“The Dragon Flute”

On the twentieth of August, we the members of the Tatenokai brotherhood held a skirmish in the boiling lowlands of Mt Fuji to test the mettle of the new recruits. Between the marching and manoeuvres, the triple rounds of crawling out and sprinting back, some of the boys collapsed in the implacable heat. During the morning march, we were a way’s up a wooded trail, where a small bridge crossed a mountain stream, when it became apparent that the scouts had made an error with the maps, bringing the platoon to a halt.

One of the boys tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a branch that jutted out over the gorge.

A snake was napping in the warm part of a dense cluster of leafage reaching out over the water like a sunshade. The leaves concealed large sections of its body, patches of brown tossed among the green, so that at first I couldn’t make out the big picture of what the boy was pointing at. When the snake’s head, however, found a better place to rest along the steep curve of the bending branch, the segments of its sleeping body slid together.

The commotion below must have brought it to its senses. The shine of its meandering belly caught my eye, slipping through the branches like the thickest, crudest oil. Somehow the head was still at rest; the red ribbon of tongue flicked the air.

Once we’d gotten our bearings, the platoon backtracked down the mountain path and came out onto a wide road cutting through the lowlands. Summertime. Choked with blooms of nadeshiko, tsuyukusa and azami thistle.

The commander for that morning’s exercises was a college boy from Kyoto named S.

S was tall and fit. He had a face that would have matched the world a thousand years ago, when men of standing wore black-lacquered hats and flowing robes. S played the flute, and played it well, a fact encapsulated by a story he once told me of rendezvousing with a lover at a temple in Nagaoka. Since he arrived at the grounds first, he used the flute to guide her towards him through the dark. When I asked him what had made him want to learn the flute, he memorably replied that it was out of a desire to live the final moments of his life, if he might be so lucky, in the spirit of the last scene of the great Noh play Kiyotsune:

Before dawn, I stood out on the bow, under the morning moon, and played my flute, the tone so clear it went across the sea. No one could hear the songs I sang, the poems I read, except the night. We come and go, as fleeting as the crashing waves.

Say what you will about the younger generation, there are plenty of old souls among them.

Covered in dust and sweat from the day’s exercises, we returned to camp and luxuriated in the taste of food, the relaxation of the baths.

Lathering myself up to wash away the sweat and grime, I meditated on the uncanny shield that is our skin. If skin were rough and pitted, all the sweat and dirt that we encounter in a day would be absorbed, and if you let it go too long, it might never wash away. What guarantees the resilience and cleanliness of skin, its smoothness and its lustre, is this profound impermeability. Without it, we would all be stuck in one bad dream, never to wake, no way to shed contamination or fatigue, leaving them to steadily accumulate until we were but shells of clay. My rebound from exhaustion was so total and replenishing it afforded me the mental space to meditate on stupid thoughts like these. On my way back from the baths, I saw a vein of lightning jump across the sky.

Once I was settled in my room, my ears picked up the sounds of insects humming in the dark outside, which I hadn’t noticed until now. These spartan quarters were just right for me.

A desk, an iron bed, and on the wall a raincoat, camo outfit, helmet and canteen . . . not a single extra thing. Through the open window, out beyond the night air of the muster grounds, I could feel the lowlands of Mt Fuji climbing off into the distance. The hulking presence held its breath, encompassing the camp lights through the darkness. The life I’d longed for all these years, rustic and plain, was finally mine.

I smeared tincture of iodine on a hangnail by my fingertip. There were no other wounds to dress, no other pain to speak of. My body was as ready for tomorrow as an oiled gun. In a word, I was happy.

There was a voice outside my door. S came in carrying a slender brocade sleeve. Earlier that evening, he had asked if he could play his flute for me, so I told him to come by after the baths, for what could be a finer treat than flute music after a day of gruelling exercise?

At camp, the boys were free to spend the evenings as they pleased until lights out at ten o’clock. Four more of them came by my room to listen to S play, making us an audience of five.

Fraternally we talked about how hard it was to command a platoon, how tough it was to keep a firm grip on the regiments, the great skill required to make split-second decisions on behalf of all the men, and above all, the crucial role played by the scouts on the front line in sizing up an enemy encountered in the field.

Each of the boys had served a different role that day, whether it be squad leader, officer or scout. One of them offered the comment that being an exemplary commander requires not only bravery, but grace.

Well put.

S seemed to think the time for flute playing had passed. When I urged him to go on, though, he agreeably produced the instrument from its long pouch and let me hold it in my hands.

This was the first time I had held a yokobue, the kind of wooden flute used for traditional gagaku music.

In my grasp, the flute had a smooth, limber heft that was different from a weapon. The weight of the thing had, indeed, a certain grace. Made from bamboo felled some 150 years ago, it was clad in birch and cherry bark glazed in an earthy red urushi lacquer, while the mouthpiece and the seven holes were each embellished with a ring of crimson paint. As per the customs of the Saho school of gagaku, the tip of the flute was weighted with a small red brocade plug. It was meant to be played horizontally, with the tail off to the right. The seven holes hit seven tones on the ancient chromatic scale: tangin, hyojo, shimomu, sojo, ohshiki, banshiki, ichikotsu. Each tone could function like an anchor. A gagaku melody played in the ohshiki mode, for example, uses ohshiki for the tonic.

