My Year of Dirt and Water Read online

  Saturday, June 5

  Walking past the rice fields today with twenty kanji flashcards in my hands, I am concentrating so rigidly, tracing each character against paper, that I almost miss seeing a group of people—maybe seven or eight on a side street—taking pictures of the sky with their cell phones. All of them hold up the gadgets and stand perfectly still, as if capturing an alien invasion. I stop walking and glance up in the direction of their photo-taking, almost expecting to see a flying saucer. Instead, a bright double rainbow arcs across the complex jigsaw of buildings and rice fields. Could Koun be seeing this too? The monks stepping away from the midday cleaning of their mountain monastery, taking tea outdoors just to watch this prismatic echo for a few brief minutes before it all fades away? As I move on, the words from the day’s flashcards rise back up into my consciousness: bowl, vermillion, revelation, texture, cultivate.

  Sunday, June 6

  Last night, the community loudspeakers announced over and over something that, as usual, I could not quite catch because of the scratchy too-loud reverberation of the ancient equipment. A typhoon? An emergency town meeting? A chikan in our neighborhood stalking my girls yet again? This morning, the mystery is solved as I walk down the street: everyone is outside sweeping, picking weeds, and gathering litter into big plastic bags. Right—the announcement had been a reminder to clean up the neighborhood on Sunday. Guiltily, I greet my neighbors and hurry past to the parking lot where I’ve agreed to meet with Yoko-san from pottery class. Today is one of Kyushu’s premier pottery exhibitions, to be held at Grandmesse. Sensei will be selling her wares, and all of us students will drop by to offer support.

  When we arrive, there are crowds of people moving through the labyrinth of makeshift pottery stalls, filling the great hall that is really more airplane hangar than showroom.

  “Wow—yakimono must be incredibly popular in Japan,” I say, feeling overwhelmed already.

  “Oh yes, very popular,” says Yoko-san. “You can get very famous names here for so cheap price.”

  Everywhere, people encircle stalls in bird-like flocks, then lift away with big bags of carefully wrapped treasures.

  A map on the wall helps us to locate Sensei’s stall, where she has arranged fragrant white lilies in some of her taller vases. “The smell draws in customers,” she explains. Indeed it does—several women stop along the aisle, exclaiming about a familiar smell that they can almost but not quite name. They swivel their heads, looking around for the source, and then approach Sensei’s booth to touch, lift, and consider.

  After checking in with Sensei, Yoko-san and I spend the next couple of hours moving from vendor to vendor, she pointing out the more famous family kilns. “This is good,” she says, motioning to one small corner stall, one of the more humble affairs. “Hagi-yaki. Very traditional style. Not like Western ceramic at all. Very . . . wabi-sabi.”

  I lift a mottled brown bowl. Ideal for a monk, or for the wife of a monk, I think, and pass it to the vendor, an older man with a kind smile.

  “This foreigner is a yakimono deshi,” Yoko-san announces loudly—not for the first time today. For Yoko-san, I suspect that her foreign friends are always a bit of a fashion accessory.

  “Ah, is that so?” He smiles as he wraps the bowl.

  “Yes. Her husband is a Zen monk—an American from Montana.”

  “Ah, is that so?” he says again, indulging Yoko-san’s bragging as he also tucks a handful of ceramic chopstick rests into my bag as a “service.”

  Exhausted by the beauty of it all, we stop for tea and cake at a central food booth, where we can eat and drink from pottery made by the artist of our choice. I select a hand-pinched tea bowl and palm-sized oval tray in coordinated texture and color.

  “It is even better when you can use it, ne?” says Yoko-san. I have to agree. The art is in the experience—glazed clay against the lip, a certain weight and texture in the hands, earthy taste of grass-green matcha against the tongue. Warmth as it enters, and then becomes, the body.

  Monday, June 7

  This afternoon I am assisting with Taguchi-sensei’s Local Culture course—my role is to give feedback on drafts of the students’ hometown reports. As I move from group to group, I learn that every town—no matter how tiny (or how indistinguishable from the surrounding towns)—has something for which it is purported to be extremely well known. Watermelon. Sweet potatoes. Oranges. Dango. Dried persimmon. Shellfish marinated in soy sauce. Altogether, a veritable feast of fame.

