The Pine Islands

by Marion Poschmann

  Suddenly the curtain fell. Gilbert had managed to grasp not the slightest narrative, no progression, but Yosa relaxed, drew back his hand and informed him that the first piece had come to an end. It had been a quarter of an hour at most, which had nevertheless felt like an infinite expanse of time. The Japanese audience members sitting around them unpacked picnics and consumed them without leaving the velvet seats. Yosa offered him a small, sweet, rubbery ball made of rice flour wrapped in a salty oak leaf. Gilbert ate the sweet, leant back in his seat, listened to the prattling, boisterous multitude, and in a single blow he was pervaded by the tense anticipation of the audience. The Crossroads of Illusions – this is how Bashō had felt as he bid farewell to his previous life and was resigned to the idea that he would hike 3,000 miles. The practice of hiking as a journey through life, meaning that one stands at the crossroads and is able to choose whether one goes or stays, whether one keeps dreaming the dream one is currently dreaming or exchanges it for a different one. And, according to the teaching of Buddhism, when measured against the eternal truth, one choice is as unreal as the other.

  Gilbert now waited for the curtain to rise again. He was ready to give up all resistance. But he primly put his hands in his lap so that Yosa was unable to touch him.

  The actor was now wearing a white robe with a hood that completely covered his face. He also concealed himself behind a parasol, which he half closed, then opened again, put down in the scenery, then picked back up. It was snowing on the stage, the actor’s feet, wearing white, split-toed tabi socks, pushed through the sparse flakes, the stand where he kept placing the parasol was covered with paperboard depicting a snowdrift. The set emitted an altogether depressive atmosphere, and Gilbert wondered whether this performance was really the best thing for Yosa. He himself was now eagerly waiting for the actor to take off the hood and once more show his feminine features. The slow-motion effect, he now realised, solely served the intensifying of a quasi-sacred concentration. And, in fact, the hood did eventually fall back. Gilbert clenched his hands together, eventually the white robe fell and unveiled flame-red brocade, there were multiple costume changes without a pause in the dancing, indeed two dark figures scurried around on the stage who, in their dark clothing, weren’t really there at all, and who, behind the slowly rotating parasol, released the actor of the sashes, the belts, ripped the upper layers of material from his body, and he burst out from behind the parasol in completely new garments. To Gilbert’s astonishment the costume changes took place in a matter of seconds, a real metamorphosis which called for an extraordin-ary amount of dexterity on behalf of the helpers, and enormous agility on the part of the dancer. His respect for the performance grew, because this finesse was also manifested in the gentle, slow-motion movements. He wasn’t entirely sure whether the woman on stage, whose intricate gestures he had grown to admire, should be the one he fell in love with or actually the man enacting this extraordinary control of his body, or whether he didn’t much more wish to be this lithesome actor himself, or, more specifically, to possess his exceptionally stunning beauty. Gilbert furtively tried to hold his own hand in such a perfectly graceful way in the dark auditorium, the way the dancer demonstrated, so utterly enticing, so convincingly feminine, which no woman on this planet would have been able to accomplish. Dear Mathilda, he formulated in the silence, it was an ambivalence that no one could match up to. No one at any rate who was real and alive.

  When they left the theatre it was early afternoon. They squeezed themselves into the overcrowded underground carriage and got off after a few stations at the Imperial Palace Gardens, Kōkyo-Gaien, pine formations on a wide lawn. There was a giggling school group right next to them continuously sucking milkshakes out of disposable beakers through thick plastic straws.

  Touristic stomping around in Tokyo wasn’t exactly what Gilbert had in mind for his abandonment of everything. Abandonment meant not following the promises of this world, and definitely not those that draw in large groups of people.

  Two women in red hiking gear were taking double portraits with the aid of a selfie stick. Gilbert couldn’t stand those things. He had banned his students from using them, not only during teaching time, but in general. Those who wished to learn something from him, he would always announce at the beginning of his sessions, had to be capable of leading a reasonably dignified life. This categorically excluded certain items for personal use. He naturally couldn’t check who kept up to his standards. But here, among the pines, where people were messing about with telescopic sticks, especially here with the pines, he saw once more how sensible his advice had been.

