The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth, freedom is rooted in one’s capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Gilbert Silvester is lost in his days. One night, a vague dream unsettles him and he is convinced that his wife, Mathilda, has forsaken him for another lover. He censures himself mercilessly the next day, believing himself to be too boring with nothing to offer to anyone, lacking wit and depth of character, and possessing an unfortunate idiosyncratic demeanour that has prevented his professional success in academia. Gilbert’s inner critic is centre stage as he boards a transcontinental flight to Tokyo in this fraught state.
On landing at the Tokyo airport, Gilbert buys a couple of Matsuo Bashō’s novels and a travel guide. Poschmann writes about such important inflection points in her story in a rather unremarkable, matter-of-fact manner. This is quite a clever way to manipulate the flow of the prose; it is easy to empathise with Gilbert’s miserable despondency as he berates himself, his disorientation and exhaustion, and his state of whatever.
He would have liked to have bought himself something to eat, but he felt too porous to make a decision, indeed, he felt veritably transparent, and this transparency had nothing to do with lightness, but was rather a manifestation of his weakness. His ability to take up space, to displace air in order to replace it with his body, seemed strangely impaired. Making his way around the city was difficult, and he sensed that it was the hectic commotion of the end of the working day that was propelling him forwards step by step, as if he was parasitically feeding on the energy radiating from the people around him, while he himself had no impetus, he didn’t know where to turn, and willingly allowed himself to be carried along.
Gilbert wanders among the street crowd until he finds himself at a train station. He notices a beardless young man at the platform readying himself to jump on the tracks before an approaching train. Another inflection point, where Gilbert is offended on behalf of Yosa, the young Japanese man; no, not like this in such a cold, impersonal, unimaginative, and unpoetic way, we will find a better place.
Dear Mathilda,
The young man I’ve taken under my wing in Tokyo will undertake a small trip with me. We are preparing to embark on Bashō’s trail, to take a pilgrimage that might make him see sense. Yosa is overly sensitive, completely self-involved and irreparably spoiled, and thus I proceed on the assumption that it will do him some good to have to tackle long walks on meagre rations and grapple with the beauty of the Japanese countryside, as well as traditional Japanese poetry. Of course, it’s absurd that it has to come to this, after all, this is his country not mine, and I personally – as you may know – have little time, and even less interest, in occupying myself with contemplating plants, waves and mountain ranges on a foreign continent. However, I see no alternative, I cannot leave the young man in this state. He has wrested an agreement from me that we will visit some locations of his choice while on this journey. Among them are the suicide forest Aokigahara and the Mihara Volcano on the island of Izu Ōshima, where the disillusioned throw themselves into the crater if they want a particularly fashionable end.
This book describes a journey, literally (albeit as a work of fiction) to the pine islands of Matsushima and also to the place within the human heart where hope springs eternal. Both Gilbert and Yosa learn to be a bit more irreverent en route their transformation, and to me that is the most attractive part of this tale. Gilbert Silvester finds his way back to himself following Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, and Yosa, unseen, finds his way back to himself as well.
Somehow I have managed to live my years knowing what a haiku is but not who Bashō was, which I tried to remedy as I read the book. Maybe one day I will make time to read his poetry.
