The Lady and the Monk Read Free Page A

the last remaining pilgrims’ districts in Japan, an ancient neighborhood of geisha houses and incense stores built in the shadow of the city’s most famous temple, Kiyomizu, the Temple of Pure Water. Wooden boards still marked the places Bashō had admired, and monks still bathed in the ice-cold Sound of Feathers waterfall above. My own street, as it happened, was still a center of the
mizu-shōbai
, or “water trade” (of women), and also the place where the widow of the city’s fiercest shogun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had retired, on her husband’s death, and built a villa and a temple. In the temple, I had read,
yama-neko
, or “mountain lion,” geisha had entertained at parties for the monks, and even now the elegant characters on the lanterns denoted the names of the women who worked within.
    Thus the whole area was preserved as carefully as a museum treasure. My local café was a rock-garden teahouse, sliding blond-wood screens opening out onto a clean geometry of wood and water; the neighborhood stores were polished galleries selling sea-blue Kiyomizu pots, silken fans, and woodblock prints, all silvered with the sound of water music; and my next-door neighbor was a forty-foot statue of the goddess Kannon, majestic against the mapled hills.
    Few places in Japan were as self-consciously Japanese as Kyoto, the romantic, templed city that had been the capital for a thousand years and even now was faithfully preserved as a kind of shrine, an antique, the country’s Greatest Living National Treasure. Almost 100,000 tourists (mostly Japanese) came hereevery day to pay their respects to the “City of Peace and Harmonious Safety,” and the city, accustomed to their worship, handed itself over to them like a collection of gift-wrapped slides — even the place mats at the local McDonald’s (which had once set a world record for serving two million burgers in a single day) were maps of the city’s lyrical conceits, locating the temple whose floorboards sang like nightingales and the rock garden that traced the pattern of infinity.
    Yet even the efficiency of its charm could hardly diminish the city’s beauty. My first Sunday morning in Kyoto, I hurried out of the temple at first light and climbed the steep cobbled paths that lead up to Kiyomizu. Taking the wrong path without knowing it, and passing through a side temple, I slipped out into a rock garden. A woman, mistaking me for a VIP, came out with a gold-and-indigo tray bearing a cup of green tea. The maples before us climbed towards the blue. Everywhere was a silence calm as prayer.
    Minutes later, I was walking through the teeming basement of a department store, overflowing with more fruit, more pickles, more high-tech gadgets than I could easily take in; sorbet houses and wineshops, noodle joints and macaroni parlors, melon outlets and chocolate-makers. I bought an ice cream from a girl, and she wrapped it in a bag with a smart gold twizzle around the neck, put that bag in a larger, foam bag, complete with two blocks of ice to keep the whole from melting, and wrapped it all in the stylish black-and-gold bag of her company; I went to temples and was handed entrance tickets that looked like water-color prints; I walked into a park again, in the cloudless exaltation of a perfect Sunday morning, and could scarcely believe that I had stumbled upon such a flawless world. To partake of the gleaming splendors of the
depāto
and to sip green-tea floats in teahouses; to find moonlit prints in convenience stores and damascene earrings in coffee shops: it shook me out of words.
    It sometimes seemed, in fact, in those early days, as if all Japan were at once charging into the future with record-breakingspeed, and moving as slowly as a glacier; both sedative and stimulant, a riddle of surface and depth.
    And so, in time, the days in the temple began to find a rhythm of their own, and I to set my watch by the pattern of their calm. Every morning at 6 a.m., the sound of the