It is now hydrangea season in Japan, which means hordes of visitors, both foreign and Japanese, at our local temple, Meigetsuin, otherwise known as ajisai-dera, or ‘The Temple Of The Hydrangeas’. Founded in 1383, it is a top destination for people coming to Kamakura in June. Though one tires, eventually, of the seas of blue and pink, and the sea of people, lining up from early in the morning to catch a view of the flowers, the combination of rainy season beads of reflectant water, clinging to the vivid shades of big, pompom hydrangea blooms like balls of glass from a mirrored dream – from pink, through mauve, to lilac and pale, innocent, bright sky blue ( as well as white, probably my favourite variety) is undeniably gorgeous. Meigetsuin itself is a beautiful temple with a famous, circular window that looks out onto a garden from a room in which you can drink green tea, esconced in the hillside, surrounded by bamboo and acer trees, with a ‘secret’ iris garden out back that you have to pay extra to enter, for come the end of June…… a festival of purple, light and dark blue hydrangeas that seem to almost grow from the air itself, this fully is a time of flowers; an inundation, a deluge of rain drinking ajisai (our front garden has even been taken over by them, a proliferation……how did they get there?), and everybody wants to take advantage.
The thing to do is to go hydrangea-viewing in the temple gardens, take green tea and a rabbit-shaped sweet manju bean cake at the tea shop just along the lane (lulled by the babbling brook, the rabbit-shaped moon), or else just head a bit further down the road to one of the Japanese restaurants along from the station : soba, sushi, tempura, or shojin-ryori (Buddhist vegetarian). Whatever you do, despite the crowds, at this time, you can be sure, in the green, humid air, to soak up the atmosphere, as the hydrangeas soak up the iron from the soil.
Just five minutes up the hill beyond Meigetsuin, as I walk on my way home there, is a beautiful little café called fue, meaning flute, and as a flute player myself (though not an especially good one) I was, for a good few years, doing baroque flute duets on Sundays with the café owner and proprietor Mr Yamahata, an interesting character, and fierce lover of music, who decided, impulsively – though it had been a long cherished dream of his – to just jack in his job at a well respected company during the prime years of the bubble economy and build, with the money he had saved, a music café on the hillside; a place where could show off his amazing collection of woodwind instruments, which are usually displayed on the wall in glass cabinets, and hold small classical concerts on the occasional Saturday evening; perfect the art of coffee making, and teach the ocarina.
Seeing this place was one of the reasons that I knew I had to live here, and one day, while in there drinking a delectable caffe latte, I suggested, off the cuff, that we play together. He was quite keen on the idea, we started practicing, and through our duet playing I came to get to know some other amateur classical musicians in the area as well. And thus every November, now, Duncan and I and my good friend Yoko annually take part in an ongakukai, or musical soirée, all very well to do and respectable, and a tradition I have come to quite enjoy as Autumn kicks in, even if I used to find it all, back in the day, rather stiff.
Although I no longer play with Mr Yamahata (Duncan does now, instead – recorder duets, which I think sound better – they seem to have a more natural musical affinity), for a while, on his instigation ( I was not consulted) our duo became a trio, with the third flute part being taken, in original arrangements for three flutes, by a violin. It kind of worked sonically, and the other person in question was closer to my age and seemed quite nice. I was game.
At once quite shy, and ‘demure’, yet more big-boned and taller than your average, petite, Japanese woman, Mika was not unpretty, quite attractive even, even if she was a touch unexpressed with a certain morose puffiness, somehow: dark, penetrating eyes like deep, black, studious sultanas staring out hurtfully at you from a wide, gingerbread face, a person that was always folding back into themselves. Eyes that were often rather heavily kohled, at other times bare. Hair, long, thick, a bit dry. A sweet smile, and a sweet nature (probably) – she likes children. Rag dolly Jemima floral dresses; brown cardigans, clunky shoes….. I can see her, in my mind’s eye, traipsing along the path to the Fue, to Mr Yamahata’s cafe on a Sunday afternoon, just before 5 o clock: her violin case, turning her head to the side ever so slightly as she said hello, perhaps coquettishly; we went inside to play.
