The Lady and the Monk (28 page)

Later, when we got to Umeda Station, she led me through the crowds to the Hilton Hotel, and up, up, up in the elevator to the sixth-floor Photo Studio. Around us, clutches of apprehensive wedding parties stood around gravely, waiting to have their moment immortalized. I looked on in surprise as Sachiko fell into animated chatter with the startled-looking lady at the desk (not accustomed, I suspected, to seeing a Japanese girl in a sari asking for a wedding picture alone). Then, eyes alight, she handed over $160 for two formal portraits of herself.

“But, Sachiko,” I protested, bursting in. “That’s enough to buy an air ticket to Thailand! Surely you can use this money better!”

“Please,” she said, putting a finger to her lips. “Please don’t worry, Pico! I want give you something you always keep together. Photo never change; you take many place, always happy memory. Later, you old man, maybe you little look this photo, time stop; you always remember this time. In photo, I always very young, maybe little beautiful.”

“But, Sachiko, it’s so expensive. You don’t have that much money!”

“Please stop. This very cheap price, I give you all-life present. I not: so rich, not so special. I cannot give you many thing. Then I want give you dream!”

I didn’t know what to say.

Later, on a night of pale light and water and mist, I told her, with regret, that I had never seen Kyoto in its full winter dress, steeples blanketed with snow, temples covered in white. The next morning, when I awoke, the flakes were coming down in long silent flurries, falling soundlessly upon gray roofs and canals, falling down upon dark temples and back streets, leaving scant trace of the buildings, making no sound as it made the city new.

With that, another cycle seemed to end, the drifts smoothing out all imperfections and presenting me with a world reborn. I looked around at the other presents I had received: the photo from Sachiko, together with an elegant, high-tech case of writing implements and a temple charm; a merry Falstaffian
tanuki
from the Brooklyn lawyer Shelley, wrapped in paper scattered with red and green cherries and inscribed with cheery cherry quatrains: “To make you happy, my pretty many cherries / I wrote you a netter my dear cherry / We play on the garden our hand are touch / We take each other and run away.”

And, from Mark, a beautiful
sumi-e
drawing of a Buddha, still and depthless, found in meditation.

SPRING

Spring rain

In our sedan chair

Your soft whisper
.

–
THE ZEN POET BUSON

O
N THE NIGHT
I returned from my trip to see the Dalai Lama, only hours after I stepped off the plane, I got a call from Sachiko, more softly urgent than ever, begging me, through snuffled tears, to meet her now, please, anywhere, even though it was almost midnight. I hurried over to the coffee shop she mentioned, and felt a pang of fondness as I saw her standing there, her small figure patient in the dark. Smiling bravely through her tears, she led me inside, still sniffling, and ordered “milk tea” for us both, then flung herself sobbing into my lap.

“Sachiko, Sachiko, what’s wrong?”

She sat up, brushing the tears from her face. “I little see movie,
Mannequin
.” This in itself did not seem cause for sorrow. “No, no,” she went on. “You not understand! I plan go together Sandy, Canadian man. But Sandy, many plan change, all cancel! Then I go together Canadian man! Very good movie, I very fun. But then he attack me!”

“What do you mean?”

She shook her head, inarticulate with grief.

“What exactly did he do, Sachiko?” I persisted, typically crass. “I don’t understand.”

“He try kiss me,” she finally got out. “First time, my life! Japanese man very gentle, very kind. But foreigner man so different. I very shock.” She gulped down sniffles and sobs. “Foreigner person very dangerous!” In all her life, she had told me in the autumn — and it was easy to believe her — she had only ever kissed her husband. And in a life so empty of event, even the smallest upset could seem like devastation.

“Don’t worry, Sachiko,” I reassured her with spurious fluency. “Not all foreign men are terrible. Two kinds come to Japan: some wanting much money, many girls; some who truly want to understand the Japanese heart.” She looked at me solemnly, swallowing back her tears, attentive as a chastened child, but I could tell that theories wouldn’t help, and I could tell that she was already beginning to feel the terrors of straying far from native ground.

Back in Kyoto now, I settled back into myself as into a hot
sentō
bath, feeling invigorated by the city, and cleaned out. Sitting at my sun-washed desk in the quiet days, I returned to familiar observances: the punctual singing cry, each morning, of the little girl calling to her mother; the midmorning walk of the hobbled old lady with hair the color of smokers’ teeth to the coin laundry down the street; the afternoon tinkle of trilling piano melodies; the lonely, melancholy sound of country ballads from the Chinese laundry shop drifting through the narrow lanes at night.

In the weeks I had been away, my neighborhood had, on its surface, transformed itself: a two-story concrete block with the look of an ice cream sandwich towered now above the grandma-and-pa grocery stores, and in the next alley down, a gleaming new health food store was trying to attract new customers. A card dealer from Reno — and, before that, Santa Barbara — had moved into my guesthouse, as well as a tall, brittle businessman from Harvard, who stalked up and down the corridors, in two-tone shirts and three-piece suits, howling, “Blow, winds, blow.”

The coordinates of my own Kyoto, however, remained un-changed. When I went to the copy shop, the cackling, clown-faced proprietor was so delighted to see me — her most faithful, and I sometimes suspected her only, customer — that she even effected an introduction to her growling familiar, a lumpy, sad-eyed dog called Goro, thirteen years old now and half blind.
The matron at the photo shop demurely murmured “Pico-san,” as soon as I walked in, and chuckled happily as she tried once more to turn my name into phonetic Japanese characters. And the three girls at the post office, though looking up in alarm from their abacuses when they saw me enter, were sufficiently worldly now to deal with a letter to Brunei Daressalam, to know that American Samoa (despite its zip code) had little to do with America, and to handle a parcel to a person whose surname I didn’t know. When I rang up the Tourist Information Center to ask who had won Miss Universe, the girls who worked there not only surprised me with the answer but, after a giggling conference, asked if I approved.

