But what does theory matter? I have largely forgotten the contents of Lessing’s Laocoön, but if I were to look thoroughly into it, I imagine I’d only become confused. Since I have failed to produce a picture, I decide at any rate to try a poem, and pressing my pencil to the page of the sketchbook I rock myself to and fro, waiting for something to emerge. I continue in this way for some time, hoping somehow to be able to move the point of my pencil from where it rests on the page, but quite without success. The experience feels rather like suddenly forgetting the name of a friend, having it on the tip of your tongue but being unable to produce it. You know that if you give up trying, the elusive name is likely to sink forever beyond reach.
Imagine you set out to mix a gruel of arrowroot. At first your chopsticks merely churn the powder and feel no resistance from the liquid. If you persevere, however, the liquid slowly grows viscous, and your hand grows heavier as it stirs. Continuing to stir without pause, you finally reach the point where you can stir no longer, and in the end the arrowroot gruel in the pan will, of its own accord, positively rush to glue itself to your chopsticks. This is precisely the process of writing a poem.
At last my lost pencil begins to find its way on the page, in fits and starts, gathering impetus as it goes, and after twenty or thirty minutes I have produced these few lines.
The spring is at its height,
My sorrow burgeons with the grasses.
Soundless, the flowers fall in the quiet garden.
The lute lies neglected in the vacant room.
In her web the spider sits unmoving.
An ancient scrawl of smoke curls at the eaves.
When I read it over, I realize it is in fact a string of images that could easily become a picture. I might as well have made it a picture in the first place, I decide. Then I wonder why a poem was easier to create than a picture. Having reached this point in my poem, the rest seems likely to follow without too much effort, but now I feel the urge to write sentiments that are impossible to transpose into a picture. After much hesitation over the possible choices, I finally produce the following:Sitting silent in this quiet world
I sense a faint light deep within me.
The human world is thronged with busyness
Yet how could one forget such peace?
By chance I gain a day’s serenity
and learn how hectic is the life of man.
Where might I place this deep expansive calm?
It belongs only to the realms of eternal sky.
I read it through from the beginning. It is not without merit, but it seems rather too dry and dull to really convey the exalted state I’ve just been in. While I’m at it, I decide to try another poem. Gripping my pencil, my eyes stray unconsciously toward the doorway—and at this moment the door is slid open, and I catch a sudden glimpse of a beautiful shape beyond, slipping quickly across the three feet or so of open space. Good heavens!
By the time my eyes have fully turned to take this in, the door is open and the figure is disappearing. The movement is over almost before my eyes can catch it, and the shape passes and disappears in an instant. My gaze is now riveted on the doorway, all thoughts of poetry abandoned.
Within a minute the figure re-emerges across the way. Silent and serene, the woman walks along the second-floor balcony opposite me, clad magnificently in a long-sleeved formal kimono. The pencil falls from my hand. I stare across the twelve yards or so of courtyard garden, breath held, while the lone figure appears and disappears, parading gracefully to and fro at the balcony railing as the evening spring sky, already freighted with cloud, grows gradually heavier with the promise of rain.
The woman has said not a word, nor sent so much as a glance in my direction. She walks so softly that even the sound of her own silk hem trailing behind her would not reach her ears. She is too distant for me to distinguish the details of the dyed colors in the lower half of the kimono; all I can make out is the transition, where the kimono’s basic color merges into the design below, a delicate shading reminiscent of the boundary between night and day, that boundary that she too treads.
I know not how many times this figure in her trailing kimono walks up and down the long balcony corridor nor how long she has performed this strange perambulation in her astonishing clothes. Nor have I the least idea what her intention might be. It’s a weird feeling, to watch her endlessly repeating her ritual, coming and going, appearing and disappearing in the frame of my doorway, so decorously and so silently, for reasons beyond my ken. If her action is some lament for the passing spring, why should it take such an insouciant form? And why should this nonchalant pose choose to clad itself in such finery?
Is it perhaps gold brocade that makes the obi at her waist so startle the eye as this spectral shape, this hue of the dying spring, for an instant entrancingly brightens the doorway’s dark depths? Moment by moment the gaudy brocade comes and goes, swallowed now into the blue depths of evening, into unpeopled remoteness, now returning hither through those far reaches of space. The sight is redolent of the twinkling stars of spring that sink at dawn into depths of violet sky.
At last the heavens are on the verge of opening to swallow this bright shape into the realm of darkness. There is something supernatural about the scene, the figure dressed in clothing appropriate to a vibrant life surrounded by golden screens and silver candelabras, “each instant of spring’s evening worth a wealth of gold,” willingly fading without fear or resistance from the visible world. As I gaze at her through the swiftly gathering darkness, she seems to linger serenely in one place, then tread with the one measured step, without haste, without bewilderment. If she indeed has no knowledge of the impending peril of the darkness, she is the height of innocence.
If she knows but does not feel it as a danger, she is uncanny. Loitering thus, so serene and poised, between the realms of being and nonbeing, her original dwelling must surely be that blackness, and this temporary phantom is now in the act of returning into the obscure darkness of its true home. The real nature of this figure is suggested by her kimono, whose bewildering pattern inexorably melts and disappears into inky black.
