My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  “In a year apart from everyone she loves, Tracy Franz reconciles her feelings of loneliness and displacement into acceptance and trust.

  Keenly observed and lyrically told, her journal takes us deep into the spirit of Zen, where every place you stand is the monastery.”

  KAREN MAEZEN MILLER, author of Paradise in Plain Sight: Lessons from a Zen Garden

  “Crisp, glittering, deep, and probing.”

  DAI-EN BENNAGE, translator of Zen Seeds

  “Tracy Franz’s My Year of Dirt and Water is both bold and quietly elegant in form and insight, and spacious enough for many striking paradoxes: the intimacy that arises in the midst of loneliness, finding belonging in exile, discovering real freedom on a journey punctuated by encounters with dark and cruel men, and moving forward into the unknown to finally excavate secrets of the past. It is a long poem, a string of koans and startling encounters, a clear dream of transmissions beyond words. And it is a remarkable love story that moved me to tears.”

  BONNIE NADZAM, author of Lamb and Lions, co-author of Love in the Anthropocene

  “A remarkable account of a woman’s sojourn, largely in Japan, while her husband undergoes a year-long training session in a Zen Buddhist monastery. Difficult, disciplined, and interesting as the husband’s training toward becoming a monk may be, it is the author’s tale that has our attention here.”

  JOHN KEEBLE, author of seven books, including The Shadows of Owls

  “Franz matches restraint with reflexiveness, crafting a narrative equally filled with the luminous particular and the telling omission. Death and impermanence—Zen’s secret heart—are very present. . . . [The memoir] incorporates Zen, pottery, living abroad, and Franz’s past and present with skillful delicacy, connecting these elements as if by analogy. Traversing territory defined by lack, My Year of Dirt and Water offers the singular pleasure of a story that ‘obscures but is not obscured.’”

  LETITIA MONTGOMERY-RODGERS, Foreword Magazine

  Published by

  Stone Bridge Press

  P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

  sbp@stonebridge.com • www.stonebridge.com

  Text © 2018 Tracy Franz.

  The lines quoted from the poem by Ryokan are from a translation by Edward Seidensticker (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1968/kawabata-lecture.html).

  Map artwork from Free Vector Maps, http://freevectormaps.com.

  Cover design by Linda Ronan incorporating a photograph by Ekaterina Dema/Shutterstock.com. Book design by Peter Goodman.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 12022 2021 2020 2019 2018

  p-ISBN: 978-1-61172-042-6

  e-ISBN: 978-1-61172-930-6

  for

  Koun

  Contents

  Sunday, February 29, 2004

  SPRING

  March: Beginnings

  April: Unsui (Clouds and Water)

  May: Authentic Experience

  SUMMER

  June: Being Here

  July: Homecoming

  August: Legacies

  FALL

  September: Returning

  October: Monastics

  November: Practice

  WINTER

  December: Impermanence

  January: Ikasu

  February: Beginnings

  Epilogue

  Note to the Reader

  Acknowledgments

  Japan, Kyushu, and Kumamoto City

  Sunday, February 29, 2004

  Today marks a leap year—a day that does and does not exist. And so I am and am not on the island of Kyushu, Japan, driving the toll roads through night away from the Oita Ferry Terminal and toward the outskirts of Kumamoto City, my mind returning to one image superimposed on the rush of blacktop: my husband—a tall, shorn-headed American with his hand in the air, black monk’s robes jerking in the wind around his body. The sun swiftly sliding into the Inland Sea. The ship receding to a single dot of light and then, finally, extinguished.

  Spring

  MARCH

  Beginnings

  Monday, March 1

  “Why are you here?”

  “For shugyo.”

  “What is shugyo?”

  “It is training in the way of Master Dogen Zenji.”

  “Go away. You need to think about it some more.”