  The pines demanded something of their visitors. They stood peacefully and gracefully, their bundles of needles opened in patient green, lustrous coronas, a hypnotic divergence where a dancer opens a fist, relaxing and splaying their fingers. The pines stood steadily among the restless people, islands of tranquillity, dignified, they had proven their worth over hundreds of years. You had to rise to their level.

  Pines, as if seeing them for the very first time. Pines in the fierce afternoon light, a void, a nebulous black seen through incessant blinking. Pines, their shadows stretched out over the path. Gilbert stepped from one shadow trunk to another, crossed over an immaterial bridge of wooden planks, walked over an abyss too deep to arouse fear, and with the appearance of having been filled in with asphalt, swimming shadows of pine needles on what appeared to be the square in front of the Imperial Palace, intangible branches, bark, pine cones, the Emperor cannot be seen, all that can be seen is his aura in the form of this army of pine trees.

  Gilbert could sense the young Japanese man at his side, who was thankful for the bare minimum of encouragement, and who in this moment seemed even more incorporeal than the shadow of a pine tree. Yosa pointed out that each individual pine tree was carefully pruned into shape.

  The imperial pines could be classified by their aesthetic appearances, just as one does with a bonsai. Chokkan – a formal upright trunk that tapers off at the top and is uniformly green. Mōyogi – an informal upright trunk bent into an S-shape. Shakkan – a perfectly straight trunk tilted to one side at a forty-five-degree angle, as if the tree could fall at any moment. Gilbert liked Sōkan – the double-trunk, forking off in different directions. He found these trees the most generous, whereas the others were thin like giant chopsticks stuck in the ground and also too meagrely needled for his liking. Bundles of needles tallied up at the ends of hyper-controlled branches, condensed into which was the untameable beauty this country was so famous for. Out of politeness he tried to focus on each tree individually and to reverently nod every time, just as he observed the older Japanese couples doing, as they sauntered along the path, topped with battered sunhats, truly absorbed in the contemplation of the pines. Now and again Gilbert believed someone would be pointing at a specific branch, but perhaps they were pointing at something completely different, seeing as he couldn’t make out any special features on whatever branch it was. Yosa, however, appeared to follow the pointing with his eyes, and Gilbert, walking beside him, sensed from the tensing of his body that he straightened himself up with each one of these gazes and inwardly straightened up too, as if he were mimicking the disposition of the pines and gained new energy from the sight of them.

  Fukinagashi, the windswept form, which grows to the side facing away from the weather, Kengai, the cascade, where the tree bows down into the depths from a rocky outcrop, like Bunjingi, the form of the literati, which is characterised by the fact that the pines appeared rather worn, grew irregularly, were somewhat debarked and therefore looked particularly old and natural, they would without a doubt, according to Yosa, come upon this tree form in Matsushima.

  They returned to the hotel early in the evening. Yosa warmed a bottle of sake in the electric kettle and poured hot water over instant noodles. They felt too exhausted to go out and get a decent meal or to even sit at a table in the hotel restaurant. They packed their bags for the next morning and prematurely laid dow
n to sleep. Gilbert turned out the light. Then he got back out of bed, pulled open the curtains and stared for a long time at the colourful neon signs in night-time Tokyo from his bed.

  Just as he was about to fall asleep, Yosa started talking.

  He had only gone out with a girl once. He had invited her to a traditional restaurant. They sat on tatami mats next to a darkly lacquered folding screen that partitioned off their nook from the rest of the diners, and which was so smoothly polished it was almost a mirror. Because the girl was so pretty he didn’t dare look at her, and only looked at the shimmer of her reflected in the screen. When she got up to go to the toilet and her skirt swung around her bony knees, he saw in the reflection that the skirt was in flames. He ought to have been suspicious at this point, if not much earlier, he ought to have realised that she was a fox that had taken the form of a girl. Foxes are masters of transformation and are capable of all kinds of magic tricks. They can start a fire with their snout or the tip of their tail, they can create delusions and spark obsession. The flaming skirt was a clear sign, but Yosa followed the movement of her legs with such a burning fascination that he wrote it off as an optical illusion caused by emotional confusion.

