The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  And as we wandered through the latest outpost of the Japanese Empire — a Gold Coast cluttered now with o-bentō stalls and koto-Muzaked malls, where couples in “Homey Honeymoon” T-shirts walked along sidewalks thick with signs crying, “Irasshaimase!” and koalas advertising prices in yen — Sachiko, in a fit of mischief, tried out the new phrase she had learned in her tour-conductor course.

  “I think I want vomit. Please can I have an airsickness bag?”

  Later, as the summer drew towards an end, back in Japan, we traveled to the Izu Peninsula, the mountainous resort not far from Tokyo, and soon I found myself sitting at dawn each day in a secluded cedar bath, high above the rushing of a stream, encircled by a ring of tall pines. The mist lifted off the water like a screen behind a stage. At night, in our small room, Sachiko curled a finger behind the shoji screen, making the shadow of an evil-eyed wolf.

  After dark, in the distance, we could hear a pagan pounding through the trees, reminiscent of the distant drums in Kawabata’s famous “Izu Dancer” story. Lanterns, red and white, were strung across the hillside, like light bulbs in some high school carnival. A long line of grannies circled slowly around a central tower, to the shrill notes of traditional music, flapping their arms around, slow and ceremonious as dying coquettes, as they summoned spirits back to earth, marking the start of the Night of a Thousand Lanterns. Along the edge of the trees, toddlers in indigo yukata scooped goldfish out of tanks, while tourists from the city ascended the tower to deliver heartfelt, deep-voiced renditions of melancholy love songs.

  Together, Sachiko and I meandered in and out amidst the trees, along the roaring stream, a gauzy summer moon high above us. The music was carried faint to us, and eerie, through the trees.

  “I think,” she said mistily, “this little Heian Age. Many curtains. Very quiet. Man, woman, not so direct feeling. Japanese person much love poem life.”

  Emboldened, I told her how much I found of her in Genji: in her devotion to flowers, her fondness for cats, a quickness to sorrow that could almost come to self-pity. So much in her reminded me of the spirited, dreamy, quick-witted women of the Heian period, less conventional, perhaps, than their men (if only because they had less to lose), and pledged, as the author of Sarashina Nikki had it, “to walk across the bridge of dreams.” Sachiko, however, did not seem uplifted by this.

  “I not so like Genji. Much much baby-making ceremony there.”

  “But in the Heian period, it sounds so poetic. Lovers together in kimono, looking at the moon, then leaving at dawn with a morning-after poem.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe very beautiful letter. But all Genji little ‘sex machine’ feeling. Genji little same Rod Stewart. This story little singles-bar style. I not so like.” With that, she went into a rapturous tribute to John Denver.

  By now, Sachiko and I were bypassing language altogether very often. And though there were parts of me she could not see, and vice versa, they were really, I thought, the parts least worthy of being seen, the verbal and the analytical sides that made up nothing but a captious surface. Not seeing them, in a sense, allowed us to see one another more clearly, just as the bareness of a Japanese room sharpened attention and heightened intensity. The words we could not share left us more room for ourselves.

  The Japanese, of course, had long prided themselves on their ability to communicate without words (in part, no doubt, because this served to bind the tribe together and so keep aliens out); in phrases like ishin-denshin, they enshrined the Buddhist ideal of speaking through actions more than words. And Sachiko, living her life in subtitles now, and resolving herself into the simplicity of a haiku, was, without trying, teaching me gradually to see a little below the surface and grow more attentive to the small print of the world. Once, when she handed me some chocolates wrapped in a stylish green pouch, I tore open the bag and gobbled them down. Only later did I gather that the present was not, in fact, the candies but the bag. It was the green, she explained, of “little cartoon eating food” (she burst into a rendition of the “Popeye” theme song). And the Japanese word for “spinach,” she said, was a homonym for their word for “secret love.” Thus, ever since the Heian period, giving someone a present wrapped in a bag of spinach-green had been the most eloquent way of giving him one’s heart.

