On Knowing Oneself Too Well

Born in Iwate Prefecture, Ishikawa's birth name was Hajime, meaning, 'first one', his father, Ittei, was curate at Joko Temple, situated in Hinoto Village. An early interest in literature and writing brought him attention from major literary figures of the time, and for a while in his late teens he lived in Tokyo, and the poet Tekkan Asano gave him the pen name of Takuboku, translating as 'woodpecker'. At this time attitudes within Japanese poetry were beginning to shift, the poet Masaoka Shiki noting that change was happening all around with the Meiji era, had begun to intiate a change in styles, hokku to haiku, waka to tanka. Along with Tekkan and Akiko Asano, Ishikawa also began to adapt the tanka form. Ishikawa's short life was dogged by poverty, his father was discharged from his position at the temple and the responsibility of providing for the family was passed onto him. He married his childhood sweetheart and shortly after came the birth of their daughter Kyoko, Ishikawa worked as a teacher but was sacked after organizing a student strike, the family poverty stricken were forced to move apart. Working for a time in Hakodate as an editor, he had to move on again after the city suffered from a huge a fire. Although this proved not to affect his output as a writer, surviving on loans and gifts, he wrote up to a thousand poems in a year. His son Shinichi was born when Takuboku was 24, but died shortly after his birth, using the advance from his first book of poems A Handful of Sand to pay for his son's funeral, not long after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and died aged twentysix on April 12, 1912, three months prior to the end of the Meiji era, his mother had also died from the disease a month prior, and a year later his wife also died.

Newly published by Syllabic Press and translated by Tamae K.Prindle, 'On Knowing Oneself Too Well' contains some of Takuboku's most well known poems, 'A Love Song To Myself', the longest poem being 117 three line stanzas of observational pieces reveal the poet's thoughts on himself, where he poses the question to life itself 'Shall I die for such a thing?, Shall I live for such a thing?, An endless controversy', the poem also contains the line that has been chosen as the title of the collection. The poem to me appears like a piece of perfect poetic cinematography, in a film where if you were to press pause at any given moment, you'd come away with a perfect photograph.'The ennui,  After pretending to be somebody, What shall I compare it to?'. In some ways it resembles Akutagawa's 'Life of a Fool', Takuboku notes the exasperation of keeping suicidal feelings in check, the pieces explore desperation, alienation, despondency, where smoking in an empty house, just to feel alone and miserable offers a momentary haven from other people, and a need of escape seems to inform many of the poems, in Smoke (1) a lost childhood is recalled, 'I escaped through a classroom window, And, alone, Went to lie in a ruin', being alone provides the opportunity to reflect, with the envy of a discontented child he looks up at the sky and the birds, in a melancholy poem about time passing and he muses on the children he knew, and the places that life has taken them, time like a stone rolling down a hill. The only thing that Ishikawa finds unfettered solace in is nature, looking at natural scenes, like an evening sky, seem to be the only opportunity to free himself of his vexations.

 

The collection also includes Ishikawa's 'Sad Toys', a poem composed from his hospital bed, thoughts of his hometown and money concerns are mixed with his distrust of the outside world, 'Fearing my thoughts would be heard, I quickly drew my chest back, From the stethoscope', and observes, 'For the first time in many years, I laughed aloud, At the sight of a fly rubbing it's hands'.

On Knowing Oneself Too Well

more on Takuboku Ishikawa


To read A Handful of Sand by Takuboku Ishikawa, visit the translations to read online post.

America & Other Poems

Looking through this collection for the first time, I came across the poem from the selection from 1973-1982 called 'Vanished Horizon', I read the stanza 'Even if you disappear from the places you belong, nothing will change in this world'. I think that when most people pick up a collection of poetry for the first time they'll experience a moment when the light bulb is switched on, or perhaps all the partitioning doors in a long corridor are suddenly opened, these lines provoked this feeling for me, reading the line for the first time it seemed to express a depressing thought,but it also has a reassuringly human tone to it. I'm not sure if I immediately made it to the end of the poem, these lines seemed to linger in my head as soon as I had read them, they seemed to contain so much, something learned from experience, now passed on in a poem, like a philosophy, advice maybe. I think I skipped next to Shogo Oketani's piece on how he had come to know Ayukawa's poetry.

