by Pico Iyer
“Not sad! This her dream!”
“But isn’t it sad that she must have such a dream? It means her real life is a little empty. She would not need such a dream if she were fully happy. And she would not love a-ha so much if she had a real-life boyfriend.”
This reasoning left Sachiko subdued. It was only later that I realized that to downgrade dreams with her was probably as cruel as to quicken them.
The first time that I ever saw Sachiko really bristle, though, was one day when I told her that I’d just gone to see The Last Emperor. She had not seen it and, she said, she never wanted to see it, after what her Japanese friends had told her. “Why this movie show many Japanese person do terrible thing? Whyyy? All person crazy in war. Japanese, Korean, your country person — all same!”
“But foreigners get upset that the Japanese pretend that the conquest of Manchuria never happened. It’s not the movie the Japanese government wants to cut; it’s the documentary footage of what really went on, the same material that is deliberately left out of all your history books. Japan is too proud to admit its mistakes.”
Sachiko, though, was not appeased, and much as she longed for images of exotic China, and all the mystery and splendor of the Silk Road, she adamantly refused to see this matchless vision of the Forbidden City. “Why foreigner person not understand Japanese heart?” she went on, somewhat plaintively. “They say Japan very terrible, many killing whale. But whale very special animal, Japanese person believe. Eating whale little religious ceremony. Other animal not same.”
Now the box was open, there was no putting a lid on it.
“You see this movie, little three lady, devil?” she continued.
“The Witches of Eastwick?”
“Maybe. Jack Nicholson little devil feeling.”
“Right.”
“Jack Nicholson little Japanese man feeling?”
“Japanese??”
“I think foreigner person think Japanese man devil.”
“No, no, Sachiko, that’s not true. Maybe sometimes they see him as a little robotlike.” I tried — and failed — to be diplomatic. “But not devil. You can see in Kyoto how many foreigners want to come to Japan. Besides, in America there are so many Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indians, Vietnamese, and Afghans, no one has a very clear sense of the Japanese.”
“But my friend say” — this was always the prelude to some Japanese superstition about abroad — “she go many country Europa, many person not so kind for Japanese.”
“Not so kind to Europeans either, I expect.”
“Really?” But I could tell she didn’t believe me.
“Really! Japanese visitors are usually very polite, very gentle, very shy.”
“But I read in magazine, foreigner person think Japanese man little devil.”
She had also, I remembered now, read in a magazine that Howard the Duck was meant to be a foreign caricature of the Japanese abroad, small, well-dressed, polite, and forever put upon by the humans he was so foolishly parodying.
At moments like this, I could see how hard it would always be for her to break away from Japan, and not only because Japan had never taught her to live without it. For something deeper was going on here than the usual conflict between self and society, or, in the Japanese context, between giri and ninjō (duty and feeling); something deeper, too, than the familiar double standard that allows us to challenge the criticisms from others that we ourselves feel free to make (I can attack my mother, but you cannot). And as fast as Sachiko sought the foreign way, Japan remained as deeply rooted in her as her family did. Watching her waver between a Western and a Japanese destiny, I began to wonder whether the country itself, determined now to turn “international,” as its last divine-born Emperor lingered on his deathbed, would ever be able — or even want — to surrender the beliefs that kept it in a world all its own.
“Japanese need change heart,” she said one day, more able now to see her country’s limits.
“But then the whole system, which has become the most successful in the world, must change.”
She nodded slowly. “Maybe very difficult.”
I could see her extending the analogy towards herself.
“Don’t worry, Sachiko,” I said with glib assurance, not even really persuading myself. “Worry doesn’t help; it only clouds or distorts. If you can solve a problem, there’s no need to worry; and if you can’t, there’s nothing gained by worry. Just stay calm, and there’s nothing you can’t do.”
Sachiko took this in, remaining very silent.
