The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  Later, just before I left, I pointed out the yin-yang symbol on the blue scarf she was wearing round her neck. Surprising me yet again, Sachiko put her hands behind her hair, unknotted the scarf, and handed it over to me as a gift. I turned it around in my hands, the cloth smothered in her perfume. It was a dizzying experience, and heady: the scarf in my hands, her fragrance all about.

  By now, I felt, I could understand a little more the nature of Sachiko’s quiet urgency, her sense of impatience in pushing against the limits of her tightly reined life. At thirty, she had clearly spent her last, perhaps her best, seven years in absolute thrall to her family — or, more precisely, to the dictates of her society. She had, I was sure, played all the roles demanded of her with typical efficiency, and yet by obediently following a schedule imposed on her from without, she had also, I felt, cut herself short somehow, allowing herself to be propelled precipitously through the roles of perfect fiancée, perfect wife, and perfect mother, without ever really having fully worked out other parts of herself. Even now, therefore, something of her youth still lodged inside her, like a slide stuck in a projector, jamming all the images that followed and threatening to blow up the whole system.

  This sense of missing the boat was, I suspected, particularly vexing in a society where the boat always, but always, left on time (a feeling I was already coming to know when racing to a bus stop at 10:12 a.m., knowing that there was no chance — absolutely no chance in this relentlessly punctual land — that the 10:10 a.m. bus had not left already). In Japan, stages in life seemed as rigorously demarcated as the hours of the day: just as people changed kimono or bracelets with the seasons, just as restaurants served different kinds of rice, or tea, according to the time of year — customs that we, not imprisoned by them, could afford to find enchanting — so Japanese people had to change roles and identity on cue, with the seasons of their lives.

  Age, therefore, was always stressed in Japan as much as it was downplayed in the U.S. (where, in California at least, a sixteen-year-old girl often looked so much older than her age, and her forty-year-old mother so much younger, that mother and daughter truly did end up looking like sisters, as the soap ads promised). One reason Japanese generally asked one another, as soon as they were introduced, “How old are you?” was station — a thirty-year-old was expected to defer to someone thirty-five and to have priority over someone twenty-five. But it was also, and relatedly, to give, and enforce, a sense of identity. Just as Sachiko’s life was set up so that she gave her mornings to herself, her afternoons to her children, her evenings to her parents, and her nights to her husband, so the stages of a woman’s life seemed all but scheduled in advance: 0–5 for shiny bowl cuts and indulgence; 6–18 for ponytails and the blue-and-white sailor-suits of school; 19–24 for bangs, high fashion, and a stint in an office; 25–45 for child raising in jeans and pretty sweaters; and the years that followed for sober matronhood in perms, a return to the workplace, perhaps, and, at last, a rounding of the cycle in the licensed second childhood of old age. The Kurisumasu kēi phenomenon was only the most flagrant example of a system that propelled its people into stages as forcibly as commuters into train compartments.

  There was, in fact, a prescribed look, a kind of uniform, for every stage. So although the old cliché about all Japanese looking alike was clearly absurd, there was some truth in saying that all Japanese of a certain position or age — all nine-year-old schoolgirls, say, or forty-five-year-old executives — were encouraged to look, or at least dress, alike by a society that wanted them to conform to an anonymous model, to become generic, in a sense. A sense of interchangeable identity not only helped to enforce unity; it also made one parent’s daughter seem almost like another’s, and thus enforced a larger sense of duty. So when Sachiko talked of her “mother part” and “wife part” and “daughter part,” she caught nicely, if inadvertently, the absoluteness of the way in which people here were both parts and partitions — and parts, in fact, were inflexibly partitioned.

  But now, with the years fast slipping away from her, and her children both in school, I could see how avidly Sachiko was grasping after her receding youth, having matured to a point where at last she could appreciate the freedom that she was no longer allowed to have. I could also see how this longing was tied up with all things Western, as if she could not find an authorized Japanese precedent for being a thirty-year-old teenager. This side of her, then, came out through foreign contact mostly — in her giddy excitement at hearing about Phil Collins, or her high school girl’s absorption in reading every last detail of Michael J. Fox’s life in the Japanese equivalent of Tiger Beat. And part of this whole desperate last stand against conformity clearly included the befriending of gaijin, not only because the foreign world was associated with the young, the new, the trendy — and, more to the point, the reckless and the self-indulgent — but also because the foreign world was, apart from her posters and her daydreams (and akin to them too, perhaps), her only alternative to reality. Foreigners meant freedom in a land where freedom itself was largely foreign.

