When my mother died, I shed very few tears. I felt as though a principle of nature were at work: just as I had happened to come out of my mother's womb, she had just as naturally returned to the womb of the earth. However, although I will not know until the time comes, I feel certain that I will shed many tears if my father dies one day. This is because it seems to me that my mother is a construction of nature, whereas my father is an artificial construction.

My father was born in the era of Meiji, my mother in the era of Taisho and I in the Showa era. Whatever the reasons for my father's becoming gentle, the relationship between him and my mother is something I will never understand. All I can say is that my father used to have quite a severe expression.

My father painted and my mother was often in tears. Of course, it is not because my father painted that she often cried. It was because my father would metamorphose from an ordinary person into an artiste as he worked. Then this artiste would strike or verbally abuse my mother.

"You'd think he was possessed by a fox spirit." My mother would exclaim in reference to these episodes. In time, he came to be transformed not only as a result of his artistic work, but in situations incomprehensible to the uninitiated outsider, such as when he tripped on a stone or looked at the face of a fish lying on the dinner table or as he watched television or the instant he stepped into the toilet. I had never seen these episodes for myself, but judging from the sound of my mother's voice sobbing into the telephone far away, I had the impression that it was more as if he were possessed rather than transformed.

After each such incident, my mother would visit the house of a shaman who we referred to in Tsugaru as kami-sama. She would return with various lettered charms and curious objets which she would hang on the beams in the house or slip into my father's purse. A kami-sama is a fortune-teller, but the reason the kami have such a devoted following among the women of Tsugaru is that it gives them relief to confide their worries and troubles to the kami. Their visits are something of a recreational pastime. My siblings and I called our mother's visits "recreational kami," but there must have been troubles that we could never have understood.

A dwelling place of kami that is known all over the country is Mount Osore on the Shimokita Peninsula on the northern edge of Japan. Young and old, men and women gather for a major festival that is held there every year from July 20. The crowd's frenzy rises an incredible pitch that even a black magic sorcerer would flee from.

It is more than twenty years ago that I witnessed this scene. Straw mats are laid down in the pitch dark grounds, then twenty or so itako, women in the service of the shrine, light about one hundred candles in the entrance. It is dark on the mountain and the wind turns the multicolored windmills that ring the temple grounds, erected as a kind of penitence offering to the souls of the numerous children killed during times of famine in order that their families might survive.

Most of the itako are old and blind. Their voices, those plaintive shrieks to the spirits of those who have gone to the other world, would make you believe the itako themselves were standing on the brink of hell.

Even so, it is certainly difficult to make out what they are saying, their language is such a jumble of Shimokita and Tsugaru dialects. Last year, a friend went to Mount Osore wanting to hear the voice of his father who had died, but grumbled that he hadn't been able to make out a thing. My friend's father had lived in Hiroshima, but apparently, speaking through the medium of the itako , his words had come out in the dialects of Shimokita and Tsugaru.

Such problems aside, communication from the other world through the itako is staged as an experience between this world and the next, and the hellishness is picture perfect. It was made abundantly clear that people are roused to a near frenzy by this staged scene and find freedom in becoming actors in the play.

After weeping copiously during the spirit communication by the itako, many of the old men and women begin to dance as if they had never shed a tear. Drinking, they join a ring of dancing figures. Half undressed, with pink and blue undergarments flapping, they dance as though possessed. Nearby is a an open-air bath with only a roof overhead. It is packed with men and women, old and young, and resounds with beguiling voices.

If this is freedom, one rarely encounters such boundless freedom anywhere else. Work in the fields and at sea used to be much harsher than it is now. In addition, a cold north-east wind often brings bad weather to this region in the beginning of summer. With even minimal food and hope to live in short supply, it is not difficult to imagine that this freedom tasted once a year was freedom enough to die for.

This is what Mount Osore brings to mind. Could the spirit communication by the itako be a ceremony for passage into a free space and time?

Now that I think of it, my mother's repeated efforts to gain relief through the intercession of kami-sama from the pain of my father's spirit possession episodes must have been driven by the same emotional reasons. My mother could never have participated in a frenzy such as I witnessed at the Mount Osore festival, since she did not drink and was not the type to dance. Yet, I remember even now her refreshed countenance when she returned from a visit to a kami-sama.

From the Akakura-sama at Iwakisan to Uchimanbe and Namioka; from Muroran in Hokkaido to a kami in Saitama Prefecture far to the west, she visited numerous kami-sama. One becomes possessed and the other flies about seeking exorcists. It may have been that there was some supernatural space between my parents that denied human involvement or understanding, and that the two were drawn to each other by some mysterious, invisible force. If that were so, one might say that my family was an extraordinary family putting on a pretense of ordinariness.

Yet, as I have already implied, this kind of phenomenon is not particularly mysterious when it happens in Tsugaru. Kami and ordinary people coexist without the faintest misgiving, with traditions handed down through the modern era right to the present day.

I myself have been taken by my mother on more than one occasion to the house of a kami. Inside an old farmhouse is an alter decorated in five colors. The area around it is overflowing with bundles of the five grains of sustenance. On the floor are musical instruments such as drums and bells, and large Japanese candles placed all over the room cast a red glow throughout.

The ceremony consists of tossing a small amount of rice into an old wooden tub filled to the brim with clear water. The divination is based on the pattern of rice grains and how they fall. In the still space, I could hear and see the grains of rice fall into the water, a mystic experience.

Looking back, I realize that these men and women were splendid tellers of Tsugaru's allegories. Furthermore, the divinations were almost always accompanied by singing, dancing and music, reminding one of dengaku and sarugaku, the ancient precursors of noh drama. In modern parlance, they might be the Laurie Andersons or the Madonnas of Tsugaru.

The kami-sama are living regional chronicles. The Laurie Andersons of Tsugaru are active even now telling the narratives handed down through the generations, descendants of the many common folk in Tsugaru who told tales in the long winter months.

My mother who loved these living chronicles died on January 20, 1990 at 3AM. The city of Aomori was in the grip of a cold wave unusual in its severity. Since then, as if the spirit of my mother or one of the Laurie Andersons of Tsugaru had lodged within him, my father has begun to speak of the past.