The metamorphoses generated by space are in addition to those caused by time: the garden—each of the infinite number of gardens—changes with the passing of the hours, the seasons, the clouds in the sky. The Emperors who designed Katsura arranged for platforms of bamboo canes to be made in order that visitors might see the blossoming of the peach trees in April, or the reddening of the maple leaves in November, and set up four tea-houses, one for each season, each of which looks out on an ideal landscape at a particular point in the year; each ideal landscape in a season has in turn a time in the day or night that is its ideal moment. But there are four seasons and the hours run their cycle around midday and midnight. With its recurring moments time removes the idea of the infinite: this is a calendar of exemplary moments which are repeated cyclically, and which the garden tries to fix in a certain number of places.
What about space, then? If there is a correspondence between the points of view and our footsteps, if every time our right or left foot advances on to the next slab a perspective opens up that has been decided by the person who designed the garden, then the infinity of viewpoints is reduced to a finite number of views, each one separate from the one that precedes and follows it, and characterized by elements that distinguish it from the others: a series of precise models each one of which corresponds to one necessity and one intention. So here is what the path is: of course it is a device for multiplying the garden, but also for removing it from the vertigo of the infinite. The smooth slabs that make up the path at the villa of Katsura are 1,716 in number—this figure, which I found in a book, seems likely to me considering that there are two slabs per half metre for a total distance of half a mile—so one can go through the garden in 1,716 steps and contemplate it from 1,716 perspectives. There is no reason to be seized by anguish: that clump of bamboo can be seen from a precise number of different perspectives, no more and no less, the chiaroscuro varying according to how thinly or densely the stems are clustered together, and one feels distinctly different sensations and feelings at each step, a multiplicity that now I feel I can master without being overcome by it.
Walking presupposes that at every step the world changes in some aspect and also that something changes in us. Consequently, the ancient masters of the tea-ceremony decided that in order to reach the pavilion where tea will be served the guests should walk along a path, pause at a bench, look at the trees, pass through a gate, wash their hands in a basin dug out of a rock, follow the path marked out by smooth slabs all the way to the simple hut which is the tea-pavilion, to its very low door, where everyone has to bow down to enter. In the room, there are only mats on the floor, a stool with very sophisticated cups and tea-pot, a recess in the wall—the tokonoma—where an exquisite object is displayed, or a vase with two sprigs in flower, or a painting, or a sheet of paper with rows of calligrams. It is by limiting the number of things around us that one prepares oneself for accepting the idea of a world that is infinitely larger than ours. The universe is an equilibrium of solids and voids. The words and gestures that accompany the pouring of the foaming tea must have space and silence around them, but also a sense of inner meditation, of a limit.
The art of the greatest master of the tea-ceremony, Sen-no Rikyu (1521–91), which was always based on the maximum simplicity, expressed itself also in the design of the gardens around the tea-houses and temples. Interior events present themselves to one’s consciousness through physical movements, gestures, journeys, unexpected sensations.
A temple near Osaka had a wonderful view over the sea. Rikyu had two hedges planted which totally hid the landscape, and near them he had a small stone pond built. Only when a visitor bent over the pond to take water in the hollow of his hands would his gaze meet the oblique gap between the two hedges, and then the vista of the boundless sea would open up before him.
Rikyu’s idea was probably this: bending down over the pond and seeing his own image shrunk in that narrow stretch of water, the man would consider his own smallness; then, as soon as he raised his face to drink from his hand, he would be dazzled by the immensity of the sea and would become aware that he was part of an infinite universe. But these are things that are ruined if you try to explain them too much. To the person who asked him about why he had built the hedge, Rikyu would simply quote the lines of the poet Sogi: ‘Here, just some water, / There amidst the trees / The sea!’ (‘Umi sukoshi / Niwa ni izumi no / Ko no ma ka na!’)
The Moon Chasing the Moon
In the Zen gardens of Kyoto there is a white, coarse-grained gravel which has the power to reflect the moon’s rays. At the Ryoanji temple, this sand, raked by the monks into straight parallel furrows or into concentric circles, forms a little garden around five irregular groups of low rocks. At the temple of the Silver Pavilion, on the other hand, the sand is arranged into a circular mound, on its own, like an upturned cone, and stretches out in an expanse that is raked in regular waves. Beyond it a lively garden of bushes and trees extends around a little lake that has a wild look to it. On the nights when there is a full moon, the whole garden is illuminated by the silver sparkle of the sand. I visited the Silver Pavilion only in the daytime, and it was raining; but those rain-soaked white grains seemed to return the lunar light which they had stored; a mirror image of the source of that light seemed to be stored in those shapes in the white sand, in that volcano which seemed as sodden as a sponge, under the raindrops falling straight as moon-rays on to the raked parallel tracks that a monk reshapes every morning.
