Category: Japanese Literature

Violence as Answer – Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

The really frightening thing about violence is how close it is to magic. If it were not, perhaps nobody would ever think of committing its acts. Violence is taboo and unacceptable to the orderly and their world, but their rejection gives it mystique. It becomes in this light a kind of portal from one world to another – from the boring, polite, controlled world, into something more raw and seemingly more real. This is what we might say to ourselves as we prepare our fists for the first blow. As a group action, violence also binds us together in complicity – guilt, even if we openly reject it, shimmers behind our thoughts and connects us to others it shadows. By a single act we have placed ourselves outside the world, while binding ourselves together in a secret confraternity. That is the power of violence, its magic, its temptation and its horror.

The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s short novel, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, (literally Afternoon tow, but John Nathan’s title is so beautiful I’m sure even Mishima would not have objected to it), has violence at its heart and violence as its source of meaning. Just as Mishima himself, trained in iron discipline by his father and connected by blood to the pre-Meiji Emperors through his grandmother, seemed to have violence at his own heart. In 1970, sick of the loss of values in post-war Japanese society as it succumbed to cultural Westernisation, he attempted a military coup with a few followers, then committed seppuku, disembowelling himself before having a loyal friend decapitate him. Before this, he wrote books. To judge from The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, angry, violent books. And utterly brilliant ones.

I knew a little of Mishima and his writing before I started. Themes involving bodies, beauty, and shame were on my mind. What I was not prepared for was the sheer intensity of his work, the absolute authorial stamp on the prose regardless of what it narrates. From the first chapter alone, I knew I had entered an entirely new world. Noboru, a boy of thirteen, discovers a peephole between his bedroom and his mother Fusako’s. He observes her as she undresses alone, his father having died five years earlier, with intense curiosity. But it is not until they have a sailor round for the evening, and his mother takes him to bed, that Noboru is rewarded with a secret initiation into the world of adults.

Everything here is intensity, extremity, and taboo. Also light and shadow. It’s interesting to see Tanizaki’s comments on light from In Praise of Shadows given body here, with the extraordinary attention Mishima pays to the light in his scenes, in particular, the effect of moonlight enchanting a scene. Noboru’s unerotic excitement of the voyeurism of observing his mother is mixed with humiliation at the thought of her having been observed by the occupying American soldiers once there in the house. Pleasure and pain are joined in a single action – pressing one’s eye to the peephole. That is one world. When Noboru instead looks at the room through the door as normal, he finds it “drab and familiar”. This is the other one. Enchantment and taboo intensity, or emptiness. Noboru, at thirteen, knows exactly which one he wants.

Noboru loves the sea, its intensity and mystery, and he is attracted to the sailor, Ryuji, as its representative. The ocean also gives the boy the central images he uses to imagine his place in the world: “a large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbour bottom – that was how he liked to imagine his heart.” Yet though he tries to steel his heart, Noboru is a boy. He idolises Ryuji, who even looks like he’s stepped out of the waves, from the first meeting. And when he sees Ryuji and his mother coupling, it’s like he has witnessed the moment of the earth’s transfiguration. He determines to protect the illusion at all costs.

The sea is everywhere in this work. Its constant presence is marked most obviously by the horns of ships as they go past Tokyo, and it is visible through Fusako’s window too. Another motif is that of daydreaming and illusion. In the first two chapters following them Ryuji and Fusako both daydream. While going about their days Ryuji remembers his visit to a brothel in Hong Kong, and Fusako thinks back to her first meeting with him from the perspective of a few days afterwards. Violence, shame, and sex are also everywhere, and often linked, as in the half-naked bodies of the stevedores that Fusako watches as they labour, subjecting themselves to the danger of their dockside work. Even more subtly though, through the way that even tree roots can look like “tumid black blood vessels”, Mishima never lets readers relax from their immersion in his vision.

What we actually have is a story of lost illusions, and the terrible attempt to recover them. Fusako, Noboru’s mother, is lonely and gladly falls in love with the sailor Ryuji. Noboru’s idolisation of the man from the sea changes to horror and disgust when Ryuji demonstrates his kind-heartedness and joviality by falling in love in return, rather than representing the boy’s frosty ideal. All this might leave us without tragedy were Noboru not part of a secret group of boys, led by “the chief”, who have their own philosophy and a willingness to put it into practice.

