The Toyotomi Blades (14 page)

As we passed through Tokyo, I could see the density of the buildings gradually thinning until houses started having small yards in the back. These houses had little vegetable gardens and weren’t as tightly packed as the buildings in the city, but they were still crowded by American standards. As we reached the outskirts of Tokyo, we could see Mount Fuji in the distant haze, looking like a painted white cone on pale gray silk. In the old days Mount Fuji could be seen from Tokyo almost every day, but smog and smoke now make Fuji a rare sight from the city.

Soon the houses gave way to farmland. The farms were densely cultivated plots in a patchwork quilt. All the plots of land were small and most were flooded with water. Rice paddies. I could see a cluster of houses that formed a small village tucked into the folds of a foothill. On the hill, near a grove of trees, were Buddhist and Shinto headstones that marked a cemetery. The farmland looked very picturesque, and except for the occasional TV antenna or pickup truck, I imagine you could find hundred-year-old woodblock prints that depicted a landscape similar to the one out the window.

When we arrived in Kyoto there was a limo with an English-speaking driver waiting to take us to our hotel. I could get used to this television lifestyle.

That afternoon the driver took us to the Kyoto Gosho, the old Imperial Palace from the days when Kyoto used to be the capital of Japan. Afterwards we were taken to a craft center where we looked at pottery and woodblock prints. I love Japanese woodblock prints, but the high prices kept us from buying, except for a rather nice vase that Mariko said was for Mrs. Kawashiri.

The next day we were taken to a bewildering succession of temples and shrines. Kyoto has over sixteen hundred temples, and our driver seemed determined to show us all of them. He was an affable man in his late thirties. Despite his smile, the rest of his face had a strained look, as if we were always behind some unstated timetable. When he drove he hunched over the wheel like Mickey Rooney in the camp autoracing movie,
The Big Wheel,
but, despite his intense posture, he didn’t speed. Of the numerous temples we were shown, only Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, was memorable, and most of the others sort of blurred into my memory until we got to Ryoanji.

The garden at Ryoanji is a rectangular expanse of white sand fenced on two sides by an austere plaster wall. A verandah made of natural wood borders the other two sides of the garden. The wood of the verandah has been polished to a hard, gleaming brown by uncounted stocking feet gliding across its surface.

In the center of the sand stand fifteen rocks protruding upward. The rocks were set so you couldn’t see all of them no matter what your viewing angle was. Small bits of moss clung to the base of most of the rocks. The sand between the rocks was carefully raked to form wavelike patterns that sinuously wound their way around the rocks and throughout the expanse of the garden.

“Ryoanji was first made in the fifteenth century.” Mariko was reading from a brochure we got when we entered. “It’s famous because of its connection with Zen Buddhism.”

As she spoke, a milling and noisy crowd passed us. Children were talking and running about. Japanese tourists stopped, looked, and having seen the famous site, moved on. More than a few were fulfilling the stereotype by furiously snapping photographs. I noticed that in the corner of the verandah an old Japanese couple was kneeling on their heels and staring at the garden. Despite the flow of tourists around them, the sound of voices and the movement, the old man and woman seemed focused on the garden. A marvelous tranquillity was washed across their faces as they sat absorbing each nuance of beauty found in the austerity of the sand, rocks, and moss.

I was in stocking feet like the rest of the tourists. I walked to the edge of the verandah and sank down. I couldn’t sit on my heels like the old couple, so I sat cross-legged and stared out across the garden.

The vista reminded me of aerial photographs I’ve seen of the South Pacific. To me, the rocks and moss seemed like islands set in a swirling white sea. That white sea washed away my anxieties and tension. It was wonderful. My family has been in Hawaii since 1896, and I wondered if the suggestion of islands in the garden was what I really found restful. For some reason this made me feel very disconnected. I wondered if Japan, Hawaii, or California was my spiritual home.

Mariko stood shuffling from foot to foot, already bored and anxious to move on, but she remained silent as I contemplated the garden. After about ten minutes, I turned to her and smiled, then stood up. We left the old couple still seated on the edge of the verandah, looking across the garden in unmoving silence.

When we got back to the car the driver already had the door open, ready to whisk us away to another temple. We got in and I asked Mariko for the brochure on Ryoanji she had picked up. The car swayed slightly as it made its way towards the next temple and it was very peaceful feeling the warmth of Mariko’s body next to mine as I read the brochure.

Detecting was the furthest thing from my mind when I turned over the brochure and noticed that it had a stylized map showing where Ryoanji temple was in relationship to other famous places in Kyoto. Mount Uryu-yama and Mount Kazan were shown to the west of the city as stylized icons, and the downtown was marked by an icon of the Kyoto Gosho palace. The Kamogawa river cut its way through Kyoto, and it was shown as a blue ribbon. The Golden Pavilion got its own icon, and Ryoanji was shown as a simple rectangle with tiny rocks in the middle. The folds of the brochure cut the map into neat sections. As I looked at the map I had a kind of Zen epiphany. My mind was clear and not consciously working, but an answer came to me as if in a dream.

“It’s not a message. It’s a map,” I told Mariko.

“What are you talking about?”

“When I talked to that professor, Hirota, he told me that he thought the patterns on the blades were some kind of message. He writes in pictographs, so it’s natural for him to think of icons as words. But the patterns are really stylized representations of temples and mountains. There’s something else that’s like a long line that I haven’t figured out, but the rest is now very clear to me. They’re all landmarks that would be used in a map. The blades fit together in sections, just like the sections formed by the folds of this brochure.”

“But why would you put a map on different sword blades and what is it a map to?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe we should turn around and return to Ryoanji temple and it will come to me.”

I was only half joking.

