Woman Who Brings the Rain E-Book

Eluned Gramich

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 61

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Winner of the 2015 New Welsh Writing Awards: WWF Cymru Prize for Writing on Nature and the Environment Shortlisted for the 2016 Wales Book of the Year: The Open University in Wales Creative Non-Fiction Award 'Eluned Gramich has written the perfect essay - a minutely detailed yet nuanced evocation of place and personalities that is full of ecologically precise imagery and is as attentive to the Japanese language as it is to Hokkaidan landscape.' – Mark Cocker As precise and nuanced as Japanese calligraphy, this memoir of the author's stay on the remote Hokkaido island in the far north of Japan, has at its heart the mountain, Yotei-san, the region's iconic equivalent to Mount Fuji. As much about learning a language (with connotations of 'reading' a wild landscape) as it is about nature, this dignified and nuanced work evokes what is cultured and cultivated, and yet also honours the wild; the untranslatable. With its themes of seasonal transformation, the peripheral, folklore, loneliness and learning to belong, this work takes a personal philosophical stance in relation to the centre and the periphery. '"Eluned Gramich" is a name to hear time and again in the future. [This writing] is as good as we the jurors have ever read... short but perfectly formed... absolutely perfect.' – Justin Albert 'Quite beautiful. [The author encounters a culture that is completely alien] and she does it with a poet's eye... precisely and vitally. She reads this unfamiliarity with all her imaginative nerve-endings open: the effect is quite remarkable...' – Tony Brown 'Most rewarding is the philosophical approach... [Gramich's] embracing of... cultural multiplicity, fluidity and adaptability... suits perfectly the changing boundaries of our modern world.' – Wales Arts Review

Leseprobe

i

‘Ame’ (雨): Rain

v

Woman Who Brings the Rain

A Memoir of Hokkaido, Japan

Eluned Gramich

With original calligraphic art by

Kuniko Sheldon

vii

To Kuniko and Takashi Tateno

Contents

Title PageDedicationMountainPathKōyōVisitSealAcknowledgementsAuthor’s NoteAbout the AuthorAlso by Eluned GramichCopyright

1

1. Mountain

The way of the valley is an immense tongue; the form of the mountain is a body most pure.

Master Rujing

3

The road to Niseko runs through forest, and farmland, and forest again. The car winds around the hills, moving from dark to bright patches, and dips down into the valley. The sun, filtering through the broad, green maple leaves, plays like an old film reel across the windscreen. I catch sight of thin-limbed deer, trotting along the roadside, before slipping in between the tree trunks. Their tan-brown bodies dapple with the woods. A line from an Ainu fairytale comes back to me: The roots, they wrote, of certain trees are known to turn into bears. Perhaps certain trees also turn into deer.

My host family, the Tatenos, are sitting in the front seats. They don’t seem interested in the animals, which they see every day, or the different trees, or the camellias blooming furiously in the undergrowth. Instead, when we drive into open terrain, they talk to me about the population size, building works, crops. The vast fields remind me of eastern England, where I once studied, but the vegetables here are different. Potatoes and cabbages, of course, but also edamame beans, sweet Hokkaido pumpkins, daikon, nagaimo, 4wasabi root. The giant greenhouses send shocks of light onto the surface of the road.

For miles and miles there is not a single house. Then they appear – one, two, three. And then nothing again. The houses themselves are otherworldly. There is no uniformity to their architecture, no sense of style. Here is a ski chalet; there a bungalow; a villa, a shack with a roof of corrugated zinc. Tateno-San explains to me that rich Tokyoites buy up land and build their own dream homes. If he’s lucky, they’ll buy the land from him. His mobile rings. Tateno-San, one hand on the wheel, takes the call.

‘Dōmo,’ he says as a greeting, elongating the ‘o’. This is manly speech: casual, confident and managerial. No one I know from my Japanese school would start a conversation this way. ‘Dōmo,’ he says again at the end.

