Kusamakura
Page 5
I stand entranced at the doors awhile longer, clad only in the single layer of the inn’s night robe, until I come to myself again and realize that the spring night in this mountain village is in fact extremely cold. Then I return to the hollow of bedclothes from which I earlier emerged, where I begin to ponder what I have just witnessed. I extract my pocket watch from beneath the pillow. It is ten minutes past one. Pushing it back under the pillow, I think some more. This can’t possibly have been an apparition. If it wasn’t an apparition, it must be a human, and if human, it was a woman. Perhaps it was the daughter of the household. But it’s surely rather unseemly for a woman separated from her husband to come out at night like this into a garden, and one that merges into the wild hill beyond. Well, be that as it may, the fact is I can’t sleep. Even the watch under my pillow intrudes on my thoughts with its ticking. I’ve never been bothered before by the sound of my pocket watch, but tonight it seems to be urging and berating me—Let’s think, let’s think, it instructs. Don’t sleep, don’t sleep. Damn the thing!
If you see something frightening simply as what it is, there’s poetry in it; if you step back from your reactions and view something uncanny on its own terms, simply as an uncanny thing, there’s a painting there. It’s precisely the same if you choose to take heartbreak as the subject for art. You must forget the pain of your own broken heart and simply visualize in objective terms the tender moments, the moments of empathy or unhappiness, even the moments most redolent with the pain of heartbreak. These will then become the stuff of literature and art. Some will manufacture an impossible heartbreak, put themselves through its agonies, and crave its pleasures. The average man considers this to be sheer folly and madness. But someone who willfully creates the lineaments of unhappiness and chooses to dwell in this construction has, it must be said, gained precisely the same vantage point as the artist who can produce from his own being some supernatural landscape and then proceed to delight in his self-created magical realm. In this respect the many artists of the world are madder and more foolish than the average man, at least insofar as they are artists. (I say nothing of how they may be in their everyday guise.) While we are on our journey, shod in our straw sandals as of yore, we may do nothing but grumble about its hardships from dawn to dusk, but when we come to tell the tale to others, we will never make a murmur of such complaints. No, we will speak smugly of its fascinations and pleasures and even proudly prattle on about all those things that annoyed us so much at the time. We do so not from any intention to deceive ourselves, or to lie to others. Rather, the contradiction arises because on the journey we are our everyday selves, while when we tell its tale we speak as poets. I suppose you could say that the artist is one who lives in a three-cornered world, in which the corner that the average person would call “common sense” has been sheared off from the ordinary four-square world that the normal inhabit.
For this reason, be it in nature or in human affairs, the artist will see the glitter of priceless jewels of art in places where the common herd fears to tread. The vulgar mind terms it “romanticizing,” but it is no such thing. In fact, the phenomenal world has always contained that scintillating radiance that artists find there. It’s just that eyes blinded by worldly passions cannot see the true nature of reality. Inextricable entanglements bind us to the common world; we are beset by obsessions with everyday success and failure and by ardent hopes—and so we pass by unheeding, until a Turner reveals for us in his painting the splendor of the steam train, or an Okyo gives us the beauty of a ghost.5
The apparition I have just seen, if viewed simply as that, would certainly be rich with poetry for anyone, no matter who saw or spoke of it. A hot spring in some little village tucked away from the world, the shadow of blossoms on a spring evening, murmured song in moonlight, a dimly lit figure—every element is a perfect subject for the artist. And here I am, confronted with this perfect subject, engaging in useless debates and inquiries on it! Chill reason has intruded itself on this precious realm of refined beauty; tremulous distaste has trampled upon this unsought moment of artistic elegance. Under the circumstances, it’s meaningless to profess my vaunted “nonemotional” approach. I must put myself through a bit more training in the discipline before I’m qualified to boast to others that I am a poet or artist. I’ve heard that an Italian artist of times gone by, one Salvator Rosa, risked his life to join a gang of bandits through his single-minded desire to make a study of a robber.6 Having so jauntily set off on this journey, sketchbook tucked into my kimono, I would be ashamed to show any less resolve.
In order to regain the poetic point of view on this occasion,
I have only to set up before myself my own feelings, then take a step back from them and calmly, dispassionately investigate their true nature. The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world. There are various ways to achieve this, but the most successful immediate one is to try jotting everything down in seventeen-syllable haiku form, with whatever words spring to mind. The haiku is the simplest and handiest form of poetry; you can compose one with ease while you’re washing your face, or on the toilet, or on a train. But that’s no reason to disparage the haiku. No one should try to claim that because the haiku is easily achieved, becoming a poet therefore costs one little, and since to be a poet is to be in some sense enlightened, enlightenment must therefore be easily achieved. I believe that the simpler a thing is, the greater is its virtue, and thus the haiku should rather be revered.
