Category Archives: Uncategorized

1.

Sabae was a grey-roofed city under grey skies, surrounded by bare brown hills.

Next morning we drove inland, with Mayu’s old friend Hisami as our guide, looking for the Ikeda Noh Mask Museum in Shizuhara. It was closed. A huge, bland, wooden, egg-shaped head, taller than a child, stood in the garden outside.

However the antiquarian store next door, owned by an ancient Noh mask-maker, was open. You had to pay 200 yen to go in, and also get past the stink in the air of kamemushi emissions and the squashed or spasming half alive insects on the concrete forecourt.

Inside was a cornucopia of wonders, including many half-finished, finished, painted and unpainted masks the old fellow, with a face like a character from one of the plays, had made.

I bought a blue and white one litre sake jar, which he said was worth 5000 yen, for 500 yen; the blue is script I haven’t yet deciphered.

Some of the roads further in were still closed for winter; they had two and a half metres of snow, whereas we, further north, had only one.

We went to see a kofun next. It was in town, near a railway line, a mound grown over with brown grass and surrounded by a dry moat.

A shrine to the god of war, Hachiman, had been built on top of it. The shrine was five hundred years old but the tomb was a thousand years older than that. It has never been excavated so no-one knows who is buried within.

In a small wooden building to one side stood three archaic buddhas, rescued from the river where they had been thrown, or hidden, during some long ago war.

Black kites, tobi, circled overhead, harassed by crows.

2.

The rocky beach at Takeno was covered with flotsam and jetsam, mostly plastic, mostly detritus off fishing boats.

There was a cave at either end of the bay; the one I went into had paw marks in the sand. A fox perhaps, or a mustelid.

In the shallows at the far end a man in waders was gathering wakame, seaweed, using a knife attached to the end of a stick and storing his harvest in a metal basket.

Uni, sea urchin, nestled on the bottom of the sea, their blackish red bristles glittering in the sunlight slanting down through the clear water.

The fines for taking them illegally are massive. The wakame man must have had a licence of some kind for his activity.

I picked up a heart shaped stone and turned it over; the markings on the back resembled a map of South America.

I left it under a notice board at the top of the path, where someone else had scattered some small pearly cone shells.

The next beach, a swimming place, had been swept clean with bamboo brooms and the detritus gathered in piles, to be removed later.

Children were picking up large white fragile clam shells.

We visited a third beach, where there was a scuba diving school, and saw more small children flying tiny blue box kites in the clear cool air.

3.

We walked along beside the moat surrounding the castle at Matsue, hearing the herons creaking and squawking in the pine trees and looking up at their big messy pile-of-sticks nests perched in the higher branches like crowns or webs or headpieces worn by strange tribes.

Long flat wooden boats powered by quiet motors passed on the brown water, their skippers wearing conical straw hats and their tourist passengers wearing them too; everybody had to duck their heads when they went under one of the low stone bridges.

The ducks and the coots swam languidly out of the path of the tourist boats, while the turtles, with their purple-black shells gleaming, clustered on the stones at the base of the massive castle walls, sun-bathing.

I remembered that Lafcadio Hearn, whose house we were going to see, in Japan adopted the heron as his emblem. In the United States he had been known as The Raven, after the ominous bird in the Edgar Allen Poe poem.

His museum was full of people moving respectfully, mostly silently, from exhibit to exhibit: there the iron barbells with which he exercised; there his magnifying glass, his spectacles, his telescope; there his leather suitcase and his Gladstone bag.

They had even found the little table he sat at reading as a little boy in Ireland.

There was a whole room devoted to the memory of his wife, Koizumi Setsu, who told him so many of the Japanese folktales he translated into English.

Family photographs, in glossy back and white prints, lined the walls of the staircase.

There was a library upstairs and I stood before the shelves and read a short essay he wrote about Robert Louis Stevenson. They were born in the same year but Lafcadio lived for a decade longer than Louis did. He was fifty-four when, in 1904, his heart stopped.

