The Lady and the Monk (11 page)

Finding no room amidst the crowds even now, four hours before the festival was due to begin, I started to climb up the hill, away from the town, up towards Kurama Temple, towering solemn above the crowds. There I sat, and walked about, hands
stuffed into pockets, and waited. I waited some more. The night grew chilly, with a winter snap to it. Still there was nothing to see but crowds. I watched a pair of German boys attach themselves to three smiling “office ladies” and smiled to myself as the Germans, new to the country, took the shy giggles and polite questions for encouragement and began sliding hands behind backs, as the girls, smiling sweetly, edged away. I listened for a while to the Springsteen tape, rented today, the very day of its release, from a neighborhood store. I watched a teahouse high above the street, where VIPs were sedately taking dinner in a perfect Tokugawa tableau of high elegance. I nibbled on corn chips, stamped up and down in the cold, began to wish I’d never come.

And then, of a sudden, there came a quickened intensity, and then a roar, and a flash of fire, and a rush of boys, naked save for loincloths, arms lifted in the dark, streaking furiously through the winter streets, bearing torches, shouting, “
Sareyā, sareyō
,” eyes blazing. It was like nothing I had ever seen in Japan: wild, pagan, full of danger. The torches played crazy games on the faces they passed, and the shouters raced to the shrine like intoxicants, faces lit up by their torches. Pointing their torches to the middle, they started building a huge fire. Flames licked the air, torches began to waver, the crowd let out a gasp. Sparks were flying this way and that, policemen were roaring through megaphones, the whole crowd, pressed as closely as in some rock concert, was shaking and wobbling as one. Shouting “
Sareyā, sareyō
,” the men in loincloths, bodies glistening in the night, poured more heat onto the fire, the flames racing up in the sky above them, their eyes alight. I could feel the danger in the air, sense the pull of some ancient force. I could feel an electrical crackle in the air.

All night the fires raged, subsiding shortly before dawn.

A couple of days later, I found myself walking along a broad avenue in the sunshine with Siobhan, the potter I had met from
Santa Cruz. “For a long time, you know, I used to repress this thing about being a witch,” she began, as we walked past groups of horn-rimmed students, remarkable only in their normalcy. “When I was young, you know, I was always afraid of all that stuff about devils; I believed that knowing anything about them was a form of possession. And then one day, Pam, who I knew from Connecticut — but she’s in Santa Cruz now — came up to me and said, ‘You’re a witch, you know.’

“And at first I just said, ‘No, no, I’m not.’ But she could tell. And she had her own coven. And then one night I saw my dead mother in a dream, and I could just tell she was in a very different place, but a good place. And that’s when I accepted being a witch.”

Siobhan smiled, and the day smiled with her.

“Anyway, now I’m in this really comfortable place in the countryside, and everything’s cool. Except that my Japanese roommate — she’s really into Stendhal and is going to France next year — has fallen in love with this young German boy who lives with us. Fell in love with him just for the way he washes the dishes. Plus, of course,” she said, eyes flashing, “there’s the whole Christmas cake thing. Keiko’s twenty-six.”

“Christmas cake?”

“You know. For girls.” I must have looked perplexed. “You don’t know about it? Maybe it’s something they only tell girls. Anyway, it’s this system they have over here; they even use the word, in Japanese,
Kurisumasu kēki
. You know how on the twenty-third of December a Christmas cake is supposed to be fresh and worth investing in, but by the twenty-fourth it’s getting kind of old? And after the twenty-fifth, it’s starting to get stale and no one wants it. Well, that’s how they think of women over here. Twenty-three is a good age to get one. Twenty-four is a little close to the deadline. And after twenty-five, forget it!”

“Which is why girls over the age of twenty-five often make a beeline for foreigners — that’s their only chance of getting married?”

“Exactly!”

As soon as I heard this, many things began to fall into place. For my initial sense that every foreign male here found some demure but passionate Japanese companion to dance attention on him had only been strengthened by some of the characters I had met in Kyoto. Everywhere I turned, I seemed to run into men who were in a kind of spell here, having not only met girls but dream girls who were the embodiment of everything they wanted in a woman. Lifelong bachelors began talking about marriage; newly wed husbands could not stop extolling the goddesses they had married; hardened Lotharios found themselves disarmed by girls whose innocence was touched by a hint of guiltless sensuality.

