Impossible Owls Read online

  As of 2005, Wikipedia told me, Koga was a practicing Shinto priest on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s main islands. I pictured him in white robes, standing in a cemetery behind a dark gate.

  Back in Tokyo, I thought the city was a river, the urban element somehow changed to liquid form. War, earthquakes, fire, and human ingenuity have annihilated it over and over again, for centuries; the city never stops building because it never stops rebuilding. Change comes like a crash, like a wave, the crowd parting and then re-forming around whatever new reality has fallen from the sky. The way you remember things in a dream is not precisely like remembering, yet anything you’ve experienced can come back to you in a dream. Under the shoguns, sumo wrestlers often appeared in ukiyo-e—“pictures of the floating world”—woodblock prints from the pleasure districts whose other great subjects were courtesans and kabuki actors, musicians and demons and ghosts. I went to an ukiyo-e exhibit and noted the wrestlers intermixed among the geisha, among the snarling samurai. Their bellies were rendered with one or two curved brushstrokes.

  And I thought about Koga. I’m not sure why. I didn’t know how I’d find him. I didn’t know how I’d speak to him. But I priced tickets to Shikoku. I looked at the sumo schedule to figure out when I could get away. To be honest, Mishima’s suicide had always struck me as absurd—in bad taste, at the very least. But I thought: It is a small island. If I start from the train station, I can walk to the shrine, and I will find him there.

  Then I looked at a map of Shikoku. “The smallest of Japan’s main islands” covers seventy-three hundred square miles, is home to 4.1 million people, and contains dozens of Shinto shrines. I gave up.

  And yet whenever I stepped onto a subway train, whenever I rode an escalator up into the light, the idea came back, and I thought, If I can track down the shrine, I will find him there. I tried to locate a directory of Shinto sites on Shikoku—but how to make contact with one, how to ask for him?

  Hello, yes, are you familiar with this celebrated author? Wonderful. Now, did one of your priests by any chance decapitate him in the early 1970s using a four-hundred-year-old samurai sword that has since vanished?

  It was an impossible question to imagine putting in English, much less Japanese. And I spoke no Japanese. I pictured the look on the face of whomever I asked to be my interpreter.

  One thing struck me, though: The only source for the “Shinto priest in 2005” line on Wikipedia was a Sunday Times article that mentioned Koga only in passing. Even that article was hard to find online. What if it was misinformation? Perhaps Koga was no longer in Shikoku. Perhaps he had never gone there at all. Perhaps he was a priest someplace else.

  Finally I wrote an e-mail to my friend Alex, a college professor who studies Japanese literature and film. “WEIRD JAPAN QUESTION” was the subject line. I asked if he had any thoughts about how I could track down Mishima’s kaishakunin. I hit Send. And I wandered through the city, waiting for an answer. I listened to jazz in blue doorways. I pulled my coat a little tighter. I watched the setting sun float in pale glass.

  4

  In the Kokugikan there are stories of ghosts, stories of sounds with no sources, invisible hands that seize you from behind. Security guards are reluctant to enter a certain hallway at night. A reporter from the Asahi Shimbun recalls being shoved in the back by something large and round, “like a volleyball,” only to turn and find that “no one was there.” A clerk is pulled from behind while using a urinal. The clatter of sumo practice comes from an empty dressing room. Somewhere under the stadium, it is said, or at least somewhere near it, lies a mass grave containing victims of the great fire of 1657, which razed two-thirds of Tokyo. A hundred thousand died. The shogun built a temple to commemorate the dead; the temple became the site of sumo matches whose popularity led to the construction of the first national arena in 1909.

  Hakuho is frictionless, devastating. He wins his next eight matches. On day 13, he wrestles Kisenosato, the Japanese rikishi who has flubbed his chance to be promoted to yokozuna and is fighting only for pride. The match is furious, Hakuho thrusting his open hand repeatedly into Kisenosato’s neck; neither man can get a grip on the other’s mawashi, so they simply bash each other, tactically berserk. They release little violent nasal exhalations, which sound like a spray bottle’s trigger being squeezed. Finally, with his foot braced on the edge of the rice-bale circle, Kisenosato twists to throw Hakuho and fails. The yokozuna loses his balance and lurches forward but Kisenosato stumbles backward in the same movement. They fall together. Kisenosato’s foot touches out of bounds a fraction of a second before Hakuho’s hand; Hakuho wins. The yobidashi sweeps up the marks.

