日本文化私観 English

I. "The Japanese"

as a Concept

I have almost no knowledge of Japan's ancient culture.

I have never seen the Katsura Detached Palace that Bruno Taut praises so extravagantly, and I know nothing of Gyokusen, Taigado, Chikuden, or Tessai.

Still less have I ever so much as heard the names of men like Hata Zoroku or the priest Chikugensai — and in any case I scarcely travel, so I know nothing of this town or that village of my homeland, nothing of its customs, its mountains and rivers.

I was born in Niigata City, which Taut calls the most vulgar city in Japan, and I love the neon signs along the streets from Ueno to Ginza that he so despises.

In place of knowing anything of the forms of the tea ceremony, all I know is how to get recklessly, senselessly drunk; living alone in my own house, I have never once given a thought to such a thing as an alcove.

And yet I do not think that a life like mine is an impoverished one merely because it has lost sight of my homeland's glorious ancient cultural tradition (though I am troubled, for other reasons, by the suspicion that it is impoverished after all——).

One day Taut received an invitation from a certain wealthy Japanese man, a devotee of Chikuden.

There were upward of ten guests.

The host, without calling on the maids for help, went back and forth himself between the storehouse and the reception room, bringing one hanging scroll at a time to hang in the alcove and show to the company, then going off for another — taking his own pleasure in the pleasure these fine paintings gave his guests.

When this was over, they say, the seating was changed and tea ceremony and a properly correct meal were served.

That a life of this kind "does not lose sight of the tradition of ancient culture" —

— and is for that reason said to be an inwardly rich life: well, when it comes to that, the standard by which this "inwardness" is measured is far too glib and absurd a matter; and yet, of course, it can hardly follow that I, who have lost sight of that cultural tradition, am (for that reason) the richer man.

Once, when Cocteau came to Japan, he wondered aloud why the Japanese did not wear kimono, and lamented the spectacle of Japan forgetting the traditions of its own country and scrambling frantically after Westernization.

To be sure, France is a strange country.

When the war began, the very first things evacuated were the exhibits of the Louvre and the gold bullion — they exchanged the fate of their country for the preservation of Paris.

They have inherited the legacy of tradition, but they seem utterly unaware that it is they themselves, and no one else, who must give birth to their country's tradition.

What is tradition?

What is national character?

Is there some necessary trait in the Japanese character, some decisive predisposition that made it inevitable they should invent the kimono and wear it?

Read the old kodan tales and you find our ancestors possessed of a fierce vengefulness, turning beggars, parting the very roots of the grass to hunt down their enemies.

Yet though barely seventy or eighty years have passed since the age of the samurai came to an end, this has already become, for us, a tale out of a dream.

The Japanese of today are, of just about all the peoples on earth, probably among those with the least capacity for hatred.

This is a story from my student days: at the Athenee Francais there was a welcoming party for a certain Professor Robert. Place cards had been set out on the tables and the seats were fixed; for some reason I alone was seated among the foreigners, directly across from Professor Cotte.

Professor Cotte was a vegetarian, so his menu alone differed from everyone else's, and he ate nothing but things like oatmeal.

Having no one to talk to and bored, I found myself watching nothing but the professor's appetite: once he picked up his spoon he drove it back and forth between plate and mouth at a furious speed, never setting it down until he had finished, and in the time it took me to eat one piece of meat he had already slurped down a whole plate of oatmeal.

I thought it only natural that the professor should have a weak stomach.

The table speeches began.

Professor Cotte rose to his feet.

And then, his voice heavy with grief, he suddenly launched into a memorial address for Clemenceau.

Clemenceau, the French premier of the previous war, was a duel-loving statesman known as "the Tiger" — and it happened that his death had been reported in that very day's newspaper.

Professor Cotte was a nihilist in the manner of Voltaire, an atheist.

He loved elegiac poetry above all else, delighted in teaching his students Voltaire's epigrams, and delighted no less in reciting them himself.

So it never so much as occurred to me that the professor might speak of a man's death out of raw, unfiltered sentiment rather than through the lens of his own thought.

I took the professor's speech for a joke.

I supposed he had some bit of humor in reserve, ready to turn the whole thing on its head at any moment.

But the professor's speech went from grave to grief-stricken, and it became unmistakably clear that this was no joke at all.

It was so utterly unexpected that I was dumbfounded, and before I knew it I burst out laughing.——

I shall never, for as long as I live, forget the look in the professor's eyes at that moment.

The professor glared at me with a bloodthirsty hatred so intense that killing me would not have satisfied it.

Eyes like that do not exist among the Japanese.

I have never once seen such eyes in a Japanese person.

Since then I have made a point of watching for them, and I have never once encountered them.

In short, this kind of hatred does not exist among the Japanese.

The hatred in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms —

the hatred in Lady Chatterley's Lover —

a hatred so bloodthirsty that tearing the man limb from limb would still not be enough — that kind of hatred is almost unknown among the Japanese.

The soft sentiment that yesterday's enemy is today's friend is, if anything, the feeling the Japanese share in common.

Most Japanese, I suspect, are painfully aware that they are simply not the type suited to taking revenge.

To go on hating thoroughly, unbroken, for years on end is next to impossible for them; at most they can manage a look that seems "about to bite" —

— and that is the outer limit of it.

In what is called tradition, or national character, a deception of just this kind sometimes lies hidden.

One ends up shouldering customs and traditions that run directly against one's own nature, as though they were an innate desire one had carried from birth.

So the fact that something was once practiced in Japan long ago does not, merely by virtue of its having once been practiced, make it something originally and essentially Japanese.

A custom practiced abroad and never practiced in Japan may in fact suit the Japanese best of all, and a custom practiced in Japan and nowhere else may in fact suit foreigners best.

Not imitation — discovery.

Just as Goethe, taking his cue from Shakespeare's works, went on to write his own masterpieces, so even in an art that prizes individuality, the process running from imitation to discovery occurs most often of all.

Inspiration for the most part sets out from a spirit of imitation and comes to fruit through discovery.

What, then, is the kimono?

Nothing more than an encounter with Western dress that happened to arrive a thousand years late.

And beyond a limited set of techniques, no alternative method suggesting some new invention was ever given to them.

It is not the meager Japanese physique that in particular gave rise to the kimono.

Nor is the kimono the only thing that looks beautiful on a Japanese body.

A well-built foreign man in kimono is bound to look far more splendid in it than we do.

When I was in primary school, the wooden Bandai Bridge spanning the mouth of the Shinano River was torn down, and half the river's width was filled in to make way for an iron bridge — and for a long time afterward I felt a deep sadness over it.

That Japan's finest wooden bridge should vanish, that the river should be narrowed, that my own pride in it should be taken from me — this was an anguish that cut me to the bone.

That strange way of grieving is now, for me, a memory like something out of a dream.

As I grew into an adult, and even as my dealings with the thing itself grew deeper, this way of grieving only ever faded, never the reverse.

