Identifying Asian

IDENTIFYING ASIAN By Miguel Paolo Celestial Serially published in WestEast Magazine, Spring-Winter 2008 “So if I have to make a summary of myself, it terrifies me. I don’t know which of the many faces represents me more and the more closely I look the clearer the transformations become, and finally only bewilderment remains.” (Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain) Journey to the East The Journey to the East was published in 1932. It was an allegory by German novelist and Nobel Prize winner Herman Hesse, involving a religious sect composed of famous historical and fictional characters. This group set out as pilgrims searching for the “ultimate Truth” in the East, which was considered “Home of the Light”, the source of renewal. Like silk and spices that drove traders and conquerors of past centuries, Asian spirituality—as exotic fruit and elixir—has inspired a similar pursuit by the West. Though its practices have been embraced in the fields of non-conventional medicine and modern well-being, these are still regarded with a fair amount of caution, approached as fads or health alternatives, or trusted only as last resort. Asian spirituality remains distant. Different. But as globalization opened access beyond Asian religion and medicine, it has allowed the West to approach this spirituality through Asia’s culture and heritage. It’s art, cinema, and literature give insight to ever-changing attitudes and identities germinating from ambiguous systems of belief. Consequently, globalization has provided greater access to the West. But what makes Eastern spirituality more interesting is how Asians have appropriated American and European ideas, views, and modes of thought and expression into their beliefs, managing in turn to exert influence on the West. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami quickly comes to mind. Has this happened because something is missing in the West’s understanding of itself? This may not necessarily be due to a want in analysis—perhaps, precisely the opposite. Central to Asian spirituality is its basis in emptiness. This “emptiness, the nothingness, of the Orient”, according to Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first Nobel laureate for literature, “is not to be taken for the nihilism of the West”. The difference being that this nothingness is also the essence of fullness, as borne by

silence, light or darkness, or the wordlessness of the upmost reaches of song, where beauty brims. Only in this emptiness is wholeness, the renewal Herman Hesse sought, possible. Completeness in the constantly new sustained by the cycles of nature, in the passing of seasons where creatures flower and die, emerge and wilt. Asian religions and cultures abide by these circular phases, transformations, and constant changes. In contrast, Western art of late has been obsessed with brittle branches of structure and appearances, and purported discoveries of the “totally new” that merely peel old bark, produce works that lack sap. Instead of leading culture to the intended evolution, this obsession, not unlike the impetus behind industry, has brought it to petrifaction. Western art has arrived at prevalent stasis, with decadence overpowering it like mold and lichen. More and more, Western culture and religion are faced with the steady disintegration of the Western soul, which has suffered the toll of wars and hate and hyper-materialism, of megalomania and self-righteousness. As the West begins to acknowledge its ebbing prowess for imagination, it increasingly looks to the East. Refugees Returning Home “At most you can only find in a particular corner, in a particular room, in a particular instant, some memories which belong purely to yourself, and it is only in such memories that you can preserve yourself fully.” (Gao Xingjian, “Soul Mountain”) Given Asia’s nearness and understanding of nature and its seasons and changes, what then could account for the “bewilderment” that Gao Xingjian, Chinese Nobel laureate for literature, has referred to about himself in his book Soul Mountain? He suggests that amidst the confusion of transformations, returning to memories or personal history is necessary to verify individuality, pointing out that “in the end, in this vast ocean of humanity you are at most only a spoonful of green seawater, insignificant and fragile”. As a writer and as an individual, Gao Xingjian has insisted on the value of literature “to preserve a human consciousness”, to retain identity. Asia’s history has gone through wars and conquests, not only over land and trade, but also over ideas and individuality—enough to cause the displacement of nations and identities.

Xingjian admits that he has been “a refugee from birth”, born “while planes were dropping bombs”. He also escaped persecution in China to settle in a foreign country, writing Soul Mountain in a personal journey back to the self. For his part, Kawabata’s compatriot Kenzaburo Oë, who also won the Nobel Prize for Literature, sought to return from the ravages of war to face disillusionment and ambiguity in Japan. Personally, in his writing, he has sought healing. Lastly, Arundhati Roy, in her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, made a journey with her protagonist back to India years after suffering injustice not only from domestic prejudice, but also from her country’s colonial heritage. Asians have a unique way of dealing with disruptive time and history. Consistent with the repetition of seasons, they have always managed to return to the old flow. Returning to emptiness, to personal memories, to the historical realities of a country, and to the wounds of persecution and prejudice, these Asian writers have identified themselves as individuals, and in the process have given readers a glimpse into the Asian spirit. From the West: Haruki Murakami “Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen, and down the mountain side. The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling— It’s you, it’s you must go, and I must bide. But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow… Oh Danny boy, oh Danny Boy, I’ll miss you so!” A child of the West, world-famous Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami was deeply influenced by its culture, growing up reading Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver, and a slew of other writers, and also imbibing the music of bands like the Beatles, jazz acts like Miles Davis, and the classical music of European composers. As Bing Crosby sings about “Danny Boy”, Murakami pines for the lost innocence and spontaneity of Japan. But he does so in a voice and method that is almost fully Western.

