The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  A few days later, as the month drew to its end, I awoke at dawn to find my window all fogged over: the first hard frost of winter. Longing to share the moment with someone — I had not experienced winter for three years now — I hurried out into the mild invigoration of the morning to visit Mark. It was a joy undiminished to awaken in the cloudless blue and see the mountains sharp in the distance, to feel the briskness of a winter morning in the sun. The whole world felt uplifted and refreshed: the narrow lanes alive with oranges, old women chattering away below the muted sun, and everywhere a sense of purpose.

  My only disappointment, I told Mark as I came into his house, was that I would not be able to see the hatsu-yuki, or first snowfall of the year. I would be leaving Kyoto the following day, not to return for a month, and I knew that I would miss the winter’s first moment of silent transformation.

  The next day, my last day in Kyoto, Sachiko came to my room again, bringing with her a book by A. A. Milne and a textbook for an English lesson. I led her up to my tiny space, and there, in the winter dark, I tried to teach her again the words that she might need. We sat on cushions on the tatami, the dark room lit by the glowing orange bar of my single-element heater. Often, in explaining the terms of my own language to her, I felt as if I were explaining them to myself. As I began, slowly, to speak English as a second language, my own tongue came to seem as new to me, and mysterious, as Japanese.

  Patiently, sometimes frowning over the words and muttering, “Muzukashii!” sometimes giggling away the difficulty, she stumbled through a text about fishermen in Holland. When we were through, she looked at me, there was a long silence, and I stood up in the darkening room to make some tea.

  As she wandered round the tiny space, inspecting the gaijin in his native habitat, I tried to divert her with some questions. I held up a Christmas card. “Ah, Monet!” she cried. Then a postcard I had bought in a museum. “Rodin!” Then a paperback I had found downtown, in Sony Plaza. “Paddington Bear!”

  After the kettle had boiled, I put down two mugs on the table and knelt down on the tatami to show her some earrings I had bought for my mother. She leaned forward till her hair was tickling my face. In the winter darkness of the tiny room, the fire glowing, I brushed back her hair, felt her lips touch mine, her body shaking as if electrified.

  Later, we walked along the river in the dusk. Turning, we saw the eastern hills, thick with orange trees, glowing in the dying light. Then, sitting down beside the red-lit river, she sang me a melody from The Sound of Music — “Something Good” — about Maria’s escape from her abbey, in a quavering, high, but steady voice. “When I little children size,” she said, “this song my favorite. But I never think I find this feeling. I think I cannot. I always ‘lost lady.’ Now I feel this song more more. Thank you very much.”

  There was a long, charged silence on the riverbank. “Autumn now ending,” she said, as we watched the last light leave the hills. And that night, it snowed.

  WINTER

  Our old older, Our new newer,

  Our kind kinder —

  Welcome to Japan.

  – THE SIGN OF MAKITA POWER

  TOOLS, GREETING ARRIVALS

  IN OSAKA AIRPORT

  IT WAS THE SMELLS that hit me first: smells of cooking, smells of rotting, smells of people being people — all the smells I had not smelled for months in exquisitely deodorized Japan, where only pleasant fragrances are permitted: the lemon scent of air freshener, the costly glamour of French perfume, an occasional hint of incense. The minute I set foot in Taiwan, I was assaulted by smells, sultry, piquant, and strange: assaulted, too, by spitters and shouters, by offers, importunities, cries of “Why you no buy? Best price for you!” Waiters dropped plates on my table as if they were hot (which they never were), men whispered, “Dollar, dollar,” crowds pushed and shoved and squawked. There was the sudden shock of car crashes in the light-dizzy streets, of winking cabbies, of women in blinding pantsuits who caught my eye and held it.

