During the two years I lived in Japan, I attended two improvisational theater workshops where the participants were encouraged to create narratives. Often those narratives did not conform to conventional American or western European expectations. However, since the objective was to look at the familiar from a new angle, we were willing to accept a different telling of the familiar, or to accept a perverse outcome. Although we were able to suspend disbelief to a certain degree, if the created narrative drifted too far from our expectations, it failed. The participants seemed unable to recognize or unwilling to accept it as presented.

The participants in the first workshop were mostly Americans, Brits and Australians. We shared similar cultural experiences and narratives which allowed us to understand what was being portrayed, even when it veered off into the unconventional. However, the participants in the second workshop spoke and understood little or no English. Fortunately, many of the non-Japanese participants spoke and understood at least a little Japanese. But this meant that most of the instruction and suggestions presented by the English-speaking facilitator, Rebecca, had to be translated.

Rebecca directed two Japanese women and two Japanese men in a scene where a married couple was arriving at a hotel. The man and woman not playing the couple assumed the roles of bell-hop and receptionist, respectively, and the entire piece was performed in Japanese. The scene was played three times with slight alterations each time. The scene that illustrates the point I want to make, about cultural expectations in narratives, was the most dynamic one of the workshop.

The husband directed the bell-hop to carry the suitcase from the car to the hotel lobby. When the bell-hop picked up the suitcase, he mimed that it was extremely heavy and said, "Omoi desu." It’s heavy. He could barely carry it. The husband, perfectly portraying a chauvinistic Japanese man, watched the bell-hop’s efforts without offering to help. Fianlly struggling to the entrance of the hotel, the bell-hop asked the husband what was in the suitcase.

Here the husband changed roles. He turned one foot in, put a forefinger in his mouth, hung his head slightly and said, "Okaasan."

The audience was silent. Rebecca asked someone what okaasan meant.

"Mother."

She burst out laughing. But she was the only one. None of the Japanese laughed. None of the other participants, who had lived in Japan long enough to understand the significance of the husband’s response, laughed.

The majority of Japanese men have an almost reverential relationship with their mothers with whom they slept in a separate room until they were probably two, as do all Japanese children. This practice reflects the idea that children arrive from a distance place and are strangers on Earth. They cannot be left alone until they have familiarized themselves with their new home. It is the beginning of the important family, school, community, national bond that is an essential part of Japanese life and culture. Furthermore, mothers are the primary disciplinarians and the driving force behind children’s success in school. One seldom sees a father at such school functions as graduations, which are held during the school day. (Maybe this is a way of insuring that the mother-child bond is reinforced.) So, when a man marries, his mother’s needs often take precedence over his wife’s. And as his mother ages, she may once again share a home with her son.

* * *

Those members of the workshop familiar with Japanese culture recognized the significance of the (assumed) dead woman in the suitcase. The husband couldn’t bear to be parted from his mother. Rebecca, knowing little or nothing about Japanese culture, heard Takeshi’s "okaasan" the way most Americans would–the man had finally had enough of Mom, decided to give her the ax, and was preparing to dump the body. By imposing her own culture on the narrative the Japanese actors had created, Rebecca missed the significance of the story.

This is only one example of what results from the imposition of one’s cultural expectations or biases onto the narratives of another culture. By assuming that all narratives are universal, that all characters act and react from the same motives, that all stories are told for the same reasons and from the same cultural point-of-view, we miss the significance of what is being expressed through the narrative. We become like members of the African tribe who were listening to an anthropologist’s retelling of Hamlet. We are mystified, even horrified at such behavior. It would simply never happen that way, we say. That’s not how that story goes.

In an attempt to further clarify the importance of understanding cultural peculiarities when addressing narratives from another culture, I will introduce and examine examples of two Japanese narrative genres–poetry (haiku, visual, and modern poetry by children) and comics and discuss how word choice, the use of space and line, and visual art may be viewed as a particular culturally-related means of expression.

Written Japanese, particularly kanji is treated almost as an art form. Beautiful calligraphy is prized. Children begin practicing it when they start school, filling graph-like practice books with smaller and smaller and more finely executed kanji. One must learn exactly where each stroke belongs in relation to the other strokes in the kanji. Furthermore, it is necessary to learn the order in which those strokes are executed. Left to right, top to bottom, unconnected strokes last.

