Do Not Let the Words Obscure the Intention — Mencius, “Wan Zhang,” I#

This return to the past begins with Haruki’s invitation. He has put the school festival DVD Mari gave him on a shelf and tried to forget it. When Chiaki discovers it, he asks whether she wants to watch. She asks if that is all right. With Chiaki, he says, it is. Onscreen, Setsuna and Kazusa look toward the camera. Beside him, Chiaki draws close and listens to his account.⁵

The same performance acquires a new listener that night. Haruki talks about Setsuna, Kazusa, the harm he did and his later wish to believe he had been forgiven. Chiaki tries imitating Kazusa. Haruki corrects the address: she did not call him by that name then. Chiaki changes it to “Kitahara.” Only then does he say it was more or less like that.⁶

Haruki wants to be understood, even wants Chiaki to become the person who knows him best. The intimate details he gives her enter her performance at the same time. Confiding does more than transfer something already written from one mind to another. What a listener asks and how she responds can lead the narrator to explain, correct himself or continue along a new account of who he is.

Chiaki has firsthand experience too. She saw the school festival performance three years earlier. Later she tells Haruki that more than Setsuna’s singing or Kazusa’s skill attracted her: the three people’s glances, movements and the relations passing through their performance did too. Hearing Haruki’s story three years later, she takes it as confirmation of her old judgment. The three also become interesting material.⁷

The judgment has an observational basis and carries her interests. Haruki first erases himself from a successful performance; Chiaki places him back at the center of its relations. He supposes his account seeks only sympathy; she is already organizing a play. His later feeling of being used does not mean his earlier telling was involuntary. Permission to watch on that occasion does not authorize every subsequent use either.

The stage performs major surgery on the past. Kazuki is modeled on Haruki; Haruna and Yukine chiefly draw on Kazusa and Setsuna, then change in their own ways. Contact that originally occurred between Haruki and Setsuna at the post-festival celebration moves to before the competition and occurs between Kazuki and Haruna. Haruki realizes that the material has been deliberately rewritten, not mistakenly recorded. Beside him, Setsuna opens her eyes wide and bites her lip. Haruna then stays in Japan, Yukine becomes a singer, and a different three years gradually brings the characters into conflict.⁸

The changes make visible things that could previously only be approached indirectly. Staying beside someone may not allow a permanent home in the position of “just friends.” Bearing pain for another person may let one’s own wishes accumulate. These are the play’s interpretations of relationships. They cannot establish that Kazusa actually gave up studying abroad and stayed for three years. Yet if honesty required copying the past word for word, art could only replay records. People who never confronted one another could never confront one another in imagination.

Setsuna’s “not that strong” identifies the cost of the revision. The stage concentrates conflict and gives wishes forceful speech. She and Kazusa did not speak that way at the time. Silence, avoidance and consideration also entered the past they actually lived. An actor’s ability to say everything for a character need not make the portrayal more complete than the person.

Chiaki plays the principal female roles herself. The two heroines cannot stand onstage at once, yet the troupe finds a way to perform their confrontation.⁹ One body carries conflicting wishes. The actor imitates others and puts herself into the work. When Yukine refuses to relinquish love, singing, opportunity and dreams, Haruki recognizes more than Setsuna: there is Kazusa, and still more Chiaki herself.¹⁰

Through the three friends’ past, Chiaki says what present she wants. Her desire enters the relationship, and the script carries an involved person’s voice. The past gains new meaning onstage, bearing the wishes of this later arrival.

Words Do Not Exhaust Meaning — Book of Changes, “Appended Statements,” I#

The three central accounts in “In a Grove” seem eager to answer one question: who killed Kanazawa no Takehiro? Tajōmaru says, I did. His wife Masago says, I did. The dead man, speaking through a medium, says, I killed myself.

They are not all competing to escape guilt. Anyone who assumes that the most self-incriminating statement must be the truest would have to believe three incompatible deaths at once.

Tajōmaru admits deception, binding and sexual assault. He admits killing too. What he insists on is how he killed: Masago demanded that one of the men die, so he untied Takehiro and fought him honorably, piercing his chest only on the twenty-third exchange. He expressly tells his listener not to forget: the twenty-third. Finally he proudly asks for the death penalty.¹¹

Confession has not stopped him building a monument to himself. A victor needs a worthy opponent; the killing needs a posture free of cowardice. He first uses violence to deprive the couple of choice. By the end of his account, he wants the killing remembered as a fair duel. Even the dead opponent is assigned to testify to his skill.

