The Lady and the Monk Read online

  Praise for PICO IYER’S

  THE LADY AND

  THE MONK

  “Brilliant and poetically charged … The chapters chronicle and color the Japanese seasons, summoning with great effects the sounds of temple gongs, the mellifluous notes of bamboo flutes, the mantra sound of rain on the roof”

  —Boston Globe

  “Iyer gets as deep into the Japanese soul as a perceptive foreigner can. With his snatches of Japanese literature and religious thought, and his easy, intelligent comparisons to the brilliance and foibles of our own heritage, [he] leads us into the cheerful land of the rising sun and finds there, instead, a strange and haunting island. A love story unique in the annals of travel writing … with Iyer as a guide, Japan becomes a place of moonlight and mist, beckoning us near while hiding its beautiful face in the shadow of an opened fan.”

  —Condé Nast Traveler

  “Like Thoreau, Iyer combines an acute sense of place with a mordant irony. The revealing detail is his specialty … [a] Madama Butterfly for the ’90s.”

  —Time

  “Iyer’s book is about his own quest for a more ancient land of monks, rock gardens and paper lanterns. Even more challenging, it is his search for spiritual enlightenment in the land of economic miracle. Like a cultural archaeologist, Iyer digs into the dead metaphors of poets and beneath the antiseptic glitz of love hotels to unearth traces of his own misty nostalgia for a bygone Japan. In dreamlike, beautiful prose … all these rich themes—East and West, spirit and flesh, old and new—become entangled in the author’s relationship with a woman named Sachiko.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  PICO IYER

  THE LADY AND

  THE MONK

  Pico Iyer was born in Oxford in 1957, and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. He is an essayist for Time magazine and the author of Video Night in Kathmandu. Just before he completed The Lady and the Monk, his house burned dramatically to the ground, leaving him with nothing but the clothes he was wearing and the manuscript for this book.

  Also by Pico Iyer

  Video Night in Kathmandu

  First Vintage Departures Edition, November 1992

  Copyright © 1991 by Pico Iyer

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1991.

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments of permission to use previously published material may be found on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Iyer, Pico.

  The lady and the monk: four seasons in Kyoto / Pico Iyer.—1st Vintage departures ed.

  p. cm.—(Vintage departures)

  Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1991.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76113-2

  1. Kyoto (Japan)—Description and travel.

  I. Title. II. Series.

  DS897.K84I95 1992

  952′.1864048—dc20 92-50071

  v3.1

  For

  Michael Hofmann,

  and my friend

  Hiroko

  Acknowledgments

  Like any foreigner in Japan, I suspect, I encountered more kindness and consideration than I had ever found elsewhere, and certainly much more than I deserved. The two to whom this book is dedicated exemplify that spirit in more ways than I can articulate.

  I also, however, owe especial thanks to Mari Gotō, who not only taught me a great deal about her country, but endured my gaucheries — and my Japanese — with angelic patience. Somehow, in the midst of an inordinately busy schedule, she took time out to answer all my endless questions and to conduct tireless researches on my behalf. In the process, she taught me by example about much of the sweetness, attentiveness, and thoughtfulness that are so remarkable in Japan.

  While I was in Kyoto two of my kindest guardian angels were Barbara Stein and Naohiko Ishida, who not only opened their home and hearts to me, but also provided me with tea and warmth and friendly conversation even as I was depriving them of their study and their peace. I consider myself very fortunate, too, to have been introduced to Yūko Yuasa, an exemplar of all that is most elegant in Japan and most civilized in any place. Many of the most beautiful parts of Kyoto, like many of the finer points of Japan, I would never have seen had it not been for her; she opened windows for me as well as doors.

  I profited greatly from the conversations I enjoyed in Kyoto with Tyrrell O’Neil and Andrew Hartley, among many others, and hope they do not feel let down by what I have produced; Eric Gower was my smiling sensei on all things Japanese, a model of how to live in Japan without losing a sense of humor or proportion. Back home, I was, as ever, buoyed and uplifted beyond measure by Kristin McCloy and Mark Muro, who read what I was scribbling with extraordinary sympathy and care, at once cheering me on and holding me to the very highest standards; Steve Carlson, with his genius for conversation, got me to say things I didn’t know I knew; and the late Kilian Coster provided me, and many others, with a model of fairness and calm. I am very grateful too to Charles Elliott at Knopf, and Elizabeth Grossman, for all their help in actually seeing my words into print: in the former, I enjoyed the rare luxury of an editor who not only showed exceptional insight and understanding in training a searchlight on my prose, but was even able to correct my Japanese misspellings.