His house was austere and elegant in the way of nineteenth century Japanese houses, with beautiful gardens on three sides. A red japonica bush was flowering.

I sat for a moment at a replica of his desk, custom made, taller than usual, so he could sit on a high stool, bend his head forward and write or read with his one good eye inches from the surface of the paper or the book.

He kept a conch shell on the floor beside him, and blew it when he wanted to summon his wife, his children, or his servants.  

On the way back to our hotel, in the shadow of the castle, we passed a shrine to Inari, the god of rice, fertility, agriculture, and prosperity. There were many stone statues of foxes there, all different sizes.

Lafcadio Hearn used to pause here on his way to work (he was a teacher then) to look at one that was his particular favourite. It was up at the top of a steep flight of steps, which I was too lazy or too tired to climb.

Mayu went to see it while I sat on a low stone wall watching three Thai girls, in kimono, pose before a flowering cherry blossom tree. After each shot, they gathered around the screen and looked, giggling and exclaiming.

A yellow butterfly fluttered by.

4.

We drove along the shores of Lake Shinji, looking for the shrine that marks the place in Japan where saké was first brewed.

Lafcadio Hearn compared the way the waters of Shinji-ko shimmer in the sun to the light on a piece of shot silk he saw in the Japanese pavilion at the World Fair at Audubon Park, New Orleans, in 1885; his first intimation of the culture and the country he would give the rest of his life to.

Today the waters were brown, choppy, sullen.

Just before we reached the turn off, we saw an animal dead beside the road, a tanuki perhaps; the first road kill I can remember seeing on any Japanese highway.

A wealth of pink hyacinths were flowering luxuriously in the garden of a house next to the steps to the shrine. There was a shed with luminescent, opaline windows.

We climbed the mossy steps in a sudden shower of rain; which cleared when we reached the top.

The shrine, Saka-jinja, was modest, unassuming; there was a smaller one, dedicated to Inari, around the side.

It was one of those of which Lafcadio Hearn wrote: ‘. . . after climbing through miles of silence to reach some Shinto shrine, you find voidness only, and solitude — an elfish, empty little wooden structure, mouldering in shadows a thousand years old.’

It is said that every year, on October 13, the gods gather here to brew and drink saké. That is also the date of my elder son’s birthday.

There was a huge metal torii gate standing out on the flat fields before the shrine. We drove through it and then photographed the shrine from its other side.

At the level crossing on the rickety old railway, we stopped as bells rang, the barrier came  creaking down and an old orange train, empty of passengers, passed.

Out on the main road we saw a black kite, tobi, perched on top of a lamp post tearing with its beak at some piece of flesh it held in its claw.

5.

We were on our way to Izumo, which Mayu called (after Ise) Japan’s other Vatican. There were swallows nesting in the ablution block. One flew in front of my face as I went in to use the urinal. Its clay nest was sculpted at the top of a low, shit-stained wall.

The shimenawa across the front of the main hall was massive, two corded ropes intertwined, each ten times the thickness of a human torso.

Lafcadio Hearn: ‘I cannot now remember where I first read the observation that the curve of the Chinese roof might preserve the memory of a nomad’s tent. When I first saw, at Izumo, the singular structure of the old Shinto temples, with queer cross-projections at their gable ends and upon their roof-ridges, the suggestion of the forgotten essayist about the possible origin of much less ancient forms, returned to me with great force.’

Around the back were two grey, low, shuttered buildings, of great elegance and restraint. One was the library, the other, the treasure house, both built up against the high cliffs and walls of forest, and the grey marbled sky where tobi circled endlessly.

6.

The streets of Hagi were lined with child-sized, silver metal statues of samurai, those of the Choshu clan who, with their allies the Satsuma of Kyushu, brought down the Tokugawa shogunate and initiated the Meiji restoration of 1868.

One stood outside an empty, derelict shop next to a Toshiba battery vending machine with the words ‘King Power’ written upon it. A poster showing another, with explanatory text, hung on a wall in the mall between two silver faux regency chairs.

