The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  All this brought home to me again how strongly the quaint Victorian notion of feminine accomplishments still held in Japan, and perhaps especially in Kyoto, and how often women here still seemed to belong in some polite and proper Austen drawing room. Here was a fairly typical young woman — a normal, middle-class woman of limited means and opportunities — who routinely drew, wrote poems, made kimono, painted watercolors, played the koto, sang foreign folksongs with guitar, could hammer out a couple of melodies on the piano, played the banjo, was an expert at aerobics, knew kendō and kung fu, and was mistress of all the other traditional arts — serving tea and sewing, acupuncture and ikebana; her five-year-old daughter, no less typical, was already cultivating Chopin on the piano and learning to dance Giselle. And as in an Austen world, women lived so much in the parlor that even the slightest encounter with the world outside had the capacity to thrill or shock.

  The next thing I knew, though, Gregory Hines had set her off on other tangents, and she was asking me what I thought of the movie Soul Man. After I gave a suitably evasive reply, she said, abruptly, “Sometimes, I think, we talk telepathy.”

  “Telepathy?”

  “Sometimes I alone, I talking you, and then I hear you talking. Please we always have telepathy?”

  “Sure,” I said, though, as ever, I had not a clue to what I was assenting.

  “Please you wait,” she said, and a few seconds later, I heard a music-box lullaby over the phone. Then her soft sigh. “Usually, this style, many time, I think not good.”

  “I understand,” I said, though really I didn’t.

  “Usually not so fun.”

  “That’s okay,” I assured her, assuming that she was trying to keep me at a distance. I could imagine the strain of trying to shuttle between lives, across a gap as wide as the Pacific.

  “Now sun set, and I together children. Very different life. Big heart control, little difficult.” I took this at first to mean “damage control,” as it did, but then I saw that she meant something more.

  “This year,” she went on, “autumn more more beautiful. But I look leave, then I think, next year, you gone.”

  That night, I had a whole series of bad dreams: that someone was advancing on me with a gun, that I felt a paralyzing chill, which stopped me from moving, that I was looking for a man called Wisdom but stumbled onto Wimbledon instead. All night the dreams spun on, about oversleeping, about missing something, about threat.

  I5

  AND JUST AS it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love — our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything — so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk.

  When Sachiko gave me a translation of Inoue Yasushi’s Roof Tile of Tempyō to answer some of my questions about the spread of Buddhism to Japan, I found myself again inside the same struggle, of doing and being, and the same question, of whether the products of a life could be its absolution. Inoue was no more analytical than any other Japanese writer, and his pale, ink-wash style refused to deviate from narrative. Yet still, with its tale of Japanese monks devoting their lives to protecting and transcribeing Buddhist scripture, his story set up an array of troubling questions. What avails monastic aspirations when, as Mark had said, religious geniuses were born and not made? Could not renouncing the world be a form of self-indulgence? Was not monasticism, in the end, as much an act of cowardice as courage?

  Then I picked up a copy of The Slave by Singer, and again the theme that impressed itself on me was the same. As the hero, Jacob, tried and tried to parse the Song of Songs, to unriddle the relation of spirit and sense, and the presence of murderers and whores in a God-created world, he was tugged at by Lilith, who was, in some sense, a Polish version of a tanuki, going abroad at night to lure men to their doom. In the end, Singer concluded, “everything comes from God — including lust.” There was a point to everything, and everything justified itself; we could doubt it, or fail to understand it, but still it continued to exist, indifferent to our uncertainty, and we could do nothing but accept it.

