'You have only to conjure the world up before you, and there you will find a living poem, a fount of song!'

Myriad Musings on the Metaphor!

[Part – 3]

Natsume Soseki | Kusamakura

The next book up for grabs on our tryst with the metaphor, would be yet another Japanese delight!

It’s by Natsume Soseki and it’s titled Kusamakura!

This amazing novel – that I’ve so loved reading, was published first in the year 1906! It’s first English translation however, was made available to us all, only in the year 1965, under the title, The Three-cornered World!

For those of us who love retreating into the mountain-side for that much-needed solitudinal tryst with Nature and for celebrating the artistic me-space within us, this book is sure gonna be a cool read of sorts!

A whole lot of lovely books of all hues whiz past your thoughts even as you flip through each page of this highly intriguing read!

Be it Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, or Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, you’ve got an array of such artistic delights popping up every now and then, lining up your thought-feed!

Such is the power of Soseki, Natsume Soseki, and his intense read - Kusamakura!

The humorist in Soseki, Natsume Soseki, doubles up as an artist, in his delineation of the protagonist of this, his endearing novel!

The word Kusa Makura translates to mean, the Grass Pillow!

And the term ‘Grass Pillow’ stands a metaphoric expression for a journey, and specifically, an artistic journey or a poetic journey of sorts!

Much akin to Kobo Abe’s nameless narrator of our last past post, Soseki’s protagonist also goes unnamed!

The artist-protagonist’s musings on art and the artist are in fact, Soseki’s too! That way the protagonist to Kusa Makura acts his able mouthpiece too!

Like Abe’s or a Calvino’s, Soseki’s protagonist is quite fed up with the daily humdrum existence of his city life and hence decides on a journey to the mountains, in search of the true meaning of art, and beauty as well!

He gets to stay at a sylvan hot spring resort, where, he happens to be the only guest! And on a beautiful moonlit night he chances upon a woman by name Nami, singing in the garden lawns of the resort! Nami happens to be the daughter of the owner of the resort, and our protagonist is drawn to her – not in a romantic way, but rather in an artistic way!

From then on, the protagonist is on song - giving out his views on art and the artist! One is reminded of a Ben Okri or a Jidduji and their takes on art and the artist, in like fashion!

To the artist-protagonist of the novel, there’s beauty everywhere around us. Only if we have the eye for appreciation, we can celebrate beauty with elan, he avers!

Quite a lot of references on artists and artistic theories abound throughout the novel, and he gives his takes on almost every other art form from calligraphy to poetry to painting to pottery!

Many Western artists also adorn his pages!

Reading up on the translator’s preface holds good to understanding the novel better! Not only because the translator happens to be Meredith McKinney, the award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese literature, who also happens to be Judith Wright’s daughter, but also because she gives us a gist to the storyline of the novel!

Says Meredith on the novel –

A nameless young artist sets off on a purposely aimless walking trip across the mountains to the remote village of Nakoi, where he stays at a hot spring inn and indulges in an artistic experiment: to observe all he sees, humans included, with a detached, aesthetic eye, in the manner of the artists and poets of old.

The novel traces this process, recording his experiences in the first person, most particularly his encounter with the startling, intriguing, and beautiful Nami, the daughter of the establishment. The scene is perfectly set for a romantic entanglement—but nothing happens.

In the final chapter, he joins Nami and her family as they travel by boat down to the town, returning himself and us to modern civilization.

Nami, the center of the novel, is (as Soseki pointed out) the still point, the enigma, around which the artist moves, watching and pondering the highly dramatized series of images of herself that she proffers him. When at last he glimpses in her a moment of unguarded pity, it completes the “picture” he has been working toward in his mind, and with it the novel.

A few memorable lines, so absorbing, so lovely, so admirable, so splendid, and so beautiful, from the novel, for us all –

Excerpts from Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and from Chapter 9

Well, the protagonist’s take on Art in the opening chapter, makes you dance! literally! I soooo mean it! He gives us such a beautiful perspective to beauty and to art! Hence I can’t part with much on this little post! Just a few snippets –

Chapter 1

As I climb the mountain path, I ponder —

However you look at it, the human world is not an easy place to live. And when its difficulties intensify, you find yourself longing to leave that world and dwell in some easier one—and then, when you understand at last that difficulties will dog you wherever you may live, this is when poetry and art are born.

The creators of our human world are neither gods nor demons but simply people, those ordinary folk who happen to live right there next door.

You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You will find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.

So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home.

Herein lies the poet’s true calling, the artist’s vocation. We owe our humble gratitude to all practitioners of the arts, for they mellow the harshness of our human world and enrich the human heart.

Yes, a poem, a painting, can draw the sting of troubles from a troubled world and lay in its place a blessed realm before our grateful eyes. Music and sculpture will do likewise.

Yet strictly speaking, in fact, there is no need to present this world in art. You have only to conjure the world up before you, and there you will find a living poem, a fount of song.

No need to commit your thoughts to paper — the heart will already sing with a sweet inner euphony.

No need to stand before your easel and limn with brush and paint — the world’s vast array of forms and colors already sparkles within the inner eye. It is enough simply to be able thus to view the place we live, and to garner with the camera of the sentient heart these pure, limpid images from the midst of our sullied world.

And so even if no verse ever emerges from the mute poet, even if the painter never sets brush to canvas, he is happier than the wealthiest of men, happier than any strong-armed emperor or pampered child of this vulgar world of ours—for he can view human life with an artist’s eye; he is released from the world’s illusory sufferings; he is able to come and go at ease in a realm of transcendent purity, to construct a unique universe of art, and thereby to destroy the binding fetters of self-interest and desire.

