NORIKO's DINNER TABLE (Sion Sono, 2005)

IDENTITY: THE PROOF BY CONTRADICTION
By: Aaron Mannino


“…but as Camus wrote, the only serious philosophical problem
is suicide. Perhaps action is a way of avoiding suicide.”
-Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle)


“In order for us to transform our own suffering we must do something radical. The first radical thing we must do is to practice stopping (shamatha). We stop in order to return to ourselves, to be calm. When we are calm, we have a better chance to see our suffering more clearly. The second radical act is to look deeply inside ourselves and see our suffering, be with our suffering, in order to understand and transform it.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Sion Sono’s NORIKO NO SHOKUTAKU (Noriko’s Dinner Table, 2005) by his admission, “fills in the emotional gaps” left by his previous cult-status film JISATSU SAKURU (Suicide Club or Suicide Circle, 2001). It is a parallel narrative. With NORIKO, unlike the convolution and inconclusiveness of SUICIDE CLUB, Sono fashions a complete universe where emotional, situational, and metaphoric relationships chart themselves fully. Narrative, aesthetic, editing, and voice-over narration transmit Sono’s social criticisms with an unexpected sensitivity and clarity, despite its horrific depths. He charges his film with an inferable Buddhist/Taoist flavor while keeping its core ideologies modernly, if not universally, relevant.

NORIKO NO SHOKUTAKU concerns itself with the “seemingly happy” Shimabara family at the point where their veil of complacency has been worn thinnest. Around this time, the Shimabara’s only two daughters, NORIKO (the eldest) and YUKA (the youngest) separately run away from what they deem a dissatisfying, if not soul-crushing provincial home-life to seek new identities in Tokyo. They want to hold themselves to brand new standards, and to actualize themselves somehow. NORIKO NO SHOKUTAKU ranges from a grounded-but-bizarre family drama, an aching multifarious coming-of-age portrait, a physically and psychologically visceral dissertation on the degenerating nuclear family, to the bearer of a philosophical dilemma comparable to that of Antonioni’s protagonist in THE PASSENGER. Thusly, in NORIKO NO SHOKUTAKU, the core dilemma probes into the realm of personal identity; the relativity of the standards on which it is based, the particular existential necessity of its assertion in the convolution of modern society, and how much power a person has in its construction/ expression. Sono pilots this investigation with the recurrent inquiry, “Are you connected to yourself?” a question perpetuated by the mysterious networking website haikyo.com, which Noriko, the eldest Shimabara daughter, stumbles upon in her quest to get her school to allow for extended computer usage hours. Though not translated in subtitle, it is thematically important to know that the word haikyo in fact means ruins.

The freedom of identity through unvarnished expression and power of decision that Noriko experiences on haikyo.com consequently prompts her to escape the broken home and banality that she endures each day. On haikyo.com Noriko, under the screen-name Mitsuko is, for the first time in her life, able to openly communicate and relate with other girls her age (seventeen), something impossible to conceive in her small-town school. In only this dimension of her life does Noriko-as-Mitsuko begin to feel actualized, which is important because the crux of Noriko’s sadness lies in her reticence and unrealized passions, enforced by the absence of anyone to share them with. She is strained by her domestic life that attempts to uphold a false image of uncomplicated happiness.

At home and school Noriko is a nervous, self-conscious, dispirited shell, always darting about, looking down, her right hand adjusting her glasses, slightly unkempt hair covering her face. It becomes immediately clear that she has a terse relationship with her father and that her only friend is her younger sister Yuka. Haikyo.com offers Noriko bonds of friendship, which facilitate a sense of self worth, and of possibility. Without an inkling of joy to thrive upon at home, Noriko reaches her threshold, packs her bags, and runs away (this being her action against the suicide of stagnation). She seeks out her trusted Haikyo.com liaison “Ueno Station 54” (a.k.a Kumiko) who lives in Tokyo. From this point onward, the film’s situations become decidedly more abstract, but diegetically so, maintaining the same kinetic, non-linear, tangent-prone dynamic as the first third. Not knowing what to expect and being awestruck at the possibility of true friendship, Noriko meets Ueno Station 54 (Kumiko) at, of all places locker #54 at Ueno Station. Kumiko arrives with a woman introduced as her’s Mother, a man introduced as her Father, and a boy introduced as her younger brother... but we discover that they are simply acting, a sense the viewer gets immediately by their forced manner. What Noriko does from this moment on is adapt. She marries into Kumiko’s family-circle, in which the participants pose as temporary family members to a lonely and disturbed clientele… for a fee. Noriko/Mitsuko gets swept right into the act, visiting two elderly women for whom this hodge-podge family unit acts as visiting kin. She "get's it" and acquiesces almost immediately. The most telling moment occurs in this span of time. Noriko/Mitsuko asks Ueno Station 54/ Kumiko what she should call her, what her real name is. Kumiko and the fake family in the van with her begin to laugh histerically. We come to sense, early on, how radically deep their philosophy of self denial runs.

