The other world where we spend a third of our lives

Three hundred thousand hours. That is roughly how long each of us spends, on average, in night across a lifetime. More than a third of our entire existence – most of it inaccessible to memory, most of it lived in a different mode of being: with a brain that softens its vigilance, eyes learning the dark, a body lying down and ceasing to defend itself. Day is what we remember. Night is what remembers us – because it keeps the images, fears, longings, faces and thoughts we avoid by daylight. It is at night that the brain reheats old fears and invents new ones; we fall in love with the absent; we make decisions foreign to the rational day.

Cultures have tried to name this space. The Semitic world gave it the name of darkness and placed it on the opposite side of light; most of the Western tradition is its heir, and in that tradition night has been, to this day, a field of moral struggle. There is also another way. Some cultures did not treat night as an enemy, but as a neighbouring country – different, but lawful, unintelligible, but sovereign. Japan is one of them. From this other path grew a literature unlike any in Europe – lovers confessing their feelings in darkness so dense they could not see each other's faces, only the style in which the other arranged verses; travellers meeting their long-dead beloved without dread or fear; poets gazing at the river of stars as a bridge, not as an abyss.

The deepest record of all this lies, however, neither in literature nor in philosophy nor in art, although each of them carries it within. It lies in a single character of writing. Four strokes of the brush, two millennia of history, millions of hands tracing it in ink – and an image: a man sits beneath a roof, beside him glows the sickle of an evening moon, and at the very bottom runs a short, unclear stroke whose origin no one fully knows. This is how the Japanese write the word night. A country in which darkness is neither the opposite of light nor the dwelling of evil, but a depth in which things begin to exist differently than by day – more intensely, more strangely, perhaps more truly. A night that need not be conquered, only inhabited. From the kanji 夜 (yoru), through the literature of old Japan, all the way to that particular Japanese openness to strangeness and wonder. In this dusk someone is already waiting for us.

The Man Beneath the Roof

夜. Yoru. Look at this character. At the very top runs a horizontal beam with a small dot above it – in Chinese and Japanese script the standard pictogram of a roof, the kind you would find on every house of the Edo era. Beneath this beam, on the left side, two strokes of the brush form a narrow, vertical figure – a person drawn in profile. To the right, in the lower part of the character, sits yū (夕) – a kanji standing on its own, meaning "evening" and depicting the sickle of the moon: a hook, with two short strokes inside. And at the very bottom, between the man and the moon, runs a short diagonal stroke. It is the most opaque element of the whole sign – no one fully knows how to explain it. Roof. Man beneath the roof. Evening moon beside him. And that stroke at the very bottom whose etymology keeps silent.

Before we say anything about the history of this character, it is worth pausing for a moment by its very arrangement. The roof above the man does not close into four walls – in kanji a roof is only a symbol, a line above the head. The walls remain unspoken. Into that emptiness on the sides one can put anything: wooden pillars, paper shōji, an open veranda, a forest beyond the threshold. It is hard to say whether the makers of the sign meant this on purpose. But anyone who looks at the kanji 夜 (yoru) today has the right to notice that the man inside it does not sit in a shelter. He sits in a space that can be filled with something. And into which the moon can look in. And if the moon – then what else?

Yet the present form of the character was reached through a long evolution; originally the sign looked entirely different. Archaeologists digging in the 1920s under the hills of Henan province in China found, in tombs from the Shang era, ox bones and turtle shells with incisions. These incisions – the oldest known Chinese writing, called in the Japanese reading kōkotsubun (甲骨文), "writing on shell and bone" – were made around 1200 BCE. Priests heated the bones in fire, asking the spirits of ancestors about weather, war and harvest, and read the answer from the cracking pattern. They recorded questions and answers in fine incisions on the edges. Among these incisions our character also appears. It looks completely different from today.

In its oldest form there is no roof at all. There is, however, a man – drawn frontally, with arms spread wide to the sides, like in the character 大, which today means "great". Under his right armpit hangs the moon. To the left appears an additional stroke that philologists still debate: some hold it is a sign of repetition (the moon returns each night), others – that it is a man lying down, an image of sleep, a time of rest. So this character looked three thousand years ago: someone standing with arms outstretched, holding the moon under his armpit, and something else.

