M Train

  —Oh no, I laughed. I bet I missed out on vats of coffee.

  Ace is the one person I would accept an itinerary from, as his choices consistently correspond with my own desires. We drove to the Kōtoku-in, a Buddhist temple in Kamakura, and paid our respects to the Great Buddha that loomed above us like the Eiffel Tower. So mystically intimidating that I only took one shot. When I unpeeled the image it revealed that the emulsion was faulty and had not captured his head.

  Credit 12.3

  —Perhaps he is hiding his face, said Dice.

  On the first day of our pilgrimage I barely used my camera. We laid flowers by the public marker for Akira Kurosawa. I thought of his great body of work from Drunken Angel to his masterpiece Ran, an epic that might have caused Shakespeare to shudder. I remember experiencing Ran in a local theater in the outskirts of Detroit. Fred took me for my fortieth birthday. The sun had not yet set and the sky was bright and clear. But in the course of the three-hour film, unbeknownst to us, a blizzard struck, and as we exited the theater a black sky whitewashed by a vortex of snow awaited us.

  Credit 12.4

  Kita-Kamakura Station, winter

  —We are still in the film, he said.

  —

  Ace consulted a printed map of Engaku-ji cemetery. As we passed the train station, I stopped to watch the people as they patiently waited, then crossed over the railway line. An old express rattled past, as if clattering hooves of past scenes galloped from brutal angles. Shivering, we searched for the grave of the filmmaker Ozu, a difficult undertaking, for it was isolated in a small enclave on higher ground. Several bottles of sake were placed before his headstone, a black granite cube containing only the character mu, signifying nothingness. Here a happy tramp could find shelter and drink himself into oblivion. Ozu loved his sake, said Ace; no one would dare to open his bottles. Snow covered everything. We mounted the stone steps and placed some incense and watched the smoke pour, then hover perfectly still, as if anticipating how it might feel to be frozen.

  Scenes of films flickered through the atmosphere. The actress Setsuko Hara lying in the sun, her open clear expression, and her radiant smile. She had worked with both masters, first with Kurosawa and then six films with Ozu.

  —Where is she resting? I asked, thinking to bring an armful of huge white chrysanthemums and lay them before her marker.

  Credit 12.5

  Incense burner, grave of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  Credit 12.6

  Departing gravesite

  —She is still alive, Dice translated. Ninety-two years old.

  —May she live to be one hundred, I said. Faithful to herself.

  —

  The next morning was overcast, the shadows oppressive. I swept the grave of Dazai and washed the headstone, as if it were his body. After rinsing the flower holders I placed a fresh bunch in each one. A red orchid to symbolize the blood of his tuberculosis and small branches of white forsythia. Their fruit contained many winged seeds. The forsythia gave off a faint almond scent. The tiny flowers that produce milk sugar represented the white milk that gave him pleasure through the worst of his debilitating consumption. I added bits of baby’s breath—a cloud panicle of tiny white flowers—to refresh his tainted lungs. The flowers formed a small bridge, like hands touching. I picked up a few loose stones and slipped them into my pocket. Then I placed the incense in the circular holder, laying it flat. The sweet-smelling smoke enveloped his name. We were about to leave when the sun suddenly erupted, brightening everything. Perhaps the baby’s breath had found its mark and with refreshed lung Dazai had blown away the clouds that had blocked the sun.

  —I think he’s happy, I said. Ace and Dice nodded in agreement.

  Our final destination was the cemetery at Jigen-ji. As we approached the grave of Akutagawa, I recalled my dream and wondered how it would color my emotions. The dead regard us with curiosity. Ash, bits of bone, a handful of sand, the quiescence of organic material, waiting. We lay our flowers yet cannot sleep. We are wooed, then mocked, plagued like Amfortas, King of the Grail Knights, by a wound refusing to heal.

