My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  “Yes?”

  “Sensei says now you are paying a foreigner price. It is important to understand.”

  “Okay. How much should I pay?”

  “Saaaaaa . . . I don’t know.”

  “Okay. But will she let me go on Wednesdays?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay. Should I call and ask Sensei myself?”

  “No, no—I asked her already. Go on Wednesday next week.”

  “So I can go on Wednesdays?”

  “Saaaa, I don’t know. Just go and you will see.”

  Monday, April 12

  Waking without breath always follows dreams of drowning. Push it out laboriously, the false water from my lungs, then inhale gasps of the life-giving air. I stumble to my dresser, slide open the top drawer, and claw through clothing until I find my emergency inhaler, take in that bitter grainy taste, and hold it until I’m nearly bursting with the outbreath. Another puff and I can breathe again. It has been a long while since I’ve had this sort of asthma, the stone lungs of my childhood.

  Outside, it is a beautiful, warm day already. The wind agitates the leaves of the trees and moves through the house and all its open upstairs windows—left this way for the pleasure it lends to both sleeping and waking. I go downstairs to boil a pot of tea to soothe my lungs, and when I climb up again with the tray in my hands, the light from the window catches in such a way that I can see the cloud of pollen coming off the evergreen sugi tree out back in a neat, graceful puff into the upstairs living room. This is then carried to my bedroom by the periodic arc of an electric fan.

  ~

  Today is the first day of classes, and there is a new fervor on campus. All of the freshmen—even those not enrolled in the English program—are trying out a “HellohowareyouIamfine” as we pass each other in the halls.

  With a handful of students seated around me, I open my sophomore English conversation class with a brief review of a simple and culturally appropriate self-introduction, just to get them back into the swing of things. I mention my hometown, my hobbies, my husband.

  “What? You’re married?” interrupts Miki.

  “Yes, haven’t you seen my husband?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Aren’t we neighbors? Where do you live?”

  “In the dormitory.”

  “I live just across from you, next to Jennifer-sensei. Haven’t you seen the tall foreigner with no hair?”

  “Oh!” says Tomomi, “I know! I know! He is always wearing wafuku—Japanese clothing.”

  “Oh, that guy—sometimes he wears black wafuku with big sleeves like this.” Miki gestures broadly at the wrist. “And sometimes geta shoes too.”

  “Right,” I say. “He wears traditional Japanese clothing. Can you guess his job?”

  “His job? No. . . .”

  “Uh—skinhead?” offers Tomomi.

  “No. . . .” I shake my head emphatically.

  “English teacher?”

  “No, well, sometimes. Usually, he’s a priest.”

  “A priest? What’s priest?”

  “Obosan. He is doing his shugyo now.”

  “Eh? Obosan? Foreigner obosan? Sugoi!”

  “Does he say ‘itadakimasu’ before a meal?”

  “Does he do ‘nya-nya-nya’ and rubbing hands together?”

  “Do you have butsudan in your house?”

  “Can he read kanji sutra?”

  “Is he Christian?”

  Here everything is in the blood—even religion.

  Tuesday, April 13

  The rain starts gently in the afternoon, and by late evening all of us pottery ladies labor to the deafening roar of water pouring from the sky onto the roof overhead. I’ve been bracing myself for today’s class, not knowing quite what to expect. Two things are immediately different: Sensei weighs and cites the cost of the clay (400 yen for 5 kilos), and then she instructs me to watch as she quickly kneads the clay into a spiraling blossom that morphs into a single fat cylinder. “Next time you do it just like that.”

  “Hai, Sensei.”

  As we settle into our workspaces, for the first time Sensei does not ask her customary question of me: What would you like to make? Instead, she pushes me out of my seat with a firm “yoisho!” and takes my place. “Watch,” she says, as a single perfect cup forms beneath her fingers. She cuts it off at the hump and sets it on the table directly in front of my wheel.

  “Here. Make teacups just like this. All the same size.”

  “Hai, Sensei.”