  All the time I was living in Kyoto, nobody could quite understand how I was supporting myself while simply reading old poems, wandering around temples, and doing as I pleased. I would not have understood either had I not known Time, whose editors continue to find ways of sustaining me even as I go off in stranger and stranger directions. Without them, and the forgiving cooperation of their Tokyo Bureau, I could not even have gone to Japan.

  Finally, all the time I was at home, and away, I was kept upright by my long-suffering mother, who reconciled herself with typical patience to a son who always chose to live in the most inconvenient of places, and without a word of complaint, collected my mail, deposited my checks, and looked after my well-being — showing that grace, no more than kindness, is hardly peculiar to Japan.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Autumn Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter I5

  Winter Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Spring Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Summer Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love —
and to sing; and if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love.

  –THOREAU

  AUTUMN

  1

  THE FIRST TIME I ever set foot in Japan, I was on my way to Southeast Asia. Japan Air Lines was putting me up for the night, not far from Narita Airport, and after stumbling out into a silver late afternoon, I was taken to a high-rise hotel set in the midst of rice paddies. After a brief, disjointed sleep, I woke up early on an October morning, clear, with a faint touch of approaching winter. I still had a few hours to spare before my connecting flight, so I decided to take a bus into the local town. Narita could not be a very distinctive place, I thought, as the Japanese equivalent of Inglewood or Heathrow. Yet I was surprised to find a touch of Alpine charm in the quiet of the autumn morning. A high mountain clarity sharpened the October air, and the streets were brisk with a mountain tidiness.

  As I began to walk along the narrow lanes, I felt, in fact, as if I were walking through a gallery of still lifes. Everything looked exactly the way it was supposed to look, polished to a sheen, and motionless. Shoes were lined up along the entrances to tiny houses. Low tables sat, just so, on impeccably brushed tatami mats. Coffee-shop windows gazed out upon vistas of rocks and running water. A clatter of kettles rattled outside a silent teahouse.

  Then, turning through some wooden gates, I found myself inside Narita Temple. Everything, here too, was held in a state of windless calm. An old man sat on a wooden bench, alone. A swan flapped noisily, and then set graceful sail. A baby, pouched on her mother’s back, cast huge eyes up towards the sky. Black and gold swished past, the rustling robes of two young monks.

  A gong began to sound, and a column of thin smoke rose high in the clear air.

  And then, walking round a corner, I came of a sudden upon a flutter of activity, a cluster of schoolchildren scattered this way and that around the quiet paths, hunched over the ground at strange angles like a flock of odd birds. No more than six years old, perhaps, these curious little creatures were dressed all alike in tidy uniforms: pink and blue hats, white skirts and shorts, sporty white socks. Occasionally, one of them would find what he was looking for — a bean, apparently, or some kind of acorn — and toss it into a cellophane bag, then hurry off in search of more. Otherwise, they all remained so deep in concentration, and so inviolate, that none of them seemed to notice me as they crouched along the tree-shaded path, silent and intent. Around them, in the freshly minted morning, was the coming autumns faint chill of regret.

  And somehow the self-contained quiet of the children, and the elegiac softness in the air — the whole rapt stillness of the scene — took me back, in a flash, to faraway mornings on October days in England, when the Oxford Parks were pungent with the smell of burning leaves and crisp with the crackle of leaves underfoot. For the first time in twenty years, I was back in a duffel coat, futureless and blithe, running through a faintly sunny morning to throw bread to the swans in the lake, then hurrying home for tea in the darkening afternoon. Called back through the years to distant childhood, I was back, too, in the blue intensity of knowing nothing but the present moment.

  There were many features of Japan that might have reminded me of England: the small villages set amidst rich green hills, all scaled with a cozy modesty; the self-enclosure of an island apart from the world, not open to sea and light, as tropical islands are, but huddled in upon itself, an attic place of gray and cold; a sense of polite aloofness, a coolness enforced by courtesies and a language built on shadows; even the sense of immovable hierarchy that made both countries seem like giant Old Boys Clubs, where nobody worked in college because the name of the college alone was enough to decide every future. But none of that could explain the urgency of a Wordsworthian moment on a mild October morning, in a place I had never seen before. And the moment stayed inside me like the tolling of a bell.

  That first fleeting taste of Japan felt like the answer to some unspoken question. For through whatever curious affinities propel us towards people or places we have never met, I had always been powerfully drawn towards Japan. Ever since boyhood, I had only to glimpse a Hokusai print of peasants huddled under driving rain, or to enter the cold beauty of a Kawabata novel, to feel a shock of penetrating recognition. For years, the mere mention of an “inn,” or “snow country,” or even a “prefecture,” had sent a shiver through me, and a chill. And though I knew almost nothing about Japan and had never had the chance to study it, I felt mysteriously close to the place, and closest of all when I read its poems — the rainy-night lyrics of Japanese women, the clear-water haiku of itinerant Zen monks. From afar, Japan felt like an unacknowledged home.

