by Pico Iyer
2
SO IT WAS THAT one day later, I found myself standing in Kyoto, two cases in my hand, outside a tiny temple in the rain. A shaven-headed monk, an albino as it happened, with vague eyes and a face like baby’s milk, appeared before me, smiling. “Do you speak English?” I asked him, in Japanese. Litteru, he replied, and so I asked once more. “One night, three thousand, five hundred,” he said. “Free breakfast.” Then he pointed to a courtyard behind him, crowded with bicycles, motorbikes, and mopeds. “My hobby,” he explained.
That, it seemed, was the end of the conversation, of small talk and of big. Eyes bulging, the pale monk motioned to a pair of slippers, then led me through a maze of gleaming corridors, past a tidy rock garden, across an altar room equipped with gong and elegant calligraphy, and into another tiny room. A room was all it was — a bare rectangle of tatami mats bordered by sliding screens. Pulling out a mattress that was standing in the corner, he nodded in my direction, and I collapsed.
Later, many hours later, when I awoke, the world was dark. I looked around, but there was no way of telling whether it was night or day. On every side of me was a sliding door: one that gave onto another tiny, empty space; another that led into the darkened shrine, spectral now in the gloom; a third that proved to be nothing but a wall; and a fourth that, when I slid it open, afforded me a glimpse of the garden behind and, rising high above it, the silhouette of a five-story pagoda, the moon a torn fingernail in the sky.
Fumbling my way through the dark, I stumbled through the shrine and out into the entrance hall, and then into the narrow street. Everything, here too, was hushed. Temple roofs and spires haunted the brownish sky. Banners fluttered from the wooden eaves of teahouses. The darkness was pricked by nothing save white lanterns and the blue-and-white badges of American Express.
I walked along the empty lane in a dream of strange displacement. No other pedestrians walked these midnight streets; no cars purred through the ghosted dark. Only occasionally could I catch the distant murmurs of some secret entertainment. Then, as the first speckles of rain began prickling my arms, I hurried back into the temple. All night long, the rain pattered down on wooden roofs, and I, now sleeping, now awake, sat alone in the darkened shrine, not really knowing where I was.
The next morning, when I got up and made my way uncertainly out to the altar room, the monk bustled up to greet me. The first item on the agenda was a guided tour. And the first stop on the tour was what appeared to be the only piece of decoration in the place: a framed photograph of himself, seated atop a tricycle, looking astonished, a bobble hat on his shaven head and a Mickey Mouse shirt under his alabaster face. “This me,” he explained. “I am Buddhist monk.” Then, in the same provisional tone, he proceeded to recite the American sites he had seen — “San Francisco, Los Angeles, Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, San Antonio, El Paso, New Orleans, Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo.” Then he led me to a low table, overlooking the temple garden, and vanished.
A few minutes later, my bewilderment now almost mirroring his own, he hurried in again and laid down before me a black lacquer tray filled with elegant little bowls of vegetables, fruit, pickles, and rice; later, a toaster, some bread, and a thermos of hot water for my tea. Then he disappeared again.
I was just beginning to enjoy the feast, looking out upon the green and silver stillness, when suddenly his astonished-looking face appeared again, speeding through the garden atop a motorized contraption. He rode up to the room where I was sitting, looked astonished some more, waved like a queen, and then roared away again in a minicloud of smoke. The next thing I knew, he was at my door, on foot this time, peering in with a hesitant smile. “Tricycle,” he said, pointing at the offending instrument, Mickey and Minnie grinning on its license plate. With that, he disappeared.
My second day, as I sat in the alcove looking out onto the other garden — a stream, a wooden bridge, a stone lantern, and, beyond, Yasaka Pagoda rising through the trees — the second, and only other, monk of the temple, an older man, with the breathless, frightened voice of a perennially bullied schoolboy issuing from a spherical wrestler’s body, padded over to me. He spoke even less English than his colleague, but that did not seem to matter, since his was not a verbal medium. Huffing and puffing, but without a word, he sat down beside me and pulled out six sheaves of snapshots: himself (wide-eyed) in front of the Taj Mahal; himself (bemused) on a bridge above the Thames; himself (bewildered) on llle de la Cité; himself (perplexed) on the steps of the Piazza di Spagna; and himself with a variety of other scenic wonders. Then, show complete, he trudged away again.
