The Lady and the Monk (25 page)

Tsukimoto, however, was in no mood for small talk. “This lape we need very badly,” she assured us once more. “Lape very important with this movie.”

A little later, in the taxis heading home, as people began to discuss the hazards of trying to simulate rape, even for $250 a day, the New Zealander turned his sociologist’s eye on the experience. “That’s the way it is with movies here,” he began, earnest as a lecturer already. “All their B movies are set in the Occupation, and they always have the GIs as these hulking murderers and rapists. That’s the way it always is.” (Just as American movies filmed in Japan, I thought, always involve the
yakuza
.) “But I suppose it does make a certain kind of sense. A lot of the foreigners here, they aren’t here to do any teaching. They just like to fool around.” He was hitting his stride now. “Like I know this one guy who rides every day on this special train full of college girls waiting to be picked up. And this other one who goes to discos all the time and kept up four girls at a time — until he got the clap. And I heard about this one bloke from Zaire — you know, black, really scary and fascinating to these people — who had them lined up outside his door and took care of six of them a day. At first when you come here, your ego gets a real massage. Then you realize that they’re just saying the same thing to everyone. It’s a dangerous psychology.”

Certainly, I could see by now how the Land of the Rising Sun could be the ruin of many a poor boy — not least because being taken as an exotic, or a demigod, was one of the hardest states to abandon.

The movie call, however, had a particular aptness for me. For often, with Sachiko, I felt as if I were responding to a similar kind of summons, auditioning to play the part of a freewheeling foreigner in the long-running romantic picture she’d been screening in her mind. Often, in fact, I got the sense that she was
trying to squeeze out of our times together every last pretty or haunting image she’d ever taken in from movies or songs or ballets, as if this were her first, and perhaps last, chance to experience all the sensations that she’d always heard about. Marriage she clearly regarded as a businesslike proposition — a matter of domestic deals and daily accounts in which emotions were as irrelevant as love songs in a résumé; now, though, suddenly, she had a chance to walk across a bridge of dreams, as the Heian courtiers had it, and find all the sensations she kept so neatly in her head, of “First Love” and “True Love” and even “Lost Love.” Sachiko, like many Japanese perhaps, was an uppercase Romantic, with an innocence that idealized experience and turned it into a reflection of itself.

No less than her words, then, her gestures summoned all the props of high and courtly romance: the hankie smothered with perfume that she gave me to keep in my pocket, the love songs with which she serenaded me, her constant plea to make contact with her by looking at the moon. And already, I could tell, she was developing her inner photographs, turning our times together into pretty, plaintive images —
memento amori
— that she could look back on as a trip to a foreign country. Sometimes she seemed almost to be inspecting her feelings like an enraptured tourist, never troubled by a sense that “perfect” and “true” need be incompatible.

Thus every aspect of our friendship was efficiently made to correspond to something from her pool of dream images, rather like the New Year’s game in which people matched the opening of ancient poems with the close. One weekend she went with her family to Nagasaki, and came back excitedly telling me how she had seen there Rembrandt’s “Face of Christ.” “This picture little same you eye!” she announced. I had hardly had time to savor this rare compliment, however, before she was also telling me that the raccoons in the zoo had my eye too (and, presumably, that of Christ). My voice, she said, was “little same Michael Jackson,” and my spirit, “little Baryshnikov feeling.” Whatever
face I presented she managed to match with some counterpart in her anthology of ready-made images — mysterious Indian, history-steeped Brit, fun-loving Californian, romantic loner, wandering writer, sometime monk. Partly, I could see, this was just a way of crossing the language, and the culture, gap, finding a common frame of reference, and partly, too, a reflection of the fact that we were obliged to speak in metaphors and images (and she variously represented me as a penguin, a bear, an owl, a raccoon, and a mole — she, too, it seemed, knew more animal words than adjectives). Partly, perhaps, she could only apprehend a foreigner — and romance — through the imported images she’d consumed, just as I could see her only through the keyhole of ancient Japanese love poems. But partly, too, I could see, with a pang, how keen she was to remove our lives from the everyday world, to lift them to some timeless, fairy-tale realm, immutable, imperishable, and immune from unhappy realities. Realism was reserved for what she did at home (where she wore different clothes, spoke a different language, and used a different voice); our time was “dream time.”

