Segaki (2 page)

The novel that Stacton finally called
Segaki
(it began its life under the title of ‘A Watcher to a Star’) was submitted to Faber in October 1957 as the second panel in the triptych Stacton had named ‘Invincible Questions’ (‘three novels
concerned with various aspects of the religious experience’). ‘It seems to me benign,’ Stacton wrote to Charles Monteith, ‘the most accessible of the three …’ The second part of the trilogy, the Egyptian novel
On a Balcony
, had significantly enhanced Stacton’s reputation both within Faber and in wider literary circles, and
Segaki
was warmly received in-house as further proof of his protean gifts on the page.

It is set in the Japan of the early fourteenth century during the Ashikaga shogunate, and tells of Hojo Muchaku, abbot of a Zen Buddhist monastery in the remote Noto province. The ‘action’ of the novel concerns Muchaku’s journey to seek out his brother, a painter, whom he hasn’t seen for many years. Storytelling, however, is very much subservient to style. Stacton had prepared for the book by immersing himself in Japanese aesthetics and spirituality, and in the writing he plainly aspired to the formal qualities of sparseness, restraint and grace that are so much associated with traditional Japanese art – that sense of immanence realised by delicate, minimal strokes.

In his correspondence with Monteith Stacton made free as ever in citing the multifarious works that had influenced and informed his writing. Zen had been enjoying something of a vogue in the US since the 1950s, thanks in no small part to the English-born, San Francisco-based philosopher Alan Watts. Stacton had read D. T. Suzuki’s influential
Essays in Zen
Buddhism
, and developed a regard for the great Japanese
haiku
poets of the Edo period (particularly Kobayashi Issa and Yosa Buson) through his reading of the four-volume
Haiku
edited by R. H. Blyth, renowned English scholar of Japanese culture. (Blyth’s
Haiku
was also keenly consulted by Beat writers including Kerouac and Ginsberg.)

Stacton was further acquainted with such seminal works as the
Genji Monogatari
written in the early
eleventh century by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu, and the
Hagakure
, a warrior’s code for living set down in the early 1700s by the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo. But it was the tradition of Japanese visual art that fired Stacton’s imagination above all. He was fascinated by the sculptor Unkei (1151–1223) whose work had progressed from iconography toward an impressive realism; by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), one of the last of the great
ukiyo-e
(woodblock) artists; and, perhaps above all, by Muqi Fac’hang, the Chinese Buddhist painter of the thirteenth century who was much imitated in Japan owing to the sheer luminosity of his landscapes, flowers, and still lifes.

Stacton had a refined appreciation not just of the Zen teachings originally imported into Japan from China, but also of Japan’s indigenous Shinto spirituality, with its animistic sense of the spirit present in all matter. ‘The Japanese are a tortured people’, he wrote to Monteith, ‘and so have had to learn how to be calm … And out of that horror they have brought not only great beauty, but also a sense of responsibility towards beauty based upon the belief that not only we, but also, say, potatoes, are merely guests …’

That said, when Stacton was further pressed to define
Segaki
’s relation to Zen teachings (chiefly for the benefit of Faber’s planned publicity campaign) he was careful to observe that no such lightning could be trapped in any bottle: ‘The point of the book was not to state or explain anything: one can’t explain the nature of Zen; but to show the process going on, in the form of the asking, thought upon, and answer to a Koan. The whole matter being summed up in Rilke’s “We comprehend flowering and fading simultaneously” …’

The aesthetic success of
Segaki
upon its publication is perhaps best measured by the splendid reception it met
with among celebrated aficionados of Japanese culture. Alan Watts lauded the novel during a radio interview, and it was well reviewed by Christmas Humphreys, the controversial English barrister who had made a conspicuous conversion to Buddhism. Among fellow novelists Henry Miller was the book’s most passionate fan, claiming in a letter to Stacton’s US publisher that he had not ‘read such an electrifying work in ages’ and thought Stacton ‘a magnificent poet’ who appeared ‘to know Japan (the everlasting one) better than most Japanese’.

In the end, how are we to best perceive the relationship of
Segaki
to its predecessors in Stacton’s ‘Invincible Questions’ triptych? Stacton himself went so far as to assert that his disparate trio of protagonists, Ludwig, Ikhnaton and Muchaku, were ‘the same sort of person, mentally and emotionally, but differently adjusted to different cultures …’ However the more that he wrote on this matter, the more he seemed keen to keep our perceptions purposely blurry:

To a degree, then, Stacton’s design remained intensely private and personal to him; but in realising it, he clearly and rightly felt that he had completed a certain kind of demanding ascent to a mountain-top. With Segaki safely delivered to the presses Stacton told Charles Monteith,
with a commingled sense of fatigue and pride in his accomplishment, ‘One is merely relieved to have it said and over with.’

