The last two or three years, I’ve been experiencing what I call visual flashes. They come on without warning, first with an intensity that nearly blocks everything else out, then stay a few minutes, or a day, or a week, but eventually fade away. These are not hallucinations in the sense that they appear to be something with a hard sense of reality outside of my mind. They are more like an attack of tinnitus, where the sound can be deafening but is clearly within one’s own brain, or like a live double exposure, where one image is overlaid on the other and both must be looked at at the same time.
This one came when I was cleaning up after lunch: an image appeared of an elderly woman sitting at the back of a small, cramped used bookstore. It was overlaid on what I saw before me so that I had to see through it to continue washing the dishes.
I stopped what I was doing and watched, knowing that there was no reason to be afraid. My wife asked if I was ok, and I said “Yes, just need to sit down for a bit.” Relaxing in the easy chair, I closed my eyes and let the scene unfold, as both observer and participant, in two places at the same time.
The image was clear and sharp – the kimono the woman was wearing was a country weave, perhaps yūki tsumugi, with subdued shades of grey, brown, and violet. She had salt and pepper hair done up in a neat bun and sat by a hibachi that had an old pot steaming on it. The store was small, with room for no more than two or three people at the same time. On the left were shelves of mostly pre-Meiji Japanese style books (wasōbon); the right side was for prints, scrolls, and larger art books, with one shelf wider, a space for spreading scrolls out to view them. As I watched, I remembered, or thought I remembered.
It is the early 1970’s. I have come down from my cabin in the hills northeast of Tokyo for a few days in Kyoto, and have spent several hours walking leisurely along Teramachi-dōri. (The name which dates from the late sixteenth century refers to the street that runs down the part of Kyoto where temples were “relocated” by Toyotomi Hideyoshi at that time. It became known not only for its temples, such as Gangyōji, but also for its interesting variety of shops, many of which specialized in areas such as fine arts, crafts, religion . . . and bookstores. In the 1970’s there were at least half a dozen second-hand bookstores on that street, some before the prefecture offices, several in the arcade section up from Shijō and a few on past that street, nestled in among electrical appliance and computer parts stores.)
I have been walking on down Teramachi from Shijō, and am tired and ready to stop when I see another small second-hand bookstore. I go inside. After a few minutes, the woman starts talking to me. Perhaps there have only been a few customers and she is bored, or maybe she just sees I’m tired and want to sit down.
“Please have a cup of tea.” She motions for me to sit on the stool across from her and pours me a cup of roasted green tea (hōji cha). “You’re interested in Classical literature?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I love to look at old books printed in Japanese style, and to hold them and to read them, or rather, try to read them. But I don’t have much money.”
“That’s fine,” she says, “the books like to be touched, too.”
We smile, and drink tea.
I notice several black and white photographs on the wall behind her. One is of a young man in a fighter pilot’s uniform. Another shows a beautiful Western style home nestled among well-manicured trees and a garden. A third picture is of an older man, also in military uniform. I assume they date from the 1940’s.
“The books are beautiful,” I say. They are indeed in excellent condition, with prices way beyond my tiny budget.
“My father and mother had a wonderful collection; they formed the base for what my mother and I have been selling for the last twenty years.”
After a moment, I ask, “Is that your father in the picture?”
She turns and points, this one?” I nod. Then, pointing to the other, “and this is my younger brother. Both died in the war.” She smiles, as though my asking had been a release.
Looking at the picture of the house, my mind flashes images of the opulent estates of Ashiya that I had sometimes visited as a child. There is something familiar about the atmosphere in the picture. “You’re from Ashiya?” She nods. We are silent for a while again; she pours me some more tea.
“Before the end, things got very bad. Ashiya was bombed several times, but the areas damaged were along the coast, so we were safe. It was terribly frightening. After that, the servants left and my mother and I were all alone. By the last year of the war the transportation system was so disrupted that it was often impossible to get fresh food. I was trained in naginata to fight the enemy with if they invaded.” She laughs. “The training was useless for growing food.” She closes her eyes, as though remembering. “As the war continued, transportation became even more difficult and food scarcer yet. We would go into the hills to hunt for something to eat – grass, roots, wild fruit, grain, even field mice and sparrows. Anything.”
“At the end we had almost nothing.” She closes her eyes again. “Oh, we had my father and mother’s collection of books and scrolls, a few tea bowls, other antiques, but who had money to spare for luxuries? When the Occupation came, the US military sequestered our home. My mother and I moved the collection to the storehouse and went to Nishinomiya to stay with her sister. We took only what we could carry. People shared what they had, but there wasn’t enough,” she laughs, quietly. It is a laugh of exhaustion and sadness. “Of course, as bad as the situation was for us, it was worse for others, especially those who lived in areas that were carpet bombed. Thousands of innocent women and children died. An atrocity.”
I listen silently, and nod; then tell her I grew up on the campus of Kwansei Gakuin University, in Nishinomiya, and had heard stories of the suffering from people living around there and in Kobe where I went to school. I remember but don’t mention finding discarded military paraphernalia on my walks in the woods. She nods. I go on.
