The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  And, from Mark, a beautiful sumi-e drawing of a Buddha, still and depthless, found in meditation.

  SPRING

  Spring rain

  In our sedan chair

  Your soft whisper.

  – THE ZEN POET BUSON

  1

  ON THE NIGHT I returned from my trip to see the Dalai Lama, only hours after I stepped off the plane, I got a call from Sachiko, more softly urgent than ever, begging me, through snuffled tears, to meet her now, please, anywhere, even though it was almost midnight. I hurried over to the coffee shop she mentioned, and felt a pang of fondness as I saw her standing there, her small figure patient in the dark. Smiling bravely through her tears, she led me inside, still sniffling, and ordered “milk tea” for us both, then flung herself sobbing into my lap.

  “Sachiko, Sachiko, what’s wrong?”

  She sat up, brushing the tears from her face. “I little see movie, Mannequin.” This in itself did not seem cause for sorrow. “No, no,” she went on. “You not understand! I plan go together Sandy, Canadian man. But Sandy, many plan change, all cancel! Then I go together Canadian man! Very good movie, I very fun. But then he attack me!”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head, inarticulate with grief.

  “What exactly did he do, Sachiko?” I persisted, typically crass. “I don’t understand.”

  “He try kiss me,” she finally got out. “First time, my life! Japanese man very gentle, very kind. But foreigner man so different. I very shock.” She gulped down sniffles and sobs. “Foreigner person very dangerous!” In all her life, she had told me in the autumn — and it was easy to believe her — she had only ever kissed her husband. And in a life so empty of event, even the smallest upset could seem like devastation.

  “Don’t worry, Sachiko,” I reassured her with spurious fluency. “Not all foreign men are terrible. Two kinds come to Japan: some wanting much money, many girls; some who truly want to understand the Japanese heart.” She looked at me solemnly, swallowing back her tears, attentive as a chastened child, but I could tell that theories wouldn’t help, and I could tell that she was already beginning to feel the terrors of straying far from native ground.

  Back in Kyoto now, I settled back into myself as into a hot sentō bath, feeling invigorated by the city, and cleaned out. Sitting at my sun-washed desk in the quiet days, I returned to familiar observances: the punctual singing cry, each morning, of the little girl calling to her mother; the midmorning walk of the hobbled old lady with hair the color of smokers’ teeth to the coin laundry down the street; the afternoon tinkle of trilling piano melodies; the lonely, melancholy sound of country ballads from the Chinese laundry shop drifting through the narrow lanes at night.

  In the weeks I had been away, my neighborhood had, on its surface, transformed itself: a two-story concrete block with the look of an ice cream sandwich towered now above the grandma-and-pa grocery stores, and in the next alley down, a gleaming new health food store was trying to attract new customers. A card dealer from Reno — and, before that, Santa Barbara — had moved into my guesthouse, as well as a tall, brittle businessman from Harvard, who stalked up and down the corridors, in two-tone shirts and three-piece suits, howling, “Blow, winds, blow.”

  The coordinates of my own Kyoto, however, remained un-changed. When I went to the copy shop, the cackling, clown-faced proprietor was so delighted to see me — her most faithful, and I sometimes suspected her only, customer — that she even effected an introduction to her growling familiar, a lumpy, sad-eyed dog called Goro, thirteen years old now and half blind. The matron at the photo shop demurely murmured “Pico-san,” as soon as I walked in, and chuckled happily as she tried once more to turn my name into phonetic Japanese characters. And the three girls at the post office, though looking up in alarm from their abacuses when they saw me enter, were sufficiently worldly now to deal with a letter to Brunei Daressalam, to know that American Samoa (despite its zip code) had little to do with America, and to handle a parcel to a person whose surname I didn’t know. When I rang up the Tourist Information Center to ask who had won Miss Universe, the girls who worked there not only surprised me with the answer but, after a giggling conference, asked if I approved.

