The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

“Ah, very beautiful story,” said Sachiko dreamily. “Little cherry blossom feeling. One-night dream.”

  “Yes, yes, precisely,” said Matthew agreeably, used by now to the Japanese habit of turning even pain into something lovely, and unaware, perhaps, that she was in effect referring to a one-night stand.

  After our coffee was finished, Sachiko dispatched the other two into a taxi bound for a department store, and clomped along the wide boulevard by my side, in tiny footsteps. “I come you room?” she asked. “Are you okay? We little buy cake?” and, stopping at a bakery, we made our way through a riddle of sunny streets, back to my room. There, sitting down, she unclasped her earrings and, laying them tidily on my table, took me by surprise.

  “Today,” she began, “I wear kimono so you always keep very happy memory of me.” I could not fathom what she meant. “You give me much dream, much imagination. I want you write many thing, very beautiful memory of Japan. We together time, very happy, many dream. But then, other life, very difficult. I much much thinking in my heart — then little stomach problem. My heart little sick.”

  She stopped, and I, accustomed both to the solemnity of her feelings and to their sudden turns, held my breath.

  “You have very beautiful bird life,” she went on. “Very free, very easy. But my life very different. I tiny, I not have wing. I need more akirameru.” She stopped and, turning to her crumpled, leather-bound old dictionary, skimmed through the pages and stopped on the word she wanted. “Re-sig-na-tion. Here in Japan, this very important. All person must have this resig —”

  “Resignation.”

  “Re-sig-na-tion. If not have, many problem. Then maybe I must little say goodbye.”

  Looking back at her, I fumbled for my words. Then, turning to the only piece of paper at hand — the happy orange-and-white bag of the bakery — I sketched a diagram of my heart, and she, a little sadly, nodded over her cake. I then drew another picture, of the three routes open to us.

  “Maybe goodbye best,” she said. “But please today, you come together my house, play together children?” There was nothing I wanted less to do right now, but I could see that she needed to recast the play, to establish herself again in the mother’s role and me as the friend of the family. And so we went back out into the mild spring sun, and on the long train ride across town, I watched her rearrange her self, as I did too, putting on a bright smile and an air of cheerful competence.

  Back at home, Yuki and Hiroshi raced out and bounced all over me, pulling me this way and that, and I began roaring at Hiroshi like a bear, and lifting Yuki high into the air while she screamed, and, when they were not looking, wheezing and whistling like an imagined raccoon. Then Yuki careened off to grab her moth-eaten, one-eyed orange raccoon. (“Lasker,” explained her mother. “Lasker?” And she sang me the jingle of a TV cartoon, “Rascal Raccoon.”) Then the children, well trained already in how to entertain all visitors, changed into their best clothes — Yuki into a pretty frock, Hiroshi donning a red bow tie — and solemnly took turns playing the piano, feet dangling poignantly only halfway to the floor. Then all four of us went back to the Nogi Shrine, in a light spring rain, and played hide-and-seek in the gathering dark, as we had done on the day we met.

  In the dying light, Sachiko bought us all cans of milk tea, and while the children played with acorns, the two of us padded around the noiseless shrine, dedicated to the hero of the Russo-Japanese War, the man who had been the Emperor’s headmaster and role model. The walkways were deserted now in the rain, the wet ground strewn with petals; the bare branches were black against graying skies.

  “Yesterday,” she said dreamily, guiding me to her favorite tree, “I lie down this bench, and look at sky. Sky very blue; cherry very pink. Spring wind come down, so soft. I look up, I dream I have little wing. Bird talking, leaves dancing in spring wind.”

  She pointed out the different trees to me, told me the stories that she shared with them, explained which one was king and which his ladies-in-waiting. “But today,” she went on ruminatively, “all cherry fall. Little fox wedding day.”

  “Half rain, half sun, you mean?”

  She nodded, and I could see her in a fox wedding mood herself, caught between conflicting dreams.

  In her flat, she cooked a quick dinner and packed the children off to bed. Then, seated at the small table that took up nearly all of the poster-filled room, she told me, eyes shining, about all the hopes she’d ever had, and how they’d disappeared. I looked around at the pictures of a-ha, the grinning sea otter on the ceiling, the framed photo of her children with the abbot of the temple: this was how the Japanese ended things, I thought, avoiding the embarrassment and mess of sudden death with the clean break of a kind of suicide. Everything brought to a ceremonial close, as shapely as a morning-after poem.

