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Overview
A fascinating memoir by Egypt-born American literary theorist and writer Ihab Hassan about his life in Japan. Part recollection, part cultural perception, Between the Eagle and the Sun records his journey, living and seeing himself sometimes as another, assaying always to read the hieroglyphs of his past in the scripts of Japan. As lucid as it is intensely felt, at once lyrical and critical, the work offers a beguiling vision of Japan and, by tacit contrast, of America. For writing, the author says, is more than praise or blame, it is also knowledge, empathy, and delight. These attributes are evident in Hassan's treatment of Japanese culture, its people and scenes. Indeed, the people, rendered in vibrant portraits throughout the book, abide when all the shadows of romance and exasperation have fled.
True to its moment, the work also reinvests the forms of memoir, travel, and quest. Cultural essays, travel anecdotes, autobiographical meditations, portraits of Japanese friends, a section titled "Entries, A to Z," fit into a tight frame, with clear transitions from one section to another. The style, however, alters subtly to suit topic, occasion, and mood.
Japan may not hold the key to this planet's future; no single nation does. Yet the continuing interest in its history, society, and people and the incresed awareness of its recent trends and growing global impact engage an expanding audience. Avoiding cliches, sympathetic to its subject yet analytical, unflinching in judgment, and withal highly personal, Between the Eagle and the Sun offers a unique image of its subject by a distinguished and well-traveled critic, at home in several cultures.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817388911 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, Ihab Hassan is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature and TheQuest for Self: Travel and Geopolitics in Our World.
Read an Excerpt
Between the Eagle and the Sun
Traces of Japan
By Ihab Hassan
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1996 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8891-1
CHAPTER 1
PART I
PREVIEWS
APPEARANCES
Nothing in Japan seems to be what it seems. Yet everything there is surface, appearance. Forms matter. You might say, the spirit killeth but the letter giveth life — only that wouldn't be exactly right.
The first thing I saw in Japan was people — silent swirls of people, vibrating in a field of sentient energy. Then I noticed faces, detaching themselves here and there from the unanimous crowd. For instance, at the old Tokyo airport, Haneda, a tiny cleaning woman in a white apron, age uncertain — say forty, or seventy-five — her body bent permanently at a right angle, skin tight on high cheekbones, black eyes intent as she sweeps trash with swift, gloved hands. It is an arresting, not a beautiful, sight.
Beautiful? Yes, the world lives in the eye; sight is primary, primary also in its prejudices. I'll say it plainly: I did not find the Japanese a handsome people. Not at first. My mind could not censor the visceral "fact." Everywhere I looked in the crowds, I saw short, stocky figures, thick ankles and wrists, bowed legs, heavy spectacles, lidded eyes. Perhaps I idealized limbs too much, being bowed in one leg myself. Perhaps I recalled too vividly those propaganda cartoons of Japanese soldiers, hiding in coconut trees or swarming Pacific beaches, pictures I had seen as a boy in Egypt. Or did I remember that character in a Tanizaki story who cries, "I have no confidence in my appearance, I'm small, I'm dark-skinned, and my teeth stick out in all directions"? Perhaps I was simply jet-dazed.
In any case, I did not feel, as travelers often do, sensuously, sensually, alive in Japan. Not in the beginning.
Then I started to note other visible facts. How deft the Japanese were in motion, how still in stillness. The gaijin, by contrast, lumbered like rhinos through undergrowth; even mentally, they seemed to bang and crash around. This Japanese economy of outer and inner motion struck me as a kind of spiritual elegance. I remarked also other somatic types: here a waist no thicker than some rednecks I have seen in America, there hands so delicate a butterfly might mistake them for a mate. Nearly everywhere, glossy, clean hair, luminously black, and smooth skin, unblemished in its various shades. Later, a decade or more later, I would realize how tall Japanese youth had become — fed at McDonald's, Shakey's, Colonel Sanders's, Mrs. Fields's? — how tall and lithe and slim. And how winsome, sometimes exquisite, women or men could be.
Still, still, my first impression lingered: the Japanese were inescapably an alien people, alien, say, as Chinese Americans had long ceased to be for me. Japanese bodies had a dynamic, a density, a shadowy space of their own. I could not project myself into that space. I accepted their distance, bowed without touching, held myself in reserve. I sensed, too, that their reserve contributed to my own. This reserve, theirs or mine, could become aloofness, even solitude.
