The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  ‘These nenju prayer beads. How old would you think they are?’

  Nakayama passed the amber beads to me, and I cradled the rosary. I had thought the beads were made of wood, but they were too light even for balsa wood, each glossy sphere faintly pitted with white stipples. I looked at the white silken tassels, which had turned faintly gray. ‘Meiji?’ I asked. ‘A hundred and twenty-five years old?’

  ‘Very good,’ he said, politely. ‘But they are four hundred years old. They would once have been a light gold. Time flows and flows, constantly. It never stops, not even for a second. Sometimes we may think back, “I should have done this, I should have done that…” And it is through those regrets, those reflections, that we move forward…’

  Above our heads stretched a yellowed scroll: For The Repose And Comfort Of Those Who Died.

  ‘It’s because we last only for a blink that our lives matter so much,’ Nakayama said.

  I stepped out, back into the harsh light of the Kodenmachō sun, opposite the bell that had survived even after the prison around it was erased. Nakayama bowed, smiling again, and went back into his temple. His footsteps were light.

  In 2002 and 2003, as Omotesandō’s bohemian enclaves gave way to developers and Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton shops, my favorite coffee houses shut one by one: Café des Flores on Omotesandō dōri, Aux Bacchanales in Harajuku. Suddenly there were four Starbucks where there had been none. Only Daibo’s was left, in the same place it had been since 1975; its ramshackle four-story concrete building a survivor among glittering steel-and-glass boxes. I brought people I loved, or people I wanted to impress, to watch Daibo roast coffee in the half-light; coffee poured over jagged ice shards in the summer, into porcelain bowls in the winter.

  When the shop was quiet, I practiced Japanese with Daibo, who spoke very little English. I would try out phrases and words, but no matter what I said, Daibo was always laughing to himself. I’d call a dictionary a bicycle. Or say cataclysmic catastrophe when I meant the word for minor inconvenience. Daibo loved correcting me. ‘Keep trying!’ he said, convinced that my Japanese would always be awful. Daibo’s wife, who sometimes worked in the coffee shop with him, spoke English to me. Like Daibo, she came from the snow country; they had met in a student production of one of Jean Anouilh’s plays, in the 1960s when French culture was all the rage in Japan. Her family had not wanted him to bring her to Tokyo. Then Daibo persuaded Mrs. Daibo’s grandmother to teach him to make soba buckwheat noodles, and she liked him. Once the grandmother approved of the match, Daibo was allowed to take his bride to the big city.

  Mrs. Daibo had a face like a flower: an iris.

  When Daibo’s wife wasn’t there, Daibo’s beautiful but forbidding assistant Maruyama took orders and settled the bills. If Daibo went out, or was busy sorting coffee beans, she would make coffee. Maruyama and I never spoke.

  The longer I lived in Tokyo, the more Daibo Coffee became the place I went when anything was wrong.

  I wasn’t alone.

  Once a Japanese madwoman appeared beside me at the counter, where she emptied her enormous handbag: she sifted through lipsticks, dirty Kleenex, packets of unused tissues, pencil stubs and papers and a hairbrush.

  Maruyama glared at the woman as she desecrated the pristine counter. Her face looked like a Noh mask: Enraged Beauty. She said nothing, though, because Daibo said nothing. He just smiled.

  ‘What may I offer you?’ he asked.

  ‘I wanna cap’ccino. Can you do me one of those?’

  ‘No, I don’t serve coffee with foamed milk,’ he said.

  ‘Whaddya mean you don’t!’ she gasped, raking the detritus – makeup, stationery, tchotchkes – back into her leather bag. ‘No cap’ccino! Everyone in the world serves that!’

  ‘We don’t,’ Daibo said, gentle. ‘Would you like anything else?’

  ‘Well, gimme coffee with milk, I guess,’ she said.

  Daibo turned and brought down a Bizen-ware bowl from the shelf behind him. He once told me that he loved that plain glaze, that it was his favorite, ‘… because you can see the way the bowl is fired. The clay tells no lies. It’s just itself.’ Of the Blanc-de-Chine bowls that I always picked – pure white, without any flaws – he said, ‘They’re beautiful, of course, but you never know what’s underneath the glaze. I never quite trust them.’

