What is a poor guy to do
when suddenly the kami has decided to send a downpour and
there is no other shelter around, but the endless, monotonous series of stores
of the sandou? The poor guy just walks into the closest one and
starts looking at the merchandise. A sandou is the street
leading up to a shrine or a temple, usually lined with shops selling souvenirs,
traditional finger-foods and sweets, and every other kind of chachkes any
pilgrim should buy. Luck had it that the poor guy caught in the rain walked
into a store specializing in items made of semi-precious stones. After looking
around once and twice, the rain not stopping, what was the poor guy trapped in
the least interesting of all stores to do, but to keep looking and feign
interest?
At some point, the rain
still pouring down, halakhic guilt kicks in: is he giving the shopkeeper the impression
to be somewhat interested in the merchandise? Is the shopkeeper thinking our
poor guy trapped by the rain is going to buy something? Don’t inquire about any
item! Should he pay some sort of “rent” for using the store as a shelter? If
so, how much should it be? In order to shut off the voice in his head our poor
guy decides that buying a chachke would probably be the right thing to do and,
with the complicity of the rain, he starts looking at prices.
Holy cow! Getting soaked in
the rain wouldn’t be a bad idea, after all...
He finally notices in a
corner a display of replicas of magatama, stone beads found in archaeological
digs around this city, Izumo. How expensive can they be, he wonders and starts
looking at tags.
Now let me take a detour
and I shall tell you something that happened to me this past June during a trip
to another town, Joetsu. I had seen the magatama at the store of the
archaeological museum when I had visited Izumo two years before. On the bullet
train to Joetsu that day the thought of Izumo and the magatama surfaced in my
mind together with the regret for not buying any. At the time I did not know
what they were, they looked like stone fangs and I really did not care for
them. On the train that morning I thought there would not be another chance to
buy one since I had no plan to go back to Izumo and I had not seen magatama
anywhere else in my trips. As they say here shouganai, there isn’t
anything to do about it at this point.
I met with Ishihara-San, we
went about our business and after lunch he said: “Wait for me. I want to give
you something to remember this day.” He went to his apartment in the company’s
dormitories and came back holding a flat wooden box. During our lunch he had
told me that the company had transferred him from his hometown to Joetsu and
now he lived there alone, that there wasn’t anything to do in the area, and he
didn’t have close acquaintances. Now he added that in his free time he had
taken up working the stones he collects at the beach, and wished to give me one
of the objects he had made. So he lifted the lid and showed me half a dozen
magatama he himself had made.
My jaw dropped, he thanked
me.
Probably he thought my
reaction, caused by the magatama materialized in front of me, was a sign of
admiration for his work. I took them in my hands one by one, looking for the
perfect one, the one where color would match elegance and smoothness of form.
They were all flawlessly round. Not a crack, not a bump.
How long it takes you to
make one?
10-12 hours. Wow! And he’s
giving me 10-12 hours of his life...
I chose my magatama and he
attached a braided string to it so that I could hang it from my cell phone and
after a few more pleasantries and a couple of bows I was on my way back. On the
train home I kept thinking about Ishihara-San, the magatama, lonely
Ishihara-San looking for the right stones on the beach, and the strange thing
had just happened.
Last week, 7 months later,
I was in Izumo again, trapped in a store, and as I looked at the price tags my
jaw dropped. Not a chance to leave this place unscathed. There must be one
magatama that won’t cost me an arm and a leg. The tags were written on both
sides: on the one the price, and on the other a description of the healing
virtues or of the supposed magical power of that specific stone. So in part
because I had time, in part because I wanted to practice reading Japanese
handwriting, in part because I did not want to buy a stone that would get me
married or pregnant, I read all the tags one by one, until the stone giving
“the courage of making the right decision, Yen 4270” appeared. Holding the
magatama I was determined to pay and leave the store despite the rain. Wow! The
first right decision already and it isn’t even mine yet!
At the counter the
shopkeeper informed me that every item in the store is hand-chiseled and then
proceeded to pelt me with questions about myself, the reason of my trip, if I
like Japan and Izumo, why am I there, what do I do in Japan, in short the usual
stuff. Then he asked “Do you know what a magatama is?” Really?! You ask me if I
know what a magatama is?! Time to show off! I launched into an explanation of magatama
that surprised him and myself. I was not even aware I knew some of the words I
used. I guess some vocabulary has stuck in my memory.
And you know what happened?
The anonymous shopkeeper gave me the magatama as a present, causing my jaw to
drop once again. He put the magatama around my neck and after that I rushed in
the rain to the train station.
As for Ishihara-San’s
magatama, I never attached it to my iPhone because, you see, I have this funny
habit of leaving it on top of piles of books in bookstores, drop it in fitting
rooms or on cab seats, and I would not forgive myself if one day that phone
call that tells me they have found the cell phone would not arrive and I would
have to part from Ishihara-San’s generous gift of 10-12 hours of his life.
