by Tracy Franz
He reached out and lifted the flower from my palm. “I’m not going to date other women.”
“Okay, then. I’m going to Japan.”
In this way it had been me who first pointed out what was happening between us; it had been me who first leapt across that line in the sand. He could have said something else, and then I would not be in Japan. What takes us to one place and not another? Who would I have become if I had simply left Spokane and gone home to Alaska? If I had matured in the center of that echo of youth and devastating memory? Or—if I had gone to some other place entirely? Who would I have become? A petal can fall and be carried anywhere by wind or water.
Sunday, December 5
This evening, the pottery ladies pick me up and we carpool to the Canadian restaurant for our yearly bonenkai. Among the many wonderful—but surely not actual—Canadian dishes, the proprietor has prepared a traditional Japanese celebratory food: a fish cooked in a thick crust of salt. The name of the fish, tai, sounds like the Japanese word omedetai, or “congratulations.”
“What is tai in English?” asks Mikiko-san, in her near-flawless accent.
“I don’t recognize it. I grew up mainly eating Alaskan salmon and halibut. This is a new fish for me.”
Mikiko-san produces an electronic dictionary from her purse and rapidly keys the word. “Sea bream,” she announces, and the others at the table mouth the foreign word—a slow, fishy mantra around the table: “Shi-bu-ri-mu . . . Shi-bu-ri-mu . . . Shi-bu-ri-mu.”
“Sea bream,” Mikiko-san says again, brandishing a utensil as she prepares to break open the salt crust. “And what do you call this in English?”
“Spatula.”
“And this?” She points to a fleck beneath the salt, lifts it, and brings it closer to me for inspection.
“Ah—that’s a ‘scale.’”
Together we compose a sentence for remembering these new words: “I removed the scales from the sea bream with a spatula.” Makiko-san coaches the other ladies on how to say it, and the difficulty of this becomes a theme for the evening.
“Maybe I can say it,” says Sensei gruffly, “after I have more beer.”
While we are gathering our things together after the meal, Yoko-san leans in close to me. “My husband has been sick lately. I think I will quit pottery class. It’s secret. Maybe this is my going-away party.”
“I’m so sorry, Yoko-san.” Terrible news. I feel defeated. Yoko-san, who so often annoys me, has also been one of my kindest allies.
She smiles, pats my hand. “I removed the scales from the sea bream with a spatula. I will never forget.”
Wednesday, December 8
Today is Bodhi Day, the day of the Buddha’s enlightenment and the culmination of the intense week-long Rohatsu sesshin practice period for the monks. It is also my birthday. A large box comes for me in the late afternoon, from a store in Fukuoka—I recognize the characters for the place that sews some of Koun’s monk’s clothing. Inside are what must be birthday gifts for me: matte black hakama and a heavy indigo kimono. Two shades of night. I unknot my hair and remove my work suit, that stripping away of the professional self, and then slip into this other self, this costume of the devoted. With hands in gassho, I bow at the regal image in the mirror. Somewhere, an American Zen monk is sitting on his meditation cushion, thinking and not thinking of me.
Thursday, December 9
“So where do you want to go?” asks Satomi after I pick her up from her house in my K-van. We are taking the latter half of the day off from work. Both of us have huge stacks of student papers with us, and the plan is to find a quiet spot to hang out and grade.
“I do have an idea,” I tell her. “But it’s probably too difficult. Koun and I happened upon this adorable restaurant in Oguni Town, in Aso, a few years ago. It must have been just after we got engaged. It was next to an apple orchard. The building was very elegant, very wabi-sabi. I remember the menu was all about apples, and there were journals at each table, for the customers. We wrote something in one of them.”
“What did you write?”
“Something totally profound and meaningful. I can’t remember.”
