I’m from a generation that grew up listening to the radio. Lucky, I guess – the 1960s was a good decade for music. We had TV too but, apart from unmissables like The Avengers and Get Smart, I didn’t watch much. It was black and white, one channel only and finished early. After we moved to Huntly in 1966, for the first time in my life, I had a room of my own. It was a wooden, weatherboard hut supplied by the Education Department and stood alone next to the main house where my parents and my sisters slept.
It had a divan bed with drawers underneath, a kit set desk where I could do my homework, a bookshelf for my books – and a radio. It was one of two old mantle radios, as they were called, the household owned, with valves glowing dimly within, cloth threaded with metal over the speakers, a lit plastic screen with the callsigns of about fifty stations upon it and a bakelite knob which you turned to move the vertical orange line back and forth along the dial. It had a shortwave band too, so I could listen to Russian or Chinese, or signals from further away, Mars perhaps.
I’d go out there after dinner, read and listen to the radio; every Thursday, at 7.30, one of the stations out of Auckland, maybe 1ZB, broadcast the Hit Parade and I remember lying on my stomach on the itchy carpet square, with a lined pad, recording in order the Top Twenty songs that week. Sometimes I’d send the list to my penfriend in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, England, who was a Herman’s Hermits fan. In this way I got to know hundreds of songs, most of which are still lodged somewhere in my memory; anything from Hendrix to The Move, Gladys Knight and the Pips to the Small Faces or the Tremolos.
Anyway, amongst that myriad of tunes there were one or two that spoke, I thought, directly to me. Walk Away Renee by the Left Banke was one; Goin’ Back by Dusty Springfield another. They are both intensely nostalgic songs, one about lost or unrequited love, the other about wanting to turn your back on adulthood and return to your youth. Unrequited love I understood, of course; what teenager doesn’t? But why, aged 14, did I want to go back to my childhood? If indeed that’s why I liked the song. It might have been because we had already moved towns twice; I hadn’t wanted to go either time; and especially not the first time.
These days I don’t have a radio, or a TV, and when I listen to music, I do so through a JBL speaker connected via Bluetooth to my phone. Mostly YouTube because, for any number of reasons, I can’t stand Spotify. One of the effects of listening like this is that your phone remembers what you’ve selected, compiles it into a playlist, and offers it up to you again in a kind of endless loop which does sometimes contain variations or even innovations. It’s another form of Artificial Ignorance, I think, but it has its advantages.
Last night, for instance, it offered up Goin’ Back, not in the Dusty Springfield version but one by Carole King (Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote the song together in 1966). It’s quite different from the lush soulful ballad, with swelling strings, that Dusty sang; more jaunty, even a bit folky; quite enjoyable. It reminds you that The Byrds, too, covered it. And then, halfway through the first verse, a couple of lines that aren’t in Dusty’s version leapt out of the speaker. Instead of ‘no more colouring books / no Christmas bells to chime’, CK sings ‘no more electric trains / no more trees to climb.’
Well. I was amazed. Colouring books and Christmas bells didn’t really loom large in my childhood. But electric trains? And trees to climb? Indeed. Three Christmases in a row I asked so-called Santa for an electric train set; three times I got some unwanted addition, perhaps some rolling stock, to the clockwork Hornby set I already owned. And out on our front lawn was a venerable old towai, which we called the beech tree, that had in its branches a tree house some uncle or family friend had built. Perhaps my favourite tree ever to climb but certainly not the only one.
There are other variations between the lyrics (written when Gerry Goffin was 27 and Carole King, 24). Dusty reckons she has ‘a lot more than a skipping rope to lift’; while Carole has ‘a lot more than just my toys to lend’. More significantly, there are extra lines in both the penultimate and last verses in the Dusty Springfield version. Whereas for Carole, at least in the reprise, it’s courage we lack, for Dusty, it’s freedom; she wants ‘to live my days instead of counting my years’.
That was, I think, my favourite line in the whole song and perhaps still is. It seems to be an apt summation of what childhood was like and the idea that you could still live that way as an adult appealed to me. And yet, paradoxically, another thing that makes the song so appealing, and yet so melancholy as well, is that, however much we may want to go back, we can’t. And we know that, even in the midst of yearning to do so. I think of a line my cousin the poet wrote: ‘Somehow it never seems to be the right day for nostalgia.’
The beech tree was cut down, along with most of the rest of that wonderful garden, by rogue tenants who rented our house after we left town. The rivers I swam in as a boy are, most of them, too polluted to do that now. The steam trains I loved to hear whistling as they chuffed around the mountain in the wee small hours have been superseded, yes, by electric trains; and train sets have no attraction for me anymore. But the music? Absolutely. Still with me, still helping me live my days instead of counting my years.
Anyway, here’s the full set of the lyrics of Dusty’s version; with Carole King’s variant lines bracketed; and Dusty’s extra ones square bracketed:
Goin’ Back
I think I’m goin’ back To the things I learned so well in my youth, I think I’m returning to The days when I was young enough to know the tru
Now there are no games To only pass the time No more colouring books, No Christmas bells to chime
(No more electric trains / No more trees to climb)
But thinking young and growing older is no sin And I can play the game of life to win
I can recall a time, When I wasn’t afraid to reach out to a friend And now I think I’ve got A lot more than a skipping rope to lift
(A lot more than just my toys to lend)
Now there’s more to do Than watch my sailboat glide Then everyday can be my magic carpet ride [And I can play hide and seek with my fears, And live my days instead of counting my years
Let everyone debate the true reality, I’d rather see the world the way it used to be] A little bit of freedom (courage) is all we lack
When Mayu went out early to get the money to give to the bonze, she sat by the door, crying.
While we breakfasted, and then dressed in black, she was crying.
I think she must have known — something. But what did she know?
I held the box containing Yoshie’s bones in my lap as Mioko drove us through the wet grey Sunday streets of Shinjuku.
It was very cold outside.
The family temple was down a narrow side street in amongst non-descript dwellings.
We sat in a waiting room, closed by shoji screens and with tatami mats on the floor.
A small bottle of green tea and a bean sweet for each of the seven mourners lay on the low table before us.
There was a very beautiful painting of a snow-covered mountain on the wall.
Greengage mountain.
Yoshie’s two daughters, her sister, her sister’s second husband, her sister’s daughter from her first marriage, her second husband’s son from his first marriage, and myself.
We were related to each other as much by grief as by blood.
When the time came we went through into the temple. It was in a large room just across the hall.
Five altars, two each side of the main one. Long slender candles burning. A proliferation of gilded ornaments of uncertain provenance. Books and papers shelved along a wall. Name tablets of those interred here before.
In the shadows, old wooden gods, from China, from India, from whatever was before India and China.
Yoshie’s box of bones, and her white wooden name tablet, stood before the main altar.
The bonze was the same man who officiated at the cremation. He sat sideways in a low chair to the right of the main altar. Robed in purple and green.
He chanted, sang, chanted and, at the end, spoke. Next to him a metal bowl which he struck with a piece of wood, making a deep and resonant sound.
He had five books: two with red covers, one blue-grey, another orange and one thick and green. This was the one that, at the conclusion of the ceremony, he placed reverently in a black box with gold trimmings.
While he chanted each of us stood up, bowed to the other mourners, took a pinch of powdered incense, held it to our foreheads, then dropped it onto the brazier. Some took two. Bowed again and returned to our places.
His sermon emphasised that those who follow the teaching of the Amida Buddha achieve satori at the moment of death.
There was a degree of irony, if not actual mockery, in the way that he said this. But his prayers were fervent. So it seemed that something was still in the balance.
When the service was over we went outside to the graveyard. It was in an enclosure down a narrow alleyway.
The rain had stopped but it was even colder than it had been before.
A cheerful fellow, bare-headed, balding, wearing a vispo vest, was engaged in the task of placing the urn containing Yoshie’s bones in the vault below the grave marker inscribed with the family name.
We were invited to look into it before it was sealed.
Yoshie’s urn was placed next to that of her second husband, Mioko’s father, who died in 2011, the year of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami.
The bonze returned, now dressed in black and white. Clear plastic covers over the toes of the cotton socks he wore inside his sandals.
He prayed to the Amida Buddha again and rang a tiny bell, hitting it faster and faster, as if to speed Yoshie’s soul on its way. This was when he read from the book with the orange cover. The pages within were concertinaed.
Afterwards we poured water over the grave then went to pay our respects at the grave of Mayu and Mioko’s grandmother, their mother’s mother, whose bones were placed in a sepulchre brought here from Fukui some generations ago.
This too was decorated with flowers. Purple stock and yellow chrysanthemums, white daisies.
As Mioko negotiated the BMW out of the carpark into the side street, a mud guard scraped against a safety pole.
This was thought to be an intervention of the ghost of Yoshie, who had not yet passed the requisite forty-nine days in the Bardo. She was five days short and still causing trouble in this world below.
Afterwards we went to a sushi restaurant.
It was a place of luxury and warmth, three stories up a narrow staircase paved with white tiles.
Yoshie’s photo at the head of the table, a glass a saké before her.
An ancient bonsaied black pine tree on the windowsill.
I drank hot saké, the others drank beer or green tea. It was a set menu.
The entrée was fugu isinglass and raw whitebait on some kind of cream. Poisonous, delicious.
Then ten pieces of sushi each, served with dark ginger and whole sansho peppercorns. After we’d finished the only thing left on anyone’s plate was a prawn tail.
Sliced duck in hot yellow custard.
Sweet potato compote with dried apricot and cream.
Soft jazz played through the sound system.
‘Summertime / & the living is easy / fish are jumping / & the cotton is high / your Daddy’s rich / & your Mama’s good looking . . .’
It was half past two. The women were talking and the men were looking at their watches.
Outside in the street, crowds of people passed holding brightly coloured umbrellas, like something out of a Hokusai or Hiroshige print.
We said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.
Mioko had bought a plant, a purple cyclamen, to put in the place on the altar where the urn had stood.
Kono-chan investigated it minutely. Then she tried to eat one of the leaves on the narcissus flowers in a vase next to the cyclamen.
Later on she curled up on the black jersey I wore to the interment and went to sleep. She is lying there still.
Yoshie died on All Saint’s Day, at one in the morning, in the short stay nursing home in Tokyo where she’d been in care for the previous two weeks. She was ninety years old and suffering from untreatable cancer of the oesophagus; she was unable to eat, was no longer receiving nutrition via a drip, just water, and had slipped into a coma a couple of days previously. After the doctor called her daughters to let them know she’d gone, Mayu and her sister Mioko took an Uber to see their mother laid out on her dying bed; then walked home through Shibuya to the family apartment in Yoyogi, down streets full of the vestiges of Hallowe’en, the discarded costumes, the balloons and ribbons, the lost late night revellers, the fugitive souls, the saints and demons.
Yoshie was not a Christian but she was smart, self-educated, well-read and knew about Hallowe’en because Mayu went to the American School in Tokyo; but she may not have known much about All Saint’s Day. She might, however, have subscribed to the mantra you sometimes hear recited here: born Shinto, marry Christian, die Buddhist. She married twice but I do not think that on either occasion it was a Christian ceremony. Both marriages were probably more like what happened when Mayu and I were married: a matter of filling out forms at the Town Office in Shinanomachi and having them witnessed. Yoshie was with us that day and afterwards we went with her to one of her favourite restaurants, ‘Look’, in Iizuna, the town next to ours, for a celebratory lunch.
When it became clear that Yoshie was entering her last days, we were not in Shinanomachi but in Shiroishi, a small provincial city in the north of Honshu, near Sendai, where Mayu had an artist’s residency. She was preparing a performance in which five local people — an American, a Bangla-deshi, a Chinese and two Japanese — would tell their life stories. On the weekends she would go down to Tokyo to see mother and sister. I went with her the first time but subsequently stayed behind in the small house, once the headmaster’s residence, next to a Middle School where Mayu’s father had studied in his teens after the war. During that visit, Yoshie and I said goodbye. I took her hand, she raised herself up from the couch in the sitting room where she slept, summoning her reserves of strength and, as she was always able to do, transformed into a semblance of the beautiful young woman she had been.
On the Wednesday morning of that last week, Mayu had a call from Mioko, with the news that Yoshie’s breathing had changed and this meant the end was near. She went down to Tokyo by train that morning and did not come back until the following Monday. The next night, a Thursday, Hallowe’en, was tempestuous, with winds blowing so hard they lifted the heavy tarpaulins that had been hammered down to kill the weeds at the side of the house, and toppled the big plastic container where the kerosene cans were stored. An automatic light at the school was triggered, again and again, by tree branches swaying in the wind, so that the sound of flapping tarpaulins was accompanied by a white beam which would flash on, stay lit for a minute or so, then go out again. The house had shoji screens down one side and, when the light came on, weird shadows played across them. It did feel like the souls of the dead were walking; and I was not surprised when, next morning, Mayu called to say her mother had joined them.
Over the weekend she kept in touch, to let me know how things were going but also because she was looking for a black suit for me to wear to the funeral, set down for the following Wednesday, and needed my measurements. The shiny black shoes and the white shirt she bought online were delivered to the house in Shiroishi; the suit she hired from a place, unattended, to which she was given an entry code and in which she chose the clothes we would be wearing from those hanging on racks around the walls. Afterwards she returned them using the courier, Black Cat, from their depot in Shiroishi.
