Both Wanderers at the World’s Edge — Bai Juyi, “Song of the Pipa”#

Before the long call in Fugutaiten, Setsuna and Kazusa envy each other.

Setsuna sees Kazusa about to take a major Paris stage while she cannot participate even in a local performance. The other woman appears to be opening toward the world. Had she not intervened, would Haruki and Kazusa already be happy? An imagined other life is tidier everywhere than the one before her.⁴

Kazusa feels she has no friends. She wants someone to hear her words and piano, to say she will succeed and her mother will recover, even if it is a lie. Her fingers nearly dial a number long deleted but still remembered. She stops herself, then actually calls Setsuna. She longs for the person living with Haruki in Japan, moving among many people, the first to become her friend.⁵

Each imagines the other occupying the place of already having. Whatever she lacks, the other seems to possess; whatever she bears, the other seems spared. Had the telephone rung a little later, Setsuna would have dialed the European number she had prepared. Both act; the timing of connection is accidental.

In The Plague of Fantasies, Žižek emphasizes that fantasy places not only an object before desire but the desiring person within a scene. One can move among positions: abandoned, enviable, self-sacrificing, awaiting recognition. A story saying “I” does not confine identification to that position.⁶

Reading Kazusa and Setsuna through this distinction exceeds the question of who loves Haruki more. Kazusa envies Setsuna’s life among people and wants some spirit to keep living. Setsuna wants to know whether she is a friend in Kazusa’s life or the unnecessary person who destroyed its happiness. They do not seek the same thing from each other.

At first they exchange safe topics. Setsuna praises the successful concert; Kazusa says it is next week. School excludes the festival, performance excludes her mother. Kazusa briefly feels they have said nothing, then consoles herself: Setsuna answered and is willing to laugh with her. That already matters.⁷

Small talk has a use. Someone imagined never to answer actually does. An unsettled relationship acquires a little time in which speech is possible.

Near the end, Kazusa finally calls Setsuna back, but Setsuna speaks first, crying an apology: perhaps she cannot save Haruki. Argument follows. Kazusa accuses her of failing the trust placed in her; Setsuna accuses Kazusa of letting go first. Each needs help and assumes the other has more to spare. Only when Youko’s illness is disclosed does Setsuna learn that the woman she envies inhabits another fear.⁸

She immediately cries and asks why Kazusa is not beside her mother. Her mother wants to hear the concerto, Kazusa answers. Even the idea most evidently shaped by concern has not included all the cared-for person’s situation. Care must hear this refusal to understand what actually troubles her.

My Heart Is Not a Stone That Can Be Turned — Book of Songs, “The Cypress Boat”#

In Akutagawa’s “Autumn,” two sisters once accompanied the same young man to exhibitions and concerts. Discussing literature with Shunkichi, Nobuko forgets Teruko, then changes the subject to bring her younger sister back. The first to neglect her is also the first to care for her.⁹

Later, Nobuko marries someone else. Teruko’s letter interprets the marriage as sacrifice for her sake. Nobuko cries each time she reads it. The narration immediately asks whether it really was all sacrifice. Unwilling to bear the question, she prefers comfortable sentiment.¹⁰

A sister’s thanks supplies a way of understanding herself. It is intimacy and a pleasant dwelling: relinquishment is always noble, hardship always has a reason, and the one left behind must be happy to prove the hardship worthwhile.

When Nobuko really needs her sister, however, she cannot remain only the sacrificer. Her husband mocks her writing. Sleepless, she repeatedly calls Teruko in her thoughts, feeling her sister is the only person she can rely on. The untransmitted call gives their later meeting weight. She wants more than Teruko’s happiness; she wants Teruko to hear her.¹¹

The reunion evening contains joy of their own. They briefly forget Shunkichi and ask about life since parting. After dinner he offers the maxim that only men can capture the Muse. The sisters ally against him. Apollo is male, Teruko asks: does that mean only women can be musicians?¹²

This small argument should not disappear because jealousy arrives tomorrow. A younger sister can stand alongside the elder and guard her own marriage against her. Last night’s assistance cannot exempt anyone from tomorrow’s questions.

Next day, Nobuko calls Teruko happy; Teruko says her sister is happy too. The words strike an old wound, and Nobuko turns cold. Seeing her sister cry gives her cruel pleasure. She says that Teruko’s happiness and Shunkichi’s love for her are enough, moving herself with her words. Teruko raises her head: then why did her sister, last night, also…? The question remains unfinished.¹³

It moves the grateful person out of the position assigned by her sister. Teruko has anxieties of her own and cannot answer with lifelong thanks alone. She can ask what Nobuko is doing now.

