Sandra Lockwood, Simon Fraser University

presented to the Joint Student and Alumni Symposium, Stanford University
June 27~29, 2008

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photo by Duran Cheung, courtesy beyondrobson.com

Speaking to the dead–what a sad human custom!

But sadder still, I can’t help thinking, is that men should have to project into a world beyond death, the images of their loved ones as they knew them in this life. [287]

So begins Kawabata’s Jojoka or Lyric Poem, the intimate address of a woman to a former lover upon hearing of his death. This short story has haunted me all my adult life. I take the occasion of this Graduate Liberal Studies Symposium to offer a personal essay on this work.

This story is about grief. It is about how we, the living, the surviving, maintain a relationship and a channel of communication with those loved ones we have lost. Jojoka is a young woman’s monologue, desperate to be a dialogue, in which she explores the complex emotions of grief. She loved a man. He betrayed her. She harbours deep, unresolved feelings that crave reconciliation. Jojoka is Kawabata’s personal examination of the fate of the soul, not just the human soul, but that of all living entities, plant and animal, from a sensual, poetic and decidedly unscientific perspective.

What if the essence of the soul is a like a smell, existing on the level of our most primal sense, conjuring forth and reconstituting memories? Perhaps, the soul “like a trail of incense, wafts from [the body] gradually and recomposes itself in the heavens after the pattern of the body it has left on earth [291].”

The narrator seeks solace through Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, Shinto animism, Western Spiritualism, and telepathic, premonitory episodes from her own childhood. She concludes that for her, she will choose to distill the remaining essence, the memory of her lover, into a sprig of plum in her tokonoma and address her words to the flowers.

Kawabata, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said that in his work he tried “to beautify death, seek harmony among man, nature, and emptiness” [Encyclopedia Britannica]. His works are elegies for the living, with equal parts beauty and sadness. Indeed, Beauty and Sadness (Utsukushi to kanashimi to), is the title of one of his novels. Beauty and sadness are one and the same; for something to be truly beautiful it must be washed in melancholy. He moulds the painful heartbreak of loss central to Jojoka into something exquisite and palpable.

Kawabata was a man who knew a great deal about loss. Born in Osaka in 1899, he lost all his immediate family before he was nine years old. He spent his youth in boarding schools before entering Tokyo University where he began to write. Loss and loneliness are constants in all his work. “My own works have been described as works of emptiness,” he said, “but it is not to be taken as the nihilism of the West”  [Nobel Lecture]. Reccurring themes of loss and emptiness are tempered by Zen Buddhist spirituality. The desired state of nothingness that a Zen disciple seeks is, as Kawabata describes, “a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless” [Nobel Lecture]. Kawabata died in 1972 by his own hand, despite expressing, in his Nobel lecture that “however alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment.”

Francis Mathy, a professor at Sophia University in Tokyo translated Jojoka into English and published it in the anthology Monumenta Nipponica in 1971, a year before Kawabata’s death. I do not know if Kawabata wrote this piece then or much earlier in his career. It has an aura, with its central meditation on the fate-of-the-soul, as an end of life piece, despite the fact that it is written from the point of view of a young woman.

Kawabata often wrote using a ‘woman’s voice.’ A former professor of mine felt that he was more comfortable writing as a woman. I do find it hard to distinguish between his own voice and that of his female creation, Tatsue. Although all writers inhabit their work, there is something so intimate in this exploration of grief and death that I feel it is coming from the heart of the man himself.

I first read this story as an undergraduate in the Asian Studies Department of University of Toronto in the early 1980’s. My young self interpreted it as a tragic story of unrequited love. I was attracted to the sensuality, the surrealism, and magic of the piece. I was especially taken with the character of the woman narrator who is a kind of telepathic synesthesist. She smells things out; she has an extrasensory connection to the mind of her lover. In one poignant episode, she describes losing consciousness, overcome by a strong perfume. She later discovers her fainting spell coincided precisely with moment her former lover was sprinkling his bridal bed with his wife’s perfume. She quietly asks, “[Did] you wish that the bride were me. Western perfume has the strong scent of the world” [Yasunari: 288].

