The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  Being abroad, in a place still strange to me, senses sharpened, and ready to be transformed, was like being a child again — or being in love. I found myself speaking more slowly, more deliberately, here, as I delivered simple sentences in Japanese, or in an English that a Japanese might understand. Instead of trying to make phrases, or impressive sentences, I was concerned only with making sense. In speaking around a foreign language, indeed, I was forced to rethink myself, to gather my thoughts in a state of preparedness and then translate them into clarity; to speak, in fact, with a little of the lucency of Zen.

  The elegant Etsuko, meanwhile, was diligently trying to give me a taste of the other side of Japan, the fine-tuned, closed-door world of the upper-class matron. One day she invited me to a meeting of a special cultural group that she had formed to bring Japanese people (mostly women) together with foreigners, the better to get to know one another, and Japan.

  When I arrived, in a smart modern salon in the fashionable area of Shimogamo, I found myself in a room bright with the chatter of dapper ladies in their early forties, trendily turned out in leather skirts and cashmere sweaters. This, it seemed, must be the Kyoto equivalent of what Embassy wives do at the club, except that here one found an air of sophistication more rarefied than even the dinner party rites of English country houses. As soon as I entered, a group of ladies descended on me, all smiles and English phrases extended as daintily as hors d’oeuvres, and I was divested of a small donation, ticked off a list, given a name tag, and handed a program. A Mr. Ono, it seemed, a local graduate student, had planned the day’s activities in an exhortatory spirit: “Let’s get on this special train leading to a galaxy of cosmic symphony.”

  Looking around anxiously, I saw that I was the youngest person here by a decade or two, the only vagrant and the only male, save for an extremely rumpled old German professor in a dark-gray suit and an air of Schopenhauer gloom, his mood apparently not improved by being identified on his name tag as “Rols” (his wife, more cryptically still, was labeled “Bal”). Depositing myself down next to Rols and Bal, I was well embarked on lugubrious chitchat when suddenly Mr. Ono called the meeting to order. His subject, he said, was play, and its meaning. His particular expertise was in the giant swing to be found in downtown Bangkok, and his belief that play admitted us to the same sense of liberating ecstasy as religion. Rols slumped back in his chair, the chirpy bird ladies craned forward, lipsticked faces alert, pretty skirts tidy against bended knees.

  Then, leaping up, Mr. Ono started playing Jankenpon (or paper/scissors/stone) with himself and scribbled some marks up on an impromptu screen. The Embassy wives murmured a collective “ooh,” heads delicately balanced on fists. Rols, however, looked a long way from catharsis. Then, unexpectedly, Mr. Ono darted around the room, handing out pieces of string. Please could we make cat’s cradles? he urged. Doing so, we felt, in some cases, little of the liberating ecstasy of religion.

  Then we adjourned for lunch, an exquisite affair of persimmons, strawberries, kiwifruit, salad, and pizza. Daintily, the Embassy wives picked at their pizza with chopsticks. I, circulating inwards more than out, ambushed a couple of them and made a bid for cultural understanding. One of them professed a breathless concern for the stories of Somerset Maugham, the other was reading Les Misérables in the original.

  Then Mr. Ono, a serious-looking fellow with spectacles above his broad young face, and a jacket and tie, strode back into the room with a cello, accompanied by another student, carrying a flute. A sweet-looking girl in black velvet dress and sheer white stockings — recently escaped, it seemed, from some heart-shaped Victorian locket — sat down at the piano and, pedaling with stockinged feet, unraveled a rippling melody. Mr. Ono, closing his eyes with feeling, started bowing his cello in a series of plaintive duets by Elgar, Saint-Saëns, and one “T. Ono.” Then, half collapsing from his exertions, the versatile hero sank into a chair, and we were treated to lilting piano and flute duets.

  Then, just as all seemed lost, suddenly a revived Mr. Ono burst into song, a ditty written by himself, no less, ineffably plaintive in its commemoration of lonely bicycles and vanished youth. Finally, the tireless trio tore into a sonata by Handel and, in response to cries of “Encore!” from the enraptured women, yet another Handel trio.

