My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  “Not exactly, but even the informal way is ritualized.”

  “Right—everything is sacred for you guys.”

  “Well, or the opposite. You know, ‘If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’ . . . Oh, look at this,” he says as we descend the long stone staircase from the temple grounds to the parking area below. “The leaves have covered the stones again. I’m always noticing things like this now—all these little details.”

  “Remind me to save plenty of housework for your return.”

  “Nothing would make me happier than to sweep floors for you.”

  As we stand before the view of the valley, for a moment I can’t speak. I want desperately to hold his hand, to hug him.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “I’m okay. It’s just—I don’t know—surreal. Like moving through a memory or a dream.”

  “I wish we could have had some time together today.”

  “I know—me too. I’m just glad you’re closer now. That’s something.” I open the back of the van and Koun sets my bag inside. “I’ve been thinking about going to Alaska over the summer break.”

  “Well, that’s new. Do you feel good about it?”

  “I’m not sure how I feel about it.”

  “Maybe that’s okay, you know.”

  “Maybe.”

  ~

  In my rearview mirror, I see that he stays in gassho—the good manners of a monk—as I drive down the mountain.

  Monday, June 14

  Such storms and gloom in my mind. Sitting zazen at Tatsuda Center this evening, stories from my childhood float up from somewhere—little devastating clouds. I’ve gotten better at not following those ugly emotions. But I follow today, really really follow, because I can’t quite figure out my simultaneous need for—and trepidation about—returning to Alaska. What I’m seeing is my stepfather driving our red Chevy Blazer on the way home, him talking, a long riff that won’t stop—teasing me in that way that isn’t teasing and looking in the rearview mirror again and again to see how badly I am taking it. My mother beside him, laughing nervously, and me in the back turning away, finally, to stare out my window at the passing landscape. And then the moose coming fast out of the trees and down from the embankment next to the road. The impact sound and sensation all in one: a rush of cold as the window bursts to the left of my face and my body thrown forward, instantly bruised by the seatbelt across my hips. I must have closed my eyes. When I open them, I see that my hands are shaking and covered in glass. My breath low and shallow while my stepfather swears and gets out of the car, moving around it to take in the damage. “Must have rolled right over us,” he says when he gets to my side of the car. “Looks like it took out your window with a hoof.” He opens my door and slams it shut. “Door’s fine.” I look beyond my destroyed window, see blood, the dark flank of the animal, my stepfather’s boots kicking gravel. “Fucker shit himself.” He kneels and I see that the animal is still breathing. I become aware of my mother then, her getting out of the car. I stare down at my hands. I don’t look up again until we get home.

  With his friends—the various people he entertained at our house (and elsewhere) on the weekends—my stepfather told his version of this story and it always got a big round of laughter. “That moose jumped out of nowhere—from the sky,” he’d say. And then there was the punchline: “When I opened Tracy’s door, she was covered in shit. Completely covered. It was disgusting.”

  Once, I spoke up. “That’s not really what happened.”

  “What?”

  “That’s not what happened.” He stared down at me. I lowered my eyes and retreated to my room, closing the door behind me.

  Days after my small act of defiance, a humor piece appeared in the local paper detailing the escapade of our family car versus a flying moose and a girl inexplicably covered in excrement. The article was written by a family friend, a journalist, and my stepfather had it framed. It hung in the hallway next to my room so I would not forget his power to shape reality and to make others see exactly what he wanted them to see.

  My mother, now divorced from this husband of many years, who knows the depths of his cruelty, still repeats his version of this and other stories. Her memory, too, rewritten.

  Wednesday, June 16

  I am walking my usual route this evening, lost in my thoughts, when an old man looks up from his work in his garden and calls out to me, waving his hand to get my attention. “Hey there!” I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this gentleman before, walking the streets dressed in nothing more than long underwear and an undershirt. “Hey!” he calls again. “Don’t I often see you walking past here?”

  I explain that yes—it’s my daily exercise, “for the health.”

