The Lady and the Monk (16 page)

Mostly, though, I was free to wander around alone, in the company of the autumn. The smell of fresh-baked bread on the Philosopher’s Path, on a shining afternoon, and the solemn tolling of a gong across a wall. A flash of gold on the wrist of a temple maiden. Men with jackets on their arms swaggering past in loosened ties, practicing English sentences: “When you are middle-aged, you must take care.” A girl in Porsche sunglasses and blazing scarlet trousers trying out “Where do you come from?” Middle-aged gentlemen standing rigid as statues while harassed photographers waved them back into the sun.

Stopping off one morning in Shisendō, the Temple of the Poet Hermits, I sat on the veranda, looking out onto the garden. A lady, very beautiful, her face the faint pink of pearl, came and sat down by my side. A light, light rain began to fall, so light that I had to strain my eyes to see it and knew that it was raining only because the bark on the trees was growing browner. Another Comme des Garçons girl came in and slid down on the floor
beside me, her head on her cashmered shoulder, as she looked out at the dreamy rain. Occasionally, a drop trickled down from the rafters. The leaves were scarlet, green, and burgundy. The drizzle was softer than a silk still life.

A little later, I gave Sachiko a call, and we arranged to go to Kobe, the shining, broad-avenued port that had always been, of all Japanese places, the one that was closest in spirit to a foreign town. As always when we met, the day was all sunshine and light drizzle. But the rains began to lift as we got onto the Kobe train, and by the time we arrived, the sky was blue above the silver sea.

Drifting along through the huge antiseptic spaces of Kobe’s lonely de Chirico streets, we chatted leisurely about Bjorn Borg and Victor Hugo, Holden Caulfield (whom she loved) and Jacky Chan (whom she admired for his “child’s eye”). Then, coming upon a bench, she suddenly sat down and began fishing out presents from her knapsack, handing them over to me in sequence: a pretty drawing, in crayons, of the story I had told her (“I’m sorry. In my heart, very beautiful, but paper not so good”); then a sheaf of autumn photos — yellow light streaming through the ginkgo trees, and maples rusted against the blue; then, out of nowhere, a monkey-decorated telephone card (a woman’s gift, I thought, and a Japanese woman’s gift, obliging me to call her).

Making our way towards the port, we looked out at the ocean liners, black in the chromium light, and sitting down on a log, the wind blustering all about us, we fell into our usual patter, she telling me how America was the land of the free, I telling her how much of what I saw in America was loneliness. And every time I ventured some generality that even she could not assent to — that the Japanese were close to their parents, say, or that thirty-year-old Japanese had the hearts, very often, of fifteen-year-olds (where in America it was often the reverse), or that
Japanese women half expected their men to take on mistresses — she simply nodded and answered sagely, “Case by case.” A gentler putting-in-place I could scarcely imagine.

Then, through the wide boulevards of the town, we walked up Tor Road, up into the hills of Kitano, and the small cobbled streets of the foreigners quarter. Surrounded by white stucco villas scattered along the winding roads, the sea below, the sky all blue above, I could easily imagine myself in the canyons of North Hollywood. Across the street, as if by design, the name of the ice cream store was Santa Barbara.

And so we drifted in and out of foreign dreams: in a Peter Rabbit store, she wound up a music box and put it to my ear — I heard “As Time Goes By” and then a song she identified for me, whispering, as “Lili Marleen”; at the English House, commemorating a foreign way of life, she lingered in the pretty flowered bedroom, gazing at it dreamily and talking of Emily Brontë. Wandering along past restaurants called Lac d’Annecy and Café Chinois, she asked me what Rob Lowe was like and why I did not think that Cyndi Lauper was cute. As we talked, I taught her a few new words: “soul” and “clear” and “fascination.”

Then, when least I expected it, I looked up to see that we were standing outside a restaurant called Wang Thai, the only Thai restaurant in this part of Japan, and something I had despaired of ever finding. This, too, seemed an augury, a present from the fates, and so, without a pause, I bustled poor Sachiko in and ordered her a spicy chicken soup. Soon she was daintily choking over her bowl, while trying, with typical courtesy, to find something positive to say.

