MUNEAGESHIKI

Last night we held the muneageshiki, or roof-raising ceremony, which is more like a barbecue with lots of booze. The plan had been to hold it on Saturday 22, but it rained, and we couldn't have workmen scrambling around on a wet roof, so it was postponed to Sunday, but it rained, so it was postponed to Monday, which was only cloudy, though it did rain later in the night, but we managed to squeeze the ceremony in there.

When Echo and I got to the land, where only a week ago there had been nothing but the concrete foundation with logs lying on it, there was an entire standing house with a lot of logs in the structure, and several men scrambling over the roof in a hurry, trying to get it finished so they could have some barbecue and beer.

They were astonishing to watch, the way they scrambled and slid, swung, dangled and hopped about up there on an open frame so many meters above the ground, their thin-soled, separate big-toed soft Japanese construction shoes giving them pedal prehensility of an extent unknown in the West, where construction workers wear thick slabs on their feet, going mainly for traction, not grasp or flexibility; these guys' feet could practically wrap themselves around a pole, or grab an eave.

Bim Bam Bom, the roof was done, a skylight cut and installed, and they were down. The 'ceremony' consisted of fashioning a wooden image from a board (with my and Echo's names calligraphied on it with a writing brush), attaching a round colorful fan-shaped object made out of paper and on that placing an otafuku mask; into a slit in the top of the board was placed some slips of blank ceremonial paper.

In traditional Japanese houses, this object is placed in a special location built for it between the first and second floors, which was not possible in our house, so the image was leaned against a pile of lumber to party with us. I suggested offhandedly that maybe the image could be put under the first floor, at which great aghastness erupted among the group, the head carpenter saying that then everybody would be "walking on it all the time," and by then I could see his point. So we let it party with us.

Later, it stands under the tarp in the corner of the workshop, gazing out at the goings on, keeping an eye on things...)