15
      

T
he dinner with Mr. Sonoda had been arranged by Junko, so I didn’t know too much when Mariko asked me about where we were going. The driver, our frenetic tour guide of the day, told us that we going to the
Kori-Mizu
restaurant. When I asked him about the restaurant, all he was able to tell me was they served traditional Japanese food and that the name of the restaurant meant ice water, which I thought was a strange name.

The Kori-Mizu was nestled in the hills above Kyoto and the driver took a winding road to get us to it. The car pulled up to a Torii-style gate and let us out. Stone steps led up a mountainside, and at the top of a steep stairway we could see the restaurant. Tall trees lined the pathway so it was hard to get a good view of what the restaurant looked like, but it appeared to be very much like a traditional Japanese temple, built of wood and up on pilings, with thick pillars and a gently curved roof line.

The path was illuminated by old-fashioned paper lanterns with candles in them. The flickering candles gave a soft warm yellow glow. The light was further diffused as it bled its way through the thin paper of the lanterns. Despite the steep climb ahead of us, it was actually a very inviting sight to look up the mountainside and see the contrast of the lighted paper lanterns, the illuminated stone stairway, and the dark trees.

Mariko and I made our way up to the restaurant door, where we were greeted by a young lady in traditional Japanese kimono. The kimono was a thick brocade of white blending into green, with embroidered gold leaves forming a pattern that looked like maple leaves being scattered in a fall wind. We gave our name and the woman bowed deeply. She pointed out cushions where we could sit and remove our shoes. Once we had done so, she provided us with slippers. They were thin plastic slippers that had terry cloth for soles.

I saw that the floor was a light polished wood done in a semigloss finish and absolutely flawless in the way it was put together. All the wooden joinery was done with hard crisp lines and there seemed to be no filler used to cover up the inevitable cracks between boards that you’d find in a Western hardwood floor. In its own way it was a work of art and it almost seemed a shame to walk across it, even in terry-soled slippers.

The woman took us down a central corridor. Off to the right and left were individual rooms with shoji screen walls. A few screens were open and we could see small rooms with tatami mats covering the floor and low-set tables. In every room there seemed to be an
ikebana
flower arrangement, pottery, or some painted scroll hanging on the wall. In its austerity, simplicity, and beauty, it was traditionally Japanese.

We came to a place where the building simply divided in two. The wooden hall ended in a platform and was picked up about four feet away. Between the two sections of the building was a tiny wooden bridge. The woman took us across the bridge and I looked down and noticed that a swiftly flowing mountain stream was cutting through the middle of the restaurant. The water from the stream lapped the rocks just a few inches from the edge of the floor. I looked over at Mariko to see if she noticed this unusual architectural feature and I could see that she was both surprised and entranced by it.

The second portion of the building seemed very much like the first. The long central corridor had more rooms leading off each side of it. The woman led us to one of the shoji-screened doors. She dropped to her knees and gave us a short bow. Then she slid the screen back and invited us into the room with a delicate wave of her hand.

Mariko and I walked into the room. Sitting on the floor before the low table was an old Japanese man with a jolly round face and a shock of white hair bursting from the top of his head like a tiny fountain. He was wearing a white shirt and tan pants and was sitting on a purple
zabuton,
or cushion. He was drinking beer from a tiny glass, and on the table before him was an enormous bottle of beer at least eighteen inches high.

“Come in, come in,” he said in passable English.

“I hope we’re not too late,” I said.

“Oh, no, you’re right on time.”

“I assume you’re Mr. Sonoda,” I responded. “My name is Ken Tanaka. This is my companion, Mariko Kosaka.”

“Of course, Tanaka-san and Kosaka-san, please sit down. May I get you something to drink? A beer? Some sake? Something like that?”

“Maybe just some tea,” I said.

“The same for me,” Mariko echoed.

“What, don’t you drink?”

“I don’t drink at all,” Mariko said.

“And I rarely drink.”

“Young people who don’t drink. What’s this world coming to?”

I looked at Mariko, a bit concerned that she was going to launch in to a discussion of AA and the reason she doesn’t drink, but instead she just gave a small smile and sat down on a zabuton. I followed suit.

The man said something in Japanese to the woman at the door, who put her hands before her and bowed, then slid the door closed. “I asked her to bring you some tea,” he said. “Then I asked her to start the first course. I hope you’re hungry. I know I’ve been looking forward to this.”

“What are we having?” I asked.

“A pretty traditional Japanese dinner, with some unusual specialties that this restaurant is known for. Actually, the first course will be cold noodles that we dip into a flavored broth. That’s normally a dish we only eat in the summer and typically this restaurant wouldn’t be serving it this late in the season, but because you are visitors to Kyoto I thought you might be interested in seeing how they serve it here.”

How many ways can you serve noodles? I don’t know, but I couldn’t imagine how serving noodles could be a tourist attraction. The door slid open again; it was the young lady again kneeling before the door. This time she had a tray with a simple but beautiful brown teapot and two cups on it. She put the tray down by the table and put the cups before Mariko and me.

They were brown earthen cups, obviously hand-turned. Each was different and each was intended to be a work of art. The teapot was placed on the table, and with another bow to us, the young lady poured the tea. Then she repeated the entire ritual of leaving the room, getting down, bowing, and closing the door.

“Will she do that all night?” Mariko asked.

“Oh yes, it’s an old traditional way of service, but I like old traditional things,” Mr. Sonoda said.

“I once worked at a Japanese restaurant in the States,” Mariko said, “but I don’t know if I could stand an entire evening of that routine. She must do a lot of kneeling, bending, and bowing throughout the course of an evening.”

“Yes, she does. She’ll be helped by others as our meal is served, but I thought it would be fun for you to see this kind of dinner.”

“I’m sure it will be a great experience,” I responded. “Your English is pretty good.”