My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  “Oh, me too.”

  Wednesday, April 28

  At home after work, I receive a letter from Yamada-san in a blue envelope with his furniture store address on the preprinted label. Perhaps it was meant to be delivered with the bamboo shoots. In his typical scrawl he writes that he likes the tea bowl I sent him for his sixtieth birthday and has given it a prominent space on his desk at work. I am not sure which side is the front. But one edge has a long drip of glaze. This he faces out for his guests to contemplate. I like the image of the tea bowl sitting there among his beautiful sketches of furniture, all those ideas that he dreams into being and then delivers, by himself, directly to his customers’ doors.

  He also writes that his good friend and gardener, the man whom he asked to install fabulously huge trees from all over Japan into the garden he has been building for his father (who is “always caring for those troublesome bonsai”), was killed in a car accident. I only found out because I read it in the paper a day later. It gave me a terrible lonely feeling.

  And then he tells me that one of his dogs died this past month too, his loyal Hana-chan. My wife says Hana-chan died instead of my father, so I should be thankful.

  When I fold up the letter and attempt to return it to the envelope, I find two photos inside: one of a towering ginkgo in a sprawling Japanese-style garden labeled “the last tree the gardener planted” and the other of a small shrine, also in the garden, labeled “Hana-chan’s grave.”

  Thursday, April 29

  In the late afternoon, I take my usual long walk through twisting neighborhoods, rice fields, and community vegetable plots—pausing on my way back at the overspill area, a vast tree-lined basin filled with air or water, depending on the mood of the sky. On this day, the morning rain has filled it, and gray-white cranes fly low along the water’s surface, creating bird and reflection, reflection and bird. For a moment, I don’t understand what I’m seeing.

  I remember, some years ago, trying to explain to Koun one of the reasons why I love being with him. You’re the only person I’ve ever been able to be properly alone with. That must sound terrible, but it’s not. It is a comfortable thing, a beautiful thing.

  There is a certain pleasure in solitude, and yet I miss Koun in every moment of every day. These twin feelings reflect each other; I don’t know what it means.

  Friday, April 30

  I’m dressing for work after morning zazen, that expansiveness still in me when the phone rings: it is Koun’s mother, Viv. There’s an edge to her voice today. I try not to take it personally, but still this goading comment echoes in my mind: Aren’t you mad at him for leaving you?

  And later, as I’m packing up to return home, it hits me: “That’s the wrong question.” I say this out loud in my office, to no one.

  Maybe the real question is this: Why am I here?

  MAY

  Authentic Experience

  Saturday, May 1

  May begins in a crush of humanity pouring through the maze of hallways, entrances, and exits of Fukuoka City’s Hakata Station, a bird’s-eye view of which would surely fascinate any physics enthusiast. My stutter-stopping is the only apparent flaw in this grand design as I try to keep up with Satomi, who moves through the crowd with relative ease. My sight is fixed firmly on her yellow backpack—the one bright beacon in the jostle of uniformity. I am beginning to question my decision to travel to Kyoto, the cultural capital of Japan and favorite must-see tourist destination, during Golden Week, the single busiest in-country travel time of the year. This week contains a string of national holidays, and many Japanese embrace the rare opportunity of guilt-free time off, happily leaping into the flood of fellow travelers. As an Alaskan used to wide-open spaces, I’ve never navigated any crowd in Japan well; I’ve always felt lucky to live in the comparatively less populated outskirts of Kumamoto City.

  Satomi turns, spots me, and mouths “this way,” motioning with one hand and holding up her Shinkansen bullet train tickets with the other. And then she’s off again, moving faster than before—and completely at ease.

  I take in a quick breath and follow, running a little to catch up. And that’s when I get it: when I stop concentrating and hesitating, when I stop examining people’s faces and bodies in order to guess which way they’ll turn, when I stop apologizing with my face and body and speech, then I’m fine, winding and looping my way through, just another ball bearing in a great and complex machine. Until, of course, a suited man neatly clips me in the knee with the edge of his bag and I more fall than step into the Shinkansen.

