When​ I first read László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below, published in Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation in 2013, I thought I had discovered a sutra of a cult I had been unconsciously following for most of my life, a cult I had dimly perceived through museums and libraries but that now I could see was mystically systematised. It had no name, as the white heron we meet stalking fish in the Kamo river in Kyoto has no name, but is ‘the artist who is no more, who is invisible, who is needed by no one’. Each chapter centres on an artwork or its creator, its making or its reception, ranging from the Shang Dynasty to the present day, across the Eurasian continent from Japan to Spain. There are seventeen chapters, each consisting (mostly) of a single sprawling sentence, and numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence, 1 to 2584, which gives the effect of travelling light years in the course of reading.

In one story, a man visiting the Parthenon forgets his sunglasses, is blinded by the sun and killed in the Athens traffic; in another, a man in Venice experiences the crushing sorrow of theophany when the eyes of a painted Christ follow him around a gallery; in another, an impoverished migrant descends into madness after meeting figures from an Andrei Rublev icon come to life. A guard in the Louvre contemplates his charge, the Venus de Milo, and concludes: ‘she did not belong here nor anywhere upon the earth, everything that she, the Venus de Milo meant, whatever it might be, originated from a heavenly realm that no longer existed ... because the higher realm had itself been disappeared from the human world.’ In another chapter, a master Noh mask-maker unwittingly summons a demon, the hannya, through his handiwork.

Art is a portal, then, through which one enters the uncanny. It can bring havoc, or it can bring bliss. In a monastery where the Heian-period Amida Buddha is disassembled to be painstakingly cleaned, its famous gaze restored to its original splendour, the technician mediates between two realms:

Most of the believers remember very well how the statue looked across the decades, a dark shadow on the altar ... but this pair of eyes, if even touching lightly upon them, does not see them but looks onto a further place, onto a distance that no one here is able to conceive, everyone senses that, and the tension is extinguished in one blow, on every face great joy can be seen.