Iwa ni Hana

There was a time in my life when I used to live very close to a river. That was during a year when I got a scholarship to study as an exchange student at a certain university in the East Anglia part of England.

But let me explain a bit about the general geography before I get to what it means to leave to live near a river. The town I lived in has a long history dating back to medieval times, and it has more churches than I could count. Having a lot of medieval churches in town means that you can tell the time by listening to the ringing of church bells, and during festival times like Christmas there would be extended tolling of church bells at midnight. I was also lucky in being assigned a dorm room with a view of a river that runs through the town. On sunny days, I sometimes saw real ducks swimming past.

Having a river means that there is humidity, and humidity means the formation of mists. So during certain times and under certain weather conditions, the entire town would be covered by heavy mists.

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The modern Chinese middle-class home is just like the housing arrangement during the Warring States Period.

I once read somewhere that if one were to travel back in time to the kingdom of Han [韓], one would most likely to find that ordinary people did not live in houses on the land they farmed on. Instead, people lived in walled-in towns and traveled everyday to the plot of land they farmed.

If one were to travel to China in 2009, one would most likely find that middle-class people lived in privately developed housing projects similar to the “Lily Apartments” series developed by Greentown China. These “Lily Apartments” have been built in first-tier cities such as Beijing, as well as second-tier cities such as Haining, Zhenzhou and Hefei. Essentially, they are housing projects that have the capacity of containing 1,000 – 1,500 households. Naturally, they are gated communities for which you need a security pass to get in.

Take Beijing Lily Apartments, for example. You can see pictures of the place from the official website here. Within its walls, you would find just about anything you would expect in a small town – a shopping arcade, a park, a clubhouse, and even its own kindergarten and elementary school. You can also check out Greentown China’s official website to find out more about their projects in various cities. There are too many other similar companies developing housing projects just like the Lily Apartments for me to remember them all. My point is, that is what the typical middle-class Chinese home looks like these days. Just to stress this point, you can explore the websites of some of the latest projects in Shenzhen here, here, and here – and even then I have to emphasize that they are but a small sample of the whole building boom across the country. (I even remember hearing about several housing projects that come with their own medical clinics, though their names escaped me just now.)

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Huang Shan [黄山], the king of cosplay from the PRC, is to release his second album of cosplay entitled “溯时” soon.

From what I gathered on the internet, Huang Shan is an arts graduate born in 1985. His first cosplay album entitled “浮岚” was released in 2007. It caused quite a stir and propelled him to semi-celebrity status. As you can see from his works, he is obviously someone born with an innate sensitivity to beauty and the endless drive to pursue it. A while ago, I was even beginning to come across a newly coined term shan liu mei xue [山流美学], which may be taken to mean “the Shan school of aesthetics”. I have also been following his blog posts and understand that he is currently located in Shenzhen. I am sometimes gripped with the mad impulse to run to Shenzhen and interview him. His blog can be found at: http://hscos.blog.163.com

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The entire second quarter at work was crazily busy, but recently I finally got more time to rest and recharge. Some part of my brain was yearning for period drama plus some sort of supernatural detective story (summer is traditionally the season for supernatural thrillers in Japan), so I went down to a bookstore and swept off the entire Kyōgokudō series (京極堂シリーズ) by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦), of which Mouryou no Hako (魍魎の匣) was the second book. I have been curious to find out more about the onmyouji-detective character Chūzenji Akihiko (中禅寺秋彦) ever since I watched Madhouse’s excellent anime adaptation of Mouryou no Hako.

Anyway, I wish they had put some sort of health warnings on the novel covers – the stories are not only lengthy (they are thick as dictionaries) but also highly addictive (you just can’t bring yourself to put them down); they can cause considerable eye strain and destroy your sleep pattern. But I am glad that I read them – it has been ages since I got sucked into detective thrillers, not since Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum which I read back in university, I think. The Kyōgokudō novels are full of interesting ideas, which will take some time for my brain to properly sort them out. The stories themselves are like creepy kaidan tales from the Edo period, beefed up with logic in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and completed with psychological analysis of the Jungian school. The only thing I wish to say for now is that it became apparent to me that there is a distinct difference between horror (ホラー) and kaidan (怪談). Horror is creepy and the visual presentation often aims to turn your stomach – think the horror manga of Umezu Kazuo (楳図 かずお); but kaidan is always both creepy and beautiful in some dangerously attractive and eerie sense, or ayashii [妖しい]. I think an example of this would be Mononoke.

The Meaning of Ayashii

There are many words for “creepy” in Japanese and ayashii is one of them. If you look at the kanji 妖, it is comprised of 女 “woman” and 夭 “premature demise” – in other words, the premature demise of a woman makes for something creepy. I would like to stress that “creepy” is not really a good translation of the word ayashii. Ayashii refers to something creepy that is also at the same time enchantingly and bewitching attractive.

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When I first came across the Japanese advertisement posted on the right, the following three points were my knee-jerk reactions:

- “This looks rather like the house that the professor of German in the Kurosawa Akira’s film Madadayo (1993) lived in.”

- “Perhaps it is a modern reincarnation of Kamo no Choumei‘s ten-foot square hut?”

- “Well, what would the developers of Beijing’s Palais de Fortune say to that?”

Palais de Fortune (财富公馆), for your information, is a recently-built gated community of 172 chateaus inspired by 18th-century French architecture in general and by the palace of Versailles in particular. You may Google around for more information and have a look at this video on their official website. Many things have been said about this residential project and I have nothing to add to those – instead I would like to concentrate on the Chinese aesthetic concept of wei mei [唯美] and the Chinese conceptualization of time in artistic styles.

