The Lady and the Monk (15 page)

As we meandered along the quiet paths, Sachiko bent down to trace the flowers with her fingers, teaching me their names, and what they represented. This one, she said, was the cosmos, the harbinger of winter, this one the “orchid” (she knew the English word because it was the favorite flower of Morten, lead singer of a-ha). This one was her grandmother’s favorite; this one, she said, was me.

We walked through quiet lanes of little huts, and she motioned to a stream swishing through a ditch.
Seseragi
, she explained. I stopped for a moment and realized of course she was right: the silence was made musical by the gurgle of the water. This time to herself, she said, was very special, “very fragile, like grass” (and now it was my turn to look confused, having forgotten her tendency to say
r
for
l
). “Very fragile time,” she said again, ruminative. “These days I always hold in my heart.” She paused for a moment on a bridge and looked into the running brook below. And I sensed that this chance to wander without plan
called her back to something long hidden within herself like a temple bell.

Then, recollecting herself, she led me over more country hills, and as we walked, I taught her the English words I chanced to use — “innocent,” “delicate,” and “subtle.” She looked up at me with searching eyes. “You teach me what is in my heart?”

I chose to evade that, and asked instead if she was hungry. “I forget,” she said dreamily. “Time stop. My stomach hungry, but my heart very full.”

And so we straggled on some more, and later, in a village, stopped in a tiny shack for “Fox Noodles” and “
Tanuki
Noodles,” and then walked out, across the random fields. She told me how her nickname since girlhood had been “Hime,” or Princess, and how she dreamed now of going to spend a night with her best friend, Keiko, in Osaka, only a few minutes away from Kyoto, provided she could get her husband’s permission. And gradually, as the hours passed, the day began to ease open, as if some catch had been unclasped. And as the sun began to set, our talk grew gradually more close. “Sunset time very beautiful,” she mused quietly, “but sad. Because children stop play, and I cook dinner, and all things finish. You are bird, I woman. You are hawk; you have strong heart, do anything, very easy. But I cannot. Then I only dream. Please you bring me world.” She paused, in a temple, in front of a painting of a monk seated before a ball of fire. “This time dream time.”

Then, in the train going home, as she looked out on the darkening fields, I tried to cheer her up by telling her a story I had dreamed up as a boy, and as I did so, I realized, with a start, that somehow, without my intending it, this tale of white birds bringing dreams across the sea, above a silver “moon path,” was more apt — and more Japanese — than ever I had known. Even the raccoon story I had made up for her children, with its theme of a rescued princess, and the provision of dreams, did not seem quite so innocent anymore. And yet, I realized now, there too, I had inadvertently gone Japanese by including two heroes
instead of one, and so, somehow, providing a denouement that concluded not in marriage but in parting.

Finally, in the failing light, turning from the window, she summoned up all her English in a brave attempt to tie up the day. “Thank you very much. You give my heart much imagination, much feeling. Thank you very much. I very, very fun. This magic time for me. When I little children size, I many times visit Grandma house. I dream very different life. But soon wake up: same me, same everything. Today I wake up, I feel new me. First time, I learn this feeling. Now I wake up — same bear with North Wind daughter. I think I bear, I have new heart.”

That night, back in Kyoto, I walked into Mark’s room to find a middle-aged woman listening to a Grateful Dead tape and looking up at me with a stare of unnerving intensity — a capable New England matron by the looks of her, in sensible brown sweater and Seven Sisters skirt. “Hello,” she announced, “I’m Emily. I’m a pagan.” At that, Mark appeared from out of his crooked staircase, and the three of us found a cab, cowboys running around on a tiny pay-TV in front of us, spouting Japanese. As we weaved through the festive lights and crowds downtown, an ad on the screen showed a teardrop, silver, and a necklace on bare skin.

In the waiting express train, as we took our seats, Emily chattered away about the religious impulse and her belief in Seth and about a new image of the Goddess that should be associated not just with Kali but with the spirit of Fertility. Around us, Osaka sparkled like a jewel box in the dark: sapphire and emerald neon making dream patterns on the buildings, bright lights gleaming in the fresh-washed night. Off in the distance the shadowed, silent mountains, and a full moon rippling through the river below.

