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“So if I have to make a summary of myself, it terrifies me. I don’t know which of
the many faces represents me more and the more closely I look the clearer the
transformations become, and finally only bewilderment remains.” (Gao Xingjian,
Soul Mountain)
The Journey to the East was published in 1932. It was an allegory by German
novelist and Nobel Prize winner Herman Hesse, involving a religious sect
composed of famous historical and fictional characters. This group set out as
pilgrims searching for the “ultimate Truth” in the East, which was considered
“Home of the Light”, the source of renewal.
Like silk and spices that drove traders and conquerors of past centuries, Asian
spirituality—as exotic fruit and elixir—has inspired a similar pursuit by the West.
Though its practices have been embraced in the fields of non-conventional
medicine and modern well-being, these are still regarded with a fair amount of
caution, approached as fads or health alternatives, or trusted only as last resort.
But as globalization opened access beyond Asian religion and medicine, it has
allowed the West to approach this spirituality through Asia’s culture and heritage.
It’s art, cinema, and literature give insight to ever-changing attitudes and
identities germinating from ambiguous systems of belief.
Consequently, globalization has provided greater access to the West. But what
makes Eastern spirituality more interesting is how Asians have appropriated
American and European ideas, views, and modes of thought and expression into
their beliefs, managing in turn to exert influence on the West. Japanese novelist
Haruki Murakami quickly comes to mind.
In contrast, Western art of late has been obsessed with brittle branches of
structure and appearances, and purported discoveries of the “totally new” that
merely peel old bark, produce works that lack sap. Instead of leading culture to
the intended evolution, this obsession, not unlike the impetus behind industry,
has brought it to petrifaction.
Western art has arrived at prevalent stasis, with decadence overpowering it like
mold and lichen. More and more, Western culture and religion are faced with the
steady disintegration of the Western soul, which has suffered the toll of wars and
hate and hyper-materialism, of megalomania and self-righteousness. As the
West begins to acknowledge its ebbing prowess for imagination, it increasingly
looks to the East.
“At most you can only find in a particular corner, in a particular room, in a
particular instant, some memories which belong purely to yourself, and it is only
in such memories that you can preserve yourself fully.” (Gao Xingjian, “Soul
Mountain”)
Given Asia’s nearness and understanding of nature and its seasons and
changes, what then could account for the “bewilderment” that Gao Xingjian,
Chinese Nobel laureate for literature, has referred to about himself in his book
Soul Mountain?
Asia’s history has gone through wars and conquests, not only over land and
trade, but also over ideas and individuality—enough to cause the displacement of
nations and identities.
Xingjian admits that he has been “a refugee from birth”, born “while planes were
dropping bombs”. He also escaped persecution in China to settle in a foreign
country, writing Soul Mountain in a personal journey back to the self.
For his part, Kawabata’s compatriot Kenzaburo Oë, who also won the Nobel
Prize for Literature, sought to return from the ravages of war to face
disillusionment and ambiguity in Japan. Personally, in his writing, he has sought
healing.
Lastly, Arundhati Roy, in her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small
Things, made a journey with her protagonist back to India years after suffering
injustice not only from domestic prejudice, but also from her country’s colonial
heritage.
Asians have a unique way of dealing with disruptive time and history. Consistent
with the repetition of seasons, they have always managed to return to the old
flow.
As Bing Crosby sings about “Danny Boy”, Murakami pines for the lost innocence
and spontaneity of Japan. But he does so in a voice and method that is almost
fully Western.
“For in his Japan, the old has been destroyed, an ugly and meaningless
hodgepodge has taken its place, and nobody knows what comes next.” “There
are no kimonos, bonsai plants or tatami mats in Murakami's novels…Murakami's
protagonists might as well be living in Santa Monica.” “I would not be surprised if
his novels…turned out to have a similar influence in the West.” “Though his
works are largely set in Japan…Murakami speaks to a global audience.” “The
modern ennui his characters feel has some specifically Japanese aspects to it,
but it is a condition found all across the world.” “The world as one small village,
but one that is uncertain of its identity.”
