As Though at a Deep Abyss, as Though Treading Thin Ice — Book of Songs, “Lesser Heaven”#

When Yōzō is a child, his father is going to Tokyo and asks what gifts the children want. At his turn, he cannot answer. It is not that he likes nothing: he would prefer books to the toy his father later suggests. But being asked makes his wish unavailable. His father proposes a lion head children wear in play; he still gives no answer. Seeing his father’s disappointment, he becomes desperately uneasy. At night he opens the notebook in secret and writes “lion dance” where the gifts are listed.⁴

Later, in a Tokyo toy shop, his father discovers the added words and is delighted. Back home he tells Yōzō’s mother. The boy hears from the children’s room: so this was what the child had wanted all along.

Desire has taken a detour. Yōzō wants his father to see a son who wants a lion head; his father sees a son who has finally written his true wish. Both obtain a moment of security, made through their misaligned understandings. To maintain it, Yōzō will have to continue resembling that son.

Calling this a mask readily suggests a complete true self already hidden beneath, waiting to meet us when uncovered. Here, however, his own desire loses its bearings in his father’s question and takes shape through imagining his father’s expectations. The problem concerns how he desires, not merely how he disguises himself.

Explaining Lacan’s concept of fantasy, Žižek emphasizes that fantasy supplies more than an object to want. It arranges desire: what am I within another’s wishes, how will I be needed, how can I avoid being cast aside? The words Yōzō adds at night invite this reading. He has not first learned everything in his father’s mind and then executed an elaborate fraud. In his father’s disappointed expression, he finds a position where he can stand.⁵

Clowning consequently has two sides. He calls making others laugh his last appeal for love to humanity. He fears people and cannot abandon them; appearing ridiculous at least lets him stay among them. Yet when they really laugh, it seems they accept only the ridiculous figure. The more accomplished he becomes, the harder it is to make a request without a smile.⁶

Takeichi interrupts this accomplishment. During gymnastics, Yōzō falls deliberately, everyone laughs, and Takeichi says he did it on purpose. What Yōzō fears is more than a failed joke. The arrangement that purchased his safety has suddenly become something another can see through. He tries to approach Takeichi and keep watch over this dangerous possessor of knowledge.

Later, after rain soaks them, Takeichi’s ear hurts. Yōzō carefully cleans it with cotton dipped in alcohol. He calls this action another trick, describing a hypocritical intention within it. Takeichi predicts that women will like him. They are close enough for one person’s head to rest on the other’s legs, yet their understandings differ greatly. Yōzō hears no all-clear in this closeness. He continues identifying his own darkness.⁷

The intention to watch Takeichi really is part of the consideration. It does not yet exhaust how they sit, how gently a hand moves or how another receives care. Motive explains part of an act; treating it as everything flattens what the act does within a relationship. Yōzō allows himself consistency only through “contemptible.” The inconsistent details of his narrative deserve our pause.

The names Yōzō gives himself can represent his self-understanding without containing the whole person. “I am unfit to be human” must itself be considered an act of speaking: who says it to whom now, which experiences does it organize, and which does it forbid to remain? “Disqualified” can certainly organize his self-knowledge. It cannot thereby exempt itself from being checked against the events he records.

Finding a few good deeds in a bad person to raise his total score would leave the character a report card awaiting calculation. More pressing is whether his explanation of himself can be changed by what he does. If every new action is permitted only as fresh proof of the old essence, supposed depth no longer needs to hear his words or watch his acts.

For You I Make This Song of the Pipa — Bai Juyi, “Song of the Pipa”#

The notebooks also contain moments of life beginning again. Living with Yoshiko, Yōzō stops drinking for a time and works as a cartoonist. After dinner they visit a cinema or café and bring flowers home. Looking at his wife, he sometimes feels he might gradually become human. The Kyōbashi bar proprietress also supports these days. Becoming human again has practical content here: work, other people’s help, walks and companionship.⁸

Yet Yōzō places Yoshiko in an excessively spotless position. She suspects no one; her trust is unblemished. When he tells her of his past, she takes it as a joke. Living together does not give them equal knowledge of how true those words are.

Later, when Yoshiko is sexually assaulted, Horiki calls Yōzō to watch. Stunned, he withdraws. His anguish is profound and quickly occupied by a question: can the purity he trusted still exist? Yoshiko comes upstairs and begins explaining what the man had assured her. Yōzō interrupts, tells her to stop, says she is incapable of suspecting people and asks her to sit and eat beans.⁹

“You do not suspect people” sounds understanding and is indeed different from blaming her. But she has not finished describing what happened. The assurances under which she lowered her guard, how the man exploited them and how she needs to be heard now all yield to her husband’s judgment about trust. Afterward she fears his gestures and watches his face; clowning that once made her laugh no longer works. Yōzō asks whether trust is a sin. Yoshiko lives with fear after an assault.

