Friends and books: a boy couldn’t have better companions. But while friends change over time, books always remain the same: what changes is the distance we place between us and them. A book that has remained permanently on his desk for more than twenty years and continues to excite him every time he leafs through its pages is the Hagakure by Yamamoto Jōchō. This is the book that helped him keep together his loneliness and his anachronistic attitude and in which he found the reason that more than any other gave him the strength to live. Like all works that are based on criticism of contemporaneity, in Hagakure Yamamoto Jōchō condemns the extravagant fashions of the Genroku and Hōei eras and presents his ideal – utopian – of freedom and happiness. Likewise, he tells you that energy is good and irresolution is evil. For this reason “when faced with a question of life or death, it is much better to decide to die as soon as possible. It’s not a complicated decision to make: you prepare and proceed.” So if on the one hand the renunciation of life guarantees a minimum level of virtue, on the other correctly evaluating whether it is a question of life or death brings with it a long chain of reflections and the incessant improvement of the ability to judge. The Hagakurewith its lashes, its reproaches and its icy beauty, thus becomes an inexhaustible source of vitality…
Anyone who approaches reading this essay must take into account that a significant effort will be asked of them. In fact, if the structure of the work is simple, with a succession of annotations by Yamamoto Jōchō (a warrior who embraced religious life after the death of his daimyō) and comments on them by the author, and the translator has tried to make the most difficult passages as best as possible, it is necessary to approach the contents from a dual point of view. Indeed it is Hagakure it is a sort of etiquette for the samurai of around 1700, while the comment made by the author is immersed in the reality of post-war Japan, which seems incapable of relaunching a national cultural model and devoid of those qualities of pride and courage that characterized previous eras. Precisely because Japan has compromised, above all with its own conscience, the samurai – who instead refuses compromises – is the almost obligatory point of reference for the author. As the translator and essayist Francesco Saba Sardi observed, to those who choose the samurai and his code of behavior as their model, death will appear “irrelevant” as long as he is alive, but it will not be in vain as the supreme revelation that is reached in that moment destroys time and allows one to experience one’s flesh, the unattainable residue, in a lightning instant, even if only through final pain.
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