Money, Monks, and Good Luck hr677

Although I don’t regard myself as a believer in Buddhism, I visit a nearby temple once a year as a custom with lots of wishes for the new year when snow melts away at the end of a long harsh winter. I toss a one-yen coin into an offertory box, ring a bell that is dangled under the eaves, and pray for a few minutes.

Kyoto, where I was born and raised, is renowned as a historical city that had been the capital of Japan for over one thousand years. Historic landmarks are everywhere, most of which are temples and shrines. In that kind of city, especially a rural town like the one that I’m from has a strong relationship with a local Buddhist temple in the hamlet. The temple that my family served as one of its main parishioners was one block away from home and I used to have quite a few occasions to go there when I was little. The temple had a cemetery of the family’s ancestors in the hamlet on its premises and managed it. Inside the temple, a variety of gatherings were held, such as a meeting of main parishioners, a lecture meeting for elderly men and women separately, and sometimes a wedding or a funeral. The chief priest of the temple lived at the site, who preached the teachings of Buddha at the meetings and read the sutras at a funeral or a memorial service that was held for the deceased in a family every several years. The sutras are intoned monotonously, of which contents and meanings I can’t make nothing, and are supposed to purify people’s minds and give repose to the deceased’s soul. Although listening to them should be a boon, all I felt physically would be pain in my legs as we usually didn’t sit in a chair but had to sit our legs bent beneath us on the tatami floor, and mentally would be a wish for the sutras to end soon.

When I was a child, the folks in my hamlet respected the old chief priest of the local temple because his preaching convinced them that he had learned the Buddhist scriptures well and disciplined himself accordingly. However, the new young priest who took over his predecessor’s duties had fallen into disfavor. He preached irrelevantly and incorrectly, buttered up main parishioners with tacky flatteries, and urged unnecessary memorial services on which decline he threatened the family to be cursed. While I understood he must have had financial difficulties, he looked like a salesman rather than a priest. Other than the one in my hamlet, monks were spotted easily around the city as there were many temples in Kyoto. When I was in my late teens and worked part-time at a steak restaurant, I often saw a skinhead man wearing a monk’s stole, who I hoped wasn’t a real monk but just cosplayed which was sadly unlikely, have an expensive steak and beer in the middle of the day and leave by driving a luxury car. Ascetic monks in the Buddha era fasted at the risk of their life or buried themselves in the ground to seek the truth of spiritual enlightenment. Compared to those who tried to hear the voice of God abstinently, it seemed that monks in modern times cherished money over God. It’s not fair to blame only monks, though. We may have lapsed into the same state as them.

I create my songs by squeezing everything I got and taking years per song, in order to dedicate them to the Higher Power of the Universe that I call it. I don’t know exactly what it is but I feel its existence from my experiences in which something must have watched over and helped me by making unexpected things happen and giving me hope with that. Since it looks on me and gives me benefit, I should show gratitude and repay it with what I could possibly do. Then, that calls forth good luck, I suppose. Because I don’t think money brings happiness, I would be happy if I were being a blessed person.

A Life Foretelling Poem hr674

My Japanese language teacher gave particular homework when I was a junior high school student in Kyoto. She assigned a Japanese poem to each student in the class and told us to interpret its meaning. The subject poem was from a Japanese classic anthology called Ogura Hyakunin Issyu which is composed of one hundred poems by one hundred poets. That set of one hundred poems was compiled in the 13th century in Kyoto, which was the capital of Japan then, and written by one hundred different representative poets of the era, who were  sort of celebrities at that time. All poems are written in a specific style called ‘tanka’ that is a long version of haiku. The anthology has been popular all along for some reason so that it became a Japanese classic card game at one point. Even now, a national tournament of the card game takes place annually, which is a fixture of the New Year in Japan.

One of those poems was assigned to me for homework. A number had been given to each student according to the student register listed by names in alphabetical order. My number was eight. The poems also had a number for each and the teacher assigned the corresponding one to the student number. Mine was the poem number eight written by Kisen Hoshi who was a Buddhist priest. Not only the style but also the words and the place names used in the poem were too old for me to understand. It wasn’t appealing and I didn’t appreciate it. Besides, I was a thirteen-year-old who had any interest in neither in tanka nor haiku. Just to finish my homework, I was looking into and trying to interpret it. But the further I went, the fonder I grew of the poem. Rather I sympathized with it. To sum up, the meaning of the poem is “I am living a secluded life in my hermitage that stands away from a capital city. People call me a recluse.” Back then, I had just entered a privileged private school where I had been struggling to fit in. As a daughter of rural farmers, I couldn’t get along with other students from rich families. I usually felt like an outcast at school and the poem generated deep empathy.

