Kakemono

The green tongue of the rice-fields thrusts itself deep into the blue sea, and its tip is lacquered red.

Haneda-no-Inari is a temple whose gateways have swallowed up its shrine, and on the low, flat, headland its many thousand torī in rows of scarlet dolmens walk inland from the sea. The green point lies a henna-stained finger in the lap of the ocean.

Beyond the red tip, a ridge of pearl-grey sky rests on the water, while overhead the clouds, like piled-up snowflakes, melt into the blue.

It is the end of September, and wide through the land the rustle of ripening rice-ears comes and goes. Haneda-no-Inari, the Rice-God, is calling the peasants to his shrine. And they come; broad-shouldered, bullet-headed men, in short, blue tunics and dark blue hose, with brown weather-beaten faces, seamed and lined; and always their hard hands, half shut, half open, as though still holding hoe or plough. Old most of them, and with that half-deaf look which years of fieldwork brings. Intelligences half shut too, shutting fast on the primary ideas of life, on the traditions of their fathers; for a thought, like the hoe or plough, is too precious a thing to be lightly laid aside; it is bequeathed from generation to generation as are the rice-fields beneath their feet.

Inari calls, and the peasants come. Not only for the sake of the Rice-God, though the rustle of the ripening rice-ears is a music in the land, but because the image of the fox has dwelt so long in the Rice-God’s temple that to the peasant Inari is both Fox-and Rice-God. And the fear of the Kitsuné is a power in Japan. The Kitsuné, who can take a woman’s shape and bewitch you; the Kitsuné, who can beguile a man that he follow to the fox’s very hole and stay there living on snails and worms. The Kitsuné, who, entering a man’s body under his finger-nails, will possess it, so that he howls like a fox, slowly changes into one, and dies. And so they come to the temple, up from the rice-fields, up under the scarlet tunnels of the torī, for the passing through each tunnel means a wish fulfilled.

The gateways indeed have swallowed up this shrine. There is no temple, only a low matted booth; at the back two white china images of the Fox-God, his tail curled high above his head, and a priest on the matting, as a shopman at his stall, selling charms, multitudes of miniature china foxes, words on rice-paper, and mounds of earth, a whole shopful of charms and amulets.

Opposite is a row of rabbit burrows, each roofed with a shelving stone; just a hole in the ground, but full of meaning to the peasant, for it is the home of the Kitsuné, and he crouches on the ground in front of it, his head between his knees, or thrust far into the big burrow in the eagerness of his prayer. And his face works; the priest behind him watches. Kitsuné is a reality to him, a force strong as Nature’s laws, but capricious; so he prays. Then half in fear, half in reverence, he thrusts one arm as far as it will go into the hole, and scraping softly brings back a handful of brown earth. His face lights up, and the priest behind leans forward.

Still on his knees the peasant wraps the magic earth in layers of clean rice-paper and puts it carefully away in the breast of his patched tunic. Then he gets up. He has his charm, a remedy against sickness and disaster, a charm for his rice-fields and himself. The priest behind reaches out his hand. He makes a keen shopkeeper, and his celestial wares are never stolen. The temple terms are “cash down, and prayers not taken in exchange.”

Through the long scarlet tunnels of the torī, back to the ripening rice-fields the peasants go. The green point lies a henna-stained finger in the lap of the ocean. Haneda-no-Inari, the temple of the superstitious, glows a living tip of red.

For its sins are as scarlet.