A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  Hang on . . .

 

  That’s what I just texted to her. I’ll let you know what she says when she gets back to me. It might be a while because it’s zazen time up at the temple. Zazen is the kind of meditating they do there, which seems different from the California kind, or at least it seems different to me, but what do I know? Like I said, I’m just a kid.

  Where was I? Oh, right, we were climbing up the steps to the temple. Damn, I really suck at this. Sometimes I think I must have ADD or something. Maybe I caught it in California. Everybody in California has ADD, and they all take meds for it, and they’re constantly changing their prescriptions and tweaking their dosages. I used to feel really out of it because I didn’t have any meds I could talk about on account of my parents being Japanese and not knowing a whole lot about psychology, so I just kept my mouth shut. But one day at lunch someone noticed that I never took any pills, and Kayla had to jump in and cover for me. Actually, she outed me, but in the nicest way. She gave the kid this really superior look and said, “Nao doesn’t need medication. She’s Japanese.” I know that sounds kind of harsh, but the way she said it made it sound like being Japanese was a good thing, like being healthy or something, and the kid just shrugged his shoulders and shut up.

  It was nice of Kayla to stick up for me, but actually I don’t think I’m so healthy at all. I’m pretty sure I have all kinds of syndromes including ADD and ADHD and PTS and manic depression, as well as the suicidal tendencies that run in my family. Jiko said that zazen meditation probably wouldn’t cure me of all my syndromes and tendencies but it would teach me how not to be so obsessed with them. I don’t know how effective it is, but ever since she taught me how, I try to do it every day—well, maybe every other day, or a couple times a week—and now that I think about it, even though I still intend to kill myself, I actually haven’t, yet, and if I’m still alive and not dead, maybe it’s working.

  3.

  Where was I? Oh, the temple. Right. So, we’re climbing up the steps, and finally we see the main temple gate, which is at the very top, and it looks enormous, like the mouth of some kind of horrible stone monster, all mossy and dripping ferns and looming over us, about to fall on our heads and crush us to death. Exactly the kind of place that ghosts would like to lurk around and haunt the living. Later I realized it’s not such a huge gate like they have at really important temples. It’s actually pretty small, but from below, that first day, it looked gigantic. I was tired after hauling myself up all those steps, and hallucinating from the heat, and hypnotized by the sound of the cicadas and the ku . . . lunk, ku . . . lunk of my wheelie bag wheels, and I was pretty terrified, too, thinking about how my dad was going to abandon me here in this spooky place. The moment I saw the gate I had a strong thought to turn around and throw myself headfirst down the steep stone steps or just let myself free-fall backward into the pillowy softness of eternity, and it wouldn’t matter if I bumped and bounced like a cabbage all the way down until I hit bottom and then rolled out to sea, because at least I’d be safe and dead.

  My legs were trembling. My kneecaps felt like the moon jellies that my mom used to watch at the City Aquarium, and just then something brushed against my bare shin, and all my hairs stood up on end like I’d been zapped with a taser. Tatari!100 I thought, and I jumped and screeched, and my dad started to laugh, and in the next Buddhist moment I found myself looking down into the moss green eyes of a tiny white-and-black cat. He gave me a quick sideways glance, then turned his back and started doing that thing that cats do, winding himself through my legs, arching his spine and sticking his tail straight up in the air while extending his front paws, not toward me but away from me, offering me his butt to scratch as well as a nice view of his puckered asshole and his giant furry white balls. Basically, when a cat offers you his butt to scratch you have to do it and not mind the rest of the package. His fur was soft and hot, and just then the temple bell began to ring with a sound so deep it made the green blades of the bamboo leaves shiver, and Dad, who was standing just beneath the stone gate, looked toward the temple and whispered to no one,

  “Tadaima . . .”

  which is what you say when you come home.

  The tiny cat with the giant balls flicked his tail and led us up the walkway, and just then I heard the sound of sandals slapping against stone, and Muji came running out to meet us. She was wearing her grey pajamas, and she had a white towel tied around her head. She scooped up the cat and tucked him under her arm and then, pressing her palms together without dropping the cat, she bowed deeply from the waist.

  “Okaerinasaimase, dannasama!” she said, which is more or less exactly what the French maids say in Fifi’s Lonely Apron when their masters come home.

  That night they had a party to welcome us, although it wasn’t much of a party really since it was just me and Dad and Jiko and Muji and a couple of old ladies from the danka who hung around and helped out with the cooking and the garden and the religious services and stuff. Before we ate, we all took turns having a bath in the ofuro,101 which was fed by the sulfurous hot springs. Dad went first because he’s the man, which would be so totally un-PC in Sunnyvale but here nobody even thinks about it. When he came out, all pink and damp, he was in yukata102 with geta103 on his feet and a small terry cloth towel on his head. Muji offered him a glass of beer, and he looked happier than I’d ever seen him in my life, even in Sunnyvale, and my hope returned that maybe he would decide to stay with us at the temple for the summer. I just knew this would be way better for him than seeing a bunch of psychological doctors. It wasn’t like he had a job or anything, and Mom was busy at work and could take care of herself, and the Great Minds of Western Philosophy had gotten on fine without him for thousands of years and could probably wait until the end of August.

