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March 25, 2021
Hannah Kirshner's Playlist for Her Book "Water, Wood, and Wild Things"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Hannah Kirshner's book Water, Wood, and Wild Things is an enchanting immersion into the town of Yamanaka, Japan, its craftspeople, traditions, and daily life.
Library Journal wrote of the book:
"[Kirshner’s] many adventures working at the sake bar, taking tea lessons, luxuriating in hot springs baths, appreciating the subtleties of the Japanese language, learning to dance, assisting with wood turning, and going duck and boar hunting are punctuated with charming sketches and recipes for delicacies such as pickles, bean gelee, sake ice cream, miso-cured eggs, fried chicken, dumplings, game stew, pickled wasabi greens, tempura, rice balls, persimmon leaf sushi, and more. . . . Travel readers who appreciate off-the-beaten-path locales and local cuisine will enjoy this dreamy account."
In her words, here is Hannah Kirshner's Book Notes music playlist for her book Water, Wood, and Wild Things:
I wrote Water, Wood, and Wild Things about a place—Yamanaka Onsen, in Ishikawa, Japan—and people making the things defining that place, each of them rooted in tradition but firmly standing in the present. Over the course of four years researching and recording these narratives, I apprenticed in a sake bar, followed a boar hunter named Sakura (cherry blossom), practiced the zen-inspired process of sado (matcha tea ceremony), learned from master craftsmen to turn bowls and carve trays, brewed saké, grew rice and adzuki beans—and found a sense of home.
The songs on this playlist evoke tile-roofed wooden houses in a verdant valley scented with the mineral aroma of hot spring water; moody mountains that made me nostalgic for the melancholy indie rock of my Pacific Northwest youth; vintage samurai movies playing on an old TV in the corner while friends sip saké from wooden cups; jazz bars like b-movie sets, smoky coffee shops full of characters that remind me of Twin Peaks (a show that attracted busloads of Japanese tourists to my hometown to snap pictures of the mountain). It’s a place full of wonder and mystery, but also ordinary. If you look closely, perhaps wherever you are marooned by the current pandemic is just as interesting as Yamanaka.
For an escape to rural Ishikwawa: run yourself a hot bath, add some mineral salts and a few sprigs of cypress or cedar, and imagine you are in the mountains above the Japan Sea while you listen to my soundtrack for Water, Wood, and Wild Things.
1. Akiko Kanazawa, “Yamanaka Bushi”
This is literally the soundtrack to Yamanaka, the town’s very own folk song. On weekends, when tourists come to admire the nostalgic scenery and in the onsen (hot spring) Yamanaka Bushi floats over the town like the mist rising from Kakusenkei gorge. Long before the song was standardized and recorded, you would have heard the voices of young ladies attending to merchant sailors who came to rest between voyages. They sang together at the open air baths, which have attracted travelers for over a millennium now.
2. Sunny Day Real Estate, “Pillars”
Maybe it’s the evergreens, ferns and moss that makes me want to be awash in the sounds of Seattle, maybe it’s the relentless dampness and decay.
3. Elliot Smith, “Say Yes”
Or maybe it's the emotional vulnerability of writing a book so far from home. Of always searching for the right words, the right way to act in a place where I don’t yet have fluency. I feel as raw as a teenager, but there’s a sweetness and excitement to that feeling too.
4. Shonen Knife, “Green Tea”
I can’t really tell you why I’m drawn to Japan any better than I can say why I like ice cream, but there’s so much Japanese art, architecture and food that’s become part of Pacific Northwest culture, so it was always around me. I do know that it was the artwork of Yoshitomo Nara (which I happened upon in Seattle’s Kinokuniya bookstore) that made me decide as a pink-haired punk teen that I had to study Japanese. And he has illustrated several album covers for Shonen Knife.
