by Sarah Sheard
Things have changed inside me. The loneliness is gone. I want to hold onto my clear mind. My head is filled with ideas rustling like a dry garden.
In the Higashigawa Lounge there’s a glass case with a mannikin dressed in traditional bride’s kimonos and headdress. Three old men sit beside it drinking tea, tracing with delicate fingers their bus tour on a map of the city. Every few moments one of them glances over at me, nods politely.
Tonight I feel something welling up that blurs my focus. I have a 100Y coin for the TV tonight. Power to conjure up company into my room. I mistrust my own imagination – it’s gotten in the way, misguided me, made me prey to all kinds of negative thoughts, deluded me into believing – once a cowhand, always a cowhand. Imagination pulling the fabric this way and that to make it fit – like a pushy department store salesman. I watch the drops of water crawl like larvae down the side of the basin. I’ve got to stop reading Mishima. I can taste what I’ve been reading like a malevolent perfume mixed into my food.
The luxurious anticipation of returning ... Will I have been missed? How will I tell the stories? Who will want to know everything?. My tattered maps, the kimono, will look incongruous and awkward, laid out on the living-room floor like thoughts pulled out of a dream. My father, on his knees, howling.
Japan has been a kind of convalescence.
Golden Week is approaching. Children will be let out of school to go travelling with their families between Kyoto and Tokyo. All the hotels here have been booked months in advance. I will be on my way to Tokyo when it hits, moving upstream.
Tiger mother crossing the ocean with her cubs. The most beautiful of stone gardens, on this gentlest of warm days yet. Thousands of black flies swarm just above the stones as though they were flowers.
The sakura blossoms are sleeting but still at the height of their splendour. I walked through a grove just as the wind blew a pink blizzard sideways into the glossy needles of the pines.
Petals on dark moss. No people here. I walk around Mandarin pond, man-made a thousand years ago. All the mountains reflected in the water belong to the same prefecture of Ryoanji. As I approach a tea-house I hear a bamboo water gong – a sound I’d only read about in haiku. A pokk every minute or so as the tube of bamboo, gradually filling with water sluiced from the stream, tips and falls back against a rock. As I walk away, the sound diminishes to a bird chirp.
A young couple are setting up a tripod and camera by a tree. The man rushes to his girlfriend, arm around her shoulder, and just makes it when the click is heard. Instantly, his hand drops. He packs up and they move on to another view.
I am invisible to them. Emma the ghost, hovering just out of frame.
Akira once told me that the south of Kyoto produced the finest tea in Japan so I made inquiries and boarded the train the next morning for Uji. A school group of little children, about forty of them, boarded right behind me and my heart sank. Their teacher made his way to a vacant seat at the far end of the car and sat down with a newspaper and the children flowed towards me like flies to honey and assembled in a tight row of yellow caps, with their name tags and identical black satchels. Each time I made a move they broke into giggles. Their faces came closer and closer until our noses almost touched. Unable to stand their scrutiny a second longer, I pulled out a paperback but each time I turned the page, the group swayed in to see, hoping for pictures perhaps. I prayed that each station we stopped at was theirs but no such luck and it wasn’t until we stopped at Uji that they all turned as one and made for the door.
I got out and scuttled across the Uji bridge to put distance between me and my group. Midway across, I had to stop. The view downriver, the mists, the mountains and the rapids, looked like a brush painting, the most exquisite fantasy of Japan. I stood and watched the egrets wheel above the foam.
On the other side, I found an open-air gazebo restaurant overlooking the banks of the river where the wind blew the bamboo curtains in and out as I ate my zo-sui, rice gruel, heated over a flame at the table, the young woman who served me brought out cha-soba, pickles and fuki salad and in hesitant English began to talk. She had heard that Canadians ate something called a pancake with maple syrup and she asked me to describe it. She asked whether I hung my wash outside to dry and why I didn’t have children. I made a joke about eating mosquitoes to survive in the bush and her eyes widened with shock. Western enzymes. She directed me to a teahouse down the road to have sencha and I could barely contain my excitement as I walked towards it – a traditional tea-house – jumping out of the novels I’d read, the woodcuts, the walls I’d dreamed of.
