My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  “Is it okay?” I ask.

  “Hmm. I don’t know. It’s difficult. Hmmm.”

  This cryptic pronouncement about my fate, and then she is back into fast banter with the ladies. I am about to push on about the meaning of the lines, but already they’re on a different topic so I go back to my work. I wonder what is missing from the geography of my skin, what secrets are revealed. Surely it is imprinted here somewhere in the clay turning beneath my fingers, in all of my failed creations.

  As I drive home, I note that my mood is decidedly dark. A line from one of Koun’s letters comes to me: Today it’s sunny; I feel good. Yesterday was rainy; I felt bad. Following the same schedule every day makes these kinds of variables really obvious.

  Saturday, July 24

  Bryan calls in the morning from Helena. “I got in yesterday. Mom’s basically doing okay now, but still there’s a dramatic difference. Hard stuff. You’ll see when you get here.”

  Today is Shokei’s Open Campus Day—Jennifer and I have been slated to team-teach a sample class. We are doing our best to be as super genki (happy/healthy/energetic) as possible, though my heart is not in it at first. But once we get going, I’m back in the flow. After we introduce a short film about how to greet an American host family, we practice introductions, shaking hands and giving hugs. The girls in their high school uniforms giggle and scream playfully through the whole thing. Will I see their sweet, open faces in my classes next year?

  “How’s your mother-in-law doing?” Jennifer asks after the last student has left.

  “Not so great—we’re all really worried.”

  “Yet you smiled all day. What we do is amazing, isn’t it? We’re always putting on this other persona.”

  Tuesday, July 27

  It’s my wedding anniversary, and it seems particularly melancholic that I will spend the day—two days, actually, thanks to the curvature of the Earth—in transit to the U.S., rushing away from the love of my life.

  Satomi, driving her mother’s car nervously but with great care, delivers me to the highway bus stop for the airport early in the morning. She hugs me and then continues to wave as I slip beyond the gate, my rolling suitcase in tow. This farewell is her gift to me, and I am grateful to not be driven by an impersonal taxi at this hour.

  Once on the bus, I phase in and out of consciousness, the announcement waking me just as we pull into the international airport in Fukuoka. I shuffle from check-in to terminal to airplane, arrive in Taipei at a reasonable morning hour, and then spend the following five hours wandering the seemingly endless, (mostly) empty personality-free terminal wings, trying to get my exercise before the much longer flight ahead to Seattle, where I will stay for a few days before moving on to Montana and then Alaska.

  At one point, I find myself in an especially shabby dead-end corridor. Hung along the length of the hallway is a surprise of art: ten ink paintings, many ox-themed. As I am looking at the images, wondering at their beauty and simplicity, an older Taiwanese man approaches me (we’ve passed each other a few times now, walking laps in these sparse hallways). He says in English, “Do you know about these?”

  “I know I read about them some time ago, but I don’t remember the meanings well.”

  “The horned cow is your mind,” he says, tapping his head. “You have to tame. That is all you need to know.” Looking again at the paintings, I see that they reveal in stages the process of finding the ox, bringing it to submission, and then, perhaps, moving on to some kind of final transcendence.

  I arrive in Seattle at nearly the exact date and time as when I left Fukuoka. As I exit customs, Bryan and his girlfriend, Kathy, greet me. Though they have been dating nearly two years, seeing them together shocks me. Their relationship blossomed entirely outside of my spatial proximity—it has been a romance for me viewed through spoken word, not image (as if the mind needed the image as proof of reality). So I accidentally see him—the brother-in-law whom I love as my older brother—still as a kind of permanent bachelor, while also recognizing him as he is now.

  As we wait for my bags to appear on the conveyor, Bryan presents me with an earth-colored ceramic pitcher he picked up with Kathy while on vacation in Mexico. “Happy Anniversary,” he says. “We thought you would appreciate this.”

  “It’s perfect,” I say, and it is, the weight of it in my hands.

