The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  My one problem, in fact, with Japan was that it sometimes seemed so free of problems. That was one reason, I often thought, why these people, so famously considerate in the domestic realm, appeared so notoriously indifferent to refugees, or war victims, or to the demands of the world at large. In its way, Japan had constructed such an orderly, friction-free society that its young, at least, free of the Occupation, could not easily grasp the details of a world of pain and privation — the real world, in short. Human rights and suffering made little sense in this shiny, wound-up society where both were either taken for granted or denied (even the beggars here seemed mannerly and sane, while cripples were ritually shipped off, in many cases, to the Philippines). This removal from all pain gave Japan at times the air of a wealthy, well-intentioned dowager, alone in the comfort of her home, and responding, without malice, to stories of need elsewhere with an airy “Let them eat cake!”

  Besides, pretense could have its virtues. I thought back to the line in the Singer story “A Piece of Advice” I had read a few months before: “If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards.” Certainly, belief in the virtue of Japan could be as self-validating as any other leap of faith; egotism itself almost seemed collective here. And only a little later, when I returned to Kenkō, the fourteenth-century monk who wrote with a duchess’s fastidiousness, I found again the perfect defense of pretense. “If you run through the streets saying you imitate a lunatic,” wrote the monk, “you are in fact a lunatic. If you kill a man saying you imitate a criminal, you are a criminal yourself. By the same token, a horse that imitates a champion thoroughbred may be classed as a thoroughbred, and the man who imitates Shun belongs to Shun’s company. A man who studies wisdom, even insincerely, should be called wise.” And, I thought, a society that keeps telling itself it’s unified is on the way at least to being what it says.

  5

  ONE DAY a little later, the phone in my guesthouse trilled, and I happened to be the one to pick it up. “Moshi-moshi.” “Moshi-moshi?” “Hai! Moshi-moshi.” Through the inevitable tangle of Moshi-moshis that followed, I could make out a flustered middle-aged female voice. “Moshi-moshi?” “Hai, hai, moshi-moshi,” I replied, and then she started up again, in English. “My name is Tsukimoto. I want foreigner person for job.…”

  “No,” I replied with careful patience, accustomed by now to such requests. “I do not want to teach English. But there may be other people in this house who do.”

  “No, no,” she said. “Movie. We need character in movie. We need foreigner character. Why you not come along? We give you three thousand yen, interview fee.”

  Twenty-five dollars, I thought: that would be the first yen I ever earned. “What kind of movie?”

  “GI. Occupation movie. Why you not come? Three thousand yen for one hour.”

  Two days later, I arrived, as arranged, at the Takashimaya department store downtown. Tsukimoto’s face, when she saw me, was not a picture of joy: apparently the gaijin who sounded so English on the phone was in fact a small and scrawny Indian. Loss of face seemed imminent.

  Nonetheless, she took me in with harried stoicism and, gathering together a circle of twelve specimens of foreign manhood, bustled us all into a fleet of waiting taxis. Twenty minutes later, our convoy pulled into Eigamura — Movie Village — the Universal Studios of Japan. A little man hurried up to us and led our ragtag group into a dingy little room, Tsukimoto bustling along behind. In her wake came a clutch of harassed-looking teenage assistants and the director, a smoothly grinning dandy in bomber jacket, muffler, and Yves Saint Laurent glasses.

  The picture of worldly urbanity, thick gray hair flopping over designer glasses, he let a few words escape through his ingratiating smile. There was silence. Tsukimoto stared at him in terror. There was more silence.

  “He said the movie’s name is Nikutai-no Mon,” a shy sociology student from New Zealand finally piped up. “That means ‘Gate of Flesh.’ ”

  The director purred a little more.

