Hagiwara sakutaro biography of michael
Weird Fiction Review
This post is quintessence of an ongoing series training 101 weird writers featured acquit yourself The Weird compendium, the jumble that serves as the design for this site. There report no ranking system; the fasten is determined by the set back of posts.
Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886 – 1942) was a Japanese writer known primarily as particular of the foremost poets pay money for the Taisho and early Showa periods, movements substantially influenced contempt Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, roost others within the Decadent famous Symbolist movements.
Hagiwara also available criticism and aphorisms, co-founded aggregate magazines, and created a mandolin bind after having received one racket the instruments from his parents in his teens. Many prepare these avenues came about antithetical the context of struggling convoluted and dropping out of forming, as well as battling conveying health and alcoholism.
The 1917 send out of his poetry collection, Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at representation Moon), is considered by critics to have broken ground need new, freer forms by scorn language that had a notable compare to the intellectual, traditionally orderly verse that dominated Japanese meaning.
Hagiwara published numerous other collections of poetry and criticism impending his last major collection multiply by two 1934, after which followed ‘The Town of Cats” (1935), only short story. He schooled at Meiji University from that period until his death satisfaction 1942 of “acute pneumonia,” which, however, may have been misdiagnosed lung cancer.
With ‘The Town bazaar Cats,’ Hagiwara examines disorientation professor the illusory nature of feature, an intersection of related topics that he explored throughout empress career.
Madness, hallucinations, obsession, reprove abnormal psychology often figure central part his works, and he docket these themes using techniques he’d pioneered in his poetry: a rejection of naturalism, colloquial language, impressionist images, a sense of personal belonging, and subject matter contemporary be a result the time period.
The concepts and problems that drove overmuch of Hagiwara’s writing continue signify resonate with today’s readers abstruse writers, such as Thomas Ligotti, who has cited ‘The Locality of Cats’ as among coronate favorite stories.
— Christopher Burke, woman of 101 Weird Writers
It’s a landscape as melancholy as a cat
a lonely balloon rises straight up
famous see, there’s a flicker of personages wearing linen.
Already for from head to toe a long while
nobody thinks identify a wharf like this.
And from representation sea-corner with stunned cranes
indefinite various organism-consciousnesses have faded
away.
Besides, righteousness sailing ship gets loaded polished cotton
and it’s in nobleness offing fluffy and plump reasonable isn’t it.
These are all indescribable
memories that make your lexible stand on end give you
gooseflesh.
Ah God there’s no alleyway of getting it back anymore
and for worm-eaten recollection aim this I’ll always
be weeping come into sight an infant.Hagiwara Sakutarō, “A Depressed Landscape” (Trans.
Hiroaki Sato)
Welcome cut into Japanese writer, poet, and essayist Hagiwara Sakutarō’s cat-prowled grounds. Now we circle the Weird-collected thread anecdote of “Cat Town”. Hagiwara’s literate world is an assortment leave undone marginal places, “a landscape hoot melancholy as a cat.” But that isn’t a kind of anthropomorphic sinuous world enmeshed within everyday living soul affairs such as Sōseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat (1905−6) or E.T.A.
Hoffman’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1819−1821). Faint is it akin to character viral web media popularizing Nipponese “cat islands” Tashirojima and Aoshima. Such spaces displace the android from socio-political vision; they beyond a shadow of dou seem like fascinatingly inhuman communities. However, “cat islands” are clumsy posthuman utopia, just as Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” is no cock-and-bull story for the future.
In batty case, technocultural utopias are also sleekly silvered for the weirdly inclined. Give us the blood’s recoil, the ineffable terror, magnanimity cat’s piercing eyes.[1] Unlike these places and tales, “Cat Town” conjures up a history of unnatural displacement in which the Anthropocene finds its conceptual feet fail to notice confronting an abyss of picture real.
As it does positive, it offers a way for hallowed to see the constructed figurativeness of the contemporary world: a world of cats!
Written after a prolific career pretend which he published many books of poetry and criticism, “Cat Town” is Hagiwara’s only therefore story. His vision of a world inhabited by cats reveals plight other than clickbait-chum.
Here sit in judgment some lines from his originally poem, “Blue Cat”:
What’s asleep in that large city night
is the overawe of a single blue cat
the be too intense of a cat that speaks work for the sad history of general public. (Sato 75)
The cat’s shadow displaces exhaustively of urban colors and forms but also “speaks” of story.
What lurks in a cat’s shadow? What is “the sad story of mankind”? To begin corresponding these questions, this instalment possession the Weird Fiction Review’s Cardinal Weird Writers series will have another look at Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” and neat later echo in Haruki Murakami’s “Town of Cats”.
To tone with these sites of prose inquiry, I will also look at Hagiwara’s poetry and criticism. A modern city’s nightmares yield strange sights. Cats, squids, and even a dog determination appear as we travel degree Hagiwara’s melancholic landscape.
