The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  The tables were filled with businessmen and their pretty paid companions, the former apparently exulting in this walk on the American wild side, the latter smiling whenever required to do so. When asked to dance, they headed out onto the floor, in orderly groups, and, lining up in rows, serious as workers doing morning calisthenics, set about duplicating the deejay’s every move. Here an arm to the right, there a finger in the air. The energy and the unity of the place were breathtaking. Below me, the four topettes were still boogying on cue, not one of their silky hairs out of place, not a trace of fatigue on their bright, unsmiling faces. They exchanged no looks or words or gestures as they danced, and when one of them went to the ladies’ room, the others kept on dancing, leaving a blank space in the line for the missing girl to fill as soon as she returned. These girls, I assumed, must come here every night and go religiously through their motions. They did straight-faced surfing moves on “Surfin’ Safari,” broke into a conga line for a Sam Cooke song, clapped through “Locomotion.” Behind them, everyone else was equally punctilious, waving their hands about every time the deejay waved his hands about, bending their knees every time the deejay bent his knees, mimicking berserkness whenever the deejay went berserk, and some foreigner at my table, a Buddhist businessman from Staten Island, was shouting, exultant, “This place is perfect! Just perfect for Japan! Everyone in lines. And following the American leader!”

  Emily the pagan and a hippie girl, meanwhile, were arguing furiously about the nature of the fifties and the conformity of hippies, and around us the bouncy waitresses continued wriggling on cue, tireless as cheerleaders, and the four chic “office ladies” jived, expressionless, through Motown moves. An Iraqi sailor from Basra sat alone at the next table, nursing his drink and shyly clicking away with his Instamatic. Several gray-suited American businessmen were led in by their eager-to-please Japanese hosts, and looked as if they would very much have liked to be elsewhere. Two goofy salarymen in their fifties got onto the dance floor with two American escorts, absurdly tall and elegant girls who must have been pulling down three hundred dollars apiece just for teetering over their dates.

  All the while, Elvis and the Supremes and Ritchie Valens kept blasting on, and the guests on the dance floor went manic on cue, dipping their knees to “409” and hopping up and down to “Jump” and banging their fists together on “Hand Jive,” as an old copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters was passed around our table. Then, out of nowhere, the deejay spotted our group of aging foreigners. “Hey,” he said, pointing a trigger finger over at us, “this one is just for you!” And on came the one and only Top 40 hit from the Grateful Dead.

  * * *

  Two days later, at Arashiyama, along the western hills of town, everything was erased in the holiday sunshine. Boats meandering across a sunlit lake; teenage girls in kimono extracting disposable cameras from gold-lamé bags; bright crowds thronging across the Togetsu Bridge as in almost every Hiroshige print I had ever seen. Old men leading their grandchildren to stalls along the riverbank and coming away with ice creams or strange sweetmeats; ladies in kimono arranging themselves like flowers in a small, exquisite garden; families flocking in patterns through the bright, still air, as quiet as the trees around them.

  It was, in fact, as much the people as the leaves that made the Japanese autumn: seated on low red-cloth tables under a canopy of colors, sipping tea and sitting silent, their talk, when it came, as soft as running water. The Japanese autumn was never wild or febrile, as in other tree-filled lands, but diffidently spectacular in its tidy, daily miracles, the air as mild as spring. And the people who came to inspect the scene were miraculously quiet, as hushed as viewers at some play. Having beautifully civilized Nature, made it orderly and trim, they fit themselves into its rhythms without ever making a sound. So even when there were crowds of people, as today, they were all so modest and self-possessed — and so fluently disappeared into the whole — that the purity of the scene remained unsmudged. At times like this, the observation of the seasons seemed akin, almost, to a playing of the national anthem; a solemn, silent act of faith.

  12

  AS MORE AND MORE experiences began to crowd in on me in Kyoto, and my once empty room began to fill up with more and more presences, I was finding it harder and harder to keep clear. I had ended up, so it seemed, in a whirlpool of paradoxes, such as the one about what a sadist should do to a masochist. What does a would-be solitary do in the company of other solitaries — the very people, in other words, whose company he most enjoys? How does a Thoreauvian respond to a society of antisocial Thoreauvians? Was not keeping oneself open just a way of dodging all commitments?

  And as my days in my new home began to turn into weeks, and my discoveries into day-to-day occurrences, I found, inevitably, that I was beginning to domesticate the dream, to know my way around the marvel and superimpose upon the map of Kyoto’s streets my own particular homemade grid: this was the restaurant where I could find the most delicious chai, made by a Japanese woman who was a devotee of Sri Chinmoy, and this the coffee shop that had the best “morning service” (not, as it happened, a religious rite but a toast-and-coffee special); this was the bus that took me to the smoky jazz bar where polite longhairs served up baked potatoes mysteriously attended by slices of lemon and chopsticks, this the one that took me to the latest issues of Sports Illustrated; this was the temple where I did tai chi on early Sunday mornings, and this the one where schoolgirls never came.