Richard T. Kelly
Editor, Faber Finds
April 2012

Sources and Acknowledgements

This introduction was prepared with kind assistance from Robert Brown, archivist at Faber and Faber, from Robert Nedelkoff, who has done more than anyone to encourage a renewed appreciation of Stacton, and from David R. Slavitt. It was much aided by reference to a biographical article written about Stacton by Joy Martin, his first cousin.

A popular festival, July 13th or 14th, the feeding of the hungry ghosts. In Zen usage it is less an attempt at placation than a form of communion.

We are all then hungry ghosts … by feeding the supposedly departed we are feeding ourselves; when they are filled we are filled; no real distinction can be made between the dead and the living. The living so called are living on the dead, that is, the dead so called are living most lively in the living.

D
AISETZ
T
EITARO
S
UZUKI

All this happened so long ago, it is so faded and a little wistful, like old brocade, that one wonders whether it happened at all. One remembers it as one remembers the smell of a dusty rose, found
unexpectedly
in a forgotten book. It concerns the invincible questions.

As to what those questions are, they are invincible precisely because, since they cannot be stated, they cannot be answered either. But perhaps they can be shown. Therefore this very simple tale.

In the Engakuji temple, at Kamakura, in Japan, there stands the statue of a fourteenth-century monk. It is a famous work, though we in the West would not approve of it. The eyebrows look like real hair, the hair looks like real hair, the fingernails look like real fingernails, and the face, though a real face, despite all this seems something more. It is a portrait of the illusion of illusion, and is attributed to Unkei, though it is later by a hundred years than he.

The face is that of a gentleman, a person of enormous physical cleanliness, polite insight, and a bland and rather cruel sense of humour. But it is the tender, amused, slightly surprised gesture of the raised right hand that fascinates us. The chief thing we know of him is that he had a gentle affection for spring snails. His name was Muchaku Hojo. This is his story.

The scenery of the west coast of Japan is wild in so orderly a way, that at first glance we should be apt to dismiss it as harmless. To do so would be most unwise.

The country, as we know, is a concatenation of islands, of which the most considerable is Honshu. Honshu is a series of heavily forested mountains, interspersed with fertile valleys. The climate is hyperborean, spring an event of the first magnitude, and the people have an
intense
affection for rain, particularly when it slants through the brusque beauty of the forests. The prevailing colours are metallic blue, and metallic green.

The culture centres about the clement bays of the
Pacific
Coast and the Inland Sea. The west coast has always been neglected, for it is poor, treacherous, and
overwhelming
. Indeed, it was for its obscurity that Muchaku had sought it out in the autumn of 1318. He had been there now for fifteen years, and was a man of forty.

The peninsula of Noto District faces the famous islet of Sado. On the right it encloses a large bay. On the left it is open to the ocean. The bright yellow cliffs are not high, but they are steep, and the beaches below them noisy and narrow. There are riptides. The black pines of the forest are thin, perpendicular, and dense, so that rain has some
trouble in reaching the yellow needles of the
undergrowth
. The fog, however, can slip in and out anywhere.

It is the belief of the fisherfolk that it is wiser not to go out of doors at night. The woods are inhabited by Kami, Kappa, and Tengu. If you are sophisticated enough not to believe in these dangerous things, there are other things to make you equally uneasy. The principle diet at Noto is fish and seafood. The people are scrawny, muscular, in their own way poetic, and without a history. They live in the stifling eddies of the white and yellow fog.

Near the haft of the peninsula, but on the coast, rises a series of miniature mountains in the style of Mi Fei, and there, just above the fog line, in a narrow ravine, stood a small monastery. Here the climate was different, and here Muchaku was, and had been for eight years, Abbot, the king of a little spiritual country of which he was thoroughly tired. Recently he had become restless and uncertain there. He did not know why.

The whole country was restless. It was not so much the war, far away, in Kyoto and Kamakura, as the reasons for the war. And though these upheavals had left Noto
untouched
, one was beginning to wonder whether or not they should.

Muchaku Hojo was a minor member of what had been, and might still possibly be, as far as he knew, the ruling caste of the country. They had been in power for over a hundred years, and though he had repudiated their world, he could not repudiate a certain healthy inherited
refinement
. Almost absent-mindedly he had made of this monastery a masterpiece.

For example, the site. The buildings were posed so deliberately to hover just above the borders of illusion.
Even the laughter leaping stream of the valley became abruptly grave as it poured in one swoop down into that fog, a few feet below the monastery gate.

