A Single Woman in Akita
In late November and December 2005, I took my ten-year old daughter Nina to Japan for the first time. My marriage was in decline and I was feeling sad. I thought that a trip to Japan would lift my spirits and I was eager to share Japan with Nina. In hindsight I see that she was too young, and although I’m sure the three weeks we spent together were meaningful to her, she did not get the chance to experience Japan on anything like her own terms. It was also a long time for her to be away from her mother.
Before we left for Japan, I had set up a visit to the far north of Honshu, to Akita Prefecture, through WWOOF (“World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms”; at the time I think the acronym stood for “Willing Workers On Organic Farms”). I was not, however, especially interested in digging the dirt or dealing with crops on a farm, so I found Tamami Kosaka (小坂珠実), a woman who ran a small ecotourism business just outside the Shirakami-Sanchi (白神山地), a 17,000 hectare (42,000 acres) heavily-wooded old-growth wilderness and strictly-protected UNESCO World Heritage Site that straddles Akita and Aomori prefectures. It was early winter, so it was impossible to get into the forest to see its famous beech trees, but I had not come to Kosaka-san’s house to explore the Shirakami-Sanchi; I came to do carpentry work.
We travelled from Tokyo by way of Kanegasaki, a small town in Iwate Prefecture that has a sister city relationship with our hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. Kanegasaki was something of a disappointment: where Amherst is a lively college town that has made major contributions to American letters in the persons of Noah Webster, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, among others, Kanegasaki’s claim to fame is a couple of lightly-visited historical sites, the Shishi odori (獅子踊り; “lion dance”), and large manufacturing facilities for Toyota and Fujitsu. Oikawa-san, director of the Lifelong Learning Center (生涯教育センター) kindly put us up in his charming but bitter-cold farmhouse.
From Kanegasaki, we took the train to the village of Futatsui-machi (二ツ井町; now merged with Noshiro City {能代市}). Driving her Suzuki four-wheel drive jeep, Kosaka-san met us at the train station – almost a whistle stop station. Nina and I crowded into the tiny car and Kosaka-san got right down to business: she told me she needed a kind of corral for the two cattle, a bull and a cow, that she had rescued from a miserable end at the slaughterhouse. Someone had rigged up scrap wood loosely attached with baling wire to the trees and posts that defined the enclosure. The corral needed to be stronger, with a gate that could be closed securely.
From the station, we went directly to a small hardware store in Fujisato (藤里) run by an aged and balding obaasan (elderly woman) and to a larger home center to get some basic tools, including an electric chainsaw and large spikes I would use to secure posts to build the corral. The jobsite was muddy and covered with a thin layer of snow. I notched the horizontal rails with a hand saw and a chisel so I could get the nails through them and into the posts and trees forming the perimeter of the corral. It was hard, cold, hungry work. The compensation was that Kosaka-san was a very good cook.
Nina noticed that Kosaka-san kept two dogs tied up in the small barn that sheltered the ox and the cow. It troubled Nina that the dogs could not run freely, so she asked me to build a zipline for them so they could run around in the corral without escaping. I persuaded Kosaka-san to let me get some steel wire and a pulley and I was modestly successful at improvising a zipline. It wasn’t a true dog run, and I would not be surprised if Kosaka-san found it more of a nuisance and took it down after we left.
In exchange for my labor, Kosaka-san gave us more than food and lodging; she shared her story.
December 11, 2005
For three evenings now, she opened her heart to me. She said we could be “soul friends,” which left me wondering if that could be anything like soulmates. I guess not. She told me about her upbringing, her emotionally repressed mother, her self-involved father, who was a teacher and who continues to write poetry. She has never been a “follower.” Hates sporting events where everyone cheers with one voice – “like fascism!” Hates the violence – either physical, verbal, or emotional – visited upon women by the men in their lives. A bit (not just a bit) of a crusader. Passionate in decrying the ugliness and wanton destruction of modern life, the wastefulness everywhere apparent.
She was a strong feminist and defender of women. She introduced me to a new Japanese expression “DV” – from domestic violence – which she said was endemic in rural areas like the one which she called home.
Kosaka-san confessed that she was carrying a torch - for a married man:
She told me about Egawa,* the nature photographer. She loves him dearly, and says she’d work with him with all her heart. In fact, absent his wife of 23 years, she’d marry him and end her loneliness. But he cannot leave his wife. He’s a shy, rather inarticulate man, far more at home on assignment in the wilderness, tracking the kamoshika (カモシカ, a goat antelope) or a rare bird or plant than among people. Kosaka speaks of him almost as if he was actually hers, abandoning the use of -san when speaking his name. Kosaka went so far as to say that Egawa, who at 48 is still relatively youthful, would be better off divorced from her husband because they’re fundamentally different.
* Hiroyuki Egawa (江川正幸, 1954-2022), known for his gorgeous photographs of the Shirakami forest.
Kosaka-san was born in Akita, but moved to Tokyo as a young woman. She worked in publishing. I think she worked as an editor. In her late 30s, she decided to return to Akita. She bought a 60-year old farmhouse (minka; 民家) and had it renovated. (In Japan, 60 years is considered an old house.) Her plan was to set it up as an inn for people who came to the district to experience one of the few old-growth forests left in Japan. She called it Mori no Kazoku (森のかぞく, “the forest family”)
The original house
On February 2, 2004, sparks from the wood stove started a fire. Neighbors saw white smoke rising from the property, but assumed that it was rice chaff burning in the adjacent field. Kosaka-san soon realized that the house was on fire. She rushed to save her three cats, and then to get the two bovines out of the barn, tugging the reluctant animals by their nose-rings. The house burned to the ground. The three cats were never seen again.
In the spring of 2004, a fundraising campaign was started to rebuild her house so she run it as a bed-and-breakfast and event space. That new house, which was considerably smaller than the farmhouse that was lost, was the house in which Nina and I stayed in December 2005.
Kosaka-san had much to say, and we talked late into the night. Mostly I listened – and struggled to follow what she was saying. My Japanese listening comprehension of 20 years ago was not as strong as it is these days, and even now I’m sure I would have trouble following her. The life she was leading in rural Akita Prefecture made me think of a writer I was reading at the time, the Belgian-American poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton. I had read Sarton’s Journal of Solitude and At Seventy. When I mentioned Sarton, Kosaka-san became very animated and exclaimed: “Mei Saaton?! Daisuki!” (“May Sarton?! I love her!”). Perhaps I should have known: after all, she was getting deliveries of books from Amazon Japan every day that we stayed with her.
Poor Nina! She felt left out, abandoned by her father and this strange host who talked incessantly. At one point she stood up, overwhelmed, and began to cry: “I miss Mommy!! I want to go home!” I comforted her and realized that this woman was drawing me into her world in a way that was not necessarily healthy. And I was letting her. I have a weakness for women with powerful, active minds, shaded by loneliness and sadness. I had fallen in love with Tamami Kosaka.
She drove us back to little station in Futatsui and we made the long trip back to Tokyo and, from there, back home to Amherst.
I lost contact with Kosaka-san soon after returning home. I’ve thought about her many times over the years, but unfortunately I can find no mention of Tamami Kosaka online later than the March 2004 post inviting people to donate to rebuild the home she had lost in the fire.
