Poet of the Month 074: TAEKO TOMIOKA

 

TAEKO TOMIOKA

1974 

 

 

 

 

 

GIRL FRIEND

 

 

 

A concubine next door

chants a sutra.

In early afternoon

I saw an animal like an ass

passing under the window.

I saw it through the interstice of the curtain.

There is a woman who comes to see me

always through the interstice of the curtain,

but she's not yet come today.

She promised to come

in a sort of Annamese kimono

made of crepe georgette

with a gait that brings men running.

As she hasn't come yet today

she may have died.

Previously

when I travelled with her

she yearned for an old woodcut

of Germany or somewhere

at an antique shop in the country.

At a country inn

I had a chance for the first time

to tear her hair

as thick as Brigitte Bardot's.

We two danced

the Viennese waltz

with crimson cheeks drawing near

as long as we wished.

Her transparent

optimistic poesy

some time dropped.

I wish to take that for tears.

She doesn't come today.

I pray

loudly though it's still mid-day

like the mistress next door.

She

hasn't promised not to come.

The one who goes,

O the one who has gone!

 

 

 

 

 

date unspecified

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translated by

 

? TAEKO TOMIOKA 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poet, novelist, dramatist and screenwriter Taeko Tomioka (I place her given name before her surname in the English style) was born in the southern Japanese city of Osaka on 28 July 1935.  Although her family had been relatively prosperous prior to her birth, this changed after her father, the owner of a foundry, abandoned herself and her mother to run off with another woman. 

 

 

Tomioka attended the Women's College in Osaka, where she majored in English literature and translated some of the work of Gertrude Stein into Japanese, after which she worked for a time as a high school teacher before leaving that profession in 1960 to move to Tokyo.  She had, by this time, already published her first prize-winning poetry collection, titled Henrei [Reward, 1958], following it one year later with a dramatic work titled Matsuri [Festival].  Monogatari no akuru hi [The Story of the Story], a second poetry collection, appeared in 1961.

 

Tomioka left Tokyo for New York in 1964, returning to Japan in 1966 after her lover left her for a younger woman just as her own mother had previously been abandoned by her father.  The following year saw the publication of a complete collection of her poetry, after which she authored the screenplay Shinju ten no Amijima [Double Suicide] for the director Shinoda Masahiro.  For the same director she wrote the screenplay Gonza The Spearman, another story based on a traditional Japanese puppet play which was released to great acclaim in 1985.

 

 

In 1969 Tomioka married, going on to publish her debut work of fiction Oka ni mukatte hito wa narabu [Facing The Hills They Stand] in 1971.  This was followed in 1974 by two more works of fiction Shokubutsu sai [Plants] and Meido no kazoku [Family in Hell], both of which won important literary prizes and consolidated her reputation as a feminist writer critical of traditional Japanese culture and the subservient role women are expected to play within it.  Hiberunia kiko [Journey to Ireland], appeared in 1997, with the book going on to win her the prestigious Noma Literary Prize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 068: MASAKO TAKIGUCHI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BLUE HORSE

 

Sunken murmurs come from the bottom of the sea.

A horse, blind in both eyes, can be seen 

Through a crease of water.

The blue horse plods along the sea bottom;

the memory of a man on its back is almost entirely gone.

How long has this horse lived in the sea?

Is the blood splashed on its back its own?

One leg brushes aside clinging seaweed,

and the horse's blind eyes become

a far deeper and lonelier indigo than the sea.

It moves unpretentiously on.

Blood oozing from its wounded belly

is washed off by sea-water

and carried from wave to wave…

 

A cold fog rises from the sea in autumn—

by a rock at the sea bottom,

the horse crouches alone, legs folded,

enduring the cold;

enduring the wait.

 

 

 

 

date unspecified

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translated by

 

KAJIMA HAJIME

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The only information I can find about Japanese poet Masako Takaguchi (I place her given name before her surname in the English style) comes from Modern Japanese Women Poets: After the Meiji Restoration, an article by Ikuko Atsumi published in Volume 7, Issue 2 of The Iowa Review in 1976.  It is posted here for information purposes only and remains its author's exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property. 

 

 

Takiguchi (1919–?) has a more artistic sense than most of the social group [of female Japanese poets who were her contemporaries].  Since she lost everything, visible and invisible, during the war in Korea, where she had lived for twenty years, her poems are full of bitter pain.  Blue Horse, her representative poem, forms a prototype of her thought in her solitary time to dream of the cold flames… There is a poem titled On Man, in which Takaguchi writes on the cruelty of man, who feels nothing but physical desire for woman, and also a poem titled At The Slaughterhouse, in which a woman's body makes love with man only because of his sexual desire. Her body and the body of a cow killed at the slaughterhouse are overlapped.  Both are interesting pieces from the viewpoint of feminism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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