CHAPTER 6
Monday morning I rose promptly at seven, washed and shaved, skipped breakfast and went straight to the dormitory supervisor to say that I’d be off mountain-climbing for two days. This barely elicited an “Oh?” from him as I’d previously taken any number of short trips when I had time on my hands. Next came a crowded commuter train ride to Tokyo Station, where I bought a non-reserved-seat ticket to Kyoto on the “bullet train,” literally leaped onto the first super-express, grabbed myself a seat, and consumed a coffee and sandwich by way of breakfast. Then I got maybe an hour of sleep.
It was a little before eleven when I reached Kyoto. Following Naoko’s instructions, I took a bus to Kawaramachi Sanjo, walked to the nearby private bus terminal and inquired about the next Number 16 bus. Eleven thirty-five from the farthest stop, I was told, and an hour’s ride to my destination. I went to buy a ticket, then bought a map at a nearby bookstore and sat down on a bench in the waiting room to see if I could pinpoint this Ami Lodge. Could the place really be so far up into the hills? I traced one good long bus ride north, over mountain after mountain, as far as any bus could go before turning back toward town. The stop where I’d be getting off was only a little before that. There, according to what Naoko had written, I’d find a trail, which after a twenty-minute hike would deliver me at Ami Lodge. That isolated, I couldn’t help thinking the place had to be some kind of quiet.
No sooner had twenty passengers boarded the bus than we departed, heading up along Kamo River through Kyoto. The farther north we went, the emptier the town became, the more fields and vacant lots met the eye. Black-tiled roofs and plastic greenhouses glinted in the early autumn sun. After a while the bus started its ascent into the mountains, and the winding road forced the driver to keep the steering wheel in constant motion left and right. It made me kind of queasy, with my morning coffee still in my stomach. Eventually the curves eased off and a sigh of relief later we plunged deep into cedar forests. Chill, almost primordial, the cedars reached such heights they blocked out the sunlight and cast a gloom over everything. The breeze that blew in the open window grew markedly colder, the dampness piercing my skin. We proceeded along a mountain stream through cedar forests that went on and on, until you’d almost think the whole world had been claimed by cedars, only to emerge into a mountain clearing. What bottom land there was between the hills was green with crops, and a pristine stream ran beside the road. Off in the distance rose a single breath of white smoke, laundry was hung out on the line here and there, and a dog or two barked, Cords of firewood were stacked up under a house’s eaves, a cat napping on top. Each bend in the road brought another such house into view, but never a soul in sight.
The scene repeated itself over and over again. Bus enters cedar forest, bus emerges at hamlet, bus leaves hamlet, bus enters cedar forest. Each time the bus stopped at a hamlet, another few passengers would get off. Not one new passenger ever got on. Some forty minutes after our departure we came to a pass with an expansive view, whereupon the driver stopped the bus and informed the passengers that there would be a five-to-six-minute wait in which they might get out if they wished. There were only four passengers on board at this point, myself included. We all got out and stretched, smoked, and gazed out over the city of Kyoto spread below us. The driver took a leak. A dark-tanned man of around fifty who had boarded carrying a large cardboard box tied with string asked me if I was going hiking. I said yes. It seemed like the simplest thing.
Eventually another bus from the opposite direction pulled up alongside our bus. The driver got out, and after a few words with our driver, each got back in his vehicle. The passengers returned to their seats and the two buses went their separate ways. I found out why our bus had had to wait for the other bus when we started downhill and the road suddenly narrowed. It would have been impossible for two buses to pass; even squeezing by a light van or car generally required one or the other to back up to some wider spot in the road.
The hamlets along the stream got comparatively smaller, the areas of arable bottom land narrower. The mountains grew steeper, looming up immediately beside us. Dogs were everywhere, vying with one another’s howls whenever the bus approached.
At the stop where I got off there was nothing nearby—no houses, no fields. Only a bus stop sign, a small rivulet, and a trail entrance. Shouldering my knapsack, I started up the trail, rivulet to my left, brush woods to my right. A gentle slope led up fifteen minutes until a side-trail barely the width of a car branched off to the right. Its entrance had a sign, “Ami Lodge—No Trespassing.”
