The Lady and the Monk (41 page)

In Australia, the first time she had ever seen a non-Asian culture, she felt, not surprisingly, even more transported, as giddy as if she had walked, quite literally, through a screen. “I feel I little living in TV,” she reported in quiet wonder, displaced by something more than jet lag as we walked Down Under
streets. “This dream world? I sleepy? Maybe soon wake up?” As we sat in a restaurant outside the Opera House, white tablecloths snapping in the lazy sunlight, and the chic young things of Sydney stretching out their golden limbs, she let out a gasp. “This not Kobe movie? This not Nagasaki park? This true? That lady, little same Olivia Hussey feeling! This man, little Hall and Oates! That man, Robert Redford! This true? My life? Why movie not stop?”

Sachiko in Australia was the spirit of delight incarnate, bending down to interview every child she passed, surprising old ladies by asking if they would pose with her in pictures, cross-questioning teenagers about their dreams. She could hardly walk past a single shop without letting out a cry of pleasure and rushing in to look more closely at their unimaginable discounts, and after visiting the beach one day, she felt so light that she simply took off her shoes and scampered barefoot through the Sydney streets. As our plane took off from Brisbane, she gasped with wonder, and sat by the window throughout the flight, peering out into the clouds. She had never seen a green-eyed child before, never heard buskers playing music in the street, never spent a whole day driving. She had never ordered a cocktail before or ridden a horse, been approached by men on the street or visited a noisy pub. Dressing up each night in her very best clothes, she had left the old Sachiko far behind.

“This true not dream?” she asked more than ever, and I did not know what to say.

I noticed, too, as Sachiko rhapsodized about this new world, how familiar her rapture sounded. Every child here, however runty or unexceptional, seemed a “doll”; every person impressed her as “very kind, very warm.” Every new street hit her like some otherworldly dream. She sounded, in fact, like me exalting the lanterned lanes of Gion.

And nothing ever fazed her here except the signs of a Japan that she was seeing as if for the first time. She had never noticed before how the Japanese always wore black and white; she had
never noticed before how incongruous they looked in their scuba divers’ goggles or “Wombat” ties (as incongruous, almost, as big-boned blondes in kimono). She had never, in fact, felt so estranged from the group. Brisbane Airport, she pronounced, was very dirty, “because many many Japanese person here.” In Surfers Paradise, as she watched her countrymen moving in tidy hordes to snap up Gucci bags and Cartier watches, she could hardly conceal her shock. “Why they all want same-same? Before, I thinking Japanese person coming Australia very special! But this style person very different. Not so special.”

And as we wandered through the latest outpost of the Japanese Empire — a Gold Coast cluttered now with
o-bentō
stalls and koto-Muzaked malls, where couples in “Homey Honeymoon” T-shirts walked along sidewalks thick with signs crying, “
Irasshaimase!
” and koalas advertising prices in yen — Sachiko, in a fit of mischief, tried out the new phrase she had learned in her tour-conductor course.

“I think I want vomit. Please can I have an airsickness bag?”

Later, as the summer drew towards an end, back in Japan, we traveled to the Izu Peninsula, the mountainous resort not far from Tokyo, and soon I found myself sitting at dawn each day in a secluded cedar bath, high above the rushing of a stream, encircled by a ring of tall pines. The mist lifted off the water like a screen behind a stage. At night, in our small room, Sachiko curled a finger behind the shoji screen, making the shadow of an evil-eyed wolf.

After dark, in the distance, we could hear a pagan pounding through the trees, reminiscent of the distant drums in Kawabata’s famous “Izu Dancer” story. Lanterns, red and white, were strung across the hillside, like light bulbs in some high school carnival. A long line of grannies circled slowly around a central tower, to the shrill notes of traditional music, flapping their arms around, slow and ceremonious as dying coquettes, as they summoned
spirits back to earth, marking the start of the Night of a Thousand Lanterns. Along the edge of the trees, toddlers in indigo
yukata
scooped goldfish out of tanks, while tourists from the city ascended the tower to deliver heartfelt, deep-voiced renditions of melancholy love songs.

Together, Sachiko and I meandered in and out amidst the trees, along the roaring stream, a gauzy summer moon high above us. The music was carried faint to us, and eerie, through the trees.

