The Lady and the Monk (21 page)

Coming from Kyoto — quasi-Japanese myself now — I found myself at sea abroad, forgetting to leave tips, reluctant to jaywalk across empty streets, recoiling like a child whenever men approached me on the streets with offers of hotels. I stood
outside taxicabs, waiting for their doors to open automatically, and then, once inside, fell into broken conversations — how many children do you have, how many hours do you work? — in Japanese. When once, returning home, I put my shoes on inside my room, I felt as surreptitious, as sacrilegious almost, as if I had worn a Walkman into church.

Abroad, as unguarded as a Japanese now, I left my things unattended and my room unlocked, and wandered round with $170 in my pocket (Japan was, perhaps, curing me a little of materialism, though not in the way expected). Whenever I bumped into someone in the street, I said, reflexively, “
Sumimasen
,” and when I returned to California, I startled teenage shopgirls with my earnest
Sō, sō, sōs
. On my way home from Los Angeles Airport, a Mexican in a gas station rushed up to me in relief — a compatriot, so he thought — and pressed me in Spanish for details on the way to Calexico. “
Hai, hai
” — I nodded briskly — “
Demo kochira wa
 …” and looked back to see the poor man terrified.

After Japan, even Harrods looked a little declassé, and when I bought a cup of tea at the Singapore Hilton for $2.20, I could not believe the bargain. I was Japanese enough now to shiver when I saw a man kiss his girlfriend in a Bangkok restaurant. And at home, in California, I felt Japanese enough to appreciate, for the first time ever, the lavender blush of hibiscus in the mild December days and the piercing clarity of Venus in the denim sky. Japanese too, I could see now, for the first time ever, the true beauties of California: long hours and long horizons.

But I felt a little closer to Japan now in some deeper sense as well, in affiliation as well as habit. Whenever I saw groups of JAL-packaged tourists being herded through the Grand Palace in Bangkok, or pairs of frightened-looking girls in khaki shorts, deep in sidewalk negotiations with some local con man, I felt,
mysteriously, a pang of sympathy and kinship; abroad, the Japanese looked so lost to the world, so far from the reassurances to which they were accustomed. They looked to me as vulnerable as shy teenagers alone, in a corner, at their first real cocktail party — not just afraid and disoriented, but anxious to combat self-pity. And whenever foreigners fell into the usual litany (“But the Japanese are so strange, so neurotic, so hard to get close to”), I found myself rushing to their defense: “But they’re so innocent, so thoughtful, and so kind.” Taken on any terms other than their own, the Japanese did, to be sure, seem tough negotiators, industrial spies, and torturers of whales, playing life to win; but now I was able to see them a little more from the other side, in terms of which everything they did made perfect sense and the world they produced was hard to improve upon. In a sense, in fact, it was that very perfection that removed them further from the world at large (as a concert pianist has that much less in common with a garage band) and made the world at large seem that much more menacing and dark. Watching the Japanese circling around Asia in a kind of see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil spell, taking in everything with polite enthusiasm, screening out disease and dirt — exemplary guests as well as hosts, as good at receiving pleasure as at giving it — my heart went out to a culture bound, and perhaps determined, to be misunderstood.

Abroad, in fact, it was even clearer that Japan was taking over the role of America in the fifties. In Japan itself, it was easy to see its affinities with the Eisenhower era, in its nuclear families with their clean suburban homes, placid and a touch complacent; its identically dressed commuters on their trains, men in gray flannel suits dreaming of golfing holidays; its almost science fictive world of gadgets and consumer goods and a conformity so absolute that it gave rise to the intertwined notions of the affluent society, the organization man, and the lonely crowd (and, in response, of Ginsberg howling poems in Kyoto streets). Abroad, however, the likenesses were even easier to see. For with the dawning of
the Japanese Empire, the “Ugly American” of thirty years ago was fast being replaced by a new focus for the world’s envies and fears. Now it was the Japanese who were traveling around the globe in groups, like conquering armies on the march, dressed in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts, cameras slung around their necks, marveling at how everything was smaller — and better — at home. Now it was Japan that seemed the role model — and the hated archrival — of many developing countries, even such unforgiving former colonies as Korea. Now it was Japan, indeed, that seemed the Land of Opportunity, and to Japan that foreigners came in search of new lives for themselves, and new identities, in a land of promise and abundance — in search, in fact, of the American Dream. And now it was America that seemed the funky, disorganized, low-budget slice of exotica that the Japanese delighted in inspecting whenever they wanted a taste of primitive wildness. Whenever I visited expensive hotels (or expensive countries, like Bhutan), nearly all the tourists I saw were groups of wealthy, retired Westerners and youthful Japanese. It seemed a natural pairing.

