︎ zazen bozo ︎


︎︎︎ June 10th, 2023 ︎︎︎


The last person who really taught me about writing that wasn’t doing so through words on a page or professional advice in passing told me that writing is best done in the morning. Something about the clarity of the air and the brain then makes it easier and sharper. 

I’ve always been a night owl and have never felt a particularly consistent lack of clarity when the sun is down. There have been evenings where I felt blurry of course, but it’s not enough of a trend to make me think I really ought to do my writing in the mornings. 

Last night though, I felt very blurry indeed. The writing of the blog post was not up to my standard so I’m going to try listening to that old advice and write in the morning for a few days or weeks or maybe forever. 


I recently watched most of the Action Button review of boku no natsuyasumi. It’s six hours long.

One concept explored in that novel-length exploration into a 2001 video game is the Japanese obsession with summer vacation in a rual locale. This is, to me, connected with the concept of a zazen bozo, at least in how they interpret it. 

They obsess over the rural summer vacation at an almost cultural level while a vanishingly small number of urban Japanese get to actually experience it. 
Amongst my favorite factoids is that there is a helpline for Japanese tourists in Paris who have found the city so disappointing that they have a nervous breakdown. They’ve spent their lives being told that Paris is an idyllic paradise of the West, but in reality it is stinky and full of French people who are not very nice, especially to tourists. 

There is a throughline from the sarrariman who desires to join the Zazen only to find that sitting and doing nothing is not his cup of tea and it hurts his back, the grass-starved urbanite who dreams of the country only to find mosquitos very itchy indeed, the would be world-traveler who can’t stand the smell of trash or the sound of French rap music, and Yukio Mishima. 

One of his novels, The Temple of The Golden Pavilion, is a work of historical fiction in the vein of In True Blood by Truman Capote where he interviews a monk who burned down an ancient Japanese temple because he decided it had been sold out, essentially. 

On this side of the twentieth and even twenty first century we come in contact with more and more things that have sold out. Our whole world has sold out. I made a joke a while ago that “There’s been no really good swimming sicne 9/11” and I feel a hideous glimmer of truth to that. 

Mishima’s answer to the question of what to do when things have sold out is simple:

Die.



Bozo