Saka Punch
Just ask Mark. I have a vendetta against soccer balls. A hatred that runs so deep it almost resulted in being impaled through the eyeball with an arrow.Please. Sit down, pick up a glass, and listen to my adventures in the North.Back in the states when a friend of mine mistakenly called the city I visited this weekend “Narnia,” I laughed in her face. Now I think the screw up was predestined.
I wandered through a land twelve shades of green, here and there a breath of red. Lightly mossed trees pulled their roots from the earth as if they were trying to escape. Fearless deer ate from the hands of the people. A bent woman pushed a sooty cart with a heart of crackling wood and a steal pipe that whistled steam. She cradled small red bundles from its black mouth and handed them to the children in the trees. I borrowed a friend’s camera to take the yam seller’s picture but she held up a burnt finger and yelled “Abunai!” I think she believed the camera would capture her soul.
In Japan, all roads end in temples and this forest was no exception. I stepped beneath the curved rafters and took out a single yen coin, embossed with leaves and a sun. I watched the others throw in their coins and listened to their hollow ascent into darkness. The sound is meant to call the god’s attention. I threw my coin, clapped twice and heard the metal strike wood. The echo expanded into timelessness. A giant smoothed the landscape with a steady hand while a man with a wild face stepped out of the clouds and began to dance. His screams raised the vines and greens. Yet another came and flailed her arms, gestures I could not understand until they manifested themselves in the ever shuddering landscape. The earth unfolded between the three and I saw its secrets.
When I came to there was a man on a wooden horse huffing and shooting tar-dipped arrows into a black hide. Some may question the validity of this kind of modern day practice. But I can guarantee, if the machines ever turn on us, equestrian archers will be the sole survivors.
Such is the nature of distant trips that we were rushed along, allowed only fleeting glimpses of the forest and grazing deer, who I now knew ate from the back of a green giant, through stone lanterns that separated the wild from our eager eyes. In the passing blur I saw the open door of an armory lined with feathered lances and reptilian armor.
We entered a museum of an ancient emperor where they kept fraying string, shell bottomed spoons, and rusty pots behind polished glass; a museum filled with ancient men’s throwaways. The walls were lined with scrolls, the communications of the long dead emperor to other royalty. Hordes of people busied themselves with the ancient letters.
I tore myself from the crowd and that’s when I saw it.
The Rainbow Dragon sat in a case all its own in the middle of a pillar of light. It was the color of lost cities, armless with a twisted spine, shriveled eyes, and peeled back lips. The mummified ermine was discovered amongst the king’s treasures, and was believed to bring rains during inspections. If the other items around me were boring before, they were blown away like castles of dust when I beheld this creature.
We left, but that blind but knowing grin still haunts my memory.
The next stop was described to me as the world’s largest storage space. I tried to keep my face from doing something insulting, but I believe I failed miserably.
“A storage space,” I asked.
“Yes!” they said, their enthusiasm for all things storage written on their faces.
Then the obvious, “Is there anything in the storage space?”
“Oh,” they said, “gold and paintings and the world’s largest Buddha.”
“Ah,” I said, and taught them a new word: “treasury.”
As I approached the building with golden horns and demon corners, I had the unsettling feeling that it not only became bigger in perspective, but was organically growing by itself. But fears subsided when I came in and saw the face of the Buddha. Sleepy eyed, middle finger slightly extended, and a face of utter simplicity and grace, he was built for plants and animals, as well as mankind. I wondered if the statue itself had some sort of unnatural power, or if in reverence to the statue’s meaning the Naran people had left the beautiful forest that ringed the wooden structure untouched.
On the way out the fluorescent light of the souvenir shop bleached out the dusky temple light.
I said, in what I hoped was a sarcastic tone, that I needed to buy a Hello Kitty sitting on the Buddha’s head.
One girl smiled and said, “I already got one!”
She dangled the pink, plastic charm in front of me.
I laid my hand on her shoulder.
“Of course you did.”
-C
) Your Reply...