfortunately did not hear me.

Trucks, jeeps and two or three battered saloons were strung out on either side of the ravine, in a crack of which the River Kumano bubbled and frothed. We parked at the end of the queue and got out to investigate. How long had all these people been waiting here? It looked as if they had been camping out for the best part of a week. One group had constructed a shelter for themselves out of tarpaulin sheets spread over a bamboo frame, and inside I could see four men squatting at a game of cards while two tousled women snored face to face on the same narrow futon. There were many fires made out of brushwood, above which had been balanced kettles, casseroles or used petrol tins black with smoke. A man was sitting cross-legged singing mournfully to a guitar. Two youths were practising sumo wrestling holds. The mountain air, now that the sun was westering, was sharp as a bite from an unripe apple.

     There must have been at least fifty men labouring at the bridge. With no equipment except a winch worked by the engine of a truck, some ropes and chains, and an assortment of foresters’ picks, saws, axes and mallets, they were crawling out like squirrels along the swaying logs, swinging back and forth over the perilous drop, or hacking at trees for timber. When they saw me, first one and then another stopped work to gape. ‘You see, they have noticed you,’ Takahashi said; and at the same moment a man who appeared to be the foreman shuffled over to us.

     ‘He wishes to know if you are American. I have told him you are English.’ ‘Igirisujin’, ‘Igirisujin’; I could hear the word being passed along the flimsy structure spanning the ravine and then up the banks on either side and into the trees. ‘He says the bridge is no good. He says that the Bridge Over the River Kwai was better.’ A sweating labourer, his face streaked with grime, grinned at me as this was translated. ‘I have said that we shall decide which is better when the bridge is completed. I shall now tell him how important it is for the bridge to be finished tonight.’

     Having done that, Takahashi led me over to one of the fires, where I was immediately invited to sit down and to drink some sake. Questions were again asked, which Takahashi took an obvious pride in answering. ‘I am telling them about the Korean and his wife and the gasoline,’ he broke off at one point, amid general guff awing, to announce to me.

     ‘Yes, that poor woman!’

     ‘Ah, these Koreans are all the same. They are savages. Animals. In Kobe, in Osaka, in Tokyo, in Yokohama — wherever there are hoodlums, you will find Koreans. Most of the gangsters in Japan —’

     I got up, because I did not wish to have another argument about the Korean minority, and wandered over to see how the bridge was getting on. I was astonished. How ludicrous to imagine that the Japanese had to be instructed by the British in the building of a bridge when here, in this remote district, uneducated peasants could improvise one before my eyes with such rapidity and skill! They worked, as the Japanese tend to work, with the absorption of men toiling to save their lives. In spite of the cold which was making my teeth chatter, sweat was streaming down their faces and drenching their singlets. As the sun sank, their efforts became even more ferocious until, when it was almost dark, the last log had finally been dragged across and lashed into place. ‘Takahashi! Takahashi! It’s nearly ready!’ I called.

     Takahashi ran over. All that now remained to be done was to spread a layer of soil and pebbles over the bed of logs. The men, panting with exhaustion, now began to do this; when, suddenly, Takahashi seized a shovel and set to work himself. Soon he had been noticed; and, at once, in twos and threes, the others who had been waiting hurried over to help. Even the two tousled women sauntered down, yawning and scratching at their scalps and armpits, and in a desultory fashion began to scape and kick soil on to the bridge with their feet. By now it was so dark that the trucks at the front of the two queues on either side of the ravine were providing illumination.

     At last, miraculously, the bridge had been completed. Tools were thrown aside; we straightened our backs, mine excruciating from the unwonted exercise, and took out handkerchiefs to mop at the mingled sweat and dust on our faces; we grinned at each other in mutual congratulation and offered each other cigarettes or a swig of sake.

     ‘They say that you must go first.’

     ‘I?’

     ‘They say that you are the most important person here and so you must open the Bridge over the River Kumano.’

     ‘But suppose — suppose it isn’t safe? Suppose that it collapses? No, Takahashi. This honour is the last thing I want.’

     Takahashi giggled. ‘You can’t insult them by refusing it. Please — come.’

     I was appalled. ‘My car is so large,’ I pleaded.

     ‘Look at those trucks. They are much, much larger.’

     There was nothing for it. I followed Takahashi back to the car and climbed in unhappily behind him. Slowly we drove to the front of the queue and then eased ourselves out on to the bridge. A cheer went up; but in spite of it I could hear the logs creaking and groaning. ‘Slowly, Takahashi! Slowly!’ I pleaded. I put a hand over my eyes. We seemed to be driving across some enormous hammock, slung from one side of the ravine to the other; I could feel it bounce up and down, and sway to right and left. Again they cheered, and burst into clapping. We were across.

     ‘Well, we’ve made it.’

     It was only then that I noticed that Takahashi’s hands were trembling on the wheel.

