It’s incredible how narrow Honshu, the principal island of Japan, is: we cross its width in three hours, traveling on local trains, which are slow and simple and purr loudly. Sometimes, suburban images repeat in the window. Sometimes a damp forest appears. Higashi, the woman I love and my travel companion, accepts my suggestion to visit the sea in Masuda, where we stop for an hour to change trains. We get in a taxi at the station and ask the driver to take us to the umi, the sea—the Sea of Japan, which the Koreans call the East Sea. The driver will soon be elderly (there are no young taxi drivers in Japan) and drives, with hands covered in white gloves, a black and gleaming car. All the streets are deserted. We reach the sea almost without noticing. From the train we arrived in, traveling along the coast through the San’in region, we saw it, blue and enchanting. But now it’s cold and windy, and there’s no sand, only stones. The driver leaves us in the middle of nowhere without asking questions. When he helps us get our bags out of the trunk, his tie flaps furiously.
Walking this country’s streets is a very different experience than staying put in any of its famous cities. To walk is to appreciate its intimacy; to stay put is to surrender to its arrogance. To walk is to enter its nature; to stay put is to admire its culture. To walk is to consider its austerity; to stay put is to lose yourself in its abundance.
Bashō, the greatest haiku poet, walked a lot. In the twilight of the seventeenth century, he embarked on a journey to feel the beauty of movement and write poetry about the experience. Bashō walked through Kyoto, Ueno, Niigata, and countless other places. In Tokyo, seven-hundred and twenty-two kilometers from Masuda, the site where his house stood still exists. Today there’s a small museum there that doesn’t preserve anything original. What’s most impressive isn’t the museum but the life-size statue of Bashō, draped in a tunic, facing the Sumida River in the Japanese capital. This bronze man, immobile—who today surveys the skyscrapers casting shadows over the three thousand trains that arrive daily at Tokyo Central Station—made traveling in Japan a performance art in itself.
Writing in ideographs provokes a different sense of poetry than that of the West: distance is a chasm. Haiku seeks nature and escapes intellectual artifice. “Ah! Summer grasses! All that remains. Of the warriors' dreams,” wrote Bashō in front of the ruins of a castle once glorious.
In Masuda, after a moment of wind and silence, we decide to leave. But how? The taxi left and there wasn’t another. There are no buses. The beach is isolated. So we walk down a road and at last come to a silent neighborhood, where all the windows are closed. In an alley, a woman with a round face watches us. Higashi speaks to her first: she tells her we’re lost and our train will leave soon. The woman tells us there’s a Shinto shrine, very near, and there will be taxis there. But we’d just passed by and there wasn’t a soul. The woman speaks to us in words we don’t understand. She speaks without stopping but without worry, and soon her husband appears. Somehow they get us into their little car and drop us off at the station. Her name is Yamada. When we say goodbye, she takes Higashi and tells her sweet, indecipherable things. And Higashi gets a knot in her throat because she suddenly remembers her grandmother, who emigrated to Argentina and was, like this woman now holding her hands, simple and generous. Her grandmother’s name was Toyoko Masuda.
Bashō traveled with a paillasse (a mattress stuffed with straw), a raincoat, some medicines, a basket with food, a pen, paper, and a stone plank to make ink. It’s well known that the Japanese are masters of minimalism. Even today, many hostels are traditional ryokan with tatami (woven straw) floors and simple mattresses.
Throughout the trip, we sleep in several ryokan, even though they can be cold and melancholy in a winter like this. These places are perfect for reading Kwaidan, one of the books in which Lafcadio Hearn collected dismal, fantastical stories. In one ryokan, every night when the manager leaves (a Japanese man called Philip, who always wore the same black windbreaker that said Panasonic), it is easy to imagine that the vast building of empty rooms was full of those dreadful ghosts who wanted to find their reader.
Lafcadio Hearn wrote twelve books in a tatami studio, at a very tall desk. His wife, Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a family of samurais, told him many of the spectral stories. He lived with her for a time in the city of Matsue, in an old house with small, delicate gardens that could justify any exile. At the museum that operates there today, they tell us that the unusual height of his desk was due to his myopia: Hearn had a tall table built to keep his papers close to the only eye from which he could still see.
A Japanese legend says a red thread attached to our little finger connects us with the person who, sooner or later, we will know and love. Higashi knows that legend, but her grandmother didn’t tell it to her in the very Japanese home in a Buenos Aires neighborhood where Higashi was raised. Instead, she read it on the internet. Now, the train rolls on. The locomotive whistles. Landscapes flash by. Legends persist by curious means.
Six stations and four-hundred and seventy-three yen after Matsue, between hills and sown fields, the great Shinto shrine Izumo rises up, made of enormous wooden buildings. To pray to the kami, you must shake a bell tied to a rope, then clap: the noise awakens the deities. We invoke them after pedaling here from the station on two electric bicycles. According to legend, the site was founded by Amaterasu, sun goddess, who once ruled the entire country from here. Shintoism—the island’s native religion—is polytheistic. It venerates nature: each year, in the tenth lunar month, eight million gods meet at Izumo. Historical research, slightly less poetic, says the sanctuary dates to the eighth century; it’s mentioned in Kojiki, the oldest surviving chronicle of Japanese history.
In 1979, when he visited Japan, Borges wanted to come to this territory far from Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. He wanted to experience the Japan of the Japanese. When he arrived, after walking a winding path through towering trees, he placed his hand on the grand entrance, completely carved with script, and María Kodama, his partner, took his photo. On the other side, a priest waited for him, to explain what his religion was about.
Guiding myself with that photograph, I look for the exact spot where Borges put his palm. I find it after a while and place there, over those same sacred ideographs, my own hand. Man and art, god and stone: anyone touched by what the blind poet wrote should put their hand there if they come to Izumo. Higashi suggests that we close our eyes, and we feel the wind on our faces and hear the chimeric conversation of the ravens. When he returned, Borges published “The Stranger” in his book The Limit. Shintoism, he wrote, “knows that after his death every man is a god that protects his own. It knows that after its death every tree is a god that protects the trees.”
We head back, pedaling the two electric bicycles. We ride in silence, impressed with the depth of Japanese mystery. Sunlight spills between the hills. A few days later, we’ll step off the last train in Fukuoka, a big city of skyscrapers, crowds, and corporations, and we’ll feel that the journey has shown us a different destination.
