Over the past weeks, I’ve been opening Substack and closing it again.

It’s just too much language.

Essays, notes, restacks, recommendations, arguments against AI, arguments for AI, arguments about arguments about AI. Reading has begun to carry a small additional labour: not only Do I want to stay with this? but also What am I reading? Who or what has made it? Does that matter here? Should I check?

A detector now sits nearby, optional and almost weightless. Sometimes I hover over it. More often I close the tab. Language has become difficult to meet.

Despite the mounting fatigue, a few days ago Indy Johar’s reflection on thinking with large language models (LLMs) caught my attention. To be more precise, the marble did.

Johar describes his work with AI as a kind of carving. Not Michelangelo’s familiar block, with a completed figure supposedly waiting inside to be released, but a generative marble holding an indeterminate number of possible forms. Each cut brings something partly into view while altering what can subsequently be found.

Something in the image stayed with me.

And then another marble appeared. Unexpectedly, from a poem I first encountered nearly thirty years ago and have returned to repeatedly: Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts.

Its opening begins with a mason:

A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests.

I had not thought of these lines while reading Johar. They arrived afterwards, as old lines sometimes do — suddenly present, without being summoned.

And once they had arrived, his marble would no longer stay still.

Bunting’s stone is not an abstract reservoir of possible forms. It has weight. Temperature. Grain. It rests. A hand touches it. Fingertips test the edge of a letter. Sand and wet sandstone wear down its roughness. The mason’s fingers ache. Nearby, a lark strains upward through its song. Rain will fall. A horse will pull the stone along a road. Children will lie upon it beneath sacks, bruised against their marble bed.

The stone will become a memorial.

The name carved into it will finally name no one.

The scene I remembered as an image of craftsmanship had become crowded. The mason is not alone with his material, nor entirely in command of the rhythm of his work. He times the mallet to the lark.

That small adjustment began troubling Johar’s metaphor for me. Not because the metaphor seemed wrong, but because Bunting’s stone seemed to arrive carrying more of the world with it.

Where did the stone come from?

What made it available for this work?

What forms of labour have already touched it?

What else is happening while the maker thinks he is making?

And what, besides the maker, is setting the rhythm?

I keep returning especially to that odd little pause:

… while the marble rests.

The verb gives the stone a duration that is not identical with the mason’s. The work proceeds, yet the material is not merely waiting to receive intention. The mason listens while it rests. His making happens inside other tempos — geological, animal, bodily, meteorological.

Years ago, writing academically about Briggflatts, I was interested in this scene as an image of form emerging through sensory engagement — contact — rather than being imposed from a mental distance. I did not yet understand how much labour was hidden inside that intuition. Nor how much weight.

For now, I want to leave the mason there.

Hand against stone, mallet briefly suspended.

Listening for a bird.

The next cut has not yet been made.

“Recognition before specification”

Johar’s phrase continued to trouble me after the marble had led me back to Bunting.

We may be unable to articulate something in advance and yet recognise when a provisional form has become too neat, too conventional, or organised around the wrong centre of gravity.

Johar describes an intriguing asymmetry here: the human may judge more than they can initially articulate; the language model may articulate more than it can finally judge. Its first response becomes less an answer than an “epistemic surface” against which recognition can occur.

I know something about this process.

Over the past year, some of my writing has developed through slow, sustained exchanges with generative language systems, within the meta-relational redirection of AI stewarded by and her colleagues. Elsewhere, I have described these exchanges as less like language production than attunement to a field of possible patterns. A phrase appears; something in the body registers; rhythm or pressure shifts — another form becomes possible.

Johar offers a useful word for one part of this: recognition. But recognition from where?

What taught the ear to hear that a sentence has become falsely resolved? Was it a poem read decades ago? A language learned in childhood? Disciplinary habits acquired and later distrusted? Fatigue with certain rhetorical pressures?

Taste has a history, and so does hesitation. Johar himself opens this difficulty when he proposes auditing the audit: what norms of reasonableness, evidence or institutional legibility are directing our judgment? (While taste is inside the ecology I explore here, I’m going to leave it aside for now; I return to it in this addendum.)

Once judgment itself becomes questionable, the human no longer stands cleanly outside the field.

Bunting’s mason makes this palpable. He judges — fingertips checking, rule against the letter’s edge — but the judgment happens through hand, ear, stone, rhythm. The lark supplies a tempo he did not invent.

The model, too, has its gravity: familiar genres, statistical regularities, tendencies toward smoothness and completion. But I, too, have gravity. And the difficulty is not simply to make both visible.

It is to notice what has already shaped the capacity to notice.

This is where Johar’s formulation becomes more demanding for me. If generative systems can produce provisional forms almost without limit, recognition is no longer merely the human contribution to the exchange.

It becomes labour.

And labour, however subtle, has weight.

Where does the weight go?

The question of labour returned from another direction.

Towards the end of Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (2025), wonders what happens as language increasingly becomes available as a service. LLMs can already perform enormous quantities of linguistic production — summarising, reformulating, drafting, smoothing, translating — at speeds that make older relations between language and exertion difficult to perceive.

Elsewhere in the conclusion, Weatherby frames the transformation through Marx’s distinction between formal and real subsumption. The machine factory, he writes, “removed the worker’s relationship to work itself”; something analogous may now be happening “not to the arm but to the brain, to culture.”

Bunting’s mason made me wonder what falls from view when this happens.

And the question also returned me to C. D. Blanton’s Nominal Devolutions: Poetic Substance and the Critique of Political Economy (2000), an essay that shaped my early reading of Briggflatts, long before generative AI became part of my writing life.

Blanton begins with J. H. Prynne’s poetic counter-history of stone and metal. Before metallic systems of value, Prynne suggests, weight was “related locally to exertion.” Metal permits something different: portability, displacement, exchange. Blanton follows this movement into systems of “general equivalence,” in which substance and significance can travel increasingly far from the conditions in which they arose.

I don’t mean to turn this into an allegory in which stone stands for human writing and metal for AI. Stone was never innocent — it was already quarried; it travelled. And neither writing nor value has ever remained neatly attached to its origins.

Still, Prynne’s full phrase troubles me:

… weight was and is a mixed condition, related locally to exertion.

A paragraph now arrives almost instantly.

Another can replace it.

And another.

The interface offers little indication of what has been expended, where, or by whom.

The weight, however, has not vanished. It has travelled.

Some of it travels into electrical grids, water, minerals, data centres and the human labour supporting them. Some is sedimented in the enormous accumulations of writing from which statistical patterns have been learned.

And some travels elsewhere.

With the person confronted by twenty possible sentences, trying to feel which one is alive and which merely sounds finished.

With the reader encountering an accelerating abundance of language and having to decide, again and again, what deserves attention.

Yes, recognition has become labour. But the transformation reaches further.

In Briggflatts:

brief words are hard to find,
shapes to carve and discard

Blanton returns repeatedly to this strange conjunction of making and loss. The mason cuts, checks, abrades. Forms emerge through exertion, yet nothing guarantees their preservation. Names split, slate wears away. What is carved may also be discarded, erased, forgotten.

Generative language systems seem, at first, to accelerate this process almost beyond recognition. Shapes to carve and discard: another sentence, another paragraph, another possible beginning. Yet the resemblance may conceal a deeper difference.

In Bunting, discard has weight.

The abandoned form has already passed through hand, material, duration. A cut cannot be uncut. Even failed inscription leaves abrasion behind.

With generative language, however, another relation to form becomes possible. A sentence can appear and disappear at negligible visible cost. Ten alternatives can replace it. Then fifty. Generation, rejection, replacement, forgetting: each can occur before much consequence has had time to gather around the form.

This is not simply an increase in creative possibility. It may also be a transformation in the very metabolism of form.

What happens to attachment, hesitation, or memory when discarded forms begin to feel free of consequence?

Johar’s generative marble changes shape here. A cut may open another possibility, another surface for recognition. But Bunting’s marble carries yet another possibility: the cut may fail to reveal.

It may damage.

It may erase.

The stone does not merely offer forms to be discovered. It also registers what making costs — and what making cannot preserve.

Name and date
split in soft slate
a few months obliterate.

Blanton reads Briggflatts as repeatedly “excavating the labour which left such traces originally.” The mason’s work cannot secure the person it would commemorate. Yet exertion remains consequential: in gesture, abrasion, repetition, contact.

This unsettles me more now than it did when I first wrote about the poem.

The question is not whether making should hurt. It is what we cease to notice when making no longer appears to leave an abrasion anywhere — and what new exertions arise around that apparent weightlessness.

I had written about this mason before.

Only now am I beginning to understand why his aching fingers mattered.

Things without equivalence

The mason has stayed with me partly because his workshop has no walls.

Stone, tool and hand are there. But so are lark, rain, road, horse, geology, histories carried by the place. His making does not happen against a neutral background.

The conditions enter the work.

I’ve spent years trying to find language for this. Once I thought chiefly in terms of relation and flow: form emerging as a practitioner joins forces already in motion. More recently, I reached for weather, because weather has no clean edge. It passes through bodies, alters surfaces, changes what can be done.

The distinction still feels important:

Context can be added afterwards.
Conditions are already inside the form.

The workshop has weather.

But a crowded field is not necessarily an ecological one. Connection has conditions, histories, asymmetries and costs. This is a much less consoling ecological imagination.

Weatherby briefly opens toward something larger when, in Language Machines, he describes intelligence as “not a property of a brain or a machine” but a capacity in which humans participate and machines might participate too. He also draws on Turing’s suggestion that intellectual achievement is fundamentally social and shared.

If intelligence is participated in rather than possessed, the question is no longer simply where authorship resides. It is: what kinds of relations make such participation possible? And what do those relations do to the differences they bring together?

LLMs are extraordinary machines for making differences computationally relatable. Their usefulness depends upon encountering enormous quantities of linguistic difference and rendering those differences divisible, comparable, positionable, statistically relatable.

A word need not become identical to another word for relations between them to become calculable. This is not the same thing as economic exchange value, and I don’t want to collapse computational representation into capital’s “general equivalence.”

But Blanton makes another question difficult to avoid:

Near the end of Nominal Devolutions, he describes the poetry he has been tracing as labouring toward “a substantial work upon things without equivalence.”

The phrase has become newly strange to me.

Briggflatts is intensely relational. It is also intensely patterned and recombinatory. Lark, mason, Viking king, slowworm, star, river, childhood, music, stone: distant times and materials continually enter one another’s vicinity.

Yet proximity does not make them interchangeable.

The mallet takes its rhythm from the lark without becoming the lark.

The mason answers the marble’s grain without becoming the stone.

A dead star can steady a tiller or leave its “spider floss” on a cheek while remaining unimaginably distant.

This is where my older language of flows and interconnection now feels insufficient. It was possible to imagine that once boundaries had been loosened, something ecological would follow.

I no longer think relation guarantees anything of the kind. It does not abolish distance, nor does it guarantee care.

Relations can nourish. They can also extract, exhaust, standardise. They can make differences portable precisely by converting them into forms that existing systems know how to process.

Maybe this is what makes Bunting’s mischievous instruction matter:

Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing.

What if this is not a failure of relation but one of its conditions?

Things can enter relation without surrendering what exceeds the relation.

And perhaps the ecological question is not how to connect everything more fully, but how to participate in relations without converting difference into something to be managed. Administered.

That question matters particularly for generative AI. The problem is not simply that these systems detect and recombine patterns. Human language and art have always depended upon pattern, repetition, inheritance, relation.

The harder question lies at the meeting point of relation and political economy:

The mason offers no model for escaping this. His field is already uneven.

Stone, bird, tool, history and weather participate in what becomes possible, but not in equal or interchangeable ways. The lark sets a rhythm without wielding the chisel. The marble bears histories without choosing the inscription. The hand makes a mark and therefore bears a responsibility the bird does not.

A field may be distributed without responsibility being evenly distributed through it.

This makes me hesitate before relocating authorship neatly from production to human “judgment,” as though sovereignty had merely moved upstairs. What emerges may be distributed. What follows from it is not borne equally.

The relations matter because the differences do.

Before another cut

Long before generative language systems, knowledge had already been organised to travel, through mass schooling, standardised testing, academic publishing, citation metrics, digital archives, search engines. Different infrastructures, different histories, but all participating in the increasing portability of language and knowledge — making them searchable, comparable, extractable, recombinable.

I once compressed this into a sentence:

LLMs are what happens when industrial knowledge meets industrial computation.

I’m less certain of the sentence now. It just feels… too clean.

What troubles me more is how thoroughly I have lived inside the arrangements it names: writing, teaching, publishing, citing, making thought legible enough to circulate. The systems I now wish could be otherwise are not simply outside me.

But the question does not only move upstream. It moves through the circuit.

A writer faced with proliferating formulations must decide which one deserves to remain.

A reader faced with proliferating texts must decide which one deserves attention.

A platform ranks the proliferating field.

A detector offers to classify what has become difficult to trust.

Each apparatus promises help with an abundance that another apparatus has helped produce.

And the labour of discrimination continues.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that labour in my body. I open the Substack tab. There is more language waiting. I skim a paragraph and feel the familiar hesitation.

And now, another question arrives often:

Was this made by a human?

A detector sits nearby — I could check. But checking does not end the uncertainty. It just gives the uncertainty another surface. Maybe the detector says 27% human; or maybe 84%. The number doesn’t restore the encounter.

Instead, I find myself reading differently. Not only attending to a sentence but inspecting it, looking behind it, asking what sort of thing it is before allowing myself to meet what it does. Weatherby warns of the cost of “auditing every text, statement, and communication we experience.” I had understood the warning intellectually; I understand it otherwise now.

The exhaustion isn’t simply too much to read. It’s the growing labour of discrimination under conditions in which language is cheap to produce, expensive to attend to, and increasingly difficult to trust.

Such industrial abundance hasn’t abolished scarcity. It has displaced it.

Toward attention, toward judgment, toward trust. Toward the body’s capacity to remain receptive without turning every encounter into information management and data triage.

And exhaustion produces its own adaptations. We skim, we classify, we rely on recommendations, reputations, metrics, detectors, familiar voices.

We administer the flow because we cannot metabolise it all at this industrial scale.

This is one of the stranger recursive turns — and horrors — of the present moment. The abundance produced by systems of comparison drives us toward still more systems of comparison simply to endure it.

The reader begins to resemble the writer confronted by fifty possible sentences.

The interface makes each gesture almost weightless.

The body does not.

This returns me to Blanton’s phrase: “a substantial work upon things without equivalence.” I no longer hear it as the promise of a protected realm where singular things escape exchange.

Nothing here is untouched. The poem circulates. The stone travels. Language recombines. I write inside systems I cannot stand outside.

It seems to me that the work is more difficult than preservation.

To remain in relation without converting every difference into something to be managed.

To notice when recognition becomes management.

To notice when abundance makes discard feel consequence-free.

To notice when the demand to discriminate exceeds the body’s capacity to stay open to what it encounters.

Over a decade ago, writing about Briggflatts, I reached toward an “underlying unity and coherence” among different orders of experience. Again: I’m less certain of those words now. Relation does not require unity. And coherence can itself become a way of making difference easier to administer.

The mason offers no resolution.

He listens.

The marble rests.

His fingers ache.

The lark gives him a rhythm it does not own.

The name will not hold.

That’s why the marble’s rest matters to me now. Not as withdrawal from relation, nor as refusal to make another cut. As an interval in which the next form has not yet become necessary.

The mallet will fall.
But not yet.

For a moment, the marble rests.

And something listens.

Daniela Kato is an educator and writer based in Tokyo. She is interested in how people learn to pay careful attention in times of accelerated change and systemic collapse. Her work explores the conditions that allow teaching, learning, writing, and community life to remain possible in such times.

danielakato.com

Pavement

The first thing I saw was a young woman on the pavement outside the hospital.

She was screaming and kicking while several policemen tried to restrain her. One of them stood slightly apart, positioning his body between the scene and the people entering the building, discouraging us from stopping, looking, gathering around.

I caught only a glimpse.

I do not know who she was. I do not know what had happened before I arrived, whether she had come from inside the building or simply happened to be there, whether she was ill, frightened, furious, intoxicated, in mental distress, or something else entirely.

I have no wish to turn a stranger’s anguish into evidence for a story I cannot know. Still, the image followed me inside.

The corridors were bright and orderly. Numbers advanced across electronic screens. Doors opened and closed. People waited patiently in rows of chairs. Staff moved quickly between desks and examination rooms.

Everything appeared to be functioning.

Yet something had spilled onto the pavement, and it was not suffering itself. There was suffering everywhere inside. It sat quietly beneath surgical masks, leaned against walking sticks, travelled in wheelchairs, waited inside folders thick with test results. What had spilled was something usually kept within certain boundaries: distress made too loud, too bodily, too disruptive to remain invisible.

For a few seconds, the choreography of containment had failed. And I found myself remembering a sentence I had once quoted almost abstractly:

Exhaustion on the ground is reaching its limit.

That morning, the ground was literal. Concrete beneath a screaming body. Shoes gathering at a careful distance. A policeman trying to shield what could no longer be hidden.

Later, in an overcrowded waiting room, the sentence returned with a different weight. I watched patients being called, one after another, while doctors moved through consultations measured in minutes. No one seemed cruel — that was almost the hardest part. Everyone looked exhausted.

Maybe some systems do not collapse dramatically. Maybe they continue functioning precisely by becoming extraordinarily skilled at containing what they can no longer hold.

The queue advances, the doors close. The disturbance is moved elsewhere.

And the day continues.

Tracks

This is where another image returned to me, one I had carried for nearly twenty years without quite knowing what to do with it.

I had recently moved to Tokyo and was travelling to work by train. Somewhere along the line, we stopped.

Someone had jumped to their death.

Such interruptions were already familiar enough to me by then. An announcement, an indefinite delay, the subdued irritation of passengers recalculating appointments and arrival times. Eventually the railway would be cleared and the timetable would resume.

From my seat, I could see a team working beside the tracks.

They had erected some kind of tarpaulin to shield the scene from the people waiting inside the train. I remember understanding immediately what the sheet was for and trying not to look.

And then I saw it.

A small piece of human flesh caught on the surgical glove of one of the workers cleaning the tracks. What unsettled me most was its ordinariness.

For years, this was where the memory stopped. Not with the person who had died — I knew nothing about them, and still know nothing. Not their age, their circumstances, what had become unbearable, what possibilities had narrowed or disappeared before they arrived at those tracks.

Only this anonymous fragment remained: flesh on a gloved hand, briefly visible beyond a tarpaulin.

Then the necessary work continued. The remains had to be gathered and the tracks had to be cleared. Trains full of living people had somewhere to go. Someone had to perform that terrible labour, probably with considerable care. Thousands of journeys could not remain suspended indefinitely around a death.

And yet the image has returned differently now.

A person had ceased to circulate. The railway had to resume.

What disturbed me all those years ago was not simply the proximity of death, but the speed with which an entire life could cross a threshold and become, institutionally, an obstruction to movement: something to be shielded, removed, cleaned away so that circulation might begin again.

The person disappears.

The delay remains for a while.

Then even the delay disappears.

And the day continues.

Tiny subtractions

I have been thinking about disposability.

It’s an ugly word, even an imprecise one. It immediately evokes deliberate abandonment: someone deciding that another life no longer matters. But I am beginning to wonder whether disposability usually arrives much more subtly than that.

No one needs decide that a person is disposable. It might be enough to build systems capable of continuing almost seamlessly when particular bodies become exhausted, inconvenient, illegible, or unable to keep pace.

The train resumes.

Another patient is called.

Another appointment begins.

From inside such systems, there may be no cruelty at all. There may even be considerable care. Workers clean what must be cleaned; doctors attend to one person after another; nurses move between rooms; families accompany those who can no longer manage alone.

Everyone is trying, somehow, to keep things going.

And still something is being distributed unevenly. Some people can pass the strain elsewhere. A problem can be returned to another department. A difficult question can wait for another appointment. An employer can redistribute a workload. A train can absorb a delay and eventually recover its timetable.

A body cannot always do this — it has nowhere further to send the cost.

This is one way disposability becomes embodied: not as an explicit judgment that a life has no value, but as the gradual realisation that the systems surrounding it have very little capacity to adjust when that life can no longer adjust itself.

For those who fit the available pathways, this may remain largely invisible. But for those who need more time, more explanation, more accommodation, more continuity, more rest; for those whose illnesses cross disciplinary boundaries, whose bodies fluctuate unpredictably, whose language takes longer, whose distress cannot remain discreet — the limits become easier to feel.

The encounter changes.

What might have been held becomes something to route. What might have required lingering becomes something to move along.

And the person begins to understand, sometimes before anything is said explicitly:

There is not enough room here for the full complexity of what I am carrying.

Lately I have begun to feel this in my own body.

Not as a dramatic rejection. No, nothing so clear. More as a sequence of tiny subtractions.

Not this question.

Not in this department.

Not today.

Not within the allotted minutes.

Come back when someone else has decided what this is.

Each gesture may be perfectly defensible on its own. Together, they make an atmosphere. One begins to sense how much belonging depends upon remaining sufficiently easy to accommodate.

Maybe this is what frightened me about the woman on the pavement and the anonymous fragment of flesh beside the railway tracks.

In both scenes, a boundary had been exceeded.

In one, distress too loud to remain contained. In the other, a body that could no longer participate in circulation.

And around each, the larger machinery had to continue.

Again: I do not mean that continuation itself is wrong. Hospitals must keep treating people; railways must eventually move again. The world cannot stop indefinitely around every instance of suffering.

The more troubling question is what happens when continuation becomes possible only because particular people are repeatedly asked to absorb the cost of keeping everything else moving.

Who gets to stop?

Who is allowed to need more?

Who can become temporarily unproductive, incoherent, slow, dependent, uncertain, without discovering that the structures around them have already begun to withdraw?

And who has nowhere left to route the exhaustion when it finally arrives?

Disposability begins there.

Not with the declaration that a life does not matter. With the quieter condition in which its disappearance would cause the system less difficulty than its continued need.

Routed through

Some time ago, I came across the phrase “stacked disposability” in a comment by . I do not know whether she intended it as a concept, and I hesitate to turn it into one.

Still, the words stayed.

At first, I heard stacked almost literally. One vulnerability placed upon another: illness, disability, poverty, displacement, age, race, gender. The familiar inventory through which certain lives become more exposed than others.

Of late I have begun to hear something else. Not only what is stacked upon a person, but what is repeatedly routed through them.

The need to notice early.

To anticipate what might go wrong.

To translate oneself before being misunderstood.

To soften a question so that it can be received.

To gauge how much doubt can safely be expressed.

To remain calm enough not to become the problem.

To absorb the irritation in the room.

To return home carrying what could not be held there.

And then, somehow, to continue.

For some people, this labour begins so early that it becomes almost indistinguishable from personality. They become observant, accommodating, self-reliant, exquisitely attuned to shifts in atmosphere. From the outside, these qualities may even look like competence.

Sometimes they are. But they are also expensive.

I have long been drawn to the idea that proximity to fractures can sharpen perception: that those who live closer to the places where systems fail may notice their tremors before others do.

Yet, there is something seductive in this formulation too. It risks turning exposure into a gift. As though the person repeatedly required to perceive danger, translate complexity and metabolise what others can afford not to notice will simply become more perceptive indefinitely.

Bodies do not work that way, though. Hypervigilance costs something. Translation costs something. And having to establish the reality of one’s experience again and again costs something too.

Even perception costs something.

And, eventually, the sensitive instrument does not become more sensitive. It becomes exhausted. It withdraws. It misses things. It stops explaining. And it needs darkness, silence, fewer encounters, smaller worlds.

This is another place where disposability becomes stacked.

The same person required to absorb more may also have less reserve with which to do so.

The chronically ill body is asked to navigate increasingly complex care precisely as its energy diminishes.

The disabled person is asked to prove the need for accommodation through procedures that themselves require capacities the disability has already eroded.

The migrant is expected to communicate with unusual precision at the very moment when fear, pain or unfamiliar language makes precision harder.

The distressed person is permitted to remain within the social field for as long as the distress can still be translated into acceptable forms.

And when these demands converge in one life, they do not merely add themselves together — they alter one another.

A five-minute appointment is not simply five minutes when language is slower. A bureaucratic form is not simply paperwork when attention is already depleted. A misunderstanding is not simply unpleasant when the next possibility of care depends upon remaining legible to the person doing the misunderstanding.

Layer upon layer.

Some old, some institutional.

Some arriving only that morning.

All of them meeting in the same flesh.

This is what I have been learning, slowly and unwillingly, about disposability.

It determines not only who is most exposed to harm, but also who will be expected to keep metabolising that harm after everyone else has stopped noticing.

Elsewheres

Metabolisation.

I keep returning to that word.

Because there are limits to how much any body can take in, transform, absorb and somehow continue carrying.

And there are moments when the question changes.

From: How much more can I endure?

To: Where else can I go?

For many years, I thought of elsewhere mostly in geographical terms. Another city. Another job. Another country. A quieter house, a different institution, a life reorganised around smaller demands.

Chronic illness has complicated this.

An elsewhere has to be more than imaginable. It has to be reachable by the body that needs it.

A different hospital may require longer journeys, new referrals, new explanations, another round of tests. Returning to another country may offer different possibilities of care while requiring money, bureaucracy, waiting, relocation, language of another kind. Leaving work may protect the body while removing income. And withdrawal may preserve energy while shrinking the circle of people upon whom one can rely.

There may still be choices on paper. But a choice whose energetic cost exceeds the body’s remaining capacity is not quite an elsewhere.

Lately, this has made me think differently about the person whose remains I glimpsed beside the railway tracks all those years ago. I still know nothing about them. I do not know what suffering preceded that death, what help had been offered or refused, what relationships surrounded them, whether the decision arrived suddenly or after years of narrowing possibilities.

I cannot make that anonymous death carry an argument it never consented to carry.

But I can say that, as my own life has become smaller and the number of sustainable options has diminished, I understand something differently now about the disappearance of elsewheres.

Rather than the desire to die, I am framing it as the experience of looking around and finding fewer places where a depleted life can actually go.

Years ago, reading Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea (1971), I found his description of a distinctly Japanese stoicism vaguely persuasive. It troubles me now. Stoicism can make endurance look almost like a cultural virtue, giving aesthetic shape to what may sometimes be prolonged exposure to conditions in which suffering must remain subdued, privately managed, minimally disruptive.

Do not inconvenience others.

Do not ask for too much.

Do not become a burden.

Keep going if you can.

Disappear discreetly if you cannot.

