Perhaps, I said, a little taken aback. But his enthusiasm was utterly engaging.

  I think it is fate I come here, he said. Fate we meet. Fujii-sensei has told me you have a great interest in Zen.

  Indeed I do.

  I began Zen practice at age of seventeen, he said. Right here in Keijo, at Myoshin-ji temple. Now I am back I will resume sitting. Very happy if you join me.

  I would like that very much indeed, I said. Thank you.

  Good, said Akio, his eyes twinkling. Good!

  It emerged that Shinki’s practice as a young man had consisted of nothing too rigorous. He had not advanced as far as koan study, but had sat in meditation once a week and listened to the master’s dharma talks. He had also done what he called practical zen – the physical work of cleaning and sweeping, weeding the garden.

  Down-to-earth, he said.

  Grounded, I said.

  So.

  The abbot’s name was Hanayama Roshi. I suppose I had expected someone older, gaunt and gnarled like a winter tree. But the Roshi, I thought, was not much older than me. He was a formidable presence, gave the impression of contained strength. The first time I attended a lecture at the temple, I could follow almost nothing of his discourse. My Japanese was still rudimentary, conversational, and the abbot’s language was sometimes arcane. From time to time Shinki would whisper something in my ear if it seemed a particularly important point was being made. Then at the end of his talk, the Abbot grew very serious, his voice admonitory and harsh. Shinki sat to attention, and I felt this was it, some profound spiritual truth was being uttered, an essential teaching passed on.

  Shinki explained to me that the admonition was in two parts, both equally important.

  The first was that we must never, and he emphasised it, never, smoke a cigarette while passing water.

  I must have looked confused, Shinki shrugged.

  OK. And the second thing?

  When the Abbot or any of the monks call out to you, Oi! you must reply immediately, with no hesitation, Hai!

  And that’s it?

  That’s it.

  Oi! and Hai!

  Yes.

  When the session was over, the Abbot got to his feet and we all stood and bowed. As he was leaving he paused in the doorway, turned and looked directly at me.

  Oi! he said, his voice gruff and challenging.

  Shinki nudged me and, somewhat self-consciously, I blurted out Hai! But I had been too slow, the Abbot had gone, out through the door.

  Never mind, said Shinki. Next time!

  When I was a boy, like all other English boys I read Robinson Crusoe. But I think I read it more often, more earnestly than most. What really appealed to me was the idea of living alone, like a Wordsworth or a John Clare, or even better like an old Chinese or Japanese hermit poet, a Han Shan or Chomei. It was a desire for nature and poetry and loneliness, a desire for solitude.

  There is a charm in solitude that cheers…

  In that spirit, I would sometimes steal away from Annie and the house and the whole cacophonous menagerie I had gathered. On a Saturday or Sunday when I was not teaching, I might escape, leave Annie with the place to herself (albeit with said cacophonous menagerie). I had acquired a little flat-bottomed skiff and patched it up, rendered it shipshape and watertight. I would take with me a bento box packed with rice and vegetables, a flask of miso soup and a bar of chocolate. And more important even than the food, I would take a few books – Thoreau perhaps, Stevenson, Matthew Arnold – and my old silver flute with a few pages of sheet music, and I would launch my little boat on the Han River. I would stay close to shore, paddle upstream a way, then drift with the current, read poems aloud and play the flute for nobody, feeling for all the world like an old Chinese hermit-poet in a watercolour painting by T’ang Yin, or Ch’iu Ying.

  The philosopher-poet with his flute on the Han River.

  OR

  At his ease on the river with music and verse.

  OR

  The fat Englishman enjoys his self-indulgent delusion.

  Whatever the reality, I returned home towards evening refreshed, restored to myself.]

  3

  BUT A DREAM

  The winters could be a struggle. The temperature fell well below freezing. Two feet of snow. Icicles on the roof-tiles. Well water frozen solid. But I resolved to go again with Shinki to sit in zazen at Myoshinji temple. On the way in at the gate, we had to pass by, or even step over, the beggars, homeless, huddled there for shelter, a place to sleep.

  My neighbour, how does he live?

  The meditation hall was heated by a single brazier at one end, and we were issued with thin threadbare blankets to wrap round our shoulders. But the cold cut to the bone as we sat numbed, trying to go beyond it, our breath clouding as we chanted sutras.

  I told myself I should be able to use energy from my meditation, keep myself warm. And at some point I succeeded in focusing all my attention on the navel chakra, generating a little heat and feeling inordinately pleased with myself.

  After the session I stepped out, back aching, legs stiff. Again we had to pass the sleeping beggars and we realised that one of them was really asleep, frozen to death. There was no mistaking it, the angle of the limbs, the gaunt features locked in a final grimace, a grim rictus.

  I was shocked at the fact of it, the finality, the body just lying there in the cold. One of the other beggars had already appropriated the dead man’s flimsy cover, a piece of old sacking, left him exposed and vulnerable, unutterably sad.