We would meet every three weeks or so, or more sporadically depending on each person’s work schedule, and my principle memory of this time is of dappling sunlight, in summer, the leaves of the trees that hung above the cafe road filtering light and accompanying our music outside, or else the cosy dark five o’clock of December, when the closed-in world of the trio, playing its heartfelt, if mediocre, renditions of French or Italian Renaissance music, felt like some long forgotten age when there was no electricity, no outside stimulations, a time when entertainment was made in the interior of people’s own homes in the form of games, the telling of stories, or playing of instruments.
During this time, I was quite enjoying doing this as one of my hobbies, as it felt quite civilized, stimulating yet relaxing, and, as usual, was just completely myself. Or as much as I could be with those particular individuals. We all got on quite well, and I knew that Mika found me amusing. I would make jokes, or just mess around, as I have always done from the earliest age right through university and beyond, even though I suppose I should have been automatically deferring to Mr Yamahata in all matters musical ( in the Japanese hierarchy of things). To my knowledge, though, (because why would I??) I had never flirted. In any case, through Yoko, who she had befriended, kind of, at the November musical Schubertiads that we had all been to on several occasions, she knew full well that I had a long term partner who I lived with at the top of the hill; that we were happy, and that, incidentally, he was male.
At a later date, she had also come round for dinner one evening, one of those dinner parties that don’t entirely work for various reasons but one you are obliged to give anyway in return for being invited somewhere else on an earlier occasion; me, D, Yoko, her husband, and Mika. We did our best to liven things up, but it was unsuccessful, in main part, for the taciturn and weirdly zombie-like Mika, who looked so black-eyed and sullen, shadowing Duncan around the kitchen all night in a long, figure-hugging, dark brown, thick, woollen dress, ostensibly to learn about Greek Cypriot cooking, but behaving oddly – she was sombre, flat, almost morbid (Yoko said to me when we were out of earshot, I don’t know what is wrong with her – she is acting really quite strangely, I think that she likes you and is maybe jealous of him); and though I had perhaps begun to wonder if this might be the case myself, this comment, when Mika was out of the room, brought this realization more clearly and fully to light in my consciousness.
But although we had shared the nervous excitement of standing backstage before a concert that we did one Spring in Kamakura Town Hall, and though I had always been friendly, affable – we would stop and talk on the street if I ever met her by chance, somewhere on the street, she riding her bicycle on the way to the Kamakura city kindergarten where she worked – I never did anything, to my knowledge, to give her the wrong impression. She knew my situation, and in any case was she not now actually engaged to this Italian boyfriend that she had met while vacationing, as she did annually, in Florence? When I heard the news I had been delighted; had congratulated her, been genuinely pleased for her.
One day, around this time, the middle of June, when the hydrangeas are at their peak, heavy with raindrops, fixed, or swaying in huge, threshing numbers – a mass of blues , purples, and green, I unexpectedly got a telephone call. It was Mika.
” I want you to go and see the hydrangeas with me”, she said, in Japanese. ” Tomorrow. I really want you to come with me”.
Trying to worm my way out of this, as I am not very interested in ‘prescribed experiences’, and didn’t especially fancy a one on one with her in any case, I made some kind of excuses, about work, and being busy and so on, but she was so strangely and emphatically insistent, practically pleading with me to go with her, that I eventually relented and said yes. I probably can’t stay with you all that long, though, I said to her. Just for a short while.
I’ll meet you around eleven, outside Mr Yamahata’s.
Walking down the hill towards my ‘date’, this unforeseen and unwarranted rendezvous, this hassle at the beginning of my day, I can’t say that I was exactly relishing the thought of what I secretly feared might turn out to be a ‘romantic’ situation (was I terribly naïve to have even gone?), but at the same time, she was an acquaintance; someone I played music with, and the hydrangea, at Meigetsuin temple, are very beautiful. And, anyway, to have assumed that her having romantic intentions was the case would have been rather presumptuous. And, as it is precisely what everyone else is doing as well in this admittedly exquisite, but deadeningly unspontaneous, season-specific culture of flower-viewing traditions, cuisine, and ‘day trip activities,’ it seemed, in many ways, quite the natural thing to be doing.
I arrive. On time. As instructed. Oh dear. No.
She has turned up in full seduction mode. In a sports car, parked ostentatiously down a side street. High heels. And a really, really short white, cotton, flower-print dress that show smooth, waxed, bare legs. Sunglasses balanced on the top of her head. Make-up. She has gone all out, there can no longer be any doubting of it, now, firing on all cylinders like Olivia Newton John in Grease, back from another trip to Italy, and now apparently sporting its fashions, if not terribly successfully, as well. But, unbeknownst to her, the fatal flaw….