Readers and critics agree that Murakami has accurately shown the empty
longing that has sliced into the lonely hearts of the Japanese with blades of neon
and pop jargon. They agree that the ache and alienation that the author has
captured in his stories have spread where capitalism has thrived: like a miasma,
like spores that settle in dark secret places, to take root and flourish—the same
for Japan as in the United States, as for industrialized Europe.
The realization of this desire through fantasy and surrealism and through the
hope granted in love is what has made his stories very popular and highly
accessible, prompting adaptations into films and plays in the West.
Parallel Worlds
“It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it
became, and the more it consisted of stillness, the more this world that
enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be
called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the
shadows for me to stop moving…” (Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird
Chronicle)
In his books, Murakami has provided escape through other worlds linked by the
subconscious, by dreams and hallucinations; and through surrealist
reconfigurations that lay bare realms in reality’s underside. He has had no need
to go far, exposing parallel universes via deep wells, deserts, or through the
subway underground.
In what seems ordinary, strangeness and absurdities wait in the shadows.
Characters in Murakami’s novels are granted strange powers from blue-black
scars, can talk to cats and cause fish and leeches to rain from the sky, and walk
different lives in paranormal dimensions. Two of them appear in the guises of
KFC’s Colonel Sanders and the liquor gentleman named Johnny Walker. A
handful also transform into “living spirits” in the Japanese tradition of ghosts.
The author also seeks parallel worlds through love. In his book South of the
Border, West of the Sun, the narrator finds out through relationships “that within
the real world, a place like this [a different place] existed”. In people he discovers
“far-off horizons” made accessible by contact or closed off by loneliness. Love
then becomes not very different from fantastic universes as it offers escape from
the self.
But the limitation in Murakami’s surrealistic landscapes is that they are merely
held together by coincidences, repetitions, and random prophecies. In the forays
of his novels into abstract destinations, the essential problems within individuals,
their intrinsic conflicts, have not been involved with the geographies of those
worlds. This implies that any return to the “real” world, after pages of adventure,
will not necessarily solve the great yearning for escape within his characters.
As Oshima, from Kafka on the Shore, says, “There’s another world that parallels
our own, and to a certain degree you’re able to step into that other world and
come back safely.” Murakami’s protagonists often return unscathed, as if the
world they had just experienced was only from a movie or a show on television.
Estrangement from the self, which the author has very ably depicted, goes
unresolved. Sea monsters, the alien and the grotesque, slimy, faceless beings,
things that get bigger and bigger in the body and grow like the roots of a tree:
these that reside in the darkness more real and palpable than the subconscious,
as natural as the lack of light at the center of a lush forest. These creatures are
not confronted. Having conjured the fantastic, Murakami has yet to tackle the
basic anthropology of the human psyche.
The alienation that has inspired the yearning for escape has not been addressed.
Perhaps a return, a tracing back, to an earlier period of Japan, before these
modern monstrosities grew their tentacles, is warranted: a time just when the
initial decay after the war crept in and the sense of beauty and wholeness was
most poignant and relevant.
The Legacy of Emptiness
Yasunari Kawabata received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, becoming the
first Japanese to merit the award.
He was deeply influenced by the epic classic The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
Shikibu. Written in the 11th century at the peak of the Heian Period, this work was
hailed by Kawabata as the “pinnacle of Japanese literature”, unsurpassed even
in the present day. The Nobel Academy, in its presentation speech for Kawabata,
traced the “sensitively shaded situation poetry” in his narratives to Lady
Murasaki’s “vast canvas of life and manners” in The Tale of Genji.
The Japanese laureate’s spare, lyrical, and subtle prose is deeply rooted, even
more than Junichiro Tanizaki’s fiction, in Japan’s classic literature. By retaining
and nurturing the elegance, refinement, honor, allusiveness, eroticism, and
sensuality of the courtly life of Japan, specifically of the Heian Period, he
cherishes and preserves the genuine legacy of the country’s tradition of style.
But Kawabata pointed out that the era of The Tale of Genji and much of
Japanese classic literature was “its finest, when ripeness was moving into
decay”, when it held in it “the sadness at the end of glory”, which was intrinsic to
the “high tide of Japanese court culture”. The peak of this literature came when
the court sank into decline and when power shifted from the court nobility to the
military aristocracy, in whose hands it stayed for almost seven centuries from the
Kamakura Shogunate (1192) to the Meiji Restoration (1867 and 1868).
