The Mushroom at the End of the World

This section covers Chapters 18-19: “Matsutake Crusaders: Waiting for Fungal Action” and “Ordinary Assets.”

Returning to Japan, Tsing stresses that efforts to revitalize matsutake reveal the limits of human action: Bringing the mushroom back relies mostly on nature, not people, though the conservationists she finds are hoping to discover where their work may be useful, facilitating what nature can already do. These groups call themselves “Matsutake Crusaders” and they clear other trees to make room for pines, and thus, mushrooms. This brings people of various ages out of the city, to form a connection to the landscape and have meals and fellowship with one another. Tsing considers these people in contrast to their American counterparts, wondering how Japanese ideas about tree renewal center human involvement, while American ones disparage it.

In the immediate postwar period, tree plantations replaced peasant forests, only to be displaced by the 1970s as Japanese people used fossil fuels to heat their homes. Villagers no longer needed their historic rights to enter the woods, and only mushrooms were of interest there. The current high price of matsutake help some villages maintain themselves. Current forest volunteers see their work in the woods as one that “remakes the human spirit” (262), by connecting them to rural practices and one another.