Few people loomed up along the path, though more than formerly. There were now more refugees, for even in Noto there were echoes of trouble. Somewhere down there in the fog, the local lord had his castle. And he, too, they said, was getting ready to go to war.

It was the beginning of June. There was a certain excitement in the air. One could not help but wonder which tree would blossom next. Surely, clip-clopping through the orchard before dawn, one heard a breathless humming in the buds, and then, as light first struck them, pop, there they were, all wet and new.

Or so Muchaku hoped. He often walked there these days, before the dawn. He could not sleep, and it was always pleasant to watch the return of reason. The winter had been severe, though beautiful, the spring not much better, and men who live too close together soon develop a common bad tempered smell.

He was a little tired of perfection and too much order. He had reached an age to find them strait. Besides there was no mirror in his room. He badly needed someone to tell him he was still there, for this eminence he was, the abbot, was not himself. Eminence of that sort was too easy to be himself. No system of self-discipline can ever be one’s self. It is merely the shell one builds to make it safe for one to have a self at all. But search as he could, he could not find himself anywhere in this shell.
Somewhere
along the way what he had meant to be had been mislaid.

There did not seem any way to find it here.

As usual, on this particular morning, he woke early, with that feeling of having been summoned that we have when we wake unexpectedly. He lay on his cotton mat and blinked. It must have been the sound of water that wakened him, a slow, exhausted drip somewhere, as though it had just finished raining.

The sliding panel to the garden was open. He half raised his tight, smooth, small, efficient body and looked outside. The garden was saturated with a sweet smelling morning mist. The drip of water must come from
somewhere
out there, among the fingered leafage. It was so early that the world still seemed private, but already
sunlight
was glancing off the swirling molecules of the fog, beginning to queue up into rays, down which warmth would gravely slide to the ground as the Amida descends benignly with his disciples, to touch Japan not far from here. That was a fancy. It made him smile.

When one is troubled, it is always better to smile. But now the whole open area of the panel was a sea of light. He got up, flung on a kimono, slipped his feet into sandals, and then decided he would rather walk on the dew barefoot. He went to the courtyard, to the well, rinsed his mouth from the dipper, splattered his face and hands, passed the corner of the Zendo hall, and cantered briskly through the monastery grounds. It is something, after all, to be the first one up in the morning. He began to feel much better.

Tucking up his skirts, he reached that mound on which was the cemetery, the few stones already covered with a succulent and carefully imported moss. Another one, he thought ruefully, of his too artful touches, and yet it did give the soothing continuity of age. Around him the fog
had abruptly prolapsed; it was only up to his nipples now. He looked at it with wonder, as though it were a new kind of snow. Underneath it somewhere he could hear the brook rushing towards the fall. The fog hovered and settled playfully, like the silkweavers’ dance in which several girls weave twenty foot lengths of cloth lightly in and out of the air, almost to let them settle, silent if it is a public performance, but giggling like swallows if they are doing it for fun.

The mist ran smoothly into the hollows, draining off. A little in the distance, towards the terrace which topped the monastery wall, against the solid chords of the
cryptomeria
, the flesh coloured tops of the fruit trees emerged. He decided to go down there.

He always entered the orchard with the solemn
excitement
of a child anticipating presents at New Year’s. He was never quite sure, there, what he would be given, but he always knew it would be a gift.

He stood quietly up to his knees in the wet weeds (another aesthetic touch: he would not allow them to be removed), with his hands clasped, his eyes blinking, for the radiance of the thinning mist was almost too bright. The acuteness of early birdcry was shattering.

And then there formed out of the mist, and bounded towards him, a lean, well cared for, smooth skinned, silent dog with a shaggy tail.

He did not move. He watched. He was afraid of dogs.

The dog stopped in mid-bound, trotted a wide circle around him, shrugged the loose accordion flesh on its gristly shoulders, turned silently, went some distance away, trod in three tight circles, and flopped down in the grass disapprovingly. The grasses hid its body; but it was
panting, and through the moist weaving stalks Muchaku could see the glint of its watchful silver eyes.

He was upset. It was one thing to be afraid of dogs. It was quite another to be rejected by them. Besides, how could it have got here? It was too beautiful not to have a master, and it was the Angrya season, the season of wandering the roads in search of experience. Those few monks who had dogs had already set out on their travels.

He could not help but feel that it was a messenger, and yet it had not spoken. The message was not for him.

Avoiding it, he went down through the orchard, pausing to shake a cherry tree and stand for a moment under the falling petals, still moist enough to cling to his cheek. But he was disquieted. There was something here he did not understand.

