Later, I meet some Tokyo students feeding the deer and ask if they know of a cheap inn. They suggest theirs, very near the park and very cheap. So now I have moved from the most expensive place in Nara to the least. The other was a thousand five hundred yen a night with two meals. This one is four hundred with one.
The tatami is dusty, the windows leak cold air, and no one brings me tea, but I like it better. My new landlady regards me with such suspicion that she leaves me entirely alone. I did not again see the talkative mistress from my prior inn but I imagine she is not happy at the loss of a customer. The taxi driver who carried me and my bag from one domicile to the other was astonished. The economic shift I had made was enormous and the only thing that would have surprised him more would have been if it had been in the opposite direction.
The new landlady has just brought tea, after all. She is still suspicious but now more curious. She keeps turning her head to one side as she regards me—like one of the deer. Now I sit in a restaurant near the station having wandered about trying to find the office of the Yamato Times. Taking many a wrong turning I have consequently seen most of the city.
Nara is smaller than I thought. It took about an hour to walk around it. Once off the main avenues the streets turn narrow and the houses hang over the traffic. Like a lot of Kansai, the place looks more like China than anything in Tokyo does. If I look down one of these cluttered black perspectives and smell the charcoal burning, I can be back in Shanghai in the winter.
With Tani Hiroaki. Nara, 1954.
These streets keep leading me back to the lake and park. I come across a small pagoda, three stories, unpretentious, a dusty red. I admire it. For so large a building it seems to weigh little. The structure is apparent and the space under and around the eaves balances that of the bulk. I stay and admire until the deer find me. So I buy them some cakes. Trying these myself I wonder at their enthusiasm. No taste at all—dry, hard, empty.
Having written this, I look up and see a student sitting at the next table. His name, I am to learn, is Tani Hiroaki, and he is kind enough to help me find the Yamato Times. Big, boisterous, very polite, he stays with me while I talk with the editor who gives me, in addition to his time, a map of the city, and expresses a polite interest in my newspaper, the Japan Times, in the distant capital. After that Tani has to go home but we are to meet again this evening.
Rest of the afternoon spent trying find a place to go to the toilet. This is always a problem in Japan and even if a place is found it never has any paper. The Japanese wisely carry their own. Since I do not, I tramped the streets and finally retreated to my inn, where I hoped they had some.
They didn’t, so I had to ask for some. At once the serving girl set up a merry noise. The spectacle of a foreigner in a Japanese toilet is a happy one and it is even better to be informed of it in advance. My simple request brought gurgles of delight. Of course her pleasure had a point. The Japanese toilet is supposed difficult for Westerns to manage. Strange that these people who willingly relinquish traditional underwear and phallic worship should cling to their toilets. Even now I can hear the maids chattering of the event. I have made their day interesting, memorable, and worthwhile.
29 december 1954. Late in the morning. We overslept and Tani is now down washing. The breakfast is on the table and as I wait for him I write, this page cold against my hand.
Last night he took me on a tour of the brothels of Nara. They are nothing like what Tokyo offers. Rather, they are low, black, Naniwa-style, with wide front entrances, like brightly lighted stables. And, on either side of the gate-like door, two old women huddled over braziers and called out to the passersby. Just inside, as though on stage, sit the girls, some in kimono, some in dresses. They read, talk, and warm themselves. The customers step into the entryway and stare at them. It is like a waxworks, a tableau vivant. Except that the girls talk, make jokes, and stare back.
I ask Tani where they come from and he says probably from the country. In one place he asks and she says she is from Tokyo. He tells me that they all say they are from Tokyo. We look a lot, then go out and have more sake.
He is now returned from the bath and we eat breakfast—miso soup, seaweed, egg to put on the rice, pickles, and tea. Sometimes I have trouble with the Japanese breakfast—want my coffee, my toast, my jam. With the smiling Tani opposite me I happily slurp my soup.