  The next year, I happened to return to Japan, for a slightly longer stay. This time I was there with my mother, on a brief sight-seeing tour, and as soon as we arrived, we found ourselves propelled through the modern nation in all its bullet-trained efficiency. For four days, we glided through uniform hotels, in and out of tour buses, through one fluorescent coffee shop after another. At night, I went out alone into the streets and lost myself in the clangor of their amusement-arcade surfaces, the crash of white signs, bright lights, neon colors — a toyland gone berserk with an intensity that could not have been further from the lyrical land I imagined. Yet even here, in the midst of commotion, images would occasionally bob up and pull me down below the surface of myself: just a picture, perhaps, of a girl alone beside a rain-streaked window; or a monk all in black, alone with his begging bowl, head bowed, in the midst of shopping crowds.

  One evening, I wandered through the ancient geisha quarter of Kyoto as night began to fall over the houses, and life to stir within them. The crooked, narrow streets were secret in the dusk, but still I could catch snatches from within: laughter from some inner passage, figures outlined in an upstairs window, the whitened face of an apprentice geisha slipping like a ghost into a waiting taxi.

  By the time the street led out onto a busy road, it was dark, and I could just make out, in front of me, the entrance to a park. Inside the giant torii gates, I found myself amidst a carnival of lights like nothing I had ever seen, or dreamed, before. Families were gathered by the side of a pond, ringed by lanterns, and lamplit stalls were set along their paths. A surge of people were marching up a path, and as I hurried after them, the way led through the darkness and into another, broader path, framed on both sides by lanterns. The lights, red and white, bobbed ahead of us, up another slope, and then along a further path, until, of a sudden, the path gave way to a kind of plateau. Around me, families ducked under lanterns or darted into shrines to have their fortunes told, inscribed in sweeping calligraphy on wooden blocks. Above me, lights danced across the hill like fireflies.

  As I began to climb, the noise fell away, and the crowds started to thin out. Soon I was far above the town, alone in a world of lanterns. For on this, the Night of a Thousand Lanterns, lights had been placed beside every grave, to lead departed spirits back to Buddha. And I, somehow, without knowing it, had found my way alone into an ancient graveyard. For many minutes I stood there, in the company of ghosts and shivering lights.

  When finally I made my way back down, and into the festive streets, the spell did not shatter, but only gained texture and animation. Round businessmen in loosened ties went reeling arm in arm amidst the weaving lights, and gaggles of giggling girls shuffled behind, fluent in their best kimono. The teahouses along the Kamo River were strung with lights this summer night, and large parties were gathered on their wooden terraces, set on stilts above the moonlit water. Along the darkened riverbank, lovers sat side by side, spaced out at regular intervals, as self-contained as in some tableau vivant. I had passed through a looking glass and into a world of dreams.

  That second trip was enough to decide me: it was time to put my visions of Japan to the test. At home, these days, one heard constantly about the zany forms of modern Japan, the double standards of its political system, the strategies of its companies, all the craft of the collective rising sun of econom
ic power that seemed to be the capital of the future tense; but the private Japan, and the emotional Japan — the lunar Japan, in a sense, that I had found in the poems of women and monks — was increasingly hard to glimpse. If this imaginative Japan existed only in my mind, I wanted to know that soon, and so be free of the illusion forever; yet if there were truly moments in Japan that took me back to a home as distantly recalled as the house in which I was born, I wanted to know that too. Residing six thousand miles away, I could only remain as distracted as when one tries and tries to recover the rest of some half-remembered melody.

  In Japan, moreover, I wanted to put another daydream to the test: the vision I had always cherished of living simply and alone, in some foreign land, unknown. A life alone was the closest thing to faith I knew, and a life of Thoreauvian quiet seemed most practicable abroad. Japan, besides, seemed the ideal site for such an exercise in solitude, not only because its polished courtesies kept the foreigner out as surely as its closed doors, but also because its social forms were as unfathomable to me, and as alien, as the woods round Walden Pond.

  In the fall of 1987, therefore, as a kind of dare to myself, I bought a ticket for Japan. I took nothing more than a little money that I had saved: no plans, no contacts, no places to live. In my suitcase I had a few essentials, and copies of Emerson, Wilde, and Thoreau; in my head, the name of a temple, a few phrases I had learned from a Buddhist priest in Santa Barbara, and a schedule of the festivals by which the Japanese measure their seasons. On September 22 — the first official day of autumn, a new-moon night with an eclipse of the sun, and, as it happened, the day on which the aging Emperor underwent an internal bypass operation that threatened the central symbol of the land — I took off for Japan.