My Year of Dirt and Water

Returning

Wednesday, September 1

It is overcast this morning—drizzly, chilly. For the first time since I have been to this yoga-studio-cum-zendo, tall lamps glow from two far corners of the room, casting deep shadows—a clear signal that the long days of the Alaskan summer are quickly growing shorter.

This new light illuminates those who are present today—Loren, Tozen, Rie—as we kneel before each other after zazen. Funny, I think, just me and the Japanese Americans. Tozen signals Loren to distribute an unfamiliar stack of sutra books, and we begin the Heart Sutra together in a language that I cannot call my own:

Kan ji zai bo satsu

Gyo jin han-nya ha ra mit-ta ji

Sho ken go on kai ku

Do is-sai ku yaku

Sha ri shi

Shiki fu i ku

Ku fu i shiki . . .

I trace my finger down the line of furigana next to each Chinese character, trying to keep pace, but the rapid rhythm coupled with inadequate lighting is too much for me and my poor second-language reading skills. My voice enters and exits. Glancing up, I almost expect to see Koun half-in, half-out of shadow, chanting along with us.

“Did you enjoy?” asks Tozen afterward as we are putting the cushions away.

“Oh yes. It is difficult but it also feels right in Japanese, not forced into an awkward cadence, as it is in English.”

“Hmm, yes,” adds Loren. “It’s hard to get the same feeling in translation.”

“Oh,” sighs Rie. “Hearing Japanese sutra—it reminds me of when I was a little girl in Japan. So comfortable.”

“I don’t think it’s comfortable for me,” I say. “But I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing—being confused. That’s my day-to-day experience in Japan. I never completely understand anything.”

“Well—that’s Buddhism!” says Loren.

Outside, the rain has stopped and the smell of damp concrete rises around us. As we are taking our leave of each other—bowing in that Japanese way—I realize that I’ve forgotten my keys. Tozen unlocks the door, and I step back inside the studio, move down the long hallway, and enter into the dark solitude of the zendo. My keys are a small lump on the floor where my zafu had been. I feel a question forming in my mind as I walk back toward the light at the entrance. When I exit the building, I thank Tozen and tell him, “Sometimes I think I just want to sit zazen because it is like sitting with Koun—this little thread of connection across time and space. Maybe that’s all this is for me. Maybe that’s it.”

“Oh, now I see,” says Tozen. He smiles broadly and then turns to amble off across the parking lot, a hand thrown into the air as farewell. I briefly watch his slow gait before turning to the car. Why did I make that confession? And what did his comment mean? As usual, I do not understand anything.

Thursday, September 2

I have decided to make something authentically Japanese for dinner, something that will give my mom a taste of my other home. The aim is to cook what I know only as “Japanese spaghetti”—noodles, tuna, shredded nori, grated daikon, a bit of onion, soy sauce, and a dash of rice vinegar. Satomi explained the ingredients to me once while I devoured a plate of it at a little café we often frequent. I remember being surprised by the simplicity of it.

But as I peruse the well-stocked local Asian grocer, I struggle with the products; I do not recognize many of them. How often do I rely on familiarity with a certain color and font and shape and nothing more? Take that away and I’m lost. The addition of English is interesting, but it does not give me the guidance I need. What happens, I wonder, to the blind who gain sight?

After I make my choice, I move on to a key ingredient—daikon. I spot a sign in romanized Japanese but beneath it is a pitiable little warped gray tuber the size of my fist. “Excuse me,” I say to the grocer. “Is THIS a ‘daikon’?”

“Of course,” he says.

When I prepare the dish, the root is dry and bitter and adds no depth of flavor.

“It’s really unusual,” says my mom as she chews the bland food. “Very mild.”

“It’s not authentic,” I explain. “I couldn’t find all of the right ingredients. And the Japanese radish should be sweet tinged with spice.”

“Well, I guess it’s authentic for here. . . .”

She has a point—this is what I’m always doing in Japan: searching for the right taste. I never find it. Maybe I need to own up to the fact that this is reality. Maybe nothing tastes the way I want it to.

Friday, September 3

When the alarm clock jerks me awake, I take in a long slow breath and notice that familiar itchy throat and ballooning pressure behind the brow: the first inklings of a cold

At the zendo, zazen proves challenging. Something—there—running out of my nose while I am just trying to sit and be a reasonably dignified being. But sickness always reminds me that there is no special dignity in bodies that are just dirt and water—each of us only holding a certain shape for a short while before breaking down into the essential elements. I hear that Tozen is coughing, too, as a counter to my sniffling. Strange percussion in this spacious room.

Afterward, I say to Tozen, “Nobody is here today. Maybe everybody has a cold?”

“No,” he says, “some people came in earlier, and they left because they had to go to work.”