Psychoanalysis has work to do here beyond following the collapse of Yōzō’s symbolic world. It must also ask whom he invested with the hope of keeping that world pure. Once Yoshiko becomes his warrant that the human world remains habitable, her experience is readily rewritten as the loss of that warrant. She did not first owe him a duty and fail it by being victimized. His expectation placed her in that position.

Yōzō’s own childhood account includes sexual abuse by male and female servants. Already a clown, he could not tell his parents what was happening and had no confidence even in a way to speak. That child needed protection. The husband who later fails to hear Yoshiko out must answer for how he treats her now. Both facts belong to one person without canceling each other. Folding all experience into “I have always been bad” can turn the wrong done to him into his wrongdoing and hide his later failures toward others within an unquestionable fate.¹⁰

Lu Xun’s “New Year’s Sacrifice” makes another distinction stark. Old Mother Liu questions Xianglin’s Wife about how she eventually yielded, assuming she had been willing. “Try it yourself,” Xianglin’s Wife replies. The words contain bodily circumstances another refuses to imagine and some surviving strength to answer back. Old Mother Liu recommends more thorough resistance—even smashing herself to death—and describes punishment after death for remarried women. Xianglin’s Wife later donates a threshold, spending her saved wages in the hope of no longer being considered unclean. At the winter-solstice sacrifice, she approaches the wine cups and chopsticks with renewed energy. The Fourth Mistress stops her as before: “Leave them.”¹¹

Asking here whether Xianglin’s Wife uses atonement in place of real responsibility would ask the wrong question. The judgment requiring atonement is itself harming her. First forced, she is then required to prove purity by resisting to the death. Surviving brings the stigma of not having died. The purification promised by the threshold does not confer the right to touch sacrificial vessels. Her payment is real money; the standing returned for it remains others’ to decide.

“Stop blaming yourself and take responsibility” is therefore no universally sound advice. First establish where the blame comes from. An imposed accusation calls for resistance; actual harm to someone calls for explanation and change. Condemning the offender’s whole person as irretrievable takes another step. It may appear to increase responsibility while depriving responsibility of any definite place to fall.

This changes the force of “Both wanderers at the world’s edge.” In Bai Juyi’s “Song of the Pipa,” the woman tells her history first. The poet then speaks of what they share and recounts his exile. Their meeting does not turn two lives into one. Misfortune may make someone hear another; it cannot prescribe the reason for that other’s misfortune, much less classify being harmed and harming as the same moral failure.¹²

Those Who Know Me Say My Heart Is Troubled — Book of Songs, “The Millet Hangs Heavy”#

No Longer Human does not give its final word to the notebooks.

The novel first lets a narrator examine three photographs. A child’s smile, a handsome young man and a later face that leaves no impression all strike him as unsettling. Before readers hear Yōzō, they receive an observer’s pronouncement about this person. Only then do they enter the notebooks and follow his repeated self-explanations, until hospitalization and the words “disqualified from being human.”¹³

Were the work to end there, photographs and notebooks might seem mutually corroborating: someone else had already seen he was abnormal, and he finally knew it too. But reading an essential character from photographs is already the outer narrator’s judgment. Yōzō in turn interprets admission to the hospital as public expulsion, as though the locked door determined his human standing. Linking two judgments does not automatically turn either into fact.

The postscript lets the Kyōbashi proprietress offer another image. She remembers his kindness and consideration, saying that even when drinking he was a good boy, like a god. She has also said that someone like that probably would not make it. The outer narrator thinks that if the notebooks are true, he too would have sent Yōzō to a hospital. She blames the father. One kind witness’s verdict does not settle matters. Photographs, notebooks and acquaintances bring what they have and have not seen to a continuing dispute over this person.¹⁴

Her words deserve hearing because she knew how Yōzō treated people in life. They cannot cancel Yoshiko’s injury or turn childhood abuse into a misunderstanding. Nor does bias in Yōzō’s narrative diminish his suffering. Its total self-negation gives powerful expression to fear difficult to voice; readers have reasons to be moved. Precisely because this voice has force, we must distinguish entering someone’s pain from granting final authority to his interpretation of everyone else. What we need to relinquish is the hope of settling these different matters with one total verdict.

