Lady Isabella Bird translates a Japanese children's poem

Colour and perfume vanish away.
What can be lasting in this world?
To-day disappears in the abyss of nothingness;
It is but the passing image of a dream, and causes only a slight trouble.

from Lady Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), Letter 10.

Bird notes that this poem, memorized by all of the Japanese schoolchildren, has some resemblance to Ecclesiastes, and "is a dismal ditty for young children to learn."

The curious thing is that the poem is actually mnemonic device. It contains all 50 or so Japanese syllables. Ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, and so on. That's why all the children know it, like the ABC song.

The wiki for the hiragana alphabet has the Japanese version (three quarters down). Each syllable is used only once, so it's a real trick poem. Wiki claims that the poem dates back to the 10th century, which is either preposterous or amazing. Citation, please.

A random poem by the Empress Shokun

The Meiji Emperor of Japan, who ruled 1868 to 1912, wrote, I am told, 100,000 poems, all in the 31 syllable waka form. At the Meiji shrine, built in his honor in 1920, one can buy one of his poems for 100 yen, less than a dollar. Just drop a coin in the slotted box, then take a random poem from the hole on the right.

Or one can buy a poem written by his wife, the Empress Shoken, at the charm shop. She had more to do, apparently, and only wrote 30,000 waka. Shake the can until a chopstick comes out, then show the number on the stick to the kimono-clad attendant so she can find the correct poem. It should be obvious that there are not 100,000 poems in that box, or 30,000 chopsticks in the shaker. Someone has edited the corpus down a bit.

Here's the Empress's poem that I bought:

If we but recall
That we may go astray,
We shall be most careful
In every trifling act.

Is this true? I have doubts. There are plenty of trifling acts in our lives which don't deserve that much care. Moderation in small things, right? Maybe I shouldn't take this so literally.

At a different shrine, I bought a random fortune (a bad one), also for 100 yen. The bad fortune was pretty accurate; I haven't quite fit Empress Shoken's poem into my life yet.

Here's a glimpse of the Meiji shrine, tucked away in a cool, lovely forest, surrounded on all sides by shopping, shopping, shopping. If you have the proper equipment, you may be able to see the two butterflies that danced around the whole time I was there - see, over the railing on the right.


Here they are, by the steps now:

A Tokyo ragbag

Let's see. What's in MyPictures. Hmm, hmm.

Is this guy depressed because he couldn't find the book he wanted, or is he groaning from the weight of books in his backpack? Or does he look like this all the time?


This I'd never seen before. A bookstore with so many books that it has shelves in the street. There's an awning and a curtain, nothing else.

Some of the bookshops also sell Japanese prints, original and otherwise. Notice how the Amateur Photographer artfully preserves his anonymity by not photographing his reflection.

Now this seems too be a giant loaf of bread baked by ma femme just before I left for Japan. Why do I have this photo with me? Why didn't I bring any slices with me?

I need to get out and take some more photos of Tokyo.

Tokyo's Jimbo-chi bookshops

A short stretch of the Jimbo-chi neighborhood in Tokyo is crammed with bookshops, dozens of them, one after another. They mostly look like the one to the left, except that they do not all have the cartoon samurai statue. They did have - I swear, every one of them - the outdoor browser. Almost every book in almost every shop is in Japanese, so these shops were not much use to me, aside from the pleasing thoughts about humanity a crowded book shop can engender. I also like that, very thoughtfully, they are all on one side of a busy street.

The Subun-so shop specialized in foreign language books - English, overwhelmingly, and German and French. It was not much use to me either - see right. First editions and gigantic multivolume sets. The Centennial Nathaniel Hawthorne in twenty thick volumes, that sort of thing. Hume's History of England in six volumes - that one's bottom center in the photo. Those are not going home with me.

Now here's a view of books you don't get very often.

Keenly aware of the problems of body as well as mind, a similarly packed stretch of the same street is devoted to sporting goods stores. Snowboarding equipment, mostly. And apparently if I had turned there rather than here, I would have found Tokyo's musical instrument shops. The books, violins, and snowboards are all within a half mile of each other, maybe less.

