The Lady and the Monk

by Pico Iyer

  There must, of course, have been a deeper side to Hideko that she did not want to show the world, or even acknowledge to herself, but certainly she played the part of loving money with unfaltering consistency. And though she was much too decorous to speak an English that she had not entirely mastered, she could hardly conceal her excitement when she heard that a foreign millionaire had come to town. So Sachiko effected an introduction to Matthew, and all three of them spent long afternoons together, sitting in coffee shops and watching videos, engaged in discussions I could scarcely begin to imagine. Some-times, he told me, they would just be sitting in the Café Mozart, munching on Viennese pastries, when Hideko, overcome by the moment, would cry out, genuinely transported, “I’m so happy!”

  Sachiko, in turn, seemed equally shaken by Matthew: here was the classic, almost ideal Japanese image of a foreigner — footloose, charming, with homes around the world and debonair Italian clothes — and all she could see in him was his sadness. He was sad, I told her one day, because he did not have a girlfriend, and he could not find a girlfriend because he was sad. She nodded solemnly. “This man only stay Japan very short time,” she said. “He have very sad eye. Then I want give him warm heart.”

  Watching the three of them together, I began to see why Sachiko so exulted in foreign company, almost regardless of the person. Once, at her birthday party, as she bubbled on merrily, tripping over her ungrammatical English with careless delight and laughing with Matthew, Mark, and Sandy, I caught a glimpse of Hideko, in the corner, her eyes very hard: she did everything so perfectly, she was clearly thinking, why could the foreigners whose admiration she so coveted not understand that she was much better than her rough-and-ready friend?

  6

  ONE DAY, I decided to surprise Sachiko with a message. I knew that she always went to the kindergarten at twelve-fifteen to collect her daughter, so at twelve-ten I stood inconspicuously around the corner from the gate. The other mothers were milling about, stoical, propping their bicycles against trees, tiny babies on their backs, waiting around outside the barred gates. I leaned on a bicycle rack and watched them small-talking in their sensible clothes. Then, with a sudden instinct, I caught sight of her, on the far side of the busy street, her white comb in her hair above the broad expanse of her forehead, where it kept the hair from falling in her eyes. Her mouth was red with unfamiliar lipstick. And her face was a face I had never seen before, hard and clenched and closed. By her side strolled her husband in a sports coat, cheery in his stride, blithely indifferent to his partner, everyone’s picture of an amiable paterfamilias.

  Suddenly, I saw all the sorrow of her life, caught by surprise in the passing seconds: she so taut and coiled, waiting to release her warmth on anyone who’d take it; he so friendly and impervious, jaunting along merrily by her side. The sight of the two of them — not a couple really, just two people walking down the street together — so shocked me that I left my post and hurried away, catching her eye across four lanes of traffic and seeing the sudden gratitude of her smile as I hurried home, very fast, to await her call.

  Although I knew very well that the Japanese made a business, and an art form, of keeping up appearances, reassuring one with smiles and never once letting the mask slip, I was still somewhat astonished at how faultlessly Sachiko could maintain the pose. Through six months together, often for hours at a time, in situations of such closeness that every vulnerability was released, she had never once lost her temper with me, or betrayed any tiredness, or even said anything unkind — except for her one flight of foxishness. It was a kind of training, I supposed — just as some people never drink, or never, however desperate the circumstances, swear — but nonetheless it was unsettling to me how well she could play her part. Her command of her role was so perfect, she knew her lines so fluently, that it sometimes felt as if playing the picture-perfect partner came as naturally to her as being herself.

  I knew, of course, that she was being especially tough in her self-censorship so as not to lose her hold on me, and the freedoms I could offer; but this very sense of vulnerability, I thought, would make most people fragile, or edgy, or brittle. That, though, was not the Japanese way: she liked me, therefore she made herself likable to me; she ran her emotions as efficiently as an office manager. Japanese women knew that the best way of attaining their dreams was by becoming dream objects themselves; that was how, like the Canadian Mounties, they always got their man. They told themselves they could not, or should not, get sad or angry or tired, and they did not. One time, when I asked Sachiko why she never lost control, she sounded, this intense and impulsive woman, like logic itself. “You come here Japan very short time. One year. This year very important time my life. Then I want make only happy time: many happy memory and dream.”