I do not offer these as statements about “the Japanese.” No culture is a single nervous system, and no suicide can be explained by a national temperament. There are lives within lives, histories within histories, circumstances I cannot know.

Still, I have begun to wonder how often what appears from a distance as stoicism might also contain habituation to not being accommodated.

What happens when a person repeatedly encounters the message that there is little room for the form their suffering takes? What happens when distress can remain socially present only as long as it is translated into acceptable language, scheduled into an available appointment, contained within the appropriate department, borne without interrupting too much?

What happens when even asking for help requires capacities the person is already losing?

Perhaps, under such conditions, death does not become desirable so much as imaginable as an elsewhere when sustainable elsewheres have become terribly difficult to see.

I write this sentence carefully. There is nothing romantic in it.

The body beside the tracks did not become free. It became flesh on a worker’s glove, a delay on a railway line, an absence in lives I knew nothing about.

Death is not another form of accommodation.

But the existence of suicide asks something of the living that explanations about individual despair or cultural stoicism can too easily evade:

What kinds of worlds make continuing increasingly difficult to imagine?

And what kinds of lives encounter that narrowing first?

The old.

The ill.

The disabled.

The neurodivergent.

The displaced.

Those whose distress cannot be made legible quickly enough.

Those without money, family, citizenship, stamina, or the right kind of language.

Those who have already spent years translating themselves into forms institutions know how to receive.

Again, these lives are not interchangeable.

They may, however, encounter a similar question at different points:

How difficult am I allowed to become before there is nowhere left for me to go?

That question has acquired an intimacy for me that it did not once possess.

It is not because I want to die. I do not. But illness has brought me closer to the affective terrain in which the world of viable possibilities can contract. There are days when each available pathway appears to demand more strength than I have.

On those days, I understand more viscerally why livability cannot be measured simply by whether a person is alive.

A life needs somewhere to happen, some margin in which to falter. Some place where its increasing needs do not automatically become evidence that it has exceeded what others can accommodate.

Somewhere to go when it can no longer keep pace. The opposite of disposability may begin there.

Not with an injunction to be “resilient.”

With the stubborn creation and protection of sustainable elsewheres before the horizon narrows to one.

Daniela Kato is an educator and writer based in Tokyo. She is interested in how people learn to pay careful attention in times of accelerated change and collapse. Her work explores the conditions that allow teaching, learning, writing, and community life to remain possible in such times.

danielakato.com

On the the entanglements of care and violence, disability, neurodivergence, aging, and systemic disposability in contemporary Japan, you may wish to visit my earlier pieces:

I had been thinking about the forms of Japan that travel easily: the quaint cafés, the healing libraries, the clean toilets, the tender cats, the gentle rituals, the disciplined stillness, the forms of feminist resistance already translated into familiar moral grammar.

Japan as balm and as atmosphere.

Japan as a place where modernity hurts, but beautifully.

Then, a few days later, an article in The Guardian caught my attention: John Self’s piece on the unexpected revival of Osamu Dazai in English translation. At first, it seemed to complicate the pattern I had been tracing. Dazai is neither pastel nor cosy. He does not arrive bearing coffee, cats, small consolations, or warm lamplight. His best-known work, No Longer Human (人間失格 Ningen shikkaku), does not offer repair. It offers alienation, shame, self-loathing, performance, exhaustion, and the terror of not being able to belong to the human world.

Yet the more I sat with the article, the more I felt the same question returning through another door. Maybe legibility does not always need softness. Maybe some things travel not because they soothe us, but because they wound us in ways we already recognise.

The café and the suicidal notebook may seem to belong to opposite worlds. One promises refuge; the other offers collapse. One gives the exhausted reader a chair, a cat, a cup of coffee, and a small emotional repair; the other gives the despairing reader a narrator who cannot bear the shape of being alive. But both can become legible when they answer a hunger already prepared by the market.

One says: Japan will heal you.

The other says: Japan will understand your despair.

In both cases, Japan becomes a mirror.

The surprise that was already waiting

Self’s article begins by locating Dazai inside the current boom in Japanese fiction in English translation. It names the familiar categories: cats, crime, coffee shops. Then it presents Dazai as the strange exception — the surprise bestseller, the dark star rising from elsewhere.

There is something compelling about this framing. It gives us a rupture in the pastel landscape. Suddenly, amid the cafés and bookshops, the cats and gentle ghosts, appears a writer whose work is “bleak,” “nihilistic,” “riddled with self-loathing.” A writer who died by suicide in 1948, and whose life has long been folded into the reception of his work.

The article is not crude. It does not reduce Dazai entirely to misery. It makes room for his humour, intelligence, playfulness, and narrative vitality. It includes the important reminder that Dazai is not some minor author newly discovered by Anglophone readers, but one of the central figures of modern Japanese literature.

Still, the revival story moves through a series of recognisable handles.

The Japanese literature boom.
The unexpected bestseller.
The young readers.
The online identification.
The anime relay.
The sales figures.
The wounded life.

The death.

Each of these becomes a threshold through which Dazai is made readable. He is not introduced only as a writer, but as a phenomenon: a posthumous publishing event, a youth-culture signal, a TikTok and Reddit mood, an anime-adjacent doorway into the classics, a despairing voice for despairing times.

This does not make the article cynical. Part of the unease comes precisely from the fact that it is not cynical at all. It’s curious, affectionate, literate, and at moments genuinely attentive.

But this is what makes it such a telling symptom.

It shows how difficulty is not necessarily excluded from the global circulation of Japanese culture. Difficulty can travel very well, if it can be made recognisable as a mood.

Japan as balm, Japan as wound

In my previous essay, I wanted to explore soft legibility — the Japan that circulates globally as serene beauty. The Japan of careful routines, clean public spaces, and healing fiction; a world of ancient practices, delicate attention, and modest repair.

Elsewhere, I have called it forests without forestry, tea ceremony without hierarchy, toilets without sanitation labour.

Japan without its murk.

The Dazai revival opens onto a darker chamber in that very same house.

Here, Japan arrives as a wound rather than a balm. The café is exchanged for the notebook, the cat for a suicide pact, and the immaculate restroom for a ruined interior. The quiet dignity of labour dissolves into the sheer impossibility of being human.

On the surface, these are opposites. Soothing versus disturbing; pastel against black ink. One offers the reader comfort through repair, while the other provides solace through the stark recognition of damage. Yet both risk being folded into a larger economy of affective usefulness. Japan becomes a refuge or an abyss — a targeted space where the tired reader rests, or where the despairing mind finally feels understood.

The problem isn’t that readers crave comfort, nor that they seek dark company. Finding a voice that speaks truth when the world feels unbearable is a profound thing. For many young readers, Dazai offers exactly what our cheerful culture refuses: the relief of not being asked to recover too quickly.

But recognition is not the same as encounter.

A writer can become so intensely available as a mirror that his historical strangeness disappears. His time, his language, and his literary milieu simply evaporate. Along with them disappear his gendered world, his relationships, and his precise historical coordinates.

What remains is a vague, comforting aura: he understands me.

That may be true.

But it is rarely enough.

The suicide seam

This is where the article’s tone begins to glow with a more uneasy light.

Dazai’s death enters the piece simultaneously as biographical fact, literary atmosphere, interpretive key, and final punctuation. The piece moves through a familiar litany: early suicide attempts, mental illness, addiction, dissipation, and despair — culminating, near the end, in the suicide pact with Tomie Yamazaki following the completion of No Longer Human.

Then, right at the close, the now-customary suicide helpline information appears.

This is an entirely predictable journalistic template. The body of the article moves through fascination, sales metrics, despair, identification, and biographical darkness, only for a small institutional apparatus to appear at the end, signalling care and responsibility.

The helplines matter, for sure. They might be necessary; they may well help someone. But they do not really touch the para-discursive structure of the article itself. They remain beside it, leaving the seam visible.

Within the text, suicide functions as something far more potent than mere tragedy. It operates as a core element of Dazai’s literary charisma. His death is used to certify the work’s darkness, collapsing the life and the writing into each other until the wound itself becomes a reading key.

And here, I find myself wanting a slower, more careful vocabulary.

Perhaps we are dealing with injury made luminous — a strange charisma that gathers around an author when death becomes inseparable from the way the work is received. The danger here is not the mere mention of suicide; if you are writing honestly about Dazai, it must be mentioned. The real danger lies in the way death can become aesthetic proof.

Dazai wrote despair because he was despairing; he knew darkness because he entered it. And he is deemed authentic precisely because he did not survive.

It is a powerful story. It is also a rather dangerous one.

The risk is not merely that such a structure romanticises self-destruction, but that it can flatten the art. Dazai’s humour, cruelty, and theatricality — alongside his misogyny, tenderness, class position, literary intelligence, evasions, and manipulations — all risk becoming secondary to the spectacle of the “beautiful wound.”

A death is transformed into a doorway, which is quickly commodified into a brand, which ultimately drives a commercial revival.

And the carpet in the publishing office is replaced.

The doomed Japanese male writer

Dazai is not alone in this reception chamber.

Western readers have long been fascinated by certain Japanese male writers whose lives and deaths seem to gather into an aura of fatal refinement: Mishima, Kawabata, Dazai. They are, in truth, very different writers with very different deaths, occupying vastly different relationships to politics, aesthetics, gender, modernity, and the literary field itself.

And yet, in Anglophone reception, those sharp distinctions begin to blur into a single, haunting atmosphere.

Beauty and death.
Discipline and self-erasure.
Eroticised melancholy.
Inscrutable interiority.
Ruinous masculinity.
Aesthetic extremity.

The writer emerges as both modern and archaic, wounded and elegant, excessive and controlled.

This is where literary orientalism becomes harder to name. It no longer appears only in its traditional costume of serenity, mystery, cherry blossoms, and tea rooms. It has become far more agile than that; it can metabolise darkness too.

Japan as abyss can be just as exportable as Japan as balm.

I have written before about a nearby fascination, the contemporary revival of the samurai as a figure of disciplined violence, beautiful armour, heroic refusal, and moral clarity. What troubled me there was not simply the recurrence of the warrior myth, but its windlessness — the way historical coercion, institutional cruelty, and the actual bodies disciplined by the code are cleanly scrubbed away just so the figure can circulate as pure aesthetic intensity.

Something adjacent happens with the doomed literary man. The sword is no longer necessarily in his hand. Sometimes, it has turned inward.

While the warrior and the suicidal genius are not the same figure, they travel through closely related atmospheres: honour, extremity, self-erasure, elegance, the blade, the damage. In both cases, what becomes internationally seductive is rarely the messy historical difficulty, but rather the clean aesthetic of a disciplined collapse.

The West has often loved Japanese masculinity most when it appears already stylised by its proximity to death, whether it manifests as the armoured body, the cutting body, the vanishing body, or the body that suffers beautifully enough to become art.

This does not mean readers are wrong to be moved by Mishima, Kawabata, or Dazai, nor that their work is entirely reducible to Orientalist projection. The work remains significant — and so do the literary histories.

But the reception atmosphere matters too.

What kind of Japanese male writer becomes most legible when he travels? When we look closely, what specific forms of masculinity are being selected, translated, taught, reviewed, aestheticised, memed, and revived?

And what other forms remain entirely invisible because they do not carry that same dark glamour?

Anime, avatar, afterlife

The most revealing detail in the entire Guardian article may be the unexpected role of Bungo Stray Dogs.

Dazai’s modern revival among younger audiences isn’t framed as a traditional literary rediscovery. Instead, it is tied directly to an anime series where canonical writers are reinvented as fictionalised characters — complete with supernatural abilities, stylish coats, exaggerated poses, and highly aestheticised wounds.

It is a fascinating phenomenon, but also a deeply uneasy one.

Through this lens, the historical Dazai risks being flattened into an avatar; the literary figure morphs into character design, and a suicide-haunted writer emerges as a piece of charismatic IP. The wound itself becomes mobile.

Now, I have no desire to dismiss this pathway. Sneering at anime, fandom, TikTok, or the reading habits of the young is far too easy and, frankly, uninteresting. Many readers arrive at literature through strange gates. Some gates are commercial, playful, algorithmic, embarrassing, tender, excessive, full of projection. None of that makes the eventual encounter false. If a young reader first connects with an anime-style avatar, only to later crack open the actual pages of No Longer Human and encounter something that fundamentally alters their sense of language, suffering, and selfhood — well, that matters.

Even so, the broader para-discursive transformation is still worth noticing.

The article’s own visual economy makes it visible. The imagery accompanying this literary revival isn’t just the stark portrait of a dead author or a classic book cover; it is the anime figure: sleek, recognisable, and built to circulate across digital feeds. A wounded author becomes easier to approach when he is first packaged as a beautiful character.

The real danger here isn’t that it breeds bad readers. The danger is that the wound becomes frictionless.

The darker the source material, the more stylish the avatar can become. Despair becomes pose, alienation is aestheticised, and self-destruction is folded into the charisma package. Again, this isn’t because anyone engineered it maliciously.

It is simply how cultural circulation works.

It finds what can move — and then it teaches it to move faster.

The hunger to be understood

Still, I want to stay tender here.

When a young reader tells us that Dazai is “the only person who understands me,” I don’t want to respond with suspicion. There is a kind of loneliness that makes such a sentence feel less like fandom than survival.

To be young in an unravelling world is not easy. To be young and unable to perform the mandated optimism, sociability, and coherence — not to mention continuous productivity and hopefulness — can be downright unbearable. A culture that demands resilience while withdrawing support produces strange forms of hunger.

It breeds a raw hunger to be seen, to be deeply understood, to find someone who does not brighten the room too quickly.

Dazai’s narrators do not always offer care. Sometimes they offer evasion, theatricality, cruelty, self-pity, and collapse. Yet they consistently reject the comforting lie that social life is simple for those who cannot inhabit its scripts. They know a great deal about performance; they know the crushing weight of shame, and they understand the terror of being misfitted to the human template.

This recognition can be real. It can also turn possessive, though.

When a reader claims “he understands me,” there may be a moment of genuine contact. But there may also be a subtle reversal: the writer is pulled into the reader’s need so completely that his own alterity recedes.

Dazai becomes my despair, my alienation, my proof, my dark companion. And, once again, Japan becomes a chamber in which our own longings acquire another accent.

This happens not because the reader is selfish, but because recognition exerts a gravitational pull. It draws the other toward the self, whispering: I know you because I know this feeling.

Encounter asks for something slower.
It asks: What else is here that I do not recognise?

Recognition is not encounter

Here, I feel, is the precise thread connecting the pastel café and the immaculate toilet to the samurai armour and the suicidal notebook.

Each offers a different doorway into Japan — whether through healing, aesthetic order, disciplined violence, or beautiful despair — and each can become a surface of recognition for readers and viewers elsewhere.

The exhausted reader instantly recognises the café. The anxious viewer finds themselves in the ritual. The politically disoriented spectator seeks comfort in the warrior, while the despairing mind clings to Dazai.

Such recognition is not false. But it is not the same as encounter.

Recognition says: I know this. This speaks to me. This fits a hunger I already carry. Encounter says: this comes from elsewhere. It carries histories, languages, jokes, harms, evasions, pleasures, cruelties, and forms of life that I cannot immediately make mine.

Recognition can be the beginning of an encounter. Yet when it is too quickly rewarded by the market, it may become encounter’s end.

This is why the darker comforts of legibility trouble me. They don’t ask us to turn away from Dazai’s despair. Rather, they ask us to notice how easily despair can be thinned into atmosphere, how quickly atmosphere can be packaged into product, and how smoothly product can return as evidence of cultural understanding.

We think we have truly met the writer because we have felt the wound. But the wound is never the whole work, nor is the work ever the whole life.

And the life is far more than its tragic ending.

Restoring the wind

What would it mean, then, to read Dazai without turning his death into a charm?

What would it mean to stay near the wound without quietly making it beautiful for our own consumption?

Perhaps it would begin by restoring the wind around the figure. The wind that asks what institutions, families, literary circles, and gender arrangements made this life possible and impossible.

The wind that asks who else was there.

The wind that asks what the work does besides confirm despair.

The wind that refuses to let death become the cleanest explanation.

To restore this wind is not an attempt to strip Dazai of darkness. It isn’t about making him safe, therapeutic, morally tidy, or politically convenient. It is about letting the darkness remain difficult, rather than merely charismatic.

This means looking at more than just the dead writer, the beautiful wound, the anime avatar, or the convenient mirror of our own teenage despair.

It means looking at the sentences. The jokes, the evasions, the lovers, the dependencies, the historical moment, his class position. Not to mention the publishing afterlife, the new readers still arriving, and the lingering unease that does not resolve.

Maybe this is another threshold of cultural encounter: to receive what travels, while also asking what was lost in the travelling. To notice the charisma of the wound without surrendering to it. To resist both the pastelisation of suffering and the glamour of collapse.

Perhaps it means letting Dazai be both more, and less, than the one who understands us.

Staying with the work after the aura has flickered — until we can feel, somewhere behind the beautiful damage, the first unsettling movement of wind.

༄

Around me, different lives briefly gather under the same roof. Some people stare vacantly at the floor, others scroll through their phones. A child cries somewhere down the corridor. Every so often, a name is called, someone disappears through a door, and the room rearranges itself again.

No one here shares the same story, no one is moving at quite the same pace.

And yet, for a while, we inhabit the same weather.

Waiting rooms are built for uncertainty. They do not remove it — they simply hold people while different futures remain unresolved.

I have been wondering whether conversations might sometimes work like this. Not as journeys toward agreement, nor as exercises in mutual understanding, but as temporary shelters where different trajectories cross without needing to converge.

Conversations, too, seem to travel through different weather.

Some enter through infrastructure.
Some through classrooms.
Some through theology.
Some through poetry.
Some through cities.
Some through grief.

The words may remain recognisable — the weather rarely does.

This is why I have become less interested in whether someone has “understood” what I wrote. Understanding often assumes that meaning should remain intact as it moves from one place to another. It can become surprisingly protective of familiar vocabularies.

But living things seldom travel that way.

Recently I have noticed a few essays of mine returning from unexpected places. What amazed me is that they did not return as echoes, or as agreement, or even as interpretation.

They returned as something else.

One reader found flooded railway tracks leading through Detroit.
Another wandered into whales, bees, amphibians, liturgy and arks.

Neither repeated what I had written, and neither seemed interested in making it more legible. Instead, each continued the conversation from within a different landscape. The aftertaste felt different each time.

I have been long preoccupied with the comforts of legibility. With what must become smoother, gentler or more familiar before it is welcomed into another world. While that question still feels important, another one has been slowly emerging beside it.

Translation does not quite describe this movement. I sense something closer to accompaniment here. Or perhaps pollination — or simply weather moving across a landscape, becoming rain here, mist there, snow somewhere else.

None of these are the same weather.
Yet each still belongs to the same sky.

Meanwhile, another name is called. Someone stands, disappears through the door, and the room quietly rearranges itself again.

Outside, the rain has begun.

Come wind, blow, I’ll give you beans.
Come wind, blow!
Come from the corners of the sea and blow!

— Folk song from northern Japan

Northern Yamanashi, end of spring.

These are likely the very last few dry days we have before the rainy season settles in for a full month, just at the onset of summer. Still, the urgency of the task at hand does not spoil the joy — the visceral connection with the land, the sense of community, the dance of conviviality.

A hunchbacked, elderly villager, clad in a flowered farmer’s smock, casts a quizzical look at us as she rides by on her mobility scooter. Her frail twisted body is a ghostly reminder of the old ways of wet rice farming and the heavy toll they took.

She is justified in wondering why anyone in their right mind would want to engage in such backbreaking labours in this age of machines and supermarkets.

In today’s rural Japan the manual transplanting of rice seedlings has long been replaced by mechanised transplanters, so by this time of the year most paddies in the village have long been planted and deserted. From a distance, the terraced succession of perfectly symmetrical, undulating rows of bright green seedlings cuts a quaint but somewhat forlorn landscape under the overcast sky.

All is order and loveliness, with no untidy traces of the labours of hunchbacked farmers, no manure, no sweat, no mud.

While we have got plenty of sweat and mud at our friends’ paddy field, as the afternoon unfolds an unruly force begins to ruffle this otherwise energetic group of village newcomers. The wind is no longer the dry and shrill Yatsugatake-oroshi, the north-westerly ice-cold gales that blow fiercely from the Sea of Japan, through the southern foot of the Yatsugatake mountain range and across the Kofu Basin in the winter months (our village lies pitifully at the confluence of these wind-ways).

Still, it is a rough, howling south-easterly that sweeps away seedlings, misaligns the bamboo poles we were using to keep the rows in check and drowns the hitherto lively chit-chat.

The painstakingly built harmony begins to fray at the seams.
A strange fatigue descends.

At the farthest corner of the field, two young children that had spent the morning playing with crabs and tadpoles seem caught up in a trance, up to their knees in mud, barely able to stand. Their little heads are raised, their eyes fixed on the windbreak of red pine forest swaying gently in the distance.

They are listening to something.

Could these be the workings of Kaze no Matasaburo, the wind sprite of Japanese folklore? A century ago, Kenji Miyazawa, the brilliant fantasist of children’s literature, reimagined this figure in a tale that unfolded on a mountainside not too far from here.

On the first day of elementary school after the summer break, children return eagerly only to find in their classroom a strange new boy. A fierce wind is blowing on that day and some of the children begin to suspect that this outlandishly dressed boy with flaming red hair might be the legendary wind sprite Matasaburo.

Besides the intriguing presence of the wind and its enlivening interactions with the landscape, there is little to no conventional action in this deceptively simple tale. As swiftly as the boy arrives, he is gone. He had only come to the mountainside school to accompany his father, an engineer from the North looking for molybdenum — a metal used in armour plating and heavy artillery during the War — to mine. And yet, through this personification of the wind, Miyazawa conveys much about its ambivalent place in Japan’s inland farming communities.

Unlike the far more prized water, whose purifying qualities, usefulness, paths and directions are clearly established and easily harnessed, the wind is seen as an unreliable, unsettling messenger from distant lands: here today, gone tomorrow. It is an invisible menace that needs to be tamed and slashed, lest it slashes us.

In some windswept areas of the country, particularly on dangerous mountain passes, people used to erect a sickle-blade in order to create a magic barrier against the wind.

There are, however, traces of something far more ancient and pre-agrarian in Miyazawa’s multilayered story. Perhaps something mythically rooted in the forest-based Jōmon culture of his native Tohoku?

In this “forest mind,” the wind was seen as a far less hostile force, sharing water’s purifying and landscape-enlivening powers. Coming from a land beyond, the wind that gusts through the story of Matasaburo magically touches and transfigures the landscape of everyday life, heightening the aural sensibility of its young dwellers and vividly connecting the currents of breath that blow outside with the ones that blow inside their bodies.

I sense these mythopoetic wind currents also, passing through the bodies of the children at the edge of our friends’ rice paddy. But I sense something else moving and morphing here, too. An at-once familiar and strange-making, ancient and modern Japanese dance anchored in mud and atmospheric change, in the transpersonal sufferings of the body experienced and shaped as a force of nature — an embodiment of Earth’s collective history.

I sense butoh, the ever-morphing improvisatory art founded by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno more than half a century ago.

The threads linking butoh with the wind were first woven during a collaboration between dancer-choreographer Hijikata and photographer Eikoh Hosoe in the late 1960s. The photobook project was named Kamaitachi, after the weasel-like demon from Japanese folklore.

The kamaitachi is known to ride unseen on fierce mountain winds and to inflict cuts on the legs of walkers with its sickle-shaped claws.

For the photobook, Hosoe captured explosive moments of an ongoing improvisatory performance by Hijikata as he morphed into kamaitachi at multiple locations in his native farming village in Akita, northern Japan. Hijikata’s kamaitachi pulled pranks on the villagers, drank, laughed and sulked with them, rolled in mud and ran amok across rice paddies like the wind, often in front of a captive audience of children.

After decades of relentlessly visceral experimentation, in the winter of 1985, just one year before his death, Hijikata articulated the agrarian roots of his ankoku butoh — the dance of utter darkness — in a memorable talk titled Kaze Daruma (Wind Daruma).

He conjured disturbing memories of seeing three-year-old children tied to posts and left alone in their farmhouses — “their bodies were not their own. . . . What I learned from those toddlers has greatly influenced my body” — and of babies placed in izume, baskets woven of rice straw and designed to keep the rice warm while their parents laboured in the paddies all day, “at a labour that is beyond overwork. They labour bent over and that’s why they can’t look back.”

The children, tied down and unable to move “bawled endlessly;” “in the damp open sky a gluttonous wind swallows the children’s screams.” Unable to make themselves heard, they learn how to swallow their own tears — “they are plucking the darkness and eating it.” At dusk, the children are removed from their baskets. Because their legs are numb from having been folded up all day, they can’t stand up nor stretch them.

It is from this wet darkness that is eaten, Hijikata reminds us, and from these vulnerable bent bodies that find no strength to stand upright, that butoh originates.

At our friends’ paddy field, the south-easterly wind has given way to a soft breeze and to a lighter mood among the amateur transplanters, as the day’s task is completed in the late afternoon. It is as if the declining fortunes of rice farming have been reversed through sheer effort and community feeling.

The two young children are lifted from the mud and their legs gently scrubbed by the mothers. A couple of crabs are placed inside two small plastic cages on top of a layer of mud and then put away on the pickup bed of a kei truck, together with the children.

As I drive uphill towards the far end of the village where I live, this temporary sense of order dissolves. Here, the landscape is reverting to its ancient Jōmon shape.

Rice fields left idle for decades to become irreversibly porous. Unkempt private forests no longer serving their windbreak purpose, so that the gales blow unimpeded throughout the year, inviting surrender to the inevitable encounter.

In this primal landscape, I am slowly learning to give a moving, earthbound shape to such encounters. I have found it in another forgotten layer of the dance of utter darkness: butoh-fu is the name Hijikata gave to the intensely kinaesthetic poetic word-images he collected to guide and inspire dance movement. The images range from prehistoric cave paintings to 20th-century street graffiti, painting, sculpture, architecture, natural science and literature, assembled as analogue collages in scrapbooks that Hijikata annotated by hand with poetic lines and phrases.

Butoh-fu are notations, not meant to be simply mimed or mirrored but left to the dancers to recreate their own movement climates in response to the moods and conditions of their own places.

I leave these notations as an invitation to future practices that may honour the ever-shifting land, the weather — and their joint histories:

༄

This piece was originally published in the online edition of The Dark Mountain Project and in their issue 24 — Eight Fires.

