The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  Jet-lagged on New Year’s Day itself, I arose before dawn and hurried out into the phantom streets, where the dark blue was beginning to clear above the lowering mountains and silver the city’s canals. All the commotion was gone now, and all noise vanished: just unlit lanterns in the street, deserted stalls, silence and debris. A few students observing the year’s first sunrise; a girl in blue kimono and white stole, hugging herself in the dawn, condensation escaping like a whisper from her lips.

  Inside the Heian Shrine, the new world was just beginning to stir. White-robed priests in conical black hats stood under orange pillars, ceremonious in the cold-breath morning. A gray-suited man bowed before an altar, the young light shining off the polished wood around him. A flock of white priests, unearthly in the early light, shuffled in slow processional along the corridors, sticks of incense held in front of them. Smoke rising off the dying fires like communal breath in the dawn.

  Later, very slowly, the open courtyard began to fill up, patient as a painter’s canvas: women in flowered kimono, snow-white fur stoles around pale necks, clopping on wooden clogs across the sunlit gravel, the sun spreading warmth across the yawning space; worshipers tossing coins into boxes, clapping their hands and, eyes closed, murmuring the year’s first prayers; then receding again into the day’s perfection. In the shining winter light, families took up positions on low wooden tables spread with indigo and scarlet cloths; lovers lingered round sun-dappled streams; pedigree ladies led pedigree cats in warm leather jackets across the shrine. A gong, slow and solemn, tolled and tolled, and little girls with flowers in their hair joined hands with beaming fathers in flowing black kimono.

  Walking home, through the sun, flowers placed on doorsteps and futons draped over balconies, I felt as if I had landed in some matter-of-fact utopia. The high cries of children playing hopscotch in the lane. Householders polishing their bikes in the quiet sun, unloading furniture from houses, silently hosing cars. The rites of everyday life polished till they shone like glass. In Kyoto, every day felt like New Year’s Day, so deft were the Japanese at remaking themselves each day. For a foreigner at least, able to enjoy all the conveniences of this world without having to pay the price in terms of obligation, there was a sense of airy weightlessness to life here that seemed to suspend harsh realities. Coming back to the sharpened air of Kyoto after a few weeks away, I felt as clean as a small town after heavy rains subside.

  Later that morning, New Year’s cards were hand-delivered to everyone in the land, and I found myself with a bouquet of lyric offerings: from Sachiko, a pretty snowdrop, inscribed with her own calligraphy, above a printed message that said, “She has a floral word meaning ‘a solace’ ”; from the Buddhist priest who had taught me executive’s Japanese in California, a hand-drawn cartoon of two happy alligators, one bestriding a pair of scales, the other cradling a baby, a soccer ball between them, and the greeting “Happy Rew Year” (rew — or, more properly, ryū — means “dragon”); from Mark, a sumi-e dragon, all Buddhist power and coiled strength; and from an American businessman in Tokyo, a photograph of himself.

  A letter had also arrived from Nagoya, home to no one I knew, and when I tore it open, I found a long and penetrating inquiry from one of the giggling girls with whom I had shared breakfast at the temple in my first days in Kyoto, asking me whether I thought the Japanese were superficial.

  Next day, I awoke at first light and buried myself again in Ryōkan, reserving his words for moments when the morning was new and the early light gilded the houses of my lane, painting gold stripes across the corrugated iron. Later, after the day was smudged, and encumbered with emotion, it was never quite so easy to retreat into his silent hut within the woods. Now, on a cloudless, high, and Zen-blue morning, I drank strong tea and read through the old monk’s verses, while Van Morrison sang “She Gave Me Religion” in the Quaker’s room next door.

  That afternoon, as the New Year’s holiday went on, I made my ritual visit to Sachiko’s home in Peach Tree Mountain. She greeted me at the door in soft-lined winter kimono, orange with the delicate outline of plum blossoms, a red ribbon wound around her tied-up hair, and snow-white, split-toed socks around her feet. Motioning me to her couch, she served New Year’s cakes, made in the temple by her children, then drew out an antique koto from its cover and played a winter melody. I watched her in the quiet afternoon — surrounded by two VCRs, a laser-disc player, a tape deck, a TV, two speakers, and a framed portrait of her children with the abbot of Tōfukuji — bent over her ancient instrument, the winter sun streaming through the wavering curtains at her back.

