The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  Was that what he was thinking?—I wondered, looking at the avian profile of the middle-aged man standing beside me, outlined against the pale winter sky.

  Ueno Plaza, 1946. stars and stripes

  I had no way of knowing. He spoke no English and I spoke no Japanese. I did not know that Kawa­bata Yasunari was already famous and would become more famous yet. But I did know he was a writer because I had heard he had written about Asakusa and it was the place itself that interested me.

  “Yumiko,” I said, pointing to the silver river beneath us. This was the name of the heroine of the novel, Asakusa Kurenaidan, which Kawabata had written when he—twenty years before, then about the same age I was, and as enraptured of the place as I was now—walked the labyrinth and saw, as he later wrote, the jazz reviews, the kiss-dances, the exhibitions of the White Russian girls, and the passing Japanese flappers with their rolled stockings. Yumiko had confronted the gangster, crushed an arsenic pill between her teeth, and then kissed him full on the lips.

  Kawabata Yasunari. donald richie

  Perhaps he was thinking of this scene from his novel and of the lost Yumiko, tough, muscled, beautiful. Or, looking over that blackened landscape, under this huge white winter sky, he was perhaps feeling a great sorrow. All those lives lost in that blazing, roaring conflagration beneath.

  Imagining a sadness that I assumed that I in his place would be feeling, I looked at that birdlike profile. It did not seem sad. Rather, Kawabata smiled, looked over the parapet and indicated the river.

  This was where, I knew, the insolent Yumiko, having given the kiss of death to the older man (who, it transpired, was the lover of the local madwoman who, it turned out, was really our heroine’s sister), leaped through the porthole of the waiting boat, and sped away just as the water police arrived.

  I knew all this without knowing any Japanese because as a member of the Allied Occupation I had translators at my command and had ordered an English précis of the novel. Now, looking at the author leaning over the edge, as had Left-Handed Hiko as he spied the escaping Yumiko, I thought about Kawabata’s love for Asakusa.

  He had begun his book with the intention “to write a long and curious story set in Asakusa . . . in which vulgar women predominate.” It had perhaps been for him as it was for me, a place that allowed anonymity, freedom, where life flowed on no matter what, where you could pick up pleasure, and where small rooms with paper flowers were rented by the hour.

  Did he, I wonder, find freedom in flesh, as I had learned to? It was here, on the roof of the terminal, that Oharu had permitted herself to be kissed—and more—by members of the gang and had thus earned herself the title of Bride of the Eiffel Tower. It was here that the Akaobi-kan, that group of red-sashed girls who in the daytime worked in respectable department stores, boasted about the bad things they did at night. Here that Umekichi disclosed that he had been raped at the age of six by a forty-year-old woman.

  I wondered at all of this but had no way of asking. And now, chilled by that great sky, we went down the steep stairs, companionable but inarticulate. I had given him an outing; he had given me his bird’s eye view of Asakusa.

  early summer 1947—kita kamakura. I stood before the great gate at Engakuji. The naked guardians grimaced, the carved eaves stretched above me, the roof soared and touched the pines. I was about to enter the abode of the Buddha, the world of Daruma, the land of Zen. I said the word softly to myself—the cicada-like drone of the syllable, the sudden halt of the consonant.

  As I did a soft summer breeze struck the overhead pines. The needles rustled and from them fell a fragrance I had known as a child. Looking up, deep into that glittering green, I felt a memory surface, then turn and disappear before I could recognize it. But its passing brought a tear—just one, but real.

  Then I was walking through the gate and into the temple, only an hour from Tokyo but already another world to me. In the silence I looked around—the main temple, the graveyard, what I took to be the zendo, a number of vegetable patches.

  Around in back I found the small tiled-roof house. There I waited, letter and gifts in hand, waited for my teacher. I had read that the Zen adept waited all day—all night too, through rain, through snow. None of this, however, proved necessary, for the man I had come to see, who had not known I was coming nor that he was my teacher, soon noticed the large foreigner standing in the cabbage patch and came out on the veranda.

