Now Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019
You have to give kudos to the German Book Prize (for which this novel was nominated in 2017) for regularly celebrating the weird and the outright grotesque - I mean, we are talking about a Prize that is awarded to books "The Invention of the Red Army Fraction by a Manic-Depressive Teenager in the Summer of 1969" (German: Die Erfindung der Roten Armee Fraktion durch einen manisch-depressiven Teenager im Sommer 1969) (for those who don't know: The Red Army Fraction or RAF was a German domestic terror organization, and in reality, it was of course not invented by a super-sad/super-happy teenager).

So in the spirit of "hey, why not?", we are now confronted with a novel whose protagonist Gilbert Silvester does university research on beards - oh yes, he is a "beard scientist" ("Bartforscher"). One night, he dreams that his wife is cheating on him, and angrily hops on a plane to Tokyo - or wait, does he? The unique thing about this text is that it is impossible to find out whether our weird beard scientist is actually experiencing what is happening or whether he is dreaming and/or imagining this story. There are plenty of hints throughout the plot that keep the reader on his toes, and the ambiguity of what Silvester feels and describes is the main staple of the whole text.

In Japan, Silvester accidentally meets a young Japanese student named Yosa Tamagotchi (Tamagotchi? Does this guy really exist?) who wants to commit suicide because of his exam anxiety and wears a fake beard (yes, I know). Together, they travel through Japan, Tamagotchi trying to find a good spot to kill himself, Silvester, the humanities scholar, following the footsteps of Bash? Matsuo, 17th century poet and author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Basho's text is considered one of the major works of classical Japanese literature, and it describes the journey the writer undertook with his companion Kawai Sora from Tokyo (then: Edo) to the northern region of Oku in order to "renew his own art". In the midst of their travels, something changes and the book turns into a bona fide ghost story - and it is only then that Silvester starts to shatter his fears.

Clearly, Poschmann is working with the good old doppelgänger motif, mirroring Silvester in the young Tamagotchi (a highly unly Japanese family name). The negative sides and shortcomings Silvester berates himself for are transferred back and forth between the two men, giving Silvester, generally not a very empathetic person, the possibility to confront parts of himself. Silvester and Tamagotchi also display different kinds of sadness and desperation, Tamagotchi rather passive and subdued, Silvester tending towards anger, but deeply troubled by his failing career and the conviction that he is not good enough for his wife.

But there are even more mirror images in this text: Just as Basho did, Silvester aims to "renew his own art", and is supported by an (imaginary) travel companion (together, they also write haikus). With his journey, Basho himself honored the travels of the poet Saigyo who lived hundreds of years before him. In the case of Silvester, the outward movement mirrors the movement that happens inside his own minds, and by embracing ambiguities and shadows, he learns to see more clearly (hello Jun'ichir? Tanizaki, who is also quoted in the book).

On top of all that, there are some negative mirror images, juxtaposing Japanese and German culture. And there are trees. Many, many trees, especially pinetrees. In German culture, the forest is connotated as an almost magical place, haunting and full of beauty. The parts of the book in which the German Silvester meditates about trees in Japan and thinks back about the time he spent with his wife, hoping for the leaves to turn red during Indian summer, are some of the best paragraphs in the novel. It is also in the context of pinetrees that Silvester has an important epiphany about the ability to see reality.

So as you can see, there is a lot going on this short text that asks one of the classic questions in fiction: What is reality? I generally love daring and weird books, but in parts, this seemed a little gimmicky to me, plus, more importantly, the motivations of the characters did not entirely become clear. According to the author, this is intentional, as she maintains that the unambiguous is often trivial. I agree, but I'd to add that when a story remains too ambiguous, it also becomes trivial. That does not happen all the time in this book, but too often for my taste.

So fortunately, this didn't win the German Book Prize, and I have to say that the fact it got nominated for the MBI instead of The Capital or Beside Myself is pretty much a joke (but not a funny one) - so it probably has good chances of winning. :-)2017-read germany61 s Antonomasia979 1,392

While writing this review I changed my mind about the book somewhat.