  Sitting in the sunlit room on this bright afternoon, a spotless tatami chamber beside me, and perky doctors’ wives, conversant to a woman with Paris and New York, while a Masterpiece Theatre heroine played the piano in an Emily Brontë dress, I felt I had landed in a salon fashioned only from the imagination. And at the end, two pretty sprites, maybe nine years old each and fresh from The Faerie Queene, padded in, and shyly presented roses to each of the performers. Then — of course — it was photo time again (turning life into memorial art), and a departure from this Sei Shōnagon circle, back into the world.

  As winter began to lift, Sachiko began to find new ways for us to spend time together. One day, as we were walking through a temple, she asked me, as if casually, “You eat every day in restaurant?” And then, a little later, “Where you wash clothes?” I answered her directly, and only later saw her drift. “Why you not: come here my house, eat dinner? Why you not give me dirty clothes? I have machine; no problem.” That was how the system worked: when her friend Hideko’s six-month-old baby was in hospital, Sachiko visited him every day. The next week, she announced with delight, Hideko was obliged to baby-sit for her. One could no more say that this was “calculating” or “guileless” than one could say that turquoise was either green or blue; Sachiko’s instincts were so shaded, I could not put a name to them.

  One day, while I was writing, the phone in my guesthouse kept ringing and ringing. Picking it up at last, I heard Sachiko’s soft excitedness. “I’m so sorry call you house! I know you working! But before you say you much like orange cake. I find! Now I very close your house. Please I come here your room, give cake?”

  I could hardly say no, and when she arrived, she quickly preempted all protests. “I’m so sorry,” she began. “I very bad, I know. You need work. But I much want give you this cake. Maybe you eat, then work very easy.” A few days later, it was some chocolate she had bought, and then a button she was eager to sew on, and then the tatami that she wished to clean. And though I could tell she was holding me hostage with kindness, I could also tell that she truly did do her thinking with her heart, and that it was as natural for her to seek out opportunities for kindness as to exercise a kind of emotional usury. Every time she visited, by now, she brought some flowers, to match the day and mood, and then, unable to wait, started fishing out other offerings from her bag. “I little give you present, are you okay?” she usually began, phrasing her question with such mischievous charm that it was all but rhetorical. “You not guilty? Is okay?” And then she pulled out a pillow, or a washcloth, or a sea otter key ring. “You hear this, you little think I here,” she said beautifully, hanging a dangle of wind chimes outside my room one day. But that night, they tinkled all night long, and their lovely silver music kept me up till dawn.

  Before very long, as I looked around my room, I realized that Sachiko was colonizing me more subtly than Japan had ever done Taiwan; and the bare room that I had set up as my secular monk’s cell now had more and more of a domestic aspect. Her claims on me were everywhere: in the long-birded “Wonder Worker” mugs she’d given me (no random gift, of course — she saw me as a bird, and a long-beaked one at that); in the guitar she’d propped against the wall, a constant reminder of her presence; in the spray of flowers on my desk and the “Bear” blanket on my floor. Taking me over with her gifts, she was remaking my room, and me, and each time she said, “Please you take,” she managed to take over a little more ground.

  Sachiko was also, almost unnoticed, installing herself in my life and putting her fingerprints even on the parts she couldn’t see. She was courting my mother now with birthday cards, the more engaging because they were so transparently sincere, and when I mentioned, in passing, a sev
en-year-old boy I greatly admired, in California, she instantly came back with “Yuki send this boy little letter, are you okay? He little new friend, no problem?” The next thing I knew, I was ferrying drawings and photos between this infant Pyramus and Thisbe, and Sachiko, pointing out all they had in common — Montessori schooling, a love of ships, and “Sesame Street” — had acquired a new contact abroad, and a new claim on my California life.

