Japan and blood: how to narrate the East from a Western body

The pandemic and a trip to Japan paralyze the creative process for a travel chronicle

The first time I wrote about blood was in a poetry workshop at the National University of the Arts when I was asked to think of a self-portrait. It was a poem and, as I read it out loud, a classmate decided to leave until we finished talking about the subject. For some reason, I found it more descriptive to mention that which binds together all the parts of me, that warm liquid that circulates so quickly and coagulates so quickly. She, however, was impressed by thinking about it, discussing it, rewriting it and imagining it. Of course, I did not attribute this effect to the shock my words can cause, but to the object and what it represents.

A few years later I went to an exhibition of the very talented artist Renata Schussheim which was called Red hot. In it, different stages of her career were displayed with a common thread: the color red. And of course, in several instances linked to blood. In an interview, the author said: “I strongly defend the color red because for me it has a lot of density. That density is what unites everything, the jackets with the faces of Charly, Spinetta and Moura, even the dresses of the Red Queen that I made for Alicia.” In her self-portrait, which was her professional life, there was an element that brought together the distant parts from each other and she decided to focus precisely on that which kept it as uniformity.

A long history of repression of the female body meant that menstrual blood was not only not the same as, but also caused more rejection than blood coming from any other part. “Something changes in the conversation when you talk about menstruation,” the coordinator of the #MenstruAccion campaign told me. Augustine Mileoin an informal conversation. And it is true, because at almost 30 years old I remember more attempts to hide it than to name it. But as writing is always talking about many topics at the same time, a trip was only the starting point for me to find myself with this subject again.

Hiroshima Memorial Park reveals the imprint of horror and personal connection to menstruation

It looks like blood on the spotless white cloth

In 2020, I traveled to Japan just before the pandemic became the problem it was. When I returned, I had a lot of free time, and I started writing a travelogue. In it, I was tempted by the opportunity to explore literature at the same time. After all, there was so much information about “the land of the rising sun” that it was pertinent to find a way for this text not to be just another encyclopedia.

I wrote some scenes and took notes on some information, even supplementing the information with research and interviews. But there was a character who lay hidden beneath the surface, as if he were looking at me from within the story and saying, “Are you really not going to talk about me?”

My time in Hiroshima was very intense. “The traces of horror are in the air,” I wrote, referring to what it feels like to be in an incredible city restored after its total destruction by an atomic bomb. Later, some misfortunes distressed me and, remembering the feeling some time later, I found the key: I was in the middle of my menstrual period. Since then, many ways of living that trip took on another meaning and even turned out to be revealing for experiences such as rest, food, sexual desire and even a feminine worldview. The trip had its own singularity in the events and in the body.

“The Japanese flag waving looks like blood on the spotless white cloth,” I wrote after thinking of a scene in the Memorial Park in Hiroshima, and so blood, my blood, became the center of everything again.

Travel stories attract by subjectivity, not just by geographical data

Why do we continue reading travel chronicles?

At the book presentation It looks like blood on the spotless white clothedited by Dragon fruit A question arose: why are all these people interested in reading the story of someone who travelled and tells it? But the answer – I think – in this case cannot be separated from the territory: what we need from Japan is not just a geographical fact or photos without context, we want subjectivity and, at the same time, we want a story. We want, even if we can watch YouTube videos, to have the experience of Kubla Khan enjoying – and even doubting a little – the adventures of Marco Polo. We do not want to know what happens in Japan, but what happened to a person in Japan at a certain time. And that, it must be said, is very Japanese.

The Japanese have a special attraction to perishable things. In the West, on the other hand, we find them difficult to process. Although in recent years there have been attempts to take the idea of ​​Ichi-go ichi-e – an encounter, a possibility – as part of the lifestyle that is quoted on social networks, in this case it has thousands of years of tradition and is applied naturally in various areas of life. An example is the relationship they have, for example, with cherry trees.

The American Donald Keene He described it thus in the prologue to his book The Pleasures of Japanese Literature: “Cherry blossoms are beautiful, it is true, but not so beautiful that they completely eclipse the beauty of peach or plum blossoms. Yet the Japanese plant cherry trees everywhere, even in parts of the country where the climate is not conducive to such delicate trees. (…) The greatest attraction of cherry blossoms may not be their intrinsic beauty but their perishability: plum blossoms remain on the branches for about a month, and other fruit trees bear flowers for at least a week, but cherry blossoms usually wither after three days of blooming, a fact that countless poets have had occasion to lament. (…); but the Japanese are happy to plant such trees anywhere, to enjoy their three days of glory.”

The East resists being told and we see many failures that fall into yearnings or prejudices about the customs of the other side of the world. However, here we have something to hold on to. Our cherry trees are the conversation and the anecdotes. Our way of understanding the world is through other eyes, through community, through the confidence that another’s observation can tell us much more about a place than an accumulation of data.

The first literary self-portrait talks about blood and provokes intense reactions

A stained glass window and a mirror

Travelling through a radically different space is very stimulating. Not only is there a constant discovery of what is foreign, but also a way of seeing one’s own particularities. One of the most interesting is that of impermanence and copying.

This is an aspect that has also been widely studied by Western researchers such as Lafcadio Hearn, a well-known populariser of Japanese landscapes and customs who wrote in his book Kokoro: “Generally speaking, we build to last, and the Japanese for impermanence. In Japan there are few things in everyday use that are made to last. Thus, straw sandals, which are worn out and replaced at each stage of a journey; clothes, made from a series of fabrics sewn together in any way to be worn, and which are unstitched again to be washed; the new chopsticks that each guest receives when they arrive at a hotel; the light shōji frames, which serve as windows and doors, and whose paper is replaced twice a year; and the floors, which are changed every autumn are just loose examples of the many small things in everyday life that show that the Japanese are very comfortable with impermanence.”

In this sense, one can also think of the idea of ​​originality and copying. The permanence of the original is not a value in itself in Japan, but human fragility and its finite characteristic are. This cultural shock can be very important. The Ise Shrine, for example, the most sacred Shinto site in the country, is rebuilt every 20 years because of the idea of ​​the transience of things. This action would be unthinkable for Western architecture, which does everything possible to restore and maintain structures because, we believe, “the truth” is preserved there. Replacing them with new ones would seem like a sin to us.

Imitations in Japan – whether in the culture of cosplay, food or sampuru replicas or the constant renovation of buildings – cannot be considered mere copies, but rather a radically different ontological point of view. This value of the trip to Japan turns the story into an experience that is not only exploratory, but also an inquiry into one’s own naturalized uses and customs. A window to the other world, a mirror of what we are, without questioning ourselves.