The Way of Tea
Imagine the most formal setting you can, something where forks of different sizes are set out and you must remember Emily Post’s rules of etiquette. Maybe a dinner with Queen Elizabeth. Now imagine that not one, but two of your deceased father’s mistresses are there. You cannot forget seeing the one mistress partially naked back when ...
The Cherry Blossom Front
The cherry blossoms have already scattered to the ground—they came and left so quickly that I never made it out with the camera. Even though they are gone, I have been thinking of them. A haiku doesn’t have to include a cherry blossom. When I taught the form to students, though, I learned that those cherry ...
Bingo, Babe: The Japanese Fille Fatale
Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto is a short novel about two cousins spending their last summer together in the easy coastal town where they grew up. As you might expect, it’s a coming-of-age story focusing on Maria, the narrator, and Tsugumi, her cousin who is an invalid. Tsugumi was born “ridiculously frail, with a whole ...
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
Kenzaburo Oe’s novel, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, is a haunting and suspenseful story filled with isolation in mountains where anything goes. Against the backdrop of war, which remains unseen except for the cruel hunting of AWOL soldiers, a group of reformatory boys gets shuffled from town to town. The description reminds one of ...
Town of Cats
I’ve finally gotten a toehold in 1Q84, Murakami’s latest tome. In the middle of the second book, one of the main characters reads a “fantastical short story by a German author” while on a train ride. The story, “Town of Cats” is summarized: the main character is vacationing, and decides to visit a nice-looking town ...
Locked Eyebrows on the East
It’s no stretch of the imagination to claim that Gary Snyder has been influenced by Eastern poetry and philosophy. He lived in Japan for twelve years; he openly discusses Zen Buddhism in interviews and liberally quotes To Fu and Bashō in talks. His poetry places itself in narrative contexts that come from the Northwest Pacific ...
So What?
What? It sounds so simple. I must ask and answer this question several tens of times a day without really reflecting on it. What? is the most profound, fundamental question in the Seon tradition (which you probably know as the Japanese word “Zen”), and it happens to be the title of this awesome book of ...
Kokoro and Craft
In 1689, Basho went for a long walk into the interior, Oku. After he returned in 1690, he began revising his travelogue from the adventure. I offer the introduction as a testament to its beauty: The moon and the sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or ...
Elegant Confusion
In a thirty-one syllable poem, there isn’t much room for a narrative context. So, collections, like the Kokinshū, present the poem with the poet’s name (or “Anonymous”) and the topic, which reads “Topic Unknown,” if not presented as a condition preceding the writing of the poem (“Snow on the trees”) or an event (“Composed on ...
Close to the Wind, Up
I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle earlier this year. The historical information sounded interesting, important, when I was stuck at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport for three days and willing to trade food vouchers for a good book. If you find yourself stuck in a blizzard in a strange airport, I recommend this book to get ...
The UnGodly I
I have been publicly anticipating the arrival of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami on the bookshelves, so I decided to read a little about the shifts that take place when translating his work. Unlike English, in Japanese there are different pronouns for the first person—an informal Boku (masculine) and a formal Watakushi or Watashi. Boku is ...
Was it really a dark and stormy mountain?
For ancient Japanese poets, rulebooks aided in the codification of topics—haze always designated spring; moon always meant the fat harvest moon of autumn unless modified by a different season. Place names, too, signified relationships with images or emotions through their codified use, even though the place may differ from an actual sight experienced: on a ...
A First Look at the Kokinshu
The Kokinshu (ca. 905 AD) was a collection of Japanese tanka, or short poems, that sought to return poetry to the public sphere. The poems demonstrate the change of seasons and the arcs of love affairs, celebrations and goodbyes, and travel. Many are crisp, witty, and poignant today. There’s a tendency for the poems to ...