Let’s imagine something has made you a little angry. Then and there you put your anger into seventeen syllables. No sooner do you do so than your anger is transformed into that of another. You cannot be angry and write a haiku at the same time. Or say you weep a little. Put those tears into seventeen syllables and there you are, you are immediately happy. Making a haiku of your tears frees you from their bitterness; now you are simply happy to be a man who is capable of weeping.
This has long been my conviction. Now the time has come to put my belief into action, and I lie here in bed trying out this and that haiku in my head. Since I must approach this task as a conscientious discipline, I open my sketchbook and lay it by the pillow, knowing that I must write down any poems that come or my focus will blur and my attempts come to nothing.
I first writeThe maddened woman
setting the dewdrops trembling
on the aronia.
Reading it over, I feel it isn’t particularly interesting, but neither is it downright bad. Then I tryShadow of blossoms
shadowed form of a woman
hazy on the ground.
This one has too many season words.7 Still, what does it matter? The point of the exercise is simply to become calm and detached.
Inari’s fox god
has changed to a woman’s shape
under the hazed moon.8
But this one is quite absurd, and I have to laugh.
At this rate all will be well. I am now enjoying myself, and I begin jotting down poem after poem as each occurs to me.
Shaking down the stars
out of the spring night, she wears
them bright in her hair.
New-washed hair, perhaps
dampened by moisture from the clouds
of this night of spring.
O spring! This evening
that beauteous figure deigned
to sing the world her song.
Such a moonlit night
when from the aronia tree
its spirit issues forth.
Poem upon poem
wandering here and there
in the spring moonlight.
Now at last the spring
draws swiftly to its finish.
How alone I am.
As I scribble away, a drowsiness creeps upon me.
Perhaps the word “entranced” is the most fitting to use here. No one can remain aware in deep sleep; when the mind is conscious and clear, on the other hand, no one can
be completely oblivious to the outside world. But between these two states exists a fragile realm of phantasms and visions, too vague to be called waking, too alert to be termed sleep. It is as if the two worlds of sleep and waking were placed in a single pot and thoroughly mixed together with the brush of poetry. Nature’s real colors are spread thin to the very door of dream; the universe is drawn unaltered a little way inside that other misty realm. The magic hand of Morpheus smoothes from the real world’s surfaces all their sharp angles, while within this softened realm a tiny pulse of self still faintly beats. Like smoke that clings to the ground and cannot rise, your soul cannot quite bring itself to leave behind its physical shell. The spirit hovers, hesitant yet urging to find release, until finally you can no longer sustain it in this unfeeling realm, and now the invisible distillations of the universe pervade and wreathe themselves whole about the body, producing a sensation of clinging, of yearning love.
I am wandering in this realm between sleep and waking, when the door from the corridor slides smoothly open, and suddenly in the doorway appears, like a phantom, the shape of a woman. I am not surprised, nor am I afraid. I simply gaze at it with pleasure. The word “gaze” is perhaps a little strong. Rather say that the phantom slips easily in under my closed eyelids. It comes gliding into the room, traveling soundlessly over the matting like a spirit lady walking on water. Since I’m watching from beneath closed eyelids, I cannot be sure, but she seems pale, long-necked, and possessed of a luxuriance of hair. The effect is rather like the blurred photographs that people produce these days, held up to view against lamplight.
The phantom pauses before the cupboard. It opens, and a white arm emerges smoothly from the sleeve, glimmering softly in the darkness. The cupboard closes again. The waters of the matting float the phantom back across them to the door. The sliding door closes of its own accord. Gradually I slip down into a rich, deep sleep, a state that I imagine must resemble that in which you have died to your human form but have not yet taken on the horse or ox form that is to be yours in your next life.
How long I lie there, hovering in that realm between human and animal form, I cannot tell. I awaken with the soft chuckle of a woman’s laughter sounding at my ear. The curtain of night has long since been drawn back; the world that meets my eyes is flooded with light. As I lie there taking in the sight of the sweet spring sunlight pouring brilliantly in, shadowing the bamboo latticework in the round window by the alcove, I feel convinced that nothing eerie could lurk in this bright world. Mystery has crossed back over the river of the dead and retreated once more to the limbo realm beyond.
I take myself off to the bathhouse in my night robe and dreamily float there with my face barely above the water for five minutes or so, feeling inclined neither to wash nor to leave. Why did I find myself in such a strange state last night? How extraordinary that the world should tumble head over heels like that between day and night!
Drying myself is too much of an effort, so I leave it at that and go back to the dressing room still dripping. But when I slide open the bathhouse door from within, another shock greets me.
“Good morning. I hope you slept well.” The words are almost simultaneous with my opening the door. I had no idea anyone was there, so this sudden greeting takes me completely by surprise, and before I can produce any response, the voice continues, “Here, put this on.” The owner of the voice steps around behind me, and a soft kimono is slipped over my shoulders. At last I manage “Why, thank you . . . ,” turning as I speak, and as I do so the woman takes two or three steps back.
