A while ago, I was given a gift voucher for a craft lesson, which I decided to use for something which couldn’t have less relevance in my everyday life: Japanese calligraphy.
I don’t know how to speak Japanese, but I do know how to read some of the words which are based on Chinese characters. Even so, no one has ever asked me to write them a couplet in decorative handwriting – in Japanese or any other language. It’s almost as if I could have carried on with my days without learning how to write Japanese characters with brush and ink …
And yet. I do love writing by hand, even though everything can be done by keyboard and screen now. What’s missing though, are flourishes. With handwriting, there’s a personality there to the way an “f” can dip below the line and kick back to the left, and the way a “y” can end with a swoop back up. It’s very hard to have flourishes with Arial.
But with ink and brush, I imagined there’d be all sorts of opportunities for dipping and swooping. After going to four Japanese calligraphy lessons now, I can confirm that there’s dipping (the brush in ink) and there’s swooping (the brush across the page). There’s also 90 minutes of standing and mindful breathing while writing. As someone who’s not been terribly active since Covid, this is practically exercise for me.
Before you begin writing, you inhale. Then on the exhale, you write a single stroke. You inhale again, exhale, and write the second stroke. If I had done that with typing every letter in this sentence, I would have hyperventilated by now.
Each lesson I write one or two characters over and over again, and the experience is not unlike doing homework for Chinese school as a kid. The first lesson, I wrote “love” eight times. The following week, “rainwater” (14 times), then “happiness” (18 times), then “sunshine” (10 times). At this point, I’m basically a few words away from qualifying as a tattooist in any Asian tourist city.
If you’re wondering why I’ve continued to go back week after week to repeatedly write words slowly – not even sentences! – the reason is this: I’m really bad at it.
In my first lesson, I did a decent job of writing “love”, itself a beautiful character filled with dots and strokes and containing the character for “heart”. But since then, my breathing and my writing have rarely been in sync, and there’s usually only one or two times each lesson that I’ll write a character in a way that matches the teacher’s example.
Sometimes, a word I write will be so warped and wonky that I feel like I’ve offended all Japanese and Chinese people on earth and in history. I can’t even write them a note to apologise – it would just cause more offence.
Despite these beginner’s blues, I really enjoy going to class because it’s so different from how I spend my days alone as a writer trying to do pleasing things with words.
My fellow classmates are all Japanese women who write beautifully. They chat in Japanese, dipping into English occasionally to include me in conversation. I admire in particular the women who write in an elegant and spritely cursive, where the brush strokes seem to dance with verve across the page.
I tell them that their writing looks like dancing, like music, and they laugh and say encouraging things to me like “You are doing very well!” Perhaps they are referring to my health?
Throughout the lesson, we take turns to gather the thin pieces of paper we write on, and stick them on the whiteboard for the teacher to give feedback on. We stand with the teacher about two metres away from the work and gaze at the collection of breaths and strokes.
The teacher points out where I can improve. “This … is too far from this,” he says, pointing to two strokes. “It’s like his neck is too long.” Indeed, it does look like the character would have an advantage at a rock concert.
During the week now, I find myself daydreaming about writing next week’s word, and that first contact the brush has with the paper, that undoable black mark on white. It’s a pleasing default place to land on in my brain, whereas once my mind would have run through a to-do list, or worried about an upcoming deadline. Looks like this brush with Japanese calligraphy is exactly what I needed.
• Jennifer Wong is a writer, comedian and presenter of Chopsticks or Fork? on ABC iView
