My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  “I’m very sorry but he’s out today,” she explains in formal Japanese, “but I’d be happy to give you a look around the shop.”

  We slip into our shoes in the genkan—that traditional space marking the transition from inside to out in nearly every building—and cross the narrow street to a row of dilapidated wooden structures. Sliding open one of the low doors, the woman beckons us to follow her into a history. Inside, our eyes adjust to low light that reveals a maze of tatami rooms stacked high with papers, scrolls, books, shelving, boxes, bound cloth. An ancient computer is tucked into one corner. At a low table she offers us zabuton cushions and pulls down dusty boxes from tall dusty shelves, unrolling each of the family’s designs with great care. We pass swatches of obi around the table—there are elaborate cranes, chrysanthemums, other famous symbols of Japan.

  “We used to design them all by hand—now we use the computer. Still, it takes a very long time to create each design. And the detailing is very fine. Most of the fabric is silk. Here is an exception—see this gold-colored thread? It is washi—fine Japanese paper.”

  I see now that her body—somehow much smaller than mine—is bent: the flat feet and bowed legs of constant seiza, the deeply arched spine of a laborer. I imagine her working the loom as a girl—straight-backed and fresh as a reed, her body defying the angles of her craft. But now, surely it is difficult to distinguish the mechanisms of her body from those of the tools of her trade.

  “I will bring tea,” she says, and Satomi smiles at me knowingly. This is the Kyoto farewell.

  “Thank you very much,” I say, “but we must go now.”

  The taxi delivers us to the train station, and we rush about searching for the necessary omiyage souvenirs for our respective coworkers and associates. I buy beautiful flower-shaped sweets for the pottery ladies and thin sheets of mochi filled with anko bean paste for the office, and then another set with chocolate for Satomi and me to eat on the train.

  “I must be becoming Japanese after all—I can’t go anywhere without getting nervous about omiyage. What if I forget someone? I need a list whenever I travel!”

  “Don’t worry, you can always buy famous cities’ goods at the train station when you arrive.”

  “That seems like cheating.”

  “Not authentic?”

  “Something like that.”

  Outside our window, the urban/rural/urban/rural landscape begins to slide by and when I briefly close my eyes I see a shifting rainbow of religion and culture: great arced eaves, gilded statuary, a woman in the shape of a loom.

  “Satomi,” I say, “when you close your eyes, what do you see?”

  Satomi closes and opens her eyes several times. “Hmmm . . . I see my bed.” She unzips her bag, produces two bottles of green tea purchased earlier from a vending machine, and hands me one. “Well, did you find what you were looking for? In Kyoto?”

  “It was beautiful. Perfect in every way. I feel more lost than ever.”

  “What were you expecting?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Well, I travel to escape my boring life. When I go home, I always find myself there—just as I left me.”

  Looking out over endless fields of rice, I can almost see the tall mountains of Alaska in the distance. I think of a school friend telling me once, as we drove the Seward Highway on the way back from a high school ski trip, You see those mountains? Most of us don’t see them, not really. But someday, if we leave, I bet that’s all we’ll think about. When I got home that evening, I drew a ridge of mountains on the interior wall of my closet. A secret drawing in permanent ink. I was compelled to do this. I don’t know why. Perhaps even in chaotic youth there can be moments of pure, unfettered clarity.

  Friday, May 7

  The house feels cloying today—too intimate. Perhaps it is just that odd feeling of arriving home after a trip, a momentum lost, a returning to reality while the dreams of elsewhere dissipate. At least I have a few days to recover before work begins.

  As I unpack from my travels, I hear a metallic clang at the mail slot in the door downstairs. In the genkan, I find a plain white postcard from Koun, this small unexpected communication slipped into the usual pile of afternoon mail. I’m allowed to write to you early only because I will be transferred from Zuioji to Shogoji, in Kikuchi, to assist with the international ango. If you could send some things soon, that would be good. A short list of necessities and, I’m OK. I love you. I miss you. I’ll write more when I’m able.