When I had lived in this world for twenty years, I understood that it was a world worth living in. At twenty-five I realized that light and dark are sides of the same coin; that wherever the sun shines, shadows too must fall.

Now, at thirty, here is what I think: where joy grows deep, sorrow must deepen; the greater one’s pleasures, the greater the pain. If you try to sever the two, life falls apart. Try to control them, and you will meet with failure.

Money is essential, but with the increase of what is essential to you, anxieties will invade you even in sleep.

This, from Chapter 2

I open my sketchbook again. This scene could be a painting, or a poem.

I picture in my mind’s eye the figure of the bride, imagine the scene as if it were before me. Pleased with myself, I jot down

Praise be to the bride

who rides across the mountains

through blossoming spring.

John Everett Millais - Ophelia

The odd thing is that, although I can clearly picture her clothes and hair, and the horse and the cherry tree, I simply cannot visualize the bride’s face. I try out this one and that, until suddenly the face of Ophelia in Millais’s painting springs unbidden to my mind, fitting itself perfectly under the takashimada hair.

This is from Chapter 9 –

“Are you studying?” she inquires.

I’ve returned to my room and am reading one of the books I brought along, strapped to my tripod on the journey over the mountain.

“Do come in. I don’t mind in the least.”

She steps boldly in, with no hint of hesitation. A well-formed neck emerges above the kimono collar, vivid against its somber hue. This contrast first strikes my eye as she seats herself before me.

“Is that a Western book? It must be about something very difficult.”

“Oh, hardly.”

“Well, what’s it about, then?”

“Yes, well, actually, I don’t really understand it myself.”

She laughs. “That’s why you’re studying, is it?”

“I’m not studying. All I’ve done is open it in front of me on the desk and start dipping into it.”

“Is it interesting to read like that?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Why?”

“Because with novels and suchlike, this is the most entertaining way to read.”

“You’re rather strange, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose I am a little.”

“What’s wrong with reading from the beginning?”

“If you say you have to start at the beginning, that means you have to read to the end.”

“What a funny reason! Why shouldn’t you read to the end?”

“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with it, of course. I do it too, if I want to know about the story.”

“What do you read if it isn’t the story? Is there anything else to read?”

There speaks a woman, I think to myself. I decide to test her a little.

“Do you like novels?”

“Me?” she says abruptly. Then she adds rather evasively, “Yes, well . . .”

Not very much, it seems.

“You’re not clear whether you like them or not, then?”

“Whether I read a novel or not is neither here nor there to me.” She gives the distinct impression that she takes no account of their existence.

“In that case, why should it matter whether you read it from the beginning, or from the end, or just dip into it in a desultory way? I don’t see why you should consider my way of reading so strange.”

“But you and I are different.”

“In what way?” I ask, gazing into her eyes. This is the moment for the test, I think, but her gaze doesn’t so much as falter.

She gives a quick laugh. “Don’t you understand?”

“But you must have read quite a lot when you were young,” I say, abandoning my single line of attack and attempting a rearguard action.

“I like to believe I’m still young, you know. Really, you are pathetic.”

My arrow has gone wide again. There’s no relaxing in this game.

Finally pulling myself together, I manage to retort, “It shows you’re already past your youth, to be able to say that in front of a man.”

“Well, you’re far from young yourself, to be able to make that remark. Is it still so fascinating, for a man of your age, all this talk of being head over heels and heels over head, and having pimples, and such adolescent stuff?”

“It is, yes, and it always will be.”

“My, my! So that’s how you come to be an artist, then.”

“Absolutely. It’s because I’m an artist that I don’t need to read a novel from cover to cover. On the other hand, wherever I choose to dip in is interesting for me. Talking to you is interesting too. In fact, it’s so interesting that I’d like to talk to you every day while I’m staying here. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind falling in love with you. That would make it even more interesting. But we wouldn’t need to marry, no matter how in love with you I was. A world where falling in love requires marrying is a world where novels require reading from beginning to end.”

“That means that an artist is someone who falls in love unemotionally.”

“No, it’s not un-emotional. My way of falling in love is non-emotional. The way I read novels is nonemotional too, which is why the story doesn’t matter. I find it interesting just to open up the book at random, like this, like pulling one of those paper oracles out of the box at a shrine, see, and read whatever meets my eye.”

“Yes, that does look like an interesting thing to do. Well then, tell me a little about the place you’re reading now. I’d like to know what intriguing things emerge.”

“It’s not something one should talk about. Same with a painting—the worth of the thing disappears completely if you talk about it, doesn’t it?” She laughs. “Well then, read it to me.”

“In English?”

“No, in Japanese.”

“It’s tough to have to read English in Japanese.”

“What’s the problem? It’s a fine nonemotional thing to do, after all.”

“So who are this man and woman?”

“I’ve no more idea than you do. That’s why it’s interesting. It doesn’t matter what relationship they’ve had till now. The interest lies in the scene before us at this moment, their being here together—just like you and me.”

“You think so? They seem to be in a boat, don’t they?”

“In a boat, on a hill, what does it matter? You just take it as it’s written.

Once you start asking why, it all turns into detective work.”

She gives a laugh. “All right then, I won’t ask.”

“The usual novels are all invented by detectives. There’s nothing nonemotional about them—they’re utterly boring.”

So why wait? Do try grabbing for yourself a copy of this wonderful read ASAP!

In short, if you are looking to be drenched in the Barthean ‘pleasures’ of a text, this one’s for you!

In fact, the novel serves an amazing prequel of sorts to the Barthean take on the effects of the text! Where he describes and divides the ‘effects of texts’ into two: the first one, he calls ‘pleasure’, while the second, he calls, ‘bliss’ or orgasmic!

So which one is yours!? ;-)

And well, our little tryst with metaphor continues…