Once she had laid the poisonous broth aside, and the second course arrived, she tucked her fork, delicately held between two fingers, into the rice and offered brightly, “I like Kali.” I was wondering what kind of demon I had roused within her to get this demure lady to champion the goddess of destruction — a less useful figure, I recalled, than the spirit of Fertility — when she repeated, with more heat, “Kali, I like very much,” motioning
to her plate, and I realized that it was only the curry she was extolling.

Yet for all these customary hazards, Sachiko seemed to be drawing closer as the meal went on, and towards the end, as she leaned towards me, oblivious suddenly of the stylish
Ramayana
murals all around us and the dreamy Thai pop music on the system, I realized that she was working around to some confession. Still, it was, as always, a little hard for me to follow what exactly she was saying. “With you,” she began, “I have clear heart. I talk my heart, very easy. But I very shy.” She smiled and hid her face in her napkin, and it was harder still to guess what she was trying to convey; I could tell it was important only by the diffidence with which she brought it forth. “When I meet husband, I little teenage size, nineteen. First time I together man. We talking bluegrass music — very easy, very fun. I expect soon marry. Before many times, I talking brother. Very close feeling. But his wife soon little sad, maybe little jealous. So long time, I not talking him. But now my heart very different. With you, talking very easy, very fun. You have clear heart. No dust on your mirror.” She stopped again, and I held my breath. “I have two heart,” she continued slowly. “I like children very much. I like you. But different. With you is dream world.” I was getting a little confused at all this. “You have found young heart in me,” she said. I said that I sensed as much but I did not know if her two hearts were in collision or in sync.

“I very shy,” she went on. “But I say true. If not good, please you say. I not want bad.”

“I’m really happy to be with you.”

“Really?” She sounded incredulous.

“Yes, really. Thank you for your friendship.”

“You’re welcome,” she said with a bright light, tilting her head on her shoulder and flashing me her prettiest smile. “My pleasure” — she tried out the phrase I had taught her.

Thus we struggled on through a curious discussion. Her wavering, heartfelt nonconfession seemed to mark the crossing
of some threshold, and now, of a sudden, she opened up with a flood of foreign images. She imagined my mother in a deep-blue sari, with a golden border, she said, and she would wear a sari for me on my birthday, even though she did not own one. She had always dreamed of India. She liked above all Thai reds.

“Art, you mean?”

“No. Red!”

Then she went on to tell me a Inoue Yasushi story about a man who quit his country to seek out the moon in Tibet, and I reciprocated by telling her about my readings in the Zen traveler and poet Issa. And so we wandered out into the Californian hills, past girls in “
SANTA BARBARA
: High Fashion Dreaming” shirts, along chic cobbled streets, a theme-park vision of gentrified Victoriana, with Sherlock Holmes alleyways and olde England streetlamps. This shiny local version of foggy London was called “romantic Kobe,” she informed me. “Many, many Japanese woman like come here this place.” “For shopping?” “Also for romance!”

We sat down on a wall, and in the minutes before twilight, she laid her head upon my shoulder. I could feel her perfume all around me, and as we watched the clouds catching the last of the light on the city below, she sighed, and a chill came into the air. I had never seen eyes shaped like hers before, with ocher eye shadow and folded lids, and when she looked up at me, I felt a shudder. “Time stop,” she said. “Why clock not stop moving?”

Then, smiling, she took my hand in hers, and hanging on to my arm, a skipping girl again, she walked me back to town.

At the station, as we waited for the train, she pulled out a scarf and tied it round my neck. Then, as we got in, taking seats by the window, I could feel her sadness building as we rode back into town. Squashed together in the crowded compartment, I improvised a story for her then, a story of a lady and a monk, and when I got to the end, I saw her eyes fill with tears. She looked down, embarrassed, and hid her face in my jacket. “I’m
sorry. I very sad. Sun set. And train go back Kyoto. I understand your story. Very sad.” “But Japanese people like sad stories?” “Yes,” she said. “Maybe you catch true Japanese heart.”

Then, brightening abruptly — as if she had quite literally taken a grip on her errant self — she looked up smiling and offered me a pastry she had bought from a German bakery. “This baker’s name is the German word for ‘friendliness,’ ” I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. She beamed. “You two kind bird. Hawk — and owl. You give me much input. Thank you.” And as the train drew slowly into Kyoto station, she covered my hand with hers. “Now,” she said, “I little catch bird.”