  Three days later, landing in Southeast Asia, I felt again, in a rush, all the things I had been missing in Japan, not so much the roughness now as the spiced softness, the seduction of kerosene lamps and unlit back lanes, the lure of night-market meals and clove-scented villages; thronged festivals, black markets, a flash of white smiles among the trees. The whole whirl of tropical sensations hit me like a fever dream: the darkness full of spirits, and whisper-soft girls in off-the-shoulder dresses; the sound of gonged instruments in the night. None of the hard, purposeful austerity of Japan, but stronger, darker forces in the hot tropic air; here again one was in the realm of the subconscious.

  My very first night in Thailand, I found myself standing on the Golden Mount, talking about water buffaloes with an irresistible shaven-headed twelve-year-old monk in saffron robes and sandals, as together we watched the full moon rise above the diamond capital; half an hour later, in the midst of crowds, I was being befriended by two sidelong-glancing, strangely affable transsexuals. Even the Japanese department stores here, all video smarts and squeaky-clean announcements, were lit up from within by a blast of Thai warmth and laughing dishevelment; and even aseptic Singapore, an aspirant Japan, seemed ripe with the promise of adventure, a veritable Marrakesh after Kyoto, with its unkempt bands of ricksha men, shirts cracked open to their hairless chests, and sharp-faced, lipsticked hookers, brazen in their scarlet shirts. Suddenly, the imagination was given something rough to chew on, a world unedited.

  At times, of course, I grew so enamored of my thesis that everything confirmed it: how dowdy were the Chinese, I thought, looking at a group of revelers, gawking clumsily, in my Taipei hotel; how different from the elegant self-possession of the Japanese. And then the people began to speak, and their language — of course — was Japanese.

  Yet still, I had hardly left Japan before I could better see how the Japanese regard all the world outside as barbarous and crude, undeveloped in every sense of the word, and terrifying too. So sheltered had my life become in Kyoto — so sanitized of danger or alarm — that I had all but forgotten that another world existed; and now it was a shock to enter a stage where tempers were lost, things went wrong, the surface snapped. And if even I felt this, after only ten weeks in Japan, how much more unnerved must a Japanese be, suddenly propelled out of his cozy home and into a world of disruption and threat. Mother Japan prepared its children only, and ideally, for Japan.

  Coming from Kyoto — quasi-Japanese myself now — I found myself at sea abroad, forgetting to leave tips, reluctant to jaywalk across empty streets, recoiling like a child whenever men approached me on the streets with offers of hotels. I stood outside taxicabs, waiting for their doors to open automatically, and then, once inside, fell into broken conversations — how many children do you have, how many hours do you work? — in Japanese. When once, returning home, I put my shoes on inside my room, I felt as surreptitious, as sacrilegious almost, as if I had worn a Walkman into church.

  Abroad, as unguarded as a Japanese now, I left my things unattended and my room unlocked, and wandered round with $170 in my pocket (Japan was, perhaps, curing me a little of materialism, though not in the way expected). Whenever I bumped into someone in the street, I said, reflexively, “Sumimasen,” and when I returned to California, I startled teenage shopgirls with my earnest Sō, sō, sōs. On my way home from Los Angeles Airport, a Mexican in a gas station rushed up to me in relief — a compatriot, so he thought — and pressed me in Spanish for details on the way to Calexico. “Hai, hai” — I nodded briskly — “Demo kochira wa …” and looked back to see the poor man terrified.

  After Japan, even Harrods looked a little declassé, and when I bought a cup of tea at the Singapore Hilton for $2.20, I could not believe the bargain. I was Japanese enough now to shiver when I saw a man kiss his girlfriend in a Bangkok restaurant. And at home, in California, I felt Japanese enough to appreciate, for the first time ever, the lavender blush of hibiscus in the mild December days and the piercing clarity of Venus i
n the denim sky. Japanese too, I could see now, for the first time ever, the true beauties of California: long hours and long horizons.

