Ikasu
Saturday, January 1, 2005
This morning I am skiing fast through trees and over ice and snow on the deserted trails of Kincaid Park, a place I often visited in high school, a place I visit even now in my dreams. It is overcast and cold and quiet. There is only the rhythm of movement and breath.
I found these old skate skis a few days ago while searching for a box of winter clothing in my mother’s storage shed. Pushing aside all those carefully tucked-away memories, I gathered up my old red ski bag and made a plan. Now, moving like this through landscape, I see that it was a good choice. The right choice. The body, in motion, is fully engaged. There is both a singular focus and a diffusiveness. There is balance. In Japan, certain monks will begin the New Year seated on a black cushion; I begin mine gliding over white snow.
As I reach the top of yet another hill, I pause. Light breaks through cloud cover overhead. I feel, suddenly, like crying. It is surprising how so much can be bound up in the body-memory of movement. It is not unlike the awakenings brought about by a smell or a fragment of music. Had I been at the top of this hill or some other when that obvious solution to my adolescent misery hit me? Take the family car in winter, at the deadliest of temperatures, in the dead of night. Drive and drive and drive and then park in some inconspicuous area, well out of sight. Hike as far as possible into wilderness and then drink from a bottle of hard liquor to take away the survival instinct (how I hated the taste and sting!). Remove the life-preserving warmth and fall back into snow. Pull the whiteness like a blanket over me.
I can see now how all of this appealed to some part of my teenage vanity, that such an act might preserve the image of the body while expelling whatever pain it carried within it. I can marvel at the stupidity of all of this now. I know the preciousness of this life. But then, but then . . .
The truth is that I remember standing in the kitchen. I remember the weight of the backpack on my shoulder. I remember putting on my boots. I remember the sound and feel of the car keys in my hand. I remember that I never got past the front door. I remember, also, being terrified of getting into trouble and so in this one way it could be said that my stepfather, or my own fear of being caught by him, saved me.
I have not thought about any of this in a very long time.
Monday, January 3
“Mom, why didn’t we tell people what Fred was really like? Why did we keep secrets for him?” My mother and I are driving home from yet another of her doctor’s appointments. All night and also today, rain pours out of the sky, melting snow and ice. I don’t recall ever seeing an Alaskan January quite as fickle as this one before.
My mom leans into the steering wheel and sighs, seems to contemplate the unlikely weather surrounding us. “I was afraid. All those stories from Vietnam, from the police force before he became a teacher . . .”
“I guess those veiled threats were pretty clear, weren’t they. He was always letting us know what he was capable of.”
“Yes, and not all of the threats were veiled.” My mother, the ex-wife of this man, knows things that I do not know.
“Sometimes I think we were just trying to be good girls. We were well behaved.”
“It was like that, wasn’t it.”
“And if you think about it, our good behavior was rewarded. Until a mood or a misstep made it all go to hell again. There was no real winning, only a staving off of something. Some beast.”
“Yes, there were definitely cycles. Good times for a while and then . . . not so good.”
How we learned to define ourselves within the treachery of those moods—stupid or smart, good or bad, ugly or beautiful. I want to ask, Do we still keep those secrets? Do we have to carry this burden forever? What are we supposed to do? Even now, I always want to know what I’m supposed to do. A good daughter. A good partner. A good person. What am I supposed to do?
My mother turns to me, smiling as if in answer. “But why focus on all that negative stuff? I want to think positively from now on. It’s healthier. It makes me feel better. I want to enjoy all the life I have left.”
So lighthearted, I think. We look so much the same, but inside we carry vastly different emotional landscapes. I envy her.
Thursday, January 6
I drive through a winter sunset, out to the Valley to visit with Cheryl and her kids. Tomorrow I’ll go in with her to Wasilla High, to talk with the students in her coworker Carla’s Japanese-language classes. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a sleepover,” I say as I step into her house.
“That’s true! But it might be a little different with the kids.”
