New Blog

The creator of the Asian Classics Project has started a new blog, the American Literature Project. Happy reading! Read more!

Cassatt's Women

Before last Friday, I knew Mary Cassatt mainly from the stamps that came out a few years ago.

They gave me a sense of soft and strangely flattened figures of mothers and children, a pleasant and toothless impressionism.

Yet it was Cassatt's work that gripped me at the Guggenheim, where it appears in an exhibit called "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia."

To "contemplate," in some cases, was merely to drop a visual reference to the Far East -- a redhead in a kimono here, a blue-and-white vase in the background there. Others took their compositional cues from the tiny figures in vast landscapes or spiraled off into mindscapes of their own.

On display was "The Death of James Lee Byars," a ceiling-high open box papered with squares of gold leaf. It shimmers, the edges of the leaves flutter. One feels strangely radiant. The quieter Nocturnes of John Singer Sargent had a muted effect: bridgescapes in black and dusky green, blurry as though through a rainy window. Beside some of the American paintings were Asian works that inspired them, such as the Japanese ukiyo-e prints of Utamaro and Hiroshige.

The American painter Mary Cassatt famously adopted the composition and domestic subjects of some of these prints, especially in her depiction of women. In one work in the exhibit, a woman dandles a baby on a train while another stares into space beside her ("In the Omnibus"). A strawberry blonde gazes over her shoulder as an assistant pins the hem of her gown ("The Fitting"). Elsewhere a seminude bends her head before the mirror and does the back of her hair ("Woman in Front of the Mirror").

I found these paintings quite different from the prints that inspired them, or indeed the work of her contemporaries.

The woodblock prints showed women of the pleasure quarters, geisha and the like, spreading their fans, playing instruments, sharing a drink. They are compositionally similar in the placement of figures, the intimacy of the scenes and the presence of women. But there's a decorative emptiness to ukiyo-e geisha, a boneless inscrutability in their bold flat planes and decorative details.

Cassatt's fellow impressionists shared her interest in domestic scenes. Often rosy-cheeked and prettily plump, these women washed laundry, cuddled kittens, and brushed their hair.

What astonished me about Cassatt's paintings was their psychological acuity. As a woman dandles a baby in "In the Ombibus," you might wonder what goes on in the mind of the lady beside her. Jealousy, annoyance, regret, crumpets? More interesting, possibly, is the thought of the woman holding the baby. How much of her behavior is natural, and how much of it a performance for her companion -- her sister, an old maid, a former rival?

In "The Fitting," too, their glances don't quite meet. Is the expression of the woman in white one of disdain, or is she thinking of an unrelated thing? The mirror doesn't reveal the expression of the seamstress.

The woman fixing her hair in ""Woman in Front of the Mirror" is topless, but not erotic. This is an everyday image, slouchy and saggy and a bit blurry, her head tilted slightly.

These aren't voyeuristic peeps into the bed or dressing room; they show women who are aware of being looked at, who half-pose and half hide their gaze in thoughts unseen.

Women are famously prone to double vision: an awareness of themselves as subjects who see and objects that are seen (cf. the male gaze of cinema). In these paintings of Cassat, women are neither "objectified" pin-ups who cast the viewer into the role of voyeur or Rosie the Riveters who stare back boldly. They gaze inward in a state of absorbed introspection.


From the Viewer's Notebook

The National Gallery of Art offers this reading of "In the Omnibus":

The woman on the left wears an elaborately decorated and sculpted hat that clearly separates her from the woman on the right, who wears a simple cap. The woman holding the baby is presumably the nanny; while her attention is focused on the baby, the baby's mother turns her gaze through an unseen window to events happening outside the bus. Women who could afford to do so hired nannies to assist in raising their children. In turn, they enjoyed greater freedom to pursue other interests, a fact which is perhaps illustrated by the mother's diverted gaze.

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Sakura Matsuri: Cherry Blossom Festival in DC

The Sakura Matsuri Japanese Street Festival is said to draw 140,000 visitors to Washington each spring, and I can believe it.

Five blocks from the White House, bamboo screens and handmade dolls vied with Dance Dance Revolution and cat-eared hats. Crowds gathered for Shiseido roulette and sake-tasting and calligraphy demos. At one end of the festival, a lady in kimono played a wooden flute as a dragon danced. At the other, two teens gamely taught the crowd Japanese phrases, and the odd Spanish, before Ai Kawashima came on.

I learned a few stray facts, like why the elegant gates outside Shinto temples are called torii. (The word means "bird-perch," a reference to the rooster that surprised the sun goddess Amaterasu into leaving her cave.) I watched the Muscle trounce a short kid at Wii tennis and marveled at yukata in bright colors.

But mostly I watched the festival go by: shock-wigged cosplayers, the Festival Queen, a pig and a small dog in pink ruffled outfits. See them and more in the slideshow below.

