Living Adventurously

If Miharu’s mother had any questions about her young daughter’s friendship with an occidental woman clearly of her own generation, she betrayed no unease as she greeted Elinor in the tight confines of the family’s apartment, above the offices of the family business. Elinor knew they owned the building, a five-story concrete behemoth. It was a successful business, selling high-end second-hand construction machinery abroad. And renting appliances inside the country. But the Japanese, she had learned, shunned ostentation, were discreet about wealth. Above all, they were accustomed to living in close confinement in a country whose geography left little to accommodate its large population. Downstairs, the building held the company offices and showrooms. Other floors were rented out to unrelated businesses.

The family’s wealth could not, clearly, be seen in their domestic circumstances. The concrete floor of the family apartment laid with the same utilitarian indoor-outdoor carpeting as her own little apartment, halfway across the city. The public room she was shown into - the family living room - shabby and sparsely furnished, not all that much room even so, to move about. Typical of urban dwellings, although she had seen stand-alone several-story-tall homes shoe-horned into the slenderest of spaces between commercial buildings. Some homes simply cramped together precariously in crowded urban areas, other truly humble abodes even hung onto the overhead tracks of rail crossings. Most people in Tokyo, though, lived in steep, concrete high-rise apartments, stippling the city’s vast landscape.

There were obvious exceptions. Where famous Japanese couturiers had their custom-built homes in streets backing off Aoami dori, for example. With their postage-stamped, walled gardens where grew plum or persimmon trees, or delicate red-leafed Japanese maples. Not all that far from the Aoami dori cemetery with its orchard-setting of cherry trees, a pink-and-white-blossomed sight to behold in the spring, where the city’s inhabitants spread blankets and had their picnics under the trees, blossoms raining petals in the slightest breeze. Where, also, in various areas of the city were situated those discreet courtyards within which Japanese versions of western-style homes housed the families of foreign diplomats.

Actually, Miharu’s family, because of their business which had introduced them to western culture in a more informal way through business acquaintance, was a little more relaxed about customary treatment of foreigners. Few foreigners, in fact, were welcomed into the homes of Japanese. Entertaining took place outside the home, in restaurants. Not only for business purposes, but social entertainment as well; extended family and friends entertained in the auspices of commercial enterprises set up specifically for that purpose. This was an especial courtesy, an acknowledgement of her relationship with the younger daughter of this prominent business family. Their older daughter lived now in the Philippines with her husband, an area representative for the family firm.

A week later, when Miharu came by Elinor’s apartment she brought with her a surprise. She unwrapped something loosely hidden beneath a canopy of colourful rice paper. It was one of the most lovely miniature gardens she had ever seen. A Ficus Benjamina bonsai, with minuscule lantern and figure, the area beneath the ancient gnarled trunk covered with lush mosses, an urgent bright green that almost lit up the dun colours predominating in her apartment.

For me? She gasped, prepared to insist that she could never accept such a valuable gift. No, Mirahu, had smiled, a loan-presento from her mother, a symbol of her kindly regard, her trust. She almost panicked. She had no idea how to care for such a living treasure. What if her neglect and ignorance killed it? What then?

No worry, said Miharu placidly. Just use common sense. She’d had indoor plants before, hadn’t she? Well, yes, but nothing like this. She knew that this was important, this was a family heirloom. Just water it sparely, once a day. Once a day? she almost screamed, surely that’s too often! Miharu was unperturbed at her obvious anxiety, said she should relax, just enjoy having the bonsai for a little while. She’d retrieve it in a month or so …

Elinor, visiting the Happoen down the street, knew how deeply she was affected by any kind of green in this city of bland concrete walls climbing to the skies. How she reacted, in fact, to the carefully tended shrubbery, the rhododendrons in bloom and the azaleas, the colourful flowering cabbages, hibiscus, camellias, tended by municipal workers, the awesome ginkgo trees, the plane trees, maidenhair fern, with their colourful bark, their breadth, width and beauty.

Entering temple gardens, ancient places established all over the city, there was an immediate sense of transformation; a packed metropolis of harried people and vehicles suddenly become an orderly green ambiance of silent devotion to nature where huge silver and gold carp flashed in lotus-sprinkled ponds, and rows of revered, century-old bonsai set on racks were respectfully nurtured by monks experts in their care. Expressing the Zen-Buddhist spirituality that her every breath so aromatically welcomed, strolling those pebbled pathways.

