The Secret Island and the Enticing Flame: Worlds of Memory, Discovery, and Loss in Japanese Poetry 9781942242420

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The Secret Island and the Enticing Flame

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The Secret Island and the Enticing Flame Worlds of Memory, Discovery, and Loss in Japanese Poetry

Edwin A. Cranston

East Asia Program Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853

The Cornell East Asia Series is published by the Cornell University East Asia Program (distinct from Cornell University Press). We publish affordably priced books on a variety of scholarly topics relating to East Asia as a service to the academic community and the general public. Standing orders, which provide for automatic notification and invoicing of each title in the series upon publication, are accepted. If after review by internal and external readers a manuscript is accepted for publication, it is published on the basis of camera-ready copy provided by the volume author. Each author is thus responsible for any necessary copy-editing and for manuscript formatting. Address submission inquiries to CEAS Editorial Board, East Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-7601.

Assistance for publication was provided by the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. Cover images by Sonia Coman, 2008.

Number 142 in the Cornell East Asia Series Copyright © 2008 by Edwin A. Cranston. All rights reserved ISSN 1050-2955 ISBN: 978-1-933947-12-9 hc ISBN: 978-1-933947-42-6 pb Library of Congress Control Number: 2008935837 Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 987654321

The paper in this book meets the requirements for permanence of ISO 9706:1994. CAUTION: Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form without permission in writing from the author. Please address inquiries to Edwin A. Cranston in care of the East Asia Program, Cornell University, 140 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601.

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Sixteen poems translated in “In the Dark of the Year” are from A Waka Anthology, Volume I: The Gem-Glistening Cup and Volume II: Grasses of Remembrance, translated by Edwin Cranston, © 1993, 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University, all rights reserved. By permission of the publisher. They are, in order of appearance in the essay, KKS XII:591, KKS XV:822, KKS XV:782, MYS IV:688/685, MYS IV:700/697, MYS XI:2650/2642, KKS XI:469, Kojiki 80, MYS XVI:3838/3816, KKRJ I:694, SIS IV:224, MYS IV:744/741, KKS XII:554, KKS XI:561, MYS XI:2421/2417, and MYS IV:691/688. Four of these— KKS XII:591, KKS XI:469, KKS XII:554, and KKS XI:561—appeared previously in the author’s “The Dark Path: Images of Longing in Japanese Love Poetry,” HJAS 35 (1975). Thanks are also due to Kawade Shobō Shinsha for permission to publish translations of three poems by Tawara Machi in “In the Dark of the Year.” The prior publication of the author’s article on Yosano Akiko is as mentioned in the Preface. Previous publications of translations of the work of Mizuno Ruriko are mentioned in the “Sources” section at the conclusion of “The Dark at the Bottom of the Dish.”

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For all lovers, book-lovers, tree-huggers, and lost children

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contents

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Preface xi In the Dark of the Year

Love Poems from the Japanese translated with prose settings 1

Young Akiko

The Literary Debut of Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) 19

The Dark at the Bottom of the Dish

Fishing for Myth in the Poetry of Mizuno Ruriko 51

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Preface

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The three essays in this volume are attempts to get at and make real what has drawn me to the poetry they present. I am a translator, and I feel deeply the need to exercise what skills I possess to enable poems to live again in another language—to move the reader as I have myself been moved in the process of immersion and recreation. If I have succeeded, then all is well; if not, the fault is mine. These three products of that need, that wish, are drawn from my work of over forty years. The earliest, “Young Akiko,” is a republication of an article in the March, 1974, issue of the long-defunct Literature East & West. The other two appear here for the first time. To call “In the Dark of the Year” an “essay” is to use the word in its etymological sense of a trying-out. It is an experiment in defining the essence of the old but still living classical tradition of Japanese love poetry. Its text is woven from a selection of tanka dating back to earliest times and coming down to our own day, each poem introduced by a brief evocation of its message provided by the weaver. The poems are extracted from their original contexts and allowed to speak directly of those themes and emotions that reach across time and culture. Two personae emerge, a man and a woman, brooding on love in a warp of memory and shifting moods. The two speakers are both two and many—they can be anyone who has felt the things they feel. There is a general drift from ancient to modern in the time of composition of the original verses, but this trend is cut across by many leaps to and fro. The underlying organizational principles are associational and repetitive, suggesting one or more

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ongoing stories presented in moments both of memory and direct experience. The result is a mosaic or kaleidoscope of desire, tenderness, bitterness, and sorrow. This approach to sequencing combines some of the basic procedures of Japanese anthologies, which began to be created as early as the eighth century, with an exploration of memory itself. It is also suggestive of the native utamonogatari, or “poem-tale,” tradition that evolved in the tenth century, in which anonymous compilers took the poems of often fairly recent poets and fashioned stories around them. The biographical truth of the resultant stories has been continually questioned by modern scholarship. But there is another kind of truth such stories and their poems tell that stubbornly survives all skepticism. The formulation of this truth is the aim of the literature’s persistent probing into sexual attraction and its human fate. Japanese love poetry over its long history worked out a variety of ways, both subtle and direct, of conveying desire, and our present selection contains notable examples of these. During its courtly centuries it also indulged in kinds of wit and wordplay that formed an idiom of communication with which the court society was at ease. The copiously preserved poetic exchanges tended to operate on the principle of “outwitting” the other person. A modern poet such as Tawara Machi may also work in a comic mode. If I have laid aside such material here, it is because I wished to present the love tradition in its essentials. There is a deeply affecting vision in the best of this poetry, one in which love is defined as longing. The dark tonality, the predominance of somber mood and a sense of loss, is true to Japanese love poetry in its classic expression. It is a poetry of need and deprivation. The poems are all tanka in the original. The tanka, or “short poem,” composed in a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5-7-7, is the formal staple of Japanese verse across the centuries. The five-line format of the translations represents its prosodic ebb and flow. At the turn of the previous century the experimental poet Ishikawa Takuboku indicated his own unorthodox scansion in his texts, and the present experiment has been faithful to them as well. In its older ranges the poetry is also referred to as waka, a term meaning simply “Japanese poetry.” Both terms contrast with other forms such as renga (linked verse), haiku, and shi (modern poetry). The



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original poem texts are here presented with indication of line division in romanization below the translations, followed by source and author. I put the sequence together in the 1990s, selecting from my store of translations and formulating the prose settings, with the notion of making it an independent publication. The intended publisher had requirements about accompanying art work that became too troublesome, and so I set the project aside. I have placed it first here because its historical sweep and multiplicity of voices provide a backdrop for the work of two specific poets. I would like to thank Charles Inouye, student and teacher, for the suggestion that led to this experiment and for his commitment to its realization. Professor Inouye, who heads the Japanese literature program at Tufts University, has been a good friend and sympathetic reader for many years. *  *  * The second of the articles in this book is, as mentioned earlier, the first in date of composition. In the fall of 1972 the late Robert H. Brower suggested me as someone who might contribute an article on Yosano Akiko to a planned special issue of Literature East & West (LE&W) devoted to “Women & the Japanese Literary Tradition.” The first letter in my file on this project, dated November 14 of that year, is from Eric W. Johnson, at that time an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and guest editor of the LE&W issue in question, informing me of Professor Brower’s kind recommendation and offering me the chance to write the requested article. The last letter in the file is again from Eric, enclosing “the proofs, at last, for your essay on Yosano Akiko.” It is dated February 17, 1977. The time between these dates brought me one of the most enriching and intense literary encounters of my career. (It also entailed a very enjoyable correspondence with Eric Johnson.) Prior to 1972, I knew Yosano Akiko thanks mainly to the translations of Shio Sakanishi—first glimpsed in Donald Keene’s Modern Japanese Literature (1956)—and the Tangled Hair volume of Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda (1971), as well as the versions by Graeme Wilson and Atsumi Ikuko that had appeared in Japan Quarterly. The translations

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were all appealing, and I was aware of Akiko’s reputation as a major romantic poet. But nothing prepared me for the challenge of dealing with her early work in the original. Concentrating on her tanka composed up until 1901, the date of her famous first book, Midaregami, I wrote an article about her literary debut. I soon realized that Akiko’s fame—or infamy—as the creator of a sexually liberated persona was fully justified, and that given the usual biographical readings, her poems made her the true successor of Izumi Shikibu, the Heian poet who was the subject of my own early studies. But while I found her boldness enjoyable, what challenged me as a translator was the discovery of her syntax, rather than her “sin.” The poems were condensed, taut with overflowing energy restrained into thirty-one syllables, containing and contained by a tension that demanded my respect and careful handling. Her imagery was gorgeous, her fantasy world delightful. After a few struggles, I found a way into these poems, the translation of which gave me more satisfaction than anything along this line of work that I had experienced before. The little creatures were all alive, each a challenge, each a reward. Here are two representative Midaregami poems: Midaregami 10   Murasaki no   Deep purple rainbows Koki niji tokishi Were the matter of his talk   Sakazuki ni   Whose sake cup Utsuru haru no ko Reflected of a child of spring Mayuge kabosoki The eyebrow’s slender arch. Midaregami 321   Haru mijikashi   Spring is soon over; Nani ni fumetsu no And where shall mortals find   Inochi zo to   Eternal life? Chikara aru chi o Chiding, I gave into his hands Te ni sagurasenu The firmness of my breasts. Here are the aestheticism, the vivid imagery, the bold temptation that combine to make Akiko’s early work what it is. I find it a heady mixture. Akiko herself found it, as the years passed, too rich a cocktail



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for her mature taste. Ultimately she refused to have Midaregami republished. Of late deserved attention has been paid to the later career of this poet—to the thousands of tanka she went on publishing in her many books, to her poetry in other forms, to her essays, her fiction, her massive work as a translator into modern Japanese of the Heian classics, and to her activities as educator and advocate for women’s rights. I find her life’s accomplishments overwhelmingly impressive, but I do not easily forgive her rejection of her early work. I have yet to be convinced that she ever wrote anything better—as poetry—than what went into Midaregami. It remains a book of which a poet at any age could be proud. The March, 1974, date of the special issue of Literature East & West in which “Young Akiko” appeared belies the fact that I finished the article in June, 1975. (The issue actually came out early in 1977.) Literature East & West is alas no more. Pages are dropping out of my copy. And so I am very grateful for this chance to present an updated version of this first essay of mine on a poet I deeply admire. It also reminds me to thank (late in the day) Eric Johnson, whom I never met, but whose letters were uniformly encouraging. And of course (posthumously), Robert Brower, without whose waka scholarship I might have gone off on some other path altogether. Finally, it gives me great satisfaction to send a thank-you to Dr. Gaye Rowley, the young Akiko scholar whom I met on a happy day in Australia back in 1985. Rowley has been a good friend over the past two decades, and I am most appreciative of her unfailing encouragement of my old desire to “get back to Akiko someday.” An authority on Akiko’s career as a translator, as is shown in her book Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2000), she is now Associate Professor at Waseda University. *  *  * The third essay in this book had a long gestation, starting as a noonhour talk and ending as an attempt to probe in depth the inner meaning of a poet’s work. Because of that slow evolution, and also because of the

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way this poet’s work puzzled me, the essay explains itself as it goes along, pondering and providing personal context, and so perhaps little need be said here. But it may be worth mentioning at once that there is in this study an implied critique of my work on waka. For the first time in many years I turned to material where my habitual methods would not suffice. There were no waka rhythms in the work of Mizuno Ruriko, and there was not even any temptation to be “inventive.” The prosodic unit of Mizuno’s poems was the declarative sentence or the isolated image. The inventiveness was all Mizuno’s, and it consisted in the intersection of the surrealist mode with the Jungian archetype and the haunted world of dream. The poetry it most reminded me of was that of Georg Trakl (1887–1914), as I mention in a note, but I had never myself worked on anything like that. There is no doubt more than a trace of obsession in my involvement with this project. No wonder, when Mizuno’s own themes are deeply obsessive. As I read and translated over a period of fifteen years (off and on, to be sure, for I had other irons I could not allow to grow cold), much of my time was devoted to ancillary readings, several of which are cited in the notes. It was a greatly enriching adventure, and whether or not I have succeeded in finding the grail, I shall never regret the time spent in the search. The essay does not attempt to place Mizuno’s work in the context of modern Japanese poetry. That would be a different project altogether. I am aware that interesting things might be said about the poetry of, say, Hagiwara Sakutarō, in a differently focused article. Nor have I studied Mizuno in the context of the Japanese prose poem, appropriate though that might be. Her true context as I see it is the world of Märchen, archetype, and animal story. Japanese surrealism, like the prose poem, has French roots (Mizuno was a French major at Tokyo University), but the specific “influences” of which I am aware in her work are those of the painters—Klee, Delvaux, Edgar Ende, and others—rather than the poets. I am grateful to her for telling me where to look. Finally, my fascination with Mizuno (still mysterious to me) undoubtedly has to do with the resonance I feel when drawn into her world of childhood with its secret fears and fantasies. Truly, her poems haunt me. She is exceptionally skillful at dream narrative—and dream in



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her work has a recognizable face quite different from the formulaic use of “dream” in waka. It is instructive to ponder here the distinction between the classic and the modern poet. Mizuno’s intellectual and artistic formation is distinct from that of even so recent a poet as Yosano Akiko. In Mizuno we enter a different world. Deeply imbued with the classics though I am, I have found the border an exciting one to cross. Ultimately, what do we seek in literature? What draws us in? Could it be a recognition of ourselves? How strange, then, to find two such different mirrors. Which is the masukagami, the clear, true mirror? The answer may be more shadowed, more complex than we realize. In addition to Mizuno herself, whose help has been essential, I would like to thank two colleagues, Adam Kern for his longtime interest and encouragement, and Jay Rubin for the thoughtful reading he gave to the penultimate version of the essay. It also gives me great pleasure to thank my editors at CEAS, Karen Brazell for her suggestion of how to make a book out of my three “essays” and Mai Shaikhanuar-Cota for her generous encouragement and endless hours of work on the project. Sonia Coman, student, poet, and artist, readily agreed to provide original artwork for the book’s cover. Finally, I am much indebted to the manuscript’s two anonymous readers for their warm appreciation and helpful suggestions and to director Susan Pharr of the Reischauer Institute for the Instiute’s substantial grant in support of this book.

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In the Dark of the Year

cd Love Poems from the Japanese translated with prose settings

In the dark of the year, in the early silence, he remembered:   A winter streamlet frozen on the surface—is it   such a thing I am, whose yearning flows in silent tears beneath a stifled love? fuyukawa no / ue wa kōreru / ware nare ya / shita ni nagarete / koiwataruramu KKS XII:591 Muneoka no Ōyori 宗丘大頼 (d. 906) She on her part, having waited too long, had abandoned hope before the year’s end. No life was left among the gleanings:   A sad harvest after hope has withered   in the autumn wind: when I know I have become an empty husk of longing. akikaze ni / au tanomi koso / kanashikere / wa ga mi munashiku / narinu to omoeba KKS XV:822 Ono no Komachi 小野小町 (mid 9th century)

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And after one has waited too long, the long-delayed avowals are more bitter than sweet:   Now that I am old and fallen into years   of wintry rain, the very foliage of your words is but a wrack of withered leaves. ima wa tote / wa ga mi shigure ni / furinureba / koto no ha sae ni / utsuroinikeri KKS XV:782 Ono no Komachi Once she had written to him at a time when they were kept apart:   Do you hide beyond the thickets of people’s talk,   longing for me, keeping to your house, as I to mine, like swords in a double sheath? hitogoto o / shigemi ya kimi ga / futasaya no / ie o hedatete / koitsutsu masamu MYS IV:688/685 Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoue 大伴坂上郎女 (early 8th century) To unsheathe the sword, to be seen, show oneself to the other—these are desires lovers know well. As the naked moon she could be gazed upon and none would know:   In the hyaline, the far sky, there dwells a moon:   were I that moon, none should know I went to you that you might gaze on me. hisakata no / sora naru tsuki no / mi nariseba / yuku to mo miede / kimi wa mitemashi Yamato monogatari 30 Princess Katsura 桂のみこ (d. 954)



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At that time the parting was still new, the wound fresh, the pain not to be borne:   Not in my hearing shall you ever speak of her;   that lady’s fragrance is a wildness in my longing like tangles of sickled rushes. wa ga kiki ni / kakete na ii so / karikomo no / midarete omou / kimi ga tadaka so MYS IV:700/697 Ōtomo no Katami 大伴像見(8th century) Her image haunted him at night, a ghost of their times together in the rooms of their rendezvous:   The lamp flame played its light across her face,   and she was real— my love whose flickering smile now hovers in shadowed air. tomoshibi no / kage ni kagayou / utsusemi no / imo ga emai shi / omokage ni miyu MYS XI:2650/2642 Anonymous Sometimes on summer evenings he woke up reborn into the emotions of those early days:   In the month of June when the little cuckoo cries,   sweet flag everywhere: oh, sweet tangle of my love that knows no weave or pattern! hototogisu / naku ya satsuki no / ayamegusa / ayame mo shiranu / koi mo suru kana KKS XI:469 Anonymous It was a time of discovery; desire and young women were everywhere, and every walk was into the moorland of love:

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  A cloak stained purple by the young and tender herbs   of Kasuga Moor: wild patterns of a yearning heart whose turmoil knows no bounds. kasugano no / wakamurasaki no / surigoromo / shinobu no midare / kagiri shirarezu SKKS XI:994 Ariwara no Narihira 在原業平 (825–880) The romantic moodiness he perennially suffered was not the whole story. There was also this, the male hubris, the sheer sexual drive:   That beauty so fine, if I can bed her, just bed her,   like sickled rushes let the tangle tangle then: if I can bed her, just bed her. uruwashi to / sane shi saneteba / karikomo no / midareba midare / sane shi saneteba Kojiki 80, attributed to Prince Kinashi no Karu 木梨の輕の 太子 (5th century) Desire crawled all over him, dominated him like a genie out of the bottle:   In the house I had a chest, wherein I thrust him,   locked him with a key, the slave called love—now clawing, clutching at my throat! ie ni arishi / hitsu ni kagi sashi / osameteshi / koi no yatsuko no / tsukamikakarite MYS XVI:3838/3816 Prince Hozumi 穂積親王 (d. 715) She spoke to him from the window, suddenly, one May, and the world changed:



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  My blood is afire: stay, I’ll lend you shelter   for a night of dreams; traveler of spring, beware— do not scorn the gift of God. chi zo moyuru / kasamu hitoyo no / yume no yado / haru o yuku hito / kami otoshime na Midaregami 4 Yosano Akiko 与謝野晶子 (1878– 1942) If he needed encouragement, she knew how to provide it. The art of metaphor can be the most effective, after all:   I’ll cut and feed him the one clump of plumegrass   that grows at my gate; won’t you let your pony come, the one that handles so well? wa ga yado no / hitomura susuki / karikawan / kimi ga tanare no / koma mo konu ka na GSS X:616 Komachi’s Elder Sister 小町が姉 (9th century) He remembered the bold challenges; she cherished an awareness of a softer blossoming:   Neither hereafter, much less in this present life,   had I hoped for this— in my much enfolded heart a cherry blooms and scatters. gose wa nao / konjō dani mo / negawazaru / wa ga futokoro ni / sakura kite chiru Myōjō, May 1908 Yamakawa Tomiko 山川登美子 (1879–1909) Those springs were long ago; winter always returned, to the landscape seen from his window, and to his heart. He could only wonder if she too had such thoughts:

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  Over the white hills the white snow falls, and deepens,   this year on the year gone by, the heaped-up longing that buries my drifted heart. shirayama ni / furu shirayuki no / kozo no ue ni / kotoshi mo tsumoru / koi mo suru kana KKRJ I:694 Anonymous Spring too could be cold, the new herbs buried in late snow:   Love, I would have gone gathering young herbs for you   on Kasuga fields— how I would have forced my way today mid the fallen snow! kimi ga tame / wakana tsumu tote / kasugano no / yukima o ika ni / kyō wa wakemashi ISZ 44 Izumi Shikibu 和泉式部 (late 10th–early 11th century) In the late cold of the night there were only two, he and she, and they were far apart in a world of wind and a strange, lorn crying:   Helplessly longing,  I went to hunt my sister   through the winter night; somewhere plovers were crying, for the river wind was cold. omoikane / imogari yukeba / fuyu no yo no / kawakaze samumi / chidori naku nari SIS IV:224 Ki no Tsurayuki 紀貫之 (ca. 872–ca. 945) When the passion was on him, he had told her things like this, making of himself the hunter, of her the deer slain by his amorous shaft:   Famished for your eyes: gleam once like the startled deer   facing the torchlight,



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and swifter than the arrow flies shall I have flown to your side. au koto o / tomoshi no shika no / uchimukite / me o dani miseba / irubeki mono o KKRJ II:1169 Anonymous When they could not meet, kept apart by miles and others’ eyes, the craving did not leave him. She became the bow of his desire:   Hands have not touched, months and days gone by, white   spindletree bow: drawn taut, I quiver in the night, rising, sinking, far from sleep. te mo furede / tsukihi henikeru / shiramayumi / okifushi yoru wa / i koso nerarene KKS XII:605 Ki no Tsurayuki Sleep once found, there were dreams, but dreams are not enough. They promise a bliss that is only empty longing:   Meeting in a dream is a cruel way to meet:   for you wake, suddenly groping, but nothing is there for your hand to touch. ime no ai wa / kurushikarikeri / odorokite / kakisaguredo mo / te ni mo fureneba MYS IV:744 Ōtomo no Yakamochi 大伴家持 (718–785) Dream. . . . Indeed, the most intimate, most tender rendezvous might be no other than that, the dream where all is possible as promised. And the aftermath might color all their haunted lives. But the end must always be the same:   Those who meet in love know darkness—a night of dream:   though the loud tempest

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takes the color from the moon, they lie that it breaks their sleep. au koto zo / kuraki yo no yume / tsuki no iro / arashi no koe wa / nenu ni nasedo mo Senshu waka 623 Shōtetsu 正徹 (1381–1459) But the body does not lie. It dances as the fire demands.   In the moonless dark of a night we cannot meet   I rouse, smoldering: fire spits and runs in my breast, and my heart burns black within. hito ni awamu / tsuki no naki ni wa / omoiokite / mune hashiribi ni / kokoro yakeori KKS XIX:1030 Ono no Komachi She too had her hubris, the female pride in her beauty, her seductive power. Gazing into the mirror of her youth, she said:   To punish men for their many sins   was I fashioned with unblemished skin and long black hair. tsumi ōki / otoko korase to / hada kiyoku / kurogami nagaku / tsukurareshi ware Midaregami 362 Yosano Akiko When she remembered, the memories were like strands of glistening, tangled desire:   I fling myself down, heedless of the wild disorder   of my long, black hair, and soon I’m yearning once again for him who used to stroke it smooth.



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kurokami no / midare mo shirazu / uchifuseba / mazu kakiyarishi / hito zo koishiki ISS 86 Izumi Shikibu Had she but known, across the years he was answering her:   I ran my fingers through this black hair long ago:   every strand distinct, now as I lie upon my bed the shadow-image rises. kakiyarishi / sono kurokami no / sujigoto ni / uchifusu hodo wa / omokage zo tatsu SKKS XV:1390 Fujiwara Teika 藤原定家 (1162–1241) The intense secrecy of their affair had been its essence. Meetings at midnight, escape to private rendezvous, always under cover of dark, her face a faint, seductive glow:   In the great city, royal ninefold Miyako,   even here they find borrowed sleep in strange lodgings, secret lovers night by night. kokonoe no / miyako no uchi mo / karine kana / shinoburu koro no / yona yona no yado Gondaisōzu Shinkei shū, Hyakushu waka (II):65 Shinkei 心敬 (1406–1475) She was left alone too many nights, but one presence always lay with her. Desire is a restless bedmate. She knew and used the old magic to turn things in her favor:   When love presses me, relentless in the glistening night,   I strip off my robe, then lie down to sleep again, wearing it inside out.

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ito semete / koishiki toki wa / mubatama no / yoru no koromo o / kaeshite zo kiru KKS XII:554 Ono no Komachi Summer, night, the gleaming of a still candescence. . . . She sang this song to herself:   My human body I have given to love’s flame,   though not as fireflies glowing across the summer night, but with a burning none can see. hito no mi mo / koi ni wa kaetsu / natsumushi no / arawa ni moyu to / mienu bakari zo ISS 34 Izumi Shikibu One evening she waited in vain. What could be keeping him?   Among the aronias this rouge so needlessly dissolved   I fling away and gaze out at the evening rain, ah, with listless eyes. kaidō ni / yō naku tokishi / beni sutete / yūsame miyaru / hitomi yo tayuki Midaregami 13 Yosano Akiko Perhaps he did come, eager for the rendezvous that had become the end of his existence. But something made him stop and not go in:   As I reach her house, all at once the sounds within   cease at my calling, and I too stand silent, hesitant beneath the eaves. yado toeba / yagate yametsuru / mono no ne ni / ware mo oto sede / tachi zo yasurau Sōkonshū 4475 Shōtetsu



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Or was it all a delusion? She sometimes wondered:   How soon I forget and spend an evening of sighs   for truant love, when truly it is only I who know the sad secret of these passing days. wasurete wa / uchinagekaruru / yūbe kana / ware nomi shirite / suguru tsukihi o SKKS XI:1035 Princess Shokushi 式子内親王 (d. ca. 1201) Knowledge of defeat came to her with the sunset, day after day. She watched the ebbing of the light:   The flames burn and burn, they somber as the light goes down,   they sink into the dark: this passage of the setting sun, love, is it not like mine? moete moete / kasurete kiete / yami ni iru / sono yūbae ni / nitarazu ya kimi Shiroyuri 66 Yamakawa Tomiko Was it over, then? All the giving and the getting, the cycling through each other’s eyes? Could the gleanings vanish like fireflies in the night?   I am more deceived by love’s dark, enticing flame   than summer moths that vanish in the fire before the transient eve is done. yoi no ma mo / hakanaku miyuru / natsumushi ni / madoimasareru / koi mo suru kana KKS XII:561 Ki no Tomonori 紀友則 (late 9th–early 10th century) Neglect, the cruelty best known to lovers, takes a long time to work its slow but lethal narcotic into the bloodstream. A woman will go on

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clinging to her precarious delusion, the product of a more willful addiction:   As yet unchastened, she again will wait the dusk:   moon on Matsuchi, even now your leaden face is lost in the dawning sky. korizuma ni / mata wa matsuchi no / yama nari to / nigori ya semashi / shinonome no tsuki Nanto hyakushu 75 Ichijō Kanera一條兼良 (1402–1481) A woman left alone dreams of the past, and the dreams invade the reality of what was. The tangle of then and now is too intricate to undo:   Was there one who vowed in waking consciousness to love?   Lost on labyrinthine trails of ever-changing dreams, was that self the self I know? utsutsu nite/ tare chigirikemu / sadamenaki / yumeji ni mayou / ware wa ware ka wa GSS XI:717 Anonymous An old man, he met again the fateful woman. And again the sweet turmoil began, and there was no rest for him:   At Isonokami over ancient Furu towers   a godly cedar hoary with age, I fall at last in the toils of an old man’s love. isonokami / furu no kamusugi / kamusaburu / koi o mo are wa / sara ni suru kamo MYS XI:2421/2417 Hitomaro Collection



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There is no rest for parted lovers until the desired rest is found in each other’s arms. And the coming of dark for those who have seen many summer suns may present the paradox of too soon and too brief:   Soon the sun will set— hurry, let us go to bed,   for on nights like these we take off our summer clothes only to find the dawn. hi shi kureba / iza toku nenan / natsugoromo / nugu ka to sureba / akenu to iu yo ni KKRJ I:266 Anonymous Remember if you can the sweetness of being young, the young body that beckons and bids farewell:   A cube of sugar—   I lick it, I let it   dissolve in my mouth: vanishing spring: I peel off this shirt of twenty-two. kakuzatō / namete owatte / yuku haru ni / nijūnisai no / shatsu nugisuten SK 293 Tawara Machi 俵万智 (1962–) The secret is the sweetest thing, but only if only one other knows:   Do not smile at me plainly as a plain white cloud   drifting straight across the face of a blue mountain— people are sure to know. aoyama o / yokogiru kumo no / ichishiroku / ware to emashite / hito ni shirayu na MYS IV:691 Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoue

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But when that other is not there. . . Sounds at the window on the nights she lay alone reminded her that a bed once shared will never be the same:   Nights when hail falls, pattering incessantly   on rustling bamboo leaves, I swear I cannot find the heart to sleep alone. take no ha ni / arare furu yo wa / sarasara ni / hitori wa nubeki / kokochi koso sene SKS VIII:253 Izumi Shikibu In the intimate coil of a solitary bed a night-loving flower blooms:   There’s a blue flower called “lonely” in flower-speech:   a single blossom I let open in my heart each time I go to sleep. hanakotoba / “sabishii” to iu / aoi hana / ichirin mune ni / sakasete ne­ muru KTH 375 Tawara Machi Her body, that garden of love, longed for his touch:   Oh, the grass-grown gate through which you came that time,   wet with the spring rain: evening of the aronia proud-faced with being loved. harusame ni / nurete kimi koshi / kusa no kado yo / omowaregao no / kaidō no yū Midaregami 31 Yosano Akiko His garden was the wild seaside. He took many walks alone in those days, remembering: In the sand dunes I bellied down in the sand remembering far off the pain of first love.



