Silence Once Begun

Int. Note

Something about the poem that had been written on the photograph of Jito Joo was haunting me. I woke several times in the night at the house where I was staying and the image in my mind was always the same — a still lake in a country of still lakes and a bright sun overhead. There was no sound, none at all. There was no possibility of sound. I felt in it the silence that had come over my wife — that very silence which seemed to me then to have ruined my happiness, and which began the long journey that had led me here to Japan to investigate the matter of Oda Sotatsu. I felt in it too his silence.

And so I told myself — this is the heart of it. If this is a mystery, then the thing that is most mysterious is the involvement of Jito Joo. What exactly was her relationship with Sotatsu? Why was she there at the prison? For what reason was she repeatedly admitted, if indeed it was her — all those times?

I told myself, you must find Jito Joo, and if you can, then you must show her that this is a thing you understand, this silence, even if it means saying things aloud to her that you have said to no one. You must draw out from her things she has told no one. Perhaps in it there will be something — a thing that makes sense from these silences, the silence of my wife, the silence of Oda Sotatsu, the stretching on seemingly pointlessly, of life, day after day with no one to call it off.

So, I began to look for Jito Joo wherever she might be found.

Int. Note

First, I looked for her in public records, in phone books, listings of ownership, real estate purchases, deeds, and found nothing. One supposes she could easily have chosen to go by another name. Indeed, she had every reason to want to.

Jiro had no idea where she might be. He felt it was unnecessary to look for her. I hired a private investigator (of a sort) to no avail. I don’t believe the man ever left his office. I began to feel it would never happen.

There is a book that I read once, a book about an Austrian huntsman. Any Trick to Finding. Some year of my childhood, I found the book in the children’s section of the library, where it had been placed, perhaps because the title was silly. I imagine a librarian must have put it there, thinking it was not an adult book. Actually, it was written in a very ornate and mannered English by a British gamekeeper who had known the book’s subject (in his youth). I might be the only one ever to have opened the book (in that library). Certainly I was the last, because I stole it and hid it under my brother’s bed behind a dulcimer and a collection of broken tambourines. Where it is now, I can’t say. I think that house was demolished soon after we left it. In any case, the book was quite marvelous. It tells the man’s story — his childhood in a poor Austrian village, his willingness to be of use, the discovery of his special talent, his rise to a position as head gamekeeper on one then another magnificent and extensive Austrian estate. But what was his special talent? Well — he could find anything, anything at all. Somehow the man, Jurgen Hollar, had invented a system for himself that enabled him to be extraordinarily efficient in several departments of being in which most humans act with extreme looseness of endeavor. Finding things was the principal expression of his gift.

While sitting in the yard at the house of which I have spoken, the house of the butterflies (those that I had been told of, and had believed in before their appearance), the memory of Jurgen Hollar and of Any Trick to Finding came suddenly to me. It had been with great difficulty that I as a boy had read the book, and perhaps it was the doggedness of my approach that had so impressed it on my mind. In any case, there I was, in a Japanese garden, considering the life of a nineteenth-century Austrian huntsman. It was to such thoughts my desperation had led me.

Jurgen Hollar, it may be related — and I give this secret to you now simply out of the general kindness of my heart — could find things because he would not look for them. This is the entire point of his book. He had a very careful method of isolating and categorizing all objects that he would find in a particular area, however large that area might be, however small (however large the object might be, however small). Whether it was a long search or a short one — whether there were many objects or few, still he would follow his credo.

Therefore, imagine this: you are asked to find a spoon. You go into a room and begin on one side of the room. First you behold a sort of long shallow couch full of cushions with a table attached that extends along a wall. That is not a spoon, you say to yourself. Next you cross the wide, sloping, rounded space of the room, walking first down then up, and approach the far side, where, upon a long flat section, you see a sort of kitchen area. There is where spoons are to be found, you think. First you lift one thing then you lift another. Not a spoon, not a spoon you say. But Jurgen, had he been with you, would have looked at each thing in turn, and asked what it was. He would have looked at the couch, emptied it of cushions, and realized that it had a fine spoonlike shape. This may be the spoon I have been looking for. He would have noticed the odd spoon-ness of the very room in which he stood, and might well have identified that as the spoon for which he was looking. He did not permit the previously drawn categories of objects that had been set before him in the world to stop up his eyes and halt his discoveries.

