The Lady and the Monk (10 page)

Joe looked over at us, his unshaven face cracking, and began laughing. His laugh got started like an aging Plymouth on a winter’s day, until he was chortling and chuckling infectiously. His unorthodox directness was hitting me like a slap in the face. But I could see that it was the most Zen-like quality about him and, if nothing else, he was very much his own man. Cackling, uncombed, talking with the crazy intensity of someone forever under some foreign influence, he put on another tape, and as
The Neverending Story
went on neverendingly, he began telling me about Japan. “Like my students, man. One time, I had to teach them the meaning of the words ‘necessary,’ ‘useless,’ and ‘useful.’ So I asked them to rate all their subjects in one of these categories. And you know the one all of them — one hundred
percent of them — listed as ‘necessary’? Sports, man! Fuckin’ sports! And the one that every single one of them listed as ‘useless’? Religious education! Except for one guy, who put it as ‘useful’ But everyone else laughed at him and said it was because he was a Christian. Weird, man, fuckin’ weird. But I thought about it, and it makes sense. Not just because sports makes them healthy. But it instills in them this sense of the team. And it makes them competitive. And in most ways, this is a very competitive society. The place is like a pyramid, man; the whole place is a fuckin’ pyramid. And the one subject you
never
mention to them is politics.
Never
, man. Makes them go dead. It’s like in the U.S., if you had a class on Byzantine Church doctrine or somethin’ — they don’t care about it. They don’t know anything about it. It’s not their concern. It just makes them dead. Not a single fuckin’ political science department in the entire country. No one here gives a damn about politics.

“There are two myths that the Japanese have about themselves. One is that they’re a small country. They ain’t small, man. France and Spain are the only countries in Europe that are bigger. And look at the fuckin’ population, man. Sometimes I get out an atlas and say to them, ‘How many people in Denmark, man? Five fuckin’ million.’ And they say, ‘
Ah sō?
’ This country ain’t small, man. Look at a map. And they think that this is an old country. It ain’t old. Ask any Japanese high school graduate to read somethin’ before 1868. He can’t do it, man. They have no connection with their literature. In the old days, before Meiji, they didn’t have this Emperor-worship thing. One old Emperor was just this nothin’ guy who had to sell his own calligraphy to keep goin’. But then in Meiji they built a new nation and trained people to think a certain way. Education didn’t mean broadening horizons. It just meant learning to be a part of society. And hey, man, if they decide to bring back Emperor-worship, you better have short hair, man.” Joe’s eyes were wild now. “And you better get new clothes. And you
better not talk in the street. No fooling around with those guys, man. You watch what you’re doin’.”

Joe was certainly giving me a crash course in one-pointedness — and in the frustrations of a longtime resident. The next thing I knew, he was flinging down before me a box that featured a floppy-eared rabbit above the legend “I Am Somebunny Special.” Inside was a novel, flawlessly typed, called
Tree-Planting in America
, by someone from Little Lake, Michigan, who was, Joe said, just some penniless guy living in a cabin without a toilet, electricity, or running water. “I knew this guy way back — in Massachusetts. We were buildin’ a
zendō
together. But he never talked about Zen. Never. Or writing. Then, last summer, he gave me this manuscript. I read it by kerosene lamp in his cabin, man, and I was gettin’ more and more excited. This is a true book, man. At fifteen, this guy tried to be a painter. Then at eighteen, he decided to be a writer. By twenty-two, he had all the skills, he says — more than he’s got now — but he hadn’t anything to say. So he put it aside for twenty years. Now, he says, he’s got somethin’ to say, so he writes this, supporting himself by slayin’ deer. That’s integrity, man. He didn’t want to make money out of his writing; he just wanted to make art. He’s starving to do it, doesn’t have any friends. He’s kind of like Kundera, I think — it’s funny, but it makes you think.”

Integrity at any cost, I thought; a rigor of dissent. “D’you like Jim Harrison?” I asked, casting around in my mind for any other Zen-minded writer who came from Michigan.

