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The alien home | page 1, 2, 3, 4
At one level, of course, all these imported props could not be more synthetic or one-dimensional, and participate, as much as anything in Los Angeles or Hong Kong, in all the chill deracination of the age. The Japanese are probably less apologetic about embracing artifice and plastic replicas than anyone I know, and have few qualms about modeling their lives on the Spielberg sets they've seen on-screen. Those who worry that history is being turned into nostalgia, and community into theme park, could draw their illustrations from this suburb. Yet the children in the neighborhood call every older woman "Auntie," and the Aunties feed whoever's child happens to be around. At dawn, old women take showers in freezing-cold water and shout out ancestral prayers to the gods. The very cool clarity with which the neighborhood shuts me out; calling me a gaijin, or outsider person, is partially what enables it to dispense courtesy and hospitality with such dependability, and to import so much from everywhere without becoming any the less Japanese. Surface is surface here, and depth is depth. The old ceremonies are scrupulously observed in Japan, even in a place where there are no temples and no shrines. Every year when the smell of daphne begins to fade from the little lanes, and the first edge of coldness chills the air, the baseball chat shows on TV transfer their interviews to sets melancholy with falling leaves, and Harvest Newsletters appear beside the Drink Bar at my KFC. And as soon as the five-pointed maples begin to blaze in the local park, it lights up with matrons, sitting at easels, transcribing the turning of the seasons on their canvases. And sometimes, on these sharpened sunny days, when the cloudless autumn brightness makes me homesick for the High Himalayas, I fall through a crack somehow, and find myself in a Japan of some distant century. Not long ago, as I was looking out on a light so elegiac that it made me think of the magical transformations of the Oxford of my youth (where Alice found her rabbit hole and a wardrobe led to Narnia, and where the Hobbit sprang out of some dusty Old Norse texts), I went out for my daily morning walk along the shiny, flawless streets, held as ever in a tranquil northern stillness of tethered dogs and mapled parks and grandfathers leading toddlers (in Lovely Moment hats) by the hand. Men were washing their white Oohiro Space Project vans in the street, and girls, or sometimes robots, were crying out "Welcome" from the computer shop with the two kittens for sale (at five hundred dollars a pop) in the window. Fred Flintstone in a White Sox cap invited me to a local softball league, and a Mormon, by a park, promised some form of enlightenment. A simple prelude of Bach's floated down from the upstairs window of the stationery shop. And, just behind the power plant, which I'd passed almost every day for five years, I chanced, for the first time ever, upon a flight of stairs, leading down into a valley. I followed the steps down, and ended up in a thick, dark grove of trees. I passed out of it and found myself inside another country: green, green rice paddies shining in the blue-sky morning, and narrow, sloping streets leading up into the hills. Two-story wooden houses, and a small community ringed by hills. Grandmothers were working in traditional white scarves outside their two-story homes, and as I passed one, she favored me with a gold-toothed smile. "It's warm," she said, and so was she. "Look at me! I'm working in my socks!" I walked on farther through the silent village streets, past flowering persimmon trees and a central oval pond. Then I turned back, and greeted the old woman -- my friend now -- as I passed. I climbed the fifty-four steps, and the hidden world fell behind me as a dream. Four-year-old boys were playing catch in Harvard T-shirts; women walked with parasols to shield their faces from the sun. | ||
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