Therefore, when the lord’s son went missing one day, it was Jurgen who found the boy, secreted away, dressed as a girl in a humble village home spinning yarn, actually spinning yarn at a spinning wheel. When a favorite horse was missing, Jurgen found that a particular family, always begging in the marketplace, were mysteriously absent, and not begging for food as they always did. He went to the marketplace and asked himself, what is here and what is not here. He did not say, where is the horse.

And so, as with many lessons, we learn them and forget them and then are forced to learn them again. The time had come for me to regain my composure as a Hollarite, as a fellow who finds things by seeing what is there.

So, after two months of fruitless search, I stopped searching. I would spend my time looking through the transcripts of Oda Sotatsu’s interrogations. I would correspond with his brother, Jiro. I would collect materials and take notes. I would prepare the parts of this very book as best I could.

Also, and perhaps most important, I would wander the area where Jito Joo had last been seen, and I would look at each thing I saw. I would ask myself, what is this that I see.

And so it came to pass after a month of sifting and thinking, I came out of a shop on a street — a street I will tell you where I had often walked! — and there she was. I recognized her from the photographs I had seen. She was on the sidewalk; it was the middle of the afternoon. She was holding a shabby cloth bag and looking at a scrap of paper. That there, I thought, is the addition of twenty years of life to the woman Sotatsu knew, the woman I had seen in photographs. It is what she must look like — it is just what she would look like. Never having seen this older Joo before, I could not look for her, but being prepared to learn what things were by looking at them — suddenly, I found her.

— Joo, I said. Jito Joo?

I explained myself poorly. She was somewhat hostile, at the very least confused and distrustful. However, she also appeared to be a person to whom others seldom spoke. After a little while, I won her trust sufficiently that we went back to her house to speak. In a phrase, she looked quite down on her luck. To whom have you been speaking, she kept asking. To whom?

The House of Jito Joo

[Int. note. This portion is retold from memory, as I did not tape the interaction. You will notice the style of the text differs slightly. That is the reason.]

We passed through several neighborhoods, each poorer than the one before, until we came to an extremely humble street. This one, said Joo, and led me up the steps of a converted building. Her flat was on the top floor, at the back of the house, and looked out onto a small untended patch of ground, and beyond it, a series of other ramshackle buildings running down a long slope.

Her apartment was largely empty. It appeared as if she had just moved in. How long had she lived there? Nineteen years in December.

It was strange, let me tell you, standing there in that apartment with a fifty-year-old Japanese woman I had never met, and no sense at all of what might come of any of it. She looked at me and waited.

Joo, I said, I want to ask you some things. I want to talk to you about Oda Sotatsu. I want to talk about Kakuzo. I want to speak about the poem that was written on a photograph of you. I am looking for this mystery. Not the mystery of why it happened but the mystery of how.

I will tell you nothing about it, said Joo. The person who would speak about it is gone now, gone a long time.

But what if I speak to you? I said. What if I speak about it — about this and about other things. What if I show you it would matter for you to speak. That speaking to me would matter.

She said nothing, but I drew a deep breath and continued.

Her apartment had no kitchen — just a sort of hot plate on a little counter with a sink. She put some water in a pot and set it on the hot plate.

You don’t know me at all, I said, but I have a feeling that you know about something that I know.

And with that, I began.

Int. Note: Speaking to Joo in Her Home

I had never really known anyone, I said, until I met her. It was strange because — at that time I could not speak her language, and she spoke mine only poorly and with little understanding. Still we spoke furiously to each other. Every moment was a new chance to share confidences. I found myself trying to tell her every last thing I had ever seen.