6
THROUGH ALL THE TIME I had been living in Japan, the one force of which I had been most conscious was Time. It was not just that I found myself hoarding moments like a miser, taking time as a measure of freedom and painfully aware that hours, once lost, could never be retrieved; it was also that modern Japan, secular Japan, the Japan that was racing into the future as swiftly and smoothly as a Rolls-Royce, seemed strangely captive to Time. In Kyoto, I sometimes felt as if I were living inside a hall of clocks — the digital counters all around counting down the days till the next great exhibition or the minutes till the next train, the little clocks at the bottom of the TV screens ticking off the breakfast hour during morning shows, the dates dutifully printed on many photographs and even on computer screens; everything became a wake-up call or a keepsake, an attempt to hold time back, or rob the passing minutes of a moment. In that sense, I could see that Sachiko’s awestruck, breath-held whisper of “Time stop!” was truly the highest praise that she could give.
It often seemed, in fact, that the greatest of all the forces in Japan was Time, if only because it was the most implacable. Yes, the Japanese could manage Time, better than anyone I knew; yes, they could harmonize themselves with its rhythms and pay homage to it with their rites (a girl becomes a woman on this day, and on this day autumn turns to winter); yes, they could make uncommonly good use of Time. But still, Time could not be controlled, as Space, or Nature, or even Truth, could be.
That was why, I sometimes felt, the Japanese were such connoisseurs of memory, the faculty that allowed them to package Time and turn the bumpy chaos of successive moments into an elegy as beautiful as art. It was also, perhaps, why they excelled so much at slowness and at speed. Most of all, it began to explain why so much of Japan was set up as a retreat from Time, a way to stay Time, or step out of it. The monastery, where one took off one’s watch as soon as one entered, was the purest expression of this; the water-world, where life was inverted with such Bacchanalian precision that women called out “Good morning!” to one another at midnight, was another.
I got my own most vivid taste of this one day when I missed the last train home from Kobe. I could not find a business or city hotel nearby, and even if I could, I knew that it would be painfully expensive. I could not see a capsule hotel. The only alternative, I knew, and the only place as reasonable as a monastery, would be a love hotel.
Off a side street, just under the gleaming boutiques and ethnic chic of Tor Road, I came upon a collection of these brightly decorated dream chambers, recently renamed “fashion hotels,” and lined up with the implausible, synthetic neatness of buildings along Main Street in Disneyland. I peered into the Rabbit’s Ears Hotel and saw an aging couple shuffle off into the futuristic Charon. But the one that appealed to me the most was the Gatsby Hotel. It had an especially sharp, cream-colored stylishness to it, with sports-car stripes down its middle, and its name, I thought, could only be auspicious. As soon as I ventured inside, a robot greeted me with a Japanese cry of “Welcome,” and I was faced with a panel of photographs of rooms, some of them illuminated. I pressed the cheapest one that I could find — it looked like a gentrified, modern one-room apartment, a palace by Japanese standards — and an arrow flashed in the hallway above me. I followed it up a bright flight of European-style stairs, past framed Barney’s ads, a message in Greek, an article about Christopher Isherwood, an old London playbill, a glossy profile of Natasha Richardson
, and a sign that said, “Some of the best-dressed beds will be wearing white linen,” all of these West Hollywood artifacts set smartly against the white, white walls. Through the bright, noiseless corridor the arrow kept blinking, silently, at the level of the EXIT signs, leading me on and on and on to a room with a flashing number, whose door swung obligingly open before me. I went in, slipping into a pair of wool-lined sandals at the entrance.
As usual in Japan, the photos had not lied: the room was possibly the cleanest and most stylish suite I had ever seen. Everything was color coordinated in elegant, Art Deco hues of black and gold: black Kleenex boxes, black matchbooks on a gold glass table, black beakers with the gold logo “Gatsby” on them. In the spotlessly clean bathroom, black-and-gold bottles of aftershave, neatly wrapped toothbrushes and combs, black-and-gold-rimmed mirrors; the door on the shower just fuzzy enough to turn movement into the haziest suggestion of movement. In the dining area, a table, a refrigerator, a black kettle for tea. And beside the spacious white bed, on its slightly raised platform, a digital, remote-control switchboard from which one could soften lights, select music, switch on TV or warm the room. One could play video games on TV (explained in a slim black-and-golden book), pen endearments to one’s sweetheart (a black-and-golden notebook was provided for such purposes), or enjoy Rental Wife on the special hotel channel, in which Yumi, a long-legged nineteen-year-old, lent herself out as a friend to the lonely. Reclining on the bed, in a space as chic as some SoHo café, I felt in command of the world.
