JOURNEY TO THE WEST--TO FIND THE EAST

In Imitation of Matsuo Basho's
Narrow Road to the Interior

        We left Hutchinson, Kansas, by automobile, that Friday morning in June, 1981, on a Journey to the West, in search of new knowledge out of the East, out of the pages of the Japanese books then becoming available in English translation in increasing numbers.  It was a missionary venture, in the service of the idea that had given birth to the paper I'd read five years earlier at the Emporia General Education Conference, The Humanities Will Rise Again--Out of the East, and in the tradition of Walt Whitman's Passage to India, to "eclaircize the myths Asiatic."  I was 52, but still an enthusiast.
        The unforeseen problems always met on a journey often involve road conditions.  The day and night before there had been heavy rains and flooding north and east of Hutchinson, so, only a few miles north of town, about where Highway 61 crosses the Little Arkansas, we met the water, perhaps a foot deep, flooding across the highway--but cars continued crossing.

  The road now a lake
  Motorcycles stand and watch
  Cars tiptoe across.

        I had been in Hutchinson for almost a month, working on a production of my Mishima, a play I'd written attempting to adapt the forms of the classical Noh drama to the handling of a modern subject, the death of Yukio Mishima, one of a number of exercises in translation I'd been involved in--this one involving translation of form--as a means of coming to terms with Japanese literature.  I was to return by air the following weekend for the single scheduled performance, June 28th.  The technical problems of production made this a collaboration in interpretation with Repha Buckman, a poetess who had risen to the challenge of trying to do Noh in the middle of Kansas.  I had rewritten a line here and there, but rehearsals were going well, and I felt comfortable about going off on my pilgrimage.

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  From out of the past
  Symbols of sword and temple
  Mishima's gesture
        So we were on our way.  An hour or so of slow and cautious driving through the water, then, local flood conditions behind us, we pulled onto our own "Tokaido Road," I-70, the great Interstate going west, in Salina.  That highway passes two blocks north of our home in Topeka and, having made the day-long drive west to Denver many times, we settled in to the familiar rhythm of the long flat miles across Western Kansas.
  Grain elevators
  Shining white through dust devils
  Far in the distance
        We were used to making the trip to Denver with our four boys, with a three-quarter mattress in the back of a 1967 Chevrolet station wagon.  Now there was just Naomi and me, in a 1973 Mercury Comet, loaded with baggage, books, and a typewriter, for a summer with Masao Miyoshi and Earl Miner in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar at the University of California.  When with the boys we passed the time playing games, watching for license plates from other states as we passed or were passed by other cars, betting, when we first saw it, which side of the highway a water tower or grain elevator would be on when we got to it (which also became a test of memory, once we had been that way before), or setting up a prize for the first one to see the mountains as we drove on into Colorado.  Naomi and I didn't play the license plate game, beyond commenting on an occasional odd one, from Rhode Island or Louisiana, but we did bet on grain elevators (best bet, the side of the highway the railroad was on), and did watch for the mountains.

  Real or illusion?
  Way off on the horizon
   More clouds or mountains?

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        We didn't stop in Denver this time, where I have an uncle we have often stayed overnight with.  To make it to San Francisco in three days we wanted to get at least as far as Laramie the first night, so saved a stop in Denver for on the way home.  Staying in Laramie was made certain by tire trouble.  We had re-cap snow tires on the rear of the car without tread enough to make it through another winter and had decided to run them.  The tread began pealing off of one of them ten miles from Laramie--first a little ticking, then more, then a thumping on the inside of a fender--so we limped in, and then spent three hours finding a pair of new tires and negotiating the change.  Of course, we would have saved time and money by buying those new tires at home, but who knows what an automobile will do?
  Out on the highway
  Watching gauges and mileage
   Hearing strange noises

        We were taking the northern route, across Wyoming.  It was a little longer, but still a faster and less complicated way to Salt Lake City.  On this long straight road Naomi did most of the driving, as I reread Masao Miyoshi's Accomplices of Silence, on four modern Japanese novelists, alternating with Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior--reading about a trip on a trip--in preparation for the summer.  I had read Miyoshi's book four years earlier, when I had done papers on two of the authors, Mishima and Kawabata, but knew most of the novels discussed better now--my play having made use of many things from Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, for example.  I still hadn't read the two Soseki novels, however, and promised myself I would that summer, for Miyoshi's comments made me sure I'd like Soseki better the better I got to know him.  As we got to the halfway point in our journey, over known ground, I was getting about halfway through those two books, thinking about those authors as links in a great tradition.

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  A book read again
  As miles flow past the windows--
  In media res
        This was the longest day, across Wyoming, then, bypassing Salt Lake City--saving it, too, for on the way back--out onto the salt flats, driving across Utah.  At one stop to change drivers we followed the example of hundreds of previous tourists and spelled out our names in white rocks on the face of the vast white desert, with its strip of black highway running down the middle.  Brigham Young was wise to stop in Salt Lake City.
  Across the salt flats
  Infinite plain of whiteness
  Names left in the stones
        And, after Utah, Nevada.  It was hard to realize there was that much open country upon which people could find nothing to exploit.  There are many such areas in the world, without enough water, perhaps, and then the vast seas, with too much--but not a drop to drink.  As the day was ending, we drove into Elko, a town composed almost entirely of modest motels, and modest places to gamble, but with little of the glare and glitter of Las Vegas or Reno.
  Out in the desert
  Waiting for tired tourists
  A ribbon of lights

        We stayed in one of the motels--television, queen-sized bed, $30 for the night.  This raise in price for a motel room, and the increased cost of gasoline, should, one would think, cure the Humbert Humberts of this world of miscellaneous travel by automobile.  But America is still, obviously, on the road--an automobile society. Many of the motel signs already read "No Vacancy."  Even stopping a little early, we felt lucky to have arrived before they all filled up.  But we had a good meal, and spent a comfortable night, without being tempted to gamble.

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        We got up early the next morning, planning to get from Elko, Nevada, to Berkeley, California, by the middle of the afternoon, so we could take a look at the apartment we had arranged for by mail and get settled before dark.  We stopped for breakfast at a Denny's restaurant in Winnemucca, however, and lost close to an hour through slow service, so decided to drive right through Reno.  I'd spent my freshman year in college there, one of the most memorable years of my life, but there wasn't time to visit old memories and still get to Berkeley while it was daylight, so we saved Reno, too, for on the way home.
        Naomi had driven more than I had up to that point, and, as we left Reno, heading West, said she'd drive again as soon as the traffic let up.  It never did.  It was bumper-to-bumper from there all the way to Berkeley--and from then on all summer in California.  So she never drove the car while we were in California at all, didn't drive again until we were leaving Reno heading East two and a half months later.
  Crowding the highways
  Weekend drivers all week long--
  California

        The sun was setting by the time we arrived in Berkeley, but we had no problem finding the apartment we had arranged for (and a place to park right in front of it--which never happened again).  Geta Buckman, the woman in the university housing office we had corresponded with, had finally given us a choice over the phone of a nice open view of the bay on the north side of the University of California campus, but requiring a short bus ride, or an apartment on the south side of the campus that was "just a little like a cave" but within easy walking distance of everything.  We chose the convenient cave, and came to be very glad we had.  Though it was a little forbidding that first evening, in the back corner on the first floor of a U-shaped apartment building, seeming to get little natural light, the small  southwest corner

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room turned out to be one where you could read all day long by the light from the window, which was perfect for me.  And the apartment couldn't have been better located to expose us to the spectrum of university life.  We need only walk the block and a half to Telegraph Street to be in the middle of the colorful world of the street people, or the single block up to the main entrance to the campus to sense the international range and flavor of the life that had been attracted there.
  A block and a half
  A short trip around the world--
  The world of Berkeley
        The next morning, Monday, the Institute met for the first time.  We received a briefing on status, facility privileges, and requirements, and discussed procedural options.  The Japanese of most was much stronger than mine--many had advanced degrees in Japanese Studies, some taught in such programs, some had written books.  I was sure my language skills would prove the most limited.  I had looked at the Japanese materials I had received in the mail with some trepidation, since it still took me an hour and a half, with two dictionaries, to read the average page.  I was concerned that I'd be left behind, or left confused, most of the time.  But I still wanted to try it all.  We were to meet Mondays and Wednesdays, morning and afternoon, and there was a suggestion that the group work in Japanese in the morning and in English in the afternoon.  I was hoping I'd be allowed to sit in on the Japanese sessions, even if I did miss most of what was being said, and was pleased when some of those strongest in Japanese said that they wanted to sit in on the discussions in English.  It became clear that there would be no division of the group by language--all came to all.