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sunayama no suna ni harabai / hatsukoi no / itami o tōku omoiizuru hi Ichiaku no suna 6 Ishikawa Takuboku 石川啄木 (1886–1912) Sand—it runs away like a love we could not hold: The sadness of lifeless sand sifting away between the fingers that hold it. inochi naki suna no kanashisa yo / sarasara to / nigireba yubi no aida yori otsu Ichiaku no suna 8 Ishikawa Takuboku The coast was a long one, and they did not meet. Perhaps he never realized that a woman too may need to confide in the waves:   This agony— I shall go to the wild sea   at the edge of night and tell it to the flooding tide; and I shall come home no more. kono modae / yukite yūbe no / araumi no / ushio ni katari / yagate kae­ raji Shiroyuri 10 Yamakawa Tomiko Memories tormented her, and she shouted into the wind:   Of this flesh, this self, that in torment yet is not   Fuji’s fiery cone, the burning still can best be called night-flame, blaze of the night. fuji no ne ni / aranu wa ga mi no / moyuru o ba / yohi yohi to koso / iubekarikere ISZ 131 Izumi Shikibu He was feverish those nights he spent alone at the inn, remembering that she was not far away, but busy no doubt with someone else. Only one cure preoccupied his thoughts:

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Let me make love like one who buries his burning cheek in softly drifting snow. yawaraka ni tsumoreru yuki ni / hoteru ho o uzumuru gotoki / koi shite mitashi Ichiaku no suna 42 Ishikawa Takuboku Lovers show each other stigmata of desire, emblems of desperation. The dim-lit room at the end of the dark path contains such scenes: “Don’t you want to die?” I asked. “Look at this,” she said, showing me the scar on her throat. shinitaku wa nai ka to ieba / kore miyo to / nodo no kizu o miseshi onna kana Ichiaku no suna 393 Ishikawa Takuboku For some survivors the fevers of desire cool at the end, and the troubles fall away. Left with memories, she looked up at the star-laced sky:   Star of the winter night you were, my love;   no, not one alone, I do not say you were but one— you were all the stars there are. fuyu no yo no / hoshi kimi nariki / hitotsu o ba / iu ni wa arazu / kotogotoku mina Hakuōshū 430 Yosano Akiko Still, not all who gaze at the night sky can be so sure. The trouble with lovers is that they must remain two, however many times their passion has bound them into one:   Watching fireworks burst on burst were two who saw,   sitting side by side, one the flowering of light, and one the pool of dark.



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hanabi hanabi / soko ni hikari o / miru hito to / yami o miru hito / ite narabiori KTH 2 Tawara Machi Sources The sources for these poems, in alphabetical order, are as follows: Gondaisōzu Shinkei shū 権大僧都心敬集, a collection of the poetry of Shinkei (1406–1475); Hyakushu waka 百首和歌 is a one-hundred-poem sequence in this collection. GSS = Gosenwakashū 後撰和歌集, the second imperially sponsored anthology of Japanese poetry, dating from 951. Hakuōshū 白櫻集, a posthumous collection of the poetry of Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) published in 1942. Ichiaku no suna一握の砂, a collection of the tanka poetry of Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912), published in 1910. ISS = Izumi Shikibu seishū 和泉式部正集, the “main” collection of the poetry of Izumi Shikibu (late tenth to early eleventh century). ISZ = Izumi Shikibu zokushū 和泉式部続集, the “continued” collection of the poetry of Izumi Shikibu. Kojiki 古事記, the first history of Japan, dating from 712. KKRJ = Kokinwakarokujō 古今和歌六帖, a late tenth-century privately compiled anthology of Japanese poetry. KKS = Kokinwakashū 古今和歌集, the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, dating from 905. KTH = Kaze no te no hira かぜのてのひら, the second collection (1991) of the poetry of Tawara Machi (1962–), a contemporary tanka poet. Midaregami みだれ髪, the first book published by Yosano Akiko, a landmark of Japanese Romanticism, 1901. Myōjō 明星, a literary magazine edited by Yosano Akiko’s husband Tekkan 鉄幹 (1873–1935). MYS = Man’yōshū 萬葉集, the earliest extant anthology of Japanese poetry in the native tongue; last dated poem 759.

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Nanto hyakushu 南都百首, a one-hundred-poem sequence by Ichijō Kanera (1402–1481). Senshu waka 千首和歌, a one-thousand-poem collection of the poetry of Shōtetsu (1381–1459). Shiroyuri 白百合, a collection of poems by Yamakawa Tomiko (1879–1909), published in 1905 as a section of Koigoromo 恋衣, which also contains poems by Yosano Akiko and a third poet. SIS = Shūiwakashū 拾遺和歌集, the third imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, approximate date 1005. SK = Sarada kinenbi サラダ記念日, Tawara Machi’s first book, 1987. SKKS = Shinkokinwakashū 新古今和歌集, the eighth imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, compilation date 1205. SKS = Shikawakashū 詞花和歌集, the sixth imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, completed ca. 1151–1154. Sōkonshū 草根集, the main collection of the poetry of Shōtetsu. Yamato monogatari 大和物語, a tenth-century collection of poem tales.

Young Akiko

cd The Literary Debut of Yosano Akiko (1878–1942)

It all began quietly, one might say decorously, enough. The diction, cadence, and sentiments were those of classical waka, as was the topic, “Deer on the Mountain Peak”:   Sayo shigure   Shower in the night, Itaku na furi so Do not pour so wildly down:   Onoe naru   High upon the hills Tsumadou shika ya The deer calling to their mates Nuremasaruran Will be drenched more grievously. This tanka of 1896 with its pure Yamato vocabulary and evocation of courtly sadness could have been written a thousand years or more earlier. It is one of several published in the twenty-ninth year of Meiji by the seventeen-year-old1 daughter of a merchant family in Sakai, an old port city on the Inland Sea. The girl was Hō Akiko 鳳あきこ, and she was about to begin one of the most astonishing careers in modern Japanese literature. The Hō family were proprietors of the Surugaya 駿河屋, a confectionary shop in the Kai-no-chō 甲斐町section of Sakai. Father and head of the family was Sōshichi 宗七, a bibliophile and respected figure in the community, dabbler in haiku, and longtime member of the city council. Sōshichi seems to have combined his cultural interests with a strong

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conservatism in family matters. His first wife did not please his mother and was divorced after bearing him two daughters. His second wife, Tsune つね, admirably fulfilled the role of the long-suffering Japanese woman. Tsune had eight children, of whom her favorite seems to have been the third, her first daughter, born December 7, 1878. The girl was named Shō 志ようand was known to the people of the neighborhood as Shōko. Later she adopted the reading Aki for the character shō 晶 (“crystal”) she herself picked to write her name. Tsune’s second child, a son, had died in infancy the previous year, and Sōshichi was bitterly disappointed that his wife had not presented him with another male child as a replacement. He disappeared from the house for several days after his daughter’s birth and had to be brought back by a servant from the local geisha quarter. A prolonged family crisis ensued during which the sick and intimidated Tsune was unable to produce milk for the baby, who cried continually and had to be sent to an aunt in Yanagi-chō, another part of the city, lest the irascible father be further annoyed. Night after night Tsune made the trip back and forth to comfort her child. This state of affairs continued until 1880, when Tsune gave birth to a fourth child, a son, Chūsaburō 籌三郎. Only then was Shō brought back to her parents’ home. In 1884, when she was five years old, Shō entered Shukuin Primary School 宿院小学校, which she attended until her graduation four years later in 1888. She spent the next few years studying at the Sakai Girls’ School 堺女学校, where she had as one of her teachers the famous kokugaku scholar Oda Sugao 小田清雄 (d. 1894). During these years she developed a lively interest in literature, and although her parents had her continue on into the Supplementary Course (hoshūka 補習科) after her graduation in 1892,2 the material offered was of little interest to her, being confined largely to home economics. The completion of this course in 1894 marked the end of her formal education. Sōshichi was enthusiastic about his daughter’s schooling—up to a point. Although he was not energetic in the conduct of the family business and owned a collection of classical literature, apparently he did not envisage a future for Shō outside her merchant-class heritage. From the time of her elder halfsister Teru’s 輝 marriage in 1889 Shō assumed responsibility for minding



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the store and keeping the account books. These tasks she worked in with her studies in the early years and then assumed full-time. Her future course seemed clear. But Shō was cultivating a secret life of her own. The reading habits acquired during her school days became all-important to her, and she stole whatever time she could to indulge them. The hours from ten p.m., the Surugaya’s closing time, until midnight (lights-out in the Hō household), were hers; every night she plunged into the world of books. She was especially fond of the Heian classics, which she borrowed from her father’s library, and over the years she acquired a thorough knowledge of Japanese literature, from its early masterpieces down to such contemporary authors as Kōda Rohan 幸田露伴 (1867–1947), Ozaki Kōyō 尾崎紅 葉 (1867–1903), and Higuchi Ichiyō 樋口一葉 (1872–1896). These were formative hours that she spent alone with her books as she grew from girlhood into young womanhood. Her imaginative powers luxuriated at the same time that her social circle remained closely circumscribed. Both her parents seem to have believed that daughters should be kept at home until married. Tsune was at pains to dress Shō in an unattractively mannish fashion when she went out, while Sōshichi forbade her to step onto the fire-lookout platform where she could be seen from outside, and even went to the extreme of locking her in her room at night. We do not know whether the parents were ever struck by the inconsistency of their daughter waiting on customers every day and yet being obliged to keep herself otherwise so completely out of the public eye. When one thinks of the young Shō, who had discovered the Tale of Genji by the time she was ten and read her way through the Heian classics before she was out of her teens—when one imagines her alone with her budding passions and romantic fantasies—one cannot help calling to mind the author of the eleventh-century Sarashina nikki 更級日記, the archetypal Heian bookworm. But “Lady Sarashina” was a thoroughgoing introvert, happy only in the land of fantasy, whereas the Sakai sweet-shop owner’s daughter turned out to be made of much more explosive stuff.3 When the explosion came, people must have thought rather of Izumi Shikibu 和泉式部, the bold queen of passion at the Heian court. Such comparisons aside, Hō Shō had developed by the time she was

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twenty an extremely strong personality with a practical as well as a romantic side. For over ten years she was the mainstay of the Surugaya, essentially running the business. Her elder brother Shūtarō 秀太郎, Tsune’s first child, went to Tokyo to be educated at the Imperial University and become an electrical engineer, stepping out of the traditional merchant world of Sakai into the new age. Shō’s younger brother, Chū­sa­ burō, was left to inherit the shop. He seems to have shared Shō’s lit­erary interests and generally to have been a congenial character. But it was Shō in whom the pulse of genius beat. Her business acumen and her poetic intensity existed side by side in a personality turned avidly toward life. Steadily the juices thickened, until the book-lover felt ready to try her own hand at literary creation. By her own account, Shō was more attracted by fiction and jōruri plays than by Japan’s traditional short forms of poetry. She was skeptical that anything of value could be accomplished in the elegant brief compass of the tanka. But it was precisely in this form that her earliest efforts took shape, and it was in the tanka that she achieved her greatest fame. The poems of 1896 and 1897 were published in successive numbers of the Sakai Shikishima Kai kashū 堺敷島会歌集 and in Chinu no Ura hyakushu ちぬの浦百首, collections of the work of local Sakai poets edited by Watanabe Haruki 渡辺春樹, the head of the Shikishima Kai, apparently the first poetic organization with which Shō became involved. There are nineteen of these tanka by the young poet. As seen in the poem already quoted, they show her well trained in classical waka. Another example gives evidence that Shō had also learned the Heian pose of “elegant confusion.” The imagery is classical but more original in terms of its conceit than the usual snow and plum blossoms: “River Fireflies”   Ōzora no   Gazing up at night, Hoshi to bakari ni Stars in the vast sky, I thought,   Mimagau wa   But I was wrong— Ama no kawara no They were fireflies glimmering Hotaru narikeri On the banks of the River of Heaven. The creative and linguistic renovation which was the main literary business of the Meiji period touched poetry in the 1890s. Classical waka



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had remained alive and cultivated to the end of the feudal era as a traditional art perpetuated by hereditary schools. The existence of such schools was, and is, a basic reason for the remarkable preservation of antique arts and crafts in Japan. It has tended to favor perfectionism at the expense of growth and experimentation. In the early Meiji period the world of waka came under the auspices of two rival factions, the Palace (Dōjō 堂上) School descended from the old Nijō 二條 poetic hegemons, and the Keien 桂園 School founded by the Kyoto Tokugawa scholar-poet Kagawa Kageki 香川景樹 (1768–1843). The latter group was influential at court and numbered among its adherents the Meiji Emperor himself. Neither school as it turned out had much to offer the new age. Suggestions began to be made to replace waka (and haiku as well) with something more relevant to modern poetic needs. As early as 1882 there appeared a collection of translations from European poetry, together with experimental Japanese poems, titled Shintaishishō 新体詩抄 (“Selections of Poetry in a New Form”). Prefatory remarks by one of the compilers dismissed the traditional Japanese forms as trivial. The seeds planted in this anthology bore fruit in the next decade and later, with the development of shintaishi, long poems (at least, longer than tanka or haiku), usually in some variety of 7–5 rhythm. The largely romantic content of Shintaishishō also helped inspire the Romantic Movement in Japanese poetry that began in the 1890s and in which Hō Shō was to occupy a central position. Poems in the new vein and the new forms were being published during the nineties by such emergent literary figures as Susukida Kyūkin 薄田泣菫 (1877–1945) and Shimazaki Tōson 島崎藤村 (1872–1943). Tōson’s Wakanashū 若菜集, one of the most admired collections of romantic poetry, came out in 1897. The idea of discarding waka was not acceptable to most poets, however; instead, proposals were put forward for its reform. Would-be reformers sometimes had contradictory ideas of the direction waka should take but were united in their dissatisfaction with what they regarded as the moribund and blindly traditional state of the art. Literary societies dedicated to a new poetry came together, subdivided, and dissolved frequently during the years around the turn of the century. The two most vital movements dedicated to renovation of the tanka coalesced around

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the personalities of Masaoka Shiki 正岡子規 (1867–1902), the leading Meiji haiku poet and theorist, and a young nationalist teacher and poet named Yosano Hiroshi 与謝野寛 (1873–1935). The differences between these two men, which came to characterize the schools they founded, were ones of temperament as well as training. Shiki, who advocated a sharp objectivity in haiku, in his 1898 “Open Letter to Waka Poets” (Utayomi ni atauru sho 歌よみに与ふる書), urged the adoption of a similar aesthetic for tanka. In the following year he founded the Negishi Tanka Society 根岸短歌会 and during the rest of his brief life campaigned vigorously for his literary ideals. Shiki died of tuberculosis in 1902, but his preferences were elaborated after his death by the dominant Araragi アララギ group of tanka poets. Yosano Hiroshi, commonly called by his literary name Tekkan 鐵幹, adopted a diametrically opposed approach, espousing a floridly subjective lyricism and “involved” patriotism. Curiously, Shiki and Tekkan found common ground in their admiration for the Man’yōshū, the great eighth-century anthology of early Japanese poetry, and in their scornful rejection of the Kokinshū and later collections of courtly waka. What Shiki liked about the Man’yōshū and disliked about the Kokinshū was the supposed honesty of the former and artifice of the latter. Tekkan was particularly drawn to the “manliness” (masuraoburi) of the earlier anthology and detested the lack of masculine spirit in the later waka tradition stemming from the Kokinshū. In 1894, four years before Shiki’s “Open Letter,” he published a series of blistering attacks on the Keien School under the title Bōkoku no on 亡国 の音 (“Tones of a Ruined State”), an allusion to a statement in the Preface to Shijing 詩經, the ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry, that mournful music is the natural product of a defeated country. The times called for heroism, not the weak and womanish verse of the old-style poets. Tekkan’s early verse is not lacking in its own mournful music, more closely allied to the Chinese classical tradition than to the Japanese. His remarks have to be understood in the context of the times in which they were made, the eve of the Sino-Japanese War with its attendant patriotic fervor. He wrote both tanka and shintaishi, and although some may have laughed at his Byronic posing (“The autumn wind rises on the peaks of Korea; fingering my sword, I am not without my thoughts”), his poems were wildly popular, and he soon found himself at the center of the ro-



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mantic movement. In November 1899 he founded the New Poetry Society (Shinshisha 新詩社) in Tokyo. Meanwhile, the new currents in poetry were agitating Osaka and its adjacent city Sakai. In Osaka the Naniwa (later Kansai) Young Literary Society (Naniwa Seinen Bungakukai 難波青年文学会) was founded in April 1897, and its organ Yoshiashigusa4 よしあし草 began publication in July of that year. In December 1898 three young poets set up a Sakai branch of this organization. Hō Shō and her brother Chūsaburō joined. The February 1899 issue of Yoshiashigusa carried a shintaishi by Shō, her first contribution to this magazine. Published under the pen name Hō Kobune 小舟子 (“Little Boat”), it is a fantasy of lovers’ meeting titled “Spring Moon” (Shungetsu 春月) and owes much to the style set by Kyūkin and Tōson: Wakarete nagaki kimi to ware Long have we been parted,   you and I, Koyoi aimishi ureshisa o But meet again tonight in joy   so deep Kumite mo tsukinu umazake ni That we can never drain its   cup: sweet wine Usukurenai no someideshi Glints softly underneath the   cheek so faintly Kimi ga kataho ni bin no ke no Flushed, fair cheek among   whose locks of hair Harukaze yuruku soyogu kana The gentle breeze of spring   sports carelessly. Tanoshikarazu ya kono yūbe Are we not happy at this hour   of dusk— Haru wa yūbe no usugumo ni Spring and dusk, a sky of lacy   clouds, Futari no koi mo satoru kana Beneath which two now waken   to their love! Oboro ni niou tsuki no moto In the radiance of the hazy   moon Kimi kokoro naku hohoemi ni You smiled an unpremeditated   smile—

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Wakaki inochi ya sasagubeki My young life shall be my   offering! In August 1899 Shō began contributing tanka to Yoshiashigusa, using the name Akiko 晶子. Since this is the name by which she is known as a writer, I shall use it to refer to her in the balance of this essay. The new melting note sounded in “Spring Moon” is apparent in her tanka as well. Her first treatment of a recurrent figure in her early poetry, the romantically desirable young Buddhist priest, is found in one of her two poems in the August issue of Yoshiashigusa:   Urawakaki   Faintly comes the sound Dokyō no koe no Of a young and tender voice   Kikoyu nari   Chanting the sutras: Hitomotozakura One lone cherry tree sheds bloom Tsuki ni chiru io On the moonlight hermitage. One wonders about the origin of the priest figure. Akiko’s first flame, as far as we know, was Kōno Tetsunan 河野鉄南, a young priest at the Kakuōji 覚応寺 in Sakai. Tetsunan was one of the founders of the Sakai branch of the Kansai Seinen Bungakukai, the organization to which Akiko belonged, but she did not meet him until January 1900, five months after the publication of the poem in question. Interestingly, Yosano Tekkan also came from a Buddhist background and was trained for the priesthood. But Akiko’s first meeting with him was even later, in August 1900. Perhaps it is simply that as Akiko’s talent rapidly matured she consciously adopted the pose of the temptress as one of her principal literary masks. Akiko’s early poetry often demands a biographical reading, but just as frequently shimmers away into a world of fantasy and imagined wish-fulfillment. Either way, the poet was by the late 1890s a fully grown and very warm-blooded young woman, eager to escape from the constricting circumstances in which she lived into the exciting worlds of art and love. Of all the young romantics of the turn of the century, she brought the most passionate personal conviction to her work. On January 3, 1900, Akiko attended a New Year gathering of a group of local literary people who gave themselves the name Shinseikai 新星 会, “New Star Society.” It was on this occasion that she first met Kōno



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Tetsunan. Akiko was shy before the others and soon left, but not before Tetsunan had spoken to her kindly. She immediately wrote to thank him, thus beginning a correspondence that was startlingly intimate and ardent, at least on her side, and that continued on into the fall. In September she published in Kansai Bungaku another tanka about a tooserious young priest:   Fue no ne ni   Who at sound of flute Hokekyō utsusu Halts the hand that copies out   Te o todome   The Lotus Sutra— Hisomeshi mayu yo O knitted brows, you are too young Mada urawakaki For such a fearsome frown. It is not unlikely that Akiko was eager for love, and it seems sure that Tetsunan was not cooperative. One of her most quoted poems in the guise of the temptress may refer to her frustration during these months:   Yawahada no   Beneath my soft skin Atsuki chishio ni Pulses the hot tide of blood   Fure mo mide   You have never tried Sabishikarazu ya To touch; aren’t you lonely, Michi o toku kimi O young preacher of the Way? By the time these two poems were published, the first in September and the second in October of 1900, however, Akiko’s feelings had focused firmly and finally on the man who became the one great love of her life. The biographical referent of “Yawahada no” has been much debated; in her later commentary Akiko, characteristically, preferred to avoid personalities and give the last line a merely general sense. One thing at least is clear: during the year 1900 Akiko emerged suddenly as the possessor of a bold and self-assured style. The “Yawahada” poem came out in Myōjō 明星 (“Morning Star”), a new magazine begun in April of the same year by Yosano Tekkan as the organ of the Shinshisha, the society he had founded in November 1899. Akiko had joined the Shinshisha in May at the urging of Kōno Tetsunan. The destiny of Akiko and Tekkan was working itself out (Akiko later that year expressed herself in just such terms) with a seeming inevitability.

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From the moment the two became aware of each other they came together like magnets—or so the facts appear to a simplifying retrospective eye. Yosano Tekkan was born on February 26, 1873, in Okazaki-mura 岡 崎村outside Kyoto at a temple called Ganjōji 願成寺. He was thus nearly six years older than Akiko. His father Reigon 礼厳 was a scholar-priest of the Nishi Honganji sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Hiroshi was the boy’s name, given him by his father’s friend Ōtagaki Rengetsu 太田垣蓮 月 (1791–1875), the famous haiku-poet nun. The early years of Meiji were a bad time for Buddhist establishments in Japan, as the religion came into disfavor with both nativistic ultra-nationalists and propagandizers for Western enlightenment. Tekkan grew up amid poverty and family discord. He was sent out for adoption into another priestly family, the Andō 安藤 at the An’yōji 安養寺 in Ori-Ono 遠里小野, a village near Sakai. He attended the same Sakai school as Kōno Tetsunan, his oldest acquaintance among the Kansai group of poets, and was familiar with the area of the Surugaya. The arrangement with the Andō broke down in 1887 when Tekkan, rejecting a future as a Buddhist priest, left the An’yōji. At his father’s insistence he did permit himself to be ordained at the Nishi Honganji, but he never practiced his religious profession. Instead he cultivated an interest in poetry that had developed at school. In order to support himself he became a teacher in a girls’ school in Tokuyama, Yamaguchi Prefecture, where he lived for three years beginning in 1889. The first two of Tekkan’s three marriages came out of his Tokuyama period. The first was to Asada Sadako 浅田信子, the daughter of a local brewer, and the second to Hayashi Takino 林滝野. Both girls were his pupils. The divorce from Sadako and marriage to Takino did not take place until much later, in 1899. Sadako and Takino each bore a child to Tekkan—Sadako a daughter in 1899, and Takino a son in September of the following year. Tekkan promised to let himself be adopted into the Hayashi family as Takino’s husband. In return, the well-to-do Hayashis gave Tekkan financial help in founding his magazine Myōjō. It was not easy for Tekkan to back out of this network of obligations when the time came. Meanwhile, he had left Tokuyama in 1892 to go to Tokyo. Borrowing money from a half-brother, he opened a literary magazine which he



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called Hōsū 鳳雛, “The Young Phoenix.” It folded after one issue, but he was able to gain the literary patronage of Ochiai Naobumi 落合直文 (1861–1903) and Mori Ōgai 森鴎外 (1862–1922), both established literary figures. The scholar-poet Naobumi in particular was important in Tekkan’s development. In 1893 Naobumi founded the Asakashaあさ香 社, the first of the “new poetry” societies. Tekkan was a member as a disciple of Naobumi. It was out of one faction of the Asakasha group that Tekkan organized the Shinshisha six years later. In 1894 Tekkan serialized Bōkoku no on in Niroku shimpō 二六新報, a newspaper for which he worked. In April 1895 he went to Korea to teach in a private school founded by Ayukai Kaien 鮎貝槐園 (1864–1946), a younger brother of Naobumi. Korea exerted a powerful fascination on Tekkan’s imagination, chiefly in terms of its role in the developing rivalry between Japan and Russia. When he returned to Japan to take up a position with the Meiji Shoin publishing house in 1896, Tekkan brought out his first volume of poetry, Tōzai namboku 東西南北 (“East, West, South, North”). It contained the poem about fingering his sword previously mentioned, others about the howling of tigers, and a series of tanka each of which begins, “Kara ni shite / ikade ka shinamu” (“How can I die in Korea?”). The reasons given for not dying there are varied—there are no mountains fit for a hero’s burial; he must wait to see the war which will come after ten years (an uncannily accurate prognostication); he has a mother and father at home; and, if he dies, manly poetry will again fall into neglect. Tekkan’s reputation, and his image, were established: “Tiger Tekkan.” Tōzai namboku was followed by Tenchi genkō 天地玄黄 in 1897 and Tekkanshi 鉄幹子 in 1901. Tekkanshi contains a long shintaishi titled “Hito o kouru uta,” written in Seoul in 1897 on a later trip to Korea. A few stanzas will suggest the quality of Tekkan’s more extended verse and his continental concerns: Miyo nishikita ni Barukan no Behold to the northwest the   spectacle Sore ni mo nitaru kuni no sama Of a country hemmed in like   a Balkan state. Ayaukarazu ya kumo sakete Will it not be in peril when,   splitting the clouds,

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Tenka hitotabi furan toki The fire of heaven falls in a   single stroke? …………………………….