“For in his Japan, the old has been destroyed, an ugly and meaningless hodgepodge has taken its place, and nobody knows what comes next.” “There are no kimonos, bonsai plants or tatami mats in Murakami's novels…Murakami's protagonists might as well be living in Santa Monica.” “I would not be surprised if his novels…turned out to have a similar influence in the West.” “Though his works are largely set in Japan…Murakami speaks to a global audience.” “The modern ennui his characters feel has some specifically Japanese aspects to it, but it is a condition found all across the world.” “The world as one small village, but one that is uncertain of its identity.” Readers and critics agree that Murakami has accurately shown the empty longing that has sliced into the lonely hearts of the Japanese with blades of neon and pop jargon. They agree that the ache and alienation that the author has captured in his stories have spread where capitalism has thrived: like a miasma, like spores that settle in dark secret places, to take root and flourish—the same for Japan as in the United States, as for industrialized Europe. Murakami’s concerns span those of developed countries: terrorists, the senselessness of war, consumerism, disconnectedness, and the common sense of loss. Through his characters, he speaks of the ambition in Japan’s “fiercely carnivorous class society”, people’s pretentiousness, T.S. Eliot’s “hollow men”, and “intellectual chameleons”, who utilize and sell ideas for the highest profit. He describes a society with jaded and fossilized citizens. Amidst all this, Murakami expresses the communal yearning for escape from dreary mechanical lives. The realization of this desire through fantasy and surrealism and through the hope granted in love is what has made his stories very popular and highly accessible, prompting adaptations into films and plays in the West. Parallel Worlds “It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it consisted of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving…” (Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle) In his books, Murakami has provided escape through other worlds linked by the subconscious, by dreams and hallucinations; and through surrealist reconfigurations that lay bare realms in reality’s underside. He has had no need to go far, exposing parallel universes via deep wells, deserts, or through the subway underground.

In what seems ordinary, strangeness and absurdities wait in the shadows. Characters in Murakami’s novels are granted strange powers from blue-black scars, can talk to cats and cause fish and leeches to rain from the sky, and walk different lives in paranormal dimensions. Two of them appear in the guises of KFC’s Colonel Sanders and the liquor gentleman named Johnny Walker. A handful also transform into “living spirits” in the Japanese tradition of ghosts. Murakami’s most explicit departure from reality is through a world totally constructed in consciousness. In Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a data technologist has a different life in a fully mapped and finely detailed universe (called “End of the World”) in his mind. Here, unencumbered by pain or loss or the capacities of the mind, the novel’s protagonist lives immortally. The author also seeks parallel worlds through love. In his book South of the Border, West of the Sun, the narrator finds out through relationships “that within the real world, a place like this [a different place] existed”. In people he discovers “far-off horizons” made accessible by contact or closed off by loneliness. Love then becomes not very different from fantastic universes as it offers escape from the self. But the limitation in Murakami’s surrealistic landscapes is that they are merely held together by coincidences, repetitions, and random prophecies. In the forays of his novels into abstract destinations, the essential problems within individuals, their intrinsic conflicts, have not been involved with the geographies of those worlds. This implies that any return to the “real” world, after pages of adventure, will not necessarily solve the great yearning for escape within his characters. As Oshima, from Kafka on the Shore, says, “There’s another world that parallels our own, and to a certain degree you’re able to step into that other world and come back safely.” Murakami’s protagonists often return unscathed, as if the world they had just experienced was only from a movie or a show on television. Estrangement from the self, which the author has very ably depicted, goes unresolved. Sea monsters, the alien and the grotesque, slimy, faceless beings, things that get bigger and bigger in the body and grow like the roots of a tree: these that reside in the darkness more real and palpable than the subconscious, as natural as the lack of light at the center of a lush forest. These creatures are not confronted. Having conjured the fantastic, Murakami has yet to tackle the basic anthropology of the human psyche. The alienation that has inspired the yearning for escape has not been addressed. Perhaps a return, a tracing back, to an earlier period of Japan, before these modern monstrosities grew their tentacles, is warranted: a time just when the initial decay after the war crept in and the sense of beauty and wholeness was most poignant and relevant.

The Legacy of Emptiness Yasunari Kawabata received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, becoming the first Japanese to merit the award. He was deeply influenced by the epic classic The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Written in the 11th century at the peak of the Heian Period, this work was hailed by Kawabata as the “pinnacle of Japanese literature”, unsurpassed even in the present day. The Nobel Academy, in its presentation speech for Kawabata, traced the “sensitively shaded situation poetry” in his narratives to Lady Murasaki’s “vast canvas of life and manners” in The Tale of Genji. The Japanese laureate’s spare, lyrical, and subtle prose is deeply rooted, even more than Junichiro Tanizaki’s fiction, in Japan’s classic literature. By retaining and nurturing the elegance, refinement, honor, allusiveness, eroticism, and sensuality of the courtly life of Japan, specifically of the Heian Period, he cherishes and preserves the genuine legacy of the country’s tradition of style. But Kawabata pointed out that the era of The Tale of Genji and much of Japanese classic literature was “its finest, when ripeness was moving into decay”, when it held in it “the sadness at the end of glory”, which was intrinsic to the “high tide of Japanese court culture”. The peak of this literature came when the court sank into decline and when power shifted from the court nobility to the military aristocracy, in whose hands it stayed for almost seven centuries from the Kamakura Shogunate (1192) to the Meiji Restoration (1867 and 1868). The characteristics of this style are comprised by the terseness of the haiku, the suggestiveness of Japanese painting, and the sensitivity and attention of the art of the tea ceremony, of flower arrangements, and of the bonsai to Japan’s flora and landscape, its moonlight and seasons: its spirit. But besides being influenced by the classic literature of Japan, Kawabata’s narratives were likewise shaped by Japan’s experiences in World War II. Although he refused to participate in the “militarist fervor” accompanying the war, he also did not believe in the post-war reforms of the country. Immediately after the war, he proclaimed that from then on he would only be able to write elegies. Already melancholic, in the hands of Yasunari Kawabata, the elegance of the Heian classics was transformed into an elegiac elegance, even more pointed because war ushered a more intense and accelerated form of society’s decline and decay. A tragic form of beauty instilled his fiction, which was tinged with the last traces of loveliness right before death. Classic Japanese art already having blossomed to its fragile beauty, the war only stirred Kawabata to increase the cruelty and bitterness in his art. Although the sense of compassion was heightened, he also sharpened the emotions of his characters; and made their

