The Miner Read online

  All of this sounds very ordinary—”proprietor,” “the next room,” “tea,” “tobacco tray.” But if I were to go into detail about what each of these items was really like, you’d be amazed at how mistaken your impression had been. Still, it’s a fact that the proprietor brought tea and a tobacco tray from the next room. And he struck up a conversation with Chōzō. I don’t remember what they talked about, but it was obvious from the way they were talking that they knew each other from before and that there were some kind of debts outstanding between them. Something about a horse kept coming up. The man asked not a thing about me or the red blanket or the boy—not that he considered us beneath his notice, surely. Chōzō had probably told him everything about us there was to tell when he went in alone earlier to arrange for our lodgings. Either that or the proprietor was unconcerned about us because Chōzō was always bringing such casual guests through here and stopping over on his way to and from the copper mine.

  Listening to the conversation, I began to doze at some point. Right about the time someone was saying he had failed to sell the horse and something-or-other, things were becoming fuzzy, and Chōzō simply melted away. The red blanket melted away. The boy melted away. The proprietor and the tea and the tobacco tray melted, and when the shack itself melted away, I snapped awake. My chin had fallen to my chest. Startled, I raised my head, finding it extremely heavy. The proprietor was still talking about the horse, but even as that thought came to me, I started to drift off again, and I just let it happen, drifting farther and farther until my eyes suddenly opened wide. Shadow-like amid the gloom, Chōzō and the master of the house were sitting on the matted floor, knee to knee. At that moment, the master was saying something about his loan and laughing jovially. This man had a very long forehead that curved back toward the crown of his head at an angle. Viewed in profile, it was reminiscent of the steep Kiridōshi Slope in Tokyo. The higher up the slope, the more hair he had. It grew in shaggy patches, some an inch long, some half an inch. When I bolted awake from my dozing and my eyes snapped open, the first thing to flash into them was this head. In the feeble light of the soot-smeared lamp, the head, too, appeared soot-smeared to me. And yet it was quite close by. Which meant that the image reflected in my eyes was a clear one. In other words, the very second I came back to myself from the non-perception of sleep, I saw this clear and at the same time hazy head of the proprietor. It was not a pleasant sensation. The queasy feeling convinced me to put off sleeping for a while, and I began to examine the room. In the far corner sprawled the boy. Stretched out next to me was Ibaraki, his big feet sticking out from under his blanket. Straight ahead was the wall, and in the corner of the wall was a hole, the depths of which were pitch black. Above was the underside of the roof, the chillingly blackened thatch appearing to tremble when struck by the mixture of light and smoke rising from the lamp.

  I became sleepy again. My head dropped again. I tried to raise it because it was so heavy, and again it dropped. At first, my head, once raised, would begin sinking as I grew drowsier and drowsier until, at the extreme point of drowsiness, it would fall to my chest and I would leap back to consciousness. After three or four times, though, I might open my eyes, but my mind would not clear. Foggily, I would return to the world, and immediately sink once again into unconsciousness. Then, as usual, my head would drop. I would feel as if I were only marginally alive. And then I would enter the Great Emptiness. Finally, it no longer mattered to me that my head had fallen forward. Probably what happened was that the weight of my head hanging down pulled me over sideways. In any case, I slept soundly until dawn and when I awoke, I found that I was no longer dozing in a sitting position but was stretched out full length on the tatami in the ordinary sleeping position. And I was drooling. I had started dozing listening to the conversation about the horse, opened my eyes to hear the conversation about the loan, picked up on the dozing where I had left off, repeated that a few times, and, finally giving up dozing for the real thing, stretched out, and that was the last I heard from my soul, so when I opened my eyes and the sun was up and I saw that the world had switched hundred and eighty degrees from Yin to Yang,12 I just lay there with my eyes open, drooling. If you could be conscious and dead at the same time, it would be like this. I was alive, but the urge to move was not forthcoming. I remembered the night before in minute detail, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe that last night’s minute details had carried over into today. Everything about my experience was new and intense, but the new, intense things were somewhere far away. Or, rather, I felt as though a thick partition had formed between last night and today, marking a sharp distinction between the two. If the mere appearance and disappearance of the sun is going to disrupt the continuity of my heart this way, then I become strangely unsure of who I am myself. Life is like a dream. Or so I began to think as I lay there steeping in my own thoughts without wiping the drool, when Chōzō went into a long stretch where he lay, bringing his clenched fists up above ear level. His fists shot straight out along the tatami. When his arms had reached their full length, the tension left him and he went limp. For a moment, I thought he was going back to sleep, but then he brought his right hand down again and began scratching vigorously at his sunken cheek. Maybe he was awake? But soon he started mumbling to himself, and I decided he must be asleep. That was when the boy flew up. Literally. In the air, landing on his bottom with a huge, resounding thump that threatened to cave the floor in. Perceptive as ever, Chōzō stopped his mumbling and raised himself on an elbow. He was blinking.