How could I not even notice the comings and goings of other people in the room? Instead, I focused inward, my meditation on snot. At least I had a general awareness of Tozen, if only for the sound of his mutual suffering.

“And how are you feeling?” I ask. “It sounds like you are a bit sick, like me.”

“I feel fine today. Sometimes I cough, but only because I am old. It is old-man sickness.”

“Then I must have middle-aged-woman sickness.”

“You are not yet middle-aged. And yes, we are all dying.”

Saturday, September 4

My autumn cold has gotten worse, and I’m bedridden today. I try to read the books and articles Tozen has given me—but my mind cannot latch onto anything, the words just flying in and out of my brain in a Buddha-inspired fog. My mother brings me hot tea and sliced fruit, just as she did when I was ill as a child. “Anything else—soup? Hot cereal?” Both of us are easy and comfortable in the roles of caregiver and cared-for. Maybe we are our best selves in these moments.

Koun calls in the evening from the pay phone at the bottom of the mountain; he says a bad typhoon just came through Kyushu. “I was working in the kitchen when the door unhinged itself and it went sliding through. I just picked it up and put it back on. What could I do? Argue with the door? I had to finish with the cooking.”

“A practical man—I always liked that about you.”

“By the way, did I ever tell you that I tried to break up with you once?—Before we were even dating? You know, I thought I should stop messing around with women, with relationships, and focus on what really mattered, on becoming a monk in Japan. I wrote this five-page letter, threw it away, and then I called you up and invited you to Montana to meet my family the next day.”

“I’m glad you called!”

“Yes, it worked out pretty well, didn’t it?”

Sunday, September 5

I still feel ill but crave fresh air, so my mom and I venture out to walk the Coastal Trail that stretches for miles along the Cook Inlet. The fireweed has completely gone to seeded white tufts now, and there is that distinct earthy, sweet-and-rotten herbaceous scent of fall. Stepping off the trail, we sort through rocks and driftwood for the best still-life specimens, our pockets filling with relics. “Do you remember beachcombing in Nome when you were little?” Mom asks.

“Of course.” Walking that barren strip of landscape had been my favorite thing to do during our five years in the Bush. You’d think it would’ve lost its allure after a while. But we always found something new—things from the ocean, things from people, sometimes a mix of both. Or a recasting of the two, like the beautiful “sea glass” that was, in a former life, beer bottles thrown into the breakers by drunks.

“Do you remember catching those little fish with your hands? I think the locals called them ‘hooligan’—you filled your pockets with them when they came in on the tide one day. We took them home and cleaned them and ate them. There were so many.”

“Oh yes, I remember, and that time we found all of those dead walruses with their tusks missing. Mutilated bodies everywhere—like a war zone. Terrible.”

“I remember the smell. I remember you cried.”

“I wonder if we’ll go back someday?” And then, shaking my head as an answer to my own question: “I guess we probably never will. I mean, even if we did, it wouldn’t be the same. Or maybe it would be too much the same.”

Somewhere in my mother’s things are slides and photographs of that distant life. 1978. A creased photo of me at age five bundled in a parka with a fur-rimmed hood, snowpants, boots, mittens. I am perched like a dark bird on a fault of aquamarine ice that juts, dagger-like, from a vast and blinding whiteness, laughing in awe because all around is the violence of the Bering Sea held fast in time—a clenched fist pulled above and behind the shoulder. It is my first winter in Alaska, the idiom of the South still thick on my tongue: ya’ll, UMbrella, YOUston. My mother, outside the photo, holds the camera. My father, in Texas, begins to build a new life.

Tuesday, September 7

“I’ve been thinking about retiring,” Tozen announces as the two of us sit down for breakfast after zazen. “Maybe I should meet your husband and his teacher sometime. Who knows? Maybe this would be a good job for him and then you could come home.”

“Well, I’d like for him to meet you. As for moving here, I don’t know about that. But—what will you do?”

“I’m thinking about moving to Costa Rica or maybe Thailand. Someplace not so expensive. I will miss Alaska, though. I like the cold.”

“Do you miss Japan?”

“No. Too much formality. But I can enjoy being there sometimes. There are some comfortable things.”

“We are both between homes, aren’t we? I didn’t think that I missed Alaska but now I can feel that some part of me has.”

“Even the cold?”

“Yes, maybe even the cold.”

“And how is your lonely year in Japan?”

“Honestly, all of this is not quite going how I wanted.”

“How did you want it to go?”

“I had an idea—that this would be my monastic year, too, in a way. That it would somehow be spiritual. I would stay in the present moment. I would pay attention. But honestly I just miss Koun all the time. And my mind is always floating off to the past. I feel like a walking paradox—who I was then and who I am now.”

“Two sides of the same paper.”

“Well, I just want the one side.”

As I am walking out to my car, Tozen hands me a photocopy of a Ryokan poem, pointing to the lines:

I wondered and wondered when she would come.

