Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cathy N. Davidson is Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, cofounder of the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, and Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English at Duke University. Her numerous books include Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America; Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory; and No More Separate Spheres! (with Jessamyn A. Hatcher), also published by Duke University Press. She is a past president of the American Studies Association and a previous editor of the journal American Literature.

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"A delightful read, offering insight not only into Japan but into the adventure of living in a foreign culture anywhere in the world."--Mary Catherine Bateson, author of "Composing a Life"

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36 VIEWS OF MOUNT FUJI

Duke University Press

Contents

A Note on Japanese Names.......................................ixList of Illustrations..........................................xiPreface........................................................xiii1 Seeing and Being Seen.......................................12 Foreigners..................................................93 After School................................................214 From the Best Families......................................375 Typical Japanese Women......................................496 Night Moves.................................................697 Sacred Places...............................................838 Accident....................................................1059 Going Home..................................................12310 Sea of Japan, Oki, 1987....................................13911 Tatami Room in Cedar Grove.................................15512 Festival of the Dead.......................................16913 Photo Album: The Fourth Journey............................18514 The Practice House.........................................20515 House Guest................................................21716 Climbing the Mountain......................................227Afterword (2005)...............................................233Acknowledgments to the First Edition...........................241Acknowledgments to the Second Edition..........................243Glossary of Japanese Words and Expressions.....................245

Chapter One

I dreamt Japan long before I went there. Moss gardens, straw-mat rooms, wooden bridges arching in the moonlight, paper lanterns with the fire glowing inside. Whenever I paged through photography books of traditional Japan, I found myself gasping with appreciation. Three rocks, a gnarled pine tree, raked white sand: awe. Pictures of Windsor Castle or the fountains of Versailles have never left me breathless.

But what struck me as we drove away from Osaka International Airport was the unattractiveness of the scene. Forget rocks and raked sand! Neon everywhere, billboards as far as the eye could see, concrete apartment blocks dingy with pollution. Even the details radiated a sense of urbanization run amok. Whereas other affluent nations bury power lines and strive for at least some sense of visual harmony, Japan seemed to be clotted with the cables and wires of modern life. Looking out the car window at gray buildings with rusting metal roofs, the power lines crisscrossing bizarrely overhead, I was reminded of some grim old photograph of a nineteenth-century immigrant ghetto, zapped by late-twentieth-century electronic overload.

My husband, Ted, and I were in Japan to teach English. Michigan State University, where I taught at the time, had established a faculty exchange program with Kansai Women's University. A Japanese professor would teach my courses at MSU while I taught hers at KWU. Ted took an unpaid leave from his liberal arts college in the States and accepted part-time jobs at both KWU and a larger, coed university in a nearby town. It had all happened fast-a note in the faculty mailboxes one winter day inviting applications, a few hasty lessons in conversational Japanese, and then, in March, we were there.

"Is it what you were expecting?" Professor Sano, the department head at KWU, asked as we drove from the airport to Nigawa, the suburb where we would be living for the next year.

I knew that Japan wouldn't look like the picture books but I was surprised at how different it really was. I joked that I had thought the streets of Japan would be paved with gold.

He laughed and said that many Americans had that reaction. Then, nodding at the passing scene, a particularly drab stretch of warehouse-like buildings, he added more soberly, "We Japanese like to say that we have a great sense of beauty and no sense of ugliness. You'll find a lot of Japan is like that."

The beauty is still there, he explained; one just has to look for it. What happens outside, in the world, is chaotic, contingent, filled with speed and accident. But, as we would later see, bleak stretches of urban sprawl are punctuated by exquisite Buddhist temples set off from the city, sometimes by stark clay walls or elaborate wooden gates, a separate peace within the chaos. On national holidays, Japanese go to these temples en masse to recharge, and they become as packed as a rush-hour subway train. We'd see the same thing soon in cherry-viewing season, he said, when everyone sets aside the tragedies or just the predictable dailiness of life to picnic and party beneath the fragile blossoms.

He described one of his favorite places, a busy intersection in a nondescript area of Kyoto where a simple carved stone Buddha, much beloved by the residents, smiles enigmatically amid the carbon monoxide and the car horns. Professor Sano dropped us off at the Western-style home of an American couple who taught at Kansai Women's University, a kind of halfway house between the two cultures, where we spent our first night in Japan. The next day the couple showed us around the local grocery store, explained how the train system worked, and delivered us to our apartment building in Nigawa, an affluent suburb between Kobe and Osaka, about half an hour by train from either. They told us that, before the War, Nigawa was a sleepy resort town, with ryokan (inns) and country villas, and long before that a stop for pilgrims on their way to Kabuto-yama Daishi, a Shingon Buddhist temple built in the ninth century on the helmet-shaped mountain a few miles beyond Nigawa. Carrying our suitcases up the three flights of stairs to our apartment, we heard the low, somber gong of the temple bell mingled with suburban sounds of commuter trains and mopeds.

We lived on the top floor of a "mansion," the Japanese term for a modern ferro-concrete apartment complex. Kansai Women's University owned our apartment and two others on the floor, each a 2DK-two rooms plus a galley kitchen, with a dining area large enough for a table and four chairs. The Western-style living room was furnished with small brown tweed couches and a coffee table. The bedroom was more traditional, with tatami (green-gold straw mats) on the floor and walls covered in a rough ocher paper that recalled the clay walls of a tea house. We had been asked if we wanted a double bed and declined in favor of the traditional futons. A bed would have filled the entire room. With futons, what was a bedroom by night became, with the futons folded away, a study where I worked on the floor, Japanese-style, breathing in the incomparable fragrance of rice straw.

A few days after our arrival, I set out for my first official visit to Kansai Women's University. Our American colleagues had drawn us a map of Nigawa that included two different routes to the university-a direct one along well-marked streets lined with apartment buildings and expensive sub-urban houses and a more circuitous scenic route past the last thatch-roof building in Nigawa, by a few remaining old kura (storehouses), over a small stream, and then up a path that led through a rice paddy at the very top of a hill. On clear days, they said, we'd be able to see Osaka. Beyond the smokestacks, factories, and oil tankers, we'd even glimpse the fabled Inland Sea.

Of course I took the scenic...