With her identity essentially erased Noriko, now Mitsuko, becomes immediately and increasingly enveloped in each of the staged scenarios of familial bonding, and virtually forgets her own given name. Rejecting the name “Noriko” seems to be her paramount act of self-denial disguised as self-liberation. To her it is the most crucial action because it is her first and most fundamental gesture of self-denial. Before she ever leaves her home Noriko explores freedom of expression on haikyo.com as Mitsuka. All of her subsequent gestures are built upon that one moment on the computer when she first uses the Mitsuko alias. The dire importance of this act is emphasized late in the film during its climax. Mitsuka is brought into a state of hyper-reactive frenzy as her true father Tetsuzo Shimabara. After having searched for Noriko for two years, Tetsuzo manages to find both Noriko and Yuka (now Yoko and part of the family-circle) by employing the services of the family-circle, repeatedly calls Noriko by her given name (a double shock as, ostensibly she has no recognition of him) She screams, and cries, and shakes, “No! My name is Mitsuko not Noriko! Mitsuko is my name!”

The name Noriko is an attaché to her former suffering. She severs it along with her home to preserve herself within the identity of Mitsuko, who is a far more vocal and expressive body. Noriko/Mitsuko also exchanges between a great number of names and pretenses as per her new trade of familial-prostitution, all as part of an elaborate network of deflected suffering (for herself and for the clients). In the family circle Noriko/Mitsuko practices an inversion of what Buddhism calls “stopping” (shamatha). She asks the same questions of self as a Buddhist might but instead of focusing on her own identity and how it is connected universally, she bounces from one identity to the other and posits that they are all isolated and separate, like islands unto themselves. Though each role she plays is unique, Mitsuko never fully absorbs into them. Her performances are shallow and cosmetic, merely an “imitation of an action” or façade to build the illusion that she is a different person and therefore exempt from experiencing her suffering (Aristotle). Her shamatha becomes an externalized escape from herself and her suffering rather than an introspective remedy and “return to the self.”
What’s so interesting and somewhat ironic about Noriko’s behavior is that she attempts to avoid suffering by denying her circumstances and “becoming” other people as a service to those who are themselves trying to avoid suffering by denying the truth of their circumstances.

For the sisters (Yuka, who eventually follows her sister’s lead, locates Kumiko /Ueno Station 54 and offers herself to the circle under the alias Yoko) and all others in the circle, Kumiko is a mentor for the philosophy of self-connectedness through self-detachment. Lacking any satisfied sense of personal identity, the sisters become blank human canvases as a virtual proof-by-contradiction, attempting to affirm their identities by a new standard. They deflect their “true” identities and adopt others as part of Kumiko’s bizarre family rental service. In a late explanatory flashback scene alias ‘Broken Dam’ is shown addressing her ‘final lecture’ to the original family circle, (most of whom have willingly died as a result of unwavering loyalty to their services and roles; an example being Broken Dam herself, who was murdered by her client “husband” due to his raging jealousy for the woman she was substituting). She states that, “the only way to know ourselves is to lie openly and experience emptiness.”

