WILSON/ATUSMI ON SHIRAISHI
by Graeme Wilson and Atusmi Ikuko, 1972
Ed’s Note. The following is the first extended bio-critical essay on Shiraishi Kazuko (1931-) to appear in English. It helps to fill in some of the blanks in her development as a young poet and the critical reception of her work in Japan and abroad in the 1960s. The views of Wilson and Atsumi should be compared with those of American poet and social critic Kenneth Rexroth, who met her during a year of study in Japan, 1967, and a decade later published a collection of her poetry in English language translation (see “Rexroth on Shiraishi”). The translations below use the term, "Negro." "African American" had not yet become the preferred designation at the time of this essay. The Japanese word is "kokumin," a black person; however, without the original Japanese text, we do not know exactly what Shiraishi wrote.
SHIRAISHI KAZUKO
Though the history of Japanese poetry is marked—even charred-by poetesses of such explicit erotic urgency as Ono no Komachi in the ninth century and Yosano Akiko at the beginning of our own, Shiraishi Kazuko's poems do not merely continue that tradition but add to it an absolutely unflinching, absolutely modern, determination to explore and to exploit the very darkest corners of the human heart. Since Japan re-established contact with the outside world barely a century ago, that nation has absorbed, adapted and frequently surpassed the notions and culture of the West. Freedom of speech has led to some startling developments in Japanese writing generally; but even in Shinjuku, the hippie heartland of young Tokyo, Shiraishi's poems about cohabitation with homosexuals and love-affairs with Negroes still occasion shock.
She was born in Vancouver, the first child of a prosperous fish-exporter who returned to Japan shortly before the outbreak of the late Pacific War. Canada remains for her the symbol of the happy life: but it was from the violence and ugliness of immediately postwar Tokyo that her poetry emerged. A tall beautiful girl with a long dyed mane of auburn hair, she roamed the garish alleys of Shinjuku like that lioness in her own strange early poem, Lion's Humming.
I was a lion yesterday
So through the nighted jungle
Humming I went.
The stars all suddenly began to fall
And, as I trod the moonlight,
All my body was starly burnt:
My nose-tip scarred,
My young life dangerously seared with love,
And my wind-blown mane streamed worlds away
To the past, the future, death's own nowhere.
And my tail and ears will never come back.
Today as I come home from school
I passed the mirror-shop
And I remember only this
That, since I left my tweezers in the jungle,
Now I shall never
Tweak back, recover
The words of my humming.
The extraordinary quality of her early poems led to quick membership in various influential poetry-groups in Tokyo, and her first volume of poems (The Town Where Eggs are Falling) was published while she was still a student at Waseda University. Though influenced by the work of her young contemporaries, notably that of Tamura Ry?ichi (whose line "the earth is rough" deeply and permanently impressed her), Shiraishi's early poems show a precocious singularity and have been, most preceptively, compared with the paintings of Joan Miro. They are poems of the dissociation, sometimes even the derangement, of the senses. They are invariably strongly visual, packed tight with sharp images expressed in a rhythmic diction derived from Hagiwara. They were poems of a world where academic discipline had broken down; where, on the knees of her Dean of Literature, she would argue the merits of Picasso and Matisse; where her fellow-poets frequented lunatic asylums; and where the clubs and coffee-bars were crowded with ill-fed students and philopon-addicts. "If I become a prostitute," she said to a friend at this time, "will you always buy me first before all others ?"
THE TOWN WHERE EGGS ARE FALLING
When I lie down beside the chasm of blue lettuce
Eggs come falling:
Cheap eggs, dear ones, hard eggs, boiled eggs,
Babies are falling,
Boys are falling, rats and heroes,
Apes and even grasshoppers are falling,
Falling on the town-church and the play-yard.
Though with both hands I tried to catch them,
Smoothly, like grief,
They slithered through.
A ludicrous silk-hat
Was dramatically perched
On top of a skyscraper,
But the eggs kept falling into the cold
Blood-vessels of vegetables.
For what?
I don't know, don't know, don't know.
This is the editorial of the journal of this town.
In the year of her graduation she married a classmate, Shinoda Masahir?, a film-director whose second marriage to the well-known actress Iwashita Shima added, somewhat curiously, to Shiraishi's public image of intense sexuality. At all events her marriage proved a failure. Her husband disliked and discouraged her ambitions in poetry, and she fell into a long but smoulderingly resentful silence. Her poem Egg of Fire, technically interesting for its Japanese exploitation of English words, was actually written before her marriage broke up; but it accurately foretold the conflagration in which the marriage ended.