The dictionary Shuōwén Jiězì (説文解字), compiled by Xu Shen in the second century CE, classifies the character as keisei (形聲), a phono-semantic compound. Xu Shen indicates that the sign has two layers: a semantic one, responsible for meaning, and a phonetic one, responsible for sound. In 夜 (yoru), the element carrying meaning is the moon (夕), and the phonetic one – here it gets most interesting – is a fragment of an entirely different character, 亦 (read in Old Chinese yì, in Japanese eki, meaning "also"). This element, originally a pictogram of a man with dots on either side marking the armpits, in 夜 (yoru) is cut down, distorted, broken up into a roof above and a side stroke below.

Which means that what today looks like a man beneath a roof is in reality the distorted form of an entirely different pictogram – a man with clearly marked armpits. Why armpits, again? Pure linguistic mechanics. The word "armpits" in Old Chinese sounded yì, the word "night" – yè. Similar enough. The maker of 夜 (yoru) needed an element with a sound close to "night" and reached for the existing character for "armpits" because the sound matched. Meaning had no meaning – only the sound counted. Chinese etymology can be ruthlessly bodily and ruthlessly indifferent to sense. What today we read as a poetic image of a man beneath a roof with the moon was born from a purely phonetic calculation: take something that sounds similar, glue on the moon as a semantic clue, done.

What is fascinating is that where today's teachers in Japanese primary schools tell children about "the man beneath the roof with the moon beside him" – and even draw mnemonic pictures of it – strict etymology says something else. The roof in this sign is a secondary illusion, formed through two thousand years of brush copying on silk, bamboo and paper. The character evolved in a direction that made it easier to recognise and remember – and along the way lost its original meaning. And yet: precisely for this reason the illusion is truer than the original. Because it is the illusion the Japanese learned. It is the illusion that works in their imagination when they see the word "night". An illusion repeated for two millennia becomes a cultural truth, decided not by how a sign came into being, but by how it is understood today. In this sense the man really does sit beneath a roof, and the moon really does look in beside him – even if historically they once meant something completely different.

The Chinese character arrived in Japan between the fifth and seventh centuries CE, alongside Buddhism, an administrative system, and the entire infrastructure of continental civilisation. But night in Japan already had its name. In the oldest surviving work of Japanese literature – the Kojiki (古事記), the "Chronicle of Ancient Events", written down in 712 – the word yo was written phonetically with the character 用 (also read yō, meaning "to use, tool"), because the Chinese 夜 was not yet a settled standard. Only later writings began to bind the native Japanese yo to the Chinese 夜. In time the suffix -ru was added to yo – producing yoru, today the most common word for night. No one fully knows what the -ru means. Some Japanologists suggest a connection with a nominal suffix, others – with a verb "to be in". One way or another: the addition made yoru sound concrete, more verbal than the archaic yo. And yo – on its own – lives to this day, only in poetry, in older forms, where the language refuses to be ordinary.

Every kanji in Japan usually has two lives. A Chinese life – the on'yomi reading, derived from an approximate imitation of the Chinese pronunciation of the era in which a given character reached the archipelago. And a Japanese life – the kun'yomi reading, assigned to a native Japanese word meaning roughly the same as the Chinese original. Which means that in any Japanese text the same character can sound completely different, depending on context, partnership with other characters, style. For 夜 the on'yomi is ya; the kun'yomi is yoru or, in older forms, simply yo.

These two readings build two entirely different worlds of language. On'yomi – technical, official, factual – lives in everyday words in which night is rather an hour-category than an experience: kon'ya (今夜, "tonight"), shin'ya (深夜, "deep night"), yakan (夜間, "the period of night"), yakin (夜勤, "night shift"), tetsuya (徹夜, "a sleepless night spent at work"). The vocabulary of offices, taxi drivers, doctors on call. In these words night is simply an hour, properly arranged in relation to other hours.