A eunuch and an albino: the monks with whom I was living were the strangest-looking pair that ever I had seen, and a cynic, no doubt, would have had no trouble explaining why they had turned their backs on the world before the world could turn its back on them. Yet they were an eminently kindly pair, and peaceable, and I began in time to think of them as good companions. Every morning, as I took my seat in front of the rock garden, they laid before me a four-course breakfast, and every morning — with a thoughtfulness and precision I could imagine only in Japan — they gave me something different. Every evening, when I went out, I found them squashed together on the floor, at a tiny table in a tiny room, drinking beer before some TV ball game. “Catch you later,” the albino monk would call out after me, waving his bottle merrily in my direction, chalky white legs protruding from tomato-red shorts.
The area where I had settled down was, by happy chance, one of the last remaining pilgrims’ districts in Japan, an ancient neighborhood of geisha houses and incense stores built in the shadow of the city’s most famous temple, Kiyomizu, the Temple of Pure Water. Wooden boards still marked the places Bashō had admired, and monks still bathed in the ice-cold Sound of Feathers waterfall above. My own street, as it happened, was still a center of the mizu-shōbai, or “water trade” (of women), and also the place where the widow of the city’s fiercest shogun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had retired, on her husband’s death, and built a villa and a temple. In the temple, I had read, yama-neko, or “mountain lion,” geisha had entertained at parties for the monks, and even now the elegant characters on the lanterns denoted the names of the women who worked within.
Thus the whole area was preserved as carefully as a museum treasure. My local café was a rock-garden teahouse, sliding blond-wood screens opening out onto a clean geometry of wood and water; the neighborhood stores were polished galleries selling sea-blue Kiyomizu pots, silken fans, and woodblock prints, all silvered with the sound of water music; and my next-door neighbor was a forty-foot statue of the goddess Kannon, majestic against the mapled hills.
Few places in Japan were as self-consciously Japanese as Kyoto, the romantic, templed city that had been the capital for a thousand years and even now was faithfully preserved as a kind of shrine, an antique, the country’s Greatest Living National Treasure. Almost 100,000 tourists (mostly Japanese) came here every day to pay their respects to the “City of Peace and Harmonious Safety,” and the city, accustomed to their worship, handed itself over to them like a collection of gift-wrapped slides — even the place mats at the local McDonald’s (which had once set a world record for serving two million burgers in a single day) were maps of the city’s lyrical conceits, locating the temple whose floorboards sang like nightingales and the rock garden that traced the pattern of infinity.
Yet even the efficiency of its charm could hardly diminish the city’s beauty. My first Sunday morning in Kyoto, I hurried out of the temple at first light and climbed the steep cobbled paths that lead up to Kiyomizu. Taking the wrong path without knowing it, and passing through a side temple, I slipped out into a rock garden. A woman, mistaking me for a VIP, came out with a gold-and-indigo tray bearing a cup of green tea. The maples before us climbed towards the blue. Everywhere was a silence calm as prayer.
Minutes later, I was walking through the teeming basement of a department store, overflowing with more fruit, more pickles, more high-tech ga
dgets than I could easily take in; sorbet houses and wineshops, noodle joints and macaroni parlors, melon outlets and chocolate-makers. I bought an ice cream from a girl, and she wrapped it in a bag with a smart gold twizzle around the neck, put that bag in a larger, foam bag, complete with two blocks of ice to keep the whole from melting, and wrapped it all in the stylish black-and-gold bag of her company; I went to temples and was handed entrance tickets that looked like water-color prints; I walked into a park again, in the cloudless exaltation of a perfect Sunday morning, and could scarcely believe that I had stumbled upon such a flawless world. To partake of the gleaming splendors of the depāto and to sip green-tea floats in teahouses; to find moonlit prints in convenience stores and damascene earrings in coffee shops: it shook me out of words.
It sometimes seemed, in fact, in those early days, as if all Japan were at once charging into the future with record-breaking speed, and moving as slowly as a glacier; both sedative and stimulant, a riddle of surface and depth.