It’s said the Athenian general Alcibiades declined to play the flute in order to preserve the shapely profile of his lips. Luckily, it seemed the yokobue had no such ill effect on a handsome face. S debated what to play for us and settled on Ranryo-o, a classic, warning us that it was a long song.

The song is traditionally accompanied by a dancer in a fearsome dragon mask whose chin ponderously dangles from the jaw, held by a string. As the story goes, a general of the Northern Qi known as Gao Changgong, Prince of Lanling, or Ranryo-o in Japan, wore a grotesque mask into battle to conceal his comely face. The song S was about to play commemorated the day he led 500 horsemen into war.

I highly doubt Ranryo-o found handsome facial features to be shameful for the leader of an army. In fact, I’d wager he was proud of his own beauty. And yet he felt compelled to wear this savage mask into the field.

Rather than bothering the good general, I suspect it must have given him a thrill as delectable as it was secretive: the mask was, on the one hand, a source of horror for the enemy, and on the other, was a shield that kept his gorgeous, gentle face from harm, that he might emerge from the battlefield each day unscathed.

Death would have brought the general’s secret to light, but Ranryo-o didn’t die that day. Instead, he crushed the forces besieging Jinyong and returned victorious . . .

When S brought the yokobue to his lips, I let my eyes travel to the open window, just as the lightning crackled through the dark.

For a moment, I wondered what the blooms of nadeshiko, tsuyukusa and azami thistle I had seen that day might look like set against the sprawling foothills of Mt Fuji, lit but for an instant by the flash.

After a brief overture, S launched into his rendition of

Ranryo-o.

The shrill opening passage assailed the ears and left them humming.

Each note splayed like the bristles of a shaft of grain. In my mind’s eye, I could feel the fronds raking across my cheeks.

A hint of autumn swept the room. Under the harsh electric lights, the khakis that the boys and I had on looked like they were the colour of dead grass. The fabric gave off the flavour of dried sweat.

The melody took on a cheerful, rhythmic tone, although it wasn’t long before it lapsed once more into the solemn and the tragic.

Just when I felt that it had taken on a virile tension, as when a man’s eyes strain to hold back tears, it flattened into the ennui that settles in after a banquet.

Behind these transformations was the sound of the boy’s breath, giving his song a core of lyricism. Firm and brash, his breath evoked the huffing of our morning march under the feral sun, yet it was tempered by the coolness that is youth, one long night that ends too soon.

It was then I realized that the flute song blended two opposing forces: a breathy, staggering undercurrent and a surging font of life.

Ranryo-o made it to the battlefield just as these contrary voices reached a climax and combined to form a single bizarre mask. This was lyricism at its maximum, like a bowstring pulled so hard it bites the finger’s skin.

The notes assailed our listening ears like a cavalcade of sound. Like a great wave crashing in the night.

I was reminded of a line from the Noh play Matsukaze:

This love will henceforth never cease to torture me.

Hearing him play was like listening, not with the ears, but with an ear to the ground of the mind. As if my mind were a dark grassland and the shrill and rustle of the flute were coming from a place far in the distance, resounding in the deepest reaches of my heart.

Its tone lacked any trace of warmth; made from the cold. No sooner had it crested the horizon than it was there beside me, a figure standing in the soundscape.

The melody came down a gentle hill only to soar up a sheer face that went off into the sky, the pained breath of the player overmastering my body as my lips parted to meet the great beyond, that I might greet the music at its source, the frozen ghost of death communing with the breath of youth.

I realized that the song was going nowhere, and that this very fact, the going nowhere, was essential. If music is a true reflection of the rhythms of existence (what could channel someone’s breath more truly than a flute!), then a song that goes nowhere was as honest a portrayal of the wayward path of life as ever was or ever could be.

The melody crashed over me in a cavalcade of sound, breaking like waves over my mind and body, but it couldn’t last forever.

A moment came when the sound paused with the boldness of a miracle.

Then there were sounds that I had heard before, returning with the echoes of the past, a gentle flow fraught with a deep unease.

Again! Again! The double rush of feeling showed the face of love in all its urgency and differently each time. There were a hundred different truths, each shifting its expression. And all of them speckled with light, flowing like a clear stream through the darkness. Surely the roaring brook that we had seen that morning from the footbridge droned on, now as ever, with the same explosive force through the blackness of the night.

Before I knew it, the flute music had progressed into a depth from which it never could return. I watched the pallor of its smooth back dip into the dark. Unable to name the feeling of the void, though perhaps it surpassed feeling altogether, entering a deeper world, clear in its ghastly lack of light, and one from which it snatched ours in its talons, crushing us with the boredom of a child squeezing a red berry in his fist . . .

Ranryo-o ended, leaving me and the four boys at a loss for words. One of them said this was the perfect night for flute music, especially Ranryo-o, to which we all agreed.

S was pleased and told us more about the flute.

In gagaku, the melody played by the yokobue is meant to travel snake-like around the melody played by the hichiriki, hence why it’s called the ryuteki, or dragon flute – an inescapable reminder of the snake we’d seen that morning in the branches.

S also shared that after spending hours on the instrument, exhaling out and out and out some more, some people would see ghosts.

‘Have you seen them?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘If you see ghosts, it means you’ve attained mastery, but I haven’t seen them yet myself.’

S paused for a moment, then looked into my eyes.

‘If it ever becomes clear that your enemy and my enemy are not one and the same, I will not fight.’