And now we are together. What thoughts need I have?

“I think this is how you must feel now, and also how you will feel when your husband comes home—nothing special.”

Wednesday, September 8

With only an hour to spare before we need to head to the airport, I realize that I’ve misread my travel itinerary. Unfortunately, the packing proves challenging. I thought that I had bought very little, but still nothing fits into my bags without a fight. There always seems to be this phenomenon of coming to the U.S. and thinking I need to buy, buy, buy in order to be comfortable in my home in Japan. But the reality is that I have new favorite products, new daily staples in my diet. Still, I see some old remembered brand and think, “This—I need this; I used to use this every day.” The next thing I know, I have a year’s worth of hand cream in my shopping cart.

Of course, the trend works both ways—I always bring too much from Japan. My mother looks doubtfully at my new comfort foods spread out on the kitchen counter: the multiple bags of green tea, instant miso soup, and assortments of seaweed. “Thanks for . . . all this. I’m not sure how to use it, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”

As we walk through the airport lobby, I tell my mother about Tozen’s remark of yesterday, about the possibility of Koun taking over his work as the AZC resident priest.

“It’s ridiculous and I don’t think he really meant it anyway, but I do keep wondering, Where to live? Where will we end up?”

“Maybe you should move here.”

“I’m fairly certain that’s the one thing we should not do.”

Thursday/Friday, September 9/10

Hurtling faster than usual into the future, I experience a delirium of travel. After the first long flight, in which I am held by white noise and buffered murmurings in Chinese, there is the endless layover in Taipei, and I spend most of this time asleep on a bench in a deserted wing of the airport. Then there are two more hours on the plane to Fukuoka, and then another two-hour bus ride to Musashigaoka, the stop nearest my home in Kikuyo.

When I finally arrive, no taxi is available at my insignificant little bus stop, so I set out dragging three bags down an unlit narrow road in the center of night, the sound of cicadas and frogs pulsing through the heavy humid air. Luckily, ten minutes or so later, a taxi pulls up alongside me, and I offer directions in Japanese—the words garbled and strange in my mouth. I am duly delivered to my townhouse. My own personal monastery, I think.

I drop my bags inside the door and, after checking for large insects in the bedroom, crash into sleep. Then I’m up again a few minutes later to attend to a nagging suspicion: yes, there is a message on the machine from Koun, welcoming me home. “Come to Shogoji Sunday, if you can—I can’t wait to see you. Maybe bring some kabocha croquette for the monks.”

As I am drifting off to sleep, it occurs to me that international travel is really moving from one vivid dream or memory into another.

Saturday, September 11

My first bout of jet lag wakes me much too early this morning, and the sun has yet to rise. But it is a reasonable hour in the U.S., so I call my mother. “Good—you made it okay.” And then, “Oh,” she sighs, “we’re both ‘singles’ again.” I know exactly what she means. I’d grown accustomed to steady company, too.

Just then the sun’s first rays offer a sliver of brightness, and I lean toward the window to catch a glimpse of the neighborhood. It looks eerily wrong somehow, deconstructed. I tell my mother I have to go, that I’ll call back later.

I didn’t notice anything at all out of the ordinary when I arrived last night. But now, in the light of day, the full effect of the summer’s latest typhoon is evident as I step outside and investigate. Trees have been uprooted. Chunks of roofs have been torn from houses. Gardens have been tied into living knots. Most of my neighbors’ windows bear big taped X’s stretching from corner-to-corner. Half of a heavy white lawn table lies face-down in my backyard. The entire side of my van and the townhome are plastered with green shredded bits of vegetation and dirt. Littered everywhere are broken relics, unidentifiable debris. Men, women, and children are emerging from their homes to clean up the carnage. Huge piles of refuse—no doubt their work from the day before—wait in orderly rows for the garbage trucks to arrive.

And indoors, too, there is evidence of an unusual atmosphere. The mold is pervasive. All of my shoes in the genkan are covered in a green fuzz. There is a dusting of black fibers beneath an errant hot pad on the kitchen table, behind pictures hung on the walls, within cabinet interiors. It’s a wonder that I didn’t die of an asthma attack in the night.

The cleaning—outdoors and in—takes most of the day, the work rooting me back into this place and time. As I am high on a ladder, struggling to free the windows from the organic paper mache that has sealed them shut, one of the women in my complex steps out her back door in plastic slippers. I climb down to greet her. Together we stand and marvel over the broken table in our shared lawn. The other table half is nowhere in sight.

“I don’t remember seeing this before,” I say. “Is it yours?”

“No.”

“Where did it come from?”

She shrugs. “A gift from the sky?” We each grip an edge and carry this unlikely offering out to the huge piles of debris on the side of the road.