And now I not only feel no sadness that the wooden bridge gave way to an iron one and the river was narrowed — I think it the most natural thing in the world.

But surely this change is not mine alone.

Most Japanese, whenever the old face of their hometown is torn down and a Western-style building rises in its place, feel not sorrow but, if anything, pleasure.

New means of transportation are needed, and elevators are needed too.

What is needed is a more convenient life — far more than anything called the beauty of tradition or Japan's true and original form.

It would cause no trouble at all if every temple in Kyoto and every Buddha in Nara were wiped out — but it would cause real trouble if the trains stopped running.

What matters to us is "the necessity of life" —

— that alone; even if every trace of ancient culture were wiped out, life itself would not perish, and so long as life itself does not perish, our own distinctiveness remains healthy.

For we would still not have lost our own necessities, nor the desires that answer to those necessities.

When Taut lectured in Tokyo, eighty or ninety percent of the audience, it is said, were students, and only ten or twenty percent were architects.

Invitations had been sent out to every architectural specialist in Tokyo, and this was the result even so.

In Europe, they say, such a thing could never happen.

There, it is said, eighty or ninety percent of the audience would always be architects, and the remaining ten or twenty percent honorary figures such as mayors interested in the culture of their cities — there would be no room at all for the likes of students to squeeze in.

I know nothing of the world of architecture, but taking an example from literature instead: even if Andre Gide were to give a lecture in Tokyo, I doubt ninety percent of our novelists would bother to go and hear him.

And, sure enough, eighty or ninety percent of the audience would be students — and perhaps thirty percent of those students schoolgirls, at that.

When I was a student in the Buddhist studies department, I once went to a lecture given by a French or English Buddhist scholar, and even though Japan is a country crawling with priests, the entire audience was students.

Priests-in-the-making, no doubt.

It may be that Japan's men of culture are simply lazy — or it may be that Western men of culture are "socially" —

— industrious, and that is the cause of it.

To be socially industrious is not necessarily to be industrious, and to be socially lazy is not necessarily to be lazy.

Industry and laziness aside, Japan's men of culture are a thoroughly hopeless lot.

They have never seen the Katsura Detached Palace, know nothing of Chikuden, Gyokusen, or Tessai, know nothing of the tea ceremony.

Mention the name Kobori Enshu and there are those who will say, was he an architect, or a garden designer, or a feudal lord, or a tea master — or perhaps he headed some school of ninja arts?

They tear down the old buildings of their hometowns, put up shoddy Western-style barracks in their place, and preen themselves over it.

And yet they do not go to hear Taut's lectures, or Gide's either.

Instead they stagger about drunk in the shadow of the neon signs, tossing back cheap fake whiskey with permed bar-girls for company.

A thoroughly hopeless bunch.

Not only have they no grasp whatever of Japan's true tradition — their aping of the West does not even hold together as a form; it retains not a fragment of beauty; it is fraudulent through and through.

Gary Cooper packs the house to standing-room only, while Umewaka Manzaburo draws barely a handful of spectators.

Is not this very type of cultured man poverty itself?

And yet between Taut's discovery of Japan and of the beauty of its tradition, and the fact that we, even while losing sight of that tradition, are nonetheless Japanese in fact — there lay a gulf that never once occurred to Taut.

That is to say: Taut had to discover Japan, but we, without any need to discover Japan at all, are Japanese as a plain fact.

We may have lost sight of ancient culture, but there is no way we could lose sight of Japan itself.

What is the Japanese spirit? — this is not a question we ourselves have any need to argue over.

Japan could hardly be born out of some explained-away spirit, nor could that thing called the Japanese spirit ever be reduced to an explanation.

So long as the life of the Japanese people is healthy, Japan itself is healthy.

We pull trousers over our short, bowed legs, put on Western clothes, go pattering along, dance the dances, throw out our tatami mats, and loll about self-importantly in cheap chairs at cheap tables.

That this looks utterly ridiculous to Western eyes, and that we ourselves are perfectly satisfied with its convenience, have absolutely no connection to each other.

The position from which they pity and laugh at us and the position from which we are actually living our lives are, at bottom, entirely different things.

So long as our way of life rests on legitimate needs, their pitying laughter amounts to nothing more than shallowness.

It is only natural that they should laugh at the sight of short, bowed legs in trousers pattering along, since it does look ridiculous; but if we ourselves feel no attachment to such things and have set our purpose somewhat higher, then surely the ones laughing are not necessarily the wiser party.

As I have already confessed, I have never seen the Katsura Detached Palace, and I know nothing of Sesshu, Sesson, Chikuden, Taigado, Gyokusen, or Tessai, nothing of the Kano school or of Unkei.

And yet I mean to try setting down my own

"Personal View of Japanese Culture."

It may seem a strange thing that a fellow who knows nothing whatever of his own country's tradition, and knows little besides neon signs and jazz, should presume to speak of Japanese culture — but at the very least, I have had no need to "discover"

Japan.

II. On Vulgarity (Man Toward Man)

From the beginning of winter in the twelfth year of Showa until the following early summer, I lived in Kyoto.

I had no particular aim in going to Kyoto — I set out with nothing but an unfinished novel and a thousand sheets of manuscript paper, not even a towel or a toothbrush besides, meaning simply to call on Oki Waichi, have him find me a room, and finish the novel in solitude.

Looking back on it now, it seems that solitude itself, and nothing else, was the one thing I longed for.

Oki, weaving it into the most casual small talk, asked me what I wanted to see in Kyoto and what foods I liked.

I had expected nothing more than the frank, easy friendship we shared in Tokyo, but the Oki of Kyoto was not the Oki of Tokyo — he had turned into an old-capital rich boy, lavishing the most meticulous care on entertaining his guest.

I answered, without thinking, that I wanted Gion maiko and wild boar meat —— I really did answer without thinking.

For on the very evening of my departure, Ozaki Shiro had taken me out as a farewell before my trip to Kyoto, and I had just eaten wild boar for the first time in my life, so the words simply slipped out on the momentum of that — and besides, I never imagined that boar meat was something one could easily come by.

But from the very next day I was assailed by boar meat every single night, and by about the third day it had become perfectly clear that its taste did not suit my palate in the least.

Even so, I had to grit my teeth and eat it.

And as for the maiko, I was taken that very first night to a teahouse on Hanami-koji, and at that time there were said to be thirty-six or thirty-seven maiko in Gion; when some twenty of them, one after another, came filing before my drink-blurred eyes, I found myself resigning it all to fate and all but closing my eyes in acceptance.

I had thus seen more than half of the maiko in Gion, and there are few things quite so absurd.

I had assumed they must be schooled in some special accomplishments, but there was not the slightest trace of any such thing; their dancing was half-baked, and about all they knew how to talk about was Turkey and Orie.