  ~

  I wake from my dreams to frigid air and a growing expansiveness in the center of my chest. Lying there, feeling it—the morning cold and also that diffusive emotion. Breathing it in and then out again. The breath visible in the morning light of a cold room. Outside, it is overcast and snowing white petals that dissolve on contact. Early plum blossoms bloom like fire along gnarled branches in the courtyard below the townhouse. It is spring in Kumamoto.

  In the weeks and months before he left to enter the monastery, my husband Koun and I gathered bits of knowledge from his teacher and other priests in the Soto Zen lineage. We learned what would be expected of him, what his life was about to become. I wonder now, how many hours has he had to wait at the gates of Zuioji this morning, ritually asking to enter, ritually being rejected? How many hours standing in formal shashu—his elbows raised high and out, left fist against his chest, right hand on top, gaze unwavering? I imagine him already admitted into tanga-ryo, the “waiting area,” a small room within the monastery where new monks remain for at least a week. The random visits by senior monks, the limited sleep, and the constant and rigid stillness will test their sincerity and resolve before they are allowed to officially enter and be called by their Buddhist names, rather than simply anata, “you.”

  From now on, he’ll likely wake at 3:00 a.m. to sit in zazen—the cross-legged posture of meditation—or to kneel in formal seiza, his legs tucked beneath his body and pressed against cold tatami, while he silently memorizes ancient sutras. The only sound his breathing and the breathing of the other three or four new monks in the room. Bouts of shivering will come and go in gusts, like the snow drifting through the cracks between the warped fusuma sliding doors. After, he will take his bowl of rice gruel, a small warm coal in the belly. Much of this will be the same again until lunch, until dinner, until bedtime at 9 p.m., and even then, in his futon, he will never get warm. In this way, the hours and days and weeks will cycle through a pattern, and later he will enter other patterns.

  The cold will eventually give them all chilblains—darkened and bleeding earlobes, cracked knuckles, split feet and knees. But by then they won’t mind so much, the cold having become just another process of the body, like respiration.

  I rise from the futon to dress for the day, and close the gray curtains against gray light, but I leave the portable kerosene heaters untouched. Better to feel the chill this morning. Those bright red blossoms burn through everything.

  ~

  The Japanese school year has just ended, and it is quiet in the halls of Shokei Daigaku, the small women’s university where I teach English. Inside my office, I sit at a desk with a pencil worrying between my teeth—that gray light still in the wall of windows behind me. My grades and stack of year-end paperwork have already been turned in, but there is now the matter of our soon-to-expire visas to attend to.

  Three days ago, Koun and I went together to Immigration, a dismal office smelling of paper and stale cigarette smoke. Behind the counter, sour-faced government workers riffled leisurely through stacks of documents—their sole job, seemingly, to produce as much red tape as possible.

  Koun cleared his throat as he approached the counter, and then he explain
ed in humble Japanese, “I’m very sorry to trouble you, but it is important that we complete this paperwork today. It will be difficult for me to return later.” As added emphasis, I stood beside him and smiled in what I hoped was an ingratiating way.

  “Impossible,” grunted Mr. Sour-face.

  “I’ll be cloistered in a Zen monastery, you see. I won’t be allowed correspondence of any kind for at least three months.”

  “Sit down,” replied Mr. Sour-face as he thumbed angrily through our paperwork and passports.

  We sat. He paced, smoked. Paced and smoked. Where, I wondered, was that Japanese politeness I had grown so used to? After a full hour had passed, he appeared to be taking a renewed interest in our documents.

  “Franz-san! Come!” We stood and approached the counter again. “It says here you’re asking for ‘dependent’ status—but you won’t be living together for a year or more?”

  “That’s right,” said Koun. “I’ll be at the monastery. In Shikoku.”

  “Well, will she be sending you money?”

  “No. That won’t be necessary. The monks engage in formal begging and the local farmers donate vegetables sometimes.”

  Long silence. “Well, you both need to think carefully about what ‘dependent’ means. You may sign the papers now, but I can’t guarantee anything.”

  We were dismissed curtly, again without the usual Japanese politeness.

