大和

Episode One — The Awakening Hills

第一段　春暁の章

At the edge of the eastern province, where the morning mist gathers in the folds of low hills, the journey begins. The cherry trees have come into their fullness this season, and their petals fall as if released from some invisible bell. To the traveler's eye, the land unrolls slowly — a single long breath drawn across the rice terraces.

It is said that in this place the kami of the soil first taught the people to bend the earth into terraces, that they might grow rice in steps as the slope rises. The hills here are gentle, ancient, weathered into rounded forms by ten thousand seasons of rain.

— recorded by an unnamed court historian, fifth month

Three days west, the road climbs to where a single peak breaks the horizon — sharp as a brushstroke struck once and never reconsidered. From its crown, a thin column of ash rises into the still air. The villagers in the foothills speak of this mountain with the deference owed to a deity who has not yet decided whether to be merciful.

Fine ash drifts down upon the road like a quiet snow, settling in the creases of every garment, every leaf, every overturned stone. The traveler walks now through a landscape made monochrome — the world is rendered in the ink-wash gradients of an old master's hand.

— from the chronicle, sixth month

The journey now passes through a country of layered mountains, range upon range, each fainter than the one before it. A late rain begins — thin, vertical, persistent. The water draws a delicate hatching across the air; the farthest ridges dissolve into the silver of the sky and become indistinguishable from it.

It is in this passage that the traveler learns the first lesson of the long road: that distance is not measured in ri or in days, but in the gradual erasure of detail. What was sharp becomes soft. What was named becomes anonymous. The mountains step back, one by one, into the white.

— from the chronicle, ninth month

Westward still, the road descends to a coastline broken into countless small inlets and headlands of dark stone. The maples that cling to the cliffs have turned the colour of embers; their fallen leaves drift on the tidewater and on the wind. The sea is the colour of a tarnished bronze mirror, and gulls cry from somewhere unseen.

Here, an old fisherman sits mending nets by a torii gate that the salt has bleached white. He bows once to the traveler and returns to his work without a word. There is, in his silence, a kind of ceremony — the same ceremony that attends the changing of the leaves, the turning of the sea, the slow folding of one season into the next.

— from the chronicle, tenth month

At the journey's end, beyond the last pass, there stands a single mountain of perfect form — a cone so simply made that one suspects it was drawn by a single brushstroke at the dawn of the world. Its summit holds the year's first snow. The night arrives early in winter; an indigo sky deepens behind the white peak, and the first stars appear above its shoulder.

The traveler, having come at last to this place, sets down the staff and stands a long while in silence. The scroll has been unrolled. The journey is complete. What remains is only the mountain, the quiet snow, and the slow turning of the night.

了 ・ end of scroll