  When it came time for me to leave, she brought out a scarf and tied it round my neck to keep me from the cold, and then walked, as usual, to the train station, as on the first day that I’d visited. As the train pulled away, I watched her standing alone on the platform, waving and waving till her small figure was finally out of my sight.

  SUMMER

  Surface is an illusion, but so is depth.

  —DAVID HOCKNEY

  1

  NOW THAT MATTHEW had finally exhausted Tokyo, there was nothing left for him in Japan. Having found the worldly life he’d always craved, he decided that he should, in fact, be seeking out the spiritual life. He doubted what he knew, and then revised his doubts. And the very qualities that attracted many foreigners to Japan — that it left one alone, and therefore free — were for Matthew, I could tell, an ordeal; Japan offered him everything except direction. He felt his own uncertainty mocked by the equable calm and self-containment of Japan. Besides, Japan had little time for agonized self-scrutiny or coffeehouse ruminations; speculation and introspection were regarded as indulgences that took one away from the matter at hand. So now, having stuck it out through the darkest days of winter, just as the weather was beginning to clear, he decided to leave.

  I was sorry to see him go, my partner in bewilderment, especially since he had no special place to go, and on our last night on the town, I invited him to come along with me to one of the year’s last performances of the Miyako Odori, the biannual geisha dance, which had been, for more than a century, the only occasion when the general public could see the most storied and private of entertainers in action. Performed in spring and autumn, when the blossoms were pink and the maple leaves red, the all-woman show was a kind of counter to the all-male performances of Kabuki. And over the years, the show itself had generated almost as many legends as those it represented: most famously the tale of George Morgan, the American millionaire, who had grown so smitten with a young apprentice geisha, or maiko, whom he saw onstage that he had embarked on a love affair as famous as those of Mademoiselle Chrysanthème or Okichi-san. Nowadays, however, there was such a shortage of girls willing to enter the old profession that the producers had had to turn to local high school students, and the daughters of loyal patrons, to fill the twenty places.

  Seated in the quiet auditorium, having missed the tea ceremony beforehand through our inability to read the tickets, Matthew and I watched scene after scene unfurl with the precise exquisiteness of watercolor prints, in richest indigo and whitest white. A chorus line of maiko came prancing, tiny-footed, onto the stage in tidy, decorous rows, bearing crimson leaves of maples or blossoms of the daintiest pink. The geisha, however, who lined the balconies, cradling samisen and letting out screeching cries, were the most terrifying hags I’d ever seen: craggy old harpies, dressed all in black, their unsmiling, berouged faces soured with the lines of scowls. Refugees from some country production of Macbeth, they gave new meaning to the notion of a dragon lady. They also put one Japanese romance firmly in its place.

  The show, however, unfolded in one shimmering sequence of gossamer backdrops — love stories presented as immortal tableaux, emotions translated into standard, stunning
gestures. Then we streamed out into the bright afternoon and began walking along Hanamikōji-dōri, or Flower-Viewing Street, the paper lanterns outside the ancient teahouses painted all with plovers in the dying afternoon. Suddenly, I heard a voice behind me.

  “Excuse me, are you Pico?”

  I looked around to see a young foreigner, with a bright-eyed woman I took to be his mother.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m John Horton. You may not remember me, but we were on a bus together in Tibet two years ago!”

  “Of course,” I said, looking at him again. The last time I had seen John, he had indeed been in a rocking vehicle crowded with peasants, bouncing across Tibetan plateaus, while his brother had been stretched out on the back seat, moaning, the simultaneous victim of Chinese food, altitude sickness, Chinese airline service, and the bus itself. At the time, I remembered vividly, John had been on his way to Kobe; a quick-witted entrepreneur who’d been in business since his teens, he’d told me he had heard that Japan was good for quick kills and, better yet, that Japanese girls were mad for Western men.

  “You’re living here now?” I asked him.

  “Right!”

  “Doing business, I assume.”

  “No, no. My only interest is in Buddhism.”

  “But the last time we met …” and then, seeing his expression, I let the sentence trail.

