One of the oldest and most beautiful manifestations of the Japanese love
of nature is the Japanese garden, the representation of nature in miniature.
In contrast to British gardens, which are structured symmetrically and made
colorful with blossoms, Japanese gardens are asymmetrical and traditionally
had no flowering plants, only green shrubs and trees, (though today, in
even the most traditional of Kyoto temple gardens, azaleas flourish). The
basic components, rocks, trees, and bamboo, were once associated with the
dwelling places of Shinto gods and still have religious connotations. Japanese
gardens are as old as the Japanese state, dating from the sixth and seventh
century in the Yamato plain (now the city of Nara, south of Kyoto). During
the Muromachi period (1333-1568), the dry rock and sand gardens, kare
sansui (literally dry mountain stream), were developed, influenced
by Zen Buddhism and Chinese ink paintings. These gardens are designed to
be seen from within a dwelling, temple, or teahouse that opens onto them.
Although closely contained, they may incorporate surrounding mountains or
other natural scenery to be viewed as part of their background. As with
other fine arts, various schools of gardening have developed, each of which
teach detailed placement of trees, rocks and water.
A recently translated short novel by Masaaki Tachihara (1926-80) called
Yume no kareno o (Wind and Stone)
weaves a treatise on Japanese gardens into the story of an adulterous love
affair. While many writers describe and praise nature in various ways, Tachihara's
short novel is distinct in its use of gardens as an element of plot. One
of the main characters, Yusaku Kase, is a contemporary landscape garden
designer, practicing an art that dates in Japan from the fourteenth century
when gardeners became skilled craftsmen. As he builds gardens for contemporary
houses, Kase takes practical advice as well as inspiration from ancient
gardening texts. Gardens, their creation, development, and effect are interwoven
into the plot of the love story.
* * *
Stone Bridge Press has receently published Stephen Kohl's recent translation
of this 1979 novella with seven black and white illustrations from three
classical books on Japanese gardens and one modern drawing. As with many
Japanese works of fiction, it is short, only 150 pages. Its plot traces
the course of an extramarital love affair, but that is not its primary interest.
This book is about Japanese gardens, the way they are created, and their
effects on the characters. The story conveys vividly the importance of the
arts in the lives of contemporary Japanese who suffer the passions and conflicts
of people of any time and place. It also demonstrates the way the arts inform
each other. In this case, gardening and Noh drama enrich an otherwise quite
ordinary love story.
The plot is simple. Mizue Shida is a contentedly married woman in her 30s
when her husband hires garden designer Yusaku Kase to landscape their garden.
During the two months it takes to build the garden, she sees Kase almost
daily but hardly ever speaks to him. When the garden is completed and Kase
has left, Mizu finds herself thinking about him. More significantly, she
feels herself being watched by the rocks in the garden. Slowly she realizes
she is made restless by these rocks, and she goes to see Kase, who confesses
he designed the garden to arouse her. As their affair progresses, Kase stops
seeing other women, but when Mizue refuses to leave her children in order
to live with him, Kase takes up with a young woman, Tamiko, whom his mother
would like him to marry. Though Mizue loves Kase and feels no regret when
her husband ends the marrage, she cannot leave her children. As she makes
no decision at all, the story ends with the lack of finality that characterizes
much Japanese fiction, and we never learn the outcome of the affair.
Although an American version of this plot line would involve overt conflict
between husband and wife, Japanese fiction often minimalizes such conflict.
Japanese fiction does, however, still demonstrate the sensitivity to emotional
states that first appeared in Japanese prose fiction in Lady Shikibu Murasaki's
famous Tale of Genji, written sometime between 1008
A.D. and 1021 A.D. Mizue's inner turmoil is demonstrated in a typically
understated way when she walks to a nearby flower farm herself to buy flowers
for her household arrangements, and she chooses and arranges them with care.
When that does not calm her, she performs the tea ceremony for herself.
The tea ceremony is a means of achieving inner peace and forgetfulness of
self, and when prepared for one or more guests it promotes harmony between
the participants. But Mizue finds no consolation in this therapy for the
troubled soul.
