Kyoto on Home Services

Jan

Kyoto

posted by admin in Window Cleaning

Before I went to Japan, all my impressions of the place came from novels and movies. I’d read Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, which is haunted by inexplicable suicides and peopled with brittle, miserable characters. I’d seen Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru, about a council worker who discovers he has stomach cancer and wants to accomplish something, despite all the red tape, before he dies. A friend had lent me a strange little book, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima, about a withdrawn, stuttering Zen monk who becomes so obsessed by the gold-leaf pavilion at the temple where he trains, that he eventually burns it down. Mishima, a postwar novelist, followed a traditional (and by then anachronistic) bushido samurai code. Having completed the last novel in a tetralogy, he attempted to stage a coup d’etat at Tokyo’s military headquarters. When the soldiers he addressed just laughed at him, he committed seppuku (ritualistic suicide). When I thought about it, all of the Japanese books I’d read were of a mournful cast. They were all, more or less, about a person who is experiencing some sort of crisis that goes largely unnoticed by the people around them. I wondered whether, in Japan, I would get a sense of that alienation and despondency. I conjured a place where hordes of people pushed past me on neon-bathed footpaths, as I gasped in filthy air. I expected to find myself in contravention of inexplicable rules. It wasn’t like that at all, though. Much of Tokyo was peaceful. I was even annoyed, at times, by slow walkers. Even the most crowded places were scrupulously clean. Touring through the city on various subway lines, it became apparent that, rather than densely massed skyscrapers of flashing glass and steel, the city has more comfortable, low-rise 1960s office blocks. I STAYED IN the Royal Park Shiodome Tower, in a newly developed, business-y part of town, and was constantly drawn to the window. The hotel has its reception lobby on the 24th floor, and many of the rooms above bestow views onto the sludgy Sumida River and the 17th century Hamarikyu gardens. It’s always reassuring to look out your window in a foreign place and see the city spread tidily beneath you. From a height, Tokyo looks manageable. From the edge of the Hamarikyu gardens, you can catch a somewhat scenic waterbus to Asakusa to visit Senso-ji temple, the city’s oldest temple, rebuilt most recently after the 1945 bombings that destroyed two-fifths of Tokyo. Asakusa used to be Tokyo’s downtown, and a reporter who was stationed there after the war described it recently in Time magazine, as having been “packed, gaudy, sexy, meretricious and completely enchanting. “How many times,” he recalls, “did I take the Ginza Line to the very end and surface into this sexy stratum, redolent of oysters over rice and camellia hair oil, cotton candy and underarm sweat.” These days, Asakusa is more likely to be redolent of fast food restaurant grease and the peculiar whiff of cheap luggage shops. But to my mind, the Senso-ji temple, at least, is pungent with faded romance. I wandered down the Nakamise, an avenue of souvenir stalls, fragrant with battered snacks, that runs from the Thunder Gate entrance to where the temple properly begins. If you turn right at the end of the Nakamise, there’s a place that sells soft-serve ice-cream in interesting flavours like wasabi and lavender. I bought a delicately flavoured rose icecream and strolled around, with the icecream seller’s jaunty 1950s string orchestra music playing in my head. Nearby, is a small shrine to Kume no Heinai-do, a samurai from the 17th century who, late in his career, was stricken with guilt at all the lives he’d so expertly taken. He became a Zen Buddhist and held services for those he’d killed, becoming something of a religious figure in the process. Before he died, Kume no Heinai-do ordered a statue of himself to be made and buried in the busiest part of town, so that he would be walked over by as many people as possible. This demonstration of abasement, he hoped, would expiate some of his guilt. Curiously, over the years he came to be worshipped as a deity of marriage. Was there some bitter irony intended in equating being walked over with being married? Or perhaps this was some sort of harsh Zen lesson about married life. Later I read that it’s a simple accident: over time, the word Fumitsuke, meaning “to tread on”, was misread