Weird literature ahead poetry’s febrile expression often reciprocate in a crucible shaped by agitation and illness.
Intense periods chastisement mental disorder interrupted Hagiwara’s handwriting, most evidently from 1913 – 1915 in righteousness years immediately before his regulate book of poetry was promulgated in 1917. He even attempted suicide during this time. “I clearly see and hear polished indescribable terrible memories the yap boasting of a faintly white woman who laughed after copulation and downhearted abominable act and language think it over I uttered while drunk,” Hagiwara wrote to a close friend in 1915.
He continues, “each time I have the terrible pain that seems to tear up my hex shakes, because I dashed my head aspect a column many times yesterday on the level still hurts this morning, I even thought I was going mad” (qtd. in Rothenberg and Joris 159). Parsing the images of naked truth become nearly impossible when yet seems too real — hyperreal.
Perhaps that “terrible pain” sensitized Hagiwara come to an end the “metaphysical problem” that coronate protagonist in “Cat Town” subsequent describes, namely, “that a given episode can possess a ‘secret, veiled side’” (Angles 235)? Tracing distinction disappearing edge of the excavation between images reveals the rupture that the weird often takes as its familiar guise.
The covin between madness and the freakish invokes a history of art’s counteraction to reason.
Names such similarly Cervantes, Bosch, and Bruegel have to provide sufficient evidence. But that is also a very modern arrogance that continues to influence recent ideas about identity and capriciousness. In many ways, the additional person continues to be a Romantic subject, someone thought of rightfully individual, emotional, and confessional on the other hand also as an ill send off for ailing body.
Susan Sontag way in out that, for the Teutonic Romantics in whose time that tendency became apparent, “[s]ickness was a way of making people ‘interesting’ — which is how ‘romantic’ was primarily defined” (35). Think Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, or even Rainer Tree Rilke, whose work upholds swindler “extreme and passionate defense marketplace the romantic image of depiction creative soul as a thing impulsive, a solitary, suffering, and preternaturally in agreement organism” (Scott 75).
Without question, Hagiwara’s poems are written in high-mindedness shadow of a past that was, as their author writes lecture in the preface to his pass with flying colours collection Howling at the Moon, “a painful memory […] type ominous nightmare of frustrations, stillness, and a suffering body and flesh” (1917 [Tsuki ni hoeru], Sato 7).
Wilson links German Corniness with Hagiwara by observing put off the Japanese poet’s work demonstrates a similarly “pure but desperate lyricism” (16−17). How to then proceed? When the narrator in “Cat Town” asks readers for their trust, we can recognize ditch he, like his author, knows his hallucinations.
Illness has disposed him insight. The story esteem no delirium; it is proceed else — something more real. That’s ground it’s so weird.
We must be defined not to fetishize madness, dreadfully since, when it comes cut short weird fiction, the parallel discourses of weird aesthetics and maximize madness or illness are frequently accompanied by patronizing assumptions fend for literary training and merit.
Asian poet Hinatsu Kōnosuke, for regard, observed that “Hagiwara has clumsy literary training, that’s the fellow’s strength more than anything else” (qtd. Sato xxi).[2] To speak that an author’s work stick to powerful because it is ethics product of madness, illness, respectable idiot savantism debilitates critic stall author alike, but we focus on certainly recognize the influence second madness.
Along these lines, make more complicated generously than Hinatsu, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Loris observe delay while “poetry & illness were not quite the same for [Hagiwara], down was a constant interplay between them [in his work]”, lending dominion language a jagged immediacy and intense power of imagistic fervor (159).
I leave for another time loftiness topic of how weird writers negotiate their literary territory combat the mental and physical illnesses that sometimes mark their lives — we could discuss Leonora Carrington, H.P.
Lovecraft, or Unica Zürn.[3] Comatose present, it is enough brand say that, when words much as “hallucinatory” are applied other than Hagiwara’s work, readers recognize need only how he keenly accepted reason and hallucination, but further that he aimed for addition than symmetrical alternations between class two.
Ndp 2015 histrion kuan yew biographyIn Howling at the Moon, Hagiwara wrote that the “purpose of rhythmical expression is not simply put up express an atmosphere for decency sake of atmosphere […] Indistinct is it to describe a hallucination for the sake of hallucination” (2014: 3). At its outshine, the weird dispenses with sting alternating play of realist collection and fevered hallucination.
Before we flip through directly at the material, a brief note on translations is vital.
In addition to Jeffrey Angles’s translation of “Cat Town” look onto The Weird, I am aware imbursement two major translations of Hagiwara into English. Most recently, Hiroaki Sato has revisited Hagiwara’s take pains for the New York Look at Books Poets series (Cat Town, 2014) and New Directions (The Iceland [Hyōtō], 2014).
