Chojun - Goran Powell

Скачать книгу

so long on my injuries. When he’d finished, he clapped his hands twice and each student took up a new piece of equipment.

      “Jiru!” he called out, and Jinan Shinzato stepped forward, “Sanchin.”

      Jiru was Miyagi’s nickname for Shinzato. No one else called him by that name. I watched as Shinzato began to perform the same movements I’d seen Miyagi do in the typhoon. This was Sanchin. Miyagi took up position behind Shinzato and began to probe the muscles around Shinzato’s shoulder and back with his fingers, testing their condition, searching for weakness, muttering as he did, “Yes, yes.” He continued down Shinzato’s spine to his hips and onward, down his legs to his feet. All the while Shinzato continued his performance, punching slowly and with tension. Suddenly Miyagi clapped his palms across Shinzato’s shoulders and the slap of skin on sweat-soaked skin rang out around the room. He struck Shinzato’s sides and his stomach in the same way, and Shinzato kept these areas tense to withstand Miyagi’s blows. When Shinzato had finished, Miyagi nodded, but it seemed he wasn’t completely satisfied. “Again,” he demanded quietly, and Shinzato began once more.

      I went to try my hand at the strength training, eager to develop a physique like Shinzato’s. The earthenware jars were sitting unused on the floor and I bent to lift them. To my surprise, I found they had been filled with water and were impossibly heavy. I planted my feet firmly between the jars and tried again. I succeeded in raising them off the ground, but when I took a step forward, I felt the jars slipping from my grasp. The thought of broken jars and water over Miyagi’s floor was too frightful. I put them back down. Just then, Miyagi clapped his hands and ordered the equipment to be cleared away.

      “Kata!” he said loudly, and each student began to practice a sequence of punches, blocks, kicks, and strikes. Sometimes they struck with open hands, using the palm, fingertips, or edge of the hand. I looked on, bewildered, until Miyagi came and put his hand on my shoulder. “You can go home now,” he said. “It is getting dark and your lesson is finished for today.”

      I wanted to stay and watch the other boys, but I dared not contradict him. Instead, I bowed and thanked him for instructing me. I offered to pay but he shook his head and told me I’d already paid. As I left the training hall and followed the long road home, I wondered what he meant by that. It would be some years before I understood.

      The next evening when I returned to the dojo, Miyagi wasn’t there and Jinan Shinzato was teaching the class instead. They had begun early, and I was left to wait in the doorway for five minutes until Shinzato beckoned me to join in. He led us through the same warm-up exercises that Miyagi had done, then ordered us to begin our strength training with the weights and jars. I looked to Shinzato for instruction, but he shook his head and led me outside saying simply, “Makiwara.”

      I didn’t know what a makiwara was and expected to find some new training aid waiting for me outside, but Shinzato sauntered over to the striking posts, one smashed and broken in two, the other darkened with my blood from the day before, and waited for me to join him. Each step was a step filled with despair. Shinzato glared at me, daring me to contradict him. I looked into his hard eyes, wondering if he really didn’t know that we went to the same school, then placed my raw knuckles against the red-brown stain and got set to punch.

      “No!” he said.

      I waited, expecting him to correct some aspect of my stance, but instead he pointed to the broken makiwara. “You need to replace it.” I must have looked at him dumbly because he spoke as if talking to an imbecile. “Master Miyagi said that if you came tonight, you should build a new makiwara, since you broke it.”

      “I didn’t break it,” I protested. “You must know that.”

      He shrugged, “Miyagi said it’s broken because of you, so you can be the one to fix it. There are tools in the shed over there, and some new planks. When you’ve finished, come back inside and rejoin the class.”

      That evening I discovered that despite being a simple piece of apparatus, the makiwara is quite difficult to replace. The plank was sunk deep into the ground and the earth around it trodden down hard. A spade made no impression on the sunbaked ground and I was forced to resort to a pickaxe. An hour later, I was down near the base. It was then that I discovered the plank had two crossbars for stability, so I was forced to dig wide as well. When the jagged stump was finally out, I set about making a new one.

      I collected a new plank from the shed. It was already tapered at one end, presumably for just such a purpose. I also found straw, rope, and glue and set about replicating the broken makiwara. I was good with wood, thanks to all the time I’d spent with my father mending his boat and recreated the crossbars on the base quite accurately. Next, I attached the straw padding, wrapped over it with rope, and glued it down in a faithful reproduction of the previous makiwara. It wasn’t until I’d sunk my new creation into the hole that I noticed night had fallen. I was still stamping the earth down when Shinzato reappeared. He held the makiwara and shook it to check how solid it was, then stamped on the ground to make it firmer. Finally, he balled his fist and struck the pad. I held my breath, praying it would stand up to his blows.

      “It’s time to go now,” he said, without commenting on the makiwara. “Put the tools back and hurry, so I can lock up.”

      I returned the tools to the shed and then followed him to the gate. The other boys had already left.

      “Where was Master Miyagi tonight, Sempai?” I asked, using the polite form of address for the class senior.

      “At a meeting in Shuri,” Shinzato said, “But don’t worry. He’ll be back next time.”

      I wanted to tell Shinzato I wasn’t worried, that I would have been happy to learn to-te from him, but it might have sounded stupid. “Goodnight Sempai,” I said as he held the gate open for me. I didn’t know what else to say.

      Shinzato grunted a reply as he turned the key in the lock and I walked down the road casually until I’d turned the corner, then ran, eager to get home and tell father how I’d built a makiwara for Sensei Miyagi.

      On my third training session, Miyagi taught me Sanchin. He showed me how to grip the ground with my feet, rooting myself to the floorboards, just as he had rooted himself to the cliff-tops in the storm. He showed me how to create a fist and punch, how to block, and how to breathe slowly and deeply into my tanden, the central point of the body two inches below the navel, in the same way he’d shown me to breathe when I was diving.

      Sanchin was just one of the sequences known as “kata.” It was simple to learn, but, Miyagi warned me, difficult to master. “Practice Sanchin deeply each day and you will always be strong,” he said. The other kata were more complex than Sanchin, yet to Miyagi, Sanchin was the trunk from which all the others branched out and the root that pulled them all together.

      No one but Miyagi was allowed to teach kata to a student, since it took too long to unlearn bad habits, and no one else was allowed to do the painful shime testing that I’d seen him perform on Shinzato. Miyagi stood behind me and pressed my muscles with his fingers.

      “Tense here,” he would say, tapping my shoulder, or my side, or my thigh. “Bring your muscle up. Good!” If his fingers felt a lack of response, his iron hard palm would slap until I brought the required tension to that part of my body. I was aware that he was slapping very lightly compared to what he had done to Shinzato, but the impact of his heavy hands was still quite dreadful. After what seemed like an hour, but was more likely ten minutes, he placed his palm on my stomach. Exhausted, I tensed nonetheless, but he tapped my belly gently.

      “You have been diving for pearls?” he asked.

      “Yes Sensei,” I said, delighted that he had remembered our conversation of some years earlier.

      “Did you find any?”

      “Not yet.”

      “One day, perhaps.”

      “If I find one, I will give it to you,” I said, “as payment for your teachings.”

      “And I will be happy to accept it,”

Скачать книгу