In Praise of Wandering Part II

I began this reflection by invoking the name of John Manjiro, a pioneering spirit and adventurous “rover” (to use the romantic vocabulary of contemporary American authors like James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville) who negotiated the uneasy spaces between two very different worlds: on the one hand, what was initially a feudal but then, later, a rapidly “modernizing” Japan; and, on the other, a “Young America” at that time just beginning to reach across the Pacific in its westward expansion. And I ended my previous entry by asking, “Where are today’s Manjiros?”

In other words, at a time of social, economic, and political stagnation, I often wonder where to find intrepid explorers unafraid to cross the horizon and venture into the unknown—and who, perhaps more challengingly, are resourceful, patient, and open-minded enough to dwell there, far from the comforts of their native lands, inhabiting those spaces “in between” cultures, languages, nations. It seems to me that such “roving” spirits are precisely what we need most urgently in today’s world, which appears to be shrinking geographically even as the distance between peoples and cultures becomes ever greater.

Now, it is true that Japan has had many great adventurers of the Manjiro-type in its relatively brief, at times violent, and always spectacular “modern” period, to be sure. In addition, they have in many ways led the charge in transforming this society from the feudalism of Manjiro’s youth to the “postmodernism” (for lack of a better term) that we see everywhere on display around us today. And wandering—let’s call it “the Art of Getting Lost”—has most certainly been a major part of that fascinating history. But what I would like to focus upon in this entry is an older, deeper tradition of wandering in Japan.

One of the earliest literary forms was known as “Zuihitsu,” literally “following the brush,” which flourished in the Heian Era (roughly 800-1200 AD). One of the most famous, and certainly most wandering or meandering examples of this genre is Sei Shōnagon’s “Pillow Book,” an idiosyncratic account of courtly life. We can likewise look at the work of her contemporary and rival, Murasaki Shikibu, who is generally considered the main author of Japan’s first—perhaps the world’s first—novel, "The Tale of Genji." In the case of the latter text, to this day no one is completely sure how many authors wrote it or in what exact order the chapters should be arranged. But to be honest, that doesn’t matter. Nothing really “happens” in the sense that modern readers have come to expect—other than Prince Genji’s innumerable amorous encounters—and yet this “monogatari” (tale or narrative) holds its present-day reader, as it has for generations, in rapt attention.

“Nothing happens” to be sure—but that’s not the point. In the Heian aesthetic sensibility, it seems that it was the journey and not the destination that mattered most. This was an art of digression and dialog, poetry and calligraphy, words and music that was less concerned with the message (or “information”) conveyed than with the message itself. It is not by chance that it was a deeply erotic, even deliciously promiscuous culture. And I would argue that this meandering or wandering style to a large extent survives even today, though it has undoubtedly undergone many transformations since its heyday.

In fact, one of the greatest challenges facing an instructor of English composition in Japan is to figure out how to help his or her students learn to refrain from such “meandering” and, instead, “get to the point” clearly, concisely, and persuasively. It is actually more difficult than it sounds, because this way of writing not only follows a proud, ancient rhetorical structure, rooted in Chinese classical scholarship—and years of reinforcement, both in and out of school—but it also reflects a manner of thinking that has likewise been conditioned by years of education and training, and is therefore deeply ingrained. Almost everything has to be thrown out, or tossed aside and ignored for the time being, as the fundamentals of what “Westerners” would consider critical reasoning and the logical presentation of a proper “argument” is introduced and then practiced.

However, it is not without some sense of regret that one attempts to assist one’s students to “unlearn” such “illogical” (or wandering) habits of thinking and writing. As Robert Rosenstone makes clear in his magnificent narrative history “Mirror in the Shrine,” early Western travelers and “experts” in Japan often reflected upon, and at times anguished over, the supposedly “beneficial” effects of the Westernization or Modernization that they were helping to bring about. The three Americans that he profiles—the missionary W. E. Griffis, the scholar Edward Morse, and the writer Lafcadio Hearn—to varying degrees lamented the onslaught of Modernization that they saw going on around them in Meiji Japan. However I think it is safe to say that this type of reaction was, and continues to be, common among witnesses to any such rapid and drastic cultural transformation. After all, one of the most common and enduring themes of the by now-familiar “Expat in Japan” literary (sub)genre has been the lamentation of the disappearance of “traditional” Japan, a land of shadows and spirits that seems to be forever evaporating before our eyes.

Be that as it may, one of the most important points that Rosenstone makes in his study is the surprisingly under-analyzed way in which these early “foreign experts” not only helped transform their adopted home, but also were themselves, in turn, transformed by life in Japan. The overarching metaphor is that of the mirror, which has an important symbolic place in both the Buddhist and Shintō religions. Rosenstone manages to show how it not only reflects the self of the wanderer (as in Hearn’s lovely essay “My First Day in the Orient,” in which he describes finding a mirror that reveals nothing but his own face, after an arduous journey to the inner sanctum of a shrine), but in addition how the “mirror” of “the East,” the cultural Other, reveals just as much about the “West” as it does about anything else. He also allows us to see how these three wanderers refashioned themselves and their identities after gazing in that mirror, and this is the theme with which I would like to conclude this reflection in my next entry.