Ikebana and Evangelion
This piece is about the Japanese anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion, episode 4, “Rain, After Running Away,” my time in Japan in 2004, and a connection between this episode and the Japanese art of ikebana 生け花.
“The space of an hour on a page (maybe more, maybe less) to fill or leave empty — sometimes the fear of it, sometimes the knowledge and anticipation of it, sometimes the two (maybe three) being one and the same.” — from a recent letter written by my older brother.
Where is Shinji?
Rain falls in sheets on the skyscrapers across New Tokyo. The opening gloominess of the image sets the mood for the rest of the episode.
The scene cuts to the inside of an apartment building and focuses on a lump underneath a blanket on the floor, clearly covering a human form in silence. There’s trash and discarded wrappers spread around the bedsheets. A lone foot reaches out and turns off the alarm clock revealing the slender sensuousness of Misato Katsuragi emerging. In the next scene she is brushing her teeth, sleep still under her eyes, one foot scratching her other leg like a college student with a hangover.
“I wonder if he’s going to skip school again today?” she asks herself.
Still in her pajamas, she knocks on a door labeled “Shinji’s room” and repeats the question above, this time speaking out loud. It’s the first spoken line in the episode. She reminds him it’s been five days already.
What happened 5 days ago? And why doesn’t Shinji open the door?
Shinji isn’t even in his room, of course. He’s not in the apartment.
The List
The notebook that I kept during my year of English teaching for the JET program in Niigata, Japan is still with me to this very day. I open it up occasionally to see if I can travel back in time and make discoveries to when I lived in the Land of the Rising Sun from September 2004 to the Summer of 2005. The notebook itself wasn’t necessarily a diary or a journal, but more of a hodgepodge of thoughts scrambled together, often containing questions about the meaning of life mixed with random Japanese phrases that I didn’t want to lose to the vortex of unused memories.
On November 11th, 2004, the comments included:
“Dreamt Grandpa was a ladies’ man….”
“….Jim drools….”
There was a sketch of a turtle.
And then there was a list entitled “Things I want to learn” which read:
- Koto
- Ikebana
- Why do we dream?
- How exactly do thoughts happen?
- How to change a tire?
Tokyo-3 Loop Line №7
The rain continues to pelt down on the tracks of the metro line, reflecting the appropriate episode entitled, “Rain, After Running Away.” Seems like a good day to sit on a train and just zone out, which is exactly what Shinji does for the next minute and a half of the episode. The passengers around him appear and disappear like phantoms. Are they real, or is he alone on the train for the duration?
School girls.
Salarymen.
An elderly gentleman and his umbrella prop one another up. He seems like the kind of guy who would last longer than Shinji on the train, and yet Shinji is immobile. Stoic. He betrays no emotion whatsoever. The train is empty except for Shinji, rooted firmly in his seat by the door. Shinji’s head hangs down, and the gentleman and his umbrella disappear before our very eyes.
Where are you going Shinji? What are you running from?
Ma 間
“In the art of Ikebana space is an essential component and often the focal point of an arrangement. It is viewed as ‘invisible energy’ that gives life to the form.” — Kiyoshi Matsumoto: MA — The Japanese Concept of Space and Time
One of the things that drew me to ikebana during my year of living in Niigata was that it felt like something much deeper than flower arrangement was afoot. I also thought the word sounded grand and powerful as it rolled off the tongue. Some of the arrangements I had seen appeared so stark and simple at first glance, and yet I had a feeling there was more to the arrangements than met the eye. There was something in the nothingness within the form that led me to believe in a weightiness that could only be felt through the pauses of empty space.
I had a Japanese ikebana teacher during my time in Japan. She was an elderly and lonesome woman who had a fragility to her spirit, and yet she retained an inner shell of protection that I could sense. The shell seemed to be in her core, built up over years of self-training. I took both my parents and my older brother to her home on separate occasions where we enjoyed an ikebana class, followed by homemade okonomiyaki お好み焼き, a sort of Japanese pancake famous in Osaka.
I remember when my older brother visited, and she was very excited to practice her English and meet another member of my family. It was in the month of December, and she had meticulously prepared flowers appropriate for the season, along with extra sets of shears and “kenzo” for my brother to use during the lesson.