He was born and raised in Nara but now goes to school in Tokyo. Is home for the holidays. His hair and eyebrows are very black and his teeth are very white; his hands are chapped and red, knuckles are big and flat. He is a member of the boxing team at university. Is just twenty-one.
We are in the train but still at the station—Nara Station, which seeks, outside at any rate, to suggest ninth-century architecture. Inside, however, it is all done in Ordinary Railway Station—tiles, fluorescent light, benches. Tani wants to know what I am writing. I do not know how to say journal. So I say Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Since he receives the enormous smattering that all Japanese students get, he nods and is now convinced I am writing my confessions. Which, in a way, I suppose I am. Ah, the bells are ringing and the orange and candy sellers gather around the windows. We are off for Horyuji.
Horyuji. We walk through the paddies for almost half an hour before seeing it—a walled compound, half hidden in pine, the pagoda bristling above the trees. Just as we mount the steps leading to the great gate the sun appears for the first time today.
The Kondo is a square, intricately wrought building, dragons flying at all angles, the inner eaves supported by patient lions. The building is square and flat as a Quaker meeting hall, and inside stand the statues, dimly gleaming, as though testifying.
Outside the compound we sit and smoke. Tani has just gone over to examine one of the trees that flank the court. It is a shell, hollowed out by the years until it looks like a large ebony carving. The sky is visible through its holes and yet it lives—from the top green leaves appear. Tani has asked the local photographer its name. He doesn’t know. So he asks him to take our pictures.
We visit the Daihozoden, a museum turned into a church by the offerings left in front of the art works. An idea we might well emulate. I would leave mine in front of Vermeer, Chardin.
Then, around a corner, I come upon the Kudara Kannon, whose picture I have often seen. But photographs have not prepared me for the effect. It is frightening—the cry of a large bird or the sudden appearance of a giant nursemaid. The face is feathered with verdigris—and she is eight feet tall and from Korea. Also she is a thousand years old.
Walking along we come across the Yumendo, the octagonal building I have often seen. It was in a volume of the Book of Knowledge that I gazed at as a child. It is also on the reverse side of the thousand yen bill. We stand, Tani, the priest in charge, and me, just such a bill in hand, and solemnly compare. See, it is just the same.
Tani is full of questions. Is that kind of wood expensive? How much did that gilt cost? He properly pays no attention to the beauty of the work, only its value. Others also ask questions. An elderly couple turns to one another. “It is very old,” says one. “Maybe one hundred years,” ventures the other. “No,” says the priest, “more like a thousand.” “Oh,” they say, “very old.”
30 december 1954. A brilliant day and we slept until ten. After breakfast, however, the sun retired and so I wrote postcards and Tani read movie magazines, just as if we were waiting for its reappearance.
I suddenly realize how happy I am—it is an instant assurance, but when I try to grasp it, it slips to one side, eludes me. It seems to me that I ask little to be so happy, yet this kind of conscious happiness is so rare that I remember all the times when it has occurred. This is now one of them. Ah, see, the clouds are parting. Tani looks out of the window and up at the sky, his neck strong in the weak light.
Todaiji—looking like a section of some celestial city, but sharing with the rest of Nara the pleasing appearance of a capital in ruins. Inside the hall, big as a stadium, we see
the famous Daibutsu himself. There is something theatrical about him. I am reminded of backstage at the opera, during, perhaps, Lakmé. This is because everything is so huge. The statue looms like a holy King Kong. And behind, the rows of statues make the place even more theater-like. They are the patient audience to all this absurd grandeur.
In so secular an atmosphere the crowd makes no effort to hush itself. A tourist party, laughter echoing back and forth, attempts to push a small and reluctant child through a hole in one of the pillars. “No, no, go on now,” says an adult in Tokyo dialect, “One time through means good luck forever.”
Nigatsudo—up on the side of the mountain, the roof of the Daibutsu a colossal tent below. Around it the rest of Nara, clear and sharp as in a photograph. This pavilion of the second month is not kept up. It is dirty and dusty and the neighborhood children play familiarly at the front gate. From here the stairs start and climb the hill behind to the great veranda that encircles the temple proper.
