Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  In all of which Jill did acquiesce, and admired me for it. I knew it was not obedience because I had experienced her obedience for four years now with a shiver of recoil, but I did not particularly see why she should admire me, though I admired myself. I supposed she clung to me because I was big and blond and Western too. It was not until late in the trip, and by accident, that she revealed she had been truly terrified by our brush with officialdom at the airport.

  “I thought they would put us in jail, I thought they would torture us!” she told me then, when it was well over, and therefore comedy. “There’s a movie where the Emperor takes a long needle and scratches the marrow of your bones. I thought they would do that.”

  It hadn’t crossed my mind; I’d thought her tired and petulant. I was afraid of nothing but her judgment, whereas apparently the amused competence with which I handled the fruits of my incompetence impressed her. Apparently she discovered that she was a child and I was her mother.

  Besides, St. Margaret’s had offered me a kickback. They had taught Jill to live by the rules, and it was I who had the power to rescind them. Could we go at night to the Kabuki puppet show? Could we have ice cream in the morning? Could we buy a monster mask in the market at Asakusa?

  “We can do anything we please.”

  And for some reason, reasons I’ve tried to describe or others I don’t understand—for some reason everything pleased us, plastic trash and ancient copper, heavy traffic and tortured trees and water and each other.

  Jill in Japan was like Jill in the garden at three: discovering, stumbling, ironic and determined. Unlike the brusque Russians, the Japanese delighted her. She liked their lithe bodies, the sharp shapes of their gardens, the frail sound of their bells and the explosive colors of their temples; she liked iced water, hot napkins and barefoot shoes. She felt, as the British often do, immediately at home in a world so ceremonious and circumscribed; at the same time she felt too long and bouncy, too blond, with eyes too open and too much leg. She discovered her Westernness as a kind of clumsy confusion, and then accepted it.

  On big streets, in the Ginza or Shimbashi, we were unremarkable enough, but once enclosed in a café or a subway car we drew furtive stares under which she squirmed and shrank. Until one day she sat up and tossed me a frowning laugh, as if to say: so what? She watched the Japanese lifting noodles out of soup with chopsticks, tried it herself in a tangle of wood and fingers, reached for a spoon, then set her jaw and slurped from the sticks until she managed them. Whatever she dared or mastered, she looked to me as if I were an ally, and I experienced her friendship as gratuitous grace.

  We walked the back streets near the American Embassy and guessed the purposes of the shops, illiterate here because the characters on the signboards conveyed not only no meaning, but no sound. We bought a ukiyo-e etching on frail rice paper, and a bag of spongy sweets dipped in powdered sugar. We came across a bird vendor’s shack, stacked to the ceiling with cages, every feathered evidence of nature’s excesses.

  “Do you think the cockatoo is really necessary,” I swaggered.

  Inside a boy stood separating coarse seed from fine, scooping it from a burlap bag with a wooden bowl, then turning the bowl as he blew on it so the lightest seed sifted into the basket at his feet. He turned the bowl and blew, turned the bowl and blew, then poured the coarse seed into his hand and blew again. His motions were both mechanical and limber, a miniature paradigm of skill. Jill edged closer to watch him, dip and turn and blow, and turn and blow, and turn and blow, and as he reached to toss the coarse seed to a second basket he caught sight of her pale toes in their Japanese clogs. He looked up startled and lost his rhythm. He was no taller than she, but the Japanese are not tall; I think he was about seventeen. He let the bowl hang in his hand and slowly saluted her with a hand over his eyebrow and a grin both shy and sly.

  “Can I give him a sweet, Mummy?” She turned to me, all bounce and childish eagerness.

  “Sure, why not?”

  She extended the bag toward him, saying, “Dozo, dozo,” and he bowed, “Domo arigato,” and reached the delicate fingers in to withdraw the powdery ball of sticky sponge.

  “Domo arigato.”

  “Dozo.”

  He showed his teeth and Jill bobbed a series of authentically Oriental bows, and then when he lifted the sweet to his mouth and, smiling with exceptional politeness, trapped it between his tongue and teeth and slowly sliced, Jill faltered. Out of the air of cross-purposes an understanding partially occurred. She tossed her brass curls, stepped crabwise and turned on her heel, clutching the bag closed.

