The Lady and the Monk (37 page)

Parker, I recalled, had managed in his nine months here to pick up precisely four words of Japanese — “little,” “horny,” “sorry,” and “cockroach.” (I often wondered what kinds of sentences he fashioned with this small but pregnant repertoire — “I’m a little horny cockroach,” perhaps — and what effect they had on the girls he was trying to impress.)

“I wish one could be married and still be a monk,” he said.

“But that’s exactly what they have over here! That’s one of the principles of Buddhism in Japan.”

“Then why become a monk?”

I, thinking of Sachiko, and my plans of being alone, could give him no answer: all of us, it seemed, found only what we did not crave, and vice versa.

O
N THE NIGHT
of the May moon, the famously hazy spring moon beloved by monks and second in importance only to the harvest moon, I walked with Mark through the local temples in the early warmth. The moonlight magnetized my attention this night, glowing at the edges of my mind — it blazed — and Mark told me the story of the Chinese poet who tried to grab the moon’s reflection in the water and drowned. For the Buddhist, the moon was illusion,
maya
, all that was chimerical; yet it was also the Tathagata, a symbol of enlightenment, and of the operations of divinity in the world. The Buddha’s mind was said to be like the reflection of moonlight in clear, deep water; and the Buddha himself was said to be as constant as the moon, though sometimes he looked full, sometimes empty, sometimes half shrouded in clouds.

Meandering slowly past the silent, shadowed houses — a wood-block of ancient stillness — I thought again of how the lady and the monk interacted here, as did so many of the riddles of Japan. Was the moon a symbol of some higher beauty, or was it just a pretty earring in the sky? Enlightenment, I recalled reading in Dōgen, was “like the moon reflected in the water. There is no disturbance here, and all the moon is reflected in a drop.” Sei Shōnagon, though, in certain moods, had taken it for what it was, no more: “At any time, and in any place, I find moonlight very moving.”

Mark, then, went on to tell me of the Bashō poem of the clouds that obscured the moon, and as so often with him, I could see how much he had picked up from being around Zen
monks and teachers; how he, too, had the gift of keeping one true to oneself, yet always thinking the best of one: a rigorously monitored idealism. I mentioned this to him, and he grasped my meaning quickly.

“The whole idea of a teacher,” he said, blue hawk eyes flashing, “is to present a reflective mirror. Not a blank surface, really, but a screen, on which you have to confront yourself. Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you’re really seeing are not his limitations but yours.”

“So that if you think he’s strict, it’s because you’re guilty? And if you find him silent, it’s because you talk too much?”

“Yeah, I guess. There are many ways to do it. Sometimes they just let you talk yourself into trouble. Or they’ll shock you out of your assumptions. Or they’ll cut you down. Everything you think you’re seeing in him is actually coming from yourself. A saint, I think, is someone who brings out the good in everyone he meets.”

“So it’s almost as if he’s your true nature, in a sense, the better part of you?”

Mark, schooled in silences, said nothing.

A little later, at the beginning of
tsuyu
, or the rainy season, I went to stay with Mark in a temple on Awajishima, the resort island not far from Osaka. The monk who came to greet me at the ferry landing, a puppyish and frisky rock-star fan, thirty years old but still living in the temple that his parents ran, ushered me eagerly into his Toyota Crown, buzzing with bright lights now, a full moon cradled in its skylight and soul music thumping out of its tape system, its dashboard fit for a 747. I pushed a button, and the back seat beneath me began to recline, till I was all but supine, looking out at midnight-blue neon and green, clean bright colors inscribed across the night. Through the sleek, rain-washed streets of the little town we drove, the lights out to sea like ornaments, the big hotels strung
along the coast like candles on a birthday cake. Past floodlit courts of tennis, and eerily spotlit swimming pools.