In the house of the scholar, Kido Takayoshi, one of the Three Great Nobles of the Restoration, the urinal was made of clay coloured porcelain with green swirls of pigment cascading down it.

In the garden grew a many-trunked cycad that must have been here when Kido, also known as Katsura Kogoro, was in residence.

For a period of about three hundred years, from the Warring States until the Restoration, the Choshu buried their leaders, their wives and their retainers, in two separate graveyards, one to the east of town, the other to the west.

Odd numbered leaders (first, third, fifth . . .) went east to Toko-ji, even numbered ones (second, fourth, sixth) west to Daisho-in.

Daisho-in was dank, haunted, dilapidated, under renovation; Toko-ji resplendent, with sakura trees flowering in the spring sunlight. Both graveyards feature hundreds of toro, stone lanterns, which, during the festival of Bon, when the dead return, also on 13 October, are lit up.

I was meeting my sister in Hagi and she was bringing with her, courtesy of another sister, who had inherited them from a third, some family photographs.

The night before we arrived I had a dream in which my father appeared as an old monk with a bald head, complaining at what I had said about him in a book I had written about my mother. (I have written no such book.)

I gave him various explanations, none of which he would accept. Then I said, illogically but accurately, well, you didn’t like your own father, either, did you? He agreed with that and was then obscurely satisfied.

My sister and I went through the photos before breakfast one morning. They were mostly of my father’s people and of our childhood in Ohakune. Some I had never seen before.

It was strange to see so many photos of my father’s father, restoring him to an humanity I had not known he possessed. As a young man, going to war, he was very handsome. The was also a picture of his wife, my grandmother, as a young, beautiful woman.

And a jocular letter my father had written to his older brother, congratulating him upon his engagement and suggesting that they might share the favours of the bride. Quite out of character for the man I thought I knew.

7.

While we were looking through the photos my other son called me from Australia. We re-scheduled the call for the afternoon, when we would be somewhere to the north and west of Okayama.

I was sitting in a huge open courtyard at the Ivy Hotel, a former cotton mill at Kurashiki, just finishing a bottle of the local craft beer and watching some turtles, red-eared sliders, an invasive species native to the Mississippi, in a small artificial brick pond, when he called back.

Most of the conversation took place in our hotel room, which looked out onto the waters of a small, shallow canal. It was about how we might catch up during my next, imminent, visit to Australia.

A kingfisher, kawaseme or flying jewel, alighted on a drain pipe, and started scanning the waters for prey. Light flashed from its iridescent wings and tail or lay quiescent in the copper feathers of its breast.

A big yellow carp, koi, came swimming up the canal, the lower lip of its catfish mouth trawling pendulous in the brown mud.

When the call ended, the kingfisher flew away.

8.

Our room at Otsu, on the southern shore of Biwa-ko, was on the ninth floor, with views of the lake.

Sometimes tobi swooped past the window, close enough, it seemed, to touch. Seen from below, against a blue or a grey sky, they make a black silhouette.

Up close, however, they are a tawny brown, with black tips to their wing feathers and black patches over their ears.

Each morning when I woke up I would look out the window and see the same man, wearing the same red wind-cheater, fishing in the same place in the opalescent waters of the tectonic lake. I never saw him catch anything.

Other men stood, like dark posts, at regular intervals along the shore in both directions.

There was a boat that turned out to be an island; and an island that turned out to be a boat. A paddle-steamer called the Michigan aimlessly circled the lake, taking tourists for a ride.

Several varieties of ducks gathered on the lawns on the foreshore, pecking at seeds. Asiatic coots patrolled the shallow inland waters.

A giant catfish lives in the deeper regions of the lake. It can grow more than a metre long and weigh up to seventeen kilograms. They are said to come to the surface when an earthquake threatens. In some mythologies, they cause the earthquakes.

We went for a long walk, hoping to reach the Meiji era hotel where Helen Keller stayed when she was here in the early twentieth century; but the way around the foreshore was blocked and the only other route, a busy four lane highway, was too loud, too noisy and too stinky for us.

On the way back we saw a small boy catching tiny fish in a net. He had dozens in his tank.

