My Year of Dirt and Water Read online

  “I suppose she can clean house with me—in a real Japanese home with a real Japanese person,” suggests Satomi. We laugh at the impossibility of this rudeness.

  “Well, if you really want to show her something wild, take her shopping.”

  “Right!” says Satomi as we pull into the parking lot of one of the city’s ubiquitous denki stores, which sell all manner of electronic goods.

  My dear friend, a seasoned traveler with an uncanny mind for detail, knows what will appear surprising to those who are not from Japan. I have become a huge fan of our anthropological shopping excursions—after all, much of what we find, to me, resembles exhibits in a museum of a misaligned parallel universe. I am not the target of the products or the marketing, and so I rarely want to buy, but I am always fascinated.

  Today, after a few hours of examining Hello Kitty–branded microwave/toaster ovens, dubious electronic facial dewrinklers, magical “diet” machines that shake the ankles back and forth vigorously while one lies prone and watches TV, and cell phones that appear to do everything, we arrive at the full-body massage chairs. These are lined up—no fewer than fifteen glorious models in all; each one is priced well over the value of my car. Nearly all of the chairs are full of weary shoppers, and the salespeople no longer bother to come over to this section to peddle their wares. This island of uninterrupted relaxation is a standard perk of visiting denki stores in Japan. I select a black leather model that boasts soothing stereo surround-sound shakuhachi flute music and calf-muscle mashers, while Satomi moves on to check out the computer department. An hour later, with a fat envelope of informational fliers in her hands, Satomi wakes me from a deep and blissful nap.

  On the way back home, Satomi tells me—in her ever-fluctuating British/Australian/American/Japanese accent—that her mother warned her before she left this morning: “You know, I’ve been hearing bad news about computers on the radio lately, so you be careful. You can even catch viruses from those things these days.”

  “What?! Doesn’t your mother have one of those fancy cell phones that basically does dishes?”

  “Sure, but that’s just my mum.”

  Friday, March 26

  In the late evening, I drive Satomi to the airport to pick up her friend, Claudine, who is surprisingly difficult to spot in the rush of airline passengers as they emerge from the gate. Finally, Satomi rushes toward a smartly dressed petite woman with shiny dark hair. Chameleon, I think. Definitely a foreigner, but you have to look twice to see it.

  We stop by a kaitenzushi restaurant on the way back from the airport, and Satomi and I marvel at Claudine’s unique ability to try absolutely anything that glides past us on the conveyor belt circling the interior of the restaurant. Glistening salmon roe that remind me too much of the jars of fish bait from my Alaskan childhood. Tiny raw octopi bearing an uncanny resemblance to severed, boiled, and peeled baby hands. Sushi of every kind. And when we remark on her bravery: “Oh, you know, ‘When in Rome . . .’” One hour into her stay in Japan, and this woman is seemingly more at ease with local culture than I’ll ever be.

  “How odd,” says Claudine as we zip through the dark and narrow streets to Satomi’s place. “Except for the restaurant, I haven’t seen much of anything in the light yet. It still feels as if I’m home.”

  Saturday, March 27

  The much-awaited cherry blossoms are starting to reveal themselves—some trees earlier than others—and new life is springing up in the crevasses of that winter-yellow palette. Claudine has timed her trip brilliantly.

  The three of us decide to begin our grand tour of the city with a visit to Kumamoto Castle, a towering, solemn structure overlooking downtown. As we enter the grounds, a woman in a flower-patterned kimono approaches us. “Try? Try?” She gestures toward a makeshift stage of portable tatami and red felt beneath new blossoms. Rows of fold-up chairs are set up off to one side for the meta-view. Bright, gaudy signage hangs from posts, advertising a tea ceremony demonstration in awkward English: “Please enjoy your happiness life with heart! We’ll do my best!” Another woman in kimono beckons us to join her on the stage, while a third heats water on a low portable burner. I am determined to pass by the display, ignoring the gentle English invitations, but Claudine stops us. “Come on, let’s do it!” The enthusiasm of a good guest—or simply of a curious mind. Maybe, in my more jaded moments as a foreigner living in Japan, I would do well to return to this state.

