Kyōto

Posted on November 7, 2012 at 11:24 pm • 0 Comments

Grey torrents of rain
engulf the dim world below —
yet above the clouds
the full moon reigns, defended
by the spearpoints of the stars

~|~

Drinking tea last Tuesday evening, a book on Japan called to mind one of my personal symbols: the hexagon, which for the Japanese represents (I think) the shell of a turtle. I wondered if the symbol had any other connotations, so I looked it up online. I didn’t find much, however, save a mention of Rokkaku-dō, the birthplace of ikebana, a hexagonal Buddhist temple said to represent the exact centre of Kyōto. Prince Shōtoku supposedly established the temple in 587, prophesying that the Imperial capital would one day be built on the site. I made a mental note to visit the place one day.

My visit took place much sooner than expected. On Thursday evening I won a free plane ticket to Ōsaka’s Kansai Airport, on the condition that I fly on Thursday evening and return on Saturday afternoon. A journey of some ten thousand kilometres in all, unusual for a day trip. I took it anyway. And on Friday morning I found myself standing in the grounds of Rokkaku-dō itself, after an additional ninety minutes by train from the airport to Kyōto.

There was plenty of legroom on the plane, with nobody beside me; and when I arrived in Ōsaka the airport’s SaintMarc bakery surprised me with the very civilized quality of its coffee. Then it was time for the train, an express ride through the tidy Kansai countryside amid some of the most beautiful cold sunlight in the world. There must be something about the North Pacific Ocean: the most beautiful mornings in the world are without a doubt those to be found in Japan and Northern California.

dozing in the sun,
lines of rust-red tracks stretch out
on rough gravel beds

~|~

Kyōto was a lovely quiet town. The buildings drab and unassuming in the typical Japanese manner, punctuated here and there by old traditional houses, or machiya. Half an hour’s walk up Karasuma-dōri from the train station brought me to Rokkaku-dō; in this I was assisted by the goody bag I’d been given at the start of my journey, which unaccountably contained a map of Kyōto instead of a map of Ōsaka.

The temple was small and quiet in the morning, with only a few curious visitors good-naturedly lighting incense, ringing the gong, and bowing to Kannon. Pigeons dozing on rooftops; carp and swans in the pond. Petitions swayed on the branches of the willow tree. A caretaker was clearing away used candles; old men were taking a break from the cold in the gift shop. At the back of the temple there was a direct entrance into the commercial building next door. A Starbucks outlet was two doors down. And in the middle of all that, me, rather bemused, wondering at the turn of events that had brought me over a quarter of the globe to this peaceful little temple. I made a donation, lit a stick of incense, rang the gong, put my hands together and bowed. Why am I here?, I asked. The statue smiled its inscrutable smile.

idiot that I am,
crossing seas to ask questions
I could ask at home

~|~

Lunchtime restaurant:
silent solitary men
hide their loneliness
in grey pages of newsprint
and the flicker of phone screens

~|~

After lunch I strolled down Gojō-dōri from Karasuma, taking in the little stores that sell pottery and teaware around Wakamiya Hachimangu Shrine (where a shrine to the god of pottery also resides). I’ve brought back an unlined tetsubin kettle — hard to find, outside of Japan — and restocked my supply of kabuse, and am looking forward to trying both when I have time for tea later this week. And then I stopped to look out at the ducks and egrets on the Kamo River; some carp were visible too, grey, huge, as big as the ducks. Two ducks crashed into each other as I watched, and started to chase each other playfully. Onwards again after that, up the hill to Kiyomizu-dera, a World Heritage Site known for its wish-granting spring water, nailless construction, love stones, and beautiful scenery. It was filled with Japanese students who seemed very interested indeed in finding luck, finding love, and taking cutesy photos. I decided to avoid them and looked out at the hills instead. Strange how green everything still is, though it’s already early November. I guess the trees here shed their leaves all at once.

