Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Japanese Diary

I am more and more convinced that work is the greatest evil of existence. The recent long hiatus in my blog is due almost entirely to work, to the way it decimates your life, squatting on your time, sapping your energy and suffocating any will to live. I loathe it. There are so many things that I meant to write in my blog, but for which I never had the time, sometimes I can hardly bear to think about it, especially when I realise that this is really a microcosm of what happens in life generally.

Anyway, in a futile attempt to catch up, I shall transcribe here a diary entry from some weeks back, when I was still in Japan:

4th November, 2005

I am in Japan. The four of us left England on the 26th of October at about seven thirty PM and arrived in Japan the next day at about two thirty local time.

Since our arrival I have re-experienced over the course of a few days something like a compacted version of all that I experienced in Japan before. Actually, it started on the plane. We flew with ANA - All Nippon Airlines - and I noticed there was no vegetarian option. It's been a long time since I've flown as a vegetarian, so I can't remember if that is true of other airlines, too, but it reminded me how difficult it is to be vegetarian in Japan, and this presentiment has proved true; I have had to give up my vegetarianism for the duration. Of course, this also relates to the infuriating way in which the Japanese place more importance on image than actuality. When they speak as if Westerners eat nothing but meat and they eat none it drives me mad.

However, that said, my experience this time has, on the whole, been positive. We took a coach from the airport to Ota, and as we started out, I was reminded of my first train journey from Narita airport to Gunma when I came to Japan in the October of 1997. The countryside, on both occasions, appeared attractive and slightly exotic to me, though it was not entirely as I had first expected and contained some elements of disappointment. It's hard to describe this countryside in a concrete way (though concrete is a notable part of it). There was a certain kind of bamboo that gave the jagged hills a peculiar shagginess that fascinated me, but in other ways the landscape was drab and underwhelming. Perhaps it was a certain lack of wildness that gave me this feeling, together with a lack of the pastoral. The countryside was mere garnish, as if it were all part of a model railway set. Even so, there was enough of nature and exoticism about it to inspire me with a sense of nostalgia for an imagined Japan that I had never actually known. This time what was more familiar was the disciplined angularity of the landscape, with the patterned surfaces of concrete folded into the hills like the shells of giant robot turtles (the kind of creatures you might expect to appear in Japanese animation). I think, this time, I had a sense of foreboding about my visit inspired by the modern elements of the landscape that seemed to rob it of all power of spiritual enchantment. If any lingering sense of enchantment remained, it was concentrated in the susuki (pampas grass) plants that caught the rays of the sinking sun here and there. Even this concentration was a rather ghostly, elusive thing. The feathery ears of the susuki grass seemed more like a memory than something real, and even if you cut one of the stalks and took it home, it would simply become a meaningless object, the faux-memory it embodied having disappeared the moment you tried to grasp it.



As we went on the dreary elements of the modern multiplied, the various symptoms of industrialisation giving Japan the texture of a car showroom forecourt. Roadside cafes, petrol stations with tyres piled high at the side, warehouses and factories and incomprehensible structures of tangled metal emitting steam - all of this thickened until eventually we were in Tokyo, the dreariness now having accumulated to such an extent that an oppressive urban grey stretched from one horizon to another, utterly without anything to relieve it. To someone like myself, born and raised in the Devon countryside, it was a vision of Hell - precisely the Hell that I imagine William Blake foresaw when he wrote of 'dark, Satanic mills'.

It goes without saying that the decimation of nature on such a scale, and the continual greedy consumption that the city represented, made me think despairing thoughts about the fate of the planet and about my own single life, which is contingent upon that fate. I believe I began to read Natsume Soseki's Mon on that coach, which opens with a description of the exhausting, oppressive, imagination-crushing existence led by the main character, Sosuke, in his role as the precursor of the modern salaryman in a Japan that was then newly industrialised. Mercifully, perhaps, my own exhaustion from the long, sleepless flight caught up with me, and I began to nod off.

I think that too many days have passed since then for me to give an account of each. We arrived at Ota at about seven PM and only had time to dine and talk a little before retiring for the night. I seem to remember that the next day was a minor revelation for me. We drove somewhere to have lunch and the dreary modern landscape had become the colourful, playful, postmodern landscape of which Momus seems to speak so often. Usually I find the Japanese landscape extremely sterile, in both senses of the word - antiseptically clean and lacking in the necessary ingredients for the creation of life. The postmodern landscape that Momus describes, however, is linked somehow to Shinto, and therefore to fertility, and I certainly saw something like this in my surroundings as we drove to our destination. It was not the first time I'd enjoyed the same mixture of almost neurotic fastidiousness and higgledy piggledy disorder in the Japanese landscape, but perhaps it was the first time I had linked it to Shinto. But in precisely what way was it linked to Shinto? I'm not sure I can really analyse this impression, but at the same time it occurred to me that because Shinto is originally animistic, it consists in the worship of elemental beings - the spirit of the waterfall, of the tree, of the hill and so on. These are strictly local gods, and magical, in the sense that they spring spontaneously into existence like a kind of mirage. This spontaneity, too, is a link with fertility. I am reminded here of William Burroughs' model for the MU, the Magical Universe, as an alternative to the OGU, the One God Universe. I saw the Shinto gods specifically in the idols and fetishes that exist wherever one goes in Japan. Of course, they are not all considered idols. For example, the manekineko, a kind of cat-doll that ushers in customers at places of business, is probably considered decoration. And yet, I could not help seeing these as a form of idol, a manifestation of Shinto. They could almost be the elemental spirits of the shops, guardians of the various groves of commerce. And as such spirits have an insubstantial, mirage-like quality to them, so do the groves they inhabit, and so does the landscape which all the groves together create.



Looking at the landscape in this way, what was antiseptic merely seems pleasingly fresh, what was barren seems light, bright and unreal. It is indeed a landscape of lightness and shallowness. It is all surface. And this is why it can so often seem like a bad film set - a Tim Burton version of sparkling suburbia with an Asian slant. But shallowness can also be seen as a virtue. Indeed, Basho required of his haiku that they be as light and shallow as a mountain stream, if memory serves me well. And it is just such a lightness and delicacy of touch that I have admired in Japanese literature - a lightness so different to the stodgy earthiness of English literature. In this connection I particularly recall a description in Dickens' David Copperfield. The main character returns to England after many years abroad and is struck by an impression of mud, mud and more mud.

This train of thought leads me to certain things I have been considering recently in connection with Gothic literature. It occurred to me that true Gothic literature has never appeared in Japan because the buildings generally are not made of brick and stone, and are not built to last more than twenty years or so. In Hojoki, buildings are described as bubbles, forming and bursting in a river. This is certainly an expression of the lightness and insubstantiality of the Japanese landscape. Gothic literature, however, requires a land of heavy buildings, built to stand out the centuries, to accumulate damp and ghosts, and to symbolise, finally, the weight of history.

Can philosophy shape a landscape? Can a way of thinking actually create a physical environment that expresses the lightness of a mirage? Or is this all some kind of projection? I am fascinated by the idea that such abstract, seemingly imagined, qualities of a landscape as lightness, insubstantiality and so on, might have some kind of independent reality. That is, they might be the expression of a kind of spirit or philosophy that is general to the country and its history, and not simply a trick of my mind.


Anyway, we arrived at our destination, where we were to have lunch, and there I was to have an encounter with food similar to my encounter with the landscape. But I shall rest my pen tonight and hope to write more later.