Fall leaves and Murasaki

This week was my fall break, which ends up being actually a full 10days, because Friday was a national holiday (Labour Thanksgiving, actually). Luckily, a friend from my Joint Seminar class (one of the Doshisha students) invited me to tag along with her ‘Genji’ class to Ishiyamadera, which is the Buddhist temple where it is believed that Murasaki Shikibu began writing the Tale of Genji, generally considered to be the world’s first novel. My friend had told her professor before that there was an American girl who was interested in classical Japanese literature, which he found amusing, and so I found myself headed out to the farther reaches of Kyoto Friday morning. Because the elevation at Ishiyama (literally ‘stone mountain’) is higher, the maple leaves were out in force, making for some of the best foliage I’d seen thus far, a fact that seemed to have gotten around, because the temple was mobbed with people enjoying their 3-day weekend. The temple complex itself is huge, with several buildings, outbuildings, winding paths up and around the rocks and many rooms for small exhibitions. We started up, after washing our hands at the fountain to purify ourselves, towards a beautiful area of tall grey rocks that were surrounded with beautifully contrasting red leaves, which I was told the poet Bassho had once compared to white autumn wind, which people think means that the rocks themselves actually used to be bright white instead of grey. Beyond that there was a replica of a screen which showed a series of small pictures that each represented a chapter of Genji, and then the main temple building. After that we saw a small exhibit of old scrolls, paintings, and more folding screens having to do with Murasaki and Genji, as well as an ink-grinding stone that is said to have belonged to Murasaki herself, though my friend said that this would be hard to verify, since almost exactly 1000years have passed since Genji was written. The amusing thing, for me, about the stone was that it had two circles for mixing ink in, the left-hand one decorated with a carp, and the right-hand one with an ox. These are puns: the word in Japanese for dark (koi) has the same sound as the one for carp, while the word for thin (usui) sounds a lot like the word for ox (ushi), so one would mix darker ink in the left one and lighter ink in the right one. After we’d had our fill of Genji for one day we headed to a café, where we stayed for awhile talking over our cake and café au laits. I returned home a little later than expected, but luckily just in time for a wine party that my host family had put together. They had bought a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau and prepared several delicious ‘tapas’ to complement it, including octopus and potatoes (much better than it sounds), scallops and sweet pickled onions, and crab salad with cucumber. This wine was the first that I’d had since coming to Japan, but actually fits in with the regular schedule of Japanese customs: every year on the same date Beaujolais Nouveau comes to Japan first (since it’s probably the first country to get to any particular calendar day) and since it’s the sort of wine that should be consumed immediately, every year it’s a big sell. A very satisfying day, in my opinion.
-It’s not a good idea, when you don’t understand what someone has said, to repeat part of their sentence, as that can sometimes be seen as an actually answer to their question, and sometimes a very odd one. I don’t know what I said, but I could tell it was weird from the laughter that followed.
-There is a boat on the river near Ishiyama called the ‘Michigan’. Imagine my surprise as, in my search for a regional ‘Hello Kitty,’ I found a charm of Kitty riding a steamboat labelled prominently with the name of a state from my own country!
-It is very easy to find yourself both ordered for and paid for in a big group here. It happened with the temple entrance fee, the café, and a significant portion of my return fare. Now I really need to buy a gift for my friend’s professor.
-When it comes to small talk, lamenting the weather works equally well in Japanese as it does in English.
-My friend had actually lived in California for a while when she was younger, and is thus fluent in English. She related to me an essay that she had read about a Japanese literature professor teaching in America, which talked about the differences between teaching on America’s East coast as compared to the West. One major feature of Japanese literature and arts in general is the extreme attention paid to making sure that the season is accurately referenced, with images carefully grouped by seasonal appropriateness. Because of this, the professor had no trouble teaching Japanese literature on the East coast, where seasons are similarly distinct, but ran into a problem teaching near LA: he felt as though he was teaching fiction.