5. The Pees “Nihonshu wo Nondeiru”
“I’m drinking nihonshu…” the singer slurs (nihonshi means Japanese alcohol, what we call saké, and saké just means alcohol). This one’s for my bike messenger friend Takuya, who introduced me to Yusuke, the saké obsessive who first invited me to Yamanaka to work in his bar. That’s what started this whole book. Yusuke says there’s music for wine and for beer, but not for saké, so he often plays Irish or Scottish music in his bar. But sometimes Takuya and I hijack the sound system to play weird vintage pop and punk rock.
6. Shintaro Sakamoto, “ I Don’t Know What’s Normal”
This is a song about chance encounters in a small town. Each person in Water, Wood, and Wild Things is on a path to mastery of their craft, but they are part of a community too, their work weaves into the fabric of the local culture. Each friendship I made in Yamanaka opened another door, and each craft I began to understand illuminated the next.
7. Hanare Gumi, “Whisky ga, Osuki Desho”
The chorus translates, roughly, to “It seems I like whisky... shall I drink a little more? shall we talk a little more?” Make yourself a highball with cheap malt whiskey, cracked ice, and cold seltzer, and I’ll show you another side of Yamanka (this could be the theme song of chapter five, “Wood & Whiskey.”)
8. Midori Hara, “Yamanaka Bushi”
You’re in a jazz bar with dark walls and low light. There’s a piano, but no one really plays it. The bartender serving another round of highballs wears a steampunk kimono. Your drinking companions are craftsmen—they call themselves “ossan,” slang for an unsavory middle aged man (they mean it in self-deprecating jest). Loosened by the drinks, they reveal their thoughts on tradition, aesthetics, and craft. These are some of the best woodturners and lacquer artisans in Yamanaka—and therefore the world.
9. Cat Power, “Wild is the Wind”
Those craftsmen became my good friends, but it was the wilderness of Yamanaka I really fell for. In Cat Power’s cover of “Wild is the Wind”, I hear Nina Simone too—longing for something that can’t be possessed, admiring wildness and ephemerality. The same feeling could be a love letter to a perfect spring day in the mountains, collecting bitter wild vegetables and admiring golden yamabuki flowers quivering in the cool breeze.
10. Angelo Badalamenti, “Twin Peaks Main Theme”
Out in those dark woods, I could mistake this place for my childhood home...
11. Enume “Smoke Sesh with the Homie Totoro”
...or a Miyazaki film. It’s not just me: my Yamanaka friends will say a mossy grove reminds them of Princess Mononoke, and they called the place where I made a vegetable garden “the Totoro house.” In that unbelievably green and fertile field, I grew local vegetables, picked persimmons, and chatted with elderly neighbors about how things used to be.
12. Packed Rich, “Umeshu”
Making umeshu is a way to mark the seasons, a remnant of a connection to nature revered but increasingly rare in Japan. Every summer that I am in Yamanaka, I fill a large glass jar with ume “plums” (botanically closer to apricots), rock sugar, and white liquor, and wait until fall to drink my umeshu.
13. Hiroshi Itsuki, “Furusato”
Furusato is a tribute to the Japanese countryside—to the idealized hometown of the collective imagination.
14. Yo La Tengo, “Roll on Babe”
Yo La Tengo was part of the soundscape of my own furusato, a place I long to return to that exists only in memory. This is new Yo La Tengo (Yoshitomo Nara illustrated the album cover), but it has the right feeling. Yamanaka has everything I love about my hometown, without any of the personal baggage.
15. Bright Eyes “June on The West Coast”
Nostalgia, newness, becoming who you were meant to be, finding your way home—I feel about the west coast of Japan the way Connor Oberst feels about the object of his affection in this song. My book ends on a note of both loss and optimism; as woodturner Takehito Nakajima told me, we are making things now that will be considered traditional in 100 years.
Hannah Kirshner is a writer, artist, and food stylist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Saveur, Taste, Food52, Marie Claire, and Atlas Obscura, among others. Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, Kirshner grew up on a small farm outside Seattle and divides her time between Brooklyn and rural Japan.
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