My current reading of Jojoka is quite different from my early schoolgirl fascination. 20 plus years on, I know what it is to grieve.

I have just completed my first year in the Graduate Liberal Studies Department of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. We read some 40 books this past year–some of the big names in the canon of Western thought: Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Descartes, William James. Were I to pull a common thread from all these great minds it would be that they all wrestled with those big ontological question of existence, the nature of the human soul and the fate of human consciousness once the body is gone. I found my memory mining this Kawabata story as I read how other minds spoke to, for and about the dead.

Why is it then, that we seek to project into a world beyond death the images of our loved ones, as we knew them in life? As a child, I often wondered when I died, if I would look the same in heaven as I did on earth. What about my parents: would I see them and would I recognize them? Would they be old or would they have the ability to revert back to any age they wanted and be kids like me? What if I died after a bad accident or was deformed. Would my injuries follow me in to the next world? Of course, this reasoning is plainly idiotic to me now. Yet, when my father passed away three years ago I could not help placing him in a human form in some sort of netherworld in my mind’s eye and addressing my grief to this inner vision. My brother dreamt of him a few days after his death–of seeing him standing on the shore of one of those beautiful Northern Ontario islands he so loved–standing and waving as if to say, “I’m OK.”  This has become the image I hold of my father.

My father planted a maple tree, a year before his death, over the ashes of his beloved cat. The tree could not endure another brutal Ontario winter. After his memorial, my mother dug up the tree, along with a good amount of soil and had me fly back to Vancouver with it. The tree is now thriving. Importantly, it has taken on a deep significance as a kind of stand-in for the man who had himself planted it as a memorial. This is not a unique experience. People all over the world plant trees in memory. Kawabata, as Tatsue, addressing her lover, writes:

The feeling that men and plants share a common fate is the perennial theme of lyric poetry…I do not know if the soul of a plant lives only in the interval between shooting sprout and falling leaf or if it is something more enduring, something that persists beyond all observable phenomena. But if I now address myself to you who have left this world I do not think of you as living in another world as you were in this. There are no better or more pleasing lyric poems than those found in the Buddhist Sutras, so I prefer to think of you, as in a fairy tale, reincarnated as a sprig of plum… [287]

To plant a living thing over the ashes or the corporeal remains of loss is to imagine that remaining carbon atoms have not bled with Lucretian finality into the soil but rather seeped upwards, nourishing and participating in new life. Life energy is transformed; the soul is renewed.

If energy and basic elements of life are eternal, then why should one think otherwise of the energy of the soul… May we not say that the word ‘soul’ is nothing more than one of the many names for the energy that flows through all things in the universe?  [295]

I recently heard a CBC radio interview with British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. I was driving in the car and felt compelled to pull off the road to give my full attention to what was being said. Sheldrake is the author of what he calls Morphogenetic Field Theory. Genes alone do not sufficiently explain how a seed grows into the complex shape of a tree. There must be, he postulates, a kind of form-giving field that holds the memory of each things’ proper shape: a collective resonance; a collective memory. Thus, a beech tree becomes a beech tree by tuning in to past beech trees.

Sheldrake has been widely ridiculed within the scientific community. The editor of scientific journal Nature, Sir John Maddox, describes Sheldrake’s book as the “best candidate for burning there has been in years” [CBC]. I felt an attraction to Sheldrake’s hypothesis if only as a kind of scientific poetry, a new fate-of-the-soul Jojoka. So it is not just genes, but an essential innate consciousness of being that evolves with us.

Kawabata speaks of the Shinchikan Sutra whereby all living things advance in successive reincarnations, being born and dying again and again over countless eons eventually becoming each other’s fathers and mothers. Thus, an ancestral essence, a collective form-giving memory is contained in very being.

