A poet in his youth, for decades Anton A. Tongue has been learning how to write English by translating tourist information, technical materials—anything—from Japanese. More recently, he translated Japan’s first* epic poem into English. The task of writing a childhood memoir is currently teaching him what he needs to know.
Left with an ageing body after an indolent life, he’s desperate to avoid physical decline. Hoping to use it before he loses it, he spends many a frenetic hour walking or cycling in and around Kyoto. Right now, he has a droopy white moustache. On the street, if you see such a man in a hurry, it may be him.
*author’s claim
Fire Rite
A windless, sunny Yamashina hillside in February: two green mounds spew writhing greys and browns, twin jets scaling up and up into winter blue. Then, high above the vents, orange flames slash the smoke. During a long pause in the ceremony narration, I escaped the microphone booth and was watching from a window.
We were on site three hours before the start at dawn. Over coffee, the TV-crew boss urged me to try the prayer sticks. Hand moving from a pocket, he mimed placing a coin on the table:
“I’d give you the money, but it’s better if you pay.”
Two hours to go: roaming outside, I bought a five-pack, the cheapest option. Following instructions, using a loaned fudé-pen, I brushed Haruto’s full name, birthdate and, copying from a lighted signboard, squirmed the kanji for “exam success.” I splotched another two sticks to heal Megumi’s dad’s lungs, her sister’s shoulder.
And the pyre for the dead… Hmm. My detested grandparents were dead.
Ernest… Henry… Payne—but 1914?
Add three years for her?
Checking which booth was which, I handed over three sticks for the living, two for the dead.
During another break, I watched a hive of holy men blessing bundled sticks before tossing them into log-fenced bonfires, fiercely flaming now the cypress shrouds had burned away.
Ten days later, my grandfather drifted into mind, lingered. Odd. Since the rift, I’d always stamped on any ember of recollection.
“Poor sod! You were about my age, nearly done with your sixth child. Your eldest daughter sends two more kids.”
He was a person, just like me.
The grudge dissolved. Unclenching began.
On Christmas Eve, I mailed my mother a card, our first contact in forty years.
What the judges said:
“A chance purchase of prayer sticks leads to a process of healing in a riven family.”
“A wonderfully unique perspective from the viewpoint of a TV crew member, and yet intensely personal and fitting with the purifying element of fire to heal old familial grudges.”
“I liked this because it shows the various things that run through the mind of a foreigner who is participating in a serious Japanese ritual in Kyoto, and how it affects the foreign practitioner even after the ritual is over.”
The Kyoto City Mayoral Prize winner receives ¥20,000 in cash, a copy of Future of Kyoto (Writers in Kyoto Anthology 6); a one-year complimentary WiK membership, a complimentary space in an online-access Book Proposal Masterclass by WiK member Beth Kempton, and inclusion in a future WiK Anthology.
See the full list of this year’s competition winners.
See this year’s competition notice with prize details.