  I was just musing on these issues — the lady at the temple gates — when I met a former monk called Rick, and when I talked to Rick, the image became even more poignant simply because Rick was so clearly torn by it, and living with its legacy. Rick’s story, as Mark had explained it to me, was at once remarkable and perhaps archetypal. Trained as a conservatory student at Oberlin, he had suddenly abandoned family and career and come to Kyoto to serve as a monk. For seven years he had lived in Daitokuji — Ikkyū’s temple — together with his best friend, Ray. But like his meditation mate, he had never man-aged entirely to break with the world, and like Ray, he had often stolen out at night to visit a girl. And when his girlfriend had borne him a baby — as had happened to Ikkyū’s principal disciple — Rick had felt obliged to quit the temple to join her. With nothing in his hands, he had walked out of the place and across town to where his girlfriend lived, together with his nine-month-old daughter. But the temple, of course, had prepared him for everything except living with a woman, and soon thereafter they had ended up having terrible, screaming, plate-throwing fights. Finally, he had left her — only to find himself totally isolated: his girl, now his wife, enraged that he had left her as a fallen woman, in charge, moreover, of a half-caste child; the monastic community outraged at his defection; and all the foreign community gathered in one clucking chorus to condemn a man — a monk, no less — for seducing a Japanese lady and then abandoning her. The final, implausible climax had come when Rick’s wife and his abbot had actually joined together in their disapproval and, bound tight by a common adversary, had become partners of a sort. Rick, meanwhile, had fled to Kobe, and then to a run-down hotel in New York City, and at last to San Francisco.

  When I met him, Rick, now working for a computer company in the Bay Area, was returning, on a business trip, to the city he had left in disgrace seven years before. As we drove through the country lanes, the mountains sharp in winter light, he simply kept repeating, “Natsukashii!” (It’s nostalgic), and I could sense that it was too intense and charged a homecoming for him to begin to articulate.

  We went to an Indian restaurant in the countryside — I was no longer surprised to find so many Japanese hippies here, or so many of them experts in reproducing the subcontinent — and as we sat, drinking chai and munching hot cashews while an Indian woman sang ghazals on the sound system and people drifted in and out of the red-and-yellow mirrored curtains, I was almost mesmerized by Rick’s quiet intensity. He was always right there, this short fellow with the bald egghead and the shambling simian gait, now in his late thirties: his eyes arresting, his voice softly purring, all of him buzzing with a quiet fire. Even here, talking in a disheveled restaurant about the tricks of self-presentation, he blazed.

  Rick was full of good stories about his years in the monastery: about sitting for ten days before the temple gates in order to gain admission; about covering his face with a wicker hat and going on his daily rounds of begging through the red-light area (where his American friend from Stanford was living, as the first non-Japanese geisha); about learning to sweep the maple leaves into a circle, because Zen teachers believed that if you could sweep them into a perfect circle, without bending down, it meant that your mind was as whole and fluid as a circle. And though this sounded strange to me, I could understand the way Zen worked by thinking of the calm I sometimes felt in washing dishes, and the pleasure of seeing a once filthy plate shine.

  “Growing up in Ohio must have hardened you a little to the Kyoto winter.”

  “Shit, no,” he replied. “Not in the monastery. I had to stand out there in the cold, before dawn, in bare feet, shivering. It’s hard, man; you don’t know how hard it is. In summer, you sweat; in winter, you shiver.
Every day in the monastery you’re facing some kind of pain. And those old monks are killers, man; they really whack you with those sticks!”

  “What took you to the monastery?”

  “Well, I was learning to be a professional trumpet player. And then I began reading some books on Zen. And one day, on acid, I read Daisetz Suzuki to see how it measured up, and it was an awesome experience — a kind of awakening, almost — and it reminded me of that line from the mystic Heinrich Suso: ‘I felt like a vase that had contained a precious ointment and now all that remained was the perfume.’ So I sold all my trumpets and stuff, and came over. Went into training for the monastery.

  “After I left the place, I found this amazingly elegant woman in Kobe. But her father was really uptight, hired a private detective and shit to follow me everywhere. So I went back home and became an interpreter in the Catskills” — the Catskills! — “working with this monk, a Living National Treasure, who had unified an entire sect of Zen for the first time in its history, and then, just as suddenly, left the temple. He just stripped his robes and spent three years going from temple to temple, challenging monks with koans and then, when he beat them at their own game, stripping them of their robes, and tearing them up to be used as diapers.”

  Later, we sat around Mark’s low table, under the bamboo lantern, and Rick played the shakuhachi bamboo flute — Ikkyū’s instrument — with a kind of piercing intensity that sounded like the voice of Zen itself.