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Lafcadio Hearn, Wanderer and Teller of Tales

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was an Anglo-Greek journalist whose uncanny tales from Japanese folklore still raise a delicious thrill. His writings from Japan enthralled a generation of readers to whom Japan, only recently opened to the West, remained an exotic country. And, even more interestingly, he was as popular – and now probably more so – with Japanese readers.

Hearn rarely stayed in one place longer than it took to write his fill about it. In Cincinnati, his gory reports from crime scenes and slaughterhouses put readers off their breakfasts. He explored cafes and riverboats in black Bucktown, where he noted songs and met his first wife. Fired from the Cincinnati Enquirer for "deplorable moral habits" -- likely for his interracial marriage -- he soon fled the cold for New Orleans, where he was one of the last to interview the voodoo queen Marie Laveau.

Then he was off to the Caribbean island of Martinique, whose porteuses, or carrier women, trekked across mountains and forests with hundred-pound loads on their heads. His chief passions seemed to be a pagan past and beautiful women, of fame and ill-fame alike.

And so it's not surprising that Hearn, weary even of the tropics, should visit Japan. What's surprising is that of all the places he had travelled, it's where stayed. Hearn took Japanese citizenship, a Japanese name, and even an arranged Japanese wife, who spoke as little English as he spoke Japanese. A most unconventional man in America, his chosen culture was built on social convention, courtesy and propriety.

Hearn was a man of such contradictions, writes Jonathan Cott in the 1990 biography Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn. "In much of his behavior as a family man, profoundly committed to traditional ways, Lafcadio accepted a world of antinomies: Old Japan/New Japan, prudery/sensuality, moralism/tolerance, married love/passion, creative isolation/ sociability, commitment/escape."

The biography is chockablack with Hearn's own words: whole newspaper stories, folktales, great chunks of letters. (Cott had initially set out to write brief introductions to an anthology.) It hews closely to the stuff of his own life; I would have perhaps liked him to trim the quotes and provide more context on the reception of his work, but that, perhaps, is another story.

Hearn was born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn in 1850 on the Greek island of Leucadia. His father was a traveling army doctor, his mother beautiful but mentally unstable. Young Hearn was soon handed over to an elderly relative, swindled out of an inheritance, and packed off to boarding schools in France and Ireland. (The French would prove useful for bolstering his income with translations of Guy de Maupassant, Théophile Gautier, and others.)

Barely five foot three inches tall, Hearn wore enormous hats and covered the left side of his face when speaking to hide his blind eye. Whatever he wanted to see, he brought within inches of his good, bulging eye or examined under a pocket telescope.

Hearn's writing brims full of sensory detail, from the lush swaying of palms to the tonal palette of Japanese landscapes. He notes the "immense sonority" of sandals crossing a bridge and the alternating rhythm of tones they create.

Then I notice how small and shapely the feet of the people are -- whether bare brown feet of peasants, or beautiful feet of children wearing tiny, tiny geta, or feet of young girls in snowy tabi. The tabi, the white digitated stocking, gives to a small light foot a mythological aspect, -- the white cleft grace of the foot of a fauness.

In his reportage, Hearn casts the stuff of real life into the forms of melodrama, ghost story, and romance. In one tale, he describes the doruma idols that, in one particular town, are one-eyed until they grant a prayer. With a satisfying, sentimental tidiness, the tale ends with him tipping his host -- who then gives his doruma a new eye. As for fiction, Hearn often asked his wife Setsu to tell Japanese tales until he felt them in his bones. His Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things is perhaps his most well-known collection.

As with most places he had stayed, Hearn grew weary at times of Japan. He revisited a temple whose elderly priest and quiet air had enchanted him in his early days, only to find the priest dead and his cat aloof. His work as an English teacher took him to Tokyo, a city he despised for "absurd fashions" and "wickedly expensive living."

Hearn nevertheless chose to stay. Known in his later years as Koizumi Yakumo, he died at age 54 beside his wife and sons. Why Japan? While Cott doesn't play shrink for Hearn, the reader may be tempted to find reasons in his rootless past. Read more!

Kannon and the Mystery of the Hereafter

Several mysteries converge at the grave of Clover Adams. Her husband, the eminent historian Henry Adams, destroyed her letters and photos after her suicide in 1885 and never spoke of her again -- even in his famous autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.

A forgery of her grave marker later appeared in a Baltimore cemetery. Nicknamed the Black Aggie, the replica inspired so many horror stories and break-ins that the cemetery had it taken away. It now stands in Lafayette Square -- across the street, coincidentally, from the home of a woman who exchanged passionate letters with Henry Adams before and after his wife's death.

As for the original grave marker, you can see it any day at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. It needs no back story to seem mysterious.

A tall ring of yew trees block it from view. You have to hunt for the steps that lead up to the rose-marble dais. There you can sit on a polished bench with eagle's wings and view The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding, better known as the Adams Memorial.

