loop in blue

If you have lose your true self, all phenomena bring you nothing but annoyance. If you discover your essenve of mind, you can follow nothing but the true path.
-Rankei Doryu, Zen master

I took bus #33 from the stop in front of my house to Omiya Hachimon Shrine to take a look at the festival there. She got on a few stops before I got off, a woman in kimono carrying a heavily-laden shopping bag. She went to the the back and I glanced at her face as she sat down. Fat, flat and creased with age, she was not a woman of grace but as she adjusted her bag and positioned her kimono, I caught something in her expression that suggested she clung with relentless pride to the past. Her past? Japan's past?

I didn't find her that enticing-- I see ladies in kimono every day-- until she took out a paper fan, unfolded it with a snap of the wrist, and started to fan herself quite ceremoniously. From the second she took out that fan until the moment I stepped off the bus, I was enraptured with her. I stared. To pretend I wasn't staring, I looked at her feet, then at her bag, then at the fabric of her kimono, to take in every detail that I could.

She had a sense of poise, an unusual character that would allow her and only her to unfold that fan in the middle of a city bus just as if it were sixty years before. She wore a certain shade of lipstick, had tied her hair just so, as if she wanted Japan to speak through her.

Then it was my stop and I had almost forgotten to push the button. The bus ground to a halt at Omiyahachimon iriguchi and I stepped off, glancing backwards. I cursed and thanked Japan, in awe of the power of this place to show me the smallest, most amazing details of life even when I'm not looking.

When I got to Omiya Hachimon, the vendor booths were already closing for the day. The shrine smelled of flowers but the blossoms themselves had all gone. The date for the festival, decided months before, had coincided ill with this year's early Spring.

Something about Omiya Hachimon is magical to me. I've been there few times before (though the shrine is mentioned in this entry) but each time I've set foot on the precinct I've felt an immense sense of calm and wonder. Perhaps today it was the musac that the shrine was pumping through the grounds (you can guess, I'm sure, that I like a soundtrack to my life) or perhaps it was just the twilight. I stayed for only a few minutes, just long enough to videotape the end of a Shinto Ceremony for two shrine patrons, before walking back along residential streets to the closest bus stop.

I've been fascinated with mirrors lately, though I don't mean the "visual aids" we hang in our homes and restrooms. A mass of tangled streets and alleys, Tokyo is full of faded, dirty and bent traffic mirrors. These mirrors and their cousins on cars and motorbikes, reflect, often at a twisted angle, a backwards semblance of everyday life.

The mirror has a special symbolism in Japanese culture. The mirror of Amaterasu is the primary Shinto artifact that represents the holy bloodline of the emperor. In addition to (or because of?) the historical importance of the mirror, it is regarded differently than in Western culture. The mirror is not seen to "keep", "hold" or "trap" what is reflected in its surface but rather an an empty pool to be "filled." This is the exact reason that I find these common mirrors to be so alluring.

What I see before me, for example, when walking on a city street, fills my perspective and therefore often falls into the realm of the "normal." But when I glimpse the same scene reflected in a mirror it becomes fantastic and exotic. The "normal world," backwards, warped and dirty somehow jumps out at me as the real Japan. I often find myself stopped and gaping at mirrors filled with the image of a street scene I only seconds before passed unknowingly.

I have become, of late, a human camera: mirror and lens, devouring and recording what I see with an impassive voracity. The crossdresser clutching his/her puppy beneath the demonic icon of MYLORD department store. The schoolgirl with a Lois Vuitton bag twice her size. Rows and rows of croquet sauce in the supermarket. The same monk in front of Shinjuku station today, yesterday and tomorrow. Patterns repeating themselves, growing, melting, shaping the mosaic.

I feel as if the very design of thought and memory within my brain has changed, channeled into a new, three-dimensional, multi-layered space. Maps and webs, my spacial memory has improved to the point that if I go somewhere once, I can remember the precise location by feel forever. Most of the time, I don't need directions, intuition will suffice. Clips, phrases, faces and songs stick to my short-term memory like glue and though eventually lost in the blur, can be called up easily if placed in their time and location on the three-dimensional map.

When I venture outdoors in this city, I dive into the web of it. If I open my mind to this mapping, the very air around me changes. I have learned to step through the looking glass.

The mirror is empty. Today all it took was one woman in kimono to fill it.