Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (31 page)

On and on it went. I’ll spare you the details. Except one: did you know Godzilla can fly? It’s true. He fires a blast of energy from his mouth and projects himself
backward
through space, a method only slightly less stupid than Gamora’s. (Come to think of it, I’ve had morning breath that probably could have achieved the same effect.) Oh yes, one more detail I learned from Yoshi: The name
Godzilla
has no connection to the word God, that is simply a misrendering of it in English. In Japanese his name is Gojira, from the Japanese words for “whale”
(kujira)
and “gorilla”
(gorilla)
, making him a Gorilla-Whale. Isn’t that just the most fascinating thing?

“My wife scolds me,” Yoshi said. “She scolds me because I buy my daughter Godzilla toys. But Ayané-chan likes them. She sleeps with Meca-Godzilla just like it’s a teddy bear. I don’t know. Maybe I should get her some dolls.”

“Stick with Godzilla,” I said. “How many dolls have saved the universe, beaten up Mothra,
and
knocked over Tokyo Tower? Godzilla makes a much better role model.”

“You should meet my wife,” he said. “She speaks English better than I. She studied Arabic in university. That is how she learned English.”

“She learned English by studying Arabic?”

“At that time there was no Arabic-Japanese dictionary. First she had to learn English. Then she translated everything from Arabic to English to Japanese.”

“So why bother?”

“It is a long story,” he said. “When she was young she saw
Lawrence of Arabia
. The film, do you know? It moved her very much. Her dream was to visit the Sahara someday, to see the pyramids, the Nile, and—how do you say it, like a temple, but Islam?”

“Mosque?”

“Yes, to see the mosques and caravans … It was her dream.”

The past tense was revealing. “She never went?”

“No,” he said, his voice as soft as a sigh. “She never went. Maybe someday.”

Dreams. In Japan the word carries with it the nuance of illusion. To admit something is your dream is almost to admit that it
is unattainable. Motorcycles across a continent. Housewives who dream of caravans. Outsiders who dream of stepping inside. Japan is filled with such dreams; dreams pervade it like the countless deities that inhabit every mountain, every rock, every island in every bay. They dwell in homes. Altars are built to hold them, they are appeased with small offerings, they are as intangible as mist, as unavoidable as air. Dreams deferred. One of the Japanese ideals is self-sacrifice, and the first thing sacrificed is usually one’s half-secret, intensely personal, unattainable dream. I remember a graffiti message on a temple wall, one of the first Japanese sentences I ever deciphered:
Japan is a nation powered largely by sighs
.

Yoshi looked up at the blossoms above us. “We grow,” he said. “We grow and we compromise.” Then, after a pause, “I love my family. Japanese people are shy to admit such a thing. We think that if you say it, it loses some of its truth. But I don’t think so. I love my family, but someday I will drive across America in my motorcycle.”

“And your wife?”

“She will travel with caravans. Someday.”

Someday. I used to think that in Japan “someday” meant “someday soon,” or “eventually,” but I was wrong. In Japan, someday does not exist in the future, it exists in an entirely different sphere of existence. It means “in another life, another time.”

“And your daughter?”

He laughed. “She will learn how to fly. Just like Godzilla.”

“And destroy Tokyo?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. She will be a cheerful monster. She is too kind to smash such things.”

A Bedouin. A long-distance rider. A cheerful monster.

“Wait till you meet my father,” said Yoshi. “He is very cheerful. Too cheerful. He speaks English. My mother doesn’t speak English, but she is very kind. Why don’t you come to meet them?”

So we slipped away from the party, walking past pools of laughter and flowers lit in the night. His parents lived not far from the park, down a maze of narrow avenues, in a house tucked in beside a temple. The last time I met someone’s father was in Uwajima, and he turned out to be an A-bomb survivor. I hesitated at the threshold of Yoshi’s home.

“Your dad,” I said. “He wasn’t in Nagasaki or Hiroshima or anything, was he?”

“No, no,” said Yoshi. He slid the front door open and we stepped inside. “But he was a POW.”

Damn. “Listen, Yoshi, your father’s probably asleep. I’ll go, okay? Maybe another time.”

“Don’t worry,” said Yoshi. “I’ll wake him.
Tosan!”
He called out to the dark, sleeping house.
“Tōsan!”

