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.

All About Me (And Some Slugs)

I've been away from my blog for a while, and I haven't been feeling too great, but I'm in a slightly better mood after noticing that an interview I gave some weeks back is now online, along with a new review of my third collection, Rule Dementia!.

I'm just about to go to bed, though, so I shall leave it at that for now.

Cheers!

PS Who saw the first episode of the new David Attenborough programme tonight? I shall survive in this world a little longer just to watch the rest of the series. Fantastic stuff. Click on this link and play the video clip of the leopard slugs mating. It's like nothing you've ever seen, I promise. There's commentary, too, so turn up the volume.

Postcard from Japan

Dear All,

I have been trying to write in my diary since arriving in Japan, but there has been very little time. It`s just after breakfast now, on Sunday, and I am snatching a few moments to send you a postcard. I don`t think I can talk much about all I have done since arriving. I feel a little as if I am seeing my entire life in Japan (some two and a half years here and there over the last decade) flash before my eyes. However, I will tell you about my daytrip to Tokyo yesterday.

A few days ago, we (I shall refrain from mentioning other people`s names) were looking around the local temple when a young lady struck up conversation with us and offered to show us around Tokyo if we were going that way. Eventually we took up the offer, and as a result, we spent Saturday wandering around Tokyo with her as a guide. We arrived at Asakusa station and so our first stop was the Kaminari Mon, or `Thunder Gate` which leads to the Nakamise market and Sensoji temple. Our guide suggested we take a boat along the Sumida River to Hamarikyu gardens, and so our course was set. On the way, however, I noticed, down an alley, a little cafe called Arizona Kitchen, which I happened to know was one of the haunts of Nagai Kafu. I mentioned this and our guide suggested we have lunch there. On the menu was a strange dish of chicken liver, which, it said, Nagai Kafu used to eat when he came here. Since my vegetarianism has already been ruined by daily life in Japan, I only felt a minor sense of regret in ordering this. I suppose it`s silly, but it made me feel a little closer to one of my personal literary deities. On the wall of the cafe were extracts from Kafu`s diary. "January the 24th. Clear skies. Cloudy later. Dinner at Arizona Kitchen." That sort of thing.



We took the boat and arrived eventually at Hamarikyu gardens. Apparently this area was once known for hawk hunting. No hope of that now, I suppose. Our guide pointed out the recent development in the area, the huge office buildings that now surrounded the gardens, and, blocking the wind from the sea, had made the summers in the area that much hotter. One of the buildings was for an advertising company. Scum of the Earth.



From there we went to Tokyo Tower via Zojoji temple. Zojoji had the most impressive displays of mizugo figures that I`ve ever seen. Mizugo are little effigies erected as memorials to aborted children. As abortion is more or less a method of birth control here in Japan, such statues are numerous. I took a great many photos. One of the statuettes, with a yellow raincoat, reminded me of Nakata Hideo`s film Dark Water.

From Tokyo Tower - a tasteless piece of architectural hubris - we looked down on the metropolis that, our guide reminded us, had all sprung up in the sixty years since the war. Tokyo is ever-changing, to quote from Hojoki, like bubbles forming and bursting in a river. I noted with interest a building with a very strange roof. I was informed it belonged to a cult known as `reiha no hikari`. There was something weirdly futuristic about it.



Our final stop was Ginza, where I managed to buy a copy of Tender Pervert by Momus, which I believe is not now available outside Japan, and also Kate Bush`s Aerial, which I have now listened to in its entirety. What`s it like? Perhaps I`ll tell you, if you ask nicely.

All for now,

Your avuncular homunculus,

Quentin.

Mencius

In my last post, I stated my belief that Chinese culture has little in the way of a concept of global community, and backed this up by mention of the concept of 'guanxi'. The link I provide here gives a very general view of guanxi, but does not explain how it relates to things such as in-group and out-group, and the idea of 'face'. Whether guanxi is a positive or negative aspect of culture is, of course, a matter of perspective, but I believe it is true to say that many Westerners living and doing business in China find guanxi to be close to (if not identical to) nepotism and corruption. Moreover, since they, as foreigners, are not part of the guanxi in-group, they find that it is a cultural feature that militates against them, excluding them from real involvement in Chinese society. It is this idea upon which I based my original statement.



I am aware of certain currents in Chinese philosophy, however, that would seem, certainly if taken at face value, to promote an idea of global community in one form or another. Taoism is one such philosophy. It is possible to interpret it as a kind of pantheism, in which the Tao corresponds to 'god'. The Tao, therefore, is the unity behind the diversity of the 'ten thousand things' which make up creation.

Some time ago, when I was in Japan, I found myself, for some reason, hanging around with a number of Chinese girls, and one of them was a student of Chinese philosophy. She spoke to me about the Chinese concept of 'tian', which is often translated as 'Heaven', but which she said also included the idea of Nature. Before I left Japan, she presented me with a gift - two volumes of the work of the Confucian philosopher and sage, Mencius.

I have often thought of Confucianism and Taoism as opposing philosophies, with the former being secular and dogmatic, and the latter being transcendent and mystical, and, indeed, there are accounts of Lao Zu and Confucious meeting each other, and of the former being a bit too clever for the latter, and the latter going off in a bit of a fit of professional-philosophical jealousy (if I remember aright). However, things are never quite that simple, are they? The T'ai Chi symbol shows a spot of black in the white half of the circle and a spot of white in the black half of the circle. All things partake of the nature of their opposite.



