Killing Kanoko

Published by Action Books at the end of 2009, Killing Kanoko, translated by Jeffrey Angles is Ito Hiromi's first selection of poems to appear in English, mainly selected from collections that were originally published in Japan during the eighties and early nineties. Jeffrey Angles also writes an introduction which gives a portrait of Ito Hiromi's approach to her poetry, noting the importance of performing the poetry live, Ito often recites her poetry with accompanying drums, and discusses the subjects that her poetry explores, pointing out the shamanistic quality in her poetry, and Ito's interest in Native American poetry. Ito's poems on motherhood often describe the physicality involved in child rearing as well as the spiritual, her poems also explore eroticism, hara-kiri, gender,childbirth and also included in the collection is the short story/prose poem, 'I am Anjuhimeko' a fable-like piece that tells of the ordeals, travels and sufferings of a young girl, abused and exiled from her mother by her father(s), searching for Tennoji, this allegoric story also incorporates the yamanba from Japanese folklore.

The use of language is looked at in differing ways in the poems, not only as a means of expression, as in the poem 'Happy Destroying' Ito explores her experiences visiting and living in other countries and examines the perspectives and perceptions associated within different usages of the Japanese language, and that of being an outsider.'Trans-Population' is a poem concerned with dislocation and rootlessness, about moving away from your birth place and the things you take with you when you leave, the deterioration of things left behind,the passing of time, and a slight suffocation to the associations and language that are inherited with it. Observations of her daughter often provoke memories of Ito's own childhood, (and likewise the other way around), as in the poem Tennoji, as Jeffrey Angles points out in his notes that Tennoji temple is well known as being a place of physical and psychological salvation, Ito recalls a circle drawn in chalk as part of a childhood game thirty years ago, the chalk circle acts as a metaphorical link within the poem and it's feelings of security, and ponders what happened to the boy who drew it.

There are controversial poems here and also observational poems like Snow and So As Not To Distort - a poem about preparing shiratama and the desire to preserve a pure love, also the more fragmentary poem The White Cat that Shone Like Sunlight.Hiromi Ito has won numerous prizes for her poetry including the Takami Jun Prize and recently the Hagiwara Sakutaro Prize.

Action Books

Points and Lines

 

Points and Lines/Ten to sen was first published in Japan in 1958, Tsuneo Kobayashi adapted it for a film in the same year, and it was later filmed again as a tv series starring Kitano Takeshi. Many of Matsumoto's books have been adapted to film and television, another notable one being The Castle of Sand/Suna no utsuwa, directed by Yoshitaro Nomura with Tetsuro Tanba as Matsumoto's famous detective Imanishi, Castle of Sand appears in Imanishi Investigates translated by Beth Cary published by Soho Crime, Points and Lines is the book that produced a 'Matsumoto boom' after it's publication, it seems it's influence extended beyond the detective genre, as Dennis Washburn notes in his afterword to Tsutomu Mizukami's Temple of the Wild Geese that after reading Points and Lines Mizukami returned to writing after a ten year hiatus with the novel Fog and Shadow /Kiri to kage. Points and Lines opens with the discovery of what appears as a double love suicide, two lovers are found dead on a beach, the lovers, Otoki and Kenichi Sayama had taken Potassium Cyanide, at first it looks like an open shut case, but with the discovery of a dining ticket for one found in Kenichi's pocket,Torigai, a detective for the local police force begins to suspect that something doesn't quite add up. When the relatives of the deceased come to collect the bodies, a work colleague of Otoki, (who used to work as a waitress in a local restaurant), comes with her mother,she informs the police that she had seen Otoki leave with a man on a train, she had been at the station to see off one of her customers,who had insisted that she see him off at the train station.

It transpires that Kenichi Sayama had worked for a ministry that is under investigation for fraud, and Kiichi Mihara of the Metropolitan police force is sent to investigate the apparent suicides. Torigai passes on what he has learned about the case and Mihara agrees with Torigai that this may not be the simple case that was first presumed. Interviewing Tatsuo Yasuda the customer of Otoki's colleague who had seen Otoki and Kenichi leave on the train, the fact that maybe Yasuda had prearranged this meeting to use it as an alibi begins to form in Mihara's mind, Yasuda goes on to tell Mihara that he was away on business in Hokkaido during the time the suicides occurred. Thus unfolds the mystery Mihara has to begin to unwind, scrupulously studying train timetables, cross checking statements until, piece by piece, painstakingly he begins to dismantle Yasuda's alibi in a story that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Seicho Matsumoto began his prolific career when he was forty, he won many awards in Japan including the Akutagawa award in 1952 for his historical story Story of the Kokura Journal/Aru kokura nikki den. The short story The Face/Kao won the Japan Detective Story Writers Prize and can be found in the collection The Voice and other Stories. The translator James Kirkup wote in his obituary of him that he was a 'Japanese immortal'. Points and Lines was first published in English by Kodansha in 1970 translated by Mariko Yamamoto and Paul C.Blum, for more, read Dorothy Dodge Robbin's excellent piece on Matsumoto at Salem Press.

