Kyoto, Do You Know?

Unless you live or have lived in Japan, when you think of Japan, you think of Kyoto. You think of geisha and red lanterns and wood buildings and temples and shrines and priests and cherry blossoms and maple leaves and bamboo groves. Of course these things exist in Tokyo, too, but in Tokyo, they are dissipated, buried in modernity. There are women in kimono. I see them on the the subway everyday. There are temples. They are dwarfed by skyscrapers and hidden behind street after street of souvenir shops and cheap izakayas. There are cherry blossoms along the river. You’ll find them right under the Shuto Expressway.

When you think of Japan, you think of geisha shrines cherry blossom temples as though they were a dense and seamless dream. You dream a dream of a Japan snagged in a moment in the past and spinning out an endless stream of tradition. Geisha shrines cherry blossom temples red lanterns bamboo groves. The Japanese dream it too. They dream it into being and recreate it generation after generation, in Kyoto.

The Mechanics of the Dream

It works something like this:

The Approach

The Shinkansen ride is like every other Shinkansen ride; It’s fast and quiet and I sleep through most of it. The difference on this Shinkansen ride is that I’m traveling on a weekday, not during the holidays, and the other passengers are businessmen, traveling from Tokyo to Kyoto to do business. They are in dark suits, white shirts, conservative ties, working, reading the paper and I am in Muji wear, black canvas pants, black shirt, Doc Martens. I am the odd man out, and people stare, which is par for the course.

On this trip, I’ll sometimes remember that I live in this world where women aren’t supposed to travel alone. I don’t mean Japan, I mean this world. It’s not that I’ll let that belief stop me ever again, but on this trip I remember that a woman traveling alone is not the norm. It’s another explanation for why people sometimes stare at me.

I arrive at Kyoto Station and head for the nearest exit.

After the friendly woman at the tourist information counter in the station finds me a tiny ryokan in Central Kyoto, I take the subway and drop off my things at the ryokan.

I say that I drop off my things and you think that this took a minute, but honestly, it took a couple of hours. First, Kyoto is laid out on a grid system so that it’s perfectly navigable--if you have the kind of brain that likes a navigable city. Unfortunately, I don’t. The Brain and I have become accustomed to Tokyo, which is much like primitive spiders’ webs, almost schizophrenic in its inconsistency. The Brain and I agree that simple right turn should really consist of three left turns, and the city of Tokyo has been a suprising ally, bolstering my confidence in this belief system. But in Kyoto what should have been a five minute walk from the station turned into an hour of wandering the backstreets of central Kyoto and the happy chance to ask directions from a convenience store clerk (“chotto chigao,” you’re a little bit wrong), a construction site security guard (“eh to, ne...” uhhhh....isn’t it?...), and a policeman in a koban near a well-hidden shrine (“At corner. Right turn. Go down. Fifty meters. Right side.”). I should’ve kissed that cop, because I followed his directions to the letter and there it was, my ryokan.

And ryokan, the traditional Japanese inns that dot the country, could never, never exist in America. Why? Well, first, there’s no lock on the front door. One steps up and slides open the door and there you are, inside the ryokan. In fact, there are no locks on any of the doors. There is no lock on the front door and there is no lock on the doors to the rooms--with the exception of the lock of the door of the Western-style toilet. Oh, and that’s another thing: The shared shared bath. Yes, that’s right, shared bath. Oh, the toilets are behind doors, but not the tub and showers, so if you’re sitting in your birthday suit, scrubbing away and singing your happy little scrubbing tune, there is every chance in the world that you could be joined by a perfect stranger. And me? I don’t even like to pass strangers in the hallway of my home-away-from-home accomodations. I certainly don’t want to be looking at their bare nakedness--or have them looking at mine.

After finding the place and checking in, I went over to S’bux (across the street from the subway entrance, just as I’ve seen them across from every major temple in Kyoto) to have a coffee and plan. Planning mostly consisted of drinking coffee and sneaking peeks at the guidebook and trying not to be overwhelmed by the thought of Kyoto’s thousand-plus temples on a two-day visit. After a bit of panic on my part, The Brain took over and decided that the best thing to do would be to fall back on our usual MO. That is, we would buy a bus and subway pass and take the nearest, soonest method of transportation everytime and see where we ended up. See? Problem solved. The first trip took us by bus all the way to the Kiyomizu-michi bus stop, which sits at the bottom of a hill. From the bottom of this hill, all roads lead up to Kiyomizu-Ji.

The roads leading up to the temple are, of course, lined with tiny tourist shops selling the usual touristy kitsch--Hello Kitty in kimono key chains, folding fans with maiko and geisha printed on them, cheap pins enameled with views of the city, postcards printed in China. But mixed in with these tawdry places are honest-to-goodness places that sell quality wares, pottery, kimono, and the traditional wooden hair combs. The prices in these places of course reflect their quality, with some of the small combs I looked at going for seven-thousand yen (about eighty dollars). Though I wanted one, there was no way I could ever justify an eighty dollar comb.

