The Lady and the Monk (20 page)

“Sure, but they’re
incredible
. Believe me, they are
amazing
. Like, in pouring the tea, you’ve got to curl your finger into this exact shape” — she curved it prettily — “which is meant to be the exact shape of the moon two days after it’s new. No way you can do the second-day moon, no way you can do the fourth. You’ve got to make it the third. And there’s a different tea, not just for every season and every month, but for every week! So you have to have this amazing concentration — like aikido too.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Yeah. But I kind of think it’s time to quit. The truth is, the longer you do it, the more you see what you’re supposed to be doing. You get more self-conscious, more uptight — more Japanese, I guess. I remember one day I had been doing tea for two hours, and then I was arranging a flower, while looking out a window. Nobody could see me. Nobody! But this lady came up to me and told me I was sitting wrong. I felt like saying to her, Tuck it! Who cares how I’m sitting if nobody’s here?’ But you can’t do that. So I had to sit the right way, and there’s no way I can sit the wrong way again. I’ve got to be self-conscious even when I’m fucking sitting down! When I first came here, I was just like this kind of happy idiot, stumbling over everything: a real bull in a china shop. But the more sensitive I became to the Japanese, the more self-conscious I had to become. I think I’m burned out.”

Another person at the party, a quiet-minded teacher who had lived for years as an editor in San Francisco, tried to explain to me what had drawn him here. “All my friends in the Bay Area thought I was completely crazy. ‘What do you know about
Kyoto?’ they kept saying. ‘What makes you want to go there?’ ‘I dunno,’ I’d say. And I’d look in the papers and see things like ‘Moon Viewing in Oakland Botanical Gardens,’ and I’d go along to that, and my friends would say, ‘Why? How come? What’s the point?’ And I’d go, ‘I dunno.’ It’s just like this mountain I kept on seeing, and I had to go there. So then I came. I gave myself a year to stay, with an option on another year. And I knew nothing about the place —
nothing
— when I came over; I thought it was just a small town.

“I got a job teaching at a university, and there was this girl who worked in the office there. Anyway, one day, she sent me a card about a play I had produced. I went back to California for ten weeks. And when I came back, I just answered her card. That was in April. In May, we went on a date. In October, we began living together. By February, we were married. Now she’s expecting. It was just one of those things, you know — I thought I was going to leave after one year, and there was this girl saying ‘You’re not going to leave.’ Now, of course, I think that
she
was the mountain I had been seeing all that time.”

Two days later, Mark and I went for Thanksgiving dinner to his friend Etsuko’s house, a fairy-tale mansion in the Japanese context, its intercom-activated gate leading into a garden softly lit with lanterns, its large wooden doors giving onto an exquisitely appointed living room — a museum in miniature — lined with Chinese scrolls and ancient Javanese puppets and books about the art world, in Japanese and English. Bach was floating through the room on a Deutsche Grammophon compact disc, and for appetizers, our hostess placed before us a couple of almond and horseradish wafers.

Etsuko’s situation was more or less typical, so it seemed. Her husband lived in Tokyo, roughly three hundred miles away, and she saw him only occasionally, on weekends, if at all (in all the years he’d known her, Mark had talked to her husband only
once, very briefly, on the phone). She, meanwhile, devoted most of her energy to raising her teenage daughter. But what time and attention she had left over, she threw into a flurry of activities, setting up charitable organizations, helping to run an English-language magazine for visitors, representing her husband’s family at social ceremonies and conferences, and, for the most part, running intercultural institutions aimed at introducing Japan to foreigners and vice versa. Having spent almost half her life abroad, she sought now to act as a kind of ambassador from each world to the other, trying to repair diplomatic relations which were always frail as china.

