WORK, LEISURE, HOME LIFE

During the next few months, there was no opportunity to break away for weekends. What spare time and money we had we spent in local bars and nightclubs. On Saturday nights I played bridge in Wim's 3-man mess, where I completed the foursome — though I dropped out when I sensed that it was becoming an obligation.

I only came home to sleep. A. proved difficult to live with, and his mood swings and need to control everything were more than I could take. When in a fit of unprovoked rage he slammed the front door so hard that its glass panel was shattered, I decided it was time to move. A vacancy had occurred in a spacious Victorian villa in Kobe's famous hillside Kitanocho district. The house — the bank's main bachelors’ mess (a house shared by single men) in Kobe — dated from the port city's first opening to foreign shipping in the 1860s, and I was invited to join the four men living there. But A. discovered that there was room for six, and within weeks he too had moved in with us. Once again, he took hold of the purse strings and the management of the house, and though he tried hard to be ‘one of the boys’, he never succeeded.

With summer approaching and work in the office easing off, I tried to escape every weekend I could, usually for a foray into the countryside or a historic town with Wim and other Dutch friends. One rather memorable trip, to Ise, I did on my own. I wanted to visit Ise because of its ancient Shinto shrines set in a forest of tall hinoki cypresses, near the shallow, pebble-strewn, crystal-clear Isuzu River. The place breathed an air of ethereal purity that quite literally cleared my mind. Its spirituality derived from nature rather than scripture, rendering it free from the heavy solemnity and wagging finger of morality I had always associated with Christian churches. The lore of the shrines also appealed to the imagination, particularly the custom observed ‘since very early times’ to raze the shrines every twenty years and erect new ones on adjacent plots reserved for the purpose. A more telling difference with Western principles of painstakingly maintaining and restoring old churches could hardly be imagined.