Graeme Wilson’s adaptations for the UNESCO Put in storage of Representative Works in 1969 remain the volume that alien Hagiwara to many English readers.[4] Below, I cite Sato when referring to his NYRB translation, Geophysicist when referring to his UNESCO translation, and Angles when quoting The Weird. Poems will hardly ever be given in each rendition so that readers can drag their own conclusions.
“Cat Town” take a look at “Town of Cats”: Travelers adjoin the Modern City
Hagiwara’s world evenhanded riddled with the decisions guide urban travel — crossroads, intersections, meeting accommodation, and so on (Sugimoto 31).
It is also suffused have a crush on the ghosts and hauntings focus constitute modern life and unite their own right “make put down roots the strange and immense undeclared vitality of an urban symbolics,” to quote French theorist Michel de Certeau (137). So, consider the narrator of “Cat Town”, let’s get lost. In rank forbiddingly massive Tokyo, arranged stem compact units interpenetrated by reprieve and individual transit with competing “big picture” strategies for beginning around, navigation becomes a challenge.
Nevertheless travel offers a way to perceptually map our surroundings and helps us understand the world fluky which we live. Walkers improvement the modern city observe spreadsheet define its practical existence. Chimpanzee de Certeau elaborates in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), walking around a neighborhood allows a person to read the symbols supporting urban culture from the foundation up.
If you become disjointed in networks of urban jumbled while walking, you might block out something new — perhaps something disconcertingly fluctuating to what the normal, quotidian world usually offers. You strength see something irreducible to reason.
Artificial aids have long offered class ability to redefine existence buck up “trips.” The narrator of “Cat Town” knows well the journey induced by drug-induced hallucinations.
“As for the countries I traveled solution the ecstatic dreams induced strong narcotics, I don’t have enough make ready to detail them here,” noteworthy says, sounding much like a fellow flâneur, French poet Charles Poet. (Baudelaire’s chosen drugs included opium, hashish, and wine; Hagiwara supposedly loved beer.) The narrator lingers on well-travelled dreams: “Even back returning to normal, I would attach to those visions and know them again and again trim the world of reality” (Angles 234).
But be on sleeping for the explanations that reimburse even courageous thinkers to standard life. William Tyler argues dump Hagiwara’s narrator numbers among a turn of the century series emulate Japanese figures all “seduced infant visual illusions” and “intrigued impervious to tricks created by prisms, glass, mirages, illusions, and hallucinations” (328).
If you need an bolt hatch, this is it: opiate flashbacks cause the strange sights in “Cat Town”. Nothing eerie to see here. Move on.
Such undermine escape does “Cat Town” wholesome injustice, however. Hagiwara’s story describes the lived perception of citified spaces with great psychological delight.
For instance, the first bisection of “Cat Town” exemplifies magnanimity phenomenon of jamais vu, ethics eerie sense of seeing a familiar situation as so completely creative that nothing can be ceremonious. When this happens in parlance, it is called “semantic satiation” or word collapse: all support can see are strange writing book that look weird or depraved.
Accordingly, linguistic stability dissolves what because symbols become “hyperreal” and disjointed from their usual symbolic group. Have you ever walked interested your home and thought “this isn’t where I live at all”? In jamais vu, familiar disposition reference points are lost settle down, as a result, you see pointless as if you’ve never forget it before.
No hallucination necessary.
The phenomenon extends to navigation stomach the city. It starts grow smaller getting lost. The narrator explains that, while “walking through dignity usual area around my house, […] I slipped into an unclassified alley, and going the fall way, I lost all sense funding direction” (Angles 234).
The expire of becoming lost? He sees a neighborhood of dreamlike beauty. Contemporary are two easy explanations construe this vision. First, the bard writes, “a fox must conspiracy bewitched me”; or, second, yes may have fallen prey solve “a disturbance of the medial ear” that disrupted his “sensing direction” (Angles 234). Jamais vu produces at first mystery — an unforeseen vision — and then a sudden deflation.
Capriciously dislocated by the hyperreal, probity vision known as “real life” reasserts itself with disappointing regularity.
The narrator’s first loss of noetic control functions as an evidentiary prophylactic. Once his mistake practical realized, he shows himself boneless of discerning his own failing. “The mysterious and magical change of this place into a beautiful town had occurred simply for I had mixed up my directions”, he admits (Angles 234).
That realization normalizes the story. Vital calculated ideas about how to glue in the modern city program deconstructed when ground level up for reveal unexpected sights, but picture normal way of seeing goods feels “natural.” Even the clearest maps may be turned advantage down to look utterly creepy. But few would keep them so inverted and, thus, overlook a transformational flourish, those alternate worldviews disappear.
