The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  Thus the qualities she responded to in the Buddha, she said, were his calm smile and “sweet eyes” — like those of a mother; and the reason she listened to the rōshi was that he tended to his followers as a mother to her flock; and her favorite statue in Kyoto was the Buddha at Eikandō looking over his shoulder to check on his disciple, an emblem of maternal solicitude and love. Motherhood was, of course, her constant frame of reference — her job, in a sense — and therefore the keyhole through which she saw the world; yet it was also something more, as if the mother were as integral to her notion of religion as a father is to ours. “Please you show me picture your mother?” she often asked, with even more urgency than the people from whom I had heard the same request in such matriarchies as Cuba and the Philippines.

  It was, I supposed, only natural, in strictly partitioned Japan, where mothers have complete control of home and family, and fathers take all responsibility for work, that images of compassion and conscience be invariably associated with the mother. Doi Takeo’s claim that amae, or the feeling of indulged passivity a baby feels at its mother’s breast, was a sensation peculiarly important to Japan — the emotional heart of Japan, in fact — was all but a cliché now. Yet it also confirmed my sense of how closely the sense of motherland here reflected — and paralleled — the sense of motherhood. When she had got married, Sachiko told me, it had been as fearful an act to her as exile; and her mother, really, was her clearest embodiment of Japan, with her reverence for the Emperor, her love of ancient poems, her fidelity to all the antique customs. Conversely, of course, society itself here smothered its children like an overprotective mother, winding them up in a net of social securities that was all but impossible to escape. And when venturing out of their motherland and into the world at large, the Japanese really did seem often like chicks jumping out of their nests into a terra that was all incognita. Japan was a mother, mother was Japan: the two great nurturing deities converged.

  Even Ryōkan, I recalled, the high priest of unorthodox self-sufficiency, had returned, in his mind, to the two still points of worship:

  The island of Sado,

  Morning and evening I often see it in my dreams,

  Together with the gentle face of my mother.

  2

  ONE DAY, before the cherries came to town, I jumped into a bullet train — the perfect emblem of Japan, all noiseless speed and purpose, the world flashing by in a series of well-framed tableaux, all comforts brought to one in an air-conditioned space — and went to Nagasaki. All day I walked along its gently sloping hills, down an avenue of temples fringed by palm trees and cactus, through quiet streets lit up by kindergarten cries. Whether as cause, or effect, of its historical position as the one Japanese port mostly open to the world, the city had a looseness, and an ease, I hadn’t found in Kyoto, a freedom from care that let dogs run around unleashed and taxi drivers go ungloved.

  In the evening, I found a room in a tiny traditional inn, which doubled as a shell museum, and drew myself a deep hot bath. Just as I was settling into it, however, there came a frantic knocking at my door; it was one of the matrons of the inn, desperately summoning me downstairs. There, she pointed to the phone, dangling off its hook, and as I picked it up, stared at by the matron and a goggle-eyed accomplice, all of us surrounded by tanks of tropical fish, I heard a fact-checker in New York asking me whether the Thai name of Bangkok could be translated as “village of wild olive groves.”

  Since the answer (it could) had to be faxed off immediately to New York, I took the two ladies out of their misery by taking myself out of their hostel and setting off down the silent, empty streets. Then, after giving my fax to the largest hotel in town, I slipped into the nearest restaurant I could find: a basement dive called Caveau. Inside, amidst the clinking of glasses and the makeshift incense of smoke rings, I saw, to my surprise, one whole table of jolly young Japanese toasting two foreigners: a bearded, ruddy engineer, from Boston, I learned from eavesdropping, and a bewildered, fresh-faced Englishman. Every time either of them spoke, there rose up a great roar of approval, as the other diners clinked glasses and doubled over in loud mirth. I, taken aback, took a small booth in the corner and ordered pizza.

  Before long, however, and inevitably, a couple of the gaijin groupies leaned over and invited me to join the party. I soon found myself in what seemed a kind of heretic clan, a secret society gathered in this underground haunt to imbibe and celebrate the values of abroad. All five Japanese at the table had the lit-up, fervent look of eager revolutionaries. One of them, a thirty-eight-year-old businessman, in pressed white shirt and black tie, a graduate in economics from Nagasaki University, leaned over woozily, extended a hand, and said, “Bullshit. I am happy to meet you.” Another, a stocky young character, flop-topped and flip-tongued, announced over the general roar, “My name is Shinji. You can call me Jason.