When Mayu arrived back on Monday afternoon, she brought with her the suit, along with a belt and a tie and a small purse which held the hand beads I would carry, like everybody else, during the ceremony. Miraculously, given the way I had arrived at my measurements, using a shoe lace and a ruler, and sending text messages listing the approximations, the suit fitted. The only problem was getting the trousers to button up over my paunch; but there were gussets at both sides and once they were extended, I could do it. She had hired a black dress for herself to wear and looked, I thought, very smart. She is, as her mother was, an elegant woman.
She had to go to Sendai on Tuesday to rehearse with the musician for the show, which was opening on Sunday. I stayed behind, working on my current book, finishing section three and making notes towards the fourth and last section, which would be very short. That afternoon, when she returned, we gathered up our things and drove to the Shiroishi Zao Shinakansen station to catch the 4.56 train to Tokyo. She wasn’t grieving; the exigencies of preparing for the funeral, along with the need to comfort her sister, who had lived with Yoshie for the last decade, and upon whom the burden of care had mostly fallen, took up most of her time and energy. Mioko, in her early fifties, had for some time been feeling ambivalent about her mother, whom she had come to see as an obstruction to the kind of life she wanted to live; now that she had gone, she was feeling guilt and shame and remorse, alternating with a relief she wasn’t comfortable admitting. On top of that Mayu was preoccupied with the preparations for her show. She had, you might say, a lot on her plate.
II
I had a few glasses of saké before we caught the train and drank a bit more during the two hour trip south. Saké affects me more like a drug than an alcohol — hallucinatory, let’s say, rather than intoxicating. Mayu had opened up her lap-top and was editing scripts for the upcoming performance. I had the window seat, looking west, watching as the skies over Fukushima (the inland city, not the coastal nuclear power plant) turned orange then red, while the hills went from ink blue to black. I could feel the motion as the Shinkansen took a sinuous snake-like curve to the right and we entered the outer suburbs of Tokyo. It always strikes me as extraordinary that the Edo of the Tokugawa has morphed from a wooden castle town into the model for the incomprehensible metropolis in Bladerunner (1981); but it’s worth remembering too that, no matter how vast it may be, at street level Tokyo is always human and incorrigibly domestic too.
At Tokyo station we transferred onto a local subway train and then walked a few blocks to the family apartment in Yoyogi. It was much warmer than it had been in Shiroishi. I was sweating and could feel the weight of the mourning suit I carried over my shoulder. Mioko wasn’t there, so we let ourselves in with Mayu’s key. She turned up a bit later; she’d been at the ceremony of the washing of Yoshie’s body. We drank more saké and had something to eat. Mayu ran a bath and afterwards, dressed in a pair of her mother’s pyjamas, went to bed. Whenever we stayed in Yoyogi, we slept in the single bed in Yoshie’s bedroom, because she preferred the couch in the sitting room. It was strange to see it untenanted, still surrounded by her books, her newspapers, her clothes. Kono-chan, her green-eyed, slightly gingery, tabby cat, roamed the apartment, crying out for her. When I tried to comfort her, she let me stroke her for a short while then bit me, not hard, on the hand.
Mioko was playing ambient music on her laptop and drinking whisky, an expensive Japanese brand, with water. I had one glass, neat, and took it slowly, in tiny sips. I can’t really handle spirits any more, they hurt my throat and, later, hurt my head as well. Mioko speaks English well enough but often has to search for a word; we weren’t really talking, however, just sitting together. Sometimes she and Mayu have long conversations which I can follow only in the broadest terms. They had a running joke about their mother: she was Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard; a fading star with delusions of grandeur who imposes her fantasies on everyone else and then ruthlessly enforces their compliance. I’d been given a part in this scenario — the writer, Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, who is found, at the beginning of the movie, floating face down in the pool, and goes on to tell the story of his own demise.
Yoshie was a luminary in fashionable circles in Tokyo in the 1950s and 1960s. She appeared, in different poses, looking like Jean Shrimpton, on the cover of half a dozen issues of an avant-garde literary magazine. Her first husband, Mayu’s father, was an innovative theatre designer who went on to work on some big productions, including Jesus Christ Superstar, before his untimely death from oesophageal cancer, which is also what killed Yoshie. Oddly enough, he too died on All Saints Day. They both had affairs. One of Yoshie’s lovers was a lesbian poet whose husband was a producer on Akira Kurosawa’s 1970 film Dodes’ka-den. Mayu, as a seven year old girl, drew the pictures of trams which appear under the opening credits of that film. Later, Yoshie worked in bars and it was then that she met Mioko’s father, who was a businessman. It was his second marriage too and his first wife was an author who is still read today. Just before I went to bed Mioko, who was going to sit up for a while longer, said: ‘Tomorrow we will have a hangover funeral,’ and laughed.
III
Next morning, not hungover, we drove, dressed in black, in the family car, a late-model bronze BMW, to the place where the funeral was to be held. It was a wide grey multi-storey building standing in a hollow, surrounded by trees and near a railway line. Mayu went off to buy rice balls for afterwards and, once she parked the car, Mioko and I entered through one of several sets of glass doors. It was cold inside and I was underdressed, wearing only a thin white shirt under my suit jacket. Mioko gave forth another sepulchral laugh and said they had to keep it cold because there were so many dead bodies around.
I was surprised to see paintings on the walls, all originals, and all by the same hand. The artist favoured subdued colours and melancholy subjects: ash-grey, yellow ochre and dust-brown landscapes showing ruined houses amidst drifting sands, camels in a caravan making their way in single file beneath sculpted dunes, abandoned mine workings choked with rubble. They weren’t bad and gave the otherwise stark interior of the building the aspect of a zone of transition, a place from which you passed over into some other land. The Bardo, perhaps.
We took an escalator to the second floor and made our way to the chapel, where Mayu rejoined us, and where Yoshie was laid out in her coffin with an altar bearing a luxurious display of white flowers — roses and carnations — behind her. She looked sere and frail; a blown husk that is finished. A photograph had been placed in amongst the bank of white flowers. Yoshie was wearing a red cashmere jumper very like one she has given me, was smiling, had Kono-chan in her arms, with yellow flowers in a vase behind her and a framed photo of her second husband in the background. Her colour was good, her hair a light brown and I was startled by a fleeting resemblance to my own mother, dead a quarter of a century now. We were invited to put mementos in the coffin. Mioko laid two folded scarves over her mother’s body, Mayu placed a soft toy, a little dog, next to her shoulder and I slipped a handwritten copy of a poem I’d drafted a few weeks previously under the edge of the coverlet tucked up over her chest. It was called To One Dying and she had, of course, never read it; and now she never would.
Next door was the waiting room, which was about the same size as the chapel. It had a wardrobe in one corner where you could leave coats, hats and bags, and was furnished with tables and chairs along the walls on both sides; and looked like a restaurant. There was a kitchen, with staff, out the back and when we sat down, a woman brought us cups of green tea. The other mourners began to arrive. They included Yoshie’s younger sister, the middle daughter of three; the third lives in the United States and would not be attending. Others were nieces and nephews and their spouses; relatives of her second husband; and her two best friends: spirited, stylish women in their eighties much like herself. One of them, who had her dyed orange hair bunched up on top of her head, offered to sit at the desk in the chapel and collect the offerings people made and record their names and messages; the other was taller, with soft silver grey hair, and a rebellious air about her. Everyone was dressed, splendidly, in black; except for the white shirts we men wore beneath our suit jackets.
While we were drinking our tea, the priest arrived and set up at the front table on the left, facing the room. He had his accoutrements in a box, from which he took them one by one and laid them carefully on the table top. Mioko and Mayu sat with him to discuss the service that was to follow and, presumably, other matters as well. An envelope containing a large amount of cash, in ¥10,000 notes, was passed over. He was an affable fellow of about sixty years, solidly built, not tall, with a benign, unlined face and a calm sense of his own dignity and the dignity of his office. Later we found out that he had just been asked to include, over Zoom, in a service he was conducting, a family member living in Switzerland; and that, until the request arrived, had not known what Zoom was, nor indeed that a technology exists which enables you to speak live and in person to someone in another country.
Next door, in the chapel, we assembled; all nineteen of us. At Mioko’s insistence, the funeral was going to be small, modest, intimate. We took our places in several rows of chairs on either side of the room, while a red folding chair was provided for the priest, who was himself robed in red. He sat before the coffin, with his back to the room, burning incense at a small table, beating a gong at intervals, at other times ringing a small bell, while he chanted and prayed. He had a book open in his hands, an aide de memoire; I’m pretty sure he knew the chants and prayers by heart. At a certain point, on a signal from one of the attendants, Mioko stood, bowed to each side of the room and then approached another table, standing behind the priest, from which she took a pinch of powdered incense and sprinkled it upon a heated element set in a bowl of sand. Then, after she had prayed, she turned and bowed, once again, to each side of the room before returning to her seat. One by one, or two by two, the rest of us followed suit. This simple ritual meant we all had a good look at each other, twice, and then (see below) twice again.
The priest’s chanting continued throughout, and his consultation with the book, which was small and thick with many pages, and his inscrutable yet deliberate movements with the incense, the gong and the bell. Towards the end of the service, at another signal from an attendant, each of us, again led by Mioko, as chief mourner, bowed to the room, approached the table, scattered incense in the bowl of sand and prayed — though in my case, and perhaps in that of others too, I was not so much praying as seeking somehow to communicate with the soul of Yoshie, who was held still to be present in the room with us, I believe, at least for now. After the last of us had made that second obeisance, the priest stood up and left the room, while an attendant took his red chair away, folded it up and leaned it against the wall.
We too left and went to the waiting room next door; but were called back again not so very long after, to find that the bank of flowers had been broken apart and strewn in the coffin, so that only Yoshie’s face was visible in that lovely sea of white and green. Some of the flowers had been held back, and they were taken on a tray around the room so that each us could select a stem or two and lay them with the others upon or next to Yoshie’s body. Mioko stood up to speak and for a moment it seemed that her tears would drown out her words; but she recovered and made her speech, which was not long, and then people were invited to say goodbye to Yoshie before the lid was put upon her coffin. Many of those present touched her face or the top of her head but I could not bring myself to do so. I did not want to feel the coldness of her flesh against my hand. Her friend, the silver-haired one, addressed her directly, loudly, in an admonishing tone: ‘Yoshie! Why have you left us this way? Why did you go so soon?’
When the coffin was closed I noticed a small sliding door in the lid through which, when it was drawn back, you could see her face. I was not expecting to be one of her pall bearers but was enlisted anyway; six of us shouldered the coffin and bore it from the chapel and placed it upon a metal transom parked outside. She was, it seemed to me, so light that she might have blown away on the wind. I remembered carrying my own mother from Old St Pauls twenty-five years ago, while Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds played; and ten years before that, my father, from another church, St Matthews, while the Anglican choir let forth what the vicar, a woman, called ‘a great shout of joy’. The transom with the coffin aboard was wheeled away to the lift and we mourners took the escalator downstairs and were shown, through a wide open door at the end of the foyer, into a large room with metal tables, brooms and other paraphernalia down one side; and three furnaces at its further end.
Two other groups of black clad mourners, both larger than ours, were gathered, just like us, in that room from which bodies were sent to be burned. Yoshie was already there, waiting, feet first, in her coffin, near the entrance to the left hand furnace. Her photograph, too, was present, sitting on a stand. The priest had returned, with his incense, his gong and his bell, but without his book. He chanted his chants, burned his incense, and then those amongst us who wanted to were given the opportunity to say one more goodbye before the coffin, with Yoshie in it, disappeared forever. At the last moment one of the attendants slid back the trap door on the top, perhaps to check it was the right person, perhaps to make sure that the person was really dead; or for some other reason. Then into the fire she went.
IV
We went back upstairs to the waiting room, where drinks and snacks had been laid out on the tables. There was bottled water, coca-cola, green tea, lemonade, and orange juice; the snacks were small packets of salty carbs of uncertain provenance. I was unsure as to what was going to happen next and starting to feel a bit anxious as a result; but nobody else seemed concerned so I just drank my orange juice and waited. The atmosphere, as it had been all along, was calm without being sombre, a matter of fact decorum which did not admit flagrant displays of grief, nor that sense of barely contained hysteria, nor even the interminable eulogies and testaments you will sometimes encounter at funerals in the West. I think this was probably because a well understood and long established procedure was being followed.
It was only about half an hour before we were summoned down below again. There we stood, in a wide semi-circle, as the oven door was opened to show the scatter of Yoshie’s bones lying white on a grey metal tray, disposed just as she had been when we’d seen her go in: feet first, head to the room. Everything else — the coffin, the flowers, the scarves, the puppy, other mementos, the scrap of paper upon which I had written my poem, as well as her flesh and blood — was gone. It was at once a shocking and a humbling sight. While the tray was being removed, we were directed to another part of the room where, behind ropes, stood one of those wide flat metal tables; upon this two attendants, wearing peaked caps and resembling officials you see on railway platforms, placed the tray bearing Yoshie’s bones.
The urn stood open at the head of the table and we were invited, one by one, to begin placing the bones therein. Mayu and I, using two pairs of long wooden chopsticks, together picked up her mother’s left femur, just below where the ball enters the socket in the pelvis, and put it gently into the urn. It felt peculiar to be handling the thigh bone of one I had known in life; but not bad. All of the other mourners did the same, picking up just one or two of her bones then giving way to the next person. When everyone had taken their turn, one of the attendants completed the task. From time to time, he would spot something black and twisted and remove and deposit it elsewhere. These were the nails that had held the coffin together. When all the bones were gone, and only fragments and dust remained, using a hearth broom and shovel he swept them up and added them to the urn. At the very last, the pieces of Yoshie’s skull and jawbone, which had been separated out, were placed, like cap stones, over the rest; and then the lid went on.
