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ONE HOT
SUMMER IN
KYOTO
John Haylock
Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California
The translations from the T’ang poet Li Ho are from The Chinese Conception of Poetry by Professor Naotaro Kudo of Waseda University, Tokyo.
The dialogue from the Kabuki play Kagotsurube is from Six Kabuki Plays, translated by Donald Richie and Miyoko Watanabe (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1963).
Published by STONE BRIDGE PRESS
P.O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707
www.stonebridge.com
Originally published in the United Kingdom
by London Magazine Editions in 1980.
Copyright ©1980 John Haylock.
First U.S. edition, 1993.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.
to Hiro Asami
1
Although I have done this journey from Tokyo to Kyoto many times and know there is still plenty of time, I obey the warning of the train’s imminent arrival and “assemble my luggage and get ready to alight,” as the official female voice advises in English after the longer Japanese announcement. I wait in the aisle wedged in by my two suitcases and those of other alighting passengers. The super-express slows gently and comes to a halt. There is a pressing forward. Passing from the air-conditioned carriage to the sweltering platform is like going into a hot conservatory from a wintry garden.
The house I have rented for July and August is in a lane off a wide road that leads past the great torii of the Heian Shrine and goes to the foot of a steep hill which is covered with pines and maples; at its base are the buildings of Nanzenji temple; the lane, “my” lane, is asphalted and just wide enough for the taxi, but the driver doesn’t want to enter it, so he stops at its entrance. He helps me, somewhat reluctantly as Japanese taxi drivers don’t like carrying bags, with my luggage, placing the suitcase he is holding in the middle of the lane only half way to the house, the first on the right after a roofed garden wall and only thirty paces from the corner. I pay the driver, get out the key which the landlord, an American who is vacationing in California, sent me by registered post, and unlock the fragile, sliding door of opaque glass panels. The door is rickety and the catch could easily be broken by a determined child; the other houses in the lane look equally unsubstantial; some like mine have two stories, others only one.
I take off my shoes in the doll’s-house porch in which there is a small chest of drawers. On this piece of furniture is a vase containing three red gladioli and above it hangs a wooden theatrical mask of a smiling old man with a wispy white beard. I push open two flimsy wood and paper doors and step up into a matted hall-hall is hardly the right word since it is a space of about two square yards-and I am confronted and flanked by sliding fusuma screens. I pause to choose-it is like a problem in a party game. The fusuma on my left reveals a flight of precipitous stairs that are not at all inviting on this torrid afternoon; the two fusuma facing me form one wall of a murky little sitting room and the two on the right screen a dining recess. In the recess is an eighteen-inch-high lacquer table over a hole resembling a garage inspection pit. These holes enable lovers of old Japanese habits to cheat: they sit on the floor, yes, but with their legs dangling instead of folded under them in excruciating discomfort. Some advanced Japanophiles protest that they like sitting on their heels, but I wonder if they really enjoy doing so. I am glad that my landlord doesn’t, for I hate sitting on the floor without any support for my back. There is a sliding door between the recess and the kitchen. Except for a picture window that looks on an umbragious garden of rocks, shrubs, and trees, the walls of the sitting room consist of sliding doors; on one wall, however, there is just enough space for an abstract painting: blobs of crimson on a gray background.
I slide open the doors opposite the window and nearly bump my nose on a television set above which is an air conditioner. I turn on the latter but it doesn’t work; the former does. It is very hot in this little room of doors and I don’t much care for television. On a table between the two bench seats that make up the Western-style furniture is a vase of white chrysanthemums. I remember the gladioli in the genkan (the porch-entryway) and wonder how these flowers have kept alive, for I know my landlord left over a week ago. The vase is full of water. The daily maid must have put them there.
I open the one sliding door that remains to be opened and I find myself in a dark passage: on the left is the bathroom, a narrow room that contains in a row a hand basin, a lavatory (sit-down type, thank heavens!), a shower, and, at the end by the window, a deep Japanese wooden tub. I fumble about the passage and push open yet another sliding door and discover a room in Japanese style with matted floor and no furniture. There is a pile of five cushions and in the tokonoma are a pottery vase with no flowers in it and a scroll of calligraphy. One side of the room consists of two paper-paneled sliding doors that screen sliding windows which give on to another part of the garden and the main house-”my” house is only a subsidiary building on the property. Though very hot and stuffy this room is charming and is, I conjecture, a moon-viewing room. I don’t think that I shall be using it much, not that there won’t be a moon to view, but it would mean sitting on the floor.
Outside this room there is another precipitous staircase which I climb on all fours. In the room above the moon-viewing room I find evidence of female occupation. A futon is laid out on the tatami with sheets and a small pillow; the top sheet is rolled back and the bottom sheet is no longer tucked under the futon. It looks as if someone got up in a hurry and didn’t have time to roll up the futon or fold the sheets; also, there are clothes, underclothes, and blouses on the floor, screwed up, unwashed; and other clothes hang from hangers hooked on to the ledge above the window. In the room there is a smell, a smell of perfume and of a woman. Who is she? A caretaker about whom I have not been informed? I am disconcerted and curious, outraged and expectant. I was told that the maid was a daily.
I descend the ladder-like stairs backwards and cross the house to the other staircase, which I mount with caution. The bedroom at the top, although matted, has Western comforts: a double bed, a bedside table with a reading lamp, a chest of drawers, a cupboard for clothes, a desk with an angle-poise lamp, book shelves, two basket armchairs, and two large windows. One window looks into the garden of the main house and the gray-tiled roof of an outhouse, and the other, which faces the little street, looks across to a temple compound planted with pines and poplars and the veranda entrance of the principal building, the roof of which sweeps gently downwards to turn upwards at the corners in graceful curves.
I lug my suitcases up the stairs and unpack in the gale of an electric fan. It is a leaden day and the air is heavy and humid. And then, still feeling an interloper, I examine the kitchen. I am delighted to find that this important room in the house is well equipped and contains an interesting collection of cookery books including Larousse Gastronomique and Cuisines et Vins de France by Curnowsky, Prince élu des Gastronomes (1927). I take these two tomes upstairs and peruse them. The colored photographs of the oie aux marrons and chapon du maitre Raymond make my mouth water and I quite forget that I lunched in the buffet car on the train, albeit badly, when I read on of the suggested menus d’été. What shall I do about dinner? Go out? I doze off with the book of the Prince élu des Gastronomes open at a picture of carée de porc en bellevue, which looks tempting and succulent, wondering whether the lady of the upper moon-viewing room can cook.
2
When I awake my neck and back are sticky with sweat. I put a towel round what was once my waist (since giving up smoking my stomach has swollen disastrously) and go down the dangerous stairs sideways, one step at a time, with my hands clinging to the walls in the manner of an amateur mountaineer descending a smooth rock face. A whiff of scent pervades the sitting room. “She” has obviously just passed through the house and gone up the other stairs