Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan

by Percival Lowell

In the mean time, if they showed themselves skeptical about our future, they proved most sympathetic over our past. Our description of the Friday footprints especially brought out much fellow-feeling. They knew the spot well, they said, and it was very bad. In fact it was called the Oni ga Jo, or place of many devils, for its fearfulness. It would be better, they added, after the mountain opening on the tenth of June.

"Mountain opening!" said I to Yejiro; "what is that? Is it anything like the 'river opening'?" For the Japanese words seemed to imply not a physical, but a formal unlocking of the hills, like the annual religious rite upon the Sumidagawa in Tokyo. Such, it appeared, it was. For the tenth of June, he said, was the date of the mountain-climbing festival. Yearly on that day all the sacred peaks are thrown open to a pious public for ascent. A procession of pilgrims, headed by a flautist and a bellman, wend their way to the summit, and there encamp. For three days the ceremony lasts, after which the mountains are objects of pilgrimage till the twenty-eighth day of August. For the rest of the year the summits are held to be shut, the gods being then in conclave, to disturb whom were the height of impiety. A pleasing coincidence of duty and pleasure, that the scaling of the peaks should be enjoined to pilgrims at the times of easiest ascent! Preparatory to the procession all the paths of approach are repaired. It was this repairing to which the watchmen referred and which concerned our secular selves.

Our difficulties began to be explained. We were very close to committing sacrilege. We had had, it is true, no designs on the peaks, but were we wholly guiltless in attempting so much as the passes in this the close season? Apparently not. At all events, we were a month ahead of time in our visit, which in itself was of questionable etiquette.

At this point the messenger sent to find the hunter returned without his man. Evidently the hunter was a person who meant to stand well with his gods, or else he was himself a myth.

Distraught in mind and restless in body, I got up and went out into the great snow waste. The sunset afterglow was just fading into the moonshine. The effect upon the pure white sheet before me was indescribably beautiful. The warm tint of the last of day, as it waned, dissolved imperceptibly into the cold lustre of the night as if some alchemist were subtly changing the substance while he kept the form. For a new spirit was slowly possessing itself of the very shapes that had held the old, and the snow looked very silent, very cold, very ghostly, glistening in its silver sheen.

The sky was bitterly clear, inhumanly cold. To call it frosty were to humanize it. Its expanse stretched far more frozen than the frozen earth. Indeed, the night sky is always awful. For the most part, we forget it for the kindlier prospect of the cradling trees, and the whispers of the wind, and the perfumes of the fields, the sights and sounds that even in slumber stir with life; and the nearer thrust away the real horror of the far. But the awe speaks with insistence when the foreground itself is dead.

Shivering, I returned to the fire and human companionship. The conversation again rolled upon precipices, which it appeared were more numerous before than behind, and casualties among the woodcutters not unknown in consequence. There was one place, they said, where, if you slipped, you went down a ri (two miles and a half). It was here a woodcutter had been lost three days before. The ri must have been a flight of fancy, since it far exceeded the height of the pass above the sea. But a handsome discount from the statement left an unpleasant balance to contemplate.

This death had frightened one of the watchmen badly, as it may well have done. The facts were these. Separated from the hot springs of Riuzanjita by two passes lay a valley, uninhabited except for two bands of woodcutters, who had built themselves a couple of huts, one on either side the stream, in which they lived the year round. It was these huts that went by the name of Kurobe. During the winter they were entirely cut off from the outside world. As soon as practicable in the spring, a part of each band was accustomed to come out over the passes, descend to Ashikura, and return with provisions and money.

Now this year, before the men in the valley had thought it time to attempt the passes, a solitary woodcutter came up to the hot springs from below, and, in spite of warning from the watchmen, started alone for Kurobe. On the afternoon of the third day after his departure, the regular band turned up at Riuzanjita, having left Kurobe, it seemed, that morning. They passed the night at the hot springs hut, and on being questioned by the watchmen about the man of three days before, they said they had heard of no such person. It turned out, to the horror of both parties, that he had never reached Kurobe. It was only the night before we arrived that the woodcutters had been there, and the affair was still terribly fresh in the watchman's thoughts; in fact, it was the identical band that had built us our bridge. These men were thoroughly equipped for snow-climbing and had come over safely; and yet, as it was, the head man of the other band at Kurobe had been afraid to cross with them, and had, instead, gone all the way round by the river and the sea, a very long and rough journey. Fatal accidents, the watchmen said, were of yearly occurrence on the passes.

And all this was only the way to Kurobe. Beyond it lay the Harinoki toge. That pass no one had yet crossed this year. And at intervals during the talk the watchman repeated excitedly, as a sort of refrain, "It is impossible to go on,—it is impossible to go on."