Broken Dam continues by saying that “people want to be the champagne, not the glass, the flower but not the vase. But the world needs glasses and vases,” insinuating that they - the circle - are the glass, the empty desireless vessel willing to receive. Broken Dam’s treatise infers upon another Taoist adage; “benefit comes from what is there, usefulness from what is not (Lao Tzu 11).” By that standard, if the self is purely a dictate of ones utility or purpose, the mutual vacancy of their mind-space makes each of them useful and subsequently connected to themselves. Kumiko’s family circle is henceforth a space (literally and figuratively) in which identity is manifest in its own absence, and serves as something of a sangha (community) of self-denial to the dissatisfied, rather than a conduit for self –awareness. This marks one of the circle’s core contradictions to the philosophies on which they tread, deceitful in its application, not necessarily its conception. Noriko’s error in the execution of her self-transcendence is her complete lack of responsibility in the matter. Her action is effacing rather than transforming, avoidant rather than transcendant, and merely perpetuates a circle of suffering outwardly; confusing her father, enabling the prolonged disdain of her clients, etc. Buddhism and Taoism never ask of their practitioners to coldly deny the world or circumstances in disfavor, because they both accept that one can only learn from having a body and a mind, as well as a spirit to eternally retain those lessons. All that we know is of and by the material world. Noriko, Kumiko, Tetsuzo (the father), and Yuka fail to realize that their divorce from the world, makes their suffering and isolation abound. Perhaps nothing is more exhausting or stifling than constantly pretending to be someone you’re not.


It is helpful, but by no means crucial that one see the film SUICIDE CLUB, in order to dissect or understand NORIKO NO SHOKUTAKU's message. Both films are quite sovereign, though a thread connects them, which mutually deepens them. That thread is the aforementioned  identity debate. Suicide Club’s satirical angle on the “are you connected to yourself” question pertains more to the idea that an individual who is un-actualized or complacent is, in a sense, committing suicide because they have abandoned the potential for growth for discord or stagnation. Put simply, if something is not living and changing it is dying, So why not actually kill yourself? The rash of suicides which occur throughout Tokyo in both films are a literal representation of this philosophical suicide or personal resignation inherent in complacency. Noriko no shokutaku approaches from a slightly different angle and treats the suicide subject more thoroughly as a question of identity, and pushes the literal suicide trend generally out of focus, or alternately into terms that apply to the family-circle’s language. “Not everyone in the club commits suicide. Only those whose role demands it.”

To re-iterate, Kumiko and the sisters all attempt to “connect to themselves” by removing themselves from their respectively stifling situations, and by attempting to create an identity through the absence of their established one. Just as in mathematics, where a theorem or principle must be proven infallible, so must ones identity be “proven.” A common mathematical method is, again, the proof-by-contradiction, through which a suggested theorem is legitimized by first stating the opposite as true, and then proving through evidence of explanation that that opposite is in fact wrong (Mitsuko is the opposite of Noriko). Noriko, Yuka, and Kumiko choose to be empty vessels, which can receive any cocktail of shallow behaviors and traits for the benefit of a lonely client, all the while disenfranchising their core selves. Tetsuzo practices a similar kind of deceit, by focusing, in his journalistic career, on the smallest most trivial but “quaint and happiness-confirming” subjects, like the opening of a new history section of the local library, or a high frequency of holiday shoppers at local markets. Their implicit contradiction, in light of their driving question of self-connectedness, is the fact that to deny or refuse all components of one’s identity, or to decline the circumstances that have shaped the individual is as much a disconnection from the self as being complacent in marginalization or mediocrity. Noriko/Mitsuko cannot grow as an individual because she exists in an artificially constructed mind space. Furthermore, because her rental roles are all separate from one another, and are likewise, separate from her baseline identity (which gradually becomes a gazing empty shell that hasn’t even the capacity to recognize her sister, lest her role demand it) she cannot incur any of the psychological or emotional development that would result from those subsequent interactions. The information and experience has no default location in her mind. At least the former Noriko, though unhappy in her situation, had the potential to expand herself. Because the perception of and reaction to reality, which Noriko has refused, facilitates the evolution of the individual, she is left basically right where she started. Without understanding her hypocrisy, Noriko chooses one life of resignation over another.