Masago’s account is more anguished. After the assault, she says, she tried to approach her husband and Tajōmaru kicked her down. What truly broke her was the contempt in her husband’s eyes. She fainted. When she regained consciousness, the bandit was gone, but she still saw contempt. She asked her husband to die with her. Leaves stuffed in his mouth prevented speech; from his lips she read “Kill me,” then drove in the dagger. She also recounts repeated attempts to die and her failure to do so, ending by asking what she should do.¹²

The guilt she admits cannot absolve the assailant of his earlier crime. Her naming the assault as her own shame is suffering to be recognized within the account, not a judgment criticism should casually inherit. Her husband’s different account says he tried to warn her with his eyes not to trust the bandit. No independent evidence decides between those readings. The words determining the manner of death are words she reads from a gaze and moving lips.

In her version, killing her husband belongs within a request to die together. Failing to die then turns that request into grounds for repeated self-accusation. She neither paints herself as innocent nor finds a settled position through confession. Saying that she wants to preserve dignity explains only part of it. The bewilderment she brings to the listener remains at the end and cannot be pared down to the same self-glorification found elsewhere.

Takehiro’s spirit tells another sequence. He tries to warn his wife with his eyes not to trust the bandit. She agrees to leave with the bandit and demands her husband’s death. The bandit instead gives Takehiro the power to decide her fate. For those words alone, Takehiro says, he almost wanted to forgive his crime. His wife escapes, the bandit leaves, and he frees himself from the remaining rope, picks up the dagger and drives it into his own chest.¹³

A man bound while watching his wife assaulted regains two positions in his story: he can judge his wife and determine his own death. Whether others really spoke those words still requires evidence. How the words speak on his behalf is already apparent in the telling. In different versions, Masago chooses the victor, asks to die together or demands her husband’s murder. She is repeatedly placed at the hinge of the death. Her own account does not thereby acquire a final guarantee either.

Admission of guilt and the bearing of pain deserve serious attention. Neither shares a single measure with narrative reliability. Someone can pay heavily in self-condemnation while defending an identity. Someone may also speak without being able to settle what kind of person they can still become.

Already, Even Then, Bewildered — Li Shangyin, “The Brocade Zither”#

Li Shangyin’s “The Inlaid Zither” asks whether this feeling could wait to become recollection, then turns immediately: even at the time, there was bewilderment.¹⁴ The turn folds back a familiar assumption—that the original experience was clear and whole, then gradually blurred with age. The poem’s bewilderment was already there.

Memory can therefore perform another task. What is finally articulated later may be no lost sentence recovered. It may be something that only later people and events make sayable for the first time.

Lacan uses the future perfect when discussing the subject’s history. Who one is becoming participates in determining who one will have been when looking back.¹⁵ An action occurred on a particular day; that date does not shift. Whether the action counts in a life as a beginning, betrayal, lesson or farewell enters into relation with living not yet complete. Promising how I will live also rearranges the past: what must be acknowledged, what no longer suffices to represent me, and what is only now showing its consequences.

Žižek presses the point in discussing the retroactive meaning of a symptom. Meaning need not lie buried in the past as a complete kernel waiting to be excavated. New connections among signifiers give earlier traces a legible position they did not have before.¹⁶ New understanding changes the connections among past events and their places in present life. Those events still constrain interpretation. Understanding a wrong as part of learning does not mean the injured person was never hurt.

Chiaki’s stage provides a useful test. Three years earlier she heard the three perform. Three years later she hears Haruki’s account and arranges them into a new story. A later relationship allows earlier glances to be named as desire. The performance history Haruki undervalues becomes a history of organizing relations among three people. Yet “This is how she now understands it” remains separated from “This is what everyone thought then” by each person’s knowledge, intentions and unspoken words.

Fictional characters are also more than codes waiting to be matched to originals. Understanding the play requires seeing the dilemmas it brings onstage. Asking only whom Haruna or Yukine equals misses the questions it poses. When neither career nor love can easily be relinquished, how can someone explain herself to a lover? When the position of friend cannot hold, how will accumulated desire enter the relationship? These questions give fiction explanatory power. A table of names cannot answer them.

