Kawamura Fujisan

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-90-832757-4-1
Verlag: PublishDrive
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 268 Seiten

Reihe: The Floating World

A bridge in Kyoto: In the middle of the night, John meets a mysterious old printmaker, Katsushika Hokusai, and a world-famous musician, Ichi. An intriguing confrontation with the past begins. John is struggling with the shame of choices made twenty years ago. Ichi wants to find out where she comes from. It's a story about guilt, love and betrayal. A quest for the truth.
The Floating World is a place where we try to forget the transience of life by indulging in amusement and pleasure. It's an imaginary world where we pretend to be something we're not, caught in constant conflict between a longing for authenticity and a longing to be seen and heard, to be special.
Fujisan (Japanese for Mount Fuji) is the first in a series of five stories from the Floating World. A journey through time, back to our origins, to discover what makes us who we are.
Kawamura is the pseudonym of a Dutch author. In , Kawamura has created a magical world based on the life and prints of the famous Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. And Hokusai himself plays a leading role...

With illustrations by Senne Trip

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kawamura

Weitere Mitwirkende

Trip, Senne

Spencer, Laura

Leseproben

Day 1 – John

I’ve come back to the past. Back to where it all began. Her world. I could never have done it before, but now here I am, lying on my futon in the middle of the night, relaxed and free from fear. The memories that tormented me for so long have lost their power. It’s as if I’ve gone through the drawings of my life with an eraser, stopping here and there to smooth out the emotions.

The slow, melancholy notes of the flute and clarinet alternate with the tender tones of the harp in the Introduction et Allegro by Ravel, one of my favourite pieces. The music starts subdued, allowing the intensity to build gradually. It’s the prelude to a latent wave of energy that rises up and sets everything in motion, turning anything in its path on its head. I allow myself to be carried along on the crest of the wave, feeling its force. My body vibrates with it.

‘John!’

Someone is calling my name. The wave knows my name.

‘Wake up, John!’

It’s not just the wave tossing me about; someone is physically shaking my body. I open my eyes and, in the half-light, I see the silhouette of a woman. Her head is bent close and I realise it’s my host, Mitsuyou.

‘John, we’ve got to get out of the house!’

The vibrations from my dream have crossed over into reality and the whole house is moving. I tug off my headphones, jump up from the bed and quickly pull on a shirt and a pair of trousers. The house creaks and cracks, and I’m grateful for the huge beams holding up the roof. Heading down the stairs to the ground floor, we have to grab on tight to the banister. We wobble and lean against each other as the lamps above our heads sway backwards and forwards, making our shadows flutter eerily over the treads, like drunken ghosts. I follow Mitsuyou’s long, loose hair, which cascades over her shoulders with every step. When we reach the front door, we quickly pull on our shoes before sliding it open.

The house I’m renting a room in stands on a narrow street, now crowded with people seeking safety just like us. I take in their tense, serious faces. Nobody speaks. People are holding each other and waiting to see what will happen next, resigned to their fate: the forces at work here defy prediction.

Mitsuyou stands close beside me, wearing a simple blue yukata. As if reading my thoughts, she apologises for her clothing, which she must have put on in a hurry. It’s also the first time I’ve seen her with loose hair, which falls down past her breasts. I look at her finely drawn features and her eyes, glinting in the light of the lanterns. She meets my gaze and the slightest hint of mockery in her expression tells me she saw, or felt, that I was watching her, though she says nothing more. I, too, keep my counsel.

We stand like that until the tremors start to ebb away and people gradually begin heading back home. They talk quietly, as if afraid to disturb the newfound equilibrium. Mitsuyou and I are the last to move, as if we don’t want to break the connection between us. I’m about to follow her back inside, when I change my mind. I ask whether she would like to join me for a stroll instead, but she shakes her head, flashes me a smile and disappears into the house.

I start walking slowly uphill. Nobody is outside anymore, though the lights are still glowing in almost every window I pass. The street curves round to the left, where it opens out onto a wide road, but I turn right and climb some stone steps that take me higher into the neighbourhood, then continue making my way uphill towards the Kiyomizu-dera Temple. As always in Japan, the empty streets are spotlessly clean. Encircled by a wreath of red leaves, the temple rises above me. Its gate is locked at this late hour and a couple of guards in the nearby security office cast me a bored glance. I nod to them and continue on, heading downhill now.

