Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (83 page)

Lately Hina’s grandmother started to talk about how late at
night, the little girl had asked her grandmother to take her out to look at the stars. In the weeks leading up to her death, she had asked to be taken out every night. She rode on her grandmother’s back and craned her head up to look at the night sky.

“Do you know the story of the Moon Princess?” Kaneta asked me.

Hina’s grandmother thought that perhaps her granddaughter had been like the Moon Princess, that she had known somehow that she was nearly out of time, and that she had wanted to look up at the night sky to which she would soon return. The Japanese liked such stories, Kaneta said. It helped to be able to find just the right ending to such a sad tale.

J
APANESE STORIES OFTEN
end with a beautiful image. The Japanese psychoanalyst Kawai Hayao has proposed that in many Japanese fairy tales, the conflict in a story is resolved by what he calls “the aesthetic solution.” In his book
Dreams, Myths and Fairy Tales in Japan
, which has been translated into English, Kawai writes, “In the West, the hero’s virtue is rewarded by a happy ending. But in Japan, beautiful endings are much preferred to happy endings.” Beauty is the ultimate democracy, because a beautiful thing, particularly if it exists in nature, belongs to everyone.

Kawai argues that in Japan, the highest form of beauty is imperfect. In
Dreams, Myths and Fairy Tales in Japan
, Kawai further elaborates:

There is a famous story about a Zen master who shows what beauty is for him. A young monk is sweeping a garden. He tries to do his best at the job. He cleans the garden perfectly so that no dust is left in it. Contrary to his expectation the old master is not happy about his work. The young monk thinks
for a while and shakes a tree so that several dead leaves fall down here and there in the garden. The master smiles when he sees this.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the terms
wabi
and
sabi
will recognize the monk and the master’s attitudes. The simplest definition of
wabi sabi
is that it is a kind of beauty whose highest form is expressed through imperfection. The venerable art historian Miyeko Murase instructed her students to consider that a full moon glowing brightly in the sky is undeniably beautiful. But how much more beautiful is the moon when it is partially obscured by a bit of cloud? A geometrically symmetrical tea bowl is a lovely thing to drink from, but how cold and precise it looks beside an earthen tea bowl whose surface is slightly marred.

The Japanese love the beauty of cherry blossoms in the spring. However, say the aesthetes, how much more beautiful are the cherry trees when they are just past their peak, and petals begin to drip-drop onto the ground.

Kawai writes in his book, “The Japanese fairy tales tell us that the world is beautiful and that beauty is completed only if we accept the existence of death.” Beauty heals us. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that perfected beauty is any kind of true antidote to suffering, for everything is always changing, never holding fast to its shape. Everything must one day die, and we are all always only just passing through. So it is that we might heal a bit by experiencing the passing beauty of a dance gesture, a fading ghost, or a flower.

I
THOUGHT A
lot about Kawai’s theory of the “aesthetic solution” when I heard the following modern-day equivalent of a ghost story. Sut
Ayane is a young woman in her twenties whose life has been
completely transformed by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Sut
grew up in Kesennuma, the seaside town in which a large blue boat washed up onto city streets, and where the port caught fire while the water raged.

Before the tsunami, Sut
was a budding writer who worked in Sendai as a caretaker for the elderly. She lived with her fiancé, who is also from Kesennuma. Sut
’s father worked in the Kesennuma harbor as a radio technician on a fishing boat. The Sut
family home is up in the hills, far away from the shore, and after the earthquake, Sut
was able to very quickly get through to her mother, who assured her that all was fine at home, and that her father would most likely be back soon.

By evening, Sut
’s father had still not made it home, nor did he return the next day. Across T
hoku, the earthquake had disrupted power lines and the water supply; Sut
and her fiancé stayed in their apartment for several days, in the dark, unable to bathe. Finally, a family friend offered to pick up Sut
and take her out of Sendai to the friend’s home farther inland, which did have electricity and running water. Nearby there was even a large
sento
, or public bath, offering discounted admission. Sut
took the offer of hospitality.