This Exhibition is at the Scottish National Gallery, Princes Street, Edinburgh but alas only till 25/2/24. The good lady and I only managed to get to it last week.

One of Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji: “Sudden shower below the summit” from 36 views of mount Fuji:-

Kasawe Hasul’s Shin Ōhashi Bridge from Twenty Views of Tokyo:-

Concert Hall by Sybil Andrews. I liked the very Art Deco feel of this:-

A Picasso print. It looks like a ‘face’ playing card:-

Toulouse Lautrec’s ‘Jane Avril’. I grew up with Toulouse Lautrec’s prints on my grandparents’ and, later, parents’ walls. I inherited a couple which now hang in my bedroom.

There was a Hockney:-

a Vanessa Bell:-

and I rather liked this John Piper offering:-

If you want to see it you’ll have to be quick. The exhibition is due to end on Sunday.

Canongate, 2013, 456 p

Spence’s previous novel The Pure Land  in retrospect represents a pivot in his writing. Its novelisation of the life of Thomas Blake Glover, who helped the industrialisation of Japan in the nineteenth century, signalled his fascination with that country and a departure from writing prose using Scottish settings. A poet as well as a novelist, his interest in and composition of haiku are well suited to this present endeavour, an exploration of the life of the Zen Buddhist master who invented the koan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” That monk was Hakuin Ekaku, who was born Nagasawa Iwajiro but was given – or took – the names Ekaku (Wise Crane) and Hakuin (Hidden-in-Whiteness) later in life. Spence’s latest novel Mister Timeless Blyth also deals with someone deeply involved with Japanese culture.

Night Boat is necessarily steeped in the Zen Buddhism practice of seeking enlightenment. We learn that Hakuin was initially inspired by his mother’s religious devotion but also that he was not immune to the attractions of the temporal world, only chose to ignore them. To that end he travelled through Japan seeking the most insightful teachers.

The ascetic lifestyle of a Zen Buddhist monk is a constant theme. Their frugality and distaste for waste even leads them to rinse their bowls and drink the liquid. That it also requires a form of begging, or at least reliance on charity, means it is actually a kind of parasitism. (Mind you, the same could be said of all religions and the ways they sustain themselves.)

Hakuin’s composure is illustrated by the incident when a young pregnant woman claimed he was the father of her child. Despite the loss to his reputation this represents he merely responded by saying “Is that so?” and took the child into his care. (The woman later relented and named the real father whereupon Hakuin relinquished the child and said he was glad the child now had a father.)

At a gathering of monks Hakuin relates the story of a country bumpkin who boasted about his visit to Kyoto before someone asked him about the Shirakawa River (which is nothing but a small stream) and he said it was night time when his boat sailed on it and he couldn’t really see it. In other words, his visit was a fabrication, a tale he’d made up. In that sense, all novels are night boats and it highlights the question of how much of this Night Boat is based on known facts about Hakuin and how much due to Spence’s novelistic imagination. This, of course, can be asked of any biographical novel but it is perhaps unwise of an author to draw attention to it as it tends to undermine the artifice, subvert the suspension of disbelief.

The text is sprinkled with haiku. As someone with no knowledge of the life and works of Hakuin, (he was also an artist, several references are made to his paintings, especially of Mount Fuji,) I have to assume that these haiku are translations of originals written by Hakuin rather than invented by Spence. Most of these depend for their effect on sparseness or else embody enigmas.

We also have the posing of several koans of which perhaps the most resonant is “What now?”

Spence’s writing here is always well more than adequate to the task and his research has obviously been formidable but there is something almost pointless about Hakuin’s search for meaning, something akin to considering the number of angels capable of dancing on the head of a pin. Beyond informing about his life and thought those of us who had little prior knowledge regarding Hakuin what utility does it have? Granted, it does illustrate a small part of the human condition but I doubt there are many larger lessons to be drawn from it.

The cover illustration’s a cracker though. (Fuji from the Ford at Kanaya, by Hokusai, Katsushika.)

Pedant’s corner:- “There was story” (there was a story,) Shotestu (elsewhere Shotatsu.) “‘You have showed one-pointed determination’” (You have shown,) sunk (sank,) can‘t (can’t.)

Canongate, 2012, 349 p.

Tan Twan Eng is the first Malaysian author whom I have read, though The Garden of Evening Mists is not a translation, being written in English and on the Booker Prize short list in 2012.

Narrator Teoh Yun Ling is a prominent Malaysian judge planning to retire as she is beginning to show the first signs of memory loss. During the Japanese occupation in the Second World War she – along with her sister, Yun Hong – had been imprisoned in an internment camp where Yun Ling suffered the loss of two fingers in a punishment (and Yun Hong was forced into being one of the jugun ianfu (military comfort women.) Yun Ling was the only survivor (“I was lucky.”) Post-war she made her name in legal circles by taking part in the War Crimes Tribunal as a prosecutor.

The novel is Yun Ling’s account of her life especially during the Malayan ‘Emergency’ of the 1950s when she briefly abandoned her legal career to try to fulfil her sister’s dream – following a visit to Japan in 1938 – of building her own Japanese garden. Despite her hatred of Japanese people she agreed to become a pupil of Nakimura Aritomo, a Japanese man living locally, who had once been the Emperor’s gardener but had come to Malaya – apparently in disgrace – before the war began, built a garden called Yugiri (the garden of evening mists of the title which, among others, utilises the principle of ‘borrowed scenery’) and several times during the war interceded with the occupiers to ease the lot of local Malays. Another principle character is Magnus, a Boer, who recounts the iniquities of the British treatment of Boer civilians during the Second Boer War in the original concentration camps as if to point out the lack of difference between Japanese and British. Nevertheless the war caused a frosting of the relationship between Magnus and Aritomo. (I note here that Asian names in the book are given in the Oriental style, family name first.)

Aritomo’s designs for the garden are rendered in the style of ukiyo-e prints (think Hokusai’s “Great Wave”) and he is also skilled in the art of horimono – whole body tattoos – both of which are not incidental to the unfolding secret of the book.

Tan weaves all these ingredients together into a compelling narrative, holding back information till just the right point, introducing complicating characters to build intrigue (for example the group of Japanese saying they wish to identify graves of the fallen but clearly with a different agenda,) illustrating the exigencies of life during the Emergency (which another author might have used as the book’s focus but Tan does not) and blending them all – including Yun Ling’s internment experiences – into the plot.

A slight clumsiness with information dumping early on and the speed with which Yun Ling comes to terms with Aritomo mean the novel doesn’t quite scale the absolute highest literary peaks but it is at times exquisitely written. It was certainly worth a place on that Booker prize short list. No surprise it didn’t win though. It was up against Bring up the Bodies.

Pedant’s corner:- “‘five week’s time’” (five weeks’ time,) “‘For goodness’ sake’” (if the apostrophe is there ‘for goodness’s sake, better to leave it out.) “‘My mother died when I was a four’” (when I was four,) snuck (sneaked,) in a list of Japanese gardening tools – named in italics – their translations are given immediately after, but the first translation ‘mallet’ is still in italics. “‘Less chances of an ambush’” (‘Less chance’, or, ‘Fewer chances’, but it was in dialogue.) “‘He’s works in Bangkok’” (He works in Bangkok,) miniscule (minuscule,) “sharing them with Yun Ling and the other women in my hut” (it is Yun Ling narrating this, so ‘sharing them with Yun Hong’.) “A line of cars were parked” (strictly; a line …. was parked.) “The two men looked at each another” (‘at each other’; or, ‘at one another’,) tealeaves (tea-leaves.)