The Barbarian's Vacation

I.

It swims toward him out of the

mists of his idealized vision, its

swelling reality massaging his

tired heart as the view turns from beach to

quilted countryside to coiled

urban warrens in breath-giving

succession.

Its life washes over him

as its densely drawn picture

writing

follows him everywhere,

punctuated by the Roman letters

placed there for illiterate

gaijin like himself. He is

there, after uncounted

years of aspiration, exhilaratingly

lost, swimming in their patient

kindness as they guide him

with quiet grace.

He gapes through the rushing window

at the impossibly dense

concrete, steel, and brick

forest, its towers filled

with lives lived within

a few hundred square feet,

proceeding endlessly across

the Kanto Plain as the megacity

swallows him with indifferent ease.

II.

He gawks at the Blade Runner nightscape,

its inhabitants swirling around him

in purposeful journeys toward

home, or

toward beer and sake,

or toward rendezvous

with quietly waiting lovers

or toward laughing revelers

snaking their way

through the myriad watering holes.

Buildings from fifty years in the future

oversee the ordered tumult,

either in quiet business repose,

or blaring out eye-blazing neon messages

into the humid night, lurid with the

promise of excitement, sex, status,

and the rewards

of money spent in the lunging pursuit

of elusive happiness.

Could this really have been

the place where on that

burning night the heat flipped

the bombers upside down

and the blackened dead

lay piled up in haystacks

of shriveled arms and legs?

No trace of the ravaging fire

remained any more,

as the Shinjuku District's engine

revved higher and higher, the neatly trimmed

business people and the spiky haired

teenagers flowing in eddies of

brightly lit consciousness

all around him.

No elders ventured into this night;

it was no longer their world,

and it was no longer interested

in their gray memories.

III.

Dotted throughout

its meticulously organized

newness, he found

cross-legged Buddhas,

gracefully sloping roofs,

pious monks,

and orange torii gates.

Clap! Clap! to wake up the gods

so that they might hear our petitions.

Wrap the delicately written prayer requests

and toss them into the big incense burner,

fragrant with tradition and hopes.

Gautama is no longer a starved seeker

after the Light.

He is huge, green or bronze, luxuriant

with prosperous fat, bowed toward,

prayed to as he hoped never to be,

idolized, frozen in poses of Bodhi-like

contemplation, while surrounded

by the gold

and sumptuous decoration

he scorned and fled from

in life.

The ancient native faith for this world

(please bless our new Lexus),

Siddhartha's doctrines for the next

(please keep me from rebirth.)

The sweet-faced, petite guide told him

that a million worshipers

packed the Meiji park on New Year's Day,

all imploring the ancestral spirits for good luck

in the unfolding year to come.

He imagined them all leaving

afterward on the immaculate trains and buses,

perhaps to hit the 7-11

or the neighborhood McDonald's,

ears pressed to cell phones, and anxious eyes

checking Blackberries, the world of the kami

now left behind.

IV.

It was as if they lived to be polite,

generous, helpful, and tolerant

of his bumbling, child-like attempts

to communicate in the clipped,

subtle music of their language.

They were unsurprised by his tall,

aging Scots-Irish appearance; they

were old pros at this, after all.

Sweet faced children on school trips

sometimes joyously said "Hello!" to

him as they passed, bravely using the strange

word to talk to one of Them.

In the lobby one little

sprite tried out "Good morning!"

He said, Ohayo gozaimas'! back to the

bold young explorer, much to the boy's delight.

And everywhere

in every clean street

and every safe night time

and every right-on-the-dot train door opening

their diligence and their

quiet pride were in evidence.

He wondered how it came to be

that they had raised the ordinary

up to the extraordinary,

and whether the white-gloved

men on the Shinkansen really knew

how abashed they made him feel

about the slacker tribe

of which he was a typically

disheveled member.

V.

He could find the quiet parks

and the elegant gilded temples

of the guidebooks and postcards.

He reveled in the lazy, spoiled deer

nuzzling him in the park by the huge temple,

and his eye was caught by the occasional

old woman venturing forth in the kimono

that a proper lady always went out in public in.

He was awed in the presence of the ancient

castles that had stood as bastions in blood-drenched

landscapes of centuries past, and he found himself

reverent during the quiet dignity and fussy etiquette

of the tea ceremony.

But he knew

that the giant train stations

and the fleets of little cars beetling their way

through the perfectly maintained streets

and the thundering factories

and crowded docksides

and the endless delivery trucks

and the ubiquitous manga figures

leering out at him

and the crazy game shows

and the garish Pachinko parlors

and the school uniforms

and the office lights still burning at 8 PM

said more about their world than

Fuji-san

ever could.

He was under no illusion

that his brief incursion

into their precision guided,

buckwheat noodled world

had revealed their nature to him.

He was smart enough to know

that the preserved villages were a past

they kept alive more for him than

for themselves. He would never

know their Zen essence,

their private anguish,

their secret hopes,

their unspoken desires.

Beneath the silly t-shirts

and conservative suits were souls

that he would never see.

He was not of their tribe;

he was not of their tongue.

He had merely dipped his foreign toes into

their crowded world, seeing its surfaces

only.

He knew something of their story;

he knew the meaning of the empty,

furniture-devoid rooms where their shoguns

had ruled with imperious command.

He knew of the upheaval those like him

had brought to this land.

But he did not yet know them;

and like a novice defeated by a

puzzle box

or a koan, he left

wanting to once again

immerse himself

in the smiling mystery

of the islands that obscured

more than they revealed.