  “How about Kikuyo—this area. What is produced here?” I ask one of the groups of girls.

  “Carrots.” Of course. How many times has a bag of carrots been pressed into my arms by a neighbor or one of the pottery ladies? Yet another obvious miss on my part.

  I continue to survey the room, making note of all the edibles, when one of my students answers, “Goldfish.”

  “Goldfish?”

  “Yes. Very famous.”

  “Are they . . . delicious?”

  She giggles uncontrollably in reply. “Not for eating!” she at last manages. “Pet! Pet!”

  “Tracy-sensei, what is your town famous for?” asks her partner.

  “Nothing special.” I pause. This answer isn’t quite right. “Oh, well, come to think of it, in the town where I went to high school there are giant vegetables—pumpkins, zucchini, cabbage. They grow very big in Alaska—bigger than a big American man, even—because of the very long sunlight hours and a special way of growing them.”

  “Giant vegetables bigger than an American man? That is strange,” she says. “We have never heard of such a thing.”

  Tuesday, June 8

  On the way to school this morning, I meander through the neighborhood and really notice those temple darlings, the great pompoms of color-changing hydrangea, tucked against the sides of several houses. Was it only yesterday that I was walking past the very same flowers and they were a brilliant blue? Could they really be the same flowers? And now I admire them in green and white. Fickle, like my moods.

  At noon, I opt for a long lunch hour to work old clay and attempt to free the dark cloud that has lodged in my mind. Unfortunately, I have yet to truly understand the process of recycling clay—it seems a koan given by Sensei to torture me. I’ve figured out that I need to dry it considerably beforehand. But there’s also the difficulty of getting it to blend. My new plan is to tear it all up into smaller pieces and knead these into workable chunks before pushing them once again into one big lump to pummel and massage. And so I do this, really putting my weight into it. The worry, though—I begin to understand this as I push and pound the final product—is that I’m just creating a more thorough set of faults for the clay to break against later, when I’m forming it on the wheel.

  Finally, I’ve been at it for too long. The muscles in my arms are cramping, and I sigh, step back, and lean into the wall with my clay-stained hands outstretched before me. What am I doing? What can I possibly hope to accomplish with this constant reworking of dirt and water?

  The sound of the mail coming through the slot in the front door startles me. I walk to the sink, rinse my hands, and wipe them on a towel—though not well enough. In the entryway, I find a single letter addressed from Koun and tear it open eagerly, covering the paper with damp gray fingerprints, little kisses.

  Koun writes that Shogoji’s nichiyo sanzenkai, the monthly day of meditation for laypeople, will be this Sunday—and I’ve been given permission to attend. He also writes that Jisen-san has said that it will be “too hard for him to see me,” that she will allow it but doesn’t encourage it. All in all, it is good news—something to look forward to. Still, the cloud lifts away only momentarily.

  ~

  I falter this evening in pottery class. I can’t seem to get the cups to stay put for trimming, as my heavy-handed, clumsy scraping yanks them clean off the wheel again and again. This frustration is punctuated by Yoko-san asking me question after question about Alaska—Snow in summer? Famous sights? Fam
ous food?—she’s wrongly got it in her head somehow that I aim to return there over the summer holiday. But no simple clarifying comment seems to stop her, so I just answer each question as it comes. Usually there is no snow in summer, unless you are at a very high altitude. Denali is the tallest mountain in North America. The king crab is very good, as are the many varieties of salmon.

  What I’ve given up on explaining—mostly because she won’t understand, culturally or linguistically—is that I very rarely return to Alaska; there have been only a few brief visits in the past eleven years or so. Because Koun’s mother can no longer travel, all of us, including my mother and brother-in-law, go to Montana over the winter or summer holidays.

  Suddenly, Yoko-san exclaims, “Yosh! I decided. I will go to Alaska with you. Your parents live in a big house there?”