They cry and reconcile again, but on departure Nobuko feels they have become strangers. The novel leaves this estrangement in her experience. We can read a sister who remembers her kindness and observes her hesitation and desire. Closeness offers support and a person capable of questioning her.

Faithful, Yet Suspected; Loyal, Yet Slandered — Sima Qian, “Biographies of Qu Yuan and Jia Yi”#

Influence need not wait for face-to-face contact. In The Love Suicides at Amijima, Osan writes to the courtesan Koharu, asking her to preserve her husband Jihei’s life. Koharu promises to break with him and protects the wife’s secret. Hearing her say she does not want to die, Jihei takes it as betrayal. His brother discovers the letter, keeps it and promises to read and handle it himself. Koharu then says she can stand by her position.¹⁴

An absent woman is already connected to her while she is misunderstood. The letter enables refusal and makes it a duty whose reason must remain hidden.

At the paper shop, Osan infers from Jihei’s account that Koharu may die alone to keep the promise. She now seeks to save more than her husband. If her letter brings Koharu’s death, obligation between women cannot stand. She produces four hundred momme of business money and gathers clothes belonging to herself, the children and others, estimating another three hundred and fifty from pawning them. She hopes to stop the immediate redemption transaction.¹⁵

Some money is in hand; some remains in the clothes. Care must pass through business, debt and children’s warmth. Her plan uses resources of her own and things the household will need. Its real intent to save someone does not make it secure accommodation already obtained.

What will she do once Koharu comes, Jihei asks? Startled, she imagines serving as the children’s nurse, cooking or withdrawing to the side. A woman trying to save another can immediately conceive only means that first diminish her own place.

Osan’s father arrives and sees a dressed-up son-in-law, disturbed clothes and an emptied chest. He believes daughter and children are being stripped again. The couple do not disclose the rescue plan. He forcibly takes her away; a child asks whom to sleep with tonight.¹⁶

Secrecy first connects two women beyond the husband’s knowledge. Later, it prevents another family member with power to act from understanding their plan. The letter is not ineffective. Precisely because it works, we must trace where it continues working and where it meets other powers.

Koharu’s seriousness prevents Osan’s request being dismissed as a rival’s words; Osan’s plan makes Koharu’s life her responsibility. They have changed each other’s weight in their lives. But fidelity alone supplies no route through which that weight can enter the arrangements of family and business.

A Name Is the Guest of What Is Real — Zhuangzi, “Free and Easy Wandering”#

“Sister” acquires another power in Quicksand. Sonoko retells her history with Mitsuko to the “teacher” listening to her account.

Mitsuko refuses to call her a married lady. She writes “older sister” and asks why Sonoko signs her name rather than “Sister.” When Sonoko goes out with her husband on Sunday, Mitsuko complains: why can she not visit when he is home, and why does nobody answer the telephone?¹⁷

There is desire between two women here. Later Mitsuko says a woman’s admiration makes her prouder than a man’s: fascinating another woman makes her beauty more palpable. Sonoko remembers the words and knows she is being directed, yet finds leaving harder.¹⁸

This cannot all be translated into using women to compete for men. Their looks, waiting and jealousy have objects of their own. Yet “sister” begins defining love: coming on Sunday, answering promptly, putting another’s needs first.

Once Sonoko’s husband Kotaro enters the relationship, Mitsuko demands that husband and wife alter their private forms of address. New names really change household relations; the marriage no longer occupies an unquestioned center. Who determines those new names remains another matter.

Mitsuko brings sleeping pills and requires both to take them as proof of fidelity. Sonoko is apprehensive; Kotaro watches the drugs too. As she is about to take hers, he grabs her hand and proposes exchanging packets before taking them together.¹⁹

A moment earlier, Sonoko envies and clings to Mitsuko. Now shared fear connects her to her husband. The same people can repeatedly change positions; one final pairing cannot explain every act. Shared knowledge does not automatically bring ease. It can give loyalty trials more room to operate.