And though most Japanese women, I assumed, would still unquestioningly follow their prescribed course towards a Japanese husband, there was, by all accounts, a minority — and an increasingly large minority — who would do anything possible to find a foreign boyfriend, if only for a while, in order to get a taste, firsthand, of the glamorous foreign world they had seen on their TV screens. In the discos of Tokyo and Osaka, foreign men were currently as fashionable as Chanel shirts or Louis Vuitton bags, trendy accessories to be shown off to one’s friends. But even in less cosmopolitan Kyoto, foreigners were still agents of escape — like the crickets kept by Kawabata’s Kyoto girl Chieko, inhabiting “a separate realm, an enchanted land … filled with fine wine and delicious food from both land and sea.” The Japanese looked on foreigners, I sometimes thought, with the same awestruck condescension that we might bring to heavy-metal rock stars, secretly convinced that they are, at heart, somewhat vulgar and barbarous, yet undeniably seduced by the fact that they belong to a flashy, semimythic world of money, fame, and glamour. We look down our noses at Jon Bon Jovi, but invited to meet him, we jump at the chance.

In Kyoto, however, the attraction of opposites was especially
strong, not least because this most conservative of cities, in one of the most traditional of all societies, attracted — indeed, because of its traditionalism attracted — some of the freest and most radical of visitors from abroad, the hiders and seekers, the rebels and dropouts who did not fit in, or did not want to fit in, at home. And Japanese girls had long been the subject of romantic fantasies of our own in the West. Pierre Loti had hired his Mademoiselle Chrysanthème as soon as he laid anchor in Japan; the Santa Barbaran Rexroth had found his Muse in a mysterious Japanese woman poet who lived in the shadow of a Kyoto temple. Even Lafcadio Hearn, who had done so much to bring Japanese Buddhism to the West, had declared that “the most wonderful aesthetic products of Japan are not its ivories, nor its bronzes, nor its porcelains, nor its swords, nor any of its marvels in metal and lacquer — but its women.” And even today, the
Japan Handbook
, the standard guidebook used by most young foreigners in Japan, devoted an entire section to “Sex,” informing its readers, with guidebook authority, that Japanese women were “orgasmic,” longed to be swept off their feet, and “[expected] you to be an aggressor and in the old-fashioned sense to make [them]” — an alarming suggestion, I thought, in the hands of men looking for “a possible partner for life.”

Besides, the pairing of Western men and Eastern women was as natural as the partnership of sun and moon. Everyone falls in love with what he cannot begin to understand. And the other man’s heart is always greener.

O
NE SUNNY MORNING
, I was huddled over some proofs in my room when suddenly a call came for me. It was Sachiko-san again — now, she said, on her way to the zoo, together with her children and Sandy, the American woman with granny glasses I had met at the temple ceremony, and her children too. Would I like to join them? This, I thought, was too good an opportunity to be missed (to show off eleven of the twelve words I knew in Japanese), so I readily accepted, and an hour later, when I approached the giant
torii
gate that bestraddles one of Kyoto’s central streets — making it fit for ceremonial processions — I found all six of them in picnic mood. Inside the zoo, we duly inspected the raccoons, the tiger, and the California seals, and I felt more than ever like the only adult male of the human species inside this shop-window collection of stylish young mothers and glossy-haired silent children. I half expected a sign to be hung around my neck identifying the rare, and undomesticated,
Homo subcontinentus
.

When it came time for Sandy and her children to go home, I half expected that Sachiko-san would go with them. But no, she said, her children had asked whether they might possibly come and see my room — their first chance, I assumed, to visit that close cousin of the zoo, the
gaijin
guesthouse. So together we ambled through the sunstruck streets, the children teetering on walls and scuffling after acorns, while Sachiko-san’s apologies tumbled out unstoppably.

When finally we arrived at my house, the children apparently found all the excitement they had anticipated. “
Okā-san, okā-san,
mite!
” cried Hiroshi, pointing in horrified astonishment at the American-sized shoes lined up at the foot of the stairs. “Mother, mother, look at the shoes!” The footsteps of the yeti would, I thought, have been no more remarkable to him. His mother, for her part, showed just how much of a mother she was — and how Japanese — by bending down to tidy up the shoes that the foreigners had left so higgledy-piggledy, arranging them all in a neat, color-coordinated row. Upstairs, when I opened the door to my room, the children’s eyes grew even wider as they took in the pile of proofs scattered messily across my desk (convincing Sachiko-san, no doubt, that my job was not that of a raccoon story writer but a proofreader).

