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Between the world of the living and the world of the dead, there is a river with three crossings. Source at one end, mouth at the other.
Between the world of the actor and the world of the noh, there is a brigdeway with three pine trees. Curtained-off mirror room at one end, audience - congregation? - at the other.
A river flows in one direction.
A river has two banks.
Wherever you are, those banks sit opposite each other.
Which one is ‘here’ and which one is ‘there’, depends where you’re standing.
Or where your priorities are standing.
Or which way the light skews the shadows on a journey of further-than-far and no distance at all. It always starts like this:
After a long journey, a traveller meets a stranger. Before long, it is revealed that the stranger is a spirit, or a grief-stricken mother, for whom this place is the most important thing in the world. In either world. They disappear. Someone pops up and tells their story. The traveller waits, and the stranger returns, seeking relief for themselves or a loved one, release and rest on the opposite riverbank.
It isn’t always clear which bank, or what state is which - dream, waking, sanity, madness. In certain lights, one becomes the other.
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The river that separates two worlds is a violence, traversable by reflected light.
Once there was a traveller, who made a long journey from a place of comfort, to the bank of the Sumida River, for a funeral.
There, he met a mother reduced to a dance-crazed thrall through grief for her lost son, still searching for him. He’s somewhere on the other side of the river. She needs to get across. The ferryman takes her poetic turn of phrase as price of passage. But the traveller knows the truth: the boy is not lost, he is dead. Part of the mother, already on the other opposite bank, uncrossably distant. The funeral is her son’s funeral.
The traveller and the mother cross Sumida river together. During the funeral, the mother hears her son’s voice, the voice of his spirit, from inside the grass-covered earth-mound of his grave. For a moment, they are reunited, on the riverbank. The cost will be high. She will pay it. Which riverbank is far and which near, is a matter of perspective.
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The river of three crossings is always changing - the deep places become shallow places, the currents travel wherever they will. The water etches runnels in sand like scratches on plastic, then erases them again.
Once there was a traveller, who made a long journey from a place of comfort to a place of prayer, with a 3-years lost young boy still searching for his mother, to help him find her. They stopped to rest at the bank of the Asuka river.
And there, they met a stranger - a woman planting rice, singing of the rich colours and sounds of life on the riverbank. Pinks and purples fading into green, reflected in the bright water - birds wings displacing flower-scented air, water currents sighing and chittering . Beautiful, deceptive river:
‘where is best to cross?’, asked the Traveller.
The woman ‘Upstream, today: the river changes daily - there is only ever one way to safely cross on foot, if on foot you must cross.’
Everything changes - the river is my teacher here but some things are hard to bear. You, boy, you remind me of my son 3 years lost, and here I still am, watching the other shore.
Do you know, a man dreamed he was a butterfly, woke up, and wondered if he was really a butterfly dreaming they were a man? Everything changes. Come I’ll show you the crossing place.
No, wait! Something clicked - the boy saw a glimmer, under the grief, of a face he recognised. Colour bleeding out under grey. Mother! They sat together on the near bank.
The river flowed on.
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The river runs swiftly, under the footbridge-crossing, but not everybody can cross that way. Resenters and grudge-holders might as well try walking through standing stones hoping for portals. Not everyone can cross that way, either.
Once there was a traveller, a priest on pilgrimage, who stopped to rest in a village by a river. There, he met a woman and a man, raising money to build a bridge. The priest offered prayers instead of money, and because that’s what they needed most, the couple revealed they were really the spirits of two lovers, who once lived on opposite sides of the river and met every night on the bridge. One night, their disapproving families booby-trapped the bridge, and the lovers both fell to their deaths. Now, their glassy hearts are anger-stained, split, trapped under that broken bridge. ‘Without intercession, we will exist in torture - able to see over, but never cross, that other bridge, over that other river. Help us!’
The couple disappeared, but now the priest knew why he’d been called to that place so he did what he did best. He prayed. To the north, south east and west, for their souls, for their freedom. Portals that were shut creaked open.
And as the broken bridge and the drowning and the family betrayal faded, that other bridge, over that other river, came into view, magic eye style.
They crossed.
And then the dream was over, and the stage slowly emptied, and the last note died away.
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If you can’t cross the river by bridge or on foot, you swim. But the water is full of things - currents, portals, dead hands. New creatures rise up after total immersion, and the water remembers what the ones that dive in head first, forget.
Not far from the green banks of the Hidaka River, there was a temple called Dōjōji.
Once, a young woman dived into that river, after a lover who had betrayed her. Men say her rage transformed her into a snake-demon, which found the lover hiding inside the temple’s bronze bell, coiled herself around it, and let friction do its work until he was nothing but ashes. Her rage was just getting started.
Years later, travellers gathered at Dōjōji for the dedication and hanging of a new bell. All male travellers - no women allowed - lessons of history.
Then a woman - a shirabyōshi [dancer - arrived. Because she was dressed as a man, they let her in to entertain all the gathered men, under the well-hung bell. .
The dance dazzled at first, but then it went angular. By triangles and parallels, straight lines, the dancer made curve-patterns - she undulated like a snake, faster and faster. She left burn marks on the ground on her way back to the riverbank.
The woman - demon - angry ghost - breathed fire but could only hurt herself.
And the men, finished their ceremony.
And the men told her story.
And the men left her flailing in that other river, never prayed for her release.
Who will pray for her release?