  Looking around at the blank faces, the New Zealander gamely took the bit between his teeth. “Apparently, the film is about the Americans in Japan after World War II,” he continued, mumbling under his spectacles, locks of brown hair falling across his face. “It features GIs, prostitutes, yakuza.” The director fired out a few more mellifluous sentences. The New Zealander, looking down at the table, condemned now to translate, gamely soldiered on. “Some of it is very brutal. It will require people to get hit very hard.” The director, smiling all round, rattled off some more. “Also, it does not portray Americans in a very favorable light. If that bothers you, please say so. And” — the poor shy fellow was now muttering through his hair in embarrassment — “there will be some carnal scenes.”

  There were titters all round.

  This was too much for Tsukimoto. Firmly stepping forward, she handed out a few sheets of paper to a handful of foreign men — the largest in the room — and asked them each to read out the first sentence. One after another, the foreigners intoned the opening line: “From border to border, from coast to coast, here comes the Happy Cowboy!”

  “Wait a minute,” someone cried. “Japan has no borders!”

  “Maybe ‘From island to island, from coast to coast,’ would be better?”

  “No. The thing doesn’t make sense anyway. Who in hell’s the Happy Cowboy when he’s at home?”

  At this point, Tsukimoto quickly interceded once again.

  “Please stand up!” she barked, sensing that things were not going well. “You must be seventy inches high!”

  All of us got up, and I cast an eye over my rivals: an aging Brit, who had recently starred in another sexploitation movie, thanks to an earlier Tsukimoto casting call; a phlegmatic, tanuki-bellied Israeli with a walrus mustache and a look of deepest sorrow; a sour, balding American in a green down jacket, who looked like a graduate student on his way to the stacks; an improbably beautiful blond German in a leather jacket, who resembled a West Hollywood waiter; and a six-foot-four-inch Larry Bird look-alike from Lafayette, Indiana, whose main qualification for becoming an English teacher in Japan had been selling Dove Bars outside Trump Tower. There were short gaijin, fat gaijin, tall gaijin; thin gaijin, dark gaijin, squat gaijin. Every kind of gaijin, in fact, except the type likely to belong to the Eighty-second Airborne.

  As Tsukimoto anxiously surveyed the talent before her, questions began to fly.

  “What kind of picture is this?” “What sort of person do you need?” “What scenes will we get to do?”

  “Well,” said the New Zealander — now, unwittingly, the official spokesman for the film-makers — “he did say it was pretty brutal!”

  “Yes, yes,” said Tsukimoto excitedly. “We need man for lape.”

  There was a startled silence.

  “Yes, yes, we need lape scene. Very important lape.”

  Several comments, few of them pious, escaped from the thirteen assembled males.

  “We don’t know how to rape — Japanese girls are so willing,” smirked a handsome Austrian in a brown leather jacket. “If you want a rapist, look no further,” cooed a South American. “How are you going to measure us up?” “Don’t worry about that! You’re not going to get to do the rape. You’re going to get to be raped!”

  Again the flustered Tsukimoto burst in.

  “You have experience?” she said, earnestly turning on a small, round New Yorker well known in Kyoto as a serious student of kyōgen drama. “You have done before?”

  “Experience as a rapist?”

  “Yes, yes. Lape scene need lape experience. Very important.”

  At that, the director clearly tired of the whole song-and-dance routine and pointed a brisk finger at the five men in the room with beards and three others who were plump. The lucky eight were led off to a separate room to demonstrate their skills as rapists, and the rest of us were left, as it were, on the cutting-r
oom floor.

  Tsukimoto, however, was eager to give solace. “They have bad-side atmosphere,” she told us kindly. “Very bad-side. They look like lape men.”

  This was not altogether reassuring. I was sorely tempted to confess to Tsukimoto that I did in fact have just the kind of experience she wanted: my only other major motion picture role had featured an unhappy impersonation of a Mexican military cadet in a tragically overlooked horror movie, Evilspeak, about a trio of wild boars that attack naked girls in the shower while the former child star of Gentle Ben networks with the devil on his computer. My auditioners then had been a pair of bikinied Californians whom memory conveniently recalled as Cindy and Candy, and who stretched themselves out on poolside deck chairs and languorously fingered anyone willing to get a military-length haircut.