This was your wife, asked Joo.

She is still alive, I said, but she isn’t now my wife.

In fact, I said, I have not seen her now in a long time. And when I have, I do not know that person. For years we lived together. I threw everything to the winds and went with her where she would go. She had a child, a daughter, and we raised that child together. I no longer desired the things I had before. To be a writer, to make my way in the world — these were nothing. These meant nothing. I wanted simply to go from place to place with her, to sit anywhere with her and see what she would say, see what she saw, what she liked, see that she was glad. I felt the fullness of this new life — and I saw that what I had thought before was important was not important at all.

I sealed off a small life from the larger world, and we lived there, as glad as any people could be.

You can never have such a thing, said Joo. Not and keep it.

One day, I said, one day it happened that we had changed countries for the third or fourth time. We were living in a large city in the country of my birth and I was teaching to earn our living. It was not what I wanted; still, I did it, so we could live and eat, and so our daughter could go to school.

One day, my wife stopped speaking. She was in the bathroom, staring into a mirror, and she found something. Something was there, of some sort. I don’t know what it was, but she found it, and from then on she no longer wanted to tell me anything. She would speak, to say things, here is the door key, or, shall we go to dinner, but to say an actual thing, to tell me something, anything, the desire for it was gone entirely. We would sit and she would stare into space. I would ask what she was looking at, what she was thinking. Nothing. Nothing in particular, she would say. I loved her beyond all measure. I would do anything I could think of, everything, to cheer her up, to surprise her. I banished all dark, all difficult things, from the house. I searched out all kinds of cheerful laughter and fellowship and offered them to her, one, then another, then another, then another. I found bright places in the city where we lived, and took her there, hoping. But her mood grew only blacker. She took to lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling. My dear, I would say, my dear. She would say nothing.

Our daughter was beginning to turn out into the world. She was of that age. She was seeking new things, things only for herself, and discovering the duplicity of other children. In the summers she would return to her home country, and so we sent her off as usual that June.

My wife was in such a grief, her father was passing, and I thought that was the whole of it, but it was beyond that. She had gone into herself in search of a whole new enterprise and she began intricate new dialogues with imagined speakers. She was a magnificent writer, one of the finest I had ever met, and she lacked for no form of invention. Suddenly, she began to invent a new way of living entirely in her imagination. From this she shut me out completely. She was now speaking solely with the ones she had imagined. And one day it came that she sought their advice: this life she was leading with me, should she escape it?

Int. Note

I was as in love as I had ever been. Constantly at her service, I came up with a dozen new ways each day to try to divert her, to make her smile and forget her grief. But it happened that a day came when I needed to travel to another city. I was to do a reading in San Francisco, and I went there. When I left that day, I felt that there was nothing truly wrong — that our troubles were small and together we would conquer them. I felt that her grief for her father was right. It seemed to me that the girl I loved would find her way through it.

But when I came back some days later, I found her things gone from the house. She was gone from the house. On the bed was a note. I am beginning a new life.

I went to the airport and bought a ticket. I flew for hours, got on another plane, flew for hours. It was a great distance. When I arrived in her country, I found a bus to the city, and I took it. I found myself the next morning, walking through foreign streets to the house where I guessed she would be staying. It was a place I had never been to before.

I rang the doorbell, then. The person who came out bore only a small resemblance to the girl I knew, so much had she changed. Though it had been only three days, four days — so much had she changed.

Joo adjusted her skirt, staring at me in the dim room, and I realized I had stopped speaking. I had not been speaking for some time.

You see, I said.

She nodded.

A moment passed, and noise filtered up from the street. Someone dragging something along the pavement. The noise grew and then faded away. And all the while, Joo stared at me, waiting.

Since that day, I continued, I have learned nothing more about it. I have tried to find it in her, going there to speak to her, again and again, but she no longer knows, if she ever did, and I have sought it in myself. I do not know it either. My life has been in immense confusion. I make no choices with any sense of the consequences involved. I found myself here. I saw this poem, and it struck me that there are things you know. Maybe they are not the things I need, but they are things, and they are near perhaps to what I need. Will you say them to me? Anything anyone knows about silence. Anything you know.

