The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  My new home was a simple enough space, appointed only with a desk, a heater, a cold-water tap, a hot plate, and a futon; in the corridors were two toilets, a phone, and two showers to be shared among the house’s fifteen residents. Outside, the props were no less simple. Every morning, at eight-twenty exactly, there came a high, tinkling cry of “Okā-san!” (Mother!) from the tiny lane, and soon thereafter, a procession of quiet, tidy children on their way to school, faces well scrubbed and hair shining, animal-faced satchels on their backs. At noon, an autumn silence along the streets: old women leading their grandchildren by the hand, in shuffling steps, to local grocery stores and flower shops. In midafternoon, young mothers carried their tiny, silent, wide-eyed charges home from school on the backs of shiny bicycles; and then, after dark, on the other side of town, there came the counterprocession of the night — the hostesses of the “floating world” slipping out of taxis at five minutes to eight, shoving change into the drivers’ white-gloved hands, and wiggling, in black leather skirts and high heels, down the neon-blazing alleyways.

  It was, indeed, almost entirely a world of women and children that I found myself inhabiting in Kyoto. Not being part of the working world, I had no contact with the gray-suited office worker, the bowing interpreter, the straphanging commuter, that form so much of our image of corporate Japan. Japanese men, who were generally captive to the office from eight until eight each day, and then sequestered in their closed-door bars until they went home to sleep, were almost entirely absent from the world I saw. So whenever I was in temples or coffee shops or movies, I found myself, apart from monks, most often amidst groups of young girls, all frightened gravity and giggles, or tidy matrons. And whenever I was downtown, I moved among troops of postcard-perfect young women, the picture of impassive chic in their expensive Dior dresses, lustrous hair waterfalling down their downturned heads as they marched in well-pressed battalions from one shop to the next. In public at least, in their official demeanor, Japanese girls seemed to conform not only to a model but to a peculiarly uninfected model: with their ritual giggles and the mechanical bird song of their voices, they looked to me like public-address systems on two legs.

  The sweetest of all the Kyoto scenes, though, took place right outside my window. For every morning, round about nine, the small area in front of my guesthouse filled up with two or three young mothers, prettily lipsticked, and trendy in their denim jackets, together with their tiny charges. And every day until five, six days a week, I would find them there, the neatly dressed mothers looking on with infinite patience while their quiet toddlers bumped around on tricycles or waddled about the courtyard with an air of grave purpose. I never saw any of the children shout, or squawk, or throw a tantrum, and I never saw any of the mothers lose her smiling equanimity: both parties formed a tableau of contentment. In New York, the near-absence of children had struck me as a denaturing almost, and in California, the sense of endless possibility that was the state’s greatest hope seemed all but a curse in the hands of its young. But here, wherever I looked, I found images of madonna-and-child, in a world that seemed so settled that it almost cast no shadow. Even Pierre Loti — I read in my first few days in Kyoto — while writing off nearly all Japan as a giant playpen, had grumpily admitted, “It was the only thing that I really liked about this country: the babies and the manner in which they are understood.”

  Five minutes to the east of me in my new home was a temple, where I began to go on hazy mornings when the grayness seeped inside me and my mind would not engage. Sitting in its spacious silences, the tree-thick hills rising beside me towards the blue, a tolling gong behind me, I was brought into focus by the details: an old monk brush, brush, brushing a pathway clean; a young girl seated on the temple platform, as clear as the pond before her; another stone Jizō littered with the offerings of disappointed mothers; a sitting Buddha imparting a peace so strong it felt like wisdom. The temples in Kyoto, around the eastern hills, took one literally out of the world, leading one up through narrow flights of stairs between the pines, away from the rush and clamor of the everyday. Yet one could never forget the world entirely. Floating up from below came the sound, plangent and forlorn, of a garbage collector’s truck playing its melancholy song.

