When trying to talk about the stars, or when delving into books about them, why can I never picture scenes in mind that feel real? It must be because I’ve never really seen darkness. I discovered a researcher named Hoei Nojiri. Born during the Meiji era, he left a huge number of essays on stars written during the Taisho and Showa eras, and was also involved in the work of giving Japanese names to constellations.
For me, who has no knowledge of stars, I was left stunned by the essay. Still, there was his one sentence that left an impression on me. In it, he was lamenting that around Tokyo where he lived, the stars, which until recently could been seen, had become invisible due to urban development. So, sometimes, he went to the mountains and “washed his eyes” in the darkness of the night. At that time, the night in Japan must have been so dark that he would have to stare at the stars on his way home. We, who cannot see the night sky with twinkling stars, have lost the story for a while.
The first time I saw real darkness was in the Atacama Desert in Chile. I had been living for a while in a community of indigenous peoples in the middle of the desert. In this place with no rain, during the day the heat is so scorching that you can almost hear your skin burning and at night it is so cold that your ears feel like they might fall off. What surprised me there was the endless darkness of the night rather than the harsh environment of the daytime. On the night of the new moon, no matter how much you stick out your eyes and open them wide, you cannot see anything. Darkness is not just dark, it has weight that feels sticky, like it is clinging to the whole body. I felt like I could not breathe, probably because I could not measure the distance around my body.
When that happened, I would immediately go outside and look at the sky. Then, you realize that there is a sky far away, and suddenly breathing became easier. Needless to say, it is the stars that turn the darkness into the night sky. Like scattering silver sand grains vigorously, they cover everything in the sky, and looking closer, it can also seem like that silver cloth is wavy, probably because the starlight is strong or weak. Not I was looking at the stars, the stars were looking at me. Then, as I kept looking up, I came to feel that walking on two legs did not make any sense, and soon I lay down on the cold beach of the desert.
One day, the indigenous persons taught me how to read a star. According to them, there are two ways to read them: the physical world and the spiritual world. In the sky, there are animals such as llamas, humans in the shape of hunters, and insects in the sky. They say that when a butterfly appears in the starry sky, it will rain in the desert the next day. The physical world guides our daily lives, while the spiritual world describes the world after human death.
“See, there are three stars on Orion’s belt. The dead are taken through the belt into a triangular black hole beyond. It is the snake that guides the way to that point.”
I could see that a series of slightly bright stars were guiding the outlines of Orion and the snake. Then I came to realize, when connecting the dots of the stars, that they form a line, and the pictures emerge one after another.
The night sky is a magnificent canvas, and a theater. People have created a story and freed it in the sky when they could no longer deal with the growing emotions and events created by living together. It is like being driven by the desire to be free from the cramped darkness.
I lie down on a cold desert beach and look up at the canvas. I ask myself, what is the story I want to draw?
The stars are shining because of the darkness.
This text is written as an introduction text to the exhibition ‘One hundred years of the star’ taken place in Tezukayama Gallery in Nov.13- De.12, 2020.