Little Yokozuna by Wayne Shorey Page A

The windows were open, so at each stop a rich complexity of smells poured in on the spring breeze, scents of sweet flower blossoms, wood smoke, and hot railroad tar, grease, and metal. There was something poignant in this unfamiliar blend of familiar odors, and Annie found herself excited by it, without knowing why.
    Kiyoshi-chan's father read his newspaper for hours, dozing occasionally while sitting straight up. Annie glanced over at his paper and tried to imagine someone being able to read such a complicated language so easily. She knew a few of the difficult
kanji
characters, and more of the simpler phonetic symbols, but it boggled her mind that anyone could read everyday news, sports articles, or the goofy-looking comics in such a complicated form of writing. It seemed like the sort of writing made only for poetry or mystical thoughts. Or maybe incantations for opening philosophical gardens, she said to herself. After trying to puzzle out a bit of it, she shook her head and looked back out the window.
    They arrived at Kyoto Station after a train journey of over five hours, and stumbled out onto the sidewalk, stiff and ready to see sights.
    "First we eat lunch," said Kiyoshi-chan's father, and untying a large silk wrapper, he passed around a
bento
to each one. Each
bento
was a box divided into compartments, filled with helpings of rice, vegetables, pickles, and small slices of fruit. They sat on the concrete ledge outside the station and ate. The sun was warm on their heads.
    "So how many temples are there in Kyoto?" asked Knuckleball, picking up a piece of fried pork with his chopsticks.
    Kiyoshi-chan's father said something, with his mouth full. Annie stared at him.
    "Excuse me?" she said. "How many did you say?"
    He swallowed. "Two thousand," he said, and smiled. He stuffed in another heaped mouthful of rice.
    "Two thousand!" she said. "Two thousand?"
    "
Hai
" he nodded, chewing. "Yes. Two thousand."
    Annie bit into a pickled radish and chewed several times. "And how many of these have gardens?" she asked.
    "All of them, of course," he said. "What is a temple without a garden?"
    "And are there other gardens in Kyoto," asked Knuckleball. "Besides the temple ones?"
    "Of course," said Kiyoshi-chan's father. "What is a home without a garden?"
    "How can we possibly see them all?" wailed Annie.
    "You can't, of course," he said. "But it only takes one to
whisk
you back to Boston, like a magic carpet."
    He chuckled, cleaning out the last grains of rice from his lunch and popping them in his mouth one by one with his chopsticks. "But regardless," he said, "if you want to see philosophical gardens, Kyoto is the place to come."
    Annie and Knuckleball looked at each other.
    "Then what are we waiting for?" said Annie. So it was that the Kyoto trip became a disaster. Like the worst sort of tourist they bolted from one place to another all afternoon, in fact until the evening became too dark to see a thing. Then they took a local train to Uji and stayed the night in the tiny home of Kiyoshi-chan's aunt, and were back in Kyoto before seven o'clock the next morning, zigzagging from one garden to another through all the length and breadth of the old city.
    Annie would regret this for years afterward, until she finally was able to return to the incredible city of Kyoto again, and to see it the way it was meant to be seen. They fled from temple to temple, garden to garden, shrine to shrine, hardly seeing the breathtaking clouds of cherry blossoms in full flower around them, never taking a moment to soak in the peacefulness of a dry, bright, sun-washed Zen garden. Years later Annie would still remember and regret the grim look that gradually settled on the face of Kiyoshi-chan's father and of Kiyoshi-chan himself, realizing that she and Knuckleball must have seemed those days like the very crassest kind of American sightseer. Though only the proprietor of a little country market, Kiyoshi-chan's father, like all Japanese, loved the beauty