by Tracy Franz
“What?” blurts Yoko-san.
“The cherry blossoms,” says Dave, now enunciating slowly and clearly, “they’re really something.” He looks back at me again and winks.
“Neeeee,” says Yoko-san, “so beautiful. It’s heart of Japan.”
Inside the restaurant, we tuck our shoes into cubbies and pad along the hallway in slippers to the formal tatami room the ladies have reserved for this event. Yoko-san insists that Dave and I sit together in the “seats of honor”—two opposite cushions at the farthest end of the long table, next to the alcove that holds the seasonal scroll and sprigs of fresh blossoms. Unfortunately, this placement isolates the two of us from most of the others.
Yoko-san sits on the cushion next to me. “Please, please—Tracy and Dave—speak English,” she insists. “I just want to listen for study.”
Dave obliges. “So you are all into making pottery, huh. I got into that for a long time. I had the hair, the clothes, everything.”
“How long were you ‘into it’?”
“Six months. I made a lot of cool stuff. This one vase, man, I wish I could show you. It was so good.”
The servers rush in with our pre-ordered lunches, beautiful in ornate lacquered boxes. Grateful for the distraction, I chew slowly and stare intently into my food as Dave gives rapid-fire complaints about all things Japanese while simultaneously badly and loudly interpreting bits of discussion from the others. Volume and brevity as a second language. I don’t bother to point out that my Japanese ability—though unimpressive—is considerably better than his. Yoko-san sighs her approval with each utterance, “Saaaa, such beautiful English. Saaaa, such good Japanese.” The exotic food does a slow roll in my stomach, but I continue to chew so I won’t have to speak.
The meal ends at last, and Dave is beckoned by the ladies to have his picture taken next to the tokonoma alcove. I turn to Yoko-san, who is discreetly preparing to pay the waitress. “Please, let me pay my share this time.”
“No, no, you are guest in Japan. You cannot pay.”
“But I’ve lived here four years, in total. Maybe I’ll be here forever. You shouldn’t always pay for me.”
“Still, you are guest. We pay. This is how it is done. Please, take picture.”
I turn and walk to the tokonoma, and one of the women instructs me to kneel beside Dave. Nishida-sensei slides in next to me on the other side, looping her arm through mine. And thus I am caught fast between two cultures.
Saturday, April 3
My mother calls very early this morning—a reasonable evening hour in Alaska—and the fog of sleep is still in my head as she tells me something about the weather and then her artist boyfriend and then a watercolor she’s working on. It’s not until that last part that I start to comprehend language again. “The colors. They aren’t coming out right,” she says.
“The colors—?”
“Yes, I guess I need to start over. Watercolor is not as forgiving as oil.”
As she says this, I fully come out of the fog and realize that I can hear the crackle of distance and also another conversation, an enthusiastic young woman who keeps repeating, “Uso! Uso!” (“No way! No way!” Literally, “Lie! Lie!”) in response to the less exuberant low-toned mumbles of a man.
“Wow—bad connection today. Can you hear that, too?”
“Sounds okay over here.”
“I’m hearing voices. Probably losing my mind.”
Sunday, April 4
I am in a foul, dark mood and am therefore grateful for the opportunity to take it all out in karate club today. The club was formed several years ago by Koun at the suggestion of Chinen-sensei, his teacher in Spokane, when the style he had practiced since high school appeared to be inaccessible in Takamori (or anywhere in Kumamoto, for that matter). To his surprise, several local people joined, and two young men—both announcing their desire “to become Bruce Lee”—drove two hours every Tuesday and Friday night to train with us in the Takamori Junior High School gymnasium. The “karate boys” as we came to call them—Mimaki-san, sly and fast, and Tsuda-san, a solid, blunt force—have returned to train with us, years after our first stay in Japan. Though now, as they are a little older and their families and jobs have become greater priorities, our schedules are harder to synchronize. Twice-a-month meetings in Kumamoto City are about all that we manage.
