Perhaps it will not seem surprising, therefore, that this ancient samurai residence, in the shogun stronghold closest to ancient Kyoto, was now home base for a powerful warrior of modern Japan. Matsuo Noda.
Samurai had once battled in Sasayama's streets; many's the time its castle had been stormed by raging armies; much blood had been shed and much honor lost. But the event that occurred in Sasayama precisely two weeks after Tamara Richardson's dinner in New York was a historical moment more important than any in its thousand years prior.
It began shortly after dawn, a cool September gray just ripening to pink over the mountains. The early sounds of morning--birdsong, the faint bell of the tofu seller, the steam whistle of the autumn sweet- potato vendor--were only beginning to intrude on the quiet. Noda was where he always was at this moment: on the veranda overlooking his personal garden, a classic Zen-style landscape whose central pond was circled by natural-appearing rocks, trees, bushes, paths. It was, of course, about as "natural" as those sculptured hedges at Versailles. In order to create the illusion of perspective and depth, the stones along the foreshore of the pond were bold, rugged, massively detailed, while those on the opposite side were dark, small, smooth--a little trick to make them seem farther away than they were.
It's a game heavy with nuance. For example, the stone footpath on the left side of the pond may look as if it goes on forever, but that's just part of the art: the stones get smaller toward the back, curving in and out among the azalea bushes till they make one last twist and disappear among the red pines and maples at the rear. Which trees, incidentally, have themselves been slightly dwarfed, again enhancing the illusion of distance, just as the back is deliberately shaggy and dark, like the beginnings of a forest that goes on for miles.
Noda's Zen garden, which deludes rational judgment by manipulating all the signposts we use to gauge distance and space, appeared to be limitless. The secret was that nothing actually ends: everything simply fades out and gets lost. It was a closed space that seemed for all the world as if it went on and on if you could only somehow see the rest of it. Yet peek only a few yards away, and you've got the mundane streets of sleepy Sasayama.
This special dawn, as a few frogs along the edge of the
pond croaked into the brisk air, he knelt on the viewing veranda in a fine cotton morning robe, a _yukata_ emblazoned with his family crest (an archaic Chinese ideogram meaning "courage") and began to center his mind. He'd left his Kyoto headquarters early Friday evening, skipping the usual after-hours-drinking obligation of Japanese executives and grabbing the eight-thirty San-in Express to Sonobe, where his limo waited to bring him the rest of the way home. Now he was up before daybreak and readying his usual morning ritual. As he sat there, gazing across the placid water dotted with lotuses at the foreshore and framed with willows at the far horizon, his silver hair contrasted with the marine blue of the robe to create a presence easily as striking as the garden itself.
For a time he merely knelt, silently contemplating the view and listening to the metrical drip of water from a bamboo spout situated just at the edge of the steps. Finally he turned and picked up his _sumi _stick, a block of dried ink made from soot, and carefully began to rub it against the concave face of an ancient inkstone, till its cupped water darkened to just the proper shade. When the fresh ink was ready, he wet a brush in a separate water vessel, dried it by stroking it against a scrap of old paper, dipped it into the dark liquid, and looked down.
This was the moment that demanded perfect composure, absolute control. Before him was a single sheet of rice paper, purest white, and now his hand held the brush poised. He was waiting for that instant when his senses clicked into alignment, when the feel of the brush merged with his mind, much the way a samurai's _katana _blade must become an extension of his own reflexes.
Although he would stroke only a few kanji characters, scarcely enough for a telex or a memo, the moment required discipline acquired through decades of practice. His Zen-style calligraphy allowed for no hesitation, no retouching. It must be dashed off with a spontaneity that was, in itself, part of the art. As with the swordsman, there could be no time for conscious thought, merely the powerful stroke guided by intuition. No decision that confronted him throughout a business day would demand half so much mental control, inner resolve.
Just then, at the far end of the pond, the first sun flickered through the wisteria. Suddenly, without his consciously knowing the exact moment had arrived, as a Zen archer's arrow must release itself of its own will, his hand struck. The dark tip of
the brush pirouetted down the paper, starting at the left and laying down a mere five lines, twenty-two syllables.
