This month let's take a look at the writing of Lafcadio Hearn in his essay collection of 1895, called Kokoro.
In his essays, we discover exquisite descriptions of Japan in a moment of great change, and stories borne out of the people surrounding the writer from the recent past: samurai; genteel geiko; pilgrims and worshippers.
With a searching curiosity and a desire to write with honest empathy, Hearn draws for us images which deftly contrast the great differences between the writer's contemporary home in Japan, with the increasingly materialistic West that he has left behind.
The papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan,-
for which reason they have been grouped under the title Kokoro (heart).
Written with the above character [心], this word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense;
spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner meaning,-
just as we say in English, 'the heart of things.'
Lafcadio Hearn, Kobe, 1895.
These fascinating essays are a product of their time: influenced by Darwinism but of a moment before countless advances in science and thinking which again changed our world unrecognisably.
But the curiosity of this author and his apparent love for his adopted culture makes his writing compelling, offering an understanding of a moment in time in which we are fortunate to be able to share.
Lafcadio Hearn returns again and again in his writing to his thoughts on ancestry. Ancestry is topical for me because in the last month I have pieced together my own family tree.
I've written some brief notes on the essays. I hope it sparks your interest to read more of his writing!
Tokyo c.1910
The essays of Kokoro open with a tale of morality and compassion in At a Railway Station.
In The Genius of Japanese Civilization we are offered a contemporary reflection on the changes wrought in Japan by the recent opening up to the West. The language is of its time, but it is interesting to discover a snapshot, like an old photograph, of how Japan used to be. Written around 1895, we find:
The land remains what it was before; its face has scarcely been modified by all the changes of Meiji...A Japanese city is still, as it was ten centuries ago, little more than a wilderness of wooden sheds,-picturesque, indeed, as paper lanterns are, but scarcely less frail. And there is no great stir and noise anywhere,-no heavy traffic, no booming and rumbling, no furious haste. In Tokyo itself you may enjoy, if you wish, the peace of a country village.
It's astonishing to read this description of Japan from just over a century ago. Anyone who has walked the lively streets of Shibuya or Akihabara could not recognise this rural quiet!
I was intrigued by the musings of Hearn as he discusses Japan as a land of impermanence:
...traditional 19th century buildings with their light shouji frames serving at once for windows and walls, and repapered twice a year; the mattings renewed every autumn...
...But the psychical influence of Buddhism could in no land impel minds to the love of material stability. The teaching that the universe is an illusion; that life is but one momentary halt upon an infinite journey; that all attachment to persons, to places, or to things must be fraught with sorrow...
These concepts permeate the Heian classic novel The Tale of Genji which was written over a thousand years ago. The Confessions of Lady Nijo, written in the 13th century, portrays the priest lover of Lady Nijo who is agonised by his love for her. His life has been devoted to his journey into the next life, and his attachment to Lady Nijo can only create immense difficulty for him.
It is so interesting to see how ideas are absorbed into a culture, and continue along the centuries.
Lafcadio Hearn expands these ideas and illustrates how they made a deep impression on Japanese architecture, art, cities, as well as literature, etc.
At times the writing reminds me of other writing that comes just a little later: The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo (1906), for example.
In Kokoro, Hearn's essays fluctuate from the seriously philosophical, to the painterly descriptions of contemporary Japan. In his essay, From a Travelling Diary we are offered a glimpse of a world of beauty in a time of great change. Hearn's descriptions of light and shadow on a canvas of shouji is reminiscent of another essay which touches on the deep beauty of shadow, In Praise of Shadows written about 40 years later in 1933, by Juunichiro Tanazaki.
Hearn's exquisite writing captures the sense of heightened yet stilled wonder, the experience of something as simple as this moment can give:
Kyoto, April 16:
The wooden shutters before my little room in the hotel are pushed away; and the morning sun immediately paints upon my shouji, across squares of gold light, the perfect sharp shadow of a little peach tree. No mortal artist-not even Japanese-could surpass that silhouette! Limned in dark blue against the yellow glow, the marvelous image even shows stronger or fainter tones according to the varying distance of the unseen branches outside. It sets me thinking about the possible influence on Japanese art of the use of paper for house-lighting purposes.
...Very possibly all sense of art, as well as all sense of the supernatural, had its simple beginnings in the study of shadows...
I was astonished to come across Part VI of this chapter to discover Hearn's contemporary account of the then-newly-built Heian Shrine: built in 1895 to commemorate the 1100th anniversary of the founding of the ancient capital and dedicated to the spirit of Kyoto's founder, Emperor Kanmu.
Hearn describes the exquisite green curved roof:
Even in this most archaic of Japan cities they startle; they tell to the sky in every tilted line of their horned roofs the tale of another and more fantastic age.
What a perfect description of a building created to honour the Heian era of beauty!