  Language can divide
  But reaching for the language
  Makes one of many

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        I spent most of the next day, in that back corner room, reading Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Man, which was moved ahead of the scheduled work by his contemporary, Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior.  I had used the book in the first course in Japanese literature I had taught, in 1974.  I thought of Yonosuke as a middle-class, or floating world, Genji, Saikaku reducing Lady Murasaki's classical love aesthetic to pleasure-quarters lust through both the values and the "life-style" of his central character, and of the book (so its author) as having something of the urbane flavor of Boccaccio (whom I also know only in translation), but Saikaku was not one of my favorite Japanese authors.  Another day with him did not change my mind.  I thought of the line in the TV commercial, "But you don't have any taste, Donny dear."  This was reinforced for me the next day when his fluency as a renga poet was emphasized in our discussions; he might have written more haikai in an afternoon than Basho did in a lifetime, but I would wager that half a dozen of Basho's are worth the whole set.  Still, Saikaku probably does reflect the whole floating world mystique better than either Basho or Chikamatsu.  The Life of an Amorous Man is an indulgent, loosely chronological narrative, presenting a loose set of values.  Of course, The Tale of Genji  isn't much better structurally--much Japanese literature is just as episodic.
  Japanese fiction
  From classical to modern--
  Don't look for a plot!

        We got up early Thursday, so I could take Naomi to the Oakland bus station to catch a bus to Eugene, Oregon, to spend three weeks with her mother and family.  Then, that afternoon I caught a plane at the San Francisco airport to Denver, then another to Wichita, to be picked up by Repha (no relation to Geta) Buckman, my director, for the last fifty miles back to Hutchinson by automobile.  I had come back in half a day from

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where it had taken us three hard days of driving to get.  As it happened, Robert Patrick, featured guest playwright at this festival for new plays, arrived from the opposite coast, from the New York off-Broadway milieu that he shared with Steve Nelson, one of the other playwrights, at the same time.  My first impression was positive, and I came to like him very much.
  From East and from West
  From very different worlds
  To meet in Kansas
        There had been another week of rehearsals and I was anxious to see what was happening to Mishima.  The dress rehearsal was scheduled for Saturday morning, before the festival workshops began, so that I could be there to see it, and, all in all, I was very well pleased.  I saw the completed costumes and the puppets the chorus members were to manipulate, and heard the final tape of the music.  And Rob Caudillo, the actor playing the student, was much improved.
        The setting for the play is the Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and, not being able to fabricate anything that would give the impression of the temple, or of a genuine Noh stage, Repha, with strong support from the cast, had chosen to do the play in a little grove in Dillon Park.  That grove had been discovered by John Hines, the actor who was playing Mishima, and suggested after one of Repha's concentration exercises.  Though the trees were very different, the grove did, in fact, remind me of the kind of sylvan setting the Kinkakuji has, in suburban Kyoto.  I would never have thought of staging the play there myself, but I liked the idea very much, and took it as a symbol of Repha's spirit tuning to the themes of the play, collaborating in this translation from the Japanese.

  Out there in the woods
  The discovery of a place
  A sylvan temple

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        I had been pleased with what John was doing with a stylized Mishima from the first, and he and Gary Witt, playing Saigo, had their sword dance down well.  But Rob, as the student, had gone through a curve, from wooden ritual, almost as if he did not understand any of the lines, to a kind of natural delivery, which was not getting any of the necessary stylization, and did not play well against John at all, at the time I left, to a rather nicely paced and stylized interpretation when I came back.  I was surprised (as they say in theatre circles) by how much he had grown in the part.  I liked it, and credited that, too, to Repha's direction.  I was lucky in her--for who else would have undertaken to do a Modern Noh play in Hutchinson, Kansas, at all?
  The function of form
  Symbols of temple and sword
  The statement of art

         All three of the plays being presented in this Festival of New Plays were being done in Dillon Park, but the other two on an open-air stage.  I had gotten to know their authors pretty well in the course of the month of rehearsals, and so was interested in what was happening to those plays, too.  Both authors were young.  Steve Nelson, an energetic off-Broadway actor, acrobatic in his skills, had written a comedy, The Golden Sceptre, that turned a comic book artist into a comic book take-off hero who would strike back by robbing the robbers.  There were concerns about rain, and, with great sympathy for one another, of course, there was an undercurrent of, as Steve so candidly put it, "If you are going to rain, don't rain on my show."  With our play on Sunday afternoon, there was also the concern about too much sun, about it being too hot, though, fortunately, my play would only run for an hour, and we were mostly back in the shade.  Steve's was a very active play, with a lot of physical comedy, and the major roles were taken by the

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Hutchinson Repertory Company professionals, with the female lead played by Carol Nelson, Steve's wife, who had played the part in a previous off-Broadway production.
        Mary Koisch was the other playwright, a young woman, teacher, artist, from Rhode Island, whose husband is a director at a school there.  Hers was a dream play, Bark, set in the 1930's in a carnival.  Mary had rewritten extensively, while I had only rewritten a line or two here and there, usually just a phrase, or a word, John was having trouble with, so the same experience was very different for the two of us, with Steve falling somewhere in between.
  First the idea
  Then facing all those people
  The living theatre

        I call my play an exercise in translation of form.  There are as many problems in that as there are in translation of content.  Repha Buckman entered into the spirit of the transaction very well, I thought, though I certainly would not have agreed with her on every choice she made.  We didn't have the Noh stage, and couldn't build one, so we tried to affirm what might be called the Shinto source in taking it back under a dominating tree, to bring the tree at the back of the stage back to life, so to speak.  We didn't have the Noh music, or the trained musicians, and--just as important--our audience would just find the music produced by a Noh flute and drums a strange set of sounds, so we used Japanese folk music played on a Western flute, by Rampal, where some of the audience would already have made contact, where the harp, rather than the drum, would provide the counterpoint.  We didn't have the trained chorus or the male actors, so used a female chorus, with the concept of their providing the alter-egos for the male actors, and puppets suggested by the bunraku tradition--this last a choice I would never have made myself.  But the most important element was

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still the shite, the primary actor, his capacity to command the stage, set the mood, develop the theme, and John was doing very well in all respects, had an imposing stage presence, and was obviously enjoying himself--is a good actor.
        Repha had stressed concentration from the first, that that was the key to getting as close to the Noh tradition as we could, and she used a number of exercises, about which, I have to admit, I had been none too enthusiastic.  So, as a crowd of about 100 people assembled that Sunday afternoon in our temple grove, she gathered the cast in the dressing tent for a pre-show concentration exercise, joining hands in a circle around a burning candle, as she invoked the spirit of the play.  It did seem to me to be in something of the same spirit as the Noh actor's tuning to his mask prior to performance, but communal.
  Hand in hand in hand
  Focused on a candle flame
  The Noh in Kansas
        I stood in the back to watch the audience during the play, which ran for about 50 minutes, and they seemed to be paying attention as John raised the spirit of Saigo Takemori,
  The great Saigo
  The last true samurai
  Can you see him there?

engaged in kendo dance with him, and mimed Mishima's seppuku.  I had debated whether to have Mishima assume the spirit of Saigo for a solo dance, in the manner of Sotoba Komachi, or have the ghost appear for a duet.  I had finally decided on the latter, and was quite pleased with the simple swordplay choreography we had worked out, as the chorus recited the lines, then Saigo retreated into a shadow of Mishima, echoing his movement, then served as his second during his seppuku.  A good bit of rehearsal time had been spent on this, and it is at the thematic center of the play.

