Nietzsche, Humour and the Great War

Yesterday, on the anniversary of Armistice Day, I like so many others in the UK observed two minutes of silence at precisely 11am in memory of all those who lost their lives in the wars. This coming together as a nation in a moment of intense solemnity to remember their sacrifice seems fitting, the least we could do. But is there perhaps a very different way of ‘remembering’ what happened in those wars and what meaning this should impart to our modern lives?

When I was a child, I recall casting my eyes around the volumes of my school library and there looming large and ominous before me was a series called The Causes of the Great War. I can’t remember how many volumes there were – perhaps a dozen or so – and opening them one would discover hundreds of pages on the European alliances of the nineteenth century, the imperial rivalries over Africa, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the infringement of Belgium neutrality. Unfurling in front of me in black ink and on yellowing pages were the causes of the First World War in all its bewildering complexity.

I asked my grandmother, who was born in 1898, whether she could remember the war breaking out. My grandmother had been born in Northern Ireland, left school at age 9 and by the age of 16 was working in a mill in a small border town. I asked what the local people at the time said was the cause of the war. ‘The King and the Kaiser had fallen out over land’ was her compact reply.

There was in that sentence a very Irish wisdom, as if Irish farmers had grasped the reins of world politics. Yet thinking about those ten words in comparison to all the millions upon millions of erudite words in the library, I was inclined to think that my grandmother’s answer grasped the nettle of the problem: The King and the Kaiser had fallen out over land.

These days I incline towards a more radical view. I think the war was partly caused by a lack of humour in both the Germans and the British and an acute failure to understand some profound insights into the human condition. I think, for example, that one reason the war broke out was because the peoples of Europe failed to get the jokes of that much maligned and misunderstood philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (pictured below).

It’s of course not possible that one philosopher can, on his own, move history. And yet we have all heard how Nietzsche’s ideas of the Superman were later twisted by the Nazis and turned into a doctrine of a master race. But even before the rise of the Nazis, Nietzsche was being blamed for all of Germany’s ills. At the time of the First World War, for example, a host of books in Britain declaimed him for a philosophy of maniacal selfishness that led the German people to think that they could trample on their neighbours with impunity.

All this would have been abhorrent to Nietzsche himself. He was the ultimate individualist; his whole philosophy was concerned with encouraging people to forge their own unique identity. The idea of forming people into regiments acting in complete obedience to a Kaiser was contrary to the spirit of everything Nietzsche ever wrote. And far from thinking that the Germans were superior, Nietzsche once acidly remarked that just dining next to one of his fellow countrymen was enough to give him indigestion.

So why was Nietzsche so misunderstood? And why did he keep receiving the blame for the disasters of the twentieth century, starting with the First World War?

One reason – as is reasonably well known – is that the all-pervasive nationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century mutated with Nietzsche’s philosophy and produced a Frankenstein’s monster. Nietzsche’s philosophy of assertion of will was all about emancipation of the individual, but when those ideas were transferred to the nation itself, they became the very opposite of everything Nietzsche intended.

Nietzsche’s philosophy is essentially a sensible guide to how to live your life. Be strong, he is saying, don’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed with pity or you’ll never get anything done in life. Yet when transformed to a national level it very quickly degenerated into a philosophy of hate that was totally opposed to everything that Nietzsche had preached. It was used as a convenient propaganda tool by the British against the Germans, claiming that here was a country that was trying to be stronger than its neighbours and imposing its will upon them and always expanding its borders.

But I said that one cause of the First World War was a failure to understand Nietzsche’s jokes. How so? We don’t I think in the English speaking world appreciate how marvellously humorous so much of Nietzsche’s writing is. There is the image of the forbidding German philosopher with his enormous moustache and his deep, dark ponderings on the nature of existence, his mind full of Sturm und Drang and Wagnerian overtures. Yet in reality, Nietzsche was a great comic writer. Not perhaps laugh out loud funny, more along the lines of comic depths that slowly sink in. One problem is that much of the humour simply doesn’t translate into foreign languages leaving the English reader to take Nietzsche’s ideas - brilliant as many of them are – a bit too literally.

Take for example the famous concept of the Superman, the so-called higher man. In German the term is Ubermensch, but what you might not know is that this is a bit of a joke on Nietzsche’s behalf. One of the constant themes in Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra is that people should always be striving to become better, more accomplished people in life. Zarathustra was written in the 1880s and being a man of the Victorian age, Nietzsche was surrounded by lots of starch-collared professors and other dignitaries full of pompous pride about their achievements, who liked to cling to their titles and station in life. We are all too familiar with this type of person in the world today, people blowing their own little trumpet.

The ‘uber’ in ubermensch did not come from any idea of a master race controlling subjugated, weaker men and women; the ‘uber’ is wordplay, a pun on the German word for crossing over – ‘ubergehen’. The ‘ubermensch’ is the person who is always trying to cross over to the other side, evolve, improve himself. That is the higher person whom we should try and emulate. It’s a pun, a bit of amusing wordplay, not a reference to some Germanic master-race. That this little witticism should have been twisted to produce misunderstandings that would lead humanity down the road to the Somme and Auschwitz is almost too disturbing to contemplate.

