Moving on with our series of honorable mentions in this year’s Kyoto Writing Competition, the judges were intrigued by Jeremiah Dutch’s piece, “Zen Failure in Kyoto” — excerpted and adapted from his novel-in-progress, Gaijin House.
Jeremiah is a New England native raising two daughters with his wife in Yokohama. Having lived in Japan since 1998, he does most of his writing on the train while commuting to his teaching job at Reitaku University in Chiba. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of New Hampshire and master’s degree in education from Temple University Japan.
A complete list of results for the Seventh Annual Kyoto Writing Competition can be found here.
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Zen Failure in Kyoto
Something snapped. You thought after all the lousy and meaningless part-time and summer jobs you had escaped from back in the States, the bit of manual labor that you were expected to do in the Kyoto monastery would be nothing.
You were wrong.
You weren’t enlightened. Or existing on a higher plane. Or one with the universe. You were one with the rake, dreading being an extension of a garden tool. You should’ve been focusing on breathing, being in the moment of morning meditation before chores.
And just being.
Period.
So, when that monk gave you a good whack with his stick to wake you from restlessness, capriciousness, and distraction – “the monkey mind,” you lost it, like a damned western barbarian.
In one swift, backhanded, move you yanked the stick from the monk’s hand and rose from your attempt at the lotus position to your feet. You towered over the holy man, but he showed no fear, even as you lifted the stick over your head. Instead of striking, you snapped it over your knee, like kindling wood. Then, catching the utter calmness in his eyes, shame hit hard. You adjusted your glasses, which had gone askew, and then apologized before gathering your belongings and leaving without another word, like a coward.
Stomping around the neighborhood of small homes and apartments you finally came to a tiny park. Exhausted, and angry, you sat down for a long time and watched the neighborhood wake up. Office workers left for their jobs, kids left for school, housewives hung futons on the railings of their decks and beat them, trash collectors picked up the garbage. The world was going by.
In September 1995, I traveled to India to commence my sophomore year in an alternative Quaker program with eight international centers and experiential learning at its core. After two months of Area Studies at our center in the southern technological hub of Bangalore*, I headed for Kathmandu to participate in a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat at the foothills of the Himalayas, and then flew back to India with a desire to assist Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity in serving the “poorest of the poor”. My time in Calcutta* would be one of my strongest initial connections to Japan, although there had been subtle callings throughout my life – the embroidered figure of a geisha designed by my grandmother and framed on her wall, the silent discovery of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes at my elementary school library at the age of eight, and an encounter with a Japanese high school student through my mother’s work with a locally-based international exchange organization.
A sari-clad sister at the Mother House helped me to choose Nirmal Hriday (“Home of the Pure Heart”, formerly “Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitutes”) as my main work site, and registered me into the system with a small, manual typewriter. Nicknamed by the volunteers for its location, “Kalighat” was minutes on foot from the Calcutta Metro. One of the first volunteers I encountered was Joji, a man from Hokkaido (Japan’s northernmost island), who had a wide smile and reassuring, warm energy. The language barrier between us was largely insurmountable, but he soon introduced me to his girlfriend Naomi from Fukuoka Prefecture in the south, my future husband Toshi from Kanagawa Prefecture in the east, and several other Japanese volunteers who were close-knit, but accepted me into their circle immediately.
Calcutta Friends: Joji (grey shawl), Naomi (sari and pink blouse), and Toshi (white shirt, left)
While working we were all intensely focused; there was always something to be done, and time was fluid. In accordance with our gender, we moved freely through the men’s and women’s sections to hold hands, massage limbs, bring food and tin tumblers of water to open mouths, and I’m not sure if others did this, but I often liked to sing songs to those I was sitting with. Residents were brought to the back of each room to receive a shower, and the dishes and laundry were washed in an adjacent room. Inevitably, we also tended to those on the verge of death (who were moved to a designated line of beds at the front), as well as those who had just passed. Toshi was viewed by the sisters and Indian volunteers as a dedicated worker who would happily take on any task, and therefore was called on two or three times daily to lift the deceased onto stretchers and carry them several minutes through the busy streets, to be cremated at the ghats on the bank of a waterway which flows to the Hooghly River. During midday breaks, the volunteers of many nationalities and faiths gathered on the spacious roof terrace to enjoy a treat of large, cakey German biscuits with strawberry jam. We then slipped into our checked work aprons once again.
Calcutta has been called the City of Joy, and perhaps so because of the strong spirit of its people. The volunteers, similarly, moved through their days with an inner rhythm and resilience. Kalighat’s residents always seemed happy to see us upon our arrival in the morning, and those whose illnesses were not severe would often raise their arms and call us over to their beds. I did not have a working knowledge of Bengali but came to understand some essential terms (food (khaabaar), water (jol), etc.), and the sisters would often act as interpreters if they were standing nearby. When there were no words, tenderness was a smile and service in action – doing, as Mother Teresa said, the things that no one else has time for. Observing my Japanese friends who had arrived in Calcutta before me, I developed a growing understanding of the Japanese national character. They not only remained in high spirits, but were kind, caring, sharing, excellent listeners, and the best friends I could have had while carrying out such emotionally challenging work.
At Kalighat
We spent our leisure time gathering in hotel rooms not much larger than a single bed, chatting over Tibetan momo, puffed puri and disposable earthen cups of ultra-sweet chai at street stalls, sticky sweet gulab jamun and jalebi, and a mango, sweet or salted lassi at the Blue Sky Café, a backpacker favorite which is still in business on Sudder Street. One day Joji, Naomi, Toshi and I sat side by side in the back seats of a large arena, taking turns dipping into various colorful bags of Indian snacks we had brought to share. We simply desired ample space and mild air conditioning – a relief from the glaring sun and bustling pavement. We paid little attention to the circus on stage until the wild cats’ tricks were suddenly interrupted by a gushing shot of tiger urine through the bars and into the audience. Those in the front row shrieked but were prepared; they quickly covered themselves with a large plastic tarp.
Perhaps I became too daring with the food I put into my belly. The longer we spent in the city, the more willing all of us were to eat as the locals do – forgetting to ask for “no ice” in our drink glasses and unable to resist the pull of the deliciously-smelling cuisine of the street vendors. My hotel window, overlooking Kyd Street, had one large wooden shutter plank which opened outward, letting into the room what I considered a euphony of sounds, enveloping me in my chosen home away from home – pedestrians’ chatter and the singsong of vendors’ cries, autorickshaw motors and bulbous rubber horns, the rhythmic clip of a manual rickshaw puller accompanied by the sound of large, wobbly wooden wheels and a tin bell carried in hand by a short, thick rope, and the squawking of large birds, some of which would perch on my windowsill. I could no longer keep food down in my final Calcutta days, and from this large window I could see Toshi at the manual water pump on the street, rinsing buckets before climbing two flights of winding stairs back to my room.
When the day arrived to return to my school in the south, Toshi hopped onto the train and traveled three days, ticketless, to assure my safety. He hadn’t had any time to alert his friends that he was leaving Calcutta, but Joji and Naomi had dutifully packed all his belongings neatly into a suitcase and brought it into their already cramped room, ready for him if he returned (which, of course, he did).
