The Lady and the Monk (24 page)

“How was your daughter?”

“Great, just great,” he said, a long way off now from
The Tao of Sex
. “She’s really pretty.” His eyes were shy now, self-denying. “Not, like, model pretty, but she’s beautiful to me.” He told us how he had talked to her about “Für Elise” and how the two of them had just sat there alone, for the first time in their lives. Later, he said, someone or other had come in and taken a picture of them — “some monk, or the abbot’s wife, or someone, I don’t know. I was just so moved, I couldn’t focus on a thing.”

Then, unable to put words to his feelings, Rick picked up his
bamboo flute, made for him by his teacher, and played along with the Billie Holliday melodies seeping through the room, summoning all the feelings that he could not voice.

“The only thing you need, man,” Joe piped up, as soon as he was finished, no more respectful of his friend’s sentiments than of any other doctrine, “is more rests. Like Mozart, man. That guy, man, was a genius, a fuckin’ genius. All the music he made was in the pauses. Everything in the symphonies depends on rests. A fuckin genius, man, and at thirty-six he died, and they put him into the ground and covered him with lime. Death, man, it’s a bummer.” He looked around at us and chuckled, and, as ever, I felt that what he was getting at was a little less obvious than it seemed. “That’s why you gotta have a baby in the house. Baby’s a real good thing to have in the house. Like right now, Sammy’s nine months old. He’s gonna be grown up. So we’ve got to get a baby in the house.” This was the way he operated: to start with some truism and then, like a jazz musician, to work improvisations around it, turning it round and round like a stone, till it began to throw off unexpected lights. “Man, you gotta have a baby in the house. Like my wife — if she wants to go out and hustle all day in the rat race, she can have it! She’s welcome to it. I can just stay home and watch my children grow. Makin’ money’s the least interesting part of life; I’d rather be at home, man, playin’ with my kids. You know why? Because a baby, man, he’s just seen the light! He’s just sittin’ there, and he’s light! I pat him on the head, and I’m touchin’ light. You know The
Tibetan Book of the Dead
? It’s all in there. Why babies are light.”

“That’s also why Shelley used to accost babies in the street,” I broke in, “and cross-question them about life in the hereafter. He wanted to get a first-person account of what it was like in heaven.”

“Jesus fuck,” said Joe, shaking his head and grinning broadly to himself. “I wish I believed that, I really do. I really wish I believed that was true.”

And I remembered how the demon Mara, when he was trying to tempt the Buddha, having failed to bring him down with discontent or desire, unleashed his strongest weapon: love.

Whenever I wandered the winter streets alone, though, Kyoto still aroused in me a surge of unaccountable elation: even in winter, the skies were unreasonably blue, and the days had a bright, invigorating chill that seemed to admit of no despair. In Japan, there was truly a sense of a culture calmly on the rise, in possession of itself and buoyant, and the mild air itself felt cleansed of cynicism and decay. Nothing was left to age here (much as the conservation-minded foreigner might have wished there to be); everything felt newly minted as a nickel. Other countries — my trip had reminded me — might seduce or assault or implicate one with the challenge of an outstretched hand; the influence of Japan, by contrast, was soft as a sheet drawn over one’s body.

I knew, of course, that it was dangerously easy for a foreigner, who enjoyed a kind of
carte blanche
in living outside the system, to endorse a world in which men dragged themselves off from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. six days a week, while women were condemned to a kind of emotional exile. I knew, too, that the lightness of being here could be unbearable — an evasion or a denial — and that Japan’s optimism was willed, sometimes, or no deeper than its sugar-coated surfaces, its pink-ribboned girls quite literally trying to make their eyes as wide as possible. (When she asked her students to find three adjectives to describe themselves, a longtime foreign teacher told me, she had had to ban the use of “cheerful,” or else every girl in class would use it.)

Yet still, I thought, it took a certain courage to be positive, and it was always easier to negate than to affirm. The fact that they had been trained always to see the good, and to expect the same in others, might make the Japanese vulnerable abroad, but at home it worked as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. And the
smiles might be all artifice, but better false smiles, I thought, on the level of daily routine, than honest rudeness. Within its strict limits, and on paper at least, the Japanese seemed to have created a kind of child’s utopia of clean surfaces and safe pleasures. One reason Kyoto took me back to England was that it took me back to childhood, and to its sense of protected calm.

