The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  She looked confused.

  “We in the West usually like to go Thai Air,” I went on, “or Singapore Airlines. Many people think those two are the best in the world.”

  “Japanese person not so like Thai Air!”

  “Why?”

  “Bad smell!”

  “Bad smell?”

  “True! Asian air very bad smell! Japanese person like only British Airway. Cathay Pacific too — but very expensive.”

  “But, Sachiko, Cathay Pacific is Asian too.”

  She stood firm. “Japanese person like!”

  * * *

  She in turn, of course, was introducing me to many things, not least the shallowness of my own reading of Japan. As I went on blathering about Hiroshige or Buson, I realized that it must have sounded as jejune and uninformed to her as typical Japanese raptures about Chopin did to us. And when I told her, proudly, about my visit to the famous geisha show, she was singularly unimpressed. “You know Michael Douglas movie?” “You mean Fatal Attraction?” “Ping-pong! This Miyako Odori, little same feeling!”

  I got a similar response, once, when I suggested we visit the love shrine at Kiyomizu and make the ritual walk, eyes closed, along a series of twelve stepping-stones, that was the famous highlight of every tourist’s visit. Listening to my suggestion, she could hardly contain her mirth. “This little teenage place,” she giggled. “Usually only high school person come here this place.” It was the same response, I realized, I would have received had I invited a mature thirty-one-year-old New Yorker, and mother of two, to a Coney Island photo booth.

  Often, too, as I inflicted on her haiku of my own composition, the effect must have been as jarring to her as hearing a prayer rewritten. And once, eager to show off my command of Japanese wisdom, I quoted to her Bashō’s famous, plangent cry of wonder, an epic in three words, “Matsushima ya / Ah, Matsushima ya / Matsushima ya.” But somehow, in the heat of the moment, I began intoning, “Matsushita ya / Ah, Matsushita ya …,” converting the poet’s poignant ode to a moonlit island into a call for the Japanese equivalent of Data General. That same day, she told me excitedly, “My friend give me little foreigner poem. Very beautiful poem. Please you see.” And handed over some verses by Leo Buscaglia.

  4

  GREEN, GREEN, green were the colors of Kyoto in the summer: the dripping green of moss gardens, the thick dark emerald of the pine trees on the temple slopes; the illuminated jade of white-barked bamboo shot through with summer light. Green lichen, green hills, green light. Always the sharpened intensity of solid colors in Japan, so strong they knocked the breath out of one: pink against blue, gold on black, a blaze of reds. And the beauty of a city that measured its year by its blossomings: the coming of plums to Kitano in early winter, the cherries on Mount Hiei in late April, the deepening of moss in the rainy season.

  In the early days of summer, with the first suggestion of returning haziness and heat, Kyoto took on a Californian lightness, and the days were motionless and blue. Lazy cumulus days without a trace of wind. Red and blue carp banners drooping from the rooftops, and lazy Bach toccatas in local coffee shops. A Constable world of suspended motion. Then, as the heat came on, a creeping intensity: Sachiko sucking ice cubes in the sultry nights and giving me new wind chimes to keep me cool (as courtiers once had spread silk cloth across the mountains to shield an emperor’s eyes from summer glare); shopgirls eating long, fine, pure-white noodles served on ice.

  Along the avenue of trees that led to Shimogamo Shrine, weekend painters sat relaxing at their easels above a dry stream, silent on their chairs as they tried to transcribe the intensity of green and blue. Etsuko, meeting me outside the shrine, greeted me with a poem she had just translated:

  Ah July,

  The rushing stream washed over the stones,

  And the stones sparkle.

  Then she led me into Kawabata’s house, turned this day into a gallery of dreams, lustrous kimono spread out upon their racks like carpets or fine silks, ten-thousand-dollar gowns with fifteen-thousand-dollar obi, bearing the faintest tracery of cranes, or phoenixes, across their midnight blue. Farther on, in a room full of windows, we took a traditional meal while a few chattering women tried to set me up in marriage with their daughters.

  “I think it is because we are externally so powerless,” she later explained, putting the encounter into perspective, “that we Japanese women must be powerful in spirit. And so it comes out in these violent and inverse ways, as in the hannya.”

