Even the boy who had led the little rebellion, Isshiki, spoke to me one day in the street. He had seen me waiting at the tram terminal and tentatively, mustering his courage, he approached and said, Hello Mister Buraisu.

  Hello Mister Isshiki, I said, and gave a little bow.

  He indicated an unlit cigarette held awkwardly between his fingers.

  Can you please lend me fire? he asked, pronouncing his words carefully.

  No, I said, I’m sorry.

  He looked disappointed, then I continued.

  But I can give you a light.

  I didn’t smoke, but as it happened, I had a box of matches in my pocket – we needed them at home for lighting the stove.

  His eyes brightened as I lit his cigarette and he inhaled, laughed, coughed.

  In time the boys grew more relaxed with me and I less rigorous with them.

  At the beginning of each class, I took a roll-call. I read out the names, alphabetically, and each boy would call out a smart Yes! when his name was called.

  From time to time, especially on a Friday afternoon, there would be more responses than there were boys in the room, and I quickly realised a few of them were playing truant and had asked a classmate to call out on their behalf. They even took the trouble to disguise their voices.

  I knew what was going on, and they knew I knew. But I let it pass. I understood the absentees had gone to a matinee at the cinema, and part of me thought they had made a good choice.

  Looking back now, I realise some of those boys would be sent to the Pacific War, and some of them would never return, and I am glad I let things be, allowed them their few hours of freedom, their Friday afternoons.

  The boys of summer.

  Given my objections to British colonial rule in India, it was ironic that I could live happily in Korea, effectively annexed and colonised since the Meiji era by Imperial Japan. Of course it was described as a protectorate rather than a colony, a fine distinction no doubt lost on native Koreans who saw their own culture subsumed if not suppressed.

  When I brought up the subject with Akio he was reluctant to discuss it. For all his openness, his experience of the wider world, he still held to the view that Japanese culture was innately superior in its essence, its refinement, its aesthetic sensibility, its pragmatism, all of it and more, embodied in Zen. So of course, he said, it was natural for Japan to extend its influence for the good, bring civilisation to its neighbours.

  Whether they want it or not, I said.

  We had been sipping Japanese green tea, bancha, with a wonderful smoky flavour, from exquisite glazed bowls, each one unique in its colouring, its texture, the feel of it cupped in the hand, just so. Even I, who was not in the habit of drinking tea, found it pleasant.

  Akio set his bowl down, looked at me as if struggling to understand.

  And why would they not want it? he said. Japan really does give protection, from Russia, from China. These are very powerful, very dangerous neighbours.

  And in return? I asked.

  Again he gave me that look.

  Japanese firms build their factories here, I said. Labour is cheap. They make huge profits.

  And make jobs for here, he said. Is good for the economy.

  And Japanese farmers, buying up the land?

  Again, he said, it’s good. Good relationship. You say symbiotic?

  Perhaps, I said.

  There was a little silence between us.

  Motoko had been sitting quietly, not joining in. Now she leaned forward and picked up the teapot, swirled the leaves, smiled.

  More tea?

  I suppose right from the beginning I took to the place more readily than Annie.

  We walked one day out of town, along the banks of the Han River and looking upstream I was elated by the vista, the landscape, the distant hills, the river itself with its traffic of little boats. I said it was timeless and looked for all the world like an old Chinese painting.

  Yes, she said, It’s beautiful in its way. Then she pointed downriver towards the city, the port with its shipyards, its plumes of dark smoke rising from factories.

  Yes, I said. This too.

  I resolved to make sense of the country and its culture through its stories, which I did my best to translate. There was one about the end of the world.

  Some time in the future the last day will come. A large red sun will rise, and heaven and earth will join together in the form of a millstone, turning round and round. Every human being on earth will die, and new creatures will be born.

  I read it to Annie and she shuddered.

  Wonderful, she said. Just what I need to cheer me up.

  She said she felt it in her stomach, visceral, and I did too – the elemental power of the image, the physicality.

  The large red sun, the grindstone obliterating everything.

  It’s suffocating, she said.

  I thought I might lighten the mood by reading some humorous stories.

  There’s a formula to them, I said. They end in, As you well know… A nudge and a wink to the reader.

  All living creatures came from water, I read. Even human beings come from water. As you well know. Heaven moves, the earth does not. In the case of human beings man, in the upper place moves, but woman, in the lower place, does not. As you well know.

  That’s it? she said. That’s the story?

  This is the story of the Three Foolish Brides, I said, hurrying on.

  Three brides who had been divorced from their respective husbands met together, and the first one asked the second, Why were you divorced?

  It was nothing at all, came the reply. One night my mother-in-law told me to throw away the pipe ashes, so I took the pipe into the garden and knocked out the ashes on a round stone. Unfortunately the round stone was the bald head of my father-in-law, and I was divorced.

  The first woman said, In my case too it was a mere nothing. My mother-in-law told me to bring in some live charcoal for smoking, so I carried it in a sieve, and I was divorced.

