When we woke up in the morning the golf course outside the window was dusted with snow, the air cold and clear, the sky a brilliant blue. We breakfasted early in the hotel dining room. You could have big Western or little Western, big Japanese or little; I chose the last and my only regret was that I didn’t manage to order a second cup of coffee: it was delicious. This painting was on the end wall of the dining room: Hakone, 1994, by Koji Yoshioka. Alas, it does not photograph as well as it looks but I do like the ghostly diners you can see reflected within the purple sky. Unless they are purple mountains.
We went for an onsen after breakfast. In the Men’s, as was the case the other day, there were children bathing with their fathers. The bespectacled man and his son from yesterday were there again; and another fellow with two children, a boy and girl, both under ten. Maybe they were twins. Lithe golden bodies, unselfconscious, innocent and playful. I heard the boy singing in Japanese words to the tune of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. Onsen etiquette seems to require that you do not make eye contact with others, or only fleetingly, but somehow that makes your awareness of those around you more acute. I like the way you are left alone with your thoughts, it strikes me as generous. On the way back the hotel corridors were full of compositions from the works of Vilhelm Hammershøi.
We had an hour to walk to the pampas fields and back; Mayu wanted to do some filming there. We went via a back lane that was partially unsealed and where ice still lay across the surfaces of some of the puddles, one of which was, improbably, heart-shaped. I remembered how when I was walking to school in Ohakune I used to break the ice on the puddles with the heel of my shoe; and also how I used to save the ones in shady parts of the road to break on my way home. While we were walking along there was a public service announcement broadcast, which Mayu said was about a planned cull of wild boars that day. There are too many of them in the hills, apparently, and people were being warned to be on the lookout for those fleeing the cull. I don’t know how they were planning to kill them nor whether they kill sows as well. Surely they must.
The path between the banks of pampas grass leads diagonally uphill. People are continuously walking up and down but there aren’t very many of them. There’s a pram left at the bottom; someone must be carrying their child. The dark line of cedars to our right has a fringe of snow today, so that you see a beautiful progression of gold / white / black trunks / russet and green foliage / blue sky; but my phone camera doesn’t capture large landscapes well and none of the macro shots is worth reproducing. I was walking on ahead when I heard Mayu cry out: the diaphanous material of her skirt had become caught in some thorns growing beside the path. As I unpicked it, I thought they resembled blackberry prickles but they were low growing and seemed to be without leaves, let alone fruit. For a couple of sequences she had me walk away, once up the path, the other down. I enjoyed being ‘the talent’; as I was walking along I sang: Pack up all my cares and woes / Here I go, swinging low / Bye bye blackbird . . . It is a great joy to sing out loud in the landscape when no-one can hear you and when you might even be, who knows, in tune. Where somebody waits for me / Sugar’s sweet, so is she / Bye bye blackbird.
The view of Fuji when we came out of a tunnel through the mountains was incomparable. What impressed me most is its size. Compared to Ruapehu, for instance, it is three and a half thousand feet higher: a really massive volcano. Also the postcard views don’t give you an accurate impression of the great grey lumpy extruded material that lies along its slopes. Nor of the range of high mountains on either side of the cone. I was surprised also to see the substantial city built at its base. This is the eastern side, the city is called Gotemba and it is one of four: there are others on the southern, western and northern flanks. Fuji too is difficult to photograph. It is as if the millions of shots that have already been taken of it have leached it of its power. I don’t mean its power as a mountain, that is fully intact; I mean its power as an image in photographic reproduction. I ended up preferring some of the shots I took from inside the restaurant where we had lunch, which, incongruously, and for no apparent reason, had a windmill on the roof.
Isinglass 