WHEN I LIVED IN JAPAN, there was a walk I would often take through the forest near my apartment. The path ran the length of a long and wide rice field tucked between two wooded hills. Herons stood in the flooded ground of the rice’s early growth. Boars and monkeys stalked the edges of the trees on the field’s far side. As the wind wove between the trees of the hills and the green rice stalks, I often thought the land looked like it was breathing.
Try as I might, though, I’ve never found the language to perfectly portray what this walk was like. There are so many things like this for me about my time in Japan—so many failures of my own words and of my ability to convey the true depth of that experience. But by the end of my time there, I finally understood it did not need my words. Its beauty simply shone on its own.
In her essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Joan Didion writes about a similar paralysis regarding words:
I … had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.
Didion inserts herself into the disorder; she takes her notes from the apartments of addicts, street lamps covered with the faces of missing children, and city parks rife with protest and violence. So it was a surprise to me, in my idyllic life in the Japanese countryside teaching English to elementary kids, to learn that we shared this same experience in our writing.
I believe in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s assessment of the world, that it “is charged with the grandeur of God.” In Japan, I could see the beauty in the mountains around me, the goodness in the laughter of the children I worked with. Yet, every day, as I learned more of the Japanese language, I recognized how little I actually knew. I’d try to write about my experiences—an act so familiar to me, an art I thought myself skilled in—and I would see how woefully inadequate my words truly were.
I could not pen God’s grandeur.
While Didion saw disorder in the world, I found disorder in myself. Many days and nights in Japan, in spite of all the goodness, all the beauty, I was keenly aware of my lack.
But what has kept me writing about life in Japan, what has kept me writing about anything at all, is not the belief that I can find the perfect words or capture the world between pages, but the hope that my words might only draw some attention to those things that actually exist.
ABOUT A YEAR into my time, my now-wife came to visit me. One of the aspects of the culture I was most excited to introduce her to was the kagura, a traditional Japanese dance complete with costumes, music, and pyrotechnics. Our chosen venue was located in a small town built around a hot spring. The upper room of the spa house was tiny, the size of a living room; we sat on the floor.
When I looked at the pamphlet, I realized I was not familiar with the story we were about to see. This was immediately concerning, because I knew I would only be able to understand a little of the Japanese, and, even worse, of that small amount, I probably would have trouble translating for my wife. But before I could frantically look up the story online, the show began.
At first, I tried conveying the story elements I could pick up, but quickly realized this was impossible. The men and women on stage, and the people playing traditional instruments off to the side, demanded our attention. Two men dressed in ornate samurai garb moved at frightening speeds, spinning around each other in perfect step, wooden swords clashing to the beat of the drums. Children in monkey costumes rolled around the stage. Eight dragons erupted from the curtains with bodies long like snakes, eyes of fire, and antler-like horns.
Each dragon costume must have been ten feet long, and yet every dragon moved with precision so that no one stumbled or collided. The dance ended with sparks shooting from their mouths. Neither my wife nor I understood the words that the performers called out, but the movement of their bodies, in sync with each other and the music, superseded any need for language. With every clash of a sword, every roll of a monkey, and every spark spat from the tongue of a serpent, my wife and I understood.
Neither she nor I could ever relay exactly what that night was like, but during the moments we were there, we were captured by the dancers and musicians, their performance pointing to something deeper that you could intuit through watching. Writing about it now, I am not trying to recreate their efforts; I am simply trying to add my own.
IN THE LIFE OF MOSES, St. Gregory of Nyssa writes, “Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond.” What I write about the world is not relevant because it is perfect. In the endeavor to try at all, I admit to a belief that there exists in the world things worth writing about.
There is no language that can articulate or substitute that walk I’d go on in Japan—but in my writing, I try to evoke some of the beauty I found there.
I won’t lie: I am troubled by my own inadequacy and the inadequacy I see in the world; the same disorder Didion experienced still exists, maybe even more deeply so than in her day. All the beauty I saw in Japan didn’t replace the problems of life that remained after my residence there.
Still, my hope is that the beauty and the goodness I felt in my bones, those things deeper than words can explain, point to that which is beyond.
And maybe my writing can point that same direction—toward that which charges the world with grandeur.
📓 This essay was the 3rd place winner of Inkwell’s first writer’s competition. Congratulations, Conor!
Conor J. Smith
Writer
Conor is an aspiring author working on essays, short stories, and a novel. You can read more of his work on his Substack, Endeavor.
📸 Photography by Dean Hinnant
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.