Stone and Water

Only when I actually sit down and write it out do I realize the tension between Japanese and Chinese is still pretty interesting.

People who think in Chinese always pay attention to imagery first. Like Weicheng, morning rain, yi, light dust — it's all using images, like a Suzhou garden, arranging odd pines and strange rocks to set up a whole mood.

渭城朝雨浥轻尘，客舍青青柳色新。
劝君更尽一杯酒，西出阳关无故人。

Morning rain in Weicheng dampens the light dust; by the inn the green-green willows look newly fresh. I urge you to drink one more cup of wine — west of Yangguan, there will be no old friends.

But in Japanese, all those subtle feelings, human relationships, the aftertaste of a single line — it's all in the endlessly changing predicates that trail behind the kanji. As someone who thinks in Chinese, what I'm used to is stones, one by one, level tones and oblique tones and level tones. It's actually pretty hard to get a grip on subtle aftertaste in a language that's slippery like water.

When I graduated high school I met an old Japanese professor who said his favorite Chinese poem line was "西出阳关无故人." Later I realized the way Japanese people read it is probably:

西のかた 陽関を出づれば 故人無からん
(to the west, if one leaves Yangguan, there will likely be no old friends)

That Yangguan refrain with its chivalrous, bold, frontier spirit — somehow it starts to feel like, under cherry blossoms, in the impermanence of worldly things, this soft, lingering emotion wells up. Even "no old friends" comes with an echo — Chinese is a nailed-down, absolute "none," while Japanese leaves you with the lingering resonance of "probably there won't be any, I guess."

I'm pretty curious what it felt like for someone like Wang Guowei to look at poetry again after learning Japanese.

Japanese as a language, compared with Chinese and English, really isn't great at reasoning things out. You have to see the end of the sentence before you understand anything, and there's all sorts of not-very-useful stuff added in just to soften the tone. So if there's English, in the end I'm still looking at the English.

But on the flip side, precisely because Japanese isn't good at reasoning, it puts all its energy into the emotional layer and the subtle distance between people. Things Chinese can pin down with a single character, Japanese has to slowly unfold with tone, honorifics, and tiny shifts at the sentence ending. That's not a flaw — it's another kind of precision.

After finishing that Waste Land project, I kept thinking about one thing: when you break poetry into data dimensions to analyze it, the differences between Chinese and Japanese become especially obvious. In Chinese, the poetry concentrates in word choice — every character is a stone, and its position and weight decide everything. In Japanese, the poetry is dispersed in the folds of grammar — the same kanji, swap a particle, change an ending, and the emotional color of the whole sentence is different.

One is architecture, one is ink-wash.

Now that transformers are out, language gets compressed down to a purer structural level. From that angle, looking back, Chinese's image density and Japanese's grammatical emotion actually show up more clearly than before. As someone switching back and forth among three languages to do aesthetics, it's still pretty interesting.