The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  “This dream?” she often said, and the only answer I could find was yes.

  6

  ONE DAY, thrilled to learn that the fabled Shigeyamas, the first family of kyōgen comedy, were bringing a whole program based upon raccoons to town, I bought two tickets and dragged poor Matthew off to inspect this curious spectacle. Ready to try anything in his quest for he did not know what, Matthew had already started attending aerobics classes with Sachiko, flopping up and down amidst rows of grinning, fiendishly energetic housewives; accepted an offer from the matronly owner of his inn to accompany her on a pilgrimage to Tokyo Disneyland; and sat through an eight-hour session of Sumō.

  None of this, though, has prepared him for a raccoon theatrical festival. Soon after we take our seats, I, in the spirit of a West End theatergoer, bundle off to purchase a bag of Green Tea candy. Inside is a sachet full of blue and white micromarbles, designed to keep the candy fresh. Matthew, however, is not accustomed to such tricks of Japanese ingenuity. He peers down dubiously at the bag. “Sugar, do you think, perhaps?” he begins, breaking open the bag and shaking a few of the baubles into his hand. “Some kind of exotic confectionery?” he goes on, tossing them all into his mouth and beginning to crunch appreciatively. “Very strange, actually,” comes his first report. “No taste at all. Really rather strange. Can’t taste a thing!” He tries to bite into one. “Awfully strange! Must be glass!”

  In a flourish of fellow feeling, I, too, pop a few of the marbles into my mouth. Matthew is right: there is no taste. They are, in fact, without a shadow of a doubt, glass. I spit them out. Matthew, however, continues chewing, as serene as a cow in pasture.

  On stage, a curtain is rising on a striking blue-and-golden lacquer set, five musicians sitting stock-still, in indigo and gray. One of them begins a piercing, dissonant melody on a flute. The others pound drums. An old man walks onto the stage and goes through a strange, slow dance, flinging his sleeved arms out like wings and emitting occasional strangled grunts. We sit back in gloom: the whole thing, clearly — and understandably — is to be in Japanese.

  Next to us, two schoolchildren crane forward with the attentiveness of critics, recording the pathos on a Sony. The unearthly sounds continue, redolent, to our philistine ears, of nothing but John Cleese.

  Then, like an Indian raga, the invocation suddenly gains momentum, picks up speed, gathers an almost mesmerizing intensity — and is over. We sit back exhausted, and to celebrate our release, purchase two ice creams from an aisle-patrolling lady while Matthew looks about.

  He is still muttering something earnest about George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead when the curtain ascends once more, and, the lights still on, we watch a raccoon masquerade as a teakettle.

  “Very primitive,” Matthew shoots out in a staccato whisper, settling back in his seat with a copy of What’s on in Kyoto. “Very strange.”

  Then, of a sudden, he sits up sharply. “Think it is glass, actually! Can feel it in my throat! Rather bizarre, actually!” The comedy on stage has nothing on this.

  Meanwhile, the audience breaks into uncontrollable hysteria as a servant is surprised by the kettle-impersonating raccoon. Matthew is looking less and less enraptured. Then “The Miraculous Teakettle” gives way to “The Tanuki’s Belly Drum” and a classic fairy tale of a raccoon dressed as a nun trying to outfox a hunter by delivering a sermon on the iniquity of taking the life of any sentient being. Matthew looks positively sick by now. Then at last the tanuki passes round a bottle of sake and brings all the loose ends together in a cheerful, transformative dance.

  Matthew looks over unhappily. “Childlike, don’t you think? Terribly immature, really.”

  “Maybe. But just imagine a typical Japanese businessman going to the theater in London and ending up at No Sex Please, We’re British or a Christmas pantomime — especially if he can’t speak English. Not really very different.” As the instigator of this expedition, perhaps, I have good reason to defend what really feels like a reproach to dilettantishness and a reminder of just how culture-bound we are.

