The Lady and the Monk (42 page)

For my own part, I began to realize that every statement I made about Japan applied just as surely in the opposite direction. I might think it odd that Japanese girls covered their mouths whenever they laughed — until I remembered that we were trained to cover our mouths whenever we yawn. I might wince every
time I read dismissive talk of “foreigners” in Japanese novels — until I thought how we use “Orientals” in our own. I might be surprised at the formal rites of Japanese courtesy — until I remembered how firmly I had been taught to say “Thank you,” even for gifts I did not like.

The best advice on the subject, though, seemed to come, appropriately enough, from a baseball player, Ben Oglivie, the famously literate right fielder for the Milwaukee Brewers, celebrated for reading Plato and Thoreau on the team bus. Now in his sunset years with the Kintetsu Buffaloes, Oglivie had only one problem here, a friend of mine who knew him said, and that was his philosophical bent; while other imported stars took the money and ran, Oglivie dwelt and dwelt on the challenge of different cultures. And his conclusion seemed infinitely more enlightened than that of many thinkers and social critics. “It’s no good coming over here and criticizing the Japanese game,” he told my friend. “That’s like going into someone’s house and criticizing the way he’s arranged the furniture. It’s his house, and that’s the way he likes it. It’s not for the guest to start changing things around.” It took a ballplayer, I realized, to teach us elementary civility.

The complexities of cultural cross-breeding came home to me most poignantly, however, when a Japanese friend from California came to visit in Kyoto. In Santa Barbara, Sumi had always struck me as a typically sweet exemplar of her culture: an accomplished listener with a computer memory, an earnest, almost guileless, optimist, and a model of hardworking consideration, holding down eight jobs and taking four courses while still finding time to design her own cards for birthdays, Thanksgivings, and Halloweens. Now, though, after three years away, she found herself as estranged from her homeland as from an America that conformed less and less to cliché. She was shocked, she told me after she arrived, to see, for the first time
ever, the sorrow and frustration of this endlessly hustling country. I was shocked to see how she had slipped, without noticing it, from first person to third when talking of the Japanese.

Returning to her small hometown, moreover, Sumi had found herself shunned by all her high school friends, not only because she had made it to the land of which they only dreamed, but also — and especially — because she presented it back to them now as something more complex than a beach poster. They could not forgive her, so it seemed, for importing some reality. She, in turn, having read about Japanese history for the first time abroad, and about Buddhism, could scarcely believe now, or forgive, the distance at which Japan lived from that knowledge, and from the source of its traditions. America, she said, seemed so optimistic, and I, thinking of how I viewed Japan, could only bite my tongue. It was, perhaps, the old half-empty/half-full conundrum; but we are optimists when faced with another culture, and pessimists when faced with our own.

Such confusions were growing more and more common now as more and more Japanese women began going abroad — or joining foreign firms — to gain the possibilities denied to them at home. This, the papers proclaimed, was the
Onna no Jidai
, or Era of Women. And even those who played by the accepted rules seemed far more complex than the smiling pietàs by whom I had been so enchanted when first I had arrived. Through Sachiko now, I was meeting all kinds of women with lives quite as quirky as any in the West — one who did not even know what her husband of ten years did for a living, and another who, in three years of marriage, had never had it consummated; one mild-mannered girl who ran a pyramid-game fraud, and another who patiently waited for the one day a year when she could spend a night together with her married lover. The acupuncturist Keiko, meanwhile, after four months of living with both her husband and her boyfriend, had finally broken down and tried to slash her wrists. Filing for divorce, she had moved back with her parents, who every night received anonymous
phone calls from a woman who gave them details of their daughter’s infamy.

Only Hideko, the textbook model of a decorous mother and wife, seemed to be keeping up the role of a perfect
ōtome fujin
(or “automated wife”), and that was because her emotions were so little implicated in the role. Now she was just returned from Australia and could not stop talking about the strip shows she had enjoyed, this prim and tiny lady, every day of her stay. The little girl she led around with her was already a mistress of distances; eyes huge, she hid behind her mother’s designer skirts, keeping the world outside at bay.

