The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  Both children stared at me in neat decorum, at once intrigued and, I assumed, faintly unsettled by this funny-looking foreigner. Then their mother invited them to sit down, and the four of us sat in silence in the small room, presided over by rock stars, and listened again to the slow and emotional ballad, with its air of tender intimacy. “I’ll always love you … September Blue.”

  The song was just starting up again when Sachiko-san vanished into the kitchen. I looked at the children. The children looked at me. Chris Rea murmured his love. Then Sachiko-san emerged again, bearing a beautiful cake, with fresh strawberries and melon slices — the ultimate Japanese luxury — pieced around the message O-tanjōbi Omedetō (Happy Birthday). Lighting the five candles, she went over to the system, turned off “September Blue,” and turned off all the lights. Then, flashing a smile of encouragement at me, by the light of five flickering candles, she began singing, in quavering, high-pitched English, “Happy birthday to you …” I joined in, and her son did too, three wobbly voices in a plaintive refrain in a room lit by candles. When we finished, the birthday girl blew out all the candles, and we were left again in the dark. I felt Sachiko-san stirring beside me, and then the lights came on again, and she brought us all orange juice to enjoy with our cake, and Chris Rea began to sing of love once more.

  I liked Sachiko-san very much — she seemed unusually warm and openhearted, as well as demure and chic in the approved Japanese fashion — and her sleek-haired, almond-eyed, utterly quiet children were entirely irresistible. My sense that mothers and children were the two great blessings of Japan was only getting confirmation. But still, I thought, this was a rather sad and awkward way to celebrate a fifth birthday, and I could not help shuffling a little in embarrassment as we sat there in a silence broken only by the song and my occasional mutterings of “Yuki-chan, O-tanjōbi omedetō!”

  Then, suddenly, I remembered the bear that I had brought for Yuki and withdrew it from my bag. And Yuki, in delight, bundled off and brought back a rabbit, a koala, a fluffy bear called Pooh, and even an orange raccoon. Delighted in turn, I inquired after their particulars and then, pointing to the Tokyo Disneyland stickers on the front of the stereo system, mentioned how much I enjoyed the place, and the children scurried off to show me their photos of their visit. Paging through the album, I pointed to photos of Yuki and asked if she was Mickey, pointed to Mickey and asked if that was Goofy, pointed to her mother and asked if it was her father, and the next thing I knew, the little girl’s sides were shaking with laughter, and she was beginning to tickle me, and I was retaliating with the aid of a bear, and Hiroshi was making a counterattack with a rabbit, and all of us were making mayhem.

  A few moments later, the children were pulling me out, one by each arm, into the street to play ball, and we were bouncing a tennis ball back and forth while Sachiko-san kept throwing her long hair back and saying, “Oh, I’m sorry. Children very happy. I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” And then Hiroshi decided that I must see his school, and all of us marched off to the shrine of the Meiji Emperor nearby, and then to the shrine of General Nogi, to play hide-and-seek, and soon the children were racing off to bring me sprigs of flowers, and Hiroshi was feeling bold enough to tell me the name of his best friend, which I ritually mispronounced, and his mother was smiling anxiously, and clicking away with her camera, and saying, “You tired? I’m very sorry. I’m so sorry,” and Yuki was clinging to my hand, and we were all running races up and down the darkening lanes.

  By the time night had fallen, all four of us were back home, and Yuki was clambering all over me, giggling helplessly as I pointed to pictures in her new Richard Scarry book, of hippos in aprons and rabbits playing golf. “Tanuki wa doko deshō ka?” (Where is the raccoon?), I kept asking. “Kono dōbutsu wa tanuki deshō ka?” (This animal here, is it a raccoon?) As one whose Japanese was strongest when it came to animal words, I realized that this was a conversational opportunity not to be missed. And Hiroshi was driving his trains all over my stomach, and Yuki was bouncing her flattened orange raccoon up and down on my chest, and Sachiko-san, as if in proof of Ruth Benedict’s claims about the blurring of apology and gratitude in Japan, was saying, “Thank you. Sorry. Thank you. I’m so sorry.”

