The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  9

  ONE SUNNY MORNING, I was huddled over some proofs in my room when suddenly a call came for me. It was Sachiko-san again — now, she said, on her way to the zoo, together with her children and Sandy, the American woman with granny glasses I had met at the temple ceremony, and her children too. Would I like to join them? This, I thought, was too good an opportunity to be missed (to show off eleven of the twelve words I knew in Japanese), so I readily accepted, and an hour later, when I approached the giant torii gate that bestraddles one of Kyoto’s central streets — making it fit for ceremonial processions — I found all six of them in picnic mood. Inside the zoo, we duly inspected the raccoons, the tiger, and the California seals, and I felt more than ever like the only adult male of the human species inside this shop-window collection of stylish young mothers and glossy-haired silent children. I half expected a sign to be hung around my neck identifying the rare, and undomesticated, Homo subcontinentus.

  When it came time for Sandy and her children to go home, I half expected that Sachiko-san would go with them. But no, she said, her children had asked whether they might possibly come and see my room — their first chance, I assumed, to visit that close cousin of the zoo, the gaijin guesthouse. So together we ambled through the sunstruck streets, the children teetering on walls and scuffling after acorns, while Sachiko-san’s apologies tumbled out unstoppably.

  When finally we arrived at my house, the children apparently found all the excitement they had anticipated. “Okā-san, okā-san, mite!” cried Hiroshi, pointing in horrified astonishment at the American-sized shoes lined up at the foot of the stairs. “Mother, mother, look at the shoes!” The footsteps of the yeti would, I thought, have been no more remarkable to him. His mother, for her part, showed just how much of a mother she was — and how Japanese — by bending down to tidy up the shoes that the foreigners had left so higgledy-piggledy, arranging them all in a neat, color-coordinated row. Upstairs, when I opened the door to my room, the children’s eyes grew even wider as they took in the pile of proofs scattered messily across my desk (convincing Sachiko-san, no doubt, that my job was not that of a raccoon story writer but a proofreader).

  “You like story?” she asked me, taming her children with one hand as she spoke.

  “Oh yes,” I said, “very much.”

  And so, as her children careened around the room, she began telling me an elaborate old Japanese folktale — the oldest surviving story in the land — about a princess, Kaguya-hime, who had come to live with an old bamboo-cutter and his wife but then at last had been obliged to leave them and return to her home, in the Palace of the Moon. When Sachiko-san finished the story, I was startled to see, her eyes were bright with tears.

  There was a long and awkward pause.

  “Maybe we little go home?” she said. Taking the hint, I offered to walk them back to the station, and as the four of us wandered through the crowded streets in the dusk, I suddenly remembered to remind the children of the new word I had taught them just a week before. At that, the day broke open like a smashed window, and the children, thrilled with their new discovery, began reeling through the crooked lanes, crying, “Raccoon car! Raccoon bus! Raccoon shop!” while I, spurring them on shamelessly, shouted, “Raccoon coffee shop! Raccoon cinema! Raccoon plane!” and all the while Sachiko-san serenely continued recounting ancient Japanese folktales that left her again and again in tears.

  The Japanese were famous, I knew, for their delight in lacrimae rerum and for finding beauty mostly in sadness; indeed, it was often noted that their word for “love” and their word for “grief” are homonyms — and almost synonyms too — in a culture that seems to love grief, of the wistful kind, and to grieve for love. So I was hardly surprised to learn that most of their stories were sad and that all of them ended in parting. Parting was the definition of sweet sorrow here. Yet still I was taken aback by this curious flash of intimacy: Sachiko-san sinking deep into her sadness, while her children pranced gaily through the gathering dark, shouting out their new mantra with the zeal of proselytes. “Raccoon train! Raccoon street! Raccoon temple!”

  Making plans with Sachiko-san was always, I had found, an uncertain business, not least because whenever she called me, both of us would engage in a polite, but ruthless, tug-of-war as to which should be the medium of confusion. Both of us were determined to speak the language we didn’t know (she to practice her English and I to try out my Japanese), and so, very often, we ended up communicating in a kind of jangled bilingual hybrid in which nothing was lost except meaning.

