Not that the writing is shaky. Rather, it is rounded, the fingers, just washed, rest on the paper, except the index finger and the thumb, blood coursing through them from the manual labor in which he was just engaged, and the joints follow accordingly, and with them the lines, loops, connections, and transitions among the individual letters. The carpenter’s writing has something about it as handy as it is hearty, it is painted and built, and it breathes like the thing written; I decipher it as a document.
Thus I have likewise developed the habit of seeking out some physical work that involves the whole man — not a sport — before I get down to writing. Except that my raking, sawing, chopping, cropping, thinning is different from the carpenter’s painstaking fitting, joining, measuring, nailing, bracing, and more often than not I fail to achieve with my gardening that pulse of variety that would make my hand not only heavy but also flexible.
And as I look again at my distant friend’s letter, I picture him that same morning, on a vacant lot in Kyoto, onto which, overgrown as it is, he fought his way with the help of a bamboo knife, and where he has gathered and piled up stones to make a hidden fireplace, from the outside merely the empty base on which at one time, in the outer courtyard of a now vanished holy place, the demon of deterrence once stood. For secretly the architect has an entirely different project in mind than the aforementioned photo album: to leave behind in a Japanese no-man’s-land another such camouflaged structure.
Back there in the winter snow of Morioka he was already close to accomplishing it. After weeks of searching from south to north, he was standing, not all that far from the center of town, at the first break in the rows of houses that otherwise stretched unbroken across the long island country of Japan.
The sight of the windy strip, with nothing but a clump of bamboo poking tall and narrow out of a puddle frozen solid, down to the gravel at its bottom, without a sign that new building activity was in the offing, for the moment did him nothing but good. A very long time ago something must have been built in this opening, of which now only a certain artificial unevenness, its forms blurred, served as a reminder. The wire fence that separated it from the street had gaps where one could slip through; it had rusted out long ago, and no sign either indicated that the place prohibited entry or announced new construction. From the crown of the bamboo, whose shafts were bluish, came a seething and humming, and the listener wished the sound would resolve itself into an utterance that he could take away with him.
Instead a little plane broke through the clouds above him, and from it boomed that martial loudspeaker voice that had accompanied him, so to speak, all through Japan, in which a nationalist party was demanding the return of the islands lost to Russia during the Second World War. And the following morning, when he came to his project site very early, still in bitter-cold darkness, equipped with a tinsnips and the many pockets of his special jacket stuffed with the necessary tools and materials for erecting the planned enclosure — a space in which the rustling of the bamboo in the midst of the emptiness could resonate — he found it illuminated by spotlights, the bamboo hauled away, the first holes bulldozed, and the area swarming with workers in blue overalls and yellow helmets, like all over the world, and even the Keep Out sign had English subtitles. And so he watched the workmen, dark like Mongolians, until the sun rose (late and very slowly above Morioka, already very far to the north): the first thing they set up was a tall wooden partition, a sort of screen from the street. And although they appeared to overlook him, in time it seemed after all as though they were following, as with a foreman, his eyes’ silent directives, which, because he knew what the next step had to be, were always one step ahead.
The medium-sized high-rise buildings around the center of Morioka looked hardly any different from those in Udine, for example, and the many sparsely wooded hills reminded him of those of Friuli, from between which, just as here, the snowcapped mountains in the north gleamed. What was so different from home in this remoteness, except perhaps that instead of the accustomed clanging of bells a gong sounded? And the carpenter felt compelled to get away from the cities, in the opposite direction from most architects.
At the railroad station in Morioka, while he was waiting for a train to take him farther north, where the couple of falling snowflakes collided in the air, for the first time on his journey one of the natives approached him, a young boy, and requested permission in English to ask him a few questions, but then could not stammer out even the first question.
To get out into the Japanese countryside, into a village, into nature, then became more tedious than tracking down the last hiding place of vagueness in the cities. But since he was fired up with enthusiasm for such a destination, it had to exist, as he told himself. And since he had unusual patience—“refresh your heart, be patient” was his motto — even the routes he took gave him pleasure.
Yet as a rule he had to plot them out himself, especially where the plains thickly dotted with settlements and cultivated fields met the mountains. Here he suddenly encountered virgin forest so dense that he could move forward only with the help of his special folding hatchet. How had the itinerant poets of earlier centuries made their way through here? Or had it been easier to cross the Japanese countryside on foot in those days? But hadn’t almost all of them died young, and in the course of their wandering?
He then recognized that the quintessential rural and village settings were very like the Japanese urban no-man’s-lands: they, too, often existed only for a single moment, though in different form. On yet another morning, now much later in the year, having arrived, as it were, by the back way at a mountain temple, and then been for hours its only visitor, squatting in the dim outhouse there, hidden in a remote spot behind plum and cherry trees, for a moment he had again experienced the sense of security he had had using the privy on his parents’ solitary farm near Aurisina, reachable only through the barn or by way of a long, roofed wooden gallery; whereupon he wrote to me that it was time for my long-promised “Essay on Convenience Stations.”
It was conspicuous that he usually stumbled upon such spots near temples, specifically in their far-branching, always narrow, tapered hinterland, carved out of virgin forests, here a small vegetable garden, there just such a cemetery, connected by an old wagon trail; and the couple of Buddhist monks, always busy, appeared there in the role of farmers.
And again one morning he saw in such an area a cluster of people who did not merely appear to be country folk, men and women, but were the spit and image of those from home, with stooped backs, prolapsed knees, gout-ridden, and this group of village pilgrims broke out in a unanimous cry of astonishment at the sight of the temple bell, at which each one straightened up from his stoop, stretched, stiffened, snapped upright, and one of the farmhand types almost tipped over backward.
That he almost always saw such no-man’s-lands or villages only from the exterior was something he found perfectly all right. Remarkable architect that he was, he almost never felt drawn to interiors. He even avoided these wherever he could.
The many different voices speaking inside him did not interfere with one another. Each one — that of the wood inspector, the wind expert, the acoustical engineer, the vagabond and dowser — could have its say, at length, was distinct from that of its predecessor, which it took account of, continued, supplemented, grounded. That would yield an entire book (and someday he means to write it himself). And in between, and often for a very long time, the voices also kept silent, and he was, again as since childhood, just someone or other, feeling invisible.