…………………………………

Tama o kazareru taikan wa The jewel-bedizened high   officials Mina hokudō no namari ari All have the accent of the north; Kōgai yoku nomu sannan no The young champions of the   three southern states Kenji wa sanjite kage mo nashi Who drank the righteousness of   wrath are scattered without a   trace. Yotabi Genkai no nami o koe Four times across the waves of   the Genkai Kara no miyako ni kite mireba I have come to the capital of   Kara: Aki no hi kanashi ōjō ya The autumn days are sad in the   royal city; Mukashi ni kawareru kumo Changed from of old, the color   no iro   of the clouds. Ā ware ika ni futokoro no Ah me, though I still the clamor Tsurugi wa nari o shinobu to mo Of the sword in my breast, Musebu namida o te ni ukete How can I stifle my sad songs Kanashiki uta no nakaran ya As I catch these choking tears   in my hands? Tekkan was in contact with the poets of Osaka and Sakai in 1899, and arranged to travel west in the summer of 1900 to gain new members for his New Poetry Society. He left Tokyo by train on August 2 and returned on August 19. The days between those two dates changed his life and that of the young Akiko. On August 3 he arrived in Osaka and put up at the Hirai 平井 Inn in Kitahama. He sent word to Kōno Tetsunan, asking him to inform Akiko and Taku Gangetsu 宅雁月, another member of the Kansai Young Literary Society. The first meeting between Akiko and Tekkan took place at the inn on August 4. They of course already knew



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each other’s poetry; Tekkan was Akiko’s editor, and they had been corresponding for some months. The two were not alone. Also present was Yamakawa Tomiko 山川登実子 (1879–1909), another young poet of the Kansai group, soon to become Akiko’s close friend and rival. Akiko remembered later that Tekkan was dressed in a white yukata and leaned on the railing during their conversation. She also recalled that there was something of the priest about him. On August 5 Tekkan gave a formal lecture on the new poetry. On the sixth the local group took him on an outing to Hamadera 浜寺. There at the restaurant among the pines on the beach eight poets, including Tekkan, Tetsunan, Akiko, and Tomiko, composed poetry to their hearts’ content. Relaxation and informality were the order of the day, as each poet stood, sat, or sprawled on the ground to seek inspiration in his own fashion. It seems altogether likely that it was on this day that Akiko—and Tomiko—fell in love with Tiger Tekkan. Among the poems composed on that day is a pair of tanka on related themes by Tekkan and Akiko. The imagery was suggested by the name of the New Star Society, to which most of these poets belonged. (These romantics permitted themselves the conceit that they were somehow stars that had come down to earth.) Tekkan wrote:   Kono uta no   If one verse should drop Hitotsu kakenaba From this roster of our songs,   Sora nite mo   In the fields of sky Kushiki hikari no One star with its mystic light Hoshi hitotsu kiemu Would wink out and disappear. Akiko’s poem by focusing on the morning star makes a telling reference to Tekkan, through the name of his magazine, an allusion which could hardly have escaped his notice:   Akatsuki no   For the Morning Star Hoshi ni nasake no Could I but fashion from my love   Uta o yomite   So sweet a song Tsuchi ni otoshite As to make it fall to earth, Tomo ni sumabaya How we would dwell together!

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The following three days were taken up with another lecture by Tekkan, in Kobe, on the new waka; by further poetry parties; and by strolls in the vicinity of Suma and the Sumiyoshi Shrine. Akiko seems always to have been present. Then Tekkan left for Okayama, where he lectured on the eleventh, and off to Tokuyama, where pressing personal concerns awaited him. Before leaving Osaka, Tekkan wrote to Akiko. In his letter were several poems, among them:   Ishi yori mo   A woman Tsumetaki hito o Colder than stone—   Kakiidaki   Clasping her, Wa ga yo munashiku Must I sink emptily Shizumubeki kana Through the nothing of life? Tekkan in fact was going home to his wife Takino’s family in the hope of nullifying the adoption arrangement. As it turned out, this was not possible short of divorce. Tekkan seems to have been torn between affection for Takino and a desire for freedom. Takino was pregnant, and Tekkan was heavily indebted to the Hayashi family. Apparently his relations with Takino were strained, and he may well have wondered if there was a place for her in the new life opening before him in Tokyo. He had surrounded himself with literary people, including a number of young female disciples. Perhaps Takino was too provincial to fit into all of this. In any case, Tekkan wanted to keep his family name. He had divulged something of his unhappy situation to Akiko—and perhaps to Yama­ kawa Tomiko as well—no doubt simplifying the muddle in terms suggested by the poem quoted above. Tekkan’s letter to Akiko, written on August 9, five days after meeting her, is an interweaving of tanka and highly emotive prose. It recalls “the shade of the pines where you told me many sad things. Will the moon be clear again tonight, the dew be thick? Already it is a memory—truly our lives are but a dream. . . . Yes, ideal love is a perilous rock in a stormy sea. . . . Love in the twentieth century is an evanescent thing. All our fine writing at Hamadera has resulted in just one idea—to meet you again in the pages of Myōjō after I return east.” But unexpectedly Tekkan stopped at Osaka again on August 15 on his return trip. There was another outing with the local poets



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under the pines at Hamadera. Akiko wrote a poem which was published in the October issue of Myōjō:   Matsukage ni   Once more we meet Mata mo aimiru In the shadow of the pines,   Kimi to ware   You and I, my love: Enishi no kami o Do not think the god unkind Nikushi to obosu na Who guides our destinies. For all his masculine swagger, Tekkan was a sensitive and high-strung person; he was laid up for a week with nervous exhaustion after his return to Tokyo. A literary controversy was brewing with Shiki, nothing had been decided about his marital problem, and his wife was entering her last month of pregnancy. There were his editorial duties to perform. And on top of all this the whirlwind trip had complicated his life with two ardent and attractive young female poets. A poem of Akiko’s that came out in the September issue of Myōjō seems to have been inspired by news of Tekkan’s illness. It shows the sort of amorous fantasy which occupied Akiko’s mind at the outset of her grand passion. The charm of the poem lies in the naïve extravagance of its pose—that of desire still untested by experience:   Yamimaseru   In one slender arm Unaji ni hosoki I shall lift your weary head,   Kaina makite   My stricken love, Netsu ni kawakeru Bending low to leave my kiss Mikuchi o suwamu On your feverish, parching lips. On August 7, the day after the first Hamadera excursion, Akiko wrote to Kōno Tetsunan, whom she had been deluging with letters since January, asking him to discontinue their correspondence unless she wrote asking for a reply. She was deeply apologetic and craved his understanding, for which she thanked him on September 26. On September 30 she wrote again, signing herself Tsumi no Ko, “Sinful Child”: “I am a sinful child. . . . It was you who introduced my name to Mr. Yosano. The name I have today is thanks to that. And that I have today become a sinful child is also thanks to that. I shall say no more. . . . It must be amusing to

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your enlightened eyes. Farewell, my brother of the past. Be the leader of us all.” This was not the end of Akiko’s correspondence with Tetsunan, however. In fact, another letter followed the next day, October 1: “Truly you are water. Your heart is virtuous, like water. I am a sinful child. As you say, he too must be a sinful child. But you will not ask, who is that sinful child? You with your pure, pure heart. Do not ask. . . .” This strange half-confession includes a poem that may be Akiko’s earliest in which she adopts the pose of the “sinful child,” one of her favorite literary masks in her early poetry: “When I was sent a white bush clover spray by Suimei5 on the sixteenth of last month, I tell you truly I was unable to hold back my tears at those blossoms:   Kiyokarishi   She bears secretly Mukashi no omoi Remembrance of the time now gone   Shinobu kana   When love was pure: Tsumi no ko hitori A sinful child, alone, Shirohagi o mite Gazing at white bush clover.” What Akiko meant by tsumi, and the extent to which it is merely a literary pose, are matters not easy to decide. Akiko and Tekkan had never been alone together at this time, but a biographical reading of her poetry suggests strongly that she felt qualms about her sudden passion for a married man, as well as guilt about her “betrayal” of Tetsunan. The fact should not be overlooked that there are intriguing references to lost sheep in Akiko’s early verse which hint at familiarity with Christian scriptures or hymns. There is also this, first published in Myōjō in March 1901:   Fuchi no mizu ni   I pick up again Nageshi Seisho o The Bible I had cast away   Mata mo hiroi   In the waters of the pool, Sora aoginaku And cry out, gazing at the sky— Ware madoi no ko I, lost wandering child. Madoi, the going astray of the last line, is a traditional Buddhist term for unenlightenment, but it will do service if need be for Christian “error.” The “child” in the poem is torn between fleshly desire and religious call-



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ing. Without overstressing what may after all be merely exotic elements in Akiko’s verse, perhaps it would not be far wrong to see in her use of tsumi a specifically sexual sense of sin. The fascination of the forbidden informs her most audacious poetry; nothing pleases her more than to flaunt her desires in the face of conventional morality. A deliberate, if rather obvious, use of color symbolism is often found in her “sinful” poems. As we have seen, white stands for purity and arouses a consciousness of sin. Akiko found a kind of sisterhood in gorgeously colored blossoms. The following two tanka were both published in the May 1901 issue of Myōjō:   Uta ni kike na   Ask of poetry: Tare no no hana ni Who from blossoms in a field   Akaki inamu   Rejects the red ones? Omomuki aru kana How fascinating is her charm, Haru tsumi motsu ko The sinful child in spring!   Tsubaki sore mo   Camellias, they too, Ume mo sa nariki And the blossoms of the plum—   Shirokariki   White, white were they all; Wa ga tsumi towanu In the peach I see a hue Iro momo ni miru That will not chide me for my sin. Tekkan went west again on October 25, 1900. Because of the birth of his son Atsumu the previous month the resolution of the question of his adoption had become more pressing than ever. His father-in-law remained adamant: either take the Hayashi name or return his daughter. A discouraged Tekkan stopped at Kobe on his way back to Tokyo. From there he went on to Kyoto, where by secret arrangement he met with Akiko and Yamakawa Tomiko. In a subsequent letter to Kōno Tetsunan, still her confidant, Akiko stressed that no one must know of this adventure. It is obvious that by now, in her early twenties, Akiko had made good a claim to more freedom of movement than had been allowed her in previous years. Nevertheless, the extent and nature of her relations with her fellow poets, and especially her growing involvement with Tekkan, must have been kept completely secret from her parents, if perhaps not from all her brothers and sisters.

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Tekkan, Akiko, and Tomiko spent the night of November 5 together at an inn at Awataguchi in the hills east of Kyoto. A little mapleviewing gave the color of an autumn outing to their rendezvous, but the occasion was a serious rather than a light-hearted one. The situation was certainly extraordinary, and one is struck by the candor with which the three discussed and accepted their emotions. Both of the young women were in love with Tekkan and accepted each other as friends and rivals. Tekkan was drawn to both but also had a lingering attachment to his wife Takino. In fact, with a characteristic self-indulgence, Tekkan complained of the cruelty of his father-in-law, who was forcing him apart from his wife. He evidently expected—and got—both sympathy and romantic devotion. Tekkan’s situation was still unresolved but apparently heading in the direction of divorce. Tomiko was facing a more immediate crisis. She was the daughter of a family of samurai stock in Obama, a town in Fukui Prefecture. Her parents had sent her to live with an elder sister in Osaka, where she attended school and joined the local poetry movement. She, Akiko, and Tekkan had all met at the same time. Now her father was demanding that she come home to accept an offer of marriage to a cousin with a promising future in the foreign service. In fact, her mother had come to collect her. Tomiko, born in 1879 and about six months younger than Akiko, had been writing poetry since her sixteenth year, and there is no question of her devotion to the art. But her father was domineering, and she lacked the stubborn willfulness and bravado of Akiko. Quietly she revealed to the others her decision to obey her parents. Akiko urged her to resist. The following verse is her reply:   Hito no yo zo   Why should we grieve, Nani o nageku to What is there to lament in life?   Tsuyoku iedo   Our words were strong— Kimi mo otomego But you are a woman, Ware mo otomego And I am a woman. In a conscious act of surrender, Tomiko brought her rivalry with Akiko to an end:   Sore to naku   With scarcely a word Akaki hana mina I let them go, the bright red blossoms,



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  Tomo ni yuzuri   All for my friend to cull; Somukite nakite I turn away and weep, I pluck Wasuregusa tsumu The grasses of forgetfulness. The sad, defeated tone of Tomiko’s poetry brings it much closer to the deeply pessimistic classical love tradition than is the case with her more assertive rival. In any case, the last thing these romantic poets feared as they played out their real-life drama was self-pity. As to all romantics, the self was precious. Tomiko addressed this poem to Tekkan as she looked gloomily ahead to a loveless marriage:   Moete moete   The flames burn and burn, Kasurete kiete They somber as the light goes down,   Yami ni iru   They sink into the dark: Sono yūbae ni This passage of the setting sun, Nitarazu ya kimi Love, is it not like mine? With Tomiko’s decision, Akiko’s own problem was simplified to a degree, but her feelings were mixed. She was and remained genuinely fond of Tomiko and was already enough of a feminist to see Tomiko’s course as a mistake. Yet after all she was her rival, and jealous. As they talked out their problems the three of them got little sleep that night. When they finally retired, Tomiko and Akiko slept together, and Tekkan in an adjoining room. Tomiko’s feet were cold in bed, Akiko discovered, and told Tekkan so the next morning.6 Then she regretted telling him, lest his pity make him love Tomiko the more. The three parted on the sixth, Tekkan to return to Tokyo, and Akiko and Tomiko to Sakai and Osaka. Tomiko departed for home and marriage later the same month. Akiko was with her when she left, seeing her off at Osaka station. On the day before, November 15, Akiko and Tomiko had a souvenir photograph taken of them together. It shows the two women seated, Akiko in a chair, and Tomiko beside her on the floor. Tomiko holds Akiko’s right hand in hers and is turned half toward her but looking off into the distance with a composed but bleak expression. Akiko looks almost straight into the camera and seems the sadder of the two, as if weary and on the verge of tears. Her face is dominated by dark, straight eyebrows, deep eyes, and the large, thrusting jaw even more prominent in other photographs.

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Tomiko has the more harmonious features, an oval face of classic Japanese beauty. Both women look very young. The intensity of feeling concealed beneath Tomiko’s outward calm is suggested by this poem published in the January 1901 issue of Myōjō:   Kurueri ya   I have gone mad! Yo zo urameshiki The world is hateful, hateful—   Urameshiki   I shall loosen my hair, Kami tokisabaki I shall wear it all undone, Kaze ni mukawamu As I turn to face the wind. Not long after the end of the year Tekkan was back in Kansai. There were New Year festivities to attend on January 6, 1901, at the Kobe branch of the Shinshisha. Tekkan read one of his long poems to great applause. Again the occasion afforded the opportunity for a secret rendezvous in Kyoto—but this time Tekkan and Akiko were alone together. They met on the ninth and stayed two nights at the same inn as earlier in November. It seems certain that this time the love of the two was consummated. Tekkan apparently disclosed the fact that divorce from Takino was now certain and promised to marry Akiko as soon as his rupture with the Hayashis was complete. He took his bride-to-be to visit the graves of his mother and father. In her correspondence and poetry Akiko began calling herself the “secret wife,” or, when discouraged, the “two-night wife.” The following was published in the March 1901 issue of Myōjō:   Hito ni soite   Kneeling by his side Shikimi sasaguru To offer sprigs of anise   Komorizuma   Was the secret wife: Haha naru kimi o You were his mother, for you Mihaka ni nakinu The tears I shed at the grave. As might be expected, this crucial point in Akiko’s life is commemorated in a large number of poems. The experience is glorified, romanticized, fantasized about, looked at from various angles, but the central situation is that Akiko has fulfilled her desire, has met and slept with her lover. One of the poems in her first book puts the matter plainly, em-



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ploying the sexually suggestive image of tangled hair, an emblem of consummated passion familiar from classical waka and soon to become her own special banner of defiance:   Harusamu no   In the cold of spring Futahi o Kyō no Two days we spent secluded   Yamagomori   In the hills of Kyō: Ume ni fusawanu Plum blossoms were poorly matched Wa ga kami no midare With the wild tangle of my hair. The white blossoms of the plum, first of the flowering trees to bloom, are associated with snow, coldness, and chastity in classical poetry, as well as in Akiko’s personal symbolism, and hence are “poorly matched” with signs of amorous delight. Again and again Akiko embroiders fantasies about the eternal theme of the shortness of lovers’ nights. The following appeared in Myōjō in March:   Hosoki wa ga   O love, reach beyond Unaji ni amaru Where my slenderness pillows   Mite nobete   In your tender arms: Sasaetamae na Block his escape, I beg you, Kaeru yo no kami This god of departing night. The lovers left Kyoto on January 11, apparently with an understanding between them, but faced with another separation. It was a long one, especially for Akiko. She went through a period of intense anxiety, impatience, and insecurity during the first half of 1901. Her love was real, no mere vision now, but still secret. Tekkan went on living with Takino. Constantly occupied with his editorial duties, involved in literary controversies, his progress in resolving his personal problems was agonizing slow. Akiko throughout her life allowed no obstacle to keep her from her goals; she was not one to wait quietly, and when she loved, it was with total commitment. It seems clear that Tekkan, despite his glamour and magnetism, was a much less fiery personality, certainly a less singleminded one. There is evidence that he was loath to part with Takino even now. But the year was 1901, and he could not emulate the expansive

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domestic arrangements of a philogynous Genji. The following two poems, both published in the March issue of Myōjō, perhaps express some of Akiko’s distraught anxiety at this time. The second in particular, recklessly ardent and even angry, may imply (if given the usual biographical reading) that Tekkan had had second thoughts about the wild course of their love:   Kurogami no   Like this black hair, Chisuji no kami no These thousand strands of hair,   Midaregami   This hair in tangles, Katsu omoimidare Now all tangled lie my thoughts, Omoimidaruru My thoughts are a tangled skein.   Isamemasu ka   Do you admonish me? Michi tokimasu ka Do you preach me the Way?   Satoshimasu ka   Do you show me my wrong? Sukuse no yoso ni Beyond karma dare to love— Chi o meshimase na Come, partake of my blood! It was finally worked out that Akiko would join Tekkan in Tokyo in early June. As the day approached, Akiko’s letters became ever more fervid. How had she endured the months since January? How could she wait even one more day? When it came, her departure was a flight, an abandonment of her family ties. Even now her parents were still ignorant of their daughter’s passion. She must have believed that they would never understand. They did not; she was disowned. Nor did her elder brother Shūtarō in Tokyo, who never spoke to her again. Akiko was twenty-two when she arrived by train in Tokyo on June 10, 1901. She immediately moved in with Tekkan (Takino had moved out only a few days before) and lived with him openly until their marriage in October. She wrote this poem about her hegira, probably soon after her arrival in Tokyo:   Kurui no ko   Child of madness— Ware ni honō no For me the wings of flame   Hane karoki   Were light to wear: Hyakusanjūri For a hundred thirty leagues Awatadashi no tabi Wild panicked hurtling flight.



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Thanks to her numerous poems published in Myōjō, Akiko’s reputation preceded her; she was welcomed into the fellowship of the Tokyo New Poetry Society. The bold and intimate nature of her verse made her something more than just a literary figure. She had been laying bare her heart for some time (not that she was unique among her coterie in this respect); the evidence of her blazing passions smoldered in the public prints. It was inevitable that she would inspire highly charged feelings of one kind or another. She was in fact on the way to becoming probably the most admired—and condemned—woman writer of modern Japan. And for her and her admirers “woman writer” was never a second-class status. Her first book was published on August 15, 1901, just over two months after her arrival on the Tokyo scene.7 It was titled Midaregami みだれ髪 (“Tangled Hair”) and contained 399 tanka, of which 284 had previously been published in various magazines. The cover showed a heart pierced by an arrow from whose tip emerged flowers. Within the heart was a young woman’s face, surrounded by stylized tangles of hair. The book contained other similarly romantic illustrations by Fujishima Takeji 藤島武二 (1867–1943), a noted Western-style artist. Midaregami was a great success; suddenly Akiko was all the rage. Its content is suggested by the poems already quoted, many of which were included. Unfortunately, an extensive analysis of this cornerstone of Japanese romanticism cannot be undertaken here.8 Suffice it to say that the poems show Akiko in her various guises—the fallen star, the sinful child, the temptress, the sensuous beauty. They are rich in colorful imagery, indeed they elaborate a kind of floral and color symbolism. They are bold, full of fantasy, and often dazzling and difficult in their compressed technique. Midaregami is a first-class literary accomplishment. The title stems from the kind of poem quoted twice above, of which there are several others in the collection, and ultimately from a nickname bestowed on Akiko by Tekkan after the Hamadera outing in August 1900. He and others noticed the tendency of her highly structured Meiji coiffure to come apart:   Akikaze ni   I shall give you names Fusawashiki na o Well suited to the temper   Mairasemu   Of the autumn wind:

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Sozorogokoro no Midaregami no kimi

Maiden of the wayward heart, Mistress of the tangled hair.

The book begins with a keynote poem evoking both the erotic hair image and the in-group conceit of the fallen star:   Yoru no chō ni   In sweet whisperings Sasamekitsukishi ’Neath the curtain of the night   Hoshi no ima o   She, a star, would love— Gekai no hito no Now fallen to the world below, Bin no hotsure yo A mortal with disheveled hair. Much of what shocked contemporaries is basically an expression of Akiko’s natural delight in the young beauty of her own body and the marvel of her awakening emotions. The positive celebration of such matters is indeed something new in the wistful tradition of Japanese love poetry. It seems unnecessary, as well as unkind, to use for such innocent triumphs the unpleasant-sounding term narcissism:   Sono ko hatachi   The child is twenty now: Kushi ni nagaruru Through her comb cascading falls   Kurogami no   Pride of long black hair, Ogori no haru no Pomp of young magnificence, Utsukushiki kana Fair extravagance of spring! Pride there certainly is, and at times a kind of arch wickedness:   Tsumi ōki   To punish men Otoko korase to For their many sins   Hada kiyoku   Was I fashioned Kurogami kiyoku With unblemished skin Tsukurareshi ware And long black hair. Akiko’s palette is extensive; some colors, such as carmine and purple, are particularly meaningful in her scale of symbolism:   Enjiiro wa   Color of carmine— Tare ni kataramu Whom shall I tell of it?   Chi no yuragi   Surging of blood,



Essay Two Haru no omoi no Sakari no inochi

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Yearning of springtime, Life in full flower!

The fires of spring can rarely have been more radiantly sung than in Akiko’s poetry. The following poem is forthright in a manner going back to the Man’yōshū, but in addition carries an idea that seems to have appealed to Akiko—that youth, love, and beauty are gifts of a divine generosity, and that it is ungrateful to let them go to waste:   Chi zo moyuru   My blood is afire: Kasamu hitoyo no Stay, I’ll lend you shelter   Yume no yado   For a night of dreams; Haru o yuku hito Traveler of spring, beware— Kami otoshime na Do not scorn the gift of God. That this attitude is found alongside the awareness of “sin” previously discussed implies the complexity of Akiko’s feelings as well as the variety of her art. The word kami (“god”) is frequent in Akiko’s verse. Sometimes it seems to refer to a supreme being, but at others to a kind of private mythology:   Midaregokochi   Tangled desires, Madoigokochi zo Blind, errant desires   Shikiri naru   Ever upon me: Yuri fumu kami ni From the god who tramples lilies Chichi ōiaezu I cannot cover my breasts. The significance of lilies is suggested by another poem:   Yuami suru   Bathing in the spring, Izumi no soko no Lapped in the warm water lay   Sayuribana   A fair white lily— Hatachi no natsu o The summer of my twentieth year Utsukushi to minu Was lovely to my gaze. The mention of breasts was rather new in Japanese poetry and seems to have been shocking. Sasaki Nobutsuna’s 佐々木信綱 magazine Kokoro no hana 心の花 printed a critique accusing Akiko of spewing out

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indecencies fit only for the mouths of streetwalkers, and of corrupting public morals. (Such abuse needless to say did not keep Midaregami from finding a large audience.) The celebration of sexual love is at the heart of the collection and indeed posed a direct challenge to conventional prudery. Among the most memorably defiant poems in the book are these two:   Haru mijikashi   Spring is soon over; Nani ni fumetsu no And where shall mortals find   Inochi zo to   Eternal life? Chikara aru chi o Chiding, I gave into his hands Te ni sagurasenu The firmness of my breasts.   Chibusa osae   Holding my breasts, Shimpi no tobari Silently I kick aside   Soto kerinu   The mystic curtain: Koko naru hana no Here a crimson flower blooms, Kurenai zo koki Deep in its roseate hue. With Midaregami Yosano Akiko was firmly launched on her career and passes beyond the scope of this article. She continued a fertile production of tanka throughout her life, was almost equally well known for her shintaishi, eventually branched out into prose fiction and the essay, translated the Tale of Genji and many other Heian classics into modern Japanese, helped found and run a school for gifted children, and was an early leader in the fight for women’s rights. Her courageous opposition to the strident militarism prevalent at the time of the Russo-Japanese War unleashed vicious attacks on her.9 From 1901 until the demise of Myōjō in 1908 she was a sort of mother goddess to the group of romantic poets loyal to her and her husband. These included such important figures as Ishikawa Takuboku 石川啄木 (1886–1912), Kitahara Hakushū 北 原白秋 (1885–1942), Yoshii Isamu 吉井勇 (1886–1960), and Kubota Utsubo 窪田空穂 (1877–1967). Yamakawa Tomiko appeared in Tokyo in 1904, following the untimely death of her husband in 1902, and joined Akiko and Masuda Masako 益田まさ子 (1880–1946) in a joint poem collection, Koigoromo 恋衣 in 1905. This was Tomiko’s only book. She



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died of illness in 1909. Although romanticism passed from fashion, Akiko always remained faithful to her own life-affirming ideals. It would be pleasant to relate that in later years she looked back with pride on Midaregami and the products of her youth. Unfortunately, she seems to have been embarrassed by her early poetry, revising the collection several times and ultimately refusing to let it be reprinted. Only since her death in 1942, and especially since the end of the Second World War, has serious research on the young Akiko begun. Her life with Tekkan also was no idyll. From her arrival in Tokyo in 1901 she was faced with Tekkan’s lingering attachment to Takino. For the first months she was forced to employ Takino’s maid, who never ceased praising her former mistress. Later, at a time of financial need, Tekkan turned again to the Hayashi family, and Akiko exploded into a jealous rage. In 1909 she published a story, Oyako 親子 (“Parent and Child”), that is patently autobiographical. It is startlingly bitter. Tekkan’s fickleness and hypocrisy, and Akiko’s humiliation in the first days of her marriage, are rendered almost too vividly. It is a psychologically insightful story, but not one easy to be comfortable with. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Akiko loved Tekkan devotedly all her life. She had an assuasive influence on his poetry. He abandoned his assertively masculine style and began to write in a softer vein from the time of his fourth book of poems, Murasaki 紫, in 1901. A poem from that book tells of the change that comes over him:   Ware onoko   Man-child am I, Iki no ko na no ko Child of spirit, child of fame,   Tsurugi no ko   Child armed with a sword; Shi no ko koi no ko Child of poems, child of love— Ā modae no ko Ah, child of agony! Akiko proved to be the more talented as well as the stronger of the two. Tekkan recognized her genius in a tanka written soon after their first meeting and published in Myōjō in October 1900:   Ametsuchi ni   In heaven and earth Hitori no zai to One talent—one true poet—   Omoishi wa   So indeed I thought;

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Asakarikeru yo Kimi ni awanu toki

Yes, I was shallow then, Before I met you.

