Traces of moss covered the rocks. The smallest one resembled a volleyball, the largest a giant tortoise. Sedge couldn’t imagine rolling the largest rock over, much less lifting it off the ground.
“One time I snuck into the enclosure late at night. I wanted to test my strength.”
“How many were you able to lift?” Sedge asked.
“The four smallest ones. I couldn’t budge the largest three.”
The fourth-largest rock must have weighed well over one hundred pounds. It looked impossible to get a good grip on. If Riku had lifted it, that would surely make him stronger than most men in the village.
The shrine path climbed two sets of steps. The first passed the ōsugi, which were marked by shimenawa ropes to signify their sacredness. They dwarfed a nearby camellia tree, whose fallen flowers lay scattered on the ground, brown and rotting.
“Someone left their cane by the handrail,” Sedge said, pointing to it. “What a strange thing to forget if you have trouble walking.”
Riku grabbed it and swiped at the air like samurais in movies do with swords, then returned it to where he’d found it. “Old people leave things here all the time.”
“Where do you think we’ll find any birds?”
Riku looked around them again, then at the tops of the trees. “Birds usually flit around between these steps and the shrine. We should have come here first.”
They waited for something to move in the treetops or dart across the sky.
A few minutes later they climbed further. The first drops of rain started falling, and within seconds it became a torrent. Their tree-cover was insufficient protection, and as the rain strengthened they ran to find shelter. Together they charged up the second series of steps, arriving at the shrine at the same time. They sat deep under its rooftop, inspecting their rain-splotched clothes.
“Mariko told me the shrine was moved to this height almost fifty years ago,” Sedge said. “It’s the second time they’ve elevated it. Eventually they’ll do it again.”
Riku muttered, “I won’t be here when they do.”
Sedge didn’t say anything for a moment. “Where will you be?”
“I want to make a new life far away from here. If both my parents could do it, so can I. But I won’t do it the way they did. Especially my dad.”
“There’s no reason you can’t be better than them.”
Riku looked away and said, “When I was in school, my teacher said Bashō died thinking he was spiritually a ‘tattered beggar.’ I learned that on our final lesson about him.”
Sedge remembered Riku’s answer to his question about why Bashō had journeyed so often. “It’s disappointing to think that through his journeys he couldn’t escape the pain of living.”
“I once asked our teacher if he thought Bashō would be happier today. He just made fun of the question, asking our class how he was supposed to know.”
“He sounds unenlightened.”
Riku shrugged.
“For someone who hated school, you clearly got something out of reading Bashō.”
“That was the only time.”
The rain sheeted down. It had collected in a groove between the eaves overhead and started dripping between them. Beyond the torii below, the village was gray with water and mist. The mountains encircling the valley had been completely erased.
Riku tried to peer inside the shrine where its front doors came together. His movement stirred the humid air and Sedge smelled the wet concrete of the path and the dusty wood of the seldom-opened shrine. He was about to call Riku back when the boy sat down again.
Raising his voice above the water flowing from the eaves Riku said, “Bashō lived in huts much smaller than this shrine. They had names, too. ‘The Unreal Hut.’ And ‘The House of Fallen Persimmons.’ I’m going to name the kura one of these days.”
“Name the kura?” Sedge said.
“The name I want to give it comes from when Bashō found an abandoned three-year-old boy on the roadside.”
“’I never heard that story.”
“We studied his haiku about it. It has nineteen syllables, two more than normal. My teacher said Bashō was overwhelmed with sorrow at the boy’s fate and seventeen syllables couldn’t contain his emotions.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and, protecting it from the rain, flipped to a middle page. “I copied the haiku. It refers to a Chinese story about a monkey who grieved so deeply when her baby was stolen that she killed herself.” He handed the notebook to Sedge. “Can you read it?”
Sedge could just make out Riku’s hurried writing.
Poets who despair at a monkey’s keening,
How would they feel hearing an abandoned child
Crying in the autumn wind?
“What became of the little boy?” Sedge asked, handing the notebook back.
Riku shrugged. “I just know that Bashō felt bad for him, but he also thought his suffering was Heaven’s will. Before he walked away, he tossed the child some food he was carrying and grieved for his sad fate.”
“That seems too cruel.”
“My teacher said that if we judge Bashō’s actions by today’s standards he seems cruel, but he acted how the times he lived in said he should.”
Sedge couldn’t help but think that for someone journeying to escape the pain and sorrow of the world, what Bashō had done in this instance was to deepen and perpetuate it.