  So I could see one reason why she was so active in cultivating me, even if it was a reason, perhaps, that had never consciously occurred to her. One of the first things I was learning in Japan was how easily shrewdness and shelteredness could go hand in hand. When Sachiko lent me a tape, I could see that she was doing so partly in order to ensure that I would have to see her again (to give it back), and when she invited me to dinner, she was binding me up in a debt I would surely feel an obligation to repay. Yet even the subtlest and most elaborate of her emotional gambits were in pursuit of ends that seemed in themselves disarmingly innocent.

  Meanwhile, as I fell deeper and deeper into such thoughts, I kept meeting foreigners who could not stop singing of their conquests. One softspoken American told me how he had fallen in love with a girl just by watching the way she sharpened his pencil. Another told me how, upon arrival, he’d been given an option on his best friend’s house, his bike, and even his girlfriend. I ran one day into an old friend — from Santa Barbara, of course — a sweet if slightly scatterbrained soul, who had always seemed girlproof, so lost was he in Mahayana meditations and herbal teas. Now, though, he said, after thirty-nine years without ever really having had a girlfriend, he was on the brink of marriage — to a woman he’d met only six weeks before. She was, of course, thirty-eight, and she’d even told him that if he didn’t marry her, he could at least, please, give her a baby. I shuddered at the consequences.

  Another day, after meeting another shy foreigner, who instantly began telling me about the love letters he had received from his students and how little they meant to him — really, how little — I asked Mark what he thought of these relationships.

  “I would imagine,” I said, “that a Japanese woman would make a very good wife, if only because she has so precise a sense of what it means to be a perfect wife, and a perfect daughter-in-law, and a perfect mother.”

  “Sure,” said Mark, with the sharp, smiling glance I knew so well by now, “and a precise sense of what it means to be a perfect husband.” In his experience, he said, the marriages often worked out well when a Japanese girl was matched with a flighty or irresponsible foreign man, in part because Japanese women were well trained at housebreaking men and, like the heroines in Shakespeare’s comedies, were often bright and agile enough to bring their ne’er-do-well partners to heel. But the marriages that brought more sensitive, and passive, kinds of foreign men together with Japanese girls often seemed to founder. Because, of course, the kind of Japanese woman who was interested in a foreign man was, by definition, a radical, independent-minded and ready for adventure; while the kind of man who was drawn to Japan was often a more retiring sort, in flight from the perceived aggressiveness of the West. So the girl, who wanted some wild, macho, Harley-throttling pop-star type, ended up, very often, with a man who had come to Japan specifically to escape the wild, macho, Harley-throttling pop culture of America; and he, drawn to Bashō or Mur
asaki, ended up with a girl who was trying to transcend the compliant surfaces enforced by Japanese convention. She wanted to see the world; he wanted just to settle down. Thus the woman ended up complaining that her partner was not wild enough, and the man that the girl was too wild; she, eager for the wrong man, found herself saddled with an unworldly Mr. Right, and he, hoping for a poem, ended up with a would-be rock song. The only thing they had in common was that both were taken with a dream.

  A few days later, Mark handed me a copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Spinoza of Market Street and told me to read the title story. Previously, in my ignorance, I had always scorned Singer, imagining him somehow to be an elderly taste. But as I began reading, I could see why Mark had given the book to me, and why now, with an unforced aptness that seemed a kind of gift in him. For “The Spinoza of Market Street” was shot through not only with Singer’s customary sense of wry wonder but also with a kind of worldly uplift, an exaltation in the face of earthly things, that I had not expected. At its conclusion, a man, all his life a hermitic philosopher, gets up from his marriage bed and looks at the moon and realizes that marriage has gone against all his reason and philosophy, and yet has somehow redeemed him beyond reason (and without reason), with a logic all its own — a moment as moving and transcendent as the same scene, more chillingly evoked, in the new Springsteen song I had been listening to in Kurama. Springsteen’s faith was, of course, very different in texture from that of Singer’s Spinoza-lover — it was a rougher thing, of the open road and big cars, not philosophy and books — but still it came to much the same thing: both characters had given up what they held dearest, the very basis of their lives — their premises — for a woman, and then had found in her a kind of saving grace. They had opened themselves up and, in the opening, found a transformation. In the pretty pun of C. S. Lewis, they had been “surprised by joy.”