A dedicated reader

This little fellow, who loves books so much* that he reads while hauling firewood, is standing outside of the Yaesu Book Center, eight floors of books, in downtown Tokyo.

I'll bet some sort of story is attached to this statue. I'll bet it's literally attached, on that plaque at his feet. Anyone have a guess about what the story might be?

* Unless the book is "How to Get a Job that Does Not Require Hauling Wood" - then his motivation may be something other than love of reading.

What to do with your worn out but treasured Japanese poetry anthology scroll

Chop off the good bits and hang them on the wall. This was once a piece of a long scroll dating from the 16th century, and is now a wall-hanging.

It is still hard for me to comprehend that those few characters to the left and right of the deer make an entire poem.

Click the picture for a better view. I didn't say great, I said better.

Another Japanese poetry anthology I would like to read

A 16th century Japanese poetry anthology, a 17 meter long scroll. Only about 8 meters are on display. Click to enlarge; oh yes, do.

Picture taken in a slow-moving crowd at the Tokyo National Museum.

Conveyor belt sushi is more interesting than Adam Bede

I want to be clear about the nature of my trip to Japan. Besides a brief visit to headquarters, I have not been much more than a quarter mile from my hotel in any direction. This weekend I will extend my horizons a little. But so far, I've just seen a narrow patch of the Meguro neighborhood.

Tonight, though, I found something ridiculous and special, a conveyor belt sushi restaurant (kaiten sushi, I guess). It's like a dim sum place in some ways - the color of the plate gives the price of the dish, and the waitress just adds up your stack at the end of the meal.

A second conveyor belt, underneath the first, has shallow bowls for soy sauce and mugs for tea. I took a mug, added some hot water (each seat at the counter has its own hot water tap) and then poured in a generous portion of soy sauce. The kind fellow next to me choked on his fish, took a new mug from the conveyor belt, added green tea powder, and handed it to me. The funny thing is that I had already poured myself a dish of soy sauce for my sushi, so I knew perfectly well which bottle had the soy sauce in it before I tried to drink it. Japan confuses me.

This fellow had a pile of ten plates, plus soup, by the time he left. I looked at my stack of four, thinking about leaving. A woman sat down beside me as I decided to try one more dish, an expensive one, maybe $4. By the time I finished that fifth sushi dish, she was on her sixth plate. I was clearly doing something wrong.

As I ate, I watched the sushi pass by at eye level, one dish after another, pink and green and orange, some startlingly beautiful, others quite unappetizing. I had Adam Bede with me, but I didn't read a word. I just watched the sushi slide past.

You can poke around on Youtube if you want to see the conveyor belt sushi in action, but who has time for that? Live, people, live!

My Signet edition of Adam Bede is now, by the way, a four-continent book, if I count the Brussels airport as a continent. Which I do.

Airplane reading 2 - Stifter's Abdias

Abdias (1843) by Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter:

A clan of Jewish traders live hidden away in a Roman ruin in the Sahara desert. Abdias is the son of one of these traders. He is sent into the world to make his fortune, only welcome back if he is successful. He is, beyond anyone's expectation.

His wealth attracts the attention of the Algerian Bey, who loots his house and confiscates his wealth. In the process, the wife of Abdias dies in premature childbirth. Abdias takes his newborn daughter to Europe, to Austria, presumably.

This covers 40 pages of a 75 page story. There are some hints that the rest of the story will lead to revenge on the Bey. Those hints are a trick. Up to this point, Abdias seems like a sort of moral tale, perhaps a relative of the Arabian Nights, and the events, if not the details, are predictable. In Europe, though, the story of Abdias and his daughter becomes something else entirely, and I would like to meet the perceptive reader who sees it coming.

Stifter is searching after The Sublime in small things. The same force that causes a volcano to erupt causes a pan of milk to boil over, Stifter wrote, and who is to say that the boiling milk is less important. Stifter wants the reader to be astonished and amazed by that pot of milk, by the extraordinary forces underlying ordinary life.

Stifter is a strange writer, in the line of Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann, but unique, weird. I was led to him, as I suspect many readers are now, by W. G. Sebald. Stifter has this in common with Sebald - I finish a book by either and think "Wait, what is this?" They defy categories.

I'll keep rereading Stifter and see if I can pin him down a little.

