The Haiku Apprentice. Abigail Friedman

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СКАЧАТЬ on Saturday, October 5, from one to five in the afternoon. I had no idea what Numamomo or Goyōtei meant, and no one I asked at my office had ever been to Numazu. One of my colleagues, a native of Tokyo, said with a tone of disdain, It must be one of those small towns in the countryside somewhere. After some searching, I found the town on the map. It looked to be about an hour and a half west of Tokyo by train, in the vicinity of Mount Fuji.

      That Saturday, leaving my family behind, I took the bullet train out of Tokyo to Mishima, the transfer point to popular tourist destinations south on the Izu Peninsula. It was the first time since having children that I was taking a trip unrelated to work, alone. I traveled so much for my job that it was hard for me to leave my family simply for pleas­ure. But the train sped along and I began to relax, catching glimpses from my window of the surface of the bay glimmering in the sun, stretching out toward the horizon. An apartment building whizzed into sight, blocking my view of the sea. Moments later it was gone, and the sea and curve of the horizon reappeared. Another building appeared, blocked the sea, became a blur, and vanished in a blink.

      How strange life is! Fifteen years ago, I was sitting in a bed at Dr. Takahara’s Lady Clinic holding my newborn son, wondering how I had ended up in Hiroshima and what it all meant. I was far from home and did not know the first thing about babies. I pored over child-rearing manuals as if they were science textbooks, trying to figure out why my baby was crying. I had spent four years in college studying the history of science and another three years studying law, and now I was supposed to intuitively know how to handle a baby.

      One evening, my husband came home and, as he watched me struggling to breastfeed our son, sighed, I don’t think this housewife role is right for you. You really should follow up with the Foreign Service. I had passed the Foreign Service exam before leaving the United States but had been lackadaisical in pursuing the option. I was having a hard time picturing myself as a diplomat. I recalled the scene well: our colicky baby had bit me, squirmed, and started to cry. Well, maybe you are right, I said, handing him the baby. A few months later we booked train tickets to Tokyo, so that I could complete my application there. Soon after that, I entered the Foreign Service.

      I thought that once I joined the Foreign Service we would come back to Japan. Instead we were sent to the Azores, windswept islands in the middle of the Atlantic. After that our life became a series of checkerboard moves, with assignments in Washington, Tokyo, Washington, Paris, and again Tokyo. Fifteen years, seven moves, and two more children later, I was back in Japan sitting on a train, this time heading out of Tokyo, past beautiful scenery, toward a town and people I did not know. I was midway through my second Japan assignment and no more certain of where I fit in the world as the day when, cradling my crying baby in Hiroshima, I first decided to join the Foreign Service. I 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.

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