There were distinct tire tracks on the path. An occasional flapping of wings could be heard from the surrounding woods, an unusually vivid sound, seemingly magnified at moments. Just once off in the distance there was the muffled report of what might have been a gun.
Having made it through the woods, a white stone wall came into view. Not much of a wall really, since you could climb over it without too much effort. The gate was of heavy black iron, but it was wide open and there was no sign of a gatekeeper in the gatehouse. Beside the gate was another plaque identical to the previous one, “Ami Lodge—No Trespassing.” There were signs that someone had been in the gatehouse only moments before: three cigarette butts in an ashtray, a cup with a few sips of tea left in it, a transistor radio on a shelf, the dry rasp of a clock ticking away the minutes on the wall. I considered waiting until the gatekeeper returned, but there was no indication that this would be soon, so I gave a couple of presses on what I took for a bell. Right inside the wall was a parking lot in which were a minibus, a four-wheel-drive land cruiser, and a dark blue Volvo. There was room enough to park thirty vehicles, but those were the only ones there.
After two or three minutes a gatekeeper in a navy blue uniform came riding down the path through the woods on a yellow bicycle. A tall, bald man, aged sixty or thereabouts. Leaning the bicycle against the gatehouse wall, he turned to me and said, “Sorry to keep you waiting,” though he hardly seemed sorry. The number “32” was written in white paint on the mudguard of the bicycle. I told the man my name and he telephoned somewhere, repeating my name twice. The person on the other end of the line said something, the man said yes, very good, certainly, then hung up.
“You’re to go to the main building and ask for Colleague Ishida,” said the gatekeeper. “Go straight up the path here and you’ll come to a turnabout, and the second path from the left—You got that? The second from the left—that takes you to an old building. You turn right there and head through another patch of woods and you come out at a big square building. That’s the main building. There’re signposts all the way, so you can’t miss it.”
I took the second path from the left at the turn-about as directed and came upon an old building that had the look of a summer house of years past. The yard had nice rocks, a stone lantern and whatnot, and carefully tended trees. Very probably the place had been someone’s summer villa. Turning right from there took me through more woods straight to a three-story ferroconcrete building, although the fact that the site had been excavated made the three stories something less than daunting. A simply designed structure, it was your study in antiseptic architecture.
The entrance was on the second floor. Mounting a short flight of steps and opening the large glass doors, I entered a reception area, where a young woman in a red dress was sitting at a desk. I gave her my name and said I’d been told to see Colleague Ishida. She smiled and pointed to the brown sofa in the lobby, asking me in a quiet voice to please wait over there. Then she picked up her phone and dialed. I sloughed off my knapsack and took a seat on the soft plush sofa, looking around at the immaculate, tasteful lobby. Several potted plants placed here and there, a soothing abstract oil on the wall, the floor buffed to a high sheen that invited me to gaze at the reflection of my shoes on the floor while I waited.
At one point the receptionist said that it would only be “a little while longer.” This place was some kind of quiet all right. Not a sound anywh
ere around, as if it was siesta time. All the people and animals and insects and plants seemed deep into their afternoon snooze.
Presently, however, there came the soft padding of rubber-soled shoes, and a middle-aged woman with extremely stiff short hair appeared, briskly sat down next to me, and crossed her legs. We shook hands, which allowed her to examine my hand back and front.
“You don’t play any musical instrument, at least you haven’t in recent years, have you?” were the very first words out of her mouth.
“No,” I answered, somewhat taken aback.
“I can tell from your hands,” she said with a laugh.
Strange woman. Her face abounded in wrinkles, which were the first thing that struck you about her, yet they didn’t add up to a particularly aged appearance. If anything, her wrinkles underscored a youthfulness beyond age. So much a part of her face, they seemed to have been there from birth. When she smiled, the wrinkles smiled; when she looked quizzical, the wrinkles looked quizzical. When neither smiling nor quizzical, the wrinkles settled over her face in a way that was somehow warmly ironic. Here was a woman in her late thirties not only sympathetic but actually quite attractive in her own way. I took an immediate liking to her.
