by Alex Kerr
For myself, I prefer to write single characters. Favorites are ‘the Creative’ and ‘the Receptive’ from the I Ching, or nuance-laden ‘dragon’, ‘night’ and ‘dawn’. Actually, when you look at old pieces, calligraphies of just one character are quite scarce. People of ancient times were more cultivated than we are today and had greater leisure time. Perhaps they also had more to say. The writing of only a single character could be seen as a sort of ‘instant’ calligraphy, a degenerate form of the art. But I like writing one kanji at a time because it allows me to close in on the meaning of that one character. Take the word for ‘heart’. One day, I drew this character in black ink and then superimposed the same shape in red. Looking at these overlapping black and red hearts, a friend who was visiting from America said, ‘It’s like a man and a woman.’ He bought the piece and hung it in his home. Some time later his house burned down and the calligraphy was damaged. I received a phone call from him saying the piece had become a talisman for him and his wife, and could I please make another. It was a great pleasure to see this piece of calligraphy fulfilling its true purpose.
When I began my art collection, I started with calligraphy. Of course I loved it, but this was not the only reason: more than anything, calligraphy was cheap! For example, an ink painting by Edo literati Ike no Taiga or Buson ran to tens of thousands of dollars, while calligraphy by the same artists could be bought for a tenth of this. Even calligraphy by an internationally known figure like Sen no Rikyu, founder of tea ceremony, was available until recently for about $20,000. This compares with the price of some of the more famous prints by Hokusai. But only a few dozen genuine works by Rikyu survive, whereas Hokusai prints were produced by the thousands. The low cost of calligraphy reflects its lack of popularity today among the Japanese.
This was not always so. Traditionally, calligraphy was the highest of the arts. The T’ang-dynasty Emperor Taizong loved the calligraphy of Wang Xizhi so much he ordered that his copy of Wang Hsi-chih’s ‘Orchid Terrace Preface’ be buried with him in his tomb. From that time on, calligraphy formed the heart of the Imperial collection, and the court and wealthy families vied for scrolls and rubbings by famous calligraphers. In Japan, the most valued possessions of Zen temples are the calligraphies of the temple abbots. Among the kuge nobles, shikishi and tanzaku plaques were treasured above all other works of art; it would not be too much to say that the calligraphy of the kuge was their very identity.
Calligraphy held the highest rank because it was believed to capture the soul of the writer. There is an ancient Chinese saying, ‘Calligraphy is a portrait of the heart’. Even ordinary handwriting can be a ‘portrait of the heart’. In the stateroom of my former employer Trammell Crow’s yacht there hung a pair of love letters written by Napoleon and Josephine. No painting could have captured their presence with more intimacy than these autographs. But more than any pen, the brush subtly reflects every slight variation in pressure and direction, thus expressing vividly the artist’s state of mind. Calligraphy provides a direct link between one mind and another.
I have never met a court noble of old, and no amount of reading can convey a clear idea of what the life of the kuge was really like. But the hair-thin lines of almost impossibly elegant script that they wrote at their poem festivals cause the kuge world to spring clearly into view. On reading the poems and essays of the legendary fifteenth-century Zen master Ikkyu, you find nothing but opaque Zen theorizing; only a scholar could possibly figure out what he is getting at. But visit Shinju-an Temple in Kyoto, where a pair of Ikkyu’s scrolls hangs in the Founder’s Hall, and in an instant the wit of this crabby old abbot jumps out at you. The calligraphy reads, ‘Don’t do evil, do only good!’ This refers to an old Chinese story in which someone asked a master to define the essence of Buddhism. The reply was, ‘Don’t do evil, do only good’, to which the questioner asked, ‘What is so special about that? Even a child knows that.’ ‘Well then,’ said the master, ‘if even a child knows that, why can’t you do it?’ Ikkyu wrote these lines in a rough hand, at what seems to have been a lightning pace. On first sight, the characters give you quite a jolt – Ikkyu is mocking us, scratching at us, shocking us.