  I wonder how many monks of rank will have read and scrutinized (or understood) this brief missive before it made its way to me? The pages of a thick dog-eared dictionary turning under suspicious hands. I know Koun would have wanted to write more. Still, I am grateful. Kikuchi, very much unlike the far-off island of Shikoku, is in Kyushu and within reasonable driving distance of the townhouse. Two hours, tops. I may have a chance to see him during our year apart after all. The possibility sits inside of me strangely, a new flavor of loneliness.

  Monday, May 10

  A beautiful warm day. Entering my office, I note that my plants have become lush and overgrown, an interior jungle in the making. Revived from a long winter sleep, it would seem. And perhaps I am, too. The thought of Koun being nearby is a comfort, though who knows when I will have a chance to see him, or what our visits will entail. Most likely these will be highly formal encounters. I think, suddenly, of the old woman I pass by on my walks nearly every day. She sits in her house in a cloth-covered chair behind a long wall of sliding glass doors, looking out blankly. I always want to lift my hand and wave at her, but I always stop myself. I am seeing something that I am not supposed to see. In Japan, there are many invisible boundaries, and they must be kept.

  ~

  Kyoko brings a guest to sit with us this evening at Tatsuda Center: her tea ceremony teacher, Saito-sensei, a dignified-looking woman in her seventies. She wears a dark suit, her graying hair tightly bound up in a bun. She bows to us all in the formal way—in seiza, fingertips angled in and head nearly grazing the tatami—and asks in ultra-polite Japanese if she may join us. Kyoko had been mentioning this possible guest for weeks, but we weren’t quite sure what to make of it. Now, we fidget uncomfortably, perhaps feeling collectively for the first time how very odd our little group must appear to others.

  During zazen, Saito-sensei sits beside me like a stone—completely fixed in her posture. When we finish the session, she bows low to us all again and thanks us profusely for showing her “true zazen,” before gracefully slipping from the room just ahead of Kyoko.

  As I gather my things, Stephen says, “I think I’ve been holding my breath the whole evening.”

  “Yes, I feel as if I just failed a test.”

  Sakamoto-san, rising from a deep stretch, lets out a loud exhale.

  Tuesday, May 11

  In pottery class this evening I carve a set of cups one by one that, to my eye and hand, seem nearly identical. But once I take a good look at them side by side, I see they are not at all the same. Here, a small circumference but a thick body. There, a thin body and a wide circumference. Not one cup appears identical to another. “Onaji ja nai,” I groan.

  “Un,” says Sensei. She takes up a ruler and reveals the obvious: “Next time, use the dragonfly tool to measure from the inside lip to the inside lip, and also the depth—NOT just the outside edges. Remember: It is the nothingness in the middle that determines the true size of the vessel.”

  Thursday, May 13

  All last night, wind and rain raging against everything. I somehow manage to leave my window open and sleep through much of it—my dreams storm-colored. When I wake, a wide swath of tatami beneath the bedroom window is damp, and continued bursts of wind and rain slam against the townhouse. On the way to school my jacket whips around me as I struggle with a flimsy umbrella that turns itself inside out again and again, and I step gingerly around lakes of water. By the time I arrive, tributaries have slipped down the back of my neck and alo
ng my collarbone, soaking patches of my shirt. My knees to my feet are damp and muddy. My hair is a mess of humidity-induced frizz and my umbrella hangs, destroyed, from my wrist.

  When I enter the building, Hiroe-sensei, whose office is opposite mine, is there, too, looking tidy and dry in his pin-striped teacher’s suit. He puts on slippers, tucks his shoes into a cubby, and sets out a pair for me at the edge of the genkan, while I swipe water and muck from my clothes. “Ahhh—a lotus blooms from the mud,” he says.

  “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks a lot. Is there some reason why you are not wet?”

  “Of course. I used my umbrella.”

  ~

  The storm abruptly stops just after the first bell, and the frogs begin to sing. I’m warming up my students with easy questions-and-answers in English, but the frogs keep starting up their collective song midway through each exchange—a great wave of sound, drowning us out.

  “Kanae, how many—”

  “Yayayayayayayayaya . . .”

  My class erupts in laughter after the third or fourth attempt to make ourselves heard.

