JAPAN’S BIGGEST TREE | TRAVEL MEMOIR PODCAST | KAGOSHIMA | New Book 2023
JAPAN
Letters to Kody is an upcoming podcast and a book of non-fiction travel memoir, to be published in early 2023.
My name is D. J. Swales, an author of fiction. This time I wish to tell you a true story . . .
In 2016, a car tragically collided with a fire truck in Kentucky. While on his way to a job at Walmart, a young man lost his life. His name was Kody. He dreamt of seeing the world.
These travel memoirs are dedicated to Kody’s lust for travel. They are an invitation from the open road, from my nomadic life following in the footsteps of my grandfather, an old Irish sea dog who was knocked down the hold of a ship in Hamburg.
Together, I hope we can carry Kody's spirit to the places he longed to see.
Dear Kody,
A lazy eagle circles, ready for its nest. Neon Pachinko halls and the white lights of noodle houses glare in the evening air as an ash column rises from Sakurajima volcano. Heading north, our minivan careens along the dark tarmac highway from the “Naples of Japan”, as Kagoshima, the home of Saigo Takamori, the Last Samurai, likes to be known. Fiery temperaments, quick wits, and the daily threat of volcanic Armageddon are traits of both cities.
On a sharp turn, praying its the right one, jabbing fingers point to paving slabs that climb a nearby hill. They vanish under a thick shroud of tall-trunked pines. That rare surviving Samurai road, I discover, is where the Last Samurai led the soldiers of his Satsuma rebellion, vowing to halt the Meiji modernisation of Japan.
In the sky, purple streaks that blossomed, now die, cut through by a clean line of ruby red that points towards the fast-arriving cloak of night. It dissolves too, like blood on imaginary black blotting paper.
Cicadas and tree frogs announce our minivan’s arrival. Seemingly affronted by the rush of air conditioning, they double down as we scuttle, dash, and sidestep - respectfully - towards the grounds of the Kamou Hachiman Shrine. The air thickens as I pass beneath the bright red torii gate. In a Starbucks in Kumamoto, while I sipped a matcha latte, a kind lady told me that red torii gates signify a Shinto temple, from Japan’s indigenous Animist religion, rather than imported Buddhism from faraway India. That was the best thing I ever learned in a Starbucks.
In the dissolving light, my friend cries, there it is! We turn, as if pulled by invisible cords, towards a vast tangled black mass that seems to have its own gravity, like the hub of a hundred Ley Lines. 'Kamou no Okusu', the temple’s great camphor tree, the reason we are here, swells with each step of our approach, in height, breadth and inward gravity, rising far above the blurring outlines of the curling temple roofs. In the sunless night, birds sleep in high branches thirty metres above our heads. Though shorter than the Jomon Sugi cedars that I’ll soon seek out on the monkey island of Yakushima, the squat truck of 'Kamou no Okusu' could swallow them whole and come back for pudding.
Bewitched, we survey the lightless scene with astonishment, so keen to drink in the sight that we come close to manifesting night vision, or the sonar of bats that sail around the tree like a vampiric carousel.
Fans enchanted by Studio Ghibli’s famous animated movie, My Neighbour Totoro, say that the Kamou Hachiman Shrine’s great camphor tree most mirrors the film, where spirits called kami cluster in the oldest camphors, trees known for healing and medicinal qualities. Kody, you loved Anime, I remember. I also recall your own love of art, and your incredible illustrations! I like to think that you watched My Neighbour Totoro a dozen times, and could hum its famous soundtrack in an instant.
On a raised boardwalk we shrink in the presence of 'Kamou no Okusu'. We are involuntary Lilliputians of Gulliver’s Tales. We circle the tree’s 1,500 year-old trunk which contorts and twists in a host of gargantuan agonies. I wonder if a sorcerer once clasped a Bonsai and ordered it to swell to the size of a whale. What an idea for a book. Imagine a forest of them!
The crescent moon and the early stars seem to watch as the fairy-tale scene demands that we whisper and smile like children, gazing in delight at boughs as big as trees, and feeling the quiver of leaves that beg to be touched by outstretched hands. I wonder if they might share enchantments, or if I could ask nicely for a leaf or three to take back to England. A small door in the hollow trunk is said to lead to a chamber as big as eight tatami mats, a form of Japanese measurement; where children played, monks slept, and people sheltered from war. So be it, but all of us here feel the unmistakable pull of a portal, a gateway to another realm. Or several, depending on seasons and the permissions of the moon.
Scenes of the oaks from Pan’s Labyrinth and Sherwood Forest flood my mind, as do melancholy thoughts of the great trees of the Druids, nurtured like bonsai for a thousand years, formed into living buildings, which the axes and adherents of a new religion took decades to cut down. I picture the scene of Saint Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon patron saint of Germany, cutting down Thor’s Oak after leaving England to convert the tribes of his peoples that clung to Pagan ways that reflected the beliefs of Japanese Shintoism. I see Saint Patrick and his followers zealously labouring for more than a decade to cut down thick groves of grand holy oaks beside Dublin. I ponder the miraculous giants that were lost. In Japan, the holy trees survive, as do the spirits that live inside them. Any skeptic need only stand in moonlight under 'Kamou no Okusu' to question why whichever god they worship keeps secrets from them.
Tonight, in Kagoshima’s narrow lanes of inns, and covered malls where fortune tellers beckon passers-by to sit, I will ponder on the great camphor tree. And in the morning light, as wide-winged kites patrol waist-high in the alleyways of the prior night, I will walk under the smouldering cone of Sakurajima, and lock eyes once again with the bubble-wrap man who sleeps outside the 7-11.
Kody, maybe it’s the magic of the tree, but I will awaken in Kagoshima with a new character for my books, the ones all dedicated to you. In my Fitzmarbury Witches dark fiction series, a young woman called Sonoko arrives in Bloomsbury. A native of Kagoshima, she was born a mile from 'Kamou no Okusu', her powers drawing from that which dwelled in the night, around the sacred camphor.
D. J.
DISCOVER THE ENTHRALLING BOOKS OF AUTHOR D. J. SWALES:
Don't miss the thrilling history and occult horror of the FITZMARBURY WITCHES SERIES
Be terrified by the short story, PARIS: A CURSE COMES TO THE CITY OF THE CATACOMBS
Immerse yourself in the bestselling darkness of MIDNIGHT'S TWIN: DARK POEMS PENNED IN MIDNIGHT HOURS
Be charmed by the feel-good magical realism of PEOPLE OF BLOOMSBURY
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