The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  Later that night, Mark and I went to a yakitori house nearby for dinner. Just as I happened to look around, in the midst of our conversation, the young Japanese man next to me caught my eye. “Excuse me,” he began. “May I talk English with you?”

  “Of course,” I said, more than grateful to be back in my own tongue.

  “What country do you come from? How long are you in Japan? How do you find Japan?” Trying to find answers compatible with these phrasebook questions, I felt as if I were being worked on by a student doctor eager to practice his still-unformed skills.

  “I saw the American movie 2010,” he went on, though whether in a spirit of bonhomie or bewilderment I could not tell. “I could understand the computer — Hal. No problem. But I could not understand the human beings.”

  “Really?” I said, not sure how to take this.

  “But she” — he pointed to his glumly chic young consort — “she is student of English literature.”

  Ah, I thought, my years of study were not in vain.

  “What courses are you taking?” I began.

  “One course,” she said haltingly, and with some apparent pain. “It is in Henry James.” I registered surprise that they would be given the most byzantine of English stylists to begin with. “And,” she went on with a bulldozer determination, “in other course, we study nineteenth literature.”

  “Nineteenth century?”

  She nodded unhappily, her eyes never once leaving her bowl.

  “Dickens, for example?”

  “Not Dickens,” she said with some authority. “Dickens is twentieth. We do Swift.”

  Ah, I thought: the inscrutable Orient.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mark consolingly as we made our way home. “You’ll soon find ways of getting out of that. Everyone does, sooner or later.”

  Back in his house, while making some tea, Mark put on an old tape of Ry Cooder: lazy, sunlit songs about the border.

  “Nice album,” I remarked.

  “Yeah. It’s funny! This was the very same tape that Ray had with him while he was living in the monastery. Did I tell you about Ray? No? Well, anyway, Ray was this huge, king-size guy from Dallas, who came over to join the Peace Corps in the Philippines and somehow ended up as a Zen monk over in Daitokuji. And somehow, he had this deal worked out whereby he kept a motorbike outside the monastery walls, together with his cowboy boots and leather jacket. And every few weeks, he would steal out to visit his girlfriend. Or occasionally he’d come over to my house. And every time he came, whatever time it was, it was always party time, because this was the only chance he was going to get. Jeez, he was something! He just had this incredible energy, which living in the monastery only intensified. And the monks couldn’t come down on him so long as he made it back before morning prayers at four a.m.

  “Well, he had the stamina to keep this up — slipping in just before four a.m. every time he left — for months. But one day, on New Year’s Day, he left when he shouldn’t have, and the head monk, who had never much liked him in the first place, seized the opportunity to get back at him, and told him that he would have to go back to the beginning of the course — become a training monk again! After seven years in the place! So he put all his things in a wheelbarrow and rolled them out of the monastery gates. And he went off to his girlfriend’s house and spent a month with her. And of course, after seven years in the temple, he was totally defenseless — totally unprepared to live in a regular domestic situation — and she just sliced through him, completely ate him up.”

  He paused. “It’s funny; many of the so-called Zen masters in America have the same problems — with money or sex or alcohol. Anyway, Ray decided to go off to Berkeley to write. He’d been corresponding with Anaïs Nin from the temple, and she’d given him some really good contacts in the Bay Area. So he had a book of poems published — by a press in Santa Barbara, in fact — and he was going really strong until an old girlfriend from high school came over and dragged him back to Texas. So suddenly he ended up in this clean suburban town where everyone thought he talked funny and nobody could begin to understand what he’d been through. He got a few odd jobs and tried to write a novel. But pretty soon, his relationship fell apart, and he did too. The trouble was, poor guy, he just wasn’t ready for the world. The monastery had prepared him for everything except the world. Last thing I heard, he was a bouncer in a reggae bar.”

  5

  AS AUTUMN BEGAN to draw on in Kyoto — and the first touches of color to grace the eastern hills — Mark invited me one day to attend a special private initiation ceremony. A longtime friend of his, now a head priest at Tōfukuji, one of the Five Great Temples of Kyoto, was about to ascend to a new rank, the youngest Zen master in Japan to attain such a position. It was a closed ceremony, of course, but Mark had been invited, as a friend, and he thought that I might be interested too. Certainly, it sounded like a rare opportunity to see a little behind the enigmatic transparencies of Zen, if only to the next layer of its public face. So when the day arrived, I dusted off my best jacket and tie, put on a black motorcycle helmet, and, thoroughly incongruous, popped onto the back of Mark’s Honda. Whizzing through the crowded streets, we veered along a maze of narrow lanes and ended up at last outside the temple compound, all abustle in the brilliant morning.

  By the time we arrived, sober parishioners in their best suits were already heading under purple banners into the temple, along with monks who looked like giant bats, black robes billowing out around them. “That’s Soto-san,” Mark whispered as one such figure hurried past. “I knew him in California.” In the glorious sunshine, the thickly forested hills that rose above a plunging gorge were glowing almost, and the maples, through which the sunlight streamed, were just beginning to turn. In the shadeless gravel courtyards of the temple, monks were scattering this way and that, some of them in special orange-and-black raiment, some waving tidy scarlet flags. Inside one of the temple’s Buddhas, I once read, the beautiful poetess Ono no Komachi had secretly stashed her love letters.