  As I lean into the work, I begin to realize that the ladies are engaging with me differently tonight as well—nearly everything I do seems to be punctuated by a cheerful and enthusiastic “Ganbatte!” (Do your best!). Obviously someone—Yoko-san, most likely—has announced that I have tentatively been accepted as a kind of deshi to Sensei. The ladies keep muttering as if they’re watching me take a turn at bat in a local league: “Ganbatte, Fight-o! Ganbatte, Fight-o! . . .”

  I manage three thick-walled cups, not at all the same size, even though I have used the tanbo (dragonfly tool) to measure depth and width, just like Sensei showed me. It seems my first efforts as “pottery disciple” are a complete failure.

  After class, Sensei instructs me to take the clay scraps home in a plastic bag to dry and then knead again into a workable consistency. “Risaikuru,” she says, using the English loanword. Before, she always insisted that I leave my wet piles of scrap for her. Perhaps I am no longer a guest after all.

  Wednesday, April 14

  Between classes today, I mentally work through the basic creation process of pottery, noting how little I really know of any of it, aside from the sparest understanding of key steps:

  Knead to soften and mix.

  Form into the desired shape.

  Dry to a semi-hard leather.

  Trim away the outer excess.

  Fire in the kiln to a porous, hard biscuit.

  Glaze (simply—or add more elaborate decoration).

  Fire again.

  And then there is the life of the ceramic as it travels from hand to lip to sink to cupboard. And the eventuality, when it breaks, of returning to the earth from which it was born.

  ~

  When I enter Sensei’s receiving room this evening, I must have the look of someone who is about to learn some greater secret about the craft, and I get the feeling that the other ladies—the women I have yet to meet—are the protectors of that knowledge. It seems as if they have all been present in the room for quite some time. There is a distinct air of formality. “Please sit,” says Sensei. I settle into a stiff seiza, as the others are seated. Sensei tells me to introduce myself, and I do, the standard mini-speech in formal Japanese that I have given so many times coming out faster than I intended: “It is our first meeting. I am Tracy Franz of Shokei University. I am from Alaska. Please favor me.”

  The other ladies introduce themselves in turn, bowing low after each introduction: Mikiko-san, the new young wife; Rie-san, the office worker; Yuko-san, also an office worker; Harada-san, the retired housewife. How the roles of women in Japan are so often of a type.

  Sensei clears her throat and begins to speak as my proxy: “Tracy would like to humbly request to join our Wednesday night class. She says it is quite an inconvenience for all of you; she knows this will likely cause you all much trouble.”

  Harada-san, the eldest of the women bows and says, “We would be honored to have you join us.”

  Before I can respond, Sensei replies for me: “Tracy says ‘please humbly favor me.’” I bow low to show the sincerity of the words that have been spoken for me.

  “Sensei,” I whisper as we rise to begin our work. “What do I do—in this class?”

  “It’s the same. Make pots.”

  Thursday, April 15

  This evening is the annual Shokei welcome party—an event held in a Western-style chandeliered hall that overlooks Kumamoto Castle. After the higher-ups talk at length, the new hi
res are obliged to give short, modest speeches. Nearly all make some statement about the cherry blossoms (my coworker Jennifer kindly suggested that I mention the flowers in my own speech last year, resulting in the school president going on at length about my sincerity and unique understanding of Japanese culture).

  After the speeches, a bounty of dainty French-Japanese fusion dishes is swiftly served and consumed, and the formal party ends in the traditional shout of “Banzai!” and three coordinated claps. People begin ambling off to the second party—which will be followed by the third, the fourth, and so on. The taxi drivers will do a brisk business in the wee hours of the morning, shuttling our drunken coworkers home to their sleeping families. Jennifer and I watch them weave away into the side streets, toward smoky karaoke and shared cups of sake poured for each other in the Kumamoto style—alcohol the oil that hones the wheels of all Japanese institutions. If we were more protective of our careers and positions at the university, we would participate; it is a dangerous business not drinking with the others. But instead Jennifer and I head to my car, which has been tucked into a monolithic vehicle-stacking machine. As we wait for the attendant to rotate my little van down to us, Jennifer remarks that she’s gotten too old for long nights of alcohol and parties. “Maybe they’ll forgive us because we’re gaijin. We make everyone uncomfortable anyway.”