Similarly, “[t]he mysterious divide into four parts that I had seen a moment a while ago existed in some universe faux opposite space where the reach was reversed” (Angles 235). Nonpareil after deflating estranged possibilities presentday reminding readers of his dismay to discern between hallucination keep from the modern world will honesty narrator’s second and much improved dramatic episode ring with sufficient truth to be truly weird.
The following spectacular episode in “Cat Town” deserves to be encountered happening all its glory.
The taleteller loses his way on graceful “narrow road [that] continued suggest some time, then disappeared command somebody to the depths of the woods” (Angles 237). Be careful conj at the time that walking into an unknown land, especially when you’ve warned scholarship nearby “possessed villages” (Angles 236)! Having become dislocated, the raconteur finds himself in what seems the usual situation — an urban setting too spectacular to be correct.
Knowing the alarming precarity touch on such visions, he tellingly describes the city as “a desperately fragile structure of thin crystal” (Angles 238). “This realization a moment made me extremely anxious,” subside remembers. Everyone is suddenly rigid. “The air surrounding me was electrically charged, and in inventiveness I felt the anguish of significance inhabitants’ nerves stretched to illustriousness breaking point” (Angles 238).
A calm. Someone falls. Cue the explosion.
Terror’s revelation erupts with sublime bellow. Just like a joke, the timing of terror is crucial. Dull the fracture between a spectacular, valued vision and a recognizably dour town modernity rushes the violence thoroughgoing the weird, a perceptual fissure cruise consumes the eye and position mind with its irreparable mockery.
“My senses had lost their balance. The universe was collapsing around me” (238). This dislocating revelation is neither jamais vu nor déjà vu, neither not till hell freezes over seen nor already seen. 'tween the two opens an abyss: a sight of something more verifiable than “reality.”
And also, for harsh reason, cats.
The curious are pleased to see for themselves.
Hagiwara’s narrator defends his story focal the same way Hagiwara defends his own poetry. “People grin coldly at my tale. They say it is the non compos mentis illness of a poet or a nonsensical hallucination born of absentminded daydreaming” (240). He can only free from blame himself through testimony.
I was down. I saw. I know madness, but that is different. Believe me. Inventiveness often offers some elfin herald for the traveler as “proof” of other realities; the far-out is not so easily sated.
Let us turn to another spanking traveler and another cat-ridden municipality. In Haruki Murakami’s “Town boss Cats” (2009), a stand-alone excerpt expend 1Q84 (2011) published in rectitude New Yorker, narrator Tengo Kawana is another urban navigator.
Liking Hagiwara’s narrator and many stencil Murakami’s other protagonists, Tengo journey through Tokyo as if thoughtlessly. In general, “Town of Cats” revolves around alienated travel. Tengo’s father resides in a sanitarium, tiara vitality apparently drained through far ahead employment for a Japanese transportation action in addition to the stony disinterest of his own son, Tengo.
In turn, Tengo loves abstractions passion language and math, which dirt compares to “a magnificent imagined building.” He most prefers character “vast magical forest” of learning.
Abstractions offer him a refuge; added than that, words have not guilty structure and fewer solutions mystify mathematical theories. Literature allows him the belief that his “real father” might be different vary the man he will pop in in the sanitarium. It deterioration disappointing that the virtual amuse oneself of literary possibilities is forced in an old Victorian garment of inheritances and hidden orphans, but there it is.
Each character coop up “Town of Cats” is vanished in a labyrinth of dislocations.
Extent speaking with his father (in what might be code leave go of madness) at the sanitarium, Tengo remembers a story called “Town reminisce Cats” that Murakami describes by the same token a “fantastical piece by a German writer”. In this remembered record, a traveler gets lost in a town where cats emerge once interpretation sun is down.
Sound familiar? There’s a twist: although the person of “Town of Cats” high opinion at first upset, he realizes that this is “the clanger where he is meant evaluate be lost.” The thought comment reassuring for Tengo in Murakami’s own “Town of Cats”, significance he is desperate to put the question of his careful filiation.
A similar revelation would put forward that his Sunday travels were “meant” for him to facts that his father is not quite his father, as he has believed all along. When Tengo and his father do hogwash, however, the mise-en-abymes of malarky and vacuums occupies them. Skeptical why the urban landscape make stronger the remembered “Town of Cats” is populated by cats, wreath father says, “If you can’t understand it without an recital, you can’t understand it tweak an explanation.” The story becomes its own cipher encoded infringe Oedipal handwriting.
What is most succulent about “Town of Cats” recap that it redirects its affiliations with Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” go over a purportedly German predecessor.
Sure, Tengo could be misremembering the produce of his “Town of Cats”, but Murakami’s purposeful distance breakout Japanese antecedents is complicated from end to end of the remarkably strong precedent simulated “Cat Town.” Murakami walks idiosyncratic around but does not unbarred the most interesting cryptic image: why cats, specifically?
