Silence Once Begun

Int. Note

When I got home, I opened the letter that Jito Joo had given me. I read it straight through twice, set it down, got up to leave the house, thought better of it, returned to my chair and read it again.

I present it to you now in its entirety.

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is. I believe in trying to understand such love through other loves, other loves that have existed before. Many people have made the records of these loves. These records can be found. They can be read. Some are songs. Some are just photographs. Most are stories. I have always sought after love, and longed for it. I have looked for all the kinds that may be. I am writing to you now to talk about Oda Sotatsu, who is a person I loved, and who loved me. Although I know there are others who will say things about Oda Sotatsu, who may say things about me, who may know about this situation, although they are few, perhaps there are some who can speak about these things, yet what I know is what I felt and what I saw. I am not writing this for any comparison or for any other sort of understanding, but as a record of love, for use by those who love and who hope to love. I am not nimble and I cannot hide things well. I will write what I felt and how. You may see how I do.

I met Oda Sotatsu with another man, a man I was seeing, Kakuzo. It was a strange time, not a good time. I knew Oda Sotatsu hardly at all, although we grew up in the same area. I had not met him until just before he was put into prison. We had exchanged some words. The man I knew, Sotatsu, existed in his situation, as a person with no freedom. That is why I became his freedom. Others who were his family came and went and made noise. They were visiting or they were prevented. For me there were no obstacles. I do not know why that was. It seems to me that there should have been, that it was never so easy for a person to do what I did, to see a person as often, or for as many times. Why it is, as I say, I don’t know. But we were lucky in that. I was Oda Sotatsu’s constant visitor, and whoever the guards were, wherever they were, I was admitted, sometimes as his sister, sometimes as a girl he knew. I was always admitted. I was never turned away, not once. There are things in life that happen like this — I can tell you that because I was there.

I was with him that night, of course. It was I who brought the confession to the police. I had a lovely green envelope. The paper was so crisp! Crisp green paper folded and secured with a string. Inside it, Kakuzo had put the confession. We were there in the night, awake, Kakuzo and I. We had parted with Sotatsu at the bar, and now we were at home. Neither of us could sleep. He was sitting there in the dark holding the confession in its envelope. There was no clock. We just sat, watching the window. Sometime after dawn, he handed it to me. He said, Joo, take it now. I put on my coat, went to the door, put on my shoes, and went down the stairs. Outside, it was a very bright day. I was so full of it — I felt like the hinge of some long thing. I was turning a door in the distance. A door was turning upon me, and it was all effortless. All that weight, but I could support it. I took the confession to the station. I knocked on the door. The officer was asleep at his desk. He woke up and came over rubbing his eyes. Here is a delivery, I said. Here you go.

They didn’t know what it was, so who I was, I guess, was meaningless. I went away and next I knew Sotatsu had been taken. He was in jail. He was the Narito Disappearer. Suddenly. I sat all day in the house and when it was nighttime, Kakuzo and I went and found something to eat. Will it work? Will it work? Kakuzo kept saying. There was a radio on in the restaurant. That’s how we heard the news.

++

It seems that people think of simple ways to say things or know them, but I was always taking the long way around. My mother always teased me. You go the long way every time. I do. I go the long way. When Sotatsu was in jail one day I went to see him. Something had changed for me in the room with Kakuzo and I felt cold all over, empty as a washed bottle. But in the jail I felt young. I had no idea what I was. I asked myself that. I said, Joo, what are you, as I went along the corridor and I truly had no idea.

When I came to his cell, he was sitting facing the wall. Sotatsu, I said, it is your Joo. From then on we were in an old tale. He looked at me and it was like I had lit him on fire, like he was an effigy I had set on fire at a festival. He knew what everything meant. I knew what everything meant. I said, I am coming here every day. We have a new life.

If some say that a man and woman must live together or that they must see each other, even that they must live in the same time in order to love, well, they are mistaken. A great lover has a life that prepares him for his love. She grooms herself for years without hope of any kind, yet stands by the crevice of the world. He sleeps inside of his own heart. She dries her hair with her tears and washes her skin with names and names and names. Then one day, he, she, hears the name of the beloved and it yet means nothing. She might see the beloved and it means nothing. But a wheel, far away, spins on thin spokes, and that name, that sight, grows solid as stone. Then wherever he is, he says, I know the name of my beloved, and it is … or I know the face of my beloved, and she is — there! And he returns to the place where she saw him, and she empties herself out — leaves herself like open water, beneath, past, in the distance, surrounding, able to be touched with the smallest gesture. And that is how the great loves begin. I can tell you because I have been a great love. I have had a great love. I was there.

