Lost Japan (14 page)

With regard to meaning, hanging scrolls commonly display phrases of three, five or seven words. Nowadays, they are as often as not slogans such as ‘Harmony, Respect, Purity, Solitude'. Traditionally, calligraphy scrolls were more subtle: poems, suggestions of the season, or Zen
koans
(illogical thoughts designed to force you to enlightenment). As I sit here writing, there is a calligraphy hanging beside me by a Zen abbot of Manpuku-ji Temple in
Kyoto. It reads, ‘The voice of the clouds enters the night and sings'. It is the perfect description of rainy nights here in Kameoka, when the rain patters on the roof and I can hear the rush of the stream at the foot of the garden. I have another Manpuku-ji scroll, which I like to set out when old friends come to visit, which reads, ‘I turn the flowers and wait for the butterfly to arrive'. Another scroll which comes to memory is one I first saw at the headquarters of one of the tea schools in Kyoto: ‘Sitting alone on a great noble peak'. What could better conjure up the solitariness of a quiet tearoom? An example of a Zen
koan
is, ‘I gaze at my loved one in a corner of the sky'. The ‘loved one' means the moon, and this is the gateway to the
koan
.

For myself, I prefer to write single characters. Favorites are ‘the Creative' and ‘the Receptive' from the
I Ching
, or nuance-laden ‘dragon', ‘night' and ‘dawn'. Actually, when you look at old pieces, calligraphies of just one character are quite scarce. People of ancient times were more cultivated than we are today and had greater leisure time. Perhaps they also had more to say. The writing of only a single character could be seen as a sort of ‘instant' calligraphy, a degenerate form of the art. But I like writing one
kanji
at a time because it allows me to close in on the meaning of that one character. Take the word for ‘heart'. One day, I drew this character in black ink and then superimposed the same shape in red. Looking at these overlapping black and red hearts, a friend who was visiting from America said, ‘It's like a man and a woman.' He bought the piece and hung it in his home. Some time later his house burned down and the calligraphy was damaged. I received a phone call from him saying the piece had become a talisman for him and his wife, and could I please make another. It was a great pleasure to see this piece of calligraphy fulfilling its true purpose.

When I began my art collection, I started with calligraphy. Of course I loved it, but this was not the only reason: more than anything, calligraphy was cheap! For example, an ink painting by
Edo literati Ike no Taiga or Buson ran to tens of thousands of dollars, while calligraphy by the same artists could be bought for a tenth of this. Even calligraphy by an internationally known figure like Sen no Rikyu, founder of tea ceremony, was available until recently for about $20,000. This compares with the price of some of the more famous prints by Hokusai. But only a few dozen genuine works by Rikyu survive, whereas Hokusai prints were produced by the thousands. The low cost of calligraphy reflects its lack of popularity today among the Japanese.

This was not always so. Traditionally, calligraphy was the highest of the arts. The T'ang-dynasty Emperor Taizong loved the calligraphy of Wang Xizhi so much he ordered that his copy of Wang Hsi-chih's ‘Orchid Terrace Preface' be buried with him in his tomb. From that time on, calligraphy formed the heart of the Imperial collection, and the court and wealthy families vied for scrolls and rubbings by famous calligraphers. In Japan, the most valued possessions of Zen temples are the calligraphies of the temple abbots. Among the
kuge
nobles,
shikishi
and
tanzaku
plaques were treasured above all other works of art; it would not be too much to say that the calligraphy of the
kuge
was their very identity.

Calligraphy held the highest rank because it was believed to capture the soul of the writer. There is an ancient Chinese saying, ‘Calligraphy is a portrait of the heart'. Even ordinary handwriting can be a ‘portrait of the heart'. In the stateroom of my former employer Trammell Crow's yacht there hung a pair of love letters written by Napoleon and Josephine. No painting could have captured their presence with more intimacy than these autographs. But more than any pen, the brush subtly reflects every slight variation in pressure and direction, thus expressing vividly the artist's state of mind. Calligraphy provides a direct link between one mind and another.

