The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  And when she says, more than once, “I live in Kyoto all life; you come here only one month, but you know more place, very well,” I feel again, with a pang, a sense of the tightly drawn limits of a Japanese woman’s life, like the autumn paths vanishing in mist around us. For I could see that she was saying something more than the usual “Tourists know more of towns than their residents ever do,” and I could catch a glimpse of the astonishing circumscription of her life. Even while her brother had been to Kansas City to study for three years and was now in his third year of pursuing Jung in Switzerland, she had never really been outside Kyoto. She now worked two mornings a week in a doctor’s office, but it was the same place where she had worked during junior high school and high school, in vacations, just around the corner from her parents’ house. Her cousin, a kind of surrogate sister, sometimes worked in the same place. Her own house was in the next neighborhood down, within walking distance of her parents-in-law’s house. And her mother still called her every night, to see how she was doing.

  Every year, she said, her husband got three or four days of holiday, and the trips the family took together on these breaks — to the sea once, and once to Tokyo Disneyland — still lived within them as peak experiences. Even a trip such as the one today, for a few hours to a suburb, seemed a rare and unforgettable adventure.

  “Please tell me your adventure,” she begins to say. “Please tell me other country. I want imagine all place,” but I don’t know where to begin, or how to convey them to someone who has never been in a plane, and what cloak-and-dagger episodes in Cuba, or nights in the Thai jungle, will mean to one who has scarcely left Kyoto.

  “I dream you life-style,” she goes on, as if sensing my unease. “You are bird, you go everywhere in world, very easy. I all life living only Kyoto. So I dream I go together you. I have many, many dream in my heart. But I not have strong heart. You very different.”

  “Maybe. I was lucky that I got used to going to school by plane when I was nine.”

  “You very lucky. I afraid other country. Because I thinking, maybe I go away, my mother ill, maybe die. If I come back, maybe no mother here.” Her mother, she explains, developed very serious allergies — because, it seemed, of the new atmospheric conditions in Japan. (All this I found increasingly hard to follow, in part because Sachiko used “allergy” to mean “age” — she regularly referred to the “Heian allergy,” and when she was talking about “war allergy,” I honestly didn’t know if it was a medical or a historical point she was making. I, of course, was no better, confusing sabishii with subarashii, and so, in trying to say, “Your husband must be lonely,” invariably coming out with, “Your husband is wonderful. Just fantastic,” which left her frowning in confusion more than ever.)

  “When I little children size, my mother many times in hospital. And Grandma too. And when my brother in Kansas City, my grandma die. He never say goodbye. She see my husband, she think he my brother. Very sad time. So I always dream in heart. Because many sad thing happen. But dream stay in heart.” This seemed a sorrowful way to approach the universe, though eminently pragmatic. Yet she held to it staunchly. “Maybe tomorrow I have accident. I die. So I always keep dream.” That was lovely, elegant, Sachiko: Sachiko, in her teenager’s high-tops, keeping a picture of Sting in her wallet and sometimes losing sleep over him — a thirty-year-old girl with daydreams.

  All this gets us onto what is fast becoming a recurrent theme in our talks, the competing merits of the Japanese and the American family systems. I, of course, argue heartily for the Japanese.

  “It makes me so happy to see mothers and children playing together here, or going to temples together, and movies, and coffee shops. In America, mothers and daughters are often strangers. People do not know their parents, let alone their grandparents. Sometimes, in California, parents just fly around, with very young girlfriends or boyfriends, and leave their children with lots of money but no love.” (My sense of America, in Japan, was getting as simplistic and stereotyped as my sense of Japan had been in America.) “So fifteen-year-old girls have babies and drive cars, and have money, many boyfriends, and lots of drugs.”

  “Maybe. But in your country, I think, children have strong heart. Do anything, very easy. Here in Japan, no strong heart. Even grown-up person, very weak!” I think she means that they lack adventure, recklessness, and freedom, and in all that I suppose she is right, and not only because twelve Japanese CEOs have literally collapsed this year under the pressures of a strong yen. And she, of course, as a foreigner, sees only the pro ledger in America, while I, over here, stress only the con — though when I am in America, I find myself bringing back to American friends an outsider’s sense of their country’s evergreen hopefulness.

  And as we continue walking, a few other people trudge past us up the hill, elders most of them, with sticks, the men in berets and raincoats, the women in print dresses, occasionally looking back through the curtain of fine drizzle at the strange sight of a pretty young Japanese girl with a shifty Indian male. Sachiko, however, seems lost in another world.

  “What is your blood type?” she suddenly asks, eyes flashing into mine.

  “I don’t know.”

  “True?”

  “True.”

  “Whyyy?” she squeals, in the tone of a high school girl seeking a rock star’s autograph.

  “I don’t know. In my country, people aren’t concerned about blood types.”

  “But maybe you have accident. Go hospital.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Really? True??”

  “Really. Foreigners think it’s strange that the Japanese are so interested in blood types.”

  “Really? Hontō ni?”

