One way to make sense of Japan is by understanding the concepts of wabi and sabi, two words which sum up much of what makes Japan special to outsiders. These ideas — which are closely tied to the Japanese tea ceremony — are a bit hard to pin down in English. Wabi essentially means sober refinement or the beauty that can be found in simplicity and imperfection, while sabi is the austere serenity that comes with the passage of time, allowing us to appreciate how an object has aged. Although they sound like concepts only Zen Buddhist monks would concern themselves with, they come up in daily speech surprisingly often, like when Yasu and I were admiring the outside of an old abandoned house built during the Showa Period, and he said, “Isn’t this house cool? It’s really wabi-sabi!” The Japanese fascination with haikyo, or the ruins of our supposedly modern age, is definitely linked to this. I often see a tendency for stories in Japanese film and anime to follow this simpler “less is more” aesthetic view, like Eve no Jikan, an anime about a coffee shop where humans and robots can interact as equals, which has no plot to speak of other than the interesting characters we meet there. Another example might be the “Endless Eight” arc in season two of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, in which Haruhi (who is a God) wishes summer would never end, and so the last week of summer repeats over and over again…for a total of 15,532 times (although we only see eight of these repetitions). While many fans outside of Japan were angry about having to watch the same events eight times, albeit with entirely new animation and visual design for each episode, the avante-garde concept was somewhat better received by fans here in Japan.
Poor Yuki had to relive the same week 15,532 times — I feel so sorry for her..