  A little later, Yuki and Hiroshi clambered in to show me their first paintings of the year, and then, taking themselves quietly into a corner, began playing the traditional New Year’s game of Hyakunin-Isshu, a version of Snap that used one hundred classic poems instead of cards. Already, I noticed, they were absorbing, from their mother, the whole standard repertory of Japanese gestures and emotions, the way children in America might be taught the reflexes of “Please” and “Thank you.” Yuki, in particular, was already as demure as a courtier, handing me gifts with exactly the right intonation of Hai dōzo! (the equivalent of Bitte!), singing back Arigatō! to every greeting, sitting entirely upright, and silent, on the train. Already too, I noticed, the children were naming all their animals after TV characters, where we, perhaps, would be likelier to give them names of our own devising (Japanese training in received dreams began early). Then, after handing me New Year’s gifts of origami raccoons, the children padded off to bed, and Sachiko shuffled round to serve apple tea, a tiny, antique figure in her small-stepping socks and kimono.

  Yawning a little as she pulled out her guitar, I mentioned that it was still 4 a.m. for me, California time, and she, duly solemn, replied, “Only monk awake time. You California monk, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” I replied, thinking how appropriate it sounded: a Californian monk, lay acolyte of indiscipline.

  Then, with the air of reverence that attended so many of her movements, she handed over a photo album, a fluffy Pekingese on its cover, a red rose on its head, and the printed message “URBAN DREAM. Everyone has a precious memory with one’s heart. Whether it is a small memory, for you it must be a world of wonderful dream. Place your dream in ‘Urban Dream.’ ” Inside, mementos of the winter: temples under snow, canals all white, a new world covered and uncovered.

  Seeing her at home again, I noticed how much younger she was in English, freed from Japanese assumptions, and able therefore to claim another self, for which her mother tongue seemed to have no terms. “Why is Mummy waving her hands?” Yuki had cried over dinner In Japanese, I gathered, Sachiko never spoke with her hands.

  3

  WINTER MADE EVERYONE a kind of monk in Japan, bringing out a streak of worldly asceticism that was never far from the surface in this land of spartan epicures. It was not so much that the weather was punishing; indeed, it was cold only indoors. Yet even the affluent here, in the world’s most advanced society, lived often, it seemed, in conditions that we would regard as neoprimitive, in miniature, half-furnished houses, with outdoor toilets, and flimsy walls, and an absence of all central heating. Their homes, very often, seemed as scaled down as their hopes.

  Again, this suggested to me how public dress here was almost a form of public address. In public, people presented themselves in highly expensive clothes and shiny, late-model, lily-white cars; behind closed doors, they lived like paupers almost. The whole society, it sometimes seemed, schooled its people in denial even as it indulged them — as any parent might — allowing them to believe that they could find any kind of cake or good or service, at any time of day, yet reminding them that they could not hope to gain a more intangible kind of license. And winter seemed to enforce the lesson, bringing a penitential strain to the rites of self-negation.

  Even the Emperor, as a boy, had been made to stand out under an ice-cold waterfall, in dead of winter, for fifteen minutes each day, without complaining or even
permitting himself a grimace. And even Sachiko, jeans-wearing, Tom Cruise–loving Sachiko, observed her own monastic rites: each day, she told me, in winter or summer, come rain or shine, she got up at dawn and took a shower in freezing-cold water, crying out chants to the gods to ensure good health and fortune for her family.

  The more time I spent with Sachiko, as the winter went on, the more ease and lightness we found together. I knew by now the mischievous glint in her eye whenever I teased her about pachinko parlors, and the speeding grace with which she flung her clothes into drawers as rapidly as she tossed her words into English sentences. I knew by heart now her bright smile and her photogenic grin; the way she’d let out a child’s cry of delight — Haitta! — every time she sank a ball at pool, and the way she’d whisper, a co-conspirator, as she bent down to stroke the cats we met in the temple. I knew by now the way that, after a single glass of cider, she would careen down the street, arms extended like a plane. When I grew sleepy on a train, she sang me traditional Japanese lullabies, and whenever I thanked her, she’d flash back, with a lilting laugh, “You’re welcome!” She made my name new with the inexplicable high softness that she gave to it.

