Summoning Sacred Nature to the City

with the help of Hokusai and his flute-playing assassins

It is Chuseok here in Korea, and we took some time off for the holiday, so this is arriving to you later than usual. This week, I incorporate a secret weapon from old Japan, and a few fantastical motifs from Hokusai Manga, into the space of a contemporary cityscape. Please enjoy the Hokusai-inspired illustration and writing, no-doubt related to last week’s column.

If you see an odd person with a basket on their head and a bamboo flute in their hands, you have probably happened upon a Shakuhachi player, called komusō in Japan.

Some good friends of ours from Turkey spent some years in Kyoto under the tutelage of a Shakuhachi maker, learning the art of producing this mythical instrument the old way.

They also learned the lore behind the players of these instruments. One side of the story says that these flute players were wandering monks of ‘nothingness,’ who played flute as part of their spiritual practice. The other story says that they were ex-samurai who served as flute-playing spies — and sometimes assassins — for the ruling shogunate. Depending on where you were and what era, it seems both versions of the story are true. Shakuhachi players have likely been spies, monks, and assassins.

However you see them, the basket-headed flute players were known to wander Japan’s cities and towns for a number of centuries, playing for alms, something like a monastic-secret-agent version of the wandering minstrel.

When flipping through Hokusai’s Manga then, I was not surprised to see a Shakuhachi player in his drawings. Active during Hokusai’s time — though they were outlawed not long after his death due to their notoriety as spies — these curious flute players would have been well known, if mysterious, figures.

In the illustration above, the Shakuhachi player is summoning both sacred nature and fantasy back to the contemporary city. This indeed makes them part assassin and part monk, in an interesting way. You see, according to this flute player, bringing the sacred and fantastical into the folds of a city starts first with assassinating your current ways of seeing and then, with meditating on the possibility of what could be. From this footing we then push ourselves outside the boundaries even of what we think is possible, we see things from within that outer edge, and then upon looking back, we find there is suddenly more possibility in that place than what we had known before. Perhaps magical Kirin beasts will not land atop our buildings, but if we can start from somewhere around here, maybe the truly possible changes would seem less frightening, more doable.

Question: With the aim of bringing your city more in balance with nature, what ideas would you want to ‘assassinate’ and what sacred or fantastical concepts would you want to ‘meditate’ on?

Next Week: I’ll be back next time with a large drawing, looking at the unique makeup of a particular Japanese urban neighborhood. There are so many topics in this one, that perhaps this one turns into another series. We’ll see.

Another Story: If you enjoyed this writing, I guess you’ll probably also like this one from some years ago, called A Bicycle in the Stars:

SHORT #7: A Bicycle in the Stars

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