“I think,” she said mistily, “this little Heian Age. Many curtains. Very quiet. Man, woman, not so direct feeling. Japanese person much love poem life.”

Emboldened, I told her how much I found of her in
Genji:
in her devotion to flowers, her fondness for cats, a quickness to sorrow that could almost come to self-pity. So much in her reminded me of the spirited, dreamy, quick-witted women of the Heian period, less conventional, perhaps, than their men (if only because they had less to lose), and pledged, as the author of
Sarashina Nikki
had it, “to walk across the bridge of dreams.” Sachiko, however, did not seem uplifted by this.

“I not so like
Genji
. Much much baby-making ceremony there.”

“But in the Heian period, it sounds so poetic. Lovers together in kimono, looking at the moon, then leaving at dawn with a morning-after poem.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe very beautiful letter. But all
Genji
little ‘sex machine’ feeling. Genji little same Rod Stewart. This story little singles-bar style. I not so like.” With that, she went into a rapturous tribute to John Denver.

By now, Sachiko and I were bypassing language altogether very often. And though there were parts of me she could not see, and vice versa, they were really, I thought, the parts least worthy of being seen, the verbal and the analytical sides that made up
nothing but a captious surface. Not seeing them, in a sense, allowed us to see one another more clearly, just as the bareness of a Japanese room sharpened attention and heightened intensity. The words we could not share left us more room for ourselves.

The Japanese, of course, had long prided themselves on their ability to communicate without words (in part, no doubt, because this served to bind the tribe together and so keep aliens out); in phrases like
ishin-denshin
, they enshrined the Buddhist ideal of speaking through actions more than words. And Sachiko, living her life in subtitles now, and resolving herself into the simplicity of a haiku, was, without trying, teaching me gradually to see a little below the surface and grow more attentive to the small print of the world. Once, when she handed me some chocolates wrapped in a stylish green pouch, I tore open the bag and gobbled them down. Only later did I gather that the present was not, in fact, the candies but the bag. It was the green, she explained, of “little cartoon eating food” (she burst into a rendition of the “Popeye” theme song). And the Japanese word for “spinach,” she said, was a homonym for their word for “secret love.” Thus, ever since the Heian period, giving someone a present wrapped in a bag of spinach-green had been the most eloquent way of giving him one’s heart.

O
NE DAY
, towards the end of summer, wearing a long red dress to offset the blinding green, and carrying a red silk umbrella against the rain, Etsuko invited me to the fabled rock garden at Ryōanji, its enigmatic stones a natural koan, and one stone omitted so that each visitor could make the meaning something different. Along one side of the Dragon Peace Temple, a washbasin read simply, “I learn to be contented.”

As we sat on the platform, in the early drizzle of a hazy afternoon, Etsuko asked if I had been following the news about the Hanshin Tigers. I knew that the summer had not been treating my favorite team well. Japanese champions just two years before, they were now in last place. Their longtime star, Kakefu, or “Mr. Tiger,” was said to be contemplating retirement. Taxi drivers squirmed and sucked their teeth whenever I brought up their favorite subject, and Sachiko, in a characteristic burst of impishness, had happily asserted, “This year Tigers not so strong! They not true Tigers; they Hanshin Cats!”

The drama had come to a climax, though, when the son of their leading star, Randy Bass, had developed a brain tumor. Bass, who had led them to the championship, had compiled the most impressive statistics of any American ever to play in Japan; more important, perhaps, he had adjusted philosophically to the Japanese system, not only slugging fifty home runs in a season but bowing when requested to do so, stoically refusing to complain when rival teams conspired to prevent him from breaking Japanese records, and even inspiring a chant that went, “God-Buddha-Bass!” Recently, though, he had flown off to San Francisco to be at his eight-year-old son’s bedside. The Tigers
had grown restive. Complications had developed, bringing the boy even closer to death. The agreed-upon deadline passed, and still Bass had stayed by his boy. Finally, the team had offered an ultimatum: come back or get fired. Bass had remained with his son, putting family before company. That, to the Tigers, had seemed the ultimate heresy. So, in a kind of strategic suicide, they had fired their Most Valuable Player.

