My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  “Oh yeah? Good. Let’s only speak Japanese. I’m tired.”

  “Hai,” I reply.

  “Oh! I will bring beer. Just a moment,” says Otani-sensei.

  “Yes, that would improve my Japanese considerably. But I am driving today so I can’t drink.”

  “That’s okay,” says Sakamoto-san. “Your Japanese will sound better to us, even if it is not better.”

  “Great.”

  For dinner we eat homemade oden—a simmered selection of vegetables, egg, tofu, and processed fish flavored with dabs of spicy yellow mustard. Otani-sensei lifts a bit of food with her chopsticks and asks what gobo is in English.

  “Burdock,” I reply.

  “What??” says Sakamoto-san, “Bulldog?? Honto??”

  When I explain the pronunciation, he doesn’t believe that native English speakers can really tell the difference between the two words. I assure him that both my translation and pronunciation are accurate.

  “How about this? Can you understand it?” He switches on the small TV, to a news report, and tells me to interpret, and so I do. I don’t know exactly what I’m getting wrong, but whatever it is, it is very, very funny. More beer and food appear, disappear.

  “Tracy-san, your Japanese is now VERY good!” Laughs Sakamoto-san, as Otani-sensei, lint roller in hand, begins to “roll up” the hairs along his arm.

  After our extended meal, I offer to walk Sakamoto-san to a taxi.

  “Daijobu,” Otani-sensei says, and then in English, “He is Japanese woman—samurai!”

  “Ehhhh?!!” responds Sakamoto-san, “I am woman??”

  “Ah—gomen!” giggles Otani-sensei. “Always mixing up those words . . .”

  Both pause to take in their breath—one, two, three—and then another volley of laughter.

  Saturday, October 30

  There’s Japanese class in the morning, but a terrible pain in my lungs prevents me from getting up in time to meet the bus. Most likely I’ve had one too many visits with the ghost of Otani-sensei’s cat.

  When I at last rise and open the windows, I find a beautiful clear day with a warm breeze—the final taste of a fading season. There is that initial urgency to do something different—something exciting and out of the ordinary, something to make use of this precious time—but there is just sewing and reading and walking and studying and working clay in solitude. And when I’m in it, really in it—nothing is lacking.

  I write Tozen and tell him about this new understanding. I am such a solitary. Sometimes I think I should become a monk, or that I am a monk already. Maybe I should shave my head.

  Sunday, October 31

  It is late morning at Shogoji. Sakamoto-san and I stretch our legs after three hours of intense sewing among the other members of the group. We slip out of the room, pace along the hallway, and then peek in the open doorway of the sodo, now empty of meditators. “What is this?” asks Sakamoto-san, gesturing toward the side of the room.

  “What is what?”

  “This. Where we sit.” He sweeps his hand out again. “I do not know the word for this thing.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “I am not joking.”

  “Tan.”

  “Oh. Tan.” He says this with reverence, a holiness against the tongue, and then moves off down the hallway.

  How my competencies in this country are uneven—those bright spots of unexpected knowledge surfacing like vivid memories from a vast darkness, the unknown, the constant murky pool in which I live my life as a foreigner in Japan.

  Later, when I return home, there is a new email from Tozen. His comment is short, cryptic. I will visit you in Japan sometime, he writes. He also says my head would not look so bad shaved.

  NOVEMBER

  Practice

  Monday, November 1

  All day, I seem to be wading through a tide of nonspecific memory, almost a nostalgia—I don’t know what brought this on. It’s a heavy, painful feeling, a burden that I can’t quite let go. One minute I am chatting with one of my eager, sweet students in the hallway—something having to do with the many moods of English verbs—and the next I’m looking out the window in my office, seeing a landscape that has nothing to do with the expanse of manicured lawn and trees and sky before me. I am in Alaska. There are flashes of my mother, and of my father, and of my stepfathers, and of all those boys and men who entered and left my life. There are quips of poisonous dialogue. Fred saying, I married your mother, not you. I don’t have to love YOU. And then a boyfriend who took too much, who took everything, and later told me, You are beautiful when you don’t smile. And then a man—once a boy I knew in high school—who said I probably deserved what I got. And then a jealous first husband who had a thing for other women and who lied to me so often that I did not know what was true and what was not. I see now the great connectedness of all of these things. How they repeat and repeat and repeat in a spiral that deepens with each turn. At the center could have been the absence of a father. Or something in my fragile nature. Or it could have been a handful of lessons with a piano teacher in Nome, when I was five or six—that first devastating loss of innocence turning what should have been natural in later years—a touch, the intimacy of a kiss—into a kind of grotesque. Sometimes I think it is not people who haunt us, but only moments of encounter.

