The Pine Islands

by Marion Poschmann

  Yosa for his part didn’t seem completely sure whether the quality of the roof met his requirements. He walked around the edge a number of times, looked down onto the street, came back and assessed the other side. The whole of the front of the apartment block was fitted out with balconies where the residents dried their laundry. A pink hooded jumper fluttered continuously over the railing directly under them, spinning on its drying rack over the drop and then returning to its original position.

  Yosa leafed through the handbook again, which apparently had tips for the most suitable direction, because afterwards he orientated himself onto the street side of the roof, measured out distances with long strides as if he wanted to take a run up, and checked the slip resistance of the roof with the soles of his shoes. After a phase of estate agent-like activity he was suddenly calm, sat cross-legged on the edge of the roof and was stilled for a long time in meditation there, his gaze aimed at the point in the distance where Gilbert had assumed Fuji was. Finally he got up, smoothed down his clothes and wanted to entrust Gilbert with his gym bag, bowing all the while. Gilbert didn’t take it. He now walked around his side of the roof, kicked a pebble out of the way, which, astonishingly, had made it to these heights, stepped on the edge mounting, which didn’t budge. He rattled the fire escape in a workmanlike fashion, then he had run out of things to do.

  Dear Mathilda!

  Sublime depth plays an important role in East Asian culture. Profundity, as it’s called, is inconspicuous, it’s neither this nor that, it’s neither loud nor lurid, it is of such a balanced restraint that the less sensitive person, particularly someone from abroad, hardly has the chance to even notice it. It never plays out in the foreground, but it also can’t be found in the background, it’s far too important for that. Is it something in between, is it prominent? Is it clandestine? It’s neither of these things. It is without colour and flavour, it is without a clear form; it is subtle, it is conceivably linked with what we also call the sublime in the West. Only it doesn’t reveal itself in power or violence, it isn’t experienced in exorbitance, nor in terms of magnitude or in being overwhelmed. You won’t find it in bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks … etc., but much more in the quiet contemplation of a dull reed bed or dry autumn grass, within nature without anything particularly eye-catching, in a landscape of emptiness and melancholy. Whether it’s a swamp or grass or bamboo that ultimately forms the contemplative object, turning leaves, a misty field or a cloud-topped mountain – what is ultimately required is a state of mind that allows the sublime to be seen everywhere. It’s believed that this is the cause of the phenomena. And, if anything, it possibly comes close to what is called the Ungrund – the ground without a ground, the undetermined, the abyss – in German mysticism.

  It’s too loud here, Gilbert informed Yosa in a dictatorial way. He could hear the traffic noise, it was absolutely too much to bear. On top of that the light was piercing, he had expected something more subdued, drab surroundings in a pure grey that absorbed everything around it, so soft that one can barely perceive oneself anymore. This place, on the other hand, was full of unpleasant stimuli. It didn’t smell very nice, hadn’t Yosa noticed. Urinal deodoriser, window cleaner, washing-up liquid. Artificial smells, and in far too high a concentration at that, even to him, as someone who hadn’t grown up in this culture, it seemed un-Japanese, simply not up to scratch.

  He went to the fire escape, then he turned – to be on the safe side – to Yosa one last time and explained that this place was absolutely out of the question. Yosa stood there slim and upright on the roof, he wore a thin poplin coat, its tails fluttered, the hanging belt ends danced at his back like the crêpe paper tails of a kite. He held on to his gym bag very tightly. His face was impenetrable. Gilbert climbed down the fire ladder into the stairwell, his own bag pinned under his arm. He paused, listened. A young couple were fighting behind one of the apartment doors. Someone was playing rock music behind one of the others. He walked down the stairs to the next floor, and then the next one, then the next one. Then he heard the light soles of the young Japanese man’s shoes making the iron steps ring out. He waited for him in front of the building. They went back to the underground station without another word.

  One could learn from Bashō that all of this had to take place on another level. Consistent long walks. Modest lodgings. Forgoing technical aids, mobile telephones above all. Only then can one distance oneself from the strict superego that seeks to keep everyone under control in everyday life. A state of sovereignty and frugality that will finally allow us to turn towards other things without huge reservations. Inner life. The pines. The moon.