My one problem, in fact, with Japan was that it sometimes seemed so free of problems. That was one reason, I often thought, why these people, so famously considerate in the domestic realm, appeared so notoriously indifferent to refugees, or war victims, or to the demands of the world at large. In its way, Japan had constructed such an orderly, friction-free society that its young, at least, free of the Occupation, could not easily grasp the details of a world of pain and privation — the real world, in short. Human rights and suffering made little sense in this shiny, wound-up society where both were either taken for granted or denied (even the beggars here seemed mannerly and sane, while cripples were ritually shipped off, in many cases, to the Philippines). This removal from all pain gave Japan at times the air of a wealthy, well-intentioned dowager, alone in the comfort of her home, and responding, without malice, to stories of need elsewhere with an airy “Let them eat cake!”

Besides, pretense could have its virtues. I thought back to the line in the Singer story “A Piece of Advice” I had read a few months before: “If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards.” Certainly, belief in the virtue of Japan could be as self-validating as any other leap of faith; egotism itself almost seemed collective here. And only a little later, when I returned to Kenkō, the fourteenth-century monk who wrote with a duchess’s fastidiousness, I found again the perfect defense of pretense. “If you run through the streets saying you imitate a lunatic,” wrote the monk, “you are in fact a lunatic. If you kill a man saying you imitate a criminal, you are a
criminal yourself. By the same token, a horse that imitates a champion thoroughbred may be classed as a thoroughbred, and the man who imitates Shun belongs to Shun’s company. A man who studies wisdom, even insincerely, should be called wise.” And, I thought, a society that keeps telling itself it’s unified is on the way at least to being what it says.

O
NE DAY
a little later, the phone in my guesthouse trilled, and I happened to be the one to pick it up.
“Moshi-moshi.” “Moshi-moshi?” “Hai! Moshi-moshi.”
Through the inevitable tangle of
Moshi-moshis
that followed, I could make out a flustered middle-aged female voice.
“Moshi-moshi?” “Hai, hai, moshi-moshi,”
I replied, and then she started up again, in English. “My name is Tsukimoto. I want foreigner person for job.…”

“No,” I replied with careful patience, accustomed by now to such requests. “I do not want to teach English. But there may be other people in this house who do.”

“No, no,” she said. “Movie. We need character in movie. We need foreigner character. Why
you
not come along? We give you three thousand yen, interview fee.”

Twenty-five dollars, I thought: that would be the first yen I ever earned. “What kind of movie?”

“GI. Occupation movie. Why you not come? Three thousand yen for one hour.”

Two days later, I arrived, as arranged, at the Takashimaya department store downtown. Tsukimoto’s face, when she saw me, was not a picture of joy: apparently the
gaijin
who sounded so English on the phone was in fact a small and scrawny Indian. Loss of face seemed imminent.

Nonetheless, she took me in with harried stoicism and, gathering together a circle of twelve specimens of foreign manhood, bustled us all into a fleet of waiting taxis. Twenty minutes later, our convoy pulled into Eigamura — Movie Village — the Universal Studios of Japan. A little man hurried up to us
and led our ragtag group into a dingy little room, Tsukimoto bustling along behind. In her wake came a clutch of harassed-looking teenage assistants and the director, a smoothly grinning dandy in bomber jacket, muffler, and Yves Saint Laurent glasses.

The picture of worldly urbanity, thick gray hair flopping over designer glasses, he let a few words escape through his ingratiating smile. There was silence. Tsukimoto stared at him in terror. There was more silence.

“He said the movie’s name is
Nikutai-no Mon
,” a shy sociology student from New Zealand finally piped up. “That means ‘Gate of Flesh.’ ”

The director purred a little more.

Looking around at the blank faces, the New Zealander gamely took the bit between his teeth. “Apparently, the film is about the Americans in Japan after World War II,” he continued, mumbling under his spectacles, locks of brown hair falling across his face. “It features GIs, prostitutes,
yakuza
.” The director fired out a few more mellifluous sentences. The New Zealander, looking down at the table, condemned now to translate, gamely soldiered on. “Some of it is very brutal. It will require people to get hit very hard.” The director, smiling all round, rattled off some more. “Also, it does not portray Americans in a very favorable light. If that bothers you, please say so. And” — the poor shy fellow was now muttering through his hair in embarrassment — “there will be some carnal scenes.”

