The Pine Islands

by Marion Poschmann

  Yosa Tamagotchi, son of a tea trader, wore a false beard. Restrained and dutiful by nature, he had been teased for being a girl since he was a child. He drank mostly tea, hardly ever cold beverages, almost never alcohol. He was invested in body care, in bath essences and perfume, in nice clothes. This is where he acted out his sense for aesthetics, he liked going shopping. A derisive label for these young types had been around for some time in Japan: they called people like him the ‘herbivore men’ or ‘grass-eater men’. For people like him sets of artificial beards were available, somewhat sparser so that they would seem all the more real, beards in slightly unseemly shapes, which would give their wearer that certain something, a whiff of nonchalance, even recklessness, qualities that his upbringing hadn’t provided him with and which he couldn’t see himself developing. His only friend studied at a different university, they had lost touch. He had never had a girlfriend. His father despaired because he hadn’t taken over the tea business. His mother had withdrawn her support and empathy for the same reason. He was interested in soft skin and after finishing his studies in petrochemistry he wanted to develop skin creams with seaweed extract. His parents found this unacceptable. The artificial beard could only stay affixed for a few days. While hiking in the forest the current model had fallen off his chin without him noticing. There were further specimens in Yosa’s gym bag. Gilbert ought to take care not to put excessive pressure on the bag.

  At some point the snivelling eased off. The forest still shuddered sometimes, then Yosa’s breathing quietened down, and Gilbert could hear that he had fallen asleep. Alone in the dark, there was nothing left for him to do but wait for the ghosts. He fancied that it was getting easier to make things out, that his eyes had become accustomed to the equalising greyification, that when he looked up he could discern the anthracite grey foliage standing out against the night-grey sky.

  The last time Gilbert had been in a forest – it had been a very long time ago – it was with Mathilda. He hadn’t considered himself a forest-lover. At first Mathilda had made him take trips into the woods with her, and he couldn’t say that he had enjoyed it. It was during his time as a visiting professor in the US, which had led to nothing in terms of his career progression. He would have been better off staying exactly where he was and winning a post in Germany, but in the conviction that it could be beneficial for his career he went to an insignificant university for two semesters in the provinces, and his career plateaued giving poorly attended German courses in which he would confront his students with a cultural theory text every once in a while.

  He spent most of his time at his desk in the small rented timber house, he looked out over cultivated lawns and majestic trees, awaiting autumn.

  In October, Mathilda came to visit for two weeks. Soon the leaves began to change colour, it was only in a few parts of the world, they say, that it was as spectacular as it was in North America, in the region of the Great Lakes. It can be observed in only a few places in the world because a large part of the world’s surface consists of evergreen plants, tropical rainforests or conifers. Central Europe, as in Canada, as in New England, had large areas of deciduous forest, in Central Europe the turning of the leaves doesn’t create that much of a fuss, it’s regarded as a matter of course, a natural phenomenon that one takes as much for granted as the weather. Maybe someone poeticises the season or the flash of colour every once in a while, The beech forest flushes autumnally, like a patient inclining towards death; The leaves are falling, falling as though from far away, as if distant gardens were withering in the sky; but these are singular examples of poetic eccentricity.

  In North America, on the other hand, the turning of the leaves provokes a hysterical euphoria that compels people out of their homes and into the woods. The cause is the sugar maple that grows particularly extensively at this latitude, from which bronze maple syrup is harvested and whose foliage in certain weather conditions displays a scarlet red, madder red, pontifical red. The miracle lasts a couple of days, and then the leaves turn brown, wither and fall from the branches. Prior to this, though, it runs through the entire spectrum from dark green to light green, yellow and orange to fire red and deep red, and this spectacle of colour blazes through the entire country, heading down from the north. Throughout the autumn months foliage-spotters give updates on the state of various spots, announcing the beginning, the flux with its coloured gradients, the peak, the dazzling red and its abeyance so that interested nature-lovers have the opportunity to betake themselves to each of these places for the great erubescence.

  Mathilda came to visit so that she could be closer to him, but she also came to see the turning of the leaves.

