The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  * * *

  “Marriages are such an efficient system in Japan,” a friend of mine called Michiko explained to me one day. “The woman makes up a résumé list — it usually consists of tea, flower arranging, and a couple of more up-to-date skills, like tennis or chansons, to show that she is a mōga (or modern girl). For the man, it’s mostly a matter of what car he drives and how much money he earns. Then the marriage broker puts them together, and they’re wed.” Supply matched to demand; a minimum of risks and a pooling of resources. It was no wonder that marriages here came almost supplied with money-back guarantees.

  After the wedding, things were no less sensibly pragmatic — he devoted his time to making money, and she to disbursing it; he took care of practical support, and she emotional. Formally, the woman was treated as a mere dependent (and the -ko suffix used for most women’s names here literally meant “child”); behind closed doors, however, the positions were tidily reversed: the woman treated her husband like a baby, putting him to bed each night, giving him his allowance once a week, and sending him off each morning with a box lunch. Thus each party was allowed to be active in some worlds, passive in others, parent and child at once. The only complication came when feelings jammed up the system. (Kawabata’s Chieko, asked if she has feelings, calmly explains, “It seems to cause trouble when one has too many.”) It was no wonder that Japan enjoyed the highest marriage rate in the world (more than 98 percent of women found a mate).

  “But I don’t think Japanese women resent their marriages,” Michiko went on, “however much they may regret them. They know how to make the most of them, and they know how to turn them to advantage. In some ways, I think, they’re much freer than many American women.” Freer? “At least they do not live vicariously through their husbands. They function pretty much independently of their husbands. If you go to a party here, you’ll find that the women hardly ever talk about their husbands. They define themselves in different ways. In some ways, they’re more able to lead a separate life. That’s why they tend not to get divorces. In any case, even if they do seek divorces, they rarely get the children — or any alimony.” It was no wonder, then, that as recently as her parents’ generation, exactly one Japanese marriage in every thousand ended in divorce.

  Michiko herself, though, was far from free of the system. Now thirty-four, she had been brought up and educated in America and worked now for an American company, even though she was entirely Japanese. (Talking to me, she seemed a regally tall, highly sophisticated, poised international businesswoman; the minute she addressed a Japanese, though, she became the very picture of a demure, deferential Japanese girl, all yielding softness and ritual self-denial.) Her mother, she told me, kept asking her and asking her why she did not have a husband. Her father spent all his spare time looking around for a potential son-in-law. And though they had lived for most of their lives abroad, her parents still could not get over the fact that their daughter was working for a company — and, worse still, a foreign company. By having a job, she was writing herself out of the collective script.

  A little later, as the cherries began to fall, I decided to return for a while to the temple where I had first stayed, to see how much it had changed, and how much I had. On a fresh young morning, the narrow lanes of pilgrims’ shops quiet save for strollers, the trees in gorgeous flower — all the city stirring now with the first tremors of rebirth — I went again to the ancient part of town, where the seasons were marked as a millennium before. April had brought a gentleness to the air, after the gray tumult and anxiety of March; there was a sense of healing in the mild, warm days, and of convalescence.

  As soon as I entered the front courtyard, full of motorbikes, the albino monk hurried out to greet me and, his astonished face more astonished than ever, invited me in for some tea. Donning slippers, I padded after him to the tiny TV room, scarcely big enough for three, where the head monk was sitting, legs splayed out in front of him, clicking over channels with a remote-control device. The Nietzsche-loving gardener was summoned too, to greet the returning prodigal, and I, feeling obliged to respond somehow, settled down, cross-legged, at their small square table and began to talk of Sumō.

  Apparently, however, some intonation was off a half note, for the head monk, nodding gravely at everything I said, responded with a vigorous lecture on male-female relations in India — he had been to the Taj Mahal, he reminded me — and, after every phrase, turned to me for confirmation of the marvels he described. I, by now accustomed to lusty participation in conversations I couldn’t begin to follow, nodded too, and said, with conviction, “That’s really so!” whenever I sensed he was asking a question, and “Is that so?” whenever it seemed that he had made a statement.