  So much of my Kyoto life caught up now in these unpre-possessing associations, and, by now, so much of myself. Giving up the world, I thought, was easy; renouncing the Rolls-Royce or Rolex I had never wanted in the first place was no harder than going on the wagon for a teetotaler. But giving up my world — the specific feelings and mementos that seemed the fabric of my being — was altogether different. On that form of attachment, though, as on every other, Zen was singularly uncompromising: memories could be as possessive, and as wasting, as sapphires, or lusts, or hopes.

  Though I had been four months in Japan now, it still seemed, often, as if I had landed, with an unseemly bump, on some unworldly star. Whenever I walked down the street to my local convenience store, the Familiar, I felt as if I were walking into a surrealist’s collage. On the wall of my lane, a sign informed me, pleasantly:

  This is my STYLE.

  The city is a 24-hour stage where we act out a life that is lively, free, and convenient. Be it day or night, we go out at any time to wherever we like, looking for something new. This scooter is just right for a life-style.

  — CITY MOTORBIKE

  Around me were fresh-faced, bespectacled boys in warm-up jackets that said “Neo-Blood,” shy teenage girls whose coats said “Dental Democracy.”

  Inside the store itself, where a Japanese Springsteen was delivering a Muzak version of the Boss’s “Brilliant Disguise,” I bought some Chips Company potato chips, their box announcing, disarmingly, “We are the nicest friends in all the world.” As a happy-voiced announcer on the PA system advised us all to enjoy our stay in the store, I went over to buy a Clean Life Please dustcloth. “FACILE for your clean life,” this helpful rag declared. “You grow to be beautiful in a pleasant and unforgettable mood.” Nearby, goods were clamoring to reassure me: My Green Life utensils, Enjoy and Laundry cloths, hand soaps for “creating your dreamy life.” Sometimes the objects here seemed almost more animated than the people.

  As I headed home, newly befriended and more beautiful, in a pleasant and unforgettable mood, past the machine that offered Drink Paradise and Your Joyful Drink, I glimpsed a pink cushion embroidered with renditions of a cartoon cat. On it, entitled Fleçon Chat, was an atmospheric scene:

  There’s a tranquil mood all over Montparnasse in the afternoon. The only sound is the gay chattering of Lyceenne and her mates. A persian cat with a beautifully silky hair hunches down gracefully near the window. She looks a little like a lady putting on airs. Her fascinating blue eyes! What a brilliant, happy afternoon, as if we’re in the world of Baudelaire’s poetry.

  These sunny, baffling sentiments were everywhere in Japan — on T-shirts, carrier bags, and photo albums — rhyming, in their way, with the relentlessly chirpy voices that serenaded one on elevators, buses, and trains; it did not take a Roland Barthes to identify Japan as an Empire of Signs. These snippets of nonsense poetry were also, of course, the first and easiest target of most foreigners in Japan, since they were often almost the only signs in English, and absurd: creamers called Creep, Noise snacks that came in different colors, pet cases known as Effem (whether in honor of the fairer sex or high-frequency radio, it was hard to tell). Every newly arrived foreigner could become an instant sociologist when faced with this cascade of automatic writing, not stopping to think, perhaps, how often we may spray paint our T-shirts with elegant-looking Japanese characters that mean nothing to us, or something worse.

  Nonetheless, it was hard not to notice how often certain words recurred in these slogans and contrived to create a certain atmosphere. Multimillion-dollar ad campaigns were no more random here than in America, and it was clearly no coincidence that they chose again and again to return to “dreams” and “feelings,” to metaphors of community and gentlene
ss, to imported notions of freedom and society. (“Coke is it,” the slogan nearly everywhere else in the world, became, in Japan, the moodier, and more involving, “I feel Coke.”) So too, it was hard to overlook how many of the T-shirts spoke of “clubs” and “tribes” and “circles,” and how often kiosks or clubs or signs invoked the first person plural (Let’s Archery or the Let’s grocery store). Even packs of cigarettes announced themselves as “An Encounter with Tenderness,” and Toyota and Honda gave their domestically sold models unusually soft and feminine names. Sometimes, in fact, the Dada fragments seemed almost to be inventories of cherished values, as in the Roget’s exuberance of the ad for Nescafé’s Excellent Coffee:

  It’s happiness people loving casual time caring friendly tasty everyday relaxing cosiness fun intimate heart open likeable and togetherness. It’s warmth heart embracing pure gentle comradeship you us family sharing sociable aroma liveliness tenderness smiling easy and yours.

