Der Pilz am Ende der Welt

The first new life that emerged after the nuclear catastrophe in Hiroshima was a mushroom. A Matsutake, which grew on the contaminated ruins of the city – one of the most valuable edible mushrooms in Asia, found not only in Japan, where it commands high prices, but also widespread across the entire Northern Hemisphere. This strongly aromatic mushroom prefers to grow in soils devastated and ruined by industrialization and cannot be cultivated.

In her fascinating kaleidoscopic essay, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing traces the paths of this mushroom as well as its biological and cultural distribution, embarking on a quest for the possibilities of life in a human-destroyed environment. She tells stories of mushroom foragers, scientists, and Matsutake traders, offering a new and unfamiliar perspective on our capitalist present. The true subject of her award-winning narrative, which has been translated into many languages, is the ecology of the Matsutake, the web of relationships surrounding the mushroom, as a pars pro toto of life on the ruins of capitalism, which may or may not be a life in relationships.