Sunday, September 12

I wake too early again, 5:30 a.m.—most likely a combination of ongoing jet lag and deep eagerness to see the love of my life—and so I take my time gathering the things I’ll take to him: head oil prepared by Brinda, two boxes of hard choco cookies and twelve packages of kabocha croquette from the neighborhood grocery store, new men’s underwear in regulation white from the U.S.

Koun has warned me in advance that there will be cameras and television crews at Shogoji today, and he’s been slated for some sort of interview. “It’s possible that we won’t see much of each other.” My heart sinks at this thought. I suppose I had imagined a more tender reunion.

When I arrive, I am received by a monk who seems to be giggling incessantly at my gift of kabocha croquette. “For lunch,” I explain. But he continues to giggle as I step out of my shoes and place them neatly against the stones.

Koun emerges from the dining area. “Jisen-san would like you to help in the kitchen today,” he says to me in Japanese as he collects the packages of food from the other monk.

In the kitchen he gives me a quick, forbidden hug. I can feel his ribs beneath his samu-e. “You’ve lost more weight! Are you okay?”

“I’m down to 145 pounds, but I feel pretty good. I’m eating healthy food all the time.”

“You lost almost 50 pounds?”

“Yeah, Shogoji is Buddhist fat camp.”

“Hey, what’s so funny about these anyway?”

He looks at one of the packages I brought and smiles. “They’re for the microwave.”

“What? You guys didn’t put in electricity while I was gone?”

It’s a little cooler today, but the heavy cloud cover outside makes it twilight in the kitchen. I peel and slice vegetables, using a sense of touch more so than sight, while Koun and I talk quietly. Both of us are particularly unsure of what Tozen’s retirement idea means. “Maybe he’s just sort of . . . thinking out loud?” I surmise. “Either way, I don’t think I want to move back there. Part of me loves it—craves it, even. But there are landmines of story there for me, too.”

“I know, T. And we’ll figure all that stuff out when we get to it. You know, I like hearing about all of your adventures. It’s one of the few good things about us being apart.”

“I think your adventures are more glamorous—after all, I’m not making national television!”

In the afternoon, reporters from NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting network, arrive with big cameras to begin filming—this will be a segment on the monastery and its inhabitants, within a longer spot about Kikuchi. As we shuffle into the sodo for zazen, I see that one of the reporters will be joining us. He selects a camera-conducive spot two seats down from me, and from the way he gets up on the platform, I can tell he’s never sat before. Such a shame that he’s being televised on his first attempt. Two minutes into sitting, and I hear his labored breathing and shifting legs. I know how he feels—I’ve been there before.

When the drum sounds, we all rise and move to the Dharma Hall for a ceremony—the monks bowing, chanting, and offering incense—while the camera crew and I bear witness. Through it all, I am observing Koun in this new role, his seamless movement through what now must be becoming commonplace to him. I don’t know if he has changed in any dramatic way. But there is possibly a grace that I’ve never seen before. A new way of holding the body. As he moves among the other ten or twelve monks, I’m not sure that I would immediately distinguish him from the others, except that he is a full head or more taller.

Later, during the break, I rest on the steps outside the kitchen watching from a distance as Koun is interviewed at length by the NHK reporter. They look, I think, so very far away.

Tuesday, September 14

It’s pottery Tuesday, and it feels like ages since I’ve touched clay. As I slide open the glass door of my teacher’s house, I am greeted by Sensei, Megumi-san, Yoko-san, and Baba-san, all unusually on time this evening. “Ohisashiburi!” they shout collectively. Sensei pours me a cup of tea and asks how my mother is, and when I say she is well, the other ladies proceed to ask about Alaska, the questions coming in rapid succession. When I take too much time to answer, Yoko-san translates.

I sigh. “It’s not the questions that are difficult. I just can’t seem to catch the right words for what I want to say tonight. . . .”

“Oh,” says Sensei in Japanese, “so you forgot all of your Japanese while you were away! Tsk!”

We settle into making pots, and working at a steady and semi-confident rate, I manage four passable cups of nearly equal size. “Jozu,” says Sensei, as she leans into the table, inspecting my work.

“Yes,” I say in fast English. “It was easier tonight for some reason. I mean, I just sat down and made tea cups. But shouldn’t I feel more artistic? More inspired or something?”

“Wow, you really did forget Japanese!” replies Sensei.

The other ladies laugh while Yoko-san translates her version of my lament.

“They’re just cups,” says Sensei, looking at me quizzically.

Friday, September 17

A postcard in the mail today from Koun—I’ve been given permission by Jisen-san to stay at Shogoji over the long holiday weekend. This way, I’ll get a chance to better experience what the monks experience; plus I’ll be able to start making my rakusu for the upcoming lay ceremony.

During the lunch hour, I peruse one of the tiny cloth shops that I’ve spotted a thousand times in passing but never once visited. I’m searching for Koun’s suggested first-time rakusu cloth: mid-weight dark blue or green cotton. An old woman, the proprietor of the shop, greets me and begins pulling out every kind of blue and green, some of it tucked beneath bolts of other fabrics. “What’s it for?” she asks.