The Japanese spoken language is extremely homonymic. There are so many words with the same sound that people often write the appropriate kanji on their palm with the index finger of the opposite hand, in order to make certain the listener knows which word is meant. Although it is usually possible to guess meaning from context, at times it is confusing. This is also why conversation often consists of a sort of question and answer pattern. The speaker makes a statement and the listener repeats back in question form what was just heard as reassurance that his or her assumption was correct. And much is left out when speaking. The listener is expected to understand and read between the lines to a greater extent than American speakers.

There are more silences in Japanese conversation, as a rule, than is normal in American conversation. Unlike Americans who often feel uncomfortable with pauses and long silences in conversations, the Japanese feel those spaces are fruitful. Such spaces allow time for reflection, for digestion of what’s been heard, and for consideration about what needs to be said. It is not wise to reply too quickly. It is best to think over all the possibilities and consequences before giving a definitive answer.

I would assert that this sense of space and silence is an integral part of all Japanese narratives and one that is reflected in traditional Japanese haiku. As an example, let us look at one of the most well-known and loved of Bash? Matsuo’s haiku:

A more American translation of this might read: A frog leaps into/ an old pond/ Splash!

It can be difficult to "read" the spaces in haiku without wanting to fill in the gaps with words. We don’t want to be left wondering what the poet is saying.

There is that same sense of unspokenness in American and European poetry, of course, but it is usually done by using words with more than one meaning or words that carry cultural connotations. It is one of the biggest reasons, I maintain, that many Americans find poetry mysterious and frustrating to read–there is no clear, ready answer or explanation of what the poet means.

William Higginson, whose translation of Bash?’s haiku appears above, maintains that the purpose of that poetic form is to tell how the poet is feeling. "‘Perhaps if I share with you the event that made me aware of these feelings, you will have similar feelings of your own’" (5). He goes on to explain this idea further by saying that, if one reads a haiku about seeing white chrysanthemums, for example, the next time one sees white chrysanthemums, there will be an enlarged awareness of their form and color.

I agree with Higginson’s sentiment to a degree, but I am not convinced that we do that. I think we more often have a tendency to read a poem and say, "That was nice," and promptly forget what we’ve read. Or we tease it apart, draw out every thread, and walk away convinced that we know exactly how it was constructed and what the writer was feeling at the moment.

I do not think most Japanese readers would be inclined to do that. Rather, there would be an understanding that the space that is opened between the moment the frog jumps and the moment the splash is heard, that moment of silence, is perhaps the most important moment in the experience. "[Bash?] was concerned that poems should be created out of a deep unity of the poet and experience. . . .‘Learn of the pine from the pine; learn of the bamboo from the bamboo’" (Higginson 10). Learn of the sound of water when a frog breaks its surface by being present in the silence just before the sound.

That same sense of space, of something being left unsaid or unanswered, along with the sense of unity with the object of the poem, is also exemplified in poems by Japanese children. Their poems often end with a question, either an explicit or an implicit one. They sometimes reveal startling associations that might make us question what these children-poets have experienced that has lead them to such insights. Maybe they do come from another place. Here are three examples from There Are Two Lives: Poems by Children of Japan:

Praying Mantis

The praying mantis was dead in the jar.
It was dead
still trying to get out of the jar.

Fukuda Hiroyuki, Age 8

Dog

When I was walking
I found a dead dog by the roadside.
It was a brown dog.
Its mouth was a little twisted.
When I told my mother about the dog
she said,
"Oh, yes?"
Don’t grownups feel anything
when I feel very sorry?

Kawado Fujiko, Age 9

Words

Where
do words come from?
The throat
and the tongue
work together
and mass-produce them.
The special liquid
of a new-born baby’s
heart,
stomach,
and liver
soaks into
the throat
and tongue.
If you carelessly speak too much
the liquid will be gone
and you’ll be dumb.
If you don’t speak a word
words will come out by themselves
while you are sleeping.
The control of words
is difficult.