  Claudine and I remove our shoes and arrange ourselves on the red felt as Satomi slips into one of the folding chairs nearby. A trio of Japanese boys, likely university students, settle into the remaining spaces next to us. All of us sit with our legs folded beneath our bodies and our backs straight. “This is seiza,” I whisper to Claudine. “It’s the formal posture. Foreigners and young Japanese struggle to stay in it for long. You can tuck your legs off to the side if it starts to get unbearable.”

  “So it’s a contest, then?”

  “That’s right. An unspoken contest.”

  The women in kimono take their places, and we are instructed in how to accept and offer tea and sweets—a formal ceremony of guest and host. Nearly everything is done deliberately, with two hands. The women move in their prescribed motions—the kata—of tea, and despite my initial reluctance I am transported to the few times I have done this with Koun, how it moved me then as it does now. In this moment I see that it has always been the taking of the tea that I love most: bow low to accept what is offered, lift the ceramic tea bowl, observe the design by slowly turning it in the hands three times, drink, reverse the turns, set it back down. A complete experience of an object.

  Thirty minutes later, when this abbreviated ceremony has come to a close, none of the guests on the red carpet can stand. The boys next to us laugh and massage their legs while Claudine and I struggle to put on our shoes.

  “Does this mean that we all won—or lost?”

  “Both,” I say.

  As the boys lean against each other, still laughing, and move off, a reporter approaches Claudine and me, and I translate the usual questions:

  “Where are you two from?”

  “How old are you?”

  “How was your experience of Japanese culture?”

  This all strikes me as amusing and a little sad. How many years do I have to live in this town to not be counted a tourist? The answer, of course, is that I am a tourist by birth—it’s in the blood. We smile as he takes our photograph and then we find Satomi and move on to the castle itself, climb those dark stairs, contemplate the relics of ancient Japan behind the walls of glass on each floor: swords, samurai armor, scrolls, shodo writing implements, bento boxes of the better classes. At last, at the top, a panoramic view of the city and welcome gusts of fresh air.

  “There!” announces Satomi. “Our next destination—Suizenji.”

  Off in the distance I can just make out the district where I lived when I arrived in 1999, during my first stay in Japan. Tucked between billboard advertisements and towering hotels is one of the “top three famous gardens in Japan,” a replica in miniature of significant landscape features between the old capital, Kyoto, and the new, Tokyo. I explored the garden and the streets surrounding it for two years, and it is often in my thoughts as the scene of one of many life-changing moments for me: walking alone at 3 a.m., peering into a stream of overfed koi outside the gates of that famous garden, bawling like a two-year-old as I tried very hard to purge all my childhood misery. But from here, the area looks unfamiliar, impersonal.

  “Cities all seem to look the same from above,” remarks Claudine, as we turn from the view and begin the slow climb down the castle stairs.

  Sunday, March 28

  Satomi, Claudine, and I zoom along the highway in my little blue K-van. Our destination today is Aso, both an active volcano and the world’s largest caldera. Nestled in the massive geographic bowl are a number of tiny villages, including Takamori, the town where Koun first met his teacher.

  “He was placed ther
e as an English-language instructor,” I explain to Claudine, who wants to know how an American winds up as an ordained Zen monk in a Japanese monastery. “He knew he wanted to do traditional meditation, but he had no clue where to go. One morning he just got on his bike as soon as he heard the 6 a.m. bells and followed the direction of the sound. Luckily, it led him to the local Zen temple. Of course, they didn’t expect him to come more than once or twice. You know, ‘tourist Zen.’ The priest made a big effort to create a ceremonial atmosphere, and his wife treated him like an honored guest, serving him tea and fancy meals on heirloom lacquerware. But after the first week, they stopped the formality and handed him a broom. For two years, he did zazen, cleaned the grounds, then had breakfast with everyone at the kitchen table, like one of the family.”

