The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer Read Free Book Online

the “floating world” was from the family home. So perhaps these magazines, with their secular cult of the virgin, served only to encourage sex in the head, catering to that famously sentimental Japanese Romanticism that prefers the idea of a thing, its memory or promise, to the thing itself. And if sometimes I felt I was living inside a gallery of antique canvases, sometimes I felt I was living in a world of vending machines,shining sentinels humming through all the quiet lanes in the dark.
    My first social engagement in Japan came one windy evening when Mark invited me to a meeting of Amnesty International — less for the meeting itself, he suggested, than in order to meet a friend of his, an uncommonly cultured and philanthropic woman who had lived for many years in England and was head now of the local group. Ready to try anything, I strapped on a helmet, and on a chill night full of stars, through a whipping wind, we rode his Honda through a maze of twisting little lanes up to an elegant old house. Inside, the walls were lined with musty, arcane volumes that had an attic air to them, and after making voluntary donations at the entrance, we were ushered up to a comfortable room where various Japanese, mostly young, were seated on the floor.
    “
Dōzo, dōzo
,” cried a man as soon as he saw us, jumping up to usher us to a couple of chairs placed near its front.
    Typical, I thought: foreigners were given the best seats in the house (a sign of Japanese graciousness) and, in the same act, were segregated from all locals (a sign of Japanese prudence). My suspicions were only confirmed when, a couple of minutes later, two other foreigners — a tweedy, very distinguished-looking couple from Massachusetts — were ushered to the front. “
Gaijin
ghetto,” muttered the old gentleman as he took his place, looking every bit the retired foreign service officer in his gray slacks, Ivy League jacket, neat red tie, and fauldessly aristocratic bearing.
    Good Lord, I thought, what on earth could have brought these New England patricians to this shaggy little gathering of student radicals? Were they CIA? Or worse? And then, in a flash, all my impudent questions were dispelled, as Mark’s friend Etsuko swept in, greeting the man as she passed with a dainty “Good evening, Reverend Farnsworth.”
    Behind her came the guests of honor, a family of three Argentines eager to describe their torture at the hands of the military government. The father was a gaunt, long-faced man in his late thirties, who looked the part of a workers’ hero, a Latin Walesa in his denim jacket and jeans; his wife was a plump madonna type, dressed all in black, with thick raven hair that fell to her waist; and their perky little son, twinkling impishly at every Japanese girl he passed, was now an eleven-year-old sixth-grader.
    Etsuko delivered a brief introduction to the audience, in Japanese, and then, looking over in my direction, asked sweetly, in her bell-like English, “Shall we begin?”
    Nobody else said anything, so I replied, “Oh, yes.” Maybe this was her way of acknowledging me?
    And then the man began speaking, delivering a sentence or two of introduction, in the rough Argentine Spanish that turns
yo
into
zho
and
vas
into
vasch
. There was silence. The man looked at me. Etsuko looked at me. Thirty pairs of Japanese eyes looked at me. I looked at everyone else. And then, with a sinking heart, as the silence deepened, I realized what was going on: mine was not, it seemed, just a foreigner’s place of honor — it was the translator’s chair. Apparently, my Spanish-sounding name and vaguely Hispanic looks had been enough to have procured for me, unbeknownst to me, the job of interpreting from Spanish, a language I had never learned, to Japanese, a language Francis Xavier himself had considered the work of the devil. My only qualification for the task, I thought bitterly, was that I was probably the only person in the room who spoke neither