“Right. I guess that makes us the adults now.” We quickly settle into chatting and playing a board game with her four-year-old daughter. Cheryl’s son, who is somehow already in grade school, sits cross-legged on the couch, arranging thick stacks of Pokémon cards.
“I need to travel more,” says Cheryl. She seems, I think, lighter than the last time we spoke. “I keep remembering how I had such a great time hiking with my dad in the Grand Canyon. Something about that trip—it just cleared my mind. And it really got my dad talking, too. I felt that I saw a new side of him. He was lit up.”
“What did you talk about?” I ask as her daughter gleefully moves a game piece several squares along the path.
“Oh, lots of things. Nothing important, really. He kept going off on ‘liberals this, liberals that . . .’ He had a lot of opinions about what you and your husband are doing.”
“Ha! Opinions about hippies like me?”
“Yes. . . .” She gives me a cautious, sideways look—unsure, perhaps, if we’ve ventured into unsafe territory.
“Okay. You can tell me—is it the Japan thing in general, or the Buddhist thing specifically?”
“Well, both.”
“I know it all sounds weird, everything we’re doing. It is weird. Unless you’re in it. Then it’s just what’s happening now. It’s a new perspective, a new definition of normal.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“But your dad wouldn’t buy that, would he?”
“Not for a second.”
“It’s just wrong, what we’re doing.”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’s certainly not the only person who feels that way.” I smile, swallow this small hurt, and roll the dice. Some part of me—that lonely inner child, perhaps—is always desperate for approval from one parent or another.
Cheryl’s daughter—her twin in miniature—looks up from the gameboard. “Mom, what’s a ‘hippie’?”
“Um, someone who has crazy-long hair and weird clothes,” says Cheryl.
“Oh boy. What’s the PG version of ‘free love’?” I say.
“A hippie is someone who takes a lot of very, very bad drugs. . . . Don’t you ever take very bad drugs!”
“Definitely not a Zen monk, then!” I laugh. “Or, at least, not one in Japan, who follows the rules. Though, come to think of it, the hair and clothes can be pretty weird.”
“Ha! You’ll have to show me pictures. . . . All right, guys, it’s about time for bed. School day tomorrow.” Her daughter squirms, protesting the ending of our game but also happy in her mother’s arms.
“I still can’t believe you have kids. I’ll need to get your advice if we ever get around to having them.”
“I wouldn’t know what advice to give. You just deal with things as they come up. I don’t know any other way to do it.”
“Sure.”
~
Kneeling on carpet, I gather game pieces, fold the board neatly into the box—this journey in miniature of luck and choice to play again some other day. From the back of the house, a mother recites bedtime prayers with her two children. A moment, a universe.
Friday, January 7
At Wasilla High, I stand in a room that looks and smells very much like one of the classrooms in the high school I attended a few miles away, in Palmer. I’ve just finished presenting to one of Carla’s Japanese-language classes, sharing tips on communicating with their pen pals at Shokei, and a number of Carla’s students surround me, some with questions, others simply eager to share their knowledge of Japanese culture. One tall and awkward boy says, “Tell me about Remi. Is she . . . is she beautiful?”
“She is very good at kyudo, Japanese archery. You should ask her about that,” I say.
A girl with bright eyes smiles and hands me several pieces of lined notebook paper on which anime characters have been drawn in careful detail—mostly big-eyed girls in high school uniforms. “Can you give these to my pen pal?”
“Nao is an artist, too. She will be happy to receive these. But don’t you want to send them with your letter?”
“I’ll make more. I draw one every day.”
“That’s good practice. I’ll look for your work someday.”
Another boy with sandy blond hair approaches and tells me his name is Trinity. He holds a fake Japanese sword in one hand. “I wonder if you can help me with something. I need to know how to do hara-kiri. It’s for a play.”
“A play?”
“Rashomon. You know the movie? We had to change some of it, obviously.”
“Well, I don’t think I’ll be much help to you—I’m no expert in disembowelment, or Japanese film, for that matter. What is the movie about? It sounds familiar.”