Come back in two weeks, said Jito Joo.

She stood up.

Can you find this house?

I can, I said.

Then come and find it in two weeks and I will see what I can say to you.

I started to leave and Joo called me back.

You know, she said, nothing is for any reason.

She shut the door.

I went down the stairs past three broken lights and one that flickered. The door to the ground floor apartment was partly open and I could hear people laughing. Someone was singing and there was the smell of cooking.

This is what we bear, I thought, the nearness of other lives.

But out in the street there was a man selling batteries and he smiled at me. I couldn’t understand him. He was saying something, but I could understand none of it. When he saw that, he held up a handful of the batteries as if in victory. He smiled again.

I shook my head at him. No, I won’t have any batteries. This actual good smile, the smile of an actual good person, fell over me. But after a moment he was gone, or I was — the street was empty and none of it remained.

Int. Note

I wanted to explain myself better to Joo. I felt that what I would receive from her depended entirely on what I could give to her, on how clearly I could explain what had happened to me. I felt I had not explained myself at all. I was sure I had done it badly. I could scarcely remember what I had said.

I wrote a letter to her, and as I was beginning it, I fell asleep at my desk.

That night, I dreamed again of Joo’s lake, but now there were chattering birds flying over it. They were shrieking and chattering, but no sound came. I could feel their cries on the surface of the lake, and I wept to feel it, but try as I might, I could hear nothing.

When I woke the next day, I worked at the letter. I worked at it all day, and in the evening I went and dropped it at the building where Joo lived. There was a little box with her apartment number in it, right there in the foyer of the building. I put the letter there. A kid with a stick was leaning against a wall. He was hitting the stick against his leg and looking at me.

No one lives there, he said.

I know someone does, I said. I saw her there yesterday.

Then I’m wrong, he said. I don’t know who you’re looking for.

Don’t touch this letter, I said. If it goes missing …

I started to leave, and he left too. We went out into the nighttime street at the same time. He went right and I went left. When he got outside, he broke into a trot and was soon invisible. I looked up at Joo’s window, but, of course, her window was only at the back of the building. In the front apartment a light was on and people were moving back and forth, their inaccessible lives casting off something like the light that settled on them.

I felt tempted then to believe, as I always do, that the people inside were happy, that they knew things I did not know, but I thought no more about it, and went home to my own cold room, and I thought of the letter I had written to Jito Joo.

Int. Note: Letter to Jito Joo

Dear Jito Joo,

Please ignore everything I said yesterday. Allow me to explain it in a different way. I have not spoken of it really to anyone, and so it came out wrong. What I said was perhaps closer factually to the way it happened, but I can say it in a way that you may understand better, in a way of immediate understanding. Let me give you that now.

A man fell in love with a tree. It was as simple as that. He went into the forest to cut wood and he found a tree and he knew then that he loved it. He forgot about his axe. It fell from his hand and he knew it not. He forgot about the village that he had come from, forgot the path along which he had come, forgot even the brave ringing voices of his fellows, which sounded even then in the broad wood as they called his name, seeking after him. He sat down there before the tree and he made a place for himself and soon no one passing there could even see that he was lying between the roots.

It was for him as though a blade of grass had turned to reveal a map of broad longing and direction and over it he could pass — and did.

He and his love then sought what they would with nothing asked of anyone. Asking no permission, they devised all manner of delights and found in each other everything that the world had lacked. You are as bright as a coin. You are as tall as a grove. You are as swift as a thought. And so well did they hide themselves in their love that grass grew over their hearts and all their loud songs became indecipherable ribbons of air.

But then one day, the man awoke. He found himself again in front of a tree, but it was one he had never seen before. He had never seen the forest either — and the clothes he wore were worn almost to shreds. Where have I been, he asked himself, and stumbled out of the woods to where others waited at a string of houses. But, they could tell him no tidings of himself.