  Often, moreover, as a resident, I did not have to go out to find Kyoto, for Kyoto was all too ready to come in to find me. One day, I was sitting inside my room, deep in Peter Matthiessen, when there came a knock upon my door. Outside, in the corridor, stood an elegant, gray-bearded man in a suit, accompanied by a sweet-smiling popette. They looked like the host and hostess of some morning talk show.

  We bowed in all directions at once, and the man quickly pursued his objective. “What country do you come from?”

  “England,” I said (hastily riffling through alternatives).

  Digging into his briefcase, he presented me with a brochure advising me not to fret; God had guaranteed happiness for us all. This made me happy. Then he followed up his advantage. Would I like a Bible?

  No, thank you, I told him in a Japanese that apparently afforded him some pain. I had been to a Christian school in England and had had ample opportunity to read the Bible there. Looking unhappy, he bowed. I bowed. The girl bowed. I bowed again. Then there was more bowing all round, and the threat moved off to another room.

  Two nights later, I was just hurrying home through the rain, a hot box of Kentucky Fried Chicken in my hands, when suddenly a boy loomed out of an alleyway before me. He asked me a few questions, and I, assuming he wished to try out his English on me, grimly replied in ungracious Japanese. Then he asked if he could bless me. This did not seem like an offer to refuse. Dutifully, I put down my box of two legs and a thigh (original flavor) and stood before him in the drizzle. Putting his hands together in prayer, he asked me to do the same. Then, eyes tightly closed, he recited three times something along the lines of “Oh, please, great spirit, bless this gaijin, thank you.” Then he asked me to cradle my hands in front of my stomach and close my eyes for two or three moments while he did some extra petitioning for my soul. This I did, in the midst of the rain, my chicken growing colder and wetter by the minute. Finally, he gave me permission to open my eyes, and kuriingu complete, I was free to go home with my soggy dinner.

  The next day, therefore, when a man in the laundromat turned around and started to engage me in conversation, I was all set to close my eyes and get a few extra credits in the heavens — until I realized that he really did just wish to tell me about his honeymoon in Disneyland. A little later, though, when I went into Shakey’s with an American student of Zen, a waiter hurried up to us, blocking our way and motioning for us to leave. The place was full of happy diners at the time, conspicuously consuming their corn-and-pineapple pies, while a voice on the public-ad
dress system declared, “This is Mr. Tender Juicy Chicken, a spokesman for Shakey’s …” When we tried to move closer to the salad bar, however, the employee panicked, shaking his head furiously. “But we only want to eat some salad.” “Salad?” He looked thunderstruck. “We’re only here to eat.” “Eat?” He stole a terrified glance at the copy of Time I was carrying, with its cover shot of Arafat. Apparently, he had thought that these foreigners had come here to convert defenseless pizza-eaters to some messianic figure in a kaffiyeh.

  Mostly, though, I was free to wander around alone, in the company of the autumn. The smell of fresh-baked bread on the Philosopher’s Path, on a shining afternoon, and the solemn tolling of a gong across a wall. A flash of gold on the wrist of a temple maiden. Men with jackets on their arms swaggering past in loosened ties, practicing English sentences: “When you are middle-aged, you must take care.” A girl in Porsche sunglasses and blazing scarlet trousers trying out “Where do you come from?” Middle-aged gentlemen standing rigid as statues while harassed photographers waved them back into the sun.

  Stopping off one morning in Shisendō, the Temple of the Poet Hermits, I sat on the veranda, looking out onto the garden. A lady, very beautiful, her face the faint pink of pearl, came and sat down by my side. A light, light rain began to fall, so light that I had to strain my eyes to see it and knew that it was raining only because the bark on the trees was growing browner. Another Comme des Garçons girl came in and slid down on the floor beside me, her head on her cashmered shoulder, as she looked out at the dreamy rain. Occasionally, a drop trickled down from the rafters. The leaves were scarlet, green, and burgundy. The drizzle was softer than a silk still life.

  A little later, I gave Sachiko a call, and we arranged to go to Kobe, the shining, broad-avenued port that had always been, of all Japanese places, the one that was closest in spirit to a foreign town. As always when we met, the day was all sunshine and light drizzle. But the rains began to lift as we got onto the Kobe train, and by the time we arrived, the sky was blue above the silver sea.

  Drifting along through the huge antiseptic spaces of Kobe’s lonely de Chirico streets, we chatted leisurely about Bjorn Borg and Victor Hugo, Holden Caulfield (whom she loved) and Jacky Chan (whom she admired for his “child’s eye”). Then, coming upon a bench, she suddenly sat down and began fishing out presents from her knapsack, handing them over to me in sequence: a pretty drawing, in crayons, of the story I had told her (“I’m sorry. In my heart, very beautiful, but paper not so good”); then a sheaf of autumn photos — yellow light streaming through the ginkgo trees, and maples rusted against the blue; then, out of nowhere, a monkey-decorated telephone card (a woman’s gift, I thought, and a Japanese woman’s gift, obliging me to call her).

