Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (33 page)

He was refined, she said. Younger men want to overcome you; a bit older and they want to be overcome; but when you get that old, just a body next to yours is enough. He asked for so little because that little had become enough. Miki admired him.

At first the other girls asked intimate questions: did he use his mouth down there; did he ever get hard; could he still pee? Later, they came to wonder what he was thinking about, lying there with a girl more than half a century younger than he was. What was he feeling? They decided that he was regretting, not life, for he had already lived, but the loneliness of death.

When he came in, neat, hair parted, put his cigarettes and lighter on the bar, drank his cup of instant coffee, they treated him with deference and, finally, with reverence. At first they had lighted his cigarettes with some disdain. Now they crouched below him to do so. They had changed.

He never changed. From the first day to the last, two whole years of Sundays, he never changed. He smiled, savored his tobacco, his coffee, the usually proffered breast.

He ought to die with dignity, they all thought. He shouldn't be kept alive with tubes and expensive and noisy machines. He should be allowed his own integrity—as a reward for having lived so long, for now behaving so well. None of them ever thought he might kill himself.

But that is what he did. He hanged himself with his fine sash. It was in the newspaper, a small column on a back page. They called him an aged recluse, Noboru Tanaka, age ninety-two, unemployed. And he was not, it turned out, rich at all. Miki thus received nothing. Though she feigned disappointment, it was clear that she had never expected anything.

For a number of Sundays afterward there was much talk of him at the Underwear Snack. Not why he had done it. They thought they knew why—look how old he was, after all. No, they wondered what he had felt, at the very last. Pleasure, relief, gratitude? No one believed it was despair—not in someone as well behaved as he had been.

Then they stopped talking about it. Still, occasionally, even if it were not Sunday, one of them would recall that gentle way he had of blinking, like an infant just awakened, or that small cough, which sounded as if he were clearing his throat to speak, though he rarely spoke.

Down the subway stairs hurried the tofu man's wife, her face serious, intent. She had perhaps heard the downtown train pull in—bells, shouts, whistles—and was hurrying to make it.

In this station, mine for many years now, there is a long flight of stairs leading to the lower level where the downtown train passes. I, coming from uptown on my way home, had just got out of the car and was walking along the platform when I saw Mrs. Watanabé hurrying down.

Seeing the train about to draw out, she broke into a run. But the doors were closing, the whistle was blown, the train began to move.

Mrs. Watanabé stopped short in front of the closed doors now sliding past and smiled. At a moment when we of the West would have turned our mouths down, she turned hers up. It was not an ironic grimace, common enough, nor was it mock despair for the benefit of those looking on. The smile was innocent and natural enough to seem instinctive.

But what kind of instinct could create this expression of delight, I wondered. And what assumptions must lie behind it? This was not the first such smile I had seen. I saw it daily, on the faces of those apparently pleased to have missed the train. The tofu man's wife was simply the latest in a long line of disappointed grinners.

For surely, I thought, disappointment must be the paramount emotion attending this experience. To then smile was, by my standards, unnatural. What person in his or her proper senses would register pleasure at the prospect of inconvenience?

Well, I reasoned, standing there, pretending to read a poster, it would have to be someone who entertained priorities higher than personal convenience, higher than missing a subway train.

I tried to fit things together. The smile that informed the face of the racing Mrs. Watanabé, and all those other hundreds and thousands I had observed over the years, began to develop only when it seemed obvious that the train would not, after all, be caught. This expression was not then the result of any hope that one might, after all, be on time.

Indeed, as I had seen often enough, if there was time and no uncertainty, the expression was the ordinary, blank subway face, the same the world over. Only when hope was slipping away did the smile blossom.

Confronted with the closed subway doors, the train already in motion, the smile was wide and forbearing, with only a trace of self-consciousness or embarrassment. It was as if the small fact of having missed the subway was already subsumed into the many other uncertainties of life.

Moreover, if Mrs. Watanabé had said anything at that point (I was still pretending to examine the poster and she had not yet seen me), it would probably have been:
Shikata ga nai
—It can't be helped. This comment is heard at least a million times a day on these islands. It is to Japan as "Have a nice day" is to America—something one says without thinking, says even when
shikata ga aru
, when it
can
be helped.

Yet here perhaps, I decided next, lay a clue to these higher priorities. For behind it was the idea (common enough here but revolutionary-sounding where I come from) that acceptance ranks over irritation, that accord is more important than discord, that the positive is more valuable than the negative.

This is to American ears an astonishing assumption. And its reverberations linger on, suggesting thoughts unwelcome: that the communal is more important than the individual, for example. Nevertheless, it is just such notions surely that produced the smile at the foot of the subway stairs.

Still standing there, I tried to imagine the system of social training that was responsible for this phenomenon: whole centuries of it during which all the Mrs. Watanabés and their husbands and children were taught that a display of personal irritation or indignation was not, by and large, socially productive. Rather, as a member of the social body, one ought to uphold its standards. The personal (by definition, often negative) reaction should be subdued, so that the coherent whole could continue in an atmosphere of harmony.

And I also thought how easy to control these generations consequently were, and are. With a populace who believed this, the process of ruling was considerably simplified. Brainwashing, oppression, totalitarianism— these terms occurred to me, a person really interested only in his
own
atmosphere of harmony, one devoid of any larger social implications.

