Lost Along the Way

Once more thoughts today have drifted east, curling backward through maze-like tracks of memory to faces and experiences of almost thirty years ago. No idea what it is that brings Junichi Mori to mind, but suddenly there he is, tall, gawky and ink-stained, writing in elegant swirls of jet black sumi-ink the old proverb or tidbit of poetry that was our assignment.

Soon after arriving in Tokyo all those years ago, I began looking around for someone to teach me Japanese brushwriting, shodô—in English, ‘the way of the brush.’ It was one of the first enchantments in my fascination with Japan and once settled there the hope was to jump right under the wing of a teacher. The practice of writing with brush and ink has always been taught in Japanese schools and teachers are about as rare as acorns under an oak tree, with every neighborhood boasting one, two, sometimes three teachers. I found Mrs Motohashi down at the end of my street, showed up at her door one day and sputtered out in broken bits of Japanese my desire to learn brushwriting. She told me to come back on Saturday morning at 10:00.

And there I was, sitting painfully on my heels, back straight before a low table laid out with felt pad, white rice paper, paperweight, a well of ink and a fat horsehair brush. To my left sat a college boy, and I noticed right off that he had the hands of a pianist, well-shaped and strong, not too big. It would have been obvious to anyone that the Chinese characters gliding off the end of his brush were hardly the work of a dilettante.

His name was Junichi, he lived a few houses down, was in his junior year at university studying English literature and had been a student of Mrs Motohashi since old enough to hold a brush. We became good friends and soon I was spending an hour or more at his home several times a week, his mother stuffing me with cakes and cookies, the occasional lunch or dinner and endless questions about America. Junichi’s family was the second to take me into their lives and show me the depth and breadth of Japanese kindness and heart. Conversation with Junichi—half English, half Japanese—was always easy, but curiously enough he never asked questions about English, about his reading assignments, and in the same vein, I never asked him to reinforce Mrs Motohashi’s teaching or to correct my faltering brush.

In another year he graduated from university and completely unrelated to his study, accepted a job in one of the big department stores. I soon learned that Junichi’s path was not at all uncommon among university graduates, that very few indeed ended up in a job related to university study. But he seemed happy, continued to live at home and continued to visit Mrs Motohashi once a week for calligraphy lessons.

A year passed and though Junichi was still shy of the average age when Japanese men marry, his parents began to get ideas of ‘arranging’ something. The traditional arranged marriages once common in Japan still have small presence in modern times, though it is becoming more rare, especially in the big cities.

It worked out badly for Junichi. Through both sets of parents arrangements were made for Junichi to marry the daughter of a Buddhist priest, for him to be adopted into the bride’s family with the assurance that Junichi would one day take over as the head priest at the temple in Kyoto. Yeah, I know…from English literature to a department store and then to a Buddhist temple on a mountainside in Kyoto. I attended the wedding, and I offered my best wishes to bride and groom, and to both families (my Japanese somewhat better at this point). But then for reasons I was not party to, it all came apart after several months of marriage. From the little I heard, things did not work out as the bride’s father expected.

These days, many years after the broken marriage Junichi is an English teacher in a public junior high school in Tokyo. We lost touch after the marriage failed and he returned to Tokyo from Kyoto. It was almost twenty-three years later that I got a phone call from his mother. She gave me Junichi’s number, I called, we talked but then never did manage to meet again. Feels like I lost a friend.

The Way of the Brush

18 Days…

The old Nozawa photos yesterday got me thinking about the hours of practice, the reams of paper and rivers of ink that characterized my study of Japanese calligraphy. Like many of the traditional Japanese arts, for the serious student, dedication to long practice is essential, and something I never imagined before picking up a brush.

An interest in Japan came late to me, somewhere in my mid-20s, and it first came in the shape of brush writing I found in books, and soon after in museums. I had a job shelving books at the local library and so soon learned to associate the 900 numbers on a book’s spine with Japan. My first experience of stopping to look closely at one of these 900 books came with a book full of Japanese calligraphy. Unable to read even the tiniest part, its fluid beauty captivated me, and I wondered at the possibility of learning how to write such elegant “words.”

