Failing Bashō

Off and on since the beginning of the summer I've been reading Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings, a collection of works by Japan's most famous poet, Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉), translated by Sam Hamill in 1998 and published by Shambhala Press in 2000.  I must admit up front that I began the book looking for pure escapism into natural aestheticism and pithy Zen philosophy.  I have also my entire life longed to travel through the countryside on foot; the appeal of Bashō's travel writing, or haibun ( 俳文 a traditional form of literature combining travel narrative and haiku), was obvious.  As such, I had more or less written the book off as irrelevant to the modern era until the very end, when I reconsidered the haiku on their own terms, this after reading the Afterword, which chronicles the poet's final years as a moody, sometimes misanthropic old man.

Bashō, real name Matsuo Kinsaku (松尾 金作, his pen name was adopted from a shelter a group of his disciples built from plantain trees, 'bashō 芭蕉' in Japanese), is well known for raising the haiku to an art form in its own right.  Before, it mostly served to introduce longer pieces of collaborative poetry known as renga (連歌).  As it came to stand alone as a form of art all to itself, it perfected certain attributes that came to be known worldwide.  Its form is simple, yet highly refined: it must be exactly three lines amounting to seventeen morae (five in the first and third lines, seven in the second), and it must contain a kigo (季語 a seasonal reference word or phrase) and a kireiji (切れ字), literally a "cutting word", sometimes defined as the "ahh effect" in haiku.  There is no straightforward translation into English of this latter pivotal word; it is often translated as a dash.  The most famous of Bashō's haiku, perhaps the most famous haiku ever, illustrates these themes perfectly:

At the ancient pond 

a frog plunges into

the sound of water

As his fame spread, Bashō attained something of a cult status, drawing followers from across Japan and often hosting haiku contests and other literary events.  At the same time, he could turn hermetic in an instant, closing the gates of whatever compound his disciples had most recently erected, and escaping inward via zen meditation.  These anti-social spells would often be followed by a swing toward wanderlust, and he would then set out on foot, usually accompanied by a young companion, to visit monasteries, sites of natural beauty, and old friends scattered across Honshū.  The writings collected here, Narrow Road to the Interior being the longest and most famous, are the author's meticulously edited journals produced from these peripatetic adventures.

Perhaps written form (translated written form, at that) is an improper medium for relaying the grand beauty of 17th century Japan.  Words must surely fail to capture the natural splendor that would have stretched endlessly outward from the wanderer's eye as he traveled in an era before urban development and combustion engine-transportation.  But there may also be a disconnect for me in adapting to a writing so simple (granted artless simplicity, or karumi, is the hallmark of Bashō's writing) that it amounts to an elevated list of mountains and shrines.  The author visits sites of historical battles or famous caves and shrines where Zen masters meditated.  We occasionally hear of the traveler's ailments or of his teary-eyed reminiscence of Chinese poet's lines. But the "action", if you will, is blunt and straightforward, with so little adornment one wishes instead for a painting and some time to make use of their own imagination.  The Knapsack Notebook, the second to last of the haibun, was perhaps the most reflective; mono no aware running deep throughout its passages, it ends with a picture of a lonely sea:  "And that is why, even now, after a thousand years, the waves meet this shore with a melancholy song."  Perhaps the darkest of the four, I was inevitably drawn to it, more evidence that my own biases and preconceptions colored my experience.  Later in life, then, I may return to these writings, prepared to meet them on their own terms, free of my own biased expectations.



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What leaves a stronger impression, for me at least, are the haiku themselves.  Those incorporated into the haibun are often bound to the scenes in which they were composed and have only limited relevance when taken alone.  However, after the travel writings, Hamill provides translations of some 80-odd pages of poetry with the Japanese provided (but sadly only in romanization).  It was reading through these that Bashō really came alive for me.

Essentially, the haiku presented can be broadly categorized into two types:  the spring and flower themed, and the autumn/winter water themed.  Of course, unabashedly sticking to those that spoke to me personally, I favored the latter.  That is not to say the more upbeat, rejuvenatory haiku I dismissed, but it is the solitude and pensiveness, the depressive, yet celebratory, part of the poet's personality that really shines through. We can imagine that many of these were written when the gates of his compound were sealed tight, visitors strictly verboten, as only a few of those I have collected make even the slightest reference to another human being, as in this poem, a casual, yet elegantly precise, snapshot of femininity:

Wrapping dumplings in

bamboo leaves, with one finger,

she tidies her hair

On the other hand, some are just as notable for their deep irreverence, for example:

A rolling cloud—like

a dog pissing on the run—

dense winter showers

O bush warblers!

Now you’ve shit all over

my rice cake on the porch

The most amazing thing about Bashō’s life is the combination of a wealth of knowledge about antiquity, poetry, Daoism, Zen and other intellectual topics, balanced by a tranquil appreciation of such small mundane pleasures and beauties, like the scene depicted above.  Surely, one gains something new with every reading.  Metaphor is heavy, and sometimes culture-specific, as in the following haiku, where the combination of mist and clouds is reminiscent of sexual desire, but is here used also to draw attention to the fertility of the autumnal fields:

Under the harvest moon,

fog rolling down from foothills,

mist and clouds in the fields

Nonetheless, no matter on what level the reader follows Bashō's verse, the superficial or the profound, it will be done so with supreme pleasure and satisfaction.  The following are those haiku, from the translation by Sam Hammil, that I personally found most enjoyable.

All along this road

not a single soul -- only

autumn evening

On Suruga Road,

the orange blossoms also

have tea’s odor

A snowy evening—

sitting alone with dried salmon,

enjoying chewing

Little river crab—

crawling up my leg while I soak

my feet in springwater.

Drunk from my hands,

icy spring water surprises

my aching teeth

At the poor mountain temple,

the iron pot sounds like weeping

in the cold

For today only,

we’ll grow old together in

the first winter rain

Awakened at midnight

by the sound of the rice jar

cracking from the ice

Drawing purifying

water—like the monks’ footsteps,

so clear and so cool

Seas slowly darken

and the wild duck’s plaintive cry

grows faintly white

With clear melting dew,

I’d try to wash away the dust

of this floating world

In the fish market,

from among the little shrimps,

a cricket sings

Drinking sake

brings on insomnia—

it snowed all night

Now autumn begins,

the sea and all the fields

the same shade of green

The moon disappears

into darkening treetops

collecting the rain

Long conversations

beside blooming irises—

joys of life on the road

From every direction

cherry blossom petals blow

into Lake Biwa

The banana tree,

blown by winds, pours raindrops

into the bucket

Seen in bright daylight,

its neck is burning red,

this little firefly!