  They spoke very little that evening. They ate a lot: squid and tuna, sliced lotus root and black, sprout-shaped seaweed, jellyfish salad. They ate soup and meatballs, salted plums and tofu skin crisped up like bark. Deepwater prawns, scallops, sweet fried tofu parcels filled with rice and sesame seeds.

  Yosa didn’t dare strike up a conversation, he sat with his head bowed over his food, looked embarrassedly at the tabletop, at the dishes, at the gleaming screen. The girl was waiting for Yosa to broach a topic, for him to lead the conversation so it would be possible for her to steady his flow of words with a broad spectrum of validating noises, as the conventional roles dictated. She commentated on the mussels with ah and oh and yesyes, nodded after every piece of fish, but since he just couldn’t get going she made her own attempts after a while. She posed him questions about his eating preferences, his music taste, his hobbies, the most harmless of queries, but he wasn’t capable of responding to her prompts, his mouth felt parched even though he was endlessly drinking tea, he gave one-word answers, shovelled down huge quantities of rice, ordered more dishes, watched out of the corner of his eye the way she lightly held the chopsticks, stayed silent. In the end she began to talk about herself, perhaps, in order to salvage the evening, or perhaps because he was apparently a good listener and she thought she understood him. She was wrong on this point, because he indeed was listening, but he was barely able to grasp the meaning of what was being said, and he could now only remember fragments of one of the anecdotes she told.

  Her parents had just had their new car blessed, and her brother had driven and written off the car the very next day. He had been extremely lucky to have survived, he hadn’t sustained any serious injuries, but she now questioned her parents’ beliefs, doubted the worth of a Shintō ritual that must have been quite expensive and which ought to ward off accidents happening to vehicles and their passengers. Had her parents made a mistake by not having her brother present at the ceremony, while she had been standing beside her parents in the car park, had endured the bowing and put up with all of it, could it be possible that her parents had given too little money, had she not taken it seriously enough, the recitations and the singing, the hitting of the gong, the stroking of the vehicle with a bushel of white paper strips, the handing over of the consecrated plaque?

  She was struggling with who she was, with the world, it was basically the usual problems with religious tradition that inevitably arose around that age, in retrospect Yosa recognised that this speech was only meant to make him feel at ease, to imply a student-like normality, because when they kissed one another goodbye that evening, or more accurately, when she unexpectedly and briskly touched her lips against his own, the flames flared up once more, burning his mouth. The fox snout sent the burning coursing through his whole body, and he was suddenly certain about what was going on, because he had never experienced such a substantial burn before. He pushed her away from him, turned around and ran away, in a direction that wasn’t even homewards, just away, and when he turned back one more time, he didn’t see her tan skirt, or her white stockings, but an oversized fox tale disappearing around the corner of the street.

  They went to the same school, but from then on he acted as though he couldn’t see her. His parents found his behaviour inexcusable, the parents of the girl were mortified, and the whole school was whispering about what had happened, so that it would have been for the best if he had just jumped from a bridge at the time. But in his confusion, he found himself unable to make any decision whatsoever.

  When he began his university studies, he left the family home and moved to a different city, and even though it had been an extremely humiliating experience, he was grateful for a little space. He had turned down taking over the tea shop, he hoped to start a new life. Nevertheless, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. No other woman had aroused his interest. He was obsessed, enamoured with the fox spirit.

  Gilbert sighed. What should he tell the boy? His students beat themselves up with comparable emotional states, but they weren’t so dogged about it, they loosened up a bit and were much more patient with themselves. And they didn’t camouflage their inhibitions with such flowery language. They knew what things were, they knew in almost unhealthy amounts, which didn’t solve their difficulties, they often made them far more complicated, but this being in the know at least gave them perspective, helped them reach a state of partial apathy that made it possible for them to let unpleasant things wash over them.

  Why didn’t Yosa have even a minimal amount of Buddhist composure, why wasn’t he even the teensiest bit mellow, as one ought to expect from the land of Zen, and where was the almost pornographic eagerness to experiment, whereby the Japanese reputedly succeed in integrating even the crudest obscenities into an excessive sex life without the slightest feelings of guilt?