Where have I been, he wondered. With whom, in my loveliest dreams, have I so endlessly been speaking? But as he thought it fell away, and he was poorer then than anyone.

Raise yourself up, the others called to him. Raise yourself up, you fool.

Ah, he said, so this is how fools are made. For I did never know.

++

Int. Note: Two Weeks

For two weeks, then, I wandered about in a bit of a haze. Speaking about my life had set me at an angle to the world I was experiencing. I felt in some way that I had put myself before Joo to be judged. What a ridiculous thing! Especially considering that she had done nothing to earn it. In fact, her part in the entire business with Sotatsu would lead one to believe nothing good about her. Yet, somehow, Sotatsu had trusted her, and likewise, now, I was trusting her.

I wrote several letters to people I knew back home. I tried to read two different novels unsuccessfully. I ate at several different restaurants, all of which were good, and ordered either much too much food or far too little.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another. To simply find out what had happened to Oda Sotatsu, that was the main thing. That was always the main thing. But if in learning that, I could see somehow farther …

Finally, after two weeks, I went back to Joo’s apartment. Somehow, I expected that she would not be there, but she was. The first thing I noticed inside the building was that my letter was no longer in the box. So, she has read it, I thought. I went up the stairs. When she opened the door, she was holding the paper in her hand.

Come in, she said.

Her face was gentler than it had been. I don’t know if I had won her over, or what. Her face was gentler, but in a way its gentleness revealed still further the difficulties that her life had put on her. She had the severity of a person who has lived in the out of doors, beneath a constant sun — the look of a field laborer or an Appalachian musician. I have always been partial to such faces, have always thought it would be fine to have such a face for myself. It seems there is a great deal of suffering prior to obtaining one. I thought of none of this then. What I thought then was, she is holding my letter. I was desperate to hear what she would say, about my situation, about Oda Sotatsu, about Kakuzo. Here she was: suddenly I was much closer to writing the book I longed to write, to discovering the material that would make possible the telling of the proper story.

But, the first thing she did was to go to the window and sit down. She gestured that I should do the same.

Let’s not talk for a while, she said.

We sat there for a while. Through the floor, I could hear the sound of the apartment below. The sun set on some other part of the building. In Joo’s apartment it became steadily darker until she was finally forced to turn on the light or leave us sitting together in darkness.

I watched her face in the light and tried to see the girl who had visited Sotatsu, who had lived with Kakuzo. After a time, I felt I could see her. She looked at me and said:

I don’t think anyone has looked at me for that long in many years. This is a thing that regular people don’t understand. Because they live in families or groups, because they do not live alone, unmet, they do not know what it is like to be alone. Months can go by without anyone looking at you, years, without anyone so much as touching your hand or shoulder. One becomes almost like a deer, impatient to be touched, terrified of it. A momentary contact in a supermarket, or on a train, becomes bewildering. However often such contact comes it is always bewildering, because it isn’t meant. And then there comes the day when no one so much as looks at you, unless it is by accident.

She clasped her hands.

I work in the next street, at a machine company. I am a secretary. There are two other secretaries beneath me. Someone tells me what to do. I tell them what to do. It is all so simple that none of that is really necessary. I eat my lunch by myself and when work is done, I come home and sit and eat my supper alone. Sometimes I walk by the harbor and look at the ships. When you say these names to me, Oda Sotatsu, Sato Kakuzo, when you say to me this name, Jito Joo, I feel so far away. You tell me of your own life and I am sorry. You have been hurt. So have I. It isn’t done. It will keep going on. I know it. But, I have read your letter. I wrote you one of my own and now you can have it. I threw it out two days ago, but then I got it back. Here it is.

She held it out to me.

I think I would like for you to go now. I wish I knew what to say to you.

She stood up. So did I.

I went to the door and she opened it.

Anything I could ever tell you, or anyone else, is in there. Goodbye.