  “Please,” he says, “you must come inside and meet my wife. Just for a moment.”

  I protest—after all, I haven’t got that much time to finish my walk, eat dinner, and get to pottery. But he keeps pushing, this lonely man who just wants to be kind to a stranger, so why not? We stroll the length of the narrow driveway to his house, and he names each tree that he’s planted himself along the way. It occurs to me that he might actually be a little drunk, and this could be a funny situation I’ve gotten myself into.

  Inside, I slip off my shoes in the genkan. It is a typical old-style Japanese home—elegant and also cluttered. I’m led to a sitting room, where his wife joins us shortly with a tray of expensive fresh-cut melon and steaming cups of coffee. “I used to be a painter,” says the man, pointing to the many paintings hung along one wall of the room and filling an adjoining room entirely. “But I can’t do it anymore,” he says, tapping his head and grinning.

  He reaches beneath the coffee table and pulls out a thick photo album, and we begin to flip through scenes of Europe. “They’re beautiful—have you really been to all of these places?” I ask.

  “Oh yes,” he replies, pointing to the albums that nearly fill two tall bookshelves. “There’s more, too—those are just some of them.”

  His wife looks agitated, twisting her hands in her lap. “Come on now, she doesn’t want to see all your pictures. Tell us, what do you do?”

  “I teach at Shokei.”

  “How about your husband? Or—you are single?”

  “I’m married—he’s at a monastery this year for shugyo.”

  “I see. Excuse me, there is something I would like to tell you. Do you have time?”

  “She’s always doing this,” says the old man, chuckling.

  “Stop that,” she says.

  “Well, I don’t have much time. I have a class this evening.”

  “Really, it won’t take any time at all. And I’m afraid it is very, very important.” She returns with a worn leather-bound book and sets it on the table before me. “Have you ever heard of The Holy Bible?”

  “Oh yes—Christianity is very common in my country.”

  “I see. Well, let me explain. There is a God, you see, and He lives in the sky, in Heaven. Can you understand my Japanese well? Can you understand ‘Heaven?’”

  “Woo—there she goes now!” The old man begins to chuckle again.

  “Stop that!” She shouts back at him while he lifts himself up out of his chair. Then she continues, “You can go to Heaven only if you believe in God. Otherwise, you will go to Hell. That is the place where the Devil lives. It is very, very bad there.”

  “Hora. Do you see that beautiful woman in this painting?” The old man is standing now, unsteadily, and pointing at a painting on the wall of a woman wearing an elegant dress slit high up the thigh. “Do you see her?” His voice becomes high and shrill. “Do you see that woman?! That’s MY WIFE!”

  “Stop it, will you! Sit down.”

  He sits back down, looks at his hands, and pouts.

  “Not so young any more though.” He snorts and chuckles again.

  “I’m so sorry—I really should go,” I say. It appears that I have indeed gotten myself into something interesting. “I’m late for my pottery
class already. . . . ”

  “Wait!” the old man stands up again. “You like yakimono? My daughter used to do yakimono. She is in Tokyo now. No time for her old parents.” He limps off to another room and then puts something into his wife’s hands, and they both disappear, and for a moment I wonder if I should just go but they both come out again as I finish tying my shoelaces.

  He presses a bag into my hands. “Please,” he says, “won’t you come visit us again? Please? Please?”

  Later, I try to explain to Sensei why I’m so late to class. “Did you all catch that?” She says, “Tracy-san was kidnapped by an ojiichan. He gave her this little vase with sakura petals etched on it.”

  They pass around the fragile vase of my lonely kidnappers. “Beautiful . . . beautiful . . .”

  Saturday, June 19

  Satomi and I sit in a dark theater in downtown Kumamoto, the sound of fast food being unwrapped around us, while on the screen mostly Japanese actors in a Japanese-produced movie speak Korean in a vaguely European setting. For Satomi and me, it has become a habit to watch foreign films together—that is, films that are in a language unknown to both of us—followed afterward by our question-and-answer sessions at a local coffee shop. Maybe being immersed in a lack of cultural/linguistic understanding has become a source of pleasure for me—I seek out confusion as entertainment.