  The next night, we went to a party together, and it turned out that the host, a complete stranger, was someone with whom Rick had shared a writing class in Vermont many years before — someone, indeed, who had come to Kyoto largely as a result of hearing Rick’s haunted memories of temple life. As the evening wore on, the former monk took to washing dishes, and again I saw his spotlessness and the simple severity of his monastic discipline. Later, when we walked out into the street and piled into a cab, Rick began talking again, hypnotically. “I’m thirty-nine now, but I really feel as young as ever. Shit — God, I don’t know why I’m using that word so much; must be because I’m near the monastery again. Anyway, I feel all my life is ahead of me. Sure, I feel more aches and pains than I did fifteen years ago, but basically I feel as young as ever. There’s this guy called Stephen Chang, a doctor in law, in medicine, from Chinese universities, master of tai chi, acupuncture, all this stuff, and he has this book called The Tao of Sex. In the West, you see, we’ve got all fixated on the orgasm. Usually, you go for that, and, bang, it’s over — with the woman usually not quite satisfied and the man totally exhausted.” What was this ex-monk talking about? “But this thing is all about conserving male seed, male energy. So you don’t bother about orgasm but use this energy for higher things, send it to the sixth chakra or wherever.”

  “And you’ve been using this?” The taxi was whizzing past pachinko parlors, video arcades, coffee shops — all the high gloss of a Kyoto winter night. And the former monk, as taut as a violin string, kept talking about girls.

  The very next day, I experienced a strange kind of inversion of my encounter with Rick when I met a group of foreigners at a Thanksgiving party. None of them had any connection with Zen, yet for all of them, everything they did, it seemed, was a meditation. I talked to a flighty California girl who worked in collage. “For me, tea is a kind of meditation.” Beside her sat her husband, a bearded Bay Area writer. “Yeah, the thing about kite flying is, it’s a sort of meditation.” Even as the Zen monk was mastering the tongue of Don Juan, these wanderers seemed to be talking the language of Zen.

  “I’ve been studying tea for three years,” the woman went on. “See, the thing about it is that it combines calligraphy, lacquer-work, scrolls, flower arranging, all the rules about bowing and manners. So everything’s right there; tea’s like a compilation of all the Japanese arts.”

  “But to a typically uninitiated viewer, it’s a little hard to see the subtleties.”

  “Sure, but they’re incredible. Believe me, they are amazing. Like, in pouring the tea, you’ve got to curl your finger into this exact shape” — she curved it prettily — “which is meant to be the exact shape of the moon two days after it’s new. No way you can do the second-day moon, no way you can do the fourth. You’ve got to make it the third. And there’s a different tea, not just for every season and every month, but for every week! So you have to have this amazing concentration — like aikido too.”

  “Do you enjoy it?”

  “Yeah. But I kind of think it’s time to quit. The truth is, the longer you do it, the more you see what you’re supposed to be doing. You get more self-conscious, more uptight — more Japanese, I guess. I remember one day I had been doing tea for two hours, and then I was arranging a flower, while looking out a window. Nobody could see me. Nobody! But this lady came up to me and told me I was sitting wrong. I felt like saying to her, Tuck it! Who cares how I’m sitting if nobody’s here?’ But you can’t do that. So I had to sit the right way, and there’s no way I can sit the wrong way again. I’ve got to be self-conscious even when I’m fucking sitting down! When I first came here, I was just like this kind of happy idiot, stumbling over everything: a real bull in a china shop. But the more sensitive I became to the Japanese, the more self-conscious I had to become. I think I’m burned out.”

  Another person at the party, a quiet-minded teacher who had lived for years as an editor in San Francisco, tried to explain to me what had drawn him here. “All my friends in the Bay Area thought I was completely crazy. ‘What do you know about Kyoto?’ they kept saying. ‘What makes you want to go there?’ ‘I dunno,’ I’d say. And I’d look in the papers and see things like ‘Moon Viewing in Oakland Botanical Gardens,’ and I’d go along to that, and my friends would say, ‘Why? How come? What’s the point?’ And I’d go, ‘I dunno.’ It’s just like this mountain I kept on seeing, and I had to go there. So then I came. I gave myself a year to stay, with an option on another year. And I knew nothing about the place — nothing — when I came over; I thought it was just a small town.

