Isinglass

natsukusa ya / tsuwamonodomo ga / yume no ato

The other night I woke from a disturbing dream. A nightmare, really. Some prince or warrior, some important samurai, was about to execute me. I didn’t know why; I only knew he had decided to spare my companion while inflicting a painful death upon me. I knew in the dream the method he was going to use but, upon waking, I forgot it. Just as well perhaps; I think it involved bricks and fire. However, I do remember the scene: a wide bare wooden floor, perhaps in a palace, the warrior king immersed in his affairs of state, and I bound, lying on a shirasu, a court of white sand, below the edge of the floor — until the moment came when he remembered he had a task to perform and turned his attention to me. I considered various forms of resistance but knew that they would all be futile. It was only when he was standing over me, about to inflict the fatal blow, that I managed to wake myself up. I was sweating and my heart was beating fast; but I was alive.

I’d probably drunk a bit too much sake the night before; I’d also been thinking, and reading, about these ancient warriors. When, for instance, the patron at Yakata said that Yoshitsune came through the pass below Aoso–san (‘Blue Hemp Mountain’) and must therefore have visited Togatta, I thought perhaps he was talking about the same person whose traces we had come across one day in Shinano: at a shrine beside the road to the recycling plant where, an information board said, his horse had left its hoofprint in a rock. And there it was, or something very like it. I went back to check the note I’d made at the time: no, I had confused Yoshitsune with Yoshinaka; it wasn’t Yoshitsune’s horse that left that mark, it was Yoshinaka’s. After his father had been killed by another member of his family, he had escaped to the then remote province of Shinano and lived there until summoned back to Kyoto to fight in the Genpei War.

And he and Yoshistune were contemporaries: both members of the Minamoto Clan who had fought in that war against the Taira Clan, celebrated in The Tale of the Heike. In fact they were cousins, and it was Yoshistune, under the instructions of his older brother Yoritomo, who brought about the death of Yoshinaka. He died in 1184 after the Battle of Awazu, along with his foster brother and loyal companion Imai Kanehira. Tomoe Gozen, the famous onna musha or woman warrior, daughter of Yoshinaka’s wet nurse and perhaps once his lover too, was also there but, on Yoshinaka’s orders, fled before she could be captured or killed. It is alleged that he did not want to die alongside a woman. Her fate is unknown: rumours of a forced marriage, a famous warrior son, a Buddhist nunnery, death at an undisclosed time and place.

It is also said that, after the battle was lost, with night coming on and many enemy soldiers in pursuit, Yoshinaka attempted to find an isolated spot in which to kill himself. However, his horse (the same horse which left the hoofprint in Shinano?) became bogged in the mud of a half frozen paddy field, and his enemies were able to approach and kill him; he died from an arrow to the heart; while Kanehira committed suicide by leaping from his horse with his sword in this mouth. Yoshinaka was buried at Otsu, in Omi, where a temple was built in his honour during the Muromachi Period (1336-1573); its name, Gichu-ji, uses the same kanji as Yoshinaka’s given name, Kiso. Matsuo Basho, the poet, who idolised Yoshinaka, asked that he too might be buried Otsu and his grave is indeed alongside that of his hero. Kanehira’s grave is there too, but some distance away.

Yoshinaka, then, was a casualty of internecine war amongst the Minamoto over who would rule once the Taira were defeated. And so, it turned out, was his nemesis, Yoshitsune. The year after Yoshinaka’s death, in 1185, Yoshitsune had to flee Kyoto in order to escape the wrath of his brother Yoritomo, the same man who had ordered him to kill Yoshinaka. Yoshitsune made his way north, in the company of his lover Shizuka Gozen, who was carrying their unborn child; but she somehow fell behind and was captured by forces loyal to Yoritomo. Yoshitsune, with his faithful retainer, the giant monk Benkei, continued north, arriving eventually at Hiraizumi, where he stayed for some years under the protection of Fujiwara no Hidehira.

He had lived there previously, as an adolescent, under the protection of the same man. But after Hidehira’s death his son, Fujiwara no Yasuhira, under pressure from Yoritomo, broke the promise he had made to his father and betrayed Yoshistune’s whereabouts. His castle at Koromogawa was surrounded, his retainers, including Benkei, killed, and Yoshitsune forced to commit seppuku. Yasuhira had Yoshitsune’s body decapitated, his head preserved in sweet sake, placed in a black-lacquered chest, and sent to Yoritomo as proof of his death. His treachery did not mean he prospered; Yoritomo soon got rid of him as well.

Sources differ as to the fate of Shizuka and their son. Some say that, like Tomoe Gozen, she became a Buddhist nun; others that Yoritomo killed both her and her son; or that she committed suicide by throwing herself in a river. There are alternative tales of Yoshitsune’s fate as well. Ainu say he escaped the siege at Koromogawa and fled north to Hokkaido, where he lived under the assumed name Okikurumi. In another version he sailed to the mainland and re-surfaced as the historical figure Genghis Khan (1162-1227). Yoshitsune was probably born in 1159 so the dates are plausible, even if little else about the story is; it seems to have been a Meiji Era invention by the writer Suematsu Kencho, who wished to amplify the prestige of his country’s history. Yoshitsune is enshrined at Shirahata Jinjo, a Shinto place in the city of Fujisawa in Kanagawa.

If Yoshitsune and Benkei had come through Togatta, when might that have done so and where might they have been going? It must have been after 1185, when Yoshitsune fled Kyoto and, pursued by Yoritomo’s men, went north to Hiraizumi. I looked at the map. If he had gone up the west coast of Honshu, along the Sea of Japan, he would at some point have had to cross the central spine of mountains towards the east: Hiraizumi is north of Sendai on the eastern side of the ranges. The main route these days goes from Niigata to Koriyama then north via Fukushima to Sendai and beyond; but there is another road, more obscure now and perhaps in those far off days as well. This follows the Arakawa River from Murakami through Sekikawa and Oguno to Nanyo, south of present day Yamagata. From there, Yoshitsume and Benkei could have travelled further east, through the mountain pass below Aoso-san, to Zao; and from Zao past where Sendai now stands and so on to Hiraizumi.

Just because this is possible, doesn’t mean it happened. And what about the other speculation that came up that night at Yakata, when the man in the blue shirt said Benkei fathered many children in the local area? That suggests a more prolonged stay. After all, he and Yoshitsume were fugitives for four years; and no-one seems to know exactly when they arrived at Hiraizumi, only when they died there. Saito Musashibo Benkei is a semi-legendary figure, six foot six inches tall, a warrior monk who had been a mountain ascetic, a yamabushi, before joining forces with Yoshitsune. The two are said to have met in Kyoto where Benkei, who thought the samurai of the capital decadent, had set himself to win, in combat, one thousand swords. He had collected nine hundred and ninety nine when he came across, one night, a slight young man with a gilded sword playing a flute at the Gojotenjin Shrine.

