Plum Wine: A Novel

Chapter 29

29 B arbara could not sleep that night, even after several glasses of wine. In the morning she looked into the refrigerator: empty except for a bean cake wrapped in a paper napkin, and one cracked egg. Some of the yolk had dribbled out and crusted on the wire shelf. She didn’t have the strength to clean it up. She sat down at her table with tea and the bean cake. On the bare tokonoma shelf were two small circles in the dust where Seiji’s bowls had been. She could not keep her eyes from the empty space. Michisan ’s papers were gone. Erased, blank. She had to get away from here. During the spring holiday she’d spent one night at a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto that welcomed foreigners. The priest and his wife spoke excellent English; they’d invited her to return. She made the call; yes, there was a room, the priest’s wife said; she could come that very day. She packed—enough clothes for the two weeks in Hiroshima and Yonago—then called a taxi to take her to the station. 4 272 4 4 273 4 In downtown Tokyo, she changed her tickets. There was a seat on the new bullet train to Kyoto, leaving in thirty minutes; everything was falling into place. The train moved out of the city, sliding past ugly concrete buildings, factories, refineries. Soon they were going through flat green fields. In the distance was a line of dun-colored mountains. Suddenly the clouds above the mountains parted; Mt. Fuji hung in the sky like an illusion. Images of Hakone, the ski lift, Seiji’s face close to hers, rose to her mind. She got up, stepped past her seat mate—a young woman crocheting a baby blanket—and went to the refreshment car where she spent the rest of the trip watching the blur of landscape on the other side of the train. At the temple she was shown to the same small tatami room where she’d stayed on her previous visit. It was only midafternoon but she got out the futon and lay down with one of the books she’d brought to re-read, Faulkner’s Light in August. The next morning, before dawn, the gong for zazen meditation roused her. Tomorrow, she told herself, and fell back to sleep. At breakfast in the Zen study room, she met the other guests, two young American men from a commune in California. Both had recently burned their draft cards and were now seeking satori— enlightenment. One of them, bespectacled with a bad case of acne, consulted his volume of Schopenhauer during lapses in the conversation . The other, who had long hair and a slightly crazed look in his eyes, said he really grooved on this place, the whole scene. Barbara slept through meditation the next day too, and did not go out sightseeing, as she had planned. She stayed at the temple, drinking coffee and reading. Occasionally her mind strayed, touching on Seiji and Michi in sharp, hot flashes: the two of them together in the teahouse, in the small room inside the pottery. In the afternoon she took a walk in the temple gardens. The priest’s wife had told her there were nightingales in the large bamboo grove, and sometimes foxes, but she did not see or hear signs of either. There was only the relentless drone of cicadas. If emptiness could be expressed in sound, she thought, it would be this cicada noise. Suddenly there was nothing in any direction but bamboo, green trunks tinged blue and orange. She was lost. She began to run, dodging through the thicket until she saw the temple roof, then fled to her room, to Faulkner: red clay, scrub pine, the landscape of home. After breakfast the next morning the priest came into the study center for an audience. A sweet-faced man in glasses, he had an air of infinite patience. He talked in a low voice to the young men, who told him they wanted to become disciples, novitiates. “Why do you desire this?” “To seek enlightenment,” the Schopenhauer reader said. “And what is enlightenment?” the priest asked. “Man, if we knew the answer to that,” the other one said, “I reckon we wouldn’t be here.” “Ah, but perhaps you would,” the priest said, with a slight smile. “What is enlightenment then, Sensei?” the first man said. “The Zen master...