by Pico Iyer
Joe was certainly giving me a crash course in one-pointedness — and in the frustrations of a longtime resident. The next thing I knew, he was flinging down before me a box that featured a floppy-eared rabbit above the legend “I Am Somebunny Special.” Inside was a novel, flawlessly typed, called Tree-Planting in America, by someone from Little Lake, Michigan, who was, Joe said, just some penniless guy living in a cabin without a toilet, electricity, or running water. “I knew this guy way back — in Massachusetts. We were buildin’ a zendō together. But he never talked about Zen. Never. Or writing. Then, last summer, he gave me this manuscript. I read it by kerosene lamp in his cabin, man, and I was gettin’ more and more excited. This is a true book, man. At fifteen, this guy tried to be a painter. Then at eighteen, he decided to be a writer. By twenty-two, he had all the skills, he says — more than he’s got now — but he hadn’t anything to say. So he put it aside for twenty years. Now, he says, he’s got somethin’ to say, so he writes this, supporting himself by slayin’ deer. That’s integrity, man. He didn’t want to make money out of his writing; he just wanted to make art. He’s starving to do it, doesn’t have any friends. He’s kind of like Kundera, I think — it’s funny, but it makes you think.”
Integrity at any cost, I thought; a rigor of dissent. “D’you like Jim Harrison?” I asked, casting around in my mind for any other Zen-minded writer who came from Michigan.
“Sure. I read Warlock and some other book by him. Better than Saul Blow or John Updick. Man, I can’t stand those guys. Best place I ever found for buying books was Taiwan, man — I’d go into this store, buy five books, read ’em, and sell ’em back to the guy the next week. I remember two books I got there. One was The Big Sleep. The other was by this guy called Ben Garcia, and I’m ashamed now that I gave it back. Ben Garcia, I’ll always remember the name.” He shook his head at the memory. “You could tell his wasn’t a learned style or anything, but this guy had truth! It was a true book, man, a true book. About this Mexican who lived with the Indians. I remember its beginning: ‘I’ve got a ranch, wife, and kids, but for seventy years I feel like I’m living in a coffin. Ranching, making money — none of it means a thing.’ That’s how it starts, man. Only book he ever wrote. True book, man, fuckin’ true book.
“Taiwanese, though, they only like food. When I asked my students what they wanted for their birthday, they’d just say, ‘Food,’ man. That’s why you’ll find a Chinese restaurant anywhere you go. Anywhere in the world, man, you go and you’ll find a Chinese restaurant — even Grenada, or Huehuetenango.”
Noticing his four-year-old son careening like a dervish around the room, Joe suddenly told him to stop. Abruptly, the boy sat down where he was, cupped his hands, and folded his legs in a perfect lotus posture. Eyes closed, he fell into a silent meditation.
“Man, I was reading Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography the other day,” Joe started up again. “Chaplin, man, the only guy I know who started out life with no ideals — just tryin’ to survive — and then he got famous and started havin’ ideals. Great, man. Fuckin’ great!” And then there was more, about R. K. Narayan and Travels with My Aunt, about the infighting of monasteries and piano techniques, about bilingualism and the chess game that lay finished in one corner. And finally, it began to rain, pittering and pattering on all the flimsy roofs and walls.
“Shito-shito,” said Joe softly. “And goro-goro for thunder. Zā-zā for heavy rain. Pica-pica for starlight. You don’t have words for these things. Just sounds, man, perfect sounds.”
And I thought how well you could always hear rain here, on wooden walls and roofs, in every Japanese poem and home.
8
AS THE OCTOBER days eased on, Autumn stole like a thief into Kyoto, in one fluent succession of days so calm they took my breath away. Wandering through the buoyant days, I felt I had never known autumn before, not even in New England. For the mild and milky afternoons were graced with a distinctly Japanese touch, unintrusive in its effects, and hesitant, and still. The reticence gave dimension to the beauty.