We sit there and look at the view, the big pagoda by the distant pond standing like a pine, the fertile vale of old Yamato stretching to the mountains on the horizon—and Tani makes a sketch of what he sees while I write in this journal until the wind chills the fingers and I can no longer hold the pen.
We stop, cold, in a warm open shop and eat warabi mochi, a hot and grainy concoction, made of yuba powder and sugar and probably much else. Tani discovers that the shop is built around a live pine tree and runs outside to observe the effect.
Back at the inn we wait for the bath to be free, both of us lying on the floor by the brazier and talking about the war. He was about ten at the time. It was terrible, he says. You couldn’t get any candy or anything. Then he tells me about some war hero he particularly admired but I don’t know any military history, and so we give up.
31 december 1954. Tonight we walk the lanes of Kyoto, and I am once again struck by the difference from Tokyo. It is just as busy, just as full of neon and pachinko, yet not at all the same. Perhaps it is that the neon is attached to an ancient façade and that the pachinko is next to an eighteenth-century dwelling. It is the feeling of the old still alive in this city that makes it different. And today the women and children are already in kimono, that traditional dress.
I wander about without my map, trusting to memory, but soon become lost. We sit in the courtyard of a temple I may once have been in and watch the children fly their kites, sharp against the cold winter sky. One kite is caught against the telephone wires and the wind beats it to death. Later, on the other side of town, we are in a coffee shop and it is quietly raining—as it always seems to be here. The streets are full and I look at the people but see no other foreigners.
Later, near Yasuka Shrine, the streets are so full I walk in the gutter. Maiko and geisha are out, parading on the edge of the Gion. Maybe Japan looked like this fifty years ago. Here people turn to look at me. They seem surprised when I smile.
A small boy with his parents sits drinking hot orange juice and staring at me, turning away when I look, but always swiveling back. Friendly and shy, he drinks with both hands. On his head is a baseball cap with a large M on it. Now he lifts the glass, trying to get at the sugar at the bottom with his little pink tongue. The geta on the foot of a sleeping little girl is nudged by a tired parent, and I hear the little bell inside it.
1 january 1955. Excitedly awakened by the maids who insist upon our coming down to the big room for breakfast—the ceremonial first meal of the first day. We are given otose, very sweet herb-filled sake, then charred fish, lotus roots, preserved beans, frozen tofu, lots more sake. Before we are fully awake we are drunk.
Ceremony often takes the place of civility here. Politeness, in my sense, is sometimes missing. Instead, we are given to understand that an honor is being done us. Here we are treated to food and flattery but we are not the objects, we are the side-benefits.
This is not so with Tani at the train station, however. He must go home—his parents doubtless wondering just where he has been these past few days. Our ceremony of departure is personal. We ourselves are the reason for our formality. He bows, I bow, we shake hands. We will meet again, in Tokyo, often, always. And he stands soberly, black in his student uniform as the train pulls out, looking until I disappear.
My coach is almost empty. Only a man and his son, and a soldier. My room for the night shakes, comes alive, and I look back over black Kyoto and there is the moon rising.
The friendship with Tani Hiroaki was to continue through the lives of the two men. (Those wishing to read a fuller version of the meeting and to learn what followed are referred to the “Hiroyasu Yano” section of Public People, Private People, 1987.)
2 may 1955. On the steamer from Niigata to Sado Island, Tani and I lie on the tatami in the big, second-class salon. We have just been given tea and the ship is already rolling. Overhead the loudspeakers are pouring out recorded folksongs from fabled Sado, and the decks are full. So is the tatami; I had my feet on someone’s open book.
We left Tokyo yesterday noon, for no reason other than that we wanted to, and in six hours had crossed the island, gone over the still snow-covered mountains, and gently descended to the plains by the Sea of Japan.
Ah, the motion of the boat has already lulled Tani to sleep.