Kun'yomi is different. Kun'yomi enters intimacy. In words read yoru and yo lives what is genuinely nocturnal in night: yonaka (夜中, "the middle of the night", when the world sleeps), yozora (夜空, "the night sky" with everything visible upon it), tsukiyo (月夜, "a night of the moon", a night luminous as water). In these words you can hear that the Japanese noticed many different kinds of night – and named each one separately.

Among all the night words a few deserve a longer pause. The first is yonaga (夜長), literally "long night". The expression does not mean simply any night longer than the day; it means specifically the autumn nights, when the day clearly shrinks, when a person sitting down to read or to write poetry has a mass of time before them. Yonaga is a long night at one's disposal. In haiku it is one of the kidai – the seasonal keyword – for autumn, and carries something of a sardonic luxury: in winter it is so cold you stay in the futon, in summer too hot to sleep deeply; but in autumn, when the evening air is at exactly the temperature at which you neither freeze nor sweat – that is when night becomes a gift of time.

The second word is yofukashi (夜更かし). Literally "deepening the night", staying inside the night despite tiredness, despite reason saying: go to sleep. The Japanese use this word not as a label for pathology, but as the name of a certain practice. Yofukashi is what a poet does when he writes. What a lover does when he waits. What the solitary one does, knowing that sleep would steal from him the time when thought and imagination can spread their wings. This single word holds a kind of ethics: sometimes denying oneself sleep is more faithful to oneself than going to bed.

The third word is yobai (夜這い). Literally "crawling at night". Today it raises a smile in Japan, because it is associated with a rural custom alive still at the beginning of the twentieth century: young unmarried men slipping at night into the houses of unmarried girls. This custom organised, for centuries, a substantial part of Japanese rural life – more so than we today care to remember. It had a ceremonial side, knew refusal, knew consent, sometimes led to marriage, sometimes did not. I will write a separate essay on it for Ukiyo-Japan one day. In any case – the true etymology of yobai runs elsewhere. The word comes from the Old Japanese verb yobau (呼ばふ) – it meant "to call", "to court someone". The kanji spelling 夜這い, "crawling at night", is a later ateji – a phonetic recording suggesting an etymology that is no longer present in the word itself. The true meaning of yobai is not creeping but calling. Night as the time when you call – not with your mouth, but with your presence, your body, by being beneath the same moon as someone else. Night calls. And calls not only to lovers.

If, then, we return now to the sign 夜 – to that man beneath the roof with the moon beside him – we will see something different from the first glance. The man in the sign does not hide from the night. Does not defend himself against it. He lives in it. The moon is not an intruder; it is a companion. The roof is not an enclosure; it is a point of orientation. Night is a country. The sign shows that one can live in this country.

How People Lived in This Country

At the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries, in the imperial palace at Heian-kyō (today Kyōto), a charming and brilliant – though also somewhat malicious – lady-in-waiting, known to us under the pseudonym Sei Shōnagon, began to record loose notes, lists, observations, anecdotes. What grew out of them is today called Makura no sōshi (枕草子) – "The Pillow Book". It is the first text in the history of world literature in the zuihitsu genre – "following the brush" – uncommitted prose that leaps freely between anecdote, portrait, list and aphorism. Makura no sōshi opens with a sentence that every Japanese pupil learns by heart in school. The first four sections are four seasons paired with four times of day. Spring – dawn. Autumn – dusk. Winter – early morning. And summer?

夏は、夜。月のころは、さらなり。

闇もなほ、螢のおほく飛びちがひたる。

また、ただ一つ二つなど、

ほのかにうち光りて行くも、をかし。

雨など降るも、をかし。

(Natsu wa yoru. / Tsuki no koro wa sara nari. / Yami mo nao, hotaru no ōku tobichigaitaru. / Mata, tada hitotsu futatsu nado, / honoka ni uchihikarite yuku mo okashi. / Ame nado furu mo okashi.)

"In summer – the night.

When the moon shines, that is obvious.

But even in moonless darkness

fireflies fly in droves.

And most of all, when only one or two

drift past, glowing faintly – that is the delight.

When rain falls – even more so."

