The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Page B

seemed so easy a route to progress-based well-being. The economy of spectacles and desires flourished, but it became detached from life-course expectations. It became harder to imagine where life should lead and what, besides commodities, should be in it. One iconic figure called public attention to this problem: the hikikomori is a young person, usually a teenage boy, who shuts himself in his room and refuses face-to-face contact. Hikikomori live through electronic media. They isolate themselves through engagement in a world of images that leaves them free from embodied sociality—and mired in a self-made prison. They capture the nightmare of urban anomie for many: there is a little bit of hikikomori in all of us. It is this nightmare that chapter 13 ’s Professor K saw in the glazed eyes of his students. It sent him to the countryside as a site for remaking students—and himself; and it has sent many other advocates, educators, and volunteers there also.
    Satoyama revitalization addresses the problem of anomie because it builds social relations with other beings. Humans become only one of many participants in making livability. Participants wait for trees and fungi to associate with them. They work landscapes that require human action yet exceed that requirement. By the turn of the century, several thousand satoyama revitalization groups had emerged across Japan. Some focus on water management, nature education, the habitat of a particular flower—or matsutake mushrooms. All are engaged in remaking persons as well as landscapes.
    To rebuild themselves, citizens’ groups mix science and peasant knowledge. Scientists often take leadership roles in satoyama revitalization. But they aim to incorporate vernacular knowledge; here, urban professionals and scientists consult elderly farmers for their advice. Some volunteer to help farmers with their work or interview elders about disappearing ways of life. Their goal is to restore working landscapes, and for this they need working knowledge.
    Mutual learning is also an important goal. Groups are candid about making mistakes—and learning from them. One report about satoyama work by a group of volunteers includes all the problems and mistakes of their efforts. Without coordination, they cut down too many trees. Some of the areas they cleared grew back even thicker with undesirablespecies. In the end, the report’s authors argue, the group developed a “do, think, observe, and do again” principle, elevating collective trial and error to an art. Since one of their goals was participatory learning, allowing themselves to make and observe mistakes was an important part of the process. The authors conclude, “To be successful, volunteers have to participate in the program at all levels and stages.” 5
    Groups such as Kyoto’s Matsutake Crusaders take advantage of the mushroom’s allure to make it the symbol for their commitments to renewing the working relations of people and forests. If matsutake do emerge—as they did in a Crusader’s well-worked hillside in the fall of 2008—they bring a surge of excitement to the volunteers. Nothing could be more thrilling than this unexpected entanglement with other participants in forest making. Pines, humans, and fungi are renewed in a moment of co-species being.
    No one thinks matsutake will bring Japan back to its pre-bubble glory. Rather than redemption, matsutake-forest revitalization picks through the heap of alienation. In the process, volunteers acquire the patience to mix with multispecies others without knowing where the world-in-process is going.

Discovering allies, Yunnan. Xiaomei admires a big mushroom (not matsutake) .
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    Anti-ending: Some People I Met along the Way
    W HEN I VISITED M ATSIMAN IN 2007, HE WAS LIVING in a small house on top of a hill with his girlfriend and a large number of cats. (“Matsi” is American slang for matsutake.) I had wanted to see matsutake growing in the tanoak forests of coastal