  The third woman said, Mine was less than nothing. I couldn’t get rid of the fleas in my petticoat so I steamed them in the rice-saucepan. They said I shouldn’t have done that…

  And I was divorced… said Annie.

  Perhaps they lose something in translation, I said.

  Not at all, she said. They’re like your music hall routines.

  I say, I say, I say…

  Yes.

  Take my wife…please.

  I look back now at those early years in Korea, and more than any other time they have a dreamlike quality, a sense of unreality. I had taken this huge step out of my old world and everything I knew. I made a new life, or it was made for me. I was well paid and greatly valued. My salary was far in excess of what I could have earned at home, enough to buy a house and almost half an acre of land.

  It was a little way out from the town centre, towards the Han River. But it was close enough to the University. I would buy a bike and could cycle to work and back.

  When we first saw the site, on a low rise overlooking a field, the house was just being built and that meant we had a say in the layout. I even helped with the work, cutting and fitting wooden beams, laying down floorboards to be covered with tatami mats, installing sliding shoji screens. In essence it was a traditional Japanese house, which appealed to me greatly in its simplicity, its sense of proportion and space. But, partly for my own sake and partly out of deference to Annie’s taste, we allowed for a living room and a study that were more western in style, rugs on the polished wood floors, a couple of armchairs, four smaller kitchen chairs and a dining table. On the wall she hung the little Russian icon she had brought with her from London.

  I built in bookcases from solid pine, sturdy, ready to take my expanding collection of books. I made a workshop behind the house kitted it out with an old bench and an assortment of tools I had picked up in the market. Next to that I put up a garden shed.

  From where to where? I said, when we moved in. We called to each other, from room to room, amazed.

  It’s hard to believe it’s ours, said Annie.

  But it was. Our home. Entirely our own.

  We began by growing our own vegetables and they thrived in the warm, humid climate, the rich soil. We bought a dog, and I suggested to Annie, half in jest, that we could keep some hens and geese for their eggs, a goat for its milk. She laughed, said Why not? So we went ahead.

  Akio was also amused. He said I was becoming a gentleman farmer, an English country gent. It was the perfect counterpoint to my teaching work, the life of the mind. The simplicity of it, the sheer physicality, was exhilarating and deeply satisfying. We bought another dog, a second goat, and finally, a horse – an old good-natured grey mare. Annie was resistant at first, thought a horse was taking things too far. But I brought her to where the beast was stabled, let Annie see her great sad knowing eyes, and clinched it by saying we would be saving her from the knacker’s yard. We called her Martha and the back garden became her paddock where she could graze and move around.

  On occasion I would saddle her up but lightly, without a bridle and bit. She was happy enough to carry me round the field where she might even break into a gentle trot. Riding my trusty steed, my ancient nag, I fancied myself some latter-day Don Quixote de La Mancha, a true man of zen (or Man of Zen) if ever there was one.

  Doubtless you look on me as a madman, a crazy fellow, and my conduct would testify to that. But let me tell you, I am not so crazy or half-witted as you would suppose.

  This madman surrenders himself to the flow of life, that is, to the Will of God.

  He rode on his way, going where it pleased his horse to carry him.

  Akio had a great enthusiasm for Zen, a deep knowledge of the philosophy, which stimulated my own interest. But I have to say it was Motoko who fired my passion for the culture and inspired me to learn Japanese. She also kindled my lifelong love affair with haiku.

  I had been blessed with an innate aptitude for languages. I had picked up enough Korean to get by. I was even compiling a basic Korean grammar for English speakers, thinking it might be useful. I had also kept up my reading in Spanish, German, Italian, tackling Cervantes, Eckhart, Dante. I had no sense that there was anything in Japanese literature to compare with these, and I thought, foolishly, that it was simply not worth the effort. (The arrogance of it!) To be fair to myself, I had been subjected to the likes of Lafcadio Hearn and his humourless romancifying of Japanese sentimentalism.

  It was on another evening at the home of Akio and Motoko – Annie and I had joined them for dinner – and the talk turned, as it often did, to poetry. Motoko asked, all innocence, who was my favourite haiku poet and I had to admit, feigning shame and making her laugh, that I wasn’t really familiar with the form or with any of the poets who practised it. I think I had read one or two insipid translations, found them thin and wishy-washy, lacking in substance. With great charm and persistence, Motoko introduced me to the haiku of Basho and it was my moment of conversion, my road to Damascus.

  She began by unrolling a paper scroll on which a single poem had been written, the exquisite lettering trailing languidly down the page. I asked if the calligraphy was her own and she gave a little bow, said it was. I complimented her, said she had already made the poem beautiful and she gave a delighted laugh, bowed again. Then she read the words out loud, chanting them, her voice sweet and musical. She chanted the poem again, tracing the flow of the lines with her slender hand, finger pointing. I was captivated.

  Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

  Had I just heard her chanting, her delivery, I might have assumed the poem spoke of things poetic, the full moon perhaps, the wind in the pines. But when she translated it I was stunned.