“It’s about many versions of reality.”
“Many versions?
“Yes, there’s this monk who stands by a gate in Kyoto. He listens to different people explaining an event—a rape followed by a death. Each person tells it in a completely different way.”
“Oh, I almost remember this story. Remind me—which person is telling the truth?”
“All of them.”
“Right, right.” I nod and close my eyes. I am sixteen. I am thirty-one.
Saturday, January 8
My mother and I bundle up and trek down the street from her condo to the museum to see the latest: an exhibit of Tibetan Buddhist artwork. There are paintings of the Dalai Lama at various ages, and also a number of mandalas. It’s the latter that really pull me in—those intricate and prismatic depictions of the cosmos—while my mother, drawn more to the portraits, notes that the Dalai Lama, at age five, “looks exactly like himself.” I see that she’s right, and also that the mandala and the portraits are perhaps not such different things. I think back to my experience as a child living briefly in Hatcher Pass, when I first began to really see the “Big/Small.” The infinite universe. The tiniest molecule. And here in this room, a mandala of people (each a mandala him/herself) move around and through and out into the cold of an Alaskan winter. Alaska, too, a mandala.
On the way back to the condo, Mom and I stop at a café and order a berry cobbler to share. It arrives shortly after—a big steaming bowl with two spoons, and a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on top. We each take big bites, and then I set down my spoon, drink most of a glass of water, and slump back into the booth.
“Are you okay?” asks my mother.
“I don’t know. This is the kind of thing I crave all the time in Japan. But here, now that I can have it, it’s much too sweet. I can’t bear to eat it. I don’t remember once feeling that way before moving to Japan. There was no such thing as ‘too sweet.’”
“Your tastes changed. Maybe all those new flavors had an effect on you.”
“Yes. Honestly, I feel that I’ve been altered in my DNA. Everything has been changed. Everything. This cobbler might be the best evidence I have for that. Before I liked sweet things, and now I don’t. I’m a person who doesn’t like sweet things. How can that be?”
“You know, over time, I think my tastes have changed, too. Maybe it’s something to do with aging. But it’s there. It’s a subtle shift.”
“Is this cobbler too sweet for you, too?”
“Not really. But I am also a changed person.”
“Changed but the same?”
“That’s right.”
Sunday, January 9
It seems that true winter has returned, and with a certain violence. After morning zazen, Tozen and I shuffle in our thick coats across the frozen parking lot and tuck ourselves into my mother’s car. The engine has been running for at least ten minutes, but it still feels like the inside of a freezer. Tozen removes his gloves and rubs his hands over the lukewarm blast of air from the vent. “I will visit you in Kumamoto soon,” he says. “I will arrange to meet Koun’s teacher. You can move back to Alaska and take care of your mother.”
“But what would you do? Where would you go?”
“It is time for me to retire. This is work for a younger person, someone with energy. I have no more energy.”
“I think you have lots of energy.”
“No, not so much. Not so much now.”
“Honestly, I’m just—I’m not sure if that is the right path for Koun and me.”
“That is for you to decide. I will go to Japan and open a door. Then you will make a choice.”
In the late afternoon, my mother and I work together in her small art room. I pack my suitcase for my return home, while she cleans and puts her supplies in order for her next project. “I need to get back to painting. It’s time,” she says.
“That sounds healthy,” I say.
“Oh—I almost forgot.” From her closet she produces a zafu, a pattern of dragonflies flitting across the bright purple Chinese silk. “I picked it up at the bookstore. Maybe you can show me how to use it before you go? My doctor said meditation might be good for reducing stress. At least, she said it couldn’t hurt.”
I take the zafu in my arms and squeeze it tightly against me. “It’s a nice one,” I say. “Sturdy but not too hard—a good foundation for sitting.”
“Oh good. I wasn’t sure if it was a real one.”
“This doesn’t mean you’re becoming full-on Buddhist, does it, Mom?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“You’d be a better one than I, I’m sure.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Just a guess.” My mother’s heart—light as a dragonfly. I set the zafu next to the wall.