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  Three levels of time
  Student, author, samurai--
  One set of values
        Dr. Andrew Tsubaki, from the University of Kansas, came to the performance as critic, and commented that there was a consistency in interpretation of the Noh conventions of about 25 on a scale of 100, problems with jo-ha-kyu pacing, and an over-intellectualized script for Noh.  I accept the latter as my major problem with the play, but claim it is Mishima's as well (and see it in another character that I have just met this summer, and also identify with very strongly, Oe Kenzaburo's Mitsusaburo, from The Silent Cry).
        I left Hutchinson immediately after the critical session on Mishima (missing the cast party) to catch a ride to Wichita, to catch a plane to Denver, to catch a plane to San Francisco.  I left Hutchinson at 5:30 and was back in San Francisco at 10:30 (including an hour and a half by car to Wichita and a two-hour layover in Denver, but also counting the gain of two hours in time)--prompting me once again to reflect upon the relativity of time and space.  It had taken three long days to drive, probably three hours by air (but probably three months by wagon train and three weeks by Pony Express, from Kansas to California).
  The trip from Kansas
  West to California
  Time measuring space

        I had been working with the technical structure of Noh while in Hutchinson, and in reading the Noh plays we would be discussing the next week in Berkeley on the way back, discovered where I had lifted the lines Mishima closes with, a reference I had forgotten--then looked for without finding--right from the middle of Takasago.  But I had modified it to get the tanka syllable count, and had not been working from the Royal Tyler translation, so I'm still not sure just how I got it:

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  The world is at peace
  Calm lies over the four seas
  Happy now to live
  The soft wind scarcely moving
  In such a reign so tranquil

        I am particularly fond of the Noh for its bringing of peace out of violence, transcending the passions of this world, and had used some of the symbolism from Matsukaze, and the formal patterns from Atsumori and Sotoba Komachi.  I had first gotten interested in Noh through comparing Zeami's Sotoba Komachi with Mishima's.  The following week's discussion of the Noh in our group centered on patterns and conceptions of time and mythic elements, which I found very interesting.
        I was surprised at how empty the apartment seemed, being in it all alone, and the second day after I got back I went out and bought a used television set, which I was really proud of finding for $100.  I discovered that I don't exactly watch television most of the time, but just having it on gave me a sense of having someone else in the apartment--which was important.
       The Japan Center in San Francisco is an impressive cultural conclave, two full city blocks of Japanese shops, restaurants, agencies.  I went there twice in the course of a week, the first time by BART, the excellent subway system, to buy books at the Kinokuniya.  After I'd spent over $60 for thirteen paperback books, I decided I didn't need to own all the books, could order them for the college library and share them with others.  I came back to the Japan Center a second time by automobile, over the Oakland Bay Bridge, providing transportation for three of the women in the Institute, in order to see a drum program, where the master was one of the premiere drummers of Japan.  This was a kind of 4th of July celebration, and it was quite good, but I thought we would never get back over the bridge after it was over--that traffic made me a believer in BART.

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  Stopped short of the bridge
  The tunnel filled with exhaust
  In San Francisco

        The following week was the week that Bill Sibley joined the Institute, to talk about Kafu and Kawabata.  I already knew how much I admired The Sound of the Mountain, but had read very little Kafu, only "The River Sumida" in the Keene anthology.  I read Seidensticker's Kafu the Scribbler as preparation for the discussion, and found it an interesting book, biography balanced against translation of stories.  As Seidensticker says, Kafu did not write a single great work, but his career was significant, particularly in his nostalgia for the Edo period, his essays on slumming, and his dairy, the ground from which "Terajima no Ki" came.  It is his sense of Edo itself, the Edo he had known and can look back on and value, that is most striking.  He would visit places and reflect upon what had been: "Oh, the good old days!"  Late in his life what had been the miserable present earlier became the "good old days" in turn, not an uncommon human experience.  I like Kafu; he reminded me a lot of the American Local Color writers of the period just after the Civil War, who were meticulously concerned with realistic detail, as Kafu was, even drawing maps, and describing the local scene in vivid descriptive detail, yet saw the present place through the sentimental eyes of nostalgia.  He never really established a satisfactory relationship with a woman, bedeviled by the Japanese curse of seeking happiness with a courtesan, as if trying to live out a realistic pattern where there is only a myth.
        I was already into the problem of time and memory when we came to a discussion of The Sound of the Mountain, my favorite Kawabata, and perhaps my favorite Japanese, novel.  I felt like I was at home.  I am very fond of the old man, Shingo, in that novel.  The mixture of memory and dream with reality to define his character is exquisite, I consider the relationship with

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the daughter-in-law, as they share aesthetic experience, a genuine love story, and I like the symbolic way the Noh mask is used.  As it happened, we had seen an impressive short film on the Noh masks that Mrs. Mishima, who teaches at San Francisco Community College, had brought, that consisted of almost nothing but shots of a variety of Noh masks from a variety of angles and under different conditions, to demonstrate the power they have to evoke larger than life values.  When Kawabata describes the way Shingo looks into the mask and tunes to it to the point he almost kisses the lips, I can see myself in the old man very clearly.  That is the potential of the Noh.

  Across centuries
  The mystery of the mask
  The clue to yugen
        Naomi came back from Oregon on the bus early Friday morning, and we were invited to Mrs. Mishima's summer place on the Russian River for Saturday.  The way the fog and cool weather lies in the Bay Area could not have been more dramatically demonstrated than it was that day.  Almost as soon as we crossed the Richmond Bridge, heading north for Santa Clara, the skies cleared and it began to get warm, so that it was actually a rather warm drive up the valley to the Russian River cut-off, and down the river to Mrs. Mishima's place.  We had an enjoyable picnic in beautiful weather.  About half of the Institute members came, several with family.  We even went in swimming, as we made the most of the day.  Then Naomi and I decided to go back by the coast route, because that coast is rugged and picturesque.  As we approached the ocean, however, the fog was lying there waiting for us, so that we could only see the water occasionally.

  In less than a mile
  From sunshine into darkness
  A blanket of fog

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        The following Monday we were considering Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles, a novel which I particularly like, but I spent the time Sunday reading Soseki's Three-Cornered World, which I had never read before, but thought I would like, and started out liking very much, for the novel is essentially pictorial:

            A set of pictures
            A lyric portrait gallery
            A chapter apiece

        The pictures are used to define an artist, his values, and the mystery woman of the mountains he comes to know.  The novel  is studded with poems as well, so that the man and woman converse, almost like Genji and his women, in tanka.  I became disappointed with the book in the last half, however, as it became clear that these pictures weren't really going anywhere.
        In our discussion of Tanizaki the next day, I heard nothing new about Some Prefer Nettles, which I knew pretty well from teaching it, but Masao Miyoshi praised a Tanizaki novella, Ashikari, as the best of Tanizaki, so I went to the library to get it.   I hadn't read it before, but had read the other novella in the same book, A Portrait of Shunkin, the love story of a blind koto player.  I read both the next day, and thought more of Masao Miyoshi for liking the story so much, for it affirmed the idealization of the relationship between man and woman, which probably is the best thing in Tanizaki.  It is about a man and a woman's sister who sacrifice everything to their conception of the woman.  Evidently Tanizaki had something of this kind of relationship with his wife, so that she became uncomfortable being idealized.  Later, I saw Mizoguchi's film version of this story, but it is hard for a movie to project the conception of idealization, which has a kind of reality that is hard to catch with a camera.
        That Saturday Naomi and I went to San Francisco to spend one day just being tourists.  We rode in on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) subway, then took a cable car directly from the

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corner where we got off to Fisherman's Wharf.  There we had a crab meat cocktail, and then took a boat ride out past Alcatraz and under both of the bridges.  It was impressive to look up through the fog as we went under the Golden Gate Bridge.  When we got back we had a seafood dinner at one of the restaurants, and then walked up a couple of blocks to a restaurant-bar famous for its Irish coffee.  I had been there with Mrs. Yamamoto two weeks earlier, after the Japan Center Fair, so I was the "experienced" tourist.  We had trouble with the cable car coming back.  One of the cars got stuck and we were delayed for perhaps twenty minutes as they brought a wrecker to pull the car up the hill.