The welcome card the Tatenos sent me is still in my coat pocket. The card contains a basic list of information: their names (Takashi and Kuniko Tateno) and the name of their dog (Hana), their ages (64 and 62) and hobbies (golf and saké for him; books for her). The only personal touch was a line at the bottom of the page, scribbled in kanji, which I spent a long time mistranslating: ‘We are so looking forward to meeting you, we could cut our throats.’ They’d also enclosed a photograph of the two of them, 5and their dog Hana, sitting in their living room. The image showed them distracted, unsmiling, perhaps worried about the timer on the camera, or about Hana keeping still. Now they sit in front of me, their faces partially obscured, their quick speech – like all Japanese – flowing in and out of my comprehension, as if I were eavesdropping on a conversation going on in another room.

Without a word, Kuniko opens a bottle of water and brings it to her husband’s lips.

‘This is Niseko-chō,’ he continues, after having a sip. ‘Chōis what we call an area. The town itself is further down the road.’

We turn off down a one lane road. The beginning of it is decorated with little piles of pumpkins: the lurid orange kind I’d seen in the supermarkets in Tokyo.

‘They’re too big to sell so we put them by the road. They’re all over town,’ explains Kuniko. We pass two small farmhouses. A dog – a Hokkaidan hound – barks wildly after us. We dip into another pocket of woodland and suddenly the world is muffled by the pines, maples and conifers.

When we come out the other side, I see, suddenly, a baffling, extraordinary form erupting from the farmland in front of us. A shape so startling that I’m at 6a loss as to what to say. The timid repetition of the word kirei or ‘beautiful’ won’t suffice. A mountain floating in the air, its outline hazy in the pale sky. Although the summit is hidden by mist, I can make out the slopes’ mossy green, rolling down from the cloud for miles and miles on either side. Its triangular shape reminds me of the muscled neck of a sumo wrestler.

‘What is that?’ I ask.

‘Yōtei-San,’ Kuniko replies. ‘Hokkaido’s Mount Fuji.’

The colours grow clearer as we approach, like the brushstrokes of a painting. Yet the scale of the mountain seems only to increase, becoming ever more distant, impossibly high, unattainable.

‘Yōtei-San,’ I repeat, testing the new word.

Kuniko nods before popping a boiled sweet in her husband’s mouth.

We arrive at the Tatenos’ home – of whose possession Tateno-San is most proud in the world – very late in the afternoon. It’s larger than any house I’ve ever seen in Japan. It has three floors, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, as well as a room for noodle-making and an exhibition space to house Tateno-San’s considerable saké collection. The walls and floors are made of a solid, golden pine imported from Canada. 7A wood-burning stove lines the east-facing wall, filling the high-ceilinged rooms with a crackling warmth. The large windows let in swathes of pale northern light, generously framing the views of fields and the late-summer sky. For someone who has spent the last year locked in a concrete block, walking streets spun with electric cables like wire cocoons, the house is a revelation. Suddenly, I have the freedom to move, to stretch, to be alone; and I have the luxury of looking out of two different windows and seeing two different views. Away from the squealing commuter trains, jingles and tannoys, my mind quietens and I begin to think freely again. The rooms of my mind come to resemble the still and quiet rooms of the house, ready to welcome new impressions and ideas.

Yōtei-San, I discover, can be seen from almost anywhere in Niseko. The kitchen window of the Tatenos’ home, however, provides the perfect panorama. The mountain greets me every morning and every evening; it’s the first thing I see when I leave the house and the last thing I see when I close the front door at twilight. I observe the mountain – the way it moves from shadow to light, from mist and rain to piercing clarity – and the mountain observes me, my comings and goings: its shadow darkening my path, its presence orientating my steps. The kitchen 8window also happens to face east. I’m reminded of the indigenous people of Hokkaido, the Ainu. For them, the east window is sacred, because it’s the window which looks out towards the gods. There the Ainu offer sacrifices throughout the day. Saké and the decorative woodshavings, inau. Unfortunately, having my breakfast in front of this sacred window each morning, I had nothing to sacrifice to the mountain god but leftover rice grains and drops of miso soup.