The Lady and the Monk (12 page)

I, of course, was hardly better, turning Japanese nouns into adjectives, using feminine forms for myself, and sometimes just deploying English words, with random vowels hopefully stuck in at the end, foolishly confident in the belief that Japan had incorporated an enormous number of English terms (
Hamu to tōsto, kudasai!
). Having picked up most of my Japanese from a businessmen’s handbook and bilingual editions of poetry — a
fitting combination, I had thought at the time — I was able to deliver nothing but sentences like “Please give your secretary the autumn moon.”

To complicate matters even further, Sachiko-san, in the classic Japanese manner, contrived to make everything as ambiguous, as circumspect, as consensual as possible — even in English. If ever she wanted to use the English word for
itsumo
, which I had been taught meant “always,” she always said, “usually,” so as to soften the assertion and allow for the exception that might one day prove the rule (leading to such statements as “Usually, the first day of the year is January one”). And where we would say yes, she always said
tabun
, or “maybe.” When once she told me that Yuki was sick, I replied, with empty assurance, “I’m sure she’ll be better soon.” “
Tabun
,” she replied. “Maybe.” “No, really,” I insisted, “I’m sure there’s no problem.” “Maybe,” she replied, all caution. The effect was one of instant melancholy, though really she must have been as sure as I that all would be okay. And of course, every adjective that was less than entirely positive — and much else besides — was qualified with a
chotto
, meaning “little,” so that Frankenstein became “a little strange,” and traveling to the moon “a little difficult.”

Much of this, clearly, was as much an act of courtesy as of caution, and not so different, really, from the reflexive softenings in which I too had once been trained in England. Always prefer a rhetorical question to a bald assertion (“Might it not be easier perhaps to try this road?”). Never disagree outright (“I’m not absolutely sure that’s true”), and sometimes soften the dissent further, with — what else? — a rhetorical question (“It’s so hard to know for certain, don’t you find?”). If absolutely forced to say no, say anything other than “no,” diluting every term in the sentence (“I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid it might be just a little difficult”). None of these were lies, as such, only stratagems for easing the social machinery.

Thus the intricacies of Japanese protocol were compounded by those of my own English training, and both were made
nonsensical by the relentless exchange of gibberish. Whenever I said anything that made her happy, she assumed I was being polite, and whenever she replied, I assumed this was mere Japanese indirectness. So I would say, “Do you want to have some coffee?” and she would answer, “Okay. Do you want some coffee?” and I would have to say,
lie, kekkō desu
(“No, thank you, I’m fine as I am”), and both of us would end up exactly where we had started.

“Should we meet on Tuesday?” I asked her. Sachiko-san gave me a smile. “No problem! Yesterday, Thursday, okay!”

Nonetheless, we did occasionally manage to meet, at almost the same time and place, and one day I found myself sitting with her in a shrine, on a bare wooden step, the light coming through the ginkgo trees as we waited for Yuki’s English lesson to conclude. Carried away with excitement for my latest enthusiasm, I asked her if she preferred Mishima or Tanizaki.

“All Japanese writer, I like,” she replied. “But my favorite is little foreigner man. His name Hess-e.”

“Hermann Hesse?”

She nodded solemnly. “I much like this man.
Siddoharuta. Narushisu and Gōrudoman
. And
Petā Kamejindo
. When I little high school size, I all reading.”

“But that’s incredible,” I said, pulling out of my bag the book I was reading at the moment, in this city of artists and anchorites,
Narziss and Goldmund
.

She, too, looked taken aback. “You read this book?”

“Yes! It was my favorite when I was a boy.”

“Maybe you your country reading, I, too, same time!”

“Yes. And did you know that Hesse was a close friend of Jung, whom your brother is studying? And that he lived in Switzerland, where your brother lives? When I was in high school, this book was the only common link between my boarding school in England and California, where I went home in the holidays!”

She shook her head in amazement. “Also, I like Emily Brontë. You know
Storm on Hill?
”

“
Wuthering Heights?
”

“Maybe.”

“That’s one of my favorites too.”

