They sat on the train as the landscape slid easily by, leaving station after station in their wake. Stationary travelling, action without action. Or a dull, unconscious drifting, like tattered leaves on the wind.
They were on a direct route to Matsushima, no beating about the bush, no layovers. This meant that they skipped some of Bashō’s stations. Muro no Yashima, where the protective patron god of Fuji, ‘The Goddess of the Blooming Cherry Tree’, was enshrined, the temple complex at Nikkō and the ancient willow tree in Ashino, which the monk Saigyō had already documented in poetry centuries before.
In Nikkō, Bashō composed a haiku about nothing more than the vernal green of the new leaf:
See this holy site –
tender, light green leaves of spring,
shone through with sunlight.
Young foliage, illuminated by the sun – the whole of the temple grounds lit up for him in this image, though of course one needed to know that the name of the temple complex itself means ‘it shines like the sun’. Bashō’s haiku is therefore a spiritual simile. Just as the sun shines through the leaves, the spiritual power of the temple shines through the world, through its people. Leaves, young and vulnerable on the branch, penetrated by the almighty sun. Gilbert already felt like a loose leaf anyway, so there wasn’t much to be gained in Nikkō. More import-antly it was vital to set some parameters for the journey, and he had set them: they had been tirelessly occupying themselves with pines for days and couldn’t devote themselves to the innumerable deciduous trees along the route as well.
As far as the ancient willow at Ashino was concerned, both Saigyō and Bashō hid in its shade while life went on around them. The tree provided them with a symbol of mental tranquillity in the face of the fleeting nature of the world.
Saigyō wrote one of the most famous waka poems under the willow in Ashino:
At the trail’s edge,
where a crystal-clear brook flows
in the willow’s shade
I wished to pause, so remained
in this place for a while.
Bashō thought of himself as someone engaged in a poetic dialogue with the great poet Saigyō. That Saigyō was long dead didn’t trouble him: it was a communication between immortal spirits. Thrilled to have the privilege of sitting in the shade of the same tree, he wrote the following:
A whole rice field
will have been planted before
I leave the willow.
Another example, if there weren’t already enough, of the lack of consistency present in all poetry. At times the tree stands for that which is transient, thereby emphasising eternity, yet at other times it stands for the everlasting in the middle of constant change, it was the one and the other, it was a contradiction in itself. It irritated Gilbert, and he would have liked to have asked Yosa how he felt about it, was it a contradiction, was it a paradox, was it perhaps obvious for a Japanese person, as with a rather easy kōan that only a non-Japanese person wouldn’t be able to solve.
Meanwhile, they had roared on past the willow, sailed on past the willow, they had skipped the tender leaves of spring, they had thus far been unable to find peace in the face of fleeting things.
Dear Mathilda,
We’re taking a shortcut. If we made a stop for every distraction we’d never reach the pine islands. We will definitely not be travelling to Mount Mihara. Yosa is extremely upset about this and won’t talk to me. For centuries the world-weary have ascended the volcano and thrown themselves into the crater. The catalyst for this was a novel, a bestseller, in which a couple in an ill-fated love affair settle on this exact idea, and everyone has been aping them ever since – the Werther Effect. Tourism to the island grew disproportionately after the book came out, special ferry services were set up so the suicidal could reach their end in comfort and so sightseers could be transported as well, entire families spent weekends walking along the newly laid out hiking trails to the most spectacular parts of the island, and even if the crater has been fenced off in the meantime, its popularity has been hardly affected at all. Between 1930 and 1937 over 2,000 people are thought to have jumped from one of the observation points into the smouldering lava. I don’t want Yosa to have to endure seeing a mass grave, and I have practically forbidden him from seeing it.