Another famous phrase coined by Nietzsche is ‘The Last Men’ or in German ‘Die letzten Menschen’. When you start reading about a world populated by ‘The Last Men’ at the end of Also Sprach Zarathustra you begin to think that you are reading a sci-fi fantasy describing an apocalyptic vision of the future where the only survivors of the human race are the scary ‘Last Men’.

But what Nietzsche is really saying is that ‘The Last Men’ are the opposite of the ‘Ubermensch’. The Ubermensch is always trying to improve herself, because she knows she can and should do better. However the ‘Last Men’ think they know everything there is to know, they’ve already reached the last stage of their development, they just want to sit back on their laurels and see things tick over the way they always have. We all know people like this – people who won’t try anything new because they fear to fail, who are full of arrogance about their own achievements. They are ‘the last men’.

But where’s the joke? I didn’t get it for a long time. Then in a minor attempt at ubermensch behaviour, I went to brush up my schoolboy German at a night class. We were listening to a taped recording of one of those impossibly unrealistic conversations between a Herr and Frau Muller when I suddenly heard one of the voices say ‘Das ist das Letzte!’ Literally, ‘That is the last one!’ I asked the teacher what the phrase meant. Apparently it is an idiom meaning ‘That’s the pits! That’s as low as it gets!’ So finally I understood Nietzsche’s joke. The last men were the pits because they think they know it all and have nowhere else to go.

All of Nietzsche’s writings are littered with such wordplay and much of it is impossible to translate. But there are many other central ideas, whose humour is misunderstood even when there is no barrier of translation. Take for example the famous line ‘the Death of God’. If you were talking about any other philosopher before Nietzsche they would not be writing of the ‘Death of God’ but of the ‘non-existence of God’. Yet the ‘Death of God’ has a quite different meaning. Non-existence is a dry observation of empirical reality. The ‘Death of God’ is an intrinsically humorous, satirical comment on the death of a supposedly ‘immortal’ being. Such a being used to ‘live’ in the beliefs of the religiously minded, but now science and the Theory of Evolution has bumped him off. It’s humour, but the phrase also tells you that the exterior world is a construct of your own mind.

You might think that what I am saying here is that Nietzsche expressed his ideas in a humorous fashion, but actually I wish to say something very different: for Nietzsche, humour was intrinsic and essential to the idea itself. If you take humour away from the idea – as countless academics and intellectuals have done when discussing Nietzsche in arch solemnity – you have misunderstood the idea itself.

Many philosophers, like Bertrand Russell who suffered from the delusion that the world could be grasped through logic and rationalism, dismissed Nietzsche because he wrote in such a way. But actually Nietzsche is the greatest of all philosophers because he grasped a profound truth: the human condition is an intrinsically humorous one. To get to the heart of humanity you have to express that humour. Nietzsche here reaches the same conclusion as Zen philosophy that saw humour – expressed in riddles and comic drawings – as the best means of getting to the very heart of what it meant to be human.

Already by the time of the First World War, Nietzschean thought was perceived in Britain as being the brutal, egomaniacal engine behind German militaristic expansion. Marshalled against it was supposed to be the free alliance of the nations conjoined in the British empire, whose soldiers were, until 1916 at least, all volunteers pitted against the German conscript army.

Yet the reality is that a familiarity with Nietzsche’s writings would have immediately revealed that Nietzsche had no time at all for nationalism and militarism. The problem was that his writings were mostly being read by exactly the kind of smug ideologues that he loathed.

In their propaganda war against the Germans the British needed an ‘axis of evil’ to make as a target and with it Nietzsche and his concept of the ‘ubermensch’ was portrayed as fuelling a belief in German superiority. His talk of the ‘last men’ meanwhile was portrayed as a dark threat to wipe out existing civilization and leave it as rubble. He became known as the man who thought of the ‘master-race’. It was almost as if there was a deliberate desire on the part of the British to misunderstand individuals like Nietzsche and through him to vilify the German threat.

And the ultimately irony is that by misrepresenting Nietzsche’s ideas in this way and using it as a propaganda tool against the Germans, the Nazis eventually started believing the twisted misrepresentation of Nietzsche’s ideas and believing that they truly were the ‘master-race’.

The disastrous twinning of nationalism with Nietzsche’s individualistic philosophy is generally understood, but equally important was the way in which humour was stripped from Nietzsche’s ideas and imported into the zeitgeist in grim seriousness. A widespread belief in the solemn destiny of the nation was a crucial part of the cocktail of ideas that fuelled the outbreak of war. Ironically today, when we ‘remember’ the wars, we abide by this obeisance to seriousness, solemnity and the nation: the very things that caused the wars in the first place.

But I think that if we wish to avoid war, we should remember what Nietzsche really had to say and recall his celebration of the individual, his advocating of permanent self-improvement, his love of life and belief in embracing danger and dangerous thought. But above all, we need to ‘remember’ his focus on the profoundly humorous heart of the human condition and never lose our own ability to perceive the intrinsic humour in the world around us.