  Since I couldn’t go on endlessly steeping in my own thoughts, I got up. Chōzō also raised himself the rest of the way. The boy stood up. Only the red blanket was still asleep. He lay there, snoring contentedly, his big feet sticking out from under the blanket. Chōzō tried to wake him.

  “Hey, kid! Hey! Better get up! We want to get to the mine by noon.”

  After three or four “Hey, kid”s, the red blanket was still sound asleep. Chōzō had no choice but to try shaking him. “Hey, hey,” he yelled, his hand on the red blanket’s shoulder.

  “Hey,” the red blanket responded in kind, standing up, more or less. Now all of us were sort of up, and I was wondering what to do, having neither washed my face nor eaten, when Chōzō took me by surprise.

  “Well, let’s get going!” he said, stepping down into the entryway. The boy followed him, and the red blanket let his big feet dangle down uncertainly to the dirt floor. Now it was my turn to make a move. The last of the group, I stepped into my geta and moped around, waiting for Chōzō and the red blanket to tie on their straw sandals.

  Now that I was down in the dirt, the obvious questions—Don’t we wash our faces? Aren’t we going to eat breakfast?—began to seem like outrageous demands, and making them was more than I could manage. Funny how something we’ve come, through habit, to view as indispensable, can suddenly turn superfluous. It happens all the time, though, I realized later in thinking about this topsy-turvy event. What’s “normal” is what everybody does; what’s “dispensable” is what you alone do. The only way to become “normal” is to make a lot of allies and do the abnormal as though it were entirely normal. I still haven’t tried this, but I’m sure it would work. After all, look at the changes that even as unlikely a pair as Chōzō and the red blanket were able to bring about in me.

  Having tied his sandals and disposed of any business he had with his feet, Chōzō suddenly raised his face. He looked at me. And he said, “You don’t need breakfast, do you, kid?”

  Of course I needed breakfast, but it wouldn’t have done me any good to say so. I just said, “No,” and let it go at that.

  Chōzō, however, would not let it go. “Want to eat?” he asked, grinning.

  He did this for one of two reasons: either a desire for food deeply ingrained in my nature was showing just a bit on my face, or the thwarting of nineteen years of expectation by a breakfastless departure on rising brought forth from me a look of dismay. Otherwise, he would never
have asked such a thing after having finished tying his sandals. It was obvious because he didn’t pose the question either to the boy or the red blanket. Now that I think of it, it does seem as though he should have asked them, too. Only an authentic vagrant or someone close to a vagrant would set off on a hike of ten or twenty miles without breakfast. They were wide awake and the sun was up, but these people didn’t associate those things with steam on the morning broth or the aroma of pickled vegetables, which meant they were that unfortunate (or fortunate) type for whom it is natural to let things take their course, happy each day just to keep body and soul together, with no thought for tomorrow. It occurred to me that, for the first time in my nineteen years, I had just spent a night with people like this and that we were going to walk out of there together. When neither the red blanket nor the boy showed the slightest facial evidence of expecting breakfast, I sensed that they belonged to a species of humanity unfamiliar with that particular custom, and I saw that my fate had slipped to something well below that of a miner even before I had become one. Not that the realization was particularly sad; I didn’t cry, of course. It still rankles me, though, that Chōzō never asked the others, whose experience of breakfast was so limited, “You kids want to eat?” Would they have said, out of sheer force of habit, “No, that’s all right,” or, aroused by an unforeseen hope that there just might be something for them to eat, would they have answered, “Yes”? It’s a minor point, but I still wish I could have heard their answer.