  Today’s film is in black and white, what appears to be a love-lost-and-gained story. The subtitles are quickly appearing and disappearing lines of Japanese—always much too fast to even begin to make sense of what little I can read. Thus for me, this is a film of visuals only. I am following the cinematographer’s obsession with images of shoes and feet intensely, trying to make meaning out of it against the relationships of the unlikely ménage of characters living in an apparent hotel. Each time we see a character, we are introduced to their feet in a flash, and later we see their feet again during times of discordance. What can it mean? Feet traveling along the path of life? Walk a while in his or her shoes? I look down at my own feet—dusty, sockless, calloused from my obsession with long daily walks, and bound up in a pair of worn, un-pretty hiking sandals. What depth of my character is revealed here? What metaphor?

  Later in a coffee shop, Satomi and I sip cool drinks, fanning away the cigarette smoke around us while I drill her with my questions, but the answers this time just leave me feeling more confused.

  “Why did the young woman who worked in the flower shop move out of the hotel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did the angry men take away the little girl’s father, and why didn’t anyone stop them?”

  “Well . . . that wasn’t the girl’s father, and anyway he killed the little girl’s mother.”

  “Wow. Okay. But what was with all the feet?”

  “Feet? I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

  “Let’s back up here. It’s a love story, right?”

  “I think so. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  Monday, June 21

  Amazingly, a typhoon just missed Kyushu again—the edge grazed us while the full storm went straight up to Shikoku. All that weather-report drama for nothing much. So far, Koun is lucky that he’s on this island for the summer.

  This evening there is a welcome party for a few delegates from College of Saint Mary, one of our sister schools in the U.S., and it’s turning out to be more lively than usual: Hiroe-sensei is very drunk and keeps making passes in the form of marriage proposals to one of the visitors, a beautiful Japanese expat (now forty, Hiroe-sensei seems desperate for a wife lately—I have been jokingly proposed to by him on more than one occasion). The woman coyly replies over and over that she already has too many boyfriends in America. And the usually stoic Takahashi-sensei teaches me Japanese drinking idioms: “We Japanese have two stomachs—one for food, one for beer” and also “Ashi-kun” which means “Mr. Legs,” essentially “designated driver.”

  In all of this drunken chaos, Cynthia, our honored and wonderfully big-personalitied foreign guest, asks the inevitable, “Married? And so what does YOUR husband do?” And when I reply, she stares at me hard. “Well, isn’t THAT interesting,” letting me know, in her tone and stare, that it is not interesting in a positive sort of way. The handsome and reserved Takeshita-sensei—sitting at an angle to me and slightly out of earshot of Cynthia—unwittingly saves me from a religious challenge that I have never found all that compelling. He leans in and asks about my experience with Zen in Japan. “My teacher does zazen, too,” he says. “I also am learning the way.”

  Wednesday, June 23

  “What’s Koun’s blood type?” Sensei asks as I am turning cups in pottery class this evening.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “How can you not know his blood type? That’s important information.”

  “Is it? Americans don’t think about it so much.”

  “How about you? What’s your blood type, Tracy-san?”

  “I’m an O.”

  “Ahhh . . . so you are an O.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  “A is very active. B is lazy. AB is crazy. O is pretty good—good balance.”

  “How about this teacup, Sensei?” I show her how I’ve snuck an American-style mug handle onto one of my cups. “Good balance?”

  “No, it is AB—crazy.”

  Friday, June 25

  It is that hour between light and dark and I decide to drive out to the onsen because I need to do something to boil out the tension that has been rising in me all week. I enter the complex, buy a ticket from the machine, and put my shoes in the rack while ignoring, as always, the big sign in English that reads “No Tattooed People”—a sign meant, perhaps, to ward away yakuza but for some reason is only printed in English. When I hand my ticket to the attendant, he warmly bids me good evening—I am a regular here, after all. I’m careful to select the character indicating the women’s entrance, as the designation changes every few days (I’ve nearly made a mistake more than once!).