Just as I was trying to put all these lives into perspective, I chanced to pick up a collection of short stories by Tsushima Yūko, one of the leading women writers in Japan today, and the daughter of the famous novelist Osamu Dazai. And suddenly, racing through her sad and suffocating tales of single mothers dreaming of flight, waiting for the men who invariably walk out on them, I felt I was seeing modern Japan for the first time, the world that all the great male novelists so scrupulously sifted out. Tanizaki and Kawabata loved young women mostly for the use they made of them, pygmalionizing them, treating them as flowers almost, totemizing them as perfect emblems of threatened purity (“It’s as if Kinko has no personality of her own, and that’s why she seems so extraordinarily feminine,” Osamu Dazai himself had written, in the voice of a fictitious schoolgirl). Even contemporary female writers seemed often to embrace the assumptions forced upon them (“A rational woman is as ridiculous,” writes Enchi Fumiko, “as a flower held together with wire”). But here in Tsushima’s gray and rainy tales of lonely, wasted women exchanging intimacies in coffee shops and love hotels, I felt I was seeing Japan through the other end of the telescope at last: the concrete blocks behind the cherry blossoms.

Most of her stories were set within the moody, blighted landscape of modern industrial Japan, amidst smog-shrouded, look-alike station cafés or lonely, boarded-up seaside resorts where it
was always out of season. Always the main character, like Tsushima herself, was a weary single mother, surrounded by her children, hemmed in by her duties, and hostage to her culture’s expectations, and always she was dreaming of escape — to the sea, to an inn, to anywhere other than her clangorous apartment. Women alone in the dark, dreaming of the day when they’d grow wings “and everyone would finally realize that she hadn’t been just some mother.”

The men in her stories were not cads or fiends; just married men in search of pleasure, with other matters on their minds, giving their lovers children, and giving their children presents, so that they would not have to give themselves. They were not so much members of a household as sightseers there. “A man was the sort who’d give you any number of children and then run off when the mood took him”; a father was “a mere shadow in a photograph.” The setting of the story, often, was the day after, in an age that did not believe in morning-after poems.

Yet even as she described the transaction as a woman’s plight, Tsushima did not, I felt, overlook the reserves of strength that Japanese women kept in private: all her women were living in a transitional age, when the reality of their inherited powerlessness was tempered by the first suggestions of a dawning freedom. In one story, a woman known only, and archetypally, as the “Mother,” absently cleans up around her drab room while waiting for her runaway daughter to return. With half her heart, she fears for her only companion; with the other half, she almost envies the girl for laying claim to a freedom that she herself has always been denied. Again and again in the stories, Tsushima alluded to the overgrowth at the side of a garden, the wilderness just beyond the neat suburban parks. Always, around the immaculate public places, there lurked a few “dark tangles along the walls.” And it was in these undomesticated spaces, she suggested, that the women were beginning to gather their strength unseen.

A
S SUMMER
drew towards an end, Sachiko got ready for her biggest move of all: taking off on a new life of her own. She had finished her Osaka course by now and passed the qualifying test, and she was ready to begin working as an international tour guide. With her monklike swiftness and one-pointedness, she had already mapped out a concrete plan of action: how she would file for divorce, move into a new home with her children, reassume her maiden name, and set up a professional life, leading tours around Asia and Japan. It was hard for me to recall now the Sachiko who, only a few months before, had hardly stepped outside Kyoto.

As she closed in on her dreams, the cavils of her society only mounted and intensified. On a practical level, her friends were extraordinarily generous: when her Walkman broke, Keiko promptly gave her another, and when she started looking around for a home, Hideko promised her an electric range and a VCR. Emotionally, though, they seemed determined to box her into the same narrow compartments to which they had resigned themselves. The best way to express yourself was to efface yourself, they kept reminding her; a woman’s strength should come from weakness. Foreigners were dangerous, and so were dreams; a woman should fulfill herself within the family. Speaking her mind, they said, was almost worse than telling lies.

