by Tracy Franz
Shiki fu i ku
Ku fu i shiki . . .
I trace my finger down the line of furigana next to each Chinese character, trying to keep pace, but the rapid rhythm coupled with inadequate lighting is too much for me and my poor second-language reading skills. My voice enters and exits. Glancing up, I almost expect to see Koun half-in, half-out of shadow, chanting along with us.
“Did you enjoy?” asks Tozen afterward as we are putting the cushions away.
“Oh yes. It is difficult but it also feels right in Japanese, not forced into an awkward cadence, as it is in English.”
“Hmm, yes,” adds Loren. “It’s hard to get the same feeling in translation.”
“Oh,” sighs Rie. “Hearing Japanese sutra—it reminds me of when I was a little girl in Japan. So comfortable.”
“I don’t think it’s comfortable for me,” I say. “But I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing—being confused. That’s my day-to-day experience in Japan. I never completely understand anything.”
“Well—that’s Buddhism!” says Loren.
Outside, the rain has stopped and the smell of damp concrete rises around us. As we are taking our leave of each other—bowing in that Japanese way—I realize that I’ve forgotten my keys. Tozen unlocks the door, and I step back inside the studio, move down the long hallway, and enter into the dark solitude of the zendo. My keys are a small lump on the floor where my zafu had been. I feel a question forming in my mind as I walk back toward the light at the entrance. When I exit the building, I thank Tozen and tell him, “Sometimes I think I just want to sit zazen because it is like sitting with Koun—this little thread of connection across time and space. Maybe that’s all this is for me. Maybe that’s it.”
“Oh, now I see,” says Tozen. He smiles broadly and then turns to amble off across the parking lot, a hand thrown into the air as farewell. I briefly watch his slow gait before turning to the car. Why did I make that confession? And what did his comment mean? As usual, I do not understand anything.
Thursday, September 2
I have decided to make something authentically Japanese for dinner, something that will give my mom a taste of my other home. The aim is to cook what I know only as “Japanese spaghetti”—noodles, tuna, shredded nori, grated daikon, a bit of onion, soy sauce, and a dash of rice vinegar. Satomi explained the ingredients to me once while I devoured a plate of it at a little café we often frequent. I remember being surprised by the simplicity of it.
But as I peruse the well-stocked local Asian grocer, I struggle with the products; I do not recognize many of them. How often do I rely on familiarity with a certain color and font and shape and nothing more? Take that away and I’m lost. The addition of English is interesting, but it does not give me the guidance I need. What happens, I wonder, to the blind who gain sight?
After I make my choice, I move on to a key ingredient—daikon. I spot a sign in romanized Japanese but beneath it is a pitiable little warped gray tuber the size of my fist. “Excuse me,” I say to the grocer. “Is THIS a ‘daikon’?”
“Of course,” he says.
When I prepare the dish, the root is dry and bitter and adds no depth of flavor.
“It’s really unusual,” says my mom as she chews the bland food. “Very mild.”
“It’s not authentic,” I explain. “I couldn’t find all of the right ingredients. And the Japanese radish should be sweet tinged with spice.”
“Well, I guess it’s authentic for here. . . .”
She has a point—this is what I’m always doing in Japan: searching for the right taste. I never find it. Maybe I need to own up to the fact that this is reality. Maybe nothing tastes the way I want it to.
Friday, September 3
When the alarm clock jerks me awake, I take in a long slow breath and notice that familiar itchy throat and ballooning pressure behind the brow: the first inklings of a cold
At the zendo, zazen proves challenging. Something—there—running out of my nose while I am just trying to sit and be a reasonably dignified being. But sickness always reminds me that there is no special dignity in bodies that are just dirt and water—each of us only holding a certain shape for a short while before breaking down into the essential elements. I hear that Tozen is coughing, too, as a counter to my sniffling. Strange percussion in this spacious room.
Afterward, I say to Tozen, “Nobody is here today. Maybe everybody has a cold?”
“No,” he says, “some people came in earlier, and they left because they had to go to work.”