Intermittent rain—

no need at all to worry

over rice seedlings

Delight, then sorrow

afterward—aboard the

cormorant fishing boat

Nothing in the cry

of cicadas suggests they

are about to die

The bright harvest moon

keeps me walking all night long

around the pond

Snow fallen on snow,

and this evening, the full moon

of November

On a bare branch,

a solitary crow—

autumn evening

Buried under moss

and ivy leaves, but from within

the tomb, a faint prayer

Falling willow leaves—

my master and I and

tolling temple bells

Hearing they eat snakes,

it’s unnerving to listen

to the pheasant’s cry

 Spring passes

and the birds cry out—tears

in the eyes of fishes

Under full blossom—

a spirited monk and

a flirtatious wife

Old lazy-bones—

slowly roused from a nap by

falling spring rain

After morning snow

onion shoots rise in the garden

like little signposts

A new spring begins

the same old wealth—about

two quarts of rice

On New Year’s Day,

each thought a loneliness as

autumn dusk descends

The new year’s first snow—

how lucky to remain alone

at my hermitage

House ハウス (1977 Ōbayashi Nobuhiko 大林宣彦 )

Over the years, any number of films purported to be cult classics have let me down in one way or another.  I always assumed that I saw them beyond a time in my life during which I could have fully appreciated their appeal.  Happily, the 1977 experimental fantasy horror comedy by Ōbayashi Nobuhiko (大 林宣彦) is not one of those movies that passed me by.  Almost never has a film so anticipated, so hyped up, lived up to, nay, exceeded, my expectations as did House.

The plot, perhaps the least important part of the film, revolves around seven girls who have decided to vacation at their ringleader Gorgeous' aunt's house in the countryside.  The wheelchair-bound aunt turns out to be a vampiric ghoul who prays on the girls to restore her youth, which was squandered after losing a fiance in the second World War.  The girls are picked off one by one, despite the long-coming arrival of a male love interest, as well as Gorgeous' soon-to-be mother-in-law.  What ensues are psychedelic freak outs where girls are torn limb from limb by killer pianos, decimated by mattresses and bedding material, or drowned in a room full of blood spewing from an oil painting of the aunt's ever-stalking Persian, Blanche.

Ōbayashi, an early pioneer of experimental film in Japan (and television commercials), is said to have borrowed the idea for the story from his seven year old daughter, and this goes some way toward accounting for the inexplicable happenings of the film (near the end, a would-be "knight in shining armor" is waylaid by a watermelon salesman and ends up becoming a heap of bananas), as well as its surreal pacing and quality.  The film's palette is glossy and hyper-real:  the young girls gaze dreamily into immaculate sunsets, silky black hair blowing in the wind, just moments before fishing decapitated heads from antique wells  The house of the title rivals anything in Kwaidan or Ugetsu for atmospheric effect, and the movie is a slapdash juxtaposition of sugary sentiments and Argento-esque mutilation.  House (or Hausu, as it is often re-transliterated from the katakana transliteration of the English word "house") in some ways sets the standard for creating an atmosphere and following through on it.  All the while, the soundtrack consists of an unrelenting barrage of sound effects and eerie piano loops, with psychedelic rock orchestrated by Micky Yoshino and his band Godiego.

The special effects, which either by choice or by virtue of the film's release date are super lo-fi, are trippy to say the least.  Reminiscent of Ken Russel's Altered States, but delivered in the manner of classic spookshow methodology (at any number of times I felt like I was watching the culmination of all the disjointed segments of Monsters Crash the Pajama Party), House pushes the medium of film beyond its limits, in ways more creative than anything the modern age of CGI entertainment has approximated.  At times the film crackles and burns on the screen, at others a psychedelic montage of disjointed images and swirls of fuzzy color assault the viewer. At one point in the story, our heroine Gorgeous emerges from upstairs to a slowed-down and scratchy motion effect that feels as if the projector is slowly eating the film.  Continuity and lucidity are two qualities that Ōbayashi decided to dispense with early on in the project.

But perhaps the most charming aspect of the film is its unabashed catering to cliches and fetishes, albeit like being force-fed gumballs laced with LSD.  The seven damsels begin the movie in school girl uniforms and before it is out one spends the majority of the action in bow-adorned panties, another is dolled up in watabōshi, and various others are stripped bare for the hungry-eyed spectator.  Painting in heavy strokes of melodrama, while at the same time sending up sundry porno plots (there is a bookish nerd, a cutesy housewife type, a kung fu heroine, a doughy-faced innocent, and so on) that had probably yet to emerge, House is a perfect blend of pop art and traditional horror genre elements--self aware, but also a tribute to the classic haunted house storyline.  It runs the gamut of creepy felines, sinister crones, antiquated manors and plenty of gore to boot.  Later genre entries from the J-horror explosion of the early noughts (St. John's Wort, for one) could have learned a thing or two by following Ōbayashi's example and not taking themselves quite so seriously.

In my book, House is a work of perfection, untouchable to the last detail.  But then it's hard to imagine a movie that combines so many seemingly incompatible pieces of my personality.  Waiting for the late October release from Criterion will be a trial of the will by any estimation.  Fortunately, my first viewing of it was consummated in a slightly run-down, vintage-era theater, where it dumbfounded hordes of ironic hipsters that arrived expecting an ordinary low budget horror film from the 70's and got something more akin to Luis Buñuel channeled through Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark .  Exiting the room, I heard a girl ask her friends what the hell had happened in the last two hours.

You just gazed into heaven's abyss, baby. And your tiny little world will never be the same again.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Women in the Lens of Three Japanese Photographers

WARNING: Kiddies might do well not to scroll down this page, as some of the "art" may not be suitable for the squeamish or the prudish.

This is a brief sketch of three Japanese photographers that probably shouldn't be included in the same conversation, much less the same blog.  While the latter two, Araki Nobuyoshi and Amano Daikichi, may share some common grounds, each of the three have an entirely unique approach to subject matter.  The one connecting thread, however, is that all three are best known for their choice of Japanese women as subjects.  Any one of the artists' work could serve as a thesis on the role of women in art, and especially in the art of Japan. Perhaps each can re-emerge in a broader context on these virtual pages in future posts.

Araki Nobuyoshi is a long-established, well-known presence behind the camera, with multiple monographs about his work, and over 300 exhibiting it.  Amano Daikichi has been a hot topic on blogs about art and the outré , but is relatively less known.  Fujimoto Aki is virtually untraceable; a veritable mystery girl who will hopefully receive wider attention in the coming years.  (Though, one hopes, not so much attention as to end up like my favorite Japanese photographer, Sugimoto Hiroshi, emblazoned on a new release by U2.)  At any rate, there seems to be an inverse relationship between my interest in the photographer, and the amount of available information on the Web and in print:  in a google search Fujimoto has virtually nil, Araki is in abundant supply.

Fujimoto Aki (藤本昌 )


  My first (and favorite) time seeing the work of Fujimoto Aki was on a trip to the Seattle Asian Art Museum.  It was a shot featuring the same subject to the left, but a close-up head-and-shoulders shot, the girl facing straight toward the camera, illumined by sunshine, eyes upwardly askance in thought.  The piece was entitled "Hmmmmm", and had I known it to be unavailable online, I would have ventured an illicit shot with my own camera.  The photo is crisp and alive and full of youthful energy, as is the one to the left, entitled "I think".

To date, so far as my monolingual skills (and help from a Japanese friend) can tell, Fujimoto has only appeared in one print anthology, and a dozen or so shows.  The book, Tokyo Girls Bravo, is an anthology of work by contemporary female artists compiled by manga-art superstar Murakami Takashi.  Its artists, who are previewed in a slide on the page of the Marianne Boesky Gallery, also features work by the loveable Yoshitomo Nara, along with a dozen other artists unbeknown to me.

