The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  In the morning, I walked with Mark through the quiet, windless streets of what looked like an English country town, the glowing, twenty-four-carat neon signs and Members Clubs all vanished now in the shiny Sunday calm. Girls in red shirts, pink ribbons in their hair, stepped through polished arcades of smiling bunnies, puzzled pandas, chuckling raccoons. A Wildean photo album in a store said: “TRUTH: Virtue is the beauty of the mind.” Schoolgirls, tethering their bikes to trees, whispered excitedly when they saw us, unaccustomed to foreigners, and then, “Brazil? Brazil?” In the local art museum, where Mark was having an exhibition, a grandma, given license to do anything by her age, appeared before us, with an equally ancient friend, in sunhat, giggling at her side. “I am eighty-eight years old,” the woman said. “I dreamed of being a lawyer. But when I was young, a woman was not allowed to have a strong position. I pity myself. I am eighty-eight years old now.” With that, she bowed and padded off.

  On the beach, in the afternoon, the waves were deferential as a waiter, lapping quietly against the shore, a shock of white sails behind them on the blue; in front of me, eight matrons in a perfect row, lined up like birds, surveying the sea, identical in their pretty skirts and sweetly appreciative coos. In the twittering, sultry afternoon, a hot siesta stillness fell upon the town. The long thin lanes resembled alleyways in some sunlit Sardinian town, sleepy in the steamy afternoon. For once, all the country’s energy was motionless and mute.

  “If you were to believe some of the things you read,” Etsuko began, “all of us Japanese are living in some cobwebbed net of obligations, our hands tied by giri and on. Of course, these elements are there. But to concentrate entirely on them is to produce a kind of caricature, a comic version of us. It’s like taking an X ray, which catches the outline of the skeleton but has nothing of the spirit, the humanity. Or” — she paused while a former maiko came to deposit a few more mysterious delicacies on the table before us — “or like a bowl of seawater in which one has all the component parts, but they do not cohere to make a whole.”

  “It’s too disembodied, in other words?”

  She nodded ruefully.

  She had taken me, this rainy-season evening, to one of those celebrated hidden centuries-old Kyoto restaurants where there was no menu and no bill, and there were no customers who could walk in off the street. Few, perhaps, would be induced to do so, in any case, since the entrance was an unassuming one, just a single small banner above an aged wooden gate at the foot of the eastern hills, on one of those narrow-waisted Gion streets that were all white lanterns and stone passageways.

  We had walked along a moss path, lanterns jutting this way and that through the garden, to an entrance, where the madam, with the painted face of an old courtesan, in electric-blue kimono, had come out and bowed profusely before us, her head almost reaching to the floor. Given special slippers, we followed a wooden corridor, past rooms full of parties and the phantom forms of young geisha, to a large, empty room, bare save for an alcove in which there was a scroll lit up by a flash of calligraphy and, under it, a slim vase cradling a violet tea flower. New screens and mats had recently been installed to register the summer — they were changed with every month, I gathered — and our own screens gave out onto a trim garden, vibrant green intensified in the early-evening gray. A single tiny hole had been made in the wall so that the moon, coming through, would be shaped as a pretty crescent. The crockery was antique, chosen only for us; the small talk as delicate as china.

  On Etsuko’s pink kimono was a tracery of rain.

  “Is that seasonal?” I asked redundantly.

  “Yes, but just a tiny bit off, a few days early. Really, this should be worn in July, with the end of the rainy season. It’s like these dishes.” She pointed out the pattern of a well, or a whirlpool, on the goodies before us. I recognized the way that every detail had been made to fit the moment, the room itself turned into a seasonal poem. “These, too, should be eaten just a little later in the year, as you know.” I did? “And of course, all these foods have water in them.” Of course. It was not the first time I realized that Japan was so strictly trained that it took a trained eye to appreciate it.

  Etsuko watched approvingly the silent bustle of the woman bringing in more dishes. “We Japanese ladies have a way of effacing ourselves without losing ourselves,” she explained. The woman, with a little bow, stole away from the lanterned room.

  “Do you think Japanese women are the strength of Japan?”

  “Yes. But we have to keep it a secret,” she giggled coyly. “We know how to seem weak. You can see that in our women writers.”

  “Are there women’s presses in Japan?”

  She looked surprised. “You have them in America?”

  “Oh yes.” I went on to explain their assumptions to her.

  “But surely that is a poor reflection on women, to be published only in women’s presses?” The quiet rebuke stung like a needle. “If they are good, should they not be publishable anywhere?”

  Having lived so long abroad, Etsuko regarded her country now, I sometimes felt, as a mother might an errant daughter. And as she tried to bring each culture to a better understanding of the other, she fretted, I could tell, about all the same issues that routinely vexed every foreigner: was it better to leave the people here in their state of happy ignorance, like the dwellers of Plato’s cave (surrounded, in this instance, by Platonic forms), or should they be schooled in the facts of life, in the ways of the world, in uncertainty?