Iijima Kenji, Age 11

Indeed. "The control of words is difficult." All the more reason not to treat them with abandon, as though they are of little significance, easily obtained and easily dispensed with. Even at their ages, these budding poets seem to sense that words carry great weight, as do the silences between the words.

The writer of the preface to another collection of Japanese children’s poetry, himself a poet, writes this about Japanese children’s poems:

On the island of Okinawa there is a saying, ‘Wisdom from children.’ By ‘wisdom’ they

. . . mean that. . . children are innocent, pure of heart, and, thus, they see the very essence of things: their senses attain to the worlds of the spirit and of the supernatural. . . .The abundance of children’s powers of imagination is truly terrifying. What is in a child’s head while walking down the road or strolling down a path? . . . .[T]here are times when children’s poems play the voices of angels, moments when they offer the keenest cultural criticism. The life of the child, one that can breathe back into us the abilities and sense we lost in growing up, is a life worthy of our highest respect. (Kawasaki in Festival 6-7).

Part of this child-like sense of vision, of possibility, of expression may be part of what allows adult artists to continue creating works that carry a sense of the not-quite-this-world or the not-quite-the-usual-way.

Some of those adult artists have used their sense of space, of the imagined but unspoken, to create visual poetry that speaks volumes, usually without words. I have attached several examples here. There are two poems called "dog" (in Japanese, inu), created by the same artist. It is interesting to note that the later one is a single "dog," an exaggerated form of the kanji, inu. It’s as though the poet wanted to pare the poem to its essence. "Fireworks" is included as another example of using the kanji for fireworks (hana, "flower" and bi, "fire") to not only allow a reader into the poem, but also to allow a seer to view the same.

Two poems called "see" invite the reader/seer to visualize what is written or drawn, as well as what is not drawn. The 1987 poem might make one think of two different phases of the moon, a endlessly recurring object in Japanese poetry and visual art. There are even festivals dedicated to moon watching. And a grass that blooms in the early fall when the full moon is especially vibrant, called Moon-viewing grass. But in the poem, which does the poet consider more important–the parts we immediately see or the part we must imagine? The full moon or the crescent?

The next three poems are by the same artist, and I have included them because they have titles that are usually associated with speech and writing. By drawing these poems using line and space (like an alphabet or a syllabary does), but in a different form, the poet is demanding that the reader/seer come at language from a different place. And this can be a bit disconcerting. Is there a correct way to pronounce the "words" in these poems? How does one read them aloud, as we are taught to do in American schools? Are they, in the end, just so much gibberish?

Finally, I have included a visual poem titled "love," simply because it seems to be an easy one to read, and the four lines say it all. Or do they?

Another art form in Japan that appears to be treated with a great deal of respect and appreciation, not only there but in the United States as well, is comics. As ubiquitous as comics are in both countries, the Japanese comics seem almost works of art first and entertainment after. And uniquely Japanese. This is especially true of "Lone Wolf and Cub," the comic I have included to illustrate what I view as some of those unique qualities of Japanese art. In particular, I want to address the way that this comic uses what comics artist, Scott McCloud calls "closure" and "aspect" (Understanding Comics 63, 72).

"Lone Wolf and Cub," the first regular manga series to be published in the United States, is the story of a renegade sh?gun’s assassin and his young son. Although the feudal period in Europe corresponds in time and events to the period of the sh?guns and the samurai in Japan, which probably makes this story fairly accessible to American readers, the historical content of this narrative is peculiarly Japanese. But what I want to address is the artistic qualities of this comic.

Drawn by Goseki Kojima, the style of this comic closely resembles historical Japanese drawing. The two attached pages, the second and third of a seventeen-page online preview, are perfect examples of what Frank Miller talks about in an online comment on the "Lone Wolf and Cub" website: "Its authors took the time and space to tell their tale in its every moment, often devoting many pages to scenes that wouldn’t last three panels in a monthly American superhero comic book."

In the first page, the first panel is an example of what Scott McCloud calls "aspect." A branch of a tree protrudes into the panel from the upper left, pointing out the sun surrounded by rays. We assume from this that the weather is warm, if not hot. The only text is the onomatopoeic words, "Gara, Gara." (A Japanese reader might immediately recognize the "gara, gara" as the sound of a squeaky wheel, but most American readers will probably have to wait until the third frame to discover it.) There is no dialog on the entire first page, only the sound text.