  It was very cold and once again the sky grew dark. I felt strangely detached, numb, yet visually connected. Drawn to contrasting shadows I took four photographs of the incense burner. Though they were all similar I was pleased with them, envisioning them as panels on a dressing screen. Four panels one season. I bowed and thanked Akutagawa as Ace and Dice hurried to the car. As I followed after them, the capricious sun returned. I passed an ancient cherry tree bound in frayed burlap. The cold light deepened the texture of the binding and I framed my last shot: a comic mask whose ghostly tears seemed to streak the burlap’s worn threads.

  —

  The following evening I mentally prepared to change hotels, already mourning my secluded repetitive routine. I had been encased in Hotel Okura’s cocoon with two miserable moths, not wishing to emerge though not hiding their faces. Sitting at the metal desk I wrote a list of my coming duties including meetings with my publisher and translator. Then I would meet with Yuki and assist her with her continuing efforts on behalf of schoolchildren orphaned by the aftereffects of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. I packed my small suitcase in a haze of nostalgia for the present stream I was just about to divert, a handful of days in a world of my own making, fragile as a temple constructed with wooden matchsticks.

  Credit 12.7

  Comic mask

  I went into the closet and removed a futon mat and buckwheat pillow. I unrolled the mat on the floor and wrapped my comforter around me. I was watching what appeared to be the end of a kind of soap opera set in the eighteenth century. It was slow-moving without subtitles or an ounce of happiness. Yet I was content. The comforter was like a cloud. I drifted, transient, following the brush of a maiden as she painted a scene of such sadness on the sails of a small wooden boat that she herself wept. Her robe made a swishing sound as she wandered barefoot from room to room. She exited through sliding panels that opened onto a snow-covered bank. There was no ice on the river and the boat sailed on without her. Do not cast your boat on a river of tears, cried the tearing wind. Small hands are still, be still. She knelt then lay on her side, clutching a key, accepting the kindness of endless sleep. The sleeve of her robe was adorned with the outlines of a lucent branch of delicate plum blossoms whose dark centers were a spattering of minuscule droplets. I closed my eyes as if to join the maiden as the droplets rearranged themselves, forming a pattern resembling an elongated island on the rim of an undisturbed blankness.

  —

  In the morning Ace drove me to a more central hotel chosen by my publisher, near the Shibuya train station. I had a room in a modern tower on the eighteenth floor with a view of Mt. Fuji. The hotel had a small café that served coffee in porcelain cups, all the coffee I wanted. The day was filled with duties, the lively atmosphere an unexpectedly welcome change. Late that night I sat before the window and looked at the great white-cloaked mountain that seemed to be watching over sleeping Japan.

  In the morning I took the bullet train at Tokyo Station to Sendai where Yuki was waiting. Behind her smile I could see so many other things, a catastrophic sadness. I had assisted her from afar and now we would turn over the fruits of new efforts to the selfless guardians of the unfortunate children who suffered infinite loss, their family, their homes, and nature as they had known and trusted. Yuki spent time talking with the children’s teachers. Before we left they presented us with a precious gift of a Senbazuru, a thousand paper cranes held together by string. Many small fingers worked diligently to present us with the ultimate sign of good health and good wishes.

  Afterwards we visited the once bustling fisherman’s port of Yuriage. The powerful tsunami, over one hundred feet high, had swept away nearly a thousand homes and all but a few battered ships. The rice fields, now unyielding, were covered with close to a million fish carcasses, a rotting stench that hung in the air for months. It was bitter cold and Yuki and I stood without words.
I was prepared to see terrible damage but not for what I didn’t see. There was a small Buddha in the snow near the water and a lone shrine overlooking what had once been a thriving community. We walked up the steps leading to the shrine, a humble slate monolith. It was so cold we could barely pray. Will you take a picture? she said. I looked down at the bleak panorama and shook my head. How could I take a picture of nothing?

  Yuki gave me a package and we said our farewells. I boarded the bullet train back to Tokyo. When I reached the station I found Ace and Dice waiting for me.

  —I thought we said good-bye.

  —We could not abandon you.

  —Shall we go back to Mifune’s?

  —Yes, let’s go. The sake is surely waiting.

  Ace nodded and smiled. Time for sake, our last evening was drenched in it.