  Today the Hondas, Koun’s other family, are out attending to a funeral, so we bypass Takamori and cut straight up the mountain to see the mouth of the volcano. When we reach the top, it is windy and cold and the various peddlers struggle to secure their hand-drawn signs and makeshift display tables. The three of us take hasty pictures in front of the steaming cauldron of noxious liquid and Satomi and Claudine race back to sit again in the shelter of the car, while I buy a bag of powdered sulphur. Some years ago, one of the men there talked me into buying a bag of the stinky stuff to ward off large insects, and now it is a yearly ritual. Soon, I’ll begin drawing a nightly circle around my futon against mukade, the giant poisonous centipedes that begin to emerge from the nooks and crannies of our aging townhouse in spring. I don’t know if it really works, but I haven’t yet seen anything cross that yellow line.

  On the way back to town, Satomi nods off in the back seat while Claudine continues to take in the passing landscape. As the blur of rice fields, trees, and mountains begins to give way to the concrete of the city once again, she asks, “Do you feel lonely? Living here in such a different culture and your husband away for a full year. . . .”

  “Oh yes. Definitely. There is that constant and pervasive loneliness of being foreign, of being out of context. And then there is this new loneliness of missing him. There’s a rawness there, a shock to the system. But it’s only been a month. How will I feel, exactly, in six months? Or eleven? I just don’t know. I do wonder how we’ll have changed in that time.”

  “Or if he will change and you won’t?”

  “Yes, that’s the fear, isn’t it? Or worse—that he won’t change at all. Twelve months apart for nothing.”

  Monday, March 29

  Satomi and Claudine are on their own for the next few days. I find myself creating itineraries in my head and envying the adventures I have already had, that they will have.

  At work, the Shokei office ladies Yuki and Tomomi give me going-away presents, bowing deeply and thanking me for helping them during our time together as coworkers—a standard custom for those leaving a work position in a Japanese institution. In my office, I open the delicately wrapped packages, expecting the usual fare of senbei (Japanese rice crackers), nori (dried and salted sheets of seaweed), or some other local edible. Instead, a child’s Minnie Mouse juice cup and a heart-shaped picture frame studded with pink sparkling glass beads. It’s what they imagined I would like, this gaudy Americana. Such kindness. I will miss them very much.

  Wednesday, March 31

  Early this morning I drive Satomi and Claudine to Kumamoto City Train Station. Claudine’s next stop is Kyoto. The three of us drink bad five-hundred-yen coffee while Satomi and I neurotically give Claudine rapid-fire instructions about how best to survive in this exotic Eastern land (Satomi, too, writing out detailed sentences in both Roman letters and Japanese script on page after page of notebook paper).

  “I think I’ll figure it out—don’t worry,” says Claudine, beaming at both of us. Clearly we are far more concerned about her travel plans than she is.

  I offer my best advice, the thing that has gotten me around Japan many times, despite my faltering language skills: “Ask young people for help in simple English—they’ll have studied it in school. Look very distressed. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ a lot. Cry if necessary.”

  Satomi digs through her handbag and produces two envelopes, which she then hands to each of us. “I almost forgot.” Inside, a copy of a newspaper article as memento: a black-and-white shot of Claudine and me kneeling beneath gray blossoms, sipping out of delicate gray cups. The Japanese on either side of us have been neatly cropped away. The caption reads, “Tourists experiencing tea ceremony at Kumamoto Castle.”

  “Typical,” I sigh.

  “It’s perfect,” says Claudine, and of course she is right.

  When it is time for her to catch the train that will carry her away to other adventures, Satomi and I are not ready to let her go. We continue to wave frantically from behind the ticket stalls, even though we can no longer see her in the throng of dark-suited travelers moving in and out of trains. She has blended into landscape.

  At last, we let our hands drop, and we turn toward the station exit. Satomi sighs. “Isn’t it sad when your guests leave? They seem to have a wonderful destination ahead of them, but you are just here, as always, left behind and waiting for something.”

