もぬけの息吹

The four characters of “kankon-sōsai” (weddings and funerals) mark the milestones of life and the ways we are treated even after death. They encompass the rituals carried out from birth to death and beyond, within families and communities. What comes to mind in all of these is “tears.”

Suspended within this work are two artifacts I once acquired: an antique English wedding dress from around a century ago, and a funeral stretcher from the same period. How many brides once slipped their arms into that dress? How many bodies rested upon that stretcher? And how many tears surrounded them all?

Tears come in many forms, but those born of joy and sorrow are uniquely human. Such “emotional tears” are unseen in other animals. The protagonists of these rites exist in the world as physical bodies, unchanged through these ceremonies—yet people weep. The true reason lies in sensing an invisible “greater transformation.” Even if no material change occurs, we know, deep down, that we are always adrift in an ocean of change. When the heart is moved deeply—by joy or sorrow—it produces tears as a kind of stress response. What, then, is this “changing existence”?

In the tank floats a wedding dress, its body shed like a jellyfish. A true “empty shell.” The old verb monuku means “to slip out, to depart,” and was already in use in the Manyōshū of the Heian era. The word emphasizes not emptiness, but the fact that “something once was here.” Inside this tank, brides and the departed overlap and drift as empty husks. Like when the evening sun streams into a room and dust glitters in the air, suddenly revealing space itself, this device was created to make visible the unseen state of “being emptied out.” Light, wind, microbes, dust, and particles like a shower of blessings shimmer and dance upon the shell of a single dress.

We likely cannot accept death without tears. Yet when gazing at the drifting emptiness, one senses that matter and spirit are never truly separate—they whisper, mingle, and cross paths, like droplets of mist. Upon the dress and stretcher, scars of human history made material, unknown radiance flows as if dissolving matter itself. It is said that Noah’s Ark, in the midst of the storm, maintained silence within precisely because of the overwhelming noise and cries outside. What exists in this tank is not a calm sea, but a turbulence that moves so fast it seems still. Within those particles in motion, hope and despair clasp hands, and even partings begin to feel like blessings. In such a moment, what kind of tears would we shed?