Descending the steps, I watch a pair of feathers brushing a young woman's shoulders. She is wearing these feathers as earrings, each so soft and so perfectly white that they might have come from the wings of angels. Yet what really helps her take flight is the music coming throughout the ear buds inserted just past each feather’s spiny tip. It all looks connected, all part of a single accessory.
I started my journey at an hour before the Bullet Trains run. After a slow ride through a light tinting all in silver and gold, I was whooshed along westward, feeling some pity for the salarymen forced to stand at such an early hour, heading as they were away from a three-day weekend spent presumably with family. I'd wager that a great number of these men did this trip every week, beckoned away by an artificial loyalty to their company.
The roads to most of the islands of the Seto-Naikai begin here, at Okayama. It seems that most of the trips I had taken out across her waters had initiated with transport out of this station. I jump a taxi and repeat my destination to my driver at least twice, before his aged ears and my accent find some common ground. We wheel out, following a streetcar carving its way through a cityscape bright and bleached out in the morning sun, the sparks bursting overhead an unnecessary accentuation. Green begins to temper the harsh glare at the edges of the city. On a patch of grass before a shopping mall, a young girl walking a poodle is suddenly hit in the chest by a sprinkler that turns on unexpectantly. Her surprise is so great that her body near folds in on itself, trying escape the rush of water.
I spent the first week in Japan here in Okayama, in a training center in order to prepare for the teaching job that I’d hold for the next two years. We were housed in a small dormitory on the far side of the station. I still remember the sweet smell of mold and fabric softener in the laundry room, a smell that I still occasional catch in summer, one that never fails to bring me back to this city.
But I associate Okayama with one other memory as well. In my training group was a young woman who had attended the same university as I. This connection was further enhanced by the fact that we were in adjacent rooms, and it reached its apotheosis in the eventual connection of our lips. This kiss signified a break not only with a waning love affair I’d left behind in the States, but a more definitive break with my life there in general. In mere days away from the land of my birth, I had begun to change into something new.
Or perhaps into something old is more like it. Within weeks I would begin to turn my back on those things that I had found most interesting in my own society, the newest, the most hip, the most up to date things. I began to find much more value in things from the past.
It is this spirit that I undertake this journey, an ironic attempt to build something new from the old. Walk Japan has sent me out to look into developing a tour of the Inland Sea, focusing mainly on the areas of art, literature, and culture. One element of this was of course Donald Richie’s iconic The Inland Sea, which I feel offers the most penetrating insight into Japanese society ever written. When I first read it shortly after my arrival here in 1994, I found it full of insight and truth. But truth is as fleeting as time. So with the book as template, I set off, to visit some of the places he visited, as well as others, in order to find out how much remains of what Richie saw nearly fifty years ago.
My taxi driver’s sense of direction is as bad as his hearing, but he is persistent and finally gets it right, depositing me in a place that at least isn't too far a walk to my ferry. I’m at first uncertain of the boat when I see it, hardly bigger than the cabin cruisers that joy-riders had undoubtedly motored off shore this past holiday weekend. Indeed, it only sits 26, far fewer at this early hour, though most seem to be heading over to Inujima in order to perform work of some sort, the women carrying boxes of soft drinks, the men sitting along the seawall smoking. Behind them, an old woman collects rubbish with a pair of extended tongs, her disfigured face straight out of a Greek tragedy. I ask another woman issuing tickets whether there is bicycle hire on the island, and she smiles and asks why I would need a bicycle, as the whole island can be walked in under ninety minutes.
Indeed, Inujima proves to be so small that I can’t make it out against the larger Shōdoshima behind. I start out by sitting flanked by propane tanks in the aft, but then move to the bow so as to look out the front windows and face the future I am heading into.
But once ashore, I find that the old cliche applies, of a place that time has given up on. A few new things have appeared however, as the island is now home to an art project that has sprouted up at various locations amidst the village. Most notable is the Seaside gallery whose wooden walls have been singed in order to protect from weather. Its shape and colour reminds me of something out of the American midwest, but rather than prairie, it instead rises from the sea. I have two hours until this and all the other structures open up, so I wander town, returning again to the dock within 15 minutes. I find a patch of shade and sit and wait, allowing time to give up on me too.
The coming of ten o’clock and the ‘opening’ of the island pulls me back. The ticket in hand is further reminder of the arbitrariness of place, the limitless of the spacial as well as the temporaral now once again open to me. Fitting then that my first destination, Seirensho Art Museum, looks simultaneously like it has both existed, and been abandoned, for ages. I enter the museum proper into a darkness that further confuses since what at first appears to be a long turns out to be a zig zag path, 'straightened' by a series of mirrors. Senses by now completely confounded, time and space begin to further break down. When they finally do reassert themselves near what you assume is the end, you find yourself facing a mirror filled with sky, clouds passing mockingly. Through a side chamber next, into a room from whose ceiling hangs the pieces and fragments of an old building, fused only where the mind fills in the gaps. Reality thus totally shattered.