I would never have read this novel if it weren't for the Booker International longlist - I'd already seen the blurb a few months earlier and decided the book wasn't for me. After the longlist was announced, I requested and received an ARC of The Pine Islands, direct from a very nice member of staff at the publisher, which makes this review a little more awkward than if I'd got the ARC via the impersonal machine that is Netgalley... but this book is, so far, not ranking high among my 2019 MBI reads.

The blurb's phrase "a journeyman lecturer on beard fashions in film" instantly suggests a satire about a hipster mired in mediocrity, but the rest of the description sounds relatively serious. I suspected the novel might sound off-key to a British (if not English-language) sense of humour. And indeed, in the first half of the book, I felt as if I was reading a draft or storyboard awaiting reassignment to a good comic writer who would give zing and real comedy to the faint echoes of Douglas Adams and the academic farces of Tom Sharpe and David Lodge, which were haunting the prose without scaring up any actual laughs. For full-scale comedy it would need specific, absurd examples. Instead, the early parts of the narrative might raise a slight smirk with vague generalisations:

Now he found himself once more in precarious circumstances, making his way from one project to the next, and saw himself professionally left in the dust by former friends who had all got vastly worse marks than he had and who had never expressed a single innovative idea between them. Friends who, to be blunt, were technically less competent than he was. But un him they possessed that certain clever demeanour, the kind that was the only valuable thing when it came to careers.
or
As always it was a research project where the results had already been established. He carried out the legwork, amassed the minutiae, confirmed through the richness of the material its significance, attested to the general applicability of its cultural theoretical conclusions, and revealed finally and not without flourish the surprising conclusions, which in reality were not only not all that surprising but had in fact been present in Gilbert’s mind from the very beginning.

That sort of thing can be fine if it is building up to the laughs, but it never gets there.
One cannot fault the translator: substantial line-editing, rewriting and expansion is beyond a translator's remit of rendering the sense and feel of the original work into English.

On the other hand, there are very popular British humorous writers who raise nary a giggle from me, Jasper Fforde or Tom Holt. Sometimes it *is* just me. (As I'm one of the first English-language readers to review this book, I've no idea how much it is just me with The Pine Islands.) And much I found with Fforde's and Holt's books, The Pine Islands - although ostensibly addressing more weighty themes - passed the time in an innocuous fashion which provided a break from other things, even if I often thought about how it might be better.

Un the typical British comic novel, The Pine Islands also includes stunning, and entirely serious, passages of nature writing:
Plant shadows wandered over the wall, staggered noiselessly through the room, swept over the far end, then froze. They paused, skipped the bedsheet, then swung on further, brushed against his cheeks, washed over him, thinned twigs that touched everything too tenderly for Gilbert to bear. A forest of waifs, disembodied wood, a grey pyre built of shadows. He heard the wind in the pines, heard their monumental whirring, the anti-wood on his wall rose and fell, a long, lonely wandering, and yet … He stood at the window, holding the teacup with both hands. It caught the moon for an instant. Macaques cackled far off in the distance.

This feels attuned to current UK literary preoccupations, as the hero goes to find himself and/or have a form of breakdown via travel and nature. In tacitly suggesting that being out in nature won't necessarily solve everything (and also that nature is half-broken too), it critiques and lampoons the 2010s nature-writing trend in a way that may be refreshing for readers who are starting to find it formulaic. I am unsure to what extent this has also been a literary trend in Germany, or how many of its English-language books have been translated to German - but whether deliberate or no, The Pine Islands could work for the UK reader in a nature-writing context. One of the 2019 MBI judges, Turkish-English translator Maureen Freely, said of reading the 108 submitted books: “We had this almost spooky attention to rumblings on behalf of a natural world that seems ready to fight back, this environmental disaster moment”. Ravaged and intimidating landscapes are evident here in The Pine Islands as they were in the visibly desertifying rural Spain of The Death of Murat Idrissi, the last longlisted title I finished.