  Slipping off our shoes at the entrance to the monastery, we followed a shaven-headed monk (from California) into an antechamber and there were offered tea. This, I gathered, was the gaijin’s corner: it included a middle-aged American student of Zen with his teenage Filipina bride; another eager-eyed American; and a New York woman with granny glasses who handled words as if they were thorny roses. Beside her, and next to me, sat a seamlessly elegant Japanese lady in a flowing dress, who apparently found it incumbent on her to make conversation with me. Where did I come from? she began hesitantly. How long had I been here? What was I doing in Japan?

  At that moment, bells began tolling, and we were led off again, in our little group, around a rock garden and over the famous hanging causeway and along a wide stone pathway to the great zendō, a celebrated National Treasure usually closed to the public. There, under a dragon-writhing roof, the ceremony commenced. Drums sounded sonorously as the monks walked in, one by one, in purple and orange robes, with orange sashes and pointed Chinese shoes. A screeching came from within, and the rōshi himself appeared, followed by a long, muttered wailing that sounded like a coyote’s howl. A monk waved a bamboo whisk above us all, extending a skinny, but commanding, hand in each of the main directions. The solemnity was broken, in our corner, as the Filipina, giggling brightly, asked if we knew where the rest room was. Four men blew on bamboo flutes, piercing, mellifluous, and sad.

  Outside once again in the radiant morning, men in dark suits, women in kimono, stood on the Tsūten Bridge, bowing with the ceremonious elegance of characters from The Makioka Sisters, One woman glittered like a brooch in a blue-and-golden sari and metallic blue fingernails, her temple dancer’s features sharp under kohl-ringed eyes. Old men in grave suits sat on Coca-Cola benches, reclining in the autumn sun like ageless school friends of the Emperor.

  When we returned to our places in the monastery, we found beside every seat an elegant purple carrier bag with golden lettering, loaded h
igh with gifts; in front of each setting, two wooden boxes on a tray, stuffed with every kind of delicacy; and — since there was no way that anyone could begin to eat all this — another elegant bag, and a stylish lavender cloth, or furoshiki, in which to pack the boxes and take them home.

  Again I found myself next to the decorous Japanese woman. Again the obligatory questions began. Who was my favorite musician? What was my age? How did I like Kyoto? Apparently, my answers were the right ones — she, too, was thirty and liked Bruce Springsteen and felt that Kyoto was “little magic town” — and so, as we munched our inexplicable food, she ventured a little further. “Sunday, my daughter little have birthday party. Please come here my house.” Sure, I replied, game for anything, and she wrote down meticulously the name of a train station and then her telephone number. “Please you come. Maybe two o’clock, begin.” “Thank you very much,” I said, and then, with a mother’s brisk efficiency, she whipped out my furoshiki, packed my food away into my boxes, wrapped the boxes in the lavender cloth, and handed it all back to me as if it were her gift.

  Later, back home, I peeled back layer after layer of the elegant cloth. Simply opening the temple’s treasure was an almost sensual experience. Caskets of Japanese cake sat inside, and bottles of expensive sake; a poem in flowing calligraphic script, written by the rōshi himself, and a screen on which to mount it; and, of course, the purple cloth, touched now with the lady’s perfume.

  Five days later, I was spending all morning writing on Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, my mind on the follies of credulity, when suddenly I remembered the woman’s birthday party. It had been a fairly casual invitation, I thought, with no meaning attached to it, but I felt that courtesy alone suggested I attend. “You never know what to expect with these things,” Mark had advised me, but I felt pretty sure that children’s birthday parties must be something of a universal: fifteen or twenty kids careening around, amidst a mess of many-colored balloons and party hats, alternately laughing and screaming, while mothers stood by the kitchen, enforcing order and swapping gossip. So I packed the bear that I had bought as a ceremonial offering, and timed my arrival to be a safe forty-five minutes late. That way, I thought, I could slip into the background and easily make my escape.

  When I arrived at the station written down by the mother, I walked out into the street and found myself inside a honeycomb of unmarked alleyways. Streets forked this way and that on every side of the diverging railway tracks. Narrow lanes led off into the distance. Signs were nonexistent. I looked for the nearest phone.

  “Moshi-moshi,” came an excited voice at the other end, up to its neck, I assumed, in children and chaos.

  “Moshi-moshi. This is Pico Iyer.” There was a silence. “The man you met in Tōfukuji Temple?”

  “Ah, hallo. How are you? What place you now?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m just outside the station.”

  “What name street?”

  “I don’t know. I came down the stairs, and I’m standing outside a coffee shop called U.C.C.”

  “U.C.C.?” she repeated, incredulous.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s the name of the coffee they’re advertising. Anyway, I’m near the stairs.”

  “Stairs?” She giggled nervously. There was a long silence. “You come here my house?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought it was your daughter’s birthday party.”