As we drove away from Otsu next day, seeking a temple after which her samurai ancestor called himself, changing his name to Kanamori during the Warring States period, Mayu remarked that, on Honshu, South means West and East means North.

Sakura flowered all the way back to Kurohime; but here the buds have not yet burst. It snowed again last night; but already, mid-morning, the snow has melted.

I can hear the far off ki-ki-ki-ki of a tobi in the air.

9.

I played three seasons of rugby with Grant Batty, 1962, 3 and 4, in the ninth, eight and seventh grades respectively, for the Greytown club. Our strip was red, yellow and black and our coach a local farmer, Claude ‘Nip’ Field. His son, Warren, aka Tubby, was our half back and a nephew, Ian, one of the breakaways. I was the other. Grant could play anywhere in the backline and often did but was usually at second five-eighth. He could also score from anywhere on the paddock and often did that too. He was a genius on a rugby field.

One year we were unbeaten and one year I was captain; whether they were the same year I’m uncertain now. Seventh grade, anyway. We would all have been twelve or so. Grant was pissed off I was made captain and in the team photo (not the one posted) he is sitting next to me with his chest all puffed out and thrusting forward so that I had no choice but to lean back. It’s actually quite a good photo of the two of us because I’m holding the ball and looking quite relaxed and Grant appears as the superstar he was going to be.

We spent quite a lot of time together; our houses were only a block away from each other and his father, Bernie, ran the liquor store at Wright Stephensons, next door to the chemist shop above and behind which we lived. The first time I ever got drunk was at his place, one afternoon after football, when his parents were out and we sampled all the various bottles of spirits Bernie had in his liquor cabinet. I tried Crème de Menthe for the first time and have never tried it again.

Grant was easily the most competitive person I’ve ever known and yet there was a side to him that was old-fashioned, mannerly, almost chivalric. I remember once we both fancied the same girl, Ngaire Woolcott, a big slow blonde who was the baker’s daughter, and one lunchtime (we were still at primary school) we went up to her and asked her which one of us she liked? She pointed to Grant and said: ‘I like you!’ Whereupon he turned to me and shook my hand.

Another time, after school, when we were playing Four Square, there was an argument over a line call and Grant got in a huff and stalked off. I called something insulting after him and he turned round and came back, rolling up his sleeves. That’s the only proper fight I can remember having in all of my school days.

After we went to Kuranui College we didn’t see each other so much. We were in different classes and, although I was still playing rugby, we weren’t in the same team any more. He’d gone straight into the higher echelons, maybe even into the First XV. And then, early the next year, we left to go to Huntly and I never saw him again. He married a local girl, off one of the farms to the east and, while I remember how elegant Jill was, I can’t now recall her maiden name.

When Grant retired, at the young age of 26, after a crippling knee injury, they moved to Tauranga and he went into business, and then into local body politics. Something happened after the Crash of ’87, the business (was it to do with timber? Or a pub?) went bankrupt and Grant got his fair share of blame; there were accusations of shady practices and the like but I don’t know how right they were. After he died I watched an interview with him and it was the one thing he was still bitter about; he thought he’d been targeted unfairly because he was a public figure and that the wrongs done, if there were wrongs done, were not done by him.

He was always fair-minded, sometimes comically so, and I doubt he was dishonest in money matters: he had too much pride. Anyway, he took his family to Queensland and I don’t know what he did there apart from coaching rugby teams, including the Maroochydore Swans and the Gold Coast Breakers, plus a spell as Assistant Coach at the Queensland Reds and a period coaching Yamaha Jubilo in Japan’s Top League. His marriage lasted and he and Jill had four kids, three sons and a daughter I think; at least one of them is a decent rugby player. He ended up living in, of all places, Wallabadah in northern NSW, running the General Store and coaching the Quirindi Lions.

