MY YEAR OF DIRT AND WATER
Journal of a Zen Monk’s Wife in Japan
By Tracy Franz
307 pp. Stone Bridge Press. Paper, $16.95.
Foreigner-in-Japan narratives have certain consistent themes. They are stories of seeking, of alienation, of awe and disappointment, of tantalized not-quite-understanding. They are often infused with longing for an aesthetic and philosophical ideal that seems always to be vanishing, like fragrant smoke. Their most famous practitioners, from Lafcadio Hearn to Alan Booth and Donald Richie, tend to be male.
“My Year of Dirt and Water” is an intriguing addition to this shelf, not just because its author is a woman. Like many gaijin memoirists, Tracy Franz writes of her determined but stumbling pursuit of traditional Japanese disciplines, in her case, pottery and Soto Zen Buddhism. But the primary reason for her extended sojourn in Japan is her tall American husband, formerly Garrett, now Koun, recently ordained as a Zen priest and now spending a year as a cloistered monk in a Kyushu temple. His motivation — a deep commitment to Buddhist service — is clear, or at least as clear as Zen paradox allows. Hers is harder to define.
The ambivalence of Franz’s position begins with the first day of her year alone: Feb. 29, leap-year day, “a day that does and does not exist.” The same might be said of Franz herself. On one level, she teaches English at Shokei University in Kumamoto and fills her free time with serious training in ceramics, Zen meditation, Japanese language and karate. She forges friendships across the language gap with her giggling students, her stern pottery sensei, her sparring partners at the dojo, the motley members of her meditation group. Beneath this intrepid purposefulness, however, runs a treacherous current of doubt — both the everyday bafflement of the foreigner in Japan and the persistent question, “Why am I here?”
Franz writes in elegantly understated journal entries, each with a satisfying heft, like a rustic wabi-sabi tea bowl. She embraces both Japan’s neon commercialism and its moments of antique serenity. Newly planted rice paddies glitter “like a mirror shattered on a staircase”; the incomprehensible visual and aural assault of a shopping center is “a museum of a misaligned parallel universe.” She strives to look past labels, to find the spiritual practice in repetitive failure, the pleasure in cultural confusion, the flow in solitary pursuits. She widens her gaze to include her troubled Alaskan childhood and contemplates her damaged past through the lens of her strange present.
Buzzing around her quiet musings, though, like a fly in the meditation room, is the largely unanswered question of what brought her to this point. She is allowed brief and unsatisfying visits to her husband’s temple throughout the year, and allows us equally brief and unsatisfying glimpses into the relationship that has transplanted her in such distant and unfamiliar soil. We know that Koun is “the love of my life,” the only person she’s “ever been able to be properly alone with”; we know he wept on the day he left her behind. But that is about all we know. The central koan of Franz’s book — a struggle toward spiritual enlightenment catalyzed by romantic desire — feels especially frustrating without a better understanding of this powerful attachment.
Or perhaps that’s the point. Toward the end, Franz goes with a Japanese friend to see an exhibition of calligraphy. “What do you think?” the friend asks, as they gaze at the scrolls.
“I don’t understand anything. But I also can’t look away.”
“Oh. Then you understand,” her friend says.
Franz’s book — a love story, a recovery narrative, a knowingly futile attempt to penetrate “a nation that takes great pride in its impenetrability” — is the same kind of thing. It demands attention, and defies understanding.
Janice P. Nimura is the author of “Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back.”