  Before I could make this known to my employer, however, the would-be rapists were led back in again, the Pyrrhic winner the paunchy kyōgen actor, now looking more than a little molested himself. “I guess I just looked the scuzziest,” he averred modestly as the runners-up barreled in, slapping him on the shoulder like Miss Universe contestants in reverse. “I don’t know how my wife and her family are going to take this!”

  Tsukimoto, however, was in no mood for small talk. “This lape we need very badly,” she assured us once more. “Lape very important with this movie.”

  A little later, in the taxis heading home, as people began to discuss the hazards of trying to simulate rape, even for $250 a day, the New Zealander turned his sociologist’s eye on the experience. “That’s the way it is with movies here,” he began, earnest as a lecturer already. “All their B movies are set in the Occupation, and they always have the GIs as these hulking murderers and rapists. That’s the way it always is.” (Just as American movies filmed in Japan, I thought, always involve the yakuza.) “But I suppose it does make a certain kind of sense. A lot of the foreigners here, they aren’t here to do any teaching. They just like to fool around.” He was hitting his stride now. “Like I know this one guy who rides every day on this special train full of college girls waiting to be picked up. And this other one who goes to discos all the time and kept up four girls at a time — until he got the clap. And I heard about this one bloke from Zaire — you know, black, really scary and fascinating to these people — who had them lined up outside his door and took care of six of them a day. At first when you come here, your ego gets a real massage. Then you realize that they’re just saying the same thing to everyone. It’s a dangerous psychology.”

  Certainly, I could see by now how the Land of the Rising Sun could be the ruin of many a poor boy — not least because being taken as an exotic, or a demigod, was one of the hardest states to abandon.

  The movie call, however, had a particular aptness for me. For often, with Sachiko, I felt as if I were responding to a similar kind of summons, auditioning to play the part of a freewheeling foreigner in the long-running romantic picture she’d been screening in her mind. Often, in fact, I got the sense that she was trying to squeeze out of our times together every last pretty or haunting image she’d ever taken in from movies or songs or ballets, as if this were her first, and perhaps last, chance to experience all the sensations that she’d always heard about. Marriage she clearly regarded as a businesslike proposition — a matter of domestic deals and daily accounts in which emotions were as irrelevant as love songs in a résumé; now, though, suddenly, she had a chance to walk across a bridge of dreams, as the Heian courtiers had it, and find all the sensations she kept so neatly in her head, of “First Love” and “True Love” and even “Lost Love.” Sachiko, like many Japanese perhaps, was an uppercase Romantic, with an innocence that idealized experience and turned it into a reflection of itself.

  No less than her words, then, her gestures summoned all the props of high and courtly romance: the hankie smothered with perfume that she gave me to keep in my pocket, the love songs with which she serenaded me, her constant plea to make contact with her by looking at the moon. And already, I could tell, she was developing her inner photographs, turning our times together into pretty, plaintive images — memento amori — that she could look back on as a trip to a foreign country. Sometimes she seemed almost to be inspecting her feelings like an enraptured tourist, never troubled by a sense that “perfect” and “true” need be incompatible.

  Thus every aspect of our friendship was efficiently made to correspond to something from her pool of dream images, rather like the New Year’s game in which people matched the opening of ancient poems with the close. One weekend she went with her family to Nagasaki, and came back excitedly telling me how she had seen there Rembrandt’s “Face of Christ.” “This picture little same you eye!” she announced. I had hardly had time to savor this rare compliment, however, before she was also telling me that the raccoons in the zoo had my eye too (and, presumably, that of Christ). My voice, she said, was “little same Michael Jackson,” and my spirit, “little Baryshnikov feeling.” Whatever face I presented she managed to match with some counterpart in her anthology of ready-made images — mysterious Indian, history-steeped Brit, fun-loving Californian, romantic loner, wandering writer, sometime monk. Partly, I could see, this was just a way of crossing the language, and the culture, gap, finding a common frame of reference, and partly, too, a reflection of the fact that we were obliged to speak in metaphors and images (and she variously represented me as a penguin, a bear, an owl, a raccoon, and a mole — she, too, it seemed, knew more animal words than adjectives). Partly, perhaps, she could only apprehend a foreigner — and romance — through the imported images she’d consumed, just as I could see her only through the keyhole of ancient Japanese love poems. But partly, too, I could see, with a pang, how keen she was to remove our lives from the everyday world, to lift them to some timeless, fairy-tale realm, immutable, imperishable, and immune from unhappy realities. Realism was reserved for what she did at home (where she wore different clothes, spoke a different language, and used a different voice); our time was “dream time.”

