Raw Silk (9781480463318) (30 page)

“Try the black bread, Jill.”

A model of obedience, she tried it. A model of judgmental tact, she hid it under the paper napkin. At the layover in Moscow two different passengers came to our table to compliment me on what a splendid passenger and lady my daughter was. Clumsily, on the Moscow-Tokyo lap, I tried to interest her in a free copy of
Pravda,
the front page of which featured three cranes and a construction worker. The front page of the
Moscow News
had a picture of two surgeons in the new premises of the A. V. Vishnevsky Institute of Surgery. Hell, it’s not my fault if the Russians let me down. Jill read a comic book and I read Yukio Mishima: “And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.”

Jill fell asleep while I drank vodka and puzzled over this passage. I turned on it the full illumination of my open mind, and found it pretentious Oriental crap. It had nothing to do with any journey I ever took in my life, all of which I possess in patterns of memory as coherent as a piece of cloth. “After that there remains only the journey itself … the process through which we lose our ownership of it.” It made no sense. I puzzled over it, fuzzily, until I also fell asleep.

And waked to the flat glassy sea at the flat shore of Tokyo, which was suddenly familiar, though I don’t know why. It was recognizably Japanese, as if I had always associated a flat sea at a flat shore with Japan, and had not known it. Minute white triangles of sail drew paths across the waves. We were both moved, and groggy with overeating, motor noise and sleep, as we alighted to be impounded at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.

We did not have smallpox vaccinations. East Anglian had left the arrangements to me, and I had not checked. In twelve years as a foreigner abroad I had not needed a vaccination, and it had not occurred to me. Jill was silently wild with accusation, but we were vaccinated, free, within two minutes by a minuscule airport nurse.

“If nothing worse than that happens to us,” I said, “we’ll be all right,” and ushered her on to Passport Control, where something did.

“I wish also please to see your visas.”

“What visas?” I asked stupidly, in the shock waves of Jill’s outrage, and then we were impounded bag and baggage. I explained, stoic in myself but feeling Jill like a turbulent eddy around me, that although we had American passports we lived in England, and since the English do not need visas, it had clearly not occurred to the travel agent to advise me. Four small immigration officials shuffled our passports, debarkation cards and still-damp vaccination certificates, and photostated Jill’s onward ticket to Los Angeles. They took the name and address of Tyler Peer and photostated a letter on an Utagawa letterhead looking forward to my stay in Kyoto. Then they told us that we would have to stay in the Tokyo Haneda Hotel on the airport premises and return to the office at ten the next morning. I was, in fact, delighted. I would bathe and sleep off the jet fatigue, finish my book, send postcards, ease myself into the weeks ahead.

“Mummy, how
could
you,” Jill fumed. “Just like some stupid
American
!” and burst into tears. This confused the immigration officials, if indeed it didn’t make them suspicious. I apologized solemnly—solemn apology was something I
had
been briefed on—for our lack of vaccination, lack of visa, loss of the overworked officials’ time, loss of self-control in my daughter. Her tears, however, seemed to be an appropriate attitude toward the grave situation of having to spend the night in a hotel, and the official handed us back over to the stewardess, repeating seven times in askew English that we
must
be back in his office at ten the next morning. Jill cheered considerably when she saw that the hotel had a private bath, television and a swimming pool. Just like some stupid American. She had a cheeseburger and a Coke for lunch, while I, trying to make some unworthy point, ate raw fish.

The next morning we were documented and dismissed, and I began the happiest two weeks of my life. I understand that meaningless superlative will be the end product of the Western world, but I savor the phrase on my tongue and let it stand: the happiest two weeks of my life. For someone who lives alone my triumphs will not be explicable. I know I am a career woman who also manages a house and servants. That has nothing to do with it. I conducted us by monorail to the center of the city. I claimed my reservation, signed the register, and was given keys. I slept till I woke, or I asked to be waked at an hour of my choosing, and at that hour bells rang. I decided at ten o’clock to see the Asakusa Kwannon at noon, and if at noon I changed my mind I did not go there. I put my sole signature beside its replica on a traveler’s check, and a yellow girl gave me multicolored money in exchange. I tipped in restaurants. I put coins in vending machines and goods came out. I gave the names of streets to taxi drivers and alighted in those streets. I caused things to happen, do you see? I harmed no one, I engaged in exchanges convenient to all concerned, I did not manipulate anyone unless Jill’s acquiescence must be counted, but in such actions as I took I was nobody’s agent; wandering Tokyo was a transaction between the map and me.