In Seminar XVII, Lacan discusses a demand for knowledge in which the other must know much, but never enough to cease treating the demanding person as knowledge’s supreme reward. Borrowing the question, we can ask: do I want you to understand me, or want each understanding to prove my right to keep examining you?²⁰

Love needs responses. A visit promised, a greeting during illness, time spent waiting cannot all be dismissed as demands for guarantees. But when any finite response merely admits someone to the next trial, intimacy becomes a course from which nobody graduates. New forms of address can open old relations or give that course a prettier name.

A Ridge Seen Across, a Peak Seen from the Side — Su Shi, “Inscribed on the Wall at Xilin Temple”#

In Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness, Otoko and her pupil Keiko, who lives with her, also look at paintings, discuss them and sketch in tea fields.

Otoko repeatedly paints Uji’s tea fields. Leaving Tokyo with her mother as a girl, she saw Shizuoka tea plantations from a train. Uji’s bushes now let her hear that old sorrow. Keiko accompanies her and attends to curved masses of vegetation and greens of different depths, tending toward abstraction. The novel specifies that she need not know the old love within her teacher’s paintings.²¹

Otoko does not accordingly judge the pupil as failing to understand. She smiles at the studies and hears Keiko describe the colors and lines she notices. Their sights are adjacent, their paintings different. The teaching relationship acquires substance in that difference.

Their contact does not revolve solely around the love story Oki left behind, nor does Otoko supply only a past available for revenge. Painting brings them together and gives them things to discuss, judge and pursue separately.

That same evening, Keiko says she will avenge her teacher. Surprised, Otoko says she has never contemplated revenge and does not hate him. Precisely because she still loves him and cannot stop, Keiko replies, she must take revenge for her.²²

She hears the answer and assigns it the opposite meaning. “I do not want revenge” becomes “Because you cannot, I must.” She explicitly admits jealousy too. Acting for Otoko also means changing whom Otoko still loves.

This contrasts with the tea fields. Painting allows Keiko not to see what Otoko sees. Revenge claims the right to act for her through superior understanding. Protection is not naturally above possession; both can share “for your sake.”

Otoko’s attachment also makes demands; Keiko is not only their recipient. The distinction is not whether genuine feeling exists, but which activities allow difference within it and which consume difference.

People often learn to distinguish themselves and surrounding things among companions before reflecting on how they relate to others. Doing something together can alter this understanding too. Its outcome includes not only a finished object, but who can participate, propose a means and have a wish answered.

Changed positions do not themselves constitute improvement. Quicksand changes names while coerced pill-taking continues. We must ask whose intervention gives whom which capacity, whose words can alter the next step and who finds leaving harder. A common achievement may be small; its value rests on these actual changes.

The tea fields consequently exceed an allegorical picture. They contain looking and experiment, a teacher’s judgment and a pupil’s new approaches. Capacity and closeness can grow together before romantic history is reduced to one account. Because this growth really occurs, later overriding another’s wishes cannot be intimacy’s only imaginable destination.

The Bird Calls, Seeking a Friend’s Voice — Book of Songs, “Felling Trees”#

In Setsuna True, Kazusa is not finally persuaded by one correct answer.

Can Setsuna guarantee her mother will live to a hundred, recover, play again and return with her to Vienna? She cannot. She imagines her own mother’s grave illness: crying and talking with family, continuing contact through unavoidable practical affairs. That is your situation, Kazusa answers. Mine is different.²³

The reply touches consolation’s boundary. Setsuna has a family that can cry and act with her. Kazusa cannot acquire the same condition merely by copying her attitude. Understanding experience begins by hearing why it cannot be transferred intact.

They quarrel, apologize and quarrel again. Kazusa says she knows herself best; Setsuna says she is deliberately acting bad. Both seek to reclaim interpretation. At times explaining another is easier than answering her.²⁴

Later, Setsuna recalls piano drawing in Haruki’s guitar and then her own voice, urging Kazusa to rebuild the world around her through music. Kazusa still refuses: she cannot make such a beautiful world. Beside Haruki she cannot give up; beside Setsuna she will be jealous. She asks Setsuna to let go, then cries that she must not leave her out.²⁵

There is no need to choose one statement as true and discard the other. In her answer, the beautiful world seems to require a self already free of jealousy, peacefully accommodating the couple. What she asks is not to be immediately abandoned while she remains unable to be that self.

Setsuna calls Haruki and asks for guitar. Kazusa directly asks Setsuna to sing Haruki’s words on her own music. Setsuna begins, Haruki turns on speakerphone and plays what he had decided to play only for Setsuna. Kazusa can enter the song again as creator and listener.²⁶

The song does not require her first to relinquish love for Haruki. It supplies something she can still join and others need her to join. Their earlier three-person experience changes use: from having been together as a prohibition on change to having made something as grounds for making again.