pain more excruciating and their hope more impossible and obscure. Moreover, Kawabata discarded more words and imbued what was left with greater poignancy. Of course, Kawabata also thrust Japanese fiction further into modernity by utilizing psychological introspection, grafting surrealism into dreams and objective realism, intensifying the intricacies of sensual and erotic episodes, and heightening the keenness of insight. He was able to convey the aspects of suffering, shame, regret, anger, and revenge that were outside of words and beyond the destruction of war and the decay of tradition. Outside words but inextricable from the depths of human experience, Kawabata’s fiction redefined emptiness according to the Orient: an emptiness that brimmed and strained with life—a nothingness that was innate and that embraced the struggles of living. Thus, Kawabata elevated Japan’s unique artistry to a moral and aesthetic awareness. Doing so, he raised the height of Japanese literature as a spiritual bridge between East and West. Drawing from one of his favorite poets, the priest Ryokan, who lived between 1758 and 1831, Kawabata elucidated what for him captured the emotions of old Japan. He quoted the following poem, written at the deathbed of the priest: “What shall be my legacy? The blossoms of spring, The cuckoo in the hills, The leaves of autumn.” Kawabata surmised that what old Japan wished to leave as its legacy was nothing more than for nature to remain beautiful. For order, for peace, for contemplation, for brimming emptiness, and for the fullness of silence. JAPAN AND FRAGILE BEAUTY: Three Novels by Yasunari Kawabata Snow Country Literally translated from the Japanese title Yukiguni, Snow Country is the title of Kawabata’s first novel, on wasted beauty rushing towards decay and inevitable ruin, which many claim is his masterpiece. The novel is set in the northerly region of Japan, where cold winds come down from Siberia after crossing the Japan Sea, bringing with it moisture that is

deposited as several feet of snow. In this setting, towns and villages are isolated in the cold and inescapable gloom illuminated by blinding and solitary light. The story’s protagonist is Shimamura, a dilettante and idler, and an erstwhile expert of Japanese dance, who became an authority of Western ballet without ever seeing a single performance. As evidenced by his profession, Shimamura is obsessed with the exotic and unknown, loving the unreal and the intangible as dreams are loved. But in the cold and deceptive light of Snow Country, Shimamura passes the real for the unreal. Shimamura meets Komako, a hot-spring geisha, lower in class than the geishas of Tokyo or Kyoto and almost a social outcast. She spends time with her for company and conversation, because unlike the other women in the hot-spring, he regarded her as clean and pure, although not beautiful. Shimamura, under the “spell of the mountains”, sees Komako as a member of the audience regards an actress—behind the intermediary of unreality: “In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.” Throughout the story, it is this image that Shimamura cannot shake from himself. As an illusion and a dream, he treats Komako like a toy, a bauble to be fumbled by the hand. He plays with his illusion as it is entangled with Komako’s own halfaware self-delusion. Until finally the window image of Komako, as it is bound to, breaks and shatters. Komako gives herself to Shimamura, fully and without regret, knowing that their passion cannot last. As he is seduced by his illusion, she is swallowed by her fantasy. Tragedy sets in. When it is time for Shimamura to leave, when his illusion melts and he feels physical revulsion, the dilettante drops Komako like a trifle. The inhuman fantasy that has frozen inside Shimamura even prevents him to see death, blatant as it is, when the body of another geisha, another object for Shimamura, collapses unconscious from a burning warehouse: “He felt rather that Yoko had undergone some shift, some metamorphosis…”

Perhaps even hoping that Yoko would just transform from one fantasy to another. Thousand Cranes Misread as an evocation of the formal and spiritual beauty of the tea ceremony, Thousand Cranes, “a negative work, an expression of doubt about and warning against the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen”, is actually an elegy for tradition. Thus dispelling misinterpretation, Yasunari Kawabata summarizes the tea ceremony as "gently respectful, cleanly quiet", wherein a “richness of spirit” is concealed by its guidelines. He regards the tearoom, simple and confined, as containing “boundless space and unlimited elegance”. Within and beyond the tea ceremony, Thousand Cranes is a novel about desire, jealousy and revenge, shame, regret, and death. Kikuji Mitani, the protagonist, returns to the house of his deceased father, invited to a tea ceremony by a former mistress, Chikako Kurimoto. He arrives to meet at the ceremony Mrs. Ota, the second mistress of Kikuji’s father who replaced the discarded Chikako, and remained Mitani’s mistress until his death. Mrs. Ota does not know that the ceremony was a miai arranged by Chikako for Kikuji to see a prospective bride, Yukiko Inamura, without his own knowing, and clearly challenging Mrs. Ota who has brought her own daughter, Fumiko, to introduce to Kikuji. Further overstepping courtesy and manners, Chikako proceeds to further stain custom. Going back, Kikuji recalls the brief relationship of his father and Chikako. Kikuji remembers having seen Chikako’s birthmark on her left breast: “Her kimono was open. She was cutting the hair on her birthmark with a small pair of scissors. It covered half the breast and ran down into the hollow between the breasts, as large as the palm of one’s hand.” This grotesque image associates ugliness and perversity with Chikako. When Kikuji’s father broke relations with her, making Mrs. Ota, a married woman, his mistress, only “poison”—malevolent as her birthmark is disfiguring—was left in Chikako’s breast. One can say that Chikako, as the mistress of the tea ceremony, has infected it with her repulsiveness and poison. She transgresses tradition and disregards the essence behind the ceremony, indulging in “performances” and display, utilizing it as a miai, and as a tool of revenge. Chikako uses this poison not only against Mrs. Ota, but also on Fumiko and on Kikuji, who declines the miai and Chikako’s other designs.