  Wednesday, July 28

  Bryan has already left for his job at Microsoft by the time I wake this morning. So I dress and head out for a walk around Green Lake in a jet-lag daze, dressed like a middle-aged Japanese woman, with my skin dutifully covered with hat, long-sleeved blouse, and pants. I long for a parasol, but know that’s a little too much. Most people look pale, under-dressed, thick, tall. In Japan I always feel ten pounds overweight and rather average in height, but here I feel tiny and delicate. As I walk, I catch snippets of conversation in English that I assume are about TV shows that I have never heard of, and acronyms for business and new technologies that I don’t know about. There is one familiar face: the old man with his sandwich board advertising Spanish lessons walks past, speaking to a young man who nods, listens intently, and then responds slowly. That gentle volley of language. A comfortable feeling comes over me. Their speech is pleasant background music, whereas the English makes me tune in and feel exhausted, as if I’m being constantly addressed.

  I ride the bus out to the mall with the intention of buying several things on my list, but when I actually get there, I have to leave after twenty minutes. Everything is big, abundant, overwhelming. And the advertising is definitely talking to me, but it’s just too much desire. So I get back on the bus and stop at a high-end grocery store near Bryan’s house to pick up a few essentials—tofu, rice, fruit. When I check out, I present my rarely used debit card to the cashier.

  “Slide it in the machine,” she drawls lazily.

  “What? Sorry, I don’t use a card very often.” In Japan, it’s cash only.

  “You know, the MACHINE.” She points to a gadget on the counter that I have never seen before in my life.

  “Okay, what do I do?”

  The woman behind me in line, nearly naked in her sexy yoga gear, mutters “What the fuck?!,” rolls her eyes, and storms away (to another line—and then on to Nirvana—I presume). Namaste to you, too, I think.

  I return to Bryan’s home and sleep, sleep, sleep.

  Thursday, July 29

  Today I wake late again and don’t leave the house for the better part of the afternoon. Instead, I sit in the small enclosed backyard and read with the smell of roses and sun-heated wood and the sound of distant traffic around me. A fat fluffy gray cat wanders in, climbing a neighbor’s tree and leaping from a branch over the fence to get here. She sniffs my ankle and then curls up in a ball next to me. There must be something to how I attract cats, my greatest allergenic nemeses, in whatever country I happen to be.

  In the evening, I go contra dancing with one of my dear friends, the soulful Brinda, who has worn the same velvet-short haircut since she shaved it all off in 2002 after her divorce (inspiring me, a few months after, to cut off my own long locks for the first time ever). She has a new beau in her repertoire, an undeniably sexy, bald, and not terribly kind ex-marine in a “utili-kilt,” a manly new Seattle fashion trend, apparently.

  “You have lead feet,” he tells me as I am passed to him during the dancing. “Slide!”

  “Are you kidding? I’m wearing hiking sandals—they don’t slide!”

  “You could if you were graceful.”

  And then, gratefully, I’m passed to another man with sad eyes and another who introduces himself far too formally and another who acts like an old lover, the way he tenderly grips me—until I’ve met all of the men and a few of the women at the dance. When, finally, it is time for a break, we take plastic cups of cold water and step outside to cool air. A man about fifteen years my senior sits down next to me on the curb, asks me where I’m from. While we talk, a woman his age looks over at us with
pain in her eyes. I excuse myself when I see that look, taking a slow lap around the outside of the building. I get the feeling that many of these men and women are carrying out unspoken and spoken romantic mini-dramas. Reading between the lines is devastatingly easy, and it’s all too intimate.

  Afterward, Brinda drives while Bill sits in the seat beside her. They talk animatedly while I lean back, exhausted, ready to be nestled in bed. I sit up when we are nearly to Bryan’s, making my best effort to participate—after all, Brinda really likes this guy. They’re basically talking about the battle of the sexes now, about men and women and annoying lovers past.

  “You’re lucky—you’ve got a great one now,” I offer, when Bill laments yet another horrible relationship.

  “What?” There is a hint of irritation in his voice.

  I lean forward, speak louder, “You’re lucky—” Brinda catches my eye in the rearview mirror, says “no” with her eyes. “Oh nothing, I’m just so tired.” I slump back into my seat. Nobody speaks for the rest of the trip.