– Sei Shōnagon, Makura no sōshi,

ca. 993–1002, Heian-kyō

The whole description acquires its aesthetic sense thanks to two words. "In summer – the night." Two words. No verb. No "is beautiful", no "I love". A bare equivalence: summer = night. Sei Shōnagon does not explain, does not elaborate, does not prove – she leaves an equals sign and walks on. Only afterwards does she show what this summer night is like: of the moon, of the firefly, even of the rain. Each detail confirms the first sentence, but none is its proof – the proof is that every detail agrees.

Night for Sei Shōnagon is not background. Not decoration. It is the equivalent of an entire season: the summer essence, its deepest meaning, lies not in the rice field and not in the lotus flower, but in the night. And in the night – not in an abstract quiet night, but in a concrete one: in the moment when fireflies glow or when rain falls from the sky. Notice one more thing: in this brief description appears moonless darkness – yami (闇). This is not the absence of light. It is a certain state of the world in which fireflies become visible at all. Darkness for Sei Shōnagon is not opposed to light – darkness is the condition for light to exist. A thousand years before Tanizaki, Sei Shōnagon already knew this.

A few years after Sei Shōnagon, in the same Heian-kyō, her colleague-rival at court – Murasaki Shikibu – wrote Genji monogatari (源氏物語), "The Tale of Genji". The work is regarded as the first novel in the history of world literature, and at any rate as the first psychological novel. Through fifty-four chapters we follow the life of Hikaru Genji, son of an emperor by a secondary union, handsome, gifted, melancholy. Most of his life happens at night. Not metaphorically – literally.

In the Heian palace there was no lighting except for oil lamps and candles. Fire, always risky, was used sparingly indoors. The interiors were closed for the night by many layers of sliding paper screens, shōji. When darkness fell, a room became simply dark. So dark that lovers meeting at night could not see each other's faces. They saw only silhouettes, felt only touch, heard only breath. The whole courtly grammar of love – from beginning to end – was built on this darkness.

Courtship began with an exchange of poems. A man who had heard about a certain woman would write to her a brief tanka in his own calligraphy. She would write back. The exchange lasted days, weeks, sometimes months. Writing said everything – the hand revealed character, sensitivity, refinement. Then – if mutuality took hold – came the visit. The visit was just what I called a few paragraphs above yobai (though I had then in mind somewhat newer rural customs): the man came at night, crept under the veranda, slipped between the sliding panels. The woman waited. She sat behind the last screen, surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, in darkness so dense she could not see her visitor, although she could touch him. Only at dawn, when the first light slipped between the shōji, did she see his face. And from that one glimpse of a face she had to invent the whole continuation of the story – everything she wrote, felt, did with him rested on an image seen once, at dawn.

Genji had many such nocturnal stories. The most famous is connected with a woman named Yūgao – "Evening Glory", because he met her by a thicket of yūgao (夕顔), the flower that opens at sunset. Their romance was brief and, as all of Genji's romances, intense. They spent one night together in an abandoned house. In the middle of the night Yūgao woke from a nightmare, began to choke, could not breathe, died on the spot – with no physical cause. Genji understood: he recognised in this the work of the spirit of Rokujō-no-miyasudokoro, his former lover, an intelligent, refined, rejected woman. Her spirit – in the form of ikiryō (生霊), the spirit of a living person acting outside her own awareness, driven by resentment – had unknowingly killed her rival. All of this happens at night. And it is at night that Genji understands that the night which gave him Yūgao could also take her away – because at night the boundary between the living and the dead, between waking and sleep, between guilt and unconsciousness, is delicate. There is no thick wall. There is only paper.

Seven hundred years later, no longer in a palace but on the road through rural Tōhoku, another Japanese would write of night – briefly, in seventeen syllables. Matsuo Bashō, the master of haiku, set out from Edo in 1689 on a journey of one hundred and fifty-six days, the fruit of which was Oku no hosomichi (奥の細道), "The Narrow Road to the Deep North". In the middle of this journey, on the shore of the Sea of Japan in the village of Izumozaki, he stopped on the eve of the Tanabata festival. Tanabata is the night on which – according to a Chinese legend taken over by Japan – two starry lovers meet once a year: Orihime (織姫, "the Weaver") and Hikoboshi (彦星, "the Cowherd") – she wove robes for the gods, he tended celestial oxen, they fell in love so deeply that both abandoned their work. The Emperor of Heaven separated them with a river of stars – what astronomy today calls Vega and Altair, divided by the Milky Way. They meet once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month. Only if the sky is clear. If rain falls – they must wait another year.

