Listening to Trees and the Haibun Form

by Holly Thompson

Listening to Trees: George Nakashima, Woodworker (Neal Porter/Holiday House, 2024) is my fourth picture book and first biography to be published. On a research visit to Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku, Japan, a friend took me to visit the George Nakashima Memorial Gallery to see pieces of George’s stunning furniture. “You know, you should write a biography of George Nakashima,” she said.

            I’d grown up appreciating fine woodworking. My father had loved working with wood—he made lamps, bowls, spoons, tables and more. He chopped wood and heated with wood. I was primed to pay attention to wood. And late in his life, he’d often page through George’s book The Soul of a Tree. While I was intrigued by my friend’s idea of a biography of the great craftsman, so much research was required. I’d need to hold that idea for several years while I completed my second and third verse novels and two poetry books in the works, plus, I was living in Japan, far from Nakashima Woodworkers in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

            But little by little, I began to research George Nakashima. 

            George’s journey to his particular woodworking ways was full of formative experiences: hiking in the Pacific Northwest and becoming an Eagle Scout; studying architecture in Washington, Massachusetts, and France; working at the architectural firm of Antonin Raymond in Japan and traveling with colleague Junzō Yoshimura; building and living at an ashram in Pondicherry, India; returning to the U.S., marrying, and starting a furniture making business; being incarcerated with his family at the Minidoka Prison Camp with his wife and newborn; making furniture with Issei carpenter Gentaro Hikogawa at Minidoka; being freed to live and work at the Raymond Farm in Pennsylvania until the end of the war. These layers of experiences seemed to provide George with the long view—the vision and determination to barter for land in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and build a home, family workshop and business from scratch following his unique woodworking ways.

            The deeper my research, the more moved I was by his life journey, leading up to his determination to create peace altars for each continent of the world, the first of which was installed in New York at the Church of St. John the Divine in 1986, four years before his death.

            In 2015, I visited Nakashima Woodworkers in New Hope, Pennsylvania, to ask permission from George’s daughter Mira and son Kevin to begin work on a picture book biography. Bouyed by their enthusiasm, I dug deeper into research, gathering materials, studying his work, listening to voice recordings, creating timelines of his experiences, collecting photographs, articles, books, videos and film footage. I was drafting, adding, deleting, revising.

            Yet as I distilled the biography to the main aspects of his life that I felt would be meaningful for young people, I felt that my text, no matter how much I polished and revised the writing, felt stiff and informational, and the style wasn’t doing justice to George. How could I add more of George’s essence?

            I thought through George’s life, the full journey of that life, plus the many journeys along the way, and I realized that the haibun form, made famous by Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) in his Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North / Narrow Road to the Interior) was a style that might suit the telling of George Nakashima’s life.

            The haibun form allowed me to say less in the main text, and helped capture George’s voice and his unique way of being. 

            The back matter in this picture book is robust, including a section about the haibun form, plus a timeline of George’s life, details of the growth of a tree, George’s woodworking process, and photos of some of his furniture pieces.

            I’m hopeful that educators will introduce Listening to Trees to writers of all ages and encourage them to share moments of their own journeys, large and small, via haibun, a  combination of prose and haiku, each giving resonance and meaning to the other. 

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Crafting Haibun with Students

            Listening to Trees opens with an illustration of George paused on a hike as a teen in the Cascade mountains and the following prose text:

George Nakashima felt at home in the woods—among firs that speared the sky and stunted evergreens clinging to mountaintops.

            And in the upper left corner of the double-page spread, in gray lettering that seems to appear through the clouds above the peaks, is this haiku:

                               a boy

                                    catches his breath

                                    at the timberline

            The haiku helps us sense that mountaintop setting and hear his breathing during that moment of pausing to gaze out at the towering peaks and the forest below.

            A few pages later there’s a spread showing an old wood-framed two-story farmhouse with snow on a thatched roof and George kneeling just inside the house with the following text:

As a young man, George boarded a ship to Japan, land of his ancestors, to work for an American architect in Tokyo. He stayed in his mother’s family home—a sturdy old farmhouse with beams and posts of fine zelkova wood.

            And in the upper left corner, in gray lettering that almost blends with the sky over the farmhouse is this haiku:

                               sunlight

                                    on tatami

                                    doors open to winter

            The prose plus haiku together create a haibun on each page spread, that combine with the illustration to show a moment of George’s life journey. 

Write: Think of your own journeys, large and small. Write a haibun with a paragraph or two of prose plus a haiku.

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Listening to Trees: George Nakashima, Woodworker by Holly Thompson, illustrated by Toshiki Nakamura (Neal Porter/Holiday House) 2024.

Text copyright © 2024 by Holly Thompson (Used by Permission)