The characteristics of this style are comprised by the terseness of the haiku, the
suggestiveness of Japanese painting, and the sensitivity and attention of the art
of the tea ceremony, of flower arrangements, and of the bonsai to Japan’s flora
and landscape, its moonlight and seasons: its spirit.
Outside words but inextricable from the depths of human experience, Kawabata’s
fiction redefined emptiness according to the Orient: an emptiness that brimmed
and strained with life—a nothingness that was innate and that embraced the
struggles of living.
Drawing from one of his favorite poets, the priest Ryokan, who lived between
1758 and 1831, Kawabata elucidated what for him captured the emotions of old
Japan. He quoted the following poem, written at the deathbed of the priest:
Kawabata surmised that what old Japan wished to leave as its legacy was
nothing more than for nature to remain beautiful. For order, for peace, for
contemplation, for brimming emptiness, and for the fullness of silence.
Snow Country
Literally translated from the Japanese title Yukiguni, Snow Country is the title of
Kawabata’s first novel, on wasted beauty rushing towards decay and inevitable
ruin, which many claim is his masterpiece.
The novel is set in the northerly region of Japan, where cold winds come down
from Siberia after crossing the Japan Sea, bringing with it moisture that is
deposited as several feet of snow. In this setting, towns and villages are isolated
in the cold and inescapable gloom illuminated by blinding and solitary light.
Shimamura meets Komako, a hot-spring geisha, lower in class than the geishas
of Tokyo or Kyoto and almost a social outcast. She spends time with her for
company and conversation, because unlike the other women in the hot-spring,
he regarded her as clean and pure, although not beautiful.
“In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror
and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the
other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures,
transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering
darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world.
Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the
girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.”
Throughout the story, it is this image that Shimamura cannot shake from himself.
As an illusion and a dream, he treats Komako like a toy, a bauble to be fumbled
by the hand. He plays with his illusion as it is entangled with Komako’s own half-
aware self-delusion. Until finally the window image of Komako, as it is bound to,
breaks and shatters.
Komako gives herself to Shimamura, fully and without regret, knowing that their
passion cannot last. As he is seduced by his illusion, she is swallowed by her
fantasy. Tragedy sets in.
When it is time for Shimamura to leave, when his illusion melts and he feels
physical revulsion, the dilettante drops Komako like a trifle.
The inhuman fantasy that has frozen inside Shimamura even prevents him to see
death, blatant as it is, when the body of another geisha, another object for
Shimamura, collapses unconscious from a burning warehouse:
“He felt rather that Yoko had undergone some shift, some
metamorphosis…”
Perhaps even hoping that Yoko would just transform from one fantasy to another.
Thousand Cranes
Misread as an evocation of the formal and spiritual beauty of the tea ceremony,
Thousand Cranes, “a negative work, an expression of doubt about and warning
against the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen”, is actually an elegy
for tradition. Thus dispelling misinterpretation, Yasunari Kawabata summarizes
the tea ceremony as "gently respectful, cleanly quiet", wherein a “richness of
spirit” is concealed by its guidelines. He regards the tearoom, simple and
confined, as containing “boundless space and unlimited elegance”.
Within and beyond the tea ceremony, Thousand Cranes is a novel about desire,
jealousy and revenge, shame, regret, and death.
Kikuji Mitani, the protagonist, returns to the house of his deceased father, invited
to a tea ceremony by a former mistress, Chikako Kurimoto. He arrives to meet at
the ceremony Mrs. Ota, the second mistress of Kikuji’s father who replaced the
discarded Chikako, and remained Mitani’s mistress until his death.
Mrs. Ota does not know that the ceremony was a miai arranged by Chikako for
Kikuji to see a prospective bride, Yukiko Inamura, without his own knowing, and
clearly challenging Mrs. Ota who has brought her own daughter, Fumiko, to
introduce to Kikuji. Further overstepping courtesy and manners, Chikako
proceeds to further stain custom.