A moment passed, and then a light flicked on and a silver-haired, sturdy-looking man came out. He was wrapping his bathrobe around his waist like a samurai answering a distress call. “Yoshihiro?” He put on his glasses and smoothed down his futon-tousled hair.

“Ah!” he said when he spotted me, his smile as broad as Yoshihiro’s was soft. “Come in, buddy!”

Soon we had roused the entire household. Yoshihiro’s wife came out and welcomed me with a sleepy bow. His mother smiled and fussed with her nightgown. Even little Ayané staggered out, rubbing her eyes lazily and peering at me with a rather annoyed expression.

Yoshihiro’s dad was ebullient. “Sit down, sit down. We speak, okay? I study English every day, you want to see my notebook? I write English sentences and words, new words, proverbs, everything. ‘A penny saved is a penny earned.’ I show you my English notes.” He went to get them, but halfway across the room he was distracted by a photo album and he forgot all about his original errand.

He came back with a stack of albums and opened one onto my lap. The photos inside were gloriously jumbled, completely out of order, much like the flow of the conversation.

“Here, you see. This is Yoshihiro as a young boy, just a baby. Here he is on motorcycle in Kumamoto City. That’s where we are from, Kumamoto. Yoshihiro looks thin in this picture. Now he is fat a little, his wife is too good cook. Here is my wedding. Japanese wedding, very formal. Nobody smiles, too serious. This is Ayané, very cute. Here is Yoshihiro and Chiemi-san’s wedding. She speaks English, you know?”

Green tea and sweets appeared as if having condensed out of the air. I was the only one who drank the tea. This is common; tea and small snacks are presented to guests as one might offer oranges to an altar—more in spirit than for actual sustenance. For a long time in Japan I had the uncomfortable suspicion that the tea was poisoned
because no one else would touch it when I was around. It is a test as well. You know you have crossed the threshold from guest to friend when they join you in tea and snacks.

Old Mr. Nak wanted to know if I was married. “You have a wife? No? Everybody say get a Japanese wife, right? Tell you Japanese wife is good, right?”

I nodded, it was true. Everyone from street sweepers to company presidents had advised me on the merits of marrying a Japanese woman.

Mr. Nak had other ideas. “Don’t marry Japanese woman. Whatever you do, don’t marry them. Japanese wife is very good—
before the wedding
. After the wedding—” He threw his hands heavenward in defeat. “Very strong.” Everyone laughed on cue, even Yoshihiro’s mother, who didn’t follow the English but was tickled to see her old hubby chattering away in another language. When she laughed her eyes disappeared into two perfect crescents, like upside-down u’s.

“Before my marriage, wife is very gentle. Always bowing to me, saying ‘You want tea, you want saké?’ And if she need to—” He made a hand-burst gesture from his rear.

“Fart?” I said.

“Yes, when she need to do such thing, she goes into washroom. She turns on the water. She locks the door. And—
poof.”
He made the tiniest of sound effects. “But now she don’t care. Big noise—
boom
—just like thunder. You see the crack on the wall, over there? My wife make that.”

By now we were all in stitches, especially Mrs. Nakamura, who enjoyed his fart gestures immensely. When Yoshi translated the above, she laughed herself into tears and then leaned across and swatted her husband on the arm.

“Da-mé,”
she said. “Stop it.”

But he continued, lamenting with Chaplinesque expressions the fate of men married to Japanese women. He changed his face from pathos to stone face as he switched from husband to wife, like a one-man vaudeville act. “Now I am old man. I am tired. When I say to my wife, ‘I am thirsty, please a little saké, please, please,’ she just look, like this”—he pulled a haughty face—“and she say, ‘So? Cup is over there, saké is in kitchen.’” He heaved a noble sigh and sadly shook his head. “Oh, Mr. Will, don’t marry a Japanese woman, they are like cats. They hide their claws.”

Then he delved back into the photo albums. “You are going to Sado Island?” he asked. “Yes? Sado is good place. I went to Sado with my terrible wife last year,” and he opened another album. “See, we are here. In the round boat like a washing tub.”

Sado Island is famous for a legend of a young woman who crossed the sea from the mainland in a large, barrel-like tub to visit her exiled lover. (I don’t remember how the story ends, probably in tragedy.)

