The Lady and the Monk (29 page)

This poppy poetry was, in spite of itself, Japanese, I thought: in some sense, it meant nothing, and yet — in the Japanese way — it substituted atmosphere for meaning and so caught the aroma of a feeling. Meaning or its absence hardly mattered; there was no more point in belaboring a meaning here than in trying to pin one down in a photo or a
tanka
. Instead of analysis, one should simply surrender; surrender to the lovely, strange trompe l’oeil:

Downtown Kyoto was strange to me in different ways, for as I came to know the central covered mall, I registered a curious discrepancy. There were two parallel aisles in the arcade, both of them typical strips of buzzing lights, cartoon faces, fast-food joints, and the occasional porno store. One, though, was always in the usual Japanese state of perpetual quiet rush hour, crammed with uniformed schoolgirls, sleek ladies of the water trade, and beribboned office ladies; the other was as lonely as a ghost town.

One day, as we wandered through the mall together, I asked Mark about this. Well, he said, one of the streets, Teramachi, or the Street of Temples, had long been a place of religious sites and graveyards, razed now by the mallifying city. But Kyotoites still tended to shun it as much as they did the areas of the untouchables, or any haunted house: they did not relish the
sensation of walking on the bones of their ancestors. So the whole strip was generally empty, save for its Buddhist shops.

Certainly, the longer I stayed in Kyoto, the more I discovered how many spirits still lingered in its byways and back alleyways, and how much, even now, an animistic strain still haunted this sleek and secular society. For all the futuristic finish of the city’s ways and surfaces, it had never fully relinquished its wilder pagan past. The Japanese still slept in certain directions that they deemed auspicious, and left food out on their doorsteps to appease the fox spirits; in the countryside, where houses lacked air-conditioning, people still told one another ghost stories to keep each other cool in summer. Sea spray was said to be the heads of shipwrecked ghosts, and a winter exorcism was still conducted near my home. One foreigner I knew lived rent-free in a huge old house that no Japanese would enter because it was said to be haunted; even a seven-hundred-dollar Shinto priest had failed to clean it out.

I noted too, as time went on, how often Sachiko referred to God, and how much he resembled the stern Calvinist dispenser of the West. If clouds began to gather on a day we met, she’d grow quiet, very often, and say, a little ruminatively, “God little give this day. Maybe he want punish me.” When I told her that I had had a chilling dream of her turning hard and brittle, she startled me by explaining, “You me very close. Then maybe God little jealous.” Most often, though, she would interpret — or describe, at least — every happy development in her life as a gift from heaven. “I get very good Benny Goodman ticket,” she said once. “Maybe God give me!” “I don’t think so,” I replied, a little churlishly. “I think God has bigger things to think about.”

I knew, though, that I was being less than fair or understanding. For God was clearly one of the terms that got most thoroughly misplaced in translation (with singular and plural fatally blurred, and Sachiko, perhaps, translating her beliefs into words I’d understand), and however much she seemed to be conflating Christian images with Shinto superstitions in the rites she performed
in Buddhist temples, she was clearly committing herself to something more than form or ritual. Whenever we passed a Buddha, she would stop and close her eyes, her palms pressed tightly together. And whatever the communication taking place, it clearly involved some exchange of feelings so intense that I stood back so as not to trespass on it. It reminded me at times of Niels Bohr’s answer to the people who said that he could not truly believe in the lucky charm he kept on his wall. Of course not, he said, but it was said that it brought you luck even if you did not believe in it.

When harassed, Sachiko still took herself to the daphne-scented quiet of the temples. And when she had done
kendō
fencing at dawn, she said, or when she listened to the
rōshi
speak, or when she went alone to Eikandō, she fell into a place so still, it sounded like a higher self. It was not so much, perhaps, that her feeling for Zen betrayed a Zen spirit as that both her feeling and Zen betrayed a common source still deeper in the Japanese heart, a natural sympathy for purity and peace.