Going back, Kikuji recalls the brief relationship of his father and Chikako. Kikuji
remembers having seen Chikako’s birthmark on her left breast:
“Her kimono was open. She was cutting the hair on her birthmark with a
small pair of scissors. It covered half the breast and ran down into the
hollow between the breasts, as large as the palm of one’s hand.”
This grotesque image associates ugliness and perversity with Chikako. When
Kikuji’s father broke relations with her, making Mrs. Ota, a married woman, his
mistress, only “poison”—malevolent as her birthmark is disfiguring—was left in
Chikako’s breast.
One can say that Chikako, as the mistress of the tea ceremony, has infected it
with her repulsiveness and poison. She transgresses tradition and disregards the
essence behind the ceremony, indulging in “performances” and display, utilizing
it as a miai, and as a tool of revenge.
Chikako uses this poison not only against Mrs. Ota, but also on Fumiko and on
Kikuji, who declines the miai and Chikako’s other designs.
But sexual tension and perversity, like venom, also run through Kikuji. Childhood
memory turns into an obsession for ugliness—an intimation of decay—when he
continues, in Oedipal abandon, to fantasize of the relations between his father
and Chikako, her birth-marked breast the focus of his imagination.
Kikuji’s own poison drives him to destruction and self-destruction when he takes
his fantasy a step further, assuming the identity of his own father, and indulging
in relations with Mrs. Ota—thus transferring the repulsiveness he felt from one
mistress to another, ultimately poisoning himself.
Poison and venom in this story roils with dirt and filth, is death sickly sweet, as
Kikuji feels “something itchy” that wanted to rise against himself and injure Mrs.
Ota:
“The venom was only too effective. With regret came defilement and
revulsion, and a violent wave of self-loathing swept over him, pressing him
to say something even crueler.”
The Master of Go
The book begins with a newspaper account of the death of the Master of Go,
Honinbo Shūsai, who died “twenty-first in the Honnimbo succession” “in Atami, at
the Urokoya Inn, on the morning of January 18, 1940” at “sixty-seven years old
by the Oriental count”. Thus the book already treats the game and the death of
the Master of Go as a thing of the past—a sad, fleeting moment and an important
part of history, but alas, just a single page in it.
The story centers on the strenuous and delicate play between the opponents of
the game: the Master, Honinbo Shūsai, and the challenger, Kitani Minoru, both
housed and shut off from the world.
The game of Go is a game of strategy, where two players, White and Black,
attempt to surround each other’s stone pieces. The object of the game is to
buttress one’s pieces from enemy attack, while surrounding and capturing the
enemy’s stones.
In the novel, the reporter observes of the Master a vestige of the aristocratic:
“In that figure walking absently from the game there was the still sadness
of another world. The Master seemed like a relic left behind by Meiji.”
The game played out in the story, considering what is at stake, is an epic
struggle of stillness and strained intensity. At times it is excruciating, with plays
lasting for more than two hours.
The tension always seems to finally break the Master, but he holds out till the
end: grandeur in distress.
In and out of the game, on break, with the defeat of the Master nearing
possibility, there is nostalgia not only for things past but also for things
approaching their end, their ruin—beautiful, like a petal falling:
“It perhaps told of his age and experience, the fact that like the flow of
water or the drifting of clouds a White formation quietly took shape over
the lower reaches of the board in response to careful and steady pressure
from Black; and so the game became a close one…”
“The coup de grace came with the assault following upon Black 133…The
fatal play suggested a psychological or a physiological failure…the Master,
consistently on the defensive, was trying to turn the tide; and at the same time
I felt that his patience was at the end, his temper taxed to the breaking…”
“Lying naked on the church floor, dark blood spilling from his skull like a
secret…By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other
ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet.
Like old roses on a breeze.”
When Honinbo Shūsai, the “Master of Go”, died, a part of old Japanese tradition
died with him. The semi-autobiographical The God of Small Things by Indian
author Arundhati Roy, who won for it the Booker Prize in 1997, is not exactly an
elegy, but a tragedy nonetheless. It is about the ruin of a family, who became
victims of circumstance amidst the struggle of a culturally and politically
complex India where ancient heritage, Western conquest, Communism, and
modernity interacted and clashed.
