Kamo no Chōmei

Kamo no Chōmei was the first, after Saigyō, to articulate a philosophical vision of the shift from impermanence to aestheticism. Disappointed in his life’s ambition to be appointed to a major position at the Shimogamo Shrine in Kyoto, where his father had been the superintendent, he retired from the world and secluded himself in a hermitage at Hino, in the hills southeast of Kyoto. In Hōjōki (An Account of a Hut Ten Feet Square, 1212) Chōmei writes, “Surely it is best to make friends with strings and woodwinds, blossoms and the moon,” steeping himself in the life of the aesthetic recluse communing with the phenomena of nature. A certain ironical outlook can be detected in a way of life that included repeated readings of Genshin’s Essentials of Rebirth. An episode about him in a collection of didactic stories, Jikkinshō, stresses a view of him as someone who failed in his life’s plans, commenting, “he had desired to become a shrine official, but when this was not fulfilled, he grew resentful of the world and withdrew from it.”

In the essay collection Mumyōshō (Anonymous Notes) Chōmei explains the concept of yūgen, writing that its importance lies in “overtones that do not appear in words and an atmosphere (keiki) that is not visible in the formal aspects of the poem.”20 As one example of yūgen, he posits an autumn evening in which the sky shows no particular color and makes no sound, and yet one is somehow moved to tears. As I have mentioned before, one of the themes we are pursuing in this book is precisely this mysterious power of the landscape, or keiki.