I had seen the Transit of Venus, the moon stained cinnamon by a lunar eclipse, and various spaceships rising from Cape Canaveral. I had been through three seasons of the yellow butterflies, bouts of fireworks and many north winds over a thousand different oceans. The ancient Rolls Royces and Dusenbergs, Bugattis and Hispano Souzas of the Concours d’ Elegance car show had driven in and out of the Ritz three times. It took four years, but finally I, prickly, peculiar, and quite shy after all, had made a friend on the island. Like all my close friends, she lived thousands of miles away. I saw her rarely, only once or twice a year when the academic year broke and her daughter and son-in-law, a professor at Columbia Business School, would come from New York, and then, when he left for Harvard Business School, from Cambridge.

Kimie lived right next door when she was not in Hawaii. When her daughter and young granddaughter arrived, she and her husband moved to a rented apartment in the building for the month.

Soon after we came to the island, her daughter, Maia, popped from her apartment to say hello. Everything about Maia reminded me of Audrey Hepburn as Rima the Bird Girl in Green Mansions. She was thin as the wind, devoted to nature and all its creatures. She knew how to rescue a wild bird wounded on the beach, she would stop and talk intensely to everyone she saw, she wrote in a tiny hand and was polite and deferential to the point of my embarrassment.

Like tentacles emerging from a sunken ship, our neighbors came forth—at first the cautious probes of beginning acquaintance and then gifts back and forth—flowers and books and large juicy limes from a local tree. Toby was a famous young professor; they had met at Harvard Business School. They came over for drinks, I went with Maia and her daughter on excursions to the neighboring island and she showed me the tabby slave houses on Kingsley Plantation where Ana Jai, a black slave from Senegal, married the owner and had hundreds of her own slaves.

In the summer, the young neighbor couple went down to the beach only in the evenings. Many days they vanished for long nature walks. They were friendly and elusive, fairly glamorous in their mystery, and Maia’s father, an engineer, a witty man of superior taste, had liked The Diamond.

One evening, Maia and her mother Kimie brought chairs out into the walkway and we sat and watched the sunset drinking green tea and eating cookies until the afterglow, the time after sunset. All this was very pleasant if transitory for me.

Like the tides they came and went, and when they were gone, our strange intermittent friendship ended, invisible renters moved in, the blinds were pulled down and I settled back into my state of sabi, “tranquil loneliness.”

Sometimes, Kimie and her husband would arrive before her daughter and sometimes they would stay on after they left, and it was in one of those times that Kimie invited me to town for a late breakfast and, over her bagel with cream cheese and nova scotia, told me how she met her husband when she was working for a hotel in Japan and how his grief– his first American wife and three children died in a plane crash leaving Japan– brought them together.

And then one day around Christmas, as the child and I were gluing gumdrops onto the roof of a gingerbread house that Maia had baked, for some reason I can’t recall, Maia remarked that her grandfather had been the Prime Minister of Japan.

“Hidecki Tojo” she said, taking slabs of gingerbread from the oven. I was truly shocked. Kimie was Tojo’s youngest daughter! I knew almost nothing of her life. How could I, who had given ten years of my life to “history” not be intrigued by this part of history living right next door—the daughter of the man responsible for Pearl Harbor, the man who commanded 90 million people through war and its crimes, a villain even to Japanese people of my generation.

That much I knew. Otherwise, I was completely ignorant of Japan and its history and somehow for months it seemed wrong to “look up” Tojo. I went home that afternoon and told Edward and then let it recede. It was a test for me whether I could close my journalist eyes and see the person before me. And yet when you know an astounding fact about someone it is always there in the background. It gives a little heft to every utterance, it make people who are already interesting more so.

Tojo was in the crossword puzzle that week. He was on the TV program King of the Hill—where the little father who had his legs sawed off in a Japanese prison camp, hated the Japanese and called them all “Tojos.” Later, Tojo would again be in the Times crossword: “Hitler:Germany:: —–:Japan.”

Maia was often with her daughter, Sophia, and Kimie and I began to have lunch and I found I truly liked her. She was just my size, and that is very small, and impeccable in her person and apartment. Perhaps you become friends because you see things of yourself or hope to see of yourself in a friend. Like me, she valued kindness in other people and good manners and rejected people who were unkind to others. She was generous and serious and sometimes a bit mystical and sad. She behaved with an almost ostentatious humility, ferocious only in our ongoing battle over who would hold the door for whom. Sometimes, she would say something about her father, who did not want anyone to write about him for one hundred years. I knew Kimie and I had both grown up in harmonious homes where the parents did not fight and trouble came at us both from without not within. We had come from worlds as different as could be and even here we lived different lives for she often went into the town and never went to the beach. When we met downstairs to go to lunch we both thought enough of each other to dress up a bit. Whenever we made a date on the phone, instead of “goodbye”, Kimie would always say “looking forward.”

One day I asked her about “yugen.” I had been reading a tiny pamphlet on Zen gardening—I had no garden here but the beach– and it said, “The Japanese term for tranquility, aesthetics, and ‘viewing’ (as in something beautiful) is yugen, which also means bringing about inner harmony.” Kimie tried to explain, but I could not have asked her a more difficult question. The concept was profound and complex—it involved much of Japanese history and culture– and she wanted to answer me carefully. We spent another lunch with her Japanese dictionary which opened from the rear like a Hebrew text and still were unsure.

A few weeks later as we were walking to the Ritz for lunch, Kimie was carrying a small shopping bag.

