Reading with the Body, Writing with the Body｜Fumiko Hayashi, Who Never Stopped Writing

Read with the body, speak with the body. This is the method I have followed in answering my own longing to know Japan.

As countless predecessors have told us, you can become a bookworm and read thousands, even tens of thousands of books, and none of it will turn into living knowledge on that account. Knowledge stored in your head as dead knowledge is of no use to the world or to anyone in it. The sages and the wise who taught a living teaching have always rejected this self-serving kind of learning.

Sima Guang put it this way: “The ultimate meaning of learning lies in the search for how to govern the heart. Whatever has nothing to do with the perfection of character cannot be called ‘learning’ in the true sense.” Since the modern era, however, learning has become an empty form, and the heart, the heat, the seriousness of staking one’s life on it have all disappeared.

Perhaps the world as it stands now is where that ends. The illusion that learning means accumulating and holding knowledge in the head has still not lifted, and I have the sense that what Sima Guang would refuse to call “learning” has entered its endgame together with a modernity that will not end.

That said, the experience of reading a book is always wonderful. I read almost no novels myself, and looking back, I think it is because I find it hard to connect a novel with moving my own body through the world.

Some people take pleasure in living, through a novel, the world an author has imagined and made. But even in that sense, it seems to me that a work ought to be something that arises of itself at the far end of a writer’s continual movement. When writers set out to write about a theme within their own vision of the world, they produced their works by first and foremost reading with the body and speaking with the body, and by going on doing it.

Seen this way, it becomes clear that writers once moved more than their readers did, and that the worlds they read and wrote with their bodies were exactly what gave readers such a rich experience to immerse themselves in. Today it is the reverse. Writers no longer move, and an age of armchair theory brandished from the desk has become chronic. The true writer who goes out on foot to gather first-hand information has grown rare everywhere in the world.

As I was thinking about this, Fumiko Hayashi’s Horoki suddenly crossed my mind. Horoki, which the great writer put before the world, was the turning point that lifted her almost overnight into a popular author. Because she went on to establish herself as a writer, people tend to assume she was a success from the start.

Not only with writers, people always cut away the context and look only at who someone is now. In doing so they invariably mistake the truth. Of course, it is true that such context is hard to see from the work itself.

But what draws me to Fumiko Hayashi is not only that she read with her body and wrote with her body all her life, but that she “simply kept writing.” Or rather, no work was ever written more with the body than Horoki.

I feel it in myself as well: for every creator, there is no way forward except to keep making things and keep putting them before the world. Even if one piece happens to be a huge hit, the world has always been full of one-hit wonders who never produced a second. Isn’t the truly remarkable one the writer or creator who kept writing until the last moment before death, bringing out one work after another?

In that sense, Fumiko Hayashi was a writer in the truest sense. This week’s KINEMA 2400 introduces Mikio Naruse’s film based on her Horoki, because it captures superbly on screen how she read with her body, wrote with her body, and kept putting what she wrote before the world.

No, rather than say it captures this, it may be more accurate to say, given that Naruse himself was a prolific filmmaker, that he conveyed the way of life of someone who keeps making things.

Among actors, too, there are many fine people, above all Haruko Sugimura and Tatsuya Nakadai, who remained actors all their lives and gave themselves to film and stage to the very end, and Sayuri Yoshinaga is still carrying on today. Shizuka Ijuin, whom I personally revere, is among them: what I love are the predecessors who read with the body, wrote with the body, and went on writing to the end.

Whether the medium is writing, video, photography, illustration or anything else, we first move the body, and from there we write with the body. The Japanese were a people who could think not with the head but with the belly, and write with the belly. These days I feel strongly that unless we recover this bodily sense once more, we will not be able to move beyond the raging current of the AI age.