The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  “Very nice city, actually, awfully charming!” he went on, throwing a sheaf of tourist pamphlets onto the tatami and flopping down, with a thump, on a cushion. “Really think this might be the right place for me. Looking for a place to stay, actually, just for a month or two.”

  “But how long have you been here?”

  “Let’s see.” He looked at his watch. “Ten o’clock now. Got into the Miyako at about eleven, then went round the entertainment quarter, got some bumf from the Tourist Information Center. Not quite myself yet, I suppose.” He certainly did seem even more revved up than usual. “Twenty-eight-hour flight, actually. Milano to Zurich. Then Paris. Then Anchorage, and Tokyo. Then Osaka. Took a taxi over here.” It sounded like a précis of his life.

  “Awfully sorry. Won’t be a moment.” He smiled warmly over at Sachiko again. “Wonder if I could just ask you a couple of questions?” He scattered the brochures around some more and started frowning over them. Sachiko, meanwhile, looked simply thunderstruck. Then, suddenly remembering his social obligations, he looked up again and began firing questions over at her, causing her to blink furiously and look plaintively over to me for help. Thus the three of us embarked on an utterly unnecessary conversation in which I deftly translated from English into English and then back again.

  “Are your parents alive?” he began abruptly.

  Sachiko looked over at me, frowning.

  “Your parents are in Kyoto?” I tried.

  “In Kyoto!” she said, looking over at him with a delighted smile. “Please you meet!”

  “Oh yes, yes, love to,” laughed Matthew in embarrassment, and then there came another yawning silence.

  Now Sachiko attacked the issue at hand. “What country you living?”

  “Italy, actually,” said Matthew in his telegraphic way. “Living in a hill town — very charming, actually — just north of Milano.”

  Sachiko looked terrified. “Hill?”

  “Yes, yes.” Matthew gave her an encouraging smile.

  “You live in hill?”

  “Not quite. You see …”

  “But my friend say, Italian man very dangerous. She standing street, man come here. He say, ‘Please you come together me, hotel.’ ”

  Matthew looked at me, perplexed.

  “She means that her friend got propositioned by a man in Italy.”

  “Oh yes, yes, quite.” Matthew beamed back. “Awfully embarrassing. Must be terribly careful. Very roguish types all round. Can’t trust them at all.”

  Sachiko smiled in incomprehension.

  “You very good smell,” she assured him. Taken aback, Matthew began sniffing around at his clothes.

  “No, no. She means you have a good smile.”

  “Oh yes, yes, of course,” he said, showing off his “smell.”

  Then, as abruptly as he had appeared, he bounced up and began clambering down the stairs again and wriggling and wiggling his way into his shoes.

  At this, Sachiko tried to put the whole uncanny encounter into words. “You little bad people,” ’ she suddenly offered. “I think you little bad!”

  “Oh, really? Very true, very true,” he said, smiling with his lawyer’s politesse and looking at me as if all his worst fears had been confirmed.

  “She means that you are the thing with feathers, always flying from one place to the next.”

  “Oh yes, a bird, quite so! Absolutely right! Couldn’t think of a better way of putting it,” he burbled, waving cheerfully and bumping into the door as he walked, half backward, down the lane, in search of a place to stay.

  Sachiko looked back at me, shaken. “Your dream true!”

  Though Matthew still seemed about as steady as a pendulum, there was never any doubting his charm, or the worthiness of his intentions: the only trouble was that his intentions were so varied and so versatile that he never knew which one he was pursuing. His genius for confusion had only been compounded by the fortune he had inherited, tying him up in golden knots. Still I was delighted to see him again, and by the time we met up two days later, he seemed already to have taken the measure of his new home.

  “Went to the Philosopher’s Path yesterday,” he shot out at 78 rpm as we walked, in thick coats, through the coldest Sunday of the year. “Little quaint, don’t you think? All these dainty tea shops and pink boutiques? Rather surprised, actually, to see a place called the English House on the road of contemplation!”

  “A little twee, perhaps?”