We will also be leaving out the Sesshōseki, a rock of volcanic origin that Bashō visited during his journey. Noxious fumes rise from it, annihilating all life in its general vicinity. It is permanently topped by a thick layer of dead insects. Dazed birds fall from the sky, mammals avoid getting too close to it, plants wither away, so the stone sits in a barren wasteland surrounded by scree, asserting its solitary reign. A gloomy place eternally submerged in oppressive fog, a lost place where nothing of worth can be found. Only tourists come near it, flocking there in droves. That the murderous vapours would tempt Yosa is certainly plausible. I too would be interested in this kind of phenomenon if I were his age and in such a desperate state. Shove the swarms of perished bees and flies out of the way with my foot and attempt to inhale the fumes. What had convinced me to steer clear of the stone, however, was an annotation in Bashō’s travelogue. For a long time, the stone has been considered the manifestation of the nine-tailed fox, a powerful demoness who at the end of her career, after she had ruined the Emperor by masquerading as his beloved, transformed into this toxic boulder. Even if the stone has been exorcised in the meantime and the fox’s spirit has been extinguished, the emanation of the fumes has in no way diminished. I think it’s for the best to keep people like Yosa, people who clearly have at best an ambivalent relationship with fox-like figures – whether they exist or not – far away from this troublesome place. Taking into account Yosa’s special psychic disposition, we will instead, and I want to put my whole energy behind this, spare ourselves some physical exertion and instead approach the Sesshōseki via the narrow path of poetry.
Gilbert thought that what he had already drafted was pretty good. He scratched out an English translation beside his poem and held it out to Yosa.
The poisonous stone –
its vapours transporting me
back to ancient times.
Yosa, huddled in his seat, seemed to read his thoughts and disapproved. Yosa endeavoured through the overpowering emissions of an aura of discontent not only to read his thoughts, but to manipulate them. He wordlessly urged Gilbert to disembark the train at the poisonous stone. He haughtily closed his eyes against the verdurous, resplendent landscape and refused to take in the banality of the outdoors. When he didn’t get his own way he sulked like a toddler. No wonder his parents despaired of him.
Yosa stubbornly sucked on the end of his brush for a long time, nothing came to mind, he didn’t want to do it, he found the whole task ridiculous, beneath him. Finally he wrote:
In the harsh wasteland
I withhold myself from you …
petrified vixen.
Yosa’s poem seemed too subjective to Gilbert and showed a lack of grammatical clarity, at least as far as he could make out from the German translation reconstructed from the English translation of the Japanese. It was down to the ellipsis after ‘you’, which substituted meaningful punctuation with meagre vagueness. If one were to have proceeded with a comma, which had been neglected or disguised in this case, one would read ‘petrified vixen’ as an extension of ‘you’, and the lyrical ‘I’ would be a counterparty to the fox. If, however, one were to insert a dash instead of a comma (a popular technique in German) in order to show a mental turn of thought in the course of the haiku, this would make possible the reading that the lyrical ‘I’ had itself transformed into a fox out of wounded devotion – or had at least threatened to do so. This indecisiveness seemed to Gilbert to be illustrative of Yosa’s condition, and once more showed that mental lucidity and emotional stability were the conditions sine quibus non for composing a haiku. Yosa regrettably lacked both.
The outer suicide and the inner suicide, he said to Yosa, are completely d
ifferent things. Bashō strove for the inner suicide, he wanted to be free of his ego in order to be freed up for his poetry. This could be seen as unnecessarily extreme, but it would be the far more interesting experiment.
Yosa didn’t answer. Yosa was pretending he couldn’t hear anything and couldn’t see anything.
He sat slumped in his seat, utterly resistant, utterly rigid, a burdensome vow never to yield, no matter what forces were placed upon him. The force might be an extraordinary one, it might for example be the authoritative Gilbertian force of a university lecturer, a force of wisdom and pedagogy, a force that, viewed from a purely spiritual perspective, was of an unsurpassable older man, a force that a young Japanese man couldn’t compete with – there was nothing for him to do except bow to it over and over again. A force, therefore, that came close to omnipotence. But the Japanese man only bowed superficially, he bowed in such an exaggerated manner – twisted, clenched, folded in on himself, immensely compacted to his core – that he asserted a hidden gravity, all designed precisely to puncture such omnipotence.
