As the bullet train from Hiroshima pulled into Kyoto station, on its way back to Tokyo, I took a snap decision to jump off there and then, in order to see the sublime Ryoan-ji rock garden again and try to reserve a couple of nights at the fabled Tawaraya Inn, sometimes called the world’s best hotel. I was allowing myself an almost carnal indulgence in the tranquil majesty of old Japan: the misty gardens, hanging scrolls, silent temples and gently splashing waterfalls. I had deliberately resisted this numinous world so far, because I’d been determined to plunge into today’s Japan rather than submit to the surviving relics of its incomparable but dying heritage. I had feared, too, that once I was enveloped in pristine silence, order and emptiness, the loud, chaotic, cluttered world of contemporary Japan would become altogether too monotonous to inhabit.
It was off-season, mid-week, and the Tawaraya had a room for two nights – fortunately, because you usually need to book months in advance, and perhaps unfortunately, because there was a price tag upwards of $2,000. Of this, around $1,000 would be for the two dinners. No matter: from the moment I’d arrived in this land of heavenly gastronomy, I’d decided to put my mouth where my money was. I’d spent at least half my professor’s salary on food, and had seldom regretted a penny of it.
All of classical Japan is compacted into this extraordinary Inn, or ryokan, on a Kyoto backstreet: refinement of the highest order; the bewitching art of understatement; service so subtle that, for the most part, it is invisible; the voluptuousness of solitude as well as its terrors; the unseen and ultimately unseeable world of the inner life. For this is a hotel with no driveway, no lobby, no gym, no restaurants, no bars, indeed with no public spaces at all except for the beautifully kept inner gardens, a miniscule “library” which is usually empty, and a labyrinth of corridors where each turn greets you with an exquisite surprise: a flower arrangement in a simple ceramic vase, a folding screen depicting a mountain scene in the Zen style of brush painting, or a little bamboo spout dripping water serenely into a stone basin. Life here happens in your room and on your own. In two nights and two days, I didn’t meet another guest, though the used trays outside other rooms confirmed that I wasn’t alone. This pinnacle of traditional luxury is not easy to take for modern senses accustomed to continual avalanches of stimulation. Here you have to attune yourself to the intensity of sparseness.
Elegy out of precision. The perfection of my room was breathtaking: the impeccably brushed tatami matting; the alcove with hanging plant, incense dish and scroll; the private garden outside a large glass window, where an old gardener was weeding and watering with miniature, almost ingrown, movements; the large antique lacquered table; the legless za-isu chairs either side of the table, each with a single brocaded armrest; a cedar bath tub evincing the most delicate fragrance; the sensuous magic of the polished white wood pillars, partly inlaid into the wall. Modern conveniences, such as telephone and television, were covered with starched white cloth or else stowed in tiny, low cupboards. I had hardly a moment to inspect this panorama of purity when my kimonoed maid brought in green tea with the choicest sweet and bitter aromas to refresh me. In the Tawaraya no wants are left unattended, even if you aren’t yet aware of them.
Though I could have lingered for hours in this slow, silent, spare world that allowed imagination and time such free rein, and where modesty verged on the immodest, the day was too beautiful to stay indoors. A relay of whispers must have announced my departure to the elderly doorman, for exactly as I approached the lanterned entrance, he brought my shoes out for me, freshly polished, placing them neatly on a washed flagstone and standing by to help me with a shoehorn. A moment later, a taxi whisked me off to Ryoan-ji temple, the doorman and my maid bowing low in the street until we turned the corner and left their sight.
Intensely personal and intensely anonymous: this is also the signature of the Zen rock garden at Ryoan-ji, one of the greatest masterpieces of world art and, for me, the only place on earth where the sacred cannot be abused. Everywhere else where the sacred manifestly lives there is latent power to justify fanaticism, self-righteousness, contempt for those outside the magic circle. One need think only of the holy places and books of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, or even pure nature, like the enchanted forests of Germany, Poland and Russia. But who would kill in the name of fifteen irregularly shaped rocks with no agreed – or even definable – meaning? Who would justify a murderous ideology on the basis of their enigmatic spatial relationships and their furry tufts of moss? Who would be inspired by a sea of raked white gravel to dehumanize and subdue foreign peoples? Unlike a god who saves, chooses or dies for the faithful, unlike a mythology that elevates one nation or creed above all others, there is nothing here to inspire violence, hubris, or condemnation. Any such feelings fall on stony ground in this most magnificent of “dry landscape” gardens. Its rocks and moss and gravel voicelessly refuse explanations or justifications. They are pregnant with meaning; but none that can be articulated.
