It was as if there were something, within this country trawled through and depicted over and over by poets for centuries, in this palimpsest of reverence and tradition, of petrified gazes and dusty stones, in the ceaseless renewal of vision, it was as if there were something in a place like Sendai that had somehow been left undiscovered.
Gilbert liked Sendai, even if all he saw of the city was the train station. Perhaps he should have stayed in Sendai, in a depressing little hotel surrounded by car parks, interchangeable buildings, flowing traffic. Wet concrete, vomit-inducing salted plums, nervous animals who can’t find any rubbish bins to rummage through because in this country, this country of the utmost order and cleanliness, there were no public rubbish bins. He liked Sendai, it was a stubborn bias that he couldn’t let go of for the rest of his journey.
Gilbert orbited the bright main hall several times, doing the rounds at all the stalls, peering inside every snack bar, every café. But even if Yosa had suddenly had the idea to buy something, to quickly partake of something somewhere, even if he had abruptly rushed to the washrooms, he would have come back a long time ago. And Gilbert could in no way explain how they had been so unfortunate as to lose one another at this train station.
He made his way through spacious halls and long corridors like the ones in airport terminals. He finally managed to find the right platform. It was rush hour and the platform was full. No sign of Yosa. The destinations blinked on the display board first in Japanese and then in English, they blinked lantern red, blood red on the black board, as if the desired destination was as clouded in secrecy as a Shintō god.
The Japanese were already standing in long rows behind the markings on the platform. The gentle curve of the queues was predefined by white lines on the ground. Every person abided by it with an almost tantalising precision, the train stopped, every carriage aligned with a predetermined point on the platform, the doors opened in the empty space between the queue of people, orderly disembarking, disciplined boarding, a system so mechanised that emotions, scrambling, even out-and- out scuffles never even arose. Gilbert got into position, right at the back, and as soon as he stood in this back row he was overwhelmed by a ‘me first’ restlessness with a potency he had never felt before. No one lost control, everyone waited, just as they should do, they made sure not to take up too much space so as not to disturb the others, they took care not to scrape the ground with their feet or to show any other signs of impatience. Gilbert advanced by a few millimetres, practised psychic pressure through imperceptible but persistent advancement on an old woman, who after a while had no alternative but to take a small step forwards and reduce the space between her and the man in front. Gilbert looked in the direction the train would be coming from every two seconds, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, almost teetering, instead of keeping good posture with his feet together, his arms flat against his body, his face expressionless. He conducted himself in a reckless manner, and he wondered why he was behaving this way, because, really, he placed absolutely no worth on standing right at the front on the markings and feeling the looks of the others on the back of his neck. Yet he couldn’t control himself, no sooner had Yosa gone than he was intentionally jostling, as if he had to give expression to what everyone else was forbidden to do.
He had queued too late and didn’t get a seat. The woman in front of him had hurried to the last free place, she had taken it a few seconds before a schoolboy who had endeavoured to take it. But when she saw the boy hanging off the hand-grip and relentlessly chatting to his friends who had had more luck than him, she gave the seat up for him. Then she stood next to Gilbert for a long time in the packed train with an expression displaying profound offense and at the same time what could be considered an air of superiority, she had demonstrated to everyone what it meant to act selflessly, to prove courteous in every situation in life, but the boy was too gormless to appreciate what had taken place, he chitchatted with his school friends without a care in the world and didn’t pay the old woman any further attention.
This is what ruined Japan, Gilbert could see she was thinking, this is how our morals decayed, this is how even the slightest attempt at a good upbringing vanished. He knew that she knew that he had been the one standing behind her and had exuded a certain unease, and, in spite of the train being packed, he evaded her eyes. He avoided her humble yet haughty, sanctimonious yet insulted, downcast yet merciless gaze.
They travelled underground for a long time. People disembarked at every station along the way, first the schoolchildren, then the workers, later the housewives with their shopping bags and packages. The train emptied out, at some point it became light, and they travelled in daylight through the outskirts. Industrial zones, the docks, the coast.
塩竈
Shiogama
Dear Mathilda,
We had effectively journeyed towards Matsushima without any further holdups, without delay. I did unfortunately lose the young Japanese man while changing trains in Sendai. Without a lapse in my attention (I would like to emphasise this, I bear a certain responsibility for him, which, under the given circumstances, is closer to obligatory supervision), he suddenly disappeared, and it is still a mystery to me how it could have happened. Now, I’m not directly to blame, when it comes down to it he’s an adult and he can do whatever he so chooses to do, but I will, even if it goes against my original intention, interrupt my journey to see whether I can locate him. To save time we wanted to exclude various stations en route to Matsushima, among them Shiogama, a day’s trek from Matsushima. This was where Bashō saw many historical monuments, namely the stone in the sea, Oki no Ishi, and the mountain of the ultimate pines, Sue-no-Matsuyama, both highly compelling places for a young man fantasising about a romantic end, just as much as the picturesque cliffs in Shiogama. Around all of these places linger tales of thwarted love, meaning that – and this I mention only as an aside – I too would consider it appropriate, all things considered, to seek them out. ‘Our love will last ’till / over Sue’s mountain of pines / Ocean waves do break.’ So wrote Kiyohara no Motosuke, bringing entire generations to tears.