“You like story?” she asked me, taming her children with one hand as she spoke.

“Oh yes,” I said, “very much.”

And so, as her children careened around the room, she began telling me an elaborate old Japanese folktale — the oldest surviving story in the land — about a princess, Kaguya-hime, who had come to live with an old bamboo-cutter and his wife but then at last had been obliged to leave them and return to her home, in the Palace of the Moon. When Sachiko-san finished the story, I was startled to see, her eyes were bright with tears.

There was a long and awkward pause.

“Maybe we little go home?” she said. Taking the hint, I offered to walk them back to the station, and as the four of us wandered through the crowded streets in the dusk, I suddenly remembered to remind the children of the new word I had taught them just a week before. At that, the day broke open like a smashed window, and the children, thrilled with their new discovery, began reeling through the crooked lanes, crying, “Raccoon car! Raccoon bus! Raccoon shop!” while I, spurring them on shamelessly, shouted, “Raccoon coffee shop! Raccoon cinema! Raccoon plane!” and all the while Sachiko-san serenely continued recounting ancient Japanese folktales that left her again and again in tears.

The Japanese were famous, I knew, for their delight in
lacrimae rerum
and for finding beauty mostly in sadness; indeed, it was often noted that their word for “love” and their word for “grief” are homonyms — and almost synonyms too — in a culture that seems to love grief, of the wistful kind, and to grieve for love. So I was hardly surprised to learn that most of their stories were sad and that all of them ended in parting. Parting was the definition of sweet sorrow here. Yet still I was taken aback by this curious flash of intimacy: Sachiko-san sinking deep into her sadness, while her children pranced gaily through the gathering dark, shouting out their new mantra with the zeal of proselytes. “Raccoon train! Raccoon street! Raccoon temple!”

Making plans with Sachiko-san was always, I had found, an uncertain business, not least because whenever she called me, both of us would engage in a polite, but ruthless, tug-of-war as to which should be the medium of confusion. Both of us were determined to speak the language we didn’t know (she to practice her English and I to try out my Japanese), and so, very often, we ended up communicating in a kind of jangled bilingual hybrid in which nothing was lost except meaning.

Whenever we tried to fix meetings, therefore — she confusing “Tuesday” and “Thursday,” I mixing up
ka-yōbi
(Tuesday) with
kinyō-bi
(Friday), she routinely transposing “yesterday” and “tomorrow” — the result was madness. “Where would you like to meet?” I would ask her, in Japanese, and she would reply, in English, “You want to come here my house?” in a tone that suggested more apprehension than delight. She would say she was free at two, and I would arrive, for a brief encounter, only to learn that she was free for two hours. I would say that I was leaving for three days, and she would assume I was leaving on the third. That first day, when she had casually invited me to drop in on her daughter’s birthday party at around two and I had casually dropped in at two forty-five, only to find that there
was no party at all and I was forty-five minutes late, increasingly seemed an augury of all that was to come.

Once we met, of course, the craziness would only accelerate. For one thing, Sachiko-san was as unabashed and unruly in her embrace of English as most of her compatriots were reticent and shy. Where they would typically refuse to utter a single sentence unless they could deliver it perfectly, she was happy to plunge ahead without a second thought for grammar, scattering meanings and ambiguities as she went. Plurals were made singular, articles were dropped, verbs were rarely inflected, and word order was exploded — often, in fact, she seemed effectively to be making Japanese sentences with a few English words thrown in. Often, moreover, to vex the misunderstandings further, she spoke both languages at once, as if reading simultaneously from both columns of a phrasebook: “
Demo
but where are you
ima
now?” she sometimes asked, hardly stopping to bother about the fact that
demo
means “but” and
ima
, “now.” Other times, she suddenly came up with an affirmative “Sí!” suggesting that somehow or other she had got hold of a French or Spanish phrasebook instead of an English one. Often, too, I could see in her sentences the scorch marks of an all-too-hasty trip through the dictionary: “Is America very high?” she asked me (since
takai
in Japanese means both “expensive” and “high”), or, to more alarming effect, “The bullet train is always very early” (since
hayai
in Japanese means “early” as well as “fast”). Sometimes, when she said something like “I have this happy feeling touch,” I could tell that she had whizzed through a list of synonyms fatally unseparated (in her mind at least) by a comma.