This philosophy is one of “absolute dispassion”, which really means a refusal of all good-will and a “matchless inhumanity”. The children believe that through adopting a posture of cynicism towards the world they might become its masters. They complete the freezing of their hearts through the joint murder of a kitten – a scene so gruesome I don’t think I would ever willingly read it again, even though, in another sense, it’s just a child’s version of the murder that binds the revolutionaries of Dostoevsky’s Demons and every bit as stupid as it.

The idea is not the world. Noboru struggles to force his heart into hardness, convincing himself that he will gain “power over existence” through this bondage of violence. Uneasily, however, he retains his boyish love for ships and the sea. He teeters, perhaps, between the boyish excitement of adventure, and the equally boyish idea that cruelty equates to manliness. When Ryuji lets him down by becoming soft, the balance is lost, and in the end, it’s almost his own self that Noboru wishes to punish.

Ryuji himself is closer to Noboru than the latter realises. With his aloofness and belief in the “Grand Cause” and glory, Ryuji too is in love with illusory ideas. Yet after several years at sea, he has already begun to lose his belief that in his life upon the waves there lies real magic. He’s glad of his love for Fusako, and the chance to enjoy the much sweeter illusion of love, which after all may not be an illusion at all. In other words, Ryuji seems a symbol of that inevitable disillusionment and mellowing that comes with a little age.

The children cannot tolerate this. All they lack is Ryuji’s experience, which would tell them that they cannot maintain their vision of the world forever. Instead, shaken by his betrayal of the authentic, dispassionate, sailor’s life, they decide on punishment – “the deed essential to filling the emptiness of the world.” Some novels show their protagonists lose their illusions willingly, typically replacing cold ideas of the world with the warmth of emotions, as Bazarov does in Fathers and Sons. What makes The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea so powerful is that Mishima does not let the children lose their illusions. He offers them a way out – one brutal, horrible, but in its way even magical. There is no moral here – no sense that violence is not, in fact, the answer.

It’s a problem I have thought about a lot. Often, when depression strikes, it’s for me as if the world has been emptied of its meaning, just as it is for Noboru after Ryuji’s unwitting “betrayal”. One of the ways that I have thought about that void I enter is that while I cannot pull myself out of it I may yet be able to save others from it. The meaning of meaninglessness becomes preventing others from falling into it, whatever the cost. Taken this way, the only thing that matters is the preservation of illusion. Some time ago I wrote a story about an occupying army, cut off from the rest of its people, which is forced into increasingly violent acts in order to maintain to its own soldiers the illusion that it is there on foreign soil with good purpose. It was an exploration of this idea, which is obviously poisonous – there is a point where the actions taken to maintain an illusion are so extreme that it is better to allow for illusions to die.

In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea we have such an action. Except that we do not have a sense that it goes too far. Because every character in the novel is absorbed in their own illusions, it’s hard to blame the children for trying to maintain their own. More pertinently, in the novel’s closing moments, as Ryuji reflects on his time at sea after giving it up for domestic life with Noboru and Fusako, he actually begins to miss it once again. In other words, at the precise moment when the children are ready to sacrifice him for the preservation of illusion he himself has retreated from reality back into that same illusion of seafaring greatness, as if to say that the children were right all along that there was nothing worthwhile in his coming ashore.

We could probably pick through the novel finding hints of Mishima’s fascism, but perhaps a better way of thinking about it is that the story presents a scenario where violence, illusion, shame and beauty come together to offer a vision of a world where the horror of the novel’s contents is justified and correct. Like any great work of literature it presents a worldview in a way that is compelling. More than that, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea concerns that classic literary deity – dignity. But not mere dignity for individuals. Instead, the novel concerns the dignity of ideas we might today dismiss out of hand. It is here, in this moonlit world of cruelty and shifting dreams, that we see a way of life that once was so tantalising for so many, and may yet become so again. A cult of beauty, death, and glory.

