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 like 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. ( )

3-stars for now. Suspect rating may improve after I have pondered for a while. ( )

A short, quirky and determinedly ambiguous novel that manages to be captivatingly deep and mournful at the same time as being delightfully superficial and funny. And a book that operates as much through symbols as it does through explicit narrative (stand by for a lot of hair and trees...). Poschmann is clearly a writer who doesn't trouble to switch off the "poet" side of herself when she's playing the role of a novelist.

With - respectively - Basho's Narrow road to the deep north and The complete manual of suicide under their arms, Gilbert and Yosa, who have met by chance on the end of a station platform in Tokyo, set off on a modern version of the poet's pilgrimage to the pine islands of Matsushima. Both of them are at low points in their lives: Gilbert, who has been doing research (without very much conviction of its utility) into the iconography of beards in the cultural studies department of a German university, has run away from his breadwinner-wife after having a bad dream about her Medusa-like hair; Yosa, who even with a false beard doesn't manage to live up to his own ideal of Japanese masculinity, has decided to kill himself after becoming convinced that he has done badly in an exam. But, for a while at least, their respective failings complement each other and allow the two of them to form an uneasy team to navigate the strange world of modern Japan together.

Poschmann enjoys herself using the cultural collisions involved in this unlikely setup to make fun of the odder and less defensible aspects of Japanese and European cultures (and, in passing, of some of our ideas about masculinity), but at the same time she draws European readers into an appreciation of some of the less obvious strengths of the Japanese way of looking at the world. A pilgrimage to look at a rock or a tree isn't as obvious a thing to do as a pilgrimage to look at a building or a great painting, particularly if we find the tree in the middle of a building site or a traffic island, but it isn't hard to see (when we look at it through her eyes) how it can also have value to us.

Of course, the resulting book isn't a well-formed novel in a conventional western way - the explicit story doesn't come to a satisfactory resolution, and the situation isn't one that would bear rationalising - Gilbert's reasons for leaving his wife would seem flimsy even by the standards of Othello, and he seems to have learnt as much about Japan 24 hours after his unplanned arrival there as the author did after three months of intensive study, for instance. But that doesn't seem to matter: This is another of those books that make you want to plan a re-read as soon as you put them down. ( )

A short, amusing, thoughtful and poetic novel. A german specialist in beard fashions argues with his wife, in a huff goes to the airport and buys a ticket on the first long haul flight available. To Tokyo. There he bumps into and befriends, well not really; or teams up with, no not that either, well he travels in tandem with a young man contemplating suicide. The journey turns into a contemplation of Japanese concepts of natural beauty in the wake of Saigyo and Basho. His young travelling companion possibly becomes a ghost. He sends emails to his wife who is annoyed but not as puzzled as you might hve thought by his long distance grump. And who would have thought beard fashions could be so interesting? ( )

'Learning to die. The journey that serves to distance oneself from everything, in order to get closer to something, was nothing more than a contemplation of the space that resulted from the journey itself.'

Shortlisted for the 2019 MBI, Marion Poschmann's novel is a quirky, elusive little thing that, judging from the reviews on GR, clearly divides opinion. Gilbert Silvester's journey - both physical and metaphorical - is deliberately dream-like, slightly out of focus, something we reach out for but can't quite touch. And that, ultimately, is why I've come down on the 4-star rating, because I think it deserves it.

At first it seems like a parody of a journey of self-discovery, with the not-quite-likeable Gilbert taking it upon himself to 'save' the suicidal Yosa Tamagochi, to lecture him on Japanese history and the appreciation of haiku, Basho and various other cultural stereotypes. No wonder Gilbert's wife Mathilda, left back home in Germany, is exasperated with him. But then the journey becomes something else, as Gilbert loses track of Yosa, and that which he has been trying to keep alive is suddenly not there. We never get to find out what happened to Yosa, and this is entirely in keeping with the feel of the whole book. There is much made of dreams - indeed the whole business begins with Gilbert's dream of his wife's infidelity - and as the book progresses the line between reality and dream becomes so blurred that it can be hard to work out which is which. As Gilbert reaches his final destination, the pine islands of Matsushima in moonlight, there is no big revelation, no neat conclusion, simply a final line that touches on the cyclical nature of the seasons, the movement of life, a trembling moment of being between time: 'The leaves are starting to turn.'

Even just the process of writing this has made me appreciate the book all the more. I get why some people just don't like it, and maybe I'm the odd one out here. But, for me, both the original and the excellent English translation (by Jen Calleja) capture something of the oddity of a German author writing about Japan, and the inconclusion of two cultures meeting, of a journey of self-discovery that becomes something much bigger. It is a novel about the spaces in between what we say and think. Yep, I definitely enjoyed it and would recommend it. ( )