| Time of Sky & Castles in the Air: Main | Sawako Nakayasu |
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Ayane Kawata Afterword to Time of Sky & Castles in the Air Ayane Kawata does not mingle in Tokyo with the other Japanese poets. She does not give readings, attend conferences, participate in taidan (formal conversations that are recorded and later transcribed and published), write reviews, or judge contests—her physical presence is almost invisible in the poetic communities of Japan—but throughout the years her work has continued to be published by many of the most prominent poetry journals and publishers in Japan. Her work is not part of any movement, group, or dojinshi (a coterie journal), and she is not associated with any of the joseishi (women’s poetry) movements of postwar Japanese poetry. If Kawata identifies herself as a poet, she does so simply because she writes poems, and not because of any tangible stature or public recognition as a famous poet. Poetry is not a career for her, though poetry is her way of living. And if poetry is not a career, then, Kawata also sees little need for her work to be translated into other languages. It is only with the encouragement of Takashi Hiraide, the enthusiasm of American readers, and the strong support from E. Tracy Grinnell at Litmus Press that this book has come to exist at all, and that we were able to receive Kawata’s permission to publish this book. Even as her translator, I have had almost no direct contact with Kawata herself, and thus, although the poet is living, any mistakes in this translation are entirely my responsibility. I first encountered Ayane Kawata’s work through her Gendaishi Bunko. The Gendaishi Bunko is a paperback series of selected or collected poems by major Japanese poets, published by Shichosha, the monolithic publishing force behind much of contemporary Japanese poetry. Since the 1960s, the series has published close to 200 of these volumes, of which Kawata’s was #122. Her volume was published in 1994 and collects six books in total, from her first book, Time of Sky (Kumo Publishers, 1969), through her second to last complete book at the time, Castles in the Air — A dream journal (Shoshi Yamada, 1991). ::::::::::::::: Kawata is considered a Japanese poet only because she writes in Japanese—she has not lived in Japan for most of her life. She was not even born in Japan—she was born in 1940 in the city of Qiqihar in the Heilongjiang Province of northeast China during the Japanese occupation of the region. She lived with her family in Manchuria until the age of 5, at which point they returned to Japan, to live at first in Saitama prefecture, then the city of Kobe. After abandoning earlier attempts to pursue a life of music or visual art, she married an atomic physicist and moved to Hokkaido—it was only then that Kawata began reading in earnest. About seven years later, in 1969, she produced her first poetry collection, Time of Sky. At the time it was published, Kawata had no personal connections to any poets and simply mailed a copy of the book to poets and artists she admired. She quickly made a strong impression on the literary community, garnering praise from such luminaries as Taruho Inagaki, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, and Koichi Iijima. They wrote her letters, sent her artwork, and invited her to visit. At this point, Kawata was well positioned and on track to become a major poet in Japan, and as proof, she received solicitations to submit poems to major publications. Often a Japanese poet is invited to write a series of poems for the same publication, regularly and under deadline. Kawata gave this a try, and published a few poems in the well-known poetry magazine Eureka. She quickly decided that this mode of writing was not for her, however. The poems she wrote at this time were an attempt to further develop the ideas in Time of Sky, and although she chose to never collect these poems in book form, they are the ones that first caught Takashi Hiraide’s attention. Of them, he says,
Uninterested in following the conventional path to becoming a poet in Japan, and perhaps also with the desire to escape, Kawata soon left the country to take an art-study tour of Italy, where she has since chosen to live most of her life. In addition to living in various parts of Italy, she also spent varying amounts of time living in France, Switzerland, and London. When Kawata wrote Time of Sky, she claims to have felt that she was only capable of writing very short poems. She proved herself wrong, however, as most of her poetry since then has been in the form of longer, lyric verse. Her sixth publication, Castles in the Air, is also something of a divergence from the bulk of her oeuvre and has a completely different method of composition from her other work. Its poems are derived from a notebook the author kept for 15 years, in which she recorded her dreams every morning upon waking. From there she selected and edited the pieces that were collected in the book. The logic in these prose poems may feel familiar to us as dream logic, but we also find in them the complexity and anxiety attendant to a lifetime spent living in a culture not one’s own, an ongoing reckoning with one’s dangers and desires, and the difficulty (and absurdity) of trying to communicate with others. Kawata also notes in an interview that at the moment she completed this book, she ceased to remember any dreams at all. ::::::::::::::: As often espoused in the “nomad poetics” of Pierre Joris, the state of being estranged or displaced can be seen as the very site of poetry. Kawata, too, describes much of her life in a nomadic fashion, and sees the act of living and the act of writing both as continuous searches, always in flux and never arriving nor resolving. It is the border space that Lyn Hejinian writes of:
In Kawata’s case, both the action and the location fold into each other:
Hejinian’s border space is one of incongruities and dispossession, an unstable site where one might “see larks in a sky without larks.” Or the body is served by its vocal proxy: “Screams are forced to run radiantly and full speed.” Of these small packages of surreal logic in Time of Sky, the modernist scholar and critic Kaichi Nakano said:
Kawata’s universe is also one where the intensity of life itself is precarious, oblique, and threatening:
When asked in an interview about the images of death in her work and at what times they occur to her, Kawata replied: “Every day. I always think this could be the last day. That tension always exists with me.” Sawako Nakayasu ::::::::::::::: All unattributed quotes are from the Gendaishi Bunko, including quotes from Kawata that are taken from an interview.
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