The Japanese soul resembles the Japanese house: its bare structure is austere and simple; its expressive richness can be evoked only in dim illumination; and if you were to direct a spotlight at it, you would conceal rather than reveal its essence.
At first, I found it hard to live in my tiny, traditional-style house. Not because of its practical challenges, such as brushing the tatami mats, remembering not to stick my fists through the shoji doors’ paper panes, or sitting for long periods on the floor. Rather, its dim and empty space disoriented me. Like most Westerners, I am used to my home being filled with light and objects. In the West, we love brightness for its own sake and for the way it brings our dwellings to life. And we need our objects, however spare or sleek their design, as markers that give meaning to space and relief to its emptiness.
In traditional Japanese houses, the reverse is true. Dimness, not brightness, brings the rooms to life. And empty space, silent space, is the animating quality. The most poetic objects in the room – a ceramic vase or a hanging scroll or staggered shelves – usually hug the walls or are set back in alcoves. These constraints are dictated by Japanese architecture itself and the centuries-old sensibility which nourishes it. You can’t overcome them by thinking to yourself, “Damn it, I’m just going to fill my rooms with books and chairs, and lighten them with tastefully discreet lamps, and then I’ll feel at home.” If you do this, the objects will look ungainly and out of place. The excess lighting will make the fusuma partitions and mud-plastered walls look flimsy and dowdy. Everything, from paper panes to lacquer, will appear too garish and obvious. The brightness will violate the room’s pristine proportions.
You even need to be careful how you let in the sun. If you just throw open the shoji, the sunlight flooding the interior will put the shadows to flight and banish all the magic. Direct sunlight overwhelms rather than illuminates; in particular, it obscures one of the most beautiful aspects of the Japanese house, the patina of tatami and of the soft wood that frames and criss-crosses the shoji. Indeed, white, brilliant light seldom reveals what is most quintessentially Japanese, whether in architecture, gardens, landscapes, lacquer, the Noh stage, or other embodiments of the national spirit. Even the early-evening sun is altogether too radiant to evoke their layers of silent presence.
Much more appropriate illumination is afforded by moonlight, and its muted, silvery rays. Just attend the superb moon-viewing ceremony, usually performed in October: it captures the essence of Japan more than any sunrise or even sunset, let alone a midday sun. Dawn or dusk over Mount Fuji is grandiose, not least because of the mountain’s wondrous symmetry and its magical solitude, but dawn and dusk are impressive in many mountainous parts of the world. There’s something about moonlight – shining on, say, a garden or temple or tatami room – that is more singularly Japanese: the matt, unshowy, indirect beams, sombre without being gloomy; the way the moon tempers the brute force of the sun; the mercurial border between night and day; the clarity interpolated by layers of opacity; the mood of yearning and serenity. It’s a bit like the way in which black-and-white photographs can capture the essence of things better than colour. In this sense, the Japanese are truly people of the moon.
How odd, then, that this country is called the land of the rising sun. Or that the Japanese claim ancestry from the Sun Goddess. Perhaps they define themselves by the sun, which is in every sense an origin – of the nation, of its light, of its energy – because an origin is easier to grasp, to name, to describe, than the complex present. And because defining an origin cannot destroy it. Whereas the present, though closer to hand, is too immediate, too diverse, too fleeting, to be encapsulated in a single myth; any clear definition of it would violate its very nature which – particularly in Japan, is to be ambiguous, intangible, shadowy.
I am suggesting, in other words, that the way the Japanese identify their nation with an origin, the Sun and the Sun Goddess, has the inestimable benefit of releasing the present, as far as possible, from the straitjacket of crude simplifications and falsifications upon which all self-interpretation depends. Such release is feasible because the present is always to some extent independent of its sources, in that it cannot be entirely explained or justified by them. The instinctive desire, which pervades Japan, to defend the innocence of the now, to protect the inescapable vagueness of the present from the violence of definitions, is for me one of the most magnificent – and maddening – elements in the elusive Japanese soul.