EGG OF FIRE
In the bitter cold of winter
When upon your table
I placed a single rose,
It proved to be a fire-egg.
Alas, I am not able
To hold that fire-egg close
Because it grows so angry.
Yet, when I let it be,
It burns the table,
Burns the table,
Burns the table silently.
When I looked into the mirror
My kerchief and my lipstick
All began to burn;
So I ran out pf that burning house
Pell-mell, taking nothing else,
Nothing but a spoon in hand,
Never to return.
The emptiness created in her life was filled initially with new poetry. The following poem, Falling, appeared in her second book of poems, Tiger's Play (1960):
That I believe that this
Is not the last hill; that,
And that alone,
Is what I'm getting at.
Having thus flown
Into another sky,
Falling in space
Falls to be my
Only and own
And my propermost place.
But that emptiness was more significantly filled by an ever-deepening absorption in modern jazz. She began to spend her days and nights with Negro jazz-musicians. Her poetry lost its Miro-like simplicities and its visual imagery, and began instead to strive solely for auditory effects; effects of extreme sophistication even through her previously precise diction and syntax now broke down into the jerky telegraphese of the jazz profession. Shiraishi subsequently described Tiger's Play as a work of "cowardly pretence," a book in which she merely tapped on the door to that world of purely auditory effect with which her next two books were totally concerned. However, there seems little pretence in such a poem as Cold Meat: a dialogue couched in a deliberately ambiguous mixture of Shinjuku slang and American jazz colloquialism, its subject-matter, the death of love (or, to be more precise, the shrivelling of lust by reason of an undesired conception), is so developed as to include such themes unusual to poetry as contraception, miscegenation and an envisaged abortion. Some may query the need to treat such themes, and more may regret Shiraishi's abandonment of her earlier manner: but new as are her themes to poetry, they are scarcely new to mankind.
COLD MEAT
Am I out of my skull? Could be.
Are you wearing a cap? Sure, feel.
In the chocolate shop just you and me
Discussing a pregnant cat. Big deal.
For real?
Of course for real. I only lie
When the lies are true.
Then give me chocolate,
Chocolate, chocolate.
Whew
What a chocolate give.
Whatever we do,
Even, love, if we murder that,
This feel would still be this?
No deal. Though it live or die,
And though I myself am alight to live,
This now can be never the same.
Cold meat? Dead flame?
Cold meat it is.
During the early sixties Shiraishi earned a miserable living as a copywriter, but her real life lay with the jazzmen in the cellars of Shinjuku. She joined several poetry-groups, notably Doing (which specialized in jazz-poetry); but she soon abandoned them as irrelevant to her new convictions. "I distrust all intellectuals," she said, "for they miss the most important thing in life." It is not unusual for a woman of complex sensitivities to shelter in the quietudes of animality, but it is indeed unusual to find such situations powerfully described by Lady Chatterley herself. For one's first impression of Shiraishi is not of her beauty, not even of her highly-developed dress-sense, but of sheer strength, of superabundant vitality. Strangely combined with a genuine and beguiling shyness there is an equally genuine militance, the inflexible determination of the totally committed artist whose own experience has confirmed that the earth is truly rough. Tight-buttoned in her long red leather coat, she looks not unlike the young long-haired Napoleon as she stands surveying the neon jungles of Shinjuku. "With sixteen soldiers," said Sappho referring to the letters of the Cadmean alphabet, "I will conquer the world." And she did. Shiraishi, with the slightly larger army of the Japanese scripts, has no less Alexandrian intentions. Not all those in the hippie world are dropouts by reason of their incapacity. For some, for Shiraishi, the rejection of established social patterns is a long-deliberated decision; a decision answering not only their own needs but also the needs of others.
NON-STOP
This man began to run; and cannot stop.
Ramming his neck out of the building's window,
He straightway scuttled down the wall. He ran
Along the road and, when the road ran out
At ocean-edge, he raced upon the water.
I tend this man who runs and cannot stop.
He runs across my notebooks, through my drawers,
Among my darknesses.
Because that man
Neglects to let me sleep, but runs and runs;
Because of that, my daytimes are grown weary
And night has no return for it is stretched
To run and run for ever.
