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