The Lady and the Monk (17 page)

At times, in fact, I wondered whether, in encouraging her to express her dreams of flight, I was falling prey to the temptation I had already noticed in some of the more softhearted of the foreigners in Japan: the urge to give the Japanese a glimpse of the world on the other side. When she had attended her first tea ceremony, Siobhan had told me, she had found herself, this radical feminist pagan from the Haight, surrounded by elegantly prim young housewives-in-the-making, getting their training in all the ladylike arts. The school play, she could not help but notice on a nearby bulletin board, was
Cinderella
. And seeing all of them preparing for a life of simple self-denial, she had started inviting some of what she called “the good girls” back to her hippie commune, to get a taste of forbidden freedom. Later, she said, she had heard them excitedly telling their friends about their “wild night of sin.”

I wondered, too, whether in encouraging Sachiko to indulge all the hopes that Japan so strenuously teaches its children to suppress, or to enjoy only in specific, and very circumscribed, conditions, I was schooling her in desires she could never fully realize. Encouraging people to realize their potential was an especially dangerous occupation in a country that taught them to fulfill their duty instead.

Most of all, I wondered how deep the ambiguities between us really reached. For even in the same tongue, we were rarely speaking the same language. To begin with, of course, she was married, and I did not know what exactly that betokened — especially in a culture where marriage was often nothing more than separation by another name. Much of the time, Sachiko functioned as if she had no family at all, using her society’s sense of extended ties to find parents or friends to baby-sit for her, and tuning out her marriage as if it were just a distant radio station. It was almost as if being a mother and a wife was a role to her, and thus a self she could shrug off as easily as her
mother’s clothes or voice; she seemed, in fact, less fettered — or more resourceful about slipping free of fetters — than most single people that I knew at home.

She, in turn, of course, knew little of foreign codes of friendship and how to translate them into terms she knew. So every time she said, “My children little want see you,” I did not know to what extent that meant that it was she who wanted to see me. And every time I replied, “I want to see your children,” I did not know if that just meant that I wanted to see her. And even though traveling had schooled me, I had thought, in the seven types of ambiguity, and more, I still had to admit that Sachiko was the end of the line in this field, the state of the art: for Japan itself was firmly based on people’s not saying what they meant and on the accompanying assumption that what was meant was rarely what was said. And women in particular were encouraged — even trained — to project an air of charming acquiescence that suggested everything and meant nothing. In a land where language itself was a force of separation as much as communion, where foreigners were invariably treated as symbolic carriers of abroad, and where everything was turned into soft focus — surrounded by an all-embracing vagueness — it all added up to the most troubling of riddles.

A
S AUTUMN DEEPENED
, bringing with it new intensities, I took myself off one morning to Nara. After listening, in silence, to my story of the lady and the monk, Mark had lent me a tape of Laurens Van der Post delivering a lecture on the unlikely, even unpromising, subject of “The Unwritten Literature of the Bushmen.” And as I got on the train, crowded now with tidy, festive families, old couples going on temple tours, a young monk shyly turning his face from tourist cameras, and packs of schoolgirls on their way to Dreamland (the modern amusement park that was now the most popular attraction in the ancient capital), I turned on the tape and fell into the rhythms of the old Dutch farmer’s swelling, bardic cadences. Birds, he was saying, in every kind of folklore, stood for the world of the heavens, emissaries from above. Birds were messengers from the gods bringing inspiration to earthbound men. That was why among the American Indians, and the tribes of Africa too, chiefs traditionally wore crowns of feathers, as if their heads were flocks of inspirations. That was also why Plato called the mind a cage of birds.

I thought of this as we rolled through the countryside, and of my own story about birds, and of how Sachiko always referred to me as a winged ambassador from abroad. I thought of how much I wanted to share this thought with her, so sonorously phrased, by a disciple of her brother’s guru, Jung, and how strange it was that stories and images that had come to me unbidden seemed much more pointed than I knew. And as the train rolled into Nara, I was jolted from my daydreams by the
Buddhist capital itself, where a local department store was offering a cup of gold-flaked coffee for more than three hundred dollars, and posters of Madonna fluttered from the souvenir stalls.