  And then I threw still more oil on the fire by teaching all three of them the English word “raccoon” and telling them how much I had always been taken by the tanuki, the mischievous masked figure, half badger and half raccoon, who stood outside most sake bars, advertising in his potbelly the Dionysian pleasures of the open road. All the while, Sachiko-san kept asking me, doubtfully, “You like raccoon? Really? True you like raccoon?” and I kept saying, “Hai, hai!” until she told me that the Japanese, as a rule, were not very fond of him: the raccoon was the rival to the fox, the other malefic trickster said to disguise itself as a beautiful woman to bring down innocent priests. Undeterred, I recounted how the Germans called them Waschbär and explained how they were famous in California for making raids on carp ponds.

  And that night, when I got home, I was so caught up in the spirit of the day that I sat down on my futon, imagining Yuki by my side, and wrote out a story for the children about a princess trapped in a castle by a jealous father, and the two raccoons, gallant, resourceful, and speaking in couplets, who spirit her away to a new life of freedom.

  6

  AS I BEGAN to settle down in my new home, I began, very slowly, to make my way, in translation, through some of the great works of Japanese literature. And as I did so, I was struck again and again by how much Japanese writing was touched with a decidedly feminine lilt and fragrance, a kind of delicacy and a lyricism that I associated, however unfairly, with the female principle. This softness was apparent not just in the watercolor wistfulness of Japanese poems, but also in the very themes and moods that enveloped them — loneliness, abandonment, romance. This was, perhaps, as much a reflection of my own tastes as of anything, and in men like Mishima, or the modern-minded Abe and Ōe, there were, of course, some towering exceptions. Yet still it seemed to me that much of Japanese writing, right down to such near contemporaries as Tanizaki and Kawabata, was devoted to the private world, a Jane Austen stage of domestic passions. The world of state, the striving of the office and the marketplace, the realm of public affairs — all these were scarcely glimpsed amidst the quiet, unworldly dramas of the soul. Even gangsters, at their deaths, wrote poems to the seasons.

  Historically, of course, there were good reasons for this. For one thing, the Japanese syllabary, though invented by a Buddhist priest, had originally been used almost exclusively by women — to such an extent that it had become known as “woman’s hand”; and while men had been confined to the public, official script of Chinese, women had all but invented Japanese poetry. As a result, perhaps, early Japanese poetry was all love poetry (where its model in China dealt more often with friendship). And by the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the great cultural flowering of the Heian period, the Japanese alphabet was so much a woman’s domain that men actually pretended to be women if they wanted to use the native script, and even fit themselves into the conventions and emotions of women.

  By and by I’ll come

  he said and so I waited

  patiently but I

  saw only the moon of the longest month

  in the dawn sky.

  That plaintive love poem was written by a Buddhist priest.

  Many of these verses, clearly, were as ritualized as thank-you notes, especially in a culture where writing poems was as de rigueur as dancing might be in other courts; clearly, too, in a society whose public life was close to formal pageant, it was only in private, behind closed doors, that people began to seem interesting to themselves. Yet whatever the reasons — or the qualifications — poetry and femininity seemed almost interchangeable in Japan, as they would never be in the literature of Chaucer, Milton, and Johnson, say; and every modern scholar seemed to agree with Kenneth Rexroth in saying that the Heian period was “certainly the greatest peri
od of women’s writing in the history of any literature.”

  Certainly, too, as I began reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, one of the two great testaments of the Heian court, I felt that much of its charm, as with Lady Murasaki’s Genji, lay in its girlishness, its womanly refinement, its sensitivity to nature, and to the lights and shades of relationships. Here was the poetry of the paper screen — of delicate walls and sliding panels, of shadows and suspicions, of secrecy and stealth.

  Yet all this was also of a piece with Sei’s extreme fastidiousness about the observation of ritual courtesies, a kind of hypersensitivity that amounted, in the end, to snobbery. Obsessed with impressions and reputations, with what was and was not “cricket,” Sei revealed herself as something of a stickler for protocol, even when it came to matters of the heart. Everything to do with the common folk she found contemptible; everything to do with the Emperor or Empress — even their bad moods — she found a source of great delight. And in her habit of anatomizing emotions and cataloguing poetic sights as if even the motions of the heart were finite, she betrayed something of the stylized reflexiveness of a society in which not only gestures but feelings themselves were prescribed; one of the “Rare Things” she exalted was “a person who was in no way eccentric or imperfect,” and one of the “Embarrassing Things” was “to hear one’s servants making merry.” One could almost hear the lady-in-waiting at Buckingham Palace saying, “But really, my dear. It’s simply not done.”