  After work, I pass through the gates of my university, still riding that terrible flood. I remember Koun slipping a strand of juzu prayer beads over my wrist outside the little Balinese import shop on Shimotori. The faint corkscrew grain on each bead and the scent of sandalwood. He told me the story of koi who do not know that they are really wise and powerful dragons, how the bright fish become their true selves as they pass through the river gate. That was my second year in Japan. And now . . . how long have I worn that famous Zen story? A protective talisman knotted at the wrist and heart.

  Tuesday, November 2

  In pottery class, I quickly produce two vases that are undeniably pleasing to the eye. Sensei, rising from the stool across from me, leans over the table and squints at my work, considering it from various angles. “Kihon,” she says finally. “You are still not doing the basics properly. You should go back to tea cups for a while.”

  “Hai, Sensei.” I sigh. So this is the feeling of pure failure.

  I clean my things early and then sit and watch as Baba-san manipulates a tall and impressive form gone wrong. She playfully—but with great concentration and seriousness—works the clay for a good thirty minutes. Various lovely objects reveal themselves before being folded back into nonbeing. At last, she settles on a shape—a tall, tapered vessel. I imagine it holding a few well-trimmed lengths of the season’s much-celebrated pampas grass. She slices her creation from the hump in one quick motion and maneuvers it to the table.

  Sensei would never let me work with just one object for so long, the walls inevitably giving way beneath my fingers, an excess of water, and all those poorly reintegrated faults. When I look over at her, this question forming in my eyes, she says simply, “Baba-san can do that because she knows what she’s doing.”

  Friday, November 5

  When I return home from work, there is a letter from my ex-student Yamada-san. It has been a long time since I wrote to you last. I am so tired, so busy. Much of his letter recalls the day-to-day happenings of his business. The usual complaints. As always, there is a pragmatic sense to his writing—I can see that he is practicing his English, and I think I’ve already read a lot of what he’s written here in previous letters. How we always return again and again to our same familiar motifs.

  But the second half of the letter, written some days later perhaps, is a little brighter . . . and different. He’s been feeding stray cats twice a day out behind his workplace. I’ve been doing this for a while. What would they do without me? More all the time. Such a nuisance. Feeding them will make me broke. I can imagine his exasperated sighs, but I know that he’s happy to be depended upon. A big sunburned man with rough hands stoo
ping to pour chow into a bowl. The bodhisattva of skittish, shred-eared alley cats.

  Saturday, November 6

  A gift for Docho-roshi. A gift . . . a gift . . . I search all—ALL—of the stores in downtown Kumamoto after Japanese class this morning, looking for something to offer to the head priest of Zuioji who will be at Shogoji tomorrow for the lay ceremony. He is no doubt spending his day writing dharma names in elegant black strokes on the white silk backings of the rakusu we laypeople have spent so many weeks preparing. As for a gift, nothing seems quite right. Bring something nice, but not too nice, Koun had told me in a letter. It should just be a token of your gratitude. All of the standard local gift-giving rules apply. So knives and clocks are out, I guess, as both allude to death. Green tea may or may not be okay—but it’s definitely boring. Handmade items are not really acceptable, unless I am a master at my craft (I am not). The value should be appropriate to the occasion and to the status of both parties (I am in no way culturally suited to evaluate this). And then I remember something Koun mentioned during my last visit, a little anecdote about Docho-roshi’s assistant once sneaking off from the Shogoji kitchen with a second plate full of homemade chocolate chip cookies that I’d sent the monks. Docho-roshi has a sweet tooth and a certain appreciation for my Western-style baking.

