kafka on the shore.

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‘The end of this calendar year feels epic to me, it always feels big, maybe its because I ll be 30 soon, and thats a milestone, many miles but one more river, is that my midlife? or do things really happen in threes? or has my life already ended, and this is my moment of lucidity before eternity??

Maybe I never really came back above ground……’

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(from Haruki Murakami s novel ‘Kafka on the Shore’)

‘Have you fallen in love with somebody, by any chance?’ he asks. ‘you seem kind of out of it.’

I don’t have any idea how to respond. ‘Oshima’ I finally say,’this is pretty weird thing to ask, but do you think its possible for someone to become a ghost while they re still alive?’

He stops straightening up the counter and looks at me. ‘a very interesting question, actually. Are you asking about the human spirit in a literary sense – metaphorically, in other words? Or do you mean in actual fact?’

‘more in actual fact, I guess,’ I say.

‘the assumption that ghosts really exist?’

‘right.’

Oshima removes his glasses, wipes them with his handkerchief and puts them back on. ‘that’s whats called a ‘living spirit’. I don’t know about in foreign countries, but that kind of thing appears a lot in Japanese literature. The tale of Genji, for instance, is filled with living spirits. In the Heian period – or at least in its psychological realm – on occasion people could become lving spirits and travel through space to carry out whatever desires they had. Have you read Genji?

I shake my head.

‘our library has a couple of modern translations, so it might b

e a good idea to read one. Anyway, an example is when Lady Rokujo – she’s one of Prince Genji’s lovers – becomes so consumed jealousy over Genji’s main wife, Lady Aoi, that she turns into an evil spirit that possesses her. Night after night she attacks Lady Aoi in her bed until she finally kills her. Lady Aoi was pregnant with Genji’s child, and that news is what inspired Lady Rokujo’s hatred. Genji calls in priests to exorcise the evil spirit, but to no avail. The evil spirit is impossible to resist.

But the most interesting part of the story is that lady Rokujo had no inkling that she d become a living spirit. She d have nightmares and wake up, only to discover that her long black hair smelled of smoke. Not having any idea what was going on, she was totally confused. In fact, the smoke came from the incense the priests lit as they prayed for Lady Aoi. Completely unaware of it, she d been flying through space and passing down the tunnel of her subconscious into Aoi s bedroom, this is one of the most uncanny and thrilling episodes in Genji. Later, when lady Rokujo learns what she s been doing, she regrets the sins she s committed and shaves off her hair and renounces the world.

The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us well before Freud and Jung shone a light on the working of the subconscious, this correlation beteen darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn’t a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn’t even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was covered in darkness. They physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this.’ Oshima brings is two hands together tightly.

In Murasaki Shikibu s time, living spirits were both a grotesque phenomenon and a natural condition of the human heart that was right there with them. People of that period probably couldn’t conceive of these two types of darkness as separate from each other. But today things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us.’

‘around your mountain cabin – that’s real darkness.’

‘absolutely,’ oshima says. ‘real darkness still exists there. Sometimes I go there just to experience it,’ poshima says.

‘what triggers people to become living spirits? Is it always something negative?’

‘I m no expert, but as far as I know, yes those living spirits all spring up out of negative emotions. Most of the extreme feelings people have tend to be at once very individual and very negative. And these living spirits arise through a kind of spontaneous generation. Sad to say, there arent any cases of a living spirit emerging to fulfill some logical premise or bring about world peace.’

‘what about because of love?’

Oshima sits down and thinks it over. ‘that’s a tough one. All I can tell you is that I ve never run across an example. Of course, there is that tale,’the chrysanthemum pledge’, in Tales of moonlight and rain…….