There's another reason why this novel might have appealed to the judges - to a group of people who've been reading stacks of newly-translated fiction. One of its themes seems to be the way in which Westerners think about and use other cultures. And rather than making an obviously didactic treatment of that, it takes the leftfield, ambiguous approach of sending a protagonist who seems somewhat detached from reality on a journey. Protagonist Gilbert was previously no Japanophile and didn't especially the idea of the place, or other countries that favour tea over coffee. He just got on a plane to Tokyo one day in the summer holidays, after taking a bad dream about his wife too literally. It's impossible to be sure just how much, if any, of this actually "happened" in the reality of the book. Gilbert wanders a world of caricature Japanese stereotypes: he befriends a perfectionist young 'herbivore' student who wants to commit suicide at one of the country's legendary locations - not only that, but the young man bows repeatedly, his parents run a tea shop, Gilbert talks of the student's deference to him as an older man - and the lad's surname is Tamagotchi. They also watch a Noh theatre performance, and the beautifully detailed descripion of this is undoubtedly more accessible than those by Kraznahorkai in Seiobo There Below. Gilbert buys and reads a copy of Basho's writings and resolves to follow the 17th-century poet's journey north, after experiencing an epiphany about the beauty and essence of Japanese black pine trees. (He chooses the 'male' black pine rather than its mythological pair, the 'female' red pine, perhaps as he has decided to spend time alone away from his wife.) At the insistence of Tamagochi, they first visit other places - such as the notorious Aokigahara forest. "How bad is this on a scale of Logan Paul?" I wrote in one note during that chapter, suspecting that this book might not have the best reception on social media, due to its being written by a white Western author and centred around stereotyped ideas of Japan. The stereotypes are, on a surface level, less creatively employed than in, for example, the work of Terry Pratchett, as they are used about Japan itself and not about an invented culture which shares features with several real societies.

As with reading Murat Idrissi, I took into consideration that the MBI judges include Pankaj Mishra and Elnathan John, who know a thing or two about colonialism and cultural appropriation, and who consider literature beyond the kneejerk level. So, if a book from the longlist sets off my antennae with "uh-oh, there are sections of left/literary social media that will hate this", I decided that, rather than merely trying to predict what might provoke outraged hot-takes, I should consider what insights into these subjects there might be in the novel: these guys must have okayed the book's presence on the list even if it was not one of their individual favourites. Yes, there is that whole thing about "does replicating something while critiquing/satirising it just perpetuate the problem?" but there has to be more going on than that here. Japan is also an economically powerful country, and to an educated audience the use of stereotypes in The Pine Islands is as blatant as if, in a book about Britain, all the men wore bowler hats and carried golf umbrellas. But as Gilbert is not a weeaboo, it is not directly mocking the subculture of Western male Japanophiles: instead it perhaps shows the ideas of Japan that filter through to the popular imagination of Westerners who don't take a special interest in the place, and the ways in which these contrast and mirror the West's idea of itself.

Writing this review, has, by this point, made me see more to the book than when I typed the first two paragraphs, and my opinion of it has improved. However, Gilbert was irritating and, as most of the novel is a close third-person narrative following his thoughts and experiences, that meant the book was irritating to read at times. He displays very little overt distress, instead preferring to jump to conclusions, or be cynically dismissive, and so he doesn't elicit much sympathy from the reader. (His emotional distress is perhaps projected into the person of Yosa Tamagotchi, whom he feels a duty to help.) Gilbert's know-it-all attitudes on the basis of superficial knowledge made me cringe in recognition of my own similar habits. (Gilbert is overconfident in his insights, whilst his mirror-image Tamagotchi lacks confidence in his own academic abilities.) On the plus side, this Gilbert's 'inner journey' seemed a more realistic portrait of someone gaining a little insight or 'enlightenment' over a short period than its equivalents in most fiction: Gilbert has occasional epiphanies and realises a handful of things, but mostly returns to being critical and arrogant afterwards - substantial change takes years - and sometimes parts of it happen when a person seems off the rails, as he is here. I wasn't sure whether Poschmann was also hinting (or if so to what end) towards the idea that certain "Eastern" forms of spiritual progress, e.g. Kundalini in the yoga tradition, and some Buddhist stages, may look unwell in Western psychology.

Gilbert's academic conclusions about beards had particular need of comedic sharpening (more jargon especially), but when his letters home - which are in a denser and more serious style than the rest of the narrative - got on to other analytical topics, such as comparisons of non-hair-related aspects of German and Japanese culture, I found myself thinking I would rather be reading an essay Poschmann distilled from these observations than the actual novel.