Though it’s November, wild flowers are blooming;
foliage throngs the verdant woods still,
almost as if the seasons aren’t moving.
Fall’s only sign: the air’s deepening chill.
How much longer before ginkgo and maple
blaze forth in brightness to combat the cold?
Too bad I’ll miss it. Yet at the right angle,
sunlight can still turn these forests to gold.

~|~

It started to get cold after I left Kiyomizu-dera: the light growing dim, a breeze making its way among the slopes and townhouses. So I stepped for warmth into a tiny museum in one of the machiya, called Kiyomizu Sannenzaka. It was well I did. Machiya are small, only about the same size as our two-storey shophouses back home; but this one housed the single finest collection of Japanese metalwork and maki-e lacquerware I have seen anywhere in the world. I have known and loved these crafts for years, and own a few modest pieces myself; but the works gathered here far surpassed the upper limits of anything I have ever seen, even in prestigious museum collections. Photography wasn’t allowed, but perhaps that was just as well: no photograph could have possibly done those pieces justice, could have accurately captured the glowing hues of metal, the depths of perfect lacquer, the textured sheen of gold. The Satsuma bowls on the second floor were particularly extraordinary, with their trademark tiny butterflies so small and close together that they looked like a single golden surface from any distance greater than a foot and a half. It was the closest I came in Kyōto to a transcendent experience.

now heaven descends —
countless tiny butterflies
pave the world in gold

~|~

Walking back from Gion in the dark — up along Higashiōji-dōri, east of the river — I thought Kyōto to be rather a quiet provincial town: most shops closed and only a few people out and about, hands in their pockets, on bicycles. Dimness of streetlamps, people minding their own business. But then I crossed the Kamo again, via the bridge at Sanjō, and found myself suddenly in the Kawaramachi shopping district: blazing lights, thronging crowds, leaflet-givers, shopping malls, girls in high socks and short skirts everywhere. Fast food, chain stores. I spent the night there, among the overnighters in Shijō: men and women, young and old, eating, studying, sleeping, playing cards, waiting out the cold. Till it was time to hurry down the chilly streets at five o’clock in the morning, headed for the train station, pausing only to gaze on the waning moon still high above Higashi-Honganji temple.

Has my face changed much?
Surely not; yet in the hush
here on the platform,
one of my own countrymen
speaks to me in Japanese

Filed Under: Ordinaries, Poems, Propers

Back once more

Posted on June 7, 2012 at 3:37 am • 0 Comments

Half a year later I settle down in the same cafe I was in, and the lights are warm and the music is sweet. The old faces I knew are still here, the same food, the same comforts of life. Desperado, sings the radio, Why don’t you come to your senses? And the air outside is fragrant from the smell of joss burning somewhere in the neighbourhood, and the sky is a deepening shade of blue against the ripple of lights and people on the waters of the pool. And I think to myself: It’s good to be back.

Filed Under: Propers

Moving north

Posted on June 29, 2011 at 9:58 pm • 0 Comments

Moving back to stay with my parents for a while, before the next big change in my lifestyle comes. I’ve been away for some time, and I’ll miss the east with its endless supply of good food, the closeness of the beach, the wind, the richness and heritage and vibrancy of the landscape. It’s the only part of the country where I’ve ever really felt at home; and, for a while, it was home, and was cherished. Suburbia pales in comparison. But nothing lasts forever, however tightly we hold on; everything changes and is gone in the end. Yet over the years I have learnt not to set too much store by anything that can be taken away, whether it be mode of living or circumstances of life; instead I lay up treasure for myself in a place I know to be secure — the past, where can be found every dance, every kiss, every song, each glass of wine, each pint of beer, every road I have ever travelled. All my eyes have seen, all my hands have wrought, is there, not to be bought and sold, not to be plundered or stolen. In experience, then, I am rich: in the rise and fall of each life I have built, moving with the cycles of the years. Change now will come again; and I will go with it, tacking once more into the wind of destiny.