  Making our way towards the port, we looked out at the ocean liners, black in the chromium light, and sitting down on a log, the wind blustering all about us, we fell into our usual patter, she telling me how America was the land of the free, I telling her how much of what I saw in America was loneliness. And every time I ventured some generality that even she could not assent to — that the Japanese were close to their parents, say, or that thirty-year-old Japanese had the hearts, very often, of fifteen-year-olds (where in America it was often the reverse), or that Japanese women half expected their men to take on mistresses — she simply nodded and answered sagely, “Case by case.” A gentler putting-in-place I could scarcely imagine.

  Then, through the wide boulevards of the town, we walked up Tor Road, up into the hills of Kitano, and the small cobbled streets of the foreigners quarter. Surrounded by white stucco villas scattered along the winding roads, the sea below, the sky all blue above, I could easily imagine myself in the canyons of North Hollywood. Across the street, as if by design, the name of the ice cream store was Santa Barbara.

  And so we drifted in and out of foreign dreams: in a Peter Rabbit store, she wound up a music box and put it to my ear — I heard “As Time Goes By” and then a song she identified for me, whispering, as “Lili Marleen”; at the English House, commemorating a foreign way of life, she lingered in the pretty flowered bedroom, gazing at it dreamily and talking of Emily Brontë. Wandering along past restaurants called Lac d’Annecy and Café Chinois, she asked me what Rob Lowe was like and why I did not think that Cyndi Lauper was cute. As we talked, I taught her a few new words: “soul” and “clear” and “fascination.”

  Then, when least I expected it, I looked up to see that we were standing outside a restaurant called Wang Thai, the only Thai restaurant in this part of Japan, and something I had despaired of ever finding. This, too, seemed an augury, a present from the fates, and so, without a pause, I bustled poor Sachiko in and ordered her a spicy chicken soup. Soon she was daintily choking over her bowl, while trying, with typical courtesy, to find something positive to say.

  Once she had laid the poisonous broth aside, and the second course arrived, she tucked her fork, delicately held between two fingers, into the rice and offered brightly, “I like Kali.” I was wondering what kind of demon I had roused within her to get this demure lady to champion the goddess of destruction — a less useful figure, I recalled, than the spirit of Fertility — when she repeated, with more heat, “Kali, I like very much,” motioning to her plate, and I realized that it was only the curry she was extolling.

  Yet for all these customary hazards, Sachiko seemed to be drawing closer as the meal went on, and towards the end, as she leaned towards me, oblivious suddenly of the stylish Ramayana murals all around us and the dreamy Thai pop music on the system, I realized that she was working around to some confession. Still, it was, as always, a little hard for me to follow what exactly she was saying. “With you,” she began, “I have clear heart. I talk my heart, very easy. But I very shy.” She smiled and hid her face in her napkin, and it was harder still to guess what she was trying to convey; I could tell it was important only by the diffidence with which she brought it forth. “When I meet husband, I little teenage size, nineteen. First time I together man. We talking bluegrass music — very easy, very fun. I expect soon marry. Before many times, I talking brother. Very close feeling. But his wife soon little sad, maybe little jealous. So long time, I not talking him. But now my heart very different. With you, talking very easy, very fun. You have clear heart. No dust on your mirror.” She stopped again, and I held my breath. “I have two heart,” she continued slowly. “I like children very much. I like you. But different. With you is dream world.” I was getting a little confused at all this. “You have found young heart in me,” she said. I said that I sensed as much but I did not know if her two hearts were in collision or in sync.

  “I very shy,” she went on. “But I say true. If not good, please you say. I not want bad.”

  “I’m really happy to be with you.”

  “Really?” She sounded incredulous.

  “Yes, really. Thank you for your friendship.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said with a bright light, tilting her head on her shoulder and flashing me her prettiest smile. “My pleasure” — she tried out the phrase I had taught her.

  Thus we struggled on through a curious discussion. Her wavering, heartfelt nonconfession seemed to mark the crossing of some threshold, and now, of a sudden, she opened up with a flood of foreign images. She imagined my mother in a deep-blue sari, with a golden border, she said, and she would wear a sari for me on my birthday, even though she did not own one. She had always dreamed of India. She liked above all Thai reds.

  “Art, you mean?”

  “No. Red!”

  Then she went on to tell me a Inoue Yasushi story about a man who quit his country to seek out the moon in Tibet, and I reciprocated by telling her about my readings in the Zen traveler and poet Issa. And so we wandered out into the Californian hills, past girls in “SANTA BARBARA: High Fashion Dreaming” shirts, along chic cobbled streets, a theme-park vision of gentrified Victoriana, with Sherlock Holmes alleyways and olde England streetlamps. This shiny local ver
sion of foggy London was called “romantic Kobe,” she informed me. “Many, many Japanese woman like come here this place.” “For shopping?” “Also for romance!”

  We sat down on a wall, and in the minutes before twilight, she laid her head upon my shoulder. I could feel her perfume all around me, and as we watched the clouds catching the last of the light on the city below, she sighed, and a chill came into the air. I had never seen eyes shaped like hers before, with ocher eye shadow and folded lids, and when she looked up at me, I felt a shudder. “Time stop,” she said. “Why clock not stop moving?”

  Then, smiling, she took my hand in hers, and hanging on to my arm, a skipping girl again, she walked me back to town.