STRUCTURE TELLS A STORY

The sprawling and sporadic construct of the film, which feels almost natural in how it reflects the workings of memory and the mind, calls all of its functions; editing, cinematography, lighting to support Sono’s pervading theme of identity deflection and self-removal. A large portion of the film, structured into four chapters, places each character essentially in their own pocket, treating them as simultaneously yet isolate beings despite their familial, existential, and temporal connection. In addition to that, from start to finish, there is a voice-over narration by Noriko’s character from a post narrative timeframe, as well as a number of segments narrated by Yuka’s character, and real-time internal monologues by Tetsuzo, Noriko’s father. Kumiko voice-over-narrates too, but hers are most distinct in that they often describe, in sync with her actions, what she does. Noriko does this towards the end of the film as well. Narration speaks to the idea of a multiplicity of simultaneous selves, illustrated most prominently through the conflux of Noriko’s baseline identity, Mitsuko (her assumed alias), the myriad identities she assumes as per her trade, and the omniscient and somewhat resolved Noriko, present through the narration. The latter constituent exposes another layer of the self-removal theme, in which the present day Noriko is objectively recalling her permutations. In this reflexive action she is as much removed from her past self as Mitsuko is from Noriko. Her omniscience is implied visually by a frantically observant, radically intimate relationship of camera to character to editing. Tangents of imagery are determined by their recollection by the character, so the film fragments itself further to accommodate those critical tangents of thought.

A more partial example of this visual approach is upon Noriko’s first waking in Tokyo before meeting Kumiko, whereby the action from opening her eyes to the turning off of the alarm is captured in roughly six quickly cut medium and close shots, all from different angles. Exempt from this motif are those very few scenes (numbering at about two), which are focused around the dinner table, and the climactic, conclusive, reuinited family discussion (a still shot which lasts a comparatively epic 5-7 min). For these scenes there is little camera movement, and minimal cutting (especially the climax, which provides Yuka/Yoko a grand opportunity for heightened emotion and a profound reduction of their [Tetsuzo, Noriko, herself, and Kumiko… and inferrably anyone] goal. “We just want to avoid suffering!” she cries).

There are many visually expressive moments that inform upon the greater themes of the narrative; for instance, the moment in which Noriko decides to leave her home is in the middle of a blackout. Not only is this functional as a cover-up for her escape, but it’s an echo of the obvious uncertainty that her journey is fraught with from the beginning, is a visual foreshadowing of her eventual mind-space; vacant and black, and the perfect kind of natural expression of a change-over, a blanking of the slate. Bouncing off of that situation is a scene in which Noriko, now in Tokyo, seeks out her Haikyo.com companion Ueno Station 54 (Kumiko) on a public computer. The scene is shot almost entirely in tight quick close ups; of her eyes, face, the computer screen and text, fingers and keyboard. What this says about Noriko/Mitsuko and one of the main themes of the film is that the internet community in which she exists as Mitsuko, the one she perceives to be so liberating, comes from the same narrow scope as her home life and likewise blinds her from the peripheral dynamism of life and her identity. The websites name, translated as ruins.com becomes important in this instant and bears real consequence. Noriko leaves the ruin of her family to the ruin of a community of denial, and even though she is enlivened by the website, she is still in effect distancing herself from tactile relationships. After all, only a small fraction of communication is verbal, the majority being tone, expression, and gesture. In acknowledgement to this Sono delegates the transmission of his themes to all the films components, creating a language of dynamic expression analogous to that of spoken language and its connection to the imagination and subjectivity.

THE CUT

NORIKO NO SHOKUTAKU’s pacing is rather quick throughout, with shots lasting anywhere from 2-10 seconds (with a few exceptions). In combination with the ubiquitous, unrefined handheld digital camera, the cutting of the film functions as an extension of the unassuredness of each characters’ perceptions and self-representations, while also capturing a sense of conflicted realism/anti-realism (the unvarnished naturalistic quality of acting and picture vs. the ubiquitous, multidirectional, if somewhat self-conscious camera). This aesthetic conflict is reflexive of the debate that Sono raises between staged reality and actuality, internal identity and externalized projections of identity, and how those terms are relative; a doubly reflexive observation considering its platform is a film.

One of the most effective photographic realisms occurs when the father, Tetsuzo lights a candle during the tide-turning blackout, he and Noriko sitting together at the dinnertable. Instead of the Hollywood approach which would have the candle illuminate half the room, it throws a pathetic almost imperceptible amount of warm red-ish light, which is a fantastic metaphor for how much Tetsuzo is actually aware of (in terms of passions, pain, conflict, and conviction) as it concerns Noriko, and by extension Yuka and his wife.

