Kusamakura (18 page)

“There’s nothing very interesting about them. They’re noisy things.”

“Well, you know the saying—‘The dogs in a misty country will bark at the sun, the cows in a hot country will pant at the moon.’ I’m a country fellow, so I’d probably have a hard time coping with trains, in fact.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’d cope perfectly well. They really are very boring things.”

“Is that so?”

Steam is pouring from the iron kettle. The abbot takes a pot and cups from the nearby tea chest and proceeds to make us tea.

“Have a cup of coarse-leaf tea. It’s not the delicious tea that Mr. Shioda makes, mind you.”

“I’m sure it’s perfectly fine.”

“You look as if you wander about a lot. Now, is that in order to paint?”

“Yes. I take along the equipment when I go walking, but I don’t mind if I don’t actually paint any picture.”

“Ah, so it’s only half-serious, then?”

“Yes, you could say that. I hate submitting myself to all that fart counting, you see.”

Even a Zen practitioner such as the abbot is apparently at a loss to comprehend this expression. “What do you mean by ‘fart counting’?”

“If you live in Tokyo for a long time, you get your farts counted.”

“How so?”

I laugh. “It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just counting, but then they go on to analyze your farts, and measure your ass-hole to see if it’s square or triangular, and so on.”

“Ah, you’re talking about hygiene, are you?”

“Not hygiene, no. I’m talking about detectives.”

“Detectives? So it’s the police, is it? Now, what’s the purpose of policemen, eh? Do we really have to have them?”

“No, artists certainly have no need of them.”

“Nor do I. I’ve never had any cause to bother one.”

“I’m sure not.”

“Still, I don’t care if the police want to go counting farts. So what? They can’t do a thing to you, after all, unless you’ve done something wrong.”

“It’s dreadful just to think something might be done to you on account of a simple fart, though.”

“When I was a young monk, you know, my superiors always told me people never get anywhere with their training unless they can throw themselves into it with the same abandon it would take to expose your guts on the street in the heart of Tokyo. You should do the same sort of rigorous training, you know. Then you wouldn’t need to go traveling.”

“If I were a real painter, I could achieve that sort of state whenever I wanted.”

“Well then, you should do so.”

“I can’t if people are counting my farts all the time.”

The abbot laughs. “Well, there you are, you see. Now, that lass of Shioda’s, where you’re staying, young Nami, after she came back from the marriage, all sorts of things used to plague her mind, till in the end she decided to come to me for some Buddhist instruction. And now look at her, she’s come a long way with it. These days she’s got a fine head on her shoulders.”

“Well, well, I did get the impression she was no ordinary woman.”

“No, she’s very sharp. A young monk studying under me by the name of Taian was led to a moment of great crisis in life on account of her, you know. It’s proved to be an excellent aid to enlightenment for him, I understand.”

The pine casts its shadow across the quiet garden. The distant sea glimmers faintly, with a shifting light that seems to answer and yet not answer the lights that fill the sky. The fishing boats’ far lamps wink on and off.

“Look at the shadow of that pine.”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not simply beautiful. It cares not if the wind blows.”

I drink off the last of my tea, place the cup upside down on the tea tray, and rise to my feet.

“We’ll see you as far as the gate. Ryoooneeeen! The guest is leaving!”

When we step out of the priests’ quarters, the pigeons are cooing.

“There’s nothing more enchanting than pigeons, you know. I have only to clap, and they all come flying over. Here, I’ll show you.”

The moonlight has grown brighter still. In the deep silence, the magnolia tree proffers its tangled branches of cloudy blossoms to the vault of the sky. Suddenly the abbot startles the very center of the clear spring night with a loud clap. The sound dies on the breeze, and not a single pigeon appears.

“Not coming, eh? Funny, I thought they would.”

Ryonen looks at me with a hint of a smile. The abbot appears to think pigeons can see in the dark. What a happy innocence.

At the gate we part. I turn to watch their two rounded shadows, one large and one small, follow each other back down the stone path and disappear.

