The Lady and the Monk (2 page)

A gong began to sound, and a column of thin smoke rose high in the clear air.

And then, walking round a corner, I came of a sudden upon a flutter of activity, a cluster of schoolchildren scattered this way and that around the quiet paths, hunched over the ground at strange angles like a flock of odd birds. No more than six years old, perhaps, these curious little creatures were dressed all alike in tidy uniforms: pink and blue hats, white skirts and shorts, sporty white socks. Occasionally, one of them would find what he was looking for — a bean, apparently, or some kind of acorn — and toss it into a cellophane bag, then hurry off in search of more. Otherwise, they all remained so deep in concentration, and so inviolate, that none of them seemed to notice me as they crouched along the tree-shaded path, silent and intent. Around them, in the freshly minted morning, was the coming autumns faint chill of regret.

And somehow the self-contained quiet of the children, and the elegiac softness in the air — the whole rapt stillness of the scene — took me back, in a flash, to faraway mornings on October days in England, when the Oxford Parks were pungent with the smell of burning leaves and crisp with the crackle of leaves underfoot. For the first time in twenty years, I was back in a duffel coat, futureless and blithe, running through a faintly sunny morning to throw bread to the swans in the lake, then hurrying home for tea in the darkening afternoon. Called back through the years to distant childhood, I was back, too, in the blue intensity of knowing nothing but the present moment.

There were many features of Japan that might have reminded me of England: the small villages set amidst rich green hills, all scaled with a cozy modesty; the self-enclosure of an island apart from the world, not open to sea and light, as tropical islands are, but huddled in upon itself, an attic place of gray and cold; a sense of polite aloofness, a coolness enforced by courtesies and a language built on shadows; even the sense of immovable hierarchy that made both countries seem like giant Old Boys
Clubs, where nobody worked in college because the name of the college alone was enough to decide every future. But none of that could explain the urgency of a Wordsworthian moment on a mild October morning, in a place I had never seen before. And the moment stayed inside me like the tolling of a bell.

That first fleeting taste of Japan felt like the answer to some unspoken question. For through whatever curious affinities propel us towards people or places we have never met, I had always been powerfully drawn towards Japan. Ever since boyhood, I had only to glimpse a Hokusai print of peasants huddled under driving rain, or to enter the cold beauty of a Kawabata novel, to feel a shock of penetrating recognition. For years, the mere mention of an “inn,” or “snow country,” or even a “prefecture,” had sent a shiver through me, and a chill. And though I knew almost nothing about Japan and had never had the chance to study it, I felt mysteriously close to the place, and closest of all when I read its poems — the rainy-night lyrics of Japanese women, the clear-water haiku of itinerant Zen monks. From afar, Japan felt like an unacknowledged home.

The next year, I happened to return to Japan, for a slightly longer stay. This time I was there with my mother, on a brief sight-seeing tour, and as soon as we arrived, we found ourselves propelled through the modern nation in all its bullet-trained efficiency. For four days, we glided through uniform hotels, in and out of tour buses, through one fluorescent coffee shop after another. At night, I went out alone into the streets and lost myself in the clangor of their amusement-arcade surfaces, the crash of white signs, bright lights, neon colors — a toyland gone berserk with an intensity that could not have been further from the lyrical land I imagined. Yet even here, in the midst of commotion, images would occasionally bob up and pull me
down below the surface of myself: just a picture, perhaps, of a girl alone beside a rain-streaked window; or a monk all in black, alone with his begging bowl, head bowed, in the midst of shopping crowds.

One evening, I wandered through the ancient geisha quarter of Kyoto as night began to fall over the houses, and life to stir within them. The crooked, narrow streets were secret in the dusk, but still I could catch snatches from within: laughter from some inner passage, figures outlined in an upstairs window, the whitened face of an apprentice geisha slipping like a ghost into a waiting taxi.