  “Very strange Japanese guy, hey,” he went on, surveying the scene around us. “Wild and crazy guy!”

  “Are you a student?”

  “Naw. I was in Waseda University, one year. Then I drop out. This stuff is bullshit! One hundred forty thousand dollars for one year doctor’s school!”

  Shinji presented himself, in fact, as a perfect inversion of the Japanese ideal. Instead of defining himself by his professional affiliation, he refused to admit to any job; instead of observing the same routine every day, he claimed that he spent most of his time just zigzagging around the country; and instead of pledging his life to family, community, and Japan, he seemed to dream only of escape. I could not tell whether he was ashamed of his job (as a glorified delivery boy, perhaps) or proud of it (as a smuggler of sorts?), but I could see that his main interest was to observe Japan through foreign eyes.

  Later, as the party began to disperse in a cloud of happy Fuck yous and bleary toasts, Shinji showed again how eager he was to be an American by inviting me to hit the town with him the following night, the first such invitation I had ever received from a Japanese male (most of whom, in any case, had no nights at their disposal). The next day, he called me in the shell museum to assure me he was coming — even the rebels in Japan seemed inalienably Japanese — and then, on the stroke of seven, appeared on my doorstep. Diligent as a tour guide, he began driving me through the winding hills of Nagasaki, until we reached a lookout point, a classic lovers’ view of the muzzy lights of the city, as romantic from here as Loti’s city, with the great liners out at sea transporting their cargo of lights. A view of possibility, a vision of flight.

  As we wound our way back down again, Shinji started to cross-question me.

  “Who is your favorite musician?”

  “Do you know Jackson Browne?”

  His eyes widened. “My favorite!” he exclaimed in astonishment.

  Somewhat taken aback, I wrung his hand in delight.

  “Actually, I also like Bruce Springsteen.”

  His eyes brightened. “My favorite!”

  Remarkable, I thought: we seemed to have exactly the same tastes.

  “You like Dire Straits?”

  “Very much.”

  “My favorite!” he exclaimed, in mock astonishment.

  Clearly, “favorite” was as elastic a term here as “best friend”; and however much “Jason” was keen to leave Japan, the Japanese wish to harmonize had clearly not left him.

  “What about David Lindley?” I asked, trying to make my choices a little more obscure.

  “Sure! My favorite!”

  Then, just as credibility was beginning to snap, he added, “I have a tape, very special tape, David Lindley live, together Clarence Clemons!”

  Swinging into a parking place, Shinji announced, with his chuckling air of boyish bonhomie, “Now I introduce you Nagasaki restaurant.”

  “Excellent.”

  We made our way through a generic mall, all dizzy lights and giggly girls, and into a McDonald’s.

  “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger!” he cried, doubling over in laughter.

  Togeth
er we trooped upstairs and found a table under a cartoon landscape. Later, as we munched our fries, Shinji outlined his worldview.

  “All Japanese like blond hair, blue eye, green eye, pale skin. To us is very beautiful. I don’t like.” Around him, McDonald’s was a clatter of trays and conveyor-belt fun. “Japanese people do not know other country. Not interesting. Japanese people think all Americans open, friendly. ‘Hi.’ Some are. Some not so friendly. Many Americans do not like Saturday Night Live because it makes many jokes about the Jews, many jokes about the Irish. The Jews are not like other Americans. They have a too strange mind. Too strange!”

  He let out a raucous whoop. They’re not the only ones, I thought.

  “I meet an American Jew one time — too strange! The Koreans here are the same as the Jews in America. The Japanese are very unfair to Koreans. Why? You know that eighty percent of pachinko parlor owners are Korean? Pachinko parlor owners very rich! Japanese people know about England and America. But they know nothing about Asia. But we are part of Asia!”

  He was sounding more and more like a Kyoto gaijin.

  “English people, too much snob — their nose in air! I have friend, his father friend Attenborough. But English people, French people, very gentle.” He meant, I saw, as Sachiko did, “gentle” as in gentil, the back-derivation of “gentleman.” “Canadian man too.

