“In this room, we take off our clothes before the meal.” The young woman pauses before the doorway, then covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes are wide with horror. “Not clothes! Shoes! We take off our shoes!” It is Less’s first restaurant of three today, and, the call to Robert having already thrown off his schedule, Less is eager to begin, but he gamely follows her ponytail to an enormous hall set with a table and sunken seating, where an elderly man, dressed all in red, bows and says, “Here is the banquet hall, and you can see it transforms into a place for maiko dancing.” He pushes a button, and as in a Bond villain’s lair, the back wall begins to tilt down, becoming a stage, and theater lights pivot out from above. The two seem enormously pleased by this. Less does not know what a maiko might be. He is given a seat by the window and eagerly awaits his kaiseki meal. Seven dishes, as before, taking almost three hours. Grilled, simmered, raw. And—why did he not expect this?—again butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. Again, it is lovely. But, like a second date too soon after the first, perhaps a bit familiar?
Look at me now, comes Robert’s voice, haunting him from earlier. I’m in the afterlife. A stroke. Robert has never been kind to his body; he’s worn it like an old leather coat tossed in oceans and left crumpled in corners, and Less saw its marks and scars and aches not as failures of age but the opposite: the evidence, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, of “a gaudy life.” It is only the carrier of that wonderful mind, after all. A case for the crown. And Robert has cared for that mind like a tiger with her young; he has given up drinking and drugs, kept a strict schedule of sleep. He is good, he is careful. And to steal that—to steal his mind—burglar Life! Like cutting a Rembrandt from its frame.
The second meal of the day takes place in a more modern restaurant decorated with the unembellished severity of a Swede, in blond wood; his waiter is blond as well, and Dutch. Less is given a view of a solitary tree decorated with green buds; it is a cherry, and he is informed he is too early for the blossoms. “Yes, yes, I know,” he says as graciously as he can manage. Over the next three hours he is served grilled and simmered and raw plates of butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. He greets each dish with a mad smile, recognizing the spiral nature of being, Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. He murmurs quietly: You again.
When he returns to the ryokan to recover, the old woman is gone, but the young woman in braids is still there, reading a novel in English. She greets him with more apologies about his luggage: no suitcase has arrived. Somehow, it is more than Less can bear, and he leans against the counter. “But, Mr. Less,” the woman says hopefully, “a package did arrive for you.”
It is a shallow brown box postmarked from Italy, surely a book or something from the festival. Less takes it to his room, where he sets it on a table before the garden. In the bathroom, as if in an enchanted hut, a bath already awaits him, perfectly warm, and he soaks his weary body as he prepares for the next meal. He closes his eyes. Did you love him, Arthur? There is the scent of cedar all around. Oh, my poor boy. A lot?
He dries himself and puts on a gray quilted robe, preparing himself to put on the same wilted linen clothes he has worn since India. The package sits waiting for him on the table; he is so tired he considers leaving it for later. But, sighing, he opens it, and inside, wrapped in layers of Italian Christmas paper—how has he forgotten he gave his Japanese address?—is a white linen shirt and a suit as gray as a cloud.
As a final challenge, the last restaurant of the trip sits on a mountainside outside Kyoto, requiring Less to rent a car. This goes more smoothly than Less imagined; his international driving permit, which looks to him like a flimsy phony, is taken very seriously and photocopied numerous times, as if to be handed out as keepsakes. He is shown to a car as small, bland, and white as a hospital dessert and enters to find the steering wheel missing—then is shown to the driver’s side, all the time merrily thinking: Oh, I guess they drive on the other side over here! Somehow he never thought of it; should they give out international driving permits to people who never think of it? But he has done his time in India; it is all a matter of Looking-Glass driving. Like laying type for a letterpress; you just reverse your mind.
The instructions for getting to the restaurant are as mysterious as a love note or an exchange of spies—Meet at the Moon Crossing Bridge—but his faith is fast; he takes the wheel of what basically feels like an enameled toaster and follows the clear, perfect signs out of Kyoto, toward the hill country. Less is grateful the signs are clear because the GPS, after giving crisp, stern directions to the highway, becomes drunk on its own power outside the city limits, then gives out completely and places Arthur Less in the Sea of Japan. Also unnerving is a mysterious windshield box, which reveals its purpose when the Toaster approaches a tollbooth: it produces a high-pitched reproving female shriek not unlike his grandmother’s when she came upon a piece of broken china. He dutifully pays the toll man, thinking he has done what the machine wants, and passes into a green countryside where a river has magically appeared. But the pastoral scene does not last long—at the next tollbooth, the lady shrieks again. Surely she is berating him for not possessing an electronic pass. But could she also have discovered his other crimes and inadequacies? How he made up ceremonies for a fifth-grade report on the religions of Iceland? How he shoplifted acne cream in high school? How he cheated on Robert so terribly? How he is a “bad gay”? And a bad writer? How he let Freddy Pelu walk out of his life? Shriek, shriek, shriek; it is almost Greek in its fury. A harpy sent down to punish Less at last.
“Take the next exit.” The GPS, that rum-drunk snoozing captain, has awakened and is back in command. Mist is rising as steam rises from damp clothing set beside a fire; here, it is from the pine-dark, folded wool of the mountains. A leaden river is coiling along a bank of reeds. The Toaster passes a sake factory, or so he assumes, because here is a cheerful white barrel sitting as advertisement on the road. Some farm or other has a sign out, in English: SUSTAINABLE HARVEST. Less rolls down the window, and there is the salt-green smell of grass and rain and dirt. He rounds a corner and sees white tourist buses parked all in a row along the river, their great side mirrors like the horns of caterpillars; before them, in a military line, stand elderly people in clear raincoats, taking photographs. Scattered below the steaming mountains are perhaps fifteen thatched-roof houses furred with moss. Across from them: a bridge over the river, a wood-stone trestlework, and Less steers the car to cross it, passing tourists huddled against the rain. He imagines a boat is meant to take him upriver to the restaurant, and as he reaches the other bank and parks the Toaster (from the dashboard comes the harpy’s shrill reminder), he sees a few people waiting on the dock, and among them—he recognizes her through her clear umbrella—is his mother.