Hidden Buddhas by Liza Dalby

Author:Liza Dalby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: hidden buddhas, buddhism, Japan, esoteric Buddhism, Shikoku, 88 temples, Kyoto, fugu, mappo, Dalby, karma, Miroku, Shingon, Mt. Koya, Kukai, Japanese novels
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Published: 2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The next morning promised a repeat of the previous day. Koji was sick of English. He didn’t want to spend the entire day cooped up in San Anselmo either. San Francisco beckoned. Maybe the Metcalfes would let him take Philip into San Francisco? Philip’s father lowered the newspaper he had been reading and looked at his wife over the top of his glasses. He declared that a terrible idea—what with Koji a stranger to the city, and Philip in the state he was. Koji did not understand every word he said to his wife, but he was utterly attuned to the tone of voice—it reminded him of the way his father gave out decrees at the breakfast table. Just like a Japanese wife, Philip’s mother did not oppose him, but when he had left the house she told Koji she had an idea.

“How about if I call Nora and ask her to go with you?” she said.

“Go where?” asked Philip.

“No-ra is who?” asked Koji.

Ignoring both of them, she got up from the table and went over to the phone hanging on the kitchen wall. Koji heard her speaking in a low voice, and then she came back into the kitchen smiling. Nora had agreed not only to accompany them; she had offered to drive. Linda turned to Koji. Nora, she explained, was a friend of Philip’s.

Koji pricked up his ears. Because of the enduring fame of Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, in Japan, Koji knew that “Nora” was a girl’s name.

“Girlfriend?” he asked.

“Well, yes, I suppose you could say that. Old girlfriend.”

“She is old?”

“No, no. She went to Philip’s high school. Girlfriend from long ago, I meant.” Linda chose her words more carefully.

Koji nodded sagely as if he knew all about previous girlfriends.

Koji was in the role of big brother now. In Kyoto he had enjoyed introducing Philip to pachinko, to sneaking out, and to Korean barbeque. Few people took Koji seriously, but in Philip he had found somebody who appreciated his rebellious side, his knowledge of sleazy esoterica. “Appreciate might be too strong—perhaps “tolerate” might be more truthful; and Koji had missed him when Philip moved to Tokyo. He had never met Nagiko, who looked impossibly glamorous in photographs. He was interested to see what Nora would be like.

“She’ll be by in about forty-five minutes,” said Linda, wondering what Koji was saying to Philip that made him grin like that. When Koji smiled, his mouthful of teeth took over his face and his eyes disappeared into creases behind his glasses. They drank more coffee and made more toast. When a deer wandered up to the back fence behind the tree roses, Koji spilled his coffee in excitement that was shared by nobody else.

“Pests,” Linda Metcalfe told him. “Rose-eating pests. We think of them as big rats.”

Koji was totally confused. He saw an exotic, big-eyed, innocent deer—not a rat. He must have missed something. The deer keep rats from eating the roses? He decided that must be it.

At ten o’clock

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