“Let’s find out!” With Satomi as chief navigator and question-asker, we quickly identify the name of the restaurant—Ringo no Ki (Apple Tree). However finding it requires not one but four additional stops at convenience stores in and around Oguni Town. The directions are all haphazard, never pointing us directly to our destination. “It’s over there a little ways. [vague wave] Just keep going. You can’t miss it.” In a last effort, we pull over next to an old woman walking her tiny dog along the street. “Over there,” she says, gesturing to a brown structure nestled among a stand of cultivated trees. It is almost immediately in front of us; we’d been passing by and around it the whole while. “It seems we were lost in the place we’ve been searching for,” says Satomi.
Entering the restaurant is entering a history. Koun and I, giddy on our new plans to get married, saw this place as an auspicious find. We’d been hungry, and on an unlikely whim, turned down a road and discovered the building of our mutual aesthetic dreams—a building made elegant by the passage of time.
Now, I take in the cabin-like wood of the interior, the repetitive and enduring geometrics of Japanese design. “Satomi, isn’t it funny how a place can look different from your memory of it? Do you know what I mean? This restaurant looks so much smaller and more humble than my extravagant mental image.”
“Oh yes, I have memories like that. But I think I visit some places from my past so often now in the present. The memories changed as I changed.”
The server—a woman in dark samu-e—greets us and Satomi tells her our aim. “We’re looking for something that was written in one of the journals. It was a few years ago.”
“Hmm . . . that will be difficult, but you are welcome to look. The old journals are on the shelves. Sit wherever you like.”
It’s early afternoon and no other customers are around, so we choose a big hand-hewn wooden table set apart from the main eating area and next to the tall, open shelving displaying hundreds of journals. We order tea and snacks, set aside our work, and begin pulling down colorful stacks of notebooks, scanning through each. I understand very little of what I’m reading or attempting to read, which probably keeps me focused on the task of finding the odd bits of English, but Satomi bursts out laughing ever so often, engrossed in every narrative. After a few hours, we have graded no papers, nor have we found the mystery message from my and Koun’s former selves. We have learned only that many people have come to this place. Many have left their mark.
“Should we write something?” I ask, when it is nearly time to leave.
“Yes, and then we can come back in a few years to look for it.”
“How will we ever find this restaurant again, let alone our message?”
“Maybe we should write that.”
“We could write ‘ichi-go ichi-e.’”
“Oh yes. You can never go back.”
Sunday, December 12
At Shogoji’s monthly nichiyo sanzenkai, the kerosene heaters blast behind all of us sitting in zazen, the warmth and slightly toxic air coaxing many out of consciousness. On either side of me, there is the unmistakable sound of sleeping men followed by the occasional break in breath as the sleepers nod and snort themselves back to reality. The comedy of this keeps me bright-eyed for some time, but eventually I am claimed too. At the end of the session, the booming vibration of the taiko drum pulls us all up from the abyss.
During informal tea afterward, the women in the group examine my new zazen outfit. Some of them leap up and tug, straighten, tuck, and retie until I am “properly” bound up in the kimono and hakama. Koun, entering the room and grinning, takes this process in for a moment from a few feet away, me at the mercy of these wonderful and opinionated women—before returning to his daily duties. Breathing will surely be more difficult in the next zazen session—but I have no doubt that my posture wil
l be as rigid as a stone Buddha.
After lunch and clean-up, I have a few brief minutes to take tea and strawberries with Koun in the now-empty informal dining area, and to give him his early birthday presents—layers of warm “legal” items (all that can be hidden beneath a monk’s daily wear) and a bag of American snack foods. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you something more interesting—but I realized you wouldn’t be able to use any of it. So I went with the basics.”
“No, this is great. You come to appreciate the simple things here. A bit of fleece, wool socks at night, the taste of winter strawberries . . . It’s as if all the excess from before, all that abundance, covers up the basic pleasures.”
“And the absence of a lover or a friend or family? There’s something to that too, isn’t there? A rawness. It brings clarity.”
“Maybe there’s a kind of paying attention that is not so easily possible in the presence of comfort and attachments. But there is the danger of escapism, too.”