There, and in other temples, she had learned to find peace and solitude on the soul-sanctified salutary grounds of Japanese gardens. Their footpaths leading to one garden-sculpted nook after another in tidy reverence to nature’s diverse offerings. Artfully natural placing of stone and rock to resemble the lofty grandeur of mountain landscapes. Echoing the distant, readily-seen summit of the sacred Mount Fuji, from Tokyo itself.

Where indescribably inviting red-painted (good fortune!) bridges arced over placidly-floating streams, the water silvery, tinkling as it made its way through bamboo structures, all conspiring to bring human sensibilities into harmony with nature. Stepping under the city’s Torii gates made a similar impression on her; their ancient symbolic blessing soothing her sensibilities. Sight of the temple guardians with their fiercely threatening countenances did nothing to dispel the quiet solitude of rest.

The Japanese brought their reverence for nature, it seemed to her, into everything they did. On tight, narrow streets, unnamed, and unnumbered, there was a general respect for anything resembling nature’s creatures. Out from crowded interiors came vestiges of the inhabitants’ most treasured possessions. Tiny oaks and pines, expertly grown in small bonsai dishes, and ceramic-puffed fishbowls, with their single carp swimming serenely around and around. No one ever tampered with any of these private possessions, diffidently placed on public display.

There existed a social pact, it seemed to her, of universal trust. She never ceased to be amazed at the tangle of bicycles, motorcycles and electric bikes left, as though carelessly herded into livestock compounds, none of them locked, all trustingly left there, to be retrieved by their owners who had taken themselves off elsewhere in the city - on the subway line, or a rail train, a bus, or simply to enter nearby buildings where they worked, until the end of the working day, when a mass exodus would commence.

She was herself trepidatious about travelling by subway. She did have a small, bright orange folding bicycle that she had found abandoned at the back of a dark old shop. She’d taken possession of it for a few yen, still usable, and found it fine for short, local shopping trips. She shopped daily for her food, like most of the city‘s residents. Not everyone had refrigeration facilities. Besides, the Japanese were famously fastidious about the freshness of the food they ate. And so was she, now. Now that she had absorbed for herself the Japanese consciousness of nutrition and freshness.

The subway intimidated her even outside rush hours when professional pushers crammed people into already-crowded cars. She was aware of the vaunted efficiency of its magnificent intersecting meshwork of underground trains, its connections to trains, other subway connections, bus services going out of the city. All time-consuming, to learn the requisite knowledge of areas mostly mysteriously unknown to her, and their connections. The shops in the underground system selling foodstuffs and hard goods a constant source of amazement. She could buy pickles on her way home! Though she didn’t care for their limp presence, their unaccustomed taste; it was the convenience, the quaintness of the opportunity that intrigued her.

The helpful signage (hiragana, katakana) should have been of immeasurable help in negotiating her way around the city, but it wasn’t; it defeated her. Her ESL colleagues had no problems, and many of them hadn’t lived here as long as she; must be her level of confidence. She never attained the ease her colleagues did with the transportation system. She preferred buses, more her style. Less efficient, definitely slower lumbering along, their wood-platform floors fascinating her. She used them regularly on her week-end shopping expeditions to Ueno market.

Where she could walk in the park, admire the sculptures of whales, dolphins, visit the damp, cool interior of the national museum, amble along into the zoo with its excited crowds of onlookers awaiting the presence of the fabled pandas. And then, she could go to the area streets reserved specifically for housewares, or electronics, or footwear; even motorcycles. Networks of streets devoted to the sale of singular consumer items.

She’d tried, once, to go to Skiiji, but found herself disappointed. She’d have to arrive before dawn to witness the excitement of a city’s devotion to uniqueness, rarity and freshness in all the edibles of the ocean deeps. Wherever she went, though, she knew she would have to carry everything back with her on the bus, and it was a long, long trip. Over time, her arms had strengthened from their daily need to carry heavy bags. But she had also developed a chronic aching-shoulder syndrome that truly bothered her from time to time.

