The consolations of literature

On a train trip West from Tokyo on the Chuo line you pass by the Northern slopes Mount Fuji, but from the angles offered it’s hard to see the summit. This was doubly the case when we did it on the way to the Nagano prefecture because that early September day was rainy and misty. I pointed my phone’s camera in the vague direction of the peak but I was guessing and it wasn’t worth pressing the shutter. There was nothing to see. Mount Fuji’s looming presence expressed itself as an absence beyond viewing. In a charity store yesterday I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This contains a couple of additional accounts of the poet’s famous travels, including ‘The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton’, in which Bashō writes: 💬 “I crossed the barrier-gate of Hakone on a rainy day. All the mountains were deeply buried behind the clouds. In a way It was fun Not to see Mount Fuji In foggy rain.” Well, sometimes it’s comforting to know…