But sexual tension and perversity, like venom, also run through Kikuji. Childhood memory turns into an obsession for ugliness—an intimation of decay—when he continues, in Oedipal abandon, to fantasize of the relations between his father and Chikako, her birth-marked breast the focus of his imagination. Kikuji’s own poison drives him to destruction and self-destruction when he takes his fantasy a step further, assuming the identity of his own father, and indulging in relations with Mrs. Ota—thus transferring the repulsiveness he felt from one mistress to another, ultimately poisoning himself. Poison and venom in this story roils with dirt and filth, is death sickly sweet, as Kikuji feels “something itchy” that wanted to rise against himself and injure Mrs. Ota: “The venom was only too effective. With regret came defilement and revulsion, and a violent wave of self-loathing swept over him, pressing him to say something even crueler.” The Master of Go The Master of Go is a faithful chronicle-novel or shōsetsu: a partly fictional account of a major match of Go in 1938 for which Yasunari Kawabata, as a journalist, actually reported on for a newspaper chain. The book begins with a newspaper account of the death of the Master of Go, Honinbo Shūsai, who died “twenty-first in the Honnimbo succession” “in Atami, at the Urokoya Inn, on the morning of January 18, 1940” at “sixty-seven years old by the Oriental count”. Thus the book already treats the game and the death of the Master of Go as a thing of the past—a sad, fleeting moment and an important part of history, but alas, just a single page in it. Kawabata considers The Master of Go as his finest work. It is regarded as the most beautiful of his elegies, written during and after World War II. The author declares, “From the way of Go, the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.” Hence it can be considered the most complete and comprehensive elegy of Kawabata for tradition in modern times. The story centers on the strenuous and delicate play between the opponents of the game: the Master, Honinbo Shūsai, and the challenger, Kitani Minoru, both housed and shut off from the world. The game of Go is a game of strategy, where two players, White and Black, attempt to surround each other’s stone pieces. The object of the game is to

buttress one’s pieces from enemy attack, while surrounding and capturing the enemy’s stones. In the novel, the reporter observes of the Master a vestige of the aristocratic: “In that figure walking absently from the game there was the still sadness of another world. The Master seemed like a relic left behind by Meiji.” The game played out in the story, considering what is at stake, is an epic struggle of stillness and strained intensity. At times it is excruciating, with plays lasting for more than two hours. The tension always seems to finally break the Master, but he holds out till the end: grandeur in distress. In and out of the game, on break, with the defeat of the Master nearing possibility, there is nostalgia not only for things past but also for things approaching their end, their ruin—beautiful, like a petal falling: “In a state of bemusement, he [the Master] suggested some rarefied spirit floating over a void; and yet the lines of the figure we saw at the board were still unbroken. They gave off a sort of leftover fragrance, an afterglow.” The game comes to represent the ferocious assault of “modernity” on tradition and the relentless refusal of tradition to bend to change, as if retirement of the Master from the game meant, in itself, a form of suicide: “It perhaps told of his age and experience, the fact that like the flow of water or the drifting of clouds a White formation quietly took shape over the lower reaches of the board in response to careful and steady pressure from Black; and so the game became a close one…” Became one between the forces of history: “The coup de grace came with the assault following upon Black 133…The fatal play suggested a psychological or a physiological failure…the Master, consistently on the defensive, was trying to turn the tide; and at the same time I felt that his patience was at the end, his temper taxed to the breaking…” The God of Small Things “Lying naked on the church floor, dark blood spilling from his skull like a secret…By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet.

Like old roses on a breeze.” When Honinbo Shūsai, the “Master of Go”, died, a part of old Japanese tradition died with him. The semi-autobiographical The God of Small Things by Indian author Arundhati Roy, who won for it the Booker Prize in 1997, is not exactly an elegy, but a tragedy nonetheless. It is about the ruin of a family, who became victims of circumstance amidst the struggle of a culturally and politically complex India where ancient heritage, Western conquest, Communism, and modernity interacted and clashed. As in Kawabata’s novels, there is much beauty in The God of Small Things, but instead of portraying fragility and elegance, Roy’s story possesses a brutal and tender honesty, needing little subtlety, breathing beauty but at the same time hiding nothing about the ugly cruelty of life. The novel begins with the mood, season and weather, and the flora and fauna of Kerala, India in an unforgettable first paragraph, as if to make clear that the following events and characters in the story come from this backdrop, cannot be separated from it, are in fact it: “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.” The strangeness of reality is clearly and coherently expressed. In Roy’s world as in Murakami’s, there are mysteries: one twin having the memories only the other has experienced, the dead talking—these are only two of them. But unlike Murakami, Roy has no need for escape or for parallel universes. For her, there is only one world, though harrowing, ultimately has to be dealt with. Consequences are confronted as the book plunges its hands deep into the wet and sticky earth of nature, magic and mystery, culture and politics, and domestic and national history. Roy works with precise detail that is at times loving, sometimes unforgiving, and mostly unsentimental. The smallest emotions flower and there is a buzz of anguish that readily stings. These are expressed in richly textured language that is highly inventive, given the spontaneity of inquisitive and innocent children. Relics and Remnants “Where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones fall like stones from the sky?” (Sophie Mol)