As in Kawabata’s novels, there is much beauty in The God of Small Things, but
instead of portraying fragility and elegance, Roy’s story possesses a brutal and
tender honesty, needing little subtlety, breathing beauty but at the same time
hiding nothing about the ugly cruelty of life.
The novel begins with the mood, season and weather, and the flora and fauna of
Kerala, India in an unforgettable first paragraph, as if to make clear that the
following events and characters in the story come from this backdrop, cannot be
separated from it, are in fact it:
“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid.
The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen
trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum
vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear
windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.”
Roy works with precise detail that is at times loving, sometimes unforgiving, and
mostly unsentimental. The smallest emotions flower and there is a buzz of
anguish that readily stings. These are expressed in richly textured language that
is highly inventive, given the spontaneity of inquisitive and innocent children.
Even the smallest of things are pivotal in this epic narrative, which bears the
scars and ongoing battles of India like a tapestry.
There is a chapter on the almost forgotten Hindu classical art of Kathakali dance,
which tells of the “Great Stories” that although are “as familiar as the house you
live in” “or the smell of your lover’s skin”, audiences still seek. Fully knowing how
the stories would end, they still listen, “in the way that although you know that
one day you will die, you live as though you won’t”.
Amidst such cultural relics exist Western influences. The family of the twins
Esthappen and Rahel has in its bookshelf a copy of The Reader’s Digest World
Atlas. The twins’ mother, when putting them to sleep, would comfort them with,
“We be of one blood, ye and I,” the Snake’s Call for protection from Rudyard
Kipling’s Jungle Book. There is a trip to the theater for the children to once again
watch The Sound of Music, even if they have already memorized the scenes and
the songs. With Coca-Cola and Fanta are Charles Dickens, The Wizard of Oz,
and not to mention Phil Donahue.
In this India, there is nothing odd in finding along riverbanks polluted with
“pesticides bought with World Bank loans” and past new “Gulf-money houses
built by nurses, masons, wire-benders and bank clerks who worked hard and
unhappily in faraway places” demonstrations by one of the two factions of the
Communist Party, rallying plantation workers and Untouchables.
Across the river, from the house of Esthappen and Rahel, dwells the “History
House”, the novel’s most solid symbol of the remnants of Indian colonialism.
Abandoned in the middle of a rubber estate, it was owned by an Englishman who
spoke the local language and wore mundus, and made the locality of Ayemene
“his private Heart of Darkness”.
The run-down dwelling is full of shadows and whispers, inhabited by lizards, and
haunted by old pictures of maps and ancestors. Chacko, the twins’ uncle, tells
them that this house is not accessible to them because their minds “have been
invaded by a war…that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has
made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.” For which Ammu, the
twins’ mother, exposes Chacko by reminding him that he had in fact married their
conquerors through his relationship with Margaret Kochamma, a British woman
he met in London. Unfazed, hypocritical and still tongue-in-cheek, Chacko
proceeds by lamenting that their “dreams have been doctored” because,
compared to the British, their sorrows, joys, and dreams will never be enough to
matter.
Chacko’s oratory, done in one of his “Oxford Moods”, is slyly discredited by the
story as he, a nominal Communist with the heart of a landlord, is shown to
despise himself, still cling to his London days, and prize the fact that he was able
to marry a white woman, long after their divorce. India’s colonial discomfort and
insecurity are inherited by the twins, who have to interact with their half-British
cousin, Sophie Mol. In the family, only Ammu shows defiance.
Broader social implications are delved with in the story through religion and
politics. The cocktail revolution of the Marxists is explained through its reformist
approach of recruiting Hindus, Muslims, Roman Catholics, and Syrian Christians,
with the method for Christians simply involving replacing “God with Marx, Satan
with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the church with the Party”.
The caste system is also surveyed at length. It plays a special part in Ammu’s
family, whose patriarch did not allow Paravans (Untouchables) in the house and
whose matriarch still has memories of the time when “Paravans were expected to
crawl backwards with a broom” to sweep away their footprints “so that Brahmins
or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves” by stepping into a Paravan’s
tracks.
The God of Small Things is told in this setting, where not just Ammu’s bourgeois
family but many other families can still recall the time when Untouchables were
banned from public roads and “had to put their hands over their mouths when
they spoke, to divert their polluted breath”. This heritage of prejudice thick and
thriving in modern Indian society lives mixed with the history of oppression from
British colonizers.