To replace him, they had scouted around for another
gaijin
and, somehow or other, had ended up with a famous malingerer whose indiscipline was so legendary that he had already been jettisoned by both the Yankees and the Angels. (The next foreigner they signed slugged thirty-eight home runs but incurred the wrath of all Japan when caught by a photographer making breakfast for his son, while his wife slept in.) Loss followed loss, of games as well as face.

“Did you hear what happened yesterday?” Etsuko asked me in the quiet of the rock garden, face pale.

“No.”

“The general manager of the Tigers jumped to his death from the eighth floor of the New Otani Hotel.”

Meanwhile, in lesser ways, the cross-cultural collisions were continuing all around me. Each night, from my room, I could hear the former president of Harvard’s Spee Club stalking up and down the corridors, complaining of the “epistemological uncertainty” of a land “where nothing was real,” while someone else marveled aloud about how he could earn $250,000 a year here as a translator. A group of thirteen Israelis began camping out in a single room downstairs, part of a circuit of foreigners who lived off the Madonna and Mickey Mouse posters they could sell on the street, making three hundred dollars or more a night. Another newcomer from Santa Barbara appeared, called, as if in some bad movie, “Beach.”

Matthew, by now, was living in Thailand, and Siobhan had returned to the Haight with a tall, silent, ponytailed Japanese
boy, with whom she had no common language. Etsuko was making plans to take off for California herself — as soon as her daughter was out of school — and write a thesis on folklore and Christianity, picking up the intellectual interests she’d had to keep in storage for so long. And Shinji, the
gaijin
-lover from Nagasaki, had managed somehow to make it to the outside world — Australia — which he now proclaimed to find “very easy, very boring.” One day, I got a package from Sydney, and tore it open to find eleven different tapes, all handmade, and carefully labeled, and based on the stray preferences I had expressed in Nagasaki almost six months before; later, another shipment came, and then another. For all his willed rebellion, I gathered, Shinji was as thoughtful and kind as every other Japanese I had met, and as skilled in the ways of obligation: having showered me with presents — David Lindley bootlegs, Amazulu tapes, ancient Buffalo Springfield tapes, and the latest from the Waterboys — he now felt free to ring me up at 6 a.m. and ask for a Burberry coat or information on helicopter licenses, advice for his friend in her college applications or a letter in support of his American visa. And since any favor I did him reduced his emotional credit, as well as the interest he could collect on it, both of us kept trying to outdo the other in kindnesses, in part so as not to have to do them again. It reminded me a little of the “you first; no, you; no, please, I insist” routines that had so charmed me when first I arrived.

No place, of course, is an idyll to its residents, as no man is a prophet in his own household. And foreigners everywhere are more solicitous about the traditions of their adopted homes than natives are (as converts are more zealous, often, than those born into a faith): Asians in America sometimes seemed as intent on keeping up the “American Way” as foreigners in Kyoto were on preserving the ancient capital’s streetcars and old wooden houses. Yet still, in Japan, the divisions seemed uncommonly
intense, if only because Japan lived at the other extreme from the self-analytical and abstract ways of the West, and was anxious to enforce that distance. The Japanese drove on the left and read their magazines from back to front. They put their verbs at the end of sentences and took their baths at night. Sexually, they “went” where we “came”; emotionally, they smiled where we wept. Even their baggage carousels moved in the opposite direction. Translated into terms we understood, two plus two made five here.

This it was, I suspected, together with the maintenance of a public face that never cracked, that began to account for the unusual violence of so many foreign responses to Japan — the same people who so admired the formality and reticence of the Japanese aesthetic complaining, often, about the formality and reticence of the Japanese people, and the same ones who so bridled at Japanese claims that Japan could be understood only by the Japanese mocking the way the Japanese spoke English. This it was too, perhaps, that helped to explain why foreigners’ responses to Japan seemed so uniform and yet so violently divided — in proportion, perhaps, to the gap between public and private. The tourists who came here for two weeks could not stop marveling, often, at the silence of the place; the longtime residents heard only the clatter of pachinko coins, the blare of right-wing megaphones, the syncopated roar of TV baseball crowds. The people who were sightseers here seemed moved, nearly always, by the courtesy and consideration that they found; the residents saw nothing but hypocrisy. And the visitors went home, very often, wishing that the West could be more like Japan; while the residents stayed here, unable to forgive Japan for not being more like the West.