  Occasionally, too, they let out the other side of Japan: a group of S & M kiddies on motorbikes, fierce-eyed and demented, with hostile scowls, under the legend: “Though They’re Hot-Blooded, Hard-Nosed and Crazy, Really They Act According to Their Principles. It’s a Purple Story at Midnight.” Rebellion made user-friendly; just another fashion statement.

  Most often, though, the Japanese brought their poetic touch to English and created out of the imported sounds a haunting kind of synesthetic beauty, with an air of lulling, melancholy mystery; often, the buzzwords came together to create a kind of Pop Art haiku, rainswept and misty as a video.

  SMOKE ON THE PURPLE TOWN

  When time is softly

  Veiled in a flower of black

  tea, what dreams are your dreams?

  ran an ad under a picture of a Picasso-like fellow enshrouded in fog on a Dantean New York street, under the warning: “All worldly things are transitory.”

  In the same magazine, another set of images again turned rough surfaces into poems:

  BEYOND THE MEMORY OF MAN

  my sepia memory

  blurred with tears. I long

  for it so much now.

  These dreamy flights of inspired lyricism could work on one strangely, composed as they were not of words but associations: syllables used as moods, as ideograms. I came in time to find my imagination expanded by my Clean Mail writing paper, subtitled “Sound of Waves,” or the monochrome photo album entitled Les Étoiles Brillantes (its subtitle sketching a Japanese ideal: “The wind whispers softly, the sun shines brightly all around, the flowers radiate joyfulness. Here the animals live cheerfully in peaceful co-operation”). Even the paper on my individually wrapped Fine Raisin Cookies declared, “Beautiful things are beyond time. Woman’s history never ceases to yearn for beauty.”

  This poppy poetry was, in spite of itself, Japanese, I thought: in some sense, it meant nothing, and yet — in the Japanese way — it substituted atmosphere for meaning and so caught the aroma of a feeling. Meaning or its absence hardly mattered; there was no more point in belaboring a meaning here than in trying to pin one down in a photo or a tanka. Instead of analysis, one should simply surrender; surrender to the lovely, strange trompe l’oeil:

  City streets at dawn

  A soft mist

  Fire on the mountainside.

  Downtown Kyoto was strange to me in different ways, for as I came to know the central covered mall, I registered a curious discrepancy. There were two parallel aisles in the arcade, both of them typical strips of buzzing lights, cartoon faces, fast-food joints, and the occasional porno store. One, though, was always in the usual Japanese state of perpetual quiet rush hour, crammed with uniformed schoolgirls, sleek ladies of the water trade, and beribboned office ladies; the other was as lonely as a ghost town.

  One day, as we wandered through the mall together, I asked Mark about this. Well, he said, one of the streets, Teramachi, or the Street of Temples, had long been a place of religious sites and graveyards, razed now by the mallifying city. But Kyotoites still tended to shun it as much as they did the areas of the untouchables, or any haunted house: they did not relish the sensation of walking on the bones of their ancestors. So the whole strip was generally empty, save for its Buddhist shops.

  Certainly, the longer I stayed in Kyoto, the more I discovered how many spirits still lingered in its byways and back alleyways, and how much, even now, an animistic strain still haunted this sleek and secular society. For all the futuristic finish of the city’s ways and surfaces, it had never fully relinquished its wilder pagan past. The Japanese still slept in certain directions that they deemed auspicious, and left food out on their doorsteps to appease the fox spirits; in the countryside, where houses lacked air-conditioning, people still told one another ghost stories to keep each other cool in summer. Sea spray was said to be the heads of shipwrecked ghosts, and a winter exorcism was still conducted near my home. One foreigner I knew lived rent-free in a huge old house that no Japanese would enter because it was said to be haunted; even a seven-hundred-dollar Shinto priest had failed to clean it out.

