Short Story (Beginning Fragment): Letters from the Village of Cranes

IX. Letters from the Village of the Cranes
“Tsuru mo boshi kabutterun desune.”
“They’re wearing a hat too.”
This is both my attempt to demonstrate my fluency in Japanese, and to break the ice. I fail in both regards. Shodo Kawabe, the head priest of the Rinzai Zen temple I’m to stay at, doesn’t even smile. Is it the Japanese, or the pathetic excuse of a joke? As with all Zen masters, he has the answer, but I’m left struggling with the questions.
We are standing beside a wooden cattle fence, staring into a snow-covered field. About two dozen or so Japanese cranes dance about in the field, hopping one footed on their wiry legs, spreading their wings like parting clouds, bobbing their red-capped pates. Shodo, dressed smartly in a brown overcoat and matching beret, looks on, his breath a thin streaming ribbon of vapor in the winter cold. His clean shaven head shines blue below the edges of the beret, and beneath the edges of his overcoat are his black and white monk’s robes.
He’d just picked me up from the Kushiro train station, and had driven through the frozen marshlands of eastern Hokkaido in relative silence, only to stop at this field at the side of the road. “This is Tsuruimura,” he had explained in broken English, smiling briefly.
Tsuruimura, village of the cranes. This was where Kannonji, Shodo’s temple, was.
It was bitterly cold outside, and I wondered, not for the first time, or the last, what on earth I was doing here. The vow I’d made, to attain enlightenment before returning home, seems pathetic and laughable now. I could be in Hawaii, celebrating Christmas and New Year’s, pretending I envied the snowier parts of the globe. Ah yes, Hawaii: blue skies, cyan waters, bikini clad women, and- Shari.
Yes, what on earth was I doing here?
The cranes seem oblivious to the cold and my thoughts, trumpeting and dancing joy...