富士山下意思：誰能憑愛意要富士山私有

English

The song

《富士山下》 (“Under Mount Fuji”) is on Eason Chan’s 2006 album 《What’s Going On…?》. The lyric is by Albert Leung (林夕) and the music by Christopher Chak (澤日生). It tells the end of a love affair: on a rainy night a man drives his former lover home and tries to talk her into letting go. Leung also wrote the Mandarin version, 《愛情轉移》, which tells a different story. The song won Best Song at the 2007 CASH Golden Sail Music Awards. Like 《K歌之王》, it has been a concert encore and a late-night headphone song ever since.

The mountain and the man who left

Most explanations of this song begin with Leung himself, and they are right to. He has a theory of Mount Fuji. Liking someone, he said, is like liking the mountain: you can see it, but you cannot move it. The only way to move Mount Fuji is to walk over to it yourself. Love is the same, and having wandered through it is already enough. From there the song is usually heard as consolation. You cannot have the person, so let go, and let the having-been-there be enough. Some readers go further. One essay hears a bodhisattva at Aokigahara, the forest at the foot of the mountain, talking a stranger back from the edge.

All of this is true to the song, but it stops before asking who is singing. It is not the one who has to let go. “Forgive me for no longer sending flowers” is his line: he is the one who stopped. She is the one who would marry no one else. By the second verse he is pleading with her not to cut her wrist. So when he asks 「誰能憑愛意要富士山私有」, “who can make Mount Fuji private property by loving it?”, he is not talking about a mountain somewhere else. He means himself.

His method is stranger than the consensus notices. He never asks her to forget him. He tells her 「我絕不罕有 往街裡繞過一周 我便化烏有」: “I am not rare at all. Walk once around the block and I dissolve into nothing.” He is not telling her to stop looking at the mountain. He is telling her there is no mountain, only a street and an ordinary man.

Can you love what you do not own?

That turns a song about heartbreak into a harder question, one that does not need the song to be asked. Is loving someone the same as wanting to possess them? If the two can be separated, what is left once they are? And is what is left a smaller love, or the real one?

Unselfing

Leung is a Buddhist, and the song rests on that ground first. Suffering comes from clinging. When he sings 「何不把悲哀感覺 假設是來自你虛構」, “why not suppose the sadness is something you invented?”, he is not calling her tears fake. He is saying that what hurts her is the man she carries in her mind, not the man in the driver’s seat.

Iris Murdoch, the English novelist and philosopher, offers a Western vocabulary for the same insight, and it sharpens it. In “The Sublime and the Good” (1959) she wrote that love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. In The Sovereignty of Good (1970) she named the obstacle: the fat relentless ego, which spins consoling fantasies and trims other people to fit its story. Her best-known example is a kestrel. She is looking out of a window, anxious and resentful, brooding on some injury to her pride. Then she sees a kestrel hovering, and in a moment everything changes. The brooding self is gone, and there is nothing now but kestrel. She called this unselfing.

Mount Fuji is Leung’s kestrel. It does not care whether you look at it, and looking at it makes your own story feel small. Murdoch helps with what the Mount Fuji theory leaves vague. Walking over to the mountain is not a tourist’s shrug. It is attention, the patient work of seeing something as it actually is rather than as you need it to be.

Neither of them dwells on the cost, and the song does. To see a person as they are is to lose the person you invented. 「要擁有必先懂失去怎接受」, “to have, you must first learn how to accept losing.” The first thing to be lost is not him. It is the mountain she built out of him, and that is the harder loss, because she built it herself.

The jacket behind the door

Wing lives in a flat of about 380 square feet in Tseung Kwan O. In Hong Kong storage space is priced by the square foot, and she has none to spare. For two years a navy windbreaker has hung on the back of her bedroom door. It belonged to the man she lived with before this flat. He left it behind, or left it for her; they never settled which. She does not wear it and she does not throw it out. Friends who come over for hotpot tell her to bin it. She says she will. It stays on the hook.

The jacket has stopped being a jacket. It is the last piece of territory he occupies in her life, and she pays rent on it. Keeping it is a way of owning something of him, and she cannot let it go because letting it go would be the end.

One wet Monday in June, the amber rainstorm signal goes up while she is already late. Her umbrella is broken. She takes the windbreaker off the hook because it is the nearest thing that is waterproof, and wears it to the MTR. By Quarry Bay it is wet nylon that smells faintly of the train. She wears it again the next time it rains, and the time after that. Some weeks later she notices she has stopped thinking of it as his. It has not become precious, and it has not been thrown out. It has become a coat.

Hearing the mountain again

With that in mind the hinge has two layers. On the surface: he is a mountain, and you cannot own a mountain. Underneath: he was never a mountain. She made him one. The first layer tells her to let go. The second tells her to look properly. Murdoch would say the second is the love, and that the first, on its own, is only resignation.

That is why the ending matters. 「你還嫌不夠 我把這陳年風褸 送贈你解咒」: “if that is still not enough, I give you this old windbreaker to break the spell.” A song about the impossibility of owning ends with him handing her something to own. It is not a contradiction. What can be owned was never the mountain. An old coat is an old coat. Once it has been worn in the rain it stops being a relic. The spell is not broken by taking the thing away. It is broken when the sacred object becomes ordinary again.

Here the reading reaches its limit. The advice to see clearly, and to treat sadness as invented, comes from the one who left. That is convenient. The person who caused the hurt is excused from the work and assigns it to the person who was hurt. Murdoch’s unselfing cannot be done on someone else’s behalf; it is slow, private labour. And a person who has reached for a blade does not need a theory of Mount Fuji, however wise. She needs someone who stays. The song seems to know this. He does not leave after his speech. He stays in the car with her, keeping warm, still trying to find the words.

The line I keep

The line I love most is a small one in the first verse: 「這風褸我給你磨到有襟花」, “you wore my windbreaker until it pilled.” 襟花 is the fuzz that forms on old fabric, a word nobody else would put in a love song. Nowhere does he say he loves her. He only says she wore his jacket so often that it wore out. Their time together is measured in wear, not anniversaries. I find that more honest than the whole Mount Fuji theory. Love is not rare. It is worn.

Two questions stay with me. Is there something in your home that is not yours, and that you cannot bring yourself to throw away? And when she took the windbreaker, did she wear it? The song ends the moment he hands it over. Whether the spell broke, Leung does not say.