Isinglass

This afternoon, when I was lying in the hottest of the baths in the onsen in the basement of the Lime Hotel, a memory surfaced – one I had not reviewed for many years. It comes, I think, from 1972, at a time when I was living at 28 Sentinel Road, Herne Bay, Auckland. It was a huge two storey mansion with numerous bedrooms and was generally known as the Living Theatre House because so many members of that group lived there, including my sister Frances and her friend, later Red Mole stalwart, Sally Rodwell. But that isn’t what this memory is about.

One day in this period, perhaps in the autumn, I went out to the west coast with Frances, our older sister Virginia and one other person who I think might have been Bryan Divers, another actor in The Living Theatre. He had been Frances’ lover but by this time their affair was over and they were just friends. Virginia lived elsewhere but I’m not sure where. Maybe 19 Chamberlain Street in Grey Lynn, a house where later Tony Fomison lived; maybe at 5 Pentland Avenue down on the flats in Mt. Eden. We drove out to Anawhata in Frances’ green Volkswagon which she called Olive. We were aged, in order of seniority, 24, 22, and 20.

It was probably a Sunday and the purpose of the trip was just that – to take a trip. In those days you could buy clear capsules three quarters filled with a brown granular powder which was the dried residue of the peyote cactus: mescalin. I forget what we paid for these capsules but it wasn’t much. The effect was different from LSD, the other psychedelic we took in those days – less edgy, although not less intense. You would feel a slow wave flowing through every part of creation, your mind as much as the trees, say, or the sea, or the wind, or even the traffic on the roads we took back to the city afterwards.

I can’t remember when we took the capsules but it was probably after we arrived; and then left the car in the park above the beach. You have to walk down to Anawhata, there’s no other way. It takes about twenty minutes and, in my recall of that day, we were the only people there. We didn’t take a picnic and we wouldn’t have carried bottled water either. If you were thirsty, you drank from a stream and there’s one at Anawhata. Maybe we went for a swim in the sea. Nothing of our time down there has remained in memory.

What I recall is going back to the car. That’s why I think it was autumn because, by the time we took the track back up to the road, it was getting dark. I remember the four of us walking in single file through the trees and then beside the grey ribbon of the road; and realising, at some point, that we were all naked. Myself, my two older sisters, Divers, our bodies pale and glistening in the light fading from the sky. And what is strange about that is we disrobed simultaneously and without consultation. Intuitively I suppose. We wanted to be naked.

We must have been carrying our clothes but I don’t remember that either: in my recall we are unencumbered, like antique humans or even like ghosts. I almost remember my embarrassment when we stopped in for petrol somewhere on the way back and I had to put a towel over my knees; but that might be a memory from another trip out west.

I don’t think we ever talked about it. What would there be to say? It is a beautiful memory, the three of us, plus Divers, naked as the day we were born, and naked as we often were together in childhood; our skin pale as moonlight, walking through the dark trees, without a care in the world. My sisters are both dead now and I’ll never see them, naked or clothed, again. But I’ll continue to see them as ghosts. Divers I don’t know – last I heard he was up north living with a French woman but that was years ago now. And I’m here in Kurohime.

I think it must have been the sight of my own pale skin through the shimmering waters of the hot pool that provoked the memory. What else might it have been? The strangeness of death, its real heartbreak, is that it takes away, not just the person you knew and loved, not just their familiar physical form but, worst of all, their lifetime of memories. Never to be thought again. Never to be remembered.

There is no consolation except maybe what Yeats wrote, rendering lines from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus thus: ‘Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say / Never to have drawn the breath of life / Never to have looked into the eye of day / The second best’s a gay good night and quickly turn away

Towards the end of a very long dream I had this morning I was walking barefoot through luxurious green grass on what I knew were the playing fields at Huntly College; and I remember looking down at the long stems, which were about to go to seed, and wondering: why can’t the footy field be planted with corn? Anyway the dream shifted and I was on an unpaved, rocky, country road, at the brow of a hill, with trees on either side, where I encountered a fellow I had met before. He was tall and bluff looking, with big ears and a pointy head and he was pushing along a contraption that resembled one of those old Victorian desks — except it was on wheels. We stopped and looked at each other. I was sure I knew him but couldn’t figure out where from. Here, he said, take this, giving me a very beautiful piece of green quartz. I was transfixed by the scintillations of light in its depths and just stared at it. Aren’t you going to thank me? he said, sounding aggrieved. Yes, of course, I said and, absurdly, sang a line from the old Scaffold song: ‘Thank you very much for the Aintree Iron . . .’ He didn’t seem to mind. Don’t I know you? I said. I’m sure we’ve met before. What’s your name? He was rubbing his big hands over his cheeks and I remembered that the fellow he reminded me of had acne scars on his cheeks but this fellow didn’t. He must have rubbed them away, I thought. He didn’t tell me his name. I’ve been working down at the old scout camp, he said. For Mr Chisholm. The Mayor? I said. He nodded. But we’re not living in Mr Chisholm’s house any more, we sold it. Somehow I knew this meant that he and his wife had split up; also that, when I’d known him before, they had been having a lot of arguments. He still looked sad. Here, I said, have this — I found it on the road just before. It was another piece of lustrous quartz, this time in black and grey. Not as splendid as the green piece was but still good. He took in in his hands and looked at it. Thank you, he said, and placed it on his mobile desk top. I saw other treasures there as well, including a large piece of red quartz which had lines like runes inscribed upon it. I wanted to pick it up to have a better look at it but I didn’t. Who are you? I said. He was rubbing his face again. I have to go, he said, pulling a remote from his pocket and using it to start up the now motorized desk. We walked along together for a while, down the hill. I was pretty sure I knew where we were now: at the corner where Mole Street joins Wood Street. I remembered it from my paper run. There are apple orchards there. He seemed a bit happier. I’ve got a job down south, he said. Working for Mr Chisholm. And thus we parted. When I woke up I could remember his face perfectly. I still think I know him; but I don’t know where from.