Inside the famous Deer Park, though, one was back inside a more changeless Japan. Families were enjoying picnics on the grass, deer grazing at their sides as in the Oxford college where I had cavorted as a boy. Ladies strolled through galleries of red, papers held up to their ashen faces to shield them from the sun. A group of smiling elders sauntered through a reception line of blazing orange trees, the sun catching the copper in the women’s hair, the men framed by an extravagance of gold. Now and then, the tolling of a distant bell summoned us back, so it seemed, to a higher time and self.

Making my way up to a temple terrace, I leaned on a railing and watched the blue hills in the distance, half shrouded now in wood smoke. Coins clattered in the collection box behind me, and an old woman grabbed the clump of white and red and orange ropes and rang and rang and rang the temple bell. An aged couple asked me to take their picture, framed against the falling leaves. Around us, the sun came down with the cleansing intensity of mountain light.

In Nara, I saw a shrine with statues of moonlight and sunlight, three thousand lanterns bobbing above the moss. Across town in the Hall of Dreams, I visited the famous Korean Bodhisattva, salvaged, like so much else here, by the visiting American Ernest Fenollosa. Outside the Great Buddha, commanding the largest wooden building in the world, I saw a wandering mendicant, a mountain monk, in white robes and straw sandals, standing stock-still, swathed in a curious mix of animal skins and bells, muttering shamanic chants.

In Nara, the temples were more hidden than in Kyoto, left to themselves, with room to breathe. To get to them, one had to change trains twice, at sleepy country stations, walk for many minutes through crooked, nameless lanes, ascend unforgiving
flights of steps; one had, in short, to earn the temples, and travel away from the workaday world — and self. A visit here could only be a pilgrimage.

Later, returning in the falling light to Kyoto, I descended once more into Van der Post as he spun out Bushmen tales of how a man had spent his whole life pursuing the reflection of a bird he had once seen, and only grabbed a feather on the day he died; and another of how a man had caught the goddess of the moon, but then, through looking in a basket full of starlight and seeing nothing, had lost her too. By the time the train pulled into Kyoto Station, I was lost in the world of the storyteller’s flights and, loath to hurry home, began to walk through narrow lanterned streets and along the Kamo River, lit by a trailing series of red lights.

As I walked, past houses lit up by a brilliant moon, I thought how much the Japanese were a people of the moon, the central image of the first Japanese story I had ever heard. And though they traced their lineage to the Goddess of the Sun, the sun was mostly used now to describe the modern or the public world — the Sun Plaza American-style convenience store, the Sunflower Hotel, and rows of Sunny cars were all five minutes from my home. The moon, by contrast, was the part they kept jealously to themselves. In their hearts, I thought, the Japanese were still a people of the Rising Moon. And just as I was dwelling on this, and recalling how Kyoto itself had once been known as “Moon Capital,” I turned on the tape again and — out of nowhere — heard Van der Post talking about how the moon in Japan was always three times larger than in any other place and how the Japanese had a deep affinity with the moon, renewing themselves, after earthquakes or wars, as cyclically as the moon.

The moon, I recalled, was the one possession that even monks did not renounce. When he lost his house in a fire, the Zen poet Masahide wrote, he found occasion for new hope: he now enjoyed a better view of the rising moon.

* * *

When next I visited Sachiko’s home, for dinner, she sat me down and put on a tape of
Howard the Duck
. Gloomily I surveyed Duck magazines, Duck TV shows, and a host of lame Duck jokes. “I much love George Lucas,” she averred. “Spielberg too. They have very innocent child heart. Coppola little different feeling; he more big brother heart. You see this movie
Goonies
?”

I shook my head no.

“
Gremlins
?”

“I’m sorry, no.” She looked disappointed. “But I do like Kurosawa.”

She now looked very grave. “Japanese person not so like this man,” she said. “Foreigner person like, no problem. But Japanese not so like. Little show-biz feeling.”

The next thing I knew, though, she had slipped into her other, deeper self, drawing out her guitar and breaking into a series of piercing, lovely lullabies. I could see her eyes as she sang begin to glitter at their corners; I could hear a quaver as she hit the high notes. She sang another wistful ballad, then, about a man looking at the pressed flowers that his lover had left for him, and again, as she sang, her eyes filled with tears.
Monoganashii
, she explained, the beauty of what’s fleeting.