  “Yeah. My plan is to go to China, learn the language, and then go to this Vipassana meditation center in Bombay.” Japan had a wonderful knack, I noticed, of awakening foreigners’ interest in every form of Buddhism except the Japanese. Still, John’s conversion had at least been in a relatively positive direction; most people seemed to come to Japan for Buddhism, and end up after girls or cash.

  “Good luck with your studies,” I said, as Matthew and I strolled away. It was apt, I thought, that Matthew see this before he left, and I, too, of course; the confusion of interests — of people coming here for good deeds as well as good times — was everywhere.

  The guesthouse in which I lived, in fact, might almost have been a sociologist’s model designed to illustrate the varieties of romantic experience, made up, as it was, mostly of lonely foreign males and shady, water-world Japanese. The place’s noises alone were a constant register of frustration and fulfillment. One Belgian girl loudly satisfied herself each day, while the room next to mine was a veritable laugh track of giggles and slaps and high-pitched squeals of “Stop! Stop it! Please stop!” in Japanese.

  One night, a man down the corridor began howling and howling, rending the night with obscenities. “Oh god, oh fuck, oh jesus!” he cried. “Oh god, please stop, I can’t stand it.” Wrenched from my dreams, I lay there in the dark, listening to his terrible wails. “Oh god, oh jesus, oh god, why did I do it?” The shrieks of the damned must sound like this, I thought. “Oh jesus, oh fuck, oh god, how can you do this to me?”

  Later, I learned that he had been in great physical pain; his main affliction, though, was loneliness.

  Another night, at 3 a.m., I was woken by some banging and knocking on another neighbor’s door. A few hours later, I was startled out of sleep again by a clamor of excited whispers in the corridor outside. Opening the door, I found three teenage Japanese girls, no older than fifteen, apparently camped out on the floor. The day went on, but they did not, and every time I came or went, I found them squatting on the floor, next to a pair of his-and-hers Snoopy slippers, laying sustained siege to the quiet, studious Swede who lived next door to me.

  For three days, the unlikely pop trio remained there, as patient as a courtly lover outside his sweetheart’s balcony, cleaning their teeth at the basin in the corridor, padding, in towels, to the shower, and occasionally finding other foreigners to take them in for the night. When finally Hans returned home from a trip one night, he surveyed the scene and shrugged his leather-jacketed shoulders. “I only meet these girls one time,” he said helplessly, “in Pub Africa. I do not understand.”

  A couple of days later, when I went down to the guesthouse telephone to make a call, Parker, the gracious Southern boy, shyly opened his door and invited me in for a chat. By the time I arrived, he was deep in Hume’s Treatise Concerning Human Understanding.

  He put the book down. “I need a girlfriend — and bad!” he began disconcertingly, this tall and scholarly lawyer’s son whose dream was to go to divinity school. “I haven’t had a woman for so long that if I don’t find one soon, I’m going to leave.” I looked around at his monastic cell: Heidegger, volume after volume of Kierkegaard, The Principles of Buddhist Psychology. “Maybe summer will be better. Have you seen all the pregnant women around right now? I’m thinking, if they’re pregnant now, summer must be the time when it’s all happening.” He looked at me pleadingly, with an eager freshman’s smile that bespoke the depths of his desperation. Around him were volumes of Rilke and Nietzsche and Zen.

  “You like philosophy?”

  “Yeah,” he says, a frat boy abashed. “Didn’t I tell you? I lived in Oxford last year, studying being. And I’m spending a year over here, doing nothingness.” There was no apparent irony in his voice. “I really love books. Books and women. If I can’t have one, I’ve got to have the other.”

  Parker, I recalled, had managed in his nine months here to pick up precisely four words of Japanese — “little,” “horny,” “sorry,” and “cockroach.” (I often wondered what kinds of sentences he fashioned with this small but pregnant repertoire — “I’m a little horny cockroach,” perhaps — and what effect they had on the girls he was trying to impress.)

  “I wish one could be married and still be a monk,” he said.

  “But that’s exactly what they have over here! That’s one of the principles of Buddhism in Japan.”

  “Then why become a monk?”

  I, thinking of Sachiko, and my plans of being alone, could give him no answer: all of us, it seemed, found only what we did not crave, and vice versa.