  “Yes, maybe. But they’ll never forgive us for being foreigners,” I add.

  As we drive home through the darkness, Jennifer asks how things have been going, with Koun away in the monastery.

  “I miss him a lot—but I guess that’s natural.”

  “How does your family feel about all of this?”

  “We haven’t quite figured that out yet—I think Koun’s parents especially just never believed that it would go this far, that he was actually serious about it all.”

  “They’re Christian?”

  “Yes—Catholic.”

  We’d revealed our plans to Koun’s parents, Dick and Vivian, and my mother, Carol, during a visit to Montana this past Christmas holiday. My mother remained quiet, but the conversation was very tense with Koun’s parents. We’re disappointed, they’d said, and How could you just abandon Tracy like that? The force of the pushback taking us both by surprise, we explained again that we’d always known that this would be part of our path together.

  “It’s also difficult because Koun’s mom has MS. She’s lost much of her functioning in the past few years. To go more than six months without a visit is hard. Her condition may have changed considerably in a year. It’s . . . a worry.”

  “We foreigners all struggle with this, don’t we? Being away while change happens at home. There’s just this occasional contact, but it’s not the same as living in the same town, or even the same country.”

  “What’s the solution?”

  “There is no solution. Unless you go home, I guess.”

  “Will you ever move back to Canada?”

  “No, my home is here now.”

  “I can’t imagine that, staying here forever. But I also can’t quite locate ‘home’ in my mind.”

  “Well,” Jennifer sighs as we pull in to the dormitory parking lot, “maybe we’re all a little lost.”

  Saturday, April 17

  In Japanese class, I am writing notes as fast as I can, struggling with the impossible characters, when my fingers begin to cramp. I shake out the hand between each word, to the amusement of Okumura-sensei (aka my good friend Satomi). “Ah . . . Nihongo ga muzukashii desu ne” (Japanese is difficult, isn’t it?), she says, peering over my shoulder.

  It seems that the extra day of pottery has affected my body. I want to explain this all clearly in Japanese, the constant and painful awakenings in the small muscles of my hands and arms and elsewhere, but all I can offer is this: “Yakimono desu kara.” (It’s because of pottery.) In this new language, I am always a simple and blunt object. I should have said “too much karate,” because this at least provides plausible context.

  After class, Satomi and I walk over to the discount rail ticket shop. “Kyoto during Golden Week—are you sure?” she asks.

  “I’ve lived here too long without seeing ‘the heart of Japan.’”

  “It will be crowded. But I don’t mind if you don’t mind. Shall we buy some guidebooks?”

  I laugh. “We are just like an old married couple, aren’t we?”

  “Yes—but without all the trouble,” says Satomi, who, like me, has a complicated history.

  Monday, April 19

  “If Koun becomes a temple priest here in Japan, does this mean something will be expected of you?” asks Stephen as he navigates the narrow road to Tatsuda Center.

  “Yes and no and it depends. But ultimately, I guess it’s up to us.”

  Could I ever become like Mrs. Honda, the wife of Koun’s teacher? I imagine attending to guests who arrive for a ceremony or funeral memorial service: boiling water for tea and arranging food into fine lacquer dishes in the kitchen, then carrying it all out to serve to the people in the outer receiving rooms. A bow and a greeting to each. Or managing the “dirty work” of the temple—the necessary handling of money for priestly services. Or, like other even more formal priests’ wives I’ve seen, their bodies bound up in demure kimono, attending in near silence to the anticipated needs of others. They slip in and out through shoji drawn open and closed while in seiza, to a room filled with laughter or tears.