  “Exactly! Absolutely! So glad there’s someone here who knows exactly what I mean! Rather like some kind of retirement home back in England.”

  “Well, that’s probably a good description of many things here. It’s like a retirement home for everyone. Everything’s as cozy and comforting as possible, designed to soothe and coddle. That’s partly why the Japanese are so thrown off by foreigners: they don’t know how to make us happy.”

  “My inn, actually, feels rather like a hospital.”

  “Well, everything’s got to be streamlined here, and sterilized,” I went on, sententious, after three months here a self-professed Japan hand. “And a customer is always treated to the same rather overpolite solicitude usually accorded a terminal patient.”

  This did little to raise Matthew’s spirits, and as we wandered through the temples along the eastern hills, I watched him get his first taste of what it was like to be a mascot and a superstar: a foreigner in Japan. As we strolled up to the main hall of the head temple of Jōdo Buddhism, an old man bustled up to us and, without introduction, declared haltingly, “I was once in America. Two month,” then padded away. (“Funny,” said Matthew, “he didn’t look very American.”) A little farther in, a gaggle of kimonoed girls, hiding their mouths with their hands, asked if they could have their pictures taken with this exotic creature with blue eyes and brown hair, in an expensive Italian coat. When Matthew, ever gallant, extended his hand towards one, four photographers crowded round to record the immortal moment. In Shōren-in, a whole traveling company of middle-aged sightseers hailed us beside a carp pond and had us stand poker-faced with them in a team photo, as proud as if they’d captured a koala and a hippo in the same frame. We played our part in the pantomime with silent acquiescence.

  A little later, walking through the temple garden, Matthew suddenly looked up, bewildered. “Is this supposed to be tranquil, or is it meaningful?”

  “Well,” I said, accustomed to these abrupt gunshots of sincerity, “I think the two are meant to be the same. The only meaning is the quiet you find within.”

  “Oh yes, yes, of course,” he said, correcting himself quickly. “No either/or in Zen.”

  4

  ONE OF THE MOST famous of all Zen stories, sometimes ascribed to Hakuin, tells of the lovely young girl, unmarried though pregnant, who is asked by an angry community to identify the father of her child. Spitefully, she points her finger at an old Zen monk long renowned for his purity. When confronted with the charge, the old monk simply replies, “Is that so?” and accepts responsibility for the child.

  Many years pass, and the old monk diligently raises the child as if it were his own. His name is discredited now, his person derided. Then, abruptly, the girl confesses to her parents that she’d lied before — the monk had had nothing to do with her. Mortified, the family rushes to the monk to make amends, and tell him of the terrible error. In response, the monk simply replies, “Is that so?”

  As winter deepened, and I continued reading, the theme of the lady and the monk continued to pursue me everywhere, and everywhere I turned, I found new variations on the theme. It was there in Kabuki, in the celebrated legend of Kiyohime, a typical Japanese demon-woman who grows so obsessed with a monk that finally, in her fervor, she turns into a serpent and scourges him. It was there in Nō, in the classic work Izutsu, about a monk meeting a woman at a well and the two of them transporting themselves back into the love story that had once unfolded there. It was there in fiction, in Naka Kansuke’s novel Inu, about a monk
renowned for his unbending purity who grows so infatuated with a woman that he becomes demented, turning her into a dog, and himself too; and, again and again, it was there in folklore, as in Lafcadio Hearn’s shocking “Force of Karma,” about a handsome monk so unsettled by temptation that he throws himself before a train.

  That monks could be licentious — a satire on themselves — was hardly surprising or unique; Chaucer had written the book on that for us. And it seemed only natural that the Japanese boulevardiers of the eighteenth century should sing the virtues of tarts in the form reserved for Buddhist parables: prostitutes, after all, were called “singing nuns,” and the term saihō jorō, or “Shimabara tart,” slipped nicely into its complementary opposite, saihō jōdo, or Buddhist Pure Land of the West. Sukenobu’s ukiyo-e picture book Steeped in the Indigo River could also be translated as Sex at the First Encounter. And a monk’s solitary musings on the impermanence of life could easily merge into a woman’s lonely complaints about the impermanence of love. If Saikaku’s definitive courtesan, the Woman Who Lived for Love, retired into a convent (ambiguously known as the Hermitage of Voluptuousness), and Genji found his ten-year-old playmate in a religious retreat in the mountains, monks were meanwhile scurrying in the opposite direction. As the old slur had it, “Never offer a night’s lodging to a holy man unless you want your daughter raped.”

