Always a story.

  I have recently read the flower-sermon as a love story, and in love, anything will do – raising a flower or not raising it, words or silence.

  The beloved understands, and the understanding is beyond words.

  The wordless is expressed when it is not asked for.

  Ah sweet mystery of life at last I’ve found you. (No you haven’t!)

  The mystery of life is grasped when we misplace something, or lose some money, or when it starts to rain unexpectedly and we are caught out, drenched.

  Then we catch the winged joy as it flies, and live in eternity’s sunrise.

  14

  THE SPACES BETWEEN

  There’s a poem by Ikkyu which I translated.

  Why do I write?

  To leave something behind?

  That’s just another dream.

  I know when I awake

  There will be nobody

  to read my words.

  So what have I been writing? A tale told by an idiot? A tale told by this idiot? Full of sound and fury?

  And yet…

  I have been working on these pages – while I still can – busying myself with organising them into something more coherent (or sometimes, for the fun of it, into something less coherent). I have been shaping the material as the fancy takes me, sometimes interspersing passages already written with what I’m writing now.

  This and that and the next thing.

  Each day the effort is more exhausting, my energies are waning. The headaches are becoming more severe.

  Perhaps someone else, someone I shall never know, will find the pages decades hence, gathering dust in an old cardboard box, and edit them, embellish them, pull them into shape.

  Perhaps.

  I suppose what I have been writing is what Shiki would have called watakushi shosetsu – an autobiographical novel. This shilling life (or ten yen life!) has certainly found its own formless form. I have come to realise in filling reams of paper with my scribblings, in looking back and trying to make sense (as if such a thing were possible), that the truth of the story is in the gaps, the silences, the things left unsaid, the spaces between.

  I recently read some translations of Spanish poems into English, and the translator described them as versions of the originals. I rather liked that in relation to my own efforts. I have made versions of haiku, rendered them new. Similarly this has been a version of my life, unashamedly partial. I have been what novelists call an unreliable narrator. But who, after all, could be more unreliable that a man telling his own tale? (Or blowing his own trombone!)

  So yes, look to the gaps, the silences, each one a pause, a caesura, a rest.

  Something understood.

  I’ve said it before and I’ll (un)say it again. Zen is what we don’t talk about when we’re not asked about it.

  The silence is the thing. Everything and nothing. The void in the full and the full in the void. The nothing at the heart of it all.

  Form is emptiness.

  Mu.

  I find this difficult to write about, more difficult than anything else I have set down in these pages.

  Akiko.

  I would not have believed it possible, thought myself long past any of this, thought it could not happen. Not this. I was a middle-aged man, settled into family life (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I had settled for it).

  Akiko had been my student, years ago, and she had made an impression.

  Kobayashi Akiko, she had said, introducing herself. Kobayashi like haiku poet Issa.

  Akiko meant bright, and yes, she was in every sense. Her English was good, her intellect clear and sharp. But there was a brightness too in her demeanour, her being. She shone and I was dazzled.

  But then I was often (and easily) charmed by young Japanese women, and it was no more than that, at most an innocent flirtation that could never be anything else.

  She graduated, moved on, and that was that. Until she came back.

  It was a bright spring afternoon, warmth in the air, a sense of promise. I felt it, even at the end of a long day’s teaching. I breathed deep, taking it all in, ready to get on my bike to cycle home. I loosened my tie, took off my tweed jacket, shook off chalk-dust as I folded it and stuffed it in my saddlebag. I was about to start off down the path towards the main gate when she spoke.

  Buraisu-sensei.

  I looked, shielding my eyes, at first not recognising her.

  Kobayashi-san, she said. Akiko.

  In the few years between she had grown even more beautiful, a young woman. She still had that brightness but with it a new-found poise, a kind of ease.

  Yes, I said. Akiko!

  We bowed to each other, slightly awkward, then she bowed again, more deeply, and we laughed. That was it, we laughed.

  Kobayashi like Issa, I said.

  Yes.

  Akiko like Yasano Akiko who wrote of the handsome Buddha at Kamakura.

  Yes.

  How had it happened that Tomiko and I had grown apart? Had we simply tired of each other, sharing less and less?

  Was it simply what happened to men at a certain time in their lives, a kind of biological imperative, a desperate need for change? I have spoken of disappointment in love, but is the very nature of human love to be disappointing?

  Not this. Not this…

  Certainly the man I saw in the mirror – to my occasional shock when the mist cleared and I saw him clearly – was noticeably ageing, the jowls heavier, the once thick dark hair now thinning and grey. There was a tiredness too in the eyes, a world-weariness. The face I deserved? Was this all Tomiko saw when she looked at me? She certainly took pains over her own appearance, wore fashionable western clothes and make-up, her hair cut and styled, given a ‘permanent wave.’ None of this particularly delighted me.