  Afterwards, less than satisfied by the entertainment so far, Matthew expresses his keenness to sample Kyoto’s nightlife. I, having always assumed this to be a closed shop, know nowhere to go except the prescribed foreigner’s haunts. At a noisy dive called the Earth Bar, we munch on cucumbers in plum sauce, cold Korean tofu, and white mushrooms cooked in butter, while drunken laughter and reggae music rise up from along the crowded wooden benches on which sit jostling multicultural couples. On a blackboard, obscene graffiti has been scrawled — to import an air of foreign aggressiveness, perhaps — demeaning Jesus with various four-letter words and culminating in the unexpected declaration: “Get your shit together: everybody must get stoned.” In a culture where exactly 6.1 ounces of cocaine was confiscated in all of 1988 and swear words are famously nonexistent, this strikes me as a curious motto.

  Matthew looks up and down the smoke-filled room mournfully, then tells me what is bothering him.

  “It’s not that one has to understand other people,” he begins plaintively, “but one does want to be understood. I’m fascinated by the Japanese. But I have the feeling they’re not at all fascinated by me.”

  “I think they’re just shy, or afraid, or too embarrassed to express themselves in a language whose codes they haven’t mastered,” I opine. “It’s just as if you were to run into Bruce Springsteen or Robert De Niro in a restaurant; you might be too shy to go up to them. And even if you did, you might not know what to say. They seem to belong to another realm.”

  “Yes, yes,” he says impatiently. “But where are all the girls who idolize Sting and ought to see that I’m the closest they’ll ever get to him?”

  “All around. You just don’t recognize them because you’re looking too hard.”

  “But somehow the charm doesn’t work here. In Brazil, in Italy, in Thailand, I never had any trouble meeting people. But this place is like another planet. I mean, people stare at me in the street as if I were a kind of animal.” He looks puzzled, and my heart goes out to him. “Actually, I suppose it’s all rather good. Awfully good, actually. Terribly liberating.” He doesn’t sound convinced.

  “But why should they want to be friends, Matthew? Why should they make the effort to cross the culture gap? It’s not as if we have that much to offer them, scarcely speaking their language and ignorant of their culture. When I’m at home, I certainly don’t go out of my way to befriend the Hmong, say, or the Japanese, especially if they can’t even speak my language.”

  “Yes, yes, suppose you’re right,” he says, gloomier than ever.

  “Remember, too,” I go on remorselessly, “that we’re seeing them in the one context — speaking English — where they’re liable to seem most ungraceful and ill at ease. And yet we bridle when they mock — or even when they compliment — our Japanese. Complaining that Japan is closed seems as beside the point as a Japanese complaining that America is open.”

  “I know,” he continues sadly. “But I still feel like the man who fell to earth.”

  Outside again, we thread our way across quiet canals in the dark, the winter silence broken only by the cracked importunities of husky streetwalkers with the voices of old men. Around us, amidst the reeling neon, hostesses in tight makeup and cocktail dresses are wriggling out of the entrances of clubs, bowing their customers into taxis, arranged like nodding dolls on the sidewalk. Weaving through the water-world, Matthew suddenly looms up before a gaggle of startled-faced girls. “Hallo! Any of you interested in a Merchant Taylors’ man?” Often, I think, it is his genuine charm that makes his unacknowledged sadness all the deeper.

  In Pub Africa, a kind of social club for the foreign dispossessed, five or six lonely gaijin men are seated around a semicircular table in front of a giant video screen, munching tiny pizzas. In booths around the darkened room, clutches of Japanese girls, maybe three or four in every giggling party, nervously look around them, drinking in the air of foreign danger an
d looking up occasionally to where Suzanne Vega is sitting on a video-jukebox stoop, singing about child abuse. Unable to catch the Japanese, I hear only the usual litanies of gaijin talk. “The Japanese are really obsessed with keeping themselves apart! Hypocritical bastards!” “My students are really a pain! They’re just too damned shy to speak English!” “I can’t believe how narrow these people are, how superficial!” On and on go the conversations — condolences in disguise — delivered, I think, with something of the overwrought intensity of a teenager spurned, trying and trying to understand why the object of his affection won’t return it and replaying all their arguments in his head (“She said I didn’t talk. But I did talk. Look at her! And why all the time …”). “You know the Japanese word for ‘different’ is the same as their word for ‘wrong’?” I hear someone say. Does that mean that the Japanese are wrong? I wonder. Just because they’re different? Sometimes the fabled ethnocentrism of Japan seems more than matched by that of many foreigners in Japan.

