Emmanuel Ghent’s innovative view of surrender developed out of his Buddhist beliefs and special interest in Eastern philosophies, and has come to be one of the most significant concepts in contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly among relational and intersubjective thinkers. Drawing on my own Japanese cultural background, I attempt to relate Ghent’s surrender to emptiness—as conceived in traditional Eastern philosophies—and narrative in psychoanalysis. Western readers will be asked to put aside responses and assumptions based in standard psychoanalytic literature and practice, in order to encounter a different and unfamiliar conception of emptiness. In return, this paper concludes, the idea of surrender to emptiness can be a useful therapeutic mode for Western analysts, allowing them to go beyond spoken and unspoken narratives or formulated and unformulated experiences. A psychoanalytic case study of a female patient who often fell asleep in sessions or remained silent for long periods, is used to illustrate this conclusion.