The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann

Author:Marion Poschmann [Poschmann, Marion]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2019-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

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?

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.

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