Or, better yet, exempted from the world, in a space all my own. Time and the self were ritually annulled in this capsule; all noise and distraction were screened out in this soundproof chamber. There were no windows, really, no maids, no noises from the hall; for once in Japan, there was total privacy and freedom. Not a trace of the world outside the designer fantasy.
I had expected — I had feared — in coming to a love hotel, to find something more rococo or stridently theatrical: a room like a space-age rocket, perhaps, or a caveman’s den, some other-worldly setting to accommodate the demand for a holiday from self. But just the insulation, the hushed spotlessness, of this elegant space was fantasy enough; entering it, one stepped into another world. The compact apartment in black and gold was not only the smartest place I had ever stayed in, it was also the most relaxing. And the main decoration in the room, I noticed as I settled in, was a beautifully framed poster announcing “The Still Center of the Turning Worlds (Intensive Seminars in Zen Buddhist meditation with Zen Master Rama).” After giving a brief synopsis of Zen, the black-and-scarlet poster provided an address from which one could procure a book called Zen for the Computer Age. It was, all in all, the perfect prop: for when I woke up the next day, and walked out into summer sun, the robot calling “Welcome” as the automatic doors slid closed behind me, I felt as cleansed as if I had been staying in a temple.
I got my final taste of how the Japanese secede from Time when Etsuko invited me, one late summer day, to a traditional teahouse along the Philosopher’s Path. Inside a spotless antechamber, we sipped some piquant apple juice, in tiny tumblers, fresh as mountain water. Then we followed a woman in a kimono out into the exquisite garden, one small stone wrapped in black marking the direction. Again we found ourselves inside a waiting room — all polished black tables, and a single paper lantern, plover-shaped.
Within the tearoom itself, every detail sang the shifting of the seasons. The poem in the tokonoma alcove spoke of hearts resembling the autumn moon. An incense holder reproduced the circle of the harvest moon. The seven autumn grasses poked, haphazardly elegant, out of a long-necked vase. “In tea,” said Etsuko softly, “we can get a taste of eternity — if I may use such a term.” She giggled self-consciously. “And that is completely separate from our real, quotidian lives. But tea gives us a concentration, and helps us empty ourselves out. By concentrating on the ritual, on all the forms and details, we can clean ourselves out. And then we can return more strongly to our usual lives.”
In the distance, I could hear the faintest implication of a koto. The temple bells were beginning to sound along the eastern hills. A faint chill of autumn could be felt now in the air; the moon was dimly outlined in the blue. I wanted, desperately, to escape time now; autumn, and departure, were quickly drawing near.
7
NOT LONG BEFORE I left Japan, I got a chance at last to see Sachiko take her first tremulous steps abroad; my work was sending me to Korea and Australia, and I arranged my schedule in order to be able to meet up with her on foreign soil. It was, as I had expected, a pleasure unalloyed to see her setting foot abroad, so electric with elation, and so high that, as she readily admitted, “My stomach little hurt. Too much excited. Cannot control. Cannot sleep!” Eager to be charmed, ready for delight, she felt herself swept up in such a surge of freedom that, her first day out of Japan, she literally began skipping across her hotel room like a hopscotch-playing schoolgirl.
I felt like skipping, too, at times, so magically did she remake the world with her fresh Miranda eyes. Usually, I could not bear even the mention of discos, but Sachiko was so excited to see these wonder worlds that I took her dancing every night, and saw these gaudy pleasure-domes anew. Once, when I invited her to an expensive French restaurant in Seoul, she was so confused and overwhelmed by the list of delicacies, this smallest and most ladylike of women, that she started ordering one dish from every section of the menu — poultry, meat, and seafood. Later, when I took her to the nightclub area, I could feel her tensing up, as anxious and excited as a girl on her first trip into the big city. That night, back in the hotel, she was so full up, in every sense, that she simply flopped down on her bed and fell asleep in her best clothes.
