The Lady and the Monk (30 page)

As we wound our way back down again, Shinji started to cross-question me.

“Who is your favorite musician?”

“Do you know Jackson Browne?”

His eyes widened. “My favorite!” he exclaimed in astonishment.

Somewhat taken aback, I wrung his hand in delight.

“Actually, I also like Bruce Springsteen.”

His eyes brightened. “My favorite!”

Remarkable, I thought: we seemed to have exactly the same tastes.

“You like Dire Straits?”

“Very much.”

“My favorite!” he exclaimed, in mock astonishment.

Clearly, “favorite” was as elastic a term here as “best friend”; and however much “Jason” was keen to leave Japan, the Japanese wish to harmonize had clearly not left him.

“What about David Lindley?” I asked, trying to make my choices a little more obscure.

“Sure! My favorite!”

Then, just as credibility was beginning to snap, he added, “I have a tape, very special tape, David Lindley live, together Clarence Clemons!”

Swinging into a parking place, Shinji announced, with his chuckling air of boyish bonhomie, “Now I introduce you Nagasaki restaurant.”

“Excellent.”

We made our way through a generic mall, all dizzy lights and giggly girls, and into a McDonald’s.

“Cheeseburger, cheeseburger!” he cried, doubling over in laughter.

Together we trooped upstairs and found a table under a cartoon landscape. Later, as we munched our fries, Shinji outlined his worldview.

“All Japanese like blond hair, blue eye, green eye, pale skin. To us is very beautiful. I don’t like.” Around him, McDonald’s was a clatter of trays and conveyor-belt fun. “Japanese people do not know other country. Not interesting. Japanese people think all Americans open, friendly. ‘Hi.’ Some are. Some not so friendly. Many Americans do not like
Saturday Night Live
because it makes many jokes about the Jews, many jokes about the Irish. The Jews are not like other Americans. They have a too strange mind. Too strange!”

He let out a raucous whoop. They’re not the only ones, I thought.

“I meet an American Jew one time — too strange! The Koreans here are the same as the Jews in America. The Japanese are very unfair to Koreans. Why? You know that eighty percent of pachinko parlor owners are Korean? Pachinko parlor owners very rich! Japanese people know about England and America. But they know nothing about Asia. But we are part of Asia!”

He was sounding more and more like a Kyoto
gaijin
.

“English people, too much snob — their nose in air! I have friend, his father friend Attenborough. But English people, French people, very gentle.” He meant, I saw, as Sachiko did,
“gentle” as in
gentil
, the back-derivation of “gentleman.” “Canadian man too.

“Which movie you like? My favorite John Belushi. And Jack Nicholson! Cheeseburger, cheeseburger!”

Then, with typical abruptness, Shinji lowered his voice and spread a softer kind of subversion. He was reading now a “secret history” of the war — precisely the kind of book, I realized, that foreigners loved to read here. It explained how FDR was aware of Pearl Harbor in advance, and went on to outline all Japans atrocities and cover-ups. “Same
Last Emperor
movie,” he whispered, brandishing his heresy. “You like Miami Dolphins?”

“Sure.”

“My favorite!”

Then, as we got ready to go, Shinji cast his eye over all the bright Formica tables, where chic college girls were sitting primly over Happy Meals and Corn Potage Soups. “All of them,” he intoned, making his face cartoonish, “pay much high money for clothes. But here” — he pointed to his head — “empty!”

The next thing I knew, he was whizzing me back through the mall, and occasionally dancing up to groups of female passersby, like De Niro in
New York, New York
.

“You want to see my home?”

“Okay,” I said, and again we were driving through quiet streets into a silent neighborhood.

“Why you so kind?” asked Shinji, not for the first time. My kindness, I knew, had extended so far to nothing more than accepting his hospitality, but I heard the same question from Sachiko too, and knew that it reflected not just empty pleasantry or routine inquiry: the Japanese really were anxious to know what was expected of them in return, and what kind of emotional debt they were running up.

Credit ratings uncertain, we parked along a canal and, slipping between wooden homes, stole into a house, and up a
staircase, past his sleeping father. Shinji’s room, not unexpectedly, was a perfect replica of Western undergraduate chaos, one skewed pile of tangled sheets and tapes and books and empty cartons of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Above the bed smiled a semi-life-size Shiseido girl.

“My parents are divorced,” Shinji announced, as if to certify his status as a crazy, messed-up Western kid.