Even if I were in the race that she apparently mistakenly thought I was in: even if I were looking for a Japanese girlfriend, which to anyone who knows me well sounds utterly ridiculous, and something that just isn’t going to happen, you can be quite certain that the woman in question, were I to suddenly undergo this transformation, sure as hell, if she really wanted me, would be smelling better. This writer, you see, is seduced not just through his eyes but through his brain and nose (which is why, cannily enough, she had brought me a nice little profumo from Firenze as a love token – L’Erbolario Magnolia – a green, muguet-ish, tea-like, Anaïs Anaïs-esque scent that I rather liked for its familiar simplicity and freshness, because just getting any bottle of scent, especially in a pleasing bottle, and a perfume you have never heard of before, is always, it has to be said, quite exciting). And she was, herself, really excited to be able to give it to me. I found it sweet – she had gone to the trouble of thinking of me, and buying it in Italy, and bringing it back to me in Japan, and though I am not really a magnolia man ( I am simply not, and never will be – that pure, that grandiloquent, that unstained), I am not averse to having a bottle of magnolia-tinted scent sitting there somewhere in my collection. As for the flowers, though……. while I admire the swathes of magnolia trees that proliferate in Kamakura at the beginning of spring, rigid, upright, with their magnificent cream, their imperial, arboreal beauty, there is also something quite prim, almost orthodox about them for me, with their swift descent into decay…….brownness, and rot.
And Mika, I’m very sorry to say, did not smell very nice at all. On that day? Always? I don’t know. I didn’t usually get so close. I think that she just had a bad cold. But we all have our turn-offs, our idiosyncratic no-go areas that foreclose any sexual attractiveness (and this wasn’t even the right gender for me, for god’s sake: how the hell had I got into this ludicrous situation?), and while we can forgive our loved ones’ occasional olfactory imperfections, as we hope that they will forgive our own, there has to be, at base, a primal connection in that field – smell – that links us beyond the grave, that fuses us bodily and soulfully together. The synapses. The lust. The animal telepathy of molecular bondage: something that is just as true in a homosexual situation as it is in the heterosexual. We love, to a certain extent, I believe, through smell. But its opposite, sexual repugnance, is surely at least as strong. It is instinctual. We cannot help it. And for me personally, while certain smells that might repel others – garlic (a true aphrodisiac for me), sweat, a certain sourness, can, in fact, at the right time, and in the right place (and with the right person), be quite significant turn-ons ( I don’t know why: I just feel it; My blood flows more quickly, I become sexually sentient), there are other smells that deep down in my erogenous wells and gut I just quite abhor, and anything mucoid, or catarrh-ish, sick-smeling, would certainly reign pretty damn high on that list.
My chief memory on that day, therefore, is not, in spite of what was about to come next, or the hydrangeas, that were looming at me from every angle, or the smell of the green magnolia perfume that I had sprayed on the back of my hand as a form of perfume escape, but that smell: catarrh. Phlegm. Illness. Revolting.
How could she not have realized?
As Susan Sontag relates in her brilliant ‘Illness as a Metaphor’, there is a mistaken and regrettable romanticizing, in nineteenth century literature and beyond, of the consumptive; of the Keatsian, feverish, doomed lover who is sensitive, pale as a peach and just as flushed, as though permanently in a sensual, ravishing swoon. But as she states quite clearly, these people, surely, would have in fact smelled, would they not. Blood on their handkerchiefs; sputum, a mucoid pallor. Not very sexy. And whenever I watch Jane Campion’s heartrendingly beautiful film Bright Star, about my favourite poet, Keats, dying from consumption, I also find myself, nevertheless,wondering how he, and his beloved, could possibly kiss. His filthy hair. His bronchial breathing, and lung-rattling coughs that lie in between. That pale, deathly complexion. The love (this film kills me) is beautifully rendered (as anything is by Campion); deeply poignant and poetic to its core, but I do, still, in fact have this issue, with smell and cinema, with the screen and what the human beings are doing on it, all the time. I am constantly imagining how the characters are smelling, in particular, perilous cinematic circumstances. For me, the screen is simply not odourless. And the poet, in this instance, quite obviously stinks.