  Tell me more about foxes, he finally said into the room’s dimness, into the ever-flickering lights, domin-eering, mysterious, shrill. He wanted to try the pastoral mode, which involved meeting people at their level, a rhetorical technique, which he had always found intoler-able because it meant lowering the general standard to the lowest possible degree. The boy, sensitive and easily offended, seemed capable of anything, and it was important not to embarrass him.

  Foxes, Yosa explained obligingly, acquire their magical capabilities with increasing age. They prefer taking on the shape of people who are wealthy and seductive – qualities that foxes apparently find most agreeable in humans. The more experienced and powerful they are, the greater the number of tails they have. They are always hungry and eat vast quantities of food. Most often they induce their transformation by placing a green leaf on their head.

  Super, Gilbert said. He was unbelievably tired. We’ll talk about it more in the morning. Yosa might like to consider whether he had caught the girl with a leaf on her head or even in the vicinity of leaves.

  He could hear from Yosa’s breathing that he hadn’t caught this instruction and had finally fallen asleep. Gilbert drew the curtains and locked out the colourful flickering. The darkness was now dense, and he waited to sink into it. He thought of leaves, colourful autumn leaves and green leaves, of Mathilda beneath bushy branches, he saw swirling leaves in the darkness, swirling trees, the vast forests of Pennsylvania.

  Red maple. Silver maple. Sugar maple. Moose maple. Vermont maple. Sycamore maple. American plane. Flowering dogwood. Tamarack larch. Weymouth pine. Table Mountain pine. Pitch pine. Virginia red cedar. Pennsylvanian ash. Red oak. White ash. Cucumber magnolia. Black tupelo. Redbuds. Sassafras. White poplar. Aspen. Black poplar. American beech. Virginian hornbeam. American hornbeam. Black cherry. Mountain black cherry. Bird cherry. Paper birch. Black birch. Gold birch. River birch. Canoe birch. Swamp birch. Hawthorn. American elm. Slippery elm. Red mulberry. Black oak. No
rthern red oak. White oak. Pin oak. Scarlet oak. Chestnut oak. Tulip poplar. Black willow. Witch hazel. Robinia. Copper beech. Bitternut. Mockernut hickory. Pignut hickory. Black walnut. Crab apple. Persimmon. Hemlock. Balsam fir. Canadian spruce. Common pawpaw. Horse chestnut. Sweet chestnut. A row of alders.

  They stood at the edge of the alder swamp. A single leaf came free and sailed between the branches, until at last it landed on the central reservation.

  Enveloping dusk, the insinuation of evening. Stormy clouds move eastwards, looming and as choppy as the sea, grey rolls of it wheeled onwards by the wind, piling up like unending traffic, the rumbling motorway, the heart of America. Clouds with breasts and battlements, mammatus, castellanus, a huge fortress built from a glistening swarm of jellyfish, they glide overhead, slide by, the jellyfish swirl with their cloudy backs, strands of them break free, stratus fractus, take on a life of their own beneath the oppressive blanket, nimbostratus, it will rain soon.

  仙台

  Sendai

  The next morning, his head was still brimming with foliage – a sack packed tightly with dried leaves. He felt hollow, hollow and weak, as if he were recuperating after a long illness, or as if the oppressive force relentlessly fuelling him had decided to take a break for a while.

  Tokyo – Ueno – Ōmiya – Utsunomiya – Kōriyama – Fukushima – Sendai …

  Everything had already begun to change as they boarded the high-speed train ‘Mountain Echo’ in Tokyo, heading for Sendai, as if Tokyo was the pivot around which the whole country tipped from the familiar into the unknown. While the train they had taken back from the suicide forest and which bore the name ‘Light’ had been very full and – in spite of its brand-new furnishings, loud upholstery and the latest technology – somewhat uncomfortable, the train to Sendai was only carrying a few passengers. And as they travelled north via Ichinoseki and Kitakami towards Morioka the train would empty out further. In Morioka travellers wanting to reach Hokkaidō and the northernmost Japanese islands changed trains. Aomori, Noboribetsu, Sapporo – this was the route that lead to Kamchatka, to the Kuril Islands along the Russian border. Yellowish curtains swayed at the windows, barely keeping out the sun; the other train had had thick plastic blinds. The antique curtains signalled the start of a journey into Bashō’s north, the path of the adventurer and the pilgrim, the yearning, the resolute – was it still?