  In the changing room I remove my clothes and tuck them into a cubby. An old woman stands next to me, also naked and clutching a tiny white towel. “Excuse me. I lost my cubby before I took the key out. It’s 34, but I can’t see the numbers well.”

  I locate the cubby for her, but her clothes are not inside. I check the whole wall, and then the next. Then we move to a different area and find her things.

  “Oh!” She says after thanking me and really seeing me for the first time. “Where are you from?”

  “Alaska. In America.”

  “Ah,” she says, “that’s good isn’t it.” Then she thanks me and bows deeply—such formality between two naked strangers—before moving off.

  I slide open a glass door and enter the steam-filled bathing area. As is necessary and customary, I spend a long time at the seated showers, washing my hair and body and taking care not to spray those seated next to me. Little boys and girls wander past—all of them stopping to stare at my foreign skin growing pink beneath hot water, before being called away by their mothers.

  And then I slip into the indoor baths one by one—the delicious-smelling yuzu (citron) bath, the jacuzzi, the ionized bath. I step outdoors to cooler air and test the sauna, the cold pool, the waterfall falling hard against aching shoulders.

  I am sitting on the ledge next to the newly-installed denki (electric) bath, letting my skin cool, when two chatting young women swiftly step down into the water, not seeing the warning signs. They scream, “Nani? Nani?!” (What? What?) and then laugh when they realize what they’ve done, subjecting their bodies to the sensation of electricity as it contracts their muscles into relaxed submission.

  In one of his recent letters, Koun wrote that whenever the monks go to the onsen—a treat after takuhatsu—they shave each others’ heads. After that, he likes to sit full lotus in the water, the heat helping his body to settle into the posture.

  I have been wanting to try this special zazen. Slipping back into the water
, I tuck each foot over the opposite thigh and sit for a few minutes before the heat compels me to get up and move on to the walking bath that is in the shape of a great circle. Water kinhin, I think: this slow tide of women flowing in silence, the water at the ribs below our breasts, our hands trailing rippling wakes, our legs and torsos pushing powerfully forward forward forward.

  Alaska. That’s good, isn’t it.

  Saturday, June 26

  “Everyone keeps asking me if I have a gun,” says Chad, a fellow language student, during our morning break at the YMCA. The animated twenty-something from California continues, “So the other day I started pointing to my pocket or a drawer at work or whatever. This guy—you should have seen his eyes—‘Really? In . . . your . . . pocket?’”

  I offer my own story of the delightful and ever-joking American Ed, who took to practicing his possessives in Japanese by inquiring if all precious items around him were “boku-no?” (mine?). This was good fun, as it caused the Japanese a considerable amount of discomfort. “But one day, one of his coworkers insisted that he take the very expensive pair of binoculars that Ed had been declaring ‘mine’ all day.”

  “Awesome,” laughs Chad as he gathers his things to return to class. “I’m trying that one tomorrow.”

  “So . . . um, that was meant as a cautionary tale,” I add, too late, as I follow him into the classroom. I’ve missed a beat and he’s already well into a jovial conversation with someone else.

  After class, Satomi and I go to lunch. “I know I don’t understand Japanese culture very well. But I also feel like some kind of anthropologist around the younger Westerners who are new to Japan,” I tell her over bowls of steaming ramen. “Sometimes I feel they don’t understand me, and when I listen to their stories, or the details of their lives, I know I’m not understanding them in the way they intended. It’s as if I’m constantly looking through these layers, or maybe accessing a myriad of meanings. And then my rhythm is permanently off because I’m always thinking in prism form, That means this and this and this and this and this. . . .”

  “Something like that happens to Japanese who leave Japan for a while. They come back, and they are still Japanese, but they are also changed forever. We are of a group culture, so everyone senses a difference. Sometimes those people become ostracized because they can’t quite fit back into the group.”