From the Japan Times of November 28

Read the Original here
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20041128x2.htm

A FIVE PART SERIES #1
Revealing 'The Japanese Sensibility': Modernity
The Japanese have a unique way of observing and describing the world, and
this has been developed and honed over the last century. In this first of a
five-part series, Roger Pulvers illuminates the emergence of the individual
psyche at the center of the 20th-century Japanese sensibility by focusing on
the 'reality sketches' of the Meiji Era poet Shiki Masaoka.

By ROGER PULVERS
Special to The Japan Times

Who was this man who wrote, "When I die I forbid the erection of anything
resembling a monument, and if erected I am vehemently opposed to any words
being engraved into it, and if people must engrave words into it I
absolutely despise when they gush on and on, because I'd rather that someone
just rolled a big rock on top of my grave and left it like that.''

Shiki Masaoka was the poet who, on the eve of the 20th century, dragged the
Japanese sensibility out from under its thick clumps of dripping moss,
denouncing a good portion of Basho's haiku as mawkish hearts-and-flowers not
worth the rice paper they were inked on. (In his "Small Talk about Basho,"
Shiki criticized the body of Basho's work as including "too many expository
and prosaic elements" and lacking "genuineness" as poetry.)

Shiki himself, in more than 20,000 haiku and tanka of his own, flung the
Japanese perception of reality into a stark light. He raised the threshold
of sensitivity in a new way by placing his own psychological state at the
center of his observations.

The modernization of the Japanese literary aesthetic in Shiki's personal
sense depended on the primary position he awarded the individual in nature,
and the absolute importance of filtering the clear light of observation
through the grim little holes in the psyche.

Shiki's art put the "I" at its center, and by doing so laid the groundwork
for the individual-centered Japanese literature of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, he came precisely at the time that the West was discovering
what appeared to be the delicate and exquisite wonders of the traditional
Japanese aesthetic. What the West wanted out of Japan was the quaint and the
quirky, the smokescreen of a pseudo-Orientalism that might add a whiff of
mystery to a tired Western literary tradition.

Yet what Shiki was about to do in his great body of work was to present an
ultramodern outlook on reality that, had it been known abroad, could have
had great influence around the world. (Unfortunately, Shiki was not
translated in any version that foreign writers would have seen until long
after World War II; and in any case, such poets as Ezra Pound and W.B.
Yeats, who were influenced by Japan, sought inspiration from the classical
rather than the contemporary.)

Shiki's view of the world is, in one degree, as mundane as Monday. Yet it is
the very matter-of-factness of his descriptions that intensifies what we
see, giving it a fine edge. For his era, he may have been the first
"photographic poet" in any country.

An autumn fly is resting
In my sickroom
On my warm window

Shiki was bedridden for eight years with tuberculosis, craning his neck to
see out of the window, recording every last detail of his confinement. The
fly has survived longer than it was meant to, lucky fly. A simple enough
image, and one that speaks softly but clearly about his own inner torment:
the photographer able to encompass both himself and the object opposite him
in his lens.

Consider this poem about sound and existence.

Shrill cicadas
Shriller than shrill cicadas
Is all there is

The ambiguity of the last line is the blade of Shiki's scalpel. Is the
mimetic shrill sound all that he can hear? Or does, in fact, this sound
represent all of reality?

It is in this single word "ambiguity" that one clue to the modern Japanese
sensibility lies. It is an ambiguity contained tightly within exactness.

The Japanese outlook on reality in the modern era is no wisp of fog, no
vague bundle of mystery. It is a cloud chamber, yes, but one in which the
smoke, with its ever-changing edges, is trapped inside by the finest steel
frame and diamondlike glass.

Look for this very sensibility now, for instance, in the prose of Haruki
Murakami: the explicitly banal that is played out in a tight harmony of
incongruities. This is what makes Murakami a very Japanese writer.

Shiki's redrawing of the lines of Japanese observation led him into an
exploration of the definition of things. Like much superb black-and-white
photography, his poems appear to be statements devoid of emotion, yet
revealing at the same time. One of his most famous and controversial poems
goes to an extreme of the prosaic.

