I who have never known men

I am going to get back on track with everything, reading, reviewing, watering the garden, learning Japanese ... I know that's not going to happen but I'll make a start, because the rule says you don't beat yourself up about stuff.

(Sorry, some spoilers as the book is not really about what happens.)

So, 'I who have never known men' by Jacqueline Harpman was the most weird of reads, and seeing from Wiki that the author was a psychoanalyst explains it somewhat. We start in a bunker prison, in which forty women are held in a cage, without explanation, guarded by men who provide for and punish them but who never speak. It has been years, mostly they have forgotten the outside world. The book is narrated by the one younger woman; having been imprisoned as a child, she is the only one with some curiosity and desire to understand what is happening. She begins to measure time using her own heartbeat and becomes obsessed with watching a younger guard. Just when you begin to wonder where the story is going an alarm sounds and the guards abandon them, the keys in the lock. With some trepidation the women make their way up the stairs out of their bunker to find a strange empty world. 

The description of their existence in the cage was so unremittingly hopeless that I found it stressful and anxiety making simply to read; it was claustrophobic and terrifying in the extreme. The powerlessness and hopelessness, and yet they just lived on. And then they emerge into a world in which they are no less trapped and hopeless. The bunker is mysteriously supplied with electricity, food and water, but little else of use. And no information about the world and what became of it. After a time they decide to walk away, taking supplies. They find other bunker prisons, filled with the corpses of prisoners who had been abandoned without hope of escape. But nothing else. A world of isolated prisons. And in the end I read the book as a metaphor for the human condition, and an examination of what gives life meaning and makes us human. The young woman is almost devoid of personality as she has no experiences and no real connection to other human beings; they were forbidden to touch each other and my mind broke at the notion of such a lack of human contact. They struggle to make some kind of new existence outside but there is nothing in the world for them, so they are tied to the resources available at each of the prison bunkers that they find along the way. The young woman has a yearning to keep looking but the older women want to just settle and live, which is what they end up doing. Gradually, over years, the women die off, until she is alone, and she sets off wandering again.

So all you are left with is questions. Are they really any more free outside the prison? Are we, as people, trapped inside the society we have created, free? What is freedom? What makes a human society meaningful? It was all very existential.

Here, they discover the first of many prisons, it gives a good impression of the dispassionate nature of her telling, she is observing, with very little emotional engagement:

"It was the half-light of night-time, but I could see the cage: the floor was strewn with dead women. They seemed to be everywhere, lying across the mattresses, flung on top of each other, groups of them gripping the bars, in heaps, scattered in an appalling chaos. Some were naked, the dresses of others in tatters, they were in frightful attitudes, torments, their mouths and eyes open, their fists clenched as if they'd fought and killed one another in the madness from which death had snatched them.

Here, the siren had gone off in the middle of artificial night, the door was locked and the guards - of course! - hadn't bothered to open it. The women had tried. They'd died of grief, long before hunger killed them. Without food, furious and desperate, how many days had they spend clawing at the bars with their remaining strength, trying to prise open the lock without keys or tools, their fingers bleeding, trying to achieve the impossible - sick, crazed, lying down exhausted and then getting up again to attack there steel with their bare hands, screaming, crying, dazed, sometimes recovering their wits to contemplate their fate and flee to it in fury, and now they stank, distended, putrid and green, infested with maggots that swarmed over their decaying bodies, a grotesque image of the fate that could have been ours, had it not been for an incredible stroke of luck." (p.90-91)

Stay safe. Be kind.

Reflections on Monkey

When Monkey first went to Japan back in March 2022 she started sending us 'pyjama selfies', because the hotels provide pyjamas for guests, such a wonderful idea. This was our first pyjama selfie and Tish said we looked like we had joined a cult. 

While I had the overarching plan for our trip to Shikoku it was Monkey who worked out the details; she knew when the trains were running, she found interesting places to see and knew when they were open, she checked what the local specialities to eat were. She found the garden and the workshops and the boat trip, and shared her wisdom about life in Japan. She made the whole trip a delight. I could not have done it without her and would not have wanted to do it with anyone else.

She has struggled with anxiety and depression for much of her 20s and to see how learning Japanese and going to Japan has transformed her makes me love the place even more. She has grown in confidence and become a real grown-up, but retains her childlike enthusiasm for everything she does:

dancing on the udon dough ... don't ask me why

insisting on putting on the entire set of Samurai armour

ice-cream pretty much every day

crossing the vine bridge

and skimming stones in the river down below

We rode bikes and climbed mountains together

We managed to balance the things that I wanted to do and the things she wanted to do to create the perfect holiday ... but we hardly have any photos of the two of us together.

Stay safe. Be kind. 

Reflections on Reflections

In Takamatsu we went to the famous Ritsurin Garden. It strikes you straight away that Japanese gardens are not like British gardens. There is very little in the way of flowering plants, and almost no 'flower beds'. It's all about the trees (see previous post) and the water. It is what is called a 'strolling garden', you walk around and admire the views. It is created to look like beautiful scenery, and the pools are integral to the plan as the reflections of the surrounding trees are all part of the view. Build for the wealthy it was opened to the public in 1875.

The Kikugestu-Tei tea house dates back to the early Edo period. 

The purpose of the tea house is that you sit in the open sided building and take tea and look out at the beautiful scene that has been created for you.

(and here on the Window Research Institute website is a fascinating film about the wonderful ingeniously designed shutters that surround the building and how they open to allow a view in any direction)

It was a complete delight, one of the highlights of the trip for me.