Nor must art expose every hidden desire to qualify as truthful. Žižek objects to turning one fantasy fragment into a universal key to an entire work. Distance, displacement and gaps between work and fantasy can disclose fantasy’s own limitations.¹⁷ Chiaki’s direct confrontation brings the girls’ conflict closer. Setsuna’s insistence that she was not that strong reveals the difference within that approach. New understanding arises between them: conflict existed in their silences, but it was not simply waiting for a braver actor to speak its whole truth.

Better No Book Than Believing Every Word of It — Mencius, “Exhausting the Heart,” II#

“In a Grove” does not stage a trial in which seven people take turns from beginning to end.

The first four headings explicitly identify a woodcutter, traveling priest, police agent and old woman as being questioned by the judicial commissioner. They are followed by Tajōmaru’s confession, Masago’s penitential account at Kiyomizu Temple, and the dead man’s words conveyed through a medium. The story places voices from different settings beside one another. The commissioner has no independent lines, but questions emerge from the first four answers. Where was the body? What about the weapons? The horse? Who was the woman?¹⁸

What is asked first and singled out already turns experience into a particular record. The woodcutter finds a body and describes a chest wound, rope, a comb and trampled leaves; he then infers that the dead man must have struggled fiercely. The traveling priest remembers a man, a woman and weapons on the road, but did not see the woman’s face clearly. The police agent finds a horse and weapons with Tajōmaru and, combining them with what he has heard, concludes that he killed the man. The old woman identifies her son-in-law, gives his name and age, and declares that his gentle disposition means he could have had no enemies.¹⁹

Seeing, inferring and speaking on a relative’s behalf remain different acts even when joined in one sentence. The story preserves reports of a body and objects without establishing the manner of death. Conflicting accounts do not make the wound, binding and assault empty words we may ignore.

The final passage is more tempting still. The dead man says an unseen hand pulled the dagger from his chest. This appears at last to explain why the woodcutter saw no weapon. Yet the hand remains inside the dead man’s version. The story identifies no owner, and no independent testimony confirms the removal.²⁰ Attach it casually to a particular person and the story becomes complete—while the evidence the reader added disappears from view.

The story withholds a verdict but gives the difficulty of judgment a shape. Some disputes lack material; some turn on the meaning of a gaze; some words seek a position the speaker can still bear to occupy. Calling everything “everyone’s own truth” and withdrawing all judgment would erase these differences. Letting the last voice decide would erase them too. Even the dead need a mouth through which to speak. Death does not automatically make narration transparent.

Lacan’s discussion of truth as something that can only be half-said does not identify half-saying with the subject’s division.²¹ Deliberate defense, limited perception and the audience toward which speech is directed need separate attention if we are to understand where speech is obstructed and what it asks. Masago’s final question recounts a past and asks her listener for a place from which she can live afterward. Establishing the cause of death and answering that request are connected but different tasks. Completing the account of events would not automatically answer the latter. Acknowledging that everything cannot be said does not cancel the factual responsibility of what has been said.

Likewise, mutually exclusive game routes are not depositions in one case. “In a Grove” has several people narrate the same death. WHITE ALBUM 2’s branches let characters experience different futures under different conditions and choices. A player who reads several futures can compare a promise’s consequences across circumstances. A character in one route does not thereby remember days lived for him in another.²² Combining every ending produces the reader’s construction. It gives no basis for reproaching a character for failing to learn from another route’s conclusion.

Know What You Know; Acknowledge What You Do Not — Analects, “On Governing”#

If limited facts required silence, forceful judgments would belong entirely to those willing to disregard facts. Lu Xun explicitly resists this outcome in “In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen.”

The essay first describes Miss Cheng asking him to write something. He too feels a need to write, yet has nothing to say. In the second section, time will wash away old traces and forgetting is approaching; the need to write returns. In the fourth, bodies have already established what happened to the dead, while government and rumor call them rioters and people manipulated by others. Again he has nothing to say. The fifth section turns: he still has something to say.²³

These returns do not circle one point. First grief defeats language. Then impending oblivion urges a record. Later slander invades the names of the dead, and speech must resist. Repetition changes the task of writing layer by layer. Deleting the similar sentences would flatten the difficult movement.

He does not make himself an omnipresent witness. Liu Hezhen’s frequent smile, gentleness and tears over her school’s future belong to the student he knew. At the account of the attack, he first says he did not witness it, then recounts the shooting of her, Zhang Jingshu and Yang Dequn and their attempts to help one another.²⁴ Direct observation and reported events are distinguished without dissolving condemnation. The names he opposes confront concrete people, bodies and actions. Their origin in power cannot simply cancel all of these.