“This is yugen” she said looking out. It was noon after a rain. The air was almost white and thick. It was not quite a fog or a haze just something like chiffon hovering over the bright grass all the way out to sea. It was mysterious and timeless with the suggestion of another world. I was seeing beyond. And through the gaps I could see the ocean, the balls of dew balanced on the grass spears. This was the translation of a pre-dream state into the physical world—that time just before sleep when, the poet Robert Lowell told me, he got his ideas.

What lay in the mist was a mysterious beauty, something suggested but beyond comprehension, something veiled and dim, elegant in its simplicity, impenetrable, with the quality of mu –nothingness– a certain sadness for what is missing, transient, the sentiment of “undisturbed lonely quietude”. “The tranquil loneliness of life”; “Half revealed or suggested beauty at once elusive and meaningful tinged with a wistful sadness”; “Subtle, profound, what is not said.” All these are definitions of yugen, the essence of which cannot be defined. It has some of the beauty of wabi sabi, of tarnished silver, a beauty that values imperfection, incompleteness, and rustic simplicity.

Then we went inside through the unreality of the Ritz to the restaurant where everyone serving seemed to know and like Kimie because she was the rare person who really talked to them. Kimie took a seven-page scroll from her little shopping bag. She had written to Japan, to a Buddhist priest, Nishihara Nariuki, who was married to her cousin, to ask about yugen.

“He says he is going to open his books,” Kimie said. And so for the rest of lunch we got through three pages of the scroll and waved away all the friendly waitresses.

It was a very old word from China long ago, and when it came to Japan it expressed the idea of beauty in literature in the waca and haiku poems, then the “gentle gracefulness” in Noh theatre and in Buddhist ideas and Zen paintings. Yugen became the center of Japanese literature, a feeling beyond words or expression. I heard about the father and son poets, Fujiwara no Shunzei, and Fujiwara no Teika— It was waca poetry and the tea ceremony and Noh. Yugen was the fog I drove through on one coast and came to live with on another

Yu-elegant

n-attractive sexy

with a little sadness thrown in

gen-part of the thread, fragility

maybe a sad attractiveness:

aware

I was not a particularly spiritual person. I had tried without success to empty myself of frivolous clutter. I was the kind of person who wanted to know, who had to know what was lost in the fog. The essence was not to know, to let the other side be the other side. Sometimes it combined with sabi—tranquil loneliness, “the supreme simplicity of the aged.”

Japanese aesthetics esteem the hidden, that which is merely suggested, the empty space in a painting, the shadows of an alcove where the sun dies on a blank muted wall.

In picking this word out of so many others, by accident, I had come upon a way of living. I had never talked like this to anyone. I had never even thought of these ideas. Somehow I had found the essence of my two islands in the study of the islands of Japan.

Every morning I saw the light in her window and knew Kimie was up and looking East to the rising sun, bowing to it as her father had done every morning. We were the only two apartments with lighted windows and from that alone I felt a kinship

Then Kimie gave me a book, Lost Japan by Alex Kerr, that fascinated me. Kerr defined “yugen” as a “dark mysterious beauty.” I began to understand why Kimie thought Japan had lost its soul after World War II. Kerr wrote of the Taoist sages, hermits “who wanted nothing more than to withdraw from the dust of the world and enjoy ‘pure conversation’ with their friends.” The literati of the 16^th century, after they had mastered poetry, painting and calligraphy, did nothing. “Their great achievement was the way they enjoyed themselves.”

Then Kimie and Maia were gone, and I had to return to New York to tend to some health matters and see my family. I carried the scrolls with me hoping to get the rest of them translated and I carried with me the idea of nothingness and a cultivated void.

At a party for the Super Tuesday presidential primaries in a Park Avenue duplex, I stood on the inlaid marble floors, in the noise, with the full dust of the world upon me. I did not know many of the people, but the ones I knew were rich and successful in New York terms, and rather thrilled with themselves as they passed from room to room. The air was dense with self-satisfaction and the big screen television sets tuned to results from the rest of America hummed at a level that was just right. This is not the place I would have chosen to have an out of body experience, but it happened.

Two men were speaking around me. One was saying that his son found the people at his new deep Southern school “not sophisticated enough.” The other man told a story about his twenty-year-old daughter’s $2000 pocketbook. He was splitting the price with her but then she charged her half on her credit card and, of course, he paid that bill, too. And then I only saw his mouth laughing and a huge sound came up—gospel singing from the radio station testimony service I heard on Sunday mornings combined with a pounding surf, and I knew that I belonged in another place, an emptier room, a different island.

I was not so much an ornamental hermit now as a person who did not exist, a person who spoke another language and heard another language. In all the happy chaos, I was finally free from striving. I did not care if this one or that one rushed to me and kissed me and said I looked well (I didn’t). Not to say I thought myself better –I had never had a worldly success, I had never made any money –I was just different, like the people from another America on the televisions. I was the one who was unfit. I could not be here anymore for I had nothing left to say. I did not understand and I could not hear.

A man who had acted against me was in one of the rooms. I had gone from room to room to avoid him, to avoid myself in front of him and what I might say. Now, I knew if he stepped in front of me, I would forebear. I was in fairyland. The walls fell away. The paintings fell from the walls. I was on an empty beach with many birds and I was free.

Then I was in the paneled elevator going down and stepping into the cold night. I walked home, my coat flapping open, the high heels hurting my feet which were used to being shoeless. “Looking forward,” I said into the night. “Looking forward.”