There was once a beautiful lady who lived in a village near the ancient city of Kyoto with her husband. One day in late summer, as the crickets began to fall silent, the man fell ill; and by the coming of the autumn, the woman could see that he was almost gone. All night, she sat patiently by his side, tending to his needs and listening for his breath; and as the light came up, she felt his heart, and knew that he was gone.

She loved him still, she knew, but the woman was too strong to let her own life wither. So, each day, in her black kimono, through flurries of falling leaves, she went back to the local temple, to lay scarlet flowers on his grave.

Now it happened that the guardian of this temple was a monk who had inherited it from his father in his youth. Seasons had passed, and the monk had grown sturdy in his faith; impervious to the world, his mind was fixed on Buddha. Yet when a member of the village died, it fell to this monk to perform all the rites for sending the soul on its way. So when the young lady came each day with scarlet flowers to the temple, he sat beside her and told her of the Buddha’s teaching, she in her black kimono, he in his black-and-golden robes.

As time went on, the woman began to return more and more often to the temple, and the monk, though lost in meditation,
could not so easily keep his mind in focus; even in the meditation hall, he could see a flash of red, could hear the rustle of kimono. The forty-ninth day of the husband’s death came and went, but still the woman kept returning, as if she could not put the memory away. And even when he said his sutras, the monk found that his mind was filled with the image of the long-haired woman in the garden, red flowers in her hand.

One day, as the first bite of winter chilled the air, the monk decided that he must barricade himself against such distractions and recover the strength of his faith. He caught her fragrance in the hall, he sensed the lady everywhere. But all day long he kept his face turned towards the wall. And when at last he returned to his room that night, he found a single red flower laid outside his door.

And so it continued each day for a week: not once did he open his eyes to his visitor, but each night, when he returned to his room, he found a flower by his door. When his teacher, a head abbot from Kyoto, came to visit, he saw all that was happening, but he knew that there was nothing he could do: the monk would have to face this challenge by himself.

Finally, one cold and brilliant day, the monk decided to wait in his room to watch for the lady’s visit. He saw her arrive at dawn, shivering in the winter chill, and even as he recited his sutras, he saw her waiting there all day, eyes smarting in the cold. As he watched her standing there, the monk felt shaken out of words: here, he thought, was a purity and singleness even truer than that he gave to Buddha. Here, in fact, was the meaning of devotion. As darkness fell upon the garden, and the woman got up to leave, he suddenly called out to her.

“Please wait,” he said. “I saw you standing here all day, hardly moving save for cold. Please drink some sake before you leave.”

When she saw him, the woman turned pale, till her face was ghostly white; but as he pulled back his screen, she slipped off her sandals and entered the incense-filled space. Sitting together
on the tatami, they watched the full moon rise above the eastern hills.

That night was the coldest of the year, but neither the monk nor the lady knew it. And when the monk went to prayers at dawn, his bare feet tingled on the frost.

That morning, when the woman returned to the temple, the monk was nowhere to be seen. And so it was for many days, she returning to the chilling temple garden, red flowers in her hand, and he alone in his chamber, silently aflame. Finally, when she arrived one morning, the lady found a white flower placed outside the monk’s door, inside of it a letter.

“You have given me,” the letter began, “all the warmth and color of the world. I want to keep my image of you as clear as running water. Please take this flower as a memory of our friendship. And know that, though we should not meet again, it is you I always think of.”

The woman took the letter and the flower, and the monk never heard from her again. But next morning, when he rose to say his sutras, there, on his doorstep, was a red flower, and a black kimono, scented with her fragrance, and the first faint touch of spring.

And as the leaves began to fall, I really did begin to feel that something was flowering in Sachiko, as if — though I feared to say it — she really was a kind of sleeping beauty awakened by romance, or at least its distant shadow. And for all her composure and supercompetence as a mother, for all her chic and self-possession, I could tell that hers was a heart more than ready to take flight and soar out of her control. And even though I had often been abroad, and often been faced, therefore, with the issue of what to do with foreign dreams, whether to try to encourage fantasies of abroad, or simply damp them down, I still had no sense of how much she was interested in making her visions reality, or whether, as a good Japanese, she was
content simply to maintain another world that she could visit in imagination.