The Japanese Chronicles

The Grey Notebook

Kyoto, February 24th, 1964

Looking for lodging

L

ATE AFTERNOON

, a stately old home, somber and beautiful, somewhere south-east of the city beyond Uji. An old couple, penniless landlords, who rent a wing of their immense home. He is a distinguished skeleton, with a worn tweed jacket over a grey flannel shirt that looks like a convict’s work shirt. And she too is withered, her eyes sunken and feverish, a face like paper-thin silk framed by the collar of a severe and sumptuous kimono. We are sitting cross-legged, in the centre of a freezing room around a brazier where a little bitter tea steeps over three embers. Beyond the sliding doors are a small pond and a numbed garden where not a single leaf is trailing. Impossible to tell if it is raining or snowing, but you know that spring will not come tomorrow. The rock, the moss, the wood, the patina of straw mats shined by slippers and reflecting the winter sky – ‘I love to hear the sounds of a child in the house,’ says the old man, breaking a long silence to which he quickly returns, while the two women (there is also an attendant or a very proud, very stubborn daughter-in-law) bow slowly. An impression of visiting the home of the dead, the home of the drowned who have just come up from the bottom of the sea. Since we have been here, the real estate agent who brought us has been agitated, snorting, falling all over us although he has known us scarcely an hour, praising this impractical and ghostly house, acting sociable when it means no more than breathing loudly through his gold-filled teeth. No one is listening and no one is worrying about it. How these somber, likable, perfectly composed people must feel to have to negotiate with this kind of swine!

… The cold, heavy cold, its importance in life here can be heard in the jingling of the Japanese music – and the trees! their branches, twisted and angular, as if suffering cramps, as if the cold is mixed into them. And all the poses of the body, as in the theatre or in engravings: tight gestures pulled toward oneself, whose only purpose is to prevent the warmth of the body from escaping …

The taxi that was supposed to wait for us has disappeared. Walking back up the street I found the driver dozing in a small grocery between jars of sour cabbage and pickled turnips that were steaming in the falling night.

Return to Kyoto by a road that I had followed on foot eight years ago. In six or seven weeks of walking I had come down from Tokyo to this point by following the ancient imperial road; today it goes through country fields. Nights spent beneath the roofs of little temples in the countryside, hamlets and lonely rice fields of the Ki peninsula: I arrived at the outskirts of the old capital an amazed vagabond, which is how you should approach a city of six hundred temples and thirteen centuries of history. I remember it as if it were yesterday: warm June rain, tall, pale-green foliage swaying against a luminous grey sky. Today these same trees are dusted by snow. In the interval between these two journeys, I feel I have somehow been absent from my life. I am curious to see which is more changed – this country or me.

Part One

The Magic Lantern

Year Zero

A

NYONE TODAY

could find the Japanese islands on a map with his eyes closed. But not so many know how the archipelago came to be there, or just where the Japanese came from.

They dropped from the sky.

That, at least, is what we are told in the Kojiki (Collection of Ancient Things) and the Nihongi (Japanese Chronicles), the most important of the Shinto sacred books, which contain ancient national myths gathered by imperial order at the beginning of the eighth century

AD

.

The way in which a people explain their existence may be as informative as the way they live it. Here then, sketching this bizarre cosmogony in broad strokes, rough and raw, is how the Japanese fell to earth, which is the first story they are told.

According to this Genesis, in the beginning was not the ‘Word’, but a layer of ooze floating serenely in the darkness. The subtle and the solid separate to form a High and a Low. Wandering about in this High is a succession of divine spirits (kami), orphans without descendants. They don’t really do anything because there is no support yet for their actions.

In the Low, all is fluid. There is not even a place to set foot until one day when two kami of this first era decide to stir the ocean of silt with the tip of a spear. These kami are brother and sister, the creators of Japan, and every Japanese schoolchild knows their names: Izanagi (he who courts) and Izanami (she who courts). The churned-up sea thickens and a lump drops from their spear and forms the first islet of the Inland Sea. The brother and sister alight on it, look at each other, she entices him, and oh! … they court. They join ‘their majestic parts in a majestic union’ and produce three stunted children, because it wasn’t seemly for a woman to make such advances. (In all things, the Japanese male is a little slower.) They try again the proper way, in the presence of a wagtail that taps out a beat with its tail, and this time the sister-wife gives birth to the eight islands of Japan. (So there are eight divinities incarnate, fruits of a coupling begun without suffering, remorse, or shame, and the woman has been relegated to the background, with that pretense of submission that has allowed her to pull the strings so conveniently. The bird/metronome rates better than our serpent, I think.)

After producing numerous divine offspring, the goddess gives birth to the Kami of Fire, who burns her so badly that she dies. Her husband-brother, in tears, goes to the realm of shadows to search for her. As in the myth of Orpheus, she promises to follow him back on one condition: he must not look back. But he is anxious and looks at her: he sees a rotten cadaver whose every organ shelters an evil spirit. Furious to have been discovered in this state, Izanami sets all the harpies of the underworld upon her brother-husband. He escapes, driving them away by throwing peaches at them (that’s why peaches are considered lucky) and then finally, panting, breathless, he plugs up the opening of hell with a rock.