He challenged him to a duel, whereupon the two of them walked to the Gojo Bridge, where Benkei lost the fight to his smaller, more delicate, but much nimbler, antagonist — who was, of course, Minamoto no Yoshitsune.  Seeking revenge, he also lost a return bout at the temple of Kioymizo, after which he became Yoshitsune’s loyal retainer. During the siege at Koromogawa, Benkei defended the bridge to the castle against all comers; he is said to have killed three hundred men. The attackers retreated and fired arrows at him and still he did not fall. When at last they had the courage to investigate, he turned out to have succumbed to multiple arrow wounds — but was nevertheless still upright. His ‘standing death’ has since become famous.

Hiraizumi was capital and principal city of the northern province of Mutsu, renowned for its gold and horses; both were valuable resources for the southern aristocracies and it seems that Yoritomo decided that the regime of the northern Fujiwara was a potential or actual rival to his own rule and had to be, not just subdued, but destroyed. The betrayal by Yasuhira, the deaths of Yoshitsune and Benkei, and the subsequent destruction of the city in 1189, during which Yasuhira died, were crucial events in his consolidation of the Kamakura bakufu (1185-1333), the military government Yoritomo founded.

Five hundred years had passed when Basho and Sora went to Hiraizumi and found nothing remaining of the dreams of warriors but summer grass. Another three hundred and thirty four years have gone by since then; but the names of Yoshitsune and Benkei are still on the lips of locals in Togatta. As are those of Basho and Sora on mine and many others also. Furthermore someone, perhaps the ghost of Yoritomo, was trying to do away with me too, just the other night.

Top: Minamoto no Yoshistune; above; Minamoto no Yoshinaka

The other night we were looking for a place to eat and found two open, both drinking houses, where food was served as an accompaniment to liquor. We decided on the one down the side street. It was called Yakata and there was a fellow outside, dressed in black, with a golf club, perhaps a five iron, which he was using to practice his swing. He said they didn’t serve rice-based dishes but, if we were ok with that, we could go in. As we entered I noticed he walked with a slight limp. There was no-one inside but his father, who looked like him but in an older and more rugged version. He bought us sake and recommended a dish of oysters, the house speciality. Mayu ordered that and a couple of other dishes. He served tofu first, as an appetiser, then a dish of circles of cucumber with a drop of a delicious relish in the centre of each one, then more of the local hand-made tofu (they use cold underground spring water) with onions, then onions by themselves covered with sprinkles of tuna flakes and finally the main dish, which consisted of a thin omelette draped over crumbed oysters in a brown sauce. You can’t get this in Tokyo, he said. People come from miles around to eat it. He wanted to know how old I was? Mayu told him and he said he was six years older than me; he didn’t look it. Later he noticed my ankles and feet were a bit puffy and expressed some concern for my health. I said it was the drinking and held up my sake glass; he said no, that’s the medicine. At some point we were joined (in the bar) by a fellow in a blue shirt who already looked a few sheets to the wind. He drank beer and vaped continuously, as if sucking on a hookah; and conversed in a low voice with the son, who was cooking. Later on there was a five way conversation (four if you except me) in Japanese which covered many subjects of local interest, including the names of the surrounding mountain peaks and some of their historical associations, the old gold diggings and the free car park with the viewing platform at the hotel. Yoshitsune passed through there, said the father, pointing to the west, so he must have come to Togatta as well. He meant the pass below Mount Aoso-san; the allusion was to the wars in the 1180s. There’s a stone with an inscription saying as much but he didn’t know where it was anymore. And Benkei left many children in the area, added the man in the blue shirt. Benkei was the giant monk who was first Yoshitsune’s rival, then his loyal companion. They must have passed through here on their way to Hiraizumi, where both met their deaths and where Basho wrote the famous haiku about the dreams of warriors coming back as summer grass. At some point they started talking about a local form of gambling, no longer practised here but once common; and the father went away to get his set. He unfolded a piece of Shiroishi washi, a kind of paper, about the size of a table top – which is where he spread it. There were six panels: along the top Fuji, a hawk and an eggplant; on the row below, Daruma, Komuso and Saigyo; that is, a good luck charm, a travelling monk and a poet. Then he took from the plastic bag a spinning top, with a long wooden shaft holding a hexagonal body with the six images painted on the six sides of the hexagon. He spun the top on the paper; when it fell, one of the six images was uppermost; those who had bet upon that outcome would win, he said, four times their wager. Sometimes people would lose their house! Sometimes they would have to lead their cow into town to pay their debt! The game is called donkorodoma and the spinner is the donkoro; the role is taken in turn among the players. The father said that the tops had to be very well made so that they spun truly and could fall equally any one of the six ways. I’m not sure what kind of wood they were made of; this set wasn’t a family heirloom, he had bought it online for fifty thousand yen because he remembered them from his childhood and wanted to own one. One source says the game originated among the soldiers of the defeated Heike after the war in 1180s when, living in hiding, they could not celebrate new year so gambled instead. Another version ascribes the invention of the top to a man from Nakayama called Kijiya, a maker and dealer in wooden toys, who moved to Togatta and used to play the game on the stumps of trees he had cut down. They were surely made by the local artisans who also make the wooden kokeshi dolls the town is famous for. Some people think they too go back to the fugitive soldiers of the Heike. Just before we left, after he had folded away the gambling set, the father told us he also remembered how, forty years ago, when someone killed a bear in the mountains, its corpse would be stood up in the town square, its skin slit from throat to groin, opening up the body cavity, and then the people of the village would come by to select what bits they wanted to take away to eat. Bear meat is tough, he said. the only tender parts are the inside of the thighs and the part over the belly. Also: women still go up on to Aoso-san and catch vipers, mamushi, and milk them for the venom, which they sell to the labs to make antivenin; but they’re getting harder to find because bears eat them.

images from here: https://omamorifromjapan.blogspot.com/2016/03/donkorogoma-gambling.html

(the set we saw at Yakata was more beautiful than this one is and we’re hoping to go back one night to photograph it properly)

Yesterday we went to Togakushi, a spectacular mountain range just the other side of our mountain, Kurohime. It’s only a half hour drive away but when you go there you enter another world. They are five shrines among the mountains, all of which have a connection with the story of the sun goddess Amaterasu’s extrication from the cave in which she had hidden herself away after a dispute with her brother Susanoo, the storm god.

The god of wisdom, Omoikame, devised a plan to lure her out; the goddess of dawn, Uzume, was the main actor when the plan was put into motion; and Tachikara, god of power and strength, the one who picked up the stone door of the cave and threw it far away so that Amaterasu couldn’t use it to sequester herself inside again. Togakushi – ‘hiding door’ – is where the rock came to rest, forming the mountain range of that name. In some versions this story takes place at Takachiho in Kyushu, where we went in March; in others, it happens in heaven and the door falls to earth and lands here.

We had visited once before, going to the so-called Middle Shrine, Chusha, built in 1087 and dedicated to Omoikame. It stands just above a busy mountain road, surrounded by huge old cedar trees; in the depths of the main building a pair of monks were chanting and half a dozen acolytes sat devoted upon a bench before them. Outside, an old couple danced a two step to the drums that followed the chanting. There is a dragon painted on the ceiling of the shrine but I didn’t see it on this occasion. Maybe next time.