Hearn describes with wonder how the working people of Kyoto gifted the magnificent Higashi Honganji at this same commemorative time. He writes that one hundred thousand people came to its grand inauguration.
He presents an astonishing picture of devotion in this ancient city.
In the essay, The Nun of the Temple of Amida, Lafcadio Hearn evokes a land of shadowy gods and ancestors who are as much a part of the day-to-day landscape as breathing.
When O-Toyo misses her husband who has been summoned to the capital, we are invited into a daily domestic world which is has an enchanting undercurrent reminiscent of a Ghibli movie.
But as the story develops it has all the Noh quality of yuugen - that tension between exquisite beauty and human suffering that underscores many of the supernatural moments in early Japanese literature, including The Tale of Genji - and continues to be explored in modern Japanese tv drama.
Sometimes, in the season of very clear days, she would climb the mountain of Dakeyama, carrying her little boy on her back. Such a trip delighted him much, not only because of what his mother taught him to see, but also of what she taught him to hear. The sloping way was through groves and woods, and over grassed slopes, and around queer rocks; and there were flowers with stories in their hearts, and trees holding tree-spirits...
'Perhaps by Western people it is thought that the dead never return. But we cannot so think. There are no Japanese dead who do not return. There are none who do not know the way.'
After the War touches again on Hearn's concept of Japan as a land of impermanence. He draws us to this land of Japan that is founded on Buddhist teachings of releasing attachments; and to this land that every year celebrates Obon when the dead return; and the houses which have a small family altar for remembering those loved ones who came before. A contrast emerges with our own countries here in the West.
I remember when we read Kawabata's The Old Capital for our JanuaryInJapan Book Club, and he described Kyoto in the earlier part of the 20th century extinguishing the electric lights across the city of Kyoto, when the daimonji fires were lit on the mountains that ring the city - so that their beloved ancestors could find their way home.
There is an intangible similarity in the subjects that Hearn is repeatedly drawn to - the supernatural and the shadows - that dusky, bittersweet quality that haunts romantic Heian poetry, too.
There's no question that the essays in Kokoro that draw me in, are the enchanting stories which read like the ancient monogatari.
Haru is the story of a woman of refined sensitivity and exquisite upbringing, and her betrayal. Again, it captures the beauty in suffering (yuugen) which is so prevalent in early Japanese stories, and Hearn captures the atmosphere of the ancient tales of love beautifully - it could almost be a scene from a chapter by the great Heian poet Izumi Shikibu, missing her lover Prince Atsumichi.
Hearn indicates the Heian tone of the story, here at the beginning. It could almost begin with the old invocation, mukashi, mukashi (long, long ago...):
...or an afternoon at Kiyomidzu, in the old, old summer-house, where everything is like a dream of five hundred years ago,-and where there is a great shadowing of high woods, and a song of water leaping cold and clear from caverns, and always the plaint of flutes unseen, blown softly in the antique way,-a tone-caress of peace and sadness blending, just as the gold light glooms into blue over a dying sun.
Hearn has a lovely way of writing :)
The Conservative is a story of exquisite beauty which serves to illustrate the difference between the East and the West at this particular point in time of great change in Japan.
Japan began to open up to the West in 1853, when American ships arrived in the Bay of Edo. It precipitated an era of rapid change when Japan absorbed Western ideas on everything from science, locomotion, art, and architecture.
Hearn writes with great empathy about his subject, the boy with samurai antecedents who has been raised and trained in hard samurai ways, as he opens his mind to Christianity and the West.
When the young man returns from the West to his home in Japan it is a moment of deep poignancy as he recognises the value of the homeland he had left behind:
Foreign civilization had taught him to understand, as he could never otherwise have understood, the worth and the beauty of his own; and he longed for the hour of permission to return to the country of his birth.
It was through the transparent darkness of a cloudless April morning, a little before sunrise, that he saw again the mountains of his native land,-far lofty sharpening sierras, towering violet-black out of the circle of an inky sea. Behind the steamer which was bearing him back from exile the horizon was slowly filling with rosy flame.
...They watched the long procession of the ranges, and looked over the jagged looming into the deep night, where stars were faintly burning still, -and they could not see Fuji...
Then they looked up, up, up into the heart of the sky, and saw the mighty summit pinkening like a wondrous phantom lotus-bud in the flush of the coming day...
Swiftly the eternal snow yellowed into gold, then whitened as the sun reached out beams to it over the curve of the world, over the shadowy ranges, over the very stars, it seemed; for the giant base remained viewless. And the night fled utterly; and soft blue light bathed all the hollow heaven; and colors awoke from sleep; -and before the gazers there opened the luminous bay of Yokohama, with the sacred peak, its base ever invisible, hanging above all like a snowy ghost in the arch of the infinite day.
Lafcadio Hearn's samurai boy, having sought the ideas of the West, returns to his homeland and poignantly arrives by ship on the same sea that brought the American ships, half a century before. It is a fascinating point-of-view from which to explore the great changes to his homeland.