America and Other Poems, published by Kaya Press in 2008, translated by Shogo Oketani and Leza Lowitz, serves as an all round excellent introduction to Ayukawa's poetry, his life and the age he lived in, the poems are presented in four time periods, starting with poems from 1942, the last poems being from 1982. Accompanying the poems there's a preface from Shogo which provides background information on Ayukawa's influences, mainly the modernist poets Pound and Eliot, 'The Wasteland' by Eliot being translated in Japan in the 1930's, Ayukawa started writing poetry in his teens and joined the poetry group, LUNA, whose members would go on to form the poetry group, Arechi, also publishing a magazine of the same name. A Japanese poet who was a source of inspiration to the members of LUNA was Kitasono Katsue, and Shogo explains how Kitasono's approach to poetry influenced them. Shogo's preface also looks at Ayukawa's position within post war poetry in Japan, and his feelings for America, looking at the title poem from this collection written in 1947. The selection chosen offers both personal poems like 'A Father's Death' as well as poems on other writers 'Solzhenitsyn'(1974) and 'The Inevitable Loser' (1978) - a poem centred around a reading of a short story from Delmore Schwartz.

Ayukawa's poetry is very individualistic in style, rarely do they seem to follow a straight line, they take an unpredictable path, beyond each curve there lies startlingly brilliant descriptive pieces. The early poems show the mark of Ayukawa's sense of loneliness, there seems to be a mute desperation or frustration in them, and a loss at missed opportunities of communication. In a poem from 1955 'If There is a Tomorrow' there's a great dual use of narration, as the winter of 1941 is recalled, the poem begins with the departure of a soldier, and a farewell, five years pass and returning to the town, war worn, the narrator is at a loss as to what the war was for, what did the liberation of defeat bring?. The narrator of the second half offers an answer to the confusions of the former, the poem is a powerful exploration of differing perspectives, where the passing of time and the muting of sound appears to be the only tangible things that we are left with.

Many of the poems are centered around Ayukawa's experience's as a soldier, sent to Sumatra in 1942 he was sent back to Japan in 1944 after contracting malaria. Morikawa Yoshinobu who was also a founding member of Arechi was drafted into the army in 1941, dying on the Burmese front in 1942, Morikawa is lamented in Ayukawa's poetry, appearing in the poems as M. In 'The Last I Heard' from 1976, a reunion of fellow soldiers is described, and the dead are remembered, but 'On a day smelling of rock and sky, of waves sand, and flowers, there was no place to mourn'. The landscape of the earlier poems bring to mind the barren paintings of Matsumoto Shunsuke. 'Soul on the Road' from 1968,a poem about disconnection seems to be the beginning of a more reflective tone which appears more explicit in the later poems of 1973-1982, which 'Vanished Horizon' belongs to.

The collection is completed with an essay from Ayukawa from 1947, explaining his thoughts on writing and poetry, his idea's clinging to the individualistic rather than following whatever the political opinion of the day is. Also Shogo Oketani gives another piece on translating Ayukawa and examines his place in world literature, a place that this collection will hopefully add to.

Kaya Press

Art, Anti-Art, Non Art

March 2007 saw the Getty Center hold an exhibition called Art Anti-Art Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Post War Japan 1950-1970, this exhibition looked at artists and art groups that had begun to flourish during the recovery years after the war. As the title hints the exhibition looked at works in the public sphere;music, performance art, it looks briefly at architecture, the book accompanied the exhibition, edited by Charles Merewether with Rika Iezumi Hiro, it features two in depth essays by Charles Merewether and Reiko Tomii that look at the formation of art groups such as Tokyo Fluxus, Hi-Red Center, Bikyoto, Group Ongaku, Gutai Art Association among others, and also profiled individual artists, photographers,and musicians. The essays are illustrated and the book also contains a great selection of plates of images and pieces featured in the exhibition, many from the collections of the Getty Research Institute.

