The Lady and the Monk (18 page)

Yet in the end, the fact that we were both speaking in this
pared-down diction made us both, I felt, somewhat gentler, more courteous, and more vulnerable than we would have been otherwise, returning us to a state of innocence. In speaking a simplified English, we were presenting simpler and clearer accounts of ourselves, edited down, with the rough spots filtered out. Reduced to essentials, in fact, and bare declarative sentences dominated by basic adjectives, we ended up speaking with a little of the clenched, suggestive clarity, the clean simplicity, of Japanese poetry. And since she spoke always in images, and I tended to mirror her speech, our conversations grew more and more lyrical, and more so still, since the Japanese words I had learned, I had largely learned from the poems of Yosano Akiko.

I knew very well that this kind of lyricism was offhand, and almost second nature in this country, and that it reflected in part just Sachiko’s limited command of English; I knew, too, that: this kind of phrasing, which sounded so poetic to me, could often be formulaic in a land where people thought in images (Saikaku had once composed 23,500
renga
, or linked verses, in a single day; even the future prime minister had composed 2,000 haiku). I noticed too how every English metaphor I explained to her — “raining cats and dogs,” being “the apple of my eye” — struck her as ineffably poetic. Yet still I could not easily resist the sustained delicacy of the terms she used and the sense of moment, as well as depth, she brought to every meeting. Her emotions seemed as exquisitely worn as her seasonal bracelets or earrings, and the words she used had a kind of otherworldly, romantic Zen flavor — or, at least, a sense of clarity and calm that seemed to cut to the heart of Zen and to the very notion of depth in Japan. She made our friendship seem a sacrament.

And all the while, the brilliant blue-sky afternoons kept coming, day after day as clear as road reflectors, and the hills of Kyoto began to blaze with reds, the trees along the canals to light up like gold. And on these shining days of autumn, the sky shifting
from milky white to blue, the trees a rhapsody of colors, I felt the brightness of the Japanese autumn was like nothing I had ever seen before: such hope and stillness in the air. Tingling mornings in shiny coffee shops, dazzled afternoons among the white-robed priests: singing Handel days of rapture and precision.

A
S AUTUMN DREW
towards an end, I found myself returning one day with Sachiko to Kobe, and on the train, as we sat side by side, she reached up and unclasped, for the first time ever, her mother-of-pearl comb, letting her hair fall in a rush down the right side of her face. The suddenly loosened sensuality hit me like a shock. “This year,” she said, “Autumn more more beautiful. I see beautiful color, and many flower, and cosmos flower, little messenger of winter. But sometimes I sad. I thinking moon soon full, then small again; my heart little same. Now full. But future, I don’t know. Maybe very empty.” In response, I told her Van der Post’s story of how the moon renewed itself.

She nodded slowly, with determination. “I want build strong heart. Please you help. I want very strong, so when you go, I not so sad. Sometimes I little fragile” (she had learned the word from a Sting album). “But now I more confidence. Before, I say, ‘Be careful! He bird! He stay in Japan only one year.’ But now heart control, very difficult. I open window and you give me sunshine.” She smiled at me warmly. “Santa Barbara sunshine.”

Already, I could tell, she was savoring the poignancy our walks would have in memory, smoothed down and elegized by its sepia tints. Already she was composing — and relishing — her reminiscences. And yet, with half her mind, wondering whether a happy Western ending might not be better than a melancholy Japanese one.

In Kobe itself, city of foreign romance, we made our way, in the blithe blue morning, to the silent modernist spaces of Port
Island, walking through avenues of glass. When once she saw a piece of litter on the spotless walkway — the first blemish I could remember seeing in two months in Japan — she could not hide her shame. “I’m very sorry,” she said, bending down to snatch it up. “This place very dirty. Japan not so clean place.” I could not explain to her that it was far and away the cleanest place I had ever seen, and so we went on talking, and walking, amidst the glinting high-rises and Californian plazas of this spacey world, the stores called Printemps and Los Abrigados and Orso. She asked me which of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons I liked, and told me how much she loved Goethe’s
Faust
, which she had read three times. Once, she explained, she had been fascinated with the Tarot too, but then had chosen to put it aside, after foretelling some uncomfortably dark truths about her cousin. She went on — though Paul Kennedy had yet to hit the best-seller list in Japan — that every country had to go through its cycle of power, as Egypt, Greece, India, China, England, France, and America had done. “Now Japan Number One,” I said, and she was bemused. “Soon,” she replied, as all Japanese did, “Korea more more strong.” Whether this was fatalism or a spur to greater effort, the Japanese seemed alone in the world in assuming they were about to be overtaken.