“The bus we rode on to the elementary school in Kobe followed a river up a valley. We passed caves that had been cut out of the cliffs along the river and turned into one-room homes, with cardboard or plywood for a front door. And there were clusters of makeshift shanties on the mountain side of Nishinomiya.”
“When was that,” she asks.
“Early 1950s,” I answer.
“Things were a lot better by then,” she sighs, then speaks slowly, as though remembering many things and speaking only of one, “My brother was in the Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai ((神風特別攻撃隊). He trained to be one of those young pilots who sacrifices his life for his nation.” There is neither bitterness nor pride in her voice, only loss. I recognize the name of the so-called “kamikaze” pilots. (Kamikaze and shimpū are different readings of the same two characters.)
I tell her that as a child exploring the university campus I had found an unmarked entrance to what was some kind of underground military complex under one of the sports grounds, and had entered it several times, always a bit afraid I might get lost in the maze of tunnels and rooms that I felt must be there. “Of course by then the place was completely empty,” I say, adding that much later I had learned it was one of the training sites for pilots who took off never to return.
“Who told you?”
“Someone who had trained there. The war ended before he was sent to the field.” I spoke quietly, remembering a talk with an elderly man in a snack bar in Hitachi, where I had gone with students after our English Conversation class finished. Some of the younger factory workers had started singing war songs and he had stopped them by saying that only people who have never experienced war sing such songs, and then began telling me about his own past.
“He was lucky.” She pauses. “Nishinomiya was where my brother did his training.”
Her eyes have the gleam of tears. We are quiet again.
“Friends told us we should take my parent’s collection, move to Kyoto, and open a store” she begins, “because a lot of foreigners came there and they might buy old scrolls, and also because there are lots of universities in Kyoto with students and scholars that might buy old books.” She laughs. “Once my father’s estate was settled, we sold the house and with my mother’s share bought this little place. It was good advice.”
“It’s a nice shop,” I say, feeling perhaps I should change the subject.
“Really? Thank you. The location is terrible; not many people come down this far unless they know about the store. Most people are just looking for some kind of electrical appliance. Still, my mother built up the collection and we have lasted this long.” She laughs again, brews fresh tea for us and offers me a couple of rice crackers (senbei.), some some Gliko caramels, and a mikan.
“Everyone I knew suffered in the war,” she says.
“Yes,” I agree, and tell her that when I was growing up nearly all my teachers, and my classmates’ parents, shared their wartime experiences at one time or another, no matter what country they were from. I tell her my father and three of his brothers had served in the war, and sometimes talked about it, too.
There is another pause; perhaps we are both remembering. Images and experiences fill my mind, images of both my own experiences and those of people I knew, or had read about, or seen in newsreels or documentaries. In the silence I feel her pain and loss; it is as though they have not been diminished by the years.
“Please, look at the books some more, they will enjoy it” she says, finally, getting up slowly and going through the narrow door behind her. I realize our afternoon tea is almost over.
There is a cardboard box of much less expensive books by the entrance to the shop. I find a little one with illustrations that I thought I might paint copies of.
“Ah, you found one you like,” she says when she comes back.
I hand her the little book – Chikuden Gafu (竹田画譜) – a collection of illustrations of the painter Tanomura Chikuden (田野村竹田, 1777-1835) published in 1880. She smiles. “You paint?”
“Sometimes,” I confess, “but I don’t have any talent”.
She laughs warmly, “The illustrations are nice just to look at, too.”
Agreeing, I pay, and thank her for the tea and conversation. She nods and smiles. As I leave, she sits down and goes back to staring into the glowing charcoal of the hibachi.
The image of this woman and its story remained with me for several weeks, hovering upon the screen of my mind. Sometimes it was a pale image, sometimes much stronger. Sometimes I only saw her sitting there. Sometimes I saw all parts of the memory at once, placed in a circle around her like in a mandala such as the Taema mandara (当麻曼荼羅). When the image was strong, often I would sit and watch it, as though meditating. Sometimes one of the smaller scenes around her would take over the center, act out what it represented, and then recede, to be replaced by another of the smaller scenes. Over time, I remembered other stories, experiences, things I had heard, read, seen, such as tying to help a friend who came back from Vietnam so traumatized that he was unable to return to a normal life and eventually killed himself. He had come to me asking for help because he knew I was a veteran, too, and might understand. I understood but I could do nothing because he was too trapped by his own experiences.
The image of a woman seated at the rear of a small secondhand bookstore thus became a kind of portal by which my mind revisited the ravages, the suffering, and the lasting pain of war.
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For an interview with Nicholas Teele about his unusual past, see here. You can also view his writing about Emperor Sutoku in Kyoto, or the 13 Temple Kyoto Pilgrimage, or a ‘reborn’ Kyoto Pilgrimage. For a list of his publications, see here.
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