by Pico Iyer
At the station, as we waited for the train, she pulled out a scarf and tied it round my neck. Then, as we got in, taking seats by the window, I could feel her sadness building as we rode back into town. Squashed together in the crowded compartment, I improvised a story for her then, a story of a lady and a monk, and when I got to the end, I saw her eyes fill with tears. She looked down, embarrassed, and hid her face in my jacket. “I’m sorry. I very sad. Sun set. And train go back Kyoto. I understand your story. Very sad.” “But Japanese people like sad stories?” “Yes,” she said. “Maybe you catch true Japanese heart.”
Then, brightening abruptly — as if she had quite literally taken a grip on her errant self — she looked up smiling and offered me a pastry she had bought from a German bakery. “This baker’s name is the German word for ‘friendliness,’ ” I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. She beamed. “You two kind bird. Hawk — and owl. You give me much input. Thank you.” And as the train drew slowly into Kyoto station, she covered my hand with hers. “Now,” she said, “I little catch bird.”
There was once a beautiful lady who lived in a village near the ancient city of Kyoto with her husband. One day in late summer, as the crickets began to fall silent, the man fell ill; and by the coming of the autumn, the woman could see that he was almost gone. All night, she sat patiently by his side, tending to his needs and listening for his breath; and as the light came up, she felt his heart, and knew that he was gone.
She loved him still, she knew, but the woman was too strong to let her own life wither. So, each day, in her black kimono, through flurries of falling leaves, she went back to the local temple, to lay scarlet flowers on his grave.
Now it happened that the guardian of this temple was a monk who had inherited it from his father in his youth. Seasons had passed, and the monk had grown sturdy in his faith; impervious to the world, his mind was fixed on Buddha. Yet when a member of the village died, it fell to this monk to perform all the rites for sending the soul on its way. So when the young lady came each day with scarlet flowers to the temple, he sat beside her and told her of the Buddha’s teaching, she in her black kimono, he in his black-and-golden robes.
As time went on, the woman began to return more and more often to the temple, and the monk, though lost in meditation, could not so easily keep his mind in focus; even in the meditation hall, he could see a flash of red, could hear the rustle of kimono. The forty-ninth day of the husband’s death came and went, but still the woman kept returning, as if she could not put the memory away. And even when he said his sutras, the monk found that his mind was filled with the image of the long-haired woman in the garden, red flowers in her hand.
One day, as the first bite of winter chilled the air, the monk decided that he must barricade himself against such distractions and recover the strength of his faith. He caught her fragrance in the hall, he sensed the lady everywhere. But all day long he kept his face turned towards the wall. And when at last he returned to his room that night, he found a single red flower laid outside his door.
And so it continued each day for a week: not once did he open his eyes to his visitor, but each night, when he returned to his room, he found a flower by his door. When his teacher, a head abbot from Kyoto, came to visit, he saw all that was happening, but he knew that there was nothing he could do: the monk would have to face this challenge by himself.
Finally, one cold and brilliant day, the monk decided to wait in his room to watch for the lady’s visit. He saw her arrive at dawn, shivering in the winter chill, and even as he recited his sutras, he saw her waiting there all day, eyes smarting in the cold. As he watched her standing there, the monk felt shaken out of words: here, he thought, was a purity and singleness even truer than that he gave to Buddha. Here, in fact, was the meaning of devotion. As darkness fell upon the garden, and the woman got up to leave, he suddenly called out to her.
“Please wait,” he said. “I saw you standing here all day, hardly moving save for cold. Please drink some sake before you leave.”
When she saw him, the woman turned pale, till her face was ghostly white; but as he pulled back his screen, she slipped off her sandals and entered the incense-filled space. Sitting together on the tatami, they watched the full moon rise above the eastern hills.
That night was the coldest of the year, but neither the monk nor the lady knew it. And when the monk went to prayers at dawn, his bare feet tingled on the frost.