By the time the street led out onto a busy road, it was dark, and I could just make out, in front of me, the entrance to a park. Inside the giant
torii
gates, I found myself amidst a carnival of lights like nothing I had ever seen, or dreamed, before. Families were gathered by the side of a pond, ringed by lanterns, and lamplit stalls were set along their paths. A surge of people were marching up a path, and as I hurried after them, the way led through the darkness and into another, broader path, framed on both sides by lanterns. The lights, red and white, bobbed ahead of us, up another slope, and then along a further path, until, of a sudden, the path gave way to a kind of plateau. Around me, families ducked under lanterns or darted into shrines to have their fortunes told, inscribed in sweeping calligraphy on wooden blocks. Above me, lights danced across the hill like fireflies.

As I began to climb, the noise fell away, and the crowds started to thin out. Soon I was far above the town, alone in a world of lanterns. For on this, the Night of a Thousand Lanterns, lights had been placed beside every grave, to lead departed spirits back to Buddha. And I, somehow, without knowing it, had found my way alone into an ancient graveyard. For many minutes I stood there, in the company of ghosts and shivering lights.

When finally I made my way back down, and into the festive
streets, the spell did not shatter, but only gained texture and animation. Round businessmen in loosened ties went reeling arm in arm amidst the weaving lights, and gaggles of giggling girls shuffled behind, fluent in their best kimono. The teahouses along the Kamo River were strung with lights this summer night, and large parties were gathered on their wooden terraces, set on stilts above the moonlit water. Along the darkened riverbank, lovers sat side by side, spaced out at regular intervals, as self-contained as in some
tableau vivant
. I had passed through a looking glass and into a world of dreams.

That second trip was enough to decide me: it was time to put my visions of Japan to the test. At home, these days, one heard constantly about the zany forms of modern Japan, the double standards of its political system, the strategies of its companies, all the craft of the collective rising sun of economic power that seemed to be the capital of the future tense; but the private Japan, and the emotional Japan — the lunar Japan, in a sense, that I had found in the poems of women and monks — was increasingly hard to glimpse. If this imaginative Japan existed only in my mind, I wanted to know that soon, and so be free of the illusion forever; yet if there were truly moments in Japan that took me back to a home as distantly recalled as the house in which I was born, I wanted to know that too. Residing six thousand miles away, I could only remain as distracted as when one tries and tries to recover the rest of some half-remembered melody.

In Japan, moreover, I wanted to put another daydream to the test: the vision I had always cherished of living simply and alone, in some foreign land, unknown. A life alone was the closest thing to faith I knew, and a life of Thoreauvian quiet seemed most practicable abroad. Japan, besides, seemed the ideal site for such an exercise in solitude, not only because its polished courtesies kept the foreigner out as surely as its closed
doors, but also because its social forms were as unfathomable to me, and as alien, as the woods round Walden Pond.

In the fall of 1987, therefore, as a kind of dare to myself, I bought a ticket for Japan. I took nothing more than a little money that I had saved: no plans, no contacts, no places to live. In my suitcase I had a few essentials, and copies of Emerson, Wilde, and Thoreau; in my head, the name of a temple, a few phrases I had learned from a Buddhist priest in Santa Barbara, and a schedule of the festivals by which the Japanese measure their seasons. On September 22 — the first official day of autumn, a new-moon night with an eclipse of the sun, and, as it happened, the day on which the aging Emperor underwent an internal bypass operation that threatened the central symbol of the land — I took off for Japan.

S
O IT WAS THAT
one day later, I found myself standing in Kyoto, two cases in my hand, outside a tiny temple in the rain. A shaven-headed monk, an albino as it happened, with vague eyes and a face like baby’s milk, appeared before me, smiling. “Do you speak English?” I asked him, in Japanese.
Litteru
, he replied, and so I asked once more. “One night, three thousand, five hundred,” he said. “Free breakfast.” Then he pointed to a courtyard behind him, crowded with bicycles, motorbikes, and mopeds. “My hobby,” he explained.

That, it seemed, was the end of the conversation, of small talk and of big. Eyes bulging, the pale monk motioned to a pair of slippers, then led me through a maze of gleaming corridors, past a tidy rock garden, across an altar room equipped with gong and elegant calligraphy, and into another tiny room. A room was all it was — a bare rectangle of tatami mats bordered by sliding screens. Pulling out a mattress that was standing in the corner, he nodded in my direction, and I collapsed.