  “Domo arigato,” the boy said again, with a pleading note. Jill threw him a severe smile over her shoulder and took my hand.

  Tourist pleasures. We let ourselves be strange and awed. We wandered in the museums, a sketchbook apiece, copying flat Sumi ink washes and deeply textured cloth; or in department store delicatessens tasting orange mushrooms and blue seaweed.

  We traveled south from Tokyo to Kamakura and ambled among the little temples in their muted tones of wood and weathered brass, feeling our bodies released into space by even the smallest gardens, because they are not like English gardens laid on a plot of ground, but designed to fill the whole cube of air above it.

  We traveled north to Nikko to nature and architecture in an altogether different mood, where the red and gold spectacle of the temple matches the extravagant woods. A pagoda emblazoned every inch vies for height with the thick-trunked, towering cryptomania; the steps of the temple are beaten brass; the contorted jeweled buddhas look on contorted trees. An arrogant razzle-dazzle mosaic monster guards the Karamon Gate—“You are permitted to clap your hands under the dragon’s mouth and hear the exquisite roaring.” We clapped and felt ourselves exquisitely roared at.

  We climbed a wide path built of granite blocks behind the Nikko temple, unconcernedly watched by lizards with orange-and-black-striped backs and luminous blue tails. We laid prayer stones on the shrines and stopped to cool our feet in a pool below a little waterfall. A torii-shaped board beside the fall spelled out a message in Japanese words but Western characters: Yo-yo wo hete musubi-giri no matsu kono takio no taki no shivaito. I read this over to Jill until we could hear the lilt and laughter of the alliteration, and when a young Japanese and his tittering girlfriend greeted us in English, I asked them to translate.

  “World … go across bind wonder together,” the boy frowned, “waterfall tail of waterfall white thread.” Then while the girl hung on his arm giggling bell-like, he frowned further and, pulling at the words with his hands, produced, “As one travels across the world one wonders what it is that finally ties all things together, and it is this White Thread Waterfall of the Tail-of-the-Waterfall Shrine.”

  I was very inclined to believe it. The couple retreated waving to us, ceremonious and gay. I hugged Jill and stretched my feet to the water; I would not have been surprised had jeweled fish come to nibble at my toes. Jill sang, “Takio no taki no,” and gathered clumps of flowered moss.

  There were two weeks of this uneventful mania before Jill flew on to Los Angeles and I went to take up my duties in Osaka. Both of us were full of confidence by then. Jill left me at the plane door as nonchalantly as she now left me for St. Margaret’s, and walked off down the aisle chattering to the Japal hostess who was to deliver her to the Jeromes.

  “See you in L.A.,” I called, and she flapped me a wave. I was down the steps and across the tarmac before I noticed what I had said, and was struck with a brief flicker of premonition. I looked at the asphalt runway, and I saw the chessboard roses of the garden at home. The thought crossed my mind: I will never see the garden again. It stopped my breath and broke my stride. Then the thought, which had after all only crossed my mind, like someone at the other end of the runway, was gone again, and I went on through the automatic doors of Haneda Airport. I was thinking that “L.A.” is a fairly natural slip for “London” when both words are familiar. It was not important. Besides, I had a tra
in to catch.

  I took the bullet train from Tokyo to Nagoya to Kyoto, luxuriating in the speed of two hundred miles an hour on the ground, reading Tanizaki, flipping the footrest to the carpeted side so that I could take off my shoes. I called Tyler Peer to say I was on my way, which I really did not need to do, but I didn’t want to miss the chance of making a phone call from a moving train.

  In Kyoto I registered at the Palace Side Hotel, which was Western in every respect except that a kimono had been laid out on the bed. I dined in the nearest restaurant, the Akuho, which served only Chinese food and looked rather like a gilded Ramada Inn, and went to bed early in the narrow room.