Well then, did they at least have the innocent, pet-like charm they were meant for? No — they were nothing but precociously pert, and had not a trace of any clean, wholesome allure.

They are, of course, creatures manufactured expressly to be doted upon, and yet, being children by definition, they possess none of the virtues of childhood.

Without bashfulness, a child is nothing at all.

And since they are children who are not children, one might ask whether they possess some intermediate charm combining child and adult — but no, not that either.

In Canton, it is said, there are geisha called mangmui — blind girls — meaning that girls with beautiful features are blinded while still small and then trained in special accomplishments such as dance and music.

What the Chinese do is vicious, but it is thorough.

If one means to manufacture something artificially for the purpose of being doted upon anyway, then this too will serve.

Blinding them — now that is an elaborate business.

A bit vicious, yes, but even just thinking about it, one senses a strange kind of allure in it.

The maiko, though they look thoroughly like manufactured products, have none of the charm that manufacture ought to give them.

And being girls without a girl's bashfulness, they have no natural charm either.

We went, together with five or six maiko, to the Higashiyama dance hall.

It was close to midnight.

One of the maiko, it seemed, had taken a fancy to one of the dancers there, and had announced that she wanted to dance with him.

The dance hall stood partway up Higashiyama, well away from any town, and was far more beautiful than any dance hall in Tokyo.

It was packed to capacity, but what astonished me was this: the maiko, who had made no impression at all chattering away or dancing in the teahouse rooms, now that they were mixed in among the crowd of the dance hall, overwhelmed everyone around them, standing out with a splendor that seemed to blaze.

That is to say, the maiko's distinctive kimono, the trailing darari sash, overwhelmed the men in Western suits, overwhelmed the girls in evening gowns, and left even the Westerners looking utterly unremarkable.

I was rather struck with admiration — indeed, a thing that carries tradition behind it does possess a power all its own.

I have always felt the same thing whenever I watch sumo.

The yobidashi's call, followed by the referee's announcement, and then the wrestlers bow to each other, stamp their feet in the shiko, take the water, scatter the salt with unhurried grandeur, and settle into their crouch.

They rise and reset, glare at each other for a while, and then, unhurried still, reach again for a handful of salt.

The wrestlers on the dohyo overwhelm the whole of the Kokugikan.

Set beside the wrestlers on the ring, the tens of thousands of spectators, and even the great edifice of the Kokugikan itself, seem far too small, far too meager.

Compare this to baseball, and the difference between the two becomes perfectly clear.

What an expanse that ground is.

The nine players are overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of the field, driven and chased about it, and beside the tens of thousands of spectators they look pitifully powerless.

Set against the size of the ground, the players look meager enough to be mistaken for grass-cutting laborers; it feels less as though they are playing than as though they are being chased about, breathless.

When I once saw Babe Ruth and his party play, the impression, I must admit, was different.

Their seasoned, crowd-pleasing showmanship dominated the field, and the vastness of the ground no longer stood out.

Even if they did not entirely overwhelm the ground, they at least stood as its equal.

And it was not simply a matter of physique.

Even among sumo wrestlers, not all of them are giants.

Nor, again, is it necessarily a matter of technique.

It is, one might say, the weight of tradition.

Because of that, they overwhelm the ring, overwhelm the great edifice of the Kokugikan, overwhelm the tens of thousands of spectators.

And yet the weight of tradition alone cannot sustain an eternal life.

Even if the maiko's kimono overwhelms a dance hall, even if the ritual of the sumo wrestler overwhelms the Kokugikan, the weight of tradition alone cannot let the maiko or the wrestler sustain an eternal life.

Without substance enough to sustain that weight, there is nothing for it but to perish in the end.

The question is not tradition, not weight — it is substance.

Until I found a room in Fushimi, I stayed for some three weeks at Oki's second house; that house was in Saga, and even when the sky over Kyoto proper was clear, Mount Atago drew down snow, and around here it would flurry every single day.

About thirty ken from Oki's house there stood a strange shrine.

It was called Kurumazaki Shrine, and though it enshrines some man of the Kiyohara clan, apparently a scholar of some kind, it is, quite blatantly, a god of money-making.

In front of the main hall there was a fenced-off area, and within it tens of thousands of small round stones lay heaped into a mountain.

One writes on a stone the sum of money one wishes for, along with one's name and date of birth, and offers it here, making one's prayer — or so it is said.

There were stones asking for fifty thousand yen, and there were sad little stones asking for a mere thirty, and, rarely, stones written out in careful detail — such a monthly salary, such a bonus, a raise of such an amount.

On the night of Setsubun, by the light of the sacred bonfire still smoldering down, I picked up these stones one by one and read them — but for a man away from home, with no fixed house anywhere under heaven, staking his whole life on a single pen and forever fighting off a confidence apt to crumble at any moment, they were not pleasant stones to read.

Makino Shin'ichi was a peculiar man, one who could never simply walk past a shrine or temple.

He would invariably bow in solemn reverence, and if there hung a rope for ringing some great jangling bell, he would ring it, offer up his coin, and stand for a while with his eyes closed in the deepest bow.

It made no difference what sect the temple belonged to.

He was terribly shy, a man who hated doing even the smallest thing that might draw attention to himself in public, and yet this alone was the exception — he did it as though he simply could not help himself.

Once, out for a walk with his son Hideo, he stopped by my place, and the three of us went to Ikegami Honmon-ji; there he urged Hideo forward to the main hall, had him offer up a coin, and father and son bowed together in solemn reverence — it looked as though he were trying to bind some nameless, desperate prayer into his own blood, and it was painful to watch.

Those stones, this stone, that I read by the light of the Setsubun fire.

Of course such sentiment, such feeling, could hardly have been deep, nor could it have been intense.

And yet, even now, I remember it vividly.

And through those days when snow fell every day on the bamboo groves, I wandered aimlessly among the temples of Saga and Arashiyama, tramping as far as the depths of Kiyotaki and deep into the graveyards of Ogurayama, but Tenryu-ji and Daikaku-ji left me with nothing but a hollow, chilly displeasure, and remain in my memory not at all.

Directly behind Kurumazaki Shrine stood a wretchedly run-down shack whose name alone, the Arashiyama Theater, sounded impressive.

Around the theater there was nothing but fields, with houses scattered thinly here and there.

On the road before the theater at dusk, a drunken farmer slept atop an empty ox-cart while the ox walked on wherever it pleased.

When I first arrived in Kyoto and was walking about with the car driver, the two of us peering here and there in search of Oki's house, I saw a flyer for the Arashiyama Theater hanging from a telephone pole, announcing Byoyuken Nekohachi, and declaring that if he proved to be an impostor, fifty bales of rice would be given as a prize.

Of course, he could hardly be an impostor.

The Nekohachi of Tokyo goes by "Edoya" —

— Nekohachi.

Needless to say, I went at once to see this Byoyuken Nekohachi perform.

It was entertaining.