Calligraphy was only the beginning, and several years later here I was in Japan and among other things, looking for a teacher. A couple of weeks after moving into the old house in Komae, I asked around and learned that a calligraphy teacher lived at the other end of the street. And so, I met Motohashi-sensei.

For two hours each Saturday over the next eight years, I sat with cramped legs, along with two other students under the watchful eye of Motohashi-sensei, writing and rewriting countless hundreds of times basic Chinese characters and Japanese kana. Each week there was a new assignment, something meant to be practiced diligently at home. It was a slow and often grueling process and just when it seemed I was getting it right, showing some modest panache, the teacher would toss it aside soaked in her orange corrections and encourage me to try again.

Some years later my teacher moved to an area about two hours distant, and the Saturday lessons became a six-hour affair—two there, two studying, and two hours back home. I managed to stick with it another two years before saying goodbye to those faraway lessons. Regretfully, after the years of regular study and practice, I ended my formal study and gradually even stopped practicing.

In the years since, there have been occasions when I inked a brush and wrote some pages, but I no longer have the strong urge, that first desire to write with brush and ink that was born in the 900 aisle of the public library.

Nozawa Days

19 Days…

You know how it is. You have a plan or an idea to sit down and do something very specific, but five minutes into it you find yourself hopelessly diverted, and the hour passes with you accomplishing little more than dusty hands and the stirring of old memories, like pleasant phantoms that have come half way back to life. That happened to me this morning when I set myself to clean out yet one more box of ‘junk.’

No notion of how the letters and photos got into that box, old and mostly yellowed stuff crammed between ten year old bank statements and long out of date work records, but there in the middle were letters written by me to my mother as far back as 1964. (I got the letters back after her death.) With the letters were some brittle old black and white photos of my dog, Sabre, but mixed in with those were some Tokyo photos from years back. How all this stuff came together in one box I can’t tell. However it was, my idea of cleaning out a closet was forgotten while I sat happy in the dust and faded images of bygone days.

My focus over these past few days has been on Tokyo, and some of the things that come to mind as I make arrangements to leave after many years here. So this time also I will stay on that theme as I rehash some thoughts and pictures of the place I lived before moving to Kugayama. Arriving in Tokyo in 1982, I rented an old house in an area somewhat far out called Komae, where I stayed for two years. The Komae house was okay, but in time I wanted to be closer to the center of Tokyo, so left Komae and rented a small apartment in an area called Nozawa, not too far from Shibuya. The apartment house had just been built, and I was the first person to move into one of the four apartments. Small though it was in comparison to the house in Komae, I was happy there and made myself a comfortable little nest fairly bristling with ‘things Japanese.’

It was during the time of studying Japanese calligraphy (brushwriting) and trying hard to write haiku poems in Japanese. Total immersion in the culture was what I had in mind, but there are always and forever conditions that force you to the surface of reality, and make that word ‘total’ a relative term. In any case, I was happy to now and then visit the nearby Shakey’s Pizza and regain a mouthful or two of Americana. But most often, with the pizza swallowed and forgotten, I was happiest trying to live like a modern Lafcadio Hearn, one well-known American who spent years immersing himself in Japanese culture. This lifestyle worked to a degree enough to make my days both interesting and worthwhile.

Probably the apartment in Nozawa had little to do with the outcome of anything, but still it was for me a welcoming place to come home to, a comfortable nook wherein to read my books and practice my calligraphy. I remember one day while practicing, managing to tip my suzuri, or inkwell over, and suddenly there was a flood of jet black ink soaking into the tatami mats. But my teacher had taught me one important little homemaker’s tidbit: If you get to it quickly, after wiping up the black ink, rub the tatami with grated radish and that will little by little remove the black stain from the tatami. Works on clothing, too.

Photos: (1) a paulownia wood tansu, or chest of drawers with a bookcase on the right, (2) a low table I used for practicing calligraphy, with a desk on the right, and (3) a sheet of my calligraphy in the old manyo-gana style of writing, written at the black table.