The Lady and the Monk (33 page)

All around, the ladies kept on slinking in and out, clouds of costly French perfume receding and approaching, whiskey glasses filling up, plates of cheese appearing on the table, fed to customers by hand. The English teacher did a brief stint on the piano, and in the giddy applause that followed, the father began talking to him casually, offering jokes and, parenthetically, a job worth two thousand dollars a month. The giggles and the backchat continued, glasses were clinked, a melon was filled with brandy. The teenage girl opined, “I want to learn English,” one of her colleagues adding, “I want to visit other country.” Beady-eyed, the company man threw in a couple of extra clauses to his offer. Then the mama-san sidled up to join our table, a small, hard bird, dressed all in white, with a soft, sweet face and gambler’s eyes.

The night eased on, whiskey and tinkling laughter, and tinny melodies on the piano, and soon — most eerily of all — I noticed that I could no longer tell the difference between the professional hostesses and the “respectable” girls at our table: both giggled too much at every comment, were promiscuous with flatteries (“Oh, you’re so clever! And your Japanese is so good!”), and picked their way through English with sweet determination, dishing out an impersonal sweetness. All Japan, it sometimes seemed, came on like a hostess — sleekly appareled, full of automatic charm, and dedicated exclusively to your happiness, as if her life — or livelihood — depended on it. Yet all Japan also seemed like a mother to its own. And with classic neatness, the Japanese had always kept its women and its feelings separate: one for heart and one for hearth, one to take care of the man in the world, one to take care of him at home. The divisions were airtight. Geisha traditionally were supposed to have no home, while wives were known as
okusan
, or “persons of the interior.” Geisha traditionally were not allowed to carry money, while
women were deputed to handle all household finances. Geisha were not supposed to marry, while wives were desexualized by the husbands who called them “Mother.” The Japanese were accomplished technicians of the heart.

Through Sachiko, meanwhile, I was beginning to see a little more of the other side of the female equation here: the young mothers I had so admired on arrival. Her best friend, Keiko, was an acupuncturist (like her father) and, like her father, a Communist; but her main activity seemed to be romance. “She little Meryl Streep feeling,” Sachiko had explained. “Japanese man much love this style.” And certainly, with her short bangs and whitened face, Keiko was the kind of Kyoto beauty that Japanese men adored. Her main outlet now, though, I found, was American football: by attaching herself to the Kyoto University Gangsters — as team herbalist — she had stolen into a world where she was the only woman among fifty fresh-faced boys (and vulnerable boys at that: when I attended a game between the Gangsters and the Kansai University Fighters, the shaven-headed linemen, the occasional postinterception jigs, the squeaky pom-pom girls shouting “Dee-fense!” “First down!” and “Go go” — all in English — could almost have belonged to a California high school; but after the game, when I visited the locker room, the defeated
samurai
fighters were slumped amidst their pads like exhausted warriors, red-eyed, or sniffling, so choked up that they could not even speak).

Now, I gathered, Keiko lived with the twenty-one-year-old manager, her four-year-old daughter, and her ball-playing husband, in an arrangement they chose to keep ambiguous.

Hideko, Sachiko’s other closest companion, was the opposite extreme — less than ninety pounds, her eyes shy and wide with childlike wonder, she was the very picture of propriety. Smiling sweetly, nearly always silent, carrying herself like a porcelain
vessel in her neat skirts and expensive shirts, she was the Platonic incarnation of what a Japanese wife should be, one of those gracefully demure types, as Matthew put it, “who would in England be called a cardigan-and-pearls lady.”

At least on the face of it. “She very small lady, very fragile — little flower feeling,” Sachiko had told me before introducing her. “Other person think very shy, very quiet. But inside” — her eyes flashed with mischief — “very different! She not have dream. She love money only!”

