薄明 "HAKUMEI" by Shinji Wakasa

Last July, I took a short trip to Mount Osorezan, a sacred mountain on the Shimokita Peninsula in Aomori Prefecture.

Mt. Osorezan has always been an important place that I wanted to visit. When I was in junior high school, I became inspired by a short story titled "Osorezan Revoir" that was unexpectedly included in a comic book called "Shaman King" which I read at a friend's house. The story was filled with a quiet poetic sentiment, rare in shonen manga, and it depicted the spirituality of human emotions, such as grief, death, and grudges. This had a profound impact on me during my impressionable adolescence.

As I continued to gain experience, my interest in the humanities, history, and ethnography grew. This interest deepened as I learned about Itako, Mount Osorezan, and the history and folklore of the Shimokita Peninsula.

When I finally set foot on the place I had longed to visit, I contemplated death and the afterlife on the pale blue shores of Gokuraku-hama. As I had imagined, I found a desolate rocky shore, an eerily quiet beach, the almost intoxicating stench of sulfur, and pinwheels placed here and there, making lonely sounds as the wind blew.

I believe I've often thought about death and the wonder of being alive since a young age.

When my beloved turtle died when I was a child, my mother and I held a funeral service for it. We brought home a coffin we had made during arts and crafts class and buried it in the courtyard of our apartment, along with a tangerine seed (which later became a tree and bore fruit). I mourned the death of that little Zeni turtle with tears in my eyes. I think I cried more than I did when my grandparents passed away. Even now, I sometimes recall the image of the turtle stretching its neck toward the food I hand-fed it.

My mother cried with me at that time, but she later suffered brain damage and over the past few years has become almost vegetative, requiring gastric lavage and intensive nursing care. I feel that my mother understood me the most, and I understood her. Now, she lies in bed, half alive, half dead, cared for by her family, looking empty, as if in a haze.

Going back in time a little, just after my teenage years ended, a very dear friend of mine committed suicide. I have no way of knowing whether she sought salvation in death or whether she had any lingering feelings about life, but every year as the anniversary of her death approaches, I remember her vividly.

And so, in death, the turtle and my friend became, for lack of a better word, a part of me. They are embedded in my memory like a timeless presence, beyond me, with me. They are like a melody that I can hum, like a verse of a song that I will never forget.

My mother, on the other hand, is still "medically" alive, but one day she seems to have become a strange presence, drifting between my conscious thoughts and my dreams. Perhaps this was due in large part to the fact that before this happened, she had said in a conversation with me, "If I were to become unconscious and in a state of serious care, I would choose death over gastric lavage." (But I will refrain from going into the issue of personal thoughts and arguments about care and euthanasia here and now because it would be too complicated.)

The turtle and my friend are more strongly rooted in me than in death. My mother's existence in me slips away, twisting in the opposite direction of mine, little by little, without fail, while she is alive.

It's strange, I think. When I think about it, I wonder if death and the deceased actually serve as the outer edges that shape my living self. I feel that the turtle and my friend, who have gone to the other side of death and once lived and shared a mutual relationship with me, continue to exist in my mind with a strong meaning and purpose. Or perhaps, I do.

Therefore, the deceased are closer to life than to death, closer to my living self, aren't they? As such, "being alive" is not as active as everyone says, but a temporary state in which "not being dead" is being temporarily postponed. For example, like a small bubble floating on the surface of water filled with the concept of death that extends to infinity. Thus, it could be said that the very meaning of being alive is the fact that its meaning and existence are always in a state of ongoing continuity.

Death is impossible for a being who is not yet dead (the living) to sense, and for this reason, we may have a kind of longing for death and the deceased.

It is a concept that encompasses a kind of catharsis that comes the moment we are released from the spell of life. It is like music that can only be recognized by its rests and endings, and only by looking back to see what it was that I had been listening to.

I spent about half a year after my visit to Mt. Osorezan expressing my unanswered feelings and thoughts in the form of musical works. Within each piece, the tones treated, the texture of the sounds, the transition of time, and their boundaries are treated as the most important mediums. Rhythms and beats are stretched and contracted as if they were raw and organic, and time repeats itself back and forth in the present. At other times, noise and music are intertwined with each other, and there are sudden stops, white distortions like a runway lamp, sustained sounds that never seem to end, field recordings as memories of the desolate and beautiful landscape of Mount Osorezan, and the traces of these mental landscapes and thoughts above, which push and pull like waves, and then disappear. The images of these mental landscapes and the traces of the thoughts above are recorded in sound.

Composer/artist.
He has composed music for commercials, films, fashion shows, and art exhibitions. In his own work as an artist, he is conscious of stillness and restraint, and believes in the intensity of sound and music rooted in resonance/texture. In recent years, he has been experimenting with a field approach to the themes of death and the materiality of music.

Photo by Kota Shoji

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