I like Nietzsche’s jokes. And I find many of Nietzsche's ideas liberating. But had Nietzsche lived a little longer and seen the way his philosophy was twisted by nationalism and grim ‘seriousness’ – the very things he most despised - into the horrors of the twentieth century, I suspect he would have probably thought that the joke was very much on us.

The Finest Hour of Lady Smith of Badajoz

For the last week I've been travelling in southern Spain on the trail of Harry Smith (1787-1860), a famous soldier statesman of the British Empire who was the most famous resident - marked by a blue plaque - of a property in the UK I am currently restoring. 

Smith had a quite incredible life that took him on a breathless odyssey from campaigns in Uruguay and Spain to America, France, Canada, Jamaica, South Africa and India. He somehow managed to be the man offering a truce at the Battle of New Orleans to being a brigade commander at Waterloo, and distinguished himself in the Sikh Wars before ruling Cape Colony. He even seems to have been one of only 40 men who broke into the White House during 1814 and ate President Madison's dinner (roasted meats and the finest madeira wine on an elegantly laid table) before burning down - on his general's orders - the White House (an act Smith referred to as 'barbaric').

I thought the best place to start my research on Smith was by reading his autobiography, written intermittently over many years so that one chapter starts 'written in Glasgow in 1824' and the next, 'Commenced at Simla, Himalayas, 11th Aug. 1844'. 

In only the first 40 pages, Harry is involved in the Battles of Montevideo and Colonia (1806) and imprisoned in Buenos Aires; he is nearly wrecked at sea on the return home, then is shipped to Gothenburg in Sweden, then sent to fight in the Peninsular War in Spain against the Napoleonic forces. He rounds up 20 bandits in the interior of Spain, campaigns in one bloody siege after another, is sent home to England and back to Spain again. He has a shrapnel ball lodged in his foot, which makes him lame, and is sent to Lisbon to convalesce and finally endures excruciating surgery to have it taken out.

From that point on however, Smith led a charmed life...As the Peninsular War dragged on in endless tactical manoeuvres, of offensives and retreats across a dizzying array of landscapes, Smith's fellow officers are killed one after the other, introduced on one page as a 'fine fellow' and mortally wounded on the next (sometimes while they are actually talking to Smith). In one instance, one of his injured comrades gets angry at the insolent remarks of a landlord, whereupon 'the carotid artery must have been wounded, for it burst out in a torrent of blood, and he was dead in a few seconds, to our horror, for he was a most excellent fellow'. Smith meanwhile sails through the action unhurt, while others fall like flies around him. 

Smith was extraordinarily lucky not just in war, but in love. The war narrative spills into one of the most famous romances of the early 19th century when at the bloody fourth siege of Badajoz in 1812 he meets the love of his life, a young Spanish girl called Juana (pictured top). 

Left orphaned at the age of barely 14 with only an elder sister at her side when Badajoz is stormed by blood-thirsty and lustful British troops (image below), she is placed under the protection of the elite 95th Rifles Brigade and immediately captures the heart of Brigadier-Major Smith, aged 24, who married her several days after meeting her. 

The couple would become virtually inseparable and she would travel with the Brigade for the rest of the war and - highly unusually for the era - travel with Smith on his adventures throughout the world over the next 50 years, eventually lending her married name of 'Lady Smith' to three towns in Canada and South Africa. 

It's historically curious though that Smith's fascinating autobiography was first published in 1901. Why would the memoirs of a man who died in 1860 be first published 41 years after his death? 

By the mid-19th century, Smith was a figure famous throughout the British Empire, lauded by the Duke of Wellington in the House of Commons and fondly known to Queen Victoria. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, he was fading into obscurity. Then something happened which made him of great interest round the world once again...

In 1899, the Anglo-Boer War broke out in southern Africa and the British suffered the humiliation of seeing the towns of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley besieged by Boer forces. The fate of these three towns dominated the news in Britain as the country every day waited and prayed for the news that they had been relieved. 

As Ladysmith became a focus of international attention, people began to ask, 'Who exactly was this "Lady Smith"? And why was there a town in southern Africa named after her?" To answer this upsurge in public curiosity, the long-forgotten autobiography of her once famous husband, Sir Harry Smith - formerly the governor of Cape Colony (1847-52) - was rushed into publication. 

Yet if the British public expected to find in 'Lady Smith' a quintessential English heroine, they were in for a surprise. For 'Lady Smith' was not English at all, but a Spanish girl whose original name was Juana Maria de los Dolores de Leon. 

There is considerable irony in the fact that the Spanish woman who lent her name to this famous siege town in southern Africa was herself the most notable survivor of the terrible siege at Badajoz in Spain 90 years earlier. 

While the life of Harry Smith has partly inspired Bernard Cornwell's 'Sharpe' novels and TV series, his wife has had more unexpected historical echoes. Juana's memory lives on for example in the name of the group, 'Ladysmith Black Mambazo', who have become an iconic representative of South African music and who sang with Paul Simon on his 1986 Graceland album and accompanied Nelson Mandela to Oslo in 1993 to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

When in 1940, the historical novelist Georgette Heyer told the story of Juana Smith in her romance, 'The Spanish Bride' (still in print today), she published at a time when Britain itself was under siege. Juana became part of the zeitgeist of 'The Finest Hour' and readers found in her grit and determination, resonances of the determination of the British to stand up to the Nazi onslaught. 

