A Humble Life

For a couple of years, A Russian man regularly travels through the towns and villages of Japan. He observes the Oriental life that surrounds him, he listens to the conversations of ordinary Japanese people, looks at the cities, reads about the history of the country. Every time he gets back to Russia, for a long time his thoughts are dominated by what he has seen. He has to break free of these dreams about Japan. But they are not figments of his imagination. They are truly deep and very un-Japanese conversations with Japanese people. The Russian traveller slowly but surely loses track of the distinction between the Russians dear to him and his Japanese partners in conversation. He feels increasingly close to them. One day he decides to tell a story about his encounters with one of them, Umeno Matsujosi (74), a woman from the village of Aska in Nara province.Once again, while visiting the mountains not far from Umeno’s village, the Russian guest remembers her spiritualised face, her expert hands that could make anything. Her benevolent silence and the equanimity with which she sacrificed herself and took life as it came served to evoke the traveller’s veneration for her human purity. The traveller gains an impression of the deep and poetic nature of Umeno and experiences this as a significant discovery.One point has to be stressed: the traveller communicates all of this to us in his personal, cinematographic form, in which pictures of nature and portraits of the old woman become intertwined with curious Japanese folk music and with the melodies of Tchaikovsky. Alexandr Sokurov