I have never met a court noble of old, and no amount of reading can convey a clear idea of what the life of the
kuge
was really
like. But the hair-thin lines of almost impossibly elegant script that they wrote at their poem festivals cause the
kuge
world to spring clearly into view. On reading the poems and essays of the legendary fifteenth-century Zen master Ikkyu, you find nothing but opaque Zen theorizing; only a scholar could possibly figure out what he is getting at. But visit Shinju-an Temple in Kyoto, where a pair of Ikkyu's scrolls hangs in the Founder's Hall, and in an instant the wit of this crabby old abbot jumps out at you. The calligraphy reads, ‘Don't do evil, do only good!' This refers to an old Chinese story in which someone asked a master to define the essence of Buddhism. The reply was, ‘Don't do evil, do only good', to which the questioner asked, ‘What is so special about that? Even a child knows that.' ‘Well then,' said the master, ‘if even a child knows that, why can't you do it?' Ikkyu wrote these lines in a rough hand, at what seems to have been a lightning pace. On first sight, the characters give you quite a jolt – Ikkyu is mocking us, scratching at us, shocking us.

Even when the author is unknown, calligraphy remains a portrait of the heart. Among my favorite scrolls is a rubbing of three characters carved on Mt Tai in China in the sixth century. The carver is unknown, but the characters have a heavy, rough-hewn power for which they have been prized by collectors. The scroll reads, ‘Virtue is not alone', referring to the statement by Confucius that ‘The virtuous man is not alone; he will always have neighbors.' As I live alone in the rural town of Kameoka, this scroll has always been a comfort to me.

One reason why calligraphy serves as a bridge from mind to mind is that it is a thing of the instant – there is no going back to touch up what you have written. As my tutors at Oxford noticed, rigor is not my strong point. I like the way in which you throw a calligraphy off and then you are done with it. There is none of the gradual development of an oil painting or a musical performance. Calligraphy is perfect for impatient types, and spending an evening drinking wine with a friend while writing calligraphies is
for me the highest form of relaxation. From that first evening as a student writing calligraphy at Roberto's house in Milan, this approach has never changed.

When I am planning to do some calligraphy, I invite a friend to come over and spend the night at my house. We select various weights of
washi
paper and then I make the ink. For me, ink is by no means always black. Perhaps as a lingering bit of Warhol influence, I tend to use a range of colorful inks: from gold and silver powders to ground rocks such as cinnabar and azurite, and artist's materials such as poster paints and acrylics. Grinding the powders, boiling the water, adding the glue and, finally, mixing the colors can take several hours. If I do decide to use black ink, I bring out Tsuru-san's water-dripper, and slowly grind the ink on an inkstone.

When at last I pick up the brush to begin writing, the evening is wearing on, and my friend and I have drunk a fair amount of wine. As we talk, I try writing characters on various subjects. The style may be standard script, semi-cursive or cursive – it changes at the whim of the moment. As each piece appears, I ask my guest what he feels about it. Curiously, the ability to judge calligraphy does not seem to depend on any familiarity with
kanji
. Even people who have never seen a
kanji
in their whole lives can sense balance and quality of line. My sixteen-year-old cousin Trevor was one of my best critics.

I write until dawn. On awakening in the late afternoon I find the room littered with dozens of creations from the night before. Most are failures, but from amongst them I select those that best convey the flavor of the previous evening. One summer night, when the frogs in the neighboring rice paddies were in full voice, clouds of moths and mosquitoes came flying into the house, attracted by the brightness inside. On rising the next day, I found only one piece worth saving. This was the
kanji
for ‘night', written large in black ink. Scattered all over the page, in some places merging with the ‘night' character, were myriad small
kanji
in gold and silver. They said ‘frog', ‘moth', ‘cicada', ‘mosquito' and ‘gnat'.

