Free The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer

walls and sliding panels, of shadows and suspicions, of secrecy and stealth.
    Yet all this was also of a piece with Sei’s extreme fastidiousness about the observation of ritual courtesies, a kind of hypersensitivity that amounted, in the end, to snobbery. Obsessed withimpressions and reputations, with what was and was not “cricket,” Sei revealed herself as something of a stickler for protocol, even when it came to matters of the heart. Everything to do with the common folk she found contemptible; everything to do with the Emperor or Empress — even their bad moods — she found a source of great delight. And in her habit of anatomizing emotions and cataloguing poetic sights as if even the motions of the heart were finite, she betrayed something of the stylized reflexiveness of a society in which not only gestures but feelings themselves were prescribed; one of the “Rare Things” she exalted was “a person who was in no way eccentric or imperfect,” and one of the “Embarrassing Things” was “to hear one’s servants making merry.” One could almost hear the lady-in-waiting at Buckingham Palace saying, “But really, my dear. It’s simply not done.”
    Thus Sei’s delicacy in responding to Nature turned into a kind of pedantry when she dealt with human nature; she read people as if they were gardens and as if both should be raked into the same kind of impersonal perfection. And in her fussiness regarding the proper associations of blossoms, the emotional effects of the moon, and the etiquette of the morning-after letter, one could see how love of beauty in such a world might often mean no more than the beautiful gowns worn by aristocrats in Florence or Versailles. The elegance we ascribed to Japanese souls belonged sometimes only to their tastes; Sei, in a sense, had designer views.
    I was more taken aback, though, to find this same preoccupation with niceties, and with the right way of doing things, in the other great classic of the
zuihitsu
, or “follow the brush,” form of collected sayings, the
Essays of Idleness
of the fourteenth-century monk Kenkō. The title, with its distinctly Thoreauvian air, promised typically serene meditations on silence, solitude, and impermanence, and all these it did indeed provide; the monk did much to enunciate the aesthetic of Japanese Romanticism, explaining why it was better to dream of the moon than actuallyto see it, and how longing was better than love. Yet in between were reflections on women (“devious but stupid”), interviews with backgammon champions (“You should never play to win, but so as not to lose”), lists of “Things Which Seem in Poor Taste” (“A man should avoid displaying deep familiarity with any subject”), and descriptions of “seven kinds of persons [who] make bad friends.” The monk wrote about his frissons of pleasure when passing an unknown woman on a night of moon viewing, and the protocol of making love; how “lamplight makes a beautiful face seem even more beautiful,” and “beautiful hair, of all things in a woman, is most likely to catch a man’s eye.” Most unexpected of all, at least to me, were the priest’s anxious obsessiveness with appearances (“A man should be trained in such a way that no woman will ever laugh at him”), and his strongly worded snipes about lower-class men and other “insufferable” or “disagreeable” types (“It is unattractive when people get in a society which is not their habitual one”). If the lady-in-waiting occasionally wrote with the exalted purity of a monk, the monk often wrote with the sharp-tongued worldliness of a lady-in-waiting.
    At times, in fact, it became hard to tell the two of them apart. Sei wrote that one of the “Unutterable Things” was “snow on the houses of the common people. This is especially regrettable when the moonlight shines down on it.” Kenkō echoed her almost to a fault. “Even moonlight when it shines into the quiet domicile of a person of