Just days prior to arriving in Calcutta, the instructors of my Vipassana meditation retreat in Kathmandu had provided guidance on how to transform our bodies into vessels of loving kindness, boldly radiating streams of positive energy throughout the darkened hall and the city, across Nepal and the entirety of Asia, and finally across the world. The sisters and the volunteers I met in Calcutta provided a model of loving kindness through direct action. And the work ethic and goodness of my Japanese friends convinced me that I had to venture to their country eventually, to live amongst such people and to analyze what made them tick. It was what I had been searching for all along.
Toshi’s face was one of the first I encountered on my very first night in Japan, in July 1999. Instead of sharing an Indian meal with our right hands, we meandered down Tokyo’s brightly lit back alleys and, as I messily slurped my first bowl of ramen, we reminisced about the challenging, yet rewarding days which served as an initial bridge between our cultures. Seven years later, Joji and Naomi would travel from Sapporo to Yokohama to be present as special guests at our wedding reception, at which my new father-in-law offered special words of gratitude to Mother Teresa and the city of Calcutta. Indeed, reverberations continue. It is perhaps because I still share life with one of my fellow “co-workers” that I still reflect on that short and profound period of time in my late teenage years, and consider one of Mother Teresa’s quotes, Do small things with great love, to be an enduring life motto.
Signed Letter from Mother Teresa
*The names Bangalore and Calcutta were changed, respectively, to Bengaluru (in 2014) and Kolkata (in 2001), but in this essay I have kept the names as they were when I resided there.
More photographs of Nirmal Hriday can be found here.
The universal love-poem
has no words
By the window
a deep and full cup drinks:
technicolor red and yellow tulip
turning to the light
Living clay
on the sun's wheel
SHAKKEI, AT ENTSU-JI
The garden is empty; an airy room without walls.
The view across the valley to Hiei-zan is invited in
like a friend, to share a deep bowl of green tea—
this leisurely moss ocean lapping the cliff-stones
and azalea-islands,
cupped by a clipped camellia hedge
and breeze-stirred maples.
Viewed from Entsu-ji’s fresh tatami
veranda posts match spaced cryptomerias
dividing the garden vista like a folding screen.
A living painting of Nirvana, or Amitabha’s Pure Land?
No. Simply the natural world, experienced as shakkei—
borrowed landscape.
Borrowed mountain slopes traversed by borrowed light
and shadow; borrowed clouds traversing borrowed sky.
Birds traverse the view, lending their voices; a crow
echoes the staccato beat of a carpenter’s hammer.
Each present moment is loaned, just for the time being.
We borrow time like air, like sun, like water;
and everything is revealed as changing—refreshed,
regenerated, millisecond by millisecond.
The Buddha’s world of constant transience.
Worth framing. Priceless.
PRUNING A PINE TREE
My fine sophistry linking gardening and editing, particularly the metaphor of pruning, does not persuade the pine tree by our front door, overlooking the rice field. It submits—with clear reservations—to stripping out the clustered dry needles that thicket its upper reaches, but draws the line at arbitrary deletions. Right—who am I to unilaterally decide the shape of a mature pine?
Yuri meanwhile insists on closely trimming my straggly graying mustache and beard.
Being Japanese, she’s embarrassed that I look like I don’t care how others see me.
Being Australian, of course, I’m embarrassed to look like I care at all about my appearance.
My dapperly refined new look, as I ascend the ladder and haul myself into its topmost branches, certainly doesn’t impress the pine, which makes no secret of aspiring to absolute dragonhood.
SPRING 2011, ARASHIYAMA
Capture this
—self-regenerating brocade
Nihonga-delicate fresh bud, leaf, petal,
cascading over Mt Ogura's shoulder
perfuming farmer Zen's breeze…
—in a single haiku?
No way.
Cue the uguisu.
“Hō-hoke-kyo”
OK, got it.
Just one line
and the silence, before and after.
[Uguisu: bush warbler, “spring-announcing bird” or “sutra-reading bird”—said to quote the Lotus Sutra,saying“Hō-hoke-kyo”;Zen,a farmer-poet friend of haikuist Stephen Gill, is or was caretaker of the big field next to Rakushisha, the hut of fallen persimmons, Bashō’s temporary abode]
MAPLE-VIEWING AT KOETSUJI, NOV. 2021
If I were a poet, perhaps
I’d be a cosmologist of the heart;
maker of maps mountain-silhouetted
along all four sides, a conjurer of odes
imbued with autumn’s breathlessness,
the small-talk of endless streams,
birdcalls embroidered into maple brocade.
But what can I say? Each new day
is a different season.
Beyond this sudden blood-red overkill
of dazzling impermanence
cool afternoon sky
whispers one word:
infinity.
Writers in Kyoto Member Stephen Benfey is a fiction writer, copywriter, and father. He lived in Kyoto during the 1970s, attending college, working for a Japanese gardener, producing videos, and listening to Osaka blues bands. There, he met his future wife and began writing. After raising children in Tokyo, the couple moved to a tiny fishing village on the Boso peninsula. This year, he received honorable mentions from the competition judges for his cleverly conceived piece, “Emperor Uda’s Love of a Cat”.
Stephen writes: “I’ve taken considerable poetic license in rendering a diary entry written in Chinese by Emperor Uda who reigned 887-897 CE. My rendition suggests that the cat becomes a silent counselor to Uda who was thrust upon the Chrysanthemum Throne at age 20. Though the diary itself has been lost, remnants were compiled in the Edo period. Translations into Japanese and English vary in descriptive details.”
More information on the original diary entry can be found at this link. (Japanese only)
A complete list of results for the Seventh Annual Kyoto Writing Competition can be found here.
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Emperor Uda’s Love of a Cat
“Prince Uda, my cat is now yours,” the Emperor said. “But father, why?” I asked. “Such a beautiful creature, black as ink!” “You will know, soon enough,” he said. I had no desire to rule over anybody. I had trained to be a monk, serene, silent, like a cat. When I saw my father depart in the Phoenix Carriage, I understood his words, for without my cat I would have come unstuck. My cat’s eyes are like sparkling needles. When he crouches he is like a dark jewel. When he curls up he is tiny as an ear of black millet. His ears point sharply to the heavens. His height triples arching like a bow. In motion he is soundless like a black dragon dancing above the clouds. He knows yin and yang. By following The Tao he keeps his coat satiny. That he is black as night is his advantage. That he is a mouser peerless in Miyako is not surprising. I give him milk porridge every breakfast like the Buddha ate after fasting. I ask him questions and he answers honestly, wisely, carefully, silently. I said to him, “You can see through me. I have no secrets from you. You know me better than I know myself.” The black cat raised his head from his paws and stared at me, eyes piercing. Then he sighed as if moved by my confession. As though words were not enough to express his heart’s emotion. His reply was more than eloquent.
This, I write in my diary in the first year of Kampyo (889), Heian-kyō.
The Rinpa (or Rimpa) school of Japanese painting was created in Kyoto at the beginning of the Edo period. Its patrons were old aristocratic families as well as wealthy merchants who commissioned large-scale works on fusuma folding doors or byobu folding screens for their homes. Rinpa’s numerous artists gave us masterpieces such as the Wind and Thunder Gods, Matsushima, or Red and White Plum Blossoms.
Red and White Plum Blossoms by Ogata Korin, MOA Museum of Art, Atami, Shizuoka
However, when Japan opened to Western influences, the public as well artists themselves lost interest in traditional Japanese arts and instead tried to soak up as much of the hitherto unknown modern world as possible.