  “Which movie you like? My favorite John Belushi. And Jack Nicholson! Cheeseburger, cheeseburger!”

  Then, with typical abruptness, Shinji lowered his voice and spread a softer kind of subversion. He was reading now a “secret history” of the war — precisely the kind of book, I realized, that foreigners loved to read here. It explained how FDR was aware of Pearl Harbor in advance, and went on to outline all Japans atrocities and cover-ups. “Same Last Emperor movie,” he whispered, brandishing his heresy. “You like Miami Dolphins?”

  “Sure.”

  “My favorite!”

  Then, as we got ready to go, Shinji cast his eye over all the bright Formica tables, where chic college girls were sitting primly over Happy Meals and Corn Potage Soups. “All of them,” he intoned, making his face cartoonish, “pay much high money for clothes. But here” — he pointed to his head — “empty!”

  The next thing I knew, he was whizzing me back through the mall, and occasionally dancing up to groups of female passersby, like De Niro in New York, New York.

  “You want to see my home?”

  “Okay,” I said, and again we were driving through quiet streets into a silent neighborhood.

  “Why you so kind?” asked Shinji, not for the first time. My kindness, I knew, had extended so far to nothing more than accepting his hospitality, but I heard the same question from Sachiko too, and knew that it reflected not just empty pleasantry or routine inquiry: the Japanese really were anxious to know what was expected of them in return, and what kind of emotional debt they were running up.

  Credit ratings uncertain, we parked along a canal and, slipping between wooden homes, stole into a house, and up a staircase, past his sleeping father. Shinji’s room, not unexpectedly, was a perfect replica of Western undergraduate chaos, one skewed pile of tangled sheets and tapes and books and empty cartons of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Above the bed smiled a semi-life-size Shiseido girl.

  “My parents are divorced,” Shinji announced, as if to certify his status as a crazy, messed-up Western kid.

  In one respect, though, his room was typically Japanese. For the main item that commanded attention here was the high-tech HQ, one long black switchboard console of CD, VCR, TV, stereo system, and Bose speakers, lined up on a shelf as carefully as a shrine might be in an Indian household. And Shinji’s record collection was like nothing I had ever seen before, big enough to stock a record store: hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of albums, all kept in clean, transparent sleeves, arranged by genre and alphabet, across shelf after shelf — soul, jazz, country, female vocalist, psychedelic, British Invasion, punk, L.A. session band, art rock, soft rock, surf rock.

  “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger!” he cried again.

  I looked up from all the albums, dazed.

  “You know cheeseburger?”

  “Sure! I eat them all the time!”

  “Cheeseburger very funny,” Shinji pronounced. The Japanese word for “funny” had the same double meaning as our own, I recalled. Then he flipped on a tape of Bill Murray and Chevy Chase doing some “cheeseburger” routine on an old segment of Saturday Night Live: samurai humor took on new meaning here.

  “You like all these kinds of music?” I went on.

  “Right now, my favorite the Mersey Sound,” he said, shutting off the “cheeseburger” routine. “Gerry and the Pacemakers! Herman’s Hermits! The Dave Clark Five! You know Manfred Mann?” I nodded. “My favorite!”

  “Do your friends like this too?”

  “Naw.” He mimicked disgust. “Japanese like only two kind music: Japanese pop and top hits, MTV style. They do not know Dave Clark Five, Sam Cooke.”

  “You have Sam Cooke?” I said, perking up.

  “Only six,” he apologized, pulling them out from the S section of Soul, rarities unavailable in the U.S. for years, complete with paisley-tone liner notes by “Hugo and Luigi” and cover versions of classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

  “Kinks?”

  “Only three.”

  “Dead?”

  He looked back, stunned. “My favorite! ‘Playing in the Band.’ I am sixties person. Hippie. But Japanese people only like eighties.”

  “You should come to Kyoto.”