So I am not singling out Mika out, here, in some misogynistic attack. We all have had this at times, the smell of illness ( and I have had very dangerous pneumonia twice, a period during which I certainly didn’t feel too attractive). But what I can’t, for the life of me, understand, is how insensitive to smell most people can be in daily life – how oblivious, as though smell were irrelevant, a mere afterthought – but on a ‘date’? How BLIND. How STUPID. How can a person plan, in great detail, an outfit, a look, a plan of seduction (to include, ironically, a virginally fresh perfume like L’Erbolario Magnolia) and then arrive reeking from the mouth and pores; unperfumed, the smell of hair washed two nights before (no, no no, I like it freshly washed……unwashed hair, male or female, though appreciated almost fetishistically by some for its poetic, musky humanness, is near the top of my list of categorical no-nos)…..such a lapse in judgement, of idiocy, particularly when the person in question knows I am as smell sensitive as I am and bought me…..a perfume. Had she not, in a land of every possible provision, thought of mints?
But I hadn’t asked for this ridiculous tableau in the first place. Me and my gal among the hydrangeas. I hadn’t asked for it. Nor for any of it, for that matter. Not the slow, theatrical gazing at those wetty, azure, head-bobbing blooms that grace the roadside, the gardens, that swell alongside the mountains like the spirits of centuries of long passed monks or ridiculous 1950′s swim hats…. hydrangeas, hydrangea, everywhere; everywhere, that I am forced to admire, and compliment, and photograph (the ones that you see are all photos I have been taking this week around where I live as I relive this strange experience and go back in time). I am not, remotely, interested in these pictures of people standing in the required pose, in their stupid hats, doing the v peace sign outside of the temple, their hydrangea prescriptions, the things you are supposed to do, like walking along with a weird girl in a light cotton sundress, who is staring at me, now, desirefully, half smiling, and really happy. I am not ready for it.
Nor right now, as we cross the railtracks, for her suddenly, to my complete bewilderment and dismay, to grasp my hand, grip it firmly in hers, stare firmly into my eyes, and make us walk, like beloveds, along to the other side of the railtracks.
I cannot, obviously, believe what is actually happening. This is just not done. This is not just friends holding hands in a gesture of affection (because we are not really friends). This is a declaration of love, and she says so – emphatically – as I vehemently yank myself free and tell her that she knows full well that I am with Duncan, that we have been together for years, and what the hell, what the hell is this all about.
“That ‘s all over now”
she says, self-confidently, and knowingly, beaming:
“Don’t worry about all that”.
“It’s over”.
I like to think that I am not a heartless person. I may have many faults, but lack of compassion is not usually one of them. And I felt quite genuinely sorry (and very embarrassed) for Mika for making such a total, and utter, fool of herself. She had obviously been working herself up to this moment for a very long time, felt for me keenly, and was trying to finally muster up enough courage in her love-driven state to grasp the moment and get her man (what kind of stupid obliviousness is this, though?!!); and, though I felt sorry, for her, I have to say that I was also quite incensed. How dare this presumptuous Jemima negate my relationship with Duncan in one fell swoop as though the whole ‘thing’ had just been some mistake, pre-pubescent phase? How dare this dough dolly assume, or even imagine, that the sight of her soft pillows bosoming under that cotton, her specially intentioned, lowered, eye-shadowed eyes as she looked at me coyly through her mascara; her venal, tuberculosis breath, that all of that would be enough to somehow instantly ‘change’ the object of her affections; to make him sweep her off her feet (hard: she wouldn’t have been all that light), and settle down merrily into a comfortable, suburban get up with kids, a dog, and a happy, heterosexual retirement?
I sat her down quickly on a bench and told her, immediately, what was what. Severed it dead. Left no illusions. While trying, at the same time, naturally, to exhibit some kindness towards her, even as I sternly lectured her that she needed to face reality and the fact that, as far as she was concerned, I myself was, now and forever more, strictly forbidden territory.
She was crestfallen. And crying. I put my arm around her shoulder and comforted her, but was still, I am afraid to say, planning my getaway; eyes firmly on the train station that was just a few hundred metres beyond down the road. I told her that I liked her, as I handed her tissues, and that we would still continue with the trio ( l lied ) and that I was truly sorry that she had been disappointed and hurt that I really hadn’t realized that she felt this strongly. And thank you, also, for the perfume, by the way, I really like it, he says, beginning to already walk away (it lay there now, accusingly in my bag, glaring back at me symbolically like a talisman).