This process, too, was done respectfully, ceremonially, but not sadly. At one point one of the attendants asked Mayu how old her mother had been and, when she told him, he said that her bones were remarkably robust for someone of that age. Yoshie was indeed a survivor: born in the mid-thirties in Tokyo, her father was a Geisha’s son who died in a railway accident when she was ten (he fell, while drunk, into the path of oncoming train) and her mother a barber who raised the three girls alone. She had lived, and sometimes starved, through the Pacific War and the Occupation before coming into her own in the 1950s and 1960s. Subsequently, judicious investments in real estate, using her second husband’s money, had established the family’s wealth. Now she was gone; and the mere fact of seeing her bones spread out before us, and then handling them, had a solemnizing effect: just as you could not deny that Yoshie had lived, nor could you fail to understand that she had died. Or rather, that the body which had borne her soul through those ninety years, had gone; while the soul itself, if indeed you believe in such an entity, was surely elsewhere; but where?
The urn accompanied us upstairs again and was placed, alongside the photograph, on a small altar at the head of the room, now transformed into the restaurant it resembled. A meal was served, of fish, rice, miso soup, pickles and a number of other delicacies. Bottles of beer, saké, tea and soft drinks now stood at the centre of each table. A plate of food was placed in front of Yoshie’s picture, along with a glass of saké. You could clink glasses with her before you drank. Yoshie was an enthusiastic drinker. I remember how, with alacrity, relish and considerable force, she would crack open the top of a new bottle. People went from table to table, refilling the glasses of those who sat there; and exchanging condolences. Mayu spoke briefly before the meal and Mioko spoke again afterwards; then people began to say their farewells and drift away.
We took the urn, secured inside a pinewood box, and the photograph, with us when we left. At the apartment in Yoyogi Mioko made another altar and placed both shrine and photograph upon it, as well as a plate of food and a glass of saké. There were sticks of incense too, which you lit and placed in a tray of sand, where they burned, giving off a thin grey smoke which curled around the portrait and the urn. Kono-chan seemed less distressed than she had been before; perhaps because for her too Yoshie’s soul had returned. She was, according to Buddhist belief, now in the Bardo, called in Japanese chūu, an in between state where she would remain for the next forty-nine days — the length of time Gautama sat under the Bodhi Tree before attaining enlightenment. At the end of that period her urn will be interred in the family vault and her soul will be free to incarnate in another body. That date, as I write, is still two weeks away.
The other thing which lay upon the altar was her mobile phone. When the sisters looked at it they discovered the last image upon it was a selfie Yoshie had taken before she went to the nursing home. She is lying on her back on the couch where she spent so much of her time in her last days. Kono-chan is curled up on a cushion behind, her eyes half open, aware of what is going on. Yoshie’s head is propped up on a red pillow, you can see the top of the blue and white housecoat she was wearing and, though it looks as if she might have put on a bit of lipstick, I don’t think she has. Her eyes are black and piercing, as they were in life, and she is half-smiling quizzically, resignedly and sweetly into the lens. The photograph comes with its own instruction. Imperious to the last, this, she says, is how you are going to remember me. And so we will.
The other day, serendipitously, I came across a record I played over and over a decade or so ago and had since almost forgotten. It was the Martha Staples’ gospel album from 2013, called One True Vine, which she recorded in Chicago with Wilco aka Jeff Tweedy producing and playing most, not all, of the instruments. His son, Spencer, was the drummer. I downloaded the album from one of the pirate sites I frequented in those days and burned it onto a cd; which I used to put on, in the car, on my way to and from a teaching gig I had then. At about 35 minutes it was the perfect length; the first half I’d listen to as I drove from Summer Hill to Broadway; the second half on my way home after the class had finished.
It was creative writing, a paper towards a Masters I believe, and it dealt with prose non-fiction. Two or maybe three hours on a Tuesday night upstairs in a draughty old classroom behind the Blackfriars church. The paper was conceived and taught by Gabrielle Carey, who was full time at UTS (University of Technology, Sydney); she’d asked me to teach alongside her, as a casual, because there were too many students for her to handle alone. She would take the other class in a room across the hallway at the same time as I did mine; and afterwards I’d usually drive her to Stanmore, where her car was parked (she’d get the train into Central), and then she’d go her own way home to Ashfield.
I met Gabrielle when a friend from Summer Hill took me to a party at her place. Michael Manuel, who lived opposite me, was another writer who worked as a stage hand at the Sydney Opera House and did odd jobs in his spare time. He was a proficient carpenter / builder and had made various improvements to Gabrielle’s house. The party, in a Sunday afternoon, was on Gabrielle’s deck, and featured a trio playing classical music, while guests stood around on the lawn talking and drinking and eating snacks. I was introduced to a prestigious Irish academic and also to Gabrielle’s then boyfriend, another Irishman, a tradie, who was getting ominously drunk with his rough mates. His name was Brendan and he was to cause her a lot of grief in the next few years, and contribute to the straightened financial circumstances that were one of the causes of her death.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened but I think Gabrielle and I must have exchanged phone numbers. Later we got into the habit of meeting for a drink in the Summer Hill hotel. It would always be just one drink, a middy, for her, while I would down a couple of glasses of red wine before we each went our separate ways. There was never any romance between us, nor even a question of one; we were colleagues who talked about writing and related matters; but over time, as you would expect, the conversations did become more personal. Fairly early on in our friendship I learned that Gabrielle was a Christian of some kind, as was Michael, who introduced us. But I never asked her about her beliefs; indeed, as with Michael, I scrupulously avoided discussing matters of faith, about which I knew we would disagree.
Nevertheless, questions of faith did have an impact upon our friendship. One evening I arrived at work to find Gabrielle marking papers in her classroom which, as mentioned, adjoined mine. The knowing look she gave me, the enigmatic smile that accompanied it, stayed in my mind. It wasn’t explained until a week or two later, when I learned that my book, Dark Night: walking with McCahon, had won the Douglas Stewart Award for non-fiction at the NSW Premier’s awards (and also Book of the Year). Gabrielle, who chaired the panel that year, had been a strong advocate for it, at least partly, perhaps, because that book does deal with the question (or not) of Colin McCahon’s Christianity.
I’m not going to go into the details of the debacle that followed, beyond saying that the award was taken away from me, on a technicality, and that Gabrielle was furious about it. She summoned me to a meeting in her kitchen, transformed into a kind of war room for the occasion, to try to work out what had happened, why it had happened and what we would do about it. Of course there wasn’t anything to be done and, if I was not simply numb, I was already resigned to my fate. One thing I remember Gabrielle saying that day stuck in my mind: ‘I always get what I want,’ she said. ‘And if I don’t I need to know the reason why.’ It seemed to me an extraordinary statement to make.
UTS cancelled my gig the following year but my friendship with Gabrielle survived that and other complications. We continued to meet for the occasional drink, this time in a small bar called Temperance that had opened on Smith Street around the corner from my flat in Morris Street in Summer Hill. The pattern remained the same: she would call or text, we’d make a time, sit there talking for an hour or two while she drank a small beer (Young Henrys) and I red wine. Then she’d walk back to Ashfield.
One of the things we often spoke about was the question of suicide, about which she was, if not obsessed, then very much involved. Her father had taken his own life; as had my younger sister; so we had that in common. Another perennial topic was her son Jimmy, who was mentally ill and sometimes running wild in the streets. He was schizophrenic, whatever that means, and so was my sister. These were not dark or neurotic conversations, they were more like a couple of survivors of life’s vicissitudes, comparing notes. Or so I thought. They almost always ended with an affirmation, which we both made, that neither of us would ever commit suicide. For me that was merely the truth of the matter; for her, I realised later, it was something said in hope, or even as a kind of prayer.
Once or twice she invited me to join her for a swim – something we both did regularly for exercise – but I declined because I wasn’t sure I wanted to extend our relationship in that way. I had a girlfriend at the time, she was fiercely jealous, and already suspected me of having affairs (I wasn’t). Even if I had been free, however, I don’t know that I would have wanted any intimacy beyond what we already shared.
I read some of Gabrielle’s books, mostly those she published after we met; they did not include the book she wrote about her father’s suicide. I reviewed one of them (Mascara #15, May 2014; paywalled), called Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family (2013).It is a very good book and I hope I did it justice; but it is also a book of secrets, particularly family secrets, some of which are hinted at but not really told. She may not have known what they were, only that they existed. It is, in other words, a book with an unconscious.
I went to what turned out to be her last book launch, in Canberra which, as it happened, was also the last time I saw her. The book was called Only Happiness Here: In Search of Elizabeth von Antrim (2020) and, since Gabrielle’s death in 2023, reads more like a plea for happiness than the celebration it purported to be. Another book with a largely unplumbed unconscious. We didn’t see each other again, not because we fell out, but because of the pandemic and then because, after it was over, I moved overseas, to Japan. I still don’t really know the circumstances which led to her death. Our friendship was really quite private so I don’t have anyone to ask. Every suicide, however understandable, is on one level always a question without an answer. A suicide also always leaves behind, fairly or not, a residue of guilt among the living. These were both things we talked about.
Anyway, I started writing this piece because of a particular song on the Mavis Staples album, which Gabrielle must have heard on one or other of the occasions when I ferried her from Blackfriars to Stanmore in the aftermath of the creative non-fiction classes all those years ago. Not that she ever remarked upon it, even if she did ‘hear’ it. Still, it always makes me think of her. The song title is given above. It’s a hymn, written in 1901 by Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley; there are many fine versions of it, but none quite like the Mavis Staples one. The lyrics, even for a committed Christian, are full of ironies. I remember, when I posted a link to it on my blog back in 2013, some wag commenting: ‘Looking for the exit, dying for a fag.’ Indeed.
Pic of Gabrielle I took outside Temperance one night – it was her birthday and she was on her way to the party: January 10, then, but I don’t know which year
She sent me ‘Poem Without a Category’, by Gensei, as a kind of farewell when she heard I was going to live in Japan.
Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris, by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson (Te Papa Press, 2025) is an illustrated biography of Aotearoa New Zealand poet and painter Emily Harris. Born in Plymouth, England in 1837, she emigrated with her family to New Plymouth, Taranaki in 1841 and lived the rest of her life in what were then still called The Colonies. Her first two decades were spent in New Plymouth; she was four years in Hobart, Tasmania; and lived out her days in Nelson. Most of her poetry is lost. Only ten poems survive out of an unknown number of works and none of them were printed or published while she was alive; they were sent in letters to friends or relatives or pasted into notebooks and manuscripts. Her paintings, in water colours and in oils, fared rather better but here too there are lost or missing works. However, unlike the poems, many of these lost art works left documentary traces behind and may return, at some point in the future, to the public eye.
Indeed the title of this fine book signals the beginning of a process of search and rescue which may in time lead us to a fuller knowledge of what this remarkable woman accomplished over the period of her long life, which ended in 1925 when she was 88 years old. It consists of a prologue (‘Finding Emily’) and an epilogue (‘Scouting’) between which are sixteen relatively brief, concise chapters which unfold a mostly chronological narrative which, however, on occasion, does track back into the past and forward into the future. Each chapter begins with a close-up detail of one of Harris’s works. Overall, there are 200 illustrations, mostly of her own paintings but including works by her father Edwin and her sister Frances as well as those of contemporaries and heirs; photographs (of letters and journal entries, of family and of exhibitions); and even a picture of Edwin Harris’s guitar. The meticulous documentation takes up the last forty pages of an almost 400 page long book.
The Harris family emigrated to New Zealand after Edwin Harris, a civil engineer and surveyor whose first love was making art, found himself in financial difficulty and spent time in prison. It is likely that he stood surety for a relative who defaulted upon a debt but the details are obscure; there is an interesting confusion in the record between ‘mill’ and ‘will’. He and his wife Sarah had three children when they left Plymouth, a son Corbyn, Emily and her younger sister Catherine; another daughter was born prematurely during the voyage but did not survive. They had four more daughters, Frances, Mary, Augusta and Ellen in New Plymouth, completing a family of seven living children. While the Harrises undoubtedly observed the proprieties, Emily had a very different childhood and adolescence from the one she could have expected in Victorian England; and it was during this relatively free and untrammelled growing up that she learned to love the new land and especially the native bush with its flowering plants and its resplendent and majestic trees. Indeed, the subject matter of her painting in later years was derived, mostly though not exclusively, from her study of the flora of Aotearoa and adjacent islands, especially those to the south.
However, the exuberant and mostly heedless life she and her siblings led came to an abrupt end with the beginning of the Taranaki War of 1860-1 and particularly with the death of their brother Corbyn, killed by a taua of marauding Waikato warriors while gathering firewood on the beach near Waitara. He was wearing the uniform of the Volunteer Rifles at the time and was one of eighteen settlers who died during the war. His death devastated the family, especially his father, and caused them to leave New Plymouth and re-settle in Nelson. Emily, however, went first to Hobart with the Des Voeux family as a kind of live-in help, combining the role of governess with more vaguely defined duties as lady companion to Mrs Des Voeux, who sounds like a spectacularly neurotic woman and thus someone difficult to manage in a dependent relationship. It was during her years in Tasmania that Emily Harris took her first formal art lessons, although she had undoubtedly already learned a great deal about drawing and painting from her father.
