Fuji / Nagauta

Long time since the last post here.

Summer holidays. Okinawa. Glass-blowing. Running The Visa Gauntlet.

Last Sunday went with Mr. Iwasaki to see a performance of Nagauta, long lyrical songs from Edo Japan. Mostly Shinobue, 2-3 Shamisen, 2-3 singers, and 3-4 Taiko of various type. I think I fell in love with the flutist. It happens sometimes, I'm not sure why. Her kimono was a wide flower pattern, white on ai-iro midnight blue. She wore her hair up on top of her head in a loose bun, and her eyes never left a space on the ground about 3 feet in front of her. The line of her hip and leg, drawn in seiza; the nape of her neck, trailing wisps of hair slipped loose from its binding; her melancholy eyes...entranced me for hours. I asked Mr. Iwasaki about her (he knows most of the musicians personally) but it seems she is married to the 2nd drummer. [frown]
A month or so ago I climbed Fuji-san. And what an event. Previously, I had sneeringly declared my contempt for the mountain. Following after certain comments by Dazai and others, I had had long and winding, more-or-less flippant conversations with Junko about the over-bearing perfection of such a mountain, of its too-beautiful, nausea-inducing photogeneity. He must have heard me, great Fuji, god that he is. I had been warned that he was a harsh deity, unforgiving and cruel, cunning and fickle; that he would call down storms to destroy those who sought to climb too high, steal their breath from them, tumble rocks on their head, choke them on clouds of plague insects, drown them in mist and lead them with signs and lights to plunge off sheer precipices, turn them around and twist them about and send them wandering bewitched through the gnarled and ghostly forests of shirakaba. Thousands had perished at his whim.


So I got altitude sickness. And barely managed to get to the top without suffering a full collapse, survivng on regular shots of canned oxygen and Meiji chocolate, crawling on my hands and knees for long sections near the top. The shape of the mountain. It's evil. By the time you near the top the angle has steeped to seem near-vertical. Like climbing up a blasted post-apocalyptic martian cliff. Red volcanic rock, boiled stone, bubbled and crumbling and light, porous, grating, eating the skin off your skeleton like bloody molars chewing on chicken bone. I saw a dead bird. How did it die up here? Lifeless, the mountain, except for the Presence. Beyond breath, it lives.

Near the summit, the dawn. I collapsed and watched the sun rise, a perfect circle of red fire in a bleach-white sky. Shouts of "Banzai" from behind and above. The sea of clouds; the south Alps like distant islands. My fingernails were bloody. I felt happy; the mountain basked in the light of the Sun Goddess. I could feel him stretching, the light on his face.

On the way down, stumbling and delirious, practically sliding most of the way, quickly a thick fog rose to swamp me, could barely see ten feet ahead. The switchbacks forever. Stumbling again, and again, falling. Countless trillions of midges, dense clouds of them, spotting my glasses black, covering every inch of me, thousands in my lungs; I could hear him laughing. Lastly, through the forest near the foot of the mountain, I could rest and collect myself. I sat by a small stream and drank some water. Uguisu birds, calling me to wander deeper into the woods; a surge of will; I resisted and wandered back to the bus stop. My legs quivering, my mind pulverised into a mush.

Somehow, this was joyous. I'd truly met the mountain. I had learned something. I had been taught.