I consider the single strawberry left on my plate, that fleeting sweetness. “I wish I could talk to you more often about not getting to talk to you very often.”
Just before I leave the temple grounds, Jisen-san waves me back. “Tracy-san, you are working over the winter holiday?”
“No—I have some weeks off.”
“Good, good. You stay here, yes? Think of something festive for celebration. This time of year is very difficult for monks—maybe especially foreign monks.”
An extended stay at the monastery, near Koun. This thought keeps me smiling all the way home.
Tuesday, December 14
I am sitting in my office after a phone call with my mother—rather, I am sitting in the pause between breaths, after one phone call and before I will begin to make many more. My mother had just heard from her doctor. There had been a biopsy that confirmed breast cancer. “I’ll know more in a few days,” she said.
Now, there is much to do. I need to talk to my travel agent. I need to sort things out with work. I need to let Koun know what is going on. I need this to not be happening.
Beyond the windows in my office, it is just starting to rain again—a cold winter’s drizzle. Earlier, during a lull, I had stepped outside with one of my students and collected a handful of fallen ginkgo leaves—delicate yellow fans clinging to wet pavement. I brought some of the leaves back to my office and put them in a tea cup.
It’s raining hard now. I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about the leaves.
Thursday, December 16
For two days I have been trying to get hold of Koun, but the Shogoji phone goes direct to voice mail each time. Between classes, finally my phone rings.
“T, I got your messages just now. I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. There’s been—some drama here, and Jisen-san’s sick. Are you okay?”
“Just trying to get the flight sorted out.”
“Yeah, but are you okay?”
“I’m okay. I’ll get to see you this weekend, that’s something. And—I wish I could talk now, but I better get back to class.”
“All right. I may not be able to talk to you again, not until you get here.”
“We have terrible timing, don’t we?”
“Always have.”
Friday, December 17
I sit with my colleagues in a huge faux-European dining room with a view of a centuries-old Japanese castle. Tonight is Shokei’s annual bonenkai, though I’m in no mood for it. Today is also Koun’s thirty-second birthday, and this fact, on top of my mother’s recent diagnosis, feels especially heavy. Last night and the nights before, I couldn’t sleep—the insomnia of a too-active mind. I can’t bring myself to eat much, either. And there is also the constant game of impotent phone tag with my travel agent—I’m on several waiting lists, but nothing confirmed so far. I have no idea when I’ll arrive in Alaska.
As soon as we finish the speeches and the alcohol begins to flow, some of the older men, faces flushed, begin singing and dancing. “Enka. Ballads of suffering,” Hiroe-sensei, seated next to me, explains. “Some songs are about missing home or a lost love or some other misery. Maybe this is the Japanese blues.”
One of the singing men takes my hand and pulls me to my feet. He holds me too tight and does an awkward parody of ballroom dancing with me as kind of reluctant life-sized rag doll. When I sit down again, I can feel the burn in my cheeks.
“You made him look good,” says Hiroe-sensei, leaning in too close. What is going on with the men tonight?
After the bonenkai (which, as always, is really only the first of several follow-up parties to come this evening), I make my excuses and veer away from the crowd of others. Kumamoto night life is just getting started on the main arcades. The youngsters strumming their guitars and crooning for spare change, or love, or the illusion of fame. The fortunetellers. The hostesses in their gaudy prom-like Western dresses—and the boy versions in shiny suits and pointy-toed shoes and yellow, matted hair. I move away from all of this, toward the shadowed streets surrounding the castle and the looming tangle of tree branches overhead. The koi swim just below the surface of the moat like small, glowing ghosts. I pluck a yellow ginkgo leaf from the pavement, offer it to the fish, watch it drift away into the pure darkness beneath the bridge.
Some time later, after I settle into the smoke-scented interior of a taxi, I notice a message on my cell phone. My flight has been confirmed. I’m going to Alaska in six days.