  “Hannya?”

  “You must know this?” I didn’t. “It is the recurrent figure in Nō drama and in so many of our stories through the centuries, like Dōjōji: the woman who consumes a monk in the fury of her passion. The term, of course, was first created by a monk; it refers to the first word of a very famous sutra. But if you say hannya today, most people think instantly of the demon-woman.” She smiled. “I think it must be a theme men like, it is repeated so often in our literature.”

  In the middle of summer, the third great festival of the Kyoto year transformed the city again into a display of scenic backdrops. On the eve of Gion Matsuri, the narrow lanes at the center of town were clogged with thirty-one elaborate, multistory floats, smothered in treasures and portable shrines, wobbly on their giant wooden wheels. Around them, the ancient houses were open to the street now, floodlit, their living rooms on show like a series of illuminated stage sets. House after tiny wooden house set up as in some spectral diorama: paintings, lacquer screens, old men playing cards around low tables. Occasionally, a group of naked-chested boys streaking through the lanes, making a strange cacophony as they passed.

  The next day, a ten-year-old boy with scarlet lips and whitened face, crowned with a phoenix, led the clanking wooden floats through the central streets of town, past geisha houses and old inns, towards the shrine that towered above the entertainment district. That afternoon, in the same shrine, I visited a special exhibition honoring the famous, centuries-old sweet-makers of the ancient capital. It was, of course, a private show, but somehow Etsuko, in the midst of arranging her father’s funeral, had found an invitation for me, at twenty-four hours notice, and, more than that, had given me a letter of introduction inside a card of Oxford, and, in fact, a picture of the very building in which I had once lived. (I thought with shame of how hard it would be for me, in California, to find a picture of her college, or whether I would even try.) Inside a special tent, a kimonoed woman, whose family had sweetened the palates of twenty generations of emperors, took me round the display of sweets, laid out on plates like Harry Winston jewels on a velvet cushion, each of them devoted to this year’s theme of “New Life.” Sweets laid out as teardrop crystals, sweets in watercolor seascapes; sweets alluding to the flower that heralded rebirth, sweets suggesting the imminence of cresting surf. Sweets as shells along the shore, sweets as snakes sloughing off old skins. Sweets that conveyed, with a drop of salt, the heartbreak of new affections. My own guide’s display was of Dante and Beatrice, made all of sweets, under the title, in sweet-form, “Vita Nuova.”

  Poems out of evanescence, old myths turned into candied images. And the next day, all these artifacts, the creation of a year, were gone.

  * * *

  One night, Sachiko called me up shortly before midnight, her voice as ever soft and breathless. “I want meet.”

  “Now?”

  “I’m so sorry. I want meet.”

  “Okay. I’ll meet you at the market twenty minutes from now.”

  A little later, she was walking towards me, smiling in the dark. “I’m very sorry,” she began, burying her head in my chest. “I need meet. I cannot patient.”

  Together, we walked through the darkened, narrow streets and into Kurodani Temple. The early-summer moon hung above us, ringed with phosphorescence, capturing the eye. Around us, here and there, lanterns pricked the dark. Beside us, in silence, a fire burned. Below, far below, as on a phantom ship, the quiet shimmer of the city’s lights.

  As
I led her through the towering temple gates, Sachiko suddenly stopped and caught her breath. “My dream,” she whispered. “I dream this gate. When I little children size, I dream this place.” She looked around in startled wonder. “I not come here this place before. But I feel come here before.” A chill went through me, and she shivered. “I little afraid this dream. Dream gate.”

  Together, in the shadow of the entranceway, we looked up at the temple, grave against the hooded, dark-blue sky. In the distance, a statue of Jizō; my favorite Buddha; the hills full of graves in the dark. A few dogs skulked across the asphalt. The sudden roar of a lone motorcyclist approaching; then a departing hush. Our features scarcely visible in the sacramental dark.

  “I remember,” she began, almost under her breath, “New Year Day. Very warm night, little same today. I walking in grave, together brother. He say, if we together, very old, we always live together.”