“I’m Popeye the sailor man [Dum dum] I live in a cara-van [Dum dum] I op-en the door And Fall-on the floor I’m Popeye the sailor man [Dum dum]” (Esthappen) “Rej-Oice in the Lo-Ord Or-Orlways And again I say rej-Oice RejOice, RejOice, And again I say rej-Oice!” (Baby Kochamma) Even the smallest of things are pivotal in this epic narrative, which bears the scars and ongoing battles of India like a tapestry. There is a chapter on the almost forgotten Hindu classical art of Kathakali dance, which tells of the “Great Stories” that although are “as familiar as the house you live in” “or the smell of your lover’s skin”, audiences still seek. Fully knowing how the stories would end, they still listen, “in the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t”. Amidst such cultural relics exist Western influences. The family of the twins Esthappen and Rahel has in its bookshelf a copy of The Reader’s Digest World Atlas. The twins’ mother, when putting them to sleep, would comfort them with, “We be of one blood, ye and I,” the Snake’s Call for protection from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. There is a trip to the theater for the children to once again watch The Sound of Music, even if they have already memorized the scenes and the songs. With Coca-Cola and Fanta are Charles Dickens, The Wizard of Oz, and not to mention Phil Donahue. In this India, there is nothing odd in finding along riverbanks polluted with “pesticides bought with World Bank loans” and past new “Gulf-money houses built by nurses, masons, wire-benders and bank clerks who worked hard and unhappily in faraway places” demonstrations by one of the two factions of the Communist Party, rallying plantation workers and Untouchables. Across the river, from the house of Esthappen and Rahel, dwells the “History House”, the novel’s most solid symbol of the remnants of Indian colonialism. Abandoned in the middle of a rubber estate, it was owned by an Englishman who spoke the local language and wore mundus, and made the locality of Ayemene “his private Heart of Darkness”. The run-down dwelling is full of shadows and whispers, inhabited by lizards, and haunted by old pictures of maps and ancestors. Chacko, the twins’ uncle, tells

them that this house is not accessible to them because their minds “have been invaded by a war…that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.” For which Ammu, the twins’ mother, exposes Chacko by reminding him that he had in fact married their conquerors through his relationship with Margaret Kochamma, a British woman he met in London. Unfazed, hypocritical and still tongue-in-cheek, Chacko proceeds by lamenting that their “dreams have been doctored” because, compared to the British, their sorrows, joys, and dreams will never be enough to matter. Chacko’s oratory, done in one of his “Oxford Moods”, is slyly discredited by the story as he, a nominal Communist with the heart of a landlord, is shown to despise himself, still cling to his London days, and prize the fact that he was able to marry a white woman, long after their divorce. India’s colonial discomfort and insecurity are inherited by the twins, who have to interact with their half-British cousin, Sophie Mol. In the family, only Ammu shows defiance. Broader social implications are delved with in the story through religion and politics. The cocktail revolution of the Marxists is explained through its reformist approach of recruiting Hindus, Muslims, Roman Catholics, and Syrian Christians, with the method for Christians simply involving replacing “God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the church with the Party”. The caste system is also surveyed at length. It plays a special part in Ammu’s family, whose patriarch did not allow Paravans (Untouchables) in the house and whose matriarch still has memories of the time when “Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom” to sweep away their footprints “so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves” by stepping into a Paravan’s tracks. The God of Small Things is told in this setting, where not just Ammu’s bourgeois family but many other families can still recall the time when Untouchables were banned from public roads and “had to put their hands over their mouths when they spoke, to divert their polluted breath”. This heritage of prejudice thick and thriving in modern Indian society lives mixed with the history of oppression from British colonizers. Ammu, who was beaten by her father, and who saw her mother suffer even worse beatings, in protest against her times, has “developed a lofty sense of injustice” and a “reckless streak”. Through her, fate will play a cruel trick involving deep hatred and fear. Breaking the Rules