I took this at first to be an exaggeration, or, at least, one Japanese woman’s somewhat cutting appraisal of another. But as I came to know Hideko, I found that Sachiko had not overstated at all: Hideko’s main interest really was in money. She had married a doctor — as prudent an investment in Japan as in America — and, by virtue of having no feelings for him, was able to play the perfect doctor’s wife. With all the energies and feelings that were left over, she devoted herself to becoming the very model of a high-fashion sophisticate: she played tennis, she went on scuba trips to the Great Barrier Reef, she spent her days buying Italian handbags and French cakes. She memorized all the foreign names she could, and still often boasted, this extremely poised and intelligent young woman, that she had been the only student in her college with a Gucci bag.

When Sachiko told me that Hideko loved living near banks — their presence actually turned her on — I took it as a joke. “Very different,” Sachiko told me, shaken. “I thinking little joke, I little laughing. But she very, very serious. Her heart not so open. She not so close husband. Then I little sad.” Hideko referred to money by the affectionate diminutive that most people reserved for children or close friends; she even got a corgi (in emulation of Queen Elizabeth II) and gave it a name that was a rhyming-slang homonym for “money.” Often, said Sachiko, Hideko told her friends how she was planning to spend her husband’s money as soon as he was dead.

There must, of course, have been a deeper side to Hideko
that she did not want to show the world, or even acknowledge to herself, but certainly she played the part of loving money with unfaltering consistency. And though she was much too decorous to speak an English that she had not entirely mastered, she could hardly conceal her excitement when she heard that a foreign millionaire had come to town. So Sachiko effected an introduction to Matthew, and all three of them spent long afternoons together, sitting in coffee shops and watching videos, engaged in discussions I could scarcely begin to imagine. Some-times, he told me, they would just be sitting in the Café Mozart, munching on Viennese pastries, when Hideko, overcome by the moment, would cry out, genuinely transported, “I’m so happy!”

Sachiko, in turn, seemed equally shaken by Matthew: here was the classic, almost ideal Japanese image of a foreigner — footloose, charming, with homes around the world and debonair Italian clothes — and all she could see in him was his sadness. He was sad, I told her one day, because he did not have a girlfriend, and he could not find a girlfriend because he was sad. She nodded solemnly. “This man only stay Japan very short time,” she said. “He have very sad eye. Then I want give him warm heart.”

Watching the three of them together, I began to see why Sachiko so exulted in foreign company, almost regardless of the person. Once, at her birthday party, as she bubbled on merrily, tripping over her ungrammatical English with careless delight and laughing with Matthew, Mark, and Sandy, I caught a glimpse of Hideko, in the corner, her eyes very hard: she did everything so perfectly, she was clearly thinking, why could the foreigners whose admiration she so coveted not understand that she was much better than her rough-and-ready friend?

O
NE DAY
, I decided to surprise Sachiko with a message. I knew that she always went to the kindergarten at twelve-fifteen to collect her daughter, so at twelve-ten I stood inconspicuously around the corner from the gate. The other mothers were milling about, stoical, propping their bicycles against trees, tiny babies on their backs, waiting around outside the barred gates. I leaned on a bicycle rack and watched them small-talking in their sensible clothes. Then, with a sudden instinct, I caught sight of her, on the far side of the busy street, her white comb in her hair above the broad expanse of her forehead, where it kept the hair from falling in her eyes. Her mouth was red with unfamiliar lipstick. And her face was a face I had never seen before, hard and clenched and closed. By her side strolled her husband in a sports coat, cheery in his stride, blithely indifferent to his partner, everyone’s picture of an amiable paterfamilias.

Suddenly, I saw all the sorrow of her life, caught by surprise in the passing seconds: she so taut and coiled, waiting to release her warmth on anyone who’d take it; he so friendly and impervious, jaunting along merrily by her side. The sight of the two of them — not a couple really, just two people walking down the street together — so shocked me that I left my post and hurried away, catching her eye across four lanes of traffic and seeing the sudden gratitude of her smile as I hurried home, very fast, to await her call.

Although I knew very well that the Japanese made a business, and an art form, of keeping up appearances, reassuring one
with smiles and never once letting the mask slip, I was still somewhat astonished at how faultlessly Sachiko could maintain the pose. Through six months together, often for hours at a time, in situations of such closeness that every vulnerability was released, she had never once lost her temper with me, or betrayed any tiredness, or even said anything unkind — except for her one flight of foxishness. It was a kind of training, I supposed — just as some people never drink, or never, however desperate the circumstances, swear — but nonetheless it was unsettling to me how well she could play her part. Her command of her role was so perfect, she knew her lines so fluently, that it sometimes felt as if playing the picture-perfect partner came as naturally to her as being herself.