About ten years ago now I tried to write a book about my parents’ courtship and marriage during World War Two. It isn’t bad but for some reason I never finished it. And I still don’t know how to do that. One of my sisters at the time said to me: ‘Well, you aren’t them, so how could you?’ Indeed. But you always regret unfinished works. What follows is an excerpt from said book – and the reason for the pic above is not just that Traff flew and died in Wellington bombers but that, when as a nine or ten year old I became obsessed with model aircraft from WW2, a Wellington bomber was the first one I bought and assembled. I had it on lay bye and it took me fourteen weeks of pocket money, at a shilling a week, to pay the price for the kitset. I hung it up on the ceiling above my bed and endlessly replayed fantasies of aerial battles from that war. My father never commented upon my choice of aircraft. He may not have known – but he probably did. Here’s the excerpt:

Trafford McRae Nichol lived with his family in the same street in Seatoun as my father: at #11 Inglis, just up from the beach, whereas the Edmonds were near the top at #109. They met when my father moved there from Wadestown, aged 10, in 1930, grew up together, went to the same college — Rongotai, over the hill in Lyall Bay — for a while; later Traff boarded in town at Wellington College. They sailed an Idalong, a small sixteen by five foot six yacht that had been made by the boat-builder father of a mutual friend, Penn Warren. Traff was the mainsheet hand and I was the forward hand, my father said. And Penn was the skipper. And we raced and went into championships but it wasn’t a big deal, we just enjoyed doing it . . . he was my best friend. Hell of a nice guy. 

They were young men about town. When Traff left school he enrolled at Victoria University College and studied Accountancy; and was employed in the city in a clerical capacity by Jenkins and Mack, Engineers. This must have been a family firm; Traff’s mother’s maiden name was Mack. At the same time, in the late 1930s, my father was studying for an LLB at VUC and also working in the city: at Morrison, Spratt, Morrison & Taylor, his father’s lawyers and also lawyers for Todd Motors, where Charlie was General Manager. The Edmond and Nicol families were close. When Traff enlisted, he gave the name of C R Edmond as one of his referees.

Traff joined the Air Force on March 23, 1941 and did his initial training at Levin before being posted to the Elementary Flying Training School at Harewood, Christchurch; thence to Woodbourne, Blenheim, where he was awarded his flying badge. He was commissioned as a Pilot Officer on September 6 1941 and, on the 14^th of the same month, embarked for the United Kingdom, arriving at Bournemouth on October 17. More training ensued: at Honington, Suffolk, he learned instrument flying; and then at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire crew-ed up and completed his training in Wellington bomber aircraft prior to being posted on the 10^th of March, 1942, to No. 75 (N.Z.) Squadron, Feltwell, Norfolk and commencing operational flying.

With this squadron, the summary in his military record continues, as a pilot of a Wellington bomber he took part in attacks on Essen, Dortmund and Hamburg. On the night of 23 / 24^th April 1942 Pilot Officer Nicol was second pilot of a Wellington bomber which took off  [for] air operations to Cologne in Germany. Returning from the target this aircraft was attacked by an enemy night fighter and badly damaged, one of the crew being killed, while Pilot Officer Nicol was very seriously wounded by canon fire.

The Chaplain’s letter to his mother takes up the story: The aircraft reached its base. The pilot having wirelessed that a member of his crew was injured. On landing (one source says it was a crash landing) P / O Nicol was immediately removed to Station Sick Quarters, where he died from multiple injuries to the torso and the legs at approximately 0800 hours on 24^th April, 1942. He was buried with service honours on 27^th April in the St Nicholas churchyard, Feltwell, Norfolk.

He had flown 328 hours as a pilot; this was his sixth operational flight. Cologne was a major rail nexus and had been bombed numerous times already, the first attack having taken place two years earlier in May, 1940. Traff’s mission, in which sixty-nine aircraft took part, came only a month or so before Operation Millennium, the RAF’s first thousand bomber raid, also to Cologne, happened. Since February, 1942, Bomber Command had been under the authority of Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, aka ‘Bomber’ or ‘Butcher’ Harris, the architect of the campaign of terror against German cities. He was a fanatic whose roll of achievements included 600,000 dead civilians, 131 burned-out or devastated cities, 43 cubic metres of rubble for every inhabitant of Dresden, 7,500,000 people left homeless. 

It isn’t hard to imagine what effect Traff’s death had on my father; that known body, that familiar form, just twenty-one years old, ripped apart by the hot metal of canon fire; bleeding to death as the Wellington bomber limped back across Holland and the North Sea to Norfolk; the friend he would not see again. It must have been as if a part of himself had died: the mainsheet hand and I was the forward hand. He probably imagined himself likewise haemorrhaging to death in the lonely night skies over Europe.

In April 1942 Dad wrote his poem for Traff, which he gave to his mother, Lousia; she had a portrait of her son, in uniform, framed with the poem, in black ink, in my father’s hand, inscribed below. He kept a copy of it by him all his life and now I too have it among my things. Traff, who was a few months younger than Dad, looks eerily like my mother did in the photographs of her taken around the same time: the same fresh-faced, rounded cheeks, the same full lips, that bloom of youth on the skin, that steady, heart-breaking, prospective look in the eyes.