“How do I start?” she asks.
“It begins with the breath,” I say. “In.” We breathe in. “Out.” We breathe out.
“Well, that doesn’t seem so hard.”
Thursday, January 13
The horned cow is your mind. The horned cow is your mind. The horned cow is your mind. . . .
Last night and also the few nights before I dreamed of walking down an abandoned hallway of an airport—the words of a stranger on a loop as I catalogue the ink paintings hanging along the walls:
A man searching along a path in the woods
The hoofprints—a hint—in the mud
From behind a tree, a bit of leg and tail revealed
The man looping a rope around an ox’s thick neck, fighting against the strength of the animal
The ox following the man, who carries a whip and the rope lead
Now playing a flute, the man sits astride the ox, riding it along the path
The ox gone, the man rests peacefully in his home
A single enso—the Zen circle a kind of mandala that points to transformation, interconnectedness, wholeness, emptiness
A river flowing through the forest
A man walking along a village street, immersed in the normalcy of daily life—the trees around him in full bloom
~
It has been a few days since I arrived home from Alaska. The luggage from my trip sits mostly unpacked in my bedroom, and I feel out of sorts. Maybe I haven’t quite arrived yet; maybe I am still traveling. The feeling is not quite a depression but more an idea that won’t form—or a riddle not yet solved.
Koun, meanwhile, has been calling constantly from pay phones while out on some long journey with the monks. I barely miss him every time he calls and so there is this other nagging discomfort, this near-miss longing. Finally, in the afternoon, I am standing near the phone when it rings and I jump at the sound.
“Oh, it’s you,” I say. “I’m so glad to hear your voice.”
“Same here, T. How was the trip? How’s your mom?”
“She seems well, herself. I’m not sure what else to say. We had a nice visit.”
“That’s pretty much all you can hope for, isn’t it?”
“You’re probably right.”
He tells me he’s been talking a lot with various people at Zuioji, translating difficult conversations for Aigo-san, in order to arrange Aigo-san’s finishing ceremonies, transmission, and so forth. “I’m pushing the limits of my language and cultural abilities. It seems to be going okay so far, so that’s good at least. I’m gaining a kind of competency.”
He also tells me that they’ve all being doing a lot of takuhatsu, a twenty-day run of it to be exact. Usually, they get to take turns resting, but he is the driver, so there is no rest for him. “I don’t know if I’m coming or going. It’s exhausting. Everything starts to run together. Sometimes I realize I’ve forgotten the name of the town as we’re marching through it, chanting and holding up our bowls.”
And then I tell him about my discomfort, the non-arrival, of being on the edge of an idea. “I want to say it’s like your experience—my brain is moving so quickly through different places that I can’t put my finger on what it’s all pointing to, or where I’m at.”
“Maybe,” he suggests, “you should make something.”
In the evening, I sit in my kitchen and form pot after pot after pot. But nothing comes to me. No grand idea. Just now, nothing but now. I finish well past midnight. After cleaning up, I slide open the back door, slip on shoes, turn off the kitchen light, and step out into cool darkness. I know there is a stand of cherry trees a few paces away. Beyond that, the field I walk through on my way to work each morning. Beyond that, vast plots of cultivated earth. But who’s to say that any of that exists in this moment? I could be anywhere. I could be nowhere—or everywhere. As my eyes adjust, I begin to regain my vision. Maybe it is time to unpack my bags.
Saturday, January 15
In my email this morning I find a single thumbnail photo of bamboo heavy with snow, hanging low over an ice-covered pond—a tiny window into cold beauty. No text accompanies the photo. I recognize neither the sender nor the scene.
And then around noon, Koun calls. “Did you get the picture? It’s the frog pond behind the main building. It’s probably bad to use up the monastery’s data, but I had to show you.”
“It looks so different, so cold.
“It IS cold. But it’s beautiful, too. I wish I could show it all to you. Everything is snow and ice right now. We’re freezing and in awe at the same time.”