Mostly, she entertained herself endlessly walking in all those places. Miharu had introduced her to Roppongi, and when she’d first walked at night with a giggling Miharu, who pointed out to her which of the women wearing traditional white-face makeup and tripping along on elevated sandals, wearing gorgeous kimono were for hire to accompany men to the various nightclubs, she felt a thrill of romantic adventure suffuse her. She returned often to the area, brightly light with blaring neon signage, like nowhere else on Earth.

Although on her many returns she walked alone, she knew she was safe, since women were rarely harassed, and street crime was virtually absent. But nothing relieved her of her loneliness, it strode alongside her like a mournful shadow, reminding her that she was a middle-aged woman in a foreign country, with few friends, no family, and no obvious opportunities to extend either of those categories.

All her co-workers were young and male. Unattached young men looking for exotic adventure;men from Australia and Germany, for the most part. Living frugally as she did in an expensive environment where the recompense for their days and evening shifts patiently teaching eager Japanese secretaries, academics, businessmen and just plain language hobbyists, the basics of English pronunciation and sentence structure. It wasn’t that her colleagues, such as they were, were unfriendly. They were simply detached, she represented no advantage to them in their search for the rare and the valuable in terms of life experiences. She could offer them nothing, and made no attempt to, believing herself to be just as devoid of interest to them as they took her to be.

Still, living there excited her, filled her with a vast admiration for the society, a pulsating ingathering of humanity, sharing a culture and a restrained religion that appealed immensely to her. Their homogeneity fascinated her; walking among them, a sole westerner, in a sea of gleaming black heads, all hurriedly making their way to some destination of importance in lives so distant from her own. She loved watching young women walking along Aoami dori during the working day, perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed in designer clothing, as though each had stepped momentarily out of the glossy pages of a fashion magazine.

She wasn’t that ignorant of the country’s past. Knew very well how hated it was by its neighbours, for its brutal occupations, before and during the Second World War. But this Japan, she felt in her very bones, was an entirely different place with a strong sense of having paid too dearly for its past political-social malfeasance. She trusted this Japan, while at the same time, deploring the Japan that was responsible for horrible misdeeds in the not-so-dim past.

Truth was, she wasn’t anxious to return home. Nothing awaited her there. True, nothing seemed to await her either in Tokyo, but at least it represented a never-ending cycle of discovery, as her mind and her soul thrilled to everything she discerned behind the façade of a western-influenced, increasingly cosmopolitan nation that stubbornly held tight to its eastern identity. The western influence was one of convenience, in a practical acknowledgement that there lay progress, while the values of enlightenment remained with tradition.

She hardly knew what she would do when her contract expired. She knew she wasn’t a very good teacher. She enjoyed amicable relations with her clients, but there was that oriental distance she could never breach, and although it didn’t make her uncomfortable, nor did she ever feel at ease, unlike her colleagues. Too sensitive to nuances, they suggested, when she mentioned it to a few with whom she had easy, but not close relations.

The thing was, she wanted to be accepted. She had no complaints; she was respected. But she wanted to be liked. For who she was. And she tried awfully hard to elicit warm feelings between herself and her clients. Some of them might share a laugh with her, over a badly expressed sentence, but this was a matter of grave moment to them also, not quite a laughing matter. They were as intent on succeeding in speaking decipherable, and decently-accented English, as she was in being accepted among them, as one of them. It took her quite a while to finally understand she never would be. There was a social, cultural distance that existed that nothing she could do would bridge.

Except for Miharu. There, with that young woman, who at 28, was the despair of her parents for her constant refusals of marriage proposals, she found solace. Miharu seemed to understand her, was relaxed with her, shared thoughts with her, told her of her disgust at the thought of becoming a typical Japanese housewife. She had received a good education, had a masters in business administration, and had no intention of agreeing to hide herself away in some dreary little apartment, looking after children. She was independent. She worked for her family's firm. She drove her neat little rag-top convertible Volkswagen anywhere she wanted to take herself.

“You don’t know, Elinor, the woman is sacrificed to the family, to raising children, making a home for her hard-working husband who puts in extra work hours, goes out tippling after work, and returns home drunk, never seeing his own children.”