Crucial to the power of the rock garden is the low earthen wall which marks it off from the thrusting pine, cedar and cherry trees outside its perimeter that tower over, but never invade, its space. This wall, itself a masterpiece of proportion, borders the rectangular garden on three sides and is overhung by a narrow-beamed wooden roof. It represents not just the demarcation between inner and outer, between the unfamiliar, man-made rock garden and the more familiar ordering of nature surrounding it; the wall, with its clear dimensions and functions, contrasts starkly with the rock garden that, for all its order and its everyday items like moss and gravel, evokes a realm of awareness beyond borders and fixity. This is a realm of freedom where our consciousness is almost palpably refined, provided we can sustain an attentiveness that really looks.
Drawn into contemplation of the Zen garden, we see how the world of spirit and the world of things, the transcendental and the profane, the sublime and the everyday, are ultimately inseparable. The spiritual is not superior to the real, or distinct from the everyday. The spiritual is the everyday intensely felt (and then, perhaps, expressed in thought and art and religion and the like). It is how we would experience the real if we could maximally open ourselves to it. If, that is, we had the courage, empathy and persistence for such openness. Far from discrediting the idea of the spiritual – the urge to do so is myopic and narrowing – Ryoan-ji shows that a fully human relation to the world is spiritual through and through; that the more we allow the raw presence of things and their relationships to speak, the more we will experience them as spiritual in their very essence. As a result any conception of human life that does not flow from and embody this passionate and compassionate openness to the world does not deserve the name “spiritual”; and all doctrines that oppose the spiritual to the worldly or the human are bogus and vain.
Yet the closer we approach the reality of anything, and so its spirituality, the more surely we will experience its ultimate remoteness. The paradox is that only as we gain the bliss of intimacy with things – a rock, a person, a god – do we encounter the terror of their ungraspable solipsism. In attaining the personal, we always come up against the impersonal. And vice versa: in really confronting the impersonal we necessarily enter into the personal. There is no deep relationship, therefore, that is wholly personal and wholly intimate. (Perhaps this is why the divine is unattainable: not because it is a fiction but, on the contrary, because it is the final reality, and so is the most profoundly ungraspable and impersonal of all realities. Perhaps, too, this is why many of us refuse the divine: not because it can’t be proved – many beliefs we accept can’t be proved – but because we are repelled by its ultimate inaccessibility and wish to experience only its intimate and personal aspect. Yet such one-sidedness is impossible.)
The shadows were lengthening in the enchanted garden, the crowds of tourists and schoolchildren were thinning, and eventually I found myself, for a minute or two, alone in the dim light and in complete silence. I sat facing the brooding rocks, submitting to their nameless wisdom, and sensing, for a second here and there, that vivid but ineffable sense of eternity which the Western mind will never cease to crave. (And which will never be overcome merely by deciding to affirm everything temporal, ephemeral, partial, novel, and supposedly opposed to it.) Eventually a monk politely indicated that it was closing time, and I realized that dinner at the Tawaraya awaited me at precisely 6.00 p.m., as did my German friend Sophie whom I had invited to join me. I took one last look at the still masterpiece, exhausted and exhilarated by the attentiveness it demanded. It abruptly withdrew its presence the moment I ceased to attend to it with the active passivity, the taut receptivity to which alone it would yield. Slightly saddened by its retreat, but also a little relieved to be freed of its power, I left swiftly for the ryokan.
Curiosity for the impending banquet must have overtaken me because, as my taxi sped through Kyoto, passing innumerable magnificent temples that I wouldn’t have time to see, I started to blank out the tremendous richness of this city, which is birthplace to so much of the country’s religion, literature, ceramics and theatre. Just as in one’s teens, sex can suddenly swamp and blur one’s entire vision, so now I felt this heady mixture of promise, desire, escape and fear at my first encounter with the complexities of kaiseki ryori, the haute cuisine of Kyoto and the most refined in Japan, if not in the world.
The only problem was that I was really hungry – not a condition to be recommended when eating kaiseki. The total calorific value of its ten to twenty courses, each of which provides only a bite or two though it might take many hours to prepare, possibly equals that of a modest sandwich. So I had the taxi stop at a roadside stall on the way, for a packet of peanuts and some tangerines, in case my appetite got too stimulated by dinner. Tucking them into the inside pocket of my coat, I plucked up courage to be welcomed back at the Tawaraya, preparing myself not to be intimidated by the staff’s unflinching attentiveness, and organizing my possessions so that they would leave the taxi with me in one piece. It seemed self-evident that the doorman would divine my imminent arrival, and be waiting expectantly outside the entrance, as if for me alone, with that benign vigilance which permanently marked his bearing.
Which of course he was. As the taxi drew up to the Inn, visible in the gathering darkness only by its soft lanterns, I saw him in silhouette, stooped and immobile like an aged sentry. My preparations for a dignified exit paid off: I managed to avoid my usual tendency to rummage chaotically around the back seat for plastic bags, gloves, guidebooks, keys and loose coins; or, worse still, to grab my coat the wrong way up and send everything flying out of the pockets. As I lumbered out, the smiling figure of my maid was waiting just inside the entrance to relieve me of these encumbrances – though I made sure she didn’t see the peanuts and the tangerines. Shoes whisked away by the doorman, I found myself back in the stillness of my room, with its garden veranda gently floodlit and the low lacquered table set for dinner.