He also tells me that the monks are slated to go to Nagasaki, but the new snow has rendered the mountain impossible to drive.
“So you’re trapped up there?”
“Well, we thought so, but when we called to cancel we were told that others are expecting us.”
“What does that mean?”
“We’re trapped, but we’re not allowed to be trapped.”
“But how will you get there? You can’t drive that mountain—it’s bad enough in summer.”
“We’ll hike down the mountain and make our way to public transportation. It’ll take up most of our takuhatsu earnings to do it.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Well, it’s not ideal.”
“Tell me if you run out of food.”
“It will be okay. It always works out somehow.”
“Do you still have daikon?”
“We will have daikon forever.”
~
I bundle up against the cold and walk to the little movie rental store several blocks from my home. My student, Mizuho, shouts out a greeting as soon as I walk in the door. She seems very amused by my many layers. “Find a movie for me, Mizuho. I will watch anything you want me to watch.”
“First I must find you, Tracy-sensei.”
“What?”
“So many coats! Why? You are from Alaska.”
“Yes, but in Alaska at least it is warm inside our houses. Here, I can never get warm in this season.”
“I don’t understand you, Tracy-sensei. But, don’t worry. I will find you funny movie.”
“Why funny?”
“Laughing to make you warm!”
On the way home, a copy of Shaolin Soccer tucked tightly under my arm, my attention is drawn again and again to the absence of leaves in the trees. Bare, bone-like branches moving and creaking in the breeze.
Sunday, January 16
“I keep trying to see everyone as their child selves lately. A compassion practice that Koun told me about,” I tell Satomi as I spread okonomiyaki batter over the hot grill between us, forming a large savory pancake. We are tucked into a booth in a cozy mom-and-pop restaurant that caters primarily to high school kids and university students.
“What do you see when you see me?” asks Satomi.
I watch the door across from us. Any minute, young people will begin pouring in for the after-school rush. What if the child Satomi were one of them? A girl on the verge of adolescence. “I see pigtails.”
“Pigtails?”
“Definitely pigtails. And a blue-and-white uniform, the sailor design. Also, one of those mandatory bright red backpacks.”
“I hated pigtails. Too much trouble.”
“Maybe I’m not very good at this.”
Satomi reaches into her bag, produces a few scraps of lined notebook paper. “Let’s see. . . . When I was a child I often used to make origami.”
“Cranes?”
“Many things. I liked boxes—they are good for keeping small objects, very practical. But I don’t know if I remember how.” She creases an edge of the paper, tears it away to reveal a square, and then considers it briefly before beginning to fold. A few seconds later, a small paper box rests next to her cup of tea.
“Wow! How did you make that? It happened so quickly.”
“I’m not sure. I guess my hands remember, even though my mind does not.” I turn off the burner, and begin to dress our okonomiyaki with sweet, thick soy sauce, nori sprinkles, mayonnaise, hot mustard, and bonito flakes, while Satomi folds paper again. She produces two cranes, setting them gently in the box as I serve our meal.
“I get it,” I say. “Birds in a cage.”
“Well, an open cage. They can fly away. See?” She picks up the cranes, mimics them flitting off to distant lands, before setting them back in the box and pouring more tea for the both of us. “Oh, after this let’s get ice cream. Children like us love ice cream.”
“My inner child likes this idea very much.”
“My inner child also likes onsen.”
“Excellent plan—I know a place that has both.”
~
As we drive back from the onsen, we pass one of many well-tended Jizo near my townhouse. An elderly woman, a neighbor, bows low to the stone deity, that patron saint of women and lost children. In my rearview mirror I see that she stays in gassho for a long time. An old woman, a girl.
Wednesday, January 19
For my students, I am the bearer of good news after lunch—I carry a big box from Alaska into the classroom, set it down, and then stand back as the girls descend upon it. As they sort through gifts and letters from their pen pals, I open a large cardboard envelope that arrived at the same time, from Tozen. Inside, there is an illustrated children’s book with a cat on the cover. It is written in Japanese, and I work out “a million times lived cat,” before arriving at the better translation, The Cat Who Lived a Million Times. On a slip of stationery there is only this explanation: “I lost the English version. Maybe this can be your Japanese study.”