She had been writing for some time when her Australian sojourn began. There are poems and letters extant from the time of the Taranaki War and there was also a diary. However, after she overheard her parents, who had found and read it, laughing (probably proud and delighted rather than malicious laughter) she destroyed it and did not take up journal writing again until much later, in Nelson. It was in Nelson, too, that she affirmed her life-long commitment to making art and began a practice whose results are notable for their rigour, their ardour and their beauty. Her works on botanical themes, as was noted at the time, are both ‘scientifically accurate and artistically presented’. She painted the local flora in the Nelson area but she also became interested in more exotic plants, especially those from alpine regions — on the slopes of Taranaki mounga, for instance, but also in the Southern Alps — and later those species which grow on the sub-Antarctic Islands and in the Chathams.
While the Harrises were members of the colonial elite, such as it was, they were not as a consequence wealthy. Edwin Harris in Taranaki worked as a surveyor and as a farmer but the death of his son made further enterprises on the land impractical. In Nelson he taught, as did his daughters, who founded and ran a school; but family finances were always tight and Emily, for instance, often had difficulty finding enough money to buy the materials she needed to make her art. Nevertheless, she produced a steady stream of work and exhibited widely, winning medals and commendations in Sydney, Melbourne and London and, in New Zealand, exhibiting in Dunedin, Christchurch, Nelson, Greymouth, Hokitika, Wellington, New Plymouth, Stratford and Auckland. Sales, however, were never enough to allow her the freedom to paint as she wished and when it came to publication of her books, she could do so only with money from subscriptions.
In 1890, in collaboration with Nelson bookseller H D Jackson, she published three discreet volumes, New Zealand flowers, New Zealand ferns, and New Zealand berries. Each of the three books contained twelve lithographs with descriptive text; some copies were hand-coloured by the author. A further collection of twenty-eight ink and watercolour studies of New Zealand mountain flora, prepared later in the 1890s, remained, despite her best efforts, unpublished. Her major work, consisting of a suite of twelve large oil paintings made for the Christchurch Exhibition of 1906 (properly ‘The New Zealand International Exhibition of Arts and Industries’), while exhibited, seems not to have been, for various reasons, given the attention it deserved. The suite was afterwards dispersed and the whereabouts of some of its individual pieces are now unknown, although some may well re-surface now this book has been published.
By the turn of the century Emily had outlived her parents and the three sisters who, like herself, remained unmarried and living at home. The two married sisters had families and made their lives elsewhere; so that the last quarter century of her life she spent living alone, in genteel poverty, in the family home at 34 Nile Street, with a small studio out the back where she painted. This is not to say she was lonely. She remained in close contact with both her sisters’ families, travelled often, had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances and corresponded with a number of scientific gentlemen who valued both her artistic skills and her botanical knowledge. Many of them sent her specimens to draw and paint. Later works include superb paintings of night skies, eclipses and comets; landscapes of the Marlborough sounds for a projected book on the dolphin, Pelorus Jack; and bird and animal studies from Tasman and Golden Bay. Towards the end of her life the Alexander Turnbull library bought sixty-three of her water colours for ten shillings a piece; a total of £31.10.
This is an unusual book in a number of respects. For instance, it is a collaborative biography, written by a poet and an art historian, one of whom is blind. Much of the text is in the present tense and uses the pronoun ‘we’ — not, certainly, the royal we but a voice that is measured and unassuming and militates against egotistical strategies. It also scrupulously avoids those twin temptations, dangers or sins of biography: I mean editorial comment and speculative supposition. There are many subjects raised which would provide fodder for the former tendency including, to name just three, the origins of the Taranaki War, the immensely destructive burning of the forest Emily Harris loved so well, in order to clear land for farming, and the effective silencing of women’s voices during the period in question. All are present in the narrative, none is made an occasion for polemic.
The refusal to speculate is a more interesting question. There are many gaps in the Emily Harris story and thus many opportunities for a biographer, or biographers, to fill those gaps with supposition. This temptation is almost entirely avoided and the reason for that is the authors’ unwavering commitment to telling us only what they have discovered, incontrovertibly, in the archival record. In fact, there is a second narrative present in the book, underpinning the life of Emily Harris; one which tells how her story was retrieved and where it was retrieved from. In other words, this a biography which is solidly based upon archival and family research and unwilling to go beyond what is attested in the record. Readers are, of course, free to speculate for themselves and many will want to; but they are only able to do so because of what has already been assembled and laid out so scrupulously before them. This is a kind of discipline which is rare these days outside of strictly academic writing and is all the more impressive for being present in a readable, indeed engrossing account of a life.
Emily comes forth from the book clear and strong, possessed of a lively appreciation of her own gifts and a subtle grasp upon the place they will both give and deny her in the world. She is almost always cheerful and positive, although there are fragments from letters and some journal entries in which her resolve falters and her spirit wilts from the exigencies of being who she is in the time and place in which she lives. She was, for instance, an almost exact contemporary of the portraitist Gottfried Lindauer but their fates, notwithstanding differences in the subject matter, are wildly at variance. Simply put, Emily Harris was unable to make a living out of her art, not even when she devoted herself to painting objects which could be sold into wealthy colonial homes: trays, screens, furnishings and the like. Her botanical pictures, which are scientifically exact yet compositionally innovative, outside of specialists, did not find a contemporary audience, probably because one for them did not yet exist and had to be created — by people like herself. What this cost her personally and how she responded is best illustrated by a formal photographic portrait of her taken in Nelson in 1898: a truly remarkable image.
One of the joys of this book then, is that you, as reader, are free to make your own suppositions to fill in the gaps in the narrative; you are also able to make connections present in the text but not emphasised by the authors. For instance, Sarah Harris’s premature birth on board ship of the daughter who died was caused, at least in part, by her taking a common remedy of the time called Morison’s Pills, a laxative. One of the constituent ingredients of the pills was a substance called gamboge, ultimately derived from a latex tapped from a Cambodian tree and known today to be toxic to humans in small doses and fatal in large ones. But gamboge was also widely used as a pigment in water colour painting and was a staple colour in Emily’s palette: one of the powders she used to make her yellows, almost certainly in ignorance of the role it had played in the death of her sister.
Another connection can be made via a vibrant and amusing first person account, in a letter, which Emily gives of the time she found her father burning family papers and letters in the fire in the sitting room at Nile Street and the methods she used to divert him from his self-imposed task and ultimately to rescue most, not all, of the precious documents. This reminded me of the shameful episode, more than a quarter of a century later, in Whanganui, when the father of Edith Collier burned, on a bonfire, a number of her paintings, evidently because of what he took to be their homo-erotic content. They seem mostly to have been nude portraits of women Collier had known in London during her sojourn there before, during and after the Great War. The casual misogyny, the infuriating assumption of an absolute authority over the traces of other people’s life and the weird desire to expunge evidence of a shared past, are the same.
This is a book with quality reproductions and a level of detail in the captions, as in the documentation, of the highest order. The visual moves in lockstep with the verbal. The text restores lost time with its fidelity to archival sources, veritable episodes from the life, judiciously selected quotations and exact documentary records, in a story told in language both rich and plain. I can’t stress enough how unusual it is in terms of what we usually get from a biography these days: a sort of fiction loosely based upon whatever sources the author happened to have access to. Groundwork doesn’t assume the life is out there as a story waiting to be re-told, with the missing bits intuited or made-up and re-inserted on cue. Rather, it insists that the real, the incontrovertible traces of a life are, in fact, all that we have; and that therefore we have to start with them. Groundwork has a solidity that contrasts, dizzyingly, with the evanescence of what we don’t know of Emily Harris’s life.
I’ll end with an anecdote. I was reading the book in bed in a small provincial hospital in the mountains of Honshu while convalescing after a minor surgical procedure. One of the nurses, a fellow who had spent time in Australia and with whom I had become friendly, asked if he could have a look at it. He spent some time leafing through, studying the illustrations. Afterwards he remarked that the work looked Japanese to him; he meant that it reminded him of the exquisite water colour flower paintings found on screens and on scrolls in this country. He didn’t need to add that one of the functions of these works is to facilitate contemplation of the strangeness, the beauty and the brevity of the things of this world; this, too, is true of Emily Harris’s paintings.
Captions (in order of appearance)
Emily Cumming Harris, Supplejack berries and white convolvulus, c.1880s, watercolour, 580 x 390mm. Cranstone collection, Whanganui
Emily Cumming Harris, Kiekie (Freycinetia banksii),nikau (Rhopalostylis sapida),five finger (Pseudopanaxarboreum) and karaka(Corynocarpus laevigata)in fruit, 1879, watercolour, 389 x 506mm. Reproduced as a Turnbull Library print in 1980. Alexander Turnbull Library, C-023-002
Emily Cumming Harris, Cordyline australis, 1880–1900, watercolour, 720 x 530mm. Alexander Turnbull Library, C-024-005
Emily Cumming Harris, White-flowering mānuka and pōhutukawa, 1906, oil on straw board, 810 x 520mm. Galpin collection, Pauanui
Emily Cumming Harris, Kiekie (Freycinetia banksii); Tī ngahere (Cordyline banksii); Nīkau (Rhopalostylis sapida); Mikoikoi (Libertia grandiflora); Neinei (Dracophyllum), 1906, oil on board, 830 x 550mm. Russell and Barbara Briant collection, Wellington
Emily Harris wearing a plaited straw bonnet trimmed with gathered tulle, satin, lace, white flowers and decorations that look like tiny bells. Glass-plate negative, c.1898. Nelson Provincial Museum, Tyree Studio Collection, 55512
Emily Cumming Harris, Rangiora (Brachyglottis rangiora), 1887, watercolour, 730 x 520mm. Reproduced as a Turnbull Library print in 1968. Alexander Turnbull Library, C-024-007
In the house where I grew up — an old wooden villa beside a dirt road on the outskirts of a small King Country town with a river at the back — my mother hung a number of framed art prints on the walls. I remember two van Goghs, a landscape near Arles (The Harvest) and one of the sunflower paintings; a Degas of young ballerinas in foaming, diaphanous tutus; Manet’s portrait of Berthe Morisot wearing a black bonnet and holding a bunch of violets. They were displayed alongside what I found out later were two originals: a children’s painting by Colin and Anne McCahon, given to my eldest sister at birth, and a range of denuded, purple-green hills by Ivy Fife. There were also two small Paul Gauguin prints. They were my favourites, probably because they were so colourful. I have them still. They are from his first Tahitian period: Te matete (Nous n’irons pas au marché aujourd’hui) and Le paysage aux paons (La mort).
There are mysteries associated with both of these works. Te matete’s sub-title ‘We shall not go to the market today’, is odd because the five women sitting side by side on a bench are already at the market; which is what ‘te matete’ means. Later I learned that the pieces of paper two of them are holding like fans in their hands are health permits, issued by the French authorities, allowing them to continue to practice their trade — prostitution; and that the subtitle means, not they aren’t going to the market but that they are not going to sell themselves that day. Later still I heard a speculation, unconfirmed, that the five on the bench, one of whom is smoking a cigarette, are not women but māhū. Mahu (= middle) are a third gender, found in all Polynesian societies, typically born male but growing up female; although the designation is not restricted to such people. Gauguin, because of his long hair and extravagant clothes, was thought to be mahu — or perhaps ta’ata vahine, a man-woman — when he first came ashore at Papeete in 1891.
Landscape with Peacocks is mysterious for a different reason. To the right of the picture, in the middle ground, a man wielding an axe stands next to a smoking fire; behind him is a pink thatched hut and two figures walking away down a green path; in the foreground, a peacock and hen are crossing the picture plane from left to right. The mystery lies in the Tahitian word inscribed in black on bright yellow lower right: ‘Matamoe’. I used to think it was the name of the landscape depicted. The original title of the work, it means, literally, ‘eyes sleeping’. That word has been variously interpreted. It could indeed be a place name; it could mean death; it could refer to wanderers or strangers (the peacocks; or Gauguin himself); it has even been translated as ‘the olden days’ (properly ‘matamua’). ‘La mort’ is Gauguin’s subtitle, given the work when he offered it for sale in Paris in 1893. No one knows why he called it that; unless he was referring to the death of his old self and the birth of a new.
It is characteristic of the oeuvre that mysteries found within it are seldom resolved. Russian scholar Alexey Petukhov, for instance, believed the figure of the young man with the axe is derived from a frieze on the Parthenon in Athens, postcards of which Gauguin had with him in Tahiti. Bengt Danielsson, who sailed with Thor Heyerdahl on the Kon Tiki and afterwards spent many years in Polynesia, identified the model for the young man as Gaston Pia, the caretaker at the primary school near where Gauguin lived at the time and a personal friend of the artist. They could both be right. There is less controversy over the origin of the five figures on the bench in Te matete: the composition is based upon an Egyptian tomb painting from 18th dynasty Thebes, of which the artist owned a black and white reproduction, probably another postcard.
It would be idle to pretend I knew any of this when I was growing up in the Burns Street house in the 1950s; though I might have intuited that there was something Egyptian about Te matete. I liked the picture for other reasons. The colours of the women’s dresses — dark blue, green, pale blue, orange, golden yellow — for instance; the two boys bent over carrying fish in the background; the enigmatic figure right foreground, in profile, looking askance at the women on the bench. S/he is the best candidate in the picture for a mahu; while those sitting talking and laughing on the bench, with their permits and their cigarettes held elegantly, nonchalantly in their hands, reminded me of Tut and Pet, two young Māori women, one a primary school teacher, the other a psychiatric nurse, who lived, intermittently, next door to us and looked after me sometimes.
