Before painting comes drawing lines and circles, shaving pencils, learning your colours and remembering brushes. Before a performance comes tuning, carving reeds, and waxing bows, an orchestra moaning like a broken ship in the wind. What comes before writing? The banality of life. Waking up late despite alarms, not making your bed, spilling coffee, and smudged appearances in smudged mirrors. Perhaps only in writing, what comes before comes through as well. Some of the most acclaimed literature of our times is, in fact, stupendously mundane.
By bringing Gustave Courbet’s realism to words, modern Japanese literature presents the readers’ imagination with a romantic banality, an inconspicuous but deeply felt beauty of everything around us. The romanticism here, however, is not a feature of the writing but the readers’ imagination. In fact, Haruki Murakami’s narrator in Norweigan Wood (1987), Toru Watanabe says: ‘Even the most well-disposed observer would have had trouble calling this setting [of a dormitory] poetic.’ But readers do see this setting as poetic: they did, after all, reach this part of the novel after reading some twenty-odd pages on the description of a dormitory and a flight to Hamburg.
I spent my sixth birthday frolicking out in the April sun. When I came back home, the walls were decorated with balloons, ostensibly put up by my mother. But to the newly six-year-old me it seemed fantastical; a few dozen pale shiny balloons summoned for me in my absence. Almost a decade later, this came to me while reading my first Murakami—serendipitously titled “Birthday Girl”—the acute banality of my mother putting up balloons and the magical effect it had on me, like modern Japanese literature has on its readers.
Banality is a curious theme. It comes with an expected tone of offhandedness, of unceremoniously viewing from a distance, but it evokes a completely different set of feelings: of intimacy, of living in an alternate world where you watch strangers do gracefully what you might do clumsily. And while it evidently stands in sharp contrast to richly imaginative writing of, say, fantasy fiction, the banality in Japanese literature is just as much or at times, even more evocative. It isn’t far-reaching by any standards, and perhaps this is why modern Japanese fiction comes off as carefully collected and delicately written despite the abrupt endings and the free-flowing writing style.
What inspires such writing? Or any writing for that matter?
This question burns deeper today when most of us have spent a majority of the past year cooped up in our homes. And banality has claimed more and more space: birthdays, lectures, meetings and concerts are no longer as special when conducted through screens.
This worries everyone, equally, hardened creatives or not. After all, some of the greatest writers and artists—Lord Byron for example— have come from lives of excess. An excess of debauchery, of misery, of exuberance and of—what Keats would call— things of beauty.
Yukio Mishima lived such a life. From his strange childhood where his grandmother would not let him go out in the sunlight to his death from seppuku—the first after World War II— after failing to organise a militia to overthrow the constitution of Japan. And it showed in his psychologically dark, convoluted themes but his style of writing nonetheless remains, in many ways, stupendously banal like that of his peers. Mishima’s works are thematically congruent to his life. His magnum opus Confessions of a Mask deals with a protagonist who had an isolatedh and sickly childhood like Mishima himself. Among his lesser known works is Thirst for Love, a convoluted novel with a morbid fascination with death which has often been attributed to Mishima’s childhood spent with his rather unkind dying grandmother. The book begins inconspicuously as such: ‘That day Etsuko went to the Hankyu department store and bought two pairs of wool socks. One pair was blue, the other brown. They were plain socks, of solid color.
She had come all the way into Osaka and completed her shopping at the Hankyu store at the last station, and now all she was going to do was turn around, board her train, and go home. She wasn’t going to a movie. She wasn’t even going to have tea, much less a meal. Etsuko hated nothing so much as crowded streets.’
And so one wonders whether the ordinary can ever be taken out of the extraordinary.
An argument also has to be made here for inspiration that comes from within and not from external influence of any kind. It is said that Beethoven’s early works are rather derivative, much of it stemming from his master Haydn’s works and that his works after his deafness were startlingly original. It is famously known that he kept on conducting the Fifth Symphony even after it had ended and had to be steered around to receive the standing ovation. Unlike Mishima’s, nothing about Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s life—apart from his writing—is remarkable in the least. His most popular work, The Makioka Sisters explores the contrast between the Japanese tradition and the West through about six hundred pages on four Osaka sisters’ ordinary lives. His writing is plain and gossipy, his subjects are ordinary, and yet the book evokes extraordinary feelings of nostalgia in the reader.
And then there is Haruki Murakami who has found magic in realism, in writing as well as in life. His writing career was rather abruptly launched when he heard the crack of a ball on the bat during a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo. In his own words: “In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel. I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.”
So, do extraordinary lives truly produce extraordinary writing? Or is it just the writer’s personal brand of realism that feeds into their life? Mary Shelley might agree but Yukio Mishima won’t. It isn’t entirely far fetched to consider banality as a theme exclusive to modern Japanese writing. Numerous other artistic Japanese parallels show that simplicity is an integral feature of Japanese culture. Hayao Miyazaki’s famously evocative and beautiful children’s films are rife with ordinary yet breathtaking scenes of people cooking, cleaning or buying groceries.
Japan’s most popular brand of poetry, haikus, are essentially a simple yet stunning arrangement of seventeen syllables:
Camellia flower,
Falling, lets drop the rain
Of yesterday.
-Yosa Buson
No writing can ever be or will ever be compartmentalised and divorced from realism: all of it is going to stem from everyday lives because that is what we truly know. It shall be read vociferously, as it is now, because as Nakajima Atsushi puts in Light, Wind and Dreams: “What convinces readers is realism, while what fascinates them is romanticism.” It is perhaps the readers’ detached attachment to writing that makes them persist through banal writing subjects. Washing dishes is glamorous unless you are elbow deep in soap water. They chase for hidden meanings in banality; is an apartment with windows on all sides a metaphor for an open cage? A fire in the distance one for impending doom? But revelations in these texts come silently. Not as groundbreaking metaphors but as vivid images in plain sight, an explanation for which is better left untouched and only to be illustrated, as Tanizaki does in Makioka Sisters:
‘And while she lay with her eyes closed, the fireflies, out there along the river, all through the night, were flashing on and off, silent, numberless. Sachiko felt a surging inside her, as though she were joining them, soaring and dipping along the surface of the water, cutting her own uncertain track of light.’
Japan has come down from its ukiyo and Japanese fiction presents us with an untouchable reflection of our lives. As they say in optical physics: a real image.
