The Pine Islands

by Marion Poschmann

  While the receptionist explained all of the technical gadgetry at his disposal as if Gilbert had never operated an electric switch before, while he praised the mosquito net over the window and stressed that one would be able to see the sea through the netting if it wasn’t as misty and cloudy as it was currently, Gilbert perceived the shadow sloshing around the plastic capsule of the bathroom, he concentrated on the uniform folds of the grey curtains and attempted to keep up his appreciative smile throughout the entire demonstration.

  He would be on the reception the whole night, the receptionist said finally, full of pride. Even if someone took over his post every now and again for a couple of hours, there would always be someone to attend to him, he said as he was leaving, and it suddenly became apparent to Gilbert that no other guests were staying at the hotel.

  He pictured himself for a moment wandering the corridors at night, his teeth blackened and a stiff, heavy robe of Japanese lacquer hanging from his shoulders.

  Then he showered. He drank a cup of green tea. He picked up his umbrella and made his way to the bay.

  Dear Mathilda,

  A travel guide to the pine islands ought really to describe the route that leads to them. From an external perspective, the itinerary is easy to explain. You get on a train and you’re there. The decisive question, however, is whether this route also leads to an inner understanding of the phenomenon of the Japanese black pine, so that at the end one is able to see a pine. Any decent itinerary should bring the black pine out from the void in such a way that the traveller sees before their eyes not only the pines themselves but also their infinite bifurcation back into the void, it must so enrich the traveller’s experience of this abstract void with images that a sensory gateway opens up before them. Waking dreams, images that surface just before the onset of sleep when our functions of thought gradually come to rest, images that still accompany our consciousness on waking, shortly before the return of routine quotidian thought, hypnopompic hallucinations that emerge when a notion is transformed entirely into images, showing a thought in its pre-conceptual, not yet comprehended state, before the synthesis sets in; images, then, which must be able to accompany all my ideas, even when not everybody can always succeed in eliciting them semiconsciously and only half-awake. Are they dreams, daydreams, reveries? Illusions, conceits, visions? These apparitions are said to be delusional, and yet they constitute the base, the abyss of every thought, every feeling. I wanted to cultivate the futile image of the pine from them.

  Gilbert had no desire to immediately walk back down the hill he had so laboriously climbed. He avoided the road he had taken and remained for a while at the same altitude. A panoramic view. Haze in the bay, a few shapes, flecks, much of it couldn’t be made out. As always, an exaggerated amount of fuss had been made over a banal landscape. From above, the islands just looked like mossy stones in the fog. Was he disappointed? He really didn’t know.

  Well, at least his project of abandonment had been a success. He had distanced himself from everything, as far as was humanly possible. Tokyo could be regarded as far away, and Matsushima was a good distance further. That the young Japanese man was no longer accompanying him he took to be an advantage. From then on, no one would be able to distract him from committing his time to the pines, the moon, nature even. He had always had to keep one eye on Yosa, the boy had always been too uptight, it was impossible to ever relax in his presence, let alone concentrate on something. All hindrances to the project had disappeared in one go. Gilbert almost hoped that Yosa wouldn’t reappear.

  A park on the crest of a hill, lawns, benches, pines. Pines upon pines, it was almost too much for him. According to legend, Saigyō had been here and had met a young monk under the pines. This monk presented him with a kōan that he couldn’t solve and, ashamed, Saigyō fled – without having reached the pine islands. Gilbert would have liked to have known what unfathomable riddle the wise travelling poet had been posed. Saigyō Modoshi no Matsu. ‘The-Park-of-the-Pine-Tree-that-Sent-Saigyō-Home’. Gilbert wondered at how little it took to dissuade the celebrated pilgrims of this country from their mission. That said, the people here were hypersensitive and liable to take offense at trivialities. This, he decided, wouldn’t happen to him. He would not be stopped, slight annoyances simply bounced off him, on the path of asceticism he’d chosen a little frustration was inevitable. He sat on a bench and contemplated the islands below. It was only then that he noticed the ear-piercing cicadas. They sounded electric, like an alarm system. He couldn’t get the islands in his sights, they remained out of focus, veiled. It almost seemed to him that the haze was still thickening. Something began to emerge from out of the bushes – just a fox that stared at him stonily, not that that helped ease Gilbert’s fear. Defenceless, he sat on the wooden bench, completely at the mercy of what was coming – not a human soul in the vicinity. The fox sniffed the air, Gilbert didn’t move. Then the animal seemed to have come to an informed decision, it set off, trotted past the bench, trotted past Gilbert and disappeared between the tree trunks. Gilbert got up. The sea sparkled for a matter of seconds beneath the haze, then misted over once more. What was he waiting for? To the islands.