It's a remarkable, unpredictable worldwide imprint for a 13-year-old Spanish girl escaping the chaos of war back in Badajoz, Spain in 1812. As I walk the streets of Badajoz today I'll be curious to find out whether this unassuming Spanish town (picture of alcazar below) remembers the legacy of one of its most famous daughters, with a strange capacity to reemerge into historical focus whenever the age requires her. 

The Laying of Odds on Murakami, Critics and the Nobel Prize

The announcement on Friday of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan has led to much opining about the connections between literature and pop music. I'd like to discuss that intriguing subject on another occasion, but just for the moment I've been thinking more about the connection between literary stallions and bookmakers...

Haruki Murakami (pictured above) - the perennial bookies' favourite in the UK - failed yet again to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Whatever the literary merits of this, there is an interesting linkage to be made between the betting on the Remain camp (favourite with the bookies while failing at the polls) in Brexit and Murakami constantly being the bookies' favourite while not winning.

As with Brexit, being the favourite leads to the impression that the bookmakers are making a judgement call, whereas in fact they are just reflecting the 'weight of money'. Which leads to the fascinating question: who is it that bets on winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature? At first sight, it seems a very odd mix of literature and betting.

Murakami being the year-in-year-out favourite (4-1, this year) represents not an assessment by any informed pundits, but presumably a desire by the millions of Murakami's fans in the West to have their reading tastes sanctioned by their author winning the ultimate accolade.

If Murakami did win, it then raises the question of whether the constant pressure of this 'weight of money' made an impact (conscious or unconscious) on the judges - so far it seems to have not the slightest impact.

Rather than reveal the tastes of the Nobel Committee however, Murakami constantly being favourite and yet not winning tells us a percentage of his fans 1. Like to have an online bet (I can't see them going to a high street bookies); 2. Have disposable wealth (We knew that already...); 3. Are not very streetwise (given that they keep on losing).

Surely this demonstrates the dangers of the ill-experienced wagering through sentiment rather than market insight? Well, you can look at it that way, but I would like to offer a different insight.

Literature and betting might appear at first to be two totally incongruous activities. Reading literature is a profoundly internalized, ultimately vague and lingering activity: you are never entirely sure how it affects your thought processes both now and into the future. Betting, by contrast, is entirely externalized, with a short thrill of uncertainty followed by complete clarity, win or lose. It seems to me to be entirely natural to wish to offset your internal literary musings with a punt on a bit of external reality.

The Nobel Prize indeed offers a potential opportunity for a flutter to those millions of people who have no interest in sport or the naming of royal babies. The Nobel Committee should perhaps be applauded for offering a gambling outlet for all those who fill red wine and book clubs up and down the country.

But even without betting on the big prizes, there is another means of externalizing your internal literary musings in a risk-laden endeavour: it's called 'criticism'. Whenever I put down my feelings on a subject and publish an article or upload a blog, I always feel like I am taking a risky punt: there's a certain mix of thrilling unease and anticipation as you wait to see what reaction your critique will garner. It's a highly unpredictable endeavour. Some of your bets will come romping home garlanded with praise; others will sink without trace or be the butt of ridicule and scorn.

I know a few people who are habitual (if not compulsive) gamblers, who can not get through a week without laying a bet. But I've rather come to recognize the same quality in myself, just transferred to a compulsive need to keep sending into the world little essays of criticism. Many people erroneously think I indulge in journalism, talks and blogs for the fabulous riches and worldwide fame they afford, but I assure you that it is the compulsive intellectual gambler inside me that whips me onward.

Once, back in my Cambridge days, my English supervisor - like me, a devotee of Nietzsche - gave me a gem of wisdom I've never forgotten: 'all great essays take risks'. Many people think that to write critically on a subject involves rational analysis and a summation of what has gone before. But what's truly essential is the ability to think creatively and to offer new insight.

If criticism does not challenge consensus, then it is pointless. Great criticism takes risks and flies in the face of convention. When it succeeds it manages to build a new consensus around its new tracks of interpretation.

The Nobel Prize is in many ways the ultimate statement of critical appreciation. Yet, paradoxically, when it merely represents a 'critical consensus' on a writer, it ceases to function as 'criticism'. In this sense, although I do not necessarily agree with the appraisal of Bob Dylan, at least the Nobel Committee are actually functioning in a critical capacity by advancing a new appreciation of Dylan's work. They have taken a punt, even as they have frustrated the bets of the legions of Murakami fans.

Anyone who is a critic is at heart a gambler. When Natsume Soseki published in 1907 his revolutionary 'Theory of Literature', he was criticized in some quarters for offering a profoundly scientific analysis of literature. But literature is not science came the critique. That's true, Soseki responded, literature is not science, but that's not to say literary criticism can't be scientific.

