POETRY OF SHINKAWAby Shinkawa Kazue Shinkawa Kazue. From: From: An Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry. Ed. and Trans. Leith Morton. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993, p. 414. Ed’s Note: Shinkawa Kazue was born in 1929 in Ibaragi Prefecture, near Tokyo, and graduated from a local girls’ high school in 1948. She married young, age seventeen, and moved to Tokyo in 1950. She is another notable Japanese woman whose years of coming of age years fall within the Occupation period. Shinkawa began publishing poetry in 1953. In addition to books, she frequently contributed poems to children’s and women’s magazines. She won the prestigious Mur? Saisei Prize in 1965 for a volume of travel poetry and became the first woman to chair the Modern Japan Poets Society, 1983-84. Together with fellow poet and feminist Yoshihara Sachiko, she also founded a woman’s literary association and journal, La Mer (The Sea), in 1983. In addition, songs have been composed based on her poetry.
There are as yet no examples in translation of Shinkawa’s poetry from the early postwar period. The two examples given here of war memories date from a later time, 1980. Well-known in Japan, she seems to have been overlooked abroad until the appearance in 1993 of a new anthology of translations of contemporary Japanese poetry. It included a generous selection of her work, ranging from 1968 to 1983. The first two poems here, “Ovum” and “Spermatozoon,” are from the volume, Hiy? de naku (Not Metaphor), 1968 (which has recently been translated in entirety). The second group of six poems, from “Eyes” to “Navel,“ appeared in the book, Jintaish? (Body Poems), 1975. The Last two, “The Water of Hiroshima” and “The Water of Pearl Harbor,” are from Mizu e no odo 16 (16 Odes to Water), 1980.
OVUM Inside a woman Made new every month the rising sun Praising the mystery of life The light which shines...warmly...red...upon...Mother earth Waiting quietly for the coming of those selected And sent by God The fire of expectation And possibility SPERMATOZOON They hurry...hurry...hurry Like a school of fish swimming against the rapids Like a team of swimmers They swim...swim...swim So that the one selected may win the crown One alone From among two billion...three billion a vast number of companions Passing through the dark valley Traversing steep mountain peak after mountain peak higher than Mount Everest Climbing over the bodies of comrades dead through exhaustion Desperately they hurry...hurry So that one may arrive faster than all the others At the dreaming pearl defended by watchfires Deep in the palace The pearl awakens...in the name of love The pearl buds...pregnant with a single, blessed encounter The desire for absolute union And the instinct for the preservation of the species forever spurs them on From the beginning to the future Becoming a river of unbroken, eternal life Swiftly...today too they...run...run ......................... BODY POEMSEYES Eyes Capture...the first light of the dawn Capture "things"...capture "shapes" Capture signs that are sent Capture their own present position Quicker...more accurately than any other organ Eyes Expose...mist rising from inside the mirror Expose...dreams...expose traps The pockmarks on the moon Expose...the king's nakedness Like a flicknife...flashes glances Eyes are The open wounds of the heart...water with pain Water at "farewells"...water at "greetings" On the death of a young, unknown soldier Water...at the light of happiness in someone else's home Like a pair of grapes in the rain Eyes Hide the lovely dusk Hide roses...hide the horizon The words in letters from kind people Hide their visages Behind the eyelids fringed by eyelashes MOUTH You count birds by wings You count fish by tails You count with your mouth...the sorrow of human mouths Refugee and king alike In the final analysis have one mouth each And require at least one bowl...one spoon The gruel is thin thin The wailing mouth is sewn shut Wriggling deep in the throat are Evil spirits The furies in dammed up voices Still only a few words Each word Like flower petals the sweet smell On the lips of babies alone Who have only ever gripped in their mouths a mother's breast NOSE The nose...at night when you are alone Apparently grows...up and up and up and up Breaking through the ceiling Tumbling the mating cats on the roof over with a snarl Caressed pleasantly by the night breezes Up and up...growing above the clouds The heavenly maiden who has come to pick flowers Says "Look...the field horsetails are blooming" Picks a basketful and returns home Boils field horsetails with either soy sauce or crushed sesame seeds To serve up as the morning meal for the gods When you ride the crowded commuter trains People wearing masks meet your eye all over the place "There's a lot of nasty colds about" They say to each other in greeting I wonder what It's like under the masks Ah!...Ah!...Ahtchoo! EARS I have a memory of picking shells On a distant shore inside my mother After putting together...to see if they match The two half-shells with the most mysterious folds I fixed them symmetrically...to both sides of my face In the same way as I wear hair ornaments The first thing that came into my ears was...the sound of the waves Tugged by the moon...waves frothed up gently Before I knew the shapes of things I was listening to the captured sounds of the two half-shells That is the sound of the well-bucket...that is the sound of a second That is...the horns of cars rushing in traffic..... So when I was born in this