Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Instead a little plane broke through the clouds above him, and from it boomed that martial loudspeaker voice that had accompanied him, so to speak, all through Japan, in which a nationalist party was demanding the return of the islands lost to Russia during the Second World War. And the following morning, when he came to his project site very early, still in bitter-cold darkness, equipped with a tinsnips and the many pockets of his special jacket stuffed with the necessary tools and materials for erecting the planned enclosure — a space in which the rustling of the bamboo in the midst of the emptiness could resonate — he found it illuminated by spotlights, the bamboo hauled away, the first holes bulldozed, and the area swarming with workers in blue overalls and yellow helmets, like all over the world, and even the Keep Out sign had English subtitles. And so he watched the workmen, dark like Mongolians, until the sun rose (late and very slowly above Morioka, already very far to the north): the first thing they set up was a tall wooden partition, a sort of screen from the street. And although they appeared to overlook him, in time it seemed after all as though they were following, as with a foreman, his eyes’ silent directives, which, because he knew what the next step had to be, were always one step ahead.

The medium-sized high-rise buildings around the center of Morioka looked hardly any different from those in Udine, for example, and the many sparsely wooded hills reminded him of those of Friuli, from between which, just as here, the snowcapped mountains in the north gleamed. What was so different from home in this remoteness, except perhaps that instead of the accustomed clanging of bells a gong sounded? And the carpenter felt compelled to get away from the cities, in the opposite direction from most architects.

At the railroad station in Morioka, while he was waiting for a train to take him farther north, where the couple of falling snowflakes collided in the air, for the first time on his journey one of the natives approached him, a young boy, and requested permission in English to ask him a few questions, but then could not stammer out even the first question.

To get out into the Japanese countryside, into a village, into nature, then became more tedious than tracking down the last hiding place of vagueness in the cities. But since he was fired up with enthusiasm for such a destination, it had to exist, as he told himself. And since he had unusual patience—“refresh your heart, be patient” was his motto — even the routes he took gave him pleasure.

Yet as a rule he had to plot them out himself, especially where the plains thickly dotted with settlements and cultivated fields met the mountains. Here he suddenly encountered virgin forest so dense that he could move forward only with the help of his special folding hatchet. How had the itinerant poets of earlier centuries made their way through here? Or had it been easier to cross the Japanese countryside on foot in those days? But hadn’t almost all of them died young, and in the course of their wandering?

He then recognized that the quintessential rural and village settings were very like the Japanese urban no-man’s-lands: they, too, often existed only for a single moment, though in different form. On yet another morning, now much later in the year, having arrived, as it were, by the back way at a mountain temple, and then been for hours its only visitor, squatting in the dim outhouse there, hidden in a remote spot behind plum and cherry trees, for a moment he had again experienced the sense of security he had had using the privy on his parents’ solitary farm near Aurisina, reachable only through the barn or by way of a long, roofed wooden gallery; whereupon he wrote to me that it was time for my long-promised “Essay on Convenience Stations.”

It was conspicuous that he usually stumbled upon such spots near temples, specifically in their far-branching, always narrow, tapered hinterland, carved out of virgin forests, here a small vegetable garden, there just such a cemetery, connected by an old wagon trail; and the couple of Buddhist monks, always busy, appeared there in the role of farmers.

And again one morning he saw in such an area a cluster of people who did not merely appear to be country folk, men and women, but were the spit and image of those from home, with stooped backs, prolapsed knees, gout-ridden, and this group of village pilgrims broke out in a unanimous cry of astonishment at the sight of the temple bell, at which each one straightened up from his stoop, stretched, stiffened, snapped upright, and one of the farmhand types almost tipped over backward.

That he almost always saw such no-man’s-lands or villages only from the exterior was something he found perfectly all right. Remarkable architect that he was, he almost never felt drawn to interiors. He even avoided these wherever he could.

The many different voices speaking inside him did not interfere with one another. Each one — that of the wood inspector, the wind expert, the acoustical engineer, the vagabond and dowser — could have its say, at length, was distinct from that of its predecessor, which it took account of, continued, supplemented, grounded. That would yield an entire book (and someday he means to write it himself). And in between, and often for a very long time, the voices also kept silent, and he was, again as since childhood, just someone or other, feeling invisible.

In time many of the Japanese appeared to him more like travelers than himself. He was the native. Having set out with a swarm of them before dawn to climb Fujiyama, he went off on his own before they had even reached the tree line and spent the day searching for mushrooms, in the course of which he came upon a deer, small and stocky, almost like a wild horse, like his deer on the karst. And in Yokohama, where he lingered for an entire day on a slope above the harbor in the “European Cemetery,” with the graves of the first traders to come in the nineteenth century, he sat or walked, like the cemetery watchman of many years, behind native visitors, who photographed each other in front of the mostly English inscriptions, and here and there young people, as dusk fell, kissed; and then another time he stood in one of the temples of mountainous Nikko while the priest deep inside called out “Amida!”—that single word that was supposed to secure eternal blessedness — but how he called it out! He stood in the background as the temple servant on duty, one step away from the group who had come by bus from Tokyo and seemed more amused than anything else by the priest’s cry.

Only the Japanese children violated from the beginning his imagined unobtrusiveness. He was the one on whom rested the bright black eyes of the infants (one of whom was always crossing his path, although during the entire time he never once saw a pregnant woman), and in front of the giant Buddha of Kamakura, enthroned out in the open, so large and heavy that he positively radiated peacefulness, he, the observer half in shadow, became a more significant sight for the children filing past all day than the colossal statue. And although he not once caught an adult passerby looking at him, afterward he sometimes carried glances inside him, especially from women, deeper and more durable than anywhere else: and each time he realized how much he had needed to be noticed after all.

Thus from time to time he himself was responsible for his plunging again into the world as it streamed past, not only by making himself noticeable but also by noticing things himself, and not merely various no-man’s-lands or the bare countryside.

On the day of the great Buddha of Kamakura, he stood there until evening on the shore of the Pacific amid a group of girls in dark blue school uniforms who, one after the other, tossed long-stemmed roses like spears out into the ocean, and then danced until the flowers were carried out to sea and night fell. And then again schoolchildren, adolescents, in the railroad station of northerly Sendai, running in swarms alongside the train departing for Tokyo, in which sat their teacher, who had just taken leave of them forever; they were uttering wild cries of dismay, wailing, their tears visibly flying, their half-raised arms like stumps, their weeping spreading through the entire station, while at the same time the teacher, sitting in his compartment, wept silently in unison with them, something my friend had not experienced in any other country on earth, and also not in the land of dreams — only in the portrayals, everywhere in Japan, of the various animals mourning the death of the Buddha.