++

I wore a different face, of course, when I saw Kakuzo next. He did not know what happened. He knew nothing at all. But, he told me. You keep seeing him. Keep going. I will keep going, I told him. Hold Sotatsu to his confession. Help him be brave. He is brave enough, I said. This is his myth. It is, said Kakuzo. It is his myth. I want to say how it was that I lived with Kakuzo, that I slept in his bed and woke with him, that I knew him every day and that I was not his, that I was with Sotatsu, that I was Sotatsu’s, that I was in between the visiting of Sotatsu, the seeing of Sotatsu. I was in a life that occurred but once each day for ten minutes, for five minutes, for an hour, whatever we were given.

The girl Joo who went with Kakuzo where Kakuzo wanted to go, who lay with him, who sat in his lap, she was less than nothing. I set no store by her. She was a shell, a means of waiting and nothing more. Each day as I set out for the jail, I would put my life on like a garment and the blood would run out through my arms, my legs, my torso. I would breathe in and out, living, and go out, living, through the streets to my Sotatsu.

What was it for him? Some say I do not know. How could I know, they say. I never knew him. I visited. We spoke little. They say these things.

In fact, I know what it was for him. I will tell you it simply: he felt he was falling. He felt he fell through a succession of wells, of holes, of chasms, and that I was there at windows, and we would be together a moment as he fell by. Then I would rush to the next window, down and down, and he would fall past, and I would see him again.

I am not a shouter. I did not shout to him, nor he to me. We were like old people of some town who write letters that a boy carries from one house to another. We were as quiet as that.

Of silence, I can say only what I heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave — and so speech isn’t itself, but its effect, and silence is the same. If there were a silent kingdom and but one could speak — he would be the king of an ageless beauty. But of course, here where we are, here there is no end to speaking and the time comes when speaking is less than saying nothing. But still we struggle on.

I imagined once that there were horses for everyone — that it might be we could all climb on horseback and make our way somewhere not waiting for any of the things deemed necessary. I would cry at the thought — I, a little girl, would cry to think of it, but it made me so happy I can’t tell you. I believe there was an illustration I had seen, in some book, of a sea of horses, and it made me feel just that — there were so many! There were enough for me to have one too, and for us all to leave.

Oh, the things I said to Sotatsu!

I said to him, I said, Sotatsu, last night, I dreamt of a train that comes once a year like a ship to some far-flung colony. I said, on the ship are all the goods that the colony needs. It carries everything, this ship, and all the colonists must do is last until the ship comes again and all will be well. Out of the west, the train, this ship, it comes along the track. It dwarfs everything. This is my dream. The gigantic train is more real than the world that surrounds it. Sotatsu, I bring nothing to you, but it is what you need what I bring and I will bring it again and again and you will wait and be strong and fare well. We will not wait, you and I, we won’t wait for another life. This life, this is our life. We will have no other, nor need any other. Here all is taken care of. We have been set aside, set apart, like legs removed from a table. Our sympathies remain with each other entirely and when we lie touching, it is as though we are the whole table, as though the missing table moves back and forth between us, there where we touch, we two table legs.

I was always saying such things, and he would smile. He would turn his mouth like a person does when tying a knot or opening a letter. That was the smile that he developed in order to smile at me. I was so fond of it — let me tell you! For there were not all good times. He had lost all his strength when he was caught and it took time for him to regain it. Then he was moved and moved again. He was put on trial. He was removed from trial. He was put in a new place, and then another place, another new place.

In the first place, we soon made a routine. I would wear a coat so it could not be guessed, what I was wearing underneath. I would say, what color am I wearing? Am I wearing any color, any particular color? And he would say one color or another color, he would say a color. Then, I would off with the coat and we would see what color it was. Being wrong or right about something meaningless is very strong. He would never guess correctly, though. I think he did it on purpose, but I don’t know. Like many things, this thing I know not at all with any certainty.

I would say to him, confess to me, to your Joo. Confess that you are in love with me. Say it.

