I attended first through fourth grades in the “annex” to the original high school building, constructed in 1931, of my hometown. From those years I remember mostly my four matronly teachers, Dick and Jane, rainy days (for some reason), and a palette of signature smells. The outer walls of the classrooms were banks of windows, with transom windows up top, opened and closed by a hanging chain. I remember the room lights as hanging globes with single bulbs—a blended ambience of soft and natural light quite different from the fluorescent radiation of later, newer buildings. Those first four years stand separate in my memory from all the school experiences that followed. I’m sure there are many, mostly subliminal, reasons for that, but it never occurred to me until I read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s 1933 book-essay In Praise of Shadows that one might be the difference in the light. I wish I could sneak back for just a few minutes to one of those four classrooms. I’m sure I would find an atmosphere of warmer light than the garish glare that not only ensued, but set the mood for the growing self-awareness and adolescent horror that came with it. To this day I prefer low-lit rooms. Womb-like maybe.
I’ve reflected elsewhere on the concept of wabi-sabi, the Japanese sensibility that appreciates impermanence and imperfection. It inspires the realization that “perfection” is a chimera of the human mind, a state that doesn’t naturally exist. Wabi-sabi is not a creed, but a preference for taking things as they are, a delight in the harmony of design and happenstance. It finds beauty, the real perfection, in the random and the transient, and honors the subtlety of such aesthetic experience and the “patina” that proves it earned it. Like meditation and other deviations from state-provided (consensus) reality, the effect of a wabi-sabi state of mind can be liberation from that numbing stricture of perception into a more restful mental state, often poignantly desolate, melancholy, and nostalgic.
In the twentieth century, and especially since the war, Japan has modernized toward western standards, a process lamented by many, and trapping many in a limbo between the emotional inadequacies of western capitalistic life, and the fading nourishments of the older ways. Ironically, many harried western minds have at the same time sought alternatives to, or anodynes for, the materialism and toxic addictive diversions of western life. I have long been one of them, attracted to the traditional Japanese sense of the ephemerality of beauty.
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Hōjōki by Kamo no Chōmei, and Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkō can be found together in a single volume beautifully translated, edited, and introduced by the Australian Japanese scholar Meredith McKinney. Both writers were medieval men who came of age in tumultuous social and political times, and became monks in later life. The decision to “take the tonsure” seems to have been difficult in Kenkō’s case, possibly in his late twenties, and impulsive in Chōmei’s, at age fifty. They lived about a century apart (Chōmei 1155-1216; Kenkō 1283-1352), and their two works share a devotion to Buddhist asceticism absorbed from China, and to the complementarity of impermanence (mujō) and non-attachment of Buddhist thought with literary creativity—but otherwise the two works are quite different. Hōjōki describes Chōmei’s escape from a life where his fortunes had declined into a monastic life, at first disappointing, then more fulfilling as he built the portable ten square foot hut (hōjō) where he spent his last seven or eight years. The essay, in a long line of Japanese “Buddhist hermit in his hut” narratives, has a shocking ending as Chōmei suddenly and bitterly equates the peace of mind he has found with attachment, and declares his heart “corrupt.” Readers have struggled to justify the ending with what precedes it; I read it as a strong but conventional retraction and expression of modesty. The essay is short and hardly mentions the cataclysmic social changes going on around the author. In the much longer Essays in Idleness, Kenkō also declines to concern himself much with contemporary politics, but is far more interested in the worldly affairs of people than Chōmei. His work is more like a journal covering a wide spectrum of observations, advice, anecdotes, and an attraction to a more tasteful and satisfying past. Both works are absorbing and provide for westerners the pleasures of sojourning in a faraway and long-ago culture vastly different from, yet resonant with, our own.
Chōmei calls to mind Thoreau, who wanted to find out what was left when you silenced the siren calls of the state. Somebody’s got to try it. And in Thoreau’s case, like other heroes of the “literature of reclusion,” the answer, recorded in Walden, was “a great deal.” Buying into the preoccupations of the state is a shallow life experience which blocks access to the deeper currents of consciousness, disillusion with not doing it thoroughly enough notwithstanding. Both Chōmei and Thoreau were acutely sensitive to the beauty of the natural world, and to the depth and nuance of that beauty available only to the undiverted mind, but I’m not sure Thoreau experienced the same constant awareness of the transience of all things (aware), and the commitment to non-attachment as the Buddhist-inspired Chōmei, who begins his essay with a Heraclitus-like statement of the heart of its theme:
On flows the river ceaselessly, nor does its water ever stay the same. The bubbles that float upon its pools now disappear, now form anew, but never endure long. And so it is with people in this world, and with their dwellings.