Filed Under: Propers

Back round again

Posted on June 20, 2011 at 11:10 pm • 0 Comments

How it is that things go always in circles! Tonight once again I walk where once I walked, in the empty evening city, after the workers have gone home and the offices emptied out. The city is busy yet and the traffic unstilled, but even so around me little music, few people, little speech. I am returning, it seems, to who I was: my mode of life frugal, walking the city in old clothes, inconspicuous. I’ve made a long journey, taken a long detour over the years to come back, almost empty-handed, to where I used to be. I am older now, and sometimes I wonder what I have done with my time. I have lived differently from other men, in that I never sought to amass wealth and goods for myself; instead I chose the path of experience, though not perhaps that of wisdom. And so I have written, and read, and taught, and loved, and danced, and translated, and travelled, and run, and lived a simple life by the sea. All of it vanishing down the years like words traced in the restless foam.

Filed Under: Propers

Breakwater, 5 a.m.

Posted on March 7, 2011 at 2:09 pm • 0 Comments

The city looms, glowing and ominous, in the west: three amber towers with the cold aquatic green of the financial centre beyond them. It’s five in the morning and I’m here at the beach, looking out over great fields of dark water. The sea is alive, waves swift and sinuous, hinting at the bodies of great beasts. On the shore the sound of the surf, hissing and rustling, gulping and slapping on rock. Clouds to the southwest, blowing in. Lightning arcs between them; a different light from that of the city, flickering and ribboned where the city is still. Again and again the night is illumined. Man and nature on par.

Spread out before me a flotilla of ships, some huge, others tiny, a field of lights and metal. Almost another city out on the water, stretched wide from west to east. The islands beyond are invisible in the darkness. Hanging in the sky above them, stars; gigantic, clearest of all, the unmistakeable hook of the Scorpion’s tail, rising. Scorpio, a water sign. Orion’s nemesis: one rises as the other sets. Almost directly to the east, the morning star, also rising; I mistook it for a plane at first because of its height and brightness, but it rose higher as the planes flew slowly, lights flashing, northeast and low to Changi.

The clouds and lightning spread, reflecting the earthshine, blotting out the stars. There are people here too: people in tents, men sleeping on benches, very early joggers. Old men walking beneath the footpath’s lamps. A couple stands in the darkness by the water, kissing, kissing; for half an hour they remain there, lost in each other. On the breakwater with me, three or four large rats, roaming about, uncharacteristically relaxed. This is their territory. They have no fear of people, coming close, inquisitive, hurrying back to the water only when I tap a foot on the stones. Down by the surf they play, scampering over the rocks and nooks, tails faint in the dark. A little after five-thirty the koels call, first birds of morning, voices clear on the land breeze. I look back up at the stars; and suddenly one of them detaches itself from the others, swings in a wobbly arc across the sky, and is gone.

Filed Under: Propers

Bethel

Posted on November 24, 2010 at 4:20 pm • 0 Comments

High in the air above me is the place where you live, the apartment which holds you smiling faintly like a cool towel laid across the forehead of an invalid. But I will not call up to you nor climb the stairways up to you, close as you are, far away as you are. For between your place in the sky and my feet here on the ground are escalators filled with angels going up, going down, but the ones standing on the right will not move for those behind them and so the entire system gets clogged up. You don’t take the escalators; you are too wise. I sit, I walk, I have my own business, even as you gaze out over the city like an angel — so high that you can only see the city, but not me. How high are forty stories? In any case I don’t have forty stories to tell, I only have one, and that too far away from you to matter.

