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The Old Man and the Monkey: The story of a friendship, by George Polley © 2008 Abbott ePublishing. All rights reserved. Drawings © 2007 by Calisse Weidner, Aurora, Colorado.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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In memory of my wife’s parents,
Ishiji and Kiyoko Konno.
Without you there would have been no Aiko,
and without Aiko my life would
not be half as rich as it is.
The Old Man and the Monkey
In a small park near one of the rivers that run through the city of Asahikawa, Hokkaido, there is a bronze statue of an old man and a monkey seated side by side on a wide flat stone looking out over the river and the mountains. The monkey is bigger than ordinary snow monkeys; the top of his head reaches to the old man’s shoulder. Looking at the bags under his eyes, one can see that the monkey, like the man, is elderly. Affixed to the base of the statue is a bronze plaque that reads: “Genjiro and Yukitaro.” These two old friends sit and warm themselves in silence as the years and seasons pass.
For as long as the statue has been there, people passing by have paused, wondering how a monkey and a man could become friends because, as everyone knows, monkeys are pests and can be dangerous when humans get too close. Some people tell each other that such a friendship is unnatural, and that because it is unnatural, is impossible. Others believe that Genjiro and Yukitaro are characters that the artist made up. But everyone agrees that the statue is appealing, because the two old friends have such an air of tranquility and peace about them that people come and sit down next to enjoy their lunch, or to just sit quietly and look out at the river and the mountains, later commenting on how peaceful the experience was. So it is that the old man and the monkey receive a constant stream of visitors who sit and enjoy their company in silence and take something of them away to warm themselves.
No one believes the old man and the monkey were real; but I know that they were because the old man was my grandfather, Genjiro Yamada, and Yukitaro was his companion and friend for the last five years of his life.
Now is the time for me to tell their story and reveal for the first time how an improbable friendship like that between a man and a monkey happened, how it was good, and how it ended.
One
Every day Genjiro, an old man of seventy-five, walked to a rise near his house, sat on a broad, flat stone and looked out over the fields that lay scattered across the valley below. It was peaceful there: the colors changed with the seasons, the river meandered back and forth across the valley floor as it made its way to the sea, the dark forested mountains rose in the north and west, and in winter everything was covered with a brilliant white blanket of snow.
The rise with its broad flat stone was where Genjiro felt most at peace and at one with every living thing. He called it his “looking place.” It was one of four reasons he bought his house when he was searching for a house that would become his and Harue’s home.
The second reason he bought the house was that when Harue saw it, she fell in love with it. It was big enough for the two of them and the children they would have, and it had ample room for a small garden where she could grow the vegetables and flowers that she became famous for. The third reason Genjiro bought the house was that it was near the edge of the village, yet far enough from the nearby forest so the snow monkeys that lived there never ventured near the house or the village. It was a house that their two children, Junichi and Kiyoko enjoyed returning to after they grew up and moved to larger nearby towns.
The fourth reason Genjiro bought the house was that it was in a tiny village in which only a hundred or so people lived. It was so small, in fact, that it didn’t have a name. People living in nearby towns like Fukugawa called it simply “the village.” Its attraction was its smallness, its closeness to the railroad track that ran between Sapporo and Asahikawa to the north, and the dense forest nearby that had the best wild mushrooms in that part of Hokkaido. The villagers were able to pick mushrooms and cut wood without the monkeys getting in their way or interfering with them as long as they stayed near the edges of the forest, something that they had learned from hard experience the first time someone wandered deeper into the forest and was driven back to its edges by a whole tribe of howling monkeys.
Over the years that Genjiro worked at a lumber mill in Fukugawa, he stopped at his looking place each evening on his way home from work and spent a few moments looking out over the valley and the mountains before continuing on home where Harue awaited him with their evening meal. Every evening, summer or winter, rain or shine, he stopped and looked out over the valley before going on to his house where he greeted his wife and children with a smile on his face.
Thus it is no surprise to anyone that when he retired, he spent time sitting on the broad flat rock after breakfast and again in the afternoon, thinking about nothing in particular and enjoying the breeze and the rich smells it brought past his nose, watching and listening as the birds and insects flew by and his neighbor’s cows grazed in the pasture near the riverbank. From time to time a red fox ran by carrying food to her kits; at other times her kits, three of them, ran with her. Sometimes when the weather was sunny and warm, Genjiro would turn to his wife and smile, and she would nod and pack a lunch with onigiri,1 dried fish, pickles and miso soup, and the two of them would go to Genjiro’s favorite spot and spend an hour or more eating and looking and saying very little, because little needs to be said after so many years together. Harue enjoyed these quiet times with her husband when so much passed between them without either needing to say anything. It was the same sense of peacefulness that she felt when she worked in her garden, digging in the soil, talking and singing to her vegetables and flowers because she felt so close to them.