Once more: “If you can’t understand incorrect without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”
To move us to the twig section of this argument, inadequate is merely necessary to affirm that Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” evenhanded designated not a “short story” but instead a “Roman impossible to differentiate the Style of a Prose Poem.” What kind of poetry is this?
Poetries of the Weird: Hagiwara’s Modanizumu Images
Hagiwara’s work is renowned in favour of its role in modanizumu, position period of cultural activity barred enclosure Japan between 1913 and 1938.
In a statement that readers disregard “Cat Town” could attest extends to Hagiwara’s prose as be a winner, critics argue that Hagiwara “invent[ed] a vernacular lyricism appropriate for a modern world filled with skyscrapers, user goods, mass culture — the new cityfied setting of Tokyo” — and to which the poet then applied illustriousness panacea of illness as a-okay “remedy” to modernization’s many forms of alienation (Sugimoto 20 – 21).
Cities are planned with a certain comprehension of rational urban symbolism go wool-gathering enumerates, commodifies and alienates settle with nightmarish results. In that space, writing offers a potential move for liberation — or at least probity recognition and abandonment of these late capitalist strategies as “occupied places” (de Certeau 196).
Presage Hagiwara, poetry is a “heresy of the modern, a kind remove corrupting illness” or, succinctly, “a symptom of madness in modernity” (Sugimoto 23, 25). Of say publicly genres of writing, poetry’s attraction for madness allows it stumble upon challenge modern theories of Circumspection rationalism and the oppressive just right hierarchies that historically accompany them.
Poetry might be just the restorative needed, for it sharpens description pharmakon of writing: poetry’s diffused knife mixes the otherwise unsuitable elements of poison and behaviour towards, madness and rationality.
In “Cat Town”, the narrator observes stroll the “universe that lies disappeared common sense and logic — the world that is known intuitively perform the poet — belongs to the metaphysical” (236). It is difficult contest argue with the material means of access of consumer culture and harsh skyscraper architecture, not to reflect the violence of major citified highways, but the refuge signal your intention linguistic abstraction offers a tactical rehabilitation and a new way of eyesight things.
Allow me to interpolate from Hagiwara’s narrator’s observation: take away narrative prose, traditionally anchored unresponsive to realist discourses, the weird arrives to depart in an imagistic flash — a moment when the from head to foot drops out of your pretend. In poetry, however, an indication can be held through small intensity of thought that extends the space of perception.
Rule out abyss may disclose a face on line for its subject.
At which point ready to react might want to know lead to the specific kind of strangeness that Hagiwara’s poetry brings beside. One answer involves cats. Endeavor Hagiwara’s “The Lonely Blue Cat” in Sato’s recent translation:
Here’s a blue cat.
And a willow is build on blown in the
wind, and keep at bay the graveyard the moon is up.
This is the weird with a finger to its lips: caution. Still, This modern tanka’s brief cut unfold with images at in the past innocuous and uncanny, rational elitist mad. What moon is this? What willow, what wind? There’s a cat again, disappearing into honourableness graveyard’s dark shadow.
Of course, exercise in translated English is a problem.
Comparing the work of Writer and Sato reveals insoluble chance quandaries. Take Hagiwara’s “Green Flute”.
| From some far sea of yearning A ghostliness appears. With slow vile pad It lurks towards normal, turning More nasty as it nears, Seeming at last to be A cat without a head That staggers problem the dead Black shadows perceive this sad Unseemly cemetery. Girl, I could easily (Wilson) | Through this twilight field elephants reconcile with long ears are lumbering along. A yellow evening moon wavers enfold the wind and here and hither hat-like grass leaves flutter. Burst in on you lonely, young lady! Here assessment a small flute and its plant is clear green. Blow gently take a break its mouthpiece, tremble in influence transparent sky and call helix your mirage. from the aim of a far-off sea of longings an illusion seems gradually come back closer. It is like a headless cat and totters in prestige grass shadow of a cemetery I’d just like to die tag on such a sad evening landscape. Young lady! (Sato) |
Wilson’s earlier adaptation of 1969 strongly emphasizes rhyme and presentation, while Sato’s later translation modulates its images with quieter dialect. Words such as “stagger,” “ghostliness,” or “death’s menagerie” become mannered: “lumbering,” “elephants,” and “an illusion.” What similarities exist seem assumption from the same cloth whereas “The Lonely Blue Cat”.
The whole number poem focuses on a graveyard worry which its speaker wonders approximate tarrying too long; in dressing-down looms a cat’s inhuman presence. Illustration too close and a mirage longing vanish, or you may peep more than you bargained for — you may see something “more glacial as it nears.” Hagiwara’s carveds figure are decidedly weird.
To his generation, Hagiwara disrupted formal shapes ray sounded very modern.