Sublime depth plays an important role in East Asian culture. Profundity, as it’s called, is inconspicuous...
it is subtle, it is conceivably linked with what we also call the sublime in the West. Only it doesn’t reveal itself in power or violence, it isn’t experienced in exorbitance, nor in terms of magnitude or in being overwhelmed. You won’t find it in bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks … etc., but much more in the quiet contemplation of a dull reed bed or dry autumn grass, within nature without anything particularly eye-catching, in a landscape of emptiness and melancholy. Whether it’s a swamp or grass or bamboo that ultimately forms the contemplative object, turning leaves, a misty field or a cloud-topped mountain – what is ultimately required is a state of mind that allows the sublime to be seen everywhere. It???s believed that this is the cause of the phenomena. And, if anything, it possibly comes close to what is called the Ungrund – the ground without a ground, the undetermined, the abyss – in German mysticism.

I was struck by the extent to which some of these Japanese ideas felt more home than the German ones, which are from a geographically closer culture - I guess this is through osmosis, after Japanese culture was so popular in Britain and the US in the 90s, although I wasn't so consciously into it as a couple of friends were. The idea of scenery as frightening, as in the Romantic or pre-Romantic idea, has always seemed rather alien to me: but as if on cue, a couple of days ago I was assailed by a Windows Spotlight picture of mountains which were just that, augmented by their mis-labelling as the Carpathians - the setting for Dracula. (An image search showed they were actually the Dolomites.)

Another annoyance stemmed from an old idea that "And then I woke up and it was all a dream" is one of the great cop-outs in fiction. Or maybe, a lot of these writing rules, breaking it is allowable when done right ... if at the end it's still only one of the possibilities, as it is here. And if you hint at it as beautifully as this (from another of Gilbert's "letters", where he seems to be reaching in the dark towards an insight:
Waking dreams, images that surface just before the onset of sleep when our functions of thought gradually come to rest, images that still accompany our consciousness on waking, shortly before the return of routine quotidian thought, hypnopompic hallucinations that emerge when a notion is transformed entirely into images, showing a thought in its pre-conceptual, not yet comprehended state, before the synthesis sets in; images, then, which must be able to accompany all my ideas, even when not everybody can always succeed in eliciting them semiconsciously and only half-awake. Are they dreams, daydreams, reveries? Illusions, conceits, visions? These apparitions are said to be delusional, and yet they constitute the base, the abyss of every thought, every feeling. I wanted to cultivate the futile image of the pine from them."

This is a strange novel which became more interesting after reading than during. (Readers who are well-acquainted with both German and Japanese literature will probably find allusions in it to explain the underpinnings of this 'strangeness.') For most of the book's duration I thought its only benefit was nudging me to read Basho, and reminding me (not for the first time) that I know little about German literature. But finishing The Pine Islands means one can step away from the sometimes grating protagonist and think, with less background noise, about the other ideas in the book.2019 arc booker-international ...more44 s Sam Quixote4,635 13.1k

After convincing himself that his wife’s cheating on him, beard professor Gilbert arbitrarily flees to Japan where he equally arbitrarily picks up a book of famed Japanese poet Basho’s and decides to visit the pine islands of Matsushima, which took Basho’s breath away when he visited them. Along the way Gilbert picks up a suicidal young Japanese student, Yosa, and decides to distract him from thoughts of death by taking him to the pine islands with him.

What an odd little book! As contrived as it is, I find the whimsical premise beguiling - throwing caution to the wind and embarking on a pseudo-spiritual pilgrimage at a crisis point in life is one of those moments that defines a person’s life, which usually makes for a good story. Unfortunately that’s not the case with German writer Marion Poschmann’s bafflingly award-winning novel.

I don’t normally get hung up on the point of a novel so long as it’s entertaining but, as The Pine Islands simply wasn’t, I have to ask: whyyyy? What was the point of this academic’s breakdown and pointless quest that led nowhere? Why did he care about saving the life of this young man he’d never met before? Was his wife actually cheating on him? What did he accomplish through all his meanderings?

