Kotone ruffles ahead, the way her stride is a quick step after a slide. I have no idea how much more energy that takes instead of an easy loll in this green green valley of of rice fields. We got off the bus at the top of the mountain and from there descended steep stone steps to the valley below. The steps were slippery from ripe persimmons that had flattened on the hard granite. The trees were full of them. To Kotone's horror I've been picking and eating them. Finally, like a subversive act, she accepts one and bites into it without getting any slime on her face. My mouth is both wooly and sticky. Through my polarized glasses her hair shines in the sun as if it were made of glass. Often her face is hidden in this dark curtain that falls straight and heavy on her shoulders and back. The slit of her eyes is thus underneath. What is the purpose of this line? Peripheral vision? Or just Egyptian loveliness? I tell her this eden reminds me of home. She is dubious of my description of the rice and tea fields of Mazandaran, the women bent to harvest in their flowery and colorful chadors wrapped around their waist, bare legs in the mud, the lush mountains half covered in mist.

Here too the valley hugs high forests. This was a field of battle and the reason I dragged Kotone to walk for hours. I am obsessed with the Heike (Taira). I tell her of another parallel. Just as Emperor Taira no Antoku was being drowned after losing the battle, so was Mahmud I, the Seljuk sultan that ruled Persia, put to sword around the same time. They were both exactly six years old. The Heike tragedy is the subject of a particularly beautiful tale that is performed in the Bunraku style that uses life-size intricate puppets each manipulated by multiple puppet masters wearing all black clothes and black mesh masks, while musicians on the sides and length of the theater play and sing the poem in loud and heart-wrenching songs that bounce between the walls and penetrate your soul like no other. That a Swallowtail Butterfly (Heike emblem) should lose to Five Bamboos (Minamoto emblem), that the Buddhist monasteries leaned on the Minamoto side, that noone survived on the losing side should be of no surprise. That the grandmother committed the young emperor to the sea is more so. I am moved, but also saddened that our own history is not revered enough to teach that the very young and the very old are not fit to rule, much intrigue, much theater. Art in the service of power is pompous and disingenious. It is delicately profound if rooted in plight,


Jam25