Discussions of Fujimoto's work inevitably bring up the issue of kawaii (可愛い),  or the art of cuteness.  A photo of a small fawn, carefree girls lost in playful reverie or drifting along on a swan.  These are the topics of Fujimoto's pieces--an honest depiction of innocence and nostalgia.  I remember reading some years back (in the Wall Street Journal, of all places) about the Little Bo Peep phenomenon in modern Japan, and its related fashion styles.  The presumption is that the cold, ambitious climate of economic life (and the rigors of cracking into it) has robbed a generation of their childhood, at the same time shoving a traditionally stay-at-home female culture into the fray.  Women well into their forties have taken to outward displays of pre-teen fantasy as a sort of coping device.  Or so said the author.  One certainly wonders what our elusive photographer Aki thinks about this, and what role it plays in her own work.  Here's to hoping we soon find out. 

Solo Swan (2003)













Untitled (2003)








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Araki Nobuyoshi (荒木 経惟) ,goes hand in hand with discussions of art and morals.  There are of course detractors, as well as those who claim his art is somehow above or beyond morals, or (predictably) "misunderstood".  I'm skeptical of giving artists a free card in moral assessment.  His work is what it is: bound and gagged women, objectified and prodded with dildos, tied up or positioned in other degrading acts.  But no simple judgment, positive or negative, captures the span of his work.  In some photos the women look pleased, in others empowered, still in others abused, degraded, angry.  It is not that I hold Araki outside the pale of moral judgment; it is just that a simple statement can't account for his entire oeuvre.  One thing is clear, however: his personality is known to be that of a hyperactive kid, in love with the world and exploratory of emotion, a persoanlity that has attracted the likes of Bjork (he shot the photos on her remix album Telegram), Lady Gaga, and hordes of Japanese literati, among others.

Araki was born in 1940s Tokyo.  A quote from the astounding Araki by Araki:  The Photographer's Personal Selection 1965-2002 illustrates the enigma at an early age:

"...[A]ll of my work has a bit of the whiff of death.  When I was a child, my playground was the local graveyard!  And then the pleasure quarter, the Yoshiwara, was close by too, so there was the smell of whores as well.  Do you know the Yoshiwara Funerary Tower?  This was a temple--a so-called throwaway temple--where the bodies of unknown prostitutes were dumped.  That was the sort of place I played in as a kid, so you can see I've been saturated with Death and with Eros from an early age.  Nothing I can do about it."

After going to work for the advertising agency Dentsu, Araki met his wife and lifelong muse, Yoko.  The two were close enough for comparison with Dali and Gala, though it was apparently an open relationship:  with much gusto, Araki photographs himself nude alongside or in intercourse with innumerable women, often capturing his subjects at the height of ecstatic orgasm.  In addition to sex and bondage, his other themes include flowers, toy dinosaurs and stuffed lizards, and photography of children.  In fact, it was a particularly scandalous photo of a young girl, shirtless in bed with the sheet invitingly thrown back, that first brought Araki to my attention, as it is the cover of John Zorn's album Taboo and Exile.  Though argued by Zorn to be placing the burden of perspective on the viewer, the collection of photos in Araki's portfolio show little that distinguishes the hyper-erotic depictions of mature (and older) women from those of the children, one of which is a close-up of a teary-eyed young girl with a wounded look on her face, possibly the same girl from the bedroom picture.  Again, those morals.

The darker side of Araki's photography, or however you want to put it, at least counterbalances the deeply emotional, often nostalgic, aura that surrounds most of his work.  His marriage to Yoko is lovingly documented from their beginnings (including graphic depictions of their honeymoon) to her death from cancer in 1990.  Often pensive, and ever enamored by the activity of ordinary people (many of his earlier shots are taken with a hidden camera), Araki's photography captures the joys of life and the pangs of contemplating mortality.  Sex is undoubtedly the glue that holds the two together in his worldview, and his palette of concupiscence is overwhelming diverse, at times playful but more often than not brutal and unrestrained.  One may suspect that the female sex is so powerful a force to Araki that he feels the need to bind it up or stuff it in a suitcase, a hop and a skip from violence and supression in the wrong hands, but perhaps the ultimate homage by others' estimations.  The sado-masochist underground (a favorite subject of Japanese noise artist Akita Masami (Merzbow)), mixes with a history of oppression and the relatively permissive attitude of both rape and schoolgirl fetishes in modern Japan in quite disturbing ways.  But Araki just grins and tweaks his El Diablo mustache before snapping away a dozen or more photos from his self-described "workroom of shame".

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If Araki Nobuyoshi views women as an overpowering sexual force that must be contained, then Amano Daikichi seems to looks at women as slightly repulsive, oddities to be dissected and internally explored (by amphibious proxy) and ultimately buried in slimy sea creatures and other vermin.  His work involves beautiful women, often in blood-red lipstick and dark eye shadow, strangulated and enveloped by octopi, often times the tentacles wrapped around their throats and penetrating their mouths (or other bodily orifices).  Some of his less risqué pieces can be seen on his website, but it is undoubtedly his work as a self-professed pornographer that has earned him infamy.  His pornography studio, Genki Genki (it has some sort of feel-good meaning), documents the most outlandish and disgusting acts your humble narrator has ever been privy too.  Women's bodily orifices forced open with medical equipment to allow newts, roaches and worms to enter and exit at will, their surrounding areas smeared with blood, moss and animals' organs.  As art, and pornography as art, is established on the premise of one-upping its predecessors, I shiver to imagine the next stage of evolution.

In interviews, Amano styles himself as a caterer to the public's fetishistic requests, less an artist of originality than a photographer working on commission.  From his own perspective it is all in good fun, driven exclusively by a curiosity to see, feel and smell these creatures in erotic contexts.  He has hinted that his models are more comfortable with the set pieces than he himself.  (He does, however, profess to trying first hand any acts to which the girls are subjected.  Oh, and animal lovers take note, all creatures killed in production are eaten after shoot.)  But this projected naivete is hard to reconcile with statements like "unusual looks and voices of women in fear cause sexual arousal to some people", and advertising lines such as "the sacrificed helpless victim of the strangulation".  Amano's work brings up the age old question concerning the link between art (or porn) that pushes the boundaries of established taste, and the instigation to violence or dehumanization which it may entail.  Behind the scenes, you can see the girls from the photos and videos patiently looking on as crew insert baby eels into their anus, or even having a laugh while being smeared with frog blood.  (In the video mentioned below, some of the girls are seen playing with the creatures like pets, or flashing the omnipresent Asian girl-peace sign for the documentary camera.)  But in the finished product their faces are twisted in a grimace, their eyes wet with the look of the victimized.  We acknowledge the right of an artist to explore any and all depths of the psyche, but what of their responsibility for the shift in society's mind toward women, or the violence it may invoke?  Are we prepared to stoke the curiosity of the latent rapist in the name of artistic freedom?  Not an easy question to answer.

In fact, Amano's work is thought-provoking on many levels.  The art work itself is morbid and disturbing, but in a video interview he insists that he is a pornographer and not an artist.  (The Vice Guide video gives the clearest picture of the reserved and mildly awkward Amano.  The critical bits are blurred out, but you get plenty of the picture.)  It's obvious that morbid curiosities, especially concerning sex, are probably timeless.  Most sources inevitably draw the connection to Japanese shunga (春画 literally "Spring painting"), most famously depicted in Hokusai's Dream of the Fisherman's Wife.  And it's perhaps not a misconception to say that this tradition has deeper roots in Japan than in most other countries.  But how do we reconcile it with modern mores imbued with the philosophy of feminism?  No one can deny that women the world over share a history of oppression, and still suffer from acts of sexual violence.  But sweeping the darker side of humanity under the rug doesn't make it go away either.