  I knew, too, that in part this was because, from birth, she had been taught that satisfaction came in service; that happiness came from making other people happy. Sachiko was so well trained in pleasing that it came to seem almost a reflex in her: if ever I told her that I liked a dish, a shirt, or even a phrase in a letter, she filed the like away and served it up again and again; when I gushed over a sweater she once gave me, she promptly rushed out and bought another one, identical. Indeed, she stored away my preferences as diligently as a courtesan and did everything she could to procure and accommodate every one of them: one week, after I had given her a tape made up of poems by Keats, Yeats, Marvell, and Shakespeare, she came to my room hoisting a Japanese edition of The History of English Literature almost larger than herself. She had already been boning up on the poets I had read to her, she explained, and now was eager to ask about other figures she had run into before. What did I think of Arnold Bennett? She had read one of his books long ago. Did I enjoy Orwell? Which was my favorite work of Somerset Maugham?

  In time, too, I noticed how determined she was that we should always be of one mind. Whenever we went to a restaurant, I began to notice, she always ordered what I ordered, even if it was something that almost made her sick. At first I thought this was because she was new to Indian food, or Thai, or Mexican. But in time I came to see that it was simply an unvarying pattern, part of her strenuous desire to please. Soon she was beginning to drink Earl Grey tea, very strong, with milk and sugar, and to school herself in Van Morrison. One of her favorite phrases in English, which she deployed as often as possible, was “Me too!”

  When I explained to her one day my boyhood fondness for Paddington Bear — we were contemporaries and had grown up in the same cozy, protected, English middle-class world — she dutifully went off and opened an account with Mitsui Bank, because their mascot, represented on every book and desk, was Paddington. At every opportunity, in fact, she went out of her way to harmonize, to reflect my own tastes back to me. In Japan, I gathered, opposites detracted, and even on the personal level, unity had to be asserted at every step, in every detail — most graphically, to us, in the honeymoon couples who traipse around Waikiki or Surfers Paradise or Anaheim in identically colored shirts, slacks, bags, and even belts, perfectly color-coordinated twins for every day of their trip.

  I could find explanations for all this, but still I felt unnerved by Sachiko’s unslipping perfection; at times, I began to wonder whether she was not more honest in her words than in her actions. Part of it, I could tell, was her gift — her culture’s gift — for always seeing the best in things and always putting the best face on them: not exactly distorting the truth so much as always accentuating the positive. Sachiko saw great beauty in Nature where I saw nothing; but she also saw great beauty in Rob Lowe movies, Steve Perry songs, and her Betty Boop pencil box. She took away from Stand by Me the golden vision of boys together, but recalled nothing of the extended mass-vomiting scene. When I told her of someone I knew who had destroyed his whole home by carrying on a twenty-five-year illicit affair, she gasped, enraptured, “Very beautiful story. True love, I think.” In return, she implicitly asked me only to give her happy or reassuring news (certain topics were taboo
, I could tell, and if ever I brought them up, she would say, “I not so like this thema,” and filter them out as efficiently as her culture had done with the Rape of Nanking).

  It: was not, really, that Sachiko was naive; rather that she had been trained to find reassurance everywhere. It always amused me when she extolled her friend Sandy because, she said, Sandy was always smiling, never raised her voice with her children, never let her sadness show; because, in short, Sandy embodied for her all the sweetness, cheerfulness, and self-control that we associate with Japanese women. To me, this was mostly a reflection of Sachiko’s own innocence in reading foreign cultures and of her penchant for sifting out only the good and remaking the world in her own happy image. The first principle of Japanese Romanticism seemed to be the culture’s Emersonian assumption that it could refashion the world as it chose, and might as well do so, therefore, in a bright and pleasant light.