The physical object strikes the eye, the imagination spins within. In erotic, political, or spiritual matters, fancy inspires its own facts. But in Japan, that first time, even my fancy seemed becalmed. I knew too little about the place, felt no compelling reason for being there — felt in fact a little absurd, as I would later, dressed formally in jacket and tie, standing in my socks on the tatami floor, conversing ceremoniously with strangers, wondering suddenly if my socks smelled, if they betrayed a darned hole, an incipient tear, and then thinking with subliminal irritation, "Doesn't all this squatting bend the shinbones?"
Tactless thoughts behind alien eyes. But the Japanese knew how to reciprocate: I probably appeared more alien to them than they appeared to me. And yet that woman at Haneda, her back a broken bow, might have stepped out, minus the gloves, of a farm tucked deep into my Egyptian past. Bearing ancestral memories, she also presaged all our hardening spines.
From the start, then, I saw Japan with puzzled, ambivalent eyes. The scene that greeted me as the airport car crawled through clotted traffic did not cheer or cleanse my sight. It was a flat scene of brown canals, barren embankments, high-rent tenements, rectilinear urban sprawls, bedizened with blocky kanji and looping hiragana signs. This was not the landscape of Utamaro, Hiroshige, Hokusai; it seemed, rather, Braque, Gris, Léger, painting "The Waste Land" through monochrome haze.
Appearances: they are blind to time. Contrary to all appearances, something in Japan impressed itself quietly, gradually, deeply, into some layer of my mind, like invisible writing, becoming slowly legible over the years. It was a message, below the surface of time, explaining my life somehow, explaining it to myself.
IWAO IWAMOTO
Iwao Iwamoto may have carried the first message.
He appeared one day, early autumn of 1966, in my office at Wesleyan University. He sat, a trim, shy figure in an armchair across from my desk, his tie slightly askew, and his small feet barely touched the carpet. He had just translated my first book, Radical Innocence (1961).
The Japanese wryly boast that they are themselves the richest natural resource of an indigent nation. Iwamoto is certainly natural and perhaps ingenuously nationalist: I have never heard him praise or blame Japan. He is a native treasure too. He teaches and travels much abroad, yet it would never occur to him, as it did desperately to me, to emigrate, and so to deny his kuni (ancestral place). After a month, say, in Milwaukee, he begins to hurt quietly, with unruffled resignation; he is missing Japanese food, sashimi and sushi, and, of course, white, glutinous rice, gohan.
Iwamoto shuns politics, never votes. A native of Kyushu, island of obdurate samurai who once fought both shogun and emperor, he remains unalterably pacific. Too young to join the Imperial Navy during the war, he survived the firebombings of Tokyo and Yokohama, where he attended school. Instead of a naval officer, he became a scholar of American literature. Later, as if by accident, he found himself one of the foremost Japanese scholars, teachers, translators, of that literature.
You can tell that he is a liberal Japanese: he never tightens the knot of his tie, and his graying hair, sometimes cut by one of his daughters, tumbles over his glasses, which he takes off to peer closely at a page. But with three daughters married now, Iwamoto has become a little patriarchic in his own wistful and sere way. He thinks less of cherry blossoms than of autumn leaves. The new Japan, which his lank, gangly students embody, puzzles him. But he does not admit to puzzlement; he only cocks his head, raises an eyebrow, and sometimes taps his heart, saying, "I'm very Japanese."
Something in Iwamoto was always autumnal, a falling cadence of life, a sense of time's hollowness, if not decay. That is a form Japanese decency takes, severity in nostalgia, refusal of color, shibusa. Sometimes I imagine seeing in Iwamoto's self-deprecating smile traces of ancient memories: fires, volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes, bloody civil wars. I imagine in that acceptant smile the spirit of the great temple at Ise, rebuilt board by board every twenty years to honor the evanescence of existence. Nothing in the smile, anyway, evokes those horrid stereotypes, the toothy kamikaze, the sword-brandishing captain screaming, "Banzai!" At worst, if you speak nonsense, the smile goes quizzical and Iwamoto says, "Really?"
How different, this avoidance of argument, from the needs of my American, let alone voluble Egyptian, friends. From my own needs. Was that my reason for valuing Iwamoto all the more, a kind of distant, "Oriental cousin," if not brother, who evinces so little spiritual vulgarity, the quotidian bluster and assertiveness of my own milieu?
