The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  The men in her stories were not cads or fiends; just married men in search of pleasure, with other matters on their minds, giving their lovers children, and giving their children presents, so that they would not have to give themselves. They were not so much members of a household as sightseers there. “A man was the sort who’d give you any number of children and then run off when the mood took him”; a father was “a mere shadow in a photograph.” The setting of the story, often, was the day after, in an age that did not believe in morning-after poems.

  Yet even as she described the transaction as a woman’s plight, Tsushima did not, I felt, overlook the reserves of strength that Japanese women kept in private: all her women were living in a transitional age, when the reality of their inherited powerlessness was tempered by the first suggestions of a dawning freedom. In one story, a woman known only, and archetypally, as the “Mother,” absently cleans up around her drab room while waiting for her runaway daughter to return. With half her heart, she fears for her only companion; with the other half, she almost envies the girl for laying claim to a freedom that she herself has always been denied. Again and again in the stories, Tsushima alluded to the overgrowth at the side of a garden, the wilderness just beyond the neat suburban parks. Always, around the immaculate public places, there lurked a few “dark tangles along the walls.” And it was in these undomesticated spaces, she suggested, that the women were beginning to gather their strength unseen.

  9

  AS SUMMER drew towards an end, Sachiko got ready for her biggest move of all: taking off on a new life of her own. She had finished her Osaka course by now and passed the qualifying test, and she was ready to begin working as an international tour guide. With her monklike swiftness and one-pointedness, she had already mapped out a concrete plan of action: how she would file for divorce, move into a new home with her children, reassume her maiden name, and set up a professional life, leading tours around Asia and Japan. It was hard for me to recall now the Sachiko who, only a few months before, had hardly stepped outside Kyoto.

  As she closed in on her dreams, the cavils of her society only mounted and intensified. On a practical level, her friends were extraordinarily generous: when her Walkman broke, Keiko promptly gave her another, and when she started looking around for a home, Hideko promised her an electric range and a VCR. Emotionally, though, they seemed determined to box her into the same narrow compartments to which they had resigned themselves. The best way to express yourself was to efface yourself, they kept reminding her; a woman’s strength should come from weakness. Foreigners were dangerous, and so were dreams; a woman should fulfill herself within the family. Speaking her mind, they said, was almost worse than telling lies.

  Sometimes, Sachiko seemed exhausted by all this. “Woman’s world very complicated,” she often told me. “Japanese woman, not so easy heart. Much jealousy there! I want say true. But always say true, soon biggg problem.” More often, though, she sped along unstoppably, her air of confidence intact. “Aren’t you worried, Sachiko?” I asked her once as she prepared to commit herself to an unknown future. “Worry not so help,” she sang out, mirroring my own words back to me. “I not want worry. You know this song? ‘Que será será.’ ”

  As I got ready to leave Japan, Sachiko asked me one day for a copy of a photograph I had taken, a thoroughly unremarkable picture of my own long shadow in the eerie light of late afternoon. The last time I visited her home, I noticed the picture on her piano, set in an indigo frame, and suddenly resonant — a way, I guessed, of keeping at least my outline in her life. And before I left her house that day, she gave me, in return, a golden lacquer box decorated with a cosmos flower — to remind me, she said, of the walks that we had taken when the days were bright with flowers.

  Autumn this year promised to hold even more elegiac weight than usual, as all Japan, in a sense, was holding its collective breath, waiting for the Emperor to die and a new imperial era to begin. And for me, as I felt the first chill entering the city and saw a whole new generation of foreigners beginning to appear, the season itself seemed to have grown older, as the city had. By now, I felt, I knew Kyoto’s moods so well that I could almost tell the time without looking at my watch: how the light lay silver on the river in the sharpened afternoons, how the temples exhaled mist in early light. Autumn seemed much deeper than spring, as sadness is deeper than brief joy, or memory than hope: the age-old Japanese assumption. Sometimes, in the dying days of summer, the beauty of Kyoto was almost hard to bear.

  Just as I was packing my final bags, though, Sachiko gave me the finest farewell gift of all: a sense of what the discipline of Zen really meant. For as she readied herself for a new kind of life, living at a tangent to the norm and seeing people turn away from her whenever she told them that she was about to leave her marriage, the only friends who came unfailingly to her assistance, encouraging her to extend herself and disinterestedly offering her all the support she needed, were those she had made through the temple. Sometimes, when her confidence was wavering, she called up Mark for inspiration; sometimes, when she needed to be reminded of how even a woman could have a “strong heart,” she turned to Sandy.

  Most often, though, when she found herself in need of counsel, she went to see the abbot of Tōfukuji. And he calmly told her that he would give her anything she needed to keep herself and her children in good health. Would two thousand dollars a month be enough? If she wanted more, he said, she only had to ask.

  Though Sachiko politely declined the offer — she was determined to do things by herself — the incident gave me a glimpse at last of what all the meditation was about. “The ultimate purpose of Zen,” I remembered the rōshi telling me, “is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it’s a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.”

  On the final day of summer, Sachiko took me to Arashiyama to watch the cormorant boats. The night was navy blue and gold when we arrived, a lone torch burning against the dark-blue hills. On the top of the distant mountains sat a round white moon. Along the riverbank, red lanterns shivered in the faint, chill breeze, their echoes wavering red in the reflecting water. A single pagoda, lonely as a plover’s cry, jutted up into the heavens. A solitary canoeist pulled himself soundless through the dark.