  On day 14, Hakuho wrestles Kotoshogiku, an ozeki from Fukuoka who specializes in bodying his opponents with his torso. Kotoshogiku seems to have grappled Hakuho to a standstill. The two men are bent at the hips, clinging to each other in the middle of the dohyo, counterpoised in a massive stalemate. Then Hakuho slaps his left hand against Kotoshogiku’s knee. Kotoshogiku crumples. The move is so unexpected—no one saw the opening except Hakuho, no one could have anticipated the reaction except Hakuho—that it flummoxes expert analysis. Hakuho shows no emotion. On the second-to-last day of the tournament he is 14–0 and one win away from another perfect championship.

  His body is strange, Hakuho’s. It’s smooth, almost unformed, neither muscled like a boxer’s nor bloated like many rikishi’s. Gagamaru, the Georgian wrestler who is currently the largest man in top-division sumo—440 pounds and a little over six feet tall—looks like a canyon seen from the air, all crevasses and folds. Hakuho, by contrast, is a single large stone, an owl quickly sketched by Miyazaki. His face is vague. Once in a while he will glance to one side with what looks like critical intelligence. Then he blurs again. The sources of his strength, whether physical or psychological, are almost totally hidden from view.

  Another Mongolian, the ozeki Kakuryu, has fought his way to a 13–1 record, making him the only rikishi with a chance to tie Hakuho and force a play-off. Kakuryu is the son of a university professor who, unlike Hakuho’s father, had no background in Mongolian wrestling. With the championship at stake, Hakuho is scheduled to face him on the tournament’s final day.

  * * *

  “Re: WEIRD JAPAN QUESTION” dinged into my inbox in the middle of the night. “Sounds like a cool piece,” Alex wrote. He had looked into the Koga question, and as far as he could tell, Shikoku was a red herring. Koga had never lived there. Nor was he a Shinto priest. He had indeed joined a religious group, but it was Seicho-no-Ie, “the House of Growth,” a spiritual movement founded in the 1930s with the aim of fusing Christianity with Buddhism and Shintoism. After prison, Koga became the head of its branch in Hokkaido, the snowy island in northern Japan where he had been born and raised. He married the daughter of the group’s leader and changed his name to reflect his adoption into her family. His new name was Hiroyasu Arechi. “Arechi” was an unusual Japanese name, formed from characters that meant “wild land” or “barren ground.” “If you want to get really literary,” Alex told me, “Arechi” was also a Japanese translation of the title of “The Waste Land.” But that was only a coincidence.

  Seicho-no-Ie struck a chord, so I looked it up in one of the Mishima biographies. There it was: Mishima’s grandmother had been a member. When Koga said at his trial that to live as a Japanese is to live the history of Japan, he was quoting one of the group’s teachings.

  Then Alex sent me a link that made me cover my mouth with my hand. The link led to a streaming video from the website of an apartment complex in the city of Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu. In the video, a sixty-five-year-old man named Hiroyasu Arechi answers questions about being a new resident of the complex. He mentions at the beginning that he is from Hokkaido. He wears a black V-neck sweater over a red-and-white gingham sport shirt. His features match those of the young Koga in a photograph I’d seen, in which he stood posed with his fellow Tatenokai conspirators, in their absurd fake-military uni
forms. It seemed that Koga/Arechi had retired in 2012 and moved from Hokkaido to the other end of Japan.

  The older man in the video has warm, appraising eyes. As he speaks, we see a bit of his apartment in the background. Flowers hanging on a light-flooded balcony. A cream-colored curtain, tied back. An inset picture on the website shows a console table lined with framed photographs of children and grandchildren. A couple holding hands in front of a landscape. Young people at a wedding. Someone in a parka, smiling, surrounded by snow.

  He does not mention decapitation, or suicide, or Mishima. He says that the bus is very convenient to the building. The sales representatives are compassionate and polite. The park nearby is a good place to take walks. There is a MaxValu store across the street, open twenty-four hours, a handy place to shop. There is a roof garden. He has a balcony. There are beautiful views at night.