When Shiraishi was not in the throbbing cellars, she was still underground; riding the subways, reading Henry Miller. Her poems show a corresponding darkening of the heart. In her early poems the skies were bright with stars, but now the sky is merely a black hole. Her next two volumes of poetry, Don't Come Any Later (1963) and Tonight Is Nasty (1965), are both full of so-called sex-poems. Often extremely long (the barely half-finished Season of Sacred Lewdness already contains over a thousand lines), these new poems celebrated in jazz disjunctive language and highly irregular forms her various love-affairs; all of them with Negroes whose sometimes brutal names decorate the inside covers of the latter book. Phallus, in 66 lines, speaks for itself; and All Day Long a Tiger leaves nothing and yet everything to the imagination.
Because, the whole day long,
Incessantly,
A tiger came and went,
This room remained a wilderness.
Broken arms and legs and chairs
Cried out the whole day long,
Kept crying at the sky.
Even when the tiger
Ceases that too incessant
Ingress and withdrawal,
The broken arms and legs and chairs
Yelp on like milk and wind.
They bark and bark and bark,
Making the sky go weak.
But through even the murkiest and most profane of her poetry there shines a steely innocence of the senses. In the most typical of these autobiographical poems, Nick and Muriel, she gives herself the name by which she was known as a small girl back in Canada. Though the resumption of the name Muriel may be partly a symbol of her rejection of all things conventionally Japanese (a rejection which is, however, already more than adequately demonstrated by her open passion for an American Negro), its real significance is of the innocence associated with her happy and un¬complicated childhood in Vancouver. Indeed, some of the poems in Tonight Is Nasty show a brilliant reconciliation of her Miro-wise naïveties with the experienced subject-matter of her mature work.
STREET
Dark street: a wretched town:
Rain and the weather cold:
Our mackintoshes slippery:
The brolly wet to hold.
How mad we were at taxicabs
Which spurned our signallings
But, in the end, we started,
Clinging as wetness clings,
To walk,
To walk,
To walk.
What future had we then?
I remember that we walked
Soaked to the very skin:
But I do not remember
Ever that I was in,
Somewhere, a warm hotel-room.
I don't remember where
We lay in one another's arms
Holding the warmness there.
I don't remember what
In that forgotten bed
We, in our love-making,
Did;
Or what we said.
A thick volume of her Collected Poems appeared in 1968. During those later sixties she supported herself with freelance journalism and by the writing of novellas and short stories. One Day Suddenly Love (1967), No Love on Sundays and Lovers, Beasts and Gods (both of 1968), Hello Lovers (1969) and Hold Sugar Bear Tight (January 1970) all confirmed and extended her reputation as an outstanding writer on offbeat sexual themes. Those unfamiliar with the Japanese literary scene might dismiss such writing as trash; but it should be remembered that Nobel Prizewinner Kawabata Yasunari wrote for the same market, and that even Shiraishi would have to strain to match the offbeat nature of the sexual theme in his House of the Sleeping Beauties. In a natural development of her belief in the interdependence of poetry and jazz, Shiraishi has recently branched out into the entertainment world. With bizarre hair-styles and dressed in strange metallic costumes, she was during 1970 giving poetry-readings both at the bar Spacekapsel in Akasaka and in the supper-club Noah Noah in Shinjuku. How many of the GIs who, in December of that year, applauded Shiraishi gogodancing semi-nude in their club at Tachikawa Air Base realized that they were watching one of the two or three best living poets in Japan? And should anyone ask why a poet should be prancing about in GI bars, the answer is that thus she makes and there she finds her poetry. "This quiet dust," said Emily Dickinson, perhaps the greatest women-poet of them all, "was gentlemen and ladies." Ladies and gentlemen would do well to reflect that, when they are indeed no more than quiet dust, Shiraishi Kazuko, her hurt and her humanity, her wisdom and her wantonness, will still be living, eternally unquiet, in the minds and hearts of readers not yet born.
POND
Get off home, I said. Tonight
Damned if I want a bed
Any damn place that you're around.
Get to hell home, I said.
Choking, crying, off you went
Trudging away from me.
Now that you're gone, my finger traces
That itinerary
Which through the streets and through my heart
Your heavy going makes.
Your tears have stained my body through.
The stains are large as lakes.
And deep within my flesh I felt
As though a pond had grown,
As though its weight were gathering
A substance of its own
As, hugging my unhappy heart,
I passed the night alone.
.........................
Reference
Wilson, Graeme and Atsumi, Ikuko (Trans. & Intro.). Three Contemporary Japanese Poets: Anzai Hitoshi - Shiraishi Kazuko - Tanikawa Shuntaro. London: London Magazine Editions, 1972; 39-50.
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