How Not to Look into the Void: Part 1
Buddhism, Japanese architecture, and the films of Yasujiro Ozu
Few directors have inspired more commentary than Yasujiro Ozu (1903 – 1963). In Japanese, English, French, and well beyond, his spare, I've always felt his formally radical style has been analyzed not to death, but a varied and continually evolving life.
His films and the critical worlds they’ve inspired have something for a lot of different movie lovers, of all levels of interest and patience with “film.” If you want a simple but powerful family drama, explore really any entry in his seasonal series (my favorite is Late Autumn, available on Amazon Prime and HBO Max). If you want to experience, at simultaneously epic and intimate scale, the tragedies of modern life and the expectations of a family on their daughter, watch Tokyo Story (HBO Max, Kanopy, Criterion, Youtube, and Amazon Prime). If you want to appreciate what is formally innovative and unique about Ozu’s shot composition, or his sawing down tripods to film at the angle from which one would view a room in a Japanese home with no chairs, read film theorist David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema and re-watch Tokyo Story. If you want to understand how his cinema is a philosophical antipode to Hollywood’s film philosophy, read Japanese new wave director Yoshihige Yoshida’s Ozu’s Anti-Cinema. If you want to see impeccable set design, with a viscerally satisfying placement of pastel ceramic cookware that would put every casually placed Le Creuset dutch oven in an airspaced-out real estate listing to shame, watch any movie from his late foray into color. If you’d like to think about the history of film through a single vase, watch his Late Spring (HBO Max, Tubi, Amazon Prime) and read scholar of Japanese cinema Markus Nornes’s article, “The Riddle of a Single Vase.” If you want to laugh at fart jokes and see one of world cinema’s most storied filmmakers make a Seinfeld-level meal out of pleasantries about the weather, watch Good Morning (Criterion). These were my introductions to thinking and learning about film from his movies, but what I've offered here is certainly an incomplete list, even in English (I’d love to hear about any other writing about or other tributes to his work that any readers enjoy!).
The import of his films has, however, often been wrapped in a sense of mystery rather than multiplicity. Ozu was famously silent about his film-making. Even as his star rose domestically, and then internationally, he gave few interviews. He wrote little. He did not often travel outside of Japan or talk to the press. In addition to his radical disinterest in Hollywood’s film grammar, perhaps most famously eschewing shot-reverse-shot cinematography, his consistent disinterest in speaking publicly about his films may be his greatest departure from America’s film culture. There is a very particular tension, one I’ll return to a lot in trying to think about art that engages with Asian religion and philosophy, between this kind of apparent silence or paucity of written testament, and the intensity of interest in his work by those who live in and on the written word. As such, in this case in particular, the little writing he left has inspired a great deal of speculation, and a sometimes outsized importance into how to read his movies. This is particularly the case for a single character, famously etched at the instruction of Ozu himself on his gravestone at the Engakuji Temple in nearby Kamakura. It’s a variant of the character mu (無), literally “not,” “un-,” or “nothing” in contemporary Japanese.
This mu has a long history in East Asia, beginning in China and the birth of the Zen koan (gong’an in Chinese). The etymology of the koan is as a “public case,” a series of then circulating stories about famous monastics and teachers in medieval China, whose strange or eccentric behavior was said by this burgeoning genre to demonstrate their enlightenment or their ability to impart their wisdom to students. These stories eventually were collected together in collections such as the Blue Cliff Records or Gateless Gate, and gradually became the object of a specific set of practices among Zen Buddhisms in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan—eventually reaching the rest of the world in the early 20th century.
The koan from which this mu has been passed down to this history goes as follows:
A monk asked the teacher Joshu ‘Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?’ Joshu replied “No!” (mu).
Despite my undying love my dog, his single minded hatred for anyone outside of my immediate family would lead me to agree that he may lack the compassion and patience to attain enlightenment by the standards of most contemporary Buddhisms. However, in context, the koan is doing a lot of different things that have earned it an iconic status as both a particular kind of riddle and representative of Zen thought in East Asia (and the object of no shortage of misunderstanding). One of the most common understandings of the koan, however, is to see it as a reaction to a specific doctrine which was circulating and being debated in China at the time. A prevailing understanding of Buddhist tradition at the time was that all beings have Buddha-nature, that is, the potential to become enlightened, either in the form that they are in (bug, hell being, dog), or to become reborn as a human in a future life and then become enlightened. In this sense, we can see Joshu as giving an obviously wrong answer. Considering his persona as an enlightened teacher, however, we can also see his “no,” as neither a “yes” or “no,” but rather a rejection of the question, of Buddhist dogma, of simplistic inquiries by students (who might have been compared to dogs at the time). Thus, the performative nature of language that has come to be associated with koans. This is a common but not definitive explanation. Perhaps as much ink has been spilled over the meaning of this koan as water has flowed through the Ganges River, to borrow one of Buddhism’s favorite metaphorical reference points.
So how did this character end up on Ozu’s gravestone, and what role has it come to play in the interpretation of his movies? I’ll get into this more in Part 2, where I’ll dive into some of the problematic ways this “mu” has been used as a cipher for Ozu’s films, and what happened when I tried to take the least textual approach I could to his work and visited the Chigasaki-kan—a traditional Japanese inn where Ozu used to write and scout for his films.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed my first real post. Please share your thoughts or forward this along to a friend who might enjoy!
Thanks for reading.
NG
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Parts 2 this essay on Ozu
A visit to the Engakuji Temple, the Zen monastery where Natsume Soseki, one of the most important novelists and literary theorists in modern Japan, sent his protagonist in his novel, The Gate.
How can we be more critical of secularism from the left?
Why are these so many Jewish Buddhists, and/or people raised in Judaism who are interested in Buddhism (myself included)?
How William James's 1902 Varieties of Religious Experiences predicted nearly every argument about the supposed alignment of religion, psychology, and neuroscience that has been sold as revolutionary from the past 25 years.