"I was supposed to attend a meeting of the River Conservancy group at the sake manufacturer's place. With the Fireflies busy running the Farm, the Village Association group and I have taken over these duties. But with all this snow, it might be smarter to skip the meeting, don't you think?"
They passed by the newly built overpass at the confluence of the Kame and Maki rivers and then drove upriver along the prefectural road, already covered in four inches of snow. As they drove, Ogi reintroduced Mr. Matsuo, whom he remembered meeting at the summer conference, to Mrs. Tsugane.
Mr. Matsuo went back to talking about the snow.
"Driving through the snow like this makes me think of Morio's music.
He was a very special and pure person, his sister too. Even now the church plays his music all day long to mark events in the daily schedule. Every time I go over to the Hollow to see Ikuo about something, it always amazes me-"
"He composed pieces about the snow?" the always level-headed Mrs.
Tsugane interrupted.
"I think he must have, since he composed lots of short pieces," Mr. Matsuo said kindly to her, following the deferential way Ogi treated his older wife.
"But there's something throughout all of Morio's music that conveys a kind of snowy feeling. There's a saying by the famous Buddhist priest Dogen that one should always be in harmony with the melody of the snow. I think it means that snow is silent, and one should play in concert with that.
"Morio was mentally challenged, but he made up for it with a keen sense of sound," Mr. Matsuo continued. "When he composed his music, I imagine he put things in the real world and things he felt and thought on an equal footing. That's how I feel whenever I hear his music and look at the falling snow. Even if we know we're supposed to be in harmony with the melody of the snow, clever musicians never take it that far, though for Morio that was the most natural thing in the world."
"Fred wants to know which text that quote is from," Mrs. Tsugane said, after she had explained in English to Fred that they'd been talking about the monk Dogen.
"I don't know if there's a translation of it, but it's from the Dogen Osho Koroku. "
"He wants to know if this is different from the Eihei Koroku."
"It's the same."
"He says that maybe snow is often mentioned in Dogen's sermons because of how cold it was in Kyoto and Fukui, where he lived."
"Fred, I underestimated you," Mr. Matsuo said. "I trained at the Eihei Zen temple, but I've never really read the entire text. Learned it instead by ear-in Dogen's teachings there's the term a sixth ear. Do you say that in English? Six ears?"
Fred Parks laughed and didn't pursue the subject any further. In a fine mood, Mr. Matsuo went on about the snow.
"When's it's snowing this hard, the local people know just how much it's going to accumulate. They used to be quite nervous about it, knowing how many days the delivery trucks wouldn't be able to get through. The produce grocer along the river used to put chains on his truck and dash off to buy supplies and be buried in snow on the way back. Sometimes the fire depart- ment would have to be called out.
"Now, though, it's different-see that car coming from the opposite direction? Since the church is doing such a great job of running the Farm, there's no need to get concerned about where the vegetables or eggs are com- ing from. They're even raising char in the spring behind the chapel. So people feel much more secure. Now people along the river and those in the Outskirts as well don't mind if the road's closed.
"That gives you an idea of how much the church has influenced life around here in the past year. Simply put, we don't have to worry about get- ting a steady supply of inexpensive quality items. I'm sure this is obvious to you, coming from the city, but regional cultural differences show up in the distribution of goods; in backwoods places things are shoddy and expensive and you have to wait forever to get them. That's been reversed here. In the bazaar held here every other week you'll find not just folks from the Old Town but even people from Matsuyama coming here to shop instead of the other way around."
Fred was quite interested in all this when Mrs. Tsugane translated the details for him.
"Fred wants to know, after such a tragedy, with children present to wit- ness it, whether the church didn't become alienated from the local people."
Ogi conveyed the question, letting Mrs. Tsugane translate Mr. Matsuo's reply.
"That shows how wise the people in this region can be," Mr. Matsuo said. "Having the Farm is advantageous to them. There was going to be a mass suicide in the chapel, but in the end nothing happened, so the local people aren't going to harp on that forever. The east slope of the Hollow is a center for butterbur, and when it's in season hordes of people come from the river basin and the Outskirts. The people in these parts like to give names to places based on some event that occurred there, and they've given a new name to the mountain stream where they pick these butterbur. They call it Mountain Stream Where Twenty-five Refined Ladies Shat, and they say it's a particu- larly tasty crop of butterbur this year. Ha ha ha!"
Nobody laughed along with him, so the head priest changed to a more prudent topic. "As time passes, just as the achievements of He Who Destroys and Oshikome are now distant events for us, the summer conference will fade into the past and-who knows?-perhaps the only thing to remain will be that place name."
"Much like the Buddhist concept of the evanescence of life," Mrs. Tsugane suggested.
"The power of the land counts for a lot, they say," Mr. Matsuo went on. "The cypress island's been cleaned up, and that's where Patron and Ms. Tachibana and her brother are buried. The memorial was done in relief by the architect who built the chapel and has one of Morio's scores carved on it. The tombstone is surrounded by the lake and faces the chapel, but now it's all covered in snow. In harmony with the melody of the snow, you might say."
By then they'd left the district road, passed over the main bridge, and started down the cross-Shikoku-highway bypass, looking down on houses along the river that, in the snow, had already turned off their lights.
"Are Professor Kizu's remains buried on the island as well?" Mrs.
Tsugane asked. This time Ogi fielded the question.
"He wasn't a member of the church. And Ikuo in particular insisted on wanting Professor Kizu's soul to be free from the realm of God."
"But isn't Ikuo the one who took over as leader of the church after Patron?"
"He's leading the church, having separated the managerial aspect of running it from the spiritual," Mr. Matsuo said in a serious tone. "Ikuo him- self seems to be free from the voice of God. Gii's been selected to take over the spiritual side of the church eventually, and the Quiet Women and the Technicians are teaching him. Gii will be inheriting the Farm from Satchan, so it'll be convenient for the Farm to merge with the church, but I don't think that the managerial side-Ikuo and Dancer, in other words-did this purely out of self-interest.
"Gii has some religious element in him that connects him to Patron, don't you think? And half his genes are from the founder of the Church of the Flaming Green Tree, let's not forget. It's a little tricky to guess how Satchan feels about all this, though Gii's own choice is pretty clear. This spring he didn't go on to high school. The Technicians designed a curriculum they say can take him through high school and college in six years. And Ikuo is apparently drilling him pretty hard in English."
"Fred wants to know what you mean by saying that Ikuo is free of God's voice," Mrs. Tsugane said.