Byoyuken Nekohachi was a huge man who looked as though he had real physical strength and a thoroughly disreputable face, and he knew no art whatsoever besides his impressions.

There was a variety act in which a woman in kimono suddenly hiked her robe up to her hips and danced, and other things besides, and at the very end Nekohachi appeared.

His entrance was a splendid thing: he wore a fine formal kamishimo, and the table before him was draped with a magnificent curtain that would not have looked out of place beside Ungetsu's own.

And then, with a strange smile that seemed to say anyone spoiling for a fight should feel free to come at him, he swept his eyes over the audience: You have all come to see me, well done, I trust you found it amusing.

— and come again tomorrow night, he went on, bringing along even more of your friends, and with words to that effect he brought the thing to a close.

To what end did he drape that splendid curtain over the table, and appear in a formal kamishimo?

He was a truly unique performer.

Troupes of traveling performers generally ran for a single day, three at the very most.

And these traveling performers were not, on the whole, fond of a fight the way Nekohachi was.

If anything, Nekohachi was the exception.

I went to see every new act that came, and would sometimes go two or three times to see the same one; among them was a troupe of farmers from the mountains of Fukui prefecture who formed a company only in winter and toured about, doing manzai comedy, plays, magic tricks — every single one of them outrageously bad at their craft — with the one seasoned middle-aged man, evidently their leader, agonizing over it, and yet caring for the members of his troupe with a solicitude so heartfelt it was painful to watch.

There was one pretty girl of about eighteen among them, and drawing in customers with her was their only means of doing so.

By day they would send this girl, with only a single chaperone, parading along roads with more fields than houses, and then thrust her up onto the stage indiscriminately for manzai, for plays, for dances — and she too was unskilled at her craft, which only made it all the more painful to watch.

I went again to see them the next day, but on the second day there were only fifteen or sixteen spectators, and they cut short the third day's performance and moved on to the next town.

That night, late, I passed behind the theater on my way to eat udon, and found the gate flung wide open, their belongings loaded onto a handcart, and the leader out in the road grilling dried sardines.

Crossing Togetsukyo Bridge in Arashiyama, one finds teahouses lined up one after another; spring is their busy season, but since sightseeing buses stop here for a midday meal, they keep a thin trade going even through the winter.

One evening, out walking with Oki, we thought we would have a drink here and went round from one shop to the next, but there was no light in any of them, no sign of a soul.

At last, at the very end, we found one.

On a winter night, they told us, a customer wandering in was simply unheard of.

There was a gentle proprietress of about forty and a nineteen-year-old maid; since there was no fire elsewhere, we drank huddled around a single brazier in the family's own sitting room, and the maid, who had once been a dancer with a circus troupe, suddenly began talking about the Arashiyama Theater.

The lavatory in the Arashiyama Theater's audience section was, without fail, overflowing with urine, its stench overpowering.

Before relieving ourselves there, we always had to labor to pick out the spot least likely to do us harm.

There were even times one had to wade across a sea of urine simply to reach the trough itself.

If the lavatory in the audience section was like that, one could only imagine the filth of the dressing rooms.

I wonder just how filthy it must be, the maid suddenly blurted out — and there was an intense reality behind those words.

She was an innocent girl.

The hardest thing about the circus troupe, she said, was that in winter she had had to drink soy sauce.

Drinking soy sauce, apparently, warms the body.

And so, whenever she had to go on stage half-naked, they always made her drink it first.

This, she said, was more than she could bear.

In Saga I spent my days writing my novel, almost exclusively.

When night came, I would, more often than not, make my way to the Arashiyama Theater.

The streets of Kyoto, its shrines and temples, its famous sights and historic places, held not the slightest attraction for me.

To sit in the piss-reeking seats of the Arashiyama Theater among fewer than a hundred shivering spectators, laughing at some stupid pun through a yawn — that alone was enough for me.

Oki, somewhat at a loss with a man like me, seems to have decided he would give me a bit of a scare.

He hauled me out by force (it was snowing that day too), and we took a train up along the Hozu River to a place called Kameoka, in Tanba.

This was the old Kameyama, the site of Akechi Mitsuhide's castle.

On the ruins of that castle had stood the imposing headquarters of the Omoto religion.

It had just been charged with lese-majeste and blown up with dynamite.

We set out to go and see it.

The old castle site had a moat running round the hill, and from top to bottom, even down in the dry moat, shattered roof tiles from the blast lay piled and crumbled everywhere.

It was a vast, desolate ruin, without a single tree or blade of grass left standing, without so much as a stray dog wandering through.

A wooden fence had been put up all around it, and something like barbed wire strung on top of that besides, with a watch post standing some way off; but having come rattling all this way (not that far, really) along the roads of Tanba for this very purpose, I told myself I could hardly fail to accomplish it, and so I climbed over the wire and stepped into the ruins of Onisaburo's dream.

Standing at the top, one could see, spread out at a glance, the town of Kameoka and the small plain hemmed in by the mountains of Tanba.

The snow had grown heavier, and was beginning to settle on the shattered tiles of the ruin.

Anything of real value had been confiscated before the blast and left no trace at all; only, up among the tiles at the top, there were indeed a few tiles worked with a pattern of gold thread, and the head of a stone statue about the size of a sake cask lay rolling down the stone steps, and around the many small rooms halfway up the hill — where, one supposed, the thirty-odd concubines who had served Onisaburo once lived — a bit of the inner courtyard's scenery still remained, and there too several stone statues lay smashed.

In any case, it had been smashed to pieces with a thoroughness upon thoroughness.

We climbed back over the wire, walked the road along the moat, and went into a teahouse at the edge of town, where we drank a local sake ill-suited to the name of that clear stream, the Hozu River; and then a horse-driver appeared, tied up his horse, and he too began drinking Hozugawa.

The horse-driver was on his way home from work, having bought up scrap paper here and there along the way, and he was grumbling that the profit on scrap paper wasn't worth so much as a single bottle of sake, what a wretched business it all was, and going through bottle after bottle as he said it — he seemed to want to say something to us, but also to be thoroughly frightened of doing so.

In time he got drunk enough to speak up, and asked: are you gentlemen down here from Tokyo on official business?

When we answered, indeed we are, he was overcome, bowing five or six times and groaning under his breath.

As we talked it became clear: he had taken us for detectives sent out on some secret mission.

Oki was got up in a narrow-sleeved overcoat and a flat cap, the very picture of a dissolute young merchant's son, while I was in a padded robe worn loose, swinging a walking stick, with no overcoat at all despite the falling snow.

Seeing a pair as strange as that stroll unhurriedly out of a forbidden area, climbing right over the barbed wire, he had followed us out of sheer morbid curiosity.

Now that he mentioned it, indeed, even the watchman had held back from us.

We had wandered the ruins for about an hour, and the watchman, sweeping in front of his post the while, would spin hastily around and pretend not to see us whenever we turned his way.