  There will be no more of this, Gilbert said sternly when they were once more sitting in his hotel room. He would travel to the pine islands, taking the same route that Bashō took. He would undertake a pilgrimage, a journey of spiritual cleansing, and he, Yosa, would be able to assist him.

  Yosa sat on one of the cubes with his head bowed. Gilbert couldn’t be certain whether the young Japanese man had properly understood his announcement. He showed no kind of reaction. Maybe he was meditating.

  Gilbert lay down on the bed with the Bashō book. After a short while the writing began to swim in front of his eyes. He would have liked to have known what Mathilda was doing at that moment. It was early afternoon, at least it was in Tokyo. He calculated the time difference. Maybe she had just got up. Maybe she was making coffee and setting the table for breakfast. Would she lay the table for just herself? Was the long-limbed, ridiculous student teacher already sitting in his place? As soon as he thought of Mathilda, a fireball lifted off from his stomach area, rose to the roof of his skull, and if he blinked even slightly, the whole room was overlaid with his flush of anger. Streaks of blood on the walls, thick drops of it falling from the ceiling, a flickering downpour that had flooded the room up to their ankles. Gilbert stood up overcome by wrath, waded over to the second cube, squatted before it and began to outline the travel itinerary on a hotel notepad. He pressed down hard with the hotel pen. The piece of paper beneath it would be a relief copy for Yosa. They would strictly keep to Bashō’s specifications. If the young Japanese man had any special requests, he could let him know.

  For dinner Yosa Tamagotchi went downstairs and brought back two bento boxes, which he’d bought from a small shop on the street. In one of the cubes he located a kettle, cups and teabags. Gilbert would never have thought of investigating the cubes, but at that moment he discovered on which side the other cube opened. It contained the minibar with a range of drinks and snacks. Yosa brewed some green tea. A pilgrimage characterised by privation, ascetic tea. Gilbert would, inevitably, have to get used to tea.

  Yosa opened the plastic box, arranged the chopsticks, poured the tea. Rice with black sesame, carrots cut into flowers, pickled radish, circular cut-outs of tofu, fried whitefish, greyish-green vegetables with small pieces of dyed-pink ginger. After they had consumed their meal in silence, Yosa shyly spoke up. He explained himself.

  The estate that they’d sought out that day was one of the most famous in Japan. Social housing from the fifties, a pilot scheme, stable dwellings for people moving out of the countryside into the cities. Electricity and running water, hygiene and modernity. Apartments, though tiny, which would rehabilitate the poorest, most disadvantaged, the misbegotten of society, create a bell of security, when warm light shone through millions of windows at sunset, when its occupants came home from work to a heated apartment in the winter, it was all a participation in the achievements of civilisation. Naturally the gloss of the place had noticeably faded over the years. Heightened crime rates, neglected buildings. Many stood empty. While other countries boasted about having adopted the principle of simple mass accommodation from the Japanese building tradition, namely from the example of the simple wooden houses with wafer-thin walls and sliding doors, Japan for its part had entered into the Bauhaus movement and considered these new piles of concrete not as a further development of the
state-owned architectural style, but far more as a symbol of cosmopolitanism and internationality.

  In the meantime, however, it had become a symbol of decline. Those who jumped from these buildings were sending out a message with their deed.

  What message, Gilbert wanted to know.

  Yosa Tamagotchi couldn’t give him an answer.

  They went to bed early.

  Gilbert dreamt of a gigantic mushroom, as high as a tower block and riddled with holes for windows, as if monstrous snails had eaten through it. It wasn’t pleasant living in this mushroom house, because mould was already dripping from the walls and everything was coated in black slime. While still within the dream he felt enraged that the young Japanese man had spread his depressive energy in a manner that had induced corresponding images for him, Gilbert. He couldn’t comprehend why the Japanese man couldn’t keep his dreams to himself. The boy, he said to himself, sticking his finger contemptuously into the black slime, was really of no use, a total loser.