‘Can an all-powerful being create a stone so heavy it cannot even lift the stone itself?’
The omnipotence paradox is a challenge to the idea of divine supremacy. How can we comprehend God’s power, what consequences does it hold for us, are there limits to its scope? A conservative response to the paradox acknowledges simply that God could create the tremendously heavy stone, but would have to concede defeat to it just like an ordinary weightlifter. Either way – should he succeed in lifting it, then the stone is, so to speak, hollow and reveals his incompetence. Should he not succeed, he proves himself to be a failure. As far as they go, these thoughts are without doubt rational and convincing. However, the omnipotence paradox at its core isn’t about the weight of the stone, but about the weight of God. Even if it contradicted everything he had ever published on the theme of God’s beard, Gilbert was secretly an adherent of the concept of absolute power. Obviously, an all-powerful being could create all kinds of stones, it would be able to lift stones and simultaneously not be able to lift them, and whoever put forward the argument that a stone an all-powerful being wasn’t able to lift would be physical proof contrary to his omnipotence simply hadn’t understood that it wasn’t about that at all, the lifting or not lifting of a stone, because the absolute power easily overrides the rules of logic that were the problem in the first place. What it really came down to (and Gilbert already understood this when he was a student of Yosa’s age) was treating the omnipotence paradox as one does a piece of poetry – to recite it while not thinking logically in the slightest, to let it affect you and to simply accept it in all its striking, irrational beauty.
Yosa sat silently in his seat like a mortally offended stone.
If this Japanese man, with whom he had spent several days, had at least been schooled in the Japanese tradition of kōan, he would have been able to discuss all of these questions with him. Gilbert would come at him with riddle-like anecdotes from Yosa’s own cultural sphere, which might be more familiar to him, that might make him see sense.
The kōan ‘The Stone Mind’, for instance:
A Chinese Zen teacher asked two travelling monks: ‘Do you consider that stone over there to be inside or outside your mind?’ One of the monks answers: ‘As everything is of the mind, I would say that the stone is inside my mind.’ The Zen master responds: ‘Your head must be very heavy if you carry a stone like that around in your mind.’
Or ‘The Foreigner Has No Beard’:
A monk saw a picture of the long-bearded Bodhidharma and he complained: ‘Why doesn’t that fellow have a beard?’
Tokyo – Ueno – Ōmiya – Utsunomiya – Kōriyama – Fukushima – Sendai …
They passed through Fukushima at super-express speed, through the mainland, far from the coast, away from the evacuated zone. There were no indicators that one of the most devastating catastrophes in Japanese history had taken place here just a few years before. The train sped past fields, past acoustic fencing, past nondescript residential neighbourhoods, past lone houses, which appeared as if glued to the forested slopes. There were no cooling towers, no nuclear power stations, no ships beached far inland, no devastated houses coated in silt, no flipped cars with tyres still spinning emptily in the air, no black plastic sacks filled with contaminated earth and piled up for kilometres and kilometres and never collected for disposal.
The train passed through Fukushima on a broad, indeterminate plain that looked the same as everywhere else in Japan, perhaps somewhat duller, somewhat less lovely or wildly romantic than other parts of the country, where one traversed deep canyons on narrow bridges and then raced through long tunnels, there wasn’t that much in particular to see in Fukushima, and this testified to the classical traditions of East-Asian countries, where the void, the bland and the reserved, was actually an aesthetic quality in itself.
Gilbert travelled during these days as if it were winter. The high summer was passing into autumn, the therm-ometer still neared 30 degrees Celsius every day, and yet it seemed to him as if it wasn’t dry plains that he could see through the window, but rather fields glittering with frost. Time and time again the impression of a wintry journey glided into his mind’s eye, he wasn’t able to see the landscape as it was: hot and sharply spotlighted in sunlight, rich in detail and close-up. The landscape threw back the dazzling light, and everywhere he saw this blazing brilliance, he saw snow.