The smile is also more than decoration proving that she had a pleasant character. Lu Xun had supposed that students resisting a principal must be fierce and sharp-edged. Meeting her, he found gentleness. When the enduring smile reappears later, it carries acquaintance, astonishment and grief. This person changed his image of a dissenter; now she also resists a rumor erasing her from concrete life. Memory gives an earlier observation a new function without inventing someone he never saw.

His judgments do not harden into one undifferentiated block. He deeply doubts the effect of unarmed petitioning on the course of history and clearly affirms the women’s courage in helping one another under attack.²⁵ Doubting an action’s effectiveness does not make the dead unworthy of respect. Respecting the dead does not require declaring every action they took the most effective course. Factual proportion and emotional force can support each other within one essay.

Literary criticism gains a method here. Reading “In a Grove,” we can refuse an unsupported verdict about the killer while analyzing how accounts distribute humiliation and power. Reading Chiaki, we can identify changes to events that never happened while affirming the form of seeing relationships her play creates. Judgment need not be all or nothing. It needs to match what it actually explains.

Words End, but Meaning Does Not — Yan Yu, “Canglang’s Talks on Poetry: Discerning Poetry”#

Chiaki’s performance receives applause. It is late into the night, but there is no curtain call. She collapses again as the performance ends. Waking to learn that it is over, she asks whether someone unlike an ordinary audience member is waiting for her.²⁶ The work has received one answer. She is waiting for another.

Applause confirms that the performance moved its audience. It cannot agree to reconciliation on Haruki’s behalf or make Setsuna and the absent Kazusa endorse the revision. A version can become a successful artwork, reach someone as a confession of love, or be used by someone involved to reinterpret herself. Which of these things it accomplishes must be distinguished through subsequent actions.

Haruki’s choice also needs its actual place in time. A later flashback supplies the conversation before they entered. Haruki had already told Setsuna that their time alone together must end: he loves Chiaki and wants that time with her to continue even though she deceived him. Only then does Setsuna suggest seeing the play to confirm Chiaki’s feelings.²⁷ A later narration corrects our understanding of an earlier scene. Their holding hands in the audience does not mean they have not discussed separation. The stage can help Haruki understand Chiaki’s answer, but it does not make his initial choice for him.

After the performance, Haruki finds Chiaki and invites her back to his room. He believes she has kept her promise by showing him a Chiaki he can trust. Then he corrects himself inwardly: more precisely, a Yukine he can trust.²⁸ The correction matters. Through the character she created, he rethinks how to be with her. Performance itself participates in the making of this trust. The understanding helps them approach each other and still bears the part he wants to believe.

Setsuna’s answer moves elsewhere. She says she cannot be that strong and cannot force herself to pretend she has let go. She is cold, but refuses Haruki’s arm around her shoulders and his coat, because he will no longer be there afterward. She still wants him to be happy and explicitly says she hates them.²⁹ Goodwill, resentment, attachment and farewell do not wait for one another to disappear. She borrows Yukine’s refusal to give something back without borrowing an ending in which everything has been forgiven.

She acquires words she can use and can still say that her stage counterpart is not who she was then. She agrees to watch and retains judgment over how to leave. The understanding opened by the work continues to grow through an involved person’s reuse of it.

Once words are written and a play performed, they enter lives the author could not predetermine. A listener’s ability to repeat an author’s answer differs from the ability to adapt it for her own life. Chiaki makes the past into a play; Setsuna makes the play into her farewell. The second action is no longer for the first person alone to decide.

A shared past thus contains events that cannot arbitrarily be revoked and meanings still unfinished. Remembering a person does not mean fixing them as one kind of person. Accepting an interpretation does not surrender every future answer. Narration’s power lies in making previously unsayable relations sayable. Its limit lies in other people’s continuing lives, which will still produce answers not entirely fitting its account.

Even at the time, there was bewilderment. Knowing that the past was never wholly known at the time can lessen the haste to pronounce its final judgment and allow more patience for understanding it again. What never happened still cannot count as having happened. What did happen need not forever bear only the first name someone gave it.

The final essay, “Let Us Share the Joy of This Cup: What Can We Do Together Without Reconciliation?” continues from these answers that still do not agree, asking whether people can accomplish something together.