To Burton Watson,
whose musical translations helped me hear Han-shan’s songs.
In my backpack I carried a clutch of other books, necessities new and old:
• My worn 1974 copy of Watson’s Cold Mountain, my ecstatic responses chicken-scratched over the margins—a sacred text to me.
• Bill Porter’s The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, whose photograph of Cold Mountain cave had launched this journey, and his newest translation project, Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse, both bilingual editions.
• The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century, translated and edited by Watson, a volume familiar to any American student of Chinese literature but new to me.
• Sam Hamill and J. P. Seaton’s handsome little red book, The Poetry of Zen, published by Shambhala in 2004, signed to me by Sam in 2005 at a reading in Northfield, Minnesota.
• Ryōkan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan, Watson’s translations of a poet-eccentric (1758–1831) who also claimed Cold Mountain as his teacher.
• A Field Guide to the Birds of China, a brick of a book ordered for the trip.
• Two journals, their lined pages empty and waiting.
Pressed into the seatback at takeoff, I opened The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry as Minnesota’s lakes disappeared below me like fallen silver coins. “The Chinese have customarily looked upon poetry as the chief glory of their literary tradition,” Watson wrote. I relaxed into that revelation just as the plane’s video terminals unspooled an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, a chief glory of the modern American literary tradition. I fell asleep reading a rueful poem written in the first century BCE by Lady Pan, once Emperor Ch’eng’s favorite concubine, now slighted for another:
I reflect that man, born into this world,
passes as swiftly as though floating on a stream.
Already I’ve known fame and eminence,
the finest gifts the living can enjoy.
I will strive to please my spirit, taste every delight,
since true happiness cannot be counted on.
September 19, 2006, 5,953 miles from home
Flight 19 landed at Tokyo’s Narita Airport at 4:30 p.m. local time. The afternoon temperature of eighty-one degrees and the soaking humidity surprised two Minnesota men. Mike and I immediately lost each other at the massive airport, realizing, on our chance reunion, that with no cell phones or backup plan for finding each other, we’d better stick together.
On the bus to our downtown hotel, we struck up an English conversation with a seatmate, affable Mr. Goto, a forty-year-old businessman wearing a conservative dark suit under long hair and funky rectangular glasses. He told us that he lived in Santiago, Chile, where he exported tankers full of wine to Japan.
I laughed at the intoxicating image of a tanker full of wine. Goto laughed too, and cheerfully volunteered to be our tour guide in Tokyo. After Mike and I checked into our hotel, Goto walked us to the famous Ginza, like Times Square on neon amphetamines, the flashing heart of Japan’s global electronics empire. Although it represented everything I’d hoped to leave behind, Mike and I gaped slack-jawed like every other tourist. We continued on to traditional Yakitori Street, located beside the Yūrakuchō train station, where we grabbed a barrel-top table at one of the minuscule sidewalk cafés. We devoured a brace of delicious yakitori, invented here—skewers of chicken grilled with different spices—plus a plate of pickled onions and mugs of cold draft Sapporo. Then we drifted back to our hotel.
I awoke at 5:00 a.m. to an unfamiliar sound from the bathroom, Mike’s electric razor. By six we were wandering the narrow corridors of the massive Tokyo fish market, which a friend insisted should be our first stop. We watched auctioneers chant over torpedo-sized frozen tuna covered in a skin of frost. Large plastic vats squirmed with eels and pulsed with sea urchins, their spines removed and pulsing in separate vats. Dockworkers in orange jumpsuits forklifted squeaky Styrofoam boxes of sea life onto motorized carts that rattled toward a cordon of idling delivery trucks. The scene throbbed with life, but I felt a rush of despair for the silent sea nearby.
AT THE TOKYO FISH MARKET, 6:00 A.M.
Someone invented language for this—
to dedicate the prows of sleek steel trawlers,
to name these frozen bodies tuna, not torpedoes,
to name their tongues tongues, still black and hungry,
samurai nature unable to resist the proffered hook.
Every word living in the sea is sold here.
In the quiet bay beneath the bridge, a lone cormorant dives free.
Still, I cannot help but feel the voice of the sea is lost.
A cab scooted us to Takashimaya Department Store before nine, as a friend had advised us we must not miss the store’s opening spectacle—white-gloved salesgirls singing the corporate song. The store opened at ten, so we waited on the busy street outside like scruffy American mannequins as workers rushed by to their offices.
IN FRONT OF TAKASHIMAYA DEPARTMENT STORE BEFORE IT OPENS
Listen to the shoe soles, like herds of gazelles!
Tap slap, tap slap of backless heels,
woodblock prints of sandal flats,
leather swish of knee-high boots,
oxford scrape of company men.
All march to the tune of shiny dark towers.
Across the street, the tallest crane in Japan
pivots against the sky, and flies higher.
Catching a badly needed espresso at Tully’s Coffee across the street, we managed to miss the opening ceremony. Still, when we entered the store, lovely blue-suited women bowed to us. “Ohayou gozaimasu.” Everywhere, more bows. We slipped down to the celebrated basement food court and feasted on free samples: pear sauce on bread, steamed moon cakes filled with sweet miso or red bean paste, a delicious sweet and vinegar cabbage, a taste of earthy Argentinean Malbec, perhaps from Goto’s tanker. A white-gloved elevator attendant whisked us to the rooftop garden, where a small boy and his mother delighted at a butterfly basking in raindrops from the spray of the elderly gardener’s hose. What a delicious way to alight in a new country, I thought.
A BUTTERFLY VISITS THE ROOF GARDEN AT TAKASHIMAYA
The gardener sprays roof grass with rainbows,
hose arcing back and forth across his bent frame.
A butterfly trembles beneath silver drops,
wings inset with turquoise glistening in sunlit prayer.
Like the cicadas who called all night in this ancient city
paved over rubble of the last Great War, surprises emerge.
How did he get here? the delighted child wants to know.
The butterfly? The gardener? Me?
The boy’s bored mother introduced herself to Mike and me in excellent English. Daughter of a diplomat, she was raised around the world, married now to a Japanese businessman. She badly missed the freedom and individuality she found overseas.