  Right in Chinatown
  The streets of San Francisco
  The cable car stalled

        I'm not sure just why, but linked verse has been one of the least attractive traditions in Japanese literature for me.  I suppose it is because I share some of the popular prejudices against Japanese verse in general, that the tanka and haiku forms are too slight to be taken very seriously as heavyweight literature and that it is surprising that a people could remain satisfied with them over the centuries, that a successful haiku might be more a matter of chance than of skill, though habituating expression to that quantity, as Shakespeare with iambic pentameter, would no doubt prepare one for the accident.  Central to this is the story of Saikaku's prolific production of haikai, usually told without examples, suggesting that none of them are really worth quoting.  I have known prolific student poets, who could turn out poetry almost faster than you could read it, though not faster than you got tired of reading it.  And the linked verse tradition seemed trivial, a game within a game, anything of merit coming out of joint composition likely to be the longest chance.

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    When anything goes
   Poems written by committee
   What can you expect?

        So it was surprising to find linked verse at the center of Earl Miner's interest, at the center of his work, at the center of the Japanese literary tradition for him.  And our consideration of renga became a revelation for me.  I still have little genuine appreciation of the renga we studied--but I had to learn to like sonnets, too.  I do see some of the interesting ways in which linked poetry is the link, between the middle ages and modern literature, between the tanka and the haiku (both of which were likely to be embedded lyric expression in a prose narrative context), and between earlier kinds of fiction, and literature more generally, and later kinds.  Most important of all was the sense of continuity projected in Earl Miner's work on Japanese poetry, from the Manyoshu to contemporary verse, for I was reading and rereading and scanning his books as we addressed this subject  (and got him to sign copies).
        Japanese Court Poetry is the classic, as every American student of Japanese literature knows, and I had known it, and read in it, for years.  I had in mind mastering its substance as part of what I would do for the summer--I had, after all, been saving the classical poetry until I knew a little more about the larger tradition which provided its setting, I told myself.  That book focuses upon the early court anthologies and how they established certain conventions in the poetry, and what they are, as they became the tradition, for all educated Japanese, from the Heian period on.  (I'd also asked Earl Miner to look at my translation of Nishio Kimiko's collection, The Cat But Seems to Sleep, and he did, but obviously didn't take it very seriously--probably didn't want to get involved giving advice to amateurs.)
        Another element in the mix is the relationship between poetry and prose, the way those short poems worked to

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highlight passages in Genji, and in other novels and diaries.  And Earl Miner had opened the summer with an analysis of an Edo period work of fiction in terms of the patterns and conventions of linked verse.  They came out of the court anthologies, and led into Edo fiction?  So what were these conventions?  The subject of much of our next week's work.
        Naomi and I took one Sunday afternoon to go up to the Botanical Garden, which was just above the football stadium from us, like almost everything else on the University of California campus, within easy walking distance of our apartment, though we drove the car, walking almost as far to where it was parked as it would have been to walk to the botanical garden, because we wanted to move the car occasionally, too, not to leave it too long in one place as a sitting target.  We noticed early on that it really got dirty just sitting there by the curb, got a lot more grime out of the air there than it did in Kansas, and also decided not to worry about that until we started home, not to spend a lot of our time washing a car that we weren't using, that really was just a nuisance to own in that environment.

  There above the bay
  That California air
  Collects on the car

        So we drove up to the Botanical Gardens, and I was in for a pleasant surprise.  I am usually not much interested in gardens.  We went on a Sunday, because the brochure said that there was a guided tour on Sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m.  We waited for about half an hour and no tour began.  The man in the office remarked that the guides were docents, volunteers, and were usually good about coming, but sometimes came late.  So we started to give ourselves the tour.  The varieties of cactus were fantastic, and I decided that cacti were my favorite plants, in spite of their associations with places that I'm not particularly

19

fond of.  There were thin cacti and fat cacti, single stalk and branching, flat and round, plain and flowering, each labeled with the country of origin.  It was interesting to try imaginatively to recreate the environment in Bolivia or Libya where these plants were native, but they all apparently thrive in the Berkeley hills--certainly the most impressive collection of cacti I've ever seen.
        Then we went over to the hill that was all native California plants, and wandered among trees and shrubs.  Then, when no one was still expecting to see her, the lady who was to be the guide showed up, apologizing for being late.  As it happened, that worked out fine, for we'd already had our own general orientation and then she led us around systematically, giving us all sorts of interesting information on when what bloomed, the kinds of problems they had getting this started, or keeping that from taking over the whole place.  We came back to the cacti at the end, and took some pictures, a couple of me sitting with my arm around a huge barrel cactus (rather cautiously, like on a first date).  I particularly like our expressions in one of those pictures.  We should try some cacti in our yard.

  On this sandy hill
  Cacti from many places
  I take as my friends

        Before going back to the apartment, we walked across the road from the garden to the redwood grove.  It was amazing the way that those few acres could create an environment.  There had been a scattering of people in the Botanical Garden, but we were alone over among the big trees.  We decided to come back there one day for a picnic lunch, and marveled again at the variety of things available within easy range of our apartment.  No doubt about it, there is much to love about the University of California campus at Berkeley--and its infinite variety.
        I came to Japanese literature through Yukio Mishima.  I know exactly when.  In the spring of 1973, two and a half years

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after he'd died to get my attention, you could say, he did.  I was thinking of resigning from teaching literature, for the curriculum I had spent years in graduate school learning how to teach was evaporating around me.  I'd taken the LSAT and was seriously planning to go to Law School, to re-tool in my middle forties for something with a future.  But I was eligible for a second Sweet Summer Sabbatical.  We had gone to England on the first one in 1969, and spent the summer pulling a caravan all over the British Isles.  It was just great, so I wanted to have one more "exotic" summer with the family before settling into the discipline of a new program, a new field of study.  I first thought of China, because Nixon and Kissinger had just opened the possibility, and Bill Marquard, a friend at Fort Hays State, invited us on a cycling trip through China he was planning.  But, by spring, it became obvious that the odds were against our getting into China.  So, while Bill continued to work on that, I thought that I'd better work on a back-up plan, going somewhere where we knew we could go, and decided on Japan.

            Instead of Law School
            Japanese Literature
            Became my future

        Grant Goodman, at KU, made this trip not only possible but very attractive with two referrals.  He referred me to the Asian American Recreation Association, which finally sold us round-trip tickets, San Francisco to Tokyo, for six, for about $1500 (I was sure that there must be a catch, but never found one).  And he referred me to people at Sophia University, which provided a summer school program in Japanese literature, and provided housing for a family of six, in Shinanomachi, right in the heart of Tokyo, within our means.  By the time these arrangements were made, I had given up on China (though Bill Marquard never did, spent much of the summer with a group in Hong Kong).  It was to be Japan, and KU's Paul McCarthy was

21

presenting an evening program, "Mishima: the Pen and the Sword," which Grant Goodman suggested I attend.

  The future is there
  It waits for us to meet it
  But who knows the road?

        That experience was absolutely pivotal for me.  I asked Jeffery, our youngest, then thirteen, if he wanted to go along, since I didn't think Naomi would.  Then Naomi decided to go, too.  When we got there, Jeffery, as he so frequently does, went right up front, while we found seats in the back.  It was to be a lecture and a film.  Paul McCarthy gave the lecture, and then they showed the film version of Mishima's Yukoku, translated as a short story as Patriotism, in the film version as Rites of Love and Death.  It was a compelling experience, whatever else may be said of it.  It commanded attention.  After Mishima, as Lt. Takayama, had committed seppuku, and the wife was dragging her kimono back and forth through the blood, Jeffery asked the man he was sitting next to whether she was going to do the same thing.  The man, who was the general master of ceremonies for the program, said that he hadn't seen the film before.  Jeffery said that if she was he wasn't going to watch.  About a third of the audience had the same feeling--they got up and left.  I brought the film to Washburn the following semester and the same thing happened there.  At any rate, in twenty minutes time, I had suddenly become interested in Japanese literature--was out the next day looking for any I could find, any Mishima, first, but any Japanese literature at all.  It wasn't easy.  The only book I found available for purchase in a Topeka bookstore was Mishima's The Sound of Waves.  Reading that convinced me that he must be a complicated author, an opinion that has never wavered.  I have been interested in Japanese literature ever since, and thoughts about law school were gone by the time we came back from our summer in Japan.