In fact, the questions this type of art raises turn the sensitive modern male in circles.  The girls in the video seem to be having fun, and there is no evidence they are forced into Genki Genki studios.  The same is true for Araki Nobuyoshi's models.  On the contrary, rather than being put off, women have been drawn toward figures like Araki and are just as fascinated by Amano as he is of them.  His interviewer for the Toro Magazine article above is a woman, and she shows no sign of being offended or angered.  The feminist movement takes issue with men viewing women as weak and fragile, positing themselves as their protectors.  So when men are more vocal in their outrage at the objectification of women's bodies than are women (with obvious exceptions), what does it say about pre-conceived gender roles?  Yet at the same time, if women now view playing the role of the victim in porn or offering themselves as passive objects to be manipulated by the camera an act of empowerment, is it not a win-win situation for men?  It's clear that artists such as these photographers play a key role in bringing such questions to the table.  One only wonders what Fujimoto Aki has to say about it.

Mono no aware in the West

In literary studies of Japan, a central cultural theme is that of mono no aware (物の哀れ), a phrase better illustrated than defined. Roughly, it is a beauty emergent in ephemera, with a pang of sadness at the transience of life--a purely visceral reaction. Translator Sam Hamill defines it as a natural poignancy in the beauty of temporal things, an "elegant sadness", and references Ivan Morris, who calls it "a beauty that is inexorably fated to disappear together with the observer." It belongs in the same category of things we describe in English as "bittersweet", but with a hint of mortality.

The phrase was coined by the 17th century scholar and poet Motōri Norinaga. In response to Buddhist teachings that claimed there should be no sorrow for death's transcendence, Motōri countered that sorrow is an essential aspect of human existence. Furthermore, this emotional element permeates all aspects of life, and came to dominate religious and artistic culture in Japan, from Motōri's analysis of Murasaki's Tale of Genji to Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood. It is perhaps best known in the haiku of Japan's most famous poet, Matsui Bashō, as illustrated in his travel narrative Narrow Road to the Interior:

Loneliness greater
than Genji's Suma Beach:
the shores of autumn

wave after wave
mixes tiny seashells with
bush clover flowers.
(translated: Sam Hamill)

In the West, there has always been an uneasiness with sentimentality; sentimental moments are usually accompanied by an apology in English discourse. Worse still, in current times irony and jadedness are the attitudes du jour; they are the bread and butter of contemporary comedy: the sarcastic parody. We live in a time when it seems all human emotions have been explored, exhausted and burn out. Yet each individual rediscovers these aspects of existence on their own and must reconcile them with the age of self-awareness.

Personally, I have for some time been prudent in reserving openness toward these sentiments for unguarded conversations in the late hours of the night. For there is something pathetically naive in the individual who, with no sense of self-awareness, outwardly gushes over the beauty of life. Some would argue, as many have for quite some time, that to do so is almost obscene, given the cruelty that pervades human history.

However, there is something equally disgraceful in hiding one's inner thoughts and feelings for fear of being the object of ridicule and satire from ironic hipsters and other members of the Blasé Generation. This blog is a major front in my war against self-doubt, as I am cautiously allowing myself to be swallowed whole by an interest in Eastern philosophy and religion which is too often pinned to the image of the clueless new age hippy here in America.

So it seems as apt a place as any to explore the currents underlying my interests in art, specifically music, film and literature. As it turns out, the above trend, along with closely-related wabi, comprise almost the entire shebang.





Mono no aware has long been within the province of visual arts and culture, drawing heavily from the sakura (cherry blossom) festival in Japan, in which the youthfulness of springtime blossoms remind viewers of the brief but beautiful times in life. This is a mode of thinking not exclusive to Japan (and, I'm sure, not exclusive to the East). In my wife's hometown of Jilin, spectators gather for a few weeks to see the rime ice form crystalline structures on the trees lining the Songhua river. The spectacle is all the more poignant in that global climate change has eradicated this phenomenon almost entirely.

But what does mono no aware sound like? I can think of two perfect examples, if slightly altered to suit the Western experience: 60's & 70's era jazz and 21st century noisy ambience.

Dissonance has played a role in Western music since the late-Romantic era, culminating in Modernist composers like Schoenberg, Berg and Boulez. But it was improvisational jazz that gave it life and beauty, saving it from the tide of academic exercise (only to force its head back under in the work of Anthony Braxton).

Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk were among the first to push jazz in an ambient direction, with stark pieces of pensive beauty, but in my opinion John Coltrane was to first to capture the essence of mono no aware. The opening notes of his rendering of My Favorite Things would develop into the ecstatic offerings on later albums such as First Meditations, Stellar Regions and Ascension. Albert Ayler famously claimed, "Coltrane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, and I'm the Holy Ghost." I couldn't agree more; the three form a trinity in which impassioned shrieks of noise mix with fleeting moments of peaceful, yet pained, beauty. (See Pharaoh's Red, Black and Green on 1971's Thembi for a great example.)

But perhaps more personal for me is the work of Christian Fennesz, whose electronic and acoustic stylings capture the wider, technology-saturated world of my own experience. With perhaps a hint of self-consciousness, sweetly melodic chords burst and wither amidst the crackle of static feedback and waves of white noise. Aptly enough, in a live recording from Japan, a few minutes of sentimental acoustic guitar chords are buried deep within a half hour of unstructured clicks and pops and scratchy dissonance. Before the listener can become comfortable with the melody, it has already faded, a fleeting moment in a sea of sound. Mono no aware.



All cultures undoubtedly recognize the poignant nature of human beings' short lives. But Buddhist/Daoist philosophy on evanescence has intermixed with wider East Asian tradition to produce a motif that runs throughout the entire artistic cannon. Where mono no aware overlaps with the Zen-inspired art of perfecting the mundane is where I'm planting my flag for sometime to come. It may not be so original, perhaps nowadays it's mostly cliché, but without realizing it, all roads on my own personal path have led back to this same place, while bits and pieces are scattered throughout most everything I enjoy.

If I had to choose my favorite scene in cinematic history, I believe it would be the train ride across the sea, near the end of Miyazaki's Spirited Away. The entire movie is perfect, but I have many times sat through its entirety just to watch this short sequence where clouds stretch across the horizon of an evening sky and lonely travelers wait and depart at tiny, isolated stations and towns amidst an endless ocean. The painfully haunting chords of Joe Hisaishi's score are an exquisite soundtrack which I think of whenever I think of traveling. And, if you'll permit me a sentimental moment, when I think of what a bittersweet excitement it is to be alive.

残雪 Can Xue

"Me? I was thrown into the chamber pot as soon as I was born. Because I was steeped in urine, my eyeballs protrude, my neck is soft and weak, and my head was swollen like a ball when I grew up. I have breathed in poisonous air for half my life, My chest is eaten up by tubercle bacillus. My father is a syphilis patient, his nose rotted into two horrifying tiny holes. And my mother...(Skylight 107-108)"


Some of the most vivid dreams I have had consisted of walking through poverty-stricken neighborhoods and wooded villages, the inhabitants devolved to semi-human mutants who rant and slobber at me as I sift, knee-deep, through garbage piled in yards and black liquid flowing in oily rivulets down the dirty streets. I've never know what these dreams say about how I view humanity; I just always knew that it was one of my greatest fears that in life I should not find myself far enough away from any place resembling such sordid environs.

