My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  I close my eyes. It is my first week in Japan. Alone, I wander out into the streets of Takamori during a festival. A mass of people in traditional clothing moving around me. The sound of drums storm-like, rising and falling. A gaggle of children who all want to touch my long, brown hair—their small fingers in it as I crouch low. And then the parade of adolescent boys dressed as caricatures of women—too-bright make-up, wigs, flowing secondhand Western dresses. They pull me into their dance so that in my bright, strange foreignness, I am just another trick of the imagination. Who is mimicking whom? The dancers release me at a fork in the road, and a man in a burlap apron hands me a tiny wooden box filled with sake from a barrel. I hesitate, and then drink. “What is happening?” I shout. “What are we celebrating?” A woman next to me takes my arm and leans in close. Brilliant sakura bloom on her yukata, a fan is tucked into her wide belt. “It is an offering,” she says in careful English. “Okaze. For the wind.” “For the wind,” I repeat, as she disappears—a stranger into a crowd of strangers. So that all I’m left with is the fork in the road. Right or left? Which way to home?

  Monday, February 28

  Koun called earlier in the day—he won’t be able to return to me on time after all. Something to do with the paperwork at the monastery. “A few extra days. Maybe a week or two,” he says in the phone message. “I can’t be sure.”

  It is early evening. I am sitting at my kitchen table, sipping tea and sorting through the notes from my year of waiting for Koun. I do not know what any of it means, what it will reveal or fail to reveal in the rereading. Beyond my kitchen window, the plum blossoms have just begun to bloom around the townhouse, each knotted center uncoiling like a memory.

  ~

  Garrett and I walk together outside the walls of the Japanese gardens in Spokane, white birds like ghosts scattering before our footsteps in the darkness, and a stone turning in my hand.

  “So you’re going to be a Zen monk.”

  “Yes. I believe that’s what’s right for me. That’s my path. But, Tracy, what do you want to do with your life?”

  I take a long time to answer, because this is the first time anyone has ever asked me this question.

  Finally: “I want to be free.”

  Epilogue

  July 2008—Anchorage, Alaska

  Early morning. I am sitting zazen in a room with ten or twelve other people. It is summer in Alaska, in this small and familiar city where I now live. Koun is visiting Shogoji, serving as a translator for a handful of other foreign monks. I have not heard his voice for two weeks—my only way to talk to him is to wait for his call from a payphone at the base of the mountain. And so he does not yet know my secret: our child, this new life, unfolds inside of me from the dark, like a flame flickering into being.

  Breathing in, breathing out—

  in every moment,

  here.

  Note to the Reader

  Timeline of Events

  The arrangement of days and events in this journal may be somewhat imperfect. My original “journal” was not a single object, but many—small and large notebooks that lived on my bedroom floor or that traveled with me, loose sheets of paper, letters, an annotated calendar, the occasional computer file or even email, as well as memories that I failed to write down—or flesh out—until later.

  Terminology and Names

  For the sake of clarity and simplicity for readers less familiar with the language, I have presented Japanese words throughout in their simplest romanized forms. When introducing unfamiliar terms in Japanese, I’ve tried to integrate the definition in English. This can sometimes lead to redundancy, as in a “kiai shout” in karate—a kiai is a shout.

  The usage of Japanese names and honorifics may present additional challenges. The family name is followed by the given name in Japan. But because I was writing in—or, at times, translating into—English, in the few instances in which both first and last names are mentioned I use the Western style of given name followed by the family name.

  In Japan, people are generally addressed either by position/rank (“teacher,” “mother,” etc.)—or by family name with an appended honorific (-sensei or -san). A first name or a nickname may be used for children, but a child’s diminutive, -chan or -kun, is often appended to it. A sibling, close friend, or student might be referred to only by his or her given name. When engaging primarily in English, the speaker may or may not drop the honorifics. So how names are expressed in Japan is highly contextualized, and the use (or not) of honorifics throughout this book is a simplified reflection of that.

  Finally, some names in this text have been changed.

  Acknowledgments

  I am thankful to Peter Goodman for his willingness to take on this project—as well as for his keen eye and encouragement along the way.

  I am also indebted to many of the people who appear in these pages—my teachers and students, colleagues, family, and friends.

  My gratitude to Koun and to our children, Cormac and Norah, is boundless. Thank you, my wonderful family, for your constant love and support.

  Stone Bridge Press books are available from booksellers worldwide and online.

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