  Suzuki Daisetz. donald richie

  Suzuki Daisetz was a small man with steel spectacles hooked behind his ears, long hairs in his eyebrows, several moles. He was in a rumpled kimono and he cocked his head to one side as he peered at the intruder. He looked like an older man just awakened, but to me he was the picture of Zen: the fuzzy eyebrows, the high forehead, the childlike gaze—my patriarch.

  He read the letter of introduction from the wife of a colleague, deceased in New York. And he received my offerings—Ritz, Spam, Velveeta, all that the Army PX could contrive. These the patriarch bundled away and then returned with a cup of tepid cracked-wheat tea for me. And there I was, finally, sitting on a cane chair on the veranda of my teacher, inhaling the smell of the tea and the odor of temple—mildew, mice, old paper. Deeply I breathed in the scent of what I took to be sutras, moldering and holy. Now my learning would begin—I had found my roshi.

  Only I had not. It was not that he refused to be my teacher but that he refused to be anyone’s teacher. He was, he insisted, no matter the priestly resemblance, a layman. If anything he was a learner too.

  This was told me in English accented by years in London. Still, he added, sounding like a British don, as a learner he had learned a lot. Yet, though he knew about mountain climbing he had never climbed Mount Sumeru.

  He then waited for me to catch up. I knew that this was a fabled Buddhist peak, the scaled summit of which, I hazarded, meant satori. So this statement I took to mean that he had not himself yet reached what I fancied to be the terminal of Zen Buddhism.

  One of the things he did know, however, he said, was that one did not climb mountains by merely looking at them. All too many people, he maintained, thought that Zen was some sort of mysticism, concerned with visions of the eternal and the like, that you simply sat and looked at it. This was not so.

  Dr. Suzuki I later learned often defined things by what they were not. His remarks on Zen—gleaned by me over a series of Sunday afternoons, outside the pines sighing in the summer winds, inside the still smell of mice droppings—were entirely negative. The only positive description I received was that mountain climbing was hard work.

  This was given with a glance in my direction. It had been ascertained that I never worked. Further, it was understood between us that I never would. Our bond, in that we had one, was that he did not either. Not if you defined work as zazen.

  But that was what I had come for so he introduced me into the zendo and I had indeed sat for a time on my folded legs, my mind busy with what I had done that morning, what I would do later that afternoon, and wondering in what form my illumination would arrive.

  This—my believing I was practicing zazen—went on for a time. The others, all Japanese, paid no attention to the interloper. They sat properly, eyes unfocused, backs straight, minds empty. They were on their way—traveling at great speed sitting completely still.

  I, on the other hand, was shortly complaining that my legs hurt. Also I had questions, wanted descriptions and assurances. Consequently, after a short time, while others sat in the lotus position in the zendo, I sat comfortably on the sofa with Dr. Suzuki.

  There he talked and I listened, hoping that learning would somehow rub off. In a way it did, because Dr. Suzuki eventually gave me an appetite for something he knew I could never eat.

  Every Sunday I would appear with my crackers and cheeses, canned meats, peanut clusters—offerings from the PX for my sensei. These he would graciously receive and carry off to the larder. In return I would be given my cup of tea and a talk. It was always about Ze
n and I never understood a word. Or, rather, it was the words alone I understood—and sometimes the sentences, but never the paragraphs. Still, I was learning.

  Other discourses I had heard were rational, logical, but Dr. Suzuki’s were something else. The process seemed associative, one thought suggesting another, apparently at random. But, as one idea followed another, I saw the randomness was only apparent. Each was attached to the other by the linearity they formed.

  And as I listened I understood that there were other means of structuring thought, ways of thinking different from those I had always known and believed unique.

  This was really all I ever learned from my teacher but it was a lesson of the greatest importance. Dr. Suzuki never gave me satori in exchange for my Velveeta, but he gave me the priceless apprehension of other modes of thought.