Airplane reading 1 - Kawabata's Thousand Cranes

It takes a long time to fly to Japan, it turns out. Yasunari Kawabata's novel Thousand Cranes (1949) barely made a dent in the time. Less than 150 pages, mostly dialogue, with illustrations.

The novel leads us through a young Tokyo man's relationships with his dead father's two mistresses, and the daughter of one of them. This is almost the full set of characters. The story is set against the Japanese tea ceremony. The man's father was a devotee of the tea ceremony, as were both of his mistresses.

"The light was really too bright for a tea cottage, but it made the girl's youth glow. The tea napkin, as becomes a young girl, was red, and it impressed one less with its softness than with is freshness, as if the girl's hand were bringing a red flower into bloom." (p. 21)

There's a lot of this sort of thing - light, colors, flowers, pottery, considered in relationship to one another and to the characters. The novel is not a treatise on Japanese aesthetics, but is an easy way to see how people actually think about or use the principles - long-lived pottery versus short-lived love, for example.

The traditional tea ceremony is clearly identified as a hobby, one in which the younger characters have less interest. The hobby combines art collecting (the centuries-old pottery) with an additional social ritual. The tea itself seems to be one of the least important considerations. I could imagine a different but not totally unrelated novel about model train enthusiasts.

The Vintage International paperback edition of his books, five slender volumes in all, is very attractive. Someone (Susan Mitchell, the back cover tells me) put extra thought into the design.

Thomas De Quincey's permanent ephemera - reading 150 year old magazine articles

Wuthering Expectations seem to have been wandering away from the 19th century a bit. It's because of the upcoming* trip to Japan. I'm all kerfoozled.

Or maybe it's what I'm reading, Thomas De Quincey's bizarre, baffling Suspiria de Profundis (1845) and The English Mail-Coach (1849), nominally two sequels to his most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822).

Note the dates - the sequels, such as they are, arrive more than twenty years after the original piece. During that time, De Quincey's prose, plenty odd to begin with, has become more tangled, more obscure, more strange. Childhood memoir - the death of De Qunicey's young sister from "premature expansion of the intellect" (encephalitis), or school tales about composing Latin poetry - alternate with visionary episodes describing "The Apparition of the Brocken" or the destuction by earthquake of the Jamaican town Savannah-la-Mar, Poe's "City in the Sea" in prose.

This all ties in somehow to the visions De Qunicey has under the influence of opium. The "Dream-Fugue" that ends The English Mail-Coach may or may not pull it all together.

The Confessions is a foundational work, cemented in place by Charles Baudelaire, of Decadent literature, not a place I normally spend much time. With this later writing, De Quincey is pushing into the Visionary category, beyond reason, perhaps beyond interpretation.

The oddest thing, in a way, is that these pieces, as well as Confessions, as well as basically anything by De Quincey that anyone still reads, are magazine articles. When you received your March 1845 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the post, you would open it to find Part I of Suspiria de Profundis right up front. You can follow that with a reviews of Stephens' Book of the Farm and Lord Malmesbury's Diaries and Correspondence, an essay on "British History in the Eighteenth Century," and, you've been waiting breathlessly, I know, Part II of "German-American Romances".

It's all anonymous, except for a mediocre poem attributed to "J.D."

Most of William Hazlitt's best essays, Charles Lamb's great Elias essays, almost everything Poe wrote, healthy chunks of Emerson, Hawthorne, Carlyle, are all magazine writing, something I usually think of as ephemera. Another idea to rethink.

This might be a good place to point to praymont's attempts to improve his prose through perusal of Carlyle, Lamb, and Hazlitt. I predict success with the Hazlitt more than the others, but would love to be proven wrong. What would a contemporary Carlyle sound like? So best of luck.

* Upcoming = tomorrow.

Edmund Wilson's permanent criticism - in other words, he's still readable

One more glance at a Hudson Review article, this time "Edmund Wilson's Permanent Criticism: 1920-1950," (not online) a review essay on the two Library of America volumes of Wilson's work. The article is by William Pritchard, himself a favorite critic of mine.