Soseki too was gambling big time on his radical criticism, but despite the fact that 'logic', 'emotion' and 'will' form the cornerstone of all his cultural analysis, he curiously neglected to see how 'wilfulness' - the desire to assert oneself, embrace danger and challenge convention - is just as essential a part of being a critic as 'rationality'.

So, in short, I have every sympathy for the Harukists laying their bets on the Nobel Prize. Because although literature and gambling might seem far apart ('The Nobel Prize is not a horse race', Murakami himself is supposed to have sniffily remarked), literary criticism and gambling are actually profoundly connected.

When it comes to your intellectual life at least, I think you should live dangerously and bet the house. Over the coming weeks, I'll be advancing new literary theories to challenge the consensus. It will be interesting to see whether my horses get over the line first or I am left seriously out of pocket...

Of Love and Letters

When it comes to the pictures of the Floating World (Ukiyo-e), I've discovered through bitter experience that I am a man of firm likes and dislikes. Throughout my late twenties and early thirties, this picture above, 'The Love Letter' by Suzuki Harunobu (c.1725 - 1770), hung on the wall of the modest 'one room mansion' I used to rent in Kansai in central Japan.

I can't quite remember where I first came upon it, but in classic student fashion, I had no funds to frame it and hang it gracefully, but rather attached it directly to the wall with blue tack at the corners. It would periodically fall off and I would have to re-press it firmly to a slightly different section of wall, leaving brown thumb marks on the corners of the poster and bluish, frayed marks on the wall.

When I finally came to move home in my mid thirties, the poster alas did not survive the move: it was far too grimy for the pristine walls of my new palace and into the bin it went. Having now entered the 'Harunobu-less' years of my life, I began to pang for ukiyo-e and would periodically find myself excitedly visiting exhibitions and leafing through books. My mind being confused however, I would forget that it was Harunobu whose poster I used to gaze on every day and I would misremember that it was by another famous ukiyo-e artist, Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) instead. But whenever I looked at Utamaro's pictures, I would be disappointed - they appeared to me to have less finesse, beauty and warmth - until I finally recalled that it was never him that I liked in the first place, but rather Harunobu.

Harunobu, Harunobu, Harunobu. I had to remember it was him that I liked, but then I forgot again and sat through Mizoguchi's film "Utamaro and His Five Women" (1946, thought by some to be a masterpiece - not in my opinion) and wondered once again what I had ever seen in Utamaro, until I finally recalled that I had misremembered it once again. Damn Utamaro!

Clearly I needed Harunobu back in my life. As recipients of my Facebook feed will be aware, I have been engaged in a restoration project of late on a 19th century mansion in the UK. One of its rooms I am naming the 'Arthur Waley Room' in honour of the great scholar, translator and popularizer of East Asian literature. This room will contain a writing desk and so it was a no-brainer what picture I would wish to have hanging over it: 'The Love Letter' by Suzuki Harunobu (in an even larger, framed version this time round).

In the ten years I spent looking at this picture while I was researching literature in Japan, a particular set of interpretations fixed themselves in my mind. As I will explain in a moment, this view was partly based on a misinterpretation of the picture, but I'll tell you first what particular meaning this picture of two people simultaneously reading a letter had for me and why I would wish to have it hanging over a writing desk.

Firstly, it reminded me that what you write should be capable of being read and re-read. It should be composed to last and to be mulled over. Second, it reminds me that the perspective of each person reading what you have written is different (which doesn't necessarily stop me winding up people of every possible stripe with ill-considered remarks).

Thirdly, it reminds me that if you communicate your passion on a subject, it will be of interest not just to your 'intended' audience, but to all kinds of other readers as well. In fact, it is this unintended 'secondary' readership that always provide me with the greatest thrill as a writer - those people in the farthest reaches of the world, or people with no particular interest in the subject, who somehow or other come upon what you have written and find their own interest sparked by it.

During the ten years I gazed at this picture in my room in Japan, I mostly spent my time at a Japanese university, preparing for a standard academic career. I contemplated the life of publishing articles in academic journals, producing books of academic research, tutoring graduate students - all very worthy and noble - but not, I concluded, one for me. I wanted to write things that would find not just the pre-ordained, 'intended' audience but reach out for that secondary, unintended readership. I wanted the scroll of scholarship to unfurl and land in unexpected, fascinated hands.

But when I came to order the half-remembered print after a 10 year gap, I suddenly discovered that it had a quite different meaning to what I had always assumed it to have. Knowing it only by its English title of 'The Love Letter', I had carelessly assumed it to be a picture of two female courtesans reading the same love letter, intended for the girl at the top, but also being read with interest by her friend under the blanket.

When I looked up its Japanese title however, I was startled to see it was 'A Man and a Woman Reading a Letter by a Kotatsu [A blanketed table])' The figure under the blanket is a man - you can also tell this from the hairstyle, which often reveals much information in ukiyo-e prints. This rather changes the dynamic of the picture and adds a sharp satirical edge.

But now, more than ever, I'm feeling this is a suitable picture to have hanging over a writing desk: reminding me than even the most familiar works of art have the ability to suddenly radiate in an unexpected light according to a new critical interpretation laid upon it.