That morning, when the woman returned to the temple, the monk was nowhere to be seen. And so it was for many days, she returning to the chilling temple garden, red flowers in her hand, and he alone in his chamber, silently aflame. Finally, when she arrived one morning, the lady found a white flower placed outside the monk’s door, inside of it a letter.
“You have given me,” the letter began, “all the warmth and color of the world. I want to keep my image of you as clear as running water. Please take this flower as a memory of our friendship. And know that, though we should not meet again, it is you I always think of.”
The woman took the letter and the flower, and the monk never heard from her again. But next morning, when he rose to say his sutras, there, on his doorstep, was a red flower, and a black kimono, scented with her fragrance, and the first faint touch of spring.
And as the leaves began to fall, I really did begin to feel that something was flowering in Sachiko, as if — though I feared to say it — she really was a kind of sleeping beauty awakened by romance, or at least its distant shadow. And for all her composure and supercompetence as a mother, for all her chic and self-possession, I could tell that hers was a heart more than ready to take flight and soar out of her control. And even though I had often been abroad, and often been faced, therefore, with the issue of what to do with foreign dreams, whether to try to encourage fantasies of abroad, or simply damp them down, I still had no sense of how much she was interested in making her visions reality, or whether, as a good Japanese, she was content simply to maintain another world that she could visit in imagination.
At times, in fact, I wondered whether, in encouraging her to express her dreams of flight, I was falling prey to the temptation I had already noticed in some of the more softhearted of the foreigners in Japan: the urge to give the Japanese a glimpse of the world on the other side. When she had attended her first tea ceremony, Siobhan had told me, she had found herself, this radical feminist pagan from the Haight, surrounded by elegantly prim young housewives-in-the-making, getting their training in all the ladylike arts. The school play, she could not help but notice on a nearby bulletin board, was Cinderella. And seeing all of them preparing for a life of simple self-denial, she had started inviting some of what she called “the good girls” back to her hippie commune, to get a taste of forbidden freedom. Later, she said, she had heard them excitedly telling their friends about their “wild night of sin.”
I wondered, too, whether in encouraging Sachiko to indulge all the hopes that Japan so strenuously teaches its children to suppress, or to enjoy only in specific, and very circumscribed, conditions, I was schooling her in desires she could never fully realize. Encouraging people to realize their potential was an especially dangerous occupation in a country that taught them to fulfill their duty instead.
Most of all, I wondered how deep the ambiguities between us really reached. For even in the same tongue, we were rarely speaking the same language. To begin with, of course, she was married, and I did not know what exactly that betokened — especially in a culture where marriage was often nothing more than separation by another name. Much of the time, Sachiko functioned as if she had no family at all, using her society’s sense of extended ties to find parents or friends to baby-sit for her, and tuning out her marriage as if it were just a distant radio station. It was almost as if being a mother and a wife was a role to her, and thus a self she could shrug off as easily as her mother’s clothes or voice; she seemed, in fact, less fettered — or more resourceful about slipping free of fetters — than
most single people that I knew at home.
She, in turn, of course, knew little of foreign codes of friendship and how to translate them into terms she knew. So every time she said, “My children little want see you,” I did not know to what extent that meant that it was she who wanted to see me. And every time I replied, “I want to see your children,” I did not know if that just meant that I wanted to see her. And even though traveling had schooled me, I had thought, in the seven types of ambiguity, and more, I still had to admit that Sachiko was the end of the line in this field, the state of the art: for Japan itself was firmly based on people’s not saying what they meant and on the accompanying assumption that what was meant was rarely what was said. And women in particular were encouraged — even trained — to project an air of charming acquiescence that suggested everything and meant nothing. In a land where language itself was a force of separation as much as communion, where foreigners were invariably treated as symbolic carriers of abroad, and where everything was turned into soft focus — surrounded by an all-embracing vagueness — it all added up to the most troubling of riddles.