  Not from his desk, nor from the lavish gardens surrounding his wooden house, not anywhere in the spacious estate (which, in German terms, would be categorised as a park) was a sign of the colouration to be found. In the Foliage Reports that started on Labor Day on the first Monday of September and were updated every three days, the map of the northeast states was resplendent in a seamless green. But Mathilda was burning to see the red maple forests, and she was determined to travel long distances, therefore, as far as Gilbert’s professional obligations allowed, they indeed travelled extensively on this most expansive of continents.

  The turning of the leaves facilitates pure presence, up to a certain degree it is unforeseeable, it is difficult to plan for, and certainly can’t be done far in advance. Those who desire to see the red autumn leaves must cast off everything, must leave everything behind, and go.

  They drove with a rental car to Maine and Vermont, they drove along the Kancamagus Highway through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, they drove to Canada. Gilbert had found these trips in remote forests ridiculous. After hours in the car driving down the same expressways and rural highways, after hours of medi-ocrely coloured trees endlessly gliding by on both sides of the car, still green at the bottom, going reddish at the tips, absolutely unspectacular and no different to the ones found along the autobahn in Spessart, after many monotonous hours they would get out somewhere at a recommended place, enter the forest, and the trees would be even harder to make out than they were before.

  They often fought on these road trips. The temperature remained above average, the leaves didn’t change colour. It was only after Mathilda had already left that the first autumnal cold period set in, the foliage flamed up, his house was surrounded by tremendous flares, and the crimson splendour crushed him because it had come too late. It was too late, it couldn’t be fixed, and he was alone.

  Dear Mathilda,

  An itinerarium is a travel guide that presents the most common paths and roads, information regarding lodgings, costs and transport, and also offers up the experiences of those who have already tackled this very same route.

  Bashō’s travelogue bears the title Oku no hosomichi; oku is usually translated as hinterland, backroads, interior, deep north, etc., but the geographical significance of the province or heartlands aside, oku can also be read as human interior and means less the body and its innards and far more the inner landscape of the human consciousness. Therefore, Bashō’s travels can also be read as a mental excursion, they can be read as an adventure of the spirit.

  In the West, St Bonaventure undertook a spiritual journey not dissimilar in character to Bashō’s travels in the East. In his Itinerarium mentis in Deum he describes the mind’s road to God, whereby it should be noted that it is less a travelogue and more a manifesto for contemplation. Just like in Zen Buddhism, a didactically motivated meditation practice is exercised that has the goal of not only promoting serenity and wellbeing, but also of leading the adept to enlightenment – Bonaventure’s method also culminates in the mystical union – and the complete spiritual disenfranchisement and discouragement of Christian laypeople through a pyramidically structured church is presumably attributed with there not being such a systematic approach that guarantees divine vision in our cultural sphere.

  What I’m driving at is that our inwar
d journey is taboo, that this interior is not only a divine space and therefore looking inward is regarded as an imposition, but that it is actually difficult to locate. When Bashō contemplated a pine, what was so inward about it? someone might rightly ask, and I ask myself too, how someone could read the writings of Bashō, which are so explicitly to do with nature, places of note, and tribulations on a tangible walk, that is, purely with the outside world, as a literature of the inner world. If the outside world is to be placed on equal footing with the space of consciousness, then the distinction between inside and outside is pointless. But it’s precisely this, I suspect, that is Bashō’s approach, and it is precisely this that made him so famous. Bonaventure found God in things and through things, Bashō conversely finds things in and through God.

  And we – seeing as we don’t understand this inner world – cannot know whether a difference may ultimately lie in the opposite approach or not.

  He awoke from a jolt that went through his entire body. It was already light. Yosa had wanted to slink away to answer the call of nature, found that the rope wasn’t long enough and had attempted to climb out of the noose inconspicuously, but had toppled over in the process and had achieved precisely that which he had wanted to avoid, namely, attracting Gilbert’s attention. Gilbert raised himself from the moss, stowed the rope away in the gym bag and began to untangle the safety line that, insofar as theirs was concerned, had recovered its yellowness and now advantageously contrasted with lengths of blue, green and yellow-and-black plastic tape.