  8

  ONE DAY, towards the end of summer, wearing a long red dress to offset the blinding green, and carrying a red silk umbrella against the rain, Etsuko invited me to the fabled rock garden at Ryōanji, its enigmatic stones a natural koan, and one stone omitted so that each visitor could make the meaning something different. Along one side of the Dragon Peace Temple, a washbasin read simply, “I learn to be contented.”

  As we sat on the platform, in the early drizzle of a hazy afternoon, Etsuko asked if I had been following the news about the Hanshin Tigers. I knew that the summer had not been treating my favorite team well. Japanese champions just two years before, they were now in last place. Their longtime star, Kakefu, or “Mr. Tiger,” was said to be contemplating retirement. Taxi drivers squirmed and sucked their teeth whenever I brought up their favorite subject, and Sachiko, in a characteristic burst of impishness, had happily asserted, “This year Tigers not so strong! They not true Tigers; they Hanshin Cats!”

  The drama had come to a climax, though, when the son of their leading star, Randy Bass, had developed a brain tumor. Bass, who had led them to the championship, had compiled the most impressive statistics of any American ever to play in Japan; more important, perhaps, he had adjusted philosophically to the Japanese system, not only slugging fifty home runs in a season but bowing when requested to do so, stoically refusing to complain when rival teams conspired to prevent him from breaking Japanese records, and even inspiring a chant that went, “God-Buddha-Bass!” Recently, though, he had flown off to San Francisco to be at his eight-year-old son’s bedside. The Tigers had grown restive. Complications had developed, bringing the boy even closer to death. The agreed-upon deadline passed, and still Bass had stayed by his boy. Finally, the team had offered an ultimatum: come back or get fired. Bass had remained with his son, putting family before company. That, to the Tigers, had seemed the ultimate heresy. So, in a kind of strategic suicide, they had fired their Most Valuable Player.

  To replace him, they had scouted around for another gaijin and, somehow or other, had ended up with a famous malingerer whose indiscipline was so legendary that he had already been jettisoned by both the Yankees and the Angels. (The next foreigner they signed slugged thirty-eight home runs but incurred the wrath of all Japan when caught by a photographer making breakfast for his son, while his wife slept in.) Loss followed loss, of games as well as face.

  “Did you hear what happened yesterday?” Etsuko asked me in the quiet of the rock garden, face pale.

  “No.”

  “The general manager of the Tigers jumped to his death from the eighth floor of the New Otani Hotel.”

  Meanwhile, in lesser ways, the cross-cultural collisions were continuing all around me. Each night, from my room, I could hear the former president of Harvard’s Spee Club stalking up and down the corridors, complaining of the “epistemological uncertainty” of a land “where nothing was real,” while someone else marveled aloud about how he could earn $250,000 a year here as a translator. A group of thirteen Israelis began camping out in a single room downstairs, part of a circuit of foreigners who lived off the Madonna and Mickey Mouse posters they could sell on the street, making three hundred dollars or more a night. Another newcomer from Santa Barbara appeared, called, as if in some bad movie, “Beach.”

  Matthew, by now, was living in Thailand, and Siobhan had returned to the Haight with a tall, silent, ponytailed Japanese boy, with whom she had no common language. Etsuko was making plans to take off for California herself — as soon as her daughter was out of school — and write a thesis on folklore and Christianity, picking up the intellectual interests she’d had to keep in storage for so long. And Shinji, the gaijin-lover fr
om Nagasaki, had managed somehow to make it to the outside world — Australia — which he now proclaimed to find “very easy, very boring.” One day, I got a package from Sydney, and tore it open to find eleven different tapes, all handmade, and carefully labeled, and based on the stray preferences I had expressed in Nagasaki almost six months before; later, another shipment came, and then another. For all his willed rebellion, I gathered, Shinji was as thoughtful and kind as every other Japanese I had met, and as skilled in the ways of obligation: having showered me with presents — David Lindley bootlegs, Amazulu tapes, ancient Buffalo Springfield tapes, and the latest from the Waterboys — he now felt free to ring me up at 6 a.m. and ask for a Burberry coat or information on helicopter licenses, advice for his friend in her college applications or a letter in support of his American visa. And since any favor I did him reduced his emotional credit, as well as the interest he could collect on it, both of us kept trying to outdo the other in kindnesses, in part so as not to have to do them again. It reminded me a little of the “you first; no, you; no, please, I insist” routines that had so charmed me when first I arrived.