“Oh! That book!” says Naoko, taking notice of the pages turning in my hands.
“Is it a good book?”
“Yes, good book. I remember reading when I was child.”
“What is it about?
“Very proud white cat, very beautiful, loves himself very much. He lives and dies and lives and dies many times. But he meets black cat and makes baby cats. He loves black cat and babies more than himself. Then, he dies.”
“He dies happy?”
“No, very sad.”
“Um, is this a good story?”
“A very good story, Tracy-sensei.”
“Then I will do my best to read it.”
“Hope you enjoy.”
“Oh—Naoko, did you change your hair? Something is different. . .”
“Yes, black. We must return to natural color now. We will all have job interview soon, because we will graduate in February.” She sweeps her arm around the room. “Do you see?” For the first time I do indeed see that almost everyone has “new” hair—shiny black, neatly trimmed. The highlights and fun dye jobs erased and returned to a monochromatic “natural.” Somehow I had forgotten about this yearly ritual.
February. I’ve been waiting all year for this month to arrive, and now it is coming on too fast. “Oh Naoko, I am not ready for you to leave.”
“We will miss you too, Tracy-sensei. Always remember you.”
Thursday, January 20
Much of the day is spent editing stuff for Hiroe-sensei—seemingly mathematics-based linguistics papers that I understand only in terms of correct or incorrect grammar, and nothing more. “You are the only person who understands me,” he tells me—not for the first time.
“Hiroe-sensei, you do realize that I don’t understand the content of anything you write?”
“Yes, but I trust you. You are the only person I trust with my writing.”
As I step out of his office, a throng of passing students circle around me. “Tracy-sensei, look! Look!” One by one I examine the sheets of professional photos in their hands, all taken for Coming-of-Age Day, a celebration of the year in which a person turns twenty. Gorgeously adorned in bright traditional kimono, elaborately styled hair and makeup, the young women are barely recognizable. “You all look so—glamorous and adult!” They laugh, tumble back down the hallway, repeating, “Guramurasu . . . guramurasu . . . guramurasu.”
When I return home, there is a letter from Yamada-san. It begins with cartoon sketches of me and Koun. There is also a two-tiered snowman, a line of mountains. A smiling bear. If you move to Alaska, maybe I will visit you, he writes. I want to see white bear dancing under aurora.
Friday, January 21
This afternoon, a long talk with Bryan on the phone. “Kathy and I are struggling a lot lately. More than usual. Maybe it’s just all part of the process.”
“Does the end point of that process mean that you’ll be together?”
“Not necessarily. And the process never ends. Everything is process, an evolution. I’m a big believer in that.”
“Is this process a line or a circle or a spiral or something else?”
“I’m not sure. I just know that I should be moving through it.”
So, he tells me, he’s taking the Feng Shui approach—clearing out the clutter and moving his bedroom to the smaller room because, after all, he doesn’t want to be “spit off the continent” (the larger room is the “travel corner,” apparently).
“The smaller room—that was where Koun and I stayed when we lived with you, right? I’m pretty sure we got ‘spit off the continent.’ Maybe that’s why we returned to Japan. Mystery solved.”
“Good point. But I think you both knew you’d go back.”
“Well, would it be so bad for you? To just go to another place for a while?”
“There’s probably some value to that, definitely. Maybe I’ll take a week or two. I’m due for some vacation time.”
“No, what if you did something more dramatic? What if you moved to Japan? Or, you know, some other totally crazy foreign place?”
“Well, that would be interesting, to be sure.” Bryan, always diplomatic. “But I don’t think that will be the best route for me right now. Someday—who knows.”
“Sure, that’s a crazy thing to do. Just up and leave it all behind.”
“Well okay, maybe for some it’s the right move.”
“So how do you map out the different parts of your house?”
