Reflections On Japan’s Preoccupation With Death
Haresh Shah
Ray Falk and Kayo Hayashi are scratching their heads to come up with something to do with Shah-san that evening. But I put their dilemma to rest. It’s my second night being back in Tokyo and we all have had an exhausting day – especially me, being grilled by the Japanese editors about them not getting the rights to Norman Mailer’s Gary Gilmore piece. Kayo drops me off at the hotel around half past five. I spend some time browsing the Imperial Hotel’s little bookstore and buy a copy of the 1968 Nobel Prize winner in literature, Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, Beauty and Sadness. My intention is to read a bit of it after I have had a light dinner in one of the hotel’s restaurants or just take it easy and order a sandwich and a beer from the room service. I don’t get around to doing either. Soon as I enter the room, I stretch out and close my eyes to relax for a while. The next thing I know, it’s past one in the morning.
I force myself out of the bed, undress and crawl under the covers. It’s now three in the morning, but I just can’t fall asleep. Resigned, I get out of the bed, fix myself a cup of coffee and call Chicago and brief my boss Lee Hall on the meetings of the day. It’s two in the afternoon in Chicago, no wonder I can’t just lie down and fall asleep. I pick up Beauty and Sadness.
Oki Toshio – the protagonist of the book is on his way to Kyoto traveling on Kyoto Express. Upon his arrival, he grabs a cab at the station and checks in at Miyako Hotel. The story flows like a gentle creek. Not too complicated a love triangle among the middle aged Oki Toshio – the novelist of some renown, his long time mistress Ueno Otoko, a painter and Otoko’s young protégée, Sakami Keiko. Already a tricky tangle. Made further complicated by the involvement of Oki’s son, Taichiro. How do you untangle the four gnarly branches so intricately entwined and manage one or more of them not to crack?
Inspired probably by the book, I decide to take a side trip to Kyoto that weekend. I board the Kyoto bound Tōkaidō Shinkansen, and upon arriving take a cab from the station to the hotel, which quite by coincidence turns out to be Miyako – booked by Ray Falk’s office. As the bullet train slithers south west of Tokyo at more than 200 km/h, I take in the blur of the scenery outside the windows while still absorbed in Beauty and Sadness.
I arrive in Kyoto around afternoon. I only have the rest of the day and that night to make the best of that ancient – once the dreamy capital of the country. First I take the guided tour that gives me a bird’s eye view of the city. There are modern areas and buildings that are no different than one would see anywhere else in the world, but what sticks out above and below them are what you would imagine Samurai and Imperial Japan to be. Multi roofed and multi colored pagoda like buildings dotting the lower skyline of the entire city. The vermilion Torris gates to the Shinto shrines and the Buddhist temples, delicately groomed Japanese gardens, narrow and the crowded streets and yet narrower stone tiled labyrinth like alleys lined with clusters of small boutiques, bars and restaurants.
My destination that night is the famous Geisha district of Gion and the surrounding Higashi-oji street and Shirakawa river. I walk the alleys, rubbing shoulders with the locals and the tourists under the multiple-low grey roofed buildings and let myself be amazed at the huge and colorful lanterns hanging outside a variety of establishments, bearing their names. Doused in predominantly yellow and red, the warm hues illuminate the streets that lead and guide your way through the neighborhood, making you feel as if you were moon walking on clouds.
And then suddenly you see the beautifully and artfully painted white faces of the illusive and alluring Geishas, tiptoeing their petite steps on the stone squares of the street. Then you see a pair and before you realize, clusters of them scurrying this way and that, going about their chores, chatting, crossing the small wooden bridges over the creeks, twirling their red oriental umbrellas, their faces peeking out of the automobile windows. Looking more like a movie set, you suddenly become aware that those Geishas are for real. That they live and breathe there in Gion. That they are bred and brought up in a house not too far from where I am walking. That they work in the restaurants, tea houses. They sing and dance and entertain like the famed Tawaifs above the store fronts and in the bazars of Lucknow. And like their sisters on the Indian continent, many of them are mistresses to some of the richest and the most powerful men in Japan.
Overwhelmed, I take a break and as recommended, walk into the restaurant Ashiya. Like in France, it’s Lyon and not Paris, in Japan, Kyoto cuisine shines over that of Tokyo’s. And the must of the must is to have a Kobe beef at Ashiya in Kyoto. So I do. The place is totally mobbed. But they find a place for me at the bar. It’s crowded and it’s loud and it sizzles with the delicious fragrance of the meat searing on the hot metal plates. Even though I am shocked at the price tag of US$ 30.- for a tinny tiny peace of a Filet Mignon – back in 1979 when the hefty T-bone steak in the US cost about $6.-, I would not let pass perhaps once in a life chance of tasting a Kobe steak at Ashiya in Kyoto. So tender it slithers down my throat like a fresh chilled oyster. I love it.