The temple, when we arrived, was a sleeker and more high-tech contraption than any I had seen in Japan. Inside, red lights were humming in the darkness of the entranceway, a panel to control the other lights and the clean white lanterns set atop the bushes. I followed my guide through long brown corridors, shadowing the small, lush garden, and lit so quietly I felt I was trespassing upon a daydream. In a perfect, clean-swept room, we ate strange celery and a rainbow of pickles, followed by ice cream made of strawberry, carrot, and plum. Afterwards, the monk went upstairs and I wandered round this house of marvels. Using the toilet, I found myself in some electric wonder system, with different mechanisms to warm the seat, shoot up hot air, expel a spray of water, and flatter one’s behind — do everything, in short, but flush. From upstairs, meanwhile, where the young master of the household was commanding a whole bank of videos, Betamaxes, laser discs, and Bose speakers, I heard the gunshots of a
Rambo
tape, some dialogue from
Flashdance
. Outside, I saw the temple’s switchboard lights, as complex as a deejay’s console; beyond, the neon of the city, as still as night lights on an airport runway. A silent summer night alive with lights, as if, as Pynchon had written of L.A., one had turned a transistor upside down and opened its back to see the tangle of wires, alive with humming energies.

In the morning, I walked with Mark through the quiet, windless streets of what looked like an English country town, the glowing, twenty-four-carat neon signs and Members Clubs all vanished now in the shiny Sunday calm. Girls in red shirts, pink ribbons in their hair, stepped through polished arcades of smiling bunnies, puzzled pandas, chuckling raccoons. A Wildean photo album in a store said: “
TRUTH
: Virtue is the beauty of the mind.” Schoolgirls, tethering their bikes to trees, whispered excitedly
when they saw us, unaccustomed to foreigners, and then, “Brazil? Brazil?” In the local art museum, where Mark was having an exhibition, a grandma, given license to do anything by her age, appeared before us, with an equally ancient friend, in sunhat, giggling at her side. “I am eighty-eight years old,” the woman said. “I dreamed of being a lawyer. But when I was young, a woman was not allowed to have a strong position. I pity myself. I am eighty-eight years old now.” With that, she bowed and padded off.

On the beach, in the afternoon, the waves were deferential as a waiter, lapping quietly against the shore, a shock of white sails behind them on the blue; in front of me, eight matrons in a perfect row, lined up like birds, surveying the sea, identical in their pretty skirts and sweetly appreciative coos. In the twittering, sultry afternoon, a hot siesta stillness fell upon the town. The long thin lanes resembled alleyways in some sunlit Sardinian town, sleepy in the steamy afternoon. For once, all the country’s energy was motionless and mute.

“If you were to believe some of the things you read,” Etsuko began, “all of us Japanese are living in some cobwebbed net of obligations, our hands tied by
giri
and
on
. Of course, these elements are there. But to concentrate entirely on them is to produce a kind of caricature, a comic version of us. It’s like taking an X ray, which catches the outline of the skeleton but has nothing of the spirit, the humanity. Or” — she paused while a former
maiko
came to deposit a few more mysterious delicacies on the table before us — “or like a bowl of seawater in which one has all the component parts, but they do not cohere to make a whole.”

“It’s too disembodied, in other words?”

She nodded ruefully.

She had taken me, this rainy-season evening, to one of those celebrated hidden centuries-old Kyoto restaurants where there
was no menu and no bill, and there were no customers who could walk in off the street. Few, perhaps, would be induced to do so, in any case, since the entrance was an unassuming one, just a single small banner above an aged wooden gate at the foot of the eastern hills, on one of those narrow-waisted Gion streets that were all white lanterns and stone passageways.

We had walked along a moss path, lanterns jutting this way and that through the garden, to an entrance, where the madam, with the painted face of an old courtesan, in electric-blue kimono, had come out and bowed profusely before us, her head almost reaching to the floor. Given special slippers, we followed a wooden corridor, past rooms full of parties and the phantom forms of young geisha, to a large, empty room, bare save for an alcove in which there was a scroll lit up by a flash of calligraphy and, under it, a slim vase cradling a violet tea flower. New screens and mats had recently been installed to register the summer — they were changed with every month, I gathered — and our own screens gave out onto a trim garden, vibrant green intensified in the early-evening gray. A single tiny hole had been made in the wall so that the moon, coming through, would be shaped as a pretty crescent. The crockery was antique, chosen only for us; the small talk as delicate as china.

On Etsuko’s pink kimono was a tracery of rain.

“Is that seasonal?” I asked redundantly.