Love for the moon often has its double in love for its reflection, as if to stress a vocation for mirror games in that reflected light. Of the four tea-houses of the sixteenth-century Katsura Villa in Kyoto—one for every season, each arranged differently and characterized by different landscapes—the autumnal one is sited in such a way as to allow you to see the moon at the moment it rises and to enjoy its reflection in the lake.
This fascination for duplication, typical of the image of the moon, is probably the source of a poem by a curious poet from the early twentieth-century Japanese avant-garde, Tarufo Inagachi. Even in a word-for-word translation, this poem seems to let us intuit (as in a reflection, appropriately enough) something of the fantasy that triggered it. It is called ‘The Moon in Its Pocket’.
One evening the moon was walking down the street, carrying itself in a pocket. As it went down the hill, one of its shoelaces came undone. The moon bent down to tie the shoelace and the moon fell out of its pocket and started to roll quickly down the tarmac road that was soaking wet from the sudden shower. The moon chased after the moon, but the distance between them increased, thanks to the acceleration of lunar gravity as it rolled along. And the moon lost itself in the blue haze down there at the bottom of the slope.
The Sword and the Leaves
At the National Museum in Tokyo there is an exhibition of arms and armour from ancient Japan. The first impression it makes on you is that the helmets, breastplates, shields and broadswords had as their main purpose not that of defending or striking anyone but that of terrifying adversaries, imposing an image on them that would strike terror in their hearts.
The war-masks, contorted into cruel and threatening grimaces, sit between helmets adorned with horns, fins and griffin-wings, and sumptuous breastplates that inflate the chest with all their loops and spikes.
Those who are like me in that, when they visit Renaissance armouries in the West, they feel the pleasant, classic detachment of a reader of chivalric poems (the great cavalcade that is the armour room in the Metropolitan Museum in New York is for me one of the wonders of the world), here for the first time do not think of these artefacts as fantastic toys but consider more the message the objects were meant to t
ransmit in situ; in other words they look at them just as today we would look at an armoured car on a battlefield. My reaction is immediate: I start running.
I run through room after room full of cases where countless sword-blades are exhibited, or different kinds of curved sabres, made of shining, tempered iron, razor sharp, with no handles, each one resting on a white cloth. Blades and blades and blades that all seem the same to me, and yet each of them has a label with long explanations. Crowds of people stop in front of every case, observing sword after sword with an attentive, admiring gaze.
Most of the visitors are men; but it is Sunday, the museum is crowded with families, and there are also ordinary women and children contemplating these swords. What do they see in those grim unsheathed blades? What do they find fascinating in them? My visit to the exhibition is carried out almost at running pace; the shine of steel transmits a sensation that is more auditory than visual, like swift hisses slicing through the air. The white cloths inspire a kind of surgical horror in me.
And yet I am well aware that the art of fencing in Japan is an ancient spiritual discipline. I’ve read the books on Zen Buddhism by Dr Suzuki. I remember that the perfect Samurai must never concentrate his attention on his enemy’s blade, nor on his own, nor on striking his opponent, nor on defending himself, but must only annihilate his own ego; that it is not with the sword but with the non-sword that victory is won; that the master sword-makers reach the peak of their art through religious askesis. I know all this very well: but it is one thing to read something in books, quite another to understand it in real life.
A few days later I find myself in Kyoto: I walk through the gardens that had once been the haunt of exquisite poets, emperor-philosophers, hermit-monks. Amidst the hump-back bridges over the streams, the weeping willows that are reflected in the ponds, the moss lawns, the maples with their red star-shaped leaves, suddenly what comes back to my mind are the warrior masks with their terrifying grimaces, the looming approach of those giant warriors, the sharp edge of those blades.
Looking at the yellow leaves falling into the water, I remember a Zen story which only now do I think I understand.
The pupil of a great sword-maker claimed to have outdone his master. To prove how sharp his sword-blades were he immersed a sword in a stream. The dead leaves carried down by the current were neatly sliced in two as they went across the blade’s edge. The master plunged into the stream a sword that he had fashioned. The leaves flowed on, slipping right past the blade.
The Pinballs of Solitude
In Tokyo and every Japanese city the word Pachinko written in the Latin alphabet means the pinball or electric billiard arcades, which are different from those in America or Europe in that the machines are vertical, arranged on the wall in a row, one next to the other, and you play them sitting down.
Judging by the number of arcades and the crowds in them at all times of the day and night, one would say that pachinko is the great Japanese passion of today. The arcades are decorated in the colours of the rainbow, inside and out, and illuminated by neon tubes and coloured lights that flash on and off. The tinny music coming out of the speakers matches this visual glitz. But were it not for this chromatic and acoustic aggression we would not notice that this is a place of entertainment, seeing these rows of people sitting on stools, everyone opposite their vertical window as though it were their place of work, their eyes staring at the flicks of the shiny machine, working the handles like a robot. The impression one comes away with is that of a factory floor, or of an office full of electronic devices, at its busiest hour.