  Standing up on the dirt floor, Chōzō turned back partway and called, “See you later, Kuma. Thanks for everything.” He stamped lightly on the ground a few times.

  “Kuma,” of course, was the name of the proprietor. He was still in back, sleeping. The shaggy head that had given me the queasy feeling the night before on the edge of sleep, I now peeked in to find sticking out from under a quilt—or, rather, a mattress. Apparently, it was his style to put a sleeping mat on top of himself when he slept. When Chōzō spoke to it, the shaggy head jerked up from the floor mats and out came Kuma’s face. It didn’t look as odd to me as it had at night. But there was no denying, even in the morning light, that the forehead curved back at an angle running straight up to the top of his head.

  “Oh, don’t mention it,” Kuma said from under the covers. And he was right. There was nothing to mention. He was the only one with a quilt. “Weren’t you cold?” he added. Here was a man who didn’t worry much over guests.

  “No, not at all,” Chōzō said, stepping across the threshold.

  “Stop by on your way down,” Kuma said, yawning, to his back.

  So now Chōzō was out in the road. I followed him, a step behind the boy and the red blanket. They were all in a tremendous hurry—and all thoroughly used to this kind of traveling, it seemed. According to Chōzō, we would be crossing over the mountains now, and we were hurrying because we had to reach the mine by noon. He didn’t say why we had to reach the mine by noon, and I didn’t have it in me to ask. I just followed along silently. Soon the road started to climb, as Chōzō had said it would. Having had my fill of climbing the day before, I found this hard to believe, but in fact I could see nothing but mountains in every direction. Mountains within mountains within mountains. We were going so deep into the mountains it was almost ridiculous. The copper mine was obviously in an isolated place. I climbed along vigorously, panting with the effort, but all the same I felt discouraged. When it crossed my mind what a time I would have trying to find my way back to the city from a place like this, I started blaming myself for having come here on a whim. Of course, I had run away precisely because I didn’t want to stay in the city. I was supposed to be going someplace hard to leave, where I could rot away without fear of encountering my parents or relatives. Whenever I came to a high slope, I would pause now and then to catch my breath and survey the surrounding mountains. Each was covered with a dark, forbidding growth of trees and a deepening layer of clouds that made it appear to draw off into the distance. Perhaps “fade away” would be a more appropriate way to put it than “draw off into the distance.” When a mountain had faded as much as it could, it would very gradually withdraw into the depths of the mist until all traces were lost of what had been no more than a shadow. No sooner had even the shadow disappeared than the clouds took their turn to move past the face of the mountain and again the mountain’s pale shadow emerged from the white, swirling mist. The shadow’s edge would grow gradually thicker, and by the time the color of the trees became clearly visible, the cloud had flowed to the neighboring peak. Then another cloud would come and obscure the color of this mountain that had managed to emerge, until, finally, there was no way to tell where the mountains were or what they looked like. Trees, mountains, valleys would appear at random from the mists as I stood looking. Even the sky above came falling down from its infinite heights to within touching distance.

  “Oh, no, it’s going to rain,” grumbled Chōzō to himself as he walked along.

  No one answered him. The four of us kept climbing through the clouds, which continued streaming at us, swirling around us, burying us. As far as I was concerned, these clouds were a joy. I had wanted to make myself invisible, and thanks to them I was able to do just that. I could walk through them without undue suffering. I could move my limbs freely without any constricting sense of being closed in, even while enjoying the advantage of concealing myself from the eyes of the world. This was what it meant to be buried alive. It was the one and only ideal for me at the time. And so I was tremendously grateful for those clouds. Or perhaps “relieved” would be a better word. When the clouds began to bury me, it was not so much gratitude as relief that I felt. Now that I think of it, I can’t imagine why. Call me crazy, I don’t know. Given the proper time and circumstances, maybe even tomorrow, I might wish I had those clouds back again. Strange, I feel as though I can’t be sure I’m really here, as though I myself am not myself.