That was not the last adventure of our journey. We spiralled up and up a mountain and then down it, and then up another mountain which I discovered to be Obamine on my map. Descending this second mountain in the darkness, over an unmade road with a drop of hundreds of feet on our right, we noticed a torch glimmering erratically ahead of us. Three men were standing beside a jeep; and as we stopped, I became aware of a sporadic rumbling and crashing in the distance. What was the matter? Takahashi asked them. There had just been a landslide, they explained, the road was impassable. They at first tried to get over it in the jeep, but they had given up the attempt when they had realized that rocks were still falling. Now they were planning to turn the jeep and go back to the village at which we had bought our petrol. Two of them came from there. I thought of the long drive up over the two mountains in the darkness and then once more across the Bridge over the River Kumano, and I gave way to despair. ‘Takahashi, I just can’t face it. Let’s sleep here in the car.’

     But the driver of the jeep, an immensely fat, jovial man wearing thick glasses, knickerbockers and a tweed hat with a long feather in it (he had been on a hunting trip, he explained) had another suggestion. On the pass of Obamine there was a bar kept by a foreman of a forestry company and his wife, and they would perhaps take us in. They were good people, he would drive us up in the jeep. After some hesitation we accepted this offer, clambered in among the camping equipment, guns and boxes, and allowed ourselves to be carried, lurching and bumping, back up the mountain.

     When we had passed the bar on our way down, neither of us had noticed it. It was too early in the year for climbers or tourists, and once the last bus had gone through, the doors were closed and the lamp extinguished. We therefore arrived to find that the proprietor and his wife were in the bath. Red and steaming in the icy mountain air, they came out in yukata and slippers to see who we were. Both of them were unusually tall for Japanese, and both were unusually handsome. ‘Come in, come in!’ they urged us; there was a fire at which to make ourselves warm. They bustled about, lighting the oil-lamps, bringing chairs and preparing coffee. The owner of the jeep explained what had happened, and the man and his wife seemed not at all surprised. Yes, of course, of course; we could sleep in their house. They only hoped — the husband glanced across at me — that we should forgive the discomforts and inconveniences. Up here, on top of a mountain....

     Soon the driver of the jeep and his two companions set off on their journey, and the woman of the house began to prepare a supper for Takahashi and myself. It tasted delicious, even though made from the most humdrum of ingredients: fried eggs, tinned luncheon-meat, rice and Japanese pickles, and cup after cup of coffee. As we ate, the husband talked to Takahashi, his wife standing silent behind him; and later, in bed, Takahashi repeated to me the gist of the conversation. Both the man and his wife had had hard lives, but now things were going better for them. He had found this job with the forestry company, and in his spare time he had built this little house with his own hands and had made it into a bar for the other workers and for tourists in the summer. No, it did not earn them much money, but it provided his wife with an occupation and him with a hobby.

     We went to bed in a room the size of a large closet; but the futons were spotless, a carafe of water and two glasses had been placed on a tray between them, and each futon had in it a stone bed-warmer. Before we retired, the man took us to the lavatory, which was accommodated in a separate little hut in a hollow below the main building. ‘He says that he has a real “flush”,’ Takahashi said. ‘He is very proud of it.’

     The man went to the handle, pushed it down, and water gushed into the bowl. He looked up and grinned at us. Then he pushed the handle down again.

     ‘The water comes from a mountain-spring. He found it himself, and piped it down here.’

     The next morning we were woken at seven o’clock and told that in half an hour a bus would pass to take us down to the point where we had left the car. We could then walk over the landslide and catch another bus, which would bring us to the nearest railway-station, several hours journey away. The owner of the bar would see that no harm came to the car until we returned for it.

     When we said goodbye, I had the utmost difficulty in persuading him to accept any money. ‘He says that he has enjoyed our visit so much,’ Takahashi explained. ‘Life here is lonely.’

     Others walked across the landslide with us — labourers, two old women, a commercial traveller, another overseer from the forestry company — and once again we experienced that same gaiety and solidarity of the previous afternoon beside the River Kumano. Everyone was making a joke of the inconvenience, as after the air-raids in England they used to make a joke of the damage.

     During the long bus-ride we discussed all that had befallen us.

     ‘What a good-looking couple! And so kind!’

     ‘Yes, they were very kind,’ Takahashi agreed.

     ‘I’ve slept in many first-class hotels which were not nearly so clean.’

     Takahashi nodded. ‘It is unusual for a Korean house not to be dirty.’

     ‘Korean! Were they Korean?’

     ‘Yes, of course. Didn’t you understand that?’

     ‘Well, there you are, Takahashi! You Japanese are always complaining about the Koreans. But have you ever met nicer people than that couple?’

     Takahashi thought. ‘They were nice,’ he agreed at last. ‘Very nice.’ Then he added: ‘But there are always exceptions. Exceptions mean nothing. They do not change a rule.’