The Hojoki

 

The following review of Kenko, Yoshida and Kamo no Chomei, Essays in Idleness and Hojoki, tr. with forward, Meredith McKinney (London, 2014).was penned in 2020:

The classic of Chomei, Hojoki, or Record of a Ten-foot-Square-Hut, is often noted for the simple beauty of Chomei’s escape from the world and simple, peaceful life in a ten-foot-square hut, but it is in the immediacy of his vivid descriptions that pour from his pen of fire, tornado, earthquake, political disruption, famine, and plague that visit the capital, in terrifying clusters, during his lifetime that concerns students today. Reading tragic literature yet works its catharsis. The unfamiliar place names provide us with a safe distance as we experience through Chomei’s eyes, how the residents of a faraway Kyoto once confronted battalions of natural disasters. 

Safe distance? Not for this Californian. What comes to mind is a sequence of paintings, LA Burning, which I discovered one calm day in the Laguna Beach Art Museum, the most shocking art I had ever seen outside Goya. Much later, though not long after a destructive fire rubbed out every other mansion, sad row of teeth, perched in magnificence above Laguna, including, so far as I could discern, one in which I had once set foot and admired (with some inner reproof at the ostentation), a towering Christmas tree, I again saw the museum. LA Burning was nowhere in view, and my inquiry was met with a startled look. Shawn Gargiulo is the artist.

After a devastating famine, the fire within, Kyoto met a fresh disaster: “So the first year drew somehow to a close. We hoped for recovery in the new year, but instead a plague was added to our woes, and every semblance of the old life was now gone. All despaired, and we were like fish in a fast-drying pond, as calamity tighten its grip on the world from day to day (9).” “Again, in the fourth month of the fourth year of Jisho a great whirlwind sprang up in the Nakamikado Kyoguku area, and swept down through the city to around Rokujo. Over three or four blocks, every single house, large or small, in the path of the swirling wind was destroyed. Some were utterly flattened, while only the pillars and beams of others remained (6).”

“The wind was fierce and the night tumultuous, and at the Hour of the Dog a fire broke out in the capital’s south-east, and spread to the north-west. Eventually the Shujaku Gate, the Hall of State, the University Hall and the Civil Affairs Bureau all caught fire, and in a single night were reduced to ashes (6).”

The distance found by modern readers in the unfamiliar names helps work the catharsis. When will we sort through the desecration of our own Hall of State? The resolution to live a simple life, unattached, days taken up with reading, music, gardening, show how one individual, long ago, coped, in lock down, with natural disasters.

We now turn to Kenko’s Tales of Idleness: “And so, watching the new year dawn in the sky, you are stirred by a sense of utter newness, although the sky looks no different from yesterday’s" (Chapter 19). Chapter 20 follows: “A certain recluse monk once remarked, ‘I have relinquished all that ties me to the world, but the one thing that still haunts me is the beauty of the sky.’ I can quite see why he would feel this.”  We recall Calvin at Geneva, the man who daily, weekly, forever, refused to let his eyes gaze on the world’s most stunning lake. 

Then Chapter 21: “You can find solace for all things by looking at the moon. Someone once declared that there is nothing more delightful than the moon, while another disagreed, claiming that dew is the most moving—a charming debate.” These Essays in Idleness, another classic from Medieval Japan, are aesthetic Ramblings, random jottings on the beautiful and the lost, on the unusual or unexpected.

“Foxes will bite people.

A retainer at the Horikawa mansion was once bitten on the foot by a fox while he slept. And one night, three foxes leaped out and bit a junior monk who was passing the main hall of Ninnaji Temple. He drew his sword and defended himself, managing to cut down two of them" (Chapter 218).

Kenko surprises in passing from one random note to another, in the Japanese fashion: foxes, streams, the moon, trees, women of elegant taste not long passed from the world, empty space. How can we reach such a faraway aesthetic?

I remember Autumn 2019. The sun had set, the classroom grew dark, and, lights out, the Asian history class loved listening to the tale of Japan and autumn, the impermanence, the falling leaves, the moon. The responsiveness of all the students surprised me. But this is Utah, and Utah and autumn, I have learned, is the high point of the year. Fall in California always caught the attention, leaves everywhere, but it was also our winter, a season of mixed responses and dark evenings. We can all share Chapter 212, with a touch of nostalgia: “The moon of autumn is especially splendid. It is a sorry man indeed who cannot understand this distinction, and claims that it is no different from the moon at other seasons" (Chapter 212).