To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
 
I have been watching this Japanese series on Netflix called Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories. I am enjoying it quite a bit because for one it feels like a window into Japanese life and culture, and for two it has a food theme. The Japanese dishes seem to be of another world; things I have never heard of or seen or dreamt! I learnt of foodstuff like weiner which is a fish sausage or bonito flakes which are dried fish flakes or noodles in a bun or deep fried yam or rolled sweet omelette. The Diner owner/chef who is referred to as 'Master' makes whatever the customer requests as long as he has the ingredients available; people are free to bring their own ingredients as well. There is something very heart-warming about the Diner place which opens at 12 midnight. I sometimes wonder if the details accurately represent Japanese life such as the fact of regular working people going to diners after 12 as if it's the most normal hour to go out for food or if some details are exaggerated to suit the theme—the problem is I wouldn't know which is which!

There was this scene in an episode I watched yesterday. Without going into the details, a young lady who is a regular customer for something called "cat rice" (it seems as if this is food that's usually served to cats) and for whom the Master has something of a soft spot dies; the day she dies he has this vision of her coming to the diner at the usual time for cat rice. He soon realises that she isn't actually there so he keeps the rice outside for cats. He finds the news of her death in the paper and after a while when he opens the door there is a cat happily eating the rice. He fondly looks at her and says, "Welcome back"!

Upon watching this scene my personal interpretation was that the girl is seen to have come back as an animal spirit in a very abstract sense. There was no explanation offered so it seems as if one expected the Japanese viewer who might be the imagined viewer to just get it. I am not sure what the Japanese think happens after death but this scene didn’t jar or shock my Indian sensibilities at all. I did not find it strange or out of the ordinary to find such a plot in a story. But the fact that it did not get a reaction from me different from the one a Japanese person might have had (keeping aside the subtle interpretational differences) actually made me wonder, how would a Western sensibility perceive this scene? How would it appear from a completely rational framework where it’s taken for granted that there’s nothing after death or at best there's heaven/hell. I am not saying that it has anything to do with actual belief; whether I actually "believe" one could come as an animal to eat food right after dying is not the point at all but what I am referring to are the frames through which we view the sense world and beyond dividing the rational and irrational neatly or blurring them. No one would think of the Japanese as irrational and they are perhaps seen as the most Westernised among Eastern nations (I assume?) but it seems as if in the East rationality seems to coexist happily with irrationality rather than crowding it out. There were many episodes that referred to astrologers, auspicious food, things which brought good luck (treated seriously)…which perhaps surprised me in the sense that I myself did not expect to find these familiar ‘irrational’ motifs in their culture! These motifs came across as "natural" rather than something unnatural to me simply because my worldview already includes these objects... makes me wonder as I said how a worldview that does not include these objects in a practical sense but simply views them as ‘irrational concepts’ would engage with these same scenes or stories. Interesting line of thought…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 9:39 pm 0 comments
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