Then he would say, my Joo, Joo of the coat and colors, Joo of all visits. He would say such things, meaning that he loved me.

When we were near to each other, he would become very stiff and still. He would stare at me. I wanted to pretend that nothing mattered, for it didn’t. Although it might have been pretending, if two pretend then it is no longer that. It becomes actual. I asked him to die. When he could say that he did not confess, that he did not agree with what he had said. When he could say the whole business right out, about Kakuzo, about the confession, and that he knew nothing … he realized, I am saying, he realized, because his brother came there and said it, he realized he could say that, and it would free him. But that same night, I was there with him, and he told me, and I said,

The line of trees that is at the horizon — they are known to you. You have not been to them, you have only seen them from far away, always for the first time. One looks out a window into the distance, or comes down a circling drive, turns a corner. There in the distance, the tree line, all at once. It is dark here and there. It moves within itself, within its own length. It is merely a matter of some sort of promise. One expects that the forest there is nothing like anything is, or has been. I will go there, one thinks, and enter there, between those two trees.

Sotatsu, I said. I am those two trees. We are entering that forest now, and the way out has nothing to do with anyone. You should not bother with anyone. They are just rasping stones that pull at you. Each person chooses his life from all the roles in all the theaters. We are a prisoner and his love. For I am sometimes one and sometimes the other. You are one and then the other. We are diving in the thin and wild air, as if the spring has just begun. We are diving but we are composing the water beneath us with our dreams, and what I see gives me hope. I will return to you, my dear, and I will return to you and return to you and return to you. You will be mine and no one else’s, and I will be the same. I will turn my face away, and look at you when I am elsewhere. I will look only at you.

Then he saw that I was right, that I was the only one for him, the only one turned entirely to him, the only one looking only at him. I earned him. He knew that with that moment, there was a possession as total as any to be gained; not even the earth, consuming the bodies of our children, can have something so completely — for only I would give myself again, again, again. Our deaths we give and they are gone. But this, we give and receive, give and receive, give and receive.

++

I went home to Kakuzo and I said, that brother told him to give up. He said, give up. I said, he told him to. He was going to. He said, he better not. For whom, I said. He’d better not, he said. You’d better tell him. I told him, I said. That’s good. He grabbed my face and he said, Joo, that’s good. You remind him.

Kakuzo was a foolish person. He was a fool, a person who is foolish as a job, as a profession. But not a fool in a court or a fool with a crowd. He was a solitary fool, his own fool. He was a fool because he did not know what made a life, and he could not see that I had made one right in front of him. He could not see the difference, couldn’t see: his Joo was gone and had been replaced by a gray woman with a raincoat who nodded and sat and cooked and blinked and blinked. He could not see that it must mean this: I was living elsewhere, like the boy who stares at an old photograph and leaves his body with a sigh.

Oh, my dear! I want so much to be again in that life. Speaking of it like this, writing it down: I am like a yard of shadows when the sun is even with the lowest clouds. I am multiplied, but only with my bags packed, only where I stand, at the station, my hat pulled low. Have you seen an old woman like me? I have been old a very long time.

++

How can I explain it, put it in a line for you? I can say there were a series of visits. I can number them and recount them one by one. I do not remember any of them. That’s true. Also, I remember every one without exception. It is most correct this way — I can say a thing about that time and know if it is true or not true. Then I write it down. I leave the false things on their own.

In the first part of my life with Sotatsu, he lived in a cell in a jail where the sun came south through the window on an avenue all its own where it was forced to stoop and stoop again until when it arrived at its little house it was hardly the sun at all, just a shabby old woman. Yet we were always looking for her, this sun, when she would come, always eager to have her meager presents, her thin delineations. I would say, oh, Sotatsu, oh my Sotatsu, today you are like a long-legged cat of the first kind. He would smile and laugh, meaning, Joo, I have nothing to do with such a cat as you describe.

In the first part of my life with Sotatsu, he lived in a basket on the back of a wolf that was running westward. I was a flea in the wolf’s coat, and had all the privileges of my grand station. I could visit the prisoner. I could speak to the prisoner. I made the wolf aware of his important profession. I said to the wolf one day, actually, I said, you are carrying a most important prisoner, you know, away beyond the frontier. He said, flea of my coat, it is your work to tell me such things, and mine not to listen.