Being beautiful is a prerequisite to being considered wei mei, but wei mei refers to a very specific kind of beauty. It is not easy to explain in a straight forward way what it is because it has no English equivalent, though a good starting point would be to decide what it is not. “Hodohodo no Ie” for instance, would probably not be considered wei mei. Houses like that are like zen gardens in that the beauty lies in the austerity and restraint, which takes time to sink in and to reflect on. The beauty of zen gardens leaves wriggling room for argument if you just don’t “get” the austerity and restraint. Wei mei has no room for differing opinion – it s always obviously beautiful.

Wei mei tolerates no defect, but it is far from having the same meaning as the English word “beautified” – the proper Chinese word for that would be mei hua [美化]. I think a fair distinction is that the emphasis on “beautified” is in on hiding ugliness away, whereas the emphasis on wei mei is about having everything that meets the eye look aesthetically pleasing. The two words are like the faces of Janus, bound together like Siamese twins but each looking the other way. Wei mei is complimentary and does not have the same negative connotation as “beautified” in English seem to have. 唯美圖 [wei mei tu] means an “absolutely beautiful picture”. 唯美風 [wei mei feng] means an “absolutely beautiful style”. 唯美風景 [wei mei feng jing] means “absolutely beautiful landscape”. Wei mei is absolute.

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You just know that the Chinese civilization has not been around for five thousand years for nothing by looking at all the words they have for describing different nuances of beauty – of beauty in the abstract, in nature, in men and women. Whatever you can think of, the Chinese is likely to have coined a word for it already. If you were ever to compile all those words together, you may actually end up with a nice dictionary of several hundred pages. What I have time to write about on this blog is only a tip of the iceberg.

There are two words in Chinese that describe the beauty of decay. They are easily confused with each other but I think several fine points of distinction would be as follows (feel free to disagree with me though):

墮落美 [duo luo mei]
The decadent beauty of something fallen that is alluring in a sinister way, but is at the same time evocative of pain and longing in being a reminder of what it once was and what it no longer is – namely, the pristine state of innocence and purity it can no longer return to. In some (but not all) cases, the evil originates from a pure, noble and innocent motivation that turned bad in its means and execution for lack of choice, and from its existing state of badness it can only go from bad to worse and beyond salvation. The emphasis of this word is on the state where you have fallen from. Duo luo mei says to the viewer: ‘There was a time when I used to be not like this.’ It evokes pain and regret in the viewer, in that beneath those layers of decay, there may perhaps be a shred of that past innocence left.

頹廢美 [tui fei mei]
The decadent beauty of something fallen that is strangely attractive in its defiance and self-abandonment. It is frequently associated with moral decay but instead of angsting over its downfall, it rejoices in its fallen state. The emphasis of this word is the state of ruin as it is. The vision is focused on the end which is near – of impending doom, destruction, disease or death. It says  to the viewer: ‘This is just the way I am now and I have no regret about it. I long for the final release and I shall put on my best dress to greet that final release.’ It is brazen and is indifferent to what the viewer feels. Tui fei mei springs from the conviction that there is no tomorrow and tends to expresses itself in a rebellious attitude, by going out of the way to do something to excite jaded senses, to be lost in worldly pleasures and self-gratifications, and the pursuit of all that is unwholesome by society’s standards. Often, it is about slipping one notch lower, then another notch lower, then another notch lower, but keeping up pretenses of greatness with extravagant and sumptuous external appearances which are calculated to hide the interior emptiness. Tui fei mei is often found in artistic works towards the end of each dynastic cycle in Chinese history; an example of this would be the poetry of the late Tang.

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Japanese sensibility perceives beauty in falling cherry petals, whereas Chinese sensibility perceives beauty in fallen flower petals.* To put it another way, the Japanese mind seems inclined to find beauty in the active act of destruction, whereas the Chinese mind seems inclined to find beauty in the passive act of coming upon what is already or partially destroyed. The words to describe these perceptions of beauty are known as 破壊の美 [hakai no bi] in Japanese and 滄桑美 [cang sang mei] in Chinese.

Hakai no Bi

There are many manifestations of hakai no bi. Hakai means ‘destruction’; bi means ‘beauty’. ‘Destruction’ in this sense not only includes active acts of violence but is also inclusive of a life force burning furiously towards its exhaustion. The fall of cherry petals, kamikaze deaths and anything to do with the writer Mishima Yukio (三島由紀夫) and his works are typical examples of hakai no bi.

One such manifestation of hakai no bi which I think is central to Japanese aesthetics is the concept of 潔い [isagiyoi]. Isagiyoi is a powerful concept in Japanese culture and though a typical dictionary would give its meaning in English as ‘graceful’, ‘manly’, ‘sportsmanlike’, ‘noble’, ‘courageous’, ‘readily’, ‘with good grace’ etc , none of these is correct – or at least not quite. There is a peculiar meaning to this word which I would personally define as:

A ready resolution to relinquish or end the existence of something/oneself at an immaculate, pure or perfect condition, either before the onset of impurity or imperfection (when or should they set in), or at the first sign of such impurity or imperfection. It is a kind of self-determination to let go of or withdraw something/oneself in a dignified manner , without fear or hesitation, before the downhill, decay or dishonour sets in. At the extreme end, this resolution may border on madness and is prone to manifest itself in death or destruction.

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