Another image: when a beautiful woman falls into lovely slumber and in the midst of this sleep draws her last breath in this world, we who watch by her pillow are stricken with grief. But if to the given pains of existence a thousand pains are added in dying, the woman herself, weary of pointless living, would feel with those who watch over her that relief from her suffering would be nothing but merciful. But how does a young child who dies easily in his sleep deserve his fate? A child drawn down to the realms of the dead in sleep has lived its precious life in a blind moment, with no preparation for death. If someone must be killed, let him first feel the absolute karmic inevitability of the fact, resign himself, and die with a prayer on his lips. If before your eyes is only the vivid fact of death, without the conditions that naturally lead to death, then you long not to chant the last rites over the dying but to cry out and summon back those feet that have already stepped halfway into the other world. Perhaps she who is slipping unaware from her mortal into her immortal sleep suffers by being called back like this, being dragged unwillingly by the chains of existence that she was in the act of severing. Be merciful, she may think, and do not call me, but let me quietly sleep. And yet we long to call.
When the woman appears once more beyond the doorway, I have just such an urge, to call her back and save her from the depths of unreality—but when her dreamlike form glides across the three-foot-wide space before my eyes, I find myself speechless. The next time, I decide, but then once more she slips past. Why can’t I speak? I wonder, and as I wonder she passes again. She passes without the least show of awareness that someone might be watching, or might be gripped by anxiety for her. She passes in seeming indifference to the likes of me, neither burdened by my fears nor pitying me for them. As I watch, summoning myself again and again to call, the clouds at last began to spill the moisture they have so long withheld,
and soft threads of rain close their melancholy curtain about that distant form.
CHAPTER 7
It’s cold. Towel in hand, I set off down to the bathhouse.
After disrobing in the little changing room, I descend the four steps that bring me into the large bathroom. There seems to be no dearth of local stone. The bathroom floor is paved with granite; in the middle a bathtub the size of a substantial tofu seller’s vat has been sunk about four feet into the ground, and unlike a normal tub, it too is lined with stone. The place has a name as a hot spring, so presumably the water contains a variety of mineral elements, but it is perfectly clear and thus a pleasure to step into. Lying here in the tub, I even take an occasional experimental sip, but it has no particular taste or odor. The water is reputed to have medicinal qualities, but as I haven’t bothered to ask, I have no idea what ailments it cures. I suffer from no particular illness, so it hasn’t occurred to me to wonder what the water’s practical value might be. The only thing that comes into my head as I lower myself into the tub are the lines from Po Chu-i’s poem, “Softly the warm spring waters / bathed the white beauty’s skin.” Whenever I hear the words “hot spring,” I taste again the deep pleasure that these lines evoke, and indeed it seems to me that no hot spring is of the least value unless it can produce in me precisely the sensation summed up in these lines. My sole requirement for a hot spring, you might say, is that it fulfill this ideal.
Once I am in the deep bath, the water comes up to my chest. I can’t tell from whence it issues, but it is continually flowing gently out over the edge of the tub. The stone floor never has a moment to dry, and the warmth of it underfoot fills my heart with a tranquil happiness. Outside, rain is falling—at first gently enough merely to haze the night, delicately imparting a subtle moisture to the spring air, but slowly the drops from the eaves begin to fall more rapidly, with an audible drip, drip. A thick steam fills every corner of the bathhouse to the very ceiling, so dense that it must be seeking a way out through any gap or knothole, however small, in the wooden walls.
Chill autumn fog, a spring mist’s serenely trailing fingers, and the blue smoke that rises as the evening meal is cooked—all deliver up to the heavens the transient form of our ephemeral self. Each touches us in its different way. But only when I am wrapped, naked, by these soft spring clouds of evening steam, as now, do I feel I could well be someone from a past age. The steam envelops me but not so densely that the visible world is lost to view; neither is it a mere thin, silken swath that, were it to be whipped away, would reveal me as a normal naked mortal of this world. My face is hidden within voluminous layers of veiling steam that swirl all about me, burying me deep within its warm rainbows. I have heard the expression “drunk on wine” but never “drunk on vapors.” If such an expression existed, of course, it could not apply to mist and would be too heady to apply to haze. This phrase would seem truly applicable only to this fog of steam, with the necessary addition of the descriptive “spring evening.”