In the first part of my life, I told Sotatsu everything about myself. I told him I was the youngest of fourteen children (a lie). I told him I had a dress that I wore as a child with a fourteen-foot train and the other children would carry it, so becoming I was. I told him I had a course in fishing where seven would stand in a stream using fourteen hands to weave a rope and the fish would leap up and into the canvas bags we wore on our waists. Every lie was a lie of fourteen. I wanted him to know about me. I said what was true also. I said, I have seen nothing that was worthy of me until you were lying in this cell. I said, I am not my surroundings or my fate and you are not who anyone says. I said, I will say things and you can stop me, but no one else can. I will be a speaker and I will speak on all subjects like a tinny radio rustling in a shop window. I will make up all the world’s smallest objects and doings. I will confuse them, muddle them like a jar, and produce them at odd times. This will be the tiniest edge, the tiniest corner of our love: so much you have yet to expect from me.

In the first part of my life, I knelt by the bars of a cell where my love lay and I called as a woman calls to pigeons when she is old and cannot see them. I made shooing noises with my mouth, for I was sure someone said once, someone said such noises would make birds come to you.

I draped myself on the bars like a blanket. I cried for him. I smiled and laughed. I was a playhouse of a hundred plays where there are no actors to do any but the one play, that first play, made when the theater, unbuilt, is first considered. If we should have a theater, this is the play we would do, and all we would need is one actor and a cloth for her to place before her face. I placed so many cloths, and taught my Sotatsu all manner of things that no one knew, not me or anyone. These were true things in our life, but empty in the common air.

In the first part of my life, I was stopped on the steps of the jail by a woman, my mother, who said she had heard about where I was going, heard about who I was seeing, heard strange things that she would learn the truth of. This woman, my mother, when she stopped me on the steps of the jail, I felt I was in a history of classical Greece, and she was my deceiver. Good mother, I told her. A person visits a friend and is unchanged.

In the first part of my life, I was asked to appear in an old film by an early director. This was filmed many years ago, he told me. You are just right for the part. There will be many scenes that are nighttime scenes, but we film those during the day, for we need all the light that can be mustered. We need as much light as possible to see, because we must be clear. We can afford for nothing to be hidden.

The first part of my life came to an end when Sotatsu was moved to the jail where they would starve him.

++

In the second part of my life, as you know, dear friend, my Sotatsu was starved almost absolutely to death by the guards who would give him no food. They said to him, you must ask us for your food. He told me, they say I must ask them for the food. I said, you? You? Ask them for food? He agreed that he would never do so. I am not in charge of my life that way, he said. He said all this by smiling. I said all this by winking. I stood at the cage in my coat and held the bars with both hands. I could see he was very hungry, and thinner.

In the second part of my life, my Sotatsu was thin almost to breaking. He had become like the edge of a hand. I wanted to tell him to eat, but I did not. Instead, I began also not to eat. I said, I will also not eat, but I was not as strong as he. When the dizziness started, and it became hard for me to rise, I knew: I would fail him. Even if I was with him in not-eating, I would be failing in my visits. I could no longer visit him, with such strength as would be remaining. So, I took to eating again, just enough, and visiting.

They would drag him off to a trial. The trial had begun and they wanted him to say things, so they were starving him and speaking to him, examining him, telling him things, asking for his signature. His hands were trembling even when they lay still. His eyes were open — they had stopped closing, I suppose this happens when one doesn’t eat. Finally, it was enough. They brought him food and he began to eat. Even once they were bringing it, though, he could not eat it. His throat had forgotten its purpose. The food just wouldn’t go in. So, it had to be retaught and this took a few days.

In the second part of my life, my love was rescued from starvation by a series of bowls of food. I did not ever see him eat. Such things were not allowed. But, I saw him standing one day. I arrived in the morning, quite early, and he was standing when he could not stand for weeks.

My dear, I called, my standing dear. How well you stand.

He looked at me and explained it, that he had begun to eat once more. That he had broken them. The trial was over, too. I knew that, and I was glad of it. I had the newspapers in stacks. I read them over and over. I had found the place where he would be on the map, and looked up the route.

My dear, I told him that last time, I will join you in the new place.

That was the end of the second part of my life.

