This Is Not a Book Review

Wild Grass on the Riverbank (Action Books, 2015) by Hiromi Ito is the newest book of translation by Jeffrey Angles, following his previous translation of Ito’s work, a collection of poems published in English with the title Killing Kanoko (Action Books, 2009). I’m not sure how many people in Poetry World know Jeffrey Angles, but as far as translation of contemporary Japanese prose and poetry goes, especially that which is written by female or queer writers, Angles is quite a force: among the many writers he has translated are Chimako Tada, Mutsuo Takahashi, Kiriu Minashita, Hinako Abe, Toshiko Hirata, with full-length collections of work by both Chimako Tada and Hiromi Ito, among others. As a fellow translator of Japanese poetry, I have always admired Angles’s tremendous verve and stamina and astuteness (he is quite prolific, and quite scholarly), in addition to his excellent choice of poets to translate. Of course I am biased: I, too, am keen on translating Japan’s female poets, and it also happens to be that Hiromi Ito is the first Japanese poet I ever translated. In reading this book, as with the previous, Killing Kanoko, I feel great pleasure in revisiting Ito’s work through Angles’s translation.

First I want to revisit the question of bilingual vs. monolingual editions of translations. As a very simple fact, I enjoyed reading Wild Grass on the Riverbank, and felt no need to compare versions. It’s possible that in the past, in an earlier phase of my life as a literary translator, I was more obsessed with the problems, difficulties, and challenges: the ever-present impossibility of it all. I wanted to check the answers at the back of the book, to compare, count the losses, quantify, measure. How successful? How faithful? How accurate? How to navigate the murky waters of linguistic travel? Like a mother unwilling to let her daughter go out in clothes that she herself would never wear—I felt possessive of the Japanese originals, those beautiful poems in my Japanese. It was “my” “mother” “tongue” after all—a visceral part of my identity. How dare anybody create an imperfect replica?

[I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but recently I’ve been contemplating the idea of a “true” (rather than “faithful” or “accurate”) translation. The idea of a translation being “true” to aspects of a work other than the actual words on the page might be a stretch, but is actually quite fascinating. Perhaps to be explored in a later post…]

Here is a truth: ever since I quit my job and thus lost my university office, my home has been awash with books, in a home not built to contain very many. There are books under my desk, in chests of drawers, stacked along the hallway…I can no longer find anything aside from the books that just arrived. And so it is that I was unable to find my copy of Kawara Arekusa, the Japanese original by Ito. And so it is that without being relegated to secondary-thus-subservient status to the original (at least in the physical space of my desk, my hands, my mind at the particular moment), this brand-new English translation by Angles stands tall, proud, wild, lush, in all its glorious sensuality, unflinching and unapologetic, unabashedly human, intermingling one lived experience with another, the lived experiences of humans, animals, plants, all breathing hard, panting, sweating, under the labor of its loving translator, the book comes to me like a memory—I have read this before—I have not only read the Japanese “original,” but I have also read some—not all, but some—other works by Ito, a body of work through which the themes link to one another—themes of sexuality, bodily existence, family, love, migration and transmigration—between the blurred boundaries of life and death, between species and kingdoms, between children and adults…and yes, it is a wonderful, remarkable book. Conclusion: why did I want to find that Japanese copy in the first place?

Instead, the act of reading Wild Grass on the Riverbank triggers my memory of other works of Ito’s—I look back and there they are—corpses, by the river (in the river?)—and the thingness of it, a corpse, a once-living-but-no-longer-alive body, variations on the objectification of that which we love—and I am particularly interested in Ito’s explorations of the human flesh as object, the boundaries between life and death, the super-frank voice she uses to discuss that which is natural, or normal, or simply human, and yet can be problematized as obscene, taboo, sensationalistic.

I said natural, normal, or simply human. That’s too big for me to broach here, especially since one of the objectives of art is indeed to address the human condition. Ito was criticized in her career because she wrote about the struggles of child-rearing in an incredibly frank way. She said things that women may have felt, but dared not speak—or perhaps even dared not think—because these thoughts and feelings were just so wrong, so taboo, so counter to the incredible joy and bliss a new mother is culturally and socially expected to exist in. In Wild Grass on the Riverbank, a child watches her mother masturbating, smells something emanating from her afterwards—“the same sweet and sour scent as always, it was not the smell of passing gas, nor the smell of breast milk, nor the smell of my navel…” (p.26) without completely understanding what has happened. She watches her mother go off to the bedroom with her lover, later hearing the noises “like the sound of a washrag sloshing around in a bucket of water, the slippery sliding sound of scrubbing, the sound of mother’s voice as if she were singing or breaking down in tears” (p.29).

There is something fascinating about the voices evoked by Ito. So there is this sort of repetitive, chanting feel that is related to the sekkyo-bushi influence, and yet that also overlaps with the very honest, innocent voice of children. Perhaps because she has had a number of children herself, the child-voice is never very far away. It’s possible that some people may squirm to read a child-narrator’s witnessing of her mother’s sexuality, but the way it is recounted in such a natural tone helps us forget that in many contexts, sex is considered dirty. But then again, perhaps one should consider the “dirt” in “dirty”—in fact it is in this book, too, where the lush tropical vines forging their way into a woman’s vagina (this, too, in plain sight of the child-narrator) reminds us of the famous Hokusai painting, “Octopus and Shell Diver,” where a woman receives cunnilingus from a giant octopus (note: this painting is more commonly known in English as “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” but there isn’t any evidence of the woman being anybody’s wife—why the unnecessary addition of suggested adultery?).