  Satomi notices my limp and grimace. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, thought I got the hang of it there for a minute, and then—BANG!”

  A few hours later, we are expelled from Kyoto Station in a crowd, drift the streets in a crowd, are funneled onto a bus in a crowd, and then enter our first destination, Sanjusangendo’s Buddha Hall, where we shuffle along in one great shifting hug.

  On display before us: seemingly endless, a thousand life-sized and gilded Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva statues in gassho prayer pose, stretching the length of the hall and disappearing into muted light. We move slowly in the presence of these embodiments of compassion, these beings said to hear all the cries of the world. Bodies brush against bodies, whispers in every language. At intervals, hands emerge from the mass to light incense and candles at stations that have been set up for this purpose. I step forward, light a candle for Koun’s mother, gassho, step back into people. Faces around us glow in the flickering flames. We breathe in, we breathe out, as one crowd observes the other.

  Sunday, May 2

  Waking this morning in the ryokan, our little Japanese inn, I have no idea where I am. My not-yet-awake mind notes the familiar: futon, tatami, fusuma, and light coming in the one window, filtered by the shifting branches of a tree. Dust motes circling above me. Familiar, yes, but not quite right—a flawed memory, or an alternate universe. The sensation lifts away with each blink.

  “What adventure awaits us today?” I ask Satomi, who, fully dressed and ready for the day, is silently studying her guidebook. “I’m up for anything—famous sights or otherwise. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “If you don’t mind,” says Satomi, “I would like to learn kodo. It’s something I’ve always been curious about. It is ‘the way of incense.’”

  “Scent and memory,” I say. “I read somewhere how one is inherently linked to the other.”

  “Then maybe it is the best of the senses. Or the worst.”

  A few hours later, Satomi and I sit in formal seiza in an elegantly spare room tucked into the back of one of Kyoto’s premier incense establishments. Six or seven Japanese tourists sit across and to the sides of us, while the sensei and his kimono-clad assistant sit at the head of the square, instructing us in a tourists’ sampling of an incense ceremony.

  “When we practice kodo,” he tells us, “we do not use the verb ‘to smell.’ Instead, we use the verb ‘to listen.’” He pauses, allowing us all to savor this unusual twist of language. “Here,” he says, handing me the small ceramic container of burning incense. “Yoku kiite kudasai.” (Please “listen” carefully.) When he beckons me to smell with this verb, I cannot help but hear/smell a synesthesia of the spiced friction of our collective bodies against tatami, muted sandalwood laughter from another room. I pass the container to Satomi, wondering if everyone is having the same mixed-up sensory experience.

  “Incense has held both sacred and mundane functions since it first came from China,” explains the sensei as the incense burner is passed around the room. “It was first burned as a religious offering, and as purification. Buddhist monks sprinkled powdered incense onto their hands before touching their okesa. In Heian times, court people often had their own signature smell. They scented their kimono, their hair. If the wrong smell was in a room—well, there could be trouble.” The tourists chuckle in response to this last bit. “At court, people often amused themselves with incense contests . . . like the
one we will try today.”

  The sensei presents a series of scents, and then gives us a blind challenge. My sense of smell and taste have always been quite good, and I am sure I know the answer when we are asked to write down the scent notes, wear it on my face in a self-satisfied grin when the sensei asks me. But when the key is revealed, I’ve guessed completely wrong. Satomi, in contrast, is merely a single note off.

  As we exit out into the busy streets again, the aura of incense still on us, I ask Satomi what the smell of home is for her. “Takana rice,” she replies. “It is something my mother makes very well. What is it for you?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think about it some more.”

  Monday, May 3

  After fighting the crowds through two of Kyoto’s more famous attractions—the massive cliffside Kiyomizudera temple complex and Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion—Satomi and I find some relief in just sitting in the viewing area of the more modest temple Ryoanji, the visitors moving around us like water around two stones. “This is Kyoto’s most famous rock garden,” explains Satomi, who remembers coming here once on a high school trip.