“They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.” The talented Paravan named Velutha, who is employed by Ammu’s family, unlike his crawling ancestors, does not walk with the weight of prejudice on his back. He is a Communist, and like Ammu, defies norms and rules. Needless to say, they become lovers. The succeeding events lay bare violence that is naked yet paradoxically impersonal. The police wrongfully hold Velutha in suspicion. Officers are sent as “history’s henchmen”, not to arrest him but to “exorcise fear”, not to beat him to death but only to inoculate “a community against an outbreak”, preventing an entire people from rising against unjust rules. In the time “when uncles became fathers, mother lovers, and cousins died and had funerals”, injustice seems inevitable and those innocent of crimes are powerless. Esthappen, who has witnessed together with his twin sister Velutha’s beating, is traumatized for life. Thick tentacles “enfolded him in its swampy arms” and dragged him down into the darkness of silence. The unspeakable has become a grotesque inner torment that has inched “along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue”. With no world to escape to, horror resides within Esthappen, leaving his mind perpetually stunned. He is another victim, who has not been able to flee the clutches of India’s unrelenting history. Hikari and Hope It has taken an immense braveness for Arundhati Roy to uncover ingrained beliefs and practices, yet healing the self and one’s country are possible only if the full extent of history is taken into account, in all its monstrosity. Can there be anything braver than confronting the grotesque in oneself? Kenzaburo Oë was born in 1935 in a “deep-hollow forest” village of Shikoku, in the southwestern part of Japan. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, 26 years after the first Nobel for Literature laureate, Yasunari Kawabata. As a child, two western novels left a deep mark on Kenzaburo: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, by the American Mark Twain and the Swede Selma Lagerlöf, respectively. Later on, even if he did catch interest in The Tale of Genji and other Japanese and Asian works, novels,

stories, and philosophies of the West were what continued to deeply influence the works of Kenzaburo Oë, among them Dante, Rabelais, Balzac, Poe, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Sartre. Like Kawabata, Oë was severely affected by the war. But unlike Kawabata, he did not vow to restrict himself to writing elegies. Kenzaburo Oë progressively decided to heal divisions and to reconcile the ambiguities of Japan, which have caused it to spilt, in the person of Oë and in his countrymen and women, into two opposite poles like separate branches of one scar. These ambiguities or two-sided characteristics of Japan include its Westernbased imitation and modernization taken with its firm stance on its Asian tradition; its complete openness to the West taken with its relative isolation in the East; and its historical modernization taken with war as an aberration of this modernization that destroyed Japan in the past and still lingers as the stain of guilt towards those that it conquered and for Japan’s own nuclear casualties. The gaping wound left by the bombs that hit Japan was never filled by anything that came after the war. Generations were wrenched from their ethical inheritance, had no working basis for new life, and were pulled in various directions. Oë recalls that in his childhood, very young students were made to vow to kill themselves if their Emperor commanded them to die, shouting, “I would die, Sir, I would open my belly and die!” But after hearing the voice of the Emperor on a radio broadcast, a divine personality descended to his subjects, to accept defeat, the impressionable Kenzaburo was gripped with humiliation. His world then was smashed into small pieces; the remaining emptiness and the painful lack of continuity frightened Oë. Through the translations of Professor Kazuo Watanabe of Francois Rabelais, Oë imbibed the Western concept of humanism, which helped him to view society and the human condition and find ways to heal the ambiguous polarization of Japan. Kenzaburo Oë wanted to go the way of Watanabe, who taught the Japanese about tolerance, the vulnerability of human beings to the very preconceptions and machines that he has created, and that “those who do not protest against the war are accomplices of the war” (Kristoffer Nyrop). Through humanism, Oë wished, to empower the Japanese, including himself, as a novelist and through literature to be healed of their sufferings and the sufferings of their time, to be cured of their wounds. In this line, Oë modifies the title of Kawabata’s Nobel Lecture, “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself”, for his own “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself”, where the traditional Japanese sense of beauty and sensitivity to Nature is grafted to the humanist view of man and woman.

Also through Watanabe and Rabelais, Oë employed in his craft the formulation of Mikhail Bakhtin of “the image system of grotesque realism or the culture of popular laughter”; the relationship between the cosmic, the social, and the physical; “the overlapping of death and passions for rebirth”; and the laughter that undermines feudal and hierarchical relationships. It is through this grotesque realism that Oë preserves and reassess the stories, myth and folklore, and history of his native Shikoku, and analyzes the modern monstrosities and the recurrent myths born and sustained in our time. He moves simultaneously in dream and reality, in the past and the present, in the animal and the human, in tragedy and humor, in masochism and rehabilitation. Oë walks the thin line between rebellion and anarchy. In his craft, he assaults traditional values by pushing the Japanese language beyond its accustomed “genius”. He pushes it, violating natural rhythms, to accommodate both the intensity and hostility of what he seeks to convey, thus forcing it to evolve: wild, powerfully poetic, and unresolved. Combining humanism and grotesque realism, Kenzaburo Oë drives his characters, his anti-heroes, beyond the limits of respectability and into the wildness of sex, violence, and political fanaticism; into the realms of abnormality and perversion. But with humanism, he presents them with compassion, whether they are within or beyond hope. This is how he exorcises his demons. On a personal level, Oë has sought to heal the deep divisions within himself. Besides the experience of war, he has also had to deal with his first son, who was born with a brain defect. Oë and his wife named him Hikari, Japanese for “light”. Through his novels such as A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry, and A Quiet Life Kenzaburo Oë bridges the personal to the political, explores the individual’s confrontation with life's tragedies. In these books, his characters overcome humiliation and shame. They move on and in so doing, find personal dignity and renewed duty towards fellow human beings. Hikari, who for a time was incommunicative, learned to talk through birdsong and music. Eventually, Hikari composed his own songs. For his father, the very act of expression has the power to heal and mend. Pain and despair, once conveyed, can be healed. For Hikari, whose compositions varied and deepened through time, music was the language to utter all the sentiments and emotions his faculties prevented from being conveyed. But Oë does not write of Hikari and other personal matters because he merely chooses to. Instead, he agrees with fellow Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer that writers do not really choose a situation or a story. His themes have chosen him.