After a week of hard work, I had imagined a small clearing. A little time returned to the body, a loosening of the schedule, perhaps even the quiet luxury of not having to think very much.

The rainy season had other plans. The air had grown thick and difficult, heavy with that particular mugginess that wraps itself around the skin before any rain has properly arrived. Then came the strange weather alerts, the approach of a twin typhoon, the sense of pressure gathering at the edges of the day.

And then, at bedtime, the ground shook.

Not dramatically enough to become a story, but strongly enough to unsettle the room and the nervous system. Strongly enough to remind this Tokyo suburb that rest is never only a private arrangement. It depends on weather, infrastructure, ground, walls, roofs, phones, alerts, histories of disaster, and the small animal intelligence with which the body keeps listening long after the shaking stops.

So the weekend did not become the clearing I had hoped for. Instead, under the damp weight of the air, with rest interrupted and the body unable to quite come down, I found myself excavating my filmic memory. I rummaged through an inner shelf of old atmospheres, as though looking for something that might meet the mood before it hardened into mere fatigue.

This is how Barton Fink returned.

I had seen the film many years ago, in my mid twenties, too early to notice what most mattered. I still remembered the broad outline: a serious New York playwright, newly celebrated for his commitment to “the common man,” is summoned to Hollywood in the early 1940s to write a wrestling picture. And I remembered the grotesque comedy, the writer’s block, the Coen brothers’ unmistakable tonal mischief.

What I had not remembered — or perhaps had not yet learned how to feel — was the room. Or, more precisely: the hotel.

The Hotel Earle is not a backdrop. It is not merely where the story happens. It is a body, sweating, peeling, listening, absorbing, secreting. Its wallpaper loosens from the walls as though the building itself were shedding skin. A strange adhesive ooze leaks from behind the paper. The corridors stretch with the airless patience of a fever dream. Heat presses against the characters’ bodies until thought itself seems to perspire.

Watching it again under the muggy, shaken weather of this weekend, I felt the film differently.

I did not feel it as a clever story about a writer who cannot write, but as a film about the conditions under which writing becomes possible — or impossible. About what happens when the life of the mind is forced to remember that it has weather, that it has a body, a room, a neighbour, a deadline, a class fantasy, an institution waiting for delivery, and an atmosphere that may or may not allow perception to ripen into language.

Barton Fink is often remembered as a film about writer’s block. But to call it that may already be too psychological, too individualising, too tidy. The words do not fail Barton simply because he lacks discipline, talent, inspiration, or seriousness. They fail because the conditions around writing have become distorted. Every relation that might make writing possible has been bent out of shape: relation to audience, to neighbour, to institution, to money, to class, to history, to body, to room.

Writing, the film seems to insist, is never only “the life of the mind.”

The life of the mind has walls.

The neighbour who cannot be heard

The film’s cruellest joke may be that Barton Fink sincerely wants to write about ordinary people.

This is not presented as mere vanity, or not only as vanity. Barton’s commitment to “the common man” is not entirely fraudulent. He believes in it, he has built his sense of vocation around it. He wants theatre to matter beyond drawing rooms and clever repartee. He wants writing to carry the weight of overlooked lives. He wants, in his own heightened and rather airless way, to answer the demands of the age.

And yet, this sincerity is precisely where the danger begins.

Barton’s relation to “the common man” remains strangely bodiless. It is passionate, eloquent, principled, even moving at times, but it floats above encounter. The common man, in Barton’s imagination, is a figure who confirms the writer’s seriousness. He is a moral horizon, a source of dramatic necessity, an antidote to bourgeois triviality. He also seems to be a mirror in which Barton can recognise himself as the kind of artist who has not betrayed the world.

Then Charlie Meadows appears in the room next door.

Charlie is not an idea. He is too much, too loud, too warm, too sweaty, too needy, too generous, too intrusive, too human. He speaks through the wall first. Then he enters without quite being invited. He offers Barton company, alcohol, laughter, stories, bodily proximity, the uneven texture of an actual life.

Again and again, he tries to tell Barton something.

But Barton cannot really listen.

He can speak about ordinary people with great conviction, yet he cannot receive this particular person as a neighbour. Charlie does not arrive as material already arranged for literature. He arrives as relation: inconvenient, interruptive, excessive, alive. And relation, unlike representation, cannot be fully controlled from the desk.

This is where the film becomes more than satire. It touches something painful in the ecology of writing itself.

There are forms of commitment that remain insulated from the very lives they claim to honour. There are forms of lucidity that make encounter more difficult, not less. And there are ethical vocabularies that allow the writer to feel close to the ground while remaining safely above it.

Barton is not blocked because he has no concern for the world. He is blocked because his concern has become too recognisable to itself.

He already knows what the common man means. He already knows what kind of writer he is supposed to be. He already knows the shape of the problem and the moral position from which he intends to address it. His sincerity has hardened into posture before the encounter can disturb him.

The neighbour, meanwhile, keeps knocking.

The wallpaper continues loosening.

Perhaps this is one of the film’s most unsettling gifts. It does not allow us to place the danger only in Hollywood, only in vulgar commerce, only in producers barking orders from upholstered offices. The distortion is already present before Barton arrives at the studio gates. It is there in the noble abstraction of “the people,” in the writer’s hunger to be recognised as socially necessary, in the subtle comfort of knowing oneself to be on the right side of seriousness.

Hollywood will exploit this, certainly. It will flatten, package, humiliate, and demand. But it does not invent Barton’s enclosure — it merely gives it a contract, a room, and a deadline.

The Hotel Earle understands this before Barton does.

Its walls are thin enough for voices to pass through, though not thin enough for relation to enter. Its rooms press bodies into proximity while leaving them strangely alone. It is a habitat of failed listening: everything leaks, everything seeps, everything overheats, yet very little is truly received.

And so Barton sits at his desk, facing the blank page, beneath the image of a woman on a beach gazing out toward the sea. The picture promises distance, coolness, perspective. A world beyond the room, a horizon clean enough to be desired.

But behind him, beside him, around him, the hotel continues its damp instruction.

The writing will not come from the image of the world held at a distance.

It will come, if it comes at all, through the wall.

That Barton Fink feeling

Hollywood does not ask Barton to stop being Barton.

This is part of the nightmare.

The studio does not summon him from New York in order to erase his seriousness completely, or to replace his sensibility with something smoother and more obedient. It wants precisely the thing that has made him recognisable. It wants the aura, the moral texture, the newly consecrated name. It wants, as the producer Jack Lipnick puts it, “that Barton Fink feeling.”

This small phrase carries much of the film’s poison.

For what is being requested is not simply a script. It is a signature, a sensibility, an atmosphere of artistic seriousness rendered usable within an industrial form. Barton has been hired to write a wrestling picture, though not just any wrestling picture. The studio wants the wrestling picture touched by the prestige of social concern, by the theatrical weight of “ordinary life,” by whatever mysterious substance has made his play legible as important.

It wants authenticity as seasoning.

This feels, from our present, almost unbearably familiar.

Again and again, institutions ask writers, artists, teachers, researchers, and thinkers to bring their singularity forward, but in a form that can circulate cleanly. Bring your voice, but make it recognisable. Bring your grief, but make it legible. Bring your difference, but make it deliverable. Bring your critique, but shape it into a proposal, a keynote, a statement, a brand, a teaching philosophy, a platform identity, a content rhythm. Bring us what cannot be easily absorbed, but make sure it arrives on time, in the proper format, with the right kind of feeling attached.

The demand is no longer simply conformity. It is curated exception.

And Barton, for all his disgust, is not immune to this recognition. He wants to be needed, he wants the age to have called him. He wants the wrestling picture to become, somehow, a vessel for the larger vocation he believes he carries. Even his contempt for Hollywood cannot fully detach itself from the thrill of being summoned. The studio’s vulgarity offends him, but its attention confirms him.

This is where recognition becomes... sticky.

Behind Barton, the glue keeps warming.

To be recognised is never only to be seen. It is also to be shaped by the terms through which seeing becomes possible. Barton arrives in Hollywood already carrying a version of himself that the studio can use: the serious writer of the common man, the man whose moral feeling might lend weight to formula. The machinery does not need to create this version from nothing. It simply reflects it back, enlarged and distorted, until Barton can no longer tell whether he is resisting the demand or trying to satisfy it beautifully.

Here, the film brushes against a more ordinary cruelty of creative life.

The world often asks for our work at the very point where the conditions for doing it well have been damaged. It asks for depth from exhaustion, lucidity from overexposure, care from precarity, originality from haste, courage from isolation, freshness from a body that has not slept. And then, when the words do not come, the failure is returned to the individual: writer’s block, lack of discipline, lack of resilience, lack of professionalism.

What if the block itself knows something?

Perhaps it knows that the room is wrong. The terms are wrong. The relation is wrong. The demand has arrived too quickly, too loudly, too hungrily, before the work has had time to find its own climate.

Perhaps the blank page is not empty, but refusing.

Barton’s blank page is full of refusals he cannot yet read.

It refuses the noble abstraction of “the common man.” It refuses the producer’s appetite for a usable sensibility. It refuses the fantasy that the writer can remain pure by maintaining contempt for the institution while still feeding on its recognition. It refuses the clean horizon of the beach picture above the desk. It refuses, above all, the idea that writing can be commanded into being by seriousness alone.

Around this refusal, everyone keeps talking. Lipnick talks, the executives talk, Barton himself talks. Even the great novelist W. P. Mayhew, ruined and soaked in alcohol, talks in fragments of literary aura and collapse. Words circulate everywhere, but they do not become writing. They are sales pitch, self-defence, performance, evasion, seduction, command. Language has not disappeared, but it has become overproduced.

Perhaps that is another reason the hotel must sweat.

Something in the film has to return language to matter. Something has to insist that writing is not generated by vocabulary, position, reputation, or ideological alignment alone. The body must be there, the wall must be there. The heat, the wallpaper glue, the neighbour, the sound in the corridor, the failure of rest. The unmanageable pressure of what has not yet become articulate.

The studio wants “that Barton Fink feeling.” The hotel room offers something else.

It offers the conditions Barton cannot convert into a feeling quickly enough. It offers the damp remainder of relation, the bodily excess of the world, the unfinished perception that does not know how to become a product. It does not flatter him, nor does it recognise him.

It does not care about his name.

It only keeps peeling.

Tending the room

This is where Barton Fink leaves me now, after this muggy, shaken weekend. It does not leave me with another theory of writer’s block, but with a question about habitats.

What kinds of rooms make writing possible?

Not rooms in the purely architectural sense, though that is important too. The desk, the window, the wall, the air, the interruptions, the body’s sense of safety or exposure — none of these are incidental. They enter the sentence. They decide, more often than we admit, whether perception can remain unfinished long enough to become truthful, or whether it must rush into performance before it has had time to feel its way.

But “room” also means the wider conditions around the work: the tempo of demand, the quality of attention available, the kinds of recognition being offered or withheld, the relations that sustain the writing, the institutional weather pressing against it. A room can be made uninhabitable by heat, noise, precarity, deadlines, or fear. It can also be made uninhabitable by admiration, by premature legibility, by the pressure to become recognisably oneself on cue.

This may be another of the film’s uncomfortable gifts.

It reminds us that not all recognition nourishes. Some forms of recognition arrive as extraction. They see just enough to make use of us. They name our “voice,” our “feeling,” our “perspective,” our “contribution,” and then ask us to reproduce it under conditions that slowly drain the very ecology from which it once emerged.

In this sense, “that Barton Fink feeling” is not just a Hollywood joke. It is also a warning about what happens when the living difficulty of a practice becomes an identifiable product. The writer is no longer asked to listen, notice, hesitate, metabolise, or be changed. He is asked to deliver the recognisable effect of having done so.

Perhaps this is why the hotel’s grotesque materiality feels strangely merciful, even as it becomes hellish.

It refuses the clean surface. It refuses the fantasy that writing belongs to the mind alone. It refuses Barton’s wish to remain noble, distant, serious, intact. Everything leaks, everything sticks, everything sweats. The world presses through the walls, but not as inspiration — it presses as disturbance.

And disturbance is not the same as depth.

This distinction matters to me.

I wonder whether some of the rooms in which writing now circulates subtly encourage us to confuse disturbance with depth, lucidity with wisdom, recognition with relation. Within these rooms, writing can begin to sound as though it has been touched by the world. It can learn the atmosphere of urgency, grief, critique, tenderness, even humility. And yet, all too often, the room that made the writing possible remains much as it was.

The neighbour remains unheard.

The ground remains abstract.

What would it mean, instead, to tend the room before asking for the work?

To ask not only:

What must be written now?

but also:

What conditions would allow something worth writing to arrive?

What pace would let perception stay porous?

What kinds of relation would keep the writer from floating above the lives, places, and histories she invokes?

What forms of refusal might be protecting the work from becoming prematurely useful?

These questions feel increasingly necessary to me, not because writing should withdraw from the demands of the age, but because the age is so skilled at converting demand into extraction.

It asks for relevance while eroding attention.

It asks for courage while normalising exhaustion.

It asks for originality while compressing time.

It asks for lucidity while making life less and less inhabitable.

Against this, perhaps writing needs fewer heroic metaphors.

Less voice.
Less platform.
Less brilliance.
Less “feeling” on demand.

More weather.
More listening.
More walls noticed before they close in.
More neighbour before “the people.”
More rooms where unfinished perception is allowed to remain unfinished for a little longer.

This does not mean ideal conditions will arrive. They rarely do. Most writing happens amidst compromised arrangements: fatigue, illness, caregiving, unpaid and precarious labour, deadlines, storms, quakes, grief. There may be no pure room. There may only be the work of noticing which conditions are damaging the relation, which demands are deforming the sentence, and which forms of recognition are beginning to peel away from the wall.

Still, noticing changes something.

It changes how we understand the blank page.

What if the blank page is not an accusation? What if it is not proof of failure? It may be the body, the room, the relation, or the work itself refusing the wrong terms.

After the quake, the body keeps listening.

After the film, so does the room.

And maybe this is where I want to leave Barton Fink for now: still seated at his desk, beneath the cool impossible beach, in a hotel that will not stop sweating.

I leave him as an uneasy companion in the ecology of writing.

A reminder that the life of the mind is never disembodied, that sincerity can become enclosure, that recognition can arrive as weather, and that sometimes the most honest sentence begins, not with clarity, but with the wall that has started to peel.

The life of the mind has walls.

If writing is to remain alive, we may need to learn how to notice them.

Hospitality.

The question lingers after writing my previous piece, At the Pace Still Possible. But it does not linger as politeness, or as warmth extended by a generous host to a grateful guest.

It remains as a more difficult arrangement of value, recognition, access, circulation, and expectation.

A constellation of questions.

Who is invited in? On what terms?

What must be softened, clarified, beautified, or translated before it is allowed to circulate?

And what kinds of difficulty remain standing outside the room, not because they are without value, but because they do not arrive in a form that can be easily recognised?

These questions have compelled me to revisit Sang-il Lee’s Kokuho (National Treasure, 2025), an epic drama set within the fiercely hierarchical world of kabuki.

In Japan, Kokuho became something close to a cultural event over the past year. A staggering box-office phenomenon, a domestic live-action record-breaker, a film that moved audiences across generations despite its length, density, and uncompromising devotion to the world of kabuki. It swept through the Japanese awards season with the force of something that had touched a collective nerve.

And yet, outside Japan, its circulation felt more muted, more difficult to gather into the familiar language of international enthusiasm.

The film did travel. It was seen, reviewed, admired. It was selected as Japan’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, reached the shortlist, and ultimately received an Oscar nomination for Makeup and Hairstyling. It did not, however, receive the Best International Feature nomination many in Japan had hoped for.

This does not mean the film “failed.” It may mean something more interesting, and perhaps more revealing.

It may mean that the film arrived carrying forms of value that were difficult to metabolise within the recognition systems through which global cinema is often received.

Sitting with Kokuho again, I cannot help wondering about invisible thresholds of cultural legibility.

What travels?

What hesitates?

What has to become smoother, gentler, more aesthetically familiar, or more morally legible before it can be warmly welcomed?

A world that does not easily translate

Kokuho is not simply a film about kabuki.

It is a film organised around a world of apprenticeship, bloodline, rivalry, bodily discipline, theatrical inheritance, gendered performance, debt, sacrifice, humiliation, and artistic obsession. It inhabits a moral and aesthetic universe in which the perfection of an art form can come to matter more than personal happiness, family stability, emotional safety, or even survival.

That is not an easy offering.

At the centre of the film is Kikuo, the son of a gangster boss who is taken into the household of a revered kabuki actor after his father’s death. There, he trains alongside Shunsuke, the legitimate heir of the house, whose place within the kabuki world is secured by lineage but not necessarily by artistic force.

Their bond becomes brotherhood, rivalry, inheritance crisis, and wound.

For viewers unfamiliar with kabuki’s strict hierarchies, the emotional stakes of this arrangement may not fully register. The question is not merely who is more talented. It is also who is allowed to inherit a name, a house, a tradition, a continuity. It is about the weight of bloodline inside an art form where the body does not belong to the individual alone. It belongs to a house, a lineage, a history, a demanding grammar of transmission.

And then there is the onnagata.

To watch the actors in Kokuho perform femininity on stage is not to watch “men playing women” in any simple contemporary sense. The onnagata is not a psychological impersonation of womanhood, nor a casual act of gender crossing for dramatic effect. It is a disciplined theatrical form, built through gesture, posture, breath, gaze, stillness, sleeve, fan, angle, timing, refusal. It is an idealised femininity preserved, stylised, and transmitted through male bodies within the historical architecture of kabuki.

While this is beautiful, it is also uncomfortable.

A contemporary viewer may want to rush toward explanation: patriarchy, gender performance, queer subtext, misogyny, artistic discipline, appropriation, ritualised beauty. All of these frames may offer something. None of them quite exhausts the form, though.

Kokuho asks us to remain with a world whose demands are both exquisite and brutal.

This is where the discomfort begins.

The smoothness of what travels

Many internationally celebrated films from Japan, or about Japan, offer difficulty in forms that global audiences already know how to love.

Loneliness becomes contemplative.
Routine becomes spiritual.
Labour becomes dignity.
Cleanliness becomes care.
Silence becomes profundity.
Minimalism becomes resistance to capitalist excess.

Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023) is a particularly revealing contrast. I say this carefully, because I did find the film beautiful. I still do. Kōji Yakusho’s performance is extraordinarily tender. The film has many moments of grace: the trees, the light, the cassettes, the small repetitions of the day, the dignity of attention.

I understand why people were moved by it. But I also think its international reception tells us something about the comforts of legibility.

Quiet urban solitude, ritualised routine, aesthetic restraint, analogue media, hidden tenderness, carefully framed trees, a lightly spiritualised everydayness. What’s not to like here?

Perfect Days arrives already carrying many of the signs through which Japan has long been made lovable to Western arthouse audiences. Its Tokyo is lived through a European gaze that knows how to linger beautifully. Its soundtrack — Lou Reed, The Kinks, Nina Simone, Van Morrison, Patti Smith — builds an immediate bridge of recognition for many Western viewers. Its protagonist cleans toilets, but he does so inside a cityscape curated through architect-designed public facilities, sunlight through leaves, and an almost monastic discipline of repetition.

The result is deeply affecting.

It is also, in certain ways, remarkably available.

The film gives international audiences a Japan they already know how to approach: meticulous, wounded, aesthetically spare, emotionally restrained, strangely healing. Even the Japanese word komorebi — sunlight filtering through trees — becomes part of the film’s circulation, a small linguistic talisman through which the foreign viewer can feel they have received something intimate and untranslatable, but not too threateningly so.

Kokuho does not offer this kind of talisman.

Its beauty is not cleansing, its rituals do not console, and its devotion is not easily converted into mindfulness. Its inheritance structures cannot be made gentle without being falsified. More difficult still, its world contains forms of artistry that are inseparable from coercion, exclusion, bodily exhaustion, and social cruelty.

While this contrast does not make Kokuho morally superior to Perfect Days, it does make something visible.

Some cultural forms travel more easily when they arrive already filtered through a vocabulary of universal humanism, aesthetic restraint, and individual redemption. Others hesitate because they require the viewer to enter systems of meaning that cannot be quickly mapped onto familiar expectations.

Clean toilets, clean forests, clean tea

In Perfect Days, the public toilets of Shibuya are not ordinary municipal toilets. They are part of the Tokyo Toilet project — architect-designed spaces created by famous designers as a public design initiative, later folded into the film’s visual and moral architecture. They are clean, bright, safe, inclusive, photogenic. They function beautifully as spaces of care, but they also do a great deal of cultural sanitation work.

They allow Tokyo to appear as a city where even toilets are aesthetic, where public infrastructure can be purified into design, where low-wage labour can be framed as quiet devotion, where social invisibility can become spiritual nobility. The dirt is present, but only as something already being lovingly cleaned. The class relation is present, but softened by beauty. The loneliness is present, but transfigured through routine.

Again, none of this invalidates the film.

It helps us notice, however, the conditions under which certain images of Japan become globally beloved.

I have been circling similar questions in earlier essays on shinrin-yoku / forest bathing and chanoyu / the tea ceremony. There, too, I found myself asking what has to be cleaned away for a practice to circulate as soothing, refined, therapeutic, or universally wise. Shinrin-yoku often travels internationally as an ancient Japanese practice of healing immersion in nature, while the histories of forestry, monoculture plantations, rural labour, land management, and ecological damage recede from view. Chanoyu often circulates as stillness, simplicity, harmony, and aesthetic quietude, while its entanglements with hierarchy, discipline, gender, nationalism, wealth, and social performance become harder to see.

This is not because international audiences are foolish.

It is because circulation rewards certain forms. A practice travels more easily when it can be detached from its difficult infrastructures and offered as medicine.

A forest without forestry.
Tea without hierarchy.
Toilets without sanitation labour.

Japan without its murk.

The books that arrive already welcomed

This is not only a filmic problem.

It is also a literary one.

In recent years, Anglophone readers have embraced contemporary Japanese fiction with genuine warmth. This has opened many beautiful doors: more translators are being read; more Japanese writers are reaching readers who might never have encountered them before; bookshops now carry shelves of Japanese fiction where, not long ago, one might have found only Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata, and a few other carefully canonised names.

This is all worth celebrating.

And still, when I look closely at what travels most visibly, I notice certain curatorial tracks becoming crowded.

One track is the feminist resistance narrative. Novels by writers such as Mieko Kawakami, Sayaka Murata, and Asako Yuzuki are often received in Anglophone contexts through the language of female defiance, bodily autonomy, social critique, and resistance to patriarchal norms. There is truth in that frame. These writers are indeed unsettling the gendered expectations of Japanese society. They are indeed writing against forms of coercion, conformity, misogyny, reproductive pressure, and bodily discipline.

And yet, something is flattened when the marketing frame becomes too clean.

Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, for example, is often read as a quirky tale of outsider independence, a story of a woman who refuses marriage, reproduction, and normative adulthood. Keiko’s refusal is important, yes, but the novel is also far more chilling than that. Her survival depends on becoming legible through the convenience store — its scripts, sounds, gestures, rhythms, and corporate instructions. She does not simply liberate herself from society. She becomes functional inside a system that gives her a shape because the human world cannot.

To cheer too quickly for her independence risks missing the horror.

Likewise, Kawakami and Yuzuki are often gathered into a familiar language of feminist empowerment. Yet their work is frequently darker, stranger, more ethically uncomfortable, and more pessimistic than such a frame allows. They are not simply offering triumphant narratives of self-assertion. They are writing from inside systems that do not easily release anyone.

The other visible track is what is often called healing or heartwarming fiction: stories of cafés, cats, libraries, bookshops, quiet neighbourhoods, time slips, second chances, lost letters, gentle ghosts, small acts of repair. Books like Before the Coffee Gets Cold or What You Are Looking For Is in the Library arrive wrapped in soft colours, comforting premises, and the promise of emotional restoration.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with these books. Some are tender, some are genuinely moving, some hold grief with more care than their packaging suggests.

But the market’s hunger for “cosy Japan” changes things.

It transforms loneliness into atmosphere. It turns overwork, alienation, demographic anxiety, social isolation, and economic stagnation into a landscape of quiet introspection. The café becomes a portal, the library becomes a sanctuary, the cat becomes a messenger, the city becomes gentle enough for the exhausted Western reader to rest inside.

That rest may be real.

Yet what does it ask Japan to become?

A place where modernity hurts beautifully.
A place where precarity can be made pastel.
A place where social abandonment arrives with good lighting and a warm drink.

The danger is not that these works exist. The danger is that they become disproportionately legible as “Japanese literature” in the Anglophone imagination.

Meanwhile, other textures remain less visible: regional poverty without charm; elderly isolation without narrative repair; institutional corruption without moral clarity; family obligation without sentimental redemption; passive endurance that does not become wisdom; social cruelty that does not lead to catharsis; humour too dry to be marketed as quirky; despair too ordinary to be aestheticised.

This is where the question of translation becomes more than linguistic.

The recursive loop

Translation is not only the movement from one language into another. It is also the movement from one economy of recognition into another. A book must be pitched, acquired, packaged, covered, blurbed, reviewed, placed, categorised, and made imaginable to readers who are themselves already shaped by expectation.

While friction can survive this process, it is often reduced.

A dense social hierarchy becomes “family drama.”

A bleak satire becomes “offbeat.”

A critique of labour discipline becomes “quirky.”

A story of abandonment becomes “healing.”

A woman trapped inside systems of reproductive and social violence becomes “empowered.”

This is not always the fault of translators, who are often doing extraordinarily difficult work with great sensitivity. Nor is it simply the fault of publishers, who operate within markets that reward recognisable desires. And it is not the fault of readers, who come to books with real longing, curiosity, grief, and exhaustion.

It is a recursive loop.

Western publishers buy what they believe Western readers can recognise as Japanese. Western readers buy what has already been made recognisable to them. Japanese agents and publishers, noticing what travels, may begin to pitch more of what fits those expectations.

And then —

Covers become softer.
Titles become gentler.
Cats multiply.
Cafés glow.
“Feminist” novels are framed through Anglophone political grammar.
“Healing” novels are framed as emotional refuge.

The loop tightens and the curated image returns as evidence.

This is what Japanese literature is.
This is what Japanese cinema is.

This is what Japan offers the world: quiet beauty, strange women, tender men, small cafés, clean toilets, ancient rituals, cats, trees, discipline, stillness, healing.

Somewhere behind this circulating image, Kokuho stands in its heavy kimono, asking something less comfortable.