After knotting the belt of my karate-gi, I bow and then step into the sunlight filtering through the high windows of the huge dojo housed within Kumamoto City’s expansive community Budokan sports complex. The boys are here already: Mimaki-san kicking over and over a thick pad braced firmly against Tsuda-san’s stout, powerful frame. It is our first meeting without our sensei, Koun. When they spot me, we exchange bows and I enter their cycle of practice: twenty kicks for each leg, and then switch, repeat, and so on. We rotate through variations on this brutal repetition for two hours, replacing our bodies with the pad, and our feet and shins go pink and numb in the process. We don’t speak much. I have no idea who among us decided that our only focus today will be kicking, but it’s what we do and it feels so right. I think I am not the only one who is in a bad mood.
In the shower at home after practice, I really feel what we—the karate boys and I—have done to ourselves, and then I see the damage the violence has wrought growing brighter beneath the sting and rush of water: swollen lumps, weeping lacerations. After drying off, I search the freezer for some remedy. There is no ice, only a couple of bags of frozen edamame, which I take out and wrap with a thin towel around my feet and shins. Perhaps in America I would wrap frozen peas, and not soybean pods, around my wounds.
Sitting there on the wood floor of my kitchen as the pain throbs and subsides, I can’t stop thinking about a moment in Alaska, in the final months of my first year at university, when I went running in darkness on a bitterly cold evening. I had been in love with someone who did not love me; it seemed nothing I did would extinguish that flame. Nothing I did. As I returned to campus, I slipped and fell on a steel grate, and for the first time in a very long time I felt some clarity, so I got up and kept running. There had been blood in the snow—dark droplets against all that white—I remember that clearly. That could have been the day I woke up just enough to leave Alaska for good. I can’t be certain.
Monday, April 5
This evening at the Tatsuda Center, only Stephen and I show up for zazenkai, and nobody but the night watchman is in the building with us.
Midway through our meditation session, both candles go out so that we can’t see much of anything, save for the pale glow of a streetlight coming in through the paper shoji covering the windows. We have to take slow and careful steps for kinhin, lest we trip over some unseen object.
“It was so quiet tonight,” says Stephen as we pack up our things.
“It was.”
“It’s funny, though. The noises don’t really bother me. I guess the sounds are just like the stick the monks use on the back of sleepy or daydreaming meditators. Whack! It makes you more present. Maybe a little distraction can be helpful.”
“Since you’re such a glutton for punishment, I’ll remember to bring the kyosaku next time.”
As we step out into night, the first cicadas of the season begin screaming in sudden unison. The sound is urgent, deafening—a swift and powerful blow to the body that does not stop. Then, the temperature shifts by a degree and there is silence.
“Hmmm . . .” says Stephen. “What do you think they are trying to say?”
Tuesday, April 6
Late this afternoon, the last of the sakura blossoms fall from the mostly green trees in spectacular puffs of swirling petals. Yayoi, the beautiful young wife of Mimaki-san in our karate club, and Iyori-chan, her two-year-old daughter, drop by for a visit.
Yayoi and I sit on the floor of my kitchen drinking green tea, talking, and watching from the open sliding-glass door as Iyori-chan joyfully chases after the falling petals in the back yard. Yayoi’s speaking moves between Japan
ese and English without missing a beat, filling in words that she can’t immediately define in one language or the other. “I wanted to name her ‘Sakura,’ ‘cherry blossom.’ But my parents . . . Dame dame da to itta. They said it’s a very unlucky name—a beautiful thing falling out of life so quickly. But I don’t think it’s so bad. It seems that we’re all sort of like that anyway.”
We pause in our discussion to observe Iyori-chan running back and forth between us, distributing crushed bits of pink into our outstretched palms. Then she climbs up into the kitchen, kicks off her sandals, and runs past both of us, out into the hallway, leaving a distinct trail of crushed petals that have somehow stuck to her feet and then neatly released—little petal-colored footprints—onto the wood of the floor. “Clean it up,” says Yayoi, and I hand Iyori-chan one of my many ceramic teacups to gather up the footprints, which she gleefully does before running outside again with her new collection container.