In one respect, though, his room was typically Japanese. For the main item that commanded attention here was the high-tech HQ, one long black switchboard console of CD, VCR, TV, stereo system, and Bose speakers, lined up on a shelf as carefully as a shrine might be in an Indian household. And Shinji’s record collection was like nothing I had ever seen before, big enough to stock a record store: hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of albums, all kept in clean, transparent sleeves, arranged by genre and alphabet, across shelf after shelf — soul, jazz, country, female vocalist, psychedelic, British Invasion, punk, L.A. session band, art rock, soft rock, surf rock.

“Cheeseburger, cheeseburger!” he cried again.

I looked up from all the albums, dazed.

“You know cheeseburger?”

“Sure! I eat them all the time!”

“Cheeseburger very funny,” Shinji pronounced. The Japanese word for “funny” had the same double meaning as our own, I recalled. Then he flipped on a tape of Bill Murray and Chevy Chase doing some “cheeseburger” routine on an old segment of
Saturday Night Live: samurai
humor took on new meaning here.

“You like all these kinds of music?” I went on.

“Right now, my favorite the Mersey Sound,” he said, shutting off the “cheeseburger” routine. “Gerry and the Pacemakers! Herman’s Hermits! The Dave Clark Five! You know Manfred Mann?” I nodded. “My favorite!”

“Do your friends like this too?”

“Naw.” He mimicked disgust. “Japanese like only two kind music: Japanese pop and top hits, MTV style. They do not know Dave Clark Five, Sam Cooke.”

“You have Sam Cooke?” I said, perking up.

“Only six,” he apologized, pulling them out from the S section of Soul, rarities unavailable in the U.S. for years, complete with paisley-tone liner notes by “Hugo and Luigi” and cover versions of classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

“Kinks?”

“Only three.”

“Dead?”

He looked back, stunned. “My favorite! ‘Playing in the Band.’ I am sixties person. Hippie. But Japanese people only like eighties.”

“You should come to Kyoto.”

And so the interrogation went on, through Elvis Costello, and King Crimson albums I hadn’t seen since my teens, and even such arcana as Pete Sinfield. More surprising to me, Shinji wasn’t just a collector; he actually knew the records well and had all the right rock-critic views on them. “Carly Simon has same face Mick Jagger! New Springsteen record
mā-mā
[so-so]. Some of it, like ‘Nebraska,’ some very big sound. I think Mark Knopfler’s teacher, Ry Cooder. My favorite Ry Cooder song is Hawaii one. He great! But not like money. Many star, too much money! Too much rich! MTV, videos, producer. Much money spoil people. Look Jackson Browne: first three albums very good, then too much money! Diane Lane same. She has old woman’s face. And Daryl Hannah — she
baka
[stupid]! Nothing in her head.” Such was the predicament of a Japanese dissident, I thought: little to rebel against save MTV and Daryl Hannah.

Then he flipped open a box of tapes and pulled out a rare David Lindley bootleg.

“This is for me?”

“Sure,” he said.

As I looked it over, Shinji strolled over to the chest of drawers,
reached for a bottle, and slapped on some aftershave. I stared with new intensity at his albums, eager not to know what was going on; Shinji began cleaning his teeth. I looked around for reassurances, and steadied myself with two framed photos of his girlfriend. Then, just as I was excavating some prehistoric Neil Young, Shinji started running his electric Norelco over his face. Now, I thought, I knew how a girl felt when her host started prettying himself up.

Suddenly, just as I was sinking into the Dead’s “Mama Tried,” he jumped up and said, “Let’s go.” I looked at my watch and realized that it was eleven-twenty; to cover my options, I had told him that I had to be back at the shell museum by eleven-thirty.

Driving back through hushed and rainswept streets, he suddenly asked, “Yesterday, what will you do?”

Another piece of surrealism, I thought, till I remembered Sachiko’s similar confusion.

“Tomorrow, do you mean?”

“Sure”.

“I think I’ll leave,” I said, to be on the safe side. “Do you like Richard Thompson?”

“Sure! My favorite! Fairport Convention!”

“With Sandy Denny.”

“Hey, you like folk? Pentangle, Steeleye Span, Lindesfarne. You know ‘Led Zeppelin IV’?”

“Led Zeppelin?”

“Sure. Sandy Denny make guest appearance. Now dead.”

Then, his slaphappy exuberance not subsiding for a moment, he continued, “What kind of dream you have tonight? Wet dream?”

“No. Very dry.”