Even when the author is unknown, calligraphy remains a portrait of the heart. Among my favorite scrolls is a rubbing of three characters carved on Mt Tai in China in the sixth century. The carver is unknown, but the characters have a heavy, rough-hewn power for which they have been prized by collectors. The scroll reads, ‘Virtue is not alone’, referring to the statement by Confucius that ‘The virtuous man is not alone; he will always have neighbors.’ As I live alone in the rural town of Kameoka, this scroll has always been a comfort to me.
One reason why calligraphy serves as a bridge from mind to mind is that it is a thing of the instant – there is no going back to touch up what you have written. As my tutors at Oxford noticed, rigor is not my strong point. I like the way in which you throw a calligraphy off and then you are done with it. There is none of the gradual development of an oil painting or a musical performance. Calligraphy is perfect for impatient types, and spending an evening drinking wine with a friend while writing calligraphies is for me the highest form of relaxation. From that first evening as a student writing calligraphy at Roberto’s house in Milan, this approach has never changed.
When I am planning to do some calligraphy, I invite a friend to come over and spend the night at my house. We select various weights of washi paper and then I make the ink. For me, ink is by no means always black. Perhaps as a lingering bit of Warhol influence, I tend to use a range of colorful inks: from gold and silver powders to ground rocks such as cinnabar and azurite, and artist’s materials such as poster paints and acrylics. Grinding the powders, boiling the water, adding the glue and, finally, mixing the colors can take several hours. If I do decide to use black ink, I bring out Tsuru-san’s water-dripper, and slowly grind the ink on an inkstone.
When at last I pick up the brush to begin writing, the evening is wearing on, and my friend and I have drunk a fair amount of wine. As we talk, I try writing characters on various subjects. The style may be standard script, semi-cursive or cursive – it changes at the whim of the moment. As each piece appears, I ask my guest what he feels about it. Curiously, the ability to judge calligraphy does not seem to depend on any familiarity with kanji. Even people who have never seen a kanji in their whole lives can sense balance and quality of line. My sixteen-year-old cousin Trevor was one of my best critics.
I write until dawn. On awakening in the late afternoon I find the room littered with dozens of creations from the night before. Most are failures, but from amongst them I select those that best convey the flavor of the previous evening. One summer night, when the frogs in the neighboring rice paddies were in full voice, clouds of moths and mosquitoes came flying into the house, attracted by the brightness inside. On rising the next day, I found only one piece worth saving. This was the kanji for ‘night’, written large in black ink. Scattered all over the page, in some places merging with the ‘night’ character, were myriad small kanji in gold and silver. They said ‘frog’, ‘moth’, ‘cicada’, ‘mosquito’ and ‘gnat’.
The great calligraphers of the past also drank as they worked. The tradition goes all the way back to Wang Xizhi in the fourth century, who would gather his friends at the Orchid Terrace, where they floated wine cups down the river while writing poems. Wine is the perfect companion to calligraphy. I once owned a folding screen by the Edo literati Kameda Bosai, written with an unbelievably wild brush. His usual ‘earthworm’ kanji had become eels, swimming madly across the paper. Looking over the twelve panels of the screen, you could see the characters squirming more agitatedly as Bosai moved from right to left, until on the last panel his kanji looked more like Arabic than Chinese. At the end, he had signed, ‘Written by old man Bosai, totally drunk’.
I learned much from pieces like the Bosai screen in my collection that I might not have discovered if I had depended on modern teacher
s. For instance, in the process of collecting calligraphy by kuge nobles I found that there had once been a style called wayo. Meaning ‘Japanese style’, wayo designates the soft, flowing form which grew up in the late Heian period and became the base of kuge and samurai scripts, and later design styles such as those in Kabuki and sumo writing. In contrast to karayo, the ‘Chinese style’ used by monks and literati, wayo was delicate and feminine, definitely not the sort of thing which Ikkyu used to put his Zen message across. The kata (forms) had been rigidly fixed over centuries, and wayo did not allow for much variation or personality; it was not a portrait of the heart as much as a portrait of an elegant ideal. In this aspect, wayo has much in common with Noh drama, where the aim is not to express the individual, but yugen (dark, mysterious beauty), beyond the individual.