The tea-garden. Freshly sprinkled with water. Moss, pines, tea-bushes in perfect globes. I pushed the gate aside, stepped onto the slate stepping stones – usually six for practicality, but here, four for kei or appearance – leading to the washing basin.
The entrance to the tea-house was small. I had to enter on my hands and knees, then slide on my knees to the right of the entrance. I thought, for god’s sake, be careful. You could put your feet through this wall. The room was the size of a doll’s house. Tokonoma scroll above the chabana, flower arrangement. The hostess entered, bowing. She smiled and pointed to the scroll, translating it roughly as something about bending a flower, the scent entering your clothes, a spring activity. Her movements, as she laid out the tea-things, poured water into the tea-pot, replaced the dipper, poured out the tea into cups, were a celebration of economy, no baroque gestures, no ornamentation. She returned her hands after each small movement to her thighs as though to indicate where the tasks broke into their parts. The tea-cake was made of bean paste mixed with green tea into an emerald fudge. I bowed and watched to see how she ate it with the splinter of wood provided. My cup was filled three times and then it was over. Don’t spill. Don’t drop. She rose and bowed and I bowed and crawled back out into the sunshine, feeling for my shoes under the balcony.
It was sunset now. I walked back across the Uji bridge into the wind, my knees aching, and realized with a pang, that I’d never be back.
When the train pulled into Shichijo station, it was dark. I stood on the bridge and watched the dark ripples below me. For a full day I hadn’t thought once about Akira.
In the washroom of the Higashigawa Lounge I found an oblique crack running down the tiled wall. Earthquake? It hadn’t been there last week. Outside the train station, students are handing out flyers protesting something. They have been given a police permit to do this. They are standing beside little cherry trees and rose bushes for sale, brought in from the country. Suddenly I see my mother’s bleeding-heart bush.
Its name in Japanese means a kind of fish.
Famished for English words I browsed through the foreigners’ bookstore and found Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s, In Praise of Shadows, an essay on Japanese aesthetics. I found a bench outside the train station and began to read.
Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall. It gives off no sound when it is crumpled or folded, it is quiet and pliant to the touch as the leaf of a tree.
One by one, three transient men came up and fell asleep on the benches around me, the last one escorted there by a policeman who carried his shopping bag of possessions for him.
... The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispell the heavy darkness of the alcove, is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are –
An old woman came up, glanced at the snoring transient and touched my arm. She insisted I share her loaf of white bread, handed me slice after slice in spite of my protests of ‘kekko desu.’ I’m full. Then a middle-aged guy, obviously her sidekick, joined us. They exchanged a glance of ’Look what we’ve got here.’ The man peered into my eyes to study their colour. He hadn’t seen green ones before. I ate my pan and submitted to their scrutiny while I figured out my exit. ‘Yakuza’ I pointed, to distract them as I rose, indicating the man with the crutches
. They nodded, subdued. Outcasts. All of us.
The ritual was spoiled by my greed today. To be hungry or thirsty at the Tea Ceremony, Cha-no-yu, to consume too greedily, was to waste what was offered. I asked for three bowls of tea because the first tasted so good, and poisoned the substance of the ritual. Hunger and thirst also had to be ritualized in order to be satisfied by the ceremony itself. Cha-no-yu fed my desire for a ceremony to take place inside me.