I have met Japanese, arrogant and vain behind their immaculate bows, offering their meishi (name cards) with impassive dislike. Yet with Iwamoto, as with many of his compatriots, courtesy is a kind of shyness, a delicacy before existence. It is a shyness or delicacy that can shade into the gruffness of Zen. At its very best, it becomes a cosmic courtesy. Was this part of the message Iwamoto brought me from Japan, on that New England autumnal day, back in 1966?
If so, the message still seems to me half garbled, barely legible.
BEWILDERMENTS: 1974
I flew from Seattle on a Boeing 747, with a whiff of dread. Perhaps it was excitement more than dread, the fine grit of adventure stirring, clouding my head. I wondered how Saint Francis Xavier had felt, in 1549, sailing on a Chinese pirate junk for Kagoshima, dreaming of Christian converts without number, all rising with him to heaven. But unlike the Apostle of the Indies, I knew heaven only at thirty thousand feet.
Arching over the Pacific in a great circle, I mused where mad Ahab had gone, and fathomless Moby Dick, their demesne drastically shrunk. "Nine hours and twenty-five minutes flying time, and we hope you enjoy your flight on Northwest Airlines." Had all mystery in the world fled? Or will the white whale live on forever in the hyperspace of our minds? I sat in my narrow plastic seat and meditated morosely on Ishmael's coffin.
I thought of America, too, receding eastward now, behind my back, though once I could imagine nothing west of that horizon of dreams. And I thought of Seattle, short hop to Alaska, with its wide, unlived spaces, its frontier seediness still visible in places, sensing one evening on a drizzly waterfront stroll a kind of derelict hopefulness, a rainy promise in the air. I had never been anywhere west — oh, except to California, of course — and I experienced Seattle as both the past, where the frontier had stopped, and the future, the still-uncrowded possibility of America, a coastland utopia beginning to gleam with glass and steel.
By the time I landed in Haneda, I fancied I had gone through a boundless mirror, the Pacific sky, and crossed into a world intangibly skewed. Japan a mirror image of America? Not quite; things were right-side there, except for traffic, trains, the way people passed you on the street. But it was always as if an Asian Cheshire Cat lurked around the corner, and a Nipponese March Hare whisked by while you were tying your shoe. I half expected to vanish in a shop window or a revolving door.
Odd serendipity: a book, a translation, a friend, and here I was in Japan.
It was mid July — though born in Cairo, I detest heat intemperately, as if it exhaled all the atavism of the race — the rainy, sweltering season in Japan. The first images that impressed themselves on me were commonplace; they simply sank in an overheated, expectant brain.
I recall, for instance, pasteboard policemen, with arms upraised and a thousand-yard stare, painted effigies at crowded intersections, reminding motorists that Authority is ubiquitous. I recall, on Ginza streets, arrays of gleaming, multicolored sunglasses, displayed on seven-foot-high revolving racks, something there for every louche or antic taste, no glasses ever pilfered. I recall models of dishes served in restaurants, their colors garish, waxen shrimp staring back at passers by, rubbery, decapitated eels ready to slither through the window. I recall in a bleak office courtyard, a rift of concrete really, all nature staged in a microcosm: a midget mountain, lake, islet, bonsai tree, meditating fisherman, everything perfectly proportionate. I recall a pachinko parlor, a sahara of nickel slot machines, the air impenetrable with cigarette smoke and the din of a million ratchets, levers, spinning wheels, and rolling steel balls, a haven for androids of every sex, class, and age — androids escaping humanity for an hour.
Such images were not allegorical; I did not know Japan enough to make them so. Two recollections, though, became more emblematic for me.
Once, on a visit to Osaka, Sally and I rambled through crowded, downtown streets. It was the empire of signs, shimmering in the midday, humid heat. Suddenly, Sally caught my arm, pointing to the top of a seven-story building across the roaring motorway. There, on the roof, side by side, stood a Shinto shrine, shaded by pines, and a large, squat air-conditioning machine. They were of equal size and equal status, seemingly locked together in daily, metaphysical converse. Sally laughed: "Another Virgin and Dynamo?" I answered: "But without Henry Adams's complaint."