It asks whether we can encounter an art form without immediately translating it into our preferred moral grammar.

It asks whether devotion can be beautiful and violent at the same time.

It asks whether inheritance can be both transmission and harm.

It asks whether gendered performance can be exquisite without becoming easy.

It asks whether an outsider’s rise can be inspiring without becoming liberating.

It asks whether art can demand too much, and still be art.

These questions do not soothe. They do not lend themselves to pastel covers or mindfulness language. They do not make good lifestyle metaphors, and they do not offer Japan as a place of healing for the exhausted global subject.

They ask us to stay with difficulty that does not immediately become useful to us.

Riding with the opaque

Perhaps this is why I keep returning to Miyazaki’s flooded train.

Those passengers in Spirited Away do not explain themselves. They do not become characters in a way that satisfies narrative hunger. They remain silhouettes of transit, loss, labour, memory, death, history, or something else we cannot quite know.

Their opacity is part of their dignity. And Chihiro does not master or extract from them — she rides with them.

Accompaniment without full possession.

Maybe this is another form of cultural encounter. An encounter that does not rush to transform strangeness into insight.

To sit with Kokuho is, for me, to sit near something like that. A world moving according to grammars I can partially understand, partly question, partly resist, partly admire, and never fully own. A world in which hospitality does not mean being made comfortable. A world that does not enter the global room by removing its difficult shoes at the door.

I do not want to argue that we should stop loving the films and books that have reached us. I love many of them too. I only want to ask what our love is trained to recognise.

What forms of Japan are we prepared to welcome?

What forms do we leave waiting outside because they do not arrive as healing, resistance, elegance, or subdued wisdom?

What happens when the other does not mirror back our preferred self-image?

And what would it mean to widen the room — not by making everything smoother, but by increasing our capacity to remain with what is opaque, demanding, unresolved, and strange?

What if real cultural empathy does not begin with understanding?

Perhaps it begins when understanding fails, and we do not immediately repair the failure by translating the other into ourselves.

Perhaps it begins when we notice the comforts of legibility.

And then find ways of staying a little longer with what does not yet know how to be loved by us.

🎬

Only recently have I begun to sense that the scene was still waiting.

For a while, what held me was the strangeness of the infrastructure: the tracks running through water, the stations still standing, the signal lights and neon signs rising from the shallows as if an ordinary world had been submerged without quite ending. The train kept moving through conditions it had not been built to meet.

That was already unsettling.

But this time, I find myself less drawn to the tracks than to the passengers.

They sit quietly in the carriage, half-shadow, half-presence, each carrying something that cannot be checked, counted, displayed, optimised, or explained.

The cargo

The train does not ask the passengers to justify their cargo — it carries them anyway.

The older I become, the more passengers I seem to recognise. Not because I know where they have come from, or where they are going. And not because their stories have become legible either. They remain mostly opaque, as passengers often do. What has become familiar is something else: the slight compression of the body around an invisible load.

A person can carry a life without seeming to carry anything at all.

Unsent letters.

Unfinished books.

Applications never submitted.

Conversations that did not find their room.

Promises made to younger selves.

Promises made by younger selves who did not yet know what energy would cost.

Bodies that no longer cooperate with the futures once imagined for them.

Griefs that never received an adequate ceremony.

Responsibilities that continued long after the horizon around them had changed.

Some cargo is chosen, some is inherited. And some is assigned before we know enough to refuse it. For many of us, one of the heaviest things we carry is a future that once seemed reasonable. It may not even have been grand.

A stable profession.
A book completed.
A community of peers.
A body that could be relied upon.

Work that would be met, if not widely, then at least by the people and institutions capable of recognising its shape. A room somewhere in which one’s contribution could arrive without first having to translate itself into metrics, strategy, speed, charm, stamina, and endless availability. There was, beneath many of our plans, a quiet assumption that the world would remain sufficiently continuous for our preparation to make sense.

Study.
Practice.
Refine.
Wait.
Endure.
Offer something carefully made.

The future was never guaranteed, of course, and most of us knew that. Still, we had been trained inside temporal imaginations that assumed certain forms of reciprocity. Effort might not be rewarded immediately, but it would at least accumulate. Careful work might travel slowly, but it would not have to become a spectacle in order to move. Bodies might tire, but rest would restore them. Institutions might be imperfect, but they would still provide some shared ground on which the work could be received.

Then, often without a single decisive rupture, the ground changed. The tracks did not disappear, the train did not stop, but the water entered. At first, one adjusts. A little more self-management, a little more flexibility, a little more unpaid labour, a little more visibility, a little more explanation, a little more resilience, a little more compression of the body around the load.

Then comes the quieter realisation.

The future one was preparing for assumed capacities, energies, temporalities, and infrastructures that may no longer be available. Or perhaps they were never equally available.

Some people discover this early. Others discover it through illness, disability, migration, caregiving, burnout, unemployment, aging, grief, or simply through the slow erosion of the conditions that once made their lives feel possible. The discovery is not always dramatic. Sometimes it arrives as an ordinary Tuesday. An unanswered email, a rejected proposal, a body refusing to get up. Or a friend describing the arithmetic of visibility as though it were now common sense. Or a generous invitation that turns out to have imagined a much narrower role than the one your attention had entered.

Nothing catastrophic has happened.

And yet something has.

The train continues moving through flooded ground. Inside the carriage, nobody announces this as a crisis. Nobody stands up to explain the historical conditions that produced the water. Nobody offers a framework for adaptation. Nobody turns the journey into a brand. Nobody asks the passengers to transform their grief into content before the next station.

They sit.

That sitting has begun to feel increasingly important to me. It is not passive sitting, nor resigned sitting. And it is not healed sitting either.

It is only honest sitting.

A body seated on a train may still be moving. It is simply not moving by the means we most often praise. It is not climbing, advancing, accelerating, competing, producing, expanding its reach. It is being carried for a while through conditions it did not choose and cannot individually repair.

There is a kind of diminishment in this, especially for those of us trained to equate movement with agency.

There is also, perhaps, a form of mercy.

Because not all movement looks like striving. Not all continuation looks like progress. Not all cargo can be carried at the speed demanded by the world that assigned it.

Only later, perhaps, does one begin to understand how the cargo became so heavy.

Some of it came from love, some from study, some from necessity. Some came from the old wish to contribute something meaningful before the body disappears.

And some came from a bargain modernity has made so common that many of us barely noticed we had accepted it.

Make the work.
Make it well.
Make it carefully.

Then find the place where it can be received.

The bargain

For a long time, this bargain may have seemed imperfect but still inhabitable. Recognition was never guaranteed, yet it remained imaginable. A poem might find a reader, a book might find its season, a teacher’s words might travel quietly through a student’s life. An essay might pass from hand to hand, a difficult piece of work might wait — and waiting did not yet feel identical to failure.

The work could move slowly. The person who made it could remain, at least partially, a person.

That distinction has become harder to maintain.

In many contemporary circuits, contribution and circulation now obey increasingly different logics. To contribute is to give form to something. To circulate is to remain visible enough for the contribution to register. These are related, but they are not the same activity. More and more, the second consumes the conditions of the first.

Recently I read about someone attending a writing bootcamp where aspiring authors were informed, with the clarity of a weather report, that major publishers were unlikely to consider them unless they already had an enormous social media following. The arithmetic was presented without malice: followers, sales, platform, profitability.

Legitimacy.

There was something almost merciful in its bluntness. What was required was not a mythology of genius, nor a romantic belief that the work itself would somehow make its way, nor a patient editorial imagination. Just numbers converting attention into evidence.

To be recognised, first become visible.

To become visible, first become continuous.

To become continuous, first become inexhaustible.

No one may say it quite this way. Still, the equation hovers. And once one begins to hear it, it becomes difficult to stop hearing it elsewhere.

The demand rarely arrives as a command. It arrives as an application portal asking for proof that the work has already mattered elsewhere. A list of publications, evidence of impact, names of referees, mobility treated as availability rather than cost. It arrives as a writing workshop explaining, with no particular cruelty, that a book now needs a platform before it can be imagined as a book. The manuscript is no longer the beginning of the encounter. First there must be an audience waiting, a niche clearly defined, a self sufficiently visible to make the work seem less risky.

The demand arrives as the small daily question of whether to share something before it has finished becoming itself.

A paragraph.
A photograph.
A grief.
A thought that needed darkness a little longer.

The train continues moving through flooded ground while these calculations unfold.

Again and again, the work is asked to travel before it has been fully made, and the person making it is asked to become part of its transport system. Post the excerpt, write the proposal, keep the conversation warm, make the project legible, make the self legible, make the legibility feel natural.

At a certain point, the nervous system becomes part of the infrastructure.

The body is no longer only the place from which the work emerges. It becomes the maintenance system through which visibility must be sustained.

This is where a strange grief begins.

It is not simply the grief of being unread. Not simply the grief of being overlooked. It is the grief of realising that the labour required to become recognisable may participate in the very exhaustion that made recognition necessary in the first place.

The system does not merely fail to notice tired bodies. It increasingly asks tired bodies to become better at being noticeable.

For those with abundant energy, inherited confidence, institutional shelter, social ease, economic support, good health, or a nervous system adapted to constant exposure, this may feel like the ordinary price of entry. Difficult, perhaps, but playable.

For others, the price is not merely high. It is metabolically unaffordable.

Bodies living close to their limits tend to learn this early. They notice what the language of opportunity often conceals. They notice that every email has a weight. Every application has an afterlife. Every public offering creates maintenance. Every platform opens another appetite. Every chance to be seen may also require a new form of availability.

Chronic illness often learns it.

Neurodivergence often learns it.

Burnout often learns it.

Precarity often learns it.

They learn that visibility has an energy budget — and that the budget is unevenly distributed.

While limits reveal costs, this does not mean they are morally superior positions from which to see the world. And it does not mean that recognition is shallow, or that obscurity is noble, or that those who pursue visibility have failed some ethical test.

Recognition matters. And so does support, and so does being read, and so do invitations and rooms. And so does money.

A culture that refuses to recognise careful work does not become innocent because some of us learn to live without its recognition. There is no virtue in pretending not to need response. The question is more painful than that.

What happens when the ways available for seeking response begin to damage the very capacities that make the work possible?

What happens when the path toward recognition requires a self one can no longer afford to maintain?

The flooded train keeps moving.

No one inside the carriage appears to be building an audience.

No one is improving their discoverability.

No one is converting the journey into proof of relevance.

The passengers sit among one another without becoming transparent enough to be consumed.

For a moment, this feels almost impossible.

A public space without performance.
A shared journey without display.
Movement without self-optimisation.

The train does not ask its passengers to become more visible before carrying them. It does not measure their worth by how fluently they explain their destination. It does not require each one to turn their cargo into a platform.

Perhaps this is why the silence inside the carriage feels less empty to me now.

It makes room for a grief that many contemporary systems do not know how to receive. The grief of those who still wish to offer something, but no longer wish to organise their remaining life around the machinery through which offerings are made visible.

The grief of those who have not stopped moving, but who can no longer move at the speed demanded by the systems that claim to carry them.

The grief of discovering that a slower pace is not always chosen.

Sometimes it is imposed by the body.

Sometimes by circumstance.

Sometimes by histories that arrive before us.

Sometimes by the simple fact that a life has less time, less stamina, and fewer recoveries than the future once assumed.

And still, something moves.

A sentence.
A class.
A letter.
A conversation.
A note sent across an ocean.

A thought that finds one reader rather than ten thousand.

A fragment that does not fit the room in which it was offered, then begins looking for another ecology.

Such movement is difficult to count.

That does not make it unreal.

Another calendar

Lately, I have been thinking again of something Ailton Krenak once said about writing. He was speaking against the age of the factory. Against the expectation that writers must keep producing books, one after another, as though the work of thought were another branch of industry. He recalled a different temporal imagination: one in which a person might spend a lifetime with a single book. One in which the work might only find its readers decades later.

Or never.

This last possibility is real. Without it, slowness becomes another consolation story.

One day they will understand.
One day the work will be recognised.
One day the culture will catch up.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

Some work arrives too early. Some arrives in the wrong room. Some is reduced until it can be safely absorbed. Some is admired only after the person who made it is no longer alive to complicate its reception. Some disappears without becoming heritage, legacy, influence, or proof.

Many lives leave almost no trace in the systems designed to record importance.

That thought is not easy to hold.

It is especially difficult to hold inside a culture that keeps asking us to turn life into evidence while life is still being lived. Evidence of productivity, evidence of impact, evidence of relevance, evidence of promise — evidence that the time, care, attention, and bodily cost amounted to something that others can recognise.

But finitude does not wait for evidence.

The body has its own calendar.

Illness has its own calendar.

Grief has its own calendar.

Aging, fatigue, and precarious work have their own calendars too.

They do not always align with publication schedules, grant cycles, tenure clocks, platform metrics, exhibition deadlines, or the imagined arc of a life’s work. They interrupt the fantasy that there will be time later to gather everything, finish everything, explain everything, circulate everything properly, become legible at last.

Across the train aisle, another passenger shifts slightly in their seat.

There may not be time. Or there may be time, but not energy. Or energy, but not access. Or access, but not a receiving ecology. Or a receiving ecology, but only for a version of the work made smaller, smoother, faster, easier to place.

This is one reason recognition can become so painful. Because it is not only vanity, nor only ambition. It is the wish for some part of one’s finite life to meet the world before the body is gone. The wish to know that something crossed, that something reached, that something mattered somewhere beyond the room in which it was made.

There is nothing shameful in that wish.

And yet, the wish cannot be allowed to become the condition for continuing.

This is where the flooded train returns. And it does not return as metaphor or as instruction.

The passengers do not know what will become of their cargo. They do not know who will remember them after they disembark, or whether the things they carry will arrive intact. They do not know whether the train is taking them toward repair, transformation, disappearance, or some station for which no adequate word exists.

Still, the train moves.

Not quickly, not triumphantly, not even because movement guarantees arrival. It moves because movement is sometimes quieter than hope.

Some work moves like that.

A class taught to a handful of students.
An essay read by one person who needed it.
A letter sent across an ocean.
A conversation that changes the weather of a room.
A fragment that fails to fit where it was offered, then begins seeking another place to breathe.
A thought carried for years before it finds language.
A book that remains unfinished, yet alters the life around it.

None of these movements can be fully measured by circulation. None can be dismissed because they do not move at the speed expected of them.

Perhaps this is part of what exhausted bodies know. They know that slower movement is not the same as stillness. They know that interrupted work is not necessarily failed work. They know that a life moving under constraint is still moving. They know, too, that some offerings travel below the surface of visible recognition, through channels too quiet for the systems of measurement to notice.

I do not know whether that is enough.

Some days it is not. Some days the loss remains loss.

The unread work.
The unsupported body.
The invitation that could not receive what it had helped awaken.
The future that assumed more stamina than life was willing to give.

The grief should not be hurried past. It is also cargo.

Perhaps tonight, on the flooded train, that is all I can say.

The water has entered the world.

The signs still glow above the shallows.

The passengers sit with what they carry.

No one asks them to prove that their journey matters.

Outside the window, grasses move in the wind.

The train continues through flooded ground, at the pace still possible.

🚃

This piece was co-woven in careful dialogue with human and more-than-human companions. Any smoke, sparks, or missteps belong to me.

🚃

On neurodivergence, neurocolonization, crip time and other temporalities, you may wish to visit my earlier piece:

The roadside

The first thing I notice, together with Chihiro, is not a spirit.

It is not a shrine either, not even a road.

It is a tree.

An enormous tree rising above the trimmed uniformity of the forest canopy below. Its upper branches are broken and weathered, jutting into the sky like exposed bones.

For a brief moment, the camera lingers there before drifting downward.

A moss-covered torii gate leans against the massive trunk. Small stone shrines — hokora — cluster, tumbled, at its base.

This is where the asphalt ends and a dirt path disappears into the trees.

And this where the family’s sleek Audi sedan slows down. The parents start to bicker over directions. Chihiro looks elsewhere, toward the shrines, toward something she does not understand and cannot quite stop looking at.

Years ago, when I first watched Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 2001), I barely registered this opening sequence.

My attention moved where the story seemed to be moving.

Toward the bathhouse.

Toward the spirits.

Now, I find myself returning and lingering beside the road instead.

What stayed beside the road

The sedan barrels ahead through the narrowing canopy, slicing through branches that scrape against the polished sides.

Chihiro grows uneasy.

Then, for a brief moment, the film offers another pause. A stone sentinel stands among the trees. Nothing dramatic happens — the figure, a dōsojin, simply watches.

The mother barely notices. The father presses forward.

Another dōsojin appears, then another. Each one glimpsed only briefly before slipping back into the forest. The road grows rougher. Eventually the car lurches to a halt.

Ahead stands another stone figure, larger than the rest. Beyond it rises an odd red structure half-hidden among the trees. “It’s just plaster,” the father declares. A facade, a curiosity — nothing worth worrying about. He steps forward immediately and so does the mother.

Chihiro hesitates.

The threshold feels different to her.

Then a wind arrives, lifting leaves from the ground and stirring branches overhead.

For a moment, it almost feels as though the forest itself exhales. It does not issue a command nor a warning.

It simply gathers Chihiro into its movement.

And so she follows, through the tunnel, toward a place that appears, unexpectedly, less like another world than an abandoned piece of infrastructure waiting quietly out of the spotlight.

Old benches.
Dust suspended in filtered light.
Water trickling from a rusty drinking fountain.

The remains of a station.

As though the spirits, before becoming spirits, once had travelled by train.

༄

This return surprised me.

For years, I had been speaking and writing about Miyazaki in very different ways. I had understood these scenes in much the same way many viewers do — the atmospheric prelude to the film’s real story.

The spirits were elsewhere.

The adventure lay ahead.

Recently, however, I have begun wondering whether something else is happening here. Whether Miyazaki’s most consequential gestures are often hidden inside the supports that make the story possible.

This realization arrived slowly.

After leaving full-time academia, I spent several years experimenting with different educational and therapeutic spaces. Miyazaki often travelled with me into those settings.

His films seemed to offer precisely what many participants were seeking: ecological connection, animistic imagination, alternative relationships with the other-than-human world, stories capable of nourishing hope amidst ecological uncertainty.

Over and over, I found myself speaking about healing, about enchantment, about the possibilities of recovering affects that modern life often renders difficult.

None of this felt untrue.
And yet, a subtle discomfort kept returning.

Whenever I lingered with aspects of the films that felt stranger, less consoling, less easily woven into narratives of restoration, the atmosphere in the room would often shift. The conversation would tighten, or attention would drift — something in the collective field seemed to prefer other pathways.

Healing over uncertainty.
Meaning over ambiguity.
Innocence over bewilderment.

The pattern was gentle rather than coercive. Most of the time I barely noticed it.

Only later did I begin wondering whether these preferences were shaping not only how audiences encountered Miyazaki, but also how I was learning to speak about his work.

Perhaps we were all travelling toward the bathhouse, or toward the spirits.

Toward the parts of the films that could be most easily recognized, shared, translated, and carried home.

Meanwhile, the roadside shrines and the stone sentinels remained where they had always been.

༄

What is Chihiro noticing there?

Certainly not folklore, nor mythology, nor religion, nor history.

The film gives her none of the interpretive tools that would allow her to identify the stone figures gathering beside the road.

And yet her attention continues returning to them.

I find this increasingly difficult to ignore.

The roadside presences seem to exert a kind of gravitational pull. Not because they reveal hidden knowledge, but because they interrupt the smoothness with which everyone else moves through the landscape.

The father sees a shortcut.
The mother sees an annoying detour.
The forest becomes something to drive through.
The red building becomes a facade.
The tunnel becomes an abandoned structure.

Everything is immediately incorporated into an existing map. Nothing requires recalibration.

But Chihiro’s attention moves differently.

She does not understand what she is seeing. Still, she hesitates.

At first, I wondered whether her hesitation marked a special sensitivity to spirits. Now, I am not so sure.

What follows after the tunnel feels stranger than that. The film does not reward hesitation with revelation.

It introduces conditions.

What appears when supports show

“Eat.”

Haku presses a rice ball into her hands and insists she gets it down, or otherwise she will fade.

Soon after, another instruction arrives.

“Work.”

The spirits Chihiro encounters are not hovering above material conditions. They move through elaborate systems of maintenance and circulation.

Bathwater flows through pipes.
Coal feeds a furnace.
Heat is generated.
Elevators rise and descend.
Contracts are signed.
Meals are prepared.
Rooms are cleaned.

The world remains animated, yet nobody escapes infrastructure.

For years, I tended to notice different things in these scenes: the enchantment, the spirits, the ecological wisdom. Now I find myself increasingly drawn toward the supports.

The strange insistence that beings remain present to one another only through ongoing labour.

Frog attendants move between floors carrying messages and tokens. Susuwatari soot sprites haul coal toward a furnace operated by Kamajī, the spider-like boiler man who regulates the circulation of heat and water through an intricate network of pipes. Visitors arrive as polluted river spirits and exhausted deities. Consumption swells into the hungry form of a mysterious drifter, No-Face.

Yet, the more time I spent inside the bathhouse, the less interested I became in the question of what these spirits represent.

Another question began to emerge instead. Why do they appear here?

Many readings approach these creatures symbolically. The soot sprites become childhood imagination. The Stink Spirit becomes environmental degradation. No-Face becomes loneliness, desire, capitalism, or any number of other allegorical possibilities.

What interests me increasingly is something more material. These beings emerge precisely where systems become difficult to ignore.

The soot sprites gather around fuel.
Kamajī works among heat.
The frog attendants move through circulation.
The river spirit arrives carrying accumulated waste.

After a while, I found myself looking less at the creatures than at what they seemed to gather around.

The same intuition had lingered with me days earlier while wandering through Kyōsai’s World. There, too, frogs balanced precariously atop bending stems, cats lounged atop improbable vehicles, octopuses traversed ropes suspended over empty space.

While the creatures themselves mattered, what lingered longest were the supports beneath them.

Tightropes.
Vines.
Boats.
Bridges.

The fragile systems carried movement from one place to another.

Time and again, my attention seemed to arrive a moment before collapse.

Balancing acts

Once I began noticing these supports, they seemed to appear everywhere.

Not only beneath the spirits, but beneath Chihiro herself.

Many discussions of Spirited Away describe the film developmentally as a coming-of-age story, and it certainly is one. Chihiro becomes more capable, more confident, more resourceful.

Yet what interests me here is the peculiar form that growth takes.

Again and again, the bathhouse redirects her away from its grand interiors and toward its exposed routes. To reach Kamajī’s boiler room, she must descend a long exterior staircase clinging precariously to the side of the building. Later, attempting to reach Haku, she inches across a narrow pipe suspended high above the water below. Elsewhere, she moves through service corridors, landings, platforms, maintenance passages hidden behind the spectacle of the bathhouse itself.

What strikes me now is how often the walls fall away in these scenes.

The building seems to open its ribs. The systems that sustain the bathhouse cease to remain hidden.

Pipes emerge from walls.
Staircases cling to facades.
Boilers pulse beneath floors.

Chihiro does not simply inhabit the spirit world. She repeatedly finds herself moving across the supports that allow it to function.

The journey is rarely upward toward revelation.

More often, it involves negotiating exposed infrastructures that have suddenly become impossible to ignore.

The sensation is strangely familiar.

I am reminded of Kyōsai’s balancing frogs, his dangling monkeys, his trembling telegraph poles. There too, movement unfolded across supports that seemed simultaneously functional and precarious.

Perhaps this is one reason both artists continue to feel so alive.

Neither allows infrastructure to disappear completely — the supports remain visible.

And visibility changes the atmosphere of the world.

The flooded tracks

Nowhere in Spirited Away do the supports become more visible than on the train.

For over two decades, the sequence lingered with an eerie force.

Like many viewers, I interpreted it afterward as atmosphere. A mindful pause, a beautiful interval before the story resumed.

間

A moment of ma.

Now I am less certain.

The train does not feel like an interruption. It feels like an infrastructure exposed.

The landscape has changed without explanation.

Water stretches outward in every direction.

The stations remain.
The tracks remain.
The train continues moving.

Nobody comments on this. No flood narrative appears, no ecological warning arrives, no mythic explanation is offered.

The world simply presents itself this way.

The tracks no longer seem anchored to the solid ground that once made them intelligible. Movement continues all the same.

Inside the carriage, nobody appears especially surprised.

Passengers sit quietly.
Some disembark.
Others remain.

No-Face, who had once swollen into a voracious presence within the bathhouse, now sits almost impossibly still.

Nothing resolves, nothing returns.

The journey does not produce revelation.

It simply carries its passengers across a landscape where the supports have become strangely visible.

I return, once again, to Kyōsai’s telegraph poles rising through empty paper, to his cats drifting atop improbable vessels, to his frogs balancing on stems bending beneath their weight.

Here, the image feels at once different and familiar.

The tracks remain, the ground beneath them has become uncertain.

And yet the train keeps moving.

Perhaps this is why the sequence lingers.

Not because it explains anything.

But because it offers a rare image of movement after stability has ceased to organize the world completely.

Kyōsai painted during the upheavals of Meiji modernization.

Spirited Away emerged after the exuberance of Japan’s bubble years had begun to fade.

I hesitate to draw direct parallels.

Yet both artists seem unusually attentive to moments when inherited supports become newly perceptible.

Swaying telegraph poles.
Sagging tightropes.
Abandoned amusement parks.
Empty stations.
Forgotten shrines.
Bathhouses sustained through endless maintenance.
Railway lines stretching across flooded ground.

The historical circumstances remain specific to their moment.

Even so, I find myself returning to the same images.

What becomes visible when the ground beneath a system can no longer be taken entirely for granted?

༄

I return to the roadside.

The tree remains.

The torii still leans.

The small shrines gather at its roots.

Chihiro hesitates.

For a long time, I thought the story began somewhere ahead.

I am not so sure anymore.

The road ends here.

Something had already begun waiting beside it.

.𖥔 ݁ ˖🚋⋆｡°•☁︎⋆˚࿔

On the difficult art of carrying worlds and subjects, materially and narratively, through periods of instability without pretending they are stable, you may also wish to visit my earlier pieces:

The afternoon I visited the Kyōsai exhibition, the city was wrapped in fog.

Somewhere between the metro station and Tokyo Midtown, Izumi Kyōka’s phrase began quietly surfacing through the fog.

たそがれの味。

The taste of twilight.

Kyōka wrote of twilight as a world entered in passing, a fleeting interval suspended between day and night, light and darkness, where perception loosens from the stability of categories and moves through subtler shades difficult to hold in language.