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        We approached Mishima in the seminar by reading the title story in Death in Midsummer, a collection of short stories I'd taught three times by then, so knew very well.  I'm quite fond of that story, the psychological study of a woman coming to terms with the loss by drowning of two of her children.  We also read American Hijiki for the same day, and it became a comparison/contrast exercise, all to Mishima's disadvantage among those sophisticates in things Japanese--which was very revealing to me.  I shouldn't have been surprised, since I have seldom met a Japanese who didn't know more about Mishima and like him less than he did most of his other native authors.  In the seminar Mishima was dismissed as stylistically pretentious--having no real substance.  Dr. Takahashi likes to say that Mishima was "all masks, nobody in there," and that he was too intellectual to be the great novelist Kawabata was, was manipulating readers--doing it with mirrors.

            They saw Mishima
            As calculating effects--
            All head and no heart

        Masao Miyoshi said, "like a bright schoolboy the emperor might well reward with a silver watch."  I do admire Mishima's intellectual capacity, certainly, but it is his moral commitment that most attracts me to him--or, another way of saying the same thing, the fact that he is neo-classical.  I like to think I meet Mishima halfway, on the Acropolis.  We both stood there once in our lives, looking down on Plato's Athens, though we saw our common inheritance in very different terms--through Thomas Jefferson coming one way, and bushido coming the other, I suppose--and while Mishima saw the ideal in the naked image of the statue of Apollo, I saw it in Socrates walking barefoot in the agora.
        The memory that stayed with me most strongly from that  day on Mishima, however, was the story Masao Miyoshi told about how being asked by his department chairman to interpret

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Mishima's Sun and Steel for him, followed by the sudden impact of Mishima's seppuku, had brought him abruptly back to the study of Japanese literature, from the Victorian literature that had been his specialty, finally leading him to write Accomplices of Silence.  Whatever one may think of Mishima, he had that kind of power.  And I think he will stand as one of the great authors of this century--long after the winner that afternoon, the Akiyuku Nosaka who wrote the story American Hijiki, will be forgotten. But he was not a particularly likable man, nor an easy author for a Japanese critic to praise.

  Try to escape it
  The image of Mishima
  Broods over us all
        I obviously liked Death in Midsummer more than anyone else in that room.  How long does it take to reconcile yourself to the death of your own innocent children, deaths in which you feel an implicit complicity?  And what is the nature of the reconciliation?  In its realism, and in the insight reflected in its social/psychological commentary, the Nosaka story is good fiction, but, I would say, lacks Mishima's mythic dimension, his universality, though I know that I'm prejudiced, what Nosaka (and probably Mishima, too) would expect from an American.
  They'll revive the myth
  But myth was not the purpose
  Cannot be to myth

        The middle of July they opened a Mizoguchi film festival in the Pacific Film Archive Theatre, which was part of the museum right next door to our apartment.  Naomi only went to a few of the films, but I don't believe I missed a single one of them during the time we were there, though I sometimes had to stand in line, and sometimes had to go to second showings at times that were awkward--and I feel I got a real sense of Mizoguchi.  The film I liked best was Utamaro the Artist, for its clear

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autobiographical quality.  It told the story of the five women around Utamaro who had served as models, influenced his art as the most renowned of the ukiyoe print-makers with women, geisha, as his subjects.  Five women was just the number  prominently associated with Mizoguchi, as he had made films that were dominated by women throughout his life, a fact emphasized in the biographical film that had opened the series.

  Another artist
  Giving birth to his vision
  Worked with five women

        I was strongly impressed by the spectrum of ages of those women, particularly the oldest two, as they discussed their experiences with Mizoguchi when they had been young and beautiful, and he had made them stars--one projecting a strong character, the other a now pathetic weakness--as they talked about their relationships with this creative man, when they were in their prime as cinematic beauties.  It would be hard to conceive of a pattern better calculated to make a statement about mortality than passing those five women in review, dropping about ten years in age with each move, and showing Mizoguchi also getting older in the process.  The Utamaro film made that statement, too, but went beyond that, to show how female beauty is important to an artist who works in that medium, and how strikingly that modifies the relationship.  It was also interesting to reflect on how much the ukiyoe tradition of Utamaro had in common with the film tradition of Mizoguchi, the ways they were the same and the ways they were different.  I was also surprised by how little romanticized the biographical film was.  After having seen a number of such films on TV about American directors and stars of that earlier generation, this one seemed rather to de-mythologize the man.
        It was time for another visiting expert in the seminar, Richard Bowring, from Princeton, and we opened with a

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consideration of work he was doing on the Ise Monogatari.  This was a particularly valuable session for me, not only in bringing me a better appreciation of this work, but of the relationship between poetry and prose in the classical tradition.  In an hour's time, I was convinced that without the Ise there would have been no Genji, that it provided two important components, the hero, the sophisticated ideal courtier, essentially a lover, but also a connoisseur (in this respect Genji is Narahira writ large), and the sense of narrative as a setting for poetic experience in the Kokinshu sense of communicated feeling.  The Ise Monogatari is an earlier instance in the development of the myth which is the central myth of Heian Japan, the sprezatura, the savoir faire, of the complete courtier, the ideal more important than the action.  We went on to do some very interesting things with The Tale of Genji, but the most valuable thing that this guest provided, in my judgment, was his appraisal of the Ise Monogatari:

  A long tradition
  The masterwork as the fruit
  Must have had its seeds

        Naomi and I went to a number of movies besides the international classics (including Mizoguchi) available right next door, and Gone with the Wind and other Hollywood classics offered once a week up on the campus, and, in the last half of the summer, we began to find out where the plays were.  There was an interesting series at lunchtime on campus, students doing one-act plays.  We had missed those the first month, but, once we discovered them, went when we could.  They were very popular--we missed getting in by being a little late one day.
        One of the special virtues of the Berkeley campus was that fast-food places served real food, and of various nationalities.  We fell into the habit of getting a large slice of pizza each and splitting a large cup of beer after we went to the noon-time

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play, or sometimes coming home in the evening from a movie, which gave us a meal for less than $3.00.  And it was about as inexpensive if we got beef or chicken on rice just around the corner at a Japanese short-order restaurant, where we could also get miso soup.

  Cosmopolitan
  The foods of many nations
  Within a few blocks
        We decided one Friday to visit Stanford, and buy some books, particularly books by Makoto Ueda, who teaches there.  There is a shuttle bus from Cal to Stanford, and I checked to see if Naomi would be eligible to ride on it.  It was booked so far in advance that I couldn't ride on it either.  So, since we were driving, we thought we would go on down to Big Sur, to give Rick Masten, a poet who lives there and who has visited Washburn several times, a call and visit the "Robinson Jeffers country," perhaps even stay overnight.
        It took longer than I had expected to drive to Stanford, but we enjoyed walking around that very distinctive campus: long, straight, palm-tree lined roads, everything in that southwestern tile-and-stucco style, all laid out neatly on "The Farm"--a secluded, academic environment.  I'd been on both campuses when I was in my teens, and then Stanford, not Berkeley, had been my ideal campus.  I liked what I saw again, in some kind of abstract way, but I was surprised to discover that, after a month at that congested, chaotic University of California campus, I had developed a genuine fondness for it.  I wouldn't hesitate a minute to choose it over Stanford now, and I'd want to live right there on Durant, right in the middle of the action (and wouldn't want to own an automobile, which is just a nuisance).

  The ideal campus
  With every kind of action
  The chaos of Cal

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        At any rate, we spent more time on the Stanford campus than we'd planned to, went up in the tower, walked down the halls, took pictures.  It was a beautiful day, and well into the afternoon by the time we left.  But, by that time, we intended to spend the night somewhere down the coast, so no big deal.  I thought we'd get to Big Sur in plenty of time for dinner.  Little did I realize how long it would take in peak California traffic--on a Friday afternoon!  As I have remarked, Naomi did not drive at all the whole time we were in the state, and I got my fill of waiting for the traffic to crawl ahead a few yards at a time that day--until we were south of Monterey!  I asked at a service station how I could get off the main roads and make a little time.  The man's response was "On Friday afternoon?"  That diminished our enjoyment of our "drive down the coast."
  Chaos come again
  California traffic on
  Friday afternoon

        Once we got down past Monterey, and on Highway 1, the traffic finally did let up.  I found Rick Masten's telephone number in a local directory and called.  It was already late in the day, and his wife was ill, so we agreed that he'd try to drop by when he got up to Berkeley, some time soon.  But I didn't expect him to, and he never did.  I'd only known him as a visitor I'd hosted at Washburn, who'd said, "If you're ever in Big Sur . . . ," and realized I should have gotten in touch much earlier to have expected to be a welcome visitor--Friday at dinner time.
        We did drive on down to Big Sur, however--which was another disappointment.   It was really getting late in the day by the time we got there, and, as when we went up to the Russian River, we had run into fog as we approached the coast.  We only saw the beach clearly in a couple of places as we went south from Monterey, but as we turned back inland a bit, approaching Big Sur, we did get patches of sunlight.

