'Komorebi': On the Art of Noticing

Komorebi. In Japanese, this word means sun leaking through the trees. It is composed of three kanji: ko is tree, more is leaking, and bi is sunlight. The kanji paint a brief, transient wonder of nature — when light seems to dissolve into threads around a canopy of leaves and come to rest, spotted and blurred, upon the earth. But komorebi is not a phenomenon observed in passing. Walk too quickly, and you won’t notice how the light bends and warps as golden midges swarm or swallows swoop by. This delicate scene requires a quiet watcher. 

While it is not a distinct literary term, komorebi conveys a manner of thinking commonly employed by writers and artists alike. It is imbued with the action of noticing. Noticing inevitably leads to a particular desire. From this desire, a pulling, magnetic desire to turn vision into words – to take the essence of what one sees and twist it into letters, to curl it into sentences – description is born. Description, to me, lies at the heart of literature. It is less concerned with what is seen than how it is seen. Think of sunlight leaking through the trees. The rays may take on a wholly different hue when observed from different angles – here made green by a beaming field of grass, there infected by the blue of a distant ocean. Description is beautiful because we all have different eyes. Its precursor, noticing, is the hard part.

So how do you notice? Well, you have to want to. You have to practise it incessantly, always, until you do it unconsciously, until the action is ingrained in your eyes, and you find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer intricacies and infinities of your environment. Think of it like collecting stones on the beach. Throughout your day, pick up little flickers of inspiration and put them in your pocket, as if they are cherished stones you’ll look at later. Notice the grand expanse of sunset over West Sands, yes, but notice, too, the brown, barnacled fishing crates stacked along the docks. Notice their rotting, sea-soured scent. Notice not just with your eyes but with your nose, ears, fingertips, with the whole of yourself. 

I’m aware this is all very abstract, so let me tell you a story. I started noticing, intentionally, last summer. It was the slightly off-balance, in-between period after senior year – uni hadn’t started yet, high school was over, and I had nothing to do. I was in Vama Veche, a seaside village in Romania, and spent my days lazing on the beach with a sun-warmed book and a sweating Coke. In the mornings, I’d stumble bleary-eyed into the little hotel’s pebbled courtyard and make myself a coffee in the outdoor kitchen, which I’d have with exactly two peaches (the bursting kind, with streaming orange insides) on one of the plastic white tables outside. With a book balanced on my knee, before I knew it, two hours would pass and I’d had two more coffees. I was enraptured by the writing of Gabriel García Márquez. Fantastical, vibrant, and tangled, his prose shimmered with magic rooted in reality – Love in the Time of Cholera transfixed me.  

The author’s prose was so full of movement and colour that elements of it began to infiltrate my own environment. I looked for stories, for fantasies, in Vama Veche. On the sands, I noticed the seaweed in the water and saw great tangled beasts lurking underneath. While eating lunch, I noticed a local cat’s missing ear and wondered who he’d lost it to, in what vengeful brawl. From the balcony, I noticed people in the sea, and saw how, from afar, they all looked like bathing seals, swaying slightly with the shallow tide. It was slightly unreal, every colour and texture and sound heightened as if in a dream. It was like

seeing the world as a child. It was wonder. So with nowhere to put all these noticings, I began to write. 

This is the art of noticing. Its purpose, if nothing else, is to consume. Consume everything around you, stop and taste it, relish the world in all its mundane and extraordinary flavours. Inspiration is sown by the self, the result of reverence for the earth around us. The writing will follow. So stand beneath komorebi, let the sunlight lick your cheeks, and notice. 

Illustration by Eloise Zhang