Her hair was cut with almost careless abandon and stuck out here and there, a fringe falling unevenly across her forehead, and yet the look became her. She wore a white dungaree workshirt over a white T-shirt, loose beige slacks, and tennis shoes. A scarecrow of a figure with no breasts to speak of, she kept curling her lip up to one side half-jokingly, and teasing the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She seemed like a skilled lady carpenter, kindly, but with her own inside scoop on how it all came down in the world.
She drew in her chin and looked me over top to bottom, lip curled the whole while. Any second I felt sure she was going to produce a tape measure and give me a fitting.
“So can you play an instrument?”
“No, I can’t,” I answered.
“Pity, could’ve had a lot of fun.”
I guessed so, without the foggiest notion of why the topic of musical instruments should have come up at all.
The woman pulled a pack of Seven Stars from her breast pocket, put one to her lips and lit up, obviously taking great pleasure in smoking it.
“Well now—Toru, wasn’t it?—before you see Naoko, there’s a couple of things I ought to explain to you about the place here. That’s why I arranged for us to have a few words in private. Things here are kind of different from other places and might prove a little trying without a bit of background information. You don’t really know very much about the place, do you?”
“No, hardly anything.”
“So, to start with,” she began, then suddenly snapped her fingers as if something had occurred to her. “Have you had lunch? Are you hungry?” “Hungry enough,” I said.
“Well, then, we’ll talk in the dining hall over lunch. Lunchtime is over, but if we hurry I’m sure there’ll still be something to eat.”
She stood up and walked briskly ahead of me, heading down a flight of stairs. The dining hall had seating for perhaps two hundred, but only half of it was in use, the other half partitioned off with a screen. Kind of like an off-season resort hotel. The lunch menu consisted of potato stew with noodles, salad, and orange juice. And as Naoko had written, the vegetables were all scrumptious beyond belief. I found myself eating every last bit on my plate.
“You really eat with gusto. Makes everything seem so good,” she remarked admiringly.
“Everything is so good. And I haven’t had a decent bite since morning.”
“If you’d like to, why don’t you finish off mine, too? I’m already full. Will you?”
“If you don’t want it, I will.”
“I’ve got such a small stomach, I can hold only so much. But what I can’t fill with food, I make up for by smoking,” she said, putting another Seven Stars to her lips and lighting it. “Oh, and by the way, you can call me Reiko. Everybody does.”
She’d hardly touched her stew. I dug in, helping myself to the bread as well, my every motion followed closely by Reiko’s curious eyes.
“Are you really Naoko’s doctor?” I asked her. “Me? A doctor?” She grimaced with surprise. “Why would I be a doctor?”
“All I was told was to see ‘Colleague Ishida,’ very authoritative-like.”
“Well, yes, people do call me ‘Colleague’ because I’m the music teacher. But strictly speaking I’m a patient. I’ve been here seven years now, teaching music, helping out with the paperwork. Can hardly tell whether I’m a patient or staff any more. Naoko didn’t tell you anything about me?”
I shook my head.
“Hmph,” muttered Reiko. “Anyway, Naoko and I share the same room. We’re roommates. It’s certainly an experience living with her. All sorts of things to talk about. Talks a lot about you.” “What sort of talk about me?” I asked.
“Before we get to that, I really ought to explain a bit about the place,” said Reiko, ignoring my question. “The first thing you’ve got to understand is that this isn’t your ordinary hospital. The long and the short of it is, this isn’t a place for treatment, it’s a place for convalescence. Of course, there are doctors here giving one-hour sessions every day, but that’s more like taking your temperature, not the all-out active kind of curing that goes on in other hospitals. That’s why there’s no iron bars here, no lock on the gate. People come in as they please, people go out as they please. So that the only people who stay are those who can make a go of this way of convalescing. Not just anyone can stay here. People who need special treatment go to specialized hospitals as their case requires. Got it so far?”