  ~

  After I drop off Satomi, I stand in the solitude of my kitchen seeing and not seeing as I pour tea into a cup that is overflowing. And when I do notice, finally, the puddle that is making its slow way across the table, all I can think about is the sound of Koun weeping in the shower downstairs on the afternoon of his leaving, how I cried because he was crying, how both of us composed ourselves, for the sake of the other, before that long drive to the sea.

  APRIL

  Unsui (Clouds and Water)

  Thursday, April 1

  “I feel like I’m going crazy. God, I AM going crazy. What’s wrong with me?”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Just—close your eyes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, imagine walking down a path in the woods. Can you see it?”

  “No, there’s nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Wait—yes. I can see it.”

  “Okay. Notice the details of the path, what it looks like, and also everything around you.”

  “Okay, I can see all of it now.”

  “Good. Now, you come upon some kind of vessel, a container—it’s there on the path. Can you see it?”

  “Yes—yes, I see it.”

  “Good. Describe the vessel and its contents.”

  “A rough earthenware bowl. Dark brown, mottled—imperfect. It fits comfortably in the palms of my hands, the weight of a stone. Inside, there’s cold, clear water and . . . nothing else.”

  “All right, that is your ideal understanding of love.”

  ~

  This morning at 6:30 a.m. I am sitting zazen alone in a cool room with a sky-blue blanket wrapped around my shoulders and the cherry blossoms out back in full bloom and my husband only a month into his year at the monastery. Bits of conversation and images come up from somewhere in my mind, and I’m following them, feeling them viscerally, and thus not really sitting zazen at all but instead daydreaming—but with the appearance of an ancient religious practice. I am seeing a five-years-ago Koun, when he was just Garrett, my closest friend in graduate school, telling me a riddle there in his living room and me curled up on the couch, nursing a confused and volatile emotion that I never knew I had in me. I was angry at my ex-husband, at past friends and lovers, at those who contributed to a flawed childhood, at myself. I was terrified that I’d somehow married a younger version of one of my stepfathers—or a composite of all three of them—and that this was in fact a pattern with me, my only way to understand love, and that I would do it again and again until it destroyed me.

  Sometime after that conversation, over coffee and pie at the dive diner in Spokane where we always met to discuss our writing—or What Comes Next—Garrett revealed that he had decided to move to Japan to study Zen. “I’l
l work as an English teacher until I can figure out how to enter a monastery.”

  I had been bracing myself for this for some time, this ending. It was not a surprise. “All right,” I’d said, “but can I shave your head before you leave?”

  “Yes, but not all the way to the skin—I’ll do that when I’m ordained.”

  Late afternoon the following day, I showed up at Garrett’s apartment, ready to cut away the trappings of desire and material life. I remember him kneeling on 70’s-era kitchen linoleum, the sunlight coming in striped through the slats of half-opened blinds, and the feeble growl of clippers. Bits of fuzz floated up around us as my body bent over his, left hand pressing against scalp, right hand arcing through dark strands, forming one narrow path after another until all was revealed. Afterward, he swept up the hair while I let myself out.

  Friday, April 2

  The rain comes in soft sprinkles at first and then in fat, heavy drops that shred the newly opened cherry blossoms behind my townhouse in a few brief minutes. From my windows I watch the pink quiver and give way under the water’s violence, revealing green-budded branches. Tomorrow will see gutters filled with bruised blossoms and children in the streets throwing handfuls of pink into blue sky.

  The ladies in my pottery class have scheduled their annual hanami (flower-viewing party) for late this afternoon, and I’ve arranged to leave early from work to join them. But Nishida-sensei calls after the rain does its worst and says we’ll have our meal at a restaurant instead of outdoors.

  Yoko-san arrives just before noon to collect me in her massive white luxury sedan. Her current English teacher from one of the chain language schools, a tall American in his mid-twenties, sits in the seat beside her. He turns with a wide grin and thrusts his hand toward me as soon as I settle into the backseat.

  “Dave,” he says, “Japanesedriversarefuckin’awfularen’tthey.” And then when he sees the look on my face: “Don’t worry—if you talk fast she won’t have a clue what you’re saying.”