In all of which Jill did acquiesce, and admired me for it. I knew it was not obedience because I had experienced her obedience for four years now with a shiver of recoil, but I did not particularly see why she should admire me, though I admired myself. I supposed she clung to me because I was big and blond and Western too. It was not until late in the trip, and by accident, that she revealed she had been truly terrified by our brush with officialdom at the airport.

“I thought they would put us in jail, I thought they would torture us!” she told me then, when it was well over, and therefore comedy. “There’s a movie where the Emperor takes a long needle and scratches the marrow of your bones. I thought they would do that.”

It hadn’t crossed my mind; I’d thought her tired and petulant. I was afraid of nothing but her judgment, whereas apparently the amused competence with which I handled the fruits of my incompetence impressed her. Apparently she discovered that she was a child and I was her mother.

Besides, St. Margaret’s had offered me a kickback. They had taught Jill to live by the rules, and it was I who had the power to rescind them. Could we go at night to the Kabuki puppet show? Could we have ice cream in the morning? Could we buy a monster mask in the market at Asakusa?

“We can do anything we please.”

And for some reason, reasons I’ve tried to describe or others I don’t understand—for some reason everything pleased us, plastic trash and ancient copper, heavy traffic and tortured trees and water and each other.

Jill in Japan was like Jill in the garden at three: discovering, stumbling, ironic and determined. Unlike the brusque Russians, the Japanese delighted her. She liked their lithe bodies, the sharp shapes of their gardens, the frail sound of their bells and the explosive colors of their temples; she liked iced water, hot napkins and barefoot shoes. She felt, as the British often do, immediately at home in a world so ceremonious and circumscribed; at the same time she felt too long and bouncy, too blond, with eyes too open and too much leg. She discovered her Westernness as a kind of clumsy confusion, and then accepted it.

On big streets, in the Ginza or Shimbashi, we were unremarkable enough, but once enclosed in a café or a subway car we drew furtive stares under which she squirmed and shrank. Until one day she sat up and tossed me a frowning laugh, as if to say: so what? She watched the Japanese lifting noodles out of soup with chopsticks, tried it herself in a tangle of wood and fingers, reached for a spoon, then set her jaw and slurped from the sticks until she managed them. Whatever she dared or mastered, she looked to me as if I were an ally, and I experienced her friendship as gratuitous grace.

We walked the back streets near the American Embassy and guessed the purposes of the shops, illiterate here because the characters on the signboards conveyed not only no meaning, but no sound. We bought a
ukiyo-e
etching on frail rice paper, and a bag of spongy sweets dipped in powdered sugar. We came across a bird vendor’s shack, stacked to the ceiling with cages, every feathered evidence of nature’s excesses.

“Do you think the cockatoo is really
necessary
,” I swaggered.

Inside a boy stood separating coarse seed from fine, scooping it from a burlap bag with a wooden bowl, then turning the bowl as he blew on it so the lightest seed sifted into the basket at his feet. He turned the bowl and blew, turned the bowl and blew, then poured the coarse seed into his hand and blew again. His motions were both mechanical and limber, a miniature paradigm of skill. Jill edged closer to watch him, dip and turn and blow, and turn and blow, and turn and blow, and as he reached to toss the coarse seed to a second basket he caught sight of her pale toes in their Japanese clogs. He looked up startled and lost his rhythm. He was no taller than she, but the Japanese are not tall; I think he was about seventeen. He let the bowl hang in his hand and slowly saluted her with a hand over his eyebrow and a grin both shy and sly.

“Can I give him a sweet, Mummy?” She turned to me, all bounce and childish eagerness.

“Sure, why not?”