“Don’t hurt it!” calls out Yayoi before turning back to our conversation. “Tracy, why did you come to Japan?”
I have been asked this so many times and usually I reply “for adventure” or “to experience Japanese culture.” But this time I feel vulnerable and tell her the truth: “The first time I came here was in 1999, just after grad school. I followed a boy who was not mine across the ocean. I couldn’t imagine a life without him.”
“Did you speak Japanese?”
“Not a word. I didn’t know anything about Japan. I got a job teaching English at a language school and moved into a tiny apartment near the Suizenji train station in Kumamoto City. Nearly every weekend I took the train out to Takamori to see Koun, or he drove to the city in his tiny blue K-car.”
“Wow—that’s very . . . yuki ga aru.”
“Maybe brave. Or maybe stupid!”
“When did you know that you would be together?”
“I think some part of me always knew, but our lives were complicated. Right before he left for Japan, I think he knew too. We both understood that he was going to be a monk someday so we resisted the attraction for a while. And then we both came here and stopped resisting it.”
“What happened after that?”
“After those first two years, we went home to the U.S. for ten months or so and got married, and then came back to Japan—Yamanashi for a year and then Kumamoto again. I guess you could say that I’m always following Koun to Japan.”
“Ah, I remember exactly when I fell in love with Hiroaki. He gave me a gabera daisy on our first meeting—like sakura, also the wrong flower. My mother told me this. But I have always loved this flower. How could he know that? It made me feel that it was meant to be. And he is a good husband—not like the other men. He watches our daughter and even cooks sometimes. I am very, very lucky.”
Wednesday, April 7
This morning I squint into the resin-stained mirror above the sink in my office as I affix my hair into a neat ponytail, tuck in my white button-up shirt, and smooth the faint wrinkles from my skirt and jacket. Stepping back to take in the full effect, a small woman in a black business suit peers at me. I cover my face with my hands, view myself again through the space between my fingers. And there it is: save for the too-pale skin and brown hair, I could pass for a Japanese. As I turn, I see through my windows the imagined version of myself—one of the new office ladies with her long black hair pulled up, dashing across the front lawn toward the library in her stiff black “recruit suit,” the exact cut and color as mine.
An hour later, I’m surrounded by the new Shokei students, all of us in near-matching clothing, and we file into the Kenritsugekijo Auditorium for Shokei’s annual entrance ceremony. Some of the new students glance shyly at me, many others shout, “Haro! Haro!” above the cacophony. I make my way to one of the balcony seats in the huge concert hall and witness a déjà-vu moment echoing the graduation ceremony a month earlier: demurely seated figures lined up on stage, a bonsai on a pedestal, the Japanese flag prominent, the essential bowing to mark the beginnings and endings—but this time no bright kimono and traditional flowing skirt-like hakama trousers to draw the eye. These young women are the blank slates—those yet unformed by experience, by an education. They collectively hold a certain look in the eyes of being totally, utterly lost.
I must have felt this way as I entered adolescence, and then at the end of that first marriage—and then again when I came to Japan. It is how I feel now that Koun has stepped out of the comfort of our shared lives into a world that I cannot enter.
Friday, April 9
A familiar blue business envelope arrives in the mail while I’m home during the lunch hour. I’ve been getting this same blue envelope every few months for more than a year. Inside, a wildly scrawled letter on notebook paper in English from my friend, Masatoshi Yamada. Yamada-san was one of my private tutorials at the language school where I taught in Yamanashi, just west of Tokyo, two years ago. Once a week, this leather-skinned furniture dealer arrived in his turquoise jumpsuit for his English lesson. He had built his business from the ground up—working in design before moving on to public relations. He preferred design but was bound to do the upper-level work of his company as the years went by and the business profited. Even though he’s long since stopped making furniture, his hands are the conduit for language. Our conversations followed a common pattern while he sketched out his craft on paper:
“What did you do today?” I’d ask.