  20

  AFTER THAT THINGS WENT downhill in avalanche. The first few days were laid on for me with tours of the Osaka operation, office buildings in the steamy suburbs and warehouses in blasted fields lined with shacks and hungry goats. A cocktail party was arranged in my honor at which a dozen East Anglian émigrés, none of whom I had known at home by name, enveloped me in a hysterical familiarity that I could understand but could not respond to. Tyler Peer, his moustache more walrus-like than ever by contrast with the clean-shaven Orientals, met me every morning for quick coffee and a few witty observations on the face-saving customs or bathroom habits of the Japanese. Then he passed me on to someone whose English was deemed sufficient—usually this meant a lot of gestures and flipping of phrasebook pages—who took me to see looms I’d already seen in operation in Migglesly, or to explain the automated silk-screening machines we were about to get. The mill sections were scattered all over the Osaka outskirts at the ends of subway lines and bus runs, but they had a common architectural theme of overgrown Quonset hut with stucco vestibule. With the sun beating down on the corrugated roofs and the steamrollers running inside by the acre, the temperature averaged a hundred and ten; they said it was worse in September.

  Industry’s not meant to be beautiful, and I could stand the heat. What I really found hard to get used to was the stuff coming off the presses. In the Tokyo museums and the obi shops of the Ginza I had felt my way into what I thought was Japanese design. I’d studied and absorbed and sketched branches in serene arabesque on hand-printed kimonos, washed-out shades of interlocking woven diamonds, translucent swirls of petal, surf-shaped borders. What they were printing at Utagawa, mainly on cotton and mainly for Canada, looked like the stuff they make aprons out of for small-town Woolworths in the Midwest. A bunch of grapes and two turnips on a ground of celery salt. Cubist study of ice cubes. Daffodil in extremis, with rainbow. The gentlemen were inclined to offer me dress lengths and brag. “Most Western, very Western.”

  “The stuff is hideous,” I stormed in a whisper to Tyler one morning. “What are they doing it for?”

  Tyler made a path through his moustache to admit his pipe and patted my arm, amused.

  “Money, dear. They do it for money.”

  “Well then, what am I doing here? We’ve already got their machines. I’m hardly going to learn anything about design.”

  “Not about design, about design organization. Just hang around the Center for a few weeks; you’re bound to pick up a lot.”

  “All right,” I said, dubious and depressed, and went to take up my listening post in the Center in Kyoto.

  The Utagawa Design Center is a single ice blue room the size of a football field. It contains a hundred and fifty steel desks, fluorescent strip-lighted from above and roughly sectioned into groups of ten by waist-high filing cabinets. Inexplicably, there is a bust of Venus on one file. Every desk has a typewriter and a telephone; every telephone has a muted ring like a doorbell chime and every chime rings on an average of once in ten minutes. Each corner of the room has a megaphone-shaped loudspeaker, and these speak in unison on an average of once in ten minutes. They say bong, or bingle, then announce the time and the tea-break shift. This much about the organization of the Design staff I learned in the first hour.

  I was met by a bespectacled young man with flawless English, rather plump for a Japanese, who introduced himself as Mr. Lawrence “Larry” Tsuruoka. He’d been born in San Francisco, he explained, and added by way of credential that his parents had spent the war in an internment camp in the dry bed of the Salt River. I did not know the appropriate response to this. Mr. Tsuruoka said that I was to do anything I liked. Mr. Tsuruoka was entirely at my disposal, and any member of the staff would be happy to answer my questions.

  “You will find us very Westernized,” he added brightly, and led me to a desk that had been assigned for my convenience between the fifth filing cabinet from the south wall and the second water cooler from the window.

  “I am entirely at your disposal,” he said again, and disappeared.

  I sat at the desk and looked around me, trying to establish some contact with the others in my ten-desk encampment. Apart from a few nods, which I returned in kind, I failed. Nearly everyone looked young, though as I’ve said I find it difficult to tell with the Japanese, and there were about three men to every woman. They were all in uniform, the women in dark dresses and the men in dark suits and ties. They were all passionately busy, hunched forward over graph paper, typewriters or telephones. I inspected my desk, which was well stocked with graph paper and carbon pencils, got myself a cup of water from the cooler and sat down again. I commanded a vast outlook of bent heads.