Serving us the sweetest grapefruit juice I had ever tasted, in cut-glass tumblers, she patiently fielded my questions, explaining how the Japanese had different colors for each wind, as well as for every season, telling me the different words for moonlight on the water, spelling out the name of the insect that was virtually synonymous with dusk. Many of these words, she explained, were suffused with a sense of nostalgia, harking back to the age of Asuka and the versatile Nukata no Okimi, once Empress of Japan; and only then did I realize that on the day Sachiko had taken me to Asuka, she had in fact been introducing me to a woman’s sanctuary, a private, forgotten place charged with the memory of this famous poetess.

Then, with a graceful bow, Etsuko ushered us into her dining room, ringed with beautifully arranged blue cups and a gallery of china plates. She served up chrysanthemums in tiny blue bowls, and fine, rare mushrooms; then, in honor of the day, a huge Thanksgiving turkey; and then, for dessert, sustaining the seasonal motif, a delicate sweet shaped like a chrysanthemum. Over tea — made from a host of Fortnum’s selections, with a separate china cup to keep the water hot — I learned a little more about this unlikely housewife, professional gerontologist, and former student at Edinburgh, who could speak, without strain, about
quattrocento
churches in Florence, Mozart pieces (identified by Köchel number), and the early writings of Fosco
Maraini. She was going to Tuscany soon, she went on, to see various chapels whose art reminded her of a certain style of Chinese painting — “blasphemous though that doubtless is.” She spoke, in French, of her studies at the Sorbonne, of the three years she had spent in Kathmandu, of Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.” She described the latest holdings in the Musée d’Orsay. And I, many fathoms out of my depth and amazed to see someone move in this almost Jamesian aura of refinement, realized anew how, whatever role the Japanese played, they played it so well and took it to such a pitch of excellence that one could never wish to see the part played again. A Beatles freak here was a freak to end all freaks, with five hundred albums in his collection; a gardener was a wholehearted purist who gave all his life to developing a single perfect flower; and a woman of culture was so accomplished at her role that she made her counterparts anywhere else seem puny by comparison. The Japanese played themselves as Gielgud, Hamlet.

A few days later, as the month drew to its end, I awoke at dawn to find my window all fogged over: the first hard frost of winter. Longing to share the moment with someone — I had not experienced winter for three years now — I hurried out into the mild invigoration of the morning to visit Mark. It was a joy undiminished to awaken in the cloudless blue and see the mountains sharp in the distance, to feel the briskness of a winter morning in the sun. The whole world felt uplifted and refreshed: the narrow lanes alive with oranges, old women chattering away below the muted sun, and everywhere a sense of purpose.

My only disappointment, I told Mark as I came into his house, was that I would not be able to see the
hatsu-yuki
, or first snowfall of the year. I would be leaving Kyoto the following day, not to return for a month, and I knew that I would miss the winter’s first moment of silent transformation.

The next day, my last day in Kyoto, Sachiko came to my room again, bringing with her a book by A. A. Milne and a textbook
for an English lesson. I led her up to my tiny space, and there, in the winter dark, I tried to teach her again the words that she might need. We sat on cushions on the tatami, the dark room lit by the glowing orange bar of my single-element heater. Often, in explaining the terms of my own language to her, I felt as if I were explaining them to myself. As I began, slowly, to speak English as a second language, my own tongue came to seem as new to me, and mysterious, as Japanese.

Patiently, sometimes frowning over the words and muttering, “
Muzukashii!”
sometimes giggling away the difficulty, she stumbled through a text about fishermen in Holland. When we were through, she looked at me, there was a long silence, and I stood up in the darkening room to make some tea.

As she wandered round the tiny space, inspecting the
gaijin
in his native habitat, I tried to divert her with some questions. I held up a Christmas card. “Ah, Monet!” she cried. Then a postcard I had bought in a museum. “Rodin!” Then a paperback I had found downtown, in Sony Plaza. “Paddington Bear!”

After the kettle had boiled, I put down two mugs on the table and knelt down on the tatami to show her some earrings I had bought for my mother. She leaned forward till her hair was tickling my face. In the winter darkness of the tiny room, the fire glowing, I brushed back her hair, felt her lips touch mine, her body shaking as if electrified.