There were titters all round.

This was too much for Tsukimoto. Firmly stepping forward, she handed out a few sheets of paper to a handful of foreign men — the largest in the room — and asked them each to read out the first sentence. One after another, the foreigners intoned the opening line: “From border to border, from coast to coast, here comes the Happy Cowboy!”

“Wait a minute,” someone cried. “Japan has no borders!”

“Maybe ‘From island to island, from coast to coast,’ would be better?”

“No. The thing doesn’t make sense anyway. Who in hell’s the Happy Cowboy when he’s at home?”

At this point, Tsukimoto quickly interceded once again.

“Please stand up!” she barked, sensing that things were not going well. “You must be seventy inches high!”

All of us got up, and I cast an eye over my rivals: an aging Brit, who had recently starred in another sexploitation movie, thanks to an earlier Tsukimoto casting call; a phlegmatic,
tanuki
-bellied Israeli with a walrus mustache and a look of deepest sorrow; a sour, balding American in a green down jacket, who looked like a graduate student on his way to the stacks; an improbably beautiful blond German in a leather jacket, who resembled a West Hollywood waiter; and a six-foot-four-inch Larry Bird look-alike from Lafayette, Indiana, whose main qualification for becoming an English teacher in Japan had been selling Dove Bars outside Trump Tower. There were short
gaijin
, fat
gaijin
, tall
gaijin
; thin
gaijin
, dark
gaijin
, squat
gaijin
. Every kind of
gaijin
, in fact, except the type likely to belong to the Eighty-second Airborne.

As Tsukimoto anxiously surveyed the talent before her, questions began to fly.

“What kind of picture is this?” “What sort of person do you need?” “What scenes will we get to do?”

“Well,” said the New Zealander — now, unwittingly, the official spokesman for the film-makers — “he did say it was pretty brutal!”

“Yes, yes,” said Tsukimoto excitedly. “We need man for lape.”

There was a startled silence.

“Yes, yes, we need lape scene. Very important lape.”

Several comments, few of them pious, escaped from the thirteen assembled males.

“We don’t know how to rape — Japanese girls are so willing,” smirked a handsome Austrian in a brown leather jacket. “If you want a rapist, look no further,” cooed a South American. “How are you going to measure us up?” “Don’t worry about that!
You’re not going to get to do the rape. You’re going to get to be raped!”

Again the flustered Tsukimoto burst in.

“You have experience?” she said, earnestly turning on a small, round New Yorker well known in Kyoto as a serious student of
kyōgen
drama. “You have done before?”

“Experience as a rapist?”

“Yes, yes. Lape scene need lape experience. Very important.”

At that, the director clearly tired of the whole song-and-dance routine and pointed a brisk finger at the five men in the room with beards and three others who were plump. The lucky eight were led off to a separate room to demonstrate their skills as rapists, and the rest of us were left, as it were, on the cutting-room floor.

Tsukimoto, however, was eager to give solace. “They have bad-side atmosphere,” she told us kindly. “Very bad-side. They look like lape men.”

This was not altogether reassuring. I was sorely tempted to confess to Tsukimoto that I did in fact have just the kind of experience she wanted: my only other major motion picture role had featured an unhappy impersonation of a Mexican military cadet in a tragically overlooked horror movie,
Evilspeak
, about a trio of wild boars that attack naked girls in the shower while the former child star of
Gentle Ben
networks with the devil on his computer. My auditioners then had been a pair of bikinied Californians whom memory conveniently recalled as Cindy and Candy, and who stretched themselves out on poolside deck chairs and languorously fingered anyone willing to get a military-length haircut.

Before I could make this known to my employer, however, the would-be rapists were led back in again, the Pyrrhic winner the paunchy
kyōgen
actor, now looking more than a little molested himself. “I guess I just looked the scuzziest,” he averred modestly as the runners-up barreled in, slapping him on the shoulder like Miss Universe contestants in reverse. “I don’t know how my wife and her family are going to take this!”