The Salt-Bearer and the Eighth Cloud

There is a village at the edge of the known, where the mountains descend into cold water and the bears leave their names in stone. Kumaishi — 熊石 (Kumaishi), Bear Stone — in the district of Yakumo, which is to say 八雲 (Yakumo), Eight Clouds. Already the toponymy reads like an incantation. When Susanoo, the storm-god of the Izumo cycle, built his wedding palace, he composed what is said to be the first poem ever written in Japanese: 八雲立つ 出雲八重垣 妻籠みに 八重垣作る その八重垣を (Yakumo tatsu / Izumo yaegaki / tsuma-gomi ni / yaegaki tsukuru / sono yaegaki wo) — "Many-layered clouds rise; the many-layered fence of Izumo, to enfold my new bride, a many-layered fence I build — oh, that many-layered fence!" Eight clouds: the number of completion, of enclosure, of the veil between what is revealed and what is held in silence.
It is in this place of mythic resonance that a man named Takada Kōtarō, once a newspaper reporter — that is to say, a scribe of the ephemeral — abandoned the gazette to become something far older. He acquired a donkey. He named him Kusatsune, 草常 (Kusatsune), meaning "ever-grass," "perpetual green," a name that is itself a prayer against famine, a talisman woven from two ideograms. Together they descended to the shore, where Kusatsune carried three hundred litres of deep ocean water on his back up to a small salt-house. There, over three or four days of unceasing fire, the water surrendered its crystal. Five kilograms per week. The ancients called salt θεῶν ἐδέσματα (theōn edésmata), "the food of the gods." Homer speaks of it as θεῖον (theîon), divine. And in the Talmud it is written: עולם אינו מתקיים אלא בשביל המלח (olam eino mitkayem ela bishvil hamelach) — "The world endures only for the sake of salt."
In late autumn of the year now passing, Takada loaded his donkey's cart with forty kilograms of this crystallised sea and set forth on a nine-hundred-kilometre pilgrimage — for what else shall we call it? — from Hokkaido southward along the coast of the Sea of Japan, then through the spectral littoral of Tōhoku, where the great wave of 2011 had rearranged the syntax of the earth. He walked twenty kilometres a day. He sold his salt in bags of one hundred grams for eight hundred yen. He called it ロバ塩 (Roba-shio), Donkey Salt.
One pauses. A man and a donkey, carrying salt along the coast of a wounded country. The resonance is almost too precise. In ancient Rome, soldiers were paid in salt — the salarium, root of our "salary" — and the great artery of commerce that connected the salt pans of Ostia to the Sabine hills was called the Via Salaria. In the Sahara, caravans of camels still trace routes older than Islam, bearing slabs of salt from Taoudenni to Timbuktu. In feudal Japan, the salt roads — 塩の道 (shio no michi) — threaded through mountain passes from the coast to the interior, sustaining those landlocked provinces that would otherwise have perished. When Uesugi Kenshin, the great lord of Echigo, sent salt to his rival Takeda Shingen — whose supply had been blockaded — he is said to have declared: "I do not fight with salt but with the sword." 敵に塩を送る (teki ni shio wo okuru), "to send salt to the enemy," persists as a Japanese proverb meaning to show magnanimity even to one's adversary.
But it is the donkey that arrests me. In the second century, Lucius Apuleius of Madaurus composed the Metamorphoses — known also as Asinus Aureus, The Golden Ass — in which the narrator Lucius is transformed into a donkey and must wander the Roman Empire bearing burdens, suffering blows, witnessing the full grotesquerie of human vice, until at last he is redeemed by the goddess Isis. "At vero ego," writes Apuleius, "miser, humana voce privatus" — "But I, wretch, deprived of human voice." The donkey is the beast of transformation, of kenosis, of divine humiliation. It carried Balaam toward the angel he could not see; it bore Mary to Bethlehem; it entered Jerusalem beneath the weight of the Messiah. Chesterton wrote of it: "The tattered outlaw of the earth, / Of ancient crooked will; / Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, / I keep my secret still. / Fools! For I also had my hour; / One far fierce hour and sweet."
Takada understood something that the age of velocity has laboured to obscure. That slowness is not the absence of speed but a distinct ontological condition. That to walk twenty kilometres a day beside a donkey who pauses to eat roadside grass is to inhabit time differently — to fold it, as one folds the many-layered clouds of Yakumo. He told interviewers that he chose the donkey over the horse because donkeys are more resilient, less susceptible to disease, more frugal in their needs. But I suspect a deeper affinity. The donkey does not perform. It does not prance or gallop for the delight of spectators. It walks, and in walking, it remembers.
Through the disaster zone of Tōhoku, Takada and Kusatsune passed the ruins of elementary schools now preserved as memorials — classrooms where the sea had entered like a terrible pupil and learned every lesson at once. Fifteen years after the tsunami, the coast still bears its hieroglyphs: foundations without houses, stairs ascending to nothing, seawalls rebuilt like the fortifications of a paranoid god. And through this landscape of aftermath, a man and a donkey, selling salt.
There is a passage in the Odyssey — ὀλίγον τέ οἱ ἦτορ ἰάνθη (oligon te hoi ētor ianthē), "and his heart was warmed a little" — that describes the moment when the wanderer, after all his sufferings, perceives that he is approaching something like home. Not home itself, perhaps, but its scent, its premonition. Takada planned to reach Chiba by midwinter and return northward with the cherry blossoms, arriving back in Hokkaido by May. The journey circular, like all true journeys. Like Kusatsune's name: ever-grass, perpetual green — a promise that what has been consumed will grow again.
In Kumaishi, the fire still burns beneath the salt-pot. The sea continues to offer its mineral tithe. And somewhere along the broken coast of Japan, a donkey walks, bearing on its back the oldest currency in the world, the white crystal without which nothing that lives can endure.
Claudius, the Salt-Bearer