Henry Adams, after returning from a trip to Japan, asked the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to base a memorial sculpture on icons of Kannon, the boddhisattva of compassion. A friend of Adams showed the sculptor the picture to the right -- a 16th-centry painting of Kannon by Kano Motonobu. Known in Chinese as Guanyin, her full name means "observing the cries of the world."

Saint-Gaudens cast a bronze of a seated woman in a cloak and hood. Her posture and the massy folds of her robes lend an air of strength in repose. Her heavy-lidded eyes are downcast, her hand raised against her face. Does she meditate or grieve? Is the hand raised to draw the hood toward her face or push it back?

When it was first displayed in 1891, onlookers called the statue "Grief." Irritated, Adams wrote to the sculptor's son Homer: "Do not allow the world to tag my figure with a name! ... Your father meant it to ask a question, not to give an answer; and the man who answers will be damned to eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx."

Visiting the grave last Saturday, I had no answers. Rainwater pooled in a fold of the statue's robe. The bronze felt warm to the touch. A fly hovered over her shoulder and I thought of Dickinson:

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

More scraps of poems floated down like colorful bits of paper. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves... And no birds sing.

The Adams Memorial is featured in a current exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum, "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989." Read more!

Rashomon and 17 Other Stories

Known for his flowing style and quotable wit, Ryunosuke Akutagawa launched his career in the 1910s with colorful short stories based on Japanese folklore.

He later turned from "borrowed containers" to the personal stories that were popular vehicles for Japanese modernists. His semi-autobiographical tales introduce his mad mother and his own descent into paranoia before his suicide in 1927.

The writings of Akutagawa remain embedded in the Japanese cultural consciousness, writes Haruki Murakami in his introduction to Rashomon and 17 Other Stories.

Translator Jay Rubin divides the collection into stories based on folklore, history, and memory. Most well-known, perhaps, are the spooky and superlative plots from the medieval anthologies Tales of Times Past and Tales of Uji. A monk tries to shrink his enormous nose; a businessman ends up with horses' legs. An artist commissioned to paint a “hell screen,” deciding he can only paint what he sees, orchestrates a horrifying scene.

With traditional plots comes modern storytelling technique. The most famous example is “In a Bamboo Grove,” which is the basis for the Akira Kurosawa movie “Rashomon.” A traveler is found dead with arrow and stab wounds. One by one, witnesses and suspects recount their versions of the events that led to the killing, ending with the ghost of the traveler himself. The manipulation of point-of-view gives these stories a psychological complexity that folktales may lack. Much of the mystery and erotic charge of "Hell Screen" – already a horror story in its own right -- comes from a faulty narrator who hints at a dark back story.

Far from didactic parables of Enlightenment or earthly success, these stories present unsparing portraits of selfishness and moral weakness. Typical of these is a soldier who repents his evil ways after his head is nearly severed in battle. Next thing the reader knows, a doctor recounts the strange tale of a man whose head fell off during a barfight. Apparently he'd returned to his dissolute ways the second he'd recovered from his battle wounds.

While his plot twists and surprise endings make for entertaining reading, was Akutagawa ambitious? In the introduction, Murakami hedges on this point. Among the national writers, Soseki and Tanazaki are his favorites, with Akutagawa coming in “distant” third. To him, Akutagawa never found the story he needed to tell.

That being said, Murakami praises the author's style and erudition and acknowledges that the images he creates endure in readers' minds. Akutagawa was "a Japanese intellectual with a consciousness torn between the West and Japan's traditional culture, in the border regions of which he succeeded in erecting a uniquely vigorous world of story." Read more!

Ten Things to Know about the Mahabharata: #5

It's destiny. The world of the Mahabharata is governed by karma, the notion that every action has a consequence. Characters reap the rewards or punishments for their deeds in this life or the next.

Many actions in the epic are explained both in terms of present-day context and cosmic destiny. Bhishma, for example, takes a vow of chastity so he'll never have a child who lays claim to the throne. On the cosmic level, he was once a divinity who plotted the theft of some sacred cows and was cursed to live a celibate life on earth. Similarly, the warriors who die on the battlefield had sealed their fates by misdeeds in this or previous lives.

Readers who expect the heroes to make difficult choices may find the epic a frustrating read. There's no escaping a fate you created yourself through past actions. The foreseen events click into place as though the epic were a Greek tragedy.

Free will in the epic is not in making choices, but in understanding the forces of karmic destiny while continuing to do one's duty. The eldest brother, Yudhistira, foresees the war that will destroy his friends and family. He knows the blind king is plotting against him, and yet he calmly continues performing his (sometimes conflicting) duties as a loyal son, citizen, and devotee. He is a Christ-figure inasmuch as he realizes that his actions are fulfilling the greater purpose of a supreme being.

Through various religious practices, such as meditating on or serving God, a Hindu may escape the karmic cycle of action and consequence, birth and rebirth, and attain moksha or liberation. The Buddhist nirvana is a related concept.

Will our heroes achieve it? On to #4... Read more!