“I’d like to introduce you to the great shoka,” she had said, her arms raised in her kimono, her eyes closed and quivering behind her spectacles. It was as if she was letting us into a world and giving us a peek into this art form that we would only ever be able to understand bits and pieces of.
“Established in the Meiji period, shoka shofutai is a style of small ikebana suitable for being placed in the tokonoma of a small Japanese traditional room. Shoka consists of three yakueda (main parts) called shin, soe and tai, likened to three poles or functions (heaven, earth and mankind) considered since ancient times as the basis of all being.” — an excerpt from Ikenobo’s Arranging Style
Dawn Breaks
After exiting the train, Shinji wanders the city aimlessly listening to his music. We see him sitting in a seedy movie theater, a man passed out in the front row, another couple enjoying themselves more than the movie. He takes a nap near the restrooms and the vending machines.
As dawn breaks, he seems to have the entire city to himself. Bathed in an eerie purple light, there is but one man, with the rising Sun, alone on the Earth. Nothing is said, and the deafening silence of the city is overwhelming and too much to take for him as he flees in a panic. He doesn’t know where he is going. Eventually his footsteps takes him to up into the mountains where he can see the entire city from atop the clouds.
A Silent Farewell
I don’t remember saying goodbye to my ikebana instructor when I left Niigata, but I know it happened. I always felt there was a great sadness inside of her that she could never express to me in words but that she was trying to express in her ikebana. I know that she had a son, but I didn’t know that much about him. She hardly mentioned him, and I never asked about her husband who had passed away.
When I did leave my final ikebana lesson, she gave me something which surprised me. It was a manuscript that she had printed out, around 80 to 100 pages in length. It was written entirely in Japanese, and so I could not read it myself. I do know that the manuscript told a story of an older woman befriending a younger American man named Lucas in Hawaii. The writing mentioned the paleness and purity of his skin, and compared his arms to a white river. I remember my teacher had commented on my arms and how fair my own skin was early on in our lessons.
When I returned to Niigata on one subsequent visit years later, I wanted to arrange a meeting with her again, but it never came to pass. I tried to arrange the meeting through my former colleague at the city hall who originally introduced us. He said that she would be unable to meet. The specific reason eludes me now, but part of me thinks that she wanted to leave our conversations as a memory in the past, giving meaning to the space and time that had naturally grown between us. I sensed a certain pain coming from her, but that was my own interpretation of the silence, the “ma.”
“‘Ma’ means an interval of space or time, or is perhaps better translated as emptiness or void. But it’s an emptiness full of meaning, and is often positioned as a focal point of an Ikebana arrangement.” — excerpt from Japanese Ikebana — Zen and the Art of Arranging Flowers
Homecoming
It’s daylight again and Shinji stands once more on a train platform. No one pulls off a sulking head-hang like Shinji, and he’s in top-form at this moment. The train slowly click-clacks to a stop, and the doors open. This is the moment for Shinji to decide if he will leave behind the calling which has been forced upon him.
He’s only a 14 year old student right? His place belongs in some classroom, being bullied or hidden away in the corner to mind his own business as he daydreams about girls. How and why did his father send for him to pilot an evangelion robot?
“Gambatte ne….” his head raises, his eyes are alert. He remembers Misato Katsuragi’s voice.
Misato hightails it to the train station in her car. Two of his classmates sit outside the train station watching the train as it pulls away, only to see Misato’s car screech to a stop.
She’s too late.
The ever-present sound of cicadas are in the background, replacing the train that has departed.
Silence.
Misato looks off into the distance to where the train was just moments before. She looks down.
The sound of cicadas.
She turns. From over her left shoulder we see the profile of a motionless boy.
She ruffles her hair with her right hand and sighs, saying nothing. As she lowers her shoulders, it’s clear to the viewer that the boy on the platform is Shinji. But she hasn’t discovered it yet. She is still stuck in her melancholic loss, resigned.
She turns around, looks up and recognises the boy. Shinji lifts his eyes to meet her gaze. The silence that follows speaks and time drags out, like the cutting of a stem at a perfect angle. The station master on the platform makes an announcement over the loudspeaker, but nothing can cut through this silence. They stare at each other for exactly one minute before Shinji speaks. We can feel all three come together.
Heaven. Earth. Man.
