Density

Some books take a long time to read.  The Katas: The Meaning behind the Movements is one of those books.  It’s not because it’s got a lot of pages, rather it’s got a lot of ideas.  Tokitsu skips freely from one complicated notion to the next, often taking theoretical leaps so large that it’s hard to even see where he went, let alone follow him there.  Still, it’s a book worth reading if you like thinking about the underlying structure of things.

I got two big ideas out of the book.  One, a kata (form) can be a structure that defines a whole life – kinda like knowing what you want to be when you grow up and actually following through with that notion.  Two, in a kata, there is an imagined “double” that can take on the persona of both attacker and teacher.  Tokitsu talks frequently about the double in a kata literally being one’s teacher.  He walks the reader through several examples of students striving to best their masters, using kata as one of the tools to do this.

There are many more ideas in this book.  I suspect I’ll end up reading it a few more times, though I need at least a year break from it for the moment.  What follows is the author’s own summary of the work.

As we come to the end of an analysis that shows that kata is indeed a complicated notion – and if, in spite of all that, we were to define kata in a few words, we might say that it is a structure of the act and of the relation to the double (in the broadest sense of the term – someone else or something else) that is recorded in a stable, hierarchical social system.

Keep training.  Keep reading.