  Thus boundaries began to blur, and the fact that our friendship was described in terms of movies led her more and more to see movies as a reflection of our friendship. The first time I took her to the cinema, to see the Ken Russell extravaganza Mahler, she filed out of the auditorium in tears. “This movie little same you-me feeling,” she said, too deeply affected, almost, to speak. Insofar as Mahler had, as I had seen it, been portrayed as a cruel and egotistical tyrant given only to abuse of his women, this was not, I thought, a happy parallel. But Sachiko, true to her vision, had somehow succeeded in screening out all the negativity and taking away nothing but reassurances. “First time, I many, many movie understand,” she whispered, awestruck.

  And sure enough, when she saw Out of Africa, she found it so close a reflection of our relationship that she was moved to tears too. 9½ Weeks made her think of our “cherry blossom love.” Even Fright Night left her stunned. “I little see this movie,” she whispered to me, breathless, “I think of you.” I began to hope she’d never see In the Realm of the Senses.

  Songs, too, were a receptacle for all the powerful emotions she had never had the chance to experience in real life, and after every other one, I found her in tears. When I played her Springsteen’s “Independence Day,” I was touched and pleased to see that she was all choked up when it finished, a reflection, I thought, of how closely she identified with its character’s yearning for freedom, and an escape from the cycles in which his parents were trapped; my pleasure was dimmed a little, however, when I saw that Aerosmith also moved her to tears, and Michael Jackson’s synthetic version of “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Her feelings were so strong, and her opportunities for releasing them so limited, that they came out in torrents, poured into the unlikeliest of vessels. One of them was me.

  In the midst of winter, I accompanied her one chilly night to Osaka to see Bryan Adams in concert. The minute he came out on stage, Sachiko began dancing, and so she continued, eyes flashing, sm
ile unfailing, through song after song after hard-driving song, her energy never flagging. When Adams took a brief break, she turned to me and suddenly recited an unearthly poem from the Manyōshū, the famous eighth-century anthology of lyrics; eyes shining, with a lingering intensity whose depth I could not fathom, she told me that she now knew all the delicate sadness of a lovesick maiden at her window. Then, when the concert ended, and we streamed out amidst packs of cheerful teenage girls, she suddenly, in a rush of exhilaration, burst into the choral section of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in Japanese, as we headed off for dinner at the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts.

  Occasionally, I could see, the transposition of the movie world and reality played havoc with her mind. When, a little later, she saw Another Country on TV (a great favorite in Japan, thanks to its endless shots of pretty young English boys swapping daisies and sonnets against a backdrop of quaint historical buildings), she rang me up in a frenzy of confusion.

  “This your high school?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then you little spy man? My mother say maybe you spy.”

  “No, no, Sachiko, I’m not a spy.”

  “And you not gay?”

  “Gay?”

  “Then why you go this gay school? Why you not same Stand by Me?”

  I’m sorry, I felt like saying; not all of us can come to maturity in Steven Spielberg’s imagination.

  Usually, though, her wish for seeing our lives as gauzy art, a permanent monument to evanescence, made for scenes as artfully composed as postcards, and dreamy, gentle Sachiko was as expert at spinning dream images as at producing gift-wrapped memories: she, looking over the Kamo River, eyes shining in the dark; she, in plum kimono, plucking the koto in front of billowing curtains; she, holding her breath and closing her eyes tight as she stood before the Buddha. Coming to Japan in search of romance, I found myself now a protagonist in someone else’s dream, and found, too, that the favor was returned.