by H. K. Bush
In Kamikochi, the sky was a brilliant blue, but the air was stultifying. It was still early enough in the day to think that I could make it to the temple, but the mid-afternoon jet lag tugged at my enthusiasm. I had secured no reservation anywhere, and so I inquired through hand gestures for nearby inns, acting out a person sleeping and snoring. “Ahh, hai!” one attendant exclaimed, nodding proudly, “Sanko! Sanko!”
“Sanko?” I mimicked.
He smiled in gratitude, pointing up the hill. “Hai! Sanko desu!” Then he put his small hands on my back and pretended to push me toward a building hidden amongst old trees and large emerald ferns.
I trudged up the hill, hoping I might discover a small inn. I doubt if I have ever felt so alone, yet there was something thrilling about venturing out, unaccompanied, into uncharted waters. In retrospect, my brief stay at the Sanko Ryokan, up in the highlands of the Japan Alps, was one of the great days of my life. It was a tiny property, owned and operated by a single family. One older daughter, called Hideko, could speak a little English, and she happily attempted over and over to tell me about their business, their history, and the marvels of the surrounding countryside, noted for its wasabi, which I discovered was a kind of horseradish. The Sanko was a small taste of what Jack, and perhaps Sensei, might consider “Old Japan.” The rooms featured tatami mats for floors, shoji screens for doors and windows, and were enhanced by the rocks, ferns, moss, and stone lanterns in a lovely manicured garden just outside the window. There were wonderfully colored pillows for sitting, cross legged, on the tatami. The Sanko also featured a real hot spring, or onsen, bubbling up from the molten lakes of Japan’s volcanic underground. The waters were considered medicinal, therapeutic, and somehow spiritually regenerative. The place reeked of sulfur, like rotten eggs. They insisted that I disrobe immediately and take a bath, which I did.
As I inched into the steaming waters of the bath, I imagined that I was now slowly experiencing Japan as Jack had, uninhibited and unembarrassed. And though I was not used to the Japanese way of bathing in a large, open pool to be shared with any other interested parties, I found the courage to accept their offer and even to relax, as I partook of their steamy peace offering. This lowering of the curtains of my biological reality, so to speak, had an extremely humbling effect, it seemed. Just as the Japanese believe, the twenty minutes of utter vulnerability in the onsen soothed my troubled soul, its magical waters rinsing off the heaviness of my travels. The bath was a baptism of fire: sempiternally heated, the waters rejuvenated me as I relaxed, naked to the world.
Afterwards, they welcomed me, if only temporarily, into the family of the inn, bearing the gifts of their wonderful food and drink including a large tray of cooked octopus with soy sauce and homegrown wasabi and complemented by an iced glass mug kept full of Asahi Dry. They took turns refilling my mug as soon as I took a drink. Another platter appeared, this one holding an entire cooked fish, blackened and aromatic. I braced myself and fumbled around with the chopsticks. Hideko patiently instructed me about how to improve my delivery, helping me eat the fish as if I were a four year old. To my surprise, it was one of the most delicious things I have ever put in my mouth— fresh, wholesome, absolutely perfect. Steamed edamame— soybeans—were plentiful, and Hideko demonstrated how to squeeze out the contents and pop them into my mouth. Noodles, fried with vegetables and tiny shrimp, with steam rising from them, were delivered fresh from the kitchen, and they brought out the aged sake, served in tiny porcelain containers. Lacquered trays, steaming mugs of thick, green tea, bitter and hearty. And all of it, seated on the floor pillow, legs dangling into the pit underneath the shiny black table, with the screens thrown back to reveal the beautiful bluish-purple mountain peaks into which I would venture the next morning. Soon enough, the combination of jet lag, the soothing bath waters, and the copious food and alcoholic refreshments did their duty. I was on the brink of collapse. I slept as I rarely do, deep and long, on a fluffy futon with a stone-hard pillow for my head, dreaming of Old Japan.