“Well, you start with the main door.”
“The main door to your downstairs apartment? Or the main door of the house itself? They’re opposites, right?”
“Oh, right.”
After we hang up, I imagine him returning to the plan he’s sketched out, tearing out the old and finding a new, clean sheet to map out a new and improved emotional geography.
Wednesday, January 26
Hiroe-sensei and I walk together across campus after classes—he on the way to his car, and I on my way home. “Oh, is this yours?” I say. The black sedan is usually parked here, in front of the gym, alongside my path to work each morning. “That long juzu hanging from the mirror always catches my eye.”
“I’m a very pious man, you know. I was ordained many years ago, by my father.”
“But—you are not a priest, are you?”
“Technically I am, but I chose the life of an academic instead.”
“Well, you seem happy with your choice.”
“I am happy, very happy. And I have good news. I am getting married in May.”
“Wonderful—congratulations.”
“I would have asked you,” he says. “But you are already married.”
“Well, at least we can still be friends.”
“Yes,” he says. “I would like that.” There is a certain sadness to his voice, and I almost laugh, but then think better of it. Have we, I wonder, been engaged in some kind of invisible romance?
Saturday, January 29
“How is your husband?” I ask Yoko-san as she maneuvers her big white car through the narrow streets of a neighborhood that I do not recognize.
“Not good, not good,” she replies. “But I can take care of him. I am still healthy and strong. . . .” Her voice trails off, and she waves toward our destination. “Oh! There is my friend! Shimamura-san.” A tiny, bent old woman—she must be well into her eighties—bows in greeting as we pull into the parking space in front of a house that looks like all the others.
“Welcome!” she says as we get out of the car and follow her into the ample entryway. Her way of speaking is tinged with age and dialect, and I can see that I’ll need to pay close attention to understand her. Inside, I remove my shoes and step up onto the main floor, carefully avoiding what looks to be a small quilt stretched across the wood.
“Oh, don’t worry—you can step on it,” says Shimamura-san.
I lean down to examine the intricate patterns. “But—it’s so beautiful.”
“Antique Japanese indigo cloth,” Yoko-san explains. “Shimamura-san makes them by hand from old samu-e clothing. It is her hobby. Look.” Yoko-san gestures around the room. Variations of the quilt adorn much of what I can see of her home. Years of work are represented in this dark and humble cloth.
“Oh—do you like Japanese quilts?” Before waiting for my reply, Shimamura-san disappears for a moment, and then reappears with two gorgeous quilts in her arms. She spreads both out on the floor. “Which do you like better?”
“They are both very lovely.” I lean down to admire the stitching on cloth made to be durable, to last a lifetime. “Gorgeous.”
“Then I will give you both.”
“What? No, no, I can’t. . . .” I look to Yoko-san, my hands in the air.
Yoko-san smiles at me as Shimamura-san beckons us both to sit at a low kotatsu. This too is covered with one of her lovely quilts. And then she disappears again, returning a moment later with a tray of Japanese sweets and tea.
“Ah, so you are an American. Tea is okay? You don’t want coffee instead? Or a chair? I can get you a chair.”
“No, no, I love green tea and kotatsu.”
“Oh, you do like many Japanese things! And pottery too, I hear. Have you ever tried on a kimono?”
“Never, but I have often admired them.”
“Come, come.” We set down our tea and rise to follow her into a spare tatami room with nothing more than a tokonoma alcove and seasonal scroll, a chest of drawers, and a tall and narrow mirror. Afternoon light filters through half-open paper shoji. A glimpse of winter garden beyond that.
“Saaahhh. A very traditional Japanese room,” says Yoko-san.
“Let me show you,” says Shimamura-san, kneeling and opening one of the low drawers. “This is where I store my kimono. It is not necessary to wear traditional clothing so much anymore. And some of these are for a younger woman, like you, Tracy-san.” She lifts one of the items from the drawer—a big slender square wrapped in thick, white paper—and places it on the tatami. She unfolds an edge of paper to reveal the bright, ornate silk beneath. “Ah, not this one. You are so fair. And this is furusode—it has the long sleeves of an unmarried woman.” She returns the kimono and lifts another from the drawer—a pale yellow silk robe. “This will suit your complexion, the pink in your cheeks. Do you want to try it on?”