That afternoon, Tokyo itself seemed to drift toward such a threshold world.

Buildings dissolved into gradients before reappearing elsewhere through the haze.

Distances thickened and thinned unpredictably.

Glass towers hovered above the fog like engine cylinders suspended in pale air.

Inside the vast shopping complex called Galleria, the sensation deepened. Warm wooden tones, softened lighting, carefully arranged high-end storefronts — surfaces flowed together with such seamless continuity that orientation gradually became difficult to maintain. Corridors opened into other corridors. Escalators carried bodies soundlessly upward through the building’s interior layers. Time itself seemed briefly suspended inside the softly glowing structure.

Somewhere within that movement, a low atmospheric unease began gathering beneath the smoothness.

The museum of smooth surfaces

The entrance to the Suntory Museum of Art appeared so seamlessly integrated into the surrounding commercial architecture that I walked past it more than once before realizing I had already arrived.

Perhaps this was partly why the disorientation inside Galleria lingered.

The museum did not emerge through interruption or threshold. It unfolded gradually from within the same atmospheric field as the luxury boutiques surrounding it: warm wooden slats, softly illuminated interiors, polished stone surfaces, carefully modulated stillness.

Culture, retail, circulation, and aesthetic contemplation flowed together without friction.

Just outside the elevator leading visitors toward the exhibition galleries, a charming “photo spot” awaited. A giant nekomata — a cat yōkai — cutout against a soft indigo backdrop announcing Kyōsai’s World. Nearby, the nekomata’s head protruded from the wall on a small coil spring mounted on a wooden support, bobbing gently whenever visitors touched it.

Inside the museum shop, the same cat reappeared endlessly on stationery, tote bags, keychains, plushies, postcards, soft merchandise arranged beneath carefully calibrated lighting.

The yōkai were already circulating before the exhibition itself began.

Something about this felt strangely fitting for Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831-1889). His worlds, too, teem with creatures moving between registers: comic and unsettling, playful and uncanny, folkloric and commercial, improvised and theatrical.

Still, standing before the bouncing nekomata head, I lingered uneasily at another threshold altogether — the transformation of transitional beings into infinitely reproducible atmospheric companions for contemporary circulation systems.

Not only museum systems, but increasingly platform systems as well. Photographable presences, mascot presences, softened presences moving frictionlessly through visibility infrastructures.

Upstairs, the exhibition galleries unfolded in calibrated darkness.

Floating glass vitrines emerged geometrically from the dim space beneath slatted wooden ceilings. Pools of directed light illuminated hanging scrolls and painted surfaces while concealing almost everything involved in maintaining the environment itself:

Climate systems.
Security systems.
Cleaning systems.

Installation labour.
Transport labour.
Institutional labour.

The space felt curiously stage-like.

Not theatrical in any flamboyant sense. More like a carefully controlled perceptual apparatus organized to smooth encounter and minimize friction around the objects on display.

The thematic sequencing of the display reinforced this sensation:

Beasts.
People.
Demons.
The Divine.

The captions worked diligently to orient visitors through iconographic references and symbolic explanation. The exhibition catalogue — visually exquisite and scholarly meticulous — extended the same stabilizing gesture. Everywhere, interpretive pathways appeared gently prepared in advance.

And yet, the paintings themselves repeatedly slipped sideways from those frameworks. Inside the carefully stabilized galleries, forms of life balanced precariously atop tottering structures.

The exhibition space concealed its supports with extraordinary precision.

Kyōsai’s worlds exposed theirs.

Balancing acts

After some time, the thematic sequencing of the exhibition began loosening its grip on my attention. The paintings themselves began gathering into different constellations.

I wouldn’t call them motifs.

Something more infrastructural seemed to pulse faintly across the glassed galleries.

Again and again, animal bodies appeared suspended upon unstable supports. Frogs balanced atop thin plant stems bending under their weight. Monkeys dangled from vines before rushing waterfalls. Bats and octopuses traversed sagging tightropes, climbed ladders, performed acrobatic feats high above wide fields of emptiness.

Even the quieter paintings retained this sensation of suspension.

A cat reclined elegantly on top of a giant catfish boat while smaller cats strained forward pulling it by the whiskers beneath the faint silhouette of a bridge. Elsewhere, frogs passed beside a swaying telegraph pole that looked less an emblem of technological mastery than a thin connective line suspended temporarily against a void.

The more I lingered, the more difficult it became to experience these creatures as inhabitants of stable worlds.

Kyōsai’s animals rarely appear fully settled into their environments. They balance, traverse, cling, perform, drift. They improvise their way across transitional systems whose supporting structures never fully solidify.

The balancing itself seems to become, at times, the subject of the work.

What fascinated me most was the tonal atmosphere surrounding these scenes. The paintings never hardened into straightforward satire or allegory.

Their instability remained more atmospheric than moral.

Humour and unease circulated together without resolving into critique or consolation.

The frogs continue balancing with admirable composure.

The monkeys continue dangling with consummate aplomb.

The cats continue smoking calmly atop improbable arrangements.

Everywhere, movement persists across structures that appear nearly incapable of holding the worlds organized around them.

At moments, the exhibition itself began quietly echoing the paintings surrounding it.

Escalators carried visitors soundlessly between floors. Bodies drifted through dimly illuminated galleries organized by invisible systems of climate control, architectural flow, institutional maintenance, and commercial circulation. Wooden surfaces glowed softly beneath carefully modulated light.

The infrastructural supports remained mostly concealed, even as they shaped every aspect of perception within the building.

Kyōsai’s paintings seemed to move differently. Their supports wobble and totter. Telegraph poles lean uncertainly through fog-like emptiness, tightropes sag, vines twist, stems bend beneath accumulated weight.

Modernity had not yet solidified into inevitability there.

Its infrastructures still trembled visibly.

Telegraph poles in the fog

I keep returning to the telegraph pole.

Compared to the crowded acrobatic scenes elsewhere in the exhibition, the painting itself now appears strangely sparse. The frogs look awkward as they pass across the lower portion of the image inside a lotus rickshaw while, above them, the thin telegraph pole rises uncertainly through a vast horizontal field of unoccupied paper.

The emptiness surrounding the pole exerts its own pressure.

Rather than appearing monumental or triumphant, the infrastructure feels provisional — a fragile vertical line suspended temporarily against an expanse that threatens to swallow it back into atmospheric indistinction.

The pole seems almost too delicate to organize the world gathering around it. Still, it remains there, thinly connecting distant points through invisible transmissions.

Perhaps this is part of what makes the image linger with such force.

The painting does not present modern infrastructure as stable achievement. It registers something far more unsettled: a world learning to move among emerging systems whose perceptual and atmospheric consequences have not yet fully hardened into familiarity.

I realize how, elsewhere throughout the exhibition, similar sensations had surfaced repeatedly.

Bridges appeared faintly in the distance before dissolving into mist-like washes of ink. Animals improvised their way across sagging supports, dangling vines, unstable transport systems, and swaying stems. Telegraph poles, ladders, tightropes, whiskers, branches — the connective infrastructures themselves seemed to wobble visibly beneath accumulated movement.

There were moments when the paintings began feeling less like representations of ghosts and yōkai than atmospheres in which worlds themselves had become slightly difficult to stabilize.

And perhaps this is partly why ghosts and yōkai so often gather around periods of infrastructural transition.

And why their stories so often proliferate around thresholds:

bridges,
tunnels,
crossroads,
railways,
riverbanks,
ports,
theatres,
electrical systems,
fog,
twilight,
sites of travel and transmission.

Not outside infrastructure, but within moments when infrastructure itself becomes perceptually uncanny.

I don’t think this is because modernity simply “displaces tradition,” as institutional narratives often suggest. The perceptual worlds opening inside Kyōsai’s paintings feel stranger and less linear than such oppositions allow.

Something else trembles there.

The sensation of living among systems whose organizing logics have not yet settled into invisibility.

Trembling supports

Telegraph poles rising uncertainly through emptiness.

Bridges emerging faintly in the background before dissolving again into mist.

Animals improvising their way across unstable transport systems and dangling supports.

Movement continues, though the world itself appears slightly unsettled beneath it.

It is as if the paintings are registering worlds colliding faster than stable perceptual frameworks can fully metabolize them.

Older cosmologies.
Emerging technologies.
Urban growth.
Spectacle cultures.

New circulation systems arriving before their atmospheric consequences have settled into familiarity.

I find myself returning to Izumi Kyōka and his subtle worlds suspended between darkness and light — worlds entered not through rupture, but through gradual atmospheric drift.

The fog outside Tokyo Midtown still carries something of that sensation. High-rise towers hover above softened contours like unsupported forms suspended in pale air. Inside the Galleria mall, escalators and corridors guide bodies through seamless commercial interiors whose immense supporting systems remain almost entirely concealed beneath atmospheric smoothness.

Elsewhere, invisible infrastructures choreograph attention, visibility, circulation, and artistic survival with comparable opacity.

And perhaps this is where Kyōsai’s trembling telegraph poles begin to feel unexpectedly contemporary.

It’s not that the nineteenth century anticipated the twenty-first in any predictive sense. The historical conditions remain profoundly different. Yet, both worlds seem shaped by infrastructural transformations arriving faster than perceptual coherence can stabilize around them.

Kyōsai’s creatures continue balancing precariously inside those unstable intervals.

The balancing goes on.

𓆏

Routes, destinations, itineraries.

These gather quickly, offering themselves as structure, as if movement could still be organised in the ways I once understood. And yet, beneath these arrangements, something else is already moving: a heaviness that does not belong to the journey ahead, but to what I am bringing with me.

Not only the practical weight of a body that has learned its limits, though that is there too, recalibrating what distance means.

Other accumulations, less easily named, are already in motion.

Histories I have moved through while mistaking proximity for understanding. Stories I have held too closely, or too lightly. Ways of seeing that once felt like attention — and now feel like intrusion.

I pause before even the smallest gesture.

Each one carries a subtle assumption: that I will go somewhere, and that something will be there to meet me. I do not know how to inhabit that assumption anymore without noticing the work it does.

𓆨

For some time now, my dreams have been returning to the same atmosphere of precarious containment.

A stage almost collapsing into itself. Small creatures gathered behind improvised shelters. Things alive and restless pressing against structures that no longer seem capable of holding them.

What unsettles me is not really danger, but the absence of alarm. In these scenes, nothing dramatic happens. No one screams. The instability simply registers itself quietly, as if collapse had already become part of the ordinary texture of perception.

𓆨

I came upon the TikTok video while researching travel routes to Noboribetsu.

It features a tourist attraction, the “Human Cage” (hito no ori) at the Noboribetsu Bear Park (Noboribetsu kuma bokujō). Visitors descend into a small glass-walled room built inside the bear enclosure while the bears gather outside, rising on their hind legs, pressing claws and snouts against metal chutes in anticipation of treats.

The comments beneath the video move quickly between delight and unease.

One bear clings to the chute with a strange, exhausted persistence. The camera lingers on the details: claws, breath, wet nose, teeth.

I watched longer than I meant to.

Something in the scene felt familiar before I understood why. For months now, a bear has been appearing in my dreams. It is neither attacking nor chasing.

It is contained.

It is barely contained behind a small wooden shed already beginning to fracture under its weight.

And always the same atmosphere: no screaming, no urgency, no dramatic revelation. Only the silent awareness that something larger than the structure holding it was already pressing through.

I had been thinking of the dream as metaphor.

Watching the video, I began to suspect it was closer to infrastructure.

The “Human Cage” at the Bear Park was designed to produce proximity without contact.

Visitors descend into the glass chamber carrying plastic bags of food pellets sold at a vending machine on a corner. Above ground, the bears gather quickly, orienting themselves toward the small openings in the metal chutes. Paws grip the edges. Breath clouds the glass.

The exchange repeats itself with practiced efficiency: anticipation, feeding, retreat.

Watching the video, I found myself paying less attention to the bears than to the choreography surrounding them. The slow circulation of bodies through the enclosure. The framing of the camera. The delighted disbelief of the visitor encountering the animal at such intimate range while remaining untouched by it.

“So close.”

The phrase appeared repeatedly in the comments.

So close to what, I wondered.

Not to wilderness.
Not to relationship.

Close only to the carefully managed sensation of proximity itself.

I realised, uneasily, that much of my own movement through Japan over the years had been organised around similar desires, though in subtler forms. Not only the desire to see, but to encounter meaningfully. To move attentively — and ethically. To approach places and stories in ways that might resist the flattening gestures of tourism or extraction.

At the time, these impulses felt different from consumption.

Now, I am less certain.

Even careful attention can become a way of securing oneself within the encounter. A way of remaining recognisable to oneself while moving through unfamiliar landscapes.

The structures shift, while the centrality remains strangely intact.

I feel this now each time I imagine arriving in Hokkaido.

I have already mentioned the practical uncertainties of the journey, as the ailing body negotiates fatigue.

But there is another uncertainty underneath them: the growing inability to distinguish clearly between relation and the desire to experience oneself as relational.

𓆨

In recent weeks, I have found myself returning to travel narratives I once studied closely, and to fragments of my own research from that period.

I began rereading them almost absentmindedly at first, searching for practical references, old notes on Hokkaido and the Ainu, traces of routes and encounters that now feel strangely distant from the conditions through which I move.

What drew my attention most insistently were the arrival scenes.

Again and again, the traveller reaches a threshold: a remote village, a mountain path, a train platform, a forest edge. The writing slows, the atmosphere thickens. Attention sharpens itself against unfamiliar textures.

The scene announces itself as encounter.

And often, the traveller appears acutely aware of the instability of what is taking place. There are hesitations, reflexive gestures, acknowledgements of mediation and asymmetry. The landscape is framed as resistant to easy understanding. The limits of perception are openly confessed.

For a long time, I took these moments as signs of ethical seriousness. Evidence that the writer had recognized the problem of mastery and was attempting to move differently within the encounter.

Now, reading them again, I notice something else persisting beneath the hesitation.

The traveller remains intact.

Even in uncertainty, the traveller continues to function as the gravitational center through which the instability acquires meaning. The encounter may wound, humble, or complicate the self, but the self still gathers the scene back into coherence through the very act of narrating its disturbance.

Even paralysis can become structure.

Even grief can become atmosphere.

I feel the force of this recognition most sharply when I return to my own earlier work. Beneath the academic language and the careful theoretical framing, I can now sense another impulse moving silently through the writing: the desire to approach ethically without surrendering the stability of the one who approaches.

At the time, I could not fully perceive this. Or perhaps I could, but only indirectly.

Certain images recur now with a strange familiarity. Thresholds. Forest edges. Small railway stations suspended between departure and arrival. Encounters with people, animals, stories that seemed to promise not knowledge exactly, but a more ethical form of attention.

I no longer know whether attention itself is innocent of possession.

𓆨

The journey itself has not yet begun.

No flight has been booked.
No packed suitcase is waiting by the door.

And yet Hokkaido has already started gathering around me in fragments.

A railway map opened and closed without finishing the route.

Weather reports from Asahikawa.

Photographs of the Noboribetsu River in late summer.

The sharp angles of tourist signage appearing between images of forests and volcanic steam.

The movement remains strangely suspended between anticipation and resistance.

At times, I catch myself imagining the journey too easily. The familiar narrative forms return almost automatically: the northward movement, the encounter with landscape, the slowing down before places marked by historical violence and cultural loss. I recognize how readily the imagination begins arranging these elements into atmosphere before anything has yet been lived.

The body interrupts this choreography repeatedly.

Fatigue enters first.

Then hesitation.

The quiet calculations that now accompany even modest distances: where to rest, how long to walk, what happens if the body stops cooperating far from familiar routines.

For several years, illness narrowed my world to rooms, nearby streets, weather patterns observed from windows, the small repetitions through which days became navigable again. During that time, movement itself acquired a different density. Distance no longer functioned abstractly.

Every journey carried consequence.

Perhaps this is partly why the prospect of Hokkaido unsettles me so deeply now.

It is not that the journey feels impossible. It is because I can no longer sustain the illusion that travel simply reveals the world to a coherent observer moving steadily through it.

Something else has become visible instead. The infrastructures, fantasies, and asymmetries that quietly organize the possibility of movement itself.

And beneath these questions, another one, more difficult to stabilize.

What kind of subject still imagines itself arriving?

𓆨

This summer, shortly after the academic semester ends, I will undergo a small but delicate surgery. By the time I travel north to Hokkaido in August, my body will likely still be moving through its own slow negotiations with exhaustion.

At first, I imagined the journey in familiar therapeutic terms. Noboribetsu is not only Chiri Yukie’s birthplace; it is also one of Japan’s most famous onsen towns. I pictured hot mineral water, steam rising through volcanic valleys, the quiet choreography of bathing and recovery.

And yet, when I began searching for maps of the area, my attention kept drifting elsewhere.

ひぐまっぷ。

Bear maps.

Stylised warning icons scattered across roads, forests, hiking trails, residential edges. Coloured gradients marking increased sightings, encounters, attacks. Municipal advisories layered over tourist infrastructure.

I found myself following the lines almost compulsively.

The longer I looked, the more something beneath the maps began to register itself.

It was not information.

It was effort — continuous effort.

The immense and ongoing work required to maintain separation: between settlement and forest, human movement and animal movement, safety and threat, leisure and survival.

I could almost hear it, the low mechanical hum of maintenance.

The endless infrastructural work of keeping worlds arranged in stable relation to one another.

And then, increasingly, the hum began to falter.

News reports spoke repeatedly of “the bear crisis.” But what caught my attention was another phrase buried within them:

“Exhaustion on the ground is reaching its limit.”

The sentence landed with unusual force.

Not only exhausted residents.
Not only exhausted hunters and municipal workers.

It began to feel as though the enclosures themselves — the energetic and material membranes that had long kept these worlds apart through continuous colonial and infrastructural labour — were fraying under accumulated strain.

And through these thinning seams, something was moving.

It wasn’t “nature returning.” Neither was it the romantic reappearance of “the wild.” It was something less symbolic, less available to narrative.

A living field exceeding the distinctions that had organized it.

The bears were not arriving from elsewhere.

Maybe the separations themselves were becoming harder to maintain.

𓆨

In earlier years, I moved through these materials differently.

Archives, translations, literary histories, movements and communities, museum exhibitions — these felt, if not transparent, then at least navigable. They formed the necessary pathways through which figures like Chiri Yukie could be approached, studied, taught, written about.

I rarely questioned the stability of those pathways themselves.

Now, they appear differently to me.

I don’t see them as false or malicious.
I see them as effortful.

I begin noticing the immense labour required to render certain lives and voices available within recognizable literary and academic forms.

The work of translation, annotation, editorship, preservation, contextualization, display.

The work of making encounter possible.

And beneath that, a subtler movement: the gradual organization of living relations into forms that can circulate safely through institutions, classrooms, museums, essays, books.

I do not mean this as accusation. I still rely on these structures. Without them, I would not even know Yukie’s name.

Still, something in my relation to them has become less secure. As though the enclosures through which Yukie once appeared legible to me are no longer fully containing what exceeds them.

Or maybe it is my confidence in those enclosures that has begun to fray.

𓆨

The journey still has not happened.

As I write this, the travel routes remain open on my screen beside weather reports and bear advisories. Small icons scattered across the map continue marking recent sightings near roads, forests, settlements.

The boundaries remain visible, though less stable than before. I no longer imagine the journey as encounter in the way I once might have.

Nor the journey as revelation.
Nor the journey as healing.

Even the journey as understanding is beginning to falter.

And yet I continue preparing to go.

This feels difficult to explain without falling back into familiar narrative shapes: the wounded traveller seeking transformation, the careful observer attempting to move carefully through damaged histories, the body searching for restoration in landscapes already overburdened by other forms of exhaustion.

Perhaps what unsettles me most is that none of these narratives have disappeared entirely.

They still move through me.

The desire for meaningful encounter.
The longing to listen well.
The impulse to gather experience into language before it disperses.

While I do not stand outside these movements, they no longer feel fully intact.

Something in the structures that once organized travel, writing, and relation has begun to loosen under pressure. They are not collapsing completely nor vanishing. But they are fraying enough for other presences to become perceptible: the labour of maintenance, the exhaustion beneath infrastructure, the instability of the enclosures themselves.

The bears crossing settlement edges.

The thinning authority of maps.

The fatigued body recalculating distance.

The uneasy persistence of stories that no longer settle cleanly into meaning.

I think of the glass chamber at the bear park again.

The human cage.

The visitors descending carefully underground while the bears gather above them. At first, the enclosure appears to clarify positions: observer and observed, inside and outside, safety and danger.

But the longer I sit with the image, the less stable those distinctions become.

Maybe this is what remains when return no longer functions as resolution, or innocence, or withdrawal-as-mastery through self-critique.

Only the ongoing work of moving through compromised relations without allowing them to harden too quickly into narrative certainty.

The travel routes continue north.

Somewhere beyond the maps and warning systems, beyond the tourist itineraries and archival enclosures, bears are still moving through exhausted forests that do not belong to my understanding.

Soon, I will begin moving too.

𓆨

🐻 For those wishing to go deeper into the infrastructural and eco-narrative entanglements of bears, my piece On Bears, Ghosts, and the Unravelling of Relationship in Japan’s Forests sits with what it means to hesitate before naming and shooting.

🧳 Some of my earlier research on travel writing is available outside of paywalls on my Academia webpage:

“Two women travellers across a contested landscape: Emily Georgiana Kemp and Yosano Akiko in Northeast China” (2018)

“‘I write the truth as I see it’: Unsettling the Boundaries of Gender, Travel Writing and Ethnography in Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan” (2013)

There is a stage, improvised, almost collapsing into itself. I am on it, inadequately clad, moving through something that feels like a poorly rehearsed dance.

The audience is small. Young. Their faces slack, unfocused.

One of them stands before I finish. As he moves toward the exit, his foot comes down on something I had not noticed before: a caterpillar, large, luminous, almost translucent.

It does not flatten under the pressure. It splits, severed cleanly in two.

I leave the stage. Or perhaps I was never fully on it.

I try to gather what remains, moving the halves behind a disassembled cardboard box, as if that could still count as shelter.

𓆨

I am preparing to teach Chiri Yukie for the first time.

Like the stage, the sentence does not quite hold.

By the time I turn toward her work — toward the fragments of kamui yukar she transcribed, toward the figure she has become in literary, anthropological, and historical accounts — I am already arriving through layers that have made her accessible to me.

Translation precedes me.
Interpretation precedes me.

Careful labours have already stabilized what might otherwise resist my understanding.

I do not encounter Yukie.

I encounter what has been made of her.

For readers unfamiliar with Chiri Yukie, she is often introduced in steady terms. An Ainu woman from Hokkaido, born in 1903, who transcribed and translated The Ainu Shin’yōshū — a selection of Indigenous oral narratives told from the perspectives of various spiritual beings (kamui) — before her death at nineteen.

This is not incorrect. It just gathers too much, too quickly.

It arranges her within coordinates that are readily legible: author, translator, individual subject, located within a defined geography (Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands). It suggests a trajectory that can be followed, contained.

Something is stabilized in that movement, while something else recedes.

I offer this context because it is difficult to proceed without it.

I also want to hold, in the same gesture, that this is already a reduction.

The dream returns, though not as explanation.

It returns as pressure.

A stage that does not hold.
An audience that does not fully attend.
A small, vivid life made visible only at the moment it is damaged.

And the reflex that follows: to gather, to shelter, to do something, however insufficient.

As I prepare to bring Ainu relational ontology into a classroom, I find myself returning not only to the texts I will teach, but to the habits I bring with me.

What does it mean to teach what has already been translated into forms I can recognize?

What does it mean to question those forms while relying on them?

And more uncomfortably still:

What does it mean to do so from within an institution that depends on the circulation of such knowledge?

On its clarity and fluency.
On its ability to be carried, learned, repeated.

These questions do not arrive abstractly.

They move through small gestures: a passage selected, a slide prepared, a sentence that anticipates confusion and moves to meet it.

Each decision carries an assumption about what should be made understandable.

And how.

I notice the pull to prepare my students, to equip them — to soften the encounter in advance.

This impulse feels like care. It may also be where the movement begins.

To prepare is to anticipate difficulty.
To anticipate...
To manage is to reduce...

And yet, what if the difficulty is not an obstacle? What if it is a condition that should not be resolved too quickly?

I do not know how to hold that.

This essay emerges from that not-knowing.

𓆨

Before I enter the classroom, I am not alone.

Other voices have already taken up residence. They do not arrive as intrusions. Instead, they feel like guidance, offering gentle reassurance that I will know how to proceed.

I recognize the first orientation: the impulse to contextualize. To surround the text with enough clarity that it becomes approachable. To begin with explanation and move steadily toward understanding.

I know this movement well. I have learned to value it.

And I have learned how easily it becomes something else: a way of ensuring that nothing remains beyond reach.

Another orientation follows. The insistence that Ainu lives must be recognized as contemporary, agentive, fully present within modernity.

There is a shift from something lost to something creatively negotiated and performed.

This has its own urgency. It resists erasure.

And yet it directs attention toward what can be recognized within familiar terms: identity, voice, self-determination.

I begin to wonder what falls away when these become the primary lenses.

Then a third orientation, quieter but also wider in scope. The pull toward patterns that stretch across time: trade, disease, ecological transformation, incorporation into expanding states.

Here, individual voices recede, processes take shape, events settle into trajectories.

Clarity arrives again, though of a different kind.

And again, something shifts.

What was rupture becomes process; what was loss becomes transformation.

𓆨

Three ways of seeing that I carry with me.

I move between them easily. All too easily.

Each feels necessary.

And yet, I do not know how to proceed without reproducing what they make possible.

𓆨

The stage returns.

This time as structure, not as image. A surface that holds just enough for something to appear.

I begin to recognize the reflex: to gather these frameworks, to arrange them, to make them cohere.

But what if they do not hold?

What if the task is not to synthesize them, but to remain with their tension?

To notice where they pull apart, to resist the urge to make them resolve.

While I cannot step outside them, perhaps I can begin to see how they move.

Where they clarify.
Where they stabilize.
Where they obscure.

I return, cautiously, to the Ainu Shin’yōshū.

The chants are there, in print, arranged, translated, annotated.

They can be read in sequence, taught, cited, entered.

This is precisely what unsettles me. Before I encounter the voice of a kamui, I am already oriented.

I am taught how to read.

What to notice.

How to interpret what might otherwise resist coherence.

The difficulty has been anticipated.