To step outside is a return to the world complete. But even here is a definitive incompleteness, in the decay of this former smelter that surprisingly stood for a mere decade at the turn of the last century. Smokestacks tower over all, devoid of foundation, rising from and toward nothing. One has chunks missing as if it bitten into. I enjoy a lovely morning hour beneath their brick, following a sandy trail that ducks in and out of the shade of jungle. It is a bit like the Buddhist ruins of Ashokan India, until the glimpses of the sea remind me again of where I am.
My stroll continues, taking in the better part of the island, past exhibits that have been incorporated into abandoned houses, representing the various natural elements in a variety of unique and creative ways. Upon approach a figure will emerge from shadow to stamp my ticket, then vanish again into shadow. It is after all a very hot day.
There is as much art on display in the views of the water that opens at the end of alleys, in the beautifully marked wings of a kite, in the triangular prows of fishing boats, in the etched faces of a pair of grannies staring out at a sea like at a third companion. The smile I receive as I pass is the greatest art of all.
Further on, a man sits in his garden listening to his radio. He beckons me over, and tells me to go inside the tumble-down shack behind to have a look at the simply massive carp he keeps in a small pool. It never fails to amuse me when I get into conversations with people who talk to me as if I were living abroad, ignoring completely the fact that we are conversing in perfect Japanese. After complimenting the man on the magnificence of his fish, I wander over to the port and performed my best imitation of him, waiting until someone comes along to take me to places far away.
Moments off the boat that sprinted me across to Teshima, I rent a bicycle to help me get around the art exhibits dotted about this hilly island. I have never ridden an electric bicycle before and am delighted at its speed, as I whiz along the harbor scaring stray cats. In the middle of the village of Ieura is a home designed by Yokoo Tadanori, who is perhaps my favorite Japanese artist. I don’t usually go in for pop art (have never really gotten Warhol and his pretentious ilk), but I like Yokoo, perhaps because I have always been intrigued by Taisho and Showa period advertising. This house then is a wonder to me, whose traditional garden has a carp pond of tiles so brilliant they rival the color of the fish themselves. The house is the opposite, subtle and dark like most old country homes, which makes Yokoo’s work pop off the walls brilliantly. In one room, the floor is glassed so that you can watch the fish swim beneath the house itself. In the adjacent room you can enter a tall cylindrical tube with a similar mirrored floor, which in reflecting the height above gives the illusion that one is walking on air. The windows of the main house are tinted red to give the sky a post apocalyptic look.
Back beneath the blue skies, fifth gear of my electric bicycle helps me fly up the long steep hills of the island center, then descend to the Art Museum, which is Teshima’s showpiece. Museum is a bit of a stretch actually, as the only exhibit is the structure itself, a white domed roof covering a vast concrete floor. Two ovals have been cut out of the dome, to reveal not only sky and trees above, but also the song of bird and cicada. Despite this, there is a quality to the silence within that is metaphysical, like that of a Buddhist temple or, considering the coolness of the floor, a mosque. There are two dozen or so people here sprawled out on the floor, in various states of doze. Resting perhaps after the long bicycle ride up. I walk barefoot between them, dodging the puddles of water that are moving across the floor in a way that looks like they are crawling toward one another, and eventually toward a larger primordial pool at the center that little by little is taking them all in. The spiritual metaphor is again oh so present.
It takes a great deal of effort to pull myself away, but I have one more stop to make. At the island’s far end is Les Archives du Cœur A woman clad in a doctor’s uniform meets me, then gestures toward a door off to the side of the room. Entering, all is dark, but for a single light bulb that pulses red in time to the beat of a human heartbeat emitted by a massive pair of woofers at the room’s far end. Since the exhibit’s installation, over 42,000 people have recorded their heartbeats, to be played at some point for the benefit of visitors to come. I am listening to the the heart of a young Parisian woman who was the 16th person to contribute her rhythm. I return to the dorm, and out once again to the beach, to the rhythm of the cicada whose own hearts will cease beating within a fortnight.
With their roar in my ears, I look across the waters to the East. I have left behind now the room of red, of white, of black, and the blue that has been constant companion above is now going grey with the building of storm clouds. Across similarly tinted waters lies the island where I will spend the night.
On the turntable: "No Alternative"
On the nighttable: Frederick Exley, "A Fan's Notes"
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