We played along as detectives and asked him about the state of the Omoto faithful still in hiding, and the horse-driver, drunk as he was, went suddenly pale and began to stammer, saying he did know a thing or two, but he himself had never done anything wrong, so please, whatever else, spare him that question — bowing over and over as though he were sitting in an interrogation room.

Manpuku-ji at Obakusan in Uji is a temple founded by Ingen, and Ingen is said to have held that the essential principle of temple architecture is solemn grandeur, and that its form must be arranged so as to elevate the worldly hearts of the faithful.

He is also said to have held that because people grow closer through eating and drinking together, meals too are of great importance.

And indeed, the dining hall at Manpuku-ji is a truly imposing structure, and its fucha cuisine is famous throughout the land.

Though, to be sure, linking meals and fellowship in this way is said to be a general custom throughout China, and may not be a notion peculiar to Ingen alone.

I know absolutely nothing of the engineering side of architecture, but at the very least, the first and foremost characteristic of temple architecture is this: a temple is not a house.

Here there is not only nothing to suggest a worldly life — every effort of attention is concentrated on expressing its very opposite, an unworldly frame of thought.

And so it is only natural that the precincts of a Shin sect temple, which affirms worldly life itself as religion, should reek at once of the mundane.

And yet the temples of the Shin sect (the two Hongan-ji in Kyoto) borrow, unaltered, a style of temple architecture that has from ancient times suggested a solitary frame of thought, and try to apply it to a doctrine of their own that affirms worldly life — and so they are unsettled, and vulgar.

There is nothing at all wrong with a thing that ought to be vulgar being vulgar; the point is only that it needs a vulgarity that is its own, unique to itself.

Kyoto is a place crammed with temples, crammed with famous sights and historic places; walk two or three cho in any direction and you run straight into some great temple or shrine precinct.

If you mean to stay about a week, it is better to walk about at random, wherever your feet happen to take you, rather than deciding on a destination beforehand.

One thing after another of apparent significance will appear, and if something catches your interest even a little, you can always ask its name, or take a proper look at it then.

It is a small enough town that walking it corner to corner amounts to nothing much.

That is how I walked it, from time to time.

I walked the mountain pass road running from Fukakusa through Daigo, the village of Ono, to Yamashina, and as for the city streets, since it is a town where you need never worry about losing your way no matter where you walk, there was a time I set out on foot from Fushimi and, by evening, found myself, to my own surprise, run up against Kitano Tenjin.

But whenever I went out into the town, it was for one of two reasons only: to seek pleasure, or to seek solitude.

And for a stroll of that kind, a temple precinct was certainly suitable — though only to the extent that it was more restful than dodging traffic on a busy street.

To be sure, a temple, as architecture in itself, tries to suggest something solitary.

There is a deliberate intent to sever every connection with the everyday mind, the worldly mind — to call up no thought of cooking smells or of wife and children.

And yet, however hard one strives to give that idea concrete form in architecture, the result falls immeasurably short of the idea itself.

A Japanese garden, a landscape of groves and springs, is surely not simply an imitation of nature.

It seems, rather, an attempt to give the solitary thought and spirit expressed in works like Southern School painting a real, physical expression in groves and springs.

The architecture of the tea room, or a garden of groves and springs (and the same holds for temple architecture too), is, so to speak, the expression of an idea rather than an imitation of nature — it is the creation of nature; and a constraint such as the narrowness of the site is, in short, the same kind of thing as the constraint of the canvas in a painting.

But when one considers the solitude of the vast, boundless sea, the solitude of the desert, the solitude of a great forest or a wide plain, one cannot help realizing that the solitude of a garden of groves and springs, however cleverly it is contrived, amounts, in the end, to precious little.

What is the rock garden of Ryoan-ji trying to express?

What idea is it trying to attach itself to?

Taut praises the black-and-white wallpaper of the shoin at Shugakuin Detached Palace to the skies, calling it an expression of the sound of a waterfall — but that one must resort to such a strained explanation merely to make one's appreciation add up is a pitiful thing.

In the end, a garden of groves and springs, or a tea room, is the same sort of thing as a Zen monk's enlightenment — a castle in the air, built upon a Zen hypothesis.

What is the Buddha? — one asks.

And the answer comes: a shit-scraping stick.

Set a single stone in a garden, and they will tell you: this is a shit-scraping stick, but it is also the Buddha.

It is fine if you look at it and think, this might be the Buddha — but if you look at it and see nothing but a shit-scraping stick, then it is finished.

For in fact, the sheer obviousness that a shit-scraping stick is nothing but a shit-scraping stick carries a persuasive force that outstrips any Zen convention.

It makes no difference how deep a solitude or how profound a sabi the rock garden of Ryoan-ji expresses, how far it reaches into the depths of Zen — nor does it matter what idea or thought the arrangement of the stones is meant to connect to.

In short, when we think of the boundless nostalgia of an endless sea, or the great sunset over a desert, and the emotion the rock garden gives us falls short of that, then we may simply ignore the rock garden without the least hesitation.

To say that it is impossible to fit an infinite ocean or an infinite plateau inside a garden is beside the point.

Basho left the garden behind, and found — and made — his own garden within nature itself.

It is not only that his life loved travel — one can say that his haiku themselves stepped outside the garden-like and made a garden of great nature.

In that garden there is sometimes nothing but a single chinquapin tree, sometimes nothing burning but summer grasses, sometimes nothing but a rock and the cry of cicadas seeping into it.

In this garden there is no stone weighted down with meaning, no artfully twisted pine — it is, in itself, a direct landscape, and at the same time, a direct idea.

And it is, by a good deal, more beautiful than the rock garden of Ryoan-ji.

That said, to actually go and build the same garden out of nothing but a single chinquapin tree or a patch of summer grass is a proposition utterly out of the question.

And so the sense that it is out of the question to build "something eternal"

into a garden or a building is a resignation that has existed in Japan since ancient times.

This does not mean that a building is "not eternal" merely because it will eventually burn down in a fire.

That is not what is meant.

That buildings burn and men eventually die, and life is therefore like foam on water — that is the thought of the Hojoki,

and Taut loved the Hojoki,

but in truth, this man Taut's own thought never amounted to anything beyond that level.

But the resignation that Basho's garden cannot actually be built, the despair at the limits of human artifice — and the attitude toward life that grows out of it, giving no thought whatever to house, garden, or furnishings — this was a stance especially favored by Japan's truly substantial spiritual men.

Taigado had no studio of his own, and Ryokan did not even need a temple.

And yet it was not that they made resignation to poverty the essence of their way of life.

If anything, in spirit they were far too greedy, far too extravagant, far too aristocratic.

That is to say, it was not that a studio or a temple was meaningless to them; rather, standing on the position that the absolute thing could never exist, they rejected every half-measure and chose instead the cleanliness of having nothing at all.

The essence of the tea room lies in its simplicity.

