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. “In Japan, you feel . . . I don’t know. I like to be different. I am different, but here it is very hard. Everyone wears the same black—I want to wear bright colors. You going to Kabuki? I drive you to Kabuki. I have German car. I like to drive fast. My husband is okay, he travels a lot. That’s okay too. This is my only child in sixteen years. I like being a mother. I have so much sympathy for the princess. She is trapped. Nothing she can do.”
At the famous Kabuki Theater, Mike and I bought two bento boxes for carry-in lunch and tickets for the cheap fourth-floor balcony. The actors’ painted faces and stylized drama fascinated us for an hour or so until we fell asleep from jet lag fatigue.
Back at the hotel I called Burton Watson at the phone number he’d sent me, and we arranged our interview for mid-morning the next day. He did not want to meet at his apartment—“Too small, too far away,” he said—so he would meet us in the hotel lobby. Mike and I spent the rest of the day madly scouting nearby parks, cemeteries, museums, and temples for an elegant interview location. In the end, we settled on Mike’s least favorite option, our hotel room, the only suitably quiet place we could find in this noisy, crowded city.
At 5:20 a.m. the phone rang. It was Goto, his body restless with the same jet lag as ours, offering to take us to see the fish market. I told him we’d done that already, so he offered to take us to breakfast. I thanked him for his generous hospitality, and the enduring image of a cargo ship filled with wine, but today we must begin our trek on the path to Cold Mountain. As we signed off, not to see each other again, I mentioned my surprise at the intense humidity in Tokyo. “This is the best weather of the autumn season,” Goto answered. “Before you arrive, a hurricane. After you go, a hurricane. You have landed between two hurricanes. The gods are on your side.”
ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARCH-TRANSLATOR
After breakfast, Mike tested his cameras while I ordered an extra cup of tea. Mike was prepared. I was not. As a newspaper editorial writer for a decade, I had routinely interviewed major business, scientific, and political leaders without the slightest trepidation. But this was Dr. Burton Watson, preeminent translator and scholar who, at eighty years old, still produced elegant texts! What enduring work had I ever really done? Yes, I was in love with the sound and rhythm of Watson’s translations, but I understood little of China, Japan, Buddhism, or, really, of poetry, though I was helplessly seized in its grasp much of my life.
I paced the hotel lobby. Right on time, a slight American pushed slowly through the revolving entrance door. He was lightly stooped, bald with a large mole decorating his forehead, wearing black heavy-framed 1950s-style glasses. He had warm, watery brown eyes, full lips, and the soft, gentle voice of a shy man. I awkwardly shook his hand (I had imagined a bear hug!), and gingerly ushered him into the elevator to our room. After introducing him to Mike, I prepared three cups of green tea while Mike seated him in the corner chair and arranged the lapel microphone.
There were surprises all around. I showed him my cherished edition of his Cold Mountain, my responses chicken-scratched all over the margins. He showed us his two-volume manuscript of Cold Mountain’s poems, woodblock-printed in 1756, that he had purchased in 1956 at a bookstall in Kyoto. Stab-bound like my book dedicated to him, it held 303 poems, the vast majority attributed to Han-shan, the rest to his two friends, the Buddhist monk Feng-kan (Big Stick) and the foundling temple kitchenboy Shih-te (Pickup). The text was surrounded by extensive commentaries by Japanese Buddhist monks, who admired the eccentric and unpredictable Cold Mountain far more than Chinese Buddhist or Confucian scholars ever did.
He told us he
