I handed out flyers for an hour, then made my way to Kinokuniya Bookstore to get a map in order to find Ichikawa Yuki’s namesake hometown. I pictured her a decade earlier, passing beneath that Tokyo Station sign in her high school uniform, but refused the fantasy that I might go to Ichikawa with her one day, nervous about meeting her parents.
This day she and her friends were headed to a farewell party for an officemate moving to Los Angeles, and they carried gifts. “Los Angeles, California!” Ichikawa Yuki said before they left me, as if California were another word for heaven, while I suggested that she might stop by Mountain Cabin that evening, if she had the time. I wished I hadn’t spoken the moment the words were out of my mouth - what teacher invites one of his students to a bar? - but words are like marbles spilling from a bag… My grandmother used to say that you could chase after them if you wanted to, but they’d find their own way.
At Kinokuniya, with the map in my hands, I perused some English translations of Japanese novels by the country’s best writers; Soseki, Kawabata, Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Oe, Abe… I bought the thickest one, along with the map, then took a bus to Ryoanji Temple in the northwest corner of the city, famous all over the world for its rock garden, and famous to me because the woman I fell in love with in England had pictures of it in a coffee table book. It was supposed to represent the Zen “no mind” that eluded Melinda.
At the temple I walked up a path to join a dozen other tourists sitting along a boardwalk and facing fifteen boulders, each an island standing apart in a coarsely sculpted sea. Some of the boulders had steep sides with flat tops, some slanted gently into that sea, some were mossy, some not. Those who’d arrived before me maintained a respectful silence, as if knowing that the thoughts they were attempting to banish might come roaring back in if they spoke. So I stayed quiet, too, holding my novel and my map.
The walls around the garden were earthen, sometimes running to rust, with natural interruptions in them, fissures where a slight change of depth or texture served to give them a meandering aspect. I had read that the wall at the far end was slightly lower, making the garden seem longer than it was. I tried not to let my mind wander, to simply see what was before me, to let the browns and russets remain themselves, to let the structure of the garden inform my opinion of it. But the thought kept coming to me that the island my uncle died on might have looked like one of these boulders, and that with the right sort of effort I might take myself back to the moment of his death. What, however, was the right sort of effort? All I knew was that he’d been killed by a Japanese Zero that came out of nowhere to strafe the beach he landed on. Everyone in my family supposed that meant he’d been killed early in the battle, save Grandma, who said he had wandered back down to the beach a day or two after the Marines secured the place, to wash in the sea and walk. She said that she was on his mind when the Zero pilot saw him, just as the Zero pilot’s mother was on his mind, her photograph stuck in his cockpit, cracked across its middle from having been folded in his wallet. She said she saw it all in ‘a dream that wasn’t a dream,’ a phrase I learned to love.
I stayed at Ryoanji until it closed at 4:30, then lingered a moment to watch a monk step down among the boulders to rake away whatever the wind or a thoughtless tourist might have dropped. I believed I could tell from the monk’s expression that he wasn’t fond of raking, that maybe he was thinking of his own father’s death during the war.
On my way back to the bus stop I got a cup of coffee and a couple of onigiri - one plum, one salmon - at a convenience store, then I headed down a lane to a far smaller temple than Ryoanji, to sit beneath an elm and open the novel I bought. It seemed to be the story of four sisters who lived near Osaka in the late 1930s, the elder two married, the younger two not. I had heard in Tokyo that this was the most Japanese of novels, in that nothing much happened on the surface of things while its underpinnings buckled and roiled. When I saw it in the bookstore I remembered that description and chose it above the others, for didn’t everyone’s underpinnings buckle and roil, just as mine were now?
The focus of the novel was on the family’s need to arrange a marriage for Yukiko, sister number three, because sister number four, Taeko, wanted to marry her boyfriend and, by custom, could not do so before her elder sister wed. But Yukiko was reticent, reluctant to be shopped around. Of course it occurred to me that Yukiko would be “Yuki” if you took away the “ko,” so from the moment I started reading, Ichikawa Yuki’s face popped into my mind whenever Yukiko’s name popped up on the page.