Anyway, yesterday we went to the upper shrine, Okusha, situated upon the slopes of Togakushi itself. Before you take the path to the shrine you have to cross a small river, the Sakasagawa, said to be the border between the human world and that of the deities. If you are riding a horse, a stone set up on the left tells you, you must dismount and go forward on foot.

The wide path led gently upwards through mixed forest characteristic of this region; when we entered an avenue of vast cedar trees planted both sides of the way, the air changed. These three hundred or so trees are ancient; they were planted early in the Edo period, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and are thus about four hundred years old.

The avenue they make is aligned towards the rising sun on the first day of winter and the first day of spring; it shines down upon you if you are lucky enough to be there on either of those days. Even on an ordinary day like yesterday, as you walk between them, you feel as if you are in a cathedral made of trees. A tree cathedral. Where an old tree had fallen, a new one had been planted in its place; and this too must have been going on for four hundred years; or longer.

Not quite halfway along the two kilometre walk you pass through the Zuijinmon Gate, with a rich growth of forest plants on its roof and two god portraits (behind wire netting) on either side of the entrance. The path begins to rise more steeply after that; off to the left, perhaps as encouragement for the faint hearted, I saw four Jizo, or maybe they were two pairs of Dosojin, in a small grotto overlooking the path. Both Jizo and Dosojin are tutelary gods of travellers.

Then you come to the steps, which are very disintegrated, indeed crumbling in parts, and steeper again. They lead to the top of the hill where you suddenly see the sky above you: the day was cloudy and humid, so there were no vistas and no ineffable blues, just the ubiquitous vivid greens and deep browns of the forest. The main shrine, built hard against the rough granite wall of the mountain, is dedicated to Tachikara himself. There is another, off to the side, which houses a local deity, Kuzuryusha, in form a dragon with nine heads and the god of water. Needless to say, or perhaps not, there is the musical sound of water everywhere you walk; and rice farmers come to Kuzuryushu’s shrine to pray that the life-giving water will continue to flow. Hence the barrels of sake in his shrine.

Read more: Togakushi

Kuzuryushu is said to have been here before Tachikara or his rock arrived; he greeted him with pleasure and made him welcome. His shrine was less imposing and there wasn’t any obvious prohibition upon photography within, so I took shots of four small, mysterious paintings on the back wall. I don’t know the status or the subject matter of any of these works, and one of them is too obscured to be made out properly anyway; but they all transmit considerable power.

One of the pleasures of visiting shrines such as these – quite apart from the majestic surroundings and the sense of otherworldly awe they inspire – is the company of other pilgrims along the way. People climb up in a spirit of cheerful anticipation and come back down in a state of happy satiation. You see all sorts – young and old, women and men, groups of teenagers, solitary wanderers. On the way up, walking ahead of my companions, I kept passing and re-passing a family of four, a man and a woman with two young boys.

The elder, about four or five, was a dawdler who investigated the creek running beside the road and anything else he came across; occasionally he would let out a cry, always answered reassuringly by his mother or his father; after which he would resume his investigations. The other, only about two, was a busy cheerful little kid who ran around his parents, but especially his father, the way a dog runs around its master. They both walked the entire distance up and at the top I saw them away in the shrubbery with their pants down having a wee.

On the way down my inadvertent companions were four women in their forties perhaps, laughing and talking, sometimes carolling like birds, sometimes actually jumping for joy. When we got to the bottom we went to eat in a soba restaurant, conveniently placed, just the other side of the Sakasagawa, back in the human world. Then we resumed our horse, actually a Toyota Vitz, and went on to the Lime Hotel for an onsen.

Read more: Togakushi

for Gabrielle Carey

Womb? Weary?

He She rests. He She has travelled.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

When?

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s eggin the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

Where?

In his reminiscence of his first visit to Sydney, in 1879, Joseph Conrad recalled ‘the tinkle of more or less untuned cottage pianos floated out of open stern-ports till the gas lamps began to twinkle in the streets, and the ship’s night-watchman, coming sleepily on duty after his unsatisfactory day slumbers, hauled down the flags and fastened a lighted lantern at the break of the gangway. The night closed rapidly upon the silent ships with their crews on shore.’ The night watchman was himself: just twenty-one years old, an Ordinary Seaman, his ship was the London wool clipper the Duke of Sutherland moored, while her captain sought a cargo for the return voyage, for five months at Circular Quay West.

Conrad goes on to describe a chance meeting on one of those autumn nights at the Quay. ‘I had an hour or so of a most intellectual conversation with a person I could not see distinctly, a gentleman from England, he said, with a cultivated voice, I on deck and he on the quay sitting on the case of a piano (landed out of our hold that very afternoon) and smoking a cigar which smelt very good. We touched, in our discourse, upon science, politics, natural history and operatic singers. Then, after remarking abruptly, “You seem to be rather intelligent, my man,” he informed me pointedly that his name was Mr. Senior, and walked off — to his hotel, I suppose. Shadows! Shadows! I think I saw a white whisker as he turned under the lamp-post. It is a shock to think that in the natural course of nature he must be dead by now. There was nothing to object to in his intelligence but a little dogmatism maybe. And his name was Senior! Mr Senior!’

This passage, from The Mirror of the Sea, published in 1906, was written a quarter of a century after the encounter it recalls. It is, I suppose, without much consequence, apart from the resonance of the name, or at least its resonance for Conrad. ‘Senior’ is an anglicisation of the French ‘seignior’, meaning feudal lord; for some reason it is a common surname in the north of England and among lowland Scots. Later, in 1963, T S Eliot described Joseph Conrad (to Igor Stravinsky) as ‘a grand seignior, the grandest I have ever met.’ The name stuck in my mind too and after my book, Marlow’s Dream, about Conrad’s adventures in the antipodes, was written and had gone to the publishers, I thought I would inquire further into the identity of Mr Senior, on the off chance that I might be able to find out something more about him. As it happened, I could.

The first clue came, courtesy of WikiData, in the form of a record of a man called Stanton John Senior, a sea captain, born sometime before 1876 at Mold-Green, York, England. Stanton Senior in Sydney in 1895 married Harriet Holtermann, the daughter of the man after whom the Holtermann Nugget was named: the largest single mass of gold ever found. It was uncovered by Bernhardt Holtermann and others at the Star of Hope mine at Hill End in 1872 after explosives, detonated at midnight on October 19, exposed ‘a wall of gold’. Following hard upon Harriet’s untimely death, aged 27, in 1901, Stanton Senior married Annie May Summerbelle at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. They had twin sons together before he abandoned the family and moved to South Africa, where he married for a third time, and where he died (it is thought) around 1918. May Summerbelle had already, in 1912, divorced him.

One of the newspaper reports of the Senior-Summerbelle wedding identifies Stanton’s father as George Senior, Esq, of Derbyshire. A man of that name and designation was, in 1865, proprietor of Hasland Lane & Dunstan Collieries and Managing Director of the Chesterfield & Midland Silkstone Company at Chesterfield, south of Sheffield. In this capacity, in February of that year, he gave a supper for about a hundred of his employees at the Prince of Wales Inn; even though he was absent at the time, having gone down to London on his honeymoon. His brother Edward presided and their bookkeeper, Mr Wilcockson, was his deputy. Toasts were proposed and drunk, and a glee, ‘Fair Flora’, along with other songs, sung. Edward Senior said that ‘where managers and workmen pull well together, all parties benefit’ and this was greeted with cheers by the assembled workers.

