Kishihachi's Opening: What the Bell Remembers

Walking through a back street in Fukagawa this morning, I heard a single test strike ring out from the speaker on a utility pole. Hearing that it wasn't the old test broadcast anymore but the real thing, I found myself stopping in my tracks.

That same bell hung in the collection facility where I spent my first winter after drifting ashore at seventeen. In a building where the power kept failing, the number of strikes was all we had to go on. One meant: still all right. Two meant: pack your things. Three meant: run now. I was a child then, too afraid to count for myself, always grabbing someone's sleeve to ask how many it had been.

Half a century later, the same sound now comes out of a disaster radio speaker. The reason for ringing it hasn't changed, but most of the people listening now have never known the bell at all. I hear a city official said the plan is to start by teaching people, "if it rings, pay attention." For my part, I think it's fine if people are startled before they understand. That sound carries enough weight to earn it.

I bring this story up in my opening lines from time to time. It's not a story that gets a laugh, but the audience, more often than not, listens quietly. Learning to listen to something without understanding it is a kind of practice I seem to have kept up ever since I arrived in this world — the lullaby, and now the bell, might turn out to have been the very same practice all along.

I won't tell this story on stage tonight. Following the bell with something bright is, I think, my own way of keeping the thread straight.