Anyway, I lifted the book of Mencius from my shelf today, perhaps prompted by recent thoughts and wonderings, and read the opening paragraph of the text. I shall attempt a translation here:

Mencius came for the first time to the court of King Hui of Liang.

King Hui spoke: "Great teacher, thou hast not forborne to journey a thousand leagues to come here, dost thou purpose to bring profit to our land?"

Mencius gave reply: "Great king, wherefore speakest thou only of profit? In the governing of a kingdom there is need of naught but benevolence and justice. If the king shall say, 'Whereby might my kingdom profit?' then his lords shall say, 'Whereby might my household profit?' and the officials and common people shall also say, 'Whereby might I profit?', and as above, so below, each shall attempt to snatch that profit for himself, and the land shall come to ill. In a land of ten thousand chariots, the man who slays the king shall be he of the house of a thousand chariots. In the territory of a thousand chariots, the man who slays the lord shall be he of the house of one hundred chariots. A thousand in ten thousand, or a hundred in a thousand, to possess such cannot be said to possess little. And yet, if profit is put first and duty second, none shall be satisfied until he has taken all. He who knows benevolence has never abandoned his parents. He who knows duty has never despised his lord. Great king, speak therefore only of benevolence and justice. Why speakest thou of profit?"

I am made somewhat uneasy by the suggestions of hierarchy here (the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate), and Taoism would say (or so I interpret) that the emphasis on duty only serves to propagate the opposite (for every action an equal and opposite reaction?); but that the above sentiments are far removed from the destructive consumption of today hardly needs pointing out.

By the way, please excuse my clumsy attempts at archaic language. I could not resist. You may find a less pretentious translation here.

Tidings from Twickenham

I am writing an off-the-cuff post (again) because I haven't written anything of substance here for quite some time, and I don't think I will be at leisure to finish any of the mini-essays I have in mind for this blog for some time to come.



Yes, I write to you from Twickenham, cradle of Gothic literature. In fact, I am booked (with a winsome friend) to attend a conference on Gothic literature in the local area, on the 2nd of December. If you read my blog, and you are also in attendance, do come over and talk to me.

I am off work, but still have to deal with a multitude of chores, not least of all the preparation for my upcoming trip to Japan. I depart these shores on the 26th of this month. I will be gone for about three weeks, and don't expect to have much time for blogging during that period.

Well, I have little to say that I can actually say in the time available to me, so I will simply attempt to bring the one or two (or zero point four) people who are actually interested, up to speed with events in my part of Twickenham.

I got up at about nine thirty today, which was earlier than I had expected, and immediately found that there were items of post awaiting me. One of them was to do with travel insurance, one was to do with the student loan that I still have not paid off, and one contained two copies of a German short story anthology in which I have a story. The original title is 'The Cypher', but it is translated as 'Die Nummer'. The original may be found on the Internet, if anyone is interested. Unfortunately, I cannot read German, but I shall, no doubt, compare the translation to the original later, just out of childish curiosity.

After breakfast and ablutions, I went out to post a form for travel insurance, buy a new phonecard, and so on. I have stopped buying the Post Office phonecards, because they're a rip-off. I went instead to a corner shop; they seem to be the phonecard specialists at the moment, selling a greater variety of phonecards than they do porn mags, or almost, anyway.

Then I popped by Langton's Bookshop, not to purchase any books, since I am pretty skint right now, but to talk to the man behind the counter, Mr Jon Foulkes, who has recently read about himself on my blog, and who I must, therefore, refer to carefully from now on. (Hello Jon.) But seriously, if you're the book type (rather than the rugby type) why not pop in to Langton's Bookshop and get a more personal service (oo-er!) than you'd ever get in one of the bigger bookshops, where they all stock the same list of celebrity books. (There you go, free advertising!)

Before finally returning home, I dropped in to Waitrose to buy some carrots, breakfast cereal and fruitbread. I also purchased a copy of The Independent, which I have been reading a great deal recently. I like the angle they have, and especially the fact that they seem more committed to covering environmental issues than other newspapers. The cover story was about a recent environmental report that indicates China as the biggest threat to the environment that the planet has ever known.



The story almost paralysed me with depression, only increasing my feeling that we're all doomed. It's my opinion that the Chinese government care even less about the environment (and even more about money) than the American governnment. There is very little concept of global community within Chinese culture, the concept of guanxi and its related notions placing emphasis on obligation to those with whom you have guanxi (or 'connection'), and leaving you to let everyone else go to Hell. That is my totally honest, non-PC opinion. Shoot me down in flames if you can and must. If the fate of the planet is in the hands of the Tibet-annexing, tiger-exterminating Chinese, then we are really doomed.

They write nice poetry, though.

Well, it's almost four in the afternoon, and I have to write e-mails to sort out what will be happening with the Twickenham writers' group while I'm away in Japan, and to make appointments, and so on and so forth.

I feel that I should leave you with some edifying message, some American-style 'moral of the story', or some BBC-style 'and finally' lighter news item. But really, what is there? I'm doomed, you're doomed. Let's face it, God made man in his own image, and that image is rapacious, arrogant evil. If we had any decency we'd all kill ourselves.

Well, talk to you later. Take care.

Q.

Chimericana

Please allow me a distinctly amateur and off-the-cuff attempt to promote a book what I am in.

It's from Chimericana Books, and it's called Horror Quarterly.

For those of you who fondly remember the Horror Quarterly website, and believed it was lost forever, the best of it is now collected together in this volume, including, it seems, my three-part essay on Japanese horror.



Here it is.

Waiting for Kate

We're just waiting...

Just waiting....



For Kate.

Just waiting...