The other memory is from a trip to the ancient capital, Nara, with its celebrated temples, Todaiji and Horyuji, its Daibutsu (Great Buddha), its Kasuga Shrine, its imperial red deer roaming freely in the gardens. Driving over from Kyoto with a Japanese friend, though, we traversed wastes of fumes and garbage, of asphalt, corrugated iron, shredded plastic. The trucks on the two-lane highway spewed hot, black clouds that rolled through our open windows. Courtesy struggled in our gasping lungs with the fumes. Finally, we put our handkerchiefs discreetly to our nostrils. Our guide pretended not to notice and I think never forgave us the gesture.
In the inner temple, various titular and protective deities surround the Buddha in his repose. Fierce, energetic figures guard the outer rectangle — the One All Seeing, the One All Hearing, Open Mouth Energy (Ah), Closed Mouth Energy (Em), the warriors Nikko and Gakko. Within, serene figures of contemplation encircle the Godhead, a void. I wondered, is this industrial belt surrounding Nara a grim parody of the protective rectangle framing the Buddhist altar? Or has the yen simply displaced Zen? Or is it, rather, that in its fanatic revanchism, Japan has committed ecological hara-kiri? Was this still the reverent land that designated ancient or giant, gnarled trees, shimboku, as sacred and draped great, straw ropes around their trunks?
My questions were not wholly rhetorical. Japanese science fiction abounded with fantasies of catastrophe: Japan turned into a polluted dump, begging the world to relocate one hundred million people — just where, after the vastations of the Imperial Army? — or Japan swallowed whole by the sea. Thus, Godzilla emerges from the mist of prehistory, a monster avatar, ready to battle enemies of the Rising Sun.
However unseductive Japanese urban landscapes seemed, other qualities, inner vistas, redeemed for me the blight: discipline; courage; loyalty; sacrifice; an adaptive genius; a meticulousness of the heart; an aesthetic tradition both simple and dazzling; asymmetry where it counts, at the center of things; delicacy in unexpected places, lighter than cherry blossoms in a breeze; a brown mournfulness beneath the skin; and yes, a spirit, a most troublesome spirit, of purity. Decidedly, Japan had something, something once crucial to society, that other nations now lacked.
It was something, when I came to recognize it, wholly sublunary, yet somehow preternatural, distilled of scarcity, sacrifice, ingenuity, distilled of time. It was something some Japanese claimed for themselves as the Japanese spirit, Yamato damashii, though when they claimed it, it could become demented. It was something at home in radical incongruities, say Technology and Shinto, and conversant with shadows. It was not intellectual, was sensuous rather, and evanescent. Roland Barthes glimpsed it in the "fissure même du symbolique." I saw it as well in dappled things, broken in their perfection, a lovely vase drab like rock, a quick brush stroke, part smear and part soul. Always, it was fashioned to the human measure, precisely, finally empty.
Japan, I have said, invites idealization and disgruntlement, and that summer I seemed to drift in and out of each. Tokyo had struck me with its immane vitality, its livid ugliness — the new architecture had not yet changed the cityscape — a colossal mart of services nearly infinite in their permutations. Sally and I had never experienced such consummate service or courtesy, even in the lowliest soba shop, hunkering beneath the rain-blotched concrete overpasses at Hibiya. Kyoto, not a breathtaking city in itself, filled our historical horizon almost too subtly. It was for us, that first time, a space of historical rumors, hidden rituals, beauties that refused to lay themselves bare.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Between the Eagle and the Sun by Ihab Hassan. Copyright © 1996 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
CONTENTSAcknowledgments
Preface
PART I PREVIEWS
Appearances
Iwao Iwamoto
Bewilderments: 1974
Suki
PART II THROUGH THE LITERARY GLASS
Texts and Conceits
Kojin Karatani
PART III “THEM”
Primary Differences (Space, Time, People)
Seiji Tsutsumi (Takashi Tsujii)
Exceptionalism
Shuichi Kato
Stereotypes and Paradoxes (Coolness, Courtesy, Conformity)
Kiyomi and Kumiko Mikuni
Internationalism or Change?
Lady in a Large Hat: An Imaginary Portrait
PART IV EDUCATION
Hiroko Washizu
The Quest for Transcultural Values
Makoto Ooka
PART V ENTRIES, A TO Z
Japanese Culture: A Personal Dictionary
Donald Richie
PART VI ENVOY
Between the Eagle and the Sun?
Mariko Shimizu
Amor Loci?