The government tried to slow, if not reverse, the decline of Japan’s unique artistic style that had been developed over hundreds of years of isolation. Policies were created to upgrade the status (and thus, the appeal) of artists who infused their work with the newly discovered modernism. The government also sent established (but young) artists overseas to experience and learn new methods and styles first hand. One of them was Kamisaka Sekka.
Kamisaka Sekka, “June Hydrangea” from Flowers and Grasses of the Twelve Months,” end of the Taisho Era to beginning of the Showa Era, Hosomi Museum collection.
Kamisaka Sekka was born in 1866, just before the Meiji Restoration, into a Kyoto samurai family. His talent for art was recognized early, and at age 16, he started his studies under Zuigen Sunki of the Shiga school. Sekka’s acquaintance, the diplomat Shinagawa Yajiro, introduced him to European art and urged him to turn towards design. So, in 1888, he became a student of Kokei Kishi, an Imperial Household artist and designer. Through these different influences, he developed his own style and in 1895, he was awarded second prize for a design on an incense container.
Kamisaka Sekka, Box with Design of Spring Flowers, private collection
In 1901, Sekka was finally able to do his hands-on research on European art, when the government sent him to the Glasgow International Exhibition. There, he was introduced to the Art Nouveau movement, which would heavily influence his later works. He was equally fascinated by the Japonism that had captivated the West and sought to understand which facets of Japanese art were most attractive to a Western audience.
Upon his return to Japan, Sekka was determined to merge his new insights with his old teachings. He came to realize, however, that Japan already had an established decorative art —Rinpa. So, he took this as foundation for his experiments with Western methods and tastes, while the subject matter of many of his works remained rooted in Japanese tradition. Over time, he updated his style and became known for images that are reminiscent of rough designs rather than detailed paintings. They are often dominated by large areas of bright colors and show a unique sense of composition. Others described his style as “the return of Korin” (one of the Rinpa masters of the Edo period).
Kamisaka Sekka, “Yatsuhashi” from “Momoyogusa”, around 1909, Unsōdō Collection
Like many artists in the Rinpa tradition, Sekka did not confine himself to large-scale paintings, even though he believed that painting skills should be the foundation of every designer. His designs can be found on tea bowls, fans, textiles, wrapping or writing paper, and pieces of lacquerware. Especially notable is his Momoyogusa (A World of Things), a set of 60 woodblock prints depicting landscapes, animals, flowers and both classical and modern themes, published 1909/1910.
Kamisaka Sekka, “Puppies” from “Momoyogusa”, published by Meiji 42-43 (1909-10), Hosomi Museum Collection
Sekka’s influence reached beyond his designs and paintings, which he continued to exhibit regularly. He played a leading role in the Kyoto craft scene and from 1905, he taught at the Kyoto City School of Arts and Crafts. He also set up two of the forerunners of what would later become the Kyoto Arts and Crafts Institute. Sekka edited art magazines from the Meiji to the early Showa period, and in 1936 became a counselor at the Kyoto Museum (now called the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art). In 1913, he was heavily involved in the Koetsu-kai, a tea ceremony created in honor of Hon’ami Koetsu, who is considered the founder of the Rinpa school of painting. Kamisaka Sekka died in 1942, aged 77.
Many of his paintings and other artworks have survived to this day. Kyoto’s Hosomi Museum has a large collection of his works, and currently, they are holding an exhibition focused on them. You can see “Kamisaka Sekka – Inheriting the Timeless Rimpa Spirit”at the Hosomi Museum until June 19, 2022.
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All images (except the first: wikimedia commons) courtesy of the Hosomi Museum, Kyoto.
Over the coming weeks, submissions from the recent Writers in Kyoto Seventh Annual Writing Competition will be shared here on the website. We hope that our readers will also enjoy and be as moved by the content as the judges were in the very challenging process of selecting the winners.
While there were a limited number of top prizes, Honorable Mentions were given to four individuals, one of whom is Ed Shorer. Ed is a retired middle school teacher, residing in Los Angeles, who lived in Kyoto from the late 1970s to mid-1980s. During that time he apprenticed as a tofu maker and taught English at Kyoto Seika University. An early contributor to Kyoto Journal, he provided an essay about Kyoto’s Music Coffeehouses for Issue #2. He has degrees in Japanese and English Intercultural Studies and Popular Culture Studies, and spends much of his time in competitive slot car racing. Thank you for joining the competition, Ed, and sharing with us a memorable slice of Kyoto’s history.
(A complete list of results for the Seventh Annual Kyoto Writing Competition can be found here.)
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Remembering Kyoto’s Music Coffeehouses
Kyoto Music Kissaten were my home away from home when I lived in Kyoto in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Honyarado for its beat poet spirit, and Shige-san’s brown bread. Zaco for the best blues. Ringo for Beatles albums I never knew existed. The Drug Store with its wall-to-wall-to-ceiling purple shag carpet, and nude poetry readings. Yamatoya with an exquisite sound system and jazz as smooth as the mizuwari that came out at night. Hitsujigoya, where the owner and I connected over our love of coffee, travel, and tofu: Hitsujigoya was formerly his father’s tofu shop, and I was a tofu-maker’s apprentice at the time.
These were not temples or gardens in the traditional sense, yet patrons attended regularly and with similar reverence.
When I last visited Kyoto in 2018, most of them were gone. Honyarado had burnt down. Mickey House and Zaco, shuttered. Still, I searched for that kissaten spirit that spoke to my soul so many years before: Masters who put their all into their passions. I could still read enough Japanese in an entertainment guide to figure out there was a jazz kissaten near Nijo Castle, and made my way there. Nijo Koya was tucked away down a tiny street, and my heart smiled when I found it. Entering I found the thirty-something owner in the middle of making a cup of coffee with as much attention as the finest tea ceremony practitioner. With Sarah Vaughn and Her Trio softly playing in the background I thought I had entered a time machine.
“Your shop reminds me so much of one I used to go to, Hitsujigoya,” I said in Japanese. “Hehhh… that shop’s owner, Fukuoka-san, is one of my regular customers!”
“Lemon” (Remon) is a short story by Motojirō Kajii. written in 1924.
Plot (The following is taken from Wikipedia. To see the full entry, click here.)
The protagonist, who has diseased lungs, is tormented by strange anxiety all the time. He lost his interest in the stationery store Maruzen, music, and poetry that he had been interested in before. He only continues walking around aimlessly in Kyoto.
In one such incident, he visits a fruit shop he likes on a regular basis through Teramachi (Kyoto Miyako Naka-ku “八百卯; Eight Hundred Rabbit”, closed January 25, 2009). There were rare lemons placed side by side. He bought one lemon that he was interested in; the coldness of the fruit in his hand was just right. After that, he felt uncomfortable, even though he stopped by his favorite shop, Maruzen, he began feeling uneasy.
He felt an unchanged feeling of dissatisfaction. Even though he looked at the usual picture albums that he used to like, he put the lemon as a time bomb on the pile of illustrations. Then he imagines the works of fine art flying out of the Maruzen shop, the excitement of blasting a lemon as a time bomb.
He was satisfied with what he had done at the end.
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Note: Maruzen was still near Sanjodori, Huyachotori in Kyoto at the time. After Lemon was published, it is said there was no end to people who continued leaving a lemon at the Kyoto Maruzen store (closed in October 2005. Now reopened in the Bal Building on Kawaramachi.).
The full story can be read in translation in its entirety by clicking on the bottom link of the Wikipedia page.