From the other side of this barrier, the horrible voice of his sister warns him: ‘So, my fine elder brother, since that’s how it is, I will strangle a thousand among your offspring every day.’

‘Since that’s how it is, my sister, I will give birth to five hundred thousand every day.’ (Take the metro in Tokyo on a Sunday in May and you will see that he has kept his word.) Then, to show her that he means what he says, he spits and begets the Kami of Spit.

Not losing a minute, he goes to purify himself, rinsing off the pollutions of hell in a stream. Every piece of clothing he sheds becomes a kami and his scrubbing creates others: Susano wo (the Impetuous Male) comes out of his nose; from his right eye comes the Goddess of the Moon; and from the left (in China and Japan, left prevails over right), Amaterasu O-mi Kami, Goddess of Light, ancestor of the imperial family and the most venerated figure in the immense Shinto pantheon.

Then, for the first time, the sun rises on a Japan where the great laws of life (you are born, you die, you grow anyhow) have already been given their justification.

The celestial kami put Susano wo, the Impetuous Male, in charge of governing the Earth; to everyone’s dismay, he is soon behaving like a troublemaker, an outlaw, and a hooligan. He destroys the rice growers’ dams, puts the horses out to graze in the rice paddies, lays waste to the fields, and releases a flood that kills everyone who doesn’t have a solid grasp on eternity. Unhappy at being exiled to the Low, he smears his sister’s palace with his excrement, defiles it with the corpse of a colt, creates trouble, and makes himself hateful in a hundred ways. The goal of this excess (the details would fill pages) is probably to force the unwilling Heaven to pay attention to his terrestrial kingdom. So this conflict is necessary, and the god’s excesses as well. The numerous temples that still honour him today clearly prove that no one holds a grudge against him. More than a spirit who is truly evil, he is the expression of the Earth’s elemental energies, the noisy advocate of an untamed nature in which ‘even the rocks, trees, and grasses are overtaken by the violence’, the expression of an infant world that needs all the celestial forces in order to find its equilibrium and form. But he goes too far, and Amaterasu, offended by these provocations, hides in a cave, plunging Creation into night and the celestial kami into confusion.

The kami assemble before the cave. They hold interminable discussions on how to lure the goddess from her cave. The story of this assembly is unintentionally funny because one can see, in a primitive form, the horror the Japanese have of the unexpected and the decisions it requires. These kami are the rough masters of a still-young universe. They may always be ready to enthusiastically embody a constellation, or a mountain, or thunder, but speculation and strategy are not their strong points. They ask the Kami of Thought to formulate a plan: despite the talent attributed to him, he proposes one that seems dreadfully vague. They must restore harmony to the world, be sensitive to delicate feelings, and vanquish doubt. In Japan – even celestial Japan – a plan like this is not easy to put into action. Finally, on the expert’s advice, the celestial kami construct a mirror, send it up to the heavens on the back of a stag, and decorate the trees with peace offerings. They make all the birds sing at once so that the offended goddess will think another sun has risen and to pique her jealousy. But all their schemes fail, and the cave stays obstinately closed.

In a final act, the Goddess of Laughter performs a sacred dance before the group of kami; quickly carried away by the rhythm, she picks up her skirts like a bacchanal, exhibiting a good bit of herself. There is a gigantic burst of laughter from the spectators, which brings the intrigued Amaterasu out of her retreat. Her brother, who has made his amends, is sent back to Earth, and Creation continues in the returned light.

Germination everywhere. In the world of the kami, everything is born from something, nothing is ignoble. Everything has a divinity – breath, blood, saliva, excrement – and can create other beings, who gradually take up residence in the material world and purge it of its tempers. There are myriads, celestial and terrestrial. Grand and modest. Powerful and subordinate, bearers in partibus of a volcano or a shrub. Some acquire a solid base in mythology, and others, after having rendered some slight service, go up in smoke. All that is needed is enough of them to animate all useful or edible things (Kami of the Comb, the Gourd, the Clam, the Rice); to sanctify every natural force; to impregnate every inch, every stump, every stream on Japanese soil; to provide a divine patron to every profession (Kami of the Distillers and even of the Spies!) and to every future clan of humans; and to neutralise the evil forces that climb from a still-turbulent matter and ‘swarm like flies on the May moon’.

To ensure order, the goddess Amaterasu sends her grandson Ninigi, armed with a saber, a jewel, and a magic mirror, to take earthly affairs in hand. Descending to the island of Kyūshū, the young prince meets a mountain spirit who offers him his help and the hand of his eldest daughter: she is a repulsive winter spirit, but she can grant immortality. He refuses her and chooses the beautiful, younger daughter instead, and so he wins the right to die. (In this way Heaven joins Earth, and this is why the sovereigns of Japan, despite their illustrious ancestry, die like all their subjects.)