Setsuna speaks too: she wants to help those important to Haruki and those important to herself. She acknowledges that her absence might most relieve Kazusa, then says that this alone she cannot do. Do not exclude her either.²⁷

Each brings a wish she cannot relinquish before the other, and they accomplish a responsive performance. Kazusa agrees to the concert and record, to play for people she loves and who love her. Commitment gains addressees and a next task.

Harmony Brings Things Forth; Sameness Cannot Sustain Them — Discourses of the States, “Discourses of Zheng”#

The music really becomes a record. In the recollection of the formal session, Setsuna has cried and recovers her composure; Kazusa reminds them of the time left and leads them when recording begins. The released object reaches Setsuna’s household. Takahiro finds the vocal track. Sounds once belonging only to three are available to others.²⁸

This is more than an interlude before the romantic arrangements are complete. Setsuna sings and brings two former companions back into cooperation. Kazusa exercises musical judgment; composition no longer merely preserves lost days. They need each other in one undertaking without being able to yield in every matter.

In another conversation on the same route, Haruki demands an immediate romantic answer. Setsuna asks why he cannot allow “Kazusa and me” more time to talk. She wants room for words unfinished in their own relationship.²⁹

Haruki can decide whom he loves. Setsuna can ask to address her relation with Kazusa before answering his future. Two women’s time is not automatically an empty interval in a man’s wait. It contains acts they have performed, grievances incompletely expressed and answers not yet obtained.

Zijuan in Dream of the Red Chamber also knows the distance between true feeling and getting something settled. She tests Baoyu with a claim that Daiyu will return to Suzhou. Despite seeing his intense reaction, she urges Daiyu to arrange the central matter while Grandmother Jia remains clear-minded and strong. Her own family lives in the Jia household; Daiyu’s departure concerns her future too. Care has personal circumstances and remains care. Tested sincerity cannot make marriage arrangements for Grandmother Jia.³⁰

Later, Aunt Xue discusses proposing a match for Baoyu and Daiyu, comforting Daiyu. Zijuan asks why she does not go and speak. Joking diverts the question. The room contains warmth and unfinished business. Conversely, taking Xiuyan’s pawn ticket and arranging redemption need not decide a whole life first. It need only move this present matter forward.³¹

Calls work similarly. At the end of Fugutaiten’s conversation, both still speak of ending their friendship and refuse to yield. Setsuna urges Kazusa onward; Kazusa protests at being pushed again. Setsuna changes her words: enjoy yourself, be lazy, play, then become the best pianist. Anger and concern turn within one sentence.³²

After the call, Setsuna goes to the kitchen to prepare a packed meal, asks her mother to help stir the eggs and says she will still visit Haruki. There is renewed power to act and a mother taking up work. She still wants to save him and restore the person she recognizes. But she has told someone imagined stronger that she too is near collapse. The argument does not complete her self-understanding. It first makes a formerly unspeakable request for help happen.³³

In another later scene, Kazusa True sends Setsuna’s song overseas through Youko. The recording contains the voices of Tomo, Io, Takeya and her brother, room for another take and the nerves of someone practiced and finally ready to begin. Setsuna says she is still singing. Those people and activities have continued making her life; only now do the two recipients see it.³⁴

Meetings thus have many forms. Letters let absent people act; calls interrupt fantasies of mutual envy; painting and music let different people work together. Each exchange deserves reading for what it accomplishes. Limited care remains care, and an achievement cannot settle other matters in advance.

“Must we have met before?” is not a prepared courtesy in “Song of the Pipa.” First the poet hears music, then a life; only then does he identify himself as another wanderer. He recounts his circumstances, and the woman sits and plays again, the strings sounding different. The encounter changes the second performance. Its listener cannot listen as before.³⁵

For Kazusa and Setsuna, another sentence must fit: having known you long does not mean knowing how you live now. Yesterday’s sacrifice, an old beautiful image and the person supposedly only you can save cannot exhaust today’s you.

They need not become the same kind of person to qualify to do something together. Relations have room to keep growing when they can make something happen, hear the new wishes it brings the other, and acknowledge what they have not yet agreed to.

The next essay, “Those Who Know Me Know My Sorrow,” asks how a lover’s recognition really changes someone, and why it is then asked to certify a complete self.