  Without further ado, they followed the tape until they found the beaten track, soon reaching the official path, the car park, the bus stop. It wasn’t long until the bus came. They stood clearly visible at the edge of the road. The bus didn’t reduce its speed and drove past.

  Yosa sighed. It’s the same bus driver as yesterday, he asserted. He recognised us. He mistook us for ghosts. No one comes back from this forest.

  They spent three hours at the bus shelter. The next bus stopped and brought them to the train station, where they took the train to Tokyo.

  千住

  Senju

  Gilbert dreamt that he was once again, yet again, still, sitting on a train. They were travelling past Fuji, travelling for hours without the mountain getting any closer, without the landscape altering. They were going fast, indeed he could hear the sound of a speeding train, but at the same time they stayed permanently fixed in the same place, here, beleaguered by an impermeable grey that pressed against the window.

  Theoretically, they had already travelled past Fuji the day before, past the sacred mountain, the emblem of Japan. When taking the Tōkaidō Line south from Tokyo, one was afforded – weather permitting – a view of Fuji. The train company even used an image of a Shinkansen in front of the slumbering volcano beneath a red evening sun in its promotional material, it had panorama carriages available where one could sit on a swivel chair in front of a very large window. On the outward journey Gilbert hadn’t thought of taking a look at the mountain, he had been of the opinion that they were headed for this mountain anyway. But the mountain could not be seen from the Aokigahara forest because the trees obscured everything. Now it had started to rain lightly, the landscape lay beneath clouds and mist, Gilbert could see a few mountainsides breaking through, their peaks hidden in the fog – was one of them Fuji? If it was then he wasn’t able to differentiate it from the other forested foothills of the mountains, and it would only show itself to those who knew it, who were able to determine it by its degree of inclination and who were not dependent on the snowy, fondant icing peak, on the characteristic crater, on the majestic splendour of its full form.

  Yosa huddled in his seat and slept, his arms wrapped tightly around his gym bag. This would have been the perfect moment for him to make himself useful, point out Fuji, give a talk about it, read out loud from his book, act as tour guide, but he was just a hopeless case.

  When the conductor came, Gilbert enquired as to what section of the journey Fuji would appear. The conductor was able to readily provide highly detailed information. He nodded and specified a time, gave the exact minute they would pass Fuji. Then he hesitated and gave the subsequent minute instead to allow room to manoeuvre, apologising profusely that the service was already running with a thirty-second delay, but adding that they might still make up the time.

  Gilbert stubbornly pursued the second hand of his watch, pressed himself against the window ten minutes before the given time, stared at the drizzle and at the droplets running down the window pane, and even though he was sure that he could one hundred per cent rely on a designated time in strictly regulated Japan, he didn’t want to rule out the possibility that his watch was running fast or slow, he stared into the rain as a precaution, for almost twenty minutes he stared intently through the haze, but there was nothing outside that he could focus on, and Fuji was nowhere to be seen.

  Learning to die. The journey that serves to distance oneself from everything, in order to get closer to something, was nothing more than a contemplation of the space that resulted from the journey itself. A move that followed the expansion of the mind, in the space between ‘here’ and ‘there’, while the mind itself, one truly hopes, would find peace; thoughts put themselves in order, the whirlwind of things slows down a little, finding its way back to a long-forgotten form, a place in which the vague and unknown, that which is constantly changing, can be observed. One follows the subtle shifts, the illusory imagery, one really hopes to become clearer about one’s own self, that most elusive of things.

  Gilbert regarded the tranquil face of the sleeping Japanese man, whose cheek was pressed against the gym bag, and suddenly felt immensely disappointed. Fuji was out of eyeshot, the Japanese man expressed not the slightest, but really, not even the slightest emotion that he could discern, and on the excursion into the suicide forest there had also been as good as nothing to see, since he couldn’t in any good conscience describe the rotting clothes of the dead and a few loose bones as ‘must sees’. He felt the disappointment rise from the centre of his chest and enclose his skull in a glutinous fog that arrested all of his mental activity.