It’s really quite cool stuff to read, so long as we keep our heads screwed on. We need the knowledge of this world to better combat it in our own, but it is a testament to Mishima’s dark strength that he makes the ideas so tempting too.

Shadows, Objects, and Life Arguments – Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows

In many ways, the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows can be read as a companion to Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea, which I read this summer. Where Okakura’s book is ostensibly about tea, Tanizaki’s essay is ostensibly about aesthetics – but actually, both are really about the differences between certain ideas of Western and Japanese culture, and more broadly about separate ways of life. In Praise of Shadows is a flowing work, one as hard to pin down as the shadows themselves. It ranges in subject from traditional Japanese theatre to Japanese architecture, from food to lacquerware. Yet certain repeated ideas make for an argument, at least for an implicit one, on a few key topics – the passage of time, the development of Japanese culture, and finally about objects themselves.

Time, Pessimism, Development

In Praise of Shadows is steeped in pessimism – Tanizaki is writing as a culture he loves is ebbing away – but he is not writing as a force of reaction. One tension of the essay lies between his desire to preserve the past and his unwillingness to completely disregard the present. Early on he describes the building of a house and the ingenuity one might employ to maintain the traditional shapes and forms of old Japanese homes while incorporating wires and electric lights, only to remark that an ideal of simplicity now can be a lightbulb hanging alone and unadorned – what previously might seem sacrilegious to a world used to candles.

Tanizaki is no fan of much that the West had brought Japan, however. He directs particular ire towards the electric fan. But still he notes that our opposition must be limited by each specific context. We can leave such things out of our own homes, but if we have a business operating in the summer heat we must also defer to the customer. This idea that we have to adapt and make compromises to the reality we face is a key idea within the text. He does not dismiss Western medicine or science or inventions out of hand, but rather notes that they bear with themselves an adaption to Western modes, and not his own in Japan. Hospitals, for example, need not be built according to Western models, but instead could use more bamboo and wood. The problem with all of this is that perhaps things would have been better if Japan had been left to itself. “We would have gone only in a direction that suited us.” Like Herder in the German lands, Tanizaki views each nation or grouping as having their own distinguishing characteristics which better internally developed than copied from others.

Western things bring western thinking. The fountain pen brings with it a different way of writing, and an implicit exhortation to copy Western literary modes. At times Tanizaki seems to go too far in these arguments, such as when he finds even paper bearing distinctive signs of whether it was produced in the West or Japan. Now, fountain pen users will know that Japan’s paper is extraordinary, such as that produced by Tomoe River. Indeed, Japan’s fountain pens and inks are also rather amazing – those of Sailor and Pilot are particularly lovely, and some of their pens have the most brilliant lacquer work designs. This is adaption in practice, taking a thing of the West and transforming it using Japan’s particular characteristics and modes. I imagine Tanizaki might have approved.

Still, In Praise of Shadows is a work where we are witnesses to something slipping away. Ways of eating, theatre shows, even the role of women, are being changed in ways that leave tradition in the dust. The essay ends with a hope that “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”. The mansion he refers to us that of artistic and literary culture, the area where he hopes resistance to Western influences may be most effectively pursued. It now makes sense to turn to that sphere and see what the fuss with shadows is all about.

Shadows, Objects and Life Arguments

Tanizaki defines Japanese culture as being one of shadows; the West as one of light. This seems slightly ridiculous at first glance, but worth taking seriously as out of this dichotomy Tanizaki draws all of his arguments about ways of living in the world. And is he not right, anyway? Our rooms are very bright – we certainly do not like the dark. We prefer spotless, shining cleanliness to the dirt that accumulates with age and contains within itself something akin to a history. (Think only about the hordes of servants who once went around polishing the silverware.) We are served food on white bowls, white plates; our bathrooms are tiled. We purchase great cleanliness with a great emptiness of character in many of our surroundings.

