Prologue
“With many tears, she told him she had guessed rightly when he supposed her not to belong to this world—that she had in truth come from the moon and that her time on Earth would soon be over.”—Yei Theodore Ozaki, Japanese Fairy Tales. The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter
One of the best things I ever did was walk into an auction of Lauren Bacall’s estate at Bonham’s near my office one day. She was a real collector—a lover of Edwardian furniture and all sorts of knick knacks, from bookends and cheese slicers to Henry Moore sculptures and Humphrey Bogart’s battered old suitcase. The auction included just about everything from her New York apartment, and sold for more than $3.5 million in its entirety. I knew nothing about auctions then. I just waltzed in to see the preview and ended up bidding for a modestly priced mirror of hers from the mid-1800s. I didn’t tell my husband about it. My four-year-old son, who rarely misses a beat, asked why I got a mirror when I already had one. But mostly it was my secret.
I sat in the lobby and waited while they wrapped it—cast-iron and much heavier than I expected. I had to hail a cab from the St. Regis Hotel to my apartment in Greenpoint because it was too unwieldy for me to carry on the subway. Old Hollywood movies had always been a touchstone for me when I was a kid. My father would drop me off at the video store and I’d watch six or seven movies a weekend on VHS—everything from Sunset Boulevard to Key Largo and Philadelphia Story. I looked for beauty wherever I could find it, creating dreamscapes in the wreckage of that house, taking cues from Donna Reed’s honeymoon in It’s a Wonderful Life. It struck me sometimes that my personality might have just been a bunch of scraps borrowed from movies and traits I liked in other people: I was probably a cross between Holly Golightly and Garbo’s Ninotchka by way of 1970s New Jersey.
The Bacall auction happened in the early spring of 2015 over the course of two days. (I was on deadline at work so went back and forth from my office, following the sale developments online. It hardly compared to the magic of being there, but I’d scoped out the scene well enough and could recall the visual details of most items, with the catalog to jog my memory.) I’d earmarked a few smaller pieces I loved, which I thought would sell for less money and fly under most people’s radars. The mirror was one of those items. I later read that Lauren Bacall developed her iconic glare at a very young age to help steel her nerves; who knows how true it was but I liked to imagine her staring into a mirror practicing. I’d spent so much time trying to cultivate different looks over the course of my own life—studying actresses and models in old photos, making faces in mirrors—that I’d only recently learned to stop catching glimpses of myself as a matter of habit. I hardly looked at myself in the Bacall mirror but often admired its tarnish, ivy edges and gorgeous handiwork.
A month before that auction, one of my closest friends got married in the heart of Mexico City, in an out-of-the-way garden owned by two architects Diego and Ana Maria. My husband teased me for wandering around the grounds like Emily Dickinson after the ceremony, rather than drinking, eating, and mingling. I wasn’t much of a drinker or socializer. What obsessed me was a staircase that led up to a mirror in the very back of the garden; it reflected a cluster of bamboo trees and made it seem like you could step into another dimension—a world made of bamboo forests and who knew what else from there.
I had the sudden feeling of being back in Japan with my husband when our son was seven-months-old, a calm baby and pretty transportable then. We were lucky to find ourselves in Kyoto during the mid-autumn festivals, just around Halloween when many temples stayed open at night, and people wandered the lit-up streets. I’d underestimated how much time could be spent in just one temple. Even some of the smallest-looking ones from the outside could lead you from one room to the next, garden after garden, on a labyrinthian path of surprises. One night, we stumbled upon Kodai-ji Temple at the foot of the mountains. Hundreds of blue-lit steps, followed by series of gardens, were like stepping through the wardrobe to Narnia. We found ourselves in the midst of a jawdropping bamboo forest, and then on the edge of the darkest, clearest lake I’d ever seen. Every detail of every red, orange and gold leaf was reflected in that lake from the neighboring trees. It looked so real, I felt I could jump into the lake, and another reality.
This is where I felt most at home: in other worlds. The smell of cypress and incense also impressed me—it permeated Japan. I bought up boxes of a hinoki (cypress) incense recommended to me by a local Japanese restaurant and burned it in my bedroom for many years after that trip. Hinoki happened to be the name of one my son’s friend’s who brought toys to the park. My son would make a beeline for him to negotiate for transformers. I learned that it wasn’t a popular name in Japan but Hinoki’s mother said she wanted to name him after a tree. Traditionally used in Japanese temples, hinoki tends to hold up well over the course of many seasons.
Cypress incense had a way of bringing me back to a deep calm and solitude, far away from the in-your-face, must-happen-now vibe of New York and all the usual daily stresses. I knew almost nothing about kōdō, the traditional incense ceremony and way of fragrance, but understood that the practice went back thousands of years in Japan, much like tea ceremony and ikebana, two of my other great loves. Legend has it that kōdōstarted sometime around the 6th century, when a piece of agarwood drifted onto a Japanese beach; the wood was so fragrant, locals decided to burn it.
I smelled pure agarwood only once in my life, and had the sudden sensation of it moving straight to my forehead and clearing out my mind. I didn’t even know what agarwood was at the time, only the effect it had on me. (Also known as oud, agarwood is typically burned in Middle Eastern homes as a form of hospitality, welcome and ease, familiar even to children. It tends to have more exotic overtones in the West, especially in commercial perfumes.) I lived in New Jersey till college, and didn’t leave the country till I was in my mid-twenties. But like oud, cypress incense from Japan was familiar to me, as if I’d grown up with it—it calmed me before I knew what it was.