All the time I was living in Sydney I knew he was up there somewhere and wondered, now and again, if I should try to get in touch. I never did and I regret that now. On the other hand, the last time I saw him we were both just 14 and he might not even have remembered me. I also watched a half hour TV special done with him, much of it filmed on a golf course, but with some footage of an exhibition match, a friendly, he played in, and it brought back to me the way he ran (very fast) on his little short bandy legs. His red hair had gone grey and then fallen out and he had this huge moustache, which I thought was a mistake; but then I think all moustaches are mistakes.

He had become a good raconteur and had many stories to tell, some against himself. And, like I say, not bitter at all, except about the Tauranga business. A couple of other things: the Battys were Catholic in a resolutely Anglican town, though I don’t know if they went to church; unlike other Catholic families in those days his wasn’t big; he only had the one older sister. I used to wonder if his courtliness came from the church; but it was more likely from his mother. The other thing is, he died on my birthday, when I turned the age he was (he was six months older than me). I’d love to be able to tease him about that; but of course I can’t.

Some time last year I was approached by a group called The Salons and invited to become part of their 2026 poetry work: Vessels of Love. The theme was abundance and decay and they wanted a short work from me that could then become the narrative of an audiovisual piece, a film. I responded by saying that 1/ I didn’t live in Australia any more and 2/ I wasn’t strictly speaking a poet. How on earth, I wondered, did they even come to invite me?

It turned out I had Vaughan Rapatahana to thank. A few years previously he had asked me to stand in for him at the Sydney launch of his book ‘te pāhikahikatanga / incommensurability’ (Flying Islands Press, 2021) and I had agreed to do so. I recalled an invocation I had learned while studying te reo Maori in 1976 (Whakaronga ake au i te tangi o te manu nei . . . ), gave a short talk and then read from Vaughan’s book, which is bilingual, as the title suggests.

Anyway, someone from The Salons attended that event (at which multiple books were launched) and remembered me from then. When I learned that, I agreed, and we started working together. My film / text, ‘A Day on Hiva Oa’, was itself launched, along with six others, at the Knox Street Bar in Chippendale, Sydney, last night. Alas, I could not be there but here is a link to my piece and, inter alia, to the rest of the project. I have to say that The Salons, and especially Angie Contini, were a joy to work with.

https://www.thesalons.org/vesselsoflove2026/#martin

I have a friend, a writer, author of many books, who said to me once that, each time the first copy of a new one passes over his desk, he feels deep shame. I don’t react in precisely the same way but I do know what he means. Books never turn out exactly as you imagine they will; furthermore, by the time you’ve finished one, you can usually only see its faults, not its virtues, assuming it has any. You may even feel you never want to see it again. I guess I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed because a box of these books turned up, all the way from Tennessee, where they were printed, and it’s my job to promote it. But how do you promote anything in this over-promoted world? I really don’t know. Coincidentally, a newsletter from Lasavia (who have done an excellent job) also turned up, and with it a short piece I wrote about how this book came about; so I might just post that:

Writing ‘On the Highway of the Story of the Gods’

When author Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan in 1890 he was advised by his mentor, Basil Hall Chamberlain, to record everything he felt and saw in those early days, because first impressions are ephemeral and would fade as he became habituated to the new land. I kept this advice in mind when we took a car trip around Kyushu, the southern most of the four main islands in the archipelago. Every night I would write up the day’s experiences and publish the result on my weblog. I thought I might thereby recruit followers of our unfolding journey; but this did not happen.

For the next two sections, set on Sado Island and in Tohoku, in the north of Honshu, I reverted to my more usual approach, taking notes which I wrote up later, once the travelling was over. These sections were easier to write, because I was working at least partly from memory; whereas the unedited weblog entries were scattered and verbose and included things that didn’t really belong. I had to try to get rid of what I came to think of as a kind of infection, caused by the virus of the inadvertent and the everyday. The last part, which describes the home we made after our initial travels were over, was the most satisfying to draft, because the material was literally at hand and I could reach out and pick it like fruit from a tree.

