Tsubu, whelk, udon noodles at Tomorokoshiya adjacent to Michi-no-Eki Mitsuishi, Mitsuishi-Kerimai, Shin-Hidaka-cho, Hidaka county, Hokkaido. 

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By Morten Schwend

Manazuru One Minute Vol.2

20120505 [KissX2] Mitsuiishi by twinklyblue on Flickr.

sunset #EVO

Finished reading D.H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent yesterday on the local express train from Kyoto to Himeji. I was sitting knee-to-knee with a woman in her late-50's. We were in facing seats. She was wearing a black skirt and stockings. I was wearing the same pair of jeans I've been wearing for over a month. I don't know why I brought D.H. Lawrence with me, and The Plumed Serpent no less. Mexico. And it begins with a bull fight. The first time I attended a bull fight (Mexico City, 2002), I cried. I cried when the first bull was killed, then I gradually hardened, immunized, with each successive bull. One bull threw the toreador from his horse. The toreador had to be carried away on a stretcher. He was waving to the crowd while being carried away, making a show of his bravery. By the 400th page of The Plumed Serpent, I wanted out—(the 1959 Vintage edition is 486 pages). In that, Lawrence had done a thorough job of creating kinship and sympathy between me and the protagonist, an Irish woman named Kate, who also wanted out, but couldn't summon the reason and finally, therefore, the will. I hated her. I can't yet fully articulate why, or why I wanted out—I'm still thinking about it—though in that I also possessed kinship and sympathy with Kate; she had become spiritually perplexed, torn between worlds. This was how I was feeling within the book, the country it made. After I finished it, I flipped back through to see what I had underlined. I had dog-eared numerous pages and marked paragraphs and passages to reread, but I had only underlined three sentences. The three sentences were: The great mango trees were most sumptuous in the morning, like cliffs. (Chapter XVI); She sat looking past the thick mango-trees, whose fruit was changing colour like something gradually growing hot, to the ruffled, pale-brown lake. (Chapter XIX); and, They were all just individuals, like leaves in the dark, making a noise. (Chapter XX). All three related to trees, two to mango trees. No other sentences were underlined. About Lawrence and The Plumed Serpent, Katherine Anne Porter wrote, He makes you a radiant gift of the place. Anyway, I threw the book away when we got to Okayama Station, before boarding the bus that took us to the ferry that took us into the Inland Sea to Shodoshima, an island where we are now. The morning is rising with the sound of birds, crickets and thunder. There is a pennant of fog moving slowly past a tall, tree-covered hill. We're staying in an old elementary school, which has been converted into a residence for artists of a local residency program. I know very little about D.H. Lawrence. I've always counted Pansies among my favorite collections of poetry. It includes the poem, "The Risen Lord," which Will Oldham covered on his album, Guarapero: Lost Blues 2. The opening of Lawrence's The Rainbow is among my favorite openings of any novel. I included excerpts from his letters in a book of my own. There is a D.H. Lawrence Society here in Japan. It was founded in 1969. They are currently accepting proposals for research presentations and workshops for their 44th Annual Meeting, to be held next year. There are currently 153 members. He makes you a radiant gift of the place. I never throw books away. I most often give them away. My library is constantly decreasing in size, despite that the number of books I accumulate continues to grow. But I felt I needed to throw away The Plumed Serpent—it was a paperback I bought in Tucson, Arizona, and both the front and back covers had fallen off—saving only the three sentences I had underlined, which I transcribed into my notebook. While riding the train from Aioi to Okayama, we passed through a long stretch of countryside. I wrote in my notebook, beneath Lawrence's three sentences, The small, spacious towns between the hills, root vegetables hanging from the eaves of houses, ladders leaning animatedly against the walls. From a distance, the hills appear to bear no relief, but there is a coolness within, and from the viewfinder of this passing train, I can make out the rising and falling of insects' muscles with the afternoon. There are such ceaseless reels of green that one might forget that people are living long in any given moment of it. While passing through the small town of Mitsuishi I wrote, The train platform is overgrowing with grass and weeds and gravel unraked so there is a softness, people being pulled away elsewhere and wise. Mitsuishi is the kind of place I fantasize stepping off a train into, that when the train doors open, a soundlessness greets me. Yet, no one boards or gets off, and this maybe is why. The doors linger open as if permitting ghost passengers through ...