  He also initially gave me a koan—the one about Nansen’s cat. This eminent Zen master saw two monks quarreling over the animal. He held it up and said that if they could give an answer the cat would be saved—otherwise not. Not knowing what to answer, there being no apparent question, they were silent and Nansen cut the cat in two. Later he told another priest about the incident. This person removed a sandal, placed it on his head, and walked off. Nansen then said that had he been there the cat would have been saved.

  It is typical of my disposition that the first and only reaction was a concern for the unfortunate feline. And, of course, I too came nowhere near a reply since I did not comprehend that an enquiry was concerned.

  Dr. Suzuki was patient. Either he saw something in me to interest him or he really needed the cheese and crackers. And so we continued until one early summer day with the cicadas screaming—zen, zen, zen—he smiled and said that I need not come again.

  I understood his reasons but felt rejected. This he saw, stood up, and took a picture from the wall. It was a seated Kannon, black ink on white paper, framed in wicker, an oval picture of great beauty that I had often seen and admired.

  It was also a genuine Hakuin. He told me to take it home with me and live with it for a while. He did not tell me why or for how long, but I understood that I would eventually return it to him.

  The blow softened, I held Kannon on my lap all the way back to Tokyo. And as the train pulled from the Kita-Kamakura station I seemed to smell again the pines, and thought about that vanishing thought that had surfaced and disappeared. No longer feeling sorry for myself, clear-eyed, I patted the picture.

  Some months later, already autumn, I was again on a train—a streetcar, rounding the corner at Ueno Park. Suddenly I again smelled the great pines of Kamakura. The scent, strong as the smell of the sea, swooped upon me, and the forgotten memory lay there basking. It was the smell of bath salts, pine-scented, that were put in the tub if I had been a good boy.

  That then was why I felt so young, as though the world was just beginning, when I stood, single tear on cheek, in front of the great gate of Engakuji. I told my companion.

  “How very fascinating,” he said. Then, as he often did, he turned the experience into something of his own. “I often have had experiences like that,” he said. “I am very close to my childhood. Though with me it is cinnamon toast.”

  And he brushed back his salt and pepper hair, cut in the loose and boyish fashion then favored by Englishmen of his age—not as old as my sensei but considerably older than I.

  This was R. H. Blyth, a friend of Dr. Suzuki’s, whom I had met at Engakuji where he had regarded my efforts on the sofa with a silent but apparent amusement.

  “Bath salts, eh? Perhaps you thought that Zen would be a hot bath? More like a cold shower, eh, what? Not that I know much about it.”

  And he tossed his head as he usually did when he said this, always thus disassociating himself from the Zen that had appeared in the titles of several of his books. “No, no. Literature. I am all literature. Never knew anything about Zen. Fact is, you know, no one does.”

  When I would bring up some Buddhist matter, he would answer with an affectionate scorn, “Oh, that stuff. That’s old Suzuki’s department, scarcely mine. Give me Wordsworth any day.”

  Then he would quote something. He was a prodigious quoter, could go on for whole paragraphs, and never apparently make a mistake. Then, “What do you want to study that stuff for anyway?”

  I told him that I didn’t study, not really, just listened to Dr. Suzuki.

  “Well, that’s better,” he said, as though mollified. Then, “There is nothing the matter with it, you understand. It’s just that it’s not for study.” Then, “Suzuki’s a great talker.” This was presented as fact rather than opinion. We knew what that stuff was worth. It was worth a great deal. It was not worth all that much.

  As I listened to Blyth, who was also a great talker, I sat back and appreciated the rationality, the logic. He usually expounded on Wordsworth or Blake or the haiku. And what he said seemed to me attractively vague after the rock-hard incomprehensibilities of Dr. Suzuki. And Blyth’s concept of revelation was quite different from that of my sensei. It was not the result of time and hard work. Wordsworthian revelation could occur just about any time, any place.

  “It could occur even in bed. Oh, yes, seriously. Suddenly. In bed.”

