Japanese endings are not abrupt things. They are often unheralded, and only noticed retrospectively. Stories unravel, just like experiences. Without dying, they simply fail to go on. Death and failure are not closely connected in Japanese thought; when nobly achieved, failure is not thought of as death. It is the manner of the performance, not its outcome, that is important. Indeed, dying well, boldly and unflinchingly, is something that many Japanese aspire to even today, and suicide can still be seen as an appropriate solution. Old people once took themselves off into the mountains when they felt they had become a burden (or they were dumped there by a helpful younger relative, after an uphill piggy-back ride). In Japanese culture, death is more often poignant than tragic. We are all impermanent, transient – fading away into the evening like the sound of a temple bell. It is a remarkably mature view that such a fate is a matter for embracement rather than futile denial. Awareness that each day may be our last, and that one will, might earn us a greater sensitivity to its sad fleeting details. Sadness can be such a fulfilment of the soul, and lends a gentleness to our actions that elation does not.
Niki Jumpie, the anonymous male character of The woman in the dunes by Abe Kobo, allows himself to be absorbed and buried in an existence without meaning and without a future, comforted by the thought that everything is illusory and unimportant. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Buddha already knew this. If, as much eastern thinking holds, to exist is meaningless, then is ceasing to exist meaningful – or is it equally meaningless? There is a Japanese word, umu, which means both existence and non-existence – as if the inexorable sliding from one to another is just part of an indivisible process. And so, with the end so near at hand, it is easy to avoid the need for a climax, a resonant last word, a full stop…