“Sure. I read
Warlock
and some other book by him. Better than Saul Blow or John Updick. Man, I can’t stand those guys. Best place I ever found for buying books was Taiwan, man — I’d go into this store, buy five books, read ’em, and sell ’em back to the guy the next week. I remember two books I got there. One was
The Big Sleep
. The other was by this guy called Ben Garcia, and I’m ashamed now that I gave it back. Ben Garcia, I’ll always remember the name.” He shook his head at the memory. “You could tell his wasn’t a learned style or anything, but this guy had
truth! It was a true book, man, a true book. About this Mexican who lived with the Indians. I remember its beginning: ‘I’ve got a ranch, wife, and kids, but for seventy years I feel like I’m living in a coffin. Ranching, making money — none of it means a thing.’ That’s how it starts, man. Only book he ever wrote. True book, man, fuckin’ true book.

“Taiwanese, though, they only like food. When I asked my students what they wanted for their birthday, they’d just say, ‘Food,’ man. That’s why you’ll find a Chinese restaurant anywhere you go. Anywhere in the world, man, you go and you’ll find a Chinese restaurant — even Grenada, or Huehuetenango.”

Noticing his four-year-old son careening like a dervish around the room, Joe suddenly told him to stop. Abruptly, the boy sat down where he was, cupped his hands, and folded his legs in a perfect lotus posture. Eyes closed, he fell into a silent meditation.

“Man, I was reading Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography the other day,” Joe started up again. “Chaplin, man, the only guy I know who started out life with no ideals — just tryin’ to survive — and then he got famous and started havin’ ideals. Great, man. Fuckin’ great!” And then there was more, about R. K. Narayan and
Travels with My Aunt
, about the infighting of monasteries and piano techniques, about bilingualism and the chess game that lay finished in one corner. And finally, it began to rain, pittering and pattering on all the flimsy roofs and walls.

“
Shito-shito
,” said Joe softly. “And
goro-goro
for thunder.
Zā-zā
for heavy rain.
Pica-pica
for starlight. You don’t have words for these things. Just sounds, man, perfect sounds.”

And I thought how well you could always hear rain here, on wooden walls and roofs, in every Japanese poem and home.

A
S THE
O
CTOBER
days eased on, Autumn stole like a thief into Kyoto, in one fluent succession of days so calm they took my breath away. Wandering through the buoyant days, I felt I had never known autumn before, not even in New England. For the mild and milky afternoons were graced with a distinctly Japanese touch, unintrusive in its effects, and hesitant, and still. The reticence gave dimension to the beauty.

Sometimes it rained, but when it did, it truly poured; other times, everything was a radiance of blue. The weather here was rarely indifferent, rarely caught in the bleary in-betweens of England; whatever the inflection, it usually seemed unqualified, and the days often passed with a kind of metronomic regularity, of sun and rain and sun and rain and shine. Sometimes the rain came down steadily, relentlessly, with an unlifting persistence that blurred the world for days; other times, mornings dawned crisper and clearer than any I could remember outside the Himalayas in winter. Occasionally, the two extremes would alternate on a single day, but still, even then, the pattern never wavered: either rapturous or foul.

Besides, Kyoto was lovely in the mist — the air rising clear above the hills, the dogs barking in the hillside temples. The singing cries of children rang out in the ringing air, and everything was green and cleansed. Kyoto back streets were lovely too, on shiny afternoons after days of heavy rain: the tangerine trees in bloom, and monks on slow-moving bicycles, and ladies bent over rain-washed alleyways, rearranging flowers. The Heian Shrine was all patterns of sunlight and reflections in the water:
girls crouched meditative over ponds; orange gates solemn under blazing autumn skies.

Autumn, moreover, was beginning to be observed in every corner of Kyoto, as a religion might be, but in a place where religions were often both secular and consumerist. Coffee shops now were advertising “Autumn ice cream sundaes,” and vending machines, like towel-bearing waiters, were changing their offerings from cold to hot. One trendy boutique had chalked a new slogan on its window: “Autumn is the season to do pretty things for you.” And at Kōshien Stadium, where the local baseball team, the Hanshin Tigers, was playing its last game of the season, the air was thick with elegy. Before the game began, the great star of the Tigers, the huge and gentle Oklahoma farmboy Randy Bass, got up on the rostrum, bowed all round, and stepped down again. Then he got up on the rostrum, bowed all round, and came down. Then he got up … eleven times in all, while Bass flags fluttered everywhere and a little boy next to me, in a flowing white happi coat with “R. Bass” on its back, looked on in wonder. After the game ended, every member of the team came out onto the field and bowed in unison to the fans. For fifteen minutes, not a supporter left the stadium. All of them — all of us — stood to attention, singing every last verse of the sober, martial Tiger fight song, in one massed, mournful choir. Here, I thought, was a team in last place, thirty-six games out of first place, which had lost two games out of every three for more than six months — yet still its faithful were rising to give it this heartfelt show of support.
Sayōnaras
were hosannas here.