++

In the third part of my life, I traveled to a prison that was built underground in order to avoid the moon. Jito Joo was the name I would give, and they would allow me to climb through a narrow aperture. They would show me into a hallway and down a hallway. They would show me to a roped-off area, where little rooms knelt like parishioners, each one bending its head. When the guards pulled a lever, the rooms would open, as many as they liked, or as few. I was allowed to go in, suddenly. I who had never been allowed in, I was suddenly allowed in. Sotatsu was sitting on a pallet. He was staring at his hands. He did not look at me. This was the first time I had seen him, I think, in my entire life, such was my feeling. I said, I am looking at him and he is here. He looked up, hearing my voice, and I sat there by him, my arm brushing against his side and shoulder.

Where will we go?

In the third part of my life, I practically lived in the cell with Sotatsu. Properly speaking, I, of course, was far away, mostly. I was mostly on the bus, going to the prison, on the bus leaving the prison, in the house with Kakuzo, sitting, eating, walking on the streets of our village, muttering greetings. I was mostly carrying on that way. But still, as I say, I practically lived in the cell. Every chance I got, I snuck away there. I was like a child with a hiding place. Where is Joo? Where has Joo gone? Joo may be found in the death cell of a prison with her beloved.

I believed then that the third part of my life was my whole life. I had forgotten about the two previous parts. I did not expect a fourth. I believed we would continue that way. Everyone on death row had been there always. They were very old. They expected to die of natural causes and be given neat Buddhist ceremonies attended by whatever gentle family members remained. In this we encouraged them, the guards encouraged them, the guards encouraged us. We were all sternly encouraged in the belief: the world would last forever.

Sotatsu, I would say, some speak of the great cities of the world where anything can be bought. These are the sorts of things I would say, and he would laugh. We would sit, laughing, like old campaigners. (I have known a few, and we are not like old campaigners, he would say by smiling, and I would say, you have known no old campaigners but we are old campaigners of a certainty.)

The third part of my life was where I was told the meaning of my life. One knows the weight of a thing when it is strong enough to bear its own meaning, to hear its own truth told to it, and yet to remain.

Sotatsu, I said, I am your Joo. I will come here forever and visit you. All I need is a small profession, just enough money for the bus and for food. I need no children, I need no objects. I need no books, no music. I am a great traveler like Marco Polo, who visits an interior land. I travel deep into the heart of a place between walls, built between the walls of our common house. I am an ambassador, an embassy sent to a single king. You are that king, my king, my Sotatsu.

Then, he would hold up his hand as if to say, such wild notions do very well, but we must be careful.

Or — let us throw even such caution as this to the winds. Let us be like all the cavalry of ten armies.

These expressions of his, they made me wild! I would leap to my feet and sit again. The guard would come running, thinking he was wanted for some small thing, a glass of water or a query.

No, I would say, it’s only that Sotatsu made a joke.

Then Sotatsu would look at his feet, which, predictably, were doing the things that feet do.

In the third part of my life, I came to a far place. I decided that I would move into a room near the prison. I decided that I had enough put away, that I could do that. I was planning it. I did not tell Sotatsu. I came the night I decided it, and I was allowed in very late. I have told you there were no obstacles and it was always true. No obstacles. I appeared and was admitted. I was taken to his cell, and the guard shut the door. He pulled a shade. I didn’t know the shade was there, but he pulled it, and the cell was closed off. It could no longer be seen from without.

Hello, my Sotatsu, I said, and I went to him. It was the last of all my visits, and the longest. When I left the sun was halfway up in the sky. The bus had come and gone. There were no more buses that day, but one came. An empty road stretching in both directions. Then, the friendly nose of a bus drifting along. The bus driver said, you are lucky, young lady. There are no buses in this direction, not until tomorrow. I just happen to have gotten lost. Then he took me back in the direction of Sakai.

I felt when I left that day that I would return immediately. I would wait for the sun to set and then I would set out. I would be back again and pressing the buzzer, being admitted through the steel doors. I would be called upon to empty my bags, to leave my things and go past a thousand tiny windows with their attendant eyes. I had grown so used to these things that they calmed me. I looked forward to them as a series of gestures. I felt surely that nothing could take them from me. That any of it could or would end. It seems silly, but I did not believe it. Neither I nor my Sotatsu: we did not believe it.

This is a letter about Sotatsu who was my love; this is a letter about my one true life, which consisted of three parts. I am now in the fourth part of my life, and it has been false. It has been a false portion. In my estimation, they give you the false portion last.