  Five minutes to the west of me was a blast of pachinko parlors, convenience stores, and shopping malls more modern than anything I had ever seen at home. Walking the shopping streets in Japan, I felt as if I were wandering through some children’s wonder-world of indulgences, soothed by jingling Muzak and singsong reassurances. My local video store, whenever I entered, greeted me with a robot’s voice that cried, “Welcome!” and, later, “Thank you very much!”; my local supermarket, after piping in chirpy messages all day, serenaded its customers when it closed each night with an unbearably mournful rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” And the dizzying depātos — compact boxes within the great gift-wrapped box that was the modern country — not only glittered with accessories and video screens, hallways of food in the basements, and twenty or more restaurants on the top floor, but even provided whole rooftop amusement worlds, not playgrounds but entire Playlands, sprawling cities in the sky offering views of the hills and the temples on one side and, on the other, a dazzling array of robots, panda trains, goldfish tanks, mechanical raccoons, and Ferris wheels.

  Sometimes, in fact, it seemed as if all Japan were a kind of tinkling dollhouse, with props from around the world reconstituted in shops that were peddling foreign dreams. In my neighborhood alone, I found the Ergo Bibamus restaurant, Notre Quotidien Pain (just a couple of blocks from Our Daily Bread), and La Casa Felice — nearly all of them filled with Kyoto Valley Girls who wore warm-up jackets with legends such as “Style vivant: nous nous aimons et nous vivons” and who tended, I gathered, to do arubaito (part-time work) in order to pay for their vacances. Not far away were the Café-Bar Selfish, the Café Post-Coitus, and the Ringo coffee shop, which had Beatles posters plastering the walls, nonstop videos of the mop-tops jamming, menus designed like copies of The White Album, and even an ad soliciting members for the Ringo Stars American football team. Yet every time I went into one of these imported theme spaces, be it the Shalom restaurant (all its signs in Hebrew and English), or the Moghul (advertised by a bowing subcontinental cutout in a turban), or the Mozart coffee shop (which specialized in Sacher torte), I was met by exactly the same scene: a team of flawlessly polite Japanese women on both sides of the counter, playing their parts impeccably amidst the exotic stage sets.

  Along the cosmopolitan streets, moreover, it often felt as if every need was somehow taken care of and every person treated as a VIP (in the formula phrases of the PA system, customers were given the honorific suffix generally reserved for gods and rulers). On one of my first extended trips downtown, I found exquisite French pastries, orange givrés, Lata Mangeshkar tapes almost impossible to find outside India, the entire inventory of New and Lingwood, haberdasher of my youth. Whole liveried ranks of servants came literally running out to serve me, gold buttons gleaming, each time I slouched, in torn jeans, into a large hotel to use the rest room. And where even the affluent in New York could sometimes feel like prisoners, with cockroaches in their sinks and garbage outside their doors, even the poor here, I sometimes thought, could feel like dignitaries, each purchase wrapped for them like priceless treasure.

  That Japan was colonizing the future with its ingenious conveniences was already, of course, a universal given; yet still I was startled to find waitresses taking their orders with computers; washbasins at the exits of Kentucky Fried Chicken parlors; special machines in my tiny local laundromat for dry-cleaning sweaters or washing old sneakers. And it was not just that the Japanese had designed telephone cards to get around the inconvenience of stuffing coins into a slot, but that they had made their inventions artful, decorating the cards with images of rock gardens or Hokusai mountains, of cartoon characters or the Golden Gate Bridge, of sumo stars and teen idols, and even — I later learned — of oneself or one’s
loved ones. And one could buy these conveniences in the streets, from machines, or in stores, laid out in little bags to keep them magnetized. The perfect world, gift-wrapped.

  Nor was a single speck of time or space to be wasted. Banks provided magazines so that one’s waiting time would be well spent, coffee shops were as well equipped with video games and diversions as amusement parks, and Sony was in the process of perfecting a portable VCR that executives could use while waiting for traffic lights to change. Even the tiny, unvisited alleyways around my house were pressed into service for the larger good, crowded with ranks of vending machines: vending machines for noodles, soup, and every kind of fruit juice; vending machines for cans of tea and coffee and cocoa, with every permutation of milk and sugar, so hot one could hardly hold them; vending machines for tickets to movies or temples or zoos, with additional machines for giving change. There were vending machines for batteries and beer, huge bottles of sake and cartons of milk, and even — should one suddenly get the urge after midnight, without a twenty-four-hour convenience store in sight — for hard-core pornography, their little windows crammed with thirty-one skin mags, six X-rated videotapes, and eight inscrutable sex aids.