The supreme effort that goes into describing the features of a hero or heroine has long been a determiner of a novel’s worth. Were one to enumerate all the words, in every language of East and West from classical times until today, that writers have devoted to evaluating the qualities of beautiful women, the list may well rival in length the complete canon of the Buddhist sutras. How many words would it take, I wonder, if I were to select from among this truly dismaying assemblage of adjectives those that might best describe the woman now standing three paces away, twisting her body diagonally to look at me out of the corner of her eye, comfortably taking in my astonishment and bewilderment?
In my thirty-some years I have never until this moment seen such an expression as is on her face. The ideal of classical Greek sculpture, I understand, can be summed up in the phrase “poised containment,” which seems to signify the energy of the human form held poised for action. The resonance of such a figure subtly inheres in that moment before the figure moves and changes into unguessable energies, swirling cloud or echoing thunder, which is surely why the significance of that form still reaches us across the centuries. All the dignity and solemnity to be found in the world lies hidden beneath this quality of poised containment. Once the figure moves, what is implicit becomes revealed, and revelation inevitably brings some resolution into one thing or another. Any resolution, of course, will always contain its own particular power, but once the movement has begun, matters will soon degenerate into mere sludge and squalor, and there will be no going back to the harmonious serenity of the original form. For this reason, whatever has motion is always finally vulgar. The fierce sculptures of the temple guardians that Unkei created, or the lively cartoon figures of Hokusai, both ultimately fail for this simple reason.9 Should we depict motion or stillness?—this is the great problem that governs the fate of us artists. The majority of the words used down the centuries to describe beautiful women can surely also be placed in either one of these two great categories.
But when I look at the expression of the woman before me, I am at a loss to decide to which category it belongs. The mouth is still, a single line. The eyes, on the other hand, dart constantly about, as if intent on missing nothing. The face is the classic beauty’s pale oval, a little plump at the chin, replete with a calm serenity, yet the cramped and narrow forehead has a somehow vulgar “Mount Fuji” widow’s-peak hairline. The eyebrows tend inward, moreover, and the brow twitches with nervous irritability; but the nose has neither the sharpness of a frivolous nature nor the roundness of a dull one—it would be beautiful painted. All these various elements come pressing incoherently in upon my eyes, each one with its own idiosyncratic character. Who can wonder that I feel bewildered?
Imagine that a fault appears in the earth where once stillness has reigned, and the whole begins to move. Aware that movement is contrary to its original nature, it strives to return to its original immobility; yet once unbalanced, momentum compels it to continue its motion, so that now we see a form that from sheer despair chooses to flaunt the movement enforced on it. Were such a form to exist, it would serve precisely to describe the woman before me.
Thus, beneath the derision evident in her features, I sense the urge to reach out and cling. From within the superficial mockery glimmers a prudent wisdom. For all the bravado that suggests her wit and spirit would be more than a match for a hundred men, a tender compassion wells in its depths. Her expression simply has no consistency; in the appearance she presents, enlightenment and confusion dwell together, quarreling, beneath the one roof. The singular lack of any impression of unity in this woman’s face is proof of an equivalent lack of unity in her heart, which is surely owing to a lack of unity in her world. It is the face of one compelled into misfortune, who is struggling to defeat that misfortune. Unquestionably she is an unhappy woman.
Bowing slightly, I repeat my thanks.
In reply, she laughs briefly. “Your room has been cleaned.
Go and see. I’ll call on you later.” No sooner has she spoken than she twists swiftly about and lightly runs off down the corridor. I watch her go. Her hair is up in the simple butterfly-wing ichogaeshi style, and below the sweep of hair a white neck is visible. It strikes me that the black satin weave of the obi at her waist would be only a facing.
CHAPTER 4
When I return, dazed, to my room, I see that it has indeed been beautifully cleaned. The previous night’s events still rathe
r disturb me, so I open the cupboard just to check. Inside stands a small chest, and from the top drawer a yuzen-dyed soft obi is half tumbled out, suggesting that someone has seized a piece of clothing in haste and quickly departed. The upper part of the obi is hidden from view beneath alluringly gaudy clothing. To one side is a small pile of books. Topmost are a volume of the Zen master Hakuin’s sermons and the first volume of The Tales of Ise.1
That apparition of the previous night may well have been real.
Idly plumping myself down on a cushion, I discover that my sketchbook has been placed on the elegant imported-wood desk, carefully laid open with the pencil still tucked between its pages. I pick it up, wondering how those poems I feverishly jotted down in the night will read the next morning.
Beneath the poem
The maddened woman
setting the dewdrops trembling
on the aronia.
someone has addedThe crow at dawn
setting the dewdrops trembling
on the aronia.
Because it is written in pencil, I can gain no clear sense of the writing style, but it looks too firm for a woman’s hand and too soft for a man’s. Here’s another surprise!
Looking at the next poem,Shadow of blossoms