Ammu, who was beaten by her father, and who saw her mother suffer even
worse beatings, in protest against her times, has “developed a lofty sense of
injustice” and a “reckless streak”. Through her, fate will play a cruel trick involving
deep hatred and fear.
The talented Paravan named Velutha, who is employed by Ammu’s family, unlike
his crawling ancestors, does not walk with the weight of prejudice on his back.
He is a Communist, and like Ammu, defies norms and rules. Needless to say,
they become lovers.
The succeeding events lay bare violence that is naked yet paradoxically
impersonal. The police wrongfully hold Velutha in suspicion. Officers are sent as
“history’s henchmen”, not to arrest him but to “exorcise fear”, not to beat him to
death but only to inoculate “a community against an outbreak”, preventing an
entire people from rising against unjust rules.
In the time “when uncles became fathers, mother lovers, and cousins died and
had funerals”, injustice seems inevitable and those innocent of crimes are
powerless.
Esthappen, who has witnessed together with his twin sister Velutha’s beating, is
traumatized for life. Thick tentacles “enfolded him in its swampy arms” and
dragged him down into the darkness of silence. The unspeakable has become a
grotesque inner torment that has inched “along the insides of his skull, hoovering
the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off
the tip of his tongue”. With no world to escape to, horror resides within
Esthappen, leaving his mind perpetually stunned. He is another victim, who has
not been able to flee the clutches of India’s unrelenting history.
As a child, two western novels left a deep mark on Kenzaburo: The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, by the American
Mark Twain and the Swede Selma Lagerlöf, respectively. Later on, even if he did
catch interest in The Tale of Genji and other Japanese and Asian works, novels,
stories, and philosophies of the West were what continued to deeply influence
the works of Kenzaburo Oë, among them Dante, Rabelais, Balzac, Poe, Yeats,
Eliot, Auden, and Sartre.
Like Kawabata, Oë was severely affected by the war. But unlike Kawabata, he
did not vow to restrict himself to writing elegies. Kenzaburo Oë progressively
decided to heal divisions and to reconcile the ambiguities of Japan, which have
caused it to spilt, in the person of Oë and in his countrymen and women, into two
opposite poles like separate branches of one scar.
The gaping wound left by the bombs that hit Japan was never filled by anything
that came after the war. Generations were wrenched from their ethical
inheritance, had no working basis for new life, and were pulled in various
directions.
Oë recalls that in his childhood, very young students were made to vow to kill
themselves if their Emperor commanded them to die, shouting, “I would die, Sir, I
would open my belly and die!” But after hearing the voice of the Emperor on a
radio broadcast, a divine personality descended to his subjects, to accept defeat,
the impressionable Kenzaburo was gripped with humiliation. His world then was
smashed into small pieces; the remaining emptiness and the painful lack of
continuity frightened Oë.
In this line, Oë modifies the title of Kawabata’s Nobel Lecture, “Japan, the
Beautiful, and Myself”, for his own “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself”, where
the traditional Japanese sense of beauty and sensitivity to Nature is grafted to
the humanist view of man and woman.
Also through Watanabe and Rabelais, Oë employed in his craft the formulation of
Mikhail Bakhtin of “the image system of grotesque realism or the culture of
popular laughter”; the relationship between the cosmic, the social, and the
physical; “the overlapping of death and passions for rebirth”; and the laughter
that undermines feudal and hierarchical relationships.
It is through this grotesque realism that Oë preserves and reassess the stories,
myth and folklore, and history of his native Shikoku, and analyzes the modern
monstrosities and the recurrent myths born and sustained in our time. He moves
simultaneously in dream and reality, in the past and the present, in the animal
and the human, in tragedy and humor, in masochism and rehabilitation.
Oë walks the thin line between rebellion and anarchy. In his craft, he assaults
traditional values by pushing the Japanese language beyond its accustomed
“genius”. He pushes it, violating natural rhythms, to accommodate both the
intensity and hostility of what he seeks to convey, thus forcing it to evolve: wild,
powerfully poetic, and unresolved.
On a personal level, Oë has sought to heal the deep divisions within himself.