With the coming of the Meiji period, schools removed wayo from the curriculum. It was too attached to the samurai classes which had been overthrown, and it was too rigid. Some of the design styles survived, but wayo as an artistic style died out, and most calligraphy we now see is karayo. Today, ‘non-individual’ has negative connotations, but the ‘supra-individual’ world of calm and elegance created by the wayo calligraphers was one of Japan’s great achievements. The Chinese, ceaselessly trying to express their individuality, never produced anything like it.
When, as an adult, I first saw Kabuki onnagata perform, I remembered the dancing sensation I had felt when writing the spear radical as a child. Kabuki dance is a play between yin and yang. The fan goes up before it can go down, the neck turns left as the feet turn right. When the courtesan points, she first draws her finger back, describes a circle and then brings her finger outwards. But at that very moment, her shoulders are turning in the opposite direction. It is the harmony of these opposites that makes Kabuki dance so satisfying. Exactly the same thing occurs in the writing of calligraphy.
Today, Japanese are often taught to write in seiza, the formal seated position with legs tucked underneath. Not only is seiza very uncomfortable, it allows for very little range of movement. I write standing at a long table, and when I do calligraphy with friends I tend to move around a great deal. Standing up, crouching down, walking back and forth – calligraphy is born from these movements. I can well understand why the T’ang-dynasty artist Chang Xu dipped his hair into a pail of ink and used his own head as a brush! Chang Xu also painted lotus leaves by wetting his buttocks with ink and then sitting on the paper, but that was perhaps going too far.
Which brings me to why calligraphy is not prized in Japan today. It has to do with the way it is taught. Alone of all the traditional arts, calligraphy is instantaneous and free, ideal for busy modern people. But at some point it became a very serious affair. Students must sit still in seiza; they must slave for years to acquire technical ability in ancient styles that are completely obscure to the average person. In addition, calligraphy is afflicted by a ‘society disease’. Most professional calligraphers are members of societies that have a pyramidal structure, with grand masters at the head, vice-chairman, board members and judges below that, and lower strata of members and students at the bottom. Art yearbooks list the calligraphers in the same way that sumo posters list the wrestlers: the people at the top of the pyramid get more space. A chairman gets a photograph and a fourth of a page; a vice-chairman gets a photograph, but only an eighth of a page; and so on, on down to mere ‘provisional members’ who get only their name in small print. A glance at the name cards of typical modern calligraphers confirms their commitment to the society system. You will find one or more titles – ‘Board Member of X Society’, ‘Associate Member of Y Society’, ‘Judge of Z Society’ – all indicating that modern calligraphers are as busy establishing their place in committees as they are producing works of art.
As a result of seiza, the emphasis on arcane technique and the pyramidal societies, calligraphy these days has slipped from the mainstream. One gets the impression that most young people think of calligraphy as something that old people do in their retirement. Millions still practice it, but the elite of the art world tend to look down on calligraphy as a sort of hobby. Today, far from being ranked first among the arts, calligraphy is something of a lost child. It has for the most part failed to meet the challenge of modern art imported from the West, and its influence on contemporary art is therefore negligible.
Perhaps the prime factor for the decline of calligraphy is the fact that few people can read cursive script anymore. The Japanese language has changed drastically since 1945, and few people use the brush for daily correspondence. Since the advent of the computer, which automatically transfers words into kanji, people find it harder and harder to remember the characters. I myself suffer from this trouble: I recognize kanji when I read them, but having become dependent on my computer for writing, I often forget surprisingly simple words.