  Frustrated, I ask, “Does anyone here speak frog Japanese?” (I pause for another bout of frog song.) “I only know frog English.” My students look out the window, considering the problem with a seriousness that surprises me.

  Suddenly, the usually reserved Kanae shouts, “Yayayayaya . . .”

  The class becomes a multitude of questions and comments: “What did you say to them?” and “Your noise is too big!” and “Did you tell them they are so rude frogs?” And then, finally, everyone is laughing and trying to speak frog while Kanae, who is from the countryside and knows the mysterious and special language of frogs, translates.

  Friday, May 14

  The “poodlers” are out in the morning sun—I watch them from my office as they cut away the rogue angles of trees and form sphere after sphere, an exercise in conformity. The men all wear wide yellow straw hats and blousy sky-blue jumpsuits and black rubber boots. They seem to float in the air at varying heights around the Shokei grounds, their tall three-legged bamboo ladders keeping them aloft. My windows are open; the cutting machines whir and click. The smell of tree blood is carried on the warm wind into my office. Exquisite violence, I think.

  There is a knock at my door. It is Midori, one of my more shy and gentle students, nervously laughing in hiccup-like bursts and wanting to tell me something, but it won’t come out in any language. Tears flow from her eyes. She pauses to look up a word in her electronic dictionary and shows me: “molester.” Finally, in Japanese, she explains that on her walk to school today there was a boy who put a cell phone under her skirt and took a picture. “Let’s go report it together,” I offer, but she shakes her head no no no. “But maybe the people in the office can warn others.”

  “Please don’t tell anyone. Please.” She shows me another word in her dictionary: “shame.”

  “Come find me before you go today. I will walk home with you.”

  “No, Tracy-sensei—I just needed to tell you this secret.”

  After she leaves, I stand in the middle of my office for a long time, not knowing what to do.

  Saturday, May 15

  I am walking downtown after Japanese class, contemplating how I should spend the rest of my day, when monks in takuhatsu (formal begging) gear run past, and I hear the chant: “Kan ji zai bo satsu . . .” (Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva . . .). They are very likely monks from Shogoji in Kikuchi, where Koun is now cloistered. I have been told that this old begging practice of the monastics has become a rare sight in Kumamoto. Perhaps Jisen-san, the tiny yet powerful Japanese Argentinian nun who now currently runs Shogoji, is compelled to set them back on this old route. I met Jisen-san last year, during an international ango—a rigorous ninety-day training session—that Koun attended. Her strictness and harsh ways, from what I remember, had become legendary with the monks—and were perhaps necessary. A woman, a foreign woman, put in a place of rank in a primarily Japanese male context. I do not envy her.

  It is difficult to see the monks’ faces beneath their straw hats, so I follow their movement along the Shimotori Arcade through the many shoppers, trying to look casual in my search for a tall foreign monk among them before finally fishing a coin out of my purse and approaching one of the men at the end of the line. I see that his legs are scabbed and pale, and his robes appear to be hitched up a bit too high—not Koun, but not Japanese, either. I put the coin in the bowl and he thanks me with a chant in a distinctly Spanish accent.

  Rising from the last bow, he exclaims in emphatic Spanish-tinged English, “Ah! Tracy-san, do you remember me?”

  I squint at the face hidden in the shadow of the wide hat. It is Aigo-san, from Spain. He also had been part of the international ango last year. “Yes, of course! I’m happy to see you again, Aigo-san. And Koun?”

  “Koun-san is doing well. But he is not here with us today. He is tenzo—head cook.”

  “Please tell him . . . ‘hello.’ Take care, Aigo-san.”

  “Yes,” he says, and is off again, running to catch up with the other monks and match their rhythm as they weave in calculated intervals through the crowd. I am left, breathless, watching as he disappears.

  Monday, May 17

  All night, a gentle but constant rain, and now quiet this morning—though the clouds are still heavy and dark. I washed clothing and towels yesterday, draping each drenched item on the backs of chairs, on the tops of doors, along bamboo poles balanced haphazardly across rooms. Nothing is dry yet. The smell of damp cloth permeates the house. Opening windows to the flaccid motion of damp outside air is only a slight reprieve from damp and unmoving inside air—but it is something. How I miss such conveniences that I once took for granted. A clothes dryer. A dishwasher. A temperature-controlled home. In so many ways, living here feels like living with one foot always in the past.

