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I Love Wasting Ink · Jan 15, 2020

There are other worlds than these (2)

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A wide valley floor of fallow fields and bare earth spreads across the foreground, their parallel furrows visible in the lower left, with a small cluster of rural buildings and a concrete bridge spanning a river in the middle distance. Dark, forested ridgelines rise steeply on both sides of the valley, framing a broad chain of high peaks whose upper slopes and summits are blanketed in snow under flat, even winter light. The scale of the mountains dominates the upper half of the frame, their white mass set sharply against a clear blue sky with scattered high cloud. The valley vegetation is brown and leafless, consistent with late autumn or winter dormancy.

One year ago I flew through the night due east, mad with life and terrified, to walk through the mountains of Shikoku and write a book about it. I landed in the Mediterranean sunshine of Nagoya, then traveled into the mountains of Gifu, where the snow fell through the night in slow motion. In the small hours of the morning I woke, drenched with sweat, my heart racing, my room in the attic dark and freezing. Then I rode out of the mountains, along the Pacific belly of Honshu, across the impossible breadth of the Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge, towards Tokushima, where I would begin my walk, and the snow melted into warm winter rain.

A slender twig bearing a single curled green leaf extends from the left edge of the frame toward the pale, lichen-mottled surface of a large curved rock or tree trunk. Cast across that surface by a focused light source is a sharp, oversized shadow of a compound-leafed branch, its dark silhouette sprawling several times larger than the small physical leaf visible in the foreground. The surrounding frame is deep black, so the lit stone face reads as a stage, isolating the interplay between the modest real leaf and its magnified shadow double.

I could do this because you helped me to. One hundred and sixty four of you gave me your money and your trust to do something I had never done before: to create a piece of work commensurate with my abilities and my ambitions. That work became The Wilds of Shikoku, my first book. I hope that some of you have read and enjoyed it. If you haven’t, you can download a digital copy here. Thank you, with all my heart. And thank you, in particular, to all of you who worked on the book in its various stages of production: Akos, Alice, Eva, Geza, Gyula, Natalie, Nora, and Tim.

A large uncut printed sheet lies flat on a white press table, its surface covered in a grid of photographs and blocks of body text arranged in an unfolded magazine layout, with a row of small color-registration marks running along the top edge. A small cylindrical metal object with a perforated honeycomb top — likely an ink or solvent can — sits near the center-right of the sheet, acting as an improvised paperweight. The perspective is low and oblique, stretching the table toward the upper right of the frame, with the industrial space behind it — dark gray walls, electrical cabinets, and a red waste bin labeled in Hungarian — slightly out of focus in the background artificial light.

In the dog days of last August, when the book was being printed and bound, I met my old friend Daniel, temporarily in Budapest between travels in Iraq and Sudan. Exhausted to the bone, I told him I would never again sell an unwritten book about an unwalked journey, never again live for nine months with the almost unbearable anxiety of having been entrusted with a large sum of money to produce a work. “But maybe that’s exactly what you had to do,” he said, and laughed. “Maybe you had to paint yourself into a corner and expose yourself to the possibility of public humiliation.”

A thatcher kneels on the steep slope of a thatched roof, leaning forward with one gloved hand pressing into the straw and the other raised overhead gripping a flat wooden mallet or paddle, poised mid-strike. The surface beneath them stretches across the foreground in dense, tightly layered pale golden straw, with bamboo poles running horizontally across it to hold the thatch in place. Strong low-angle backlight floods the frame from the upper right, creating lens flare and silhouetting the figure sharply against a pale sky, with forested hills visible in the soft-focused distance.

A month later, I moved into a tiny room of an old thatch-roofed Japanese farmhouse, a day’s walk into the hills north of Kyoto. The house, sized for multiple generations living and sleeping and dying under its vast, thatched roof, was inhabited by an old man and the youngest of her three daughters. For the next month, joined by friends and family, we worked with a thatching crew from further up the hills to change the roof, which had last been re-thatched in September 1980, the first month of my life. I documented the work from beginning to end as the days shortened and the autumn wore on and the snakes lurking in the fields went off to hybernate when the rice was harvested and then husked.

Two people lean over a spiral-bound photo album open on a light wooden table, viewed from directly above. The person on the left, wearing a dark jacket, extends one hand to point at a photograph on the lower page while the other person, in a grey shirt and work-worn trousers, stands with hands clasped at the waist. The album pages show multiple construction photographs arranged in a grid alongside handwritten Japanese annotations in red ink. A glass of amber liquid sits on a separate small wooden surface at the lower right edge of the frame, and a gravel outdoor area is visible in the background.

When the work was done, I shouldered my rucksack and walked due west, and on a November evening, somewhere between the sand dunes of Tottori and the grey-green flanks of Mount Daisen, I thought of the sea:

ceaseless the waves waves waves waves waves
swelling rising surging breaking whelming
foam of the inchoate
semen of futility sinking into the sand’s skin
the eternal performance of rippling light
on the
shore’s
piano

A steep mountain slope covered in dense, wind-flattened dry grass fills the foreground, its pale tan blades pressed into swirling, matted patterns that suggest sustained strong wind. The slope drops sharply away toward a broad valley far below, where patchwork lowlands and smaller ridgelines recede in successive layers of blue-grey haze. Diffuse overcast light falls evenly across the scene, flattening shadows and merging the distant ranges into the pale sky. A dark ridgeline cuts in from the left, framing the vast open drop beyond.

The story of this house and this work will be the subject of my next book, with the working title “Kayabuki”, to be published later this year. I will need your help again to bring it to life. If you haven’t already done so, please sign up my mailing list, to hear first about its publication.

(Quote from Tarō Naka’s “The Sea”, translated by Timothy Harris)

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