  Yet all this she achieved without ever making a demand on me or ever abandoning her natural grace; she had surrounded me with her presence, while scarcely seeming to move. And I could hardly blame her for wanting to stake a claim on her elusive new friend and seeking some guarantees in return for all her risks. “You little same cherry blossom,” she said one day. “Long time I waiting. Then you come back, I very happy. My life very beautiful. Then you must go again.” It was true, I knew, and there was nothing I could say.

  It was also natural, I thought, that she try to lure out of hiding a foreigner who was almost Japanese in his evasiveness and self-containment. “Strong heart,” she was finding, could be an antonym to “soft” as well as “weak.” Soon she was beginning to tell me, pointedly, of the new dress she had bought for going out, of how her husband was taking her to a piano bar, or of how the American monk at Tōfukuji could speak to her in fluent Japanese.

  “One man,” she said one day, “Canadian man, very warm, very kind, he say he give me English lesson. Very cheap. No problem.”

  “Look,” I said, rising to the bait. “I’ll give you English lessons free, okay?”

  “Really?” she said, delightedly, drawing out her datebook to fix a time. “Two times, one week, we meet, no problem?”

  One night, not long thereafter, she suddenly called my house, her voice strangely coiled, and when I called her back from the street — not wanting to tie up the guesthouse phone — and cheerily sang out, “O-genki desu ka?” (Are you well?), she said, “I’m fine. Not so fine.” A long pause. “Not fine.”

  “Sick?”

  “Maybe. Little problem in heart.”

  I didn’t know exactly what this meant.

  “I ask you many questions, are you okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, though the night was dark and cold, and faces kept appearing at the phone booth, looking in.

  “Why you no angry if I have other foreigner friend?”

  “Anger no good. I cannot control your heart.”

  “Whyyy?”

  “It is your heart, your choice. Anger doesn’t help.”

  “But you sad?”

  “Maybe.” I was certainly turning Japanese. “But I think it’s fair: if I do bad thing, then bad things happen to me.”

  “Please we meet,” she said urgently, more or less telling me that I had failed.

  Twenty minutes later, on an unseasonably chilly night, we met outside the hooded gate of Chion-in, ghostly now in the late-winter dark, and walked amidst the stone carcasses of temples, cold and silent in the night, returned now to all their grave antiquity.

  Shivering in the chill, her voice choked up, she began to talk. “Today my heart little muzukashii feeling. I feel little dynamite in heart.” She laughed gaily at the new word she’d learned, but I knew it was her social laugh.

  “I’m sorry if I helped you put it there,” I said.

  “No, no,” she said, as she always did when I apologized (the Japanese seemed to use “no” mostly to shrug off apologies or thanks, almost never to contradict or repudiate). Her voice then took on an unaccustomed hardness, a steeliness I had heard only when she was speaking Japanese. Her words came out with the condensation of her breath.

  “If my marriage broken, what you think?”

  “I’d be sad.”

  “Why sad?”

  “Because I think your husband is a very good man.” Anything I could say now would only incriminate me. “He takes good care of you and your children.”

  “Why you not happy?”

  “Well, for example, if your brother goes away, you cannot stop him. But still you feel very close to him.” Everything I said was only digging me in deeper.

  “But what you do if I say sayōnara? If I find other foreigner friend, what you say?”

  Blowing out cold air as we walked side by side along the deserted temples, the street all hushed around us, I got every answer wrong. “I would be disappointed,” I said, “but I would accept that you had good reasons for it, or that larger forces were at work. I would be sad, but I would accept that I could not change your heart, or life.”

  “I think maybe I wait long time for you,” she said.

  She was correct, I knew, though I did not know what was the right thing to do.

  Then, suddenly, eyes flashing in the dark, she said, in an eerie and unearthly tone, “I’m very bad. I little devil. I fox-woman.” Her face in the dark was distant and haunted. “I little ghost. Old Japanese story: ghost visit man many many times, many very happy time together. But man’s friends much worry. His face more weak, more pale. Ghost eating his heart.”