The most poignant thing for me in Traff’s war record is the list of personal effects, mostly clothes, that he left behind. The shirts and collars, the 29 handkerchiefs and 14 ½ pairs of socks, the Box Brownie camera, the pyjamas and slippers, the keys, the wallet and the travelling rug, the bathing trunks, the flannel trousers and the blazer. The list concludes: 1 Gold Chain with button attached; 1 Ceremonial Hat; 1 Chain & Key; 1 pr Cuff Links; 1 Scarf; 1 Handkerchief; 1 Toy Penknife; 2 Charms; 1 Wrist Watch; 1 Driving Licence; 1 NZ Sixpence.

My father’s poem about his dead friend is, as he knew, conventional and sentimental; it was also of the time. Another contemporary piece of writing, with similar faults and similar virtues, is included in Traff’s war record. It was written a few years after the war by a Mrs Soward who was visiting the grave of her own son, Sergeant Joyce, at the RNZAF cemetery at Feltwell: The rose trees are in full bloom at each grave, she wrote, the lawn is starred with daisies. Larks are singing madly all day: as far as the eye can see are beautiful meadows, corn fields, gigantic old trees in all their lovely new green, and wild flowers in every hedge. The village is very old.

I had the great satisfaction of being taken by Sir Henry and Lady Peat, all through their lovely house, of great antiquity, at Huckwold, a mile or so from the Feltwell Air Station. I saw all the apartments which were set aside as dormitories for the aircrews, so that they could get the necessary quiet and sleep between Bombing Raids. This lovely house was a joy to them, great copper beeches, thousands of acres of meadow and beautifully laid out old time flower gardens . . . many dogs were there and the boys made great friends of them. Such hospitality as was possible, was extended to them in the way of invitations to sherry or other drinks with the family.

I trust that the knowledge of the care, peace and beauty of this spot, if made known, will bring comfort to the parents and prevent them thinking of a “lonely grave”. While I sat here writing the other day, a girl of twelve brought up a great bunch of golden Iris and put [it] on my son’s grave. Apparently she does the rounds, and at her age cannot have known any of them personally. How I wish they could televise this as I see it today, and hear the larks overhead, see outside the plot, the rose hedges, tall grasses waving over four feet high, pink may, dog roses, sorrel, meadow sweet and kindred things.

Creek Water Journal (Walking Bird Books, Wellington, 1977)

Poems I wrote about rivers and lakes I swam in as a boy. In Ohakune and environs, they were the Mangawhero, the Mangateitei, the Manga-nui-a-te-ao but not the Whangaehu; we used to go there to collect sand for the sandpit on its sulphurous banks. In the Wairarapa, we swam in the Ruamahanga, the Waiohine, the Waipoua, and at Lake Ferry. In the Waikato we boated on the river but never swam in it; but did sometimes bathe in the lakes: Hakanoa, Waahi, Ohinewai, Rotongaro and Waikare.  In Upper Hutt we used to go up the Akatarawa valley and swim in deep green pools in the Akatarawa River.

Brimstone (Vagabond Press, Auckland, 1981)

A poetry journal recounting my experiences with theatre group Red Mole and band Red Alert as we travelled from Wellington to Auckland to Los Angeles to San Francisco to New York; thence to London, with a side trip to Amsterdam; then back to New York and across the continent to LA again; coda is NZ in the summer of 1980-81. It was a source for Bus Stops on the Moon (2020) but is a different work with its own voice and its own preoccupations.

Cross Words (Pergamon Publishing, Canberra, 1984)

Six essays about politics New Zealand and Australia in the early 1980s; dealing with, in New Zealand, the Springbok Tour of 1981, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in July 1984, and the election of the Lange Government in that same month and year. In Australia I wrote about the minerals boom of 1981 in the last years of the Fraser government; the election of the Hawke-Keating government in 1983 and its subsequent re-election, with a reduced majority, in December 1984; and the Lionel Murphy imbroglio and the many other corruption scandals surrounding the Wran Labor government in NSW.

The Inward Sun (Exilic, Sydney, 1996)

A study of Antipodean literature focussed upon works by Janet Frame (Owls Do Cry), Maurice Duggan (Along the Ridout Road that Summer), Ronald Hugh Morrieson (The Scarecrow) and Ruth Park (Pink Flannel aka Dear Hearts & Gentle People). The intention was to look at these four works, which all came early in their author’s careers, in terms of that old dialectic, identified but not invented by William Blake, between innocence and experience.

The Fantail’s Feathers (Project Printing, Ormondville, 2003)

A memoir of the women of my maternal line, from my great grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother and to my eldest sister, who is in some respects a reincarnation of our great grandmother. She was the wife of a butcher turned farmer, a drunkard, and bore him twelve children before she died, worn out, aged only fifty years, at the turn of the century. Our grandmother was one of those twelve children and, like her sisters, most likely abused, even sexually abused, by her father. She became a primary school teacher who married a painter / decorator and had four children, of whom my mother was the second. The foregoing events all mostly occurred in Hawkes Bay or in the East Coast area, around Gisborne and Wairoa. My mother became a well-known poet and writer; my eldest sister is her first born; another teacher, she travelled widely, especially in Africa and the Middle East, before returning to NZ and re-training as a psychotherapist. She and our mother did not get on. The point about reincarnation arose because of her startling physical resemblance (as seen in the photographs) to her great grandmother.