  As I’m folding chocolate chips into buttery batter, Sakamoto-san calls. There is some confusion about when all of us are supposed to arrive at the monastery for the ceremony tomorrow, and—in typical fashion—no one can get through to the Shogoji phone. “I assumed 9 a.m.,” I say. “Isn’t that what we were told? Did I miss something? Was that code for some earlier or later time?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the monk’s wife. Don’t you know exactly?”

  “Be there at 9. Then we can be too late or too early together.”

  “I will go at 8:30.”

  “Fine. 8:30 it is. Oh—what did you get Docho-roshi?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The gift?”

  “There is no need for a gift. Jaa . . . shitsureishimasu.”

  I hang up the phone with a sigh and return to my necessary or unnecessary project.

  Sunday, November 7

  I arrive at Shogoji just before 8:30 a.m. A great number of cars have completely filled the main parking lot, and I have to squeeze into a non-space near the entrance to the grounds. It is a good thing I have a small vehicle. Ahead of me, an older couple dressed in crisp black business-style suits slowly work their way up the long stairway, and I regret my choice of simple zazen clothing—dark blue cotton samu-e. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would be expected to wear something other than what I usually wear at the temple. This, of course, is “common sense” in Japan. Formal events require Western business suits. I should have known.

  A monk greets me as soon as I reach the upper grounds, bowing deeply and gracefully in his long black robes and okesa. It is certainly a different atmosphere at the monastery today. I trail after the monk to the entrance to sign in, where he takes my gift of cookies—then leads me past a seated group of temple supporters to an altar in the back room where the others, the fukudenkai members, have gathered. Clearly they have all been waiting for me to join them in the initial chanting and bowing.

  Sakamoto-san, wearing a neatly-pressed black suit, is among those present. “You wore the wrong clothes,” he says.

  “Um, yeah. Thanks for noticing. I thought we had decided on 8:30.”

  “Yes,” he replies, with no further explanation.

  Collectively, we are led into the Dharma Hall to practice the ceremony. It would be poor form, I suppose, to get it wrong in front of Docho-roshi. Sakamoto-san sits on his knees next to me, and then each of us takes turns practicing walking up to the altar seat to bow and then receive the rakusu. “I’m nervous,” he says as we return to our spots. “Maybe I will trip. Or—maybe you will trip.”

  “Or maybe I will trip you,” I offer.

  At last, the guests are ushered in, and the actual ceremony begins. We chant, promise to abide by the layperson’s rules, bow repeatedly, and nobody trips as each of us moves forward to officially accept our rakusu. Docho-roshi, looking ancient and regal in his maroon robes, swirls each quilted cloth over a bowl of smoking incense, blessing it, before delivering it into our hands. The ceremony is over in a matter of minutes. Such formality and fanfare to frame this brief moment.

  Afterward, we gather to have lunch, picnic style, beneath the color-changing leaves on the Shogoji grounds. The weather is unusually warm and sunny—a lucky last good-bye, perhaps, to a season. As we eat and drink, each of us passes around our rakusu, and the Buddhist names we’ve been given are discussed at great length. My new lay name, in particular, gives everyone pause. “What does it mean?” I ask, again and again.

  The answers are vague: “Well, it’s very profound. . . .” and “It’s a little difficult to explain, but it’s a very good name. . . .” and the common and wise-sounding, “Ahhh . . .”

  I find Sakamoto-san and ask him to explain. “I don’t know what it means,” he says. “You should ask someone.”

  Monday, November 8

  While walking the university hallway during one of my breaks, I discover a huge praying mantis tucked into a corner, legs bound in a mess of dust and fibers. I put down my stack of paper and books, and squat on hands and knees for a better look. Its heart-shaped head moves side to side as I peer at it—like a quizzical dog. It’s among the largest insects I have ever seen.