George Senior and his wife Emma, née Coe, had two other sons, both Australian born: Sacheveral George (b. 1885) and Edward Wilson Hastings (b. 1888). Sacheveral was killed, aged 30, at Gallipoli, in August, 1915 and is buried in the cemetery at Lone Pine. Edward, who also served in the war, as a sapper, survived. Born in Mosman, Sydney, he died at Austimer, near Wollongong, in 1955. When and how the Senior family emigrated to Australia isn’t clear. As with any genealogical inquiry, there is plenty of scope here for speculation; and, while it is by no means certain that the gentleman Joseph Conrad encountered at Circular Quay was George Senior, Esq., of Derbyshire, he might have been. If so, he was a wealthy man, with a wife and a young son, who had imported a piano from the old country, perhaps to grace the family home in Mosman.

Genealogical inquiry can also open doors which might otherwise have remained closed. May Summerbelle, whom Stanton Senior married in 1901, was at that time a widow with a seven year old daughter from a previous marriage. Born in 1867, the child of another sea captain, in January, 1893 she married Edwin Hubert Glasson, known as Bertie, the youngest son of a family of wealthy graziers from the western districts of New South Wales. He was 25 years old, a stock and station agent who also had an interest in a butcher’s shop in the town of Carcoar. Bertie was, by all accounts, handsome, popular and easy-going, a good sportsman and a fine judge of a horse. The Glassons, who were Cornish, were Wesleyans while the Summerbelles were Catholic.

The Evening News reported: ‘A very pretty wedding took place at St. Joseph’s Church, Woollahra, on Wednesday, the 18th instant, when Miss Annie May Summerbelle, the talented young pianist and composer, daughter of Captain William Summerbelle, of Double Bay, was married to Mr. Bertie Glasson, of Stanfield, Carcoar. The youthful bride looked charming. She was attired in ivory merveillenx, with empire sash, her veil being fastened with a diamond crescent, the gift of the bridegroom.’ Her sisters, Blanche and Stella, in pink crepon silk dresses and carrying bouquets of pink roses, were her bridesmaids. The couple afterwards went to the Carrington Hotel at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains and thence to Hobart and to New Zealand for their honeymoon. The newspaper reported ‘the presents were both numerous and costly.’

Bertie and May lived together in the luxurious Metropole Hotel, on the corner of Young and Bent Streets in Sydney, for some months after their wedding and it must have been while they were there that May fell pregnant. But all was not well. Bertie, who may have been a gambler, and who had fallen out with his older brothers over his share in the family property, was in financial difficulties. The butcher’s shop in Carcoar, which he co-owned, was mired in debt and about to be sold out from under him by the City Bank in Bathurst. Evidently, the lifestyle he and his wife lived at the Metropole was not just lavish, it was beyond their means. Bertie decided to attempt to ease their predicament by desperate measures. He told his creditors he was about to come into a large sum of money and took a train to Carcoar.

There, after visiting a family friend, who sensed nothing amiss, at 2.30 am he broke in through a window to the Carcoar branch of the City Bank on Belubula Street. The manager, John Philips, who lived upstairs, heard a noise and came down to investigate. He had a pistol in his hand. When he saw Bertie, whom he knew, he tried to talk him out of whatever his mad plan was. Glasson demanded the key to the safe and when it was not forthcoming (Philips did not have it) attacked and killed him with a ‘razor-sharp’ tomahawk. He also struck Philips’ wife in the face with the axe, and despatched her sister (or perhaps her friend), Frances Cavanaugh, with a single blow. Fanny had the Philips’ three year old daughter, Gladys, in her arms when she was hit and the little girl lost two fingers and a thumb.

Glasson, having murdered two people and seriously injured two more, fled, without any money, on a horse stolen from the local vicar, who was his cousin, and was arrested the next day at a barber’s shop in Cowra. His bloody clothes were found in a field on the family farm and there was a pathetic, unsent letter to his wife (it may have been an attempt at an alibi) in the pocket of his jacket: ‘O my precious Queen, I am going mad, and felt it coming on for some time. I came to myself today, Sunday, in one of Stanfield’s paddocks, and I had on a black suit of clothes all covered in blood. What I have done I have no idea. I remember leaving Sydney to go to Orange . . . ’

At the trial he pleaded insanity and in his defence suggested he had inherited his malady from his mother Elizabeth’s side of the family; her maiden name was Paull and, like the Glassons, they were Cornish. It was to no avail: he was convicted and hanged in Bathurst Jail in November. His wife was refused permission to visit him there and it was during this period, pregnant and alone, that she wrote the song ‘Love is a Fadeless Flower’. Their daughter was born the next year, 1894, and called by her mother Noëla Beatrice Myer Ewart Glasson. When, in 1901, May Summerbelle married Stanton Senior, seven year old Noëla (pronounced ‘Nola’) took her stepfather’s name and it was as Noëla Senior that she was herself married, in Ashfield in 1922, to the poet Kenneth Slessor.  

Captain William Summerbelle, English born in 1834, came out to New South Wales at an unknown date and worked on ships, sailing mostly to and fro and in between the islands of the Pacific. He married Honora Savage in Sydney in 1859 and they had six children, four girls and two boys. May was their fifth child. Captain Summerbelle’s obituary records that ‘having made his fortune in South Seas trade and feeling the need to spend time with his growing family, William became the manager of the North Shore Steam Ferry Company. He passed away, aged 62 years, in 1896 at Ryde, New South Wales.’ He had lived long enough to witness the denouement of his daughter’s disastrous first marriage.

May Summerbelle was a pianist who wrote light classical music and popular songs. She had been a student at the Phillip Street, Sydney, school of Alice Charbonnet-Kellerman, the French-Australian composer of romantic and classical music, teacher of the opera singer Nellie Melba and of the composer Lydia Larner, as well as the mother, by her violinist husband, Frederick William Kellerman, of the famous long distance swimmer, vaudevillian, screen actor, nude model and educator Annette Kellerman. May Summerbelle’s first compositions appear to have been written in the early 1890s, around the time of her courtship and marriage to Bertie Glasson.

She went on to write over a hundred tunes, including ‘So Long’, which was played as the Third Australian Light Horse embarked at Circular Quay for Gallipoli, where they fought, dismounted and without their horses, as infantry. Another of her compositions, ‘Ave Maria’ (1910), was ‘written specially for and sung by Madame Melba’. Some of her music was selected to be performed at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in London. In later years Ms Summerbelle who, after Stanton Senior left, never re-married, involved herself in repertory theatre. She died in 1946. Recently her reputation has been restored as a part of a drive to rehabilitate neglected Australian woman composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

 Another of the Summerbelle sisters, Stella, also married a sea captain, Francis Joseph Bayldon. Their wedding, with Catholic rites, took place in Sydney in 1898, three years before May married Stanton Senior. Bayldon was born in Lincolnshire, England in 1872, the son of an Anglican minister. In 1887, aged 15, he was apprenticed to Devitt & Moore, shipowners, and became a cadet officer in their passenger clippers sailing, as Joseph Conrad did, out to Australia via the Cape of Good Hope and back to England around Cape Horn. He earned his chief mate’s ticket in 1894 and his master’s in 1896, after which he ‘went into steam’. For four years he was with the Canadian-Australian line, steaming between Sydney and Vancouver. In 1901 he was employed by Burns Philp and became a chief officer and a master on ships engaged in their Pacific Islands trade for the rest of the decade.

