Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 147 influence Ishii assigns to art. Ishii gives artists a special responsibility for mediating between individuals and the monstrous fantastic. Categories of Beauty Donald Richie describes the role of aesthetics in Japanese culture and worldview by saying, “If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary” (22). Although Japanese aesthetic categories and terminology cannot be compared one-to-one with the elements of Western aesthetic philosophy, the practice of thinking and writing about the elements of the beautiful has a long history within Japanese traditional culture. One may examine the individual qualities valued in Japanese aesthetic thought without ever arriving at a comprehensive delineation of aesthetics as a science or of the objects and experiences to which it applies. The cultivation of taste and elegance, as opposed to simply art, in traditional Japanese society sufficiently obscures the line between art and life that Sen no Rikyū, one of the tea masters responsible for the current form of the tea ceremony, could insist to his disciples that the beloved art form consisted of “nothing more than boiling water, steeping tea, and drinking it” as though its goals were really no more ambitious than those of an afternoon snack (Richie 30). It is this unspoken fluidity of art and life that complicates attempts to draw a distinction between art and life in Japanese culture: the characteristics of aesthetics can be found in experiences that have little to do with the quest for beauty, and the methods of observing good taste can be applied to situations in which the end goal is not to produce art. Richie both clarifies and complicates the attempt to separate life, aesthetics, and art when he explains that, as in so many other aesthetic traditions, nature is considered the ultimate guide to aesthetic production, but unlike any other system of aesthetics, simply mimicking nature was not enough to create aesthetic beauty. “It was as though there was an agreement that the nature of Nature could not be presented through literal description,” he writes. “It could only be suggested, and the more subtle the suggestion…the more tasteful the work of art” (19). Fortunately for the Western reader of Japanese literature, such subtle suggestions come in several categories that are far more easily recognized than the overall concept of naturalistic intuitions. Richie explains that the oldest and most familiar categories are sabi , which describes the elegance of simplicity or austerity; wabi , contentment and self- sufficiency in the context of evoked or literal loneliness; aware , a sense of sympathy that prompts wistfulness or melancholy; and yūgen , a term for mystery, depth, or the impression of meaningful obscurity (34-59). Applying these criteria creates a category of experiences portrayed in the film that cannot be considered art and yet share characteristics of beauty and taste that play a significant role in individual characters’ attempts to cope with the monstrous fantastic. Nobuo’s occupation as a therapeutic hypnotist proves to be an aesthetic experience for him and for his patients due to the elements of aware and yūgen present in the visions of his hypnotized patients. The real importance of Yoshiko’s experience while hypnotized lies in the aesthetic of yūgen , the sense that the obscured meaning behind her vision is more central to the truth of her