  —What a nice cup and tokkuri, I noted. They were cerulean green with a small red stamp.

  —That is the official sign of Kurosawa, said Dice.

  Ace pulled on his beard, deep in thought. I roamed about the restaurant, admiring Kurosawa’s bold and colorful renderings of the warriors of Ran. As we happily made our way back to his car he produced the tokkuri and cup from his worn leather sack.

  —Friendship makes thieves of us all, I said.

  Dice was going to translate but Ace stopped him with his hand.

  —I understand, he said solemnly.

  —I will miss you both, I said.

  —

  That night I set the cup and tokkuri on the table next to the bed. It still contained drops of sake that I did not rinse out.

  I awoke with a mild hangover. I got a cold shower and made my way through a labyrinth of escalators that led me nowhere. What I really wanted was coffee. I searched and found an express coffee shop—nine hundred yen for coffee and miniature croissants. Sitting at the next table facing mine was a man in his thirties dressed in a suit, white shirt, and tie, working on his laptop. I noted a subtle stripe in his suit that was understated yet defiantly different. He had a demeanor above the average businessman’s. He proceeded to change laptops, poured himself a coffee, then continued his work. I was touched by the serene yet complex concentration he manifested, the furrows of light on his smooth brow. He was handsome, in a certain way like a young Mishima, hinting at decorum, silent infidelities, and moral devotion. I watched the people passing. Time too was passing. I had thought to take a train to Kyoto for the day but preferred drinking coffee across from the quiet stranger.

  In the end I did not go to Kyoto. I took one last walk, wondering what would happen if I bumped into Murakami on the street. But in truth I didn’t feel Murakami at all in Tokyo, and I hadn’t looked for the Miyawaki place, though its district was only a few miles away. So possessed with the dead I skipped contact with the fictional.

  Murakami is not here anyway, I thought. He is most likely somewhere else, sealed in a space capsule in the center of a field of lavender, laboring over words.

  That night I dined alone, an elegant meal of steaming abalone, green-tea soba noodles, and warm tea. I opened a gift from Yuki. It was a coral-colored box wrapped in heavy paper the color of sea foam. Inside the pale tissue were loops of soba from the Nagano prefecture. They lay in the oblong box like several strings of pearls. Lastly, I focused on my pictures. I spread them across the bed. Most of them went into a souvenir pile, but those of the incense burner at the grave of Akutagawa had merit; I would not go home empty-handed. I got up for a moment and stood by the window, looking down at the lights of Shibuya and across to Mt. Fuji. Then I opened a small jar of sake.

  —I salute you, Akutagawa, I salute you, Dazai, I said, draining my cup.

  —Don’t waste your time on us, they seemed to say, we are only bums.

  I refilled the small cup and drank.

  —All writers are bums, I murmured. May I be counted among you one day.

  Credit 13.1

  Tempest Air Demons

  I TRAVELED HOME backwards through Los Angeles, stopping for a few days at Venice Beach, which is close to the airport. I sat on the rocks and stared at the sea, listening to crisscrossing music, discordant reggae with its revolutionary sense of harmonics drifting from various boom boxes. I ate fish tacos and drank coffee at the Café Collage, a block west from the Venice boardwalk. I never bothered to change my clothes. I rolled up my pant legs and walked in the water. It was cold but the salt felt good on my skin. I couldn’t bring myself to open my suitcase or computer. I lived out of a black cotton sack. I slept to the sound of the waves and spent a lot of time reading discarded newspapers.

  After a last coffee at the Collage I headed for the airport, where I discovered my bags had been left at the hotel. I boarded the plane with nothing but my passport, white pen, toothbrush, traveler tube of Weleda salt toothpaste, and midsize Moleskine. I had no books to read and there was no in-flight entertainment for the five-hour flight. I immediately felt trapped. I flipped through the airline magazine featuring the top-ten skiing resorts in the country, then occupied myself with circling the names of all the places I’d been on the double-spread map of Europe and Scandinavia.