And yet it is not the product of a spirit that holds nothing is better than something.

To the spirit that holds nothing is better than something, every particle of deliberate care is itself filth, itself a kind of chatter.

However much the alcove may affect a natural simplicity, the very care spent on affecting it is already the thing that nothing-is-better-than-something rejects.

To the spirit that holds nothing is better than something, the simple tea room and the Toshogu Shrine at Nikko are both alike products of the same "something" —

and, in the end, birds of the same feather.

Seen from this spirit, there is no distinction to be drawn between the Katsura Detached Palace as simple and refined and the Toshogu Shrine as vulgar.

Both alike are mere chatter, buildings that no "aristocrat of the spirit" —

— could bear to contemplate for eternity.

And yet, though the cold, critical spirit that holds nothing is better than something can exist, an art of nothing-is-better-than-something cannot itself exist.

There can be no such thing as an art that does not exist.

And so, if one sets that spirit of nothing-is-better-than-something aside and tries, for the moment, to return to some tangible beauty, it would only be natural to reject the unnatural simplicity of the tea room and instead look for its flowering at the very extreme of extravagance and vulgarity, in a splendor built out to the very limit of human effort.

If both the simple and the splendid are equally vulgar, then rather than the misery of trying to deny vulgarity and yet remaining vulgar in spite of oneself, the freewheeling ease of being vulgar precisely because one meant to be vulgar is, if anything, the virtue to prize.

I see this spirit in Hideyoshi.

Just how much understanding, how much power of appreciation, did this man Hideyoshi actually have when it came to art?

And to what degree did he actually interfere, hands-on, in the many branches of art he commissioned?

Hideyoshi himself was no craftsman, and one would expect each artisan's individuality to have been given free rein — and yet the art produced under his commission has, in fact, one thoroughly consistent character running through it.

That is the ultimate of artifice, the greatest extravagance imaginable, and so long as it stays on that trajectory, it has the sweep to swallow clear and murky both.

When he built a castle, he hauled in stones of preposterous size.

As for the wall at Sanjusangendo, it is a giant among walls, and as for the folding screens at Chishaku-in, Hideyoshi sitting before them must have looked like a small monkey amid the flowers.

There seems to be no art in it whatsoever.

It is an enterprise carried out by the single most vulgar will imaginable.

And yet it has a composure that cannot be denied.

There is a solidity to it.

One can say, in fact, that his spirit was, in truth, that of a

"ruler of all under heaven."

Ieyasu too seized the realm, but his spirit was not that of a ruler of all under heaven.

And though there were many shoguns who seized the realm, Hideyoshi alone possessed the spirit of a true ruler of all under heaven.

Both the Golden Pavilion and the Silver Pavilion are, on the whole, products far removed from that spirit of a ruler of all under heaven.

They were, one might say, the hobby of a wealthy man of refined taste.

In Hideyoshi there is neither refinement nor hobby.

There is only the expression of a maniacal will that would not be satisfied unless every single thing he made was the very best under heaven.

There is no trace of hesitation in him, not a single sign of ever having held himself back, even one step.

He wanted every beautiful woman in the realm for himself, and when he was refused, he thought nothing of killing even Sen no Rikyu.

He was in a position to throw every tantrum imaginable.

And, in fact, he threw every tantrum imaginable.

And the unruly, insolent solidity that belongs to a spoiled child blossoms, consistently, at the scale of a ruler of all under heaven, throughout the many things he left behind.

There is only this regret: that even the scale of a ruler of all under heaven remains, in the Japanese way, a small one.

And one can also glimpse, in him, the nihilism of a ruler of all under heaven who could throw every tantrum he wished and yet still could not bend everything entirely to his will.

As a rule, splendor carried to its extreme is always trailed by a strange sadness, and something of the same clings to the traces Hideyoshi left behind — and there is, besides, something in them that defies easy measure.

The Taiko Wall of Sanjusangendo survives today in only the smallest fraction, but it is a work that gave almost no thought whatever to any symmetry with Sanjusangendo itself.

If there is any symmetry in it at all, it looks rather as though it were vying, pointlessly, over sheer size and composure; a wall, by its nature, ought only to exist by virtue of the building it encloses — but this wall alone stands entirely on its own, with Sanjusangendo nowhere in its sights.

And that self-sufficient strength, that composure, stands above Sanjusangendo itself.

And in the distinctive curve that keeps its enormous size from ever looking unnatural, there is a beauty surpassing even Sanjusangendo's own.

When I went to Kameoka, I imagined that Onisaburo might, in this modern age, be a man who had given concrete form — in an extremely outlandish way, but concrete form nonetheless — to that same tantrum-throwing spirit of Hideyoshi's, and I had gone to the ruins of his dream with some small expectation; but the scale of it was too outrageously petty, and it was nothing more, nothing less, than vulgarity itself, plain and unadorned.

It was utterly meager, utterly impoverished.

Needless to say, there was not so much as a trace of that sorrow which seeps out of splendor carried to its very limit.

Give me a cask of wine, sings one poet, and what is an emperor to me? sings another — I would be a shoe, trodden beneath that girl's foot.

Among the poets of the Man'yoshu, among the followers of Anacreon, in China, in Persia — wherever culture has existed, such poets and such thoughts have always existed too.

And yet a thought of this kind is tedious.

It is not simply a matter of what is an emperor to me — the truth is that such fellows have no imperial quality in them to begin with, and even if they were made emperor, there is not one splendid thing among them they could actually accomplish.

What moves me is the sight of a vulgar man living out, honestly and to the full, his own desperate wish as a vulgar man, and a small man living out his as a small man, each remaining exactly what he is.

Art is the same.

It must be honest, whole, and true to itself.

It is not that the temple exists first and the priest comes after — it is that the priest exists, and the temple exists because of him.

Even without a temple, Ryokan exists.

If Buddhism is something we need, then what we need is the priest — not the temple.

Even if every old temple in Kyoto and Nara burned to the ground, the Japanese tradition would not shift an inch.

Even Japanese architecture itself would not shift an inch.

If it is needed, one need only build it anew.

A barracks will do just fine.

The temples of Kyoto and Nara are all much of a muchness, and leave no deep impression on my memory; and yet, even now, the coldness of those stones at Kurumazaki Shrine remains on my hand, and I cannot forget that tunnel of more than a mile of gaudily vulgar red torii gates at Fushimi Inari.

They are ugly at a glance, not beautiful in the least, and yet, tied as they are to men's desperate prayers, there is something in them that strikes the heart, honestly and without pretense.

This is not the kind of thing where

"nothing is better than something" applies — however petty and vulgar the manner of its being, it was a thing that had to exist.

And I have no wish to rest in the rock garden of Ryoan-ji, but there are times I do want to sit lost in thought while watching the fake revue at the Arashiyama Theater.

A human being loves only human beings.

There can be no such thing as an art without human beings in it.