There were four sisters in the family but only three of them were very much in the story at the start. The eldest sister lived with her husband in central Osaka, and served only to cast scorn upon the second sister, Sachiko, for not finding Yukiko a husband. I got angry with the oldest sister. All she wanted was to protect the family name, caring nothing for Yukiko’s happiness. The youngest sister, too, didn’t care about Yukiko. Were there never families who simply loved without competition, then, no matter the country or the generation?
I had always been a fast and competent reader and I liked the book immediately, with its precise descriptions and its simple, declarative sentences. But the sun was setting, so after another hour I carried my book to the bus stop, read a little more of it under an unlit streetlight, read more on the bus back to the center of Kyoto, then went into a coffee shop and read again.
That was a kind of “no mind,” was it not? The ability to go away from oneself while entering a world invented by someone else? Isn’t that what you are doing now?
By the time I left the coffee shop the second sister, Sachiko, got a call from a matchmaker about a good marriage prospect for Yukiko, so maybe things would take a positive turn in the pages to come.
*****
My goal for the day had simply been to get coffee and avoid running into Bill, but I’d gone out so quickly that I’d worn the clothes I wore the night before, without my tie and jacket. Also, by the time I finished reading and with only those two onigiri in my belly, I was hungry again. I wanted to go back to my room, shower, put on fresh clothes, then hurry to Mountain Cabin on the slim chance that Ichikawa Yuki might show up, never mind that I had no idea when her company party ended nor even if my suggestion had offended her.
I had walked to Kinokuniya okstore but didn’t feel like walking home, so I hailed a taxi in front of the coffee shop, its door swinging open for me automatically. I had it stop a block away from Sunny Hive, a building that housed more people than Bill and Melinda and me, one of whom was just then coming out of it. I knew him from Bill’s description - sallow-faced but with a yodeler’s demeanor - as the guy who’d inspired Bill’s “verboten.”
I said, “Hi. I live here too. Cornelius MacLeish,” as soon as I got to him, I guess in order to blunt Bill’s description, but he looked at my wrinkled pants and shirt like I might be a desperate Christian proselytizer, with no converts yet that day. His nose was pinched, his Adam’s apple prominent, and the hand he let me shake felt like parchment. Bill hadn’t mentioned that he was in his forties, but he was.
“Fritz Stolz,” he said.
‘Fritz Stolz’ my ass. I’d just met a ten-year-old boy named Fritz Stolz, living next door to the family in the novel I was reading… his own German family was about to fly home to the Führer before war broke out. But all I said was, “I spent the day reading this book.”
When I showed him the novel I expected he would laugh and tell me his real name, but though his demeanor changed, it wasn’t in the way I expected.
“I love that book!” he yodeled. “I have read it in Japanese, in German, and in English. Its depiction of how we lived back then is marvelous! God bless the author! He should have won the Nobel Prize.”
He put his free hand over his heart and bowed to the book.
“I like it, too,” I said. “I’m rooting for Yuki not to marry some jerk.”
“Yukiko,” he yodeled. “You have to get the names right.”
I was sure I’d seen him coming out of Sunny Hive, but he followed me inside, as if he were just returning to it, too. “We can discuss it when you finish,” he said. “I want to hear your impression of the sisters. About each I have a strong opinion! Maybe we’ll concur, maybe we won’t, but that is the glory of criticism, to disagree with others who have read, with care and a modicum of intelligence, the same books you have. And there is so much more to come in that one. Oh my goodness, wait until you…”
He paused to mumble, “Stop it Fritz, do not ruin it for him,” then he bounded up the stairs like I’d released a spring in him. I waited until the stairwell was quiet, but when I went to my floor and saw that someone was in the laundry room again, I worried it might be Fritz, stopped to get his lederhosen from the clothesline. I slipped my key out of my pocket and had just inserted it into the lock when Mr. Sugiyama came out of the laundry room wearing only a T-shirt and boxer shorts and socks.
“Ah, Cornelius,” he said. “Come meet my wife.”
