The Promise

 

 

 

It is four years since the master came to this village.
The high-pupils in black robes cleaned and fixed an abandoned hut for the master.
Every Tuesday, the master goes to the market on his donkey.
On the other days, you can find him fishing in the stream.

 

Four young men in dark suits met before a gigantic suburban train station on a humid, hot evening to see off their common friend. It was late August of 1996. The summer day was still alive, with the thick, sticky atmosphere vibrating with energy, traffic noise, commuters' footsteps and countless insects in the air. I was one of the four men.
We walked silently into the northern residential area of the suburban city, bed of one million commuters to Tokyo. My head was full of words. I was closest with the departing friend, Kai, of the four. I knew how promising a young scholar he was and how much he liked stupid or obscene jokes. I felt a weird impulse to show off my knowledge about him to the other three. I wanted to share it with the guys because it was almost the last chance. Before everything was lost in oblivion, I wanted to make a shared reference about him. On the morning of the day before, Kai's mother found him in bed without breath or pulse. After some forty hours, I was walking to his house, irritated by the other three men sunk in a uniform funeral silence. I wanted to break it and stir it up. This should not be an ordinary funeral, because Kai was not an ordinary person.

 

No villager knows in what skill he is "the master."
Still, they just call him "Master."
Once in a while, a small group of children tries to peak in his hut,
And always runs away in a panic.
Some say, "His books are protected by a strange creature with golden eyes."
Others say, "There is nothing but scary darkness in the window even on sunny days."

 

We, the four men and Kai, all met each other in 1988. I remember Kai walking on the campus, always carrying huge old library books under his arm, happily, but with a long shadow of feebleness right behind him. Due to some congenital problems in his circulatory system, he was incapable of hard exercise or even running across a busy street. In high school, I guess, he could not join any PE class or ball games during recess. He did not seem, however, to care much about his physical limitation. On the self-introduction form of our college class, he wrote, "I'd like to publish at least one book on history." He knew exactly what he could and he couldn't, and lived with a bright resignation. He was watching people and life around him through a small window of his study, just as much as he needed to live in the society. Compared with him, I was a typical young man, uselessly curious about other people's affair, easily excited and always looking for changes. On the morning Showa Emperor's death was announced, I saw Kai at a class. I said, "Now that the ghost of World War II is gone, our country can finally change!"

"Nothing will change in this country," Kai said with his usual unconcern.

After twelve years, I unwillingly admit he was right.

 

It was a common setting for a funeral. Wrapped with large sheets of cloth in black and white stripes, his house had turned into a huge alter, opening up all its doors and windows toward the street. The small garden and the street were occupied by a long line of visitors. Whispering quietly, or nervously touching their handkerchiefs or handbags, people were waiting for their turn to offer incense before Kai's large picture decorated with black and white ribbons. The neighborhood was full of the smell of incense. A Buddhism priest was making a monotonous sermon for the dead through a microphone. "A karaoke priest!" I reviled in my mind, remembering how Kai hated any superficial rituals.

 

The boy's parents wanted him to play with other kids,
But the boy liked to lie alone on the bank and look into the flow.
In return for the boy's magical fish-gathering,
The master decided to teach him what was in his gilded books.

 

An old man with white hair and short, round body was lecturing through a microphone. There were about one hundred students in the theater 505. "My voice is sooo hypnotizing, isn't it? In classes just after the lunch, I can make three quarter of students fall asleep." As one of requirements for BA degree, I had to take a history course. As soon as I asked Kai which one he liked, he dragged me to Dr. Matsu's class in medieval Japanese history. Despite his drowsy voice and speech, his lecture inspired even students from other majors.
"The term paper can be anything. You can even write about your illusion and delirium."
Dr. Matsu did not lie. For my paper full of illusion and delirium about one of Japanese folk tales, he gave me an A. The result seemed to have offended Kai a bit, because he had poured tons more insight and hard work into his paper for the same grade.
"Why doesn't our college have marks like A+++?"
He also had earned far more credit hours than he needed to graduate.
"Why don't you donate some of your excessive hours to me?"
"No way!"

 

Dr. Matsu, an authority of medieval Japanese history, retired in 1994. In accordance with the custom of Japanese academia, they planned a memorial volume consisting of papers by Dr. Matsu and the best crops of his pupils, including Kai.
"Kai, can I write something for him, too? Although I'm not a student of history, I liked his class. That A was one of the highlights in my undergraduate study. I'm ready to write a splendid poem about him to open up the whole volume!"
"Don't even think of it. Your crazy writing would devastate our academic authority."
"Ok, in that case I'll print my poem with my computer and personally put it in every copy of the book at the bookstore. No one can stop the outburst of my artistic passion!
He somehow seemed enjoying such stupid conversation, which were lacking in the graduate school. Most students were so afraid of looking stupid. Kai was a rare exception, maybe because he didn't have to worry about his intelligence.
"After all, what the heck do you want to write about him?"
"Doesn't he look like Sancho Panza?"
After a brief pause, he burst into laughter.
"In his retirement, he lives in a Spanish village with a huge straw hat, fishing rod, and a donkey to ride."
"I can see the picture so clearly."
"I'll send you the poem when I finish it."

I failed to do so---because I didn't know the deadline was so early.

 

A month after the funeral, I received a phone call from a middle-aged man. He was Kai's father. I did not know how to respond him, who had just lost his only son. I liked Kai, but I was not sure if my favorite side of him would also please his parents. "Yes, he was..." I could not think of any words to follow. I decided to depend on Japanese silence, which can be interpreted just as listeners would like and works to avoid conflicts. After an odd silence on the both sides of the phone line, he began to say what had been in his mind. "My son sounded so happy when talking with you on the phone. Maybe you were his best friend." I might be. Or he just had no other friends.
"I'm glad to hear that."
Another long silence.
He hanged up after a short, but cordial words of gratitude for me. I still feel guilty of my awkwardness at that time.

 

When I was finished with the brief ritual of incense and went out of his house, they gave me a small packet of salt. Traditionally we put a pinch of salt at the doorway to keep the "filth" of death from coming into our house. I hated the idea for the first time in my life and threw the packet away on the way back to the station. I remembered I had company, but decided to go alone. In the downtown, I had to walk against thousands of people in simple summer kimono pouring out from the station's exit. It was the day of an annual festival where we dance to invite and entertain the spirit of ancestors. In the humid air of early night, I felt the film between life and death was so thin and vibrant. Kai was still much closer to me than this flood of people, who went past me dance-walking to the music.

 

It was last autumn that I found an advertisement on the web for Kai's first and last book. The ad said, "The long-awaited posthumous work of Kai Yamada finally comes out, edited by his friends and prefaced by Dr. Matsu." Maybe it is high time for me to finish singing my part, no matter how bad I am.

 

 

Around the boy's fingertip soaked in the water,
Fishes write runes in silver.
The old man smiles and shows the boy luminous diagrams in the air.
And Now,
The water wheel slowly begin to rotate again,
On the river of centuries.

 

 

 

---The End

 

 

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