Pritchard acknowledges a real intellectual debt to Wilson (as does the more ambivalent Joseph Epstein in an essay that can be found in In a Cardboard Belt!). The question for Pritchard is why a reader should spend time with Wilson now; Pritchard concludes, roughly, that Wilson wrote well enough and was insightful enough, so why not? That may not be exactly it, but any Amateur Reader who spends too much effort reading any critics is probably misallocating his time. There're a lot of books out there.

In my experience, Wilson does write well enough, and is insightful enough. His long essay on Proust, in Axel's Castle, is as good an introduction to that writer as I know, and might give a burst of momentum to any reader stuck halfway through The Guermantes Way. Wilson has a particularly strong gift with plot summaries - he describes the plot of In Search of Lost Time in detail, but somehow weaves his criticism in with the synopsis. The final result is utterly un-encyclopedic.

The Shores of Light, a thick collection of essays from the 20s and 30s, was less interesting to me for its specific insights than for its sense of The Spirit of the Age. The Wilson of that period wanted to read everything, and tried. His reviews of the promising young writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald communicate the thrill readers found in their books better than anything else I've read. Wilson makes the new writers of the time sound so exciting.

Here's Mark Sarvas, describing his Summer of [Philip] Roth, a reading or rereading of all or most of Roth's books, all in preparation for reviewing the new one. Whatever you do Mark, don't calculate your hourly wages for that review. Anyway, this is exactly what Edmund Wilson would do, read an author all the way through before reviewing him, no matter how long the shelf of books. He even decided that he had to learn Russian before he could understand the great Russian novels, and then he did it, more or less. The man could pack away the books.

P.S. Look, the Letter-writing Librarian recently read Axel's Castle, and wrote about it here.

Why haven't I heard of Elizabeth Spencer before? Or have I? - That was long ago when he was proud of her.

I could, and perhaps should, spend a week at Wuthering Expectations plundering The Hudson Review whenever a new issue arrives. There’s hardly a shortage of good writing in good literary journals, so I’m not sure my advocacy is especially useful, but The Hudson Review is the one I read all the way through, every time.

The last issue has (most links are PDFs), besides the Heaney essay, three (or possibly two) unpublished stories by Penelope Fitzgerald, fine poems by B. H. Fairchild and many others, and a long excerpt from Joseph Epstein’s forthcoming biography of Fred Astaire, a breezy and elegant piece. The short story by Elizabeth Spencer (“Sightings”) is unlikely to win an award for originality – it’s what one might call standard New Yorker stuff – but it ought to win one for excellence. It’s not innovative in any way, but merely has characters who seem like real people, insights into human nature, artful uses of symbolism. Ho hum.

I’m embarrassed that I had never heard of her, or had forgotten her. Look at this lovely website; look at all those books. She seems to be pegged as a Mississippi writer, and good for her.
Here’s a bit of the story. A teenage girl’s mother is going to marry an idiot; the teenager has fled to her father; the mother and new man have pursued her. The point of view is the father’s; Celie is his ex-wife, Guy is the idiot:

“Guy Bowden was a beefy fellow, large arms, thick legs, heavy feet. But wearing a nicely pressed grey suit, a satin tie. Celie was trim, she was a word he used to think about her: petite. It rhymed with neat. That was long ago when he was proud of her.”

The description is nothing special – a lot of writers can do that, or better – but that last line gets us somewhere.

Anybody else have warm feelings about Elizabeth Spencer, or particular books of hers? I’ll read more, I hope.

William Wordsworth is aptly admonished; Seamus Heaney approves; William Hazlitt does not; Dorothy Wordsworth quietly observes

Seamus Heaney’s recent article in The Hudson Review (“’Apt Admonishment’: Wordsworth As an Example”) is about the moment a poet encounters a muse. I do not believe I have ever met such a creature. He wanders through examples from Hesiod to Wordsworth to T. S. Eliot, ending with himself, and the moment he saw a photo of the Danish bog man and was inspired to write his best-known poem, “The Tollund Man.”

The Wordsworth example supplies the title of the piece – “Apt Admonishment.” The poet of “Resolution and Independence” (see yesterday’s post) has met an elderly leech gatherer, a garrulous fellow. Here’s the key moment of the poem:

The old man still stood talking at my side,
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard, nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream,
Or like a man from some far region sent
To give me human strength by apt admonishment.