  But the clouds, at least, those clouds were a joy. I’ve never forgotten how the four of us moved through them, drawing apart, bunching up, screened from each other, enveloped together. The boy would emerge from the clouds and plunge back in again. The blanket from Ibaraki would turn red, then white. No more than thirty feet ahead, Chōzō’s dotera would grow solid, then fade. No one said a word. Speed was everything. I’ll never forget how those four shadows, cut off from the world, went forging through the clouds, pulling ahead, falling behind, drawing together, springing apart, never increasing, never decreasing, but always four, we had to be four, as if it could never be any other way.

  I was buried in the clouds, and so were the other three. Clouds were the world, and we four the only people in it. All three of the others were homeless vagrants. For them it was natural to wander through the clouds without washing their faces or eating breakfast. When I had climbed more than two miles and descended almost five with these companions through the blowing clouds, and my legs were ready to give out, it started to rain. Since I had no watch, I didn’t know what time it was. From the look of the sky, it could have been morning, but it might just as well have been afternoon or evening. The world was as out of focus as my mind, though one thing I couldn’t help noticing was the color of the mountains filtering through the rain. It was completely changed. Before I knew it, the trees were gone and the hills were transformed into bald heads, some completely bare, some with patchy growth, all as red as cinnabar. I had staggered this far with nothing more on my mind than to keep my legs moving as quickly as possible, the clouds a huge brushstroke blotting out whatever bound me to the world at large. When these red hills suddenly appeared before me, I snapped out of the spell of the clouds. I had never imagined that color could have such an impact on me. (By nature, I’m so indifferent to color that I wouldn’t be surprised if I turned out to be color-blind.) The moment the red mountain made its fairly violent attack on my optic nerves, I thought to myself, “Finally, we’re coming close to the copper mine.” Perhaps it was just a presentiment of some kind, but I’
m sure I associated the color of the mountain with copper. In any case, when I sensed intuitively that we had arrived (“intuitively” having no deeper meaning most of the time than this), Chōzō said something like what I had been thinking:

  “We’re almost there.”

  Within fifteen minutes, we came to a town. Having burrowed into mountains within mountains and passed through clouds within clouds, I was so amazed at the unexpected sight of this new town that I wanted to rub my eyes in case they were deceiving me. If the place had been a post town or village that had some ties with the old days of the shoguns, I wouldn’t have been so surprised, but here everything was brand new—new banks, new post office, new restaurants, even new women with makeup on their faces. It was like a dream, and before the surprise could register on my face, we had passed through the town and come to a bridge. Chōzō stopped on the bridge and glanced down at the water flowing beneath.

  “This is the entrance,” he said. “We’re here now. Better keep that in mind.”

  I had no idea what he meant by this last cautionary remark. I just stood on the bridge, looking from the entrance at what lay beyond. There were hills on the left and hills on the right. I could see houses scattered on the slopes. The wood of the houses looked as new as the town. A few were white stucco or painted. They, too, were new. The only thing old and peeling was the mountain itself. I was beginning to feel a little disappointed, as though I were being dragged back into the real world. When he saw me standing there, peering beyond the bridge, Chōzō asked, as he had before, “You doing okay, kid? You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I answered clearly, but inwardly I was not the least bit fine. For some reason, Chōzō was concerned about no one else but me. He never asked the boy if he was “doing okay” or the red blanket if he was “all right.” Obviously, he was taking it for granted that both of them were predestined to become miners and to end their allotted span in the copper mine. Which meant that I was the only one he couldn’t count on. Maybe he had been suspicious about my qualifications all along. So much for my inflated self-image.