  No place, of course, is an idyll to its residents, as no man is a prophet in his own household. And foreigners everywhere are more solicitous about the traditions of their adopted homes than natives are (as converts are more zealous, often, than those born into a faith): Asians in America sometimes seemed as intent on keeping up the “American Way” as foreigners in Kyoto were on preserving the ancient capital’s streetcars and old wooden houses. Yet still, in Japan, the divisions seemed uncommonly intense, if only because Japan lived at the other extreme from the self-analytical and abstract ways of the West, and was anxious to enforce that distance. The Japanese drove on the left and read their magazines from back to front. They put their verbs at the end of sentences and took their baths at night. Sexually, they “went” where we “came”; emotionally, they smiled where we wept. Even their baggage carousels moved in the opposite direction. Translated into terms we understood, two plus two made five here.

  This it was, I suspected, together with the maintenance of a public face that never cracked, that began to account for the unusual violence of so many foreign responses to Japan — the same people who so admired the formality and reticence of the Japanese aesthetic complaining, often, about the formality and reticence of the Japanese people, and the same ones who so bridled at Japanese claims that Japan could be understood only by the Japanese mocking the way the Japanese spoke English. This it was too, perhaps, that helped to explain why foreigners’ responses to Japan seemed so uniform and yet so violently divided — in proportion, perhaps, to the gap between public and private. The tourists who came here for two weeks could not stop marveling, often, at the silence of the place; the longtime residents heard only the clatter of pachinko coins, the blare of right-wing megaphones, the syncopated roar of TV baseball crowds. The people who were sightseers here seemed moved, nearly always, by the courtesy and consideration that they found; the residents saw nothing but hypocrisy. And the visitors went home, very often, wishing that the West could be more like Japan; while the residents stayed here, unable to forgive Japan for not being more like the West.

  For my own part, I began to realize that every statement I made about Japan applied just as surely in the opposite direction. I might think it odd that Japanese girls covered their mouths whenever they laughed — until I remembered that we were trained to cover our mouths whenever we yawn. I might wince every time I read dismissive talk of “foreigners” in Japanese novels — until I thought how we use “Orientals” in our own. I might be surprised at the formal rites of Japanese courtesy — until I remembered how firmly I had been taught to say “Thank you,” even for gifts I did not like.

  The best advice on the subject, though, seemed to come, appropriately enough, from a baseball player, Ben Oglivie, the famously literate right fielder for the Milwaukee Brewers, celebrated for reading Plato and Thoreau on the team bus. Now in his sunset years with the Kintetsu Buffaloes, Oglivie had only one problem here, a friend of mine who knew him said, and that was his philosophical bent; while other imported stars took the money and ran, Oglivie dwelt and dwelt on the challenge of different cultures. And his conclusion seemed infinitely more enlightened than that of many thinkers and social critics. “It’s no good coming over here and criticizing the Japanese game,” he told my friend. “That’s like going into someone’s house and criticizing the way he’s arranged the furniture. It’s his house, and that’s the way he likes it. It’s not for the guest to start changing things around.” It took a ballplayer, I realized, to teach us elementary civility.

  The complexities of cultural cross-breeding came home to me most poignantly, however, when a Japanese friend from California came to visit in Kyoto. In Santa Barbara, Sumi had always struck me as a typically sweet exemplar of her culture: an accomplished listener with a computer memory, an earnest, almost guileless, optimist, and a model of hardworking consideration, holding down eight jobs and taking four courses while still finding time to design her own cards for birthdays, Thanksgivings, and Halloweens. Now, though, after three years away, she found herself as estranged from her homeland as from an America that conformed less and less to cliché. She was shocked, she told me after she arrived, to see, for the first time ever, the sorrow and frustration of this endlessly hustling country. I was shocked to see how she had slipped, without noticing it, from first person to third when talking of the Japanese.