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        As with most places with literary associations, it's probably better not to go--just let your imagination take the trip.  The coast roads in Northern California and Oregon are definitely more rugged and scenic.  I was waiting for it to become truly picturesque, and it never did.  Right at Big Sur it was more like any public camping area in California or Colorado than anything in Robinson Jeffers--nothing we saw there seemed worth the trip.
        That part of the trip was not a total loss, however.  We decided to go back to Monterey to eat, though it would be after dark and a little late, so we were both hungry by the time we got there.  But we had the most memorable meal of the entire summer at The Windjammer, a little restaurant sitting right on the water in the bay.  It was not crowded, the lights were reflected across the water, where small boats were bobbing, and there was evidently a pet seal cavorting.  And I had a broiled seafood platter that was excellent.  I would have to go back to the seafood meal on Mishima's Utajima that I shared with our two youngest boys and Kazuko Aoki and their two sons to beat it.  So this, too, took me back to Mishima and his Sound of Waves.
  Broiled seafood platter
  Memories of Mishima
  Monterey Harbor

        I wish I could go there for dinner again this evening--would even put up with Big Sur again to get there (but not with that California traffic).  We decided to drive back to Berkeley that night, largely to avoid the traffic, but also because there was nothing there we cared to stay for, and we did make it back in less than a third the time it took us to get there.
        We had an extra session of the seminar on Oe Kenzaburo--one of three extra sessions on modern fiction, but the one that meant most to me.  I had first met Oe in a collection of modern Japanese stories Mishima had edited and I had used in Freshman Composition one semester.  It contained

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Oe's story The Prisoner.  I liked that story, for it focuses nicely on the psychology of the two young brothers, who only partially understand what is going on, come to see the black American airman, first, as a kind of pet, then, as a kind of friend, then, ironically, finally find him to be dangerous.  Then I read A Personal Matter (to translate which John Nathan had given up Mishima), and was very disappointed.  It seemed to be sentimentalizing deformity and the central character's psychological instability, in ways that may be fashionable in modern literature (it did read as the closest thing to a modern American novel I'd read in Japanese literature)--but that wasn't to its credit.  The translation had been popular, however (Nathan is, no doubt, part of the reason--a chicken/egg thing), and, because of Oe's growing reputation, I had elected to use his Teach Us to Forget Our Madness, sight unseen, in one of my classes.  By the end of that semester, I was ready to give up on Oe.
  Madness in fiction
  May be the sign of the times
  But it's still madness

        Oe's novel The Silent Cry is what we read for the seminar, however, and it was no doubt the best novel I read all summer.  I identified with the central character very strongly, a thing I had never done before in one of Oe's works, and yet, in many ways it was the same central character, and some of the things he did were just as weird.  Perhaps it was because there was greater distance.  For the most part the narrator is just an observer.  He had plenty of opportunity to be involved in the action, but, generally speaking, chose not to be.  The themes were more provocative, too, though perhaps some of Oe's themes in other works might be if I saw what they were.  Here he is obviously doing something with time and space coordinates, going back to the origins, finding himself in family traditions, finding himself in his brother, and yet not being able

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to accept kinds of identity, not being able to give himself to principles of revolution.  I see myself in Matsusaburo, because he is more observer than actor, and then, in the nature of his reflections on his own reactions, is a kind of Hamlet figure--who feels under compulsion to do something, who is looking for something to do that would reconcile him to his friend's vivid suicide, who can see the alienation from his wife and understand it in good part--yet is unable to act.  The character is consistent and sympathetic, and as compelling a picture of modern alienation as I can recall--with the possible exception of Ellison's Invisible Man.  There is also a search for a viable myth, which I see as ambitious.  I hope Oe continues in this vein.
  It is always good
  To find another author
  Who joins the first rank

        We went to two plays in the last week we were in Berkeley that were both good.  One was a Shakespeare biography play, focusing on Shakespeare's relationship with Marlowe, Love's Labour's Won, that was historically perceptive and very well performed, by the Berkeley Players.  They were performing in a modest, made-over kind of theater on the west side of town and evidently on a low budget.  The other company had its own theatre right down town, and the actors had professional credits that were significant.  They were doing the three plays of the Norman Conquests in sequence, and I think we saw the second one.  The play was based on a clever concept, and was very well acted.  But if we think it is expensive to go to plays in Topeka, it was at least twice as expensive there, so we passed on seeing a couple of Shakespeare plays that we would otherwise have gone to see, one in the park, another in San Francisco.  They were not well reviewed either, so, I decided, cost too much.
        We did see a set of Shakespeare-related movies, however, in the theatre auditorium in the main building, where all of the

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English department offices are.  They were to be presented in two companion sets, in fact, a ballet film and a classic straight film of, first, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and, a week later, Romeo and Juliet.  In the first set, they showed the ballet, but did not have the straight film, so showed the film sent by mistake, The Wizard of Oz.  We had seen The Wizard of Oz, or parts of it, on television year after year, ever since the boys were small, but I was surprised, as I had been with the Gone with the Wind seen earlier, to see how much more impressive it was without commercial breaks and cuts for television, and on a big screen.  We really enjoyed it, and I'd seen the missing Max Reinhart film of A Midsummer Night's Dream a couple of times before--but long enough before I would have been happy to see it again.  The Romeo and Juliet evening, a week later, was good, too.  The ballet was excellent, and the film was Zefferelli's, which is another real classic.  The Romeo and Juliet in it are so good you are willing to tolerate the liberties Zefferelli takes with the text, the very presence of those two young actors almost seeming to catch the essence of what Shakespeare is presenting.
  All literature
  Once you've met that magician
  Relates to Shakespeare

        These film ballets reminded me of an experience I'd had while Naomi was in Oregon.  I had discovered a small, double, inexpensive upstairs movie theatre, down Telegraph Street a block or two, which showed pornographic films on one side, old classics on the other.  You could buy a ticket downstairs and attend either one you chose.  I'd tried the pornographic film one evening, and become so bored by the first half hour I'd finally gone over to the other side to see The Mask of Dimitrios (almost as boring, not nearly as good as I'd remembered it).  But then, a few evenings later, I saw a film version of Oh, Calcutta on the pornographic side I considered a genuine (and

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fantastic) nude ballet--a far superior production to the crude, lewd (but long-running) Broadway version of the play we were disappointed to see not long after that.  Where did that film come from, if not from that play?  I'd certainly like to see it again.
  Sitting in the dark
  Imagination ready--
  For the great escape!
        We finished the seminar with a couple of sessions discussing techniques for teaching Japanese literature, mostly in translation, in American universities, since that was the business of most of the people attending and the seminar had been designed to consider curriculum patterns.  I'd been very pleased that we'd gone for content instead, without much theorizing about teaching method, and I didn't expect much out of the theorizing sessions now planned.  I felt that if I learned enough about Genji and Basho and Kawabata I already knew how to teach them--if I could figure out how to get any students to take the courses.  I was surprised, in fact, at how interesting it was to hear some of the others talk about their experiences in very different kinds of schools with very different kinds of students.
  Across the country
  Though faces are different
  Problems are the same

        We also needed to get our car ready for the trip home.  First it had to be washed, so we'd be able to recognize it.  Then, we needed two new tires to complete the set.  And, as we were getting it lubed, just two days before starting home, we had the brakes checked, and were sold a new set of brake linings we probably didn't need, but, after the tire experience on the way, were gun shy.  For two people it's a toss up whether it's cheaper to go by private automobile or by public transportation halfway across the country.  But, since we had the car, we decided to take our time going home and see a few things.