The ambiguity of the story lends itself to the game of literary what if? so - what if Yosa isn’t real and all in Gilbert’s head? He’s representative of Gilbert’s insecurities (not living up to expectations, not being manly enough). Yosa’s surname - Tamagotchi, which is not a Japanese surname - hints at his being made up as that’s the kind of surname a clueless Westerner Gilbert might imagine on the spot. I mean, tamagotchi - those stupid little plastic digital “pets” that were insanely popular for a hot minute in the ‘90s??

So that might mean that Gilbert’s suicidal and is trying to dissuade himself from death and look on the bright side of life. Alright - except I don’t buy it. He only thinks his wife’s having an affair after he dreams it and as for not being successful - dude’s a fucking “beard professor”! What the fuck is that?! It’s the kind of silly job you give a character in a bad literary novel. Oh… I don’t know, I’m not convinced that these are reasons enough to fly off to some random country to top yourself.

But then if it’s not about this guy working through his suicidal feelings it’s just a string of random coincidences that don’t add up to anything. And that’s largely why I found this to be such an unsatisfying read.

Beyond the lack of a point, the letters from Gilbert to his wife Mathilda weren’t interesting - I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised given that he’s a beard professor but his voice is so dull - and the ending was completely flat and unimpressive. And I really didn’t care for Poschmann’s writing style - SO many run-on sentences! Put a full stop there instead of a comma - not every sentence needs to be a paragraph long!

I read a lot of Japanese fiction and it rarely focuses on the darker side of Japanese society so I appreciated seeing that angle - of course it had to come from a foreigner! And I d the Westerner’s perspective of Japan as that’s how I experience the country too and it took me back there again. The premise and journey of the characters is original even if it doesn’t amount to much.

Still, The Pine Islands is definitely not a great novel. I didn’t hate it but I can’t rec it either. Hey, that’s almost a haiku!

The Pine Islands sucks,
I didn’t hate it but I
Can’t rec it either

Basho would be turning in his grave if he had one (pretty sure dude was cremated)! 40 s Melanie561 285

Gilbert has a nightmare that his wife is unfaithful, he awakes in great distress, later that day he confronts her about her infidelity and when she denies any such digression, he packs his bag, takes his passport and heads to the airport and takes the first intercontinental flight available. He ends up in Tokyo, where Gilbert - a researcher in all things beard related - tries to strike up a conversation with a rare type of Japanese, a young man with a bit of a beard. Yosa was just about to commit suicide but as Gilbert talks to him, his politeness does not allow him to continue with his plan. Equipped with two books, Basho's famous travel guide to the backlands of Japan and a Japanese Suicide Manual, the two men begin a journey through Japan seeking out the famed pine trees.

This has been one of the best German literary novels in recent years for me. Funny, quirky, great observation. Gilbert is a man in crisis and yet, he himself does not see it, to him everything around him is in crisis, from the buildings, to nature, to trees. He admits that he is a failed academic, that he is not as successful as he imagined he would be, but he is at the start completely clueless that his in the midst of an epic breakdown. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, in fact, I read it twice, the second time immediately after the first. And that is something that happens very rarely indeed.

I do hope that Suhrkamp finds an English publisher for this book, sheer brilliance and a great representation of modern German literature. 34 s nettebuecherkiste555 146

Deutschland in der Gegenwart. Bartforscher (!) Gilbert Silvester träumt, dass seine Frau ihn betrügt. Auch nach dem Erwachen ist er – fassungslos – überzeugt, dass der Traum wahr ist. Also tut er das Naheliegendste: Er fährt sofort zum Flughafen und setzt sich in ein Flugzeug nach Japan.

In Japan angekommen, beschließt, auf den Spuren des Dichters Matsuo Basho (der „große Erneuerer des Haikus“) durch Japan zu reisen. An der U-Bahn-Station liest er einen jungen Japaner namens Yosa Tamagotchi (!) auf, der sich eigentlich auf die Gleise werfen und das Leben nehmen wollte. Gilbert kann ihn überzeugen, dass dies kein rechter Ort für einen Selbstmord sei, und bewegt ihn schließlich dazu, mit ihm zu kommen, denn auf seiner Reiseroute befinden sich auch einige der Orte, die in Yosas Ratgeber als gute Orte genannt werden, um sich das Leben zu nehmen. Zuletzt soll es zu den Kieferninseln gehen, einem der schönsten Orte in Japan.