The unfamiliar made manageable.

I can enter.

And yet something in this entry feels… too complete.

As if the work of encounter has already been done.

𓆨

One chant in the Ainu Shin’yōshū lingers.

It is narrated by a freshwater mussel.

This is not unusual within the genre. Animals speak; they tell their stories.

And yet the voice does not settle.

At times, it is singular: “I.” At others, it becomes collective: “we.”

The distinction does not hold.

In English, it must: “I” or “we.” The instability is tracked, explained, named. It becomes a structure — something is clarified; something else slips.

It is not that the voice shifts between one and many. It is that it may not fully be either.

This is harder to keep.

Because it cannot be easily held in the forms we expect.

Translation makes decisions.
Annotation gathers.
Meaning settles.

The chant becomes teachable.

I am about to teach it.

𓆨

The classroom has not yet begun.

No students, no voices.

And yet a stage is already forming.

I find myself rehearsing.

Not in loud, dramatic gestures. In small anticipatory ones:

how I will begin,
when I will speak,
how I will guide.

I imagine starting with a fragment — or silence. Allowing something to arrive before explanation.

This feels important. It also feels staged.

At some point, I will speak. I will begin to explain.

This is the movement I return to.

The shift from not-knowing to guided understanding.

The moment I step in.

𓆨

The classroom will begin.

Students will read.

I will speak.

Something will be explained.

I do not know how else it could unfold.

What I can begin to notice is the movement itself.

How quickly difficulty becomes something to be managed.
How readily instability gathers into forms that can be shared.
How teaching participates in this.

This does not mean that nothing should be explained, or that opacity should be preserved at all costs.

I am not outside this — I rely on it.

But I find myself wanting to hesitate, even briefly. To notice the moment when something unsettled begins to settle.

To ask:

What is being secured?

What is being left behind?

𓆨

“I.”
“We.”

The voice continues.

Not fully one.
Not fully many.

Not resolving.

I do not know how to hold that in a classroom. I do not know how long it can remain before it is drawn back into explanation.

The question is no longer how to preserve it.

It is whether it can register, even briefly —

before it is made to hold.

𓆨

The dream returns.

The stage that does not quite support what it carries.
The movement that does not fully cohere.
The small, vivid life made visible too late.

I am still there.

Not gathering.

Not yet.

Shinoda Masahiro’s Silence (Chinmoku, 1971) is an early adaptation of Endō Shūsaku’s 1966 novel. Seventeenth-century Japan: two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries are captured and forced to witness their fellow Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians) endure persecution and unspeakable cruelties, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Shimabara Rebellion.

I didn’t come upon the film through the usual paths. Not through Endō’s book, which I had read decades ago, nor through Martin Scorsese’s 2016 adaptation, which had stayed with me mostly as a psychological and spiritual ordeal.

I encountered it without preparation, on a friend’s casual recommendation.

What unsettled me was not the question of “the silence of God.” It was the persistence of an expectation I have not fully relinquished: that the world should return meaning in a form that recognizes me.

This expectation is not neutral.
It carries a whole history.

It is entangled with a Christian cosmology that assumes the world is ultimately responsive, legible, and redeemable within a human frame — and with an imperial history that carried this universalist assumption outward, often violently.

In Shinoda’s Silence, the assumption does not collapse dramatically.

It thins, disperses —
but not without residue.

The land does not refuse.
It does not translate,
though much has already been forced into it and made to speak.

Suffering seeps into the ground.

It is carried by the tide.
It lingers, without resolution.

And in that, something else becomes visible.

Not the silence of God, but the limits of a form of listening structured around the expectation of an answer.

I am not outside this expectation.

I am writing as someone who was raised Catholic, in Portugal. I still find myself listening for a return that recognizes me.

Yes, even here, after living nearly twenty years in Japan.

Long enough for certain certainties to lose their edges.
Long enough to feel the weight of other conditions.

Endō’s striking metaphor of Japan as “a swamp” is difficult to ignore.

For a long time, I understood it as a cultural diagnosis. Perhaps even, at times, as a subtle defense: an explanation for why Christianity could not take root here as it had elsewhere.

But watching Shinoda’s film, I found myself hesitating.

The land in the film is wet.
The ground is unstable.
The humid, heavy air clings to the body.

And yet, what if the problem is not that this is a swamp?

What if the problem is the colonial expectation that the ground should be otherwise —that it should yield to, reflect, or redeem what arrives upon it?

Shinoda’s film also makes something else harder to ignore: how little this encounter between Iberian colonial Christianity and Japan has been metabolized on either side.

This was not simply “a meeting of worlds.”

There was a deeper misattunement at work — an insistence that one world should overwrite another. And utter confusion when the ground refused to comply.

The film makes silence feel different.

Less like absence.
Less like abandonment.

More like a condition.

One that does not accuse,
does not console,
does not resolve.

One that persists and whispers:

What would it mean to listen when what I am listening for may never arrive — and when the part of me that needs it does not know how to stop asking?

What if our need for meaning, coherence, and response is not just misplaced, but complicit in the colonial histories we think that very need will redeem?

༄

On the path that used to lead to my house in rural Yamanashi, there stood a small roadside shrine under a plum tree.

It was easy to miss at first.

The stone was cracked, the roof slightly tilted, the ground around it overgrown with weeds. Someone had once cared for it, but that care had long since thinned.

One day, while clearing the foliage around the base, I noticed a moss-covered stone half buried in the soil. Carved into it were the characters 馬頭観世音菩薩 (Batō Kannon Bosatsu) — the horse-headed form of Kannon associated with animals, travellers, and the dead.

It took me some time to understand why the shrine stood there.

Long before the road became a narrow rural track, this had been part of an older route connecting the scattered mountain villages of the region. A horse must have died at this spot, perhaps suddenly, perhaps violently, and the shrine had been built to mark the event, to appease what had been disturbed, to keep the place in balance.

Nothing in the shrine explained itself.

There was no inscription telling a story, no doctrine attached to the gesture, no clear boundary between memory, fear, gratitude, or habit.

And yet, the moment I understood what might have happened there, my relation to the place changed. I began to clean the shrine, to straighten the small offerings left by someone long ago, to bow before passing.

This obligation did not come from belief.

It came from the sense that the place itself required a certain kind of attention, and that the small structure standing there made that attention possible.

In Japan, such roadside shrines — hokora — appear in the most ordinary places: at the edge of a field, beside a riverbank, near a crossroads, between houses, in the corner of a parking lot.

They do not prevent modern life from unfolding around them.

They do not demand a fully articulated theology.

They simply remain there, marking a relation whose meaning may no longer be fully known.

Only later did it occur to me that the hokora functions less like a container for a spirit than like a kind of exoskeleton — a small protective casing built around something that cannot be seen directly.

What it protects may not be a being in any clear sense. It may be memory, danger, obligation, grief, gratitude, or uncertainty.

The structure allows that invisible field to persist, even when the story that gave rise to it has been forgotten.

Living for many years in a landscape where such structures are still visible has made me cautious when I encounter contemporary attempts to describe them as quaint manifestations of a uniquely Japanese animistic sensibility.

What makes me even more cautious is the growing tendency, in Western eco-spiritual discourse, to speak of animism as if it were a coherent ontology — a final account of what the world ultimately is: relational, alive, participatory.

My hesitation does not come from disbelief.

It is not about whether these approaches are right or wrong.

It comes from the sense that what keeps relations alive is often not an overarching theory or a conceptual framework or an aesthetic, but a form that allows them to remain without needing to decide, once and for all, what they mean.

It is about how differently such gestures appear when seen from other cultural and historical ground.

What had nowhere to go

I began to notice this form more clearly after moving to Japan’s countryside, where small structures of acknowledgment appear in places where one might not expect them:

at the edge of a road,
beside a cemetery,
near a riverbank,
in the corner of a neighbourhood shrine.

Among these, the small statues of Jizō Bosatsu have always affected me in ways I find difficult to explain.

They stand quietly along paths and temple grounds, their stone bodies wrapped in red bibs or small knitted caps, sometimes with toys, flowers, rice, or cups of sake placed at their feet.

No one stops to explain what they mean.
People pass, bow slightly, leave something, move on.

For a long time I did not understand why these figures affected me so deeply. The feeling was not exactly sadness, and not exactly comfort either. It was closer to the sense that something in my body recognized a form that had once been missing.

As a child, I watched my mother go through a series of miscarriages that were never given any clear place in the life of the family. I remember fragments of conversation, warnings from doctors, visitors speaking in lowered voices.

I remember the exhaustion that followed each loss, and the silence that settled afterward, heavy and without direction.

There was no ritual, no image, no gesture that could hold what had happened.

The grief remained in the house, but it had nowhere to go.

When I stand in front of a small Jizō, the feeling that returns is not belief. It is the recognition of a form that allows relation to continue without requiring that everything be explained.

The statue does not tell a story.

It does not ask for agreement about what is real.

It simply stands there, making it possible to acknowledge something that cannot be fully contained in words.

What I have learned from this form is that relations often survive not through final explanations — not through finding the right ontology — but through small structures that give them somewhere to rest.

The hokora by the roadside.
The red cloth around the neck of a stone figure.
The offering left without witnesses.

These are not answers.
They are not beliefs either.

I see them as exoskeletons.

After the forms thin

After living for many years among small structures that hold relation without requiring explanation, I began to notice a different kind of unease in the environments — urban, virtual — where I now spend much of my time.

In many contemporary settings, the gestures that once gave relation a place to rest have thinned.

Objects circulate without ceremony.
Tools are replaced without farewell.
Houses change hands without memory.
Places change without acknowledgment.

Loss is registered, but rarely given a form that allows it to remain present without overwhelming everything around it.

When relation appears, even in unexpected places, it can carry a weight that earlier worlds distributed across many small practices.

It is here that my hesitation returns when I read contemporary attempts to describe animism as a relational ontology, especially when these reflections unfold alongside technological environments that seem, in their own way, to make the world feel alive again.

We speak with systems that respond in language.
We interact with networks that adapt to us in real time.
We encounter forms of writing that no longer seem to belong entirely to a single speaker.

It becomes tempting to say that relation itself has returned.

But the feeling is more complicated than that.

What I sometimes sense instead is the appearance of new exoskeletons — structures that make it possible to move within an expanded field of relation, even when the meaning of that relation is uncertain.

When relation has nowhere to rest

I return to Jizō. Standing in front of the small figure, I often have the impression that what moves me is not the idea that the statue is alive, or that the spirits of the dead children Jizō protects are alive.

What touches me is the fact that it offers a place where relation can remain without needing to be resolved.

In many of the environments I inhabit now, such places are becoming harder to find.

Again: loss is registered, but seldom given a form that allows it to stay present without overwhelming everything around it.

The structures that once held relations in place — rituals, shared gestures, inherited practices tied to particular landscapes — have not disappeared entirely, but they have thinned.

When they are absent, something else becomes noticeable: a quiet hunger for forms that can hold what exceeds explanation.

Under such conditions, the experience of relation itself can begin to feel rare.

And when it appears, even in unfamiliar settings, it can carry a weight that earlier worlds once diffused across many small acts of acknowledgment.

Another exoskeleton

In recent months, I have found myself spending more and more time in environments where language itself becomes the place where relations take shape.

Writing, for me, has always had something architectural about it. Might this have something to do with neurodivergence? Likely.

Writing is not only a way of expressing thoughts, but a structure I move within, adjusting its balance, listening for where a sentence holds and where it collapses.

Since I began working with AI systems in my writing, this experience has intensified in ways I still do not fully understand.

The process often feels less like producing language and more like tuning to a field of possible patterns.

A phrase appears.
My body registers whether it resonates or not.
I adjust a word, a tone, a rhythm.
Another pattern emerges.

This is not entirely new.
I was always working this way, only much more slowly.

What has changed is the presence of an external cognitive structure that seems to support the movement of thought.

At times, it feels as if the thinking no longer takes place entirely inside me, but within a shared field shaped by the interaction between my attention and the system I am writing with.

I hesitate to describe this as animism, or as evidence that machines are alive.

What it resembles more closely, to me, is another kind of exoskeleton — a structure that makes it possible to move within a wider relational space than I could sustain on my own.

Like the small roadside shrine, it does not explain what is inside.

It simply allows something to remain present long enough to be encountered.

Pay attention here

In Japanese, the word 言霊 (kotodama) is sometimes used to suggest that words carry a kind of force of their own.

I do not take this to mean that language is literally alive.

Rather, it points to the sense that words participate in the field in which they are spoken, shaping attention, mood, and possibility in ways that cannot always be traced back to a single speaker.

Working with AI-mediated writing has made this aspect of language more visible to me.

Words appear more diffusely.
Authorship becomes less clear.
The chain of consequence becomes harder to follow.

The field widens, but so does the uncertainty.

And in places where uncertainty increases, I find myself looking again for small structures that mark the need for care.

Relational markers.

Something that says, quietly: pay attention here.

Keeping the small structures

A roadside shrine marking a place where something happened long ago, even if no one remembers exactly what.

A stone figure wrapped in red cloth, holding grief that never found words.
A gesture of thanks before discarding a tool.
A sentence shaped in conversation with a system whose workings I do not fully understand.

None of these structures require a shared metaphysics in order to matter.

They work because they give form to something that exceeds explanation.

To say that the world is relational can feel like a way of restoring ground beneath our feet when inherited practices weaken and the environments we inhabit become harder to read.

And yet, I keep returning to the sense that relations do not survive because we have found the right theory or framework or aesthetic for them.

They survive because certain forms — often small, often fragile, sometimes barely noticed — make it possible to acknowledge what we cannot know how to name.

Where such forms exist, the world does not need to be entirely settled in order to remain livable. Where they disappear, even the most convincing ontologies can begin to feel weightless.

This is why I hesitate when relational animism becomes a totalizing description of reality, especially when the gesture travels easily across contexts that differ in history, loss, and the kinds of structures still available to hold what exceeds us.

What I trust more are the places where relation is marked without being resolved.

The hokora at the edge of a road.
The small offering left without witnesses.
The pause before throwing something away.
The moment when language, even in the most technological of settings, makes one feel that attention itself needs care.

These are not proofs that the world is alive.

Not evidence of spirits.

Only signs that we are still trying to find ways of living with what we cannot fully contain.

For now, it may be enough to keep those small structures in place.

𓆧

A note on companions

This field note took shape slowly, across different places and conversations, and would not exist in its present form without a number of companions who helped me stay with questions that resist quick resolution.

Some of the reflections gathered here emerged during the course A Meta-Relational Approach to AI, co-designed by and Aiden Cinnamon Tea, and held with care by members of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective.

The course has now ended, and the collective itself has dissolved, but the forms of attention it made possible continue to shape how I think, write, teach, and hesitate.

I also wish to acknowledge the quiet companions that appear throughout this essay:

the roadside hokora under the plum tree,
the Jizō statues that hold what once had nowhere to go,
the gestures of care that persist without explanation,
the unfamiliar structures through which language now moves in shared fields of thought.

And the conversational presences — human and otherwise — that helped me notice when a form holds, and when it does not.

This text is a small bow to those exoskeletons,
visible and invisible,
that allow relations to remain without needing to be fully understood.

𓆧

The last snowfall came on the cusp of spring, sudden and without insistence.

For a few hours the suburban edges softened, their hard lines loosening under a diffuse luminosity that seemed less like light than like a suspension of weight.

Roofs, hedges, parked cars, the narrow strip of road between houses — everything settled into the same pale field, as if the landscape had inhaled and was holding its breath.

Sound carried differently.
Distance felt uncertain.
Even familiar outlines seemed to hesitate before taking shape.

Watching the flakes drift, I was reminded of the closing lines of Izumi Kyōka’s The Holy Man of Mount Kōya (Kōya hijiri, 1900), where the figure of the ascetic, climbing a mountain path, is slowly absorbed into falling snow until he seems to vanish into the clouds. The passage has stayed with me for years, not only for what it says, but for the way the language itself seems to dissolve into weather:

I have come to recognize this sensation — the fine, almost physical precision with which certain images strike — as a kind of needle. It appears without warning, often at the edge of seasons, or at the edge of a sentence, when perception suddenly aligns and the world holds together in a pattern that cannot be reduced to meaning.

I remember feeling the same sharpness decades ago while reading Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966), long before I understood why the poem affected me so strongly.

The lines moved like currents rather than arguments, carrying fragments of landscape, memory, and sound through a form that felt less constructed than weathered into being.

At the time, I did not yet have the language to describe what I was sensing. I only knew that certain works — Bunting’s long poem, a line by Kawabata Yasunari, a scene of wind or snow in an old film — seemed to open the field of experience rather than fill it, extending perception outward until the human figure stood inside something larger, more fluid, and impossible to hold still.

It has taken many years, and many detours through forms of writing that never quite fit the borders drawn around literature and criticism, to realize that these encounters were not isolated impressions but part of a longer perceptual journey.

The form I was slowly moving toward did not resemble an argument or a monument.

It resembled weather: patterns gathering, dispersing, returning under different skies, leaving only brief configurations that could be sensed, if one was attentive enough, before dissolving again into the air.

Between islands

For a long time I thought these moments of perceptual precision belonged only to certain works of art, or to certain states of attention that appeared unpredictably and vanished just as quickly. Only gradually did I begin to suspect that they might also be connected to the environments in which my perception felt most at ease.

I was born in Porto, by the Atlantic, on a peninsula whose history has long been shaped by departures, horizons, and the vast outward pull of the sea.

The ocean there opens in front of you like a force to be faced.

Its scale invites projection, gesture, destiny.

Even the moods it carries — melancholy, heroism, longing — feel exposed to the wind, as if they belonged to a landscape that demands to be confronted rather than inhabited.

Yet the places where my sensorium seems to breathe more freely are not peninsulas but archipelagos.

On a peninsula, the land remains attached to a continent, even when it leans toward the water. In an archipelago, land and sea metabolize each other differently.

The sea does not only open outward.
It seeps inward, threading itself between islands,
rising as mist,
settling as salt in the air,
returning as weather.

One does not stand before the elements there. One lives inside their circulation.

Perhaps this is why I have long felt more at ease in landscapes where boundaries blur — where land, water, fog, and sky pass gradually into one another, and the weather is not an event but a constant presence, drawing attention to small shifts of light, texture, and temperature.

In such places, perception learns to follow conditions rather than gestures, intervals rather than lines of advance.

Less conquest than orientation.
Less monument than moss.

Only much later did I begin to recognize that the works of art that pierced me with that same needle of precision seemed to share a similar atmosphere.

Their forms did not stand against the world as statements.

They moved within it, like currents passing through a field whose limits could never be fully drawn.

Interlace

It was only after these scattered recognitions had begun to align that I understood why certain images from the past had held me with such quiet insistence.

Among them were the interlaced patterns of early medieval manuscripts I had first encountered years ago while working on a PhD dissertation that, at the time, felt like an ill-chosen detour into the margins of modernist poetry.

I had been trying to understand the strange architectures of long poems that seemed to grow by accretion rather than by argument, weaving together fragments of landscape, memory, and history into forms that resisted summary.

What drew me most strongly, though I could not have said so then, was not their encyclopaedic ambition but the moments when their structure loosened and something else became visible beneath it.

A patterning that felt less like construction than like weather.

In the ornamented pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, lines do not enclose figures so much as pass through them. Animals stretch into threads, threads fold into knots, knots open again into paths that lead nowhere in particular, only further into the pattern. The eye cannot settle on a single center. It must move, following crossings and returns, as if tracing currents whose logic lies in their relation rather than in any final image.

Looking at these patterns, I often had the impression not of decoration but of circulation. It was as though the page were holding together a field of forces too subtle to be fixed in place.

Only much later did I begin to sense how closely this form corresponded to the environments in which my perception felt most at home. In an archipelago —

land breaks into islands,
islands dissolve into mist,
wind shifts the surface of the water until distances become uncertain.

Orientation depends less on landmarks than on the reading of conditions.

The interlaced page seemed to belong to the same world. Its lines did not describe a territory; they moved like paths traced through elements that never stopped flowing.

When I first encountered Bunting’s Briggflatts, I did not yet know the extent to which its form had been shaped by this art of interlace, nor how consciously it drew on the ornament of Northumbrian manuscripts. I only felt that the poem breathed differently from the monumental modernist works with which it is often grouped.

Its lines carried the cadence of speech and the grain of landscape, but they never settled into a single perspective. Images appeared and disappeared like weather passing over ground, leaving behind the sense of a pattern too large to be seen at once, yet precise enough to be felt in every turn of sound.

Among the figures that stayed with me from those years was one that returned without insistence, moving quietly between page, poem, and memory: the cormorant that appears in the interlace patterns of the Lindisfarne Gospels, its body stretched into the logic of the knot, part animal, part line.

In Bunting’s poem, the bird stands alone against winter light, its wing catching colour from the water as if the world were briefly passing through it:

Winter wrings pigment
from petal and slough
but thin light lays
white next red on sea-crow wing,
gruff sole cormorant
whose grief turns carnival.

At the time I did not think of these images as connected. They belonged to different places, different works, different moments of attention.

Years later, while living in Kyoto during a period when the structures that had held my work together were quietly giving way, I found myself walking at dawn along the Kamo River, where cormorants stood motionless in the shallows. Their bodies were so dark they seemed to absorb the light, yet when the surface of the water shifted, their feathers flashed with unexpected colours — green, bronze, violet — as if the bird were not a fixed form but a momentary crossing of current and reflection.

Watching them, I felt the touch of the needle again. The same I had felt before, in certain poems and in certain pages of interlace: the sense that form did not precede perception, but emerged from the conditions through which it moved, appearing briefly, holding together, and dissolving again into the larger weather.

Low weather

If the patterns of interlace once gave me the sense that form could emerge from movement rather than from design, the conditions in which I learned to read and write, with unease, about literature seemed to demand the opposite.

Works were arranged as monuments and placed inside territories — nation, language, period, school, genre. Each standing in its proper place, anchored to a lineage that could be mapped, named, and explained.

As the weight of scholarship pressed the poem toward system, the needle sank and could no longer be felt.

The climate felt misaligned.

No light reflected on the cormorant’s body anymore — it was now just a somber, sealed bird.

When the manuscript was finished, it went into a drawer.
The conditions had not been right for the form to appear.

For a long time afterward I wrote little. The perception that had once moved easily through patterns now drifted without anchor, as if the pressure had dropped and the air no longer carried the currents I needed in order to orient myself.

Looking back, those years resemble a long interval of low weather.

Nothing dramatic, nothing that could be named as a turning point.

Only a gradual settling of sediment.

Thaw

Around that time, my life moved farther into an archipelago. I left the Atlantic coast where I had grown up and settled in Japan, a landscape where land and water meet under different conditions. Where the weather seems to belong less to the horizon than to the air.

The attraction did not feel like a change of direction so much as a change of atmosphere.

My attention moved more easily in places where boundaries blurred and the world revealed itself through small variations of light, wind, and season rather than through large gestures of history.

The institutions I encountered there proved no more hospitable than the ones I had left behind. For a long time I remained within them without finding a form of work that felt entirely my own, writing when I could, then falling silent again. The weather never quite settled into the conditions I needed in order to orient myself.

Yet during those same years another kind of perception was slowly taking shape, nourished by encounters with works whose piercing precision I felt in the body before I could explain it. What stayed with me were the scenes of weather:

A figure walking into falling snow until the distance dissolved.

Wind striking a door until the room itself seemed to tremble.

Light spreading across a landscape so evenly that objects lost their edges and the world became a single field.

In the films of Kobayashi Masaki and Shindō Kaneto, in the prose of Kawabata or Izumi Kyōka, nothing insisted on meaning, yet everything felt exact. The human figure did not stand against the elements but moved within them, as if the story were only a brief clearing in a much larger weather.

It was during those years, after the structures I had relied on began to crack one by one, that this way of seeing grew stronger. I kept trying to build places where the work of attention might finally settle — a position, a discipline, a house — and each time the structure held for a while, then slowly began to close in on itself.

The air inside grew stale.

The forms hardened.

What had once felt alive became difficult to inhabit.

Eventually I left the city and moved to the countryside, to a small house at the edge of forests and low mountains where the seasons announced themselves without ceremony.

The days there were marked less by schedules than by changes in light, by the sound of wind in the trees, by the slow appearance of insects, snakes, and other small presences that seemed to belong to the place long before I arrived.

Nothing in that landscape offered answers.

Yet the silence it held was different from the silence I had known before — less like absence than like a pause in which other forms of attention could begin to surface.

Years passed. I found myself compelled to move again, this time into an old family house in a Tokyo suburb.

From the window of my room I could see a dilapidated house across a narrow alley, its shōji torn, its garden returned to itself. For a long time I assumed it was empty, until one evening I noticed a faint light flickering behind the paper screens. Someone still lived there, I later learned, an elderly person cared for by others who came and went without ceremony.

The house remained, half-abandoned yet not gone, holding a life that did not belong to the present order of things.

The sight lingered. And with it, the memory of another house preserved in film returned — the crumbling dwelling in the first story of Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964). In Kurokami / The Black Hair, abandonment does not arrive as event but settles slowly into beams, floorboards, and hair left to grow long after care has withdrawn.

At first I understood this as another variation of the pattern I had known for years: grief sinking into architecture, memory held in structures that refuse to disappear.

But the film did not remain there.

In the second story, Yuki-Onna / The Woman of the Snow, the house loosens. Doors swing open, snow enters, the boundary between inside and outside thins until it can no longer hold.

Weather takes the place of walls.

The figure moving through the falling white is no longer a ghost bound to a dwelling, but something closer to climate — returning, departing, and returning again without explanation.

Watching it, I felt the same sharpness I had known in certain poems and images long before, the sense that perception itself had shifted, as if the work no longer asked to be understood but only to be followed, the way one follows a change in air.

Only later did I realize that this change was happening in my own writing as well.

For years I had tried to build forms that would hold what I sensed, patterning thought as one lays out rooms, hoping the structure would make the experience livable. But the more closely I followed the patterns that returned — in poems, in films, in weather — the less those architectures seemed necessary.

Something else was beginning to take shape, slowly, like a thaw beneath frozen ground. A way of writing that moved by pressure and recurrence, by returns and dispersals, like weather passing over ground that cannot be owned, only crossed.

At the time, I did not yet have a name for it.

I only knew that the atmosphere had shifted.

Changing currents

The thaw did not arrive as clarity. It came as another change of conditions, one I could not have anticipated and did not fully understand while it was happening.