At Tagajō Station, six short stops before Matsushima in the city of Shiogama, Gilbert got off the slow train on the Senseki Line and walked to Sue-no-Matsuyama.
The route took him through a completely unremarkable residential area. White low-rises up against the road, no pavement. Older residential buildings with wooden blinds at the windows, newer ones with carports and balconies, apartment blocks behind gravelled parking spaces. All things considered, just a bunch of houses squeezing themselves into narrow plots of land. There was barely enough space in the gap between the fences and the outer walls of the buildings for a pruned, rounded conifer.
The route wasn’t strenuous, but it went steadily uphill. Low walls threw oblique rectangular shadows onto the road. Gargantuan Japanese characters were written in line-marking paint on the asphalt at junctions. The sky was spanned with drooping cables, no cars on the road, not another person in sight.
The noonday heat descended like dust and coated everything with a powdery unreality. An imposing boundary fence caught Gilbert’s eye on reaching a street corner. A pre-cast concrete wall that brought to mind narrow, vertically stacked bricks was set atop a poured concrete base drilled at equal intervals with holes to guide rainwater into the gutter, and with a chain-link fence placed on top of it. In front of this structure the road curved away towards the ultimate pines.
Soon the road narrowed to an inconspicuous footpath where three concrete barriers had been positioned to prevent cars from driving any further. At the edge of the road, at the highest point of the residential estate, were two pines, somewhat dishevelled, and nothing else. If there hadn’t have been an information board no one would have suspected this pair of pines of being anything special. Behind them, where the terrain fell away again, began a vast cemetery. Bashō mentions these graves, but it was the tree shrine that was of interest to him. Bashō had visited
the double-trunked pine of Takekuma, the dense pine grove in Sendai (which he calls the ‘tree canopy’), through which no beam of sunlight could pierce, he had paid tribute to the stone in the sea overgrown with weather-beaten pines and scaled the pine mountain of Sue, one of many famous poem pillows.
The pines marked a place of classical poetry that threw up the question: what remained of the lovers after their farewell? They swore to one another that their affections would remain unchanged even during a separation, until – and here comes the rhetorical figure of impossibility – the sea’s waves deluge the pine-covered peak of Sue. And as it happens, the waves of the most recent tsunamis had never reached the peak, in part because the position of the hill had, over the course of the last few centuries, shifted back a few kilometres from the shore. Nowadays, tree shrines were generally found on well-frequented roads or concreted-over squares, wizened, splitting scraps of wood people categorically need dissuading from seeing – shadows of their former selves, tainted by the bleakness of the modern age, just not worth the visit.
Gilbert carefully walked around the pines and tried to see whether he found traces of Yosa under the bushes, a suicide note, his gym bag, but when he had the sparseness of these pines before his eyes, pines that looked uncared for, neglected in spite of their status as a national cultural monument, he couldn’t envisage Yosa having been there. He must have known that both of these trees, amid the banality of living, were reminiscent of the heroic and romantic past only with the aid of much good faith, and that this place was unsuitable for his purposes.
Unable to abide the pines any longer, Gilbert walked a little down the hill towards the Oki no Ishi, the stone in the sea. The court lady Nijōin no Sanuki had written a poem about unrequited love in the eleventh century, which she compares to a stone:
My sleeve is heavy
and, like the stone in the sea
that remains hidden
even at low tide, wet and
unbeknownst to anyone.
Gilbert quickened his steps. Why hadn’t he hurried straight to the stone? Stone in the sea, doubly forsaken now that the sea had withdrawn from it too. Gilbert ran along the road. His steps pounded against it in the heat. He couldn’t think straight.
He reached the multi-branched intersection out of breath. The stone in the sea was easy to spot. In place of a traffic island in the middle of a roundabout there was a fenced-off pond. Out of this pond a small island jutted up: a few boulders with three crooked pines growing from them. The rock was no longer submerged by water, it lay in a cloudy slop, which was fed by a canal inflow and might just about come up to Gilbert’s knees. The concrete enclosure would allow the water to rise a further two metres, but Gilbert doubted that it would look any better at any other time of year. No sign of Yosa. Gilbert tried in spite of this to see the bottom of the pond. He shimmied all the way around the railings, green algae drifted in the water, here and there a five-yen coin winked, nothing more.
Gilbert stood pressed against the railings and jotted down a haiku, while a small truck arrived from nowhere and circled around the pool in an attempt to manoeuvre its cargo down a side street.
On the high mountain
where the field of graves begins
two pines are standing,
he wrote. The truck had finally found its way and turned around. The haiku was superbly executed, unpretentious and punchy. Gilbert thought it was textbook. In order to take into account the rock in the sea, he continued:
Sea or lack thereof –
the water here is murky,
merely a puddle.
Then he added:
Dear rock behind bars,
please conceal yourself from me,
disappear once more!