Masked Days (Rain City Books, Auckland, 2006)

An autobiographical account of the year 2004, which I spent mostly in Auckland writing Luca Antara; based on a diary I kept while I was there. I started out living in the Ponsonby villa of an old friend but there really wasn’t room for me there, plus he had a new girlfriend and she was problematic too. Also I was mired in various disputes, some of them violent, with art world people consequent upon the book I’d published about Philip Clairmont five years before. Later on I moved into a bedsit in Mt Eden beneath the house of a rare books dealer who was just establishing himself in the auction market. He and his wife, in their different ways, tried to seduce me to their ways and means. Neither succeeded. In September I flew to Kuala Lumpur and then went to Malacca, after that Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa and Flores — before landing back in Australia, in Darwin, with a debilitating ear infection; which I have since recovered from.

Zigzag Street (Exilic, Sydney, 2012)

Memoir of literary life in the Antipodes 2005-2011; includes descriptions of a series of gatherings of poets and writers from Australia and New Zealand over that period: Fugacity 05 (Christchurch 2005);  Bluff 06 (Bluff and Rakiura, 2006); Home & Away (Sydney & Auckland, 2010); periphery / to carry around (Melbourne 2011). The moving spirit of those gatherings was Michele Leggott; this book is really a paean in praise of her; and includes a log of our interactions in the wake of the deaths of Alan Brunton, in 2002, and David Mitchell, in 2010. It is a farewell to a generation and welcome to the next.

Hokitika Town (forthcoming in 2024 from Rain City Books, Auckland)

Essays on four nineteenth century New Zealanders — Ferdinand von Hochstetter, Andreas Reischek, Walter Buller and George Grey; with interludes on the painters Charles Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer. The essays are about these men’s fluency in te reo Maori and how that facility led them to betrayal; foregrounding the betrayals of that old meddler, George Grey; in Victorian lawyer Thomas Tancred words: ‘a terrible and fatal man’. The intent is identify Grey as the progenitor of the Tory tradition in New Zealand, which is now (2024) undergoing a resurgence; its values are wealth, derived from landlordism; the theft of the land of the indigenous people; their consequent oppression; the elimination of the public service and other agents who might impede this plunder; and the further immiseration of the poor; in the name of policy objectives that are always opaque — but by means of which they and their friends will be enriched.

We got off the bus at Parramatta Markets and I said to my companion I was going to look at the second hand books

It was a place I had been to before, both in dreams and in real life

Some querulous young man was engaging the door woman with his trivial complaints

When it was my turn I gave her the 100 yen coin it cost to enter and then found the door was still obstructed

A giant and his tiny girlfriend, sitting on a bench, offered to get me in

The giant took me in his arms, raising me up above his head, and torpedo-ed me over all of the obstacles and into the shop

I banged my head on the lintel on the way through but it didn’t hurt and didn’t bleed so I didn’t mind

Did I say my younger son was with me? He was now

First I looked at the books on the semi-circular display shelves

Burroughs, Ancient Egypt, The Art of Tea — there wasn’t anything I wanted

We went down to the side room where the medieval texts are held

Shelves stuffed with parchments that had lost their bindings; leather-backed volumes you would not dare to open in case they cracked

All in Old or Middle English which I cannot read anymore

Two spivs in suits were surveying the offerings in search of investment opportunities

One of them, younger, red-headed, tipped a shelf forward as if to topple it down over on to him

You’re really stupid, you know that? I said

He shaped up as if to take me on but I knew I had his measure

He slunk off after the other guy

There were three people in the next room: a father, a mother and their grown-up daughter, who was about 40 and beautiful; Russians

Was it about force or was it about righteousness? they asked

They were talking about Raskolnikov

I did not know the answer and nor did they; but we all knew what the question was

They found a copy of Crime & Punishment and the daughter slid it into the embroidered shoulder bag she was carrying

We bowed and parted

In the next room I discovered a book about the Tartars, illustrated with gorgeous paintings accompanied by an unreadable calligraphy

Half Turkic half Chinese

I showed it to my son who turned it over and looked at the back

Eight dollars he said; a bargain

He’s good with money but was looking bored; you’re bored, aren’t you, I said

He was too polite to agree but I knew it was so

OK let’s go I said

We were going to take a boat down the river to Marrickville so went to wait at the landing; it was a grassy slope above the water

Some hairy rotund old baldachin-clad fellow came up to my son and asked for his help in crossing the river

He said he would; but that he couldn’t carry everything; so would I take the rest?

Of course I would

They set off swimming across the broad reach of the brown river

I took the bridge

But the bridge didn’t go all the way over and I was soon wading through deep water and then swimming myself with packages held above my head

To no avail: the newspapers and the other items floated away

When I returned to the other bank and was re-united with my son he said: yeah the old guy got across but he lost his sofa as well

Just then his older brother turned up, with his elegant luggage neatly packed but looking worried

Yeah yeah fine he said (he always says that) I just came to help you get home

Before we embarked on the river journey my beloved came back

She said: I sold all of my 142 baby geese

I saw that she was grieving; I was too; I remembered their white breasts and their emerald green wings

Their black beady eyes

I didn’t get enough for them either, she said; but I sold them to a friend; so she’ll look after them

I don’t know what happened to the Tartar book but it will still be there next time I visit that place

Wherever it is

I hope

There’s a fair few people saying why doesn’t America do something to stop the slaughter in Gaza. They mostly assume that Israel, as a proxy state of the US, has gone rogue and can’t be reined in. An assumption of this assumption is that the Israel lobby in the US is too strong and if Biden doesn’t do what they want, he’ll lose the 2024 election. These people assume the tail is wagging the dog.

But look at it another way. Since 1990 the US has fought a series of wars in the Middle East, most of which continue in one form or another. Tariq Ali characterised these as the Oil Wars. Someone else said Oil War Three. Biden needs the US economy to pick up in order to be re-elected. The two main industries in the US are Oil and Arms. Both are invested in the destruction of the Palestinians.