13
AS AUTUMN DEEPENED, bringing with it new intensities, I took myself off one morning to Nara. After listening, in silence, to my story of the lady and the monk, Mark had lent me a tape of Laurens Van der Post delivering a lecture on the unlikely, even unpromising, subject of “The Unwritten Literature of the Bushmen.” And as I got on the train, crowded now with tidy, festive families, old couples going on temple tours, a young monk shyly turning his face from tourist cameras, and packs of schoolgirls on their way to Dreamland (the modern amusement park that was now the most popular attraction in the ancient capital), I turned on the tape and fell into the rhythms of the old Dutch farmer’s swelling, bardic cadences. Birds, he was saying, in every kind of folklore, stood for the world of the heavens, emissaries from above. Birds were messengers from the gods bringing inspiration to earthbound men. That was why among the American Indians, and the tribes of Africa too, chiefs traditionally wore crowns of feathers, as if their heads were flocks of inspirations. That was also why Plato called the mind a cage of birds.
I thought of this as we rolled through the countryside, and of my own story about birds, and of how Sachiko always referred to me as a winged ambassador from abroad. I thought of how much I wanted to share this thought with her, so sonorously phrased, by a disciple of her brother’s guru, Jung, and how strange it was that stories and images that had come to me unbidden seemed much more pointed than I knew. And as the train rolled into Nara, I was jolted from my daydreams by the Buddhist capital itself, where a local department store was offering a cup of gold-flaked coffee for more than three hundred dollars, and posters of Madonna fluttered from the souvenir stalls.
Inside the famous Deer Park, though, one was back inside a more changeless Japan. Families were enjoying picnics on the grass, deer grazing at their sides as in the Oxford college where I had cavorted as a boy. Ladies strolled through galleries of red, papers held up to their ashen faces to shield them from the sun. A group of smiling elders sauntered through a reception line of blazing orange trees, the sun catching the copper in the women’s hair, the men framed by an extravagance of gold. Now and then, the tolling of a distant bell summoned us back, so it seemed, to a higher time and self.
Making my way up to a temple terrace, I leaned on a railing and watched the blue hills in the distance, half shrouded now in wood smoke. Coins clattered in the collection box behind me, and an old woman grabbed the clump of white and red and orange ropes and rang and rang and rang the temple bell. An aged couple asked me to take their picture, framed against the falling leaves. Around us, the sun came down with the cleansing intensity of mountain light.
In Nara, I saw a shrine with statues of moonlight and sunlight, three thousand lanterns bobbing above the moss. Across town in the Hall of Dreams, I visited the famous Korean Bodhisattva, salvaged, like so much else here, by the visiting American Ernest Fenollosa. Outside the Great Buddha, commanding the largest wooden building in the world, I saw a wandering mendicant, a mountain monk, in white robes and straw sandals, standing stock-still, swathed in a curious mix of animal skins and bells, muttering shamanic chants.
In Nara, the temples were more hidden than in Kyoto, left to themselves, with room to breathe. To get to them, one had to change trains twice, at sleepy country stations, walk for many minutes through crooked, nameless lanes, ascend unforgiving flights of steps; one had, in short, to earn the temples, and travel away from the workaday world — and self. A visit here could only be a pilgrimage.
Later, returning in the falling light to Kyoto, I descended once more into Van der Post as he spun out Bushmen tales of how a man had spent his whole life pursuing the reflection of a bird he had once seen, and only grabbed a feather on the day he died; and another of how a man had caught the goddess of the moon, but then, through looking in a basket full of starlight and seeing nothing, had lost her too. By the time the train pulled into Kyoto Station, I was lost in the world of the storyteller’s flights and, loath to hurry home, began to walk through narrow lanterned streets and along the Kamo River, lit by a trailing series of red lights.
As I walked, past houses lit up by a brilliant moon, I thought how much the Japanese were a people of the moon, the central image of the first Japanese story I had ever heard. And though they traced their lineage to the Goddess of the Sun, the sun was mostly used now to describe the modern or the public world — the Sun Plaza American-style convenience store, the Sunflower Hotel, and rows of Sunny cars were all five minutes from my home. The moon, by contrast, was the part they kept jealously to themselves. In their hearts, I thought, the Japanese were still a people of the Rising Moon. And just as I was dwelling on this, and recalling how Kyoto itself had once been known as “Moon Capital,” I turned on the tape again and — out of nowhere — heard Van der Post talking about how the moon in Japan was always three times larger than in any other place and how the Japanese had a deep affinity with the moon, renewing themselves, after earthquakes or wars, as cyclically as the moon.