Have you ever wandered through the streets of Miyagawacho or Gion or Kamishichiken in Kyoto, and wondered what happens behind the intriguing wooden entrances of the teahouses, or okiya where the maiko and geiko live?
Kimiko is an exquisite story that takes you by the hand and leads you through a narrow geiko street and into a geiko house.
These stories of the floating world, like Kawabata's Thousand Cranes and Snow Country, describe a time when the geiko are unfailingly exotic and otherworldly.
Kimiko has been raised in a genteel manner:
...sent to a private school kept by an old samurai, -where the little girls squatted on cushions before little writing tables twelve inches high, and where the teachers taught without salary.
When her father dies her family are cast into poverty, selling 'house and lands first,-then, article by article, all things not necessary to existence - heirlooms, trinkets, costly robes, crested lacquerware'...
Until finally, there is no help for it but for her to become a geisha.
Hearn regularly returns to familiar themes in Kokoro. His interests are repeatedly the supernatural: the gods and ancestors.
In this delicately-written story, In the Twilight of the Gods, he takes us to the heart of the people who worshipped daily, as he is guided around a storehouse filled with ancient Buddhist curios.
He deftly contrasts a story of centuries of forgotten piety with the sharp commercial interest of a street-smart salesman.
...they told me of the dead millions whose pilgrim feet had worn hollow the steps leading to their shrines, of the buried mothers who used to suspend baby dresses before their altars, of the generations of children taught to murmur prayers to them, of the countless sorrows and hopes confided to them. Ghosts of the worship of centuries had followed them into exile; a thin, sweet odor of incense haunted the dusky place.
Similarly, in The Idea of Preexistence and Some Thoughts about Ancestor Worship, he describes a way of moving through daily life with a natural belief that the kami and familial ancestors are within touching distance:
It is universal as the wash of air: it colors every emotion; it influences, directly or indirectly, almost every act.
He expands on this idea as he discusses Shinto:
Stated in the simplest possible form, the peculiar element of truth in Shinto is the belief that the world of the living is directly governed by the world of the dead.
...The kami are ghosts of greatly varying dignity and power, -belonging to spiritual hierarchies like the hierarchies of ancient Japanese society. Although essentially superior to the living in certain respects, the living are, nevertheless, able to give them pleasure or displeasure, to gratify or to offend them...
To Japanese thought the dead are not less real than the living. They take part in the daily life of the people,-sharing the humblest sorrows and the humblest joys. They attend the family repasts, watch over the well-being of the household, assist and rejoice in the prosperity of their descendants. They are present at public pageants, at all the sacred festivals of Shinto, at the military games, and at all the entertainments especially provided for them, And they are universally thought of as finding pleasure in the offerings made to them or the honors conferred upon them.
As he writes, we begin to see our Western position and the loss of so many of our ancestors, unless they are infamous or famous heroes, and the broad contrast with the 'feeling of grateful and reverential love' that the Japanese have towards their family ancestors, which has come to them partly through Confucianism and filial piety.
I'm interested in this idea of ancestors and who we are, especially at this moment. I have very recently discovered my own ancestors.
When I was small, I used to listen to my grandmother talk about our family.
And then, recently it began to dawn on me that what she used to say was significant.
I've always loved medieval English history and literature since I was a teenager - this grew into a passion for 11th century court tales from Kyoto.
It was only a month ago that my own family history unrolled before me like a medieval manuscript, and I discovered an astonishing story that had lain dormant for decades.
I hope you have enjoyed reading about the writing of Lafcadio Hearn in his series of essays, Kokoro, and that his beautiful writing encourages you to read more!
I was fascinated by his intriguing ideas, by his truly beautiful story-telling that captures the atmosphere of the old monogatari, and by the snapshot he takes of contemporary Japan at a time of such massive change.
If you can recommend more of his writing, do let me know!
In December we will be announcing our JanuaryinJapan Book Club for this coming January.
Join the Zusetsu team: Cathy, Yukki, and our dear friend Akira san for our popular meet-up chat online!
This year we have a super read for you, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa.
It's based in Tokyo, and Yukki and I have a surprise coming for you!
We are delighted to be collaborating with the publisher Manilla Press, so don't miss it!
All sign-up details will be coming soon!
Cathy
xx
Sources
All quotes from Kokoro by Lafcadio Hearn, and the foreward by Patricia Welch, (Tuttle Publishing, 2011).
Bowes Museum: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival Were Fed with the Sanct Grael; but Sir Percival’s Sister Died by the Way, 1864, Watercolour and gouache on paper.
Photo of Mount Fuji from Tokyo.
Business Insider: Tokyo c.1910
Christie's: Asami Shoei (Matsue), The Third Princess, Onna san no Miya, 1931.
Comentarios