Emi asked her mother to take our photos in their backyard, not where we’d been doing our exercises, but up against the house, with her mom and her camera in the middle of the yard and the late afternoon sun behind her, shining in our eyes. Etsuko tried to tell her that it would make us squint, but Emi said we wouldn’t if her mother didn’t take forever setting things up.
Once we were settled, with Emi sitting straight and me kneeling down so we’d be the same height, I glanced up at my Sunny Hive window in order to try to see my doll. I’d turned her toward the yard so Emi might see how she looked before she got her haircut. But from this distance the doll’s hair was little more than a thick black shadow, and her face was too small for us to recognize much expression in it. Farther up the side of the building, however, I caught a glimpse of Fritz’s ghostly self again - glimpsed it and then it was gone. Who would think that Fritz Stolz, with both his names stopping dead at the end of the alphabet, would so affect me that I would conjure him as a middle-aged wretch watching us from his room, after he left town? I had come to terms with the unreality of Kikuya’s singing companion, but she was from my grandmother’s ether, while Fritz had nothing to do with me.
“Stop looking at his window!” Etsuko said, her voice a duplication of the pain I’d seen in Fritz’s face.
“Speak Japanese, Mama! Tell me what you said just now!” demanded Emi.
“No talking!” Etsuko told her. “Cornelius, lift your chin!”
“You’re the one talking, Mama. Can’t you just take the pictures? We’ve got to get them in for developing and get them back tonight, you know, so Cornelius can choose which one he wants to take with him tomorrow.”
Etsuko let her camera fall until it hung from the strap around her neck. “If he goes,” she said. “Maybe he’ll stay here, watch Jikan Desuyo with us again next week, become a member of our family.”
I thought Emi would like that, but she said, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her, “You know as well as I do that Cornelius has to leave us, too, Mama. It is written on his itinerary.”
Her “too” stood in the early evening air, as visible to me as Fritz had been. I would leave them, too, because I had an itinerary.
—
For the rest of that evening and into the next day, Emi’s “written on his itinerary,” would not leave me alone. As I thought about it, I was sure my grandmother believed it was her duty to let the highways and byways she found herself on dictate her life, à la Mr. Watanabe’s twine. Until I got my itinerary, however, despite my grandmother’s influence over me, I had never been much for highways and byways. I wanted surety in my life, and often had a sort of “nothing to be done about it” attitude when things went wrong. Even now, for all the thrill I felt when opening the itinerary and despite Emi pointing out those stamps festooned at the bottom of it, I felt sure the trip had not been paid for and therefore was merely an idea, a possibility. So on the day after we got our pictures taken, only twenty-four hours before my scheduled departure, when I went to the Japan Travel Bureau and showed them the itinerary, I was once again unsettled when the woman behind the counter gave me a packet of tickets without asking for anything from me - no money, no nothing.
There was no longer any “if”, regarding the trip, only whether or not I would get on the train, and, if I did, who I might find there waiting for me.
The Travel Bureau I took the itinerary to was next to Kyoto station. I went there on the bus, but when I left the place with my tickets in my pocket, I stopped at Higashi Honganji temple before braving another bus home.
I had been inside Higashi Honganji before, on the day of my arrival in Kyoto, but I left almost immediately to go find my room at Sunny Hive and venture down to Pontocho, on the lookout, as it were, for my grandma. And since then, if I didn’t count my visit to Ryoanji, I’d avoided Kyoto’s traditional sites - its temples and gardens, castles and shrines - in favor of what always drew me, the ritual machinations of too much thinking about everyday life.
What I’d liked about Higashi Honganji the first time I saw it was the outright ‘bigness' of the place - it’s the largest wooden structure in Kyoto - and this time, too, the moment I passed through its outer gate and walked up the stone steps to the main temple building, its massive room, supported by some ninety wooden pillars and laid with nearly one thousand tatami mats, let me feel my own smallness. I hadn’t felt it at Ryoanji, but slipping out of my shoes and stepping into an absolute sea of tatami calmed me.
There was no one else in the place, so I tried to gauge the exact center of the room and went to stand there, and then sit down. By walking everywhere and often forgetting to eat, I had lost weight in Kyoto, so when my T-shirt dislodged itself from the waist of my jeans and the knobs of my hips came into view, the weakness of them, that is to say, their outright impermanence, made me laugh. Why worry? Whatever came would come, and then I’d be gone.