I left my key and went to the laundry room, where Mr. Sugiyama’s suit was stretched across an ironing board, his stack of fliers beside it. A tall bottle of beer sat there, too. Mrs. Sugiyama, that is to say, Etsuko, stood beside the ironing board, prettier than I’d expected her to be, not like the picture in my head. Right away I thought of Sachiko, the second sister from my novel.
“I hope you like your new tatami,” she said. “It’s still a little green but it will settle down.”
“I like it. I appreciate you changing it for me,” I said.
“What?” asked Mr. Sugiyama.
“He likes the new tatami,” said his wife in Japanese. She then told me that they lived next door, that they had a washing machine there, too, but it was broken.
“Ah, but we are poor hosts,” said Mr. Sugiyama. “Would you like a glass of beer?”
I didn’t want him to say “What?” again, so I turned down the beer as simply as I could. When I ducked back out into the hallway, however, Etsuko Sugiyama followed me.
“Do you need soap or towels?” she asked. “This is not a hotel, but I can provide them for you. We want you to feel at home.”
I didn’t need anything and said so. Her ability to speak English might not have been as good as her husband’s, but her understanding of it surpassed his by many times. So I asked what she knew of Ichikawa Yuki. I tried to make it seem like I was interested in all my students, was only asking because I’d met her on the sidewalk that morning.
“Ah, Miss Yuki,” she said, but nothing more.
When she walked me to my room I was reluctant to open my door in front of her since my bag still sat in the center of the new tatami with most of my clothes spilling out of it. They weren’t dirty, but they would look that way to her.
“Ichikawa Yuki’s English is good,” I said. “In fact, there’s a high level of English in that entire class. They’re a fun group to teach.”
She seemed mildly irritated that I was sticking to that subject, but said, “Miss Yuki often wears kimono. She is not a typical modern girl. I think she believes that the refinements of the past suit her best. I used to think so, too, when I was her age.”
Was that her way of telling me to keep my distance? Should I say that I liked the past’s refinements, too?
“I just met Fritz Stolz,” I said. “He got excited about this novel I am reading.”
I held up the novel, hoping it might work its magic twice, but she hardly glanced its way. “Don’t mention Fritz. I am angry with him,” she said.
It came to me that her anger with Fritz was what drove him out into the street. It also came to me that she was likely to stay beside me until I went into my room, so I put my hand on my key and turned it, letting the door swing open.
“Is your house next door on my side of the building?” I asked. “If so, I think I saw your father outside exercising this morning, along with a little girl.”
“That would be Emi, my daughter,” she said. “Don’t tell her your secrets if you don’t want them spread around. She is what you call a ‘blabbermouth.’”
She tried to maintain her scolding tone, but a smile invaded her face.
“How old is Emi?” I asked.
“She is ten, but how did Fritz put it? Ten going on seventeen.”
She kept her smile when mentioning Fritz, the man she was angry with right now.
Endnotes…
When Cornelius bought ‘the thickest’ of those English translations of Japanese novels at the bookstore, something told me that it should remain unnamed. So please, should you happen know its title, as many of you do or soon will, do not say so here.
I visited Ryoanji Temple often during the first half of the 1970s. I loved it and love it still but, like Melinda and Cornelius, I never seemed able to sit quietly, becoming one with the version of nature it represented. Rather, I succumbed to peeking at those around me, in order to gauge how they might be faring. My loyalty was to observation more than self-realization. It’s a common writerly burden.
Back to the unnamed novel. Cornelius’s reading and retelling of it is meant to be contrapuntal to his story, that is, to the one you are reading. Such a thing may be a literary conceit, but if it works I intend to build on it.
My decision to name the German man in Sunny Hive ‘Fritz Stolz’ (also the name of the German boy in the novel Cornelius is reading, is, in fact, building on it. The ‘Fritz’ in that novel, Fritz #1, I shall call him, was ten years old in the late 1930s, while the one on the street in 1972, Fritz #2, was in his forties, so roughly the same age that Fritz #1 would be were he able to escape the boundaries of the book he is in. Talk about your literary conceits… Let us see how that one works!