  I held her, shivering, against the windless night, and together we looked up at the hazy moon of monks. “I dream of sea,” she said, “and many star.” Above us, the moon was balanced on the branches.

  Then I felt her hot whisper in my ear, and saw her lying down, her curved eyes flashing in the dark.

  The moon, the mild, warm air; the silent, sleeping dogs.

  5

  AS SUMMER DEEPENED, Buddhism still continued to pursue me much more assiduously than I did it, and the procession of holy men to my guesthouse showed no signs of abating. One day, having narrowly avoided the Jehovah’s Witnesses (attractively represented by two young nymphs), I surfaced just in time to get a blessing from another roving evangel, who invited me into the corridor for some kuriingu (an alarming sight for a newcomer to the guesthouse, who walked up the stairs, jet-lagged, on only his second day in Japan, to see me and the girl, bowing our heads in the corridor, hands joined in prayer, repeating a mantram together, eyes closed). Soon, in fact, my alertness to the threat was so great that when a man appeared at my room, all politeness, I instantly assured him, “Thank you very much. But I’ve been blessed many times in recent weeks. That’s enough. Thank you!” and closed the door on the half-terrified face of a TV repairman.

  Another day, in Osaka Airport, I was wandering around the customs area, waiting for Sachiko, when a man materialized at my side. He extended a hand and then a business card, and told me how much he enjoyed living in Michigan. I was pleased; this was the first Japanese businessman who had ever come up to introduce himself.

  Then, however, my new friend began looking around shiftily. Was I alone? Yes, I said, for the moment. The next thing I knew, he was handing me a four-color brochure advertising a meditation institute that looked disarmingly similar to the one founded by Wayne Newton in the latest James Bond movie. The place was Buddhist, he said, handling the word with all the exotic and elegant associations it held for foreigners, and it had many foreign adherents; his life’s work would not be complete until I was among their number.

  Just then, up raced Sachiko, out of breath, to rescue me again from a Buddhist career.

  In Tokyo, a little later, I was looking for a place to stay. “Please try the Hokke Club,” a hotelier friend of Sachiko’s advised. “It’s in Ueno, and I can organize a special foreigner’s discount. It’s very unusual.” “Hokke Club?” I said, wondering whether its associations were with sports or truancy. “No problem. I’ll call up right now. How many nights?” “How much?” “Don’t worry. Any price okay.”

  I wondered what I was getting myself into as I went across town towards a hotel that sounded as suspicious as a members-only escort agency: when I arrived, I quickly got the picture. Through the lobby, like crowds from a Cartier-Bresson portrait of Shanghai in the thirties, filed a sea of strange gray families as far as possible from the polished Japanese norm: squinty little boys, skulking fathers, dowdy mothers. Some of them gathered in disorderly groups around the TV. Others, in summer kimono, filed like sci-fi creatures into an elevator. Others shambled through the lobby with the furtive air of yakuza or traveling minstrels, people exiled somehow from the promise of Japan. Like the derelicts downtown, or the snake-eating dwarfs I had seen once in a Kyoto freak-show tent, they seemed to belong to some hardscrabble underside of Japan.

  When I presented myself to the desk clerks, they led me up in the elevator, through a long corridor, up an emergency staircase, to a bare little room without a washbasin. Breakfast, they said, was compulsory, and would cost ten dollars. No exceptions were made. I did not sleep soundly that night in the Hokke, or Lotus, Club, at the heart of the Tenrikyo sect of Buddhism, one of the “new religions” of Japan, so affluent and powerful that it ran a whole city of its own near Nara.

  * * *

  In my own essay in Zen idleness, meanwhile, I was beginning to see how hard it was to leave thought alone. Not unlike Matthew, perhaps, I was realizing that I did not have the discipline to meditate, and because I did not meditate, I did not have the discipline. The analysis itself meant more paralysis; reason proved unable to transcend itself. And everywhere I looked, to my chagrin, I found admonishing injunctions: even in the metropolitan prose of Julian Barnes, worldliest of writers, I came across moments that sounded like pure Zen: “Stop the loom, the futile chattering loom of human thought. Stare at the lighted window, and just breathe.”