文月や六日も常の夜には似ず

(Fumizuki ya / muika mo tsune no / yo ni wa nizu)

"The seventh month.

Already its sixth night

is unlike any other."

– Matsuo Bashō, Oku no hosomichi,

poem from Izumozaki, 1689

The Tanabata festival is held on the seventh day of the seventh month. Bashō writes the poem on the sixth – the evening before. Nothing has yet happened. But the night is already different. Something hangs in the air that cannot be measured or named. Night as anticipation. As a state of waiting. For Bashō that is enough.

On the same night – or the next, depending on the commentator – he records a far more famous poem. He stands on the shore, looking at the island of Sado on the horizon. Sado is the island of exiles; for centuries those who had to be removed but not killed were sent there. Zeami, the master of nō theatre, died on Sado.

荒海や佐渡によこたふ天河

(Araumi ya / Sado ni yokotau / amanogawa)

"A turbulent sea.

Toward the island of Sado stretches

the River of Heaven."

– Matsuo Bashō, Oku no hosomichi,

Izumozaki, 1689

In seventeen syllables Bashō fits three planes. The first – earth, sea, the elements, salt water beating against the rocks. The second – the human one, specifically the exiles, specifically Zeami, the whole history of that island's solitude. The third – the cosmos, the Milky Way thrown across everything like a bridge, but a cold bridge, indifferent, inhuman. Three planes, one moment, one gaze. There are not many sentences in world literature that contain so much in such a brief form. This night of Bashō's is not romantic – there is no lover in it. Nor is it horror. It is cosmic. The poet stands beneath an immense sky, and the night allows him to see that he is small. And that this smallness is alright.

Almost a hundred years after Bashō, in Osaka, lives Ueda Akinari – physician, scholar, writer disappointed with his own life. His hands had been deformed by childhood smallpox; he made of this the matter of a self-ironic pseudonym: Senshi Kijin (剪枝畸人) – "the Misfit with Pruned Branches". In 1776 he publishes a collection of nine tales under the title Ugetsu monogatari (雨月物語), "Tales of Rain and the Moon". The title is an image. "Rain and moon" means for Akinari a specific kind of night: one in which it had earlier rained, then the clouds parted, and through the misty damp shines a hazy moon. On such nights – Akinari says in the preface – ghosts appear. Demons come out. The dead return. People speak with those who are no longer there. And at dawn everything vanishes without trace.

One of the tales is titled Asaji ga yado (浅茅が宿), "The House Among the Weeds". The samurai Katsushirō, out of poverty and ambition, sets off for Kyōto to sell silk and earn a better life. He leaves behind his young wife Miyagi, promising to return before autumn. War breaks out. Roads are closed. Katsushirō is stranded for seven years. When at last he manages to come back to his native village, he finds his house abandoned, overgrown with weeds, half-collapsed. Inside, in the half-darkness, sits Miyagi. He spends one night with her – they speak, they touch each other, they sleep together. In the morning he wakes on damp earth. Miyagi is gone. The roof is gone. Weeds have grown where the bed was. He goes to the neighbours. He learns that his wife died five years ago, waiting for him. The gravestone stands behind the house. The meeting of the previous night was real – but it took place in another world.

For Akinari the night is not a setting of horror. It is a threshold – a place where two worlds touch each other. One can enter, one can return, one can stay. This topography contains no moral warning: Akinari does not tell Katsushirō "do not return at midnight", does not tell the reader "the night is dangerous". He says: the night is what it is. Some have the good fortune of meeting in it the dead they loved. Others meet snakes, demons, the spirits of betrayed emperors. The night neither punishes nor rewards. It gives back what it has.

One hundred and fifty-seven years after Akinari, in 1933, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, at the height of his fame, writes a short essay titled In'ei raisan (陰翳礼讃) – "In Praise of Shadows". It is a hymn to a Japanese aesthetics that – in Tanizaki's view – is dying under the pressure of Western electric lamps, white bathroom tiles, chromed washbasins.