In 1904 Tekkan and Akiko collaborated on a joint collection called

Dokugusa 毒草 (“Poison-Grasses”). Some of Tekkan’s poems in this book, written in an experimental form called zekku (5–7–7–7–7), are

among his best:

  Ame mireba   When I gaze aloft, Kogane hoshi no yo I see a night of golden stars; Naru ya kono toki At such an hour is born Shinju wa umi ni The pearl in its ocean bed, Uta wa mimune ni The poem in your heart. Myōjō ceased publication in 1908 with the secession of the Yosano disciples, who wanted greater independence and were tired of the already dated romantic manner. Tekkan (by this time he had dropped his pen name and was once more “Hiroshi”) went into a prolonged slump. Unable to face reversal, he took to idling about the house and writing self-mocking poems. Akiko was obliged to take over the support of the family (a large one—she ultimately had thirteen children, of whom eleven lived to grow up) by her prodigious literary production. This of course deepened Tekkan’s self-contempt. Akiko raised money to send him off to Europe in 1912 to give him a change of scene—and then followed after him, unable to bear his absence. They toured five European countries and met several prominent people in literature and art. But Tekkan never really did recover his former self-confidence, or his position in literary circles. Photographs of Tekkan and Akiko made a fascinating study. Interestingly, the two had the same large, jutting jaw and commanding eyes— dominant people both, one would say. But in Akiko (except for her somewhat subdued wedding picture) there is apparent a bitter strength lacking in her husband. From the turn of the century, through the 1920s, and into her last years, one finds the same large eyes, striking eyebrows, and deep, imperious glance. There is intelligence and passion in the face, and an eagerness that brooks no delay.



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Tekkan died of pneumonia in 1935 at the age of sixty-two. He was mourned by his former disciples, and by his widow, who survived him by seven years, dying in 1942 at sixty-four of complications following a stroke. Among her posthumous poems is this:   Fuyu no yo no   Star of the winter Hoshi kimi nariki Night you were, my love;   Hitotsu o ba   No, not one alone, Iu ni wa arazu I do not say you were but one— Kotogotoku mina You were all the stars there are. Notes 1. Ages throughout this article are given in the Western fashion, from date of birth. 2. Perhaps 1890 or 1891; accounts vary. Shō’s first, unsuccessful, entrance to Shukuin Primary School appears to have been at the age of three. She reentered at five. (Beichman, pp. 25, 287. See Bibliographical Note.) 3. Edith Sarra explores the complexities of the Sarashina author’s “desire for fiction” in her Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women’s Memoirs (Stanford University Press, 1999). 4. “Reed-and-rush-grass.” The Sakai and Osaka area, called Naniwa in ancient times, was famous for the reeds and rushes growing where the Yodo River debouches into the Inland Sea. Yoshi and ashi also have the meaning of “good” and “bad,” implying a critical range. 5. Kawai Suimei 河合醉茗 (1874–1965), one of the Sakai poets. 6. The cold feet are memorialized in Midaregami 184:   Tomo no ashi   “Her feet were cold Tsumetakariki to Last night . . . ” I let it slip,   Tabi no asa   That morning at the inn; Wakaki wa ga shi ni Without thought of what I said, Kokoro naku iinu I told our young teacher this.

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7. The author’s name is given as Ōtori Akiko おほとり晶子. Ōtori (“Great Bird”) is the name of the village where Akiko’s father’s ancestors lived. Beichman (p. 285) argues that it is the more probable reading of the family name Hō 鳳 (“Phoenix”). The name Yosano Akiko first appears in the January 1902 issue of Myōjō. 8. Beichman devotes three of her chapters to untangling Tangled Hair. 9. Steve Rabson discusses the “firestorm” surrounding Akiko’s 1904 antiwar poem “Kimi shinitamō koto nakare” in his article “Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One’s Life or Not—A Question of Which War.” This article, which appeared in the special issue devoted to Yosano Akiko in Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese (see Bibliographical Note), also provides evidence that Akiko later accepted and supported Japan’s justification of its war in Asia and the Pacific in the 1930s and 1940s.

Bibliographical Note Of the several books I have looked into to acquire knowledge and appreciation of Yosano Akiko and her poetry, I have found the following particularly helpful. Satō Ryōyū 佐藤亮雄, Midaregami kō みだれ髪攷 (Shūdōsha, 1956), presents with bibliographical information almost all of Akiko’s tanka written through the publication of Midaregami in August 1901. It also contains a valuable biographical study of this period of her life, along with several illustrations, including the photograph of Akiko and Tomiko discussed in the present article. These studies are now superseded by Itsumi Kumi 逸見久美, Hyōden Yosano Tekkan Akiko 評傅 與謝野鐵幹・晶子 (Yagi Shoten, 1975), and its revised edition, Hyōden Yosano Hiroshi 寛 Akiko: Meiji-hen 明治編 (Yagi Shoten, 2007). I have found Itsumi’s discussion of Tekkan’s first two marriages particularly useful. There are two excellent commentaries on Midaregami: Satake Kazuhiko 佐竹籌彦, Zenshaku Midaregami kenkyū 全釋みだれ髪研究 (Yūhōdō, 1957, 1969); and Itsumi Kumi, Midaregami zenshaku みだれ髪 全釈 (Ōfūsha, 1978, 1986). The latter, which was not yet available when this article was written, arranges the poems in order of first publication; those that appeared for the first time in Midaregami are grouped separately at the end. I was also helped by Matsuda Yoshio’s 松田好夫 chap-



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ter on Yosano Akiko in Hisamatsu Sen’ichi 久松潜一and Sanekata Kiyoshi 實方清, eds., Kindai no kajin 近代の歌人I (Kōbundō, 1969), which contains the then recently discovered nineteen poems written in 1896– 97. I also profited from Fukuda Kiyoto 福田清人 and Hamana Hiroko 浜 名弘子, Yosano Akiko (Shimizu Shoin, 1968), a short biography, and from Yoshida Seiichi 吉田精一 and Kimata Osamu 木俣修, eds., Yosano Hiroshi, Yosano Akiko, Yoshii Isamu 吉井勇, vol. 4 of Nihon shijin zenshū 日本 詩人全集 (Shinchōsha, 1968), a handy selection from the works of these poets. For background on Meiji tanka reform movements I am indebted to Robert H. Brower’s article, “Masaoka Shiki and Tanka Reform,” in Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton University Press, 1971). Since the original publication of this article two important booklength studies of Yosano Akiko have appeared in English. G. G. Rowley, Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2000), is devoted to Akiko’s career as a translator of the Heian classics, and specifically of Genji monogatari, into modern Japanese, an undertaking that occupied a major portion of her time and effort for decades. Janine Beichman, Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry (University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), contains a detailed narrative of Akiko’s early life based on extensive new research, as well as three chapters devoted to a study of Midaregami, its organization, sources, and originality. A number of articles also appeared in the 1990s, several of which are included in the April 1991 special Yosano Akiko issue of the Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese under the guest editorship of Laurel Rasplica Rodd. In addition to the many fine new translations in these books and articles, I have enjoyed and profited from the older ones done by Shio Sakanishi, Tangled Hair (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1935); Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda, Tangled Hair (Purdue University Studies, 1971); and Atsumi Ikuko and Graeme Wilson, “The Poetry of Yosano Akiko,” Japan Quarterly, XXI, 2 (April–June 1974). The translations in the present article are my own.

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The Dark at the Bottom of the Dish

cd Fishing for Myth in the Poetry of Mizuno Ruriko

Several years ago I chanced to meet a Japanese woman poet at a party for art historians and not surprisingly passed the better part of the evening sitting beside her talking about poetry and translation. Out of that meeting came a new venture in my life as a translator, a life devoted for decades to classical poetry, the intricate art of waka, whose 5–7–5– 7–7 rhythms had become and remain deeply embedded in my brain. The poet’s name was Mizuno Ruriko 水野るり子, and the kind of poetry she wrote, sanbunshi 散文詩 (prose poems) and gendaishi 現代詩 (“modern” poetry in free-verse lines),1 provided far different challenges and satisfactions from those that had long been the staples of my work. In the course of our conversation, I asked Mizuno-san if she would be willing to send me some of her poems; she was, and I at once began to try my hand at making translations. As I recall, the very first was “Tsuki no sakana” 月の魚—“Moon Fish.” o fish, oh, you shedding tears over Andalucía carried donkey-back up wild fields a waning moon drawn bowstring down up from one day in eternity far, far o fish, carried away:

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you are like one drop of offering for the drying earth. o fish, oh your soul-globe’s going in the great transparent bowl of sky the moon breaks piece by piece and the sea dries away drop by drop from the earthenware vessel where you’re carried, o fish, oh your little body, copying the lonely shape of the moon, leaps bowlike toward the sky. o fish, oh that sound of water stars will listen to ten thousand years from now: Then you are hanging in a moonless sky like a memory looking down on a lost waterless planet. This poem went easily enough, and its short lines and bright, surreal images appealed to me, as did its implied concern for the fate of planet earth. Mizuno-san seemed pleased, and soon a book of her poems arrived in the mail. It was Henzeru to Gurēteru no shima (Hänsel and Gretel’s Island), the second collection (1983) of her published work, a volume that I found had received the prestigious H-Shi Shō, the “Mr. H. Prize,” for modern poetry.2 As I began to explore its content, I was aware of being drawn into a darkling world, haunting and strangely powerful. I ended up translating the entire book and then going on to translate three more books of Mizuno’s poetry and several uncollected poems as well. Since I was also continuing my work on waka, obviously the Mizuno



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project was competing for my time. Why was I so drawn to a poetry previously unfamiliar; what was it that got me hooked? This essay is an attempt to probe for an answer. To begin with, I must admit that the opportunity to work with a living poet who could tell me about herself and answer my queries weighed heavily in my decision to devote time to this project. Hitomaro, Izumi Shikibu, and Yosano Akiko,3 to name three of my favorite “poets dead and gone,” have remained smiling their archaic smiles behind the veil of time, allowing me to imagine I am communing with them, but preserving their final words in a lovely, echoing silence. I am in some wise a camp follower of the scholarly horde that has gone ahead, but always wait for the moment when I can slit open the tent and creep into the inner sanctum on my own. In other words, I take liberties. Who would not, who is amorous for poetry, I have thought, justifying my practices. But with Mizuno the liberties have been few indeed. Working in tandem with this living poet, at least, has meant checking every word, discussing punctuation and layout, and making whatever number of revisions is called for until the final OK is given. It is a chastening experience quite different from translating waka. It is also an instructive one, finding the ways in which a poet cares about her own work. That finally much of that work comes to seem my own despite the restraints under which I have willingly operated is even more instructive—and chastening. But translation methods are not the topic I intend to deal with here. I mention them only to emphasize the closeness I feel to much of what Mizuno has created. When I ask myself what draws me to Mizuno’s poetry, I keep coming back to the word “mystery.” There used to be a radio program called “I Love a Mystery.” The phrase sticks in my mind. What is it to love a mystery? For some it may be the pleasure of matching wits with the detective, but I suspect that for me the heart of the matter will always remain the mystery itself, not the solution. The howling on the moor, the library maze, the revenant evil preying on the child. . . . Dream and sudden death in a haunted house. Many of Mizuno’s best poems are pervaded by the dark glimmer of what she herself has described as “a twilight zone that is neither day nor night,”4 a darkness which can be that of noon as

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well as midnight, a suggestive undertow that draws on dream, the surreal, and myth. It also draws on certain traumata of her own life, as is surely inevitable for any poet. At the heart of Mizuno’s world in Hänsel and Gretel’s Island is a nuclear family of father, mother, brother, and sister. Brother and sister are closely bonded, but the brother is ill and dies. The parents are the Other, alien, uncomprehending, somehow menacing. Through this world wander animals, symbolic, interactive, mysterious in their meanings. Let us begin with a prose poem titled “Sakana no yoru” 魚の夜—“The Night of the Fish.” The child is awake in a deep dream. From the sickroom window the town’s interior comes into view. The town is blackish, here and there destroyed. A solitary man passes through the town stepping along a crack in the thick dark on the streets. The man is carrying a large fish on his back. With the man’s every step a fishhook gives out a dull gleam deep in the throat of the upward-gazing fish. The belly of the big fish is crammed with little starveling fishes. Jammed in together, the fish are slowly carried toward a market deep in the darkness. It is a long way up from the sea. One by one the houses stand, their shell-encrusted windows shut tight. The fish-peddler’s face cannot be seen. No one notices his footsteps. They are like the ticking of a clock whose measured time advances in a circle night by night. The deep sound of the man’s boots reverberates against the windows of the sickroom all night long. Again and again the child opens his eyes in his dream. From the great staring eye of the fish the color of the sea pours out endlessly, wetting the gray street in a single streak. The mother places her ear against the chest of her feverish child. Little blind fish are wriggling in his chest. The child’s mouth is dry. It smells like an ebbing tide. The mother softly opens his chest. She thrusts in her hands and carefully lifts out his heavy, useless organs one by one. The soiled sheets are changed.



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The mother picks up the transparent body of her child. Holding it lightly in her arms, she goes out of the dark sickroom. The scattered fish bones are found in the morning, thrown into a hole in the concrete, far away from the sea. The poem beckons toward interpretation. Its broodingly surreal dreamscape articulates one of Mizuno’s recurrent narratives—the death of the brother. Carl Jung, whose thought has deeply influenced Mizuno, states that the Mother archetype “suggests darkness, something nocturnal and fearful, hemming one in.”5 One meets the Mother frequently in Mizuno’s work, and we shall also go on encountering the sick child and the fish. Time is a basic theme, the ticking clock an ominous image. Hänsel and Gretel’s Island begins with a set of five related prose poems, the first of which has the same title. It is narrated by the sister and immediately introduces the elephant, a favorite Mizuno trope for the wholeness, largeness, sadness, and helplessness of the world. The Hänsel and Gretel story (Grimm is one of Mizuno’s sources for childhood themes), it is well to remember, features a child-devouring witch. Mother and witch in both Grimm and Mizuno can sometimes, it would seem, conflate into one. Here is “Hänsel and Gretel’s Island”:6

There was a summer when the two of us lived together on an island. An X was affixed to the small gate so that our house could not be distinguished from the others. I climbed narrow stairs and went into the room, thrusting a flower in my hair. In the room there was an elephant. The elephant faced away and was lost in dreams of the sea. Waves kept breaking over its back, until finally it began to be an island. Before long the island, with its little lamp lit, put us on its back and sank toward the sea night after night. At night my brother talked on and on about the island: When still in its infancy, the island was captured by people, stripped naked, and even marked with a zoological distribution chart. (We two were very ashamed.) Even now the old symbolic markings survive faintly on the island, here and there. They look like the marks left by a rope. A track remains of a kind of amphibian that crawled across the

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island in the Devonian epoch, but nothing is known of the creature beyond the fact that it passed this way. The lonesome island has been waiting for us quietly ever since in the form of an elephant. To take us to the sky and the shade of the bright fern forest. During the day we faced each other across a round dining table and thought only of where the elephant and island had gone. Music for the bon dance reached us faintly on the breeze; we had an inkling we had come to some country of the East. I gave the elephant the name Dora;7 my brother gave the island the name Dora. I made a poem about the creepers the elephant-handler uses to make his whip, and meanwhile my brother was writing a long article about the island’s geology and the measurements of one remaining enormous footprint. Circling the table, the two of us drew closer and closer to the spot from which the elephant and island could be seen. In many different places fathers and mothers began to die. War had started among the grownups. We were somehow aware of the presence of a strange fish that had mounted the stairs and was listening at the door. When I bent over and picked up the fish, I severed its legs. All the legs were short. Outside the window we could smell the legs and the old entrails. In the belly of the pregnant fish was a map of something blind, all red and folded up. My brother unfolded the map onto a dark oval platter. It was of a fecund region. The two of us lay down like innocent wounds and studied for the first time in our lives the recipe for preparing a strange fish. We learned that fishes and people both eventually need to be healed. That was the secret of the grownups. Deep in the forest there was a sound of fern spores spilling in golden color. In the oven the witch was starting to come back to life. My friend had no more bread crumbs or pebbles in his pocket. And at the end of the brief summer he died. It was a summer like a small transparent cup. But I had the feeling that that kind of summer was what people call love. It was this poem more than any other that first began to haunt me. It contains perhaps the heart of Mizuno’s narrative, sad and edenic, the



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shape of lost innocence itself. Even before it was brought to my attention that at the end “Hänsel” is no longer called ani 兄 (elder brother), but ano hito あの人 (that [special] person), I had no doubt that it was indeed about love. Naturally, it puzzled me too. Elsewhere in his writings, Jung has an interesting passage about fish. In the apocryphal tale of Tobit the fish is a magic creature that heals blindness and serves as a protective talisman on an otherwise fatal wedding night.8 Intriguingly, Jung sees a double nature in the fish archetype, both healing and soiling. “[S]exuality is numinous—both a god and a devil.”9 Such ambiguities run through Mizuno’s work. She describes the secret realm of brother and sister as a room toward which the ominously ambivalent fish mounts the stairs while destruction and death in war rage outside. In that room brother and sister enter the abyss of sex—for them, a love that will heal all. They prepare the fish, thus discovering “the secret of the grownups.” That its eating is a sacrament, sacred and accursed, troubles the poem. And behind the “innocent wounds” lurks the figure of the devouring witch, who is “coming back to life.” Innocence once lost, there is no prophylaxis to keep her at bay. “Hänsel and Gretel,” the original Grimm story, is about being eaten, as well as about eating. In Mizuno’s poem the witch finally “eats” her victim. Death and the end of childhood coincide; all that remains is the memory of the island and a summer “like a small transparent cup.”10 Jung is very helpful in understanding the “fish” and casts light on some other images. I wonder however if in the long run he did not overreach himself. His early and persistent criticism of Freud for simplistic and over-determined readings of dream images shows him rejecting what he regarded as a shallow skepticism. Deeply historical in his education, and drawn to esoteric study, Jung became ever more erudite, until finally he elaborated a universalistic system of dream interpretation in which he claimed to have the power to decipher dream narrative and imagery in terms of mythic archetypes.11 It would be rash to challenge such a giant on his own ground, and intuitively I agree with his basic principle that everything in dreams has a meaning. But I am more comfortable with the “deep well” theory expounded by John Livingston Lowes in his study of Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu. Everything we read and experience and are falls into the “deep well” of our unconscious and

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then emerges in kaleidoscopic, metamorphosed forms in what we create.12 (I shall return to this notion at the conclusion of this essay.) Meanings cannot be pinned to single significances in accordance with some system. Insights are what to look for, in Jung as elsewhere. In writing about poetry, I think it folly to over-interpret, to “explain” everything. My work as I see it is to present, let poems live and breathe, let them create their magic, only pointing here and there at pattern, recurrences of image and scene that may imply the deep structure of an author’s thought. Charles Mauron writes of “un ‘mythe personnel’ propre à chaque écrivain” observable in the networks of “métaphores obsédantes” in his work. I agree, but I have not attempted a rigorous application of his methodology to Mizuno’s work.13 Rather, I am embarked on a “fishing expedition,” curious to see what will come out of the well, the pool of childhood and animal story and archetype that Mizuno herself recognizes as constituting the ground and mode of her imagination. Mizuno includes the following paragraph in the “Afterword” to her book Hänsel and Gretel’s Island: One day in summer “Hänsel and Gretel’s Island” suddenly floated up from the under-layers of my consciousness. It seemed to be a project of remembrance, of recalling for the first time impossible memories involving my brother—he was five years older than I—who died when I was still a young girl. In the creative process my brother became an alter ego, another self. I proceeded to write poem after poem, pulling in like a magnet fragmentary glimpses of dreamlike memory. With each poem the world looked different. Mizuno’s brother—she also has another older brother, and a sister, unlike the “sister” in the poems, who has only the one brother—died of tuberculosis in the famine-stricken time after the end of the Pacific War. He was in his third year of higher school under the old system. His death appears to have been the great grief and defining trauma of her early life. It also gave focus to some of her best poems. The image of the “dark oval platter” in “Hänsel and Gretel’s Island” brings to mind one of her free-verse poems. Platters are recurrent images in Mizuno’s work. The poem, titled “Kage no tori” 影の鳥—“Shadow



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Birds”—is another that hints at an association of eating with either sex or death—or both. A somber atmosphere of utter loneliness pervades this surreal realm. Birds after dying gradually grow thin



In the town there are many windows Deep in every one at night an orange moon rises



But in the dark on the platter a flock of thin birds hides



Each bird stands with one thin leg on the platter becomes a large, black shadow leaps toward a moonless sky

The dead birds in the rain-gusting sky lay dripping-wet eggs clutch after clutch





And each stretching out one cold leg they peer at the sinking moon In a deep place are humans inside windows cutting shrunken, lonely trees

Birds are among the most prevalent images in Mizuno’s poetry, but their significance defies easy characterization. Their fate as victims of man’s urban fortresses preoccupies a poem in Mizuno’s third book, Rapuntseru no uma (Rapunzel’s Horse), published in 1987. The poem is “Tsuki no tori” 月の鳥 —“Moon Birds.” Here the child is an observer, puzzled about a world which is like a dream that turns out to be true.

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The bed dangles tiny in a sky with moon. Flocks of speckled birds flap low over the bed in the wind. One bird’s talons catch in a dark wrinkle of the sheets. The bed tilts sharply, and the child rolls over in its sleep. The gelid feet of birds graze the child’s back. They leave light red wounds. The child gets up and shuts the window. Deep inside the window a sulphur-colored moon hangs low. The street is made of innumerable plates of window glass. Cries of crashing birds shatter on thin panes; tiny ripples of sound rock the child’s bed. All night the child counts birds’ footprints falling down among the buildings. One Two Three . . . Mother Why do birds have feet? . . . Six Seven Why? At dawn a small gondola crawls up the building’s face. The windowcleaner’s bright fingers quickly peel away the bird feathers left plastered on the windows. They look like petrified flowers. Cold blue sky spills out from deep inside the polished window glass. The window-cleaner’s whistle gradually mounts toward the sky. But in the dark intervals between the buildings at his feet speckled birds are piled in heaps. Their eyes are open, looking at the sky. A lone child has his eyes open at the window in the street of the full moon. He draws in his pink feet on the bed and peers intently at the street below. One might pause to note that a pair of poems from Mizuno’s first book, Dōbutsu zukan (An Animal Picture Book), published in 1977, had already infused the realm of birds with ominous images of fright, darkness, and sudden death. The familial frame of her later work is usually lacking in these stark poems. Here is “Tori” 鳥—“Bird.” There’s one that freezes to death in midair There’s one that’s a headless body falling to earth beaten by hail



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Caught by surprise drowning in the sky instantly the bird clutches with the feet of fear its first sky Out of the depth of that sky its head has already begun at the speed of head alone to fall Death comes again in “Karasu no yoru” カラスの夜—“The Night of the Crows.” Before daybreak a crow was killed hit by a flung pebble it was rolled into the raucous current of the crows and hung suspended from the dark sky

The forest broke loose in a hubbub an uproar of clamoring crows “Not me!” “Not me!”

Rasping cries fill the night of the crows black specks combining   an unresting circus scattering outward sucked again inward the enormous maelstrom of the crows

The forest falls silent but the incantation of the crows goes on “Too bad!” “Too bad!”

Pursuing a flame receding from the sky calling calamity

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opening wavering whirling up higher and higher— all only a moment’s dream dreamt by the crows? Before daybreak a crow died shrugging off its black shroud a single crow fell like a stone Like other wild things, birds trouble the human mind with intimations of a world beyond our ken. “Tōdai” 灯台—“Lighthouse”—is the poem immediately following the “Hänsel and Gretel” sequence in Mizuno’s second book. Snow falls steadily in the midnight sky A bird impelled by memory of another bird shaped like it flies away out of the wind. Fish still frozen circle beyond earshot

I cannot light the candle that fell over, inward And now the location of this island still remaining is eaten away by the dark



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A dark world whose lighthouse has fallen, whose candlepower is quenched, whose very location is lost—indecipherable maps are another Mizuno motif—is the bird-haunted terrain found (as though by accident) in much of Mizuno’s work. Yet her terrain is often domestic—the kitchen. Even in a poem atypical of the work examined so far, a poem suffused with summer light, in which a telephone conversation takes place between two woman friends, the sense of randomness is dominant. It is called “Todoku koe (Kyō to iu ichinichi ni)” とどく声 (今日と いう一日に) —“The Voice that Arrived (On this Particular Day).”14   (The phone lines crossed from time to time . . .) The peaches are ripe, and so right now cooking. . . . My friend’s voice came through in fits and starts.   “Are you making jam?”   “I thought maybe I’d make compote . . .”   “Peaches from your garden?”   “Yes . . . the tree Father planted out in the . . . the year our daughter    was born. This year . . . lots. . . .” The voice kept fading in and out. We had a leisurely chat about varieties of peaches amounts of sugar ways of sterilizing glass jars—things like that.

(In the saucepan the peaches must be cooking down; their sweet-sour smell must have begun to fill the room. The fruit flies that gather in the sun, drenched in the juice of overripe peaches, must now be washing down the drain, and blue magpies were no doubt perched atop the stripped peach tree, sipping the last traces of syrup: I pictured the everyday place where my friend was talking on the phone.)

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  “Today . . . isn’t it muggy. . . .”   “Yes, there’s supposed to be a typhoon headed north. . . .”   (Let’s make sure we get together sometime this summer.) We promised—and the connection broke. *     *    * But the promise was not kept. . . . The voice had arrived from a different star. By the time we spoke, that star was already headed billions of light years away: It sped into the distance with all of them on board: the peach tree, the father who had passed away, and the little summer kitchen. After that the line went dead.

Perhaps that time my own star too just happened to pop up on some edge of the universe— just that one day— one of those happy accidents.

The uneasy quotidian is darkened once again as the surreal dream­ scape returns in the prose poem titled “Hebi” 蛇—“Snake.” This poem too begins in the kitchen, but this time it is the child that speaks. His use of boku 僕 for “I” makes it clear that the child is a boy. He apparently has no sister; he dreams of the strangeness of the unknown. The kitchen window is small and clouded. The whole sky is clouded too, and filled with cracks. Under the cracked sky you can see our house plopped down by itself. Deep bowls are lined up on the table. The first bowl is for Father, the second bowl is for Mother, and the third bowl is for me. But I can’t



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remember what is in it. The vague darkness hidden at the bottom of the dish—I climb onto a chair and peer in. The bowl is deep, like a marsh. Father said there was a snake at the bottom of the marsh. I mustn’t go near. Nothing that walks on legs ever returns. When the sun goes down, the marsh draws away from my room and becomes a black point at the tip of an arrow sign. I get on the swing without letting anyone hear. The slanted midnight swing. The crooked swing. I close the window and pump the swing. Mother appears. Wings folded like a big, sick bird perched on a tree in a forest at the bottom of the marsh, Mother, wavering upside down. Waves rise in the marsh. The road twists. A snake’s trail is leading to the marsh. I pump the swing again. Higher, higher. And then I let go. I fall toward the marsh where Mother is waiting. I fall and fall. Mother is slicing the vegetables for supper. The sound of the knife echoes against the stone walls like a lullaby.