  青木ヶ原

  Aokigahara

  Dear Mathilda,

  The young man I’ve taken under my wing in Tokyo will undertake a small trip with me. We are preparing to embark on Bashō’s trail, to take a pilgrimage that might make him see sense. Yosa is overly sensitive, completely self-involved and irreparably spoiled, and thus I proceed on the assumption that it will do him some good to have to tackle long walks on meagre rations and grapple with the beauty of the Japanese countryside, as well as traditional Japanese poetry. Of course, it’s absurd that it has to come to this, after all, this is his country not mine, and I personally – as you may know – have little time, and even less interest, in occupying myself with contemplating plants, waves and mountain ranges on a foreign continent. However, I see no alternative, I cannot leave the young man in this state. He has wrested an agreement from me that we will visit some locations of his choice while on this journey. Among them are the suicide forest Aokigahara and the Mihara Volcano on the island of Izu Ōshima, where the disillusioned throw themselves into the crater if they want a particularly fashionable end. Unfortunately, these places aren’t to be found on Bashō’s route, they’re in the opposite direction in fact, but are still in greater Tokyo, which goes to show that this suicide trend isn’t exactly innovative, but instead inhabits known visitor spots. Whatever the case may be, we’re starting with his locations for reasons of economy and will then head for the north.

  They left Tokyo by train, then travelled for a while by bus, Gilbert growing more and more annoyed all the while that they were essentially going backwards. Instead of north they travelled south, towards Mount Fuji, at whose feet could be found this forest that Yosa wanted to visit at all costs. Yosa carried his belongings in his gym bag, Gilbert only carried his leather satchel. He’d left his suitcase at the hotel, a suitcase was too unwieldly, he wouldn’t need a suitcase on a pilgrimage. In his leather satchel he had stuffed his bag of toiletries and some fresh underwear, a fountain pen, ink, a notebook, plus an umbrella and the plastic cutlery from the aeroplane, just in case. The satchel was a bulky burden on his lap in the bus.

  Bashō complained about his excessive baggage on his journey: about the rainproof gear, the weight of his writing and painting utensils, but most of all about the countless farewell gifts from his friends that he hadn’t allowed for, but could not return and politely had to schlep around with him.

  In principle, Gilbert’s luggage amounted to what Bashō had packed, minus the paper robe to keep warm at night, because he presumed that they wouldn’t be sleeping outdoors, minus the bath kimono, seeing as there wouldn’t be an opportunity or time or, as far as he was concerned, even a desire to bathe in public, and minus the leaving presents, as he hadn’t received any.

  Nor had anyone said goodbye to him. He had left, and no one had shown the slightest interest – what he was doing in this faraway land had been met with indifference. Was there, from a German perspective, any real difference between Tokyo and Tokyo’s environs, was there a difference between the main island of the Japanese archipelago and a collection of tiny, scattered islets in an isolated bay on this main island, that’s to say, the whole once more in miniature? From a German perspective the journey he was undertaking must seem like one where he wasn’t markedly shifting his position; he was both travelling and not travelling. He was travelling a little within a larger journey, which itself, from a German perspective, had been cast into doubt from the outset.

  Yosa had given him the window seat, but there was nothing outside to see. From out the corner of his eye he was aware of Yosa beside him devouring heaps of provisions, which he must have bought within a matter of seconds somewhere on the way without Gilbert having noticed. Rice triangles wrapped in seaweed with different fillings that Yosa announced every time he bit into them: salt plum, tuna fish. Some kind of golden mushroom. Beef. Spinach. Hadn’t Yosa fully grasped that they were setting off on a journey of hardship and restrictions? Or did he think that this would be his final chance for gluttony? Finally, it all became too absurd for Gilbert, and he allowed himself to be handed a night-black triangle filled with prawn mayonnaise.

