That was a long time ago, thought Bärger. Now he envied three high school girls who sat in front of the classroom and wrote the complicated symbols with ridiculous ease.
He had a good ear, which could detect even slight differences in speech so he could pronounce what he heard correctly, but he was almost ready to give up on the script. Again and again, he had tried to arrange the complicated system of symbols in some system, in some order he could remember, but without success. For him, hiragana was visual chaos. There must be something to the Japanese opinion, thought Bärger, that any European who learns perfect Japanese has to be crazy.
But it was time to go. He shoved the books, his vocabulary book, and his loose-leaf binder into his old, cowhide book bag, which got better looking each year as it aged. He closed the door behind him and made his way to the streetcar stop.
It was a very mixed bunch that came together every week to learn Japanese in the rooms at the old high school. At the beginning, they had all introduced themselves, giving their names, occupations, and reasons for learning the language.
One was a policeman, who wanted, or who had been assigned, to learn the language for professional reasons, and one was a fireman, who was interested in the samurai and especially in their swords. There was a married couple sitting next to Bärger who ran a martial arts school together. A retired man, who hadn’t really been able to explain why he was interested, had quit after the third lesson. As well as the three high school girls who sat in front, two students from another school also attended, explaining that they were preparing for a university language major. He was the only one who was preparing for a trip to Japan, and he was much envied by the others. It was very quickly clear to him that, in the short time he had for the course, he could not acquire enough real knowledge of the language to make himself understood in the country, even at a beginner’s level. The teacher had explained that there would be no problem using English in the cities, but that people in the country normally spoke only Japanese. Only one thing helped him to recover a bit from his disappointment. She explained that the Japanese were very pleased when a foreigner – a gaijin - not only mastered the usual manners, but was also able to express the most important courtesies in words.
After that, Bärger concentrated on correct pronunciation and the complicated rituals of introduction, greeting, and departure in combination with the appropriate bows for each occasion.
Today’s lesson concerned shopping in Japan but, like all the others, it began with a quiz. Its tempo and results reminded him unpleasantly of his schooldays from long ago. According to everything that he had heard and read, it was the same in Japan. Was he simply to old for this sort of class? But he had paid for the privilege of being treated as a schoolboy and presumably the method really was effective. Even so, he didn’t like it, and he cared even less for the superior attitude and mockery of the high school girls, who openly made fun of the awkward pronunciation of their older classmates.
What really gave him pause was his obvious inability to learn the twenty-three symbols of hiragana, the Japanese syllabic script. This bothered him particularly. He had always believed that he had a particularly good visual memory, but this task was simply too much for it. Bärger felt that he was even beginning to develop a dislike for the symbols. He found it absurd that a people who unconditionally recognized the value of a modern, technically oriented, and extremely rational working environment, would at the same time use three different scripts in parallel and mix them together.
When he asked about it, the teacher, Yoshiko-San, had answered that the origin of the hiragana symbols lay in a further development of the Chinese script symbols as a phonetic, syllabic script. That helped explain the shapes of the symbols, which had often seemed so bizarre to him, but it did nothing to make learning them any easier.
On the other hand, he found it remarkable that he had a much better grasp of the true Chinese script – the kanji. Although he had never really wanted to learn the thousands of graphic symbols that had originated as simplified pictures, it had been possible for him to learn a few of the basic forms quickly. However, that was long before his efforts with the Japanese language and was probably due to his intense interest in the spirit and technique of Chinese ink painting at that time. He took relaxed pleasure in adding the written symbols to his ink pictures, and he also considered it an agreeable calligraphic exercise. No, he liked the classic forms of kanji, but he wasn’t able to do anything with the simplified script derived, from it.
“Bärger-San.”
The teacher’s voice brought him back to the present. After a last glace at his exercise notebook, he stood up, went to the chalkboard, and without hesitation wrote the required sentence on the green surface. Even as he dusted off his hands and returned to his seat, he knew that by tomorrow he would have forgotten it all again.
The lesson continued at the rapid pace that Yoshiko-San thought proper. Bärger admitted to himself that he hadn’t quit only because he didn’t want to confess in front of the schoolgirls that this kind of instruction was beyond him.
The lesson ended precisely at the break. He made a note of the homework assignment in his loose-leaf binder, intending to deal with it the next morning.
“No more school work, Bärger-San!”
Yoshiko stood smiling in front of him and held out her hand. It was a minute before Bärger understood. Then he stood up, bowed, and grasped her hand.
“I wish you a pleasant trip to Japan,” said Yoshiko formally. “You will see the autumn leaves in the woods of Kyoto”. It sounded a little wistful. But then she said, smiling again, “Your bow was too deep for a simple teacher, Bärger-San. I wish you a safe return.” Then she quickly left the classroom.
On the way to the tram stop, Bärger thought about his approaching trip. He had studied the guidebook thoroughly, and had discovered that the proposed route hit every culturally significant spot in central and southern Japan. He was a little concerned whether he would have the time to see them properly.
He recalled a trip to Cyprus in November two years ago; the huge empty hotels along the beach, the dried vegetation, and the smell of the burning rubbish heaps at the edge of the city. In particular, he remembered the disaster of a side excursion to Cairo from Cyprus, a two-day tour by ship to Alexandria offered by a local shipping firm. The luxury liner sailed there and back at night, arriving in Alexandria in the morning. From there, they boarded the waiting buses for a non-stop, six-hour trip to Cairo along a four-lane highway through desolate country. Most of the way the route ran parallel to the Suez Canal, with only the superstructure or funnels of an occasional passing ship visible above the banks of the canal.
Cairo proved to be a large city with endless suburbs. They went right on through to Giza. It was a shock to him. He had seen a large number of pictures of the pyramids and the sphinx in various books and magazines. He had felt their majestic calm and impressive size and was captivated by the magic loneliness of these ancient monuments, but the reality proved to be quite different on their arrival in Giza. As soon as they had come to a halt in a cloud of yellow dust, a mob of clamoring Arabs surrounded the bus doors. Gesticulating wildly, they held out postcards, plastic camels, scarabs, and small plaster figurines in their hands. They ran after the people getting off, grabbed them by the sleeves, and tried to shove the souvenirs into their pockets in order to force a sale. A half dozen of them sat silently on arrogant-looking camels a few meters away and persistently edged their way in front of any tourist with a camera when he tried to take a picture of the pyramids. The base of Cheops’ Great Pyramid seemed to be surrounded by hundreds of these vendors on foot; some had climbed a third of the way up this gigantic ruin.
He swallowed, remembering his boundless disappointment at the time. At first he had stayed seated in the bus, unsure as to whether he should get out. But then when a turbaned