  “Tracy-sensei, what are you doing?” Yukari appears next to me, and then drops to her knees when she sees the insect. “So BIG!”

  “Yes . . . and I think it has a problem.”

  “Oh!” she says, and then, “Just a moment please!” She leaps up, runs down the hallway to the ESS room, and then returns a few minutes later with two sets of convenience-store chopsticks.

  “For take away the dirt,” she explains, handing me a set. Careful as surgeons, we pluck bits of fluff from the insect with the chopsticks.

  “Tracy-sensei, what is the name in English?”

  “It’s a ‘praying mantis.’ It is similar to obosan with hands held together in gassho.”

  “It is ‘kamakiri’ in Japanese—cutting the grass with big knife, like a farmer.”

  “Sensei—”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I take a paper?” She points to the notebook paper stacked on the floor next to me.

  “Of course. Why?”

  “For little obosan.”

  Yukari, my kind and fearless student, scoops up our farmer/monk friend with a sheet of paper and releases him into the grass outside. True compassion is no hesitation.

  Wednesday, November 10

  After pottery this evening, I cannot sleep. Instead of preparing for bed, I brew a pot of tea and sit curled up on tatami in front of the television, watching a videotape made by Senpo-san—Jisen-san’s son and now disciple. He shot the film using the little video camera I lent him some months ago. A box—with the camera and video inside—arrived from him this afternoon, with a simple note: Thank you, Tracy-san. I hope you enjoy. If it’s not too much trouble, can you make a copy for me?

  So far, the tape is a collection of moments at Shogoji, all gathered during Senpo-san’s many months at the monastery. The observing eye rests a long time on each scene, just taking it in:

  a breeze working its way through tall rice fields

  monks laughing at tea time

  takuhatsu through some unknown town

  chanting rising out of the darkness—an invisible night ceremony

  a sunlit pond

  an impossibly miniature frog balanced on the tip of a large leaf

  monks meditating in flickering lamplight

  Koun sewing alone in a room

  I watch almost the entire tape—nearly three hours of footage—when the scene cuts to what must be one of the Latin dance studios in downtown Kumamoto. Loud salsa music echoes from the speakers as J
apanese and Latino men and women writhe to the beat. A conga line forms, and the camera shakes as it is passed to another cameraman. Senpo-san appears then—for the first time in the video. He grins and waves from the tail of the conga line. Thick hair still on his head, civilian clothes—a snapshot of a previous life.

  Saturday, November 13

  This morning I meet the karate boys, Mimaki-san and Tsuda-san, at the Budokan. The room is cold, and, like my body, my karate-gi feels stiff and inflexible. Only movement and sweat soften it.

  As usual, we begin our practice without much small talk. Tsuda-san leads us in warm-up stretches, and then we work through the kata together, pausing after each set to critique each other’s form. Several times we find ourselves puzzling over the “correct” way to do something, our flawed memories leading us astray.

  “That does not look right,” says Mimaki-san.

  “But the other way does not feel right,” I reply.

  “Practicing without a teacher is too difficult. Maybe we are learning many mistakes.”

  “Bah, it’s okay,” says Tsuda-san, swiping away our conversation with his hand. “Our bad form will give Koun-sensei something to do when he returns!”

  Tuesday, November 16

  No work today—it’s a national holiday. Still, I take no pleasure in this thought as I dig through the closet in my bedroom with a chill in my bones that won’t go away. On go the long underwear, the layers of shirts and sweaters, the thick socks. The ancient air-con heater in my bedroom wheezing out barely enough warm air to dress by. Downstairs is an icebox, and I’ve run out of propane for the portable heaters there. Breakfast, then, is taken upstairs, directly beneath that frail but endless outbreath.

  A short while later, I collect Satomi in my K-van.

  “So cold today!” she says.

  “How do those school girls manage in their short skirts all winter long?”

  “Haramaki,” explains Satomi. “It is a secret warm cloth that wraps around your middle. And also heating adhesive patches. These can be hidden beneath clothes as well.” This, she tells me, is a throwback to the days when monks carried hot stones beneath their robes as personal heaters.