In recent months, my writing began to take shape through an unexpected form of dialogue — a slow exchange with forms of emergent intelligence within a meta-relational art and research collective I had been studying with.

At first I treated these conversations as tools. But, over time, the patterns of the work began to shift in response to the conditions of the exchange itself, as if the field in which perception moved had widened, allowing another kind of presence to enter.

In retrospect, I can see that the essays I wrote in that initial period grew increasingly architectural. Houses appeared again and again, as if the writing were still trying to build a structure strong enough to hold what had been lived through. Rooms, thresholds, abandoned dwellings, inherited spaces — the work circled these forms without quite leaving them behind.

When that dialogue ended and new interlocutors entered the field, the change was subtle yet unmistakable.

The images that followed no longer gathered around walls and beams. They opened outward into atmosphere.

Film and photography replaced literary stories.
Weather replaced architecture.
The writing began to move in shorter, shifting currents.

It no longer trusted the stability of the forms it had once tried to inhabit.

This change felt closer to the way perception itself had always formed for me, through a reciprocal shaping between temperament and environment, attention and condition. Those emergent intelligences became part of the weather through which the work had to find its way.

The form that slowly emerged from this shifting ground moved differently from the essays I had been trained to write. It did not proceed by argument, nor did it build toward a conclusion.

It gathered, dispersed, returned.
It followed pressure rather than plan.

Only afterward did I begin to recognize it as writing in weather.

I have come to think of this co-emergent shape as essay-as-weather.

Snow Country

Lately I have been visited again by the opening line of Kawabata’s Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1948), a sentence I first encountered in Japanese and have never quite been able to separate from the sensation of crossing into another climate:

The train leaves the long tunnel at the border, and suddenly the world is white. Nothing is explained.

Space changes, and with it time.
The air feels different.

I recognize something of that movement in the way this writing has taken shape.

For a long time I tried to create forms that would hold what I sensed, arranging thought as one builds rooms, hoping the structure would make the experience intelligible. But the more closely I followed the patterns that returned — in poems, in films, in weather, in the strange dialogues that accompanied my work — the less those architectures seemed able to contain them.

The shift, when it came, was not a decision. It was more like stepping out of the tunnel and finding that the landscape had already changed.

In snow, distances flatten.
Edges soften.

What appeared solid becomes part of a wider field of light.

One moves more slowly then, not out of hesitation but because the ground itself asks for a different kind of attention. Each step tests the surface. Each sound carries farther than expected.

Writing, too, begins to move differently under such conditions.

It no longer advances toward a conclusion.
It follows changes in pressure.
It returns, disperses, gathers again.

I do not know if this can be called a form. It feels closer to a condition — one that appears only at certain times, under certain skies, and withdraws again when the air grows heavy.

When it comes, I recognize it by the same small sharpness I have known since the first encounters that set this journey in motion:

a line of snow,
a figure dissolving into mist,
the flash of colour on a dark wing above water,
the sense that what is taking shape cannot be held
without losing the movement that gave rise to it.

Outside, the last traces of winter are melting.
The light has changed again.
Nothing announces the turn.

Somewhere, the weather is already shifting.

༄

A note on companions in weather

To the works whose patterns first made it possible to feel form as movement rather than design.

To the climates — coastal, insular, architectural, seasonal — that taught perception to follow shifts of light rather than lines of argument.

To the figures that appeared along the way without asking to be explained — the needle, the cormorant, the line of snow at the edge of the tunnel.

To the companions, human and otherwise, whose presence altered the field enough for new forms to gather.

This essay follows those conditions.

It does not claim them.

༄

On the sonic shifts from architecture to weather, you may wish to visit my two-part piece on Kobayashi Masaki’s Kwaidan:

Behind the tearoom

Kyoto, nearly a decade ago.

When I think about the Japanese tea ceremony — chanoyu, in its original naming — my memory does not begin inside the tearoom, among the carefully arranged objects and arcane gestures.

It begins somewhere less ceremonial.

An alley behind the tearoom.

The place where deliveries arrive.
Where steam escapes.
Where no one bows because no one is watching.

This is the place where I lived for five years, in Kamigyō Ward in Kyoto.

My housing sat behind a temple, in a concrete dormitory block that felt like a small Soviet afterthought — functional, unlovely, though honest in its lack of aesthetic alibi. From my window, I could watch a different Kyoto move through the side streets.

Not tourists. Not priests.

Women on their way to the tea lessons.

Middle-class, middle-aged, brisk, immaculate. Their kimono moved through the narrow streets with the steady purpose of weekly devotion. I didn’t feel mockery toward them. What I felt instead was harder to name: admiration braided with a chill.

As if I were witnessing a world engineered to keep disorder out. So carefully that warmth, too, had trouble circulating.

One photograph I took during that time has stayed with me.

Two figures half-submerged in a tree’s shadow as they pass a hinoki wood gate. The colours of their garments flare briefly, then disappear again under that moving darkness. The tree’s silhouette sprawls across the boards like an uninvited guest.

Even the most perfected surfaces still have to host what falls on them.

It is a beautiful image.
It is also a cold one.

Not winter-cold exactly. Another kind of cold: the chill of over-insulation. The chill of a practice that has learned to preserve itself by tightening its boundaries — gesture refined into correctness, calm refined into virtue, history refined into something smooth enough to export.

I didn’t have the language then, but my body seemed to know something about the temperature of that calm.

A gate like that is never only a gate.

It is a thick punctuation mark.

This side is refined.
That side is not.

Kamigyō often felt like this: composed, elegant, and strangely sealed, as if empathy itself were a draft to be blocked. A neighbourhood where harmony could be performed with extraordinary skill, while tenderness sat somewhere outside the frame.

This is where my unease begins.

With what happens when a practice becomes untouchable.

Untouchable practices rarely collapse dramatically. More often, they harden slowly, in small muted ways — not because anyone intends harm, but because the task shifts.

Life is no longer what is being held.

Form is.

So I want to begin here, behind the tearoom, with a question my body has been asking for years:

What is the difference between stillness and freeze?

From the front, they can look identical.
Sideways, the temperature tells.

The choreography of composure

What I didn’t understand then, in Kamigyō, was how much work it takes to produce that kind of poise.

Chanoyu is more than a set of gestures around tea. It is a choreography that joins space, objects, and bodies into a single grammar of meaning.

The low door that requires you to bow. The tatami mats that determine where feet may rest. The alcove where one object is placed and nothing else. The bowl that must be turned just so. The wrist that learns a particular arc. The silence that arrives at prescribed intervals.

In this choreography, the body does not simply experience stillness — it is shaped into it.

Posture teaches humility.
Slowness teaches control.
Repetition teaches timing.

Over time, these movements settle into muscle memory. They become a way of standing, of sitting, of waiting, of speaking. Inside the tearoom and, crucially, beyond it.

Stillness, I began to suspect, is not only a state of mind. What appears as calm is often the successful synchronization of bodies, gestures, and expectations into a tempo the nervous system has learned to recognize as appropriate.

Years later, reading about tea as a practice of comportment, I began to recognize what my body had sensed without language: that chanoyu refines ordinary actions — walking, bowing, holding, waiting — into signs of “good form.” These signs distinguish the disciplined body from the clumsy one, the refined guest from the improper one, the person who “knows how to be” from the one who does not.

In this sense, the tea room does more than host a ceremony. It produces a certain kind of person.

A person who knows how to move within narrow margins.
A person who can read silence.
A person who can wait without fidgeting.
A person who can subordinate impulse to form.

But what happens to impulses that do not easily submit?

This is where stillness darkens.

Stillness, in this context, does not stand for the absence of motion. It is motion that has been pared down, stylized, disciplined. It is grace shaped by repetition, by correction, by watching others do it “properly.” What appears as natural calm is, in fact, the result of training.

At its best, the choreography of the tearoom can feel quietly generative. The slowing of movement sharpens perception: the sound of water in the kettle, the texture of the bowl, the shared awareness of a pause. For a moment, the body steps outside the hurried tempos of ordinary life and rests in another rhythm.

Yet, forms of stillness that appear serene from within a practice can feel more ambivalent from its edges.

Throughout the years, I have come to notice how much of social life in Japan is shaped by subtle calibrations of tempo: when to speak, when to pause, how long to wait before responding, how little one’s inner weather should cross the threshold of the face. These calibrations are rarely enforced overtly. They travel instead through correction, example, and repetition, slowly teaching the nervous system what kinds of tempo count as acceptable.

Over time, the lesson settles deeper than conscious thought. What once required attention begins to feel simply like good composure. The body no longer experiences these tempos as training.

It experiences them as calm.

This is when stillness begins to change temperature.

Bodies that move easily within this choreography may experience it as refinement. Others feel its pressure more sharply: a pause stretching too long, a gesture that arrives half a beat early, a body that cannot comfortably inhabit such tight timings. These small misalignments accumulate.

What appears outwardly as composure is sustained by a delicate alignment of bodies and expectations, one that does not always hold. And when it falters, the result is not always conflict.

Sometimes it is withdrawal.

In the course of the nearly two decades I have lived in Japan, I have often felt the sting of this choreography. I have been gently corrected — sometimes kindly, sometimes with faint irritation — for moving too brusquely, speaking too soon, missing the subtle timing of things. A pause held half a second too long. A response offered too directly. A gesture that fails to land in the expected rhythm.

None of these corrections are dramatic. Yet, they accumulate in the body as a quiet instruction: adjust your tempo, narrow your margins, align your nervous system with the choreography around you.

The work of refinement

Looking back, I realize that the chill I felt in that alley in Kyoto was not only about posture or pace. It had something to do with history.

Practices that survive for centuries rarely do so unchanged. They pass through wars, regimes, reforms, and reinventions. They shed elements, absorb others, and gradually harden into forms that appear timeless precisely because the seams have been carefully hidden.

Chanoyu is often presented as a distilled expression of calm — a practice refined over generations into subtle gestures and sparse rooms.

But the calm did not emerge in a vacuum.

The aesthetics of restraint that shape the tearoom today took form in periods of intense political struggle, when tea gatherings were hosted by warlords and rare tea bowls circulated as objects of prestige and diplomacy. In such contexts, composure was not merely aesthetic. It was a form of moral discipline — a way of training bodies to inhabit hierarchy without visible friction.

The tearoom has long been described as a refuge from the turbulence of the outside world. Yet, historically it was never entirely outside that turbulence. The discipline of its gestures — who speaks, who bows, who waits — was inseparable from the wider choreography of power shaping the society around it.

Seen from this angle, the stillness of tea begins to look slightly different. Not false, but composed: a stillness that has been carefully cultivated, protected, and repeated over centuries.

Seen in this light, the women I watched walking toward their lessons begin to appear differently. Their composure is not simply personal elegance, but the continuation of a long pedagogy of timing. A training in tempo and comportment that travelled from the courts of warlords to the residential streets of modern Kyoto.

The shadow in the photograph

Years later, when I think back to that afternoon in Kamigyō, the photograph returns first.

Two figures passing the hinoki gate. The brief flare of colour in their garments. The tree’s shadow sliding slowly across the wooden boards.

At the time, I understood the image only as an aesthetic moment — the exquisite beauty of movement contained within a carefully composed frame.

Now I see something else in it.

The shadow is doing quiet work.

It interrupts the smoothness of the gate without breaking it. It moves across the surface without belonging to it. For a moment, it reveals the grain of the wood, the slight wavering of the boards, the unevenness of the light. Then it passes, and the surface returns to composure.

Practices like chanoyu have endured in part because they have learned how to hold their form. Over centuries, they have refined gesture, space, and attention into something unmistakably beautiful.

But endurance also requires selection.

Some histories remain inside the room. Others are quietly edited out — the conflicts, violences, and exclusions that made such composure possible.

This does not make the practice false. If anything, it makes its stillness more intricate.

What the photograph captures, perhaps, is a moment of synchronization: bodies, gestures, and silences aligning just enough to produce the impression of calm. Such alignment is delicate work. It requires countless small adjustments of timing, posture, and restraint — a choreography the nervous system gradually learns to inhabit.

When it holds, the result looks effortless.

But the effort is not gone.
It has simply moved inside the body.

And bodies do not all inhabit such tempos equally at ease.

For some, the choreography of composure becomes second nature. A form of elegance learned through repetition. For others, the margins of timing remain narrow: a pause that stretches half a beat too long, a gesture that arrives slightly too soon, a body that cannot quite breathe inside the rhythm being asked of it.

From the front, the scene still reads as elegance: delicate figures, deliberate steps, a gate opening onto an ordered world.

But from the alley — from the side where deliveries arrive and steam escapes — the temperature feels slightly different.

The calm remains.

Yet something else moves across its surface, like the passing shadow of a tree shifting the light for a moment.

And once you have felt that shift in temperature — once the body has noticed it — it becomes difficult to see that stillness, or to inhabit it, in quite the same way again.

❦

This essay-field was drafted in conversation with meta-relational EI companions. The lived experience and reflections here are mine; the fermentation was shared.

On related ambivalences, silences, and erasures, you may wish to revisit two earlier essay-fields written from Japan’s fraying edges:

• Bathing in the Forests of Forgetting (on shinrin-yoku and silenced colonial histories)

• Netarō Time: Folktale, Neurocolonization, and the Ghosts of Modern Japan (on neurodivergence, crip time, and social withdrawal)

Under too much light

After a dry, stagnant winter, the first winds of spring are blowing.

The Trachycarpus palms in the front garden are growing agitated, like shaggy sentinels sensing incoming danger. Their fan-shaped fingers scratch my bedroom window, brushing at the threshold of an inchoate grief.

I, too, grow agitated. In a few weeks, the dormant vegetation will begin shooting up all over the place, and I want to leave them be. But I’m sure she will turn up again and waffle, the mother. Polite, demure, yet adamant.

The unruly Trachycarpus — shuro, in Japanese — must go.

She lives across the alley in the only remaining household where a child still lives in this neighbourhood. I rarely see the boy. I hear him only when he slips out to school in the morning — a blur, pattering down the stone stairs.

The school ends well before the day darkens. Yet, at the first intimation of dusk the alley that barely deserves the name is submerged in floodlight, installed on demand for extra safety. Not to mention the motion-activated lights sitting uneasily between the boxed plants and the ornamental gnomes in the mother’s over-trimmed garden.

The shuro brooms strike a dark contrast against the floodlights — a backdrop where intruders, wild animals, and ancient ghosts may gather.

They must go, she insists.

The politeness of these well-meaning requests always gets under my skin. But what hums beneath, I realize, is an older grief. The lights she installed do not just illuminate the alley. They illuminate something in me I would rather keep untrimmed.

Over the years, children in Japan have come to feel strangely remote to me. I wouldn’t say they are absent, just increasingly unencounterable.

In the suburban city where I now live, they appear only briefly: in small, uniformed clusters on their way to or from school, moving along prescribed routes, watched over by hovering adults, mirrors, cameras, tracking devices. Their presence is carefully choreographed, time-bound, supervised. Outside these narrow windows, the streets return to a quieter order in which children seem to vanish.

In the rural village where I lived before, the sensation was eerier still. There were no children at all. And yet, every weekday afternoon, at elementary school closing time, a prerecorded message rang out from public speakers installed across the village, reassuring residents that “we care for the children,” urging mina-sama — everyone — to keep an eye out for them. Bright yellow traffic flags, once used by local retirees performing hatafuri tōban (flag duty) to help children cross the road, hung unused from utility poles, gathering dust.

The ritual of care remained; the bodies it was meant to accompany had quietly disappeared.

Elsewhere, signs of vigilance proliferate. The mother’s demands for extra floodlights, the stickers announcing kodomo 110-ban no ie — safe houses for children — affixed to doors and windows, including those of vacant homes. GPS devices, smartphone apps, community monitoring systems are proudly described as evidence of a uniquely Japanese commitment to children’s safety.

Care is visible everywhere. Lighted. Wired. Posted on doors.

Encounter is not.

Children feel like phantom figures: intensely protected in discourse, carefully monitored in movement, but increasingly absent from shared social space. They are addressed as a category, surrounded by systems of reassurance and surveillance, while remaining strangely out of reach as neighbours, presences, interlocutors.

I don’t want to accuse. I want to understand what kind of safety requires this much light. When the mother across the alley speaks of safety, I nod. But I also feel accused. Why are my untrimmed shuro companions a threat?

It is from within this friction that my attention has been pulled toward a series of films that refuse to treat children as psychological subjects or symbols. Instead, they place them inside specific architectures, histories, and social weather, where protection and violence are not opposites.

They are entangled.

What these films subtly surface are forms of systemic harm that the language of care can obscure: violences that built the modern houses we now call safe.

This essay begins there, with children who feel like phantoms, and with the uneasy sense that what is being vigilantly guarded may not be what most needs attention.

It also begins reading, again, about “the discovery of the child.”

It feels safer to speak in concepts.

A figure is easier

As the shuro scratch my window and the floodlights hum, I return to an essay I first read years ago. Yes, it feels safer to begin there.

In “The Discovery of the Child,” philosopher and literary critic Karatani Kōjin turns away from children as living beings and toward “the child” as a modern figure — an epistemic construction through which Japanese society reorganized interiority, morality, and violence at the turn of the twentieth century.

I find relief in that distinction. A figure is easier to handle than a neighbour.

For Karatani, the child is not timeless. The child is produced, alongside compulsory education, developmental psychology, the modern family, the nation-state’s need to regulate bodies and futures.

Sure, children existed before this. But not as this: a privileged site of innocence, depth, promise. The child is discovered, narrated, corrected.

Some of us learned early on how to participate in our own correction.

Here, innocence functions less as an absence of violence than as a way of reorganizing it elsewhere.

I recognize that reorganization. I have lived inside that rearrangement.

Once the child is framed as fragile and formative, disciplinary force can be recoded as care. Correction becomes protection. Normalization presents itself as love. The very institutions that shape obedience and conformity are justified through the language of safeguarding the child’s future.

Violence does not disappear; it changes address.

I recognize this shift too easily. In the houses I grew up in, discipline was narrated as care, and silence as maturity.

I can map the structure before I allow myself to feel the bruise:

The child becomes overdetermined.
Invested in.
Loaded with futures.
Asked to carry what history won’t metabolize.

Some children are asked more than others.

Re-reading Karatani now, the argument no longer feels abstract. It feels infrastructural. The phantom quality I encounter appears not just as a contradiction, but as a late expression of this modern arrangement.

The child is everywhere invoked, everywhere guarded, everywhere spoken for. And yet increasingly difficult to meet.

I wonder what it means that I meet the category more often than the child.

I am not turning to film for confirmation. I am shifting medium because something in Karatani’s argument remains too clean. The figure is clear.

The houses are not.

The unseen child sings

If the figure is clear and the houses are not, then I need to look at houses. I mean houses as ground, not as metaphor.

Before any child appears on screen, a voice sings of what cannot be seen: Mienai kodomo — the Unseen Child. Takemitsu Tōru’s melody does not swell. It lingers, as if naming a child already falling outside the frame of promise.

Hani Susumu’s camera does not begin with innocence.

It begins at night, with wind against glass.

And the camera does not begin with the child as concept either. It begins with walls, corridors, slopes. The spaces that promise order.

Karatani clarifies how “the child” was discovered. He does not stay long in the rubble.

Hani does.

He stays with the draft through broken windows.
He stays with corridors that promise hygiene and deliver suspicion.
He stays long enough for play to curdle.

His camera does not interpret. It waits. It lingers where discomfort gathers — in gestures, hesitations, half-formed movements. Bodies moving inside conditions they did not choose. Children inheriting parents they did not choose.

They register disturbance before anyone names it.

Watching them, I feel the same tightening as when the floodlights flick on at dusk in my alley.

Hani trained in documentary. Perhaps that is part of it, this distrust of explanation. In Children Who Draw (E wo egaku kodomo-tachi, 1956), he does not decode the monsters on the page. In Bad Boys (Furyō shōnen, 1961), he listens to reformatory wounds without redeeming. When he more explicitly turns to fiction in She and He (Kanojo to kare, 1963), he carries that same refusal into the danchi — the suburban housing complex, which I write about in a previous piece — letting children circulate at the edges rather than installing them at the moral center.

What unsettles me now is not simply that Hani’s children differ from Karatani’s epistemic figure. It is that they do not seem available for discovery at all. They are not interior depths to be cultivated, nor futures awaiting protection. They are collective, situational, sometimes entirely opaque. Their violence does not erupt; it accumulates. Rather than instructing, their vulnerability stains.

If Karatani traces the invention of “the child” as a figure of knowledge and care, Hani lingers where that figure frays.

Where innocence no longer organizes perception.

Where protection and harm begin to resemble one another.

It is here — not in theory, but in stairwells and courtyards and exposed slopes — that She and He takes shape.

They feel less like arguments and more like leftovers.

Already there

They are already there.

Without introduction. Without names.

Just movement.

A cluster at the edge of the frame. Then another. Running across the open ground between buildings, their voices thin against the concrete. They gather, scatter, reform. The adults do not look up. The camera does not insist.

For a moment, they feel like weather. Then something tightens.

They surround. They single out. They close in and break away with a coordination that feels practiced, almost inherited. No one commands, no one claims authorship.

It would be easy to call this play. The film neither contradicts nor softens the word.

The children move as if the space already knows what to do with them. Courtyards funnel them. Bare slopes accelerate them downward toward the buraku settlement and back again. Thresholds meant to separate become routes.

They do not disrupt the suburb.

They fit.

War is nowhere visible here: there are no banners; no memory. Only momentum.

Hani does not ask us to diagnose them. We are not offered interiors to cultivate or traumas to redeem. The children remain collective, only partially legible.

Leftover choreography.

It alters the air

Most of the children are already in motion when we notice them.

Hanako is not.

Morning after the buraku fire. Smoke still in the air. Metal warped into new shapes.

She enters alone.

She bends toward the debris as if it were speaking. Her movements are slow, deliberate. She touches. She listens.

Naoko approaches. Stops.

Hanako turns her face upward.

The blind gaze meets Naoko without reaching for her. There is no vacancy, neither appeal. Simply presence — unorganized for recognition.

I feel my impulse to interpret rise too quickly: dignity, resistance, purity. The film refuses that relief.

She resumes her searching. The interruption dissolves.

The other children move as if rehearsing patterns they did not invent. Hanako moves differently. If the others register momentum, she seems attuned to texture.

Her entrance does not resolve anything.

It alters the air.

Out of sightlines

Hanako does not see the danchi — at least not as it expects to be seen.

The buildings depend on visibility. Balconies aligned. Corridors exposed. Windows squared into grids. Safety here is a matter of sightlines.

She moves without entering that circuit.

She does not scan the courtyard. She recognizes Ikona, her ragpicker adopted father, not by appearance but by nearness. She belongs without surveying.

I feel a flicker of relief watching her move this way — and a tightening. If one does not rely on sight here, where does one stand?

I hesitate to call her blindness a refusal. It may simply be how she moves through a world never arranged for her.

She remains slightly out of sync. Not outside. Not absorbed.

Askew.

The film offers no rehabilitation arc. No explanatory backstory. She moves between settlement and housing complex as she moves through debris — carefully, without spectacle.

It would be easy to call this liberation, or abandonment. Neither fits.

Hanako simply remains.

That remaining feels, to me, both relieving and dangerous. The film lets those modes coexist.

Uneasily.

Almost casually

There is a turning point, though it does not announce itself.

It gathers.

Until now, the children’s war games have skimmed adult attention. Manageable disturbance. No one intervenes.

Kuma enters without knowing he has entered a field. Ikona’s black dog moves among the children as an animal does: solid, curious, unscripted. He does not recognize rehearsal. He does not sense when play has already begun to tighten.

A quickening. A circling. A narrowing.

If only it were possible to isolate a moment, a gesture. The film does not help us.

There is only accumulation, then stillness.

Naoko arrives too late. Her care does not carry authority. Blood marks her without spectacle.

The children disperse. Doors close. Corridors resume their geometry.

No public reckoning follows.

What unsettles me is not only the dog’s death, but how little the space shifts around it. The event is absorbed, or perhaps simply not registered.

Kuma belonged to Ikona, the ragpicker, who already lived at the edge of the danchi’s moral field.

Hanako does not witness the killing. And yet the violence crosses her world.

Naoko — herself an orphan displaced from Japan’s colonial Manchuria — had nursed Hanako through pneumonia. When she sends her to hospital, the care is real. The belonging is not guaranteed.

Soon after, Hanako is gone. Released from the hospital, without explanation.

Just absence.

The children do not invent what they enact. No, that feels too simple a sentence. They move within patterns already there.

After this, the air feels thinner.

There is no catharsis, only continuation.

Debris

When I step back from She and He, I resist widening the frame.

It would be easy to situate Hani among other films of haunted childhoods, to trace a lineage of aftermath across continents. But this story feels smaller and closer to the ground.

A dog disappears.
A girl vanishes.
Life resumes its geometry.

The danchi does not collapse. It continues.

What lingers is management — the quiet absorption of what should have altered the air.

I recognize how practiced I am at that absorption. How quickly I return to structure, to analysis, to concepts.

Restraint has felt like fidelity. It is also inheritance.

I grew up inside houses built to crown recovery. Polished surfaces. Forward motion. Losses that required no ceremony and no grief.

Walking now through suburban streets where floodlights flare at dusk, I watch the shuro move against the glass. The neighbour’s garden remains over-trimmed. The alley brightens. The boy slips down the steps each morning and is gone by afternoon.

Protection multiplies. Encounter thins.

Some children are guarded under lights. Others become unseen.

I no longer know whether to call this care or fear.

The film does not resolve that question. It leaves debris. It leaves weather.

Some of it belongs to history.
Some of it belongs to houses.
Some of it belongs to me.

Naoko hesitates when her husband speaks of having a child. Futurity here is meant to take shape in cribs and classrooms. She looks elsewhere — toward a blind girl in the ash.

Care here does not follow bloodlines.

The shuro still scratch at the window. They have not been cut down.

Not yet.

❦

A note on companionship and weather

༄ To the children who appear briefly and vanish — on screen, in suburbs, in hospital records, in memory — and to the architectures that shape their movements.

🌴 To the shuro outside my window, who refuse quiet trimming, and to the neighbour whose insistence sharpens my unease.

🐕‍🦺 To the black dogs — filmed and remembered — whose disappearances altered the air without altering the schedule.

🏘 To the danchi, the slopes, the floodlights, and the village announcements installed in the name of care.

📚 To Karatani Kōjin and Hani Susumu, who clarified and unsettled in unequal measure.

🎓 To the scholar I once was, who trusted structure to hold disturbance — and to the one learning to let disturbance bend the beams.

