The Lady and the Monk Read Free Page B

tolling gong and the husky rumble of chanted sutras, broken by the silver tinkle of a bell. Then the patter of receding footsteps. Sweet incense seeping under the screen, making the space all holy. Then breakfast in first light, beside the garden, and random walks through lemon-scented mornings, rainbow banners fluttering above the wooden shops. At noon, the elder monk would take his dog, Kodo, for a walk and then, regal in black robes, clap his hands above the pond, summoning the carp to lunch. A little later, the temple was silent again, and the tidy pairs of slippers outside one room, and the squeak of a TV hostess, told me that the monks were eating.
    At night, when the city was asleep, I took to slipping out of the place to make phone calls to my employers in Rockefeller Center (New York offices were open from midnight to 8 a.m. Kyoto time). And only then, as I stood in a squat green phone booth, plastered all over with trim stickers advertising topless girls — a novel kind of convenience shopping — did I see the other, shadow side of Japan begin to emerge: the derelicts with wild hair, the crazy-eyed vagrants and disheveled beggars, venturing out into the pedestrian arcades or huddled together under department store eaves, tidy in their way and self-contained, as if, in some part of themselves still good Japanese, they were determined not to intrude upon the world around them. Watching these denizens of the underworld — all but invisible except in the city center and late at night — I recalled that such a one, six centuries before, had gone on to found Daitokuji, the Temple of Great Virtue.
    * * *
    By day, though, the temple was mostly deserted: just me, the two monks, and their dog. Sometimes, on the wall above the toilet, another visitor appeared, a vile, pale-green lizard, with eyes like raisins on the top of his head. And one bright morning, after I had finished breakfast, I met the only other member of the household, a laborer who came each day to make the gardens perfect. As soon as I returned the gardener’s smile, he came on over and shook my hand in the glassy autumn sunshine. “Are you wealthy?” he began. A little taken aback, I did what I had been told to do in every meeting with a Japanese male: handed him my business card. This he scrutinized as if it were Linear B.
    “My hobby is making money,” he went on, and then, before I could get him wrong, interjected, “Is joke!” I see, I thought, a joke. Then the conversation took a literary turn.
    “Have you read Milton? And Shakespeare? How about Nietzsche, Kant?”
    “Sometimes,” I said. “Have you practiced English with many foreigners?”
    “Oh no.” He waved his hands at me. “I very embarrassed. I cannot. Especially girls. I very, very shy.”
    This, I thought, was familiar enough terrain. “So you like American girls?”
    “At first.” He paused. “But gradually, no.”
    “They are not
shizukana
,” I tried.
    He nodded happily. “Not modest.”
    “You must be working hard today.”
    “Not so hard. One hour I talking monks. Now Grand Sumō tournament. Monks love Sumō very much; every day they watch. Three hour.” Yet another surprising arrow to their quiver!
    The other unexpected feature of the temple was that it was ringed, in large part, by the gaudy purple blocks and curtained parking lots of love hotels. This was, of course, in a way, quite apt:monks and women had always been close in Japanese literature — had, in fact, been the main purveyors of classical Japanese literature — and Gion itself, the name of the “flower district” here, was also the name of a famous temple. Professional women had long been known as “Daruma” (after Bodhidharma, the first patriarch of Zen) because, like legless Daruma dolls, they tumbled as soon as they were touched, and then bounced back. And “dark willows, bright flowers” — a Zen metaphor for the Buddha nature — had long been a euphemism for the pleasure quarters, or