After some minutes, I stood again to make my way to the front of the room, where a vast altar stretched across the length of the room. I saw a wooden statue of Shinran, the founder of the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist sect, looking a lot like I thought Bashō must have when he set out walking and writing his poems. I also saw a red and white painting of lotuses, as realistic a depiction of things as the right side of Kikuya’s face in the portrait Melinda bought me, and two framed Chinese characters in gold, not very stylized so not very difficult for me to read. I sat down in front of them, just as I had in the middle of the room. The first character, ken - 見 - meant “See,” while for the second, shin - 真 - was “Truth.” So together they were kenshin, or “See Truth.” It pleased me to know them, but it also made me impatient to be handed such a banal credo.
“Easy to say,” I told the characters, “but what is the truth I am supposed to see?”
The characters weren’t about to explain themselves, but I sat in front of them for a lot longer than I had in the middle of the room, just sat there breathing in and out, until a tour group entered the building, its guide spooling out the history of the temple in loudly whispered English.
“Four fires over the centuries,” she said. “So this current structure was only built in 1895.”
Maybe, but “See Truth” would survive the ravages of any fire, would it not?
—
The Shinkansen was scheduled to leave Osaka at seven a.m., stop in Kyoto, where I would get on, then stop in Nagoya before arriving in Tokyo, where we had a five-hour layover, enough time for us to visit the town of Ichikawa if we wanted to, before all night travel to Hokkaido.
I cleaned my room the night before, put my doll, the newly-mended stand I retrieved from Watanabe-san’s shop, plus my bifurcated Kikuya portrait in a lockable closet, and gave the key to Etsuko in case of something like fire, which “See Truth” might withstand, but not my belongings. I showered, shaved, packed my bag, went to bed early, then failed to fall asleep until three o’clock in the morning. Despite the calm I found at Higashi Honganji, I asked myself again and again what I was doing, and now, plagued by sleeplessness, burdened with an overstuffed bag and a very thick novel, I stood on the northbound Shinkansen platform. It was the moment of departure, not of the train, that would occur in a few more minutes, but of myself from myself, of my present from my past.
The train slid into the station almost silently. It was famous for that, and also for being on time, so I stood where the marks on the platform said my car would stop. I had showered and shaved, but nerves, the growing heat, and the hurried trip to the station made me sweat, and now there were rings under the armpits of the shirt I bought especially for the trip.
The moment the train’s door opened I stepped inside to a floral smell and the brisk professionalism of a conductor who said “Hello,” to me in English. He was older than the younger Mr. Sugiyama, younger than the older one, and wore a badge that said his name was Nakamura, which I happened to know meant “middle of the village.” Middle of the Village, yet he flew past hundreds of villages daily on this train. It made me think that no one ever truly lived in the middle of anything, that, fast or slow or whether or not we had itineraries, all of us simply coasted by.
Each pair of seats had what my grandmother would have called “doilies” on them, meant to serve as headrests. My seat number was written on my ticket but I checked it twice, and then twice more, since Ichikawa Yuki wasn’t sitting in the seat next to it. I looked at my ticket a third time - maybe I had the wrong car? - then I peered into the nearby seats, thinking maybe she was playing a trick, ready to pop up, smiling and happy, before walking me back to the seats we were assigned.
Soon enough, however, I fell into our seats by myself, fell into them and moved over by the window, my heart as heavy as a Ryoanji stone. Though I had imagined it plenty of times, played with how tragic it would be, how tragic I would be, just a numb and stupid Hamlet riding off to Hokkaido alone if she didn’t show up, I hadn’t truly believed that she could engage in such a deception, for I knew the goodness of the woman’s heart.
I took off my sweaty shirt, spread it out on the aisle seat, and had just begun to let the knowledge that I was once again alone leak into me, when the train left the station as quickly and quietly as it had arrived. I rested my head on my doily and closed my eyes.
Have you ever wanted love or hoped for love against all odds?
If so, then you know me, if not, then you don’t.
I opened my eyes a couple of minutes later to pick up the novel I had thrown onto the aisle seat, too, so that no one would try to sit where my absent beloved belonged. I tossed the novel down by my feet. The trip to Tokyo would take three hours, but each one would seem like ten now. It had occurred to me that she and I - had there been a “she” - might have felt it important to talk during that time, or that we might have found the confidence to simply sit together in silence, and, if so, I thought I might read my book in preparation for next semester’s class.
But I didn’t have the stomach to read now. I had taken my shoes off, also, so I pressed a stockinged foot down on the novel’s top. Maybe I could prepare to teach it through my tears, and through osmosis.
By the clock at the front of the carriage, ten minutes passed before I gained enough control to pick my shirt up and fan it out into the aisle. I would wear the damned thing, never mind that its armpits weren’t dry. I would sit there with some dignity, not like a fool in a T-shirt!