For light is a thing that reveals, whereas dark and shadows do more than that – they contain the space where the imagination plays. Puppets, Tanizaki notes, seem more real in the dark. They movements gain a certain magic. And puppets are not alone. Food can be supremely enhanced by the atmosphere of its serving. A dark lacquer bowl works better than a plain white bowl because in that darkness a soup’s contents are not on display as at market. Instead, there is an air of mystery – a taste of mystery, in fact:

“Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, or overtones but partly suggested.”

This imagination from darkness is connected very much to the arguments about simplicity that Okakura makes in The Book of Tea. There, one of the most memorable chapters concerned the decoration of tea rooms. To us Westerners, a room with only a single painting would strike us as sparsely adorned. But for Okakura, a single object focuses our attention on a single thing. It creates a much purer and more effective atmosphere – and thus a more pleasant tea-drinking experience. If adorning a room sparsely creates a stronger effect then why would we do anything otherwise? (The argument does not suggest that lush decoration is wrong, but rather than clutter is wrong – harmony is the lesson to be learned from this, and harmony is easier to achieve using simplicity).

But there is something else at play here, lying behind this argument about simplicity, something connected to Tanizaki’s pessimism earlier. What makes us value light, and the Japanese dark? In Tanizaki’s view, it’s a kind of stoicism:

“We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light – his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”

We may disagree with this characterisation of the West – and people familiar with Japan may well disagree with Tanizaki’s view of his own culture. But once again we encounter an argument for making the most not just of fewer things, but also of present things instead of what we lack. Just as he regrets that Japan’s development has been so influenced by the West instead of Japan developing independently, we can see a corresponding idea in why we might choose to value shadows:

“The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.”

If we find beauty and value in what we have, we will have no need of anything more.

Conclusion

Tanizaki’s characterisation of the West as a collective block is at times tedious, but unlike Okakura he was writing for a domestic audience in his own language and we must forgive him that. What he says is interesting and worth reading because although we may have heard the ideas before – simplicity good, unthinking acceptance of foreign technology and influence is not always a great plan – by focusing on shadows he adds further depth to these arguments and makes them still more attractive to us. We may already know that objects can be better appreciated in isolation, but in In Praise of Shadows we learn about how shadows work to help objects make that better impression. In our quest to make a beautiful world, after reading this short essay we have another tool in our toolbox for making that happen.

Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea

Certain friends were rather sceptical of me reading this book. I myself am not a serious tea-drinker. My beverage of choice is water. I do not drink coffee and can’t stand alcohol either. At their most exotic my tastes generally reach only as far as hot chocolate and apple juice. But when I was in Moscow at the beginning of this year, I did spend a little time drinking tea. I even, with what proved atrocious timing, bought an expensive tea set from the Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg the day before Russia invaded Ukraine.

I do not like the taste of tea that much, though it does provide a little variety. What I do like, however, is the ritual surrounding it. Kettle on, teabag in, steep, remove the bag, wait for the temperature to become bearable, and then finally drink. To this list, we might add various intermediary stages – hot water to the teapot, teapot to teacup, the ubiquitous milk and sugar. There is something (comforting? Or homely?) about drinking tea that seems to suggest that life is good. It is a stabilising act. You can’t successfully make tea while running or in a rush. You have to be calm and have a little time on your hands. It both requires stability and order, and plays its part in creating them. I look forward to the next time I will feel at ease enough to want to brew myself a cuppa.

By comparison with me and my little ritual of kettle-to-cup, the ceremonies described in Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea are elaborate pageantry. But I did not read The Book of Tea to learn about tea, so I was not upset to find that the book, which is really a long essay broken into short chapters, does not have that much to do with tea. Instead, it is about the meaning of tea drinking and its connection with Eastern philosophy. Written in English, its goal is at least partly to illumine us westerners’ ideas of Japan and its culture, and it does this by connecting the culture to the sources and ideas that inspire it. In my case, specifically, I was inspired to read Okakura’s book by its connection with Heidegger, who was given a copy in 1919. Some philosophers, such as Tomonobu Imamichi, say he was inspired to create one of his key concepts, that of “being-in-the-worldness” after he read it.  

My fancy tea set, now stranded in a dacha outside of Saint Petersburg with the rest of my things.