“I think so. But what is this ‘way of convalescing’?”
Reiko let out a puff of cigarette smoke and finished off her orange juice. “Living here is itself convalescence. A regular schedule, exercise, isolation from the outside world, peace and quiet, fresh air. We have our own vegetable gardens and are practically self-sufficient. No TV, no radio. It’s hip enough to be a commune, though of course staying here is pretty expensive, so it’s different from your regular commune.”
“Is it that expensive?”
“Not cheap, but not impossibly expensive, either. I mean considering the facilities. And the grounds. Small number of patients to a large staff. Me, I’ve been here a good long while and I’m practically half a staffer by now, so I get my fees waived, but so much for that. Say, how about coffee?”
I told her I wouldn’t mind a cup. Whereupon she put out her cigarette and got up, poured two cups from a coffee warmer on the counter, and brought them back to the table. She stirred sugar in hers, made a sour face, and took a sip.
“This sanatorium’s non-profit. That’s how they manage to keep the fees reasonable. The property was all donated. It’s legally incorporated. This all used to be a private villa up to twenty years ago. Still looks like one, doesn’t it?”
That it did, I agreed.
“In the old days, there used to be only that building over there where they got together for group therapy. Which is to say that the whole thing got started because the son of the owner had some psychiatric problems and this specialist recommended group therapy. The doctor maintained that by living off by themselves away from town in a mutual-help situation, doing physical labor, with a doctor standing by to advise and check on their progress, people could heal themselves, as it were. That’s how the whole thing got started. And gradually it got bigger and incorporated, the garden acreage increased, and the main building was added five years ago.”
“So the cure worked, I take it.”
“Yes, with exceptions. Nothing works for everybody and there’s lots of folks who can’t get well this way. Still, there’s plenty of people who have found other treatments useless but who’ve walked out of here fully recovered. The best thing about being here is that everyone helps one another. We all know our own imperfections, so we make a point of helping. Other places it’s no
t like that, unfortunately. Other places, the doctors are strictly doctors, the patients strictly patients. The patients request help from the doctors and the doctors make it their business to help. But here we all help one another. We’re one another’s mirrors. And the doctors are our friends. They’re standing by watching us, ready to lend a hand if we need it, but sometimes we help them out. Which is to say that we’re better at some things than they are. For instance, I teach one doctor piano, another patient is teaching the nurses French, things like that. Despite our illness, there’s a lot of us with specialized knowledge of one kind or another. So in that sense we’re all equals here. The patients, the staff, even you. As long as you’re here, you’re one of us, so I help you and you help me.” Reiko’s face crinkled in a good-natured smile. “You help Naoko, Naoko helps you.”
“So what should I do exactly?”
“First of all comes the willingness to help the other person. And the realization that somebody has to help you, too. Second comes honesty. Not to tell lies or fabricate things or gloss over indiscretions. That’s all.”
“I’ll try,” I said. “But tell me, Reiko, why have you been here for seven years? All this time I’ve been talking to you, I can’t see that there’s anything wrong with you.”
“Not during the day,” she said, her expression darkening. “It’s nighttime that gets to me. soon as night sets in, I’m foaming at the mouth and rolling all over the floor.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Of course not. You actually expect such nonsense?” she replied with a curt shake of her head. “I’m pretty well recovered now. I’ve stayed on because I enjoy helping folks get better. Teaching music, growing vegetables, I like it here. Everyone’s such good friends. By comparison, what do you have oh the outside? Me, I’m thirty-eight, going on forty. Not like Naoko. Nobody’s waiting for me to get out of here, no family to take me in if I did leave. I’d hardly even have any friends. And what with being in here for seven years, I’m sure the whole world’s changed outside. Sure I look at the papers in the reading room sometimes, but the fact is I haven’t set foot outside this place in seven years. And I wouldn’t know what to do if I did.”
Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Page 12