Although Kawabata makes a persuasive case for choosing the fate-of-the-soul ‘fairy tales’ of the East, the lyric poems of the Buddhist Sutras, over those of the West, he was very intrigued by the life-after-death tales of English physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. Lodge was famous in his day for his pioneering work with early radio transmission, but it is Lodge’s interest in psychic phenomena that has endured. His young son Raymond was killed in an assault on a hill near Hooge in Belgium during the First World War. The grief stricken father enlisted the aid of two spiritualist mediums to contact his son and he compiled the experiences from the séances into a book published in 1916, Raymond or Life and Death. Kawabata references this book in Jojoka. His heroine, Tatsue, with her special sensitivity to smell recounts Raymond’s fate-of-the soul tale:

The smell of flowers that have lost their bloom on earth rises to the heavens where it produces flowers of the same variety. All the matter of the world of spirits has been composed by smells risen from the earth. Everything that dies on earth, everything that decomposes has its own proper smell. The smell rises and becomes again that from which it came. The smell of acacia is different from that of bamboo. The smell of rotted flax is not the same as that of rotted wool.

The soul of man does not shoot out of the body like a ball of flame, but rather, like a trail of incense, it wafts from it gradually and recomposes itself in the heavens after the pattern of the body it has left on earth. Thus the appearance of man in the world of spirits is exactly the same as it was in this. Even Raymond’s eyelashes and fingernails had not the least changed [291].

Tatsue is clearly moved by Raymond’s description. Yet, in her address to her departed lover, she deplores how realistic, how vulgar this Western vision is. Belief in the immortality of the soul is symptomatic of our unwillingness to let go, to detach ourselves from our loss. That we must place the souls of the dead in a society not unlike that on earth is an unnatural constraint. She says, “When I die I do not want to dwell in a pale world of ghosts” [296]. She tells him she would rather become a windflower, an anemone. She identifies with the nymph Anemone from the Classical Greek myth, who having fallen in love with the West Wind Zephyr, finds herself banished from the palace by Zephyr’s paramour. Despondent, alone in a field, she becomes an anemone, preferring to have her lover’s breeze waft over her petals than resume a rejected human form.

I am neither expansive nor enlightened enough to envision myself in death as a flower. I am estranged from the natural world. Nature, especially in its most extreme elemental aspects, is something from which I seek to be shielded. I am too imbued in the Cartesian dualism that has permeated Western science, medicine and philosophy. This separation of mind and body does alienate us from the natural world. Death is not grounded here on Earth.

The saints of old, as well as the spiritualists of today, people who have thought long and deeply about the human soul, have been wont to exalt it at the expanse of the souls of other animals and plants which they have completely ignored. Over a period of thousands of years men have run even more precipitately in this direction, making even sharper distinctions between themselves and other phenomena of nature. Isn’t it this very self-complacency that is finally so futile that accounts for the deep sense of solitude of the human soul today? [295]

Tatsue’s address to her departed lover is really a self-address, just as the abstract concept of soul is a construct of the living, the surviving, in order to survive. Tatsue needs to convince her own heart that her lover has transformed–his soul transmigrated. And ultimately it doesn’t matter where or into what he has gone; just the knowledge is enough. She tells him that he need not even to be a flower before her: “I would find it just as easy to speak to a flower that bloomed on some unknown mountain in France” [287].

That she chooses to believe he has taken the form of a flower is personal imaging. Ultimately, I believe all fate-of-the-soul beliefs are personal, unique to every individual. We are going to die. We are conscious of this. Is not the very idea of a ‘soul’ a coping mechanism so we are not overwhelmed with our own mortality?

I have reread Jojoka a great many times over the years and I continue to be enchanted. I am still wrestling with how I ‘speak to the dead,’ but I can think of no better way to leave behind some essence of myself than as a line of lyric poetry. I finish with Tatsue’s last words:

I do not want to be your lover in another world. It seems to me more beautiful to become flowers, either red plum or oleander, and have our rites performed by the butterfly carrying your pollen to me [305].

Works Cited

Jojoka. Lyric Poem
Kawabata Yasunari, Francis Mathy (trans.)
Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 26, No. 3/4 (1971), pp. 287-305.

“Kawabata Yasunari.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9044896.
Accessed: 25 June 2008.

Yasunari Kawabata, Nobel Lecture, Dec 12, 1968. Nobelprize.org
Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1968/kawabata-lecture-e.html

Accessed: 25 June 2008.

CBC Radio Ideas. How to think About Science.
Episode 9: Rupert Sheldrake. 30 April 2008.

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html

Accessed: 25 June 2008.