Getting out of the train, forty minutes later, we walked along moving stairways, up escalators, through corridors of signs, and
out into a narrow lane of jangled colors. Under a bridge, across a tunnel of lights, stood an illuminated dome called Studebaker’s. Inside was quite a scene: a blond American deejay was flinging his hands about at the front of a room and spinning oldies — “California Girls,” “Twist and Shout,” “Return to Sender” — while four female customers in front of him, all in expensive, primary-color dresses, hair falling down their backs in identical styles, stood in a perfect row on the dance floor and went through elaborate steps, in perfect sync, to every song, a different step for every song, following the lead of the fast-talking deejay, never stopping, never sweating, just rolling their hands or twisting their hips or punching the air, impassive, song after song after unrelenting song. The whole place was done up in bright, Beach Blanket Bingo colors, pinks and Cadillac reds, and the waitresses, in perky ponytails, red miniskirts, and Laguna Beach sunglasses, danced as they went around the room, holding trays and jumping onto tables every now and then to do the twist, while the waiters, also sunglassed and fresh-faced, leapt onto the bar and strummed crazily away on unplugged guitars in a pantomime of fun, all of it meant to replicate some squeaky-clean, synthetic movie image of Redondo Beach in ’64.

The tables were filled with businessmen and their pretty paid companions, the former apparently exulting in this walk on the American wild side, the latter smiling whenever required to do so. When asked to dance, they headed out onto the floor, in orderly groups, and, lining up in rows, serious as workers doing morning calisthenics, set about duplicating the deejay’s every move. Here an arm to the right, there a finger in the air. The energy and the unity of the place were breathtaking. Below me, the four topettes were still boogying on cue, not one of their silky hairs out of place, not a trace of fatigue on their bright, unsmiling faces. They exchanged no looks or words or gestures as they danced, and when one of them went to the ladies’ room, the others kept on dancing, leaving a blank space in the line for
the missing girl to fill as soon as she returned. These girls, I assumed, must come here every night and go religiously through their motions. They did straight-faced surfing moves on “Surfin’ Safari,” broke into a conga line for a Sam Cooke song, clapped through “Locomotion.” Behind them, everyone else was equally punctilious, waving their hands about every time the deejay waved his hands about, bending their knees every time the deejay bent his knees, mimicking berserkness whenever the deejay went berserk, and some foreigner at my table, a Buddhist businessman from Staten Island, was shouting, exultant, “This place is perfect! Just perfect for Japan! Everyone in lines. And following the American leader!”

Emily the pagan and a hippie girl, meanwhile, were arguing furiously about the nature of the fifties and the conformity of hippies, and around us the bouncy waitresses continued wriggling on cue, tireless as cheerleaders, and the four chic “office ladies” jived, expressionless, through Motown moves. An Iraqi sailor from Basra sat alone at the next table, nursing his drink and shyly clicking away with his Instamatic. Several gray-suited American businessmen were led in by their eager-to-please Japanese hosts, and looked as if they would very much have liked to be elsewhere. Two goofy salarymen in their fifties got onto the dance floor with two American escorts, absurdly tall and elegant girls who must have been pulling down three hundred dollars apiece just for teetering over their dates.

All the while, Elvis and the Supremes and Ritchie Valens kept blasting on, and the guests on the dance floor went manic on cue, dipping their knees to “409” and hopping up and down to “Jump” and banging their fists together on “Hand Jive,” as an old copy of
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
was passed around our table. Then, out of nowhere, the deejay spotted our group of aging foreigners. “Hey,” he said, pointing a trigger finger over at us, “this one is just for you!” And on came the one and only Top 40 hit from the Grateful Dead.

* * *

Two days later, at Arashiyama, along the western hills of town, everything was erased in the holiday sunshine. Boats meandering across a sunlit lake; teenage girls in kimono extracting disposable cameras from gold-lamé bags; bright crowds thronging across the Togetsu Bridge as in almost every Hiroshige print I had ever seen. Old men leading their grandchildren to stalls along the riverbank and coming away with ice creams or strange sweetmeats; ladies in kimono arranging themselves like flowers in a small, exquisite garden; families flocking in patterns through the bright, still air, as quiet as the trees around them.

It was, in fact, as much the people as the leaves that made the Japanese autumn: seated on low red-cloth tables under a canopy of colors, sipping tea and sitting silent, their talk, when it came, as soft as running water. The Japanese autumn was never wild or febrile, as in other tree-filled lands, but diffidently spectacular in its tidy, daily miracles, the air as mild as spring. And the people who came to inspect the scene were miraculously quiet, as hushed as viewers at some play. Having beautifully civilized Nature, made it orderly and trim, they fit themselves into its rhythms without ever making a sound. So even when there were crowds of people, as today, they were all so modest and self-possessed — and so fluently disappeared into the whole — that the purity of the scene remained unsmudged. At times like this, the observation of the seasons seemed akin, almost, to a playing of the national anthem; a solemn, silent act of faith.

