The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer

the local baseball team, the Hanshin Tigers, was playing its last game of the season, the air was thick with elegy. Before the game began, the great star of the Tigers, the huge and gentle Oklahoma farmboy Randy Bass, got up on the rostrum, bowed all round, and stepped down again. Then he got up on the rostrum, bowed all round, and came down. Then he got up … eleven times in all, while Bass flags fluttered everywhere and a little boy next to me, in a flowing white happi coat with “R. Bass” on its back, looked on in wonder. After the game ended, every member of the team came out onto the field and bowed in unison to the fans. For fifteen minutes, not a supporter left the stadium. All of them — all of us — stood to attention, singing every last verse of the sober, martial Tiger fight song, in one massed, mournful choir. Here, I thought, was a team in last place, thirty-six games out of first place, which had lost two games out of every three for more than six months — yet still its faithful were rising to give it this heartfelt show of support.
Sayōnaras
were hosannas here.
    A few days later, on another brilliant morning, the trees beginning to turn under skies that were blue and puffy white, I went to see one of the three great occasions of the Kyoto year, the Jidai Matsuri, or Festival of the Ages, in the Imperial Palace.
    When I arrived, an hour or so before the procession was to begin, the performers were relaxing backstage, on the lawns of the spacious compound. Little girls whose ghost-white faces and twisted hairdos reproduced the high elegance of Sei Shōnagon and Murasaki sat erect in priceless kimono under trees. Old wooden carriages stood at rest on gravel walkways, forgotten props from some period movie. Wrinkled men in fierce warriors’ dress glared for cameras in the shadeless courtyards. Incarnations of great figures from the city’s past, the performers were as shiny as the apple-polished day around them.
    And as the parade began, one stately procession of spirits walking and breathing through the high-rise town —
daimyō
and
samurai
, courtiers and geisha, caparisoned and costumed, and fighters all in armor, watched in respectful silence by the crowds — I could not help but think of the last such celebration I had seen, just two months before I arrived in Japan: Carnival in Havana. It was an absurd comparison, I knew, yet the difference was as striking as between real life and art. For Cuba, however circumscribed by government edict and reduced by poverty, was still one pulsing, writhing explosion of lust and liquor, of bikinied girls and wriggling dragons and foot-high paper cups of beer foaming over beside the seaside Malecón. Here, by contrast, all was grave formality. Boys in black walked two by two, in synchronized steps, playing pipes; ancients regal on slow-stepping horses passed in noiseless dignity across the gravel; girls as stately as Heian courtiers glided with phantom steps through coffee-shop streets. The audience was as silent as a congregation. Everything, timed to the moment, was as rigid as a catechism.
    All festivals, of course, are acts of collective myth-making, chances for a nation to advertise its idealized image of itself. In Cuba, for all the privations, that meant abandon, gaiety, and bacchanal; here, it meant mellifluous order, solemnity, and grace. In Cuba, one could feel the effusions of a passionate, rhetorical people able and eager to give themselves over to the sentiments they voiced so recklessly; here, the effect was one ofstrange, almost awestruck, disengagement. It seemed as if the Japanese were almost paying homage to the fact of ritual itself — and to the religion of Japan — so that the ceremony became pageant, and the festival a kind of memorial service.
    Before the day was out, however, this, like most of my generalities about Japan, found its refutation in the country’s other side, the side that came out after dark — in this case, in the