Later, we walked along the river in the dusk. Turning, we saw the eastern hills, thick with orange trees, glowing in the dying light. Then, sitting down beside the red-lit river, she sang me a melody from
The Sound of Music
— “Something Good” — about Maria’s escape from her abbey, in a quavering, high, but steady voice. “When I little children size,” she said, “this song my favorite. But I never think I find this feeling. I think I cannot. I always ‘lost lady.’ Now I feel this song more more. Thank you very much.”

There was a long, charged silence on the riverbank. “Autumn now ending,” she said, as we watched the last light leave the hills. And that night, it snowed.

WINTER

Our old older, Our new newer,

Our kind kinder —

Welcome to Japan
.

–
THE SIGN OF MAKITA POWER

TOOLS, GREETING ARRIVALS

IN OSAKA AIRPORT

I
T WAS THE SMELLS
that hit me first: smells of cooking, smells of rotting, smells of people being people — all the smells I had not smelled for months in exquisitely deodorized Japan, where only pleasant fragrances are permitted: the lemon scent of air freshener, the costly glamour of French perfume, an occasional hint of incense. The minute I set foot in Taiwan, I was assaulted by smells, sultry, piquant, and strange: assaulted, too, by spitters and shouters, by offers, importunities, cries of “Why you no buy? Best price for you!” Waiters dropped plates on my table as if they were hot (which they never were), men whispered, “Dollar, dollar,” crowds pushed and shoved and squawked. There was the sudden shock of car crashes in the light-dizzy streets, of winking cabbies, of women in blinding pantsuits who caught my eye and held it.

Three days later, landing in Southeast Asia, I felt again, in a rush, all the things I had been missing in Japan, not so much the roughness now as the spiced softness, the seduction of kerosene lamps and unlit back lanes, the lure of night-market meals and clove-scented villages; thronged festivals, black markets, a flash of white smiles among the trees. The whole whirl of tropical sensations hit me like a fever dream: the darkness full of spirits, and whisper-soft girls in off-the-shoulder dresses; the sound of gonged instruments in the night. None of the hard, purposeful austerity of Japan, but stronger, darker forces in the hot tropic air; here again one was in the realm of the subconscious.

My very first night in Thailand, I found myself standing on the Golden Mount, talking about water buffaloes with an irresistible
shaven-headed twelve-year-old monk in saffron robes and sandals, as together we watched the full moon rise above the diamond capital; half an hour later, in the midst of crowds, I was being befriended by two sidelong-glancing, strangely affable transsexuals. Even the Japanese department stores here, all video smarts and squeaky-clean announcements, were lit up from within by a blast of Thai warmth and laughing dishevelment; and even aseptic Singapore, an aspirant Japan, seemed ripe with the promise of adventure, a veritable Marrakesh after Kyoto, with its unkempt bands of ricksha men, shirts cracked open to their hairless chests, and sharp-faced, lipsticked hookers, brazen in their scarlet shirts. Suddenly, the imagination was given something rough to chew on, a world unedited.

At times, of course, I grew so enamored of my thesis that everything confirmed it: how dowdy were the Chinese, I thought, looking at a group of revelers, gawking clumsily, in my Taipei hotel; how different from the elegant self-possession of the Japanese. And then the people began to speak, and their language — of course — was Japanese.

Yet still, I had hardly left Japan before I could better see how the Japanese regard all the world outside as barbarous and crude, undeveloped in every sense of the word, and terrifying too. So sheltered had my life become in Kyoto — so sanitized of danger or alarm — that I had all but forgotten that another world existed; and now it was a shock to enter a stage where tempers were lost, things went wrong, the surface snapped. And if even I felt this, after only ten weeks in Japan, how much more unnerved must a Japanese be, suddenly propelled out of his cozy home and into a world of disruption and threat. Mother Japan prepared its children only, and ideally, for Japan.