  Thus Sei’s delicacy in responding to Nature turned into a kind of pedantry when she dealt with human nature; she read people as if they were gardens and as if both should be raked into the same kind of impersonal perfection. And in her fussiness regarding the proper associations of blossoms, the emotional effects of the moon, and the etiquette of the morning-after letter, one could see how love of beauty in such a world might often mean no more than the beautiful gowns worn by aristocrats in Florence or Versailles. The elegance we ascribed to Japanese souls belonged sometimes only to their tastes; Sei, in a sense, had designer views.

  I was more taken aback, though, to find this same preoccupation with niceties, and with the right way of doing things, in the other great classic of the zuihitsu, or “follow the brush,” form of collected sayings, the Essays of Idleness of the fourteenth-century monk Kenkō. The title, with its distinctly Thoreauvian air, promised typically serene meditations on silence, solitude, and impermanence, and all these it did indeed provide; the monk did much to enunciate the aesthetic of Japanese Romanticism, explaining why it was better to dream of the moon than actually to see it, and how longing was better than love. Yet in between were reflections on women (“devious but stupid”), interviews with backgammon champions (“You should never play to win, but so as not to lose”), lists of “Things Which Seem in Poor Taste” (“A man should avoid displaying deep familiarity with any subject”), and descriptions of “seven kinds of persons [who] make bad friends.” The monk wrote about his frissons of pleasure when passing an unknown woman on a night of moon viewing, and the protocol of making love; how “lamplight makes a beautiful face seem even more beautiful,” and “beautiful hair, of all things in a woman, is most likely to catch a man’s eye.” Most unexpected of all, at least to me, were the priest’s anxious obsessiveness with appearances (“A man should be trained in such a way that no woman will ever laugh at him”), and his strongly worded snipes about lower-class men and other “insufferable” or “disagreeable” types (“It is unattractive when people get in a society which is not their habitual one”). If the lady-in-waiting occasionally wrote with the exalted purity of a monk, the monk often wrote with the sharp-tongued worldliness of a lady-in-waiting.

  At times, in fact, it became hard to tell the two of them apart. Sei wrote that one of the “Unutterable Things” was “snow on the houses of the common people. This is especially regrettable when the moonlight shines down on it.” Kenkō echoed her almost to a fault. “Even moonlight when it shines into the quiet domicile of a person of taste is more affecting than elsewhere.” Sei flaunted her irreverence by mischievously declaring, “A preacher should be good-looking … an ugly preacher may well be the source of sin”; the monk returned the favor by writing, “A man may excel at everything else, but if he has no taste for lovemaking, one feels something terribly inadequate about him.” Both of them, weighing fashion against tradition, seemed — even more than their counterparts elsewhere — to be writing almost impersonally. And yet the effect was ravishing. That, in fact, was the confounding paradox of this land of pragmatic romantics: If you find something beautiful, it seemed to say, why not simply reproduce it and reproduce it ad infinitum (even if it was a woman or a poem or a gesture)? If you’ve found something pleasing, why ever deviate from the norm? And what answer could one provide when the finished product shone with such an enameled perfection?

  It did not take me long, in the autumn afternoons, to find that whenever I tried to find any particular place in Kyoto — to locate, that is, a specific site on a map — I ended up wandering around in circles, through riddles of dead-end lanes, thoroughly defeated by the maze of Japanese planning. There was, I thought, a metaphor in this: one could not plan epiphanies any more than one could plan surprise visits from one’s friends. Expectations would only defeat themselves. So as the days went on, I tried to keep as open as I could, waiting to see what kind of things found me.

  One day, I was just walking home down the narrow lane, when suddenly I was hailed by a strapping, red-faced fellow with a mat of straw-blond hair. “Excuse me, mate, d’you live near here?” He pointed to an ad for my guesthouse. “Yes, I do.” “Would you mind if I tagged along and took a bit of a look at it?” “Not at all.” Bob, I quickly discovered, was a former professional Aussie-rules football player and sometime engineer who had recently moved here from Surfers Paradise. I would not have believed that such a place existed, with so immodest a name, except that the previous day I had met a man in my very own house who also came from “Surfers” (the Santa Barbara of Australia, so it would seem). Bob was something of a larrikin — he still walked eight hours a day, he said, to keep himself in shape — and as he eagerly accepted my offer of a cup of tea, I began to see that he was more in need of company than a room. But still he struck me as a friendly fellow, in the Aussie way, and he seemed to have a genuine wish to do well. “Thing with the Japanese is,” he declared, “they’re a clever group of bastards. Found out how to be hard the nice way. I’ve been living in the youth hostel over in Osaka” — he made it sound like an Irish pub — “two months now. Way I see it, you get here for a year, learn a bit of the culture, give yourself a chance to crack the language. Jesus, I’m learning more English than my students — grammar, y’know, and all that bullshit! Way I see it, you’ve got to know something if you know nothing.” (The Zen of Surfers Paradise, so it would seem.) “Not like a chapter from a book, but in a real sense. Mind’s a tough bastard to control.