  It seemed clear that I was intended to bend my own, so I took out a pad of the paper and centered the words UTAGAWA DESIGN CENTER, KYOTO: ORGANIZATION across the top. This took five minutes. Then I retraced the letters, calligraphizing their shape; that took another ten. Then I designed an Oriental version of the arabic numeral 1 and reflected that Simon Cunliffe was a prick: I told him I was no good at organization.

  “1. Proportion of designers to secretarial staff:”

  I’d got this far among the tinkling phones and the singsong of conversation when a louder chime, something like the first two notes of a cathedral bell, sounded from the megaphone, and all at once everybody stood and snapped to attention. A short speech ensued in enthusiastic monotone from the loudspeaker, punctuated at several points by a universal response of “So!” I stood myself, to be less conspicuous, though I understand that it is not possible to be conspicuous where nobody is paying any attention to you. As I got to my feet the room went into motion. The dark clothes bent and snapped while the megaphones chanted. There were barbell bendings of the arms and backbends and toe-touchings and a finale of running in place. The chime bonged again. They stopped. They sat.

  “Oh, that,” said Mr. Tsuruoka when I found him. “That was the declaration of loyalty to the company and morning calisthenics. Very good for the circulation. Please feel free to ask any questions you wish.”

  I went back to my desk and for the next five days what I did was, approximately, to sit there. From time to time when restlessness impelled me I wandered among the desks and tried to strike up conversations, but there were several impediments to this, of which the major one was that I found no one outside of Mr. Tsuruoka with more English vocabulary than “Yes” and “Good-day.” Even these comments were offered furtively, with however extravagant a showing of teeth, and it was clear that even if the staff might have been happy to answer my questions they did not feel free to do so. Not if it involved unbending from the nape. I evinced no curiosity and could discover none in myself: what the designers bent over were the scurvy designs I had seen in Osaka, and what the secretaries bent over was secretarial stuff. The graph paper was for plotting Jacquard cards, as at home. I knew what everybody was doing there but myself.

  I am no good at doing nothing (Calvin was a sick man but no fool) and this routine began to bleed my spirit. Why I continued to go there I don’t know; I was expected to. Because I was expected to I wore my one dark dress and became passably good at calisthenics. I thought I should be writing a report on the organization of the Utagawa Design Staff, but after the word “military” I did not have much to add. When the pretense of research brought me to ac
ute exhaustion I decided that I must save myself by the one thing I knew how to do, and I began to draw. For the first time I found myself an object of some curiosity, not that this was expressed overtly but in detours round my desk on the way to the tea corner. I began making patterns after the kimonos and obis I had sketched in Tokyo, but almost immediately I began to hear titters behind me, between the glug-gluggings of the water cooler. No doubt my version of the Sumi style was as crude as the Osaka Woolworth’s. So I began tracing on the graph paper old designs, the best of those I had submitted over the past five years to East Anglian. There can’t be a much more pointless exercise; I was showing off for the benefit of people with whom I had no contact.

  The Design Center hours were long and I attended all of them; I was expected to. So that by the time I was released into the steaming streets the museums and parks were closed. I walked the main thoroughfares among boutiques with names like Man-Dom and Love-Tan-Tan, or strolled in the dusty Kyoto Gosho Palace Park, or sat in my colorless cubicle in the Palace Side, reading Mishima. (“That is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.”) I had been told that Kyoto was a more beautiful city than Tokyo, the city of the arts, so it disappointed me. It seemed sprawling, centerless. When the weekend finally came I went from museum to museum, avid to catch as many as possible during their open hours, to find again some sense of a tourist’s urgency. I began to make mistakes, irritating little evidences of impotence, like mispronouncing one vowel in a street name so that the taxi driver delivered me to the wrong end of town. I went to Gion Corner for the variety show, but had misread the performance times, and a lone ticket seller advised me to come back the next day. I bought a bag of what I thought were sweets, like those Jill had offered the seed-sifter in Tokyo, and when I popped a whole one in my mouth as I walked along the street, it turned out to be an unbaked roll. The flour dust had an alkaline taste and the dough was slimy on the roof of my mouth. I looked round for a litter bin but encountered only curious faces. Unable to spit out the pasty lump in that crowd, I chewed and swallowed it.