Komachi on the stoop: Writing and the threshold life

As Milosz's poem tells us, then, entrance into the liminal is a fundamental aspect of the life of writing. By speaking from the open awareness of threshold and the point of view of multiplicity and betweenness, the writer becomes a person who allows both individuality and community to ripen into their truest and widest expression. In the work of such a person, a range of experiences beyond the more simplistic, conventional, and "authorized" versions of a culture's narratives can find voice, and a newly broadened knowledge and conception of being is made available to all.

It isn't hard to see how these ideas relate to Komachi's story. From the play's opening words, the two monks situate us in a place of threshold, amid worn-down mountains and hiddenness and the world of uncertainty that exists between the past and future Buddhas. But while they are in many ways liminal figures themselves-as all monks are-they also represent in Sotoba Komachi the world of role and structure and of society's habitual ways of thinking. Their understanding of Buddhist teaching isn't bad, but it is incomplete, and their role in the play will be to be instructed and initiated by Komachi, a woman who represents the deeper wisdom of the threshold-person whose long immersion into hardship and a stripped-down being has freed her from conventional thought. The monks, for example, say that the fields they find themselves in are their one true home, but for Komachi, this is not doctrine, but the actual truth. Though as unsui, "wandering clouds," they have taken vows to become home-leavers, the two priests are in fact passers-through, on their way from their home temple on Mount Koya to the capital. Komachi is the one who lives fully and permanently in the condition of "outside," a forgotten person separated from her former identity, her roof falling open to the wind and moonlight. One of her more famous poems describes it this way:

This abandoned house, shining, in a mountain village. How many nights has the autumn moon spent here?4

From her first speech, Komachi is identified as having stepped out of human culture and into the wider natural world-she is, she says, a floating reed; and even when describing the time when she was a part of the court culture, every physical comparison is with something from naturewillow branches, kingfishers, nightingales, bush clover. But now, she has truly entered exile and anonymity, leaving her name behind to live beyond the walls of the city, venturing out only by moonlight and darkness. She dresses in clothes barely distinguished from their sources in the wild, clothes that are on their way back to being the reeds and grasses that they were made from; she lives by begging; she who was once beautiful is now loathed and reviled even by the lowest members of society; her very age places her on the cusp between life and death. In each of these characteristics, she embodies Turner's description of a liminal person.

And what about that other aspect of liminality, the way it opens into a more universal sense of community? In the debate surrounding the stupa, Komachi sits squarely on the side of non-separation and oneness: for her, a fallen log and the body of the Buddha are truly the same thing. And, just as this symbolic stupa has mostly rotted back into the earth it arose from, so has she, the once-great poet who now calls herself "also a halfburied tree." Her chosen path to awakening lies not in putting on the formal black robes of a monk, but in a cultivation of the single-minded intention to attain the Bud&a's Way that takes place inwardly and without visible signs, amid the common life of this world. And where the two monks speak of trying to break free of the attachments to parents and children that come of being born, she speaks for a different path-the belief that even wrong actions and the life of the passions may lead a whole-hearted person into awakening. It is perhaps more than a mere accident of No play structure that the speech that meditates upon these ideas is put into the mouths of all three, making of them for that moment a visible and audible embodiment of community's shared life.