_Inishie ni
_Once held_,_
_ari kemu hito no
_it's said, _
moteri cho
_by men of long ago,_
omitsuwa wo
_my ancient prize-- _
ware wa mochitari
_at last is near!_
_
It was done.
He sighed, leaned back, and reached for the cup of green tea that rested beside him on the polished boards. The verse was in an archaic style, a few syllables longer than a haiku, modeled on an eight- hundred-year-old work by a court poet of the Heian era. The strokes were perfectly nuanced, the flow of the brush precise, the intuitive strength as natural as a waterfall.
Noda drained his tea, then rose to go back inside. His antique house was tastefully "empty": its _tatami_-floored rooms, measured in multiples of those standard three-by-six reed mats, were barren, a museum to times past. They also were open to each other, their sliding doors, _fusuma_, being pushed wide. The walls, too, were vacant expanses of white plaster with only an occasional mounted six-fold screen depicting poetry parties of the Heian era, that courtly civilization portrayed in The Tale of Genji. And there were no overhead lights, merely an occasional cypress _andon_ floor lamp to augment the pastel glow of the rice-paper shop windows.
"_Asa-han_." He curtly ordered his gray-haired cook to bring breakfast, then turned to mount the ancient stairs.
"_Hai_." She nodded and was gone.
Although he kept the lower floor exactly as it had been two centuries past, the upstairs was a different matter entirely. It had been converted into a high-tech office, hooked through a maximum security TeleSystems TCS-9000 direct uplink (via the mid-Pacific Mareks-B satellite) to the mainframe of his new NEC information management system in the Kyoto headquarters, an augmented NEAX 2400 IMS, which handled voice, data, text, image. He had scarcely flipped on the system when the woman who managed his kitchen appeared, bowing, and deposited a tray bearing _miso _broth, rice, an uncooked egg, and more tea.
He grunted thanks as he was checking a CRT screen for the current rate on Fed funds, the cost of the money American banks lend each other overnight to meet reserve requirements. No surprises. Then he turned and cracked the egg over his rice, adding a leaf of dried _nori _seaweed. As he leaned back, chopsticks in hand, he quickly glanced through the Tokyo papers, followed by The Asian Wall Street Journal and the satellite edition of London's Financial Times. Finally he tossed them aside.
This was always the moment when he liked to take measure of the three photos standing in a row across the back of his teak desk. The first was his deceased wife Mariko--long-suffering, deferential, resignedly selfless. A model Japanese woman. He still thought of her with fondness, but as was expected of a Japanese helpmate, she always ran a distant second in his affections. His work came first.
The next picture was very different. This woman's face was white, her hair a lacquered wig, her lips a tiny red pout. Her name, Koriko, had been assigned years ago in the Gion district of Kyoto, and she was holding a three-stringed lute, a samisen, and intoning some classical melody from centuries past. These days she purchased thousand-dollar kimonos the way most office girls bought jeans, but she worked for the money. She was a geisha, a real one, an artist whose calling required years of training and commanded the awe of even the most modern Japanese. Like a prizefighter or a matador, she'd spent long painful hours perfecting style, technique, art. She had been Noda's one-time protegee, beneficiary of his patronage. Now, though, she had other "patrons." He still missed her, but the memory was fading.
The third photo was a face familiar to all of Japan's avid TV viewers-- Akira Mori. She was wearing a dark blue Western suit, her hair a glossy pageboy cut, the conservative look of times past. It was the occasion of her graduation from the School of Law, Tokyo University (Tokyo Daigaku, or Todai as it's known), an important moment. Todai's alumni represent a network, a _batsu_, of the country's ruling elite, who compete with each other for the choicest, most prestigious government ministries. Although she had chosen a more visible career, she still relied heavily on her contacts in this governing clique, heads of the leading ministries, including Finance, Foreign Affairs, and of course the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, MITI.