Craig Arnold's Blog, page 2

Karuizawa - Tokyo

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On the train, contemplating the forest path in Hakushu’s poem. The characters oku “inner part, interior” and michi “road,” recall Basho, the title of his last travel diary, Oku-no hosomichi. It is usually translated into something like “narrow road of the interior.” One could also say “the backwoods.”

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, writes Dante. In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.

Cold and windy, or dark and pathless, what is

Asama-yama, 6

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At breakfast, before driving you back to the train and Tokyo, Tomoko gives you a present. It is a postcard, a blue woodblock print of Asama-yama puffing smoke, seen through a vista of trees so skeletal and sketchy that they look like kanji. Above it is printed what seems, from its layout, to be a poem.

It is Kitahara Hakushu, Tomoko tells you, famous Japanese poet. He stayed Karuizawa, wrote this poem about the karamatsu, those are the pine trees that drop their leaves. It is the very forest you

On Blueberries

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You are volcano man? Satoshi asks. Yes, no. Poetry man. You are like haiku? Yes, very much. I think, Tomoko says very seriously, I think haiku have full of Japanese mind.

And so, with the help of your hosts and a pocket phrasebook, you spend the rest of the evening trying to compose a haiku in Japanese. You have had something in mind, actually, since your first night at the hostel. Basho would sometimes leave poems for his hosts, and you feel it would be a fine tradition to honor.

There is no nati

A Digression Upon the Japanese Word for Volcano

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In kanji, the system of Chinese characters borrowed by the Japanese for their own use, the word for volcano is written

         火山

which pairs the character for fire, 火 hi with the character for mountain, 山 yama.

A literal-minded Westerner might imagine, then, that the word for volcano was pronounced hiyama. But it is actually kazan. Hi and yama are only the names of the characters; they are not what the characters mean. For volcano, what they mean are ka, the aboriginal Japanese word for fire, and

Asama-yama, 6

Somewhere between Onioshidashi-en and the hostel, you take a wrong turn, or several. It would not be hard to do – few of the road names are posted, and the arrows on the signs point in directions that make no sense to you, even if you could read them. You recognize the kanji for north, 北 kita, but it is hard to navigate from only one point of the compass. You stumble on for an hour for two, for four.

Now dark is falling, and you are nowhere near anything you recognize. At times you catch glimpses

Asama-yama, 5

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The next day, by way of consolation, you walk yourself over to Onioshidashi-en, Demon Push-Out Park. In the Shinto pantheon, oni are the red- or blue-skinned demons or devils or ogres who live in hell and carry out all manner of mischief. Oshidashi means to push out – it is also the name of the most common move in sumo wrestling, where one combatant grapples the other and simply pushes him backward out of the ring.

What the demons pushed out at Onioshidashi Park is a lot of lava. When Asama erupt

Asama-yama, 4

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These days you are low on self-responsibility. Only last month Asamayama erupted, throwing lava bombs a kilometer from the crater. A four-kilometer exclusion zone has been declared around the volcano, a perimeter that barely excludes the highway and the shrine of Onioshidashi-en to the north. Climbing it now would be, as with so many of your plans, a bad idea. This does not make it seem any less attractive. Whatever holds you back, it is not self-responsibility.

There is a game you would play in

Asama-yama, 3

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Her name is Keiko, his is Shin. He is the more sociable of the two. His profession is sumi-e, traditional ink brush painting, and in the sitting room of the Blue Berry, beside an underpowered fireplace, he shows you his portfolio. Mostly he paints rocks – impossibly jagged rocks, ornamental rocks, cliffs bristling with pine trees. It is hard to get a sense of their scale.

 

            Is it a brave pine

                      on a cliff edge or a rock

                                  sprouting a bo

A Digression Upon Feet

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Life in Japan requires much attending to the disposition of one’s feet.

When you enter the door of a private home or hostel, you will be faced with a boundary – marked perhaps by single step up, a wooden bench, or the edge of carpet or tatami. This is the impermeable membrane between outside and in. At no point should your shoes pass or even rest on this boundary. At no point should your stocking feet touch the outside floor. Rather they should be inserted directly into a pair of indoor slippers,

Asama-yama, 2

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You have hiked uphill for three hours when you begin to come across patches of snow. The first is easily skirted, the next one less so, and so on, until you are no longer walking over ground with snow-patches, but snow with patches of bare ground, until at last the trail disappears beneath it.

 

            Why did he stop here –

                        whoever left those footprints

                                    for me to follow

 

The going is not pleasant, steep and slippery. By the time the tr