Among the tour photos were pictures of serious Japanese men in short-sleeve shirts, buttoned right up to the top, with cameras hung like albatrosses around their necks. There was only one woman in the group, Mrs. Nakamura, and there was only one person smiling—grinning, really—and that was Mr. Nakamura. The two of them stood out as clearly as real people in a wax museum.

I looked at the photographs. “Why didn’t the other men bring their wives?”

“Who knows?” said Mr. Nak. “Maybe they don’t like their wives. Maybe their wives don’t like them. It is old custom. Japanese men don’t travel with their wives so much. But not me. How can I go to Sado without my terrible wife?”

“She doesn’t seem very terrible,” I said.

“Ha! We have company, so she is hiding her claws!” and again the house rocked with laughter, and again Mrs. Nakamura leaned over and swatted her errant husband.

One of the biggest sources of humour in Japan is the discrepancy between the public and the private person. Everyday life requires small, daily acts of hypocrisy, and these are a source of endless amusement.

A typical example—a comic haiku cited by Jack Seward in
The Japanese
(the translation is my own):

as she gathers her loved one’s funeral ashes

she weeps and weeps—

and searches for gold teeth

I tried to recite it to the Nakamuras, but it came out wrong, and they thought I was relating some sad personal story. They became very quiet. When Japanese tell it, it always gets a big laugh (it must be my delivery).

Fortunately, Mr. Nak soon had the room full of laughter again. You had to stay on top of the conversation when Mr. Nak was around, lest it veer out from under you like a runaway horse. His wife insisted that he show me his calligraphy; he had once been a prefectural champion.

He got down a big stack of his work and then instantly changed his mind, not from false modesty but from sudden inspiration.

“Every day I die,” he said. “And every morning I am reborn. Every day is a lifetime. When I go to sleep I thank my god, thank you for this day.”

He translated this into Japanese and his wife nodded thoughtfully and everyone paused out of respect, and then we were off again.

“You like fish? I went fishing yesterday, do you see my sunburn?” He showed me his forearms, as dark brown as polished leather. “I caught twelve baby fish: one, two, three, like that. Now when the mother comes home, she ask, ‘Where are my babies? Why somebody take them away?’ Sad, maybe.”

He used the same forlorn face for the mama fish as he used for the henpecked husband earlier. It was highly entertaining. I had never met anybody quite like Mr. Nakamura. He was breathless in his excitement, as though he had a lifetime of small quips and everyday wisdom to share, as though he had only this one night to impart it, as though time were running out and he was picking up the pace.

“Guam,” he said. “My wife and I in Guam.” He showed me the picture of them in their Sunday best, smiling in front of a coral reef, an American flag in the distance. He had his official Japanese retired man’s cotton hat on. He and his wife stood side by side like a pair of Buckingham Palace guards who didn’t know they weren’t supposed to smile. The Japanese use the world as a backdrop for photographs of themselves; the important thing is not the place, but the fact that you were there. Whether this is shallow or just more honest is hard to say.

“Australia,” said Mr. Nakamura. “Look, a koala in a zoo. Looks like Yoshihiro.” I looked at the photo and then over to Yoshi. He was right. And Ayané looked just like a little baby koala, clinging sleepily to her mother.

“I do not look like a koala,” said Yoshi. He appealed to me as a disinterested judge. “Tell him. I don’t look like a koala.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Your dad’s right, you look like a koala. But in a nice way.”

“Ha,” said his father, “I told you. My son is a koala.”

Mr. and Mrs. Nakamura’s next trip was to be a tour of Europe. Mrs. Nakamura was nervous, but her husband would hear none of it.

“My wife said she didn’t want to go to Australia either. Too dangerous. Everyone hates Japanese, she worried. But we went.” He chuckled. “And now she wants to go back.”

“Really?” I said to her, switching over to Japanese.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Australians were so fun and lively. Japanese are too shy, I like lively people.”

“Like Pop,” said Yoshi.

“Yes, your father is very cheerful,” she said, using that ineffable, untranslatable, multipurpose term
—genki
. It is one of my favourite words in any language. It means healthy, energetic, optimistic, high-spirited, filled with life. When Japanese greet each other, it is not “How are you?” met with a hedged “Not bad.” In Japan the question is “Are you genki?” and the answer is “Genki yo!” And when you part, “Stay genki!”