  * * *

  At the Kabuki-za Theater, there were pictures on the curtains. Herons in a stream. Mount Fuji. A hummingbird breaking out of a tangle of cherry blossoms. The curtains kept changing, and each time they changed their reflected light tinted the auditorium a different shade. Tiny old women in surgical masks changed colors faintly with the curtains; packs of theater kids in leather jackets and fishnet tights turned from gold to green to violet. An old man (blue, then pink) slept in his seat with both hands balanced on his cane. The kabuki play I had come to see was about sumo, or involved sumo, I was not entirely sure. The English-language audio guide I had rented for seven hundred yen left certain details indistinct, probably by necessity. The play’s story was fantastically complex and was itself only a tiny peripheral fragment of a larger story, a legend about two brothers seeking revenge for the murder of their father. The plot spanned decades and flowed inexorably from an equally long backstory. The story when the curtain opened was simple, though. It was a story about love.

  A beautiful young woman was adored by two men. She herself loved the handsome youth with the impossibly sad white face, but the burly cross-eyed villain with the orange-red face was determined to win her hand. The villain (I learned from the voice in my ear) had never lost a sumo-wrestling match. So the youth with the sad white face and the villain with the orange-red face wrestled to decide whom the woman would marry. They danced this, spinning slowly and not quite touching their hands. At last the youth with the sad white face won the match. But the cross-eyed villain explained in an evil aside to the audience that he would yet betray the lovers. Spotting a pair of mandarin ducks in the lake, he threw his dagger and killed the male. A little wooden duck turned upside down, like a prop in a parking-lot carnival. The villain told the audience that if he could trick the youth into drinking the duck’s blood, the youth would go mad. And he did so.

  But the mandarin duck is a symbol of marriage, of fidelity, and now, in some magical way, the two young lovers began to swirl. They swirled and became the ducks. They became, by magic, the souls of the ducks. The guide did not have to explain this. They took to the air on bright wings. They had become transcendent, timeless. On the same ground where the sumo match was fought, the duck-souls attacked the villain. They danced this, darting and bending their backs. The ducks drove the cross-eyed villain to the ground, making him even more cross-eyed. Then the lovers’ costumes turned inside out, revealing brilliant plumage, plumage like an illustration in a children’s book, feathers as vivid as fire. Then they all froze in place and the curtain dropped.

  5

  Yukio Mishima’s novel Runaway Horses tells, in part, the story of a samurai rebellion. In 1868, the reign of the shoguns ended and power reverted back to the emperor of Japan, or (because nothing is ever as simple as the official story) to a group of elites acting in his name. One of the consequences of this event, which is called the Meiji Restoration, was that the large samurai class that had governed Japan for hundreds of years was stripped of its power and dissolved. Imperial edicts compelled members of the former warrior caste to stop styling their hair in topknots, to stop carrying swords.

  In 1876, a group of two hundred ex-samurai called the League of the Divine Wind launched a surprise nighttime attack on Kumamoto Castle. The league’s aim was to eradicate all traces of Westernization and return Japan to its feudal past. As the barracks burned, they drove back the conscript soldiers of the Imperial Army, wounding hundreds and killing the wounded. Fires broke out everywhere. “Even his garments, drenched in enemy blood, glowed crimson in the flames,” Mishima writes of one samurai. At last the imperial soldiers regrouped and reached their guns and ammunition. The league had chosen to fight with swords alone. The samurai were slaughtered. The leader of the attack, gravely wounded, called on a follower to cut off his head. Most of the survivors committed seppuku.

  Old buildings in Japan are seldom really old. A country that builds with wood instead of stone runs the constant risk of losing its monuments to fire. Ancient shrines are copies of ancient shrines. The Imperial Palace in Kyoto has been rebuilt eight times, and its current layout would be unfamiliar to any emperor who had lived there. The main keep of Kumamoto Castle, which burned to the ground during another samurai uprising, in 1877, was reconstructed from concrete in 1960.

  His building is there. Koga’s, I mean. In Kumamoto, just down the hill from the castle. I found him a few hundred yards from the scene of the battle in the book that made me think of him in the first place.

