Retreat To the Past — page 2

The next year, I returned to Japan as an exchange student at a university in Tokyo, but I spent most of my time exploring Iya and the adjacent mountains. I discovered that it wasn't merely that I, as a foreigner or a modern person, found the place strange and picturesque. Iya had always affected people that way. The "lord of Awa" (the old name of the province) had written in 1830: "The spirit of the land is remote and mysterious. We call it 'Our Peach Spring of Awa.'" In classic Chinese poetry, the Peach Spring was a quaint village that the poet happened upon while taking an idle walk, only to find that it was a haunted paradise.

Iya had been a place of mystery even then, before industrialization changed the look of the country. Because of its remoteness, Iya had been a refuge for shamans fleeing the 8th century Nara overlords, for the Heike clan after it lost the battle to control Japan in the 12th century, and for 14th century mountain warriors fighting the Muromachi shogunate. That is, the losers of each age fled into Iya.

In the early '70s, however, I found this paradise deserted. Young villagers had fled for the cities, and Iya was filled with abandoned homes—one of which I bought in 1973. As a young romantic, I hearkened after Chinese nature poets and played the flute, so I named the thatched house Chiiori: "Cottage of the Flute."

Chiiori was pure yugen. It's a word associated with Noh drama, and it literally means "mysterious darkness," a world of shadows and vaguely glimpsed images. The source of heating in the winter, and of cooking year-round, in old Japanese houses is the irori hearth, a square cut in the middle of the floor in which burns an eternal campfire. It fills the house with smoke, and even at night it never completely goes out. After centuries of smoke from the irori, the inside of my cottage had turned black: black columns, black floors, black beams. The underside of the thatch is darkening, and in another 20 or 30 years it will glisten as though lacquered black. Aside from this, there is nothing save the occasional mat. Only empty floors, the irori, the smoke, and the mists outside. At night, way up another hillside just visible between the slopes of mountains curving inward like a cascade of folding fans, I can see one solitary light far across the valley.

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