  Daibo pushed the coffee across the counter. As the woman drank it, she became still, quiet, thoughtful.

  Then it was my turn.

  Daibo put beans for my coffee in a battered old aluminum measuring cup. He ground the beans and put them into the flannel drip he had made himself with unbleached muslin cloth and a thick wire he had shaped around a whiskey bottle. He took up a stainless-steel pot and let the hot water fall in a shining thread, one drop at a time, onto the coffee grains. Except for his hands, Daibo was absolutely still.

  Daibo poured milk into the coffee, straining it so no skin would form on the surface. The bowl was white like the moon.

  Drink this. And heal.

  浅

  草

  ‘Asakusa’

  Sensō-ji demarked the border between this world and another world – the one that separated death from life.

  Nam-lin Hur

  Asakusa: The Mythic Kantō Plain

  The bar had glass walls. Many floors down, the districts of Hanakawado and Kaminarimon unfurled: pale gold headlamps, gold streetlights, golden light under the eaves of Sensō-ji temple, gold on each uplit level of the red-and-gold five-story pagoda beside it. Gold, dappling the Thunder Gate leading to the temple. Philippe Starck’s Flamme d’Or on Asahi Super Dry Hall, which everyone in Asakusa refers to as kin no unko, The Gilded Turd. The SkyTree and a few neon karaoke banners touched the landscape with electric blue. The Sumida River was too dark to see, flowing in blackness to the east.

  I was sitting alone at the bar, reading The Lotus Sutra.

  It is rare to hear this Law, and a person capable of listening to this Law is rare. It is like the udumbara flower which all the world loves and delights in, but which appears only once in many many ages.

  I was wondering what an udumbara flower was, when someone touched my elbow, his fingers light. He was young, with a fine quiff and a good suit.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Our … colleague would like to practice his English with you. Will you join us?’

  He stumbled over the word colleague, gesturing to the three empty seats between me and an ancient, almost bald man in a pin-striped double-breasted suit. The man had glasses with enormous lenses; his left eye was closed so tightly that it might have been sewn shut.

  ‘I’m fine sitting here,’ I said, looking down at The Lotus Sutra again.

  ‘You speak Japanese!’ he said, eyebrows raised with an expression of exaggerated surprise. ‘Wonderful! May we come to you, then?’

  I shrugged. The man gestured to the barman, who slid the grandfather’s wine glass along the counter. A waitress brought me a small cocotte: meat and potatoes.

  ‘You’re not eating?’ I asked.

  ‘I never touch Western food.’

  ‘Well, please forgive me for going first,’ I said, falling back on one of those Japanese conversational formulae that fill in the blanks when you don’t know what to say.

  The grandfather handed me his name-card with a flourish: chairman and CEO.

  His two young employees left the bar, snickering like small boys when a braver friend threatens to eat something inedible: a live snail, a frog, a jellyfish.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I live in England, but—’

  ‘Piccadilly Shurkush! I love England!’ He took a deep breath and launched into ‘O Danny Boy’. The bar’s other customers studiously ignored him. ‘’Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow! O Danny Boy! I lo—o-o-o-o-o-ve you so…!’ Then he sang a stanza from ‘Love Me Tender’ and finally a ballad in Mandarin. I clapped after the ballad, impressed by his Chinese despite myself.

  ‘I have a seco
nd wife in Taipei and a huge, huge…’ he paused, smiling and raising his eyebrows, ‘… house here. Thirteen stories! You can see it from that window!’ He pointed to the plate-glass observation window.

  ‘You live near the temple?’

  ‘Yes. In Azumabashi, for my whole life.’

  ‘You weren’t evacuated during the war?’ I didn’t know the word evacuate, so I gestured with my hands as if I were waving a bird away. From the bar top toward the ceiling. ‘For safety?’

  ‘No. I was in Tokyo the whole time. Bombs kept landing everywhere.’ It was his turn to mimic something that he lacked words for: incendiaries whistling through the air, impact, exploding vectors. ‘I like America, though. What happened was war. No one can do anything once it starts … The Americans weren’t bad people.’

  He gestured to the wedding ring glittering on my hand. ‘You could never have a second man?’