  In other ways, though, inevitably, I was also beginning to see that I drew closest to the discipline only when I did not know that I was doing so — in the utter absorption of writing about Sachiko, say, or talking with her sometimes. Happiness came with self-forgetfulness, and it seemed only apt that the Buddhist principle of “right absorption” was translated often as “right rapture.” True concentration took one out of time and self, an unacknowledged ecstasy. And if Zen extolled the child as much as any Romantic poet did, that was partly because the child lived fully and intensely in the moment, free of both nostalgia and a sense of future. Only when the mind was not preoccupied could it be fully occupied by something else.

  I thought back then to what the abbot of Tōfukuji had said, explaining how even a businessman or journalist had something to gain from a night in a monastery, and a taste of stillness. One had to learn how not to spend time, he had suggested. “When you’re hurrying around too quickly,” he had said, “there’s a part of the world you can’t see. If, for example, you’re taking a wrong direction in your life, it’s only when you stop and look at things clearly that you can revise your direction and take a more proper course. The message of Zen is that in order to find ourselves, we’ve got to learn to stop.” This whole year, now, seemed a lesson of that sort.

  As Sachiko came towards the end of her tour-conductor course and the beginning of her dreams of taking off into the dark, the pressures on her grew more and more intense, till it seemed as if she were wandering through a kind of wind tunnel. Often, when I saw her, she seemed alight with her new prospects, quickened and uplifted by her expanded sense of horizon. Just as often, though, I could see how much her struggle to be free could weigh her down.

  One day, as she was excitedly telling me about her plans for travel and self-sufficiency, the phone rang, and she picked it up brightly. As the minutes passed, I saw her face fall. “Chigau, chigau,” she kept repeating. “No. That’s wrong! You don’t understand!” Finally, after forty-five minutes of discussion, she put the phone down and flopped into her chair, her spirit broken. “My mother say she want die,” she told me, through her tears. “I need stop course. I cannot more. I dream bird life, but I cannot. My dream, child dream. I not bird; I human.”

  “But, Sachiko, you need a dream if you want to change. If no dream, all your life will be sad.”

  “This part I know very well,” she said sadly. “But I not so strong. I not so have confidence. I see foreigner person, they little giant feeling. Anything do, very easy. But I little scared. My boat very tiny.”

  She stopped, and brushed her eyes clean. “Middle life best, all person say. But I have problem. I cannot stop. Middle life very easy, I k
now very well. But I want dream, I want more difficult life. This Japanese system: no dream — no problem.”

  By now, I could more easily understand why dreams held such a talismanic importance for her. In dreams lay responsibility, in a very literal sense; in dreams lay her only hope for realizing — even transcending — herself. Dreams meant carving out a little imaginative space of one’s own — a retreat — in a world as cramped in time as it was in space; yet the Japanese were more keen to have dreams entertain them than the other way round. It often seemed to me, in fact, that all the tinkly amusement-park surfaces and chipper reassurances of the public world here were almost a way of keeping people quiet; or at least of providing them with preshrunk pleasures so that they would not seek out unscheduled dreams of their own — let alone acknowledge any kind of sadness. Thus all the happy communal rites — from Disneyland tours to cherry blossom parties — seemed ways of providing safe, user-friendly forms of organized happiness, satisfaction guaranteed, a little like the bright baubles that a parent might offer a child to prevent him from crying. This was the social contract in Japan: forfeit your individuality and you would receive a life of perfect stability and comfort; give yourself over to Japan and it would never let you down. It was like a kind of emotional welfare system: give up your freedom and you would receive a life so convenient that you’d hardly notice the freedom you’d relinquished.

  So when Sachiko went on talking of dreams, I tried to hold my tongue. For her, every dream was something of a triumph, and movies like Rocky III, which she had seen four times, were especially liberating tales to one who was struggling to see how an individual could live apart from the system. She had told me recently of a friend of hers, a twenty-year-old girl, whose ardor for a-ha was so intense that she had taken a part-time job and worked around the clock to save up enough money to see every single concert on their forthcoming tour of Japan, following them from Tokyo to Nagasaki to Osaka to Yokohama to Fukuoka and around. Didn’t she think it was sad, I said, that this was the closest her friend could get to foreign feeling?