For decades, manga has been establishing itself in European markets and has given rise to a prosperous territory of fairs, passions, heroes, costumes, holograms and even fictosexual relationships – those that humans maintain with fictional characters -, similar to the which starred Akihiko Kondoy and the virtual singer Hatsune Miku, until the company in charge disconnected it from its servers and some began to talk about Kondoy as “the first digital widower.” Perhaps manga fans sense that metaspace of folds, apparent paradoxes… in which nothing is impossible and we feel comfortable; a space built on contradictions. Or contradictions at least for Western binary logic, governed by the now very unpopular dichotomies: male/female, white/black, full/empty, animate/inanimate, death/life… In fact, Japanese culture – and manga is not the exception—proposes infinite loopholes that allow us to never be a single thing or forever. It suggests the pleasant coexistence of opposites: what is no longer and has not yet ceased to be.
It occurs in the animations of Hayao Miyazaki, whose work The boy and the heron It was released on our screens this year. Here the story of young Mahito is told who, immersed in nostalgia for his mother, decides to enter a place where the living and the dead coexist, without insurmountable borders between the two. It is the negotiation of paradoxes that we perceive in the artist Yasumasa Morimura, one of the most relevant in the country and curator in 2014 of the Yokohama Triennial, which had a title that does not need clarification: ART Fahrenheit 451. This Triennial is one of the most suggestive international events and in the spring of 2024 it will open its eighth edition —Wild Grass: Our Lives, a title taken from the Chinese writer Lu Xun—with a reflection on life after covid. It began its journey in 2001 and has had artists as curators, among others the Indian collective Raqs, presented at CA2M in 2014.
This assault on binarism is astonishing in Morimura. Through his image, he occupies the roles of men and women with equal ease; humans and apples, fish, flowers…; the face of Manet's Olympia, of her African maid, the body of Frida, of the characters in Las Meninas, Van Gogh's sunflowers or the carp torn from a Japanese print… For Western culture, Morimura formulates a gesture as drastic as walking through the world of the dead while alive. Furthermore, is there anything that more clearly poses an attack on the masculine/feminine binomial than kabuki? Spectators prefer to see Lady Macbeth played by a male star, just as in the Takarazuka theater, created by the businessman and politician Kobayashi Ichizo in 1914, all the roles were played by young girls who based the kata —formal patterns—in the postures and gestures of Marlon Brando in the 1950 films. The stereotype is not bad.
The Japanese friend barely cracks a smile. One day he listened attentively to my explanation about Morimura and he became interested in our readings and enumerations; categories, pigeonholing; divisions between fish, sunflowers, African maids, Frida and Velázquez. Those dichotomies do not exist in their culture or ever in the way we understand them; There are no irreconcilable differences between the animate and the inanimate. So Japanese culture hypnotizes us, although perhaps for the wrong reasons. It would only be necessary, then, to determine where the attraction towards Japan in the West comes from, long before manga and even the Impressionists and their collections of Japanese prints, the one that appears in the background of the portrait that Manet paints of Zola.
Roland Barthes reveals it when he sensed on his trip to Japan in 1970 how traveling to that country is for a Westerner to confront a text that has a lot of longing. In The empire of signs (Seix Barral, 2020) —published after his stay and translated and prologued by Adolfo García Ortega— Barthes associates it with his writing experience, a shudder, he says; he satori —understanding in Zen—, which for the French is quite seismic. However, it is not—or not only—the thrill of the unfathomable or impossible of the ultimate translation, but rather the amazement at a language where, despite each concept being governed by a precise sign, the meaning is for logic. western an approach maneuver on a foggy landing strip.
In that inhabiting of the liminal and approaching what is barely intuited, the irresistible nature of Japan for the West could be located. They are sensations that the reader experiences while reading Nagori, by the Paris-based writer and food critic Ryoko Sekiguchi, published this year by Periférica and for me one of the most exquisite books I have ever read. The multi-significant word nagori It becomes a guide for a reflection on seasonal fruits and the different notion of time in Japan, among other things because the seasons have a much more complex meaning there. Nagori It refers to nostalgia for the season that is ending, but also to the evocation of the house that no longer exists; or the trail left by a person or object when they leave. In other words, at the passing of the seasons that flow, the subject of another very delicate book that Errata Naturae has just published: The peninsula of the twenty-four seasons by Inaba Mayuki, which captures the Japanese love for cats.
Regarding the passage of time, Soetsu Yanagi stopped in 1926 in his text 'The beauty of miscellaneous objects' collected in The beauty of the everyday object (Gustavo Giili, 2021). Zakki, “miscellaneous objects” that accompany us on a daily basis, become more beautiful the more they are used and the more beautiful they are, the more they are used. Years ago, similar comments about the passage of time that makes objects more desirable enthralled us in Praise of the shadow (Siruela) by Tanizaki, and announced the eternal Japanese spell on our culture, from the pages of Nagori until the recent manga fair in Barcelona.
Japan does not bewitch us, like this, by challenging our dichotomies. It seduces us by appealing to that mental space excluded from our logic, that of satori, the ultimate and essential understanding, which once revealed we long for even in the “pocket version” that the rudimentary Western logical-linguistic tools allow us to glimpse. What's more, now that our language aspires to break the old dichotomies regarding gender and we have waged a particular war on binarism, tracing multiple and open possibilities in its definitions – the term LGTBQ+ can be used to combine the denominations that emerge -, I think of nagori, in how complex it is to translate it into our logic, and I sense a certain linguistic failure when we insist on establishing those categories of gender option, many and non-binary, although closed boxes with no way out —“cis”, “tras”, “bi” ….— which, in their own way and despite everything, reproduce the logic reigning in Diderot's encyclopedia: that each thing has a precise definition within the world. The world in order: strawberries all year round.
“As one delves deeper into Nakahira's visual work and essays, one believes one is closer to understanding, but each time new questions assail us, what seemed so banal and trivial suddenly appears to us as something disconcerting and strange.” , writes Dani S. Álvarez in his prologue to the book by Japanese photographer and essayist Takuma Nakahira The documentary illusion (Ca L'Isidre Edicions, 2018). Welcome to Japan.
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