The Duke of Ikebana

Originally published in Issue 4 of Pallet Magazine: http://allthingspallet.com/.

When I was a kid, I liked to show off. One of my favorite tricks was this: whenever I met someone from another country, especially one with a distinguished culinary tradition, I liked to reel off a catalog of the main foodstuffs and dishes associated with that tradition, as a ringing demonstration of my cultural knowledge. There was never any art to this; it was just a straight list. Oh hey, you grew up in Johannesburg? Biltong bobotie! You’re Shanghainese? Xialongbao niangao hongshaorou xintairan! You mentioned you’re from Italy? Provolone pecorino mortadella cotechino zampone zabaglione prosciutto crudo!

Needless to say, I was quite an annoying child. But the habits of early life die slowly, and it’s only a few minutes into the class I’ve been invited to watch Noritaka (“Nori”) Noda, ikebana master, teach at the Nippon Club in midtown Manhattan before I’m hoisting up a figurative canvas and laying on the glib, cliched Japanese cultural references nice and thick. A middle-aged woman ushers me into a classroom from reception; she is small and dressed in a drab work suit, just like the receptionist you’d find in a Haruki Murakami novel. Under fluorescent lights in the kind of worn, unwelcoming, false-ceilinged room you’ll find in countless office buildings throughout midtown, which is really just another way of saying you’ll also find them in Tokyo, still stagnating in the shadow of the lost decade, Noda, who’s short, stocky, in his early 50s and dresses in color-block shirts and comfortable trainers — the very model of an aging hipster — moves from table to table, rearranging twigs and flowers with small movements and little conversation.

Noda doesn’t talk and has an air of quiet, accomplished cool about him — just like Takeshi Kitano! The room is quiet — so Zen! Everyone seems so stoic, so inscrutable — just like Yukio Mishima did before he drove a blade through his intestines in November 1970! There’s soft jazz playing as the class’s nine students clip and cut and tuck and twist gloriosa lilies, globe thistle and steel grass to make their arrangements. Jazz, again — so Murakami!

Noda walks over and offers me a few catalogs and ikebana periodicals to leaf through — apparently there is a whole magazine industry in Japan devoted to the coverage of flower arrangements. Simplicity, he says, is the key to ikebana: “Less really is more.” I can’t resist the opening. “Ahhh, like the Kaiseki tradition in Japanese cooking?” I inquire, perhaps a little too pleased with myself. “The what?” he replies. “Kaiseki — the, you know, the… Japanese tradition of multi-course, carefully crafted dining.” “Oh,” he says, giggling. The conversation ends there.

Is it possible to write about something as emphatically Japanese as ikebana — Japan’s thousand-year old tradition of floral artistry — without succumbing to the temptation to see in every gesture, every leaf, every snap of the secateurs a reflection of some twee, simplistic and reductive Japaneseness? More adept minds might be able to pull it off; I can’t. But a lot of this is down to the way the Japanese themselves, in the way they present ikebana to the world, stress its essentially Japanese quality, its status as the incarnation, through flowers, of an inalienably Japanese approach to nature, and life, and movement, and flux. There’s a certain nationalism in the management of these flowers. But it’s a roomy nationalism, a welcoming nationalism — the best type. And Noda proves to be an obliging, patient guide.

In 1956 Duke Ellington’s career was flagging. His big band, once the most famous musical ensemble in all of America, had largely stopped touring; he was paying his musicians off the royalties earned from the albums made during the band’s swing era pomp, in the 1930s and 40s. With jazz mortally threatened as a musical force — first by the rise of the crooners like Frank Sinatra, then by rock ’n roll — things were looking grim for the Duke and his orchestra. Indeed by the mid-50s, they were without a record label. The rest of the story is well known: Ellington’s orchestra took to the stage at the Newport festival in July 1956, blew the crowd away with a breathless exhibition of improvisational big band jazz, and the result was one of the most celebrated recordings in jazz history. Newport revitalized Ellington’s career, which sprung on to its final, glorious chapter in the 1960s.

Everyone likes that story because it is a story of success, but if you watch Ellington’s performances from the early 1950s — the time of his so-called pre-Newport funk — what’s most remarkable is that even while his career is apparently falling apart, even as he sinks into anonymity, the guy is having so much fun. There’s no funk, no on-stage agony, no struggle to feign enthusiasm for the music or the work — instead we see a fully exuberant Duke, bouncing at the keyboard with unrestrained joy as always.

As he pivots and pirouettes around his arrangements, shoulders hunched, head angled down, Nori Noda has none of the shout-out-loud enthusiasm of Duke Ellington in full flight. But it’s clear that there’s much of the same delight in his work that the Duke showed at his supposed career nadir. A delight registered in a different key, yes — a hushed delight, a careful delight — but a delight all the same — and a delight made all the more intense, perhaps, for having no need of celebrity to nourish it. Noda is not famous by any stretch: he’s the head of the New York chapter of Ikenobo, Japan’s oldest ikebana school (there are more than 300), but in the hierarchical world of Japanese floristry, that makes him no more than a satrap in a province far removed from the center of power. He’s not even famous on Instagram, where he has fewer than 1,000 followers. The very nature of ikebana is perhaps inimical to lasting fame for its creators, since it’s an act geared towards constructing something that will quickly perish. But Noda doesn’t appear to care — indeed it’s this ephemeral quality that draws him towards ikebana. Quiet and unshowy, the master is at home in ikebana precisely because it’s a quiet, withdrawn, unobtrusive art form.