  “Wait—what?”

  “Your parents have a big house?”

  “No—my mother. . . it’s just a small condo.”

  “Okay. I will book hotel. Maybe my granddaughter will come too. You tell me the dates.”

  I collapse the bottom of the cup I’ve been working on, ruining it.

  “Pay attention!” says Sensei, shaking her head.

  Giving up on trying to explain to Yoko-san, I rise to clean up all that I have destroyed.

  Saturday, June 12

  In downtown Kumamoto City I sit in a café, adjacent to a wall of window, scribbling in a notebook and watching people pass by beyond the glass. Every few minutes, someone seems to startle and notice me, an exotic fish in captivity—while I, looking out at them, witness a similar effect, but in the plural.

  In Japanese class earlier this morning, a baby-faced American boy in his twenties had learned my age during a practice discussion and lapsed into English, “Whoa—you’re thirty? I guess I’ve got some years to learn Japanese then.”

  I’d laughed. “I feel that I was twenty yesterday.” And that’s true. But now that I really think about it, I also feel that twenty was a million years ago—I was not yet, but nearly, twenty when I moved away from my home in Alaska.

  Opening to a new page in my notebook, I draw a line down the middle and label two possibilities: Go home and Don’t go. Though it is unlikely that Yoko-san really intends to go to Alaska, her comments have sparked this idea in me—an idea that I have been circling around for some time now. But my pen hovers over the page. I don’t know what to write. There is just the felt-sense of Alaska—a single, inexplicable knot of emotion. Is it possible to long for a place and hate it at the same time?

  I put down my pen and look up just as two of my students, Risa and Kanae, appear behind the glass. They pause, seem briefly shell-shocked with recognition before exchanging emphatic waves with me.

  A minute later, the girls enter the café and find my table. “Tracy-sensei! Surprise to see you in natural life setting.”

  “I’m surprised to see you, too!”

  “You are writing something?”

  “Just thinking mostly. What are you two doing?”

  “Shopping!”

  “Where are your bags?”

  “Oh, few money. Looking only.”

  “Window shopping?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Does it make you feel bad, looking and wanting all those things that you can’t have?”

  “Yes, but—we enjoy.”

  After they sit with me for a bit and chat about their many fashion desires, the girls wander off to more shopping adventures. I finish my tea in a swift gulp, tuck my notebook into my bag, and consider my needs for the journey to Shogoji on Sunday: a modest dark long-sleeved shirt, cookies or something else to offer for the monks’ tea time, and simple comfort foods for Koun—most likely snacks from the foreign-food section of the big department store.

  As for Alaska, the question can wait. Tomorrow I will see my husband for the first time in over three months. There is enough to obsess about already. And seeing Koun—it might be a little like window shopping.

  Sunday, June 13

  I wake much too early and, after a frantic bout of zazen, sit out on the steps of my townhouse for a long while, drinking a can of cold and too-sweet bitter coffee purchased from a nearby vending machine, as the neighbor’s cat passes through and around my legs—an infinity loop of furry affection. When it is time to go, I toss the can in the recycle bin and get into the car.

  I’ve driven the route to Shogoji several times before, as I dropped off and picked up Koun for the international ango, as well as other events, the previous year. It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive out of the city and into the smaller town of Kikuchi and then another twenty minutes or so through a tiny village and up into the mountains. Driving this last bit, up the one-lane, shoulderless road that clings precariously to a steep cliff, I am thankful that our car is so compact. The drop-off is terrifyingly sheer. Below, small rice paddies staircase down to the river. When I pull up, at last, to the parking lot that overlooks the valley below, Koun is there waiting for me in gassho, a twig broom on the ground next to him and a wide grin across his face. For three months, I’ve been longing for that familiar smile.

  “Wow—you look thin!” I say as I get out of the car, and he does, the samu-e falling loosely around his body and his cheeks hollow.

  “You should see me naked!”