Writers in Kyoto offer their heartfelt thanks to all who submitted their short shorts to the competition this year. Entries were received from a highly creative group comprised of twenty-five nationalities, based both in Japan and across the globe. A milestone has been reached with this year’s introduction of the Kyoto City Mayoral Prize (supported by the Kyoto City Cultural Office), the Unohana prize for a non-native English speaker, and the Australia Prize (with thanks to the Australia-Japan Society of Victoria). Our contest announcement and prize details can be found at this link.
(In addition to the awards originally listed, we are also very grateful to Beth Kempton (Writers in Kyoto Member and Author of books including Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life) for offering a complimentary space in her Book Proposal Masterclass, beginning on May 16th, to the recipient of our Kyoto City Mayoral Prize. Thank you, Beth!)
The judges of the Seventh Annual Kyoto Writing Competition are very pleased to announce this year’s winners, as follows:
KYOTO CITY MAYORAL PRIZE
“The Watcher” by Maria Danuco (Australia, based in Japan)
All submissions listed above will be published on the Writers in Kyoto website in the coming days, with judges’ comments. We will also share the following submissions, which received special recognition from the judges:
SOLIDARITY PRIZE
“Blooming Ukrainian Freedom” by Vladyslava Konotopets (Ukraine) In addition to our listed awards, the judges have decided to offer this special prize to a former international student in Kyoto who is now residing in Kyiv. Writers in Kyoto, based in Kyiv’s Sister City, wish to express our protest of Russia’s relentless and aggressive acts of war, our support for those who currently find their lives upended, and our admiration for the heroic spirit of the Ukrainian people. In due course, her submission and some of her further thoughts on the current state of affairs will be shared on this website. Ms. Konotopets will also receive a set of WiK anthologies and a complimentary one-year WiK membership (April 2022-March 2023).
As Competition Organizer, I would also like to express my gratitude to this year’s judges for their time, insights, and cooperation in the process of selecting the winning entries — a very difficult task, considering the excellent quality of the submissions received.
For the official announcement and submission details of our next Kyoto Writing Competition (#8), please be sure to check our website in the middle of November 2022. If you have not yet shared your work with us, we warmly welcome you to do so in the future.
Blurb: “In Wintermoon Robert MacLean distils twenty-five years of living in Kyoto, Japan, into a single seasonal cycle … of 119 haiku.”
Wintermoon, by Robert Maclean. Isobar Press, Tokyo, 2022.
A review by Mark Richardson.
I’m most at home with verse conventional to English from the 16th through the 20th centuries. I enjoy poems that argue or imply arguments. I want rhyme, well-framed stanzas, conceits. Give me Hardy, Herbert, Larkin, Frost or Bishop⎯or Seidel and Ogden Nash. Still, I’ve read haiku in English, and haiku-like poetry in English⎯a fair amount of it. I never acquired a taste for most Black Mountain School versions of haiku-like poetry, or for its Pound or Charles Olson incarnations. Robert Creeley, Snyder, and William Carlos Williams published a lot of haiku-like poetry, and much of theirs I enjoy. But I’ve never written about this kind of poetry, not a paragraph that I can recall. In that sense I’m new to the game. So, I’ll speak of its rules and conventions⎯givens that most readers of Wintermoon would feel no need to speak of. I’ll ask questions and cover ground not strictly necessary to a book review.
For example, there’s an elliptical grammar peculiar to haiku written in English. Wintermoon employs it. Consider this poem, the first in part five of the book, “Back Route on Fushimi Inari”:
main path that way go this way (37)
I assume two sentences are implied here, one indicative, the other imperative: “The main path is that way. Go this way instead”⎯this way being (again my assumption) the “back route” of the subtitle. Get off the beaten path. Leave the flock. Alright, sensei⎯I’ll try. (I think I know that un-beaten path, having once gotten lost, with no cell-phone reception, somewhere inside Fushimi Inari.) Now: exactly how does the poetry get into this haiku? Is it first by compression⎯the omission of an article, the copula, and an adverb⎯and then by lineation? I don’t doubt that the poetry gets in. Wintermoon is a lovely book, though “main path”⎯–I’ll refer to the poems by their first line⎯is not a high point. The sentiment, here, is unsurprising, and paradox always arises when you find yourself instructed to leave the beaten path (unless the imperative is self-directed). Of course, it’s unreasonable to single out, from a carefully ordered collection of them, so short a haiku-like poem.
Whatever the case, the elisions and line breaks seem: (a) meant to slow the poem down (requisite in a text of seven words), and probably meant also to suggest how it ought to be said aloud (with two little pauses and a beat at the end); (b) meant to reflect, in English, the fact that pronouns generally don’t populate haiku in Japanese, and the fact that Japanese sentences usually imply a subject, and so can strike a native speaker of English as merely predicative; (c) meant to reflect the fact that Japanese doesn’t have articles (hence one major difficulty Japanese learners of English encounter); and (d) meant to reproduce the two-to-three line arrays in which haiku in Japanese are presented (though these lines are often vertical in Japanese). These practices are evident in a great deal of haiku, and haiku-like poetry, in English. One thing more: “main path,” like most haiku, isn’t written for the speaking voice. Who talks this way? Nobody. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it aloud. But if you do, you must adopt the “voice” of English haiku, and that voice is distinctive proportionate to the distinctiveness of English-haiku grammar.
Another example, from late in the book:
Kyoto silent now no traffic temple bell rings 108 sins backward to zero (65)
Again, two sentences are implied: “Kyoto is silent now, with no traffic [in its streets]. A/The temple bell rings 108 sins backward to zero.” Maclean provides a helpful note, for readers unacquainted with this Buddhist ritual: “On Oshogatsu, New Year’s Eve, throughout Japan, temple bells are struck 108 times, voicing the ‘snares and delusions’ (bonno) of tradition. No one today seems quite sure what these 108 sins are, but it’s fun trying to find out” (83). In short, the poem captures an annual event, which happens immediately before midnight, with the city traffic all thinned out; the poem also captures the idea that this is a count-down, not a counting up, of the 108 sins (you start at 108, not at 1). The ringing of the bell is thought to help rid us, as if by sympathetic magic, of the sins of the dying year. “Zero” is the aim. In line two, at first blush, “rings” transiently seems intransitive (a temple bell rings). But of course, we see at once that it’s transitive, though in an unusual way, owing to the object it takes and the adverb that modifies it: the bell rings the sins backward. As with “main path,” I can’t quite say how the poetry gets into “Kyoto silent” by omission of articles, a copular verb, and so on. But again, I don’t doubt that poetry gets in, and the tongue-clapper in its bell (the verb “rings”) is the more eloquent for the unusual grammar.