  To find such appurtenances in a quiet family neighborhood — row after row of dimpled teenagers posed in positions of compliant ease under (English-language) titles such as Dick, Deep Special, and Mad Sex — dramatized most graphically this society’s difference from our own. Yet whether these shots of innocence in transit — cherry blossoms in the flesh, in a sense — were an incitement to perversity or a defusing of it, I could not begin to tell. Certainly, in a city where I never saw couples even holding hands, and where the streets felt cleansed of every sexual threat, I suspected that public impulses were as separated from social ones as the “floating world” was from the family home. So perhaps these magazines, with their secular cult of the virgin, served only to encourage sex in the head, catering to that famously sentimental Japanese Romanticism that prefers the idea of a thing, its memory or promise, to the thing itself. And if sometimes I felt I was living inside a gallery of antique canvases, sometimes I felt I was living in a world of vending machines, shining sentinels humming through all the quiet lanes in the dark.

  My first social engagement in Japan came one windy evening when Mark invited me to a meeting of Amnesty International — less for the meeting itself, he suggested, than in order to meet a friend of his, an uncommonly cultured and philanthropic woman who had lived for many years in England and was head now of the local group. Ready to try anything, I strapped on a helmet, and on a chill night full of stars, through a whipping wind, we rode his Honda through a maze of twisting little lanes up to an elegant old house. Inside, the walls were lined with musty, arcane volumes that had an attic air to them, and after making voluntary donations at the entrance, we were ushered up to a comfortable room where various Japanese, mostly young, were seated on the floor.

  “Dōzo, dōzo,” cried a man as soon as he saw us, jumping up to usher us to a couple of chairs placed near its front.

  Typical, I thought: foreigners were given the best seats in the house (a sign of Japanese graciousness) and, in the same act, were segregated from all locals (a sign of Japanese prudence). My suspicions were only confirmed when, a couple of minutes later, two other foreigners — a tweedy, very distinguished-looking couple from Massachusetts — were ushered to the front. “Gaijin ghetto,” muttered the old gentleman as he took his place, looking every bit the retired foreign service officer in his gray slacks, Ivy League jacket, neat red tie, and fauldessly aristocratic bearing.

  Good Lord, I thought, what on earth could have brought these New England patricians to this shaggy little gathering of student radicals? Were they CIA? Or worse? And then, in a flash, all my impudent questions were dispelled, as Mark’s friend Etsuko swept in, greeting the man as she passed with a dainty “Good evening, Reverend Farnsworth.”

  Behind her came the guests of honor, a family of three Argentines eager to describe their torture at the hands of the military government. The father was a gaunt, long-faced man in his late thirties, who looked the part of a workers’ hero, a Latin Walesa in his denim jacket and jeans; his wife was a plump madonna type, dressed all in black, with thick raven hair that fell to her waist; and their perky little son, twinkling impishly at every Japanese girl he passed, was now an eleven-year-old sixth-grader.

  Etsuko delivered a brief introduction to the audience, in Japanese, and then, looking over in my direction, asked sweetly, in her bell-like English, “Shall we begin?”

  Nobody else said anything, so I replied, “Oh, yes.” Maybe this was her way of acknowledging me?

  And then the man began speaking, delivering a sentence or two of introduction, in the rough Argentine Spanish that turns yo into zho and vas into vasch. There was silence. The man looked at me. Etsuko looked at me. Thirty pairs of Japanese eyes looked at me. I looked at everyone else. And then, with a sinking heart, as the silence deepened, I realized what was going on: mine was not, it seemed, just a foreigner’s place of honor — it was the translator’s chair. Apparently, my Spanish-sounding name and vaguely Hispanic looks had been enough to have procured for me, unbeknownst to me, the job of interpreting from Spanish, a language I had never learned, to Japanese, a language Francis Xavier himself had considered the work of the devil. My only qualification for the task, I thought bitterly, was that I was probably the only person in the room who spoke neither Spanish nor Japanese.

  Glumly, I leaned forward, thirty pairs of Japanese eyes following me as I did so.