My attraction to Landscape with Peacocks was simpler. It resembled a more brightly coloured version of our own garden. That garden was temperate not tropical; lush nevertheless, with a honeysuckle hedge, camellias, a bower of ferns, nectarine, peach, quince, plum and apple trees, gooseberry, red and black current bushes and what I once thought was an almond but was more likely a walnut. There wasn’t a coconut palm but there was a big old cabbage tree, called tī kōuka, sometimes titi palm, in te reo Māori, at one end of the lawn and a venerable beech, towai, which flowered pink and fruited red, at the other. We didn’t have peacocks but we had bantam hens; and up the back, across the river, as in the Gauguin painting, there was a mountain. In other words, both paintings, in different ways, represented aspects of the world I lived in then.
Neither of these works was in the exhibition, Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, which closed in October last year at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Te matete is in Switzerland; there were works from the Kunstmuseum Basel in the show so its omission was probably a curatorial or else a logistical decision. Le paysage aux paons is held at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, along with more than a dozen other paintings; there are a nearly equal number at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Unfortunately, for the last hundred years, it has been difficult if not impossible to show the thirty-odd Russian-based Gauguins in the West. After the revolution they were confiscated (= stolen) by the Bolshevik government; the ever-alert descendants of the Kreb, Morozov and Shchukin families, who are their rightful owners, will certainly sue for the return of their property if ever they appear physically in a local jurisdiction.
Henri Loyrette, curator of the NGA show, did open negotiations with Russian museums to try to arrange loans of some of these pictures; the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 put an end to that initiative. It remains the case that a comprehensive exhibition of what Gauguin achieved as a painter remains out of reach; and even those publications which try to see him whole, using illustrations, usually fail, for the same reason: not everything is, or can be made, available. This is part of a larger phenomenon: of all the major artists of his generation, Gauguin is the one who has proved unassimilable to orthodox art historical narratives — and even to the unorthodox. He remains an outsider and there have been, in recent years, attempts to cancel him altogether: for his alleged paedophilia, his sexual adventurism, his putative syphilis, his complicity in colonial strategies; most of all, perhaps, for his refusal or inability to create a coherent oeuvre. This last charge is of course the most interesting.
Loyrette, in his catalogue essay, like many commentators on Gauguin, begins at the end, with his death on 8 May 1903 in La Maison de Jouir, his house at Atuona on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands, now part of French Polynesia. He uses naval surgeon, writer, photographer and explorer Victor Segalen as his proxy. It was Segalen who, in August of that year, in an official capacity, picked up Gauguin’s remaining possessions from Atuona and took them to Papeete to be auctioned. He left an evocative account of the studio, with its dusty harmonium, its harp and its mandolin hanging on the wall, its detritus; and became the first reader of Gauguin’s manuscript of his book, Noa Noa,as well as the purchaser of a number of works, twenty-four in all, including the carved wooden boards with which the artist had decorated the entrance to the top floor of his two storey house. Segalen, who wrote a short, incisive and eccentric study of Rimbaud, became a Sinophile and a pioneering photographer in remote parts of China; until his early (and mysterious death) in 1919, he was an active proponent of the view of Gauguin as ‘un sauvage’ as well as, after Rimbaud, ‘un autre’.
Loyrette, very loosely, structures his essay as a triptych. Part one uses Segalen as a medium through which to explore Gauguin’s house as home and museum; a location for the artist’s embodied and disembodied consciousness, from which he or his ghost might view his and other people’s extensions in space and time. A Degas expert and a former director of the Louvre, Loyrette draws an explicit parallel between Degas’ museum of the mind and the one Gauguin took with him — his ‘little friends’ — and reconstructed in Tahiti and the Marquesas. His second panel is built around an analysis of the fifteen or so self-portraits Gauguin painted over his lifetime, treating them as another kind of home, in this case for an identity which is, paradoxically, both mutable and elemental, fluid yet stable. The self-portraits are way stations on the journey to the final resting place at Atuona; and the last self-portrait is also, Loyrette believes (contra Segalen, who thought it was Breton village in snow), the last painting.
The third part of the triptych is made up of Gauguin’s writings. Gauguin was a prolific writer, especially towards the end of his life, when physical debility made painting difficult. His texts, anecdotal, autobiographical, philosophic and polemical, are best approached as a series of vignettes which might be compared to drawings or sketches that sometimes, not always, attain the status of finished compositions. You cannot derive from them consistent arguments and there are no fully achieved book length works; though you can find in them any number of fruitful provocations. Nor can you reconstruct a persuasive biography or autobiography; most stories exist in multiple, conflicting or ambiguous versions. There isn’t a theory of painting to be found amongst them either, although there are many pertinent observations upon his own practice; and (mostly acidulous) remarks upon the practices of others.
The chameleon nature of Gauguin’s achievement, the way he changed and kept on changing, is thus present in the writings. Loyrette identifies this as characteristic of the oeuvre as a whole and concludes his essay with some sonorous phrases which don’t offer much of substance. The first part of his essay title — ‘Into the far distance and into the self: the view from Gauguin’s window in the Marquesas’ — quotes Stéphane Mallarmé’s summation of his friend’s trajectory when, in 1891, he left for the first time for Tahiti. It sounds good: but what does it mean? That for Gauguin distance from the metropolis meant intimacy with the self? Perhaps. In some ways he never left Paris at all. It was where he sent his pictures and from whence his money came; where his closest friends and most active correspondents lived; as France was the source of the tinned food, the wine, the brandy and the absinthe he consumed. Or is it a way of talking about Gauguin the symbolist, in whose works everything signifies something else but no-one, not even the artist, can say precisely what that something else is? Loyrette’s essay doesn’t mount an argument for the coherence of the oeuvre, let alone that of his own exhibition; no matter how magnificent the works (and many of them are) he gathered for it.
His long essay is followed by four shorter ones. Nicholas Thomas’s ‘The painting of modern Polynesian life’, with its Baudelairean echo in the title, is a precis of some of the arguments in his recent Gauguin and Polynesia, discussed below. Vaiana Giraud’s ‘Gauguin the writer: Noa Noa and other prose’ is a precise and accurate summary of the voluminous writings the artist produced, including the journalism he wrote during his second stay on Tahiti; but doesn’t go much beyond a description of their extent, with a nod or two towards their content. Norma Broude, in her ‘Paul Gauguin and his art in the era of cancel culture’ offers a boiled down version of a longer essay which explores connections between Flora Tristan, Gauguin’s feminist and socialist maternal grandmother, and his own credentials as a supporter of, and an activist for, women’s rights. The fourth essay, as perfunctory in its way as the others, is also the most poignant.
Miriama Bono’s ‘Imagining reconciliation beyond myth and polemics’ anatomises the absence of Gauguin and his works from Tahiti and the Marquesas; and consequently from the consciousness of most if not all present day inhabitants of French Polynesia. She also gestures towards contemporary practitioners like the artist Kanaky (Philippe Lallut), who in works such as C’est fini avec Gauguin, tries to come to terms with the Frenchman’s legacy in the place he and other Pacific Islanders call home. Bono quotes Jean-Marc Pabrum: ‘Until Polynesian artists have asserted their own identity and paid homage to their people or culture, at least until they are at peace with themselves, the notion of passionately devoting themselves to a foreigner cannot help but seem futile and incongruous’. In this connection it is worth mentioning Samoan-Japanese artist Yuki Kihara’s series Paradise Camp, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2022, which restages Gauguin’s compositions with fa’afafine (the Samoan equivalent of mahu) as models and photographs the results. Kihara, too, had heard that some of the people in Gauguin’s paintings may have been mahu.
The essays are followed by an illustrated chronology prepared by Jane Messenger. This takes up more than half the book and functions both as a biography and a catalogue of works; although those which appear elsewhere in the volume (logically, I suppose, but confusingly) are omitted from it. The chronology is informative, mostly accurate and includes a commentary which is sometimes illuminating, but usually only in terms of currently fashionable or unfashionable attitudes to the man and his work. I found its inclusion perplexing; I would have preferred a catalogue of works, with commentary focussed upon particular paintings, rather than upon biographical matters which deserve, and require, much fuller consideration than can be given in a chronology. Fortunately, two book length biographies of Gauguin were also published in 2024: Nicholas Thomas’s aforementioned Gauguin and Polynesia, and Wild Thing: A life of Paul Gauguin, by Sue Prideaux.
In many respects the books are complementary. Thomas’s is scholarly, Prideaux’s (as the title indicates) popular. Thomas, a Sydney-sider, first travelled to the Marquesas in 1984 as a young anthropologist to do field work on ‘Ua Pou, one of the six inhabited islands in the group. He has been back to French Polynesia, and to a lot of other places in the Pacific, many times since and is as well-informed and knowledgeable a commentator on Pacific cultures, past and present, as we have. He has also actively participated in the careers of contemporary artists like Niuean John Pule and the late Jim Vivieaere, a Cook Island Māori, to whose memory his book is dedicated. Fluent in French, he is well placed to access those sources for a Gauguin biography which have not yet been translated into English. While his book is even-handed and measured in tone, it isn’t difficult to intuit behind the prose a sense of exasperation with the persistent misunderstandings of Polynesian cultures by Western observers — from Louis Antoine de Bougainville until now. These misunderstandings, he believes, have also led to mis-readings of Gauguin’s work; hence his book.
Sue Prideaux, an Anglo-Norwegian with a French name, is a professional biographer who has published lives of Edvard Munch (2005), August Strindberg (2012) and Friedrich Nietzsche (2018); all three of these works won prestigious literary awards in Great Britain. Prideaux’s godmother was painted by Munch; Strindberg and Munch were friends; Nietzsche and Strindberg didn’t meet but corresponded briefly and fiercely with one another in the late 1880s, just before the former’s descent into madness; while Gauguin and Strindberg got to know each other in Paris during the period in the 1890s between the painter’s two sojourns in Tahiti. Prideaux’s biography therefore grows out of her previous inquiries and reflects an interest in the European dramatic, literary, painterly and philosophic circles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She has a sophisticated understanding of this milieu and of Gauguin’s interactions within it and her writing about these associations and intersections is the best part of her book.
Curiously, however, the further her investigations take her from Europe, the less convincing she becomes. In place of solid research she adopts novelistic strategies, as in her description of Gauguin in Auckland in 1895, en route to Papeete for the second time: ‘He was miserable. It was mid-winter, the hotel was unheated, and he couldn’t talk to anyone on account of his execrable English. Bored and cold, he disliked the city for its inauthenticity. Life was so dull he went out spending money for something to do’. In her account it is this boredom and misery which led him to the Auckland Institute and Museum where he found, in Thomas’s words, ‘the richest collection of Oceanic art [he] ever saw’. In fact Gauguin went both to the Museum and the Auckland City Art Gallery, which also held a collection of Māori artefacts, and filled a sketchbook with drawings of what he saw there. I find it hard to believe it was not curiosity and enthusiasm, rather than misery and boredom, which led him to those places.
Thomas goes into the detail of what Gauguin saw in Auckland and makes the point that, as in Tahiti, he was not encountering the remains of some ancient authentic tradition which had died out but contemporary art by Māori and other Polynesians which existed in relation to, and in reaction against, European colonisation; and, crucially, that Gauguin knew this was what he was seeing. In Polynesia proper, Prideaux falls prey to another of the misunderstandings which Thomas tries so hard to correct: the myth of the granny frock aka the Mother Hubbard. Prideaux repeats, several times, a trope common among recent writers on the Pacific, which deplores the long dresses women wear, ubiquitous in the islands today, as an imposition forced upon them by the missionaries, in order to cover up their hitherto freely exposed bodies — the same naked bodies which were such a magnet (this train of thought somewhat contradictorily asserts) for the prurient gaze of white colonising males like Gauguin.
Thomas takes issue with this view, pointing out that, at contact, all Polynesian societies placed a high value on locally manufactured tapa cloth and used it as an often extravagant covering for both the female and the male body on prestige, ceremonial or memorial occasions. They were, concomitantly, interested in the varieties of cloth offered to them in trade with Europeans, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. When the Russo-German explorer Adam Krusenstern was cruising off the coast of Hawai’i in mid-1804, for instance, desperate to obtain provisions, especially pigs, from the locals, he found that a kind of Russian red cloth was the only thing the Hawai’ians would exchange them for and, because he did not have it, or rather did not have enough of it, his people had to go without fresh meat. A decade later Otto Kotzebue, as Thomas records, had the same experience. Tahitian women, he says, welcomed the opportunity to make themselves clothes out of a rich variety of fabrics they had not encountered before.
Both biographies re-tell the story of how Gauguin painted one of his early Tahitian portraits, Vahine no te tiare (‘Woman with a gardenia’) but they do so quite differently. A neighbour visited and showed some interest in Gauguin’s portable museum. He began to sketch her but, when she saw what he was doing, she made some exclamation and left. An hour or so later she returned, perfumed, dressed in a blue gown, with a flower behind her ear. For Thomas, ‘her dress is beautiful’; for Prideaux, it is just another Mother Hubbard. Thomas sees her return as an act of agency, a decision to have herself represented the way she wanted to be seen; Prideaux thinks she is trying to mimic a European ideal. She repeats some mildly suggestive banter between the woman and Gauguin during which he says, in answer to her question, that, yes, the woman in Manet’s Olympia, a reproduction of which was pinned to the wall, is his wife. We have only Gauguin’s account of this conversation — if indeed it occurred. Its tone is impossible to gauge now, but I imagine amused scepticism on the woman’s side and an unconvincing, faux bravado on his; rather than the active flirtation Prideaux suggests.