  Increasingly, then, as I went on reading Singer, I began to see that the great project of this closet pantheist was, quite literally, to build a rainbow bridge between heaven and earth. Again and again, his robust tales turned around men who wished to renounce the world in favor of some unearthly, abstract love — a devotion to scholarship, or even God — and then, of a sudden, found themselves confronted with the presence of something less lofty that seemed to betray a higher source; again and again, his people were divided, their eyes on the heavens and their hands on earth. And invariably, Singer resolved the issue by showing that earthly love could be just the manifestation of heavenly love; that it revealed to us a radiance and a beauty that were otherwise concealed; that this was all we could know of heaven here on earth, and all we would need to know. “The more we know of particular things,” Spinoza had written, “the more we know of God.”

  11

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I met Sachiko early one morning and we set off together on another expedition: to Nara. Whenever she had the choice, I saw, she loved to go not to places she had never seen but to ones she already knew. Our trips, I sensed, were journeys as much into remembrance as freedom; and in visiting the places she had not seen since college, Sachiko was visiting, I sensed, the parts of herself she had not known since before her children and her marriage.

  On the train through the countryside, I took out a fading twelve-year-old copy of Joni Mitchell’s Blue and said that in the West, at least, such songs were very popular with girls. The sadness of the songs appealed to them, I went on; the complexities of boyfriends lost and babies missed, and lonely nights in lonely rooms. Perhaps it was not so different from Japan? Sachiko was silent as I told her this, but her face looked puzzled. “I think people in your country very, very strong,” she said at last, reiterating her favorite theme. “Woman too, very tough.” “In some ways,” I said, reiterating my favorite theme, “American women are often as tough as men. They work in offices and hold good jobs.” “But,” she tried, “when they go home, they all alone, very sad?” “Exactly! And that’s when they listen to Joni Mitchell and dream of boyfriend or child.” I dealt in stereotypes, I knew, in laughable cartoons, but I felt that nuances would only get lost between us and that I could not overdramatize for her the gulf between the world she knew and the one that she imagined.

  When we got off the train, I realized that I was in for another surprise: we were not, it seemed, going to Nara at all, but rather to the nearby town of Asuka, the ancient city where Buddhism had arrived in Japan thirteen hundred years before and subject of some of the most haunting of old love poems:

  The mists rise over

  the still pools at Asuka.

  Memory does not

  Pass away so easily.

  Outside the tiny country station, the obligatory schoolchildren were lined up, scores of them, seated in rows in which they listened to the instructions shouted at them through megaphones: one movable feast of unified young humanity. But mostly, the villages and fields were quiet as we wandered along the lanes and up a hill, walking over rice paddies, and lost, for the most part, in our talk. The sun came out and disappeared; a mist rose above the mountains; the sky was slivers of blue in a gray porcelain bowl.

  As we meandered along the quiet paths, Sachiko bent down to trace the flowers with her fingers, teaching me their names, and what they represented. This one, she said, was the cosmos, the harbinger of winter, this one the “orchid” (she knew the English word because it was the favorite flower of Morten, lead singer of a-ha). This one was her grandmother’s favorite; this one, she said, was me.

  We walked through quiet lanes of little huts, and she motioned to a stream swishing through a ditch. Seseragi, she explained. I stopped for a moment and realized of course she was right: the silence was made musical by the gurgle of the water. This time to herself, she said, was very special, “very fragile, like grass” (and now it was my turn to look confused, having forgotten her tendency to say r for l). “Very fragile time,” she said again, ruminative. “These days I always hold in my heart.” She paused for a moment on a bridge and looked into the running brook below. And I sensed that this chance to wander without plan called her back to something long hidden within herself like a temple bell.

  Then, recollecting herself, she led me over more country hills, and as we walked, I taught her the English words I chanced to use — “innocent,” “delicate,” and “subtle.” She looked up at me with searching eyes. “You teach me what is in my heart?”