This is strange stuff. The moment becomes dream-like; the old man’s words blend together and are “scarce heard”. Not a good listener, this Wordsworth. Then there’s the final simile: “like a man from some far region sent \ To give me human strength by apt admonishment”.

Oh, now I see, that’s what he’s like. No, I don’t see it. What is that sort of man like, from a far region sent? Sent by whom? Why? Yes, to aptly admonish Wordsworth, but why would anyone send a man to do such a thing? Why wouldn’t a local man do? In fact, a local man seems to have done the job all right. As Heaney says, the muse has appeared to Wordsworth.

William Hazlitt took every opportunity he had, and invented others, to make his single insightful point about William Wordsworth (an ex-friend), that Wordsworth was a poet of pure ego. The descriptions of nature, the peasants, were all a screen. “Resolution and Independence” shows what Hazlitt meant. The leech gatherer may exist in the actual world, but to the poet he’s not quite real. He’s an instrument for Wordsworth to explore himself.

Hazlitt thought he was making a devastating criticism. Today, we are more likely to say that the turn inward is the whole point of Wordsworth’s project, his great innovation. Still, compare William’s poem to my favorite line about this encounter from his sister Dorothy’s journal: “He said leeches were very scarce partly owing to this dry season, but many years they have been scarce.” And then add in the “godly books”, and the sailor son. A world opens up there, a world outside of Dorothy Wordsworth.

Maybe this is a hint as to why I mostly like Dorothy’s writing over her brother’s, excepting “Michael” and a few other poems. And I haven’t even brought up the daffodils – see Dorothy’s Wikipedia entry for the appalling results of that comparison.

Seamus Heaney’s piece is in the Spring 2008 Hudson Review (PDF).

D & W Wordsworth and the leech gatherer - compare and contrast

"We met an old man almost double. He had on a coat thrown over his shoulders. . . . Under this he carried a bundle and had an apron on and a night cap. His face was interesting. He had dark eyes and a long nose . . . He was of Scotch parents but had been born in the army. He had had a wife, 'a good woman, and it pleased God to bless us with ten children.' All these were dead but one, [a sailor] of whom he had not heard for many years. . . . His trade was to gather leeches, but now leeches are scarce and he had not the strength for it. He lived by begging and was making his way to Carlisle, where he would buy a few godly books to sell. He said leeches were very scarce partly owing to this dry season, but many years they have been scarce . . . Leeches were formerly 2/6 [per] 100; they are now 30/. He had been hurt in driving a cart, his leg broke his body driven over, his skull fractured.”

Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal, October 3, 1800


Himself he propped, his body, limbs and face,
Upon a long grey shaft of shaven wood,
And still as I drew near with gentle pace
Beside the little pond or moorish flood,
Motionless as a cloud the old man stood
That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth altogether, if it move at all.

At length, himself unsettling, he the pond
Stirred with his staff, and fixedly did look
Upon the muddy water, which he conned
As if he had been reading in a book;
And now such freedom as I could I took,
And drawing to his side, to him did say,
“This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.”

A gentle answer did the old man make,
In courteous speech which forth he slowly drew,
And him with further words I thus bespake,
“What kind of work is that which you pursue?
This is a lonely place for one like you.”
He answered me with pleasure and surprise,
And there was while he spake a fire about his eyes.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He told me that he to this pond had come
To gather leeches, being old and poor—
Employment hazardous and wearisome!
And he had many hardships to endure;
From pond to pond he roamed, from moor to moor,
Housing, with God’s good help, by choice or chance,
And in this way he gained an honest maintenance.

The old man still stood talking at my side,
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard, nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream,
Or like a man from some far region sent
To give me human strength by apt admonishment.

William Wordsworth, from "Resolution and Independence", aka "The Leech Gatherer" (1807)

The ellipses are those of Seamus Heaney, from whom I have borrowed the comparison (link is a PDF). He's really going after that last stanza. More on that later.

This is one of W. Wordsworth's best poems, one of the greatest in the language, perhaps, yet I prefer his sister's version. A failure of taste? Or intelligence?