When I say “rakusu,” I see that I need to explain: “Bukkyo no mono desu.” (It’s a Buddhist thing.)

“Aaaa . . .” she says knowingly, as if my explanation was adequate.

Finally, with cloth in hand, I’m driving back to school when Koun calls from the Shogoji phone. He tells me that Jisen-san is now concerned about my visit because

(1)I will distract the monks,

(2)It will hurt Koun, and

(3)It will be too challenging for me.

So, I may only stay one night . . . or maybe not at all. She will decide after I arrive Saturday. “I guess this is a test-run,” says Koun.

“What? Surely she recognizes that we’re adults? We know what we’ve gotten ourselves into. We’re not going to behave badly!”

“I know, I know. I’m not sure what’s going on. Probably we don’t get to know.”

Saturday, September 18

I’m driving up the mountain to Shogoji after my morning Japanese class in the city, my mind grappling with the many challenges of a foreign grammar, when I must suddenly negotiate the one-car road and sheer cliff by backing down when a gray van approaches from above. I’m flustered by the time I actually reach the parking lot, but Koun’s smiling face is the first I see as I lift my eyes to the top of the stairway and it brings a sigh of relief. “You’re just in time for some weeding,” he says, taking my bag and handing me a pair of gardening gloves. “Check in with Aigo-san over there—he’ll tell you what to do.” And then a little quieter: “Probably shouldn’t work near each other because of—whatever it is.”

Aigo-san instructs me to pull delicate green shoots from around big stones. “But NOT the moss—moss is very precious.”

“Why is it precious?”

“It takes a very long time to grow.”

How unfortunate to be fast-growing, I think. On the other end of the courtyard, across a sea of pebbles, a pair of monks kneel over their work. They wear their requisite uniforms—black work samu-e and thin white towels tied around their heads to halt sweat and sunburn.

A little while later, Jisen-san emerges from the main building and instructs me to attend to the wilting flowers throughout the temple. Feeling like a wilting flower myself, I am grateful to get out of the sun. However, Jisen-san’s manner is especially stern and brusque today, and the seemingly very simple responsibility assigned makes me nervous: I am to collect the many vases in the monastery, discard the old flowers, arrange fresh flowers and greenery, and then return all of the newly filled vases to their exact original positions throughout the buildings. “You must take vases from one area at a time—so you remember,” says Jisen-san.

“If the placement is important, why not take them one-by-one?”

“No—too slow.”

After my first attempt, Jisen-san is not pleased. On one altar, I’ve placed two pairs of vases in opposite positions. She reverses the vases, then beckons me to stand a few paces in front of the altar. “Tracy-san, look. Do you see? He is a face. You can’t move the parts. He will not be the same face. He will be a completely different man.”

On the next attempt, I pause to really look at each altar and imagine the distinct features on its surface. The eyes, the nose, the mouth. When I put the vessels back, I am confident of the placement. Jisen-san finds me again while I am gathering more greenery outside. “Tracy-san, come.” I trail after her, this tiny and fierce bald woman in cheerful purple-pink samu-e, as we retrace my work. “Not like this—like this,” she says, moving each vase just slightly to the left or right. “You must remember the face exactly. It is important.”

I sigh as she walks away. Is it possible that, in my carelessness, I have altered the character of a monastery?

After informal dinner in the evening, I sit in my room, waiting. I haven’t seen much of Koun all day—not that that is too surprising, given Jisen-san’s expressed concern. I scribble in my notebook. Consider the kanji I’m supposed to be learning. Watch as a black spider the size of my hand slips through a crack in the fusuma. The wife of Koun’s teacher once told me not to worry about spiders in the house—“They look scary but really they are lucky; they kill bad things.” But still . . . I jump at a knock at the door. It is Koun, standing outside with a towel over his arm. “I heated the bath,” he says. “Ladies go first tonight.”

As we walk along the open corridor in the twilight, mist moves over the mountains. “I can’t believe how beautiful it is here—like being in a painting or a dream or a scene from the past. It’s another world.”

“It is another world. I’m happy you’re able to visit, even if it’s brief.”

“How long can I stay? Did she tell you?”

“One night. No more.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“Lock the door to the bath. There’ll be trouble if one of the monks walks in on you.”

“Okay.”

After the bath, I return to my room to wait for the final zazen bell of the evening. It’s raining outside now, a soft patter against the roof. Some of the monks are engaged in shodo practice, and as I step out of my room into the open-air walkway, I see them far across the courtyard, beyond the wide-open doors of the generator-lit informal eating area, leaning over ink and paper. All else is pure, disorienting blackness. Frogs and insects sing from the darkness.