Somebody, somebody, who could it be Turn about, turn about, snake he’ll see.

I turn around and push open a stone door.

Somebody, somebody, who could it be, Turn about, turn about, snake he’ll see.

I turn around and once more push open a stone door. I keep pushing. Door after unopened door. Finally, way off in the depths of evening, Mother is taking the lid off a saucepan and looking in. I can’t see whether the food has finished cooking or not. I can’t make out the bottom of the pan. I stand on tiptoe. My feet are crushing the grass. The smell of the grass begins to rise. My solitary room is there in the hot breath of the sunlit grass. “The dark at the bottom of the dish” has somehow come to stand in my mind for the mystery at the heart of Mizuno’s poetry. There surely lurks something forbidden in this bowl, this marshy lake. Over the everyday world around us is superimposed a dark transparency, estrang-

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ing, haunting, troubling our dreams. It is the world as seen by the child, and the sexual signposts of snake, arrow point, and “marsh” seem innocently integrated into the dream puzzle through a “naïve” surrealism that subverts the patterns and paradigms of a story-book world. At the same time, and typically of Mizuno’s work, Mother’s teasing song, the “crooked midnight swing,” the pumping and the release convey a less ambiguous layer of erotic tension, here between child and parent rather than sister and brother. Mizuno’s understanding of “marsh” and “snake” is also suggested by an article she has written on the unique erotic charm she found in D. H. Lawrence’s poem “River Roses,” in which Lawrence and Frieda sit perched in a fir tree overlooking a glacial marsh. The poem ends, “Let it be as the snake disposes / Here in this simmering marsh,” or, in the translation of Sekiguchi Atsushi 関口篤, “Hebi ga yaru yō ni yarō yo / Kono wakitatsu numachi no hotori de.”15 The snake is mentioned again at the conclusion of one of Mizuno’s prose poems in her third book, Rapunzel’s Horse. This poem too deals with mother and son, as well as with a symbolic goat. The boy here is given a name, “Alan.” According to an article published by Mizuno herself, Alan, inertly drifting in the air, represents an ideal of receptivity toward the universe, while the goat is defiantly earthy and physical.16 Mother, practical, “plucks the mushrooms” of her child’s genius to use as mere food. Stripped of his higher nature, Alan falls victim to feverish dreams. The poem’s title is “Gogatsu no Aran” 五月のアラン—"Alan in May.” Morning Alan is under the sky holding a glass balloon. Young Alan’s feet float slightly off the ground. No matter how hard he flails his feet, they never quite reach the earth. The wind is scattering locust blossoms. Faint shudders run through Alan’s body.

Afternoon Short-stemmed mushrooms start to grow out of Alan’s ears. One after another the dry, light brown plants open their umbrellas, all the while conversing in low voices. Concerning the speed of emergence of pupas from their cocoons and the angle of



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flight of spores. Concerning the respiratory methods of long-legged wasps. Within Alan’s brain secret labyrinths of mycelia begin to spread. Alan’s body hangs inert in the air like a block of wood. The wind softly swings him.

Mother opens the rear door and enters Alan’s labyrinth. Her footsteps are quick, like the wingbeats of a moth. Standing on tiptoe, she plucks the mushrooms from Alan’s ears one by one. Alan’s ears are soon stripped bare. Mother’s basket keeps getting bigger and bigger. Alan, left behind in the twilight, droops his grass-green ears.

Night Alan has a fever. Alan’s insides are a lush forest of locust trees. The forest is wet with rain. The clustered leaves rustle wetly under Alan’s skin. Alan tosses and turns. Did the snake get its prey? Is its hole under the horse chestnut really as dark as they said? The forest drops spikes of blossom and utters not a word.

The darkness within receptacles is evoked again in another poem from Rapunzel’s Horse. The poem deals with death, and with memory. Its title is “Natsu no mado (Shijitachi ni)” 夏の窓 (死児たちに)—“Summer Window (For the Dead Children).” The old woman by the window holds the receiver to her ear. She’s dialing a distant summer. Clouds hover vaguely over power lines. The wind blows back the curtain to reveal a raging sea. The bottom of the sea is deep summer. Cicadas are crying in a forest of kelp. Geem Gee Geem Gee Geem Gee Gee Their voices do not reach the sunlit surface of the land. A boy . . . and another boy . . . pale blue poles in hand, recede into the depths of the forest. (Or are those guns . . . ? The old woman peers after them.) A girl sits on the veranda near a towering cumulus cloud. Distant thunder rumbles in the parsley field. Here and there in

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the cloud sparks begin to scatter. “Hurry home! Hurry home! Your house is on fire!” the ladybug sings over and over. The girl lays down her book and gets up. It’s pitch dark deep in that unfinished picture book. A fierce rain begins to fall. (The old woman is looking for her umbrella.) After the rain a red shoe lies sunk in a puddle. In a sunset bucket the old woman washes the children’s footprints. The footprints gradually fade from sight into the depths of the water. It’s gone completely dark at the bottom. The old woman straightens up and wrings out the heavy shadows of the children. They never dry no matter how she wrings them. The damp shadows flap all night at the veranda window. It’s late at night. The windblown curtain hangs low. Nobody comes home. The old woman puts down the receiver and heads up the late-night stairs. A yellow half moon is pasted on the window. What else might an old woman remember? Mizuno explores layers of memory, or of fantasy, in an adaptation of the Grimms’ story “Rapunzel.” Rapunzel is the ideal innocent, the girl child conceived and given in exchange for love. Imprisoned by the witch in a doorless, windowless tower, she herself is never to know love. But in spite of all, a lover comes and opens the world for her. The enactment of a young woman’s escape from enforced virginity would seem to be the story’s underlying theme. Mizuno recasts this tale to capture the time of anticipation, of waiting, wondering, fear, and doubt. It is a drama enacted over countless generations. Mizuno calls her poem “Chishabatake de— ‘Rapuntseru’ yori” ちしゃ畑でーラプンツｴルより—“In the Lettuce Field—from ‘Rapunzel.’ ” The old woman is asleep. A sky opens out behind her thin eyelids. The sky is one unbroken stretch of lettuce field. At the bottom of the dusk is an ivy-covered tower. In the tower there is neither staircase nor entrance. It is like a deep well sunk into the sky. A girl crouches at the top of the tower undoing her braided hair. Her tresses are long. Even as with her grandmother’s



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grandmother’s grandmother, will they become a painful rope fishing up various things, rustling, from the witch’s lettuce field? For instance . . . hens   for instance . . . dried fish   and above all, smelling of the dark breath of grass, a young man or two. . . .The girl cannot rest her hands, for no matter how often she undoes it, her hair keeps on growing. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair!” Unconsciously the girl goes on undoing her hair. The girl’s eyes are fixed on the distant forest. The forest is sighing. The girl’s fingers alone, drenched white in the moonlight, as if loosening a chain, wind out unbeknownst to her, out from inside her, invisible strands of hair. Eventually her hair becomes a golden river and flows down slowly from the window into the dark beneath. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair!” The old woman, feeling someone is calling, raises her head from the dream. Outside the hushed window a wind is blowing. Over and over lettuce sprouts, lettuce grows, lettuce wilts. And once again the little lettuce plants begin to sprout. Each of Mizuno’s books is followed by an interesting “Afterword.” That to Hänsel and Gretel’s Island gives a conceptual context to the figure of the child “sleeping within her.” The part of us that is the chaos of life, the part that can only be told directly, by the sense of touch. . . . It seems to me that a power, vegetative and universal, one that tirelessly attempts to grow outward, lurks in each separate cell thanks to the roots of our existence being immersed in that chaos. A world of silence that for me was untranslatable, incapable of interpretation except by these means of expression—somewhere in a corner of that soil of daily living always lingered, shadowlike, a child.

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That a child should have the deeply shadowed feelings for its mother often found in Mizuno is disturbing. But the dark-forested world of the brothers Grimm is disturbing too. Theirs is not a pretty book.17 Perhaps the most haunted and haunting of Mizuno’s poems on the mother-child relationship is “Haiiro no ki” 灰色の木—“The Gray Tree.” Was it Mother who taught him to draw trees? When she had spread the damp scarf of evening and completely hidden her justborn child, Mother went down into the chilly depths of the dream. Holding only a gray pastel crayon, along a road lined with sparse, stunted trees. By the gray hillside yellowish-green birds kept flocking, flying up, subsiding, but Mother went down without a sound into the valley of tears. She dropped one of the child’s little shoes. Now I can’t go anywhere. Now I can’t go anywhere. The child was learning to cry for the first time when he found a gray bird’s egg buried deep in his mother’s bared bosom. Presently from amidst his mother’s endless sobbing came a whir of wings as a great gray bird flew up. Its neck was a long, straight line, its starving beak was sharp. Grow up big, grow up into a big tree in the fall. By the time that bird comes back from the stormy sky you’ll be a great, big tree, said his mother, cradling his bare feet in her arms. Fall came. A bare tree stood at the base of the hill, its branches lopped off, its empty locust shells all stripped away. The tree was trembling in the wind. The tree was trying with all its might to reach the stormy sky with the tips of its few remaining gray leaves. The child drew picture after picture of the tree. As the tree grew, the sky receded into still more distant storms. Whenever he woke from dreams, there was nothing in his hand but a gray pastel crayon. Stealthily the child cut his finger and added among the leaves one spot of red for fruit. The blood dried quickly and turned black. But



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after all the bird did not come. The child, pale, continued to draw trees. Such gloomy drawings, Mother muttered, peering over his shoulder. The inexplicable and remorseless sadness of this poem is surely that of a certain kind of dream, the kind from which the dreamer wakes in tears. Charles Mauron mentions it too, “. . . un de ces rêves . . . qui comporta un réveil en larmes . . . une tristesse infini. . . .”18 One may speculate about guilt feelings, always threatening in the parent-child relationship, but the power of such a dream lies in part in its very inaccessibility to logical explanation. More than one mother perhaps has taught her child to love such things as reading books or drawing pictures, only to find that the child’s absorption in an essentially solitary pleasure forms a barrier. But such an insight is too shallow to deal with the mysterious and unbearable sorrow. The world of a lonely child, haunted and fearful, is evoked again in a poem inspired by a painting of Paul Klee. Again we find birds, and the Mother. The poem is titled “Kage—Kurē ‘Fuyu no imēji’ yori” 影―クレ ー「冬のイメージ」より—“Shadow—after Klee’s ‘Image d’hiver’.” The upward-falling teardrop is true to the image in Klee’s painting. It’s been snowing all day A child is looking out a window Trees lift slenderly from murky dreams of shellfish wavering in the blinding snow like lonely antennae

Wings and legs swept off in the flash of a silver broom one by one the birds

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are tossed upside-down into a spotless white kitchen

The child’s voice is sucked into a thick, gray canvas in the evening A single teardrop trailing a huge, black shadow falls into the depths of the sky Birds and their eggs are obsessive images in Mizuno’s poetry. Another poem presents a surreal family portrait, one enlarged to include the father, the grandmother (as we have already seen, an old woman— obaasan can indicate either—appears repeatedly in Mizuno’s work), and the father’s horse. It is titled “Tamago” 卵—“Eggs.” Mother is putting out the noon fire in the kitchen. In the oven an orange-colored sky remains unburnt. Under the sky there’s a dining table where Father, facing away, is eating an omelet. His back has disappeared into the dusk. Mother is peeling off charred pages from a calendar pad. Mother is barefoot. Behind her gray apron, birds are incessantly laying eggs. The moon rises in the nest. Children in the eggs are dreaming. The faint demarcations of their eyebrows and mouths are superimposed on distant branches and clouds, too indistinct to tell apart from them. Inside the eggs everything is a green dimness. With their short arms and legs, the children rehearse being born. Some children are half turned to snakes, others begin to become fish. The torsos of the children are already dark. Grandmother is peering into the eggs. Her fingers are transparent in the moonlight. In one egg it is pouring rain. In another, ferns run riot. In still another a sandstorm rages. Each scene is different. But



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when Grandmother stealthily puts the eggs back where they were, each is exactly like all the others. Clustering silently together, they lean out into the full moon. Father gets up from bed, trailing a shadow behind him. The shadow looks like a wet horse. The horse disobeys commands. Father, exhausted, trips over the eggs by the window. The eggs break one by one, emitting faint sounds. The sighs of the children linger vaguely. But Father doesn’t notice. Head drooping, he stands at the window. The horse steps over Father’s shadow, back to bed in the full moon. Jung has this to say about the horse archetype: “The horse . . . represents the non-human psyche, the subhuman, animal side, the unconscious. . . . [I]t represents the lower part of the body and the animal impulses that rise from there.”19 He also mentions “the black night-horses which herald death.”20 These interpretations do not seem entirely irrelevant to the situation in this poem. The horse is presented as the father’s shadow—the father’s darker self? The father eats an omelet and at the end—accidentally—destroys the eggs wherein the children “rehearse being born.” Father is left lost in thought, but the horse goes back to sleep in bed. The other striking image in the poem is the egg itself. Hollow objects, spherical objects, are often life-containing miniature worlds in Mizuno’s work. Jung confirms the significance of the “large transparent sphere” as the “green womb” of life, a term for Shiva in Kundalinī yoga.21 One of Mizuno’s poems describes the world inside a head of cabbage, complete with its own sun, where a tiny man dangles a whip (or is it a trumpet?), and horses hatch out from cocoons. It is called “Haru no kyabetsu” 春の キャベツ—“Spring Cabbage.” It’s begun evaporating here and there it’s vanished in thin air but if you climb it   that long ladder woven from grass fiber and peer in from a crack in the sky some days you’ll get a glimpse inside the cabbage

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If it’s spring deep in a green barn horses will be emerging like moths transparent hooves scratching away at the insides of their cocoons and feathery antennae beginning to unfold toward the sky (One day for the cabbage is unbelievably long. . . .) The wheat-colored sun goes round above where a tiny man sits on the cabbage’s thick core That thing he’s dangling in his hand— Is it a trumpet? Is it a whip? The man has kept guard there for at least a hundred years but the cabbage goes on ripening without haste If you listen carefully you can hear the sound of leaves curling inward somewhere in the emptiness of sky The core of the cabbage is dark like a cloud of stars Many of these motifs are arranged again in a poem Mizuno calls “Haru no mozaiku” 春のモザイク—“Spring Mosaic.” The tone is coolly descriptive, the matter menacing, grotesque, and surreal. Inside thin-shelled eggs children are stretching out their necks waiting for the green platter. Spring is near. But the chef must be busy somewhere else—he simply doesn’t arrive. Uneasy, the parents crouch in a corner of the restaurant. For some time they’ve been nervously thumbing a train schedule. Old women worn out with waiting approach a brown door in the shapes of birds. They pull the handle—and there it is, the dense,



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swirling fog of the first spring storm. The freezer’s full of it. They can’t see an inch ahead. Instantly, in a whir of beating wings, the birds have been sucked up into the clouds. The sky fills with echoes of gray voices. The town is carried off on a large platter in the direction of noon. It’s a cracked platter. Cabbages are overrunning the backyard. Children playing house are cutting off the head of Father’s horse that he left tethered in the field. It’s very quiet. The horse slumps forward and slowly pours red smoke from the depths of its throat. A crow up in the sky catches a whiff. It’s a dangerous afternoon. An old woman runs up and hauls in an ad balloon. The old woman has legs like a duck. Many ducklings are starting to hatch in the dark of a cupboard. Their eyes are still not open. Mother reaches in with both hands and tries to remove one of the eggs. Her hands are out of sight. Spring is at the point of nightfall. Father comes home. He’s rinsing his little tongue under the tap. This poem succeeds in combining the jerky, nonsequitur motions of dream narrative with the underlying continuity of parent-child alienation. That children are to eat, the theme enunciated in the Grimms’ Hänsel and Gretel story, is recurrent in Mizuno’s work. Hänsel and Gretel’s killing of the witch is echoed here by the slaughter of the horse, but Father’s rinsing of his tongue, otherwise inexplicable, is menacingly suggestive too. “Kage no sarada” 影のサラダ—“Shadow Salad”—the penultimate poem in Hänsel and Gretel’s Island, deals more complexly with eater and eaten. At a twilight table children are eating white asparagus. It’s a soft salad. It all falls to pieces. They can’t satisfy their hunger, no matter how much they eat. The children’s fingers are pale rose. Long, skinny legs are in constant motion under the table. Legs of rosy red. Grandmother crouches at the back door. It’s a vegetable garden like the hollow of a hand. The stars are down. The birds have fallen. It’s a lonely, open place, gone wild. Off in the distance are sparse, wrinkled greens. There’s nothing to harvest for the night. The old

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woman pulls herself erect, and a pack of light brown dogs passes through like the wind. Father is going out the gate. He has a gun on his shoulder. A bronze horse stands watching him go. The horse’s eyes are cold. White birds flock in the sky. The birds are crying in voices like smoke. The children run together and look up. The shot never makes a sound. Only feathers come fluttering down on the dining table. Mother cocks her ear. In her ear it’s raining. The rain wets a gray island. On the island is a little man. He’s a dark, prolific man. On the island, soft, pale green babies multiply until there’s hardly room to stand. Mother is at her wit’s end. She nips some in the bud and surreptitiously piles them on a platter. It’s a meager, bitter salad. The children are at the table, waiting. The dark man, the hunter, the father, is the object of a devastatingly intense focus in a poem from An Animal Picture Book. The poem is “Kitsutsuki” キツツキ—“The Woodpecker.” It zeroes in on the fatherdaughter bond:

Into a forest hollow a woodpecker wandered

At dark the girl grows taller With the tips of her delicate fingers she peels an eggshell and fashions a pipe to lure forth the bird She thrusts the mouthpiece of the pipe into her father’s fist In the night forest the girl plays her pipe on and on summoning her father Her father is closed within the dream he plucks the feathers from a chick he strains the soup into a large dish he squeezes out one drop of the girl’s blood he becomes a great bird



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The girl lures the great bird   its wings spread wide into the hollow in a tree in the night In the nest the girl hatches into a bird The great bird buries its face in the forest’s hair its grass-green eyelids are closed The girl sidles closer  closer and then pecks without mercy

All night long until dawn in a forest hollow a woodpecker went on pecking its own bones

The animus in this poem surely matches anything in Sylvia Plath,22 but I am far from suggesting the sort of biographical reading usual in discussions of that poet. (By a strange coincidence, Mizuno, Plath, and I were born in the same year, Plath and I in the same month.) At least this can be said of the poem—it conveys how cruelly anger rebounds on itself. “Innocence is connected with cruelty,” Mizuno observed in a 1983 interview.23 Mizuno’s third book includes a poem that returns to the fatherdaughter theme, but in a quite different way. Here it is the mother, more than the father, who is “problematized.” The poem is titled “Chichi no shinwa” 父の神話—“The Myth of the Father”—and is based, as its subtitle specifies, on the Grimm story of “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids.”24 It will be recalled that in the story the wolf got into the house disguised as a goat and ate up six of the seven kids while the mother goat was away. One hid in the grandfather clock and survived. The mother later cut open the wolf ’s belly and rescued her children, replacing them with chunks of stone. When the wolf woke up from “wolfing” down its victims, it fell into a well and drowned. Mizuno’s version is different. Here is “The Myth of the Father”: In the pen of make-believe sits a mother talking to her only daughter. Her voice is like a plaintive lullaby. You, daughter, were the last of my seven children. Your brothers all had fleece as white as white could be. One could jump higher

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than any of the others. Another was better than anyone at singing. A third had the most distinguished nose. I was blessed as a mother. But then one day the wolf, pretending to be a goat, sneaked in while I was away and ate up all my children. (Mother, Mother, you mean the day Father played tag with us seven kids?) It’s a lie, that story you were saved that day because you hid in the clock case. Because you alone, my daughter, inherit that wolf ’s blood. I was ravished by the wolf at the edge of the forest and bore you against my will. (But Mother, Mother, see, my skin is a goat’s skin.) I wanted to save my dear children, the children the wolf ate, and I cut open the wolf ’s belly. But all that came out of his belly were great, big chunks of stone. Where did my children go? Alas, my vanished dream—how unhappy my life has been! (Mother, Mother, what became of the wolf after that?) The mother replies not a word, but holds tightly to her daughter’s hand. The sun shone down on that ghost of a goat pen, wherever it may have been, and the wind blew over it. It was hard to believe, so bright it was, that once upon a time a wolf was slaughtered there. Almost Faulknerian in its cradling of the dark secret, this fable suggests the subterranean roots of alienation that feed the lush forest of Mizuno’s imagination. In her own interpretation of the poem, Mizuno has stated that it is consciously about herself and her own mother and has observed that “countless wolves have to be psychologically slaughtered in this way” in order for women to survive.25 For my taste, this confession is too overt, too limiting, but it does raise the interesting question of the relation between the “conscious” and the subconscious. I feel that it is in the latter realm that creativity lies. And indeed, most statements by Mizuno on the subject of her themes tend to agree with this notion. Whatever



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reading you care to give it, the story strikes at the heart of innocence. The primal hostility so evident in “The Woodpecker” is here displaced onto the mother, and it would seem that the father, the wild sire of the child’s “difference,” is a sacrificial victim. Humans may need to be healed, but where is the healing to be found in Mizuno’s universe? Let us return to the figure of the elephant and to the Hänsel and Gretel sequence. The second poem in the sequence is titled “Dōra no shima” ドーラの島—“Dora’s Island.” “Let’s go look for Dora,” my brother said. Dora was an island elephant. The island was close to where the sun set. In the very center of the island was a day’s worth of sky. The sky hid the town. The town hid the window. My brother gazed from the sickroom window after Dora, who had gone off toward the shadows of the forest. Dora was being pursued. My brother said: Dora is the infant prototype of the world. From elephant to bird, from bird to lizard, from lizard to shellfish, from shellfish to man, you can see a spiral musical scale passed on without a break. Sent out from Dora, an endless series of green vowels circles back again to Dora’s ear. Dora is listening. The slow vowel rhythms set to humming the basso aa inside us, they draw out our quavering ee, they circle the spherical sky. The island flowed on toward the end of summer. The elephants were gradually hunted out, became stiff, turned into bread, became whips, became chairs. It was the memory of Dora alone that made the two of us conspirators. We secretly set out walking between the round hands and feet that had been left behind. The elephants, overtaken by night, changed into knobbly plants at the top of a cliff. Out on a V-shaped headland one of the parched elephant trees lay on its side. Half-buried in dry gravel, the tree had neither tree rings nor fruit. It looked just like mineral. Dark-winded days the beach was filled with the elephants’ intermittent screams. The grownups forecast my brother’s death. In mid-sky over the island the world resounded like a broken organ. During the summer

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my brother and I, searching for Dora, little by little drew near the location of the gray ear with its sparse hair. The road ended in a cold, moss-covered corner of hearing. Fragments of all the accustomed words and sounds became a torrent of sand and were sucked down to the depths of the great funnel-shaped ear. The world became soundless, and Dora’s trail broke off. In the vacuum there was only the sound of my heart beating. That was the sole rhythm circling the sky. As if drifting into dream while waking from another dream, the side of death was dark. My brother’s eyes were fixed on me. He was looking through me at the window behind. In the sunset window the sea foamed, and Dora’s island sank into it. The wholeness and health of the world are clearly embodied in this “prototype” (genkei 原型) animal, whose very hugeness is osanai 幼ない, “infantile.” The fate of the elephants, “hunted out” and turning to stony trees and various other forms, must relate to the fate of childhood itself. The elephant is a harmless version of Behemoth, “that eateth grass as an ox,” the first of God’s creations in Mizuno’s Genesis. (Leviathan also captures Mizuno’s love for the large.26 In her uncollected poem, “To a Lost Whale” —“Ushinawareta kujira e” 喪われたクジラヘ—she writes: I love the bigness that is you Listen—when I pressed my ear to your wet skin I felt for the first time—oh, yes— with my own touch the briny beating of the universe between the dazzle of the sky and sand) Genesis is revisited in the fourth poem in the Hänsel and Gretel sequence, “Zō no ki no shima de” 象の木の島で—“On the Island of Elephant Trees.” Here the fate of the elephants and that of the brother and sister are made one, suggesting again the end of innocence. This poem also provides a key phrase for Mizuno’s vision of a world in which animals (like children) are trapped. The vision takes on a tragic mantle here,



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with an ending reminiscent of Hamlet’s plea to Horatio to “tell my story.” The shape of the island changed from day to day. Depending on the quantity of clouds, the angle at which the window was open, the position in which the chair was placed, it would open out like a starfish, or scroll up like a snail, or sometimes be as tiny as a grain of sand. The room was up stairs. While I mounted the innumerable stairs, the day drew on to dusk, and the room was left alone, orphaned in the midst of dark. My brother had the tall, narrow window closed and the lamp lit and was peering into the interior of the island. An enormous elephant tree stood alone in the moonlight. (The pursued elephants stopped and stood still on the island; little by little they became trees.) The tree sucked up memory of the distant past from under the sand-colored rocks and told the two of us its story. As its big, gray leaves rustled in the sandy wind, the tree became an elephant named Rangu. Rangu stood tense and still, and the wind blowing between his ribs created strand after strand of a lonely winter scale. This music brought to mind the voices of far-off living things, voices lost before they became speech. Rangu hung his head and spoke. Once there was an age that opened facing the sea. A creature was born then, before tusks began to grow. It was born of a desire to pass on a body that was large and abundantly endowed. Secreted away inside it was a particle from the boundless sky. That creature could submerge in the ocean and not be wet, yet drown in a drop of water. It flew through the wind toward the sun, its full length exuding orange-colored odors. It was like an elephant of the sea, it was like a whale of the sky; no one had yet called out its name. It was a creature of a single instance, a species that existed in one specimen. If the sun shone for a thousand days, that creature could breathe a thousand ways and one. In those days the world was hot.

