In April, I’m traveling in Japan so my 16 quotes from 16 poems are by Japanese poets. Enjoy! (How do I say that in Japanese?)

 1. ‘Blossoms at night’ by Kobayashi Issa

Blossoms at night, / and the faces of people / moved by music.

Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828), also known as Kobayashi Yataro and Kobayashi Nobuyuki, was born in Kashiwabara, Shinanao province. He eventually took the pen name Issa, which means ‘cup of tea’ or, according to poet Robert Hass, ‘a single bubble in steeping tea’. In addition to haiku, Issa wrote pieces that intertwined prose and poetry, including Journal of My Father’s Last Days and The Year of My Life.

2. ‘Lighting one candle’ by Yosa Buson

Lighting one candle / with another candle— / spring evening.

Yosa Buson (1716 – 1784) was a Japanese poet and painter and considered to be among the greatest poets of the Edo Period.

3. ‘In Childhood’ by Kimiko Hahn

things don’t die or remain damaged / but return: stumps grow back hands, / a head reconnects to a neck, / a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic. / Later this vision is not True: / the grandmother remains dead / not hibernating in a wolf’s belly.

Kimiko Hahn is an American poet of partly Japanese descent born in 1955 in Mount Kisco, New York. Her poetry collections include Air Pocket, Earshot, The Unbearable Heart, Volatile, Mosquito and Ant and Toxic Flora.

4. ‘Wrapping the rice cakes’ by Matsuo Bashō

Wrapping the rice cakes, / with one hand / she fingers back her hair.

Matsuo Bashō was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Bashō was recognised for his works in the collaborative haikai no renga form; today, after centuries of commentary, he is recognised as the greatest master of haiku (then called hokku). His poetry is internationally renowned.

5. ‘A Syllable of Seeing (Portraits of Womankind)’ by Shunatro Tanikawa

THE SECOND SYLLABLE
I look at a woman, / My mother’s mother. I look at the huge, / Serenely black // Eyes of the gentle / Reptiles whom the earth wiped out / Millennia back. // I look at a sinking / Sailing-dinghy whose jib-sail flickers / In the running tide.

Shunatro Tanikawa has written more than 60 books of poetry in addition to translating Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and the Mother Goose rhymes into Japanese. He has been a phenomenon in Japan since the publication of his first collection, Alone in Two Billion Light Years, in 1952. ‘A Syllable of Seeing (Portraits of Womankind)’ is a seven-part poem.

6. ‘Metaphorical Summer’ by Anzai Hitoshi

The girls crouched down / searching for the bean / and when they looked up they saw / ‘the passengers, the train, and everything out the window’ scorched by flame / ‘Only two girls were uninjured’ / writes one woman who went to school in Hiroshima

Anzai Hitoshi’s work is translated into English in Three Contemporary Japanese Poets, Hitoshi Anzai, Kazuko Shiraishi, Shuntarō Tanikawa (with Atsumi Ikuko).

7. ‘You in the Shade of a Tree’ by Kiyoko Nagase

For some time now I have been aware / of your eyes fixed on me from the shade of a tree. / You, so fondly treasured by your husband, / are radiant with a fair glow like a Renoir / or a Titian. / I have been tempered by toilsome sparks of fires / all by myself, gasping for air. / Now I stand tall on my ground / managing to speak with your husband. / I am no longer embarrassed / I behave simply as a wholesome human being – / Yet I am aware. / Your eyes, so blue they look dewy, glisten / with worries and apprehensions. / My proud heart grows tender / deeply moved by women’s frailty / I slowly hang down my head. /

Kiyoko Nagase was born in 1906 and died in 1995 on her 89th birthday—publishing her 12th book of poems in the year she died. She worked as a farmer to support her family and wrote her poems at the kitchen table in the early hours when her husband and children were asleep. She was a woman of great intellectual power, who stood shoulder to shoulder with the literary geniuses of the past century.

8. A selection of tanka by Takuboku Ishikawa

‘The Patient’

One push of the door, a single step / And the corridor seems to stretch / As far as the eye can see.

‘Unforgettable’

I can’t get them out of my mind … / Lovely Koyakko’s soft earlobes / Among other things.

‘For some reason’

There is a cliff inside my head. / And day by day a fragment of earth / Crumbles off it.

