Best of the Transparent Hummingbird
The Massive Continuity of Deer
That I went to Nara was entirely unremarkable but for the fact that when I set out that morning I had been on the bus to Kinkaku-ji in northern Kyoto.
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The Kintetsu train would have been cheaper and brought me nearer to the Naramachi, but dawdling too long at Kyoto station I had to go on the next, a JR. The attendant in the station tourism office on the other end was aggressive to the point of rudeness, something I had not thought possible in Japan. I was hailed and beckoned towards the office when I had no intention of stopping, a map thrust upon me by a fierce matron barking out instructions while tracing a route with a thick marker telling me exactly where I wanted to go and how. In fact, I was going quite somewhere else, but I meekly allow her to tell me, and then was guided by Google maps the rest of the way.
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Arriving on a hot day and discovering that I could not put my hair up (having left my rubber band behind in the pocket of my other jacket) was a minor vexation, one almost immediately placated by my finding Hiraso Restaurant with no trouble at all. The Nara speciality is kakinohazushi, pressed sushi with cured mackerel wrapped in persimmon leaves. Neat rectangular green parcels, like ancient jade pillows. With it, somen in chilled broth with sweet cherry tomato, mushroom, kinshi tamago, chiffonaded shiso, and a black chunk that looked distinctly unpromising but turned out to be marinated eggplant (a burst of earthy, creamy sweetness in the mouth). Before I leave I found a spare hair scrungee at the bottom of my bag, afterall.
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After a while in the Naramachi I become self-conscious: other pedestrians, men, primarily, were looking at me. I begin to wonder if I had got my dress on inside out, or if my undergarments were showing. Finally I decide that the fact of my wearing a dress at all, a long flowy ankle-length dress in bright coral — the colour is as conspicuous as the length and Grecian cut — was what was drawing attention. This did not cease until I got into Nara park itself where the tourists are too absorbed to bother about other tourists.
[digression] I do not understand other people’s aversion to travelling in long dresses. They are to my mind excellent and exact for the purpose despite the common and erroneous belief that they restrict movement. In the right cut they are flowy and comfortable, in the right material they add little bulk to your luggage; indeed you can also cushion breakables in them. The ones I have take wrinkling well, a sensible consideration when living out of suitcases (I, whose non-travelling wardrobe consists almost entirely of crisp cottons, linens and silks, am never far from an iron.) In cold weather you appreciate the extra coverage, in warm they keep off the direct sun, at all times they mask the scruffiness of travel and confer the illusion of decorum: they convey modesty if you go into a place of worship and presentability if you go into a restaurant or a museum. What is there not to like?]
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Five minutes into Nara Park, the deer become visible, and so do these signs. After a while I become slightly miffed that none of these were happening to me.
(I am also half-amused and half-peeved by the depiction of old ladies and young girls on the sign. and do they mean (she snickers) by the ‘X’ in the lower left corner, that the little girl is either killed or swearing fluently?)
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The pragmatism and selective regard of Nara deer when it comes to tourists becomes apparent two hours later, once I buy some deer cracker. I have never felt so blatantly and mercenarily pursued and pressganged as when I held crackers in my hand, nor so rapidly and thoroughly shrugged off as when the crackers run out. After my third 150 yen on deer crackers I decide that money would be far better spent on buying myself matcha ice-cream (also 150 yen), for I would enjoy the ice-cream a lot more than I was enjoying the deer. When deer have been relentlessly butting you and tugging at your clothing and taking nasty nips from your derriere, you soon lose any illusions of Sweet Bambi.
Sacrilegious thoughts, but one begins to wonder: what do they put in these deer crackers, that being offered the same snack day after monotonous day by thousands of tourists the deer still stampede to feed? The contemptuous boredom of say, a swan in the Singapore Botanic Gardens if you tried to toss it some bread ought be the norm — animals on public display in tourist areas are not easily enticed by the mere offer of food. Do they keep the deer slightly underfed deliberately so that they rush tourists for supplements? Or are there additives to the crackers, that leave the deer craving and dependent, each an unknowing addict?
*
On my way out of the Kasuga Taisha I see a sign for a botanical garden and immediately halt. The brochure says it displays 250 types of plants described in Japan’s oldest collection of poems, the manyoshu. This is precisely the wrong season to visit any sort of garden (a floral garden when not in the season of blooms is a wretched, woebegone sight that dismays the looker), but when literature and flowers and classifications coincide I felt practically obligated to enter. I buy a ticket and go in. And of course, it was disappointing.
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Todai-ji’s unexpected majestic scale (all wood) silences me for a while.
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A pleasant encounter with a friendly American man whose deer I had accidentally lured away with my liberal handing out of crackers. He is the only person I have seen in Nara who can cuddle a deer without food inducements (Thomas Wyatt would have been jealous.) For a time we sit by the side of the path not far from Nigatsu Hall and talk of travel and America and social justice. Later, walking back to the train station together, an accident with ice-cream cones and my (ahem) décolletage inappropriate for describing here ensued in some boldly flirtatious chatter that end in nothing because we boarded trains to different Japanese cities. He says he is going to hike Mount Fuji the following week. I wonder if he has succeeded.
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At the Kintetsu station going back to Kyoto a jazz duo was performing to a large crowd: posters tell me this is the week of the Nara Street Music festival. I was greatly sorry I could not stay on longer.
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My Nara, I have concluded, is definitely not that of Minz-mother’s.*
Kyoto, June 2014
[** earlier on.]
The mother was in Kyoto and Nara in the spring of 1974, exactly 40 years ago. I hope that my Kyoto and Nara in 2014 will be my own journey but will also let me see some of the same places, with her memories overlaid on them. Not to retrace some of her steps, for that suggests much more purpose. I simply would like to know that as I wander through the city sometimes our personal paths were crossing in space though not in time.
I also quite like the idea — though I admit it is a load of sentimental codwash — that some of the deer she fed would have been the ancestors of deer I’m feeding. (Recalling also Peter and Harriet in Oxford: “Twenty three years ago I fed these identical ducks with these identical sandwiches… and ten and twenty years hence the same ducks and the same undergraduates will share the same ritual feast, and the ducks will bite the undergraduates’ fingers as they have just bitten mine. How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.“)
‘The massive continuity of deer’ would be a good title for something, but I don’t know what.