  When he awoke he found himself back in his hotel room with the white cubes. They had arrived early that evening, had lain down straight away and lost consciousness. Gilbert still felt dazed. Every movement was difficult, and all his joints ached, as if he had lain on a mound of crooked branches. Yosa was making noise in the bathroom, white steam rose from underneath the door.

  Dear Mathilda!

  The suicide forest Aokigahara proved to be a flop and we immediately returned to Tokyo. It has confirmed that the young Japanese man’s fancies are unrealistic, and I do not want to waste any more time on his shambolic projects. Thus we’re commencing the Bashō trip without further delay. Bashō broke free of the then Edo – modern-day Tokyo – with his sights set on the shrouded Fuji and the cherry blossoms of Ueno. After the first leg of the journey he spent the night in a place called Senju, the first post station on the Northland road. Bashō named the starting point of his journey ‘The Crossroads of Illusions’ in his travelogue. We can get to both Ueno and Senju from our hotel in no time at all on the underground, it would only cost us the morning. Yosa suggested that, seeing as I’ll only be in Tokyo once, we could visit the gardens of the old Imperial Palace, which I’m reluctant to do because I didn’t make this long journey to Japan only to see my progress hindered by the pleasure-seeking masses at beloved tourist spots. However, Yosa is obsessed with this idea all of a sudden and has been going on and on about how these Imperial Gardens would be the ideal preamble for our actual destination, the pine islands of Matsushima, because they contain a large stand of imperial black pines. So as not to put him in a foul mood, indeed, essentially to motivate him, I have succumbed. Nevertheless, after the experience in the forest, I don’t have any great expectations regarding the imperial pines and I also no longer place any faith in Yosa’s suggestions; the whole lot has proved how an undisci
plined mind allows itself to be overwhelmed by muddled feelings and drifts towards irrational and meaningless acts. I had expected more from a Japanese man. And so it’s left up to me to keep my composure, without making my misgivings apparent in the slightest, to accompany him to these pine gardens in accordance with the Zen device: action without action.

  As the door to the wet room swung open, a white cloud swelled up out of it. Only gradually did the outline of a narrow figure in a white bathrobe appear, an apparition in the unknown place between white and white. Gilbert held his breath. The boy appeared translucent, fluid, whittled down. Gilbert was overcome by a faint fear, he didn’t dare speak to him, as if Yosa could simply evaporate if addressed too fiercely. The boy, still visibly exhausted, walked over to his gym bag and rummaged around for a fresh false beard.

  Before freshening up himself, Gilbert sent Yosa out into the world on a little errand. He asked Yosa to buy him the socks that were atrociously cheap in every supermarket, thin ones, socks that wore out in the blink of an eye, a disposable product in Japan. It wouldn’t do any harm to have some new socks on him, even if he didn’t necessarily think he needed any. And he wanted to be alone for a while. He found it unpleasant to use the bathroom while Yosa was in the room. He was only able to move with the most extreme caution when going about his washing routine and made efforts to avoid making any noise whatsoever since it became apparent to him that the Japanese boy reacted with great sensitivity to it afterwards. The toilet apparatus didn’t only offer warm flushing water and a heated toilet seat, it also functioned as a stereo with a wide selection of soundscapes including the sea, rain showers, waterfalls of various heights and babbling brooks, but also tweeting birds, the wind in desolate treetops, coastal storms, as well as all of Mozart’s violin concertos. The mania with cleanliness in this country had gone so far that they even wanted to flush away filthy noises with water sounds. Yosa would put the highest waterfall on while performing his ablutions, so that Gilbert could in fact never tell whether he was showering or brushing his teeth, but since figuring out the point of this device he himself had become self-conscious. Must one really draw attention to their undertakings in the bathroom by placing a layer of noise underneath it? Didn’t the intensified water noises only drastically heighten the feelings of shame? Didn’t it force people to listen to what else was going on when usually no one pays any attention whatsoever to such things? Gilbert for his part refused to play a background sound given that these were natural processes, but mindful of Japanese customs, he was ashamed not to. And so he sent Yosa out for socks, listened in the corridor for the sound of the lift doors closing, and only then did he undo his belt and go into the bathroom.