  The proprieties observed, the albino then led me back into the room I had occupied many lives ago, and through the long afternoon, I savored the temple’s luxuries of silence and open space. In the night, the outlined figure of the shaven-headed older monk shuffling through the blackened antechamber and letting out a startled, high-pitched cry upon discovering me, alone in the dark, looking out on the distant pagoda. In the dawn, my small bare room slatted with light, and the song of birds. In the chill first light, when some places look exhausted, and others seem reborn, Kyoto seemed always a miracle of early-morning hopes.

  As I wandered in the days through the neighboring streets, I could begin to see how Kyoto had lost by now a little of its imagined purity to me, the simple clarity of myth; had become, in fact, so much a part of me that I could see it no more clearly than the back on which my shirt was hanging. The shops along the lanes seemed a little gaudy now, and no longer so uplifting — a sign, perhaps, that I was spoiled more than they were — and now it was the brassy American songs on their sound systems I noticed and not the lovely geometry of their goods. Kyoto was no longer a magic lantern to me; more an album of photographs, thick with associations, particularized, and domesticated. A certain hazy preciousness had been lost, on both sides, and in both senses of the word.

  Yet in return, a certain specificity had been gained, a sense of detail that gave flesh and fiber to the dream. And as I walked through the drowsy streets one late afternoon to Maruyama Park, lost in thought, I looked up idly and, suddenly, lost all breath: the huge central weeping cherry tree in the park, its richly flowering branches drooping almost to the ground, was spotlit now, a blaze of burning pink against the dark-blue sky. I had seen this shot a hundred times before, in pictures and posters and books, but now, coming upon it unexpectedly, a royal elegance of blue and pink, I felt as if transported from the world.

  In the shadow of the famous tree, revelers were seated in rows on blankets, eating bean cakes in the shape of cherry blossoms, strumming guitars, and bawling drunkenly as the sky turned pink behind the mountains. Shutters snapped, men in expensive suits put on their smiles, drooping girls made peace signs for the camera. And then, as darkness fell, torches came on along the waterways, their golden lights flickering in the pond. Suddenly, now, the park was a blaze of colors: navy blue and gold, a flash of pink, the black hills darkening in the distance.

  In that instant I knew that Kyoto had installed itself inside me much deeper than mere fancy. No other place I knew took me back so far or deep, to what seemed like a better time and self. And as I wandered back in the dying light, lit up with a sense of rapture and of calm, I remembered the line of the poet Shinshō “No matter what road I’m traveling, I’m going home.”

  5

  AS SPRING WENT ON, Sachiko and I still found ourselves often trading metaphors over the phone, exchanging complex feelings in pieces small enough to throw, and catch, I at a little open booth, on an empty, narrow alleyway, in the dark, she in the small room that sometimes seemed an almost unbearably wistful compound of her dreams.

  “I want only dream time together you. You are from other world. I want see and learn this other world. But I cannot join. My heart very tiny — little fragile, like grass on windy day.”

  “
But dream world only not so good,” I replied, reflecting her English back to her. “If I were talking to Yuki, I could tell her stories, because she is a child. But you are not a child. I want to help you if you have problems. Dream time only not so good.” I realized that I must be sounding bizarrely like Richard Chamberlain addressing the aborigines in The Last Wave.

  “Then your heart change?”

  “Not change. But sometimes tired. I feel I am on a beach, waving, calling out, ‘Sachiko,’ but you are on a far boat and cannot hear me. I want to help, but if you cannot see or hear me, I cannot give you food or medicine.”

  “I little moon feeling, then you cannot reach?”

  “Yes. And I cannot give an answer to your problem. I can only give you a quiet time, a relaxed time, the chance to forget your problems so that you will be more strong to conquer them. It’s like going from South Kyoto to North: you cannot run all the time — you must sometimes walk, sometimes stop in a coffee shop for food. The coffee shop does not get you closer to North Kyoto, but you need it to arrive there. You cannot always run.”

  “You say true. But if I much cry, have much tear in eye, then I cannot see star, or beautiful thing. Only cloud.”

  To that I could say nothing in return.