  But I felt a little closer to Japan now in some deeper sense as well, in affiliation as well as habit. Whenever I saw groups of JAL-packaged tourists being herded through the Grand Palace in Bangkok, or pairs of frightened-looking girls in khaki shorts, deep in sidewalk negotiations with some local con man, I felt, mysteriously, a pang of sympathy and kinship; abroad, the Japanese looked so lost to the world, so far from the reassurances to which they were accustomed. They looked to me as vulnerable as shy teenagers alone, in a corner, at their first real cocktail party — not just afraid and disoriented, but anxious to combat self-pity. And whenever foreigners fell into the usual litany (“But the Japanese are so strange, so neurotic, so hard to get close to”), I found myself rushing to their defense: “But they’re so innocent, so thoughtful, and so kind.” Taken on any terms other than their own, the Japanese did, to be sure, seem tough negotiators, industrial spies, and torturers of whales, playing life to win; but now I was able to see them a little more from the other side, in terms of which everything they did made perfect sense and the world they produced was hard to improve upon. In a sense, in fact, it was that very perfection that removed them further from the world at large (as a concert pianist has that much less in common with a garage band) and made the world at large seem that much more menacing and dark. Watching the Japanese circling around Asia in a kind of see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil spell, taking in everything with polite enthusiasm, screening out disease and dirt — exemplary guests as well as hosts, as good at receiving pleasure as at giving it — my heart went out to a culture bound, and perhaps determined, to be misunderstood.

  Abroad, in fact, it was even clearer that Japan was taking over the role of America in the fifties. In Japan itself, it was easy to see its affinities with the Eisenhower era, in its nuclear families with their clean suburban homes, placid and a touch complacent; its identically dressed commuters on their trains, men in gray flannel suits dreaming of golfing holidays; its almost science fictive world of gadgets and consumer goods and a conformity so absolute that it gave rise to the intertwined notions of the affluent society, the organization man, and the lonely crowd (and, in response, of Ginsberg howling poems in Kyoto streets). Abroad, however, the likenesses were even easier to see. For with the dawning of the Japanese Empire, the “Ugly American” of thirty years ago was fast being replaced by a new focus for the world’s envies and fears. Now it was the Japanese who were traveling around the globe in groups, like conquering armies on the march, dressed in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts, cameras slung around their necks, marveling at how everything was smaller — and better — at home. Now it was Japan that seemed the role model — and the hated archrival — of many developing countries, even such unforgiving former colonies as Korea. Now it was Japan, indeed, that seemed the Land of Opportunity, and to Japan that foreigners came in search of new lives for themselves, and new identities, in a land of promise and abundance — in search, in fact, of the American Dream. And now it was America that seemed the funky, disorganized, low-budget slice of exotica that the Japanese delighted in inspecting whenever they wanted a taste of primitive wildness. Whenever I visited expensive hotels (or expensive countries, like Bhutan), nearly all the tourists I saw were groups of wealthy, retired Westerners and youthful Japanese. It seemed a natural pairing.

  It was only when I returned to the world at large, moreover, that I realized how far away I had been in Kyoto. It was not just that Japan occupied a different kind of universe, which rarely made contact with our own; but, more, that this island was — by choice as much as circumstance — psychically as well as physically removed from the world at large. The analogy here was not so much with Gulliver as with Alice; in Japan, one felt as if the world had been turned upside down and inside out, all its values and assumptions turned on their heads — as if, one might say, the force of gravity had been so radically altered that one had ended up on another planet. It sometimes seemed — and Japan liked to make it seem — as if Japan had a different epicenter from the rest of the world, as if, indeed, all the rest of the world inhabited a Copernican, and Japan a Ptolemaic, universe; and so, where much of the rest of the world traditionally looked to America as its center, Japan looked only to Japan. America might be a fashion accessory, a collectible, a sign of imported glamour; but it was not the end-point of most aspirations here. America was an alternative to Gucci, not to Bushidō or Emperor-worship or Japan.

