Tsurezuregusa and Yokohama

I recently finished writing an essay about the Tsurezuregusa (徒然草) or Essays in Idleness (which I quoted here), and to take a break before writing my next essay I read a volume of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (ヨコハマ買い出し紀行) or, somewhat awkward in translation, “A Record of Going Shopping in Yokohama.” I was struck by how similar the two works are.

Certainly they have their differences. Tsurezuregusa was written in the fourteenth century by a reclusive Buddhist monk, and contains his reflections on many things: the proper way for a gentleman to behave; precedent and the correct form of court ritual; anecdotes and stories he heard and terse pieces of advice. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, on the other hand, is a twentieth/twenty-first century fictional manga that focuses on a very human-like robot named Alpha who runs a coffee shop (she occasionally goes to Yokohama to buy coffee beans, hence the name).

Tsurezuregusa is renowned for its description of a certain widespread (although not universal) Japanese aesthetic. Yoshida Kenkō, the author, describes the aesthetic value of things that are asymmetrical, incomplete and worn out. In one oft-quoted line he writes that “It is only after the silk wrapper has frayed at top and bottom, and the mother-of-pearl has fallen from the roller that a scroll looks beautiful.” (page 70 of Donald Keene's excellent translation), and again: “Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring – these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration.” (p. 115)

This aesthetic appreciation for the worn out or faded, often called sabi, is brilliantly portrayed in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. Alpha's coffee shop is located out in the lonely Japanese countryside in a world where the oceans have risen. She travels across highways that were great arteries in the past, but are now cracked and split, with sand blowing across them. In one of the more sublime scenes Alpha visits a former coastal town that is now submerged underwater. However, through (presumably) some oversight at the power company the streetlights are still hooked up. When night falls the lamps come on, and the pools of light reveal glimpses of the once great city that glitter up through the black water, turning the whole bay into an extraordinary, beautiful light show.

However it is not only the environment that expresses the aesthetic beauty of the worn out. In the series humanity itself seems older and more worn down. Yokohama still seems to be a bustling city, but outside of it there is none of the magnificent energy of human commerce. The roads are in disrepair and there are no trains hauling materials and products from place to place. Occasionally we see the remains of what seems to be an office building or hotel covered with weeds. Politically as well, the world seems but a dim reflection of its former greatness. The nation of Japan seems to no longer exist, at least as we know it, as small areas are referred to as countries and called by their old feudal names.

Other than the robots, human technological innovation seems to have halted. One volume introduces an old racing boat built by one of the characters, now an old woman, in her youth. Although it seems to have been a great accomplishment when she built it, now it is derelict and rusting, and as we are not shown any newer models, it seems that this reflects the general state of technological progress. Also Alpha is amazed when she sees a small, single engine airplane in flight, a far cry from the people of our day who barely notice great jets thundering above them.

But rather than depicting this human decline as some sort of apocalyptic dystopia (a theme that is a bit tired by now), the series basks in the aesthetic attractiveness of a world that offers but a glimpse of former human greatness. Alpha leads a very attractive life attending to her infrequent customers, taking pictures of old buildings, wondering what they were used for, and sipping coffee with her friends, watching the swaying pampas grass in the twilight of the human endeavor.

The two works are similar in other ways as well. Both posit themselves in a degenerate age that is but a pale reflection of the past. For Kenkō that past was the Heian era, the height of aristocratic refinement, which had been corrupted into the age of warrior power in which he lived. Tsurezuregusa is also a representative work of zuihitsu literature. Zuihitsu (随筆) literally means “following the brush,” and refers to a style of simply writing whatever comes to mind without restriction. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is not a zuihitsu work, since it is a work of fiction and must develop characters and events. However it is structured as a set of discrete episodes that, while they move forward in time, are often unrelated and do not build up dramatic tension within a structured plot, very similar to the zuihitsu style.

Kenkō was a Buddhist monk, and accordingly one of the themes of Tsurezuregusa is the Buddhist idea of mujō (無常), or impermanence; the idea that all phenomena are conditional and impermanent, and therefore attachment to them is the source of human suffering. Alpha is no Buddhist monk, and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is not didactic Buddhist literature. Nonetheless the work definitely conveys the idea of impermanence. Alpha is an unaging robot, and eventually all the people she has grown attached to go away. The children she plays with grow up and move away or move on, and she is conscious of the limited time left to the kindly old man who runs the nearby gas station. Everything she forms an attachment to will eventually leave her, including her original attachment; her distant, absent owner.

I think Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou brilliantly captures the themes and aesthetic sensibilities of Tsurezuregusa in an ambitious, futuristic, scifi-ish setting. I believe it belongs on the short list of manga deserving serious literary consideration.