This thought took me back to Mizuki. It was only five days since I’d been at the bar and the barbecue place with her, but my journey seemed to have stretched the time that separated us.
I imagined her climbing the craggy mountains on the island in the north of Japan. We’d arranged to meet the following night in the bar named after me, but I was suddenly assailed by fear. What if Mizuki had gone through with her original idea and would never come back?
I calmed myself with the thought that the person who really plans to commit suicide never announces the intention but simply goes ahead and does it.
With this foggy, changing mental landscape matching the one all around me, the train stopped in Nikko.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil
I woke up in a Nikko guesthouse with five other roommates. The night had brought a relentless concert of snores and sighs, and even a soliloquy in Japanese. Though I’d woken up several times, the fir trees outlined against a moonlit sky had soothed me. I’d dropped back into an even deeper sleep in the company of their silhouettes, which I could see through the window at the foot of my bed.
I had breakfast feeling as if I’d been resting for days. Perhaps my spirit had needed to be surrounded by forests and I’d unjustly confined it to the city.
In the dining room there were three Japanese girls in Scout caps, who got into a huddle and started whispering as soon as they saw me; plus another man of about fifty—bald, mustachioed and dressed in Tyrolean shorts with braces and heavy-duty shoes. He raised his hand to greet me, and a minute later we were chatting over our fried eggs and beans. There’s an unwritten law decreeing that solitary travelers should start to talk and then end up walking together.
He introduced himself as Hans Martin from the Swiss city of St. Gallen. After years of wanting to explore Japan, he’d overcome his fear of planes and set out on his solitary adventure. I merely mentioned my wabi-sabi story and told him that I was returning to Kyoto that afternoon.
“I think the three wise monkeys would be a major inspiration for your book,” he said.
Of course, I knew about this wooden sculpture of a group of monkeys in which one covers its ears with its hands, another covers its mouth and a third covers its eyes, but I didn’t know what they had to do with Nikko.
Hans Martin turned out to be an expert on the matter. “They are seventeenth-century carvings mounted over the stables at Toshogu Shrine. It is not far from here. I will accompany you if you like.”
“I’d like that very much.” I was surprised by his courtesy. “It will be a pleasure and, actually I don’t have much time for visiting the temples. I have to get on the train after lunch.”
“Well, if you can only see one thing, it should be Toshogu.”
Not long afterward, we were on our way, crossing immaculate forests, radiant in the morning light. The strange calm that had pervaded me during the night grew with every step. At that hour, we were the only ones out and about except for the birds trilling in the top branches of the trees.
“It must be wonderful to study the beauty of what is imperfect,” Hans Martin commented as he guided me along a tree-shaded path. “There are many people trying to make everything smooth and uniform. But the world is wrinkled and cracked. Nothing ever turns out the way it is supposed to—and that is a good thing, because otherwise it would be terribly boring. Do you know what Tagore says?”
“Lots of things, I suppose. Did he talk about wabi-sabi too?”
“In his way. He said the forest would be very sad if only the best birds sang.”
Those words made a deep impression on me. As we continued walking in silence, I thought they should apply to love as well. It would be tragic if it was a field reserved only for the most attractive, empathetic and seductive people, because they are precisely the ones who don’t need love. They have enough with the admiration they get from everyone around them.
People with broken or yearning hearts are the ones who need to be loved, and if they haven’t yet learned the song of life, they should be able to sing it beside another bird that knows it and will perhaps help them to sing it sweetly.
I was lost in thought when we reached atoriigate at the entrance to the shrine, consisting of two columns topped by an upwardly curving horizontal beam. Hans Martin seemed happy to be at Toshogu, although it was the third time he had been there in the last two days.
“Let us go and see Mizaru, Kikazaru and Iwazaru,” he said with boyish enthusiasm.
“Who are they?”
“The three wise monkeys, man! Those are their names, and they mean ‘see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil’.”
He led me past small shrines with wooden altars richly adorned with human and animal statues. The likeness of a black-and-white cat sleeping between lotus flowers caught my eye but, without a doubt, the greatest attraction at Toshogu was thesanzaruthree wise monkeys.
I stood before the monkeys, which so eloquently expressed their rejection of the three senses.
“Do you know why they’re doing that, Hans?”
“There are several interpretations. One is that if you wish to be pure at heart you must never hear, speak or see evil, because it defiles the mind.”
“Then we should never turn on the news.”
“It depends what the news is.”