Besides the experience of war, he has also had to deal with his first son, who
was born with a brain defect. Oë and his wife named him Hikari, Japanese for
“light”.
Through his novels such as A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry, and A Quiet Life
Kenzaburo Oë bridges the personal to the political, explores the individual’s
confrontation with life's tragedies. In these books, his characters overcome
humiliation and shame. They move on and in so doing, find personal dignity and
renewed duty towards fellow human beings.
Hikari, who for a time was incommunicative, learned to talk through birdsong and
music. Eventually, Hikari composed his own songs. For his father, the very act of
expression has the power to heal and mend. Pain and despair, once conveyed,
can be healed. For Hikari, whose compositions varied and deepened through
time, music was the language to utter all the sentiments and emotions his
faculties prevented from being conveyed.
But Oë does not write of Hikari and other personal matters because he merely
chooses to. Instead, he agrees with fellow Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer that
writers do not really choose a situation or a story. His themes have chosen him.
The current of the times and his experiences have called on Oë and he
responds. Therefore, he does not choose the topics of war, political division,
handicap, and abnormality. They continually choose him.
Waiting for an “expectation”, a trigger for motion, Mitsusaburo lies down a soil pit
excavated for the septic tank. Without knowing it, his hands are pulling out rocks
and clods of dirt. He unconsciously wants the walls to collapse, burying himself
alive.
For many days already, he feels as he wakes up that his body parts are
detached, separate. The pit becomes his mouth gaping with his silent cry.
The Silent Cry, considered as Oë’s masterpiece, centers on Mitsu and Takashi
Nedokoro, a repentant activist with a violent streak, returning form Tokyo and
America—reunited brothers—to Okubo, the village of their childhood.
They find themselves returning to more than the forest, its sounds and smells,
and the legend of the Chosokabe; they are greeted by “Japan’s Fattest Woman”;
a Korean “Emperor of the Supermarkets”; television; old village politics,
prejudice, and hypocrisy; and an unresolved family history, which threatens to
repeat itself.
They discover latent things in themselves rearing their ugly heads. They swim in
despair, shame, deceit, and cruelty.
“I've had a split personality all along. Whenever life's calm for a while, I get
an urge to stir myself up deliberately just to confirm the split. And it's like
drug addiction—the stimulus has to be progressively stronger….”
Mitsu and Takashi grapple for the words to express themselves, to utter their
“truths” in order to escape their personal hells.
A Personal Matter
In front of Bird, a cram school teacher, is a huge atlas, a map of the frontiers of
Africa. He longs to escape to the exotic continent and leave everything behind.
Small and thin, diminutive, pecking only at the seeds of life with folded wings,
Bird, at the age of twenty-seven, sees himself as an old man.
After coming from the hospital, discovering that his first-born son had a brain
hernia, a disfiguring abnormality leading to permanent handicap, in horror, “he
would have liked to flee his own body”.
He turns to a former lover, Himiko, to indulge in depravity, the kind of sex “that
would strip and hold up to the light the shame that was worming into him”,
embracing the tentacles of sadomasochism.
“Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two
universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die; the
other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it. Just as you
would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you only
exist as a corpse and move on to the universe in which you are still alive.
“In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree
limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk.”
A student of William Blake, she invokes: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle
than nurse unacted desires…”
A Quiet Life
The tone of the novel is informal and light as Oë turns his real family experiences
into semi-fiction with much ease. There is even banter between the children on
how they feel as literary material:
“A pain in the neck, don’t you think, even if it’s been done favorably, that
he writes about us from his one-dimensional viewpoint? It’s alright with my
friends who know me, but it depresses me to think that I’m going to meet
some people who, through his stories, will have preconceived ideas of
me.”
The family’s relationships with other people are revealed, so are scaffoldings of
religious belief, awkward moments in growing up, and simple family pleasures.
Like Kenzaburo Oë, Gao Xingjian seeks to heal the cleft within himself, but his
struggle is not primarily with another or with an external event; because of the
history of China, Xingjian has searched for a solution to problems involving the
individual ego, the very nature of the self.