“T.” I startle at Koun’s whisper behind me. I turn and see nothing. There is just the gentle tug and the brief, wordless kiss. “Okay,” he says, stepping back so that I wonder if this small transgression was only in my mind. The bell rings. I flick on my flashlight, and we make our cautious way to the sodo to join the others for evening zazen.

Sunday, September 19

2:55 a.m. I rise just before the patter of a monk’s feet running the length of the hallway outside, a high-pitched bell rattling in his hands. And the low, heartbeat-like taiko drum felt before it is heard. Last night, I was in and out of sleep as heavy rain fell. There was also the sound—and sting—of mosquitoes taking cover in my room. Where was that lucky spider when I needed him?

I dress quickly in the thin beam of a flashlight, step outside to wash my face, and then proceed to my cushion to sit. There is a lot of rustling-cloth movement behind me—I keep raising my hands in gassho because I think maybe it is Jisen-san doing morning greeting, but of course I can’t turn around to check. At the completion of the session, we move together to the Dharma Hall. Koun is the doan for the ceremony. I know by the sound of his voice—loud, full, clear. He sits somewhere in the shadows, hitting the wooden block in time with the chanting. The Heart Sutra. The lineage. Layers of sound filling a room. The black-robed monks all in semi-darkness, the few lamps failing to illuminate much of anything, and then morning light begins to trickle in. At last, the ceremony ends in a flourish of taiko drumming. I feel that we all have just now woken up.

During breakfast, I recall Koun’s reminder that I’m expected to finish everything that I take, and to eat very quickly. Unfortunately, I put too many ume in my bowl because I can’t identify much in the poor lighting of this room. I swiftly swallow my salty-sour meal of rice and pickled plums and am then led to my first chore for samu, the work periods that fill out a monk’s day. My task is to clean the wood floor of a long hallway. Koun provides me with a white towel and shows me how it is done. “You get the cloth a little damp like this. Fold it, place it on the floor, put both hands on it, stick your butt in the air, and run.” He scoots a few feet down the wood floor to demonstrate. “The trick is to balance your weight between your hands and your feet—too much pressure either way and you’ll lose your balance.” And then he’s off to attend to his own chores, leaving me to contemplate the hallway that seems to be getting longer and longer as I stutter-slide along it.

When the bell rings the cleaning period ends, and I see the first few arrivals for the sewing group—the fukudenkai—walking up toward the main building. Among them is Otani-sensei, a priest and our soon-to-be sewing teacher. I remember her well from the international ango last year. She was not ordained under the Soto sect, and her teacher has forbidden her from attending Soto events. Still, she comes to Shogoji on the sly to teach people how to sew the traditional Buddha robes—rakusu and okesa.

Under Otani-sensei’s guidance, we slide open closet doors and produce long, low tables, zabuton, zafu, and well-stocked plastic sewing boxes. Together, we quickly turn one of the monastery’s back rooms into a suitable space for the work ahead of us.

Suddenly Sakamoto-san, the sometimes-attendee of the Tatsuda zazenkai and one of the lay regulars of Shogoji, arrives, sweaty and defeated-looking. Otani-sensei chides him for his lateness. “I biked here,” he explained. “I didn’t realize how far away it is.”

“You biked—from Kumamoto City?” she asks. “Famiri-boi, are you crazy?”

“Did she call him . . . Family-boy?” I whisper at Koun across a table we are adjusting.

“He works at Family Bank,” he explains with a smile.

After a brief pre-sewing ceremony, Otani-sensei and Koun move around the room, helping everyone measure out the pieces of cloth to cut and sew for the mini Buddha robes.

Koun shows me the length of cloth he’s been sewing as an example. Each stitch is perfectly spaced. “You have to angle the needle just so. The stitches are said to resemble bits of rice.”

“Wow—that seems very . . . precise.”

“As Jisen-san says, this practice will make you straighten pictures on walls.”

“It makes you have OCD?”

He laughs. “Well I don’t know, but it does make you pay attention.”

Before I leave for the day, Sakamoto-san brings his pack to my room. I give him my bug spray, spare flashlight, Kayumi Baibai (Itch-Be-Gone), and extra purified water. I also warn him about the fierce mosquitoes.

“What do you do?”

Smack! I kill one on my arm in reply.

“We’re in a temple!—You can’t do that!”

“Oh—right. Sorry about that.”

Sakamoto-san laughs, but I notice too that he just gently waves the annoying insects away instead of harming them. I am, as always, a terrible Buddhist.

Monday, September 20

It’s a holiday today, and the neighbors have been arguing all morning—the volume of their voices, if not clarity in meaning, is carried through the paper-thin walls of the townhouse and through open windows. I, meanwhile, am standing at my kitchen table, working a knot of stubborn clay. Outside, a bright line of laundry flutters beneath a darkening sky. When the rain comes, the shouting pauses, and I expect a frantic Jennifer or her husband to come tumbling out in plastic house slippers to gather the bright flags of cloth. But there is only a rising drumroll as water falls and falls and falls to earth.