I make my escape. Leaving her there, weeping on the bench. Head forward. To the train station. And feel quite disquieted by the entire experience, which was simply not what I was wanting on what could have been a peaceful Tuesday morning by myself at home. After all, though nothing untoward had happened, and a hand being taken by another would be shocking, feel like real trespass, only in a Jane Austen novel. Just like one of those novels, though, the circumstances surrounding the event, on that wet day in June with the polite and pastoral pastime of hydrangea viewing, did, it fact, all make it rather startling. It felt like an invasion of my space – a misguided and mutually mortifying assault. I told Duncan about it later that day, and I am ashamed to say that we laughed – not at her, exactly, but for the absurdity and the mutual embarrassment, the ridiculousness of it all, and the bizarreness of its happening in the first place. But I can’t say that he was exactly pleased, either, with the way that she had behaved, especially seeing that she had been invited to the house and been cooked for by him. With her complete and nonchalant attempted erasure of his existence; her genuine belief that her charms, and the romantic allure of big blue flowers, were enough for me to be swayed in her direction.
It was not long afterwards that the phone calls started. The first time, in the middle of the night, she said nothing. Just silence. But I could feel her, on the end of the line, breathing. I felt that she, also, was in the dark (and I didn’t even know, for sure, that it was her). But in any case, I have never really liked the telephone, the jarring intrusion of its shrill ring, the interrupting of my peace. And late at night, especially, when I am the kind of person who finds it hard to go back to sleep once my adrenaline has been awakened, it was a real nuisance.
Mika, is that you?
Silence.
Then, on the third or fourth time I can’t remember, I hear a voice.
After a long, protacted, and painful silence.
‘Kurushii’.
‘Kurushii……..’
I am suffering……
In the black of the kitchen, still half in dream, having just woken up, at 2 or 3 am, there it is: a disembodied voice, female, in the ether, telling me of its suffering (which I am apparently the cause of). She is sobbing, quietly, in obvious torment, and I feel for her, I do, but don’t need this shit. I try to assuage her, tell her that she’ll find someone else, but ask her, politely not to call again. She hangs up.
But it happens again.
Again, that plaintive, pathetic voice…….I suffer. I am really suffering!; I love you, Kurushii……but this time I tell her quite violently to stop calling me; that the whole thing has gone on quite long enough, and that I really don’t have any more patience. I don’t want to see her anymore , and she is to leave both of us alone.
The thing is, although I know my own mental state and capabilities, I didn’t know hers. She seemed like quite a nice person, but having seen enough psychothrillers and horror movies in my time, as well as reading newspapers, I knew I had to lock my doors more securely, just in case, melodramatic though it probably sounds (we often just leave it all open). And there was something genuinely quite horrifying about that voice, even when I knew its source. I could feel her darkness, but it felt ghostly, even sinister, despite the apparent infatuation behind it, with me as its unwavering object. It gave me the creeps. She wanted to see me again, but I said no. No way. And I wondered…………would she be waiting for me somewhere in the dark as I made my way home? She didn’t seem to be like a person that was unhinged, but how could I know for sure? and in any case I made my excuses about the trio, said I was busy at work, and our ensemble quietly died a death. I avoided her if I saw her cycling along the street.
And never saw her again, except perhaps just two or three times, both at the November concert. The first time she came in, Yoko saw her first and whispered (their friendship had long since ground to a halt), ‘god…wow, sexy…..look at her’: she was all teased out Kate Bush hair, woollen mini-skirt, and deep, heavy eye-makeup, apparently, it seemed, for my benefit. The second time she looked entirely different; she had put on a lot of weight, wore no make up, and was now playing the piano instead of the violin. She told me she was no longer with the Italian (we think, now, that he was just a ploy, non-existent to begin with, a way of making me jealous) and that she was fine, enjoying her job, still teaching young children.
It has been a long time since I saw Mika. But when this season comes around, and we are flooded with hydrangeas, I must say that despite my admiration for their quaint, buoyant loveliness, I do not love them. That day, and its ensuing inconveniences and eerinesses, as well as my heartfelt discomfort at having caused, unwittingly, another person’s pain, has rather, I must say, put me off them. It was very unpleasant, and difficult, for both of us. The flowers were the pretext.
I wish her well.