Visual metaphor plays constantly significant role in the layering of Sono’s film and is no better employed in the moments when Noriko and Yuka definitively relinquish their identities to emptiness and amorphism. This poignant gesture is visually captured as Noriko removes a dangling thread from the sleeve of her jacket; first when she arrives alone in Tokyo, and secondly, when she seals her “contract” of loyalty with Kumiko. Upon receiving the short red string from a smiling Noriko, Kumiko asks, “What is that?” to which Noriko responds, “It’s Noriko’s umbellical chord.” For this situation it is notable to discuss that the first time she pulled a string from her sleeve it was turquoise, the same color as her jacket, which suggests that Noriko’s motion to leave home was not yet necessarily a severe gesture of self-denial. The use of red thread in the repeating of that action suggests an understated violence that is complicit in the motivations of her self-refusals. Taoism and Buddhism mutually iterate that terms of violence exist as both an external physical and internal psychological phenomenon. Conflicts of thought and emotion are expressly considered a form of violence in Taoism. “A violent man will die a violent death”(Lao Tsu). From that same token, a conflicted mind will die unresolved and by that conflict.

Yuka adoringly shadows her older sister and performs the same gesture with a string at the end of the film, wearing Noriko’s turquoise jacket as she leaves home yet again, even after the stirring cathartic reunion of the night before. Her decision is to find herself. After spending a few cherished moments watching Noriko and Tetsuzo sleep, Yuka walks out of the house and faces the early dawining light. Plucking the dangling red string from her sleeve, she says internally the almost the same thing that Noriko uttered when she arrived in Tokyo. “I’m walking for the first time. Not as Yuka, or as Yoko. Just a nameless girl...” And so she walks. It may be that Yuka left a second time because even as a member of the family circle she hadn’t “proven-herself-by-contradiction.” Yoko didn’t represent an opposite to Yuka, but was simply a vehicle to both reconnect with her sister, and teach their father to see the damage of his selfishness and patriarchal inadequacy. Only after the course of that arc, was Yuka honestly struck with the desire to “connect to herself.” Yuka’s anshin is left yet hanging in the balance. For a change, she cannot share this with her sister. Yuka has realized to what extent she defined herself by her relationship to and sympathy for Noriko.

What’s so tragic about this action is the fact that Noriko, after the climactic and psychologically taxing family reunion between her, Tetsuzo, and Yuka (not Yoko) after 2 years absence (notably, the mother had committed suicide), awoke to her “true self” the next morning. The last words of the film are “I am Noriko,” said inside herself. She expunges Mitsuka from her psyche. Noriko experiences anshin, a Japanese word which means peace of mind and “implies that the question of self has been settled” (Kwong 27). As she observes Yuka’s empty bed, Noriko’s anshin is made bittersweet. A single tear rolls across the bridge of her nose.

THE APPLE DOESN’T FALL FAR


Tetsuzo, Noriko’s father, is far from innocent of any escapism or self-denial, in fact his may be the gravest. Tetsuzo works for a local newspaper. He chooses to cover “uncomplicated” events, which are shown in montage, such as, breaking ground at the site of a new house, an anniversary, a bake sale; all seemingly trivial and miniscule. By this gesture he tries to filter the “bad” out of the world, focusing exclusively on the simple pleasures and successes of the community. Subsequently, in blinding himself to the suffering and inconsistency of the world, he is also blinded to his own family’s resulting pain and dissidence. He gets lost in the simplicity and quaintness of other’s lives and neglects his obligations as a father to be perceptive and sensitive, transforming his distraction and introversion into a destructive and resentful selfishness. His particular brand of escapism is ostensibly the most grounded, in that he loses himself in “real” scenarios to experience a vicarious happiness, which is legitimized, at least to him, by their documentation. However, it could be argued that he escapes in much the same way as his daughters, and that Noriko’s rental-role situations are no less experientially real, though staged.

Tetsuzo’s transgression is implicated as the catalyst of the entire narrative, making his daughters’ decisions seem more mimetic than a rebellious. Tetsuzo’s neglect and disdain motivated Noriko to leave, which in turn motivated Yuka to leave, and their mother to eventually commit suicide. “This gives the father an enormous amount of power,” albeit destructive, “being the catalyst for all the women’s downfalls” and suggests the antiquation of the hierarchical structure of the classical model of Japanese households; yet another layer to this films dense collage of censures (Rini Yun Keagy). However, in an egalitarian counterpoint to this criticism, Sono has given the character of Kumiko an enormous and similarly natured power. As the head of her own “family” she is responsible for leading several of her “sisters” to their own downfalls and deaths, first having them deny their own selves and eventually die for the sake of their functionality. Despite this, Kumiko presents a new model of Japanese woman; clever, empowered, and bold.