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And Rangu spoke: of a long, dry age on land; of the various shapes of flesh and blood hung parching in the empty sky; of many voices chained together to make a circus sideshow; of ears plucked off and cast away like great leaves; of tongues teased out and exposed to view; of countless footprints buried in Biology’s concrete; of the inside of an invisible cage as big as the world. His voice became the wind and rattled windows on the island night after night. Stones, grasses, and animals crossed their frontiers and cowered close to each other. The island began to cool. The grownups moved in herds near the elephant trees. Every night huge four-cornered shadows jostled at the window. On the island candles and firewood were in short supply. Rangu’s bark was stripped off and burned; the fire brightened our window for an instant. The bole was chopped off close to the root; before long it became a wrinkled lump. Then it became a gray bench. In the dusk at evening children sat on it. They too became part of the wood. The island fell silent, and the little room grew numb with cold. Starving birds crossed the island at the height of the window. Their wings beginning to freeze, the birds were crossing the sand dike, carrying tiny eggs toward the sea. My brother and I, huddled together in the dark, sent down numberless aerial roots toward the gray layer of earth where Rangu had stood. An ice age that had started from some indeterminate place was beginning to seal the memory of all living things once more in darkness. We too will someday become a tree, my brother said. The tree will be cut down and become a chair and become fire. Both chair and fire can carry the story of the elephant tree to far away places. Snow came down inside the frozen window. We hugged each other close. The snow began to deepen over us. “An invisible cage as big as the world” is a phrase that, along with “the dark at the bottom of the dish,” resonates in my mind as a key to Mizuno’s



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work and her vision. For her poetry is oriented not only toward the human situation of innocence and its loss, but toward the plight of the non-human Other. Indeed, her earliest published work, influenced by the Dōbutsu aika 動物哀歌 (A Threnody for Animals) of Murakami Akio 村上昭夫 (1927–1968),27 is about animals. In the “Afterword” to Dōbutsu zukan she remarks, “Even now, animals, for me, are mysterious entities, creatures remaining under some sort of magic spell since the separation of heaven and earth. They are the embodiments of an uncanny power that masks, casually and with various forms, the limitless silence of the world.” And at the end of her third book she mentions her “major themes of time, consciousness, and extinction.” Mizuno’s environmental con­ cerns are apparent throughout her work, usually interfused into a surreal dreamscape, but also stated directly, as in the “lost whale” poem. The third poem in the “Hänsel and Gretel” sequence is titled “Moa no ita sora” モアのいた空—“The Sky Where the Moas Were”—and focuses for its central image on the extinct giant moa. This poem, unlike the others, is narrated by the brother. When I was little we often had windy days. When the wind had blown away all the piled-up material in the sky, the footprints of birds became visible. My sister and I enjoyed a game we had of following a set of footprints to see if we could find the bird. My sister drew all kinds of birds—she filled entire sheets of sky-blue art paper with their shapes. Thick legs and long necks, and again thick legs and long necks. Of all the birds my sister drew, not one had wings. When night came, the birds slipped away from the square surfaces of their drawings and stole into our dreams. The lines of their serenely majestic backs fitted precisely the silhouette of a giant moa. Many times a moa took me with it into my sister’s dream. Inside the dream was a vague, wide-open space where many sand-colored children were wandering about. Every child was exactly like my sister. They had large eyes and the legs of birds. We often talked about moas. The moa, a bird whose wings had atrophied. The moa, a bird that had lost the sky. The land where

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the moas went must be the most precious, the loneliest place on earth. Fire and hunters and winged eagles gradually drove them into the marshes. One day fifty thousand years ago a mother moa with her young left a set of footprints in sandstone. After that day what serpentine track did they make as they headed into bottomless mud pits on the way to extinction? We took our position midway between marsh and moa and played at joining the sporadic footprints with lines. I laid down fire, ice, and the bow and arrows of desire in the moas’ field of vision. My sister was gazing up from a transparent map at the sky where the wind had died. In the recesses of her eyes the sky deepened to indigo. Fragments of torn insects turned to little flames and blazed up. At that moment my sister drew a line, sharp and clear, in the direction of the brief sunset at the bottom of her eyes. The grownups drove the useless children downstairs. The children clustered in the dark, pale as white crayons. They lifted their eyes and gazed where the sky had been. One night I saw it: Many children, half turned to birds, mounted the stairs and in single file entered the sky through the opposite window. And after that I never saw my sister again. *  *  * When I was little, I had only to open the window to see the inside of the sky. At the bottom of the sky the bones of extinct moas were piled like stars. Dawn and dusk whipped past each other, and the sharp stars of the day bore wounds. And we too, tumbling in small circles, slowly moved along above the orbit of the invisible birds. In recent years Mizuno has issued a series of poem post cards, each featuring an extinct bird or animal. One is devoted to the aurochs, a giant wild ox. It is titled “Ōrokkusu no peiji” オーロックスの頁—“The Aurochs Page.”28 The earth was covered in dense forest through it roamed herds of aurochs



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like moving hills   maybe the world at last was entering the time of myth When nobles every night filled giant horns to overflowing with the frothy mead and hunters took their sport in poaching game maybe the world was still in myth’s continuum Finally the forest vanished those intrepid wild oxen followed into oblivion leaving hollow drinking cups   and a bitter intoxication the long aurochs page   torn out   the world’s book has ever since been incomplete Extinction, however, is not the only fate awaiting animals. There are also captivity, maiming, and degradation. A poem titled “Zō” 象— “Elephant”—in Mizuno’s first book presents the elephant as the em­ bodiment of all that has been corrupted and lost in the displacement of the natural world. It antedates the images of Dora and Rangu in the “Hänsel and Gretel” poems. The elephant had three legs Heaving along under the weight of its pendulous folds of skin  it hid in the shadows of the town dump This mountain of the indigestible  the things that never decay emits a burning smell invades the sky with heavy wastes of oil Where no bulldozer growls where neither fire nor seed can bloom to this place from somewhere  betrayed  an elephant came These too out-of-place surroundings bewilder the elephant At night it makes the dumpyard squeak foraging for something to   eat Its footsteps send the rumble of drum cans into the town’s sleep It complains bitterly about its missing leg— the one it carelessly rushed off and left behind

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Concealing its herbivorous condition avoiding observation it reaches up with its trunk and complacently snares the birds that fly through the filth in the sky above the town But the sadness of the deformed elephant hangs like a heavy anchor chain in the ever-rustier sky Over all the towns with their scrap-metal foundries drifts an evil dream for which no remedy can be found Has no one glimpsed an elephant wandering under that yellow gas? Has no one seen it that wasteland no longer human territory the place of the elephant? The anger in this hellish vision, this cry against pollution and industrial squalor, is hardly compromised by the comic incongruity of the absentminded elephant. The elephant, as always, is innocent, and its forced switch in diet is part of its maiming. To assume that the elephant has escaped from a zoo misses its symbolic import as all wild nature struggling to survive in a world irremediably changed by man. An Animal Picture Book is filled with a menagerie of real and imaginary animals rendered in a style intense and passionate, brooding and laden with a sense of otherness and victimization. Crocodiles and hippophants, the seagull, the crow, and the bear, make their brief appearances and slip away from human attempts to hold them, to know them. But by the time of Mizuno’s third book, Rapunzel’s Horse, a new and more playful tone begins to affect the handling of animal images. This is particularly evident in a poem titled “Zō to” ゾウと—“With an Elephant.” This elephant is as companionable as Dora, and as strange, but its tragedy is diminished by lack of dignity. Enigmatic as always, the elephant has been domesticated, deflated. Instead of turning into a tree or haunting a dump, it emits yellow balloons. The fate of the circus animal seems to have been accepted. Its life narrative “clatters along like an old steam



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train” instead of evoking the origins of life in poetic images. The speaker of the poem is evidently an adult, one herself caught in the maze of urban life; but alienation has been replaced by puzzlement. Off I go to town to buy feed for a dead pigeon I zigzag from A to B   from B to C but the usual street corner stumps me— somehow I can’t get around I glance back: there   blown by the wind stands an emerald elephant —Hey  hello there —Well  hello yourself While I make my bow I peek in at the dark staircase deep in the elephant and find an old man seated by himself Pretending I haven’t noticed I go off with the elephant walking through the shadows of the town There’s a shop where they grind varicolored coffee beans and we sit down there together The coffee-grinder wears suspenders and grinds the beans like fireworks in his mortar The coffee has a bright aroma It permeates my body The elephant faintly enlarges and begins the story of its life The story clatters along like an old steam train an endless succession of cars and in one car an old man crouches beating a tiny old woman The sound has the density of gas

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and it gradually swells until from deep within the elephant’s throat one after another yellow balloons emerge and drift up into the sky I run after them but can’t catch a one Deflated and small the elephant hangs its head I retrace my steps alone from C to B   from B to A looking for the way home  glancing up I see a sky filled with yellow balloons Like Rangu, this elephant hangs its head, but humans do not cower in fear at the doom its transformation brings upon them. Yellow balloons, not poisonous yellow gas, drift in the sky. Mizuno’s vision seems to have lightened. But then one recalls the scene of human cruelty revealed as in a peepshow within the elephant’s narrative. The poem remains evasive, at ease with the absurd, but not too reassuring about life in the cage that is the world. Escape from the cage is achieved at the end of Mizuno’s second and third books, in final poems that are tonally consistent with the overall mood of each book. Hänsel and Gretel’s Island concludes with a prose poem titled “Uma to sakana” 馬と魚—“Horse and Fish.” Once again we are in the world of mother, father, brother, and sister, each enacting a seemingly defined role in a surreal drama of family life. Father again washes something—this time a knife. (Knife [like tongue?], a commentator suggests, could be a threatening image of parental sex.)29 Father finds fish in his bottles,30 and Mother remembers a black horse. The fish dream dreams turbid with blood, and the horse recedes, then dies. But it miraculously revives in the hands of the children and carries them away into the universe. Old archetypes need to “change direction,” the poem suggests, to make escape possible. The brother narrates: In the kitchen at dusk Mother’s fingers, dissecting cabbages, are wet with a pale green. A droplet falls from her fingertip, and at its splash a black horse looks up from the wave-trough of her memory. Spring is long. The horse slowly changes direction; treading on the



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hyacinth bulbs buried in the plain, it recedes into the distance night by night. On an evening when its hoofbeats have faded away in the dark hills, Mother sits quietly unwinding an ammonite fossil from deep within her ear. Wine bottles, their labels removed, lie in a row under the floor. It is Father who picks up and examines the naked bottles. Down inside each bottle a fish is sleeping. The dreams of the fish flow out as transparent liquid from the bottles’ mouths. Father is washing a red, dark knife in the flow. Spring deepens. The dreams of the fish gradually turn turbid red. In a corner of the kitchen heads of ripening barley are lifting up the lid of an iron pot. Sister and I take off our aprons and step over a diagonal line into the nighttime barley field. Out in the moorland green-smelling lamps are burning. A dead horse hides in the hollow of our hands. Barefoot, we stand and loosen black reins into the wind. Freed, the horse revives and carries us along the stream of wakened stars. I hold tight in my hand a limber grass-colored whip. Sister’s hair blows in the wind. Ripening barley keeps rustling in the chill constellation of the Great Bear. Looking back, we see Mother washing the evening dishes at the window late in spring. This gallant exit places the poem among a number whose recurrent theme is travel through the cosmos. Other worlds, always called “stars” (hoshi 星), clearly intrigue this poet. There is, for instance, “Kentaurusu no shokutaku” ケンタウルスの食卓—“The Table of Centaurus”—in Mi­zuno’s third book. Here, appropriately for its constellation, the horse seems to be a centaur. The “lonely star” supports a bloodless race of vegetarians, but the speaker and the centaur prefer “sizzling steaks” and platters heaped with edible creatures. The “secret and bloody affair” suggests the two are outlaws—the position of the brother and sister in earlier poems. No interfering parents threaten freedom on this far star. In winter I kept the window closed. Was it for this reason that my horse’s breath grew faint? When he breathes, it smells of chlorophyll. This is a star once modestly cultivated through irrigation. Its hills

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are lined with lemons and carrots strewn like stardust; brussels sprouts overflow into its bays. People sit on the cold terraces of the sky forever eating hydroponic watercress. Descendants perhaps of a line of pale grasshoppers, they are sullen as mist. Won’t you come with me to the south? Our dining table has sunk halfway into the plain. There I share a sizzling steak with him of the delicate hooves. It is a secret and bloody affair. On a dark platter are snails, rabbits, fish—all hiding deep in their throats a gleaming bugle. (As with us, it is rosy red.) They lie on the table with their silent eyes wide open. Our appetites are innocent. After dinner we take down the great sickle of the moon and descend into the crater to gather lettuce. (Generous helpings of cold salad go well with the lingering warmth of wild flesh.) His running hooves carve deep into the dark. The sky keeps slowly tilting more and more. Finally we spread the white napkin of dawn—while outside the window there continues the thin chomp-chomp of watercress being chewed. This is truly a lonely star. The last poem in Rapunzel’s Horse provides an exit in which the horse image plays no part. In order to deal with it, we need to introduce another creature from Mizuno’s menagerie, the rabbit. This rabbit is the one that has its home in the works of Lewis Carroll. It is a quirky and capricious animal, the child’s guide and unreliable friend, one that seems to offer “a way out.” Its earliest appearance in Mizuno’s published work is in a poem in Hänsel and Gretel’s Island titled “Isogashii yoru” 忙しい 夜—“A Busy Night.” It is his fever that keeps the child “busy,” and the feverish child becomes one with the frolicsome rabbits while he dreams. The horse and the snail, other recurrent images, also play their parts in this dream world, along with a mysterious frog. The narrating voice is neither mother nor child, and a gentle glamour, unthreatened by obviously sinister images, hovers over the moonlit scene.31 Father and Mother are parching beans behind the door. A slender tendril starts to grow out of one of the beans. The tendril enters the



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child’s room through the keyhole. On the other side of the keyhole is green night. A long-necked horse parts a thicket and comes down the slope of the moon. The horse’s eyes glow softly in the light. The horse is thirsty. The moon passes over a well. The wavering golden objects at the bottom of the well are eggs. A frog holds them clasped in its hands. The second-sweep of spring lazily circles the sky. The child has gotten into bed wearing a tall green hat. Under the hat it hides white ears. A white rabbit stirs on its midnight pillow. It’s not well—something’s wrong with it, somewhere. The tip of its nose, the inside of its ears? It’s hard to say. A little spider is spinning a web. The web gradually expands. The child still can’t sleep. Outside the window black rabbits frisk and gambol all night long. Mother is singing in a soft voice. From deep inside her song a single snail crawls out. It’s a sleepy snail. Pulling in its crimson horns, it climbs the hill of the moon. The child follows it. Lichens send their spores whizzing through the air. A wind has begun to blow. Mother reaches her hand out the window and hauls down the sail of the full moon. Rabbits recur with increasing frequency toward the end of Mizuno’s third book, and always as familiars of the child. In one the child is specifically a girl named Alice. Two of these poems will suffice to illustrate the rabbit’s role as seducer, liberator, and guide. The first is “Natsu no tobira” 夏の扉—“Summer’s Door.” Close on to summer a large oak door sways back and forth— anyone is free to go through A bench stands by the door—it’s always there A mother and child sit side by side and while they talk a cool breeze springs up from time to time

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The voices of the two are carried in snatches toward a peppermint-colored sky The air bellies out into a sail pierced by thorns of light That day the horseflies were buzzing constantly when suddenly a rabbit cut across Abruptly it turned its grass-green back “There’re hoppers in the fields. . . .” That’s what it said, pretty sure The rabbit’s voice was like the faint popping of grass seeds at   dusk It didn’t reach the mother’s ear The child swings its long shanks ever so slowly   like pendulums the shadows come and go all through the lazy summer. . . . Then the child got up and hat in hand saying not a word disappeared with the rabbit beyond the oak door And then a hundred years . . . the mother goes on sitting on the bench though the oak door is open like smoke toward fields of grass I remember from my own childhood this fantasy of escape from the world of adults into the friendly fraternity of grass, the refuge of magic animals. Only the grownup does not know that freedom is really there, beyond the open door. But the final exit is a more complicated business. “Tobu heya” 飛ぶ 部屋—“The Flying Room”—is the last poem in Rapunzel’s Horse. The escape here, as at the end of Hänsel and Gretel’s Island, is into outer space. Earth itself becomes a rocketship, and everything comes loose in its lurching liftoff. Seen from high above, the diggers for old bones, the buried dreams and hurts we leave behind, are so many winged ants. The watashi 私 who speaks the poem seems very close to the poet herself.



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The benjamin tree is perhaps the one potted in her own apartment. In any case, she is quite alone at the end, unlike the brother and sister astride their black horse in the earlier book. The rabbit, having fulfilled its comic, liberating role, vanishes with a casual sayōnara, leaving the speaker free-floating in space. Dressed in a sky-blue coat a rabbit comes through the window into a room where the wind sways the leaves of a benjamin tree Coffee’s left in the cup one slipper’s left where it dropped. . . . In the middle of such a room our globe suddenly lurches resumes speed—30 km. per second— and enters orbit in the sky Midst the creaking  the wild oscillation the rabbit and I each fix on a spot let our white tablecloth belly in the wind and pour ourselves a cup of three o’clock tea Everything blows about in the room. . . . The benjamin tree is flying the hands of the clock are flying the dishes are flying  the carpet is flying and as they fly they separate out scattering away across the sky Peering from the place where the window was we make out far below men digging something in the sky Could they be searching for a grave? All at once gray shards of bone boil up like marine snow. . . . They chase off after them vanishing like winged ants and quickly that whole area goes dark (The Paleozoic lies in that direction) says the rabbit standing on tiptoe

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and his voice brushes my ear like a petal From somewhere in the middle of the room a sunset glow begins to spread . . . So long . . . says the voice and when I turn to look the rabbit is no longer there All that’s left is a chair plunked down floating in space and me still flying   alone *  *  * Mizuno published a fourth collection of her work, Hashibami-iro no me no imōto (Little Sister with the Hazel Eyes), in 1999. In the twelve-year interval since Rapunzel’s Horse, Mizuno suffered another noteworthy loss in her personal life. It was the death of her mother, which occurred in 1991, close to the time when the poet and I first met. This event, one at once natural and fraught with deep significance in the lives of many, brought about a shift in Mizuno’s handling of the mother figure so dominant in her earlier work, and especially in Hänsel and Gretel’s Island. Mother as the Other, the feeder and devourer, is reconceived as “little sister,” a new double in place of the brother. This imōto is a kind of ghost, a helpmeet who mysteriously comes and goes, the haunting “ur-form of the woman who was my mother . . . a woman whose young days contained an eternal girlhood that in the end I could never know,” Mizuno explains in her “Afterword.” Could it be that the threatening parent becomes mythically acceptable as benign only when made over into “the eternal child”? The first poem in the book introduces little sister in a folktale setting evoking childhood and a vanished past. It is titled “Oka” 丘—“Hill.” In the dusk at eve a procession of derby-hatted foxes wends its way through plumegrass up the hill

(. . . First comes the coffin, oh What’s in the coffin, though?— A mackerel sky—)



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As the song dies away in the distance in a village at the foot of the hill feverish again little sister so small And deep in autumn parting the plumes of the plumegrass she went away for good . . . Even her name vanished in the sky O barefoot little sister of mine Little sister is elfin, wraith-like, a memory of the past. She is a lonelier, more diaphanous entity than the younger sister in the Hänsel and Gretel poems. The folk world evoked here is not that of Grimm, but of traditional Japanese fox lore. Her fever reminds us of the brother, reminds us that Mizuno’s children are familiars of illness and death. The new tale reaches toward fuller definition in the second poem, “Aki no imōto” 秋のいもうと—“Little Sister in Autumn.” We are again in the kitchen, in the midst of pots and pans and the preparation of food. The ingredients include a variety of pear called nijusseiki 二十世紀, “twentieth century.” Time and a sense of its passing are also familiar ingredients in the work of this poet. Suddenly an elephant joins the scene—itself perhaps only a memory. Dora and Rangu are long gone, and this nameless pachyderm dissolves into nostalgia. Metamorphosis, a basic Mizuno technique, once again transforms animal into plant. The poem deliberately blurs speaker, visitants, and memories of the dead mother. What happens on the cookstove frames the surreal narrative. When the wind blows, little sister comes visiting. Her hazel eyes downcast, she’s scalding chrysanthemum blossoms in the kitchen. The saucepan beside her froths and boils over.

“Fry mushrooms Fry red peppers Olive oil and . . . add balsamic vinaigrette   um . . . yes then when I’ve grated last night’s leftover nijusseiki pears . . .

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rock salt fennel and then a pinch of herbs from the backyard . . .”

When barefoot little sister comes, the evening elephant comes into the backyard too. Now it’s seated by the western well curb in quiet, old-fashioned modesty. (That’s its invariable custom.) Memories of elephants have become larger than elephants themselves, and how many stars have sunk into those memories nobody (not even the elephant) knows. No doubt it too one day will wander away like my little sister lost from earth. “I’d like a glass of water.” When I turn around to look, the evening moon is rising from where the elephant was. I take the watering can and step down into the garden, but the elephant is lying prone on the ground exuding odors of wilted vegetation. The plant is a kind of ground creeper—an herb of the genus elephanta—a pale-colored grass that once grew on a distant star. Little sister’s fingers are picking the elephanta. She’ll add it to the nijusseiki recipe. (That’s a salad suitable for twilight.) The berries of the herbs fly scattering like stars, crackling in the ambient air. (It is like an elephant’s funeral in a dell of grass.) The insides of my ears are dyed with grass-colored dusk. The shadow of an elephant drifts by. In the kitchen an apron is faintly swaying. Our dead mother passes close behind little sister’s back and is gone. (That place is one star.) The aroma of the chrysanthemum blossoms drifts . . . the saucepan froths and boils over. In another poem the poet herself, dreaming, becomes the visitor. This poem, whose title is “Mon e” 門へ—“To the Gate,” hints at one motivation driving these poem collections—the recapture of the past, a theme to which we shall return at the close of this essay. The gate is the entrance to that past. Little sister, the reconceived mother figure, is there. The past thus must be a double exposure, a nijū utsushi二重写し,



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which indeed is the operative principle throughout Little Sister with the Hazel Eyes.32 In the depths of the dream stands a gate   a gate I once went in and out of with the other members of my family   a gate whence my childhood dreams departed for places far away   a gate beside which a cherry tree in full bloom spread its branches in spring   That gate   already vanished from earth   calls me into the dream Leaving the station   I climb the long stone steps   follow the uphill road around the bend   and proceed along beside the hedge   (suddenly there is a gap in the hedge)   The view beyond opens out into a tennis court   I hear the happy voices of young girls (they are my high school classmates)   I quicken my steps and hurry on past   The lane turned left and there stood the gate Little sister of childhood days is squatting there before the gate   Clay animals are arranged on the ground   They were like tapirs   They were like elephants   But on closer inspection they also looked like lumps of mud   It was as if they had wandered out unfinished while the dream was still in progress   Their backs were moist and light blue   Were they things little sister’s hands had called forth from the earth?   When the sun shone   they cast shadows that were dark one moment and faint the next   Uttering not a word   I stood and gazed on and on at those shadows (The gate is a place I cannot go past    It is the scar of a wound incised in the fortress of family memory   Time in its turmoil hastens by    whirling    streaming  out    flowing  away. . . .    then flowing back   damming up    deepening into a pool from whose surface it skims the thin fibers of memory . . . spinning them into threads   endlessly stitching back together the remnants of what was)

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The  gate  connects  to  a  narrow  private  lane   Along  that lane   a  potato  field  was  planted   an  air  raid  shelter was  dug   incendiary  bombs  blazed   a  dog  wandered  in from  the  burnt-out  ruins  emitting  vapor   the  newspaper  man  ran  by   my  elder  brother   young   went  by   singing that  brother’s  coffin  was  carried   Indian  strawberries bloomed   and  wilted   Some  departed  down  that  path to  return  no  more   Some  entered  it  and  never  came out   leaving  only  soft  earth-colored  footprints  along  the ground  of  the  dream Why is little sister fashioning strange animals there before the rotting gate? . . . Will I succeed in finding my way once more to that gate and touch those lumps of earth?   (that soil sharing a portion of the stuff of innumerable stars)   and stitch together with memory’s thin thread those remnant scenes   fashioning a quilt to cover the slumber of the souls that went no one knows where. . . .

As we have seen, memories of the war filter into Little Sister with the Hazel Eyes. War among the grownups, experienced immediately and metaphorically as a time of discovery of love, loss, and death in Hänsel and Gretel’s Island, returns in incendiary flashes in “Kawa no hotori no imōto” 川のほとりのいもうと—“Little Sister at the Riverside.” Here

too, little sister seems to be the keeper of the past, and hence the mother figure, but is also the child who—like Mizuno—experienced the war in her school days. A numbed silence prevents the rantings of wartime from reaching beyond the mirror-reflected world of memory. The older sisters are all gone; only the ashes of their fruitless lives remain. The significance of dogs in Mizuno’s work is always puzzling. They appear in dreams and seem bearers of some inarticulate message—perhaps undisciplined fugitives from the human world. Eating them suggests wartime famine, but also thought control.33 Little sister sits on the riverbank, gazing at last night’s sky. A dog with a wispy tail comes up beside her. Pointing its muzzle at the sky, mouth open wide . . . is it howling into the distance? (This is a place in a mirror and has no sound.)



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A man is shouting something on the opposite bank (perhaps he’s making a speech?), but his voice cannot be heard. His voice becomes strands of ever-changing colors—orange, steel-blue, light brown, yellow—that tangle, untangle, twist, loop together, spreading their distorted ripples through the sky—the fireworks of other nights. Encased in flame, the elementary school classroom is burning. The homing pigeon is burning   the frock coat for the deep obeisance is burning   the imperial portrait is burning   the lanky janitor is burning   the picture books are burning   . . .   little sister’s Red Riding Hood is burning. The Rose Nebula descends from the sky with a scorching smell. (Beneath that sky all the grownup girls file past in their bridal veils, like clouds.) A river marks the distance with a single line; bamboo shoots are popping out of the ground on the hill in back. These are mothers   mothers   a whole village whose soil is saturated with the voices of mothers. (Off in the blue, oxygen bubbles keep bursting.) From time to time the older sisters heave themselves erect in the fields, sigh in relief, and look up at the sky. When they do so, a column of sky-blue steam rises from deep in each throat. That place is a village of ever-wavering shadows. The dog with the wispy tail moistens its nose in the soft grass; now it’s crouching down on the embankment. In this village there’s a man who time and again captures and eats the wraithlike dogs. The dogs bark like mist; like mist they vanish. (Leaving behind a trail of faintly discernible footprints. . . .) Little sister follows the footprints back to the river. The river flows out in a single stream from the world beyond. The older girls who died burn their blue family registers, place the ashes on leaves of bamboo grass, and send them to the younger sisters they have never seen. (On the far bank the man gradually begins hauling in last night’s firework display.) Slowly the sky recaptures its ultramarine blue and swallows up little sister’s shadowy form. Day draws to a close in the mirror.

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Another poem brings back the brother into the evocation of a particularly sad and tender memory of secret sharing. Typically, little sister and the speaking voice conflate, but the time remembered is surely that of Mizuno’s own childhood. Mizuno embeds in this poem an adaptation of a stanza from “The Dumb Soldier,” a poem in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Garden Days.34 One may observe that the garden has now replaced the “island” as the sacrosanct realm of memory and freedom to be a child. The face of the adult onlooker, the man in the moon, is obscured. Only his voice drifts over the scene, like an offstage chorus of one. The soldier boy is dead and buried, and the real bullets that once rained there are of an ambiguous past. In this layering of generations, one must remember that Japan has needed firing ranges for more than one war. Now all the fragments of the past have vanished under a changed world—gone with the puppy and the white clover. The lost past is a persistent theme in Mizuno’s work. The poem is “Yuri no ki no shita de” ユ リノキの下で—“Under the Tulip Tree.” A tulip tree stood in the middle of the garden. Little sister called it “the Sailboat Tree.” When the tree rustled its canopy of leaves in the wind on moonlit nights, the garden would be swept with platinum wavelets. That night a nimbus ringed the moon directly over the Sailboat Tree. A man could be seen sitting in the moon. His face was dark beneath the shadow of the moon’s huge umbrella-shaped halo. But his voice (he was singing) sounded in the ear like the buzzing wings of a golden horsefly. Little sister sang softly in unison:

“I am buried in the grass . . . Looking up with leaden eyes Scarlet uniform   pointed gun To the stars   old father sun (forever)”

It was like a song my elder brother used to sing. The song carried the fragrance of grass. Wind began to blow across the grassy field where the lead soldier slept. It was spring. The whole field rippled with blossoms of white clover. When we were children we lay there with our puppy; we wove endless chains of blossom.