A man across from me looked up, startled by my flapping shirt and expecting a bad odor.
“No!” I said, but he flipped the pages of his newspaper at me anyway, to chase away the absent smell.
From a particularly radical turn that the train took a few miles out of Kyoto, I got a clear view through my car and into the one in front of it, where travelers stood as well as sat down. The man who thought my shirt stunk stood and headed that way, maybe still hoping to avoid me, or maybe in order to use the between-cars toilet that a woman had just come out of.
Conductor Nakamura was walking toward me with his ticket puncher, clicking it and smiling and blocking my view of both the man from across the aisle and the woman, who in any case had paused behind the half-wall just inside our car, until Conductor Nakamura was far away for her to come to me.
She wore western clothes, a soft brown skirt with an off-white long-sleeved blouse, and her hair was down to her shoulders. The bag she carried was smaller than mine and her shoes were light blue Keds.
“Ah,” she said when she got to me, “you came.”
She said it calmly, though my mind contained a hurricane.
She put her bag on the rack next to mine. When she sat down she said she hoped I wouldn’t mind if she rested for a moment, that her stomach was upset, that from three o’clock that morning, at about the time I finally fell sleep, she’d been bothered by a bout of diarrhea, which had struck again just before the train arrived in Kyoto. She said she hoped her time in the toilet hadn’t worried me, took my hand, pressed her own ticket into it, and closed her eyes.
When her breathing settled, I bent to get my novel, opening it to its final few chapters, since reading seemed a very fine thing for me to be doing now. The novel wasn’t War and Peace, which I would tell Mr. Sugiyama I decided not to teach, but the one I had been reading over and over again since my arrival in Kyoto, The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki.
I am happy to report that at the conclusion of the novel, Yukiko agreed to an arrangement with the son of a viscount, an architect with a degree in aeronautics from a not-so-famous American University, who would soon go to work in the East Asia Aircraft Corporation in Osaka. His name was Mimaki, he was forty-four years old, and though he had little money of his own, his father had promised to secure the couple’s future with a monthly stipend and by giving them a house he happened to own.
Their wedding was set for the Emperor’s birthday, April 29, 1942, half a year after Pearl Harbor and a couple of years before my uncle got killed. I didn’t want to consider the grave probability that neither Yukiko nor her husband, nor any of her sisters, would survive the war, since the US bombed Osaka relentlessly during mid-March of 1945.
But right now, here in my life, Ichikawa Yuki slept until we got to Nagoya, woke for a moment, then slept again to Yokohama. Her diarrhea persisted throughout our visit to her hometown and was a problem on the train to Hokkaido.
Endnotes…
1. Cornelius’s experience at Higashi Honganji was mine, as well. It was the first Buddhist temple I ever visited. Since then, I have been there many times, to sit amongst its sea of tatami, cross-legged during earlier years, later more uncomfortably. Far more than Ryoanji, the place brings me some internal calmness. Maybe because at Ryoanji I am outside looking in, while at Higashi Honganji the tatami includes me, and seems to stretch forever.
2. I decided not to reveal the name of the book Cornelius read until the very end, even though The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki’s great masterpiece, is not widely known to many of you who have been following my episodes. Was that a mistake? Would you like to have known the name of the novel all along? Of course, those who know the book may have guessed it from the start.
3. The last line of The Makioka Sisters is “Yukiko's diarrhea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo,” so I tried to pay homage to it with my last line. I also tried to reflect the personalities of the novel’s four sisters in my characters: The “Oh” Woman, in a way, is Tsuruko; Emi’s mother, Etsuko, is Sachiko; Ichikawa Yuki (of course), is Yukiko; and Kaori is Taeko. Maybe doing so was a silly conceit, but my hope was to provide something pleasing for people who know The Makioka Sisters without obstructing the enjoyment of those who don’t. There are many ‘plot’ commonalities, also, a main one having to do with Ichikawa Yuki NOT coming to answer a waiting telephone.
4. Those who have read my 2022 novel, “The Grievers’ Group”, the story of Cornelius and Ichikawa Yuki 50 years later, also may recognize the “light blue Keds” Yuki wore on the train, for they appear in that book, too, as does the man who sold them to her.
5. This will be my last installment of “Notes From a Decrepit Boat Ramp” for a while. Here is a recent photo of me, sitting in front of a fake library. Some might say it’s exactly where I belong.
I had a JNR railpass.
We will miss your posts. Thank you for sharing your writing with us. I hope all is well.