One of my favourite desserts as a child was baked apples, smothered in custard, and stuffed with sultanas and brown sugar. My mother had a special tool for cutting out the apple cores. She called it a corer. I remember thinking that it should be called an ‘uncorer’ since it took cores away rather than put them in. To be cored, I realised later, could mean either having a core, or not having a core. All of which is made more confusing in Japan, where cores often aren’t, and in not being, often are. In the words of Roland Barthes, the centre is rejected, the notion evaporates and, despite the unintended irony of his overblown passage on empty containers in Empire of signs, emptiness is crucial. Meals have no main course, Tokyo has no city centre. Alex Kerr aired the same idea in Lost Japan: an elaborate preparation leads to nothing, the final secret of an ancient art, once revealed, is nothing but prosaic pragmatism. This meeting of the Buddhist void, he claims, is what makes Japanese art so unlike that of any other culture, so plain, minimal, indirect, creating through the negative as it were.
Buddhism revels in the idea of there being – precisely where one most thinks there should be, must be, something absolutely crucial, pivotal, essential and central – nothing. It is the entirely bearable darkness of not-being. A Japanese word for nothing, mu, is one of those words that automatically has good connotations. A very fine Hyogo sake has been named mu. It is often found in product names. Mu is a popular kanji with calligraphers. The message is that mu (nothing) is good. Daruma says ‘I looked for it, and I couldn’t find it’ Not because it wasn’t there, but because he was looking. I read this in A circle round the sun, by Peregrine Hodson, and am interested to follow the story of Hodson’s escape to the Japanese countryside, intending to write a book, first person, about himself and Japan. The rural surroundings he describes are so familiar to me that I, having similarly retired to rural Yumesaki-cho, half expect to look across the road and see him in the house opposite. He came to the country to write, but self-consciously realises that he is installing himself in a scroll painting, an image of Japan, the steep hillsides and the dense forests enclosing him and settling him down. Here, he says, he found what he was looking for, but it was not what he had hoped for. His ideal has been shattered. He went the long way round, but he got there, he got to the heart, kokoro. ‘Japan’ is not ideal, but it can seem that way because it is just not there. Or as everyone likes to describe the idea of Zen, ‘the moment we go to capture it, it disappears.’ It is the emptiness of Mahayana Buddhism that is ultimately acknowledged as having been there all the time, and realising that it is all we really need: nothing. All in nothing.
This theme – true in so many ways. For example, Ian Buruma, in the gorgeous A Japanese mirror, talks about the difficulty of finding the locus of power within Japanese organisations. It is like the empty chamber at the heart of a Shinto shrine, the selflessness of satori, the crater at the hypocentre. Yet it is here that the power really does reside, in the emptiness. The Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku, circular and Mecca-less, shows there is nowhere to get to, there is only somewhere to go. The shrine at Ise, as close to a Mecca as one can find in Japan: hidden from sight, left entirely to the imagination, like the sacred mirror that resides there, or doesn’t, as the case may be. Shinto and Buddhism share this essential vacancy, and it may be why they cohabit so well, forever in orbit around one another, their common centre of gravity floating in the empty space between them. Satori cannot exist without the arduous apprenticeship. The truth of Buddhism is practice, not dogma. The truth of Shinto is ritual. The procedural wins over the declarative – how behaviouralist!
The famous emptiness of classical Japanese interiors creates echoes of the void. The Japanese value of appropriateness practically dictates that most household belongings be kept out of sight until they are appropriate to the time, occasion and those present. To take the other alternative – of assigning occasions to single-purpose locations, as is normal in European houses – necessitated too may rooms too infrequently used, and this is in conflict with the other Japanese value of economy.