The Maid

The Maid is the fourth book from Yasutaka Tsutsui published by Alama Books, translated by Adam Kabat, previous books include Salmonella Men from Planet Porno, (short stories), Paprika, adapted into an anime by Satoshi Kon, and also the novel entitled 'Hell' where the characters find themselves in hell and contemplate how and why they are there. Yasutaka Tsustui's prose has a great ability to pull the fantastical and bring it up so close to reality that the border between the two becomes blurred. The Maid follows in this vein, Nanase a young maid who has the ability to read people's minds, she can't recall the exact time when she first realized she had this telepathic power, she thought that maybe other people have this ability too but they kept it to themselves, she sees her ability as having an extra sense, made up with a 'latch' that she can turn to stop hearing other's thoughts. The book follows her through her time working with eight different families. The first family, the Ogata's appear as a slightly wayward family, but as Nanase begins to listen in to each members thoughts, things become increasingly strange. As she moves from job to job, what constitutes as the 'surface morality' that so much of human interaction and communication takes for granted begins to vanish. Through Nanase we get to peer into the unspoken consciousness of her employers, and it presents quite a bleak picture. A middle aged wife cheating on her husband, pursuing her youth in a flashy sports car to meet her young lover, events take a turn for the worse as desire and desperation spiral out of control. Nanase finds the wife staring at her thinking, 'I want her skin. I want her youth. I want her inexperience, her vulnerability. I want her healthy stupidity'.Nanase is at pains to hide her gift from others but working for one family, who's father is forced into early retirement, who spends most of his time lusting after his young daughter in-law, his attentions soon turn to Nanase and she's forced into revealing her psychic power in act of self defence.

Working at the Takemura household, a family clinging to their middle class pretensions, Tenshu, the father is an artist, although he only paints part time on Sundays he's constantly harangued by his wife and son to paint a mural for the local ward office, a lucrative proposition, although Tenshu is an abstract painter and can't paint what they want. As Nanase looks into his thoughts she sees that he thinks only in abstractions, in his mind he reduces his nagging family to shapes and colours, and remains obstinately silent, infuriating his wife to hysterical proportions. Nanase looks into the thoughts of Teshu's son, Katsuki, and observes him graphically beating his father to death whilst calmly eating two bowls of ochazuke. For a while it seems that Nanase has found a redeeming character in this artist, who at first appearance looks like an innocent, but as she investigates further, it doesn't take long to discover that he too has a darker side hidden from his family.

Many of Tsutsui's books have been adapted into films and anime, another famous adaption being The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, The Maid originally published in 1972 in Japan as Kazoku Hakkei as part of a trilogy featuring Nanase, other parts of which have been dramatized for television and a forthcoming movie. Tsutsui's novels manage to dip in and out of many genres, effortlessly mixing, sci-fi, humour and a dark satire.

Alma Books

The Catch and Other War Stories

The Catch and Other War Stories first appeared in hardback as 'The Shadow of Sunrise', published by Kodansha International, it also came with an extra story, which was 'The Far Worshipping Commander' by Masuji Ibuse, I'm not sure why the story wasn't included in the paperback edition as I would have liked to have read it. The paperback edition came out in 1981, and the stories were selected by Shoichi Saeki, who also writes an introduction and biographical notes on each of the authors included, the collection doesn't contain war stories as we know them, rather as Shoichi Saeki mentions, 'a spectrum of human situations in wartime'.