  Far in the distance, car lights glided silent across the Tōgetsu Bridge; in a teahouse nearby, the upswept coiffure of a geisha flashed briefly in an upstairs window. Occasionally, above the water, a firework shot up into the dark, and then, with a quiet hiss, streamed down in a sad, slow extravagance of gold.

  There was a sense of elegy about the river tonight, the smell of spent fireworks, the faintest hint of autumn chill, the happy, clapping songs of summer’s final parties.

  Cool in her summer kimono, Sachiko led me over the bridge to where the boats knocked against the dock, lanterns along their sides bearing the faint outline of cormorants. Stepping behind her into a boat and steadying myself, I saw the moon shivering in a row of silver lanterns.

  Without a sound, our boat set off across the lake, the darkness deepening above the dark-blue hills. The boats, with their crisscrossing lines of lanterns, looked eerie now, and ghostly in the gathering dark, their white globes doubled in the rippling water. From across the water came the dull thud of an oar. The teahouses cast reflections, red and white and blue, across the rippling water.

  And so we drifted through the night, approaching, then receding from, the other silent boats. Occasionally, an open cormorant punt came past, torches burning at its prow, scattering sparks across the dark. For a moment, in the torchlight, the aged fishermen’s faces were lit up, in a flash of Rembrandt gold, and then, as soon, their wrinkled features and medieval grass-skirt forms vanished again into the dark.

  Another boat glided past, ringing with the laughs of company men lined up around a long, low table, served strange delicacies by white-faced geisha. A firework shivered off into the dark, and then came
down in a shower of white and gold and pink. The torches singed the water gold. Every now and then, a bird plunged down into the water, emerging with a fish within its beak.

  “This place before, I little goodbye ceremony,” said Sachiko, face whitened in the dark. Behind her, the lanterned boats were slow and soundless in the night. “I not know this. But he say he want only friend.” Her voice trailed off into the dreamy dark. A boat bumped up against us, and the gold reflections blurred and shivered in the water.

  Along the bank came the sudden sound of children laughing. A grandfather bent down to light a firework for his toddler, and it veered off into the sky, a shooting, soundless bird, then slowly came back down again. Lovers wandered off into the cicada-buzzing dark. Across the water, the lone canoeist pulled his way in from the shadowed, distant mountains.

  “Summer soon finish,” she said softly. “Soon weather little cold again. Tonight last summer party.” Thoughts turn to autumn, and to separation. In the distance, the sound of ancient folk songs, and of grandmas dancing.

  It was only later, after I had left Japan, that I realized that everything had been there that night: the lanterned dark, the moon above the mountains, the dreamlike maiden in kimono. There was the Heian vision I had sought since childhood. And yet, by now, it was so much a part of my life that I had not even seen it till it was gone.

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  New Directions Publishing Corporation: Excerpt from poem from 100 Poems from the Japanese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, and excerpt from poem from Women Poets of Japan, translated by Ikuko Atsumi and Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

  Princeton University Press: Poem from Kokinshu: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern, translated by Laurel Rasplica Rodd, copyright ©1984 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

  Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc.: Three poems, #7, #47, #54, from Tangled Hair by Akiko Yosano, translated by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda. Reprinted by permission of Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., Tokyo, Japan. Warner Chappell Music Limited: Excerpt from “September Blue” by Chris Rea. Copyright ©1987 by Magnet Music Limited. Reprinted by permission of Warner Chappell Music Limited.

  Weatherhill, Inc.: Excerpt from poems from One Robe, One Bowl by Ryokan, translated by John Stevens, and five haikus from Santoka by Santoka, translated by John Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Weatherhill, Inc.

  ALSO BY PICO IYER

  TROPICAL CLASSICAL

  Essays from Several Directions

  In Tropical Classical, Iyer visits a holy city in Ethiopia where hooded worshipers practice a Christianity that has remained unchanged since the Middle Ages. He follows the bewilderingly complex route of Bombay’s dabbawallahs, who each day ferry 100,000 different lunches to 100,000 different workers. Iyer chats with the Dalai Lama and assesses books by Salman Rushdie and Cormac McCarthy. And he brings his perceptive eye and unflappable wit to bear on the postmodern vogues for literary puffery, sexual gamesmanship, and frequent-flier miles. Overflowing with insight, and often laugh-out-loud funny, this is Pico Iyer at his globe-sprinting best.

  Travel/Essays/978–0–679–77610–9

  FALLING OFF THE MAP

  Some Lonely Places of the World

  What does the elegant nostalgia of Argentina have in common with the raffish nonchalance of Australia? And what do both these countries have in common with North Korea? They are “lonely places,” cut off from the rest of the world by geography, ideology, or sheer weirdness. And they have all attracted the attention of Pico Iyer, one of the finest travel writers ever to book a room in the Pyongyang Koryo Hotel. Whether he is documenting the cruising rites of Icelandic teenagers, being interrogated by tipsy Cuban police, or summarizing the plot of Bhutan’s first feature film (“a $6,500 spectacular film about a star-crossed couple; she dies, he throws himself on the funeral pyre, and both live happily ever after as an ox and a cow”), Iyer is always uncannily observant and acerbically funny.

  Travel/Adventure/978–0–679–74612–6

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  Abandon, 978–1–4000–3085–9

  Cuba and the Night, 978–0–679–76075–7

  The Global Soul, 978–0–679–77611–6

  The Open Road, 978–0–307–38755–4

  Sun After Dark, 978–1–4000–3103–0

  Video Night in Kathmandu, 978–0–679–72216–8

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  Available at your local bookstore, or

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