By dawn I was awakened, and soon after breakfast, I handed a 10,000 yen note to Hideko and proceeded to show her my instructions, written in both languages. She studied them meticulously, with occasional nods, then summoned a local taxi for my use. After many thanks, I departed, with her and her parents standing outside the inn, bowing and bowing over and over, as the taxi motored slowly off. Just as the Keio Plaza had in Tokyo, Hideko supplied me with a few matchboxes with their name, address, and phone number emblazoned on the side, should I ever wish to return.
The taxi slowly began to climb the mountainous winding roads with severe switchbacks and sheer cliffs falling away into the tiny rice paddies carved into the terrain below. In about ninety minutes we had arrived at a remote location near the top of a mountain. Off to one side were some of the highest peaks in Japan. And there stood before me, finally, the massive torii gate described by Jack, under which I had to pass to find the path leading up the mountainside to the temple. Pulling out my stack of yen, I liberated another 10,000 yen note and handed it to the stunned driver. I pointed at my watch, saying, “Tomorrow?” Yes?” He nodded eagerly, jumped out of the car and pulled my bag out of the trunk. Setting it on the road, he presented it to me.
We both turned to peer up the mountain path. He still held the handle of my large, roll-around luggage, and it immediately occurred to both of us the absurdity of the immediate situation. I must labor up the side of the mountain, pulling along behind me this overstuffed piece? The wheels were good on sidewalks or train station platforms, but here they were simply useless; and so I turned to the driver, pulled out of my pocket the matchbox from the Sanko, and with heavy gestures, tried to communicate my desire that he return the bag, thus making my decision that I would grace the Sanko with a return visit. Thankfully he seemed to understand my intentions, replacing the bag in the trunk. Settled back into the driver’s seat, he repeated, “Hai Wakarimashita—Ashita, juji—OK—koko, OK!” Then he was off, and I stood alone, clutching my small backpack containing a few essentials and staring up an empty path into the heavily forested mountains.
I was at the Ryoan-ji Temple almost exactly twenty-four hours, including the time up and down the path, mosquitoes harassing me throughout. I arrived sweaty and with a severe headache, breathing heavily, even though I rested several times during my ascent. Almost magically, the inmates of the temple seemed to be expecting me, possibly due to the letter I had sent a couple weeks beforehand, though I had not specified a precise date.
As instructed by Jack, I showed them the weathered copy of Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea. It worked its own magic, and I was immediately brought into the presence of their leader, still Watanabe-sensei, the same roshi who had hosted Jack some fifteen years before, but now even more gray, more bent over, and yet more sublime in appearance and tone than I could have imagined.
We had tea in a site of true grandeur—a clean and well-lighted tea room, with gigantic vistas overlooking those awesome peaks, the windows thrown open. We sat mostly in silence, across the table from one another.
“And how was your journey, sensei?”
I told him about the challenges so far, and about my rest stop at the Sanko nearby the previous evening, and Hideko’s generous spirit.
He nodded and smiled a moment. “And how do you like Japan?”
“Very much,” I told him and described the temple experience the first morning in Yoyogi Park.
“Ah yes, the Meiji Jingu. It is a shrine for the Meiji family, a kind of—what is it in English?—a place of burial, a memorial place for the dead. It is quite beautiful, I think.”
“Yes. And very peaceful.”
He thought about this for a moment, never rushing his words.
“And how about the food? Can you eat with chopsticks?” He grinned at these questions.
I laughed and told him about learning to eat the broiled fish the night before, and how I had managed with the kind assistance of the aging daughter.
He stroked the gray stubble on his chin. There were further brief inquiries made, then Watanabe got to the point. “I suppose you are now curious about the materials that Springs-sensei has left with us, yes?” He began to get to his feet.
I followed suit, and brushing the wrinkles off of my pants, agreed. “Of course, I have come a long way, and would be much obliged to inspect them—whenever it is most convenient.”