Takuboku Ishikawa (1886 to 1912) is best remembered for his tanka (literally, ‘short poems’). The tanka is one of Japan’s oldest native forms of poetic expression. Containing 31 syllables, the genre dates back to the eighth century anthology Manyoshu, and was refined in the ‘Kokinshu,’ the primary poetic anthology of the Heian Period (794-1185). Roger Pulvers’ collection of 200 translations of tanka by Takuboku Ishikawa is published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha under the title, Eigo de yomu Takuboku no Tanka.

9. ‘The New Blade’ by Anzai Hitoshi

My son is using a new razor / with clumsy hands. / Grooming himself as a grownup for the first time, / he spreads his elbows wide, as in a ritual, / very fastidiously, not looking sideways. / From below his temple a smear of blood / as big as a bird’s tongue keeps flowing, / no matter how often he wipes it off, / and he looks a little afraid. / what is hurt in him, I wonder. / His naked back is moistened, shining bright /like a tree with its bark peeled off.  /

Translated by Naoshi Koriyama and Edward Leuders, from What Have You Lost, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, (HarperCollins). See Anzai Hitoshi bio at entry # 6 above.

10. ‘TRIP 7’ by Shuntaro Tanikawa

The tree is shaped like a tree / singing in the wind / It does not matter where it stands // If I feel just as I see / all will glow in beauty / If I could write like I see / time would cease

Shuntaro Tanikawa has published over 60 books of poetry. In virtually every book he consciously and artfully adopts a different mode and style and has been at the cutting edge of contemporary Japanese poetry throughout his career. TRIP 7 is from Journey, published in 1968.

11. ‘Between our two lives’ by Matsuo Bashō

‘Between our two lives / there is also the life of / the cherry blossom.’

Matsuo Bashō – see poet bio at # 4 entry above.

12. ‘Meeting in the Shadow’ by Yasuhiro Yotsumoto

But, when the wind stops, it’s so deadly quiet here. / Over the hilltop of a closed eyelid, / I see my wife walking back. / Her face smeared with dirt, her bare foot bleeding, / she holds to her chest silence / which looks like a strange animal. /

Yasuhiro Yotsumoto was born in 1959 and has published eight collections of poetry in Japanese, each, like Family Room (his first collection to appear in English translation), grouped around a single theme. ‘Meeting in the Shadow’ is from Family Room—a collection that Peter Boyle says, ‘masterfully transcends the opposition between tradition and experiment’.

13. ‘I Have Never Been Anything Like Pink’ by Kazuko Shiraishi

when she missed the bus the girl / walked with a large brown bag in the dark daytime / on a road lined with black woods on both sides / when a raven flew over / she called out, ‘Poe’ / Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and Prison without Bars were her only partners / to talk to / even now she can dream of that long road sometimes the / characteristic whizzing / wind of Musashino carried off the girl’s black bobbed hair / childlike human beings go walking on it like black specks /

Kazuko Shiraishi is a Japanese poet and translator born in Vancouver, Canada. She is a modernist, outsider poet who got her start in Katsue Kitazono’s  ‘VOU’ poetry group, which led Shiraishi to publish her first book of poems in 1951. She has appeared at readings and literary festivals all over the world.

14.‘White Bird from the Faucet’ by Ura Kanako

I picked them all and made a garland for my sister / but I couldn’t find her anywhere / When I picked them they sounded like small bird bones breaking / I put them in my mouth, caressed them with my tongue and swallowed them / Each one tasted different and I couldn’t get enough / so I kept digging up little bird graves / I dug holes all over the garden / dug up more and more little bird graves / and stuffed their little white bones in my mouth /

Ura Kanako is a poet from Fukuoka. Her first book of poetry, The Lake in My Ears, was nominated for the Nakahara Chuya Award.

15. ‘Sad Moonlight Night’ by Sakutarō Hagiwara

Drat that snatch-thief dog, / He howls at the moon from the rotting pier. / When the soul pricks up its ears, / It hears the shrill girls choiring, / Choiring / With their gloomy voices, / By the sombre stone wall out at the pier.

Sakutarō Hagiwara (1886 – 1942) was a writer of free-style verse, active in Taishō and early Showa period Japan. He liberated Japanese free verse from the grip of traditional rules, and he is considered the ‘father of modern colloquial poetry in Japan’.

16. ‘When My Desire’ by Ono no Komachi

When my desire / grows too fierce / I wear my bedclothes inside out, dark as the night’s rough husk.

Ono no Komachi (c. 825 – c. 900) was a famous Japanese waka poet, one of the Rokkasen—the Six best Waka poets of the early Heian period. She was noted as a rare beauty; Komachi is a symbol of a beautiful woman in Japan. She is also numbered as one of the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals.