A City Full of Rain
Collected Stories
By: Gary Eberle
I heard Fiona McKay before I actually saw her. I had taken the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, then an inter-city north to Kanazawa, switching there to a small and, by Japanese standards, not very clean two-car local train to Hakui on the Chirihama coast of the Noto Peninsula. The Noto juts out into the Sea of Japan from the northern coast of Honshu like an unfinished thought, and I thought it might be one of the few regions of Japan which had been left relatively unspoiled by the postwar industrialization.
As I switched from train to train, the number of foreigners progressively decreased until, after Kanazawa, I was the only gaijin left on the train. During my two years in Japan, I had gotten out of Tokyo as much as possible, mainly to get away from people like me. Being a foreigner is a strange experience on an island as homogenous as Japan. Since, in my work, I dealt mainly with Japanese I sometimes found my looks somewhat repulsive when I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror or store window. I looked pale, almost green, and far too large, with hay-colored hair sprouting out of my face and head. My blue eyes reminded me of the eyes of a dead fish. I wished I looked otherwise.
After two years of being among the Japanese, I had grown impatient at the stupidity of the American tourists, people like me, I was constantly bumping into on the streets of Tokyo. I found myself looking at the gaijin like a Japanese. We were large, ungainly, loud, barbarous, demanding too much space to swing our legs and arms in, like
hairy apes set loose in Tokyo with cameras. Fortunately, since most of the gaijin stayed in Tokyo or Kyoto, escape was possible.
But at Hakui, a small town that serves as little more than a railway transfer point, I was surprised to hear an English speaking voice rising above the general hum of traffic outside the train station.
"Buh-loody hell! No, no, no!" the voice exploded in frustration, and I turned to see a towering red-headed Australian woman gesturing at a large backpack and two wooden boxes that lay beside a local bus. She held a Berlitz phrase book open in one hand and between bursts of English profanity she was trying to get the bus driver to allow her to take the pack and the odd boxes onto the crowded bus that was going out to the nine-mile stretch of rocky coast on the western side of the peninsula known as the Noto Kongo.
Without knowing it, she was trapped in an embarrassing dilemma. As a foreigner, she should have been accorded the utmost courtesy and allowed to do as she pleased. The driver, who probably had never encountered a Westerner before, much less a six foot redhead, had politely offered to load her heavy things into the baggage compartment outside the bus, but she had apparently misinterpreted his gesture as an attempt to prevent her from taking her gear with her.
By the time I saw them, a sizeable crowd had gathered to observe the bus driver do battle with this strapping Amazon whose flying red hair probably made the peasants among them think she was part dragon.
My first impulse was to turn away, thinking she was just another stupid tourist, but the bus driver just then caught my eye and looked at me with such an expression of faceless embarrassment that I went over to see what I could do.
The arrival of a second gaijin, as tall and wild haired as the first, sent a ripple of murmurs through the crowd gathered on the sidewalk. The murmurs were silenced, however, when I bowed deeply to the driver, deeper than necessary, actually, and addressed him in Japanese. I took care to use a polite form of the verb, not too polite, of course, but enough to indicate that I didn't wish to cause him any further discomfort.
"Well, thank Christ," the red-haired woman said, "Would you tell this bloke I need my bloody gear and want to take it on board?"
I turned to her after bowing to the driver again and said, slowly, as if she didn't understand English, "He knows that. He is only offering to load it into the baggage compartment beneath the bus for you."
The driver fired off something in Japanese and I caught most of it, though his accent was a little rough.
"He says he would be most pleased if you would allow him to take the burden of your heavy pack personally and that if you would take a seat on his humble bus and make yourself comfortable and all that he would be most honored."
"Oh," she said, blinking as if just waking up, "Oh, Christ, is that all? Well then, tell him to load it on and let's get on then."
Then she threw back her head and let out a loud laugh. Some of the older peasants on the sidewalk backed away, perhaps fearing that flames would come from this dragon's mouth. I translated her comment, loosely, and added a thanks to the driver who smiled and laughed and bowed himself at the misunderstanding. The crowd tittered and dispersed as the large pack and the two boxes were absorbed into Japanese efficiency beneath the bus. No one lost face.
"Fiona McKay," she said, extending her hand. Her last name rhymed with sky and her handshake was firm. It was strange to be staring into the eyes of a woman half an inch taller than I. After seeing mostly the ink dark eyes of Japanese for two years, I had forgotten just how bright and varied the pigments in our eyes are. In Japan, drivers' licenses don't even have a space for eye or hair color since everyone's is the same. Fiona's eyes were a surprisingly deep green with flecks of gold in the irises. "Harry Dean," I said, "On vacation?"
"Don't I wish," she replied, "I'm hiking up the Noto for research. Finishing up my dissertation."
"On?"
"Entomology at U-Syd."
"Sounds interesting," I said, to be polite.
"Too right," she replied. She had a wide open smile the way many Aussies do, and her teeth were large and white. "Specially here. They've got some Japanese coleoptera here as big as your bloody hand, regular
samurai. Wish I spoke the local lingo better, though. Thanks for your help." She jerked her thumb back at the bus. "Ridin' out?"
"No, I said, "Not today anyway. I'm staying at a ryokan here tonight, then tomorrow I'm going north a bit to Myojoji temple. It's supposed to have an exquisite founders' hall and pagoda."
"Ah," she said, with about the same tone of feigned interest as I had used when commenting on her bugs. "Well, ta, then."
And with that, she turned and mounted the bus. I couldn't help but wonder how she'd do out there. I wasn't concerned about her physically. She was a strong woman, about twenty-eight years old, with a lean and wiry build over firm bones. She was dressed all right, too, for the rugged Noto, in hiking boots, khaki walking shorts and cotton shirt.
But the Noto wasn't the outback. There was really no place you could go in Japan anymore to be totally away from people and Fiona McKay struck me as the sort of person who would have difficulty with the layers of politeness even the most rural Japanese expect. After two years, I hadn't mastered it myself, and I always felt awkward, even with my colleagues.
But, as I never expected to see her again, I didn't give it much more thought. I was wrapping up my two-year stint teaching English at the Meiji Institute in Tokyo, and this visit to the Noto was my last chance to find what I imagined was the "real" Japan. It was nearly impossible to encounter it in any form anymore. It had all been Westernized until the cultural contamination was like the pollution in the ocean. It was worst closest to Tokyo, but there was nowhere you could go without meeting it. I loathed what we had done to Japan, even if most of the Japanese didn't.
The hall of the ancestors at Myojoji was a perfect example of what had happened. Its ceiling had a magnificent heron on it carved from a single piece of cypress. The ceiling was painted a deep cerulean and the gray heron, symbol of long life, seemed to fly across it. But there in the corner of the room hung a smoke detector, its bright red eye detracting from the otherwise perfect blue of the false sky.
The new ugly Japan kept intruding itself that way everywhere. Just the week before, a tea ceremony at a friend's house was interrupted
three times by the telephone. At Nikko, Buddhist monks carried SLR's around their necks, and I'd found lunches in exquisite bento boxes garnished with plastic bamboo leaves.
My desperate attempt to find the Japan of my imagination in Hakui failed, and after two days there I pushed my search halfway out the Noto peninsula and across Nanao Bay to the island of Noto, hoping to find some untouched remnant there. Just eighty years ago, the island was inhabited only by primitive tribes of pearl divers. To my disappointment, the small bays of the island were now covered with the ugly grids of commercial pearl growers, and at the small minshuku, or guest house, where I stayed, the owner ran the TV day and night.
Disappointed, I decided to drive the coast highway back to Hakui even though it was out of the way. I wasn't thinking of Fiona McKay at all at that point, but was just trying to find something of the lost Japan of Utamaro and Basho. I still hoped to discover some unblemished corner on the back roads.
Then, just north of Tatsurahama, I ran into Fiona again. Actually, I didn't see her at first, only a bizarre apparition that I thought might have been the last hallucination of a desperate traveller. A gaggle of schoolchildren in Girl Scout uniforms was following someone carrying a large ungainly bamboo rack. They were laughing and waving their hands. Attached to the rack, which was about four feet square, were perhaps one hundred small tubes made of bamboo. The bearer carried the whole contraption on her back using a headstrap to take the extra weight. It looked like something from Hiroshige's Tokaido series. The whole gang was approaching a small roadside shrine to Jizo-bosatsu, patron of children and travellers, when I passed them. I had gone about fifty yards when I noticed that it was Fiona in the middle of the children.
I stopped and backed up to them. Fiona had a great big smile on her face and, through gestures and a few words of Japanese, she and the children were carrying on an animated conversation. They crowded around her and asked for her autograph as if she were a celebrity. All my fears about her fitting in were apparently wasted.
"`Lo," she said, recognizing me, "You again, eh? Me and me chums were just hiking to the bus stop. How about a lift to Hakui?"
I got out of the car and saw that the weird contraption around which the children were gathered was actually a rack for carrying her specimens. She had run out of collecting bottles, and then had run into the Girl Scouts who used their scout knives to fashion boxes for her out of bamboo. The little bamboo tubes were full of insects that she and the children, whom she'd met and befriended when she'd stumbled on their campground, had collected. Their teacher, Mrs. Yamaguchi, had spoken a little English and among them they had gathered far more insects than Fiona had ever anticipated getting on such a short field trip.
"Arigato, domo arigato," Fiona said, bowing deeply to the children who did not want to let her go. They lit some incense in Jizo's small shrine and rang the bells to get the god's attention as, somehow, we managed to jam the specimen rack, her boxes and her backpack into the hatchback of the little Toyota I was driving. As we left, the children and Mrs. Yamamoto all shouted "Bye-bye, bye-bye," and waved. I cringed at the children's "bye-bye's," a creeping Americanism my Japanese intellectual friends regularly railed about.
Fiona smelled all sour of sweat and wood smoke after a week of camping on the coast, and before we'd driven more than ten kilometers she'd fallen asleep, her head rolled back in a great snore which continued until we hit the outskirts of Hakui where I had to slam on the brakes. The streets were jammed with people and the area around the station was filled with small stalls and booths selling everything from fresh fruit to rubber sandals.
"What's this?" she asked, stretching out as she woke up. Her long arms filled the small car and went out the windows on either side. The car was filled with the spicy odor of her underarms.
"A midsummer festival," I said. "Tanabata-matsuri. It must be seventh night. It looks like all the farmers have come in for the fireworks. I hope we can find rooms. There's no train out till morning."
We tried every one of the few hotels around the stations, but they were all booked solid. Tries at more outlying ones failed, too. Finally I dropped the Toyota at the station rental place because the festival traffic made driving absurd and a friendly cab driver took us to a small
ryokan, or traditional inn, he knew of on the southern edge of town. It was on a backstreet, only a block away from some gaudy festival stalls.
The door was unmarked and dark. The proprietress turned out to be an old woman, bent double, like many Japanese women, from years of hard labor. She walked with her hand in the small of her back, and had to take great pains to bend up to see my face. Her teeth were all golden with metal bridgework and when she spoke the smell of Suntory whiskey filled the cluttered vestibule.
She nervously whispered something to the taxi driver, the only word of which I caught was gaijin. The driver replied that I understood Japanese and had lived in Japan for two years. This seemed to placate her somewhat. Perhaps she had dealt with Westerners before who did not know proper shoe etiquette or who refused to eat raw fish. Then they had another whispered conversation at the end of which the old lady gave a hissing laugh.
When I went back to the taxi, Fiona was attempting to shoo off an aggressive salesman who was trying to sell her a couple of sticky rice balls wrapped in seaweed. She looked very tired in spite of her nap, and I got rid of the salesman by giving him the two hundred yen he wanted for the snack. I put the rice balls in my jacket pocket and said, "The good news is they seem to have room for us."
"What's the bad news?" Fiona asked.
"It's kind of a dive. The proprietress says there's only one room left, so we'll have to share. Also, the driver seems to think we're married."
"Christ," Fiona said wearily rubbing the back of her hands across her eyes.
"There's really no other room in town," I explained.
Fiona looked at me from the back seat of the cab. Her long legs were folded up uncomfortably and her face was drawn and tired from the week's camping on the Noto. Her large hands fluttered in front of her face for a moment in a helpless gesture that seemed oddly feminine in a woman her size. Finally, she sighed. "Well, I suppose I can stand it if you can," she said.
At the registration desk, the awkwardness of the situation got even worse. I saw the hunched old proprietress cast a quick look at Fiona's
ring finger, and smile. A sudden lowering of her head told me that she had just erected one of the those invisible psychological walls the Japanese build when they don't wish to be embarrassed. I had seen it happen on a subway in Tokyo once when a drunken man lurched on to our car and made as if he were going to relieve himself in a corner. The air in the car seemed to turn ten degrees colder and I heard the walls snap into place with the finality of metal doors sliding to. They had rendered the man invisible. Good God, I swore to myself, she thinks Fiona's a prostitute. I felt acutely uncomfortable, but Fiona seemed not to mind or notice.
She had kicked off her hiking boots in the entry way and lined them up with my shoes. The boots looked gigantic next to the loafers I wore constantly in Japan to make the endless shoe rituals easier. I noticed the maid's startled expression when she saw those boots standing there on their own, looming over the tiny tennis shoes and slip-ons of the staff and other guests. I myself was somewhat surprised to notice that, in our stocking feet, Fiona was still a half-inch taller than I. After two years of looking at Japanese, I found her body all out of proportion. The paleness of her skin and the redness of her hair startled me every time I looked at her.
The maid, in a cheap yellow kimono with a flower on the obi, wordlessly led us across a small bridge over an indoor carp pond and up a few steps to a narrow hallway. Her tabi, stockings with toes in them, swept noisily over the tatami. Her steps were large and heavy, and I thought she could use some training in tea ceremony to teach her to walk better. She stopped in front of a shoji door and slid it open. The door glided smoothly on its runners making a sibilant sound that magnified the silence of the old inn.
The room we entered was a small one even by Japanese standards, with a pair of water-stained shoji at the far end. It was sparsely furnished with only a small imitation laquerware table of the sort you could pick up at any department store. The takanoma, or niche, had an old silk flower in a vase and painted scroll with a reproduction of old calligraphy on it. On the table was a tall plastic thermos with hot water and two handleless cups. Though the room was rather expensive, the
furnishings were cheap imitations of traditional Japanese crafts, a distinct disappointment, but as it was the only place left in town it would have to do.
"Tea?" I asked Fiona as the maid bustled about the room touching a thing here and there to make sure I noticed it.
"I'd kill for some," she said, thumping her backpack with its odd rack of insect cages against the wall. "Then a bath. After a week in the bush I'm about due, eh?"
"Furo, kudasai," I said to the maid as I put a bag of green tea into each of the cups. The maid disappeared into the bathroom, and a moment later, we heard the sound of water splashing into the deep cube of the tub. The maid came back out gesturing and chattering excitedly.
"Wakarimasu," I said, smiling and bowing. "Wakarimasu." I understand.
"What's that then?" Fiona asked. She had sat herself on one of the cushions by the low table and stretched her legs out straight beneath it. Her feet in their ragg hiking socks flopped on the tatami and looked disembodied, like the lower half of a magician's illusion, and her legs seemed to reach halfway across the small room.
"She's telling us how to take a bath," I explained. "You're to wash first and then get in the tub. There's a stool you can sit on, and a bucket."
"Been through that before," Fiona said. "Thank her and tell her we'll manage."
After tea, Fiona took one of the yukata or summer kimonos that had been provided us and headed for the bathroom. I heard her dip the plastic bucket into the hot water of the tub. That was followed by a short shriek. "Oooww!," she whined, "Poached like an egg! Why do they keep it so bloody hot?" I heard her run some cold water into the tub and then climb in.
As she soaked, the maid returned and efficiently laid out the futons. There was one blue one and one red one, both of them ornately decorated with dragons more in the Chinese style than the Japanese. She put them side by side, and I decided Fiona and I could move them whatever chaste distance apart we wanted when we went to sleep, though the room was so small it would hardly make any difference.
The maid bowed and left silently, and when she'd gone I was surprised at the quietness of the ryokan. Even at the best of the old ones these days, the calm studied atmosphere was usually destroyed by the muffled noise of television sets behind the shoji, but this one was oddly silent for such a third class place. Either all the other guests were out on the street enjoying the festival or the rooms had been rented to a convention of deaf mutes.
I listened hard, then (almost reassuringly) heard the distant crackle of laughter from a TV game show. The truly profound quiet of traditional Japan was a thing of the past. I had only experienced it twice in my two years there; once at the stone garden of Ryoanji in Kyoto when I accidentally found myself alone on the porch for a few moments between tour buses, and once at an old inn similar to this one high up in the mountains overlooking a busy harbor when I awoke in the middle of the night from a dream and found myself immersed in an inky quiet I found almost terrifying.
Other than the TV, easily ignored, there seemed to be no sound at all in the old inn except an occasional drip from the bathroom as Fiona changed positions in the tub. The sound of her in the water reminded me, for some reason, of the splash of the tail of one of the ornamental carp I'd seen earlier that year in a pond near Nara. There was also an occasional rustle or chirp from within the bamboo cages she'd improvised to hold her specimens.
I squatted down beside the pack to examine the boxes more closely. It was quite ingenious what she and the scouts had done. Each box was formed of one cell of bamboo about four inches long and two inches in diameter. With pocket knives they had cut out sections of the sides of the tubes to serve as doors, then held the hatches secure with twine. Air holes were bored into the cells with awls and the whole thing had been arranged on the rack and tied onto her backpack. I'm sure the scout master had been proud to show off her children's dexterity with bamboo. The orientals never stopped telling you about the wonders of bamboo. It's a grass, not a tree, they tell you, and it grows up to forty feet high, each cell of it as hollow as the Tao. You can eat it, build with it, make musical instruments with it. You find it everywhere. They use
it for making drinking cups at temples, handles on trays, paintbrushes, furniture and everything else. Every Japanese construction worker has at least one story about bamboo scaffolding standing up during an earthquake while the Western-style steel pipe scaffolding came tumbling down around them. Now Fiona and the girl scouts had made insect specimen boxes out of it.
I heard something behind me and turned, startled to see Fiona watching me from the door of the bathroom.
"Don't set `em free," she said walking towards me across the tatami, "It took me and the girls all week to catch `em."
The blue and white yukata she was wearing was much too short for her, though it fit her well enough around. As she strode across the floor in her bare feet, a flash of white thigh showed through the opening of the yukata. She tossed her crumpled khaki shorts and T-shirt into a heap beside the backpack, and looked down at the futons laid side by side in the center of the room.
"Cozy, eh?" she smiled, "Just like Mr. and Mrs. Yamamoto."
"We can move them, if you like," I said, surprised to find myself suddenly nervous. The tightly knotted yukata emphasized the flair of her hips and the swell of her breasts in a way that her hiking outfit had not, and now that there were no Japanese present, I was not even struck by her size so much, though the too-small bathrobe should have emphasized it more. In fact, if anything, she looked smaller and more feminine in it. The open V formed by the crossing sides of the garment revealed a large expanse of pale skin above her breasts, the whiteness of which reminded me of Northern snowdrifts, and I realized that though she was a tall woman she was not out of proportion at all. I had merely forgotten what a white woman's body looks like.
"I've left the water in if you'd like a bath yourself," she said, rubbing her hair vigorously with the thick white towel. "Local custom, isn't it?"
Even now, I could smell the steam of the bathroom coming into the main room. It carried the sweet sour scent of Fiona's body. The idea of sitting in the same bath water Fiona had just come out of unnerved me somehow, though I had almost grown used to the custom in the time I'd spent with Japanese women and friends.
"I think . . . maybe later," I found myself stammering, "Did you cover it so it stays hot?"
She nodded. I had no idea what she was thinking or if the half smile that seemed to play over her lips constantly was mocking me or not. I was saved from finding out by the maid who entered with a meal. Two cups of miso soup, a square of tofu in soy sauce, a few pieces of sushi, rice and saki. The maid left it on the low table and bowed out. Fiona dug in with relish, handling her chopsticks deftly. Jozu, the Japanese would have said, she was very skillful, and her long pale fingers manipulated the sticks delicately.
By the time we'd finished, talking of this and that, it was nearly nine o'clock and I heard a few stirrings in the bamboo insect boxes behind me. Fiona's eyes brightened.
"They know it's dusk even though we're in here with lights on. Circadian rhythms. Amazing, isn't it?"
She unfurled herself from the table and padded across the tatami to her pack. She untied a few of the bamboo tubes and brought them back. Until this time we had managed to keep the table between us, but when she returned she sat down right next to me and set the little cages on the table. She brushed her hair back with her hand (it smelled like wet wool) and then, using a chopstick from dinner, she popped open one of the tubes. She turned it over and a three-inch long beetle fell scrabbling onto the table. Its back was the color of an emerald, and its curving mandibles were as long as the rest of its body. Fiona pinned it in place gently with her chopstick and held it on the small pile of rotting leaves and moss she'd packed in with it to serve as food.
I had jumped aside when the thing started scuttling towards my end of the table and Fiona laughed. "This one's an old Tokugawa warrior all right," she said as the beetle kicked furiously trying to escape her chopstick. "Don't worry though, those choppers are purely ornamental. They're rigid, don't close at all."
I looked more closely. I had seen prints of such insects and of crabs done up so the plates of chitin covering their bodies looked like samurai armor. Now for the first time I saw how little the artists had to exagger
ate. Using her fingers, she carefully lifted the bug up by its hard shell and slipped it back into its cage, put the cover on and tied it closed.
"I can hardly wait to get back to the lab and study them," she said. She rattled off a dozen names of species she had found: matsu mushi, kutsuma mushi, kusa hibari, kin hibari. The Japanese girls taught her the local names. She undid another cage and emptied onto the table a green swordtailed grasshopper.
"Munin," Fiona said. The grasshopper looked around itself and took one or two tentative steps with its frail legs. Then it arched its legs like tiny flying buttresses and the room was filled with a strange, disembodied sound. It was a mournful melody, just three notes, long and slow, that came out of the munin and seemed to permeate the room like the odor of incense.
It was exquisite music, full of mono-no-aware, that "sadness of things" that the Japanese used to treasure so much in their art. It was something deep out of old Japan, like the moan of the wind through the branches of a thousand year old cypress tree or the whining song of a Noh actor.
"Every night at this time, right as a clock," she whispered. She seemed rapt by the sound, sitting there on her heels, like a Japanese woman, her hands on her thighs, the light summer kimono slightly open. She reminded me of a figure from an ukiyo-e print by Utamaro, Girl with Grasshopper.
"What's it singing about?" I asked.
"What's it singing about?" she repeated softly, not taking her eyes off the insect. "What do we all sing about? Loneliness, life, all that." She shook her hair back. "Sorry," she said, changing her tone.
"What for?"
"Not too scientific, that bit, was it?" She smiled, but her lips twisted up in a funny way. "I've just felt lonely lately," she continued. "I broke up with someone back at U-Syd just before I came here. The munin's probably just getting ready to molt or mate or something, nothing romantic about it."
Suddenly the room was jolted by a series of explosions. The Tanabata fireworks had begun. The paper of the outside shoji windows
turned blue, red and white. Fiona slid the munin back into its box and joined me at the window. Over the ridge poles and tiled roofs of the houses across the street we could see the fireworks lighting up the sky. Fiona had turned her face up and I could see her pulse beneath the pale skin where the arc of her neck met the jaw. Her red hair was drying now and the light of the fireworks threw deep shadows into the whorls of its layers.
"What is Tanabata anyway?" she asked, "They have so many festivals here I don't know how they keep track."
"Seventh night of the seventh moon," I said, "An old legend. The star of the cowherd Tanabata meets the constellation of the Spinning Maiden over the River of heaven. They were separated by her father or something. The two lovers can meet only on this night. It's a very romantic holiday, for the Japanese, anyway."
Fiona sighed. "I was looking at the sky all week out on the Noto, flat on my back. One night I suddenly started to cry, just like that. I felt lost among the Northern constellations. They make no sense to me. God, how I missed the Southern Cross."
For some reason, her comment startled me. There was a note of sadness in her voice, and I could see her eyes straining up beyond the fireworks to the sky, trying to pick out the stars made invisible by the streetlights of Hakui. I had never thought much about the fact that Fiona, whom I had considered so like me, had grown up under a different sky on the bottom of the world. Her winter was my summer; her day my night. In the flickering light of the fireworks I suddenly found this woman, whom I thought I knew through and through because she was white like me, was very foreign to me.
In the narrow street beneath us, a gang of schoolgirls turned a corner and ran down the rain-damp pavement in blue sailor uniforms. They were carrying slips of paper and they gathered in a clutch around a small tree that stuck up incongruously from a hole in the sidewalk across the narrow back street our room faced. We watched as they tied the papers, prayers to the Spinning Maiden to bring them good husbands and lovers, onto the branches of the tree with pieces of colored yarn. The girls giggled and made bawdy jokes as they tied their prayers to
the small tree. They were just ready to run off when an old woman in a frayed green kimono rounded the corner into the narrow street below us. She was carrying a samisen and she was accompanied by a younger man, an intellectual type, who carried a small tape recorder in his hand. The schoolgirls bowed before the old woman, apparently an old performer, and begged her for a Tanabata song. The samisen player exchanged a few words with the man, who, I guessed, was an ethnologist or folklorist from some university. (There was a push to save whatever bits and pieces they could of the past folk arts before they were all swallowed up by Japanese versions of American television.) The young man turned on his tape recorder as the old woman joked with the girls a bit about their boyfriends then struck her samisen with a large black plectrum and began to sing. Her old cracked voice and the sharp banjo-like twang of the instrument filled the empty street below.
Fiona edged closer to me. "What's she singing?" she whispered. The old woman looked up at us standing above her and seemed to smile, a bit embarrassed at having an alien audience. I bowed slightly and Fiona smiled and the old woman projected her voice up to us. It was a special moment for her. From the looks of the old kimono she wore, she was not well off, probably a singer who in the pre-war days had been popular in the entertainment districts but who had since fallen on hard times.
I translated as best I could as she sang plaintively:
"Would that I might become a star,
The star of Tanabata!
The crimson leaves of the maple tree
Might bridge the River of Heaven
and carry my love to me.
The colored strings of the Tanabata festival
Might bind my longing and desire
To his handsome heart!"