  I noted too, as time went on, how often Sachiko referred to God, and how much he resembled the stern Calvinist dispenser of the West. If clouds began to gather on a day we met, she’d grow quiet, very often, and say, a little ruminatively, “God little give this day. Maybe he want punish me.” When I told her that I had had a chilling dream of her turning hard and brittle, she startled me by explaining, “You me very close. Then maybe God little jealous.” Most often, though, she would interpret — or describe, at least — every happy development in her life as a gift from heaven. “I get very good Benny Goodman ticket,” she said once. “Maybe God give me!” “I don’t think so,” I replied, a little churlishly. “I think God has bigger things to think about.”

  I knew, though, that I was being less than fair or understanding. For God was clearly one of the terms that got most thoroughly misplaced in translation (with singular and plural fatally blurred, and Sachiko, perhaps, translating her beliefs into words I’d understand), and however much she seemed to be conflating Christian images with Shinto superstitions in the rites she performed in Buddhist temples, she was clearly committing herself to something more than form or ritual. Whenever we passed a Buddha, she would stop and close her eyes, her palms pressed tightly together. And whatever the communication taking place, it clearly involved some exchange of feelings so intense that I stood back so as not to trespass on it. It reminded me at times of Niels Bohr’s answer to the people who said that he could not truly believe in the lucky charm he kept on his wall. Of course not, he said, but it was said that it brought you luck even if you did not believe in it.

  When harassed, Sachiko still took herself to the daphne-scented quiet of the temples. And when she had done kendō fencing at dawn, she said, or when she listened to the rōshi speak, or when she went alone to Eikandō, she fell into a place so still, it sounded like a higher self. It was not so much, perhaps, that her feeling for Zen betrayed a Zen spirit as that both her feeling and Zen betrayed a common source still deeper in the Japanese heart, a natural sympathy for purity and peace.

  At the same time, in Sachiko, I was beginning to see a plaintive sense of guilt that made again a mockery of the sociologists’ explanations of how the cultures of the East have a sense of “shame” and not of “guilt.” Again and again, when we were together, she said darkly, “I very bad daughter. I very bad mother. I bad wife,” and though some of this may only have been a ritual disclaimer, some, I could sense, really did prey on her. For a while, I had wondered whether perhaps she had a secret life that was the subtext of these self-reproaches. But in time, I realized that she didn’t, and that her sense of insufficiency stemmed only from the fact that she longed now and then to be away from her children, chose on occasion to go out without telling her mother, craved sometimes a little time for herself. In Japan, of course, that was tantamount to heresy — if everyone started indulging herself in this way, the whole system would collapse. Self-i
nterest must be communal.

  Sachiko, then, was tyrannized by the cult of perfection here. But more than that, I could see that she was haunted by the fear of failing other expectations, which were something more than social: she felt discomfort at her knowledge that her mother’s death might be a source of relief as well as sorrow; guilt at the fact that she could not wholeheartedly embrace the notion of unquestioning self-sacrifice; unease at her sense that her dreams — or, more exactly, her wish to realize them — were a violation of the code in which she had been trained. She sensed that she was a traitor to Japan’s values, and she knew that excommunication here was, quite literally, a fate worse than death (since death at least involved the preservation of honor).

  Yet all these feelings had another, surprising twist, to me at least: for insofar as she felt any unease about our being together, it was clearly because she saw it as a betrayal, not of her husband but of her mother. Her husband, she often implied, was no more affected by her doings than a big boss might be; her emotional life had little to do with the practical setup of her marriage, and he, in any case, had little interest in her life. But her mother was the one she saw as conscience, confidante, and caretaker of her better self. It was her mother who checked in on her daily, closely assessed her performance as a mother, and told her often — this highly capable and efficient thirty-year-old mother of two — that she should not go out in the rain or venture outside after dark. It was her mother who exerted the gentlest kind of emotional blackmail, in large part because it was her mother who had always been her one and closest friend. And so her mother had become, in a sense, an instrument for her sense of religion, until her religion itself came to seem a reflection of her mother: both were symbols of a higher law that held her to moral standards.