At Sendai he vacated the cool tube of the air-conditioned super-express train and stepped down shivering onto the platform. The moist heat closed in around him like a thick robe, taking his breath away and immediately isolating him from his surroundings. Gilbert alighted with the secret desire to turn away from everything, he alighted with the fear that this turning away could actually happen, he alighted with the hope of finding something in this dislocation that would open his eyes once and for all about the nature of things. He thought primarily about pines while doing so, he thought almost exclusively about pines. The Japanese pines on their scenic island – were they truly capable of teaching him to see something? And if they were, why couldn’t a completely normal pine, like one in the Brandenburg Forest, for instance, not be just as qualified to do so?
He looked around for Yosa, who had been standing next to him a moment before. Gilbert had stepped down onto the platform first, followed by Yosa, Gilbert had sensed him at his back. Then Yosa had stepped towards him and respectfully waited to see whether Gilbert had noticed the way for the disembarking passengers to exit and continue their journey. Gilbert had stood motionless in the heat, only for a few seconds, and Yosa had been swallowed up by the crowd.
Gilbert stepped to the side to allow other passengers past him, his gaze passing over their faces as he searched for Yosa’s. The Japanese had stopped looking all alike to him a long time ago, but he couldn’t find Yosa’s face anywhere.
They were supposed to change trains here, and Gilbert looked for the way to the lower levels. Over the entrance to the main concourse was an illuminated screen depicting a bamboo forest. Electronic birdsong came from all sides, and as he descended the steps into the cool forest, the singing transformed into rice cakes and gaudy jelly cubes, into ornamental fruit made of sugar on long tables surrounded by crowds of schoolchildren in black-and-white uniforms.
Sendai Station: gigantic, modern, squeaky clean. A pineapple-yellow plastic egg the size of an airport concourse wrapped around glinting stone floors, stylish waiting areas, cavernous washrooms. Gilbert would have liked to have sat himself down at one of the groups of seats and waited a while to see if Yosa re-emerged, just sat there and waited. A Japanese family were sitting very upright in the comfortable seats around a picnic table drinking green tea and eating rice balls topped with tiny dried fish. Gilbert sat at a table near them for a few minutes, sipped a little cold tea from his flask and watched how they put the leftover rice balls, still wrapped in foil, into a wooden box and tied the box with a colourful cloth. All of t
his took place almost soundlessly, amid muted conversations and considered movements. There was no sense of the usual hectic pace one is accustomed to at train stations; this Japanese family’s performance was suffused with the kind of studied elegance one begins practising in earliest childhood.
In the washrooms, too, the atmosphere was akin to that of a luxury hotel. Marble and mirrors, exotic flowers, perfume. A long row of lavish washbasins under lighting that made even Gilbert’s face appear noble in the mirror. No droplets of water splashed around the basins, no crumpled paper towels, no little puddles on the floor. Instead there were extremely spacious cubicles with photoelectric sensors, artificial intelligence. Doors opened of their own volition, water ran when it was required, everything could be used without touching anything. He washed his hands for a long time and considered the fresh lotus blossom next to the tap, which was doubled in the mirror and became a never-ending chain of blossoms in the row of mirrors behind him.
Sendai wasn’t an attractive destination. Sendai was nothing. In the travel guides, Sendai was insignificant, which meant tourists didn’t go there. Remarking that one had travelled to Tokyo could, especially from a European perspective, considerably enhance one’s travel history. One only travelled to Sendai if it was unavoidable, for professional or family reasons, or while in transit. And yet Gilbert had remained completely indifferent to Tokyo. Nothing sparked in his imagination when someone said ‘Tokyo’, the sequence ‘Tokyo – Paris – New York’ left him cold, and even back in Germany he had never harboured ambitions to travel there. Sendai, on the other hand: vapid photographs on webpages, grey high-rises that might just as well be in Calcutta, in Detroit or Vladivostok. The vacuity of Sendai drew him in with a magical energy.
The Pine Islands Page 9
