Mitsuharu Kaneko

An old capital (1) amid weeping willows.
There are tiles with yellow dragons painted on them. There are old coins.
No, in the lonely weeds are crumbled red walls (2),
puddly ponds where water buffalos play,
and a long, long castle wall where magpies fly.

In the canal below the teahouse surrounded by the warblings of birdcages, a pleasure boat. (3)
Red-purple lanterns from the eaves, coloured handrails, simply bored and hushed during the day. . . .
(A crow's shadow, reflecting in the dirty water, flits.)
The singing maidens, tired, will sleep. Jewelled necklaces removed, lips peeled;
no fiddles, no clappers sound.
In the old capital that is endlessly declining,
old temples with roofs, and roofs, with odd cat's ears erect on them.
If you are to hear the pitiful tune of man's declined heart,
go to the Taihuai (4).
If you are to explore the songs of the most profound rise and fall, go to the grassland.

Quails, reeds, black ugly toads and coffins, and wild dogs,
do you not hear in the wind the tinklings of sash jewels (5) of old?
do you not see reflected in the slight puddle (6) the colonnades that used to be?
...

Wherever I go, pebbles.
There's no place where you don't lie about.
Blue lentils, round gravel.
Whichever, seems I've met you before.

Near the roots of weeds white with dust,
around a utility pole, a road marker, along a fence,
smashed by cars, sprung by the hoofs of a draft horse,
trampled under shoes, kicked away by a wooden clog,

but no one pays any mind.
That they treated you cruelly, even that you were there.
By chance, someone may pick you up,
but only so he may capriciously throw you into the distance.

Those like you, in China,
were called "dark people", were named "black heads". (1)
Pebbles. You remain in silence,
from century to century, waiting for what?

In which direction are you looking?
You do not answer. But I know.
That after all the clutter's gone from this earth,
you will be the ones that remain.
...

1
How their breath stinks.
From their mouths, suffocating steam.

Their backs wet, how slimy, like the rims of the hole for a grave.
So repellent as to make you feel nihilism,
oh, melancholy.

Their bodies like mud bags,
their dusky heaviness. Lethargy.

Gloomy bounciness.
Sad rubber,

how stuck-up their minds are.
How banal.

Freckled faces.
Large scrotums.

Being pushed by crowds of these, so raw-smelling as to turn your nose blue, always
was I thinking of the opposite direction.

The streets where they came and went like gathering clouds,
jostling, were, to me,
as desolate as the Alaska
that I saw in old films.


2
Them. Those so-called ordinary folks.

They are the ones
who drove Voltaire out of the country, threw Hugo Grotius into jail.
They are also the ones who churn this globe up
with dust and talkativeness, from Batavia to Lisbon.

The ones who sneeze. The ones who spit bits of food out of their mustaches. The ones who fear, point at those who stifle yawns, show stand-offish gestures, and break rules, and shout, Rebels! Lunatics! and gather together, babbling. Those. They are husband and wife for each other. Mistresses. Sons who inherit their true natures. Toads with dingy blood. Or factions. Or again their connections. And countless matings; the body-to-body walls seemed to block the ocean currents.

Onto the sea they'd been pushed into like a flow, the sleety sun poured down.
Along the boundlessness of the sky they'd look up at, there always was a metal net.

. . . Today's their wedding celebration.
Yesterday was their Flag Day.
All day, in the slush, they heard an icebreaker hitting the ice.

Constantly bowing, rubbing flippers with flippers, rolling their torsos like barrels, bustling with nothing but their repellence, emptiness, they went on soiling the seawater visibly with the bubbles of their own urination.

Warming one another with their body temperatures, hating the cold they'd face if they left the down-and-out crowd, they searched for commiserating looks, called to one another in thin voices.

3
Oh, they were, each and every one of them, darker than the midnight streets, they weren't aware in the slightest that the ice block carrying them split quickly, without a scream, and started to slide silently over the abysmal depths.
Opening their obscene-looking tail flippers, waddling,
they crawled about on the ice,
. . . talking about literature and such.

Plaintive gloaming.
Hanging scroll of the setting sun ravaged with chilblains!

In the crowd of those offering prayers, casting long, striped shadows, their heads all lined up as far as the eyes can see,
in a manner utterly contemptuous,
all alone,
a fellow turning the opposite way, nonchalant.
Me.
The seal that doesn't like seals.
But he is still the seal that he is
except
"a seal
looking the other way".
...

You must not peer into the sky's depths.
In the sky's depths
gods are jostling one another like white-eyes.

Drifting in the candy-like ether,
an angel's armpit hair.
A hawk's feathers.