Electric Dress - Tanaka Atsuko,1957

Focusing on art in the public sphere the book looks at many events that are now perhaps considered defining moments in post war performing art in Japan, Hijikata Tatsumi's performance of Mishima's, Kinjiki, (Forbidden Colours) in May 1959, the piece which saw the start of his Ankoku Butoh Group (School of Utter Darkness). The photographer Eikoh Hosoe was inspired by this performance and would photograph Hijikata for two later exhibitions. Other photographers that feature in the book include Moriyama Daido, Domon Ken, Shohei Tomatsu, and their work in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki, Document,1961 features, a work that looked at the effects the bomb had on the citizens of those cities, the work also included reproductions of paintings by Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi known as The Hiroshima Panels which are on display at the Maruki Gallery. Japanese artists who found affinity with George Maciunas's Fluxus Manifesto,1963, are also examined.

Hijikata Tatsumi Holding an Infant and Running Across a Rice Field, by Hosoe Eikoh, 1965

Images reproduced with permission

For more - The J. Paul Getty Museum

Soul Dance - Poems by Takako Arai

Born in Kiryu City, Gunma Prefecture Takako Arai grew up in a family involved in the local textile industry,a traditional industry in danger of facing extinction. The city's skyline is famed for it's sawtooth roofed mills, in the the Nara Period, the city's textiles were presented to the Imperial family, along with those from Kyoto. A phrase from older times states, 'For the West, it is Nishijin, for the East, it is Kiryu' is an indication of the prominence that textiles from Kiryu were held. Many of the poems included in 'Soul Dance' are situated within this industry. Takako Arai's first collection of poems Haobekki was published in 1997 and Tamashii Dance, (Soul Dance), her second collection published in 2007 won the 41st Oguma Hideo Prize. The English translation was published in 2008 by Mi'Te Press, a poetry journal where Arai is editor.

In her introduction Arai laments the effects of the recent economical downturns have had on textile factories of her hometown, standing amongst the vacant lots where the factories once stood, (these lots now sadly sold off at auction prices), Arai has chosen poetry and language as a means of showing resistance to these closures that are turning her hometown into a desolate place. In New York and Belgrade Arai saw vacant lots similar to the ones that the factories had occupied in her hometown, shadowless places that had been created by violence and saw in them a profound message of what the present means to us. Soul Dance is a collection in two parts that infuses the physical and the spiritual, through them we are given a glimpse of life lived in proximity to a living industry.

The poems are full of movement both in word and concept, in 'For Amenouzume-san', which appears in both Japanese and English,a natural rhythm builds within the poem, Ame-no-uzume, the mythical Goddess who coaxed out the Sun Goddess Amaterasu who had hidden in a cave, plunging the world into darkness, by using song and dance. 'Mohei's Fire' a prose poem starting in a Tokyo suburb under redevelopment, and a meeting with the elderly Takejiro-san who recalls when the area was a farming village, harvested vegetables were washed in the Yata river. Whilst recalling these slower days, Takejiro-san remembers Grandpa Mohei's encounter with a fox, in a poem that is like a fable from folklore brought up to date, when a candle seen in the present merges with one mentioned in the reminiscence. In the last poem 'Shadows', amongst the rubble of a flattened factory, an object found left there before the bulldozers moved in, initiates a salvage into memory and attachment, a poem that at it's root also turns to an inquiry on value.

Soul Dance is translated by Jeffrey Angles, assistant professor of Japanese literature and director of the Japanese program at Western Michigan University, whose award winning translation of 'Forest of Eyes' is forthcoming from California University Press. Additional translators are Sawako Nakayasu, whose book 'Texture Notes' is forthcoming from Letter Machine, and You Nakai, a member of no collective, the cover art is from Fuyune Suzuki.

Mi'Te Press