Thus boundaries began to blur, and the fact that our friendship was described in terms of movies led her more and more to see movies as a reflection of our friendship. The first time I took her to the cinema, to see the Ken Russell extravaganza
Mahler
, she filed out of the auditorium in tears. “This movie little same you-me feeling,” she said, too deeply affected, almost, to speak. Insofar as Mahler had, as I had seen it, been portrayed as a cruel and egotistical tyrant given only to abuse of his women, this was not, I thought, a happy parallel. But Sachiko, true to her vision, had somehow succeeded in screening out all the negativity and taking away nothing but reassurances. “First time, I many, many movie understand,” she whispered, awestruck.

And sure enough, when she saw
Out of Africa
, she found it so close a reflection of our relationship that she was moved to tears too.
9½
Weeks
made her think of our “cherry blossom love.” Even
Fright Night
left her stunned. “I little see this movie,”
she whispered to me, breathless, “I think of you.” I began to hope she’d never see
In the Realm of the Senses
.

Songs, too, were a receptacle for all the powerful emotions she had never had the chance to experience in real life, and after every other one, I found her in tears. When I played her Springsteen’s “Independence Day,” I was touched and pleased to see that she was all choked up when it finished, a reflection, I thought, of how closely she identified with its character’s yearning for freedom, and an escape from the cycles in which his parents were trapped; my pleasure was dimmed a little, however, when I saw that Aerosmith also moved her to tears, and Michael Jackson’s synthetic version of “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Her feelings were so strong, and her opportunities for releasing them so limited, that they came out in torrents, poured into the unlikeliest of vessels. One of them was me.

In the midst of winter, I accompanied her one chilly night to Osaka to see Bryan Adams in concert. The minute he came out on stage, Sachiko began dancing, and so she continued, eyes flashing, smile unfailing, through song after song after hard-driving song, her energy never flagging. When Adams took a brief break, she turned to me and suddenly recited an unearthly poem from the
Manyōshū
, the famous eighth-century anthology of lyrics; eyes shining, with a lingering intensity whose depth I could not fathom, she told me that she now knew all the delicate sadness of a lovesick maiden at her window. Then, when the concert ended, and we streamed out amidst packs of cheerful teenage girls, she suddenly, in a rush of exhilaration, burst into the choral section of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in Japanese, as we headed off for dinner at the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts.

Occasionally, I could see, the transposition of the movie world and reality played havoc with her mind. When, a little later, she saw
Another Country
on TV (a great favorite in Japan, thanks to
its endless shots of pretty young English boys swapping daisies and sonnets against a backdrop of quaint historical buildings), she rang me up in a frenzy of confusion.

“This your high school?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then you little spy man? My mother say maybe you spy.”

“No, no, Sachiko, I’m not a spy.”

“And you not gay?”

“Gay?”

“Then why you go this gay school? Why you not same
Stand by Me
?”

I’m sorry, I felt like saying; not all of us can come to maturity in Steven Spielberg’s imagination.

Usually, though, her wish for seeing our lives as gauzy art, a permanent monument to evanescence, made for scenes as artfully composed as postcards, and dreamy, gentle Sachiko was as expert at spinning dream images as at producing gift-wrapped memories: she, looking over the Kamo River, eyes shining in the dark; she, in plum kimono, plucking the koto in front of billowing curtains; she, holding her breath and closing her eyes tight as she stood before the Buddha. Coming to Japan in search of romance, I found myself now a protagonist in someone else’s dream, and found, too, that the favor was returned.

“This dream?” she often said, and the only answer I could find was yes.

O
NE DAY
, thrilled to learn that the fabled Shigeyamas, the first family of
kyōgen
comedy, were bringing a whole program based upon raccoons to town, I bought two tickets and dragged poor Matthew off to inspect this curious spectacle. Ready to try anything in his quest for he did not know what, Matthew had already started attending aerobics classes with Sachiko, flopping up and down amidst rows of grinning, fiendishly energetic housewives; accepted an offer from the matronly owner of his inn to accompany her on a pilgrimage to Tokyo Disneyland; and sat through an eight-hour session of Sumō.