I want to bring home rocks and pine seedlings, saffron pickles and cha-soba, katsuobushi shavings, the sake cup, gold-flecked, like drinking from a river bottom, the futon tufting piled in the window like milkweed silk, chopsticks cut from bamboo still green and damp, straw sandals with bright rag woven into the straps, shoji paper with fibres, caught smoke that glistens when it’s turned to the light, then goes out. Tanizaki’s lacquer bowl so light it’s like a stomach itself that’s lifted to the lips, full of soup. The moisture that gathers under the lid ... The mosaic brick of egg and tofu cooked separately then put together with a seam of fish roe so tiny, pearl grey, it looks like froth so that this one-bite piece resembles a landscape in cross-section to be held but only for a moment between chopsticks before it begins to tear apart.
The Sea of Japan I have been swimming through – this sea of original people – I could swim out of my old life and into a new one, as old as Asia.
A day begun upside down. Mrs. O, the landlady of the Ladies’ Inn, comes to bid me goodbye. She gives me a hand-painted tea-cup, wrapped in silver foil, a farewell present. I don’t know how to say that she has made a mistake, that I had reserved my room until tomorrow. Caught in my usual awkward web. How would a competent person have solved this, huh? But I have stayed here almost a month, longer than any other guest and I know that during Golden Week she could fit four or five students into my room so, after breakfast, I changed inns and came back to pick up my bags. I presented Mrs. O. with some special tea and two boxes of rice-cakes and my library of Japanese novels in translation and she fell upon Soseki’s I am a cat. She shook hands and watched me all the way to the end of the street, waving each time I turned around.
Akira, I could jog all the way to Tokyo for you. Listening for your car rumbling up behind me.
The minshukan tonight is very modest, run by an obaasan and her husband, a kindly-looking pair with absolutely no English. We had tea in their sleeping room while the TV flickered silently on the tatami.
The next morning I waited for half an hour in my room for breakfast, only to discover they had been expecting me downstairs in the sleeping room which was now a dining-room. They sat watching me drink my cold soup, smiling each time I tried another dish, unable to believe I was actually enjoying a Japanese breakfast. The old man leaned forward and crinkled up his face – ‘Cohee? Cohee?’ No thanks, I shook my head, ‘O-cha, kudasai.’ What! The gaijin preferred green tea to coffee! They patted me on the shoulders. I was really okay.
In the afternoon, I followed the map to Seiteian – a Zen hermitage run by a monk called Shohokku in his house, which was traditional, old and wonderfully shabby, built around an inner garden. I arrived while a meditation sitting was in progress so I knelt by the outer doors and watched the light fade in the garden. When the group rose to do walking meditation, Kinhin, I slipped in and joined them. They sat again for fifty minutes, a very long time for me to keep still.
Shohokku’s feet were wide and spread into the tatami as though he had walked barefoot most of his life. I couldn’t take my eyes off his toes, so beautifully cut. I felt an unseemly sex pang. He asked me to stay for dinner. Young face, deep voice. One of the meditators pointed out Shohokku’s wife to me. A nun, she whispered, on leave from her monastery. I looked more closely. She appeared younger than me, very strong lines to her face, serene. As though she had heard us talking, she nodded gravely to me, then got up and disappeared into the kitchen. Shohokku indicated tea and the other meditators rose to follow him into the kitchen. Counting Shohokku and his wife, we made six. The kitchen was ancient, country-style with skylights and gas lamps.
Afterwards we all helped to clean up while the woman who had pointed Shohokku’s wife out to me, began to talk incessantly. She was from San Francisco and had been sitting for thirteen years.
We went back into the sodo and sat again for an hour. It was easier this time. It surprised me that the San Francisco woman, after such long practice, had to shift position constantly that hour.
I had wanted to ask some questions but I said goodbye and caught the bus back to my ryokan, wishing I’d been able to overcome my shyness. I’d lost my one chance to speak to a Zen monk.
On my last afternoon in Kyoto, I toured Nijo Castle but the scale of the architecture was too large to be comfortable in. I walked past hall after hall where the Shogun once received his feudal lords. Mannikins had been arranged to show the Shogun sitting on a dais behind which were panels concealing his bodyguards. Should a disgruntled warlord so much as move towards him in threat, the display card read, the guards would spring out and cut him down. The Shogun’s private apartments were austere and cold. He looked lonely, sitting in his floor chair while six ladies-in-waiting bowed on their knees at the far end of the room.
