The man seated cross-legged in the center must be in his fifties. He is broad shouldered and full of raw vitality. My grandfather had kept this photo carefully, and after his death it had been in a drawer in the Buddhist alter at home. I had quite forgotten about my grandfather but something brought him to mind after my mother died.

The man seated in the center of the photo is my great grandfather, Hamada-ya Kichibei. As I recall, my grandfather died in the winter of '65, so it must have been more than twenty-five years ago that I last saw this photo. Of course, I have never seen my great grandfather. So why do I suddenly recall him now? Why does this old photo remain on my mind?

These questions are clearly related in some way to the other question, "Who am I?"

I am told that my great grandfather and his father before him were fishermen. It used to be that when spring came early to Hokkaido, the herring would come with it. My forefathers were herring fishermen.

As it was told to me by my grandfather, the spring herring would come close to shore one spring morning in the early hours of dawn. And they came in such numbers that you might mistake them for a huge wave.

Herring leaping over each other until they actually piled themselves up above the surface of the ocean, they would approach from the open sea like a living tsunami. If you stuck in a pole, it would be carried upright among the fish from the open sea to the shore, swaying but never tipping over or sinking.

People told such stories as honest fact, such were the shoals of herring that swam to the southern shores of Hokkaido. After my great grandfather's time, however, the spring herring ceased to come, so my grandfather stopped fishing and set himself up as a kind of shipping agent.

After he quit this business as well, he would sit every day by a small open hearth, munching on Tsugaru's sesame rice crackers and stroking his stomach. I often sat nearby and he would tell me stories of my great grandfather.

Even though I was still a child, I felt somehow proud of my great grandfather. He often appeared in my dreams, his figure rising against the masses of herring which had turned into a gigantic monster.

It was also a source of secret pride that his fearless strength ran in my blood as well. In his heyday, he is said to have had some two thousand men working under him. Although such stories seem exaggerated now, the scenarios were more than enough to excite my imagination as a boy.

Ihe stories also taught me that even in the height of prosperity, destiny can lay your life in ruins, for the gods of fate turned away from my great grandfather and cast him down. As empires rise and fall in history, so my great grandfather discovered one day that there was not a single herring to be caught. The tragic ending that one morning he woke up to find himself completely bereft, living out his days gazing out at sea as the keeper of a small hut, lent color to the story of my great grandfather's life.

I saw my great grandfather in my dreams, his back to me and facing the waves of herring, but then the dream would change. The opulent building that was testimony to the booming herring business would be enveloped in flames and reduced overnight to ashes.
I once composed a verse: "Whether there are gods/or whether none such/On my great grandfather's hand/a fish scale glistens."

My grandfather's name was Kijiro. He was born in the city of Hakodate. Although not the oldest son, he filled the role of head of the family because the firstborn turned out to be a scamp. As a young man, my grandfather was living in Tsugaru but spent more than half of his time in Hakodate, perhaps because he had such a deep attachment to Hokkaido. He later took up residence in present day Sakhalin as well in order to pursue his business. My father was already in about the third grade of elementary school and lived a few years in Odomari (present-day Yuzhno Sakhalinsk) on the island of Sakhalin as well.

This is rather tangential, but my family history as I know it is based largely on stories told by my father and grandfather. What is puzzling is that neither my grandmother, nor my great grandmother for that matter, ever once makes an appearance. I sometimes wonder where the women figured in these stories told like mini prose epics. Just what they could have been thinking and doing?

Since my father was the oldest of nine children, my grandmother must have still been bearing children during my father's elementary school years. So my grandparents could not have possibly lived apart for all that time.

What could the women's lives have been like and how did they view the lives and work of such men as my grandfather and his father? What was my great grandmother thinking as she looked at her husband who had two thousand men laboring under him and who smoked a gold tobacco pipe? When I think of it, I realize that women never appear in my family's history.

My grandfather moved to Sakhalin in order to engage in trade with Khabarovsk. Trade was mostly pursued in mid-winter. From Odomari, he would set out alone in an enormous sled pulled by twenty or so Karafuto dogs and speed across the frozen sea for days on end. If he ran out of food on the way, he would eat one of the sled dogs. Stopping at Eskimo encampments to rest, he would sleep enveloped in the naked bodies of their women, then set out again in the perpetually faint light to cross the frozen expanse.

There is an expression in the Eskimo language that means, "please smile." My grandfather explained to me many times that this means, "Please take my wife or daughter to warm your cold body and sleep well." It is a pleasant expression, a serene offering in a serene land. Although I can well understand these words now, as a boy, it made my lower body strangely hot and excited to imagine the ensuing situation.

With business completed, the sled would begin the return trip laden with furs and dried meat purchased from Eskimo and Russian middlemen. Traveling for many days and nights across the ice, my grandfather would return to Odomari, or so the story went.

Was it Odomari, or Hakodate or Tsugaru? I do not actually know where he returned to. But in any event, my grandfather would be blind from the snow by the time he returned and would commence to sleep for days on end. After two weeks or so, he would begin to faintly sense light on his eyelids. Little by little, the light would take on color, and according to my grandfather, he would one day discover himself lying in a flood of bright light. I remember gazing for a time at his eyes, this broad shouldered grandfather who gave me the impression of being heavy like stone.

Once his eyes were completely well, the party would begin. They all came, the neighborhood horse and cattle trader, the dog fight promoter, the man who ran the fish stall and the young men working at the barber's. For days, the drinking and carousing would continue, the daytime blending into night.

Three Tosa dogs for dog fights were tied behind the house and fighting cocks were jumping around in the shed. Because of the cold, the men wore vests made of reddish dog fur that clung to their backs and the mountains of herring roe that were served with the sake produced clouds of vapor from their huge serving platters.

Even now, I sometimes see such scenes in my dreams. Or perhaps I am only imagining such fabricated "dreams," but the recollections make me nostalgic nevertheless. I dream of a sled that creaks as it makes its way through a snowstorm, swaying, and of my grandfather with his broad back, tearing through the empty white space.

By now, this scene must be too unreal to be believed. But it is already firmly etched in my memory as if it had really happened, and feels as if it were a scene I had actually witnessed.

It was this old photograph that prompted me to find material for my performances, guided by these memories from my great grandfather's time to my grandfather's. With this photograph as a starting point, I decided to go on a trip to trace my family's roots. This was the beginning of my performance journeys.

It began in December 1980, with winter almost upon me. I departed from Tsugaru for Hakodate, then visited Kushiro, Akkeshi and Abashiri. I went on from there to Otaru for research. This was already in the new year, toward the end of January. I returned on a warm, springlike day just before the month of March.

An enormous sled. Dried fish. Blankets. Fish oil. Dog flesh. Furs. Creaking noises. Blindness. Naked women. Reindeer antlers. Shoes made of salmon skin. The sound from drifting ice floes. A wooden fork. A small jar of honey. A gold tobacco pipe. Horses neighing. A chicken's head. Blood flowing. A dog's rope leash. The milling silhouettes of hundreds of fishermen as if in an illusion. The death of the fish. My grandfather's expression as he nuzzles his face in a woman's breast. A penis shrunken in the cold. The Eskimos' igloos. The dark sea; the faintly illuminated sea. Shoals of fish traversing the Okhotsk Sea. Journey into Okhotsk.

　Raging, roaring sea ─
　There be no gods here.
　Bitter Tsugaru winter.
　But on my great grandfather's hand,
　Shines a fish scale."