But then here I am, caught up in reading book after book by contemporary Chinese author Can Xue. Marginalized at best by the Chinese establishment, Can's stories are like the worst aspects of these mutant dreams of mine, amplified and rotten. The first story I read, a novella entitled Yellow Mud Street, was one hundred and fifty-something pages of daily life in just such a town, located on the outskirts of a major city, but somehow lost to the world, where smoggy clouds of pollution are respite from the piercingly hot sun, and the residents flee to their attics to escape the rising tide of dirty, stagnant flood water, defecating through holes in their ceilings, the waste dropping on the shoulders of neighbors who drift by in boats muttering and wailing to themselves. Can herself has claimed much of her work is the result of periodic "attacks of madness".

The language comes across as typical of dreams, and has often been compared to James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Others have pointed out its roots in Chinese poetry and painting. One of her translators describes it as "narration as improvisation rather than retelling, the sentence that leads rather than follows." In the short story Skylight, the narrator follows into a mirror her father's colleague, who lives on the edge of a cemetery, his job to cremate corpses, resulting in his often smelling of the dead. They travel into the sky to eat grapes that grow out of the ashes of the cremated bodies. Long descriptive passages evoke disconnected images of agitated sleep:

"The gloomy silhouette of the old house was softened, green water dripped from the eaves. On the roof sat my father, who is suffereing from an advanced stage of syphillis. He looked like a running sore. With him was my fat mother, dying of diabetes. The two supported each other, crushing many tiles under their weight. My brothers were crawling here and there like monkeys. In their transparent empty bellies huge stomachs were convulsing, greenish fluid oozing out. They were all staring at the smoky gray sky with their blank whitish eyes, making a clumsy gesture of expectation. (Skylight p. 109)"


"All of a sudden, the door of the cellar opened wide. My old aunt galloped out on the back of a mad bitch dog. They circled on the slag before dashing back into the cellar. The door banged in a painful sob. From somewhere a bell rang, numerous gray shadows of heads rose from the rubble, a green snake crawled between the shadows. The door was open again. Mother was pushed out in a bathtub. Her head was covered with blood. In one hand she held high a cluster of white hairs with clumps of skin attached to the roots. She couldn't scream because her voice was blocked by a bone in her throat. The bathtub was so tall that she failed time and again in attempting to climb out. The old man moved, his eyelids released two drops of blood, and spasms of white foam poured from his lips. "I'm OK now." He sounded sorry while spitting out broken teeth behind me. (ibid, p. 110-111)"

To say that her stories focus on the mundane is an understatement. Nothing ever happens to the characters, yet the smallest events are cause for anxiety and sickness. Often the focus is on inter-human relationships, which are almost always marked by mutual hatred and mistrust:

"I remmeber that rainy morning when Father stepped in heavily from the outside in his overshoes, messing up the floor with rainwater. The he came near me, telling me in a roundabout way that according to the lab experiment there were leeches in my lungs. While he was talking, his whole body twitched with restrained laughter. He believed that he had fulfilled a magnificent mission. (ibid, p. 108)"

In the collection Dialogues in Paradise, numerous stories focus on burdensome parental figures who wallow all day in dampened blankets, causing stress and sickness for their tortured children. In "Raindrops in the Crevice", a scheming mother figure stays wrapped in a wet quilt, revising a letter of appeal to the authorities, while her daughter sits by reading a novel, every exchange an invective hurled at the mother. The next story, "Soap Bubbles in Dirty Water", is a similar variation, this time about a son who waits with bated breath for his mother to suffocate on fumes from the gas stove in front of which she has bedded down. He later seizes the opportunity to help her into bath water, which ultimately results in her melting away to soap bubbles. (The upshot, however, is not a happy one; the suds wail from beyond her watery grave, driving the son into the street, where he bites a chunk of flesh from the shoulder of an old man who is part of a crowd gathered around to heckle our unfortunate narrator.)

No less surreal than the plot lines (or lack thereof) of Can's stories is the dialogue. Very often exchanges consist of raving monologues, ostensibly directed toward the other interlocutor, yet mutually ignored by all involved. Very often characters live in a virtual nightmare of their own concoction, and most espousals are a way to convey this. Another story in Dialogues in Paradise, "Hut on the Mountain", which follows the fears and musings of a girl who alternates her time between organizing drawers and worrying about rats, wolves and various insects that are constantly attacking their home, relates the following passage between mother and daughter:

"'That light from your room glares so that it makes all my blood vessels throb and throb, as though some drums were beating inside. Look,' she said, pointing to her temple, where the blood vessels bulged like fat earthworms. 'I'd rather get scurvy. There are throbbings throughout my body day and night. You have no idea how I'm suffering. Because of this ailment, your father once thought of committing suicide.' She put her fat hand on my shoulder, an icy hand dripping with water."

However, the most memorable line I have so far read was in Yellow Mud Street, spoken from Qi Ergou to his wife, the latter having just spoken enviously of a neighbor who has grown fat from sucking bats' blood. He complains: "There's a thick layer of dirt accumulating behind your neck. Why don't you wash it when you clean your face? An ant has built a nest there. I hear the chewing sound at night." This in a chapter that consists mostly of ants, centipedes and maggots crawling amidst collapsing houses.



In various interviews, Can Xue (real name Deng Xiaohua 邓小华, her pen name means roughly "the dirty snow (at the peak of the mountain) that refuses to wash away") denies that her stories are overtly political, though there is good biographical reason to assume otherwise. In 1957, when she was four years old, her parents (journalists and editors for The Hunan Daily News) were persecuted as ultra-rightists and sent to separate re-education camps, where they were regularly subjected to public humiliation. Can spent much of her youth being transported between elementary schools and caring for her father through visits to jail. Forced to leave school at age 13, Can was raised by her grandmother (a colorful character serving as the subject of the biographical sketch A Beautiful Day in the South) in the countryside, where starvation was a constant threat and later led to her and her brothers' contracting consumption and then her grandmother's death in 1960.

Throughout the Cultural Revolution, Can worked as a type of nurse known as a "barefoot doctor", as an iron worker in a mechanical factory, and as an elementary school teacher until she taught herself to sew and opened a business with her husband Lu Yong, whom she married in 1978. Working as a full-time tailor, she began writing fiction in 1983, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping's anti-spiritual pollution campaings. Her first work was published in 1985, and the first English translation in 1989. She lived in Changsha until moving to Beijing in 2001, by her own admission to escape the humid weather of the south. The author of three novels, six books of literary criticism, a few dozen novellas, and over a hundred short stories, she has been invited to conferences and to give lectures and readings in the US and Europe.

Can stands out among post-Mao Chinese writers for her deliberate breaks with the Socialist Realism that infamously weighs down contemporary Chinese literature. Susan Sontag was quoted as saying, "If China has one possibility of a Nobel laureate it is Can Xue." Her early translator, Robert Jansson, described her work as thus: "Her fiction appeals to those who would stand against a stifling tradition, those who have grown discouraged, even cynical, in their quest for something real and personal (p. 165)." In a foreword to Old Floating Cloud, Charlotte Innes adds, "while readers will sense warmth, empathy, and humor, they will also be aware of that feeling on the brink of madness which comes when everything around one seems on the verge of chaos--or when reality, as everyone else sees it, runs counter to one's own inner sense of reality."