A few meters from the comb shop, another shop drew my attention with its wares. The tiny old fashioned shop was brimming with small bags, wallets, sewn things, fabric things. But what drew me were a few little bundles of fabric. Five little rolls of fabric were packaged in cellophane and arranged in little baskets near the door to the shop. Each package was labeled 730 yen. I’d been meaning to pick up some fabric bits to bring home for crafty folks, and these fit the bill. I picked out a package and went into the store.

It was a cloudy day and the inside of the shop was dark. There was no one in the shop. “Sumimasen!” I called out softly, the way one does to get someone’s attention. I heard movement in the room next to the shop. After a moment, the curtain between the room and the shop rustled and a very tiny old woman in a kimono came out.

I say that she was very tiny, and you may be thinking of someone who is tiny. But you are wrong. When I say that she was very tiny, I mean that she was tiny. She probably came up to just above my elbow even in her two-inch high geta.

I say she was old, but even if you are thinking of the oldest person you know, you are still thinking too young. I mean that she was very old. She is so very old. She was so old that she moved very, very slowly, so very slowly, shuffling with tiny steps on her high, tiny geta. She was wearing a gray kimono with a pinkish-lavender wrap over it and her hair was done in a style that was probably popular sometime in the mid-last century. She had pinkish watery puppy eyes and it was clear that she could barely see.

She didn’t speak any English, but she welcomed me and she took the package from me and she peered and peered at the small price tag on the front.

“Nana-hyaku-san-ju-en, desu ne?” she asked finally. Seven hundred and thirty yen, isn’t it?

“Haiiiieee,” I answered in that way one does, drawing the word out and giving it a soft finish so it doesn’t sound impatient.

She took the package over to a low counter and she took a piece of brown paper from a stack of pieces of brown paper and she began to carefully and slowly wrap the package in paper the way they do here, a complicated wrap with about fifteen folds that always comes out perfectly so that one little taped corner holds the whole thing together. It always comes together at the end, this bit of shop keeper origami.

Only this time it didn’t.

When she was finished, there was one corner that gaped open a couple of millimeters and this was clearly wrong. I could already see from how she was peering at the gaping corner that this is going to be a problem. I said quickly that this was okay. It was okay with me, no problem, so what if one little corner gapes a bit? But she had other ideas about how things are supposed to work and this gaping corner clearly did not fit in with those ideas.

She peered at the gaping corner and peered at it and then she began to pull at the paper with her gnarled little hands almost grrr-ing at the paper’s impertinence. After a minute, she had the edges very close together and she reached for the tape. The tape was that old kind of tape, the kind that would be clear if it weren’t so thick and gummy and yellow with glue. She tore off a half-inch long strip and pasted it across the corner. This was not enough to put the paper in its place, so she reached for another piece of tape. She grrr’d gently at the paper again and taped the corner again and then she examined her work very closely. Then she taped it once more and then it was finally okay.

She finished wrapping the package and she added the store’s label to hold the corner of the paper down and then she put a piece of tape over the store label for good measure. Then she reached for a plastic bag to put the paper-wrapped package in. The bag was brown like the paper and the edges were sticky and her gnarled fingers tugged at the edge of the bag trying to open it, and I didn’t really need a bag but I knew better than to say anything.

She put the package in the bag.

I handed her sen-en and she shuffled slowly into the back and then shuffled slowly out with my change. She showed me the change in her outstretched hand and she asked me if it was okay and I said it was but I didn’t count it of course. I put the change in the bag with the cloth and she hobbled with me to the door and bowed at me as I walked away.

I suppose most people would find this charming, so I know that you might be thinking that there’ something very wrong with me that I don’t. I can’t.

I know it’s this woman’s shop and so its probably her life’s work. I know that she has some purpose in life and this probably keeps her going day after day when many people would have succumbed to...something. I know this. I know she gets up in the morning and she puts on her kimono and she opens up her shop and people come to visit her, and maybe those people are her children or her children’s children. And I know that probably her husband died a long time ago. I know that she is probably some kind of content or comfortable with her life and I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I saw this and I wanted to cry.

I mean, I know some of what it is.

Part of it is that I’m leaving. I’m leaving Japan and it is very likely that this is the last kind of these kinds of interactions that I will ever have and it reminded me of when the cherry blossoms were in bloom and everyone rushed out to appreciate their fleeting beauty. This woman, this tiny kimono’d woman, was one of those cherry blossoms, dropping its petals into the pathway along the Sumida river and she reminded me that I’m leaving this land of women in kimono and temples and cherry blossoms and saying goodbye to this dream is as difficult as it was to say goodbye to the dream of the desert and the big, insistent sky and the big, browned people who are my friends and family.