In the West pinball machines in bars and in arcades are nearly always surrounded by groups of youngsters busy challenging each other and betting and taking the mickey. Here the impression one has is of a crowded solitude: nobody seems to know anyone else, everyone concentrates on their own game, staring into that flashing labyrinth and ignoring their neighbour to right and left; everyone is walled in, as it were, inside their invisible cell, isolated in this obsession or curse.
You can find pachinkos nearly everywhere, in the various centres of the polycentric city that is Tokyo as well as in its different suburbs, but above all in the nightlife districts. In the midst of night-clubs, pizzerias with their Italian colours, strip-clubs, bars, poruno-shops (the word ‘porno’ is adapted to conform to Japanese pronunciation), surrounded by the smell of eel that is either raw or fried in soya-oil, in the midst of this noisy world the pachinkos open up like metallic gardens offering a haven for the individual wanting to do something that will fully absorb his attention.
The players are mostly men, of all ages; but in the morning, when the signs in the entertainment areas have all gone out, only the pachinkos’ rainbows stay lit and a new public takes over the little billiard balls: respectable housewives with their shopping baskets. Middle-aged or elderly women, mostly, with their garish-coloured kimonos, and large bows tied at their backs, their clogs over their white socks, sit down at these machines, placing by their side shopping-bags with celery and sweet potatoes sticking out, and very quickly, as though working a sewing-machine or electric loom, they devote their calm and contented attention to the bounces of the little balls.
Nightlife in Tokyo extends across several districts: Ginza, Shibuya, Shinjuku, from the most elegant to the most popular areas. You could almost say that half of the metropolis has no other purpose than to entertain the other half.
The crab restaurants are topped by signs that could be seen as extraordinary works of Pop Art: a giant crab occupying the whole of the façade of the building moves its legs and claws in all their different articulations, its protruding eyes going up and down in a constant rhythm. But the most sumptuous façades are those of the cafés, which are considered the ne plus ultra of Westernness. And what is more Western than an English castle? So then the cafés—usually on two or more floors—have a façade that portrays a medieval manor and have names which, in order to create an English atmosphere, rejoice in tautological titles such as ‘The Mansion House’.
The miracle that everyone talks about and that never ceases to amaze people is that this over-populated metropolis has very low crime levels: violence is very rare, and women can go out alone at any hour of the day or night even in these districts without being molested (except by the odd drunk).
It is true that nightlife finishes early: at midnight all the places close because that is what is laid down by the law of this country, which has always practised austerity. (Only the night-spots classified as ‘private clubs’, in other words very expensive clubs, remain open.) The other reason is the transport problem. Everywhere starts to empty already by 10 p.m., night-clubs and pizzerias, cinemas and pachinkos, because the vast majority of the people live in distant suburbs and they have two hours of travel still to go; they cannot miss the last metro or train, and they have to go to sleep early in order to be up at dawn the next day to face two more hours on the train in order to go to work.
Eros and Discontinuity
Some observations on Japanese erotic prints. In them the human body appears to be shaped by three distinct elements:
faces intensely concentrated, engrossed in a kind of inward gaze;
bodies whose outlines are drawn with calm, clean lines and with colourless surfaces conjuring up pale skin and soft, muscle-free flesh—with no difference between men and women;
sexual organs represented with a technique that is much more detailed, a three-dimensional rendering (drawn with many lines and dark colouring) which manages to show everything: pubic hair, the labia maiora, sometimes even the inside of the woman’s vulva, and the male member like a turgid entrail: this is a stylistic departure from
the rest of the drawing and reveals in the sexual organs both a nature that is completely different, independent from the rest of the person and a savage ferocity.
The discontinuity of these aspects is stressed by the fact that the bodies are partially draped with clothes or blankets, hiding the details of the tangle of limbs entwined and superimposed on each other, so much so that the first action in our ‘reading’ of them, which is anything but instantaneous, is that of recognizing to whom this or that limb belongs.
Such stylistic eclecticism seems to have been created deliberately to convey the simultaneous presence and action of very different aesthetic and emotional factors in physical love.
The Ninety-Ninth Tree
The history of every temple and palace is interwoven with dynastic events and the preachings of Buddhist sects. As I go around I hear snatches of guides and escorts intoning flat, readily forgettable facts. The student who is acting as my interpreter condenses whole stories into one sentence that is comprehensible but lacking in emotional appeal. And yet those stories were recounted in a fascinating, warm, exciting way by the taxi-driver, who unfortunately only speaks Japanese.
The taxi that has been put at this guest’s disposal during his stay in Kyoto is driven by a small, round, dynamic, giggly man, Mr Fuji, who takes his white-gloved hand off the gear-stick (Japanese taxi-drivers always wear white gloves) to indicate the main points about the places we have come through and which evoke famous episodes, and to bring them alive with enthusiastic gestures. He is the one who knows the whole history of this ancient capital, of the Courts which resided here and in nearby Nara for twelve centuries; he is the encyclopedia of local lore, but also the bard, the rhapsode of a world that has disappeared, buried beneath the thick covering of the present.
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