I took dozens of photographs over the course of the year the book spans; but only used a few of them. Photographs, however, are excellent memory aids and will bring back to you, not just people and places, but the feelings and thoughts you had when you took them. The other indispensable resource was the writing of others, especially historians. I always read looking for the salient detail that might elevate the humdrum to the haunting. I also wrote a number of short poems, which I was going to include in the text, in homage to the Japanese form called haibun, which mixes poetry and prose; these stanzas survive only in paraphrase.

Writing is irredeemably time-bound. One of the reasons we were in Japan was to help look after Mayu’s aging mother, and she became a major character in the last part of the book. Yoshie died, aged 90, before its publication, but too late to include an obituary. So she appears as she was, a vigorous, optimistic, even hedonistic woman, intent on living the few years she had left to the full. This wasn’t planned, of course, but I am happy it has turned out the way that it did.

Yesterday we went down to the Nissay Theatre in Tokyo to see the musical Issa in Paris – ‘original concept, lyrics, and music by Maury Yeston’. You can look him up if you don’t know who he is. For various reasons: Kobayashi Issa is our village poet, he was born and died in Kashiwabara, where we live; Mayu’s father, a stage designer with the Shiki Theatre Company, worked at the Nissay from when it opened in 1963 until his death a decade later; she remembers going there many times as a child; it was an excursion arranged by the Shinanomachi Town Office and we would be going there and back by bus with a party of locals.

There was a blizzard raging when we woke up Sunday morning. I had to dig a path to the car, dig it out of the carport and then drive the icy roads, through a virtual white out, into town for the 7.45 am departure. We were the last but one to get onto the warm bus idling outside the Town Office. Sixteen of us, plus tour guide and driver; a mix of old couples, literary types and employees of the Town Office, including the Mayor, all of us equipped with warm clothing and a joyful anticipation of the pleasures of the day ahead.

We set off down from the mountains towards the flat lands of the Kanto, where skies were clear and blue, even though the temperature remained just above zero. We made several toilet stops, where aging bladders could be relieved; and a hot lunch was served on board, supplied by a Karuizawa business which has been operating for a hundred and twenty years and making this particular dish for sixty. Mayu remembered it, too, from her childhood. The chicken, bamboo slices, pickles, grated ginger, chestnut and dried apricot, plus a quail’s egg, on rice, came in a handsome, ceramic, lidded pot which you might keep once you had eaten its delicious contents. We did.

Our tour guide was a young woman wearing pancake make up and a bright smile, with an infectious enthusiasm that suggested the jaunt we were on was something we would remember for the rest of our days. She was ferociously efficient and I did wonder what kind of person would appear if one of us took it into their head to disrupt proceedings. Somebody quite formidable I think. That didn’t happen so I never found out if mask was person or mask was mask. That is a not unfamiliar situation here.

The Nissay is near the centre of Tokyo and we approached it driving alongside the moats and walls and gardens that surround the Imperial Palace, once Edo Castle, and the heart of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The Tokyo-tomin were out and about, walking their dogs, or jogging, or just promenading. At the Nissay, the bus let us out and we walked over to the theatre for two photo opportunities, one outside, before big posters advertising the show, the other inside in front of the booth that our Town Office was operating in the foyer. It was there to promote Shinanomachi as a holiday destination.

Marble staircases lined with red carpets led upstairs to the entrances to the auditorium. The crowd was young, fashionably dressed, mostly women, especially younger women; some older people and a few children. I did not see one gaijin, a unique experience for me in Tokyo. I guess foreigners just don’t go to something as outré as a musical about an eighteenth century Japanese haiku poet’s mythical visit to pre-revolutionary Paris.

The theatre holds about 1300 people and it was full; but not to overflowing. The seats covered in fabric coloured the same pinky-red as the carpets. Not a single straight line anywhere to be seen, if you except the rectangularity of the stage; the wavy ceiling shone with a luminous glow. I found out later it is covered with twenty thousand pearl shells. The stage as pictured; the hanging banners inscribed with Issa haiku and a single glass chair standing front and centre.  