I believe it was Oscar Wilde who remarked that Christ’s approach to life was supremely artistic. I don’t know about Christ, but I certainly believe this statement could justly be applied to the abbot of Kankaiji. Not in the sense of tastes, or of being in accord with the times—after all, this is a man who hangs in his alcove a Bodhidharma scroll painting so execrable it scarcely deserves the name of art, and boasts about how fine it is; a man who believes that there are doctorates for painters, and who thinks that pigeons can see in the dark. But I would claim that, despite all this, he is a real artist. His heart is a bottomless well. Everything passes straight through it without hindrance. He moves freely through all places, creates at will, and moves on, and there’s not the least hint of any sullying particle of experience remaining lodged within him. If just a touch of discernment and taste could be added to his brain, he would become the perfect artist, at one with whatever situation he found himself in, maintaining the artist’s essential state of mind even in the most trivial everyday moments of life.

I, on the other hand, will never be an artist in the true sense as long as the detectives are still at work counting my farts. I can turn to the easel, I can take up the palette, but I cannot be a painter. Only by bringing myself to this unknown mountain village and steeping myself deep in its late spring world have I at last found within me the attitude of the pure artist. Once I have crossed this frontier, all the beauties of the earth become mine. Though no drop of paint nor jot of brushstroke ever meets the pure white canvas before me, I am nevertheless an artist of the highest order. I grant I do not equal Michelangelo in artistry, nor Raphael in skill, but my artist’s soul can take its place alongside those of the great men of antiquity, proud and equal. I have not made a single painting since arriving, indeed I almost feel that to have brought the painting box along at all was a mere whim. And you call yourself a painter? you may say with a sneer. But sneer though you may, I am for the present a true artist, a magnificent artist. Those who have attained this state don’t necessarily produce great works—but all who produce great works must first attain it.

These are my meditations as I savor a cigarette after breakfast. The sun has risen high above the trailing mists. I slide open the screen doors to gaze out onto the mountainside beyond. The spring green of the trees seems almost transparent in the sunlight and glows with an astonishing richness.

I’ve always felt that the relationship between air, form, and color is the most fascinating study that the world affords. Do you focus on color to evoke air, or on form? Or do you focus on air, and weave color and form through it? The slightest shift in approach can alter the feel of a painting in any number of ways. It will also differ, of course, depending on the tastes of the painter himself, and be limited by the strictures of time and place. The landscape paintings of the English contain no hint of brightness. Perhaps they dislike bright works, but even if this weren’t the case, nothing bright could be produced in that dismal air of theirs. The paintings of the Englishman Goodall, however, are a completely different matter, and justly so.
¹
Though he was English, he never painted a single English landscape. His subject was not his native land but exclusively the landscapes of Egypt and Persia, whose air is by contrast marvelously pure. Anyone seeing his paintings for the first time will be astonished at their clarity and wonder that an Englishman could produce such brilliance of color.

Nothing can be done about individual tastes, of course, but if our aim is to paint the Japanese landscape, we must depict the air and colors peculiar to it. No matter how fine you think the colors of French paintings, you cannot simply borrow them wholesale and claim that your painting depicts a Japanese landscape. You must immerse yourself in the natural world, study its multifarious forms, the shifting ways of cloud and mist, morning and evening, and only then, when you have at last lit on the very color you need, should you seize your tripod and rush outside to paint. Colors change from moment to moment. If you once lose the opportunity, you must wait a long time before your eyes fall on precisely this color again.

The mountainside to which I now lift my gaze is flush with a marvelous hue rarely seen in these parts. It’s a great shame to have come all this way to be confronted by this moment, and to let it slip. Let me just try to paint it. . . .

I open the door to leave, and there at the second-floor window, leaning against the sliding paper door, stands Nami. Her chin is buried in the collar of her kimono, and only her profile is visible. Just as I am on the point of greeting her, her right hand rises as if lifted on a breeze, while the left hand continues to hang at her side. Something—is it lightning?—flashes swiftly up and down at her breast, there is a sharp click, and the flash is gone again. In her left hand I now see she’s holding the unvarnished wooden scabbard of a dagger. The next instant she has hidden herself behind the screen door. I leave the inn with the illusion that I have stopped in briefly on a morning performance at the Kabuki theater.