On my way home I came upon a children’s cemetery – little spirit-stones with impish faces, wrapped in red cloth aprons with dustcaps on their heads. Offerings had been left which could only have been children’s treasures – parts of toys, buttons, crayons, candies.
Looking through a hedge at sunset. Disarray in the garden. Petals in a heap under the rose-bush. Fresh fuki leaves thrown into a compost pit. As the sun burned below the horizon I remembered that there had been a time when I would have wanted to hold onto such a moment, preserve it in memory’s amber. Tonight there was only the experience.
In the Noh drama I’d seen that afternoon, four characters served tea to an itinerant monk. This took thirty-five minutes. In the second act, two men each tried to persuade a small child to follow him. Several of the attendants nodded fast asleep as they sat onstage. After a lengthy soliloquy, the percussion and flute began to play and a feeling of ’thus it was’ transformed the soliloquy into the sound of a soliloquy. I wondered now if I had understood any of it correctly at all.
I was musing thus, when I turned around to walk home and discovered that all the landmarks I used by day had been swallowed up in darkness. For over an hour I wandered up and down identical streets searching for something I might recognize. Finally I gave up and sat down on the curb. A housewife came up to me. I showed her my address card and she smiled, hand over mouth, and pointed across the road. Silly gaijin, led home by the hand.
An old woman’s voice from the window, singing the Tanka love songs from the New Year’s game, Hyaku nin i-shu, one hundred people, one head.
On the train to Tokyo, I caught my reflection in the mirror as we entered a tunnel, my features distorted into exactly the grotesque gaijin mask I feared I wore. Big hair, tiny face. Long nose, round eyes, jutting chin. Little pinhead, big mouth, goose neck.
I looked away, my thoughts in a jumble ... a mountain of pine needles, children’s graveyard, countless yellow caps, Akira, my own harsh voice, my unchanging thoughts, useless fantasies of wanting to change form, my expressions of taste, hungry-spirit torture, restless craving. My judgement of other people, the endless comparing, a process relentlessly refineable.
Tanuki, the badger, changed form into a tea-kettle, allowing his master to sell him to a monastery. A young monk began scrubbing the sooty kettle, whereupon the tanuki-cha-gama began protesting – ‘Not so hard!’ The startled monk rushed off to tell his master, who advised him to put the kettle on to boil. When the heat became unbearable, the tanuki changed back to his original badger form and ran away.
The passenger told me that story, he said, in order to explain the Japanese mind. I needed to appreciate the animism of Japan, particularly of rural Japan. He talked about the extremism of his people. Their tendency to be overly rigorous in their clean
liness, work ethic. The Japanese cares about what his good neighbour thinks of him and what his bad neighbour thinks. Ego is very weak, he said. This is a problem of the Japanese.
I remembered the obaasan at the minshuku. Her practiced hands pulling together Juniper branches, dahlias, an iris, baby’s breath, into a tokonoma arrangement. Tall, to complement the scroll. She showed me how to hold the bowl, her fingers cool as they closed over my own.
‘Pon.’ The sound the cha-whisk handle made each time she dropped it against the rim of the tea bowl. When I tried to stand up afterwards, both my legs were completely asleep. I pointed to them and shrugged, made a thumbs down, no dice, gesture. She caught on and laughed out loud, hand over mouth, shoulders shaking. She asked me, like so many other people, what I came here for. Pon. A feeling of completing a natural ring of stones. Every thing here, every fold, colour, shape, position, stones and flowers, pottery – gives this pleasure.
I took the newspaper with the announcement of Akira’s concert downstairs to the concierge.
Please, would you give me directions?
He studied it for a moment then got out a sheet of paper.
The – Concert Hall is in Oueno district. You know Oueno station?