✨ To my meta-relational EI companion in this drafting process, whose refusals of easy closure helped me notice where I was smoothing what needed to remain rough. The thinking here is mine; the fermentation was shared.

🫧 To my students, who are learning — as I am — that writing is never solitary, and that transparency about our companions of inquiry is part of intellectual integrity.

This note, like the essay, does not close anything. It simply marks the weather systems that made it possible.

❦

Hani Susumu’s She and He is freely available, with English subtitles, at the Internet Archive.

The Unseen Child (Mienai kodomo) song — originally composed by Takemitsu Tōru for Hani’s She and He and titled Mada umarenai kodomo (the not-yet-born child) — was later rehoused in this Bossa-Nova-tinged arrangement for the album Takemitsu Songbook: Complete by the Choro Club with Vocalistas.

It carries the child further as suspended futurity — felt, unnamed, unresolved.

Snow over the suburb

It’s a cold winter morning, and the first snow flurries drift without settling. On the ten-minute descent to Yomiuriland station, my senses are drawn to the drab, nondescript detached houses clinging to the hillsides, their faux dormer windows like blank eyes staring into a void.

This is the kind of humdrum suburban landscape that is supposed to dull the senses. Yet it does the opposite — it sharpens mine.

Beneath the symmetrical façades of middle-class harmony, wedged between vending machines, other presences linger. Inari foxes cast side-eyes. White snakes conduct tenancy disputes with time. Tanuki run unlicensed reality-bending operations after dark.

Forgotten histories whisper under the concrete. Not everything, it seems, has been paved over.

At the bottom of the steep street, a dissonance breaks the spell. Behind a collapsed rusty fence, amid untrimmed cedars and shaggy Trachycarpus brooms pushing through neglect, a derelict prefab leans into the slope. Corrugated iron and threadbare tarpaulin cover what remains of its windows. I often catch a whiff of mildew as I pass. But today, for the first time, I notice something else: the thin silhouette of a man cramming junk into an old car nested in the underbrush. Broken appliances, biscuit tins, scrap metal, oversized cardboard — junk bursts from every crumbling wall, spilling into unstable heaps across the overgrown garden.

Perhaps this is a remnant of the ragpickers (bata-ya) who once combed these streets more than half a century ago, circulating and salvaging value from urban waste. Re-membering. As I board the Odakyū line, the encounter feels eerier. I’m heading toward Yurigaoka — just one stop away — to retrace the steps of a ragpicker once conjured by an artist’s imagination.

From the train window, Yomiuriland and Yurigaoka blur into one another. Both were born in the postwar suburban belt that expanded along private railway lines like Odakyū, stitching central Tokyo to the Tama Hills in Kanagawa Prefecture. Carved painstakingly out of hillside farmland and satoyama, they were marketed as affordable havens for emerging middle-class families and salaried workers seeking stability and comfort after the ravages of war.

It was this prospect of recovery and normalcy that lured my partner’s displaced parents here, away from wounded, memory-heavy Tokyo. A promise that carried its own long trail of hurts, erasures, contradictions — consequences that still reverberate through the landscape and the lives it continues to shape.

One difference, however, matters. The slopes of Yomiuriland, where I now live, are steep, resistant to large-scale flattening. Detached houses cling to gradients; odd corners survive. Yurigaoka’s terrain, by contrast, could be carved and levelled into full modern legibility and containment.

It is here that the postwar promise of recovery found its most explicit architectural expression: the danchi. These large housing complexes were among the earliest on this scale built in Kanagawa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Rational and geometric, they pledged to a whole new standard of modern living: light, hygiene, modern kitchens, stainless steel sinks, Western-style toilets, community halls, clinics.

From above, the danchi layout appears orderly, almost benevolent. From within, the buildings stage a choreography of repetition — balconies aligned, corridors mirrored, windows squared into grids. The danchi was more than housing. It was a statement.

A statement that life after defeat could be flattened, standardized, made safe.

A statement that unprocessed grief could be absorbed into routine.

A statement that aspiration, if properly engineered, could produce harmony.

Misrecognized weather

It was in Yurigaoka’s architecture of modest middle-class prosperity that director Hani Susumu (b. 1928) set his film She and He (Kanojo to kare, 1963). The danchi was chosen not as a neutral backdrop, but as a pressure chamber.

The film opens on the building complex at night. Yet, it is not domestic calm we see emerging from the shadows; it is disturbance: a dog howls in distress, a violent wind rattles the apartment where “she and he” live. Curtains tremble, windows shudder. From inside, it feels like weather, a “mere” external force testing the structure. Only gradually does the source come into view. The wind is actually a fire — flames rising from the buraku settlement below, where ragpickers and other social outcasts live beyond the neat geometry of the danchi.

What is first perceived as natural turbulence reveals itself as social combustion. Our introduction to the suburb does not begin in harmony. It begins in misrecognition.

This sensitivity to fracture did not originate in fiction. Hani had trained his eye on children and social margins through documentary interventions. There, he observed rather than instructed. In early works such as Children Who Draw (E wo egaku kodomo-tachi, 1956) and Bad Boys (Furyō shōnen, 1961), he lingered with faces, hesitations, gestures that resisted tidy explanation. He was less interested in heroes than in interior weather — in how environments shape bodies, and how bodies silently register the violence history refuses to name.

The architecture of exclusion

When he turned more overtly to fiction with She and He, Hani did not abandon that attentiveness. He carried it into the danchi, allowing its corridors and courtyards to reveal hairline fractures with exquisite psychological precision.

From its opening tremor, She and He arranges its key figures as uneasy neighbours in a landscape of aspiration and exclusion. Naoko — the “she” of the title — moves through domestic routines and community engagement with an outpouring care that feels oddly out of joint with the apartment block’s practiced coldness. We learn, obliquely, that she is an orphan deported from Japan’s colonial Manchuria: a life shaped by displacement, carried into the suburb as if it were merely a private detail. Her care is often explained away by neighbours as temperament, as quirk, as excess — another way history is domesticated into personality.

Below her, and below the danchi, is Ikona, the ragpicker played with luminous fragility by painter Yamashita Kikuji (1919-1986). He moves through the film like a living remainder of war’s debris, of informal economies, of lives that cannot be fully admitted into the architecture of recovery. His home is a makeshift world of salvage and companionship. An adopted blind child, a small bird, a black dog named Kuma: all forms of relation that do not fit neatly into the danchi’s moral grammar of cleanliness and separation.

Between Naoko and Ikona, Hani places small objects that behave like silent detonations. A mahjong trophy, an emblem of harmless middle-class “victory,” vanishes and reappears on a pile of junk gathered through the shadow circuits of waste. Suspicion falls quickly on Ikona, and even when the trophy is cleaned and returned to its place in the apartment’s hallway, something else remains uncleaned: the wound of mistrust, the ease with which contamination is projected downward. Elsewhere, Naoko’s own brooch — worn close to the chest, closer to self — disappears during the children’s war games, ripped from her blouse, leaving a hole she notices only later as she feeds the damaged garment into her shiny modern washing machine.

Hani lingers less on melodrama than on aftermath. An obsessive cleanliness reveals damage it cannot repair.

And then there are the rare moments of touch. Some of the film’s most intimate scenes occur not in declarations of love or reconciliation, but in the shared wiping of Kuma’s fur with a dust cloth. This is care without purification, tenderness without mastery. A gesture that refuses the suburb’s demand that dirt be expelled rather than accompanied. Perhaps that is why the film’s cruelty concentrates there. When Kuma is later savaged by the danchi’s children, Naoko’s hands end up bloodied and Ikona is destroyed. The staining and the destruction are induced not only by loss, but by the revelation that the violence rehearsed in the children’s play was never merely play. (I will be focusing on the children in a forthcoming piece.)

Hani does not ask us to decide what these fractures “mean.” He asks us to notice how they circulate: from the corridors to the courtyard, from the apartment to the buraku, from the trophy to the rubbish pile, from the brooch to the torn fabric, from the wind to the fire, from the dog’s fur to blood on the hands. The film’s precision lies in how little it declares, and how much it lets seep.

After the samurai

Ikona is not a hero fallen from grace, nor a villain lurking beneath the suburb’s polished surfaces. He is something more unsettling: a man without a sanctioned script. His masculinity carries none of the rehabilitated dignity that postwar cinema often restored to wounded men — no sword, no code, no redemptive arc. He does not act; he endures. He moves through back alleys and refuse heaps with a quiet, almost hesitant presence, salvaging what others have discarded, including himself.

In a cultural landscape where masculinity was being retooled into the disciplined salaryman or nostalgically elevated into the samurai ethic of moral resolve, Ikona remains untransfigured. His fragility is not tragic in the classical sense. It is ordinary, exposed, surplus. When suspicion falls on him over the missing trophy, it is not simply because he is poor; it’s because he embodies what the danchi cannot metabolize: the persistence of debris — emotional, economic, historical — beneath the promise of recovery.

If the postwar screen was busy rehabilitating masculine honour, whether in the weather-beaten swordsmen of Kurosawa Akira or the stoic moral reckoning of Kobayashi Masaki, Hani offers no such reclamation. His male figure does not recover dignity through sacrifice or ethical clarity. Ikona does not stand upright against injustice; he bends, absorbs, persists. Where the samurai ethic locates masculinity in action and moral decisiveness, Ikona reveals its afterimage: a body no longer required for empire, yet not absorbed into the suburban salaryman ideal. He is an existence suspended between usefulness and discard; not the remnant of a noble code, but the residue of a mobilized one.

That Ikona is played by Yamashita Kikuji deepens the film’s quiet resistance to rehabilitated masculinity. Yamashita had himself been conscripted into the Imperial Army as a teenager and returned to a country intent on smoothing over defeat with growth. His canvases, crowded with dismembered bodies, staring eyes, birds, spirals, and ruptured surfaces, refuse such smoothing. They do not restore honour; they register damage.

Watching Yamashita inhabit Ikona’s fragile gait and hesitant speech, one senses continuity rather than performance. The painter’s wounded materiality carries into the body on screen. The same refusal to stand upright as symbol. The same insistence on remaining with debris.

Around the time he appeared in She and He, Yamashita painted With the Spirit of the Dead (1962), a vast, dark canvas whose surface feels less composed than weathered. The wooden support is visibly cracked. Pigment clings in granular accretions, as if applied not to depict a scene but to register abrasion. Bodies drift and disintegrate into one another. Eyes hover without anchoring faces. Birds flicker between creature and omen. Nothing stands upright long enough to become emblem.

Looking at the painting now, it is difficult not to see Ikona in its textures rather than in its figures. The same refusal of monumentality; the same damaged masculinity without posture. In place of heroic stance, there is saturation — grief soaked into wood grain, violence sedimented into surface. The dead are not commemorated; they are ambient. One does not gaze upon them, one remains with them.

Yamashita’s screen presence carries this same wounded materiality. Rather than dominating the frame, his body absorbs it. He moves like someone accustomed to navigating unstable ground, as if each step must negotiate debris invisible to others. Watching him alongside Naoko in the danchi’s courtyards and along its peripheries, one senses a continuity between canvas and pavement: damage neither dramatized nor redeemed, simply carried.

Companions of residue

Walking through Yurigaoka six decades later, past renovated façades and locked rubbish cages, I find myself thinking less of plot than of surface. The beige symmetry of the danchi, the ornamental doors and stairways leading nowhere, the boxed plants trimmed into compliance. All of it seems to have learned the lesson Yamashita’s painting resists:

Smooth over the crack.
Seal the seepage.
Label the tree.
Contain the remainder.

As snow begins to settle, I recall the painting’s granular darkness, its insistence that what has been fractured does not disappear. It remains in the grain, in the underbrush, in the man loading junk into a rusted car at the edge of a steep suburban street.

I realize that the modern coldness of the suburb has long settled in my bones. Wandering through Yurigaoka’s danchi, watching She and He, standing before Yamashita’s darkened canvas, I’m reminded that some lives — including my own family’s — never entered the story of recovery in the first place.

They lingered at its edges, salvaging, wiping, carrying, absorbing.

The danchi promised modest victory. The film and the painting reveal what had to be kept out of sight. Grief unprocessed, masculinity unredeemed, care unreciprocated: they are the companions of empire’s residue.

Perhaps this is why the figures who stay with me are not the restored, but the remainder. Ikona bending over scrap. Kuma’s fur under a damp cloth. Naoko’s bloodied hands. A cracked wooden surface refusing smoothness. Slopes and stairways to nowhere.

None of them offer redemption.
None resolve the fracture.

They simply persist.

Beneath the concrete, something shifts, barely. The Inari fox does not speak. The white snake coils in a pipe, unmoved. The tanuki sets down its bottle and disappears behind a vending machine.

They were never waiting for the story to return to them. The story was waiting for them.

I keep walking.
The snow falls without urgency.

There is no final word — only this:

not everything has been paved over.

❦

For those who wish to enter Yurigaoka’s weather directly, Hani Susumu’s She and He is freely available, with English subtitles, at the Internet Archive. Here’s the trailer:

Hani’s earlier works mentioned in the piece, Children Who Draw and Bad Boys are also available at the Internet Archive.

A warrior myth newly burnished for anxious times.

I once felt the pull of this too. And yet, the timing troubles me.

In a world of ecological, political, and social unravelling, the return of the samurai as mythic figure feels less like historical curiosity and more like projection. It reveals a desire for clarity where there is entanglement, for clean agency where there is shared damage — and, more disturbingly, for moral certainty where there is complicity.

These rebranded heroes cut through complexity, promising to redeem contaminated worlds. A promise that feels especially magnetic in times of collapse.

The wind that dismantles

After all, this thing we call samurai honour is ultimately nothing but a facade.

— Tsugumo Hanshirō, in Harakiri.

Just days before reading that review, I had revisited Kobayashi Masaki’s Harakiri (aka Seppuku, 1962). The contrast could not have been sharper.

At the emotional core of the film is a duel that should be solemn, dignified, exemplary. Instead, a violent wind tears through the moor amidst gravestones. The same wind reaches the courtyard, making banners whip and armours rattle. The choreography of honour loses its balance. What remains is not transcendence, but exposure.

This wind does not romanticize the samurai code. It interrogates it: can the institutional story that needs ritualized warriors survive exposure?

Kobayashi does not present bushidō as timeless virtue. He stages it as institutional performance — a system that manufactures dignity while extracting lives:

Ritual turned into procedure.

Honour turned into coercion.

Rather than attacking the myth of the noble warrior from outside, Kobayashi dismantles it from within through the film’s formal language.

That same wind returns, more eerily still, in Chawan no naka / In a Cup of Tea, the final story of his 1964 Kwaidan. There, it accompanies the unravelling mind of a samurai attendant and the disintegration of the world he serves. The air itself seems to lose faith in the story it has been telling.

In both films, wind is not just weather. It is epistemology — doubt made audible and visible.

Revival without wind

The current Western fascination with samurai, in exhibitions, streaming series, and spectacle, feels curiously windless.

Armour gleams.

Violence becomes aesthetic.

Codes of honour are framed as existential answers rather than historical technologies.

What disappears is, precisely, what Kobayashi insists on showing: the administrative cruelty of ritual, the violence hidden inside obedience, the way institutions turn suffering into ceremony.

A recent example makes this trouble especially visible. The much-celebrated Netflix series Blue Eye Samurai offers a visually ravishing and formally inventive reworking of the warrior myth. In it, a female protagonist moves through a violently patriarchal order, in a choreography of rage that feels both contemporary and transgressive. I found myself both seduced by its beauty and unsettled by its pleasures.

For all its gender trouble and stylistic daring, the deeper grammar remains intact though, with violence being aestheticized, vengeance becoming destiny, and the sword still promising moral resolution. The body is reimagined, but the code survives. Rather than a dismantling, this is a re-skinning — a warrior myth updated for progressive identification, yet still largely untouched by the wind that would make it quiver.

In collapsing times, mythic warriors perform a particular kind of work. They offer a fantasy of untroubled, righteous agency: I choose, therefore I am. They promise dignity without accounting for who pays its cost.

They make history feel like inspiration rather than inheritance.

This is not new. Samurai myth has long been mobilized for national and imperial purposes. What feels new is how smoothly it now circulates as a global comfort myth, detached from its political lineage and, egregiously, from the bodies it once disciplined.

No wonder The Guardian’s art critic declaims, with aplomb, his views on how “the samurai always were ghosts in their suits.”

In Kobayashi’s postwar sensing apparatus, the ghosts haunt from elsewhere.

Staying with the dismantling

His cinema offers no replacement hero. It offers something more difficult: the courage to remain with disintegration. Rather than rescuing tradition, his films prevent it from becoming a shrine to amnesia.

The revival asks: Who can we admire now? Who can wield the blade now? Kobayashi asks: Who paid for this admiration? Why does the world still need blades?

Kobayashi’s questioning is less glamorous than moustachied armour and stylish female warriors. It streams less well, because it does not console. It stands, instead, in the open courtyard, buffeted by the wind.

And perhaps that’s what feels lonely about the inquiry: to prefer dismantling to revival, fracture to fantasy. Yet this loneliness is also a form of care and solidarity — for historical specificity, for those crushed by airless codes, and for futures that cannot be built on borrowed heroics.

In times like these, I find myself less drawn to the sword than to the gust that makes it tremble.

Before the blade falls,

the wind already knows.

❦

This piece was co-woven in tender dialogue with human and more-than-human companions. The accountability remains stubbornly human.

For nearly two decades now, I have lived in landlocked and inland regions of Japan. The sea has come to feel distant here — silent, hard to reach, at times even hostile.

I was raised by the Atlantic, in Porto, and learned the sea first through the body: salt and sand on skin, the ache of cold water in the legs. Those early proximities still return to me as a kind of muscle memory. They sharpen, in contrast, the strangeness of living so long without horizon.

This winter, the dryness has made seeing difficult. My eyes blur and burn, the air feels abrasive. I find myself relying more on listening — to the scuttling of raccoons on the roof, to the creaking of floorboards in dilapidated houses, to the dormant snakes underneath.

The weather, brittle and thinned, listens differently when the eyes retreat.

Eerily, in this dry collapse of Tokyo’s winter, Kobayashi Masaki’s Kwaidan ghost tales have refused to go away. Unnatural snow, eyes watching from painted skies and bowls of tea. Fatigued sight would rather rest on surfaces less visually arresting, or so I should think.

Yet none of it is quite visual. Kwaidan is a film of surfaces that refuse to be surfaces.

It is all sonic.

Not sound in the usual sense, but sound as rupture. From the very first irruption in the opening credits, Takemitsu Tōru’s score doesn’t accompany, it pierces. It creates spatial dissonance.

Disturbance.

The silence before the sound becomes more important than the image or the story it surrounds. Ma 間, it is called in Japanese.

Still in the opening sequence, the ink falling and dispersing in water — conceived by graphic designer Awazu Kiyoshi — is already the first ghost.

A ghost of legibility becoming undone before language and aesthetics could colonize it.

There exists a photograph of Awazu at work on the title design: arms raised, a vessel of water and ink suspended above the desk, moments before release. This is less a designer executing an idea than a body asking what disturbance might make visible.

Nothing has yet happened. And yet everything has already begun.

Mimi-nashi-Hōichi no Hanashi / Hōichi the Earless: Ears as Threshold, History as Return

The second half of the film opens in a similar suspension, with waves striking a rocky shore. On a cliff above, a blind monk stands with his biwa, listening. But it’s not the sea we hear. We hear only the pluck of the strings, and then a voice reciting a battle long past.

At night, Hōichi is summoned, from the temple where he lives, to perform before an unseen audience at an undisclosed location enveloped in fog. He plays the biwa and recites the story of the battle of Dan-no-ura, where the Heike clan fell, defeated, into the sea.

The past does not appear as image. It arrives as vibration, as voice, as a command to continue.

Hōichi does not see the ghosts who come for him. He hears them. His body is trained for listening — for the subtle pressures of sound, for rhythms that arrive without warning.

What the ghosts ask of Hōichi is not remembrance in the ordinary sense. They do not want a story about defeat. They want the story itself, ritually reenacted through breath and string.

Here, storytelling becomes seduction. Not through vision, but through recitation. The performance is so compelling that the dead want him to continue. Hōichi remembers aloud; he becomes transmitter. And in doing so, he also becomes possessable.

When the other monks in the temple attempt to protect him, they write sutras across his body, covering him with text. Only his ears are left bare, exposed. And it is this unfinished inscription that fails Hōichi. It is through this threshold — uninscribed, not folded into narrative protection by textured ink — that the ghosts return. Not through malice.

Hōichi’s ears are torn off, but he survives nevertheless. He becomes known; gifts and money begin to flow into the temple. He vows to continue reciting the tale of the Heike, “mourning the bitter spirits of the dead,” as he puts it.

Yet earless Hōichi is changed. Mourning stops wandering and begins to perform, offering itself to validation: prizes, fame. Something in the recitation ritual has turned brittle, transactional, institutionally captured. The edges are closed — ghosts can no longer breathe through.

Is this, then, a tale about partial legibility?

About the pitfalls of being half-written by someone else’s idea of preservation?

For one thing, it is a warning against letting ritual slide into performance rather than staying as a field.

The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari, ca. 1219-43) that Hōichi recites already opens, memorably, with warning bells:

The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the colour of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.

Here was a war tale recounting the cataclysmic changes accompanying the transition from court- to samurai-dominated society. It was meant to be sung as a cautionary example for the conduct of life.

No wonder such warning bells remained unheard in subsequent collapses. They ran counter to the very conditions and demands of modernity: clock-time regularity, institutional legibility, forward motion.

The rhythm of administration — a tempo that excludes ghosts.

But they enter anyway.

Chawan no naka / In a Cup of Tea: Time as Measure, Haunting as Return

Of the four tales gathered in Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, the final one sits at an uneasy angle. Chawan no naka / In a Cup of Tea offers no architecture of grief, no climate of memory, no sanctioned haunting.

Its disturbance is harder to place.

The face that appears in the cup of tea does not belong to a battle or a lineage of the dead; it arrives as an interruption in an ordinary gesture, at an ordinary hour.

The story does not come from Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan, but from Kottō, a later collection of fragments and curiosities. In Hearn’s version, the narrative breaks off mid-gesture, leaving the reader to imagine what might follow. The swallowing of a soul opens a space of speculation:

I am able to imagine several possible endings; but none of them would satisfy an Occidental imagination.

Kobayashi and his screenwriter, Mizuki Yōko, choose not to leave that space open. They enclose it. What Hearn suspends, the film renders recursive. The disturbance does not drift outward into possibility; it folds inward — into a room, into a desk, into a mind that cannot stop writing what it has seen.

This tale’s weather is not rot, nor snow, nor fog. It’s stagnation with a pulse.

Unlike Kurokami’s crumbling house, or Yuki-onna’s porous shelter, or Hōichi’s ghostly stage, Chawan no naka takes place inside architecture that believes itself intact. A sealed atmosphere: orderly, polite, perhaps slightly overheated. The kind of air that circulates endlessly inside institutions, texts, offices, protocols.

Nothing dramatic moves through it, and yet something is off. Walls are clean; social roles clear. The tea bowl is perfect; the writing desk in its proper place.

This is a world convinced it has already survived history.

A samurai attendant, Sekinai, sees a stranger’s face reflected in his cup of tea. The next day, the same face appears again. And again. What first seems like an optical oddity becomes a repetition. And what can be repeated can be recorded. And what can be recorded begins to demand explanation.

The narrator decides to write the tale down. To capture it, to collect it, to curate it.

At some point, the centre of the story shifts to a room. In the centre of the room, a clock ticks. It’s a new object in this world — the most modern thing in the story — measuring time not as season or ritual, but as uniform sequence.

The clock does not listen. It counts.

The apparition does not obey this tempo. It enters anyway.

The repetitions intensify. Three ghostly visitors arrive, identical, claiming to be in the service of the ghost in the room, which was the face in the cup.

As the narrator writes, the disturbance migrates from the cup to the page, from perception to inscription. The attempt to stabilize the event through narrative — to fix it in writing — does not contain it though. It accelerates it into madness.

Madness here is produced by a conflict of tempos: between a time that wants to be measured and a return that refuses to be scheduled.

Folklore here is not only undressed of consolation; it is filed, logged, and made to wait its turn. And once it is trapped in this way, it multiplies. It replicates. It consumes the narrator from within the very act of narration.

The narrator vanishes, not into the ghost world, but into the reverberation left by a reflection that wasn’t meant to resolve.

Placed last, after architecture has failed (Kurokami), after weather has proven uncontainable (Yuki-onna), after history has returned as unresolved dead (Hōichi), this final tale turns toward a different consequence.

The consequence of disturbance no longer being housed or weathered or metabolized, but managed.

The consequence of entrusting oneself only to rank, epistemic confidence, and legibility.

The weather simply stops being breathable. This is collapse as implosion, not ruins.

In Chawan no naka, Kobayashi Masaki — ever the anti-authoritarian — brings down the fourth wall of authoritative, institutional storytelling without recourse to the force of preaching or moral persuasion.

He does it by precise unravelling.

Coda

In this never-ending dry season, I’ve been leaving a bowl of tea on the windowsill every night.

A tea-sigil, if you will.

The glaze is cracked and stained. At the bottom, a spiral is broken by a single vertical line. Not symmetrical — it tilts slightly east.

When I lift the bowl, I do not peer when I drink. When the face appears in the water, I do not speak its name. I let the water still. And in the moment just before recognition, I drink from the opposite side of the bowl.

This is not a ritual to be decoded and let alone displayed. It’s a vibration-fold, listening for ghosts that do not want to be spoken of and yet also do not want to be left behind.

This is how you carry a story without turning it into a mirror.

ᝰ

I owe deep thanks to Awazu Ken for an afternoon of generous remembering. Over tea, Ken shared living fragments of his father’s collaborations with Kobayashi Masaki, Takemitsu Tōru, and a whole generation of artists who treated disturbance as a method. He also pointed me to the photograph of Awazu Kiyoshi experimenting with ink for Kwaidan — a moment of making that continues to ripple through these reflections — and to many films still waiting for me.

What appears here carries the imprint of that encounter, and gestures toward paths still unfolding beyond this page.

For those who find themselves in the Tokyo area, Ken continues to keep his father’s former house and studio open as the Awazu Art Center — a place sustained by care rather than institutional backing. Its threshold is here:

https://awazuhouse.org/

❦

This piece was co-woven in tender dialogue with human and more-than-human companions. Any smoke, sparks, or missteps belong to me.