  I stopped Shinki who was about to walk on.

  There’s nothing to be done, he said. It happens all the time. Some of the younger monks will be dispatched to take the body to the cremation ground for disposal.

  Lug the guts into the neighbour room, I said.

  There’s nothing to be done, he said again.

  And yet.

  It was the manner of it, the lack of care, of simple humanity. The coldness.

  Inasmuch as you have done this to the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me…

  Nothing to be done.

  Coldness and cold.

  When I returned home I didn’t immediately tell Annie what had happened. She was struggling with just being there and hadn’t warmed to the place or our life in it. I had no wish to fuel that particular fire. We ate a simple supper of rice and vegetables, seated at our low kotatsu table, our legs tucked under its quilt to keep warm.

  The words I use in writing this. She hadn’t warmed to the place. To fuel the fire. We ate, keeping warm.

  The deepest level of Dante’s Hell is not fire, but ice, intense cold.

  We ate, and made small talk, but she knew me well enough to tell I was at odds with myself. So I told her the story, described the old man, dead outside the temple gate.

  She sat a long while in silence then let out a sigh that was almost a sob.

  So sad, she said. So very, very sad.

  The foxes have holes. The birds of the air have nests. Only the son of man has no place to lay his head.

  The first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: Existence is suffering.

  The manner of the old man’s death, the sheer misery, the unremitting poverty. To be born for this.

  That night the dead man haunted my dreaming. Now he was my father. Then somehow he was myself, and although I was looking at him, and knew it was a dream, at the same time it was real, and his face was my own, looking back at me, grimacing.

  I woke in a panic, with no idea where I was, only aware of the cold and dark surrounding me. Then there was Annie beside me, human warmth, holding me, calming me, bringing me back to this life we were living.

  The experience at the temple had shaken me. But I recalled the parable of the young Prince Siddhartha, who would become the Buddha, going out from his palace with Channa his charioteer. He is full of the joy of being alive, on a beautiful day. But one after the other, Siddhartha encounters an old man, a sick man and a dead man. He comes to realise absolutely that humanity’s lot is to age and sicken and die. Existence is suffering. He vows to go beyond, to conquer death.

  If Zen could be said to be about anything, it was about that, a going beyond suffering and death, but a return to this, the reality of suffering and death. It was a coming to terms with that reality.

  This and that. And the next thing.

  When I next went to the temple, Shinki was reluctant to speak about the dead man, but I brought it up, told him I had been deeply affected by it.

  It is not just something that happens here, he said. I am sure you would see the same thing outside the great cathedrals of northern Europe.

  I said that was true, but it didn’t make it palatable, or right.

  No, he said. It is neither. So we work to make ourselves better human beings. And we do that here.

  He bowed and we entered the temple, bowing also to the other figures still huddled by the gate.

  All through the meditation I had the passage from Lear going through my head.

  Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

  That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

  How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

  Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

  From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

  Too little care of this!

  It was my mantra, my sutra. It drove out everything else.

  From time to time, at the end of the working week, I would go out to eat with Akio and Shinki and a few other colleagues. On special occasions – a birthday, the end of term – we would go to the Chosun or the Keijo Hotel, in the Japanese enclave downtown. These were often unsatisfactory for me as a vegetarian. While my companions gorged on sukiyaki and thick steaks, my choice was limited to variations of vegetables and rice, perhaps enlivened by some marinated beancurd. They found it hard to understand that I didn’t even eat fish (for fish too were living creatures, sentient beings). This made it doubly difficult for me as even the simplest of dishes – a bowl of noodles for instance – was almost certainly cooked in a broth seasoned with little bonito fish-flakes.

  Occasionally (only occasionally I hope!) this made me a little tetchy and I would launch into a tirade against everything that irritated me about the Japanese, especially their headlong rush to embrace Western manners and customs. I remember once delivering a rant about forms of greeting, praising the inherent politeness and decorum of bowing. What was the norm in the West? I asked. Shaking hands or kissing, both practices filthy and animalistic, unhygienic and downright barbaric.

  Akio led the laughter at my expense, led the others in a toast to me, raising a glass of sake.

  Kanpai!

  I raised my own glass of clear water.

  Cheers.

  The company, of course, was male. No women were invited.

  Akio said perhaps I did protest too much.

  Perhaps he was right. I have been accused of prudishness in my time, and there may after all be some truth in it, at least as far as my public pronouncements went, my writings, my pontifications.

  I can see myself, a little pompous, faintly ridiculous, declaiming, holding forth. Protesting too much.

  Kanpai!

  My own favourite eating place, the Sushi Hisa, was not for away in busy Honmachi Street. It was a haven, and the chef, Momota-san, was a master. In fact I addressed him as such, called him Sensei.

  He returned the compliment, knowing I was a teacher.

  Momota-sensei.

  Buraisu-sensei.

  Oi!

  Hai!

