Little Yokozuna (10 page)

Later she wondered how long she had been smelling the sweet familiar evergreen breeze before it finally sank in what it was. Years later she still believed that the breeze had been in her nostrils for some time, and that it was this heartbreaking, piercing, lovely breath that had been giving her that strange and joyful hopefulness even in a cave filled with demon warriors. Now, though, she suddenly realized what it meant.

The garden gateway was open again. The stone garden, which had dumped them here in this black cave, was now beckoning them somewhere else, anywhere else, away from danger.

Staring back at the huge demon, she slowly moved her feet until they were propped against the crane stone of the garden. It was better leverage than she had ever had yet for the rolling of Q.J. The piney breeze was pouring over her shoulder, from beyond ihe little ridge of trees. All she had to do was get Q.J. over that ridge.

She stared back hard at the demon warrior, who was still peering into the gloom of the garden end of the tunnel. She wondered if he also could sense that there was an open garden gateway here. She wondered if he could even see her. For some unknown reason, as a sort of reckless experiment, she stuck her tongue out at him. He didn't respond.

Wedging her sturdy bottom as far under Q.J. as it would go, Libby gathered up her strength for the greatest and most important effort of her little life. "Oof!" she cried out as she heaved upward and backward. The demon warriors roared, hearing her. Q.J. rolled over once, to the top of the ridge, where the stone trees stopped her from going over.

"Oh, please!" gasped Libby, leaping up and over the ridge herself. She grabbed Q.J.'s arm and tried to pull her over, which is the hardest thing to do with a heavy weight. Two, three, four, five, six goblin warriors came stooping around the bend, swords drawn. They still seemed to be having trouble seeing into the garden, but suddenly with another gravelly roar they leaped forward.

"Oh, please!" wailed Libby, pulling on Q.J.'s arm with all her might. And even as she pulled, she felt the stone floor dissolving below her as the tiny garden enlarged and rushed outward expanding, to take her into itself and far away.

 

 

 

It was on a lovely, dream-like Sunday in April when Kiyoshi-chan's father took his son and the two American children on an excursion to Kyoto.

"It is the ancient capital of Japan," he said. "You
must
see it before you go back to Massachusetts."

"And," said Kiyoshi-chan with a significant look at Annie and Knuckleball, "it has many, many temple gardens."

"Yes, yes, yes," said his father, raising an eyebrow. "I know that you must see your gardens. I will close my market tomorrow so we can spend two days there. Sunday night we will spend with my sister in Uji."

Annie and Knuckleball had finally given their whole story to Kiyoshi-chan's family, and though the father had laughed at the parts he couldn't believe in, the mother and old grandparents had taken it all very seriously.

"We will show you gardens then," the father had finally said. "Until your parents come to get you. We will show you gardens and gardens and gardens until you decide to go home by airplane instead. Of course traveling by gardens is cheaper, but at least airplanes take off on a schedule." He laughed, not unkindly, but as if he thought of them as two rather nice lunatics.

"Domo arigato gozaimashita,
" Annie and Knuckleball had both said. "You are being very kind to us."

So they traveled to Kyoto by train, leaving by the first departures on Sunday morning. The children slept for the first part, laying their heads on each other's shoulders as the train rocked and rattled along, and as the aisles in front of them grew gradually more crowded with curious people. There were many stops, the next station often visible from the last, and the noise of hissing brakes, scuffling feet, and tinny announcements all mingled with the children's dreams and drowsy thoughts.

They changed trains several times, once at a great booming, roaring madhouse of a station where they had to run up flights of steps, weaving through the crowd, and then down onto another platform, where they were jammed at the last second into a packed train by uniformed attendants.

"I'm glad we don't have to do this very often," said Knuckleball, peering up at Annie from his place in the crush of bodies. "I can hardly breathe."

"I would think there would be a

line to Kyoto from Tokyo," said Annie to Kiyoshi-chan's father. "The bullet train. Wouldn't that be faster, and less crowded?"