Part of it is that. And part of it is me, of course. Part of it is that I want not to cause anyone any trouble ever. Part of it is that I don’t want to be the person who makes a nuisance of herself by wanting to buy nana-hyaku-san-jyu-en’s worth of fabric. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to think that I might have interruped her teatime and I don’t want to be the person who does that kind of thing. I don’t want to be the reason why the paper gapes at the corner because I know that if there were no me, there’d be no paper, and if there were no paper, there’d be no gaping corners in this world. There’d be no frustrating little gaping corners if there were no me.

And too, I don’t want to be the person standing there while those gnarled litle hands tug at gaping paper corners and sticky plastic bags. I don’t want to be that person who has nothing to do but stand there. I don’t like the just standing there part of the equation. It’s too much for me to do, stand there, and there’s nothing for me to do that doesn’t look impatient. If I pull money from my wallet too soon, I look impatient. If I shift from one foot to the other, I look impatient. It’s not that I’m impatient, but I am uncomfortable.

And I was uncomfortable because this woman reminded me of my grandmother. She reminded me of my grandmother so much that I wanted to take her in my arms and apologize for every mean word that ever came out of my mouth, every time I disobeyed, everytime I caused anyone a moment’s worry. I was standing in the shop, ostensibly buying a small package of fabric, but really, I was thousands and thousands of miles away, in another world altogether. In the waking dream that I suddenly found myself in, I’m standing in my grandmother’s tiny living room, in the house where I spent countless hours, the house of a million throw rugs that needed to be straightened a million times a day. In the waking dream that was once my life, I’m sitting in the nondescript hospital room with my grandmother the last time I ever saw her and I’m listening to her sleep, listening to her deep even breathing, listening to her talk softly to herself in her sleep, telling someone in Spanish to turn out the light, turn out the light. And I’m sitting in her kitchen, at the big table that was always covered with a flowered plastic tablecloth and plastic placemats, and I’m watching her, watching her aging, abled hands roll out perfect tortilla after perfect tortilla.

And all the time this is happening, from the time the curtain parted and my grandmother slowly shuffled out on her tiny geta, to the time I walked away from her as she bowed to my retreating back, my heart was breaking.

My heart was breaking and breaking and breaking.

Stand, Standing, Stand It

Kiyomizu-ji is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of seventeen such sites in Kyoto. It’s free to wander the temple grounds, but to actually enter the temple costs three hundred yen. Of course, I wanted to enter the temple, so I walked up to the ticket booth and asked the man for a ticket and then I reached into the bag for the change the woman at the cloth shop gave me. I poured it into my hand. It was three hundred eighty yen.

The cloth was seven-hundred thirty yen. I gave her a thousand yen bill. She gave me three hundred eighty yen back. She had given me 110 yen too much. I had said it was okay. What was I supposed to do now?

The man was waiting so I handed him three hundred-yen coins and he handed me a ticket.

It was three-thirty and I wanted to see the temple which closed at five, but if I spent too much time at the temple, I might not make it back down the hill in time to give the woman back the extra change. I hadn’t noticed what time the shop closed, but I would be willing to bet that it would be at the same time as the temple. I had said to the old woman that it was okay and it wasn’t and now it was my responsibility to make it right.

I walked into the temple. The extra hundred and ten yen was sitting on my heart like a lead weight. I know that sounds so stupid, so overdramatic, but I know myself, so I knew that if I didn’t give the money back, I would be making the wrong kind of memory at Kiyomizu Temple. That’s the kind of evidence that The Brain collects to chew like cud in the small morning hours. Do you remember the time you...? And you could have gone back but you didn’t because of a selfish desire to see a temple and what kind of person steals one hundred and ten yen from an old woman? And, too, there’s the feeling that I have a responsibility to the memories that I create in others. I mean that a lot of gaijin have passed through here, not all of them good people. Some have been rude. Some have been careless. And I am determined to be neither of those things. I am determined to be the gaijin that changes someone’s mind about gaijin. As such, I have to be very careful about my responsibilities.

I walked Kiyomizu temple but saw none of it. I was there for about twenty minutes before I turned around and went out of the temple, back down the hill, and to the fabric store.

The old woman was milling around the store and I went in and tried in my broken Japanese to explain what had happened. She didn’t understand. I tried to hand her the change but she wouldn’t take it and I tried to put it on the counter but she picked it up and she put it in my hand. She wouldn’t take it. She led me to the door and she bowed at my retreating back.

And I cried my way down the hill. And I got into the first taxi I saw and I came back to the ryokan.

I felt better after a while, but by then I had already learned that Kyoto was going to break my heart.