“Oh yes—may I?” I remove my sweater—just the American uniform of T-shirt and jeans beneath—and the two women dress me, discussing the proper way to wear kimono.
When they finish, Shimamura-san points to the mirror. “Please,” she says, “it suits you very well.” I move to the mirror. The transformation is remarkable. Who am I now?
“I will give this kimono to you. Just a moment please.” She hastens out of the room.
“Yoko-san, I can’t accept all of this. The quilts and now the kimono—it’s too much.”
“No, she wants to give these things to you. She is very old. She will be happy if you take them. Very, very happy.” She smiles and moves across the room to the window overlooking the garden. “Oh—look!”
My body now bound in exquisite silk, I take small, delicate steps across tatami. In the garden outside, tiny yellow daffodils are in full bloom. The color of a kimono.
Sunday, January 30
A lonely day made more so, perhaps, by the heaviness of a dream I cannot shake: me, skiing some moonlit Alaskan trail alone in winter. A stillness pervading everything as I slip between the dark specter of trees. This vista of a far-off place overlays the Kumamoto kitchen in which I work clay all day, and I am there as much as I am here. Cups and bowls form beneath my fingers and fold back into themselves to begin again and again and again.
When I settle into my bedding at night, I follow a memory down that rabbit hole of sleep. It must have been just after my fifteenth birthday. I was getting off the bus for ski practice at Kincaid Park as snowflakes fell. That day, though, I’d forgotten my ski boots. One of the older boys said he had, too. So we sat across from each other at a table in the lodge for that hour and a half of practice while the others skied the trails in failing winter light. It was warm inside, but still I wore a big striped sweater—frumpy, like a thick hockey jersey—and he commented on it, my tendency to hide my body. And when I didn’t respond, he leaned across the table and touched my hands, then my arms inside the sleeves of the sweater. I couldn’t bring myself to pull away. I felt that for the first time I had been seen. That somebody recognized the darkness I carried. There was both cruelty and compassion in this moment that would not end. Then he released me and pulled a sketchbook from his backpack. “Look,” he said, and I watched as he drew a timber wolf, starting from the line of the snout. I also loved to draw, but I had never seen anyone do so with such precision—nor from the center out. In this way, I saw him for the first time as well and that image seared into me: a boy in flow, a boy on the verge of becoming.
Strange, the memories we hold on to, that hold on to us.
Monday, January 31
A letter from Koun today. There’s something that comes up a lot in lectures here. ‘Zazen no toki ni zazen o ikasu.’ That is, ‘When you do zazen you just let zazen be whatever it is.’ ‘Ikasu’ in this case is active—an active ‘letting be.’
As I walk in the evening, I can’t seem to escape a deluge of thought. All those past encounters. All of those things I could have said or not said. Actions I could have taken or not taken. That burden of karma given to me. Finally, I stop at the edge of the overspill area and stop trying to escape. I scoop up a handful of stones and throw them into the water one by one, thoughts rising again and again and again. I think about Koun, what I wish I could say in this moment: There is a story I tell myself, that I have told myself for a few years now. About how I went to Lake Ezu and drowned my past there, all that misery unburdened. I wanted to be free of it so I could be with you. To live in nothing more than the story of our lives together. To be my very best self. But the truth is that it’s all there still, just hidden beneath the surface. It’s always been there. Maybe refusing memory is not the same as accepting and letting go.
I pick up another stone, pull back my hand, and then stop. I lower my arm and inspect the object in my open palm. Ordinary, jagged, dirt-streaked granite. Flecks of gray, black, white. I tuck it into my pocket, give the water one last look before moving on. At the neighborhood statue of Jizo, I place my stone neatly, with two hands, and then bow and gassho.
Ikasu.