  Returning to her small hometown, moreover, Sumi had found herself shunned by all her high school friends, not only because she had made it to the land of which they only dreamed, but also — and especially — because she presented it back to them now as something more complex than a beach poster. They could not forgive her, so it seemed, for importing some reality. She, in turn, having read about Japanese history for the first time abroad, and about Buddhism, could scarcely believe now, or forgive, the distance at which Japan lived from that knowledge, and from the source of its traditions. America, she said, seemed so optimistic, and I, thinking of how I viewed Japan, could only bite my tongue. It was, perhaps, the old half-empty/half-full conundrum; but we are optimists when faced with another culture, and pessimists when faced with our own.

  Such confusions were growing more and more common now as more and more Japanese women began going abroad — or joining foreign firms — to gain the possibilities denied to them at home. This, the papers proclaimed, was the Onna no Jidai, or Era of Women. And even those who played by the accepted rules seemed far more complex than the smiling pietàs by whom I had been so enchanted when first I had arrived. Through Sachiko now, I was meeting all kinds of women with lives quite as quirky as any in the West — one who did not even know what her husband of ten years did for a living, and another who, in three years of marriage, had never had it consummated; one mild-mannered girl who ran a pyramid-game fraud, and another who patiently waited for the one day a year when she could spend a night together with her married lover. The acupuncturist Keiko, meanwhile, after four months of living with both her husband and her boyfriend, had finally broken down and tried to slash her wrists. Filing for divorce, she had moved back with her parents, who every night received anonymous phone calls from a woman who gave them details of their daughter’s infamy.

  Only Hideko, the textbook model of a decorous mother and wife, seemed to be keeping up the role of a perfect ōtome fujin (or “automated wife”), and that was because her emotions were so little implicated in the role. Now she was just returned from Australia and could not stop talking about the strip shows she had enjoyed, this prim and tiny lady, every day of her stay. The little girl she led around with her was already a mistress of distances; eyes huge, she hid behind her mother’s designer skirts, keeping the world outside at bay.

  Just as I was trying to put all these lives into perspective, I chanced to pick up a collection of short stories by Tsushima Yūko, one of the leading women writers in Japan today, and t
he daughter of the famous novelist Osamu Dazai. And suddenly, racing through her sad and suffocating tales of single mothers dreaming of flight, waiting for the men who invariably walk out on them, I felt I was seeing modern Japan for the first time, the world that all the great male novelists so scrupulously sifted out. Tanizaki and Kawabata loved young women mostly for the use they made of them, pygmalionizing them, treating them as flowers almost, totemizing them as perfect emblems of threatened purity (“It’s as if Kinko has no personality of her own, and that’s why she seems so extraordinarily feminine,” Osamu Dazai himself had written, in the voice of a fictitious schoolgirl). Even contemporary female writers seemed often to embrace the assumptions forced upon them (“A rational woman is as ridiculous,” writes Enchi Fumiko, “as a flower held together with wire”). But here in Tsushima’s gray and rainy tales of lonely, wasted women exchanging intimacies in coffee shops and love hotels, I felt I was seeing Japan through the other end of the telescope at last: the concrete blocks behind the cherry blossoms.

  Most of her stories were set within the moody, blighted landscape of modern industrial Japan, amidst smog-shrouded, look-alike station cafés or lonely, boarded-up seaside resorts where it was always out of season. Always the main character, like Tsushima herself, was a weary single mother, surrounded by her children, hemmed in by her duties, and hostage to her culture’s expectations, and always she was dreaming of escape — to the sea, to an inn, to anywhere other than her clangorous apartment. Women alone in the dark, dreaming of the day when they’d grow wings “and everyone would finally realize that she hadn’t been just some mother.”