By the way, the fact that I am only addressing the treatment of sexuality in this book does not mean that it is the only thing going on—there’s a lot to say about many other issues, but it happens to be that one of the things I admire about Wild Grass on the Riverbank is the range of sexuality that it encompasses. Ito’s work creates a fluidity, an openness, about the very nature of human desires and instincts and curiosity. Ito, through her lifetime of writing, does not advocate having sex with plants, or killing your own children, or cutting off the penis of the man you love, but she helps us become more aware and perhaps more accepting of our range of feeling, of emotion, and of the absolutely strange, (and yes, sometimes delirious), state of being human.

In an earlier work, I am Anjuhimeko, a daughter is buried alive in the ground. In Wild Grass on the Riverbank there is a father of uncertain status between life and death—he is alive, has sex, or is dead, is desiccated like a shriveled up plant—

And then mother/ Stood in front of father’s corpse/ Took his penis, white with mealy little bugs, in her fingers/ And snipped it off/ My little brother asked, is it dead? / Mother said, leave it alone and it’ll grow again (p.41)

Here she likens a male body part to a plant “that will grow again,” while also referring to the true story of Sada Abe, a woman who, consumed with love for her lover, killed him in the very act of impassioned lovemaking, and then proceeded to cut off his genitalia and take it with her.

From “Part of a living man”:

And so with sex, with liking, loving someone, if I was bound by these strong feelings, I think I could do it too, could choke a man to death, mess around with his corpse without feeling one bit afraid. Yep, I could. The whole process of the murder of a living thing, I was there, right, and now he’s dead, right, and laying on the floor. So even dead he’s still the same human, right. In one sense he turned from a thing into a thing, in another, from a living thing into a living thing, even if the substance of it changed a little, I think it was only just a transfer.

Again, maybe a stretch, but in continuing to think about translations, variations, versions, while considering the liminal space between the living body and the corpse. I want to think fluidly about translations, and about bodies. I think about the Japanese Buddhist funeral ritual, which includes outfitting the deceased in preparation to cross the rivers of the underworld. (And if I indulge this analogy between living/dead bodies and original/translated texts, perhaps I am taking the translated-disabled text idea of Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson to its logical extreme, but then again, they are the publishers of this very work in question!) But note that part of what fascinated the Japanese public when the whole Sada Abe story broke out was her sheer joy and delight (albeit, yes, deranged) regarding the course of events, how upon her capture she related to police her confessions of love—how very much she loved the man she murdered. How their love, not sanctioned by society, was consummated more in death than in life, absolute possession of the lover being possible in no other way.

Ito is not alone in her fascination with the Sada Abe story. Japanese film critic Donald Richie quotes the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima from the obscenity trials surrounding his film portraying the same story.

The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain liberation. When that which one had wanted to see isn’t sufficiently revealed, however, the taboo remains, the feeling of “obscenity” stays, and an even greater “obscenity” comes into being.
—Nagisa Oshima, from “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film” (1976)

This “desire to see” comes up often in Ito’s writings, old and new:

Corpses are things that, deep in my heart, I’m always thinking that I want to see. So then, watching the river go by, I watch it, thinking, I want to see a corpse, I want to see a corpse. Lots of things go by, right, like trash, small stuff, bubbles, and among them, isn’t there something better, I think, like a corpse? and I’m always looking out for it.
—from “Part of a living man”

And then as I write this, I am hearing the news about the horrible jobs out there, all the horrible images we would come across on Facebook, YouTube, elsewhere on the internet, if not for the legions of third-world employees paid to manually filter them at the cost of their own sanity. It’s similar, yet absolutely different—indulging the desire to see, versus being paid to see it, to the point that it causes severe emotional trauma. And so we are faced with the fact that art is, after all, a luxurious space, where one can indulge these desires—I want to see a corpse—without having to consider the reality of those who have to mourn, to clean up after, to filter from our very screens—that very corpse. And should we be sacrificing the mental sanity of others less fortunate, for the sake of our Facebook? I’m not sure.

And so anyway, why not a bilingual edition? Why do I not need to pick up the original Japanese? Why do I not want to discuss how fluid, how wild, how interesting the translation strategies? Certainly I could have chosen to do that too, but somehow in this current moment, it did not seem like the most interesting thing for me to do. Because Hiromi Ito is a ravenous, ferocious and fearless writer whose writing, while absolutely masterful and exquisite in Japanese, writes words that have more than enough energy to carry itself over to the other side.

And, because everything changes—a text is no more permanent than a body. The original changes, the translation changes, perhaps multiplies, and the readers change. Because it is possible to love the corpse more than the living body. Because my very own thoughts regarding translation, regarding trueness, regarding value, also change over time. (For a lovely video-meditation on change, see this video of Jonas Mekas here.

Hiromi: Once again I put my wild money in the banks of your river.
Jeffrey: Congratulations on your translation.

Goodbye.