The Hojoki

 

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. We’ve already held two productive class discussions, with a writing opportunity, about this classic. Catharsis through reading tragic literature is yet necessary. The unfamiliar place names provide students a safe distance as they experience through Chomei’s eyes, how the residents of a faraway Kyoto once confronted battalions of natural disasters. (The natural disasters class at SLCC has been one of the most popular here.) 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.

The edition to read is that of Meredith McClussey (Penguin Books).