People can fix themselves in an existing identity and use “This is how I am” to evade their continuing possibilities. A bad identity can be defended very earnestly. The good person must be spotless everywhere; the bad person must be irredeemable everywhere. Opposite signs can make the same demand that experience obey an already chosen name.

Why is self-condemnation so attractive? It hurts, but also specifies a position. If I suffer enough and condemn myself strongly enough, others should know how to treat me: punish me, leave me or prove I am not so bad. An unpredictable relationship becomes a trial with roles and lines. Even consolation can be received as further proof that I do not deserve consolation.

Discussing the superego, Žižek observes that renunciation itself can become a satisfaction. Sacrifice ceases to be limited by accomplishing something; obedience to the command becomes its value. The more one loses, the more loss confirms obedience to an absolute demand. This does not mean secretly finding pain pleasant. It can mean finally knowing who one must be while needing to continue suffering to preserve that knowledge.¹⁵

Applied to self-condemnation, the question is less its sincerity than whether it permits change. If no concrete correction can bring punishment to an end, no response from the injured person can alter the sentence, and later good actions prove only that one is living with guilt, self-condemnation has begun sustaining itself. A person may sincerely demand judgment while refusing to return an undecided future to the relationship.

Do I Not Think of You? Yet You Do Not Come to Me — Book of Songs, “The Clearing by the East Gate”#

In the concert hall on the affair route, Haruki tells Setsuna he traveled north with Kazusa, that they had a sexual relationship and that Kazusa has decided never to see him again. He explicitly acknowledges the transgression himself. His subsequent wish to punish himself does not justify reclassifying the entire confession as a false performance.¹⁶

But Setsuna asks questions he has not selected for her.

Did he forget her? More specifically, did he think of her at any moment of intimacy with Kazusa? Haruki considers the inquiry meaningless: whatever the answer, betrayal has occurred. Setsuna allows that this may be true and still asks him to answer.¹⁷

As a judgment about whether transgression occurred, his reasoning holds. Someone can remember a lover and still betray her. Remembering does not make the act innocent. But Setsuna evidently asks more than whether the charge is established. She wants to know how she existed within that experience. When physical intimacy occurred, was their shared past entirely erased? The answer will enter how she understands herself and the person before her. It can matter alongside his guilt.

Haruki knows he remembered her more than once. Even with Kazusa beside him, Setsuna’s voice broke in. He closed his heart precisely because he could not separate them. Aloud, however, he says he forgot her throughout and betrayed her from the bottom of his heart.

The paired subtitles preserve “Did you forget?” and “I forgot completely.” The more specific question and Haruki’s contrary thoughts appear in script 3908:546–568. ©2012 AQUAPLUS; gameplay footage uploaded to Bilibili by xueyinhualuo.

The lie increases his guilt. Admitting remembrance would leave a person who loves and harms, remembers and continues transgressing. That person cannot be tidied away in a sentence. Saying he forgot compresses the relationship into total betrayal and casts him as the person Setsuna ought most to abandon. Unwilling to burden her again, he still decides which Haruki she should know.

Self-punishment acquires an actual harm here: someone already injured receives another distorted account. This differs from disclosing the true events. Pain as a common origin does not make them one kind of sincerity. The statement is addressed to Setsuna; judging it requires seeing what she learns and what she is denied.

Haruki then says she need neither forgive nor accept him; this is only his own satisfaction. He knows internally that punishing himself does nothing for her. Knowing is insufficient to stop arranging his punishment. Setsuna fears he will collapse again; he does not want to place expectations on her. Painstaking concern and high-handedness occupy the same spot. He wants to ask nothing more of her while denying even the meaning of a question she has chosen to ask.¹⁸

Setsuna stops the conversation and asks him to hear Kazusa’s final piece first. She issues no acquittal and does not declare, as he proposes, that they will never meet again. She puts something still happening before them. Haruki wants to finish narrating the rest of his life; Setsuna first asks him to stay and finish living this moment.

The exchange changes one thing: Haruki’s self-judgment fails to become the conversation’s endpoint. The injured person still has questions, concerns and the right to answer outside his account.