  Today, Takahashi-sensei, the head of the English Department, calls Immigration on my behalf and then tells me gravely that I’ll need to write up a statement explaining

  (1)What Exactly Koun Is Doing, and

  (2)Why He Is Doing It

  This, I already know, is no easy task. After all, we haven’t yet been able to explain it adequately to anyone, not even to our friends and family who tend (usually, at least) to be sympathetic listeners. How then to present it to bureaucrats in all its official glory? I spend something like three hours at my desk writing up possibilities before finally settling on this statement:

  (1)Learning the values, traditions, and lineage of Zen Buddhism as set forth by Soto monasteries/temples throughout Japan

  (2)In order to obtain the necessary licensure and training to become a full priest in the Soto Zen tradition so that he, Koun Garrett Franz, may one day be of service to the Japanese/Buddhist community at large (on the advisement of his master, Reverend Honda Kosoku of Ganzoji of Takamori, Aso)

  What I want to write:

  (1)Saving all beings (infinite), ending all delusions (inexhaustible), realizing truth (incomprehensible), following the path of Buddha (unsurpassable)

  (2)No special reason

  Or:

  (1)Seeking enlightenment

  (2)To obtain enlightenment

  Or better still:

  (1)Shugyo

  (2)I don’t know

  Tuesday, March 2

  Just before 8 p.m. nearly every Tuesday, I drive the ten minutes to my pottery teacher’s house and leave my car in an adjacent grocery store parking lot. I have never seen the inside of her home, save for the receiving room that I always enter through the open-air garage stacked high with fat bags of clay, walking past the enclosed workroom and adjacent kilns and then sliding open the glass door to a cozy tatami room walled with shelves and cupboards. Each shelf displays pottery—yakimono, literally “fired things.”

  Tonight, the pottery ladies are in good form, the four of them deep in conversation as I slip off my shoes and bow into the room. In many ways, we are typical of the women who make up such groups around the traditional Japanese arts: my teacher, Nishida-sensei, in her mid-fifties, a housewife and at-home pottery teacher with three artistic daughters; Baba-san, in her sixties, a well-traveled housewife with a salaryman son; Megumi-san, a newly married city hall office worker in her early thirties; Yoko-san, in her seventies, a housewife and an avid student of English with one daughter and two grandchildren; and me, the token foreigner, married, thirty years old, childless (a point frequently noted by all in the room), and harboring a vague desire to dive into something “authentically Japanese.”

  We greet each other as Sensei sets a cup of green tea and an assortment of delicate rice crackers at my place on the kotatsu, the low heated table under which we collectively tuck our chilled legs and hands. Thoughtfully, Sensei slows her speech and simplifies her vocabulary and dialect so I can participate in conversation.

  “Koun-san mo otera ni iru?” (Is Koun already in the temple?)

  “Hai, so desu.” (Yes.)

  “Aa, so. Taihen ne. . . Bangohan mo tabeta?” (Ah, that’s rough. . . Have you already eaten dinner?)

  “Ee.” (Yes.)

  “Nani o tabeta?” (What did you eat?)

  “Chili o tabemashita.” (I ate chili.)

  “What?!” asks Yoko-san loudly in English. “Chiri? You ate dust?”

  “No—ah—it’s Mexican food, kind of like a soup. Beans, tomatoes, taco spices. Usually it has ground beef, but I’m basically a vegetarian so I leave that out.”

  “Tako? It has octopus?”

  “Tako-SU,” corrects Sensei—indicating the popular Mexican dish as opposed to the Japanese word for the eight-armed sea creature. She continues, “Hitori de tabeta?” (Did you eat alone?)

  “Hai.” (Yes.)

  “Aa, sabishii, nee.” (Ah, that’s lonely. . . .)

  The conversation lulls and we sip our tea, contemplating the gravity of my new situation: alone in an empty kitchen, eating dust-and-octopus soup.

  “Well, I for one am grateful when my husband is gone,” says Baba-san in a burst of local dialect. Giggles in agreement all around. “But the young couples these days, maybe it’s different for them. . . .”