  Whenever we tried to fix meetings, therefore — she confusing “Tuesday” and “Thursday,” I mixing up ka-yōbi (Tuesday) with kinyō-bi (Friday), she routinely transposing “yesterday” and “tomorrow” — the result was madness. “Where would you like to meet?” I would ask her, in Japanese, and she would reply, in English, “You want to come here my house?” in a tone that suggested more apprehension than delight. She would say she was free at two, and I would arrive, for a brief encounter, only to learn that she was free for two hours. I would say that I was leaving for three days, and she would assume I was leaving on the third. That first day, when she had casually invited me to drop in on her daughter’s birthday party at around two and I had casually dropped in at two forty-five, only to find that there was no party at all and I was forty-five minutes late, increasingly seemed an augury of all that was to come.

  Once we met, of course, the craziness would only accelerate. For one thing, Sachiko-san was as unabashed and unruly in her embrace of English as most of her compatriots were reticent and shy. Where they would typically refuse to utter a single sentence unless they could deliver it perfectly, she was happy to plunge ahead without a second thought for grammar, scattering meanings and ambiguities as she went. Plurals were made singular, articles were dropped, verbs were rarely inflected, and word order was exploded — often, in fact, she seemed effectively to be making Japanese sentences with a few English words thrown in. Often, moreover, to vex the misunderstandings further, she spoke both languages at once, as if reading simultaneously from both columns of a phrasebook: “Demo but where are you ima now?” she sometimes asked, hardly stopping to bother about the fact that demo means “but” and ima, “now.” Other times, she suddenly came up with an affirmative “Sí!” suggesting that somehow or other she had got hold of a French or Spanish phrasebook instead of an English one. Often, too, I could see in her sentences the scorch marks of an all-too-hasty trip through the dictionary: “Is America very high?” she asked me (since takai in Japanese means both “expensive” and “high”), or, to more alarming effect, “The bullet train is always very early” (since hayai in Japanese means “early” as well as “fast”). Sometimes, when she said something like “I have this happy feeling touch,” I could tell that she had whizzed through a list of synonyms fatally unseparated (in her mind at least) by a comma.

  I, of course, was hardly better, turning Japanese nouns into adjectives, using feminine forms for myself, and sometimes just deploying English words, with random vowels hopefully stuck in at the end, foolishly confident in the belief that Japan had incorporated an enormous number of English terms (Hamu to tōsto, kudasai!). Having picked up most of my Japanese from a businessmen’s handbook and bilingual editions of poetry — a fitting combination, I had thought at the time — I was able to deliver nothing but sentences like “Please give your secretary the autumn moon.”

  To complicate matters even further, Sachiko-san, in the classic Japanese manner, contrived to make everything as ambiguous, as circumspect, as consensual as possible — even in English. If ever she wanted to use the English word for itsumo, which I had been taught meant “always,” she always said, “usually,” so as to soften the assertion and allow for the exception that might one day prove the rule (leading to such statements as “Usually, the first day of the year is January one”). And where we would say yes, she always said tabun, or “maybe.” When once she told me that Yuki was sick, I replie
d, with empty assurance, “I’m sure she’ll be better soon.” “Tabun,” she replied. “Maybe.” “No, really,” I insisted, “I’m sure there’s no problem.” “Maybe,” she replied, all caution. The effect was one of instant melancholy, though really she must have been as sure as I that all would be okay. And of course, every adjective that was less than entirely positive — and much else besides — was qualified with a chotto, meaning “little,” so that Frankenstein became “a little strange,” and traveling to the moon “a little difficult.”

  Much of this, clearly, was as much an act of courtesy as of caution, and not so different, really, from the reflexive softenings in which I too had once been trained in England. Always prefer a rhetorical question to a bald assertion (“Might it not be easier perhaps to try this road?”). Never disagree outright (“I’m not absolutely sure that’s true”), and sometimes soften the dissent further, with — what else? — a rhetorical question (“It’s so hard to know for certain, don’t you find?”). If absolutely forced to say no, say anything other than “no,” diluting every term in the sentence (“I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid it might be just a little difficult”). None of these were lies, as such, only stratagems for easing the social machinery.