I have no wish to rest beneath a grove of trees that holds no nostalgia.

I consider "Higaki" —

to be literature of the first rank, world-class, and yet I have no wish to actually see it performed on the Noh stage.

Because I cannot bear to sit through, bored, some form of expression or manner of chanting that no longer connects to us directly, waiting patiently for at least one grain of gold dust to turn up.

The stage I can imagine for myself, and build for myself — that is enough.

The genius Zeami is eternally new, but whether the Noh stage, its manner of chanting, its forms of expression, are eternally new as well is doubtful.

What is old, what is tedious, ought naturally either to perish or to be reborn.

III. On the House

For the past ten years now, I have lived alone for the most part.

I have lived alone in this street or that of Tokyo, in Kyoto, in the little town of Toride in Ibaraki prefecture, in Odawara.

And yet a house (a single room will do as well) always trails a certain regret behind it, even when one lives there entirely alone.

I leave the house for a while, drink outside, fool around with women, and sometimes simply come back from some trip with nothing to show for it.

And then, without fail, there is regret.

There is no mother to scold me, no wife or children to grow angry.

It is a life in which even greeting the neighbors is unnecessary.

And yet, at the moment of going home, I can never escape a strange sadness, a strange guilt.

On the way home I stop by a friend's place.

There, that sadness, that guilt, is entirely absent.

And so, quite ordinarily, I make the rounds of four or five friends' houses, and then head back to my own.

And then, sure enough, the sadness, the guilt, rises up again.

"Going home" —

— is a strange sort of demon.

So long as one does not

"go home," there is neither regret nor sadness.

But once one does "go home,"

then, wife or no wife, children or no children, mother or no mother, there is simply no escaping regret and sadness.

Within the very act of going home, there always dwells a demon that makes one look back.

To escape this regret, this sadness, the answer, in short, is simply not to go home.

And to always, only, move forward.

Napoleon always advanced, and never once retreated — not until Russia.

Hitler has never once retreated, but even a great genius on that scale, I think, cannot escape his own house.

And so long as one has a house, one must, without fail, go home to it.

And once one goes home, surely, I think, he cannot escape that same strange regret and sadness that I myself cannot escape.

But are those great geniuses made of a different steel than I am?

No — precisely because they are made of a different steel, all the more so..., I think.

And I find myself thinking about the private musings of that pale man of steel, alone in his room.

There is no mother to scold him, no wife to grow angry, and yet, when he comes home, he is scolded all the same.

A person, even living a life of solitude in which he need answer to no one, is never truly free.

And it is out of just this kind of place, I believe, that literature is born.

"Freedom for Us"

— there exists a motion picture called that.

It appears to be a satire on mechanized civilization.

Every day a Sunday, no bosses and no factory hands, spending one's days fishing or drinking and idling about — that, it suggests, would be free and joyful.

But freedom is not so simple a thing as that.

Even with no one to answer to, a person cannot be free.

For one thing, if there is nothing to do every single day but idle about, idling loses its special quality and ceases to be enjoyable in the least.

Pleasure exists because pain exists; if there were nothing but pleasure, it would be the same as if the whole world had turned into nothing but water — and pleasure would lose the very thing that makes it pleasure.

Man must die.

It is because death exists, presumably, that joy and anger, sorrow and delight, exist as well; but if it were settled that one would never, ever die, that would be an unspeakably tedious business.

Because there would be no particular meaning left in being alive.

"Freedom for Us" —

— never mind how foolish that picture is; setting Rene Clair aside, when I consider that even the men called social reformers hold, in the end, an idea of freedom scarcely any better than this one, I cannot help but put ever deeper faith in literature.

I believe literature can do anything.

For literature is the thing that, even with no mother to scold you, no wife to grow angry, still scolds you when you come home.

It is from just that place that literature sets out.

And so it is also my conviction that the day one can no longer trust literature is the day one can no longer trust human beings at all.

IV. On Beauty

Three years ago I lived in a town called Toride.

It is a small town along the Tone River, and had no eating places besides a pork-cutlet shop and a soba shop, so I ate pork cutlet every single day, and by the sixth month I had grown thoroughly sick of it; but it was my habit, generally twice a month, to go into Tokyo and come home drunk.

Though, to be sure, the town had its own sake shop.

But there was nothing like an oden stall — it was an ordinary sake shop, and one sat on the raised threshold there and drank sake by the cup.

This they called "tonpachi" —

— written with characters meaning "striking eight,"

or so it is said to mean.

That is, a full sho comes out to no more than eight cups.

In other words, each cup holds more than a go, brimming over — meaning the pours are generous.

The farmers of the village would say, "How about a tonpachi?"

— just like that.

I made a habit of it, naturally; a cup went for fifteen sen one day, seventeen the next, varying by the day according to whatever the shop had paid for its stock, and friends who came from Tokyo would drink it with a grimace.

From this town to Ueno takes no more than fifty-six minutes, but the train crosses three great rivers — the Tone, the Edo, and the Arakawa — and on the bank of one of them stood Kosuge Prison.

The train runs on, looking out at this huge, modern-looking structure.

An extremely tall concrete wall towers up; the prison building spreads its wings out grandly in the shape of a cross, and at the crossing point rises a jagged watchtower higher even than a great factory smokestack.

Of course, there is not a single spot of aesthetic ornament anywhere on this great structure; from every angle it looks exactly like what it is, a prison, and could not possibly be mistaken for anything else — and yet it is a sight that strangely draws the heart.

This is different from being struck by its intimidating quality, tied up with the idea of a prison as such.

It is, if anything, a feeling closer to nostalgia.

In short, in the end, it draws my heart in through its beauty, somewhere in it.

Neither the scenery of the Tone River nor Lake Teganuma ever drew my heart as much as this prison did.

Is it really beautiful, I wondered, from time to time — truly?

There is one other experience like this, still clearly lodged in my memory.

It is more than ten years ago now.

I was still a student then, and did not drink at that time; my friends and I had just started up a coterie magazine together, and since we didn't drink, it naturally happened that we would keep on walking and arguing for five or six hours at a stretch.

Because of that, we walked the streets in every direction, wherever our feet happened to take us.

By the middle of the night, and even before it, we were repeatedly questioned by police officers; it was an era when the leftist movement was in full swing, and we were interrogated with thorough, nagging persistence.

On the whole, the very fact that several of us were out walking late at night without having had a drop to drink was, if anything, what made us suspicious.

Not that this state of affairs made me reform my ways and turn into a heavy drinker, mind you.

We often walked from Ginza to Tsukiji, took the ferry, and crossed over to Tsukudajima.

That ferry ran all night, so there was no worry of being stranded.

Tsukudajima had, along both sides of a dark, narrow lane about one ken wide, houses reading "Tsukumo" —

— or "Tsukuichi" —

— lined up one after another, probably shops selling tsukudani preserves; the whole place had the feel of a fishing village, and stepping off the ferry, one suddenly felt as though one had traveled to some far-off place.

