Empire of Signs

Brief appreciations of things Japanese, of the richness, mobility, and subtlety of the Japanese exchange of signs: published in France in 1970, and Barthes at his most seductive. These are the observations of every traveler, translated (without strain) into recognitions. The dinner tray seems a picture of the most delicate order; it is actually a palette, with which you are going to play in the course of your meal. . . (In the next piece: by chopsticks, food becomes no longer a prey to which one does violence . . . but a substance harmoniously transferred.) And this sequence of thoughts leads Barthes to remark on the absence of a center, a precious heart, a deep meaning (food is never anything but a collection of fragments). There then comes Tokyo: a city with an empty center, the forbidden grounds of the (figurehead) Emperor's palace. Japan not only affords Barthes a profusion of complex signs, it suites his penchant for the formal--and for non-meaning, the absence of a symbolic charge. The haiku is not a rich thought reduced to a brief form, but a brief event which immediately finds its proper form. Thus, also, the reflections on bowing; on Bunraku puppets; on the Zengakuren riots (a great scenario of signs climaxing in a purely vocal exercise--The Zengakuren are going to fight--without a subject or stated cause.) There is more concentrated pleasure here, along with fewer stylistic and other impediments--than in major works of the canon.