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That field had once been known as “the firing range”—fusillades of innumerable bullets left their traces there. Deep in that grassland lay the lead soldier with his wide-open eyes. (A high-rise housing development now covers that grassy field. . . .) Is the tiny soldier, voiceless now, still gazing up at the stars and the sun? I called to mind his sad, leaden eyes. The song persisted many moonlit nights, then faded, leaving golden echoes in my ear. The lunar nimbus descended to the garden, covering the trees, and the tulip tree started to take down its sail. Before long, rain came on from the direction of the moon, swept over our garden, swept over the white clover field . . . and began to drench the lonely soldier boy. Another poem in Mizuno’s fourth book evokes the loneliness of an isolated child in chilling terms. Here the boy, poised on a high-rise building at the beginning of the poem, contemplates suicide—and then carries it out, throwing his life away as if it were a matter of little concern. The onlookers now are the already dead—cold, indifferent, but observant. Like the long ago phone conversation between two kitchens,35 the event is given a cosmic frame. Perhaps one might dub this one “an unhappy accident.” The poem is titled “Sono yoru” その夜—“That Night.” In a space lit by an almost full moon an abandoned building on reclaimed land casts the shadow of a giant jungle gym On the roof a solitary child stands looking down in the form of a bird “If you lose . . . fly!” “I’ve lost . . . so here goes. . . .” From around his feet the muttered words break off and fall like rubble

People on some other celestial orb having set up tables for the evening meal endlessly help themselves to portions of

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metaphysically gelid cloned shrimp with entrails of blue (How long has it been   do you think (since we died? (A hundred years? (No   longer . . . (Ah   look over there . . . (It looks like somebody fell (A bird? It doesn’t make a sound (Tonight’s quieter than usual   don’t you think? (Yes   moonlight’s flooding the mud flats

Alongside the shoulder blades of a child lying face down crabs crawled toward the sea to lay their eggs . . . That night a star whose orbit spanned ten thousand thousand years passed above one tiny death The death of the boy child, the brother, the most hauntingly persistent of Mizuno’s themes, is not really what her fourth book is about. That volume, in fact, appears to bid it a very deliberate farewell. The poet chooses to make her most autobiographical gesture here. After being invited to a reunion of her brother’s classmates in 1996, she wrote one more poem about the elephant Dora and the death of the brother—here undisguisedly her brother: “Dōra no mimi (Ani no gojikkaiki ni)” ドーラ の耳（兄の五十回忌に)—“Dora’s Ear (On the Fiftieth Anniversary of My Brother’s Death).”36 Descending through showering waves of cicada drone into the dusky ear of dawn, one came upon a range of gray sand dunes. A shooting star streaked across one corner of the sky; my dead brother’s voice was whispering in my ear. “Look! Do you see it?” Glancing up, I



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noticed that the stars had faded out, and in their place a lamp glowed at a little sickroom window. Again, my brother: “Do you remember Dora? Can you still hear that elephant’s voice?” *

* One day Dora’s page was torn out and discarded along with all the miscellaneous trash and picture books from the deep dark of the children’s room. Afterward there remained only one bloodshot gray ear. And the world dissolved into war. * “Dora’s tusks were torn out, her skin was ripped off, she became bare flesh, she vaporized and vanished from our hours in the dunes. Things that become extinct (all things   humans   animals   plants   insects)—each is the last species of one particular star. Each takes away with it the language of that unique star. . . .” My brother’s voice gradually faded into the distance. * The sky over the dunes was one sheet of stars. There were also stars at the bottom of the dunes, shining like stiffened starfish. Some

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of the light came from already extinguished stars. Some stars had arrived from tens of thousands of light years away. And now each shone like a murmuring voice from beyond its own reach of time. * The summer he was twenty my brother died in a hospital in a ruined country defeated in war. I was barely able to find one bouquet of bellflowers to place in his casket on the way to the cremation grounds. The star my brother belonged to—where did it go? Where does it twinkle, the lost language of that star? (When I closed my eyes there appeared a tiny point of light—Dora’s gray ear, shining alongside a cloud the dark violet color of bellflowers.) The valedictory quality of Mizuno’s poems of memory in Little Sister with the Hazel Eyes hangs over a dream of the father as well. A man of si-

lences, he leaves behind his boots and the ghostly image of a white moth. The ruby-eyed insect, borne away by devouring time, in turn leaves only the trace of its powdery scales. And like Dora’s island sinking into the waves, the whole dream-scene at last sinks into the darkness of a desolate plain. The poem is titled “Aki no wasuremono” 秋の忘れもの— “Something Forgotten in Autumn.” As if I were carrying a still-warm platter of food, I hold the sunset glow in my bosom to the very end and wander off aimlessly toward the floating isle of dreams. * Walking along, I pass by great numbers of windows. One window blows open in the wind. I hear a telephone ringing. The next window opens to reveal a sickroom. A column of ants emerges, heading for their winter nest. As I step across the column, I notice that their evening meal is a large white moth. * Now I approach a wild plain. Off in the pampas grass an old man has opened a dark umbrella. I’ve seen him from behind like this



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many times. The boots the old man always wears are my father’s. One day my father went away, leaving just his boots behind. * When my father was still among us, there was a white moth that made itself at home in his room. Come summer, the moth came too, ruby-eyed, lighting on the lampshade. (What did it feed on, I wonder.) It flew round and round the ceiling on its velvet wings, and its powdery scales piled up in a toy freight car. Even in autumn the freight car remained motionless on the rails. * The pampas-grass plain is huge now and has begun to sink into the dark. A dining table, at which an old man sits absentmindedly, floats drifting in the gathering dusk. That favorite umbrella of his is folded closed. A shadow lies over his mouth. The man seems to be waiting for something. Wet down one side of my breast with a sunset the color of tomato soup, I make my way around the remoteness of that man, eyes lowered. * And only the wild field is left, forgotten in the shadowy depths of evening. But we must return to the mother and to her childhood preincarnation to find the trouble that distinguishes this book from the others. For it was the death of Mizuno’s own mother that haunted the poet’s emotions during the compilation of this series, as the author herself says in the Afterword to her book. In perhaps the author’s most adept handling of dream, in a sequence of images reminiscent of an Ingmar Bergman film, the haunting pursues the bereaved daughter in the form of an innocent (“herbivorous”) dragon that turns into a cloud and disappears like the soul of the dead in an ancient Japanese poem.37 The author’s environmental anxieties transmogrify into an absurd image, while her grief-laden obsession with the deaths of both mother and

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brother insists on making its presence known in telling images of recognition and loss. The final image of the darkness within the carefully carved caskets is a masterly cinematic shot at the conclusion of this carefully conceived and executed poem. The poem’s title is “Haru no hitsugi” 春の柩—“Spring Caskets.” Near the station I saw a man take a squirrel out from under his coat. He picks green grains out of a bag and feeds them to the squirrel perched on his hand. (A shadow falls over the man’s cheeks, and his long hair clouds his face.) Displaying the movement of his nimble fingers, the man mutters to himself (These are chock-full of chlorophyll . . . the same ingredient you find in cosmofood. . . . Whatever ingests them will grow rapidly.) Oblivious, the squirrel goes on feeding from the man’s hand. When I got back to the house, Mother was there. Every piece of glass in the room had been polished. Mother was standing absently at the window, and through her back I could see the movement of a cloud. (Mother often said she wanted to become a cloud when she died) The cloud was shaped like a great dragon and was flowing toward the north. I approach softly and lay my hand on Mother’s hair. The air swirled lightly around my fingertips. There was no one there. That night the squirrel turned into a gigantic herbivorous dragon and flew over the roof. . . . The treetops of the metasequoias are thrashing wildly. . . . The man with the nimble fingers is performing card tricks on a dark street corner. Every card he turns over shows the face of an exhausted soldier. (Every face has the eyes of my brother who died young) The soldiers picked up their guns and one by one turned over and scattered into the dark. I thought, they’ve gone in pursuit of the herbivorous dragon. Daybreak   I had the feeling someone was polishing glass by my pillow. When I opened my eyes, Mother was there. Starting with the windows, every piece of glass—the cups on the shelf, the pitcher, the flower vase, even the little glass wind-chime—



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all had been polished by invisible fingers. And a moment comes when the glass in the whole house shines like falling stars. Dawn, five o’clock . . . the hour of my mother’s death. Looking up, I see a cloud trailing away beyond the east window. It is more like a mass of cotton floss than a dragon. The evening rain is wetting the streets. The man with the nimble fingers is whittling miniature boxes out of plain, white wood. His handiwork is lined up on a stand. Decorated with openwork carvings of lotus flowers, they looked like light spring caskets. People were silently peering into the darkness concealed in each. Eventually they were purchased by the customers, put away in pockets one by one, and carried off into the depths of the town. One complex and loving adventure in the layered past brings the speaker and the “little sister” together in a secret garden where they share storybook memories of a young boy playmate. “Mayonaka no imōto” 真夜中のいもうと—“Little Sister at Midnight”—was inspired by the English author Philippa Pearce’s enchanting fantasy Tom’s Midnight Garden, in which Tom discovers entry into a mysterious past when a strange clock strikes thirteen.38 Invisible to others in this time-out-oftime, Tom nightly meets a little girl, the one person innocent enough to see him. They become playmates, but the idyll ends when Time asserts its power and the girl grows up and marries. The “old woman” of Mizuno’s poem seems to be at once Tom’s onetime playmate, Mizuno’s own mother (who is also the “little sister”), and perhaps Mizuno herself. On autumn nights the moon goes by, close to my ear. . . . In the sky the big clock struck thirteen. Deep inside my head I could hear the sound of someone opening a rusty bolt, and little sister slipped into my garden like a shadow. The backyard fence was broken, the season of roses over. “Tom must be meeting Hatty now in the midnight garden, mustn’t he? Since people can live in two different times at once, the past and the present. . . .” Little sister’s voice was a whisper. It brushed against my cheek like the flutter of an unseen bird. Little sister seated herself

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at the edge of the decaying veranda; the moonlight washed over her ghostly bare feet. (On my bookshelf of memory the pages of one book were riffling in a gray wind. It was the story of how an old woman met a young boy in a midnight garden across the barrier of time.) The moon resembles the clear eyes of the dead. Little sister and I were like two rose leaves scattered in the garden, bathed in the moonlight. One who was not there, and one who was . . . little sister and I . . . we shared between us like left hand and right hand the hour of the midnight garden. The world was the sum total of the memories of the dead. Little sister and I melted into its blue light. (Outside, dead leaves drifted down through the dark. . . .) We talked about the fir tree that stood again after being struck by lightning, and about the pair of skates shared by the boy and girl across the barrier of time, and about all the other adventures. It’s true—everyone shares a pair of shoes, a dining table, an umbrella, with those who have died. Sometimes I have a sudden feeling of the presence of the dead, come back like a memory, hovering about near the shoes, the umbrella, the table. . . . (The world is a single tree. And we were the larvae hatched out on that tree, now autumnal and with few remaining leaves.) The gray wind blows the pages of the storybook, turning them one by one. The wind was our voices and the voices of people who had died. I slept beside little sister, a chrysalis waiting for spring, listening to the flow of memory rising like sap in the tree. The wakening of the mother is rendered poetically as a merging into the world of vegetative life in “Shida no haha” しだのはは—“Fern Mother.” This forgiving and self-forgiving vision of death belongs to the richly metamorphic world created by Mizuno’s surreal and poetic imagination.39 It also forms another stanza in Mizuno’s love song to the natural world.



Essay Three From every nook and cranny of my mother’s sleeping body fern spores by the thousand awaken and spring out My mother’s rounded shoulder uncovered by the midwinter sheet is wet in softly falling starlight (Mother   Is it the dream that makes this place so bright?) From her wrists   coral evergreen From her back   white-leaf From her semicircular canals   hare’s-foot From her eyelids   spiderweb From her breast   royal fern (Mother   Did you too come here on the wind?) Covered over in fern scent Mother takes on the shape of an island brooding in silence Lonely plants live on the island lushly flourishing   wilting away Pungent with the odor of the green-grown Jurassic they whisper in low voices with the tongues of spores some red   or purple some light brown the whole history of the island across indeterminate ages waiting for one stirring of the wind (Mother   You too were waiting for the wind, weren’t you?) In my sleeping mother’s breast the coiled spring that wafted out the well remembered tones from the old and often mended organ box is at last unwinding moment by moment   Why

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no one knows   but now from far beyond the island calling my mother a wind has begun to stir Another dream narrative comes closer to an actual account of Mizuno’s mother in her final months. Once again, surrealism helps make the unbearable bearable, or at least speakable. Still, the line in which the mother “realizes both her hands are tied to the bed” may cause a catch in the breath for those who share such memories. The end came just a few days before Mizuno departed on the trip that led to our first meeting. The poem is titled “213-gōshitsu no yume” ２１３号室の夢— “A Dream of Room 213.” What was my mother waiting for there in the geriatric ward? Was it for me? Wasn’t it for something else—a bird or an angel? Each time I went to see her, she looked at me intently, whispering, “R-chan, how did you know I was here?” As if I had descended from the sky. . . . On each visit I met for the first time this mother whose memory of even the day before had faded out.

The old women laying themselves down in rows of white beds descended each night into the sea of sleep Only my mother was awake ears alert for any sound outside the door of Room 213 The door was half open toward some other celestial orb Suddenly train tracks would stretch out and away or a boy with a rabbit in his arms peer in And then a little girl gets herself up from the bed (Where are you going?) (To catch the neighbor’s birds with birdlime . . .) (I’ll go too. Take me. . . .) (I’ll be waiting. Beside the well next door) Lowering her delicate bare feet from the bed



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the girl is about to step across the tracks when suddenly a tall, frock-coated doctor is standing at the   crossing 40 With a cold glance, his eye still at the microscope, he says, “It’s not your turn yet. You are not to leave the waiting room.” (And now she realizes both her hands are tied to the bed) Beside where she lies unable to move a muscle   the shadow of a youth with a rabbit in his arms passes and is gone   then another   and another . . . In the dream my mother seems to be going over and over her girlhood days. But surely there is somewhere a far greater memory, something beyond quotidian reminiscences, and my mother has gone on alone and almost reached it. And I too, as if approaching that far-off place, following this person who has become a young girl, today once more push the wheelchair and with my mother enter a late spring. “Dora’s Ear” ends with a final reminiscence of the brother’s death placed outside the surreal frame. The equivalent is not true of “A Dream of Room 213.” But the poet does devote an entire poem to intimate recollections of her mother as she seemed to a young daughter’s eyes, and this poem finally deals with the mother’s death—as a thing that occurred long ago. The “moon stones” seem fragments of memory itself, fragments whose luminousness is challenged by their change into prosaic opacity. But they keep coming back in dreams, suggesting the persistent power of “something that is not real.” The second stanza refers to a belief that hidden stones could magically turn into items of apparel. The poem is titled “Tsuki no ishi no kioku” 月の石の記憶—“Memories of the Moon Stones,” and is noted as being “from a dream on the night of the bedrock collapse in Hokkaidō.”41 It was a room with a large window looking out at the moon. To one side of the window a rock pillar towered up and up until its summit seemed to pierce the sky. The rock surface, mottled with brownish

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spots, broke off easily, and from time to time falling stone fragments struck the window glass. (At night the sound of the fragments fell until it reached my pillow.) Small stones lay scattered over the moon-drenched floor. My barefoot mother is muttering, “Who do you suppose broke the window? Careful now, not to cut our feet. . . .” And with that, she starts to pick up one by one the little moon-colored stones and make a collection. “These are moonlight stones, so let’s put them away in the cabinet. That way we’ll have more clothes.” The stones shone faintly in the palm of Mother’s hand. A solitary moon stone is a lonesome thing. But when they were collected in a sky-blue bottle the stones shone as if with a kind of aura. Mother often polished them on moonlit nights. (During that period the lamps were always draped with black cloth because of the nightly air raids.) I frequently caught sight of Mother holding a beaker full of moon stones, letting the light of the moon pour through them. On these occasions she seemed like some stranger I had never met. When Mother was away I would secretly open the tea cabinet. Under the light of day the stones looked like nothing more than brownish bits of broken tile or fossilized wood. (Mother was old by then, to be sure, but eventually I secretly took those little stones out and threw them away. And Mother never said a thing about it.) Could it be that when Mother was young the light of the moon sometimes congealed into crystals? Did the other world Mother saw through those stones cease to exist upon her death? . . . If so, why does the shining of that other world pour down upon me now through memories of those stones with their grassgreen and amber luminescence, their cherry-pink lustre? Like remembrances redolent with the vividness of life. . . .



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Such as this. . . . One day I discovered, in with the stones in the cabinet, quite by accident, one of my mother’s secrets. Articles for the female menstrual period, what was referred to in whispers as “the monthlies,” had been put away in a little drawer. Child that I was, I handled them, I gazed at them intently, and for the first time brushed against a soft and enormous darkness. It was the dark lurking within the petals of the moonflower. After my mother’s death, I discovered a little oval stone fragment in the drawer of the mirror stand. Wrapping the faded moonlight stone in a sheet of paper, I put it away again deep in the tea cabinet. I was burying the moon stone in the depths of memory along with objects Mother had put away, such as a single black glove and the little box in which she kept her children’s umbilical cords. But from about this time the moon stones began to appear frequently in my dreams. Something that was not real, but that made my heart pound, was hidden near the moon stones. A fragment of memory, broken off and fallen, had scattered like mica and was trying to cohere again in the atmosphere, to crystallize once more. Like something left over from a dream. (. . . Under a darkened electric lamp someone is still groping about for those fragments of moon stone. . . .) And I too was obliged to turn off the lamp in order to capture the radiance of the faintly shining stones. Hänsel and Gretel’s Island ends with a horseback exit into the universe, brother and sister riding together. Rapunzel’s Horse finds the speaker alone, floating in the sky, aided in her escape by a captious rabbit, in its last poem. By contrast, Little Sister with the Hazel Eyes faces downward at the end. Its final poem, “Ishi no jikan” 石の時間—“Stone Time”—is earthbound. The moon shines down, the speaker examines the hidden geological order of the earth, holding a stone under a magni-

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fying glass. Father and mother have departed, leaving only the moth and the stone, the thin shower of scales and a faint warmth. The powerful last line, Jeffersian in its bonding with stone, welcomes personal obliteration.42 It provides a magnificent ending to this poet’s long voyage through dream lands of light and shadow. A moth fluttering at the window over a fragment of limestone placed on the sill sheds the thin shower of its scales

Beyond the window tiny   a celestial orb declines . . . in the hour of the dead might the atmosphere flow in might the moon shine in?



The dead ones depart (mother   father   friends) trailing their long shadows somewhere Only the wordless hours day after day lay down their layers within me

When I press it to my cheek the stone feels faintly warm I open the encyclopedia

When I apply a loupe to the pure white surface of the stone finely distinguished lace-pattern strata emerge Brittle   but beautiful in its hidden order the stone holds in its volume hundreds of millions of years of death . . . the moth



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bathed in the moonlight rests its wings above the stone *



In the end   the moth   and I no doubt will join the accumulation mingling with all the other fragments down to the finest level renouncing every trace entering the stone time of this celestial sphere *  *  * Conclusion

And so, what can be said at the end about all of this—how can I answer the question posed at the outset about what it was in Mizuno’s work that “got me hooked,” and at the same time be faithful to my disinclination to try to “solve the world,” be that world only the one in a writer’s innermost mind? Would it be something like this: There is a secret place where children go—an island, a room, a garden, a sanctuary for animals . . . a “tree house” sacred to memory, where dream narratives coalesce. We have yet to look at “Ki no ie” 木の家, the last of the five prose poems opening Mizuno’s second book. The Tree House The children alone had been left behind in a large, shadowless noonday. Who had abandoned the tree house? Was it the children? The grownups? As if it means nothing to them, the grownups open any window near at hand and point toward the old tree house. Immediately the tree house floats up like a memory on the outskirts of the afternoon, fine-stemmed plants grow over its walls, and insects are humming softly. Every time my brother and I stepped to the window, we too gazed at the tree house. *  *  *

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My brother said: “That thing over there is not the tree house. Our tree house is decaying on a yellowing map of the night. No one pushes open its rusty door. No one even passes by. The walls inside are sunken into moisture-laden depths as dark as the night sky. I can see them—the little star-like stains left on the walls. Try joining the marks—those are the figures of the wondrous animals we drew on nights when we were small. “The eyeless crocodile looking up at us even now from the depths of the darkness; the legless elephant that followed us; the birds that fell to the ground calling out to us—where did they come from, those creatures our hands kept drawing unawares? The tree house is filled with their panting. All that is needed to lead them out into the light may be one more line, the addition of a single mark. But I no longer have the time.” Every night when I was alone I saw on the scarred plain of my dreams the head of the crocodile that was pursuing me. I bumped into the legs of an elephant that wandered through ruinous cities. I saw birds that sank into the sea. The swollen tails and heads of these creatures stuck out from my dreams. They bled silently. This hurt me like an open wound. Every night my brother set out toward the tree house, match in hand. My brother now prayed that he might burn all those voiceless creatures off the face of the earth. But he always drifted back to me at dawn smelling of death like a wounded fish. With his long, wet hair over his forehead, my feverish brother looked like some strange girl. In the end my brother’s single-minded expeditions failed to reach the animals. *  *  * For me, no memory remains of whether the dark pictures in the tree house are the scribblings of early childhood or not. But, I thought, I must set out to see the tree house once again before it rots away, before its wooden walls collapse. I must connect the fading star-like marks, must discover the location of the abandoned crocodiles’ eyes



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and legs. And, to accomplish that end, I prayed that I might have, not a match, but a strong artist’s brush. In The Road to Xanadu, John Livingston Lowes writes of “. . . that thronging and shadowy mid-region of consciousness which is the womb of creative energy,” where Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced his strange poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.”43 It is the “deep well” of the psyche, where life experience, reading, and dream interact without conscious control. Coleridge himself referred to “twilight realms of consciousness.”44 These darkling sources of the poetic imagination, drawn upon in dream, produced “Kubla Khan”; molded by the conscious “shaping spirit,” they resulted in the organized structure of “The Ancient Mariner.” Such “ways of the imagination” are curiously close to how Mizuno has conceived of her own work. The passages from the “Afterword” to Hänsel and Gretel’s Island quoted above (pp. 58, 69) say as much. Mizuno returns to the same issue in her 1983 interview. After stating that excessively “conscious” writing produces little of interest, she modifies her stance: “Just flinging out what comes from the unconscious is useless. Unless it is sewn together with the needle of the conscious, it will result in a work that is unintelligible to others. That point of contact [between conscious and unconscious] is vital.”45 Mizuno’s “needle” is Lowes’ “shaping spirit.” The final lines of “The Tree House” say it again. Mizuno employs a surrealist technique that adds yet another layer of strangeness, this one deliberate, to her poems, but this modus operandi should not be confused with the underlying myth that gives them their power. That myth has to do with the “shadowed realms” of innocence and its loss, with love, guilt, death, and unbearable sorrow. Mizuno’s brilliant and haunting images lead us back into a very deep well. Or, in terms of her own poetry, an island, a cage, a tower, a strange kitchen, a forbidden room. A tree house, whose mystery can be explored, but not solved. I too am drawn to enter that rusted, decaying realm. It suits me very well to be there. That children’s world contains a dish whose depths remain mysterious, a marsh where the snake of sexual danger lurks, an oven where the devouring witch is coming back to life. These “hooks” draw me in, though they may never allow me to catch and

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bring the magic “fish” to the surface. These shadowed realms are threatened by Time, the loss of innocence (which is the inner close of fantasy), and the parching world of adult rationality. Voices of lost childhood echo through this maze of dream, enticing, subverting, despairing. In the end, like the poet, we must douse the lights to see the moon stones gleam. Sources Mizuno’s four books discussed and extracted in this article are, in order of publication: 1. Dōbutsu zukan 動物図鑑 (Chikyūsha, 1977) 2. Henzeru to Gurēteru no shima ヘンゼルとグレーテルの島 (Gendai Kikakushitsu, 1983) 3. Rapuntseru no uma ラプンツェルの馬 (Shichōsha, 1987) 4. Hashibami-iro no me no imōto はしばみ色の目のいもうと (Gendai Kikakushitsu, 1999) Mizuno has subsequently published two further collections, both in 2003. They are Kujira no mimikaki クジラの耳かき(Shichigatsudō) and the CDROM Usagijirushi no yoruうさぎじるしの夜 (Origin and Quest). The following translations in the article have been published elsewhere: “Fish” and “Moon Fish” in Poetry Tokyo, no. 6, Winter 1993. “Hänsel and Gretel’s Island,” “Dora’s Island,” “The Sky Where the Moas Were,” “On the Island of Elephant Trees,” and “Tree House,” in TriQuarterly, 91, Fall 1994. “Eggs” and “A Busy Night,” in Nimrod, vol. 46, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2002.

Notes 1. Sanbunshi can be regarded as a subcategory of gendaishi, but Mizuno usually speaks of them as separate forms. Gendaishi is not to be confused with the shintaishi 新体詩 mentioned in the essay on Yosano Akiko. Shintaishi employ traditional Japanese 7–5 syllabic prosody, which gendaishi, a twentiethcentury innovation, do not.



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2. “Mr. H.” was Hirasawa Teijirō 平澤貞二郎 (1913–1991), a businessman and poet who endowed the prize for contemporary poetry known by his initial and administered by Nihon Gendai Shijinkai 日本現代詩人会. 3. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro 柿本人麿 (fl. ca. 680–700), the leading Man’yōshū poet; Izumi Shikibu 和泉式部 (late tenth to early eleventh century), famous for her bold style in poetry and love; Yosano Akiko 与謝野晶子 (1878– 1942), a major romantic poet and cultural figure in the early twentieth century and the subject of the second “essay” in this book. 4. “Afterword,” Henzeru to Gurēteru no shima, p. 92. 5. C. G. Jung, Dreams, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 107. See also C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933), p. 24. 6. For the stories in Grimm, I have referred to Jack Zipes, trans. and intro., The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Bantam, Third Edition, 2003). The “X” in Mizuno’s poem comes from another famous story collection. See Sir Richard Burton, trans., “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” The Arabian Nights: Tales from A Thousand and One Nights (Modern Library, 2001), pp. 667–68. 7. The name of the elephant (and island) is ドーラ, “Dōra.” When translating this poem, I reflexively shortened the long “o,” with the result that in my own mind the elephant became “Dora,” a female. Because this poem does not necessitate the use of a personal pronoun, Mizuno-san remained unaware of my gender concept until, years later, I translated “Dōra no mimi”—“Dora’s Ear” (see pp. 102–104)—where the feminine pronoun could not easily be avoided. Mizunosan was taken aback, but using “his” in regard to “Dora” would have been awkward, and “its,” for other reasons, hardly less so. 8. Tobit is included in Ernest Sutherland Bates, ed., The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature: The Old and New Testaments in the King James Version (Simon and Schuster, 1950), pp. 863–79. 9. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed., Aniela Jaffé; trans., Richard and Clara Winston (Vintage, 1989), p. 154. Also Edward F. Edinger, The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in C. G. Jung’s Aion, ed. Deborah A. Wesley (Inner City Books, 1996), p. 101. 10. Nakamoto Michiyo 中本道代 sees the listening fish as an expression of “Gretel’s” burden of anxiety. “Gretel” is willing to break the sexual taboos weak-

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ened by wartime chaos and discover “the secret of the grownups” in an act of sibling incest. For Nakamoto, the brother is a projection of the idealized self, a “brother” with whom the sister’s relation on the dream island is intense, secret, and pure. “Gretel” has a strong life force and is a survivor, while “Hänsel” descends into nihilism and death. The story disturbs us, for “we” (women) are all Gretels—we know this island. Nakamoto imagines “Hänsel” to be about 15 or 16, “Gretel” 12 or 13. “Tōmei na chiisai koppu no yō na natsu—Mizuno Ruriko Shishū Henzeru to Gurēteru no shima no tame ni” 透明な小さいコップのよ うな夏―水野るり子「詩集ヘンゼルとグレーテルの島」のために, La Mer, 19, Jan. 1988, pp. 43–50. In my opinion, the Hänsel and Gretel poems convey conflicting impressions of pre-adolescence as well. 11. See Dreams, pp. 32–33, 38, for Jung’s disagreement with Freud over the interpretation of dreams. In this paper, first published in 1916, Jung asserts the view that dreams have no “fixed meaning.” He sees in an altered dreamimage “an altered psychological situation” and rebukes Freud for insisting on “fixed significance.” Jung finds “a comparison to the motifs of mythology” more productive. On pp. 70–71, from a paper first published in 1945, Jung argues strongly for “context” in interpreting dream images and against fixed symbols and the “preconceived” Freudian doctrine of “repressed wishes.” But in this same paper, pp. 76–77, Jung enunciates his own doctrines of the “mythologem,” or “archetype,” and the “collective unconscious.” It turns out that, with the “knowledge of mythology and folklore” Jung had acquired in depth by 1945, he found dreams to contain “symbolical images which we also come across in the mental history of mankind.” The “big” (important) dreams drawing on the collective unconscious have “poetic force and beauty.” This aesthetic element in Jung strongly distinguishes him from the materialism of Freud and unquestionably is one reason why poets like Mizuno are drawn to him. (For me, the notion of a “collective unconscious” remains hard to grasp, largely, perhaps, because of my inadequate understanding of “the mental history of mankind.”) Most of Dreams is taken up with a detailed analysis of a series of dreams by a patient who related them to an assistant and whom Jung did not actually interview, from the standpoint of medieval alchemy. Jung defends this apparent contradiction of his “basic principle of dream interpretation” (i.e., context) on the grounds that the dreams are a series and “[t]he series is the context the dreamer himself supplies” (pp. 118–20, emphasis as in original). See also Memories, pp. 147, 150, 160–61, 209 for Jung’s disagreement with Freud on the psychological significance of sexuality.