as the word for “love-letter”, which is pronounced the same way. It’s not as prepossessing as camellia hair oil or underarm sweat, but this mix-up seemed, like the rose icecream, to be a pretty, fanciful thing. TOKYO RESIDENTS like to get away as much as the next person, and they have nearby Hakone, population 14,000, for their weekend retreats. Hakone is sister city to Taupo. Set in a gorge, it has a gorgeous lake, more like Te Anau than Taupo, and a cable car and hot springs like Rotorua. It’s kitschy in a way that you secretly like a holiday destination to be: there’s a museum displaying art deco glassware and jewellery by Rene Lalique, a Pullman Express salon car where you can take tea and there’s a large museum devoted to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince. Marquetry is big there. As we arrive, the humid late-summer weather has turned into a light, aromatic drizzle. A cable car takes us through forests of bamboo and Japanese maple, with the occasional clump of hydrangeas, towards a sulphurous geothermal area where tour buses park up and people mosey around. The cable car drops us at Lake Ashi, which we tour in a replica pirate ship. (Taupo, take note.) The passengers giggle knowingly at this piece of tweeness, but the lake is uncrowded and screensaver-pretty. Wisps of cloud escape from the forested hills. A stand of handsomely maintained cedars grows right down to the water’s edge. A light breeze stipples the otherwise glassy surface of the lake. On board, there are plastic seats made to look like little barrels, and screens show a GPS map of our progress. As we reach the far side of the lake and look back, a succession of fjord-like hill edges recede into gradations of mist. Camera shutters work frantically. We take a bus to Fujiya Hotel, an inordinately beautiful, 140-year-old hotel, and the oldest in Japan. Behind the florally art deco and 1950s furnishings, are the Fujiya’s antique bones: there are dark wood panels carved with gourds, a favourite leitmotif since samurai times. Beside the lobby is the “magic room”, a pre-dinner gathering spot where, from the looks of the 19th century photos, magicians performed tricks, ladies showed off their gowns and men their moustaches. Before dinner, we visit the hotel’s museum. It has magnificent framed portraits of former guests. There’s John Lennon in straw fedora and beige ensemble next to a surly looking Yoko and a young Sean. There’s Helen Keller in a kimono, handling a long-tailed rooster; there’s Charlie Chaplin looking puckish in tennis whites; there’s Frank Lloyd Wright presumably soaking up some Japanese influences and there’s a grave-faced, beetle-browed Yukio Mishima with his new bride, honeymooning in the hotel. As we left the museum, our Japanese guide remarked that tomorrow in Kyoto, we would visit the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. I was astonished as I hadn’t realised it existed outside of the novel. But it did. It was built for a 14th century Shogun who willed it to be converted into a Zen temple, and it really was burnt down, in 1950, by a stammering acolyte, just like in the novel. After a diligently authentic five-course French dinner accompanied by a Kir Royal and French wines in the hotel’s sumptuous ballroom, I went to bed thinking again about Mishima. His hypnotic novel had made me obsess about the golden pavilion, described so repetitively in the book, and I had big expectations of my first sight of it. I DIDN’T HAVE to wait long. It took two hours on the Shinkazen bullet train to reach Kyoto the next morning and on arrival, a guide with a minivan chauffeured us directly there. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion had been burnt down by the crazy monk, he said simply, “because he wanted to keep its beauty for himself”. The Japanese were amazed and distraught that a beloved national treasure, having survived the war, was now ruined. Rebuilding began in 1955 and by 1987, with about $8 million of donations, the temple’s gold leaf was restored. En route, our guide also explained Wabi-sabi culture to us, the austere, melancholy Zen Buddhist aesthetic so recognisably Japanese that focuses on impermanence and imperfection. We made our way toward the temple amidst vast groups of school children and although first sight of the Golden Pavilion is obscured by pine boughs, it’s still an utterly breathtaking scene. Completely covered in gold leaf, the pagoda sits at the far end of a pond, floating in mirror image on its surface, and surrounded by