In his Nobel Lecture for the 2000 literature award, he traces this repression back
to Confucius, when an autocratic ideology and system already existed, which
gave nonconformists no choice but to withdraw from society and live the life of a
recluse or take refuge in monasteries, otherwise feign madness to be able stay in
the mainstream. Even these two options are gradually eradicated in the early
twentieth century.
Xingjian sets out to reclaim the self that he has surrendered, to take back his own
“instincts, sensitivities, thinking, perceptions, and judgments”.
When he undertakes physical travels that bring him to faraway mountains and
forest reserves, village dwellings and great rivers, and to festivals and cadre
headquarters, he treks parallel landscapes within himself—no less deep, vast,
and treacherous than mountain terrain.
In his travels in the Tibetan highlands, he meets an old man, a song master and
dancer, who tells him how folk songs were prohibited, saying, “It was the Cultural
Revolution. They said the songs were dirty so we turned to singing Sayings of
Mao Zedong songs instead.” Xingjian encounters stories of black magic, hexes,
“demon walls”, fox fairies, the King of Hell, and the Goddess Guanyin, who rules
over the dead. He listens to legends, is haunted by stories of ghosts of suicides,
and is awed by the fire god who was seen as “a huge red bird with nine heads
spitting out tongues of fire [soaring] into the sky trailing a long golden tail”. He
sees fortunetellers.
Xingjian recounts the thrill of stumbling on a genuine folk song that he says
reveres the soul, lamenting the emptiness of a desolate residual race. He
encounters more stories of bandit chiefs and rebellions, of clans that wage wars
as regular as the passing of seasons.
But staying with forest reserve rangers, “who have grown silent like the trees”, he
becomes frustrated with the lack of conversation, and thinks that maybe it is
analytical thinking, logic, and the unceasing search for meaning that has been
the cause of his anxieties.
He visits Daoists and Buddhists in their monasteries, and is drawn by their life
lived with the absence of desire and longing, apparently free from the world’s
suffering. But he discovers that he is “not a recluse and still [wants] to eat from
the stoves of human society”, even if he has to undergo “endless daily trivia” and
live among people preoccupied with their “solemnities”.
It is only his confrontation with nature that fear rises within him against stark,
absolute loneliness. At first, Xingjian is struck by pristine beauty, “irrepressible,
[seeking] no reward…derived neither from symbolism nor metaphor and needing
neither analogies nor associations”. Light draws song from his depths. But the
wildness of nature shuns him as a complete stranger, making his existence
“ephemeral to the point of meaninglessness”.
Palpable, primordial darkness reminds him that humans could have worshipped
fire out of an innate fear of this darkness. It is a fear of one’s identity merging with
chaos, becoming inscrutable amidst everything else. Xingjian knows that this
“primitive loneliness devoid of all meaning” is not the consciousness he seeks.
Deep within, he is afraid of sinking, of falling into this abyss.
Identifying Oneself
“I don’t know if you have ever observed the strange thing, the self. Often the
more you look the more it doesn’t seem to be like it, and the more you look the
more it isn’t. It’s just like when one is lying on the grass…clouds are transforming
every instant.”
Xingjian’s travels within the ego, simultaneous with his journey to mountains,
forests, and villages, have been written out as conversations between himself—
in alternating chapters as separate pronouns, who are projections of himself. The
“I”, the “you”, “he”, and “she” engage in conversations based on Xingjian’s
different thoughts, opinions, judgments, and predispositions.
This literary method devised by Xingjian, clever and highly original, though
extreme, is praised by the Nobel Academy for having “opened new paths for the
Chinese novel and drama”. Xingjian’s concerns are universally valid, and his
insights sharp.
But does the persona in Soul Mountain find what he has set out to find? Does he
reach the mountain called “Lingshan”? Has it ever been there in the first place to
be found?
The end of the novel is inconclusive, signifying no clear understanding that the
quest has reached its end. Xingjian concludes with, “The fact of the matter is I
comprehend nothing, I understand nothing…This is how it is.”
As always, the journey becomes the objective. But this is not to say that Xingjian
has not already learned what he first most needs to learn.
Escape is never the path. Solitude and renunciation are not the only ways. “Don’t
go searching for meaning, all is embodied in the chaos.” Xingjian is back to the
beginning.