A few days later, on another brilliant morning, the trees beginning to turn under skies that were blue and puffy white, I went to see one of the three great occasions of the Kyoto year, the Jidai Matsuri, or Festival of the Ages, in the Imperial Palace.

When I arrived, an hour or so before the procession was to begin, the performers were relaxing backstage, on the lawns of the spacious compound. Little girls whose ghost-white faces and twisted hairdos reproduced the high elegance of Sei Shōnagon and Murasaki sat erect in priceless kimono under trees. Old wooden carriages stood at rest on gravel walkways, forgotten props from some period movie. Wrinkled men in fierce warriors’ dress glared for cameras in the shadeless courtyards. Incarnations of great figures from the city’s past, the performers were as shiny as the apple-polished day around them.

And as the parade began, one stately procession of spirits walking and breathing through the high-rise town —
daimyō
and
samurai
, courtiers and geisha, caparisoned and costumed, and fighters all in armor, watched in respectful silence by the crowds — I could not help but think of the last such celebration I had seen, just two months before I arrived in Japan: Carnival in Havana. It was an absurd comparison, I knew, yet the difference was as striking as between real life and art. For Cuba, however circumscribed by government edict and reduced by poverty, was still one pulsing, writhing explosion of lust and liquor, of bikinied girls and wriggling dragons and foot-high paper cups of beer foaming over beside the seaside Malecón. Here, by contrast, all was grave formality. Boys in black walked two by two, in synchronized steps, playing pipes; ancients regal on slow-stepping horses passed in noiseless dignity across the gravel; girls as stately as Heian courtiers glided with phantom steps through coffee-shop streets. The audience was as silent as a congregation. Everything, timed to the moment, was as rigid as a catechism.

All festivals, of course, are acts of collective myth-making, chances for a nation to advertise its idealized image of itself. In Cuba, for all the privations, that meant abandon, gaiety, and bacchanal; here, it meant mellifluous order, solemnity, and grace. In Cuba, one could feel the effusions of a passionate, rhetorical people able and eager to give themselves over to the sentiments they voiced so recklessly; here, the effect was one of
strange, almost awestruck, disengagement. It seemed as if the Japanese were almost paying homage to the fact of ritual itself — and to the religion of Japan — so that the ceremony became pageant, and the festival a kind of memorial service.

Before the day was out, however, this, like most of my generalities about Japan, found its refutation in the country’s other side, the side that came out after dark — in this case, in the mysterious Fire Festival held that very night in the village of Kurama, in the hills to the north. I had heard for days how terrible the crowds would be, so I took pains to leave home early, arriving at the train station just as the late-afternoon sun was turning faces to gold and catching the firelights in hair. This was the magic hour of the Kyoto autumn, the last hour of light in the waning days: the hills silhouetted with a shocking clarity, the sky a burnished strip of gold and silver.

The minute the train drew into the station, the whole huge crowd piled in until we were packed as tightly as nuts in a bag of Japanese sweets. I bumped against rows of silky hair, was shoved into pockets of expensive perfume, buried myself in a new Springsteen tape. Through all the crush, the Japanese remained unfailingly calm, some of them even sleeping where they stood.

As soon as we arrived at the village, the crowds piled out again and into a steep, narrow main street, so thick with bodies that one could scarcely move. A smell of bonfires redolent of Guy Fawkes Night, on a blazing, chill November evening in England, the details of the world smoothed down now in the dark. Lanterns all about, and the shadows of hills, and ashes spitting into the night like fireflies in some Peter Brook production. Along the tiny, toylike streets, the crowds expectant, a loudspeaker conferring on everything an air of panic and authority.