This loss of literacy was inevitable, but in my view it really does not make much difference. Kameda Bosai’s earthworm squiggles were unintelligible, even to his friends at the time; there is a comic poem which says that the only writing of Bosai’s which anyone could read was a letter asking for a loan. In the old days, being able to read the characters was of secondary importance to the quality of line and the ‘heart’ of the author. Today, ironically, it is foreign collectors who have the least trouble with the fact that they can’t read the characters. They look at calligraphy as abstract art, which, in the end, is what it is. But for the Japanese, not being able to read calligraphy is unsettling. I once had a Japanese assistant who told me that he hated calligraphy; Bosai’s earthworm kanji especially bothered him. ‘Foreigners can appreciate it as abstract art, and that’s fine for them, but for us calligraphy must have a meaning,’ he said. His inability to understand the meaning was a source of great unease: it would seem that modern Japanese have a complex about being unable to read things.
Calligraphy as fine art – shikishi, tanzaku and hanging scrolls for tea ceremony – is slowly losing its place in the culture. But calligraphy as design is very active. Japan has always been a design country, perhaps because of its love for the surface of things. Even such simple things as geta (wooden clogs) exist in a huge variety of designs: standard double clogged, single clogged, tall for sushi chefs, extremely tall for courtesans, square toed, round toed, made of white wood, dark wood or lacquered. In the field of calligraphy, dozens of design styles grew up during the Edo period, far more than ever existed in China. There were separate styles for Kabuki, Noh drama and puppet theater; for sumo; for samurai documents; for men’s letters and women’s letters; for tea masters’ signatures; for the writing of receipts; for coins and bills; for seals, and many other things.
With such a wealth of traditional styles to draw upon, graphic design using kanji is one of Japan’s most vibrant modern fields. From matchboxes to animated TV commercials, kanji are still alive and squirming as madly as anything Bosai ever wrote. This is why the signs of Ginza are so remarkable. There is nothing anywhere in the world, not even in China, to compare with them.
CHAPTER 7
Tenmangu
Ghost Concert
When I was caught up in Kabuki in the late 1970s and early 80s, I would go to Tokyo and stay at a friend’s house for months on end, visiting the theater every day. Ten years later, while working for the Trammell Crow Company, I had an office and an apartment in Tokyo. I would spend Monday to Friday minding Trammell Crow’s business, then commute to Kameoka on weekends. These days, although my work consists mostly of writing and public speaking, I still need to spend a considerable amount of time in Tokyo. It is the center of almost every form of dynamic cultural activity, and most of the artists I know live there.
When Friday evening rolls around after a busy week in Tokyo, I hail a cab for the Yaesu exit of Tokyo Station and take the bullet train back to Kyoto. When I first get on board, my mind is still abuzz with business matters, but as the train draws away from the city, these thoughts subside. I start thinking about my house in Kameoka
. Are the water lilies in the pots in front of the house blooming yet? I wonder how the repair work on the dragon painting I sent to the mounter is coming along … By the time the train pulls into Kyoto a few hours later, all work concerns are totally forgotten.
The first thing I notice in Kyoto is the difference in the air. As soon as I get off the train, it always strikes me that there’s not enough oxygen in Tokyo! Drinking in the clean air after a week’s absence, I get in the car and head for the mountains to the west. Finally, at about eleven o’clock at night, I arrive at my destination of Kameoka, a town about twenty-five kilometers outside Kyoto. My base for the last eighteen years has been here. My home is a traditional Japanese house in the grounds of a small Shinto shrine called Tenmangu, dedicated to the god of calligraphy. Like Chiiori, the house measures four bays by eight bays, but it is tiled rather than thatched. While the house is not large, it has considerable garden space because of its location in the grounds of a shrine. One side of the property fronts a small road, while the other side overlooks a mountain stream; the grounds sandwiched within cover about a thousand tsubo of land. The mountain rising up on the other side of the stream is also shrine property, so the ‘borrowed scenery’ of the garden actually extends over several thousand tsubo.