He looked at her in a bewildered way, so she wondered if she had offended him. Maybe the famous bullet train was too expensive, and she had hurt his feelings by mentioning it? But then with a sick feeling she remembered the whole business about Yazu and Taiho and the rest, and she wondered weakly when the
Shinkansen
had first been built. She turned and looked out the window, trying to put it from her mind.

As they left Tokyo behind the crush eased somewhat, and after another change or two they were able to get seats again, but on opposite sides of the train, and separated. Annie gazed out the far window, watching the tiled roofs, neat green fields, and dusty roads flowing by. There were bicycles everywhere, and men and women walking here and there with huge loads on their backs. In places there were children playing, but once there was a schoolyard full of uniformed children doing some kind of organized Sunday activity. The windows were open, so at each stop a rich complexity of smells poured in on the spring breeze, scents of sweet flower blossoms, wood smoke, and hot railroad tar, grease, and metal. There was something poignant in this unfamiliar blend of familiar odors, and Annie found herself excited by it, without knowing why.

Kiyoshi-chan's father read his newspaper for hours, dozing occasionally while sitting straight up. Annie glanced over at his paper and tried to imagine someone being able to read such a complicated language so easily. She knew a few of the difficult
kanji
characters, and more of the simpler phonetic symbols, but it boggled her mind that anyone could read everyday news, sports articles, or the goofy-looking comics in such a complicated form of writing. It seemed like the sort of writing made only for poetry or mystical thoughts. Or maybe incantations for opening philosophical gardens, she said to herself. After trying to puzzle out a bit of it, she shook her head and looked back out the window.

They arrived at Kyoto Station after a train journey of over five hours, and stumbled out onto the sidewalk, stiff and ready to see sights.

"First we eat lunch," said Kiyoshi-chan's father, and untying a large silk wrapper, he passed around a
bento
to each one. Each
bento
was a box divided into compartments, filled with helpings of rice, vegetables, pickles, and small slices of fruit. They sat on the concrete ledge outside the station and ate. The sun was warm on their heads.

"So how many temples are there in Kyoto?" asked Knuckleball, picking up a piece of fried pork with his chopsticks.

Kiyoshi-chan's father said something, with his mouth full. Annie stared at him.

"Excuse me?" she said. "How many did you say?"

He swallowed. "Two thousand," he said, and smiled. He stuffed in another heaped mouthful of rice.

"Two thousand!" she said. "Two thousand?"

"
Hai
" he nodded, chewing. "Yes. Two thousand."

Annie bit into a pickled radish and chewed several times. "And how many of these have gardens?" she asked.

"All of them, of course," he said. "What is a temple without a garden?"

"And are there other gardens in Kyoto," asked Knuckleball. "Besides the temple ones?"

"Of course," said Kiyoshi-chan's father. "What is a home without a garden?"

"How can we possibly see them all?" wailed Annie.

"You can't, of course," he said. "But it only takes one to
whisk
you back to Boston, like a magic carpet."

He chuckled, cleaning out the last grains of rice from his lunch and popping them in his mouth one by one with his chopsticks. "But regardless," he said, "if you want to see philosophical gardens, Kyoto is the place to come."

Annie and Knuckleball looked at each other.

"Then what are we waiting for?" said Annie. So it was that the Kyoto trip became a disaster. Like the worst sort of tourist they bolted from one place to another all afternoon, in fact until the evening became too dark to see a thing. Then they took a local train to Uji and stayed the night in the tiny home of Kiyoshi-chan's aunt, and were back in Kyoto before seven o'clock the next morning, zigzagging from one garden to another through all the length and breadth of the old city.