The biographers differ, too, in their assessment of the painting. Prideaux sees a profound sadness in the woman’s countenance and suggests Gauguin is painting ‘the melancholy he saw in the vanished paradise of her race’. For Thomas, she is contemporary, unphased, ‘utterly confident in herself’. He points out that she is wearing what appears to be a wedding ring, albeit on her right hand, and remarks that ‘it is highly unlikely that the artist would have ventured to seek intimacy with a woman he found at least a little daunting, whose self-possession he certainly did not doubt’. In other words, he sees the subject of the painting, and her power relation with her portraitist, in a diametrically opposite way to Prideaux. For me the biggest problem with Prideaux’s book is here, in her reading of the paintings. This is, of course, a matter of opinion; but I hardly ever found myself in agreement with her descriptions of what the works show, let alone her interpretations of them. Thomas, as befits his training, is more circumspect and, to my mind, more accurate; and, when it comes to matters Polynesian, more knowledgeable as well.
Prideaux, too, begins her tale at the end, with the death of the artist at Atuona. Then, with a flourish, she goes on to tell the story of Gauguin’s teeth. During the clearing, in 2002, of the site where his house had once stood (so that a replica could be built) a well was uncovered. This was the place he used to cool his drinks as well as draw his water. From its depths, among other things, a jar containing four decayed human teeth was retrieved. How they got there isn’t known; but, following DNA analysis, they were determined to have belonged to Gauguin. Further analysis showed that the tooth enamel was free of traces of cadmium, mercury or arsenic: standard treatments for syphilis in the nineteenth century, which would certainly have left their mark behind had they been used. Ergo, Prideaux concludes, Gauguin may not have had the disease after all: ‘If the story of the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas is not true, what other myths might we be holding on to?’ Subsequently she writes as if his syphilis were indeed a myth.
Thomas doesn’t address the issue in the body of his text but does mention it in a footnote, observing that ‘there appears to be no technical or scientific publication of the analysis that clarifies the implications of the finding’. He goes on to say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: if Gauguin was not treated for syphilis, that does not mean he did not have it, only that he was not dosed with heavy metals as a consequence. On balance, he thinks it likely that he did suffer from the disease but is not prepared to go further than that. He does, however, pose the question: if he did have it, where and when might he have contracted it?
By his own account, Gauguin had his first sexual experience, aged fifteen, presumably with a prostitute, just before he embarked at Le Havre on his first voyage in the Merchant Marine. He went in the Luzitano to Rio de Janeiro, where a friend had given him the address of a woman with whom he spent time ashore on this and on his second voyage, in the same ship, to Brazil. She was an actress, a native of Bordeaux, who called herself Madame Aimée; she had other lovers, including a Russian naval officer who was, Gauguin claimed, an heir to the Tsarist throne. Subsequently he sailed, in the Chile, to ports on the Pacific coast of South America (but not, as both Messenger and Prideaux allege, to India or Japan). It is thus entirely possible that he picked up the disease in his teens when he was a sailor; it’s also possible that he didn’t know he had it until much later in life, when tertiary symptoms began to manifest. There is no evidence that his Danish wife, Mette-Sophie Gad, nor any of their five children, were infected.
The allegation that he had syphilis is contentious because of the possibility that, knowingly or unknowingly, he passed it on to the women who were his lovers in Tahiti and in the Marquesas; affairs which are also controversial because the women were so young. Records are unreliable but it seems that the two who lived with him for extended periods of time during his two sojourns on Tahiti — Teha’amana and Pau’ura, respectively — were in their early teens when the liaisons began. It is this circumstance which has led to accusations that Gauguin was a paedophile. Thomas investigates these relationships in some detail and shows that they were consensual, that the young women’s families knew of and approved them, and that the women were free to leave at any time. It is also the case that he was not doing anything illegal: the age of consent in France and her territories at the time was thirteen; and, in both Tahiti and the Marquesas, boys and girls became sexually active as soon as they were physically mature.
Instead of focussing upon the unknown consequences of these and other liaisons, it is more interesting to speculate upon the nature of Gauguin’s own sexuality. He must have encountered homosexuality on board the ships in which he sailed; but there is no suggestion that he himself was inclined towards sex with men; apart, that is, from a brief, equivocal passage in Noa Noa, from which Prideaux quotes in her book. Gauguin and a young Tahitian, Jotepha (Joseph) have gone inland to seek wood from which to make carvings. Jotepha knows of a rosewood tree which, he says, doesn’t belong to anyone. As they are walking along, one behind the other, Gauguin following, he becomes fixated upon Jotepha’s ‘lithe animal body [with] graceful contours’. He wants to ravish him but is aware that his desire is ‘the awakening of evil’; and then, suddenly, is overcome with ‘the weariness of the male role, having always to be strong, protective; broad shoulders may be a heavy load. To be for a minute the weak being who loves and obeys’. It seems that, rather than ravishing Jotepha, he wants to be ravished by him.
At this point they have to cross a stream; as they do so, Jotepha remarks that the water is cold and the spell is broken. They carry on, cut down the tree — in Gauguin’s account an orgy of repressed sexual violence — and take the wood back to the studio for carving. ‘I was definitely at peace from then on. I gave not a single blow of the chisel to that piece of wood without having memories of sweet quietude, a fragrance, a victory, a rejuvenation’. Prideaux, who reads the episode in terms of the story of the Garden of Eden and, superfluously, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as well, suggests the encounter ‘released Gauguin from the role of the sexually predatory white male’. This may be so; but surely it also liberated him into a consciousness of his female side, albeit conceived in atavistic, nineteenth century terms: ‘the weak being who loves and obeys’?
Here the figure of the mahu becomes pertinent again. Gauguin wrote that, among Tahitians and Marquesans, women and men were more like one another, physically and psychologically, than they were in Western societies and that meant relations between the sexes were more equal, more tender and more free. He doesn’t seem to have made any overt comment upon the middle sex but there are many figures in his pictures who could be either male or female — or both. And there is one at least where his depiction is unequivocal. In the painting Nave Nave Moe, in the right middle ground, sits a figure with its head turned to the side and one knee drawn up, upon which s/he rests a left hand. Along the thigh of the other, extended leg lies an impressively large penis; its presence compels a re-examination of the naked breasts of the figure, which turn out to be as characteristic of a fleshy male body as they would be of a small-breasted woman.
Nave Nave Moe (‘Sacred spring’ or ‘Sweet dreams’) is one of the works held in Russia, at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. I have read half a dozen commentaries upon it, all of which identify the figure in question as a woman, perhaps because it is shown in the same pose as that of the central image in the much more famous Aha oe feii (‘What! Are you jealous?’). Or perhaps as an example of deliberate or inadvertent censorship. It is a significant omission. Nave Nave Moe was painted in Paris in 1894 and exhibited there along with the equally famous Mana’o tupapa’u (‘Spirit of the dead watching’), the work which, more than any other, has led to accusations that Gauguin was a pornographer. But what if the naked figure lying face down on the bed is not a girl but a mahu; or even, as Stephen Eisenman suggests in Gauguin’s Skirt, an hermaphrodite, like the one in Bernini’s famous sculpture (a copy of a lost Greek original), whose pose Gauguin quotes in his picture? What are we to say about the male gaze when it is directed at a figure whose sex is ambivalent?
In the story about Jotepha Gauguin does in fact characterise the young man as an hermaphrodite but also says he was ‘unaware’. This lack of awareness is not ignorance but innocence and he contrasts it with his own fallen nature: ‘I alone carried the burden of an evil thought, a whole civilization had been before me in evil and had educated me’. This is probably the most accurate, and the most sympathetic, way of understanding Gauguin’s (admittedly tiresome) reiteration that he was, or rather wanted to be, ‘un sauvage’ — a word which, as Thomas points out, in French means something more like ‘wild’ or ‘untamed’ than ‘primitive’ or ‘barbaric’. Gauguin, whose first language was Spanish and whose early years were spent in Lima, may have wanted to return to the state of innocence he had known as a boy in Peru. Just as his search for tropical locales to paint may have been a quest to recover the lost colours of his childhood.
The other charge against Gauguin is that he was complicit with the French colonial enterprise in Tahiti and the Marquesas. At the most basic level, this is true: how could he not have been? Merely by being there, a white man in a settler society, he was implicated. Politically, however, Gauguin always opposed what he saw as the abuses of the colonial system. During his first sojourn, when he was beholden to the French government, he expressed himself privately (and eloquently); during his second, he became an activist. He contributed critical and satirical letters to the periodical Les Guêpes (‘The Wasps’) and accepted a paid position as its editor. Les Guêpes was the organ of the Catholic party and in his articles Gauguin tended to promote the interests of settlers against the colonial government. His own newsletter, Le Sourire (‘The Smile’) took a similar stance; one that was not necessarily, or always, sympathetic to the Tahitian people but was consistently hostile, in an anarchic and scattergun fashion, to the colonial government. He became a popular public figure among the disaffected and was known affectionately about town as Koké — the local pronunciation of his surname.
Things were different in the Marquesas, where both periodicals were read and where, when Gauguin arrived there in 1901, Koké was already a hero. In Atuona he found a smaller society in which he could make a real difference to people’s lives. By reading the relevant legislation, for example, he was able to inform local families that the hated compulsory education of their teenaged children at segregated Catholic schools in town only applied to those who lived within a certain distance (4.5 kilometres) of these institutions. Families who didn’t want their boys and girls indoctrinated promptly moved outside the limit and withdrew them, legally, from the schools. He also refused to pay his taxes — in what was still a virtually cashless society — and advised others not to do so either.
Another intervention focussed upon the method of policing used at Atuona. The gendarmerie regularly arrested people for crimes such as drunkenness or fornication; when a magistrate from Papeete made his brief, six monthly visit, he heard only the arresting officer’s testimony, invariably entered a conviction and then levied a fine — a proportion of which went into the gendarme’s pocket. Gauguin wasn’t able to get this iniquitous practice abolished entirely but did succeed in lowering the amount of the kickback. His reward was a conviction of his own, for libel, a fine and a prison sentence. He was preparing to appeal this conviction when he died.
Of course there is another sense in which Gauguin was implicated in the colonial project: his use of models and, by extension, the imposition of his gaze upon those he painted, whether they were teenage girls, mature women, mahu, men and boys or old people of both sexes. This brings us back to the work. Gauguin was someone who could not paint without models. His search for new subjects took him from Paris to Brittany, to Martinique in the Caribbean, to Tahiti and finally to the Marquesas; but his use of them wasn’t straightforward. One of the arguments he had with van Gogh at the Yellow House in Arles was about what he called ‘abstraction’. For van Gogh, the model was an opportunity to make a true representation of the soul of the person they were; for Gauguin, it was a leaping off point; he was looking to augment, alter, even reify, his model into something else. He was frequently vague about what this something else was but still knew what it was he was trying to do. ‘Emotion first — understanding after,’ he wrote in July, 1901.
A characteristic of Gauguin’s work, from the very beginning, is his use of decorative patterning in his backgrounds as well as in the fabrics he so often painted. Indeed, like Matisse, he carried with him a collection of favourite pieces of cloth which appear again and again in his work. In the Tahitian and Marquesan paintings, you can see this love of patterning expressed in the way he renders the clothes people wear and the fabrics they have about them, as much as in the walls they sit before or the landscapes they inhabit. These passages of pure painting are unanalysable in rational terms yet they are, in some respects, the ‘meaning’ of the works. In an interview with journalist Eugène Tardieu, published in L’Echo de Paris in 1895, Gauguin made this explicit:
‘It matters little whether blue shadows do or do not exist. If a painter tomorrow decides that shadows are pink, or violet, there is no reason why he should have to defend his decision, assuming his work is harmonious and thought-provoking.’
‘Then your red dogs and pink skies are deliberate?’ asked Tardieu.
‘Absolutely deliberate,’ Gauguin replied. ‘They are necessary, every feature of my paintings is carefully considered and calculated in advance. Just as in a musical composition, if you like. My simple object, which I take from daily life or from nature, is merely a pretext, which helps me by means of a definite arrangement of lines and colours to create symphonies and harmonies. They have no counterparts at all in reality, in the vulgar sense of that word; they do not give direct expression to an idea, their only purpose being to stimulate the imagination — just as music does without the aid of ideas or pictures — simply by that mysterious affinity which exists between certain arrangements of colours and lines and our minds.’
This doesn’t answer the charge that he was exploiting his Marquesan and Tahitian models, nor that his view of them was sexualised, predatory or demeaning; but it does shift the ground. Besides, however apposite the accusations may be, they do not change the paintings and it is to them we must look for answers. In my view the people who appear in his works, particularly those from the last dozen years of his life, are fully present before us in a manner both enigmatic and uncanny — in the same way that those decorative backgrounds and passages of paint in the cloth or in the landscape are fully present and, equally, enigmatic if not necessarily uncanny. While Gauguin’s Polynesian faces may seem generic, to anyone who has lived amongst Māori they are familiar; and their characteristic expressions are those I remember on the faces of the boys and girls, the men and women, I knew when I was growing up in Aotearoa.
