A vessel that cannot tell us everything

Jōmon to the early state · Prehistory–seventh century CE

Does order make us fairer? Can a story tell a truth that an official record leaves out? Do we understand ourselves better by trusting our judgment or questioning it? Across five chapters, meet Japanese writers and thinkers who disagreed about knowledge, feeling and a life well lived.

A rim rises and curls like tongues of fire. Below it, the clay body bears the impressions of cord. This vessel, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dates to the Middle Jōmon period, around 3500–2500 BCE. Someone shaped it by hand, adding raised forms and small openings around the rim. We know how parts of it were made. We do not know its maker’s name, or the words they would have used to describe it.

We might be quick to call it an expression of love for nature, or the wisdom of simplicity. Yet its dense ornament unsettles the familiar picture of Japanese art as always quiet and restrained. Nor does a surviving object give us permission to invent its maker’s beliefs. Things can carry knowledge without explaining everything they meant.

Our journey begins, then, with a question about our own way of understanding. When we look at an ancient work, what do we actually see, and what do we bring from our expectations? Sometimes knowledge needs imagination to bring a distant life closer. It also needs a point at which imagination stops. Something about this vessel will remain unknown, even when we have learned to describe it well.