It was only when I returned to the world at large, moreover, that I realized how far away I had been in Kyoto. It was not just that Japan occupied a different kind of universe, which rarely made contact with our own; but, more, that this island was — by choice as much as circumstance — psychically as well as physically removed from the world at large. The analogy here was not so much with Gulliver as with Alice; in Japan, one felt as if the world had been turned upside down and inside out, all its values and assumptions turned on their heads — as if, one might say, the force of gravity had been so radically altered that one had ended up on another planet. It sometimes seemed — and Japan liked to make it seem — as if Japan had a different epicenter from the rest of the world, as if, indeed, all the rest of the world inhabited a Copernican, and Japan a Ptolemaic, universe;
and so, where much of the rest of the world traditionally looked to America as its center, Japan looked only to Japan. America might be a fashion accessory, a collectible, a sign of imported glamour; but it was not the end-point of most aspirations here. America was an alternative to Gucci, not to
Bushidō
or Emperor-worship or Japan.

Besides, Japan’s strength was only growing as America’s declined. It was morning in America, but in most parts of Asia, especially in Tokyo, it was already the next evening. And the notion of a Japanese takeover was gaining an almost literal significance as the Japanese bought up hotels and companies and entire downtowns; the sluggers of the major leagues, the diamonds of Tiffany’s, the canvases of Van Gogh. Even Monet’s “Soleil Levant” had been spirited away, by
yakuza
, or gangsters, to Japan (the Rising Sun itself was going East). Meanwhile, all the news from America was bad: AIDS, crack, Irangate; an aging president, a collapsed economy, a clergy double-crossing itself with scandal. And my sense that America was beginning to look more and more like an underdeveloped country next to Japan was only eerily confirmed when, my first night back in California, a thunderstorm began to shake my hillside house, rattling the windows and pounding the walls all night, like the ghost of a monsoon, until, of a sudden, we were plunged into darkness, powerless for twenty hours while the wind howled all about.

Ambushing Japan from afar, I was better able to see what I liked about it. Bangkok, for example, bustling by day and dazzling by night, alive to business and to pleasure, struck me as the ultimate urban intoxication; yet it also seemed to encourage the abandoning of vision for mere fantasy. It was hard to imagine reading there, or thinking, or leading any kind of life that would engage the deepest part of one. The place invited one to surrender to reality, not to lead a life so much as to be led by one. And
where people came to Japan, very often, to pursue something, they came to Bangkok — or Bali, or Sri Lanka, I suspected — not to do so. Thus spicy, sultry, vivacious Bangkok sent me back with renewed affection for Japan. Thailand, I thought, was the girl at the edge of the temple, beckoning one away with a smile.

I
HAD NOT EVEN
set foot in Kyoto on my way back to Japan before enlightenment and seduction — and the intertwining of the two — were all about me once again. On the plane back from L.A., I found myself next to a glamorous young Korean who was all fluttered eyelashes and whispered invitations, until I exposed her, in midflight, as a Mormon practicing her missionary positions. And when the plane got stranded in Seoul, I found myself sharing a room with a tree planter from Sonoma County, who was, he said, on his way to India to spend twelve hours a day, for one hundred eighty days, meditating in a cell. I said hello to him, and he raised his hands in prayer and said, “I’m so grateful to meet you, sir”; the airline representative gave us vouchers for our breakfasts, and he said, “I’m so very grateful for your gift, ma’am.” I asked him how his flight had been, and he smiled, beatific. “At first,” he began, “I couldn’t sleep because I was next to these two kids, and they were crying. It was beautiful that they had to cry” — he smiled forgivingly again — “but it made it kind of hard to sleep.” Then he addressed his spiritual life. “I used to be into this guru thing, Rajneesh and all that stuff. But I suffered a lot of alienation. Now I just want to find this quietness inside of me, and be of service to humanity. After a while, you know, when you’re meditating, you just get into this state, and all your sexual energy disappears.” A fit antidote to Rajneesh, I surmised.