That is not all: one of the peculiarities of Gauguin’s oeuvre is the way the face of his mother, Aline, appears, throughout. Another is the manner in which he conjured up visages like those seen in the sculptural works of Cycladic art from the Greek Mediterranean (3500-1500 BCE); or, even more anciently, in the Venus of Brassempouy (c. 25,000 BCE), with her slanted eyes, triangular chin and feline look. These faces appear, usually in the background, in works from Brittany, Arles, Tahiti and the Marquesas. I don’t mean to endorse Gauguin’s identification with an authentic lost past of human kind, re-discoverable only by self-styled savages like himself, nor to promote pan-racial stereotypes: but there is something about the archaic faces in these paintings which does make you wonder. They seem to come from the beyond to which he had exiled himself.
The synoptic works of the late 1890s are best seen, Bronwyn Nicholsen suggests, as religious paintings: ‘images that cannot represent a real Tahiti but that suggest the mysterious connectedness of peoples and cultures at some deep level. He places them in a setting made up of multiple planes of partly intersecting, partly disparate realities, that draw on numerous traditions — European, Asian, Polynesian — not out of a desire for mere exoticism but through a restless probing of the conjunctions and disjunctions between cultures’. The landscapes from Atuona, which are plainer, exist, incongruously, beside a number of other, almost documentary works, some of which Thomas reproduces, which show priests and nuns going dutifully about their pastoral activities amongst their Marquesan hosts. Gauguin was catholic in more ways than one.
So much criticism of his work focusses upon what he was trying to say; but the paintings ask different questions: what do you see? How does it make you feel? What think? That is, they are not about the painter but the viewer; or rather ‘that mysterious affinity which exists between certain arrangements of colours and lines and our minds’. In this connection it is worth recalling that, in his later years, when Gauguin was often ill and sometimes in extreme pain (he broke his ankle during a street brawl in Brittany and the compound fracture never really healed), his sufferings do not enter his works: the result both of a formidable discipline and an unwavering commitment to a certain kind of vision; of what may still be called, howsoever fallen its creator or its inhabitants may be, a paradise.
An artist I interviewed once, New Zealander Philip Trusttum, told me: ‘Painters don’t have very much subject matter.’ He meant that motifs, howsoever discovered, may be explored indefinitely, without necessarily generating narrative coherence. Gauguin, speaking of Marquesan art, said something similar: ‘One is astonished to find a face where one thought there was nothing but a strange geometric figure. Always the same thing, yet never the same thing’. Bach’s fugues come to mind. But he wasn’t really of that persuasion: repetition didn’t interest him so much as novelty. Or perhaps that should read novelty in repetition. Gauguin at Atuona had, you might say, pace Henri Loyrette, come home to his native land, which was a place of repetition but also one of novelty. A Tahitian woman reclining in the pose of Manet’s Olympia, for instance, with a fan behind her head; Marquesans riding horses on a pink beach after a composition by Degas; a Polynesian Eve in a garden of coconut palms and breadfruit trees, presided over by a Buddha whose figure is derived from one in a temple at Borobudur in Java; five prostitutes sitting on a bench at a market in an arrangement first depicted in a 3500-year-old frieze from Ancient Egypt.
His mentor and first teacher, Lucien Pissarro, when he saw the early Tahitian works, expostulated: ‘This was the art of a sailor, a bit taken from everywhere. He is always poaching on someone’s ground; now he is pillaging the savages of Oceania’. It’s true that Gauguin’s work is mixed, impure, with elements taken from many different cultures, including his own, and assembled in ways that make sense pictorially but not necessarily anthropologically, historically or intellectually; but this does not make them inauthentic. Idiosyncratic, rather. Nicholas Thomas prefers to leave the question open. Of his own study he writes: ‘this book is partial. It stops short of judging: must this artist be condemned or rehabilitated? To the contrary, it tries to define quite why it is, and will remain, impossible to reach any settled conclusion about what Gauguin did, who he was and how finally his work should be valued’.
Gauguin’s repetitions were also those of a sailor: abroad on the high seas then home to port to celebrate and recuperate; then to go, for an indeterminate period, elsewhere again. His elsewheres included Peru, Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen, Brittany, Panama, Martinique, Brittany again, Tahiti, twice, and finally Atuona in the Marquesas — and always, not incidentally, the sea. He went on his first ocean voyage before he was two years old; and as a young man was a sailor, first in the Merchant Marine and then, after war with Germany was declared in 1870, an officer in the French Navy, patrolling Baltic ports and the North Sea. And, as any sailor does, he must have spent long hours gazing out over what Matthew Arnold called ‘the unplumb’d salt estranging sea’. He probably also, though he never admitted to it, like many sailors, drew.
By the same token his later paintings — especially those from Brittany, Martinique, Tahiti and the Marquesas — show a curving line of white, blue or pink in the background: the waves of the sea, with upcast foamy ornaments like flowers, seen through trees and past sandy beaches, where groups of people engage in their scrutable or inscrutable activities. He was, or became, a classic example of that nineteenth century type, the beachcomber. The word was first used by Richard Dana in Two Years Before the Mast (1840) to describe the lives of those ‘adrift along the coasts of the Pacific and its islands’. An 1889 dictionary expanded the definition: ‘A seafaring man generally, of vagrant and drunken habits, who idles about the wharves of seaports; used most frequently in countries bordering on the Pacific Ocean’.
However beachcomber can also mean ‘a long, rolling wave’. If sound can be a part of a mute and static art like painting — and Gauguin was or claimed to be synaesthetic — then we may say that the reverberation of those long rolling waves breaking upon the shore, roaring and hissing up the beach then, with a high bright diminuendo, receding, always accompany our viewing of his pictures too.
Works consulted:
Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2024
Gauguin and Polynesia Nicholas Thomas, Apollo/Bloomsbury, London, 2024
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin Sue Prideaux, Faber & Faber, London, 2024
Gauguin’s Skirt Stephen F Eisenman, Thames & Hudson, London, 1997
Gauguin and Māori Art Bronwyn Nicholson, Godwit/Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, 1995
Paul Gauguin in Russian Museums Anna Barskaya & Marina Bessonova, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1988
Paintings in order of appearance:
Te matete (Nous n’irons pas au marché aujourd’hui) (1892)
We picked Trane up at Kurohime Station a bit after eleven on a Saturday morning and, with me driving and Mayu navigating, set off on an hour and a half journey north to Izumozaki, a small town in Niigata Prefecture on the shores of the Sea of Japan. Izumozaki is the birthplace of Zen poet Taigu Ryokan (‘Ryokan, the Great Fool’) and we were going there to seek traces of his life and work. Mayu and I had been to Izumozaki before, in 2023, but on that occasion we were on the trail of two other poets, Matsuo Basho and Kasai Sora, who passed through in 1690 in the latter stages of their great walk, described in the Oku no Hoshomichi. Ryokan was born seventy odd years later, in 1758, making him a near contemporary of our local poet, Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828); like Issa he was a Buddhist and a profound believer in the sanctity of all forms of life, howsoever humble.
Given the birth name Eizo Yamamoto, he was the eldest son of merchant and village headman Inan Yamamoto and his wife Hideko, who was from Sado Island. A dreamy child, when he was eight years old he was scolded by his father for spending too much time inside reading books. Whenever he was told off, Eizo responded with a silent upwards staring look; and on this occasion his exasperated father told him if he kept on looking like that he would turn into a flounder. Later that day the boy was found to be missing; the whole village went out looking for him and he was eventually discovered down by the sea, sitting on a rock, waiting, he said, to turn into a fish and swim away. Another, more drastic, formative experience was witnessing an execution which his father, as headman, was required to attend. Because of the mines on Sado, the bullion port of Izumozaki was under the direct control of the shogunate in Edo; decapitation was their preferred method of execution.
Upon reaching his majority, at the age of eighteen, Eizo announced that he would not be inheriting his father’s position as headman but entering the priesthood instead. He left home and went to live at the local temple, Kosho-ji, where he studied Soto Zen; then, when Zen master Kokusen visited the temple, Eizo received permission to become his pupil. Kokusen gave him the name Ryokan and the two travelled together to Entsu-ji temple at Tamashima in Okayama Prefecture, where Ryokan studied for the next decade. The year before his master died he attained satori; and afterwards set out on another decade long pilgrimage through the archipelago, visiting other temples and studying with other Zen masters.
When his own father, aged sixty, died in mysterious circumstances in Kyoto, Ryokan went there to oversee his obsequies. Some accounts say his father, who was also a poet, drowned himself in one of the canals in the city; others that he was murdered by the shogun’s secret police because he was agitating for the return of real political power to the emperor. Following his father’s funeral Ryokan, in 1799, returned to his home country and took up residence in a small hut he called Gogo-an on Mount Kugami; here he lived as a hermit for most of the rest of his life. Four years before his own death, because of increasing frailty, he went to live in the house of one his patrons, Kimura Motoemon, in Shimazaki and was cared for there by a young nun called Teishin. They became extravagantly fond of one another and used to exchange haiku; she was with him when he died, aged 73, in 1831.
We took the Joetsu-Takada expressway north from Kurohime and then, at the interchange, the Hokuriku towards Niigata. Past the nuclear power station at Kashiwazaki we turned off onto a prefectural road and headed towards the coast. Flocks of white geese grazed amongst snow melt in the muddy fields, pausing on their spring migration to Hokkaido. Even though we were further north, there was less snow here, probably because we were nearer to the sea. Izumozaki is a small dark town built between the ocean and the low cliffs behind; it subsists mostly from fishing and tourism these days and the buildings, with their gleaming tiled roofs, are made of wood treated with Japan Black, which ages to beautiful shades of slate, soft grey and bronze.
We had lunch in a crowded restaurant on the second floor of the building that housed the Tenryo Izumozaki Historical Museum, which includes the Petroleum Museum. It specializes in exhibits commemorating Izumozaki as a port for ships bringing gold and silver from the mines on Sado Island; they were unloaded here and the precious metals taken by caravan to Edo. These caravans could be four or five hundred strong and most of the bullion was carried on the backs of porters; although horses, too, were sometimes used. Magistrates, other officials, soldiers, musicians and dancers, were included in the long line which progressed, in single file, to the sound of bells and drums, down Highway 18 to the capital. We could see Sado, a long pale blue line on the horizon, between the paler blue of the sea and the darker blue of the cloudy sky, from our table in the restaurant.
Then we went up to the Ryokan Memorial Hall, an elegant, architect designed museum set in a traditional Japanese garden on a hill behind the town. Ryokan, the poet, was a renowned calligrapher with a unique, fluid style and among the exhibits in glass cases were scrolls bearing examples of his writing, along with homages from fellow poets, painters and calligraphers. A replica of his hut, Gogo-an, stood in the garden; inside there was another, tiny model of it with an image of the poet / monk seated on an altar within. Halfway down the narrow room lined with glass cases stood a small bronze statue of him, with staff and begging bowl, robe and sandals, and his characteristic quizzical expression. On one of the end walls was a set of shelves, floor to ceiling, containing an extensive library of books by, and about, Ryokan; who may have been a kind of holy fool but was nevertheless knowledgeable, especially about classical Chinese poets and those among his Japanese forebears who had imitated them. Han Shan, for reasons which are obvious, was a favourite of his.
Afterwards I bought Ryokan-sama by Soma Gyofu (translated into English by his grand-daughter) from the gift shop and then we climbed a small hill next to the museum where there was another statue of Ryokan, this time larger than life size and in the company of two small children. He has a ball in his lap and is pointing to the sky; one of the children, sitting, holds a staff in his hand; the other, a girl, standing, is pointing out to sea. The group gave forth a vivid sense of a conversation in progress; though the ball in Ryokan’s lap looked more like a rugby football than a kamifusen, the traditional hand-made paper balloon native to the town, often used in children’s games. Alternatively, it could have been a temari ball, made not of old kimono cloth but of fiddlehead ferns wound together. Ryokan, who loved playing with children, always carried a temari with him.
Our ryokan (same word, different pronunciation, different meaning) stood on the main road, with a car park in front of it and a view out over the sea to Sado. It was old, perhaps as old as the Edo Period, and heritage listed: its chandeliers, its ceilings of woven bamboo. Our room was large and spacious and on the first floor; twenty-eight tatami mats and a moveable partition which opened it up to an equally generous room behind. Trane’s room, next to ours, was large too and also looked out over the sea. He and Mayu went for a walk through the old town while I sat by the window drinking a bottle of Kirin beer which one of the ryokan staff brought me. I had a slight head-ache, probably from the driving, which the beer soon cured. After they returned we went downstairs to eat an eleven course meal, consisting mostly of fish dishes, all local species, locally caught. The delicious butterbur relish and the salted plums were made by one of the women who ran the ryokan.
In the morning the day before’s cloudy haze had cleared and I could see the snow-capped peaks on the Osado and Kosado ranges on Sado. The island consists of two parallel mountain ranges with the Kakakura plain in between; in its northern reaches there is a saline lake where oysters are cultivated; and near that a sanctuary where crested ibis, once on the verge of extinction, are raised and nurtured until they are able to be released into the wild. Osado, the northern range, is higher and more rugged and on its seaward slopes the seams of gold and silver ore were found. While I was gazing out the window, I saw a flock of white geese flying north in a sinuous line which coiled and uncoiled yet kept the same basic shape in the air. Breakfast was less elaborate but just as delicious as dinner had been; and featured fish dishes along with miso soup and green tea; with strong coffee to follow. Then we set off to explore some more.