The very name of this essay is key. Had Tanizaki wanted to say simply "shadow", he would have used the character 影 (kage) – the standard word for shadow as the effect of light striking an obstacle. But he uses two characters: 陰翳, read in'ei. The first, 陰, means dimness, shade, half-light, the turned-away side, the feminine aspect (this is Chinese yin); the second, 翳, carries the ideas of veiling, recess, of a feather casting a shadow. In'ei is not "shadow" – it is an ensemble of half-light, a constitutive dimness, a darkness that is not emptiness. Tanizaki says that Japanese culture knows something about this kind of darkness that the Western world has forgotten.

He writes: "nature taught us the laws governing darkness". For Tanizaki, a lacquered bowl acquires its character only when it is placed in a dimly lit room. Then darkness enters it, settles on its bottom, begins to work with the reflection of the candle on the lacquer surface – and the vessel ceases to be a vessel. It becomes an image of infinity. Gold on tableware shines only in half-light; in electric light it loses its depth, becomes flat. A woman in a kimono, framed by black hair, with a face whitened with makeup, makes sense only when surrounded by dimness; in full light she looks like a doll. The whole Japanese aesthetic of half-light is not a capricious fashion. It is an ontological discovery: things have two kinds of existence, and one of them awakens only in darkness.

Two years after In Praise of Shadows, in 1935, Kawabata Yasunari begins to write his most famous work – Yukiguni (雪国), "Snow Country". Its first sentence, one of the most famous in the history of Japanese literature, reads: "The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The bottom of the night turned white." In Japanese – yoru no soko ga shiroku natta. Soko means "bottom". The bottom of the night. Because night has a bottom. Because night is not an absence, but a three-dimensional space into which you can drop a coin and hear it strike the floor. European languages have no easy translation for this sentence. They must choose: "the earth lay white under the night", "the bottom of the night turned white", "the underside of night". None of these sounds natural. In Japanese it does. Because in this language night is volume, not abstraction.

A Different Land

Here it would be easy to make a mistake that recurs in texts about Japan written for the Western reader. To say: "for us night is fear, for them aesthetics". Or: "Christians fear the dark, the Japanese love it". This is not true. Europe has a deep and beautiful tradition of nocturnal literature. Novalis wrote Hymns to the Night, regarding it as sacred, higher than the day, maternal. Keats wrote his ode to a nightingale singing in May, at night. Dostoevsky gave us White Nights. Hoffmann lived by night. Edgar Allan Poe placed his demons in every dark hour. For the German Romantics night was a place of truth. Nietzsche, reportedly, wrote best after sunset (though perhaps not as well as while walking). The notion that Europe had no mystique of night of its own is false.

The difference lies elsewhere. In axiology – in the value-map onto which night was inscribed. Europe carries within itself a value-map bound to its adopted religion. Even Novalis, even the deepest mystics of the night, write against this map or by trying to invert it. In the biblical tradition, from the very first verses of Genesis, light is good, and darkness is the state preceding order. "God divided the light from the darkness" – divided, because light and darkness are opposites. For two thousand years night in Europe was a field of temptation: the prince of darkness, witches on Walpurgis Night, sleep as "the little brother of death". When Novalis or the Romantics write of night positively, they work against this map – their positivity is heretical. Night is good only when wrested from the devil. Always in reaction. Always in dispute.

In Japan there was no such struggle. Buddhism and shintō, two vigorously intertwined traditions, never gave the night an unambiguous moral label. Yōkai is not a devil. A spirit – yūrei – is not damned. Kitsune, tanuki, bakeneko do various things, sometimes mischievous, sometimes cruel, but they are not agents of cosmic evil. Rokujō kills Yūgao out of grief, not out of moral guilt. Yuki-onna, the "snow woman", freezes wanderers because that is her nature, not because she serves "evil" demons. In Japan night was not a front. It was a region. A country with its own topography, not an emptiness between the order of the day and the return of order at morning. That is why one could live in it.

