Preface

We rarely see sorrowful dockside partings any more, observes the poet Ishigaki Rin. She is commenting on a poem in which the speaker recalls a scene from boyhood: his family huddled together at a northern port for a long farewell, waiting for a steamboat to take his grandparents away. His grandfather presses a coin into his hand. His father whispers to his grandfather, then tells him to give the coin back. Both men have tears in their eyes. The poem ends in the present, sixty years later:

Sleeping quietly Grandfather Grandmother Father Mother—I am also grown old.

The poem is "Steamboat" by Tanaka Fuyuji (1894–1980). Ishigaki could have included train stations and especially airports as places for good-byes that are now mostly lighthearted—insofar as people see each other off at all, that is. What disappeared from our world along with sad farewells?

I know the question invites nostalgia, which I cannot scorn, but it can't be absorbed by it. Some of the answers are strewn along the passage, never complete, from a world of suffering

to one of stress. It's that passage I try to explore in the writing that follows, writing prompted by a stay in Tokyo in the summer of 1995, the season for observing the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the War. I want to draw together the parts of the history we live more and more disjunctively. With what effect, I can't now know, though some yokings may be jarring, too idiosyncratic, even, to seem persuasive.

But I hope this book isn't only a willful collection of fragments, not least because of the friends, acquaintances, and strangers who extended insights, gestures, anecdotes, sustenance. Here I want to thank just a few of them: Kozaki Setsuko, Zhang Zhen, Igarashi Akio, Diana Young, Uezato Kazumi, Mariko Tamanoi, Kawazoe Fusae, Candace Vogler, Hiyane Miyoko, Kathy Rupp, Kondaibo Mie, and Tsushima Chitose. Leora Auslander has been that vital thing, a comrade in mulling. Bill Sibley continues to prompt me to relish the experience of the day for itself. Earl Miner gave me the pleasure of back-and-forthing on poetry translation. I also want to thank those who have over the years helped me on chases, unsuccessful as well as successful, after stray bits of information: Eizaburo Okuizumi and Kuki Yoko of the East Asia Library at the University of Chicago, Ichiko Morita of the Japan Documentation Center at the Library of Congress, and Amanda Seaman. I am grateful to Marilyn Young and Anne Allison for their generosity in reading the manuscript for the University of California Press; Anne helped me to see it from outside my own head, and Marilyn pushed me on details from her own catholic knowledge and engagement with history. I thank Sheila Levine for being willing to tackle this experiment.

Laura Driussi and Dore Brown make professionalism attractive. I am soberly but gratefully indebted to Evan Camfield, copyeditor and therefore reader extraordinaire.

Lucian Marquis took me on as a student when I came back to mundane college life in 1968 after a junior year in France. That was a thrilling time to be alive in many places around the world, and I came back exhilarated and impatient. Lucian prodded me to think about what had happened with some discipline and showed me how. That is to say, he showed me how one comes to have ideas at all. His academic subject was politics, but it was always made legible in juxtaposition with literature, history, music, sociology. Indeed, I can't think of anything that would be irrelevant for Lucian Marquis, in whom living and learning are inseparable from each other. I thank him for his example and for continuing to be my teacher.

I have a special debt to Ishigaki Rin, whose poem I translate at the beginning. Ishigaki was born in 1920 in Tokyo. After completing what was then called "higher elementary school" at age fourteen, she went to work for a bank, not because she necessarily had to but because she wanted to have her own time and money for writing and subscribing to poetry journals. She ended up working at that bank for some forty years until she retired.

Her first poems to become well known were written during the heyday of postwar union activism. Often, her poetry dwells on the details of everyday life. For such reasons she has been called a "bank clerk poet" and especially, a poet of "life." The Japanese word is seikatsu , which marks "life" with the ac-

cent of "livelihood" Ishigaki herself, writing about the common linkage of her poems to "life" muses over how this word smells of poverty while "art" is somehow luxurious. It's important to distinguish between objecting to the spirit behind such labels and objecting to the labels themselves. Rejecting the labels not only accedes tacitly to the judgment that writing close to work or everyday life is necessarily impoverished but simultaneously contributes to the illusion that the works of poets not so labeled in fact float free, unrelated to the world of labor and everyday life, in the stratosphere of—existence?

When asked her aspirations for poetry, Ishigaki says, she can never come up with a proper answer: "It is not that I have special hopes for poetry, but that my wishes and prayers for real life are intertwined with poetry and inextricable from it. So at times I have answered, 'How wonderful it would be if the poems I have ended up writing were to be useful'" Elsewhere, thinking about the impact of literary prizes on her life, Ishigaki notes how increased attention and demand for her work resulted in the utter neglect of her personal ties. It is then that she achieves this clarity: "I had been hoping that the scab called 'life' would peel off naturally from my poetry. But when I thought about what could be born from a way of life careless of human connection, I began to have a strange worry. If life were to peel off from the poetry of life, it would end up just plain poetry!"

During the period when I was working on this book, I often traveled with Ishigaki's poems and essays. They made life instantly less lonely. The also introduced me to many contemporary Japanese poems that I would have been sorry to miss.

My own familiarity with Japanese poetry had been largely confined to premodern, fixed-form verse. Ishigaki's poems gave me that rare thing after youth, a new hunger. It made me fall in love with the language all over again, or rather, as if for the first time.

All translations in the text that follows are my own. Japanese names appear in standard order, surname first. A version of "The Anniversary of a Lie" appeared as "The Devastating Absence of Surprise" in The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 27, no. 3 (1995), 18–19, and is here reprinted with the kind permission of the editors.