Dale Furutani - Death at the Crossroads

He was making good time. Perhaps he wouldn’t be too late after all.

In his mind he started practicing a speech. By nature he was a taciturn man, but his part-time profession of selling charcoal in the small village of Suzaka forced him to communicate with his customers. That was sometimes the hardest part of having his small charcoal business, because words did not come easily to Jiro’s mind or tongue. When he wasn’t selling charcoal, he was farming, and he much preferred the life of the soil to the life of commerce.

With farming he could go for days without making a sound, save for the occasional grunt as he dug his hoe into an especially stubborn piece of earth. The tender green shoots only required a gentle touch, sunlight, and water to respond with their bounty, and oily words were not necessary for their growth. The birds and rabbits were startled by raucous human speech, and Jiro’s habitual silence allowed him to glide in and out of their world with little or no interruption. When a man talked, he couldn’t listen to the subtle rustle of tall grass bending in the quickening breeze or the frothing music of a nearby stream. With so much to listen to, Jiro had no problems being silent. It was communicating with humans that always challenged him.

Because he was such a quiet man, Jiro always marveled that he had managed to marry Yuko. In fact, however, his marriage had been arranged with almost no words spoken, at least on Jiro’s part.

Jiro’s mother died less than a year after his father, when Jiro was still a teenager, so the elder women of the village took it into their hands to arrange a wife for the young man. In an agrarian village, the men and women worked as a unit, and it was simply taken for granted that Jiro would need a wife, even if he was taking no action to get one. In a cultured family, the marriage would have been arranged through intermediaries, complete with subtle hints, a “chance” meeting, and formal matchmakers, but in the rough life of the village, it was handled more directly, while the elder women sat around weaving straw sandals.

A bundle of straw was taken and twisted into a skein. Then the skein was plaited with others, forming a rough base for a sandal. Then cord or strips of rag were used to form ties for the sandal. Despite its rough appearance, the resulting footwear was surprisingly durable and comfortable. This was done as a community project by the older women of the village. It had a utilitarian product as its output in the form of the sandals, but a more important function was the chance for an informal council among the women who wielded considerable influence in the village.

“Who shall we get for Jiro?” one of the elder women of the village asked bluntly, grabbing a fist full of straw.

“There aren’t too many choices,” said another, repeating what they all knew anyway.

“What about the daughter of the barrel maker?” another mused, throwing out a trial candidate.

“She is a tart,” Elder Grandma, the oldest matriarch in the village, said bluntly. “Jiro will have a hard enough time without his mother there. Any wife who doesn’t have a strong mother-in-law can be trouble, and that girl will be a handful even with a strong woman to guide her.”

“How about my daughter?” Yuko’s mother said quietly. As a suggestion for a match, it was explosive. The other women were flabbergasted. Gnarled hands stopped the plaiting of straw into sandals. Faces creased and weathered brown from years of working in the sun took on expressions of surprise and even shock.

Jiro was not handsome, and his family’s plot of land was far from the biggest, so it was astounding that Yuko’s mother had let it be known that her daughter was available. Yuko was one of the prettiest girls in the small village, although at age fifteen she was a bit past the average age when girls got married. The natural assumption was that Yuko’s mother was waiting for an exceptional match for her daughter, perhaps even hoping that the pretty girl would catch the eye of a lord or samurai so she could become a rich man’s concubine.

The other village women considered Yuko far too clever and far too pretty for Jiro, and said so. But Yuko’s mother had seen kindness and a good heart and a hard worker in the young man, and she knew it would be a match where Yuko would not be abused and, most likely, would be in charge. She wanted that, because of all of her eight children, Yuko was the favorite.

Jiro was presented with the proposition of Yuko as a wife by a small delegation of village women showing up at his hut one morning before he went to his rice paddy to work. The bewildered teen, still smarting from the death of his parents, simply accepted the collective wisdom of the elder women of the village and nodded his agreement. Within a few days, there was a small wedding feast, where the people of the village were fed sake, tofu , and some fish. Yuko served the feast and made sure each of the guests went home with a bit of food wrapped in a broad leaf. After cleaning up, Yuko moved into Jiro’s hut, and they were tentatively considered married, pending the birth of their first child.

Although smart, Yuko wasn’t talkative herself, and she and Jiro made an excellent match. Through the shared communion of their silence, they went through the stages of awkward adjustment, awakening sexual enthusiasm, then love and friendship. The elder women of the village soon looked upon the bond developed by the couple with proprietary pride, a symbol of their matchmaking abilities, forgetting their initial skepticism over the union of the pretty girl and the awkward farmer.

Starting the charcoal-selling business as a sideline to farming was Yuko’s idea. Yuko was always a thinker, and prior to Jiro’s going into business, the people of Suzaka village would have to make the long journey into the mountains to seek out charcoal sellers themselves. It was a constant source of complaint among the women, and in this complaint Yuko saw opportunity. She decided that by charging a small amount, a neat profit could be made without the others in the village feeling that she and Jiro had become like greedy merchants.

At first, Jiro thought he was incapable of operating this small sideline. He was strong enough and hardy enough to go into the mountains to get the charcoal, but selling it was something else. Charcoal selling, like all village selling, involved a whole symphony of speech. First was the shouting: walking through the village with the basket and singing out, “Charcoal! Fine charcoal!” Jiro actually didn’t mind this part because it wasn’t directed to anyone in particular. But next he was expected to make real conversation. When a woman heard his call and emerged from a hut with a basket or pot for the charcoal, she expected entertainment, not just goods.

A housewife expected a polite ritual of greetings and small talk from any village vendor. It was often the high point of her day, and a purchase usually involved a chance to catch up with news and gossip. In this, Jiro felt hopeless and awkward, even though his customers were lifelong neighbors. With Yuko’s patient support and tutoring in the fine art of gossip, Jiro was able to make a modest success of their small business, and Jiro’s periodic trips into the mountains became a natural adjunct to the rhythm of life, like the spring rains and the planting and the harvest and the winter snows.

Yuko died in childbirth, trying to give life to their first son, who also died. By village custom, Yuko wasn’t really considered Jiro’s wife until she had borne him a child, but this didn’t make his grief any less. Uncharacteristically, Jiro rebelled against all efforts of the village women to get him a second wife. He would not bend like the bamboo to the collective wisdom of the village. He could never articulate the reason for rebuffing the matchmaking efforts of the elder women, even to himself, but in his heart he loved and cherished the memory of Yuko and couldn’t conceive of replacing her.