  Gilbert found the famous Matsushima Bay installed with pontoon cranes and construction equipment. The port’s defences had sustained damage during the Tōhoku earthquake, the waves had rolled over the promenade and had devastated many buildings on the waterfront. The terrain immediately behind it was steep. Overall, just as the receptionist had said, the damage in Matsushima had been limited. Construction-site fencing blocked off the front windows of a row of shops. Other shopfronts were still covered with newspaper. But a few small souvenir shops had finished their renovations and were showing off their elegant dark wooden decor and their colourful wares. Gilbert bought a fried rice dumpling at a snack kiosk. He would not eat oysters from the gravelly banks, nor seafood, nor fresh fish from the bay. Could one really know which stretches of the coast had been reached by the radioactive water from Fukushima? The hotels, huge caskets in the Japanese post-war socialist style, had remained unharmed or had already been completely rebuilt. But there was not a tourist in sight. Empty bus parks, sealed-up houses, a ghost town. He looked searchingly past the buildings covered with scaffolding and tarpaulin for a way to the beach.

  The waves arched, licking the sand, melting away in white foam. They crashed against the rocks, atomised into a spray. Thin black seaweed swayed in the water, snaking around the low shoreline, and he thought of Mathilda’s hair, the way it unfurled when she lay in the bath, slender eelgrass, its buoyant toing and froing.

  Bashō came ashore on the island of Ojima. He came over the water from Shiogama in a rented boat and landed at Matsushima Bay in the evening with his travelling companion Sora.

  Gilbert reached Ojima via a red wooden bridge. Zen monks had meditated here for decades on hard stones, this was the point of the bay at which the pine islands culminated in the mightiest of all the islands. A dirt path led along the bank, over exposed pine roots, past grottoes occupied by squatting Buddhist statues, weather-worn, encrusted with verdigris, highly dignified. Gilbert kept his distance from them, they projected a repellent greatness, a centuries-old eeriness which prevented any living being from getting too close to them. He sat beneath a tree beside the lake, leant back against the scaly bark and looked out over the bay.

  An overhanging pine branch with black-green needles, the glittering water behind it, the islands in the evening light. From his position he could only see a part of the bay, the cluster of islands opposite blocked his view into the distance, but he wanted to stay where he was, look at the pines, wait until the moon rose above Matsushima.

  That is, if the moon was going to rise at all. He hadn’t the faintest idea what phase of the moon it was, full moon, new moon, his planning had really failed on this point, he had to just wait and see. Treacherous clouds might gather overhead. At that moment the sky cleared. The pines on the island opposite clung to the rocks and gen
tly swayed in the breeze. Behind them was the deep-blue sky, the shining sea.

  Thousands of needles

  Thousands of kilometres

  in front and behind.

  It was good to lend the poems a sense of wistfulness, but on the other hand they shouldn’t be too personal. He made another attempt, as unspecific as possible, as vivid as possible, he tried to make the lines sound as if they had been written by Yosa.

  Far away from home

  Pine trees as old as the stones –

  fleeting clouds above.

  This haiku examined the relationship between durability and ephemerality, the unremitting transitoriness of things, of travelling. He was rather taken with it and wrote on with gusto:

  Screen of conifers

  Impenetrable shadows

  tougher than the rocks.

  For Yosa he wrote:

  In the fading light

  waves lap against the islands,

  susurrating pines.

