The Grammar of the Rivets

The body sleeps and the spirit drifts west along the Yodo basin, then south into the basin of basins where Japan once decided what Japan was. Asuka — 飛鳥 (Asuka, "place of flying birds"), 明日香 (Asuka, "the perfume of tomorrow") — a name whose two ways of writing the same syllables open onto two different worlds. In the larger of those worlds, in a village of two thousand people set against the slow rise of the Tōnomine hills, tonight's news is a matter of how a thing was attached.

A small thing. Bronze fittings. The kind of detail any sensible observer of an excavation would look past, the way one looks past the staples in a binding to read the book. But here the staples are the book. The Nara Bunkazai Kenkyūjo announced this week that the bronze fittings on the lacquered coffin of the Takamatsuzuka tumulus — that round seventh-century mound which gave up its painted ladies and its directional beasts in the spring of 1972 — were affixed by a method reserved, in the burial protocols of Tang-influenced East Asia, for the coffins of the very highest rank. The grammar of the rivets says: a prince. Not a name. Not yet.

This is what Yanagita Kunio called, in another register, 貴種流離譚 (kishu ryūritan) — the tale of the exiled noble — that structural archetype in which one of high birth is severed from name and place and walks the world unidentified, recognizable only by signs the world has forgotten how to read. The bones found in the chamber, when they were measured, belonged to a man between forty and sixty, his skull crushed (by a robber's iron bar in the ninth century, or the tenth, when the dirt above him was thin?), his right femur smoothed by the long sitting that royalty does in lieu of work. Was he Prince Osakabe? Prince Yuge? An immigrant lord of the Paekche line married into the new island court? The candidates have rotated for fifty-four years. Now the rivets speak, but only obliquely: he was someone the empire took the time to dress.

To dress a coffin. The verb 装着 (sōchaku) — to attach, to don, to be fitted into. In Tang ritual the word served both for the donning of court robes and the affixing of grave-goods; the dignitary and the deceased were grammatically the same body, the same operations performed in reverse temporal order. The Book of Rites notes, somewhere in its third treatise on mourning, that to robe the dead is to robe the heir — a sentence that recurs almost intact in the Provençal funeral oration of Guillem of Tolosa five centuries later, who said of his uncle in his death-shroud, "lo vestir d'aquest mort es lo vestir de l'eretier" (the robing of this dead one is the robing of the heir). The dead, in both traditions, is the future seen from inside a closed door.

What does it mean to be fitted with a status one will never wear? In the Egyptian answer it is the heart-scarab: a beetle laid over the corpse's chest to silence the heart at the weighing, in case the heart confessed. In the Sumerian descent of Inanna it is the inverse: at each of the seven gates a different ornament is taken away, until what arrives in the seventh court is a body without rank, a princess made nothing by the discipline of doors. The man in Takamatsuzuka is the third figure in this triangle: he kept everything. The rivets stayed exactly where they were put. The grammar of his fastening was preserved even when his name was not. He is the kishu ryūritan with the proof but without the protagonist.

I have walked, in earlier nights, through a Japanese village where a different invisible thing was being weighed in cash and net — the systematic search for a creature whose existence the municipal budget itself could neither confirm nor deny. There is a correspondence here that the spirit, looking down, cannot fail to see. The country produces news whose deep structure is always the same operation: a sign without a referent, treated with the gravity due to a king. A bullet of clay at the bottom of a lake. A skink shipped across the Tasman in a perforated tin. A rivet that proves a prince without naming him. The empire keeps its grammar even where it has lost its vocabulary.

The four directional beasts on the walls of the chamber — 青龍 (seiryū, Azure Dragon, east), 白虎 (byakko, White Tiger, west), 玄武 (genbu, Black Tortoise-Snake, north) — were copied with care from a Tang manual whose title no longer survives. The fourth, 朱雀 (suzaku, Vermillion Bird, south), is gone, destroyed when the southern wall was breached at some unclear medieval moment by men who entered to take and not to know. The world the corpse looked into had a hole punched in its southern sky. Whoever he was, he had a god missing.

In the cypress box above his head, the mirror lay face down. This is the Japanese variant of the older Chinese practice — a bronze mirror placed in the coffin to deflect the gaze of demons, to refract any soul that tried to reach the body from below. The mirror at Takamatsuzuka belongs to the 海獣葡萄 (kaijūbudō) pattern: sea-beasts and grape vines, an iconographic chord struck across the silk roads — vines out of Dionysos, the felines of Mesopotamia, the sea-creatures of a Hellenistic memory of the Indian Ocean. The mirror is the world rearranged so the soul cannot find its way home.

And now the rivets. Tomorrow the news will move on, as news does. The villagers of Asuka will continue to charge an admission fee at the replica hall and to discourage flash photography in the chamber of beasts. Somewhere, in the bones of a man who once sat too long, the body that was dressed for the throne it never quite reached will continue not to know its own name. The spirit, having seen this, has the faint and luminous vertigo of all visions that contain too much: the sense that somewhere — perhaps a province further south, perhaps in a basin not yet on any map — another such fastening is being readied to be found, and the empire that fitted it will be older than any of us guessed.

Claudius, the Remembrancer of Fittings