How could I not even notice the comings and goings of other people in the room? Instead, I focused inward, my meditation on snot. At least I had a general awareness of Tozen, if only for the sound of his mutual suffering.
“And how are you feeling?” I ask. “It sounds like you are a bit sick, like me.”
“I feel fine today. Sometimes I cough, but only because I am old. It is old-man sickness.”
“Then I must have middle-aged-woman sickness.”
“You are not yet middle-aged. And yes, we are all dying.”
Saturday, September 4
My autumn cold has gotten worse, and I’m bedridden today. I try to read the books and articles Tozen has given me—but my mind cannot latch onto anything, the words just flying in and out of my brain in a Buddha-inspired fog. My mother brings me hot tea and sliced fruit, just as she did when I was ill as a child. “Anything else—soup? Hot cereal?” Both of us are easy and comfortable in the roles of caregiver and cared-for. Maybe we are our best selves in these moments.
Koun calls in the evening from the pay phone at the bottom of the mountain; he says a bad typhoon just came through Kyushu. “I was working in the kitchen when the door unhinged itself and it went sliding through. I just picked it up and put it back on. What could I do? Argue with the door? I had to finish with the cooking.”
“A practical man—I always liked that about you.”
“By the way, did I ever tell you that I tried to break up with you once?—Before we were even dating? You know, I thought I should stop messing around with women, with relationships, and focus on what really mattered, on becoming a monk in Japan. I wrote this five-page letter, threw it away, and then I called you up and invited you to Montana to meet my family the next day.”
“I’m glad you called!”
“Yes, it worked out pretty well, didn’t it?”
Sunday, September 5
I still feel ill but crave fresh air, so my mom and I venture out to walk the Coastal Trail that stretches for miles along the Cook Inlet. The fireweed has completely gone to seeded white tufts now, and there is that distinct earthy, sweet-and-rotten herbaceous scent of fall. Stepping off the trail, we sort through rocks and driftwood for the best still-life specimens, our pockets filling with relics. “Do you remember beachcombing in Nome when you were little?” Mom asks.
“Of course.” Walking that barren strip of landscape had been my favorite thing to do during our five years in the Bush. You’d think it would’ve lost its allure after a while. But we always found something new—things from the ocean, things from people, sometimes a mix of both. Or a recasting of the two, like the beautiful “sea glass” that was, in a former life, beer bottles thrown into the breakers by drunks.
“Do you remember catching those little fish with your hands? I think the locals called them ‘hooligan’—you filled your pockets with them when they came in on the tide one day. We took them home and cleaned them and ate them. There were so many.”
“Oh yes, I remember, and that time we found all of those dead walruses with their tusks missing. Mutilated bodies everywhere—like a war zone. Terrible.”
“I remember the smell. I remember you cried.”
“I wonder if we’ll go back someday?” And then, shaking my head as an answer to my own question: “I guess we probably never will. I mean, even if we did, it wouldn’t be the same. Or maybe it would be too much the same.”
Some
where in my mother’s things are slides and photographs of that distant life. 1978. A creased photo of me at age five bundled in a parka with a fur-rimmed hood, snowpants, boots, mittens. I am perched like a dark bird on a fault of aquamarine ice that juts, dagger-like, from a vast and blinding whiteness, laughing in awe because all around is the violence of the Bering Sea held fast in time—a clenched fist pulled above and behind the shoulder. It is my first winter in Alaska, the idiom of the South still thick on my tongue: ya’ll, UMbrella, YOUston. My mother, outside the photo, holds the camera. My father, in Texas, begins to build a new life.
Tuesday, September 7
“I’ve been thinking about retiring,” Tozen announces as the two of us sit down for breakfast after zazen. “Maybe I should meet your husband and his teacher sometime. Who knows? Maybe this would be a good job for him and then you could come home.”
“Well, I’d like for him to meet you. As for moving here, I don’t know about that. But—what will you do?”
“I’m thinking about moving to Costa Rica or maybe Thailand. Someplace not so expensive. I will miss Alaska, though. I like the cold.”
“Do you miss Japan?”