The Book of Tea is broken up into seven sections, each of which deals with a different aspect of tea and culture. Some of these were more relevant to my search than others. Things like section II, “The Schools of Tea”, a look at the curious history of tea drinking in East Asia, in particular in how its preparation differed in different periods and places, and why that was so; section IV, on the tea room itself, and the architectural principles lying behind it; and finally, section VI, about flowers and what our treatment of them says about us and our cultures, were all interesting but not necessarily as philosophically dense as the third section, dealing with “Taoism and Zennism”.

Less philosophically dense, less explicit on that topic, but not devoid of philosophy either. If “Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence”, then every attention given to that beauty within these pages has a part to play. Okakura describes his little philosophy as “essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.” The ritual of tea drinking is not a mere mechanical process for him, but rather seems to contain an image of life that we would do well to absorb into ourselves –

“It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.”

It is a ritual that elevates simplicity above tacky grandeur, that beatifies it. The austerely adorned tea rooms of Japan are not empty because of poverty, but because of love and respect for what they do contain. A single painting or flower, together with the tea itself, can do more to summon an atmosphere and create a mood, than an entire forest of bric-a-brac can. Okakura notes in connection with this the obvious but memorable fact that “one cannot listen to different pieces of music at the same time.” In short, unity of effect, or that oft-repeated word, harmony, is more important than merely proving one’s power and riches, intentionally or not, by a clutter of shiny objects.

The thing that The Book of Tea does best, I think, is serve as a bridge between cultures. Okakura’s English is every bit as harmonic and beautiful as the tea scenes he describes, and he brings many new thinkers and characters into our world as we read. No matter how philosophical he is waxing, he is always willing to use traditional stories and anecdotes to make his points. My favourite of these concerns Rikiu, a legendary tea-master, and his son. One day he asked his son to clean to the way to the tea house. Shoan, the son, swept the path and tidied everything up. Despite this, Rikiu said he had not done the job properly, so Shoan returned to his task. Eventually, he said to his father that he could clean no further, that the whole thing was spotless. But his father shook his head and walked to the nearest tree and shook it, scattering over the garden path its red and gold leaves. Cleanliness is one thing, but the master’s goals were always beyond it, in the creation of a full and perfect impression.

“Teaism” grew out of Taoism and Zennism, two of the major Eastern traditions. Taoism has been called the “art of being in the world” (Heidegger no doubt spat out his own tea at this point) by some Chinese historians, Okakura informs us. Taoism’s key message in Okakura’s reading lies in adaptability, “a constant readjustment to our surroundings”. A readiness for change led practically to an emphasis on hesitancy and care when going about our lives, a sort of reverence arising through respect for the malleability of life and things. The second part of the puzzle is Zennism, whose key contribution is “its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual.” In reorientating ourselves towards the everyday, and making us treat it seriously, we have the philosophical foundations necessary to drink tea as a Tea-ist. “Taoism furnished the basis for aesthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical.”

I myself have not had a proper Eastern philosophy “phase”. At school, the furthest I got was downloading the Tao-Te-Ching on my Kindle, and then never getting around to reading it. At various times I have tried meditating but never got very far with that either. As for a literary approach, both my Schopenhauer and my Siddhartha (the Hesse novel, which apparently isn’t a fantastic representation of Buddhism, anyway) are stuck in Russia for the time being, alongside the tea set I mentioned earlier. As I have not had such a phase, I was very much treading new ground reading The Book of Tea, and have no way of telling how well it represents its themes.

Yet who needs all that to know that this is a book presenting some sensible ideas? Especially today, when much of the world’s problems seem connected to our having too much stuff and thinking we need more, The Book of Tea emphasises the way that reality can be transfigured if we only alter our attitude towards it a little bit. “When we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.”

In all this, Teaism fits nicely into the world of Wendell Berry, and indeed of other environmental thinkers with their emphasis on the local and the small instead of the boundless and consumptive. In a single room, with a single cup, there can be more fodder for the imagination than in the greatest houses of the world. Whether or not we choose to make this the guiding principle of our lives, it still has much to offer us. Because anything that teaches us reverence and to find beauty in the everyday can never teach us that truth often enough.