So we’re responding to my short story, ‘The Source’.
I wrote it after cycling around Lake Kawaguchiko in Japan and discovering a statue by Seibo Kitamura. It sits at the edge of the lake. Overlooking it, I imagined.
It goes like this:
THE SOURCE
A man, aged twenty-one, lived on the south-eastern curve of Lake Kawaguchiko.
He lived in the shadow of the gentle slope of the mountain and its trees, who were stark in early autumn, except for the flame red maple leaf.
This man thought himself the saddest person alive.
While his friends met every lunchtime to slurp onsen-hot houtou-men noodles with the joy of carefree boys, Sonshitsu lay under his duvet in his bedroom.
And while his father, ageing fast, fished along the east side of the lake with his ageing friends, Sonshitsu added verses to a poem about losing so much so young.
West of the lake, in a town called Nagahama, where roaring gullies rush down from distant Fuji, there lived a woman called Nozomu. Just a few months older than Sonshitsu, Nozomu enjoyed taking ‘tourist swan boats’, that’s what she enjoyed calling them, onto the lake.
‘The people get such joy,’ she would say. ‘I want to share their joy with them.’
Sometimes she would paddle alone, sometimes with friends, one time she invited a couple to join her on the water. They said yes and that they loved her rosy cheeks.
If you saw Nozomu—her wide eyes and wider smile—you wouldn’t think she had been through such hurt.
‘Excuse me,’ said Sonshitsu, one evening below the bridge that crosses the lake. ‘Do you have a cigarette?’ Sonshitsu was doing a circuit after sunset. It was his ritual.
‘Your eyes,’ replied Nozomu. ‘Who gave them to you?’
Sonshitsu walked on, away from Nozomu.
‘I mean they are like stars.’
‘No cigarettes?’
‘Your eyes are wonderful. Come back.’
Sonshitsu stopped and sighed before turning.
‘My eyes reflect the sadness of losing my mother and my brother. They were the stars. Not my eyes.’
‘We learn through loss,’ said Nozomu.
‘I have learned there is no joy in life,’ replied the man.
Nozomu picked up a stone and gave it to Sonshitsu.
‘Take this. If you see a stone, you are mistaken, my friend. You are holding a part of the universe in your hands, like the universe holds you. This stone seems hard, but stroke it and it is smooth. Through your perspective, soft even.’
Sonshitsu held the stone in both hands and felt its smoothness. He thought it as smooth as his brother’s hand when he would help him to cross roads in Japan’s busy cities.
‘It’s hard inside. I am hard inside. You are right. I am like the stone.’
Nozomu smiled. ‘You are a smart man except when it comes to your feelings.’
With that, Sonshitsu threw the stone as far as he could into the lake, shattering its surface. ‘Today the stone drowns. What does that tell you? Goodbye.’
‘You will find hope, my friend. Or hope will find you.’
Two years later, Sonshitsu was again walking around the lake in the early evening. It was springtime now and the hills were in light blossom.
He reached the underneath of the bridge at dusk and was surprised to see a group of people pointing out to the water. Friends of his father, his mother, his brother—all now gone.
They all knew and loved Sonshitsu. His mind was just too busy to notice.
‘What is it?’ asked Sonshitsu, joining the group.
A fisherman held out his rod. ‘A miracle.’
‘It is what the great sculptor showed us,’ shouted another.
‘It is his “Source”. The renewal of life.’
‘It is the essence of the universe.’
Sonshitsu knew the story depicted in Kitamura’s sculpture. The old man, aged one-hundred-and-one, visited Sonshitsu’s lake a year before he died. The two women who dance around Kitamura’s vase statue are Negativity and Positivity. The sculptor believed that when these powers meet, they reveal the answer.
Sonshitsu looked out to the lake to see a small island where he had thrown the stone given to him by Nozomu two years earlier. He had never seen this island before. Nor, it appeared, had anybody else who lived beside the lake.
Standing in a gentle breeze on the Nagahama side of the island stood a crane. Its body was as clean and white as the crown of Mount Fuji.
My tale tells the story behind the statue, and leans into the fantastical style of Japanese fiction I enjoy so much.
But what about the main characters? Sonshitsu and his loss, Nozomu and her hope.
Write to one or to the other in haiku form, 5-7-5, just you to them.
Happy writing
Rob