  “I’m also interested in Asian girls,” he went on disarmingly, “as a possible partner for life. Went over to the Philippines a couple of times, for a month or so, looked it over. Nice girls, if you know what I mean. But psychologically — naw! I mean, you want to have a chat now and then, if you know what I mean. A lot of my friends over in Queensland, they have these Filipina brides. But they’re just simpleminded guys; as long as they’ve got someone to take care of them and have sex with a lot, they’re as happy as pigs in shit, if you’ll pardon my French.

  “See, the way I look at it” — Bob apparently did a lot of looking — “you’ve got up here” (he put his hand parallel to his head) “all these incredibly obnoxious, dominating, demanding American and Australian women — you might think this is sour grapes, but it’s not; it’s just a statement of fact — and you’ve got down here” (he put his hand at heart — or was it breast? — level), “down here, you’ve got all these really feminine Asian girls, and sexual too; I mean sex not just for sex but for other things too. Way I figure it,
it’s easier to bring these girls up than the other ones down, the ones who are busy saying, ‘You guys have had it good for a thousand years, now it’s our turn to take over.’ So you raise the girl, and you’re raised yourself.”

  I wasn’t entirely persuaded by his logic, but I kept my ideas to myself, and Bob brought his Sunday sermon to a rousing climax. “Nice to talk to you, mate,” he said, extending his hand, and headed off for more of his eight hours walking.

  * * *

  The East, of course, had always been filled with Bobs, with Western men seeking Asian wives, as well as Asian wisdom, and not always troubling to distinguish between the two. Romance and religion had long constituted the double lure of the Orient, and in recent years, the confusion of the two had grown even more intense as the presence of U.S. troops on the continent — in Japan, then Korea, then Vietnam and the Philippines — had turned every war zone into a kind of erogenous zone, leaving more and more Westerners smitten with Buddhism, and with the other graceful attractions of the East.

  In Kyoto, however, the division was especially vexed. Here, after all, was a city built on an imperial grid, yet curlicued with scented gardens and pretty floral canals. Here was a city still inscribed with the bloody feuds conducted in its hooded temples and dark castles, yet a city that was now a repository of all the country’s female arts. Kyoto today was the center of kimono and flower arrangement and geisha; of lacquerwork, paper umbrellas, and fans. Even the Kyoto dialect was famously a girls’ tongue, best suited to a high, melodious delivery, in which arigatō became ōkini, and wakaranai, wakarahen. “Every city has its sex,” Kazantzakis had pronounced unequivocally. “This one [Kyoto] is all female.”

  Thus the “City of Purple Hills and Crystal Streams” had always been defined, for the foreign world at least, by the monks who lived in the hills and the women who dwelt along the streams. The two great mountains surrounding the city were known as the “Mount of Wisdom” and the “Mountain of the Cave of Love.” The mountains themselves were supposed to carry the male energy of yang; the rivers, yin. Yet the division had never been as clear as its designers would have liked. For temples had famously been used as trysting places, and Buddhist storytellers had sometimes doubled as prostitutes. Paintings had shown Daruma dressed in courtesan’s clothes, and vice versa. Even today the classic postcards of the city showed fledgling geisha standing, coquettish, outside temples. And for foreigners, who came to Japan in search of “a good life” and “the good life” and were not always able — especially in a country whose language has no articles — to tell one from the other, the dialectic was especially bewildering. I was probably typical, having long been drawn to the aesthetic and the religious elements in Japan, and wishfully hoping that the two were one and the same (the Japanese made a religion of pure beauty). Even the latest of the Western poets to settle in Kyoto, Brad Leithauser, had taken as the epigraph for his novel about the city Shakespeare’s sonnet 144, the classic statement of the conflict between two loves, one heavenly and the other of the earth.