At the same time, in Sachiko, I was beginning to see a plaintive sense of guilt that made again a mockery of the sociologists’ explanations of how the cultures of the East have a sense of “shame” and not of “guilt.” Again and again, when we were together, she said darkly, “I very bad daughter. I very bad mother. I bad wife,” and though some of this may only have been a ritual disclaimer, some, I could sense, really did prey on her. For a while, I had wondered whether perhaps she had a secret life that was the subtext of these self-reproaches. But in time, I realized that she didn’t, and that her sense of insufficiency stemmed only from the fact that she longed now and then to be away from her children, chose on occasion to go out without telling her mother, craved sometimes a little time for herself. In Japan, of course, that was tantamount to heresy — if everyone started indulging herself in this way, the whole system would collapse. Self-interest must be communal.

Sachiko, then, was tyrannized by the cult of perfection here.
But more than that, I could see that she was haunted by the fear of failing other expectations, which were something more than social: she felt discomfort at her knowledge that her mother’s death might be a source of relief as well as sorrow; guilt at the fact that she could not wholeheartedly embrace the notion of unquestioning self-sacrifice; unease at her sense that her dreams — or, more exactly, her wish to realize them — were a violation of the code in which she had been trained. She sensed that she was a traitor to Japan’s values, and she knew that excommunication here was, quite literally, a fate worse than death (since death at least involved the preservation of honor).

Yet all these feelings had another, surprising twist, to me at least: for insofar as she felt any unease about our being together, it was clearly because she saw it as a betrayal, not of her husband but of her mother. Her husband, she often implied, was no more affected by her doings than a big boss might be; her emotional life had little to do with the practical setup of her marriage, and he, in any case, had little interest in her life. But her mother was the one she saw as conscience, confidante, and caretaker of her better self. It was her mother who checked in on her daily, closely assessed her performance as a mother, and told her often — this highly capable and efficient thirty-year-old mother of two — that she should not go out in the rain or venture outside after dark. It was her mother who exerted the gentlest kind of emotional blackmail, in large part because it was her mother who had always been her one and closest friend. And so her mother had become, in a sense, an instrument for her sense of religion, until her religion itself came to seem a reflection of her mother: both were symbols of a higher law that held her to moral standards.

Thus the qualities she responded to in the Buddha, she said, were his calm smile and “sweet eyes” — like those of a mother; and the reason she listened to the
rōshi
was that he tended to his followers as a mother to her flock; and her favorite statue in Kyoto was the Buddha at Eikandō looking over his shoulder to
check on his disciple, an emblem of maternal solicitude and love. Motherhood was, of course, her constant frame of reference — her job, in a sense — and therefore the keyhole through which she saw the world; yet it was also something more, as if the mother were as integral to her notion of religion as a father is to ours. “Please you show me picture your mother?” she often asked, with even more urgency than the people from whom I had heard the same request in such matriarchies as Cuba and the Philippines.

It was, I supposed, only natural, in strictly partitioned Japan, where mothers have complete control of home and family, and fathers take all responsibility for work, that images of compassion and conscience be invariably associated with the mother. Doi Takeo’s claim that
amae
, or the feeling of indulged passivity a baby feels at its mother’s breast, was a sensation peculiarly important to Japan — the emotional heart of Japan, in fact — was all but a cliché now. Yet it also confirmed my sense of how closely the sense of motherland here reflected — and paralleled — the sense of motherhood. When she had got married, Sachiko told me, it had been as fearful an act to her as exile; and her mother, really, was her clearest embodiment of Japan, with her reverence for the Emperor, her love of ancient poems, her fidelity to all the antique customs. Conversely, of course, society itself here smothered its children like an overprotective mother, winding them up in a net of social securities that was all but impossible to escape. And when venturing out of their motherland and into the world at large, the Japanese really did seem often like chicks jumping out of their nests into a
terra
that was all
incognita
. Japan was a mother, mother was Japan: the two great nurturing deities converged.