  What was more surprising, though, was that sometimes the woman’s virtue could be stronger than the monk’s, that, in a sense, the woman could become an agent of belief and a gateway to a heaven not only seen in earthly terms. In the story of Gyoren Kwannon, a lovely girl, by virtue of her loveliness, entices people to the sutras; and Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties was only the most famous example of a story in which girls of easy virtue were taken to be emblems of a higher purity. “Religion is not to go to God by forsaking the world,” the monk Sōen Shaku had written, “but by finding him in it.”

  Mostly, then, the two impulses lay tangled together as a passionate couple, as troublingly intertwined as in the lyrics of Emily Dickinson or Madonna.

  I fell in love with the Lord Buddha

  when I kiss his chill lips sacrilegiously

  my heart swoons.

  Belief itself, as in Graham Greene, could be the highest version of romance.

  The next time I ran into a gathering of monks was when I went one night into Mark’s house, to find Mark himself seated in a corner, deep inside his painting, while the one-pointed Joe was sitting at the wooden table, drinking beer and listening to a tape of a mandolin player from the streets of San Francisco. The screens were all pulled in tight in the early-winter dark, to give a sense of warmth and close enfoldedness (with their sliding screens and panels, Japanese rooms were as malleable as their selves). A kettle was steaming and puffing atop the kerosene heater.

  The minute I pulled back the front screen behind me, Joe fixed me with a penetrating stare.

  “You know Ted Williams the ballplayer?”

  “Sure.”

  “I read someplace where the reason he could hit so well was he could slow the ball down. His fuckin concentration, man, it was so good, he could make the ball come slowly. That’s what I do when I’m playin’ the piano. It goes slow, man, real slow.”

  “Or chess?”

  “Sure. It’s like goin’ into a trance, man. Only thing is, you gotta do it alone. All movements, man — fuckin’ Moonies. I remember this one time, these guys from the temple were doin’ takuhatsu — daily beggin’, y’know — outside my window, doing that weird kind of chanting of theirs. It was like seven in the morning, man — on a Sunday! — and I was tryin’ to get some sleep. And I was in this tiny old room, with a leak in the ceiling, and I had this bucket of water by my bed. So I picked it up, and I opened the window and …”

  Joe began chuckling, and I braced myself for another strong dose of unorthodoxy. “Those monks, man, they can really put the sake away. Only people drink more than they do are the geisha. On New Year’s Eve, man, you just see these senior guys grabbin’ some monk and pourin’ sake into him till he’s spewin’ the stuff up. Other times, man, they go, like once a month, on their day off, down to Tōji — you know, the strip joint south of Kyoto Station — and all these girls, they come up to the front of the stage and say, ‘Hai dōzo.’ Come and get it.”

  Again I was taken aback, and again I realized that Joe was dispensing Zen wisdom in a purer form than any textbook: the need to slow things down, to speak your mind, to shake up lazy assumptions. Going to the famous Kyoto strip joint was still, after all, known as “going to see Kannon” (the Goddess of Mercy); and Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion had largely dealt with Kyoto monks’ visits to the red-light district. I was just about to ask Joe something about whiskey priests when Rick, the onetime monk, came in, just returned from San Francisco. Today, for the first time in seven years, he had seen his wife again, his teacher, and his daughter. Now, on his way back from the encounter, he looked overwhelmed, as if the occasion had taken him so deep he could not easily bob back to the surface.

  “How was your daughter?”