  “How was the dancing?” asks Bryan after Brinda drops me back at his place.

  “I don’t know. Fun and athletic, but weirdly emotionally draining. I have this feeling that it’s really a place for those who desperately need to be touched. Oh and—I don’t think I understand what ‘dating’ means.”

  Friday, July 30

  Brinda and I sit in the steam room of a neighborhood gym, rubbing handfuls of sea salt across our bodies, flaking away the old skin to reveal the new. “I’m sorry about that thing with Bill in the car yesterday,” says Brinda. “He’s got boundaries. He says I bring out the worst in him.”

  “‘The worst in him’—what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. He’s a complicated guy.”

  You deserve better, I think. And then, We’re all complicated. But I don’t trust my ability to evaluate anything right now, so I say nothing.

  “You know, in relationships there are cycles. In my marriage, we went around and around. And then we got to the bottom of a cycle and just didn’t come back up.”

  “I’ve never experienced that. I had a bad marriage before, and now I have a good one.”

  “You will experience it someday. Maybe.”

  “How are things, now that you are separated from your husband?”

  “When we were first together, he painted. He was very artistic. And then he stopped. Now that we’re apart, he is painting again. We are both happier now. So much happier.”

  After the steam, I sit in Brinda’s apartment drinking tea while she moves around the kitchen, gathering dried herbs for me into brown paper bags. “This will nourish your lungs,” she says, “and this one’s for your heart.” Brinda, the wise woman/Microsoft professional/mother of three who knows the intricacies of healing plants, who walks the earth barefoot on every solstice—I’m always touched by her inclination to nurture. Having finished gathering a pile of remedies for me (some of which may or may not get me stopped in the airport), she sits down with a deck of cards in her hands. “Okay, are you ready for a tarot reading?”

  Cards are placed. Complex symbols are interpreted. The herbal teas flow freely. I have no idea what any of it really means. Yet another foreign language.

  I sigh, rub my forehead. “So, I’m on the verge of a breakthrough?”

  “Something like that.”

  ~

  In the evening, I trust the old bus route to take me to the karate dojo where Koun and I train with our Seattle sensei, Steve, whenever we’re in town. I am duly delivered to a recognizable neighborhood. In the studio, I find myself among a few familiar, but mostly new, faces. After a warm-up bout of randori sparring, Steve points out the obvious, “You haven’t been training enough, have you?”

  “Jet lag,” I reply, but we both know he’s right.

  Saturday, July 31

  Bryan, Kathy, and I hike a mountain trail some hours from the city. Clear skies, warm sun, and just enough breeze to keep the bugs off as we wend our way up and around and through the ever-evolving terrain. At last, we traverse the final ridge and emerge at the peak. All that effort and then there is nothing to do but take in the sun and breeze and the brilliant blueness of sky and distant lake.

  “It’s like standing on top of the world,” says Kathy, and it is, the illusion of it. Why is it, I wonder, that a certain landscape inspires us? Why one and not the other? Or why one in a certain way, and another in a different way entirely? I realize that I associate broad, natural vistas with the U.S. and cultivated close-ups with Japan, but that may not be an entirely fair assessment of the aesthetics of two complex nations—the cultures may in fact be in direct opposition to this view. What I do know is that the landscapes of both countries move me, and whenever I pay attention, the familiar becomes foreign; the foreign becomes familiar.

  As Bryan and Kathy explore the mountaintop from every angle, I settle onto a broad, flat rock, pick up a stick, and etch and re-etch a phrase into soft dirt that the wind or a hiker’s boot will sweep away by the end of the day:

  ichi-go

  ichi-e

  ichi-go

  ichi-e

  When it is nearly time to descend the mountain, I think I must look as pensive as I feel, and Bryan asks, “Is it weird to be back in the U.S.?”

  “Yes, maybe. It always feels so unreal at first, this re-entry period. I’m an outsider in the place that I know to be my home. Of course, the feeling will pass soon enough. It always does eventually.”

  “Do you feel this way in Japan, whenever you return?”

