The Lady and the Monk (34 page)

It: was not, really, that Sachiko was naive; rather that she had been trained to find reassurance everywhere. It always amused me when she extolled her friend Sandy because, she said, Sandy was always smiling, never raised her voice with her children, never let her sadness show; because, in short, Sandy embodied for her all the sweetness, cheerfulness, and self-control that we associate with Japanese women. To me, this was mostly a reflection of Sachiko’s own innocence in reading foreign cultures and of her penchant for sifting out only the good and remaking the world in her own happy image. The first principle of Japanese Romanticism seemed to be the culture’s Emersonian assumption that it could refashion the world as it chose, and might as well do so, therefore, in a bright and pleasant light.

Yet her unfailing self-command only aggravated the eternal game of she loves me, she loves me not. I often wondered: was I
attracted to her because she was so like me, or was she so like me because I was attracted to her? In Japan, this was as vexing a riddle as the chicken and the egg:
dakara
all over again. When it came to shopkeepers, say, I could happily accept that all their kindness was feigned, or functional at least; but when it came to Sachiko, that was less easy to acknowledge.

And then, at last, one night, I got my answer. Just as I was getting ready for sleep, the phone rang in the corridor downstairs, and it was Sachiko, asking me to come across town to her house; when I arrived, I found her sobbing and sobbing, her lavish hair tied up in a scruffy ponytail, her unmade-up face puffy and smeared. As soon as she caught sight of me, she threw herself upon me and buried her head in my chest, her small body heaving, and sobbing, and sobbing, as if with no hope of respite. I could feel her convulsions around me, her fingers tightening round my waist so hard I shook. I leaned back to look at her, but she grabbed me again, digging her fingers into my back, and sobbing, and sobbing, and sobbing.

Finally, motioning me to a chair, she pointed, through tears, at her tiny, worn dictionary, opened up on her “Bunny” table-cloth. I leaned over to where she put her finger under a word: “sacrifice.”

“So,” I said, as gently as I could, “you think that you must make all the ‘sacrifice,’ and I don’t have to make any?”

Eyelids bruised and tired, she nodded.

“I know; maybe you’re right. And you think my life is easy and free but yours is very hard. Because you must make plans, find baby-sitters, give excuses to your mother. While I am alone, and everything’s easy. And you have to live with your husband and your children, while I have only myself.” A small nod, that of a little girl getting told off.

“I know, Sachiko. I know it’s hard for you. Please cry if you like.” And she did, flinging herself round me once more. I held
her, and looked round — at the otter smiling down at me from the ceiling, at the jigsaw puzzle on the table, at the winking red jewel in her Wizard of Oz comb.

“You can cry,” I went on. “That’s all right. Don’t worry,” I mumbled into her hair, and she sobbed, and clung, and shook in my arms. “That’s all right. Please don’t worry.” Her Swiss cuckoo clock struck ten, and at last she sat back and brushed away her tears.

Then, over the little table, in one steady, uninterrupted flow, she came out with the whole story of her life, and all the accumulated sadnesses that had brought her to this lonely, perky room. “Before I always living parents’ house, I little prison feeling,” she began. “Mother many times sick, father always tired. Grandma die. Dog die. Brother go many place; but I must always help parent. Then first time I meet husband, little rescue feeling. I dream maybe little
Gone With the Wind
.

“But soon true marriage, very terrible feeling! Mother-in-law, father-in-law, more more prison feeling. Husband all day work, never together time. Then I have first child, I more more excited. But children not so help. Soon very tired. I have many dream. But I think I cannot find.”

Outside, a train whooshed past, drowning out her words.

“Husband many times promise we little visit my brother, America. But he never do. My husband very kind man but not so strong: usual Japanese situation. He want only usual life, very quiet life. He not have dream.”

That, I could see, was his main transgression: he was not, in her telling, a drunk or a tyrant or a philanderer or a crook; just a regular, fallible man captive to his received sense of duty and too small to accept the challenge of change. “He very good man,” she went on. “But he much afraid his mother and father. Last year I ask, which you prefer: me or mother? Please you choose. And he choose mother. Then I ‘all lost’ feeling.”