  “Great, just great,” he said, a long way off now from The Tao of Sex. “She’s really pretty.” His eyes were shy now, self-denying. “Not, like, model pretty, but she’s beautiful to me.” He told us how he had talked to her about “Für Elise” and how the two of them had just sat there alone, for the first time in their lives. Later, he said, someone or other had come in and taken a picture of them — “some monk, or the abbot’s wife, or someone, I don’t know. I was just so moved, I couldn’t focus on a thing.”

  Then, unable to put words to his feelings, Rick picked up his bamboo flute, made for him by his teacher, and played along with the Billie Holliday melodies seeping through the room, summoning all the feelings that he could not voice.

  “The only thing you need, man,” Joe piped up, as soon as he was finished, no more respectful of his friend’s sentiments than of any other doctrine, “is more rests. Like Mozart, man. That guy, man, was a genius, a fuckin’ genius. All the music he made was in the pauses. Everything in the symphonies depends on rests. A fuckin genius, man, and at thirty-six he died, and they put him into the ground and covered him with lime. Death, man, it’s a bummer.” He looked around at us and chuckled, and, as ever, I felt that what he was getting at was a little less obvious than it seemed. “That’s why you gotta have a baby in the house. Baby’s a real good thing to have in the house. Like right now, Sammy’s nine months old. He’s gonna be grown up. So we’ve got to get a baby in the house.” This was the way he operated: to start with some truism and then, like a jazz musician, to work improvisations around it, turning it round and round like a stone, till it began to throw off unexpected lights. “Man, you gotta have a baby in the house. Like my wife — if she wants to go out and hustle all day in the rat race, she can have it! She’s welcome to it. I can just stay home and watch my children grow. Makin’ money’s the least interesting part of life; I’d rather be at home, man, playin’ with my kids. You know why? Because a baby, man, he’s just seen the light! He’s just sittin’ there, and he’s light! I pat him on the head, and I’m touchin’ light. You know The Tibetan Book of the Dead? It’s all in there. Why babies are light.”

  “That’s also why Shelley used to accost babies in the street,” I broke in, “and cross-question them about life in the hereafter. He wanted to get a first-person account of what it was like in heaven.”

  “Jesus fuck,” said Joe, shaking his head and grinning broadly to himself. “I wish I believed that, I really do. I really wish I believed that was true.”

  And I remembered how the demon Mara, when he was trying to tempt the Buddha, having failed to bring him down with discontent or desire, unleashed his strongest weapon: love.

  Whenever I wandered the winter streets alone, though, Kyoto still aroused in me a surge of unaccountable elation: even in winter, the skies were unreasonably blue, and the days had a bright, invigorating chill that
seemed to admit of no despair. In Japan, there was truly a sense of a culture calmly on the rise, in possession of itself and buoyant, and the mild air itself felt cleansed of cynicism and decay. Nothing was left to age here (much as the conservation-minded foreigner might have wished there to be); everything felt newly minted as a nickel. Other countries — my trip had reminded me — might seduce or assault or implicate one with the challenge of an outstretched hand; the influence of Japan, by contrast, was soft as a sheet drawn over one’s body.

  I knew, of course, that it was dangerously easy for a foreigner, who enjoyed a kind of carte blanche in living outside the system, to endorse a world in which men dragged themselves off from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. six days a week, while women were condemned to a kind of emotional exile. I knew, too, that the lightness of being here could be unbearable — an evasion or a denial — and that Japan’s optimism was willed, sometimes, or no deeper than its sugar-coated surfaces, its pink-ribboned girls quite literally trying to make their eyes as wide as possible. (When she asked her students to find three adjectives to describe themselves, a longtime foreign teacher told me, she had had to ban the use of “cheerful,” or else every girl in class would use it.)

  Yet still, I thought, it took a certain courage to be positive, and it was always easier to negate than to affirm. The fact that they had been trained always to see the good, and to expect the same in others, might make the Japanese vulnerable abroad, but at home it worked as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. And the smiles might be all artifice, but better false smiles, I thought, on the level of daily routine, than honest rudeness. Within its strict limits, and on paper at least, the Japanese seemed to have created a kind of child’s utopia of clean surfaces and safe pleasures. One reason Kyoto took me back to England was that it took me back to childhood, and to its sense of protected calm.