Here’s a poem where elisions don’t quite work, I think, or at any rate become inadvertently salient.
stopping on Kitaoji bridge look down my drowned face
Line one, a participial phrase, doesn’t readily give in to line two, which, though presumably short for “I look down,” doesn’t banish⎯I mean altogether banish⎯the ghost of an imperative mood. Is “look down” a request to a companion on that bridge? I doubt it. The unstated “I” must be alone with his “my.” But I can’t be certain. How often do statements made in haiku imply an addressee other than the reader? Very seldom, I think. (See “hold hand-,” below, for a possible exception.) I also wonder if the omission of subjects and pronouns leads composers of English haiku to deal in quasi-imperatives⎯or in brief sentences that are ambiguously imperative⎯when they don’t really wish to. I’m not sure the past tense in line three sounds right. The larger sentence implied must be something like: “Stopping on Kitaoji bridge, I look down and find my face (its refection), drowning in the water.” Perhaps I’m sensing, or fabricating, a temporal problem, somehow springing from the fact that the three verbs are conjugated to different purposes: stopping, I look down, and my face has already drowned. Do its eyes give back no gaze? Does the serene composure of the reflected face immediately seem lifeless? Or is the tone of the poem dark, as if the watcher on the bridge somehow feels implicated in what he says and sees of his face? One might well hear the tone as whimsical: a face, not a person, drowns, of course (no jumpers here). The slight oscillation between moods⎯indicative, imperative⎯may be deliberate. I’m aware, of course, that English haiku aren’t equivalent to any grammatically complete sentences they may imply. Still, this poem asks a bit too much of English syntax and grammar. Its joints creak. Wintermoon is otherwise entirely free of ellipticalities that trip me up. One can see that a composer of haiku in English will always have a hard time telling how far to carry his language towards Japanese. Maclean almost always gets it right.
One more technical matter. Occasionally, though sparingly, Maclean splits words at line ends, giving us a poem that can be experienced only on the page, in type, as he does in this haiku:
lum inous empti ness (71)
The poet dispenses with hyphens (in one or two other instances of this kind he employs them), so we have, here, the effect at its most conspicuous. I do not think Japanese haiku provide a precedent for this. The technique must derive from such poets as ee cummings and perhaps some of the Black Mountain crew. Herbert, though, does similar things a couple of times in The Temple (1633). Marianne Moore splits a few words. Ben Jonson breaks a word up at least once⎯in “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison” (lines 92-93: “twi- / Lights”).
But what can be the use of this technique in “lum”? I’ll take a flier and guess that we are to hear these lines in two ways: “loom in us, emptiness” (ad homonym, so to speak) and “luminous emptiness” (straight up). The second reading is indicative (it specifies that emptiness and illumination are related); the first is invocative (“Emptiness, loom in us”). Fair play? Why not, once in a while? Construed this way, the poem winks a little: its two incarnations reflect (or reflect on) each other. Maclean, as I say, has the tact to use this technique very sparingly. You can see its necessity here. The plain phrase “luminous emptiness” would make no poem, say nothing novel, involve no play, nor give anyone reason to utter it in a special way. Best to cut up with it in type. I should add that, read with the two haiku it follows, “lum” takes on a far stranger and more solemn aspect. Many of the haiku in this book are subtly, and artfully, altered by the ones that precede or follow them.
One other example from the broken-word school:
hold hand- lessness on your lap (63)
Why is the hyphen employed here and not in “lum”? I assume because “handlessness” is a nonce word and therefore needs the help; you also must know that the second line isn’t altogether to be treated as a word. This haiku is a sentence, imperative mood. It’s pedagogical, as are several others, and has to do, I gather, with Zen practice. Part one of the book is titled “Zazen at Tofukuji” and this poem is addressed (second person) to someone sitting. Is “hold hand-” that rarity I spoke of above⎯a haiku with an implied, on-the-scene-auditor, additional to the reader? Is it half of an exchange? I doubt it (unless Maclean is the addressee). Anyway, Maclean needs a word for a non-idea that lacks one, and he finds it, or a hint of it, in “lessness,” where the suffix -ness makes a noun of less, as it makes a noun of the adjective “empty.” Intensify lessness enough and you arrive at emptiness. But take the word whole, no line-break: handlessness. What can this mean? The state of being handless? And what then are we being told to hold? Something that we can’t lay hands on or should keep hands off. This is holding of another kind, as when we hold a thought, or an unthought⎯the thought of “handlessness,” for example. Hard work. But then “hold hand-” appears in part eight of the book, “Rohatsu Sesshin at Tofukuji.” A welcome note in the appendix explains: “A sesshin is an intensive training retreat, usually for seven days; literally, ‘to gather the mind.’ The Rohatsu sesshin is held in December to commemorate the Buddha’s enlightenment and is noted for its severity” (my emphasis; 82). This accounts both for the imperative in “hold hand-” and for what that imperative asks of us. Can you handle it?
Wintermoon consists of 119 haiku. By my count 53 of these either are or contain proper English sentences (about half), ranging from the indicative to the interrogative to the imperative mood. Maclean is at ease in or out of proper English sentences (except, perhaps, when he’s on that bridge at Kitaoji). And he’s appealingly unsystematic in setting his haiku up (as Robert Bringhurst notes in the jacket copy). Maclean is no 5-7-5 poet, as what I’ve quoted shows.
The poems are by turns observational, riddling, seasonal, instructional, humorous, and enigmatic. A reader gathers from one haiku that the poet hails from a much colder clime than Kyoto (a biographical note on the back of the book tells us where: Cape Breton, Nova Scotia).
wind bell icicles my distant country (34)
This poem appears in part four of the book, “Summer Solstice.” The metaphor rings as lovely as it does plain: wind chimes, touched by a summer breeze here in Kyoto, remind the poet of icicles⎯and with that thought comes a wave of nostalgia (for a maritime province in Canada, or anyway somewhere cold and a long-haul flight away). Wind chimes are like icicles in that both typically hang from the eaves. Wind chimes are also metallic and often cool/cold to the touch, and, like ice, they glint in the sun. For their part, icicles are like chimes in that the wind can play clacking tricks with them. (I know from my decade in Michigan.) The metaphor comes over us quickly, as it must have overcome the poet, and precisely in the steps implied by the lineation: one, two, three. The poem⎯caught in the act of having its idea⎯summons winter in summer, ice in the heat, with a paradoxical grace (homesickness involves its own relief). One question remains: why the singular bell, and the plural icicles? We may not be speaking of “wind chimes,” in which case some of what I’ve said may not apply. The poet has been a bit more precise than me: he likely means fuurin (風鈴).
As for observational haiku, here is a good example, from part three of the book, “Three Mat Room” (for readers unfamiliar with Japanese domiciles, that means a very small room: about fifty square feet):
5 a.m. old ladies gossiping by blue garbage bags (23)
No figurative work at all, here. Instead, the interest comes in the setting implied, which must be urban. This is the sort of thing you can only hear, from inside your bedroom (it’s 5 AM), when living in close quarters⎯and when living in cities, we infer, with ordinances that proscribe leaving garbage bags out overnight, and which govern recycling (the bags are the same color for a reason). Also implied is enough competence in Japanese to know “gossip” from some other kind of talk; we are learning a lot from a little about the poet. Another thing we learn is that he knows when not to omit an article or a preposition. Remove “by” from that last line and see what happens.
