46 pages • 1 hour read
Patti SmithM Train
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Her Name Was Sandy”
Content Warning: This section discusses suicide and natural disasters.
It is Halloween 2012. Smith and her friend Jem go to the bungalow to take photos and walk along the boardwalk. On the way back to Manhattan, Smith realizes that she left her camera on the beach. She is upset; though it was not her only camera, it was her favorite. As they part, Jem warns that a storm is coming: Hurricane Sandy. At home, Smith is uneasy, not just because of the storm but because Halloween marks Fred’s passing. She decides to go back to Rockaway Beach but learns that because of the storm, the whole city is shutting down, and the trains are not running.
She waits out the storm and thinks about Fred’s death. There was also a storm the Halloween that he died. She writes that the raging wind and rain personify Fred’s “rage and sorrow for being torn away” (160). After the storm breaks, the city is left without gas or electricity for days. The boardwalk in Rockaway Beach has been completely destroyed, and Zak’s café is gone. Smith’s bungalow, however, is safe.
Smith spends some time in Spain and then returns to New York and visits the bungalow. Her neighbors have boarded up their windows and draped an American flag across their front door to protect it from looters. Her friend, Klaus, explains that it shows that the house is “under protection of the people” (164).
For her 66th birthday, Klaus and a friend drive her to Rockaway Beach to check on the bungalow again. While there, Smith sees more of the hurricane’s devastation. Returning home to Manhattan, Smith spends the evening watching movies and thinking about “the premature end of certain men. Fred. Pollock. Coltrane. Todd” (166). She is astounded by the weight of her new age.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Vecchia Zimarra”
Some years ago, Smith met a poet and admired his coat. When he told her he would give her anything she wanted for her birthday, she asked for the coat. The poet happily obliged. Smith loved the coat and wore it all the time, but one day, it disappeared. She still looks for the coat wherever she goes, hoping that one day it will miraculously reappear. She ponders all the lost things in the world.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Mu”
Smith cannot easily visit her bungalow because the train is still not running. She will have to wait until spring before she can begin renovations. She wishes things could be as they were. Even Café ’Ino is closed for the holidays.
Smith decides to visit her friend Ace in Japan. Ace is a wonderful guide; the last time Smith visited, he took her to the grave of writer and poet Yushio Mishima (1925-1970), and Smith wants to visit more graves of important Japanese writers. She also wants to visit another friend, Yuki, who is engaged in humanitarian relief work for orphans after the Tōhoku earthquake.
Before she leaves, Smith makes lists of what to take with her and dreams about Detective Holder, a character from The Killing. He tells her that he is tying up loose ends. She brings books by Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) on her trip. She does not read very much on the plane. She watches Master and Commander twice because the character of Captain Jack Aubrey reminds her so much of Fred. She begins to cry, wishing that Fred would come back to her.
At her hotel in Tokyo, she dreams of visiting Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s home and seeing silkworms repairing a ghostly dressing robe. She tries to write but finds that she thinks more than she writes. She wants to write something for Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Osamu Dazai, both of whom died by suicide, but she does not want to disturb Akutagawa’s spirit. She finds that Dazai’s spirit, on the other hand, “seem[s] to be everywhere” and decides to write about him (183). She spends her first week in Japan in solitude, struggling to write anything of value. Soon after, Ace calls her through their mutual friend and translator, Dice. They invite her out to dinner and plan to visit a number of graves and temples.
Ace and Dice pick Smith up the next day and take her to a Buddhist temple in Kamakura and the graves of filmmakers Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) and Yasujirō Ozu (1903-1963). Ozu’s grave does not bear his name, only the Japanese character mu, which means “nothingness.” The next day, they visit Dazai’s grave. Smith washes the grave and places bundles of fresh flowers in the flower holders. The sun comes out, and Smith believes that Dazai must be happy. Finally, they visit Akutagawa’s grave, where Smith photographs an incense burner. On her way back to the car, Smith sees a cherry tree wrapped in burlap. She takes one final photo: “a comic mask whose ghostly tears seemed to streak the burlap’s worn threads” (194). This photograph is included on the opposite page.
The next day, Smith prepares to travel to visit her friend Yuki. She takes the bullet train to Sendai. Together, they visit the orphanage school that Yuki helps run and that Smith has donated to. They then visit a destroyed fishermen’s port. Yuki asks her if she will take a photograph of the destruction; Smith replies that she cannot take a photo of nothing.
Smith returns to Tokyo and has one last evening with Ace and Dice. At dinner, Smith admires a cup and tokkuri (sake bottle) decorated with Kurosawa’s official sign. When they leave, Ace reveals that he stole the cup and tokkuri for her.
The next day, Smith wonders what it would be like to bump into Murakami, but she does not feel his energy nearby. She goes over all the photographs she has taken on her trip and salutes Dazai and Akutagawa. She imagines them telling her not to waste her time on them but replies that she would be honored to one day be counted among them as a great writer.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Tempest Air Demons”
On her way home from Japan, Smith stops over in Venice Beach for a few days. Her bags get lost, and she boards her flight out of Los Angeles with only her carry-on possessions, including one of her journals. The journal contains two photographs from her trip: one of her daughter and one she took at Sylvia Plath’s (1932-1963) grave in England. She writes about Plath and reflects that she has spent a lot of time lately with writers who died by suicide. She remembers traveling to Heptonstall, where Plath is buried, to photograph her grave. She was proud of all five photographs she took, but a few days later, she lost them during her travels. She later returned to Plath’s grave and attempted to recreate them, but the lighting was wrong. She visited Plath’s grave a third time and managed to take a photograph that she was happy with, but it was still not as good as the original, lost photos.