“I delivered furniture to an old people’s home.”
“What kind of furniture?”
“Here, let me show you.” He reached for the paper I always brought and pulled a knife-sharpened pencil from his jumpsuit pocket. “Here three shelf attached to a dresser, a shoji and a—nan to iu?—closet. It is used to divide the beds. Do you see? Can you understand?”
His drawings were elaborate and precise and so quickly executed, his words coming out almost as an afterthought.
One time I asked what he would do if he wasn’t in the furniture business.
“Well, I collect guitars. I used to be a musician. I played country and blues with some guys from the American base. That’s how I learned a little English. I would like to do that again, but I’m too old. And . . . no time.”
“I would like to learn guitar, too. But I can only play a little. I’ve forgotten most of what I did know.”
The next class session, he brought a guitar from his collection: a beautiful black Ovation. It must have been tremendously expensive. “I’m too old for this now. You take it. Learn to play and make me a recording. I want to hear ‘Sakura.’”
~
In today’s letter, Yamada-san tells me that he’s turning sixty near the end of the month—a significant milestone in Japanese culture—and that he’s tired of working so hard. He wishes he could turn over the furniture business to his son. But his son is not so good with people, and Yamada-san is afraid that he’ll run the business into the ground within a few months. He writes, I want to work with my hands again. I want to enjoy my life.
When I return to work, I tell the office ladies that I’d like to get something for my friend, for his sixtieth birthday.
“Something red,” they say. “Traditionally we give a cap and a Japanese vest. Like akachan, ‘baby.’ We say that old men and women become like babies again. They are ojiichan and obaachan. We give them our affection in this way. The red means that we are willing to care for them—like children.”
I consider this gift. I like the idea. But all day I keep thinking, hands, hands. So this evening I break tradition and tuck wadded-up grocery bags into a box around my best handmade tea bowl, an accidental beauty.
Saturday, April 10
After I return home from Japanese class this morning, I call Yoko-san—there’s something about Yamada-san’s letter that’s got me thinking. “Yoko-san, I really want to ask your opinion about something.”
“Come to my house,” she says. “I’ll pick you up.”
An hour later Yoko-san collect
s me in her huge white car and takes me to her home where she serves up Western-style tea and strawberries on dishes that she’s made herself in pottery class. Her house is classic modern Japanese—shodo scrolls displayed in each tokonoma. Wabi-sabi pottery along one long, low bench of planed and lacquered natural slab. Numerous photos of her two tiny grandchildren in ballerina costumes filling one wall. A large and ornately carved butsudan altar. A Western-style kitchen set next to a gorgeous tatami room with an inset floor for the low dining table centered in the middle. I am taking all of this in from my seat at the table in the tatami room—the startling beauty of juxtaposition—while Yoko-san settles in across from me and pours me another cup of tea.
“You have the most beautiful house, Yoko-san. Like an art museum.”
“Thank you. I made the shodo.”
“Really? It’s gorgeous.”
“I would like to put it in a gallery or sell maybe, but my teacher will not give me license. She is a little . . . strict. But that is my problem. It does not matter.” She waves her open palm in front of her face, as if brushing away her words. “What is on your mind, Tracy-san?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about taking more yakimono lessons. Maybe on Wednesday nights as well. Do you think it would be appropriate to ask Sensei for this? Of course, I know I will have to pay more.”
“Eh, you really like pottery?”
“Um, yes.”
“Really?! Oh, this is so wonderful! I will call Sensei now. I can check.”
When she calls, she speaks very quickly, but I can make out the word deshi several times. I know this word well from the Buddhist context—“disciple.” Finally she hangs up. “Sensei is very excited, but she wants to make sure you are serious, that you will do your best.”
“Of course.” I have no clear idea of what has just transpired between the two women. “Ah, so is it okay to go on both Tuesdays and Wednesdays?”
“Maybe it is okay from next week. But—I’m so sorry to say this . . .”