  Akiko dressed stylishly but subtly, wore little or no make-up. Her hair hung long and straight to the shoulders, glossy and lacquer-black, her look altogether more natural and unaffected. But there was more to it than mere appearance.

  Not only had Akiko returned to Gakushuin to do research, she had been assigned to work as my secretary for two or three days a week. The fates had conspired. She was to help with my backlog of paperwork, and, more important, finding haiku and senryu to translate. Her own knowledge of the forms was broad and deep and her suggestions were invaluable. Not since Motoko back in Korea had I worked with someone who had such a profound and intuitive understanding of the poems, an awareness of their power. Like Motoko she opened my eyes.

  We make a good team, I said, and she nodded, blushing in a way I found utterly disarming.

  On another occasion we were discussing the intricacies of kigo, the season-words so essential to haiku. They were like a code – an image or a single word indicating the time of year being described. Ume no hana, plum blossom, was spring. Suzukaze, cool breeze, was summer. Yosamu, cold night, was autumn. And you could feel winter in hatsuyuki, first snow.

  The way she spoke each word, the shapes her mouth made, filled me with a longing, a kind of sweetness tinged with melancholy.

  She stopped and smiled. I am spring, she said. You are autumn.

  A good combination? A counterpoint?

  Could I not have seen it coming? Could I have prevented it?

  In one way it was a cliché, a matter of time and chance, propinquity. It was ever thus. But it felt much deeper than that, a kind of recognition, something shared.

  Akiko was helping me translate a series of renga, linked haiku, by Basho and a few of his disciples. She was explaining that the link from one verse to the next should be subtle, not overstated or obvious.

  It’s like this, she said. You sit close to someone, but not so close you are touching.

  She put her hand on my arm, let it rest there lightly, the briefest of moments, took it away again, moved her chair a little away from me.

  But close enough you smell the other person’s perfume. So.

  Another moment. I breathed in her fragrance, light and delicate.

  So. That’s how the link should be.

  I moved my chair closer to hers again, reached over and put my own hand on her arm.

  Not like this? I said.

  No, she said, her eyes bright.

  Not subtle enough?

  Not subtle, she said, putting her other hand on mine. Not subtle. But is OK.

  Tomiko and I had less and less to talk about, less and less in common. We were jaded, often irritable with each other for no real reason – my getting back from work later than usual, spent and exhausted, she feeling numbed by the sheer dull monotony of domesticity. When we did try to converse, to find common ground, we found language a problem in a way it had never been when we were younger. Her English had never been strong, but we managed. Now when exhaustion took hold I could lose the ability to think in Japanese or express myself clearly, and the effort of it made my head ache.

  I might also, as it were, be banging my head against some intractable koan from the Mumonkan (It is like trying to swallow a red-hot iron ball…) while she would be trying to decide which plastic kitchen containers to buy from a range known as Tupperware. One of her friends had visited the house, bringing samples and inviting her to a kind of party where they would be on sale. With the same friends Tomiko would sometimes go to a coffee shop while the girls were out at school, or she would watch a performance of some popular Kabuki show. I had no objection to any of this, but neither was it of any great interest, just as the Mumonkan was of little interest to Tomiko.

  Sometimes too – even after all these years – she would balk at having to cook me separate vegetarian food. (A fishbone of contention, as it were!) Again this was worse if I came home late. She and the girls would have long since eaten. (Often the smell of fish would linger, clinging, in the hallway). I grew used to tasting bonito, fish-flakes, in the noodle broth! I accepted this with what I am sure was a sullen lack of grace.

  These were small matters in themselves, but cumulative.

  Looking back I think the worst of it was that we simply lost the ability to laugh together, and love without laughter, without humour, is an abomination.

  At the end of last term – was it really so recent? – I had a session with one of my students, a very earnest intelligent young man named Munakata who had come to me for a seminar on Shakespeare, in particular on the theme of Love in Shakespeare. (No small subject matter!) He began by reading aloud the passages from Julius Caesar relating to Brutus and Portia. I listened, attentive, as he read, his voice at first shaky then gaining in confidence. When he had finished he fell silent and I waited for him to say something more, perhaps venture an opinion.

  I allowed the silence to continue until finally, hesitantly, he broke it.

  I have no words, he said.

  Ah, I said.

  I could see he was struggling but I felt very kindly towards him.

  Their love is so beautiful, I said, that you cannot find words to say what you feel.

  Yes, he said, grateful. Yes, that is it exactly!

  I understand, I said, and their love is indeed beautiful, and true. But somehow it is not complete. It is lacking in humour.

  Is it excepted I should know no secrets

  That appertain to you? Am I yourself

  But, as it were, in sort or limitation,

  To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,

  And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs

  Of your good pleasure?

  Tomiko, Tomiko. How did it come to this? The suburbs of each other’s good pleasure.