Go to Japan, take tea in the tea house.

Reflections on Mountains

 

Japan is an entire country of mountains. I think the thing that makes Mount Fuji so iconic is that it stands alone, not in amongst loads of other mountains. Everywhere we went on Shikoku we were surrounded by mountains. We drove up them, down them and through them. We stopped and admired them. We gazed in awe.

This was our view from the restaurant the first full day when we stopped for lunch:

So many mountains ... so we just had to climb the biggest one.

Mount Ishizuchi is the tallest mountain in western Japan, just short of 2,000 metres.

A seven minute cable car ride takes you probably about half way.

then you hike up to a shrine, and back down into the dip. This chart shows that point at 1300m, from where you go almost straight up:

This friendly sign give the 'rules for hikers', stuff like taking your litter home and being careful on the mountain:

In places there are these climbing chains that allow you to cut off some of the meandering route (if you're up to the climb):

It was very early April. We did not anticipate how much snow might remain on the mountain. The wooden steps were buried in places:

... until the path disappeared altogether. This is the point at which we admitted defeat and turned back. We were not well equipped, the last cable car was at 5 and we were not going to reach the top:

It was an exhilarating adventure just to look down from what felt like the top of the world.

View from the castle across the city of Matsuyama:

Go for the food ... stay for the mountains.

Reflections on Art

My first day in Japan we took the train to Tokyo and went to the Ueno Park to the National Museum and the Metropolitan Art Museum. The Joan Miro exhibition was so extensive that we didn't have time to look at anything else, but it was ok as it was fascinating and we learned a lot about him.

The island of Naoshima was my inspiration for our trip to Shikoku, so at the other end of our holiday we took the ferry from Takamatsu to see the extensive collection of modern art. Much of it is very large and site specific. First up Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama, hundreds of metal spheres, floating in a huge pond, filling the garden and inside the rooms of a concrete bunker, reflecting the viewer, each other and their surroundings:

We moved on to the Benesse House Museum,

Fish and Bread by Jennifer Bartlett

Inland Sea Driftwood Circle by Richard Long, which I photographed for my dad, who has made driftwood art himself, and the lovely muddy circles on the wall that are made with River Avon mud, transported all the way to Japan.

100 live and Die by Bruce Nauman

The Secret of the Sky by Kan Yasuda (who has a very cool website), 

and I thought the little sign said no climbing on the stones, but on second glance realised it meant 'take your shoes off the climb on the stones' and look at the sky.

Seen/Unseen Known/Unknown by Walter De Maria, reflecting the view across the sea.

Don't know what/who this was: a circular structure of mirrors that you can enter, creating a surreal illusion ... here we are actually facing each other on either side of the central divider:

Is this a sculpture that is also a bike park ... or a bike park that is also a sculpture?

(What's more fun is the little sign that says 'no 

bikes' and 'no parking')

We took the bus to Honmura to the Art House Project, where seven abandoned houses have been repurposed as art. This is the Go'o Shrine, the glass steps continue down into an underground cavern beneath the huge stone.

One of the transformed houses. 

The Yellow Pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama. It was this image that I saw online, never imagining that we would actually end up here. The queue of Instagrammers is just out of shot.

So much art, so little time, we had to catch the boat back at 3 to stay on schedule for the mountain ... 

Reflections on Trees (part 2)

I spent a lot of time thinking about, noticing, the ways in which Japan and Britain are different. Japanese cities are very grey, not much in the way of green spaces, and domestic gardens (certainly in urban areas) were very minimal, often just some pots outside on the doorstep. It made me feel that my tiny yard was quite generous after all. But the Japanese take their trees very seriously. The cherry blossom forecasts on the telly tell people where the best blooms are and autumn leaf displays are treated with the same enthusiasm. 

On my second day in Japan I took the train while Monkey was at school to Omiya to the Bonsai Museum. I assumed it was 'just' a bonsai museum, but it turns out it is 'the' bonsai museum. It was created as part of the Bonsai Village, established 100 years ago for bonsai growers who came to live together (who's gardens you can also apparently visit) and be a centre of bonsai growing.

Some of them have names: this one is Juun and is an 800 year old Japanese Juniper.

There are words for all the different styles of bonsai and for things like the whitened dead wood that is created as a decorative feature. 

It would be lovely to come again in the autumn to see the maples change colour, as of course many were not yet in leaf, but there was this beautiful bonsai cherry.

First morning on Shikoku we are driving up into the mountain when Monkey spots a sign that says 'Big Tree', so what else could we do but stop off. Many trees are sacred in Japan (and not necessarily just the ones in shrines like this) indicated by the rope, which was frustrating as I assumed it meant no touching. Though split at the trunk I believe it was one tree:

and you can see here panels of copper that had been used to protect the hollow parts from rotting away. 

This is the camphor tree at the Oyamazumi Shrine on Omishima. 

It is 3,000 years old.

We visited it for breakfast when we stayed nearby:

I didn't seem to take as many photos of cherry blossom as I imagined. There were random blossom trees in amongst the evergreens on mountain sides everywhere but they were not quite in full bloom and I kept waiting for one that stood out. The magnolias on the other hand were almost over, and Monkey kept referring to them as 'poor man's cherry blossom' but we did try to appreciate them too.

This is Neagari Goyo-Matsu Pine Tree, in the Ritsurin Garden, originally a bonsai, then planted out and allowed to grow (more of the garden to come):

Definitely go to Japan for the trees ... and not just the blossom.