To Touch the Universal, Dive into the Abyss: The Marebito Ritual

Continuing from my previous article, I have been probing the essence of the Nomadology proposed by Deleuze and Guattari from a unique perspective. And this concept of Nomadology achieves a startling resonance with a certain school of thought: the concept of the Marebito, proposed by the folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu.

To begin with, the dawn of folklore studies in Japan let out its first cry amidst a violent collision: the decay of the unique system of the Edo period, the pressure of Western powers demanding the opening of the country, and the modernization revolution known as the Meiji Restoration. In this process, where the system of Western academia flowed in like a muddy stream, and as the Japanese people scrambled to ingest and absorb it, there was one bureaucrat who attempted to search for the substratum of the Japanese people. That man was Yanagita Kunio.

However, the folklore studies Yanagita Kunio sought to construct was, in fact, nothing more than his own distorted scholarship. He arbitrarily positioned the settled, wet-rice farmers as the “ancient layer” of the Japanese people, premising everything on rice cultivation. This approach was always in a complicit relationship with the narrative of homogenized national integration demanded by the modern state. Yanagita’s approach sought to retrieve the diverse and chaotic lives of the Japanese archipelago into a single, beautiful, ordered system; yet, in this process, countless pluralistic worlds were destroyed.

Against this massive “institution of knowledge” that was Yanagita, there was a pioneer who shone a light on what spilled out of that system—on the “other worlds” and the wanderers that could not be narrated by the logic of a rice-centric sedentary society—attempting to carve out the pluralistic world of Japanese folklore. That was Orikuchi Shinobu. In short, Yanagita Kunio was a conspirator in the reality alienated and generated toward the state, while Orikuchi Shinobu chose a thorough gaze at The Real, refusing to cater to the movement being retrieved by the former. The reason I saw possibility in Orikuchi Shinobu’s Marebito theory regarding the Nomadology of the entirely different context of Western intellects Deleuze and Guattari is this: Orikuchi’s own life coincided with the euphoric period of the establishment of the modern state system. Consequently, he witnessed the movement where reality, alienated from The Real, lost its myriad pluralistic characters and was integrated into a sole reality. And he did not pander to this. He resisted the torrential movement of reality—taking a step toward a pluralistic world that could not be integrated—and walked a profound path toward the excavation of The Real itself. Here, I see the image of the future nomad.

Thus, based on years of voluminous research, what Orikuchi Shinobu focused on—and what became the core of his thought—was the Marebito. The Marebito refers to a spiritual, majestic entity that visits a specific community (village) from an “other world” beyond the sea (or mountains). In Japan, this other world was historically conceptualized and called “Tokoyo” (the Eternal World). The Marebito is an awe-inspiring, absolute Other that brings new vitality and blessings to a depleted, stagnant community, while simultaneously carrying the potential for destructive transformation or calamity. In other words, the Marebito was God itself.

What is extremely crucial here is that the Marebito was never dyed by the logic of sedentary society; it always appeared wrapped in the wind from the outside, existing to agitate the stagnant air of the interior. And the most decisive characteristic was the custom that if a Marebito visits, they must eventually “return.” In other words, the Marebito does not settle. They do not settle; they inevitably leave. I am convinced that this dynamic of the Marebito—coming with the premise of “leaving”—is the essential form of Nomadology as I conceive it.

In fact, signs of this are already visible in the modern nomad. The nomad discussed in recent contexts has derived into the “slow nomad,” a lifestyle positioned as a kind of liquefaction of residence: staying in one place for several months, engaging earnestly with the community, and conducting business to solve problems. However, what is important here is the nomad’s own mindset. Do they remain merely because “business went well” or “it is comfortable”? Or, when they resolved to live as a nomad, was “leaving” factored into that mindset? What I wish to question is the singular resolve to stand in that place not as a movement for convenience or to survive a banal modern society, but as an existence destined to “leave” from the very beginning. This is the lifeline of the essential nomad, and the true externality.

Originally, in the essence of Nomadology, the “smooth space” (the space of the war machine/nomad) and the “striated space” (the space of the state apparatus)—or the Interior and the Exterior—were inseparable. However, under the name of risk management and efficiency in modern society, these have been completely separated. The Interior is accelerating its intensity as a safe, clean, managed society, and in proportion to that acceleration, the Exterior is distanced as a risk to be excluded. Originally, this Inside and Outside held an intense tension, but since modernity, and leading up to the present, no one could endure this tension anymore; the Interior and Exterior have been extremely distinguished, exposed as political struggle. Modern nomads are, in the end, merely moving from one dispersed, safe Interior to another Interior; this cannot become the true movement that causes the human being to arrive at the next stage. That is why thinking this point through is critical. Because, regardless of whether one is currently a nomad or not, ours is an era where everyone will encounter situations where they are forced to move, in every form, suddenly.