  Wilderness. Forests passed by bearing down from a great height, white-grey treetops, luminously swelling clouds that move quickly overhead. Over the multi-lane motorway, over the rounded crests of the mountains, the pale mounds floated on higher levels of the air over the endless rice fields, pristine, everlasting, out of bounds, this final natural landscape of water vapour and ice drifted, rough, remote and rugged, bleak and enchanted. Stratocumulus clouds smeared through the glass of the interurban coach, they continued steadily onwards, disseminating unease, longing, an ache to escape to some far-off place.

  Gilbert was relieved when they finally disembarked. The bus drove on, and they stood momentarily lost on the edge of the road, the shuddering of the bus still in their bones, dazed by a light vertigo, not quite back to being of this world. Then Yosa sprang into action, he had a plan and a mission, and there was nothing left for Gilbert to do but follow him.

  They left the small layby that the bus had pulled into and wandered along the main road. They must have been at the foot of Mount Fuji, but the base of Fuji was apparently huge and nothing could be seen of the mountain itself. Gilbert had no conception of whether they had come so close to the mountain that a panoramic view of it was no longer possible because they were already on its slope or whether the mountain was simply concealing its snow-tipped crater in the clouds. Around them was nothing but forest, the sky grey and drab above them, a void of anticipation and uniformity.

  Yosa turned off onto a small road, Gilbert went down it after him. For a while he amused himself with the fantasy that they were a miniature caravan, travelling single file through the nothingness. The guide at the front who knew the way, then the camel carrying the luggage. The leather satchel pulled down on Gilbert’s arm, he pinned it under one arm and then the other. The advantages of a nylon rucksack. Beyond a certain level of exertion, aesthetic concerns faded into the background. But they weren’t quite at that point yet. Gilbert walked grimly determined at Yosa’s back and tried to feel some excitement for this journey. An unremarkable road, leading to a forest car park. The car park was quite big for one that was in the middle of nowhere, and it was surprisingly full. Abandoned cars that hadn’t been moved in a long time rotting away, covered with layers of leaves that had collected on the windscreen wipers, the hubcaps thoroughly coated in moss, and inside on the seats were crushed water bottles, as if they’d just been finished and discarded, and unfolded maps.

  The owners had got out here and not come back, Yosa said in a travel guide’s voice, one could say in a know-it-all tone, as if he had personally brought about these conditions and as if it were associated with some heroic achievement that escaped the average person like Gilbert, it had to escape them because the average person like Gilbert didn’t recognise the higher meaning of disposing of one’s car in some wild place and disposing of one’s own
body shortly afterwards, that is, to simply use the world as a waste disposal unit for the spiritual and physical waste one had produced throughout one’s lifetime.

  Gilbert entered the forest vexed, and while vexed he acknowledged that they were following the papery authority of the suicide handbook, which was leading them down a dull footpath, and then astray.

  The forest opened its black wings, closed in around them, drew itself closer and closer together with a sigh. Who is one fleeing when entering this forest? A great leafy being wrapped them in its humidity, wrapped them in its formidable rustling, within its breezing and whispering, its ominous mouldy odour.

  They disregarded multiple warning signs. Yosa planted himself next to the first one and translated its advice, so that Gilbert in no way misunderstood what they would be flouting henceforth: under no circumstances leave the marked routes, otherwise you won’t be able to find your way out of the forest. If you are harbouring specific intentions in this regard, you are reminded to think about everything your parents have done for you. Parents shouldn’t be disappointed, after all. The rest of society also had a right to the labour of young people and it beseeched anyone desperate enough to have reached this point – the warning sign – to call a telephone hotline.

  Hanging across the path that turned off from the main footpath next to the sign was a thin cord, which was clearly intended to symbolise a barrier. Yosa raised the symbol, leant forwards and ducked underneath it, and Gilbert did the same, instantly filled with hot defiance against an official admonition comprised of slack string. They really hadn’t needed to accost him with this silliness, treat him like a child with this barrier of packing string, he adhered to a sufficient number of regulations already, albeit reluctantly, and while walking in the forest he didn’t need to be monitored or infantilised. He caught up with Yosa and stomped angrily along the track through the unwieldy, forbidden territory.