Sometimes it rained, but when it did, it truly poured; other times, everything was a radiance of blue. The weather here was rarely indifferent, rarely caught in the bleary in-betweens of England; whatever the inflection, it usually seemed unqualified, and the days often passed with a kind of metronomic regularity, of sun and rain and sun and rain and shine. Sometimes the rain came down steadily, relentlessly, with an unlifting persistence that blurred the world for days; other times, mornings dawned crisper and clearer than any I could remember outside the Himalayas in winter. Occasionally, the two extremes would alternate on a single day, but still, even then, the pattern never wavered: either rapturous or foul.
Besides, Kyoto was lovely in the mist — the air rising clear above the hills, the dogs barking in the hillside temples. The singing cries of children rang out in the ringing air, and everything was green and cleansed. Kyoto back streets were lovely too, on shiny afternoons after days of heavy rain: the tangerine trees in bloom, and monks on slow-moving bicycles, and ladies bent over rain-washed alleyways, rearranging flowers. The Heian Shrine was all patterns of sunlight and reflections in the water: girls crouched meditative over ponds; orange gates solemn under blazing autumn skies.
Autumn, moreover, was beginning to be observed in every corner of Kyoto, as a religion might be, but in a place where religions were often both secular and consumerist. Coffee shops now were advertising “Autumn ice cream sundaes,” and vending machines, like towel-bearing waiters, were changing their offerings from cold to hot. One trendy boutique had chalked a new slogan on its window: “Autumn is the season to do pretty things for you.” And at Kōshien Stadium, where the local baseball team, the Hanshin Tigers, was playing its last game of the season, the air was thick with elegy. Before the game began, the great star of the Tigers, the huge and gentle Oklahoma farmboy Randy Bass, got up on the rostrum, bowed all round, and stepped down again. Then he got up on the rostrum, bowed all round, and came down. Then he got up … eleven times in all, while Bass flags fluttered everywhere and a little boy next to me, in a flowing white happi coat with “R. Bass” on its back, looked on in wonder. After the game ended, every member of the team came out onto the field and bowed in unison to the fans. For fifteen minutes, not a supporter left the stadium. All of them — all of us — stood to attention, singing every last verse of the sober, martial Tiger fight song, in one massed, mournful choir. Here, I thought, was a team in last place, thirty-six games out of first place, which had lost two games out of every three for more than six months — yet still its faithful were rising to give it this heartfelt show of support. Sayōnaras were hosannas here.
A few days later, on another brilliant morning, the trees beginning to turn under skies that were blue and puffy white, I went to see one of the three great occasions of the Kyoto year, the Jidai Matsuri, or Festival of the Ages, in the Imperial Palace.
When I arrived, an hour or so before the procession was to begin, the performers were relaxing backstage, on the lawns of the spacious compound. Little girls whose ghost-white faces and twisted hairdos reproduced the high elegance of Sei Shōnagon and Murasaki sat erect in priceless kimono under trees. Old wooden carriages stood at rest on gravel walkways, forgotten props from some period movie. Wrinkled men in fierce warriors’ dress glared for cameras in the shadeless courtyards. Incarnations of great figures from the city’s past, the performers were as shiny as the apple-polished day around them.
And as the parade began, one stately procession of spirits walking and breathing through the high-rise town — daimyō and samurai, courtiers and geisha, caparisoned and costumed, and fighters all in armor, watched in respectful silence by the crowds — I could not help but think of the last such celebration I had seen, just two months before I arrived in Japan: Carnival in Havana. It was an absurd comparison, I knew, yet the difference was as striking as between real life and art. For Cuba, however circumscribed by government edict and reduced by poverty, was
still one pulsing, writhing explosion of lust and liquor, of bikinied girls and wriggling dragons and foot-high paper cups of beer foaming over beside the seaside Malecón. Here, by contrast, all was grave formality. Boys in black walked two by two, in synchronized steps, playing pipes; ancients regal on slow-stepping horses passed in noiseless dignity across the gravel; girls as stately as Heian courtiers glided with phantom steps through coffee-shop streets. The audience was as silent as a congregation. Everything, timed to the moment, was as rigid as a catechism.
All festivals, of course, are acts of collective myth-making, chances for a nation to advertise its idealized image of itself. In Cuba, for all the privations, that meant abandon, gaiety, and bacchanal; here, it meant mellifluous order, solemnity, and grace. In Cuba, one could feel the effusions of a passionate, rhetorical people able and eager to give themselves over to the sentiments they voiced so recklessly; here, the effect was one of strange, almost awestruck, disengagement. It seemed as if the Japanese were almost paying homage to the fact of ritual itself — and to the religion of Japan — so that the ceremony became pageant, and the festival a kind of memorial service.