And so, in time, the days in the temple began to find a rhythm of their own, and I to set my watch by the pattern of their calm. Every morning at 6 a.m., the sound of the tolling gong and the husky rumble of chanted sutras, broken by the silver tinkle of a bell. Then the patter of receding footsteps. Sweet incense seeping under the screen, making the space all holy. Then breakfast in first light, beside the garden, and random walks through lemon-scented mornings, rainbow banners fluttering above the wooden shops. At noon, the elder monk would take his dog, Kodo, for a walk and then, regal in black robes, clap his hands above the pond, summoning the carp to lunch. A little later, the temple was silent again, and the tidy pairs of slippers outside one room, and the squeak of a TV hostess, told me that the monks were eating.
At night, when the city was asleep, I took to slipping out of the place to make phone calls to my employers in Rockefeller Center (New York offices were open from midnight to 8 a.m. Kyoto time). And only then, as I stood in a squat green phone booth, plastered all over with trim stickers advertising topless girls — a novel kind of convenience shopping — did I see the other, shadow side of Japan begin to emerge: the derelicts with wild hair, the crazy-eyed vagrants and disheveled beggars, venturing out into the pedestrian arcades or huddled together under department store eaves, tidy in their way and self-contained, as if, in some part of themselves still good Japanese, they were determined not to intrude upon the world around them. Watching these denizens of the underworld — all but invisible except in the city center and late at night — I recalled that such a one, six centuries before, had gone on to found Daitokuji, the Temple of Great Virtue.
* * *
By day, though, the temple was mostly deserted: just me, the two monks, and their dog. Sometimes, on the wall above the toilet, another visitor appeared, a vile, pale-green lizard, with eyes like raisins on the top of his head. And one bright morning, after I had finished breakfast, I met the only other member of the household, a laborer who came each day to make the gardens perfect. As soon as I returned the gardener’s smile, he came on over and shook my hand in the glassy autumn sunshine. “Are you wealthy?” he began. A little taken aback, I did what I had been told to do in every meeting with a Japanese male: handed him my business card. This he scrutinized as if it were Linear B.
“My hobby is making money,” he went on, and then, before I could get him wrong, interjected, “Is joke!” I see, I thought, a joke. Then the conversation took a literary turn.
“Have you read Milton? And Shakespeare? How about Nietzsche, Kant?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Have you practiced English with many foreigners?”
“Oh no.” He waved his hands at me. “I very embarrassed. I cannot. Especially girls. I very, very shy.”
This, I thought, was familiar enough terrain. “So you like American girls?”
“At first.” He paused. “But gradually, no.”
“They are not shizukana,” I tried.
He nodded happily. “Not modest.”
“You must be working hard today.”
“Not so hard. One hour I talking monks. Now Grand Sumō tournament. Monks love Sumō very much; every day they watch. Three hour.” Yet another surprising arrow to their quiver!
The other unexpected feature of the temple was that it was ringed, in large part, by the gaudy purple blocks and curtained parking lots of love hotels. This was, of course, in a way, quite apt: monks and women had always been close in Japanese literature — had, in fact, been the main purveyors of classical Japanese literature — and Gion itself, the name of the “flower district” here, was also the name of a famous temple. Professional women had long been known as “Daruma” (after Bodhidharma, the first patriarch of Zen) because, like legless Daruma dolls, they tumbled as soon as they were touched, and then bounced back. And “dark willows, bright flowers” — a Zen metaphor for the Buddha nature — had long been a euphemism for the pleasure quarters, or so I had learned from a scroll I had seen in Santa Barbara, by the eighteenth-century Zen monk Gakkō, suggesting that Daruma could as easily be found in a brothel as in a temple. Even one of the most famous episodes in Bashō had found the wandering monk and a disciple in an inn, spending the night next to two concubines and their elderly consort. The next morning, the girls, on a pilgrimage to Ise, had expressed their wish to travel with the monks, and Bashō, regretfully, had demurred:
At the same inn
Play women too were sleeping,
Bush clover and the moon.