He had the impression of danger, though he did not know from what or where. The orchard no longer soothed him. He hurried down through the grounds, until he found himself on the final terrace, the one on top of the embankment that walled in the grounds on the path side, where the ground fell away steeply, the one that faced, moreover, the solemn continuous shimmer of the woods.

It was one of those places in which the monks always knew they were to leave him alone, and perhaps that was why he went there now. It was where he brought his thoughts and doubts. Walking up and down it was a little like pacing out a syllogism. For a hundred yards in one direction he could state the problem. Then reversing his steps, he could mull over the complementary
problems
. And then, with a glance at the forest, taking up his
stalking meditations again, he would find himself not with the conclusion, but with the original problem once more. And as usually happened, he learned more from a quick look at the foliage than he ever did from his own mind. He took a quick look always automatically, for it did not do to look at something as dark as the forest too steadily.

The trees seemed unusually restless, and yet there was no wind. Perhaps they had a wind of their own. They had the sombre flashing blues and beetle greens of a screen of living peacock tails, those valuable, impersonal, stealthy colours one finds in a very old painting that is never the same for two minutes at a time.

Something metallic.

Forests always made him nervous. They always stood there, up to the very edges of man’s ingenuity, like a dangerous, watchful crowd, stirring, murmuring, not exactly angry, but very much longing for a little violence; and no man likes to be watched when he thinks he is alone. The foliage reared up over him, hesitant but inexorable, like a frigid wave, always at that instant before it crashes down.

It was impossible to understand it. It moved too rapidly. It was like trying to reason with someone who speaks in spurts and says everything at once. There is a special way of saying prayers when one is in a hurry, by flipping the folded leaves of the sutra in and out like a concertina. One catches the stray character as it flashes by, but it makes no sense. The wall of the woods was like that. A convulsive shudder would run rippling over its surface, so that what was light was dark, what was dark was light. The pattern would hold only an instant.
Then, some heavy bough would dip down and then up like a lever, and the whole series would shift, before one had the chance to understand it. The system of
interlocking
levers was endless and the performance eternal. It made one feel ignorant, temporary, and frail.

It was a little too symbolic to be true, but too
convincing
to be false. If he had been a painter, as his brother was, trained to believe every, and solely, the moment was eternal, and therefore never lost, but only mislaid, no doubt he would have spent his life looking at such things. And since people believe what the painter finds is what he was looking for, no doubt he would have been able to make his thoughts satisfactory to somebody, even if they never were to himself. But he was not a painter.

Somewhere in the bowels of that wood a rotten bough crashed to the ground. Bushido had had another casualty, with the human difference, that the dead have no
cones, but have to make their preparations almost too far in advance. There is no such thing as a celibate tree. The winds and the birds soon see to that.

The sound was deafening. And that black bronze colour of the oldest trees had too metallic a glint.
Something
was shifting around in there.

He heard a whistle.

He did not know what made him step aside. From
behind
him the dog hurtled through the air, cleared the wall, and leaped ten feet down to the ground. It yipped, righted itself, and ears streaming back, the long hairs of its tail sleek along the vertebrae with speed, it loped joyously into the wood, vanished, the bracken crackled, and it was as suddenly utterly still. Even the wind fell.

Muchaku stood motionless. His flesh tingled. He
blinked. Something was happening to that foliage. It was making another pattern. From somewhere below him something was watchful, and staring back at him. Reluctantly he turned to the lower left-hand corner of the wood.

And there, abruptly, it was, between the blue leaves and the green, the hard and dangerous glint, the silver and brown to black of armour. Light caught it. Then it was not visible. He did not think it was an illusion. It was there. And light likes metal. It knows very well how to sprinkle it with diamonds.

It was what he feared these lawless days, feared enough never to mention. He turned, and though he was too composed ever to hurry, still he went slowly a little more quickly than usual, feeling the prick of an arrow in his back, and so distressed, that he almost wished the arrow were really there, and the whole anxiety over with.

But he must pretend, he knew, that nothing was wrong. So must they all. For the rest of the day, and for the rest of every day.

It was not the civil wars that bothered him. In ordinary times wars took place chiefly in valleys, and might be watched or ignored with equal safety from the nearest hill. The anarchy of a general insurrection was another matter. For most people cannot contain a peace. It makes them costive. They must have a bowel movement every day and one war every generation, for though they say they loathe violence, we always deny what we like best. When hatred is undisciplined, and runs like water down the nearest convenient course, then even those who have built safely above the high water mark of human avarice and fear are apt to be flooded out.