Before the day was out, however, this, like most of my generalities about Japan, found its refutation in the country’s other side, the side that came out after dark — in this case, in the mysterious Fire Festival held that very night in the village of Kurama, in the hills to the north. I had heard for days how terrible the crowds would be, so I took pains to leave home early, arriving at the train station just as the late-afternoon sun was turning faces to gold and catching the firelights in hair. This was the magic hour of the Kyoto autumn, the last hour of light in the waning days: the hills silhouetted with a shocking clarity, the sky a burnished strip of gold and silver.
The minute the train drew into the station, the whole huge crowd piled in until we were packed as tightly as nuts in a bag of Japanese sweets. I bumped against rows of silky hair, was shoved into pockets of expensive perfume, buried myself in a new Springsteen tape. Through all the crush, the Japanese remained unfailingly calm, some of them even sleeping where they stood.
As soon as we arrived at the village, the crowds piled out again and into a steep, narrow main street, so thick with bodies that one could scarcely move. A smell of bonfires redolent of Guy Fawkes Night, on a blazing, chill November evening in England, the details of the world smoothed down now in the dark. Lanterns all about, and the shadows of hills, and ashes spitting into the night like fireflies in some Peter Brook production. Along the tiny, toylike streets, the crowds expectant, a loudspeaker conferring on everything an air of panic and authority.
Finding no room amidst the crowds even now, four hours before the festival was due to begin, I started to climb up the hill, away from the town, up towards Kurama Temple, towering solemn above the crowds. There I sat, and walked about, hands stuffed into pockets, and waited. I waited some more. The night grew chilly, with a winter snap to it. Still there was nothing to see but crowds. I watched a pair of German boys attach themselves to three smiling “office ladies” and smiled to myself as the Germans, new to the country, took the shy giggles and polite questions for encouragement and began sliding hands behind backs, as the girls, smiling sweetly, edged away. I listened for a while to the Springsteen tape, rented today, the very day of its release, from a neighborhood store. I watched a teahouse high above the street, where VIPs were sedately taking dinner in a perfect Tokugawa tableau of high elegance. I nibbled on corn chips, stamped up and down in the cold, began to wish I’d never come.
And then, of a sudden, there came a quickened intensity, and then a roar, and a flash of fire, and a rush of boys, naked save for loincloths, arms lifted in the dark, streaking furiously through the winter streets, bearing torches, shouting, “Sareyā, sareyō,” eyes blazing. It was like nothing I had ever seen in Japan: wild, pagan, full of danger. The torches played crazy games on the faces they passed, and the shouters raced to the shrine like intoxicants, faces lit up by their torches. Pointing their torches to the middle, they started building a huge fire. Flames licked the air, torches began to waver, the crowd let out a gasp. Sparks were flying this way and that, policemen were roaring through megaphones, the whole crowd, pressed as closely as in some rock concert, was shaking and wobbling as one. Shouting “Sareyā, sareyō,” the men in loincloths, bodies glistening in the night, poured more heat onto the fire, the flames racing up in the sky above them, their eyes alight. I could feel the danger in the air, sense the pull of some ancient force. I could feel an electrical crackle in the air.
All night the fires raged, subsiding shortly before dawn.
A couple of days later, I found myself walking along a broad avenue in the sunshine with Siobhan, the potter I had met from Santa Cruz. “For a long time, you know, I used to repress this thing about being a witch,” she began, as we walked past groups of horn-rimmed students, remarkable only in their normalcy. “When I was young, you know, I was always afraid of all that stuff about devils; I believed that knowing anything about them was a form of possession. And then one day, Pam, who I knew from Connecticut — but she’s in Santa Cruz now — came up to me and said, ‘You’re a witch, you know.’
“And at first I just said, ‘No, no, I’m not.’ But she could tell. And she had her own coven. And then one night I saw my dead mother in a dream, and I could just tell she was in a very different place, but a good place. And that’s when I accepted being a witch.”
