Kurze Inhaltsangabe
Gilbert Silvester, Privatdozent und Bartforscher im Rahmen eines universitären Drittmittelprojekts, steht unter Schock. Letzte Nacht hat er geträumt, dass seine Frau ihn betrügt. In einer absurden Kurzschlusshandlung verlässt er sie, steigt ins erstbeste Flugzeug und reist nach Japan, um Abstand zu gewinnen. Dort fallen ihm die Reisebeschreibungen des klassischen Dichters Bashō in die Hände, und plötzlich hat er ein Ziel: Wie die alten Wandermönche möchte auch er den Mond über den Kieferninseln sehen. Auf der traditionsreichen Pilgerroute könnte er sich in der Betrachtung der Natur verlieren und seinen inneren Aufruhr hinter sich lassen. Aber noch vor dem Start trifft er auf den Studenten Yosa, der mit einer ganz anderen Reiselektüre unterwegs ist, dem Complete Manual of Suicide.

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. ( )

Gilbert Silvester, un profesor universitario que investiga el imaginario de las barbas en la historia del cine, sueña una noche que su mujer le engaña. En un arrebato irracional, abandona su casa y se sube al primer avión disponible, rumbo a Japón. ¿Qué se le ha perdido a él, un cafetero empedernido y amante del pragmatismo occidental, en el país del té y del misterio? Poco tiempo tiene de pensar en ello, pues enseguida conoce a Yosa Tamagotchi, un estrafalario estudiante que, con su inseparable Manual completo del suicidiobajo el brazo, va en busca del lugar ideal para acabar con su insustancial vida. Incapaz de abandonarlo a su suerte, Gilbert decide acompañar a Yosa en su funesto peregrinaje, al tiempo que propone desdoblar el viaje y seguir la senda de los cuadernos de Bashô, el célebre poeta de haikus, para ver brillar la luna sobre los pinos de Mastushima.

Las islas de los pinos es una aventura luminosa y profundamente poética, salpicada de toques fantásticos y grotescos, sobre el fracaso, la deserción y el abandono de certezas.

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. ( )