All Aboard the Mishima Express

In Japan they have a variety of exotically decorated theme trains dedicated to famous writers. For example, in Iwate in north-east Japan, there is the 'Night on the Galactic Railway' train dedicated to the memory of fairytale author Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933). Or else on the island of Shikoku, there is a 'Botchan' train, based on the famous story by Natsume Soseki, which will take you round the city of Matsuyama where 'Botchan' is set.

I was thinking however that they have surely missed a trick in not having a Yukio Mishima-themed train that will take you to the city of Mishima, near Mount Fuji. (Geekish note: Yukio Mishima's real name was Kimitake Hiraoka and he took the pen-name of 'Mishima' from this very town in 1941.)

In Japan if a train is bound for somewhere they add the suffix 'yuki', so the Mishima-bound train is known as the Mishima-yuki train. This would afford the ineffable daily pleasure to the announcer of being able to pronounce that, 'This is the Mishima yuki Mishima Yukio train' which would surely elicit a smile every time.

Both Awful and Wonderful? It must be "Yabai"...

About 15 years ago, I remember having a conversation with an Irish bartender in Osaka about the Japanese word "yabai". The word was originally used by Japanese criminals as indicating the threat of imminent capture by the police but had entered common parlance as representing something you did not like the sound of. I droned on that it was quite a difficult word to translate into English. My Dublin friend, with characteristic impatience for such pretentious blather, immediately cut me short and remarked that what "yabai" really meant then was "F*** that!" - which both made me laugh and stays in my mind as the best possible translation.

But reading a newspaper a few days ago I was shocked to discover that while I wasn't paying attention, "yabai" has completely changed its meaning. It seems that even 10 years ago, 70% of teenagers had switched to using "yabai" as meaning "terrific" or "wonderful".

It's interesting the way that words have the capacity to completely transform their meaning. In English, the word "sick" has undergone the same transformation from negative to positive meaning. And if you go back far enough, you discover that the most bland-seeming words like "nice" apparently once had the meaning of "terrifying".

What people seek from language is not necessarily clarity of meaning: language often represents the restlessness of the human condition, constantly seeking to invert and subvert that which has gone before. It's easy to become numbed to the fact that some of the words we use are a previous generation's ironical inversion of what they received from their forebears. When you attempt to adhere to fixed definitions of meaning, you alas lose sight of the way that language is in a constant state of rebellious evolution.

Why Hagakure is Japan's Strangest Book

I recently ran a three part series in The Japan Times on Bushido (the Samurai code) and referred in Part Two to the Hagakure. As it is the beginning of the Rio Olympics this weekend, I thought I might offer a closer reading of this Bushido classic: Japan's Gold Medal candidate for 'Strangest Book Ever Written'.

Around 15 years ago, Hagakure enjoyed a small vogue amongst young men in the West due to its prominent role in the dire Jim Jarmusch flick Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). This film is set in the US and is about a hitman called Ghost Dog (played by Forest Whitaker) who receives the names of his targets from a Mafia goon by carrier pigeon landing on the rooftop where he lives. He is obsessed with the Hagakure and the portentous quotes from the book that dominate his thoughts are framed and voiced over at regular intervals throughout the film.

As a sincere believer in the 'Way of the Warrior', Ghost Dog attempts to live and die by the samurai code, requiring him to wipe a slew of Mafiosi who threaten the gangster who once saved his life. Jarmusch, like Tarantino, attempts to enfold the whole world into his films and piles into this one not only Italian Mafiosi and classics of Japanese literature such as Akutagawa’s Rashomon, but rappers, an exclusively French-speaking ice cream man, Chinese restaurants and The Wind in the Willows. It is the author of Hagakure however who tops the ironical ‘personal thanks’ in the credits.

Ghost Dog is really a very silly film, where too often ‘quirkiness’ tips into self-indulgence and cliché (particularly in its depiction of Italian Mafiosi), but it does have a few interesting aspects. One is that Ghost Dog regards Bushido as a complete value system to live his life. He even has the symbol from the front cover of the book embossed on the back of his jacket and constantly wears it as a medallion. At one point in the film, he passes another young man on the street wearing a cross as a medallion – as if two equal and complete value systems had met.

Another idea, somewhat buried in the film, and only obvious through Jarmusch’s pretentious thanks in the end titles to ‘Miguel de Cervantes’ is that Ghost Dog is a modern Quixote, attempting to live by a code of chivalry in an unchivalrous age. This is a perceptive observation about the way many Westerners relate to the code of the samurai and indeed to Japan itself.

And finally there is the pairing of gangsters with Bushido, which might seem weird, but to my mind is entirely apt, as the samurai were in fact the world’s ultimate gangsters, living by strict codes precisely because they had arisen due to the collapse of the authority of central government and were notorious for internecine conflicts and blood-letting.