Despite events in her formative years, Can Xue claims to be uninterested in "superficial" political events, focusing instead on the human psyche and the "soul world", which she explores through her "soul" or "life" literature. Reminiscent of the painter Agnes Martin, she claims high literature should not concern itself with the superficial realm of society. She is disdainful of contemporary American literature, and cites Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Dante Alighieri as her greatest inspirations. She similarly chafes at the label "postmodernist", instead referring to her work as "neoclassical literature". Her style has been compared to Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, but also to Tu Fu, Cao Xueqin and Lu Xun. Can sees herself as crafting a special blend of Western and Chinese traditions: "My works are like a plant. My ideas grow up in the West but I dig them up to replant in China's deep soil, a rich history of 5,000 years. My works aren't like those from the West or from China, bur rather my own creation. Chinese culture is from my heart. I was born here. I live here. I don't need to learn what is from my heart."

Though unassuming in personality, she is not timid about elevating her own literature when discussing it. In an interview with Bill Marx, she claims "Authors like myself, whose works belong to what Harold Bloom defines in 'The Anxiety of Influence' as 'high literature,' should not -- and cannot -- take account of the reader at the moment when they are writing.....I think that my works are suited to a small number of advanced readers...If a reader feels that this book is unreadable, then it's quite clear that he's not one of my readers." In an interview with Laura McCandlish, Can dismisses contemporary American literature as well as most contemporary Chinese literature, calling Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian naive and "average". She speaks lowly of postmodernism and expresses a distaste for Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Though citing Wang Anyi as a close friend, she is critical of her reliance on traditionalism in her writing. She even calls the early work of Kafka, her greatest influence, immature, preferring later works like The Castle to earlier stories, such as The Metamorphosis.

Can Xue has been largely untouched by the censors in Mainland China. Finally being recognized as a professional writer (and thus elligible for state subsidies for artists), only two of her works were banned at the time of her interview with McCandlish in 2002. She ascribes this as a general inability to comprehend her work on the part of the censors and critics alike: "I'm most afraid of self-censorship-that I myself will control my writing. Of course, I am very hated by the Chinese government. My memoir piece "A Beautiful Day in the South" was also banned, but it wasn't written against the government directly. I write against the authoritarianism of traditional Chinese culture, and the government happens to be from that culture. The current leaders are just like those from ancient times. It keeps getting worse and worse. I hope to change young people's conception of this culture." As Charlotte Innes puts it, "the government is slower to condemn what it doesn't understand...[t]o read Can Xue is more like falling asleep over a history book and dreaming a horribly distorted version of what you've just read."

My guess is that I have Can Xue entirely wrong, at least if authorial intent is considered the correct reading. Obviously, focusing on her two earliest works, I have latched on to the more grotesque, the more vitiating passages. Conversely, she has often referred to her writing as beautiful, of the soul and from the heart of Chinese culture. The Buddhist analogy of the lotus flower is perhaps most appropriate: a thing of beauty that rises out of the cesspool. In her own words, Can echoes this thought: "It is imagination, and only imagination, that allows the people of Five Spice Street [one of her novels] to fly over the gulf of human nature. That is to say, Can Xue flies over the gulf, because while sitting on the polluted earth she can conceive of paradise." As for now, my reading of her work still bobs a few inches below the muck.





When I finished Yellow Mud Street, it was with a degree of relief that I returned the book to the library, glad to abandon a world so bleak and sordid. But I was inevitably drawn back to Can's writings, curious to plumb deeper the depths and crevices of her imagination. I found her other writings to be less scatalogical, but just as surreally disturbing. I have, however, found a way to fully immerse myself in the experience by alternating the music on my headphones between Naked City and Sun O))). The chaos and darkness that pervade the writing are sublimely complemented by the guttural feedback and mincing shrieks in the music. The experience is similar to having a canker sore: the first attempts to ignore the pain fail miserably, which inexorably lead to jabbing the ulcer with your tongue, savoring the excruciating experience.

(See MIT's Can Xue page for links to the cited interviews and biographical sketches, as well as a bibliography of her work and others' critiques.)

Random, Disorganized Thoughts on Reading Norwegian Wood

These are just some personal notes I want to lay down before going to bed. Twenty minutes ago I finished reading Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森). This is the fifth Murakami book I've read and I have all along been hoping that there would be one I don't gushingly love, just so I don't look like a non-discriminating stooge. With this one, I may have found that book.

To say that I don't love Norwegian Wood is both scandalous and inaccurate. Surely, there are thousands who adore this novel. It is, after all, the book that added an extra zero to the end of the number of readers of Murakami's novels; it is what he's famous for. To not praise Norwegian Wood is deliberately to look like an iconoclast. But for me, it's also not the whole story. Of the five I've read, and five are enough for an ordered list, my favorite to least favorite go: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; What I Talk About When I Talk About Running; Sputnik Sweetheart; Kafka on the Shore; and Norwegian Wood. If I appear lackluster in my feelings for the last, it is only because I'm a flaming devotee to the first four.

Two motifs attract me to Murakami's writing. The first is the characterization. The autobiographical sketch aside, the three novels I previously read all have characters to which I was inextricably drawn, to the point I could barely keep from blazing through the books in one sitting. Kafka's life in Kafka on the Shore could've been expanded into a twelve-part encyclopedia, and I would've wanted to read more. In the beginning of Sputnik Sweetheart I was somewhat annoyed by Sumire, but after she went to work for Miu, I was hooked on the relationship between the two. (Not to mention the Greek isle on which the latter half of the book takes place--almost a character in and of itself.) The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, the first one I read, was perfect in its creation of characters forever etched in my memory: May Kasahara, Malto Kano, Creta Kano and the narrator as well. It still stands on a plane above the rest, quite possibly in my five favorite books of all time.

Plot spoiler in next paragraph

Though Watanabe's character in Norwegian Wood is certainly someone I can relate to, I never found myself too drawn toward him, for whatever reason. Nor were either of the two main female interests all that intriguing, either. Of all the people in Watanabe's life, there was only one who I felt some particular feelings toward, his friend Nagasawa's girlfriend, Hatsumi. The short passage, a page at most, that lays her suicide on the reader like a splash of cold water in the face, caught me totally off guard. Perhaps the only normal person in the entire book, her dismal fate was all the more unfair. (I take this back; Reiko is a character that will stick with me for some time in the grand tradition of memorable Murakami characters.)

The other mainstay of Murakami's writing that so speaks to me on a personal level is, as a matter of fact, alive and well in the book. I have some sort of obsession about the neat and orderly life that Murakami's characters, and so far as I can tell from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Murakami himself, lead on a day-to-day basis. When Watanabe leaves a sleeping girl to slink off into the night, he is careful to wash his tea or beer cup before he goes. He learns from his neurotic roommate to keep a neat and orderly dorm room as well. This tendency is probably most manifest in the daily routines of Kafka from Kafka on the shore, but Watanabe has perhaps the second most regimented lifestyle of all the characters, a steady diet of reading and doing laundry and taking long walks. I don't know why I envy this modern cliché of East Asian culture (I think it is this, and its corresponding interior decorating schemes, via Korean movies like 301/302 and any number of romantic dramas, that drew me into Asian cinema to begin with--what I once heard described in a Takako Minekawa review as "space-age bachelor pads"), but it has something to do with the self-discipline, as well as the calm introversion of a life spent perfecting routines, that minimizes human experience to an intricate art form of insignificant, yet epic, events.