The Arms Industry because they profit from selling the munitions, the rockets, the hardware, used in the killing; the Oil because there are deep reserves of Gas off the coast of Gaza, which they want to get their hands on. The intention is to secure these deposits by eradicating those who live over them and might, in some weird way, be said to own them.

Afterwards they will build condos and resort hotels on the Gaza coast. The beautiful people of Tel Aviv will have holiday homes there. Real Estate developers will profit too. They are doing what used to be called Slum Clearance.

One of the disturbing things for me is that so many people, some of whom I voted for, some of whom I thought were decent people, are complicit in this process.

Democracy

The flag goes with the foul landscape
and our jargon muffles the drum

In the great centers we’ll nurture
the most cynical prostitution

We’ll massacre logical revolts

In spicy and sun-drenched lands
at the service of the most monstrous
exploitations, industrial or military.

Farewell here, no matter where

Conscripts of good will
ours will be a ferocious philosophy

Ignorant as to science, rabid for comfort
and let the rest of the world croak

This is the real advance.

Marching orders, let’s go!

For a few years I was in the habit of writing an end of year report, mostly for my own purposes, about what I had got up to in writing and publishing over the previous twelve months. They often degenerated into an unedifying list of complaints, either about my incapacity to finish a given piece of work or my inability to find a publisher for whatever work or works I did finish. I can’t remember when I stopped doing it, maybe only a year ago because, in 2022, I had very little to report. Indeed, since 2020, when three books came out, I have published nothing apart for the odd review. It seemed that, at the back end of my adult life, I had ended up much as I had been at the front – writing away but unable, for whatever reason, to publish what I wrote.

I remember, in the first half of that year, 2022, writing the umpteenth draft of Marlow’s Dream, my book on Joseph Conrad in the Antipodes. This was after sending the previous version to a couple of people who agreed to read and comment. On the back of their helpful advice, I decided to draw a line under it and try to publish the imperfect but now definitive final draft that resulted. I copyrighted it June 30, 2022 and forwarding it to my agent, who began the process of circulating it to prospective publishers. What followed, over the next six months, was a series of rejections, about twenty in all, which all said the same three things: Great idea; beautiful writing; can’t sell it. But somewhere in that catalogue of disappointments, I answered a tweet about Joseph Conrad’s ships and the ensuing conversation has led to a small independent press in Melbourne picking up the book – which, all going well, will come out at some as yet unspecified date in March, 2024.

Another book I’ve been working on for about five years, maybe longer, will also come out in 2024, most likely in September. This was a commission, a biography of the Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, which is timed to appear when the earthquake strengthened heritage building and the brand new white cube extension built behind it, are opened to the public. It will be an illustrated book but, oddly enough, I have had very little say in what those illustrations will be. All I have really done is supply a text and even that text, especially over the last year or so, has come to include contributions from other people, some of them made without my knowledge. This is not a complaint, however, because I have seen a proof and had the opportunity of making corrections; and I have also seen (most of) the images that have been chosen to illustrate it. And I’m happy with both text and images.

In the meantime, we’ve been living in Japan since February 2023 and over the course of the last ten months I’ve compiled, working mostly from diaries, a kind of hybrid travel book. It’s in four sections. The first is set in Kyushu, which we circumnavigated, more or less, in a rental car over three weeks in March. The second describes a three day trip we made in June to Sado Island, off the coast of Honshu in the Sea of Japan and only a couple of hours away by ferry from our nearest port, Joetsu. The third section details another road trip, this time from Kashiwabara, where we live, to a small town in Miyagi Prefecture called Togatta Onsen, where Mayu had a two week artist residency in July. We left a week early and retraced parts of the route Matsuo Basho and Kawai Sora took during the journey recounted in Basho’s Oku no Hashimoto; and it is the events of that eight day week I wrote up. The fourth section is a general essay describing the local area and what it’s like to live here.

In between working on this book – On the Highway of the Stories of the Gods – I researched and wrote a short biography of a New Zealander, Max Bickerman, who spent ten years in Japan between the wars and published, in 1931, a seminal essay on our local haiku poet, Kobayashi Issa. Bickerman is virtually unknown in New Zealand but counted among his friends anthropologist Reo Fortune and his first wife Margaret Mead; scholar and author James Bertram, whom he knew in Hong Kong before and during the Pacific War; Rewi Alley, with whom he worked in China in the 1940s; and English literary critic and poet William Empson, in whose London household he lived from 1952 until his death in 1966. This biography is about 35,000 words, a tricky length to publish, but the paucity of sources available here make it unlikely I’ll be able to expand it, at least as long as I keep on living in the mountains of Shinano.

The other one is about 85,000 words and was originally conceived as an illustrated work, using my own photographs taken along the way; but I’ve largely abandoned that idea in favour of reproducing just a small selection of images, nine in all, one for the cover and two more top and tailing each of the four sections. As with the Bickerton, I have no idea how or where to publish this but I’m not too concerned about that at the moment. It’s in fairly good shape but still needs more work: the most challenging thing I find is trying to turn the episodic writing of a diary into narrative prose. I mean any diary will contain inadvertencies and also diaries often seem to lack any point except as a record of the passing days – and I’m hoping to make something more durable than that.

images :

two boats on the Uchikawa at Tsuruoka, where Basho and Sora embarked for their journey to Sakata

Max Bickerman, a studio portrait taken in Tokyo in 1924, inscribed to Reo Fortune.