My heart went out to her, and to him too, this fond and dutiful father and husband, clearly decent and agreeable, and
confused now, surely, as he felt his pretty, vivacious wife slipping away from him, but not sure what he could do to reverse it or what he had done to deserve it. He was only guilty, in a sense, of innocence; but now, unable to get home before eleven-thirty six nights a week, and totally exhausted on the seventh — working all through the night, sometimes, at his parents’ shop — he could not find the time to turn things around. He might wish that he had more time with his family, but that seemed as fruitless as wishing he had six legs.

And Sachiko, too, was clearly captive to nothing but her situation; captive to Japan, in fact. I could see why she wanted to escape and how difficult it must be to have that hope centered on another. And as she went on talking, all her heart came finally tumbling out: how her perfection had indeed been an act of will; how she had wanted to be flawless lest flaws drive me away; how she had tried to act out only the best parts of herself. I had upset her sometimes, and she had smiled; she had worried, and had laughed.

That night, Sachiko crossed a threshold of sorts, and ever after, I saw a more relaxed and shifting kind of person: a heart, in fact, not so different from the ones I knew at home — spontaneous, scared, willful, and warm. She allowed herself sometimes to get put out, or jealous, or depressed; she grew more direct in her requests; she even started ordering her own dishes. I came to know the feel of her warm tears on my cheek (though if ever there came a knock on the door, she composed herself instantly and put on a radiant smile). I came to see her emotional prudence, always watching the endings of movies first (in order to enjoy the pleasure of melancholy in advance). I came to recognize her favorite, self-delighted cry — “I cannot stop. Cannot control. Cannot other! I so sorry!”

Yet even now, with so much to lose, she still responded to most disappointments more in sorrow than in anger; and I felt
her occasional reproaches the more because they were unvoiced. If ever I did something to upset her, Sachiko’s eyes would silently fill with tears, and I felt more strongly rebuked than by any rough obscenity; she was Japanese enough, I thought, to be truly gentle, and to use that gentleness to induce a sense of guilt as well as debt.

Mostly, though, I could never get over how happy she remained, even now. Ardent, dreamy, mischievous, and sweet, she giggled on cider and got up at dawn for
zazen
; practiced kung fu kicks in the temple and spun herself around in her joy. Here she was, I sometimes thought, loosed of all moorings, her parents antagonized, her family all but abandoned, and an unknown future in front of her, and yet, even now, she humbled me with her good nature.

O
NE DAY
, on a clear spring morning, I decided it was time at last to go and stay in a Japanese monastery — not a temple like the one where I had lived on first arriving, but a training center where I could briefly sample the rigors of the monastic life. The natural choice seemed Tōfukuji, where first I had tried
zazen
and where first I had met Sachiko. The largest Rinzai sect monastery in Japan, Tōfukuji was also well known for its cosmopolitan
rōshi
, one of the few Zen masters in Japan willing to take in Western students — even women — and concerned about the state of Zen around the world.

When I arrived at the temple gates, I was met by a young fifth-year monk from California. In the heavy silence of the entrance hall, a would-be monk was kneeling on the polished wooden stairs, head bowed in supplication, maintaining a motionless position that he would have to keep up for two days or more while his petition to enter the temple was ritually refused. Nearby, in a tiny antechamber, another aspirant — at the next stage of the process — was seated alone, in silence, in a position he would have to keep up for five more days before being admitted to the temple. Once inside, each of them would have to spend three years or more in a regimen unswerving as the temple’s cedar pillars.

Greeting me in the silence with a bow, the monk led me along the narrow polished corridors of the monastery, a few busy figures robed in black gliding past us. As we went, he explained, in a whisper, all the disciplines that I would have to observe: how I must walk, hands folded across my chest, and
how I must bow each time I entered and left the
zendō
; how I must step across the threshold with my left foot first, and how I must line up my sandals, in a perfect row, at the base of the meditation platform. How I must sit, how I must breathe: how I must learn to live deliberately.