But I felt sure there were larger implications. It was certainly true that this kind of self-abnegation in the face of personal disappointment can be politically manipulated; it can also result in quite mindless acceptance of a social norm. But there was something else, something of deeper value.

So I turned again to look at Mrs. Watanabé. Though she had long ceased smiling and was staring off into space with that universal subway face, I remembered the form her smile had taken. Yes, it certainly suggested forbearance ... but also—for want of any better words—a kind of affirmation.

The poster I'd been staring at reminded one not to leave one's umbrella on the subway. This was a pragmatic race, intensely so. It was one that believed in the "rightness" of things, and rejoiced in it. It saw that reality, neither malign nor benign, is all we have; that what
is
exists quite outside the limitations of our personal convenience; and this should be accepted, made much of.

The more I thought about it the more familiar the idea became. I considered the attitude of the haiku master; the attitude of my favorite film director, Ozu. I thought of what the
suiboku
brush-and-ink master puts in and leaves out, and how the true Zen
roshi
approaches the real and instant now. In all these examples that now came flooding to my mind a personal predilection is sacrificed (too strong a term?) in the interests of something else. And that is the appreciation of reality. Not a higher one, merely reality itself; a small celebration of its qualities. It is the attitude of the older Japanese who looks in the mirror, sees one more gray hair, one more wrinkle, and is pleased because things are going as they must. And things going this way are fitting, proper—in a word, good.

I glanced at Mrs. Watanabé waiting for her train. Would she, I wondered—she of the beautiful, indulgent smile—also grin at her wrinkles and gray hairs, affirming the impermanence of life? It seemed unlikely as she stood there rocking slightly in her neat housedress, staring ahead. Yet it didn't seem impossible, for I remembered her expression, common but mysterious, when she realized she would miss her train. I knew that what her smile represented had contributed to and been exploited by centuries of feudal rule; at the same time, I saw in it a token of another scale of values, an affirmation that went far beyond the ordinary concern with positive and negative.

At which point Mrs. Watanabé first noticed my own universal subway face and gave me a friendly smile: Ara, is that you, Mr. Donald? Going downtown?

- No, I just got off.

- That was ten minutes ago—just missed it myself. What have you been doing?

- Oh ... nothing much, just standing around.

- At your age, she said with a smile: Me, I'm off to my sister's for the afternoon. Husband's looking after the shop. And about time, too.

She went on in this fashion until the subway train arrived and she got in. Then I climbed the stairs, still thinking. Whatever its historical associations, I couldn't but approve of that smile of Mrs. Watanabé's, find it admirable in its implications, and envy her its unthinking, assured possession.

I stood before her, the Empress of Japan, and congratulated her on her nice new palace. This was all I could think of saying and, adroitly, like a good hostess mindful of her guests, she asked me where I lived. Then, with that distant interest which is apparently common to royalty: Ah,
shitamachi,
old Tokyo. As in the films of Ozu.

- Have you seen many of them? I wondered.

- Well,
Tokyo Story
certainly, she replied, adding that, although they had a screening room in the Imperial Household office, they didn't go there much, so they made do with video cassettes.

It was kind of her to have mentioned Ozu. It showed that she knew why I was there: I had received an official award, and an audience at the palace was one of the perks. Not only would we meet the royals, we would see where they lived.

We were even limousined the long away around, through the Sakashishitamon, so we could see more of the grounds. This I had much wanted to do. After fifty years of looking at them from the public side of the moat, seeing the tops of trees and the roofs of distant buildings, I wanted to see them for myself.

Passing through various checkpoints and the outer gates, which bristled with guards, we were soon inside the inner moat and driving through parklike gardens, then down what looked like a country road on either side of which were further guard boxes, walls, and behind them the virgin forest that lies at the heart of this tract of land. I had heard that rabbits, badgers, and foxes still lived here, in the center of Tokyo.

The cars pulled up in front of what looked like one of the grander wedding halls. This was the new palace, with chamberlains waiting. After a good deal of bowing, we were ushered into a series of rooms, all decorated in a modified imperial style. It was a style set in the Meiji period and hence Victorian, with plush-covered sofas and wainscoting and coffered ceilings. Since the palace was built in 1993 and not 1893, however, there are no sofas and the plush has turned into brocade. Still, the imposing comfort of Windsor is there.

A senior chamberlain introduced himself and with great patience explained how our audience would proceed. He had a piece of paper with circles drawn on it and arrows showing where everyone should stand, how everyone should move. My role was but a modest one. I was second from the right and would simply bob forth and back. The president of the foundation responsible for giving our awards had a more difficult part to play: he was choreographed to move forward, then circle back around the recipients about to be introduced, before coming to a stop on our right.

We all then lined up in another room. This one owed more to Shinto than to Victoria. It was paneled in cedar and had hanging curtains, as in Ise, and though the furniture was Western—blonde wood enclosing gold brocade—it still looked ecclesiastical.

Outside the wide windows stretched the gardens and beyond them the forest. It was like being on a country estate far away from any city, except that over the trees I could see the square-cut top of the Dai-Ichi Building, which half a century before had been the headquarters of the Allied Occupation forces. It was as though General MacArthur were still peering over the hedge.

As the chamberlains bustled about, I was struck by the resemblance of the palace and its staff to a really expensive
ryotei,
a Japanese restaurant which costs so much that absolutely nothing must go wrong. There were the same purposeful scurryings, the same watchful glances. Then someone solemnly announced: They are coming.