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Once there was a god who travelled by rowing boat from the heavens to the earth. There, he met an old couple, gods of the land, drowning in grief for seven of their eight daughters, devoured by a eight-headed serpent who rides the Hii river like its personal merry-go-round.
I’ll save her, said the god - with a trick. I’ll fill eight boats with wine, and use the surface as a mirror to reflect your very beautiful eighth daughter. In his attempts to devour her, he’ll drink the wine - then he’ll be easy prey.
The eighth daughter - now betrothed to the god - became a comb, and kept the god’s hair out of his eyes while he did his work. On a mountain above the river, at its source, she became woman again, and her form was reflected in the face of the liquids below. It worked. The serpent got drunk, and in the following, flailing fight, its heads became the god’s property. So did its tail and that’s where the true treasure was - nestling inside, beautiful as a solved equation - the sword which cuts open grass and clouds and reality itself.
Beams of coloured light on dark sand, searchlight-sharp, like truth’s supposed to be - Kusanagi no Tsurugi - one sword to protect them all - won by the god of storms for the life of the earth’s eighth daughter.
Deeds cast long shadows on the beach of the earthly realm.
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7. |
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If you hold a mirror up to the water, the water takes on the properties of glass. Water into glass, glass into a thing that flows, a thing that takes on a life of its own, a thing that floats between two worlds. In that state, the mirror can show you things you never knew were there. But there they are - catch them while you can.
On the rolling Kasuga plain, there was a body of water, which was called the Watchman’s Mirror.
Once, there was a traveller who stopped in Kasuga on his way from one mountain and another.
There, the traveller met an old man, a watchman whose job it was to watch over the Watchman’s Mirror pond - a pond so clear that long ago, it fooled a great emperor into believing his lost hunting hawk, sitting in the tree above, had become a fish.
Watchman’s Mirror - named for a real mirror. A magic mirror, that reflects heaven, hell and earth all at once. Once it belonged to a demon, who posed as a watchman by day and lived in a cairn by night.
The old man watchman is that demon. After dark, up from the water mirror, the demon appears to the traveller, and shows him what no human should be able to see. Water becomes glass, the mirror stands between one world and the other. The traveller keeps on travellng.
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In certain lights, the reflection is the active party.
In this way, through a magic mirror, as a reflection, long ago, a demon found that it could inflict sickness on the lady Yohiki, the dazzling consort of a great emperor.
One day, that great emperor was making the journey up to Yohiki’s beside when he met an old man. The old man was the ghost of a scholar who killed himself, sure that he had failed the court examinations. But he hadn’t. The emperor had him buried in his graduation robes. To say thank you, the ghost returned, and offered to fight the demon in the mirror and end the sickness.
After dark, the demon drew itself out of the mirror, but the emperor and the scholar ghost were ready and waiting. They fought, and the fight was like a dance that you see reflected in a mirror so it’s not real enough to be traumatic.
The demon never made it back into the mirror. Yohiki recovered. The sun shone in the kingdom again.
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There are mirrors that allow you to see people who are dead, as if they were still alive. There was once a father, whose daughter owned a mirror. In it, she said, she could see her dead mother. He hesitated before breaking it to her that what she saw was her own reflection - a daughter, whose face is the image of her mother’s. Together, they looked into the mirror - of course - it's nothing but what you see when you look into the face of a pond! Their happy tears clouded their reflections.
But there was more to it than that - more to the mirror than that. And it was the hearts of the father and daughter, not their eyes, that were clouded.
Because the mother WAS inside the mirror.
The mirror was a magical relic, once split in half by an ancient Chinese emperor and his wife, so they could look and remember each other while he was away. He forgot her and remarried - but the wife’s magpie companion miraculously transformed into the lost half, and the mirror was made whole again.
The mother was stuck inside that mirror with a demon trying his best to pull her to hell. That was, until her daughter - not mad, gifted - recognised her, and released her.
What is here and what is there - what is real and what is fabrication, is a matter of perspectives. Which are as changeable as the Asuka river, and that other river, which we will all cross, one way or another, one day.
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10. |
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see bonus items (full lyric sheet in PDF)
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A response in narrative and improvised soundscape to some of Helen Maurer and Angela Moore's photographed installations as exhibited in the exhibition YOKAI for White Conduit Projects Gallery, London (Feb 2022). Also available to view at
www.maurer-moore.com
Although the exhibition is named after Yōkai - the panoply of shapeshifting supernatural creatures who can ‘move between myths’ - what sparked my imagination is the works' parallels with stories from noh, the highly stylised Japanese dance-drama form developed by Zeami in the 15th century which I’ve studied since 2011.
Each track is named after both a Japanese noh play and one or more of the artworks. Inspiration from both is weaved together into a story, which unfolds according to noh structure, and speaks to some of the exhibition's visual, folkloric and mythological themes.
Tracks 1-5 retell stories of rivers real and imaginary, and their relationship with the Three-crossing River - in Buddhist mythology, the threshold between real-life and the spirit-world.
Tracks 6-9 retell stories where mirrors unlock inner and parallel worlds, weaving in images and ideas from the works in YOKAI.
View the images at
www.maurer-moore.com.
For more information on the ideas behind the piece, LINER NOTES are included with the download. Also available on request - get in touch!
released February 15, 2022
Words written and performed by Laura Sampson
Soundscapes by Stephan Barrett and Sam Enthoven
Mixed by Sam Enthoven and Laura Sampson
COVER IMAGE: 'Golden Duck' (c) Helen Maurer and Angela Moore, 2021