Seeking to Stand, Help Others Stand — Analects, “Yong Ye”#

Kazusa True makes the disagreement more direct. Haruki visits the Ogiso household to withdraw his proposal; Setsuna is absent from the conversation. He is willing to face her parents’ disappointment and explain the altered relationship himself. At the same time, he urges the trial to hurry along in his thoughts, hoping confession and punishment will release him sooner. Real explanation and an urgent wish for closure can coexist.¹⁹

Takahiro overhears, rushes out and hits him. Following Haruki’s self-condemnation, these blows could readily appear part of the price he owes. Setsuna’s father instead orders his son to stop: he must not hit people. He apologizes to Haruki, offers to cover all medical costs if treatment is needed and tells him never to visit the house again.²⁰

Rejecting Haruki and stopping the beating are actions of the same father in this encounter. One ends family contact; the other acknowledges responsibility for violence against the person present. Hurting Setsuna does not make Haruki someone anyone may strike at will. Conversely, an apology for a son’s fists does not retract the father’s refusal. Different measures emerge; pain cannot be offset against pain.

Kazusa puts another gravely precious thing on the table when she offers to abandon piano. She is willing to sacrifice a career almost equivalent to life as the price of betraying Setsuna. Setsuna says it has no meaning. Kazusa too knows it is her own satisfaction.²¹

Why no meaning? Piano matters enormously to Kazusa; losing it proves willingness to pay something enormous. But Setsuna has not lost Kazusa’s piano. Betrayed trust, an engagement and the life she expected will not be restored because Kazusa also destroys something valuable. Two losses do not constitute an equivalent repayment.

Later, Haruki asks Kazusa to relinquish another demand: that obtaining one important thing requires discarding another. If piano still makes her happy, she should play. If she no longer needs it later, she can judge again. She does not know now; she can think slowly after returning. For the moment, she should perform well tomorrow.²²

Piano temporarily changes from an instrument of punishment back into an activity she can pursue, enjoy and reconsider in the future. Kazusa and Haruki retain actual responsibilities, but need not prove them by destroying her ability to go on living. Setsuna retains the right to refuse the sacrifice. She need not praise it as sufficient merely because the other person is willing to lose so much.

“What else should I lose?” and “How must your injury be addressed?” can therefore lead in opposite directions. I can continually raise the stakes of the first and appear increasingly solemn. The second must let you say that this is not what you want, or that you cannot answer yet. Responsibility entails active work to change things. It confers no unilateral right to declare equivalence or recovery.

Food and Clothing Need Care; Hard Work Will Not Fail Me — Tao Yuanming, “Moving House,” II#

Return to Villon’s Wife. The woman who says she is happy initially goes to clear up her husband’s wreckage.

Ōtani takes five thousand yen from the tavern, and the owners pursue him home. He threatens them with a knife; fearing injury on either side, his wife stops the pursuing proprietor. The money was newly collected and needed for year-end payments to suppliers. Failure to pay would damage business after New Year too. The next day she comes to the tavern, falsely claims that someone will soon bring the money and offers to remain as a hostage and help. When she says this, she has arranged no such payer.²³

The lie delays collection and gives her entry to work. That result does not establish that she had a secure plan from the start. The proprietor still bears the risk of nonpayment; she leaves her body and labor there. Later, Ōtani tells another woman in Kyōbashi about the theft, and that woman supplies repayment. Separately, his wife offers to work off older debts the proprietor has discounted to twenty thousand yen. Returning the five thousand, promising to pay old debts and labor already performed are different events occurring in sequence.²⁴

Count only what the bad man spends and what the woman replaces, however, and her newly opening life contracts into another hole. Every action receives meaning from the size of the deficit it fills for him.

As a child she helped her father in his little oden shop; those skills now serve her with customers. The first busy day makes her feel light enough to float, and brings substantial tips. She dresses herself, alters her clothes and wants to come to work. Her husband’s debts really push her there. Her actions gradually acquire content not wholly belonging to those debts. Labor can be constrained by old relations and give the worker new contacts and wishes. Both directions exist here.²

Pleasure in the new life has shadows. Even amid the initial exhilaration, she imagines her body melting like ice cream. The owners help her and calculate their business interests. Customers notice her looks and her status as a poet’s wife; some address her frivolously. A place in which to act also exposes her to others’ desires.²⁵

Later, a customer escorts her home, leaves and returns, saying he missed the last train and asking to sleep in the entranceway. What she permits is a night in the entranceway. A very brief passage describes her assault the next morning. At work afterward, things are only outwardly as usual. “Outwardly” prevents routine from meaning that nothing happened. Letting someone stay overnight cannot retrospectively become consent to everything that follows.²⁶