Plot spoiler in next paragraph

The last fifty pages of Norwegian Wood held my attention much stronger than the first 250. Probably the two scenes I will take away from this book will be the still quiet of the sanatorium in the forest, when Watanabe first visits Naoko, but more so the reconciliation of the narrator with Midori atop the roof a downtown Tokyo shopping mall, rain pouring down in torrents:
"I set the umbrella down and held her close in the rain. The dull rush of tires on the highway enveloped us like a fog. The rain fell without a break, without a sound, soaking her hair and mine, running like tears down our cheeks, down to her jeans jacket and my yellow nylon windbreaker, spreading in dark stains."
It's something of a cliché unto itself, the passionate kiss in the rain, but then so is the whole French New Wave-influenced, witty characters smoking cigarettes and coping with deep psychological torment that makes up the rest of the book. But it's damn good at what it is. The few times I felt the book sank below the weight of its supercool was in some of the sex scenes, or rather some of the conversations about sex, that seemed TOO contrived. No matter how outlandish the event, replete with the Murakami-trademarked "act of defilement", never in his other books does sex seem unnatural. At times in Norwegian Wood (worth pointing out, the earliest of his books that I've read), the language harkens back to the type of passages that feel thrown in to rouse the middle school, reading-and-snickering-in-secret crowd. In Murakami's later works these elements have matured and grown into integral plot developments. Perhaps there was something lost in translation?

Finishing a Murakami book, even Norwegian Wood, always leaves me feeling refreshed in life, but also with a hint of anxiety. Though the back catalog is still quite extensive, the idea of having no new Murakami book to read leaves me on edge, and reluctant to hasten that inevitable day. I've been told that South of the Border, West of the Sun is a good one, so I'll probably put it in the queue. Until then, however, I'll revel a little longer in thinking of Reiko's last visit to Tokyo, the faux-funeral in which she and Watanabe drank excessively and played guitar renditions of Bach, and, of course, the elegiac Norwegian Wood, which I'll never listen to in the same way again.

Tokyo Sonata トウキョウソナタ (2008 Kurosawa Kiyoshi 黒沢 清)

It's fairly safe to say that there is no way I could have not liked this film. From beginning to end, everything from pacing to music to cinematography was right up my alley. So consider this review officially biased.

The movie opens in a darkened Japanese apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo. A storm is brewing in the distance, literally and metaphorically, and a gust of wind has blown through the apartment, billowing the curtains and rustling papers across the floor. It ends with a slight breeze, playfully rippling at another curtain, the sounds of Debussy's Claire de Lune closing the film on a tranquil note. Between these extremes, the story unfolds slowly and steadily, building to a surreal crescendo before winding down. The aesthetic is subdued, but at times quietly abrasive, like a loud clap of thunder in a spring storm.

The director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is most well known as a prominent figure from the Japanese horror renaissance of the last two decades. His most famous film Pulse (also known as Kairo, it was the basis for a 2005 American remake) is an apocalyptic thriller in which the dead return for the living through the ubiquitous technology that has absorbed the modern world. His 2003 drama Bright Future, a meditation on disenchanted youth, has long been one of my favorite films. Both are grounded in the loneliness and isolation of the contemporary world. Tokyo Sonata may be the culmination of Kurosawa's earlier work: the subtle aesthetic of films like Pulse and Cure, melded with the plaintive view of the disparateness of contemporary urban Japan.

The story begins with the forced resignation of Ryūhei Sasaki (Kagawa Teruyuki 香川 照之), who has grown comfortable in his career as a low-level manager at a bureaucratic office job. After his position is outsourced to China, he spends his days in humiliating interviews for jobs he has no qualifications for, or in unemployment lines, where he links up with an old friend who has also recently lost work. When his friend commits suicide, Ryūhei takes work as a janitor at the local shopping mall, though never fully accepting his fall from grace.

A typical patriarch trying to hold together his crumbling family life, he hides his work situation from his wife Megumi (Koizumi Kyōko 小泉今日子), the latter's days consisting of a lonely routine of menial housework and tending to her unappreciative husband and two sons. The younger son, Kenji is quiet and brooding, and when his father denies him permission to take piano lessons, he uses his lunch money to pay for classes on the sly from a beautiful young instructor who is going through divorce proceedings. Takashi, the older of the two, barely at home and hardly ever interacting with his family, cannot find work and so decides to sign up to serve in the American Army in Iraq. Eventually, everyone's secret is outed, along with their long-suppressed emotions, and the series of events that follows makes for a chaotically brilliant climax.



The technical side of the film is perhaps the most astonishing element. The cinematographer, long-time Kurosawa collaborator Ashizawa Akiko (芦澤　明子,one of Japan's few female cinematographers), alternates between metallic gray views of the Tokyo skyline to cramped sequences in the Sasaki home. Reminiscent of Christopher Doyle's work in In the Mood for Love, Ashizawa frames most of the shots from behind window panes or staircases. The voyeurism of the audience is blocked by these obstructions, just as the emotions of the characters are stifled by tradition and lack of communication. In one scene the family has just seated themselves around the dinner table. We watch from between the rails of the staircase as all wait for word from the father to pick up their chopsticks and begin the meal. Ryūhei takes a gulp of beer, there is an uncomfortable pause, then he imbibes another large gulp before announcing "let's eat". The dinner scene is shot in one long take, never drawing away from, but never too close to, the tension that thickens the air around the table. The score, written by composer Hashimoto Kazumasa, sounds like 1960's minimalism, in the vein of Terry Riley or early Philip Glass. It is the perfect fit for the mood of the film, melancholy and staccato, a subtle but steady accompaniment to the story.

Tokyo Sonata is a pensive film, but the viewer never feels overwhelmed by the events in the Sasakis' lives. In a speech given at the premiere in Japan, Kurosawa noted how audiences in Europe and the US told him they could identify with the difficulties and disappointments that unfold on screen. This is true. Like all good films, Tokyo Sonata is grounded in the local circumstances of its characters' lives, but is universal in the scope of its artistic vision. The sadness in the movie is catharsis for a society, and a world, grappling with the pressure and alienation of modern life. Kiyoshi Kurosawa captures this theme with the skill of a true auteur.

Official Website

Departures おくりびと (2008 Takita Yōjirō 滝田 洋二郎)

(N.B. Mild spoilers abound.)



The opening shots of one-time pink film director Takita Yōjirō's Departures are shrouded in a thick haze of snow flurries, reminiscent of the first scene of Fargo, but switch the flatlands of North Dakota for the scenic valleys of rural Japan. Parting this wall of white is a solitary hearse, the passengers of which we follow along to their destination: an encoffining ceremony for a recently deceased daughter of a local village family. Except that she turns out not to be a female at all. The solemn ritualistic cleansing and enrobing of the corpse is abruptly halted by the younger specialist's discovery, which shatters his image of the otherwise attractive young "woman" and sets the tone for the majority of the movie, reverent but humorous at the same time.