Two
The days passed by one after the other, each much like the one before it until one morning a few days after Genjiro’s seventy-fifth birthday, when a large grey monkey walked out of the forest, came up to where Genjiro was sitting, stopped in front of him and stood looking intently into Genjiro’s eyes. Genjiro concluded from the large pouches under the monkey’s deep-set light brown eyes that he was old like Genjiro himself. Because the monkey’s lip was curled in what looked like a snarl, the first thought that crossed Genjiro’s mind was that the monkey might attack him; then he noticed that what he took for a snarl was an old scar. Since the monkey’s gaze was calm, Genjiro returned his steady gaze with a nod of his head and a gentle smile.
After a few minutes standing motionless and looking intently into Genjiro’s eyes, the monkey sat down on the rock next to him, and for the next hour or so they sat together looking out over the valley without moving or making a sound. Then the monkey got up, looked into Genjiro’s eyes again and ambled off toward his forest home. Genjiro’s eyes followed him until the monkey disappeared into the forest.
This
same scene occurred every day for the next four days: catching a
glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye, Genjiro would look
toward the forest and see the old monkey walking toward him. On the
third day as the monkey ambled toward him, Genjiro said to himself:
“Since you keep coming to visit, you need to have a name. I will
call you Yukitaro.”2
When Genjiro got home that afternoon, he told Harue about his new
friend.
“You have to be careful,” she said; “You know how dangerous monkeys can be. He might attack you. Be sure not to give him any of your bento. It will only encourage him. One day he will follow you home and I will be overrun with monkeys in the garden.” Harue regarded her husband with a skeptical eye, knowing that at that very moment he was probably thinking about how much of his onigiri he would give the monkey the n ext time he saw him. Her husband was talking about the monkey almost as if he was a new friend, and one always shares one’s food with a friend.
“You know what the others in the village will say if pesky monkeys begin coming around,” she continued. “They,” looking him in the eye, “won’t like it one bit.”
“Mmmm,” Genjiro responded with a slight inclination of his head. “I will keep that in mind.”
But after their meal she saw him wrap an onigiri and put it in his pocket, “for later,” he said. But Harue wasn’t fooled. She knew her husband was thinking about sharing it with the monkey should he appear during his afternoon meditation at his looking place.
But that afternoon the monkey did not appear, so Genjiro ate the onigiri himself.
One day in the middle of an afternoon early that summer, Genjiro and his wife walked to the looking place and sat looking out over the valley as a rain squall followed the river’s meandering course, leaving a rainbow and a trail of steam that rose in the hot summer sun. They spoke softly to one another about things that occupied their minds, namely their children and grandchildren and the weather and where Genjiro’s monkey friend sat, the two of them looking like two old men, which is what they were. The idea of her husband and a monkey sitting side-by-side enjoying the scenery (if monkeys do that sort of thing) seemed so odd to Harue that it made her smile. She had never known Genjiro to form a relationship with any animal other than an occasional small dog, and neither of them had seen a monkey near the village until the monkey Yukitaro put in an appearance. Harue cast a sideways glance at her husband: he was the same Genjiro she had known since she was twenty, except that he was a good deal older. They both were. Perhaps having a monkey as a friend wasn’t so bad, though it did cause talk around the village. She signed.
Genjiro turned toward her, smiling. “What are you sighing about, Harue-chan?”
“You and your monkey,” she said, feeling slightly embarrassed. “People talk.”
Genjiro smiled back at his wife. “I know they do, Harue-chan. If they weren’t talking about this, they would be talking about something or someone else. I enjoy Yukitaro’s company when I sit and look out at the valley. It is so old, this valley. I like thinking about how long it has been here, and how everything is linked together. I enjoy sitting here alone, and I enjoy sitting here with you, just like this. And since Yukitaro appeared, I have enjoyed sitting here with him. He seems to know when I am here, and shortly after I arrive, he comes along. Not every day, but three or four days a week. I enjoy his company. And he seems to enjoy mine, because he keeps coming back.”
“But you’ve been coming here to sit and meditate for the last fifteen years,” Harue replied, glancing sideways at him. “Why didn’t he come along before? Why did he wait until this spring?”