  As we stuff coins into the jukebox, pressing numbers so haphazardly that, suddenly, a Japanese teen idol appears on the screen before us, Parker, a friendly Southern boy from my guesthouse, appears at our side. “I need a girlfriend,” he begins, after shaking hands with Matthew. “I just broke off. I had a Japanese girlfriend for two months, then I found out that she’d had a boyfriend all the time.” Determined to find a partner in Japan, Parker has effectively ensured that he can never find one; his insistent trying seems only to confound itself, and the girls he does meet see only a man in search of girls. Thus he ends up like a kitten with a ball of string; the more he tries to untangle himself, the more tied up he becomes.

  As Parker heads off into the night, an Australian hippie, shaking his long, heavy-metal hair out of his granny-glassed eyes, leans back in his chair and extends a hand to Matthew. “Scuse me, mate. I’m Brad. Just got here, and I’m lost. All my ideas of the place were erased as soon as I got off the airplane.” “If you look for anything here,” declares Matthew, wise now after a couple of weeks, “you won’t find it. But if you don’t look for it, you’ll find it. Somewhat paradoxical, I suppose.”

  With that, we dutifully proceed on our hegira, passing strip clubs, sake bars, and weeping willows, peering in on a “live house” (with a “Snobbery Connection” badge on its window), where four boys in pink tuxedoes and black bow ties are singing “La Bamba” in the original. The main other spot on the gaijin map — the only other night stop more or less colonized by aliens — is Rub-a-Dub, a wall-to-wall reggae joint that encourages cross-cultural communication by squeezing people into so small a space that they are obliged to sit in one another’s laps. This is too much for Matthew, though, who now feels let down by both traditional Japanese culture and the foreign imports. By now, he’s getting desperate.

  Finally, we find ourselves in front of a glittering eight-story building along the canal, as slim and elegant as a giant Parker pen in the Kyoto night. Lights wink and glitter up and down the spine of the Imagium, a pleasure dome situated somewhere east of Blade Runner in the year 2040. Outside the glowing block is a board of shiny panels advertising the names of the boîtes inside this sybarite’s Tomorrowland.

  “Which shall we try?” asks Matthew, determined to break through Kyoto’s panels of glass screens.

  “Well, I don’t think one can really go to any,” I offer timidly. “It’s not like Thailand here.” Above us, the building towers, enigmatic and reproachful as the mysterious block in 2001. “Most of these places are Members Clubs, and the ones that aren’t are by invitation only. They’re virtually closed to foreigners.”

  “Oh no, not at all,” he says, and off we go. Up and up and up the silent elevator glides, through the winter night, up to the very peak of the thin wall of lights, and then it begins to come down, one floor at a time. At each stop we peer out into some postmodernist dream chamber: Hip to Be True, Nostalgia Space Was, the Pleaisure Dome. Finally, at a “café club” called Is It a Crime?, we step out into a dark chamber done up in soft indigo and sapphire neon. Inside, in the funeral hush of some rich gangster’s nightspot, an unnaturally pretty girl in a slim white dress to offset her long black hair leads us, bowing, into the club. Within, four waitresses, all in black or white, are arranged next to pillars like counters in Go. One of them steps forward and leads us to a small round table, black-and-white chopsticks placed atop a black marble surface. Behind the bar, three more color-coordinated girls, long black tresses against sheer white dresses, strike fashion-model poses, showing off their profiles. One of them shakes up a drink, white arms flashing teasingly above the sleek black counter. A girl in black stands against a pillar, ramrod straight and motionless; across from her, another unmoving girl, all in white. Men in expensive dark suits sit beside the cash register, whispering.