This evening, we all forgo zazen at Tatsuda Center. Only Stephen and I can meet—Richard is too busy—and it is beginning to seem excessive to make a trip out for only two people. Instead, I sit in the evening by myself at home and then watch the moon light up the trees. Around 11 p.m. Satomi calls: “I’m so sorry, but . . . can you pick me up at the bus stop? I got off work late and my mother can’t collect me.”

“I’ll be right there!” My voice is just a little too loud. I wonder if she noticed the eagerness? Such a lonely day. And the neighbors’ wet laundry still shifting along a line in the darkness.

Tuesday, September 21

Sensei canceled pottery this week for a family trip. I feel restless after work. I want my routines.

There’s a call from Tatsuda Center—the woman very angry and incoherent, and I’m having a terrible time understanding why. All I understand is “you didn’t come” and “money.”

“Okay, okay, I can come now and pay you the 500 yen.” This, apparently is the wrong answer, as she gets angrier and more incoherent.

I call Richard and he sorts it out for me: “It seems that the watchman stayed at the Center the other night just for us—when none of us went.”

“But there are always other groups in the building when we’re sitting. And don’t they have open hours during that time?”

“Yes, well maybe nobody was there this one time, or there is some other reason. . . . We don’t get to know.”

“I’m never going to win, am I?”

“No. There is no winning here.”

Wednesday, September 22

During after-school seminar, one of the girls in the Art program, my homeroom student, gives me a beautiful shodo gift—my name written out in elegant katakana on rice paper. “Don’t tell my teacher or I’ll be in trouble.”

“It’s beautiful—why will you be in trouble?”

“I’m still a student. I’m only allowed to practice.”

Perfect for me, I think as I tack this unsigned art to my office wall—a gift from one student to another.

Thursday, September 23

Today is another holiday, and Satomi and I are driving into the city on a mission to locate okesa-worthy dark blue cloth for Koun. My previous sewing lesson has given me a better idea of what is needed for the project. The difficulty is that the cloth must be of a natural fiber, not too heavy or thin, nothing too flashy. Ideally, it should have a broken weave. I explain the desired aesthetic to Satomi: “Back in the day, monks made okesa using only found cloth—rags from the garbage, or the cloth from corpses. They’d dye it all one color and then sew it together.”

“So we’re trying to find something that looks like it’s been roughed up a bit? Or . . . died in?”

“Yes, that’s the idea.”

Satomi proceeds to explain in detail my peculiar request to a clerk at one of the better cloth stores downtown. A few moments later, the clerk produces a possibility: a super-soft broken-weave linen in indigo.

“Hmm. Satomi, what do you think?”

“I don’t know if a corpse would wear it, but maybe it will work for Koun’s purposes.”

Satomi and I part ways, and I drive solo out to Kikuchi. Brilliant red spider lilies, the higanbana—known to old Japanese women as the “flowers of death,” according to Satomi—trace along the edges of green rice fields.

The monks are attending to their daily chores when I arrive, so I only get to see Koun for a moment (he loves the cloth!) before I am led to the back “sewing room” where Kenpu-san, Jisen-san’s son, is working diligently on an okesa.

“Does this mean you are planning to be ordained?” I ask him.

He shrugs. “I’m not planning on it, but I’m here. Maybe it is simply the thing that will happen.”

Saturday, September 25

“You’re always rushing off to somewhere after class. I think you must have a secret life.” This from Chris, one of my American classmates from the YMCA. “You sure you don’t want to come to lunch with us?”

I decline but promise to explain “my secret life” some other time. And then I am out the door, hurrying along the sidewalks to the parking garage, and then in my car speeding down the highway to Kikuchi. I have been given permission to stay a night at Shogoji again.

Arriving just in time for samu, I sweep leaves and debris from the stone stairs and take boxes of it all down to feed the bonfire, which sends clouds of smoke tumbling down the mountain.

Koun is the doan in the rotation today, and so I help Aigo-san in the kitchen when it is time. Like me, he also became a vegetarian at age sixteen, so he has no problem with vegetarian cooking. “But,” he explains, “it is a little difficult here because there is such a strong link between food and emotion, and this can create a problem when Japanese and foreign monks must dine together. Strong tastes, too much spice, mixing foods and colors incorrectly for the Japanese palate. . . . Sometimes there are very big problems when we get it wrong. Sometimes there are fights.”

“But I thought the goal was to transcend such mundane worries.”

“People get upset—it’s human nature. If it’s not something trivial in the outside world, then it’s something trivial here.”

