“The Pine Islands” by Marion Poschmann (translated by Jen Calleja)

This a strange, short novel. It begins, “He’d dreamt that his wife had been cheating on him…. He couldn’t recall later on whether he had been shouting at her (probably), struck her (surely not) or spat at her (well, really, a little spittle may very well have sprayed from his mouth while he was talking animatedly at her), he had at any rate gathered a few things together, taken his credit cards and his passport and left…. In the plane en route to Tokyo he drank green tea, watched two samurai films and repeatedly reassured himself that he had not only done everything right, but that his actions had indeed been inevitable.” Thus begins Gilbert Silvester’s sojourn in Japan. He is a pretentious associate lecturer, severely disappointed he has yet to attain professorship. Gilbert researches the depiction of male beards in art. “He clung on to words that had long fallen out of usage and on to implements of a past age, there was something antiquated about him. Indeed, he had tried to offset it with postmodern ties and neon-coloured pocket squares. To no avail. He was regarded at the university as a reactionary aesthete.” Purchasing the works of Basho upon landing, Gilbert sets out to retrace the poet’s pilgrimage to Matsushima, the bay of pine islands. “The travelers to Matsushima were lunatics, moonstruck, eccentric. They composed their own sacred legends, everything was worthless to them apart from poetry, and for them poetry stood for the spirit’s path to nothingness.” Gilbert befriends a young man, Yosa, about to commit suicide on the subway tracks and ropes him into becoming his traveling companion. “The outer suicide and the inner suicide, he said to Yosa, are completely different things. Basho strove for the inner suicide, he wanted to be free of his ego in order to be freed up for his poetry.” Instead of tourist sites, Yosa takes Gilbert to the most famous suicide spots in Japan, while Gilbert tries to nudge Yosa to visit Matsushima with him. “He thought almost exclusively about pines. The Japanese pines on their scenic island—were they truly capable of teaching him to see something? And if they were, why couldn’t a completely normal pine, like one in the Brandenburg Forest, for instance, not be just as qualified to do so?”