‘s a labyrinth with nothing at its heart

built to defend against a ghostly threat

by lords whose hearts were labyrinthine too

lacking a beast within their sanctuary

& a lady with whom they could confide

they painted scrolls & wrote poems of loss

replete & empty in their solitude

behind heavy iron belted studded doors

& under rooves where fish with tiger’s heads

guarded against the inevitability of fire —

a lightning strike in 1784

on new year’s day burned the tenshu down

it took another century to rebuild

now across the replica’s wooden floor

kids roll over laughing over & over

at the eastern gate a sable cow reclines

upon the altar of a scholar’s shrine

& in the big sky hung above the town

crows in their interminable colloquy deride

the up & down of pilgrims on the stairs

the threading & unthreading that we do

armoured by nostalgia to the past

& naked in the future of our dreams.

~

(A covid fever dream)

~

She was walking away down a misty lane

wearing a hood & a long grey coat

& I knew she was young by the way that the coat

clung to her hips as they swayed

as she walked away down the misty laneway

on a night full of meaningless portents

~

She was tall & hooded & walking away

& I knew I was supposed to follow her down

that misty laneway with its avenues

of unseen trees on either side

down to the shores of a hidden lake

but I did not know why I should go

~

She was walking away & she never looked back

& she never seemed to get any further away

& I was supposed to follow her down

that misty laneway, that avenue of trees

down to the shores of the invisible lake

& I did not know why I should go

~

She was walking away & I thought that perhaps

beyond the trees & down by the lake

there was a barn with an open door

& into that dark door she would go

& I would follow & still not know why

I should go into that darkness with her

~

I followed her down that misty lane

where she walked & never got further away

& out of the murk appeared trees & a lake

& a barn with a door down by the shore

& there she stopped & waited for me

until I came close enough to touch

~

the rough grey water-beaded cloth of her coat

though I did not do or try to do that

because just then she turned & opened her coat

& I saw all of the limbs of her body were bones

& all she had inside her hood was a skull

& red lipstick on the chops of her skull.

*

Image: Death and the Maiden

Marianne Stokes

c. 1908, Oil on canvas, 95 x 135 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

17-19 March, 2023

The Glover was perched high up on a steep hill overlooking the harbour. A very steep hill. It billed itself as European style, but maybe what was meant was English. The eponymous Thomas Glover, however, of whom more later, was a Scotsman. In our suite there were several pieces of heavily varnished wooden furniture with no discernible purpose, including an empty cabinet on the top of which stood a plaster bowl of fruit: I mean both bowl and fruit were made, in one indivisible whole, of painted plaster. It was as light as the cabinet was heavy.

Nevertheless the suite was spacious and comfortable and I liked the elegant way the rooms, of which there were three, gave onto one another. In the lobby downstairs you could help yourself to free drinks — beer, wine, and highball (pre-mixed whisky and soda) — as well as make tea and coffee and toast some kind of local sweet which I never tried. A small Nagasaki-themed library included several photography books. Here I first learned about Felice Beato, the Italian British photographer who worked in Japan from 1863 until 1884. His staged shots of seppuku and of executions are extraordinary; his documentary work is even better.

Next door was a building site and on Friday morning I watched while the assembled workers, about thirty of them, at 8 am sharp, gathered outside and went through a program of Tai Chi like exercises under the tuition of someone I could not see. It was beguiling watching these fellows in boots, overalls, vis-po vests and hard hats going through the motions — mostly without enthusiasm, but dutifully, calmly, perhaps resignedly. Then they resumed the hard labour of construction on a site that was just a ledge on a cliff that plummeted towards the harbour below.

Mioko, Mayu’s sister, was joining us from Tokyo for the weekend so after lunch we drove the forty-five minutes or so out to the airport to pick her up. It turned cold and rainy during the afternoon and by evening was really wintery. We were trying to find a taxi to go to Chinatown for dinner and ended up on the main road with buses and cars streaming by — but no taxis. In the end Mioko called one on her phone.

As we drove through the wet streets the driver started singing lines from a famous song: You’re the only one I ever loved / I believed you when you said you loved me too . . . it’s another rainy night in Nagasaki. Then he laughed. It doesn’t rain that much here, he said. We looked it up later: Nagasaki wa kyo mo ame datta was sung by Kiyoshi Maekawa, the front man and vocalist for Hiroshi Uchiyamada and the Cool Five, a kayōkyoku (pop music) group formed in 1967. A do-wop influenced number with a catchy chorus, it was a huge hit for them in 1969. It’s one of those tunes that mixes evocative beauty and melodramatic absurdity in about equal measure.

Afterwards, back at the hotel, we broached a bottle of sake we’d bought from the maker in Kikuchi and carried with us ever since. Five Daughters, he’d told us, was brewed and bottled without the use of preservatives and so had to be drunk immediately or else kept on ice; which we hadn’t really done although we’d tried. It was delicious and after a few glasses the Tominaka Sisters, as they are wont to do, got a bit hilarious. There’s a Nagasaki delicacy called Castella (Kasutera), a kind of Portuguese sponge cake, and they remembered an old TV ad for it, with a jingle based on a tune by Offenbach and featuring five animated furry figures, cats or foxes, doing the Can Can. They did the dance and sang the song and then fell about laughing.

***

Thomas Glover, the man after whom the hotel, and the nearby Glover Garden, was named, came as a very young man from Fraserburgh north of Aberdeen to Shanghai, where he worked for Jardine, Matheson and Co., notorious for their involvement in opium trafficking but also traders in silk, tea, cotton and other commodities. In 1859, aged just twenty-one, Glover was sent to Nagasaki as their agent.

He soon went into business on his own account and, in partnership with a British colleague, Francis Groom, made a fortune exporting tea, camphor, timber and other local products, and importing steamships, machinery and industrial goods. He diversified, as you do, into coal and, as a good Scot, into ship-building too. He also enriched himself in the arms trade, selling guns and ammunition, at least until the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration imposed an inconvenient peace upon the region.