  Was he able to see? The pines, their beauty, their contours, their details, a complete picture? He didn’t know where he should focus his attention, on the conifers opposite, on the bizarre rock formations protruding out of the water, on the pine branch hanging in his field of vision which, on the one hand, was distracting, but on the other hand evoked the typical pictorial charm that he recognised from countless paintings. The view strained him. He had spent the whole day in the heat climbing asphalted-over hills, running across dreadful harbour grounds. He pressed his back against the warm bark, closed his eyes, listened to the wind running through the branches. The scent of resin. Creaking pine cones. Swishing needles. Rasping branches.

  He once more closed his eyes, then closed his eyelids even tighter, sunk deeper into his exhaustion, allowed himself to be pervaded by the wind, by the scent of the pines, by the breath of the islands.

  Out from the remote water of the darkness, half sleep, half dream, the overgrown rocks emerged once more, rounded like black jellyfish, brittle like dried tufts of seaweed, islands, dim silhouettes in the blackness, bubbles of darkness that held their shape, that were given a form, while behind them the darkness faded, hard cut-outs over the bottomless horror, the unreasonable, furious froth. This. This is. It. Finally. Black bubbles that swirl. That burst.

  He got up and wandered among the pines, between their pillowy bushels of needles, in half sleep, a fakir sleep of the constant wind. He stroked the hard, black needle points, sunk them into the back of his hand to check whether or not he was in fact sleeping.

  From behind the trees Yosa appeared – taller than usual, at least that’s how it seemed to Gilbert – pine needles in his beard, little black needle beard, then (a tad too mischievously, at least that’s how it seemed to Gilbert) Yosa bowed deeply before him. And rightly so, he thought, the young man had caused him a great deal of trouble that day, after he, Gilbert, had sacrificed his own needs again and again to take care of him.

  Yosa declared that he had been dead for a long time. That he needed Gilbert to finally deliver his suicide note to his parents. He passed him a document with a Japanese inscription, which Gilbert took with both hands. His parents lived in Kanazawa. Would Gilbert be so kind as to take the letter there. His parents have been waiting for it for years. For decades. Centuries. Eternity.

  A breeze made the pines shiver, and as if all the needles were falling at once, hard, fine spines, Yosa disappeared behind a curtain of murmurs, a curtain of wind. Gilbert wanted to follow him, but there was nothing there. There just wasn’t anything there.

  He woke up, his fists balled around dry, brown needles. The moon was over the bay, almost full, and immersing the islands in an unearthly light.

  Shadowlike pine branch,

  unfathomable water –

  still in the moonlight.

  Up the slope in the dark, beneath the street lamps, inside the booming song of the cicadas. Their spine-chilling chirping swaddled him like a cocoon, nestlike interwoven tones, a piercing ball of dried twigs that rolled with him upwards, turning with every step, inevitably, against gravity, and against all reason.

  It smelled of the sea and plants warmed by the sun, emanating their herby scent in the cooling evening. The hotel lobby was illuminated. Outside, through the glass door, Gilbert saw a crumpled gym bag on the gleaming stone floor. Before he could enter, the receptionist bustled over, picked up the bag and carried it away. Gilbert stood in front of the reflective glass looking at the cleared floor for a long time, saw his own thin reflection standing there and looking back at him. When he finally walked through the hall with unbearably loud clacking footsteps, tempestuous, troubled, no one else was there.

  Back in the hotel room he switched on all the lamps, filled the kettle with water, turned on the television, the air conditioning, flicked every switch in the room as if it would mask the dreadful feeling of having been forsaken. He lay on the bed, picked up the remote control.

  The news. Gale on Kyūshū. Mild earthquake in the Kansai region. A ceramics exhibition will open soon. Train delays due to a person being struck by a train. A local politician speaks into a microphone. Sumō wrestlers, practically naked, in front of a Shintō shrine. Weather forecast. Adverts. A bright red maple leaf spins over the map of Japan, it sinks down over the island of Hokkaidō and flashes nervously while green leaves pop up over the other regions, each time in places where Gilbert presumes there are the largest cities, Tokyo, Ōsaka, Hiroshima, Kanazawa, comically drawn leaves, thickly outlined, kimono patterns, teapot decorations.