Shipwrecks, seashells, and the search for life on Mars - Christopher Benfey's The Great Wave

Or The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (2003), to give Benfey's book its full title. Benfey is a specialist in 19th century American literature - Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane - but here he indulges a lifelong love of Japan to write a unique two-way history of ideas. Ideas flow from the United States (New England, really) to the newly-opened Japan, and from Japan to New England.

In the first chapter a teenage Japanese fisherman named Manjiro is washed to sea with four other fishermen and stranded on a desert island. He ends up in Hawaii, and then Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Simultaneously, Herman Melville leaves Fairhaven on a whaler, and misses crossing paths with Manjiro in Honolulu by six months. Manjiro, aka John Mung, was the first Japanese person to live in the United States, and the first great carrier of Western ideas to Japan. Melville was - I think we all have some idea what Melville eventually did with his youthful voyage in the Pacific.

So this is a history of ideas told through biography, mostly those of the first New Englanders who went to Japan, and the first Japanese who went to America. There are a lot of strange transformations. The seashell collector Edward Sylvester Morse became an expert in No plays and the tea ceremony. Morse's lectures in Boston drew the attention of the everything collector Isabella Stuart Gardner and many others, including Percival Lowell, who wrote several books on Japan before turning his attention to trying to prove that there was intelligent life on Mars. Lafcadio Hearn does everything he can to actually become Japanese.

The small world of intellectual New England helps the book cohere as a story. Edward Sylvester Morse was cousins with Clover Adams, wife of Henry Adams. The book closes with a photo of Henry and Clover's Augustus Saint-Gaudens-designed tomb, based on the Kannon Buddha that Henry saw on a trip to Japan. Mars madman Percival Lowell was the brother of poet Amy Lowell (whom he called "Big Fat Baby"). Mabel Loomis Todd, tied into the Mars business by marriage, was Emily Dickinson's (posthumous) editor, and had a long affair with Dickinson's married brother. Some of this may seem a bit distant from Japan. It's all so interesting that few readers will care.

What else is there? Lafcadio Hearn's ghost stories, Teddy Roosevelt learning Judo. At the end, Ezra Pound, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Heidegger - in other words, Modernism. Benfey pulls a lot together. He reminds me of how much I have to learn about American literature, much less Japanese.

"The greatest period of women writers in the history of any literature"

So says Kenneth Rexroth about Heian Japan, 794-1192. This is the period of Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, Sei Shonagan's Pillow Book, and a quantity of poems that is hard to fathom, almost all of them in the five-line tanka stanza. How do specialists in the period keep them all straight?

Here is one of Lady Murasaki's poems, from the late 10th century:

This life of ours would not cause you sorrow
if you thought of it as like
the mountain cherry blossoms
which bloom and fade in a day.

Yes, well, easier said than done.

If I skip ahead to the 17th century, when the haiku makes its appearance, not only are there no shortage of poems by women, but two of the best known haiku are by little girls. This one was written by Den Sute-Jo when she was six. Yes, as per A. A. Milne, when she was six:

A snowy morning
Everywhere II, II, II
The tracks of clogs.

That's pretty clever.

So what were women writers up to in the West during the classic period of Japanese literature? That's a trick question - what was anyone up to? It was the Dark Ages, for pity's sake. At least there's the example of Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century.

I'm with Virginia Woolf - the centuries of waste of women's talents is an indictment of Western civilization.* Make yourself a timeline. Start with Sappho in the 6th century B.C.E. Hildegard is next, I think, a gap of 1,700 years. We need another 200 years to get to Christine de Pisan. Things start to improve a bit in the 16th century - Marguerite de Navarre, Gaspara Stampa, Mary Sidney, St. Teresa de Avila. Not exactly parity, but real change. Who do we have in the 17th century? Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Madame de La Fayette's The Princess of Clèves, Madame de Sévigné. Aphra Behn, I guess, although I think she was a hack.

Meanwhile, in Japan, 6 year old girls were writing classic poems.

Translation are by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi, Women Poets of Japan, also published as The Burning Heart.

* Western civilization also has its good points.