After lunch, most everyone has gathered in the sewing room and Koun and I go to work on his okesa—he’ll need it for a ceremony at Zuioji soon. As we cut, iron, and sew, Koun tells me about a man from Oita who visited him yesterday morning. “He’d recently lost his mother, whom he had never liked very much, and then he saw me on TV. He said he immediately got into his car and drove here from Oita, just to see me. We talked for thirty minutes or so, he gave the temple some boxes of yuzu from his grove as an offering, and then he left.”

“What did you tell him?”

“What could I say? His mother is already gone. But we did talk about practice and compassion, what he can do in this moment to relieve the suffering of others.”

“Does everyone have a complicated relationship with their mother?”

“Probably.”

As the day shifts to evening, I think of the famous writer Junichiro Tanizaki and his assertion that all the splendor of a Japanese temple is best revealed in shadow. How right he was. As I step through the gaido doorway for zazen, I stop and watch as Koun chooses and then plumps up one of the larger zafu for me. A mosquito coil has already been lit next to my spot—the smoke rising in a thin, protective cloud. So this is true love, I think. I shuffle in oversized slippers to my cushion. Koun and I bow to each other before settling in. Three deep breaths. The rustle of robes behind me as others enter and take their places. The flicker of oil lamps. Outside, the living music of the night.

At nine, the taiko signals, and I’m off to bed. Slipping into my futon in the guest room, I switch off the flashlight. Brilliant light from the nearly full moon streams through the window as I drift off to sleep. My secret life.

Sunday, September 26

Zazen is weirdly intense in the monastery this morning—perhaps due to such a short sleep cycle. Bright flashes of my mother and I in Nome, standing beneath the northern lights on some distant winter night. Of wandering alone through the brush in Hatcher Pass in summer and finding that unexpected purple flower—monkshood—against endless green. All the colors of my youth.

Just as I settle in again for the second half of zazen, a fat cockroach bumps against my bare foot. Do I stay still and let the thing crawl up my leg? Or break the rules and brush it away? I opt for the latter, but it returns again and again. When the taiko starts up near the end of the session, I breathe a sigh of relief.

As I return to my room, I touch the switch on my flashlight, feel a wet smushy thing against my thumb and drop everything. The lamplight reveals a small, stunned frog on the floor. I pick up the flashlight and discover more frogs clinging to my bedroom door and all along the walkway.

“In the mountain, you live with the creatures of the mountain.” I startle at the voice behind me. Aigo-san. He bows, moves beyond me, the light of his headlamp quickly swallowed by darkness.

Koun and I sit together in the open back of our van. The door is popped up and our legs swing against tall grass. I’ll need to head out soon.

“I’ve been thinking about when we’ll actually leave Japan,” says Koun. “We have these special skills now. We’re very good at being foreigners in Japan. But these skills don’t necessarily translate well in America. And my time here in the monastery is like that, too. I can’t expect that my skill set will transfer, even if I do become an expert at all of this. I can’t hold on to that one expectation.”

“Yes, I feel that, and also how other habits and ways of being are always slipping away. For both of us.”

It becomes dark as we talk, and Koun realizes that he hasn’t switched on the generator. I turn the car around, aim the headlights at the stone steps to the monastery, and off he goes into the night. That last image of him turning and waving at the top of the steps. This, among the string of moments that makes up a life. I can’t let go of what I don’t want; I want to hold on to what I can’t keep.

Tuesday, September 28

In pottery class there is much speculation about the nature of the “Alaskan tea”—a commercial brand from the supermarket—that I brought for Sensei as omiyage. “Perhaps it has cinnamon because of the weather or because of recurring sore throats or . . .” The cups of tea are sniffed, then tasted, between each comment. I am enjoying listening to the speculation so much that I don’t bother to explain that it’s a common tea blend, and it is not Alaskan in origin.

When we get down to work, the cone I form from new clay is not at all well-centered, so the walls of my first cup are uneven. I decide to keep it anyway because it still looks fairly pleasing. Sensei gives me the evil eye. “Renshu!” (Practice!)

“Hai, Sensei.” The verdict is clear, so I cut the form off the hump, discard it in the scrap bucket, and keep going. When the exact same thing happens again, she allows me to fold the rim over and back into the cone so that I’ll still have plenty of clay with which to practice. I precisely repeat my mistake again and again. Clearly, my sense of balance is off today. Giving up early, I go outside to clean my things, and Sensei follows.

“The radio says a typhoon is coming again.”

I look doubtfully at the sky. “Really? It looks calm.”

“Help me protect things so they won’t blow away.”

“Hai, Sensei.”

Thursday, September 30

After yesterday’s typhoon, cold last night and this morning too. I move through yoga poses in that delicious air before settling into zazen with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Flipping through the goldenrod pages of the sutra book that Koun has lent me, I find the Heart Sutra. The sound of my voice and the thin stream of incense smoke is pulled in a slow curl out the window and to the neighborhood beyond.