Turning left directly outside the gate, I’m soon confronted with a steep path that sets off almost perpendicularly straight up the mountainside. Cries of bush warblers echo here and there among the trees. On my left the gentle slope that descends to the valley is planted with mandarin trees; two low hills stand to my right, apparently also devoted entirely to mandarin orchards. How many years ago was it that I visited here? I can’t be bothered counting. I remember it was a cold December, and it was the first time I’d come across a landscape of hills swathed everywhere with mandarin trees like this. I asked one of the mandarin pickers perched in a tree if I could purchase a branch of them, and he replied cheerily, “Take as many as you want,” and began to sing an odd song. Back in Tokyo, I remember reflecting wonderingly, you had to go to a herbalist to come by so much as the skin of a mandarin. I heard a frequent sound of gunshot, and when I asked what it was, I was told that hunters were out shooting ducks. On that visit I had not the faintest inkling of Nami’s existence.

As an actor, she would make a marvelous female impersonator on the Kabuki stage. When most actors appear onstage, their performance is that of someone outside the home setting, but she spends her everyday life performing, and she doesn’t even recognize the fact. She’s a natural actor. Hers could truly be called “the artist’s life.” Thanks to Nami, I am well on the path to true painting.

Unless I view her behavior as performance, its unsettling nature will doubtless plague me to distraction all day. An ordinary novelist, equipped with the standard tools of reason or human sentiment, would quickly find the study of this woman overstimulating and retreat in disgust. If any emotional entanglement were to develop between us in the real world, my suffering would no doubt be unspeakable. But my aim on this journey is to leave behind the world of common emotions and achieve the transcendent state of the artist, so I must view everything before me through the lens of art—apprehending people in terms of the Noh or other drama or as figures in a poem. Viewed from my chosen artistic perspective, this woman’s behavior is more aesthetically satisfying than that of any woman I have come across, and it’s all the more beautiful for the fact that she is unaware of the beauty of her art.

Don’t misunderstand me. I maintain that it’s quite unreasonable to judge behavior such as hers simply as unbecoming in a citizen of our society. Yes, to do good, to be virtuous, to preserve chastity, to sacrifice oneself for the sake of duty are no easy matters. All who attempt these things must suffer to achieve them, and if we are to brave such suffering, somewhere must lurk the promise of a pleasure great enough to defeat the pain. Painting, poetry, drama—these are simply different names for the pleasure within this anguish. When we once grasp this truth, we will at last act with courage and grace; we will overcome all adversity and be in a position to satisfy the supreme aesthetic urges of our heart. One must disregard physical suffering, set material inconvenience at naught, cultivate a dauntless spirit, and be prepared to submit to any torture for the sake of righteousness and humanity. Defined on the narrow basis of human sentiment, Art could be said to be a bright light hidden within the heart of us men of learning, a crystallization of that fierce dedication that cannot but repel evil and cleave to the good, shrink from the warped and align itself with the straight, aid the weak and crush the strong—a crystal that will shoot back the flashing arrows of the daylight world that would pierce it.

People will laugh at someone’s behavior when they see it as theatrical. They are really laughing at what is, from the point of view of human sentiment, the quite incomprehensible and meaningless sacrifice being made on the grounds of purity of aesthetic principle. They deride the folly of parading one’s sensibility before the world rather than awaiting a moment that will allow innate beauty of character naturally to shine forth. Those who have a true grasp of such matters may well scoff, but the louts and riffraff who have no understanding of taste, and choose to scorn others by comparing them to their own base natures, are unforgivable. There was once a youth who leaped five hundred feet to his doom down a waterfall into the swirling rapids, leaving behind him a final poem on the rock above.
²
To me, it seems that this young man sacrificed his life, that precious gift, for the sake of beauty pure and simple. Such a death is heroic, though the impulse that prompted it is difficult for us to comprehend. But how can those who fail to grasp the heroism of that death dare to deride his action? Such people, who can never know the emotions of one who accomplishes such supreme heroism, must surely forfeit all right to scoff, for they are inferior to this young man in being unable, even in circumstances that justify such an action, to achieve his noble sacrifice.