  “Yes.” I am beginning to feel I am letting her down in some way, so I quickly ask if she is interested in the Chinese calendar, or astrology. All this, though, is frightful to try to translate, and when Sachiko says that she is the sign of the “ship” and I say, “Ah yes, you mean the waves,” she looks very agitated. “No, no waves! Ship!” Now it’s my turn to look startled. What is going on here? “The Water Bearer?” “No,” “The Fish?” “No. Ship!” She is sounding adamant. Then, suddenly, I recall that Aries is the ram. (Thank God, I think, for all those years in California!) “Oh—sheep! You are the sheep sign.” “Yes. Ship.”

  And then, of a sudden, she plops down on a bench, and draws out from her backpack a Japanese edition of Hesse, and shows me the stories she likes, and repeats how he had struck a chord in her when young. “When I little high school size, I much much like. But Goldmund, not so like. When I twenty, it not so touch my heart, not same feeling. Now thirty, maybe different feeling. Which you like?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m reading it again now. When I was young, I liked Goldmund. Then, later, I understood Narziss a little better. For a long time, I spent one month living like Goldmund, traveling around the world, and one month like Narziss, leading a monk’s life at home. Now I’m trying both at the same time, to see which one is better.”

  Somehow the world has misted over as we talk, and time and space are gone: the world, I think, begins and ends on this small bench. And as we sit there, sometimes with her dainty pink umbrella unfurled, sometimes not, I pointing to the yellow trees, or the blue in the sky, and saying, “Onna-no kokoro, Kurama-no tenki” (The weather in Kurama is like a woman’s heart), I can see her perfect white teeth when she laughs, the mole above her lips, a wisp of hair across her forehead, another fine strand that slips into her ear. She bends over to look at the magazine in my hands, and her hair falls all about me.

  “You tell parent about girlfriend?” she says, looking up.

  “Well, for many years, I haven’t had — or wanted — a girlfriend.”

  “So what am I?” A long silence. “I man?” She giggles girlishly, and I don’t know where that puts us: our discourse is soft and blurred as autumn rain.

  “I think you’re a very beautiful lady,” I say, looking down at my outs
tretched legs like a bashful schoolboy. “Your husband is a very lucky man.”

  “I not so think. I bad wife.”

  And then, seizing the closeness in the air, she tries to formulate more complex thoughts. “I very happy. Today, time stop. Thank you very much, coming here this place together me. I only know you short time, but you best friend feeling. I think I know you long time. I no afraid, no weak heart. You foreigner man, but I alone together you, very easy. I think maybe you very busy man. But talking very easy. I very fun, thank you.” All of this is a little heart-breaking, I think, together on a bench on a misty autumn day, and she so excited to see me after only two weeks of acquaintance.

  Standing up, we start walking slowly down the hill, through faint drizzle, talking of her closeness to her mother, and the poems of Yosano Akiko. And as we leave the hill of temples behind us, she turns and bows towards the shrine, pressing her palms together and closing her eyes very tight.

  That evening, I read Yosano Akiko late into the night and try to recall the short tanka Sachiko had recited to me on the hill. But I know only that it begins with kimi, the intimate form of “you,” as so many of Akiko’s poems do. Falling asleep over the book, I awaken with a start in the dead of night, imagining that I am holding her by the hand and saying, “Sachiko-san, I’m sorry to disturb you. I know you have a husband, and I’m very sorry, but …”

  And later in the night, I think of the two of us under her pink umbrella, and flip hurriedly through the book in search of the phrase “ai to ai gasa” When I find it, my heart seems almost to stop: it is, it seems, a classic image of intimacy, and one of the most famous figures in Japan for lovers.

  10

  AS I WENT BACK and forth between my walks with Sachiko and my talks with the Zen-minded foreigners, I was beginning to pick up a little more Japanese by immersing myself in a bilingual edition of Yosano Akiko’s almost unbearably sensuous poems, Midaregami (Tangled Hair). Voluptuous and rich as full-bodied peaches, her tanka presented a world quite different from the one I had found in the haiku of the monks: hers, indeed, was the world of the temple as seen from the other side, by a young girl loitering at its gates, provoking the monks with her come-hither boldness:

  You have yet to touch

  This soft flesh

  This throbbing blood—

  Are you not lonely,

  Explainer of the Way?

  In the rich nights, I sank deep into Akiko’s delectable tremors; in the bright afternoons, I steadied myself with the clear-water verses of Ryōkan:

  If your hermitage is deep in the mountains,

  Surely the moon, flowers and maples

  Will become your friends.

  Certainly, the more I read of Ryōkan, the more I found myself thoroughly won over by this gentle eccentric spirit, wild brother to Thoreau, who lived all alone in the mountains for most of his life, as good as his poetic word. Yet as much as he savored his loneliness, the friendly old monk seemed never to forget that solitude can only be as strong as the compassion it releases. All his life, according to the folk legends, he drank sake, danced freely in the villages nearby, spent his days playing hide-and-seek with children or stopping for a game of marbles with some geisha.