I pillow the back of my head on the rim of the bathtub, relax every muscle, and let my weightless body float in the translucent water. My soul too drifts lightly, like a jellyfish. When I am in this state of mind, the world is an easy place to inhabit. You unbar the doors of common sense that lock up the mind, and fling open the heart’s barriers of worldly attachment. What will be will be, I think, afloat here in the water, at one with the surrounding medium. No life knows less suffering than the life of that which flows, and being in the midst of flow, with the very soul afloat on its waters, is an even finer thing than being a follower of Christ himself. Seen in this light, even a drowned body becomes an essentially elegant, aesthetic object. I think the poet Swinburne, in one of his poems, wrote of the happiness felt by a drowned woman. Looked at thus, Millais’s painting of Ophelia, which has always somehow disturbed me, is in fact a work of considerable beauty. I have long wondered why he chose such an unpleasant scene, but now I see just why it works as a picture. There is undoubtedly something inherently aesthetic about a figure drifting or sunk, or half afloat and half sunk, lying at ease upon the flow. If you add an abundance of herbs and flowers along the banks, and depict the water and the face and clothes of the floating figure in serene and harmonious colors, there you have your picture. And there is such peace in the expression of that floating girl that it almost belongs to the realm of myth or allegory. Of course, if she were depicted writhing in a spasm of agony, it would quite destroy the spirit of the work, but on the other hand an utterly unalluring and indifferent expression would convey no trace of human feeling. What kind of face would work? I wonder idly. Millais’s Ophelia may well be successful on its own terms, but I suspect that his spirit and mine inhabit different realms. Millais is Millais, I am me, and I feel the urge to try painting an elegant picture of a drowned corpse after my own fancy. But conceiving of the face I want for it isn’t such a simple thing.
Still suspended in the water, I next try my hand at composing a eulogy to the drowned figure.
Rain dampens
And the frost chills.
All is dark within the earth.
But in spring waters there’s no pain
Afloat on waves . . .
Sunk beneath waves . . .
I am floating there aimlessly, intoning these lines softly to myself, when from somewhere I hear the plucked notes of a shamisen. Now, for a man who calls himself an artist, it’s embarrassing to confess that I have almost no notion of matters to do with the shamisen; my ears have scarcely ever registered the difference between one modal tuning and another. But listening idly to the sound of those distant strings makes me wonderfully happy, lying here in a hot bath in a remote mountain village, my very soul adrift in the spring water on a quiet vernal evening, with the rain adding to the delight of the occasion. From this distance I have no idea what piece is being sung or played, which too holds a certain charm. But judging from the relaxed timbre of the notes, it might be something from the repertoire of the great blind Kamigata performers, played on a thick-necked shamisen.
When I was a child, a sake shop by the name of Yorozuya stood outside our front gate. On quiet spring afternoons the daughter of the establishment, a girl called Okura, would always take up her shamisen and practice the old nagauta songs she was studying. Whenever Okura began to play, I would slip out into the garden to hear her. We owned a plot for growing tea, around forty square yards, in front of which, to the east of the guest room, stood a row of three pine trees. They were tall trees, about a foot in girth, and the interesting thing was that they were visually pleasing only as a group, not individually. The sight of them always made me happy as a child. Beneath the pines crouched a garden lantern of rusted black iron on a slab of some kind of red rock, grim and immovable, like an obstinate little old man. I used to love to gaze at it. Around this lantern the nameless grasses that had pushed up through the mossy earth tossed fancy-free in the world’s fickle winds, casting their scent and taking their pleasure in their own sweet way. I discovered a place to squat among these grasses, a space just big enough for my knees to fit, and my habit at this time of year was to go and sit there, absolutely still. Each day I settled down beneath those pines, glaring back at the grim little lantern and sniffing the scent of the grasses, as I listened to Okura’s distant shamisen.
Okura must by now be well into marriage, and her face across the sake shop counter would be that of a solid householder. Do she and her husband get along well? Do the swallows still come back each year to those eaves, their busy little beaks laden with mud? Since that time I have never been able to separate in my imagination the sight of swallows and the smell of sake. Are those three pines still there, forming their elegant configuration? The iron lantern has certainly disintegrated by now. Do the spring grasses remember the boy who used to squat among them? No, how would they now recognize someone who even then passed only mutely through their lives? Nor, surely, do they retain any memory of the daily echo of Okura’s voice as she sang “The Hemp
Robe of the Mountain Monk,” accompanying herself on the shamisen.
Those plucked notes have spontaneously recalled for me a vision of the nostalgic past, and I am transfixed, once again the artless boy who inhabited that world of twenty years ago—when suddenly the bathhouse door slides smoothly open.
Someone’s come in, I think, turning my eyes to the doorway as I float. My head is resting on the rim farthest from the door, and the steps leading down to the bathtub are diagonally visible to me about twenty feet away. But my searching eyes still cannot discern any figure there. I wait alertly, hearing only the sound of the raindrops along the eaves. The notes of the shamisen have ceased without my noticing.
A long moment later a form appears at the top of the steps. The large bathhouse is lit by a single small lamp hung from the ceiling, so even if the air were free of steam, it would be hard to make out anything clearly at this distance; now, with the thick steam held down by the evening’s fine rain and prevented from escaping, I cannot discern the identity of the standing figure. Unless it descends one step and its foot goes to the second, and the full light of the lamp bathes it, addressing this figure as either man or woman is impossible.
The dark shape takes a step down. The stone seems velvet soft; indeed, to judge by the sound alone, one could easily believe the shape hasn’t moved at all. But now the outline swims hazily into view. Being an artist, my senses are unusually acute when it comes to the human frame. The moment the ambiguous figure moves, I understand that the person in the bathroom with me is a woman.