Yes! The lyrical only takes place at the margin of the epic, which means turbulent times.
The epic is history’s main stage—the wars, the power struggles, the ideologies that demand full participation. But the lyrical exists only in the spaces left behind, in the cracks of the collapsing order. It is always a residual mode of being, a way of surviving when the grand narratives no longer hold or are in the process of unraveling.
Zatoichi as the Lyrical Wanderer in a Twilight Era
• Zatoichi moves through the margins of a fading world, where the old samurai codes still linger but are hollowed out by corruption and decay.
• His blindness is not just a physical condition but a metaphor—he does not see the grand narratives of power and history. He only feels his way through the world, step by step, like a true lyrical figure.
• He drifts, refusing attachment, yet every place he enters is touched by the larger currents of history—corrupt officials, struggling commoners, ruthless gangsters.
The Lyrical as the Trace Left by the Epic’s Disintegration
• Bashō walked in an Edo Japan that was stable, but his poetry found the fragile, ephemeral moments within that stability.
• Scudder walks a Manhattan where the old structures of morality and justice are decaying, leaving only personal codes of honor.
• Zatoichi walks the late Edo period, when samurai rule is already a ghost, and the future (Meiji modernization) has not yet arrived.
Thus, the lyrical does not belong to the stable order of things. It emerges only when the epic is failing, when the system is no longer absolute, and when individuals must find their own meaning in the ruins of what once was.
The Philosophy of the Lyrical: To Walk at Twilight
If the epic is day (history, power, ideology) and night is total collapse, then the lyrical is twilight—a way of moving between worlds, neither fully belonging to the past nor surrendering to the future. Zatoichi, Bashō, and Scudder all belong to this twilight space.
And maybe, so does van life—a way of moving through the 21st century’s collapsing structures without being fully consumed by them. Perhaps our era is another twilight, and those who live lyrically are the ones who refuse to be pulled fully into the epic’s machinery, choosing instead to walk, wander, and remain at the edge of history.