  The garden before us is relatively small and consists of just fifteen moss-covered boulders set haphazardly into a rectangular field of raked pebbles surrounded by a low, time-stained wall. “Not much to it, is there?”

  “According to the pamphlet,” says Satomi, “we’re supposed to sit here and contemplate the meaning of the garden.”

  “Like a koan?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says Satomi. “This is our chance to get enlightened.”

  We sit and cycle through a few possibilities: Could it be ocean and islands—a geography of Japan? Or clouds in sky? Or—

  “Well, ‘Happy Clouds,’ at least. For the characters in Koun’s name,” offers Satomi.

  “How about ‘nature of mind’? That’s probably the Zen answer.”

  “Large rocks and small pebbles?”

  “Okay, I think that is a better Zen answer!”

  As we are on our way out, Satomi points to an object on display in a dusty nook of the entranceway. The size of a tea tray, it is an exact replica of the garden. “You can touch this—they’ve put it here for the blind.” We close our eyes, run our fingers over sculpted metal worn smooth by so many hands, fill up vast darkness with the idea of a garden.

  Tuesday, May 4

  Weaving along temple lanes on the outskirts of Kyoto after devouring a “traditional temple-style vegetarian meal” for lunch, we turn and amble down an unassuming dirt path lined with tall, cooling bamboo. Multi-colored ceramic shards embedded in the dirt beneath our feet glisten in the sun. We pause to take in what must be a potter’s spacious backyard. Huge open-bottomed crockery accommodate the thick bamboo stalks that shoot up from the earth, through the pots, and into sky—houseplants that can’t be contained.

  “This has to mean something, don’t you think?” I ask. “A failure or a triumph?”

  “Maybe it depends on the perspective.”

  “Of the pot or the bamboo?”

  “American or Japanese.”

  “Good point.” I take out my camera and snap a couple photos before we move on. “Satomi, is Kyoto different to you? Aside from the various landmarks, can you tell that it is not your home?”

  “Well, the dialect is somewhat different—that is obvious. But there is a curtness, a distance here, and that doesn’t feel like Kumamoto. When people offer tea at the end of a meal or conversation, here it means that it is time for you to leave. It is a very direct indirect communication.”

  “I always feel a distance here—I mean, anywhere in Japan.”

  “Of course. That’s because you are not Japanese.”

  Wednesday, May 5

  The day begins with rain, more crowds, and the imminent danger of wet umbrella spokes gouging out our eyes as we move on and off Kyoto’s buses and trams and along walkways. We decide to escape the main thoroughfares, working our way instead through the neighborhoods. We spot lush miniature gardens tucked into the two-foot spaces between houses, talk with well-fed cats peering at us from the dry promise of open doorways, marvel at all the traditional family specialty shops nestled among homes: sellers of manju sweets, shakuhachi bamboo flutes, formal tea ceremony paraphernalia, kimono and other textiles.

  Eventually we happen upon a small, discreet sign that points the way to a destination on our list: Kanjiro Kawai’s house. We enter the late eminent potter’s home—now a museum—through a low sliding door and pay a fee that gives us free reign to wander through the past. Despite (or because of) the rain falling outside, very few tourists are here and the rooms are nearly silent as we move through them. Everywhere, there are natural wood surfaces and patterned shadows. Windows and walls open to an interior courtyard. Though large and labyrinthine, there are distinct similarities between this place and the house where Koun first lived in Takamori some years ago, and to the many temples and old houses we have visited.

  “It almost feels too intimate, doesn’t it? Like stepping into another person’s dreams,” says Satomi in a whisper as we crawl through a “humble door” into the tea room overlooking the garden. “I feel that I am a spy or an intruder.”

  After we move on and inspect the great wood-fired kiln, old-style potter’s wheels, and various artifacts displayed behind glass, I stop in the lobby to buy a postcard photo of one of Kawai’s angular, thick-walled pots—a humble blue ash-speckled vase. Like all of his pots, the postcard explains, it is unsigned. The artist rejecting ego.

