JAPANESE GARDEN INSPIRES ROMANTICISM
SHARAWADGI is a Japanese word connoting asymmetry, carried to Europe by the Dutch to describe the naturalistic gardens they encountered. Fused with a politics of nature, the classical idyll, and the infinite vistas of the new astronomy, it became the catalyst of the elysium which was the English landscape garden (above).
This is the story told by Ciaran Murray in Sharawadgi. Born in Carlow, Ireland, home of the propagator of sharawadgi, he is a former writer for the Nationalist & Leinster Times, Carlow and the Irish Times, Dublin. He holds a doctorate from the National University of Ireland, and is professor emeritus of English at Chuo University, Tokyo. His volume Disorientalism is a sequel to Sharawadgi which traces further Asian influence in the development of Romanticism into Aestheticism and Modernism; Voyagings and Ports of Call continue these explorations into the cross-currents and undercurrents of the history of ideas. He has also published fiction The Secret Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, poetry Haiku and the Like and autobiography The Three and the Four.
Personality Profile
VIVIENNE KENRICK
‘“I had to come to Japan, to sit in a garden and discover something of Japanese culture, in order to write the history of my hometown”, Ciaran Murray said.
This intriguing statement encapsulates a remarkable study that delves into “18th-century landscape, literature, art, architecture, philosophy, politics, science and religion”. Murray said his “return to nature involved all these things. The garden is a miniature universe”.
His hometown was Carlow in Ireland. After graduating in classics and English literature, he joined his local newspaper. He moved to the Irish Times in Dublin to combine editorial work with gaining his master’s degree with distinction in American literature.
Later, with leave to travel around the world, he reached Japan. Invited to Kyoto, Murray sat in a temple garden where the principle of “borrowed” landscape was explained to him… He married in Japan, and…took his wife back to his native Carlow… “We went to a local park that…has a classical house with a lake and wooded island and a view over to the highest mountain in the area. Suddenly it came to me that the lake was artificial, created as a foreground for the mountain behind…”. Later on, a Cornell professor to whom he spoke referred Murray to a rare book that stated the English garden had been influenced by…“sharawadgi”… “The strangest thing of all was that the’ person who wrote that description ‘had lived in my hometown”, Murray said. “Here was a story I simply had to follow up”…
Murray has earned a Ph.D. for his work… He is now writing a sequel, and has written…historical fiction.’
Japan Times, 13th July 2002