As soon as Sophie arrived, the ceremony began. Nothing is deeply experienced unless one encounters it at the right pace; and kaiseki is no exception. The procession of dishes was perfectly timed and the whole was imbued with magical harmony. In fact, with five sorts of harmony. There was harmony of colour. Second, harmony of raw texture – for uncooked ingredients. Third, harmony of added texture, imparted by the four methods of cooking represented in our dinner: stewing, steaming, grilling, and shallow-frying. Fourth, harmony of landscape, balancing the flavours of mountain, plain, river and sea. And, finally, harmony of salty, sweet, sour, bitter and sharp.
After a couple of days on this sort of diet, the challenge of soon reverting to Western food seemed daunting. The thought of a slab of steak, or a mass of starchy pasta, or a dismembered vein- and nerve-riddled chicken carcass, or the pungent, burly flavours of so much Western cooking in general, was perfectly disgusting. So was using such brutal implements as knives and forks, which, unlike disposable chopsticks, release oxidized metal into your food and, in restaurants, have been in thousands of other mouths. I was even coming to share the horror of my Japanese friends at my morning muesli, which they regarded as little better than animal feed, or wood shavings or – after pouring milk over it – soggy peat. It was good, therefore, to be returning to Tokyo for a couple of weeks, as a sort of gastronomic quarantine before flying back to Europe. I resolved to stick to simple foods in order to ease the transition: soba noodles, yakitori chicken, tofu, soups of vegetable and shrimp. Though this basic fare was delicious, it was less traumatic to forego than, say, sushi, sukiyaki, fugu, Zen-temple food, kaiseki, and the other higher reaches of what is possibly the greatest living tradition of gastronomy on the planet.
As the bullet train streaked back to Tokyo, I also decided that despite my new disgust for Western foods, I had to face my fear: the swiftest way to wean myself off Japanese food would be to mount sporadic, violent and sustained attacks on the palate using such taste bombs as pasta with gorgonzola and smoked-ham sauce, triple-decker sandwiches mixing cheese, meat and pickles, double-chocolate muffins and strong coffee. Under such duress, my taste buds would become sufficiently numbed and disoriented to stop craving the unavailable. And after a fortnight of corrective training, it was true that I was duly capable of eating a small meal in London from beginning to end without feeling abused. Sometimes, the only solution to losing something is to overwhelm yourself with its opposite.
When I got back to Tokyo, I asked Yuki what she would do in my situation.
“I recommend baked potato in Cotswold district of England. Best baked potato in the world. I never ate a potato like it. One has missed something unique until one eat Cotswold baked…”
I interrupted her and taught her the phrase “damning with faint praise”. She didn’t quite get it until I remarked that Japanese often judge foreigners benignly, by rock-bottom standards which they wouldn’t be seen dead applying to themselves.
She vigorously denied this. “Please, Simon, I’m serious. The Cotswold baked potato 100% unbeatable. I even went into the kitchen and asked chef how he make such a thing. I think you need a special sort of potato, special sort of oven. So far I haven’t managed to copy it.”
After nearly a year here, I was no longer fazed by the deftness of Japanese condescension. The put-downs are so playfully deadpan that they’re hard to counter. It was perfectly obvious that the story of the baked potato referred more to Yuki’s horror of anglophone cooking than to the perfection of the world’s crudest vegetable.
“Well, of course,” Yuki admitted, after my needling finally punctured her rituals of admiration, “I feel sorry for English people. Cotswold baked potato is great, but otherwise your food is so bad, it might be better to give it to your animals. Then, at least, they would be healthy.”
It turned out she was referring to mad-cow disease.
This reminded me to tell her the old adage that the English kill their beef twice: once when they slaughter the animal and once when they cook it. “And a third time when they feed it,” she added for good measure.
The amusement that many Japanese derive from trawling over the supposed awfulness of English and American cooking – indeed of most foreign cooking except French, Italian and Chinese – masks genuine disbelief, even terror, at its concoctions.
“One of my best friends,” Yuki said, “distinguished chef, visit England recently and on his return he try reassure me that English cooking isn’t as bad as we Japanese think; in fact, that it’s made lot of progress. But I don’t believe. Copying French, Italian or Japanese technique, or mixing them all up, will not produce anything genuine, especially if there isn’t great history to draw on. You would be better to stick to simple thing, like Cotswold baked potato.”
For Yuki the baked potato was all that stood between English food and gastronomic barbarity. Her attitude reminded me of Bernard Shaw’s quip that America was the only country ever to have gone from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. But then Shaw also believed that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a triumph of human civilization.