by Sawako Nakayasu
Litmus Press 2006
Reviewed by Steven Karl
A Loosening Inclination to Talk
For the most part, anthologies attempt to create a dialogue focused around a specialized niche. So it becomes difficult, if not tedious, to talk about an anthology without delving into a digressive conversation about inclusion/exclusion relative to an editor’s political or editorial ties. Four From Japan is refreshing, then, its genius lying in the fact that it offers a sample small and varied enough to eschew the problem completely.
Four From Japan is a studied glimpse into the writing of four contemporary Japanese women poets. It does not aspire or attempt to do the work of representing or encompassing contemporary Japanese (or Japanese women’s) poetry in its entirety. Instead, according to primary translator Sawako Nakayasu (Cole Swensen also has a cup of coffee as translator in the book), this is “a poetry by women that does not fit into a prescribed category of women’s writing.” She makes the distinction that these four women do not fit into what is considered the canon of Japanese literature; instead, what you get are four unique contemporary women outside the socio-historic normative of Japanese poetry.
These poets are Kiriu Minashita, Kyong-Mi Park, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and Takako Arai. The poems first appear in the English translation and are followed by their Japanese originals. Although I can’t read Japanese, it is beautiful to see the original architecture of these poems, how they adorn the page, how they breathe upon the page. We are further aided by essays by each poet published at the end of their respective sections; this is a rewarding decision because instead of having an editor attempt to explain (or explain away) what a poet’s impetus might have been, we hear it straight from the poet (albeit, in translation), which adds another way of prying into the poems.
The best of the essays, Kyong-Mi Park’s “My Asian Bones are Ringing,” has particularly worthwhile insights on language. While it takes great facility with English and Japanese to translate Gertrude Stein and discover the wisdom that “the act of using words is that of being possessed by the words of someone else,” Park is also able to conjure up her own experience walking around Manhattan in 1986 and struggling “with the language and with daily life.” Other poets in the collection similarly echo a sense of how transitory time and place can be. Take Kiriu Minashita’s “Intermezzo”:
Towards the water-soluble sky
The roadside trees showered with metal rain
Spit out drops of life at night
You walk in front of me
There is in these lines a vacillation of both the center and its margins; the distance of rain on trees from one’s own awareness of them and the poet’s obsession with “life” are nearly surrealistic, centered on an almost mysterious longing.
Park’s poem “Very” is made up of long, sprawling lines, functioning much like some of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s more recent poems. The opening line might be the best of all the poems in this book: “A loosening inclination to talk. Dangling a teabag. We’ve not spoken in a while. A brother-like person asks is this purple/flower a kind of primrose.” Not all poets who demonstrate an inclination to talk are able to inspire readers to listen. The translation is interesting here; brother-like, for example, is considerably more interesting than “brother” would have been, and the short, clipped sentences catch a staccato that non-Japanese speakers are helpless to avoid considering might be echoed in the poem’s native tongue.
Rounding out the collection are Ryoko Sekiguchi and Takako Arai. Sekiguchi writes succinct, sometimes pretty prose poems that are translated first by herself from Japanese to French, then by Cole Swensen from French to English (the poet currently lives in France, writing in both the Japanese and the French). Arai’s poems are probably the most experimental, playing and building off of repetition and Japanese mythology. Both poets are worth the price of admission. In the end, Four From Japan is a perfect place to investigate a variety of uses of language, reminding one that a common national identity is not a “style” in and of itself. The anthology works to get a pulse of contemporary Japanese writing (Sawako Nakayasu also edits Factorial, a journal dedicated to modern Japanese poetry) and to discover four talented and impressive poets.
*