A
S MORE AND MORE
experiences began to crowd in on me in Kyoto, and my once empty room began to fill up with more and more presences, I was finding it harder and harder to keep clear. I had ended up, so it seemed, in a whirlpool of paradoxes, such as the one about what a sadist should do to a masochist. What does a would-be solitary do in the company of other solitaries — the very people, in other words, whose company he most enjoys? How does a Thoreauvian respond to a society of antisocial Thoreauvians? Was not keeping oneself open just a way of dodging all commitments?

And as my days in my new home began to turn into weeks, and my discoveries into day-to-day occurrences, I found, inevitably, that I was beginning to domesticate the dream, to know my way around the marvel and superimpose upon the map of Kyoto’s streets my own particular homemade grid: this was the restaurant where I could find the most delicious
chai
, made by a Japanese woman who was a devotee of Sri Chinmoy, and this the coffee shop that had the best “morning service” (not, as it happened, a religious rite but a toast-and-coffee special); this was the bus that took me to the smoky jazz bar where polite longhairs served up baked potatoes mysteriously attended by slices of lemon and chopsticks, this the one that took me to the latest issues of
Sports Illustrated
; this was the temple where I did tai chi on early Sunday mornings, and this the one where schoolgirls never came.

Often, moreover, as a resident, I did not have to go out to find Kyoto, for Kyoto was all too ready to come in to find me. One
day, I was sitting inside my room, deep in Peter Matthiessen, when there came a knock upon my door. Outside, in the corridor, stood an elegant, gray-bearded man in a suit, accompanied by a sweet-smiling popette. They looked like the host and hostess of some morning talk show.

We bowed in all directions at once, and the man quickly pursued his objective. “What country do you come from?”

“England,” I said (hastily riffling through alternatives).

Digging into his briefcase, he presented me with a brochure advising me not to fret; God had guaranteed happiness for us all. This made me happy. Then he followed up his advantage. Would I like a Bible?

No, thank you, I told him in a Japanese that apparently afforded him some pain. I had been to a Christian school in England and had had ample opportunity to read the Bible there. Looking unhappy, he bowed. I bowed. The girl bowed. I bowed again. Then there was more bowing all round, and the threat moved off to another room.

Two nights later, I was just hurrying home through the rain, a hot box of Kentucky Fried Chicken in my hands, when suddenly a boy loomed out of an alleyway before me. He asked me a few questions, and I, assuming he wished to try out his English on me, grimly replied in ungracious Japanese. Then he asked if he could bless me. This did not seem like an offer to refuse. Dutifully, I put down my box of two legs and a thigh (original flavor) and stood before him in the drizzle. Putting his hands together in prayer, he asked me to do the same. Then, eyes tightly closed, he recited three times something along the lines of “Oh, please, great spirit, bless this
gaijin
, thank you.” Then he asked me to cradle my hands in front of my stomach and close my eyes for two or three moments while he did some extra petitioning for my soul. This I did, in the midst of the rain, my chicken growing colder and wetter by the minute. Finally, he gave me permission to open my eyes, and
kuriingu
complete, I was free to go home with my soggy dinner.

The next day, therefore, when a man in the laundromat turned around and started to engage me in conversation, I was all set to close my eyes and get a few extra credits in the heavens — until I realized that he really did just wish to tell me about his honeymoon in Disneyland. A little later, though, when I went into Shakey’s with an American student of Zen, a waiter hurried up to us, blocking our way and motioning for us to leave. The place was full of happy diners at the time, conspicuously consuming their corn-and-pineapple pies, while a voice on the public-address system declared, “This is Mr. Tender Juicy Chicken, a spokesman for Shakey’s …” When we tried to move closer to the salad bar, however, the employee panicked, shaking his head furiously. “But we only want to eat some salad.” “Salad?” He looked thunderstruck. “We’re only here to eat.” “Eat?” He stole a terrified glance at the copy of
Time
I was carrying, with its cover shot of Arafat. Apparently, he had thought that these foreigners had come here to convert defenseless pizza-eaters to some messianic figure in a kaffiyeh.