Siobhan smiled, and the day smiled with her.
“Anyway, now I’m in this really comfortable place in the countryside, and everything’s cool. Except that my Japanese roommate — she’s really into Stendhal and is going to France next year — has fallen in love with this young German boy who lives with us. Fell in love with him just for the way he washes the dishes. Plus, of course,” she said, eyes flashing, “there’s the whole Christmas cake thing. Keiko’s twenty-six.”
“Christmas cake?”
“You know. For girls.” I must have looked perplexed. “You don’t know about it? Maybe it’s something they only tell girls. Anyway, it’s this system they have over here; they even use the word, in Japanese, Kurisumasu kēki. You know how on the twenty-third of December a Christmas cake is supposed to be fresh and worth investing in, but by the twenty-fourth it’s getting kind of old? And after the twenty-fifth, it’s starting to get stale and no one wants it. Well, that’s how they think of women over here. Twenty-three is a good age to get one. Twenty-four is a little close to the deadline. And after twenty-five, forget it!”
“Which is why girls over the age of twenty-five often make a beeline for foreigners — that’s their only chance of getting married?”
“Exactly!”
As soon as I heard this, many things began to fall into place. For my initial sense that every foreign male here found some demure but passionate Japanese companion to dance attention on him had only been strengthened by some of the characters I had met in Kyoto. Everywhere I turned, I seemed to run into men who were in a kind of spell here, having not only met girls but dream girls who were the embodiment of everything they wanted in a woman. Lifelong bachelors began talking about marriage; newly wed husbands could not stop extolling the goddesses they had married; hardened Lotharios found themselves disarmed by girls whose innocence was touched by a hint of guiltless sensuality.
And though most Japanese women, I assumed, would still unquestioningly follow their prescribed course towards a Japanese husband, there was, by all accounts, a minority — and an increasingly large minority — who would do anything possible to find a foreign boyfriend, if only for a while, in order to get a taste, firsthand, of the glamorous foreign world they had seen on their TV screens. In the discos of Tokyo and Osaka, foreign men were currently as fashionable as Chanel shirts or Louis Vuitton bags, trendy accessories to be shown off to one’s friends. But even in less cosmopolitan Kyoto, foreigners were still agents of escape — like the crickets kept by Kawabata’s Kyoto girl Chieko,
inhabiting “a separate realm, an enchanted land … filled with fine wine and delicious food from both land and sea.” The Japanese looked on foreigners, I sometimes thought, with the same awestruck condescension that we might bring to heavy-metal rock stars, secretly convinced that they are, at heart, somewhat vulgar and barbarous, yet undeniably seduced by the fact that they belong to a flashy, semimythic world of money, fame, and glamour. We look down our noses at Jon Bon Jovi, but invited to meet him, we jump at the chance.
In Kyoto, however, the attraction of opposites was especially strong, not least because this most conservative of cities, in one of the most traditional of all societies, attracted — indeed, because of its traditionalism attracted — some of the freest and most radical of visitors from abroad, the hiders and seekers, the rebels and dropouts who did not fit in, or did not want to fit in, at home. And Japanese girls had long been the subject of romantic fantasies of our own in the West. Pierre Loti had hired his Mademoiselle Chrysanthème as soon as he laid anchor in Japan; the Santa Barbaran Rexroth had found his Muse in a mysterious Japanese woman poet who lived in the shadow of a Kyoto temple. Even Lafcadio Hearn, who had done so much to bring Japanese Buddhism to the West, had declared that “the most wonderful aesthetic products of Japan are not its ivories, nor its bronzes, nor its porcelains, nor its swords, nor any of its marvels in metal and lacquer — but its women.” And even today, the Japan Handbook, the standard guidebook used by most young foreigners in Japan, devoted an entire section to “Sex,” informing its readers, with guidebook authority, that Japanese women were “orgasmic,” longed to be swept off their feet, and “[expected] you to be an aggressor and in the old-fashioned sense to make [them]” — an alarming suggestion, I thought, in the hands of men looking for “a possible partner for life.”
Besides, the pairing of Western men and Eastern women was as natural as the partnership of sun and moon. Everyone falls in love with what he cannot begin to understand. And the other man’s heart is always greener.