  “I love this,” I say to Satomi as I show her the postcard. “It reminds me of something, a visceral, homey feeling.”

  “Oh yes, you can almost feel it in your hands.”

  “Satomi, why don’t you join my pottery class? I think it would suit you.”

  “The yakimono, yes. But I know about those groups, so nosy—not that they’re bad people. It’s just the way of Japanese women. I don’t want anyone picking at my personal life.” Satomi, a child of divorce like myself, has a complicated family—made more complicated by the local habit of directly or indirectly shaming those outside the so-called norm. The dark side of a collectivist culture.

  “Here, I always lie about my family,” I say. “Or I just let people make assumptions. I learned early on that it makes things easier. I remember trying to explain divorce and step-parents and half-siblings to students who kept asking—what a nightmare.”

  “It is more difficult for me to lie about such things. They would be very nosy with me. They would feel sorry for me. I couldn’t stand it.”

  “The cultural barrier protects me, doesn’t it? Maybe sometimes it is better to not understand.”

  “Yes.”

  ~

  In the evening, the rain continues on and off, and we stroll the famed Philosopher’s Walk lined with temples. I picture the monks inside making their nightly preparations. We wander off the path a bit as the light begins to give way and find ourselves walking the grounds of a tiny temple that is seemingly uninteresting to the other tourists. In one of the buildings, the doors are propped open and we discover an art exhibit of soft pastel nudes. The colors run over and through the bodies, the feeling permeating our own damp skins, as if we are meant to be part of the art. And then stepping out again, we are surrounded by the soft wet blur of green moss and endless bamboo dissolving into near-total darkness. The lit stone pathway shows us the way to busy city streets, but Satomi touches my arm, motioning to another dimly lit side street. “Let’s not just yet. It’s so peaceful here away from all that artificial light and noise.”

  I nod and follow her lead. “You know, my first two years in Japan I spent most nights walking the streets of Kumamoto at odd hours. It felt a little like this.”

  “Why? Maybe that’s . . . a little dangerous.”

  “Yes, well, it’s difficult to explain. I had a lot going on in my head. A lot of anger at first, and then mostly this terrible feeling, like shame. I wanted to find a wa
y out of that bad place in my mind. It seemed important for my relationship with Koun. So I walked every night until I couldn’t walk any more.”

  “Did you find the way out?”

  “Maybe. It got better after a while.”

  “And did you keep your habit of walking at night?”

  “Not so much now.”

  “That’s good. After dark, a city changes.”

  “True.” I saw many things in the night. A couple making love against the shadow of an office building. Teenagers drinking alcohol and laughing in the tall reeds near Lake Ezu, their disembodied voices rising out of the darkness. Solitary drunken salarymen in black suits weaving more horizontal than vertical. An old man practicing kendo kata in a parking lot. A mother, framed in the light from an open window, disrobing for her evening bath with her children. A man thrown from a slow-moving car by yakuza gangsters, a bag of groceries tossed after him, like an afterthought, and him on his hands and knees weeping and collecting the cans and packages of food into his arms.

  Once, I was attacked by a groper, a chikan, as I walked beneath an overpass. He bloodied my face and tore at my clothes as cars flew past—the people in the cars perhaps seeing nothing, or seeing nothing in that way that is Japanese, or misunderstanding what was seen: just lovers drunk and quarreling, stumbling over each other in the flash of headlights.

  As I made my way home that night, a woman gave me wide berth, crossing the street when she saw the blood, the intensity in my foreign eyes.

  Thursday, May 6

  On the final morning of our Kyoto mini-vacation, we fold up our bedding into tall piles and move the low table back into the center of the tatami, where we take breakfast each day: homemade onigiri rice balls and miso soup and dishes of pickled vegetables. When the lady of the ryokan, a demure woman in her fifties, comes down to collect our trays, we ask if we can hear about her father’s obi-weaving business, something we’ve learned about by reading the guest log in our room. The wide, often ornate belts can be as treasured as the kimono they hold in place.