Inemuri by Eric Scaggiante

In Inemuri, Eric Scaggiante looks along the silent carriages and sees bodies delicately suspended on the soft seats, motionless, eyes closed. Some are perfectly composed, others abandoned like a sweatshirt thrown over a chair in the bedroom as someone rushes out in a hurry. The word inemuri, sleeping while present, fits what he sees: the body stays in the shared space while the person steps out of its demands. He imagines that each soul has momentarily left its body to linger a little longer in its true world, then returns “here” at the right stop, takes on the world of things to do, steps off the carriage, and the doors close.

He was travelling back by bus and train from Fukuoka to Tokyo, on a typical first trip to Japan, and he was alone. The week before he had been in Seoul on business, a decidedly modern East Asian city that had not made him feel so far from home. In Fukuoka, everyone seemed to him a little “on the other side” of the reality of things to do, each in their own way. There was less earthiness, and something always spilling over into the “elsewhere” where one is simply the rest of one’s soul. This elsewhere is a ma (間), the interval between things, the pause that belongs to the whole it separates. Inemuri opens such an interval in the middle of the day. In the quiet, orderly calm, and in the respect and kindness, he sensed a constant waiting, and in each person an undecided dream, one to be inhabited and left unrealised. Small things well organised and subtle details full of soul put an animism into the doing, a naturally perpetuated meditation poised between “this side” and “the other side.” Ma names that between.

He saw the same scenes again on the trains and the metro, on the Osaka-Nara line. Those were tortuous days, the kind when one blows out the candle of a love and a placid veil of smoke accompanies a period of reflection, in which leaves are shed, new ones sprout and excess branches are pruned. The carriage was an interval between the place left and the place reached, and those weeks were another, between a flame put out and the leaves not yet grown. The carriages helped and lightened the process. They seemed made of rubber, filled with silence and light, with rounded sounds and with rain, and their windows were like paintings. There, on the soft seats, in front of passengers suspended for a while from themselves and from the world rushing past outside, he too suspended himself with them.