The moon, I recalled, was the one possession that even monks did not renounce. When he lost his house in a fire, the Zen poet Masahide wrote, he found occasion for new hope: he now enjoyed a better view of the rising moon.
* * *
When next I visited Sachiko’s home, for dinner, she sat me down and put on a tape of Howard the Duck. Gloomily I surveyed Duck magazines, Duck TV shows, and a host of lame Duck jokes. “I much love George Lucas,” she averred. “Spielberg too. They have very innocent child heart. Coppola little different feeling; he more big brother heart. You see this movie Goonies?”
I shook my head no.
“Gremlins?”
“I’m sorry, no.” She looked disappointed. “But I do like Kurosawa.”
She now looked very grave. “Japanese person not so like this man,” she said. “Foreigner person like, no problem. But Japanese not so like. Little show-biz feeling.”
The next thing I knew, though, she had slipped into her other, deeper self, drawing out her guitar and breaking into a series of piercing, lovely lullabies. I could see her eyes as she sang begin to glitter at their corners; I could hear a quaver as she hit the high notes. She sang another wistful ballad, then, about a man looking at the pressed flowers that his lover had left for him, and again, as she sang, her eyes filled with tears. Monoganashii, she explained, the beauty of what’s fleeting.
In terms of everything I knew, things were fast becoming more and more slippery and strange. When I gave her a couple of poems I had written for her in Nara, she looked up at me with a kind of melting intensity and said, “Me too.” And when she showed me an album of her wedding photos, and I admired the loveliest one of all, of the bride in a white veil, caught in golden light, she simply peeled it out and handed it over to me. Now, I felt, I was not only gate-crashing her marriage but actually taking possession of her memories.
Whenever I tried t
o ask her about her husband, though, or his family, she never said anything except, “My husband very good man, but weak heart.” If ever I tried to get anything more out of her, she just laughed it off, and said, “Chotto muzukashii” (It’s a little difficult). Her husband, in the telling, was nothing more than a kind of spectral, distant authority figure on the margins of her life, spoken of in the terms that people in a large company might reserve for the CEO. So I never really got a sense of his features, his preferences, his self; he was just a kind of shadowy bogeyman who, like many a Japanese man, dutifully did “family service” on his one day off a week, filled up his spare hours with jigsaw puzzles, and was too scared of foreigners ever to meet me or any of his wife’s other foreign friends.
Then, finally, seemingly heavy with emotion, she tried to put into words why we should not meet in Kyoto. “I’m sorry,” she began, “my heart much change,” and I got ready for a brush-off — a prudent one, I thought, in the circumstances, and one in which I almost wanted to assent. “Before, talking very fun, very easy. But now …” she went on, and I did not have a clue in what direction her heart had changed, when this had happened (since past tense and perfect were elided in her English), and whether she now felt closer than before or more distant.
I was also beginning to realize how treacherous it was to venture into a foreign language if one could not measure the shadows of the words one used. When I had told her, in Asuka, “Jennifer Beals ga suki-desu. Anata mo” (I like Jennifer Beals — and I like you), I had been pleased to find a way of conveying affection and yet, I thought, a perfect distance. But later I looked up suki and found that I had delivered an almost naked protestation of love. Often, too, I would use the particle ga, never remembering that it could be both nominative and accusative. And both of us, in other ways, were forever confusing subject with object. So she would say, “You help me,” and it was a long time before I realized that she meant, “I’ll help you” (and not just because one good turn deserved another). Thus both of us ended up like children in the dark, flinging around pronouns at random till it was utterly unclear who was meant to be doing what to whom. When we got to sentences like “I’ll call your house,” the ambiguities became positively disabling.