“Ah, no?” She pouted—the perfect brat.
Juggling plans I didn’t have, I said, “I can promise to wait if you come back on your birthday. I’ll use the week to visit a few places and collect material for my friend.”
“Done.”
I was surprised that she should agree so readily. Then again, it was simply further proof that she was quite unhinged, showing how her thinking swung wildly from one idea to another. I dipped a bit of meat into the sauce as she gazed at the circle of glowing coals, as if mesmerized by them. She’d hardly even tasted the vegetables.
“Let’s do that, then . . .” I was being very patient. “We’ll meet at Samuel’s Bar next Thursday and celebrate your thirtieth birthday with your uncle. Then we can come back here, if you like.”
“I’m only going to do a couple more classes. You need to understand that.” Her tone had turned unexpectedly cold. “I’m like this circle of coals, which will soon turn into ashes. My body’s not yet cold, but the fire that used to warm my soul went out a long time ago.”
Alone in Tokyo
I spent the last week of spring getting the most out of my Japan Rail Pass and hoping to learn something about the country. From Kyoto I went to nearby Nara, which is known for its giant Buddha inside an equally enormous wooden temple. In order to reach the Enlightened One you have to cross a park where deer nip tourists’ backsides in the hope they’ll drop the biscuits they’ve brought for them.
My next stop was Osaka—a totally unprepossessing city by day which, at night, turned into a futuristic stage set with girls in outrageous dresses and bizarre makeup parading around under the neon lights.
I spent barely two days in Tokyo, because it was too immense for me. I only had time to go to the fish market, the upscale shopping district of Ginza, the statue of Hachiko—the faithful Akita dog that inspired the movie—and the fifty-second floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel.
It was in this lofty tower, in the New York Bar made famous by the movieLost in Translation, that I found myself on a Tuesday evening at the start of summer. In memory of the movie’s world-weary languid protagonist, I ordered a Suntory Hibiki 17 whisky and watched night slowly falling over the megalopolis.
Meanwhile, a Diana Krall clone at the piano purred American standards that sounded like canned music to my ear.
Perched at the bar next to the window, I alternated between staring out at the vertiginous view of the city and reading myLonely Planetguidebook as the Japanese malt scalded my throat.
There’s something quietly powerful yet sad about a person going on vacation alone. I’d thought back more than once to some of my weekend trips with Gabriela—seeing a man dining alone in a Chinese restaurant in London’s Soho, or a girl in Paris wandering all by herself through the Louvre—when I’d wondered whether that solitude was voluntary or imposed by circumstances. It’s not always easy to tell. Some people leave their partners because they want to be alone and are fed up with the domestic bickering that has become the background noise of everyday life. Then there are those who, after being left, discover the virtues of solitude—this wasn’t my case—and rediscover personal treasures they’d neglected while trying to fit with someone who, in hindsight, belonged to a completely different world.
How much are we able to accept life’s changing seasons?
But let’s not kid ourselves. Solitude is scary, and very few people would break off a relationship in order to live alone. More often, one partner is simply traded for another who seems like a better fit. This wasn’t my case, or Gabriela’s either, if I was to believe her.
While I was pondering all this, the sunlight slipped away behind the forest of skyscrapers around me and the neon lights came on.
I couldn’t help remembering what an old friend from the faculty once told me: he couldn’t imagine greater solitude than that of a man all by himself in Tokyo, surrounded by millions of people and with no one to talk to. I was that man, alone in Tokyo.
Turning into a Flower
On the last day of my mini tour of Japan I went to Nikko, a mountain town surrounded by shrines and temples, ninety miles north of Tokyo.
Despite the short distance involved, getting there was a minor odyssey. You had to take the bullet train to the industrial city of Utsunomiya and then change to a local train, which seemed to have last been refurbished in the nineteen-seventies.
Sitting on a bench seat upholstered in red velvet, I was prompted by my first sight of woods in the countryside to return to Titus’s book. After I left Osaka we’d waged a lengthy text-messaging war. It had taken him a while to admit he was the author of the postcards that had lured me to the other side of the world, but he’d eventually confessed. I thought his remorse was sincere. He even offered to reimburse me for what I’d spent on my flights, paying me in installments after September. “But I won’t cover your accommodation, food and drinks, because you’re the one who’s sleeping, eating and drinking,” he’d said.
I’d replied, “We’ll see.”
As for Gabriela, we’d exchanged a couple of messages at the most. I asked her if she knew about Titus’s hoax and, while acknowledging that she did, she added that it hadn’t been her idea. She was still in Paris and was showing signs of depression.
As if I give a damn, I thought. The train trundled on, bearing me, in that antiquated carriage, through a dreamscape of bluish hilltops where it had just started to rain.
In a moment of satori enlightenment, I suddenly had the insight that this gently undulating countryside was a perfect image of my inner topography. The only good thing about being a middling kind of man is that catastrophes, too, are homely.
I flipped through the anthology, looking for the text about this kind of awakening. The author was D. T. Suzuki, the man who introduced Zen to the West. He said that meditation seeks as its ultimate end the fusion of subject and object, observer and observed. Only when we penetrate the essence of things can we understand them in their profundity—an idea which Suzuki explains beautifully by taking as his example a person absorbed in meditation and a flower:
To know the flower is to become the flower, to be the flower, to bloom as the flower and to enjoy the sunlight as well as the rainfall. When this is done, the flower speaks to me and I know all its secrets, all its joys, all its sufferings—that is, all its life vibrating within itself. Not only that: along with my “knowledge” of the flower, I know all the secrets of the universe, which includes all the secrets of my own Self, which has been eluding my pursuit all my life so far, because I divided myself into a duality, the pursuer and the pursued, the object and the shadow. [ . . . ]
Now, however, by knowing the flower I know my Self. That is, by losing myself in the flower, I know myself as well as the flower.
It was a simple but uplifting idea. I had to read the text a couple of times to understand what it was saying. What, then, does the flower teach us? Does it only teach us to look? Maybe when we learn to contemplate the smallest things without filters, we’ll be able to turn our eyes toward ourselves. Very few things are beautiful or ugly. Beauty and ugliness are only in the eye of the beholder.