Nonetheless, it came as something of a shock to me, on the night of the harvest moon, to return to the temple to find two pairs of delicate white pumps resting neatly in the yard of motorbikes. I wondered whether the monks were entertaining, but I could hear no whispers in the dark, no rustling behind doors. Next morning, I stumbled off my mattress at the sound of dawn prayers, as usual, and wandered into the breakfast room, to find two young Japanese girls — perfectly composed, of course, and tidily dressed, even at this extremely godly hour — standing in the garden, while the elder monk fussed all about them. Then, with a gallantry I had not expected of him, he effected an introduction of sorts, led us to the low table, and presented us all with a full, five-course Japanese breakfast. A little awkwardly, we sat around the table, the two girls exchanging giggles and dainty jokes, then shy smiles and painful pleasantries. They asked me a question, and then giggled. I returned the favor, and there was more giggling. Their giggles came close to hysteria when they looked across the table to see the foreigner flapping around wildly with his chopsticks, and losing, by a technical knockout, to a piece of sushi. Then, just as fun was at its maddest, up roared the albino, astride his motorized tricycle and giving us all his Empress wave. With that, he zipped away. We were only just beginning to catch our breath after this unexpected command performance when suddenly he materialized again, pale legs pumping furiously as he pedaled through the delicate garden on a baby-blue tricycle, Donald Duck chuckling on its mudguard. The girls clapped their hands in delight and giggled some more, and the monk, flushed with his success, gave another majestic wave and pedaled off again.
The idea of living in a temple while stealing out after midnight to make contact with New York appealed to my sense of incongruity, and I felt open and uncluttered in my empty room. But I could tell that it would be an encumbrance to continue staying there, not least because my after-midnight telephone calls disturbed the monks’ early nights as surely as their dawn prayers disturbed my early mornings. Besides, the main purpose of monasticism, I thought, was to help one build a shrine within, so strong that time and place were immaterial. I decided, therefore, to find myself a basic, functional room and to keep the temple as my secret hideaway.
When I told the monks that I was leaving, there was a great commotion. The albino asked me, again and again, if I could not stay but a single night more, and the gardener, with whom I had grown accustomed to having daily chats, announced that I was the first foreigner he had ever met who was “reserved, polite, and
modest” (an encomium that his own politeness doubtless prompted him to deliver to every foreigner he met). The elderly monk invited me into his chamber for a final cup of tea, and only the lizard seemed unmoved.
3
ON ONE OF MY first days in Kyoto, a poet from Boulder, whom I met by chance in the Speakeasy “American-Style Coffee Shop,” urged me to go, that very evening, to a once-a-month happening called the Kyoto Connection. On my way there, in the bus, a frizzy-haired potter from Santa Cruz sat down next to me and told me that she was going there too. Five minutes later, we found ourselves in a quiet Londonish square, in front of a murky little dive with blackened windows on which was inscribed: “Studio Varié: Le Chat qui Fume.”
Inside was a small stage in front of a bar, and lots of smoky little tables at which were seated a ragtag group of Bohos: foreigners with shaven heads, foreigners in dreadlocks, shiny-faced Japanese men with ponytails, and bright-eyed Japanese girls. Two girls came in and joined us at our table — friends of Siobhan’s, I gathered — dressed in scarves, with kohl around their eyes and hennaed hair and bangles. One, with a ring in her nose, was just back from Tibet; the other, wearing a yin-yang necklace and maroon Nepali trousers, was settled now in Angola. The first talked about “the full moon on the terraces of Lhasa,” the other about “the powerful kind of energies in Luanda.” An emcee got on the stage, an Aussie with a thick black beard — a former Rajneeshee, I was told, from Tasmania — and announced that this was to be the “Peter Tosh Memorial Evening.” A Japanese “salaryman” in his middle years strolled in and sat down at our table, whispering to me urgently, “Please help me. I want to meet foreign girls.” And then the show began.
The first group was a quartet singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in Japanese, and soon they were followed by another Japanese group, a trio of young students with soft high voices and angel harmonies, singing, “It never rains in southern California,” and then, “I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,” and then, in words I could scarcely recognize, “Good morning, America, how are you? Say, don’t you know me, I’m your native son.…” Next up was a local bluegrass sextet delivering “Tennessee Homesick Blues,” and I began to wonder whether people here sang songs only if they had American place names in their titles.