Obaa-san, for her part, proclaimed without so much as a reassuring smile that the wen didn’t appear to be life-threatening, and showed no further concern. The neighbors were somewhat more sympathetic, saying that such a large wen must be quite a nuisance and how had he acquired it and wasn’t it painful? But Ojii-san just laughed and shook his head. Far from considering the wen a nuisance, he really has come to think of it as a darling grandchild, a companion to comfort him in his solitude, and when he washes his face each morning he takes special care to purify the wen with cool, fresh water. On days like today, when his spirits are high and he’s drinking alone in the mountains, this wen is an indispensable sidekick. He’s petting it fondly as he sits atop the boulder with his legs crossed wide.
“Ha! What’s there to be afraid of? I’ll have my say! You’re the ones who need to drink and loosen up a little. There’s such a thing as being too serious, you know. ‘The Saint of Awa,’ eh? Well, forgive me, mister holy man!”
He mutters these tirades to his wen, roundly disparaging one person or another, and always finishes by clearing his throat loudly: Ahem!
It grew cloudy.
The wind started to blow.
Rain came pouring down.
Squalls like this are rare in springtime. But we must assume that weather is volatile on mountains the size of Tsurugi. White mists rise from the mountain slope as rain beats down, and pheasants and other birds dart for cover with the swiftness of arrows. Ojii-san just smiles to himself.
“Can’t hurt to cool off my wen in a little shower,” he says, and remains sitting on the rock, watching the rain come down. But the longer he watches, the harder it rains, and the less it looks like letting up.
“Hmm. Now it’s gone beyond cool,” he concedes. Standing up, he sneezes mightily, then shoulders the bundle of wood he’s gathered and crawls into the brush. It’s already crowded in there with birds and beasts taking shelter.
“Excuse me! Coming through! Sorry!” He greets the monkeys and rabbits and pheasants and things with cheerful courtesy and passes deeper into the forest, where he finally wriggles inside the hollow trunk of an enormous old cherry tree.
“Well, well, this is a very nice room!” he says once inside, then calls to the rabbits and the others, “Come on in, everyone! There aren’t any high and mighty Obaa-sans or Saints in here! Come in, come in!” He babbles excitedly for a while, but soon he’s softly snoring. Drinkers tend to say inane and obnoxious things when they’re drunk, but most of them are in fact harmless, innocent souls like this.
Waiting for the rain to stop,
Ojii-san fell fast asleep.
The skies cleared, and the sun went down.
Now a bright moon lit up the cloudless sky.
It’s a waning quarter moon, the first one of spring. It floats in a sky the color of water, almost a pale green, and slivers of moonbeam litter the forest floor like pine needles. Ojii-san is still sound asleep. Only when a cloud of bats flies out of the hollow tree with a thunderous flapping of wings does he wake with a start, alarmed to find that it’s nighttime.
“Uh-oh. This isn’t good.” The somber face of his old woman and the austere countenance of the Saint rise before his eyes. “Never yelled at me yet,” he reminds himself. “But coming home this late, things could get unpleasant. Say! Sake’s not gone, is it?” He shakes the gourd and takes heart when he hears a faint plish-plash. “There you are!” He drains the last drops and begins to feel tipsily sentimental. “Well, I see the moon’s out,” he says, and continues to mumble fatuous remarks to himself as he crawls out from the hollow tree. “Spring evening: one moment—”
And then...
Whose voices were those,
laughing and shouting?
Oh, look! What a wondrous sight!
Was it a dream?
In a grassy clearing in the forest, an otherworldly scene is unfolding. Just look...
Now, I don’t really know what these ogres, these Oni, are like, never having met any. From childhood on, I’ve seen more pictures of Oni than I care to remember, but I have yet to be granted the privilege of coming face to face with one. Complicating matters is the fact that there would appear to be many varieties of Oni. We use the word to describe hateful people, murderers, and even vampires, and one might therefore feel safe in assuming that these beings possess, in general, fairly despicable personality traits. But then one spies in the “New Books” column of the newspaper a headline reading, “The Latest Masterpiece from the Ogre-like Genius of So-and-So-sensei,” and one is perplexed. One wonders if the article is an attempt to alert the public to So-and-So-sensei’s wicked influence or evil machinations. Worse yet, they have gone so far as to label him the “Oni of the Literary World.” One would think that the great sensei himself would react angrily to being called such nasty and insulting names, but apparently that isn’t the case. One even hears rumors to the effect that he secretly encourages their use, which only leaves one—at least one as ignorant as I—even more perplexed. I simply can’t bring myself to conceive of these Oni creatures—with their tiger-skin loincloths, scarlet faces, and crude iron clubs—as gods of art.
But perhaps this is only my lack of experience talking; perhaps Oni come in a wider variety than I’m aware of. If only I had an Encyclopedia Nipponica at hand, I could easily assume the guise of a respectable scholar, admired by women of all ages (as most academicians tend to be), and with a look of unfathomable profundity on my face hold forth at great length and in minute detail on the subject of Oni, but, unfortunately, I’m crouching in a bomb shelter, and the only volume I have at my disposal is this children’s book on my lap. I am obliged to base my argument entirely on the illustrations.
Just look. In a fairly wide, grassy clearing deep in the forest, twelve or fifteen gigantic, red-faced, heteromorphous beings sit in a circle, dressed in those unmistakable tiger-skin loincloths, drinking together in the moonlight.
Ojii-san is momentarily paralyzed with fear. But drinkers, though cowardly and quite useless when not drinking, are apt to display when drunk a courage that few non-drinkers can summon. Right now, Ojii-san is feeling his rice wine. We have already witnessed the fearless and heroic manner in which he rails against his stern missus and his morally irreproachable son when they aren’t around. Nor does he disgrace himself now, after crawling out from the tree on all fours and being stopped in his tracks by the eldritch spectacle before him. He observes the dubious drinking party carefully for some moments. And then something like joy bubbles up in his heart.
“Looks like they’re really enjoying that wine,” he murmurs.
It seems that drinkers derive a certain pleasure even from watching others get drunk. Perhaps, then, most lovers of drink are not what we today would call egoists but rather guardians of the sort of generous spirit that inspires all of us to toast, at times, our neighbor’s happiness. We do this because we want to drink, yes, but if our neighbor gets drunk along with us, our pleasure is double. Ojii-san knows what he’s seeing. He knows intuitively that those hulking red figures before him, neither human nor beast, are in fact of the fearsome tribe known as Oni. The tiger-skin loincloths alone are enough to dispel any doubts he might have. But these ogres are getting happily sloshed. Ojii-san too is sloshed, and he can’t help but feel a certain sense of fellowship. Still on all fours, he watches the uncanny proceedings unfold in the light of
the moon.