What Sono shows in the downfall of these two “parental” figures is that hegemony is not a successful model and that what needs to occur, in the context of any governing body, is a sharing of power and responsibility and perceptivity. This point is captured wholly in the films conclusion, during which the family reunites under the combined efforts and realizations of Tetsuzo and Kumiko (who decided first to allow for this reunion to occur [knowing it was staged by Tetsuzo], and secondly to adapt to it and use the formation of fabricated familial roles to blend back into their former selves; Yoko returning to Yuka, Mitsuko returning to Noriko, and herself becoming the mother she was denied in life). Testuzo and Kumiko also share a similar character arch, and in this, broadly address the transforming gender roles in Japanese society with their proportionality.

I WANT TO START OVER

Through a poignant expose Yuka-as-Yoko, in desperate sobs amid the five minute plus still medium shot of the climactic family reunion, (which visually and tonally begs a comparison to the family mourning sequence of Hou-Hsiao hsien’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die with its unabated intimacy and assimilated voyeurism of a family wailing around their patriarchs dead body) states with a twinge of questioning, “Were just trying to avoid pain, right? We’re just trying to avoid pain.” These words reveal, in their almost naïve concision, one of the family’s most basic commonalities, a tie that binds them closer than they could ever have admitted before. Yuka’s simple somber honesty also reveals the heart of her and her family’s psychological imprudence, and makes a gesture towards the wisdoms they gainsay.

The Tao Te Ching expresses that, “those who wish to embody the Tao (for our purposes Tao refers to a ‘resolute self’) embrace all things. To embrace all things means first that one holds no anger or resistance towards any idea or thing, living or dead, formed or formless. Acceptance is the very essence of the Tao (Lau Tzu 3)” In the case of Noriko, by resisting tactile relationships, denying a relationship to herself, and rejecting her own situational reality rather than accepting her circumstances, she also denies her capacity to transform or transcend them respectively, compounding her suffering. Her actions show a resistance to the truth that in order to accept life and grow, in spite of or because of it, one must accept suffering. Accepting suffering is acknowledging that it is a precondition of existence. “Suffering comes from having a body. How could one suffer without a body? (Lao Tzu ).” Or as Aristotle posited, “tragedy is rooted in the fundamental order of the universe.” Acceptance of suffering also means understanding that suffering is a transient state, something that can be dispatched, transformed, if not learned from. Noriko sought to avoid suffering as though it were an unacceptable result, but her very aversion of it informs on her greatest philosophical infraction, explained by Lau Tzu; “to embrace all things means also that one rids oneself of any concept of separation: male / female, self and other, life and death. Division is contrary to the Tao (3)” “Whatever is contrary to Tao will not last long (55).”


These words especially cut to the core of the film and are an explicit indictment of the characters’ actions of self-denial. Noriko, Yuka, Kumiko, Tetsuzo, and even the mother, are defined by their separations; the self in denial of itself and its circumstances, the assumption of fabricated roles that share no explicit awareness of one another. Such action offers no catharsis to their discontentment. Divorce from themselves and each other is antithetical in its result, and merely burgeons their suffering because it festers unacknowledged. By the end of the film most of them realize, Noriko and Tetsuzo definitively, that in order to transform oneself out of suffering one must be willing to indiscriminately accept the full range of forces affecting them, good and bad, otherwise the natural balance is disrupted. Buddha, Lau Tzu, and now Sion Sono advise that one must be perceptive to the cause and condition of their suffering, for within it lies its own remedy. To that end one must be receptive to the consequences of all the forces affecting them, for experiences, in our acknowledgement of them, change us and facilitate growth. “Foregoing antagonism and separation, one enters the harmonious oneness of all things (Lao Tzu 3).” In the vain of receptivity and perceptivity Sono’s final caution is to keep the lines of communication open with oneself and with those close, for expressing ones personal suffering is perhaps a means to its end.


Works Cited
• Kwong, Jakusho. “No Beginning, No End.” Harmony Books: NY, 2003.
• Lao Tsu. “Tao Te Ching.” Vintage Books: NY, 1989.
• Walker, Brian. “Hua Hu Ching: The Unknown Teachings of Lau Tzu.” Harper Collins: NY, 1992.
• www.tribo.org/nanking/