  It was, in fact, his sense of warm mischief that rescued Ryōkan from sanctity and that seemed to make him as much at home with the world as with the universal. (“The great man,” wrote Emerson, “is he who in the midst of the crowds keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”) Ryōkan’s truth, he confessed, with typical simplicity, was “not that I do not wish to associate with men. But living alone I have the Better Way” (in almost perfect anticipation of the celebrated Romantic credo of his contemporary Byron: “I love not man the less, but Nature more”). Yet it seemed only fitting that the light of his last years was the twenty-nine-year-old nun who fell in love with him and tended the sixty-nine-year-old monk in his final four years and then for another four decades after his death. It was she, in fact, who brought out the first collection of his poems — not, she said, as a work of art but rather as a testament to his life. The two terms in any case dissolved in his work.

  What is the heart of this old monk like?

  A gentle wind

  Beneath the vast sky.

  One day, legend has it, a famous scholar from Tokyo came to visit the old monk. Ever hospitable, Ryōkan asked his guest to wait for a minute, while he went down to the village to buy sake. Minutes passed, and more minutes passed, the distinguished guest kept waiting, but still there was no sign of Ryōkan. Finally, after more than three hours, the man went out to look for his host — only to find him sitting on the ground just outside, gazing at the moon. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Ryōkan asked his guest. “Yes. But what about the sake?” “Oh yes, the sake. I’d quite forgotten about it.”

  This was, of course, a classic Zen tale of absentmindedness, in the highest sense of the word: the mind was absent to the world — but only because it was taken up with something higher. Who, I thought, could resist the figure of this fun-loving monk who took the official name of Great Fool and wrote about his daily life, his walks with the local children, his love?

  Yet who, I also thought, could withstand Akiko’s sumptuous lyrics, with their almost palpable musk of sensuality, more subtly delicious than any poems I knew, except, perhaps, for the quatrains of Rumi? A kind of overpowering perfume suffused her lines, humid with the pressures of spring rain.

  O this heaviness of spring,

  Surrounding

  Maiden and priest,

  From her shoulders a lock of hair

  Over the sutra.

  And her central image of “tangled hair” suggested all the wildness and abandon that the Japanese generally kept so strictly under wraps (not least, perhaps, because their word for “hair” was a homonym of their word for “god”). Hair, for the Japanese, was a way of keeping perfection all about one, and hair, in the Heian period, had been the focus of an attention “so overwhelming,” in Ivan Morris’s words, “as to seem almost obsessive.” Even a millennium ago, Japanese women had prided themselves on their long, straight, glossy hair, making up the deficiencies of nature with their art. Yet Akiko, locked up by her father in her bedroom as a girl, had broken out to write some of the most rebellious verses ever heard in Japan, throwing her hair — and everything around it — into disarray. All her sympathies she had given, subversively, to the women who had traditionally been regarded as mere playthings, and even to such celebrated outlaws as the young shopkeeper’s daughter who had been executed for burning down her family house in order to be closer to the priest she loved. Akiko had even committed the heresy of outdoing her poet husband, himself the son of a priest. In her explosive poems, hair was nearly always loose and tangled, as far as possible from the shaven clarity of the monk.

  Pale handsome priest,

  Can you not see

  The girl lost in dreams

  By the tree of pink blossoms

  This spring evening?

  And so I read on, across the parallel texts, lady tempting monk, monk renouncing lady.

  The first time Sachiko invited me to her house for dinner, I was taken aback, and touched, to come in to find that she was playing a Bruce Springsteen tape (in honor, no doubt, of my stray comment at the temple). Sitting me down at her small round table, she brought out a four-course dinner of all the favorites I had mentioned in passing — a salad lit up by straw-berries, a dish of corn, potato croquettes, and Earl Grey tea. On her piano sat a spray of gold and violet flowers. “Every room need little flower,” she explained, as gracious as a Heian courtier. “Every day I find new flower. I think person, then I choose flower. This flower you!” The whole room, in short — like Sachiko herself — had been remade for the occasion.

  After dinner, she glided through the next act of what seemed as efficient a plan of hospitality as at some geisha house. Inviting me to sit down on her couch, she drew out a guitar and started singing, in a strong, high voice
, a series of bluegrass-flavored songs, all of them sounding like “Red River Valley,” yet all, she said, made famous by the Carter Family (yet another all-American institution I had never heard of till I came to Japan). Then she broke into some Japanese folk songs, their melancholy tales of broken love carried by the lilting softness of her voice. As with so many things in Japan, female singing seemed to be done to formula, and yet it was a lovely formula, guaranteed to please. The songs rang out in the quiet room, as fresh as the flowers, and as sweet.

  This song, she explained, was about lanterns floating down a river at night, each of them carrying a spirit of the dead, yet seeming, to the children along the bank, nothing more than an exciting play of lights. “This song little same my father sing in war,” she declared. “But feeling, little different. This more spring light feeling — Subaru,” though here, I gathered, she meant not the car but the constellations for which it had been named.

  And as she sang, I was struck again at how the Japanese, shy as they generally are — perhaps, indeed, because they are shy — tend to be professional performers at home, almost as if they feel obliged to shower guests with accomplishments as well as other kinds of gifts. I, by contrast, would rather do anything than perform on cue, though on this occasion, sensing an unspoken request, I glumly sat down at her piano and tried to bang out some half-remembered Beethoven and Bach.