  Besides, Japan’s strength was only growing as America’s declined. It was morning in America, but in most parts of Asia, especially in Tokyo, it was already the next evening. And the notion of a Japanese takeover was gaining an almost literal significance as the Japanese bought up hotels and companies and entire downtowns; the sluggers of the major leagues, the diamonds of Tiffany’s, the canvases of Van Gogh. Even Monet’s “Soleil Levant” had been spirited away, by yakuza, or gangsters, to Japan (the Rising Sun itself was going East). Meanwhile, all the news from America was bad: AIDS, crack, Irangate; an aging president, a collapsed economy, a clergy double-crossing itself with scandal. And my sense that America was beginning to look more and more like an underdeveloped country next to Japan was only eerily confirmed when, my first night back in California, a thunderstorm began to shake my hillside house, rattling the windows and pounding the walls all night, like the ghost of a monsoon, until, of a sudden, we were plunged into darkness, powerless for twenty hours while the wind howled all about.

  Ambushing Japan from afar, I was better able to see what I liked about it. Bangkok, for example, bustling by day and dazzling by night, alive to business and to pleasure, struck me as the ultimate urban intoxication; yet it also seemed to encourage the abandoning of vision for mere fantasy. It was hard to imagine reading there, or thinking, or leading any kind of life that would engage the deepest part of one. The place invited one to surrender to reality, not to lead a life so much as to be led by one. And where people came to Japan, very often, to pursue something, they came to Bangkok — or Bali, or Sri Lanka, I suspected — not to do so. Thus spicy, sultry, vivacious Bangkok sent me back with renewed affection for Japan. Thailand, I thought, was the girl at the edge of the temple, beckoning one away with a smile.

  2

  I HAD NOT EVEN set foot in Kyoto on my way back to Japan before enlightenment and seduction — and the intertwining of the two — were all about me once again. On the plane back from L.A., I found myself next to a glamorous young Korean who was all fluttered eyelashes and whispered invitations, until I exposed her, in midflight, as a Mormon practicing her missionary positions. And when the plane got stranded in Seoul, I found myself sharing a room with a tree planter from Sonoma County, who was, he said, on his way to India to spend twelve hours a day, for one hundred eighty days, meditating in a cell. I said hello to him, and he raised his hands in prayer and said, “I’m so grateful to meet you, sir”; the airline representative gave us vouchers for our breakfasts, and he said, “I’m so very grateful for your gift, ma’am.” I asked him how his flight had been, and he smiled, beatific. “At first,” he began, “I couldn’t sleep because I was next to these two kids, and they were crying. It was beautiful that they had to cry” — he smiled forgivingly again — “but it made it kind of hard to sleep.” Then he addressed his spiritual life. “I used to be into this guru thing, Rajneesh and all that stuff. But I suffered a lot of alienation. Now I just want to find this quietness inside of me, and be of service to humanity. After a while, you know, when you’re meditating, you just get into this state, and all your sexual energy disappears.” A fit antidote to Rajneesh, I surmised.

  “Sure,” he said, looking out upon the sleek neon blocks of Seoul. “Meditation and relationships — those are the ways to do it, I guess.” He thought a little more. “Relationships, I guess, are the fastest way.”

  That night, I had strange dreams of Kyoto: of huge boule
vards and people sitting in the streets; of standing on large intersections late at night, not knowing where I was, and groups of Japanese terrifying me in their clowns’ costumes, painted red faces dreamlike in the dark.

  My first night back in Kyoto, the city was indeed a dream to me again, as I wandered through its dizzy streets, in and out of weaving crowds, past megaphone voices and floodlit stalls, a fairy world of Pierrot faces. A surge of kimonos everywhere, streaming through the reeling lanes, in and out of noodle stalls, snapping up octopus pancakes and New Year’s tofu, features all invisible in the dark, then shockingly lit up by passing lanterns. Shadows gliding through the temple corridors, billowing white banners above their hooded entrances; figures collecting fires from a central roaring blaze; and then, at midnight, the great bronze bell of Chion-in, tolling and tolling in the new Year of the Dragon.