  There were about thirteen hundred yen and four photographs inside the inner flap of the Moleskine. I laid the pictures out on the tray table: an image of my daughter, Jesse, in front of Café Hugo in Place des Vosges, two outtakes of the incense burner at the grave of Akutagawa, and one of the poet Sylvia Plath’s headstone in the snow. I tried to write something of Jesse but couldn’t, as her face echoed her father’s and the proud palace where the ghosts of our old life dwell. I slipped three of the pictures back into the pocket, then focused on Sylvia in the snow. It was not a good picture, the result of a kind of winter penitence. I decided to write of Sylvia. I wrote to give myself something to read.

  It occurred to me that I was on a run of suicides. Akutagawa. Dazai. Plath. Death by water, barbiturates, and carbon monoxide poisoning; three fingers of oblivion, outplaying everything. Sylvia Plath took her life in the kitchen of her London flat on February 11, 1963. She was thirty years old. It was one of the coldest winters on record in England. It had been snowing since Boxing Day and the snow was piled high in the gutters. The River Thames was frozen and the sheep were starving on the fells. Her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, had left her. Their small children were safely tucked in their beds. Sylvia placed her head in the oven. One can only shudder at the existence of such overriding desolation. The timer ticking down. A few moments left, still a possibility to live, to turn off the gas. I wondered what passed through her mind in those moments: her children, the embryo of a poem, her philandering husband buttering toast with another woman. I wondered what happened to the oven. Perhaps the next tenant got an impeccably clean range, a massive reliquary for a poet’s last reflection and a strand of light brown hair caught on a metal hinge.

  The plane seemed insufferably hot, yet other passengers were asking for blankets. I felt the inklings of a dull but oppressive headache. I closed my eyes and searched for a stored image of my copy of Ariel, given to me when I was twenty. Ariel became the book of my life then, drawing me to a poet with hair worthy of a Breck commercial and the incisive observational powers of a female surgeon cutting out her own heart. With little effort I visualized my Ariel perfectly. Slim, with faded black cloth, that I opened in my mind, noting my youthful signature on the cream endpaper. I turned the pages, revisiting the shape of each poem.

  As I fixed on the first lines, impish forces projected multiple images of a white envelope, flickering at the corners of my eyes, thwarting my efforts to read them.

  This agitating visitation produced a pang, for I knew the envelope well. It had once held a handful of images I had taken of the grave of the poet in the autumnal light of northern Britain. I had traveled from London to Leeds, through Brontë country to Hebden Bridge to the ancient Yorkshire village of Heptonstall to take them. I brought no flowers; I was singularly driven to get my shot.

  I had only one pack of Polaroid film with me
but I had no need of more. The light was exquisite and I shot with absolute assurance, seven to be exact. All were good, but five were perfect. I was so pleased that I asked a lone visitor, an affable Irishman, to take my picture in the grass beside her grave. I looked old in the photograph, but it contained the same scintillating light so I was content. In truth I felt an elation I hadn’t experienced in quite a while—that of easily accomplishing a challenging goal. Yet I offered a mere preoccupied prayer and did not leave my pen in a bucket by her headstone, as countless others had. I only had my favorite pen, a small white Montblanc, and did not want to part with it. I somehow felt exempt from this ritual, a contrariness I thought she would understand but that I would regret.

  On the long drive to the train station I looked at the photographs, then slipped them into an envelope. In the hours to come I looked at them several times. Then some days later in my travels the envelope and its contents disappeared. Heartsick, I went over my every move but never found them. They simply vanished. I mourned the loss, magnified by the memory of the joy I’d felt in the taking of them in a strangely joyless time.

  In early February I again found myself in London. I took a train to Leeds, where I had arranged for a driver to take me back to Heptonstall. This time I brought a lot of film and had cleaned my 250 Land Camera and painstakingly straightened the interior of the semi-collapsed bellows. We drove up a winding hill and the driver parked in front of the moody ruins of Saint Thomas à Becket Churchyard. I walked to the west of the ruins to an adjacent field across Back Lane and quickly found her grave.

  Credit 13.2

  —I have come back, Sylvia, I whispered, as if she’d been waiting.