  Thus the intricacies of Japanese protocol were compounded by those of my own English training, and both were made nonsensical by the relentless exchange of gibberish. Whenever I said anything that made her happy, she assumed I was being polite, and whenever she replied, I assumed this was mere Japanese indirectness. So I would say, “Do you want to have some coffee?” and she would answer, “Okay. Do you want some coffee?” and I would have to say, lie, kekkō desu (“No, thank you, I’m fine as I am”), and both of us would end up exactly where we had started.

  “Should we meet on Tuesday?” I asked her. Sachiko-san gave me a smile. “No problem! Yesterday, Thursday, okay!”

  Nonetheless, we did occasionally manage to meet, at almost the same time and place, and one day I found myself sitting with her in a shrine, on a bare wooden step, the light coming through the ginkgo trees as we waited for Yuki’s English lesson to conclude. Carried away with excitement for my latest enthusiasm, I asked her if she preferred Mishima or Tanizaki.

  “All Japanese writer, I like,” she replied. “But my favorite is little foreigner man. His name Hess-e.”

  “Hermann Hesse?”

  She nodded solemnly. “I much like this man. Siddoharuta. Narushisu and Gōrudoman. And Petā Kamejindo. When I little high school size, I all reading.”

  “But that’s incredible,” I said, pulling out of my bag the book I was reading at the moment, in this city of artists and anchorites, Narziss and Goldmund.

  She, too, looked taken aback. “You read this book?”

  “Yes! It was my favorite when I was a boy.”

  “Maybe you your country reading, I, too, same time!”

  “Yes. And did you know that Hesse was a close friend of Jung, whom your brother is studying? And that he lived in Switzerland, where your brother lives? When I was in high school, this book was the only common link between my boarding school in England and California, where I went home in the holidays!”

  She shook her head in amazement. “Also, I like Emily Brontë. You know Storm on Hill?”

  “Wuthering Heights?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s one of my favorites too.”

  Minutes later, we were seated on a bench in the flowering gardens of the Imperial Palace, while three hundred school-children sat in rows on the gravel before us, patiently listening to a pep talk from their teachers. Sending her daughter off to play amidst the trees, where she set about making a pretty brocade of leaves (Japanese children had a remarkable gift, I noticed, for playing with flowers; their training in Nature awareness started early), Sachiko-san started telling me the story of the “North Wind’s Daughter,” an endearing children’s story about a bear and his sorrow, made all the more engaging by her ideogrammatic delivery.

  “Bear live in house. Mother, father, grandma, all die. All brother, sister, die — hunting! Bear very sad in his heart. But he has much pride; he never not cry. He think music very happy sound, then he little make sign, ‘Please. I need Music Teacher. I have money.’

  “Then much banging on door, very big noise. Man in blue there. He have trumpet. Then he play music. Sun shine, and set. Bear very happy. Then very sad in his heart. He try trumpet — but sound very bad sound. Then he blow much much, break tooth. He say man, ‘Please you teach me.’ Man say, ‘You cannot play. You tooth break. Please you give me blueberry pie.’ Bear give him pie, but in his heart very sad.

  “Then blue woman come here his house, North Wind. She has violin. She play violin, very beautiful sound, little silver staircase sound. Sun shine, and set. Bear in his heart very happy. He try violin. But very bad music. He very sad. Very cold. Woman say, ‘Please look your icebox. Please give me pineapple pie.’ He give.

  “Then much banging his door. Very pretty child there, North Wind daughter. She blue! Bear sad. He has no food in freezer. But girl say, ‘Please you close eye. Please you count.’ Bear try, then open eye: hot cakes and chair! Bear very happy. Then girl say, ‘Please you close eye. Please you count.’ Bear try, then open eye. Then bear very sad. She not there. She gone. But he still have music, and many beautiful memory.”

  “Happy ending?”

  “Yes,” she laughed sweetly, her voice like running water, and with that, she took her daughter home.

  One delicate autumn day a few days later — the sky now gray, now blue, always like a woman’s uncertain heart, a light drizzle falling, and then subsiding, and falling once more — I met Sachiko outside an Indonesian store, for a trip to Kurama. She was, as ever, girlishly dressed, her hair falling thickly over one side of her face, held back on the other by a black comb with a red-stone heart in its middle; the tongues of her black sneakers hanging out from under lime-green legwarmers.

