Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The China Seas

I'm unsure whether to delete the post two before this one. One the one hand, why keep it? I was just feeling frustrated with the world and with myself and wanted to send out negative vibes, but now I have no desire for those vibes to remain in existence. However, maybe I want to remember that morning and remember that frustration. Do I? Will leaving up that post make a difference in what I remember? If I come upon it in twenty years, will the emotions rush back? Do I want them to? For now, I think I'll leave it. No revisionist history.

Meanwhile I re-read 365 Views of Mt. Fuji yesterday, the first novel by Todd Shimoda, author of The Fourth Treasure which is an artistic masterpiece and my favorite novel. I had read 365 Views before, sometime in high school, and I remember my reaction as being basically positive but somewhat ambivalent, and in any case not very intense. I wanted to re-read it now that I’ve lived in Japan and even been to Mt. Fuji. I thought maybe it would have new meaning for me, somehow.

Well: this time, I had one of the strongest and most conflicted reactions that I can remember having to a book. Some lines made me catch my breath with their sudden wisdom. Sometimes I felt so suffocated I had to take a break from reading. Some of the sensuality was vivid enough that I felt embarrassed to be sitting in the teachers’ room at school; sometimes it plunged me into depression. I emerged at the end of the school day, having read constantly all day with breaks only for two classes, feeling rather dazed and disconnected from the world I seemed to be inhabiting – I remember gathering my things up from my desk, walking to the genkan to change my shoes, climbing into my car, all while feeling rather confused about what exactly I was doing here and why any of it was important.

Perhaps a few words about the story are in order. I summarize The Fourth Treasure to people, if I want to be as brief as possible, by saying that it’s about how meaning is created through consciousness. At a similar level of abstraction, 365 Views is about the constant fight against emptiness and meaninglessness. While The Fourth Treasure, in the end, leaves one with reassurance that the little things can add up, that lives can come to mean something, that connections can be real, 365 Views is much more ambivalent: can emptiness be staved off without caving to insanity? What is insanity anyway? What is art? What is important? The predominant mood of the book is of isolation and confusion, and in the end, the narrator, who started out being criticized by everyone around him for being so ordinary as to be practically worthless, ends up letting go completely of any desire to be part of society, to form any human connections. The only thing that comes to have meaning for him is creating the perfect pattern of colors, textures, and shapes. How do we take this? Has he escaped a superficial, boring, thoughtless existence, and discovered a deep inner well of artistic feeling? Or has he descended into insanity, given up on what’s real and retreated into himself, imagining meaning and power in a pile of trash?

The book is, I believe, quite flawed. Some of the characters are just slightly too odd, slightly too symbolic, to feel human. And too much is left unexplained and unexplored. I approve of stories where not every detail is filled in, where the reader is asked to intuit and infer and make connections on her own. However, there’s a line beyond which the story just becomes frustratingly confusing, rather than complex or thought-provoking. I believe there’s too much we’re left not understanding at the end of this book, and not even really feeling we know how to guess at. While The Fourth Treasure succeeds in embodying what it’s trying to show you – the gradual build-up of meaning and power – 365 Views relies too much on just shoving the big questions right at you. It lacks subtlety.

However, if the goal was to leave the reader disturbed and confused, I suppose I can’t accuse the book of falling short of that goal. But why did it affect me so deeply right now? I don’t entirely understand, and what I do understand I don’t know that I can articulate. I suppose I’ve been worrying, more than I ever bothered to in high school, about whether I have anything deep to contribute to the world, and what the hell that would even mean, and whether it should matter. In this book, you either lead a meaningless, artless life, or you go mad. That’s a frightening world. I suppose the book succeeds well enough in conveying the inevitableness, the inescapability of this, that I found it suffocating. Maybe I felt accused of being one of those empty, worthless people, who stop at official Scenic Viewpoints and spend four and a half seconds at each painting in a museum and never really understand or contribute anything. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s too ready to worry that perhaps, after all, I ought to be building mountains out of trash in an old submarine factory. Maybe I’m too ready to believe that everything I find deep and powerful is really nothing, and all the real meaning is just beyond me.

Now that it’s been twenty-four hours since I finished reading it, I’ve re-emerged from that world and don’t feel suffocated and disoriented by it anymore, which is making it harder to find the right way to explain how it felt and why. I wish we were fifty years in the future when books can be uploaded directly into your memory so that I could just zap it to all my friends and then we could actually discuss it. However, we’re not there yet, and I don’t think that overall I like this book enough to encourage anyone to actually spend all the hours to read it. I’m sure there are better books out there on which to spend that time. But it is thought-provoking, if nothing else. I plan to read it again in twenty or thirty or fifty years, and see how my reaction has changed.

I add, "The onsen in quite pleasant."

"Pleasant," she repeats. "Enjoyment. Could that be considered an aesthetic, or an emotion? And is it a function of the object or the person experiencing it?"

What?


I would like to know whether it means something when I feel overwhelmed or touched. Whether it's possible for me to think something is deep or powerful that isn't, or whether my reaction by definition imbues it with meaning. Is it true that recognizing power in things I experience means I have the ability to be profound, even if I can't find a way to create anything powerful myself?

From The Fourth Treasure:

The more she gazed into the inkstone, the sharper and deeper the pain cut. But it was no longer just physical pain; the inkstone represented the pressing burden of shame that her affair had brought her, the crushing disappointment that caused her parents to loathe her.

She had found herself, her emotional self, her irrational self, through the inkstone. What she found wasn't intrinsically bad. She found that she could
feel: that she could love, that she could experience life on her own terms, not on her husband's or her parents'. The inkstone had also given her Hana. It had brought her to San Francisco, where she could exist on her own terms. It had given her Tuesday night dinners at the China Seas with Kiyomi.

I much prefer to believe that everything matters, that everything is deep if it feels deep. What's the point of thinking otherwise?

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