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        The television set I had been so proud of buying for $100, and that had worked so well all summer that I had planned to fit it into the car somehow and bring it home, went out that last weekend.  We got an estimate on getting it fixed, which was roughly $100, so left it, with a note,  for the regular tenants of the apartment to decide whether or not to get repaired.
        The very last evening there was a party at Masao Miyoshi's house.  I had missed the party that opened the seminar, by flying  back to Hutchinson, so this was the first time there for us.  But I also wanted to see the Mizoguchi film, The Life of an Amorous Woman, one of the real classics, and one of the first Japanese films I'd seen (before I'd read the novel, which I understand was not translated in full).  We opened the seminar with Saikaku, and I thought it appropriate to close with Saikaku.  There was another connection made between the film series and our seminar when they showed the film version of Tanizaki's Ashikari, a good film, with Mizoguchi's best actress.  The Life of an Amorous Woman was certain to be sold out, so I bought tickets as soon as the box office opened.  Then we went to the party, stopping for our rental deposit on the way.

  Of the many things
  It was hard to leave behind . . .
  Those films right next door 

       At the party I particularly wanted to talk to Alan Wolfe about his friend, David Goodman, whom he had known in Japan during the years when Goodman was putting out Concerned Theater Japan, 1970-73.  Goodman had been a precocious young rebel (leftist) who had gotten genuinely involved with the precocious young rebels (leftists)--dramatists, actors, critics--who were making Japanese theatre the most exciting, revolutionary, and experimental theatre in the world in those years, and he had the literary skills and editorial energy to produce a record of that exciting moment in theatre history that

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should be fascinating reading fifty years from now--when all of those young people are as old as Mizoguchi is now.  It had opened a whole new world for me, and I'd been reading as much of it as I could ever since I'd found out about it.  My interest was so strong in part because I knew I'd be able to take courses with Goodman, who'd be a visiting scholar at KU the following year.  So I got Alan Wolfe to trace something of his background for me, then got Masao to sign a copy of The Divided Self, his book on the Victorian writers--then we left.
        The movie wasn't as good as I'd remembered.  The novel probably is Saikaku's best (though none of his are much to my taste), for it does have a line of action--the woman's fall--but it's still largely chronological--and the film is long!  It does seem to be reaching out for the West, as Rashomon did, and the actress in the lead role was good (had been prominent in the Mizoguchi biography), but I shared something of Naomi's boredom.  And we had to get up early the next morning and head for home.

            The final evening
            A film by Mizoguchi
            But far from his best

        We left Berkeley about 6:00 the next morning,  to be out of the traffic before there was much, heading for Merced, where Naomi has an aunt and uncle living right on the road going up to Yosemite, so we stopped for a short visit on the way.  We had been to Yosemite once, about ten years before, with the four boys, as we were camping across country, and had finally had to find a spot for our camper trailer out of the park on the East.  It was the height of the season again, so we had expected a crowd, and we had one by the time we were in the park.  But, in spite of that, we weren't overwhelmed by these tourists--just joined them.  We weren't worried about finding a place to camp, knew that we wouldn't be staying overnight, would probably go on up to Reno and find a motel for the night, but only if that

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happened to be convenient.  We weren't under any pressure to get home.  So, where there was traffic, we just followed it and enjoyed the sights, stopping frequently to get out and walk, take pictures, eat a picnic lunch.  As we got into the center of the park it was pretty congested, all right, but still worth it.  What impressed me was that, even given all the people, the scenery remained in command.  You could walk off of the road fifty feet almost anywhere and feel you were lost in the woods.

  Natural beauty
  In spite of all the tourists
  Still a wilderness

        It was a journey back in time for Naomi, as she remembered the trips she had taken to Yosemite with her family as their regular Sunday outing when she was a child, and for both of us as we remembered the problems of the road with the boys and trailers.  That day sort of set the tone for the whole trip home.  We were lucky we had such a beautiful day to visit the park, and by the time we were out of it on the East side we could see that we had left most of those people--had in effect left California traffic--behind.
        We knew it would be close to dark by the time we got to Reno, but still decided to go on, since Reno is mostly an after-dark experience anyway.  I especially wanted to visit the university, however, where I had spent my freshman year in college in 1946-47, and we got there with just enough light to walk once around the campus.  I remembered many things, but much was changed, so it wasn't very effective recreating the environment I remembered with so much affection anyway.  I didn't even remember the buildings very well, and couldn't get into Lincoln Hall to see the dorm room where Ears and I used to play Gin Rummy to 2000 points, and where I was thrown out in the middle of the night by a dean in a bathrobe for sliding my old Nash in the gravel in the parking lot, practicing a racing technique that Chet Richards was teaching me.

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        And when we went down town, there was even less to remind me of my youth.  It brought Kafu back to mind, one of the authors I felt I had come to know best that summer, with his constant feeling of, "It's just not what it used to be."  There is much more there in Reno than there used to be, but few of the places I knew best as a freshman--not the little bar where we used to stop to drink a quart schooner of beer for a quarter on the way down town, to get a glow on cheap, not the place where we normally drank beer at 15 cents a glass, that was sort of our club, where Billy got in a fight over what was going to be played on the juke-box, not even the Palace Club, where I would stop on my way back to school in the early morning hours from my job as night janitor for the movie houses and play at the quarter 21 table with whatever change I had found that night until I either lost it or had won enough to buy something I wanted--that green shirt, that black watch.

  Recalling lost youth
  The bright lights may still be there
  But so much has changed

        Still, we did find things.  We found an excellent meal for less than five dollars.  It was a come-on, of course, but it was really good, a rib roast, with everything, including wine, at a club that was not there in Reno when I was there, The Casino.  In general, Reno had changed from the town where a cowboy might still ride his horse down Virginia Street to just another town for gamblers, no longer had much of that old-West mythic edge on Las Vegas.  Now we had a room in a motel so far south on Virginia Street that it seemed half way to Carson City.  Ironically, poker is much more prevalent now than it was when the Wild West mystique was stronger.  I'd never played poker in Reno, and never had where the house just takes a percentage of the pot for dealing, but I no doubt would have if there had been more in town--for I considered poker my game at that

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time. Now, I sat in for about twenty minutes and lost $20.  I had two good pair to three of a kind, then three of a kind to a straight.  I thought that that was enough, and that, with that loss, I'd paid a pretty good price for the dinner after all.  Naomi put her allowance in the slot machines, and, while she was winning, gave me some of it to keep her company.  I had none of the expectations of winning at gambling that I had had as an 18-year-old.  In fact, I had been pretty generally disillusioned by the end of that first year in college, about a lot of things, my chances of getting rich in gambling casinos among them.
        We left the next morning early, but before driving out of Reno we went back up to take a few pictures on the university campus, and I was reminded of the line, "you can't go home again."  What a strange thing it was that the memories I had of the University of Nevada when I was 18 were as close to "home" as any memories I had, were among my fondest memories, bracketed by years of a sense of homelessness.  It certainly had to do with kinds of freedom, with the discovery of independence.  Reno was a fine place for that in those days.

  Lost youth left behind
  With its dreams and illusions
  Life still must go on

        We drove to Winnemucca for breakfast, and, to avoid the Denny's that had taken so long on the way out, ate at the casino-cafe across the highway.  They gave us coupons good for a dollar at the tables, and I played 21 for fifteen or twenty minutes and won about five dollars.  I was leaving with what I thought were silver dollars to take home and give to the boys, when Naomi pointed out that they were the casino's chips, just made to look a lot like silver dollars, so I cashed them in.
        We planned to get to Salt Lake City in the early evening so that, if the Mormon Tabernacle Choir were performing, we might hear it.  A woman we'd met on the way out had praised

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it highly, so we'd promised ourselves.  Once out of California Naomi was driving again much of the time, and, to reorient my mind, and because my office-mate, Tom Averill, is the living expert, I was reading Kansas authors, in this case an article in The Little Balkans Review on Edythe Squier Draper, of Oswego, written by Tom's wife, Jeffrey Ann Goudie.  Edythe had been born in Hakodate, reminding me of the ferryboat ride I'd had from Aomori to Hakodate with our son, Jeffery, in the summer of 1979.  We had gone to Hokkaido as much to enjoy that ferryboat ride as anything, and Jeffery had hit it off with a group of junior high school girls, had been surrounded by them most of the trip.  We had written to two of them for a time, and should again--should encourage them to come to Washburn.
        We went on up to Sapporo, and on the way back had been given a tour of the city of Hakodate by our hostess, one of a group of women who had been to Topeka two years earlier, and her husband and son, which ended with a cable-car ride to the top of Hakodate-yama.  That was one of the most memorable experiences of that summer, to look down on the city at dusk, framed by the sea, and watch the lights come on.  We had then stayed at the Hakodate Youth Hostel and left the next morning on the ferry.  I had written a sonnet on the experience of watching the mountain gradually disappear into the fog.

