Suppose Japan did not exist. That it was a legendary territory like Atlantis or the islands of San Borondón, which are represented on old maps and wonders told by travelers who were never there. They tell us their myths, their culture, their customs, and then artists create a world of their own from those forms borrowed, not from an original, but from the collective imagination. The delicate beauty and cruelty, the learning and self-discipline of martial arts, the silent wisdom, zen and cherry trees, haiku and harakiriare some of those themes that build the western idea of what is Japanese, behind which any possible daily life disappears, because how can there be daily life in a mythical territory.
In recent times, two beautiful books have fallen into my hands that discuss the reception in the West of the forms, ideas, and themes that have come from that country. In the blue bonfires (Candaya 2021), Juan F. Rivero recreates and twists –gently– traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku and tanka; and Javier Vela, in Bowmaster’s Revelations (Pre-Texts 2021), builds a hybrid of fragmentary essay, novel and accumulation of -supposedly- Japanese texts. But neither of them have been to Japan. Or if?
They both tell me that their first contact with Japan was through manga and anime. Juan has also been practicing aikido since he was fourteen years old. And one day some uncles gave him a very successful birthday present: “It was called Words of Light, and it was a compilation of 90 haikus by a 17th century Japanese poet named Ueshima Onitsura. It was from that moment on that I became interested in both haiku and other forms of Japanese literature.”
Javier Vela also made this transition from manga to other artistic forms: “S?seki, Higuchi, Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Ibuse, Kawabata, like later Abe or Mishima, fell chaotically into my hands and invited me to unknowingly conceive a territory mythical that now I’m not sure I want to contrast with the model or the real space. It was through those Meiji era and modern books like I got to the classics, Sh?nagon, Shikibu, Kenk?etc., which ended up completing an image in which many of the symbolist authors that I read at the time were reflected, with that taste for exoticism with a colonial imprint, and that slightly hegemonic and self-satisfied look that still survives in certain orientalists”.
But it is not easy to escape from the orientalizing gaze, from that form of appropriation that reduces a foreign civilization to a handful of clichés, perpetuated in literature and cinema, suitable for consumption in the West, a problem that both authors are aware of. “In the book”, affirms Javier Vela, “I tried to offer aA rereading or a complementary reading of the wisdom traditionin this case addressing the parallels between archery and literature: both disciplines require patience and commitment, but also a disposition of mind, an abandonment or temporary forgetting of the self and a questioning of one’s own identity.
Lastly, it tried to invent a literary archipelago that was significantly different from the one that actually exists (heteronormative and patriarchal), an alternative canon shifting the focus of attention, which until now had fallen on the notion of ‘teaching’, towards the idea of ’transmission’, essential to honestly embrace the feminism of our days, and to the wisdom treasured by women and bequeathed from one to another without the mediation of men”.
Rivero also discovers orientalist traits in the way haiku is practiced in the West, and even in the way it is translated. “A feature that is very present in Japanese haiku authors, for example, is the humorand yet the number of humorous poems collected in our anthologies is very insignificant.
Something similar happens with the elements of nature, which in the japanese tradition They always respond to the elaborate Japanese symbolic code, which in turn drinks from Chinese and, therefore, has a tradition full of reminiscences and games that the general reader ignores, missing half of the poem. In my case, what interests me about haiku and forms like tanka is that they force me to express myself in very few words, and that sharpens both ingenuity and creativity. When one has only seventeen or thirty-one syllables to convey something – in most cases, an idea and/or an emotion – he is forced to pay absolute attention to all the details, including elements that normally seem secondary to us, such as punctuation or euphony”.
This being the case, it seems almost provocative that one of the two epigraphs that preside over the book is this quote from the poet Si Kongtu: “All borrowed forms are absurd.” “I think that not one of the poems that I have included in the book could be considered orthodox. For me poetry is hybridization, because it always consists in filling the common with the intimate, in appropriating language and impregnating it with one to cause a response, an emotion, in the other. When I chose that epigraph for the collection of poems, I wanted to warn the reader that he was not before a book of haikus, before an odorless bouquet of borrowed forms, but before something very mine and, therefore, heterodox, hybrid, contaminated by me. Forms are not to be borrowed, but occupied, inhabited; make them your own.”
Vela approaches these borrowed forms “imprinting a certain ironic distance with respect to what could be expected from Naoko, the mistress of the bow, and her tutelary role, something that Hitomi, her student, as well as the reader, is constantly spared” . As she explains, what she tries to do is “parody (which cannot be done except by going to her sources with veneration) the tradition of japanese wisdom literature from various aspects. From the outset, the book proposes a code of reading that participates at the same time in its own model. It occurred to me to call it ‘wisdom fiction’ […] I do not believe that anyone can inherit, except by reproducing it in an artificial way, a spirituality so strongly rooted in another culture, and the ineffective use of all that self-help literature only confirmed it: books that perhaps opened certain paths of search, but rarely lasting transformation or assimilation.
So in the Revelations of the teacher of the arc there is learning but we don’t fully know how it occurs, because a good part of what comes to us are the silences of the teacher or behaviors and phrases that are difficult to understand. Silences that we often find in the representations of Japanese masters and apprentices, and which lead to meditation or perplexityas in the famous koan that asks what is the noise produced by the clapping of one hand.
But we are not only here before silent characters, the very structure of the book creates silences in the interstices. It is not about exhausting any subject, but about pointing it out; and, in addition, the main narration is interwoven with annotations, quotes, reflections that seem to be part of the Japanese tradition but often what they do is invent it: “That’s right. The text delimits and defines its own field of action, incardinating itself in the scheme of the genre ‘zuihitsu’, in which the statements follow one another digressively and without any systematic order. In a certain sense, the book tries to bring out its own tradition, in which, of course, a good number of non-existent authors participate and many books that may be written one day, but that until now, let us say, maintain a conflictive relationship with the TRUE”.
And of course there is silence in The blue bonfires: the haiku and the tanka, by necessarily limiting themselves to narrating or recreating a detail, they mean that the context can only be produced in the imagination, in the echo that the poems produce in those who read them. And in that game between detail and everything that it suggests, another of the features with which we associate the Japanese appears, delicate beauty: “I think that delicacy”, says Rivero, “is a necessary quality in an artist.
It implies knowing the material with which one works, its texture, its possible folds, and operating knowing the limits to which it is physically and conceptually possible to take it. In this sense, I like Japanese poems, as well as their painting and ceramics, because they prefer to reduce the artifact to its minimum expression in such a way that everything is visible. When I work with words, I try to apply that same requirement to myself: I try not to give more than is necessary, I correct and correct, sometimes to points that could seem absurd, and, if something does not seem to me up to what I intended when I started to work, I rule it out without further ado.
The Japanese concept of Makotowhich can be translated as honesty, captures this idea well: we have to be honest with ourselves out of respect for others; we have to be delicate when we work because the reader deserves it”.
And perhaps this is one of the essential characteristics of these two books so different but how well they dialogue with each other: honesty, particularly when approaching a foreign culture without trying to appropriate it, rather using some of its proposals to develop a personal work that does not deny its own tradition. Japan, if it exists, does so at another level, just like any nation: it is the embodiment of the social and economic relations – and therefore political and cultural – that have been forged throughout history in a given space. That is why what Vela and Rivero do is not so much to show Japan as to resort to a fiction that evokes not a legendary country, but the capacity to imagine of its readers and readers.