  Through Sachiko, I was coming to see more clearly the Japanese way of glee, less famous than their gift for grieving. When I told her one day, after she had been talking and talking, “Sumimasen. Kekkō desu” (Thank you very much, I think I’ve had enough), she burst into peals of such wild laughter at my overformal Japanese that I began laughing too, in embarrassed perplexity. And often, she was so happy that she began, quite literally, to bounce on the soles of her feet. As soon as I began to anatomize her charms, I realized I was falling deeper than I knew.

  Usually, though, her main gift was surprise, and when she visited my room one day in early winter, she flung open her bag and brought out one wonder after another: an indigo pot of yellow flowers, wrapped in a bright yellow ribbon; a guitar that she asked me to keep and that, unasked, she began to strum, hair streaming down one side of her face as she belted out the sad folk songs she’d sung to her dying grandmother; and, finally, a brand-new Walkman. Silently, as if performing some ceremony, she handed over to me a second pair of earphones, and once she’d pressed a pink button, I found myself listening to the gruff, romantic tones of Georges Moustaki, crooning, “Ah, je ne suis jamais seul, avec ma solitude …”

  The irony of listening with her to this classic psalm to solitude was almost too much for me. Sachiko, though, responded less to its meaning than to its gauzy atmosphere.

  As soon as the song was over, she solemnly took off the earphones. “When I little high school size, this song my favorite.”

  “You mean you liked Georges Moustaki when you were sixteen?” With Sachiko, I often sounded foolishly incredulous.

  “I like,” she nodded smilingly.

  “But he’s really obscure. The only people I know who listen to him are lovesick seventeen-year-old European girls and English schoolgirls just back from their first romantic summer on the Continent.”

  “Me too. I listen this song, then much, much dream. When I little high school size, I also many dream. I dream movie star.” She enunciated the syllables of a name I could not follow, then burst into a Hindi melody.

  “No! Surely you weren’t listening to this stuff too?”

  “I listen,” she insisted, adamant. “True! I many many picture in my room. Indian movie on TV, one week, one time! I meet Indian person in my parents’ cigarette shop — they come here, Fushimi Inari Shrine. When I junior high school size, I play princess. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves!”

  Good Lord, I thought: this girl was more cosmopolitan than Isabelle Adjani. The next thing I knew, her eye had fallen on my copy of Antony and Cleopatra, which I was rereading as a handbook to the East, and its ambiguous charms.

  “Ah, very beautiful story!”

  “You know it?”

  “I see movie! Four times! You know Jack Wild?”

  “Jack Wild?” I hadn’t heard that name in more than a decade. “You mean the teenage boy who played the Artful Dodger in Oliver!?”

  “Ping-pong,” she sang back in the happy affirmative of a TV quiz show (“yes” seemed a word of acquiescence more than of affirmation for the Japanese). “And Melody too.” I thought back to a film I had seen when I was fifteen, at the same time I was reading Narziss and Goldmund, being serenaded by Georges Moustaki, and losing my heart to Olivia Hussey’s Juliet. Somehow, I seemed to have more in common with this Kyoto lady, enjoying the same things at the same time, than with most of my contemporaries in England or California.

  “Do many Japanese people like Jack Wild?”

  “Many, many like,” she replied. “I before, Jack Wild Fan Club. I see this man one time in Heian Shrine!”

  Egad, I thought, almost ready for anything now, and she bubbled on to express her devotion to Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve, and her love for Baudelaire. When I asked after Marcello Mastroianni, she nodded with delight.

  “What does this mean?” I said, pointing to the red stone in the middle of her comb, with dancing figures all around it.