A haiku on the page following “5 a.m.” confirms that these are city poems. This one offers a bit of “how to” advice.
how to navigate crowds deadman’s float (24)
Maclean doubtless speaks from experience, hard-won in, say, Shijo Station during Gion Matsuri. Christ, those crowds. You can lift both feet off the floor in them. This haiku is witty⎯and, as I’ll suggest in a moment, perhaps something more into the bargain. (Maclean’s best haiku are expansive condensations.) The wit has to do with the fact that “navigation” cannot be a passive act, a letting go. “Navigation” implies control and a destination, whereas in “how to” we are advised to treat the crowd as an ocean or river, as a thing with currents in it, and advised then to let ourselves float on those currents. But not float in just any way: we are to dead–manfloat, exertion-less. Is there a slight imprecision here? If you dead-man floated in a crowd, you’d somehow have to get atop it⎯though remaining facedown (this isn’t crowd surfing). Whatever the case, “how to navigate” says, in a whimsical-humorous way, what we’re elsewhere, many times, told to do in Wintermoon: relinquish or abolish “self” (an aim, as I understand it, of Zen and zazen). Compare “how to navigate” to this haiku, from part one, “Zazen at Tofukuji”:
fall inside yourself until that word too is gone (13)
Another sort of dead-man’s float: a fall is passive, non-exertive, a letting go–anything but a jump. And the idea is to fall so far that the word you once used to refer to yourself follows you right down the self-hole like a Kennebunkport windbreaker no one will ever again need. Yes, let go of the thing; let go even of the word for the thing. Unscrew the doors of perception from their jambs. But to return for a moment to “how to navigate.” Surely I won’t be the only reader familiar with the navigation of crowds in Japan to point out that there’s another technique than the dead-man’s float: the extension of the right hand in a chopping, blade-like maneuver, tipping your head and quickstepping in the direction it indicates. This always parts the waters. Some unspoken social contract concerning the use of this gesture must exist. If I’ve seen it deployed once (and to astonishing effect), I’ve seen it deployed a hundred times. The gesture is unique to Japanese men, I should add. I don’t recall ever seeing a woman use The Blade. How they “navigate” our denser crowds I don’t know. I’ve used The Blade a few times myself. The glances I sometimes get suggest I’m committing an act of appropriation, as if The Blade can’t be used by just anyone. But all this only seconds the quasi-philosophical point made in “how to navigate.” Use of The Blade in a crowd is highly Self-Assertive, thoroughly directional, as aimed as is any arrow. And, no, we just can’t have any of that in Wintermoon. A dead-man float it must be.
I implied that we learn a good deal about the poet in Wintermoon. We learn not only that he is (or was) an expat from a cold climate practicing/studying Zen in Kyoto. We learn that he was a teacher. From “Three Mat Room”:
even though they seemed to be listening how quickly everyone leaves
You might take this as an observation about a crowd in a concert hall, but you’d be wrong. We are in a classroom. Who other than a teacher would feel the pathos in the aptitude with which students so deftly disembark? Everyone in the teaching racket wonders how real apparent listening is. Do we expat-native-sensei have a harder time gauging this than our Japanese colleagues? I haven’t asked. The other question implied in “even though they seemed” is harder to put and more humbling: “Was what I just said worth listening to?” Maclean follows this haiku, and its quiet air of doubt, with the only answer that can rightly be made:
erase the whiteboard turn off the light bow to the empty room
Did Maclean-sensei perform this last act? ¥10,000 says he did. Keep it all modest, leave the classroom cleaner than you found it, and never forget your due respects⎯without regard to whether anyone sees you pay them. And really, does it matter whether the students were listening, or matter what it was they supposed they’d heard? No classroom is a crucible. I like the attitude these poems take towards teaching.
This haiku, also from “Three Mat Room,” gives us a way to think about Maclean’s art.
my voice a rusty knife whittling these shavings
Call this an equation haiku, with the “is” or equal sign left out: “my voice [is] a rusty knife whittling these shavings.” “Voice” we take for poetic voice, the chiefly silent vocalizing you get into when making poems (and by which the poems are recognized as yours). Only here, writing is whittling, and the poems are the shavings the knife-voice reduces our lumber-language into. Whittling⎯at least in North America⎯is the very type of a pleasant but aimless endeavor. Whittle and slip outside of Time. Whittling was already a figure before Maclean got to it. (The Andy Griffith Show whittles.) Whittling can be purposeful, if what you want is a proverbial sharp stick in the eye (the thing all other things are said, in American English, to sure beat). But really, whittling is the place where aimlessness and craft have their encounter⎯in a kissing-cousin way. I think “my voice” suggests that Maclean finds the wellspring of his poems right there, where aimlessness somehow acquires purpose, or where purpose feels effortless. Is there Zen in this? You want, he seems to be saying, to have as little will in the act, which means as little Self-assertion in it, as is needed.
And yet, there’s a fully realized personality in Wintermoon: zazen-sitter, city-dweller, husband, father, cat lover, very likely a guitar player, an animist, mourner, expatriate, neighbor, teacher, philosopher (more in a minute), and disciple. You wouldn’t mistake his shavings for those made by any other knife. His voice is a “rusty” knife anyhow, oxidized, corroded a bit by life. Rust is a slow burn, but a burn nonetheless. This whittler’s voice⎯his instrument⎯is tarnished, roughed up, aged; this is part of its appeal. Does anyone ever clean a knife before whittling with it? The acts seem incompatible.
Wintermoon is, to be sure, a philosophical book. This is announced by haiku and section-titles that derive from or name Zen practices. Some haiku strike me as animistic, and of a more ancient vintage than Zen.
light pulses in the ventricles of a stone (33)
The elliptical grammar of English haiku raises a question. Is “light” an adjective or a noun? If the latter, this is a seen event and not a felt one (no nurse’s geo-sensitive fingers laid on here). “Light” as a noun would also make this haiku a sentence. But who’s to say this isn’t a felt event, that the poet didn’t touch the stone, and that this isn’t an eight-word phrase? The poem makes me suspect we’ve been slandering the mineral world all these years by giving unempathetic people “hearts of stone.” Maclean’s hearty stone has ventricles, and he’s tender about it. Is some litho-cardio-vascular worry implied? Sclerosis?⎯from the Greek “sklērós,” or “hard.” God forbid. Other stones in Wintermoon give⎯I don’t think they take⎯“language lessons” (39). Some may even converse with cats (51).
Two haiku concern insect emotion (including “love”). This one might have been written by a Jain:
cockroach scuttles across the sidewalk afraid (19)
The omission of the article at the head of the poem allows for a momentary experience of “cockroach” as adjectival and “scuttles” as a noun. What kind of “scuttles”? The cockroach kind. But the point is sympathetic: insects, too, know fear. Or better still, and closer to the language of the poem: cockroaches are often sore afraid. That adjective can involve a latent tenderness, or pathos, as the translators of the English Bible knew; “scared,” for example, lacks it. (“Scared” turns up once in the KJV; “afraid,” 232 times.) I almost wish Maclean had added the adverb sore, but the rules of the game forbid it.
This haiku sent me to Wikipedia and to PubMed.gov (one of the internet’s Incontestably Great Sites). Your cockroach, it seems, is not a “true bug” (i.e., not a member of the order Hemiptera). He/she/they are more ancient. Still, the cockroach is a social insect. In fact, Adrienn Uzsák and Coby Schal have shown that, in females of the species Blattella germanica (the German cockroach), “social isolation slows oocyte development, sexual maturation, and sexual receptivity.” Female Blattella need a little foreplay: the “tactile cues” that come from crossing antennae. So, we can speak of cockroach fear and of cockroach loneliness, and therefore obviously of cockroach happiness. Incidentally, the tone of the Wikipedia page for Blattella germanica suggests it was composed chiefly by entomologists in the pay of Big Pest Control. Uzsák and Schal (and Maclean) have considerably more fellow feeling.
This brings me to the haiku that concludes “A Walk by the Kamo River” (part two of Wintermoon).
creaturely world translations from a lost original
Does the plural in line two require that we regard each creature in our “creaturely world” as a translation of a “lost original”? Or is the creaturely world we now inhabit⎯taken tout court, cockroaches and all⎯the last in a long series of “translations” from an “original text” now “lost”? Both seem possible. (Incidentally, here is a case where omission of an article, or of the possessive pronoun “our,” at the start of the first line is necessary to the view implied.) This haiku may remind some readers that “translation” has a meaning in metempsychosis. Souls⎯ themselves immortal⎯are “translated” from body to body, but, after a dip in the waters of the river Lethe, they must, with each birth, forego memory: all previous “editions” of a soul are “lost” to it. The most celebrated statement of the idea comes at the conclusion of The Republic. We meet a modified version of it here. Now, imagine that first line as “animal world” or “this animal world.” That wouldn’t do, and not because it excludes the plant kingdom. “Creature” is to “animal” as “afraid” is to “scared” (see above): there is a pathos to “creature,” unavailable to “animal,” probably owing to how it holds within it the idea of creation. “All animals great and small, / The Lord God made them all” is awful⎯in sound and doctrine.
Maclean works with ready material. Jargon borrowed from writing now pervades talk of genetics, and therefore talk of biology: “editing,” “transcription,” “code,” “decoding,” “translation,” and of course DNA, “written” by us spellers in a four-letter alphabet: AGCT. In biology “translation”⎯so says my dictionary⎯is the conversion, during protein synthesis, of a sequence of nucleotides in “messenger” RNA into amino acids. (Messenger RNA: language again.) “Translation” is a function within “the language of life,” to borrow a phrase from Francis Collins⎯former head of the Human Genome Project (and member of the creaturely Pontifical Academy of Sciences). In what sense is our “creaturely world” a “translation” of a “lost original”? As a neo-Darwinian, I grant that every “creature” now living⎯and of course let’s bring the plant kingdom in⎯is a fresh phenotypical “utterance,” at times with slightly new “spelling” and a novel “idiom” or two, made in an underlying “language” (the genome). Some scientists quest after the Last Universal Common Ancestor of everything now alive (LUCA), which must have been a phenotypical “utterance” in the “ur-language of life.” They expect to find its first “speakers” in (say) prokaryotes or protoeukaryotes dating to the Archean Eon. The dinosaurs were “translated” into the Library of Birds, and so still may be “read” there, albeit in the Avian. Or think of birds as theropods “written” in “Cenozoic,” or “translated” from the “Cretacean” into the Cenozoic. (I may mistake my nomenclature.)
I assume the idea in “creaturely world” requires that we suppose the “translations” will continue. Obviously, at some point no creature will “speak” the AGCTs peculiar to the human genome. Whether its “language” will ever be “translated” is doubtful; we seem bent on ensuring it won’t, so jealous are we of legatees. The language called “cockroach,” by contrast, is proverbially immortal. Haiku are often said to catch “moments.” This one takes much less than a moment to utter. But its clock is set to geological time.
One more, this time from part seven of the book, “Autumn.”
crickets pulse all night harmonic of a deeper tuning (49)
Maclean hears the stridulating “pulses,” or chirping, of the crickets as if in hertz; they indicate a certain frequency beneath which (“deeper”) you can infer a more fundamental, or tonic, frequency, even if you can’t “hear” it. The metaphor is acoustic. A “harmonic,” in the sense used here, is a frequency some specifiable order of magnitude higher than that of a given tonic note (or “first harmonic”). Guitar players produce harmonics by lightly touching the A string, say, above the fifth fret and then plucking it. The tonic, or first “harmonic,” here is 110 hertz, the third, what you hear when you employ the technique, is 440 hertz (two octaves up, a note you can sound by plucking the high E string at the fifth fret). Lightly touch the A string at the seventh fret, while lightly touching the low E string (82.41 hertz) at the fifth, pluck both, and you get the same E note (329.64 hertz, now two octaves up). That’s one way to harmonize your guitar. And “crickets pulse all night” concerns harmony⎯obviously, the harmony of the natural world, which includes us. The Great Tonic Note of the whole affair may be “deeper” than any we can actually “hear.” But this haiku assumes, or simply posits, that the tuning of the world is nonetheless sound and well-tempered. The assumption entails the idea that the natural world involves, or maybe is, a kind of “music”; that everything in it is probably reading off the same score; and that, although our senses always afford us only a partial audition of this music, we can, given sufficient clarity of mind, discern that it is whole. This haiku presents itself as a record of exactly this kind of discernment and implies (again) a particular philosophical outlook. The world, for that matter the cosmos, is somehow consonant, agreeably ordered, and, so far as I can tell from this book, all’s pretty much right with it. Maclean’s is not a tragic view, at least not in Wintermoon. Nor is he a pessimist or a cynic.
Wintermoon, in “crickets pulse all night,” recalls Dryden, in his Lucretian “Song for St. Cecelia’s Day (1687):
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony ——-This universal frame began. ——-When Nature underneath a heap ————Of jarring atoms lay, ————And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high, ————“Arise ye more than dead.” …
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony ——This universal frame began: —–From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, —–The diapason closing full in man. (479)
Maclean doesn’t share that last sentiment. He’s no humanist in the old sense, as Dryden is. I think it safe to call Wintermoon a vote against any humanism that takes “mankind” as the starting point⎯or culmination⎯of inquiry. Mankind is the center of nothing, nor is it the fulfilment, resolution or “close” of anything (Dryden uses “close” in its musicological sense). And if ever we hear a dissonant note in all the “music” Maclean hearkens to, it will be⎯count on it⎯sounded in a man or a woman. Only our minds are unsound or unclean.
But the world, as we know it in Wintermoon, is right in tune. We don’t say who the Conductor of all this music is, let alone the Composer. I suspect the idea is that we inhabit an auto-composing and auto-conducting world (or cosmos), and it somehow “knows” how to “play” or “perform” itself. And the music is darn good, maybe even another Pet Sounds. The “cricket” haiku says something like what “creaturely world” says: stipulate that we can’t get at the “lost original” of which this creaturely world is a translation; stipulate also that we can’t really get at, by transcription, the score of whatever “music” the world “is” or “plays.” We can, however, deduce that the “original language” once existed, and that the “score” still exists and sounds out its first harmonic. And we can dig it. This book hints at the reality of the unseen⎯to borrow a phrase from William James⎯but also at the reality of the unheard.
Wintermoon, on any number of pages, suggests (or states) ideas of the kind found in “crickets pulse all night.” The book is of a piece. Its wholeness suggests a much “deeper” composure, which we might on occasion achieve, or anyway sense⎯with practice, lots of practice. At times, the book speaks of terrific bereavement, as, for example, in a haiku of three lines almost too much to bear in their plain-spoken way (see page 70; I will not quote the poem here; leave it to the privacy of its pages, which afford and reflect consolation). Bereavement is one thing a “creaturely” world must involve. But Wintermoon is equal to it. As I’ve hinted, this book is pitched in a major key, though not without its moods indigo (see the image on the cover: “Tsuki,” by Sarah Brayer). I take it as written by an exponent of something like the “religion of healthy-mindedness” William James describes in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). “One can but recognize in such writers … the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. … Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision” (83, 88). But no, that’s wrongheaded: Wintermoon “deliberately excludes” nothing from its field (except those pronouns and articles). If it exemplifies “healthy-mindedness,” it does so in a nuanced form⎯healthy-mindfulness, say. Does this book entail a variety of religious experience? Yes. And its constitution is of the “twice-born” kind, as James would say. Wintermoon derives from an experience of enlightenment or conversion, or something very like one. Healthy-mindfulness of the kind it implies acknowledges the wickedness of the creaturely world, but “places” or “sorts it out,” and attains thereby its resolution (as James says Buddhism can). And its attainment is the work of many a year, even if it sometimes arrives⎯I can only assume, sick soul that I am⎯as if in a wind-chimes-to-icicles-to-Canada instant.
Wintermoon is a tonic. I commend it to any reader. True, five days out of seven I turn to unregenerate poetry of the irrefragably mordant, once-born kind⎯and in rhyming stanzas or sonnets. Hardy’s poetry, as I said above. Or Frost’s. Or Larkin’s. (How does “This Be the Verse” relate to the desire to escape the Wheel of Existence?) The gracefulness these poets achieve is the more striking because they don’t imagine a world with any grace in it at all. Their world is a jangle. On occasion, they deliberately include evil in their “field of vision” of it. (See “Christmas: 1924,” by Hardy, or “Deceptions” by Larkin.) And the only “practice” these poets embrace is the practice of making poems. But that’s neither here nor there. Whatever gets you through the night is all right.
WORKS CITED
Dryden, John. “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687.” In Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. The Oxford Book of English Verse. New edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1940.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York and London: Longmans, Green, 1902.
Uzsák, Adrienn and Coby Schal. “Sensory Cues Involved in Social Facilitation of Reproduction in Blattella germanica Females.” PLoS ONE 8(2): e55678. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055678.
Down the hill from where she lived and up a side street was a little shop that Ann had grown to love. The woman there spared Ann the “Help! It’s a gaijin!” act. Nor did she mouth misremembered middle-school English while deaf to Ann’s Japanese. No, Tanaka-san was helpful and caring, if not always understanding.
On this particular rainy Wednesday morning in Kyoto’s northwestern corner of Takagamine, Tanaka-san was drawing a blank.
Ann couldn’t imagine why. Like, what’s not to understand about “butter?” It’s a loan-word—English with a Japanese accent, no?
Ann had tried baata, baataa, bata, baattaa, and even battoru.
At wit’s end, Ann said, “Anou, pan ni nuru mono desu. ‘Batta’ desu.” Uh, it’s what you spread on bread. A “grasshopper.”
The woman’s face lit up. “Ah! ‘Bataa’ dosu na? Shou shou omachi okureyasu.” Oh, “butter,” right? Just a moment, please.
Ann pursed her lips in consternation. Isn’t that what I just said?
She thanked the proprietor and headed home. How long, oh Lord, would it take?
Conversing with people in Kyoto was complicated by Kyoto-ben, the local dialect. Her college courses taught hyojungo, Standard Japanese. Standard for TV and exams, but not necessarily family and friends—unless you hailed from Tokyo or Hokkaido. Can’t blame the teachers. Would a Japanese university teach Bronx English?
Not counting cases like today’s butter slip-up, Ann’s standard Japanese worked just fine. It was the respondent’s Kyoto-ben that threw her. Kyoto-ben was more than an accent. It had a different vocabulary and conjugations. Where you’d say “kawanai” in standard Japanese to indicate you weren’t buying something, here people would say “kawahen.”
Months after arriving in Kyoto, Ann was still baffled by the words, “sakai ni.” She heard it everywhere, but couldn’t find it in any dictionary. Another mystery: where had the basic Japanese phrase “da kara” gone?
Eureka! In Kyoto you used “sakai ni” instead of “da kara” to mean “because” or “therefore.”
Ann was also confounded by the ubiquitous “ooki ni.” Satori: it was how you said “doumo arigatou”—“thank you” in Kyoto.
As her self-consciousness faded, a funny thing happened—people stopped looking at her. Not that being stared at was a constant. Near Kyoto’s landmarks—Gion, Nijo Castle, Kinkaku-ji, Ryoan-ji, and the rest—foreigners outnumbered pigeons. But take a few steps down a narrow side street and—bam!—you were the lone gunslinger walking into a saloon. The place goes silent. Even the dog raises its head to size up the stranger.
Ann knew an exchange student working on his doctorate at Kyoto University. His surname was Ono, coincident with a common Japanese family name. People would cross the street to avoid him at night. They feared he was a bakemono, a fox spirit, a ghost or a god—his skin was blue-black .
At times, Ann “passed,” like, she imagined, a light-skinned person-of-color might in North America. But this only happened, she had to admit, with people who had forgotten their eyeglasses or who were desperate.
There was the elderly lady who asked if the next bus went to Arashiyama. The taxi driver who pulled up beside her near Ginkaku-ji. He needed to get to Nijo Castle but his GPS wasn’t working.
Mulling over the cabbie’s odd choice of informants, she concluded that asking a Japanese person would have been deathly embarrassing. He’d be laughed at. That, or the guy wanted to see her face.
She had learned to enter shops casually, expressionless, not looking at the proprietor until they had responded to a simple question or comment. Preferably a non-judgmental one such as nakanaka, my, my; or he–, registering pleasant surprise.
She also asked questions in the negative so people could respond in the positive if the answer was no. Strategies and tactics were there for the using.
Her friend Diana said if they’re going to look at you, give them something to look at. Diana’s multicolor, variform ensembles awed, frightened, or delighted, depending on the viewer’s personality. A living, walking Rorshach test, she was.
Then there was the Japanese gardener she met at a bar, who spoke an unusually direct version of Kyoto-ben whether he was vacationing in Rome, working in Hong Kong, or visiting Tokyo. Salt of the earth, he made people comfortable by his very being— no agenda, no self-image issues, no trepidation. He flew below their radar. Before their conscious minds had registered “strange male, speaking unknown tongue,” their hearts and guts had been drawn to him like warm spring rain to a thirsty earth.
He got what he wanted, usually more.
On days dreary with rain, feeling depressed and unloved, Ann told herself she was murahachibu, an outcast, expelled from the village as punishment for, whatever. It was the rainy season—uki—the fifth season of the year, an honor denied by a near universal insistence that Japan was unique in having four seasons. In the face of this unanimity, it would be cruel to suggest that the Bakufu should have informed Vivaldi of this fact before he composed Le quattro stagioni.
One such day she decided to splurge and wash her clothes at the nearby laundromat. On a weekday morning there’d be no waiting for washing machines or dryers.
The tiny washer outside her tiny apartment was near useless this time of year. Her clothes might mildew before they dried. Even on rainless days it was that humid. A dryer was a nonstarter. It would trip the circuit breaker.
She put her dirty clothes in the big machine. She put in the laundry soap and the coins and pressed start. She told herself she would study kanji while she waited. A shaft of light entered the room. She saw a patch of blue pushing through the clouds. Ann stepped outside into the sunlight.
In the distance she saw a man and a small boy. Suddenly, the boy, who looked to be five or six, sprinted in Ann’s direction, leaving his father behind.
She stepped aside to let him pass, but the boy stopped right in front of her. He tilted his head back, directly under Ann’s face so they were eye-to-eye. The boy stood there, half her height, his face blank, yet alert as a pet cat scrutinizing its human.
Ann broke the silence. “Nan desu ka?” she said. What is it?
The boy’s eyes widened and his mouth formed an “O.” He swiveled back toward his father, still a good way off, and at the top of his lungs yelled, “gaijin ja nakatta!” It wasn’t a foreigner!
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Stephen Benfey’s homepage with examples of his short stories can be found here. For his short story on gardening and rocks, see here. For a New Year story, click here. For his piece on foxes, see here.
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