Even Ryōkan, I recalled, the high priest of unorthodox self-sufficiency, had returned, in his mind, to the two still points of worship:

O
NE DAY
, before the cherries came to town, I jumped into a bullet train — the perfect emblem of Japan, all noiseless speed and purpose, the world flashing by in a series of well-framed tableaux, all comforts brought to one in an air-conditioned space — and went to Nagasaki. All day I walked along its gently sloping hills, down an avenue of temples fringed by palm trees and cactus, through quiet streets lit up by kindergarten cries. Whether as cause, or effect, of its historical position as the one Japanese port mostly open to the world, the city had a looseness, and an ease, I hadn’t found in Kyoto, a freedom from care that let dogs run around unleashed and taxi drivers go ungloved.

In the evening, I found a room in a tiny traditional inn, which doubled as a shell museum, and drew myself a deep hot bath. Just as I was settling into it, however, there came a frantic knocking at my door; it was one of the matrons of the inn, desperately summoning me downstairs. There, she pointed to the phone, dangling off its hook, and as I picked it up, stared at by the matron and a goggle-eyed accomplice, all of us surrounded by tanks of tropical fish, I heard a fact-checker in New York asking me whether the Thai name of Bangkok could be translated as “village of wild olive groves.”

Since the answer (it could) had to be faxed off immediately to New York, I took the two ladies out of their misery by taking myself out of their hostel and setting off down the silent, empty streets. Then, after giving my fax to the largest hotel in town, I slipped into the nearest restaurant I could find: a basement dive called Caveau. Inside, amidst the clinking of glasses and the
makeshift incense of smoke rings, I saw, to my surprise, one whole table of jolly young Japanese toasting two foreigners: a bearded, ruddy engineer, from Boston, I learned from eavesdropping, and a bewildered, fresh-faced Englishman. Every time either of them spoke, there rose up a great roar of approval, as the other diners clinked glasses and doubled over in loud mirth. I, taken aback, took a small booth in the corner and ordered pizza.

Before long, however, and inevitably, a couple of the
gaijin
groupies leaned over and invited me to join the party. I soon found myself in what seemed a kind of heretic clan, a secret society gathered in this underground haunt to imbibe and celebrate the values of abroad. All five Japanese at the table had the lit-up, fervent look of eager revolutionaries. One of them, a thirty-eight-year-old businessman, in pressed white shirt and black tie, a graduate in economics from Nagasaki University, leaned over woozily, extended a hand, and said, “Bullshit. I am happy to meet you.” Another, a stocky young character, flop-topped and flip-tongued, announced over the general roar, “My name is Shinji. You can call me Jason.

“Very strange Japanese guy, hey,” he went on, surveying the scene around us. “Wild and crazy guy!”

“Are you a student?”

“Naw. I was in Waseda University, one year. Then I drop out. This stuff is bullshit! One hundred forty thousand dollars for one year doctor’s school!”

Shinji presented himself, in fact, as a perfect inversion of the Japanese ideal. Instead of defining himself by his professional affiliation, he refused to admit to any job; instead of observing the same routine every day, he claimed that he spent most of his time just zigzagging around the country; and instead of pledging his life to family, community, and Japan, he seemed to dream only of escape. I could not tell whether he was ashamed of his job (as a glorified delivery boy, perhaps) or proud of it (as a smuggler of sorts?), but I could see that his main interest was to observe Japan through foreign eyes.

Later, as the party began to disperse in a cloud of happy
Fuck yous
and bleary toasts, Shinji showed again how eager he was to be an American by inviting me to hit the town with him the following night, the first such invitation I had ever received from a Japanese male (most of whom, in any case, had no nights at their disposal). The next day, he called me in the shell museum to assure me he was coming — even the rebels in Japan seemed inalienably Japanese — and then, on the stroke of seven, appeared on my doorstep. Diligent as a tour guide, he began driving me through the winding hills of Nagasaki, until we reached a lookout point, a classic lovers’ view of the muzzy lights of the city, as romantic from here as Loti’s city, with the great liners out at sea transporting their cargo of lights. A view of possibility, a vision of flight.