Two generations later, Jimmu Tenno, the first human emperor, conquers Yamato and founds the Japanese state. To be very precise (that is, to be very mythological), on February 11th, 660

BC

.

For a long time, the Japanese, honestly convinced of the excellence and uniqueness of their divine nature, will not be able to consider people who come from outside anything other than ‘foreign devils’. For a long time, the natural reaction of a foreigner will be to ridicule this potpourri of national legends as incongruous, infantile, absurd, or indecent. In the eighteenth century, the German traveller Kaempfer, informed as well as he could be of the national origins, concluded ‘that in brief the entire system of Shinto gods is such a ridiculous weaving of monstrous and unacceptable fables that even those whose business it is to study them are ashamed to reveal the ineptitudes to the members of their own sect and still more so to the Buddhists or members of some other religion.’ And I guess you will easily believe him.

A question of customs and climate. After all, a Man-God born to a Virgin in a stable, kept warm by an ass and a cow, and nailed to two beams between two thieves by the will of a merciful Father … Put yourself in the place of the first Japanese who heard this story so familiar to us!

Kaempfer adds that he cannot find in this mythology ‘anything that could satisfy the questions of the curious about the essence and nature of the gods …’ Not much logic and no tragedy, it is true. But he forgets:

– No sin: pollutions, and purifications to get rid of them.

– No mortification: ‘cleansing’, for one is to reflect like a clear mirror on the happy organisation of things.

– No ethics or morals, since the ‘divine’ origin of the Japanese dictates their course to them; instead, ceremonies, rituals, and instructions.

– No doctrine or ‘reasonable proof’, but litanies where one enumerates in the same breath the gods and the gifts that they assure you:

August Kami of the Crossroads

Kami of the Metalliferous Mountain

of Clay

of the Right Hand

of Thermal Springs

of the Rice Grain

Litanies chanted every day in the sanctuaries, which sound like a moderately rich man (Japan is a frugal country) counting and recounting his few coins in awe and gratitude.

– No De Profundis, because when a beneficent spirit listens to you from within a tree trunk or a rock, your first thought is to thank it for being there, then to ask for a little something in passing.

– No chastisement, no Passion, no anguish, no Hell, nor any of the other bearers of evil, except for a handful of dull vagabond Spirits that you appease with a prayer and a few rice balls.

Truly a strange religion!

In that case, what’s left ‘to satisfy the questions of the curious’? There remains the lively story of this agreement slowly negotiated between a benevolent Heaven and her earthly descendants, and the uninterrupted imperial descent that testifies to it. Beyond that there is a deep, undefined gratitude that is not expressed in dogmas but is danced almost daily in the Shinto sanctuaries to the sound of drum, flute, koto (a harp lain flat), and a small mouth organ. It is a strange, slow music that seems to be drawn up from the earth, from the black of the roots, of the trunks; beside it any Western requiem (polyphonically much superior) takes on a manufactured, worldly air. Perhaps not as varied or harmonious to our ears, which are accustomed to richer sauces, but with such immediate power that you have to check that the trees under which you are sitting are not running off on the road to Amaterasu’s Great Temple in Ise.

From these origins of long ago until the defeat of 1945, the imperial person will know many vicissitudes, but official doctrine will never cease to maintain that ‘His Gracious Imperial Majesty descends from the goddess Amaterasu, whose virtues, etc.’ and that the Japanese people were born of divine essence. In the interval, all the outside influences that will reach Japan will find a sky, a soil, and a mentality impregnated with omnipresent kami, both rough and easygoing, with whom everything must be shared.

The Island of the Wa

F

EBRUARY

11

TH

, Kigen-Setsu, the Festival of Origins, celebrates the foundation of the state in the year 660

BC

by an emperor of divine descent. This is a religious truth and that, in itself, is enough. So why this date with its pedantic precision and nothing to support it? We must remember that in this part of the world and at this time, the Chinese are the only ones who keep their books up-to-date.

It is through the chronicles of the Han and then the Wei dynasties that Amaterasu’s heirs pass from mythology to history. Reports are rather rare, because China, sheltered by its recently completed Great Wall, is more directed toward its own immense interior spaces.

Besides, the sea that separates China from Japan is one of the worst in Asia, and the Chinese are not very good navigators … but such merchants, and so curious! In the second century

BC

, risking everything, they set sail and land in Kyūshū to see if there isn’t some way to sell, buy, or exchange a little something. They call the country the ‘Island of the Wo’ or ‘Wa’ (which can be read: dwarves) and note that it is divided into a number of small kingdoms often controlled by ‘priestess queens’ who exert their authority by magic and divination; some of them acknowledge themselves as vassals of the Han.

Not a hint of those ‘majestic events’ that, according to Japanese mythohistory, would have stunned the country many centuries before. Nor of a unified power, much less an absolute sovereign. Had the Chinese got wind of a ‘Country of the Gods’ and of a ‘Divine Emperor’, they would surely have delighted in this comic pretension, since for them there is only one