Filed Under: Propers

Workingmen’s morning

Posted on November 16, 2010 at 10:09 am • 0 Comments

There is a man salting fish across from me. Salt on the outside spread over the head, rubbed over the skin, two long smooth strokes. Salt on the inside, the edge of a hand pressed along the clean flesh of the long ventral cut. Then the fish laid silvery down in a basket, separated from its fellows by a corrugated strip of banana leaf. The voices of coffeeshop attendants cut through the air, calling out drink orders; I recognize one of the security guards on a coffee break, and we exchange nods. Across the road, sparks fly: workmen are grinding welds down, careful, efficient, rebuilding a shophouse from within. Everyone is working. Further down the road, beyond painted iron shutters, two men, one with a laptop, one making adjustments to a printing press; and further on another two men, squatting low over a motorcycle engine. They are talking, they have tools. The bike itself stands next to them, looking forlorn. In the museum on the corner a woman from China says hello to me. It’s her first day at work and she’s eager, enthusiastic. Paint tins and newspapers sit below a large canvas, half-finished; eight Vietnamese artists are collaborating, and the large painting will showcase their work. But the artists have not yet arrived. I leave and pay a visit to the Chinese tea merchant; the shop is surprisingly busy. The shopkeeper recommends me a pack of Tie Guanyin — the fragrant Tiger variety, not the stronger Pearl one — and wraps it up for me. And then I walk past the sparrows playing tag between treebranch and windowledge and kerbside, and enter my own office. And it’s my turn to work.

Filed Under: Propers

Canticle

Posted on November 2, 2010 at 2:48 am • 0 Comments

Rain at night, tiny, sketching over the surface of the pool circles concentric, interlocking. A dusting of dew on the sidewalks; wind from the north, a cool breeze making its way down the empty roads on its procession to the sea. The land breathing. Over the sleeping town the rain still falling, like a dream, like a memory of the sea which once rolled deep and grave in place of the ground on which I stand. I remember New York and walking after midnight in the heavy snow which covered the cars with quilts of white, thick-packed, cold. Out over the air the voice of Alicia Keys, no one, no one/ can get in the way of what I’m feelin’, faint on a distant radio with no one in sight to hear. November. November, just after the Feast of All Saints, and the winds are changing, the season shifting, and the rain continues to build.

Filed Under: Propers

I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey

Posted on September 28, 2010 at 7:24 am • 0 Comments

Daybreak and I sit cross-legged, back straight, facing the window in silence. Colours of daybreak whisper around me, words scatter through me, the goddess is here. I sit in contemplation, knowing as I do the changes of light and time, year after year, as the calendar moves. The waking of the birds, the hiss of the traffic, the breath of the world blowing.

And I do not say, as once I did, Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel; I do not sing the canticle of Zechariah. Instead the words which pass my lips are those of another man, also a Jew, some two thousand years removed:

Lovely is the world rising early to evil,
lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity,
in the forbidden mingling of ourselves, you and I,
lovely is the world.

And I remember when my lover once said those same words to me, and now that she is not here I say the words still, and I remember other times, other places, an unlocked room, a Muslim girl brushing her hair in the dark; and I remember when my heart broke for the first time, and I knew it would not be the last.

I have always been fond of early morning activity: all the rushing about that men do, travelling, hurrying, singing, cooking, moving through the morning into the day, with the clatter of pots and pans, the whisk of brooms, the ripple of music over the air. It has been a long time since I was a child, but I remember the way we would sit in school early, and more and more friends would arrive and gather until all of us were there, and the bell would tip us forward into the onrushing day. I have been on both sides now, and I still think that was the better lot.

Filed Under: Propers

Inside and out

Posted on September 22, 2010 at 1:32 am • 0 Comments

Dancing still goes on here, red on black on black, as all around us outside the searing white of the racetrack cauterizes the streets, slices electric chunks out of the old city. It’s a world of machines and men and massive concrete panels, pounding their way through, preparing. But for us, this final night before the roads get sealed off, we dance, in the closeness of the dark and the music, bodies moving and swaying, flesh, scent, skin. Yukako’s made tiny mooncakes, pale and delicious, melting on the tongue; just as above our heads, far higher than the massive automaton of the Flyer, the moon, almost full, and in the western sky Jupiter, brighter than the earthshine, unconquered.

Filed Under: Propers

Category Archives: Propers