When the old woman finished, the girls bowed respectfully and Fiona and I applauded. When the girls saw us they squealed "bye-bye" and
skittered off in a flurry of giggles to the next tree. We thanked the old singer, and she and her companion disappeared into a nearly deserted yaki-tori bar across the way, and the street was empty again, as if the scene below had been made of clouds. The fireworks had ended and I noticed that Fiona had looped her arm through mine as we stood at the window.
The sad song of the munin once again filled the silence and she turned her face to mine and said, "How about a kiss, Harry Dean? Japan's too damned beautiful to face alone."
As we made love on the dragon-embroidered futons, I was surprised at Fiona's strength. She was so different from the Japanese women (prostitutes whom my friends had arranged for me) I had made love to in the past two years. They were small-breasted and slim hipped, their arms no bigger around than wands of young bamboo. They were suffused with the taste that was not there. Their touch was so fine it had brought me as close as I ever thought I would get to being fully satisfied. But now I realized it had been like dining in Tokyo gourmet restaurants where the delicate taste was so tightly wrapped in a jacket of ceremony and ritual and artistic presentation you never really tasted anything. The women were highly polished surfaces, formed, like laquerware, by putting thin layer over thin layer until they were hard and cold and brittle. But Fiona's lovemaking was as straightforward as herself, blunt, athletic, and intoxicating, with nothing understated about it. Making love to her was like wrestling with something big and powerful. In the tight embrace of her arms and legs, I felt surrounded by something sure and oddly familiar I had been away from for a long time. The paper-thin walls of the old ryokan seemed to shake as we two big gaijin rolled on the blue and red dragons of the futons.
Afterwards, we lay on the tatami tangled in our yukata like two characters from an old erotic print. The munin's song was finished and we heard only an occasional sound of movement from within the cages, soft sibilant sounds of hard shell against bamboo in the darkness. Blue light from the streetlight, not the moon, filtered through the shoji doors and the night was growing cooler. In the distance, the television still mumbled.
Without a word, Fiona turned toward me and fell asleep, her red hair tumbling over the silk cover of the futon. Her lips were parted slightly, revealing the white of her teeth. The blue light through the paper doors and windows threw the shadows of her breasts across her white skin and cast into darkness the rough triangle between her legs.
In the deep and strange calm that embraced us, I remembered the munin. In spite of the fireworks and the television and the cheapness of the room, it had filled the night with a sound as old as Japan itself, echoing from the time when the divine couple, Izanami and Izanagi, dipped their spear into the ocean at the beginning of time and drew up mud to form the islands. Beside me, a beetle scratched inside its cage with a sound like a fingernail against bamboo. I felt I had arrived in Japan even as I was preparing to leave it.
Three days later I was on a plane headed back to the United States. Fiona and I had parted with just a handshake at the train station in Hakui. It seemed oddly impersonal after the night before.
"Genji used to leave his lovers with a poem when they parted," I said as she boarded the train for Kanazawa. (I was heading up to Niigata to get the bullet back to Tokyo.)
Fiona shrugged and waved from the steps. "Well, give my love to old Genj if you see `im," she said. "Meanwhile, bye-bye."
As I packed my books back at the Meiji Institute, I found a postcard from Tokyo Disneyland a friend had given me. On it, a Japanese school girl, in kimono, embraced Mickey Mouse as though there had never been anything else in the history of the entire world. I sent the card to Fiona at the University of Sydney, and on the back I copied some lines from Genji monogatari that I had looked up when I had gotten back to Tokyo:
The dew upon the locust wing
Is lost among the leaves—
So are my tears lost.
On the plane, I wondered how she would react, back in the lab with her tubes of insects, when she received the card with Mickey Mouse on one side and Lady Murasaki's nine hundred year old verse on the other. I thought it strange that both those things were Japan, and then I thought it even more strange that I was sitting in a big aluminum tube hurtling through the sky listening to Bach and thinking of all this. From the ground, I realized, the plane I rode in was just a small white dot, making its way from star to star across the dark Pacific sky like the lost lover Tanabata.