  And so the interrogation went on, through Elvis Costello, and King Crimson albums I hadn’t seen since my teens, and even such arcana as Pete Sinfield. More surprising to me, Shinji wasn’t just a collector; he actually knew the records well and had all the right rock-critic views on them. “Carly Simon has same face Mick Jagger! New Springsteen record mā-mā [so-so]. Some of it, like ‘Nebraska,’ some very big sound. I think Mark Knopfler’s teacher, Ry Cooder. My favorite Ry Cooder song is Hawaii one. He great! But not like money. Many star, too much money! Too much rich! MTV, videos, producer. Much money spoil people. Look Jackson Browne: first three albums very good, then too much money! Diane Lane same. She has old woman’s face. And Daryl Hannah — she baka [stupid]! Nothing in her head.” Such was the predicament of a Japanese dissident, I thought: little to rebel against save MTV and Daryl Hannah.

  Then he flipped open a box of tapes and pulled out a rare David Lindley bootleg.

  “This is for me?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  As I looked it over, Shinji strolled over to the chest of drawers, reached for a bottle, and slapped on some aftershave. I stared with new intensity at his albums, eager not to know what was going on; Shinji began cleaning his teeth. I looked around for reassurances, and steadied myself with two framed photos of his girlfriend. Then, just as I was excavating some prehistoric Neil Young, Shinji started running his electric Norelco over his face. Now, I thought, I knew how a girl felt when her host started prettying himself up.

  Suddenly, just as I was sinking into the Dead’s “Mama Tried,” he jumped up and said, “Let’s go.” I looked at my watch and realized that it was eleven-twenty; to cover my options, I had told him that I had to be back at the shell museum by eleven-thirty.

  Driving back through hushed and rainswept streets, he suddenly asked, “Yesterday, what will you do?”

  Another piece of surrealism, I thought, till I remembered Sachiko’s similar confusion.

  “Tomorrow, do you mean?”

  “Sure”.

  “I think I’ll leave,” I said, to be on the safe side. “Do you like Richard Thompson?”

  “Sure! My favorite! Fairport Convention!”

  “With Sandy Denny.”

  “Hey, you like folk? Pentangle, Steeleye Span, Lindesfarne. You know ‘Led Zeppelin IV’?”

  “Led Zeppelin?”

  “Sure. Sandy Denny make guest appearance. Now d
ead.”

  Then, his slaphappy exuberance not subsiding for a moment, he continued, “What kind of dream you have tonight? Wet dream?”

  “No. Very dry.”

  “About exams?”

  “Maybe. And the Emperor.”

  That, I thought, should keep him quiet. But only briefly. “How about I share your bed?”

  This, it seemed, was taking his love of the foreign a little far. “No, thank you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d rather be alone, thank you. Good night.”

  “Good night,” he said, politely dropping me off at the entrance to the inn and waving a cheerful textbook goodbye.

  3

  BACK HOME in Kyoto, the late-March days eased by in one seamless flow of blue epiphanies: the first touch of spring was bringing a refreshed brilliance to the heavens, and mild afternoons of loosened shirts and hopes. I drank tea with a slice of orange and ate melon sorbet in a coffee shop whose window announced, unexpectedly, “I’d like to eat with you and gaze into your eyes while we talk of UFOs,” and I went to a university rock concert where a couple of blue- and pink-suited emcees exchanged TV patter while mop-haired singers in dark glasses leaped up and down on stage in a frenzy of punk nihilism, jerking themselves around with borrowed fury while a guitarist played solos with his teeth; I read articles about this year’s Miss Universe contestant from Japan (“Michiko Sakaguai enjoys flower arrangement, playing the electronic organ, and golf”) and translated Latin tags from Iris Murdoch — it was always Iris Murdoch here, among the matrons and the literati — for an overzealous professor of English literature who felt he could not understand her without knowing the meaning of these phrases. I caught a glimpse of the Grammy Awards on Mark’s TV and felt as if I’d stumbled onto hidden treasure.

  In Kyoto indeed, as anywhere abroad, I was recovering a kind of innocence, as time slowed down, and space opened up, and everything seemed new, even — especially — the things I knew from home. Going to the movies only once every two months, I found myself curiously spellbound: I went to Fatal Attraction (equipped here with a happy — or, at least, less savage — ending) and gasped at its most standard of manipulations; I saw Benji: The Hunted in a darkened cinema and was intensely moved by the otherworldly self-sacrifice of its eponymous hero — a kind of four-legged Bodhisattva — until I noticed that the only other person in the theater, a frazzled-looking salaryman, was slumped over in his seat and breathing very deeply.