Books like Empire of Signs

Someone here on Good Reads recommended I read this, can't remember who now to thank them...My daughter is doing her honours thesis on cute Japanese animal advertisements for eating meat and how these seem to skate incredibly close to what we in the West might consider to be food taboos. As part of that, I recommended she might read this book – which was brave of me, given I hadn’t actually read the damn thing. She returned the favour today by ‘requiring’ me to read this so we could talk about it. It has been an interesting day. Barthes repeatedly says that the country he is discussing is a kind of oddly unreal place – nothing at all like the actual country by the name of Japan. His point is that for someone who speaks virtually none of the language what he has to say about the place is necessarily going to be quite limited. But if only I could be so limited. This is an utterly fascinating book.It starts with a long description of Japanese food. Western food generally comes to the table in a way that makes it hard to tell what the food is composed of. Even when the meat is raw – like steak tar-tare – it is so heavily seasoned that it is hard to know it is raw. Anyway, in French and Italian raw food is called ‘crude’ – with the same sexual references as this word has in English. But this isn’t true of Japanese food, which is often raw and announces itself as being from the animal or the vegetable it is actually from. There is a kind of essentialism to Japanese food – but one that is not exactly ‘natural’. I think his point here is that in presenting the essence of these various foods the Japanese need to ‘perfect’ them, in a sense. So that, like a Japanese garden, it is ‘nature’, but not quite ‘natural’, it is highly ordered nature – as nature would have been if God hadn’t been rushing to finish in seven days.He makes much the same point about haiku. When I read this poem with Western eyes:It is evening, in autumn,All I can think ofIs my parents.The network of connections – ‘autumn years’, ‘the evening of one’s life’ – registers with me in particular ways and so I see this as a poem about someone with aging parents. I can even add words that are not completely justified, such as ‘concern’ and ‘nursing-home’. But his point is that this is precisely the wrong way to read a haiku. Again, the point of haiku, like the point of Japanese food, is to capture the essence, rather than allude to a ‘deeper’ meaning. My problem was that the examples he gives of haiku that clearly don’t really ‘mean’ in our standard Western way, with below the surface irony, such as this one:Already four o’clock . . .I have got up nine timesTo admire the moon.Might well be, as he says, merely a bland statement of fact, or it could in fact have remarkable hidden significance to the Japanese that I’m completely unaware of. Judging poetry in translation is a fool’s errand at the best of times. It could just be that doing something nine times is highly significant to the Japanese, whereas eight times is quite ho-hum – he does make the point that haiku are to be read twice – as once might imply the importance of the poem is the shock you get from the unexpected the first time you hear it and three times might imply the meaning comes in repetition – twice being just enough to confirm the right level of blandness. Sort of bland, but not mind-numbingly boring.The most interesting bits of this relate to Japanese theatre. Puppet theatres where the puppets have no strings and no attempt is made to hide the puppet masters – in fact, they, and the people providing the voices and music, unlike Western puppet shows, are essential and apparent parts of the performance. Or the male actors who play female roles in drama – as no women are allowed to perform – and are not at all like a Les Girls show, where it is hard to know if you are watching a woman or a man. Here no one would confuse the men acting these roles with real woman – they are a symbolic woman. The actor, even in disguise, is clearly male: essences, yet again, are what are essential.And then a fascinating description of gift giving, where the gift is virtually completely unimportant, but how it is wrapped, how it is presented, is what matters. This really is a fascinating journey to a wonderful Japan of signs - not really discovered from a dialogue, as much of our knowledge tends to be, but almost as someone might appraise a painting.