Later, many hours later, when I awoke, the world was dark. I looked around, but there was no way of telling whether it was night or day. On every side of me was a sliding door: one that gave onto another tiny, empty space; another that led into the darkened shrine, spectral now in the gloom; a third that proved to be nothing but a wall; and a fourth that, when I slid it open, afforded me a glimpse of the garden behind and, rising high above it, the silhouette of a five-story pagoda, the moon a torn fingernail in the sky.

Fumbling my way through the dark, I stumbled through the
shrine and out into the entrance hall, and then into the narrow street. Everything, here too, was hushed. Temple roofs and spires haunted the brownish sky. Banners fluttered from the wooden eaves of teahouses. The darkness was pricked by nothing save white lanterns and the blue-and-white badges of American Express.

I walked along the empty lane in a dream of strange displacement. No other pedestrians walked these midnight streets; no cars purred through the ghosted dark. Only occasionally could I catch the distant murmurs of some secret entertainment. Then, as the first speckles of rain began prickling my arms, I hurried back into the temple. All night long, the rain pattered down on wooden roofs, and I, now sleeping, now awake, sat alone in the darkened shrine, not really knowing where I was.

The next morning, when I got up and made my way uncertainly out to the altar room, the monk bustled up to greet me. The first item on the agenda was a guided tour. And the first stop on the tour was what appeared to be the only piece of decoration in the place: a framed photograph of himself, seated atop a tricycle, looking astonished, a bobble hat on his shaven head and a Mickey Mouse shirt under his alabaster face. “This me,” he explained. “I am Buddhist monk.” Then, in the same provisional tone, he proceeded to recite the American sites he had seen — “San Francisco, Los Angeles, Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, San Antonio, El Paso, New Orleans, Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo.” Then he led me to a low table, overlooking the temple garden, and vanished.

A few minutes later, my bewilderment now almost mirroring his own, he hurried in again and laid down before me a black lacquer tray filled with elegant little bowls of vegetables, fruit, pickles, and rice; later, a toaster, some bread, and a thermos of hot water for my tea. Then he disappeared again.

I was just beginning to enjoy the feast, looking out upon the
green and silver stillness, when suddenly his astonished-looking face appeared again, speeding through the garden atop a motorized contraption. He rode up to the room where I was sitting, looked astonished some more, waved like a queen, and then roared away again in a minicloud of smoke. The next thing I knew, he was at my door, on foot this time, peering in with a hesitant smile. “Tricycle,” he said, pointing at the offending instrument, Mickey and Minnie grinning on its license plate. With that, he disappeared.

My second day, as I sat in the alcove looking out onto the other garden — a stream, a wooden bridge, a stone lantern, and, beyond, Yasaka Pagoda rising through the trees — the second, and only other, monk of the temple, an older man, with the breathless, frightened voice of a perennially bullied schoolboy issuing from a spherical wrestler’s body, padded over to me. He spoke even less English than his colleague, but that did not seem to matter, since his was not a verbal medium. Huffing and puffing, but without a word, he sat down beside me and pulled out six sheaves of snapshots: himself (wide-eyed) in front of the Taj Mahal; himself (bemused) on a bridge above the Thames; himself (bewildered) on llle de la Cité; himself (perplexed) on the steps of the Piazza di Spagna; and himself with a variety of other scenic wonders. Then, show complete, he trudged away again.

A eunuch and an albino: the monks with whom I was living were the strangest-looking pair that ever I had seen, and a cynic, no doubt, would have had no trouble explaining why they had turned their backs on the world before the world could turn its back on them. Yet they were an eminently kindly pair, and peaceable, and I began in time to think of them as good companions. Every morning, as I took my seat in front of the rock garden, they laid before me a four-course breakfast, and every morning — with a thoughtfulness and precision I could imagine only in Japan — they gave me something different. Every evening, when I went out, I found them squashed
together on the floor, at a tiny table in a tiny room, drinking beer before some TV ball game. “Catch you later,” the albino monk would call out after me, waving his bottle merrily in my direction, chalky white legs protruding from tomato-red shorts.