The Carp-Faced Boy and Other Tales

The Spider Sweeper-1

THE SPIDER SWEEPER

Kumo-harai balanced a fat-bellied spider on the end of an old, twiggy broom. He was hurrying to reach the persimmon tree before the creature leapt to the ground and scrambled away. Morning spiders were always taken to the same tree and carefully placed in its craggy branches. Everyone knew that they were good luck and should never be harmed. Kumo-harai could boast—if he were the type of man to do such a thing—that in his three years of working at the temple he had never killed or injured a single morning spider.

His kindheartedness, though, embraced even the night spiders, which were all thieves and should be crushed beneath a tightly woven sandal. These creatures he feared. Placing his palms together as he saw the monks do every day, he bowed, recited some pieces of the Heart Sutra he’d managed to memorize, and left the night spiders entirely alone. It had never occurred to the young man that they could possibly be the same exact creature.

It was early and he was depositing a green and yellow harlot spider on a low branch the first time he heard the voice behind his ear.

“Kumo-harai.”

It was his lover who had been gone for six days. Excitement swelled in his chest and he spun around. But there was no one there, only a wet, early morning mist settling into the leafy ground and beyond that the old wooden temple, its paper doors pushed open. He could see the monks filing quietly into the main hall for meditation. A bronze bell rang in low waves across the graveyard; and Kumo-harai’s heart broke for the second time.

“Kumo-harai,” the voice whispered again.

Kumo-harai. The Spider Sweeper. It wasn’t his real name, but it was what everyone called him, ever since the monks of the Yamaoku Temple had taken him in. It was his job.

He was just one of too-many children, a boy who didn’t work particularly hard at anything, who would rather stare at a cloudless sky half the day than mend the broken geta of a beautiful woman. But still he was attractive enough for the go-betweens in town to seek out his parents and attempt to arrange marriages for him. But no matter how much status or money the offering family had, Kumo-harai—much to his parents’ shame—always fled their requests.

The young man was eventually taken to the local soothsayer who deemed him one of those poor souls who were bound to loneliness their entire lives. He would need more than he would ever give, she explained. And over time this would consume all of the family’s fortune and luck. She suggested he be sent away, that the lessons he needed to learn were under some other roof. His parents agreed. It was only the monks who were able to find the work he could do and the quiet that he desired.

“Kumo-harai.”

It was then he saw in the thin blue predawn light a tall handsome man with his sedge sandogasa hat thrown back and his long hair loose around his shoulders, his hands open and empty by his sides. It was Jin. Kumo-harai felt an immediate rush of affection well and then crash into clammy terror. The fog shifted, the vision faded, and the young man collapsed on the ground and wept until the head abbot found him on his way to the toilet half a day later.

The head abbot was a serious man with small foxlike eyes that were sunk too far apart on his face. This might have been handsome had he a strong nose and mouth. But he didn’t. His nose was the shape of a sticky rice ball rolled by a pair of tiny hands, his mouth the color of an earthworm and perpetually downturned. When he smiled—which wasn’t often—he showed his bad, almost pointy teeth. Still he was a man of great wisdom and patience, whom many of the townspeople came to for consolation and advice. Do not be deceived by appearances was one of his more frequent sermons.

Kumo-harai buried his face in the abbot’s old silk robes, scratching his cheek on the rough-edged holes burned into the fabric by the daily spitting fire of the purification ceremony. He was embarrassed at his emotions and his lack of control, but the sobbing wouldn’t cease. The abbot was a magnanimous man and didn’t ridicule him or spout the Buddha’s teachings of non-attachment. He merely held the young man close to his chest, rocking him and waiting for his explanation.

When he was able, Kumo-harai described what he’d seen and heard. The abbot nodded but said nothing. Later that day a pair of traveling monks arrived. They were given a meal and a blessing and sent right back out to see if they could learn something to put their spider sweeper’s fears aside.

The next day the vision returned. It strode across the graveyard and disappeared near the thick-walled storehouse where the monks kept their pickled vegetables and rice. Kumo-harai cried out, disturbing the morning’s meditation, but by the time the abbot arrived the ghost had vanished. Kumo-harai insisted on being taken to the soothsayer. Maybe she’d have an answer.

The abbot steadfastly refused, stating that she was a charlatan preying off of people’s fears. But after the third day when the apparition, Jin, returned again with the morning mist and marched across the yard and into the storehouse, Kumo-harai abandoned his work and went alone to the woman who seemed to know truth much more than the monks.

“Your relationship…,” she started.

“We’re friends. We became friends when he visited the temple one month ago.”

“Friends,” she repeated, rattling a bamboo cup full of long sticks.

“It’s like I’ve met him before. I would say I know him better than I know any of my brothers or sisters,” Kumo-harai paused. “And he knows me.”

“This is evidenced by his visits,” the bent and warted woman said. “Sometimes strong emotions can cause a person’s spirit to leave their body. Emotions of hate, jealousy…” The woman squinted at the fidgeting young man. “Love,” she continued slowly as if judging his reaction.

“So it’s not a ghost I’m seeing?” Kumo-harai asked. “Just his spirit missing me?”

“You say the vision calls out to you and walks to the storehouse?” the old woman asked in response.

“Yes.”

“Why the storehouse?” She gave the sticks one more shake and then scattered them across the floor.