Bayldon joined the Royal Naval Reserve in 1898 and was promoted lieutenant in 1907. He was a skilled hydrographer who corrected defective charts and added new details to them, including the Bayldon Shoals, off Tulagi, to the east of Iron Bottom Sound in the Solomon Islands, where after his death his ashes were scattered. His observations of the zodiacal light were published by the British Astronomical Association and by the Lick Observatory in the US. His treatise, On the Handling of Steamships During Hurricanes on the East Coast of Queensland, was highly recommended by other master mariners who steamed those waters. He retired from the merchant marine in 1910 and that year opened the Sydney Nautical Academy ‘catering for all types of nautical certificates’. He sold the school in 1947, the year before he died; its curriculum went on to form the basis of navigation studies at Sydney Technical College.

Bayldon was a fellow of the Royal Australian Historical Society and contributed articles to its journal, including one, in 1925, on the 1606 voyage of Luís Vaz de Torres from the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu, through the strait that bears his name to the Moluccas and then on to Manila. This essay was severely criticized in the introduction to the book, New Light on the Discovery of Australia, as Revealed by the Journal of Captain Don Diego de Prado y Tover, edited by Henry N Stevens and published by the Hakluyt Society in 1930. Bayldon, who had sailed through Torres Strait himself and knew its waters well, was incensed. He took every opportunity thereafter to counteract what he called Henry Stevens’ ‘most misleading deductions’.

Bayldon was also a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London, a foundation councillor of the Geographical Society of New South Wales, president of the League of Ancient Mariners and vice-president of the Shiplovers’ Society. A quiet, unassuming man, nick-named ‘Gentle Annie’ by his fellows, he was not, however, a prude, ‘for he drank, smoked and swore’. He was also the model for Captain Dobbin in the Kenneth Slessor poem of that name. Slessor wrote: ‘He had a magnificent library, more than a thousand books about the sea and seamen, logs, journals, learned papers, instruction manuals, maps and charts, many of them exceedingly rare and valuable. Fortunately the Mitchell Library acquired them after his death.

‘Since he was my wife’s uncle, I was allowed to browse through this collection on my weekly visits [to his house in Darling Point]. Over a glass of sherry I was encouraged to ask questions, and his enthusiasm, his scholarly gusto and his astonishing knowledge of unfamiliar details soon infected me with his own worship of Cook. Indeed, all that I have written about Captain Cook I got from Captain Bayldon. The Five Visions, rough and incomplete as they seem to me still, are merely fragments of the image he built for me.’

Curiously, Slessor’s biographer, Geoffrey Dutton, while he tells the story of the Glasson murders, fails to realise that Noëla was Bertie Glasson’s daughter. He thinks Stanton Senior was her father and that she was born on Christmas Day, 1905, making her a girl of sixteen when Slessor married her in 1922, not the 28 year old she actually was. Slessor, seven years younger, was 21. Dutton’s portrait of Noëla is unsympathetic. He describes her as ‘a vain, frivolous, selfish woman’, who ‘occupied a shrine in Slessor’s heart where she appeared as a goddess.’ She was thus a burden and a drag upon the great man. How much his misapprehension as to her age and her antecedents contributes to this assessment is difficult to say; it must have had some effect.

Whatever the nature of their relationship, it is clear that Kenneth loved Noëla all her life. Moreover, her death, from cervical cancer in 1945, coincided with the end of his poetry writing (there was just one more poem). He several times in interviews remarked upon his inability to write poetry once she had gone. There are of course many reasons why a poet might stop writing and the lack of anything more to say, which Slessor also alluded to in interview, is foremost amongst them. However he didn’t actually abjure the writing of poetry, he merely said he was waiting for the conditions in which poems would come to mind again to re-occur. In Noëla’s absence, they never did.

Noëla, and the wider network of the Summerbelle family, were thus an indispensable part of the ecology out of which Slessor’s poetry grew, as his association with Captain Bayldon demonstrates. You could also reach back to Captain Summerbelle’s position with the ferry company for a ghost connection to Slessor’s most famous poem, ‘Five Bells’, an elegy for his friend Joe Lynch, drowned in Sydney Harbour after accidently falling into the water from the ferry Kiandra on the night of May 14, 1927. The Kiandra was operated by Sydney Ferries, which grew out of the North Shore Steam Ferry Company, which William Summerbelle managed.

The influence upon Noëla, and through her on Slessor, of the Glasson murders, is harder to construe. Slessor’s sternly Presbyterian mother Margaret, a Scot whose family were from Hebrides, opposed the marriage, perhaps because the Summerbelles were Catholic, perhaps because of the association of Noëla’s mother with the notorious killer. Margaret Slessor, née McInnes, was from Orange, where Kenneth was born in 1901, when the Glasson murders were still in living memory. His father, Robert, an English mining engineer of German Jewish descent, changed the family name from Schloesser just after the beginning of the First World War. Whether because of Noëla’s Catholicism, her antecedents or for some other reason, Margaret Slessor disapproved of her and told Kenneth that she would never receive her. She never did.

I don’t know if Noëla knew who her biological father was, nor whether Slessor did either. Common sense says they both must have, but whether that means their marriage was haunted by the spectre of Glasson and his bloody crime is impossible to determine. Again, common sense suggests not. Nevertheless, the presence of a veritable axe-murderer in his wife’s genealogy suggests that the apprehension of a kind of gothic horror lurking just outside the penumbra of ordinary life might also be adduced as another part of the ecology out of which Slessor’s poems grew.  

Dutton’s hostility towards Noëla is unremitting; yet his version of her is derived mostly from Slessor himself; even though he acknowledges, as others have done, that Slessor was a very private man, intricately masked, and that no-one really knows, or can know, what the marriage was like on the inside. A reviewer of Dutton’s 1991 biography of Slessor, Dennis Haskell, quotes a friend of Peter Porter’s: ‘All marriages are opaque’. Perhaps Noëla’s alleged frivolity was an escape from the darkness of her background. Or perhaps she inherited certain traits from her mother. Dutton remarks disparagingly upon Noëla’s ‘inexhaustible appetite for shopping’. Haskell points out that Slessor, ‘whose poems are full of closely observed and often exotic objects, seems to have enjoyed these outings just as much. Noëla’s fastidious tidiness was another obsession that he shared.’