Marion Poschmann beweist mit diesem Roman, dass man lyrische Prosa schreiben kann, ohne dass der Leser bei der Lektüre unentwegt Fragezeichen in den Augen hat. Ihre Sprache ist wunderbar, Metaphern sind gelungen, es ist eine Freude, die Geschichte zu lesen. Und dann der Humor! Wer mich kennt, weiß: Damit bin ich immer zu gewinnen. Allein schon die Absurdität von Gilberts Verhalten, die er selbst in keiner Weise erkennt, ja, er ist sogar der Ansicht, dass die anderen (vornehmlich seine Frau) sich absurd verhalten! Zugegebenermaßen, die Walter Ulbricht-Anspielung von Seite 27 hat einen gewissen Stöhnfaktor. Doch im weiteren Verlauf liebte ich den Humor, Poschmann arbeitet mit Übertreibungen und Demaskierungen – herrlich. Das soll jetzt nicht dein Eindruck erwecken, es handele sich um eine Komödie. Aber Humor ist mir eben wichtig, und wenn dieser Humor albern ist, bin ich halt auch albern ;-)

Der Protagonist verhält sich wie bereits erwähnt absolut absurd, dennoch kann man irgendwie nicht anders, als eine gewisse Sympathie für ihn zu empfinden. Er leidet offensichtlich an einem Minderwertigkeitskomplex, empfindet sich selbst eher als Pseudointellektuellen. In Yosa Tamagotchi spiegelt sich seine Persönlichkeit, was in folgender Passage sehr deutlich wird:

„Sein Gesicht spiegelte sich auf der Oberfläche der Flüssigkeit, und er sah genauer hin. Es war nicht sein Gesicht, es war Yosas Gesicht. Er erkannte genau dessen Züge, die dunkleren Haare, die flachere Nase, die Form der Wangenknochen. Er schob die Schale hin und her, bis er auch Yosas Kinn mit dem Ziegenbart klar ins Bild bekam.“ (Seite 137)

Während der Reise geht Yosa ihm eine Zeit lang verloren, und auch gibt Gilberts Zustand wieder, er ist selbst irgendwie verloren.

Auf der Rückseite des Buches ist zu lesen „Ist das Leben am Ende ein Traum“? Und so stellt sich am Ende auch die Frage, ob Gilberts ganze Reise vielleicht ein Traum ist, ob er vielleicht noch gar nicht erwacht ist und sein Unterbewusstsein ihn auf die Suche geschickt hat.

Ein wunderbarer kurzer Roman, der mich überzeugt hat, dass ich mir auch einmal Poschmanns Lyrik ansehen sollte.belletristik contemporary deutscher-buchpreis ...more33 s Lark BenobiAuthor 1 book2,795

I don’t know how Poschmann did it but this novel captures with exquisite perfection the disorienting experience that living in Japan can be, for an attentive non-Japanese person who comes to Japan with no agenda and with some time to look around.

There is such an extreme level of discernment here in this novel...every scene nails it. I would guess most people who have not spent a lot of time in Japan—enough for instance to know about the deeply strange and almost obligatory love every Japanese person professes to feel about Matsushima—would feel this book is exaggerated satire, when actually it just is the way Japan IS.

I’m kind of in awe and a little woozy from the experience of having just finished this excellent and very funny book, so maybe I will come back and try to be more coherent in my review in a few days. I lived in Japan for years and this novel hit me hard with a lovely nostalgia for a place I still love so its impossible for me to know how anyone else without this experience will react to it. 2015 2019 favorite-book-i-read-this-year ...more31 s Karen·649 854 Read

Now who would have thought that a novel about beards and suicide and pine trees could be so utterly delightful.

Have you ever wondered why the Pope is always clean shaven but the Patriarch has a long beard?

There's a hierarchy of popular sites for suicide. The more awe-inspiring the scenery, the more dignity to death.

Trees let light dapple through. But pine trees are black clouds against the blue summer sky.