He survived the consequent bankruptcy and moved to Tokyo in the 1870s, after which he visited Nagasaki often but never returned to live. He had a son and a daughter, by two different Japanese women, and lived with the mother of his daughter as his common law wife until her death in 1899, after which he expressed a wish to be buried next to her when he himself died — as he did, in 1911.

A fluent speaker of Japanese, from his early years in Nagasaki Glover established himself in the community as a respected and influential figure. In the lead up to the Meiji Restoration he gave advice to those who were advocating exactly the kind of industrial modernism Glover exemplified in his own career. Businesses he was involved with have lasted until today. They include the corporation that became Mitsubishi and the brewery that makes Kirin Beer. Glover’s house is extant in the gardens named after him; a museum now, of the sparse and unconvincing kind.

After going there we had tea and cakes in a café opposite, said to have been the first European style establishment in the whole of Japan. Jiyutei was opened by Kusano Jokichi in 1863; he had learned how to cook European style food while working for the Dutch on Dejima Island, their dedicated base in the harbour. When Jokichi died in 1886, Jiyutei closed and the building was bought by Nagasaki District Court and used as their reception rooms. In 1974 it was dismantled then reassembled on site in Glover Garden. It featured some beautiful stained glass and a Dutch method of making coffee by means of the slow expression of cold water through the grounds, over a twenty-four hour period, using an array of elaborate glass vessels. Mayu and Mioko ate kasutera with their tea.

***

Nagasaki (= long cape) is not an old city by Japanese standards. It was still an obscure fishing village when, in the second half of the sixteenth century, Christianised Kyushu daimyō (‘lords’) and the Portuguese together chose it as their harbour of choice for the China trade. The local daimyō, Ōmura Sumitada, in 1569 issued a permit for the establishment of a port with the express purpose of receiving Portuguese ships; it was set up in 1571 under the supervision of Jesuit missionary Gaspar Vilela and Portuguese Captain-Major Tristão Vaz de Veiga, working closely with Ōmura.

Because of the depredations of Wokou, Japanese pirates, Ming Dynasty China refused to trade directly with Japan; but they didn’t mind using the Portuguese, from their base in Macao, as intermediaries. Nor did the Kyushu daimyō who, however sincere their Christianity might have been, were still very much aware of the commercial advantages it gave them in dealing with the Portuguese. The same, from a different point of view, might be said of the Jesuits with respect both to the Japanese ruling classes and the Portuguese merchant adventurers — when it came to using commerce to facilitate their missionary endeavours, that is.

The sixteenth was a century of civil strife in Japan and, because of the disorder, Ōmura and the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, an Italian, decided to hand administrative and military control over to the Society of Jesus, turning Nagasaki, albeit briefly, into a Jesuit colony. By 1587, however, Toyotomi Hideoshi’s effort to unify the country had reached as far as Kyushu and he placed the city of Nagasaki, and its trade, under his direct control, while at the same time ordering the expulsion of all missionaries. The expulsion order wasn’t enforced, however, the Jesuits continued to practice business as usual (both God’s and Mammon’s) and Nagasaki remained a largely Christian city; while direct control of the port was retained by the government.

By now the mendicant orders, mostly via the Philippines, had also begun proselyting in Japan; much to the chagrin of the Jesuits. In the wake of the wreck of the San Felipe, a Spanish galleon, off the coast of Shikoku in 1596, Japanese authorities decided that Franciscan missionaries were the vanguard of a planned Iberian invasion of Japan. (The Portuguese and Spanish monarchies were united at the time.) Hideyoshi, in retaliation and as a warning, ordered the crucifixion of twenty-six Christians in Nagasaki. They were mostly Spanish Franciscans and their converts, with one unlucky Japanese Jesuit apparently included by mistake.

Portuguese traders were not really affected, however, and nor were the Jesuits; Christian Nagasaki continued to thrive. The Tokogawa shogunate which, from 1603, administered the city from Edo, also maintained a policy of de-facto toleration, at least until after the final defeat of the Toyotomi, their great rivals, in the siege and burning of Osaka Castle. In 1614, Christianity was officially banned and all missionaries ordered to leave Japan. The persecutions that followed were both violent and extreme.

The trade with Macao, and therefore China, continued but there were now English and Dutch rivals to the Portuguese. The Tokugawa several times investigated the possibility of opening up a relationship with the Spanish in Manila, and at one stage intended to invade the Philippines. From 1609 the Dutch were allowed to trade into and out of the port of Hirado, to the north of Nagasaki; the English voluntarily withdrew from the Japan trade in 1623. The failed Shimabara Rebellion of 1637, an uprising by Christian Japanese, ended the Portuguese trade for good, after which the closed country policy, sakoku, endured for more than two centuries.

The word Shimabara had come to signify the connection between Christianity and disloyalty to the state; the rebellion convinced the Tokugawa that foreign influences were more trouble than they were worth; with just one exception. In 1641, after the Portuguese had been expelled, the artificial island in Nagasaki harbour, Dejima, which had served as their trading post, was given over to the Dutch instead, who were allowed to continue to trade there on condition that they did not proselytise. The Protestant Dutch, ever practical, agreed. Thus Dutch became the language of diplomacy for more than two centuries. When the English returned, in the mid-nineteenth century, as a matter of course they recruited diplomats who were already fluent in Dutch.

The Dutch connection is also why Nagasaki became a centre for learning. In 1720 the ban on Dutch books was lifted and scholars from all over the archipelago came to Nagasaki to study European art and science. Subsequently, the city became the major centre of rangaku, or Dutch Learning. Japanese purchased and translated scientific books from the Dutch, obtained from them Western curiosities and manufactures (clocks, medical instruments, celestial and terrestrial globes, maps and seeds) and were given demonstrations of Western innovations, including the flight of a hot air balloon. In 1813 a Dutch ship came in to port with an elephant on board.