  “Not for another eight and a half months, Sweetie.” I want to embrace him, but cannot. As I know from his previous ango stay, this is a potentially delicate situation. Somewhere lurking in the shadows of the monastery could be Jisen-san, or perhaps some other monk, eager to spot some small indiscretion (real or imagined) that will be used as evidence to keep me away. Instead, Koun helps me with my things and we ascend the stone stairs to the main cluster of buildings, both of us walking slowly and grinning like idiots, just happy to be in each other’s company.

  From the top of the stairs we follow a stone path across a field of pale rocks, at the center of which is the huge temple bell. I scan the complex, this centuries-old monastery that has fallen and risen again and again from the dirt. The kuin (reception, kitchen, and informal dining hall) is to our left. The main building, the hatto (Dharma Hall), sits directly before us, and to our right is the sodo, where monks and laypeople do zazen. Beyond that is the bathhouse and monk’s quarters. The koki-an (abbot’s quarters), though I cannot see it, is behind the kuin. All of the buildings are joined by open-air walkways, and many of the thin walls of the buildings slide open so that the monks spend much of their days outdoors—even when they are inside. Surrounding the complex is the pulsing, vibrant life of the mountain, always threatening to swallow it whole.

  “It must be hard to keep the forest at bay, especially in summer,” I say.

  “True—it occupies a lot of our time.” We stop together at the open front veranda of the kuin. “I need to get ready, but I’ll see you again soon. Oh—we’re doing formal oryoki lunch today.”

  “That complicated thing with all the bowls and whatnot?”

  “Don’t worry—just follow along with the others.” As Koun moves off to finish his duties, I remove my shoes and bow into the receiving room, where one of the Japanese monks greets me formally and indicates where to sign my name on the temple ledger. “Please follow,” he says, and leads me past the ornate hatto—where the gilded Buddha looks down on us from a high altar—to an adjacent vestibule, where I drink tea alone, contemplate the serene face of a large Medicine Buddha, and wait for the others to arrive.

  Several people amble in at the same time, talking among themselves, and then almost immediately we are all beckoned out onto the walkway, where we slide our feet into slippers and shuffle along the smooth wood to the sodo for zazen. I choose a seat near the entrance, pull my body up onto the platform while tucking the slippers beneath, and then face the wall and settle into meditation posture. Koun and I are now sitting together—under the same roof at least—and it is a comforting feeling tinged with longing. I feel I could stay here, in this rigid posture, forever.


  My body jerks when the drum sounds, signaling the end of the morning session. I gracelessly follow the monks and laypeople through a series of bows and prostrations. The ceremony begins after this, and I pretend to chant while the others recite the lineage from Shogoji’s founder to the Buddha. Through these small failures, I can feel myself growing more and more nervous about oryoki. Koun explained it to me once, when we were preparing for his entrance to the monastery. But I don’t remember much about this ritualized way of formal monastic dining. All I can recall, I think, is that I must eat a bit of the rice first, and then move from bowl to bowl in a circle, until all has been consumed. The drums sound and the server monks begin to rush around, delivering lacquerware oryoki bowl sets wrapped in furoshiki cloth to all the guests. Jisen-san looks on from the teacher’s seat at the center of the room, orchestrating everything with her eyes. We untie the stack of bowls and place them on the cloth, and I can see that I am not the only one who is nervous. Some of the monks’ hands shake as they rush from person to person, delivering rice, miso soup, and vegetables. A couple laypeople, too, are muttering under their breath, asking each other what to do. We eat fast and as efficiently as we can after a monk announces second helpings, and then we are delivered water and then tea to wash out the last bits of food from our bowls. Finally, we restack the dishes and tie them up into neat packages with the furoshiki cloth. We laypeople shuffle slowly out of the sodo afterward, as if defeated.

  As I’m putting on my shoes at the exit, Koun appears next to me. “I’ll walk you to the car.” He lifts my bag and I follow him.

  “What did you think about oryoki?” asks Koun.

  “It’s a lot like tea ceremony . . . but on steroids.”

  He laughs. “It is like that.”

  “You don’t eat that way all the time, do you?”