True Stories: The Only Monk I Ever Dated

My strange encounter with a reluctant man of the cloth.

By Maria Kenney

It was spring, and I'd been living in Japan for the past five months. As you may or may not know, Japan is the worst place on the planet to be a single white female, but I'd managed to score a date that night with another foreigner, a fellow outcast. I was riding an empty train to Tokyo in the evening with only one other person in the carriage with me. After my long day's work, I was pretty dazed, so I didn't pay him any attention, and he didn't look at me the whole way. When we both got off at the last station, though, he jumped in front of me and started asking me questions in Japanese. I apologized haltingly that I didn't understand him.

"Where are you from?" he said, switching to English. He was tall and pretty good-looking, but he was totally bald under his hat, which you never see in Japan except among high-school students and yakuza guys.

I told him I was from Canada, while keeping an eye out for the guy I was supposed to meet. The bald guy's English was pretty broken, but he wasn't going anywhere, so I asked him about himself. He couldn't seem to find the right words. 

"I... um... I... Buddha!" he said, and then he clapped his hands together in prayer. "Buddha! Do you know?"

"Yes... I know Buddha," I said, but I had no idea what he was talking about. Was he a religious-studies student or something? Then he asked for my number, which was good timing on his part, because I was officially curious at that point. He punched it into his dainty cell phone (with a Hello Kitty charm dangling from it, no less) and then said goodbye. I met my date, and ten minutes later my own phone buzzed with the following message:

hello! i think you are so atlactive when i saw you in train. i'm happy. by the way my job is monk.

Monk? But weren't monks supposed to wear those orange robes and meditate all day and, you know... not hit on blonde foreign women? I had so many questions for this alleged monk that it was all I could do just to prevent myself from texting him back and ignoring my date. 

The monk asked me to meet him for drinks. I was positive that by "drinks" he really meant green tea, but I agreed. To my surprise, when we met, he pulled me into a popular local bar and ordered us a round of beer, and then another. He was wearing a knit cap. He kept much more quiet than he had when he'd approached me at the station, so small talk turned into me grilling him on the monastic life. 

I learned that he was not technically a monk yet, but a monk-in-training. He was in his second year of a three-year apprenticeship program at a famous Buddhist temple. He lived with a few hundred other monks-in-training at the temple and he wore the orange robes and woke up at five a.m. every day to pray for hours on end. I was excited to hear about the "monk rules," of which there seemed to be a neverending list. 

"Um..." he said, thinking hard. "We must shave our heads."

"Yeah, I noticed. What else?"

"Mmm... we must listen to elders at temple. We are not permitted to buy cell phone and buy these clothes." He gestured to his street clothes.

"Ever? Then why are you wearing them today?" 

He paused to gather his English, and grinned. "I am bad monk." 

I asked him if he ever got in trouble, and he said not often, but when he did get caught he would have to sit on the floor, knees bent and feet under his butt, for two whole hours while his legs lost circulation. If he did something really bad, one of the elder monks would get someone to "punch him." As he said all this he was wide-eyed yet straight-faced, betraying no hint of his emotions.

I didn't know what in the hell I was getting myself into. The monk was adorable, but in the manner of kittens and unicorns. Plus, he was bald, which interfered with my love of a good head of hair. I wondered if he was celibate, but then, did it matter? I couldn't see myself jumping into his futon even if he wasn't. On the other hand, the more answers he fed me, the more questions I had. I agreed to a second date.