  As we traveled towards the hillside village, she set down her backpack beside her on the train and began telling me excitedly about her friend Sandy, and how it was Sandy who had first introduced her to Zen, Sandy who had first taken her to a temple, Sandy who had first encouraged her to try zazen meditation. “I Japanese,” she said softly. “But I not know my country before. Sandy my teacher.” More than that, she said, it was Sandy who had shown her another way of life and given her the confidence to try new things. Sandy, supporting two children alone in a foreign country and at the same time embarked on a full-length course of Zen studies, had shown her that it was possible, even for a woman, to have a strong heart.

  Now, she went on, Sandy was planning to send her children back to America for high school. “I dream, maybe Hiroshi go your country, Sandy’s son together. You see this movie Stand by Me?” I nodded. “Very beautiful movie. I want give my son this life. I dream, he little Stand by Me world feeling.” And what about her husband’s view on all this? An embarrassed giggle. “I don’t know. Little difficult. But I much dream children go other country.” She paused, deep in thought. “But I also want children have Zen spirit inside, Japanese feeling.” I asked her to explain. “Example — you and Sandy, zazen very difficult. Japanese people, zazen very easy. I want my children have this spirit.”

  “But if your children go away, they may grow distant. Maybe never talk to you. Maybe forget all Japanese things. Wouldn’t that make you sad?”

  “Tabun. Maybe.”

  “It’s very difficult, I think.”

  And so we get off the train, and climb from shrine to shrine, scattered across the steep hills of Kurama, and the rain now drizzles down, now stops again, and the two of us huddle under her umbrella, sweaters brushing, her hair almost falling on my arm. “Ai to ai gasa,” I say, thinking of the phrase I had read in a Yosano Akiko poem, describing two people sharing a single umbrella. “Maybe,” she says, with a lilting laugh, and we climb some more, the hills before us resplendent now, and then still higher, in the gentle rain, till
we are sitting on a log.

  In front of us, the trees are blazing. “I like color now,” she says, pensive. “Later, I not so like. More sad. Leaves die. Many thing change.” And then, carried away by the view, perhaps, she recalls the only other time she has come to this hill. Kurama is only a few miles north of Kyoto, a thirty-minute train ride. But Sachiko has not been here for fifteen years, and all that time, she says, she has longed to return. “I so happy,” she whispers, as if in the presence of the sacred. “I so excited. Thank you. Thank you very much. I very happy. Very fun. Before I coming here, little teenage size, together three best friend. We climbing mountain, I very afraid, because I thinking snake. Much laughing, many joke. Very fun. My friend’s names, Junko, Sumiko, and Michiko. But Osaka now. Very busy, marry ladies.”

  We walk down again, through the drizzle and the mist, then up slippery paths, between the trees. “I much love Kurama,” she says quietly, as if in thought. “Sometimes I ask husband come here; he say, ‘You always want play. I very busy. I cannot.’ And come here together children, very difficult. Soon tired. Thank you very much, come here this place with me.”

  This is all rather sad. She tells me of her adventures, and the smallness of it all makes me sad again: how, when she was a little girl, she went with her cousin and brother and aunt to a cinema, and her aunt allowed her to go and see The Sound of Music alone. “I very scared. All dark. Many person there. But then, film begin, I soon forget. I much love. I dream I Julie Andrews.” She also describes reading about Genghis Khan. “I dream I trip together Genghis Khan. I many trip in my heart, many adventure. But only in my heart.” She tells me how once, last year, for the first time ever, she went alone to Osaka, forty minutes away, to see the Norwegian teenybopper group a-ha in concert, and then, exhilarated by this event, went again that same week to another of their concerts, in Kobe, with her son and her cousin, all three of them sharing a room in a luxury hotel. The night she spent in the hotel, the trip to the coffee shop after the concert, the way she had chanced to see the lead singer’s parents in the coffee shop and then to meet the star himself in an elevator — all live on in her as what seems almost the brightest moment in her life. “I very lucky. I very excited. I dream, maybe next summer, I go this hotel again. See other a-ha concert.”