“I like the fact it disappears,” Noda tells me a few days later as we stand in a studio in Chelsea. He’s here to have his photo taken; I’m here to watch him put together an arrangement of sandersonia, caladium and steel grass in the ultra-simple shoka style of ikebana. Noda moves with quick, unhurried confidence, snipping the stems of the sandersonia and smoothing out each blade of steel grass so it bends and falls at just the right angle. Noda has lived in the US for 28 years; growing up in Japan, he gained a first appreciation for horticulture from his aunt, an expert bonsai gardener. Before he devoted his life to flowers and plants full-time, he worked as a graphic artist and set designer for music concerts (“Mostly J-pop but also foreign artists like Madonna, Billy Joel,” he tells me). Set design, of course, is similarly ephemeral to flower arrangement. “You can create something for just the moment,” he tells me. “It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t last — you can enjoy it while it lives and dies. Flowers have smell, they change shape, they open, they die. That’s what I like — ikebana isn’t static, it has a life. Even if it’s a short life.”

Noda doesn’t just pick flowers up; he doesn’t just hold them, or manipulate them, or break them, or twist them. He forms a relationship with them, caressing them, talking to them, looking at them and — who knows? — being looked at in return. This is, he tells me, all part of the ikebana arranger’s primary task, which is to understand the flower in all its complexity. Often this means understanding the flower in all its imperfection. “The best leaves are the ones from the garden,” Noda says as he paws at the pot of caladium leaves and sizes up the appropriate one to place at the base of his shoka arrangement.

Dying leaves, broken stems, unopened buds, torn petals: these are the purest, most interesting floral features of all, Noda says, because they show nature as nature truly is — in a constant state of flux. In one arrangement he did recently, he included only dead leaves. The gallery that had ordered the arrangement called him in a panic to tell him that all the leaves had already died. “It took me a while to convince them that was the point,” he says. “In all art forms we need some weirdness. If music is too perfect it’s not so interesting. There needs to be dissonance. It’s the same with ikebana.”

In June 2008 I traveled to Japan at the invitation of the Japanese government. Months earlier I’d written a short satirical article for a national newspaper in Australia on the Japanese government’s whale hunting program, applying all the same spurious, quasi-scientific arguments used to justify the program to a completely different species. The result was a piece setting out the reasons why anti-whaling activists need to be killed for scientific research purposes, and was obviously meant as a joke.

But the Japanese government’s representatives in Australia missed the humor — or so it appeared when I received a call from the consulate-general in Sydney inviting me to be part of a delegation of young professionals to Japan. “We appreciate your perspective on Japan and Japanese issues,” the woman from the consulate explained when I asked why I had been chosen. I patiently explained that the whaling article was satirical, a joke, not to be taken seriously. The woman said it didn’t matter. I pushed back. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied, a slight tone of exasperation creeping into her voice. Besides, she added, she was under a deadline to fill spots for the trip; she needed to complete the roster by the end of the day. Three months later, I found myself on a plane to Tokyo.

Deadlines can lead us to make all sorts of questionable choices and compromises. But they are also an indispensable tool of invention. “Finishing is always the hardest part,” Noda tells me as he continues to soft-shoe around his arrangement in the studio in Chelsea — whose shoka style is designed, he says, to evoke “the beauty of movement, like athletes in motion,” in contrast to the more ornate still lives of the rikka style. “You always need to put a deadline on yourself — otherwise you can keep tinkering forever.” Indeed cutting things off is a key part of ikebana, in a literal sense too — the clipped central stem is a key trope of the rikka style, symbolizing eternity. Without rupture (a deadline, a cut stem), there can be no potential, no imagination, no creation — and no eternity.

This, it probably doesn’t need to be said, is not the type of thinking to which flower arrangement in the West — sunny, colorful, therefore monotonous — lends itself. There’s an instructive difference in the way Westerners and Japanese people approach the task of buying flowers as a gift. In the West, it’s normal to buy flowers that are already open; consumers want the quick visual sensation of a bouquet in bloom. In Japan, people offer bouquets of buds, not open flowers, as gifts. What makes the flower interesting, Noda tells me, still snipping, still smoothing, is the experience of its growth. This, really, is the experience of its unpredictability, since some flowers can blossom and flourish, while others wither, or only half-open, or otherwise underperform. Flowers are like humans: you never know how they’re going to turn out.

Arranging flowers is not designed to create something straightforwardly beautiful; it’s designed to create something interesting. As he continues to press and pet and coax the components of his arrangement into shape, Noda offers up a nugget: he wants his arrangements to be just like Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” The best remembered rendition of the Duke’s signature tune dates from that 1956 performance at Newport; it’s filled with off notes, broken passages, and short eruptions of impromptu crying and hooting and stomping and rumbling. Noda twists stems here, tears leaves there, draws on materials he deems “weird” like driftwood: “If there are only beautiful actresses in a film, it’s boring. There must be dissonance. Just like Duke Ellington.”