The current of the times and his experiences have called on Oë and he responds. Therefore, he does not choose the topics of war, political division, handicap, and abnormality. They continually choose him. Kenzaburo Oë writes from personal matters not to emphasize individuality, but to link them to society, cracking the isolation of Kawabata’s Oriental emptiness and esoteric beauty, and pushing Japan’s literary legacy to explain the times, to express and heal the self. THE AMBIGUOUS PERSONAL AND UNIVERSAL MATTERS OF KENZABURO OË Three Novels The Silent Cry Waiting for an “expectation”, a trigger for motion, Mitsusaburo lies down a soil pit excavated for the septic tank. Without knowing it, his hands are pulling out rocks and clods of dirt. He unconsciously wants the walls to collapse, burying himself alive. Mitsusaburo has an expressionless abnormal child, whom he feels is an abnormal growth from himself, an abscess. Recalling words from his friend who had just killed himself, Mitsu relates to himself, “I too have the seeds of that same, incurable madness.” For many days already, he feels as he wakes up that his body parts are detached, separate. The pit becomes his mouth gaping with his silent cry. The Silent Cry, considered as Oë’s masterpiece, centers on Mitsu and Takashi Nedokoro, a repentant activist with a violent streak, returning form Tokyo and America—reunited brothers—to Okubo, the village of their childhood. They find themselves returning to more than the forest, its sounds and smells, and the legend of the Chosokabe; they are greeted by “Japan’s Fattest Woman”; a Korean “Emperor of the Supermarkets”; television; old village politics, prejudice, and hypocrisy; and an unresolved family history, which threatens to repeat itself. They discover latent things in themselves rearing their ugly heads. They swim in despair, shame, deceit, and cruelty. Takashi uncovers the cleave in himself: “I've had a split personality all along. Whenever life's calm for a while, I get

an urge to stir myself up deliberately just to confirm the split. And it's like drug addiction—the stimulus has to be progressively stronger….” Mitsu and Takashi grapple for the words to express themselves, to utter their “truths” in order to escape their personal hells. A Personal Matter In front of Bird, a cram school teacher, is a huge atlas, a map of the frontiers of Africa. He longs to escape to the exotic continent and leave everything behind. Small and thin, diminutive, pecking only at the seeds of life with folded wings, Bird, at the age of twenty-seven, sees himself as an old man. After coming from the hospital, discovering that his first-born son had a brain hernia, a disfiguring abnormality leading to permanent handicap, in horror, “he would have liked to flee his own body”. He soaks in whisky, mixing shame and the yearning to escape. He turns to a former lover, Himiko, to indulge in depravity, the kind of sex “that would strip and hold up to the light the shame that was worming into him”, embracing the tentacles of sadomasochism. Himiko, trapped in her own web, leads him: “Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die; the other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it. Just as you would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you only exist as a corpse and move on to the universe in which you are still alive. “In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk.” A student of William Blake, she invokes: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires…” A Quiet Life A Quiet Life is a novelistic study on an unusual nuclear family when K, a novelist and the head of the house, undergoes another one of his “pinches”—an allegedly immobilizing malaise that prevents him from writing—and to get over it, he and his wife fly to Chicago.

The three children, Ma-Chan, O-Chan, and Eeyore, who is mentally handicapped but can compose music, are thus left to fend for themselves. Now in charge of running the house, Ma-Chan is tasked to keep things in order and to handle daily concerns, especially those of Eeyore, his eldest brother. Their relatives and family friends cannot but comment on their predicament as “abandoned children”. Even if Eeyore is handicapped, the three seem to have a very commonplace family relationship. The tone of the novel is informal and light as Oë turns his real family experiences into semi-fiction with much ease. There is even banter between the children on how they feel as literary material: “A pain in the neck, don’t you think, even if it’s been done favorably, that he writes about us from his one-dimensional viewpoint? It’s alright with my friends who know me, but it depresses me to think that I’m going to meet some people who, through his stories, will have preconceived ideas of me.” The family’s relationships with other people are revealed, so are scaffoldings of religious belief, awkward moments in growing up, and simple family pleasures. As Kenzaburo Oë acknowledges, writing and literature are ways towards healing. But O-Chan observes of his father’s “pinch”: “If a difficult problem on the side of reality is to be clarified by writing a novel, and yet the problem can’t be hurdled in the novel, then things are going to be hard for him.” But all throughout, the story’s frustrations are counterpoised by Eeyore’s unsinkable cool. Even if the name Eeyore, whose character is patterned after Hikari (Oë’s son, who is also called Pooh-Chan), is derived from a pessimistic donkey in a cartoon, his attitude and actions are full of vigor and hope. Eeyore, ecstatic on his swimming lessons: “I sank. From now on I shall swim. I think I shall really swim!”

A Pilgrimage Back to the Beginning “There are three hundred and sixty pole loads of songs, Which load do you carry on your pole? There are thirty-six thousand books of songs, Which book do you carry in your hand?