Minutes later, we were seated on a bench in the flowering gardens of the Imperial Palace, while three hundred school-children sat in rows on the gravel before us, patiently listening to a pep talk from their teachers. Sending her daughter off to play amidst the trees, where she set about making a pretty brocade of leaves (Japanese children had a remarkable gift, I noticed, for playing with flowers; their training in Nature awareness started early), Sachiko-san started telling me the story of the “North Wind’s Daughter,” an endearing children’s story about a bear and his sorrow, made all the more engaging by her ideogrammatic delivery.

“Bear live in house. Mother, father, grandma, all die. All brother, sister, die — hunting! Bear very sad in his heart. But he has much pride; he never not cry. He think music very happy sound, then he little make sign, ‘Please. I need Music Teacher. I have money.’

“Then much banging on door, very big noise. Man in blue there. He have trumpet. Then he play music. Sun shine, and set. Bear very happy. Then very sad in his heart. He try trumpet — but sound very bad sound. Then he blow much much, break tooth. He say man, ‘Please you teach me.’ Man say, ‘You cannot play. You tooth break. Please you give me blueberry pie.’ Bear give him pie, but in his heart very sad.

“Then blue woman come here his house, North Wind. She has violin. She play violin, very beautiful sound, little silver staircase sound. Sun shine, and set. Bear in his heart very happy. He try violin. But very bad music. He very sad. Very cold. Woman say, ‘Please look your icebox. Please give me pineapple pie.’ He give.

“Then much banging his door. Very pretty child there, North
Wind daughter. She blue! Bear sad. He has no food in freezer. But girl say, ‘Please you close eye. Please you count.’ Bear try, then open eye: hot cakes and chair! Bear very happy. Then girl say, ‘Please you close eye. Please you count.’ Bear try, then open eye. Then bear very sad. She not there. She gone. But he still have music, and many beautiful memory.”

“Happy ending?”

“Yes,” she laughed sweetly, her voice like running water, and with that, she took her daughter home.

One delicate autumn day a few days later — the sky now gray, now blue, always like a woman’s uncertain heart, a light drizzle falling, and then subsiding, and falling once more — I met Sachiko outside an Indonesian store, for a trip to Kurama. She was, as ever, girlishly dressed, her hair falling thickly over one side of her face, held back on the other by a black comb with a red-stone heart in its middle; the tongues of her black sneakers hanging out from under lime-green legwarmers.

As we traveled towards the hillside village, she set down her backpack beside her on the train and began telling me excitedly about her friend Sandy, and how it was Sandy who had first introduced her to Zen, Sandy who had first taken her to a temple, Sandy who had first encouraged her to try
zazen
meditation. “I Japanese,” she said softly. “But I not know my country before. Sandy my teacher.” More than that, she said, it was Sandy who had shown her another way of life and given her the confidence to try new things. Sandy, supporting two children alone in a foreign country and at the same time embarked on a full-length course of Zen studies, had shown her that it was possible, even for a woman, to have a strong heart.

Now, she went on, Sandy was planning to send her children back to America for high school. “I dream, maybe Hiroshi go your country, Sandy’s son together. You see this movie
Stand by
Me?
” I nodded. “Very beautiful movie. I want give my son this life. I dream, he little
Stand by Me
world feeling.” And what about her husband’s view on all this? An embarrassed giggle. “I don’t know. Little difficult. But I much dream children go other country.” She paused, deep in thought. “But I also want children have Zen spirit inside, Japanese feeling.” I asked her to explain. “Example — you and Sandy,
zazen
very difficult. Japanese people,
zazen
very easy. I want my children have this spirit.”

“But if your children go away, they may grow distant. Maybe never talk to you. Maybe forget all Japanese things. Wouldn’t that make you sad?”

“
Tabun
. Maybe.”

“It’s very difficult, I think.”

And so we get off the train, and climb from shrine to shrine, scattered across the steep hills of Kurama, and the rain now drizzles down, now stops again, and the two of us huddle under her umbrella, sweaters brushing, her hair almost falling on my arm. “
Ai to ai gasa
,” I say, thinking of the phrase I had read in a Yosano Akiko poem, describing two people sharing a single umbrella. “Maybe,” she says, with a lilting laugh, and we climb some more, the hills before us resplendent now, and then still higher, in the gentle rain, till we are sitting on a log.