“Yes, but just a tiny bit off, a few days early. Really, this should be worn in July, with the end of the rainy season. It’s like these dishes.” She pointed out the pattern of a well, or a whirlpool, on the goodies before us. I recognized the way that every detail had been made to fit the moment, the room itself turned into a seasonal poem. “These, too, should be eaten just a little later in the year, as you know.” I did? “And of course, all these foods have water in them.” Of course. It was not the first time I realized that Japan was so strictly trained that it took a trained eye to appreciate it.

Etsuko watched approvingly the silent bustle of the woman
bringing in more dishes. “We Japanese ladies have a way of effacing ourselves without losing ourselves,” she explained. The woman, with a little bow, stole away from the lanterned room.

“Do you think Japanese women are the strength of Japan?”

“Yes. But we have to keep it a secret,” she giggled coyly. “We know how to seem weak. You can see that in our women writers.”

“Are there women’s presses in Japan?”

She looked surprised. “You have them in America?”

“Oh yes.” I went on to explain their assumptions to her.

“But surely that is a poor reflection on women, to be published only in women’s presses?” The quiet rebuke stung like a needle. “If they are good, should they not be publishable anywhere?”

Having lived so long abroad, Etsuko regarded her country now, I sometimes felt, as a mother might an errant daughter. And as she tried to bring each culture to a better understanding of the other, she fretted, I could tell, about all the same issues that routinely vexed every foreigner: was it better to leave the people here in their state of happy ignorance, like the dwellers of Plato’s cave (surrounded, in this instance, by Platonic forms), or should they be schooled in the facts of life, in the ways of the world, in uncertainty?

In the midst of all this, though, Etsuko was still Japanese enough to dodge every question with a smile, to talk in enigmas, to keep herself mostly to herself. One day a little later, she called me up to tell me that she could not, alas, attend a meeting of her culture club; I was hardly surprised, I replied, since I knew her life was so full of obligations. We talked for a while of
ma
, the Japanese notion of “betweenness,” and the space between people, and the summer. Finally, after perhaps twenty minutes of chat, I asked after her father; when last we had met, she had told me, in passing, he was ill. “He died early this morning,” she said calmly. “Luckily, I was there at the time. But I have to return to Tokyo tonight for more arrangements and the service.”
That was why, I realized, she could not come to the club meeting; but she would never have told me had I not brought it up.

I dream one night I am on the Big Sur coast. The fog is rolling in across the sea, and a strange aircraft above makes me feel as if all the world is moving. I am talking Ryōkan with a hippie there, and we walk across stepping-stones in a quiet lotus pond, where I find, somehow, that everyone is speaking Japanese. The man at the front office, recognizing me, says, “Sachiko is going into fits. You probably don’t remember her, but you knew her very well once. Now she doesn’t know whether to ask you to dinner or not. I hope you don’t mind my …” “Of course not,” I say, startled to find that there is a Sachiko here. The coastline is magical today, high above the surf, and the cedar tubs take me back — far back — to Japan.

T
HE NIGHT
I got home, after saying goodbye to Sachiko, I lay awake for most of the dark and silent hours. Outside, the rain was coming down so gently I could scarcely hear it, trickling down pipes, pattering into gutters, tapping as silently on my roof as a mother awakening her child. At times, when I could not sleep, I rose and penned mock-Japanese poems.

And as the daylight came in, I felt that what I wanted most to express to her was admiration: out of habit, I clambered up to my desk and looked up the Japanese word for “respect,” though by then, perhaps, the chance to use it was gone, and I felt a little like someone who’s holding a winning lottery ticket long after the deadline has passed.

Sachiko’s goodbye marked, so it seemed, the ending of a cycle; from now on, I sensed, she would be charting a new life on her own. But as the days went on, I also came to see that she could not so easily hold to her resolve, if only because she needed some external impetus to help her to break free. By now, she was fully embarked on her tour-conductor course, attending classes in Osaka twice a week, committing to memory the niceties of foreign customs and places, taking tests in the logistics of a “bird life.” And for the first time ever, I suspected, she had found a field wide enough for her to spread her wings, a forum large enough to accommodate all her diverse energies.
Everywhere one looked in Japan, one saw an identical sorrow: so many women with so much to give, and so little occasion to use it. Nine in every ten women here had completed twelve years of schooling; yet in their brief stays in the office, they were rarely allowed to do anything more than look decorative and make tea. Put the character for “woman” together with the character for “woman” twice, and you got the character for “trouble.”