  Things came to a head. There had been niggling quarrels over nothing, a constant annoyance at each other, a prickliness, a readiness to take offence. Eventually it erupted in a full-blown argument, a shouting match, each in our own language only half understanding the other. But things were said, on both sides, that could not be unsaid.

  It ended with Tomiko, in frustration and rage, by accident or design, with a sweep of her arm knocking something from the top of my desk. I heard it smash on the floor, saw it was the little tea bowl Yanagi had given me, the one made by Shōji Hamada. I looked down at it, shattered to shards and fragments. I felt nothing, a kind of emptiness, as I kneeled to gather the pieces, pick them up. I watched myself doing it, found myself taking refuge in a story.

  When master Ikkyu was a boy he once knocked over and broke his teacher’s favourite tea-bowl which was very old, a priceless antique. He hid the pieces then asked the teacher why everyone had to die. It is the nature of things, said the teacher. Everything has to die when the time comes. Very well, said Ikkyu. It was the bowl’s time to die.

  Always a story. Even at a time like this.

  Tomiko left the room, in tears. The door was a sliding shoji screen but she still managed to slam it shut, shaking the partition.

  Always a story. There was another. The Shogun Yoshimasa also had a favourite bowl which was accidentally smashed. Instead of throwing it away, he had a craftsman repair it, painstakingly piecing it together. But instead of trying to disguise the cracks, the craftsman accentuated them by using a mix of lacquer and powdered gold. The random patterning of gold lines was appreciated and greatly valued. Kintsugi. Repairing with gold.

  But this, this was beyond repair. Sweeping up the bits of broken bowl I cut my fingertips, felt the sting, saw tiny red jewels gather. Mind numb, I licked them, tasted my own blood, salt and warm.

  I bade Mr Munakata farewell at the end of our session, fully expecting to see him again in a few short months, after the summer break, but it was not to be.

  A few short months?

  Time is behaving strangely, as it always does.

  If you talk to a beautiful girl for an hour, says Mr Einstein, it seems like a minute. If you sit on a hot stove for a minute it feels like an hour. That is relativity. (And in matters of relativity, Mr Einstein is absolutely correct).

  It would also explain why these few months have felt so long, often unendurably so.

  And yet in general, the time has gone faster, year by year.

  Explain me that if you will.

  You’re dancing round a maypole, holding the streamer attached to the top. Every round the cord gets shorter, the distance less, the steps fewer, till there’s nothing left and you stop.

  Or is it that say, when you’re five or six years old, a year is a very long time indeed, a huge percentage of the time you’ve known on earth. Then by the time you’re, say, sixty-five, a year is nothing, a blink, a tiny fraction of your allotted span.

  Time and change. Time and change and death.

  Some interviewer once asked me what had sparked my interest in Zen. Without hesitation I said, Disappointment in love.

  I laughed as I said it, so perhaps my reply seemed flippant or throwaway, even cavalier. But at the time I meant it.

  And what, pray, did I mean by it?

  There was Dora, the one-that-got-away. A walk by the Serpentine. Many a time in the Rialto.

  I shall not circumscribe our love.

  Then Annie who gave up on me. Annie in the lecture room, bringing in the cold. The warmth of her in heavy coat and thick scarf.

  Always a story.

  Then Tomiko, soft hand cupping mine as she placed my change, a few coins, in the palm of my hand. A palm-of-the-hand story.

  Love is not love.

  Tomiko.

  Who was it who said to lose a wife is tragic, to lose two is downright careless?

  I thank yew!

  Every one a gem.

  But was it really love that disappointed me? Or was I the one who was the disappointment? Or is it simply that love can never really be anything other than disappointing?

  Now at the very last there is this late love, true love, but at what cost?

  Akiko, teaching me about renga – not so close you are touching, but close enough to smell the other’s fragrance.

  At what cost?

  A colleague once told me that his marriage of twenty years had come to an end. I asked if things had been going wrong for some time. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, Oh, about nineteen years.

  Tomiko moved out, went back to live with her parents. Nana was torn but decided to stay with me. After some time, Akiko moved in.

  When did the headaches begin?

  I recently read again a few letters from my mother, written on thin airmail paper, pale, sky-blue. Each sheet when folded, stuck down, made an envelope containing itself. Hold the page to the light you can see right through, see the writing on the other side.

  The words are faded here and there but still clear, the handwriting firm.

  Each one began differently: Dear Boy, Dear Reg, Reg Boy, Dear Son, and signed off Mother, Ma, Loving Ma, and once, near the end, Ma Ma Monkey.

  I look through them, my eyes blurring.

  Did I tell you I’ve worn a thick coat and snow boots all winter long? All winter long by the fire with a blanket over my knees. The snow boots are to keep chilblains off my toes.