  2

  ON THE NIGHT of the May moon, the famously hazy spring moon beloved by monks and second in importance only to the harvest moon, I walked with Mark through the local temples in the early warmth. The moonlight magnetized my attention this night, glowing at the edges of my mind — it blazed — and Mark told me the story of the Chinese poet who tried to grab the moon’s reflection in the water and drowned. For the Buddhist, the moon was illusion, maya, all that was chimerical; yet it was also the Tathagata, a symbol of enlightenment, and of the operations of divinity in the world. The Buddha’s mind was said to be like the reflection of moonlight in clear, deep water; and the Buddha himself was said to be as constant as the moon, though sometimes he looked full, sometimes empty, sometimes half shrouded in clouds.

  Meandering slowly past the silent, shadowed houses — a wood-block of ancient stillness — I thought again of how the lady and the monk interacted here, as did so many of the riddles of Japan. Was the moon a symbol of some higher beauty, or was it just a pretty earring in the sky? Enlightenment, I recalled reading in Dōgen, was “like the moon reflected in the water. There is no disturbance here, and all the moon is reflected in a drop.” Sei Shōnagon, though, in certain moods, had taken it for what it was, no more: “At any time, and in any place, I find moonlight very moving.”

  Mark, then, went on to tell me of the Bashō poem of the clouds that obscured the moon, and as so often with him, I could see how much he had picked up from being around Zen monks and teachers; how he, too, had the gift of keeping one true to oneself, yet always thinking the best of one: a rigorously monitored idealism. I mentioned this to him, and he grasped my meaning quickly.

  “The whole idea of a teacher,” he said, blue hawk eyes flashing, “is to present a reflective mirror. Not a blank surface, really, but a screen, on which you have to confront yourself. Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you’re really seeing are not his limitations but yours.”

  “So that if you think he’s strict, it’s because you’re gui
lty? And if you find him silent, it’s because you talk too much?”

  “Yeah, I guess. There are many ways to do it. Sometimes they just let you talk yourself into trouble. Or they’ll shock you out of your assumptions. Or they’ll cut you down. Everything you think you’re seeing in him is actually coming from yourself. A saint, I think, is someone who brings out the good in everyone he meets.”

  “So it’s almost as if he’s your true nature, in a sense, the better part of you?”

  Mark, schooled in silences, said nothing.

  A little later, at the beginning of tsuyu, or the rainy season, I went to stay with Mark in a temple on Awajishima, the resort island not far from Osaka. The monk who came to greet me at the ferry landing, a puppyish and frisky rock-star fan, thirty years old but still living in the temple that his parents ran, ushered me eagerly into his Toyota Crown, buzzing with bright lights now, a full moon cradled in its skylight and soul music thumping out of its tape system, its dashboard fit for a 747. I pushed a button, and the back seat beneath me began to recline, till I was all but supine, looking out at midnight-blue neon and green, clean bright colors inscribed across the night. Through the sleek, rain-washed streets of the little town we drove, the lights out to sea like ornaments, the big hotels strung along the coast like candles on a birthday cake. Past floodlit courts of tennis, and eerily spotlit swimming pools.

  The temple, when we arrived, was a sleeker and more high-tech contraption than any I had seen in Japan. Inside, red lights were humming in the darkness of the entranceway, a panel to control the other lights and the clean white lanterns set atop the bushes. I followed my guide through long brown corridors, shadowing the small, lush garden, and lit so quietly I felt I was trespassing upon a daydream. In a perfect, clean-swept room, we ate strange celery and a rainbow of pickles, followed by ice cream made of strawberry, carrot, and plum. Afterwards, the monk went upstairs and I wandered round this house of marvels. Using the toilet, I found myself in some electric wonder system, with different mechanisms to warm the seat, shoot up hot air, expel a spray of water, and flatter one’s behind — do everything, in short, but flush. From upstairs, meanwhile, where the young master of the household was commanding a whole bank of videos, Betamaxes, laser discs, and Bose speakers, I heard the gunshots of a Rambo tape, some dialogue from Flashdance. Outside, I saw the temple’s switchboard lights, as complex as a deejay’s console; beyond, the neon of the city, as still as night lights on an airport runway. A silent summer night alive with lights, as if, as Pynchon had written of L.A., one had turned a transistor upside down and opened its back to see the tangle of wires, alive with humming energies.