The Toyotomi Blades

14

The blue-and-white bullet train slid into the station like a slinking beast. Junko, Mariko, and I were standing on the platform. Mariko and I had baggage in hand. When the train stopped, the doors slid open and we walked into the car.

The interior of the train was off-white and gray with polished aluminum strips framing the windows. The bench seats had a bright blue upholstery, and over the seats was a luggage rack of polished tubular aluminum. Mariko and I found a seat and slung our luggage on the overhead racks.

“How long will the train stop?” I asked.

“Only a few minutes,” Junko said. “I’d better say good-bye now. Have fun in Kyoto, and remember that a car and guide will meet you when you arrive. The dinner with Mr. Sonoda is all arranged. I’ll see you in two days for the program.” Junko shook my hand, then said to Mariko, “It was nice meeting you.” Then she left us to return to the platform.

“She’s interested in you, all right,” Mariko said. “I’ve got frostbite from that send-off.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. I feigned indifference, but secretly I hoped Mariko was right. I was very happy with Mariko and had no intention of being unfaithful to her, but let’s face it, nothing is as great for the ego as someone finding you desirable.

In under five minutes the train started moving. The doors closed and the car shuddered slightly as the train left the station. I marveled at how smooth and quiet the train was. Much smoother and quieter than any train in the U.S. I’ve ever been on.

“How fast do you think we’ll be going?” Mariko asked.

“We’re on the Nozomi train, which is supposed to be the super express. The guidebooks say we’ll do a hundred eighty or ninety kilometers per hour. If it’s a clear day we should be able to see Mount Fuji on the trip.”

Mariko was dressed in black slacks, a dark green turtleneck sweater, and a green jacket. The slim line of the slacks fitted her trim body and made her look much taller than she really was. I had jeans, a shirt, and a ski parka on.

“How long will it take us?”

“A little more than two hours.”

As we passed through Tokyo, I could see the density of the buildings gradually thinning until houses started having small yards in the back. These houses had little vegetable gardens and weren’t as tightly packed as the buildings in the city, but they were still crowded by American standards. As we reached the outskirts of Tokyo, we could see Mount Fuji in the distant haze, looking like a painted white cone on pale gray silk. In the old days Mount Fuji could be seen from Tokyo almost every day, but smog and smoke now make Fuji a rare sight from the city.

Soon the houses gave way to farmland. The farms were densely cultivated plots in a patchwork quilt. All the plots of land were small and most were flooded with water. Rice paddies. I could see a cluster of houses that formed a small village tucked into the folds of a foothill. On the hill, near a grove of trees, were Buddhist and Shinto headstones that marked a cemetery. The farmland looked very picturesque, and except for the occasional TV antenna or pickup truck, I imagine you could find hundred-year-old woodblock prints that depicted a landscape similar to the one out the window.

When we arrived in Kyoto there was a limo with an English-speaking driver waiting to take us to our hotel. I could get used to this television lifestyle.

That afternoon the driver took us to the Kyoto Gosho, the old Imperial Palace from the days when Kyoto used to be the capital of Japan. Afterwards we were taken to a craft center where we looked at pottery and woodblock prints. I love Japanese woodblock prints, but the high prices kept us from buying, except for a rather nice vase that Mariko said was for Mrs. Kawashiri.

The next day we were taken to a bewildering succession of temples and shrines. Kyoto has over sixteen hundred temples, and our driver seemed determined to show us all of them. He was an affable man in his late thirties. Despite his smile, the rest of his face had a strained look, as if we were always behind some unstated timetable. When he drove he hunched over the wheel like Mickey Rooney in the camp autoracing movie, The Big Wheel, but, despite his intense posture, he didn’t speed. Of the numerous temples we were shown, only Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, was memorable, and most of the others sort of blurred into my memory until we got to Ryoanji.

The garden at Ryoanji is a rectangular expanse of white sand fenced on two sides by an austere plaster wall. A verandah made of natural wood borders the other two sides of the garden. The wood of the verandah has been polished to a hard, gleaming brown by uncounted stocking feet gliding across its surface.

In the center of the sand stand fifteen rocks protruding upward. The rocks were set so you couldn’t see all of them no matter what your viewing angle was. Small bits of moss clung to the base of most of the rocks. The sand between the rocks was carefully raked to form wavelike patterns that sinuously wound their way around the rocks and throughout the expanse of the garden.

“Ryoanji was first made in the fifteenth century.” Mariko was reading from a brochure we got when we entered. “It’s famous because of its connection with Zen Buddhism.”

As she spoke, a milling and noisy crowd passed us. Children were talking and running about. Japanese tourists stopped, looked, and having seen the famous site, moved on. More than a few were fulfilling the stereotype by furiously snapping photographs. I noticed that in the corner of the verandah an old Japanese couple was kneeling on their heels and staring at the garden. Despite the flow of tourists around them, the sound of voices and the movement, the old man and woman seemed focused on the garden. A marvelous tranquillity was washed across their faces as they sat absorbing each nuance of beauty found in the austerity of the sand, rocks, and moss.

I was in stocking feet like the rest of the tourists. I walked to the edge of the verandah and sank down. I couldn’t sit on my heels like the old couple, so I sat cross-legged and stared out across the garden.

The vista reminded me of aerial photographs I’ve seen of the South Pacific. To me, the rocks and moss seemed like islands set in a swirling white sea. That white sea washed away my anxieties and tension. It was wonderful. My family has been in Hawaii since 1896, and I wondered if the suggestion of islands in the garden was what I really found restful. For some reason this made me feel very disconnected. I wondered if Japan, Hawaii, or California was my spiritual home.

Mariko stood shuffling from foot to foot, already bored and anxious to move on, but she remained silent as I contemplated the garden. After about ten minutes, I turned to her and smiled, then stood up. We left the old couple still seated on the edge of the verandah, looking across the garden in unmoving silence.

When we got back to the car the driver already had the door open, ready to whisk us away to another temple. We got in and I asked Mariko for the brochure on Ryoanji she had picked up. The car swayed slightly as it made its way towards the next temple and it was very peaceful feeling the warmth of Mariko’s body next to mine as I read the brochure.

Detecting was the furthest thing from my mind when I turned over the brochure and noticed that it had a stylized map showing where Ryoanji temple was in relationship to other famous places in Kyoto. Mount Uryu-yama and Mount Kazan were shown to the west of the city as stylized icons, and the downtown was marked by an icon of the Kyoto Gosho palace. The Kamogawa river cut its way through Kyoto, and it was shown as a blue ribbon. The Golden Pavilion got its own icon, and Ryoanji was shown as a simple rectangle with tiny rocks in the middle. The folds of the brochure cut the map into neat sections. As I looked at the map I had a kind of Zen epiphany. My mind was clear and not consciously working, but an answer came to me as if in a dream.

“It’s not a message. It’s a map,” I told Mariko.

“What are you talking about?”

“When I talked to that professor, Hirota, he told me that he thought the patterns on the blades were some kind of message. He writes in pictographs, so it’s natural for him to think of icons as words. But the patterns are really stylized representations of temples and mountains. There’s something else that’s like a long line that I haven’t figured out, but the rest is now very clear to me. They’re all landmarks that would be used in a map. The blades fit together in sections, just like the sections formed by the folds of this brochure.”

“But why would you put a map on different sword blades and what is it a map to?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe we should turn around and return to Ryoanji temple and it will come to me.”

I was only half joking.