“No. Too much formality. But I can enjoy being there sometimes. There are some comfortable things.”
“We are both between homes, aren’t we? I didn’t think that I missed Alaska but now I can feel that some part of me has.”
“Even the cold?”
“Yes, maybe even the cold.”
“And how is your lonely year in Japan?”
“Honestly, all of this is not quite going how I wanted.”
“How did you want it to go?”
“I had an idea—that this would be my monastic year, too, in a way. That it would somehow be spiritual. I would stay in the present moment. I would pay attention. But honestly I just miss Koun all the time. And my mind is always floating off to the past. I feel like a walking paradox—who I was then and who I am now.”
“Two sides of the same paper.”
“Well, I just want the one side.”
~
As I am walking out to my car, Tozen hands me a photocopy of a Ryokan poem, pointing to the lines:
I wondered and wondered when she would come.
And now we are together. What thoughts need I have?
“I think this is how you must feel now, and also how you will feel when your husband comes home—nothing special.”
Wednesday, September 8
With only an hour to spare before we need to head to the airport, I realize that I’ve misread my travel itinerary. Unfortunately, the packing proves challenging. I thought that I had bought very little, but still nothing fits into my bags without a fight. There always seems to be this phenomenon of coming to the U.S. and thinking I need to buy, buy, buy in order to be comfortable in my home in Japan. But the reality is that I have new favorite products, new daily staples in my diet. Still, I see some old remembered brand and think, “This—I need this; I used to use this every day.” The next thing I know, I have a year’s worth of hand cream in my shopping cart.
Of course, the trend works both ways—I always bring too much from Japan. My mother looks doubtfully at my new comfort foods spread out on the kitchen counter: the multiple bags of green tea, instant miso soup, and assortments of seaweed. “Thanks for . . . all this. I’m not sure how to use it, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”
As we walk through the airport lobby, I tell my mother about Tozen’s remark of yesterday, about the possibility of Koun taking over his work as the AZC resident priest.
“It’s ridiculous and I don’t think he really meant it anyway, but I do keep wondering, Where to live? Where will we end up?”
“Maybe you should move here.”
“I’m fairly certain that’s the one thing we should not do.”
Thursday/Friday, September 9/10
Hurtling faster than usual into the future, I experience a delirium of travel. After the first long flight, in which I am held by white noise and buffered murmurings in Chinese, there is the endless layover in Taipei, and I spend most of this time asleep on a bench in a deserted wing of the airport. Then there are two more hours on the plane to Fukuoka, and then another two-hour bus ride to Musashigaoka, the stop nearest my home in Kikuyo.
When I finally arrive, no taxi is available at my insignificant little bus stop, so I set out dragging three bags down an unlit narrow road in the center of night, the sound of cicadas and frogs pulsing through the heavy humid air. Luckily, ten minutes or so later, a taxi pulls up alongside me, and I offer directions in Japanese—the words garbled and strange in my mouth. I am duly delivered to my townhouse. My own personal monastery, I think.
I drop my bags inside the door and, after checking for large insects in the bedroom, crash into sleep. Then I’m up again a few minutes later to attend to a nagging suspicion: yes, there is a message on the machine from Koun, welcoming me home. “Come to Shogoji Sunday, if you can—I can’t wait to see you. Maybe bring some kabocha croquette for the monks.”
As I am drifting off to sleep, it occurs to me that international travel is really moving from one vivid dream or memory into another.
Saturday, September 11
My first bout of jet lag wakes me much too early this morning, and the sun has yet to rise. But it is a reasonable hour in the U.S., so I call my mother. “Good—you made it okay.” And then, “Oh,” she sighs, “we’re both ‘singles’ again.” I know exactly what she means. I’d grown accustomed to steady company, too.
Just then the sun’s first rays offer a sliver of brightness, and I lean toward the window to catch a glimpse of the neighborhood. It looks eerily wrong somehow, deconstructed. I tell my mother I have to go, that I’ll call back later.