Sunday, December 19
I drive out to Shogoji one last time to see Koun before I leave for Alaska. All is silent when I arrive. As I climb the stone stairs, no monks can be seen moving around the grounds, or through the open-air corridors. When I turn to look back the way I came, there is only that stunning view of the valley, and then the parking lot, and then a single charred bottle glistening from the center of the burn pile. I move on to the entrance of the main building and as I’m slipping off my shoes, Koun steps out of the kitchen.
“What’s going on? It feels wrong here.”
“Jisen-san is still sick, so she’s been away a lot. The other monks are sleeping or hiding out in the guest rooms. There’s some cultural tension, I’ll put it that way. The Japanese monks are mad at Jisen-san and Aigo-san for being pushy—and me for being in proximity, I think.”
“That does not sound good.”
“It’s not.”
“Is it safe for you to be here?”
“For now, yes.” He hesitates. “I think so.”
“Okay, I’ll have to trust you on that one.”
“I’ll be fine. You have your own stuff to worry about.”
“So what are you and Aigo-san doing?”
“We’re trying to keep up the schedule as best we can. But there are only two of us. We focus on the essential tasks, mostly.”
“And the other monks? Are they eating?”
“They are eating. Not at mealtimes. Sometimes they steal the keys and take the car into town.”
“I don’t like this.”
“I know. That’s just how it is right now.”
“I think you’ll have a lot to tell me when you leave this place.”
“Yes, that’s probably true. Come on—let’s go to the hatto.”
Aigo-san, seated on the floor of the Dharma Hall and surrounded by odd metal tools and a tray filled with ceramic incense burners, rises and greets me as I enter. “Ah, Tracy-san. I’m very sorry to hear about your mother.”
“Thank you. . . . What’s all this?”
“I am preparing the incense. Come, you can help me.” I sit next to him, and he hands me chopsticks and an incense holder filled with ash. The small bowl is a gorgeous Japanese ceramic with a blue flame of glaze swallowing dark earth. And that smell of incense—always present in the monastery—is suddenly so much stronger.
“Here, pick out the bones,” says Aigo-san.
“The bones?”
“The, ah, leftover incense sticks. The parts that did not burn.”
<
br /> “What is it with you Zen monks and death?”
“Death is our business, Tracy-san. It is the truth of life.”
“That kind of makes it everyone’s business, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” He places another bowl before me, lifts a metal object that resembles the top of a can, but with a little handle attached. “Watch, this is how we make it new again.” He presses the metal gently against the ash, smoothing it out across the surface.
“Death and then rebirth?”
“You’ve got the wrong Buddhists,” says Koun with a smile as he rises to slide open the shoji walls, so that we are now both outside the building and within it. A slight breeze begins to move around us like a slow river. In this way we begin the work of six monks.
~
At the edge of nightfall, Koun walks with me to the van.
“How are you feeling, about your mom?”
“I’m okay. Parents—those relationships—are so complicated, aren’t they? There is this overwhelming sense of love and blame and guilt and sadness. Lots of helplessness. It’s all so mixed up. It’s also nothing new really, it’s just more with me right now. More present.”
“I’m sorry I can’t go with you, T.”
“You were with me today. Take care of yourself. Be careful.”
It had been a beautiful day. A perfect day. But as I’m driving home all I can think about is the glint of a charred bottle that should not have been there. And the conversation with Aigo-san while Koun was boiling tea:
“Tracy-san, do not go walking alone here.”
“What?”
“On the grounds, where others cannot see you. Do not walk alone.”
“Why?”
“I overheard something.”
“What did you hear?”
“Not a good thing.”
“Okay, Aigo-san. I understand.”
~
When I get home, I order a feast of snacks for the monks from the American Costco in Fukuoka, all to be delivered on Christmas eve: giant apple pie, spiced cider, cookies, tins of salted nuts, instant chai, hot cocoa. A little bit of positive currency for Koun, I hope. I don’t know what else to do.