This part of the funerary ceremony in Japan, which cuts across all religious denominations Eastern and Western, requires sensitive and skilled hands. After sponging the body's exposed skin with a sanitized cloth, the clothes are removed from under a silken cerement, and once the rest of the body is cleansed, new clothing and make-up is applied to restore the departed to look as if in their prime, before being lowered into a coffin and transferred to the cremation retort. Our startled handler, Daigo Kobayashi (Motoki Masahiro 本木　雅弘), called an "NK agent" after the Japanese term nōkan 納棺, has recently returned to his hometown and fallen into this line of work after plans to become a symphonic cellist in Tokyo failed to pan out. Though the job is elevated to an artform, revered by all mourning Japanese (the bereaved often tearfully proffer gifts of gratitude to the agents), it is nonetheless beneath an individual's dignity to fulfill this function. While the protagonist, on his journey from resigned acceptance of the position to genuine veneration of its rites, attempts to hide the nature of his business from his dotingly smiley wife (Hirosue Ryoko 広末涼子) , soon word of his profession spreads around town, deflecting old acquaintances and finally driving away his homemaking wife as well.

Though the movie, which won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, has its moments, for the most part the sequences develop like a feature-length Japanese soap opera. Despite the stunning scenery of Yamagata, nestled in the shadow of Mount Fuji, our emotions are piqued by little else on the screen. The story develops along largely predictable lines: As Daigo develops an immense pride for the work that previously had driven him to wretch before every meal, he ostensibly has to choose between his ordinarily submissive wife, and his newfound pride for the profession. It turns out he must have known all along how to play his cards, as his wife dutifully returns with only the pretense of a fight. Moreover, when characters pass away it feels more like a familiar plot turn than any great loss to shed tears over. By the end, a longstanding family sub-drama is even resolved, with no outstanding tensions left remaining.




Adding to the semblance of the daytime drama, most characters overplay their roles: at some of his more dejected moments, our leading man pulls faces that remind me of the Korean screwball comedy Sex is Zero. (In the scene where Daigo discovers the symphony he has worked so hard to be a part of is dissolved, he draws a quick face that might have been accompanied by the boing of a burst Slinky.) This makes it hard to sympathize for the character when he is supposed to be duly enduring the down sides of the story. The wife figure, though sometimes charming, is played to bubble-gum effect, so fixated on an overstretched smile and crescent-moon eyes that she grins in her sleep.

The one exception is the other staff at the NK agency, especially Shōei, the proprietor (veteran actor Yamazaki Tsutomu 山崎 努, perhaps known best for his role in Itami Jūzō's Tampopo). Tall and aquiline, his presence exudes at both times a sense of gravity and humanity mostly lacking elsewhere in the story. Aloof throughout most of the film, he plays the traditional sensei role to perfection, all the while appearing to tolerantly guide the actor Motoko as much as the character Kobayashi. The high point may be the private puffer roe dinner shared by the two agents, in which Shōei dryly opines to his apprentice on the themes of work and mortality.

Departures isn't a bad film to relax with after a long day. The long shots of the Japanese countryside are beautiful, and toward the end, most of its shortcomings can be conveniently ignored if one is willing. But in a country famous for Ozu Yasujiro's light-hearted family dramas and Akira Kurosawa's humanistic storytelling, Departures feels more like a spin-off with a mildly unconventional theme. Released the same year, Kore-eda Hirokazu's Still Walking (歩いても 歩いても) is a much greater example of the vibrancy that still flourishes in this great tradition.

Still Life 三峡好人 (2006 Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯)

(The following is a movie review I wrote some time back for my brother's blog.)



Over roughly the last decade we have seen the slow decline of some the biggest names in mainland Chinese filmmaking. Luminaries of the fifth generation of Chinese cinema like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have abandoned the simplistic and artful styles that made up films like Yellow Earth and The Story of Qiu Ju, and with perhaps an eye to China’s ever-growing foreign markets, have produced glossy, flamboyant period pieces that are nearly as foreign to domestic audiences as they are to those who flock to them in the West. This vacuum in art cinema has been filled by a new generation of directors who have focused their lens on daily life in a country that is marked by upheaval and perpetual social change stemming from breakneck economic development. The name that has received the most recognition as of late is Jia Zhangke, director of Unknown Pleasures, Platform and The World. His most recent feature length production, Still Life, has taken him from the margins of obscurity into the fold of world cinema, for which he received the 2006 Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival.

Shunning any form of adornment, Jia’s films focus on the daily lives of ordinary people in some of the most underdeveloped regions of China. In Platform, a performance troupe-turned-rock band tours the back towns of north central China, finally ending up in the same place they started. The World follows the daily routines of migrant workers at an ambitious theme park in Beijing, where famous global landmarks are recreated in miniature form for Chinese tourists. Every film captures the mundane life of those people absorbed in a country changing by the minute, but held just outside the benefits which are purported to follow--an endless waiting for something new or something better. Jia’s films unfold slowly with a deliberate pacing similar to Abbas Kiarostami or Hou Hsiao-hsien, marked by understated gestures and austerity, a far cry from Hero or Curse of the Golden Flowers.

Still Life makes its setting in a small town on the Hubei/Sichuan border, currently under destruction for the massive Three Gorges Dam project, which will bring cleaner energy to thousands more Chinese citizens, but has in the process destroyed innumerable local ecosystems and cultural landmarks, uprooting hundreds, if not thousands, of local residents, the subject of a recent documentary Up the Yangtze.



The film opens with the return home of one of the two main characters, Han Sanming, hailing a motor-taxi to his old address, only to find it completely submerged below water. He proceeds to find work with a local demolition crew as he searches for his estranged wife and tries in vain to re-establish contact with his daughter, whom he has not seen for 16 years. Wandering amid the rubble and chaos is the film’s other protagonist, Shen Hong, who is also looking for her spouse, who has been incommunicado for quite some time. Even in the same town, the two’s paths never cross, and when they finally accomplish their missions, the results are anticlimactic at best. In the meantime, they form ephemeral relationships with others amid the disarray that surrounds them.

People wander in and out of scenes as in a Fellini film: a young teenager singing saccharine love songs, a lackluster proprietor of a small prostitution ring, a civil engineer showing off his elaborate light display to a group of businessmen. All the while, there is the noise of sweaty demolition workers toiling in the humid haze amid fumigators and crews marking new buildings for destruction or projecting stages of future water level rises.

The scenes that unfold, less like a movie than the titular style of painting, show a section of society crushed under the boot of so-called progress. Air conditioning here is either absent or useless in the sticky climes of southern China. The music emanating from old radios and television sets is from decades past. When not repetitively hacking away with sledgehammers, barely-clad men sit in idle groups, mechanically wiping sweat from their faces. There seems to be such a tacit acceptance of the tumult that has marked their otherwise monotonous existence, that no one seems to notice, or care, when a flying saucer wobbles in over the mountains and then exits as nonchalantly as it came, or when a building inexplicably rockets itself off into the hazy skyline. In a world coming slowly undone, these are minor details to be observed, and then discarded, before moving on to the next routine task.

But it would be too easy to attribute some air of condemnation originating from Jia’s projects. He never appears to be pointing the finger, or making a value judgment in his films. He merely documents what he sees around him, and does so to aesthetically stunning effect. The subjects and themes may speak to the viewer in any number of ways, but they are, after all, just daily life in a country whose citizens make up over one third of the world’s population.