A Little Death

I was fasting that day when we went out into the farmlandsaround Nagasaki, looking up referrals. After hours of walking,we found ourselves on a ridge looking down on rice fields and a tiny villagework of life being carried on by Breughelesque distant figuresset as if to the foreign swelling of unripened musicunder a mute old sun, all things basking in the glowthat fasting sometimes casts over the world.We turned back there, never found that referral. When we got homeI felt wobbly but no rest for here was the mission assistantwhisking me off to visit Kurume and Sasebo. By Kurume I was feeling run overand by Sasebo barely conscious, there deliveredto the naval base hospital—diagnosis: pneumonia.Spent the next days in hourly ritual coughing: feet on the bedhands on the floor, till I'd emptied my lungs of crap.When I got out I was alone, for everyone had goneup to the taikai: the big mission conference in Fukuoka.I walked to the train station reveling in the lightness that accompanies recoverybut which this time went deeper. Weightless, companionless,no mouth to my ear, no loyal soul-absorbing voice. but ratherevery unkept pore seemed to breathe for the first time in Japan—seemed to draw in the spirit of that garbled unmanageable worldof people calmly heading to places they never knew they'd never get toa world of silent traffic, shops and houses wonderful, ordinary and strange—and to breathe me out into that world, so that I seemed to benot in Japan but inside Japan. Rules, too, had dissolved. Why, I could have . . . but the thought never really occurred, only the quiet wishto have this walk last as long as possible, and indeed it hasn't ended yet.Which train did I take to Fukuoka—the slow train or the express?At Fukuoka I was welcomed as one returning from a little deathfor so it was, the first of several over the years— a taste of what's to come?When the big one hits I imagine coming through the pass out to a forkthe left road leading down into the plain where stands the Holy Cityfamily and friends, symphonies ascending to the skiesthe other a narrow trail leading deep into the mountainssilent, empty of a living soul. Maybe I'll take that one.