  Yoko-san nudges my side and cocks her head, that common Japanese gesture indicating an attempt to understand. “Nani? Tako-SU??”

  The two ladies across from me begin to laugh again into their now-empty cups, but Sensei cuts them off abruptly: “Jaa, hajimemashoka?” (Shall we begin?)

  Sensei stands, paces decisively across the room to slide open the door, and beckons us all out onto the covered patio that shelters her kilns and shelves of pots awaiting glaze. She points me toward the tiny workroom that is, thankfully, warm because of the one portable kerosene heater set in a corner nearest my stool. A boiling kettle of water sits atop the heater, giving off steam. On my electric pottery wheel, a lump of freshly kneaded gray clay has already been set out for me, a gift that always makes me feel more than a little incompetent. As I wait for the others, I tie my hair back and lean into the warmth of the heater, watching the labor of the women through the sliding glass door. The four of them stand around an old wooden table and cut thick slices of gray and brown clay from fat blocks, which they then quickly and powerfully knead into shape before entering the room one by one, squeezing around and over buckets of water, tables, tool boxes, works in progress, and the five big pottery wheels. Once settled in, it’s amazing we’re ever able to extract ourselves. “Like sardines,” giggles Baba-san, getting in one last joke before the work begins.

  I take in a long breath and then exhale as I lay my hands across the gray lump before me. Despite the warmth of the room, the clay is still cool—a surprise. I lift it and throw it down with a loud slam onto the approximate center of the wheel, adhering it to the metal. I flick on the power, dip my hands in the water bucket, and then run my wet fingers over the surface of the mound while pushing cautiously on the pedal with my right foot. The clay spins and wobbles with possibility. After nearly six months of lessons with Nishida-sensei, I still have only rare glimpses of that felt-sense of creating something purposefully. What, I wonder, will I accidentally make today?

  Bracing my elbows against my thighs, I begin to work—first applying firm pressure to the sides of the clay, then coaxing it in and up into a tall, slender cylinder, then forcing it all back down again with one hand pushing against the top and the other cupping the back. Repeating this several times will center the clay and, I am told, remove
the potential for faults and air bubbles when the form is heated in the kiln. I finish this process with a squat cylinder, pause to wet my fingers again, and—taking in a quick breath—push both thumbs firmly into the center and out as the wheel spins too fast, then too slow. The fingertips of one hand begin to trace inside the vessel, and the fingertips of the other hand are on the outside, working in tandem to thin and lift. In this way, the beginning of a bowl appears, but my hands-the-clay-my-hands-the-clay seem unyielding and awkward. I pause again, the wheel coming to a full stop as I consider the tools on the table and then select and soak a two-by-two-inch square of chamois in water. My foot pushes down gently on the pedal, and I press the sodden cloth against the interior of the form. Mud spits across my fleece vest, up along my arms to the elbows. I push away a bit of flyaway hair in frustration and streak gray sludge across my forehead. My bowl is a damp, lopsided mess.

  When she sees what I’ve done, Sensei nudges me off my stool and takes my place. She pushes down hard on the foot pedal and inserts a sponge into the center of spinning clay. The excess water disappears, and then she balances and shapes the bowl—all of this in under thirty seconds. I try to track her hands with my eyes, to break it down into plausible steps—press and then pull and then lift and then—but I can’t follow her fast, sure fingers. First, a twisted, ugly lump. Then—perfection.

  She cuts the bowl off the hump with one quick slice of a string held taut, and then she makes another identical bowl while I watch, still unable to comprehend. Finally, she centers the mass that is left, drawing it up into a balanced cone. We switch places. I try once more, but my next attempt folds in on itself, a victim of the weight of water.

  Wednesday, March 3

  I’m eating my lunch alone in the kitchen when a crushed box from Thailand arrives three days too late. Inside are bargain-rate monk’s clothes—casual samu-e for work, flowing formal robes, traditional undergarments. Each item must be carefully refolded into a new box before I can send it on to Koun tomorrow.