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12. John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Houghton Mifflin, 1927; 2nd ed., 1964). Lowes adopted the term “deep well” from a remark of Henry James about the plot of The American. James says he “dropped [the original suggestion] for a time into the deep well of unconscious cerebration.” Lowes, p. 52, quoting Henry James, Works (“The New York Edition”), II, vii. 13. Charles Mauron, Des Métaphores obsédantes au Mythe personnel: Introduction à la Psychocritique (Paris, Librarie José Corti, 1963; 9th printing, 1995), p. 9. Mauron’s method is to “superimpose” works of a given author in order to bring out the networks of associated images. He takes such repeated image clusters to be “obsessive and probably involuntary.” By their analysis he then arrives at a writer’s “personal myth.” The myth “and its avatars” are then “interpreted as an expression of an unconscious personality and its evolution.” Finally, “[t]he results thus attained . . . are controlled by comparison with the life of the author” (p. 32; translations my own). Mauron’s book is deeply fascinating, and I wish to thank my colleague Howard Hibbett for bringing it to my attention—and lending me his copy! Mizuno’s work tempts me toward the application of Mauron’s “method,” but I have set this project aside for a later occasion. “Obsessive images” abound in Mizuno’s poems and have led me to my own, less scientific, notion of Mizuno’s “mythe personnel,” presented in the concluding paragraphs of this essay. 14. The asterisks in this and other poems are Mizuno’s own, inserted as sectional markers in the text. They do not signal an omission. 15. “D. H. Rorensu ‘Kawa no bara’” D. H. ロレンス「河の薔薇」, La Mer, Summer 1989, pp.80–81. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, eds., D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems (Penguin, 1977), pp. 216–17. 16. “‘Gogatsu no Aran’ kara” 「五月のアラン」から, La Mer, Nov., 1990. My own reading of this poem would point to Alan’s struggle before becoming “inert.” His legs are not long enough to reach the ground. Perhaps he suffers from the impracticality of his own “genius.” 17. Prettified though it may have been by the scruples of the Grimms: “[Wilhelm] tended to make the tales more proper and prudent for bourgeois audiences.” Zipes, p. xxxi. 18. Mauron, pp. 185–86, quoting in part from Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, II, 163. The dream was Valéry’s.

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20. Loc. cit. I am strongly reminded of a passage in a prose poem of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914), “Traum und Umnachtung”—“Dream and Derangement”: “. . . der Schatten eines Rappen sprang aus dem Dunkel und erschrekte ihn” (“. . . the shadow of a black horse sprang out of the darkness and frightened him,” in the translation of Lucia Getsi). Trakl, whose brief, tormented life was lived amid drugs and disorder, created a body of work of surreal vision, brilliant imagery, terror, and fascination with death. His poetic world, like Mizuno’s, is fluid, the haunt of symbolic animals, strange metamorphoses, and most strikingly, a brother and sister who are projections of each other. Getsi remarks, “. . . Trakl could in his poems simultaneously be the murderer . . . and the murderer’s victim, himself as well as his brother, and he could be his sister or the reverse. And just as dreams have an inner coherence, not of logic, but of mood and tone, so do Trakl’s poems.” And so, one might add, do Mizuno’s. Jung would hardly be surprised at the appearance of Trakl’s horse image, which could be taken as evidence of the “collective unconscious.” Trakl, who was suicidal, died in the Austrian army in the first year of World War One under suspicious circumstances, confined to a military psychiatric hospital. In a late poem, “Offenbarung und Untergang”—“Revelation and Decline”—he mentions the horse again: “Und es sprach eine dunkle Stimme aus mir: Meinem Rappen brach ich im nächtigen Wald das Genick, da aus seinen purpurnen Augen der Wahnsinn sprang …” (“Out of me a dark voice spoke: because madness leaped from his purple eyes, in the night forest I broke my black stallion’s neck”). The brother-sister nexus in Trakl alternately soars in idealized images of crystalline beauty and redemptive love and collapses into hints of incest, guilt, and expiation. The quotations above are, in order, Lucia Getsi, trans., Georg Trakl: Poems (Mundus Artium Press, 1973), pp. 146–47, 3, and 170–71. 21. Dreams, p. 228. Kundalinī yoga is defined in J. S. R. L. Narayana Moorty and Elliot Roberts, trans., Selected Verses of Vēmana (Indian Classics Series, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1995), pp. 196–97: “The yoga of union of the kundalinī (lit., ‘coiled-up serpent’) power with the Divine Energy of Godhead . . . ; it lies dormant at the bottom of the spine. . . . Kundalinī is equated with the ‘feminine’ energy of the universe.” 22. The key texts embodying Plath’s animus include “The Colossus” in the book bearing that title and, most notoriously, “Daddy” in her posthumous



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collection Ariel. To these one may add the mother-directed “The Disquieting Muses,” also in The Colossus. Plath’s father died when she was eight years old, and her rage against him seems irrational. There apparently is no evidence of abuse on his part, though he is reputed to have been a strict disciplinarian. It has been suggested that the rage in “Daddy” is in part directed against Plath’s husband Ted Hughes, from whom she had recently separated because of his infidelity. See Helen McNeill, “Sylvia Plath,” in Helen Vendler, ed., Voices and Visions: The Poet in America (Random House, 1987), especially pp. 486–90. This essay also contains interesting references to Plath’s reading of European myth, notably Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. Plath’s two poem collections are The Colossus and Other Poems (Random House, 1957; Vintage Books edition, 1968) and Ariel (HarperPerennial, 1966). 23. The interview, “H-shishō no shijin ni kiku” H 氏賞の詩人にきく, was held on the occasion of Mizuno’s receipt of the “Mr. H. Prize” for her second book, in 1983. Published in Bungei hiroba文芸広場, June 1983, it is a three-way conversation among Mizuno, Hirasawa Teijirō (“Mr. H.”), and Hirasawa’s younger brother Hatanaka Tetsuo 畠中哲夫. The remark about innocence and cruelty is on p. 9. Mizuno’s comment grew out of a discussion about cruelty (残 酷さ) in Grimm and in her own work. 24. Zipes, pp. 18–20. 25. “Ōfuku shokan Mizuno Ruriko—Osegawa Masaaki” 往復所翰水野る り子－尾世川正明, Kujakusen 孔雀船, Jan. 1989, p.69. Osegawa, the other party in this epistolary exchange, is himself a poet. 26. For Behemoth and Leviathan, much more fearsome monsters than Mizuno’s benign elephant and whale, see Job 40, 41. Mizuno’s whale poem, of which this is only a part, was published in the July 1990 issue of Pepper Land ペ ッパランド, a poetry magazine of which she was editor. 27. Mizuno has published an article on this poet, winner of the “Mr. H. Prize” for 1968: “Genshi no hito Murakami Akio—sono sakuhin no shotokusei” 幻視の人村上昭夫―その作品の諸特性, in Botsugo 30-nen Murakami Akio “Dōbutsu aika” e no michi 没後３０年村上昭夫「動物哀歌」への道, a special exhibition publication of Nihon Gendai Shiika Bungakukan 日本現代詩歌 文学館, Oct. 1997. Mizuno cites the following poem, 鴉の星, as one that par-

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ticularly affected her. Its resemblance to her own poems of “hallucinatory vision” is indeed striking. The Star of Crows A crow was cawing Aahh   Aahh   Aahh On that star where once the waterlilies waved That star that like the Weaving Woman of July Preserved in secret the legend of Black Rose Snow kept falling, on and on Aahh   Aahh   Aahh The star was round and solid like the Earth But snow that had long since forgotten how to stop Endlessly kept falling The legend like an ancient fiddle tune Will echo all across the Milky Way And remembering the last surviving fish A lone crow must mindlessly be cawing Aahh   Aahh   Aahh While snow that has forgotten how to stop Endlessly keeps falling Aahh   Aahh   Aahh 28. The post card is decorated with the image of a bovine creature with huge flaring horns. (The illustrator is Higashi Yoshizumi 東芳純.) Between the poem and the illustration Mizuno gives the following information: “The aurochs was a long-horned wild ox, the ancestor of domestic cattle. It became the source of the unicorn legend and appears in the Old Testament. Its horns were prized as drinking cups, and its flesh was eaten. The last aurochs died in 1627.” 29. Nakamoto Michiyo, “Tōmei na chiisai koppu no yō na natsu,” p. 49. 30. Jung recounts a remarkable dream in which he enters his father’s workroom and finds “hundreds of bottles containing every imaginable sort of fish.” Jung’s father was a Protestant pastor, and Jung understands the dream as a summons to investigate the problem of Christianity (Christ the ichthys, or fish). The dream also has a portion about Jung’s mother, accompanied by a feeling of



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terror, in which he discovers beds she kept for visiting “ghostly married couples.” Memories, pp. 213–15. 31. Mizuno has published an interesting article that reveals this poem to have been of particular significance to her. It appears that its inspiration—and title—came from a child’s painting shown to her by the Jungian translator Akiyama Satoko 秋山さとこ. The picture (which I have not seen) depicted a fairy-tale house with a red roof, a tree standing beside it, and the figure of a woman, all encompassed by “a soundless stirring filling the atmosphere of a moonlit night.” To Mizuno this scene suggested “the inner busyness of a child, perhaps on the verge of summer vacation, longing for the adventure of life, with uneasiness and anticipation, fear and trembling, stirring its emotions like waves on an unquiet sea. . . .” Mizuno goes on to discuss the fate of the “inner child” (a central concept in her work) when adult life leads to its abandonment. She remarks that her American translator has quizzed her about traumas in her early life. Her family, she says, was a very “ordinary” one. The “trauma” she experienced is one common to us all—the wound incurred by “killing her innocent” childself. “Busy days” replace “busy nights” in the adult world. But the deep memories remain and call for formulation into poems. Mizuno Ruriko, “’Isogashii yoru’ no kioku ni”「忙しい夜」の記憶に, Shigaku 詩学, Sept. 1998. 32. In a personal communication (August 25, 2005) Mizuno has informed me that this poem is based on an actual dream and that the “little sister” is her own younger sister, not the reconceptualized mother who pervades this book. (The house is also the actual house where her family lived during the war.) I feel that in the context of Little Sister with the Hazel Eyes this information does not invalidate the “double image” interpretation I propose. However, the reader should be aware that the dimension I see in the poem is my own view, not the author’s. I have eliminated punctuation from my translation of this poem in conformity to Mizuno’s practice in all her prose poems. For reasons not entirely clear to me, this poem’s dream narrative seems to flow more naturally in this untrammeled form. 33. In personal correspondence Mizuno has said that the dog keeps appearing as “a shadow of myself ” (letter, Oct 14, 1995); in another letter (Nov 14, 1995) she calls the dog the étranger in human society (in contrast to the horse)—familiar, but not us. 34. William P. Trent, intro., The Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson (Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1900), p. 91. Stevenson’s stanza reads:

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c The Secret Island d Under grass alone he lies, Looking up with leaden eyes, Scarlet coat and pointed gun, To the stars and to the sun.

35. “Todoku koe” has since been included in Hashibami-iro no me no imōto. It was as yet uncollected when I translated it. 36. Seven surviving higher school classmates gathered on August 5, 1996, in affectionate remembrance of her brother. (The brother’s meinichi 命日, the anniversary of his death, a significant date in Buddhist countries, is July 29.) In a personal communication of August 28, 1996, Mizuno reveals that she has been reading the yellowed pages of her brother’s notebook. “The words left behind. . . . Could we but hear the silent words behind all things. . . .” Ten years later, on August 9, 2006, she writes again of her feelings on opening the old box containing her brother’s photos, tapes, and other memorabilia, and she comments on the intense bonding and intellectual excitement shared by male students under the old system. 37. These two examples will serve, the first on the death of Emperor Tenji in 672, the second on that of his brother Emperor Tenmu in 686, each composed by a bereaved consort: MYS II:148   Aohata no   Over green-bannered Kohata no ue o Forest-bannered Kohata   Kayou to wa   I can see him pass, Me ni wa miredo mo Turn and pass, still wavering, Tada ni awanu kamo But we two shall not meet again. MYS II:161   Kitayama ni   On the northern hills Tanabiku kumo ni Now there trails a band of cloud,   Aokumo no   A blue cloud drifting, Hoshi sakariyuku Drawing away from the star, Tsuki o sakarite Drawing away from the moon. 38. Philippa Pearce, Tom’s Midnight Garden (Puffin Books, 1958; Harper Trophy, 1992). This winner of the Carnegie Medal for children’s literature is a particular favorite of Mizuno’s.



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39. Metamorphosis is basic to Mizuno’s narrative method. The poem is also reminiscent of animistic creation myths in the ancient chronicles. See, e.g., Kurano Kenji 倉野憲司, ed., Kojiki 古事記, Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei (NKBT), I, 85; Donald L. Philippi, trans., Kojiki (Princeton and Tokyo University Presses, 1968–69), p. 87. 40. “The name of a scholar in a novel of Jules Verne. He often appears in the paintings of Paul Delvaux” (Mizuno’s note). Delvaux is one of a number of surrealist painters whose work has helped shape Mizuno’s vision. Other painters she admires include Klee, Miró, Goya, and Edgar Ende. Otto Lidenbrock appears in Verne’s novel Voyage au centre de la terre (1864). In Delvaux’s paintings he is always a tall, thin, frock-coated figure peering through a hand-held microscope, the very image of cold scientific detachment. 41. The opening scene with the rock pillar was suggested by Delvaux’s painting “Les phases de la lune II” (1941). As noted in the title, another source was an incident that occurred on the tenth of February, 1996. A calamitous cavein of the Toyohama tunnel in Hokkaidō trapped and killed 19 bus passengers and crew. Mizuno watched the futile rescue efforts on television and suffered nightmares afterward. The tunnel entrance was at the foot of a towering cliff. 42. “. . .the silent Wing-prints of ancient weathers long at peace, and the older Scars of primal fire, and the stone Endurance that is waiting millions of years to carry A corner of the house. . . . ” Robinson Jeffers, from “To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House” “My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite. . . .” Robinson Jeffers, from “Tor House” 43. Lowes, p. 12. 44. Ibid., p. 51. 45. Bungei hiroba interview, p. 8. Mr. H. himself asks a question that encapsulates a notion straight out of Xanadu: “When you have observed and come to know the world and its ways, when you have read many poem

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collections and other books, when all this has been refined in that crucible—is that when the words of your poems are born?” Interview, p. 9. Sono rutsubo その坩堝—“that crucible” [emphasis added] is surely the “point of contact” between the “deep well” and the “shaping spirit.”

CORNELL EAST ASIA SERIES 4 Fredrick Teiwes, Provincial Leadership in China: The Cultural Revolution and Its Aftermath 8 Cornelius C. Kubler, Vocabulary and Notes to Ba Jin’s Jia: An Aid for Reading the Novel 16 Monica Bethe & Karen Brazell, Nō as Performance: An Analysis of the Kuse Scene of Yamamba 18 Royall Tyler, tr., Granny Mountains: A Second Cycle of Nō Plays 23 Knight Biggerstaff, Nanking Letters, 1949 28 Diane E. Perushek, ed., The Griffis Collection of Japanese Books: An Annotated Bibliography 37 J. Victor Koschmann, Ōiwa Keibō & Yamashita Shinji, eds., International Perspectives on Yanagita Kunio and Japanese Folklore Studies 38 James O’Brien, tr., Murō Saisei: Three Works 40 Kubo Sakae, Land of Volcanic Ash: A Play in Two Parts, revised edition, tr. David G. Goodman 44 Susan Orpett Long, Family Change and the Life Course in Japan 48 Helen Craig McCullough, Bungo Manual: Selected Reference Materials for Students of Classical Japanese 49 Susan Blakeley Klein, Ankoku Butō: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness 50 Karen Brazell, ed., Twelve Plays of the Noh and Kyōgen Theaters 51 David G. Goodman, ed., Five Plays by Kishida Kunio 52 Shirō Hara, Ode to Stone, tr. James Morita 53 Peter J. Katzenstein & Yutaka Tsujinaka, Defending the Japanese State: Structures, Norms and the Political Responses to Terrorism and Violent Social Protest in the 1970s and 1980s 54 Su Xiaokang & Wang Luxiang, Deathsong of the River: A Reader’s Guide to the Chinese TV Series Heshang, trs. Richard Bodman & Pin P. Wan 55 Jingyuan Zhang, Psychoanalysis in China: Literary Transformations, 1919–1949 56 Jane Kate Leonard & John R. Watt, eds., To Achieve Security and Wealth: The Qing Imperial State and the Economy, 1644–1911 57 Andrew F. Jones, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music 58 Peter J. Katzenstein & Nobuo Okawara, Japan’s National Security: Structures, Norms and Policy Responses in a Changing World 59 Carsten Holz, The Role of Central Banking in China’s Economic Reforms 60 Chifumi Shimazaki, Warrior Ghost Plays from the Japanese Noh Theater: Parallel Translations with Running Commentary

61 Emily Groszos Ooms, Women and Millenarian Protest in Meiji Japan: Deguchi Nao and Ōmotokyō 62 Carolyn Anne Morley, Transformation, Miracles, and Mischief: The Mountain Priest Plays of Kōygen 63 David R. McCann & Hyunjae Yee Sallee, tr., Selected Poems of Kim Namjo, afterword by Kim Yunsik 64 Hua Qingzhao, From Yalta to Panmunjom: Truman’s Diplomacy and the Four Powers, 1945–1953 65 Margaret Benton Fukasawa, Kitahara Hakushū: His Life and Poetry 66 Kam Louie, ed., Strange Tales from Strange Lands: Stories by Zheng Wanlong, with introduction 67 Wang Wen-hsing, Backed Against the Sea, tr. Edward Gunn 69 Brian Myers, Han Sōrya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK 70 Thomas P. Lyons & Victor Nee, eds., The Economic Transformation of South China: Reform and Development in the Post-Mao Era 71 David G. Goodman, tr., After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with introduction 72 Thomas Lyons, Poverty and Growth in a South China County: Anxi, Fujian, 1949–1992 74 Martyn Atkins, Informal Empire in Crisis: British Diplomacy and the Chinese Customs Succession, 1927–1929 76 Chifumi Shimazaki, Restless Spirits from Japanese Noh Plays of the Fourth Group: Parallel Translations with Running Commentary 77 Brother Anthony of Taizé & Young-Moo Kim, trs., Back to Heaven: Selected Poems of Ch’ŏn Sang Pyŏng 78 Kevin O’Rourke, tr., Singing Like a Cricket, Hooting Like an Owl: Selected Poems by Yi Kyu-bo 79 Irit Averbuch, The Gods Come Dancing: A Study of the Japanese Ritual Dance of Yamabushi Kagura 80 Mark Peterson, Korean Adoption and Inheritance: Case Studies in the Creation of a Classic Confucian Society 81 Yenna Wu, tr., The Lioness Roars: Shrew Stories from Late Imperial China 82 Thomas Lyons, The Economic Geography of Fujian: A Sourcebook, Vol. 1 83 Pak Wan-so, The Naked Tree, tr. Yu Young-nan 84 C.T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction 85 Cho Chong-Rae, Playing With Fire, tr. Chun Kyung-Ja 86 Hayashi Fumiko, I Saw a Pale Horse and Selections from Diary of a Vagabond, tr. Janice Brown

87 88 89 90 92

Motoori Norinaga, Kojiki-den, Book 1, tr. Ann Wehmeyer Chang Soo Ko, tr., Sending the Ship Out to the Stars: Poems of Park Je-chun Thomas Lyons, The Economic Geography of Fujian: A Sourcebook, Vol. 2 Brother Anthony of Taizé, tr., Midang: Early Lyrics of So Chong-Ju Janice Matsumura, More Than a Momentary Nightmare: The Yokohama Incident and Wartime Japan 93 Kim Jong-Gil tr., The Snow Falling on Chagall’s Village: Selected Poems of Kim Ch’un-Su 94 Wolhee Choe & Peter Fusco, trs., Day-Shine: Poetry by Hyon-jong Chong 95 Chifumi Shimazaki, Troubled Souls from Japanese Noh Plays of the Fourth Group 96 Hagiwara Sakutarō, Principles of Poetry (Shi no Genri), tr. Chester Wang 97 Mae J. Smethurst, Dramatic Representations of Filial Piety: Five Noh in Translation 98 Ross King, ed., Description and Explanation in Korean Linguistics 99 William Wilson, Hōgen Monogatari: Tale of the Disorder in Hōgen 100 Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann and Ryūichi Narita, eds., Total War and ‘Modernization’ 101 Yi Ch’ŏng-jun, The Prophet and Other Stories, tr. Julie Pickering 102 S.A. Thornton, Charisma and Community Formation in Medieval Japan: The Case of the Yugyō-ha (1300–1700) 103 Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945 104 Harold M. Tanner, Strike Hard! Anti-Crime Campaigns and Chinese Criminal Justice, 1979–1985 105 Brother Anthony of Taizé & Young-Moo Kim, trs., Farmers’ Dance: Poems by Shin Kyŏng-nim 106 Susan Orpett Long, ed., Lives in Motion: Composing Circles of Self and Community in Japan 107 Peter J. Katzenstein, Natasha Hamilton-Hart, Kozo Kato, & Ming Yue, Asian Regionalism 108 Kenneth Alan Grossberg, Japan’s Renaissance: The Politics of the Muromachi Bakufu 109 John W. Hall & Toyoda Takeshi, eds., Japan in the Muromachi Age 110 Kim Su-Young, Shin Kyong-Nim, Lee Si-Young; Variations: Three Korean Poets; trs. Brother Anthony of Taizé & Young-Moo Kim 111 Samuel Leiter, Frozen Moments: Writings on Kabuki, 1966–2001

112 Pilwun Shih Wang & Sarah Wang, Early One Spring: A Learning Guide to Accompany the Film Video February 113 Thomas Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan 114 Jane Kate Leonard & Robert Antony, eds., Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs: Qing Crisis Management and the Boundaries of State Power in Late Imperial China 115 Shu-ning Sciban & Fred Edwards, eds., Dragonflies: Fiction by Chinese Women in the Twentieth Century 116 David G. Goodman, ed., The Return of the Gods: Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s 117 Yang Hi Choe-Wall, Vision of a Phoenix: The Poems of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn 118 Mae J. Smethurst and Christina Laffin, eds., The Noh Ominameshi: A Flower Viewed from Many Directions 119 Joseph A. Murphy, Metaphorical Circuit: Negotiations Between Literature and Science in Twentieth-Century Japan 120 Richard F. Calichman, Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West 121 Fan Pen Li Chen, Visions for the Masses: Chinese Shadow Plays from Shaanxi and Shanxi 122 S. Yumiko Hulvey, Sacred Rites in Moonlight: Ben no Naishi Nikki 123 Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann, Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition 124 Naoki Sakai, Brett de Bary, & Iyotani Toshio, eds., Deconstructing Nationality 125 Judith N. Rabinovitch and Timothy R. Bradstock, Dance of the Butterflies: Chinese Poetry from the Japanese Court Tradition 126 Yang Gui-ja, Contradictions, trs. Stephen Epstein and Kim Mi-Young 127 Ann Sung-hi Lee, Yi Kwang-su and Modern Korean Literature: Mujŏng 128 Pang Kie-chung & Michael D. Shin, eds., Landlords, Peasants, & Intellectuals in Modern Korea 129 Joan R. Piggott, ed., Capital and Countryside in Japan, 300–1180: Japanese Historians Interpreted in English 130 Kyoko Selden and Jolisa Gracewood, eds., Annotated Japanese Literary Gems: Stories by Tawada Yōko, Nakagami Kenji, and Hayashi Kyōko (Vol. 1) 131 Michael G. Murdock, Disarming the Allies of Imperialism: The State, Agitation, and Manipulation during China’s Nationalist Revolution, 1922–1929 132 Noel J. Pinnington, Traces in the Way: Michi and the Writings of Komparu Zenchiku 133 Charlotte von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea: Japanese Trade with China and Korea from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries, Kristen Lee Hunter, tr.

134 John Timothy Wixted, A Handbook to Classical Japanese 135 Kyoko Selden and Jolisa Gracewoord, with Lili Selden, eds., Annotated Japanese Literary Gems: Stories by Natsume Sōseki, Tomioka Taeko, and Inoue Yasushi (Vol. 2) 136 Yi Tae-Jin, The Dynamics of Confucianism and Modernization in Korean History 137 Jennifer Rudolph, Negotiated Power in Late Imperial China: The Zongli Yamen and the Politics of Reform 138 Thomas D. Loooser, Visioning Eternity: Aesthetics, Politics, and History in the Early Modern Noh Theater 139 Gustav Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Late Heian Japan 140 Joan R. Piggott and Yoshida Sanae, Teishinkōki: The Year 939 in the Journal of Regent Fujiwara no Tadahira 141 Robert Bagley, Max Loehr and the Study of Chinese Bronzes: Style and Classification in the History of Art 142 Edwin A. Cranston, The Secret Island and the Enticing Flame: Worlds of Memory, Discovery, and Loss in Japanese Poetry 143 Sung-Il Lee, Blue Stallion: Poems of Yu Chi-Whan

DVD Monica Bethe and Karen Brazell: “Yamanba: The Old Woman of the Mountains” to accompany CEAS Volume 16 Noh As Performance

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