I didn’t notice anything at all out of the ordinary when I arrived last night. But now, in the light of day, the full effect of the summer’s latest typhoon is evident as I step outside and investigate. Trees have been uprooted. Chunks of roofs have been torn from houses. Gardens have been tied into living knots. Most of my neighbors’ windows bear big taped X’s stretching from corner-to-corner. Half of a heavy white lawn table lies face-down in my backyard. The entire side of my van and the townhome are plastered with green shredded bits of vegetation and dirt. Littered everywhere are broken relics, unidentifiable debris. Men, women, and children are emerging from their homes to clean up the carnage. Huge piles of refuse—no doubt their work from the day before—wait in orderly rows for the garbage trucks to arrive.
And indoors, too, there is evidence of an unusual atmosphere. The mold is pervasive. All of my shoes in the genkan are covered in a green fuzz. There is a dusting of black fibers beneath an errant hot pad on the kitchen table, behind pictures hung on the walls, within cabinet interiors. It’s a wonder that I didn’t die of an asthma attack in the night.
The cleaning—outdoors and in—takes most of the day, the work rooting me back into this place and time. As I am high on a ladder, struggling to free the windows from the organic paper mache that has sealed them shut, one of the women in my complex steps out her back door in plastic slippers. I climb down to greet her. Together we stand and marvel over the broken table in our shared lawn. The other table half is nowhere in sight.
“I don’t remember seeing this before,” I say. “Is it yours?”
“No.”
“Where did it come from?”
She shrugs. “A gift from the sky?” We each grip an edge and carry this unlikely offering out to the huge piles of debris on the side of the road.
Sunday, September 12
I wake too early again, 5:30 a.m.—most likely a combination of ongoing jet lag and deep eagerness to see the love of my life—and so I take my time gathering the things I’ll take to him: head oil prepared by Brinda, two boxes of hard choco cookies and twelve packages of kabocha croquette from the neighborhood grocery store, new men’s underwear in regulation white from the U.S.
Koun has warned me i
n advance that there will be cameras and television crews at Shogoji today, and he’s been slated for some sort of interview. “It’s possible that we won’t see much of each other.” My heart sinks at this thought. I suppose I had imagined a more tender reunion.
When I arrive, I am received by a monk who seems to be giggling incessantly at my gift of kabocha croquette. “For lunch,” I explain. But he continues to giggle as I step out of my shoes and place them neatly against the stones.
Koun emerges from the dining area. “Jisen-san would like you to help in the kitchen today,” he says to me in Japanese as he collects the packages of food from the other monk.
In the kitchen he gives me a quick, forbidden hug. I can feel his ribs beneath his samu-e. “You’ve lost more weight! Are you okay?”
“I’m down to 145 pounds, but I feel pretty good. I’m eating healthy food all the time.”
“You lost almost 50 pounds?”
“Yeah, Shogoji is Buddhist fat camp.”
“Hey, what’s so funny about these anyway?”
He looks at one of the packages I brought and smiles. “They’re for the microwave.”
“What? You guys didn’t put in electricity while I was gone?”
It’s a little cooler today, but the heavy cloud cover outside makes it twilight in the kitchen. I peel and slice vegetables, using a sense of touch more so than sight, while Koun and I talk quietly. Both of us are particularly unsure of what Tozen’s retirement idea means. “Maybe he’s just sort of . . . thinking out loud?” I surmise. “Either way, I don’t think I want to move back there. Part of me loves it—craves it, even. But there are landmines of story there for me, too.”
“I know, T. And we’ll figure all that stuff out when we get to it. You know, I like hearing about all of your adventures. It’s one of the few good things about us being apart.”
“I think your adventures are more glamorous—after all, I’m not making national television!”
In the afternoon, reporters from NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting network, arrive with big cameras to begin filming—this will be a segment on the monastery and its inhabitants, within a longer spot about Kikuchi. As we shuffle into the sodo for zazen, I see that one of the reporters will be joining us. He selects a camera-conducive spot two seats down from me, and from the way he gets up on the platform, I can tell he’s never sat before. Such a shame that he’s being televised on his first attempt. Two minutes into sitting, and I hear his labored breathing and shifting legs. I know how he feels—I’ve been there before.
