Misc. Notes on the Kawabata and Oe readings.

1. First of all note the overtly religious nature of Kawabata’s speech. Is this typical in a Nobel prize acceptance talk?
2. How does K’s evoking of nature as an ally fit with D. T. Suzuki’s description?
1. Recall the poems by Saigyo and Rennyo:

Only for a moment's stop

I'm in a roadside willow's shade,

  Where pure water of a spring

Flows by. . . as has the time now

Since my 'moment's stop' began.

                                                                        Saigyo

Going out to beg this spring day

I stopped to pick violets--

Oh! The day is over!

                                    Ryokan

3. Where is the subject in these poems? Nowhere. Remember mushin, “no mind”, no conceptual thought:
1. Basho:

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccumpaion with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one‑ when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural‑ if the object and yourself are separate‑ then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit. (from Narrow Road to the North and Other Travel Sketches, Penguin classics, intro, p. 33)

4.     Compare also the aesthetic ideal of wabi or sabi that permeates K’s speech: the beauty of simplicity and a disciplined austerity. Derived from the word wabishii, lonesome, wabi refers more to the conditions of one's life, one's physical surroundings, than a particular emotion of loneliness. As such it refers to the state of destitution, deprivation, distress, poverty, and the like. The aesthetic of wabi was initially born of the appreciation of the simple life of the meditative recluse, and is thereby also related to the aesthetic of sabi, derived from the sabishii, meaning loneliness and referring to the emotion or human feeling of being alone, but especially of being alone amidst a great beauty or splendid elegence. Together wabi and sabi denote a sort of aesthetic asceticism. Both of these expressions can be understood also to refer to a sense of the smallness or finite-ness of the individual in the face of the infinite.

a.      This is also related to K’s ruminations on suicide. How does his thinking compare to Mishima’s glorification of death as a spiritual ideal? Remember that both are authors. By the by, Kawabata also ended his life in suicide.

5. What is K’s emptiness? How does he compare it to the empty nihilism of the West?

OE

1. Oe characterizes K’s speech as typically Japanese—why?
1. It is beautiful.
2. It is vague—why?

                                                               i.      Japanese mysticism. What is mysticism, and why is it susceptible to the charge of “vagueness”?

2. Oe charges that K had abandoned all attempts to communicate with the West. He was talking to himself about an apparition, a Japan that does not in fact exist.
3. In a sense we can think of Oe as abandoning a very traditional Japanese value of “form” as the vehicle for content. In other words, it is not just enough for Oe to talk about “Japan the Beautiful,” he really had to see beauty in the world around him. For Oe the beauty of Japanese aesthetic tradition is indeed very much like that of a bonsai tree or Japanese rock garden: artificial and not found in the real world.
4. Oe calls the mysticism of K a form of Oriental mysticism. How does this fit with Sharf’s description of D. T. Suzuki’s brand of “reverse orientalism”?
5. It seems to me that in the end Oe is critiquing K for living in a private world of mystical aestheticism that, by its very nature of being unique to the Japanese and mystical hence beyond language, was also beyond critique. Oe lived through the radical days of Japanese student unrest in the 60’s (factions of the Japanese Red Army are still around) and distrusts this attitude as one of authoritarianism shrouded in the mists of spirituality (“oriental mysticism”) and a refusal to engage in dialog. In another context he wrote, “No matter what sort of essay, I cannot bear it if the writer adopts an authoritative voice. If, in my own essays, I find lines that take on the air of authority in order to hide my weakness, no matter how forgiving the reader, I am embarrassed.”

From all of this you by now should have some of the buzz-words of this confrontation under your belt: oriental mysticism, the spiritual east vs. materialist west, experience against rational thought or body vs mind, nature vs artifice, and the like. It is not important for us to take sides in these battles (and because of social-political implications a bit like the “culture wars” in the US), rather it is important for us to note that the very notion of a Japanese spirituality is up for grabs and the subject of dispute.