  Old pond, she said. And frog jump in. Water make a sound.

  A line of Herbert came to me. Something understood. And that was it, something was understood, I knew not how. Basho’s frog in the poem leapt into the pond in my head, in my heart, in my consciousness, made a tiny frog-shaped splash that resonated, sent ripples out and out.

  Yes, I said. Yes!

  With Motoko’s help, line by line, I made my own translation – the first of many.

  The old pond:

  A frog jumps in –

  The sound of water

  I knew it wasn’t perfect but it was something, it was a beginning. I was as pleased with it as if the poem were my own. I bowed to Motoko. Akio clapped his hands. Annie looked uncomfortable. But a door had opened. I would learn Japanese and I would learn haiku, and Motoko – with Akio’s approval – would teach me both.

  Even now, after decades of immersing myself in the subject, I am amazed how often I am asked the same question. Do you think foreigners can ever understand haiku? And even after publishing volumes of my own haiku translations I am still asked, Do you think haiku can ever be translated into English? I have always found both questions infuriating, but my answers, respectively, would be, No they can’t, and Yes they can. At first I would give both answers through gritted teeth, but in time I could give them quite calmly and with an unaffected smile. So perhaps in this at least I have made some progress.

  The more Motoko taught me about the subtleties of the language and the intricacies of the form, the more enamoured I became, paradoxically, with the utter simplicity and, at the same time, the universality of haiku. Multum in parvo. Infinite riches in a little room.

  No frog jumps into the same pond twice.

  In the middle of the forest, if a frog jumps into an old pond, and if nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

  Mizu no oto.

  I was in the school staff room one rainy afternoon, preparing to teach a class, when Akio came in carrying a book which he placed on the table in front of me.

  This is it, he said. This is the one.

  His eyes were bright with kind of suppressed excitement and he couldn’t keep from grinning.

  The book was in English, published in London. The title was Essays in Zen Buddhism and it was written by a Japanese scholar, DT Suzuki.

  It is for you, said Akio. A gift. Please, keep it. Read it. It will change everything.

  He was right.

  I took the book home and read it straight through, staying up all night, by the light of my desk-lamp. (Annie took herself off to bed and left me to it – she had long since given up trying to understand my whims and foibles, my sudden incomprehensible enthusiasms). I didn’t know anything of Suzuki or his work, but it was intriguing that it had been published at all (at a time when very little writing on Zen was available). It was edited by one Christmas Humphreys (a splendid name, I thought!), President of the Buddhist Society in London, and it pleased me to think of this physical object, this book I held in my hands, being produced in my home town and by chance – by chance! – finding its way to me here, halfway round the world.

  From the opening pages the book gripped me. There was clearly a formidable intellect at work, but there was no attempt at obfuscation, intellection for its own sake, thinking-too-precisely-upon the event. The language was clear and direct, the style engaging.

  It is the object of Zen, he wrote in the preface, to save us from going crazy or being crippled.

  I was, as they say, hooked.

  Dr Suzuki was not averse to subjecting Zen to the light of the analytical mind, to scrutiny and philosophical argument. But he was adamant, it seemed to me, that this could only go so far

  Appeal to the intellect is real and living as long as it issues directly from life. Otherwise no amount of literary accomplishment or intellectual analysis avails…

  What came across more than anything was his sense of Zen as a kind of enlightened common sense, albeit interwoven with all manner of affirmations that seemed relevant, inappropriate, irrational and downright nonsensical. And yet, this was the whole point (and the paradox) – to drive the intellect beyond itself.

  A monk asked Joshu, When the body dies and returns to dust, one thing eternally abides. Where is this one thing?

  Joshu answered, It is windy again this morning.

  As it happened, (How I have grown to love those three words!) the wind was shaking the trees outside the house. I looked up from my reading and laughed, and must actually have shouted Yes! out loud, for I heard Annie stirring in the next door room.

  Yes, I said, this time in silence. This, I said. Here, I said. Now.

  There was so much in the book that chimed with my own way of thinking, my own way of seeing. The very act of reading was a kind of awakening. Behind the words there was the sense of a great consciousness expressing itself, an openness, an inclusiveness.

  I was delighted too to find that the good Doctor made reference to western poets and thinkers, in fact to some of those I held closest to my heart. The book might have been written for me and me alone.

  There was Blake, of course. To see a world in a grain of sand.

  There were passages from Eckhart – I would tell Annie in the morning. The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.

  He linked that to Plotinus – That which mind, when it turns back, thinks before it thinks itself.

  Then it was back to Eckhart again. What a man takes in by contemplation he must pour out in love. Then Suzuki’s own comment that in Zen he must pour it out in work. Mysticism had to be grounded, down-to-earth. Then the most thrilling leap of all, for me, back to Herbert.

  Who sweeps a room as to thy laws makes that and the action fine.

  I could have wept from sheer gratitude, an overwhelming sense of recognition.

  By first light I had read the book from start to finish and was ready to begin again.