  ‘Never,’ I said, sipping my wine. ‘I like simplicity.’

  He straightened as if I had insulted him, muttered a brief word to the barman, who slid his glass three seats westward again. He looked longingly at his name-card, as if he wanted to take that back, too.

  I kept eating.

  The grandfather produced an enormous magnifying glass, and examined his iPhone. ‘Biji-ness,’ he said frostily, tossing back the last of his wine. Then he paid his tab, collected his briefcase and walked unsteadily past me toward the exit. ‘Oh, this is no good! No good! I’m too old for you,’ he said loudly, so that everyone in the restaurant looked over at us; as if he were refusing me.

  He looked eastward, toward the thirteen-story house.

  When he was gone, the young bartender frowned at me. ‘He’s a regular,’ he said. And the next night, when I came into the bar for supper, the hostess was careful to seat me by myself, almost hidden behind the coffee machine.

  * * *

  The novelist Kawabata Yasunari once wrote that, standing on Kototoi Bridge near Asakusa, he could feel the wideness of the Kantō Plain eddying around him. The melancholy of the entire city flowed beneath that bridge.

  Nihonbashi and the Kodenmachō jail are where Edo had its origins in 1590, when the first Tokugawa shogun Ieyasu began rebuilding a ruined castle. But Asakusa began at least a thousand years before that, as a village in a landscape empty but for grasses and a labyrinth of rivers. One medieval traveler, a nun from Kyoto, described passing through vast fields where nothing could grow but bush clover, reeds and pampas grasses. The grasses were high enough that a man on horseback could pass through, invisible. ‘For three days,’ the nun wrote, ‘I pressed on through the fields without getting where I wanted to go … there was only the plain stretching into the distance far behind and far ahead of me.’

  The great river, flowing one way before sometimes changing its course, in spate and in drought, was the single landmark.

  The literati of western Japan liked the idea of the eastern badlands so much that, even as the plain itself changed – with settlements and farms – the rules for writing about it stayed the same. It was always a wilderness, always bleak, always almost empty.

  The plain was not so much its own landscape as a foil for elegant Kyoto. Even its first name (Bandō) meant East of the Passes. A later name – Kantō – was East of the Barriers. In stories and songs, the eastern wastes were a place of bandits and exiles. No one actually wanted to visit, much less live there. Not even the thieves and renegades.

  * * *

  The beauty, and the murderer. These are the two faces of Asakusa.

  * * *

  Beauty was first, in the year 628. A small golden statue of Kannon, the goddess of mercy, which three brothers pulled into their fishing boat. In woodblock prints of the story, radiance blazes from the water, the weight of a mysterious object tugging down the hemp mesh nets. It is Asakusa before Asakusa: the broken ridge of Mount Tsukuba to the north, reeds, pagoda trees, the crosshatched waves of Tokyo Bay, which then didn’t even have a name. It was just the Inland Sea.

  The villagers built for the image a crude shrine. When a monk was blinded after looking at the image’s face, monks created a receptacle to keep the dangerous face hidden. Then someone carved a wooden copy of the original statue, and put that away in another receptacle, which stood in front of the first image. The Kannon was doubly mysterious, doubly sacred.

  No one alive has ever seen the original Kannon image. Its dimensions were never recorded. During great fires when the main sanctuary was threatened, the statues were moved to a boat on the Sumida River, and the receptacles were kept hidden in a palanquin. Buried deep under Sensō-ji temple, the image survived the firebombs of 1945, too.

  * * *

  The murderer was a crone who lived in the wastes near the river. No one knows exactly when. She had a lovely daughter whom she used to lure unwary travelers to her stone hut. The men would lie down with the daughter on a stone pillow. When the lovers were asleep, the crone would smash their skulls. What the travelers carried, the crone took, and then she dumped their bodies in a nearby pond. Nine hundred and ninety-nine men died that way.

  One of the temples near Sensō-ji used to display the stone pillow for pilgrims to touch.

  Kawabata later wrote this version of the story: the thousandth traveler heard a reed flute. ‘It sounded like a voice, and sang: When night falls, even if you have no place to lay your head, do not stay at the lonely house on the Asakusa reed plain.’ The next morning, the wanderer woke up in Sensō-ji temple, saved by the goddess of mercy. The reed flute had been the voice of Kannon.