  Yet her unfailing self-command only aggravated the eternal game of she loves me, she loves me not. I often wondered: was I attracted to her because she was so like me, or was she so like me because I was attracted to her? In Japan, this was as vexing a riddle as the chicken and the egg: dakara all over again. When it came to shopkeepers, say, I could happily accept that all their kindness was feigned, or functional at least; but when it came to Sachiko, that was less easy to acknowledge.

  And then, at last, one night, I got my answer. Just as I was getting ready for sleep, the phone rang in the corridor downstairs, and it was Sachiko, asking me to come across town to her house; when I arrived, I found her sobbing and sobbing, her lavish hair tied up in a scruffy ponytail, her unmade-up face puffy and smeared. As soon as she caught sight of me, she threw herself upon me and buried her head in my chest, her small body heaving, and sobbing, and sobbing, as if with no hope of respite. I could feel her convulsions around me, her fingers tightening round my waist so hard I shook. I leaned back to look at her, but she grabbed me again, digging her fingers into my back, and sobbing, and sobbing, and sobbing.

  Finally, motioning me to a chair, she pointed, through tears, at her tiny, worn dictionary, opened up on her “Bunny” table-cloth. I leaned over to where she put her finger under a word: “sacrifice.”

  “So,” I said, as gently as I could, “you think that you must make all the ‘sacrifice,’ and I don’t have to make any?”

  Eyelids bruised and tired, she nodded.

  “I know; maybe you’re right. And you think my life is easy and free but yours is very hard. Because you must make plans, find baby-sitters, give excuses to your mother. While I am alone, and everything’s easy. And you have to live with your husband and your children, while I have only myself.” A small nod, that of a little girl getting told off.

  “I know, Sachiko. I know it’s hard for you. Please cry if you like.” And she did, flinging herself round me once more. I held her, and looked round — at the otter smiling down at me from the ceiling, at the jigsaw puzzle on the table, at the winking red jewel in her Wizard of Oz comb.

  “You can cry,” I went on. “That’s all right. Don’t worry,” I mumbled into her hair, and she sobbed, and clung, and shook in my arms. “That’s all right. Please don’t worry.” Her Swiss cuckoo clock struck ten, and at last she sat back and brushed away her tears.

  Then, over the little table, in one steady, uninterrupted flow, she came out with the whole story of her life, and all the accumulated sadnesses that had brought her to this lonely, perky room. “Before I always living parents’ house, I little prison feeling,” she began. “Mother many times sick, father always tired. Grandma die. Dog die. Brother go many place; but I must always help parent. Then first time I meet husband, little rescue feeling. I dream maybe little Gone With the Wind.

  “But soon true marriage, very terrible feeling! Mother-in-law, father-in-law, more more prison feeling. Husband all day work, never together time. Then I have first child, I more more excited. But children not so help. Soon very tired. I have many dream. But I think I cannot find.”

  Outside, a train whooshed past, drowning out her words.

  “Husband many times promise we little visit my brother, America. But he never do. My husband very kind man but not so strong: usual Japanese situation. He want only usual life, very quiet life. He not have dream.”

  That, I could see, was his main transgression: he was not, in her telling, a drunk or a tyrant or a philanderer or a crook; just a regular, fallible man captive to his received sense of duty and too small to accept the challenge of change. “He very good man,” she went on. “But he much afraid his mother and father. Last year I ask, which you prefer: me or mother? Please you choose. And he choose mother. Then I ‘all lost’ feeling.”

  My heart went out to her, and to him too, this fond and dutiful father and husband, clearly decent and agreeable, and confused now, surely, as he felt his pretty, vivacious wife slipping away from him, but not sure what he could do to reverse it or what he had done to deserve it. He was only guilty, in a sense, of innocence; but now, unable to get home before eleven-thirty six nights a week, and totally exhausted on the seventh — working all through the night, sometimes, at his parents’ shop — he could not find the time to turn things around. He might wish that he had more time with his family, but that seemed as fruitless as wishing he had six legs.

