Mitsuharu Kaneko Poems

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).
...