Photography, too, came to Japan via Nagasaki; the first camera arrived in 1848 and the first known photograph by a Japanese was taken in 1857. Then, in 1862, photographer Ueno Hikoma opened his studio. The city was also much photographed by foreigners; Felice Beato was preceded, in 1859, by Swiss photographer Pierre Joseph Rossier, who taught Ueno Hikoma, and by a telegrapher in the German navy, August Sachtler, who arrived with the Prussian Expedition to East Asia in 1861. When the Americans bombed the city on August 9, 1945, they probably didn’t know they were trying to obliterate the most Christian, and most Western, city in Japan.

***

We had a discussion that night over the remains of the sake: whether or not to visit Ground Zero the next day. Mayu had been there before; Mioko hadn’t but didn’t want to go. She argued, reasonably enough, that for her there were other and better reasons to remember her first visit to Nagasaki than a bomb dropped on it by the Americans seventy years ago. In a way I agreed with her: Nagasaki seemed to me an elegant, sophisticated and cosmopolitan city, easy and graceful, which wore its past lightly but did not deny it either.

On the other hand, I was conscious of a feeling of dull anger that this place had been bombed at all, in the arbitrary, indeed cynical way that it was, especially when I ran across parties of loud and garrulous American sight-seers from the cruise ship anchored in the bay below our hotel. Nagasaki wasn’t the original target and it wasn’t a major military site either, despite the Mitsubishi ship-building yard: the US military, having tested their uranium based device on Hiroshima, wanted to see what a plutonium bomb would do.

The original target was Kokura, on the northern tip of Kyushu (also the alternative target to Hiroshima). But there was cloud over the Shimonoseki Straits that morning so the planes headed to Nagasaki instead. Both Hiroshima and Kokura had not been firebombed so that they remained pristine targets for the new weapons to show their capabilities. Nagasaki had been hit four or five times before but the city was difficult to locate at night using the available radar technology and none of the bombing raids had caused much damage. A few weeks earlier, it had not even been on the list of potential targets; it was only when the ancient capital of Kyoto, which had also not yet been bombed, was taken off the hit list that Nagasaki came into contention. Such are the vagaries of war.

In the end, Mayu and I decided to visit the memorials on Sunday morning before returning to the hotel to collect Mioko and take her with us to Sasebo for lunch; from there she could catch a bus to the airport, which was out that way. We took a series of elevators up to Peace Park. At the top of the last one is the Peace Fountain and beyond that a wide flat area where there are sculptures, ruins and places you can sit and contemplate what happened here. At the fountain a man and a woman stood with their hands clasped. He was about forty-five and he had his eyes squeezed tight shut: not tight enough to prevent tears silvering his cheeks. 

As we walked along, for no particular reason, I found myself in tears too. We were crossing the ruins of a prison at the time, the nearest public building to the point of impact: you could still see the lines of the foundations of its stone walls in the grass. How unlucky is that: to be in jail when they drop an atomic bomb on you? Those imprisoned were mostly foreign workers from the occupied territories, many of them Chinese or Taiwanese, who had somehow transgressed against Japanese law and been locked up.

Beyond was the huge figurative sculpture which is the centre piece of the park. It seemed outré to me; but then none of the sculpture (and there is a lot of it) looked right. On the other hand, this inadequacy, if that’s what it is, does not seem to require any explanation. What work of art, sculptural or otherwise, could possibly communicate, let alone atone for, what happened here? I liked the images of cranes, however, both graphic and sculptural; they even featured in the stained glass windows of the ablution block. Cranes are associated with Nagasaki because the long, narrow harbour is thought to resemble the bird in flight.

Traditionally cranes live for a thousand years; and have the power to grant wishes and answer prayers. This is where the practice of senbazuru comes from: the folding of a thousand origami cranes to make a single wish come true. It was revived in the 1950s by Sasaki Sadako, a little girl irradiated, aged three, in the bombing of Hiroshima, who folded more than fourteen hundred and fifty cranes in the hope that her illness might thereby be cured. She died of leukemia in 1956.

***

Ground Zero is on flat land in a separate, adjoining park. A simple black obelisk marks the spot and it was somehow cheering to see children running around it, chasing each other and laughing in the sunshine. In another place you could look down, through glass, to see the actual rubble left on the ground by the blast just after 9 am on August 9. It looked like the dirt floor of a disused sexton’s shed I saw once. The other public building destroyed that day, apart from the prison, was a church: the largest, most sophisticated and most beautiful cathedral in East Asia at the time. Some of the masonry survived and has been reconstituted and placed near the obelisk, with a statue of the ubiquitous Saint Francis Xavier on top.

The bomb didn’t fall on the Mitsubishi shipyards, its original target, but exploded about four kilometres further up the valley where, to some extent, the surrounding hills shielded the rest of the city from the worst of the blast. Windows were still shattered and rooves torn off buildings in Ishibashi, ten kilometres away, where we were staying. There wasn’t a firestorm afterwards either, as there was at Hiroshima, although there were many random fires. A bad painting, of the Twenty-six Martyrs of Nagasaki, which I saw at the Oura Church in Ishibashi was, a caption said, ‘damaged by the atomic bomb’, but it didn’t say how or where. This was the only reference I saw, heard or read about the catastrophe anywhere else in the city. I suppose some things are better forgotten; however hard that might be, remembering is probably harder.

Images: Rubble at Ground Zero; Teahouse window, Jiyutei