The smell of the gods' skin as fierce as bronze burning. The scale. (1)

You must not stare at the sky's depths.
Your eyes would be burned and crushed by the light.

That which comes down from the sky's depths is the power that encompasses
eternity.

The punishment
for those who go against the sky.

Only devout souls ascend.
Standing erect in the mist of the sky,
a single white candle.
—the lighthouse.
...

A state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Finally these guardian deities of the lonely spirit brought the war.
You are not to blame. I, of course, am not to blame. Everything is the doing of loneliness.

Loneliness made them carry guns, even made them, with the bait of loneliness, shrug off their mothers and wives
and leave toward where the flags flapped.
Trinket makers, cleaners, clerks, students,
all turning into folk shaken with the wind.(1)

Every and each one, no distinction among them. All taught to die was best.(2)

Petty, timid, good-natured people, their thoughts darkened in the name of the Emperor, went off like brats, delighted, hubbubbing.

But on the home front, we're nervous,
fearful of an arrow with white feathers, (3)
forcing ourselves to push aside skepticism and anxiety,
we try to spend just this one day, we're all doomed anyway,
drunk on the sake given out. (4)
Egoism, and the shallowness of love.
Bearing it in silence, women wait for rations,
linking themselves like beggars.
People's expressions growing sadder day by day,
the fate of the folk of an all-out nation,
I had not seen, since my birth, a loneliness so immediate, so profound.
But I no longer care. To me, such loneliness doesn't mean anything now.

The loneliness that I, I now truly feel lonely about
is that I can't feel, around me, any desire, not even of a single person,
holding his ground in the opposite direction of this degradation, trying to find the very roots of loneliness as he walks with the world. That's it. That's the only thing.

On 5 May 1945, Boys' Day (5)
...

For many years I had thought that the vessel called the washbasin was something in which we put water or hot water for us to wash our faces or hands. Nonetheless, the Javanese fill it with curry soup in which kambing (lamb) and ikan (fish), chicken and fruit, are cooked, and wait for customers under blooming silk-trees, while Cantonese women sit astride the same washbasin in front of their "wanton guests" to clean their impure parts and urinate into it, making desolate shabori shabori noises.
Desolate noises
in the washbasin.

A rainy sojourn
at the darkening tanjung. (1)

Swayed,
listing,
my tired heart
still can't get rid of the echoes.

As long as my life continues.
Ears. You must listen.

To the desolation of the noises
in the washbasin.
...

The woman's become naked. But
not to wait for caresses.

In the shifting light and dark
her skin faintly smells.
Knowing no lewdness, her
thin bloom,
her fine wrinkles.

Like the marks left by someone hitting,
these aquamarine stains
that remain all over her body
are the fingerprints of those who touched her and went.
Like a fruit left unsold
at the fruit store.

The woman's become naked. Summer clothes
changed to those for autumn, that transience.
...

Staggering. I'm already 51.

When it comes to my wish in this world
it's to see those women once again.
Those women that I slipped by, without
means of conversing with them.

No matter how completely they've changed,
well, it's the same here, with me, isn't it.

I'd love to follow them to the very end
just to hear one utterance:
"Wow, you're the one I knew then?"
...

On the day of my only son Ken's draft physicals (1)
Sea's daybreak
peeling off
like a shark's body.

—the muddy rinse water
that once laundered court ladies' underwear
with rose soap.

—the sea
where, now, only seashells grown so worn and round, barlike arms, barlike legs, faces from which eyes and nose were washed away, featureless hearts and such lie deep at the bottom.

Ah, how far, how remote are
the water veins wasted, exhausted so.
The puffing of death
on bloodless cheeks.

Surely, now, no hair is left
on mankind's head.

Stabbing through the soft skin of the water,
suddenly, the tip of a needle is out.
A submarine.
Unable to bear the suffocation
it has come up to the surface, relieved.

To its very apex, in no time,
all the surviving nerves of the world gather and hear.
The news that both Asia and Europe
have become all bald.

20 April 1944 (2)
...

The joy of buying things for women.
More than a hundred virtuous acts, humane deeds,
more than the lofty spirit, and art,
the happiness of giving gifts to women.

Rejecting everybody (1) and penniless,
putting up with an empty stomach and bedbugs,
getting senile for the rest of it,
I may sleep in a cabin at ship's bottom,

but in nightly dreams and memories,
I'll watch the purchases I gave women
ascend to heaven, to the blue sky
where drifting clouds are light, transient.

Fabrics with various designs, cheap perfumes.
Rings, fake pearls, from street booths.
Dolls, parasols, chocolate,
all, all, go to paradise. Floreat(2).
...

Handgun, knife, axe,
weapons of any kind are lying there, anywhere.
You can take any of them.
Pick up any of them.