I knew, of course, that she was being especially tough in her self-censorship so as not to lose her hold on me, and the freedoms I could offer; but this very sense of vulnerability, I thought, would make most people fragile, or edgy, or brittle. That, though, was not the Japanese way: she liked me, therefore she made herself likable to me; she ran her emotions as efficiently as an office manager. Japanese women knew that the best way of attaining their dreams was by becoming dream objects themselves; that was how, like the Canadian Mounties, they always got their man. They told themselves they could not, or should not, get sad or angry or tired, and they did not. One time, when I asked Sachiko why she never lost control, she sounded, this intense and impulsive woman, like logic itself. “You come here Japan very short time. One year. This year very important time my life. Then I want make only happy time: many happy memory and dream.”

I knew, too, that in part this was because, from birth, she had been taught that satisfaction came in service; that happiness came from making other people happy. Sachiko was so well trained in pleasing that it came to seem almost a reflex in her: if ever I told her that I liked a dish, a shirt, or even a phrase in a letter, she filed the like away and served it up again and again; when I gushed over a sweater she once gave me, she promptly
rushed out and bought another one, identical. Indeed, she stored away my preferences as diligently as a courtesan and did everything she could to procure and accommodate every one of them: one week, after I had given her a tape made up of poems by Keats, Yeats, Marvell, and Shakespeare, she came to my room hoisting a Japanese edition of
The History of English Literature
almost larger than herself. She had already been boning up on the poets I had read to her, she explained, and now was eager to ask about other figures she had run into before. What did I think of Arnold Bennett? She had read one of his books long ago. Did I enjoy Orwell? Which was my favorite work of Somerset Maugham?

In time, too, I noticed how determined she was that we should always be of one mind. Whenever we went to a restaurant, I began to notice, she always ordered what I ordered, even if it was something that almost made her sick. At first I thought this was because she was new to Indian food, or Thai, or Mexican. But in time I came to see that it was simply an unvarying pattern, part of her strenuous desire to please. Soon she was beginning to drink Earl Grey tea, very strong, with milk and sugar, and to school herself in Van Morrison. One of her favorite phrases in English, which she deployed as often as possible, was “Me too!”

When I explained to her one day my boyhood fondness for Paddington Bear — we were contemporaries and had grown up in the same cozy, protected, English middle-class world — she dutifully went off and opened an account with Mitsui Bank, because their mascot, represented on every book and desk, was Paddington. At every opportunity, in fact, she went out of her way to harmonize, to reflect my own tastes back to me. In Japan, I gathered, opposites detracted, and even on the personal level, unity had to be asserted at every step, in every detail — most graphically, to us, in the honeymoon couples who traipse around Waikiki or Surfers Paradise or Anaheim in identically colored shirts, slacks, bags, and even belts, perfectly color-coordinated twins for every day of their trip.

I could find explanations for all this, but still I felt unnerved by Sachiko’s unslipping perfection; at times, I began to wonder whether she was not more honest in her words than in her actions. Part of it, I could tell, was her gift — her culture’s gift — for always seeing the best in things and always putting the best face on them: not exactly distorting the truth so much as always accentuating the positive. Sachiko saw great beauty in Nature where I saw nothing; but she also saw great beauty in Rob Lowe movies, Steve Perry songs, and her Betty Boop pencil box. She took away from
Stand by Me
the golden vision of boys together, but recalled nothing of the extended mass-vomiting scene. When I told her of someone I knew who had destroyed his whole home by carrying on a twenty-five-year illicit affair, she gasped, enraptured, “Very beautiful story. True love, I think.” In return, she implicitly asked me only to give her happy or reassuring news (certain topics were taboo, I could tell, and if ever I brought them up, she would say, “I not so like this
thema
,” and filter them out as efficiently as her culture had done with the Rape of Nanking).