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Updated: May 24, 2025
It is a great, soft, dull buffet of sound like a heartbeat in its regularity, in its muffled depth, in the way it quakes up through one's pillow so as to be felt rather than heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice a sort of colossal wooden mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a pivot.
A little wearied by the day's journeying, I get to bed early, and sleep as dreamlessly as a plant until I am awakened about daylight by a heavy, regular, bumping sound, shaking the wooden pillow on which my ear rests -the sound of the katsu of the kometsuki beginning his eternal labour of rice-cleaning.
And there was another writer, famed greatly for his skill, named Onomo Toku, who laughed at some characters on the tablet of the Gate Shukaku- mon, written by Kobodaishi; and he said, pointing to the character Shu: 'Verily shu looks like the character "rice". And that night he dreamed that the character he had mocked at became a man; and that the man fell upon him and beat him, and jumped up and down upon his face many times even as a kometsuki, a rice-cleaner, leaps up and down to move the hammers that beat the rice saying the while: 'Lo!
If you have been even a week in Japan you will recognise the pestle as the pestle of a kometsuki, or rice-cleaner, who works it by treading on the handle. But what is the hare? This hare is the Hare- in-the-Moon, called Usagi-no-kometsuki: if you look up at the moon on a clear night you can see him cleaning his rice. Now let us see what we can discover in the way of cheap ingenuities.
By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its fall seems to me the most pathetic of all sounds of Japanese life; it is the beating, indeed, of the Pulse of the Land.
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