“So desu-ne,” he said. “Why not now?” With this he led me out of the side building where we had taken our tea and down a path toward the main temple proper. It emerged out of a lush bamboo forest and stood before me, seizing my attention utterly. In respectful awe, I gazed up at its tall, round timbers, its faded colors, red and black, and its massive bell, situated above the porch in the front of the entranceway.
Inside, he took me into a back chamber, and began disassembling some floorboards. Underneath the tatami mats was the vault with a cover that could be lifted off, one end precariously tilted above it. One by one we pulled out the six dusty old cardboard boxes that had been stored there, protected in their black plastic bags, for these many years. Watanabe bowed gracefully, and backed out of the room, leaving me to inspect the contents privately as a breeze fluttered through the open windows.
I was sitting on a tatami mat in a Buddhist temple near the top of the Japan Alps as streams of sunshine, filled with floating dust particles, moved through the muggy air. It was just after noon, and the moment for which I had traveled so far had finally arrived. The boxes arranged haphazardly before me had waited patiently for my arrival, slumbering beneath these ancient floorboards next to medieval katana swords, old Buddhist scrolls, and other historical and religious artifacts, for a very long time. And I was about to unveil their vast abundance of materials, out of which I might choose to focus and constitute the remaining scholarly work of my life. Still, I hesitated, soaking it all in, savoring the moment.
I began slowly, relishing each treasure as it emerged, one by one, folder by folder, stack by intriguing stack. Letters written by Longfellow, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather. Old hand-written manuscripts by the likes of Jack London, Herman Melville, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Files written in Japanese, many by Mishima. Unpublished tales by Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Unpublished pamphlets written by a young journalist named Walter Whitman. An entire file folder of original pamphlets by Harriet Beecher Stowe, another containing newspaper articles by Mark Twain from the Virginia City Enterprise. Old notebooks and daybooks, penned by a variety of important figures. And there were very old photographs—Twain sitting in a carriage with an old black man; Stowe lounging around a table in the backyard of her Florida plantation; William Dean Howells with his arm around Henry James at someone’s birthday party; Ernest Hemingway, shirtless, smoking a fat cigar. Mishima, days before his suicide, calm in his freshly laundered white robe. And Allen Ginsberg, naked, eating a banana.
And the books! Two of the boxes held numerous first editions, many of which had been signed by the author. Masterpieces of the American canon, the books regularly assigned by professors to their eager college wards, with a few British titles for good measure. One by one I pulled them out of the cardboard containers, astonished with each one, and astonished that they had been imprisoned here for so long, ignored by man and by history. Many of the names of these books spoke of the magic they contained, their intrinsic enchantment: The Marble Faun. The Minister’s Wooing. The Princess Cassimassima. The Wild Swans at Coole. Perelandra. Others, however, balanced this majestic feel with a darker sense of life’s varied fortunes. The Sound and the Fury. The Grapes of Wrath. No-No Boy. Death Comes for the Archbishop. The Damnation of Theron Ware.
I inspected each one slowly and gingerly as time stood still, on that mountaintop, and on the most dazzling day of my life.
Patiently, I continued my investigation throughout the afternoon, with occasional water breaks outside, inventorying all I found in a spiral notebook that I had brought along for this very purpose. It was the curator part of my character, insisting that I record for all posterity everything unearthed from this sanctuary. But soon enough, one of the interns came to say that it was nearly the dinner hour of the temple, and that I was to be the esteemed guest of honor. By then, nearly everything was back in the boxes, ready for transport back down the mountain—a task that seemed unlikely, if not impossible, given the exhausting hike up.
At dinner, Watanabe was quiet, chewing his rice and swallowing large draughts of beer. The rooms were hot and stuffy. At meal’s end, he continued his inquisition from earlier in the day. “Sensei, did you find the contents of the boxes to be satisfactory?”