But back to Hagakure…

Hagakure means ‘In the Shadow of Leaves’ indicating that the author was giving a whispering insider’s account of the subject. It is a collection of commentaries on Bushido (or, more precisely, what would later be called 'Bushido') by Yamamoto Tsunetomo who was a senior retainer of the Saga Clan in northern Kyushu in the far west of Japan. The commentaries were collected by Tsuramoto Tashiro and are based on his conversations with Tsunetomo between 1709 and 1716.

Hagakure was only published in full however in the twentieth century once the samurai themselves had long since disappeared. It was particularly prized as Japan turned to the extremes of nationalist and militaristic sentiment in the 1930s.

Hagakure divides opinion even in Japan between those who feel, like Yukio Mishima (who was a great fan of the book and wrote his own commentary on it), that Tsunetomo offered the most piercing insights into Bushido and those who feel that his opinions were completely crazy.

Yamamoto’s position is best summed up with the thought that, for the samurai, loyalty to the master is everything and that he must be prepared to instantly give up his life for his master at any time. Yamamoto even criticized the famous Forty-Seven Ronin. They took nearly two years to avenge their master’s death (before being ordered by the Shogunate to commit seppuku themselves), but according to Yamamoto they should have immediately attempted assassination on their master’s enemy even if such an attempt was doomed to failure.

A refrain throughout Hagakure is that the samurai must repress self-interest. ‘People think that they can clear up profound matters if they consider them deeply, but they exercise perverse thoughts and come to no good because they do their reflecting with only self-interest at the centre’, Yamamoto bewails.

Instead one must give obeisance every morning to one’s master, one’s ancestors, patron deities and guardian Buddhas. But amongst them the master is all-important. ‘For a warrior there is nothing other than thinking of his master.’

It is instantly obvious why this text appealed to Mishima so much and gave him such inspiration. Rather like Mishima’s tips on behaviour for so-called ‘modern samurai’, the text switches suddenly from lamenting the lack of skill at beheadings and cowardice (instead of resolve to commit suicide) to some handy tips on manners. ‘It is because a samurai has correct manners that he is admired’, Yamamoto points out, and proceeds to warn that one should not yawn or sneeze in front of other people.

Sometimes Tsunetomo reminds us of the sayings of his father Yamamoto Jinemon who said that you should look your listener in the eye, not put your hands in your pocket and throw away books after reading them. According to his father, a samurai with no group and no horse (i.e. a wandering samurai or ronin) was no samurai at all. Also, according to Yamamoto pere, a samurai should rise at four in the morning, bathe and arrange his hair daily, eat when the sun comes up and retire when it becomes dark. Mishima took none of this advice, routinely going to bed when the sun came up after writing throughout the night.

The whole book is washed with the hues of nostalgia and longing for an age before peacetime brought a general corrupting mood of idleness, luxury and triviality. ‘It is a wretched thing that the young men of today are so contriving and so proud of their material possessions...Every morning, the samurai of fifty or sixty years ago would bathe, shave their foreheads, put lotion in their hair, cut their fingernails and toenails rubbing them with pumice and then without fail pay attention to their general appearances. It goes without saying that their armor in general was kept from rust, that it was dusted, shined, and arranged.’

Yamamoto advises us to look for models of politeness, bravery, proper way of speaking, correct conduct and steadiness of mind. We are told that ‘a person who does something beyond his social standing will at some point commit mean or cowardly acts…one should be careful with menials and the like’. And yet, in a characteristic contradiction, we are told, ‘As for a person who has risen from the humble, his value should be prized and especially respected, even more than that of a person who was born into his class.’

Self pride and luxury are to be avoided; attaching cloves to your body will stop you being affected by colds; it is better to have some unhappiness when you are still young to stop you becoming giddy; drinking a decoction of the feces from a dappled horse is the best way to stop bleeding from an injury received by falling from a horse; look for the single purpose of the present moment as loyalty is also contained within single-mindedness; apply powdered rouge carried in your sleeve if your complexion is poor.

Intertwined with all of these ideas runs the constant refrain about preparing for death, dreaming of dying in battle or committing seppuku. ‘The way of the samurai is, morning after morning, the practice of death, considering whether it will be here or be there, imagining the most sightly way of dying, and putting one’s mind firmly in death.’ But there is, it seems, a silver lining. ‘With martial valor, if one becomes like a vengeful ghost and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he should not die.’

A highlight of the book is its description of various Sicilian-style revenge killings among the samurai. Often these would start as drunken brawls in bars, or sometimes be over nothing at all, and yet end up killing lots of innocent people. For example, a boy accidentally steps on a ronin’s foot while putting on his sandals. The ronin instantly kills him and his grandmother. The boy’s uncle then kills the ronin, but is in turn killed by the ronin’s younger brother. Another uncle, a Buddhist priest, then plans to kill the ronin’s younger brother, but kills the ronin’s father instead…and all this over treading on someone’s foot.

The samurai were also pretty nasty in their tortures. This is the punishment meted out to one robber: ‘all the hairs on his body were burned off and his fingernails were pulled out. His tendons were then cut, he was bored with drills and subjected to various other tortures. Throughout, he did not flinch once, nor did his face change color. In the end his back was split, he was boiled in soy sauce and his body was bent back in two.’