In front of us, the trees are blazing. “I like color now,” she says, pensive. “Later, I not so like. More sad. Leaves die. Many thing change.” And then, carried away by the view, perhaps, she recalls the only other time she has come to this hill. Kurama is only a few miles north of Kyoto, a thirty-minute train ride. But Sachiko has not been here for fifteen years, and all that time, she says, she has longed to return. “I so happy,” she whispers, as if in the presence of the sacred. “I so excited. Thank you. Thank you very much. I very happy. Very fun. Before I coming here, little teenage size, together three best friend. We climbing mountain, I very afraid, because I thinking snake. Much laughing, many joke. Very fun. My friend’s names, Junko, Sumiko, and Michiko. But Osaka now. Very busy, marry ladies.”

We walk down again, through the drizzle and the mist, then up slippery paths, between the trees. “I much love Kurama,” she says quietly, as if in thought. “Sometimes I ask husband come here; he say, ‘You always want play. I very busy. I cannot.’ And come here together children, very difficult. Soon tired. Thank you very much, come here this place with me.”

This is all rather sad. She tells me of her adventures, and the smallness of it all makes me sad again: how, when she was a little girl, she went with her cousin and brother and aunt to a cinema, and her aunt allowed her to go and see
The Sound of Music
alone. “I very scared. All dark. Many person there. But then, film begin, I soon forget. I much love. I dream I Julie Andrews.” She also describes reading about Genghis Khan. “I dream I trip together Genghis Khan. I many trip in my heart, many adventure. But only in my heart.” She tells me how once, last year, for the first time ever, she went alone to Osaka, forty minutes away, to see the Norwegian teenybopper group a-ha in concert, and then, exhilarated by this event, went again that same week to another of their concerts, in Kobe, with her son and her cousin, all three of them sharing a room in a luxury hotel. The night she spent in the hotel, the trip to the coffee shop after the concert, the way she had chanced to see the lead singer’s parents in the coffee shop and then to meet the star himself in an elevator — all live on in her as what seems almost the brightest moment in her life. “I very lucky. I very excited. I dream, maybe next summer, I go this hotel again. See other a-ha concert.”

And when she says, more than once, “I live in Kyoto all life; you come here only one month, but you know more place, very well,” I feel again, with a pang, a sense of the tightly drawn limits of a Japanese woman’s life, like the autumn paths vanishing in mist around us. For I could see that she was saying something more than the usual “Tourists know more of towns than their residents ever do,” and I could catch a glimpse of the astonishing circumscription of her life. Even while her brother had been to
Kansas City to study for three years and was now in his third year of pursuing Jung in Switzerland, she had never really been outside Kyoto. She now worked two mornings a week in a doctor’s office, but it was the same place where she had worked during junior high school and high school, in vacations, just around the corner from her parents’ house. Her cousin, a kind of surrogate sister, sometimes worked in the same place. Her own house was in the next neighborhood down, within walking distance of her parents-in-law’s house. And her mother still called her every night, to see how she was doing.

Every year, she said, her husband got three or four days of holiday, and the trips the family took together on these breaks — to the sea once, and once to Tokyo Disneyland — still lived within them as peak experiences. Even a trip such as the one today, for a few hours to a suburb, seemed a rare and unforgettable adventure.

“Please tell me your adventure,” she begins to say. “Please tell me other country. I want imagine all place,” but I don’t know where to begin, or how to convey them to someone who has never been in a plane, and what cloak-and-dagger episodes in Cuba, or nights in the Thai jungle, will mean to one who has scarcely left Kyoto.

“I dream you life-style,” she goes on, as if sensing my unease. “You are bird, you go everywhere in world, very easy. I all life living only Kyoto. So I dream I go together you. I have many, many dream in my heart. But I not have strong heart. You very different.”

“Maybe. I was lucky that I got used to going to school by plane when I was nine.”

“You very lucky. I afraid other country. Because I thinking, maybe I go away, my mother ill, maybe die. If I come back, maybe no mother here.” Her mother, she explains, developed very serious allergies — because, it seemed, of the new atmospheric conditions in Japan. (All this I found increasingly hard to follow, in part because Sachiko used “allergy” to mean “age” — she
regularly referred to the “Heian allergy,” and when she was talking about “war allergy,” I honestly didn’t know if it was a medical or a historical point she was making. I, of course, was no better, confusing
sabishii
with
subarashii
, and so, in trying to say, “Your husband must be lonely,” invariably coming out with, “Your husband is wonderful. Just fantastic,” which left her frowning in confusion more than ever.)