Sometimes, Sachiko seemed exhausted by all this. “Woman’s world very complicated,” she often told me. “Japanese woman, not so easy heart. Much jealousy there! I want say true. But always say true, soon biggg problem.” More often, though, she
sped along unstoppably, her air of confidence intact. “Aren’t you worried, Sachiko?” I asked her once as she prepared to commit herself to an unknown future. “Worry not so help,” she sang out, mirroring my own words back to me. “I not want worry. You know this song? ‘Que será será.’ ”

As I got ready to leave Japan, Sachiko asked me one day for a copy of a photograph I had taken, a thoroughly unremarkable picture of my own long shadow in the eerie light of late afternoon. The last time I visited her home, I noticed the picture on her piano, set in an indigo frame, and suddenly resonant — a way, I guessed, of keeping at least my outline in her life. And before I left her house that day, she gave me, in return, a golden lacquer box decorated with a cosmos flower — to remind me, she said, of the walks that we had taken when the days were bright with flowers.

Autumn this year promised to hold even more elegiac weight than usual, as all Japan, in a sense, was holding its collective breath, waiting for the Emperor to die and a new imperial era to begin. And for me, as I felt the first chill entering the city and saw a whole new generation of foreigners beginning to appear, the season itself seemed to have grown older, as the city had. By now, I felt, I knew Kyoto’s moods so well that I could almost tell the time without looking at my watch: how the light lay silver on the river in the sharpened afternoons, how the temples exhaled mist in early light. Autumn seemed much deeper than spring, as sadness is deeper than brief joy, or memory than hope: the age-old Japanese assumption. Sometimes, in the dying days of summer, the beauty of Kyoto was almost hard to bear.

Just as I was packing my final bags, though, Sachiko gave me the finest farewell gift of all: a sense of what the discipline of Zen really meant. For as she readied herself for a new kind of
life, living at a tangent to the norm and seeing people turn away from her whenever she told them that she was about to leave her marriage, the only friends who came unfailingly to her assistance, encouraging her to extend herself and disinterestedly offering her all the support she needed, were those she had made through the temple. Sometimes, when her confidence was wavering, she called up Mark for inspiration; sometimes, when she needed to be reminded of how even a woman could have a “strong heart,” she turned to Sandy.

Most often, though, when she found herself in need of counsel, she went to see the abbot of Tōfukuji. And he calmly told her that he would give her anything she needed to keep herself and her children in good health. Would two thousand dollars a month be enough? If she wanted more, he said, she only had to ask.

Though Sachiko politely declined the offer — she was determined to do things by herself — the incident gave me a glimpse at last of what all the meditation was about. “The ultimate purpose of Zen,” I remembered the
rōshi
telling me, “is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it’s a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.”

On the final day of summer, Sachiko took me to Arashiyama to watch the cormorant boats. The night was navy blue and gold when we arrived, a lone torch burning against the dark-blue hills. On the top of the distant mountains sat a round white moon. Along the riverbank, red lanterns shivered in the faint, chill breeze, their echoes wavering red in the reflecting water. A single pagoda, lonely as a plover’s cry, jutted up into the heavens. A solitary canoeist pulled himself soundless through the dark.

Far in the distance, car lights glided silent across the Tōgetsu Bridge; in a teahouse nearby, the upswept coiffure of a geisha
flashed briefly in an upstairs window. Occasionally, above the water, a firework shot up into the dark, and then, with a quiet hiss, streamed down in a sad, slow extravagance of gold.

There was a sense of elegy about the river tonight, the smell of spent fireworks, the faintest hint of autumn chill, the happy, clapping songs of summer’s final parties.

Cool in her summer kimono, Sachiko led me over the bridge to where the boats knocked against the dock, lanterns along their sides bearing the faint outline of cormorants. Stepping behind her into a boat and steadying myself, I saw the moon shivering in a row of silver lanterns.

Without a sound, our boat set off across the lake, the darkness deepening above the dark-blue hills. The boats, with their crisscrossing lines of lanterns, looked eerie now, and ghostly in the gathering dark, their white globes doubled in the rippling water. From across the water came the dull thud of an oar. The teahouses cast reflections, red and white and blue, across the rippling water.