One of the haikus he wrote for himself, the other on Yosa’s behalf. Both fell somewhat short of the pine mountain haiku, they sounded mawkish and unbalanced, one could even say bleak. It wasn’t all that clear to him how he should allocate these haikus. The gloomier of the haikus would be the one for Yosa or by Yosa, but the tone was similarly miserable in both. He decided to make up his mind later about which was the jolliest and then would claim it for himself. It was Yosa’s own fault that he had had to be replaced by Gilbert at this point in their journey. Composing a bad poem was the lesser evil. He read the haikus through one more time, then sensed a bubbling disquiet rising up in his body, settling in his chest, bubbles bursting endlessly inside it, and he set off running, back to the train station, took the first available train, rode it three stations to Hon-Shiogama, got off, ran to the harbour, to the bay of Shiogama and its once wildly romantic cliffs.
Vast, desolate, set in concrete. The harbour basin was not made to be walked around on foot. Gilbert rushed along the edge anyway, over broad car parks from which the tourists were jammed into the boats for Matsushima, past the container warehouses, past the crane equipment, silos, mounds of grit and white bales of compacted waste.
Time and again he thought he could see Yosa’s gym bag behind a bollard on the bank, but then it would turn out to be only a rolled-up sail, a T-shirt that had been left behind or a plastic bag.
He paced around the harbour basin in the oppressive heat for a long time, his leather bag pinned underneath his arm, dripping with sweat, thirsty, inappropriately dressed.
He had dressed like the Japanese commuters on their way to their air-conditioned offices. Dark suit, white shirt, well-polished shoes. This seemed an appropriate contemporary outfit for a travelling monk, an ascetic pilgrim, he simply blended in with the masses, even if he had had to forgo a few props that the Japanese office workforce would bring with them in the summer heat, namely a terry-cloth towel that some would drape around their necks to mop up the sweat, which usually broke out on leaving the artificially cooled rooms. Considering how honourable his enterprise was, a towel seemed too vulgar. He had read in the prospectuses lying around in the train carriages about other similar aids, special underwear that absorbed moisture in critical areas without anything being visible from the outside, and he would hate to imagine that the legions of elegant men who stream into the public transport system on a daily basis were wrapped up like babies underneath their expensive fabrics, particularly as it seemed to him that the additional layer of clothing would only make the problem worse, but that might be incorrect, seeing as the Japanese were covered up even in their leisure time, the women wore several layers of loose garments over one another, long-sleeved and short-sleeved and sleeveless T-shirts, knee-length tops over even longer skirts, all of it in sludgy or ashy tones, which, since the rekindling of the tea ceremony in this country, had been the aesthetic sensibility.
Yosa, it suddenly occurred to him, had never sweated. Yosa always appeared to be at the same temperature, lean and cool, elegant. Yosa had never been seen with such a towel. But it was possible that he had also employed certain tricks to give the impression that he wasn’t a human made from flesh and blood and didn’t ever perspire.
The vast harbour was completely still. No sign of unrest or excitement, no clusters of people at the edge pointing enthusiastically into the water, only wide, empty expanses of asphalt and the completely motionless sea. Gilbert slowly made his way back to the station. He sat in a small restaurant and ordered soba noodles. He was brought tea without him having asked. The word tea fluidly passed his lips in Japanese. He had heard Yosa use it, it seemed to have become a reoccurring motif of his project of abandonment, and so he accepted the tea without resistance, even though there were other beverages available.
He let the bowl sit there for a while so that the tea could cool, before finally leading it extremely carefully to his mouth. His face reflected in the surface of the liquid, and he looked at it more closely. It was not his face: it was Yosa’s. He clearly recognised those features, the dark hair, the flatter nose, the form of the cheekbones. He swirled the bowl so that the chin with its goatee came into view. Yosa’s face shyly smirked and he tried to stealthily duck to the side, but Gilb
ert jolted him back with the tea bowl and held him tightly in his sights. Yosa recoiled, turned his head away, closed his eyes. Then he gave up and looked Gilbert directly in the eye, subserviently, resignedly. Gilbert felt as if he was imploring him to do something, but Gilbert didn’t know what. He didn’t know anything any more. He sat on a plastic stool outside a Japanese noodle bar, outside the awning the sun fell mercilessly, he had placed his leather bag on the floor between his feet and gripped it tightly with his ankles and his lower legs. He recited the poem he had written for Yosa in his head.
Dear rock behind bars,
please conceal yourself from me,
disappear once more!
A young woman cleared away his tray. She came back with a cloth, wiped down his table, straightened the chairs. When he was sure that she wouldn’t be bothering him any further, he bent back over his tea bowl. Yosa’s face had gone, he only saw himself.
He didn’t touch the tea. He bought two ice-cold bottles of milky, sugary isotonic water from a vending machine. He was completely dehydrated. It was possible that he’d been hallucinating. He emptied both bottles, threw them away in a rubbish container in the station and got on the train to Matsushima. Maybe Yosa had missed the connection in Sendai, perhaps he had been urged on by the crowd and sensibly stopped at the next destin-ation, where their paths would surely cross once more. Perhaps Yosa had already gone to the pine islands.
The Pine Islands Page 10