Today we know about the night things inaccessible to Sei Shōnagon or to Tanizaki. Neuroscience shows that as dusk falls the activity of the prefrontal cortex – the seat of self-control, rational planning, impulse-inhibition – gradually drops. The activity of the amygdala – the seat of emotion, especially fear and aggression – rises. In REM sleep the brain processes the events of the day, links them in unexpected configurations, produces images that never existed in reality. It is not that we become stupider in the evening. There is intelligence, but a different one – emotional, associative, metaphorical – it is this intelligence that writes poems, possesses lovers, in every culture produces its own gallery of demons and spirits. Sei Shōnagon did not know magnetic resonance imaging. But she knew that the summer in her was not at noon – it was in the night, between fireflies darting over the brushwood.

Freud gave this second intelligence a name: the unconscious. He said that the "censor" – the Superego – loses its vigilance at night, and so what was suppressed and ignored by day comes out of the human being. In the cultural circle of the West this was for a long time called temptation, sin, the work of Satan. Freud transferred the same structure from religious language to medical language: at night something surfaces with which one must afterwards deal. The Japanese never had to build this structure. For them, what surfaces at night is not "sin", but simply another kind of reality – tamashii ("soul"), yūrei ("spirit"), yōkai, and sometimes simply okashi – "that which is worth noticing". The same substance. An entirely different label. And entirely different consequences for how a person treats himself at night. If what surfaces is sin – it must be fought. If it is a guest – it must be received.

And this is, for me, after years of reading about Japan, the most important lesson of the sign 夜. Not that the Japanese are wiser. Not that their aesthetics is richer. Only that, at some point, they decided not to regard darkness as an adversary. They did not declare war on it. They did not start winning against it. Instead they accepted it as a neighbouring country – different, but not hostile – and learned to live in it. They learned that at night one does not need to illuminate everything. That a single candle is enough, and the rest happens by itself. That what has not been illuminated does not vanish – it lives on, only with another kind of life.

Let us return then to the first image. The man in the depth of the room. The hearth dying out, tea cooling in the bowl, on the wall the trembling reflection of a candle on lacquered wood. Beyond the thin paper wall the last blue of the sky is fading. The man is not alone. Beside him – not physically, but in the dense, palpable presence things have at night – sits the moon. Above him a roof that does not enclose, only shelters. Everything – every sound, every touch, every impression – has within it a certain concentration, intensity. Night is another country. A country with its own law, its own grammar, its own inhabitants. A thousand years ago Sei Shōnagon shared with us her wonder at the charms of the night. Seven hundred years later Bashō saw in it a cosmic stage. Later still Akinari described its inhabitants. Tanizaki tried to understand its aesthetics.

And we – after everything that has changed the night forever: after electricity, neon, screens – open a window in the city, switch off the light in the room, and for a moment that country comes back. Nothing more is needed. There is no need to fly to Japan, no need to learn calligraphy, no need to know how yoru or tsukiyo is written. One only needs, once a day – for ten minutes – to stop defending oneself against the night. To allow the house to open. To see who comes to visit. And to notice that beside us, all this time, has been sitting the moon.

SOURCES

1. Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi), Polish translation by Agnieszka Heuchert as Zapiski spod wezgłowia, czyli notatnik osobisty, Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog, Warsaw 2013.

2. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (In'ei raisan), Polish translation by Henryk Lipszyc as Pochwała cienia, Wydawnictwo Karakter, Kraków 2016.

3. Mikołaj Melanowicz, Historia literatury japońskiej [A History of Japanese Literature], Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsaw 2012.

4. Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan, Knopf, New York 1964.

5. Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1998.

6. 松尾芭蕉『奥の細道』, 久富哲雄全訳注, 講談社学術文庫, 東京 1980 (Matsuo Bashō, Oku no hosomichi, complete translation and commentary by Hisatomi Tetsuo, Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, Tokyo 1980).

7. 白川静『字統』, 平凡社, 東京 1984 (Shirakawa Shizuka, Jitō – an etymological dictionary of Chinese characters, Heibonsha, Tokyo 1984).

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Enduring the Gaze of Strangeness — fushigi and the Art of Understatement in Japan 

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"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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