Shida, Mizue's husband, plays only a shadowy background role. We learn only
enough about him to complete the picture of Mizue. He is a well-to-do businessman,
a reliable and considerate husband, father, and company worker who manages
two plants for the family business, which produces canned hams and pork
products. Although Shida cultivates the arts and has fine taste in clothes
and food, his occupation is one that traditionally Japanese have considered
unclean. The butchering and processing of animal products is still often
associated with burakumin, a despised caste who, though racially
no different from other Japanese, have for centuries been treated as outcasts
and social pariahs, not allowed into more respectable occupations and living
areas. In western Japan even today Japanese consider the canned ham business
as belonging to burakumin. Though Shida lives and works in Tokyo
where burakumin numbers are fewer and where the associations may
be less immediate than in western Japan, many Japanese readers give a start
when they read that this cultivated, near-perfect husband earns his money
through unclean work. Even an American reader may sense the irony in the
contrast between Shida's cultivation of traditional Japanese arts and his
prosaic, modern occupation. The narrator never suggests anything but that
Shida is a hard-working, conscientious husband with excellent taste, but
the reader is left to understand that he does not have aware.
Aware is an aesthetic ideal developed in the eleventh century, sometimes
translated as "the sorrow of human existence" and sometimes simply
as "sensitivity to things." The writer who developed the concept
in literature was Lady Murasaki in The Tale of Genji,
in which aware is one of Genji's most esteemed qualities. Derived
in part from the Buddhist sense of ephemerality, it is a poetic uniting
of the individual self with nature. The concept focuses on the beauty of
impermanence and on the sensitive heart capable of appreciating that beauty
(Keene Pleasures 86-87). Kase's attractiveness to Mizue combines
physical attraction with her sense of his aware.
The title of this novel, Yume wa kareno o, comes from the last poem
written by Matsuo Basho (1644-94). The full poem reads "Tabi ni yande/yume
wa kareno o/kakemeguru. "On a journey and sick. Dreams of roaming.
A withered moor (Kato, Sanderson 2, 103)." The four words used in the
novel title cannot meaningfully be translated without the final verb, so
the translator Stephen Kohl changes the title altogether to Wind
and Stone. Such incomplete sentences often characterize Japanese
conversation, and its use here indicates that Tachihara prefers to write
in the manner of a Japanese author rather than a Westernized Japanese novelist.
Though the connection between dreaming and the withered moor of Basho's
poem and this short novel may not be readily apparent, every educated Japanese
reader will recognize the title and will readily understand the association
between the character Kase and the poet Basho. Basho lived at a time when
traditional literature was declining in quality and popularity, and the
chonin class of Kyoto city merchants was rising. Their favorite author
was Ihara Saikaku whose tales of sexual exploits and humor suited the cultural
emphasis on sex and the earning of money. Gardener Kase lives in late twentieth-century
Japan, where sex and money again predominate. Both Basho and Kase feel uncommitted
to society's values and unconcerned with religion. For Basho, the "Way
of Elegance" (fuga no michi), is the only value,
a way of escaping the coarseness and turmoil of life. For Yusaku Kase the
"Way of Elegance" is the Japanese garden. He has devoted his life
to building gardens and he refuses to alter his standards for anyone.
As a landscape designer, Kase has an artist's license to live outside socal
convention. He has been married twice but each wife has left him when he
left home for months on end to work on gardens. Although Kase admires Japanese
gardening tradition and seeks to construct gardens that fulfill ancient
standards of restraint and a humble self, his life contrasts sharply with
traditional Japanese customs of cooperation, agreement, and politeness.
He works and lives alone, even spending New Year's holidays, the time for
visiting family, in a hotel alone. He displays his artist's autonomy when
he refuses to build a garden for a politician whose modern house, with its
"gaudy, tasteless chandelier" and bright red carpet, is not to
Kase's liking. Even when the politician's secretary insists on Kase's services,
Kase rudely refuses. Kase's two divorces and his defiance of civility and
convention even though it might cost him future business place him in the
tradition of the independent Japanese artist.
The women in Kase's life remind him of particular gardens. Mizue's given
name is written with the Chinese character meaning "water," as
though she were an essential garden element. Her body is to him like the
roil, the path in a tea garden. Roji, though translated as
path, actually refers to the garden area around the door to the tea house.
This garden area may contain stepping stones, stone lanterns, stone washbasins,
and bushes or small trees. The importance of the roil is to help
prepare the visitor's mind properly for the approaching tea ceremony. When
Kase looks at Mizue and thinks she is like the roil, the narrator
adds, "One could not enter the tea house unless one trod the path.
Just walking the path itself was a source of joy (95)." When Kase looks
at Mizue's body, he anticipates the peace, harmony, and self-forgetfulness
he achieves when he makes love to her.