  Matthew turns his Milano eyes around the darkened room, one silent capsule of blinding white and black. “No good at all,” he pronounces. “It’d look terrible in the daytime. All maya, really, all an illusion. Just animated mannequins.”

  “Animated?”

  “Yes! Like in a cartoon! All here to impress. No heart. Just for show! What time is it?”

  I look at my watch and realize that here, on my first night inside the circles of the pleasure quarter, I have swallowed a kind of lethe; the night feels as weightless as some Armani ad. The Japanese seem to use their dreams less as stimulants than tranquilizers; like the death chambers in Soylent Green, almost — convenient, soundproofed ways to ease oneself away from time and space.

  The girls in black and white rearrange themselves, their dresses knotted loosely in the back.

  “Do you think we should get the bill?” Matthew says at last, another vision closed to him. A girl delicately lays the paper on the table, and he consults it with horror: two glasses of iced oolong tea — more ice than tea — cost thirty-five dollars. “Is it a crime?” he huffs. “Yes!” The beautiful hostess in white bows winningly and presses the elevator button for us. Then, as the door closes, she bows again, very deeply, and the hushed style sample disappears from view.

  7

  ONE DAY I got a call from Sachiko, even more breathless than usual.

  “You know passport?” she gasped at the other end.

  “Yes”

  “I have!” she exclaimed. “I get. Husband not know.”

  “Your first time?”

  “First time passport!” she announced. “I little go office, Osaka. Then many many question answer. Now I have! Please I show you!”

  “Yes, please. Demo ima tottemo isogashii desu.”

  “Ima now? You little busy?”

  “Hai! Yes! Why? Are you free now?”

  “Tabun maybe.”

  “Demo today is very beautiful day.”

  “Tabun maybe.” Our conversations, as ever, were strange affairs, shards of different languages flung across distances we couldn’t gauge.

  A few hours later, though, with a speed and efficiency I was coming to see as characteristic, Sachiko arrived at my room, proudly bearing her new possession, very likely the first Japanese passport she’d ever seen, let alone owned. And already — for between the intention and the action there fell no shadow here — she was working on a larger plan.

  “I much reading newspaper. Then maybe I little try tour-conductor course, Osaka! I not so strong, maybe little difficult. But I want try. I want little wing.”

  “You’ll go to Osaka every day?”

  “One week, two times! Maybe I go five o’clock, come back ten o’clock.”

  “And what about your children?”

  “I find baby-sitter. Many, many baby-sitter. I not want mother know. If know, biggg problem!”

  Before, when she had said, “I little jealous, you job,” I had thought, in my vanity, that she resented my work for keeping me away from her; only now did I realize that what she had really meant was that she, too, wanted a job, and a self of her own. Looking over at her bright-eyed resolve, I could not help but wi
sh to cheer her on.

  “Usual Japanese person believe, akirameru life better,” she went on. “You know this word?”

  I flipped through my tiny dictionary and found it: “resignation.”

  “But I not so want this life. I want dream! My mother all life very lonely,” she went on. “My father very good man, but not so good husband. Always tired. Sometimes little angry. They not so close feeling. I not want this same, my mother’s life.” Her mother, I inferred, had been obliged to fill up her emotional life with poems and temples and flowers, and it was precisely the absence of any real companionship that had made her so close to her daughter and, in a sense, so dependent on her. Now, I imagined, it would not be easy for her to watch her daughter seeking out the freedom that she herself had always lacked — and, in the process, depriving her of her only confidante.

  “But, Sachiko, this will be very difficult.”

  “I know.” She smiled back with determination. “But I little thinking Gone With the Wind. You know last scene? Tomorrow bring new world. I little hoping my life same.”

  That afternoon, she asked me to go with her to Osaka to visit the office where she would be taking her classes. As we chugged along through mile after mile of factories and featureless suburban housing, she gradually turned more philosophical.

  “All life,” she began, looking out the window at the offices, “I think, woman very weak.”

  “But in Japan, don’t you think that the women are often stronger than the men?”