The Easy Life in Kamusari (Forest Book One)

By Miura Shion 

Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

(2012, translated 2021)

Amazon Crossing 

(Novel)

Miura Shion’s hero, Yuki Hirano, is a directionless young man who has just graduated from a Yokohama high school. His parents regard him as a remarkably undistinguished scholar who has yet to find a subject or career that interests or inspires him. In keeping with his drifting-through-life personality, he has made no plans for summer employment beyond imagining that he might be able to pick up a string of low-skill temp jobs and occupy his downtime living in idleness. But his parents have made plans for him: they are sending their son off to a remote forestry camp in Kamusari. A city boy at heart, the son is horrified by the prospect of spending his senior summer in a cultural backwater. His parents refuse to relent, sending him off by train before he fully grasps what is happening to him. Arriving at his destination, he meets a stranger who looks like an extra from a Japanese gangster movie. The man demands to see the boy’s cell phone, and when Yuki hands it over, the yakuza-looking local promptly hurls the phone’s battery deep into the forest. So begins Yuki’s strange ordeal. He is taken into the mountains where he is assigned to live in the home of his mentor, Yoki Iida, and immediately begins his tutelage in the exhausting and dangerous work of traditional forestry, a task that requires a strength he does not possess and an array of complex skills for which he has absolutely no aptitude. Despite his many errors in the field, he slowly earns the respect of veteran employees of Nakamura Lumber. As he plants saplings, prunes back limbs, and fells trees, he admires the thoughtful and even reverential stewardship of the mountains, the trees, and the wildlife. He is also fascinated by the folklore associated with the region and the long-lived traditions of the community, and even experiences encounters with the gods of the small but precipitous mountain range. In all, Yuki will spend a year in the mountains. He will learn about Japanese forestry and the new trends in building homes with traditional woods to aid the health of those suffering from “sick building syndrome,” and the lengths to which Nakamura Lumber workers will go to produce toko bashira, the pillar to the left or right of the tokonoma, the traditional formal reception area in Japanese homes and a place for contemplation of art and floral ikebana. Miura will also emphasize the role of family and the transmission of generational knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps most significantly, Yuki will learn about the physical and spiritual beings that inhabit the mountains, from snakes, leeches, and ticks to the gods and spirits that rule the landscape and, from time to time, visit the village.   

(N.B: Kamusari is a fictional village modeled after Misugimura in Mie Prefecture in Honshu.)

“Excitement was quietly building as the village prepared for the festival honoring Oyamazumi. As usual, I was in the dark, clueless about both the god and the festival. Nearly every day, somewhere in the village, some sort of Shinto ritual was held. If the festival was the presidential election, the little rituals were the primaries. They began and ended before I quite knew it. First I would notice that one or another of the miniature shrines around the village had been swept clean, and then I’d discover shimenawa, those sacred straw ropes, strung across the Kamusari River. People in charge of these preparations seemed intent on doing them unobserved.

“Sweeping the shrines purifies the village from the inside,” Iwao explained. “Hanging shimenawa over the river keeps evil from entering the village from the outside. When those things are done, it’s time to begin the festival of Oyamazumi-san.” (145)