Chrysanthemum in the Rock
What sort of rock had it been? I looked through a number of books like
Awazu Hidekọji and Wada Yaezo’s A Full Color Guide to the Rocks Japan
in an effort to help myself remember, but I still couldn’t be sure. I’m
entirely ignorant as far as rocks and stones are concerned, and I’m sure it
would have been difficult for me to decide which of the illustrations the
rock matched even if I had spread the chart out in front of the rock and
compared the two directly. To make matters even worse, it’d been thirty
years since I’d seen the object itself. The rock is in my hometown, far
away.
There was a large hollow in the front of the rock that someone had
packed with soil, and a chrysanthemum had been planted there. I remember
seeing the white flower in bloom, a chrysanthemum so swollen with petals
it looked like a bal. Nowadays large flowers of this shape are sold in every
florist in Kamakura. Maybe that ancient chrysanthemum was a flower of
the same variety, maybe it had simply gotten smaller over the years? It
grew on the surface of a rock, after all, and there was no one to look after it.
The blossoms of the white chrysanthemums that florists in Kamakura
sell are extremely heavy—so heavy that if you stand one up in a narrow
vase the arrangement looks unsteady, as though the vase is about to fall
over. The chrysanthemum that blossomed in the rock was small, but serene.
And it hadn’t been planted there on a whim, or to comfort the living. It
had been planted as an offering.
A woman’s head had been appearing over the rock. It was a ghost. A
memorial service was held, a chrysanthemum was planted in the rock as an
offering, and the woman’s head stopped appearing. Ever since then the
villagers have planted a chrysanthemum in the hollow in the rock every
year. This was the story people told.