  She could hardly have given more eloquent expression to all my unspoken fears. I knew all too much about the Japanese fox-woman, who was said to possess innocent ladies and make them wild. I had seen the Lady Macbeth figure in Kurosawa movies, I had read about the avenging fury of Lady Rokujō in Genji. It hardly mattered that “fox possession” now was said to have been taken over by “TV possession”; ghosts in Japan were nearly always said to be jealous women driven by unburied grievances.

  The next thing I knew, though, all the force had gone out of her, and she was crumpling down, sobbing (or laughing) as she said, through sniffles, “I’m so sorry. I’m very bad. I’m very sorry! Japanese woman very difficult. Face very soft, but inside very hard. I little fox feeling, I’m so sorry!”

  “Maybe you are an Inari fox,” I said to comfort her, reminding her that her hometown was the center of Japan’s most famous fox shrine.

  “I have two face,” she went on. “Two side me.”

  And then she broke into tears, the condensation coming out of her mouth in gasps, on the silent, deserted avenue of stone temples.

  4

  WHEN THE CHERRY BLOSSOMS came to town, it was a punctual miracle, as well rehearsed and perfect as all the other events on the city’s calendar. For weeks now, the preparations had continued: paper blossoms had been fluttering off the lampposts of the major downtown stores, and newspapers had run elaborate charts giving notice of the cherries’ busy schedule. Mild Seven cigarettes had brought out their latest seasonal packs — all cherry trees and geisha — and depāto shopgirls had changed into their vernal clothes. Everything had re-dressed itself to show the blossoms off to advantage. And the trees themselves stood perfectly placed, as efficiently blocked out as seasoned actresses, arranged in such a way and so strictly trained that they were guaranteed to ravish.

  So when the blossoms came at last, they mocked all jadedness with their otherworldly beauty, as stunning as a stage set by a heavenly designer. A blaze of lustrous pink above the city’s canals, more dizzy and intense than any words could find, a shock of fluffy, fluttery pink frothing above the city roads. Pink-framed branches outlined against the faultless blue, branches drooping prettily above the pink-reflecting water.

  All the people of Kyoto were well trained too, in amending themselves to the whims of the seasons, and so they streamed out on boundless Sunday afternoons and arranged themselves in well-framed pictures with the blossoms: old couples standing under sure-shot branches, young girls clad in the colors of spring, in peach skirts or apricot kimono, delicately fading into the retiring pinks, men in dark suits, stiffening their shoulders; the colors framing all of them as sharp as any dream. The Philosopher’s Path was one foaming avenue of pink now, and couples meandered through long trellised tunnels of the blossoms, sun-dappled in the blue; along the Kamo River, lovers sat silent under the blessing of weeping canopies of pink; and on Mount Hiei, a cable car ride up the sacred slope through a psyched
elic tunnel of overhanging pinkness left me reeling with its Day-Glo brightness.

  It was not long, however, before I found that I was, quite literally, allergic to the photogenic images of evanescence, and soon enough, my nose was stuffed and my nights stretched out through labyrinths of headached dreams. But where previously, in such fever states, I had found myself going round and around all night the Mondrian maze of the Paris metro, now, in my delirium, my mind shuffled and reshuffled the names of Japanese companies: Sony, Matsushita, Mitsubishi.

  My conscious mind was turned round, too, by all the well-prepared grace of the season. Was beauty beauty if it could be mass-produced on cue? Why not, I thought: a ballet or an opera or a symphony was performed again and again, yet each time was transformed by the interpreter, and interpreted again in the mind of every listener. Could there be paint-by-number miracles? Did assembly-line epiphanies make sense? Sometimes, in Japan, the seasons were so formulaically displayed and so formulaically enjoyed that one was tempted to eliminate the active voice altogether: just to say that sake was drunk, blossoms were observed, and merriment was had.

  And when the blossoms began to fall, breezed down through the sunlight by a passing gust of wind, or by a fleeting rain, there was a silent, rushing snowstorm of pink, fluent, soft, and noiseless, down upon the ground, the water, the pink-kimonoed ladies. After the rains, dead blossoms carpeted the earth and blanketed the rivers, leaving the trees half nude, their branches outlined black against the cloudless blue.