Kenkō shares with Chōmei a nostalgic turn of mind, but Kenkō is far more obsessed with the supreme importance of taste and feeling in a world whose courtly traditions are eroding into vulgarity. He likes to write about people he encounters who embody the old ways, though he also comes across as a man who is interested in everything. A prominent literary artist, Kenkō is also aware of the fickleness of literary fashion, and offers a sensible Buddhist appraisal of his own efforts:
Writing this, I realize that all this has already been spoken of long ago in The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book—but that is no reason not to say it again. After all, things thought but left unsaid only fester inside you. So I let my brush run on like this for my own foolish solace; these pages deserve to be torn up and discarded, after all, and are not something others will ever see.
I love Kenkō’s delight in the un-obvious, and his awareness of the multidimensional depth of all phenomena, unavailable to the flat-dimensional vision of the self-centered mind.
Rather than gazing on a clear full moon that shines over a thousand leagues, it is infinitely more moving to see the moon near dawn and after long anticipation, tinged with the most beautiful palest blue, a moon glimpsed among cedar branches deep in the mountains, its light now hidden again by the gathering clouds of an autumn shower. The moist glint of moonlight on the glassy leaves of the forest shii oak or the white oak pierces the heart, and makes you yearn for the distant capital and a friend of true sensibility to share the moment with you.
Another favorite:
The moon of autumn is especially splendid. It is a sorry man indeed who cannot understand this distinction, and claims that it is no different from the moon at other seasons.
And one more favorite: a story about a young man trying to make himself into a “preaching” monk. Like an artist who devotes all his/her energy into creating the perfect studio space, not neglecting a single cliche, the aspiring monk spent all his time learning the ancillary skills of a preacher, riding and singing, and “in the end he grew old having devoted all his time to them with none to spare for learning how to actually preach.” We all, Kenkō continues, underestimate the brevity of youth, and more often than not dawdle it away. He concludes: “Thus, you should carefully consider which among the main things you want in life is the most important, and renounce all the others to dedicate yourself to that thing alone . . . If you find yourself reluctant to abandon the others, you will never achieve your primary aim.”
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In Praise of Shadows is a more modern work, published in 1933, but in it the great twentieth-century novelist Tanizaki touches some of the same notes as his medieval predecessors. His work is pervaded with the themes of impermanence, transience, nostalgia, spiritual longing, and the sense that the superior old ways have been lost and aren’t coming back—as well as an insistence on the role of literary effort to discover the nuances of human experience. All of that—but mostly Tanizaki is interested in the aesthetics of shadow, where the surfaces of objects and phenomena are not lit with glaring light that hampers the mind’s participation in the coaxing of their depth from dimness. His complaints are mostly registered in a Japanese vs. the West context, stressing the necessities, such as the unavailability of bright light, that often nurtured Japanese aesthetics. He laments that Japanese culture westernized so quickly, and often wonders what the result would have been if a Japanese sensibility had driven the development of modern technology. In one memorable passage he reimagines the cold sterile feel of the western hospital in “softer, more muted colors.” He adds, “Certainly the patients would be more reposed where they are able to lie on tatami matting surrounded by the sand-colored walls of a Japanese room.”
In broader terms:
The westerner has been able to move forward in ordered steps, while we have met superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years . . . We would have gone ahead very slowly, and yet it is not impossible that we would one day have discovered our own substitute for the trolley, the radio, the airplane of today. They would have been no borrowed gadgets, they would have been the tools of our own culture, suited to us.
He goes on in a like manner in discussing the Japanese vs. western experience of the toilet, music, film, lacquerware, jade, gold, fabric, food, architecture, room design, feminine beauty, writing instruments, paper, old age, and so forth, always lamenting the harsh lights that blind the inner eye.
He concludes:
I have written all this because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved. I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.
East is east and west is west. But one can dream about the frenetic, materialistic west, brightly lit and in a big hurry, finding some harmony with the eastern sense that the essence of life is in the depths, not the surface, and the value of anything is derived from its ephemerality.