  “I got a job teaching at a university, and there was this girl who worked in the office there. Anyway, one day, she sent me a card about a play I had produced. I went back to California for ten weeks. And when I came back, I just answered her card. That was in April. In May, we went on a date. In October, we began living together. By February, we were married. Now she’s expecting. It was just one of those things, you know — I thought I was going to leave after one year, and there was this girl saying ‘You’re not going to leave.’ Now, of course, I think that she was the mountain I had been seeing all that time.”

  Two days later, Mark and I went for Thanksgiving dinner to his friend Etsuko’s house, a fairy-tale mansion in the Japanese context, its intercom-activated gate leading into a garden softly lit with lanterns, its large wooden doors giving onto an exquisitely appointed living room — a museum in miniature — lined with Chinese scrolls and ancient Javanese puppets and books about the art world, in Japanese and English. Bach was floating through the room on a Deutsche Grammophon compact disc, and for appetizers, our hostess placed before us a couple of almond and horseradish wafers.

  Etsuko’s situation was more or less typical, so it seemed. Her husband lived in Tokyo, roughly three hundred miles away, and she saw him only occasionally, on weekends, if at all (in all the years he’d known her, Mark had talked to her husband only once, very briefly, on the phone). She, meanwhile, devoted most of her energy to raising her teenage daughter. But what time and attention she had left over, she threw into a flurry of activities, setting up charitable organizations, helping to run an English-language magazine for visitors, representing her husband’s family at social ceremonies and conferences, and, for the most part, running intercultural institutions aimed at introducing Japan to foreigners and vice versa. Having spent almost half her life abroad, she sought now to act as a kind of ambassador from each world to the other, trying to repair diplomatic relations which were always frail as c
hina.

  Serving us the sweetest grapefruit juice I had ever tasted, in cut-glass tumblers, she patiently fielded my questions, explaining how the Japanese had different colors for each wind, as well as for every season, telling me the different words for moonlight on the water, spelling out the name of the insect that was virtually synonymous with dusk. Many of these words, she explained, were suffused with a sense of nostalgia, harking back to the age of Asuka and the versatile Nukata no Okimi, once Empress of Japan; and only then did I realize that on the day Sachiko had taken me to Asuka, she had in fact been introducing me to a woman’s sanctuary, a private, forgotten place charged with the memory of this famous poetess.

  Then, with a graceful bow, Etsuko ushered us into her dining room, ringed with beautifully arranged blue cups and a gallery of china plates. She served up chrysanthemums in tiny blue bowls, and fine, rare mushrooms; then, in honor of the day, a huge Thanksgiving turkey; and then, for dessert, sustaining the seasonal motif, a delicate sweet shaped like a chrysanthemum. Over tea — made from a host of Fortnum’s selections, with a separate china cup to keep the water hot — I learned a little more about this unlikely housewife, professional gerontologist, and former student at Edinburgh, who could speak, without strain, about quattrocento churches in Florence, Mozart pieces (identified by Köchel number), and the early writings of Fosco Maraini. She was going to Tuscany soon, she went on, to see various chapels whose art reminded her of a certain style of Chinese painting — “blasphemous though that doubtless is.” She spoke, in French, of her studies at the Sorbonne, of the three years she had spent in Kathmandu, of Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.” She described the latest holdings in the Musée d’Orsay. And I, many fathoms out of my depth and amazed to see someone move in this almost Jamesian aura of refinement, realized anew how, whatever role the Japanese played, they played it so well and took it to such a pitch of excellence that one could never wish to see the part played again. A Beatles freak here was a freak to end all freaks, with five hundred albums in his collection; a gardener was a wholehearted purist who gave all his life to developing a single perfect flower; and a woman of culture was so accomplished at her role that she made her counterparts anywhere else seem puny by comparison. The Japanese played themselves as Gielgud, Hamlet.