  We were sitting on the wooden veranda, overlooking the little temple garden, and an evening wind was rustling the bamboo leaves. I was watching him enjoy his beer, and was just about to ask him if he would stay, when Jiko got to her feet and said, “Nattchan, issho ni ofuro ni hairou ka?”104 It would have been rude to refuse, so I got up and followed her to the bath, hoping that her cataracts would keep her from seeing all the little scars and bruises and cigarette burns, which were mostly healed up except for some that would probably never go away.

  Outside the bathhouse, there was a little altar, and Jiko lit a candle and a stick of incense, and then she did three full-body bows, getting all the way down on her knees and touching her forehead to the floor, which took her a while, but not as long as you might imagine, given that she’s so old. She made me do it, too, and I felt really clumsy and dumb, but she didn’t seem to notice, because the whole time she was mumbling a little Japanese prayer under her breath that in English would go something like this:

  As I bathe myself

  I pray with all beings

  that we can purify body and mind

  and clean ourselves inside and out.

  It seemed like a big deal to go through, but then I thought about the bar hostesses at the sento and how clean and pure they seemed after their baths. It wasn’t like they were leading wholesome lifestyles or anything, so maybe Jiko’s prayer was really working for them.

  The bathhouse is basically a big wooden box with a smaller wooden box inside. The smaller box is the soaking tub, and it gets filled with superhot water that is sulfury and steaming and smells like boiled eggs, which is to say that it takes a while to get used to. Inside the bathhouse is really dark, except for these shafts of intense sunlight that pierce through the dark air like sharp swords and fall upon your naked skin. Next to the tub are a couple of little wooden stools and some plastic basins for dipping into the bathtub to get hot water for rinsing.

  The way you take a bath in Japan is first you rinse your body really well with hot water to get the sweat and dirt off so you don’t make the bathwater gross, and then you
climb into the bathtub and soak for a while to kind of soften things up. Then you get out again and sit on your stool, and that’s when you really wash yourself all over with soap and a scrubby cloth, and if you’re going to shampoo your hair or shave your legs or brush your teeth or something, you can do it then. And after you’re all clean, you rinse off all the soapy suds and get back into the tub to finish things off. You can really hang out there for a long time if you’re into it and can stand the smell of rotten eggs.

  It was pretty crowded in the bathhouse, because even though Jiko’s body is really tiny, mine isn’t, and next to her, I felt like a naked hippopotamus, and I was worried that I might knock her over or crush her every time I moved. But Jiko didn’t even seem to notice, and after a while I calmed down about it, too. That’s the thing about Jiko, one of her superpowers, is that just by being in the same room with you, she can make you feel okay about yourself. And it’s not just me. She does this with everyone. I’ve seen her.

  Maybe this is a good time to describe how old Jiko looks, because actually I was totally shocked that first day in the bath. You have to remember that she is a hundred and four years old, and if you’ve never hung out with an extremely old person before, well, I’m telling you, it’s intense. What I mean is that even though they still have arms and legs and tits and crotches like other human beings, extremely old people look more like aliens or beings from outer space. I know that’s probably not very PC to say, but it’s true. They look like ET or something, ancient and young all at the same time, and the way they move, slow and careful but also kind of spastic, is like extraterrestrials, too.

  And then there’s the fact that because she’s a nun she is totally bald. The top of her head is shiny and smooth, and so are her round cheeks, but everywhere else her skin is covered with the finest and most delicate wrinkles, like a spiderweb with dew in the morning. She probably only weighs fifty pounds, and maybe she’s four feet tall and as skinny as bones, so that when you hold her arm or leg, your thumb overlaps your fingers on the other side. Her little ribs are like pencils under her skin, but her hip bones are enormous and bowl-shaped, and way out of proportion to the rest of her. You’d think her body would have lots of loose skin hanging like folds of fabric from her skeleton, but actually the skin on her body is surprisingly young-looking. I think it’s because she’s always been thin and never developed any excess flaps. Her breasts are small and flat, so her chest looks like a young girl’s, who has just started developing, with nipples that are small and pink and fresh.

  And then there’s another thing, and maybe I shouldn’t mention it but I will because I trust you not to take this in a perverted hentai way, which is that between her legs she’s also pretty bald and you can see her sex pretty clearly, so that this part of her gives the impression of being quite young, too, until you happen to notice the few wisps of long grey hair hanging down like an old man’s beard. In the shadows of the bathhouse, watching her pale, crooked body rise from the steam in the dark wooden tub, I thought she looked ghostly—part ghost, part child, part young girl, part sexy woman, and part yamamba,105 all at once. All the ages and stages, combined into a single female time being.

  I didn’t have all these thoughts that first night. What I’m describing is the overall impression after a couple of weeks, watching her climb in and out of the tub and washing her back and even helping her shave her head with a razor. The bathhouse is just big enough for three people to bathe in at once if you really squeeze, and sometimes Muji came with us, and then we did our bows and little prayer together. When you live at a temple, there are all these rules, like for example, you’re not supposed to talk in the bath, and mostly we didn’t, but sometimes Jiko broke the rule and then it was okay for us to have a quiet conversation, which felt really peaceful.