The homework stimulated my interest in the anthology and I fell for it before I knew it. I read and interpreted all one hundred poems and in the end, I won the school’s card game tournament by remembering all the poems completely. I don’t say that poem changed my life, but it surely influenced the course of my life. As an unknown singer-songwriter, I often feel that I’m not part of this society. And I suspect that the poem is one of the reasons why I quite easily accept that feeling. It told me that I was not alone. It also showed me the strong power of what someone creates fueled by empathy. My belief that a song can change somebody’s life for the better may have stemmed partly from this encounter with the poem.

I’m still able to recite some of those one hundred poems. Among them, the number eight that was given to me as my homework often comes up in my mind. After decades have passed since I came across that poem, I feel empathy more than ever. I had left my family and friends and moved into a remote town closed in by mountains to make music. When I see the snow-covered mountains from the window of my small apartment, I recite the number eight poem unknowingly, and find myself living just as it is written.

No Other Choice hr647

Photo by rikka ameboshi on Pexels.com

I chose music as my lifelong carrier when I was a college student. The first thing I got down to was to form a band. After I realized I couldn’t find band members at nearby universities because students played music just for fun, I expanded my search to the general public. Until then, the whole world I had been familiar with was the small hamlet where I was born and grew up and the schools I went to. I was about to tread on to the unknown, new world.
It was early 80’s when neither the Internet nor SNS had existed yet. The common way to find band members back then was recruitment columns on dozens of pages in a monthly music magazine. When you found someone appealing to you, you would contact him or her by a double postcard to receive a reply. I narrowed down to two postings for a candidate band. As I couldn’t figure out which one was better, I asked my mother out of curiosity. She glanced at each posting and without much attention picked one which address indicated a good residential district. Neither she nor I ever imagined that casual pick would have changed the course of life of mine, my parents’ and of the one who posted the recruitment message. From that point, inexplicable passion moved me in fast forward mode. I jumped on my bike, rushed to the post office to get a double postcard on which I scribbled enthusiastic self promotion on the spot, and mailed it.
A few days later I received the reply card with the phone number on it. We talked over the phone and set up the meeting in Osaka where he lived. Osaka is the big city located next to Kyoto where I lived. It took me about a 15-minute bike ride to the train station plus s 45-minute ride on the express train, which was quite a travel for me who was a farmer’s daughter in the small village of Kyoto. Adding to that going to the big city alone was so nervous in itself, the one whom I was going to meet was a boy. I had hardly talked to boys of my generation since I went to girls’ school from junior high to college. That all felt like a start of my adult life.
Before I set out for Osaka though, there was a problem. I needed to make s demo tape of my songs for the meeting where we were to exchange demos. When he talked over the phone about the exchange of demo tapes, I said “Exchanging demos? Sure, it’s a matter of course!,” which I found myself in a cold sweat to be honest. I had only one song on a tape that I had made for an audition. All other songs of mine were on paper as it was before the era of hard disc recording by a computer. The gadgets for a demo I had were a radio cassette tape recorder, the piano and the guitar. I didn’t have a microphone or a mixer, which meant I had to record by singing to my own accompaniment in front of the tape recorder. Although I had done that before and even done a few gigs too, the demo I finished this time sounded so lame that I thought he would turn me down as his band member at the meeting.
To me, my demo tape sounded as if it made me a laughingstock since I had confidently declared myself to become a professional musician over the phone. He would either laugh at me or get angry for wasting his time when he listened to it. Rather, I may have had excessive self-esteem to think about becoming a musician with those poor songs in the first place. It seemed more and more like the recurrence of my mistake in which I failed the entrance examination of most universities after I had declared to everyone around me that I would go to the most prestigious university in Japan.
I felt hesitant to go to Osaka for the meeting. On the other hand, my sudden loss of confidence showed how much I committed this time. At that point of my life, joining a band was so important. An audition or a gig as a high school student was nothing compared to that. I didn’t have my purpose for living anywhere else. It was the only way left for me to go on. I had no other choice but to be heading for the meeting with my demo tape held in my hand.

