Shoe Dog Read Online Free Page B

storms. Slowly she led me to my room, which was more a box. Tatami mat, lopsided table, nothing else. I didn’t care. I barely noticed that the tatami mat was wafer thin. I bowed to the bent old woman, bidding her good night. Oyasumi nasai. I curled up on the mat and passed out.
    HOURS LATER I woke in a room flooded with light. I crawled to the window. Apparently I was in some kind of industrial district on the city’s fringe. Filled with docks and factories, this district must have been a primary target of the B-29s. Everywhere I looked was desolation. Buildings cracked and broken. Block after block simply leveled. Gone.
    Luckily my father knew people in Tokyo, including a group of American guys working at United Press International. I took a cab there and the guys greeted me like family. They gave me coffee and a breakfast ring and when I told them where I’d spent the night they laughed. They booked me into a clean, decent hotel. Then they wrote down the names of several good places to eat.
    What in God’s name are you doing in Tokyo? I explained that I was going around the world. Then I mentioned my Crazy Idea. “Huh,” they said, giving a little eye roll. They mentioned two ex-GIs who ran a monthly magazine called Importer . “Talk to the fellas at Importer ,” they said, “before you do anything rash.”
    I promised I would. But first I wanted to see the city.
    Guidebook and Minolta box camera in hand, I sought out thefew landmarks that had survived the war, the oldest temples and shrines. I spent hours sitting on benches in walled gardens, reading about Japan’s dominant religions, Buddhism and Shinto. I marveled at the concept of kensho , or satori—enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop. Sort of like the bulb on my Minolta. I liked that. I wanted that.
    But first I’d need to change my whole approach. I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.
    In every religion, it seemed, self is the obstacle, the enemy. And yet Zen declares plainly that the self doesn’t exist. Self is a mirage, a fever dream, and our stubborn belief in its reality not only wastes life, but shortens it. Self is the bald-faced lie we tell ourselves daily, and happiness requires seeing through the lie, debunking it. To study the self, said the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, is to forget the self. Inner voice, outer voices, it’s all the same. No dividing lines.
    Especially in competition. Victory, Zen says, comes when we forget the self and the opponent, who are but two halves of one whole. In Zen and the Art of Archery , it’s all laid out with crystal clarity. Perfection in the art of swordsmanship is reached . . . when the heart is troubled by no more thought of I and You, of the opponent and his sword, of one’s own sword and how to wield it. . . . All is emptiness: your own self, the flashing sword, and the arms that wield it. Even the thought of emptiness is no longer there.
    My head swimming, I decided to take a break, to visit a very un-Zen landmark, in fact the most anti-Zen place in Japan, an enclave where men focused on self and nothing but self—the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Housed in a marble Romanesque building with great big Greek columns, the Tosho looked from across the street like a stodgy bank in a quiet town in Kansas. Inside, however, all was bedlam. Hundreds of men waving their arms, pulling their hair, screaming. A more depraved version of Cornfeld’s boiler room.
    I couldn’t look away. I watched and watched, asking myself, Is this what it’s all about? Really? I appreciated money as much as the next guy. But I wanted my life to be about so much more.
    After the Tosho I needed peace. I went deep into the silent heart of the city, to the garden of the nineteenth-century