The temple where Ryokan went to live, aged eighteen, was, like the museum, built on the low cliffs at the back of the town. We walked up and found it apparently closed and deserted. Trees out the front were covered in fat buds about to burst into leaf and flower. Down one side was a shrine to Inari, the fox god, with two stone foxes facing one another at the beginning of the path to a tiny wooden building; the head of one of them had fallen off. Trane investigated the house built beside the temple, saw a sign inviting visitors to knock, and raised a man I assume was a monk. He was about sixty, portly, bald, hatless and wearing glasses. He said we were welcome to go into the temple and came through an inside passage to open the door for us. To the right of the main altar was a shrine to Ryokan with several statues and two rather good paintings of the poet, one of him among bamboos. He had once cut a hole in his veranda roof so that a bamboo shoot could grow through it unimpeded; this painting commemorated that act.
Here, too, there was a glass case full of books; above the unordered shelves were a large number of what looked like paper manuscripts jammed willy-nilly together. I wondered, not for the first time, how so much of Ryokan’s writing has survived. He was notoriously careless, or rather unconcerned, about the fate of his works, many of which we have only because other people remembered or preserved them. His fame as a calligrapher meant that anything he wrote down was considered valuable, even precious, and there are many stories in which people try to persuade him to write something for them. He usually refused such requests but did, on occasion, fall victim to various subterfuges; when he was outsmarted he conceded gracefully, even if what he wrote down were only numerals or letters of the alphabet.
We visited the execution ground next, where hundreds of tiny buddhas, gathered before tombstones or inside small wooden sheds, commemorate the anonymous dead. The Tokugawa were indiscriminate in their choice of victims; if the people of a village declined to co-operate with the shogunate, or otherwise offended, the headman and his wife, for example, might be executed in lieu of whoever the refractory person or persons might have been. We had been there before and I was, once again, curious as to where the actual decapitations had taken place; but there was no clue to this and, seemingly, no way of finding out where that blood-soaked ground had been. My favourite statue was a small buddha which, like the fox at the Inari shrine, had lost its head; someone had substituted a flat oval stone for the missing head, giving the buddha an unusual, oddly contemplative, personality.
After that we drove out of town to the north and turned inland. I didn’t know what our next destination was; it had been decided by Mayu and Trane in cahoots with each other and I hadn’t inquired as to what it was. Sometimes I like not knowing where I’m going; it’s more interesting that way. Trane was talking about metal-working and tool-making and I gathered the city we were headed for, Tsubame, was known for its copper ware, for the production of kiseru, Japanese smoking pipes, and for its cutlery and knife ware. It is an industrial town built on the banks of the Shinano River. We drove down low old rusty streets looking, without success, for the information centre; the place google maps took us to turned out to be a day care centre. We went on, looking for somewhere to eat and found a restaurant across the road from a factory called Airman, where they made different kinds of air compressor engines. It was packed with workers, the cook and the waitresses were cheerful and the food excellent.
The second Ryokan museum was on the outskirts of town near the railway line and not far from the river. Rice fields spread across the flats into the distance. Major irrigation works were underway. The museum contained Ryokan exhibits much like those in the first one; of limited use to me since I can’t read Japanese; though I can (and do) use my phone to translate captions. And I always look at the paintings. I was interested in two ancillary exhibits: one of high quality, expressionist wood cuts; the other of historical photographs and artefacts. The photographs demonstrated a very Japanese preoccupation with natural disasters, in this case mostly floods; and documenting milestones like the arrival of the railway and, somewhat later, of the first mechanical snow ploughs in the early 1960s. After we had looked at the exhibits, a weary-looking older man showed Mayu, on an annotated map, how to get to Mount Kugami, where Ryokan had his hermit’s dwelling.
We found our way there without difficulty and took the winding road up the mountain until we arrived at a long narrow car park with a row of buildings along one side. There was a looped path which included a shrine, a temple, a well, a swing bridge and Ryokan’s hut. At the first shrine you gave money and asked the jizo presiding for relief from cancer and dementia. We all contributed. The temple was next, up a short, steep rise. Banks of snow lay here and there on the ground and Trane was briefly distracted by Dashido Hall in which there is a statue of Kobo Daishi, the Great Master of Matchmaking. Here you request good fortune in love; at the ryokan Trane had mentioned a desire to begin dating again. The temple itself, called Kokujo-ji, is the oldest Buddhist temple in Niigata prefecture and is said to have been founded in 709 CE.
As I approached down the path between snow drifts I saw bright splashes of colour amongst the venerable grey wooden walls of the Hondo. They are a suite of paintings by Ryoko Kimura, a contemporary Japanese artist who specializes in erotic paintings of men. Her innovation was to bring together a number of figures associated with the temple into manga-style paintings in which they are depicted as contemporaries enjoying themselves at various pursuits, including music-making, massage and bathing. They are Amida Nyorai, the Buddha of Limitless Light; Uesugi Kenshin, a powerful lord of the sixteenth century; Shuten-doji, a red, horned, mythical demon; Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a military commander during the Heike War of the twelfth century; Benkei, the warrior monk who was his sworn companion; and, somewhat incongruously, Ryokan himself, accompanied by a white cat with multiple snake-headed tails.
Ryoko Kimura, born 1971, works in the style of Nihongo painting, using mineral pigments and ink, together with other organic pigments, on silk or paper; but her paintings here were in acrylics on wood. Her subject matter is the traditional Bijin-ga or beautiful person picture; but instead of depicting women she paints the male figures from, in her own words, ‘the sexual gaze of the heterosexual female’. Her ikemen or good looking men are inspired, at least in part, by her fascination with Johnny’s Boys, the famous Japanese male entertainment and talent agency. I thought at first I was looking at images from The Journey to the West, the story of how the Buddhist scriptures came to China; and it turns out she has illustrated that narrative too.
The paintings, while they are well-executed, I found lurid rather erotic; but then I am not their target audience. When asked why he would allow this material to be displayed on such a sacred site, the temple’s head priest, Kotetsu Yamada, said it was to attract more attention from young people, crucial to the survival of heritage sites like Kokujo-ji. And it is true that the murals are known all over Japan and internationally too and have become a site of pilgrimage for those who love manga and associated arts. Reports from the early 2020s said the paintings were going to be taken down, for conservation, but that either never happened or else they have been restored and put back up again. They looked to me to be in excellent condition.
Past the temple was the Hojo Lecture or Guest Hall, built in 1737 and the home of a Thousand-Armed Kannon, a sacred deity worshipped by the afore-mentioned Sengoku warlord Uesugi Kenshin; it was closed. Across a piece of muddy snowy waste land, dozens of yellow quinces lay rotting upon the ground beneath the bare tree they had grown upon. Further on was a well where you went to pray if you wanted to end or to escape from a bad relationship; there was a gory story associated with it, about the sacrifice within of a handsome but faithless man. You were not supposed to look into the well because, if you saw your own reflection, you might share his fate; I looked in it before I knew the story and saw only grass and moss growing over rubble.
Gogo-an, Ryokan’s hut, was just down the hill from the wishing well. It was off the path, on a small shelf of land that looked north over the plains to distant mountains. Tiny, wooden, its thatched roof green with lichen and moss. Just a single room; and it was locked. There was a sliding panel at the back, just above ground level, which you could pull back and look in; Trane said he saw an enclave where you might place a vase of flowers. The sun had come out. I sat on the veranda at the front and closed my eyes. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my eyelids; the peace that passes understanding came over me. It must have been cold here in winter; Ryokan used to gather leaves and twigs to burn on his fire and boil the rice he begged in the villages and towns of the plain below. He was always abstemious: a gogo is half a sho, the amount of rice considered necessary for a working man to eat in a day. The word ‘an’ means hermitage. Hence his name for his hut.
We crossed a magnificent red suspension bridge which led to a small garden below the carpark, where there was another statue of Ryokan playing with children; his gaunt figure, sunken cheeks and large nose were familiar to us now, like someone we had known in life. It was getting late; Trane’s train back to Nagano was leaving Kurohime at a quarter to six and he had work — teaching — next day and some preparation to do before that. I quite like having an excuse to drive fast and, unless there’s been an accident, you almost never see police on Japanese highways. Sometime before we joined the expressway I saw in a field on our left what I am almost sure was a toki, a crested ibis. Some of those released into the wild on Sado have established communities on the mainland and this must have been one of those. I saw its red head bent dipping into the water while two smaller blue herons walked along the bank of the creek.
Later, when we were nearing home and brightness began to fall from the air, we saw a strings of lights cascading down the side of the mountains where the ski-lifts and ski fields are, looking sweet and lonely in the immensity of the snowy wilderness. Trane caught his train with a few minutes to spare and then we went back to our own little house in the hills. I never know what to say when I pray at a temple or a shrine, but as we drove up the road past the athletics field and the shed where the burnables go, I remembered words that had come unbidden into my head while praying at Kokujo-ji: ‘Let my mind be like a bowl of clear cold water’.
Last time we came back from Australia, at the end of January, at a bookstore in Haneda Airport I bought a copy of ‘Confessions of a Yakuza’ by Junichi Saga. Saga was a doctor who served a community at Tsuchiura, north of Tokyo, on the shores of Lake Kasumigaura; his father had been a doctor too and they both came to know the people they looked after intimately. At some point Susumu Saga retired in order to devote himself to painting and Junichi took over the practice. Around the same time he realised many of the people he moved among were the repository of extraordinary stories of tradition, resilience and change; and began to write them down. His habit was to seek permission to visit his patients at home, after hours, and record them using a portable tape recorder.
One day a man called Shozo Ijichi turned up for a consultation at his rooms. He was a big, dignified fellow in his early seventies; when Saga got him to strip for an examination, he saw the dragon and peony tattoo on his back, with a pretty woman in the heart of the flower the dragon was in the act of swallowing; and realised he was a yakuza or gangster. He was suffering from liver disease as well as complications from diabetes; but he did not want to go to hospital for a course of treatment. He told Saga that he had always done whatever he wanted to and that he didn’t mind dying. He just wanted some relief from the pain in his legs and the discomfit in his abdomen.
He started coming to the clinic for shots twice a week; and then, after the two had got to know each other better, and the illness didn’t progress as fast as it seemed at first that it would, the gangster invited the doctor to visit him at home. Saga would take his tape recorder and the two would sit together, eating mandarins, while an unseen woman played the shamisen elsewhere in the house; and Ijichi told him his life story. The result is an absolutely fascinating account which begins when Ijichi was fifteen, in 1912, and ends with his death and funeral in 1978.
He was a softly spoken, level-headed, modest man who told his story without the need for grandiosity or excessive elaboration; while the doctor, for his part, put this account together unobtrusively, almost delicately, with a maximum of tact and a minimum of editorial commentary. The improbably happy ending to the tale comes out of nowhere and is a perfect example of a truth that is stranger than fiction. Illustrated with miniature black and white paintings by Saga’s father, this really is a superb book and I’d recommend it to anyone.
As you do when you find a writer whose work you admire, I went looking for other books by Dr Saga. There are quite a few but the only one I’ve been able to get hold of so far is ‘Memories of Silk and Straw – a self-portrait of a small-town Japan’, which is an oral history of Tsuchiura consisting of more than fifty short narratives told by people of the town, ranging across all of the different professions and occupations, some of which no longer exist. Everyone is there, from the geisha to the executioner, the reed thatcher to the horsemeat butcher. Shozo Ijichi turns up as well but in a much briefer appearance; the book is also illustrated, exquisitely, by Susumu Saga; and includes a number of priceless period photographs.
‘Memories of Silk and Straw’ turned up yesterday and while I was looking at it last night something started tugging at the edges of my mind. Hadn’t one of the many accusations of plagiarism aimed at Bob Dylan included the charge that he lifted lines from an obscure book about a Japanese gangster? I went online to check and, sure enough, it was Dr Saga’s ‘Confessions’ he had used; a number of things Shozo Ijichi said turned up more or less verbatim in songs on Dylan’s 2001 release ‘Love & Theft’. Dylan, when asked in 2012 about this and other borrowings said: ‘wussies and pussies complain about that stuff’; and pointed out that some of those he quoted would have remained unknown to the larger world had he not used their words. He also said he was adding to, and widening, the tradition, the way folk and blues artists have always done.
Someone also tracked down Dr Saga and told him what had happened. ‘Who is Bob Dylan?’ he asked. But then he went to the trouble of listening to the CD and said: ‘I like this album. His lines flow from one image to the next and don’t always make sense, but they have a great atmosphere.’ He said he would have liked his book acknowledged but when asked if he wanted royalties shook his head. He was honoured to have been able to help, he explained, and that for a person to ask for money for something that had made so many people happy would be a poor thing to do. Subsequent sales of his book in the West were estimated at around 25,000 copies; so there might have been a few extra royalties there.
Two other books by Dr Saga I’m keen to read are ‘Memories of Wind and Waves: a self-portrait of lakeside Japan’, which recounts interviews with thirty-three elderly men and women who spent their lives working on or around Lake Kasumigaura; and ‘Susumu’s Saga: A Boy’s Journey from Rural Japan to Manchuria and Revolutionary Russia’, the story of Juichi’s father’s odyssey as a young boy into Manchuria and then Siberia – as far as Lake Baikal. Both of these books exist in English translation but so far I’ve only been able to find an extremely expensive hard back copy of ‘Wind and Waves’; and a Kindle edition of ‘Susumu’s Saga’; but I’ll keep on looking.
Isinglass 