  To get to Kumamoto from Tokyo you ride the Shinkansen train south to Kyushu, changing in Osaka. The trip takes six hours. The train passes just below Mount Fuji at the start of the journey and stops near the end at Hiroshima, where the windows look out on the baseball stadium. As you hurtle south, you pass into a misty country. Blue hills lean in the mist. If it’s raining when you get out at Kumamoto Station, you can buy a clear plastic umbrella for 350 yen from a bucket in the station shop. If you have time and don’t mind getting wet, you can walk into town along the river, the Shirakawa, which lies in a wide, ugly basin.

  The castle is on a hill in the center of the city. There is a tiny parking lot at the base of the hill with a vending machine that sells hot coffee. The castle’s fortifications merge with the hillside just behind the parking lot, a tortoiseshell of large, dark stones too steep to climb. Behind the castle keep, green mountains disappear into the clouds.

  His building is down the hill. A five-minute walk, if that. Come around the slope and you will see the complex, a series of squat, identical gray blocks, each around eleven stories tall. Cars speed by on a busy street. A security guard in a gray jacket and white motorcycle helmet stands beside the gate, near some orange traffic cones.

  There is a bus stop very convenient to the building. There is a MaxValu just across the street.

  * * *

  So this is where I am. I am standing in the parking lot of the MaxValu. I’m thinking about endurance. The day is drizzly and cool. The cars that turn in to the lot are blunt, compact hatchbacks, little modern microvans in gold and turquoise and white. They are shaped like sumo wrestlers, I think, and I think, not for the first time, that sumo is essentially a sport of refusing to die, refusing to pass into history, refusing to accept the insolidity of the dream. It was a street entertainment, really, until the early twentieth century. Then the samurai tradition burned down and had to be rebuilt.

  And soon I will think about this while I watch Hakuho wrestle Kakuryu on the TV in my hotel room, on what is supposed to be the last match of the last day of the tournament. Hakuho will miss his chance to seize Kakuryu’s mawashi just as Kakuryu wins a two-handed grip on his. Kakuryu will leap forward with spasmodic sliding jumps, backing the yokozuna to the edge of the rice-bale circle, where Hakuho’s knees and then his ankles will flex frantically, until he goes toppling, the greatest sumotori in the world, off the edge of the clay, twisting onto his stomach as he falls.

  When he gets to his feet, Hakuho will offer no reaction. In the play-off match a few minutes later he will grapple Kakuryu in the middle of the ring and then drop his hips and lift
Kakuryu halfway off the sand and force him backward, and they will both fall out of the ring at the same moment, but Kakuryu’s foot will touch first, giving Hakuho the Emperor’s Cup and his twenty-eighth tournament championship. The yobidashi will sweep the marks away. Hakuho will smile slightly, not a smile that is meant to be read.

  But that will happen later. Now I am leaning on a railing in the parking lot of the MaxValu, thinking about endurance at four o’clock in the afternoon. I am looking across a busy street at the apartment complex of the man who beheaded Yukio Mishima and then lived a whole life afterward, lived another forty years. Had children and hung flowers on his balcony. I think: He is in there. I think: It is time to decide what to do.

  I get up and move toward the crosswalk. The wind is damp. It’s January, so I don’t see any butterflies. It is a cloudy day, so I do not see the moon.

  Lost Highway

  Life could be a dream.

  —The Chords, “Sh-Boom”

  From the air, I did the inevitable thing, the thing anyone who flies into Roswell, New Mexico, must do: I imagined I was looking down from a flying saucer. The outline of the town had surely changed, but the pale gray desert where it’s set would have looked more or less the same on July 4, 1947, the approximate date when, depending on whom you believe, either a military surveillance balloon listening for Soviet atomic activity or a spacecraft of extraplanetary origin went down in a violent storm, fireballing to the ground at a ranch thirty miles north of the city. Depending, again, on which source you trust, this mysterious silvery object either did or did not leave a five-hundred-foot scar in its wake, and the resulting twisted wreckage either did or did not contain a number of alien corpses, the number itself being intensely disputed, which might or might not have been taken to the nearby Roswell Army Air Field, flown to Washington, D.C., to be viewed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and/or transported, along with the remains of the craft and its potentially recoverable advanced extraplanetary technology, to the secret military installation known as Area 51, in Nevada, where they were autopsied, or not, and/or redeployed in military applications whose potential significance and near-certain danger to humanity absolutely boggle the mind, or else are total bunk.