“Sure,” he said, looking out upon the sleek neon blocks of Seoul. “Meditation and relationships — those are the ways to do it, I guess.” He thought a little more. “Relationships, I guess, are the fastest way.”

That night, I had strange dreams of Kyoto: of huge boulevards and people sitting in the streets; of standing on large intersections late at night, not knowing where I was, and groups of Japanese terrifying me in their clowns’ costumes, painted red faces dreamlike in the dark.

My first night back in Kyoto, the city was indeed a dream to me again, as I wandered through its dizzy streets, in and out of weaving crowds, past megaphone voices and floodlit stalls, a fairy world of Pierrot faces. A surge of kimonos everywhere, streaming through the reeling lanes, in and out of noodle stalls, snapping up octopus pancakes and New Year’s tofu, features all invisible in the dark, then shockingly lit up by passing lanterns. Shadows gliding through the temple corridors, billowing white banners above their hooded entrances; figures collecting fires from a central roaring blaze; and then, at midnight, the great bronze bell of Chion-in, tolling and tolling in the new Year of the Dragon.

Jet-lagged on New Year’s Day itself, I arose before dawn and hurried out into the phantom streets, where the dark blue was beginning to clear above the lowering mountains and silver the city’s canals. All the commotion was gone now, and all noise vanished: just unlit lanterns in the street, deserted stalls, silence and debris. A few students observing the year’s first sunrise; a girl in blue kimono and white stole, hugging herself in the dawn, condensation escaping like a whisper from her lips.

Inside the Heian Shrine, the new world was just beginning to stir. White-robed priests in conical black hats stood under orange pillars, ceremonious in the cold-breath morning. A gray-suited man bowed before an altar, the young light shining off the polished wood around him. A flock of white priests, unearthly in the early light, shuffled in slow processional along the corridors,
sticks of incense held in front of them. Smoke rising off the dying fires like communal breath in the dawn.

Later, very slowly, the open courtyard began to fill up, patient as a painter’s canvas: women in flowered kimono, snow-white fur stoles around pale necks, clopping on wooden clogs across the sunlit gravel, the sun spreading warmth across the yawning space; worshipers tossing coins into boxes, clapping their hands and, eyes closed, murmuring the year’s first prayers; then receding again into the day’s perfection. In the shining winter light, families took up positions on low wooden tables spread with indigo and scarlet cloths; lovers lingered round sun-dappled streams; pedigree ladies led pedigree cats in warm leather jackets across the shrine. A gong, slow and solemn, tolled and tolled, and little girls with flowers in their hair joined hands with beaming fathers in flowing black kimono.

Walking home, through the sun, flowers placed on doorsteps and futons draped over balconies, I felt as if I had landed in some matter-of-fact utopia. The high cries of children playing hopscotch in the lane. Householders polishing their bikes in the quiet sun, unloading furniture from houses, silently hosing cars. The rites of everyday life polished till they shone like glass. In Kyoto, every day felt like New Year’s Day, so deft were the Japanese at remaking themselves each day. For a foreigner at least, able to enjoy all the conveniences of this world without having to pay the price in terms of obligation, there was a sense of airy weightlessness to life here that seemed to suspend harsh realities. Coming back to the sharpened air of Kyoto after a few weeks away, I felt as clean as a small town after heavy rains subside.

Later that morning, New Year’s cards were hand-delivered to everyone in the land, and I found myself with a bouquet of lyric offerings: from Sachiko, a pretty snowdrop, inscribed with her own calligraphy, above a printed message that said, “She has a
floral word meaning ‘a solace’ ”; from the Buddhist priest who had taught me executive’s Japanese in California, a hand-drawn cartoon of two happy alligators, one bestriding a pair of scales, the other cradling a baby, a soccer ball between them, and the greeting “Happy Rew Year” (
rew
— or, more properly,
ryū
— means “dragon”); from Mark, a
sumi-e
dragon, all Buddhist power and coiled strength; and from an American businessman in Tokyo, a photograph of himself.