Words by Oliver Cheung

I have a buddy named Wren in my Japanese class. She’s a master’s student in Classical Japanese Literature. Even as somebody who’s studying the language, I have no idea why you’d want to look into an infinitely more difficult version of this language that’s already kicking my GPA down the road like a rusty can. I guess the difference between myself and her is the fact that she’s actually good at speaking, I’m just some bum who’s in too deep to quit. Still, one day she brought up the topic of her own field of study, and she sent me the EPUB for Anthology of Japanese Literature, translated to English, of course. I gave it a read, I was a fan of Rashomon so I figured I would like this, and I did. I highly recommend it. But there was one short story that popped out to me, being An Account of My Hut, which was a tale by an old man writing on how the world around him had gone to smithereens and he had retired to renounce all his worldly possessions in the name of being a monk and lived alone in a hut on the side of a mountain. 

Ten square feet, at the end of the world

Also known as Hōjōki (方丈記), the story was written by Kamō no Chōmei in 1212, during the early Kamakura period. It regales the life of the author as he watches the current kingdom rise and fall, the changing of human values, and eventually his quiet life on the side of Mt. Ohara. It opens with the following quote:

The flow of the river never ceases,
And the water never stays the same.
Bubbles float on the surface of pools,
Bursting, re-forming, never lingering.
They’re like the people in this world and their dwellings.

This has become a significant passage in Japanese literature for being an embodiment of the concept of mujō (無常), referring to the impermanance of things, which is a key component of Buddhism. Things in our human life never stay as they are, and are never as they seem. We exist in fleeting pockets of space, only ever briefly affecting and sometimes never at all. Just as bubbles and pond scum will simmer to the surface of the lake, they burst and disappear all the same, and Chōmei ascribes this quality to people as well.

The story opens with Chōmei recounting his time in the old capital of Kyoto. He writes of the old ages of prosperity, but also just as quickly shifts the tone to that of disaster. A great fire rips through the city, followed just as soon by a whirlwind that causes the city to vanish near overnight. The values of people change, old samurai families are brought to indignity, and beggars tear apart the gold-inlaid pillars of temples for firewood. All the treasures in the world have been laid low as the war between the Minamotos and the Tairas (one of the biggest conflicts in Japan’s medieval history, but a story for another time) persist through the decades. Eventually, the capital was relocated to Fukuhara for a time.

“The mansions whose roofs had rivaled one another fell with the passing days to rack and ruin. Houses were dismantled and floated down the Yodo River, and the capital turned into empty fields before one’s eyes. People’s ways changed completely—now horses were prized and oxcarts fell into disuse. Estates by the sea in the south or west were highly desired, and no one showed any liking for manors in the east or the north.”

As they say in latin, sic transit gloria mundi, “glory fades.” That much isn’t new, however, everyone knows of the empires of old. Camelot, Rome, Alexandria, everything returns to dust one way or another. As living beings on this Earth, we are cursed with impermanence, and everything we are is what we bury. But the significance of Hōjōki and Chōmei’s retelling is how it ends.

As I mentioned earlier, Chōmei would live through this and renounce the world, living as a monk “into his sixth decade” and building himself a ten-foot-square hut of mud on the mountainside of Mt. Ohara, located in what is now Tochigi City. That’s where the story ends. But what does this have to do with media theory? I didn’t think much of it either, until I came to understand that Chōmei’s concept of mujō and our understanding of subjective value are actually quite similar.

Nothing good was built to last

Tim Ingold was onto something actually very Buddhist in his recounting of value, being that real value is shown in decay and in desolation, through usage and lived experience. Items take on new lives of their own in human hands, a love taken miles to forge. I found this concept extremely compelling as I reread Hōjōki again with a media theorist’s lens.

Chōmei treats objects as Ingold would, as possessions that ebb and flow and exist as the companions to people, for better or for worse. And yet, within the desolation, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief through the tragedy as these manors and mansions of old, treated as travesty by Chōmei, were repurposed by survivors or retaken by nature. For their purpose in one life had ended, and they have found different meaning in the constant movement of life, time itself had given them new value. Oxcarts were abandoned to moss, giving way to the admiration of the equine, and Buddhist artifacts that had sat collecting dust were sold and circulated for survival’s sake. In wordly pain, the movement of objects, the foundation of new value became necessary. Is this just a long-winded way of saying that human beings are resourceful and will do anything to secure their continued existence? Yes. That’s exactly what it is. But that’s what also drove me to become so interested in Ingold’s theory of value and creation.

Buddhism is centred around the concept of everything. Everything exists in context of everything else and everything is just as beautiful as everything else. If you wanted to be media theorist-y about it, you could say that all objects exist in relation to materials within a space. But that space must exist in time, and different times require different objects that then carry that memory of usage. And that’s the true humanity that lives in Chōmei’s story – the world can go to ruin however many times over, through fire, wind, and by our own hand. And yet, we do whatever it takes, making value out of anything to get our way, live another day.

The story closes with Chōmei commenting on how his own method of escape, his ten-square-foot hut, has become precious to him. He had inititally used it as a form of temporary seclusion, angry at the state of the world, but in his time on Mt. Ohara, he came to love his tiny hut for it had become more like a home than any other residence he had before. Bollmer would account this to Ahmed’s definition, but it’s far more poetic to say it how it is.

When we use something, we come to love it. When we live somewhere, we come to feel like we belong. We live in relation with everything else, and everything else is beautiful.

By Oliver Cheung

Keene, Donald. Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Grove Press, 2014.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.