The second panel, narrower than the first, shows only a banner written over with kanji, a example of McCloud’s "closure." There is a translation of the banner’s text in a box in the upper right. What is interesting here is that the kanji are written in such a way that they appear backward to the reader, placing the reader to the right of the baby carriage, which doesn’t become apparent until the next page. In the third panel is a view of a baby carriage, seen from what might be nearly ground level. The sound is still heard, and the only other thing in the frame is a hand pushing the carriage.

The final two panels are a small one showing the torso of a sleeping baby and a larger one filled mostly with human shadows. In the upper right of the larger panel are the legs and feet of two people. A small part of a bamboo shade hat can be seen in the lower left. The sound continues.

The first panel of the next page shows three pairs of feet shod in what might be described as Robin Hood-type shoes. The style of shoe is probably meant to indicate what socio-economic group the wearers belong to. And here, for the first time, we have dialog coming from the owners of the three pairs of legs. They are discussing the writing on the banner and surmising who the man is who is pushing it. We have yet to see who is pushing the carriage, but the (assumed) men’s dialog reveals that to us. The next panel shows the same three pairs of feet, this time walking toward the right of the page, progressing into the subsequent panels. The sound is neither seen nor heard in these two frames, which leads the reader to suppose that the carriage stopped when the men stopped. Or the men stopped because the carriage stopped.

What follows are two small panels, one showing only a small part of the baby carriage and the "gara, gara" indicating the sound of it. Two of the now unseen men are discussing the banner’s meaning. In the second small panel, the baby is seen again and his looks commented on by one of the unseen men.

The final panel is a bird’s eye view of a country road with a text box stating the location. Three people wearing bamboo hats, a man leading a horse, and the man pushing the carriage and carrying the banner we saw earlier, are walking along the road. The sound of the carriage is still heard and with it, another sound–"miing, miing." What or who is making the sound is unclear.

What makes this comic culturally situated is how people and objects are shown in minimal ways without detracting from the reader’s understanding of what is going on in the narrative. By showing only certain parts of the baby carriage, for instance, it serves to play up the importance of what it contains–the son of the samurai. If, in fact, that is the artist’s objective, then we might assume that the men who are only represented by their feet and their shadows will play an important role later in the story. And in these two pages we never see the face of the man who is pushing the carriage. When we do see more than just his hand, it is his retreating back, and that from a significant distance.

Like the haiku, the visual poetry, and the children’s poetry, this comic is an exemplar of how space and silence, unspoken words and unwritten text, and even distance from one’s subject are used to dynamic effect to reveal more than myriad words and minutely detailed pictures ever can. And this is what makes them uniquely different from the way we write poetry and create comic art in the United States. We tend to be a people of many words, needing to explain and define ourselves, our subjects, the world, too often uncomfortable with silence and what it

contains. A Japanese kindergartner, Noda K?hei expresses this idea in his short poem, "Maze," so much better than I can with all my pages:

Western clothes
are like a maze.
Because you never know
where your hands should go.

Works Cited

Higginson, William J. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku.

Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985.

Lewis, Richard, Ed. Trans. Haruna Kimura. There Are Two Lives: Poems by Children of Japan. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

"Lone Wolf and Cub." Online Comic. 15 March 2001 <ews./features/pg_feview/sku_40092/

item_40092a/index.html>

"Lone Wolf and Cub." Online comic feature. 15 March 2001 <features/pg_feview/sku_40092/

item_40092/item_40092c/X_O/index.html>

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

Navasky, Bruno, Trans. Festival in My Heart: Poems by Japanese Children. New York:

Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993.

Yoshizawa, Shoji. ShiShi: Concrete and Visual Poetry. Tokyo: SHISHI Group. March 1986. No. 16.

______ . May 1986. No. 16.

______ . October 1986. No. 17.

______ . March 1987. No. 18.

______ . May 1989. No. 23.

______ . August 1989. No. 24.

______ . April 1991. No. 27.