*
At Aikawa. Sado is much larger than I had thought. The bus trip across it took almost two hours. And it has high, snowy mountains, too—as well as streams and lakes. Not much like an island except that you can see the sea more often.
Tani is impressed by its resemblance to his part of the country, near Nara, and accents on the bus indicate that, indeed, almost everything came from Kansai. I look from the window of the bus and recognize the architecture, and the shape of the fields—like the fields of Kyoto.
Sado is still pleasingly primitive, however, and considering its fame, is still not touristy. The towns remind me of Calabrian villages—they are that plainly, that casually put together. Ryotsu, where we landed, could have been a village on the Adriatic.
We are now in an inn on the other side of the island, drinking tea and eating cakes the like of which I have not seen before. Brown and bitter. My audience sits and looks. The hotel maids find my white skin and round eyes so different they cannot bring themselves to leave. They keep staring at me and then at the cakes. Probably expect me to rub them into my hair.
A long walk, both of us in geta, and at the end we reach a small park beside the sea. There are bridges and a hill and a toy temple, desolate and swept by a strong, steady wind from the Sea of Japan. I see that the bushes, even the trees, have learned over the years to lean away from it. It must always blow.
We rent a boat and Tani rows me far off to the pebbly shore, where a single, enormous rock hangs suspended between two cliffs. We were going to explore, but the boat drifts off and we catch it just in time.
After supper we go to the local theater to see a dance program—the famed Sado Okesa. Though this is famous as a women’s dance, all eight dancers tonight are boys. They wear girls’ kimono and red ribbons, but this is their single concession to femininity. They are probably carpenter apprentices or fishermen, and they dance like it—rough, male. This unison dance is full of high steps, the kimono opening as the dancer turns. But instead of the rounded calves of fisher maids, we see the muscular thighs of the local boys. Japan is casual about gender. This is the dance the men know too, and so they perform it for the benefit of their neighbors and whatever visitors the town might be having.
Performance over, I congratulate the boys in their women’s straw hats and pretty ribbons. They are flushed and friendly, but not very used to foreigners. The children, for example, do not shout out haro, as they do in Kyoto, or simply pay no attention as they now do in Tokyo. Rather, they look, mouth open, then turn away, suddenly shy. This is true of many of the adults, too. No one seems to stare and yet, when you look back, the gazes are still sliding away.
Much later. Tani is asleep on his stomach,
half on the futon, half not. He breathes quietly, regularly, his profile sharp against the shoji, shadowless in the night light.
3 may 1955. A boat ride to Senkakuwan, a large and rocky bay with an island at the further end and a hanging bridge famous for some reason or other. We left the boat and went up a steep path to the plateau from where we can see the whole coast.
Tani has already seen the place. It is famous as the location for some movie. Here, he tells me, is where Machiko stood and wept. Why? I asked. Because she had yet again missed her lover. And they almost met on that bridge back there. Then I remembered the film, Kimi no Na wa [What Is Your Name?], in which the two followed each other all over Japan, always missing by inches.
After a long and seemingly perilous bus ride we have come to Ogi, on the southern side of the island. It is a pleasant fishing village, more prosperous-looking than most, and split into two by a large cliff. We take the top floor, a single room, of an enormous, rambling old inn. From here the wind shakes the windows and we can see miles out to sea.
Later we get a rowboat and go out into the bay, heading for a small shrine on the opposite shore, past little islands that hold large sea caves. We row into one and push our way up a dim channel to a dark beach where the rocks and sands are black.
The light from the distant opening is bright, but the cave is like night and reflections as though from the moon are cast across its ceiling. We beach the boat and look for interesting stones. Tani finds so many that we cannot carry them all, though we fill all our pockets
When we leave the sun has gone and wind come up. We row with it, and just as we reach the hotel the rain begins. Now the windows are rattling and there is the smell of brine in the room. The electric light flickers and Tani sits across from me, looking at what I write, wondering if it is about him, but not asking.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 9