It was hard to believe that Ginza lay just across the water.

I loved that feeling of being on a journey; and for one thing, there was a dry-ice factory near St. Luke's Hospital where one of the magazine's members worked, which gave us many occasions to head that way.

Now, this dry-ice factory — it drew my heart in a strange way.

In a factory district it might have been an entirely unremarkable building.

There were things like cranes and rails, concrete to the left and right, and high overhead something like an elevated rail line jutted out, running on from the warehouse — here too there was not the slightest aesthetic consideration at all, and the whole structure was built up out of nothing but equipment answering to bare necessity.

Seen in the midst of an ordinary town, it looked grotesque, a strange and alien sight — and yet one could tell it was beautiful, head and shoulders beyond anything around it.

St. Luke's Hospital, that grand, imposing building.

Beside it, the factory was a small, meager-looking thing; and yet, set against the dense, massive presence of that factory, St. Luke's Hospital was nothing but a trifling piece of children's handiwork.

This factory bit into my chest; it had a broad, generous beauty that led on and on into some far-off nostalgia.

Kosuge Prison, and the dry-ice factory.

I have occasionally found myself thinking about some connection between the two, but beyond the fact that both of them possess a robust sense of beauty that stirs my nostalgia, I had never made any real effort to think it through.

It is nothing at all like the beauty of Horyu-ji or Byodo-in.

Moreover, the beauty of Horyu-ji or Byodo-in is the kind that requires one to keep antiquity, or history, in mind, and to talk oneself into some sort of understanding of it first.

It is not a beauty that strikes the heart directly, that bites straight into one's gut.

There is a certain insufficiency in it somewhere that one has to make up for before one can be satisfied.

Kosuge Prison and the dry-ice factory struck me far more directly, with nothing needing to be made up for, and had the power to lead my heart straight into nostalgia.

Why that should be, I had simply never stopped to think.

One early spring I took a trip to a port town at the tip of a peninsula.

In that small inlet, one of our Empire's invincible destroyers lay at rest.

It was a small warship, one that gave off a certain modest impression, but at a single glance its beauty shook my soul.

I rested on the beach and gazed, unwearied, at that black, modest mass of iron floating on the water, and, bringing together these three things — Kosuge Prison, the dry-ice factory, and the warship — I found myself calling to mind the true nature of their beauty.

Why are these three things so beautiful?

In them there is no beauty whatsoever that has been worked in for the sake of being beautiful.

There is not one pillar, not one piece of steel, added from the standpoint of beauty, and not one pillar, not one piece of steel, removed on the grounds that it was not beautiful.

Only what was necessary was placed, and placed only where it was necessary.

And everything unnecessary was stripped away, so that the form that came into being was the one demanded by necessity alone, and by nothing else.

It is a form that resembles nothing but itself.

Necessity twists a pillar without hesitation, strings steel about in jagged, uneven lines, sends a rail jutting out suddenly from overhead.

Everything comes down, simply, to necessity.

No inherited notion of any other kind could ever stand as a force able to obstruct this inevitable generation born of necessity.

And so here, three things came into being that resemble nothing else at all.

Literature, my own work, is exactly the same.

There must not be a single line written merely to make the thing look beautiful.

Beauty is never born out of a place where beauty was consciously aimed at.

What absolutely must be written, what there is a necessity to write — one must write it out to the very end in answer to that inescapable necessity alone.

Simply "necessity" —

— that alone, first to last, one thing or a hundred, from beginning to end, nothing but "necessity"

— nothing else.

And it is the distinct form demanded by this "inescapable substance" —

— that gives birth to beauty.

Set up even a single pillar from outside the demands of substance, standing on some aesthetic or poetic footing instead, and it becomes, at once, nothing but a trifling piece of handicraft.

This is the spirit of prose, the true essence of the novel.

And, at the same time, it is the great road of all art.

The question is whether what you set out to write was truly a necessity.

Whether it is a jewel so entirely your own that you could not rest without giving it expression, even at the price of your own life.

And whether, in answer to that demand, by your own particular hand, everything unnecessary has been stripped away, and it has been given expression that is truly, exactly right.

Between the beauty of Owens sprinting the hundred meters and the movement of a second-rate runner lies the difference between a movement's beauty perfectly answering to necessity, and an awkwardness that cannot fully answer it.

When I was in middle school, it was taken for granted that a hundred-meter runner had to have a body that was lean, light, long-legged, and smart-looking.

A heavy, fat man was shunted off exclusively to the throwing events, hoisting the shot put or swinging the hammer around in some corner of the field.

That was still true up through the era of men like Paddock and Simpson, who came to Japan themselves.

But from around the time Metcalfe and Tolan appeared, the rule was revised: what the sprint finally demanded was the acceleration of a heavy body, and the smart, slender build was pushed off toward the middle distances instead.

I once went out to Haneda Airfield and saw a captured I-16 fighter plane on display, and no sooner had it appeared at the left end of the field than it had vanished off to the right — a speed that left me utterly astonished.

Japanese fighter planes put their emphasis on maneuverability in dogfights and treat speed as secondary, so there is simply no comparison on that score.

The I-16 has a short fuselage, is stubby and thick, has a solid, heavy weight to it — and answers perfectly to the physical requirements of a modern-style hundred-meter runner.

There is not a trace of smartness in it anywhere — it is built to look thoroughly ungainly — and yet, in the beauty of speed with which its weight and acceleration cut through the wind, it was beyond any comparison with a smart passenger plane.

Smartness in mere appearance alone can never amount to a thing of true beauty.

Everything is a matter of substance.

Beauty for beauty's sake is never honest, and in the end is not a real thing at all.

In short, it is empty.

And an empty thing can never strike a person through any truth of its own; in the end, it is a thing that makes no difference whether it exists or not.

If Horyu-ji and Byodo-in both burned down, it would cause no trouble at all.

If it is necessary, then let Horyu-ji be torn down and a railway station built in its place.

Our people's glorious culture and tradition will never perish because of that.

The quiet sunset over Musashino is gone, but the evening sun now falls instead on rows upon rows of shanty roofs, and even on a clear day the dust turns the sky hazy, and in place of the moonlit landscape neon signs now shine.

So long as our actual life has put its very soul down here, how could this fail to be beautiful?

Look — in the sky planes fly, on the sea steel runs, and along the elevated lines the trains go thundering by.

So long as our life is healthy, then even if we ape some cheap Western-style shack and preen ourselves over it, our culture remains healthy.

Our tradition remains healthy too.

If it is necessary, then turn the park upside down and make it a vegetable garden.

If that is truly necessary, then true beauty will, without fail, be born there too.

Because there, true life exists.

And so long as one is truly living, there is no need to be ashamed of aping others.

So long as it is true life, even mere aping possesses the very same excellence as originality.