In terms of everything I knew, things were fast becoming more and more slippery and strange. When I gave her a couple of poems I had written for her in Nara, she looked up at me with a kind of melting intensity and said, “Me too.” And when she showed me an album of her wedding photos, and I admired the loveliest one of all, of the bride in a white veil, caught in golden light, she simply peeled it out and handed it over to me. Now, I felt, I was not only gate-crashing her marriage but actually taking possession of her memories.

Whenever I tried to ask her about her husband, though, or his family, she never said anything except, “My husband very good man, but weak heart.” If ever I tried to get anything more out of her, she just laughed it off, and said,
“Chotto muzukashii”
(It’s a little difficult). Her husband, in the telling, was nothing more than a kind of spectral, distant authority figure on the margins of her life, spoken of in the terms that people in a large company might reserve for the CEO. So I never really got a sense of his features, his preferences, his self; he was just a kind of shadowy bogeyman who, like many a Japanese man, dutifully did “family service” on his one day off a week, filled up his spare hours with jigsaw puzzles, and was too scared of foreigners ever to meet me or any of his wife’s other foreign friends.

Then, finally, seemingly heavy with emotion, she tried to put into words why we should not meet in Kyoto. “I’m sorry,” she began, “my heart much change,” and I got ready for a brush-off — a prudent one, I thought, in the circumstances, and one in which I almost wanted to assent. “Before, talking very fun, very easy. But now …” she went on, and I did not have a clue in what direction her heart had changed, when this had happened (since past tense and perfect were elided in her English), and whether she now felt closer than before or more distant.

I was also beginning to realize how treacherous it was to venture into a foreign language if one could not measure the shadows of the words one used. When I had told her, in Asuka,
“Jennifer Beals ga suki-desu. Anata mo”
(I like Jennifer Beals — and I like you), I had been pleased to find a way of conveying affection and yet, I thought, a perfect distance. But later I looked up
suki
and found that I had delivered an almost naked protestation of love. Often, too, I would use the particle
ga
, never remembering that it could be both nominative and accusative. And both of us, in other ways, were forever confusing subject with object. So she would say, “You help me,” and it was a long time before I realized that she meant, “I’ll help you” (and not just because one good turn deserved another). Thus both of us ended up like children in the dark, flinging around pronouns at random till it was utterly unclear who was meant to be doing what to whom. When we got to sentences like “I’ll call your house,” the ambiguities became positively disabling.

Worse still, of course, matters of causation were invariably scrambled and Humpty-Dumptified, since the Japanese put their “because” in the opposite place from where we do. Thus I, in essaying “I like you because you are kind,” would come out with the equivalent of “You are kind because I like you,” and she would look back at me, frowning more than ever. Noticing that she still tended to use the Japanese word
dakara
in every sentence, even when speaking English, I thought I was doing her a favor by teaching her “therefore.” But this only vexed the chaos further. “I little sad, therefore you are leaving,” she said, and I recalled — too late! — that
dakara
could mean “because” as well as “therefore.” And she often used “yes” where we say “no” (“You’re not cold?” “Yes!”).

And just as Sachiko, I could tell, became franker and bolder — more direct — when she was speaking English, shedding her inhibitions in translation, so I began to see that I too was probably more daring, more intimate, more reckless with myself, when I ventured into Japanese, throwing around terms I had found in Rexroth’s love poems without ever really knowing the nuances they carried. Meanwhile, of course, nearly all her shadings were lost to me, and I felt sorry for her having to box her feelings into the few adjectives she knew, throwing heavy terms over subtle, fleeting nuances — like the loose and flabby U.S. Army jacket she wore over her tiny body. Once, when I had to leave her house ten minutes early, she said, “I very sad,” and another time, when I simply called her up, she said, “I very happy” — and I began to think her unusually sensitive, or else prone to bold and violent extremes, when really she was reflecting nothing but the paucity of her English vocabulary, all the more frustrating, I imagined, for one accustomed to a language that so finely distinguished between melancholy and mournfulness, wistfulness and sorrow. Talking in a language not one’s own was like walking on one leg; when two people did it together, it was like a three-legged waltz.