  Last year’s autumn depicted in fast forward, red maple foliage making its way from north to south, from the coasts to inland, from the mountains to the flatlands, bright red leaves sweeping in a wave over the country, leaving behind a faded yellow where the foliage had peaked and had in truth not yellowed, but fallen.

  A photo from today to end on: red foliage in front of a river at the northernmost point of the country. Travel tips for the Ashikawa region, where brown bears roam through forests and it’s not all that far to the Russian island of Sakhalin. Red leaves, a complementary red for all the things in this country that stay green. The bamboo. The pines. The tea.

  It would be unthinkable to make a special trip just for a tree back home, just for some leaves! The Japanese maple with its filigreed leaf takes on a carmine red like the American sugar maple when a period of sunny, mild days and cold, frosty nights sets in in the autumn. Japanese television has daily reports about the progress of the changing of the leaves, and a great number of enthusiasts pay attention to this information and set forth, travelling on to the next location. In the past few days Gilbert had become used to the idea of undertaking trips to marvel at trees, a completely useless custom that remained deeply enrooted in Japanese culture. It wasn’t an educational journey in the European sense, one that could be bragged about for many years to come, like when one travels to Rome and will always be a person who has seen the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the baths, the portrait of Innocent X. This viewing of natural phenomena was linked neither with art nor with architecture, nor with history, it was tender and mysterious, and if a form of education were to come from it, it was impossible to explain or recall afterwards.

  Now he saw a deciduous tree, which, like a nightmare, would turn red overnight. All its leaves fall off one after the other, and the tree stands there bare. Without savouring the cardinal-red adornment, the flames, the play of colours. Without following the orderly sequence of the leaves, without him seeing most of them landing in a brook and being carried away by the water. Some get entangled in the overgrown riverbank, some stay hanging from a rock, quivering on the stones, come free and keep going.

  Gilbert turned off the television. He made the tea, turned out the lights, walked over to the window. Outside, more grotesque branches in the secretive moonlight.

  Plant shadows wandered over the wall, staggered noiselessly through the room, swept over the far end, then froze. They paused, skipped the bedsheet, then swung on furthe
r, brushed against his cheeks, washed over him, thinned twigs that touched everything too tenderly for Gilbert to bear. A forest of waifs, disembodied wood, a grey pyre built of shadows. He heard the wind in the pines, heard their monumental whirring, the anti-wood on his wall rose and fell, a long, lonely wandering, and yet … He stood at the window, holding the teacup with both hands. It caught the moon for an instant. Macaques cackled far off in the distance.

  Mathilda wasn’t a big fan of conifers. She particularly loathed sparse firs, the kind older homeowners used to border their gardens, an impenetrable dark wall from inside the property, rigorously trimmed from the outside so that not a single twig jutted onto the pathway. For passers-by there is only the sight of the bare reverse, the sight of snags with dried, brown needles stuck to them.

  Mathilda had two more days of teaching, then it would be the weekend, and then the autumn holidays would begin.

  He would call her, he told himself. Mathilda, sweetheart, he would say. Let’s meet in Tokyo, he made a mental note, it’s all very simple, come meet me in Japan. The leaves are starting to turn.

  Acknowledgements

  The author and translator would like to acknowledge the German and English translators of Bashō and Saigyō – Geza S. Dombrady, David Landis Barnhill and those uncredited – whose work was used as reference to create versions of the haikus and tankas that appear in this book.

  Thanks for reading!

  Join our mailing list to receive Serpent's Tail book news, competitions and extracts.

  Contents

  The Pine Islands

  Marion Poschmann

  Jen Calleja

  The Pine Islands

  Tokyo

  Takashimadaira

  Aokigahara

  Senju

  Sendai

  Shiogama

  Matsushima

  Acknowledgements