There are countries about which one can know a great deal without ever truly coming closer to them. Japan may belong to this category more than most. Few societies have been surrounded by such a dense accumulation of images, by ideas of politeness and discipline, cherry blossoms and high-speed trains, samurai, manga, Zen, loneliness, overwork, and that peculiar conjunction of future and past which has fascinated Western observers for decades because it seems to contain something at once familiar and profoundly foreign. The difficulty begins when these images are no longer perceived as images, but taken for explanations.
Japan then becomes a country one believes one has already understood before ever encountering it.
Perhaps this is precisely why I have returned to Japan once more, this time by way of two paths that initially resemble detours and may, for that very reason, lead closer to what resists direct description. One path runs through literature, the other through film. The two books belong together without depending on one another, and both begin with a certain mistrust of that kind of knowledge which arranges its objects neatly and, in doing so, occasionally loses something that only becomes visible once the order itself begins to waver.
For a country is not the sum of its data.
One may know its history, describe its political systems, trace its economic development, catalogue its religious traditions and explain its social rules, yet the question still remains of how people actually live within that order, what they leave unsaid, what they expect of one another, what they shrink from, and which contradictions they endure because they have learned to live with them. It is precisely these spaces in between that interest me.
Literature and film are not illustrations of this.
They do not explain Japan by revealing some hidden truth, but by showing us where language becomes uncertain, where a gesture lasts longer than it should, where someone remains silent although an answer is expected, or speaks although there is no longer anything left to say. A society reveals itself not only in its laws and institutions, but also in the stories it tells and in the stories it finds itself compelled to tell again and again.
Perhaps this is the real point of departure for both books.
Not: What is Japan?
But rather: What happens to our image of Japan when we stop trying to answer that question too quickly?
In literature we encounter people whose relationship to society is rarely as clear-cut as a cultural explanation might prefer it to be. They obey and resist at the same time, they long for closeness and defend their distance, they suffer under forms of order whose disappearance they might equally fear. The conflicts do not always arise where we expect them. Sometimes what matters most lies not in a dramatic act, but in a shift, an omission, a sentence left unfinished, or a memory that proves more persistent than the present.
Film possesses other means.
A room can begin telling a story before anyone enters it. A street can reveal more about an era than a historical commentary. The distance between two people can become a social statement without either of them having to speak about it. Cinema forces us to look, but it does not guarantee that we will understand what we are seeing, and perhaps that uncertainty is precisely what makes it productive.
For the foreign does not begin where something becomes incomprehensible.
It may begin where we understand something too quickly.
For Western observers, Japan is especially vulnerable to such rapid translations. Silence becomes harmony, politeness becomes submission, tradition becomes immobility, technological modernity becomes faith in the future. Observations become patterns, patterns become explanations, and explanations eventually harden into certainties that appear stable only because everything contradicting them has been excluded.
But societies are made of their contradictions.
A person may defend an order that restricts them. A family may be both refuge and prison. Community may produce loneliness, while individualism does not automatically produce freedom. The past does not disappear simply because high-rises are built, and modernity does not erase tradition, but often merely forces it to alter its form.
The Japan that concerns me in these books is therefore not a finished Japan.
It is a Japan in motion, sometimes visibly, sometimes beneath the surface on which the familiar images continue to survive. A country whose social changes do not always take place where headlines expect them to, and whose continuities sometimes become most visible precisely at the moment when everything appears to have become new.
The point is neither to idealize Japan nor to replace fascination with disenchantment. Both would be too easy. Admiration can blind us just as thoroughly as rejection, and the supposed sobriety of the person who claims to have looked behind the curtain often produces nothing more than a second stereotype.
What interests me is something else: the possibility of sustaining a gaze for longer.
Not judging immediately when a contradiction appears. Not translating every form of foreignness into a familiar category. Not drawing conclusions about an entire people from individual observations. And at the same time, abandoning that romantic politeness which prefers to leave the foreign untouched for fear that closer examination might destroy its magic.
Understanding does not mean sparing something from scrutiny.
Nor does it mean possessing it.
Perhaps understanding is not a state at all, but a movement that begins again the very moment we believe we have arrived.
The two forthcoming books, Understanding Japan Through Its Literature and Understanding Japan Through Its Films, emerged from this movement. They are neither histories of literature nor histories of cinema, neither collections of reviews nor guidebooks to cultural peculiarities. Literature and film serve instead as points of access to a society that often reveals itself more clearly in its stories than in its explanations of itself.
Familiar works will stand alongside less expected ones, familiar images will lose some of their apparent self-evidence, and certain questions will have to remain open, because an open question can sometimes be more exact than a premature answer.
Perhaps this, too, is one of the things Japan teaches us, if we are willing not only to look, but also to observe our own gaze.
We never see only another country.
We also see the expectations we carry there with us.
And sometimes genuine understanding begins only at the moment when those expectations no longer hold.