I considered his choice of words, and agreed. “Yes, the contents were … very satisfactory.” I felt no compunction to go into details, already under the hypnotic effect of the treasures left by Jack, and greedily desiring that they remain a secret between just the two of us.
“And so what are these marvelous things that Springs-sensei felt were of such great value?”
More hesitation. I am not one who is typically coy, but I took a long drink of beer, then wiped my mouth. “They are things of value to literature teachers such as myself and Professor Springs. Only that, I’m afraid.”
My answer seemed to amuse Watanabe slightly, though his poker face betrayed almost no emotion, except for a brief twinkling of an eye. He also took another long draft of beer, then responded. “I am surprised he would store such things so far up here in the mountains, then. I am sure you must be annoyed that he has forced you to come all this way for such small matters.”
I debated how best to respond, then said, “Yes. Well, perhaps just slightly annoyed. It has given me a chance to travel in your wonderful country, though. And to visit Ryoan-ji.” I faltered a moment. “But we have a saying in English. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Do you know that saying? It means … I suppose it means that although many people might find little value in the things Jack brought here, I find great treasure in them. They are … shall we say, of infinite value. Yes, for me, and for the others in my field who do what I do, I would say so.” Another long pause as my comments hung there, portentously. “There are great secrets in those boxes, to be sure. And yet so many people would see only things to be burned, like fuel for a fire.”
Watanabe thought over my little speech. Then he nodded, “Yes. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Much of life is like this, I think.”
We sat in more silence.
“And what will you do, now that you have learned the secrets contained in those boxes?”
I pondered his meaning. “Well, first I need to get the boxes down to civilization. It will be very difficult for me to carry it all back down the trail … So if you could be of assistance to me, I would be very grateful. I have arranged for a taxi to meet me there at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, so—”
He smiled broadly. “Do you imagine us trying to carry those heavy boxes down the side of the mountain? And are we really so uncivilized?”
He laughed at his own joke, and so did I. “No, of course I wasn’t saying that you were uncivilized.”
“Relax, sensei. I understand. It is all actually a part of a small joke that Springs-sensei has played on you, just as his old friend Jim Daymon played it on him. When he first climbed the mountain, and even on his next trip, he also assumed that there was only one way up and one way down the mountain. This turned out to be absurd, of course. How could we live such a life? How would we get our food and other things up and down?
“Finally, after the earthquake, when he came with those boxes, terrified and clearly in a traumatic state of confusion, Jim showed him the back way into the temple complex. We have an old pick-up truck that we occasionally use for shopping and other matters, and it is parked down the mountain only about a five-minute walk away. But that driveway entrance is hidden by the trees, and known only to the inmates here and a select fe
w others.
“So you see, Professor Springs has tricked you, just as he was tricked by Jim.” Here he actually stopped to laugh, then spoke some sentences in Japanese to the others, evidently explaining to them our conversation. He laughed again and the others joined him, all of them guffawing with great enthusiasm, just as it dawned on me that the short cut had been kept hidden from me by Jack. Watanabe regained his composure. “I suppose he felt that you needed to climb the mountain yourself. It is the only proper way to enter a holy site, through the torii gate, and then through each of the subsequent torii. It was fitting that you should do so. I am sure this is all that he meant by it, yes?” With this, he placed his hand gently on my shoulder, and nodded some more, yet still giggling a bit.
I thought through the implications of this final twist, and realized that it made my appearance on the scene even more special, and that it would allow for my departure to be much smoother as well. “I suppose it is fitting, then. I climbed the mountain, yes.”
Then I tried to ask one last favor. “So, with your truck … could you see fit to help me tomorrow? Could we load up the truck with the boxes, and take it all down to the place I left the taxi?”
Watanabe wiped his mouth, took another swig of the beer. “Of course. I was planning on it.”
And so, at 10:00 a.m. the next day, the taxi was already waiting for us as we made the final turn and spotted it. The driver leaped out, and with his earnest help, we quickly filled the trunk, then the back seat, with the six boxes.