Her husband’s grand pronouncements cannot explain her experience either. Walking at night earlier, he spoke of male fear, meaningless artistic work and repeatedly asked whether God exists. She said she did not know. She cannot supply an omniscient judge for him; her own days still have to continue. After the assault, she suggests that they live at the tavern. The proposal turns her attention to future accommodation. Whether it can be realized lies beyond the story.²⁷

Only now does her final remark acquire weight. Reading a newspaper that calls him an inhuman creature, Ōtani defends the theft as an attempt to give his wife and child a comfortable New Year. She is not particularly pleased. What does it matter if he is inhuman, she says, so long as they remain alive?²⁸

“Inhuman creature” is an insult Ōtani reads; “disqualified from being human” is Yōzō’s verdict on himself. They should not be blurred into one shared maxim. Her remark neither absolves his theft nor obliges all wives to endure. It emerges from the days she has lived: her husband’s debate over what he ultimately is cannot bring both lives to a halt. She wants to live. She has found pleasure in work, suffered a new injury and proposed a new arrangement. Each has substance to be faced separately.

A loved person is as finite as oneself. The wife need not eternally care for Ōtani to prove he remains worthy of humanity; Setsuna need not guarantee Haruki’s human standing. One can want to help another and continue living with him without being responsible for supplying the ultimate explanation of all his pain.

The caregiver’s pleasure acquires its own weight too. It need not establish that suffering was worthwhile before receiving acknowledgment. If she later no longer wants to continue, past happiness does not incur a debt she cannot leave. When the wife says she is happy, she has already named an experience others should hear. Her husband’s grand theory can neither prove it nonexistent nor fix it forever.

Knowing What Lies Ahead Can Still Be Pursued — Tao Yuanming, “Homeward”#

In Fugutaiten no Kimi e, Haruki returns to the editorial office. He still solemnly promises future repayment, while his colleagues have articles to deliver and trips to make. A welcome party is arranged. Suzuki forbids pressure to drink: oolong tea from the opening toast is fine. Kizaki says he should be allowed to leave when he wants. Haruki feels this is probably still his home ground. Hamada removes the “probably.”²⁹

Nobody convenes a moral examination to check whether he has atoned enough before letting him sit down to work. Nobody requires colleagues to forgive on Setsuna’s behalf. Freedom from pressure to drink and permission to leave early make attendance possible. Work to do lets him return as more than a recipient of care. Help takes shape in a day’s arrangements; people can continue having their own affairs.

From a distance, this meets the copy of The Classic of Mountains and Seas A Chang buys.

As a child, Lu Xun finds his nurse meddlesome and resents how much room she takes in bed. Her stories of the long-haired rebels briefly give her an alarming “divine power.” Later he wants The Classic of Mountains and Seas. An elderly distant relative who knows the book can no longer find his old copy, and the child cannot easily visit a bookshop himself. When A Chang asks, he initially considers telling someone unfamiliar with such books useless. Returning from leave, she hands him four volumes, mangling the title as “Three-Hum Classic.”³⁰

This time the child again declares her divine power great. Similar words reverse the judgment: fear acquired from a story becomes recognition that someone has done for him what others would not or could not. The books are badly printed on poor paper; some illustrated eyes are even rectangular. They remain a treasure.

A Chang does not first become the educated, refined person of the child’s ideal to qualify to help him. She asks, listens and buys the book with an inaccurate title. Known actions suffice to change the old judgment. The adult remembering still does not know her real name. She nevertheless exceeds the outline of an anonymous servant.

Equally, the gift leaves more than a debt. It lets a child turn pages and look at pictures, opening a door onto a world previously beyond reach. Kindness sometimes lies in what it enables another to do and how it changes their dealings. Fixate on who owes whom and even the recipient’s later interests shrink back into entries in the benefactor’s ledger.

Yōzō’s notebooks, the wife’s reply and Setsuna’s questions deserve reading together without being compiled into one register of sinners. Yōzō has been hurt and has hurt others. The wife has a livelihood, pleasures and experiences of her own. Setsuna asks for facts beyond Haruki’s prepared charges. The more completely a name seems to explain someone, the more carefully we must retain actions and voices that do not fit it.

An actual wrong can be acknowledged and stopped; the injured person can identify what remains unanswered. Imposed shame can be challenged. Whether someone is forever unfit to live need not be settled before days begin. Haruki can drink oolong tea at his welcome party, A Chang can buy a book, and the wife can say she is happy today. Relationships keep growing through these things that have not said everything for everyone else.

The next essay, “No Regret for Wet Clothes,” carries desire further into life: after people want to love each other, how do work, housing, relatives, friends and each person’s answer make a choice practicable?