The Dream Super Express hr642

I was born and grew up in a small village of Kyoto, Japan. My family made a living by farming, which contributed to my even more old-fashioned childhood than usual that was nothing like a current ordinary life.
Food on the table was almost self-sufficient that came form our fields or the front yard and the chicken coops of the house. We had only one tiny refrigerator without a freezer that was more than enough as beer or watermelons were chilled by pumping well water. The bathtub was round and made of wood. Its floor was a round iron plate on which a round wooden board was put in to sit. Beneath the iron plate was a small furnace that my grandmother put wood, straw or used paper in the fire to heat water in the bathtub. Our toilet was a wooden bucket placed in the garage. My grandfather would carry it on a wooden pole to our fields as manure. Not only the way of living was old-fashioned, but also the way of thinking was. All the family members obeyed submissively my grandfather who was a patriarch of my family. Women were deemed to be inferior to men and treated unfairly. Families were giving and receiving them through marriage as if they were commodities.
But the changes of the world can’t be stopped. In the year I was born, a bullet train started running between two major cities in Japan, Tokyo and Osaka. It was dubbed ‘a dream super express’ because of a high speed. The city of Kyoto where I lived was close to Osaka and on the line of the bullet train. A new special railroad and its platforms were built above the existing ones. The railway near my home accordingly had the new overhead railroad above it. When I was an elementary school student, I crossed the local train railroad and the big, tall, splendid bullet train railroad by an underpass beneath the tracks on my way to school on foot every day. In the middle of the passage, when a local train or a freight train passed above my head, I would cringe at an enormously thunderous noise. But the bullet train sounded like a whistling wind, almost soothing.

The number of children had been increasing as the economy was picking up. The elementary school I went to burst with students and a new school was built when I was in the fifth grade. I was sent to the new one that stood right next to the railroad. Out of the windows, the bullet train was running. From a brand new school building, I had never get bored to see the bullet train zipping past at incredibly high speed through the countryside where time went by so slowly. Thanks to the bullet train, my new school had the air conditioner since the building had soundproofing windows that can’t be opened because of train noises. My former four years in the old school with wooden buildings and coal stoves were felt like ancient.
I loved the bullet train so much. To me, it seemed alive with a soul like Thomas the Tank Engine as its headlights looked like eyes and its coupler cover looked like a nose. Since I had difficulty in getting along with others back then, I felt more attached and closer to the bullet train than other human beings. Every time I saw it passing by, I sensed it glanced at me and was running toward the future, carrying hope and dreams. Years later, I left home of an old village and moved to Tokyo by bullet train to become a musician.
Sometimes there is a day when we feel that this world has come to an impasse and been headed just for destruction. But if we adapt ourselves to new ways of living or thinking, we may be able to see more of something bright and exciting. In 2027, Japan is going to have a new railway on which magnetic levitation bullet trains called Linear Bullet Trains run at the highest speed of 320 miles per hour. I wonder how their faces look like. I can’t wait to see them.

What Wild Animals Try to Tell Us hr640

When the snow still lay six feet deep, my partner suddenly spotted something and pointed it with a surprise out of the dining room window in our apartment during lunch. In the direction of his pointing, I saw a Japanese serow on the snow-covered ground under a tree in the grove about 30 feet away from the building.

I had never seen a Japanese serow in the residential area. Or should I rather say, I had never seen it for real altogether. It had a face like a goat and its body looked rather like a calf than a serow, covered with light brown and gray fur. I wondered why just looking at a wild animal was somehow awe-inspiring. I took my binoculars and observed it closely.
The Japanese serow was standing on its hind legs and holding on to the trunk with its forelegs. It seemed to eat the tree bark or something on the trunk. Every time a car pulled into the parking lot stretched out between the grove and the apartment building, it hid behind the tree and peeked out the lot. After people were gone, it resumed eating.
In the beginning of this winter, my partner bumped into a boar for the first time on the foot of a mountain beside the street he was walking on. The boar was staring at him at a distance of 60 feet. Its size was about a calf and with black fur and a pig-like face. He was afraid and turned back. It was the right choice since I had heard about quite a few incidents that a boar rushed into and injured people or bit them in Japan this year, which hadn’t happened so often before. Considering that much more bears than before appeared in my town last autumn, wild animals have come down to the residential area around this year far more than they used to.
It’s said that has to do with climate change. Wild animals aren’t the only ones that have been sent out of the depths of mountains. Judging from the present situation, unknown viruses that are new to human beings and stay where they’re supposed to be may continue to come out as well.
Twilight drew near and the spots in the parking lot of my apartment building were being filled up as commuters’ cars came back one after another spewing out exhaust fumes. The Japanese serow started walking back slowly. It stared over here for a while one last time as if it was trying to tell something, and plodded back on the snow, up into the mountain.