Today’s comic is told from Sayuri’s side in JAPANESE VISION, which is a lot less exciting than it sounds.  Hope you’re up on your Nihongo.

This weekend I sought a wholly Japanese experience.

You would think it would be easy, considering the fact that I live in Japan. But it turns out that’s not the case. Major American chains are sprouting up on every street corner, English spreads like a rash across shop fronts (I saw a haircutting place yesterday that said, “Butcher is our specialty; The Glue is free, my friend”), clothing stores blast customers with the latest in American rock, and Japanese kids run up to you, say “Hello!” and then run screaming away as if they’d just cast fire into a viper’s den.

Fortunately, there are still some small areas that preserve the Japanese experience: unsoiled, purified Nihon.

I took a train to Takamatsu, walked past the McDonald’s and the Starbucks, and up to the second level of the station where a curtain of brown rope combed me of the outside world. The usual American pop was replaced with stilted, mournful music drifting overhead. The woman sang in the old Japanese style, less like a melody and more like a branch scraping against a window on a windy evening: certainly unsettling, possibly beautiful. I couldn’t see a single English word in the place, no “Good Coffee Smile,” no “We are delightful to have your day be our best time.” So I stayed.

The counter was a rough piece of lacquered wood, the original shape and texture of the tree. I signaled the chef and pointed to one of the illustrious, plastic-dipped display pieces in the front window. The man drew a blade in a blinding flash and the fish cut like smoke between his deft hands. Dipping his fingers in ice and with another flick of the wrist (better suited for a dojo than a restaurant) he swabbed wasabi between shiny slices of fish and perfect white balls of rice.

When the pearly row of sushi was set before me, I marveled at the millennia of men casting lines into the sea and eating whatever came out, as was, uncooked (this from the people who stare at me with horrified mouths agape whenever I eat a raw carrot). The chef filled my cup with warm, brown liquid from a blue leafed teapot. The tea was less flavorful and more like an intuition of something woody, something distant. The bark on the side of the table poked my stomach and my sushi tray wobbled slightly in the knots as I ate. I tried to remember the rules set out for me: never lay your chopsticks on the table, don’t drowned your sushi in soy sauce, make sure everyone knows you’re enjoying your meal by chewing loudly and not withholding any gas. I tried to pretend the stakes were high, that if I slipped up even once, the Daimyo of Takamatsu would show up with his katana and paint the ground with my insides.

A stomach full of something pure, I put Shugo Tokumaru on my iPod and headed toward Takamatsu Castle, avoiding other Americans along the way by hiding behind neatly pared trees. I crossed a bridge and entered Tamamo castle. The grounds are covered on three sides by natural moats fed by a green sea. I read that Tamamo is, in fact, a “water castle.” Just the name brought the Triforce from Zelda gleaming into my brain, and I couldn’t help but search the stone walls for hidden levers to gain entrance.

The gate was open though, and I walked right in.

The winter wind blew everyone indoors that day and I found myself alone on the grounds. Through the latticework of a rickety bridge I could see black bream and bass swimming with leafy fins that flowed behind them like torn gowns. Stone steps led me through a silent garden populated with twisted, almost human-like trees in a frozen dance, black bushes wept pink pedals, stone lanterns curtsied as I walked by, and there was the incomprehensible music of birds. I leapt across the stones of the path toward a scaly building almost invisible behind the open-armed, unclothed trees.

I peeked into the warped glass and beheld perfect tatami and paper doors. I became lost in the emptiness. I thought of the principles of Japanese gardening. The painstaking craft attempts to blur the line between art and nature. From the balcony it looked seamless, as if the plants stretched and grew together to form lanterns and a perfectly symmetrical home.

Japan’s castles are made from wood to prepare for the inevitable earthquakes. A stone structure on trembling earth would certainly crush whoever was inside, so the old builders went with wood and the inhabitants of the castles burned to death instead. The combustibility of Japan’s greatest treasures means there are only a handful left, and they are only a shred of the grandeur they once were: small white buildings dwarfed by silvery skyscrapers on all sides. Takamatsu castle has been cut down to 1/9^th its original size. The little castle looks more like a hut, or the top tier of a wedding cake put into the freezer in order to savor the fleeting honorable moments for just a little bit longer.

As I exited, I traced the short stone walls into the sky and tried to sketch the missing pieces back in. I could almost see the dizzying heights of honor and protection stretching above me. Though they were burned away to ash and ghosts a long time ago, the emptiness still carries a weight.

I prepared myself to re-enter the greasy, buzzing, concrete world by flipping my iPod to something more mind numbing, and I walked back across the moat.

-C

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under All Comics, Incompletes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.