Address me as master singer for I know, The first book is the book born within us, The first book is the script born within us.” (Record of Darkness) Like Kenzaburo Oë, Gao Xingjian seeks to heal the cleft within himself, but his struggle is not primarily with another or with an external event; because of the history of China, Xingjian has searched for a solution to problems involving the individual ego, the very nature of the self. After a lung cancer diagnosis is retracted, seemingly being granted a second chance on life, he sets out on a voyage. Xingjian sees this as an opportunity to start anew. He leaves “those contaminated surroundings”, seeking to return “to nature to look for this authentic life”. He flees from Beijing, from an intellectually repressive environment and possible imprisonment. He takes a journey to discover himself and writes Soul Mountain at a time of intense self-censorship to “dispel [his] inner loneliness”, for Xingjian understands that only literature allows a person “to preserve a human consciousness”. He makes this conclusion during the time of total dictatorship under Mao Zedong, when even monasteries cannot provide sanctuary to individual thought, and even writing in secret can endanger one’s life. Then, he discovers that to be intellectually autonomous, one has no choice but to merely whisper to oneself. In his Nobel Lecture for the 2000 literature award, he traces this repression back to Confucius, when an autocratic ideology and system already existed, which gave nonconformists no choice but to withdraw from society and live the life of a recluse or take refuge in monasteries, otherwise feign madness to be able stay in the mainstream. Even these two options are gradually eradicated in the early twentieth century. Xingjian sets out to reclaim the self that he has surrendered, to take back his own “instincts, sensitivities, thinking, perceptions, and judgments”. When he undertakes physical travels that bring him to faraway mountains and forest reserves, village dwellings and great rivers, and to festivals and cadre headquarters, he treks parallel landscapes within himself—no less deep, vast, and treacherous than mountain terrain. In his travels in the Tibetan highlands, he meets an old man, a song master and dancer, who tells him how folk songs were prohibited, saying, “It was the Cultural Revolution. They said the songs were dirty so we turned to singing Sayings of Mao Zedong songs instead.” Xingjian encounters stories of black magic, hexes, “demon walls”, fox fairies, the King of Hell, and the Goddess Guanyin, who rules

over the dead. He listens to legends, is haunted by stories of ghosts of suicides, and is awed by the fire god who was seen as “a huge red bird with nine heads spitting out tongues of fire [soaring] into the sky trailing a long golden tail”. He sees fortunetellers. Xingjian recounts the thrill of stumbling on a genuine folk song that he says reveres the soul, lamenting the emptiness of a desolate residual race. He encounters more stories of bandit chiefs and rebellions, of clans that wage wars as regular as the passing of seasons. But staying with forest reserve rangers, “who have grown silent like the trees”, he becomes frustrated with the lack of conversation, and thinks that maybe it is analytical thinking, logic, and the unceasing search for meaning that has been the cause of his anxieties. He visits Daoists and Buddhists in their monasteries, and is drawn by their life lived with the absence of desire and longing, apparently free from the world’s suffering. But he discovers that he is “not a recluse and still [wants] to eat from the stoves of human society”, even if he has to undergo “endless daily trivia” and live among people preoccupied with their “solemnities”. It is only his confrontation with nature that fear rises within him against stark, absolute loneliness. At first, Xingjian is struck by pristine beauty, “irrepressible, [seeking] no reward…derived neither from symbolism nor metaphor and needing neither analogies nor associations”. Light draws song from his depths. But the wildness of nature shuns him as a complete stranger, making his existence “ephemeral to the point of meaninglessness”. Palpable, primordial darkness reminds him that humans could have worshipped fire out of an innate fear of this darkness. It is a fear of one’s identity merging with chaos, becoming inscrutable amidst everything else. Xingjian knows that this “primitive loneliness devoid of all meaning” is not the consciousness he seeks. Deep within, he is afraid of sinking, of falling into this abyss. As literature can become a conversation with oneself to preserve one’s own consciousness, Xingjian finds that that returning to memories, “which belong purely to yourself”, can also be a method for preservation. In his travels, he realizes that childhood and its memories are not necessarily limited to one place. Passing by villages that remind him of his hometown, he gets nostalgic and quickly returns to this place in his dreams. Identifying Oneself “I don’t know if you have ever observed the strange thing, the self. Often the more you look the more it doesn’t seem to be like it, and the more you look the

more it isn’t. It’s just like when one is lying on the grass…clouds are transforming every instant.” Xingjian’s travels within the ego, simultaneous with his journey to mountains, forests, and villages, have been written out as conversations between himself— in alternating chapters as separate pronouns, who are projections of himself. The “I”, the “you”, “he”, and “she” engage in conversations based on Xingjian’s different thoughts, opinions, judgments, and predispositions. From the loneliness imposed by severe censorship, he has undertaken a solitary activity of verifying himself from himself. Xingjian has done so following the implications of his conjecture that the power relations between a political structure and an individual are also present between an individual and an “other”. There is no one else to rely on but himself, his own individuality is what can only verify experience and reality, free of all coercion, manipulation, delusion, and anxiety. This literary method devised by Xingjian, clever and highly original, though extreme, is praised by the Nobel Academy for having “opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama”. Xingjian’s concerns are universally valid, and his insights sharp. But does the persona in Soul Mountain find what he has set out to find? Does he reach the mountain called “Lingshan”? Has it ever been there in the first place to be found? The end of the novel is inconclusive, signifying no clear understanding that the quest has reached its end. Xingjian concludes with, “The fact of the matter is I comprehend nothing, I understand nothing…This is how it is.” As always, the journey becomes the objective. But this is not to say that Xingjian has not already learned what he first most needs to learn. Escape is never the path. Solitude and renunciation are not the only ways. “Don’t go searching for meaning, all is embodied in the chaos.” Xingjian is back to the beginning.