  I chose to evade that, and asked instead if she was hungry. “I forget,” she said dreamily. “Time stop. My stomach hungry, but my heart very full.”

  And so we straggled on some more, and later, in a village, stopped in a tiny shack for “Fox Noodles” and “Tanuki Noodles,” and then walked out, across the random fields. She told me how her nickname since girlhood had been “Hime,” or Princess, and how she dreamed now of going to spend a night with her best friend, Keiko, in Osaka, only a few minutes away from Kyoto, provided she could get her husband’s permission. And gradually, as the hours passed, the day began to ease open, as if some catch had been unclasped. And as the sun began to set, our talk grew gradually more close. “Sunset time very beautiful,” she mused quietly, “but sad. Because children stop play, and I cook dinner, and all things finish. You are bird, I woman. You are hawk; you have strong heart, do anything, very easy. But I cannot. Then I only dream. Please you bring me world.” She paused, in a temple, in front of a painting of a monk seated before a ball of fire. “This time dream time.”

  Then, in the train going home, as she looked out on the darkening fields, I tried to cheer her up by telling her a story I had dreamed up as a boy, and as I did so, I realized, with a start, that somehow, without my intending it, this tale of white birds bringing dreams across the sea, above a silver “moon path,” was more apt — and more Japanese — than ever I had known. Even the raccoon story I had made up for her children, with its theme of a rescued princess, and the provision of dreams, did not seem quite so innocent anymore. And yet, I realized now, there too, I had inadvertently gone Jap
anese by including two heroes instead of one, and so, somehow, providing a denouement that concluded not in marriage but in parting.

  Finally, in the failing light, turning from the window, she summoned up all her English in a brave attempt to tie up the day. “Thank you very much. You give my heart much imagination, much feeling. Thank you very much. I very, very fun. This magic time for me. When I little children size, I many times visit Grandma house. I dream very different life. But soon wake up: same me, same everything. Today I wake up, I feel new me. First time, I learn this feeling. Now I wake up — same bear with North Wind daughter. I think I bear, I have new heart.”

  That night, back in Kyoto, I walked into Mark’s room to find a middle-aged woman listening to a Grateful Dead tape and looking up at me with a stare of unnerving intensity — a capable New England matron by the looks of her, in sensible brown sweater and Seven Sisters skirt. “Hello,” she announced, “I’m Emily. I’m a pagan.” At that, Mark appeared from out of his crooked staircase, and the three of us found a cab, cowboys running around on a tiny pay-TV in front of us, spouting Japanese. As we weaved through the festive lights and crowds downtown, an ad on the screen showed a teardrop, silver, and a necklace on bare skin.

  In the waiting express train, as we took our seats, Emily chattered away about the religious impulse and her belief in Seth and about a new image of the Goddess that should be associated not just with Kali but with the spirit of Fertility. Around us, Osaka sparkled like a jewel box in the dark: sapphire and emerald neon making dream patterns on the buildings, bright lights gleaming in the fresh-washed night. Off in the distance the shadowed, silent mountains, and a full moon rippling through the river below.

  Getting out of the train, forty minutes later, we walked along moving stairways, up escalators, through corridors of signs, and out into a narrow lane of jangled colors. Under a bridge, across a tunnel of lights, stood an illuminated dome called Studebaker’s. Inside was quite a scene: a blond American deejay was flinging his hands about at the front of a room and spinning oldies — “California Girls,” “Twist and Shout,” “Return to Sender” — while four female customers in front of him, all in expensive, primary-color dresses, hair falling down their backs in identical styles, stood in a perfect row on the dance floor and went through elaborate steps, in perfect sync, to every song, a different step for every song, following the lead of the fast-talking deejay, never stopping, never sweating, just rolling their hands or twisting their hips or punching the air, impassive, song after song after unrelenting song. The whole place was done up in bright, Beach Blanket Bingo colors, pinks and Cadillac reds, and the waitresses, in perky ponytails, red miniskirts, and Laguna Beach sunglasses, danced as they went around the room, holding trays and jumping onto tables every now and then to do the twist, while the waiters, also sunglassed and fresh-faced, leapt onto the bar and strummed crazily away on unplugged guitars in a pantomime of fun, all of it meant to replicate some squeaky-clean, synthetic movie image of Redondo Beach in ’64.