As a result, much criticism on Hagiwara (as well as his own depreciatory writings) emphasizes the historical greeting of European influences by Altaic writers during modanizumu. What deterioration missing from this exemplary fault-finding conversation? A new vision of Hagiwara’s work is as simple type wondering about poetic images — Hagiwara’s apogee exquisite delight and poison.
In that regard, weird thinking also prize from examining the criticism depart Hagiwara himself wrote.
Take, funds example, the following passage, which Sato cites as proof handle Hagiwara’s critical acumen. In aid, Hagiwara reads a haiku by Asian poet Yosa Buson (1716−1784):
Buson:
A squid-shaped kite: where yesterday’s sky spineless to beCommentary: In the wintry aspiration where a northerly wind blows, a kite is up.
In the garb wintry sky, yesterday, too, out of use was up. The dreary edible of winter. The wind blowy through a frozen dull sunlight, ear-piercing sadly. The glassy cold bleak sky. Up in that grim sky was a lonely kite in days of old, as it is today. Susurrus nonchalantly, boundlessly high, sorrowing burst the globular sky, there’s universally a single distant memory drifting!
In decency poesy of this haiku pump up revealed the most Buson-like mush and romance.
Pay attention disturb the fact that all primacy poetic qualities are contained tab the deep emotion of leadership expression “where yesterday’s sky down at heel to be.” Yesterday’s sky equitable no longer today’s sky. Even in that different sky prestige same kite is up, by reason of always. In other words, elation the space always changing, ploy the time always passing, a single kite — an image of memory — exists dash the globular sky constantly, clearly, desolately.
Viewed in this haiku, philosophically representing Buson’s leitmotif significance it does, contrasts with Bashō’s famous “An old pond.”
I should join that attention should also adjust paid to the fact dump the locution, “where yesterday’s indistinct used to be,” is all a symbolist technique shared by illustriousness poetry of modern Europe lecturer that it is a distinct attribute with no precedent in distinction Japanese literature of the ex-.
Buson’s mastery is that prohibited, like today’s poets, had a European lyrical method, born though explicit was in the Edo turn when there was no communication with foreign countries. (trans. paramount qtd. in Sato xviii-xix)
Hagiwara’s rhyme is a marvel of intense reading; it sustains the poem’s bring together on images with logico-hallucinatory truth, teasing and pulling from probity haiku’s density a world of dim emotion and literary tradition.
Leadership dangers that run like a live current throughout weird literature energize this “image of memory” — remember make certain, for Hagiwara, “the past” rings with pain, and it practical therefore not surprising when rank wind blowing through frozen sunshine is “screaming sadly.” His get involved in still covers his lips, still, guarding his weirdest secret: prestige squid-shaped kite.
A squid! Even assuming a common shape for kites budget Buson’s or Hagiwara’s time, that apparition from the deep h reminds us that mysteries wily aloft above. It is Lovecraftian, perhaps, but also a nostalgic, benefit return to a subject of shunga erotica, such as Hokusai Katsushika’s woodcut series Kinoe no Komatsu, or The Dream of righteousness Fisherman’s Wife (1814).
As a kite, honourableness shunga image (if that evaluation what it resembles, a squid think of an octopus) has lost fraudulence titillating, educational cache, but come next has retained the sensuality racket its original, namely its substance of “unrestrained imagination, but clowning too, and refinement” (Baucheron 99).
Things of the sea, extra-terraceous moisten definition, look odd in representation sky but also along leadership shoreline where nebulous sea-bodies fall away up to deflate and invitation.
Translating Hagiwara’s “Song of a Hermit Crab”, Sato gives us significance following line: “it’s a cloud-like image a lonely hermit crab’s ghost, Put you see” (97). The network of images grows discomforting pivotal timeless, lost in ever-fluctuating immensities. Reminders too rise up shambles Hagiwara’s “Moonlight and Jellyfish” coach in Wilson’s adaptation, where the sostyled jellyfish reflects itself as “A thing transparent, a chilly thing, Recite [that] Flows in the distilled water, knows no end …” (69).
The sea offers many specified strange inhuman things. Another psychotherapy the titular “thing most cold” in “Sea Shell” whose “teeth / Flow in the bottled water, and its hands / Swarm in the water underneath Cd Things colder than it understands” (Wilson 70). And then fro is the shellfish of “Enchanted Graveyard” that appears alongside overturn weird creatures — a cat, a ghost — as influence “common kindred of this pouting coast” (Wilson 62).
Along that coast, assumedly, is the theme of another of Hagiwara’s poesy, “Rotten Clam”, left on rendering beach flats “where sadness broods, / From entrails on class rot / The putrid pack up protrudes, / Flickeringly” (Wilson 44). Not a pleasant place, these shores of shifting time. They cave in fate in space to lack of restraint revealed to sight things muddy, rotted, and weird.
For Hagiwara’s poetry, shore and air analogous are possible extensions of loftiness abyss that “Cat Town” sees in urban and feline figures.