  She sang back the melody of “Over the Rainbow.” So then we were off on that subject too, exchanging reminiscences of ancient movies, and she was telling me, excitedly, “When I little children size, only two times my father take me movie. ‘Hundred One Dog’ and War and Peace. I much love Audrey Hepburn!” (Everyone in Japan seemed to love Audrey Hepburn, for her Japanese demureness and air of gamine innocence.) In some respects, indeed, Sachiko’s tastes were strictly programmed by her culture (nearly all Japanese seemed to have cosmopolitan tastes, but nearly always they were the same tastes: Chopin, Baroque music, the Impressionists; Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, and the Beatles. In that sense, they were all somewhat received tastes, as ours are, no doubt, for Mishima or Itami). But Sachiko, as we kept on talking, often broke the rules: she liked Monet, she said, but preferred Millais; she liked Maugham, but got more out of de Maupassant. She even hotly expressed her love for Hemingway, and Steinbeck’s “Angry Grapes,” as well as his “Red and Green” (I could hardly carp, I thought, if she really had read Stendhal). When it came to names at least, and surface responses, there seemed no limit to her range. Trying to find some weakness in her repertoire, I chided her about her indifference to baseball; she promptly assured me that she did indeed like Sadaharu Oh, the foremost star of the Yomiuri Giants, but was not so fond of his celebrated teammate.

  “Nagashima very good player,” she pronounced judiciously. “But I think not so good man. He has child’s heart. Little same Mozart!”

  “Mozart!” For a moment, I was taken aback by a comparison that seemed to owe more to Amadeus than to the shadowed Requiem. Then I recovered. “But Mozart’s childishness was essential to his art; if he hadn’t had that kind of heart, he couldn’t have produced such sunny music.”

  Silently, she accepted this. “He have many dream. And very beautiful life. You know Jung? This man Jung say dream come true. Then I very happy.”

  I clumsily replied that so far as I knew, Jung was addressing the mysteries of the subconscious more than the whimsical daydreams of rock fans. And Sachiko, listening to her newly pedantic friend, took it all in philosophically. But still I could feel something in me breaking, and it was the sound of certain illusions about Japan.

  When next I met Sachiko, outside a temple one frosty morning, the city all tingling and refreshed, I was terribly worn out; I had hardly slept all night for dreams, the worst of them featuring her (transfigured, by strange dream logic, into a beautiful nineteen-year-old cousin of mine in Delhi) arriving at my room one day to find three half-wanted friends there, all of whom refused to leave. After I recounted the dream to Sachiko, who took such portents seriously — Kyoto women, after all, were famous for listening to their dreams ever since the Heian period, and besides, Sachiko’s brother had introduced her to the work of various Jungians — she nodded gravely. “I much worry this dream,” she said.


  Nonetheless, we walked together through lanes bulging with china raccoons, one of them, with impish eyes, dressed in the habit of a nun, and back in my room, I set about helping her through a passage of English, trying to teach her the meanings of “mischievous” and “brave” and “clumsy.”

  “I not so good study,” she said, after stumbling repeatedly over “clumsy.” “You think my grammar very bad?”

  “Not at all.”

  “My friend say, she talking phone, foreigner person, her grammar very bad. He not see her, then he think maybe she little black. If I bad grammar, other person think I black?”

  “No, no, don’t worry,” I reassured her.

  Sachiko still looked glum, however, her attitude to English summarized in her furrowed brow.

  “I not so like study. I little guilt feeling.”

  I looked up, startled.

  “Please don’t worry,” she said appeasingly. “Other person teach me this word, ‘guilt.’ ” She tried it on again for size.

  Just then there came a furious knocking at my door. Who on earth could it be, I thought, visiting me at breakfast time on a freezing winter morning? As soon as I opened up, a familiar figure extended a huge smile and a hand. “Oh, hallo! Awfully good to see you again. Hope I’m not disturbing you. Very good to meet, actually. Very good indeed!” In the last ten years I had seen Matthew only once, and never even heard from him. But now he bundled in as naturally as if he were living down the street.

  “Very good timing, actually; awfully nice to see you! Oh, terribly sorry to interrupt,” he said, smiling over at Sachiko, and talking in the speeded-up regimental voice that I remembered so well. “Had some friends in Italy, actually, kept telling me about this place Kyoto. Then, few days ago, got your Christmas card. Thought it was a sign, perhaps, a karmic hint. Thought maybe I should come over here and try some high seriousness; austerity and all that. Rio, Bangkok, Italy — all terribly fun, of course, but really what’s the point? Thought I might come over here, get some Buddhism. Get back on the spiritual track.” He flashed another reassuring smile at Sachiko, and she smiled dumbly back. For as long as I had known him, Matthew had been wandering the globe in search of the perfect place, or the perfect girl, and if ever he found one, he decided he ought to have been looking for the other.