  And Sachiko, too, was clearly captive to nothing but her situation; captive to Japan, in fact. I could see why she wanted to escape and how difficult it must be to have that hope centered on another. And as she went on talking, all her heart came finally tumbling out: how her perfection had indeed been an act of will; how she had wanted to be flawless lest flaws drive me away; how she had tried to act out only the best parts of herself. I had upset her sometimes, and she had smiled; she had worried, and had laughed.

  That night, Sachiko crossed a threshold of sorts, and ever after, I saw a more relaxed and shifting kind of person: a heart, in fact, not so different from the ones I knew at home — spontaneous, scared, willful, and warm. She allowed herself sometimes to get put out, or jealous, or depressed; she grew more direct in her requests; she even started ordering her own dishes. I came to know the feel of her warm tears on my cheek (though if ever there came a knock on the door, she composed herself instantly and put on a radiant smile). I came to see her emotional prudence, always watching the endings of movies first (in order to enjoy the pleasure of melancholy in advance). I came to recognize her favorite, self-delighted cry — “I cannot stop. Cannot control. Cannot other! I so sorry!”

  Yet even now, with so much to lose, she still responded to most disappointments more in sorrow than in anger; and I felt her occasional reproaches the more because they were unvoiced. If ever I did something to upset her, Sachiko’s eyes would silently fill with tears, and I felt more strongly rebuked than by any rough obscenity; she was Japanese enough, I thought, to be truly gentle, and to use that gentleness to induce a sense of guilt as well as debt.

  Mostly, though, I could never get over how happy she remained, even now. Ardent, dreamy, mischievous, and sweet, she giggled on cider and got up at dawn for zazen; practiced kung fu kicks in the temple and spun herself around in her joy. Here she was, I sometimes thought, loosed of all moorings, her parents antagonized, her family all but abandoned, and an unknown future in front of her, and yet, even now, she humbled me with her good nature.

  7

  ONE DAY, on a clear spring morning, I decided it was time at last to go and stay in a Japanese monastery — not a temple like the one where I had lived on first arriving, but a training center where I could briefly sample the rigors of the monastic life. The natural choice seemed Tōfukuji, where first I had tried zazen and where first I had met Sachiko. The largest Rinzai sect monastery in Japan, Tōfukuji was also well known for its cosmopolitan rōshi, one of the few Zen masters in Japan willing to take in Western students — even women — and concerned about the state of Zen around the world.

  When I arrived at the temple gates, I was met by a young
fifth-year monk from California. In the heavy silence of the entrance hall, a would-be monk was kneeling on the polished wooden stairs, head bowed in supplication, maintaining a motionless position that he would have to keep up for two days or more while his petition to enter the temple was ritually refused. Nearby, in a tiny antechamber, another aspirant — at the next stage of the process — was seated alone, in silence, in a position he would have to keep up for five more days before being admitted to the temple. Once inside, each of them would have to spend three years or more in a regimen unswerving as the temple’s cedar pillars.

  Greeting me in the silence with a bow, the monk led me along the narrow polished corridors of the monastery, a few busy figures robed in black gliding past us. As we went, he explained, in a whisper, all the disciplines that I would have to observe: how I must walk, hands folded across my chest, and how I must bow each time I entered and left the zendō; how I must step across the threshold with my left foot first, and how I must line up my sandals, in a perfect row, at the base of the meditation platform. How I must sit, how I must breathe: how I must learn to live deliberately.

  He led me to a tiny guest room and asked me to take off my watch. Then, serving tea, he told me a little about his life. At times, when he talked of L.A. and his family, he sounded like a kid again, the twenty-two-year-old college boy he had left behind as soon as he entered the temple; at other times, when he talked of Zen, he acquired a sonorous gravitas that made him indisputably my elder. It was a little like being with Sachiko again: when the monk asked about where he could find the best pizza in town — on his one day off each month — he seemed a guileless teenager; when he told me how he wanted to live, I could see why he was the rōshi’s prize student.