When Smith arrives home, she is devastated to find that she lost her journal and, with it, the surviving photo of Plath’s grave. She tries to convince herself that she has enough possessions, but she is overjoyed when, a few days later, the journal and photograph are returned to her in an unmarked envelope.
Trying to get her routine back, Smith goes to Café ’Ino. The owner, Jason, invites her in and tells her that he is closing the café. Smith is stunned and sits at her usual table one last time. She gets a passing girl to take a photo of her at the table. Smith does not ask Jason why he is closing the café, feeling that “the answer wouldn’t make any difference anyway” (211). Jason gives her the table she usually sits at and the accompanying chair as a memento.
That night, she dreams of the cowpoke. Together, they reflect on how they keep coming back to one another. Smith wakes, feeling that something is coming. She reflects that people want what they cannot have and that everything changes, whether you want it to or not.
Chapter 14 Summary: “A Dream of Alfred Wegener”
Smith collects her mail and finds a letter from the CDC, telling all members to destroy any official correspondence, as the club is disbanding. Smith finds her archival box containing everything she has collected over the years relating to the CDC and burns everything. She thinks about Alfred Wegener and wonders what he saw in his final moments in Greenland. She thinks about Wegener and his wife, Else, having tea together. She starts to write.
Chapters 10-14 Analysis
Smith mentions several writers in this section of the memoir. She visits the graves of Yasujirō Ozu, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and Osamu Dazai. Ozu was one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, getting his start in silent films. He was known for his use of unusual and striking camera angles. Akutagawa was a writer and poet. He is particularly famous for his influence on the short story genre in Japan. Osamu Dazai is the pen name of Shūji Tsushima, a writer and left-wing activist celebrated in Japan but not particularly widely read in other parts of the world. Smith feels a particular connection to American poet and writer Sylvia Plath. Plath’s most famous work is her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which was largely about her experiences with mental illness.
The title of the chapter about Smith’s lost coat is “Vecchia Zimarra.” This title is a reference to one of the songs in Puccini’s famous opera, La Bohème. In English, the song is usually called “Old Coat.” Though the Italian word zimarra now refers to a chimere, a kind of sleeveless cloak often worn by bishops, the word is used to refer to a winter coat more generally. In Puccini’s opera, the song is sung by a character who pawns his coat to buy medicine for a dying friend. This link reinforces the theme of Grief and Loss and the way that everyday objects and interactions can lead to meaningful memories.
Smith interprets Writing About Nothing in new ways in this part of the story. Writing about nothing can mean writing about what is left after destruction. She reckons with the destruction of the boardwalk after Hurricane Sandy and the destruction of the fishing port after the earthquake in Japan. She struggles with the idea of taking a photograph of nothing, which is difficult for her for the same reasons that writing about nothing is hard. For Smith, writing about nothing really means writing about what used to exist but no longer does. The absence is painful, but it is only painful because of what used to be. For example, there is now nothing left of the CDC, and Smith keeps no mementos. This absence would not be meaningful if she had not been part of the CDC to begin with. The concept of nothingness is captured by the mu character on Ozu’s grave. His grave presents death as a kind of nothingness, given meaning only because of the life that came before it.
Once again, Smith’s life vacillates between Solitude and Connection. She intends to spend her birthday alone, but the people who love her insist on spending time with her. She travels to Japan alone, but her important friendships with Ace, Dice, and Yuki bring her out of herself. Yuki in particular allows Smith to find connection through shared loss. Loss and emptiness can bring a profound sense of isolation, as Smith is intimately aware. She misses Fred constantly and is usually alone. But when she does open herself up to connections with other people, she is able to share the burden of grief and loss instead of carrying it all herself. As always, Smith also connects with people she never met and people who are long dead. Her vivid imagination helps her perceive these individuals as fully complex, fully realized people, even if she will never meet them. While her solitude is valuable to her, these chapters demonstrate how connection and friendship make life meaningful, especially after loss.
Grief and loss are writ large in this section of the book. There is an ongoing interplay between personal loss and large-scale, collective loss. Smith’s writing draws parallels between the slow process of grief after a death and the gradual process of rebuilding after a disaster. Before Hurricane Sandy, Smith had a personal objection to Halloween because it reminded her of Fred’s death; there was also a storm the year when died. Now, her feelings are shared by many people who endured a traumatic storm around Halloween. Collective disasters are by no means something to celebrate, but in the aftermath, people often generate much-needed solidarity so that they can share their grief and heal more effectively. This solidarity is represented by the flag draped over the ruined home in Rockaway Beach, a symbol of the community’s protection.
Smith finds that although she still misses Fred very much, there are still echoes of him to be found in the most unexpected places. Watching Master and Commander lets Smith feel briefly closer to him by pure coincidence. Things that are lost do not come back, however, and reckoning with that loss is an important part of writing about nothing. Just as Fred is gone forever, so are Smith’s camera, coat, photographs of Sylvia Plath’s grave, and favorite café. However, echoes of lost things sometimes reappear, making loss feel, just for a moment, easier to bear.