  Towards the end of spring, I made my first official trip to the water world, the fabled entertainment quarter, of Kyoto. So segregated was the demimonde from the daylight world that walls had once been erected to separate it as firmly from the temples nearby as, in Japan, one self is shut off from another (if you are relaxing, relax without scruple, goes the logic, and if you are working, work without distraction). The area was also largely closed to nonmembers, as Matthew and I had discovered. Now, though, a local businessman was eager to take his son — on his way to Santa Barbara — out for a farewell night on the town, together with his son’s English-language teacher. Eager to make a grand show of his hospitality, he begged the teacher to bring along some friends, and I found myself invited as an expert on Santa Barbara, together with the ubiquitous New Zealander, here, yet again, to translate risqué Japanese quips into proper English terms.

  Our group met in the coffee shop of a large hotel — the two other foreigners, father and son, and two attendant girls, giggling and bebanged, and decorously attached to son and teacher.

  “How much does a Corvette cost in California?” was the departing student’s first question to me.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, ready to aim high. “Maybe forty thousand dollars.”

  “Phew!” The boy whistled through his teeth. “Incredible!”

  “Expensive, right?”

  “Expensive? No. Very cheap! I can buy two!” The father beamed down his blessing on Junior’s ambitions. Then we went out into the streets of Shimabara, the ancient pleasure quarters, built around a willow tree, symbol of transience for both monk and courtesan. Piling into taxis, we headed off to the father’s regular bar, in Gion.

  Inside, the decor was meant to reproduce a French salon — plush sofas and love seats, a big grand piano, tall, heavily made-up vamps in short dresses, slinking around with iron smiles of uninterest. Hard-faced, hard-mannered, and hard-boiled, they glided about like tropical fish, objects of brightly colored weirdness. One of them sat down and played “As Time Goes By” on the piano, another placed herself beside a baby-faced guy in a perm and white shoes, and smiled at him through clenched teeth. (“Look,” muttered the New Zealander to me, through his own clenched teeth, “if you utter the Japanese word for that guy, we’re finished!”) Elsewhere, at another table, a handsome man in an expensive gray suit sat back while another woman, tall and cool as the drink she served, languidly lit his cigarette.

  Truly, I thought, this was a shadow world in the Japanese setting, inverting all the laws and expectations of the daytime world, with everything reversed as in a negative. No reticence here, but boldness; no giggles, but hard smiles; not men in control, but women. It was, again, a form of Japanese pragmatism at work: if one had to find some relief or release, then one went to a special pleasure world in which certain ease could be found without danger of explosion or confusion. Debauchery on cue, a licensed kind of licentiousness. Safe sex might almost be a redundancy here.

  The only exception to this Mardi Gras reversal was a young girl who sat down at our table and, perky as a university student, told us that she was doing this only as arubaito, or part-time work; the other ladies at the table laughed encouragingly and stared at her with hatred. In fact, she went on with engaging guilelessness, she was still taking classes. Tonight, Cinderella-like, she had to be home by twelve. This, as it happened, she continued sweetly, was her nineteenth birthday. The other girls cackled some more, their laughs like broken glass. For all I knew, hers was a role too, perfectly designed to offset the others, on this, her hundredth nineteenth birthday of the year.

  All around, the ladies kept on slinking in and out, clouds of costly French perfume receding and approaching, whiskey glasses filling up, plates of cheese appearing on the table, fed to customers by hand. The English teacher did a brief stint on the piano, and in the giddy applause that followed, the father began talking to him casually, offering jokes and, parenthetically, a job worth two thousand dollars a month. The giggles and the backchat continued, glasses were clinked, a melon was filled with brandy. The teenage girl opined, “I want to learn English,” one of her colleagues adding, “I want to visit other country.” Beady-eyed, the company man threw in a couple of extra clauses to his offer. Then the mama-san sidled up to join our table, a small, hard bird, dressed all in white, with a soft, sweet face and gambler’s eyes.