  Tuesday, April 20

  An earthquake strikes just before noon. Students stop talking in class, a collective tuning-in. I picture the housewives of Kumamoto poised in the act of striking their hanging futon, and the office workers with their official stamps in the air, heads cocked to the side, as if listening. When it is over, whispers of “That was a big one, wasn’t it?” And then we all turn back to our work, this small interruption seemingly forgotten, but also noted as a tragic possibility. Uneasiness seeps into the fabric of the day. It is like this in Alaska, too. Another place with a dangerous character shifting and grumbling beneath the surface.

  After school, I realize that I haven’t kneaded the clay scraps Sensei sent home with me last week. They’ve been sitting, forgotten, in a covered bucket beneath my kitchen table. Luckily, I have some time before class. But when I dump it all out on the table and begin to knead, I create nothing more than a molten mess. With each push, clay squirts out like soft excrement between my fingers. It feels like some larger metaphor. I squeeze the excess clay from my hands, wash up at the sink, then slide the kitchen windows open completely—maybe the breeze will take up some of the water while I go out for a long, much-needed walk.

  A couple of hours later, I return to knead the clay again and then gather it all up—a slightly firmer sticky mess—into one heap to take to class. It occurs to me that I should have gone at it with a hairdryer, but it’s too late for that now.

  In class, when I throw the lump down on the wheel and begin, the first cup comes out goopy—the edges simply won’t hold. Sensei notes my struggles. “Recycled? Hmmm, it looks too wet. Also, your technique is not good.”

  I take a breath, begin again. But with each attempt, the pot folds into itself, and I have to cut it off at the hump and throw it in my scrap bucket, now growing full with half-formed misshapen clay bodies. “Next time you must completely mix the clay. Let it dry properly. This is important.”

  We are already in the final twenty minutes of class. I’m focusing on my last bit of clay, determined to not fail this one time. Creasing my brow and biting my lower lip, I think, Concentrate, concentrate. . . . Suddenly, the ground begins to shake. I look up, my hands still spinning in clay. “Just a bus,” says Sensei, laughing as my fingers destroy yet another hopeless form.

  Wednesday, April 21

  During tea this evening, the Wednesday pottery ladies drop their air of formality with me.

  “All day I was so nervous, trying to think of how to say the thing I want to ask you in English,” says Mikiko-san.

  �
��You can ask me—don’t worry.”

  “How did you meet your husband?—Is that correct English?”

  “Yes, yes. I met him in graduate school, in America.”

  “In Alaska?”

  “In Washington.”

  “Where did you get married? In a church? Was there big white dress?”

  “No, we got married in a Japanese Zen temple in Hawaii. Koun wore his priest’s robes and I wore a simple white Thai silk dress. The ceremony was in Japanese. Koun’s teacher came all the way from Takamori to perform it.”

  “A Buddhist wedding! Even Japanese do not have Buddhist weddings so often. We say Shinto is for weddings and Buddhism is for funerals. But now Christian weddings are very popular, though we are not Christian.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “I think,” says Mikiko-san, “you and Koun must have been Japanese in a former life.” Koun gets this all the time.

  “Neee,” adds Harada-san. “More Japanese than Japanese.”

  “If only I’d remembered the language a little better . . .”

  “Eh?” asks Sensei, unable to follow our English.

  “Zannen desu ne. Nihongo o wasuremashita.” (It’s too bad I forgot Japanese.)

  Saturday, April 24

  When I return home from karate practice at the Budokan today, there is a package from Yamada-san on my stoop. Inside, nestled in newspaper, are what look like huge, deceased rodents—but on closer inspection reveal themselves to be several fresh bamboo shoots coated in fine brown hairs. There is no note, only these oddly shaped edibles. A transmission beyond words.

  When I ask Satomi later, she is not confident of the proper way to cook the shoots. “I think you’ll need to soak them in water for a while to remove the bitter poison.”

  “The poison?”

  “Yes—my mother will know how to cook them properly. I will ask her.”

  “But—is it safe?”

  “Oh yes, and quite healthy. Good for the skin.”

  “It sounds as if you are describing the onsen. If we soak in the bath long enough do you think we will remove the bitter poison?”

  “Maybe I will have to soak a very long time.”