She extended the bag toward him, saying,
“Dozo, dozo,”
and he bowed,
“Domo arigato,”
and reached the delicate fingers in to withdraw the powdery ball of sticky sponge.

“Domo arigato.”

“Dozo.”

He showed his teeth and Jill bobbed a series of authentically Oriental bows, and then when he lifted the sweet to his mouth and, smiling with exceptional politeness, trapped it between his tongue and teeth and slowly sliced, Jill faltered. Out of the air of cross-purposes an understanding partially occurred. She tossed her brass curls, stepped crabwise and turned on her heel, clutching the bag closed.

“Domo arigato,”
the boy said again, with a pleading note. Jill threw him a severe smile over her shoulder and took my hand.

Tourist pleasures. We let ourselves be strange and awed. We wandered in the museums, a sketchbook apiece, copying flat Sumi ink washes and deeply textured cloth; or in department store delicatessens tasting orange mushrooms and blue seaweed.

We traveled south from Tokyo to Kamakura and ambled among the little temples in their muted tones of wood and weathered brass, feeling our bodies released into space by even the smallest gardens, because they are not like English gardens laid on a plot of ground, but designed to fill the whole cube of air above it.

We traveled north to Nikko to nature and architecture in an altogether different mood, where the red and gold spectacle of the temple matches the extravagant woods. A pagoda emblazoned every inch vies for height with the thick-trunked, towering cryptomania; the steps of the temple are beaten brass; the contorted jeweled buddhas look on contorted trees. An arrogant razzle-dazzle mosaic monster guards the Karamon Gate—“You are permitted to clap your hands under the dragon’s mouth and hear the exquisite roaring.” We clapped and felt ourselves exquisitely roared at.

We climbed a wide path built of granite blocks behind the Nikko temple, unconcernedly watched by lizards with orange-and-black-striped backs and luminous blue tails. We laid prayer stones on the shrines and stopped to cool our feet in a pool below a little waterfall. A
torii
-shaped board beside the fall spelled out a message in Japanese words but Western characters:
Yo-yo wo hete musubi-giri no matsu kono takio no taki no shivaito.
I read this over to Jill until we could hear the lilt and laughter of the alliteration, and when a young Japanese and his tittering girlfriend greeted us in English, I asked them to translate.

“World … go across bind wonder together,” the boy frowned, “waterfall tail of waterfall white thread.” Then while the girl hung on his arm giggling bell-like, he frowned further and, pulling at the words with his hands, produced, “As one travels across the world one wonders what it is that finally ties all things together, and it is this White Thread Waterfall of the Tail-of-the-Waterfall Shrine.”

I was very inclined to believe it. The couple retreated waving to us, ceremonious and gay. I hugged Jill and stretched my feet to the water; I would not have been surprised had jeweled fish come to nibble at my toes. Jill sang,
“Takio no taki no,”
and gathered clumps of flowered moss.

There were two weeks of this uneventful mania before Jill flew on to Los Angeles and I went to take up my duties in Osaka. Both of us were full of confidence by then. Jill left me at the plane door as nonchalantly as she now left me for St. Margaret’s, and walked off down the aisle chattering to the Japal hostess who was to deliver her to the Jeromes.

“See you in L.A.,” I called, and she flapped me a wave. I was down the steps and across the tarmac before I noticed what I had said, and was struck with a brief flicker of premonition. I looked at the asphalt runway, and I saw the chessboard roses of the garden at home. The thought crossed my mind: I will never see the garden again. It stopped my breath and broke my stride. Then the thought, which had after all only crossed my mind, like someone at the other end of the runway, was gone again, and I went on through the automatic doors of Haneda Airport. I was thinking that “L.A.” is a fairly natural slip for “London” when both words are familiar. It was not important. Besides, I had a train to catch.

I took the bullet train from Tokyo to Nagoya to Kyoto, luxuriating in the speed of two hundred miles an hour on the ground, reading Tanizaki, flipping the footrest to the carpeted side so that I could take off my shoes. I called Tyler Peer to say I was on my way, which I really did not need to do, but I didn’t want to miss the chance of making a phone call from a moving train.