While sitting in the yard at the house of which I have spoken, the house of the butterflies (those that I had been told of, and had believed in before their appearance), the memory of Jurgen Hollar and of Any Trick to Finding came suddenly to me. It had been with great difficulty that I as a boy had read the book, and perhaps it was the doggedness of my approach that had so impressed it on my mind. In any case, there I was, in a Japanese garden, considering the life of a nineteenth-century Austrian huntsman. It was to such thoughts my desperation had led me.
Jurgen Hollar, it may be related — and I give this secret to you now simply out of the general kindness of my heart — could find things because he would not look for them. This is the entire point of his book. He had a very careful method of isolating and categorizing all objects that he would find in a particular area, however large that area might be, however small (however large the object might be, however small). Whether it was a long search or a short one — whether there were many objects or few, still he would follow his credo.
Therefore, imagine this: you are asked to find a spoon. You go into a room and begin on one side of the room. First you behold a sort of long shallow couch full of cushions with a table attached that extends along a wall. That is not a spoon, you say to yourself. Next you cross the wide, sloping, rounded space of the room, walking first down then up, and approach the far side, where, upon a long flat section, you see a sort of kitchen area. There is where spoons are to be found, you think. First you lift one thing then you lift another. Not a spoon, not a spoon you say. But Jurgen, had he been with you, would have looked at each thing in turn, and asked what it was. He would have looked at the couch, emptied it of cushions, and realized that it had a fine spoonlike shape. This may be the spoon I have been looking for. He would have noticed the odd spoon-ness of the very room in which he stood, and might well have identified that as the spoon for which he was looking. He did not permit the previously drawn categories of objects that had been set before him in the world to stop up his eyes and halt his discoveries.
Therefore, when the lord’s son went missing one day, it was Jurgen who found the boy, secreted away, dressed as a girl in a humble village home spinning yarn, actually spinning yarn at a spinning wheel. When a favorite horse was missing, Jurgen found that a particular family, always begging in the marketplace, were mysteriously absent, and not begging for food as they always did. He went to the marketplace and asked himself, what is here and what is not here. He did not say, where is the horse.
And so, as with many lessons, we learn them and forget them and then are forced to learn them again. The time had come for me to regain my composure as a Hollarite, as a fellow who finds things by seeing what is there.
So, after two months of fruitless search, I stopped searching. I would spend my time looking through the transcripts of Oda Sotatsu’s interrogations. I would correspond with his brother, Jiro. I would collect materials and take notes. I would prepare the parts of this very book as best I could.
Also, and perhaps most important, I would wander the area where Jito Joo had last been seen, and I would look at each thing I saw. I would ask myself, what is this that I see.
And so it came to pass after a month of sifting and thinking, I came out of a shop on a street — a street I will tell you where I had often walked! — and there she was. I recognized her from the photographs I had seen. She was on the sidewalk; it was the middle of the afternoon. She was holding a shabby cloth bag and looking at a scrap of paper. That there, I thought, is the addition of twenty years of life to the woman Sotatsu knew, the woman I had seen in photographs. It is what she must look like — it is just what she would look like. Never having seen this older Joo before, I could not look for her, but being prepared to learn what things were by looking at them — suddenly, I found her.
— Joo, I said. Jito Joo?
I explained myself poorly. She was somewhat hostile, at the very least confused and distrustful. However, she also appeared to be a person to whom others seldom spoke. After a little while, I won her trust sufficiently that we went back to her house to speak. In a phrase, she looked quite down on her luck. To whom have you been speaking, she kept asking. To whom?
The House of Jito Joo
[Int. note. This portion is retold from memory, as I did not tape the interaction. You will notice the style of the text differs slightly. That is the reason.]
We passed through several neighborhoods, each poorer than the one before, until we came to an extremely humble street. This one, said Joo, and led me up the steps of a converted building. Her flat was on the top floor, at the back of the house, and looked out onto a small untended patch of ground, and beyond it, a series of other ramshackle buildings running down a long slope.
Her apartment was largely empty. It appeared as if she had just moved in. How long had she lived there? Nineteen years in December.
It was strange, let me tell you, standing there in that apartment with a fifty-year-old Japanese woman I had never met, and no sense at all of what might come of any of it. She looked at me and waited.
Joo, I said, I want to ask you some things. I want to talk to you about Oda Sotatsu. I want to talk about Kakuzo. I want to speak about the poem that was written on a photograph of you. I am looking for this mystery. Not the mystery of why it happened but the mystery of how.
I will tell you nothing about it, said Joo. The person who would speak about it is gone now, gone a long time.
But what if I speak to you? I said. What if I speak about it — about this and about other things. What if I show you it would matter for you to speak. That speaking to me would matter.
She said nothing, but I drew a deep breath and continued.
Her apartment had no kitchen — just a sort of hot plate on a little counter with a sink. She put some water in a pot and set it on the hot plate.
You don’t know me at all, I said, but I have a feeling that you know about something that I know.
And with that, I began.
Int. Note: Speaking to Joo in Her Home
I had never really known anyone, I said, until I met her. It was strange because — at that time I could not speak her language, and she spoke mine only poorly and with little understanding. Still we spoke furiously to each other. Every moment was a new chance to share confidences. I found myself trying to tell her every last thing I had ever seen.
This was your wife, asked Joo.
She is still alive, I said, but she isn’t now my wife.
In fact, I said, I have not seen her now in a long time. And when I have, I do not know that person. For years we lived together. I threw everything to the winds and went with her where she would go. She had a child, a daughter, and we raised that child together. I no longer desired the things I had before. To be a writer, to make my way in the world — these were nothing. These meant nothing. I wanted simply to go from place to place with her, to sit anywhere with her and see what she would say, see what she saw, what she liked, see that she was glad. I felt the fullness of this new life — and I saw that what I had thought before was important was not important at all.