As I walked through Ueno park, I couldn’t help but recall Basho’s journey through this same area, five hundred years before.  The cherry blossoms were about a week from blooming and families spread tarps and blankets on the ground in anticipation of the event.  Games of Go and drinking happened alongside laughter, and some bold, angry interjections that eventually spilled into laughter and tears.  A young woman looked on both horrified and smiling as two men embraced in tears after a moment of fierce reaction.

Clouds of cherry blossoms! / Is that temple bell in Ueno/ or Asakusa? (Matsuo Basho)

The day was cloudy and a light rain sprinkled along the concrete pathways.  As I passed the empty baseball field, children ran past me laughing hysterically and their mother demanding for some compliance.  They ignored her calls and ran fearlessly into a huge crowd.  Soon, they came back around with Mom exasperated at the brief trauma.

At times I raised my camera for a shot and then walked slowly through the stream of onlookers and people seeking their own bit of solace in the trees of the park.  I was almost brought to tears seeing so many emotions on display, and especially feeling the laughter of adults and children, not so far separated in their common state of joy.

I was drawn into a museum, pulled by something beyond this mundane experience.  I walked to the kiosk and purchased a ticket for a special exhibition called Does The Future Sleep Here?  The silence of the museum invited contemplation and a brief jaunt down the stairs into the exhibition immediately swept me up in a moment of quiet reflection as I was struck by the intaglio prints of Nakabayashi Tadayoshi.  The effect of these images was melancholy and I felt drawn into the artwork.  The series shows a detailed image of flowers wrapped in a ribbon and progressively ending in a final panel of an ink blot on paper.  The disappearance of the image into ink on paper represented to me the dissolution of ego and expectation.

I struggled with a load of expectations about traveling to Japan even though I promised myself I would absolutely NOT grasp onto the experience.  And yet here I was trampled by my own mind and wandering through an exhibition a bit unmoored as I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing here.  To say I was led into the exhibition might feel a bit ridiculous from my rational, thinking mind, and the fact that I ended up HERE rather than THERE spoke to me.

As I reflected on this one choice, this one moment in time, it’s was easy to dismiss the choice as a simple binary; yes or no, zero or one; forward or backward.  The pull away from the spiritual to the rational is strong in all of us and I too wrestle with these ideas.  My Buddhist training tells me to question; to see but not label; to hear but not question.  As soon as we place a label or feeling on a anything that comes through sense, our mind begins the process of dualism; separating what we see and hear, etc into discreet ideas and images.  In that moment, we are grasping and our mind gets carried away into a whole series of thoughts, feelings, and emotions built around something that is just an object.  An object, any object, has no inherent meaning unless we apply some meaning to it.  Here I was, at the beginning of an art exhibition, creating a whole story about why I entered the building what I was seeing, and how what I was seeing related directly to me.  I immediately put ME at the center of the exhibition.  It was, in essence, about ME.

Of course, my critical mind kicked in and I realized that while the exhibition wasn’t about me, it spoke to me.  Yeah, I get it.  There really is no ME in this scenario and I’m forming ideas based on experiences and thoughts collected over a lifetime. These collected notions I assembled into a form of meaning as I walked into the exhibition and formed into a coherent narrative of something along the lines of “I’m experiencing an exhibition that is speaking to me and that helps me understand where I am spiritually, thoughtfully, and emotionally.”  Almost immediately the narrative emerged in my mind in moments after walking into the exhibition hall and seeing these prints in front of me.  I was in awe of the skill and vision of this artist and was emotionally drawn into the images and the feelings of these prints.  The experience was magical in a very real sense of feeling a resonance with the artist and the artist’s work.

Of course, I don’t know Tadayoshi or his intentions.  I do know what my experience of his art was and his art shaped my thoughts. I guess that’s what art is all about, isn’t it?  

As I felt through all of these competing ideas and emotions, I continued through the exhibition, now drawn into the idea that these artists and the artwork they presented were some kind of representation of my ideas.  In each gallery some art resonated more or less.  I was completely caught up in the feelings I expereinced as I met each of these artists through their artwork.  As I walked out of the exhibition and into a room with vending machines, I grabbed a green tea and sat in this small room drinking the cold tea from a plastic bottle and thinking about the experience.  Soon, I walked upstairs to the gift shop and purchased the exhibiiton catalog written entirely in Japanese with the forceful idea that I would read this book in its entirety.  Maybe it would take me years, and I would start as soon as I got home. (…and I have…)

Walking out of the museum back into the mass of humanity filling Ueno Park at around noon, I moved more deliberately, slowly bringing together the various thoughts in my mind as I stayed with the feelings that arose.  At that moment, I thought back to Narrow Road to the Interior by Matsuo Basho. Basho’s travels through Japan and his haiku that punctuated his journey came to me in a rush.  As I walked through Ueno I thought about his journals again and his brief remarks about cherry blossoms in Ueno.  More specifically, I thought about his play on words in the journal’s title, “Narrow Road to the Interior” meaning the interior of Japan and into his interior = his mind.  Captured by that idea, I delved into what I had seen and experienced and how those images were stirring me into deep thought about my journey, here, in Tokyo.

You see, nothing went the way I planned.  I found myself wondering at what I was missing and where I needed to adjust.  As Basho’s journey came to mind, I let go of the expectations about what I orginally planned and paid attention to what was in front of me.  In his Knapsack Notebook, Basho commented, “The first task for each artist is to overcome the barbarian or animal heart and mind, to become one with nature.” (65) The bustling streets, the people sitting against a wall looking into their hands, a mom and baby strolling along the street, in a hurry for something, and me, seeing it all pass me by.  Finally, I settled into an idea I read in Basho – it’s really not about the destination. I didn’t need to go looking for something; it would find me.

From what tree’s / blossoming, I do not know / but oh, its sweet scent! (Basho 101)

As I opened up for a different kind of experience, those moments unfolded in a myriad of ways.  I stopped trying so hard to do something and just walked.  Actually a better way to describe it is that I wandered.  Not lost and not in a direction toward something…of course, I wasn’t headed into a wall or anything…I was walking around, generally in the direction of Asakusa. Moments came and went as I walked past shops and alleys, people of various types and in various styles.  I took few photographs, even with camera in hand. It was just me walking.  I felt like I was on the narrow road to the interior and in this case, into a kind of walking meditation.  The light rain finally stopped, and a cold wind blew from the west, and soon I was cold.  The cold roused me from some kind of stillness and I thought about eating some hot ramen.  As that feeling rose in me, I decided to make my way to a private booth at Ichiran.  All of my noisy thoughts stilled, I realized exactly what I was experiencing: a beautiful day.

May you be happy, may you be well

References

Art Scenes – Find and collect your favorite art. (2024). Art Scenes. https://art-scenes.net/en/artworks/34191?gallery_id=153

Bashō Matsuo, & Hamill, S. (2019). Narrow road to the interior and other writings. Shambhala.

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