The burnt field the colour of soaprock scarlet -
you can go sidewise, go straight,
you're free to pick your way.
There's never been such an expanse.

Bathed in blood and alcohol,
the setting sun
sinks beyond
the naked horizon when,

damn, what's this!
Blocking my way, mushrooming
are nothing but phalluses.
Some even with an anchor tattooed on them.
...

Rocking, rocking,
jostled, jostled,
for so long, I've grown to be
as transparent as this.

But, getting rocked isn't an easy matter, I'd say.

You can see through from outside, can't you? Look.
In my digestive organs
a toothbrush with its brush worn down,
and, a small amount of yellow water.

No, sir, I have nothing as dirty as
a heart. Not by this late date.
Waves took it away
along with the intestines.

Me? Me means
emptiness.
Emptiness, being rocked,
was rocked back, again, by the waves.

I wilt, you may think, but then
I bloom wisteria-purple;
come night, at night,
I light a lamp.

No, what's being rocked, truth be told,
is just the heart that has lost its body.
The thin oblate
that had wrapped the heart.

No, no, it's no more than the tired shadow
of the pain of being rocked, rocked,
jostled, jostled,
until I became as empty as this.
...

The woman had never had it done to her before.
The man, just like a brand-new teacher
conducting a chemical experiment at the podium,
doesn't seem certain of his hands, even after many tries.

He holds her hand gently,
caresses it, then holds it against his cheek,
guides it, unobtrusively,
down to his pants to make her touch it.

Then, he manages to do
many more silly things,
but this is neither because he is unlikeable
nor because she is indecent.

He covers her face with a handkerchief (1)
and, to calm himself,
lights a cigarette, has a drag,
then deliberately unhooks her.

He feigns astonishment at every turn,
and says, in a dumbly excited voice,
"So this is what you call a navel!"
Darn, you know you have one, too.
...

The chest all made of paulownia,
how terribly light it is.

The thin straight grain of the wood called paulownia,
its dry lustre,

the handles on the drawers,
with only the parts the fingers touch,

faintly smudged
with grease.

The white body
set on the cold tatami.

The empty chest
is as sensuous

as the female heart
that has lost all.

The drawer has nothing in it
but a folding sheet with paper strings (1)

and a thick bundle of hair
scythed at its root

crawling, snaking
like a catfish at the bottom.
...

At the fiery rock snout as in mythical times,
the barnacles, crowding, massing, listen to the groans of the earth, the roars of heaven.
Splashes leap deep into the purple cavern, flapping their manes.

The entire seascape of the lucid morning is sent off in briny mists.

At that moment, casting their shadows on the boulders,
the holy lanterns of gold angels offer,
two seagulls fly across the blue darkness. (1)
Toward the platinum lighthouse.
Playing on their thin flutes of life.
...

To the offing. To the ocean where scaly travellers(1) rub their backs, go over one another, compete.
Betting my life on the moment, to the offing, to the offing, I am young.

I have returned. From there, tired of fighting, seeking rest,
to be cradled in an inlet, to sleep, to let myself be rolled in and out, be played with, on the beach of pinewind.

White noon, my legs dangling from the burnt rock under the lighthouse, eyes closed,
in the midst of the commotion of whirling waves, these are the words I heard.
...

Rain threatening any moment in the May sky.
In a grungy port town, a used-shoe store.

All the used shoes hung from the eaves, every one of them,
heels worn, leather torn, all repaired as long as possible, trash no longer mendable.
Delicate types whose rundown state you feel all the more keenly,
dated deep rubber shoes,

student shoes covered with coloured patches,
boots that haven't lost suggestions of power and prestige, children's shoes,
each in its own way, crossing which ocean routes, these ragtag vessels,
now gathered here, all tired.

Oh, what metaphoric views all this.

Even so I try to find a companion that fits my feet.
Yes I know. Leather soles that have turned gritty with the sweat and foot grease of someone somewhere, the pain of a stud sticking out.

Yes I know. The cold of the water that seeps in, the urge to cry,
the deeply sympathetic words that touch us two, that we the down-and-out can understand in our hearts.
...

White rocks, multitudinous wharf roaches scatter.
It's a lonely, darkening shore.
. . . In the offing, a heavy stone mortar is being ground, grinding.

Straight rain unto dry seashells, black codiums, corroded anchors. . . .
Ah, becoming soaked, I sat at a sea corner,
and let the negligence of my life be washed!
It's an ancient soul. The sea!

What's lonely is the evening,
the abyss around me, the battles of waves
. . . Far off, at the tip of sleet-hued tides,
on a branch where great kelps cross,
stands a seahorse, darkening.
...