Kumo-harai was rinsing off his broom in the river when the traveling mendicant first arrived. He was darkly tanned, lean and long-muscled. He was filthy. Kumo-harai crouched by a hydrangea bush and picked up a stick, quietly pretending to remove the more obstinate threads of web buried deep in the bristles of the broom. He observed the stranger from the corner of his eye.

The stranger placed his walking stick and pack on a rock. He removed his leggings and sandals and stripped down to his shitaobi. Untying his cone-shaped hat, he used it to cover his belongings. Finally, he removed a small length of twine from his hair before he climbed a boulder and plunged head first into the icy water. Kumo-harai watched him swim, his own hands temporarily forgetting his made-up task.

After some time the man returned to the shallow bank and stood, his long black hair falling down to the small of his back. He rubbed his body and face with handfuls of soft sand until the grime and dust that had accumulated from his travels disappeared and his skin shone red. He cupped his hands and drank deeply from the river.

“You, over there!” the stranger called, turning to face Kumo-harai. He was beautiful. “This is the best tasting water I’ve had since Joanji in Shima. There must be magic in these mountains.”

Kumo-harai rose, took a step, and stumbled. He didn’t think he’d been seen. Had the stranger known he’d been watching the whole time? Maybe he was talking to someone else. Kumo-harai looked over both shoulders. The dark man laughed.

“Is that your temple up there?” He pointed to the silver-tiled roof visible through the trees.

Kumo-harai shouldered his broom and nodded.

“You don’t talk, do you?”

As it turned out Kumo-harai did talk. He just wasn’t used to being talked to. The monks only spoke when something needed conveying. And other than the tofu seller who delivered the morning meal at dawn, there was really no one except the birds and the insects and the murmuring spirits that rattled the wooden grave tablets to converse with.

Before the day ended in purple and blue, Kumo-harai learned the mendicant was called Jin, the son of a paper maker up north in Echigo. Five years ago an outbreak of smallpox ravaged his town and he lost his entire family. Heartbroken he renounced his trade and possessions and set out to travel down Japan visiting all of the sixty-six holy sites.

When Kumo-harai asked what he was searching for, Jin said he didn’t know, that maybe he was running from something or toward something, but the real answer was probably that he was simply afraid. Kumo-harai fell asleep that night admiring deeply this stranger and wondering why his own kind of fear didn’t encourage movement but left him too scared to do anything at all.

The next day Kumo-harai discovered they were the same age, although Jin looked much older with his sunburned and lined face and the slight limp he’d taken on from his years of traveling. But it wasn’t just that, there was a hushed energy about him that suggested deep thought or a long-lived life. Kumo-harai couldn’t help but address him in the overly polite language he usually spoke only to the abbot of the temple.

At first the townspeople were wary of the dark-skinned stranger. Even the monks while allowing him to stay—as they must any itinerant disciple of the Buddha—were watchful. And so for fifteen days Jin spent all of his time with Kumo-harai helping him with his many chores. They replaced the oil in the andon lanterns, raked the embers from under the bath, and pulled kudzu from the stone stairs of the temple. And every morning they woke before dawn and carefully swept away the spiders from the rafters and the gravestones and set them gently on the shivering limbs of the old persimmon tree.

There was a familiarity with Jin that Kumo-harai had never felt before, something comfortable. Days passed much more quickly than they ever had before, and yet at night, tossing on a threadbare futon, there were so many things to remember that the young man found himself refusing sleep just to reexamine each memory one by one.

There was the dark stranger and there were his stories. Jin would recount his travels, teaching Kumo-harai folk tales and superstitions from as far away as Hizen and Tosa. During the day on trips to and from the river, two slatted barrels across their shoulders, he’d tell him funny and curious customs.

“In Kyushu they call spiders kobu instead of kumo,” he explained one day as they rested for a while with their backs pressed against a leaning gravestone. Jin held a tiny sunset-red spider on the back of his hand.

“Kobu,” Kumo-harai repeated, liking the silly sound of the dialect.

“The night spiders are referred to as yoru kobu instead of yoru kumo.” Jin blew lightly on the insect and it hopped onto a bent strand of grass. He then crossed both arms over his knees, rested his chin on his forearms and waited.

Kumo-harai smiled, finally understanding the play on words.

“It sounds like yorokobu, happiness,” Kumo-harai said. “So night spiders are good luck there?”

“The more I travel the more I realize all things, even your perception of things, are only a matter of the words ascribed,” Jin said. “Or so it seems.” He looked Kumo-harai in the eyes for a long time. “People would be better off being quiet. Like you.”

Later in the day Jin’s accounts would invariably turn to the macabre, eerie folklore of beautiful women with greedy mouths concealed in the backs of their heads, or impossibly thin, hungry ghosts that swilled their long tongues into unattended oil lamps. He even told of giant spiders that hid in the forest only venturing out occasionally to crack the skulls of unsuspecting victims and feast on the soft of their brains.

When it was finally judged that Jin wasn’t a wandering bandit, that he was indeed full of fascinating stories and news from all over Japan, the townspeople began to come around. And soon it wasn’t just Kumo-harai who loved the dark stranger named Jin.

Women gathered to learn remedies for skin ailments and weak stomachs; men came to ask about the state of certain territories, the lords who reigned there, and the outcome of various battling clans. Even the children tugged at the man’s robes, begging a new game or song. Some days he sat for hours in empty rice fields teaching the little ones how to make whistles from the stems of dandelions.