It isn’t uncommon for a biographer to feel they know better than their subject how they ought to have lived their life. As such, Dutton is sometimes guilty of the kind of proprietorial judgement that illuminates his own predilections more than it does Slessor’s character or experiences. His failure to realise Noëla’s antecedents is a more egregious error, depriving her of a decade of lived life, and making her five years younger than her husband, when she was in fact seven years older. The long and happy marriage of Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy, who was eighteen years his senior, comes to mind. The mistake seems to open the way into an alternative past for both Kenneth and Noëla, as well as leading to a different future for them; which, at this point, remains unwritten.

One of the episodes in this unwritten story might show, as in a movie, May Summerbelle composing a song for Nellie Melba to sing upon the piano Joseph Conrad remembered sitting in a crate on the dock at Circular Quay in 1879, while he talked to its owner, Mr. Senior, who in this version is Noëla’s step-grandfather. Noëla, meanwhile, is a teenage girl listening to her mother’s songs as they are born, and borne, upon the air, in the same way that as her husband’s companion she witnessed, in some sense, all of the poems he made during the twenty-three sometimes tempestuous years of life they shared with one another. She was, to use an antiquated term, his muse. This vignette, though plausible, is also retrograde, crossing the line between biography and fiction and thereby becoming something that may be imagined but which cannot be attested to as real.

This raises the question: in biography, and indeed in autobiography, what is the status of the real they claim to reproduce? Somehow, in non-fiction writing, the conviction that truth is available to readers persists. Meanwhile, in fiction, the notion that a kind of meta-truth might emerge from a confection of narrative and descriptive sources, including inventions, relying for their impact upon their imaginative coherence, likewise endures. Perhaps non-fiction differs from fiction not in kind but in degree; perhaps our (relatively recent) distinction between the two is artificial, made not because one tells the unvarnished truth and the other tells the varnished kind, but because they follow different methodologies. That is, one relies upon invention while the other recovers what we think of as fact.

Even these methodologies may not be as dissimilar as they seem: both memory and research are as necessary for the construction of a work of fiction as they are for one of non-fiction. Furthermore, in any of the kinds of writing that are conventionally termed non-fiction ― autobiography, biography, memoir, the log of a scientific experiment, the progress of a voyage, a confession, a meditation, a manifesto or a dream ― there will be a proportion of willed or unwilled forgetting, if only because the multifarious nature of the world requires a writer to select and in selection there is always both remembering and forgetting. If there are also inventions, and often there are, they will not be identified as such.

It may also be that in some states of mind a writer does not so much remember as intuit those aspects of circumstance, character, action, description and the rest that make compelling work possible. As if under the guidance of the superannuated muses, swiftness, accuracy, power, meaning and beauty, in a miraculous way, manifest and allow what might otherwise have been laboured or botched, effortlessly to appear. This, too, applies as much to the writing of non-fiction as it does to fiction. Writers of non-fiction are, or can be, just as imaginatively engaged in their work as any fictioneer might be.

A reprise: the tinkle of cottage pianos at Circular Quay is succeeded by the blue notes May Summerbelle plays on Mr Senior’s instrument, in memory of her first husband, the hanged man, while their daughter, Noëla, hears and remembers. She transmits, perhaps by occult means, what she has heard to Kenneth Slessor, who writes: ‘Between the double and the single bell / Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells / From the dark warship lying there below / I have lived many lives’. Later in the poem, listening, without hope, in the night of the harbour, for the voice of his friend who has drowned, he continues: ‘I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, / The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack, / The short agony, the longer dream / The Nothing that was neither long nor short’. Or, as Joseph Conrad wrote in a letter in 1915: ‘reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.’

images : the Duke of Sutherland at Circular Quay; X-Ray of Joseph Conrad’s left hand, Glasgow, 1898

There was an English language newspaper in a slot outside our room – The Japan News it was called: the first newspaper I’d read for a long time, a month at least. Therein I learned that the percentage of people in Japan with antibodies to Covid is around 42% (you have to have had the disease to have antibodies) and the figures are skewed overwhelmingly towards the young. Of all the major cities, Fukuoka had the highest rate, about fifty percent. Another article reported that, since the mandate upon wearing masks has been dropped in Hong Kong, hardly anyone has dispensed with them. This was funny, because exactly the same thing has happened in Japan: since March 14 you no longer have to wear a mask in public; and almost everybody still does. I took a RATs test, because of my cold, and because Mayu’s mother is well into her eighties and should not be exposed to Covid. It came back negative, as I *knew* it would.

The hotel had a pool so we went for a swim and a bath before checking out. Found the car in the basement, drove out towards the airport, filled it up with gas, returned it to the depot and then were driven by shuttle to the terminal for the flight to Tokyo. The driver, a genial fellow, was listening to a radio replay of last night’s baseball game, in which the Japanese had beaten the Americans in the World Series Final. I took a note of the car’s rego: 41 – 77. It was Nissan Note, not an elegant or a stylish vehicle, but eminently functional: it did everything I asked of it and took us everywhere we wanted to go, including down, or up, some improbably narrow and steep roads, both in the country and in the city. It was melancholy leaving: so that was Kyushu. Or the bits of it we saw.

After checking out of the hotel – huge and modern, with a dining hall that reminded me of one on a cruise ship, where smoke from the beef, pork and chicken you could cook on a small brazier at your own table, hung in the air – we drove into the old port of Hirado. The Dutch weren’t allowed to trade from here for very long; they were removed, en masse, to Nagasaki, in 1641, following the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1639. The Dutch Factory was on the same small island in Nagasaki Bay, called Deshima, out of which the Portuguese had once operated. Crucially, the Dutch agreed not to proselytise, which is why the first Protestant church wasn’t inaugurated in Japan until the mid-nineteenth century. The town was small and old, clustered around the water front, with a huge castle on the other side of the water, the seat of the Matsura Clan. It was built in 1704, partially dismantled after the Meiji Restoration, and more recently restored. We didn’t go up there; nor to the strange green church, the St. Francis Xavier Memorial Church, we could see in the hills overlooking the town. We went on instead towards Imari. Or rather, towards Okawachiyama.

At some point towards the end of the sixteenth century, when the Ming Dynasty was in strife and supplies of porcelain disrupted, Japanese rulers abducted a number of Korean potters and brought them to the town of Arita and set them to making porcelain – not for export, but for the tables of the rich and the powerful. The discovery of deposits of kaolin near Arita was one of the triggers for this abduction. Subsequently, the Lords of Saga, the Nabeshima clan, kidnapped thirteen of these Korean potters – the best of the bunch – and relocated them, and their workshops, to the village of Okawachiyama. This place, and its kilns, was built specially for them; there was only one road into the village, which has mountains of three sides, and a guard house was set up on this road to dissuade the movement of people into or out of the village and also to discourage any leakage of information.

Most of the Koreans lived out their days here and there is a strange porcelain pyramid in the local cemetery which functions as their memorial and their grave site. As time went by the Dutch, who could no longer obtain the fine porcelain they desired from China, became interested in Imari and / or Arita ware and quantities were shipped through the port of Imari to Europe. Early forms of this pottery sometimes pretended it was indeed Ming work; later it earned its own credentials; of course it also had a huge influence upon European, and especially Dutch, ceramics.