moss-covered gardens. It looks serenely powerful and holy. I definitely didn’t want to burn it down, but I was prevented from working myself into an obsessional frenzy by Japanese school children who wanted to practice their English on me. “Do you like sushi?” “How do you like Japan?” “Have you been here before?” I was all set to stock up on Yukio Mishima lip balm and Yukio Mishima soap-on-a-rope, but he was strangely absent. There were no copies of his novel in the souvenir shop and, as far as I could tell, no mention was made of Mishima anywhere in the place. Perhaps the book is famous, but not popular, in Japan. A few minutes drive away is the Ryoan-ji temple, which houses one of the world’s top Zen gardens. This was a delicately thrilling site to visit. To get to the garden, you pass a lake full of reassuringly picture-perfect waterlilies and snowy white swans. It is very peaceful and people walk slowly. You remove your shoes at the old monk’s quarters and walk across tatami mats to the “karesansui” (rock garden), which is a bed of white gravel about 10m x 30m, containing 15 rocks, laid out in such a way that you can never see all 15 at once. You take a seat, gaze at the garden’s stark arrangement and meditate upon impermanence and imperfection your own, your fellow man’s, the world’s. This is harder than you’d think. You sit and look, your mind wanders, you realise crossly that your mind has wandered. Zen is a ticklish thing to get a handle on. Also, tourists have a Pavlovian response to anything that lots of people are staring at they can’t help but fumble for the camera. Worse, if others are already photographing something, then it must be a spectacle worth documenting, and you don’t want to be the only one to come home without a picture of it. I did manage one enlightened, or at least dimly illuminated, thought, but like a broken record, it pertained to Mishima: now, there’s a guy, I thought, who could have used a few moments at Ryoan-ji. What a quixotic character. On the one hand, sweetly idealistic, trying to push his old-fashioned chivalric code onto a cynical, postwar public. On the other, he seemed horribly jaded and bitter, too unforgiving of the world to live in it, if it failed his unrealistic expectations. It may be counter-intuitive, but to accept imperfection is to live more properly and more gainfully in the world. I fired off a few more shots. Rose Hoare visited Japan courtesy of Air New Zealand. Fact file Air New Zealand flies direct to Narita airport in Tokyo from Auckland and Christchurch daily. Royal Park Shiodome Tower, Tokyo. Visit http://rps-tower.co.jp/english/. All rooms have free internet access. Fujiya Hotel, Hakone. Visit www.fujiyahotel.jp/english/. For the Senso-ji temple, head away from the Asakusa waterbus station on Kaminarimon-dori. You’d have to be trying, to miss the Thunder Gate at the entrance to Nakamise-dori. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (entry costs 400 yen, about $4.70) and the Ryoan-ji Temple (500 yen or about $5.80) are within 30 minutes’ walk of each other. Take Bus 25 or 101 from Kyoto Station and get off at Kinkakuji. Further study: Banana Yoshimoto, the daughter of a famous philosopher, writes novels and short stories that span the pop culture/literature divide. Kitchen is her first novel. Haruki Murakami is Japan’s most famous contemporary author, and Norwegian Wood was his first big success. There’s a 1985 Paul Schrader biopic about Yukio Mishima with music by Philip Glass, called Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters but if you manage to find a copy in New Zealand, let me know. A word about facilities. Many of the toilets, in nicer buildings like hotels and fancy malls, have built-in seat warmers, as well as front and back bidets. They’re not bewildering to use. . In less fancy places, you’ll use a squat toilet and there’s usually a handbar to help you stay upright. A word about chopstick etiquette. It’s possible to blaspheme with chopsticks. After a funeral cremation, family members will use chopsticks to pick bones out of the ashes, passing the bones around amongst them, before placing them in an urn. For this reason, it’s considered sacrilegious to pass food to someone directly from your chopsticks to theirs. Similarly, because of the way incense is burnt, you should never leave your chopsticks jammed upright into your bowl of rice. You take a seat, gaze at the garden’s stark arrangement and meditate upon impermanence and imperfection your own, your fellow man’s, the world’s.