  “Yes, but—it’s different. I expect it to be weird.”

  “And the first time you arrived there?”

  “I knew immediately that it would change me.”

  How could I ever forget my first day in Japan after an ill-advised forty-eight-hour journey via a bargain airplane ticket, purchased for the selling price of my car, the only thing of value I owned? I stepped off the plane wearing a simple blue dress, wrinkled from travel and humidity. There were buttons along the front of the dress—this detail strangely clear. Feeling tired, drugged almost, and the surroundings assaulting the senses in such a way that I felt I had arrived in the idea of a country. I slept most of the way in Garrett’s car as he drove us to that old house in Takamori, me waking at brief intervals to a cacophony of complicated architecture and signage in an unknown language, to massive gray apartment buildings that seemed to echo each other, to a rise of mountains and greenery, to a village of rice paddies and ornate tile roofs, and finally to that old house nestled against a bamboo forest. And then, standing in the bedroom for the first time, noticing the squares repeating again and again and again throughout the angles of the interior—the large silk-edged squares of the tatami flooring, the dark wood slats crisscrossing the white putty walls, the smaller squares of paper shoji, the ceiling patterned, too, in square wood tiles. An angled mandala, this recursive architecture. There was just the roundness of the buttons coming undone beneath Garrett’s fingers, and of his head beneath my hands.

  AUGUST

  Legacies

  Sunday, August 1

  Today Bryan and I opt to explore Seattle’s Chinatown today. At first, we are in a classic Seattle city district of tall brickwork buildings, endless concrete and glass. And then the landscape transforms: kanji looping across sidewalk art signs, storefront windows filled with Asian artifacts, passersby looking up at us with eerily familiar faces. “It’s so weird—I feel as if I’m recognizing people, their names on the tip of my tongue. It happens in Japan, too. I see a foreigner and I think, hey—didn’t we go to high school together? Aren’t we old friends? It’s an unexpected empathy.”

  We duck into Uwajimaya, peruse the aisles of goods that are identical to those available in my neighborhood store in Kikuyo, save for the sheer quantity and also the exotic additions from Korea, Thailand, China. And then into the adjacent Kinokuniya, the bookstore that bears the same name as my favorite bookseller in Japan. “But this is
even better than the one in Tokyo!” I exclaim, rushing from aisle to aisle like a kid in a candy shop. I am vaguely aware of Bryan trailing after me, amused, and then my focus shifts entirely to the books. The English section is exceptionally well stocked—and the theme is all things Japanese. It seems that I am the ideal consumer of this particular complex of consumables, and oh how badly I want to buy, buy, buy.

  Some while later, Bryan’s voice pulls me from my frantic seeking.

  “Lost you there.”

  “Oh—I’m definitely lost.”

  “Hey, are you hungry?”

  “Starving. Lost and starving.”

  From the stack in my arms, I select just one tome to purchase for now—a basic how-to on Japanese ceramics in English, complete with illustrations. “Is this really all you want?” asks Bryan as we leave the store and move toward the food court.

  “No, I want it all. But it’s too much. I’ll start with the pottery.”

  After we make our purchases at the food counter and seat ourselves at the one unoccupied table, we lean eagerly into our meals. I pop tuna makizushi and bean-paste-filled mochi into my mouth. Bryan twirls a fork through spicy pad thai. At the neighboring table, two twenty-something Japanese boys—I imagine them to be local university students—slurp udon loudly and complain about the windy-wet Seattle weather in fast, rough Japanese. I want to embrace them, but I know they are as inaccessible to me as whatever it is I am searching for now. I think of Koun, then, how he should be here with us, experiencing this out-of-context abundance. I chew my final makizushi while a familiar bright sting grows wider and wider in my nostrils and pressure builds behind the eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Very authentic wasabi,” I explain, laughing and weeping at the same time.

  Monday, August 2

  The University of Washington campus is, at noon, nearly free of students. But soon, I imagine, they will move in and out of the buildings in little tributaries of humanity, their backpacks slung over one shoulder, casually, as they arrive and arrive and arrive into their bright futures.