Later, as we walked, she talked about her love of “macaroni Westerns” and explained how Diana Ross had changed her look to appeal to whites; and then, of a sudden, how she had won a school oratory contest with her heartfelt account of the Hiroshima bombing, which had left her aunt sterile.

At times, I realized, it was easy to interpret too much — as well as too little — from the way she had to fashion elaborate English packages, wrapped up in images, analogies, and parallels, to get her meaning across to me. Yet still Sachiko’s words rang out like music after the more familiar Californian diction of “coping” and “sharing” and “parenting.” I was falling in love, in a sense, with the fairy tales she made of even the smallest of our encounters — “If you not here, then flower not open,” or “Where
your white horse? I think you prince”; she not only quoted but lived out the ancient poems I had always sought.

Then, walking into the Portopia Hotel, we came, unexpectedly, upon what resembled a Japanese production of
Gatsby
: the whole yawning lobby was taken up with men in black ties and tuxedos, girls with Isadora Duncan hats above black flappers’ dresses.

“Is there some kind of marriage going on?”

“No marriage,” she said soberly. “These lady little hostess feeling. Not real people.”

“But this is a hotel. And these men seem to belong to some company.”

“This Japanese system,” she went on. “If company have party, many hostess here. Wife must always stay in home. If man introduce wife, very terrible feeling. Then company give little hostess.”

“But isn’t this very expensive?”

“Very expensive,” she said solemnly, stealing a glance over at a hostess as she might at a gangster’s Rolls-Royce. “Night-world person, very sad eye,” she whispered, with a faint tremble that suggested she would like to turn to other things. “Please we go upstairs?”

Upstairs, in the coffee shop, she was a bouncing girl again, excitedly explaining how this was the very hotel where she had stayed a year before, stealing away from her husband for the first time ever and buying an a-ha ticket for several times the forty-dollar price, and then, after the concert, coming by chance upon her heartthrob Morten. The moment still glowed inside her like first love. When she had met him, she said, in the elevator, she had given him a present: What did I think it was? Flowers? No. A ring? No. A record? No, a book. Oh, Inoue Yasushi? No, a book about Zen. Because, she explained, she had read that he was a devout man who had almost become a priest. And this book was the best way for a foreigner to get to the heart, the very soul, of her country.

Just as I was about to wonder about her judgment, though, she took me, as ever, by surprise. “But I not want visit this man’s house in London,” she went on. “On stage, I look him, very easy, very fun. But in his life, I not want talk. I think he not remember me. Maybe he never read book. He not know my name. But not important. I always keep him in my heart.” The quintessential Japanese balance, I thought: to surrender all of yourself to an illusion, and yet somewhere, in some part of yourself, to know all the while that it is an illusion.

Meanwhile, Sachiko was meandering again into an account of her life and telling me about her fear of the sea, and how a carp would suddenly bob up and pull her down, down into its mysterious depths, where it was bottomless and dark. The sky was all right, she said, because it could not exert such a pull on her, and the jungle was okay, though she feared its central darkness. She told me, too, how Madonna was traveling with a fourteen-year-old boy, because of her conviction that in an earlier life, she had been a boy who died at fourteen.

“Madonna is like an elephant,” I said facetiously.

“Very different,” she answered quietly, and grave. “She jaguar. Very beautiful, very dangerous, man-eating jaguar.”

I, for my part, told her about malls in California, and Valley Girls, about gay waiters, and husbands who did the cooking. All this she seemed to find remarkable. “Why? Whattt? True??” I told her that trains were not invariably on time in America, and she could not even digest this kind of aberration. “Why? How? Not possible, I think.” “Well,” I began, Reaganesque in my evasions, “sometimes they are broken.” “Really?
Hontō ni?
Why? How possible?” “Well, maybe it is an old train and not perfect.” “Why? How?” She frowned uncertainty back at me. “I not understand!”

Later, as the afternoon went on, I taught her some new words — “clever,” “bright,” and “precious.” “Thank you for a precious day,” she dutifully sang back to me. And when the sun got ready to set, I could see the sadness in her eyes. “This day,”
she said slowly as we took our seats on the train, “I open door of heart. Then put memory inside. Then close.”