The first story is by Oe Kenzaburo called The Catch the story has also appeared as Prize Stock in other translations and anthologies, translated here by John Bester, the story won Oe the Akutagawa prize, and was adapted to film by Oshima Nagisa, (Shiiku). The second story, Sakurajima, is by Umezaki Haruo - 梅崎 春生, an interesting author who hasn't been widely translated into English, born in Fukuoka in 1915, he won the Naoki Prize for Boroya no shunju, ('Shanty Life'). Two other short stories of his that I'd like to read one day are 'The Birthmark on S's Back' and 'Under The Sky', the latter translated by Sakae Shioya, two of his novels have been translated into French. Sakurajima is the longest story in the collection, and was published in Japan in 1946, the translator was D.E Mills. The story opens in July 1945 and centres around Murakami, a petty officer who is stationed at a signals unit in Bonotsu but gets transfered to Sakurajima. Arriving at his new post he encounters C.P.O Kira an overbearing disciplinarian who Murakami can't get along with from the start, Kira's obsession about order and discipline is taken to pointless extremes when Murakami observes the men digging a ditch that would take them until at least November before they would finish, Murakami is seen throughout the story questioning Kira about his orders, looking into Kira's eyes Murakami knows that he hates him, the relationship between these two characters is fraught with tension. Murakami sometimes walks up to the observation post, and talks to the man on duty, they discuss the suicide squadrons, and the year's first appearance of tsukutsukuboshi cicadas as they watch the occasional stray Grumman fly over. Umezaki's story captures the sense of futility felt by the ordinary soldiers, and the mounting tension they feel fearing that an American invasion is imminent. The unit has a drunken party one night and Kira starts questioning Murakami's willingness to die in battle, Murakami's preoccupation with his feelings about his own death form an underlying narrative that starts from the beginning of the story,'Let me live unhurried, calm, until my death' he reasons to himself. Murakami's tone is very distant from any type of 'glory in death', when the lookout is shot dead by an enemy plane he sees that - 'The face of the dead lookout had been peaceful, but it was not the face of a man who had learned in death the key to all the mysteries of human life'.

The third story is Summer Flower by Tamiki Hara, and translated by George Saito, a prize winning piece concerning the first few hours after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the story has also appeared in the The Crazy Iris and Other Stories, not many of Tamiki Hara's writings have been translated into English, three poems can be read here. The last story is by Fumiko Hayashi and translated by Ted T.Takaya, 'Bones' centers around Michiko, who's husband we learn died on Okinawa, with no other means to support herself or her family she heeds a suggestion made by a friend to become a prostitute. The first half of the story describes the nervous night of her first encounter into this world. Hayashi's prose has a brilliant straight forwardness to it, which immediately forms an empathy with her character's plight. Michiko's younger brother, Kanji, who worked at a factory contracts T.B and is sent home after coughing up blood, her mother died sometime ago, and Michiko also supports her ageing father as well as her young daughter.The money she manages to save through her earnings she hides away in her husband's bones box. 'Bones' was published in 1949, Hayashi Fumiko is another author who has many short stories scattered across various anthologies, the subjects of many of her stories are war widows, her writings are a great chronicle of post war life seen from the civilian perspective.

Dead Languages Selected Poems 1946-1984

 

 

 

 

Originally published in 1984 by Katydid books, Dead Languages is a dual language edition, selected and translated by Christopher Drake who also provides a translator's introduction, at the end of the English section of the book there's explanatory notes which include extracts from conversations that Drake had with Tamura Ryuichi in 1983, and also some pieces taken from various essays written by Tamura. In the notes for an early poem, 'Etching', Tamura explains that the poem is taken from his 1956 collection 'Four Thousand Days and Nights' (Yonsen no hi to yoru), and on deciding to write in prose he says 'traditional 'poetic' rhythms were too sentimental. They couldn't absorb emotion and force it to another level. All they could do was leak feeling out. Prose let me write about my selves, instead of myself'. This objectifying element figures largely in the poems, and the poems here show Tamura as a poet influenced by modernism, but also that he is beginning to maybe take his poetry a stage further. As Christopher Drake mentions that Tamura suggested that it will be at least another two hundred years before a Japanese poet writes in rhythms not dominated by Classical Chinese and Western pressures. Christopher Drake's biographical notes provide a portrait of the poet and the events in his life that influenced his poetry.
 

Born in 1923 in Otsuka, a suburb of Tokyo, his parents worked in his grandfather's restaurant. Like most of the poets of Tamura's generation, the war was intrinsic to their poetry, Tamura avoided the draft in 1941 by enrolling in Meiji University, but by 1943 his draft-deferment expired and he chose to serve in the navy. In 1944 he failed the naval pilot exam as he was too tall to fit in the cockpit of a zero fighter, he began basic training in Kagoshima, then going onto Shiga in 1945. Many of those around him were called up, and the experience of being close to death left an indelible mark. After the war, the Arechi group reformed in 1947 although missing some members, and some returned from the war wounded, but by the early 1950's they had begun producing anthologies, some of the poems in Dead Languages are taken from these. Tamura's prose poetry not only speaks of himself in an objective way, but also views time and place in this way, and the use of a slight surrealism adds another dimension. The metaphoric poem 'In the Waiting Room', where waiting at the dentist the narrator flicks through magazines filled with a mixture of images, 'corpses scattered around wrecked planes', with 'a beautiful naked blonde', his name is called, when the dentist is finished 'I find myself once more within time'  back in the waiting room he smokes a cigarette noting 'there is no time here', and in a conclusion of sorts, he observes; 'To possess time, to be possessed by time', comparing the feeling of time being taken out of control of one's hands whilst at the dentists, with that of disappearing time in actual life, is a perfect metaphor that also comprises the ennui of the modern age. The spiritual vacuum of the post war world is also depicted in many of the poems, vividly in 'Green Conceptual Body' the emotional detachment from the physical world, which give forms a shell like quality, brittle and transparent, reducing sound to silence, mixing identities, this poem is really intriguing being both a claustrophobic and a liberating read, a world of graveyard diggers licking ice cream, haunted by dreams and nightmares, and the dislocation of appearance and action is shown in at the start of the poem, 'Dogs run inside dogs' and 'birds fly inside birds nailed to the sky', which also alludes to another layer of existence within, immune to the outer world, functioning without contact with the external, and the 'nailed to the sky' hints at some further feelings of captivity.
 