  After breakfast, I put on my too-warm suit and wade through thick air to the hot balloon that is my office. A short while later, one of my energetic freshmen comes in because she needs help on a report for one of her other classes—she wants to write an explanation of Japanese temples and monasteries in English but doesn’t know where to begin. I take out some paper to jot down ideas, and her eyes grow wide when I offer possibilities: the special food, the sacred clothing, the grounds and buildings, all the daily activities of a monk.

  “Have you ever been to a temple?” she asks. So I explain, and she giggles uncontrollably. “Really? Really? Your husband? A foreigner? Shugyo?” Though I adore my student, today this annoys me and I feel my patience growing thin. Perhaps it is the heat, the terrible humidity.

  Tuesday, May 18

  At Nishida-sensei’s table, Yoko-san is speaking to the other pottery ladies in a low, serious tone. She is telling the story of a man who slipped and fell nearly ten years ago, hitting the back of his head against a rock in such a way as to cause him to lose nearly all functioning in his limbs.

  “He can’t use his legs at all anymore. He can’t use his fingers. His hands have curled into fists like this. He can only lift his right hand and arm a little.”

  The women lean over two six-by-ten-inch framed pictures while she talks, considering each before passing them on. The pictures are silhouettes: one of nori farmers standing on little boats in the ocean, stirring seaweed with long poles; the other depicting several houses in the old style with thick rice-bale roofs. The images—both printed from a computer from the dot-matrix era—are simple yet moving.

  “He always wanted to draw, so in those ten years he taught himself how. His wife tapes his hand to the computer mouse so he can make his art. It takes him a long time to make each one—but he loves it.”

  After class, Sensei gives me a shopping bag filled with some of my pots wrapped in newspaper—free of the usual “firing” charge—as well as a small bushel of carrots and an onion. “Make soup,” she says.

  Yoko-s
an also tucks the picture of the nori farmers into my hands as a gift. “We are worried about you,” she says. “You look thin and lonely.”

  Friday, May 21

  Fierce rain all day—the edge of a typhoon passing from Okinawa up to Shikoku. When I get home from work, a small pile of damp mail greets me in the genkan. I am surprised to find two items addressed from Koun.

  The first, a postcard, details a drunken fistfight between two monks over “the nature of enlightenment”—the only pointed discussion of Buddhism he’d heard from any of them yet. And, he writes, I’ve mostly stopped hitting my head against the doorframes. Mostly.

  The second, a long letter written in the brief lulls between daily duties, points to even more fascinating happenings: A monk passed out from lack of sleep during an important ceremony. Everyone watched his half-lidded eyes open and close, him swaying in and out of proper posture, and then his body hit the tatami hard, like a felled tree. And once at night, while dreaming about me and trying to “spoon,” Koun crossed the edge of his four-by-six tatami into another monk’s space, apparently touching the monk somehow (Koun not really remembering in his sleepy state), eliciting this firm warning shouted in darkness, the monk hovering inches from his face: “NEVER . . . AGAIN, KOUN-SAN . . . NEVER . . . AGAIN!” And also, during one morning meal, Jisen-san disowned one of her most promising deshi, the handsome and gentle Kodo-san. It was the morning Kodo-san was to complete his training, and he still needed money to return to his home country, Argentina. He wanted to see his daughter, who was having some trouble. So he had asked Jisen-san earlier if he could borrow some items from the monastery in order to do takuhatsu to raise money for the journey. She was not happy about his idea. All of this was expressed in angry Spanish over the formal morning tea, and then explained later, in English, to Koun by Aigo-san in hushed tones. Probably there was another argument going on here—one that we observers couldn’t really understand. And then Kodo-san, a short while later, was sent down the mountain in his rough rope sandals while the monks sang “Stand by Me” at the tops of their lungs until he surely could no longer hear them. And then they all turned to their daily chores again, because what more could they do? When a person leaves, it is like they were never here.