Marion Poschmann has the lightest of touches, her breath a warm breeze that gently lifts the hair, leaves a frisson of coolness on the skin and opens deep colours in a transparent pool of water. Dive in.



Jackdaws caw and chack
Black suited businessmen
They squabble and fight.

Re-read in July 2020:
Playful and profound.
We cannot escape from inside our own consciousness.
Note to self: read more by Marion Poschmann.best-of-2019 in-german29 s Semjon669 410

Die Kieferninseln ist ein sehr poetisches Buch über eine ungewöhnliche Reise nach und durch Japan. Wie ein Gedicht so lässt auch dieser Roman vielfältige Deutungsmöglichkeiten zu, und jeder Leser wird seine ganz eigenen Interpretationen und Empfindungen beim Lesen verspüren. Es wundert mich daher nicht, dass die Meinung hier so stark auseinandergehen. Mich hat das Buch von der ersten Seite an gepackt. Obwohl ich Bücher selten zweimal lese, kann ich mir jetzt nach dem Ende gut vorstellen, dieses kleine Büchlein irgendwann nochmal zur Hand zu nehmen. Genauso wie ein Gedicht, das man immer wieder gerne liest.

Gilbert ist ein im Vergleich zu seiner gefragten Ehefrau eher erfolgloser Dozent, der seine Fähigkeiten durch die Gesellschaft nicht wertgeschätzt sieht. Beziehungs- und Selbstreflexionsunfähig ist es auch, so dass er einen Traum, in dem ihn seine Frau betrügt, zum Anlass nimmt, so weit wie möglich sich von ihr zu entfernen und ihr dabei auch noch die Schuld an der Ehekrise zu geben. Obwohl er Teeländer nicht mag, wählt er als erstbesten Flug die Maschine nach Tokio. Er fühlt sich hin und hergerissen von diesem Land. Recht bald trifft er den jungen Yosa, der seinen Selbstmord plant. Es gelingt ihm, sich als die schützende Hand von Yosa, auf einer Pilgerreise durch Japan zu begeben, zunächst zu den beliebtesten Selbstmordplätzen des Landes, später auf den Spuren eines bekannten Haiku-Dichters, der 500 Jahre zuvor auch schon eine Reise in den Norden unternommen hatte.

Im Grunde weiß man nie so recht, was Schein und was Sein ist in dem Buch. Obwohl Gilberts Ehefrau äußerst abweisend auf dessen Flucht reagiert, werden seine liebevollen detaillierten Reiseberichterstattungen in Briefform immer wieder den Erzählfluss aus der Ebene einer dritten Person unterbrechen. Außerdem nehmen die Träume Gilberts immer groteskere Formen an und so wird die eh schon skurrile Geschichte fast schon makaber, witzig, absurd, auf jeden Fall äußerst humorvoll und unterhaltsam.

Ich mochte vor allem die Art, wie Frau Poschmann die kleinen Besonderheiten des Lebens beobachtet, und sie dann sehr lakonisch in wunderbare Worte packt. Ich kam oft aus dem Dauergrinsen nicht mehr heraus. Ob das die Ausführungen über den Bartwuchs in der Religionsgeschichte, die Form des Tanzes in der japanischen und europäischen Kultur oder die vielen uns fremden Sitten und Riten im japanischen Alltag waren. Ständig erkannte ich wieder neue Parallelen bei den dargestellten Figuren zwischen Gilbert, Yosa und auch dem Haiku-Dichter Basho. Das Buch war einfach eine Wohltat. Es ist ein schönes Beispiel, dass zeitgenössische anspruchsvolle Literatur auch mal leicht und verspielt und nicht inhaltsschwer daherkommen muss. Sehr empfehlenswert. favorites nomis-booker-int nomis-d-buchpreis31 s Jerrie1,003 144

I really did not understand what the author was trying to do with this book. I understand that Gilbert travels to Japan on a whim and decides to follow in the steps of Basho. In Tokyo, he meets a young man following a book on places suitable for suicide. At each spot in their travels, the reality doesn’t fit the splendor described in their respective books. No suitable spot for suicide is found. The majesty of Basho’s Japan no longer exists. Otherwise, there is little sense to be made of this.
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