  Then he regarded me in an owlish manner and I remembered his having told me of a beautiful girl who was apparently a member of his large and attractively disordered household. I smiled, picturing him in a sudden state of satori, and at that moment my eyes opened, my smile faded, and I saw a connection—a real one, a bridge of living tissue between my faltering need for religion, my inclination for whatever I thought Zen was, and something I knew quite well: that inchoate bundle of needs, satisfactions and exhaustions which I called my sex life.

  The pines of Ueno had long passed but now their fragrance returned. The bridge was there. Another means of thought had been revealed, and for the first time Zen seemed real to me.

  Kannon was again sitting on my lap. I was returning her to Engakuji. The plum blossoms had passed, the cherry blossoms were budding, and it was raining. I had lived with Kannon for more than half a year, had derived comfort, pleasure, and pride—a Hakuin on my humble wall. Then, as is the way with pictures, or as is the way with me, I gradually forgot about it. Now, carefully wrapped, she rested on my knees. Going home.

  Once there we sat in the now nostalgic odor of mice. Dr. Suzuki removed the wrapping, and held the picture at arm’s length as though to renew acquaintance. Then back she went on the wall.

  I thanked him for everything and he smiled. Then, as though offering a further gift, “Not at all, Mr. Richie. You are, you know, very much of this world, very much of this flesh.”

  He then smiled as though the smile were a way of shaking an understanding head at the ways of this world. And he was right about me. I nodded and as I admitted this to myself I understood—a kind of illumination it was—that I had no vocation and never would, not because anything was missing but because I would never summon up the necessary discipline. Not that it was impossible—nothing is impossible—merely that it was very unlikely.

  I looked at Kannon, back on the wall and looking at home no matter what wall she was on, and at Dr. Suzuki, always a man in the present tense, and I thought of the slender but sturdy bridge that now connected me to my own reality.

  Richie’s billet was the Continental Hotel, originally the main office of Ajinomoto KK until the Occupation moved in. There he roomed with Herschel Webb and Eugene Langston, who became Japanese scholars. For a memoir Richie reworked some of the 1947 journal entries that told how he met them.

  summer 1947. I was late for breakfast and all the tables in the basement dining room were taken, so I asked a man reading a book if I could sit with him. He looked up and smiled, but so politely and so briefly that I was not tempted to begin a conversation. Until I saw what he was reading—then we had lots to talk about.

  The book was Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and the reader was named Gene Langston and though only a few years o
lder than I, he had already met the author.

  “What was she like?” I wanted to know.

  “Well, let me see,” he began—a reasoned response which I soon learned was typical of him. “A bit abrupt, dark, not given to smiling, at least not with me. She was lesbian, of course.”

  I marveled. Never had it occurred to me that authors might share attributes with their characters.

  “Not that that is either here or there,” he said, a smile already apologizing for an observation which might have been misinterpreted as criticism. He did not criticize, the smile said.

  Then, learning that I too had read the book, he became more interested—for it was unlikely that two members of the Allied Occupation of Japan were both reading Nightwood.

  He also became more confiding and said that the character he liked best so far was the doctor. All I remembered about the doctor was his saying that what he wanted in life was to cook some good man’s potatoes. But perhaps my new acquaintance had not yet gotten that far in the book. In any event it was too early in our relationship for me to mention it.

  Instead, I asked about his work. It was in ATIS, the translation section. Yes, he could read and write Japanese.

  Tokyo/Hibiya Crossing, Dai-Ichi Building, 1947. eighth army signal corps

  “And speak it too?” I wondered.

  “Mo chotto bata o motte kite kudasai,” he politely asked the waiter, requesting that more butter be brought. The waiter, delighted to be spared English, smiled and further pats were produced.

  I was impressed. I wanted to be able to speak too and couldn’t. Then he looked at my breakfast and asked how I could eat it. It was the customary contintental fare: gelid egg, frigid toast. Then I saw that his was the only Japanese breakfast in the room: rice with raw egg, miso soup, seaweed squares, and pickled plums. The butter had been thoughtfully ordered for me.