“Like a safety box?”

She nodded sadly. “Safe box. And when I have ‘myself time,’ then I open and look.”

She paused again, falling silent as we drew towards Kyoto. “Sometimes I want wing, fly away.”

“For a day or two?”

Nodding solemnly, she smiled in shame.

Meanwhile, my occasional dabbling in Zen straggled on. Often, I asked Mark directly about the Zen experience, but more often he gave me glimpses of it when I did not ask. Left to his own devices, he rarely seemed to talk about either his painting or his training. There was, in a sense, no seam in him: cut him in any place, and he was the same. His doctrine was his being as surely as his being was his doctrine.

When I asked him about this reticence one day, he said quietly, “That’s my teacher. He believes that the first thing you must do is get yourself together as a person. The painting’s really just an act of discovery; it’s so direct that it becomes a way of seeing yourself. So, in
sumi-e
, there’s really no difference between the state of your mind and the state of your art. My teacher, for example, has two altars in his house — one devoted to Shibayama and one to Bashō: the abbot and the artist. And he has his own temple on Awajishima. But for him, I think, his painting is a form of meditation.” He fell silent. “Usually, I wouldn’t use that kind of word around foreigners, because they haven’t got a very deep sense of meditation. They think it just means mindlessness, emptying out.”

“Whereas in fact it means mindfulness?”

“Yeah. And emptying out, but with awareness. It’s hard to understand unless you’ve done some sitting. Some of these guys, they’re just incredible. I remember one group of monks
that did
zazen
for forty-nine straight days after their head monk died. I was amazed, but when I thought about it, it really wasn’t so strange. Their teacher just believed that
zazen
was the only truth and that was the way to go.”

In
sumi-e
, he said, as in haiku or in any Zen training, the aim was to develop a discipline so sure and a spirit so true that one could afford to be utterly spontaneous; to get into such a state of deliberateness that as soon as one put pen to paper, one would produce something powerful and true (like Shakespeare, perhaps, never blotting a line). Thus a
sumi-e
painting should be quick and direct as an ax cutting wood (akin, I thought, to Shelley’s definition of poetry as “a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed”). Instantaneous in its execution, a
sumi-e
painting should catch the moment before it fled; and let the moment speak, unclouded by hesitations or revisions. And though this sounded strange to me at first, I recalled how, whenever I had tried to record dreams, I had had to transcribe the instant before the moment fled, without thinking or even realizing I was writing. If I waited even a minute, the mood was gone and the images would fade; if I waited any longer, it would soon be impossible even to remember that I had ever had a dream.

The most eloquent aspect of Mark’s explanation, though, was simply his example; he lived Zen a good deal more than he talked about it — indeed, one sign of this was that he spoke very little at all, and then only with a slow, and prudent, settledness. And whether this was the cause of his feeling for Japan, or its effect — or, more likely, both — he seemed to know exactly where he stood, and so had found the self and life he wanted.

As I read deeper in the Zen poets, I soon stumbled upon Ikkyū, the fifteenth-century sword-wielding monk of Daitokuji, who had entered a temple at the age of six and gone on to express his contempt for the corrupt monasteries of his time in famously controversial poems. Like the Sixth Dalai Lama, in his way,
Ikkyū had been a patron — and a laureate — of the local taverns, and of the pretty girls he had found therein; and like his Tibetan counterpart, or John Donne in our own tradition, he had deliberately conflated the terms of earthly love with those of devotion to the Absolute. The very name he gave himself, “Crazy Cloud,” had played subversively on the fact that “cloud water” was a traditional term for monks, who wandered without trace, yet “cloud rain” was a conventional idiom for the act of love. His image of the “red thread” ran through the austere surroundings of his poems as shockingly as the scarlet peonies of Akiko. And in his refusal to kowtow to convention, the maverick monk had turned every certainty on its head: whores, he said, could be like ideal monks — since they inhabited the ideal Zen state of “no mind” — while monks, in selling themselves for gold brocade, were scarcely different from whores. Many of his verses trembled with this ambiguity. One couplet, taken one way, was translated as “Making distinctions between good and evil, the monk’s skill lies in knowing the essential condition of the Buddha and the Devil”; taken another way, it meant: “That girl is no good, this one will do; the monk’s skill is in having the appetite of a devilish Buddha.”