  In the midst of all this, though, Etsuko was still Japanese enough to dodge every question with a smile, to talk in enigmas, to keep herself mostly to herself. One day a little later, she called me up to tell me that she could not, alas, attend a meeting of her culture club; I was hardly surprised, I replied, since I knew her life was so full of obligations. We talked for a while of ma, the Japanese notion of “betweenness,” and the space between people, and the summer. Finally, after perhaps twenty minutes of chat, I asked after her father; when last we had met, she had told me, in passing, he was ill. “He died early this morning,” she said calmly. “Luckily, I was there at the time. But I have to return to Tokyo tonight for more arrangements and the service.” That was why, I realized, she could not come to the club meeting; but she would never have told me had I not brought it up.

  I dream one night I am on the Big Sur coast. The fog is rolling in across the sea, and a strange aircraft above makes me feel as if all the world is moving. I am talking Ryōkan with a hippie there, and we walk across stepping-stones in a quiet lotus pond, where I find, somehow, that everyone is speaking Japanese. The man at the front office, recognizing me, says, “Sachiko is going into fits. You probably don’t remember her, but you knew her very well once. Now she doesn’t know whether to ask you to dinner or not. I hope you don’t mind my …” “Of course not,” I say, startled to find that there is a Sachiko here. The coastline is magical today, high above the surf, and the cedar tubs take me back — far back — to Japan.

  3

  THE NIGHT I got home, after saying goodbye to Sachiko, I lay awake for most of the dark and silent hours. Outside, the rain was coming down so gently I could scarcely hear it, trickling down pipes, pattering into gutters, tapping as silently on my roof as a mother awakening her child. At times, when I could not sleep, I rose and penned mock-Japanese poems.

  All night, the rain.

  I listen again in the dark

  To the sound of footsteps departing.

  And as the daylight came in, I felt that what I wanted most to express to her was admiration: out of habit, I clambered up to my desk and looked up the Japanese word for “respect,” though by then, perhaps, the chance to use it was gone, and I felt a little like someone who’s holding a winning lottery ticket long after the deadline has passed.

  Sachiko’s goodbye marked, so it seemed, the ending of a cycle; from now on, I sensed, she would be charting a new life on her own. But as the days went on, I also came to see that she could not so e
asily hold to her resolve, if only because she needed some external impetus to help her to break free. By now, she was fully embarked on her tour-conductor course, attending classes in Osaka twice a week, committing to memory the niceties of foreign customs and places, taking tests in the logistics of a “bird life.” And for the first time ever, I suspected, she had found a field wide enough for her to spread her wings, a forum large enough to accommodate all her diverse energies. Everywhere one looked in Japan, one saw an identical sorrow: so many women with so much to give, and so little occasion to use it. Nine in every ten women here had completed twelve years of schooling; yet in their brief stays in the office, they were rarely allowed to do anything more than look decorative and make tea. Put the character for “woman” together with the character for “woman” twice, and you got the character for “trouble.”

  This it was, I assumed, that produced the notorious supermoms, who trained all their formidable powers of will on Juniorchan’s success, and this it was that began to explain that other infamous figure of urban folklore, the rapacious landlady, who threw herself on any foreigner with such naked intensity that he was left, very often, shaken, almost terrified, by the vehemence of her unspent passions. If the first cliché of being a foreign male in Japan was finding a faultless dream girl, the second was to find oneself almost consumed by the ravening ardor of these women, who could, if they chose, turn that same unearthly attention, in an instant, on someone else. Regardless of their object, they were as obsessive and Zen-pointed in love as in every other pursuit and brought the same degree of concentration, and full-bodied surrender, to their affections that they might elsewhere bring to their company, or their baseball team, or their religion.

  Now, though, for the first time ever, Sachiko seemed to have moved beyond mere diversions — first Zen, then aerobics, then a-ha, then me — to some larger sense of destination. And as she did so, inevitably, she found her whole society arrayed in a vengeful chorus all around her. Her mother had told her that if she continued the course, she would never talk to her again. Her brother, recently returned from Switzerland, had warned her that she was “little balloon. If not usual Japanese-style life, I cannot stay ground.” Her Japanese friends were either jealous or disapproving of her for seeking out the freedom they had so diligently denied themselves. And her husband was sorrowfully bewildered, gallantly giving her a tour-conductor record for her birthday, then silently going off to another woman. Only her father, the longtime adversary whom she affectionately thought of as a child, now became an unlikely ally, secretly urging her to see the world (and asking her if she’d take him with her).

  Watching her swimming bravely against the current, I longed to do everything I could to help her. One day, therefore, in early summer, I invited her on a tour of Osaka Airport, only the third time in her thirty-one years she had ever visited this thorough-fare of dreams scarcely an hour from her home. In wonder, when we arrived, she gazed up at all the people moving off to other lands and lives, and tried out the new phrases she had learned. “De-par-ture lounge,” she spelled out to herself. “In-ternational arr-i-val.” “CIQ,” she proudly informed me (customs/immigration/quarantine). Together we stood before the departure board, and she recited to herself the destinations clicking over, a registry of hopes.