Once Yamamoto gets going with his tales of revenge killings and seppuku, there is really no end to them. There are tales of adultery leading to seppuku; of fathers acting as kaishakunin (assistants who behead the person committing seppuku) for their sons; of revenge killings leading to seppuku; of retainers crucified for not finishing off a fight or banished for intervening.

The slightest slip could lead to your death. One retainer is scolded for daring to put gold coins before his lord: ‘To place such base things before a person of importance is the extremity of carelessness’. (Given that the samurai class were created in the first place by ambitious warlords annexing land and appropriating taxes for themselves, and hiring gangs to protect them, this absurd denial of their own covetousness is truly breathtaking).

At this point, we get more handy tips from Yamamoto pere: ‘If you cut a face lengthwise, urinate on it, and trample on it with straw sandals, it is said that the skin will come off. This was heard by the priest Gyojaku when he was in Kyoto. It is information to be treasured.’

Tsunetomo relates how a samurai was dismissed from trial for having the bravery to cut down opponents of his clan and thereby uphold the way of the samurai and Tsunetomo gives us many instances of exemplary retainer behaviour such as the samurai who rushes into a burning house to save his lord’s treasured genealogy. The samurai dies in the flames, but when his corpse is found, it is discovered that he has cut open his stomach and put the genealogy inside.

Tsunetomo was very enthusiastic about the recuperative, blood-clotting powers of horse feces, but surprisingly very down on the value of tactics. ‘On the battlefield, once discretion starts it cannot be stopped. One will not break through to the enemy with discretion. Indiscretion is most important when in front of the tiger’s den. Therefore, if one were informed of military tactics, he would have many doubts, and there would be an end to the matter...there are no military tactics for a man of great strength’.

We are shrewdly told that ‘one should not show his sleeping quarters to other people. The times of deep sleep and dawning are very important’ and that ‘underwear should be made from the skin of a badger’.

There are occasional flashes of wit between the samurai:

Matsudaira Izu no kami said to Master Mizuno Kenmotsu, ‘You’re such a useful person, it’s a shame that you’re so short.’

Kenmotsu replied, ‘That’s true. Sometimes things in this world don’t go the way we would like. Now if I were to cut off your head and attach it to the bottom of your feet, I would be taller. But that’s something that couldn’t be done.’

However the odd snippet of humour is far outweighed by general insanity, with lots of tales of heads being cut off and invocations to always think of your master.

'The warriors of old cultivated mustaches, for as proof that a man had been slain in battle, his ears and nose would be cut off and brought to the enemy’s camp. So that there would be no mistake as to whether the person was a man or a woman, the mustache was also cut off with the nose. At such a time the head was thrown away if it had no mustache, for it might be mistaken for that of a woman. Therefore, growing a mustache was one of the disciplines of a samurai so that his head would not be thrown away upon his death.'

In Yamamoto’s view, boys should be taught valour, forbearance, politeness and etiquette. For girls however, the most important thing is chastity. They should be always kept six foot from a man, never look them in the eye, or receive things from them by hand. And heaven forbid that they ever go sightseeing or on trips to a temple.

Yamamoto is firm in the belief that all identity should come from the clan. All worship and respect should be given to clan elders and ancestors rather than such things as Buddhism, Confucius or famous warriors of other clans. ‘One worships the head of whatever clan or discipline to which he belongs. Outside learning for retainers of our clan is worthless.’

One should serve the clan, even committing seppuku whenever required by the lord, is Yamamoto’s message. In this way, Yamamoto vows never to be outdone in the Way of the Samurai.

Albeit that Hagakure has found fans in such people as Yukio Mishima and Jim Jarmusch, and is undoubtedly a superb illustration of an extremist samurai mindset, there is surely no question that Yamamoto is insufferably pompous. There is no real consideration of why you should devote your life to your lord – this is merely an a priori assumption, endlessly reinforced like a Buddhist priest chanting a sutra.

A while back I was watching Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and istening to the declarations of the Nazis at the Nuremberg rallies (‘We know of nothing but to follow the Fuhrer’s order and show our loyalty!’) and Hitler’s own declaration that the spiritual tenets of National Socialism would be like that of a religious order, you can see that the guiding principles of fascism and the more extremist samurai – the blind cult of loyalty, the yearnings for militaristic order, the nostalgia for the past, the xenophobia – had a good deal in common.

The resurgence of Bushido in the 1890s, accompanied by Nitobe Inazo's book Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) becoming an international bestseller, clearly created in Japan an intellectual framework in which fascism and dictatorship could quickly take root (ironically this development was not foreseen by the internationally urbane Nitobe Inazo, who was horrified by Japan storming out of the League of Nations in 1933 after the Lytton Commission’s critical assessment of Japan’s culpability in the invasion of Manchuria. Nitobe died shortly thereafter in Canada.)

I appreciate Hagakure in the same way as I appreciate Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films – as a fascinating insight into what is now a barely comprehensible mindset. Yet while delighting in its Gothic nastiness, I can’t but help feel that if is this is the Way of the Samurai, I won't be joining Ghost Dog and his pigeons on the rooftop anytime soon.