It was raining hard as we left the main highway and drove up narrow roads into the hills until we reached the village, crossing over a beautifully decorated bridge on the way in. There are about thirty workshops, each with the shopfront, in the village; we only visited a half a dozen of these, and made a few modest purchases. It was easy to become bamboozled by the range and quality of work in display and I am very far from being an aficionado of such things; we concentrated upon pieces that we will actually use and passed over those too expensive to risk breaking. It would be good to return there on another day, perhaps one on which the sun is shining.

Fukuoka is a big city, the fourth biggest in Japan I think. We were flying out of there the following day. I dropped Mayu at reception in the grand hotel and went to park the car in the basement. Coming out into the busy city afternoon, I became confused and lost my way: where was the hotel? It had to be here somewhere. I didn’t panic. The strange thing about being lost, I thought, is that you do not know how long it is going to go on for. It wasn’t a very long time: I’d inadvertently caught the lift to a mall / department store that was behind the hotel, and eventually found my way back to reception. They were already looking for me. The fellow who had brought our luggage in came gliding across the floor, flapping his hands, in equal parts consternation and relief. A search party would have been next.

From our room in the Yukai Resort Hotel Ranpu we could see a line of monuments on the other side of the road, looking out to sea. Perhaps, I thought, they were something to do with the Dutch, who were granted a trade concession at the port of Hirado from 1609. The hotel lobby had a series of glass cases in which were preserved memorabilia of that time, including paintings, pottery and artefacts; and, elsewhere, there was a bad sculpture of a knight on horseback which I think was meant to be a Dutchman. However, when we went down there for a look, after lunch in a small café up the road, the monuments concerned someone else entirely: Zheng Chenggong aka Koxinga, Teiseiko in Japanese. He fought to preserve the Ming Dynasty rulers of China against the incursions of the Qing from the north; later he was instrumental in taking Taiwan (Formosa) from the Dutch who had occupied the island. On one of the stones was his biography, in Chinese characters, composed and inscribed in 1852 under the auspices of the 35th Lord of Hirado.

Zheng was born here, at Kawachi, in 1624, the son of a Chinese merchant by a Japanese woman, and spent his first seven or eight years at Hirado before moving to Fukien in southern China. His career thereafter is complex and resists easy summary. Suffice to say that his attempts to preserve the rule of the Ming Dynasty failed and that his taking of Taiwan was, in part, an attempt to find a base for Ming forces from which they could, at some point, retake the mainland. Just like Chiang Kai-shek, many years later. He was as much a warlord as a loyal servant and, when his sudden death, from malaria, occurred at the age of just 37, he was engaged in a campaign to expel the Spanish from the Philippines. In both places he supported the indigenous peoples of those lands against their European colonisers. His legacy too is complex: he is remembered very differently in Japan, in the Peoples Republic of China, and in present day Taiwan, though in all three places he is accounted a hero.

A graceful, curving breakwater sheltered the beach from the wide bay beyond. Hirado is an island, reached via a bridge; we were looking south and could see parts of the mainland on the other shore, as well as the opening of a passage to the East China Sea. Mostly we just hung about the hotel. It was cold, with a wind from the north, and we had had enough of sight seeing for the moment. We saw small steamers plying their trade back and forth and, that evening, three large fishing boats anchored in the bay and, with their lights blazing, let down nets (I suppose) to catch the tidal flow.

20-21 March, 2023

Our hotel, The Glover, was in the former International Settlement, to the south of the city, perched high up on a steep hill over looking the harbour. A very steep hill. Next door was a building site and on Friday morning I watched while the assembled workers, at 8 am sharp, gathered outside and went through a program of exercises under the tuition of someone I could not see. It was beguiling watching these fellows in boots, overalls and hard hats going through the motions – most without obvious enthusiasm, but dutifully, calmly, perhaps resignedly. I walked with Mayu to a nearby coin laundry then came back to the hotel to catch up with this diary, which has become, not so much onerous as complex. Like the laundry, you never quite catch up, and also you start to confuse what you do with what you will write about what you do, as if the two are not really distinct. And perhaps they aren’t. Writing was difficult because the internet supposedly wasn’t available in the rooms and, while we did have a connection, it was intermittent and needed constant refreshment. I wouldn’t have had that problem if I was diarising in a notebook, as I always used to do when I was travelling.

Mioko, Mayu’s sister, was joining us from Tokyo for the weekend so after lunch we drove the forty-five minutes or so to the airport to pick her up. She’d inadvertently booked a flight that went via Kobe but arrived on time. It had 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 a main road with buses and cars streaming by – but no taxis. In the end Mioko called one on her phone. As we drove down to Chinatown the driver rehearsed the chorus of a famous pop song set in this city. After a catalogue of the woes of love gone wrong comes the refrain: ‘And it’s raining in Nagasaki again.’ Afterwards, back at the hotel, we broached the bottle of sake we’d bought from Kikuchi: Five Daughters it was called and after a few glasses the Tominaka Sisters (sic) 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 of Offenbach’s 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 was named, and the nearby Glover Garden, was a Scotsman, from Aberdeen, who was sent as a very young man from Shanghai to Nagasaki towards the end of the 1850s as an agent for Jardine, Matheson and Co., notorious for their involvement opium trafficking but also traders in silk, tea, cotton and other commodities. Glover soon went out on his own, in partnership with another Brit, and made a fortune selling tea to China. He diversified, as you do, particularly into coal and, as a good Scot, into ship-building. He also enriched himself in the arms trade, selling guns and ammunition, at least until the Meiji Restoration in 1868 imposed an inconvenient peace upon the region. He survived bankruptcy in the early 1870s, moved to Tokyo, after which he visited Nagasaki often but never returned to live. He had a son and a daughter with two different Japanese woman 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 with her when he too died – in 1911. In those early years he established himself in the Nagasaki community as a respected and influential figure. In the lead up to the Meiji Restoration, indeed, he gave advice to those in the Satsuma Clan who were advocating the kind of industrial modernism Glover exemplified in his own career. Businesses he was involved with included the corporation that became Mitsubishi and the brewery than now makes Kirin Beer. His house is extant in the gardens named after him; a kind of museum now. We had tea and cakes in a restaurant reputed to have been the first ever European style establishment in the whole of Japan. It had been dismantled elsewhere and re-assembled on site; it featured some beautiful stained glass.

Sight-seeing is exhausting and can seem a bit futile after a while. We had been over the church (no photography allowed) before visiting the gardens. When we got back to our hotel we had to move rooms and ended up across the hallway with a view of the harbour instead of the building site. There was a cruise ship moored below; we had encountered some Aussies and Americans in the Glover Garden, loud and anomalous as always; the ship left that night around seven and good riddance to it. They probably all had Covid too. Mayu had spent some of her coupon money on a couple of books and I became absorbed in one of them: The Nagasaki British Consulate 1859-1955, written by a Canadian professor of cultural history at the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Sciences and a former Zen Buddhist monk. Among much else I learned that here Dutch was the language of diplomacy for two centuries, that is, for the bulk of the period of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

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 before; Mioko hadn’t but didn’t want to go. She argued, reasonably enough, that for her there were many other and better reasons to remember Nagasaki than the 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. There was, for instance, a wonderful collection of photography books in the lobby of the hotel I had been working my way through; photography, too, which has such a powerful tradition in Japan, began here. On the other hand, I was conscious of a kind of dull anger that this place had been bombed at all, in the arbitrary, indeed cynical way that it was. It wasn’t the original target and it wasn’t a major military target either, despite the big Mitsubishi ship-building works here: the Americans, having tested their uranium based device on Hiroshima, wanted to see what a plutonium bomb would do.