So much of my Kyoto life caught up now in these unpre-possessing associations, and, by now, so much of myself. Giving up the world, I thought, was easy; renouncing the Rolls-Royce or Rolex I had never wanted in the first place was no harder than going on the wagon for a teetotaler. But giving up my world — the specific feelings and mementos that seemed the fabric of my being — was altogether different. On that form of attachment, though, as on every other, Zen was singularly uncompromising: memories could be as possessive, and as wasting, as sapphires, or lusts, or hopes.

Though I had been four months in Japan now, it still seemed, often, as if I had landed, with an unseemly bump, on some unworldly star. Whenever I walked down the street to my local convenience store, the Familiar, I felt as if I were walking into a surrealist’s collage. On the wall of my lane, a sign informed me, pleasantly:

Around me were fresh-faced, bespectacled boys in warm-up jackets that said “Neo-Blood,” shy teenage girls whose coats said “Dental Democracy.”

Inside the store itself, where a Japanese Springsteen was delivering a Muzak version of the Boss’s “Brilliant Disguise,” I bought some Chips Company potato chips, their box announcing, disarmingly, “We are the nicest friends in all the world.” As a happy-voiced announcer on the PA system advised us all to enjoy our stay in the store, I went over to buy a Clean Life Please dustcloth. “
FACILE
for your clean life,” this helpful rag declared. “You grow to be beautiful in a pleasant and unforgettable mood.” Nearby, goods were clamoring to reassure me: My Green Life utensils, Enjoy and Laundry cloths, hand soaps for “creating your dreamy life.” Sometimes the objects here seemed almost more animated than the people.

As I headed home, newly befriended and more beautiful, in a pleasant and unforgettable mood, past the machine that offered Drink Paradise and Your Joyful Drink, I glimpsed a pink cushion embroidered with renditions of a cartoon cat. On it, entitled Fleçon Chat, was an atmospheric scene:

These sunny, baffling sentiments were everywhere in Japan — on T-shirts, carrier bags, and photo albums — rhyming, in their
way, with the relentlessly chirpy voices that serenaded one on elevators, buses, and trains; it did not take a Roland Barthes to identify Japan as an Empire of Signs. These snippets of nonsense poetry were also, of course, the first and easiest target of most foreigners in Japan, since they were often almost the only signs in English, and absurd: creamers called Creep, Noise snacks that came in different colors, pet cases known as Effem (whether in honor of the fairer sex or high-frequency radio, it was hard to tell). Every newly arrived foreigner could become an instant sociologist when faced with this cascade of automatic writing, not stopping to think, perhaps, how often we may spray paint our T-shirts with elegant-looking Japanese characters that mean nothing to us, or something worse.

Nonetheless, it was hard not to notice how often certain words recurred in these slogans and contrived to create a certain atmosphere. Multimillion-dollar ad campaigns were no more random here than in America, and it was clearly no coincidence that they chose again and again to return to “dreams” and “feelings,” to metaphors of community and gentleness, to imported notions of freedom and society. (“Coke is it,” the slogan nearly everywhere else in the world, became, in Japan, the moodier, and more involving, “I feel Coke.”) So too, it was hard to overlook how many of the T-shirts spoke of “clubs” and “tribes” and “circles,” and how often kiosks or clubs or signs invoked the first person plural (Let’s Archery or the Let’s grocery store). Even packs of cigarettes announced themselves as “An Encounter with Tenderness,” and Toyota and Honda gave their domestically sold models unusually soft and feminine names. Sometimes, in fact, the Dada fragments seemed almost to be inventories of cherished values, as in the Roget’s exuberance of the ad for Nescafé’s Excellent Coffee:

Occasionally, too, they let out the other side of Japan: a group of S & M kiddies on motorbikes, fierce-eyed and demented, with hostile scowls, under the legend: “Though They’re Hot-Blooded, Hard-Nosed and Crazy, Really They Act According to Their Principles. It’s a Purple Story at Midnight.” Rebellion made user-friendly; just another fashion statement.

Most often, though, the Japanese brought their poetic touch to English and created out of the imported sounds a haunting kind of synesthetic beauty, with an air of lulling, melancholy mystery; often, the buzzwords came together to create a kind of Pop Art haiku, rainswept and misty as a video.

SMOKE ON THE PURPLE TOWN

ran an ad under a picture of a Picasso-like fellow enshrouded in fog on a Dantean New York street, under the warning: “All worldly things are transitory.”

In the same magazine, another set of images again turned rough surfaces into poems:

BEYOND THE MEMORY OF MAN

These dreamy flights of inspired lyricism could work on one strangely, composed as they were not of words but associations: syllables used as moods, as ideograms. I came in time to find my imagination expanded by my Clean Mail writing paper, subtitled
“Sound of Waves,” or the monochrome photo album entitled Les Étoiles Brillantes (its subtitle sketching a Japanese ideal: “The wind whispers softly, the sun shines brightly all around, the flowers radiate joyfulness. Here the animals live cheerfully in peaceful co-operation”). Even the paper on my individually wrapped Fine Raisin Cookies declared, “Beautiful things are beyond time. Woman’s history never ceases to yearn for beauty.”