Cockscombs
Fourteen, fifteen
It's hard to tell

Here the cockscomb is a flower, often of flame-red color, that grows in a
mass of plumes and combs. Its very shapelessness, when seen from some
distance, becomes a definition of its essence. This, too, is the modern
Japanese sensibility: not a pseudo-Buddhistic "ah" and a bit of monkish
mumbo-jumbo on the side; not your dainty lacquer box with its ancient key
and drawer of secrets; rather an observation that does not describe an
object but rather pierces its core; a method of highlighting reality by
picking out a single detail and isolating the essence of reality from its
trappings.

Here are two more of Shiki's poems that present contrasts, not as
contradictory juxtapositions, but as part of a whole.

A yellowish greenish spider
Is crawling
Over the red roses

The mountains in summer
With all creation green
And a red bridge

The genius of the Japanese outlook on reality is in the selection and its
distillation of substance.

The first of these two poems is painterly, both impressionistic and finely
drawn. The second displays that very gift of selection, when a single object
throws all that we see into a new light.

The American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) wrote what came to be
considered one of his most celebrated poems as a simple statement: so much
depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside
the white / chickens.

Well, Shiki pulled that red wheelbarrow into the light of day decades before
the American. If Shiki had been writing in a European language at the turn
of the 20th century, he might have been ranked with Baudelaire and Whitman
as one of the world's great literary innovators.

Shiki used the word shasei, meaning "reality sketches," to characterize his
approach to what he saw and did with his writing. His poems mix sound and
color in a unique way, and this mix reverberates throughout the modern
Japanese sensibility.

The sound of clippers cutting
Roses in the air
On a perfect day in May

The light of the scene is intersected by the blades slicing stems in the
air.

My hot water bottle spills out
Into the moonlight
Of the old garden

He revisits his illness in terms of a banal symbol (the hot water bottle)
and illuminates beauty at the same time.

The ability to muster this combination of harrowingly banal detail and throw
it into the arc lights of an unadorned beauty was also a gift of Yukio
Mishima (1925-70), perhaps the novelist with the most honed modern Japanese
sensibility.

Another feature of the modern Japanese sensibility, and one passionately
advocated by Shiki, might be called the decay of the sacred. Shiki, in one
wicked swoop, redefines tradition when he begins a poem with furuike ya (old
pond), a reference to the famous Basho haiku: The old pond / A frog jumps /
Plopping into the water. Beginning a haiku in Japanese with furuike ya is
like starting a modern English poem with the hallowed opening line of
Shakespeare's Sonnet #18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Shiki's
pond, however, is not Basho's. Shiki goes far beyond parody.

The old pond
And on it floats a cicada's shell
Upside down

Somehow, the West figured that Japanese people revered their traditions
simply because they didn't chuck them out as Westerners do. But the modern
Japanese sensibility has been to turn tradition on its back, always to keep
it close at hand, to take a close look at the underbelly of the old
cockroach as it flails its legs under their nose.

Many Westerners have misunderstood this aspect of Japan. Whether in books,
articles or documentaries about Japan, whether focusing on mores,
architecture, cuisine or what-have-you, the common commentary is that Japan
is a land of bizarre contrasts, where the ultra-modern coexists
uncomfortably with the traditional.

In fact, the Japanese sensibility has allowed for a very comfortable
conglomeration of traditions and contemporary custom. There is nothing
bizarre about this, nothing mutually exclusive, as there might be if it
existed on the same scale in the West. (Westerners seem to feel obliged to
scrap the old before adopting the new. The Japanese live with the two
together and see no problem with it. They continually redefine the content
of the traditional to suit today, while maintaining its outside form and
trappings.)

Shiki Masaoka died in September 1902, age 34. He was good friends with the
great Meiji Era novelist Soseki Natsume, as he was with other writers and
poets of his day. He was hailed during his short lifetime by no less than
novelist Ogai Mori as "the great literary reformer" of Japan.

Indeed, Shiki represents those incisive, unrelenting yet unaffected and
profoundly touching qualities that are at the core of the modern Japanese
sensibility.

He was able to isolate and proclaim the life of a single creature:

Not a cloud in the sky
Over Tsukuba
For the red dragonflies

And he gave a new definition to the Sun when he wrote:

The sunrise on New Year's Day
Is so blinding
It has brought the sky closer

Had Shiki been writing in a European language, he would have moved heaven
and earth. As it was, he only brought them that much closer to each other.

The Japan Times: Nov. 28, 2004
(C) All rights reserved

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20041128x2.htm



Greetings from Gabi in Japan








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