  After that, still far from Japan, we traveled to Kobe, the city closest to a foreign place, and nibbled on tacos in a Mexican restaurant, complete with Mexican waitress, piñatas, and ponchos on the wall, then climbed up to a tiny second-story sari shop, with soft sitar music piped through elegant, silk-wrapped chambers, copies of Vogue lying beneath framed Kashmiri miniatures. On the way back into town, we stopped inside the English House and posed for photographs in Victorian gear (Japanese tourist sites always had these props on hand, so that one could actually occupy a foreign identity for a moment and have the moment commemorated). “I little crazy?” she asked, more in hope than apprehension. Craziness, I could tell, was the foreign country to which I could admit her.

  In some ways, I was discovering, Sachiko seemed to know everything about the world, sampling the products and photogenic images of different cultures as easily as in some International Expo. Yet in some ways, she knew nothing. In geography, as in everything, the Japanese seemed to favor a ruthlessly edited version of the world, converting each country into a collection of gift shop pleasantries and postcard images. The classic example was the TV documentaries in which some pretty young hostess led viewers through a Third World hellhole, either screening out the suffering in search of scenic vistas or treating it as a kind of artificial prop that only increased the quaintness and exoticism. Even the Japanese tourists I ran across abroad seemed not really keen to understand or penetrate other cultures, but content just to collect them, and to snap up a few Taj Mahal souvenirs or pictures of the Eiffel Tower to take back home like trophies. The rest of the world, like Japan itself, they saw mostly through rose-colored lenses or through blinkers.

  So when I mentioned Bhutan to Sachiko, she knew every last detail of this picturesque land, where the people, wearing their own versions of kimono, resembled some theme-park recreation of the Muromachi period; Japanese TV had shown a famous documentary on the subject. As for Burma, Central Asia, the caravan stops along the romantic Silk Road, now being featured in every Japanese book and screen, she was all but definitive. Yet when I mentioned Nicaragua, she had never heard of it, and eager only for good news, she, like nearly every Japanese I knew, had never heard of the Cold War, was shocked to learn that Washington and Moscow were ideologically opposed, knew nothing at all about China’s difficult reforms.

  When I took her later that afternoon to an exhibition of anti-apartheid art, partially sponsored by the tireless gaijin crusaders of Kyoto, she was stunned and horrified; incredulous to learn of a place where such discrimination was employed (though to foreign eyes, racism and segregation were scarcely alien to Japan). And as we watched a video of Afrikaners talking about their experiences with the system, Sachiko’s eyes filled with tears and she lost all words. On heading out, she asked me if I would take her to Cry Freedom and A World Apart, and when I told her that Japanese were considered honorary whites in South Africa, she could scarcely contain her indignation: “Why this system? Not so fair! This system very terrible!”

  It amused me to find that I, least politically informed of creatures, was introducing her now to many of the things that Japan so carefully screened out: to inequity, to unexpectedness, even to tipping (though when I tried to explain this habit to her, she looked quite shocked at the notion of institutionalized bribery; “service,” in Japan, meant not an extra charge but, in fact, an extra dish or gift that the customer received gratis — and in any case, every gift here left the recipient doubly indebted).

  Through the world I inhabited too, Sachiko was ending up in situations she had never known before. Slipping into the Western world, as through some Lewis Carroll looking glass, she had entered a world of fun-house inversions and fairy-tale shocks, in which new conventions loomed up at her as suddenly and scarily as the glowing skeletons in the Haunted House to which I took her once, which left her clinging to my arm in a state of happy terror. One day, she called my guesthouse and was answered by the eccentric young gay from Harvard who had somehow grown fascinated with her. Moshi-moshi, she called out, uncertainly; Moshi-moshi, he replied, recognizing her voice. “I love you.” There was, I gathered, a long silence on the other end, and then an uneasy giggle. “No, really,” he went on. “I love you. If you weren’t already claimed, I’d want you for my own. If you were my girlfriend, I’d never want a boy again.”

  Four days after the incident, Sachiko was still shaken by the conversation. Everything she considered sacred had been defamed. To talk to a self-professed gay was itself an unnerving novelty for her. But to get a frank admission from him, and to hear from a relative stranger intimacies of the kind she had never heard in public even from her husband — it clearly left the ground beneath her shaking.<
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  Just as often, though, her innocence seemed almost proof against the world, making the world seem innocent. When I introduced her one day to an English friend, she looked at him with awe as he politely complimented her on the beauties of her town. Then, unable to contain herself any longer, she abruptly said, “Your country very beautiful country. I many time dream this place. Cinderella, many big castle, fairy princess. When I high school size, I always dream this world. Your world little Emily Brontë world.”

  He burst out laughing and went on rhapsodizing about Japanese teahouses and Sōseki’s novels.

  But Sachiko was not to be sidetracked, or to be diverted in this rare encounter with an emissary from the land of dreams.

  “Japanese person much love your country air. British Airways!” She was proud of her new knowledge.

  “British Airways?” he repeated, incredulous, thinking of rock-hard rolls and hockey-stick attendants. “I usually try to go with JAL.”

  “Japanese person not so like this air. Very cold feeling; little distant.”

  “But, Sachiko,” I butted in, “isn’t that how all Japanese service is? Isn’t that, in fact, the glory and aim of Japanese service?”