“Don’t worry. Many people, they go to bigger places for no be hit by surcharge, but they will not find what has this place.”
“You mean the karaoke?”
“No! There is karaoke everywhere. We two we meet here. That is the good thing. Next time I come with my niece. She speaks perfect English and she will be happy to meet you. In fact, she is my English teacher, two times a week.”
I bowed before leaving the bar, wrongly convinced that there would be no next time.
“What’s the name of the bar?” I asked, purely out of courtesy. “It might be difficult to find if I come again some night.”
“It does not have name yet. The owner only came one week ago and she does not like old name. Do you have suggestion?”
I shrugged, the best answer I could come up with, before going out into the silence of the night. The moon shone down on the cobbled lane of old Kyoto, promising adventures. A casual encounter in a nameless bar was just the beginning.
Wabi & Sabi
Although I’d gone to bed after midnight, tired after my long journey, jet lag opened my eyes at four in the morning. I was wide awake.
My body’s alarm clock had gone off, and there was no way it was going to let me go back to sleep. Lying on my bone-achingly hard mattress, I tried for quite a while to fight it, but to no avail. Finally, acknowledging defeat, I got up.
It was a quarter to five when I picked up one of Titus’s essays, thinking I could read it in theonsenhot spring bath offered by the ryokan.
In dressing gown and slippers, and equipped with towel and book, I went downstairs to the ground floor onsen. Unsurprisingly, at that hour there was nobody else in the place, which seemed to have been carved out of the rocky subsoil. It was a natural pool facing a window looking out onto a chaotic, overgrown garden. Next to one side of the pool, faucets were set into the wall, with metal buckets placed beneath them.
I stripped off in the changing room and went into the bathroom, where I sat on a low stool in front of a set of faucets and washed myself. When I had poured several buckets of water over myself to rinse off the soap, I grabbed my book from the changing room and stepped into the onsen, with its pleasantly warm yellowish water.
Now seated on a flat underwater rock, I gave my attention to my book’s description of the wabi-sabi concept which, six thousand miles away, was taking up so much of Titus’s time and effort.
As a philologist, I couldn’t overlook the origins of the word, so I started with that. It seems thatsabiwas originally used to describe the subtle, somewhat sad and subdued beauty of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Japanese poetry. Titus’s anthology informed me that the word summoned up melancholy feelings, something like a “sparrow foraging in a pile of fallen autumn leaves.”
According to the book, the other part of the equation, the wordwabi, conjured up humility and austerity, the refined poverty born of indifference toward wealth and ostentation.
Fascinated by this sophisticated sentiment, I flipped through the pages looking for more information about these two terms. Kamo no Chomei, a hermit monk who lived from the twelfth to the thirteenth century, said:
Wabiis the feeling that arises when we gaze at an autumn twilight sky—the quiet melancholy of its color when all sound has faded, those moments when, for reasons we cannot explain, tears begin to fall without end.
Lounging in the water of the onsen, I recalled for the umpteenth time David Friedrich’s painting hanging in Titus’s hallway. Everything about that man standing on a mountain was melancholy.
I wondered whether this was the sentiment that inspired the haiku and watercolors by Japanese artists. Perhaps they had another way of experiencing the beauty of the world.
Is there such a thing as universal melancholy?
Immersed in the sulfurous water, I was reclaiming my essence as a romantic soul—one who wards off loneliness with that kind of questioning. A distraction, like any other.
There was a second definition ofwabi, this time offered by a present-day author, Makoto Ueda, Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Stanford University. For him:
Wabiis the beauty that springs from the creative energy that flows in all things, animate or not. It is a kind of beauty that, like nature itself, can appear with darkness and light, and be sad and joyful, rough and gentle. The beauty of this force of nature is imperfect, always changing and beyond our reach.
Before I could ponder this text, a very large Japanese man came into the room, sat in front of the faucets and washed himself in stoic silence. He then lumbered over to the pool with a towel draped around his neck.
“Ohayo gozaimasu.”
I understood that, with this muttered greeting, he was wishing me good morning. It was half past five, and the business-trip guests in the ryokan were starting to stir.
As if the warm water was healing deep, long-open wounds, the man grunted with pleasure a couple of times. It seemed to be the most normal thing in the world for him to be sharing a bath with a stranger, but I felt a little uncomfortable with this colossus next to me. Once again, the book came to my rescue. Professor Ueda now brought the two wordswabiandsabitogether.
Wabioriginally meant “the sadness of poverty.” But gradually it came to mean an attitude toward life with which one tried to resign himself to straitened living and to find peace and serenity of mind even under such circumstances.Sabi, primarily an aesthetic concept, is closely related towabi, a philosophical idea.
My academic’s brain—which had reveled in the classes I’d taken in aesthetics and the history of thought—couldn’t ignore this provocative blending of meaning which I was still far from understanding.
