The Haiku Apprentice. Abigail Friedman
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had a great job, three energetic children, and a husband I loved dearly. So why was I still in a restless search? What was I looking for? The sea disappeared and appeared and disappeared again.
I was one of only a handful of passengers who changed trains at Mishima that day for the local to Numazu, in the foothills of Mount Fuji, far from the peninsula’s luxurious beaches and mountain retreats. We rattled past cement-block buildings, laundry lines, and electric wires, arriving at a forlorn station with two bare platforms and no roof overhead. I had expected clean, crisp views of Mount Fuji from the train. Instead, the only image of the mountain I saw was in the station when I got off the train, splashed on posters advertising everything from English-language institutes to cut-rate business hotels. Outside, too, images of Fuji adorned the stands near the station that sold dried fish snacks and bean-paste-filled sweets. In Numazu, Japan’s most famous mountain was reduced to a marketing device.
In front of the station, I found and got on the bus for Goyōtei, that still-mysterious destination. Like the train, the bus was almost empty. A thin old man in worn, shiny pants sat close to the driver at the front. A little further back, another elderly man in a faded fedora and a once-fine suit sat patiently waiting for the bus to start. A desultory young woman in a soft red leather Italian jacket and a knee-length black wool skirt stepped onto the bus. She looked around, found a seat far from all of us, and marked her territory by placing a large leather bag on the empty seat beside her.
I tried to guess which of my fellow passengers might be going to the Goyōtei for a haiku session. Other than my brief acquaintance with Traveling Man Tree, I had no sense of what a contemporary Japanese haiku writer might look like. The only other person I knew who wrote haiku was a French woman I had met five years earlier, when I was posted to Paris. Until then, “haiku” was just one more poetic term, like “sonnet” or “iambic pentameter,” tucked away in a drawer in my mind marked “poetry,” ready for me to pull out in the event that a conversation ever turned to that subject. But my friend from France, Elizabeth Guinsbourg, wrote haiku. She showed me a journal she kept in her purse, where she jotted down haiku as they came to mind. Writing haiku for her was a spontaneous, uncomplicated act.
pluie bienvenue si
je ne songe pas à regretter
le soleil d’hier
rain welcome if
I don’t think to regret
yesterday’s sunshine
métro: un type porte
une vieille selle de vélo dans
une cage à oiseaux
subway: some guy is
carrying an old bike saddle
inside a birdcage
dans une vitrine en
passant j’ai vu le visage
de la fille qui t’aime
in a window in
passing I saw the face of
the girl who loves you
ELIZABETH GUINSBOURG
(both French and English)
Elizabeth had already published one book of haiku and by the time I left France she was well underway on her second. She was a strikingly handsome woman with black eyes glowing with artistic passion. If anyone on the bus was a haiku writer, I was sure it must be the classy woman in the red leather jacket.
The light changed and the bus lurched forward. Numazu was unremarkable in every way. We passed coffee shops with ersatz French names, a shop selling plastic buckets, a string of fast-food restaurants, and a row of car dealers. I began to regret wasting my first holiday without my family on this town.
From somewhere above my head the silken, recorded voice of a woman purred the name of each stop. When I was growing up in the America of the 1960s, the recorded voice of machines or movie documentaries was always optimistic, matter-of-fact, confident, and male. Sometime in the 1980s, the voice became assertive, instructive, and female. The voice of early postwar Japan, which I knew from documentaries, had been bright, sunny, and male. Today, on this bus, as everywhere in Japan, the recorded voice was young, cute, and female. Change was happening in Japan, but I was unsure in which direction it was heading.
Numazu’s commercial strip eventually gave way to private homes packed close together. The bus rounded a corner and pulled to a stop. The recorded voice announced, Goyōtei, Goyōtei. Please watch your step. Please don’t forget your belongings. The woman in the red leather jacket buffed her fingernails and made no move to get off the bus. The gentleman in the fedora, however, had stepped off the bus and was walking briskly toward a high iron gate. I got up, paid my fare, and followed after him.
A wooden sign near the iron gate marked it as the Goyōtei. I stepped through the gate and found myself in a richly wooded stretch of land, wrapped in quiet. I stood silent, breathing in the scent of pine mixed with the salt air of the sea. I closed my eyes. I was far, far from Tokyo.
I had lost track of the man in the fedora, but a gatekeeper in a wooden hut handed me a brochure with a map of the area and a description of the Goyōtei. I now learned it was once a summer retreat for the imperial family. Like many imperial holdings the Goyōtei had been turned over to public use after the war. I asked the gatekeeper if a haiku session was being held on the grounds. Unaccustomed to hearing a foreigner speak Japanese, he used hand motions, pointing first to a low, Japanese-style wooden building at the far end of the grounds, and then to the impeccably clean slate walkway I was to take to get there.
I walked up to the low building, toward a gathering of about thirty elderly-looking men and women who were taking off their shoes and placing them in cubbyholes at the entryway. Everyone bowed and smiled at me as I neared, and I bowed and smiled back. I was the only non-Japanese in the group, and my longtime habit of setting myself apart from others kicked in.
I had never been to a haiku group, and was not much for joining groups in general. A feeling of paranoia grew within me. What if this turned out to be a cult? An American colleague in Japan once told me of being invited by strangers into their home. After taking off his shoes and entering the house, he realized the strangers were members of a pseudoreligious cult. They smiled and offered him tea and talked to him of spiritual salvation, but would not let him leave. Hours later, after much negotiation and growing panic on his part, his hosts relented and gave him back his shoes. I placed my shoes in the cubbyhole with some anxiety, but resisted the urge to carry them in with me.
Then again, the group might just as easily be a hotbed of Japanese far-right nationalism. After all, haiku had a long historical tradition in Japan, and we were meeting on grounds once owned by the imperial household. Or the haiku group might be a far-left association. My years as a diplomat analyzing political trends were distorting my judgment. Still, I made a mental note to check whether McCarthy-era laws remained in place, and whether I might be fired for membership in a Communist Party haiku group.
Whatever the nature of the group, there was no turning back. We were all making our way now down a narrow hallway. We turned right into a very large room, about twenty by thirty feet, with a high cedar ceiling and a tatami-mat floor where we were to sit Japanese-style. A delicately carved sheet of thin cedar spanned the ceiling at its midpoint, providing the room’s only decorative touch. Sliding paper screen doors along one wall hid recessed closets. Facing me, another set of sliding doors opened onto a glass-walled, enclosed wooden balcony that ran the length of the building. The room, rich with the scent of cedar and tatami, was beautiful in its simplicity.
A Japanese garden beckoned beyond the balcony, through windowpanes wavy with age. Toward the back of the garden, near a bamboo fence, stood an old stone lantern, squat and mossy—the kind that I had until then seen only in old prints of Japan. It was a “snow viewing,” or yukimi, lantern, so named because it is most beautiful when capped with snow. I could hardly believe that I was a part of this exquisite scene. Its sheer beauty calmed my fears.
Several members of the haiku group were taking low, folding tables out of the recessed closets