As for the show it was, for me at least, impossible to describe; but I will try. The set up: a young man from contemporary Tokyo, a musician, has had a hit using words from Issa haiku as lyrics for his song, called Talk Talk Tokyo. Now he has writer’s block and cannot conceive the follow up. This inability to write is related to the premature death of his father and his consequent rejection of his mother, an obsessive haiku scholar, who died in Paris while researching her intuition that that was where Issa’s lost decade (1777-87) was spent. The son, the singer, also goes to Paris, to find his mother, or his inspiration, or perhaps just the tour guide with whom he falls in love, and she with him.

Meanwhile, the story of what happened to the poet in those lost years is also told, in parallel, with a second protagonist, playing Issa, acting out his journey from Kashiwabara to Edo, Edo to Nagasaki and, on a Dutch ship, to Paris, where he meets and falls in love with a revolutionary whose code name is Nightingale; and becomes involved in events leading up to the French Revolution. These two stories are told in a series of interspersed, often very brief, indeed haiku-like, scenes. As in Noh plays, ghosts of the departed, or of former selves, appear as live actors on the stage. Several times the singer and the poet meet each other and at one point exchange identities. Needless to say, or perhaps not, the singer recovers his mojo.

It was, artistically, aesthetically, and technically, a consummate display. The acting was immaculate; the sets and costumes superb; the choreography and the dancing, particularly the acrobatics, likewise. The symphony of colours was amazing. There were echoes of Les Misérables; and several frog jokes which seemed to go past the audience; lost in translation perhaps. Issa wrote about 200 haiku about frogs and they have come to stand as his de facto avatar. The music, played by an unseen orchestra, was excellent too. It was only at the very end that a curtain towards the rear rose and we saw the fourteen musicians playing on a raised platform behind the stage. Probably the most impressive thing about the production, apart from the sets and costumes, was the way the logistics of a complex performance were handled so flawlessly and with supreme confidence.

After half a dozen curtain calls and a standing ovation, we left, climbed back on the bus, and started for home. Some of the men had brought booze with them and got boisterously drunk up the back; while their wives chatted and handed around snacks – chocolates, mekans, biscuits and so on. It was late afternoon and I could see, away to the south, the snow covered cone of Fuji outlined against the paling sky. We stopped once, to pee, and once more, at a roadhouse, for dinner.

It was dark when we reached Nagano, and as we neared Shinanomachi, everyone on board leaned forward in their seats to see what the weather was doing. The blizzard was still blizzarding, hard. Mayu texted our neighbour to see what the situation at our place was. Sakura, out shopping, had had to use her snow blower to get her car out of the garage. She said our other neighbour, Mr. S, had cleared the front of our carport on the way over to restore access to his parent’s place. She said the municipal snow plough had not been through yet; and that she would have a look at our stairs and the path to our door.

At the Town Office everyone said cheerful goodbyes to each other, bowed, and turned away to face the drama of the weather. Our car, a Toyota Vitz, had almost disappeared under an accumulation of snow. A genial fellow lent me a scraper and I removed the worst of it; while he followed after me with an ice scourer. We got the car going without any trouble, called in at Lawsons for some restorative saké, then drove up towards Mizuho.

The snow was thick and soupy on the road, making the car slew, alarmingly; Japanese call this ‘swimming’. Then, on the last hill it stopped, wheels spinning uselessly in the slush. I tried reversing. No. Put it in gear again and tried going forward. Still no. The heater was on full blast and I was starting to sweat. I turned the heat down, put the car into a lower gear, took a breath, said a prayer, and tried again. Slowly we slithered up the hill, around the last corner and, erratically, into the carport.

Sakura, bless her, had cleared the snow from the steps and from the path to our door. We went inside, broached the saké and started running a hot bath. It was still snowing outside. I remembered the haiku Issa wrote after he had returned from his travels to his old home town, perhaps for good:

well here I am | my final home | five feet of snow

images : the stage before performance; a section of the mural in the foyer

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

So catch me if you can
I’m goin’ back

Even before we woke up, Kono-chan was crying.

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.

I

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sPHnotbSzo

https://gladdestthing.com/poems/poem-without-a-categoy

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 (Pseudopanax arboreum) 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