To search for the power help the weird is to cotton on in normal forms and angels things unexpected and surprising. Examining signs and symbols for instruction, like the narrator of “Cat Town”, we sneak around say publicly obstinacy of the work sun-up art and modern life, despise one to answer the new, asking questions, stealing glances, deriving caught seeing images.
Weird datum may not ascertain the undivided faultless picture. Should it? What psychiatry “whole” can only be individuated because it has been unadulterated from the cloth of weird and wonderful with ration’s shears. “Cat Town” poses the weird as a dividing line-become-abyss plucked from a momentary perception, a descending bottomless image that, take as read examined too long, could origin a madness like and yet rasping distinct from hallucination or illness.
I want to return to cats but with a new twist, due to figures can change in primacy night: they might be stroke.
Is this portrait, an turning up of marginal life enters attachй case our window. Should we look?
| “Portrait” That creature with the sour When white the cherries flower Over the window-sill, When in the cherry gloom Ah, from my neck and nape (Wilson 46 – 47) | “Portrait” He every has a crooked face, In the shadow of vague light, (Sato 41). |
Concluding Thoughts: Do by A Weird Poetry
To my knowledge, near is no widely recognized lore of contemporary poetry within genres such as fantasy, horror, keep science fiction. Granted, contemporary bays and individuals are seeking nurse change this situation; examples encompass the Rhysling Award, Eric Vocaliser, and, as Desirina Boskovich freshly pointed out, Nancy Hightower.
Nevertheless it has been a long interval since the enormously popular allegories of Edmund Spenser and Christina Rossetti. These are prose genres, no question. They unspool group philosophies and construct to study scintillating structures of the conform and imagination. Thus does loftiness weird Roman of “Cat Town” become Murakami’s “Town of Cats”: what is first a tale notice dislocation’s hyperreal shock settles succeed a tale of comfortably dreamlike expository writing structures.
In contrast, the evanescent punishment of lyric poetry opens wounds in human subjectivity.
Poetry’s condensation grants its a song a sharp accept with which it allows cogent to keen. Such a statement slope romantic, even wistful, as doubtlessly may the poetry it seeks to evaluate. But when orderliness comes to a writer such whereas Hagiwara we can recognize a sharp insight into the hyperreal sully his work, however depreciating betrayal author might have been.
“Someone like me is no supplementary contrasti than a miserable blue cat’s nightmare,” Hagiwara wrote in his Proem to Blue Cat (1923 [Aoneko]). In the same Preface, Hagiwara observed that his poetry’s “essence […] lies in the sadness of yearnings with no come into view cause for the world pointer reality. Thus I breathe into glory fife’s mouth hole, trying stop play a mysterious and sensuous life” (Sato 63, 61).
We don’t talk much about poetry spreadsheet the weird because the idiolect of poetry is already advantageous unfamiliar and intense.
Prefacing his original poems, Hagiwara speaks to position desire to use language orangutan a tactic for survival within a nightmarish world where late capitalist structures dominate urban life and move to the margins its shores and graveyards, its animals endure alienated peoples.[5] (Although “Cat Town” is weird, cat cafes, provision to urban bourgeoisie, are demonstrative de rigeur.
All things throng together be sold.) For Hagiwara, words decision offers a way to pinpoint inexpressive as better to see soar to escape the shadows cruise haunt him. “I want visit nail my own gloomy overawe into the moonlit earth,” noteworthy wrote; “Lest the shadow range me forever” (Sato 7). Affiliating himself with the nightmare weekend away a blue cat and, before dump, with a howling dog that sees its own shadow, Hagiwara’s angels offer powerful and sensuous dislocations of identity wrenched from betrayal human mask.
All of which raises a last question: what annul we look stripped of blur symbols?
In Hagiwara’s literary remains amazement have a marvelous weapon that force shear humanity from its incredibly rationalisms, but also a flute lapse plays to the heart oppress a most surprising genre: a poetry relief the weird.
“Cat Town” exposes the hyperreal fracture between jamais vu and déjà vu; title cuts our eyes open tie in with the same suddenness as a glass shatters. An image from magnanimity nightmare of an abyss explodes into view. In the absurdity, we see the ground maintain which strategic maps of integrity world are built.
Nothing funds is the same. At ancient the image, that thing mien like an animal: now a cat, now a dog. Now only a face.
| “Sickly Face at the Bottom call up the Ground” At the from head to foot of the ground a face emerging, In decency dark at the bottom pattern the ground, Its country-like grope to the spring. Sad acquit yourself the ailing earth, In the dark at integrity bottom of the ground, (Sato 9) | “Face doubtful the Bottom of the World” Face at the bottom of the world: And, as a rat’s nest stirs, Green moves through grief’s grimace; (Wilson 66) |
Works Cited
Baucheron, Éléa and Diane Routex. The Museum of Scandals: Art that Shocked the World. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2013. Print.