  The fog closing in
  As Hakodate-yama
  Slowly fades from view

        The most telling statement in the article on Mrs. Draper, however, was one that has become an axiom for my office-mate and me, that it is "no good knowing Japanese in a community that knows none."  It made me wonder, coming back from a summer spent studying Japanese literature, what the purpose was--what is the good of knowing Basho, in translation, and of trying to interest people in Topeka, Kansas, in him?  There is

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more to it than a rejection of what there is no practical need to know, more than the related ostracism of any special knowledge that carries a sub-conscious fear of the unknown.  It involves an extension of the definition of the Humanities as "the presence of the past," which has a space as well as a time dimension.  How do you make Basho present in Topeka?  I was playing tennis with Jeffery one evening in autumn a few years back when:

  I paused in my serve
  On a branch a crow landed
  Basho in Kansas
        We arrived in Salt Lake City late in the afternoon, but still got a motel room almost right across the street from the temple (though the Motel 6's were booked long in advance).  We found out the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was not singing that evening, but the choir from the University of Utah was, and that we'd just have time to clean up and take a short tour of the temple grounds before the performance.  We found the tour impressive, the management of the lighting, the celestial sense of the exhibition hall, the pictorial story of Mormonism--the story of Joseph Smith, the strange amalgam of history and myth, the sea gulls (most appealing to me), building the temple, the organ, the choir--all were interesting to see and hear about.  Then we went to hear the choir, and it was impressive, too:
  The salt flats behind
  In the great tabernacle
  The huge organ sang

        Coming from the West, Salt Lake City is indeed an oasis between Reno and Denver.  After the long day's drive on the seemingly endless strip of highway through the barren country of Eastern Nevada and Western Utah--then crossing those great salt flats--the scenery around Salt Lake City may look better to a modern traveler than it did to Brigham Young coming the other direction.  The first time I had visited Salt Lake City I had

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come up from the south, through a very fertile valley, so hadn't been properly prepared to appreciate it.  This time we both did.
        After the choir performance, we finished our tour of the grounds, then walked across the street on the other side to have dinner in the fanciest McDonald's I have ever eaten in (and I have eaten in McDonald's from Tokyo to Dublin--which has provoked us to make a small investment in McDonald's stock).  This one was a restaurant, not a drive-in--no parking--but the food was very much the same.  McDonald's is McDonald's, which is why we often go there, why everyone goes there.

  Wherever you are
  Under those golden arches
  Big Macs are the same
        We left very early the next morning, so that we would be in Denver by dinner time (I had called Donald the night before), but would still have plenty of time to stop and look at things on the way.  As we drove through deserted city streets, the moon was large and full.  I thought of the Japanese attraction to moon viewing and was particularly pleased when, as we moved East in the special early morning silence, we could look back and see the outline of the temple against the moon:
  The moon presiding
  The aspirations of man
  Reach up to the sky

        We chose to take the road across the mountains, more direct and more scenic, but some longer in time than going by way of Laramie, for there were high passes and winding sections of road.  But then we were able to stop and watch the sunrise in the rockies, not so different from the experience of watching it rise from the top of Mt. Fuji, a third of the way around the world, in that summer of 1976--leaning against the hard, sharp mountain rock, a chill in the air, but the promise of the sun.  The picture taken from the top of Mt. Fuji hangs over

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my desk, and, though longer ago, the experience is still the stronger memory--the sunrise wasn't nearly as picturesque as the one in Utah, but the symbolism was important to me.
         One reason we had chosen this route was that, even before we left Utah, we came to Dinosaur National Park, which neither of us had ever visited before.  It was about a fifteen minute drive from the highway, but through pretty country, and the number of tourists making the drive back to where archaeologists have uncovered dinosaur bones was not great enough to be a problem--not like at Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, or Yosemite.  And one can hardly stand before the displays of the bones these archaeologists have found, and the reconstruction of the animals they represent, without wondering, "Who and where am I in the coordinates of existence this schema seems based upon?"

  The dinosaur bones
  Can still speak to all of us
  If we will listen

        It was a beautiful day to be driving through the mountains.  We had been this way before, I remembered, coming the other direction, when the boys were very small (I still have a picture in my wallet we took at Donald's house that time), and we had camped out high in the mountains in a tent.  It was great in the evening, around the campfire--it must have been some time in June--but it was bitter cold the next morning, and I thought that we were going to freeze to death before we could get things packed back in the trailer and get the car going to the point the heater began to work.  That must have been when we still had the 1957 Chevrolet station wagon.  Sometimes I wish we still owned that car, for it probably gave us more good miles than any other car we have ever owned.
        We followed a horse, pulled in a nice, new trailer, for miles going up the mountain:

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  Shifting back and forth
  In a trailer going East
  A horse's West end
        We stopped at the top of Berthoud Pass, at the Continental Divide, then began the long drop down into Denver.  The highway sweeping around curves and through tunnels becomes increasingly more modern as the traffic increases approaching one of the biggest cities in the country--so I was driving.
        Following Don's instructions, I found their new house without getting lost once, a big house (at least for two people) in a new subdivision.  Don, as always, it seemed, had been called out to drive bus, but Maxine was there, and we had a good visit with her before he got home.  Then Don and I spent most of the next two days (part of it on another bus trip) talking about the past, things we'd done as boys in California, mostly with Dad, and the time, just after Naomi and I got married, when we drove our 1936 Chevrolet until the radiator and engine froze up in below zero weather in Wyoming, then limped into Boulder to become his dependents for a time--until I had to report to the Air Force Navigation School in Texas, and Naomi went back to her parents' home in Oregon.  That was just before Maxine and Don had gotten married, too.  Their four girls and our four boys are all grown now, and, since they had girls, they already have grandchildren--ours are yet to come.

            The passage of time
            To the next generation
            Provokes reflection

        We left early Monday morning, again to get out of the city before the going-to-work traffic took over.  Naomi slept for the most part as I drove out of Colorado.  I began to feel  that "last lap impulse" I had known when I used to run long distance--however arduous the trip, when you know you are on the last lap, approaching the finish line, you get a new burst of energy.

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        It was just after dawn that we crossed the state line into Kansas, and, within a few miles, passed a large field of sunflowers, all facing the sun, which did seem to be symbolic:

  The Kansas state line
  A huge field of sunflowers
  Welcoming us home
        We had been to California, and, in a sense, fallen in love with the University of California.  But there was no question that Kansas was now our home, where we preferred to live.  There are more options now that the boys are grown.  We have always liked to travel, and now we can afford to (though perhaps not nearly as much or as easily as we would be able to if the costs of travel were still what they were when the boys were small, when we took all of them to Japan for less than it would cost the two of us to go these days).  But we have also established a firm home base, and are both satisfied living in Topeka.  For my part, I say that it doesn't really matter whether I ever get back to Japan again in physical terms, for I can get there, at least to the Japan of Genji, or Basho, more effectively in my own study than most of those who take a plane.  After all, I had spent the summer in California studying Japanese literature.
        We got home about dinner time, so stopped to eat at our local McDonald's.  And then, both at school that evening and at the post office the next morning, there were (one of the most important things for me) the piles of mail.
  A good homecoming
  Accumulation of mail
  And the house still there

        We had made our journey to the West to become better acquainted with some of the literature coming out of the East, which I then hoped to be teaching in Topeka, Kansas, and it had been a very good summer--one of the best I can remember as I look back over these notes.

The End

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