  “I think maybe you no come. Now three o’clock.”

  “Oh, I’m very sorry.”

  “Please you wait station. I come.”

  Two minutes later, a small and pretty figure bounced up to me, long hair tumbling over her shoulders, a bright turquoise scarf over her black shirt, and leg warmers covering her acid-washed jeans. I was not quite sure who this was, but I assumed it must be the funky teenage sister of the woman I had met at the temple, maybe ten years younger than that elegant matron with the severely swept-back hair and the long brown dress. As she flashed me a dazzling smile, though, I recognized the look, and the soft, melodious voice — and realized that this was the same woman, remade now in a different role. She led me down the station stairs and, breathless, filled me in on the plans.

  “Other person little telephone my house. They little late. Maybe five o’clock.”

  “Oh fine. Well, if it’s easier, I can come back then?”

  She looked at me, confused. “You no want come my house?”

  “Either’s fine really. Whatever’s easiest.”

  “You not want come ima now my house?”

  “Sure — if it’s no trouble.”

  “Maybe other person come five o’clock. Maybe six. Are you okay?”

  “Oh yes. No problem.”

  She led me through a sliding door, and I found myself inside a compact modern flat. The main room was utterly silent. It had the look and feel of a teenage girl’s bedroom. On the walls were two posters of the teen-idol pop group a-ha (a latter-day Osmond family from Norway, so far as I could tell) and one of Sting, in all his open-shirted glory. Album covers of Sting hung from the doors, and more beefcake posters of a sultry-eyed a-ha. From the ceiling, an upside-down sea otter chuckled down at me, and all along the gleaming bank of high-tech stereo and video equipment that were the room’s main decoration were stickers from Tokyo Disneyland. The teenage artifacts sang out strangely in the quiet of the room on this sleepy afternoon.

  “Please you sit,” offered Sachiko-san, motioning me towards her small paisley sofa. “You like Sting?”

  I felt I could hardly admit that I found him one of the more disagreeable creatures on the planet. “Oh yes.” With that, she gave me a pretty smile of delight, pressed a few buttons on the stack of gleaming black consoles, and disappeared. I sat alone in the silent, empty room and listened to the maestro sing dirges about Quentin Crisp and Pinochet.

  A few minutes later, Sachiko-san reappeared, bearing two cups of Twining’s tea on a tray (I recalled that I had mentioned, en passant, at the temple that I preferred English tea to Japanese). She sat down beside me and smiled shyly.

  “You seem to like the West,” I began.

  She nodded gravely. “My brother go Kansas City study. Three year. My mother very sad, many time say, ‘Don’t go!’ But then he send picture from your country, always biggg smile! America, he say, little animal country. He think he living movie world — little Disneyland cartoon. But he much much want return.”

  “So he’s here now?”

  “Now Switzerland. Jung Institute. You know this place?”

  “Oh yes. Have you visited him there?”

  “I like.” She paused. “But now I am mother part. Japanese system, man visit other country, very easy. But woman must always stay Japan.” A long pause. “Very sad.”

  A difficult silence fell. Then she brightened up. “But my son now little learning English. He want go Switzerland. He much love Matterhorn. T.G.V.”

  “Really?”

  At that moment, the record finished, so she popped up and stepped over to the tower of video monitors, laser videos, and speaker systems. “You like Chris Lay?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know him.”

  Her brow creased up in confusion. “You not know Chris Lay?”

  “No.”

  “Please you try.”

  At this, she put on another record, a very, very slow love song, delivered by a husky, infinitely gentle male voice, about a lovers’ parting. We listened in silence to the slow, heartfelt ballad, with its drawn-out, wrenching climax: “I’ll always love you … September Blue.”

  There was silence.

  “Very nice song,” I said brightly, hoping to lighten things up.

  “You like? Please one more time.” She bounced up again, pressed a button, and again, in silence, in the empty room, we sat side by side on her couch, listening to the husky, heartrending strains of the teary love song.

  When it was finished, Sachiko-san jumped up again. “I write word,” she announced proudly, and then pulled down from the wall a computer p
rintout on which was typed, “ ‘September Blue’ by Chris Rea,” and all the words in English.

  I’ll be all right, though I may cry,

  The tears that flow, they always dry,

  It’s just that I would rather be,

  With you now.…

  And every time I see that star,

  I will say a prayer for you,

  Now and forever,

  September Blue.

  “You have a computer too?”

  “My husband buy.”

  “Is he here?” I looked around. Now it was my turn to be confused.

  “Not here. He cannot holiday. Every day, much much work.”

  “Sunday too?”

  “Sunday too. Every day, he come home twelve o’clock.”

  A long silence.

  “Your country same?”

  “No, not really.”

  At this point, two small heads suddenly peered around the screen door: one belonging to a boy of about seven and the other to a five-year-old moppet. “Ah, please,” said Sachiko-san, smiling happily. “Please you see. This my son, Hiroshi. This Yuki.”

  They stood in silent shyness at the door.

  “And today’s her birthday?”

  “No. Today no birthday. Two day before.”

  “I see,” I said, though of course I didn’t.