In the end, Mayu and I decided to go, on Sunday morning, before returning to the hotel for Mioko and taking her with us to Sasebo for lunch; from there she would get a bus back to the airport, which was out that way. We took a series of elevators up to Peace Park. At the head of the last one is the Peace Fountain, where a man and a woman stood with their hands clasped in prayer. He was about forty-five perhaps and he had his eyes squeezed tight shut: not tight enough to prevent tears silvering his cheeks. And it was like that. For no particular reason I found myself weeping too. The nearest public building to the point of impact was, it turned out, a prison: you could still see the lines of the foundations of its walls in the grass. How unlucky is that: to be in a prison they drop an atomic bomb upon? Beyond was the huge sculpture which is the centre piece of the park; it seemed to me outré; 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.

Ground Zero is an a separate, adjoining park. A simple black obelisk marks the spot and it was somehow cheering to see little children running around it, chasing each other and laughing. In another place you could look down, through glass, to see the actual rubble left by the blast on the ground in August 1945. The other public building destroyed that day, apart from the prison, was a church: the biggest and most elegant cathedral in East Asia at the time, in a city that was once said to have been ‘run by the Jesuits’. Some of the masonry survived and has been reconstituted and placed near the obelisk, with a statue of the ubiquitous Francis Xavier on the top. The bomb didn’t hit its original target; it landed about four kilometres further up the valley from where it was meant to go; and it turned out that the surrounding hills shielded the rest of the city from the worst of the blast. For some reason 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 other church 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.

In Sasebo we had lunch in an Italian restaurant then saw Mioko off on the bus. Sasebo was the main launching point for the UN and US forces fighting in the Korean War. Millions of tons of ammunition, fuel, tanks, trucks and supplies flowed through during those years and there’s still an American naval base here. Sasebo is also the home port of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Forces. We could see the sinister gun metal grey American ships, with their round radar towers, moored up the harbour; and the (by comparison) tiny little patrol boats of the JMDF nearby. At a village outside the city Mayu wanted to do some more shooting. She is assembling a film to accompany a recording of eight songs by a Koto player she knows and this village is where Satsuki comes from. Mayu took footage of the primary school and the junior high school; of a shrine and a temple; of the house where Satsuki grew up; and of the river that flows through Sazacho.

After that we drove on to this vast hotel in Hirado, with its stunning views of the sea and its collections of mostly Dutch, or Dutch inspired, objets d’art, pottery, artefacts; and its beautiful glass and tile work. I am nursing a cold I picked up after our night out in Chinatown on Friday but it doesn’t seem too bad today. The sun is streaming through the window, the room is large and generous, the onsen hot, varied and convivial. There are lots of children and young people here, too. Some are playing croquet on the lawn outside the window.

17-19 March 2023

All night I was troubled by the sight of the palm tree out the window, which sometimes looked ghostly, like an after image of a catastrophe, and at others like something seen in a mirror of the same disaster. It was changing as the exterior or interior lighting at the hotel changed and I kept thinking I should get up and try to photograph it; but I didn’t. Or not until morning, when all I managed was a conventional shot of a palm standing before the sea, lit by yellow dawn light.

There was a public swimming pool, using thermal water, ‘out of the ground’, nearby so we decided to go there. We have been in and out of water a hundred times over the last few weeks but we haven’t done any laps. The pool was set up high on a low hill, looking over flat farm land to the sea. There were children doing lessons inside and various aged souls gathered in the foyer, awaiting the official 10.30 opening and their turn in the water. The woman at the desk explained everything in great detail, including how to work the shower in the men’s (she showed me) and the way to mop the floor if I happened to drip any water upon it. These tutorials are common everywhere and the only way to deal with them is to submit gracefully and wait.

I ended up using the wrong shower – there was one just before you went through to the pool – as a couple of genial old fellows pointed out; but I showed them my wet hair and skin and they decided not to insist. Once they ascertained that I was going to be swimming freestyle they indicated which lane I was to use and off I went, in the warm, slightly cloudy water. It was a twenty-five metre pool so that meant, to do my usual kilometre, I had to complete forty lengths; which I duly did. Mayu joined me after a while and we swam happily back and forth together until we were done. After we got out one of the oldsters said I swam well and asked how old I was? After she told him 71 he said he was 81, and that he swam well too. I really liked the enthusiasm for living that these people had, and their pride in their fitness too. There were stained glass windows over the main pool and afterwards I tried photographing them, from the outside, with mixed results. I think I might be trying a bit hard with the photography too.

We drove through fields of potatoes on our way to the second ferry, which would take us off Amakusa and on to the Shimabara Peninsula, which is really just the surrounds of another enormous active volcano, Unzen. We could see it glowering across the water from the ferry terminal. At the edge of the carpark a green tanker truck was parked, with its engine running, in front of a line of small cypress trees, and I finally took a photograph I was happy with. I think perhaps the more I do it the higher my standards become and the meeting of them, concomitantly, rarer.

We disembarked at Kuchinotsu, once a significant port in the days of the Portuguese and the Dutch; there was a set of old European buildings, now a folk museum, on the left as we came into the harbour, linked to the rest of the city by a bridge with a splendid red arch. Mayu had been here before, when researching her play ‘You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly’. By the nineteenth century Kuchinotsu had become an important coal port and also the place where young women might stowaway on the freighters in order to go to other lands, including Australia, where many of them ended up working as prostitutes. Her play concerned one of these who had ended up in a small town in Western Australia. Some of the girls were sold by their families to traffickers; they were effectively indentured labourers and would have to pay off their passage before being able to earn money for themselves. Of course the ships’ captains usually knew what was happening; one of the strategies to get the girls safely aboard was to light fires on the hills to divert the attention of the local officials.

Kuchinotsu is a sleepy place; the main port now is further up the east coast. In that direction, too, is the fort where the final massacre of the Christians happened. There was a statue of their leader, a very young man, at the ferry terminal at Amakusa, where he was from. We went the other way, up the west coast, and along the road came across Futagoiwa Rock, with its eerie resemblance to one of the Easter Island Mo’ai. There used to be another, more celebrated rock next to it, with a pine tree growing from its summit, but it fell over in an earthquake. Even Futagoiwa has been strengthened, recently, with concrete.

After that it was an uneventful drive, first by the sea, then inland, then via a freeway, into the city of Nagasaki. I did not expect to find that it resembles Wellington: built on hills around a harbour, with steep streets running upwards from narrow coastal flats. Our hotel, the Glover, is in Ishibashi, on the eastern flank of the harbour, to the south, near the Glover Garden and the Oura Cathedral, said to be the first church built in Japan. Nearby is a substantial Buddhist temple and a large Shinto shrine; the three faiths, people say, existing in harmony, side by side.

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