  And talking about rules, the two of them had all these crazy routines they did for every different kind of thing you can imagine, like washing their faces or brushing their teeth, or spitting out their toothpaste, or even going for a crap. I’m not kidding. They bowed and thanked the toilet and offered a prayer to save all beings. That one is kind of hilarious and goes like this:

  As I go for a dump,

  I pray with all beings

  that we can remove all filth and destroy

  the poisons of greed, anger, and foolishness.

  At first I was like, No way am I saying that, but when you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I’d flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, “Thanks, toilet,” and it felt pretty natural. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that’s okay to do if you’re in a temple on the side of a mountain, but you’d better not try it in your junior high school washroom, because if your classmates catch you bowing and thanking the toilet they’ll try to drown you in it. I explained this to Jiko, and she agreed it wasn’t such a good idea, but that it was okay just to feel grateful sometimes, even if you don’t say anything. Feeling is the important part. You don’t have to make a big deal about it.

  I didn’t talk to Jiko about this kind of thing right away. At first I felt shy and didn’t want to talk to her or anyone at all, especially after Dad snuck off early in the morning, while I was still sleeping, without even bothering to say goodbye. He left a note, which I found when I woke up. He wrote it in English and it said, “Nao-chan, you look so peaceful as Sleeping Beauty. I will return at summer’s end. Please do not worry about me. Be a good girl and take care of your dear Great-Grandmother.”

  I tore up the note. I thought it sucked that he’d just ditched me there and split before I even had a chance to beg him to stay and make him feel guilty. He didn’t say anything about his promise to take me to Disneyland, and he left without buying me an AC adapter for my Game Boy, which he’d also promised to do, so now I was stuck with nothing to play except for Tetris on my keitai, which was not so thrilling. Back then, the temple didn’t even have a computer, so I couldn’t email Kayla in Sunnyvale, and of course I didn’t have any friends in Tokyo I could text or call. The long, hot days of my summer vacation stretched out in front of me, and I thought I was going to die of boredom.

  4.

  “Are you very angry?” old Jiko asked one night, in the bath, as I scrubbed her back.

  I was moving the rough washcloth around in circles, being careful not to press too hard because by then I understood how fragile her old skin was, as thin as rice paper. At first, not realizing this, my roughness in scrubbing left dark red marks on her skin, but she never complained, and I realized I had to pay more attention, especially in the places where her bones poked out. So when she asked me if I was angry, I thought maybe I was scrubbing too hard and hurting her, and I apologized.

  “No,” she said. “It feels good. Don’t stop.”

  I put some more soap on the washcloth and started moving it down the knobby curve of her spine. Like most old people, her spine was pretty stiff and twisted, but when she sat zazen, her posture was perfectly upright. She didn’t say any more, and when I finished, I scooped a couple of basins of hot water from the tub and poured them over her back to rinse off the suds, and then I swiveled around so she could start on mine. We took turns like that.

  I waited. Old Jiko liked to take her time, and she was really good at it because she’d been practicing for so many years, so as a result, I was always waiting for her, and you’d think that waiting would be annoying for a young person like me, but for some reason I didn’t mind. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do that summer. I sat there on my little wooden stool, naked and hugging my knees and shivering, not from the cold but in anticipation of the scalding heat of the water, so when, instead, I felt her fingertip touch a small scar in the middle of my back, I was startled. My body stiffened. The light was so dim, how could she see my scars with her bad eyes? I figured she couldn’t, but then I felt her finger move across my skin in a pattern, hesitant, pausing here and there to connect the
dots.

  “You must be very angry,” she said. She spoke so quietly, it was like she was talking to herself, and maybe she was. Or maybe she hadn’t said anything at all, and I’d just imagined it. Either way, my throat squeezed shut and I couldn’t answer, so I shook my head. I was so ashamed, but at the same time, this enormous feeling of sadness brimmed up inside me, and I had to hold my breath to stop from crying.

  She didn’t say anything else. She washed me gently, and for the first time I just wanted her to hurry up and finish. After we were done, I got dressed quickly and said good night and left her there. I thought I was going to throw up. I didn’t want to go back to my room, so I ran halfway down the mountainside and hid in the bamboo forest until it got dark and the fireflies came out. When Muji rang the big bell at the end of her fire watch to signal the end of the day, I snuck back into the temple and crawled into bed.

  The next morning I went looking for old Jiko and found her in her room. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the door, bent over her low table. She was reading. I stood in the doorway and didn’t even bother to go in. “Yes,” I told her. “I’m angry, so what?”

  She didn’t turn around but I could tell she was listening so I went on, giving her an executive summary of my crappy life.

  “So what am I supposed to do? It’s not like I can fix my dad’s psychological problems, or the dot-com bubble, or the lousy Japanese economy, or my so-called best friend in America’s betrayal of me, or getting bullied in school, or terrorism, or war, or global warming, or species extinctions, right?”