“It can’t be that bad. Surely things are changing”, she responded to an obviously-upset Miharu, who’d presented herself, unannounced, after one of her arguments with her parents. Miharu hated to upset her mother. She didn’t that much care about how angry her father would be, with his pinched, furious face, with his patriarchal view of a woman’s place. It was her mother’s unexpressed pain at her younger daughter’s defiance of tradition that bothered her.

“It’s bad”, she said. “Once a Japanese woman gets married her life is as good as over. Unless she marries a foreigner, and goes to live with him outside of Japan. And then another aspect of her life is over. Once she leaves Japan she can never return as a Japanese. She becomes a foreigner and that foreignness always hangs over her. Anyway”, she sighed “my parents would never forgive me”.

Miharu told her excitedly about a group she had just joined. Friends of the Earth, in Japan. They went regularly on trips outside Tokyo, to adjacent towns, where hiking trails led up into the mountains. They could see monkeys in the trees on some of those trails. Some of the forests were comprised solely of bamboo. There were temples atop some of the summits, and ancient ginkgo trees, some reputed to be two thousand years old. There was also a temple dedicated to the Buddha who had walked from India to Japan (Isn’t Japan a series of islands? No matter) and his immense sandals can be seen there, outside the temple. Some of the hikes would take them to formal tea houses, and they could take part in a tea ceremony.

She was sold. She was still in pretty good shape for 54. They’d had to rise very early on week-end mornings. To grab a series of subway trains, buses, rail trains, and again buses, to finally get them out of Tokyo, where, on the perimeter, the final bus would finally stop outside villages and towns close to where these trailheads began. It was all so bucolic, so infused with good fellowship and adventure. There was a mixture of Japanese, Australians, Germans, and her, the sole Canadian. Mostly men, a sprinkling of women. The Japanese always wore lederhosen, their version of how mountain climbers, trail trekkers, should look. And they didn’t miss an opportunity to try out their command of English on the foreign element that made up their group, sometimes with hilarious results.

Elinor hung back, with Miharu, on the first several of what turned out to be many such outings. Miharu might be furiously verbose in her denial of taking her customary place as a traditional Japanese woman, but tradition was steeped deep within her, and she was shy and quiet, and self-disparaging, particularly in the presence of men, most markedly in the presence of foreign men.

It was on their eighth climbing adventure that Elinor decided she would exert herself a little more vigorously, demonstrate just how robust she was for her age, decidedly more advanced than any of the group. She forged ahead, clambering up the rubble-strewn trails, very well aware of how surprised everyone else was, in her wake. She heard, behind her, people speaking to one another, marvelling at the physical resources she was exhibiting, striding seemingly without effort, before everyone else. Whenever they passed a group proceeding in the opposite direction she would gasp the obligatory "konichiwa", and forge on, determinedly.

Gradually, the effort began to tax her, and she felt truly alarmed at the increasingly leaden feeling in her limbs, her stifling, pounding chest. Still, she strode confidently ahead, the others straggling behind. She felt proud of herself, glowing in the reflection of the others’ awe at her progress.

Then they stopped as usual, for a break. Everyone searched in their backpacks for refreshments. Muffins, cookies, trail mix, and water to wash it down. Elinor had sprawled on the ground, her back resting on a Paulownia trunk. Miharu seated beside her, was eating crackers and dried fish. Suddenly, Miharu lifted her head, and closely regarded her friend. Who was not eating, not having anything to replenish her exhausted resources, but sitting there, dully, breathing heavily. “Something wrong?” Miharu asked, quietly.

“No”, said Elinor. “I just suddenly feel awfully tired. I don’t know, Miharu, if I can repeat what I’ve just done. I don’t seem to have any more energy”. This admission depressed her horribly. Made her feel ashamed of her previous bravado, her obvious audacity, her showing-off, like a kid looking for compliments and admiration. What, did she think one of the men would view her differently, decide he would like to become more intimately involved with this decidedly unusual woman whose energy belied her years?

When, finally, it was time to tuck everything back into backpacks and resume the hike, everyone did so enthusiastically, and slowly everyone in their group trickled off. There were some surprised faces, looking back at Elinor and Miharu, still sitting there, making no effort to rise and join them. Elinor felt a deep blush of shame paint her face. Miharu patted her friend’s hand, whispered to her that she should rest, take her time, they would catch up. Eventually.