  The tortured man looked back at me. “Do you speak Spanish?” he asked under his breath, in almost unintelligible Spanish.

  “Not really. I’m not Spanish, you see; I’m Indian.”

  “I see,” he said, looking gloomier than ever. “Okay.”

  “But if you speak very slowly and simply, I can probably follow.”

  “Okay,” he said, looking very much as if he had come seven thousand miles in vain.

  And so I began. “It was like a movie,” I found myself saying. “He put a gun at my head, and said, ‘Juan Carlos, you are a dead man.’ Then they put handcuffs on me and threw me under a blanket in the car.” Etsuko duly relayed this information to the goggle-eyed audience, and the narrative went on. “I will not go into the methods of torture they employed, but they laughed and joked at me, and I remembered that there was a school of torture in Argentina, a school for the members of the death squads.” On and on the torture ran, and all I could do was try desperately to tell the difference between cabeza, which means “head,” and cerveza, which means “beer,” between esposas meaning “handcuffs” and esposas meaning “wives.” Only a couple of weeks earlier, in the temple, I had read Scott Spencer’s Waking the Dead, about a family of Chilean refugees led around by radical groups to meetings such as this one. Now, as I tried not to say, “They tied me up in wives and wrapped a blindfold around my beer,” I felt as if I myself were waking the dead.

  “When I was released from prison, I was of two minds,” I went on, morosely. “I was happy at the prospect of seeing my wife and son, my only child. But I was very sad at the thought of all the dear friends I was leaving behind. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have embarked on something very dangerous and difficult, spontaneously forming their group. Some of them have themselves disappeared.”

  As the terrible litany ran on, I found more and more that the Japanese words that always deserted me when I needed them were now the only words I could remember. When I had arrived in Japan, fresh from Cuba, I had often found myself saying Sí or Permiso to frightened-looking Japanese who looked more alarmed with every syllable. Now, however, I found myself saying, “Hai, hai” to the anguished Argentinians and “Ah sō, desu ka?” to their heartfelt explanations of the “Dirty War.” Tabun in Japanese means tal vez in Spanish, I kept telling myself, casa means “house” in Spanish and “umbrella” in Japanese. Meanwhile, Reverend Farnsworth was squirming in his sea
t and muttering imprecations each time I uttered the words “liberation theology,” and the Japanese on the floor were looking increasingly unhappy and perplexed. Finally, the narrative ended.

  Before I could catch my breath, however, the audience, eager to hear more about these alien horrors, started firing questions at the long-suffering Argentinians. “Were there any Japanese among the detainees?” “Do you know of any Japanese who have disappeared?” “Are there Japanese among the prisoners still in jail?” all of which I deftly turned into Spanish sentences about wives and umbrellas.

  Then, out of nowhere, a Japanese man in the audience, unable to wait for the interminable process of translating Japanese into English and then into Spanish and back again, suddenly spoke directly to the family, in Spanish. “Do you know this friend of mine,” he began, “who disappeared? I lived in Argentina for many years, and I know all that you are describing.” Madre de Dios, I thought, my mind on anything but the desaparecidos: here was a man who was perfectly equipped to translate from Spanish directly into Japanese, and vice versa. I was off the hook!

  Which only shows how little I understood Japan. “¡No, no, me olvidado de todo!” the man cried out, with enviable fluency, when it was suggested he serve as translator. “¡No me acuerdo de nada!” And try as I might, I saw that there was no way at all of persuading him to speak a tongue in which he might possibly, just possibly, in the space of several paragraphs, make a single tiny error. And so I went back to my horrible task, stumbling through more accounts of torments made scarcely more pleasant by the dawning realization, as the Argentine speaker interrupted my translations and the whole family fell into animated debate about which parts I was distorting most, that the main speaker knew more English than I did Spanish; that his wife, who had sat through it all with a look of great pain, spoke both languages well; and that their son, who was enrolled in a Manhattan junior high school, was fluently bilingual. “And so I say to you, my friends,” Juan Carlos said through me, my unhappy look a fair translation of his own, “that your efficiency and discipline and unity have turned this country into the third-strongest power in the world. Just think what you could do if you worked on behalf of human rights!”