The great calligraphers of the past also drank as they worked. The tradition goes all the way back to Wang Xizhi in the fourth century, who would gather his friends at the Orchid Terrace, where they floated wine cups down the river while writing poems. Wine is the perfect companion to calligraphy. I once owned a folding screen by the Edo literati Kameda Bosai, written with an unbelievably wild brush. His usual ‘earthworm'
kanji
had become eels, swimming madly across the paper. Looking over the twelve panels of the screen, you could see the characters squirming more agitatedly as Bosai moved from right to left, until on the last panel his
kanji
looked more like Arabic than Chinese. At the end, he had signed, ‘Written by old man Bosai, totally drunk'.

I learned much from pieces like the Bosai screen in my collection that I might not have discovered if I had depended on modern teachers. For instance, in the process of collecting calligraphy by
kuge
nobles I found that there had once been a style called
wayo
. Meaning ‘Japanese style',
wayo
designates the soft, flowing form which grew up in the late Heian period and became the base of
kuge
and samurai scripts, and later design styles such as those in Kabuki and sumo writing. In contrast to
karayo
, the ‘Chinese style' used by monks and literati,
wayo
was delicate and feminine, definitely not the sort of thing which Ikkyu used to put his Zen message across. The
kata
(forms) had been rigidly fixed over centuries, and
wayo
did not allow for much variation or personality; it was not a portrait of the heart as much as a portrait of an elegant ideal. In this aspect,
wayo
has much in common with Noh drama, where the aim is not to express the individual, but
yugen
(dark, mysterious beauty), beyond the individual.

With the coming of the Meiji period, schools removed
wayo
from the curriculum. It was too attached to the samurai classes which had been overthrown, and it was too rigid. Some of the
design styles survived, but
wayo
as an artistic style died out, and most calligraphy we now see is
karayo
. Today, ‘non-individual' has negative connotations, but the ‘supra-individual' world of calm and elegance created by the
wayo
calligraphers was one of Japan's great achievements. The Chinese, ceaselessly trying to express their individuality, never produced anything like it.

When, as an adult, I first saw Kabuki
onnagata
perform, I remembered the dancing sensation I had felt when writing the spear radical as a child. Kabuki dance is a play between yin and yang. The fan goes up before it can go down, the neck turns left as the feet turn right. When the courtesan points, she first draws her finger back, describes a circle and then brings her finger outwards. But at that very moment, her shoulders are turning in the opposite direction. It is the harmony of these opposites that makes Kabuki dance so satisfying. Exactly the same thing occurs in the writing of calligraphy.

Today, Japanese are often taught to write in
seiza
, the formal seated position with legs tucked underneath. Not only is
seiza
very uncomfortable, it allows for very little range of movement. I write standing at a long table, and when I do calligraphy with friends I tend to move around a great deal. Standing up, crouching down, walking back and forth – calligraphy is born from these movements. I can well understand why the T'ang-dynasty artist Chang Xu dipped his hair into a pail of ink and used his own head as a brush! Chang Xu also painted lotus leaves by wetting his buttocks with ink and then sitting on the paper, but that was perhaps going too far.

Which brings me to why calligraphy is not prized in Japan today. It has to do with the way it is taught. Alone of all the traditional arts, calligraphy is instantaneous and free, ideal for busy modern people. But at some point it became a very serious affair. Students must sit still in
seiza
; they must slave for years to acquire technical ability in ancient styles that are completely obscure to the average person. In addition, calligraphy is afflicted by a
‘society disease'. Most professional calligraphers are members of societies that have a pyramidal structure, with grand masters at the head, vice-chairman, board members and judges below that, and lower strata of members and students at the bottom. Art yearbooks list the calligraphers in the same way that sumo posters list the wrestlers: the people at the top of the pyramid get more space. A chairman gets a photograph and a fourth of a page; a vice-chairman gets a photograph, but only an eighth of a page; and so on, on down to mere ‘provisional members' who get only their name in small print. A glance at the name cards of typical modern calligraphers confirms their commitment to the society system. You will find one or more titles – ‘Board Member of X Society', ‘Associate Member of Y Society', ‘Judge of Z Society' – all indicating that modern calligraphers are as busy establishing their place in committees as they are producing works of art.