  The night eased on, whiskey and tinkling laughter, and tinny melodies on the piano, and soon — most eerily of all — I noticed that I could no longer tell the difference between the professional hostesses and the “respectable” girls at our table: both giggled too much at every comment, were promiscuous with flatteries (“Oh, you’re so clever! And your Japanese is so good!”), and picked their way through English with sweet determination, dishing out an impersonal sweetness. All Japan, it sometimes seemed, came on like a hostess — sleekly appareled, full of automatic charm, and dedicated exclusively to your happiness, as if her life — or livelihood — depended on it. Yet all Japan also seemed like a mother to its own. And with classic neatness, the Japanese had always kept its women and its feelings separate: one for heart and one for hearth, one to take care of the man in the world, one to take care of him at home. The divisions were airtight. Geisha traditionally were supposed to have no home, while wives were known as okusan, or “persons of the interior.” Geisha traditionally were not allowed to carry money, while women were deputed to handle all household finances. Geisha were not supposed to marry, while wives were desexualized by the husbands who called them “Mother.” The Japanese were accomplished technicians of the heart.

  Through Sachiko, meanwhile, I was beginning to see a little more of the other side of the female equation here: the young mothers I had so admired on arrival. Her best friend, Keiko, was an acupuncturist (like her father) and, like her father, a Communist; but her main activity seemed to be romance. “She little Meryl Streep feeling,” Sachiko had explained. “Japanese man much love this style.” And certainly, with her short bangs and whitened face, Keiko was the kind of Kyoto beauty that Japanese men adored. Her main outlet now, though, I found, was American football: by attaching herself to the Kyoto University Gangsters — as team herbalist — she had stolen into a world where she was the only woman among fifty fresh-faced boys (and vulnerable boys at that: when I attended a game between the Gangsters and the Kansai University Fighters, the shaven-headed linemen, the occasional postinterception jigs, the squeaky pom-pom girls shouting “Dee-fense!” “First down!” and “Go go” — all in English — could almost have belonged to a California high school; but after the game, when I visited the locker room, the defeated samurai fighters were slumped amidst their pads like exhausted warriors, red-eyed, or sniffling, so cho
ked up that they could not even speak).

  Now, I gathered, Keiko lived with the twenty-one-year-old manager, her four-year-old daughter, and her ball-playing husband, in an arrangement they chose to keep ambiguous.

  Hideko, Sachiko’s other closest companion, was the opposite extreme — less than ninety pounds, her eyes shy and wide with childlike wonder, she was the very picture of propriety. Smiling sweetly, nearly always silent, carrying herself like a porcelain vessel in her neat skirts and expensive shirts, she was the Platonic incarnation of what a Japanese wife should be, one of those gracefully demure types, as Matthew put it, “who would in England be called a cardigan-and-pearls lady.”

  At least on the face of it. “She very small lady, very fragile — little flower feeling,” Sachiko had told me before introducing her. “Other person think very shy, very quiet. But inside” — her eyes flashed with mischief — “very different! She not have dream. She love money only!”

  I took this at first to be an exaggeration, or, at least, one Japanese woman’s somewhat cutting appraisal of another. But as I came to know Hideko, I found that Sachiko had not overstated at all: Hideko’s main interest really was in money. She had married a doctor — as prudent an investment in Japan as in America — and, by virtue of having no feelings for him, was able to play the perfect doctor’s wife. With all the energies and feelings that were left over, she devoted herself to becoming the very model of a high-fashion sophisticate: she played tennis, she went on scuba trips to the Great Barrier Reef, she spent her days buying Italian handbags and French cakes. She memorized all the foreign names she could, and still often boasted, this extremely poised and intelligent young woman, that she had been the only student in her college with a Gucci bag.

  When Sachiko told me that Hideko loved living near banks — their presence actually turned her on — I took it as a joke. “Very different,” Sachiko told me, shaken. “I thinking little joke, I little laughing. But she very, very serious. Her heart not so open. She not so close husband. Then I little sad.” Hideko referred to money by the affectionate diminutive that most people reserved for children or close friends; she even got a corgi (in emulation of Queen Elizabeth II) and gave it a name that was a rhyming-slang homonym for “money.” Often, said Sachiko, Hideko told her friends how she was planning to spend her husband’s money as soon as he was dead.