  In other variants of the story, the hag’s daughter falls in love with the thousandth guest. Or: the daughter wants to atone for her part in the murders. She wants to die, and substitutes herself for that thousandth victim. In the dark, the hag kills her own child by mistake. In remorse and grief, the old woman then drowns herself in the same pond where she had disposed of her many victims.

  Or: she becomes a goddess, and chooses to protect what she would once have devoured.

  It is a single leap, in a single instant, from perfect evil to perfect goodness. The old storytellers saw no contradiction in movement from bestiality to enlightenment.

  In Asakusa, the world of devils and demons coexisted along with the celestial world of Buddhas and petty deities. Asakusa was unique in Tokyo: history did not have to be a trap. Escape was possible.

  * * *

  By the early nineteenth century, Edo’s townspeople had grown increasingly jaded, feeling that traditional Buddhas and Shinto deities had forgotten them. One contemporary writer complained: ‘Today, all the spirits (kami) have ascended to heaven; the Buddhas have left for the Western Paradise; and all present and other worlds have fallen into disuse…’

  New ‘fashionable’ divinities filled gaps of belief and faith, and the grounds of Sensō-ji were crowded with their shrines.

  Benzaiten had been a water deity, dwelling in one of Asakusa’s ponds. She was rehabilitated as the goddess of literature and music and given her own little shrine next to the Bell of Time, one of the oldest bells on the Kantō Plain. The bell was vast, heavy; a bell that could imprison a grown man alive like the bells in the old stories. Beside this one, other bells looked like toys. The tower’s columns were woodworm-riddled and shearing away. Even the stones had cracked.

  A placard read: RŌJO BENZAITEN. Old Woman Benzaiten, who was the third daughter of the Dragon King. The shrine’s black and gilt doors were folded back. I was surprised; I had only ever seen the red shrine shut up like a box. But it was the Day of the Snake, and so the shrine was open: snakes are Benzaiten’s messengers.

  I had never seen an image so alive, so watchful. I looked at the Face, and then backed away from it. The Benzaiten stared outward, her skin shadowed, her hair a smooth sheet, white as a Yoshino cherry blossom. Incense drifting from the shrine burned my throat.

  Behind me an old woman threw coins into a box before she prayed; she wore a silvery summer kimono with a black obi sash crosshatched with
triangular fishing nets. After she had turned down the path back to Asakusa’s main hall, her metal cane tapping the stones, a policeman came; he bowed to the Benzaiten as if he were saluting some dignitary.

  I went slowly down the polished stone stairs, which a famous koto player had donated. I wondered what I had seen. I wondered what the policeman was worshipping. Benzaiten the goddess of knowledge and music, or the murderous hag?

  By the square ishigaki stone wall, a woman was squatting in front of the shrine. She looked about seventy, although she could have been younger; maybe born during the first years of the war. She wore a thin dress the color of cherry-blossom liqueur. Her silvery hair fell to her shoulders and was pinned up like a girl’s in an upswept bouffant, like Barbara Eden’s around 1965. It was neatly, even expertly, done.

  The White-Haired Benzaiten.

  The man beside me had balanced his chin on his balled fists. He was what the Japanese call a koffeemaniakku (‘coffee maniac’) or coffee otaku. Both terms originally were rude, especially otaku, which appears in the 1990 edition of Japan’s Basic Knowledge of Modern Words as ‘a kind of fan discriminated against by others. They are reclusive, mentally unbalanced and obsessed with details. Nor can they communicate well. They usually do not care about their clothing and are not dressed well.’ A nerd, in other words. A freak.

  The cultural historian Jonathan Abel has tracked how otaku evolved in the 2000s to mean someone who was merely into role-playing games, or anime cartoons. The word lost its creepy overtones until it meant someone ‘over-the-top, a hobbyist, an enthusiast of any sort’. There were train-spotting otaku, fishing otaku, wine otaku. Japan suddenly became a nation composed entirely of otaku.

  The coffee otaku gazed at Daibo, intent: watching the thin thread of water as droplets fell into the cotton filter, becoming mahogany beads underneath; falling into the porcelain cup until it was three-quarters full.