Annie would regret this for years afterward, until she finally was able to return to the incredible city of Kyoto again, and to see it the way it was meant to be seen. They fled from temple to temple, garden to garden, shrine to shrine, hardly seeing the breathtaking clouds of cherry blossoms in full flower around them, never taking a moment to soak in the peacefulness of a dry, bright, sun-washed Zen garden. Years later Annie would still remember and regret the grim look that gradually settled on the face of Kiyoshi-chan's father and of Kiyoshi-chan himself, realizing that she and Knuckleball must have seemed those days like the very crassest kind of American sightseer. Though only the proprietor of a little country market, Kiyoshi-chan's father, like all Japanese, loved the beauty and metaphysics of nature, and was a minor poet in his own village. Not believing in their desperate need to find a garden gateway, he could only interpret their headlong rush through Kyoto as the greatest possible insensitivity to beauty, to delicacy, to sun and bloom and wind and tree.

But Annie and Knuckleball could only think of lost Little Harriet, and they galloped from one place to another, towing their Japanese friends behind them. They looked everywhere for likely places, sniffing their way through the heavy scent of spring flowers for a familiar cool, piney breeze, stepping into bright shrubbery and behind stone pagodas and under twisted little evergreens, hoping against hope to feel the earth dissolve beneath their feet and to find themselves swept away on the trail of Little Harriet again. But the ground was always solid, and every hint of an evergreen smell turned out to be the smell of an actual pine or larch or cedar, almost lost in the overwhelming Kyoto riot of April flowers.

They saw the Kinkakuji, or Golden Pavilion, and the Ginkakuji, or Silver Pavilion, both magnificent in their settings of ponds and trees. At the insistence of Kiyoshi-chan's father they took a moment to dip water and drink with a long-handled tin cup from the famous spring of the Clear Water Temple, Kiyomizudera. They saw the many-roofed pagoda of Daigoji, and the kilometers of red torn at the Shinto shrine of Fushimiinari.

They saw the famous dry rock garden of Ryoanji, and at the Tendai temple of Sanzenin they saw but hardly noticed the lovely moss-mounded garden, with its shrubs sculpted into fat little heaps, like clusters of very docile green farm animals.

After all this, Annie finally paused in one place. She never knew the name of it, but it was a deep bamboo grove, with the stalks of bamboo growing almost too

tightly to walk between. The pointed leaves overhead were entangled together into a green roof, through which the Monday afternoon sun could barely filter. She looked into the grove and was caught, as if by a mystic power.

"Come on, Knuckler," she whispered.

"Yes!" breathed Knuckleball, seeing into the grove himself. "This is just the kind of place."

They stepped into the grove, while Kiyoshi-chan and his father looked after them, puzzled. It was like stepping into an underwater world, the kind that comes to life in so many Japanese fairy tales of the realm of the Dragon King. Liquid green light flowed around them, the ground was soft underfoot, and the bamboo spoke in a hushed whisper, like the sound of gentle rain. They took each other's hands wordlessly. There was a breeze through the grove, not the piney mountain breeze they were looking for, but maybe related to it, somehow.

Annie turned back toward their friends, whom they could barely see through the gently swaying stalks. "We have really not done well," she said. "We have to go talk to them."

"OK," said Knuckleball, understanding.

They emerged into the bright sunlight, where the man and the boy waited for them, wearing expressions of long but weary patience. The two American children bowed very low to them both, one at a time.

"We have been very rude," Annie said. "We have been a little out of our minds. Please forgive us. We have hurt you, and we are sorry."

Kiyoshi-chan grinned, and his father bowed to Annie, insisting that no such apology was necessary. When he straightened, his face was eased of its frown.

"Show us what you would like us to see," said Annie, "in the time we have left."

So they went to just one more place, another nameless temple with a garden. There they sat as the shadows lengthened, watching three turtles on a rock, listening to the
thock
...
thock
...
thock
of a bamboo water pipe, which filled from a falling trickle and tipped, pouring its water into a stone basin. No garden gateway showed itself, but a great peace flowed around them, and Annie and Knuckleball both felt some of their distress fall away.