Emperors, Princesses, Prime Ministers - high ranking classical Japanese poets

So last week in my note on Léopold Senghor I mentioned the rare but not unheard of phenomenon of statesman-poets. The briefest attention to classical Japanese poetry reveals that it was not merely common for Japanese rulers and courtiers to write poetry, but it was virtually a duty of office. The great Japanese poetry anthologies like the Manyoshu can contain thousands of tiny little poems. Many of them are by members of the court, generals, provincial governors, Shoguns.

One might be suspicious of the quality of the poems of emperors, or the reasons they are anthologized. Power might have more weight than merit. Could be. Here's the Emperor Uda, who ruled from 880 to 897:

Like a wave crest
Escaped and frozen,
One white egret
Guards the harbor mouth.

from One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, tr. Kenneth Rexroth.

That seems pretty great to me. It looks like just one idea, one precisely accurate visual metaphor. In a sense, I'm completely wrong about that. Most of these poems have, for example, Buddhist interpretations which are entirely opaque to me.

This is a minor example of what I was talking about yesterday. I know so little about Japanese literature that a single 150 page book is full of revelations. Imagine what I would learn if I read two books, or three.

The return on investment of literature

From time to time over the years, restless in spirit, dissatisfied with the limits of earthly existence, I have been tempted to switch my attention to Asian literature, meaning, mostly, Chinese and Japanese. The Book of Songs, The Tale of Genji, The Dream of the Red Chamber, Basho and Li Po. I know so little about Asian literature. The more I fill in my knowledge of Western literature, over the course of many years, the larger the gap becomes, and the more it niggles at me.

I sound like a spiritual seeker, hoping to refresh my soul in traditions not my own. But no, the fact is that my return on investment would be higher if I switched to Asian literature. It might require a high initial investment – the history is unknown, the names of things are strange, the aesthetic standards are unfamiliar. Diminishing returns would kick in at some point. But for a long time, everything would be novel and exciting. Investment here means time and concentration. Return means knowledge, delight, curiosity fulfilled.

What I’m calling diminishing returns – the novel I’m reading is just like other novels I have read, the history I’m studying is mostly full of ideas I have already encountered – is actually a crucial step towards real understanding, towards specialization. Great scholars repeat themselves, circle around the a single set of facts or single author, searching for new insights. But that will never be me, so at some point, I would shift my attention to something else. I don’t plan to write about 19th century Western literature for the rest of my life, either.

Why do I say “switch” to Asian literature? Because for the Neurotic Reader, everything is a project. Lists of books, background history, modern essayists. Jonathan Spence on China, Donald Keene on Japan. Perhaps this post will serve as a goad to myself – don’t read so neurotically. Dip in, wander around, use the lists for inspiration. A certain amount of neurosis is probably necessary to actually finish a long, complex book life The Tale of Genji. But some moderation, please.

I do want to insist on the value of specialization, even for amateurs. Spending a year or two reading nothing but classical Greek literature is a different experience than scattering the books over a lifetime. Very valuable, very satisfying. But there are limits to our energy, and interest, and time.

I go out of the darkness
Onto a road of darkness
Lit only by the far off
Moon on the edge of the mountains.

Lady Izumi Shikibu, late 10th or early 11th century, translated by Kenneth Rexroth.

Now it turns out I'm going to Japan

Although there ain't no guarantee uh nothin', it looks like I will go to Tokyo, On Business, for basically the entire month of August. What a wonderful opportunity, etc., etc. But Japanese banks don't fly a person halfway around the world to retrace the steps of Basho.

I've never been farther west than San Francisco, so this really is a good thing, although it will be, mostly, work and more work. I worry that it will impact my posting. No, who cares about that, I worry it will impact my reading.

No formal reading list this time, although I am looking at some of Kenneth Rexroth's translations of classical Japanese poems, and I just finished Christopher Benfey's The Great Wave, a superb account of the cultural interactions between Japan and the United States (New England, really) in the late 19th century. Maybe more on that book later.

I'm also trying to teach myself Japanese. Ha ha ha ha! Teach myself - ho ho - Japanese! Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, ku, jū. Hajimemashite. Amateur Reader desu. Dozo kory-something. That was from memory - am I learning? Is it more polite to mangle your host's language with the best intentions, or to stick with English?

A 9th century poem, by Ariwara No Narihira, from Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese:

I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.