world I looked at those things...in an especially nostalgic way Even so My mother said...how forlorn her ears look When I grew up...my lover said it too I don't have large earlobes...but No wonder my ears look so lonely Since they were fixed separately on me The two half-shells will never—perhaps not for all time Have the opportunity to be rejoined HAIR There are mornings when it cannot be tied up...properly It seems like wheat from someone else's field And though I didn't steal it I become more and more agitated...I can't arrange it properly There are nights when it is loose everywhere Climbing hills...trailing through valleys Like a chateau overgrown with ivy It shuts in my view Is it really mine? Even when I'm asleep When I'm awake...and sad It never stops growing...this stubborn grass Where it is growing is Unmistakably my head but It is as if the cultivator resides in a place of which I have no knowledge And is watching night and day...... NAVEL Things are thought of in the head But...once or twice in life It's time to think with our navel To come to a conclusion It's a cut-end severed from mother The wound is in a deep depression but It seems that the notion...that we are all by ourselves Somehow or other must originate here So the path we take We consider in our navel...and decide with our navel All our strength Like a army that you can rely upon is gathered together all once At times like that...people know for the first time Why the navel is Placed so imposingly in the center of the body ......................... OTHER POEMSTHE WATER OF HIROSHIMA When I wake up every morning...I drink one glass of water By turning on the tap...the water immediately fills the glass But when it...goes down my throat My throat...is convulsed by a line of a poem which springs back to life "Give me water / Ah...water / Give me a drink" Going beyond Hara Tamiki's poem written in katakana This line has already become...the voice of Two hundred thousand or more people Of Hiroshima who on that summer's day when the whole city became in an instant the cauldron of hell Were fried...boiled...and died On my second trip since the war to the "Hiroshima delta" The green leaves are fresh...the oleanders are blossoming The male pigeons puff up their breast feathers...and press the female pigeons The young travelers in their jeans Making merry in the shade of the Persea trees, spreading out their packed lunches Ah...what a peaceful scene! I...wonder if they have already visited the museum? Seen the many pictures infinitely tragic Painted by the hands of the citizens displayed in the room deep inside the second floor of the Cultural Center? The exhibition was planned by Tadakatsu Kasahara of the NHK press corps but Now he has been transferred to the Fukui bureau His successor Sadafumi Shiino Put them together into a picture book with English subtitles in order to appeal to the whole world I am now on my way...cutting through the park To meet Mr. Shiino at our meeting-place beneath the H-Bomb Dome Before greeting him formally I...feel as I might suddenly blurt out "When all is said and done...peace...is a single glass of water" Then...I'll probably tell him about my experience morning in the hotel I was about to drink the water as usual when I could not lift the glass...it was so heavy I could not bring it to my mouth Countless hands burned red the skin hanging off in one sheet "Countless fingers burning with blue flame" in the picturebook Reached out to me from everywhere...countless countless That is what I saw Water
Water
Please
Someone
Ooooh
Ooooh
THE WATER OF PEARL HARBOR On a large JAL passenger plane taking off from Oahu island Ascending cutting through the air at an angle "Hey!...A rainbow!" From the seat directly behind me A Hawaiian shout conspicuously lacking in consonants I had earlier noticed Like the bright sail from a yacht turned upside down A small rainbow plunging into the surface of the sea I was looking down on it in silence Holding my breath...at the fact that where the rainbow began was Pearl Harbor Yesterday...and the day before as well I kept on being rejected by The dark look Of the water of the bay which I stared at relentlessly through the sugar-cane The Waikiki ocean and the waters of Hanauma Bay were Laughing brightly emerald-colored but The waters of Pearl Harbor...have not yet forgiven me And they are grieving Over their unhappy fate only being able to hold in embrace the lead-coloured warships "The old diver who blew in from a far land Told me when I was a child — Try to find the source of the rainbow, There's supposed to be a pot of gold there" "If that's true it sure beats black coral It'd be better to have gone diving than to have gone on this sight-seeing trip to Fujiyama" "But it's a no-go area" "Not if we use diving gear" 8 December 1941 Pearl Harbor before dawn...when I imagined how the aggression of my homeland Japan Carried out its evil intentions My breast Feels heavy, oppressed...as if I'd swallowed a hundred torpedoes I myself was a child at the time but Born and raised beside a lovely, peaceful river Naturally I had never seen Pearl Harbor Or any sea at all..... "What time will we arrive in Japan?" "Our E.T.A.—no we'll probably arrive an hour or so before E.T.A." "That was the same...wasn't it as...Pearl Harbor They say the Japanese declaration of war Happened after most of our battleships Were sent to the bottom?" "I wouldn't know...I wasn't born then" "I haven't got much idea myself" .........................
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