Translation Notes
Hachikai’s poetry celebrates the primordial force of life found in humans and other lives and explores the possibilities of subconscious memories beyond individual human experiences. In straightforward, effortless language, sometimes in dialogue with Old Japanese, sometimes with subtle humor, Hachikai opens up a textual space inside our bodies where poetic language regains its vivacious energy, just like she does with her pen name, Hachikai (beekeeper) Mimi (ear).
The four poems translated here are from her fifth and latest collection Kao wo arau mizu (Some Water to Wash My Face, 2015). Themes in this book are wide-ranging, from private matters as the death of her father to historic catastrophes as the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and its subsequent nuclear disaster. Hachikai attempts to reinterpret the present human environment as a “hypothetical structure” that calls for fresh alternative visions. Simple everyday acts like washing one’s face bear renewed importance.
—Kyoko Yoshida
Forgetting even to dissolve the reflections
Water simply raises her eyes toward the surface.
Water simply becomes
bored with the reflections that she can touch
purely on the surface, and sinks, leaving only her face behind.
The mask becomes her ultimate shield
that does not even try to fill the void—
underneath, her sleep is light and polygonal.
Canary-colored mountains, indissoluble,
with dangling ears, mingle and fuss above her.
fussing nagging
When she wakes, the newly-reborn field of vision is breathing.
The floating mountains she couldn’t dissolve
remain bright, wiped off one by one—
Water falls into the heart of Waterness.
Learning how to dissolve,
eyeballs, wishing to perch at the sky’s remote corner,
leisurely seek their abandoned eyelids.
The person I met yesterday had, as it happened,
been expelled from work—
hearing this, my face
doesn’t know where to orient itself.
The lightbulb aging from within its globe softly
sheds on each face a light resembling a fixed decision.
The two of us
are left slightly giddy as the word
corruption resonates between us.
Our lightness ebbs
and then a box of bafflement
washes up ashore.
Like a new species of creature,
furry corruption crawls
raggedly across the dustless floor.
Let’s change the subject.
That’s how we completed the transfer of apples.
when I came to
the calm creaking was a rope
hoisted up
the ground moves away
a single flake falling through the weave of the basket— a feather
its shadow tracing its form falling fluttering
I put my nose to the holes in the basket and peek down at the world below
humanlike figures, the soles of their feet pressed to the ground, make a racket
no memory of which trap I was caught in
the feathery basket is pulled up
as my hackles shedding
in desperate struggles
among the crowd all facing this way
I find myself— our eyes meet
a gut feeling a horn blows
I see a ring of fire burning falling feathers
even when I decide to go
somewhere far, everything remains here
fig leaves flit past my vision and breathe
in and out through the cell walls
soon immersed, water will soak
through the countless holes in the basket
Turning back
In the wrong way
And every last face is tainted
Sidestepping involvement in this world,
Double-checking every step,
Before I know it I’ve joined a line
I don’t recall assenting to
On every OK or STOP or
YES or NO
Double-checking without conviction
We recede without fully leaving
Uttered words trail behind us
And yet, unless we lay out a neat totality,
We are forbidden to pass through the gate
So all I do is to spread
A tentative formation
Into the night of flying geese
Uttered words trail behind us, that is
Not the thing of the past, it’s the present
The sorrow of letters
(handle with care)
The suspension-bridge creaks of
Those vessels known as letters
How would a world be without humans?
OK or STOP or
YES or NO
Every single reply
Up in the air as I swallow
I abstain from the elixir of life
Vote my footing
For involvement in this world
Utterance rewrites the boundaries
Utterance snatches others’ brains
Utterance, humans, this human¿
Pale birds are flying
Therefore, there, the sky emerges
Are they souls who are gone,
Or souls yet to be born?
A fall of down feather layers sleep over gravity
Citruses perch on the new-year branch
Even snow’s rhythm
Possesses that particular citric radiance,
Is it deliberate languidness?
Therefore, it’s transparent around
OK or STOP or
YES or NO
While cleansing every last one of them
The time lodged in individuals burns down, burning out
Involvement becomes noninvolvememt
Or rather,
Uninvolvement with some vestige,
(hence or nonetheless)
With no inconvenience to the sun and the moon’s revolutions
Imagine the world without humans
Sharing the earth and water, we borrow its pillow at a tentative abode
Before YES or NO
If, upon birds’ snow white winks and wingbeats,
The ocean’s breath is reflected in changing colors,
The sea passage of involvement
Or uninvolvement will be found
Carrying the invisible YES and NO
Uttered words always and still trail
Behind us
Becoming light
Before making it on time
Notes:
[1] The title is based on an old saying in Japanese: “If fish has a heart, so does water” (魚心あれば水心), approximately meaning, “Claw me, and I’ll claw thee.”
[2] Based on an old folk song “Kagome-Kagome” and children’s game based on it. Its mysterious lyrics refer to a bird captured in a basket.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: © Ivan Ivanovič. Source: Unsplash. Photograph taken at: Veľké Lovce, Veľké Lovce, Slovensko. Published on September 15, 2021. Reproduced here under the Unsplash license.
Translator | Kyoko Yoshida
KYOKO YOSHIDA (1969- ) writes fiction in English and translates from/into Japanese. Her stories are collected in Disorientalism (Vagabond Press) and Spring Sleepers (Strangers Press). She translates contemporary Japanese experimental poetry and drama into English and contemporary American fiction into Japanese. Her book translations include Nomura Kiwao’s Spectacle & Pigsty (2011, with Forrest Gander, Best Translated Book Award in Poetry) and Proud Son by Matsui Shu (with Andy Bragen). She teaches at Kyoto University.
Author | Mimi Hachikai
MIMI HACHIKAI (1974- ) is a prominent voice of contemporary Japanese poetry and a recipient of many major awards. As a postgraduate student of Classic Japanese Literature at Waseda University, she won the Nakahara Chūya Prize with her debut collection Ima nimo uruotte iku jinchi (1999), which was translated into English as The Quickening Field by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Since then, Hachikai has been a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, children’s stories, essays, and reviews, and translates books for children and Japanese classics such as Hōjōki into modern Japanese. She teaches creative writing at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.