“About exams?”

“Maybe. And the Emperor.”

That, I thought, should keep him quiet. But only briefly. “How about I share your bed?”

This, it seemed, was taking his love of the foreign a little far. “No, thank you.”

“Why?”

“I’d rather be alone, thank you. Good night.”

“Good night,” he said, politely dropping me off at the entrance to the inn and waving a cheerful textbook goodbye.

B
ACK HOME
in Kyoto, the late-March days eased by in one seamless flow of blue epiphanies: the first touch of spring was bringing a refreshed brilliance to the heavens, and mild afternoons of loosened shirts and hopes. I drank tea with a slice of orange and ate melon sorbet in a coffee shop whose window announced, unexpectedly, “I’d like to eat with you and gaze into your eyes while we talk of UFOs,” and I went to a university rock concert where a couple of blue- and pink-suited emcees exchanged TV patter while mop-haired singers in dark glasses leaped up and down on stage in a frenzy of punk nihilism, jerking themselves around with borrowed fury while a guitarist played solos with his teeth; I read articles about this year’s Miss Universe contestant from Japan (“Michiko Sakaguai enjoys flower arrangement, playing the electronic organ, and golf”) and translated Latin tags from Iris Murdoch — it was always Iris Murdoch here, among the matrons and the
literati
— for an overzealous professor of English literature who felt he could not understand her without knowing the meaning of these phrases. I caught a glimpse of the Grammy Awards on Mark’s TV and felt as if I’d stumbled onto hidden treasure.

In Kyoto indeed, as anywhere abroad, I was recovering a kind of innocence, as time slowed down, and space opened up, and everything seemed new, even — especially — the things I knew from home. Going to the movies only once every two months, I found myself curiously spellbound: I went to
Fatal Attraction
(equipped here with a happy — or, at least, less savage — ending) and gasped at its most standard of manipulations; I saw
Benji:
The Hunted
in a darkened cinema and was intensely moved by the otherworldly self-sacrifice of its eponymous hero — a kind of four-legged Bodhisattva — until I noticed that the only other person in the theater, a frazzled-looking salaryman, was slumped over in his seat and breathing very deeply.

Being abroad, in a place still strange to me, senses sharpened, and ready to be transformed, was like being a child again — or being in love. I found myself speaking more slowly, more deliberately, here, as I delivered simple sentences in Japanese, or in an English that a Japanese might understand. Instead of trying to make phrases, or impressive sentences, I was concerned only with making sense. In speaking around a foreign language, indeed, I was forced to rethink myself, to gather my thoughts in a state of preparedness and then translate them into clarity; to speak, in fact, with a little of the lucency of Zen.

The elegant Etsuko, meanwhile, was diligently trying to give me a taste of the other side of Japan, the fine-tuned, closed-door world of the upper-class matron. One day she invited me to a meeting of a special cultural group that she had formed to bring Japanese people (mostly women) together with foreigners, the better to get to know one another, and Japan.

When I arrived, in a smart modern salon in the fashionable area of Shimogamo, I found myself in a room bright with the chatter of dapper ladies in their early forties, trendily turned out in leather skirts and cashmere sweaters. This, it seemed, must be the Kyoto equivalent of what Embassy wives do at the club, except that here one found an air of sophistication more rarefied than even the dinner party rites of English country houses. As soon as I entered, a group of ladies descended on me, all smiles and English phrases extended as daintily as
hors d’oeuvres
, and I was divested of a small donation, ticked off a list, given a name tag, and handed a program. A Mr. Ono, it seemed, a local graduate student, had planned the day’s activities
in an exhortatory spirit: “Let’s get on this special train leading to a galaxy of cosmic symphony.”

Looking around anxiously, I saw that I was the youngest person here by a decade or two, the only vagrant and the only male, save for an extremely rumpled old German professor in a dark-gray suit and an air of Schopenhauer gloom, his mood apparently not improved by being identified on his name tag as “Rols” (his wife, more cryptically still, was labeled “Bal”). Depositing myself down next to Rols and Bal, I was well embarked on lugubrious chitchat when suddenly Mr. Ono called the meeting to order. His subject, he said, was play, and its meaning. His particular expertise was in the giant swing to be found in downtown Bangkok, and his belief that play admitted us to the same sense of liberating ecstasy as religion. Rols slumped back in his chair, the chirpy bird ladies craned forward, lipsticked faces alert, pretty skirts tidy against bended knees.