Zen and the Geisha
The Flower and Willow World. By A. C. Scott. (Heinemann, 30s.) To 'popularise' Zen is simple enough : all you need is Dr. Suzuki's energy and an audience ready to wash their hands of their own civilisation. 'We talk very much these days about all kinds of freedom, political, economic, and otherwise, but these freedoms are not at all real. . . . The real freedom is the outcome of enlightenment.' Do our Western Zen-men really want to throw overboard philanthropy, responsibility, reason and what economic and political freedom we have managed to achieve or cling to? Few seem to have remarked how convenient a discipline Zen is from the point of view of a totalitarian regime. Satori, enlighten- ment, can be brought about by a sudden slap in the face: perhaps also by a rubber truncheon. Convenient for highbrow militarists, too: 'Swordsmanship is, after all, not the art of killing; it consists in disciplining oneself as a moral and spiritual and philosophical being.' Its great in- fluence on Japanese art would seem less equivocal. Yet, 'Zen finds its inevitable association with art but not with morality.' Should we Westerners really welcome the scission which this implies? Zen 'treats life and death indifferently.' Do we wish to? What is best in Zen comes from the strong intuitive faculty of Eastern people and their exquisite consciousness of self; what is worst comes from their weakness in logic and in con- sciousness of community. That it has a valuable lesson for us I do not doubt : to swallow it un- critically would be an invitation to anarchy.
The one thing the average Westerner now knows about geisha is that they aren't what the average Westerner thinks—glorified prostitutes. This small revolution has been brought about by a series of studies of which Mr. Scott's is the most scholarly. I much admire his work on Oriental drama, but the present book appears to have been based too trustingly on a hand-out from a Shimbashi PRO. The question, 'What does a geisha do?' cannot be answered simply. There are geisha and 'geisha,' as in the West there are dancers and 'dancers.' The elite are highly trained artists, or carriers of traditional arts. The fact re- mains that their paying audience is exclusively male, chiefly expense account, and more interested in food and drink than in aesthetic experience. Far be it from me to insinuate : but the 'public suspicion and confusion' mentioned by Mr. Scott as surrounding this subject is Japanese—and the more significant in view of the Japanese gift for euphemistic thinking. I don't aspire to be more moral than the locals, but nor do I wish to be less observant. And I think Mr. Scott is too quick in dismissing the remarks of a journalistic Buddhist priest, cousin of a well-known geisha : 'The geisha is really a pitiful creature, so her world must be abolished.' A pitiful creature'—that is the note which has long sounded in Japanese popular writ- ing. The geisha is an inhabitant, however privi- leged, of the Flower and Willow World. a world which is not all sweetness and light. ('Flower and Willow sickness' isn't something you catch from someone else's wine-cup.) Towards the end, Mr. Scott's book raises issues of wider import than Madam Butterfly's virtue. Perhaps, as a connois- seur, he is a little reluctant to admit plainly that the younger generation's preference for jazz and Western classics over samisen music is a symptom not of the degeneracy of a people but of the atrophy of an art too long confined in a small, closed, artificial world.
D. J. ENRIGHT
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