Often, too, I could see how her buoyancy actually reshaped the world it met. One night, I took her to a country-and-western bar in the red-light district of Seoul, where huge, big-necked GIs straddled bar girls while “Maggie May” and “Smooth Operator” rasped across the system. After we took our seats, a harassed, pretty Korean girl sauntered up to take our order. Sachiko, however, was so disarmed by this kind of place, and so intrigued, that she started asking the girl questions, and with such happy sincerity that the girl in turn responded — and soon the two of them were sitting side by side, chatting away in an unlikely English and telling one another, through shining eyes, their hopes for one another’s future. Around them, bargirls squealed over darts, and Asia hands fondled Asian thighs; but all the world was lost to Sachiko and her friend as, earnestly, they exchanged their hearts. When finally we got up to leave, many hours later, the hostess extended a warm hand to each of us, eyes bright.
Whenever we went to a restaurant, Sachiko greeted the waitress with a happy “Kansahamnida!,” her first Korean word, and if ever she got a reply in Japanese, she let out a breathless sigh of relief and returned to her native tongue with a happy “Yokatta!” (I’m so glad). In sushi bars, she looked on in horror as Japanese businessmen, in golf shirts and crisp pants, picked their teeth and stared into the distance, with an air of lazy ownership, while their local girlfriends slurped down noodles. And when, on her last night in Korea, I took her to a performance of classical dance, she came out shaken, close to tears. “Before, I always thinking Korean person little animal person. Very big voice, very tough, always fighting! Now I’m so sorry! I very embarrassed! I see Korean person have much pride! They make very beautiful dance, very special custom. But I not know. I so sorry!”
In Australia, the first time she had ever seen a non-Asian culture, she felt, not surprisingly, even more transported, as giddy as if she had walked, quite literally, through a screen. “I feel I little living in TV,” she reported in quiet wonder, displaced by something more than jet lag as we walked Down Under streets. “This dream world? I sleepy? Maybe soon wake up?” As we sat in a restaurant outside the Opera House, white tablecloths snapping in the lazy sunlight, and the chic young things of Sydney stretching out their golden limbs, she let out a gasp. “This not K
obe movie? This not Nagasaki park? This true? That lady, little same Olivia Hussey feeling! This man, little Hall and Oates! That man, Robert Redford! This true? My life? Why movie not stop?”
Sachiko in Australia was the spirit of delight incarnate, bending down to interview every child she passed, surprising old ladies by asking if they would pose with her in pictures, cross-questioning teenagers about their dreams. She could hardly walk past a single shop without letting out a cry of pleasure and rushing in to look more closely at their unimaginable discounts, and after visiting the beach one day, she felt so light that she simply took off her shoes and scampered barefoot through the Sydney streets. As our plane took off from Brisbane, she gasped with wonder, and sat by the window throughout the flight, peering out into the clouds. She had never seen a green-eyed child before, never heard buskers playing music in the street, never spent a whole day driving. She had never ordered a cocktail before or ridden a horse, been approached by men on the street or visited a noisy pub. Dressing up each night in her very best clothes, she had left the old Sachiko far behind.
“This true not dream?” she asked more than ever, and I did not know what to say.
I noticed, too, as Sachiko rhapsodized about this new world, how familiar her rapture sounded. Every child here, however runty or unexceptional, seemed a “doll”; every person impressed her as “very kind, very warm.” Every new street hit her like some otherworldly dream. She sounded, in fact, like me exalting the lanterned lanes of Gion.
And nothing ever fazed her here except the signs of a Japan that she was seeing as if for the first time. She had never noticed before how the Japanese always wore black and white; she had never noticed before how incongruous they looked in their scuba divers’ goggles or “Wombat” ties (as incongruous, almost, as big-boned blondes in kimono). She had never, in fact, felt so estranged from the group. Brisbane Airport, she pronounced, was very dirty, “because many many Japanese person here.” In Surfers Paradise, as she watched her countrymen moving in tidy hordes to snap up Gucci bags and Cartier watches, she could hardly conceal her shock. “Why they all want same-same? Before, I thinking Japanese person coming Australia very special! But this style person very different. Not so special.”