None of this, though, has prepared him for a raccoon theatrical festival. Soon after we take our seats, I, in the spirit of a West End theatergoer, bundle off to purchase a bag of Green Tea candy. Inside is a sachet full of blue and white micromarbles, designed to keep the candy fresh. Matthew, however, is not accustomed to such tricks of Japanese ingenuity. He peers down dubiously at the bag. “Sugar, do you think, perhaps?” he begins, breaking open the bag and shaking a few of the baubles into his hand. “Some kind of exotic confectionery?” he goes on, tossing them all into his mouth and beginning to crunch appreciatively. “Very strange, actually,” comes his first report. “No taste at all. Really rather strange. Can’t taste a thing!” He tries to bite into one. “Awfully strange! Must be glass!”

In a flourish of fellow feeling, I, too, pop a few of the marbles into my mouth. Matthew is right: there is no taste. They are, in fact, without a shadow of a doubt, glass. I spit them out. Matthew, however, continues chewing, as serene as a cow in pasture.

On stage, a curtain is rising on a striking blue-and-golden lacquer set, five musicians sitting stock-still, in indigo and gray. One of them begins a piercing, dissonant melody on a flute. The others pound drums. An old man walks onto the stage and goes through a strange, slow dance, flinging his sleeved arms out like wings and emitting occasional strangled grunts. We sit back in gloom: the whole thing, clearly — and understandably — is to be in Japanese.

Next to us, two schoolchildren crane forward with the attentiveness of critics, recording the pathos on a Sony. The unearthly sounds continue, redolent, to our philistine ears, of nothing but John Cleese.

Then, like an Indian raga, the invocation suddenly gains momentum, picks up speed, gathers an almost mesmerizing intensity — and is over. We sit back exhausted, and to celebrate our release, purchase two ice creams from an aisle-patrolling lady while Matthew looks about.

He is still muttering something earnest about George Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead
when the curtain ascends once more, and, the lights still on, we watch a raccoon masquerade as a teakettle.

“Very primitive,” Matthew shoots out in a staccato whisper, settling back in his seat with a copy of
What’s on in Kyoto
. “Very strange.”

Then, of a sudden, he sits up sharply. “Think it is glass, actually! Can feel it in my throat! Rather bizarre, actually!” The comedy on stage has nothing on this.

Meanwhile, the audience breaks into uncontrollable hysteria as a servant is surprised by the kettle-impersonating raccoon. Matthew is looking less and less enraptured. Then “The Miraculous Teakettle” gives way to “The T
anuki
’s Belly Drum” and a classic fairy tale of a raccoon dressed as a nun trying to outfox a hunter by delivering a sermon on the iniquity of taking the life of any sentient being. Matthew looks positively sick by now. Then at last the
tanuki
passes round a bottle of sake
and brings all the loose ends together in a cheerful, transformative dance.

Matthew looks over unhappily. “Childlike, don’t you think? Terribly immature, really.”

“Maybe. But just imagine a typical Japanese businessman going to the theater in London and ending up at
No Sex Please, We’re British
or a Christmas pantomime — especially if he can’t speak English. Not really very different.” As the instigator of this expedition, perhaps, I have good reason to defend what really feels like a reproach to dilettantishness and a reminder of just how culture-bound we are.

Afterwards, less than satisfied by the entertainment so far, Matthew expresses his keenness to sample Kyoto’s nightlife. I, having always assumed this to be a closed shop, know nowhere to go except the prescribed foreigner’s haunts. At a noisy dive called the Earth Bar, we munch on cucumbers in plum sauce, cold Korean tofu, and white mushrooms cooked in butter, while drunken laughter and reggae music rise up from along the crowded wooden benches on which sit jostling multicultural couples. On a blackboard, obscene graffiti has been scrawled — to import an air of foreign aggressiveness, perhaps — demeaning Jesus with various four-letter words and culminating in the unexpected declaration: “Get your shit together: everybody must get stoned.” In a culture where exactly 6.1 ounces of cocaine was confiscated in all of 1988 and swear words are famously nonexistent, this strikes me as a curious motto.