  He was a true man of zen (if not Zen), the embodiment of zen-in-action. (And what other kind of zen is worth its salt, its gomasio?) He did everything with gusto – that’s the word – with life-more-abundant.

  It was not simply that he offered me more than the usual fare, it was the consciousness he brought to making and serving the food. My favourite dishes were norimaki, tight little rolls of rice wrapped in thin sheets of toasted seaweed, pickled ginger at the centre, and inari-zushi – dried beancurd compressed and somehow puffed up into little rectangular pockets when they were fried. These too were stuffed with rice and served with pickled ginger, a sprinkle of sesame seeds, and they were served with that flair, that dash of panache that marked him out as a master.

  There were no tables around the place – the customers sat on stools at a counter like a bar-top encircling the central space where Momota-Sensei worked and moved and had his being. This was his temple but also his stage, and he owned it utterly.

  I never tired of watching him at work, totally absorbed in it, focussed and at ease. He would cut and dice vegetables with swift efficiency, fan rice with a bamboo paddle to cool it. His knife was a precision instrument, steel blade fine and honed as a samurai sword as he sliced raw fish into the thinnest of slivers for sushi.

  In retrospect I wonder about the time and energy expended on splitting the atom and I think perhaps the same result could have been achieved by giving the job to Momota-san. One stroke of his redoubtable blade might have done the trick, cleaved the particle in two, sundered worlds. But then Momota-san himself would have been whisked off with his trusty knife to some research station in Omsk or Arizona, making his atomic sushi.

  Instead he moved with ease and grace in the cramped space of his kitchen (where he most definitely could take the heat), the air thick with the scents of hot sesame oil and dark soya sauce, the fresh tang of ginger. He was the Bodhisattva Manjushri, wielding the sword of discrimination. He was master Hakuin dicing his demons and pounding them into miso to make soup. But at the same time, at the same time, he was the chef Momota, grounded, light on his feet in the here and now.

  There was always something bubbling and boiling, something deep-frying in blackened iron pans – agedashi tofu in batter, gyoza dumplings, crisp-coated tempura fritters.

  Momota-sensei the lord of his domain, calling out to me across the counter.

  Oi!

  Hai!

  For all his eagerness and enthusiasm, Shinki-san could also behave with a kind of formality, a certain reserve. He never called me anything but Blyth-san and I, likewise, called him Shinki-san.

  He spoke to me one day in the staffroom, asked, tentatively, if it might be appropriate for him to give me a gift.

  I said that would be most kind, and I would be honoured, and I asked him what the gift might be.

  It is nothing special, he said. You will see.

  Next day he brought it, a flat package, maybe three feet square, carefully wrapped.

  I knew he had studied brushwork and calligraphy as part of his Zen practice, and his gift was a painting he had made, a watercolour landscape in the Chinese style, a river in the foreground, a suggestion of trees, distant mountains through mist.

  He said, It is called Autumn on the Han River.

  Yes, I said. You have caught it just so.

  I noticed he had not signed the painting, not even stamped it with a seal. I mentioned this and he was suddenly awkward.

  My teacher said is not good to sign. Means you think it is finished, is perfect. Too much ego!

  Perhaps just a little ego is necessary I said.

  I took the painting home and hung it on the wall of my study. Annie glanced at it, said the brushstrokes could have been more vigorous but it was not bad, it was something, better than nothing, better than a blank wall.

  I invited Shinki to eat with us at home and he was delighted, brought a little box of exquisite mochi sweets, made with red bean paste. Annie accepted them with genuine good grace, said they were her favourite. But after we had eaten she excused herself and said she would leave us to it, our discussion of poetry and zen, the poetry of zen, the zen of poetry.

  By the time I went to bed, after Shinki had gone, Annie was already asleep, or that was the impression she wanted to create as she lay almost too still, turned away, her back to me.

  I don’t know when it began. Perhaps it had been happening all along and I had simply ignored it. But Annie grew more and more listless, irritated, out of sorts. I finally brought it up, asked her what was the matter.

  It’s everything, she said. It’s us. It’s this place.

  But we’ve made a life here.

  You have, she said. Not me. I might as well be in purdah.

  We have friends.

  They are your friends, not mine. This is your world, not mine. It has never been mine, not any of it, not ever.

  Akio and Motoko invited me to the Sushi Hisa for the birthday of little Katsura. Annie was also invited but felt a little squeamish, said she wouldn’t come. I offered to stay home with her but she shooed me out, said, Go! Go! So I went.

  Katsura was happy to see me, her Oji-san. I gave her as her birthday gift a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, in one volume, with the wonderful illustrations by Tenniel. She turned the pages, eyes wide with delight.

  Read to me please, she said, holding out the book to me.

  It will be an honour, I said, and I cleared my throat and read (or rather, recited, for I knew the words by heart).

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  Katsura laughed and clapped her hands.

  What does it mean?

  I have no idea, I said. But it sounds wonderful.