He led me to a tiny guest room and asked me to take off my watch. Then, serving tea, he told me a little about his life. At times, when he talked of L.A. and his family, he sounded like a kid again, the twenty-two-year-old college boy he had left behind as soon as he entered the temple; at other times, when he talked of Zen, he acquired a sonorous
gravitas
that made him indisputably my elder. It was a little like being with Sachiko again: when the monk asked about where he could find the best pizza in town — on his one day off each month — he seemed a guileless teenager; when he told me how he wanted to live, I could see why he was the
rōshi’
s prize student.

Then the training began in earnest. In silence we went into a simple medieval chamber, and in silence ate a dinner of vegetables served from wooden buckets. If I wanted more, my guide had explained, I would have to tap my bowl; and after I was finished, I would have to rinse out the bowl with my finger and hot tea, ensuring that not a speck of rice was left. Then I would have to wrap the bowl up, left over right over bottom, in the
furoshiki
that was almost the monk’s only possession. They were allowed no books, no keepsakes, no reminders of their lives outside; nothing but their robes, their bowls, and the body-length mats on which they slept face-up.

Our dinner finished, we walked across, in the chill of the darkening afternoon, to the wooden shack where the monks were allowed, once every five days, to take baths. The man preparing the bath today, a bespectacled man in his fifties with a look of frightened bewilderment, was rushing around in panic while the younger monks shouted orders at him. Only a week before, I learned, this man had been a regular salaryman, living with his family at home; then, however, he had learned
that he would have to take over his family temple and been obliged to join a monastery. Now, as the junior monk in the place, he was the one the others were obliged to toughen up.

Scrubbed and rinsed clean in the scalding water of the tub, we proceeded to the ancient meditation hall. As the last light of day seeped in through the pulled-back screens, I sat with the monks, erect on the wooden platform, in silence. Occasionally, a monk, standing silent sentry by the door, strode forward and whacked, with his long wooden stick, anyone whose form was slipping — usually the terrified-looking newcomer in spectacles. The other seven sat in motionless
zazen
. Now and then, in the bird-scattered quiet of dusk, the mournful melody of a garbage collector’s truck floated up from a nearby street. Occasionally, there was a swish of black robes, a flash of motion, as a monk headed away for
dokusan
, his daily private conference with the
rōshi
.

I too, once, at school, had gone off on evenings such as this for private meetings, and alone with my thoughts — too new to be above this — I thought back in the dark to school in England, so similar to this: the cold showers at dawn, the ascetic bare rooms, the beatings, the daily prayers in five-hundred-year-old chambers. The sense of hierarchy, the all-male rites, the chores, the fears, the longings — all seemed eerily the same. But that kind of school had been preparing its students to take over the world, while this one taught them to renounce it; ruling ourselves, at school, we were made to feel we could rule everything; while here, ruling the self, one was trained to need nothing from the world.

My legs by now were aching, my body was stiff; I waited and waited for the session to end. Finally, with relief, I heard a monk stir, and draw back the screens against the night. In a flash, with movements as quick and precise as in some army drill, the monks whipped out their bedrolls and stood at attention; the poor businessman, wrestling unhappily with his lot and unable to get it all done in five seconds, earned more sharp shouts and
rebukes. Then, single file, we walked off to the temple garden, silver in the moonlight.

Nine figures, eerie in black robes, shaven heads shining in the silent dark, sat perfectly erect in the cool night air. When at last I left to sleep, all eight were sitting there, ready to continue through the night.

By three o’clock the next morning, my guide was rustling me awake. Bare feet cold on the wooden planks, we shuffled back into the meditation hall. There, still groggy, I followed the monks to another room, where gongs sounded and sutras were chanted, broken by the silver ringing of a bell. Then we returned to the hall for more
zazen
, screen doors open to the chilling dark as, very slowly, the light began to seep in and the birds to sing.

Hours, many hours later, we took a brief breakfast of gruel and pickled plums. Then we went out into the golden light of morning and began sweeping leaves, the monks working rapidly, in silence, sweeping and sweeping till every last inch was spotless. Above us, the temple’s cherry tree blazed against the dawning blue.