M Train

Patti Smith's M Train (2015) is a much different book than her National Book Award winning memoir Just Kids. This book is something of a memoir and something of a travel book combined. I find Smith a compelling person with alluring interests that range from modern explorers (Alfred Wegener) to 19th century poets (Rimbaud). We have many similar tastes in literature and films-two things that have informed much of her recent travel. One of her quests was to retrieve stones from the French prison (Papillion's) in French Guina and eventually lay them at Jean Genet's grave in Larache, Morocco. Whielin Morroco for a symposium on the Beat poets and writers, and Paul Bowles in particular. It is during this visit that she delivers her stones. I am also a big fan of Bowles writing and envy the fact that she got to meet him for an interview before his death. In addition, Morocco is high on my "bucket list" destinations. These two trips are bookends for the memoir. The first trip was one that Smith took with her now departed husband Fred "Sonic" Smith-thus it is pregnant with memories and nostalgia that came bubbling forth once she finally laid the stones more than 20 years alter at the grave of one of her beloved authors. Not all of the travel are physical they are the mental travels of time and memory to her days with Smith in Michigan to her recent life in an apartment in Greenwich Village, New York. However, ti also chronicles her journey to buying a place on Rockaway Beach that is destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in which we find her waiting for it to be rebuilt at the end of the book. These journeys and those that take place in her apartment and favorite coffee shops are far less compelling than the artist inspired pilgrimages that she records in these pages. These includes trips to places that I have visited: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's house, Casa Azul, in Mexico City and Tokyo and the grave sites of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Since I live in Tokyo I was especially interested in her obsessions with writers Ryunosuke Akutagwa, Osamu Dasai, Yukio Mishima, and Haruki Murakami. I wanted to ask her why she left out Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki-two of my favorites that she doesn't mention. I was equally amused with her eating choices and her stay at the ultra cool modernist Hotel Okura, which is slated to be torn down and remodeled in the near future. A couple of her meals were at Mifune-a Kurosawa themed restaurant run by the actor Toshiro Mifune's family in Roppongi that I have been to before. I suspect that if she tried, being a well-known artist and writer, she could have gotten a meeting with Murakami as well. At any rate, several of the other pilgrimages are moving and enlightening. For example she visits the graves of Sylvia Plath, Rimbaud, Dasai, and Akutagwa as well. The Wegener Society meetings seemed interesting and exotic as well-I believe they took place in Berlin, Germany and Iceland. At any rate, it was overall an inspiring collection of travel informed by reading and appreciation of people present and past.