There is no sign anywhere of the force of nature that just made the houses shake, certainly not for the first time. Sometimes the homes will have come through the violence unscathed, but other times they will have had to be rebuilt, resulting in a new structure and form. Or perhaps the structure remained unchanged and only the form was different. People inevitably try to repair the damage, to make it as if nothing ever happened. And if that isn’t possible, they try to create something new, which always feels strange at first, until the memory of what was there before begins to fade and the new becomes the old, comfortable and familiar.

For me, there is no old or new in these streets. I don’t know whether that roof tile was already crooked yesterday. The roof doesn’t remind me of the events of earlier this evening, or any event at all. I can assume something happened to cause that tile, which was once straight, to become crooked, but I don’t know what. Perhaps the roofer was drunk, or it simply wasn’t his day, and the roof tile has always been crooked. The latter seems unlikely, though, given the Japanese eye for detail. The same meticulous care and attention goes into the traditional Japanese breakfast of tea, fish and rice I find outside my bedroom every morning, prepared by Mitsuyou before she goes to work. I’m usually already awake and hear the creak of the stairs as she comes up them quietly to put the tray down outside my door. Then there’s silence for a moment before I hear her walk back downstairs.

When I arrived in Kyoto, I wanted to find a place where I wouldn’t need to say how long I intended to stay. That wasn’t a problem for Mitsuyou. The house she inherited from her parents is on a quiet side street in the very busy tourist district of Higashiyama. A renovated machiya, it still has lots of traditional features. The front entrance is an ornately decorated wooden sliding door that opens onto a tiny hall, where you leave your shoes. You slide your feet into the waiting slippers and step up into the raised corridor, which leads either straight on to the small kitchen or round to the right, towards the bathroom and the steep stairs up to the first floor. Off the kitchen is a small balcony with a stream running beneath it. There are two bedrooms on the first floor. Mine is on the left-hand side of the landing, facing the street, and my host’s is on the right. They can be closed off from the landing by sliding panels made from wooden frames lined with paper, and there’s a futon on my bedroom’s tatami floor.

Mitsuyou is a doctor at a clinic. She leaves early in the morning and gets home at some point during the evening, so I have the house to myself all day. She lives for her work. In fact, during these first three weeks of my stay I have seen no sign of friends or family. I’m used to staying in hotels when I travel, but now suddenly I’m living with someone. I like her and find her attractive but, even though there’s a spark between us, it hasn’t lit a fire yet. Sometimes she stands close to me and our hands touch, but there’s an invisible line we haven’t crossed.

It’s hard to imagine she’s never been in a relationship, but there are no photos in the house and the only person she talks about is her sister, so I assume she doesn’t have children either. In the evenings, we’ll chat about what kind of day we’ve had. I’ll tell her what I saw on my walks, and she’ll share what happened at work – always at the kitchen table. If she gets home from work early, she cooks a meal and we eat it together. Other times I go out to grab something and she eats it later on when she gets home. We don’t need to exchange many words; it all comes naturally.

The old, narrow, cobbled streets are deserted, and the countless souvenir shops and restaurants are closed, wooden shutters over the windows. During the day they are swarmed with visitors wanting to catch a glimpse of the past, of a time when merchants and artisans touted their wares to women in kimonos, samurai strolled through the streets and courtesans offered their services to those who could pay. Smiling, one arm outstretched, the visitors of today try to make contact with those distant times, in search of something fleeting. Or seeking the opposite, wanting enduring evidence that they exist. They capture and share their experiences, making everyone a witness and adding to our joint mountain of memories. Only now that darkness has fallen, though, is there room for the past to come back to life. I hear the soft notes of a koto and a geisha walks towards me, her features hidden beneath a layer of white make-up. Unaffected by what she sees, where she is or in what century, she walks right past me and I breathe in a floral scent that I don’t recognise. When I turn around to watch her go, she has disappeared.

I walk on down the mountain towards the Kamo River, beneath the vibrant autumn colours of the trees. The night is still warm. I’m thirsty and the soft-drink machines on every corner glow invitingly. I put my hand in my pocket, where there are usually a few coins or a couple of notes to be found, but this time I’m out of luck. I walk past the old tram, the museums and the Rohm Theatre and then follow the footpath along the Okazaki Canal, down towards the river. Red leaves crackle under my...