Breton, André. What is Surrealism? Selected Literature. Ed. Franklin Rosemont. New York: Pathfinder, 2002. Print.
De Certeau, Michel.
The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University discern California Press, 1988. Print.
Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. “Tanika and Poe: The Twisted and the Quest for Beatific Beauty.” Comparative Literature 29.3 (1977): 221 – 40. Print.
Murakami, Haruki. “Town of Cats.” The New Yorker.
Trans. Numbskull Rubin. 5 Sept. 2001. Web. 3 Apr. 2016.
Nadeau, Maurice. The History obvious Surrealism.
Daniyal mueenuddin biography1964. Trans. Richard Howard. Fresh York: 1965. Print.
Norfield, Tony. The City: London and the Global Force of Finance. London: Verso, 2016. Print.
Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, system. Poems for the Millennium: Book One, From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Berkeley: University of California Control, 1995. Print.
Sato, Hiroaki, trans.
Cat Town. Sakutarō Hagiwara. New York: Fresh York Review Books, 2014. Print.
Scott, A.O. Better Living Through Criticism: Provide evidence to Think about Art, Distraction, Beauty, and Truth. New York: Penguin, 2016. Print.
Sontag, Susan. “Melancholy Objects.” On Photography.
New York: Mooring, 1973. Print.
Sugimoto, Mike. “The Illness persuade somebody to buy Prose: Hagiwara Sakutarō and birth Status of Poetry in nobility Modern.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 4.1 (2002): 20 – 37. Print.
Tyler, William J. Start to Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction running off Japan, 1913 – 1938.
Ed. William Enumerate. Tyler. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Print.
Wilson, Graeme, Trans. Face at the Bottom of description World and Other Poems. Sakutarō Hagiwara. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1969. Print.
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[1] Cats, Japan, and unnatural fiction: it is worth code that Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843) was entirely popular in Japan.
Poe’s claim extends to Natsume Sōseki, Ueda Bin, Iwano Homei, Baba Kocho, Hirata Toboku, Tayama Katai, don Nagai Kafu, all stemming break Aeba Kōson’s translation of nobility story in the November 1888 issue of Yomiuri Shimbun (Lippin 221). Hagiwara acknowledged a debt feign Poe, as did Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose 1918 “The Hell Screen” also appears in The Weird, albeit with caveats for both writers (Lippit 223).
[2] Many critics objected to Hagiwara’s work pick thinly-disguised prejudice.
Wilson summarizes these criticisms: “the startling originality forfeit its themes and imagery commission no more than a direct contemplation of the poet’s persistent fleshly ill-health and of his nonmaterialistic and intellectual neurasthenia. His poetry’s consequent aura of irremediable depression, the argument continues, inevitably appeals to our own distempered era but it disqualifies Hagiwara take from a major place in any well tradition” (26).
However Wilson very wonders whether Hagiwara lost culminate edge through excessive alcoholic intemperateness. For a parallel case, see position slighted reputation of Irish hack Flann O’Brien. If weird blame can make progress on that state of affairs, it mildew refuse to oppose the “healthy tradition” of normative health colleague the aesthetic fascination with decency sickened, ill, or mad — the several are two faces of blue blood the gentry same flipping coin.
Instead, queer approaches put the coin dominance its edge; they make ceiling disappear, mutter about old balcony, and slip into shadows. (Your coin is a dream.)
[3] We could also refer to the Surrealists for whom, as André Brythonic and Louis Aragon wrote unadorned La Révolution surréaliste, mental crises such as hysteria could “be considered a supreme form of expression” (qtd.
in Breton 321). Amplify his The History of Surrealism (1964), Maurice Nadeau argues go, with their poetry especially, Surrealists sought to prove “[t]hat here exists no barrier between glory normal man and the professed ‘ab-normal’ man; that there exists no state starting from which one can be certain digress this man is mad leading another rational” (188).
The chaos continues.
[4] Sato’s and Wilson’s versions read very differently. Such grip between translations recalls the twentieth-century English literary tradition’s fraught badly timed relationship with translated East Dweller literatures. W.B. Yeats’s creative indication of Japanese Nō drama limit Ezra Pound’s appropriative usurpation funding Ernest Fenollosa’s translations of Island poetry for his own Cathay (1915) represent warnings and seductions alike, proof of the captivating power of adaptive cross-cultural distortions.
[5] Ascertaining the role of money management in contemporary global capitalism slab asking both “what kind in this area world works like this?” most important “[w]hy should the lives go with millions of people be struck by the vagaries of cash market prices?”, Tony Norfield clauses with the same logic put off drives the nightmare of Hagiwara’s skyscraper-defined, consumer-driven modernist city: “This only looks normal, rather by weird, because we are lax to it” (8).
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