A number of the poems included are taken from the volumes of poetry Tamura composed from his travels, five of the poems here are from his trip to Nepal in 1975. Tamura visited England and Scotland in 1979 and included here is 'Scottish Water Mill', also the poem 'September First'  in a nod towards Auden's poem, Tamura actually visited Auden in New York in 1971. This selection ends in 1984, but Tamura lived on until 1998. For another overview on Tamura Ryuichi and to read some of his poems visit his page at Poetry International.

Katydid Books

 

Hyperart:Thomasson

Walking back from a lunch break, Genpei Akasegawa and two friends had walked passed what has now come to be known as 'The Yotsuya Staircase', unconsciously walking up one side, walking along the small platform and then walking down the opposite side. A small flight of stairs, seven in all on each side, with a wooden banister, much the same as many other stairs, although when looking at it, something was amiss, usually the platform would lead to a door, but here there was no door, looking at them, they seemed to be a completely useless flight of stairs. Perhaps at some distant point in time there had been a door at the top but now that it was no longer there, it had rendered the stair's use obsolete. On closer inspection they came to see that a section of rail from the banister had come off and been replaced by a new piece of wood, they surmised that not only it being a staircase that actually led to nowhere, it was also being preserved and maintained as such. So begins Akasegawa Genpei's book, that had appeared originally as columns in photography magazines from the mid-eighties, it was published in Japan by Chikuma Shobo Publishing back in 1987.

Realizing that he was moving on from l'art pour l'art, to le stairs pour le stairs maybe, Akasegawa termed this art 'Hyperart', and debating it over with his students they decided they needed a more precise name for their discoveries, and they came up with the name: Thomasson. Gary Thomasson a baseball player who had then recently been signed by the Yomiuri Giants encapsulated everything that the art signified, since starting his career with the Giants he had failed to contact bat with ball, although being paid a mint he served no great purpose. So the momentum for the hunt of Thomassons begins and they discover the 'defunct ticket window of Ekoda' (sealed with plywood), 'the pointless gate at Ochanomizu', (looks like a gate but completely sealed with concrete), mysterious eaves that jut out of walls protecting vanished mail boxes removed long ago. Many examples prove to be puzzling to solve, a floating doorway appearing high in a wall that belongs to the basement of a house?, and the photograph used as the book's cover from a report sent in from a reader in Urawa, noticing a wall of a dry cleaners that appeared to have a blip in the middle, closer inspection revealed that it was in actual fact a doorknob for a door that was sealed over, 'what's more, the doorknob actually turned' the report concludes. Soon with numerous reports of sitings and photographs being sent in by the magazines readers, some from Paris and China, it becomes clear that Thomassons are not only a Japanese phenomenon, Thomassons can be found wherever humans create buildings. Collecting together paintings, models and photographs, Akasegawa hosted the worlds first exhibition of Thomasson artefacts which he called 'A Neighbourhood in Agony', and the interest garnered bus tours to visit the locations of sitings. Told in compere like prose, the book explores the unconscious nature of architecture, which in turn has created some truly unintentionally inspiring objects which questions what we have come to think of what constitutes as art, or architecture.

Translated by Matt Fargo, who provides a summary of his thoughts about translating the book, Reiko Tomii also provides an in depth essay on Akasegawa Genpei, who has also won the Akutagawa Prize in 1981, under the pen name Katsuhiko Otsuji, and is also a key figure within the Japanese art world since the early sixties, involved with groups like Hi-Red Center and Neo-Dada, in 1963 he was at the centre of the 1000 Yen Note incident. Published by Kaya Press the book is full of photographs of Thomasson's and also has trailer which you can see here, (at 2.02 check out the picture Iimura Akihiko took of himself standing at the top of a chimney, no guide ropes!), and if you have seen a Thomasson take a photograph and fill in a report and mail it here.

Kaya Press