Back to strolling the alleys, I can’t help but think of Beauty and Sadness. And of Otoko and Keiko. As if they were real people and not the characters in Kawbata’s novel. I expect them any moment to emerge out of one of those hundreds of Geishas going about their business through those narrow pedestrian streets. I find something about their real existence mysterious. And then it occurs to me, even if Otoko and Keiko did exist and the novel was based on the real Geishas, what were the chances that they would still be around? And if they are, Otoko certainly would be very very old, but Keiko could still be in circulation. They could even be dead!
The thought nudges me into a nostalgic state of mind. Up until then, the little that I know of this mysterious land, I can’t help but see lingering behind the reticence of the Japanese character a certain shade of melancholy. Not just a mask, but something deeper, something inherent in their being.
As much life and the noise and the hubbub that swirl around me, there is something about the narrowness of the streets, smallness of the shops on the either side and their grey-brown tiled roofs all seem to give me an eerie feeling – the melancholic slippery sweetness of the dark wildflower honey. Other than the slight sliver of the sky up above, the solid stone tiles on the ground and the shops so close across from each other give me a feeling of a cocoon closing in – wrapped inside is a sleeping dead body and the soul, still inhabiting the earth, luxuriating in the ultimate slumber. What a morbid image? Why am I thinking of death?
Perhaps the answer lay in the ending of Beauty and Sadness, which I finish reading the next day on my train ride back to Tokyo. How does Kawabata deal with his four characters all curled up in one single web of loving? Simple! What if one of them were to have an accident and die?
The more I read and get to know of Japan, the more I get a feeling that the Japanese are preoccupied with death – like most Indians are, especially when it comes to the matters of the heart. I fail to see any glory in death. As inevitable as it is, it should be as natural as the birth. I can’t see inducing an end to life. Of the two Japanese authors I have read so far, both committed suicide. In November of 1970, Yukio Mishima committed the ritual Seppuku of carving out his own abdomen with a sharp knife and letting his disemboweled entrails hang out like blood soaked slithery snakes.
The public suicide of Mishima was all announced and choreographed. At the time I was working for Time and Life magazines. I still remember how us in Chicago production waited for the layouts, the photos and the text to arrive from the editorial offices in New York. I don’t remember exactly how we felt about awaiting for him to be done with and for us to put the magazines to bed and then go home. I don’t remember us having discussions about it either. Strange! Now that I think of it, it feels spooky, but then it must have felt a normal occurrence. Those were the days when Vietnam was well and alive and was covered extensively and in all its gory details in the Life magazine, week after week. The photos and the reports of the continuous death stream was hardly shocking anymore.
Mishima lost the Nobel Prize to his fellow writer and the close friend, Yasunari Kawabata, who too committed suicide by gassing himself to death in April 1972. Unlike Mishima, tried to give a rousing speech amidst the boos of the crowd before proceeding to slice his stomach, Kawabata didn’t even leave a small suicide note, leaving his loved ones and the fans wondering forever. There are many theories about his taking his own life, among them, him being haunted by hundreds of nightmares following the death of Yukio Mishima.
The protagonist of Mishima’s Sailor Who Fell From The Grace With The Sea is murdered by a bunch of teenagers. I would go onto read Kawabata’s Snow Country, and realize that in both of his novels the “intruding” characters die of accidents, thus clearing the path of the survivors.
While I found Mishima difficult to read, I find Kawabata’s style and the narratives soothing, simple and nostalgically romantic. Both of the books have made a deep impact on me and yet even decades later, I can’t help but wish that instead of resorting to killing his characters, he could have given his stories delicate twists and left them alone. But the the endings do tell you something about the way the Japanese feel about life – or more precisely about death.
Committing Seppuku is the ultimate glory and so is the Kamikaze pilots taking off on suicide missions in their single engine, non-landing, one-man Nakajima Ki-115 Tsurugi planes and going down with the blazing bright and glorious flames. And Madama Butterfly choosing the path of con onor muore (to die with honor), blindfolds her child, goes behind the screen and plunges the knife into her heart. Applause, applause!
Fast forward to the one of my most favorite Japanese authors of today. At the time of Mishima and Kawabata’s deaths, Kyoto born Haruki Murakami was only in his very early twenties and had yet to publish his first book, which came out in 1979. But it wasn’t up until 1987 did he burst onto the international literary scene with his mega seller, Norwegian Wood, named after the Beatles song of the era. A bitter sweet love story of the young college students set in Tokyo – the generation grooving and grown up to the essence of the music that defined the Sixties, it’s the suicide of one of the lovers that moves the story forward pulling at the heart strings not only that of the Japanese but that of the readers across the globe.
© Haresh Shah
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
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