Kase abhors a garden that seems artificial and out of harmony with the house
for which it is built. When the roji is right, "even though
the stones are placed irregularly in what appears to be a disorderly manner,
they nevertheless follow a single, direct line." Even though the stones
might not be convenient for walking, they should nevertheless be "appealing
in appearance." Once, having just completed a garden path, he walked
along it and felt reminded of "the mature woman's body" (84).
Only a gardener who could filter out his own ego could build a good garden
path. The designer of the garden at Tofukuji Temple in Kyoto, Kase believes,
had not separated himself from the design (100). Later Tofukuji seems to
him "unrefined," inspiring "both repulsion and empathy"
(143). Kase sees Tamiko as "the living embodiment of the Tofukuji garden,"
(128) yet he continues seeing Tamiko and begins to think about living with
her.
The narrator discusses garden building throughout the novel and quotes from
instructions given in Roji Kikigaki, "Accounts of the
Garden Path." But Kase cannot blindly follow such instructions, however
hallowed. Even with such famous texts as guides, "it was still possible
to make a tea garden that seemed artificial, like a bonsai. When a tea garden
is too elaborate, it becomes contrived, and those who know gardens can't
bear to look at it" (82). Only a gardener who has known a woman can
fully understand the method of placing stones outlined by this book, Kase
believes. Walking on a path he has laid out, he is reminded of a mature
woman's body.
* * *
Japanese often feel that the same spirit pervades many of the Japanese arts.
Tachihara himself, the son of a Zen priest, studied Japanese literature,
the Noh theater, and other arts. One of his other novels is entitled Takigi
Noh, a reference to torchlit Noh drama, and another is Tsujiga
hana, the name of a particularly fine quality kimono fabric. Japanese
readers of Yume wa kareno o sometimes say they
feel that the four main characters resemble the characters of a Noh drama.
Mizue parallels the shite, the main character, the only character
who wears a mask. The shite possesses few individual qualities but
may be almost an incarnation of some powerful emotion. In this case Mizue's
intense passion grows throughout the story, causing the dissolution of her
marriage and family, similar to the madness, called kyojo mono,
of female shite characters in some Noh plays.
Tamiko, the young woman with whom Kase begins an affair despite his professed
love for Mizue, resembles the shite tsure, a kind of companion
character. Usually the tsure is but a shadow of a character, and
Tamiko is young, compliant, and neither asks nor expects anything from Kase,
though she comes to love him. Kase may be seen as the waki, technically
the "person at the side." Often in Noh the waki merely
asks questions and lacks a personality or identity of his own, but sometimes
the waki is a kind of antagonist who conflicts or in some other way
interacts with the shite. Here Kase arouses Mizue's love but then
takes no responsibility for her children, offering Mizue, but not her children,
the possibility of living with him. The problem of how to love this man
and keep her children becomes her conflict alone. Shida, her husband, parallels
the waki tsure, again a shadow who plays a minimal role.
* * *
Tachihara's Wind and Stone stands alone among Japanese
modern and contemporary fiction in its use of physical nature as both background
and plot. At the same time some of its characteristics can be found in many
modern and contemporary Japanese fiction writings. For example, the book
has a strong visual sense, with its frequent descriptions of gardens. The
overriding principle is beauty, not dramatic contrast. Conflict takes place
in the individual psyche rather than in the social arena, and the high drama
of the love affair is subordinated to the aesthetics. If the ending lacks
finality, it is nonetheless realistic, as we leave Mizue, packing to leave
her home, undecided about whether to continue with Kase, unclear about where
to take her children, the possibility of death still open to her. Her once-ideal
marriage, the garden that stirred her passions, the love affair that seemed
so extraordinarily perfect have, like all things emphemeral, passed away.
Works Cited
Kato, Shuichi. A History of Japanese Literature.
Trans. Don
Sanderson. Vol. 2. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1979.
Keene, Donald. No and Bunraku: Two Forms
of Japanese Theater. New York: Columbia, 1966.
Keene, Donald. The Pleasures of Japanese Literature.
New York:
Columbia, 1988.
Tachihara, Masaaki. Wind and Stone. Trans. Stephen
W. Kohl.
Berkeley: Stone Bridge, 1992.
Having spent some five and one half years in Japan, Pat Parker has become
a fan of both Japanese gardens and Japanese novels. Now back in the United
States teaching American literature as a professor of English at Salem State
College, she continues to read and review Japanese fiction and hopes soon
to offer a graduate course in it.